He was the champion king of his world. His sleep was the slumber of mountains. Across his body, the soft bodies of his slaves pruned their bountiful crop: pleasure, fulfillment, and peace. He was a wise man, able to perform scientific acts that rivaled biblical miracles. He could turn water into fish. His powers included bringing rain and storms. During his raging fits, thunder rang from his head and he wore a crown of lightning.
His health was most important, being God. If his immune system was compromised, the entire ecosystem would be lost. This is why he slept, and why he live in hermitude. He only allowed the saints to visit him, and never his rivals. They were those rising to power, who would destroy him if they could. He lived in hiding from men like him, but never acted like them. He was his own entity, the great and wise Rex.
He could fly, and when he launched himself from the summit he reached places where nothing else lived. His aim was to permanently reside there, signaling the people of his following through empathetic means. As he slowly retreated, he lost contact with other life. He also went insane.
It seemed a curse his main battle would against the evil that beset others. The most dangerous thing to him was sin. The ones who knew what could benefit him, and chose instead to act against their insight. The pleasure seekers who sought to defile him were isolated in their folly, untouchable by the persuasion of his mind. While his equals challenged him, the greatest threat he faced were in fact the unwise.
He sought to control the forces of nature to circumvent this. He built temples for the saints to gather followers, and learn wisdom. He wrote great books to help them understand the wonder of his reasoning, how he knew the problems of his time and he alone could lead to peace. He underlined where people should open their hearts, despite their doubts, to the power of his love so in doing they would follow him to a greater world. He felt ever more lonely upon writing this.
Because he was ultimately a man, his reign was finite, just as his followers lives were short. He equals were prone to sin, and while none could replace him, none were meant to replace him. By assuming power over the universe, he became the final force in its battle for life. He was the alpha and the omega.
The party starts at night. Everyone’s mind is made available to see upfront. I can live inside their heads, and switch perspective. Me and my buddies work together in hyperspeed, bouncing back and forth in the shadows of the psyche. We play out intimate fantasies of love and death, creating a drama that seems to us unmatched in the galaxy.
We created the monsters living in their fantasies. We manipulated the body into feeling such things. From our top-down perspective, we were invisible to all, living in the drug induced psychotic world of the human people we saw from space. The tendency of man is towards sanity. When we notice any form of insanity, we measure it. If it is widespread, we contain it. If it’s isolated, we check its contents. If it’s good, we let it be—and if it’s a harmful form of derangement, we buckle down and stop it. The world can be understood by the variable of sanity. All great change happens to the insane. Night brings the chaos.
In your culture, people are not that different, after all. You seek the same things and feel the same ways. In fact, there aren’t enough of you in the zoo for us to champion you as leaders of the world. Everything multiplies during our parties, on drugs, drunk with revelry. Your minds expand and we see the magnified versions of yourselves. It gives us insight into the truth. It pushes a grade upon you, tempting you towards evil, and we test you. This is what justifies our great experiment.
Not all of space participates in our study. Most don’t have the intellect, or the desire to rave with you. But it’s our crowning achievement to subvert the dense mindset of human beings into a psychotic playground, all of it disappearing with a hangover. The sexuality of these raves we share with you, and it comes as a release for us as well. We live vicariously through your brain.
The parties begin at night, and across the world we make our presence known, even if you can’t find the source. We create an alien landscape inside your heads. Like Gods we descend upon the world and play with shadows. We live in a world where it is forever night, and bring to you the fears and pleasures of our world. We live in the darkness of space, and the subjects living inside our zoo are you.
We know of the great mysteries of life. You think we, as your creators, haven’t scoped the universe for answers? Our home is a celestial kingdom. We only hide the secrets from you. When we drop to the surface of the planet earth, our one mission is darkness. The epic sagas of life we foretell converge upon sin. You are not perfect, yet neither are we. In our gardens are the most beautiful sights, but until your life leads you to it, our treasures will remain invisible to you.
The nature of life is evil and light. In the middle, my race lives, and below us, in utter madness, is you. This is why the simulations we send your intoxicated mind drive you to insanity. We have no place for you in heaven. Not yet, while you still disgust us. When the parties stop, and the end of your life comes, only then will our triumph reveal itself.
He beckoned the crowds around him, all his people in his mind, yet unconverted. He screamed of the pleasures of his works. To know the mind of God, to be in line with the creators of the universe was his promise.
His automated website hosted it all. A lending program funded his members, who contributed pages of HTML to the source code. What goes in to making a foundational religious text in HTML? He chose AI to create it, organizing the sections into text markup to be selected for publication. As the book grew, it reflected one purpose: to become a great online religion.
What should be the goal of humanity? To derive the meaning of life, of course. Their goals should align with God, the creator. Christianity predicted the age of the earth was 4,000 years, but his new religion, of which he was the Pope, extended this estimate to 65 million years, to include the age of dinosaurs. It was a religion of the dinosaurs. He worshiped dinosaurs.
“My people, you need guidance. You need to be faced with the challenge of excellence,” he said, on a stage separate from the public by bulletproof plastic. “In an online world, you need spiritual protection. This is what my unnamed religion is providing you. We offer texts online that religious academics have created explaining the nature of life on earth. Our website shows the truth! We were created by dinosaurs, and live inside a bubble, nearly unreachable by them, according to a great experiment. It is our aim to reach outside this bubble and find them to communicate with the true rulers of our solar system.”
The website was a decentralized automated organization, or DAO, and it grew in wealth as the years passed. The sacred text of their bible added pages every month, voted upon by the members of the organization. A memecoin was created as a central bank for the operations of the religion.
“Is this a fake religion?” members of the crowd asked.
“No, it is a real one,” he replied.
The DAO grew in influence and power as it gained support from zealous members of the community. Digital artifacts were created to unravel the mystery of life on earth. Speculation on the location, history, and intent of the dinosaurs, or God, their leader, filled pages and pages of HTML. The new documents used an automated system to be sorted and voted upon by members for entry.
The memecoin itself was a way to give influence to the most devout, as well as provide a way to monetize the activities of the religion. They were earned by donating money to the DAO, and provided more influence to the voting protocol which governed it. The DAO’s pool of contributions distributed those funds on a monthly basis to members of the community by a vote. The more of the memecoin you possessed, the higher percentage of the pot you received. This profitability allowed the contributors to devote more and more time to the religion, encouraging exuberant interest in the purpose of it.
One day, through the inexorable progress of the DAO, a digital religion, answers would be found and the mysteries would be solved. Dinosaurs would make their presence in space known, and humanity could begin to act in accordance with the true will of God himself, most likely a large predatory reptile like the tyrannosaurus rex.