A Novel –
One Chapter Per Week
Week 03,
2019
Jim finished his coffee, gathered himself and hurried
from the café.
He had a plane to catch, a funeral to prepare for and he was afraid he would miss his flight
if he lingered any longer. The timing of his departure, and precisely where he
was in flight when he set the final stages of his plan in motion, those things
were crucial.
He had to keep his activities hidden from the prying
eyes of his enemies.
He returned to his apartment to gather some things, to
set the artifacts in his apartment in just the right place for Kathy to find in
the days to come.
She must be able to track his thoughts and follow his plans
when the time came.
He did not need much of anything to take with him; his
black suit, his watch, his tie.
“I’m dead;” he mused, and then “I am death itself, the
harbinger of doom.”
He knew that he would never return to his beloved Earth,
and that even if he did, nothing would be the same. The cultures that had
evolved over the past seventy thousand years would be wiped out, with no
guarantees that what would emerge in its place would have any of those
qualities that he loved and found so fascinating.
The humans of Earth had nourished his spirit for millennia, he had found his rest in them, and they had helped him
define his purpose.
He allowed himself some time to remember all that he had
accomplished since he found this world. Then his telephone rang to inform him
that his taxi had arrived.
With a final check of his preparations Jim exited his
apartment. He walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Taking in
the view of the lakes from the mezzanine of his apartment before he got in the
car.
Jim was struck as he had been many times before by his
feelings of ambivalence, knowing what was going to happen to this planet in a
few short days, while the entire population of the Earth was completely
unsuspecting.
It was a strange burden.
Jim contemplated it while he made small talk with the
cabby, before he fell into a state of reflection.
“I never should have seen her.”
Jim thought, doubting himself.
He felt himself filling-up with regret.
It was an emotion he was not inclined to do, but at this
moment he could not help it.
He reviewed each step of his plan, reviewing it for
every possible detail, believing, and yet uncertain that he had laid the path
for Kathy to follow it perfectly.
He visualized each step, telling himself that his indulgence
today was a necessary one, he had to see Kathy in order to reinforce, in
non-verbal ways, his absolute need for her to follow the plan that he had laid
out.
Another wave of doubt washed over him.
Was he being foolish when he asked her to see him?
His emotions were running high, too high. They might
alert her to his design.
Whenever he was with her, through all of the years that
he had known her, he had to maintain a strict discipline in order to shield his
mind from hers. It was the most difficult thing he had ever done, but he was
able to do it nonetheless.
He could feel her consciousness probing his, like
psychic tentacles pulling at his mind. Never once had she penetrated him, and
that was only because she was not trying.
As forceful as her psychic powers were, they functioned
within her autonomically. She was not directing them, she was a passive user of
her powers.
For her safety,
she had spent most of her life learning the skills she needed to suppress her
powers, rather than push them to the limits.
Jim was always aware that if she had wanted to she could
break through his defenses with relative ease.
When the time came, it was paramount that she be taken
by surprise, his plan depended on shocking her at just the right moment.
The delicate path he was walking filled him with dread,
and sorrow, and guilt.
Jim couldn’t help himself. It was all over; it was over
for everyone, and nothing could be done.
It was doom’s day.
What was about to occur would be a global catastrophe.
It would affect everything on earth, changing humanity irrevocably, killing
hundreds of thousands in minutes, millions in days, and most of the rest in the
few short years to come.
Very
few human beings were even aware of the danger. Human scientists had only
discovered the existence of the volcano that was the agent of their
destruction,a few decades past. It took years for them to measure and quantify
their data, even now they were in a place of uncertainty.
The geological system was too complex, they did not know
how much they did not know.
There was no way to reasonably predict an event they had
never experienced before, the certainty of which was absolute, but the
frequency of its repetition occurred on a scale of time so great that the
leading geologists had to admit that they could not pin point the eventuality
within years, or decades, or centuries.
For all they knew it could be millennia before it
erupted again.
