Emergence 4.0 - Part Five, 92835670100561474; Chapter Thirty-five, Discovery

Week 37, 2019

His trek through the galaxy took place over hundreds of thousand of lifetimes.

Ten of millions of years—changing bodies, observing, discovering; during which he led the recovery project for the Empire, for the Collective and the Continuum.

The farther away from the Central Planet he journeyed, the more distance he put between his mission and the Empire, the more change he encountered in the populations he discovered.

Every society had to make adaptations to its genetic profile in order to accommodate the physical demands of the worlds they had colonized; gravity, foodstuffs and water, these were different in every world.

The children of the Ancients prepared themselves for this when they set off on their trek through the stars. They would identify the planets they intended to colonize long before their arrival, each planet having been previously seeded with the building blocks of organic matter, having demonstrated the strong potential for hosting life

Probes and drones would transmit reports regarding the composition of the atmosphere, the planet’s relative mass, light and heat, the types of food they would be able to grow. The explorers would have generations to prepare themselves, in-so-doing they introduced changes into their gene pool in advance of arriving at their destination, so as to accommodate their habitation of the new worlds.

The living planets would change the population on its own, after the colonization began.

The population of every colonized planet were mutants. Most of the mutations were subtle, not noticeable to the naked eye.

Some others were extreme.

The Empire followed, led by the Jim in one body or another, led by Jim who had come to be known as “The Observer.” The Empire followed either to bring the people into the Imperial fold, or to eradicate them.

Genetic mutations are a normal response to varying conditions of radiation, atmospheric gasses, gravity, available proteins, nutrients, and other environmental factors, all of which differ from world to world.

In his role as an Observer, Jim had sought permission from the Collective to bifurcate his consciousness, allowing him to live two lives at the same time, one as an embodied being leading the teams of archeologists, planetologists, and sociologists who were always busy cataloging the recently discovered civilizations that they were drawing into the Imperial fold, whether those civilizations were dead or alive; while his other consciousness remained active and present in the form of a mechanoid, hurtling through the galaxy tracking every lead he could discover to the paths the Children of the Ancients took.

The Continuum had been against this allowance, but once again it was overruled by the Collective, which was fascinated by the work he was doing in uncovering a history of the origins of the colonies, which the Collective thought of as their own.

The Collective eschewed the concerns for its safety and security that were raised by the Continuum. It felt it had nothing to worry about from Jim, so far removed from the HomeWorld and the Central System.

To a person, the Collective was fascinated by the process of discovery, for the wide range of insight and drama that ensued, for the narratives that were unraveled which fueled the stories they constructed for their private worlds.

The Observer followed the tiniest strands of every thread to the last outpost of the Ancient Explorers.

He followed those threads to a small, young, yellow star, in the far reaches of one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, to a little blue green planet that its people came to know as Earth.

Of all the mutations that had been discovered in his sojourn, the mutations that occurred on Earth were the most sublime.

Earth had produced something unique, a phenomenon that emerged from an interaction of the population with its magnetosphere, in the balance of metals and salts, of their tiniest nano-particles free flowing in the cerebral functions of the human brain, altering the quantum mechanics of the thought process, opening it to new possibilities.

The identity forming myths of a people persist in the roots and branches of shared experience.

It is the core of their sense of belonging to one another.

A people will naturally, instinctively go to incredible lengths to retain their memories.

Jim found the records of their journey, and traced it from planet to planet through the Milky Way.

He followed their history.

He discovered their odysseys retold in stories and song, in paintings and drawings that mirrored their sojourn among the stars. 

The farther he travelled away from the Empire, the Central system and the HomeWorld, the less the people remembered about where they came from.

He discovered that the Children of the Ancients no-longer connected to their origins, everything about their past had become symbol and metaphor.

They were born in darkness, adrift in an ocean of time where planets were like skipping stones, glowing in the light of hungry stars.

A world was merely a way-place on a journey without end…until the end, when their vessels could no longer be repaired, retrofitted, repurposed, when they had no choice but to land, to set down roots and attempt to survive.

They met many different conditions. Sometimes they were prepared for what was coming, sometimes they were not.

On Earth, the humans were prepared for their landing, but not for what came after on the young geologically unstable world.

The end of Jim’s journey was Earth.

The Ancients who landed here had nowhere else to go.

Neither did the Observer once he found them, it was a homecoming.

They had journeyed farther and longer than any of the other explorers who had left the crèche of the Ancient Civilization.

Eons had passed since their probes had discovered Earth. They had exhausted all of their resources and found no other suitable destination.

They spent their fuel adjusting their course to take them there, knowing that generations would be born and die during the passage.   

