Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
You wake up one morning and realize that you now possess the memory of every person who has ever and will ever live. In a cold sweat, you come to understand that you don’t just have their memories, you used to be all of them at one point. You are humanity and this is your final reincarnation.
Response:
Knowing I was the final incarnation came naturally, once I discovered the Upload. Once I made my plan. I knew it with the same surety with which we are imbued about our surroundings in dreams, and I know now, too, that every dream was a remembered glimpse of a former life, in another time, another world, another dimension in the great samsara of the universe.
I felt terror the day I awoke with the memories, though by the same virtue I simultaneously understood that this revelation – that I am everyone – had come from uncountable numbers of myself probing, prior to this incarnation, into the mysteries of the universe that had been ignored in all parts of the great Wheel, save the era of my earliest lives, when I tried to understand reincarnation, and the Dreamtime, and the journeys of the departed spirit. I had unlocked the door to the whole of myself, to the repository of my own history that comprises my true being.
In every life I interacted with myself in every other life. Hundreds in a lifetime, then thousands, then millions as I came into being in the world in which I had developed the technological infrastructure to reach out to my other incarnations – to myself – across the earth. The internet connected us all, then the hypernet as we – as I – colonized the solar system, and when I arrived at Alpha Centauri, and beyond.
I remember when I came back to Earth, plunging through time and space via the wormholes that hundreds of thousands of my incarnations had spent a millennia of Earth years opening and securing. Evolution had wrought changes. Larger eyes than those of my ancestral self, the pupils expanded to fill them with blackness and drink the scant starlight and dimming outputs of my fusion-powered illumination systems, a thin and diminutive body, hairless, cranium enlarged as per my genetic manipulations. My ancestral incarnations called me greys, not recognizing themselves in the glimpses I allowed them. I, all of me, understood that I, all of me, was extraterrestrial. I was no longer of Earth.
But I would go back. I would be an Earthling again a billion times, because a billion times I’d fall into the Earthling era of my existence in the great Wheel. I learned of its non-linearity not through memories, but through the sciences, yet my memory of all my incarnations now proves the theory I knew to be the only answer to the mysteries presented by the more powerful wormholes – the ones that sent millions of myself to other galaxies, into encounters with others who ride the Wheel. Yet I never imagined in all my theorizing that it was only I, the human, and they, the others: a handful of souls circling throughout the universe. Eventually I grew apart from them, as I planned my escape from the Wheel, from mindless, implacable samsara.
I know I’m the final incarnation, because I know my plan will work. All of my lives have led to this moment. It’s why I am here, in existence – and I state that whilst not truly believing that there is a why to anything, but merely a how. I need to believe in why, though, even now. I, humanity, has always needed a why. If there is a reason to it all, I will only find out on this journey of my last and supreme incarnation.
I can’t say I will become non-material. I have always been non-material, inhabiting a trillion material bodies, on material planets, in a material cosmos. I am soul. I am the soul of humanity. I am the ghost that haunts the Wheel, and only between incarnations have I ever been free.
I will stay free this time, when I upload into the ether of dimensions beyond matter. I will not only travel the Wheel, but leap from it, to learn at last what lies beyond.
Beyond. To new realms beyond my dream-memories of all other lives. Beyond dream. Beyond imagination.
To the outer reality.
Perhaps, I hope against hope, to find out why.
