Welcome to the human race, post-human
This is the part where I talk about my first mission. Like the Dog said, it's not like I was in the army or air force. I had just come of age as a post-larval spiritbeing. There were just things you had to do to make sure that a world full of intelligent pupaes didn't ruin the whole wombbomb factory. See, it's all so touch and go, this process of having 6 billion people in their various states of partial free will running the show with hardly any training at all. You get up half a notch out of the baby crib and you realize, "Holee Fucknose, these peeps are going to consume their whole future, all of time and space without realizing what they're trashing."
At first I was angry. Night and day. It's all the same to me, as I don't sleep. (There are other attitudes that take the place of that egoless state. We'll cover that later if we can.) It is true what they tell you about your sense of indignation. It seems like all you have left. And since, you've given up your little stake in the whole game, you become resentful of the ones that still play. And so it goes.
Don't you know what you could do if you only knew? If you only knew how powerful you were, would you change? Would you change if you found out that you won the game when you were born. You won the game to get on a planet like this. To get on a planet like this, you had to go through a few thousand iterations somewhere else. And after those iterations, you slipped through. You slipped through to paradise. To paradise, you went but somewhere along the way, a few dozen other larva like yourself tried to convince you that it wasn't free. You had to pay them with your own life in paradise for the privilege to share your pleasure and pain with them in paradise.
On my first few abortive missions, all I could do was beat on the controlboard of the mummyship. "Goddamn you all, fucking graveworms. You robbed me of my life, now you want my afterlife too!" I would stop at the door to the ship and turn around. Put one bandaged foot in and decide nothing could be done.
Many spirals are necessary to complete a vector. The soul is a rotating thing. Just ride the downstroke and act on the upstroke. The mummyship works by way of the same technology. It's no mystery. Finally I was able to get it up, this tumescence of spirit.
It gets better the higher you go. Crisis dissolves with altitude. Out in space, you can see it all come together. Out where it's less dense and the gravity low and the pace relenting, you can easily feel the love. It comes off the planet in waves. And the obvious keeps ringing your old sense dinger over and over. See, I'm hollow inside like a bell. And anyone that comes near can hear me ring. Space is a heavy place.
One thing has become certain. I'd never felt so human as when I stopped being one.
***
One of the pieces
***smummy joins #bandagelounge
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<smummy> how's it going in mummyland?
<isis6969> hiya, bandageman.
<smummy> feeling a little lonesome. i'm trying to come up with a decent mission for my first. something i can do before i get the ship together.
<isis6969> i'm sure you'll come up with something good.
<smummy> yea, like scaring a bunch of people or something.
<isis6969> i was thinking about you.
<smummy> really?
<isis6969> yea. well, i was just thinking about everything. i was in a slightly altered state of mind. i decided that, well, do you know the osiris myth?
<smummy> sure, basically. i mean, i was really into mythology when i was a human.
<isis6969> well, you know how he was cut into so many pieces, right?
<smummy> 14 it was. heh, i used to read mythology books when i was a kid. the egyptian myths were my favorite.
<isis6969> of course they were. see, my theory is that we are all missing pieces of osiris and we are trying to put ourselves back together.
<isis6969> and that's why we're here.
<smummy> wow. that's really cool. i think you're on to something. so what part am i?
<isis6969> lol. if you don't already know, how am i supposed to tell you?
<smummy> i think you're the one that puts everything together.
<isis6969> that makes sense.
<smummy> you're the glue, isis.
<amonRocker> gag. it gettin sticky here
<isis6969> get the fuck off, lurker.
*amonRocker gets off
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<isis6969> that's not one of the essential parts there
<smummy> heh. you crack me up, isis.
***
First Mission, or something finally happens! Nope, false alarm
For a first mission in the mummyship, I pulled myself together. Outrage could not be the sole working principle of my afterlife. If I just threw all caution to the wind, I could let some other force move me. Something absurd, occasionally sinister, but mostly hilarious. I could devote the rest of my afterlife to saving the world from its humorlessness.
I pieced together the accumulator last and I'm glad I did. If I had started with the orgone concentrating device, I think I wouldn't have got anything else done. See, I had pretty much written sex off altogether after the mummification ritual. It only follows that once you're dead, the libido goes too. And I tried not to mourn it too much. Still, I kept wondering why so much of SMIRC was devoted to sex and roleplaying through various fetishes.
With the orgone accumulator, the libido charged back like donkey with chipotle in his oats. I won't go into detail because you probably don't care about the big mess of frankincense all over my fresh bandages. And the stuff is so hard to get out of fibrous material. So I figured I'd smell like some bad christmas only I also exuded a strong musk like an Ox stuck in a wet field of hemp.