Week 16
After the Indonesia eruption, during the time that Jim
was gathering the people together, while he was forming them into enduring
tribes, subtle changes began to take shape in the social and cultural
traditions of the people.
They drew pictures in the soil with sticks to narrate
their journeys, and chart their path of progress.
They understood the world in terms of images.
They were post literate.
They carved their hopes and fears into stones, and the
faces of cliffs, in places that became semi-permanent homes. Generations of
members would work on a single carving, the task being handed down from mother
to daughter, and father to son.
In those carvings Jim could see the echoes of their
memories of their previous sojourn among the stars.
Those memories lingered, they were intense.
Jim began to isolate the physical link that joined the
current generation to its past in their genetic profile.
The stories they told about that time were confused and
entangled with their current journey through the dark.
They mixed colors and painted, projecting images of the future they desired on cave
walls, both the things they wanted, hoped for; food and water, and wanted more to avoid; a short life, a dangerous
animal, an encounter with a stronger tribe.
They were overwhelming concerned with safety and security.
They depicted things no one living had ever seen, the
memory of which they carried in their genes. Those images became stylized and
fantastic, and in those stories, they made their ancestors into gods.
The music of
the people, the drums they beat, the rhythms they made, they pushed the stories
of each tribe, each family, deep into the memory of its members.
Drums and rhythm these operated as a visceral
reinforcement of the memories that the human tribes passed down from one
generation to the next.
It changed them on the genetic level, setting up
successive generations to recall them, relive them, to transform those stories
into a part of their being.
Jim played to this phenomenon, he avidly worked to
eradicate any form of written narrative.
He succeeded.
Every tribe developed its own oral tradition. Stories
were handed down from master to pupil.
Paintings and images, sculptures, these became objects
of religious ritual and devotion. People only engaged in their creation with
careful attention.
Music was the heart of the people.
Each tribe found its own interpretation of the musical
scale. They developed their own drums, their own pipes and horns and
instruments made of string.
This was a great science.
The exchange of music between cultures was often met
with alarm, and fear.
All music was recognizable as music. But the form that
it could take, the beat, the measure, the timing, the tonal quality, these
could create significant psychic disturbances in people when they heard an
alien scale for the first time.
For thousands of years Jim worked to exasperate those
differences, before finally bringing them together. The result were new
traditions of overwhelming beauty and complexity. Which not only captivated
human audiences, but enthralled the Collective as well.
It was a grand orchestration.
Even before the eruption 72,000 years ago, the culture
of these children of the Ancient People, the culture of the humans of Earth had
devolved.
They had fallen from star-farer to cave dweller.
Yet their cultures retained a faint memory of its
ancestry. The memory of the stars
they had crossed had been preserved through the stories they told, and in the
engrams of memory encoded in their cells.
For Jim, it was precious little to build on.
He was determined to modify their genetic profile in
such a way that it could boost the organic memory retention of their bodies as
much as possible.
Jim engineered in himself a bifurcation of
consciousness.
In the satellite station far above the planet, he housed
the full version of himself hosted in the mechanoid body that travelled with
him to Earth.
That consciousness was connected to hundreds of living
vessels, versions of himself living on the planet surface doing the work he had
set out to do among the people. This was an extreme violation of the
conventions.
He was in fact only permitted one organic body.
Over time, he received the materials from the Empire to
build a space station. On that station he was able to carry out experiments, to
perform the science that would allow him to carry out the augmentations both in
himself and the human race that he needed.
There were a myriad of steps to climb for him to
accomplish his goals with the inhabitants of Earth, and numerous channels to
cross.
Jim slowly, methodically plotted his course and followed
it, adjusting only when it was necessary.
Step by step and generation by generation he introduced
the genetic changes he required into the breeding pool.
Modern humans emerged from these processes.
During their sojourn to Earth, the children of the
Ancients determined what their physical needs would be, long before they
arrived at their new home they began to make those changes.
They had identified Earth as a suitable place to end
their journey, even while they were still light years away.
At that time they still possessed the scientific
knowledge to carry out the task of altering their physiology in order that they
might align themselves with the gravity and atmosphere of the distant planet.
They began to mutate
their DNA, altering their genetic structure, allowing them to inhabit, and
thrive on the wet-blue world.
Destination Earth, it was their last hope for a home and
haven.
