Appendix Chapter One, Secrets
Jim did not require the Continuum or its vast technologies to aid him in
the creation of his fantasy world.
He did not need assistance because his world was one of simple idealism.
After spending ages in the dark, sleeping the great sleep, floating on
the undulating waves of consciousness generated by the Collective, he was
content to retreat into the silence of his private domain, making it into a seemingly
infinite plane of light and peace.
He was looking for purity, thirsting for it. He wanted to purge his heart
and mind from the rank hedonism that preoccupied the consciousness of the
majority of the membership comprising the Collective.
He was seeking rest as if he
had a physiological need for it.
He was free to do this, but it disturbed the Continuum.
He did not want to return to the great sleep.
He wanted to be alone.
He avoided contact with his peers, but he could not live in that place of
pure light at all times.
His own fantasies involved the reorganization of the Collective,
returning it to a noble purpose, the instantiation of altruism, and the
destruction of the Continuum.
He could not let his thoughts manifest themselves in his private domain,
if he had, the Continuum would have known.
He learned to buffer them.
Jim studied, he planned.
He understood that he needed to use the strengths of the Continuum against
it; for the sake of his safety and
security he needed to be able to harness its own technology, comprising the
vast interconnected network it relied on for control of the membership, the
Observer Corps and the Empire.
He had to be secretive, which meant immeasurable years of slow
preparation, utilizing the skills he had developed through his return from the
great sleep to insert subtle bits of code into the root systems of the
Collective, codes that allowed him access to the machinery of HomeWorld, and
the entire central system.
He needed to be everywhere, like the Continuum itself, he needed access
to every subsystem. There was not a single thing that the Continuum touched
that he could ignore. With the greatest degree of patience he pushed through all
of the mechana of planetary governance.
The networks he inserted himself into revealed the weaknesses of the
Continuum.
They exposed the things the Continuum gave the greatest attention to,
what it was hungry for, its appetites and curiosities.
Understanding these things was crucial for Jim, through them he began to
be able to predict the agenda that the Continuum was working toward. He came to
understand its individuality as a distinct identity apart from the Collective
which formed the basis of its unconscious.
Jim exploited those appetites.
He took advantage of those fears.
He tested the Continuum again and again, playing out scenarios throughout
the Empire to measure the Continuum’s tolerances, using the real lives of
ordinary people to prove his theories and to probe the depths of the
Continuum’s liabilities.
He set his mind on a single goal, the complete destruction of the
Collective and the Continuum. He believed he would find his own absolution through
their annihilation.
He could not admit it, but he wanted the universe to forgive him, both
for his own crimes and for all of the crimes the Collective had committed
against the Children of the Ancients People.
He felt responsible, though he was not.
Like all members of the Continuum his own sense of self was magnified
beyond the pale of reality. His own ego could not let him see himself in any
other role than the role of both villain and hero, either or.
The crimes belonged to him, as did the responsibility for redressing them.
He could not let anything hinder his progress.
It was only through this ideation that he developed his sense of belonging
He committed more crimes in the fulfillment of his intentions, sacrificing individuals, tribes, whole nations along
the way.
The outcome he desired was to harness the technologies of the Collective
in order to liberate the Children of the Ancient People, and free them from the
grip of the Continuum, from the hand of the Imperium which the Continuum had
foisted on them.
He was a utilitarian to the core.
He was looking to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number, as
he understood the good to be. He planned and schemed and allowed nothing to
stand in his way.
He would sacrifice the well-being of an entire planet, offer it up for
destruction, just as a feint, as a means of distracting the Continuum and the
Collective from his own ambitions, to hide what he was looking for from their
omnipresent watching.
He did it without remorse.
Jim tested the scope of the
Continuum’s cognitive field
He paid particularly close attention to the threshold where he would
encounter an individual member of the Collective. He tested its strengths and
its weaknesses, its resilience and elasticity.
He found the electromagnetic barriers to be as fluid as any other thing
below the quantum field. He sensed the tiniest threads that entangled the group
consciousness together.
He saw the Continuum, like a spider at the center of the web.
He had probed it for eons, and he discovered that it functioned much like
the immune system of a biological entity, identifying alien activity then
meeting it with force, to cleanse itself of disease.
He found that the barriers could be stretched to the point of
invisibility, and then he discovered that they were permeable.
The Continuum had access to the entire structure of the Collective,
theoretically, nothing was hidden from it.
It accessed the entire field through an impossible series of security
protocols and permissions that were meant to protect the privacy of the
individual members from each other.
Those protocols were unnecessary, effectually they were the only barriers,
they were just lines of code.
He discovered on the sub-quantum level, through probing his memories of
his time in the great sleep and during his return to consciousness that the
Collective field was one thing.
It was unified.
The Collective was truly a Collective, and the Continuum, in as much as
it had come to control the group, he confirmed what he knew to be true about it;
that it was merely an algorithm designed to protect the individuals from their
fear and suspicion of one another.
He discovered proof of the
vulnerability he had been looking for, it was not one thing, but rather it came
from the dynamics that were in place to protect the integrity of the whole.
The Continuum, inasmuch as it functioned as a singular entity,
nevertheless remained an amalgamation of the group mind.
It superseded the whole but was still comprised of it.
Changes to the Collective, had a direct effect on the Continuum. The
narratives that the membership were obsessed with, if they could be
manipulated, could be used to make subtle changes in what the Continuum was
focused on.
During the eons and ages in which the members of the Collective were
primarily focused on the status of their own private worlds, the Continuum
became rooted in the notion of its divinity.
During the ages in which the Continuum was directing the formation of the
Galactic Empire, the Collective became focused on the drama and interplay of
the various hierarchies, such as the establishment of the Imperial Cult.
The Collective accepted new members from the Empire, and they brought with
them their own deeply seeded beliefs about who and what the Continuum and the
Collective were.
This created a feedback loop that reinforced the identity the Continuum
had invested in itself.
