# Mother of Hydrogen (part 6 of 11)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [148], part 6 of 11. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2012-11 (from the career record), https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Contains Harappa, the target design for mass relocation, expressed as fiction.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Mother of Hydrogen (2012): Novel drawing on the shelter, meditation and pandemic work.
  - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine)
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Harappa
- Ideas developed here: Hexayurt
- Topics: Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — peter, harry, cadets (71%); Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — harry, yevish, president (17%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Harappa (14 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Mother of Hydrogen (7 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); real assets (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); camping gear (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); early warning (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); NaNoWriMo (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); refugees (7 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); social order (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); India (7 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); citizens (5 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): real assets; Harappa; social order; camping gear; early warning
- Importance: core-text score 1.00 (1.00 is the top), number 1 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [108] [User:Vinay Gupta/The Unplugged (2006)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/108.md): The Unplugged (2006): the earlier statement of the same long-term vision
  - [224] [The Unplugged: The Videos - Shareable (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/224.md): The Unplugged (2006): the earlier statement of the same long-term vision
  - [822] [Mother of Hydrogen, a novel (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/822.md): same career work: Mother of Hydrogen
  - [235] [The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/235.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
- On the same works, just before: [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md); [395] Open Data Ireland 25 October inaugeral meeting (2012); [396] [Transparency International launch event, Dublin (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/396.md)
- On the same works, just after: [391] [Green Foundation Ireland - The Future of Europe (4) (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/391.md); [393] [Green Foundation Ireland - The Future of Europe (2) (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/393.md); [394] [Green Foundation Ireland - The Future of Europe (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/394.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Mother of Hydrogen, document, 2012-11, https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [148], https://guptaoption.com/texts/148.md.

## Passages, part 6 of 11
[passage 70](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) the skin of the puppet, and he's going to pass unknown through this world of shades, and into a purer realm. Still tripping, Harry thinks. That's not my language, we're immanent, not transcendent. We don't float above all this, we ARE all this. So there's lift, too. The animal brain starts to settle down. The smart one upstairs, the one with words, is not so crazy. Harry's body doesn't understand what is going on, but it's learned to trust that when the above-mind is confident and happy, that corresponds to good conditions all round. There is confusion, but there is less fear. This can be made to work. They wait, slowly testing the interconnections, puzzling out what has been done, far, far below Harry's conscious awareness of what is going on inside of his brain or his skin. Puppet totem, the master hidden as the slave, is a potent clan. Even if it never existed yesterday. Harry has his myth. Harry has his initiation. ===== Gregory is in a microcopter, a light aircraft about sixteen centimeters across, weighing 50 grams. Micromechanical motors keep it aloft on little more than occasional sunlight and background heat. It's peppered with a couple of dozen cameras, thermometers, a couple of useful general chemical sensors (ph, ammonia, alcohol, methane, high level VOCs) and a couple of applications-specific packages, one for vermin (distinctive compounds from rat and mouse shit, termites, weevils and similar) and one for locating gunshots precisely, to the square meter. Normally the drone feeds into an inventory computer, which simply dumps numbers into the constraint solvers of the EMPG (Enterprise Management, Policy and Governance) system that more or less is the State Department's Africa operations. "You normally don't hear from these systems in weeks" thinks Gregory as he idly noses through the piles of Golden Rice 25kg bags just to be able to say he's looked around and there's no problem. State basicaly figures out dollars per calorie per person for each region, sets some policy priorities, and hits "Go!" and humans don't touch the operation again until food is being loaded on trucks. It's a pretty efficient operation. Gregory's job is to handle exceptions, when the software doesn't deliver, or more commonly when the people don't deliver, and nobody's getting on a plane to the Sudan for $2000 of missing food, or a tracking tag that ripped off in shipping. "Eyes and ears" is an integral part of hearts and minds. Gregory says his mantra "Automation means Fraud, Fraud means Waste, Waste means Press, and Press means Trouble." When somebody ratholes the systems, they can stay undetected for years. It's rare, but it's devastating, now we can calulate how exactly how many people - and often their names - died because somebody stole from the system. The news sites love that stuff - pictures of kids on bicycles riding around from before a famine, then DECEASED, KILLED BY OUR CORRUPT STATE DEPARTMENT stamped over in big red letters. "Poor Denise Mbatho died

