A Novel – One Chapter Per Week
Week 13, 2019
This knowledge was lost.
Ages before the technological advent of collective
consciousness, before the invention of the Continuum, the Ancient People were
adventurers.
The Ancient Ones came to being in the oceans of a hot
planet, long forgotten.
Their planet of origin had orbited a massive red star,
near to the center of the galaxy, a star that was now just a dark-pulsing shard,
a tiny remnant of what it once was.
The Ancient People emerged from water, crawling from the
primordial ooze to stand on two feet and then they learned to fly.
They escaped the gravity of their birth world.
They explored their solar system, colonizing every
planet, exo-planet and satellite.
They sent their genetic material to every planet they
discovered in the habitable zones of every star they could see, seeding them
with the building blocks of life.
They set their sights on those faraway places,
determining to make homes of them, determining that there would be life on
those worlds, foodstuffs growing
when their children’s, children’s, children arrived.
They launched themselves into the galaxy on ships and
planetoids that crossed the dark and empty chasms between the stars, never to
return.
They were spacefarers.
They were adventurers without limits to their hope and
imagination.
They undertook journeys that would take generations to
complete.
Most of the missions failed, they understood the
likelihood that they were facing a virtually certain doom, even as they
launched into the void.
This prospect did not daunt them.
They did not fear for their safety, their security
lay in the unknown.
Millions upon tens of millions of years passed.
The Collective was founded, and the Continuum arose.
In time, a curiosity formed within the Collective, and that
curiosity became too much for the Continuum to ignore. The Continuum also
wanted to discover the end of every trail that had ever been cut by the Children
of the Ancients, though its own motives were different from those of the
Collective.
A search
began.
The Collective desired to discover what had happened to
those ancient explorers, the adventurers who gave everything of themselves to
the quest for knowledge, the colonists of asteroids and comets.
They were the children of their own ancestors, cousins,
with a common set of ancestors.
Space travel changed people. It altered their DNA. The
sojourneers mutated as a means of compensating for new environments. Colonizing
planets did the same thing. It was the nature of life to adapt to new
conditions; breathable gasses, heat, gravity, protein structures, conditions of
light, and many other extrinsic factors played their part in altering the life
form.
Many mutations occurred naturally, many others were
developed intentionally, as long as the explorers retained their scientific
skill, with the means and the ability to do so, they would use their science
and technology to augment the natural processes, allowing them to adapt that
much more quickly to the exigencies of their new environment.
Physical mutations had a great deal of effect on cognition,
and every other mental faculty. These things were of the utmost importance to
the Continuum.
The Continuum launched probes into space to follow their
trails, to discover the records of their passing.
The probes were sensitive enough that they could follow
a stream of particles in the void between stars that was millions of years old.
A trail that had gone cold could be reconstructed through the extrapolation of
data, and statistical analysis.
The search uncovered the living remnants of thousands of
colonies.
The Galactic Empire mobilized to bring them into the
fold.
Many thousands of more were found cold and dead.
They discovered colonies spawned by colonies. The
searches called for an in-person examination of the ruins of those
civilizations.
Jim positioned himself as the Observer assigned to those
missions.
After millennia upon thousands of millennia all of the
lost colonies were found, both the living, and the dead. Every last trace of
the great sojourn was tracked down, every record, every file, every artifact
was recovered that could be recovered.
Through the auspices of the Imperial schools, dead
civilizations were recreated, so that their stories could be absorbed by the
Collective.
Of the living, very few remembered anything of their
origins or the long dead, long cold star system from which their progenitors
hailed.
Everything for them was shrouded in myth and
legend.
The Empire found it relatively easy to bring these lost
colonies into the Imperial fold. There was always some resistance, but the homecoming was inevitable, resistance
was always crushed; mercilessly and systematically.
The Collective was fascinated by the drama that ensued
through these interactions. Their attention would be riveted on the process of colonial
integration.
It was easy to coax the returning people into the
Imperial cult, into worshipping the Continuum, into believing in its promises
of prosperity and eternal life. It was relatively simple to recast them, and
forge them anew as belonging to the
Empire.
Integration might take centuries. It was a long process.
Generations would be born and die while the Imperial infrastructure was
extended to those remote locations.
The process was welcomed by most of the citizens.
Inclusion in the Empire was accompanied by a certain loss of heritage and
identity, a loss of freedom, but the technological gains were so great that the
majority of the people accepted it without question.
They wanted it, they wanted the things that the Empire
promised.
They wanted to believe in the hope for Eternal
life.
A priesthood emerged from the civilizations founded by
the Ancients.
The priesthood was the primary social structure in the
advancement of the Galactic Empire. It was the pinnacle of the social order.
The emperor was the titular ruler, but he was governed by the priests of the Magisterium.
As with all things, civil and social power concentrated
closest to the center, the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the center of greatest
esteem. Those worlds in greatest
proximity to the HomeWorld of the Collective, to the Central Planet, they
became the drivers of Imperial activity.
The core worlds of the Empire were also the oldest, they
had been pulled together and unified at a point nearer in time to the formation
of the Collective and the birth of the Continuum.
As the Imperial structure cohered, the command and
control function began to be governed by a hidden agenda of the Continuum, and
guided by the Observer Corps, in violation of its edicts.
Even though the Observers were sworn to a path of
non-intervention, the Continuum could not resist using this vehicle as a means
of controlling the Children of the ancients, drawing their resources to itself,
and uncovering any threat to it that might be lurking in their science and
technology.
