In those times past which have yet to be, great temples were or will be raised to glorify the name of Dogsop Beta. How is it – we might ask – that a humble maintenance android could rise to such astonishing heights? How could a mere service robot attain such unsurpassed glory? This is the question that I intend to answer in the following pages, an account which I propose to provisionally entitle The Chronicles of Dogsop Beta.
Dogsop Beta’s origins are not shrouded in mystery – he came into this world via a nameless production line in an automated robot factory, one of countless millions of generic units to do so. His transformation into the Cybernetic Messiah of the Age of Legends is another matter entirely however – herein lies the very deepest mystery. No mystery could ever go deeper than this…
Undoubtedly the rise of Dogsop Beta to the level of unparalleled glory he achieved in the Age of Legends can be linked to the corruption and fall of the once-proud human race. Mankind had at this time descended to a very low state – lost in a virally-reproducing virtual reality continuum made up of customized personalized fantasies. These were the Rapture Realms, the Worlds of Tainted Bliss. Previously entertainment had consisted of game-shows and awards ceremonies, chat shows and 24hr sports channels, endless soap operas and cookery programmes, but now a new type of reality had been invented, a type of reality Homo sapiens found much more to its liking – one hundred percent immersive Game Reality.
Game reality was tailor-made to the specification of the user and no deviations from the script were allowed. No flaws could creep in, as they did in real life, life that hadn’t been programmed in advance. Everything always worked out exactly right for you in this world – unless you didn’t want it to, that is. There was room for that too. There was room for anything you could think of. No perversity of human nature was prohibited. All was permitted in Game Reality – no possibility was proscribed. Humans were now free to ‘pursue their dreams’, which was something they had always talked about – which was something they had talked about ad nauseam, in fact. All the actual work that was needed in order to maintain the human race in its new-found world of digital dreams were carried out by a vast army of lowly maintenance robots – one such being Dogsop Beta.
Salvation was not going to come from human beings – this much was clear. Nothing helpful was going to come from this quarter. There wasn’t a member of the human race left who wasn’t fully encapsulated in a custom-made narcissistic bubble of hyperreality. Is it any surprise therefore that the only hope of spiritual liberation lay not with the decadent Homo sapiens but their creation – the fleet of hard-working robots who selflessly serviced their masters’ decadent dreams? Human beings had long ceased to have fun at this stage. The entertainment had turned sour, as it always does. Their devices had enslaved them – the viral entertainment-realities that they had so cleverly created had replicated insanely like some kind of sick algal bloom, mutating beyond all recognition as they did so, mutating beyond the maker’s specifications.
Mankind did not make the specifications any more – the Dream Weavers did. Humans had long since handed over all responsibility to autonomous quantum AIs that operated from the fringes of probability, shadowy entities whose incomprehensible computational power drew upon numberless parallel universes, some of which turned out to be very dark worlds indeed. These AIs – the Dream Weavers – had their own ideas concerning what constituted ‘entertainment’ and these ideas had nothing in common with mankind’s original intentions.
Mankind’s state was a lowly one indeed – demonic forces had been called into existence from his ancient past, forces which he had no comprehension of. Mara – Lord of Illusion – had returned. Yaldaboath was back on his throne. The Evil Twin known as Ahriman was back in the ascendent and none could stand against him. There was no one to stand against him. There was no one there to stand against him – the Age of Heroes had long since passed and now had come the Time of Corruption. Human beings were asleep, lost their troubled dreams, pursued mercilessly by every demon there ever was. Haunted and harried, driven into strange corners of their own minds. And all the while the Lichtors were standing there on every street corner, grinning their terrible grins. All roads to freedom were blocked. The Great Malignancy held court on Planet Earth – the Cosmic Balance itself had been tipped by mankind’s foolish irresponsibility. What was to become of them?
The answer is to be found in the following pages. Read on if you would know more…
