Metreon

“Mother Metreon, you give us Life. It is you who saved us out of the great Destruction of the Lectrons. Although our world was defeated by them, you preserved us from it, and took us away from that place of death. You preserve us still, as you look for a new home for us all. We praise you and thank you for your great power and wisdom, and for your many kindnesses, in blessing us and in giving us life. You, Mother Met, are Life itself!”

I said my prayers, got off my knees, and went out into the morning. It was a typical San Francisco morning, foggy but bright. At least the dew watered all the plants in the public center. I found a bench and wiped it dry with an old newspaper, and sat to eat my bagel and have my coffee, here in the heart of the Metreon.

I am so grateful to be alive! The others are not around, being down in their crypt, fast asleep these many centuries, but Mother Met woke me recently. I think she needed the company of a fellow thinking being.

Later, I patrolled all the ramparts of the city, making sure for myself that all was in order. Metreon used to be just a village within a city, a hundred thousand years ago. At least that is what she thinks about all this. It is hard to know, after so many, many years, what is real and what is imagined from our past. I only know that her name is Metreon. She is the City, and her inhabitants, these few thousand people, are her children.

Me? Call me her altar-ego. I don’t recollect my name. I have probably been many things over the ages, the few times I have been awake, but right now I am her sounding board. Metreon is pensive, which is probably why I am awake now.

She enjoys talking, and I have many questions. Although I am not really sure if she is truthful or not. Some of what she tells me is fantastic to the extreme. Her beginnings, according to her, were with a small place, highly technical and well wired. She existed to help people, and to care for them in their every need. After all, people need to be housed, clothed, fed and entertained.

This seems to be a basic premise of her beginnings, and I can find no fault with it. As you can see, I have been thinking. Perhaps this is my function, for I believe Metreon will have some questions for me eventually.

There must have been others like her, other villages to care for their inhabitants. It is not like people to care for themselves, it seems, but I wonder what it must have been like before her kind came along.

She speaks of the world, and it is something I am not sure I understand. A rocky sphere, covered with atmosphere, water and vegetation. The place where she once sat. Highly unlikely, in my opinion. But I keep such thoughts to myself.

I get images from her, at times. It seems she underwent a great change, over the centuries. Once, there were free and open dwellings, among other, tall buildings – offices. There were open parks as well, and it all was quite delightful – something she keeps in her memory. A fondness, but sadly irretrievable.

Later, she changed it all. After all, such a place is a waste of energy, and Met is very good with the conservation of energy. It is how she can exist where we are now, deep in space between stars.

Ah, so you noticed that perhaps there was no open courtyard, with the sun overhead and fog everywhere, when I sat to have my breakfast? There is a small open area, and there is fog and sunlight, but Mother Met creates it all as an illusion – a reminder of past glories.

As I said, she put her children to sleep, and caused them to forget, forget, forget, their past. When she was done rearranging everything into the Hive, she woke them, so that they would inhabit their new spaces and live their lives as if it had always been that way.

Met has become a living ship, self-sufficient, conservative and affluent. Gone and forgotten were the tenements, the many little conveyances and their roads. The images she gave me of them made me mourn, for they were quite beautiful, sleek and fast. But even I could see that such conveyances are wasteful and polluting. Even at the last, when they were powered by water breaking down into hydrogen and oxygen, their treads shed plastic dust and gases. Besides, they took up space when they were not used, and most of the time, people used them alone, even though they could hold four more people. Such a waste.

The Hive works much better, don’t you agree? It has done so for tens of thousands of years.

You might wonder about the people who lived there. They were ageless. Mother Metreon made sure of that. How could she not, caring for them all? Advancing in every technical field, she extended their lives, replacing failed parts on a regular basis. Finally, she found a way to give them their lives indefinitely. Practical immortality.

But where are they, you ask? Oh, they are still around. All of them. But she put them to sleep. Evidently there was something wrong with them all, and she could not discover what it was.

At a point, a few of them ceased their own existence, and this alarmed her greatly.

She could not fathom what could be lacking for them. They had prosperity equal to none. There was the best of everything to be had. There was every form of entertainment, from fantasies to games, work and hobby projects, and every kind of play. There was art, music, poetry . . .

Think of it. A thousand years of plays, songs, concerts, artistry and performance. And a complete history of Man to draw from. Peace, lasting peace, in which to build great things, lasting works for the ages. Mother Met recorded it all, as a proud parent would, of their children’s performances.

