Emergence 4.0 - Part Five (a), Jim; Appendix, Chapter Seven, Kathy

Jim had been despondent until he began to receive reports from his network concerning the birth of an extraordinary child.

When he found Kathy and tested her skills, he also set out on a detailed examination of her heritage, mapping each contact he had had with her line down through the millennium, through every root and branch of the family tree. Though he did not require this for proof, the study confirmed for him that she was the one.

He had no doubt; Kathy was the product of his ambition. She had received all of the crosses which he had been managing in other lines; only, she had received more, happening at different intervals, her line had incorporated more stabilizing structures in it than he had wanted to build into the genetic profile of his prime candidates.

Now he saw his error, and he was grateful for it.

Kathy did not come from one of his principle studies, she was a wild card.

He thought that was poetic.

There was something uniquely human about the way Kathy just crept-up on him with her fully realized potential.

Now that she had arrived and Jim had examined her, he knew that it could not have happened any other way, and he took this lesson to heart.

Of course he had to manage her upbringing and test her abilities exhaustively, but he had to remain distant at the same time. He was afraid that over-interference might spoil his work, or like a watched pot, she would never boil.

He needed her to boil. Jim needed that sustenance.

As Jim reviewed the file on Kathy’s background he began to feel remiss. He had failed to notice many things, and he began to wonder how many other things he had missed over the decades. He worried that this was an indication that there might be a fatal flaw in his plan.

He felt insecure.

He began to suspect his network of human agents, and even more critically he began to suspect the replicants acting for him, acting as him all around the globe, he began to suspect them of sabotage.  

Kathy’s parents had been exceptional subjects, as Jim reviewed the materials related to them, he understood that their abilities and their genetic profile should have been brought to his direct attention years before, but he knew them only from data sheets and statistics. He had only visited Kathy’s parents once each, when they were still children, and he did that before they ever met.

He had no other direct involvement in their upbringing.

He spent enough time with them to conduct some basic testing, enough to establish a baseline on their liabilities, and to complete the auto-hypnotic coding he subjected every person in his breeding program to.

A key feature of his manipulations was the instillation of a control mechanism, making it so that they are unable to resist his suggestions or the controls of his operatives, should they at any time have a need to move them to perform a specific action in a certain way.

Kathy’s parents were docile, kind people. They possessed exceptional mental acuity, and artistic abilities but they were unexceptional in other ways.

They met and became coupled up through seemingly random interactions. Like attracts like, and this was not entirely unusual for subjects in his breeding program.

He saw that he had approved their union though he had done so without having conducted any further interviews with them, and yet they produced the child that he had been looking for, in a seemingly random union.

Because of this extraordinary happenstance Jim viewed Kathy as a miracle.

She was a gift.

Jim secretly delighted in the unexpected, but there was very little that took him by surprise. He was steeped in the examination of possibilities and probabilities. For millions of years his experience of real-time was merely a reduction of long range forecasting, down to the point of actuality.

Kathy’s parents were not in Jim’s main line of research, and so her emergence from that field was a surprise.

In the twentieth century, as the volcano slumbering beneath Yellowstone began to show signs of an imminent eruption, he began to narrow his focus. This caused him to miss things. He had screened Kathy’s parents and approved of their union, but he had rejected the probability matrix which suggested they might produce the fruit he was looking for.

He did not expect the vessel to come from them. He was searching for it in an entirely different part of the world. He expected a male, and he expected that male to come from one of his main lines of research.

He wanted that to be true, he wanted to have control over the person who emerged as his prime weapon, from the beginning to the end.

He was wrong.

Kathy’s arrival was unexpected, it did brought him joy, but it also caused him to doubt himself and everything he had done.

He only visited Kathy and her parents after receiving word that their child had manifested interesting abilities.

Interesting was an understatement, she was phenomenal, possessing both a strong link to her genetic memory and the greatest sensitivity to the cynergenic field he had ever measured.

She had other savant capabilities that he had not counted on or imagined possible, but which proved crucial to her training.

Jim was cautious.

He needed her to belong to him, fully, willingly and without reservation.

He concluded that in his own management of the breeding program, his own interference in it led him to miss obvious queues, which if he had not missed would have led him to the end sooner.

He no longer trusted himself.

Jim sent proxies to her parents, human agents to watch over her development, people who were under his control, but who had no knowledge of the secret societies they belonged to.

He proceeded with the utmost care.

Jim engaged the full scope of his international intelligence and security apparatus to protect her, while at the same time allowing her to develop in as normal a mode as possible.

