Lords

"I'm not expecting you to believe me. But you also have no reason not to. Remember our little talk about truth and trust?"

"Sure, I 'member. But would you please answer my question already?"

"Where's the fun in that? Care to take a guess? I'll guide you in the right direction."

"Yeah, why not. So… do you die?"

"Quite the opposite, I can assure you."

"Okay. Then it's some kind of reproduction?"

"Well, yes and no."

"Mitosis?"

"You're joking, right?"

"Worth a shot. Self-cloning?"

"Bingo! I create a clone of myself, which will be in an infant stage for several hundreds of years in your universe. I go into a sort of hibernation…"

"…and in the meanwhile your offspring gets the soul energy."

"Right. But I'm sure you've figured this out ages ago."

"Yeah, literally somewhere around the stone age. But there's another thing that's bugging me about this process."

"Ah, now I see what's going on. You want to try your little plan, but need to know if it's the right time."

"So you do know about it. Yeah, if that's okay with you. And I do need the information."

"Why wouldn't it be okay? I haven't heard of anybody attempting this, but there's no harm in it, and even I'm curious if it would work. It could be a problem, if everybody could do it, but so far I've only seen you coming up with the math for it, and even I can't calculate the precise amount of karma power needed. So you're good to go."

"Well, that's a relief. So… is now the right time?"

"Yeah. As you've figured it out, the world is boiling right now, and the majority of humanity will be gone in a few years. My 'child' will need less nourishment at birth, so I'll be giving 'birth' right when things… pardon the pun… die down a bit. Humanity will enter a sort of transitioning dark age, and will repopulate the planet, while my 'child' grows up. When the planet recovered enough to sustain both me and my 'child', I'll send it out to seed another planet, and I'll continue to monitor this one. Humanity is quite fascinating among the other species, since they managed to destroy most of the ecosystem, and used up most of the riches of the world, but are also able to recycle the waste. Also, the development of AI will help humanity a lot with the rebuilding, so they might even be able to achieve a new age of prosperity, and help me with a second 'birth'. Or, at the very least, they'll keep me alive for millennia to come, which are all good prospects among my species."

"I was right then. Since this requires this dimension to be fully powered, now is the best time. If my next resurrection comes after your 'birth', there won't be enough energy stored for me to calculate the exact amount of karma transfer needed."

"Right you are indeed. So, you're going to do this now? You have about two months of time in your perspective to complete it, after that I'll be starting the cloning process, and this pocket dimension will be severely powered down for all souls for a couple of hundred years."

"I suspected as much. Then, I'll get started right away."

The conversation with Ark puts me in a really good mood, I know I should be concentrating on the plan, but I'm really excited to see if this will work, and this is a chance I'll only get once, so it has to work on the first try. Okay, now I'm making myself nervous. Calming down… Better. I start conjuring up my tools from the past, which can help me with this. Since physics don't work normally and there's no matter in this dimension, I had to invent a new, energy-based computational system for myself. It works by projecting my memories with the help of soul energy, and manipulating them by will. It's complicated, but I had a lot of time working on it, so it's really optimized. I can calculate with it anything a conventional computer can, as long as I can recall the concepts of the calculations. But what's even more important is that it can calculate my karma power fluctuations.

Karma powers, as I've been calling them, are two other types of energy, similar to soul energy. But while soul energy is Ark's food, it has no use for karma powers, so it gives us, the reincarnated souls free reign to do with it as we please. It's a lot of fun experimenting with reincarnating using high or low karma, and devising strategies to always have high-karma lives. And we can spend it, although unknowingly, through the course of our lives, or even generate negative or positive karma. It all depends on our actions and our environment. When we come to this pocket dimension, however, we can consciously activate the gathered positive or negative karma acc.u.mulated for our next reincarnation. Our consciousness stores the remaining karma, and the cycle repeats. It was fun finding out that activating a lot of negative karma actually helps in the acc.u.mulation of positive karma in the next life, although it tends to lead to a pretty miserable life. And positive karma has the opposite effect, while living a better life in general, I mostly wound up with a whole lot more negative karma at the end of it.

But probably the most interesting thing that happened was when I tried balancing out positive and negative karma. While I can feel the rough amount of positive and negative karma I activate, and the balance between them, I can only estimate if the end result is going to be positive or negative. It's sort of like an intuition, and it's impossible to be precise, probably because of the limitations of our minds. Well, almost impossible. Since I've invented my karma power calculator, I've been able to make a few pretty good estimations on the amounts needed to end up with zero karma, and in the few incarnations that I tried this kind of balancing, although without precise enough calculations, the effects were amazing. It felt like I was in tune with a higher power, sensing there's a god out there, sensing the existence of karma, and even getting a few déjà vu-like flashbacks of my previous lives. I wasn't able to use much of this knowledge most of the time, but these lives always ended up attracting more of both karma types than usual, and being very interesting and fulfilling. I mean, I was Leif Erikson and Jeanne d'Arc, that's pretty amazing by itself.

I figured that the main problem in nullifying karma is that I can't calculate the point where that is, with enough precision. When I get close to the zero karma point, there is a range in which I just can't feel any karma at all, so I don't know when it's completely neutralized. I couldn't calculate the amount needed to add and subtract either, since the pocket dimension's power relied heavily on the overall soul power of Ark – the more he feeds, the stronger my godly powers become in this dimension. So now he's at an all-time high of soul power, and I have the calculator, awaiting assembly, to give this a shot. Aaaand just like that, two weeks passed by with the assembly. No matter, I still have plenty of time to do the calculations. I really hope this works. And I really hope that after all the effort I put into this, I wind up reincarnated at a good place and not just die at birth. I have no control over that aspect whatsoever, the only thing manipulating it to a certain degree is karma power, since you won't ever end up being the child of a beggar with lots of positive karma, or the son of a millionaire with lots of negative karma. But since I'm going for the exact middle ground, pretty much anything could happen. Well, I'm hoping for the best, and getting mentally prepared for the worst.