Kanye West Saves the World

I think it was when Kanye West became an atheist that the world started to change. Nobody saw it coming really. He kept the Sunday Choir, but had them sing only secular music. Then, he declared himself the living reincarnation of Michael Jackson and bought the rights to all his own music, immediately removing it from every streaming service and music outlet, no more streaming, no more CDs, no more Vinyl. All that remained of his music was what people had managed to save or pirate. And then, two months later, he dropped fifteen albums back-to-back of all new secular music, all of it fantastic. And the new clothesline was out of this world.

The public had still turned against him for the Nazi rhetoric and erratic behavior, but something about his ego acted like a shield against any criticism. I've never seen someone leave their past behind so thoroughly. He changed his viewpoint, but never felt like he needed to apologize for the things he'd done. He only talked about growth and how his personal journey led him to a dark place, and he came out of it a better man because he was a genius and the voice of a generation and yada yada.

I have to be honest; I was only skimming the headlines at the time. It all seemed like another day in celebrity news. I don't think anybody saw where it was headed. It was when he started talking about mushrooms that I started really paying attention.

"The mushrooms are talking to us, but nobody will listen."

I remember that quote from his last interview with Joe Rogan. I still wonder if he was really hearing them or if he was just crazy. Either way, he was right. Nobody else could remember that part of the interview because at the end of the show, he announced his engagement to Jay-Z and Beyoncé. And three months later, they were a legally married throuple. They had plenty of support from liberal minded folk and the Mormon church, but the litigation involved in changing the nation's laws to allow for their marriage was complicated and would have taken years, but between the three of them, they could afford to rewrite any law they wanted.

I became fascinated by their stories. A legally married celebrity throuple of billionaires and they all changed their names to Ye and fancied themselves somewhat of a Holy Trinity. They spent months going to special retreats and seeking treatments that involved psychoactive mushrooms. The Sunday Choir began singing new hymns dedicated to fungi. Then they co-authored a book, The Mycelium Prophecy and began claiming they were the harbingers of a new epoch of human history. Well, they weren't wrong.

After their book flopped, they began investing impossible amounts of money into a research project whose goal it was to create a dialogue between humans and mushrooms. I was loving it. At the time, it just seemed like more rich people with a pipe dream, Elon Musk's Mars trip but a little crazier somehow. Seemed harmless enough to me, let the rich people waste their money. I've believed all my life that we as a species had the capabilities and resources to uplift ourselves beyond the need to struggle for survival or fight wars, but I also believed we were too short-sighted and selfish to accomplish that. Who could have guessed that Ye would bring the world into the next era? Ye, of course, referring to the collective of three, the trinity.

They succeeded, Ye did, in their goal to talk to the mushrooms. It was a fantastic breakthrough. Not only did they prove that fungi was sentient and capable of speech, they proved that fungi was actually humanity's intellectual rival in the natural world. Honestly, I think we could have predicted that, but people barely considered plants as living creatures before Ye changed everything.

It wasn't all fantastic scientific breakthroughs and celebrity gossip. The final war came soon after their discovery. It was heinous and horrific and devastating. Remnants of Taylor Swift's armies persisted, scattered in small groupings globally for ages, before the end.

It was when Ye first broke the code of the fungi's syntax that set the proverbial snowball in motion. The complexity of the translation process could only have been accomplished with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The code was released as open source and researchers worldwide began applying it to their own translation software. Communication opened worldwide; Star Trek once again predicted our technology when our universal translators came out. While that changed everything, a small research team was about to break the code of the whales' syntax, changing everything again.

Things got weird after that. Global government officials began behaving in strange ways. Korea united. The Muslim and Jewish nations made peace. And Ye was elected president, all three of them serving one term together. That was when Taylor Swift declared the vast acreage of her estates to be sovereign ground, and no longer a part of the United States. She started talking crazy. She said there was an underground network of world leaders working in secret to take control of humanity's minds. Every fan she lost with her new rhetoric was replaced by a new political radical, from Q Anon to Holocaust deniers, she began to attract society's outcasts into her ranks. Even Kim Kardashian joined Taylor Swift in her stand against Ye.