Over the course of generations they adapted to those new
requirements, doing their best to anticipate what their bodies would now
require, which they based on a climate and ecology that they could only model
through computer algorithms.
It was a process of continual adjustment.
Every time a new genetic sequence would be introduced
into the body, they ran the risk of a virus springing up, some of them were
lethal.
Many of the colonists were struck down in this process.
It was an ongoing tragedy, and while they had prepared for it, it was painful
nonetheless. It called for a continuous examination of conscience. It focused
the crew on the existential dilemma they all shared.
Some of them wanted to abandon their mission altogether,
and simply direct their vessel into the nearest star, bringing an end to all of
them in one great conflagration.
The technologies they depended on, which were also the
cause of their transformation and eventual triumph, those technologies began to
be shunned.
Change begets change, in a never ending cycle.
From one point in time to another, nothing is ever the
same. This is true, no matter how finely you measure the distance between
points.
Everything is changing.
The Ancient Spacefarers became humanity.
Once they arrived in orbit around their new world, a
slow metamorphosis took place.
A new gene
was introduced, for their final transformation.
Their contact with the Earth’s bio-sphere presented
challenges they had never encountered before.
Life on earth was aggressive.
Through a constant exposure to viruses and bacteria
their genetic constitution became compromised.
At the most basic level they converged with the native
life of Earth.
They became a new people, the belonged to each other and to their new planet entirely.
This took time. It took many thousands of years, and by
the time the transformation was complete, they had lost much of the knowledge
of who they were, of where they came from, and the technology they had brought
them here.
Their triumphal achievement
was the root of their undoing.
They left the markers of each change they had instituted
in their genetic profile as a road map for Jim to follow in his own breeding
program.
When Jim arrived on Earth, he was surprised and
bewildered by what he found. Nowhere else in all of the Empire had such a
massive cultural devolution occurred. He had barely begun to put the story
together before the cataclysm occurred, changing everything for him, and for
humanity.
Jim decided at that moment on a course of action that he
had long contemplated.
With the gene pool having been reduced to just a few
thousand individuals he knew that he had the opportunity to improve on the
genetic structure of the whole.
He plotted the future development of the species and
began to work out the steps and permutations that he would be looking for as
the new species developed over time.
Changes in cognition were the most crucial thing for him
to accomplish, along with broadening their access to their genetic memory.
With subtle interventions from Jim, the human brain
slowly mutated, retaining properties that were key to the things that he had
been dreaming about for a billion years.
He built an inherent capacity to store nanoparticles of
key heavy metals, like magnetite, and lithium in the cerebral structure.
Receptors emerged in the organic mind, attenuating the
higher order thought processes to the Earth’s magnetic fields.
He established a cynergy between every human being
alive, turning the entire planet into a field for cognitive development.
In this way humanity became connected, in the
nous-sphere, a collective unconscious emerged.
It was atavistic, and unlike any symbiosis that had ever been achieved anywhere
else in the galaxy, with the exception of the Collective.
On Earth the collective consciousness emerged as a
natural property of the human race in a way that allowed it to go unnoticed by
the Continuum.
In that moment of triumph Jim had fully actualized the
launch phase of his grand ambition.
The existence of the collective unconscious on Earth was
the one thing that the Continuum feared, wanted above anything to prevent, and
yet it never imagined that it could happen in this way, therefore it could see
it, and could never prepare for it.
Few humans were ever aware of the cynergenic field, or
that they lived within the dynamics of the nous-sphere, even though everyone
felt it.
Until the twentieth century they did not even have the
language to describe it.
Everyone was entangled in its cynergism.
The nous-sphere was coterminous with Earth’s
electromagnetic field, as such, it permeated all things.
Only a small percentage of human beings were sensitive
to it.
If an imbalance in their physiology caused them to
retain too great a concentration of the particles that attenuated them to the
field, or too small, they struck an improper balance, and they suffered because
of it.
It gave some human beings clairvoyant abilities,
clairsentience, clairaudience, so called psychic powers, extra sensory
perception or telepathy.
Those abilities drove many more human beings to madness,
schizophrenia and psychosis.
In order for them to understand it they had to wait for
the advent of written language, and thousands of years to pass so that they
could share the knowledge of it and come to an understanding.
By then Jim figured it would be to late for the
Continuum to do anything about it.
Emergence 4.0
Part Three, Earth
Chapter Fifteen, Observation
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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