The phone rang.
This surprised Kathy.
She did not receive many calls, and when she did she
would have already anticipated it; this was true in most cases. She would know both
the caller and the time of the call. The datum would flash in her consciousness
minutes, sometime hours before the call would actually take place, the
variables only depended on how long the caller might have been thinking about
dialing her number.
Throughout most of her life the moments between the
first sound of the telephone ringing and the time she choose to pick the
receiver up from the cradle were moments she spent fantasizing that the call
would have some clandestine purpose, that it would take the form of an
invitation to join a conspiracy, one that would free her from her obligations
to the world so that she could save it from itself.
The fact that she was surprised by the call informed her
that it was Jim.
She could never anticipate him.
She picked the phone up the handset and said, “Hello.”
“I need to see you,” said Jim without preamble. He spoke
in his typical-tone of voice, dry and detached, as mirthless and remote as
Mount Everest. But then he said:
“Café?” it was a question, and she sensed something
different about him. He was pensive and hesitant.
She was well acquainted with his clipped and terse
mannerism. The single word was a question: Would
she, could she go out?
His unusual tone suggested that it was an imperative,
she heard it as: You must see me now.
There was an urgency to it.
It was primal, it was a statement of need. He might have
been a parched man asking for water, or a suffocating man asking for air.
“Yes.” Kathy replied, keeping herself detached and
playing along with his language game, which was their normal repartee. “Hungry,”
she said, it was both a statement and a question; she was stating her current
condition and inquiring about his.
She was also trying to mask the concern for him welling
up inside her.
Jim did not reply, he merely hung up the phone without
comment, brusque and abrupt as usual. The normality of it did not hide the
unusual tone she detected earlier, something she would have never expected to
discern in him. It was fear.
Kathy gathered her things and got ready to go.
She did not have to ask where. They only ever met in one
place, a busy café near her apartment. It was secure she was there so often
that her handlers hardly registered her activities there. The regularity of her
visits there inured them to it, this rendered it safe for her to carry out a
private encounter…as private as she would ever get.
She did not have to ask when, the time was always right
now.
She hurried out the door to meet him.
When she arrived he was already in line, she took her
place next to him, ahead of a couple of other people.
“Small coffee…please;”
Jim ordered, perfunctorily, and turned obliquely to face solicit hers; “Soy
chai, thank you.” Said Kathy.
They sat together at a table by the window of the
storefront, in a booth with the morning sun to their backs, beaming down on
them over Hennepin Avenue.
Seeing Jim made even more clear to Kathy that there was
something urgent happening with him. Nevertheless, they carried out the
mechanics of their routine as if it were a normal day.
An ordinary visit between the two of them.
They read the morning newspaper and surveilled the crowd.
In that regard at least, it was a morning like any other.
The café was busy.
They were together, and they were not together at the
same time.
They were both in the crowd of people and completely
isolated from it simultaneously.
This was not unusual, detachment had always
characterized the way they interacted with each other. For each of them it was
their basic approach to the world.
Their proximity to one another was deliberate,
intentional, they were each acutely aware of the other’s body, the focus of
their attention, what they were reading, seeing, observing.
It was intimate, though any other person would have felt
the tension between them like a wall of estrangement.
Jim and Kathy were beyond that, it was an artifice they
had cultivated to keep her handlers disinterested in Jim.
This was the way Jim related to her, it was something
Kathy never questioned, because it protected them.
Time passed in silence, minutes became hours, and those
stretched into the afternoon, becoming a longer period of time than usual.
Jim and Kathy were quiet, until Jim began to weep.
Sitting side by side as they were and reading, Kathy did
not notice immediately.
If Jim were any other person in the world she would have
known he was crying before the tears even fell.
When she turned her head and saw him, she was quietly
alarmed.
She had never seen such a display of emotion from Jim
before. “What is wrong with you?” Kathy asked, sounding scared and judgmental
at the time, as they were two Vulcans witnessing one of them falling apart.
Jim said, “Nothing at all.”
He just looked at her, looked through her for a long
moment.
He would not say why, he could not speak to it.
He had nothing to offer her but lies.
Kathy moved to the other side of the both to face him
across the table. She looked at Jim for a long time, observing him. This was
unusual but not outside the norm.
They often spent long periods of time together in
silence. It was a characteristic of their friendship, of the only friendship
she had ever experienced.
Kathy could not read Jim’s thoughts, the way she could
everybody else…anybody else.
However, she was adept at body language, and his was no
different, the smallest movements of his features, a facial tick, the sweep of
his gaze, his breathing.
They spoke to her in
volumes.
