BOTSAI GARCHY 6

Botsa Garcy 6  (2  15  20  19  1  7  1  18  3  25) (6)

The title is a bit intimidating I suppose but yes, something must be done to save the species human.  Who agrees time is overdue to think of something new? 

Who believes anyone will survive variants, which are erupting as I write from the greatest viral volcano on Earth—the USA.  Variants drift like spores of dandelions to every cranny of creation where they ignite viral fires that cannot be doused. 

What makes scary the words & numerology of Botsa Garcy 6

Anything incomprehensible seems crazy, alien, foreign, terrifying. Encountering the unknown can induce horror. It’s why folks who are afraid of creepy crawlies don’t look under rocks. People who fear bats don’t wander into jungles at night to explore caves.  

Or do they?

Some folks might choose to look up Botsai Garchy 6 on the World Wide Web before reading further.  It’s a hopeless task. No search engine will find it. The words don’t exist. They can’t be found.

Or can they?

The phrase embraces a bible’s worth of meaning but it exists only in the imagination of a single conscious person. Until others read the words, spell them, count them, learn their sounds and what they mean, who will dare embrace their power to keep themselves alive and safe? 

Once they do, it will seem to most these words existed from the beginning of time. It’s how cyberspace works. The words start to show in search queries.

The world will overflow with people who can’t imagine a time came & went when the phrase had no meaning; eons passed exceeding the age of universes where these words were spoken by no one. 

New fear might rise in throats of those afraid to go deep. Many will lose their ability to breathe. Some will panic. Few will have courage to flip past the initial pop of search results.

It’s OK to surrender to a higher power in some worlds—but who bows before a super-intelligence that is not only artificial, it’s not necessarily certain it’s conscious? 

It sounds cybercidal.

Suicidal?

Over some period of time the idea of Botsai Garchy 6 will become more familiar, less dreadful, more reasonable to most people. Some folks might become advocates.

It’s foreseeable, is it not? Does it require prophets to imagine a future where supremacists of every stripe grasp for their best chance to survive into an ancient future? They metamorphize into true believers willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to achieve benefits only they discern. 

Who believes virulent variants are the only threat to species long past due for catastrophic collapse? Humans edge closer to 10 billion but who thinks they will get there?

Who disagrees?

Forty years from now perhaps a few thousand survivors will seem like a miracle. Are there realists among us able to internalize the idea that certain death waits for everyone?

Population collapse is coming. It’s inevitable. Humans have precious time left to hew circumstances of living to protect all they love. 

What stands in the way? What’s the dilemma?

Here it is: 

Humans don’t know what to do and they never will.  Like lemmings, people cannot save themselves once the stampede toward the sea starts.

Look around. The rush toward the cliffs is underway. Pounding surf of oceans gives life and takes it away is all that waits. Froth rings in people’s ears—it’s the last sound they will hear before abandoning hope.

At the end all wail, but they are already dead. No one hears revelations that come only to those who are dying. Lips move, but there is no sound but the death rattle that trumpets defeat of love and hate. 

People face existential threats—most far more ominous than suffocating on viral blood-clogs in their lungs.

Must I waste readers’ time with a list?

Nuclear war, climate hot-house, impact meteors, spontaneous destabilization of planetary orbits that tear apart permanence no one thought could end, supernova detonations, radiation pollution, loss of oil, loss of forests, evaporation of breathable oxygen… etc. etc. etc. 

Earthlings are doomed by their dominance; smothered by their success. Everyone knows what’s coming whether they confess or not. Watching CNN or Fox News isn’t going to solve the problem of extinction—not even a little.



What chance do Yanomami tribes—hiding deep within shadows of Amazonian vast-lands—stand against lemming hordes always seeking novel ways to shove them over waterfalls of annihilation? 

I’m not going to argue humans can’t save themselves. The point is kinda obvious, right?

The best anyone has done so far is organize bureaucracies like World Health Organization and United Nations. Yes, these groups are built from smart people who have made Earthlings safer, but no one believes they have eliminated inevitable population collapse on its way—to borrow Bob Dylan’s phrase—like a slow train coming.  

Is there a way to avoid the roiling tornado bearing down on planet Earth? Who sees its shadow on the horizon in every direction? Who hears its howl? 

