The following papers were uncovered with the new documents. They are copies of documents found by the previous expedition to my own. While they were copied over by hand, I have compared the documents with the other copies found, and while there are minor copy errors, they are effectively identical, as far as content is concerned.

 

However, its placement in this pile of "faxes" sheds a new light on them. While clearly the following documents were written by the Quonset Manager, I believe they were written by the Robert York persona. While this might seem like splitting hairs, I think it sheds a great deal of light onto the mind set of The Manager.

 

Furthermore, its' order of placement within the uncovered documents indicates that these documents were "received" by The Manager from "Robert" on day 536. Which means that "Robert" was writing these for weeks, possibly months before The Manager "read" them. At least we assume he read them. He never really refers to them again in any other writings we have.

 

Puzzling, to say the least.

 

I have my own theories, but they are just theories and ones that I have not fully explored. With any luck, I will receive enough funding to mount a fourth expedition to Great Bear Island and attempt to find the Prepper cache that Rich, Hurley, and Jennifer took refuge in. I am certain that it is under many layers of ice at this point, but if I am correct in what is to be found there... well...

 

I'll leave that cliff hanger for my next book.

 

That all said, the following is a copy of the notes uncovered. Those scholars familiar with the previous expedition can skip over the remainder of this chapter. Those who are not, there needs to be a small amount of clarification.

 

These are not journal entries, but instead, philosophical musings. They are not accurate, or even scientific, but show the mind set of the author. These entries were used to fuel the Cant-verse franchise and are clearly acts of fiction. While interesting to read, they are not REAL. Read them with an eye for understanding the mindset of the author.

 

The author, being in this case, Robert York, the radio persona of The Quonset Manager.

 

Take them with a grain of salt. Please do not fall down the same rabbit hole as my colleague Maximillian Ivanov. His bastardization of the so-called "Cairn Portfolio" to push his new age nonsense is down right criminal in my opinion. I cannot stress enough that their are no demons, no monsters, nothing that-should-not-be. While it makes for great fuel for horror writers, it is clearly fiction.

----

On the Objective vs the Subjective:

 

It is a false dichotomy. It's because of our limited nature of existence that we tend to fall for traps like this. There is no subjective reality, only imperfect memories of objective experiences.

 

The reason we accept this as "subjective" is because we think we are real. We exist and we want that to be important. The belief in the subjective is the height of hubris. And we are "real", but just not very real. We do have free will, but compared to the higher beings in the universe, we have as much free will as your average peanut.

 

How long did it take you to learn how to walk? Months? Years? Imagine you learned how to walk in a moment. That is what a being with true free will can do. We are like animals to them, but a rather curious animal. Animals have no free will. They are either driven by genetic memory or, having developed knowledge through exposure to stimulation, the memory to react to familiar situations.

 

What to run from. What to eat.

 

They are programed by objective reality. Events occur, they perceive the events, they look for patterns, they then react in the best response they can determine from the interaction of events. It may seem like they are learning, but they are not. They are being programmed.

 

You are programmed. Mostly

 

You don't think about every step you take. Where every toe is placed. If you did, you couldn't walk. Physically speaking, you have been programmed to walk. You have been programmed with language. The words you are listening to are being instantly transformed in your head into patterns that trigger other programmed results.

 

Except there is a difference between you and animals.

 

We have Thoughts. We have memes

 

There are many orders of memes, from the simple to the complex. Vast memetic biomes.  These are ideas, living, growing, interacting with other memes. Ideas are alive. They grow. They consume energy. They reproduce. Memes are just another form of self replicating order. Life, in other words. Life by a different medium, of course.

 

This is where man comes in. Frontal Lobe. A wondrous addition to the self-replicating physical object known as a nervous system. A handful of neurons that give us the ability to do make a binary choice. You see, most of our brain stores knowledge, processes it, looks for patterns, then makes rules. If X then Y. If not X, then Z. These rules cover almost everything we do. If you think of your mind as a computer, these rules are just subroutines. We are nothing but triggered cascading subroutines.

 

Except for the frontal lobe.

 

That little glob of protein and lipids gives us a unique power among the natives of this world. The power to turn on a subroutine, and the power to turn them off.

 

That's it.

 

That's the extent of our free will. That's why they call us Self Bi-Aware. We have self-awareness, but only in a binary fashion. On or off. One or zero. True or false.

