Jim took his time on Earth.
He replicated his consciousness in the same ways that he had done on
HomeWorld, creating copies of himself to aid him in the fulfillment of his
mission.
He acquisitioned resources to create multiple orbiting platforms, vessels
that housed the consciousness of each of his dopplegangers, there were back-ups
to his back-up, and contingencies for contingencies in the event that anything
ever went amiss.
He had to make his requisitions with great care. The technologies of the
Collective were like food and water,
they sustained his efforts, without them his plan would die. He had to get
these technologies directly from the source, until he could repurpose them, to
build his own means of production, and it all had to be done in absolute
secrecy.
They guided the orbiting craft and dwelt in the powerful mechanoid bodies
designed for the Observer Corps. They were stationed like guardians overseeing
the human migrations.
They constructed outposts for their organic bodies to retreat to for
solitude and security and from which they could influence the course of human
culture.
Jim made numerous embodied versions of himself, according to the bodily
mode of all Observers.
He situated them with the tribes, dwelling with them.
He created a unique body for himself, one that would not age, tire, or
suffer harm, and from that time forward he made the Quantum journey through the
wormhole back to HomeWorld infrequently, only when it was necessary to oversee
the operations of the cadre dwelling within the mechanical systems and quantum
fields of Collective and its Continuum.
On Earth he planted stories in the imagination of the people he lived
with, preparing them generations in advance to go to certain places, so that
they could fulfil his requirements.
He was their guide.
There was little room for error, even in the experimental stage, he
planted mnemonic devices in their rituals to lock down their responses to his
commands.
Jim made himself the indispensable counselor
to the royals, to emperors and priests, both through the ministry of his
doppelgangers and through his interaction with them in his primary incarnation.
He was the king maker, the seer and the sage, the principle advisor and
the grand vizier.
He wove stories into every culture. Creating narratives that functioned
like auto-hypnosis for his audience, building on and augmenting the mnemonic
tropes he had carefully laid down in prior generations.
Through these procedures he had control of all human government, and with
that control he subtly guided them through periods of strife and hardship,
through war and famine.
He managed the controls invisibly, careful not to draw attention to his
activities, mindful of how the smallest decisions could ripple outward in concentric
rings, creating patterns that could potentially alert the Continuum to his
clandestine activities.
He moved exceedingly slow for the sake of safety and security.
He knew that the Continuum had sent other Observers to Earth, to watch
him and monitor his work. This was against protocol, it was evidence of the
fact that the Continuum operated beyond the Control of the Collective, but
those factors were immaterial.
Jim built programs into the social order of humanity that echoed the
norms of the Empire, as if he were preparing them for inclusion in it at some
future point.
To the Observers assigned to watch over him he appeared to accomplished
those things without violating the non-interference directive. Jim masked his
work so as to make it seem like an organic development; the emergence of a
caste system, the organization of the priesthood, the mythological tropes that
pointed the faithful to a hope beyond this world, a hope for themselves and
their families rooted in a belief in reincarnation.
He included in his schemata of beliefs the notion of karmic debt,
instilling it deep within the psyche so that it governed every function of
human culture, the cult of sacrifice, and perpetual service to the invisible
gods, and their ancestors.
Jim constructed paradigms and mythological tropes, building archetypes he
then translated across the globe.
The same story repeated itself in the hearts and minds of every human
being.
He fashioned a common typology of heroism, which he instilled into every language
and every culture.
Every human child was raised with the aspiration of fulfilling this
model, heroism became a key building block of their aspirational identities. And
in the paradigm, Jim was always positioned as the seer. Only the most extreme adverse conditions of poverty, abuse
and fear could undermine it, and even then it could not be eradicated.
Through ritual imagery and narrative he created a guidance system that
would shape the emotional and cognitive foundation of the vessel he was forming,
through this conditioning they would discover love, altruism and a sense of belonging.
Thousands of generations would pass before the singular person emerged
from the masses, when that child did emerge, their fate would be to bear all
the pain and suffering of the human race, to bear it gladly as a willing
victim, they would channel it like a weapon straight into the heart of the
Continuum.
He conveyed to the Collective that he was merely interested in creating a
planet with the greatest warriors the Empire had ever seen, so that in the
fullness of time, when the tendrils of the Empire finally reached Earth, the
conflict that ensued would produce a drama like no other.
This played well with the Continuum. The drama was predictable, build
them up and tear them down.
The Continuum had no intention of letting Earth throw off the Imperial
yoke. The entire planet would go up in fire first, but it relished the notion
of a great conflict, therefor it did not impede the Observer’s progress.
Jim inserted himself into every mythology; through incarnation after
incarnation.
He was ageless Methuselah and Melchezedek of Salem, he was wandering
Mordecai, he was blind Tiresias and far sighted Heimdall, he was Taleisin the
Merlin, he was many more.
He sat in court, he gave advice, he listened and he played the fool.
He created a role for the wise man, standing apart from the power that
organized the social structures in every society, in every age; a role for the sage and the sibyl.
