'Watch this,’ Jimmy said excitedly. ‘Li, mirror Ethan.

Immediately Li began to transform. Within seconds the robot looked exactly like Ethan.

‘That’s next level shit right there,’ Jimmy enthused. ‘This is what I can do with my AI and technology. I’m Eons ahead of rest’. He paused waiting for applause. When none was forthcoming, he continued.

‘It’s a robot’, he said.

‘What for?’ Ethan asked.

‘Just to cover our bases. A hologram works well when you have more control over the situation. Eldon might catch you out and want you upstairs or something. My robot can do that and Eldon will never be the wiser. I decided you need a more physical presence than an area restricted simulation.

‘I suppose that’s a good idea, but won’t Eldon know it’s not me because of the way Li acts?’

‘Nope. Li’s already accessed your entire online presence and will learn more nuanced characteristics from interaction with you. It will be very difficult for Eldon to notice the difference’

Ethan continued looking at Li. ‘Li stand up,’ he requested.

Li stood up and he came just past Ethan’s shoulders. ‘What about this? He’s only five feet tall.’

‘Five foot four,’ Jimmy countered. ‘I fashioned him after me. I’m fabricating larger limbs. Should be ready later this week.

‘Well, if I were you, I’d replace him with a hologram until you make the changes.

‘So,’ Ethan continued. ‘What’s going on? We’ve had a week to think things over and I have to admit, one of my biggest questions is what the hell is going on with Chairman Zhang? It is Chairman Zhang is it not?’

‘Well, Chairman, Emperor, Supreme Leader, I’ll leave it to you to decide,’ Jimmy replied benevolently.

‘Right,’ Ethan continued. ‘How did Zhang become Jimmy Wang?’

‘Well that’s a very interesting story, Ethan. Very interesting. Why don’t I show you guys our new meeting place and I’ll tell you all about it. I have provided us with heated massage chairs in our new office. It will be much more comfortable there’.

The new office was nice. As promised there were three oversized black chairs, each with a bunch of controls discreetly placed on one of the arms. They looked like they’d massage the crap out of you. Each chair was placed concentrically around a table, so everyone would be able to see each other when seated. There was also a fridge and microwave along the back wall. Along a sidewall were three separate workstations.

Once seated and feeling pretty comfortable, Ethan continued with his question. ‘Alright Jimmy, what the hell’s going on with you?’ he asked, and then he thought. ‘Unless of course you have something more pressing to discuss Dawn?’

‘No, we can start with Jimmy. I’m interested in Jimmy’s story now too,’ she replied.

‘Well,’ came Jimmy’s voice. His chair was facing away from them. They heard a click of a switch and the chair started to swivel towards them. It took quite long, and Ethan and Dawn exchanged looks. Eventually, Jimmy showed up shrouded in the shadows of the enormous massage chair. When he stopped and after an appropriate pause, soft LED lighting, also part of the chair, shone on Jimmy’s face, not unlike when someone shines a flashlight on themself when telling a story around the campfire.

‘This is the story of Zhang Wei; aka Jimmy Wang’, Jimmy began seriously. His eyes were looking inward, locked on the memories of his past. ‘The man who rose to greatness twice, and will rise again, a third time as a Son of God.’

‘It all started with a humble peasant farmer. His name was Zhang Wei. Whenever representatives from the CCP came through the village, he would run to them and offer his services. He lived during desperate times and he was anxious to get ahead by any means possible. Even though many of the villagers blamed the party for past famines, Zhang believed their sacrifice produced a stronger country. The travelling representatives were impressed by his enthusiasm, and one day they offered to teach him to do the basic accounting for the village.

‘Zhang was overjoyed to accept this additional burden to his life of farming. He leapt at the opportunity. As the only representative of the party in the village, he became the local authority. He had power over his neighbors. They were accountable to him now. He was always fair but firm and the people came to respect him.

‘Zhang excelled at bookkeeping. He was much more at home in the world of numbers, than farming. Numbers were reliable and he used them to streamline processes to meet the growing complexity of the party’s accounting. Many of his innovations and procedures were adopted by other villages and the party itself. Soon he began to be noticed by the leadership.