Jim was able to test his theory and find proof of it. He discovered a
means of manipulating the focus and attention of the Continuum, by shaping the
interests of the Collective.
His sense of self and personal esteem
were rooted in these activities.
Everything was mutable in the narrative field.
This was where he was determined to concentrate his efforts.
Jim began to shape plans in his mind and put them to the test.
It was time for action.
He discovered he could hide data in the bandwidth of frequencies that
separated the individual members of the Collective, a place no one would think
to look for the presence of a whole, cognitively active member of the group
mind.
He took steps to divide his consciousness in ways that were forbidden by
the Continuum, a replication and self-sequestration that was in violation of
his compact with the Collective, in so doing he abandoned his oath to the
membership.
He was fully actualized.
The divisions and copies of his identity he made were all versions of
himself, all of them holding to the same purpose. Though each of them was
autonomous, and any one of them could betray the mission at any time.
Nevertheless they were him, and they dutifully posited themselves within those
high frequency fields. Looking listening, watching and waiting.
He practiced deception, and the obfuscation of it.
He layered his true intentions behind a myriad of masks and false
desires. He had to lie in his heart, he had to believe the lies himself.
Prevarication, he found, was just another frequency of thought. He could
mask it, he became adept at it.
His entire life became a lie, a miasma of falsehoods.
He pursued his intentions in the middle distance, in the space between
spaces, he became master of the in between and the up-side down.
He was the ghost in the machine.
Jim practiced the art of concealment.
He developed layer upon layer of security.
He became adept at deception.
He hid things, even from
himself, and that is how he knew he could keep his secrets from the Continuum.
When he had acquired that confidence he slowly pushed his plans forward, placing
safeguards for himself in the liminal space that would buffer him and support
him in the event that he was discovered.
The veil was thin, but it was potent. He managed to sense the
electromagnetic fields around him, to harness them to create false narratives
within it, narratives that were ultimately accepted by the Continuum.
First he would insert something into the experiential field of an individual
member of the Collective, then they would share it with others, exposing them
to the lie.
Finally, when he told the lie himself, it resonated with the expectation
that he had established in the group mind, thereby it did not arouse suspicion.
The things he wanted the Continuum to believe were taken for granted.
Despite this he could not prevent the Continuum from being suspicious of
him, even though he was able to divert its attention away from his clandestine
activities.
He grew in confidence and pursued his goal of building the framework that
would help him succeed in pulling it down.
Appendix Chapter Two, Society
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.
Appendix Chapter Three, Breeding
Jim abducted people, he experimented on living tissues.
He dissected cadavers and sent genetic materials back to the replicants of
himself, to his myriad of dopplegangers that were spread throughout the Empire.
He sent them through space on a journey of thousands of light years.
He used that genetic stock to introduce subtle changes
into the DNA of the population of thousands of worlds. The subjects of his
experiments were became a source of sustenance
for him to carry out a material change in the condition of the citizens of the
Empire.
He used them like food or medicine to revive a dying
person.
Jim discovered
something in the human race that affected the consciousness of its entire
population, nanoparticles of the heavy metal magnetite collecting in the
cerebellum, interacting in a unique way with Earth’s magnetic field, allowing
for the possibility of psychic cynergy among the humans of Earth.
This dynamic established the conditions for Earth’s
nous-sphere.
He found the abnormalities in himself first, after
recognizing something unusual in the cognitive functions of his host body. He
was hyper alert to the feelings and thoughts of the human beings he lived among
He tested the limits of his empathic powers, and he found
at the upper end of its natural curve that he could cross the threshold into
true telepathy.
It was an outstanding and surprising revelation.
He isolated the physical components of the telepathic
abilities in himself first. Then he found the same components distributed in
various degrees throughout the bodies of Earth’s human population.
He developed programs to augment it.
Jim understood a great deal about the phenomenon of
consciousness.
The Collective had been engineered on the basis of its
science.
Jim’s personal history, suggested to him that he had been
among the original members of the Collective, one of the engineers who had
built the first machines that captured the essence of the individual to house
them in a perpetual state of being.
He had seen the early failures and witnessed their first
successes. He had been among the first volunteers to enter the Collective,
after the technologies had been perfected.
He possessed these memories, though he was doubtful of
whether they actually belonged to him. He had not always remembered them, but
the memories came with him when he emerged from the great sleep.
Even if they were not his own, he owned them now. He
owned them completely. They comprised an essential part of his identity.
He understood that consciousness is essentially an
electromagnetic phenomenon. He did not understand why consciousness of the type
that the Ancient People possessed, had emerged in his ancestors and nowhere
else in the known galaxy, except possibly on the planet Earth.
Jim hypothesized
that there was as element at work in the cognitive process of human-beings,
nanoparticles of magnetite, which had bonded with the human brain in a strong
link, connecting each person to its magnetic field and through that field to
one another, thereby creating a field of cynergy not un-like the
electromagnetic fields that comprised the Collective.
The type of consciousness which the Ancient People
possessed was not merely a product of their genetic endowment, it was also a
function of their interaction with a unique environment.
This is what he found on Earth.
He theorized that no species could advance to the point
of becoming a spacefaring civilization if their home planet did not have these
properties, properties which allowed the inhabitants to connect with one
another through a subconscious field.
Creativity and inventiveness happened there, through an
unconscious collaboration in the nous-sphere.
Jim came to believe that the Ancient People had created
the Collective at the height of their scientific achievement, on a world that
had these same properties. They subsequently traveled to other worlds, built
colonies and seeded life on a million other planets, on planets that did not
have such properties, while in the meantime, their cradle-star went supernova,
destroying the world that had spawned their civilization.
This was a secret that he had to protect, keep safe and secure.
He could not go back and study that planet to confirm his
hypothesis.
Jim developed a secondary interest.
For the first time in over a billion years he wanted
something more than to pursue the destruction of the Continuum and the
dissolution of the Empire.
