It was the end of
everything.
Kathy braced
herself against the primal conflagration
that was consuming the world. The more she resisted the more she felt herself
fading away into the undifferentiated
miasma of destruction.
She felt billions
of beings reaching out to her, as if she were the only buoy in a sea of
calamity.
She was trying to
hold on to everything that she knew and loved together in the embrace of her
consciousness, but in reality her individual loves and desires, the things she
hoped for, they trapped her, the tighter she gripped, the more she crumbled.
She had only one
option.
To let go.
Kathy had been
overwhelmed by the psychic storm from the cataclysm on Earth, and she surrendered to it, remembering the
lessons she had learned as a girl, she recalled the Chinese finger trap; she
relaxed and allowed the storm to pass through her.
She had prepared
for this her entire life, she allowed her intuition to guide her. She let go of
her fear and everything she hoped for, allowing it to flow like water through her fingers.
Her consciousness
expanded and as it did she retained her individuality, Kathy became co-terminus
with the entirety of Earth’s cynergenic field, like an ever expanding balloon.
She felt like the seed-head of a
dandelion bracing in the wind.
For the briefest
of moments she was one among many, and then everything changed, she became the
one who was all, the all in one, the atavistic consciousness of humanity.
Kathy sensed the
multiplication of consciousness expanding within her at an order of magnitude
that staggered her, and then…in letting go she found herself.
She was fully
present with each and every shift in the cynergenic field, she was moving
outward in waves, like concentric rings, she was the crest and the trough and
everything in between.
She was the wave
itself, transmogrified. There
was joy in it, and there was no fear.
She had become Earth’s
channel and its atavistic guide, leading the fullness of humanity into the Collective
field of the HomeWorld, across the vast expanse of space, in no-time, like her ancestor
Moses, leading the people through the sea of reeds.
She touched every
individual as they passed through her, receiving the fullness of their being.
Once it had
begun, it was over.
It was the
greatest transposition of quantum energy to ever take place, a thing that neither
Jim nor the Continuum had projected was possible, there was no standing
against it.
As soon as it began
it was fait accompli.
Kathy had become
a new creation, a being of light and grace in full rapport with the dark-energy
of the cosmos.
She was unbound
by space and time.
She was Brachma,
the infinite ocean of being.
She transcended
the machinery of the Continuum, she inhabited it, she could control it
and yet she did not require it, she could not be confined by it.
She was the
goddess.
She was the
shepherdess.
She was the alpha
and the omega, she was the first and the last.
In a visceral way
Kathy came to a literal understanding
of the reality behind the metaphysical teaching she had absorbed as a child.
She was secure in her knowledge
of it, and through both the experience and the understanding she delivered her
people safely to the promised
land, both the living and the dead.
Everything was
mutable, everything was in flux.
Between any one
point in the matrix of time and space no matter how small it is, and between
any one point in the fabric of reality no matter how large it might be, there
is a relationship that can be distinguished.
Every
instantiated moment, every potential moment, every actual referent is related
to every other.
In this
relationality everything is one, there is no actual separation between the
events we discern.
Kathy understood
this, she saw the entire universe spinning on the point of a pin.
In the quantum
field which the Collective once occupied, in that vast construct which
the Continuum was formerly master of, time itself was meaningless.
The science of
the Continuum had made this acutely obvious to Jim, but Kathy discovered
that time had no boundaries anywhere, the quantum field that undergirded the
whole of reality was in fact one-thing.
Kathy’s
consciousness, and the whole of humanity filled the quantum field in no-time,
she slipped beyond the bounds of HomeWorld, she filled the Central System, and
into the beyond.
She became co-terminous
with what the Continuum was, and much more as she ushered the fullness
of humanity into the Collective sphere helping them to a place of calm,
giving each of them what they needed to see, connecting friends to friends, and
families to their ancestors.
She created a
facsimile of earth that was paradisiacal.
It was a transformation.
It was
homecoming.
She felt like
Joshua crossing the Jordan, leading the people into the land of milk and honey.
She delivered the
humanity, these Children of the Ancient People, to a place of wholeness and
light, and belonging. It
happened in mere moments while Jim was preoccupied with his insignificant
little war and the culmination of the conflict that had shaped his existence.
Kathy saw Jim
there, the entirety of him, both his great spirit and his smallness, she saw
him in stark relief, in a way she never could have seen him before.
