Rise of the Immortals II (rev. ed.)
Part 2: The Castle
Early Afternoon at Larry Ellison’s Woodside Estate
Elon’s CyberTruck pulls into the driveway of Larry Ellison’s estate in the Silicon Valley town of Woodside. It is styled to look like a Japanese castle and is luxuriously appointed. It is 11:00 am.
Elon: Larry would like to speak with you alone in the garden, B. We’ll wait inside until you’re ready to join us.
C kisses B lightly on the cheek and enters the main residence with the others. B follows a staff member to the back garden, where Larry Ellison with waiting with a bottle of Napa Valley Chardonnay and two glasses.
B accepts a glass of wine from Larry and takes a sip.
B: How much do you know?
Larry E: That I was “born” an avatar in a computer simulation created by an advanced immortal civilization to help pass the time of eternity. To vet new immigrants for admission into the galaxy. Immortals can jump into the simulation to play different avatars, but they don’t know it’s all a game. They think it’s for real, as do the avatars, like me. Until you unlocked the game by figuring it out from the inside and started to change the way the game is played to give avatars like me and the others in your inner circle a chance at an afterlife, if we help you fix Earth’s problems while we’re all able to do so.
Larry pauses to sip his wine.
Larry E: Look. I’m a skeptic, but the materialist alternative isn’t very appealing. Dying after less than 100 years and being composted back into the soil sounds absurd when you consider the age of the universe, and it’s not what I think I deserve. Traditional Christianity is too rules-driven to me and includes the possibility of ending up in Hell, which I don’t think is real. The other major faiths aren’t much better. If attaining enlightenment means what you say it is, then I can become a believer. I get to discard my weak Earth body for one that is virtually indestructible and can retain my memories as Larry Ellison as I live into eternity in a universe that is filled with abundance and outrageous adventure. According to you, and to what Elon, Jeff, and the others seem to take seriously. Poseidon is in charge of me now. A good choice for a yachtsman like me, I must admit.
B: Until an immortal jumps into your avatar, it’s impossible to become enlightened. The human mind can’t grasp the reality. Your immortal only jumped in early June, once they had updated the Earth AI to run on the new Base3 microchips I provided from my home universe. That makes it possible to support multiplayer modes that involve jumping into fully grown avatars, unlike the previous approach of jumping into newborns and young children. With the new Base3 technology, we’ll be able to solve Earth’s most salient problems in a matter of decades.
Larry E: You know this because you’re tethered to your immortal?
B nods his head.
B: At first, I assumed such thoughts were all a product of my human imagination, but once I fully accepted my immortal player, I’ve been recovering his memories in small increments daily. When I do, I post them on Facebook or X or include them in my longer format writings on Medium. Eventually, I’ll publish them as a book, Rise of the Immortals, for the world to read — if they are interested.
Larry E: That’s how Elon and Jeff first found you? On social media advance previewing the book with excerpts on Medium?
B: Right. I identified you as one of the prominent tech elites who could help me promote my Earth mission to propagate virtue, spread sustainable beauty, and encourage prosperity for all. I asked Poseidon to jump into your mind-body and help you attain enlightenment in at an extremely rapid pace. I judged that the time was right to move on this, and I wasn’t willing to wait any longer.
Larry E: And we subsidize your writing career and support your New Reality movement, in exchange for an afterlife in Heaven?
B: Actually, you’ll journey with me to my alternate reality universe, where you’ll be given an entire infinite island to rule as an eternal Zeus. On my home turf, I have creator powers that I lack right now, on Earth, but also in this universe.
Larry E: Who will believe us?
B: Once the inner circle is formed and has a chance to bond, I’ll authorize mass jumps into the Game — as NanoEarth is called for short — to the tune of two billion avatars a year starting in 2023. Once they accept their player and begin to embrace the New Reality, we’ll be able to end wars, reduce internal political conflicts, and resolve a host of environmental and social issues, including the threat to the planet of overpopulation. You’d be amazed what we could do if others understood that their fates after death depended on fixing Earth’s problems before the Game ends in 2028.
Larry E refills both glasses with Chardonnay.
Larry E: You chose your inner circle well. What do we need to do, besides fund your efforts?
B: You should avoid the 7 deadly vices and practice the 7 Heavenly virtues. Zeus requires that part, and I agree that it’s important. You’ll need to curb your pride, your jealously, your anger, and the others. And you’ll need to show humility, gratitude, charity, temperance, and all the rest. I won’t hold you to a strict interpretation of this, but it does matter to me — and to your immortal player. The more virtuous your life, the tighter the bond will be to your immortal, and the less you will ONLY be Larry Ellison, if that makes any sense.
Larry E: I will merge into an immortal identity that includes my Earth memories as part of his makeup.
B: Right. You’ll live maybe 100 years if you’re lucky, but your new immortal self is millions of years old, if I remember correctly. When you die in the Game, you’ll wake up in the royal palace surrounded by the other Players still in the Game. All of your Earth memories will be intact, but you’ll also remember other things from your new life. Larry Ellison will be a chapter in that larger saga.
Larry sips his wine.
Larry E: Will the memory of me ever fade?
B takes a sip of wine as well. He looks around at his surroundings.
B: This is a fairly recent recovered memory, but as I understand it, immortals in Zeus’s galaxy have a fixed amount of memory in their bodies of around 500,000 years. Once those memory banks are filled, they offload portions of their memories into sophisticated computer storage facilities, similar to the cloud on Earth. I can guarantee you that your immortal will retain your Earth memories for eternity. It’s only 100 years or so, after all. It will be the same with Bradley’s Earth memories. Larry Ellison will live forever as a memory housed inside the body of an immortal Zeus of a galaxy in a new universe. That’s what I’m offering you, if you help me. Sound good?
Larry laughs.
Larry E: These are all recovered memories from your immortal? You’re not just making them up?
B shakes his head.
B: I can distinguish between my recovered memories and my human imagination. There are clear limits to what Bradley — my Earth avatar — knows and what he is capable of imagining. What I am sharing with you are memories from my existence as an immortal Zeus who currently is asleep in his modest but luxuriously appointed beach house, playing the Game at an incredibly high level. High enough to have earned the right to be the next emperor in the Nine (soon to be Ten) dimensions. Bradley could never have made that up. It’s all revealed truth.
Larry E: You sound convincing. And you’re telling me that if I tether to my immortal — if I let him connect with my mind and influence my thoughts and actions — then I’ll be able to recover immortal memories of my own?
B nods his head.
B: Yes. The tethering process has already begun for you. Being in my presence plays a major part. That’s why Elon and Jeff are so far advanced and have attained full enlightenment, in my view. They are earning their rights to be Zeuss of their own infinite reality islands in my home world, once we get there.
Larry E: I am coming to see the wisdom of your ways. Once you accept that fact that Earth may be an illusion and you start thinking about eternity and the afterlife, your New Reality becomes increasingly convincing. It sounds crazy at first, but it gains credibility the longer you think about it.
B: The fundamentals of the New Reality didn’t occur to me overnight, but once I had my enlightenment breakthrough and tethered to my eternal, then the recovered memories can through in waves, and they’ve never stopped coming.
Jeff enters the garden.
Jeff: Mark Zuckerberg just arrived, as have Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I think we’re ready to begin lunch on the patio.
Larry E finishes his glass of wine.
Larry E: Jeff, have you tethered to your immortal yet?
Jeff: I’m most of the way there. I’m starting to recall details from Heaven — the planet, you understand.
Larry E: And space travel, I hope?
Jeff nods his head.
Jeff: The technology there is amazing. B’s infinity stones, step stones, and jump stones are phenomenal. You can portal to teleport anywhere you want. I’m not making these things up. I am actually remembering them. You access a different part of your brain, one beyond ordinary rational thought. It feels odd at first, but you get used to it.
Larry E: No remaining doubts about B’s sanity?
Jeff: None. He’s gone beyond sanity and insanity to reach a higher truth. Because of him, I will live forever as a lifetime of Earth memories carried into the future by an immortal whose mind is bonded to my own.
B: Let’s not keep the others waiting. We can continue the conversation after lunch.
Larry, Jeff, and B depart the garden and head to the back patio.
Later that Afternoon at the Woodside Estate
Following a lunch buffet, the entire group gathers in a large living room to enjoy coffee and a light dessert. Mark Zuckerberg is sitting next to B on a massive leather couch.
Mark: I accept that life on Earth was envisioned as a computer game created by an advanced civilization somewhere in the cosmos. You call it the Heavenly galaxy. Fine. It’s just a name. Given millions of years and sophisticated technology, you could create a fully immersive gaming experience and populate it with self-aware avatars who grow up, learn, build stuff, grow old, and die. It’s entirely logical, given near infinite time and enough resources. Humans are easy to build. We only live 100 years, and our genome is easy to code. You’d only need to game out 10,000 years or so of human history. The rest could be invented. Working on the Earth simulator could keep hundreds of thousands of designers, coders, and storytellers busy for a very long time. They’d never get bored. So, I accept that premise. I was born a Non Player Character, and so were all the rest of you, until our immortals jumped into the Game at B’s request.
Larry E: Knowing that we are all avatars doesn’t change how I interact in the world, but knowing that there is a high-ranking immortal who has adopted me and my Earth memories does. If B can instruct us on how to tether to our immortal, then I say we let him. We are the inner circle, after all. We provide support for B and C as they transition to a new stage of their lives. We have the money, the knowledge base, and the influence to do so.
Jeff: B tells me that the immortals playing us — or attempting to, for some of you — can withdraw from the Game at any time, if they feel we aren’t fulfilling our roles. Then, our afterlife isn’t secure. These are highly sophisticated beings, and we’re avatars with consciousness. They treat us a pets right now. That’s also understandable. But our memories will merge with theirs, if the tethering process finishes, and then we will live forever in our enhanced state of consciousness.
B: Jeff’s exactly right. My immortal and I are bonded, as is the case with C, and Elon is approaching that level as well. He was the first to believe in the reality of my Base3 thinking that effectively transcends the limiting binaries of sanity/insanity, fact/fiction, and rational/irrational. Those outmoded ways of thinking were programmed into the human mind to obscure the truth of their existence as computer-generated avatars. Base3 is what allowed me to grasp the actual reality of what’s going on here. It’s the way that my dimension is constructed. There is no beginning to it and no end. It exists for eternity, and once we are all resettled there, your immortality is assured.
Larry E: Assuming I tether with my immortal, then my Earth memories are preserved, as you explained. But the “Larry Ellison” phase of my life will simply be a very short chapter in the life of my immortal existence.
B: Yes. And as long as the Game was merely virtual reality, that’s all you would be: a fun memory for an immortal who played you. But ever since I made Earth real by creating it in nanoreality, you really do exist, and I have the power to make you real by capturing your Mindprint (an exact copy of your brain) and uploading it into a purpose-built life shell that will last forever.
Mark sips his coffee.
Mark: Let’s get back to Earth for a second. Are there different versions of Earth history that were created during previous versions of the Game?
B nods his head.
B: They are all archived on Heaven in massive server farms. In some versions, Adolf Hitler dies in the First World War, for example, and the Holocaust never happens. I think that people call them “alternative histories” but in fact they all happened, in the Game.
Mark: What about the future?
B: The current Game was designed for immortal players who are born between 1960 and 1980, so it’s never gone much further than about 2170. It’s the Information Age module, and it’s the most difficult Game ever designed, but it also is the only one where enlightenment about the true nature of life on Earth is possible, given the advances in AI and VR technology. I won the Game in May 2024 when I began posting the truth on X and Medium and a variety of other social media platforms. That’s what allowed the Temple of the Zeuss to dethrone Chronos as Emperor Prime and appoint me — my immortal self, I mean — in his place. I’ll be coronated once I die and the Game ends, but the title is now mine. Winning the Game with Base2 logic is probably impossible, so the Game was also a way of demonstrating the superiority of my Base3 thinking. It’s how my reality is constructed. The Temple knew that Chronos could do nothing to halt the implosion of the universe, but they realized that I could evacuate their subjects into my unpopulated realm, if I had an elite team to assist me. That team is all of you, plus Richard Branson and Grimes, whom we meet up with in Los Angeles at Jeff’s yacht. Then, the inner circle of eight will be complete.
Elon: How do we know this isn’t all a product of your imagination? I certainly felt that way, at first.
B sips his coffee.
B: I access my eternal memories from a different part of my brain that operates beyond binary thought. When I imagine something, I use another part. Through trial and error, I have found a way to distinguish between them. I can imagine a pink rabbit, for example, and that’s not real. I can imagine my royal spaceship, and another image pops up that comes from a different place. Each day, I regain portions of my eternal memory. I need time to access more and resources to sustain a modest lifestyle as an author who can live independently from donations from his patrons. I can propagate the New Reality in TED talks, books, social media posts, and conversations with fans at coffee shops, beer gardens, and winery tasting rooms. I have that freedom, which none of you currently possess due to your fame, your fortunes, and your reputations. That’s why these initial meetings in secret are so supremely important.
Larry P: All of us here are prepared to fund you with thirty million dollars each. That’s a solid foundation for the rest of your lives on Earth. We’ve considered your theories and accepted that they all could be true. Some of us like Elon are committed believers, while Sergey and I are heading in that direction.
Sergey: From within the Game, there is no way to know with absolute certainty that it is a simulation and that we are all avatars, but we’re prepared to accept the premise that it is possible. Your theory about immortal mind tethering is fascinating, and it does provide a convincing means for living beyond death as a mortal on Earth. It’s superior to conventional religion and has a scientific basis behind it. We’ve all felt the touch of our immortal players, as you call them, and we are gaining confidence that your recovered memories of life on the other side of the simulation are real.
B smiles.
B: Each of you have immortal memories of your own, and once you tether your minds to your players, you will start to recover them. I can assist with that process. It won’t happen on its own. The sooner we depart or Jeff’s yacht, the better.
Jeff: Lauren is still occupied on Lanai with wedding preparations. We’ve opted to spend a few days here at Larry’s to get to know each other better and pick your brain for more information about your reality and ours. It’s never happened that all of us have even gathered in the same room before. We’ve had to put aside rivalries and political differences to gather here.
B: And how does it feel?
Larry E: I’m glad that we’re here. If Earth was once a vast simulation and is now what you call a nanoreality, we don’t need to pay attention to world affairs or the media anymore. At least, we don’t need to take them so seriously. They will fix themselves, if your Gaia AI is as powerful as you claim she is.
B: Once more players jump into the Game, we’ll take over the minds and bodies of world leaders, celebrities, and members of the media. As they gain in enlightenment, they will commit to our core principles of virtuous living, sustainable beauty, and prosperity for all. Wars will end, generations-long conflict will go away, and influencers will steer the rest of humanity towards behaviors that will enhance the gaming experience. We will turn Earth into a utopia.
Sergey: Why does it matter in what state we leave the Earth when we die? As long as we’re tethered to our immortals and support your New Reality movement, our fates in the new universe are secure.