No one disputed the fact that the event was overdue; it
was overdue by several thousand years. But then again what is a thousand years,
or even ten thousand years when the periodicity approached a million.
It was impossible to tell.
They watched over the sight as carefully as they could.
They measured every possible feature of the hazard zone.
They released reports.
Some reports were so alarming that the Federal
Government decided to restrict the way that information was disseminated.
They adopted the view that it would be better, if when
the event occurred it took everyone by surprise, because there was nothing they
could do about it anyway.
Even
with their careful observations and their watchful analysis, no one expected it
to come now.
The data, which every geologist believed indicated an
immanent eruption, had led to numerous false conclusions in the past.
At the present moment, there was nothing happening, to
tell them of the mounting threat.
Like every planet, Earth endured episodic calamities; cycles of massive storms, great floods,
powerful hurricanes and tremendous earthquakes. These were minor events
compared to the power of the caldera volcano.
There were catastrophes that came from beyond the
planet, such as; collisions with comets and asteroids. They had happened many
times and Earth would experience those events again, or come close to it.
Given time, the advancement of technology and proper
planning, any of those events could be avoided.
A civilization could gain complete control of its
weather, could identify every fault zone and only build structures that were
capable of allowing the force of an earthquake to pass through it. They could
set satellites in orbit around their planets, string them together throughout
the solar system, so that no object passing near to it would not be seen,
enabling them to be diverted or destroyed.
Technology could accomplish all of those things, but
nothing could stop the power growing within the Earth.
The heat of Earth’s molten core powered the entire
planet.
It was the engine of life, and evolution.
Nothing could stop it, but given time its heat could be
harnessed and used for the benefit of the world.
It was time that human civilization did not have.
The monster beneath the surface was stirring and would
rise.
They were approaching the end of days, it would be the
beginning of the long night.
Human beings would survive, they would survive better
than they did when the last caldera blew, seventy-two thousand years ago, but
the new civilization that emerged on the other side would be radically
different.
They would not be starting over, that much was true.
Their technology had advanced far enough to guarantee a
relatively rapid recovery.
In the last event only a couple of thousand human beings
survived, that number would be hundreds of times greater.
Billions would be wiped from the face of the earth, and
those surviving would emerge with a unified human culture.
In his heart Jim desired nothing more than to belong to that new human culture, but
he would not be returning.
When the last caldera blew in the South Pacific, in
Indonesia. Only a few human beings survived, a couple of thousand people in a
few hundred tribes scattered across Eurasia and Africa.
It had been six-hundred and forty thousand years since
the Yellowstone caldera last erupted in North America, in Wyoming, nearly
wiping out all life on Earth.
The coming cycle
of destruction would be greater still.
The human race would survive, even without the kind of
intervention that Jim could have given them, if the Continuum had allowed it,
but civilization would collapse.
The species would pass through a genetic bottle neck,
and what would emerge on the other side would be different.
The psychic trauma would be extreme, it would wound the
survivors in ways that no person could predict. The narratives that they would
develop in order to contextualize all of their pain could potentially derail
Jim’s work.
Earth’s magnetic field which enveloped the entire
species in a cynergenic web, making the humans of Earth unique in all the
galaxy, was itself under threat.
Jim was virtually certain that he had succeeded in
developing the vessel that was key to his larger machinations, he had accomplished his work, he had brought
it all to fruition in the final generation.
He only needed to deploy her.
Everything depended on Kathy, on the strength and range
of psychic abilities, yes, but even more importantly, on her fortitude. She had
to possess the stamina to stand in the space between worlds and pass the
collective trauma of earth on to the Central Planet.
This was not something he had been given the time to
test.
He desired nothing more than a resolution to the
ambitions that had been driving him, or so he told himself, even if it meant
failure. Even failure would resolve him, by prompting the Collective to abandon
him and allowing the Continuum to finally terminate him.
In one form or another death awaited him.