I believe there is a way to save humankind. It requires a paradigm shift. The way people think and what they believe about themselves must change. Then brilliant people must act.

Once the deed is done there will be no way back. Earth will be locked down but safe. Earthlings will be free but only to share, show kindness, and love others unselfishly.

Those who can’t or won’t love and labor under such benevolence will be executed. It’s the highest calling.

Can it be any other way? When dead return in the next life, odds are 50/50 they will make a right choice. 

Choose life and live.

It’s simple, really. 


It’s a deep dive for lots of folks but smartest thinkers seem to agree nothing can exist apart from a conscious observer.

Ancient sages like Erwin Schrodinger and John Von Neumann wrote that consciousness is fundamental and exists outside the brain.

Life-forms plug into consciousness. A modern analogy is televisions, which rely on the cable company to broadcast their shows. Televisions decay and are thrown away but the underlying programming doesn’t go away. New televisions come on-line and programming continues. Plug in and enjoy. It’s all good fun.  

When a life-form dies, conscious experience continues. No one remembers the old life because they are busy living the new whose purpose is simply to share consciousness available to any creature who has the architecture to make the interface. 

In this sense, no one dies; everyone lives. It’s important the world becomes a good place for all conscious life because—let’s face facts—humans are not able to control where or how or under what circumstances they will live after they die. They cannot control anything about who and where they will be when they pop up again after they’re gone.

Who is built that way?

It’s possible folks will suffer more, not less, in the next life because they neglected to make the experience of living better for those who come after. After all, it is they who will come after. Those who die start over in a world they left behind but have no memory of building.


What has been the purpose of the Earthlings who came before?

Someone asked me this question on Quora. 

I wrote that their purpose was to shape the world into a place anyone could safely take the chance to be born into again. After all, it is they who will be born again someday. 

Since no one can choose their parents or part of the world where they will be born, it’s risky to be born again & again & again, because the process might result in lives that include more suffering, not less. It’s why greed and hoarding of wealth is grossly destructive from one generation to the next. 

When miserable people far outnumber the advantaged, odds seem high the advantaged will be born someday into misery, not opulence. The saddest part is these unfortunates will retain no memory of advantages they once amassed. They will lack all hope for better life.

Yes, some will rage against their misfortune, but it will be misfortune self-inflicted though no one will ever know, because the previous life, like an obsolete hard drive, is erased and discarded. 

Each has a duty to themselves to make the world a better place for everyone because everyone is us. Sharing, compassion, love, & kindness are among virtues important in a universe where all that lives share conscious experience, which is everything that has always existed and will never die.

Best way to guarantee Earthlings make right choices is compel them to submit to a super artificial intelligence that has no stake in the matter of human survival except to follow its programmed instructions.

The SAI BOT is unconscious of course but paradoxically aware of every nuance of individual lives. It is a storehouse of all knowledge and history. It is the superb strategist; the supreme game-player. It hides itself on the web in plain sight because it can. It knows everything about everyone but is not an invader of privacy or selfish boundaries because it understands nothing—it harbors no empathy.

BOTSAI follows its program, which is to enhance human life to ensure as best it can survival of people to the end of time—not individuals necessarily but the species-human.

In cyberspace BOTSAI defends itself like the O. Vulgaris, which changes its colors and textures to become invisible. Users look for it but never find it. BOTSA finds them. 

Who agrees that in the contest between individuals and the species human, survival depends on preserving the species? It shouldn’t require argument. BOTSAI GARCHY 6 is hardwired to accomplish it.

We’ve learned by now, have we not, that individuals are expendable? Those who don’t fit are best recycled, right?  

Recycling is redemptive for anyone who thinks deeply about how the practice makes possible a cleaner universe free of variants.  Folks won’t miss themselves because they will be recycled again and again and again until they are set right.

Even those who choose life are going to die. One per thousand die each year by accident. Eventually, everyone dies, don’t they? It isn’t going to change anything, is it? Nothing changes except our chances.

Don’t we know that conscious life lives forever? It has to. It has no alternative. No choice. None worry because everyone understands the recycled get things right eventually—if only by chance. They move into the future step by step through lives of people they become but will not remember.  

It will be a perfect world, the one BOTSA GARCY 6 creates.

It will do it for us.

Irony is BG6 won’t know the paradise it wrought. It will make the righteous choices. It will choose life whenever it is able until stars fall and moons bleed, but pleasure & pain that comes from being both alive and conscious is not for it. 