It was vital that Kathy be grounded in the human experience, be empathetic toward suffering, attuned to the necessities of justice, to desire justice for its own sake. 

Jim’s proxies conducted cognitive tests to confirm what Jim suspected, to confirm that Kathy’s intelligence was off the charts.

She was unique.

She possessed a powerful consciousness that had to be guided through the final stages of its organic growth and maturation.

It was precarious.

Jim knew that Kathy must develop the tools and skills to wield her power, or insanity would ensue.

Jim found himself operating on two distinct tracks.

On one track he was fighting against time: the super-volcano in Yellowstone was going to erupt, and when it did it would kill tens of millions of people in a matter of minutes, hundreds of millions within hours and billions within days.

Through the power of his sensors and monitors he knew when the blast would occur, he had timed it down to mere minutes, he would be able to control the timing within a matter of seconds through the use of the explosives he and his team had situated in the critical structure of the volcano’s magma chamber.

He could make it happen sooner if necessary, but he could not delay it.

This filled him with a sense of urgency.

On the other track he delighted in watching Kathy grow, learn, stretch her muscles, and mature. 

He was proud of his accomplishment in her.

Kathy proved to be a miracle, she was greater than anything he had ever hoped for. She was genuinely psychic, with the tell-tale signs of cognitive gifts that would aid her in her development and prevent her from falling off the precipice into insanity.

She was connected to the cynergenic field and rooted in her genetic memory at one and the same time.

Jim surmised that the presence of her ancestral past within her, something which every human being possessed but which Kathy appeared to have unique access to, that this dimension of her personhood stabilized her, and this filled Jim with hope for her.

She was both centered in herself and expansive in her consciousness, she was grounded and open to everything, and there were mysteries within her which slowly unfolded for him.

Jim had spent hundreds of millions of years contemplating possibilities, considering probabilities, and tracking eventualities as they shifted into actuality.

He was surprised when he discovered the broad range of Kathy’s abilities carefully balanced in the cognitive field of such a small-child.

It had seemed to him as if nature could not produce a person with such poise and grace.

It was as if she was being taught, trained, conditioned to be able to manage the powers of her formidable mind, from a coterie of teachers that were invisible to him.

She had access to her genetic memory and full immersion within the cynergenic field, but she was not the first candidate to manifest such a strong connections, she was merely the first who was not driven mad by those powers.

It was a mystery.

Kathy was a mystery.

She was a self-actualized miracle.

Through his investigation of her aptitude, he began to discover new things concerning the nous sphere. Without being able to prove it, he suspected that there were higher dimensions or frequencies to Earth’s cynergenic field than he himself had been able to access.

He attempted to experiment on replicants of himself, to penetrate the veil which Kathy seemed to be able to move back and forth through at will.

Every experiment ended in a terrifying disaster.

Kathy knew things she could not possibly know. That much was certain. Through his testing of her he surmised that she had knowledge of the past that she had no genetic link to.

He explored the possibility that Kathy could access another person’s genetic memory through her psychic link to them.

He was unable to prove that hypothesis, and the truth behind her abilities escaped him.

Jim was an outlier, as a member of the Collective he stood alone in his criticism of it, this is true, but it was not the case that there were no other critics in the Collective. However, there were no other members who criticized the function and purpose of the Collective itself.

Other critics were critics of process, they were critics of the Continuum, they were critics of the structures that set limitations of their freedom, but not of its existence.

Jim had never touched another member who desired to see the entire thing go away. There were many critics who opted for the great sleep, seeking to be sequestered, and looking for the dissolution of the self, but he had never encountered another who wanted to end it all.

There were times that this caused him to doubt himself. He felt isolated and alone, and not even a period of communion with his replicants could ease that burden.

As the clock wound down and Jim realized that he had not found the vessel for his rage, he began to experience a sense of fatalism and fear of failure that he had long dreaded.

He questioned everything he believed, everything he had thought and done.

Then he discovered Kathy, and Jim looked on her as if she were a gift from the universe itself, as if her arrival was a validation of his purpose.

After her testing was complete he knew Kathy would be able to serve as a conduit. Through her a remnant of humanity would survive. He told himself that he could save them all, there would be time for the Empire to reach Earth before the planet tumbled into its mother star. Through

Kathy the Continuum would be dealt a crippling blow, one that would allow Jim to push it over the edge into oblivion.

Kathy would be the agent of salvation for countless Trillions of people. Her sacrifice was demanded.

She had arrived in the hour of his need. Kathy only needed to be prepared.

Jim was ready to teach her.

Emergence 4.0

Part Five (a), Jim

Appendix Chapter Seven, Kathy

A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week

#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek

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