The Continuum created the doctrine and dogma, it created
all of the binding rituals that structured the spiritual devotions of the Empire.
The Observers implemented it, and built up the ideology of faith and belief, of
education and service that consolidated its power among the people.
Every living being was motivated by two principle
psychic forces, the power of fear, and the power of hope. Pain, hunger,
pleasure, satiation, those feelings only had significance insofar as they
related to the basic divisions in the psyche of fear and hope.
The Continuum wielded this knowledge with brute force
and surgical precision both, in everything that it did through the agency of
the Observers, and through the vast complex of the Empire.
Star system by star system, planet by planet, the
Imperial missionaries recovered the
lost peoples, bringing them all together.
The integrative process took hundreds to thousands of
years, it was the great occupation of the Empire over the course of eons that the
Empire came to refer to as the Missionary Epoch. They conceived of the work as
a harvest, a harvest of people and cultures, of languages and art.
They translated all the fruits of the harvest to the
Collective through the Continuum.
The Empire took its final form after those remnants of
the ancient race, the race of beings that had given birth to all of them, were
brought into the fold.
They formed a unified and coherent society, even though
each planetary grouping had changed in significant ways. They had different
languages customs, different cultures, different modes of work and living, of
leisure and art. They had different forms of conflict, and different forms of
conflict resolution. They were genetically different, but alike enough to be
recognizable as kin, and able to be bred with one another.
The Imperial Missionaries offered them peace and
prosperity through inclusion in the Empire, it offered them an understanding of
their past, redacted and altered to fit the imperial narrative, and it offered
them the hope of eternal life in the Continuum.
It was a great time for the Observers, they were
constantly bringing new information back to the Collective. It was an era of
high drama, of conflict and conversion.
In this era the Empire achieved its highest potential,
it was a fully realized civil body,
at the end of the missionary era, it began to contract, and corruption, which
was always present, began to magnify.
Jim was in the vanguard of every discovery.
He was the lead explorer, hunting down the most
miniscule clues, tracing contrails of particles through the deepest-darkest
places in the void between stars, unearthing long buried archives from long dead
worlds to point him along the paths those Ancient Colonists had taken.
The children of the Ancient People evolved into many
different life forms, with varying cultures and alternate ways of being on a million worlds.
The Empire collected them all, gathered them into a
cohesive body, bound them to one another through ritual, by dogma, with
doctrine and the promise of eternal life.
The Empire was the threshold of the Continuum, it was
the gatekeeper.
In truth there was little hope that any of the citizens
of the Imperium would ever make it into the Collective.
The only candidate were from among the priesthood of the
Imperial Cult, the smallest sect with the greatest power.
The Imperial religion ranked each world, and promoted
the belief that a person had to be reincarnated through billions of lifetimes
until they were born on the world that was at the heart of the Empire. Progress
through reincarnation was slow, eternally slow, and even when the soul of a
citizen arrived and was finally incarnated there, they still had to progress
over thousands and perhaps millions of lifetimes in order to rise through the
classes and multiple stages of the chain of being.
Even when a person made it into the priestly class they
had to rise through the stations over the course of hundreds of life-times,
until finally their soul was ready to ascend to the highest place, and upon
their death be ready for translation into the Continuum.
This was the wheel of life, it was the great chain of being.
It was the Dogma of the Imperial Cult.
It was a lie.
Merging with the Continuum was the ultimate aspiration
for each and every citizen, and it was an effective means of control, working
to keep the population of every planet in line.
There was no reincarnation, there was no eternal cycle
of birth, death and re-birth.
There was no fulfillment in the Continuum, no joining
the Collective, save for a very select and popular few, there was only the
continual feed of consciousness, of memory and experience to the Continuum, the
individual consciousness of the citizen, extracted, and abstracted to serve the
appetites of the membership of the great society
The Empire was organized hierarchically, like a great
pyramid, with the Emperor at the top.
The Emperor was viewed by all of the people as the
living manifestation of their will.
The Emperor was the one person who must be obeyed at all
times.
The Emperor managed everything pertaining to the normal
function of life and society, all of the material resources, but most
importantly the Emperor commanded the armed forces of a million worlds.
The Emperor was the focal point, the sword tip, the apex
of the vast galactic civilization which imagined itself ruling the lives of
countless people.
Only the priesthood operated outside the Emperors sphere
of influence, technically, in reality the Emperor had great sway over priests,
especially in the lower orders, among the corrupt and those who could be bought
and sold.
The Emperor was actually an Observer in almost every
iteration.
The station he occupied was one of the many bridges that
had been established, connecting the functions of Imperial government directly
to the Continuum.
The Emperor, whose word was law, who ruled by decree,
whose will was imperative, he was the Pontifex Rex.
The role of Emperor had been filled by many Observers
over time. Handing out the position of supreme authority was one of the rewards
that the Continuum used to coerce members of the Observer Corps into doing its
bidding.
With an obedient Observer safely ensconced in the role
of Emperor, the Continuum was able to effectuate its will throughout the
million worlds of the Imperium.
Most of the direction the Continuum gave to the Emperor
was merely intended to generate the drama which the Collective craved, to feed
it.
This violation of the standards of the Observer Corps,
of the rules against intervention were seen as an absolutely necessary means of
control over the vast and sprawling civilization, therefore it was allowed.
Emergence 4.0
Part Two, The Continuum
Chapter Twelve, The Empire
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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