Emergence 4.0 - Part Three, Earth; Chapter Fifteen, Observation

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

Like it, Follow it, Share it!