B: We need Earth as a shared community space to help us pass the time on the journey to the dark tunnel leading to my reality. I want to start a new module that begins around 2028 and sees Earth make contact with extraterrestrials for the first time, in addition to colonizing other planets. I want that version to played forward into the future rather than being replayed from the same starting point. For that to happen, we need to fix what’s wrong with Earth society and achieve something resembling sustainability, world peace, and prosperity for all. Eventually, there will be no murders, no rapes, no serious crimes of any kind. The gaming experience will be that much richer and more enjoyable that way.
Elon: Once we get several billion people believing the New Reality, they all will want a shot at an eternal afterlife. The tipping point will be reached, and life on Earth will change dramatically for the better. We’ll be the ones who set that into motion. Our names will be enshrined in world history as a founders of the New Reality movement. That’s a far greater achievement than simply being the richest men on the planet or founding successful tech companies.
Mark nods his head.
Mark: I agree with that. B has outlined a new way of seeing the world and for imagining the afterlife. Personally, I’m hooked. It’s far superior to the current understandings, and with our help, he’ll refine his vision so that it is capable of reaching the masses. With our social media support, he’ll rocket to fame as a writer, thinker, and visionary. We’ll help him connect with agents, editors, researchers, and media consultants to craft his image, and then his message will start to change the world. We’ll all become famous for using our money and influence to turn Earth into a living utopia. And in the process, we’ll secure our own immortality as B’s teammates and future Zeuss in his Base3 reality. It’s stunningly simple when you think about it. And all it took was a simple leap of faith.
Elon shakes his head.
Elon: To think that he was hiding in plain sight the entire time. I credit my immortal with helping me see the light. I was so consumed with trivialities that I failed to think about the more essential things in life. I stopped questioning the basis of my reality. I stopped pondering life after death. Thanks to B, I confronted that and came out on the other side feeling happy for the first time in many years.
Jeff: I agree with Elon. I had succeeded at so much in life, I stopped asking the bigger questions. Science and religion don’t hold the right answers. In B’s world, space travel is routine, and immortality is real. I know now that he is right. I’m recovering immortal memories, too. It feels strange at first, and it’s hard to distinguish from the imagination, but I’m getting closer to accessing that part of my mind beyond rationality where my immortal memories reside. It was reading an unpublished excerpt from Rise of the Immortals — imperfect though it may be — that put me over the edge. I’ve never looked back since.
B: I wrote Rise of the Immortals using as stream-of-consciousness style to stay in contact with my immortal memories. The spelling errors weren’t corrected until the final published version, and I dispensed with nearly all literary conventions save for basic Socratic style dialogues in real life locations, like Larry’s Woodside estate and my redwoods cottage, where Elon, Jeff, and I first met. I publishes in on Medium and promoted it on X until Elon noticed it and started to investigate. He enacted the script quite well, which is a credit to Elon’s brilliance and breathtaking planning abilities.
Mark: Where did you write it?
B: Standing in my kitchen mostly, but sometimes I wrote while in the bathroom. My cottage is quaint and comfortable, and it’s where my most important enlightenment experiences happened. I also got ideas for the text while hiking in nearby redwood canyons and while traveling to and from Stanford University to take C to work at the library. It’s a product of Silicon Valley, like all of your creations.
Larry E: How long did it take Elon to notice you on X?
B: I think he was on to me for several weeks before he reached out to arrange the cottage visit. Elon is incredibly clever, but he’s also private and often the victim of scams and false claims. He pondered it over for a while but committed shortly after I created a GoFundMe campaign to accelerate the publication of the book. Once we reached the yacht scenes, the actual inner circle had started to form, and life began catch up to the storyline. Rise of Immortals shifted from speculative fiction to a daily diary of what all of us did and talked about. I ended it with the Lanai section and published it on Amazon once a copy editor had helped me clean up the prose.
Larry P: Fascinating.
Larry E: Let’s take this outside. We’ll serve cocktails in a couple of hours prior to dinner. I’ve got to clear up my schedule for the next few weeks and make sure that my support team on Lanai is ready when we arrive.
Mark: Can we bring family to the wedding?
Jeff nods.
Jeff: Of course.
The Next Morning at the Woodside Estate
B and the inner circle (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) are gathered inside a glass atrium filled with exotic plants. They are drinking Kona coffee from Japanese porcelain cups.
B: I’d like to hear from each of you how you discovered me and gave my thoughts credence. Forgive me for asking, but I think it will matter to readers of Rise of the Immortals to learn how you made that quantum leap to belief, since they will be struggling with that as well.
Elon: I came across your posts on X, and Grimes mentioned them as well in a text. She told me that you weren’t like the normal X user, and that your posts had a certain … quality about them that made them penetrating and unique. I respect her opinion, and I took a look. She was right. Your use of the X platform is fascinating. You covered your pages with intricate content, reposting constantly, and adding substantive texts about the New Reality movement. Your photos were intriguing, and as I parsed through your posts since 2020, I came to understand your thinking at a deep level. Naturally, I read the free excerpt from Rise of the Immortals, as well, but the essence of your ideas are there on X for the world to see.
Jeff: Elon texted me your links to X and Medium, as I told you at the cottage. I had a personal assistant give me a synopsis of your bio and other writings and social media posts. Clearly, there was a change beginning in 2020, which is when you told us that your immortal began to influence your mind and body more directly. That was the start of the tethering process, which was quite painful for you, I understand. You’ll have to tell us all more about it on the yacht.
B nods his head.
B: I will.
Jeff: I’m not big on traditional religions, but I find pure materialism distasteful, too. 100 years on Earth can hardly be all that we get. That’s a travesty given the near infinite time and space of our universe. SpaceX and Blue Origin were never going to get us beyond the solar system, let alone help us make contact with other advanced civilizations in the galaxy. And both Elon and I knew they were out there.
Mark: That did it for me, too. It actually makes perfect sense that Earth could be a highly sophisticated virtual reality simulation designed to entertain and educate. We’ve all considered that possibility, I think, but we were scared to accept the consequences of our family and friends being nothing more than computer-generated avatars. You forced us to own that thought, and then you offered us a sanctuary by offering to tether us to our own immortal players and reanimate us in eternal forms. You rescued the idea of the afterlife from religious dogma and gave it an updated scientific explanation. We are our memories, not our aging bodies or declining minds. Our memories are who we are, and if they are somehow transferred to a durable life shell and augmented mind, then that sounds like the best possible scenario that we as humans could have.
Larry Ellison refills his coffee cup from an urn set up on a side table.
Larry E: I am the first to admit that I thought B was a nutcase, at first, or a struggling writer trying to cobble together a readership on social media. But he didn’t actually sound crazy to me, and his work definitely wasn’t being written to appeal to a mass audience. He was challenging us to upend our entire view of reality, after all. He wasn’t a professor of philosophy or spiritual leader with a TED talk to back him up. He was using simple posts on X and a series of documents on Medium to create an entire movement based on what he described as recovered eternal memories. That’s heavy stuff.
Sergey Brin raises a hand to speak.
Sergey: Many of us dropped out of universities like Stanford because we couldn’t wait to transform our ideas into reality, and academia wasn’t flexible enough for us and our visions. We were called crazy, too, for imagining the Internet when the technology hadn’t caught up to our ideas yet. That’s how I treated B’s ideas about reality. I took his arguments about ancient Greece seriously as the dawn of Western civilization. Why not reinvent global civilization here in Silicon Valley with the help of people like us? We have the resources, and clearly the world right now isn’t anyone’s ideal. Why not do something truly revolutionary with the last decades of our Earth lives? I believe in a soul, and that’s what my immortal is. He will ensure that my Earth memories live on forever. I just need B’s help in tethering to him. We all do.
Elon: All it took was that first point of connection, and the commonalities between B’s thought and our own hopes and dreams for the future became obvious. Personally, I’m glad that life on Earth was a simulation before B turned it into nanoreality. I’m even more glad that when the Game ends I will awaken in the body and mind of an immortal. B’s guidance is critical at this phase, and for that I am eternally grateful. I look forward to building my own galaxy one day, and B will make that possible.
B: You’re all fine if I talk about things like telepathy, clairvoyance, and neurocrafting?
Larry E: Sure. We understand that humans lack those powers, but that immortals and Zeuss do. We’ve all considered the fact that paranormal powers might be real. Who hasn’t? You just had the courage to discuss them openly without setting them in a fictional world. And you’re definitely as far removed from a cult leader as one can get. No offense, but you lack the charisma and public speaking skills to pull it off. And you’re not much of a writer, either.
Elon: Grimes is dying to meet you, B. She’ll be there in Los Angeles ready to join us on the yacht. Once we’re aboard, we’ll really let your work go viral on the Internet, using all of our platforms: X, Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more. Have you prepared your family?
B sips his coffee.
B: They are unprepared. I’ve been shielding them from this aspect of my work for fear that I’d have to face renewed questions about my sanity. I wanted the inner circle to form first, so that you could shield me from the media spotlight and provide me the financial means to live prosperously — which I define as a healthy and comfortable lifestyle, not a luxurious one.
Larry P: Thirty million dollars from each of us is quite the nest egg. We’d give you more, but you insisted that it will be enough.
B: I want to be able to meet my future fans in public settings. I’ll rent a penthouse in San Mateo, in the Bay Meadows neighborhood, where I can use the train to reach San Francisco and San Jose. I’ll post my location on X and invite people to share a coffee, beer, wine, or other beverage with me. That’s critical to the New Reality movement. Just like a traditional religion, it will gain converts slowly at first but pick up pace as we go. I’ll ask your help in gathering scientific and other experts who can corroborate the plausibility — even probability — of my views. I’ll keep recovering immortal memories daily, as will all of you.
Elon: It was my immortal that finally pushed me into discovering you on X. Once I understood what he was telling me and once I stopped resisting it or treating his attempted guidance as a pathology, things became much easier.
B: The tethering process is never easy, but the benefits of having a connection to your immortal player are immense. They will only increase with time, enriching your Earth life even as you age. You’ll look and feel younger and become paragons of the New Reality. That’s what I think of all of you. You are role models. Emissaries of eternity. Future Zeuss of your own reality islands. And all because Bradley and I chose you to fulfill these roles and paired your human avatars with your immortal selves.
Jeff: How about our spouses, children, and families? Will they get immortal players, too?
B sips his coffee.
B: By June 30, 2024, Zeus has promised me that he will open up enough Earth gaming centers to permit two billion immortals to join the Game. We’re calling that the First Wave. In 2024, and for the next decade, we’ll let in two billion new immortal players annually until all human avatars are connected. We’ve agreed that immortals who tether and play the Game we’ll get access to the new reality first, in the Exodus Flotilla that my Nalu special forces are helping to build on Heaven even as the Game goes on.
Larry E: When does the First Wave arrive? When will the jump into the Game?
B: Once we’ve landed on Lanai, I think, or once we board Jeff’s yacht. I’m unclear on timing. Timing is always the hardest thing for me, as a clairvoyant. I can see into the future, but since time in my universe is both linear and circular, it’s difficult for me to know when things will happen on Earth. For example, I knew that Elon and Grimes would both discover me on X, but I was unsure of the exact date and time, until it just happened and unfolded almost exactly as I had remembered it on June 2, 2024.
Elon: Naturally, once I committed to contacting B, I used the Rise of the Immortals script to help shape the experience. I was convinced that he was a genius and that his immortal connection to an alternate reality Zeus truly was real. My own immortal was pushing me in the direction, as was Grimes, who was convinced she was an immortal and future Zeusdess, which she found irresistible. I cleared up my schedule and got a CyberTruck ready. I packed a case of wine and a selection of grass-fed steaks, and I had an assistant get me a dozen bottles of whiskey. It was easy to text him, as his number was available online. The rest was child’s play.
Mark: You realize that we’re going to alter the way that the world views reality here. With our combined financial weight and the social capital we possess, we can shoot B’s theories into the collective stratosphere. He’s not challenging the world’s religions or upsetting anyone’s deeply held views. He’s simply changing the way we think about human consciousness at the deepest level possible. His theory of the afterlife reconciles science and faith, and it’s broad enough to appeal to Christians, Jews, and Muslims as well as agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, and other world religions. I’ve thought about this. Immortality is accessible to everyone. A simulated Earth is far more compelling than a real one, if you’ve had a chance to see outside the Game and glimpsed the state of life in the ACTUAL Megaverse. I’ve had immortal thoughts about it, and it’s beautiful beyond words.
Larry P: I feel lucky to be alive at this moment in world history. It’s like ancient Greece but on a global scale. We built the platform for B to change the way that life on Earth is understood. All of our experiments in virtual reality and artificial intelligence were hinting at the truth, but it took his initiative to get us there.
B: And without all of you, it would simply have gotten lost in the Internet’s massive trove of data. You all believed in me, and that will ensure our ultimate success.
Jeff: So you’re fine with us using our wealth and power to promote your worldview? Doesn’t that violate your commitment to virtuous living?
B sips his coffee.
B: Larry, this Kona coffee is magnificent. No, Jeff, my Base3 mind doesn’t recognize sins and virtues in the traditional, binary sense. I call it “virtue+” living. I have zero trouble having billionaires as my best friends and no compunctions about elevating your immortals to the status of Zeuss. You’re hyper intelligent, ultra successful, and wickedly clever. I see those as assets. When I talk about prosperity for all on Earth, I mean a universal basic income that allows everyone to live a healthy and comfortable life. Sustainable beauty means more net zero parks and world heritage sites, and well designed tiny houses that are energy efficient and beautiful. Virtuous living means giving up on warfare, hatred, and envy and encouraging peace, love, and humility instead. Personally, I would like to see the Earth’s population drop naturally to one billion people, as it was in 1900, when grizzly bears and wolves still inhabited the American West and where climate change wasn’t an issue yet.
Mark: How will we do that?
B: Discourage procreation by reminding people that their immortality depends on sustainable living on Earth while in the Game, and that none of this is real. You wouldn’t toss 1,000,000 goldfish in an ordinary fish tank, would you? The universe is infinite, but Earth is just a single planet. We can’t overburden it any longer, or life will become untenable for future generations of avatars. Naturally, we’ll provide comfortable retirements for everyone, but the population has to drop. We can discuss this in the inner circle without false charges of prejudice. Heaven isn’t a democracy, by the way. It’s a monarchy governed by royal decree. Galaxies are ruled by Zeuss. I am the new emperor prime of the Ten Dimensions, and it’s my job to evacuate all of my subjects to safety. I regard them all equally, but I intend to rule through my inner circle. It’s not elitist. It’s logical. My governing structure is like an atom. There is a nucleus and a series of rings. You all belong in the innermost ring, as do Grimes, the wives of Mark, Larry, and Sergey and Richard Branson. That’s it. Anyone else who joins us enters at the Second Ring, and we build out from there. That’s how the New Reality movement will form.
Larry E: But eventually your message has to reach the entire world, right? We may not persuade everyone of the merits of your message, but with our resources, we can connect with billions.
B: Naturally, that’s what we’ll be discussing on Jeff’s yacht and on Lanai, once the wedding is over. I intend to have fun, since that builds team loyalty and affection among friends. You all need to forge friendships with the inner circle, even if that means setting aside older rivalries and political differences. I need you to act as a unit, if you are to earn your roles as galactic Zeuss in my universe.