He feared that another version of himself would at some
point abandon the plan he had devised, but despite his fears he pushed forward.
He used their agency to conceal his covert activities; on Earth, throughout the
Empire and on HomeWorld.
He advanced his clandestine ambitions against the
Continuum.
There were many times when he had to sacrifice the lives
of his dopplegangers. When he had to shred the consciousness of one of his
ghosts dwelling in the circuitry of HomeWorld. He always did so with great
reluctance. In every instance he saw his own likeness to the Continuum, as if
he were just another monster in the machine.
The knowledge he gathered was everything, he deemed that
it was worth the cost. He believed that those whom he sacrificed believed the
same. They belonged to one another
through their absolute commitment to their ideals.
Through his testing and experimentation, Jim found that
nowhere else in all the Empire did the unique genetics of the population
combine as they did on Earth, combining to form the electromagnetic structure
of an orgainc cynergenic field.
He experimented on tens of thousands of people, both the
living and the dead.
Every single one of his living subjects spent the
remainder of their lives in shock and terror, in fear and wonder, as they were
slowly peeled apart in the sterile chambers of Jim’s laboratories, an environment
that was completely foreign to them, by machines they had no frame of reference
for.
The chambers were cold, brightly lit, filled with shining
steel, and gravity defying objects.
After thousands of years of putting people under the
knife and the microscope, he finally found the proof, a mutation in the genetic profile that allowed for the
critical capture of the magnetite nanoparticles, housing them in the cerebral
cortex, a concentration strong enough to allow for a cognitive connection that
linked the humans of Earth, one to another, via the planet’s magnetic field,
the strength of which formed an organic cynergy, a naturally occurring version
of the Collective that the Ancient people and Jim as one of them, had
engineered long ago.
The mutation had been a side effect of one of the many
that had been devised by the Ancient people on their way to Earth. The capture
of the magnetite created a kind of antenna in the human brain, interfacing with
the electromagnetic functions of human consciousness.
This had not been intentional, nevertheless…it was real.
Jim’s research led him to believe that similar conditions
must have held together on the native planet of the Ancient people, and not
found on any other world since they had left the place of their ancestral
birth.
The natural Collective field fostered creativity and
ingenuity at levels which could not be replicated without it. On every other
world in the Empire individuals lived out their lives in complete insularity,
relying on artificial networks and data sharing to approximate true community.
Once Jim understood the mechanism for the way in which
the human race interacted with the cynergenic field, he was able to map out the
changes for the genetic profile that he needed to establish in order to
strengthen and enhance those features.
His discoveries confirmed the necessity of his work and
filled him with esteem.
Jim intended to introduce changes into the genetic
profile of each tribe at the same time so that he could establish a base set of
conditions upon which to build his design, then he would be able monitor the
effects of that intervention by breeding the traits he was looking for into
individual tribes separately.
In the scale of time that he and the Collective were used
to operating in, he had precious little of it to work with. He had tens of
thousands of millennia but her feared he would lose the gambit before the next
great planetary disaster struck Earth.
He planned to
optimize the retention of nanoparticles in the cognitive structures of the
brain, making each person a transmitting and a receptive node in the field of
consciousness. He intended to stabilize that by giving each and every one of
them access to the type of memory that was locked into the root-code of their
genetic structure. Jim theorized that enhancing their access to their genetic
memories would contextualize the input they were receiving from the
nous-sphere. It would ground them as he actualized
them.
He took his greatest risk by exporting his work off
world, he sent tiny vessels speeding back across the void on a trek of light
years to be recovered by him and his agents at the fringes of the Empire.
He needed to safeguard his discoveries against disaster
and against the possibility of his failure, so that they could be recreated on
any other world that the Empire discovered, providing that it had the same
conditions that had obtained on the blue-green marble known as Earth.
His struggle would continue even in the event of his
failure.
That much he guaranteed.
The application of genetic science was meticulous.
It was artistry.
Jim created
physical markers that would manifest themselves in the characteristics of the
gene pool he was developing. He could tell at a glance whether an individual
was a part of one of the control groups he was studying, or an outlier.
There were many markers for every tribe, these guided
him; pigmentation, hair color, eye color, the presence or absence of freckled
skin; moles and birthmarks, these told him different things.
The markers helped him map his progress toward his signal
goal, which was the birth of a human being possessing a mind powerful enough to
harness the fullness of human consciousness, and stable enough to channel all
of its raw emotion, the pain and fear that would be caused by the coming
cataclysm, and transmit it through the quantum field of the worm hole like an
invading host, directly into the Collective, to wield it like a battering ram
against the Continuum.
He was a weapon smith practicing a different kind
metallurgy.
What he was forging would be the deadliest weapon ever
constructed.
He was weaponizing consciousness itself.
It would hit the Collective with the destructive force of
a billion stars, or so he told himself when he was thinking of his work in the
terms a poet might use.
When he found himself in this soliloquy he realized he
had gone far beyond his original mission, which was the elimination of the
Collective and the eradication of the Continuum.
He was being shaped by his sojourn on Earth, just as much
as he was shaping humanity.
Jim understood the risks he was going to take. He was
about to recreate the same type of risk that he had engineered on the
HomeWorld, the duplication of his consciousness, as many times as was necessary
for him to be able to carry his mission forward on the limited time scale that
was available to him.
Jim was resolved to plum the limits of his discovery, if
there were any limits to what he had found.
The difference between what he was doing on Earth, and
what he had accomplished on the Central Planet were considerable. In both
locations he needed multiple-independent nodes of action. On HomeWorld, each
and every node was connected by its field of collective consciousness.
They were a society of one.
On Earth their connectivity through the cynergenic field
was more tenuous, it operated on a different frequency.
It was less immediate.
