Convergence
“The story is everything. And everything will become the story.”
TOP SECRET – CONVERGENCE
BRIEFING NOTE
The Convergence Project is a covert military/governmental science project that uses prisoners on death row to explore what happens to people as they die.
The experience of life flashing before your eyes just before death is a process called active retrieval where memories are being recalled and lived out again in the mind. As the amount of time before death decreases, the brain exponentially increases the speed of playback and starts looping: repeating over and over a lifetime’s worth of memories. Each playback makes the memories stronger and retains more detail. Mathematically, the remaining time before death can always be halved – so one second to death becomes half a second to death then a quarter of a second and so on, to a billionth of a second, a trillionth, until finally the memories are being replayed over and over in an infinitesimally small amount of time before death. As the brain exponentially increases the speed of playback at each iteration and there is no end to this process, an infinite playback speed is reached forming a memory singularity called a Convergence Point.†
The question the project asks is: Why does this happen?
Theory
- The consciousness is editing memories to form a memory timeline that is acceptable to the brain before the Convergence Point is reached.
- When, in the last moments, a person is in a Convergence Point, from their perspective that “moment” lasts for ever, as their brain is processing at infinite speed, and they effectively enter an afterlife of their own making.
Test Methodology
Subjects on death row are killed by lethal injection within an enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core. This brings on active retrieval and the brain activity is imaged moments before the Convergence Point forms.
So far the project has failed to image a Convergence Point itself as it disappears exactly at the moment it comes into being, although the project can get close to it. These ‘near’ Convergence Points are downloaded into neutral clones – this being the most effective way of interacting with the data, as the clone effectively decodes the brain patterns back into memories. These Convergence Clones undergo psychoanalysis to try to gain an understanding of the death experience. In particular to investigate how the subject interacted with the memories to form a narrative to their life. It is also noted that this method produces far superior clone matching to the normal memory transfer sequencing method.
The project has the added bonus of extracting information held deep in the subconscious of terrorists by using Convergence on them and then interrogating their Convergence Clone, which is recycled after use and reformed.
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† Convergence Point – Definition: a lifetime’s worth of memories contained within an infinitesimally small amount of time.
TOP SECRET – CONVERGENCE
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Mike French
Mike French is the owner and senior editor of the prestigious literary magazine, The View From Here which has been called many fine things since it started in 2007 including, "Attractive, informative, sparkling and useful" by Iain M. Banks and for having a "great passion and drive" by Booker shortlisted Tom McCarthy. Mike’s debut novel, The Ascent of Isaac Steward came out in 2011 with Cauliay Publishing and was nominated for The Galaxy National Book Awards which due to an unfortunate clerical error was awarded to Dawn French.
Born in Cornwall in 1967, Mike spent his childhood flipping between England and Scotland with a few years in between in Singapore. Splitting his time between his own writing, editing the magazine, running author workshops and working with atp media in Luton, Mike is married with three children and a growing number of pets. He currently lives in Luton in the UK and when not working watches Formula 1, eats Ben & Jerry's Phish Food and listens to Noah and the Whale.
The Dandelion Trilogy
The Dandelion Trilogy consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