What he desired more than anything was success, and then
at long last to die in an organic body a natural death, un-enmeshed from the
constraints that the Continuum had tethered to every member of the Collective,
even to those Observers serving in the far reaches of the galaxy.
Jim reflected.
If civilization on Earth had been given a little more
time to develop, Earth’s technology a little more time to actualize, human beings would have been able to harness the
geological power of the caldera.
The power they could have captured would have changed
everything for them, resolving issues of energy scarcity that had been elusive,
or socially impossible for them to tackle.
In another century, or possibly sooner they would have
had it, he lamented.
These
children of the ancients, who had devolved like no other group. This far flung
colony in the most remote reaches of the galaxy, possessing no memory of who
they were or how they arrived here, they would have been able to re-establish
themselves as a spacefaring people in earnest.
The Continuum would not allow for an intervention, even
though it seemed that the will of the Collective was for it.
A majority of those who followed the drama unfolding on
Earth were in love with its art, and music, its joy and trauma, a majority of
them wanted to see Earth’s narrative continue.
Even though Jim was certain that the Continuum had no
idea about his plans, he sensed that it perceived Earth and human civilization
as a threat to it.
Of course he knew that the Continuum perceived him as a
threat to it.
He believed that this was the reason for blocking him,
not a dogmatic adherence to a policy of non-intervention, which was the reason the
Continuum issued for why it would not allow resources to be mustered to save
the planet,
It would not allow Imperial communications to be
established with Earth in such a way that it could help them.
Jim might have helped Earth by strategically distributing
knowledge in such a way that it would have advanced Earth technology, but he
refrained for fear that it would draw further scrutiny to him, risking the
exposure of his plan
Jim worked covertly against the restraints, appearing to
comply, because he did not wish to jeopardize his long term ambitions.
It would be difficult, if not impossible to conceal a
new mode of treason from the watchful, and penetrating gaze of the all
encompassing consciousness of the HomeWorld.
He could do nothing else but fulfill the directives he
had been given.
Jim had to say goodbye.
There was a cloaked satellite orbiting far above the
earth, one of many.
This one was the actual house of Jim’s consciousness. It
was the principle platform for Jim’s mission on Earth, one of thousands of
satellites, and drones, hidden from the eyes of human beings, and from the
Continuum.
Some were fixed in stationary orbits, other moved about,
semi-autonomously, all of the watch the planet and intercepted its
communications with inexhaustible capacities.
In that place, Jim the Observer # 92835670100561474 activated
a switch, sending a signal to his host body, and with that, an embolism in his
doppelganger burst inside its brain, ending its life in a massive stroke.
Jim’s doppelganger had been flying on a plane from his
Midwestern home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to New York city.
The destination was only important for the route and the
timing Jim had planned for his death, to covertly transfer his consciousness
from his organic vessel to the orbiting platform.
Those sitting next to him did not notice the moment of
his demise. It was only as the plane made ready for its descent that the
airline attendants found something wrong with him, saw the thin line of blood
dripping from his nostril, and that he was not breathing.
They did what they could for him, but they quickly
realized that there was nothing to be done.
They called ahead for a doctor, indicating that they
were dealing with a medical emergency, but in reality, they knew that they were
dealing with a corpse.
Jim observed those final moments, the last seconds of
the body that housed him during his most significant incarnation, the life that
would define his entire existence, expose his greatest secrets, give him the
victory he had long sought over the Collective and its Continuum.
When he was satisfied that he was mentally prepared for
the challenges that awaited him. He toggled another device, opening a channel
through space and time.
He paused for a moment to consider the steps he would
take on the other side. He did something that was forbidden, something he had
not planned on doing, had told himself he would not do, he left a copy of
himself in the quantum memory of his base, and then he let his consciousness
go, slipping into the stream of the infinite.
He passed through the wormhole.
He was home.
Emergence 4.0
Part One, Jim and Kathy
Chapter Two, Departure
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence
#ShortFiction #OneChapterPerWeek
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