Though it was possible for each unit to act autonomously
on HomeWorld, each copy of himself could break away from the plan, or sabotage
it, but he and the other members of his private cabal would have known
immediately, and while this possibility existed, there was not even the
slightest hint of defection.
On Earth he was faced with considerable unknowns.
Jim cloned himself, planting his dopplegangers in every
population center around the world, each one connected to the prime version of
himself through the cynergenic field, as they were on HomeWorld, only this
field was weaker, there were gaps in it, places where individuals could hide,
or disappear.
Continuum would have destroyed the Earth with him, it
would have delighted in it.
Appendix Chapter Four, University
Through his advice and
authority Jim shaped the burgeoning cultures of human civilization.
He established centers of
learning among the tribes, even while they were pre-literate, he built up
systems and oral traditions by which they captured and recounted their
histories, and those took the form of narratives that would take decades to master.
Through these schools he
guided the people’s understanding of agriculture, giving the growing population
mastery over their food supply. He
taught them the secrets of building, and he foster in them a patience that
allowed them to track the movement of the stars.
He trained them to manage
calamities in this way, to preserve their fragile way of life.
He conditioned them with
mnemonics, to remember who they were, what their ancestors had done, and he
worked into those memes the control mechanisms that would allow him to have
sway over the people for all future generations, through secret codes built
into the language structure.
He took these psychological
sciences, neuro-linguistic programming to levels they had never been before.
These were the tried and true conditioning techniques of the Imperial Cult, but
in the operative context of Earth’s cynergenic field their potential was
greatly magnified.
The schools of learning he
developed became the centers of civilization, the locus of worship, they became
the distribution centers of food and
those who cared for these places became the custodians of clean water,
purveyors of the medical arts, teachers and priests.
It took thousands of years,
a time frame that was nothing to Jim, but was exceedingly long for the people
of Earth. In that time these centers became temples, cathedrals and
monasteries, and ultimately they became the universities and colleges of great
cities, one institution taking the
place of the other, built on top of the old foundations.
Logic was the
icon Jim knelt beside, logic was his Grail, his object of devotion.
He drilled his fetish for
logic, his strict adherence to it, deep into the structures of the institutions
he built.
The institutional bias was
always for logic, a dispassionate and utilitarian world view.
There was safety in logic, there was
predictability.
The power of logic was
demonstrable, and belief in its power was ingrained into every level of the
schools he founded.
People are not logical by
nature, they have to be conditioned to it.
The languages they spoke
created modes of thinking that were more and less suited to it.
Jim left some groups to be
wild, never touched them with the machination of logic.
He kept them as a control
group, to measure the effect of their presence on the group mind.
Other tribes were built
around intricate webs of logical assumptions.
At different points in the
development of a society he engineered disasters which took away the
institutions that undergirded the transmission of logic.
He starved those societies
of it, allowing them to regress into natural states of animal emotionality, of
fear and suspicion.
Then he would bring it back
like a healing balm and watch while the people renewed themselves and their
cultures through the influence of it.
Within the great-stone
walls of the institutions he founded, Jim formed secret societies to protect
and carry out his work. This allowed him to focus his attention all around the
globe, guiding the development of civilization with a slow-steady and invisible
hand.
He layered control devices
into their collective memory, repeated through the stories they told and the
lists they memorized, in the tropes of poetry they wrote into their beating
hearts.
He controlled them through
the archetypes they bonded with, through the myths they constructed, that gave
meaning to their lives.
His work was art.
His art was a weapon
There were a myriad of
concerns to manage in the detailed labor of engineering the living-vessel he
needed so that Jim could deliver the crippling blow to the Continuum.
The human body had
developed a reliance on aggression as a survival skill, but raw power would not
be enough to dislodge the Continuum from its control of the HomeWorld and all
the systems of the Central Planet.
He need to create doubt and
fear, he needed the Continuum to turn its eye inward, and collapse on itself.
This required that the entire field of consciousness belonging to the Collective do the same thing.
The colonists who had come
to populate Earth had come to rely on swift action for the mitigation of
crisis, this had to be tamped down to ensure the survival of the tribes, to
keep them from tearing one another apart. They had a proclivity for war that
was driven by fear, by worry over the allocation of limited resources in times
of great scarcity.
Jim needed the power and
dynamism of the aggressive impulses which the Ancient Explorers had bred for
(albeit unintentionally) on their ages-long trek across the galaxy, but he
needed this to be modulated by conscientiousness, and bent toward the most
supernal values.
Jim methodically
conditioned altruism into the social mythological norms of consciousness he
propagated among the humans of Earth.
He established defaults in
his human subjects that served as capacitators, allowing great rage to be
channeled into protectiveness, and for the individual to instinctively risk
their own self for the sake of the whole which they represented.
These fail safes followed
the religious programming of the Imperial Cult in many of its dictates, and so
Jim’s efforts in this regard were seen as a form of preparation for the coming
of the Empire, as such it did not raise suspicion with the Continuum.
Jim expended incredible
efforts at the habits and practices of concealment. He risked everything if he
was discovered.
The truth had to remain hidden.
He had to be careful with
how the genetic properties, and psychic qualities he was engineering into the
human race manifested themselves in the population. If the Continuum were to
discover these, even if he was able to hide his role in engineering them,
planet Earth and the Human race would be doomed.
In order to conceal his
work he also had to be on the lookout for spies from the Observer Corps, for
any manifestation of the machinations of the Continuum interfering in his work.
To carry out his work in a
state of concealment, Jim introduced subtle changes into the genetic profile of
the human being.
There were moments when he
used the transmission of a virus to affect widespread mutation, and at other
times he was more precise, changing the genetic profile in targeted ways,
family by family. He monitored the families he was experimenting on for
generations; following them, normalizing the changes he had introduced before
spreading those changes outward.
It was the most intricate
of all puzzles.
He pieced it together under
extreme duress.
He experienced great pride when he reflected on his efforts.