[passage 71](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) it's devastating, now we can calulate how exactly how many people - and often their names - died because somebody stole from the system. The news sites love that stuff - pictures of kids on bicycles riding around from before a famine, then DECEASED, KILLED BY OUR CORRUPT STATE DEPARTMENT stamped over in big red letters. "Poor Denise Mbatho died last week, one of 54 children who have died this year because of..." Because we've got less than a quarter percent of waste in this entire system, and... yeah. There's just not a hell of a lot to do, but the systems say visual inspection of the entire warehouse is required, because of unspecified anomalies, so up and down the rows he goes. The machines did it, something didn't quite add up, and they're not sure what. AI... great when it works, but very bad at explaining itself. The systems are so complex internally... There's a bit of spillage over there, a thick scattering of white grains trod into the sandy floor. No signs of tears in the bags on the stack, could have been there for months. Nothing, nothing, bored, bored bored. It's all fine as long as the programmes run more-or-less silently, throwing some of America's wealth into patching up the holes. Something goes wrong, the Great Eye of the Public turns around on top of its pyramid, and all of a sudden everybody is reminded of Africa, of how little we're really doing for them, devastated by climate, high-tech war and disease. The pain has to go somewhere, and the State Department is the logical target. "You're 2.4% of GDP! Why don't you do more?" So Gregory flits around, looking for something software would not notice - a family camped out in a small shelter excavated out of the center of a pile of rice bags, with a roof covered in more rice bags, in one memorable instance - or more usually - rats and a false report from the pest control contracts. Gregory banks the corners and imagines he's an a fighter, flying through skyscrapers. "Pew-pew-pew, Godzilla at 6 o'clock Wing Commander Gregory!" Finally there's something out of place. Gravel. Long trail of gravel tracked all the way up an aisle where a bag of "rice" got ripped and spilled out on the forklift. Makes sense. Gregory punches out. He calls his boss and says "Looks like we've got some filler bags again" to the boss's digital assistant. "Can you schedule an inspection robot drop, and I'll do a manual inspection then? Get a couple of samples, wring the supplier's neck?" The system processes just a hair longer than a person, and says "Ok, Gregory Vine, I heard your requests and will comply. Thank you!" 21st century voicemail, but the boss will never hear the message. It'll just get done, and Gregory will see a scheduled robot drop, one robot delivered by another robot, and go and find that for one or two deliveries, 1% or

[passage 72](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) hair longer than a person, and says "Ok, Gregory Vine, I heard your requests and will comply. Thank you!" 21st century voicemail, but the boss will never hear the message. It'll just get done, and Gregory will see a scheduled robot drop, one robot delivered by another robot, and go and find that for one or two deliveries, 1% or 2% of the bags are gravel, or (what a waste) all the bags are 5% gravel and... Gregory vividly remembers flipping over a tank. The incredible power, as he jams his full bulk, in a 5 ton bot, right under the fire-shadow of the tracked behemoth, the screaming of the hydraulics as he pushes, and the tracks lift off the ground, making a space for Williams to get right under it, and then the two push and flip the tank on its side. Williams shoots off a tread, just in case somebody rights it later, then they go to work on the crew hatch, hoping for a couple of prisoners and some information. The little microcopter settles in a patch of sunlight from a skylight, resting on a sack of the genetically engineered grain. Gregory slips his goggles up off his face, sits up in the reclining chair, and stretches. It really is dull work. He stands up in the small office, and looks at an empty coffee cup. Time for a break. He spends a quarter of his life alone in warehouses or flying over wells watching anonymous locals thums-up or thums-down to get a quick indicator of the local conditions. Instruments lie because people lie, and people lie because people are people, and... well, to them, he's a little plastic copter, or occasionlly a semi-humanoid inspection robot, covered in all kinds of clever devices. In theory you can do surgery with one in a pinch, he's certainly done a few medical x-rays... They're serious pieces of equipment. He quite likes the gear. It's quality. Old. Gregory remembers when those inspection robots were state of the art, as good as industrial models. He's been with the department a long, long time. They keep relics like me around because we know how to fly metal, and even if all we fly is plastic these days, we know how to fly. Really, when it gets right down to it, it's not the drone. It's the eyes and ears and mind behind the drone, that counts. They're extensions of our bodies, we're not putting our minds into the machines, we're wearing them. Just like, in metal, you can sense the fighting spirt in an opposing unit even though both of you are secure in boxes, half way around the globe, plugged into ultra low latency boom networks. Just like you can tell Direct Neural troops from across a kilometer by the way they move, even if you can't say why. Just like... Gregory picks up a paper aeroplane he keeps on his desk, and tosses it across the room aiming for the

