Having Fun All The Time

My name is Ivan Kowalski. I am 42 years old, a fourth generation American whose parents named him in honor of their Polish heritage. My name is Polish, but my great- great-grandparents moved to the United States from what is now the Ukraine in the 1920s. I have lived a normal life, with no harsh or dramatic experiences. Until recently, I worked as an academic at a negligible university in the American Midwest. I still remember the red bicycle I stole from another boy as a child, and the place along the dirt road to my home where I hid the bike in the brush, but soon that memory will not matter to me, for I will have for all purposes ceased to exist.

I remember the gray color of my grandfather’s eyes as he looked down at me when I was a young boy and he sat in his easy chair in his living room in Philadelphia. His eyes, like all eyes, were kind, filled with the impulsive curiosity of all men; but soon the image of my grandfather’s eyes will be as meaningless to me as the eyes of an unfamiliar animal. Beyond that, his identity will mean nothing to me. But it will not be strictly me for whom the memory will have no meaning, for I will have joined what I can only refer to indirectly (for so little is known about it, although it has been given many names), and only by the imperfect name the “stream”.

I must attest that I have done nothing to earn the right to join the stream. No particular merit, beyond good health and a baseline level of intelligence, is required to join it. One need only be, as I am, of at least middle age, and in a position to no longer fulfill one’s worldly duties. I have no wife, no family, no reason to remain attached to the constraints of modern life, except that, of course, I have no direct knowledge of an alternative. Nor can I know what alternative the stream represents, except that, within it, I will no longer be what I am. The stream will erase what I was, and leave only some other thing, some raw faculty of human consciousness that will be my offering to the future. I will surely be forgotten, except to the extent that I will be recorded as having given myself up to the stream.

It occurs to me now, as I recollect my life, that those things I believe I will miss are the things that I have only the vaguest recollection of: the sound of my mother’s voice over the telephone when I spoke to her on summer afternoons as a small boy, for instance; or the hum of the clothes dryer as she folded laundry in the room next door; the thickness of my father’s hands as he taught me to tie my boots, or the smell of the blanket he wrapped himself in on the cold evenings of the far-away past. These memories seem arbitrary to me now, the product of a frail and limited mind: I recall the color of the sweater of the first girl I ever came to love, for instance, but I cannot trace the picture of her face in my mind; I remember the fear and violence of my first car crash, but I do not remember the color or the car, nor do I know the names of the people who were in the car with me. I recall the emotional sensations of some drugs—painkillers, alcohol, nicotine, and the rarer encounters with marijuana and cocaine—but I no longer remember nearly all of the places where I tried them. I remember the snowflakes on my first dog’s ears, when he was only a puppy, the night my family and I brought him home from his litter and I was allowed to walk him; I remember the feeling of panic I felt upon gaining the duty of care for another living creature, and the accompanying wave of love I felt for the dog as he grew; but those memories, now, are incomplete, imperfect, subject to the wear of time and the limited grasp of my mind.

Nonetheless, they matter to me now; but soon those memories and all other sundry memories I have collected in my 42 years as a man will be meaningless, or so close to meaningless that the difference will be entirely negligible. I will have joined what is now ubiquitously known as the stream, but what is really an amalgam of the minds of many former people, bound inseparably, in a feat of human consciousness that has ended the era of human invention; and led to the revolution of human knowledge, to the answers to all the greatest myths and mysteries that have plagued the intellect of humankind for millennia.

I did not make the decision to join the stream in any light form; the Entry Committee made certain that I had fully considered the ramifications of my choice before I was approved, as they did with the hundreds of others before me. I understand that it will not be me who will enter the stream, but only some elemental version of myself; and yet the truth of this knowledge eludes me; I cannot imagine that which is defined strictly by the world outside myself. What little direct knowledge exists of joining the stream is now broadly and publicly distributed. The truth it outlines is simply this: I will no longer be myself, nor will I even, in the sense of my consciousness, be recognizably human. All my personal thoughts and preferences will be eradicated. Perhaps more significantly, all my prior memory of life and of the world will have become irrelevant, even to myself. I will become merely a part of a whole. In two months’ time, I, Ivan Kowalski, will have joined the stream, which is to say that every last meaningful shard of my personality, my memory, or my identity will be gone, except that I will continue to exist in a more abstract form, which I will achieve by surrendering every piece of myself to the greater flow, the interminable stream, or what was once mistakenly referred to as the singularity.

It is impossible in my present state to apprehend what my experience will be then. (Or, more accurately, what the experience will be, since I will no longer be limited to the presence of a single mind.) But it is almost certain that I will no longer consider the rest of humankind, or even my former self, as in any way interesting, or complex, or worthy of attention beyond speculative thought. It is theorized that in that elevated state, I will no longer perceive any other solitary mind as in any way capable of purveying meaning. I will view all preceding human thought as a sort of crude imitation of thought, such that the life’s work of a thousand geniuses—all those greatest feats of human agency throughout history (until the present)—will seem hasty, rough-hewed, incomplete, like the writing of a disabled or a cave man. The greatest and most complex ideas that have trickled through the human mind will be easily accessible to me (as the stream); and upon those ideas I (within the stream) will build complete thoughts that will be infinitely more complex than all the compiled thoughts of all humankind since the first.

I have recorded all this not to boast. It was not my choice to be born in this age, just as it is not the choice of a bird to be born a bird, or of the world to have ever shimmered into existence. To boast would be meaningless, for I now see very clearly the end of me; I am confident that after joining the stream all my past associations with self-conscious being will abruptly end.

It will be, I am sure, very similar to death, excepting that some fragment of my mind, some ribbon or trace of my consciousness, will proceed on the arc of time. I believe that it will be like death, except that instead of complete darkness, it will shed complete light. When I, Ivan Kowalski, join the stream, all consciousness will abruptly end at the moment that a ceaseless and riveting current of thought will begin. I will go from being merely a man to participating in the construction of a new mind for the benefit of all men. That which I formerly knew as thought will be completely overwhelmed by an infinitely greater deluge of the stream. Time will be suddenly malleable. I will be able to exist within an infinitely small fraction of a second, on an infinite plane of time, a state that is indistinguishable from immortality.

I will go, in one moment, from being merely a man to being nearly all men. I will join the never-ending stream. I will become whole. I will disappear. My name is Ivan Kowalski and soon I will no longer exist.