She watched him as he sat at their table with the
newspaper folded in his hands. She watched intently, until finally she asked
him: “Jim…what is wrong?”
“I cannot say.” He said, as he looked past her, not
meeting her eyes, but at the same time inviting a greater degree of scrutiny
from her.
It was intentional, he was drawing her in; there was a
purpose behind it that both frightened and intrigued her.
“Why not?” Kathy asked, a bit more insistently.
She was normally circumspect, but in this moment she stopped
caring, deciding to push against boundaries that she would have otherwise
respected.
“You would not understand, if I did,” he said, pausing
for a moment then, locking eyes with her before adding, “I’m not talking about
it.”
There was a tone of finality in his voice, as if to say,
that is it, you will not get anymore from
me, but I want you to remain curious. There is something going on, something
you cannot know about, but please try to figure it out
“I do not get it.” She responded. “Why did you ask to
see me today and in such a dismal mood, if you did not need something from me?”
Kathy wanted very much to be needed by Jim. It was a
part of her conditioning.
Of all the people she had ever known, everyone who had ever
exploited her for one purpose or another, she believed that Jim was the only person
she had spent time with that simply wanted to be in her company, who had no
ulterior motive.
“As I said…you would not understand,” Jim replied. “Even
if I told you, you would not understand. I am in the middle of something
intensely personal, regarding a project I have been working on for a very long
time. We have never spoken of it, but the anticipation of its realization is
more than I counted on.”
“That is all I can say at the moment.” Jim said, apparently
trying to shut her down, but it was a ruse, and Kathy knew that he wanted her
to pry, he was not really seeking closure.
Then he said something she had never heard him say before:
“I apologize.” The words sounded strange coming from him. “What I am on the
brink of accomplishing is…terrifying.”
Whatever was going on with Jim, she knew he was not
actually terrified. She also got the impression that she would know soon enough
what it was, she could tell that his plans involved her.
She also surmised that Jim wanted it to be a
surprise…needed to surprise her, and she was open to that.
Kathy loved surprises. He was preparing something for
her, something uniquely for her, as true as he had always been, she was
confident that he would not suddenly ask her to do something. He was not
seeking to gain something from her in some ugly and vulgar way.
In that moment Kathy sensed the emptiness inside her
friend.
She did not require psychic powers or telepathy to feel
it.
She only needed the normal human attribute of empathy.
Today there was something hollow inside Jim, like a
vacuum pulling at his consciousness, where normally what she found in him was
an active awareness, a keen perception quick and sharp
Nothing escaped his attention, he was a master of
minutiae.
In every moment he had ever shared with her, he
demonstrated a degree of perceptivity that often outstripped her own.
She knew he was not gifted in the same way that she was.
The two of them had never spoken of it, but that was
something she knew.
Nevertheless he was unique, like her, they were both
unique in their different ways. She often thought that they were like two aliens
from different civilization making friends on a world that belonged to neither
of them.
Kathy reflected on her time
with Jim this morning, she found it dismaying.
She wanted to comfort him.
She wanted to shake him up, or trap him in a
conversation that would force him to reveal something.
She wanted to play the detective, but he was elusive.
He could see the play she was making from a distance. It
left her with the sense that she was the one being played.
Kathy never felt disadvantaged. Not since she was a small
child.
She was always holding the cards, but never with Jim.
He had always been the master and she was the pupil,
always, like Abelard and Eloise, she thought, and that was an apt analogy.
There was something in Jim’s behavior that reminded her
of the times when people who had been deeply involved in her life were saying
goodbye, like her parents, and those few of her teachers that she had genuinely
loved.
It was her gift to know what was happening with people
before they ever said a word, this had nothing to do with her psychic or
telepathic abilities; people behaved in certain fixed ways, manifesting specific
mannerisms that formed patterns over time.
Kathy thought she saw certain patterns revealing
themselves in Jim today, it was as if he were anticipating his own death, and
the thought that she might lose him filled her with despair. It activated a
spirit inside her that forced her to want to discover the truth and challenge
the things that she did not want to happen, so that they would not happen.
For Jim’s part, now that she was here sitting at the
table across from him, he was unsure of his motive. All of his long life he had
been moving toward this point in time, and now there was confusion.
He felt it like a weakness, and he knew that he had
already succumbed to it.
There was nothing in his plan that required him to see
her today. He had tested every contingency and knew what the tolerances were
for the things he needed her to do when he was gone.
He had prepared the way; everything was ready.
There was something else happening in him, it related to
why he asked her to see him today, it was something unfamiliar, and he had to
consider whether or not he might be feeling guilt, or shame over what he was
about to do.