All the things he was
aiming for had to be kept in a state of constant tension, with multiple
trajectories kept isolated from one another until they were ready to be blended
with other parts of his study.
He was busy, and everything
he did had to be guarded, kept secret, the systems that he put in place to
protect them were artificial and unnatural. They were so extensive that he ran
the risk of being exposed, simply by virtue of the fact that he was taking
measures to protect his work.
His research was slow,
meticulous and exhaustive. As his experiments progressed he began to uncover
memories of his own that recalled the initial work he had participated in, work
which led to the creation of the Collective.
Those memories confirmed
for him a narrative concerning the Ancient People which he had suspected was
true, but had previously doubted, thinking that they could be false memories
from an artificial narrative he might have lived in his private world.
He had no way of
independently verifying this until he began to study the electro-magnetic
frequency that comprised the consciousness of human beings.
Jim began to peel back the
barriers that separated one person from another, exposing them to each other,
plumbing the limits he discovered, finding where the threshold between one
human consciousness and another actually existed.
As he delved into this
field of research his subjects became deranged, unstable, so he learned to
manage their confusion medicinally, through the intersection of chemical aides
and frequency blockers.
Madness and insanity
followed his subjects into the breeding pool, in some cultures he established
cultural protections for these people, allowing them to thrive and procreate at
random, they became holymen and holywomen, oracles and shamans.
In other cultures he
isolated them, constructing social taboos that identified those traits early
and deliberately ostracized them.
In all cases they became
fodder for his studies, their activities were communicated upwards to him through the institutions he developed.
As much as Jim pretended to
care for humanity, in the final analysis human beings were little more than
laboratory animals in service to his greater purpose.
Jim observed the subtle
changes taking place in the human population; in the electromagnetic
frequencies he monitored, emanating from their cognition and its nearly
imperceptible influence on the electromagnetic fields proximate to them.
The patience he had
mastered while he was coming back to consciousness, coming out from the
long-silent interval of the great sleep, and later during the sequestration and
his imprisonment, and later still, on his sojourn as an Observer, leading the
thousands of missions he went on to track down the lost colonies of the Ancient
People, tracking them all the way to Planet Earth.
He studied these patterns
with extreme patience as he pulled the genetic structures of human beings
apart, sequencing and resequencing them, combing and recombining them,
manipulating the proteins and amino acids that formed the tiniest links in the
chain of their genetic profiles.
He reduced them to the foundation of their being, with the
objective of strengthening their access to their genetic memory, and enhancing
the retention of the key particles, like magnetite and lithium, which allowed
for the individual person to connect with the Earth’s cynergenic field.
Jim was pleased with what
he found in his subjects. He was encouraged by their reaction to his work and
the feedback he received.
Whether the individuals
adjusted to and thrived from the alterations he introduced into their genetic
lineage, or whether they suffered, experienced madness, alienation and pain,
Jim was pleased.
Relatively few the
experiments he conducted resulted in death. Most came through the changes
alive, aware and able to procreate.
He established different
social paradigms in various cultural groups for how to manage the population of
the gifted, and he coordinated systems to identify them and report them to him
for closer observation as their gifts and talents emerged.
As his work progressed,
Earth became home to him, in a way that no other world had.
Jim felt something like
happiness for the first time he could remember as he pursued his mission. After age upon age of pursuing
his cold purpose, the experience of life on Earth made him feel a sense of joy,
even pleasure.
He experienced a sense of
safety and personal security emanating from the cynergenic field. He felt a
deep connection to humanity, and an atavistic connection to the replicants he
had made of himself, with all of them working towards the actualization of a common goal.
He was filled with a sense
of purpose, and if gratified him as he moved toward the completion of it.
These challenges and the
surmounting of them brought him another kind of joy.
He was looking for
resolution, and he found it. He found it at the end of the line, in the last
remnant of the Ancient People still remaining in the galaxy.
He found it in human beings
with their unique abilities, giving him something for which he was eternally
grateful, and he was prepared to offer up the whole of it for the sake of
destroying the Continuum.
The humans of Earth and the
Collective would burn together on the altar of his sacred purpose, to satisfy
the trust he had taken to himself, for his own ambition.
The citizens of the Empire
would be the beneficiaries, he told himself.
If Jim was lucky he would
escape the onslaught. If he did, he was determined to scour the galaxy for
another world like Earth. Intending to build a new civilization from there, and
a home where he could end his days.
Appendix Chapter Five, Spymaster
Jim could not be
everywhere.
He worked tirelessly
through the agency of his replicants.
Even with his cadre of
dopplegangers he frequently encountered the limits of what was possible for him
to do.
The human population grew
quickly, spreading throughout the world. Jim guided them to places where they
could establish their villages, in areas where the electromagnetic fields were
optimal for his research, where there was access to food and water, and
where they would develop for the greatest length of time independent from one
another.
Jim required autonomous
population growth and cultural development to test his hypotheses.
He used his agency to
establish networks around the world. He cultivated spies, informants and
confessors in every tribe.
They were like spiders spinning. The people had different
names for them, calling them priest, shaman, witch-doctor, prophet and oracle.
They were the officiants of
the sacred rights.
They were his eyes and ears
among the people.
They listened to and
recorded everything the people said and did, keeping a special ear out for
incidences of the paranormal and psychic intrusion.
They were indispensable to
him.
Jim built a global system
of interlocking cells.
Each web of spies served their own community first. They were
tribalistic in the extreme, and conditioned to be xenophobic as the Continuum
prescribed.
Each and every independent
cell held allegiances to the people of their own tribe first, but at the
highest levels they underwent initiations that opened-up their broader purpose.
They were initiated into
the sacred mysteries which gave them a glimpse of the galaxy, of the Empire, of
the great Collective Consciousness and the Continuum, which was the demi-urge
at its heart.
In the shadows Jim
cultivated a secret cabal, hostile to the Continuum, people who were
conditioned to believe that their sacred mission was to prepare the world for
the inevitable encroachment of the Empire.