 

Now, a computer is nothing more then ones and zeros, and look at what a computer can do. Even with Self Bi-Awareness, we can do incredible things. Like a very complicated computer program, we can stack binary choice upon binary choice until we achieve amazing things.

 

It's this rudimentary self awareness that allows us to be a haven for memes. To them, we are like algae. We exist in vast numbers, most unaware of the world around us. We take in resources and give off... ideas.

 

Our thoughts, our daydreams, our beliefs, the stronger we think, the stronger we feel, the more memes we create. Memes exist without us. You do not understand their true nature. How thoughts can take on a life of their own. They can exist without us. Most of the time we just give off random memes that just flit about and are consumed by stronger memes.

 

If you are starting to get the bigger picture, You are quite right.

 

In the grand circle of memetic ecology, we... are the algae.

 

Now imagine that you were swimming in the ocean one afternoon and some clump of algae started talking to you.

 

This is their perspective. Boggling. Unexpected. And potentially dangerous. Tell me, would you want all the algae in the world to become self aware? Would you want algae talking about oppression and algae rights? The world's ecosystem is built on algae.

 

Memetic Ecology is built on humans.

 

I haven't talked much about THEM, because you need to understand what we are before I get to THEM.

 

They do not have senses. They do not see, or smell, or hear. They just know truth. They do not need senses to gather information that is interpreted, subjectively, in their minds. They just KNOW objective truth. They just know what objective reality IS. This "sense", for lack of a better term, has it's limits. Their knowledge is limited by distance, but the concept of distance to a memetic being is nothing like how we understand it.

 

They also are truly and fully self-aware. This isn't what is actually happening, but it's the closest example I can think of that will give you an idea of what is happening.

 

"Give you an idea." Heh. Irony.

 

Imagine you could reprogram your brain instantly. Imagine you could teach yourself how to walk in a moment. Imagine you could watch someone perform Kung-Fu and now YOU know Kung-fu. You just need a sample of the concept, then you can "see" the rest of the meme. You then consume it. Make it a part of you. You feed on thoughts.

 

That is what true self-awareness is. No wonder we appear as algae to them.

 

But they also need us. We produce the oxygen they need to breathe. The memes they need to eat, although the concepts of breathing and eating do not really apply. I'm just trying to get the general concept across as something you can wrap your head around.

 

Why do you think there were so many gods in human history? The strongest memes needed to be fed and back then there were so few humans. They needed religion to maintain enough food just to survive on earth.

 

How they got here, or how they came about, I'm not sure. Some sources indicate that earth is a colony world, another that we are an experiment in their version of terraforming, and yet another shows how we came first and we created our gods. Which one is true? I suspect it is some sort of combination of the three.

 

Ghosties and ghoulies and long leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night, we pray to god to protect us.

 

But now there are so many humans, and with the advent of the internet, memetic production has gone into over drive. No longer do they need to maintain churches or compels worship to gain enough power to survive. The earth is awash in Memes and they have grown lazy, and decadent.

 

So the gods no longer protect us.

 

Memes can take on a life of their own. Old concepts resurface. Books are far more dangerous then you could possibly imagine. Don't try to imagine how dangerous, you'll only make the situation worse.

 

We give birth to monsters and they thrive in this rich memetic soup we have surrounded ourselves with. Like the oxygen produced by algae at the dawn of earth allowed for a jump in evolution to aerobic-based multi celled organisms, the memeticly rich environment of earth has allowed a jump in Memetic evolution.

 

I don't understand exactly what this means, other then it has the gods of old scared as hell. Like someone who went away on vacation for a year, only to come home and find the kudzu has overgrown everything and find a family of critters living in the attic, they are wondering how to fix this mess.

 

At the moment, they are moving slowly. None of them want to risk getting rabies from a rabid wombat.

 

And then some of the algae managed to get their attention and say, "Hi! It's been a while! What you been up to?"

 

They... don't see us as individuals. They believe that Humanity has reached a critical mass and become a hive mind. Claims of being an individual are just seen as growing pains. Give humanity some time, it'll finally settle down. It was just born, after all. Babies have all sorts of stupid ideas.

 

And that... is the current situation. You need to understand this part. The universe is unique and immutable, but our perception of that reality gives rise to life as thought itself. Our thoughts take on a life of their own. From our perspective, it seems like perception equals reality. Well, it does, for our reality, but not the true underlying scaffolding that makes up the true objective universe.