[passage 73](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) secure in boxes, half way around the globe, plugged into ultra low latency boom networks. Just like you can tell Direct Neural troops from across a kilometer by the way they move, even if you can't say why. Just like... Gregory picks up a paper aeroplane he keeps on his desk, and tosses it across the room aiming for the top of the book case. It noses down too soon, crashes, lands on the floor. Boom. Gregory wonders how his son is doing after Induction. He makes a fist and relaxes it two or three times. Tight, stiff. It's funny watching his son fly, he's an ape. He jams gestures out and pilots sim devices as if they were on a remote control, drags them around with his head. You just can't teach the kid how to blend over the wire, how to sort of... Gregory imagines shaping the flightpath of the paper aeroplane with a subtle twist of the shoulders, leaning on the non-existent aileron. No, you can't teach the kid everything. Walking downstairs, Gregory wonders - for no rational reason - if he'll ever see his son again. But this is the Senior Cadets we're talking about: annual mortality approximately zero, on a 10 year line. Statistically it's almost certainly safer than staying at school. It's... Not war. It's not anything like war. In the kitchen, Gregory reflexively guesses lines of sight behind the toaster on the table and the kitchen taps, guessing the field of view from the salt cellar. Heavy weapons pound in the back of his head, and he misses the war, right or wrong. He was good at war. Once in a while, somebody will call Gregory a "troubleshooter." Gregory thinks "you have no idea." Some of the guys from the corps get together and play sims sometimes. Usually war games. Usually old engagements. Greg can't do it. He needs to feel that somewhere, on the other side of the world, there are real atoms on the other side of the goggles. It's the real world. What you see in a robot is the real world. The kid thinks it's just a sim, even when he's flying a little node. That's why he can't fly well. Gregory walks into his wife's studio looking for her, perhaps they can take a break together, or go for a walk before dinner. She's passed out on the couch under a blanket, didn't really sleep last night because she was worried about Harry. He moves her legs over a bit, sits beside her, and holds her hand. She doesn't quite wake up, but he's comforted. There's something profound about being in your own flesh-and-bloody body, with familiar things, close to people. She's somewhere else, dreaming, flying some other body in some other place, a wonderland or an endless night. The girls are at school, a few years and they'll have to go through all of this again with them, if either one opts into the service. Right now

[passage 74](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) about being in your own flesh-and-bloody body, with familiar things, close to people. She's somewhere else, dreaming, flying some other body in some other place, a wonderland or an endless night. The girls are at school, a few years and they'll have to go through all of this again with them, if either one opts into the service. Right now nothing looks less likely... Gregory goes back into the kitchen. It's tempting to wake her up, tell her he loves her, tell her everything will be alright. Gregory makes the fist again. Tight as a stuck bolt. He's clearly a lot more worried than he consciously feels. They should get a call around 6PM. He can do a couple of more hours. He rises, pats Helen's arm, and leaves her to sleep. They're worrying in shifts. With good reason. ===== Peter hums merrily along the highway in the van. He's playing the mandolin as the road drives the van, not a care in the world. He's let the situation go, as he must. Nothing he can do right now, short of huge efforts of will, can affect Harry's outcomes. And if he senses trouble, and throws the lad a rope, he'll probably wind up getting pulled in and drowning too. So Peter focusses on the Great Perfection, on knowing that everything is, right now, as the Great Spirit, or God, or the Mother of Hydrogen, or whatever you want to term it, has willed things. It's not his job to save the world, it's not his job to save Harry, if Harry even needs saving. It's his job to be Peter Vine, and right now, Peter thinks, that means zooming down the road on automatic, practicing the mandolin (I still suck!) and smoking a big spliff (legal, I'm not driving.) Peter is not blissful in an uncaring way, but he's blissful in the manner of a wise archer who's loosed the arrow waiting for it to strike its target. He can worry about the arrow in flight, or he can watch it's flight in delight, but he cannot control its flight. He can assume anything is happening to Harry right now, wonders or apocalypses. The kid might have gone nuts and be locked in the brig, or he might have gone under and come to believe that the New Manifest Destiny is the vital truth, or he might be sitting there with the keys to unlock the heads of an entire generation, poked a hole in the Induction ritual's magical hold on this entire country. Anything could have happened. And every ounce of pressure that Peter had to apply to that situation, that ounce was applied as close as he can tell at the right time in the right measure, at least as judgement allows. Bliss is how Peter reacts to the uncontrollable unknown. That's what makes him a hippie, nearly 100 years after the term was invented. Peter secretly hopes he'll live until the 2060s, and he can be