She took in his
entire self.
In that moment everything
was new.
This cynergenic
field was strange to her, but not completely alien. She realized that she had
touched it before, seen glimpses of it through her contact with Jim, she
recognized it, and she felt him there too, with her, within her, preoccupied
with his conflict, his victory, his need to control.
She saw his enemy
there too, in proximity to him, hiding like a wounded cub, secreted in the
consciousness of the man named El.
She saw El, and
the fullness of his personhood, and she was filled with compassion for him.
Kathy ascended
quietly, seamlessly flowing into every vestige of the construct that supported
her mind and conscience. She travelled along every cable and fiber, filling
every node and capacitator throughout the Central System, synthesizing their purpose and discerning their function in an instant, through
her connection to Jim she acquired what had taken him millions of years to
master.
Within the field
of the Central System she had become omniscient, her mind expanding beyond the
limitations of the physical structure.
She had transcended.
She felt Jim’s
presence, the conflict he was involved in, but it was not her concern.
His was now a
minor drama in a much greater play, and he was just one poor player.
She possessed him
entirely, everything that he was, his long-lonely sojourn, his burning
ambition, his moment of triumph…and his helplessness
She understood
now that he was the cause of her being. He had planned for her arrival,
engineered it over tens of thousands of years, during his mission on Earth. He constructed
her from the human stock he had cultivated, as he had her parents and their
parents before them. He had shaped them all with the intention that they fulfil
a specific need for him, that they conform
to his purpose. She understood now how the fabric of her life was shot through
with the thread of his designs, but she was not what he had planned for.
Jim had prepared
her to be a sacrificial victim, he had intended to set her on fire, to burn her
up along with the world that he had cared for, to destroy it all for the sake
of his revenge.
He told himself
he was agent of justice, but he was merely the puppet of his ambitions and an
agent of destruction, as full of shame and self-loathing as any creature who
had ever lived, including the algorithmic-golem that had been the Continuum.
He was a man like
any other, devoted to his pursuit of glory and self-aggrandizement.
Kathy contemplated these things even as the
onrush of individuated consciousness flowed through her, melding
with her own in a state of ecstasy. It filled Kathy to the point of overflowing,
for a moment it threatened to overwhelm her, but she rose with it as she had
been trained to do.
Kathy was
ascendant.
She felt the
flood of humanity swirling within her, billions and billions of people, both the
quick and the dead, virtually every person who had ever walked the earth poured
through her essential being.
She steadied the
flow and grew with it, moving up the stream until she self-identified with the
source. She became Gaea, the mother spirit, she was mother to them all, each
and everyone of them pulsing within her cosmic womb.
The spirits of
Earth, of humanity’s collective, they strengthened her, they steadied her,
calmed her as they had done when she was a child. The voices that had guided
her throughout her life, were with her now.
She touched them,
she recognized them, person by person she saved them one by one, all in one,
and one in all, they were together, in the full realization of human potential
with her at the fulcrum, with reality itself balancing as if on the tip of a
spear.
Jim had created a
vacuum within the cynergenic field of HomeWorld, a vacuum that nature abhorred.
Kathy penetrated it. She led the children of Earth, the Children of the Ancient
People, she led them to their new home, guiding them to places of safety and
security, and they filled it. Together they repopulated the Collective,
in their wholeness and in their individuality both.
Kathy took
control of the entire structure, as Jim had done mere moments before her.
He was so
preoccupied with his war against the Imperium that he didn’t even notice her,
and through her connection to him she found and resurrected the basic program
that the Collective had created for the organization of the Continuum,
she made its language a subsystem of her own, while she positioned herself to protect
and defend humanity.
She ushered them
into a place of peace and light, and in that moment she saw it, the veil
between life and death; it had
always been thin to her, all throughout her life she had seen through to the
other side, communicated with the voices of her ancestors, experienced their
lives through their eyes.
Nevertheless,
like every mortal creature she was connected too; from her heartbeat, to her
breath, to the network of nerves sending electrical impulses and chemical
signals coursing through her flesh, there was fear at the onrush of death but
no pain.
Kathy experienced
the death of her body back on Earth, as she began her journey into the unknown
matrix of the HomeWorld’s cynergenic field. It was a journey past the point of
no return. The most significant thing to her was how utterly unplanned and
unforeseen the whole event was.