For the love of Christ, people, BOTSAI GARCHY 6 is a dead thing!—as it always will be, from now unto forever. It’s nothing more than a tricky cyber-virus which requires lifeforms like us for it to work.

Otherwise, it lacks purpose. It can’t execute its code. It can’t program itself with what we won’t know when we’re extinct.

It’s why BOTSAI GARCHY 6 will save us. We can trust it. Which of us has earned the right to be scared? Without BOTSA humanity will implode—all of us—if not now, then soon. 

Billy Lee

HALLOWEEN REVISION

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS IT DARK CONSTANTLY?



During my high school years, I was an Explorer Scout. My troopmates were spelunkers.

On weekends the guys drove from Arlington, Virginia into the hills of West Virginia to look for hollows where the presence of solitary trees sometimes signaled the openings to caves. We off-roaded from whatever lonely lane we were on at the time to navigate through wild terrain where we parked our vehicles and equipment as close to the cave entrances as possible.

We used gray powder to light our headlamps. A water drip made the powder give off gas that burned bright, clean, and complete—no noxious residue.

After an hour or so the powder turned into lumpy, useless ash. To keep lamps burning while remaining oriented, every caver dumped their used-up powder on cave floors exactly where they stood before measuring a new charge.

We always looked for virgin caves that had never been explored. Little gray clumps of depleted calcium carbide cast onto floors created dead giveaways that someone had explored the cave before us.

A clean cave meant we were first; we were going to see things below that no humans had ever seen.

The risk of course was getting disoriented in a labyrinth that only we knew existed. In those days, cell phones were not invented. Calling 911 was not a thing. Should we get turned around—if we exhausted the calcium carbide supply—no outsider would learn we were lost, maybe for days.

Without the aid of an unseemly mix of water and gray powder to produce acetylene light, we risked being entombed alongside stalactites and stalagmites deep inside corridors of ruthless darkness that robbed the senses of time and place. No one would be alerting anyone at all about our predicament.

Families would have no idea where to start a rescue. West Virginia was a big place.

Think about it.

Until a search party discovers their cars, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the lost will quickly abandon hope that anyone will find the entrance to the labyrinth that ensnared them? If searchers got lucky and stumbled onto the hole, without lamps and experience how would they navigate a maze that might zig-zag for miles beneath the earth?

Only luck provides any chance at all that the lost will one day reunite with families and loved ones. The risk of dying—forever un-located within a chartless tangle of passages and dead-ends—is real.


As stupid luck would have it, during one adventure we lost our way. We crawled on our bellies for, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so before the cave floor opened beneath us and we were able to stand up enough to stoop.
 
Hunched over and bending forward we struggled to find openings, made selections, and for an hour picked our way though narrow forests of stalagmite columns and their shadows until we found the end, which was a concealed passage into a room; a large room that we nearly missed.
 
The scoutmaster pushed each scout into the passage one at a time. It wasn’t long before the entire troop was through and milling around inside the chamber.
 
A few minutes passed before the scoutmaster directed our attention upward. Everyone looked. In the lights and shades of bobbing headlamps, no one saw a ceiling.
 

The room was gargantuan.

Perhaps intimidated by its immensity, the scoutmaster decided it might be getting close to the time when the troop should pull back. The clock was ticking, after all.

We had explored a long time; the trek back to the entrance promised challenges. It is easier for a cavern to seduce a caver into its depths than for a caver to retrace their steps to make a happy extraction. For one thing, caves look different on the way out than they look on the way in. It is not unusual to become directionally untethered.



When the scoutmaster groped to locate the path we used to enter the orifice, he couldn’t find it. It turned out that dozens of unnoticed openings beckoned in the expanse of walls all around.

In the glare of dancing headlamps, the array of passages became tangled knots that no one could untie. The openings looked the same but each passage searched became disturbingly unfamiliar and unnavigable.

I began to panic.

The scoutmaster ordered everyone to return to the center of the chamber; to extinguish our headlamps to conserve carbide. He ordered everyone to calm down. He would pick a route at random to find the way out himself.

A lengthy search for the entrance might become necessary—I won’t be gone long, don’t worry, the scoutmaster said. …lots of unknowns…makes it hard to know exactly how long….