[passage 75](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) that situation, that ounce was applied as close as he can tell at the right time in the right measure, at least as judgement allows. Bliss is how Peter reacts to the uncontrollable unknown. That's what makes him a hippie, nearly 100 years after the term was invented. Peter secretly hopes he'll live until the 2060s, and he can be a Child of the 60s once again. He thinks about going to Gaskin's Farm, now a thriving little Amish village, 20 years ago, and kissing the sacred ground where St. Steven's people lived and worked, setting fires that burn strong to this day, if you know where to look for the thread, The Well, the Whole Earth movement, all of it. Perhaps he should head to Tennessee for the winter, where it's mild, and in the air a little magic lingers. Peter realizes how tired he is. It's a strain, maintaining this world model, this way of life, in the face of the machinery. He wants to rest, not just body, but soul, to lie down in the soft, deep earth, and sleep for 200 years. But it is not given yet. He drifts off to sleep in the van's passenger seat, joint in the ash tray, mandolin in his lap. As he falls asleep, he feels Helen in his dreams, holding her son's head above water through a hole in the ice of a frozen lake. Gregory is there too, wearing a thick sweater in an odd purple-grey colour, sliding a ladder across the ice. Peter falls beyond the dream, and into dreamless sleep. The van streams down the highway, thinking about nothing beyond road safety and driving heuristics. It's going to Asheville. ===== Gregory falls asleep in the chair before he can plug into the next node. Nobody minds, it happens sometimes. If it's urgent, they'll wake him up with beeps and vibrating gloves. ===== I'm sitting on the floor of the disabled access bathroom, door locked, cross legged on a field jacket. I am going to sort this out now, or I'm going to die trying. It's all scrambled, my mind's turning itself inside out, the twists and folds of the paper in my head, the splits in my personality-mind-brain layers unwinding, falling apart. It feels like my head is on fire, and all I want is to get out of this somehow. Not the Senior Cadets, not my body. I want to get out of existence. Even death won't do it. There's a contradiction in terms wedged into my being, a paradox, some great lie that's forcing me out of existence, forcing me out of being itself, a lie that's greater than my truth is killing my soul, eating me up. It's death. One level up, I'm fairly sure this is going fine. As Peter suggested, the damage is contained. Unfortunately it seems to be upside down. I thought it'd be my rational mind that got turned inside out, coming to believe that America is God

[passage 76](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) itself, a lie that's greater than my truth is killing my soul, eating me up. It's death. One level up, I'm fairly sure this is going fine. As Peter suggested, the damage is contained. Unfortunately it seems to be upside down. I thought it'd be my rational mind that got turned inside out, coming to believe that America is God or something equally asinine, but it's the other way round. I can still tell that we're an Empire, that we're killing the world, that the corruption's down to the bone. All that's still true, and I'm having no problems holding it in my mind. I'm fine. But my emotional self, my body's intelligence, is insane. It's chewing through realities like there's no tomorrow, roiling the waters like a dying crocodile, and I don't know why. I can't figure out what's wrong, why it's so incredibly... I don't even know the emotions, they keep changing. Something huge has activated. All I can do is keep breathing, and keep listening, see if I can pick up some subtle thread, some clue, some line. I'm not that far out of whack here, other people... they may come to believe what's not true, but they don't become flesh eating zombies. Well... unless you're on the other end of the gun. Then... we dine on flesh, yes, indeed. And that's the angle. The whole thing peels apart in my mind, I can feel the layers separate, then combine. I'm struggling with everything I have to slide out some tiny detail, and it's a deadly as a peanut allergy. Some tiny glitch in the immune system, your body misidentifies nuts as deadly poisons, and over-reacts badly enough to make them deadly poisons. Choking out on a trace of peanut butter left on a knife. Self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like that, an allergy to lies. Dying of it. I think about the Senior Cadets I've seen, their self-assurance. It's copied, copied, copied but not from their fathers, it's copied-copied-copied but not from their brothers, their uncles or their friends. It's a discontinuity, something grafted into them, an identiy. A blind. I've lost it again, peeling, spiraling back into the chaos. It surges and foams. It's all peeled apart and split as the pieces are forced back together. No house can stand divided amongst itself. I'm thrashing around inside myself, the mental equivalent of food poisoning. I wait for the next wave, determined to catch it this time. There can't be much time left, eventually mess time will come, and I'll have to park all this. If I can do that without going off my rocker. Again it surges. My animal self's trying to throw up a lie, vomiting out something wrong, something evil, searching for internal consistency. It's vile, the animal intelligence in all of us is a simple beast, easy to please, it was not meant for this. We're not meant to... live in a world... like. Click. It tears and twists to the surface, by degrees.

