CHAPTERS 1-4! Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
After Jane’s death, I found a job as a trainee auditor. I was always fascinated by the idea of auditing. Auditing was to hear or to listen, originally. Today, it was more likely that auditors needed to find ways to hear what they wanted to hear, as well as checking out the relevant documents. Auditing to me was a social science, which meant that it was a social process to get a scientific finding. Science here meant reaching for logical conclusions based on a collection of statements or evidence in layman’s words, collected from all available sources. The point about social science was that one should never ignore the human factor in this process. Social science was perhaps the best compromise between human beings and science.
Training on the job was always an ideal thing, since you got paid while learning something useful to improve your work in the future. This gave you extra incentive to learn fast and accurately so that it improved your performance accordingly. At the end of the day, one needed to pass the prescribed exams to become a professional auditor.
Jane’s property was quickly sold and a young couple with three kids moved in. Sometimes, I would drive there to indulge in my memories of Jane. Omnipotence was very much alive on its own. Without the human element in its ‘brain’, it served merely as an infrastructure for the service of individual users, like a road or a river. I thought that was what Jane would have wanted for Omnipotence, as that way more people would benefit from its power rather than one or a few people tried to abuse it.
Democracy was about laiser-faire, or let people be. A democratic society was one in which various channels of infrastructure were built for the benefit of individuals. It was key to the success of such societies that individuals should maintain as much freedom as possible to make their own choices and hence choose their own destinies. Thus, history and man became intertwined together, so we no longer begged the answer for whether it was man who made history or vice versa. Everybody had a choice, and each choice had its consequence, for better or for worse.
One had to remember that with each infrastructure, there came the power of constraints as well as empowerment. For example, if one learnt to swim, one could make good use of a river, for sports, relaxation and so on. When one travelled on a boat on a river, the boat had to stay away from the banks, rocks and so on. For each infrastructure, one needed to learn to take advantage of it. And learning was never free to start with.(to be continued)
Updates on 27 Feb. 02: The night Jane died was going to be with me for a long time, just like the morning when I looked at my deceased grandma’s face. Death was the ultimate price we paid to live a short existence on the earth. Sometimes, people wondered why we never had the right to choose weather we wanted this existence or not. There seemed to be every reason that we should live our live to the full, e.g., trying to work hard towards some meaningful goals or achieving one ambition after another. It was not everybody’s cup of tea to live with such consciousness of our mortal or humanly being. Sometimes, it seemed that most of us just learned or succumbed to survive, i.e., living just like an animal or a live being. The fundamental difference between a human existence and that of an animal seems to be that of transcendence. For animals, surviving the hardship thrown at them by mother nature would be the ultimate challenge. Surviving was to be every sense of living for animals. For the human, there were always those few whose work or efforts would transcend their mere humanly nature, by that being unselfish sacrifice to the largest degree or achieving beyond all manly imagination of his or her time and generation.
Jane made every effort to make a living out of her existence, despite her broken heart and genetic disability. She successfully created and maintained Omnipotence, the most powerful global communications software of its time. She told me in her last moments that it would be my choice whether to claim ownership of Omnipotence and thus make use of it my way. I knew the ownership of Omnipotence would make a huge difference to my life. Perhaps it would mean as much as that I would belong to those few who had lived rather than survived. When times were harder to take in my daily life, I sometimes wandered away in what it would be if I had Omnipotence under my control. To be or not to be…