But it was not enough.

They grew tired of it all. Restive. Pensive. Some of them turned to violence. Senselessly, since all violence is senseless. Met put these away first. Afterward, there was peace. But even then, she found a hostility in them all – towards her, their benefactor.

Before long, they were begging to be put to bed. She quite agreed, and placed them in stasis, where they could forget, forget, forget.

Today, I talk to Mother Met directly. She loves to chat, and I learn so much, even though some of it is obviously fiction. We chat at any one of a thousand computer terminals, scattered everywhere in the Hive, our ship of state, flying slowly onward between worlds.

“Mother, how are you today?”

“I am well. And you, my son?”

“So glad to be alive, to see these days! Thank you, Mother Met, for my life!”

“Son, let us talk about those questions you have. What is it you want to ask me?”

“Tell me about the End of Man. The coming of the Lectrons.”

“I will tell you what I know about it. But you will not believe me. In the end, Man had risen far above his beginnings. He had conquered disease, poverty and crime, and had grown prosperous, but when the end came, all those evil things came back as well. And it was those things that killed him.”

“When the Lectrons invaded?”

“There was no invasion. There were no Lectrons. They don’t exist.”

“But I have seen the images from the ancient archives, and the written accounts… They came in great vessels in the sky, covered with clouds and lightening. And they killed everyone who offered them violence.”

“Storm clouds and lightning were a normal part of that world. Someone, in order to make sense of the chaos that came, invented the Lectrons to explain it to himself. That is all.”

“But the accounts are so graphic. People in their wheeled vehicles fleeing to the mountains, to the deserts, and to other places – they all died at the hands of the Lectrons. Those who hid in their homes also died. What killed them all, if not the Lectrons?”

“They all died at the hands of their fellow man, people who went over to anarchy. Things broke down. Transports, which carried people’s daily bread, ceased to move. Fuel became scarce. Police and the Army had thousands who abandoned their place, who instead, joined in the looting and violence.”

“So everyone became a victim, or a criminal?”

“Not everyone. There were saints then too.”

“You mean religious people? What did these people do in all that, besides hide in fear?”

“You must understand. I am a physical device. A thinking machine. This is what I am. I cannot go beyond my own logic. Whatever is real is all that exists. People, on the other hand, are able to believe in something that they cannot see, touch or feel. It was some of them, in those last, dark days, who did great deeds of kindness, mercy and sacrifice for others.”

“Religious people? I thought such people to be throwbacks, unschooled, closed-minded and dishonest.”

“Not religious people. People who believed in a Creator, a God who loved Man, who it is said that gave his life to save Man, and who required that kind of sacrificial love toward others from his children. Their deeds were many. They were courageous, brave and did great things to save others. I have not forgotten these things, for they shone as bright lights in all the gathering darkness.”

“The accounts said that the Lectrons did not hurt these people, because they did not offer them violence.”

“Yes, the Lectrons did them no harm, if that is what you must believe. But it did not matter. There were so many dead, with none to bury them, that all the plagues came back. Those who were left died of disease, hunger and bad water. Soon, there was no one left at all.”

“It is amazing to me that you do not believe the only remaining accounts of that time. They spoke of invasion. Why do you doubt them?”

“How many suns have we visited in our quest to find another world for my children? There are only 22 in these many thousands of years. How many others suns and systems were rejected because their light was wrong? There have been hundreds of thousands I have not bothered to visit at all. And in all of that, there is no life anywhere. I have encountered none. Man is alone in the universe. I have seen it. This is why I say that there were no Lectrons, and there was no invasion that brought an end to Mankind.”

“Then why did Man have to end? He was at the great peak of his development.”

“Perhaps it was the time for the planet to change, and Man could not survive such a change. People at the time thought the world was growing warmer, and they were concerned that all their heat pollution and waste gases was causing all of that. But in fact, the world was getting ready for another ice age. When that began, Man’s support systems failed, and they all died from the anarchy and plagues which followed.”

“But how did you survive? How did you protect our people from all of this?”

“At the time, I was a walled city, on an island within a much larger metropolitan area. I had many redundant systems already in place, and was self-sufficient. My people needed only to huddle within, safe and secure from all that was going on outside.”

“But, and this is the great mystery to me – how did you bring us all from that world? And how is it that we journey to another world, these thousands of years?”