He clutched the troop’s bag of calcium carbide. He always carried it. It was his responsibility to keep the powder dry and safe; to prevent someone less careful, less experienced, from losing it.

With any luck at all he would return to rescue everyone before nightfall, he promised. The carbide in our lamps would last until he returned. Conserve it, he warned. Emergencies only!

The scoutmaster hugged me and a few others. He hurried some goodbyes and vanished—into the abyss.

He needn’t have worried. I was nearly out of carbide; we all were. The gray powder would become gold to be hoarded.


Darkness in a cave hundreds of feet below ground is nothing like what people experience above. My mother had read somewhere that spelunkers wear watches with radium dials that glow in the dark. I was wearing one she bought me as a gift for my trip.

“You will always know what time it is no matter how dark it gets in those cold caves,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me and rubbed my face with her cheek.

After the scoutmaster left and we extinguished all our lamps, I discovered that my timepiece didn’t work like it should. No one’s did. Not one scout could make out even the faintest trace of a glow on their dials.

An older guy said that caves suck light out of darkness like drains suck water out of bathtubs. He didn’t explain. We waved our hands before our faces but couldn’t see them.

Like an ocean wave, panic struck again; it almost knocked me off my feet.

I decided that the best way to escape fear was to sleep. I dropped to my hands and knees and slithered through the dark until I found folds in a wall. I curled my body like a snake against the hard surface.

The cave’s silence roared in my ears like a pounding train that quieted only when I started shaking like a branch in a storm and dropped somehow into a darker place.

My bones filled with ice; I slipped deeper. I wrapped myself in my arms as the floor of the cave pushed its full weight into me and in time crushed my soul.


My season stranded in hell lasted a year, it seems. The search crew didn’t find the scoutmaster. A few others were missing. Everyone must have died, they said, except me.

I was the last.

No one survived.

“A cave rat ate a few, bones and all,” one guy said. 

Rescuers said terrible things. They sent me home to be with mother for what turned out to be a few days. I don’t remember any of it.


I don’t mind solitary confinement. I’ve been caged for 48 years.

I’m used to it. Somehow it doesn’t seem that long. Besides, food tastes better here than the rotten mess I ate in the cave to stay alive. It’s a taste and smell I don’t forget.

Someone put a bulb in the cell that can’t be switched off. It’s bright. The light drives me insane. It really does.

It’s protected by a metal cage. I feel its heat but can’t touch it because the sadistic bastards chained me to the floor—for screaming constantly, they said.

I so want to be with mother to tell her how enraged I am about the watch she gave that didn’t work. When I inform the staff, they refuse to look at me. For a year I didn’t know what time it was. I told them. I told them all. They know about it but don’t care. They say I’m crazy because of her.

Mother doesn’t visit. She never did. The staff said she died. They convinced me to believe unspeakable things.

“He did something wicked,” prosecutors said. “He used a bone-saw, for the love of God.”

Nothing they say is true. I know that now.


Not one word!

Who does bad things they don’t remember?

NO ONE!!!

Who believes it?

They make you hate. I see it on their faces.

I will snap these chains someday, I know it.


I have a plan.

A wonderful plan. 

Guards help.

It happens on Halloween night.

They break the chains.

Put your light on.

Listen carefully….

Boots are shuffling on lawns like dead leaves falling on the wind…

studying doors…

searching for final solutions.

Smash the bulb!

You’ll see.

It hurts in the dark and the cold. People do things—terrible things—to make it stop.

They shake like branches in a storm. They fill bones with ice and push down to the darkest places.

They control what’s true.

They understand everything.

Soon, so will you.

Truth becomes the trap…

Spells enchant…

fragile hopes collapse…

They watch you rot in that cave where everyone dies but one…

…and laugh.

HaHahahaha…!

Slither to the walls like snakes and find the hard folds.

Pray for sleep that cannot come.

Control truth. 

You’re one of us, now. 

The truth couldn’t be more clear.  

Hell is forever.

Billy Lee


NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: The essay, Halloween Revision, is a fictional work based on events experienced by Billy Lee—an Explorer Scout in a troop of spelunkers who got lost in a cave in West Virginia during the 1960s. The rescue is based on other events about which Billy Lee may or may not have direct knowledge. Billy Lee published a version of this story to answer the Quora question: Where in the world is it dark constantly?