Unity would be required of
the people of Earth if they were to survive an encounter with the Empire, and
to that end they set aside their tribalism, shared information and cooperated
together.
Their safety and security depended on it.
There was nothing more
important than this, the fate of humanity was at stake.
Jim was extremely selective
about who he chose to promote into these ranks. He deliberately chose men and
women who had a weak connection to the cynergenic field.
He engineered into their
genetic profile capacities for psychic resistance.
He never perfected these,
but his most trusted spies were unreadable to ordinary psychics.
They were indoctrinated
into the secret societies after careful consideration and vetting, every one
was interconnected by their sense of duty and loyalty to humanity itself, and
to Jim above all.
They were absolutely
trustworthy and their presence allowed Jim the freedom to roam about the world.
The cloak of secrecy was
everything.
Jim had to be able to
conceal his work from the Continuum. He had to be able to endure its scrutiny
at each and every cycle in which he was required to report back to HomeWorld,
where he would expose his consciousness to the Continuum, and share his
first-hand experience with his brothers and sisters in the Collective.
This task was filled by a
replicant, a version of himself who was completely committed to the mission Jim
had claimed as their collective purpose. To prepare themselves to pass through
the ordeal Jim had restricted the experiences of this one replicant, Jim
controlled what it was exposed to, making it so that he had precious few
secrets to hide at the moment his consciousness was opened to the powerful
examination of the Continuum.
He had to conceal his
movements and machinations from the mechana of spycraft that the Continuum had
required him to position all around the world; satellites with powerful tools
for audio and visual surveillance.
He had to bend to these
demands.
He had to be even more
careful in consideration of the living spies he knew the Continuum had sent to
Earth, his fellow members of the Observer Corps, sent to watch over him and
report back to the Continuum covertly.
They were all a part of the
Collective, but Jim felt no sense of belonging to them.
When Earth entered the
digital age, he had to be even more mindful of his actions because he knew the
Continuum and its spies had penetrated the information technologies of nations
states, and could use their technological resources to sort massive amounts of
data at incredible speeds, thereby increasing the likelihood that he would be
discovered grew by an order of magnitude.
Jim orchestrated the
development of his international organizations, personally managing the
traditions that would allow them to progress, pulling the cloak of secrecy over
it, stretching its shadowy tendrils into every facet of human society; the
Templars, the Hashishim, the Jesuits, the Illuminati, they all belonged to him,
served his bidding, fulfilled his purpose, operating in the shadows, well
beneath the notice of the Observers.
Jim continued the
meditative practices that he had developed, practices which allowed him to
partition his mind and thoughts from the Continuum and his fellow members of
the Collective.
He exercised his ability to
keep secrets. He did so while
probing the mysteries of Earth’s Cynergenic field. It was unlike the artificial
construction on HomeWorld in distinct ways, it did not have the
smooth-predictable channels of energy, the linear circuitry, and other
structural features that were the product of design and intention.
It was organic, it was
messy.
In the crucial moment to
come he would be exposed to the scrutiny of the Continuum, he would have to
keep everything he had been planning partitioned behind a wall of sheer will,
until the moment when the disaster struck and then he would have to let it go.
The tension of the timing
would be fraught with danger.
He had to keep secrets even
from himself, shrouding all of his intentions in mystery, he had to trust that
his replicants also trusted him, because like him, they were essentially free
creatures.
He utilized the
institutions he had developed to test and augment his theories, both concerning
his own liabilities and concerning the hidden mysteries of Earth.
Jim was Prime, and he
watched over his Seconds with systematic scrutiny. These dopplegangers had to
be kept out of the information loop for hundreds of cycles, fulfilling the
regular functions of the Observer, responsible for reporting to the Central
Planet, hiding from the Collective only the things which Jim had always kept
hidden and was practiced at hiding. They had to remain ignorant of the details
of the unfolding mission.
The fact that they remained
willing, spoke to the purity of his purpose and filled him with pride.
Jim busied himself with
work that served a dual purpose, tasks that advanced his personal mission,
which also fit within the assignment he had undertaken for the Continuum
He seemed to be devoted to
the type of work the Continuum expected him to do; archiving, preserving,
recording the history of this world.
Through his international
network Jim kept alive the ancient languages
that informed disparate groups and tribes of their essential unity, even the
original language that the colonists spoke when they crashed on this planet so
many eons ago.
He kept them alive through
his secret societies, using them as a vehicle for initiation as the members
ascended through the various hierarchies.
He hid codes within the
prevailing tongues, echoes of those ancient forms of speech that rang out like
a bell, or an alarm to the initiate when they heard it.
He created auto-hypnotic
tropes which they could not resist once their indoctrination was complete. He
moved freely through the circles of power with the use of them.
He could not rely on his
machinery to help him construct this network, the risk of its being hacked by
the Continuum was too great. Instead he relied on the ancient methods of oral
tradition, and complex mnemonics to achieve those ends.
Secrecy was the path to
survival.
Through it his purpose
became actualized.
Discovery would put the
Earth in jeopardy, and he might not know it until the warships appeared in the
sky above the tiny blue green planet, Imperial juggernauts large enough to blot
out the sun.
That would threaten
everything.
Jim bided his time.
He was forming a living
weapon and he layered into its consciousness an implicit acceptance of cyclical
nature of revolution, of the rise and fall of governments.
The individual that emerged
from his work would have to be able to see the destruction that he or she was
wrecking on the Collective in a contextual structure that seemed natural.
Jim utilized his network of
spies to form political states, to build Empires and dynasties, turning slaves
into royalty, making great armies out of herdsmen and nomads, turning bandits
into Kings, only to tear them down at the apex of their power, as if it were a
natural cycle of growth, death, and rebirth.
This satisfied his
ambition, and it satisfied the hunger of the Collective as well.