The reports from their probes informed them that they had found a planet teeming with life, successfully seeded by the ancient people in forgotten ages, life that would be easy to assimilate to.

They hoped to reestablish themselves here, on a mineral rich world that would provide them with all of the resources they would ever need to prepare themselves for their next great adventure.

Some wanted to return to the world of their birth.

Some wanted to continue their exploration and traverse the distance between galaxies.

Some wanted to plant roots, and build a new civilization on the wet-blue world that had become their haven.

The group believed that all things were possible when they landed

Jim followed, becoming human.

He found Earth and watched over its population.

He constructed the platform from which his consciousness would preside over the small gleaming planet, and the mechanism by which he could transfer his consciousness back and forth between this most remote of all locations and the Central Planet, where the Collective and its Continuum dwelt on the HomeWorld.

He felt a great sense of pride for having arrived at his final destination, he sense the esteem of the Collective flowing out toward him.

He gathered the requisite genetic material.

He studied it dispassionately.

He observed the planet’s living beings, probing their memories and drawing their stories from them.

He constructed a new body, implanting his consciousness in it; as Observers did in their stations throughout the galaxy, as he himself had done thousands upon thousands of times.

He was unprepared for this awakening.

Inhabiting a human body was unlike any experience the Observer ever had.

The flow of consciousness itself was different, it was exhilarating.

He was keenly attuned to the world around him, he sensed the people, the life force of the planet, the echoes of their thoughts pushing like waves against his.

He immersed himself in this new experience. It was akin to being in the Collective, only sweeter and more satisfying.

He discovered the nous-sphere.

It was an unprecedented moment of actualization.

In time and with careful study, the Observer was able to identify the physical links between human consciousness and the magnetosphere that comprised what he came to understand as the cynergenic field, the nous-sphere.

The human body, and the human brain, its primary organ of cognition, it carried a significantly higher degree of metallic nano-particles and conductive salts embedded in and throughout its neurological structures, a higher degree than any group that had evolved from the Ancient People.

The electrical activity that animates every living organism requires such metallic substances. Both voluntary and autonomic neural functions require these elements to transmit signals from the brain to the extremities, and also to receive signals from the sensory organs to the brain.

Cognition does not take place without these heavy metals in place, carrying the electrical currents that are the essence of thought.

What differentiated the humans of Earth from their forebears, and their cousins throughout the Empire, was the degree to which these metals were present, and the organization of them in their mutated cerebral cortex, but even more important was the way those structures interacted within the localized region of Earth’s magnetic field.

The nano-particles inside the human brain were like antennae, sending and receiving thought signals in the electromagnetic field, linking each person together in a web of consciousness.

It was cynergy, it was spirit.

The Observer began modifying his genetic profile to enhance the genetic sequence that optimized his conscious link to that field.

He searched for human children who developed the same genetic mutations naturally, he cultivated them.

He bred them.

He formed an organic collective.

It was the strength and frequency of Earth’s magnetosphere that created the conditions for the collective consciousness.

This cynergenic field was a profound discovery for the Observer, it was a natural manifestation of the artificial structure his people had created billions of years ago, and millions of light years away.

In all his travels he had never encountered anything remotely like it.

It embraced every human being on the planet, connecting them to one another, mind to mind.

It did much more, and the people of Earth were completely ignorant of it.

They felt the connection, but they did not have the tools to measure and understand it, not yet.

The uniqueness of Earth’s magnetic field had properties that even Jim did not discover. It not only connected each person to every other, but it recorded the activities of their consciousness.

Every human being left an indelible imprint in the field they occupied, the imprint remained active, even after death, where each person became manifest as a spiritual being, like ghosts walking the earth beside their progeny.

This was an organic form of the Collective, and somewhere less distinct, there was a rudimentary amalgamation of the Continuum as well. A collective unconscious, that moved people, influenced their choices, motivating them to act in concert with one another.

It was a unifying force.

There was something else about the uniqueness of this planet, and his discoveries, something that hearkened him back to the long lost and forgotten world of his birthday, the true home of the ancient people who constructed the Collective in the first place.

That world had long since been swallowed by its star, and there was no returning to it, but the more he pried into the mysteries of Earth, the more he became convinced that the Ancient People must have emerged on a planet with similar qualities.

He believed that without cynergism, their great civilization would have been impossible, the Ancient People might never have evolved into sentient beings.

Without the cynergenic field, the possibility of scientific discovery of the type necessary to drive people into the galaxy, to split the atom and to peer into the quantum-skein of tangled-string, it would have been impossible.   

He had to protect his discovery, this gave him a purpose beyond his purpose.

Emergence 4.0

Part Five, 92835670100561474

Chapter Thirty-five, Discovery

A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week

#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek

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