Jason Marc Harris | 47
Handle to our cerebral lobes, they have become us.
And we have become them, harbingers of edifying change.
We submitted willingly to the mantle of duty that came with this gnosis.
We were too educated to refuse, nor could we stop what was already set in motion.
What is planted must grow. What grows will be harvested. These cycles are eternal.
Previously, perhaps we had been insular, parochial, short-sighted—whatever adjective the elite had deemed fit to disparage our semi-rural perspective with which we measured our own lives and puzzled out the rest of the world. Certainly, we did not at first anticipate that the Handle had major implications for the entire globe. In our moments of considering whether the Handle were truly alien contact, it had seemed to be a close encounter of the paltry kind. But we were wrong.
The Handle had truly been a seedling. Glimmering filaments that had bossed our brains and shone out our ears had drifted in the winds, shimmered through the water, and tangled synapses of minds both humbler and superior to our own.
The government agents who took the Handle helped to accelerate the progress of dissemination and holy assimilation as they studied what taught them beyond their initial capacities.
Signs were subtle at first: fewer bar fights and more books sold. News stations stopped doing the “sound bite.” People stopped buying Twinkies. Twitter and Facebook were disbanded due to enlightened minds preferring to read and converse about the meaning of life, the relative malleability of other worlds, the gravitational corridors of space-time that awaited our entry.
Larger patterns emerged: gambling, invasions of other countries, and sex without a condom dropped to record lows. Those of us most gifted with