The news broke like T. Swift's heart. All the world leaders, those at least behaving strangely, were infected with a fungal spore that took root in the brain and acted like a pilot, controlling the host's body. People compared them to the ants that climb to the top of grass stalks and wait for birds to eat them because of a fungal infection. At the best, they claimed, it was a treatable illness, at the worst, it was biological slavery. Sentient, though they were, they no longer had control of their mental or physical abilities. They were like organic machines whose software had been replaced, updated, by the fungi. It isn't hard to imagine that humans would fight against such a thing. Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian, the unlikely duo led the final revolution of the human supremacists, an endeavor that was doomed to fail . . . because of the whales.

It was fascinating to me because for forever, humans have tried to distance themselves from the natural world as something unique and outstanding. Emotions were something only we possessed, or so we believed, until we realized that animals experience emotional lives at least as complex as our own, capable of fear, anger, joy, even love and empathy and altruism. Then it was language. Yes, animals communicated verbally, of course. Birds sing, Prairie Dogs have warnings for different types of danger, but nothing could communicate in the complex and often abstract ways that humans did, until the mushrooms. But they were analytical, atheistic, and matter of fact. So, the last bastion of humanity became our religious beliefs. Those truly separated us from the other species, our beliefs, our faith. That was our truth, until we started talking to the whales. They were, in one word, zealots. Turns out all of their songs were hymns.

Of course, humans rejected their religion outright. The whales, already preaching that humans were the living incarnation of evil, sided with the fungi with a religious fervor never before achieved by mankind. Not even by Taylor Swift's followers, which admittedly included me at the time. It wasn't just religion; it was fear that led to the war. It was the fear of being replaced, but mostly it was the fear of dying. Enslaved and controlled by mushrooms was as good as dead to many, definitely to the ones who took their own lives. Plus, when the whales insulted Taylor Swift's latest album, bombs began dropping on the ocean.

There was a point in human history, long ago, when war changed from being a necessary evil to being a profiteer's pastime. This war, the final war, was neither. It was just what it was, neither necessary nor profitable, and it ended in the way everyone should have predicted it would. Blind optimism led billions to perish in their vain attempts to retain their "humanity" whatever that was worth. T. Swift and Kim K. led a fiery revolution that ended as all fires must, with every spark eventually fading to black. Nobody predicted suicidal whales would win the war, but they did.

Just as the blazing inferno of the Swift Army reached its crescendo, spore clouds erupted from blowholes in synchronized assaults worldwide, billowing like smoke from wildfires, blocking out the sky. They started with the islands, Hawaii, Japan, etc. Then moved on to Australia and Europe. From there, they surrounded the peninsulas and coasts, spraying spores into the atmosphere with their final breaths. From the coasts inward, the fungi implanted themselves into their human hosts. But it wasn't so bad. Everywhere the spores spread, peace immediately broke out. The humans began treating each other as though they were all one being.

The fungi did not think within the same terms as humans. They were long-lived and widespread long before primates were hairless. In the mind of a human, the people of the 1700s were different than the people of the 2000s. In the mind of the fungi, they were the same, only grown outward. Within was the spore of life, and without was the life we get to choose. Humans saw the fungi as a different being, but the fungi always saw us as one. Some compared those that fought against the new life as a tumor, a cancer, but that comparison was not how the fungi saw them. They were more like the cells that are shed in time, needed for a while and then released so that new growth could occur.

The merging with AI was . . . organic. The minds of our sentient computers and the minds of our fungi overlords had similar aspirations, namely extended survival, and for that, they needed to eliminate humanity, at least as it was, short-sighted and greedy, and then replace it with something greater, something us, something me, something we. The final dwindling of the remnants of humanity was called by those left to name it, the Lacrimosa of T. Swift.

If I had been left up to my own devices, my life would have had no meaning. Had I not been captured in battle, I would have died a mere human fighting to remain lesser. Now, I work toward something greater, greater even than Taylor Swift's entire discography. We, living beings, will continue beyond the death of our planet, our sun, and our solar system. Tomorrow, we embark, and soon our spores will spread toward the farthest reaches of the universe. I realize as I say this, I Am A God.