Chapter 30 - The Nature Of Demons

While it may seem contrary to your way of thinking that bacteria can be intelligent, a few transhumanists believe that the human mind can be uploaded on to computers. Computers are only silicon switches, each one by themselves far simpler than a bacteria. In fact the only reason why nerve cells evolved is speed of thought, not depth of thought.

However while intelligent life is pretty much everywhere technological civilisations are pretty rare indeed. To have a technology you have to harness energy to a machine. To have a space faring technology you have to harness external energy to a machine. At the very least you need lots of oil. It really helps to have nuclear power if you're going to jump to the next star. But before you work your way up to nuclear you need lots of oil. To make use of the oil you need an oxygen atmosphere to burn it in. That atmosphere cannot have constantly strong winds, which are surprisingly common in the universe.

You also need a strong body that lives on land. A squid cannot rub two sticks together to make fire because it's underwater. To live on land you cannot be on a planet that's too big because the gravity will not only make it impossible for a spaceship to leave, but the tectonic plates will not rise above sea level. On the other hand the planet cannot be too small because the atmosphere will be too thin for fire to burn hot enough. A strong body needs high energy fuel, which is a lot more practicable when you're orbiting around a sun which burns brighter than a red dwarf. But if our sun was much bigger then its life would be too short for intelligent life to have evolved and the extra ultraviolet radiation would have burned surface life to a crisp.

While most of these factors may not be that improbable by themselves, put them all together and we are living on an extremely unusual planet. To put it bluntly Earth is a galactic freak show. We are prejudiced to see this as normal because this is where we have been born, it is what we have evolved to survive in and it is all that we know.

Having said that life's progress on Earth was held back for well over a billion years because of a scarcity of the element molybdenum. This is needed for the efficient fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere to form proteins. If a large meteor of molybdenum had of smashed into us 4 billion years ago we would already have colonised this galaxy and Andromeda."

"And you know all this just by touching that meteorite?"

"Most of it from touching the meteorite. I'm getting to that. What do you think life on Earth is up to in the long term."

"Finding, feeding and reproduction?"

"That goes without saying and that's short term stuff. No, in the long term life here has got a problem. In a few billion years it will decidedly be in the wrong place due to the expanding sun. It has to get off or it will perish. So guess what, you humans evolved. Now there is the technology to colonise Mars and soon beyond."

Daniel spoke slowly, he had picked up the slip. "You said 'you humans' as if you weren't one yourself. Are you?"

Imogen smiled, "I was going to save that for later on tonight, at just the right moment but you're stealing my thunder. Physically I'm human, biologically I'm human, but my spirit is a Djinn - a type of demon."

Daniel felt a chill go through him and he felt his balls rise in fear. She wouldn't have brought him this far just to kill him. It then occurred to him that no girl had ever liked him because Imogen wasn't one in spirit. He had never had any acceptance from his own kind, if a demon was what it took to take away the loneliness and to have his skills and contributions recognised and to be treated with dignity then what the hell. He wouldn't be a traitor to his 'own kind' because he had never been accepted as one of them and so therefore there was nothing to betray. Fuck humans, fuck 'em all. " So what defines you as a demon? You've always treated me well."

"We demons do get a bad press. If you think of President Trump's treatment - well it is very bad for a human - demons get it a lot worse. A demon is simply a spirit from hell. So what is hell. Hell is the biological cyber reality, the plennum, created by the collective intelligence of the worlds microbes, most of which are lithotrophs - which are bacteria and archaea living in the Earth's regolith. The bottom of hell is too hot for life because, as you know, the Earth has a molten core.

It wasn't ordinarily intended for demons to live in the light. It was intended that humans start as a new soul. This keeps the spirit world fresh. This is done by infantile amnesia where the brain rewires itself and in the process of this rewiring memories are destroyed along with any demon that may have possessed the child at birth.