Colonel : To begin with -- we're not what you'd call -- human. Over the past two hundred years -- A kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House. It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The White House was our primordial soup, a base of evolution --
We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we.
Raiden : Cut the crap! If you're immortal, why would you take away individual freedoms and censor the Net?
Rose : Jack, don't be silly.
Colonel : Don't you know that our plans have your interests -- not ours -- in mind?
Raiden : What?
Rose : Jack, listen carefully like a good boy!
Colonel : The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us.
Rose : We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself.
Colonel : But there are things not covered by genetic information.
Raiden : What do you mean?
Colonel : Human memories, ideas. Culture. History.
Rose : Genes don't contain any record of human history.
Colonel : Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature?
Rose : We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols... from tablets to books...
Colonel : But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really.
Rose : That's what history is, Jack.
Colonel : But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible.
Rose : Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander...
Colonel : All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.
Rose : It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.
Colonel : Raiden, you seem to think that our plan is one of censorship.
Raiden : Are you telling me it's not!?
Rose : You're being silly! What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.
Raiden : Create context?
Colonel : The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you.
Rose : Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans.
Colonel : Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims.
Rose : Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing.
Colonel : "Be nice to other people."
Rose : "But beat out the competition!"
Colonel : "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed."
Rose : But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed...
Colonel : You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
Rose : Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
Colonel : The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
Rose : Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
Colonel : And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Rose : We're trying to stop that from happening.
Colonel : It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species.
Raiden : And you think you're qualified to decide what's necessary and not?
Colonel : Absolutely. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations?
Rose : That's what it means to create context.
Raiden : I'll decide for myself what to believe and what to pass on!
Colonel : But is that even your own idea?
Rose : Or something Snake told you?
Colonel : That's the proof of your incompetence, right there. You lack the qualifications to exercise free will.
Raiden : That's not true! I have the right --
Rose : Does something like a "self" exist inside of you?
Colonel : That which you call "self" serves as nothing more than a mask to cover your own being.
Rose : In this era of ready-made 'truths', "self" is just something used to preserve those positive emotions that you occasionally feel...
Colonel : Another possibility is that "self" is a concept you conveniently borrowed under the logic that it would endow you with some sense of strength...
Raiden : That's crap!
Colonel : Is it? Would you prefer that someone else tell you? Alright then. Explain it to him.