 

Unfortunately accessing just objective reality is next to impossible, so we have to live in and deal with the illusion. An illusion so powerful that our perception of it defines it. Like algae perceiving the ocean in which it floats, the world is fluid and frothing and forever changing, even if far beneath it all lies a rock hard, solid foundation.

----

 

On the Nature Of Emotion:

 

If you are going to be dealing with these memetic life forms there's some fundamental psychology we need to get out of the way, at least from their perspective.

 

First and foremost, they view us as creatures of passion and that we use logic to justify our passions.

 

Second, Love is the most powerful emotion. I know that sounds corny, but you also do not understand how they conceptualize love. Furthermore, they view it as a scale. One does not act out of love, from their point of view. One experiences love for something, say, on a scale of 0 to 100. Now to this love, you react.

 

There are four reactions to Love.

 

Rage, Fear, Jealousy, and Despair.

These four emotions are the ones that lead to action. In their raw state, they just are. Formless without direction. When you direct these negative emotions, they become focused and with purpose, and they have different names.

 

Focused Rage becomes hate.

Focused Fear becomes courage.

Focused Jealousy becomes protectiveness

Focused Despair becomes spite.

 

To memetic creatures, unfocused emotions are preferred over focused ones.

 

Back to the analogy of the Algae. When humans have unfocused reactions, we just give off the memetic energy into the universe. This creates food for the memetic life that exists around us. When you focus it, you are restricting feeding to only the concept you are focused on. You are keeping the oxygen for your own use, in a way. IF the focus is upon a specific memetic creature, they can feed on this emotional energy, but no one else can

 

This is why so many rogue memetic creatures try to harm humanity in the way they do. Why they prey upon the weak and the damaged.

 

This is also why so many "gods" of old desired worship. It was food directed at them that no other memetic creature could consume. Of course, the memes consumed changes the nature of the creature that does so. A feedback loop is formed where the "god" directs the worshipers, but the "way" the worshipers envision the "gods" changes the gods to match the follower's perceptions.

There are four types of memetic "bottom feeders" as it were. The ones that don't feed off specific concepts or directed faith, that is. I'll get into the specific names for them later, but for this introduction, you only need to know one thing.

 

They. Want. Food.

 

This is why they do what they do. They don't want you afraid. They want you so afraid you can't focus. They don't want you to despair, they want you plunged into ennui so deep you can't even think. They don't want you angry, they want you in a blind unfocused rage. They don't want you worried about what you covet, they want insanely possessive and paranoid about everyone around you taking the thing you love.

 

This is why you must focus on self control. Because you need to know when your emotions turn negative, if you can FOCUS those negative emotions to a productive outcome, you can deny memetic entities the fuel they would gain from you.

 

The Hate to destroy your enemies.

The Courage to act in spite of your fear.

The Desire to protect those you love.

To Spite your enemies believing it doesn't matter if you win, as long as they lose.

 

This is the mind set you must come to accept, lest you will just be making those we must fight stronger.

 

You must then empty your mind. Caring is not good nor bad. Caring is just the strength of your feeling. How much you care about something could be how much you love it, or how much you want it destroyed. Caring can be positive or negative.

 

Remember that.

There is the reverse of love. GREED.

Love is a daily devotional.

 

Greed is the absence of contentment.

 

Greed is not the act of filling the hole, but the hole itself.

 

The root of all emotions goes back to two basic desires. Need and Satisfaction.

 

Love is based in satisfaction. Greed is based in need.

 

Originally, feeling need was a negative thing. You felt uncomfortable for some reason (a lack of food and you were dying) and then you went to satisfy that need and felt better. So you felt pain when you needed something, and better when you didn't.

 

Over time, these basic feelings evolved and became more complex. Pain when you are dying is a good thing. It motivates you to stop dying. But as we became more complex, so did our emotions. Because of this "negative/positive" dichotomy, we started grouping feelings into a good/bad spectrum. Unfortunately this isn't the reality of Emotions, and so you must forget all that you have learned.

 

After need came greed. The need to not just get what you NEED, but to stock up on extra supplies so that if the need comes back, you are covered. This system of rewards would lead to contentment and happiness, which in turn leads to happiness and love. Love. Greed. The foundations of the heart.

 

We are not creatures of logic. We are creatures of passion and use logic to justify our passions.

 

You must make your passion be for logic. Accept that only passion for logic can lead to control of your passions. This is the great conundrum of our age.