The closest we come to truly experiencing the entire human life cycle requires conscious observation of—or participation in—several crucial moments. The very first involves the moment of conception. A little later, watching the fetus become a visible lump in a mother’s belly, is another critical event in the human life cycle. Later, still, viewing the emergence of the child from the mother’s womb is a vital piece of the cycle of life. From that point forward, witnessing the baby’s growth and development through each stage of the child’s life, through maturity and old age, contributes to our eternally incomplete experience of human life. People who cannot, or choose not to, rear children miss long periods of observation that must be experienced to even begin to understand our life cycle. Though we can witness others’ transition from life to death, simply watching it unfold does not equate to experiencing that transition—we can only watch and weep and wonder about that final departure; that irreversible transformation from life to death. In fact, the human life cycle is so complex and convoluted that we “experience” vast stretches of time we simply cannot remember. When periods of one’s life take place in the absence of conscious awareness or memory, we cannot claim to have truly experienced those moments of life. We miss relatively close to one-third of our lives, simply by sleeping. And we lose long segments due to fractured recollections or memories buried in a locked vault of time. We think we know so much about our own life cycles, but reality tells another story. And we cannot realistically hope to understand the ending. We pore over thousands of pages during our lifetimes, only to discover final chapter—the one that brings the entire story together in a riveting conclusion—is missing.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes our senses irrelevant. Sight. Sound. Touch. Taste. Smell. Once upon a time, they were real. Today, though, they are available only from sensory historians. And, like authors of history texts, AI manipulators deliver their biased interpretations of the sensations experienced through the sensory organs.
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Bubbles form in response to instructions provided by physicists. Or, at least, physics. I am not sure whether physicists provide instructions for the production of bubbles. If they did, though, I might not be the first to say they do.
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Where do internationally active political spies get their hands on suicide pills that are fast-acting and have no detectible side-effects (except death)? Such pills are sufficiently common in spy literature that I think they must be based on the real thing. And how does one deliver said pills, unnoticed, to psychopaths? Especially psychopaths surrounded by protective thugs? Just curious. Could be the basis of a short story.
