The Ghost Profiler

by George S. Karagiannis

conclusion

Now that the toxolite nanorobots have fully transformed me into an Oracle and I dwell in full cognition and Oracle reasoning, I can allege with certainty I hold valuable knowledge about this world.

We Oracles visited Earth in A.D. 2560, approximately 200 years after the extinction of the human race. The purpose of our trip to Earth was to elucidate the reason behind this holocaust.

After some extensive investigation, we came to a concrete conclusion, verifying the pessimistic hypothesis we initially feared: the human race was unfortunately led to its self-extinction by the depletion of energy deposits and the parallel emergence of sociopathic leaderships that passionately pursued vanity and pushed the strings of war by arming hazardous biological weapons.

Flesh-eating bacteria had been released into the atmosphere. The pathogens had a remarkable ability to spread, and as a matter of fact, it took less than twenty days to infect all human beings and eventually kill them.

As we Oracles had to take a proper initiative to ensure that our effort would have prosperous results. We decided to extract genetic material from long-deceased human carcasses. We were also able to retrieve genetic material from livestock animal fossils, such as goats. We subsequently initiated a “reconstruction project” to recreate human offspring like those that lived pre-apocalyptically.

The newborn human clones were engineered to be deficient in pre-apocalyptic memories. To this end, we reconstituted an open frame in their “memory slots” and eventually attached a predesigned set of memories to affix an alternative history in their “veins.” After we injected these false memories into the reconstituted human subjects, they were very familiar with fictional historical events.

According to the false memories, the human race had been supposedly captured by an alien species of unknown origin, which in an effort to spray its domination and control over Earth, it suppressed vital necessities such as food, water and speech. We Oracles honestly never wished to treat any life form in the universe in such a terrible way. We have respected life-related ethics.

However these “humans” ended up treating life so badly even for them, that we could not risk leaving them unattended. They could bring about a disastrous domino effect in their evolution for a second time. We decided to make them believe they were enslaved to us Oracles; this would allow us to monitor their behavior tidily for a long period of time just to make sure the same mistake would not be repeated.

Hence, we designed a plasmatic virtual-reality world, called Emerald Fields, where we forced humans to consume specific food only: turpin flowers and makazaya fruits. These two plant hybrids, according to our molecular analyses, retained all essential nutrients for proper human development.

We additionally engineered them to retain antimicrobials and protective films against the remaining flesh-eating bacteria that still swelled on Earth. That was why I became so sick back in my childhood, when father stopped feeding me violet soup.

Unfortunately, we had to restrain the freedom of speech by declaring any form of communication illegal. We wanted to prevent a sociopathic leadership from growing again in their primitive societies. Unfortunately we had to adopt a totalitarian means of prohibiting group meetings for exchange of philosophical, political, economical or sociological ideas, and at the same time forbid books.

Of course, in case we tracked down any rebels we had to take proper actions by radically erasing them, no matter the cost. The Dead Poets Society turned out to be one of the most organized and prominent malicious activities developed by humans.

We even systematically deployed a childhood fear scheme, based on pre-apocalyptical research on child psychology, by introducing a whole folklore of mythical creatures and monsters in the human community. This helped us control, in part, the broadening of the child intellectually and achieve the incorporation of conservative beliefs in the inbred, socialized humans. In other words, children would always stay children in heart, unless they overcame their childhood fears.

After we carefully watched samples from the pre-apocalyptic film industry the humans had, we realized that a typical fearsome concept was that of gigantic monsters eating people. For this reason, the wormolyte legend was our best childhood fear scheme, adapted in the Emerald Fields.

For years, we have been formulating this setting of playing master and servant, and we have unhurriedly performed all our observations on the developing dynamics in human societies.

As far as my brother Manny is concerned, he was never actually brought to a Mother Instititute, for such a thing never existed. Currently, there are no fertile mothers in the human society. We have not yet been able to reconstruct a functional reproductive system for the human species, but our scientists are exerting all their efforts in this direction.

Manny was actually selected through a deterministic process of genetic phylogeny: this was determined by the DNA test done on us that unforgettable day at our place, for his remarkable ability to capture and distinguish details and facial expressions and characteristics.

As a next step, Manny was brainwashed and became an excellent agent for us Oracles. I was informed that the Oracles suspected father was a rebel and eventually used Manny to locate the members of the Dead Poets Society and shut down their futile private war.

Now that I saw how proficient in profiling human faces Manny is, I realize why he kept telling me, as a child, he couldn’t sleep because the faces of the “dead poets” haunted him. Manny is now serving us Oracles at the bureau of censorship, a specialized center for detection and direct extermination of malicious rebel activities.

Father was the first to be arrested on the accusation of treason. More precisely he was accused of delivering ideas about the morals of human nature through scripting methods. Many times I have kindly asked Udloob to let me speak to father just once, before his eradication, but Udloob was negative. He tells me I should keep my distance from emotional interventions, since we Oracles should be flat and cold-blooded beings if we really want to assist humans in rebuilding their empire again from their own ashes.

As far as I am concerned, I now proudly dare to claim the position of the most legendary Oracle of all times! You see, initially, I had no idea why Udloob wished to transform me into an Oracle individual. However, I realized that no Earth child believes in the ridiculous threat behind the wormolytes. This concept has gradually worn out and people have begun to realize that gigantic worms burrowed in the soil and floating up during the night to seek out prey is nothing more than an idiotic cliché.

Nevertheless, children residing in the Emerald Fields now have a more serious threat to deal with. They have to get to sleep very early, unless they wish to experience a one-way, night visit by the ghost profiler; a spooky, putrid adult capable of bringing into existence the most horrific ghosts he can imagine.

The ghost profiler — along with his trusted army, the Plague Charon, the Axe Sisters, the Everwaiting Lady, the Holes Child, the Raped Nymph and so many others — comes and haunts every child who doesn’t get to sleep early. The bloodthirsty ghost profiler is eager to collect a protectorate of menacing ghosts, destined to hunt and tear down children’s sugary dream-castles by turning them into bloody nightmares.

Now that I have found my place in this world, all I wish for is a satisfying answer to the only question that resists resolution and yet refuses to go away. If I indeed am a reconstituted human clone, I wish I knew of the origin of these pre-apocalyptical memories of mine. How on earth did all these ghosts occur to me, anyway? I have been trying to find an answer to this for a long time.

My most logical assumption is that maybe part of my mind once belonged to a professional horror-fiction author who specialized in writing plots about murders, homicides, slaughters and other perverted fictional concepts. After his reconstitution in my clone body, the dead author’s thoughts were somehow awakened in my mind.

I really hope this is the case! Because if all these ugly things I learned from the ghost narrations actually happened in reality when humanity existed, then I think I am getting closer and closer to the ultimate understanding as to why humanity did go extinct. I mean, take a look at all this perversion; humanity didn’t stand a chance in the first place...

Is that right?