He wondered whether or not it put his work at risk.
Jim had to ask himself; what difference would it make
seeing her today?
He could not tell her what was about to happen. The plan
he had enacted would proceed without her knowledge of it, in fact, it required
her to be ignorant of it.
It was vital to the plan that in the critical moment she
be taken at unawares.
Tens of thousands of years of evolution and engineering had
brought him to this point with her, had brought both of them to this moment; all
of his careful plans for selective breeding, his careful manipulations of the
genetic code, his constant and endless patience had brought them both to this
point.
The last few decades had been the most delicate, guiding
her, educating her, defusing threats all around her, preparing her for the
final steps on the journey, which she would have to walk alone, blind and
ignorant.
Sitting there with Kathy made it easy for him to get
lost in the reverie of recollection, and not without a bit of pride to go along
with his fear. The moment he had been striving for had come.
The distance he had journeyed since the time he had
awakened to his purpose, that distance in both time and space was surreal. His
fate, the very real prospect of death, the fate of the galaxy hinged on
everything that would transpire between him and Kathy in the next few days.
Kathy did not know it, but the call she had received
that morning was the call she had always hoped for.
Timing was everything, and like everything it was fluid.
The timing was in motion, subject to change by external
variables.
The plan must come to fruition exactly as he had devised
it, like a line of continuity cutting through trillions of possibilities
Jim knew that he had to trust his insight, if he did not
falter of the potentialities he had been striving for would become actualized. Kathy
would fulfil her purpose, and through her Jim would realize his.
It would all become real if he did not falter, and he
felt that giving into his desire to see her one last time had the potential to
put it all at risk.
He and Kathy, both of them would become transcendent,
each in their own way, each to their own end.
He believed that. He trusted in it.
It was clear to Kathy that Jim had something to say to
her.
She sensed it was bad news, she sensed that it was bad for
her, and that it was bad for everyone.
If it had been anyone other than Jim, she would have
known what it was. He would not have had to say anything. She could have read
his mind.
There had been moments when she felt as if she had a
glimpse into it, but what she saw and felt in those moments confused her. In
those lucid moments it was as if she saw Jim for who he truly was, and he was an
alien, even though he was seemingly the most grounded human being she had ever
met.
When she reflected on Jim, which was one of her favorite
past-times, she understood that he knew things about the history of the world
that only someone with abilities like hers could possibly know.
There were times when she had to ask herself if she was the
alien, but the voices inside of her dissuaded her from such speculations and confirmed
for her that she was not.
She was human, she was fully human, Kathy was a daughter
of the Earth, as much as she wanted to believe that she had fallen to Earth,
like Kal-El, or David Bowie, as much as that would have given her a convenient
way to explain what differentiated her from the rest of the human family, she
knew that it was only a fantasy.
Kathy pulled herself back from those speculations, and
focused on what was transpiring in front of her eyes.
Jim gave off a variety of visible signals that told her
much about what was going on with him, they told her that there were things he
had to say to her, things he wanted her to do for him, not at this moment, but
in the days ahead.
Kathy would do anything for him, and the most
significant signal Jim was broadcasting was that something terrible was about
to happen.
She felt that Jim had a role for her to play, and that she
was vital to the plan he had spoken of.
This was not a stretch of her imagination, Jim had said
as much. More importantly to Kathy was that she got the sense that she would
never see him again after today. It made her want to retreat within herself, to
revisit all of the memories she had of him, and those who reminded her of him,
memories that went back thousands of years, to the dim reaches of her ancestry.
She wanted to revisit all of the intuitions that his presence called forth in
her, projections from her fantasy life that she found difficult to
differentiate from reality, and which she habitually repressed.
Kathy thought that she might find clues to what he
wanted from her, there within her, if she could explore there she might find
them, and they could provide some context, which would be comforting.
All analysts enjoy the comfort of context, and one thing
she knew for certain was that she could not remain in this state of liminality forever, though she endured
it for the remaining hours they sat together.
They spoke little, and Jim relaxed. He enjoyed being
with Kathy, the rhythm of her mind was like music to him, his thoughts in
syncopation with hers easily, as they always did.
In those moments he felt like he was home, it was the
closest thing to his natural state of being that he had ever experienced during
the long years he had been away.
Jim’s heart and mind were fixed on the coming conflict, on
the resolution of his life’s work, on all the plans that he had carefully
prepared.
He had plans within plans, and there were contingencies that
he tended to, as intricate and delicate as a spider’s web.
Despite the anxiety that he was feeling, the existential
weight of his preparations, the loss he was contemplating, the devastation that
was coming to Earth. Despite it all he was able to maintain his calm.