He wrote the prophetic tracts the guided the destiny of empires.
His efforts held the world together in times of darkness and famine, he
preserved the ancient records for one generation, and destroyed them in another
so that he could test the cognition of his subjects, proofing their connection
to each other through the cynergenic field.
He was the perpetual advisor, teacher, confessor and tutor.
He whispered in the ear of Manu and Hammurabi, he spoke from a column of
fire, he guided the hand of Ashoka, he wandered the world in robes of ochre and
saffron.
He was a catalyst for change in one moment and the voice of tradition in
another. He pushed and he pulled, he held fast and he set free.
He was the feathered serpent, the voice from the cave, the man in the
tree.
He was often captured in images, riding on the back of a water buffalo,
or as a tiny creature resting at the center of a web.
He was a chameleon and a trickster, both trusted and feared, he was foe
and friend.
Jim experimented relentlessly; on himself, on the human population and on
the planet. He did so with cool calculation, telling himself that his motives
were pure, that the suffering he wrought served a higher utilitarian purpose,
that he was a scientist.
As detached as he was from the ordinary vicissitudes s of life, he still
had needs related to the esteem of others, and he fulfilled them through his
work.
There were mysteries on Earth that had not been found on any other world.
Those mysteries had to be explored, understood and exploited.
He was careful not to let his research advance the state of human
technology too rapidly. He was in a constant state of temptation to take over
the governance of the planet and reveal to humanity its true history and its
real purpose.
He wanted to see them benefit from the science he could deliver to them,
but he was forbidden from doing so, it would be a violation of the Observer’s
compact with the Continuum, and it would put all of his planning, including the
planet itself at risk prematurely.
If he drew the scrutiny of the Continuum in any measure greater than he
already did, he feared that would lead to his being discovered, and so he spent
more energy at the task of shaping human culture, than at developing its
technological arts.
The Collective thirsted for the stories that came from Earth.
Its dramas were brutal and primal, its art and its poetry had a beauty
that were not emulated anywhere else in the Imperium, because the social
elements did not exist anywhere else that could produce it…and there was
something else that neither the Collective nor the Continuum could ascertain,
but Jim knew what it was.
He began to suspect that the world from which the Ancient People had
emerged had similar properties to Earth, not understood in the time of the
Ancient People, but which shaped them, making them into the people they became.
Jim became adept at all the tools of spy-craft. He employed them with
expertise of a spymaster, drawing on
the resources of the Collective to augment his intuition, applying everything
he could to the situation on Earth, with what technologies were available to
him in society, as well as the other technologies he possessed, he was able to
keep hidden from the subject population.
The Continuum was short on resources for monitoring society without its
vast array of remote sensors and communications devices. But Jim augmented
those systems, developing analog variations of them for his own access.
Through these measures he was fully actualized.
He established secret societies that monitored every aspect of human
government, every religious institution, as well as the agents of the Continuum
who came to earth to monitor him.
He took great care to keep these hidden.
The confessionals became the primary model by which the people reported
upward all the things he needed to know about the subtle shifts taking place in
the collective experience of humanity
He took measures to protect himself, hiding his assets, constructing the
technological and human vehicles to execute his will. Trusting in his team of
dopplegangers to work tirelessly toward their common goal.
He knew from his spy network that some of the Observers who came to
monitor his work were not dedicated to the Continuum in anyway.
They could be covertly coopted.
Others were fanatically devoted.
These had to be controlled or killed.
None of them were supposed to be on Earth at all, according to the
Observer’s protocol, but protocol never stopped the Continuum from doing as it
pleased.
And nothing ever stopped Jim from doing the same.
Jim positioned himself as an administrator, replicating himself as often
as he needed to, in order to position himself as a servant of governments world-wide, as a specialist, a functionary
and a problem solver.
He was always the indispensable man.
He rarely took on a role as the lead of an agency, always working in
support of the human systems, managing them.
He was good at it.
He drew on the vast knowledge of governing bureaucracies that were
available to him through his data bases on the function of the Empire.
He always sought to be his own counterpart in governments across the
world, whether those governments worked together as allies, as competitors or
as enemies.
This made the coordination of government easy and it was rarely disrupted
by human interference.
He was always able to parcel out enough information to move events in the
direction he wanted, whether or not his interests lay in war or peace, he was
able to produce the results that rulers and governments desired.
The slowness with which events moved troubled him.
They were not slower than the eons he spent in contemplation, stretching
his consciousness into the every corner of the Collective, and they were not
slower than the ages he spent alone in the deep of space moving from planet to
planet in his quest to discover the whereabouts of each and every colony seeded
by the Children of the Ancients.
The slowness of those periods was marked by isolation, in those times he
did not feel the pressure of impending doom.
The events on Earth were different, there was a clock ticking, there was
the volcano, and when it blew his best chance to realize his ambition would
blow with it.
Emergence 4.0
Part Five (a), Jim
Appendix Chapter Two, Society
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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