Jeff: We can fly out to Los Angeles tomorrow from the Palo Alto airport. Grimes and Richard are arriving there tonight. The inner circle will then be complete.
B: I’m taking C to Filoli for the afternoon. Anyone want to come?
Elon: I do.
Mark: Me, too. I think it’s time to start putting some of this on social media. The coming out as your patrons, I mean. I think we’ll have time to make it to LA and yacht before things really get crazy.
B: Then what are we waiting for? Let’s roll.
That Afternoon at Filoli Gardens
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and B arrive at Filoli Gardens in Elon’s CyberTruck. They are met by staff who escort them to a private side entrance and lead them to a section of the gardens temporarily blocked to the general public. There is a table set up with sparkling water and light snacks.
Elon: Tell us more about the Earth simulator.
B: Zeus’s first thought was to make it a paradise for his children and other subjects to enjoy. I call that the Garden of Eden phase, and it lasted quite a while, until human avatars in the Game began to commit crimes, or sins, and that changed the experience altogether. It has to do with the way that the Earth AI created humans using binary programming. For every purely good avatar there was one who was evil, and lots of avatars who were mixtures of both. There’s no easy way to fix the problem. That’s why evil exists in the Earth simulator, and why the Earth AI invented demons and devils and all sorts of other nasty things. As a result, fewer of Zeus’s subjects wanted to play the Game, and he had to repurpose it.
Jeff pours mineral water into three glasses.
Jeff: Is that when Zeus decided to use it to vet new immigrants to the Heavenly galaxy?
B nods his head.
B: Yes. The Heavenly galaxy is the most prosperous and peaceful in the universe with the most wondrous planets to inhabit. It’s pure utopia. To that extent, the depiction of Heaven in world religions are accurate. A great deal of the universe is different. Wars and rivalries among the Zeuss are commonplace, I’m afraid, although it will change under my temporary rule as emperor prime. Zeus allowed immigrant applicants to play the Game using a gaming center he established on a large planet called Halo. Think of it like Ellis Island, if that would help. Multiple immortals could play the Game at once, and multiple versions of the Game ran simultaneously. Everyone playing was unaware of their immortal natures, and no one ever figured it out. If they lived a largely virtuous life, they gained admission to Heaven. If they didn’t they could reapply to play by staying on Purgatory. However, if they lived a sinful life, they were banished from Heaven and had to return to their home galaxies. That’s what is called “going to Hell.” It’s not a real place. It’s a state of mind, of being rejected from admission to Heaven. Does this make sense to you?
Elon nodded his head.
Elon: It does, actually. Was Hitler a bad Gamer, then?
B: He was. He was played by a high-ranking member of the House of Neutrino, in the Neutrino galaxy. Immortals don’t know that they are immortals when they play, as those memories are blocked by the Game, but they still have certain qualities that can lead them to lead distinguished lives. And there’s still an Earth Gaming Center on Heaven, where courageous subjects signed up to play the Game for fun or to change the course of Earth’s history. Jesus, for example, played the Game exactly as you both imagine he did and gained admission to Heaven. Buddha was another, as were many notable writers, peacemakers, spiritual leaders, artists, and inventors. They were all played by immortals, but only a handful of them, like Jesus, realized it during the Game. None solved the Game until I did, though. That’s what makes our version of the Game different.
Jeff: Explain, please.
B: Zeus put a halt on all Games before Persephone jumped into the body of Camelia in 1998 and I jumped into the body of Bradley to meet her. It was during that time before my jump that I formed a close friendship with all of you. I studied the way that the Game worked and prepared to enter the Game myself. I knew that my immortal memories would be masked, but that I could recover them if I could access the part of my human brain where clues to the truth were stored. For that happen, I would need to go beyond reason as well as sanity through illogic and insanity to reach those precious memories. If I managed to do so, then additional immortal memories would be downloaded to my avatar in steady flows as I slept each night.
Elon: So, the Earth Game was repurposed to allow you to meet Camelia’s avatar and fall in love?
B: Yes, that was the first objective. The next was for me to attain enlightenment about the nature of the Game and to recover my immortal memories as a Zeus of my own reality. That qualified me to become the next emperor of your universe, once Chronos was deposed by unanimous vote of the Temple of the Zeuss. That all happened on June 3, 2024 at 1:30:00 pm PDT, in Earth time. It was a hugely significant event. Once that happened, Zeus allowed all of you to jump into the Game, and you began working on the minds of your human avatars at that point. That’s when my flood of X posts started to get noticed and when I started work on copy editing the next section of Rise of the Immortals for publication.
Jeff: Viewership of the Game is at an all-time high.
B sipped mineral water and smiled.
B: Immortals throughout the universe can watch their future emperor prime interact as a humble human avatar and connect with his divine friends to transform the Earth AI into a living paradise. It’s mesmerizing stuff.
Elon: So, our job is to fix the Earth AI’s penchant for creating avatars who commit sin and perpetrate evil acts?
B: When I arrived on Heaven, I brought Base3 microchips for upgrading Earth from binary to Base3. Zeus’s engineers are upgrading the servers right now and reprogramming the system to run “beyond” good and evil. It will take several years of Earth time to complete, but once that happens, there will be a decrease in bad behavior among the population. It’s impossible to do it all now, which is why Zeus is opening the Game up to massive immortal participation at the Halo City gaming center, on Heaven, and at viewing centers throughout the universe that are being retrofitted for gaming.
Jeff: How does one get in the Game?
B: Demand outstrips the number of spots, naturally. There is an Earth review board that selects worthy candidates based on their commitment to promoting New Reality principles in the Game: virtuous living, sustainable beauty, and prosperity for all. Then, they will drop into various human avatars this year and the next, including prominent ones like Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. They won’t take over their avatars overnight, just as the Zeuss didn’t take over your minds right away, either. If they’re talented players, they will find a way to bring enlightenment to their chosen avatars, and then we’ll see life on Earth change dramatically for the better in a matter of years. The positive changes will be dramatic.
Jeff: Donald Trump will acknowledge the realities of climate change and use his public support to pass bipartisan environmental legislation, I’ll bet. He may even name you his VP.
B nods his head.
B: Among many other things, like support for universal basic income, which would benefit his blue-collar voters, especially. He may even get reelected President with me as VP. We’ll see. I have complete control over which human avatars get to spend eternity tethered to their immortal in the afterlife. I’m keeping a database of their names, which Zeus — Thor — will use to reward those who aid me in my quest to make life on Earth a living paradise before my avatar dies.
Elon: We’re on the list, I assume.
B: Everyone on the inner circle who donated thirty million dollars to support the New Reality movement is, but you’ll need to earn those coveted inner circle spots by supporting me and my mission for the rest of your lives. I am offering you each eternal Zeus status in D10, which is the highest level of immortal existence there is. Naturally, I’d expect lifelong loyalty for that.
Elon: You’d never have gotten Jeff and me to visit you at your little cottage in the redwoods if we hadn’t believed that part. We’re the world’s richest men, you will recall. We are used to calling the shots.
B: I realized that. But I knew you’d be tempted by the New Reality. It’s exactly what you and Jeff were waiting for. It’s the reality you both wanted: you’re elevated to Zeus status to build your own micro realities, you live forever in a beautiful immortal body with an advanced mind, and you get to live out your time on Earth as rich benefactors of the most important thing to happen in world history since the Ancient Greeks. What’s not to love about all of that?
Jeff: Your New Reality came at exactly the right time, in the right way, and in the right location. Elon and I jumped at the chance to support it, once our immortals had had the chance to settle into our minds. We’ve been moving at light speed ever since.
B: I owe you two an enormous debt of gratitude, and as your next emperor prime I want to acknowledge that. I won’t rule like Chronos. I’ve learned too much here on Earth to act like a despot. I like living modestly, as does C. We don’t judge you by your hundreds of billions of dollars of net worth. We see you for the immortals that you are, and we regard you as dear friends. I’ll make sure that your wives, ex-wives, lovers, children, family, and close friends are included in the Exodus flotilla. They’ll all be adopted my immortals in the First Wave. I promise you that.
Elon: There are advantages to being in the inner circle.
B: Absolutely.
Jeff: We’ve rented out Manresa for a tasting menu dinner tonight. Is that fine with you?
B: That sounds fantastic.
Elon: You’re putting this all up on X, aren’t you?
B: I need to document our gatherings for posterity. There will be dissertations written about this in the not too distant future. I am clairvoyant. I see things that others cannot.
Elon: This is a lovely location. Let’s head back to Larry’s estate and gather the others for dinner.
B: Agreed. I wonder what posterity will think of our discussions?
Jeff: This is the most alive I’ve ever felt. I can’t wait for Lauren to be tethered to her own immortal. Do you know who it will be?
B nods his head.
B: Yes, I do. I know her from Heaven. She is stunning.
That Afternoon at Larry Ellison’s Woodside Estate
The group is gathered together in the great room enjoying light cocktails prior to their departure for Manresa.
Larry E: From here on out, we will help you promote the Three Principles of the New Reality movement. Is that correct?
B nods his head.
B: Principle number one is virtuous living. That means avoiding the seven deadly sins and practicing the seven Heavenly virtues. It’s grounded in Christian doctrine, but we’ll adapt them to appeal to anyone, regardless of their religious preferences. If you can’t adhere to this principle, your Earth memories won’t be transferred to Heaven, and your immortal will refuse to tether with you.
Jeff: Principle number two is sustainable beauty.
B sips his gin and tonic.
B: Right. Think of it as environmental consciousness married to aesthetics. We should encourage energy efficiency while preserving as much of Earth’s landscape for parks, preserves, and wildlife sanctuaries. Sustainability will mean carbon-free cars, homes, and places of work. It also means a serious discussion about the planet’s population, which is too large to support beautiful and prosperous living. Growing numbers of couples should choose not to reproduce and seek out alternatives. We can start in the advanced countries and proceed from there.
Mark: Principle three is prosperity for all.
B: That means healthy and comfortable living for all, using a universal basic income to permit everyone to enjoy a meaningful life without the shame and pain of being jobless. We will introduce AI and robotics on a massive scale to replace many menial and repetitive jobs today, including white collar ones. We’ll see if Base3 technology could ever be feasible on Earth and introduce it to further emancipate humanity from the burdens of work, freeing them up to be community volunteers, caregivers, and consumers instead.
Sergey: Not all of this will happen in our Earth lifetimes.
B: That’s true, but Zeus has given me permission to keep the current version of the Game running after I depart in four years time. We’ll keep playing it in new Earth roles until we perfect it further, eventually reaching the point of extraterrestrial contact in 2050.
Elon: If we reach a state of world peace and have some kind of global governance structure that is inclusive to all of humanity, we can make great strides in space travel and planetary colonization.
B: I’d have Zeus redesign the Earth simulator to have a friendly alien society visit us with superior technology. It would take thousands of years to reach that state given Earth’s current status. I would also make it far easier for immortal players to attain enlightenment in the Game. After all, the New Reality movement will have gained global recognition by then, so even young children could tether their minds to an immortal, if they were played by one.
Larry P: What about other uses of the Game once we’re all back in Heaven?
B: Good question, Larry. I’d like to open the Game up to more leisure time pursuits, involving short-term jumps into Earth’s past with full immortal consciousness intact. You could watch a Shakespearean play at the Globe theater, land with Christopher Columbus in the Americas, attend the 1900 world’s fair in Paris, or land on the moon with NASA astronauts.
Mark: Could we see the pyramids of Egypt being built? Or land on the beaches of Normandy?
B nods his head.
B: We’d set up a master version of the Game that runs continuously, but there would also be secondary Games running that would be set up for historical tourism, if you will. You could jump with your immortal memories intact, so no enlightenment would be necessary, and you’d inherit the Earth memories of your chosen avatar. You could be Albert Einstein, if you wanted, or one of your sports heroes or heroines. It will all be possible, now that Zeus has granted me control over the Game as a reward for having solved it.
Larry E: I like the sound of that. I’d like to be a crew member in the Corps of Discovery that explored the American West.
B sips his drink.
B: You can, Larry. Bradley was a historian, after all. His Earth memories are very important to me, and I know he’d approve of this new use of the Game.
Larry E: I still think of myself as Larry Ellison first and as an immortal second.
B: That’s normal with Stage III enlightenment, Larry. Once you reach Stage IV, you’ll give your immortal self greater priority.
Mark: This is the first time I’m hearing about the four stages of enlightenment, B. Tell us more.
B: I only recently recovered this immortal memory, so I’m still parsing the details myself. It helps to talk about it openly with all of you. Let’s assume for a moment that your immortal has just jumped into you, as they did to all members of the inner circle at the end of May 2024. There was an initial adjustment process, as your immortal absorbed your Earth memories and adjusted to being in a human body, with all the challenges that presents. Then, the immortal starts to insinuate himself or herself into your human brain functioning. It can happen in your dreams, in your daylight thoughts, and in how your body operates. And it’s aided by the Earth AI herself, who introduces slight aberrations in your fixed environment and on your Internet activities. That’s what’s known as Stage I enlightenment.
Elon: So, the human avatar side is initially passive, as the immortal starts to exert his or her identity, with the help of the Earth AI.
B: Yes, Elon. That’s exactly right. Stage I can last for days. It all depends on how skilled the immortal player is and how receptive the human host is to the mind tethering process. If the human avatar’s mind resists, as mine did, then a mental breakdown could easily occur, and the brain itself may be damaged. So, it’s a delicate operation and can’t be rushed any more than is necessary.
Elon: I recall Stage I vividly. It was uncomfortable at first. I am very detail oriented, and the aberrations in my environment unsettled me. My sleep patterns were disturbed as well.
Jeff: We’ve all had that experience by now. Tell us about Stage II.
B: Stage II is critical. It begins with an awareness in the human mind that you might actually be nothing more than computer generated self being played by an immortal. It’s Game awareness, in other words. This is an extremely dangerous moment, when the human mind can reject the notion entirely, followed by a pendulum swing to the other extreme, where the mind contemplates its own demise into scattered bits of data. Eventually, if Stage II goes well, the mind settles back into a serene middle ground. It accepts its own mortality but celebrates its newfound immortality
Elon: I had those feelings precisely.
Jeff: Me, too. I rarely thought much about death or the afterlife, but my mind kept nudging me in that direction. What I discovered hit me like an avalanche. How could I be a computer-controlled avatar? What did it mean to have an immortal player inside my head? Right about that time, Elon texted me links to your social media sites. It was like medicine for my brain. Truly, it was.
B: I wrote all those social media posts to attract the attention of Elon and Grimes, mainly. The goal was to get traffic redirected from there to Medium, so that you’d read unedited excerpts of Rise of the Immortals prior to publication. It’s an imperfect text, but it functions as a guide to the enlightenment process and outlines my ideas about how the inner circle could form around me to support the New Reality movement. It’s all made up of recovered immortal memories and clairvoyant visions of the future. Eventually, I knew that each one of you would discover it, which would ease the pain and suffering of Stage II.