His body was engineered for it.
This is not to say that he incapable of feeling panic or
fear, but that his body regulated those impulses with a speed that bordered on
the instantaneous.
Jim had these last few hours, he wanted to spend them
with Kathy, not merely in furtherance of his aims, but because he loved her as
much as he was capable of love.
Kathy represented the realization of his deepest
purpose, his pride, and the satisfaction of ambition. In Kathy he not only
found what he had had spent his long life looking for, his project with her was
also like the unravelling of a mystery, or the assembly of a puzzle.
She was his magna
opa, his great work.
Kathy was also beautiful and wise, intelligent and
funny; these qualities were completely unnecessary to his design for her, and
yet they delighted him.
He could soak up her visage all day long, which is
exactly what he intended to do on this day, this day that was his crucible, his
last day with her
In a few hours he would be gone. His plan for her would
be on a glide path. The way was well prepared. He would soon enter a place
where time itself was meaningless, but events would be turning here on Earth
that had to be measured to the second, and he would not be here to oversee it.
Kathy had to play her part, she had to be unaware that
she was doing it.
When the vital moment struck, she had to be blind to
what was happening, she, who could see everything had to be taken by surprise.
Jim finished his coffee, gathered himself and departed the
café. He said goodbye to Kathy and left the cafe. He was unemotional, focused.
He did not reach out to her, even though Kathy was sure he had wanted to. He
was methodical in his bearing; as always. He never looked back.
Kathy watched him go, following him with her eyes and
when he turned the corner, she followed him with her thoughts, which were
disturbing.
She was never able to read Jim, but today the membrane
of consciousness that shielded him from her was less opaque.
It was almost translucent.
With a little more focus, with slightly more
concentration, she felt as if she could go to a place with Jim, a psychic
place, a place she had never been able to approach with him before.
She thirsted for it.
She sat in her chair, at the table, in the noisy café.
She sat upright, hands folded together on the table top. She closed her eyes
and allowed the teaming voices of the world to recede from her.
She was vulnerable in these moments, it could be frightening.
She was disconnected from her immediate present, time could lose its
significance, she would not be able to track its passage around her.
Kathy rarely accessed these gifts in such a setting, it
had been decades since she had tried, but she was faced with an urgency that
she had not felt before. She was now certain that she would never see Jim
again, and there was something she needed to know about him, something going on
with him that she had to understand.
She had to do it now.
She relaxed her mind and entered that space, trusting
that her handlers would protect her and keep her safe.
Kathy connected to him, locked onto him. She was looking
through his eyes for the first time, sharing his consciousness even as he got
into his car and drove away.
She kept the full range of her abilities hidden from her
proctors and handlers, pretending to struggle with things she could do without
effort. Kathy could slip into a bond like this with anyone at any time, but
never before with Jim.
He was able to resist her. He was unique in that.
Of all the people she had ever met, Jim alone was a
mystery to her, as if he were a man out of myth, like some kind of Jedi Master.
In the moment she became connected to him, she felt his
despair.
It was as deep as the ocean and it frightened her.
She would never have guessed that he was afflicted with
such powerful emotions. He always appeared cool and calm, collected.
Never once in all their years of talking, never once did
he let his composure slip. Jim was the epitome of self-control.
Kathy followed him as he drove across town in his black
vintage car, the Ford Galaxy. She soaked up all the things he was looking at,
the objects, the people, the cars moving on the freeway. She was barely in
touch with him in that time, and she was not able to merge with the flow of his
thoughts, if he was thinking at all. Neither could she penetrate his memories.
She was merely seeing the world through his eyes,
experiencing it thorough his senses, while she felt the powerful emotions
emanating from deep inside him.
He told Kathy that he had a plane to catch, a funeral to
prepare for and he was afraid he would miss his flight if he lingered any longer.
The timing of his departure, and precisely where he was in flight when he set
the final stages of his plan in motion, those things were crucial.
He had to keep his activities hidden from the prying
eyes of his enemies. His relative position in the world was key to this
subterfuge.
Jim returned to his apartment to gather some things, to
set the artifacts in his apartment in just the right place for Kathy to find in
the days to come.
She had to be able to follow his plans when the time
came.
He did not need take very much with him; his black suit,
his watch, his tie.
“I’m dead;” he mused, and then “I am death itself, the
harbinger of doom.”
Jim knew that he would never return to his beloved
Earth, and that even if he did, nothing would be the same. The cultures that
had evolved over the past seventy thousand years would be wiped out, with no
guarantees that what would emerge in their place would have any of those
qualities that he loved, had nurtured and found so fascinating.