Jim’s was the unseen hand
behind the powers and principalities of the world, he was the invisible
whisperer that conditioned the policies of the most powerful people. He would
point and they would go, taking credit for the movement to themselves, never
realizing the deep influence they were subjected to.
The rulers of Earth never
fully suspected how they were being manipulated.
He exercised his power in a
variety of ways, overtly and covertly, with stealth and might.
He was a strategist, and
none of the tools of statecraft were out of reach for him: gold, sex, power,
fear, he employed them like an artist would a brush, or a sculptor would the
chisel and hammer.
The actors on the stage
rarely knew what was happening in the grand scheme of things. He guided them
with the lightest of touches, planting seeds inside their heads when they were
children, reaping the fruit he had sewn when it was ripe.
Everything was cultivated
and he was the master planter, the invisible gardener tending to everything
that grew within his sight.
Jim pushed and pushed,
ever-so-subtly to bring coherence to human government, binding them through
language systems, tribal allegiances, and systems of fealty.
As time progressed he
allowed for the emergence of empires, he formed city states into nations, and principalities into
kingdoms.
He implemented different
governmental systems to stand in tension with one another, fostering
hierarchical systems of governance from the top down, which articulated the
divine right of the rulers to rule, of the nobility to inherit both wealth and
power.
Against these hierarchies,
he allowed for systems of government based on mutuality and common bonds,
developed from the implicit understanding that the right to rule stemmed from
the consent of the governed.
These were not developments
that the Continuum desired, but the drama it produced when civilizations
clashed was utterly tantalizing to the Collective.
He wrote the laws that
governed the great powers of the world, and he established the ministries which
those governments revolved around, relied upon. Within those organizations he
planted replicants of himself, and the human cadre of followers who were
utterly committed to serving his ideals.
They worked together hand
in glove to orchestrate global conflict and its resolution. All in the service of
Jim’s mission.
He took extraordinary pains
to mask his work, keeping it secret from the Continuum against impossible odds,
while keeping the human societies that he manipulated in the dark at the same
time.
He did not conceal it all,
rumors abounded of secret societies and secret powers, but nothing was ever
substantiated to link the rumors to the reality of what Jim had actually built,
to what he was actually doing.
Appendix Chapter Six, Approach
There was an endless amount
of work to do, and it went precariously slow.
Jim allowed his replicants
to organize his network of spies and educators, weaving the webs of
surveillance he required, and he empowered one special replicant to deliver his
report to the Collective each one hundred year cycle. He shared virtually
nothing with this version of himself requiring that it keep only the secrets
that they had always kept, the secrets they were practiced at keeping from the
Continuum.
The work being conducted on
Earth was slow, interminably slow, but in comparison to the millions of years
Jim had spent in the great sleep, and in sequestration, the time ahead of him
was almost nothing.
On Earth he was acting
under a deadline, he had to achieve his ends before the next great catastrophe
struck the planet, this made the passage of time seem like torture, as he
pulled millions of threads together in his breeding programs, searching for the
perfect vessel to carry out his work.
He was like a hunter-gatherer looking for something
that did not yet exist, the thing that would sustain him.
He did not even know that
it was possible.
He and his replicants acted
in concert, they were as one in their resolve. They were free agents, each of
them.
There were only rare and
isolated moments of betrayal. These were dealt with swiftly, and none of his
co-agents ever questioned the necessity of it.
Their work together was a
miracle of cooperative effort.
The deployment allowed him
to devote his attention to observing
and overseeing the mutation of the human stock. Tracking both the wild progress
occurring in the unregulated breeding pools, as well as the planned for changes
taking shape in his controlled studies.
It was the safest way to proceed.
There were moments in
history when Jim thought he had found the individual he was looking for, but
the timing was not right, he could not engineer the crises he required in time
to take advantage of their gifts, if those gifts could be fully developed; they
were born at a time too distant from the moment of catastrophe.
There was a prince in the
Himalayas, a fisherman in Palestine, a camel driver in Arabia, each separated
from each other by hundreds of years.
The timing was never right.
His work was like sifting
the sand of the ocean floor, or the full harvest of finely milled flour through
an equally fine meshed screen. He needed to touch every particle, to look at
each one as it passed through the sieve.
Jim built systems into the
social fabric, systems of reporting that allowed him to identify those who carried the genetic structures he was looking
for, so that he could build on them.
He did not have to rely on
his network of spies and informants for this. The reporting simply bubbled-up.
Over time he learned to take greater efforts in concealing the lives of these
extraordinary peoples.
At a glance he could see, a
hue in the Iris, the contour of an earlobe, the shape of a thumb, the texture
of hair, physical traits that marked a new born child as distinct, they were
the talk of the village, and news carried fast.
Investigators would be
dispersed.
Cognitive testing followed,
and depending on the results, Jim would place an emissary of some type close to
the individual; to protect them, to watch over them, sometimes they would be as
intimate as a teacher or a private tutor, at other time they might simply be
situated as a remote benefactor.
These were always
extraordinary people, it was difficult to contain their fame, they had deep
connections to their world and their people through the cynergenic field, they
were frequently blessed with great physical beauty, strength and power.
Jim would attempt to hide
them, to secure their genetic material for his breeding program, and to hide
their offspring if he could.
They belonged to him, they were his creation.
His life was one of deep
analytical scrutiny, of asserting, testing
and rejecting various hypothesis concerning the exact structure within the
human brain that would establish the strongest link to Earth’s cynergenic
field.
He tested the population of
his subjects in hospitals and asylums, in monasteries and convents, in
university laboratories and in prisons, sequencing their genes to either
enhance or restrict their capacity to carry nano-particles of magnatite and
other conductive elements within the brain that facilitated cynergy.
He covertly exported some
of his finding back to the Empire where his own covert operatives, replicants
of himself received them and inserted some of his work into the gene-pools of
selected worlds.
It was a way for him to
preserve his work should he be discovered and a disaster befall Earth.
