"Ah, very good," said Alan, "now we come to why you, all of you, were invited here today..." he let the silence stretch for a few moments while tapping his papers back into a neat stack.

Having deviated so far from what had been planned, Alan didn't see much point in returning to the script. He put the stack of papers back down, "Simply put, you have been asked here to serve as an advisory council. At the end of time together here at The Facility, we will hopefully have formulated a plan as to how this information is to be distributed to best serve humanity."

"But why me?" asked Rothschild from his seat in the front row, his voice subdued in comparison with its earlier belligerence. He fidgeted with his gold topped cane while focusing on The Box, "Why us? If this ultraintelligent machine is so smart," he said, sweeping his hand to include all those present, "why do you need any of us?"

"Ah, well..." Alan had anticipated this, it was one of the points he had truly prepared for, "many of you are here for your ability to convey the information in a clear and reliable manner to others, so your credibility can serve to disseminate any announcement we may decide to make. Others of you are here because they have the necessary technical knowledge to substantiate Christopher's findings and confirm to the wider scientific community that our findings are indeed legitimate. And no small number of you are here because you exert an inordinately large influence on the quality of life of a majority of people on the planet.

"Which brings us back to the earlier question about the signatures excluded from reinsertion and how 'imminent' the emotional catalyst must be." Alan sought visual confirmation from Hugh and Jack they were prepared to proceed. Both nodded curtly. "Hugh will address the second point first, Hugh?" Alan couldn't help but feeling they were all one-eyed guides leading the blind, though in truth, he wasn't entirely certain they weren't blind as well.

Hugh's voice took a somewhat cautious tone, as if he tapping his way forward with his explanation., "The first thing to understand is how the emotions we cause in others are incorporated into our quantum signature. It appears that no small portion of our DNA actually serves as a sort of antenna, transmitting, receiving and storing the emotional...frequencies we engage in. It serves as a sort of... epigenetic nexus between our space-time and the omphalos.

"The next thing to understand is that it appears there is no... 'safe' distance or degree of separation. It is not necessary that we intend or are directly involved with the emotional consequences of our actions for them to be received and encoded in our DNA, a true quantum event, for parsing and reinsertion in the omphalos. This means that even the unintentional consequences of our actions at the end of a causal chain can result in our reinsertion as an 'other'."

"What!?" cried out a high nasal voice edged with panic, "But that would mean if we unintentionally cause suffering to people we don't even know that we will experience that suffering ourselves? That can't be true!"

Jack interjected, silencing the speaker with a tone that left little doubt as to his lack of sympathy, "As it turns out, it is true. Like Alan said, no small number of you have been invited here today because your actions and plans for humanity have and have had serious consequences. Not just for humanity, but as you are doubtlessly recognizing at this moment, for yourselves as well."

"Ah," said Alan, seeing Lanza raise his hand again, "Dr. Lanza, you have a question for Hugh?"

"I do, thanks. But should this really matter to us? We won't remember who we were or what we did in the previous incarnation. If we end up suffering something we essentially did to ourselves, we can't learn anything from that, because we don't remember having been the previous incarnation of ourselves who performed the action that caused the suffering."

"That is, in the new incarnation, true," Hugh responded, "but I was interrupted before I could finish describing the functions of that part of our genetic code that has often been described as junk DNA, meaning all that DNA that to date has remained unexplained. As it turns out, there is no 'junk' in our DNA, everything has a function.

"As I said, our DNA includes an antennae function and a storage function, both of which are necessary for later parsing and reinsertion. It also includes a key to reconstituting a complete read-only consciousness-chain of previous incarnations within the omphalos.

"If Christopher's analysis is correct, there is another process at work that performs an evaluation each time a signature enters or re-enters the omphalos. This process then appears to evaluate if a signatures will be excluded from reinsertion to our space-time."

"What Hugh is saying," commented Jack drily, "is that it is possible for individual incarnations to be removed the reincarnation cycle."

"That does appear to be the case," Hugh confirmed.

"And what are the criteria to stop being reincarnated? What can we do?" asked the high nasal voice nervously.

"Well," said Jack somewhat primly, "that is certainly a valid question. To answer it we need to ask what the process is that makes the determination, which is not yet entirely clear. Christopher, our ultraintelligent machine, has a few hypotheses about what is being evaluated.

"By assigning numerical values to emotional states, with positive emotional states having positive numbers and negative emotional states having negative numbers, Christopher believes that the sum total of a consciousness-chain's emotional value, if positive or negative enough, can enable a particularly signature to be removed from the reinsertion process."

"And where does that signature go from there?" asked Musk.

Alan shuffled his papers somewhat distractedly, they had almost reached the limit of what they knew. As a man of science, Alan wasn't entirely comfortable with the speculation he had heard from his colleagues in this regards, but they had agreed it needed to be presented.

Hugh continued, "We can't be absolutely certain at this point, but it appears the signature removed from the reinsertion process does transitions through yet another dimensional barrier, leaving our space-time and the omphalos entirely."

"And here's the real kicker," Jack grinned ruefully, "upon exiting the omphalos, at the moment it pierces the membrane into that other dimension, the signaure appears to reconfigure a copy of the entire consciousness-chain, comprised of multiple, if not countless individual signatures, into a single unified signature."

"Meaning, I believe," Hugh said, bringing it to a point, "the signature becomes consciously aware of all previous incarnations of itself."

...

To be continued in [Eternity is a Closed Circuit - Chapter 9: Marrow of the Machine]