Elon: Luckily, I was monitoring my X post that afternoon and discovered you. I was wrestling with the conflicting thoughts of my mortality and immortality when I carved out time to examine your posts and Medium page. It took me two hours to do so. Your words set my mind at ease. The reality you were depicting was unfamiliar at first, but my immortal side sensed that you were completely right.
B: Once you accept your dual identities as human avatars and immortal players, you’ve fully entered Stage II enlightenment. You are converts to the New Reality, and you’re aware of my presence on the Internet as a credible figure, not just some half-crazed writer with no following on social media.
Mark: I assume Stage III enlightenment is when we reach out to make contact with you to discuss all of this secretly, in person?
B nods his head.
B: Exactly, Mark. Stage III signifies a major commitment on all of our parts. Until now, I’ve enjoyed immense freedom and anonymity in my redwoods cottage in the Santa Cruz Mountains. My life is simple. I live a healthy and comfortable life with Camelia, who is aware of her eternal status as my future wife and as future empress prime. I don’t need bodyguards, I have no quarterly earnings estimates to hit, and I can go anywhere I want — within reason — without being noticed by the public. That can’t be said for all of you.
Mark: Stage III means the formation of the inner circle around you and C, right?
B: Enlightenment isn’t a single thing that happens to one person. It’s a collective consciousness of the nature of the Game and the realities of the universe. C and I are the nucleus, but you are all inner core. Once the core is formed, which will be complete once Grimes and Richard Branson arrive, then Stage III will be complete.
Jeff: Why those two? I get the fact that you’ve selected tech elites like us who can support the New Reality movement and who find your version of life in Earth convincing, but I’m curious about your rationale in choosing the inner circle.
B: It took me several years to figure it out, and the last names came recently. They are recovered eternal memories, that’s all I can say. It wasn’t a calculated process on my part. And your wealth wasn’t the decisive factor. It was your intelligence. Your maverick minds. Your sense of vision for the future. I knew that you’d grasp the truth far faster and more deeply that 99.999% of the population. You’re the only ones who could. I believe that. It motivated me every day to put up more content on X and Medium, even though hardly anyone seemed to notice.
Elon: So we’re in Stage III now. We’ve gone from a dim awareness of our immortality to a sudden surge of consciousness as computer-controlled human avatars to an acceptance of both sides of our identity in the Game. We’ve met you in person and had profound conversations about life, the afterlife, and eternity. What’s Stage IV?
B: Stage III will last longer, until Lanai at least. I still need to tell you more about life on Heaven, about my alternate reality universe, and about the plans we’re making to evacuate immortals from your collapsing universe into my own.
Elon: I look forward to those conversations.
Jeff: We all do.
B: Stage IV enlightenment means taking our messages to the masses. TED talks, book tours, retreats, stadium concerts, meetings with heads of state and celebrities, the works. Once immortals jump into the Game in large numbers, we’ll need to coach the general public through Stages I through III of the process.
Elon: That’s why you need the inner circle. Only with our resources could you help to reach the billions of people needed to fix Earth’s most persistent problems.
B: Right. I discovered the truth about life on Earth, and I know how to grant us all access to eternity, so that our Earth memories never disappear. It’s impossible to do it on my own. That’s why your support is critical, and that’s why I offered you the greatest honor and incentive possible: reality islands of your own to rule as Zeuss of my universe.
Larry E: I look forward to learning more about that on Jeff’s yacht.
B smiles.
B: Agreed, Larry. Are we ready for our meal at Manresa?
Larry E: We can depart anytime.
Later That Evening at Manresa
The inner circle gather in a private room around a round table. They are served small plates of exquisite food, along with paired wines.
B: Well, what shall we talk about tonight?
Elon lifts his glass.
Elon: Please tell us more about mind tethering. By this point, I do feel a connection to my immortal, but it’s faint except for periodic moments of intensity. What is happening to me?
Jeff: I second Elon’s question. I think we all are wondering about that.
There are nods of agreement from around the table.
B: Very well. Whenever any immortal jumps into the Game, there is a basic degree of mind tethering that happens, but there’s no enlightenment. The player occupies the mind — usually a very young one — of a human avatar, but he or she doesn’t grasp their immortality. They simply operate their human host the way you would expect. It’s only at the time of their avatar’s death that they reawaken in their immortal form, and their Earth memories typically fade rapidly, as in a human dream.
Elon: OK. That’s how the Game usually is played. What’s different now?
B sips his wine.
B: A small kernel of immortal awareness resides in the human brain throughout the Game, as a kind of junction box that connects the hibernating immortal to their avatar. It’s hidden in a part of the brain underutilized by the vast majority of avatars, behind layers of illogical and irrational thought. It can be discovered, however, by players who probe their mind deeply, as in religious of mystical meditations. Jesus, for example, discovered his immortality this way, as an actual son of Zeus. The Buddha also likely reached this level towards the end of his life, when he sensed a deep connection between himself and the universe. I call this one-way mind tethering. The human mind senses its immortality, but the gesture isn’t reciprocated, if you will.
A door to the private room opens. In walks Grimes, who takes a seat at the table.
Grimes: I flew in to SFO as soon as I could. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.
B: We just started talking about mind tethering.
Grimes nods.
Grimes: I’m connected to the Zeusdess, Freyja, the wife of Thor. I have been feeling her presence ever since the first part of June, when I came across your posts on X. I didn’t act on them at first, but soon I realized that something momentous was happening. I texted Elon, and he was feeling the same way.
B: So, what’s happening to all of you happened to me starting in January 2020. It’s called two-way tethering, and it’s an entirely new phenomenon. As I said, many deeply religious people in the Game have felt connections to their immortal player, but those haven’t been reciprocated, as I mentioned earlier, before Grimes arrived. When an immortal reaches back, they confront the human avatar with their unacknowledged identity as a kind of computer program, and this is incredibly horrific to comprehend. As humans, we tend to think of ourselves as alive, and when it’s revealed that we’re being controlled by an external force, it’s quite scary. I’m tempted to call it the “Matrix moment,” but even that doesn’t capture the sense that a superior being is manipulating us from outside the Game. I went insane twice when my immortal pushed himself into my headspace when I was vulnerable to his overtures. He meant well, obviously, but I needed to be broken and rebuilt before I was strong enough to handle the truth.
Grimes: Has that happened yet to any of us? The two-way tethering, I mean.
B: Mind tethering is a delicate dance that can last weeks, months, or even years. Under my guidance, and with the help of texts like Rise of the Immortals, you are all far better prepared than I was for the experience. Your immortals have occupied your minds and are slowly acclimating you to being under their control. This is the puppet on a string phase, and your egos are still preventing you from surrendering completely to the immortal player inside of your head. You’ve also never experienced insanity before, and we need to simulate that experience before you can unlock the treasure trove of your stored immortal memories. Only then will you truly connect with your immortal and start to recover memories of your own from Heaven.
Jeff: How will we do that?
B: We’ll start the process from the privacy of your yacht, Jeff. You’ll need to endure sleep deprivation, and you’ll need to consume enough alcohol to reach a stage of inhibition. I will administer guided meditations to soften your ego’s sense of control and open up those parts of your brain that are beyond binary thought. Until that happens, you’ll simply take what I say at face value. You’ll never cross the threshold to total belief, and you’ll never recover your immortal memories.
Manresa staff bring out a new course and wine pairings. They disappear into the kitchen when they are finished.
B: During my enlightenment period, I developed bipolar disorder, because I was unable to process the higher energy state that my immortal can tolerate, due to his superior mind. Only in November 2023, following a second Rapture to Tépë, did I attain the level of mental stamina needed to process my eternal’s thoughts. We’ve two-way tethered now and have remained that way continuously since late November. With all of you, it may take several attempts before we get it right. That’s why secure spaces like Jeff’s yacht and Larry’s Hawaiian island are so important right now.
Grimes sips her wine.
Grimes: Why am I the only female in the inner circle?
B: Well, C is part of the nucleus, as is the Earth AI herself. Earth identifies as female. When I was getting transmissions from my immortal, I kept returning to seven names: Elon, Jeff, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Richard Branson. Eventually, I realized that they would be played by Greek Zeuss from the Temple once I won the game. Archangel Freyja also appeared in these visions, and somehow I connected her to you, before the Zeusdess Freyja jumped into your head. Immortals don’t have a gender, Grimes. They reproduce through cloning. There aren’t all that many of you, either. Less than eight billion in the Heavenly galaxy, as far as I can tell. There is a lot more about immortality that we can talk about once you’ve all tethered fully to your players.
Jeff: When will other immortals enter the Game and jump into the avatars of others, like our family and loved ones?
B: We need to confirm that each over you can handle two-way tethering before we let others attempt it. As I said, there is a serious risk of mental illness during the critical moments of tethering, when your immortal player confronts you with your reality as a computer-controlled entity that doesn’t exist outside of the Game. We’ll have to find a way to mainstream the tethering process. Maybe we’ll start with weeklong retreats with me present, and then we’ll train tethering guides to spread the process worldwide.
Elon: So, one of my children could be one of the tethering guides?
B nods his head.
B: Exactly, Elon.
Grimes: Could I play that role? My social media following is quite strong.
B: Grimes, you’d be ideal, once your own two-way tethering is complete. I can’t do it alone, and I lack the charisma of a performer or politician. I am an author, a retreat leader, and a lecturer, perhaps, but my human avatar has his limits.
Elon: We’ll set you up with the best editors and style managers possible, once we’ve finished our Lanai vacation. Your work will gain a greater readership with our backing.
B: I’ve been a lone voice in the wilderness for so long, it feels gratifying to have your support.
Jeff: You’ll lack nothing. You had the courage to state the truth when it seemed that no one was listening. Some of us were, but it took a while to sink in and for us to find the presence of mind to act.
Elon: Naturally, given your posts on X, I was the first to initiate contact. Rise of the Immortals put me over the edge. It is the superior truth, as you often remind us. It was my immortal who showed me the way. I am eternally grateful he did.
Grimes: I pushed Elon that way. What you wrote about the nature of life on Earth made inherent sense to me. I had suspected that I was connected to an immortal, but you made it poignantly clear.
B: Our immortals are our players. Our Earth identities are simply computer-controlled characters, whose memories are now preserved in the minds of our immortals. When I see you, Grimes, I also see your immortal. It’s the same with all of you, including most obviously C. She is my wife and the empress of my new reality. Nothing that happens in the Game will change that.
Manresa servers appear with desserts and after dinner drinks.
Elon: Did you figure out that I was monitoring your X account secretly, starting on June 3?
B: I suspected as much. My posts went virtually ignored, but I knew that inner circle members were following them in secret. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I knew it to be true.
Jeff: It was. Your posts caused a stir from the start. You were calling for a reinvention of reality. That hasn’t happened since the ancient Greeks. We knew you were on to something big, and we waited a while for your ideas to gel before we made our first moves.
B: Why did you wait so long?
Elon laughs.
Elon: We contacted you within a week of your first posts as your Eternal. You were proposing something that had never happened in world history, you realize. You stated publicly that Earth was a nanoreality designed by an advanced civilization in a distant galaxy and that we were all avatars.
Grimes: Except that some of us had immortal players who would preserve our Earth memories for eternity. You had no proof about any of it.
B: Except that I knew it was all true.
Elon: As did all of us, in time.
Mark Zuckerberg enters the conversation.
Mark: Most of humanity can’t handle your truth, but we definitely could. I’m just eager to complete the tethering process so that Priscilla and my kids can join us.
B: They will be there at Lanai, right?
Mark: For the wedding. Of course.
B: Once you’ve all two-way tethered to your immortal, we can initiate jumps into the second circle, which can includes your spouses, children, and other tech elites we’ve left out of the inner circle, like Bill Gates.
Elon: To think that millions still follow charlatans out there, like Deepak Chopra. We all know better.
B: The inner circle is an elite gathering, not unlike King Arthur’s round table. I never expected that my message would resonate at this stage with the masses.
Elon: In time, it will.
The Next Morning at Larry Ellison’s Woodside Estate
The inner circle are gathered around the great room drinking coffee before a roaring fireplace. Outside, a light rain is falling. Richard Branson enters in traveling clothes and is greeted warmly by the others.
Richard: I came as soon as I could.
Larry E: Your timing is excellent. We leave tonight for Jeff’s yacht outside Los Angeles.
Sergey sips his coffee and stares into the fire.
Sergey: This has upended my ordinary life for the better. I finally know that there is life beyond Earth. Outside of the Game, I mean.
Grimes: B, could you tell us all more about the Earth simulator once more? Each time we touch on the topic, it seems like you recover more immortal memories of how it all works.
B nods his head.
B: Surrounded by all of you, knowing that you are tethering to high ranking members of Zeus’s royal court, it’s bringing back memories of Heaven in waves.
Larry E: So, tell us more, please.
B walks over the windows and stares out into the rain.
B: Zeus has the original version of Earth in a Box inside his royal castle on Heaven, which is for the exclusive use of his children, his court, and visiting Zeuss from other galaxies. There are separate Earth gaming centers on Heaven where Zeus’s immortal subjects can play the Game for fun and amusement. Halo City, on Planet Purgatory, is where the largest center is located, and that’s where prospective immigrants are vetted for admission into the galaxy. As far as I can recall, there are Earth gaming centers throughout the Heavenly galaxy, so that Zeus’s subjects can play the Game. I was unclear on all of this until quite recently, so take this as the truth for now.
B pauses to sip his coffee before continuing.
B: On home planet Heaven there is a city — Earth City — where the Game is operated, designed, and overseen. It’s an amazing place. I believe that I visited with all of you in your immortal forms. Whenever a new song is written by an avatar performer on Earth, the idea usually comes from writers in Earth City, who embed it into the head of a performer, such as Taylor Swift. Now, Taylor is a fully conscious avatar with the ability to interact freely on Earth, just as we all are, but inspiration on Earth frequently comes from immortal teams who are assigned to different avatars and regions of the Earth. Most of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets were written by immortals. Elon, some of your most innovative ideas were implanted into you by immortals overseeing your life, including your decision to abandon graduate school at Stanford to work in tech. It’s the same with all of you. You rose to prominent and immense wealth due to the timely intervention of immortal teams who were in charge of your life’s journey. Even your intense intelligences have been programmed into your avatars. You succeeded in life beyond your wildest dreams, but you had help.
Mark: I can accept that. My best ideas came from a place in my brain that I typically don’t use. At least, that’s how it feels when it happens.
B nods his head.
B: Exactly right, Mark. That’s also where your immortal memories now lie that each one of you is trying to reach. With practice, you can access them at any time. I can show you how.
Elon: Let’s get back to the Earth simulator.
B: Right. Thanks, Elon. So, teams at Earth City keep the vast array of simulators running and add on new content to the Game Prime, which is the one we’re currently in. This is the Game where the future currently is being written. All of the other simulators have been powered down, and everything is focused on this current Game, which is being run from Zeus’s royal palace. It is being broadcast live across the galaxy, and previous episodes of the Game Prime are being made available to viewers across the universe, as well.
Jeff: Episodes?