He tested candidates in the
military, breeding them both for their strength of limb and their mental
acuity. He experimented on them as mercilessly as the Continuum ever did,
testing the limits of human courage and despair.
He was as amoral in his
pursuit of his vision as anyone or anything that had ever been created, and he
knew it.
The genetic line he was
searching for slowly came into focus, he mirrored the properties belonging to
his studies and built them into the genetic simulacrum of his own body, but
only when he was certain of the risks. He personally felt the power of his
design and with that he programmed the rest of his aides in the same way.
It gave him greater control
and personal security over the autonomous versions of himself, his co-factors
in the mission.
In spite of his incredible
progress, pulling the desired properties through the human gene pool on Earth
was a different matter. It was excruciatingly slow, though it advanced
significantly once he knew the properties he was actually looking for.
Jim pushed his program of
genetic modification across all fronts.
Year after year he
validated his work, he verified the
general strengthening and enhancement of the specific features he was building
into the genetic endowment of the human race; psychicism, extra sensory
perception, access to and facility with genetic memory.
He was always on the
lookout for persons born with significant advancement in their connection to
the cynergenic field, when he found them he exported those genetic traits to
the population at large.
As time went on the changes
came more rapidly, it was more than he could manage as a single person, without
his team of replicants he would have been powerless to control the program he
had set in place
He was moving toward his
goal; steadily, inexorably moving, and the exercise was changing him. He had
become single minded and fixed on one outcome.
Nothing else mattered for
him and he was despotic in his pursuit of it.
The humans of Earth, these
Children of the Ancient People, they represented the answer to the Continuum,
and he began to imagine a future for himself within the new Collective he was
forming.
He fantasized about saving
Earth and himself along with it, after liberating the Empire and destroying the
HomeWorld, his esteem for himself was completely reliant on these fantasies.
The sacrifice of the human
race would lead to freedom across the Imperium, the sacrifice would be great
but a remnant would survive, and he along with them.
After liberating the
Empire, the Empire would rescue the survivors on Earth. That became his plan.
Jim brought all the threads
he had been weaving for his great-genetic tapestry together in North America,
in the United States, a nation lovingly referred to as “the melting pot,” in
that place his work came to fruition.
Jim guided its development.
It became the indispensable
country, wealthy and powerful and a beacon to the world. Its democratic
foundation was the antithesis of everything the Continuum stood for, and it
infused the people with a mythology, a set or archetypes that conditioned its
members to be willing to make incredible sacrifices for the greater good.
It was a place where
refugees from all over the world came for the hope of peace and justice, for
prosperity and advancement, this allowed Jim to watch over both the random
interactions that were taking place in the gene pool at an ever increasing
rate, as well as giving him access to the best institution where he could
conduct his experiments.
More importantly, his
positioning here gave him proximity to the epicenter of the coming disaster,
the great caldera volcano lurking at the center of the continent.
When Jim discovered the
families which he surmised would produce the offspring he had been looking for
he inserted himself into their lives as a counselor, to closely observe them
for the validation of his
hypothesis, and its actualization.
He manipulated them though
his agents, preparing them like an artist might prepare a canvas, establishing
the material conditions that would bring about the end he had been seeking.
He waited, he watched…and
what he was looking for did not come from the expected quarter.
She came randomly from a
discarded thread.
He was delighted about
this.
Nature had produced what he
had not.
He found that fitting.
Jim thought it was poetic.
They named her Katherine,
after the Saint and martyr from bygone Alexandria, the patroness of
philosophers.
Jim was a cautions
scientist.
He had long since validated
his hypothesis concerning Earth’s cynergenic field, though his original
hypothesis was not inclusive of all of its properties.
Throughout his thousands of
years of research his focus was only on the nature of an individual person’s
engagement with the nous-sphere.
Through his programs he
validated his theory on how that field could be accessed, the balance of
physical properties that had to be present in the human brain for it to
function in the collective field, without at the same time driving the person to
madness.
It was a grand design in
bio-chemistry and bio-physics, in genetic engineering and electromagnetism.
The living organism had to
be carefully controlled. Their powers and liabilities depended on nature and
nurture, both
He was interested in
actively controlling it, not merely the passive experience of it.
He needed the power to
actively manipulate the cynergenic field, both for his own use, and to create
the perfect weapon for his plan to destroy the Collective and its Continuum.
Through the millennia he
sacrificed hundreds of thousands of subjects, condemning them to insanity.
He documented the full
scope of their suffering, telling himself that it was a small price for these
individuals to pay for the salvation of the whole.
He counseled himself, justifying his crimes on the theory that he was
merely seeking to balance the scales of justice.
It was early in the
twentieth century when he found her.
Before he did, Jim had
begun to despair.
He was only a few decades
away from the cataclysmic event that he intended to use as the force behind his
attack on the Collective and the Continuum.
He believed he was running
out of time.
He had identified a few
possible candidates, but based on their cognitive testing and the stability of
their psyche, he knew that they were not strong enough to manage the psychic
connection, between Earth and HomeWorld, the cynergenic energy he required his
vessel to channel was unknown, therefore its strength had to have no
discernable upward limit.
Jim had attempted to
engineer a prototype of his replicant body to stand in the place of this
vessel, but he failed time and time again. He and his replicants could access
the cynergenic field telepathically, but there were limits to what they could
do there. There were dimensions of complexity to the nous-sphere, complexities
he had not been able to fathom, and would not be able to until he found the
object of his intention.
Just as he was beginning to
give up hope and plan for one of his alternatives, she emerged from an obscure
corner of his field of research.
Jim found Kathy, at long
last.
She was the thing that he
had been searching for, she was his Holy Grail, she was the sacred vessel that
would carry his ambitions and deliver justice to the Continuum.
He took control of her.
In the end, her parents
were grateful for the opportunity to give her up. Jim was primed to begin her
preparation as the holy victim.
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
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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