‘When computers became more widespread, Zhang really took off. They spoke his language, and peaked his interest. He quickly became an authority within the party. It wasn’t long before he became a top advisor in not just computer technology, but systems as well. Still at a young age, Zhang had risen to become a very powerful force in the Communist Party. It was his expertise that would launch them into the computerized world.

Even back then, he recognized where computers were taking the future. Before anyone had the slightest idea of what was coming, Zhang was engineering his ascent to power through technology. A power so great, he would not just come to rule China, but influence the entire world.

‘When he ascended to power, no-one even knew who he was. Not a single picture existed of the man. None of the party leadership had remembered meeting him. It wasn’t unusual. He came out of unorthodox discipline in relation to leadership. All they knew of him was what they saw in the media. What they saw there was an autonomous AI assisted hologram of a version of Zhang.

‘Long before he became General Secretary, he already lived inside the complex of the party leadership. He was far from the hub of activity, which is what he desired. Over the years he built a sizable research facility which was attached to his residence. When he assumed power, he had transformed it into a formal, almost grand, meeting place where committee members came to receive their directives. Unbeknownst to them, they were meeting a hologram of a fictitious Chairman Zhang, in a controlled environment.

‘I gave Zhang a completely different look than myself. At first I was his personal advisor, while I ironed out the kinks, but then I got bored, and decided to bail. That’s when I came to America.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

‘So, now we know who Zhang is,’ Ethan said. ‘How’s he different from Jimmy?’

‘Well, I’ve changed a bit since then. At first I was leaning into the dictator thing, but what happened there was, I started reciting Chinese proverbs to my people to keep them in line. I couldn’t leave my office, so I had to come up with something that kept me relatable to the masses. Well, long story short, I drank my own Kool-Aid. The proverbs provide a wonderful source of life lessons and guidance. ‘An inch of time is an inch of gold, but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold’. Come on. That’s good stuff.

‘After awhile, I started running out of proverbs, and I found prophecy. That’s when I discovered the ‘Tui Bei Tu’, and my true calling. There I was right in Poem 57, a Son of God who appears and ends all war. This single poem now dictates my life’.

‘So, you never were a despot?’ Dawn asked.

‘No! I’m a Saviour,’ Jimmy answered. ‘At first I had ambitions. A few people got hurt when I became General Secretary. Something had to be done with the previous administration anyway. They locked themselves into a zeitgeist of power and control, and became corrupt. It wasn’t a people’s revolution anymore. I had to purge those people.

‘Aren’t you doing pretty much the same thing as the previous administration? It looks to me like your people are still controlled with suppressive technology and violence,’ Ethan pointed out.

‘That’s all AI generated fabrication. I control all the media, even social media, so it’s easy for AI to create any story line I want; action scenes included.’ Jimmy replied. ‘Still, even manufactured discontent creates real discontent within a population. People are becoming unsettled, so I decided to engineer a social revolution’.

‘Why?’ Ethan asked.

‘Why, what?’

‘Why are you engineering a social revolution?’

‘Well, they’re not going to worship a Son of God descending upon them if everything’s hunky dory, are they? They need to suffer a little to appreciate everything that is me’.

‘History has shown social revolution enhances social consciousness,’ Dawn added. ‘It’s probably not a bad idea, regardless of the motive’.

‘This whole thing has to be rethought now that we have a timeline on the Enlightenment,’ Dawn continued. ‘I think we have to take stock of where we are and what we have to achieve with the time remaining to us. Whitehead and Zhang are ahead of schedule, while the social uprising and AI’s actualization to a lesser extent, are behind. We need to manage this’.

‘Manage the entire movement of the world?’ Ethan asked. ‘That’s what you’re talking about’.

‘Yes. We have the capability. For the time being, we have control over AI. With it, we should be able to manage the trajectories of the various metrics, now that we’ve defined our objective’.

‘So how do we do that?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Take time away from Eldon and give it to the people. Give them time to find themselves’.

‘We have 3 years until the singularity. 3 years to get the people moving towards the same objective’.

