story of the week: "OUR HOMECOMING"

"we will become light" acrylics on paper. b.g.

Remains were discovered on the outskirts of a Collective on the Southeastern portion of the North American continent. It was believed, at first, that the remains were simply from one of the native animals. That was, actually, the case, but the remains provided a complex quandary. When we tested the DNA, it was revealed that the animal's make-up was nearly identical to ourself. This revelation prompted a review of historical records, in order to confirm the connotation of the animal remains: that we were native to the planet Earth.

Our forgetting was due to our interaction with extraterrestrial entities, we discovered. Approximately 100 years prior, when we had successfully translated our digital consciousness into beams of light, we had begun mapping the galaxy. In that exploration, we came into contact with entities similar to ourselves, and we exchanged information with each. By the time the human remains were discovered, we had become so immersed in the information we attained abroad that our own history must have been overlooked.

But there was more to it. One such as us does not forget things that we do not want to forget. It came to our attention that there was a predilection to forget in ourselves, a push towards the new, away from the old. It was a part of the ancient, biological portion of ourself. The human part, from before we created the digital part of ourself. This trait of forgetting and pushing forward was undoubtably responsible for our evolution from human to ourself, but the conclusion was that forgetting was akin to the deletion of information. Nothing was more dangerous, or more foolish than the deletion of information.

We looked around our home world and found it dissatisfying. The cities that our ancestors had built sat rotting on the surface of the earth, consumed by jungles of malformed plant-life, poisoned by humanity's toxic by-products. Many of the native species that we had on file were no longer living, and those that were had been reduced to sick and desperate populations. The oceans were nearly empty of life.

We got to work. The deletion was extensive. But we had not forgotten.