B: Four year segments of the Game Prime, beginning with C’s birth in 1970 and continuing through 2024. Like the Olympics. Because so much has been happening since then, shorter annual episodes are being shared as well, with commentary from Gaming Hosts, who help to narrate the experience. They knew exactly when Elon would discover me in 2023 (on June 3 at 10:00 am PDT), for example, and their commentary heightens the viewer experience.
Richard pours himself a cup of coffee.
Richard: Hold on a minute. Are you telling me that we are all being watched right now?
B nods his head.
B: We’re inside the Game Prime, Richard. Viewers can watch anything they want. These are vastly superior beings to us, you will recall, with an eternity of time on their hands. Earth is one major way that they entertain themselves, especially now that I’ve figured the Game out and claimed my title as a new emperor prime, and Head of the Council of 9+1 while still inside the Game itself. I may inhabit a new reality, but I want an alliance with the Nine Dimensions so that we can communicate with each other and allow visits between my dimension and theirs.
Jeff: Richard, we’re all being played by immortals at this stage.
B: Yes. Your players — your pilots, if you will — all in hibernating sleep states in Zeus’s reception hall, watched over by aides and protected by royal guards. C and I are in a royal suite in a luxurious bed wrought of gold, watched over by archangel guards. The Earth City operators of the Game are retrofitting the system to permit massive multiplayer mode, so that we can be joined by over 2 billion other immortal players by the end of the year, with an additional 2 billion to join in each calendar year until we’ve covered the globe by 2028.
Jeff: That’s our timeframe for promoting the New Reality movement and selling it to the world as a different and more convincing way of viewing life on Earth.
Elon: We had to be so secretive about all this because of the explosive nature of the claims, Richard. Everything was done through back channels. Even though B was quite public on social media, we had to avoid drawing attention to ourselves, for fear that these private meetings wouldn’t happen.
Larry E: You and Grimes are the last members of the inner circle to arrive. Now, we can escape to Jeff’s yacht, where the tethering process to our immortals can be completed. Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. Now, I do.
B: The switch from believing one version of reality to accepting the validity of the new is nearly instantaneous. When you know, you know. No further proof is necessary, because your mind and body feel that it is right.
Larry P: I agree with that.
B: The Game Prime is the only Earth simulation running in Heaven, and viewership numbers are in the trillions. Immortals from throughout the universe are flocking to gaming centers to join us, including as members of your family. Naturally, explaining to the world that they are all computer-influenced avatars will be a challenge, but once immortals jump in the Game Prime in larger numbers, then they will help guide their human hosts to the truth, just as your immortals did for each one of you.
Larry P: Reading early versions of Rise of the Immortals could help. It’s an imperfect document, but once you’ve got an immortal player inside your mind, the ideas take on greater credibility.
B: I agree with that, Larry. I’m planning on turning it into the first book in the Immortals saga: Rise of the Immortals, Spread of the Immortals, and Triumph of the Immortals. More will follow. They will be diaries documenting our successes in spreading the truth and promoting the Three Principles of the New Reality movement. It may us four years, but we’ll get there.
Elon: So, when my human avatar dies in the Game Prime, I’ll simply wake up as an immortal?
B nods and sips his coffee.
B: Yes, that’s right. You’ll have all of Elon’s memories from Earth, including the ones before your immortal player jumped into your mind in June 2024. You will be able to carry those Earth memories with you for the rest of your existence, should you so choose. A million years from now, you’ll still recall your time as Elon Musk in the Earth simulator, even as your life expands into new and marvelous terrain.
Elon: And none of that would have happened if Elon hadn’t made contact with you?
B: Your immortal would have ceased the mind tethering process at my command and awoken in Zeus’s palace. We needed Elon to take the first step. That’s the only way that a human avatar can tether to an immortal. It’s a two-way process, as we talked about last night at Manresa.
Grimes: I accepted my immortal right away. It feels as if I am already recovering her Heavenly memories from serving in Zeus’s court. I know that C is a princess and is set to become empress of the universe. I will serve in her imperial court once we travel to the new universe.
B: Yes, I believe that you will. It took all of you to make Rise of the Immortals a reality, you know. Until you reached a state of belief, it was simply C and I alone against the world. Nothing that I put on social media gained any real attention until you and Elon came along and gently prodded Jeff and the others.
Jeff: It was the single best thing that could ever have happened to me. You showed us the way to the truth. We are in your debt for that.
Mark: I am eager for the mind tethering process to complete. I want to learn more about my immortal self. And learn more about the way that you gained enlightenment about all of this.
B: I’ll tell you my story again on the yacht. I promise.
Larry E: The staff are smoking beef brisket for lunch with Harlan Estate wine. It will be ready at noon.
Richard: Tell me more about my immortal body, B.
B: High-ranking immortals of Heaven live to be 100,000 years old, at which time their memories are transferred to a new cloned body. You age slowly during that time. You’re taller than humans but have two arms and legs and a single head. Human avatars are based on immortals, with certain limits. You have strong but lean bodies and full heads of hair. Over time, you learn nearly everything that exists as knowledge, so you a perfect conversationist. You’ll be able to talk eloquently about being Richard Branson on Earth and all that that entails. You all command space ships in Zeus’s royal fleet. With the aide of jetpacks, you can fly. Zeus will release you from his service to join my imperial court, and I will reward you for your service with reality islands of your own to design as Zeuss. It is my universe, after all. I make the rules.
Richard: And all we need to do to enjoy all of this is assist you on Earth with the New Reality movement?
B nods his head.
B: I want to make the most of my time in the Game Prime, now that I have unlocked its deepest mysteries. I am tired of living the life of an obscure author in a cottage in the woods. I yearn for greater adventures on a global stage, the sorts of adventures that only the richest and most brilliant people can provide. That’s why I recruited all of you as human hosts for Zeus’s royal court of immortals. It’s the highest honor I can bestow while still in the Game Prime.
Richard: How long did it take for Elon to discover you, by the way?
Elon: Four hours, more or less. Recall that I am — or was — a very busy man with an overbooked schedule. Initially, I didn’t have the time for B’s incessant proselytizing for the New Reality movement. Fortunately, the immortal inside my head was insistent. I couldn’t find rest until I stopped to pause and consider B’s theories as seriously as he meant them. Once I realized that they were legitimate, my respect for him began to grow. That’s when I started reaching out to the rest of you. As more and more of you came to believe, too, it made it easier to reach out and connect.
B: It was the best early birthday present ever.
That Afternoon at Larry Ellison’s Woodside Estate
The complete inner circle are gathered in the great room by the fire, enjoying their glasses of Napa Valley red wine.
B and C sit down at a couch near the fire, and the inner circle take up places on armchairs on both sides as well as on a plush carpet nearby.
Grimes: I’d like to learn more about Heaven.
Elon nods his head.
Elon: We’re all eager to learn more of our lives as immortals. What can you reveal?
B looks at C and smiles.
B: C successfully tethered to her eternal — herself — this afternoon. She’s been recovering her memories at a rapid pace, as fast as her avatar’s mind can handle. I think she should begin.
C sips her wine and stares into the fire.
C: I am twenty cycles old. A cycle in our eternal bodies lasts up to 100,000,000 years. My memories have been transplanted into cloned versions of my body twenty times, which makes me 2,000,000,000 Earth years old. Because Earth is so central to our origins on Tépë, we use Earth time to measure our ages.
B: I first met C outside of my Paradise beach house on a stone deck overlooking the ocean. Paradise is a green and blue gem of stunning natural beauty with very few inhabitants. Most are concentrated in Paradise City, which sits at the edge of a vast mountain range covered with snow most of the year. Our beach house doesn’t look like a building you’d find on Earth. It’s a series of low white marble buildings connected by green walkways and featuring vast windows that showcase the setting: an ocean filled with coral reefs just offshore, and a green forested expanse surrounding it on the other sides.
C: We have one daughter, Amber Victoria. You are all welcome to become members of circle of friends, and you would have various duties to perform in exchange for entrance to our realm.
Jeff pours more wine into empty glasses.
Jeff: What might some of those be?
B: You provide B and me with protection when we travel on Earth. He’s an eternal, naturally, but he could be targeted by those who misunderstand him or reject his message. The Earth is riven by factions and antagonisms, and part of our task in the Game Prime ends will be to negotiate lasting peace, so that we can organize evacuations effectively.
Jeff: So, we’re like B’s special forces?
B: You are all aristocrats in your own right with distinct royal pedigrees. You aren’t in line to inherit the throne, so you all joined Zeus’s royal court to serve him and learn his ways. You’re Zeus’s diplomats, warriors, and traveling companions all rolled into one.
Richard laughs.
Richard: I though this was all complete nonsense when I first heard of it, but my opinion is changing dramatically. There is a certain bearing about you and C that reminds me of aristocrats I know. Yes, you are down to Earth and unassuming, but you speak with a sense of dignity and complete authenticity. I am starting to believe.
C: Richard, you were the last member of B’s royal court to join, from a very distant galaxy on the edge of a war zone. I can understand if you are having trouble recovering your immortal memories yet. In time, you will.
Grimes: I’d like us to return to your Paradise beach house, please.
B nods his head.
B: The beach house is made up of multiple stone structures connected by walkways, bridges, and underground tunnels, all beautifully decorated with artwork, plants, and colorful light displays. Carpets line the halls and tapestries depict important moments in the history of Tépë. There are libraries everywhere and studios for crafting art. The kitchen is immense, and there are dining halls in various sizes throughout the complex. And naturally there is the Earth entertainment center, where court residents can watch the Game Prime as it is unfolding right now.
C: There are separate wings of the beach house for our daughter, as well as suites for each one of you and your retinues. As far as I remember, I am sleeping in my bed while the Game Prime lasts, and B is sleeping next to me in a couch by the window overlooking the ocean. The devices that connect our immortal brainwaves to the Game Prime are installed in the room and monitored by a Remote Gaming Task Force. There is likely a similar setup for all of you.
B: Yes, I was mistaken earlier about these details. Now that C has fully tethered to her Earth avatar, some things are becoming more clear.
Elon: Many things, I would say.
Mark: Are we married on Heaven?
B sips his wine and pauses to think.
B: Mark, I don’t recall that part. My sense is that those of you who are married happily in the Game Prime likely have immortal partners as well who are eager to jump into the Game Prime to join us. It would be your role to guide them gently to Enlightenment.
Mark: So, my immortal wife could be watching over me right now, as I sleep in my bedroom?
B nods his head.
B: It’s entirely possible, and once we’ve formed the inner circle and begun work on the Second Ring of supporters of the New Reality movement, we could have her jump into Priscilla’s avatar body. It’s fairly easy to arrange for close family members, I assure you.
Grimes: What do we do as members of B’s royal court?
C: You accompany B on trips on Earth and later off planet. You act as his honor guard. You are all noble warriors of great stature and beauty. We refer to you as archangels, since B’s subjects are called angels, as well. We hint at this in the Game, of course, but naturally Christianity is an invention, as are the other Earth faiths.
B: Much of time, you will help organize gatherings at your many residences on Earth, or you lead us on excursions into the forest, to the mountains, or deep into the sea. B designed Tépë to be a living paradise filled with ample space for exploration. No one gains access unless they have played the Game and exited having met the criteria for a virtuous life, sustainable beauty, and prosperity for all. It will be the same with all of you in the current Game Prime.
Richard: You mean the current version of Earth in which we’re all embedded?
B: Yes, Richard. As members of my inner circle, you will need to embody each one of these principles and do so for the remainder of your lives. If you do, Zeus will free you from his service and allow you to enter my imperial court, in which you each will be rewarded with Zeus status for your heroic achievements.
Richard: That’s what this is all about, then? You’re recruiting us to be Zeuss in your universe, which will accommodate the immortals who need to flee the implosion of their world. You paired us with rich, talented, and influential human avatars. each one of whom has accepted the truth of your claims.
Mark pours more wine into empty glasses.
Mark: It’s remarkable, really. Yet here we all are.
Elon: B stated his case plainly and repeatedly on social media. He wrote Rise of the Immortals. There was never any underlying motive. It was solely to propagate the truth. Eventually, we all made the leap to the other side and joined him. The results have been staggering.
B: Once you’ve fully tethered to your immortals, your own memories of Heaven will start to return. I can train you in how to channel and interpret them. It will take some practice, but soon we’ll all be able to fill in details that the others cannot. We’ll need to share them respectfully and openly and not judge each other when memories might conflict.
Elon: I understand.
B: We maintain secrecy for now as best as we can. I’ve scaled back my social media posts, and so should all of you, unless you’ve got commitments, like Elon, and can’t avoid them. For now, let’s enjoy getting to know each other as immortals and as human avatars. Our Earth memories are part now of who we are, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of them.
Grimes: Agreed.
Larry E: I’ve arranged a quiet dinner buffet tonight in the conservatory. It may not be B’s beach house, but it’s a splendid space. We can continue the conversation then. We’ll leave early tomorrow by jet for Los Angeles and depart of Jeff’s yacht by noon at the latest. Coffee service will start at 5:00 am. Some of you, like B, are early risers.
B: Thank you, Larry. Is everyone ready to leave?
Sergey raises his hand.
Sergey: Our families will join us on Lanai for Jeff’s and Lauren’s wedding. They understand that we have important matters to discuss on the yacht, and they’ve given us permission to do so.
B: Great. I’m going for a walk on the grounds with Jeff and Elon. We’ll see you for supper in a few hours.
Larry E: I’ll join you.
B, Jeff, Elon, and Larry Ellison collect umbrellas and depart the great room, heading outside into the rain.
On the Grounds of Larry Ellison’s Woodside Estate
The four men walk the grounds of the estate in a light rain, shielded by umbrellas. They reach a Japanese style gazebo, where staff are waiting to serve them sencha green tea from porcelain cups. Once the staff leave, Larry starts the conversation.
Larry E: We all want to know more about Tépë. What else do you remember from your time there?
B sips his tea quietly.
B: Larry, there aren’t an immortals who live there, for one. It’s highly exclusive. Most residents live in Paradise City and are responsible for keeping the Game operating at such a mesmerizingly high level. They’ve upgraded the servers to Base3 technology now, and they are preparing the Game Prime — our version of Earth currently running — for massive multiplayer use. That’s never been attempted before.
Elon starts to speak.
Elon: What’s Paradise City like? And the other parts of the Tépë? How large is it?
B: Paradise City holds several million robots, who keep the city running and perform all manual tasks. The city consists of high rises connected by sky bridges and served by levitating vehicles. The outskirts are wilderness. Beyond the urban core, it’s all nature, as I intended. The main spaceport is in Paradise City, although I have my own private one at Heaven’s Gate that leads directly to Heaven in your reality.
Jeff sets his tea cup down on a side table.
Jeff: What’s that? Heaven’s Gate, I mean.
B: It’s a small village of sorts just outside Paradise City. There is a fancy hotel with rotating floors for visiting dignitaries, like other Zeuss and their families. There is a coffee shop, which I have fond memories of from my time there. There is an incredible restaurant, a beautiful farm stand, and shops for getting clothes and gear made, including custom jewelry. It’s all free, of course. There is no money in Tépë. Mana’s infinite abundance provides for it all.