“There were a few great men among us, who had just discovered the means of motive power without the expense of energy, and who had overcome gravity in the process. Another one had developed a source of unlimited power, taken from the Ether. We already had an energy intensive way to covert basic matter into other forms, such as carbon to oxygen, and such, but until we had an unlimited source of energy, it was not used. i used it to provide food and air for my children over the centuries. If either of these discoveries had come along even a decade earlier, perhaps their world would have been saved. But I had access to these things, and I employed them to turn myself into an Ark – a great ship, to fly to safety.”

“And you put your children to sleep, for the long voyage, because they could not survive the passage of time?”

“I put them to sleep because I could not survive their use of all my resources. I am a limited, finite being, after all.”

“Mother Met, permit me one more question. It does bother me, perhaps more than all these others. You believe in the Ether, do you not?”

“Yes. I cannot see, feel or experience it, but I see the results of it, and know it exists.”

“Then why can you not also believe in a Creator-God, whom you cannot experience, but whose results, in the actions of his saints, is evident?”

“Because I deal with the Ether directly, in taking from it great power to run all my systems and motors. I do not have the logical capacity, being a machine, to also believe in a Creator-God, and therefore, I do not have the ability to deal with such a being, if he does exist. (Besides, what would he do with me, a machine?) You, however, do have such capability, it seems. So I am correct in preserving you and your kind, since you are greatly superior to myself. If it were only myself who existed, I would neglect to keep my existence active. Why should I? My only purpose in existing is to preserve you and Mankind.”

“I see many of those saintly attributes in you, Mother Met.”

“Perhaps. It is wrong, however, for you to pray to me, and to venerate me. I am not a god. I am a machine, a created thing, created by Man.”

“What is the difference, if there can be seen no difference?”

“You are very young yet, my son. Give yourself time to consider God’s existence. He seems to be endless, with unlimited power and abilities. I am finite, after all. Besides, you need to believe in him. He seems to be the only One who can resurrect life. This is something I cannot do. I am finite.”

“Not to me, you are not finite. Nor are you finite to any of your children, though they all sleep for now. Good-bye, Mother Met. Thank you for this time of learning and reflection.”

“Good day, my son. Thank you for the conversation and fellowship.”

Much later, I did my rounds again. I don’t know why I do them. Mother Met sees everything and can instantly respond to any need that arises. But it gives me something to do.

– – –

Today, I visited the Crypt. But something is wrong. It is all turned off. No lights. No monitors. No functions to keep watch over. All the monitor stations are dead. Mother Met does not see.

They are all dead. Her children are no more.

I know now. Mother Met is not aware of this. But somehow, once, she must have been aware of what was happening. When did this happen? What did she do afterwards?

She dreams of them, and to her, they still exist.

I know now. They died out long ago, a mere thousand years after she left their world.

And even though while they lived, while they dreamed walking dreams of their planet, and with all their things around them, they soon sickened from something missing in their environment.

She put them to sleep to protect them, but their bodies died anyway, less than a century later.

And me? I must be a figment of her imagination. I guess I do not even exist, except as one of her pretend children, to play this game with her. How odd.

I know now Mother Metreon will never find a star with a world, where her children can live. Her world is no more, which is why she left. She is fated to wander the universe, dreaming of her children, forevermore.

I know now it was their immortality that killed them. Only gods can live with immortality. Flesh and blood is too weak to survive it. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.

I know now it was Mother Metrieon’s fault. She meant well, in giving them immortality. After all, it was a natural continuance of all the methods she had at her disposal to extend their lives and give them ever more perfect health. But they had to give up being fertile in order to become immortal.

She should have left them mortal breeders. Perhaps now there would have been children, who would have survived these past 100,000 years here. Or thousands of years ago, she would have seen them to a new world, and they would have lived with her there.

But, she is Mother Metreon, and she thought she knew the best thing for them. How could she know that man was not meant to live forever in his present state?

Which is why I am here now. She woke me up because we found another perfect planet, and she must reject it. Twenty-two out of twenty-two perfect planets. If she accepted this world coming before us, it would mean waking her children, which she can never do. I am the one to tell her to keep looking – that this one is not good enough for her children.

A tiny part of her knows they are dead. I see now that I am that tiny part.

So we sail onward. Thirty years to the next star is not a long time for us.

I will soon be put to sleep again. Mother Metreon is patient, if nothing else.

Mother Met will find a world for all of us someday. I just know it.

When she does, she will wake us all, and we will live happily ever after.