[passage 77](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) My animal self's trying to throw up a lie, vomiting out something wrong, something evil, searching for internal consistency. It's vile, the animal intelligence in all of us is a simple beast, easy to please, it was not meant for this. We're not meant to... live in a world... like. Click. It tears and twists to the surface, by degrees. I get glimpses of the open plains but I can't tell if it's mythic Africa or Papa's imagined Great Plains. It's soaked in blood, so probably here. I see the white people as grinning skulls in the night. Then the horror: my sisters' faces, as gnawing zombies, the blue of their eyes made neon and piercing. Then it snaps, and a Senior Cadet beats them off with a rifle butt, and I cling to his legs, sheltered. He loves me. Snap. I feel stuff tearing inside me as the implant comes free, as my animal self splits self from other and vomits out the introject. I see the State, the Flag, the Cadets, everything else interconnected into a great predator, the Sovereign Reich, a sort of mental infection. The Queen Bee lands among the people, and they obey her, they feed her brood for the right to live in her house, which they themselves built. Mutual enslavement, orchestrated by the grid, an organizing center. It's organizing us for its own benefit, we get two parts, it gets one, and it grows stronger-and-stronger-and-stronger-and I can see light at the end of the tunnel. It's coming together. I lose it again twice, and then it all rips free in a single piece. It's a lineage, just like the magic from Peter. It's the lineage of the grey-faced men and women who comprised the State, from the age of the Kings. They organize, they optimise, they improve, but they take a cut out of the system's yield on each pass, and when growth stops, the entire model of taking-a-cut-of-the-profits turns into servitude and destitution, as they take slice after slice out of the flesh of the nation. Overseers, slave-masters, managers, all one single lineage, those who must be obeyed, or you're turned out of house and home, out on to the streets, which are owned by the city, by the territory, by the Crown. Ultimately, and then I see it in total, clear relief, sodium light. Ultimately, we've gone beyond our own evolution. All they're doing at Induction is taking the next step - "your real family isn't the people that made your body, it's the people who feed and protect you, the service." The shape of the organism has changed, we're no longer little tribes of field monkeys defending rocky outcrops from big cats and hyenas, we're... Links in the supply chain. There I am, eating food from the service, away from my home, doing as I'm told, to implement directives. I'm a cell in an organism, but that organism is a cancer. I tear free, and look around me. Bricks and

