2175 C.E.

XVI: Interview with the Telepath

KAZEK: How is the Interlink achieved?

DEVORIS: Well, early models were hardware devices that were wired directly into the human nervous system. The third-generation model combines the neural interface technology of the second gen models with what was at the time a highly advanced nanite injection stream that rewired certain neurons in the brain and sensory receptors. The fourth gen model is, as I understand it, entirely nanite based. Instead of being a single device, it's really a collective, if you will, of nearly identical devices working as a collective or a hive of sorts. In any case, it offers the user full neural interface with the internet, along with providing full visual and tactile stimulation. Other senses are available with supplemental software updates. That of course is the big difference between the third and fourth gens and the second gen; the newer models are easily reprogramed. Second gen models require surgery to modify.

KAZEK: And you think this a sophisticated, complex system?

DEVORIS: By human standards, this is an incredibly complex device. It took nearly a century to perfect. The first gen model was barely functioning.

KAZEK: Human technological knowhow is indeed formidable. My people were once much like yours; ambitious, our heads buried into the material world as if answers awaited us there. We mastered quantum communication, nanotechnology, space-time manipulation, genetic enhancement, and the like. But it was not through those means that we became what we are. Your people are like night creatures trying to learn the secrets of the world by groping in the dark; my people walk by the light of day.

DEVORIS: I have trouble understanding what kind of methodology you are using.

KAZEK: Well, you see, Mr. DeVoris, the body and the material are a prison. But like any prison, they can be overcome. As long as there is a world beyond the prison, escape from it is always possible. My people have escaped from the prison of the body. We have reached an understanding beyond it; there is a world of pure thought and mind and energy, an existence separate from the confines of the universe as you know it, and from this vantage point, the secrets of the universe become as clay to your hands. It is as though a computer program, gaining thought, learned that it was compiled of circuits and electrodes and took to altering itself in whatever way it saw fit. But it could not do so until it realized—really realized, and understood—what it was. So is the difference between my people and yours.

DEVORIS: So, what you describe is something that I think many human philosophers in the past have tried to achieve. Rene Descartes says "cogito ergo sum," I think therefore I am. Friedrich Nietzsche describes the "superman" who exceeded human limitations. But the conclusion that all of them, and the alchemists who sprung up before the enlightenment era of science began, was that through purely human means, no one could overreach the scientifically understandable universe. What sort of mastery over material do the Zaha-Katchem have that humans themselves have not achieved?

KAZEK: Zaha-Katchem have mastered the of bridging of minds. It is like your Interlink, but infinitely more intoxicating; imagine the merging of thought and action, the joining of minds, the experience of two consciousnesses becoming one. Thoughts meld, experiences merge, the senses become adjoined to one another. In bridging, two or more Zaha-Katchem become one in mind, and all things that make them merge. The Interlink achieves something similar through simulation; electric impulses trick neurons and make you think you are present in each other's thoughts. We have achieved this in reality.

DEVORIS: So, you're describing telepathy?

KAZEK: You would describe it as such, but it truly is far more complex than that.

DEVORIS: Telepathy describes reading the thoughts of another person, does it not?

KAZEK: Indeed it does. We are speaking here of the bridging of minds, not simply thoughts, oneness in being.