Emergence 4.0 - Part Five (a), Jim, Appendix, Collected Chapters

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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