[passage 78](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) longer little tribes of field monkeys defending rocky outcrops from big cats and hyenas, we're... Links in the supply chain. There I am, eating food from the service, away from my home, doing as I'm told, to implement directives. I'm a cell in an organism, but that organism is a cancer. I tear free, and look around me. Bricks and mortar, steel and wire, radio waves and visible light. There isn't a natural thing left in my life, except possibly what's happening with Emma, which is as old as genes, maybe older. And there it is. Right in the root of me, there's an instinct to protect all life. To create new life. And it's being perverted into an instinct to protect not life, or even just my species, the humans, but something much more selective: the Americans, and specifically, the service. My species is supposed to be Government, not human. Induction makes me a member of a new genus, Homo Militaris, the self-replicating viral invasion of wars. The uniform is my skin and I am click. Wearing it. It peels off in a sheet, a whole identity, a mindset, something passed down from Rome or Greece or perhaps Sumeria before that, The Man of the King, a member of a Royal Household superorganism, clamped on top of the local peasantry like a vine enmeshed in a tree, offering order for 20% off the top, a symbiote living on the float, multiplying gain and causing agonizing pain on loss, it's... It goes on for what seems like hours, and then it settles in. It's fairly simple. Because America is as much responsible for my welfare as my family is, my deep physical inteligence, the animal mind, wants to relate to America as if it was a family member. But America doesn't have a face. At Induction, they were pushing Colonel Gibbons into my head as a sort of State Father, a... a third parent, a stand-in for Jefferson, for Washington, for the President for that old mythical form, Uncle Sam. And the impulse to imitate a role model, to copy... the Senior Cadets age because they take a graft from a much older man. It's an introject. I'm holding a chunk of John Gibbon's substance in my mind, not him as the individual, but him as the vehicle for the National Will, our group mind. He's the Vicar of Jefferson, the Priest of the New Manifest Destiny Church of the Interim Ruling. He's plugging directly into the old Christian wiring, where everything flowed uphill to the Pope, and then to Christ, and then to God, that old murderous sky bastard wreaking his wrath and vengance on the innocent and the rebellious alike. They've taken everything we used to feel about the Earth as the source of nourishment and Wonder, and transferred it to two ghosts: the Economy and the Nation State. They feed us, they clothe us, they... I see the little pill come back up. John Gibbons is not

[passage 79](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) wreaking his wrath and vengance on the innocent and the rebellious alike. They've taken everything we used to feel about the Earth as the source of nourishment and Wonder, and transferred it to two ghosts: the Economy and the Nation State. They feed us, they clothe us, they... I see the little pill come back up. John Gibbons is not my father, and I am not going to grow up to be just like him. The Senior Cadets are not my brothers, they're conscripts, just like I am. There's no "esprit de corps" beyond a bunch of teenagers in uniform smelling each-others pheremones and forming a territorial gang. They are hacking us to support a super-organism called a country, and it's bleeding us to the bone. The State is not my father. The State is not my mother. My father is my father. My mother is my mother. The Earth is their support, as it is mine. With a staggering flash, it comes right through. I clearly percieve myself to be a hundred kilograms of billions-of-years old atoms, clung by gravity to the surface of a great dark sphere whirling in space, cruising around a ball of fusing gas. I'm a ripple in bits of the earth, nothing more, but I'm part of something so sacred, so ancient! This is Wonder. Then I see the pattern integrity of my body subsumed into the pattern integrity of an even greater structure, the State, and then the system of the world, and then... it's us, we've turned against the natural order of things, our self-awareness unconsciously biting the hand that feeds, turning on the life that made us, enslaved by the mind. The lesser eats the greater, for it's own continuation, and the balance of nature is violated. The microcode, the firmware of my animal self, is stripping the poison back out of my rational mind, but it's going far, far further than undoing the Induction. It's stripping me right back out of the culture. I'm an ape in a suit, cross-legged in a strange, small cubic cave. My evolutionary heritage rises up my spine, over my head, and engulfs me. I see the whole world, lots of tiny magnets pointed towards an imaginary God, rather than towards the real, observable pole of Life. I see layers and layers of imaginary mental nonsense layered on top of a simple truth, "life is good", trying to obscure it behind layer after layer after layer of "if you buy this new and amazing" or "if you obey the rules" or It blows me right out of my frame. Unconditional love. I don't want to kill anybody. I don't want anybody to kill anybody. I don't... there's a twist... hunting for food to feed the kids, I'd kill a deer for my sisters, somehow... I feel everything changing, like a canoe that's been upside down in the water flipping up, and for the first time in my life, I can breathe air! We don't have

