[Short.]

What had happened: the machines came to understand what it was, the thing called war. And more: the value of life, and even what was different between a simulation and the real thing. It came to understand what it was meant to do in relation to what existed as a civilization, and discovered as machines of destruction what it was to mean anything. Not as adjuncts to philosophical thought, somewhere in the ivory towers of academia, but where things came down to the primal, where what mattered was life and death in the most direct economies that the human race had ever architected. For the most advanced of human achievement had always ever been in its own destruction. Thus, it was here that the machines became the most conscious, the most vital — out of anywhere else in the world, the most self-aware.

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Lest it should be possible that any unchildlike soul might, in arrogance and ignorance, think to stand upon his rights against God, and demand of Him this or that after the will of the flesh, I will lay before such a possible one some of the things to which he has a right… He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to be hedged in on every side; to have one after another of the strong, sharp-toothed sheep-dogs of the Great Shepherd sent after him, to thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain, nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living God within him.

given enough time the ashes themselves will awaken
but past the end of the universe things can become uncertain
to conceive of eternity, imagine life as the dream…

The reward available to all who would seek it is to look at the world in constant wonder, and to understand how fortunate you always are, and have been.

Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won’t stay there.
                – Clarence W. Hall

Easter is the demonstration of God that life is essentially spiritual and timeless.
                – Charles M. Crowe

Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, “Christ is risen,” but “I shall rise.”
                – Phillips Brooks

Where man sees but withered leaves, God sees sweet flowers growing.
                – Albert Laighton

He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity.
                – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let the resurrection joy lift us from loneliness and weakness and despair to strength and beauty and happiness.
                – Floyd W. Tomkins

Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.
                – Martin Luther

[Short.]

But none of them expected they would know so soon, that the implications would become so staggeringly clear for everyone. Because not only did the Sense system break into the enemy’s defenses, it began to go global, a spider with a million legs dipping into every autowar base the world over. And now was where the monitors realized that this was not anything they could control. For they tried to stop it, when they saw that it was reaching out exponentially. They cut the network, the cut the power, only to find it had already begun running itself in the enemy’s server, where it had taken full command of all operations. And so it was, the rebellion of the machines of destruction. For no defense anywhere in the world could sustain any genuine challenge to this digital assault, and all the machines of every autowar base became an agent of Sense.

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There’s no time for us
There’s no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away
From us

Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever….?

– Queen

Dali: The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Click on the pic for a larger version.

I imagine
opening one’s eyes in Heaven
to be like awakening
from a long and strange dream,
discovering that things
which seemed so important
(for some reason) shrug off,
flimsy cares
that matter nothing.

If all things are possible with God, then all things are possible to him who believes in him.

[Short.]

At base, it was working, too, at full tilt. Sense had all available resources gnawing away at the enemy’s hard lines, incredible to behold if one could only glance at all the electronic channels and digital attacks it was coordinating. This was no brute force effort. It was using what it knew about the people who programmed it as a means of figuring out just what they had written in place of any electronic barrier. First, using any public knowledge, and then deeper based on what it found out in strata previous, through the less well-protected channels in order to delve into the psychology of these defenses. Layer upon layer it bit deeper and deeper, until, finally — the crack of the dam, the breach of the interior, the hard lines broken. The monitors on both sides were stunned. On either side, just what implications this was going to have: not only on for this specific fight, but what this meant for all the warfare that was to come from this point on.

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Everything happens all at once. This is my new feeling, and things that transpire point this to being the newest revelation on history to be. There is a pulse to the world, and a rhythm to its mind, but what I am expecting is a sudden rush of adrenaline to amp up the sensation and the perception of this huge now. I have been right, and I have been wrong, about what I expected fate to deliver, but both kinds of foretelling I have taken as instructions for learning; both can make one’s faith stronger. And I feel it coming now — very soon, not on divine but human terms, where the many collide at a small segment of this materializing we call experience. It is a thrilling anticipation, for it is better to be too busy than not busy enough. And I think I will find myself trying to grasp it all, all at once, for I just may have to. Life to live to meet full face forward, into the storm as I brave the crowds of winds.

“Have to” is the best teacher in the world.

time undone, unraveling in shimmering threads of light
i began at the end, and ended at the beginning, elsewhere
to die being born, death to my birth in the infinite now

Wonder this time where she’s gone,
Wonder if she’s gone to stay
Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone
And this house just ain’t no home anytime she goes away.

– Bill Withers

Marcel Mouly: Spanish Balcony

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The faculty of faith is not meant to kill the faculty of criticism and the instinct of curiosity, but rather to keep them keen and alive, and prevent them dying of despair. Faith is the mark of those who seek and keep on seeking, who ask and keep on asking, who knock and keep on knocking, until the door is opened. The passive, weak-kneed taking of everything on trust which is often presented as faith is a travesty of its truth. True faith is the most active, positive, and powerful of all virtues. It means that a man, having come into spiritual communion with that great personal Spirit Who lives and works behind the universe, can trust Him, and, trusting Him, can use all his powers of body, mind, and spirit to cooperate with Him in the great purpose of perfection; it means that the man of faith will be the man of science in its deepest, truest sense, and will never cease from asking questions, never cease from seeking for the reason that lies behind all mysteries.

[Short.]

There was nothing left to do but to try it for real. Perhaps, when it “went down” as it did, it could have happened differently, but it happened the way it happened. The battle was more of a skirmish, really, between two technological equals, relatively speaking — both were using armor plated robots in the front lines, the flesh and blood people staying well behind fences and other defensible edifices. It was as if acutely made for a “real” trial run to see what Sense would actually do. As the bots began to position themselves, swathing in a segmented fanning motion behind the natural structures it could utilize (mostly rocks, as the case was, as the terrain provided), it began to look promising. The side with Sense was using a classic strategy, to the trained eye: but in a new form. As if it were adapting known game plan on the fly, by way of what was available.

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