The Trophy Wine

I went to get my sling-bag and take out the bottle that was inside of that.

It was just an ordinary Chris Ringland Shiraz ‘Shiraz Barossa’ vintage 2021. ‘Ordinary,’ right? As if anything Chris Ringland is ordinary...

When I went over to go stick that onto the dining table with the other bottles I could see what those were for the first time. Penfolds Superblend 802A and 802B.

Leader guy – MacGregor, as it happened – spoke again. “Do you know what the Thales Intercept is, John?”

“No, I do not know what it is. Thales is a military communications multi-national from France originally, I think. NATO supplier, mostly electrical and electronics systems, some general military equipment though nowadays. Bushmaster military vehicles, for example.”

I could see out of the corner of an eye that the others were opening all the bottles.

“Thales of Miletus. The first geometrician of ancient classical Greek history. He devised the Thales Intercept – which you should learn about if you wish to help the people down there in the world below us.”

“Well summarise it for me. I’m lazy.”

“One time he reserved a vast number of olive presses just before a huge generally unexpected crop of olives were produced in a particular year and made a fortune from that after some prominent member of society had gone around posing the question: ’Why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth.”

“Oh. Interesting.”

I could see one of the Xans had found the controls of the audio system, which just happened to be this Triangle COMÈTE speaker system with McIntosh Laboratories amp and controls.

Oh man, warm and loud!

Airdrop – ‘Changes.’

Chamber music?? O-kay.

One of the reasons for why they wore those big long slanted dark-looking lenses over their natural eyes was that their eyes were capable or giving off these incredibly bright shining light displays.

“Don’t think, John. Don’t.” McKenzie murmured up into my ear. “Just enjoy. Do you know how to do that?”

These guys’ skins were all a little bit translucent too, from time to time, particularly when they were expressing emotion.

I recall I had seen some briefing videos a long time ago with a couple of the subjects from the original Professor John Mack research study – Athena Demetrios and Shary Levy – and the both of them opined that these creatures were incredibly intelligent and knew all about us organically, physiological, biologically, but then did not understand what we felt. Later on, public interviews were given and these are around... You can find them.

Well but that isn’t right that they don’t understand our emotions. It isn’t that they do not understand how we feel, it’s that we do not understand how to feel. We think we feel in the sense of personal and meaningful emotions. We imagine ‘feelings’ are these things we get through receiving stimuli from the outside, and into us via our sensory organs, and which we process in our CNS and then come up, almost instantaneously, with an idea of value about a feeling that we are experiencing.

Yes we feel sensations, but no, we do not process things intelligently. We process them automatically as pre-programmed automatons. We have a social environment-created, master program that pre-sets haptics hierarchies of value. We do not actively consciously ‘think’ anything as a rule, at all.

See, take the Thales situation as a metaphor for intrinsic value judgements and how we feel about something: did Thales himself feel that he was rich while the process of what he was doing was underway? Did he, as a mathematician, feel that inevitability of outcome as a sensation of wealth – or then again, was he going to set that aside until actual realisation of the outcome as a ‘manifested existential?’

Logically he was going to ‘win.’ In truth was he going to win?

Was the outcome absolutely 100% a given?

Well if it was then it was a truth, even before it had happened in linear unfolding.

I just felt I had to go ahead and ask, get confirmation from the ‘experts’ of this kind thing, as it were – which they were, must have been: “Hey do you think it is inevitable that another nuclear weapon will be used by the human race? I just would like to hear it from you because in my mind I think I already know.”

“You think, Johnny?” McKenzie, being a touch forward and familiar.

I actually could see what they were all doing right now. They were circulating beams and patterns of light around and around between each other. It was making parts of their skin literally glow.

At a point it was just one big circle of light which they were sharing and part of. Hive mind? Looked like and then some.

“Let’s just go eat some food and drink some wine, John, before the rest of the team go bananas with how they are feeling, John John Johnny...” She instructed abruptly, and breaking out of the light circle momentarily to speak to me but then re-entering back into it again.

I couldn’t get in there. Didn’t know how to. Looked pretty cool though. I have to admit.

‘MacGregor’ the leader guy came up close to me and peered at me again, hard into me eyes. “You think nuclear weapons being set off are the worst things they will do now? They care not about a few people, or individual persons, and they care not about lots and lots of people.”

“Yeah but what can we do? What can you do – you guys have all the advanced super technology and things.”

“Hmn.” Was all that he answered.