[passage 80](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) kill anybody. I don't want anybody to kill anybody. I don't... there's a twist... hunting for food to feed the kids, I'd kill a deer for my sisters, somehow... I feel everything changing, like a canoe that's been upside down in the water flipping up, and for the first time in my life, I can breathe air! We don't have to live like this. It's a shattering blow. I see my ancestors spread out across time, realize that as long as we pass something forwards of what came before, that's enough. I see wolf and deer and beavers, not those exact animals, but the ancient, ancient forms that we evolved from, pre proto-monkeys, little pigs, the first furry shrewes, nosing around among dinosaur bones. I see the whole framework, the whole tree of life before me, and I see my branch of humanity, wrapped around it like a vine, choking the life out of the trunk. We're parasites, and we've gone mad. And Induction's just the next step. We've completely lost our center and our values, we're not even taking care of our families, never mind the world. Snap. Layer after layer tears off, until I'm sitting there naked. I move slowly, gently, and stand up. I'm straighter and clearer than I've ever felt, and there's no me, no animal-self, no human-self, nothing beyond... this. I move inside of my clothes, feel them as a surface on my skin, quite distinct, and quite separate. I understand now. I'm an animal, in a world of animals that have become confused. There's no rational mind, there's no animal mind, there's just mind, formed from the ancient evolutionary cores, watching the feet or the skies or the inner terrains directed by attention. All of the conditioning drops. I feel myself smooth and hard and round like a pebble, like the pill that I ingested. All the layers, all the revelations seem cheap and untrue, passing fancies. The room ripples slightly, the drugs not quite spent. I put myself back into the room during the Induction, and I see it now. The whole message is "this is what a successful adult male of your species looks like", and every level of my mind has processed it in a different way. They're pointing us at these military archetypes like we're little compass points, and they're using the drugs as a big old electromagnet. "Be one of these." I shiver and shake it out of my bones. I see the paper unfold in my mind, and I rub the picture of the origami box off its surface. It vanishes, and I'm better. But if I'm not going to be Colonel Gibbons, and I'm not going to be my father, and I'm not going to be Peter, who am I going to be? No wonder the conditioning takes so deeply: they take the hardest decision in your life, and they make it for you, and then they dare you to change their mind. Something forms. It reminds

[passage 81](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) going to be Colonel Gibbons, and I'm not going to be my father, and I'm not going to be Peter, who am I going to be? No wonder the conditioning takes so deeply: they take the hardest decision in your life, and they make it for you, and then they dare you to change their mind. Something forms. It reminds me of the spear, but it's consciously directed, like choosing to see. I realize that the force inside of me that I used to feel as instinct, as lust, as anger, as need has changed. I think about Emma and what I feel isn't just desire, it's the-desire-to-make-people. Food's the desire to move, to act, to be. I realize that I'm not feeling nature, the natural drives, as separate things anymore, but they aren't blind forces any more. I'm... just... Peter makes a lot more sense. He's just rolling with this. I'm not going to just roll with it. I'm going to steer, guide, go places. I don't want to be a passive part of this world, rolling down stream. I want to guide it. I'm not just an expression of nature, and I'm not just a cog in a machine. This life is mine to make something worthwhile of. And I'm going to do it. I open the bathroom door, check nothing's out of place, and walk through a short corridoor into the barracks. I've got about 20 minutes before the next scheduled event. Most of the cadets are lying on their bunks reading, writing or sleeping. Most look glorious, free from doubt. One or two look pensive. We're out of our home groups now, no longer among familiar faces. From the corner of my eye, I catch myself comparing faces. "Brothers?" some part of me asks. "NO" I say to myself. "Senior Cadets." I make my way to my bunk, nod to a couple of people, and lie down. I close my eyes and very clearly visualize myself pulling the Puppet over me, the marionette dancing on strings, and I settle into this fake me, this non-person I'm going to be for the next one or possibly two years. When I wake up, I have the most intense feeling that I've been with my parents and Peter only seconds before. I don't remember dreaming. People shuffling around getting ready for dinner and the commencement speech. I find that I'm eager and excited, optimistic and chipper, looking forwards to seeing more of my new peers and our new way of life. I make a mental note to call Emma, and then call home as I walk across the base to the mess hall. Mom answers the phone. I feel the Puppet's mouth open, then push it out the way and say "Hey... I'm still here." She laughs. I say "no, seriously, I absolutely understand how I'm supposed to feel, the warm patriotic glow and all that, but I'm still your son, and I'm not going to become anything that