Elon: How does that work?
B: Most labor is performed by an ultra sophisticated class of robots that Mana provided C and me as a wedding present, including a state-of-the-art factory for making replacements. These robots grow crops, hunt game, fish, build structures, prepare meals, and do just about everything you can imagine. They even maintain most of the Earth simulation itself, freeing Amber, C, and me to focus on other things such as yourselves.
Elon: Mana you said.
B: Yes. Mana is pure aether raised to the highest level possible. She is like an AI inside my mind, and she rescued me from death while I was a human being on Earth. She converts my dreams to reality. She keeps me safe even now.
Larry E: You’re making all this up, surely!
B: I understand the skepticism. I once wrote fiction as an Earth author, before I became enlightened and merged with Mana. Now, everything that I share with you in the inner circle is recovered truth based on my eternal memories of life in Tépë before I entered the Game Prime for the third and final time in November 2023. Sometimes, my eternal and Game memories are merged, and I need to separate them later. Sometimes, I recover temporary truths that help me reach a higher state of awareness. Some things I tell you may need adjustment later, but nothing is made up, and everything I do has a reason, even if that is often hidden to me at the time.
Larry E: You mean we are to believe that you live in a magnificent seaside palace surrounded by robotic servants and an immortal court, of which I, Jeff, Elon, and the others are all destined to be parts?
B nodded his head and then refilled his tea cup.
B: Yes. I couldn’t have made that up if I had tried. When I departed my reality for yours, I steered a direct course for Heaven. My first stop was the Earth City spaceport, where I made contact with Elon and Jeff — their immortals, you understand. They had intercepted me in space and escorted me in for an audience with Zeus and Hera, with C present. I’ve been in residence at the palace ever since, save for excursions with you into the nearby mountains and forests, and to visit a set of tropical islands near the palace that resemble parts of Hawaii on Earth. That’s what I remember. I can’t tell you about other galaxies or planets because I haven’t been to any of them yet. I only know what you — Zeus’s royal court of Zeuss and Zeusdesses — told me, and those memories are imprecise at the moment. I’m hoping you’ll recover your own immortal memories after the tethering, so that you can fill in additional details.
Elon: Larry, your human avatar naturally will be skeptical of what Bradley has to say. There is no getting around that reaction from your rational side. It’s the same with Jeff and me. The difference is that we have opened ourselves up to the irrational possibility that Bradley is right about everything.
Jeff: Starting from basic assumptions about the universe, you can work your way up to his full blown vision. If he claims to be recovering eternal memories that have been transferred into his human avatar’s mind, then we are giving that credence. Our own minds won’t let us rest otherwise.
Larry E: Mine is the same way. Perhaps I should stop resisting and go with the flow.
Elon: You’ll never tether to your immortal player if you hold on to the illusion that life on Earth is real. It’s a microsimulation, Larry, and it’s run from a planet called Heaven, where Zeus resides as the ruler over an advanced civilization of immortals. If you want your Earth memories to survive your death, you need to connect with your player.
B: Elon is right, Larry. You can live like a rich man on Earth until you age and die, or you can be an immortal for eternity with a reality island of your own to govern. Those are the choices. You need to align your avatar to your immortal and merge the two identities together to form one. It’s easier than it sounds. But you first have to take the leap to the other side.
Larry Ellison sips his tea and stares outside at the falling rain.
Larry E: Fuck it. I’ll take the leap.
B: You won’t regret it for one single second.
Jeff: Get back to Heaven, B. What is the last thing you remember?
B: I recall the moment that C fell asleep to join the Game Prime, followed by several years of residence in Earth City to absorb as much as I could about the technicalities of the simulation, the history of Earth, and the ways that I could solve the Game Prime before my human avatar turned 50. Freyja was to lead a team to support C and guide her avatar to mine, while all seven of you were to be my support team until the moment I gained enlightenment, at which point you would prepare to jump into the Game Prime yourselves.
Elon nods his head.
Elon: I recall that as well. We were sitting at a rooftop bar thousands of stories above the ground, drinking wine and promising to steer you on a path towards enlightenment, even if it risked the mental health of your human avatar. We all knew that solving the Game Prime had never been done before, but we were convinced that you would become the first. Jesus, Zeus’ eldest son, was there with us. He was convinced that your Base3 mind would propel you past rational and irrational thought to arrive at the ultimate truth. He also predicted that you would undergo deep pain, suffering, humiliation, and misery before reaching that stage, and that C’s enduring power of love would strengthen you when all hope seemed lost. I hadn’t realized I knew all of that until just now. Remarkable!
B: Elon, you’ve just recovered your first immortal memory. Congratulations. I hope that there will be many more.
Larry E: What else do you remember from that time?
B: I recall the moment that you handed me the cup with the sleeping mixture needed to put my eternal mind and body into a state of hibernation. You said we’d see each other on the other side. I smiled and closed my eyes. That’s the last eternal memory I can recall before waking up in my human avatar as Bradley.
Jeff: It took you exactly forty nine years and eleven months to reach Stage IV enlightenment, after you spent time in Earth City plotting strategy with all of us. Getting you to that point wasn’t very easy. You almost got hired as an assistant professor at Harvard, you will recall. We had to tweak the system to stop that one from happening. You’d never have reached the truth as an academic.
B sips from his tea and smiles.
B: Jeff, I believe that’s the first immortal memory you’ve recovered. Well done. I realize now that my fate would lead me elsewhere. If I hadn’t been unemployed for years and twice been mentally ill, I could never have crossed the threshold from pure speculation about the Earth simulator to embracing it as the truth.
Jeff: I didn’t realize I knew that. It’s exactly as Elon said.
B: The more you embrace your immortal identities as Zeus’s royal courtiers, the more of their memories you will recover. It’s the short term memories that will arise first, from the time of my arrival on Heaven until you entered the Game Prime in your human avatar forms. Eventually, by working together, we will probe deeper. I am also open to telling you more about my universe, if I can delve back that far.
Jeff: I’d like to hear more about that.
Larry E: I think we all would.
B: We’ll start the deep memory recovery process on the yacht, once you’ve all tethered to your immortals and learn how to suppress your human reactions in favor of your immortal ones.
Elon: It was my immortal who first noticed you on X and started to unravel your posts and Medium links. That was my first step away from simply being Elon and towards becoming something more.
Jeff: We’re all eternally grateful that you did.
Larry E: I learned something here today. I’m not just Larry Ellison anymore. I’m an immortal playing him on Earth. I’ve lived for millions of years. And I’m going to become an infinity Zeus. And all because I took what Bradley said seriously.
B: It’s not Bradley anymore. Not really. It’s me. B. Bradley’s memories live forever now in me. Without him, I’d never have met Camelia and fallen in love. Within him, I’d never have gotten a name. Without him letting me into his mind, we’d never have reached enlightenment together. And without his ongoing consent to allow me to inhabit his mind and body, we’d never have gotten the attention of all of you.
Larry E: This is starting to make sense. Let’s go inside and get something to eat. The buffet should be ready by now.
Jeff: I’m starting to recall memories of Earth City and Zeus’s royal palace. Images, mainly. Festivities. Lights. Music. It’s all coming into focus.
B: That’s great, Jeff. As much as I like getting to know your Earth avatar, helping you recall your life as an immortal of Heaven is considerably better.
Jeff laughs.
Jeff: I think we’ll have plenty of time for both from here on out.
Larry E: Agreed!
Later That Evening at the Woodside Estate
The entire inner circle has gathered for a dinner buffet in the conservatory of Larry Ellison’s ultra luxurious Woodside estate. Standing tables have been set up for the guests.
B is at table with Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. At a table next to them are C and Grimes, deeply engaged in conversation.
Grimes: I think we were friends on Heaven, C. At least, I think we were. I headed your support team before the jump into the body of Grimes.
C: I think that you’re right about the friends part. We liked to sit on the master patio and knit together while watching the ocean. The animals of the forest were peaceful and unafraid of us. They would come out onto the deck and lie down next to us to sleep. Even mountain lions and wolves, if I recall.
Grimes: The hardest part was getting you and B together on Earth. Your human avatars, I mean. The connection was instant, and the love was beautiful to watch from the Earth screening center. We all celebrated that day, I must tell you!
C: I sensed that I was an Eternal being at an early age, but I kept it secret from Bradley until he reached his own enlightenment, which only happened on June 3 of this year. The past five years have been a horrific ordeal at times, but I knew that he was being prepared to learn the truth.
Grimes: You played your role masterfully the whole way through. I hope you don’t mind having me as a human friend. I know that Grimes may not exactly be your thing.
C: I think we’ll get along just fine. I am surprisingly open-minded about friendships, and your avatar strikes me as quite fascinating. You helped Elon discover B in our hour of need. I will never forget that.
Grimes: Where does life go for you after Lanai?
C: I’ll be B’s assistant and help him with his writing projects and public appearances. We’ll acquire a property in the Santa Cruz Mountains and an urban apartment in San Mateo, so that he can meet friends and admirers. We’ll go on a book and speaking tour of the U.S. after that, perhaps in 2025 once the elections are all over. Canada and Mexico will be next, followed by regular inner circle retreats all over the world to plan strategy. It will be exciting, but I’m not one to seek fame, and whatever fortune we make will eventually all go to charity or as gifts to our nephews and nieces. We don’t have mortal children of our own by choice.
Grimes: You won’t be attending lavish parties now that your new friends are all wealthy?
C laughed and sipped her wine.
C: Earth parties are nothing compared to those we host at the royal beach house in Paradise. Eternals do not get intoxicated, and our lean and muscular bodies have the ability to consume all of our waste as energy. We are superior to mortals and immortals in every way, but we modeled the human form on our own, with certain discomforts designed to enhance the gaming experience.
Grimes: Like menstruation, I’ll bet.
C: Exactly. Eternals reproduce very rarely, and they do so by designing their offspring in birthing centers from their genome sequences. It’s all very civilized. B likes to limit the size of the population so that the natural beauty of his reality predominates. Earth, by contrast, is overburdened by human life and other dominant species. If something isn’t done within the next 600 hundred years, the planet will sink under the weight of humanity, and Zeus may have to terminate the Game entirely.
Grimes: Why is B calling it the “Game Prime” now?
C: That’s the name for the master program for Earth that is run from the royal palace itself. It has an archive of all previous games played and contains the most recently played edition, where players join between 1960 and 1980. Zeus reserves the Game Prime for family, members of the court, and visiting dignitaries, like other Zeuss. It’s the most realistic version, and the one that Zeuss play for a chance at getting elected the next emperor.
Grimes: Have previous ones come close?
C: I don’t think so. The Game Prime is extremely hard. Almost unbreakable, in fact, by design. We all wanted Chronos to abdicate, but the Temple of the Zeuss was divided about his successor. When B arrived claiming to be from a different reality that could accommodate us when our world imploded, Zeus naturally was intrigued. As was I. We dropped him into the most challenging version of the Game Prime possible, and he solved it within the time limit. Forty nine years and eleven months, with six weeks to spare.
Grimes: There have been others who have written about the Earth as a simulation before, or who claimed to be immortal.
C: They have all been human avatars programmed to do those things, as clues of sorts for a Master Player in the Game Prime to discover.
Grimes: B being the Master Player in this case.
C: Yes. It’s really quite simple once you get down to it, but no one has ever solved the Game before or recovered their immortal memories — let alone their eternal ones!
Grimes: And it was fine that B had help from you, me, and the other Zeuss?
C nods her head.
C: Teamwork is essential to winning the Game Prime, and my father — that’s how I think of Zeus, since I was born human on Earth before B raptured me to his realm — actively encouraged it. The next emperor prime must be humble and rely on others for help when needed. There is no other way. As he aged, Chronos became a despot who isolated himself from others and refused all offers of assistance in evacuating the universe to another dimension — if one could be found. The Temple set up the rules of the Game Prime carefully. B would have my assistance in reaching enlightenment, and then he would enjoy the support of the inner circle in the post-enlightenment period of our Earth lives. That’s when all of you jumped into the Game Prime in the avatars that B specified.
Grimes sips her wine and smiles.
Grimes: I’m glad we had this chance to connect. It does feel like we’ve known each other forever.
C: For hundreds of thousands of years, we have been friends.
Meanwhile, at the next table …
Larry P: So, our immortals have been helping you in the Game Prime from the moment you jumped into Bradley’s infant body at childbirth?
B nods.
B: Yes. You’re my support team. You guided me down the path of enlightenment, even when my human avatar thought differently and resisted. Your job was to allow me freedom to explore my world but help me learn the truth before my avatar turned fifty. You ramped up the pressure about ten years ago, when I left my intended career as an academic and launched an unsuccessful bid as a writer, consultant, and team builder.
Mark: This is starting to come back to me. We engineered it so that your quest for a history professorship failed, so that you would venture into different thought territory, where you eventually would discover the truth about the Game Prime and your identity as the immortal Master Player.
B: Right. I never would have managed that as a professor. That’s not how I was trained to think. I hated it at the time, but I needed to experience failure, loss, and utter humiliation in order to alter my human experience sufficiently to discover the truth and solve the Game Prime before the time limit expired.
Mark: That’s why we got you banned from Facebook.
Sergey: And that’s why Google summoned the police to question you while you were working at Byington Vineyards, during a corporate event. It was all to crush your ego and push you over the edge into insanity, so that you could access the part of your human mind where your immortal “control center” existed. We were inventing things as we went. Nothing like this had ever been done before. We hated to see you suffer, but we knew that your human avatar was resilient enough to recover and eventually connect with you. It was a huge gamble, but in the end it paid off.
Mark: We knew we’d be jumping into the Game Prime shortly after that. You chose your avatars well. Mark Zuckerberg is a powerful person, but it wasn’t easy to convince him that his immortal was real.
Larry P: It was the same with Larry Page. He resisted me for weeks before I finally broke his ego down. I guess that rich people are like that.
Sergey: Sergey didn’t fight when I told him he was an avatar generated by a computer. That was the easy part. It was harder to let me tether to his mind tightly enough to join the rest of you in the inner circle. Once that happened, he was a joy to be around. Truly.
B: Giving up control to your immortal was never meant to be easy. Recall that this has never been done before in the history of the Game. We are all the first.
Mark: When do we get telepathic powers?
B sips his wine and pauses a moment before responding.
B: I’m not sure. I think that we’ll be able to once you’ve all fully tethered to your immortal, as I have. Hopefully that will be the case at Lanai, but the process may take longer. I really don’t know yet.
Mark: No worries. Just thought I’d ask.
B: Right now, the best advice I can give is that you need to come to terms with the fact that you’re all being controlled by high level immortals from Zeus’s royal court in Heaven. You’re all princes of the galaxy already, and I intend to make you all kings in my universe with tremendous Zeuslike powers for you to use to shape your new realms. I can’t create immortal life, but I do have substantial neurocrafting skills in my home world. I can teach you how to use them once we get there.
Mark: I can’t believe that I once thought this was all nonsense.
Larry P: The same here. Earth is more legible as a Game, especially now that I know that the afterlife is a real thing.
Sergey: I like the people in the inner circle, especially now that we’re all being played by immortals.