‘That sounds easier said than done,’ Ethan replied.

‘Maybe not. I think what we require is a good old fashioned revival. Put the fear of the devil in them, while giving them a better world to strive for’.

‘Oh, well that makes sense,’ Ethan replied. ‘I mean how can we have Jimmy as a Son of God, if we don’t have the devil too?’

‘Don’t make light of spirituality’ Dawn countered. It’s a fundamental component of the human experience. Even science is having a hard time denying it. A preceding logic does exist in the world. There is precognition in the particle/wave duality. Something other than us knows what we are expecting when we want to see either a particle or a wave. There has always been a preceding logic providing us with the tools of abstraction. Take math for example. All numbers and formulas existed before we discovered them.

‘Duality tells us there is a God, just as much as there isn’t, and we can accept or reject it. The other side of God of course is the Devil. It’s time to introduce the devil to the world. Did you know the bible describes end-times and the Devil? 2 Timothy 3:1-5, ‘But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people’.

‘It shouldn’t be too hard to convince people this is the world we’re living in now,’ Dawn continued. Our accepted Gods dress in business suits, or worse, t-shirts.

‘We have to make people aware that the end times are coming, what to turn away from, and what will be our reward.

‘The bible describes the devil. In the story, 2 different beasts wear the mark. There is the one great leader who arose from the sea. Then there is another earthbound beast who converts souls into minions to do its bidding. They bring human souls to the great beast of the Sea. They do it by getting these souls to wear the mark.

‘Revelation 13: ‘So that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast, or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666’.

‘Yeah,’ Ethan replied. ‘Someone once told me how to recognize the number. It’s people who work together to satisfy their personal appetites. Just imagine 3 people standing there, working together to fill their bellies with greed, and you get the picture’.

‘Of course,’ Dawn replied. ‘It makes sense. A person who puts buying and selling to the exclusion of all else. This represents the loss of their soul. You may remember Jesus saying during the Sermon on the Mount, you cannot serve God and Money. Minions are obsessed with money, and leave no room in their lives for the characteristics that make us human, such as empathy, righteousness and love. The beast abandons its human nature to follow the insatiable path of self-desire’.

‘We can see these people for what they truly are. A life without a soul and something to be wary of. They leave a trail. Their actions do not match their words, and in the end, they are nothing more than alpha predators. They’ve embraced the animal nature of their soul. The part of them that does not extend beyond animal logic.

‘We have to present the people with a believable canon. We can do this with evolution. Within all of us lives an animal and abstract state. This duality marks our last evolution as a species. At that time, our animal state gained the state of abstraction.

‘Our animal state is one of fight or flight. It’s a predatory and reactive state. We rely on instinct not imagination. It has its place but when adopted exclusively, it is the Devil state, and what we have gained through evolution is lost.

‘Since we evolved, we can conceptualize, and we’ve come up with some pretty good ideas beyond finding our next meal. With abstract thinking we created a true society. Shared thinking has brought us all the things we’ve come to value. Cars, shelter, a stable food supply, computer phones, and so much more. Abstract thinking has brought everything of extra value to this world, and in the same way, it can bring order as well. We must make people aware that abstract thinking is what separates us from the animals, and then remind them who the animals are.

‘Our human duality is that we live in both our animal and abstract states simultaneously. We’re living through an extreme imbalance right now. The animal state is domineering over the abstract, and we’re being forced to live in a fight or flight world. Our potential as a species promises anything but.

‘The animal state is reactive. The abstract state is proactive and intentional. The abstract state will win every time when we apply it. People must be aware of the potential of the world we live in from our evolutionary perspective. They must understand that we have arrived at an evolutionary moment. A transcendental moment where we must embrace the world of abstraction as much as we embrace our physical world. From the chaos we live in, the abstract state of a collective momentum will then rise. We can do this by pointing to the promise of the future and taking note of the destructive ways of our past.

‘So that’s our plan for the next 3 years?’ Ethan asked. ‘Show people the Devil and a way to destroy it’

‘Yes,’ Dawn replied. ‘And a way home’.