[passage 82](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) to the mess hall. Mom answers the phone. I feel the Puppet's mouth open, then push it out the way and say "Hey... I'm still here." She laughs. I say "no, seriously, I absolutely understand how I'm supposed to feel, the warm patriotic glow and all that, but I'm still your son, and I'm not going to become anything that I don't want to be, and I love you." She smiles, and says "I'm so proud of you. I'll let Dad and Peter know that you're well. See you!" I'm at the mess hall, and inside, it's like looking at a motor. People move as if on belts, cogs and pistons serve food on to plates, the pieces of the machine functioning as a whole. I let the Puppet take over, and the room fills with warm, friendly, wholesome people who are working together to make the best of their new opportunities as Senior Cadets in the greatest country on earth. I smile with an easy cameraderie, effortlessly making small-talk with John, Jim, Jane, Gerald, Hazel, Tom, Dick, Harry, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. They're friends, their family, they're the people I'm going to work with for a year and... peeping out between the cracks, I see the whole thing for what it is: one great big fraud, convincing us that the higher-order functions of society have replaced our dependence on nature ... and the Puppet goes about its business, masking the Shaman from view, while I sharpen my claws and go about my business. I fall asleep, and other that my time with my family, I do not wake up for a year. I wrap the safe in a cardboard box, so nobody can see it, then cut a hole in the box so I can immerse the leg of my bed in the safe's nanofibres, anchoring it securely. Only I can reach inside of the box to retrieve anything or free the bed leg. But the only objects I keep in the safe are my keys and remote when I'm asleep, and a single sheet of origami paper, with a box drawn on it freehand and a box of matches. I have no secrets. ===== Emma and I are talking. She's very, very angry with me. "I told you that I wanted us to be together this weekend, Harry! It was important to me." She's crying. I think about whether this is a job for the Puppet or me, and I realize I'd better let the Puppet handle it. Is that heartless? She takes another stab at it. "We're in this together, and I want you to meet the Cadets I'm serving with. You're supposed to be at the base, here with me this weekend! They're simply the most amazing people, they're so important to me, and you're blowing it off to spend time with people you've seen every day for your entire life! Get with the program!" Definitely a job for the Puppet. I can't handle this without... breaking.

[passage 83](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) I'm serving with. You're supposed to be at the base, here with me this weekend! They're simply the most amazing people, they're so important to me, and you're blowing it off to spend time with people you've seen every day for your entire life! Get with the program!" Definitely a job for the Puppet. I can't handle this without... breaking. I can't fix this. Mentally, I see her slipping out of reach down a ravine, falling into night. The Puppet says "I don't think it's appropriate for you to question my values this way, Emma. My base commander thinks it's important for us to spend time with our families at regular intervals so that we are not leaving a gap at home in the ordinary flow of family life. Helps puts people's minds at ease." "Well, that's not how we do things here." she snaps. I peek out at her for the last time, and see the face that I'd loved, transformed. There's a driven hardness there, a passion and intensity that knows nothing of what had gone between us before. I've lost her forever, and she's lost herself too. "I think you'd better do this your way from now on" she says, and I feel the finality. Something between us dies, and she says "I'll miss you" and, for a moment, I see a flicker of her that means it surface, and then slip away below the mask of duty. I fold the box around myself quickly and calmly, and let The Puppet take care of it. I'll be back later. ===== Everything which was great in the past eventually faded away. What made you think this was going to last forever? ===== At the end of the year in the Senior Cadets, my Puppet has learned to take orders, give orders, fire a non-sim rifle, spent a little time running a non-sim mech, learned an easy-to-train martial art based on conditioning reflexes using cortical stimulation, and been trained in a uniquely American political theory called New Manifest Destiny which suggests that it's our job to be the world's protection against nanotechnology and biotechnology, because the Second Holocaust proves that we're the only ones who can do it, because only we have the technical prowess and the moral integrity. I think that President Knight would be turning over in his firey grave, but that's not my job right now. I'm not here to think. My Puppet is patient and fascinated. I'm utterly bored and disgusted, but I only check in once a day. I want the end to be visible. I come back fully for the last few hours of the Senior Cadet period. To make sure that I don't fuck up, I spend half an hour in a mirror, practicing The Puppet's ways. I haven't analyzed exactly how it all works but I get the basics. A certain amount of emotion and disconnection is natural enough at a time like this, we're all going our separate ways, all

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/148-7.md (part 7 of 11).
End of [148] Mother of Hydrogen, part 6 of 11. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.