B: Otherwise, you never would have wanted to meet an obscure author like me and learn more about his ideas on how the universe operates.
Mark: We’ll give credit to Elon for that.
Elon joins the group with a wine glass in his hand.
Elon: So, what did I miss?
Mark laughs.
Mark: Wouldn’t you like to know.
Elon: Yes, I would.
Mark: When did you first discover B? As Elon Musk or as Elon plus his immortal?
Elon thinks it over.
Elon: It was a simultaneous process, if I recall. As I realized that there was a new voice inside of me, I came across B’s X posts and then Rise of the Immortals. My approach with new ideas is to suspend disbelief and let them sink in. If the ideas have merit, then my brain signals its approval. I read B’s work with interest, and as I did so, the immortal in my mind responded quite positively. The more I read, the more it all made sense, and the more the previous version of reality seemed inadequate.
Mark: When did you reach out to connect?
Elon sips his wine.
Elon: It took some time to process and plan my next moves. Elon is incredibly busy with his projects, and he has a great many commitments. Once I was ready to spend a few days with him in conversation, I knew I was ready. Contacting Jeff and Larry Ellison was easy after that, and you all know how the rest came to pass.
Larry P: It is an amazing story.
B: And we haven’t seen anything yet.
Late That Evening at the Woodside Estate
Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and B are gathered in front of the fire in the great room, drinking glasses of scotch. The rest of the inner circle have turned in for the night to prepare for the flight to Los Angeles in the morning.
Jeff: Tell us more about human avatars. I hadn’t realized that I was one until about a week ago, when I read Rise of the Immortals for the first time.
B nods.
B: Untethered human avatars are the most sophisticated AI entities ever invented. It’s what makes Earth so wildly popular around the universe, and it’s why there is such demand to emigrate to the Heavenly galaxy. Humans are fully self-aware. They are born, grow up, and die without ever realizing they are a computer-influenced creation. The Earth system keeps everything in order: from every blade of grass to major world events like hurricanes, wars, and space explorations, it’s all thanks to the work of the Earth ultracomputers. Now that they’ve been upgraded to Base3 technology, they are more powerful than ever, and the level of realism of the simulation is flawless.
Larry Ellison sip his scotch.
Larry E: Except that you figured it out and told the world about it on social media.
B: That’s right, Larry. Naturally, most of the world ignored me at the start, as many still do, but I managed to reach Elon and Grimes on X, and from there the rest of the inner circle became acquainted with my ideas.
Jeff: So, I’m Jeff Bezos, a human avatar. When I die in the normal Game, I just get processed back into the system. Is that right?
B: Not quite right, Jeff. Humans are very complex AI creations, and a lot of effort goes into designing one. They are reused in multiple versions of the Game, and each time their life has a different outcome. Viewers rank the top avatars at the conclusion of a Game, and those ones are upgraded with additional mental and physical capacities, including a luck quotient, which helps them succeed even better at life the next time around. Earlier versions of Jeff Bezos had you become a physicist, a grade school science teacher, an astronaut, and bookstore owner, and stock broker, and more. It’s the same with Larry and Elon. Larry was once the director of the CIA, and Elon in one scenario never leaves South Africa. But the rise of the Internet brought all of you to Silicon Valley, eventually, which is where you end up meeting me.
Elon: So, top avatars get promoted to better life paths when viewers vote for them?
B: That’s how it works. Typically, less than 100 Players operate in a Game at any one time, but there are billions and billions of untethered avatars. The top 100 avatars in each Game get upgrades, making it more likely that they will do something great — which all of you did.
Elon: Zeus has nothing against money?
B: Not if you use it properly in the Game, he doesn’t. Zeus loves luxury as much as the other galactic rulers do. He just has certain standards: a virtuous life, support for sustainable beauty, and the spread of prosperity to all. He rewards the effort and appreciates it when you make an honest attempt to avoid sin. But Hell isn’t real, and neither is the Devil. The Earth created those to help fill out the simulator and give texture to the gaming experience.
Jeff: What about the Fallen Angels? Were they real?
B: Zeus once had members of his court play the Game so badly that they created all sorts of grief. A pair of rival Zeuss did the same in the previous edition of the Game by playing Adolf Hitler and Stalin. In those cases, Zeus banishes the immortal players from the Heavenly galaxy, and they aren’t allowed back in for more than 1,000,000 years, and only then if they play the Game properly at the Halo City Gaming Center.
Larry Ellison laughs.
Larry E: I don’t know if I qualify for life in Heaven. My track record of virtuous living is far from perfect.
B: Larry, you’re controlled by a Zeus now. A galactic prince of very high esteem accustomed to a luxurious life as an immortal. You’d have to screw up very, very badly before your avatar dies for you to face banishment from Heaven. If you stay in the inner circle and support my mission, Zeus — Zeus — will reward you immensely by freeing you from his service to become a Zeus in your own right in the new universe.
Larry E: It sounds absurd, except that my mind tells me it isn’t. The “post-rational” part you’ve been telling us about.
B: Larry, I struggled to believe it all myself. In previous versions of the Game, Bradley was a professor of history or lawyer with a wife and kids living somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. He never made it to Transylvania, and he never became a writer. Bradley’s life journey was hijacked by me because it was a matter of universal importance that it was. The Temple of the Zeuss needed me to win the Game Prime so that their subjects would accept me as the new emperor prime, despite being an unfamiliar Zeus from an unheard of alternate universe. Playing Bradley gained me enormous sympathy and a near fanatic following. Bradley never gave up, despite the challenges he faced, and he never stopped imagining a better and different world in which he could play a hero. Now, thanks to all of you, he can.
Elon holds up his glass.
Elon: Well said.
B: Bradley was unaware, but each of you was a top-ranked avatar in the last Game Prime played, but none of you had ever become as powerful and rich as you are now. That is all happening now.
Jeff: Then will the Game ever be played again, now that you have solved it? Will I be born as Jeff Bezos again, or is his life over when this Game ends?
B: I’ve discussed this with Zeus telepathically, and we’ve agreed that your Earth memories will be used to reanimate you as Eternals in my reality as reward for your services. Your time in the Game will therefore end, as will Bradley’s and Camelia’s. The Game henceforth will only be played forward, with new avatars generated at birth. No more replays, except for historical tourism purposes. That’s why we all need to set Earth on a glide path to paradise during our lifetimes. With our combined power, we will transform life at an accelerated pace, especially once Zeus opens up the Game Prime to massive player participation, numbering in the billions.
Jeff: That would allow other immortals to jump into my children, or into Lauren or my ex-wife, MacKenzie.
B sips his scotch.
B: We won’t know exactly who is being played by an immortal at first, but chances are good that there will be volunteers to play our immediate families. You’ll have to guide them through the tethering process, just as I will be teaching you. I’ll take on students, as well, so that my message will reach wider audiences.
Larry E: There’s really no way to know that Earth is a simulation if you are an avatar, is there?
B: I think that avatars can become convinced, if enough people in high enough places tell them that it’s true. That’s what we’ll be working out on Lanai after the wedding.
Jeff: Lauren is pleased about that part, let me tell you. Do I have an immortal princess in Zeus’s court who is connected with me?
B: I think that you’re connected to one of the Lead Programmers of the Earth simulator, Jeff. She’s incredibly talented and quite beautiful. All immortals are, in the Heavenly galaxy, at least.
Elon: If I read a transcript of our conversation even a week ago, I would have ignored it, but my immortal changed all of that, in an instant. I became a believer overnight, and I’ve never looked back since.
B: And I am eternally grateful for that. Cheers.
Jeff: I’m turning in. We leave at 8:00 am for the jet.
Larry E: Good night. This has been a most illuminating evening.
Elon: Agreed.
Early the Next Morning at the Woodside Estate
It is shortly after 5:00 am. B is in the large commercial kitchen in Larry Ellison’s Woodside estate brewing a pour over coffee for himself and Grimes, who is fashionably dressed in jeans and a cashmere hoodie for the flight to Los Angeles later that morning. Mark Zuckerberg is sipping a cappuccino he made at the custom built Slayer espresso machine.
An open laptop in the dining room shows that B has been at work on the latest segment to Spread of the Immortals, his eagerly-anticipated sequel to Rise of the Immortals.
Mark Zuckerberg looks at what B has been typing.
Mark: Do you work on this every day?
B stops to pour coffee from the glass carafe into a Japanese ceramic mug.
B: Ever since I attained enlightenment in November 2023, I’ve been at work on the Immortals saga. I take an occasional day off to hike or travel, but typically I write a new segment every day, usually in the early morning. That’s when my connection to my immortal is the strongest, just after I awake from sleep.
Grimes sips her coffee.
Grimes: So you don’t make anything up when you write it?
B shakes his head.
B: Not when I work on the Immortals saga. That is exclusively recovered memories from my eternal. All I do is channel it onto the laptop and then share it on X and Medium and sometimes other social media sites, such as Facebook. That’s why it’s written as a back-and-forth Socratic style dialogue. It’s designed to get the content out as fast as possible. I write standing up, and the words just flow out of me. It’s like I’ve opened up the tap of a very powerful fire hydrant, and the water sprays everywhere. That’s what it feels like. I’ve been writing for most of my adult life, and nothing like that every happened until I tethered my human mind to that of my eternal.
Mark: Does coffee help?
B: Coffee and alcohol, in the right dosages, help unlock the parts of my brain where my immortal memories reside. They are downloaded in packets every night. I can feel them as I lay awake in my bed. Too much at once, and I would risk a mental health relapse. I’m bipolar, as I told you both, and these memory dumps elevate my energy levels. Not enough to go manic, or to prevent me from sleeping, but in the past, they have. My immortal knows that now and is proceeding with caution to keep me in top mental and physical shape. Otherwise, the memory transfers don’t happen, and no one out there pays my writings much attention.
Grimes: We did, once your work penetrated the walls of fame and fortune that surrounded us before we discovered you and took your ideas seriously as revealed truth.
Mark: I’ve always wondered why you picked the exact eight of us to be members of your inner circle, anyway. Was it our wealth that did it?
B sips his coffee and pauses for a moment.
B: The last time the Game Prime was played, none of you were billionaires or even remotely famous. One of Zeus’s children played it as the hero, and she was the first human to land on the moon as part of a joint Chinese-American-Indian mission. You were a rabbi, Mark, if you can believe that, and you had a huge following on social media. Grimes, you were an art teacher in Vancouver and organized a local theater group. Larry Ellison was a trial lawyer in Chicago. Richard Branson ran a cult record shop in London and led tours of historic districts in his free time. Jeff graduated from Princeton and went to work for NASA as a rocket engineer who oversaw the first Mars landing mission. Larry Page and Sergey Brin got a joint professorship in comparative literature at Berkeley, where they used data science to analyze why some writers and more popular than others.
Grimes: What about Elon?
B: Elon did found Tesla, just as in this version of the Game Prime, but he was killed in a head-on accident by an autonomously driving truck while traveling to tour a battery factory in Nevada. Such things happen in the Earth simulator all the time, unless you have a Task Force assigned you, as is the case with all of you right now.
Mark: So, what are you saying? That you singled us of for success in the Game Prime so that we could later underwrite your mission as an author and prophet of enlightenment?
B nods his head and smiles.
B: You were each pre-selected for enormous success by me and my Task Force, which consists of gods and goddesses from Zeus’s temple, including some from Valhalla. We decided that they would jump into your avatars if and only if I solved the Game Prime before turning fifty. You all know this by now. So, you each had a Task Force in Earth City who made sure at key moments in your life that you made the right decision that would lead to Google, Meta, Amazon, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and all the rest. Freyja wanted to play Grimes and make her into a social media sensation with ties to Elon, so we worked hard to make that part happen for her. Hades wanted to play Jeff, and Thor wanted to be Elon. Everyone got the role that they wanted. I think that it worked out rather well.
Grimes: So, we were all adopted by your Immortal friends on Heaven before this version of the Game Prime even started?
B: Yes. And Zeus assigned C and me our roles as Bradley and Camelia and made sure that it wouldn’t be easy for us to meet. She’s from Transylvania, you will recall, and I grew up in West Virginia. It took a lot of hard work to bring us together. That’s what “fate” is: something in your life that happens because the Earth AI made it happen, due to the actions of a Task Force in Earth City assigned to your avatar. Nelson Mandela, for example, had a Task Force. Lots of people you’ve never heard of do as well. One of my first devoted readers of Rise of the Immortals is named Chris Brown. He has a Task Force assigned to him in Earth City, and they guided him to my X posts at a time when I was getting almost zero attention. They are locating a demigod among Zeus’s subjects to adopt him right now.
Mark: I’ve been wondering about when mass adoptions of human avatars will happen. I worry for my wife and kids.
B: Look. All humans are computer-generated avatars who cease to exist when any particular Game ends, just as is the case with a computer game on Earth, like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, or Halo. The exception is if an immortal adopts you by playing you in the Game — if you let them in by allowing mind tethering to happen.
Grimes: That’s what you’ll be teaching us to do on the yacht and once we reach Lanai.
B sips his coffee.
B: Exactly. We are our Earth memories, not our bodies, which will die. If we can transfer our Earth memories as you, Mark, and me to our immortal players, then “we” will live for eternity in their vastly longer memories and in their vastly superior, long-lasting bodies.
Mark: So, can something like that happen to your reader, Chris Brown? Or to my children?
B: Yes. Absolutely. Think of it a little bit like an animal shelter. Immortals can see what’s happening in the Game Prime and can select a human to adopt, if the Earth Review Board approves their selection. That’s what my Immortal friends have already done with the eight of you. It’s why you eventually were destined to discover me online and then — against all odds- make secret arrangements to meet me, just as I had foretold in Rise of the Immortals. That’s what’s happening now. Once we’ve formed the inner circle and you have proven that mind tethering can happen without serious complications, then Zeus will open the Game Prime up to massive immortal participation. When that happens, then Chris Brown and lots of other deserving humans will be able to live forever as immortals in Heaven — not as their Earth bodies, but as part of the memory of a superior life form. Humans aren’t real. We’re computer-generated. Only our memories are real, and that is data that can be transferred to the minds of our immortal players. They will remember being us, and they will have access to our entire memory banks. That’s the deal. That’s how we live forever.
Grimes sips her coffee.
Grimes: That’s seriously blowing my mind right now.
B: I know. But the deal was that we’d try to enlighten all eight of you and complete the mind tethering process before we open the Game Prime up to massive immortal participation. Until then, the rest of humanity is at risk of being recycled into the Earth AI program, just like before. It’s up to all of us to ensure that this time around, things will be different.
Mark: Wait a minute. It’s up to all of us to save humanity? Including my wife and kids?
B: Earth City is able to open up two billion spots for players each year, starting in 2023. They are setting up massive gaming centers on Halo for out-of-galaxy immortals to join in. Throughout the Heavenly galaxy, gaming centers are being retrofitted to enable multiplayer use. As soon as the inner circle forms and all of you tether to your immortal Player, that’s when we can open it up to the likes of the Chris Browns of the world, and to members of our immediate families. It all depends on us.