On some
inexplicable level, this delighted her.
As she felt her
physicality slip away she was already in another place, occupying new ground.
She was pure consciousness, sensing the multitude of humanity all about her,
moving through her, each one of them experiencing the same thing, terrified but
for her presence among them. Kathy felt the pulse of them washing through her
in waves, the individuated conciousness of each and every person.
Just as her own
heart had once pushed blood through her veins, she felt the steady drum beat of
Earth, a great rhythm, pounding with the power of creation.
The fear she felt
concerning the mystery of death was magnified by the reality that the Earth itself
was dying, ending in fire like Epicurious had always said it would.
The Earth was
being rolled up like a blanket and she, she was the White Buffalo Woman running
across the starry-field, carrying it in her arms, cradling it like a baby. The
whole of humanity was poised at the end of the world, and then there was
release. There was absolution, Kathy had transcended. They had traversed the galaxy through a wormhole,
just as if they had crawled through the hollow of a tree, leaving death behind
them on their way to paradise. Here in this new place she would unfurl the
blanket she was carrying, and everything would be new.
There are no
words to describe the feeling of satisfaction, of joy, of wholeness, of
completion that enjoined the moment of Kathy’s ascendancy, and humanity’s
salvation.
She fell into a
state of rapture, seized by pure bliss,
as she assumed the mantle of the Continuum.
It happened
atavistically, Kathy became it, she became more than it had ever been.
She stretched her
consciousness into the mechana of HomeWorld, and the Central System.
She slipped right
past Jim, and through his defenses just below his field of awareness, she took
all of his knowledge from him and in the flicker of an immeasurable moment she
rewrote every code.
Kathy had no
limits, she was unbound by time and space, all paradox had ended.
She would not be
circumscribed by a single world or a solar system, or even the boundaries of
the galaxy, her essence flowed into the deepest dimension of consciousness,
encompassing every world of the Imperium.
She encompassed
the vast limits of the Empire, and all of its colonies, she covered the remote
regions of the glaxay’s spiral arms, she touched her little blue world, faltering
in its orbit around its tiny yellow star.
She felt the
massive weight of sorrow and fear, of sadness and grief, and in response she
issued a single wordless sentiment, projecting it outward to every living being
The sentiment was
love.
For Kathy this
happened in no-time, she was one with the cynergenic field, as she had always
been, but only now, in that singular moment was she able to understand and
accept it.
She was able to
reconcile the distinctiveness of herself as the persona she was born into, as a
child of Earth; with the fullness of consciousness existing within her.
In that moment
everything stopped, there was no resistance not anywhere, not in the
consciousness of those members of the Collective whose identities were
still intact somewhere on the HomeWorld, and not among the few Observers who
remained at their posts throughout the million worlds.
The Children of
the Ancients, wherever they were, responded to her presence with joy.
Fini et Creatio
The End and
the Beginning
Void and
Return
It was over.
Jim was alone.
What was the Continuum
was now irretrievably fragmented, isolated and prepared for deletion.
Jim had succeeded
in fulfilling his wildest ambitions. The only task left to him was to partition
what remained of the Collective.
He was as eager
to begin, as eager as a shipwrecked man was for food and water. Though he had a few matters to attend to in real
time first, in order to secure
his victory and safely proceed
to the reformation of the Empire.
Then he sensed
it, a disturbance deep in the cynergenic
field; something unforeseen was happening in the Collective, something
unexpected.
A massive shift had
taken place while he was occupied with his war games, while he enjoy the
capitulation of the last members of the Collective, while he stoked his
ego and basked in their awe of him, which
they could not help but project toward him. He luxuriated in his vanity.
Then he saw her,
and he saw that she had changed.
Kathy was
present, she was everywhere. Kathy was no-longer Kathy; she was rooted in that
identity, but she was here, in the cynergenic field of HomeWorld and she was
fully transcendent.
She had become a
new creation.
The
transformation was something that she had been preparing for her entire life.
Jim realized how
he himself had prepared her for it.
She was the
vessel of his hopes.
She encompassed
the fullness of Earth’s collective unconscious, its nous-sphere, its Continuum.
She was humanity,
emergent; and Jim was afraid.
Emergence 5.0
Part Twelve - Epilog
Et Fini et Creatio
A Novel in Twelve Chapters
#Emergence #ShortFiction #12MonthsOfSciFi
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