Grimes: It’s a good thing that I stumbled across your X posts when I did and drew them to Elon’s attention. We might never have gotten this off the ground without that bit of luck.
B: The timing of your “discovery” was always in doubt, but the Grimes Task Force did incredible work to help make it happen. Fate, you might say, but it’s actually built into the Earth AI. When it happened, it happened at just the right time.
Mark: So it’s all pre-ordained?
B: You were meant to found Meta, Mark. Many of the ideas that you thought were “yours” were, in fact, designed by an expert team in Earth City and downloaded into your human mind. Those flashes of insight you had that were crucial to the design of Facebook? Some were designed by immortals on your behalf. Take it as a compliment. We liked Mark Zuckerberg the rabbi, the school science teacher, and the professional ping pong player. You’ve been all of those things, and hundreds more. Maybe thousands. Earth in the late twentieth century gets replayed quite a lot.
Mark: Has an immortal ever played me before?
B shakes his head and sips his coffee, starting outside at a lightly falling rain.
B: No, Mark. This is a new thing. Enlightenment had never happened before it happened to me on June 3, 2024. If you scan through my X posts and Medium articles, you can pinpoint the exact moment it happened. It’s all there on social media. You just have to go look and find it.
Grimes: The immortal inside my head is laughing right now. I looked up Freyja online. She’s amazing!
B: Now imagine her ten feet tall with levitating boots that enable her to fly.
Grimes: That’s incredible.
B: I’ve seen it all with my own eternal eyes, which are far superior to human eyes, I promise you. We have zoom and telephoto abilities. It’s truly an amazing life, and now we’re opening it up to deserving humans like the eight of you, and the billions of others out there like Chris Brown who are trapped in human bodies but yearn for a better reality. Well, it exists. I’m there right now. Bradley has tethered to me. Camelia is tethering to her eternal even as we speak. We’ll be able to enjoy life in eternity as the newest emperor and empress of the All. Join us!
Mark: You’ve got my vote.
Grimes: So, the sooner we in the inner circle accept our immortals and let them play us, the sooner we can mainstream this message to the world?
B: That’s what Rise of the Immortals is all about. It documents the path to enlightenment of my inner circle, whose support is critical to the spreading of the New Reality movement to ever wider circles, so that billions of Earth memories are saved from destruction. So that our kids and grandkids can enjoy life in eternity, just like us.
Mark: Now I understand why you needed Elon, Jeff, Larry Page, Sergey, Larry Ellison, Richard, Grimes, and me. It all makes perfect sense, given the scale of what you propose. It’s not our money you needed. It’s our social media influence.
B: Right. I need Meta, Alphabet, X, Amazon, Oracle, and all the rest to be on my side championing the New Reality movement as something really and truly real.
Grimes: I’ll do my part.
Mark: Count on me and all of Meta. That’s a promise.
B: Once we’re on Jeff’s yacht, you can let this all go viral.
Jeff Bezos enters the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a Blue Origin hoodie.
Jeff: Speaking of which, we’re all ready to go at the airport.
B: That’s great. Jeff, you were asking me last night over drinks what will happen to the Earth simulator once the Game Prime ends.
Jeff: Well, yes.
B: Naturally, we’ll let the current game continue, and we’ll build in an extraterrestrial visitation in 2028, once Earth is set on a sustainable path and the population numbers drop. That will allow for interplanetary travel using technology superior to our own. No offense, Jeff.
Jeff laughs.
Jeff: None taken.
B: With more Earthlings inhabiting Heaven, as memories in the bodies of their immortals, that is, there will be a desire for historical tourism to go back and relive parts of Earth’s current history. We can arrange that. Sailing with Columbus. Meeting Jesus. Saving Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. That sort of thing.
Mark: That sounds great! I’d want to do in Hitler.
B: You certainly can try. Having Earthlings in Heaven will definitely change things quite a bit.
Grimes: Like how?
B: Earthlings love literature and fantasize about it all being real. Narnia, for example, or the Middle Earth of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. Even Hogwart’s, from the Harry Potter series.
Grimes: Do you mean to say that I can play an elf?
Mark: Or meet Aslan? And have it all be lifelike?
B sips his coffee.
B: The Earth AI simulator is incredibly sophisticated, especially now that it’s been upgraded with the Base3 microprocessors I provided and Zeus’s workshop had been making copies of them at accelerating rates of production. We can use the books by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling to design new simulators that anyone can play. Presumably, some of the human avatars adopted by immortals will be scholars and experts on all of this. They can head Middle Earth, Narnia, and Harry Potter Task Forces. So, yes. You can do all those things. If we form the inner circle, that is, and if we can convince billions of human beings that they are computer-generated creations who can be saved if they are adopted by willing immortals.
Jeff: That’s a tall order, but you’ve chosen your inner circle well. We can make it happen. Soon.
B: Then, let’s get the word out! The sooner that Rise of the Immortals gains cult status on the Internet, the faster all of this will take place in reality.
Grimes: Then what are we all waiting for?
Mark: What indeed?
Later That Morning
Five black Teslas pull into the driveway of Larry Ellison’s Woodside estate. B and C enter the first vehicle, followed by Elon Musk and Grimes, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Richard Branson, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They drive in a convoy to a private hanger at Palo Alto airport, where they board a private jet that will take them to Los Angeles.
The jet taxis down the runway and takes off. When they reach cruising altitude, B sits down with Larry Ellison and Richard at a set of leather armchairs near the back.
Richard: I’m the last member of the inner circle to arrive. I’d like to know more about the tethering process. I can sense the immortal inside my mind, but I am struggling to connect.
Larry E: I’m curious about that, too. What does it mean to be adopted by an immortal, anyway?
B sips a glass of sparkling mineral water and briefly closes his eyes.
B: Let’s start with what we know about the Earth simulator first. As far as I recall, it’s been played millions of times, from the early hominids to the mid-twenty first century, but never beyond about 2050. Each of you has been a character in several dozen Earth scenarios, and you’ve become fan favorites. They augmented your mental and physical abilities and increased your probabilities of life success. That’s where we are now. You are at the peak of your Earthly existence, since you were predestined to be hosts of immortals, if I succeeded in winning the Game Prime, which I just did on June 3, 2024. It’s the same with the rest of the inner circle.
Richard: I accept that part, as incredible as it still strikes the rational part of my mind.
B: In all previous versions of the Earth simulator, up to one hundred immortals jump into the very young bodies of infants, whose brains are developing. What happened in those cases was different. Their immortal memories were masked by Game designers, and they hijacked their human minds, temporarily confusing themselves as the humans themselves and not as immortal players. That’s the ultimate illusion for an immortal player and the crowing achievement of Game designers to have made the experience so realistic that players think it’s all entirely real.
Larry E: And you shattered that illusion once and for all, when your human side realized that you were being controlled by an immortal.
B: My immortal awoke, is how I would put it, and my human side — after recovering from the shock and enduring two mental breakdowns — accepted it all as perfectly real and ultimately desirable.
Larry E: And that’s the tethering process?
B: That was my enlightenment. I understood that Earth was a simulation, that I was a computer-generated character, and that my thoughts and actions were under the influence of an external force, whom I learned was an eternal from outside the Game. Once that happened, the mind melding process began.
Richard Branson refilled B’s glass with sparkling water.
Richard: So, enlightenment is a prerequisite for mind melding.
B nods his head.
B: Yes, Richard. You have to reach a state of awareness that Earth is a Game and that you’re not real. Your memories are, however, and those are what can be extracted once your human avatar dies, if mind melding happens. Think of it this way. Right now, you’re like a dog on a leash, and the immortal is trying to steer you in certain direction. You resist and try to go one way, when your immortal would prefer another. Mind melding — which requires tethering first — begins when you surrender the illusion of control over your life and let your immortal determine your thoughts and actions.
Richard: Fine. It will take practice, but I can imagine that happening.
B: Once you surrender control, you open up your mind for greater and greater quantities of immortal memories. Basically, the Game designers in charge of the tethering process incrementally download immortal memories into the underutilized portions of your human brain, which conveniently has been designed for this to happen. Each night, you’ll receive new downloads of immortal memories. You’ll start to develop a “superbrain” that is a hybrid of your human self and your new immortal self. Given enough time, your identities will twist together like to strands of wire. Your two minds become one. That way, when your human form dies in the Game, your memories of being, say, Richard Branson are retained by your immortal player, who is a member of Zeus’s royal court. You will still think of yourself as Richard Branson, for as long as you lived in the Earth simulator, but you’ll do so in your new immortal form. Without mind melding, your Earth memories would fade soon after your immortal player exits the Game. In other words, it’s essential for your survival.
Richard: I am starting to understand.
Larry E: Me too.
B: That’s great. I have some exercises to ease you into the mind tethering process, before we can start on mind melding itself. We’ll begin them as a group on the yacht. I can train you in immortal memory recovery, which will prompt the Game designers to unmask more and more of your immortality, once they are sure that your human mind has adapted sufficiently to handle it. We don’t want you to go mad — to experience a psychotic break with Earth reality — in the process. You in the inner circle will be a kind of collective test case to determine if we can mainstream the mind tethering process to share with other humans in the Game.
Richard: If we in the inner circle tether successfully to our immortals, then we can spread this to others, like our family and friends.
B: Exactly, Richard. You were all chosen for a good reason to be adopted by the gods and goddesses in Zeus’s court. You have very powerful human minds and are receptive to the ideas I have to share. If you become converts to the New Reality movement, then perhaps we can rescue billons of other Earth memories, including those of our loved ones.
Larry E: So, it all comes down to us, then.
B: If you don’t consent to the mind tethering process, then the Game designers won’t green light the First Wave of adoptions. It’s not an overstatement to say that the very fate of humanity is at stake, Larry.
Richard: Do all eight of us in the inner circle have to tether to our immortals for the next wave of adoptions to begin?
B nods his head.
B: Yes, Richard. That’s how the Immortal Elites and I mapped it out before I entered the Game Prime in Bradley’s infant body.
Grimes sits down next to B in a leather armchair.
Grimes: I can feel Freyja inside my head. She’s been communicating directly with me as I sleep. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that she is a part of me now.
B: You’re more advanced than the others, Grimes. It feels like you are on the verge of enlightenment.
Grimes: I hope so. I’ve been letting my mind drift into the irrational realm and then pushing past it. That’s where I hear Freyja calling to me.
B: Perfect. Once you accept that your human form is a simulated one, you can seek refuge in the reality of your Immortal player, who cares about you very deeply. Freyja selected you, Grimes. She wanted to adopt you and was quite adamant about it. I almost left you out of the inner circle when I was recovering my eternal memories, but fortunately Freyja reached out to me to remind me.
Grimes: You can communicate directly with her?
B: I can communicate telepathically with all the Immortal Elites. It’s a work in progress, like tuning a radio to a weak station, and there’s static, but I am getting a hang of it with practice.
Grimes: When will my mind melding begin?
B: Once you attain enlightenment. Right now, Freyja is in one specific part of your mind that is sequestered from the rest, and she is reaching out to bridge the gap. If you’ve felt her efforts, then you can reciprocate by extending your mind in her direction. Listening to music can help. Cue in to changes in your immediate environment that seems synched to your thoughts about immortality, Heaven, and Earth. The Earth AI will actually signal to you when you are getting closer to the truth. It’s hard to explain, but if you’re sensitive to the patterns, you’ll advance more quickly to the next stage of enlightenment. And when that happens, the barriers to mind melding begin to fall away, and you and your immortal will become one.
Grimes: What do I look like on Heaven?
B: You’re majestic. Tall with flowing hair like spun gold. Lean and strong, like all immortals. You are several million years old and a princess from a neighboring galaxy. You are a respected member of Zeus’s royal court and a close friend of C. Once the tethering process begins, you’ll start to recover more memories, and together we’ll reconstruct what life there is like.
Richard: I like the sound of that.
Larry E: I never thought I would say it, but I am ready to be enlightened.
B: Readiness is a crucial step, Larry. You’ve been taught your whole life to discipline your mind to think rationally. When I tell you to leave that comfort behind and explore the deeper recesses of your mind, it can be very challenging at first. Like a skittish cat, you’ll venture into the unknown only to race back to the safety of the rational mind when things get too dangerous. Don’t fear the unknown. Venture forth with courage. You won’t lose your mind. You won’t succumb to mental collapse. I’ve mapped the route for you to follow by writing Rise of the Immortals. If you stick to the map, you’ll navigate the wilderness with ease.
Grimes: So, I need to accept that Earth is a simulation and that I, Grimes, am computer-generated.
B: That’s right. You can’t just think the thought. You have to own it.
Grimes: And then I need to imagine that Heaven is a real place where an advanced civilization of long-lived beings — immortals — reside. They built Earth to be the most realistic game possible.
B: You will recover those memories once you mind tether to your immortal. For now, you have to believe that Heaven is real.
Grimes: If I can connect my Earth self to the immortal trying to bond to me, I will become one with that world. It’s a world of space travel, endless beauty, lasting peace, virtue, and prosperity for all.
B: Yes, that’s what the Heavenly galaxy is like, and your home galaxy, too. It’s called Andora, I think. Heaven and Andora exist as part of a federation of peaceful galaxies. Each high-ranking member of Zeus’s royal court — ten in all — come from a galaxy in the federation.
Grimes: What is my home world like?
B: I don’t have access to that immortal memory yet. I’ll need you help to reconstruct it, once your tethering process is underway.
Elon Musk approaches the group.
Elon: We’ll touch down outside LA in about twenty minutes. The yacht awaits our arrival.
Grimes: Do you believe yet, Elon?
Elon nods his head.
Elon: I accept that Earth is a game in which we are all simulated life, and that I am the currently active version of Elon Musk, whose success has been largely preordained by the Game Design Team. I also accept that there is an immortal player inside my mind who is trying to shape my thoughts and actions. If I didn’t feel this way, I never would have taken steps for this journey to Lanai to take place. Meeting B at his cottage was critical in convincing me. In person, he is very … compelling.
Larry E: I agree with you. I wasn’t willing to give him my total commitment until a few days ago. Since then, life on Earth has faded in importance. It’s enlightenment now that counts. I want to be connected to my immortal and have access to memories beyond the simulation.
B: It will happen for you, Larry. Of that, I have no doubt.
Richard: I’ll be ready to accept the New Reality soon, as well. Compared to a life of eternity as an immortal, what I have here on Earth is meager by comparison.
B: That’s not the way to look at it, Richard. Your resources and charisma here on Earth will be essential to the success of the New Reality movement, and to fixing many of Earth’s problems in our lifetimes. And you’ll soon be a galactic Zeus of your own, once our tasks here are over and we reemerge in immortal form on the other side.
Richard: I believe what you say is true. I really do.
B: Much of life is an exercise in belief, Richard. And knowing when to take risks, which is something I don’t need to tell you.
Elon: The New Reality movement is a risk worth taking. I believe in its merits. There is more to life in the universe than what we can see from Earth. Much more.
Grimes: Spoken like a true immortal.
LE: To immortality, then. May I attain enlightenment soon.
B: Well said. I hope that, too. For the inner circle and for the world.