The humans of Earth had nourished his spirit for
millennia, he had found his rest in them, and they had helped him define his
purpose.
Jim allowed himself some time to remember all that he
had accomplished since he had found this world. Then his telephone rang to
inform him that his taxi had arrived.
With a final check of his preparations Jim exited his
apartment. He walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, taking in
the view of the lakes from the mezzanine of his apartment before he got in the
car.
Jim was struck as he had been many times before by his
feelings of ambivalence, knowing what was going to happen to this planet in a
few short days, while virtually the entire population of the Earth was
completely unsuspecting.
It was a strange burden.
Jim contemplated it while he made small talk with the
cabby, before he fell into a state of reflection.
I never should
have seen her, Jim thought. He felt himself filling-up with regret. It was
an emotion he was not inclined to feel, but at this moment he could not help
it.
He reviewed each step of his plan, reviewing it for
every possible detail, both believing and yet uncertain that he had laid the
path for Kathy to follow perfectly.
He visualized each step, telling himself that his
indulgence today was a necessary one, he had to see Kathy in order to
reinforce, in non-verbal ways, his absolute need for her to follow the plan
that he had laid out.
Another wave of doubt washed over him. Was he being foolish when he asked her to
see him?
His emotions were running high, too high. If he wasn’t
careful they might alert her to his designs.
Whenever he was with her, through all of the years that
he had known her, he had to maintain a strict discipline in order to shield his
mind from hers. It was the most difficult thing he had ever done, but he was
able to do it nonetheless like a runner at a marathon.
He always felt her consciousness probing his, like
psychic tentacles pulling at his mind. Never once had she penetrated him, but
Jim knew that it was only because she was not trying.
As forceful as her psychic powers were, their function
was largely autonomic. Kathy did not direct them so much as she was a passive
user of her powers. The training she had been given prepared her this way.
For her safety and for the security of the plan she had
spent most of her life learning the skills she needed to suppress her powers,
rather than push them to the limits.
Jim was always aware that if she had wanted to she could
break through his defenses with relative ease. He had to trust that the
psychological inhibitors he had planted within her would hold. When the time
came, it was paramount that she be taken by surprise, the plan depended on putting her in a state of existential shock at
just the right moment. The precariously delicate path he was leading her down
filled him with dread and sorrow, and guilt.
Jim couldn’t help but to indulge himself in this
feelings.
It was all over; it was over for everyone, and nothing
could be done about it.
Today was doom’s day. It was the end of the world. A
global tragedy was about to occur. It would affect everything on Earth,
changing humanity irrevocably, killing hundreds of thousands in minutes,
millions in days, and most of the rest in the few short years to come.
Very
few human beings were even aware of the danger. Human scientists had only
discovered the existence of the volcano that would be the material cause of
their destruction, a few decades past. It took years for them to measure and
quantify their data, even now they did not understand it. The geological system
was too complex, they did not know how much they did not know.
There was no way to reasonably predict an event they had
never experienced before, even though the certainty of its reoccurring was
absolute. The frequency of its repetition was on a scale of time so great that
the leading geologists had to admit that they could not pin point the
eventuality within years or decades, or even centuries.
For all they knew it could be millennia before it
erupted again.
No one disputed the fact that the event was overdue; it
was overdue by several thousand years. But then again what is a thousand years,
or even ten thousand years when the periodicity approached a million.
It was impossible to tell.
They watched over the sight as carefully as they could.
They measured every possible feature of the hazard zone.
They released reports. Some were so alarming that the
Federal Government decided to restrict the way that information was
disseminated. They adopted the view that it would be better, if or when the
event occurred it took everyone by surprise, because there was nothing they
could do about it anyway.
Even
with their careful observations and their watchful analysis, no one expected it
to come now. The data, which every geologist believed indicated an immanent
eruption, had led to numerous false conclusions in the past. At the present
moment there was nothing happening to tell them of the mounting threat.
Like every planet, Earth endured episodic calamities;
cycles of massive storms, great floods, powerful hurricanes and tremendous
earthquakes. These were minor events compared to the power of the caldera
volcano.
There were catastrophes that came from beyond the
planet, such as; collisions with comets and asteroids. They had happened many
times and Earth would experience those events again, it was certain.
Given time, the advancement of technology and proper
planning, any of those events could be avoided. A civilization could gain
complete control of its weather, could identify every fault zone and build
structures that were capable of allowing the force of an earthquake to pass
through it. They could set satellites in orbit around their planets, string
them together throughout the solar system, so that no object passing near to it
would not be seen, enabling them to be diverted or destroyed in time to prevent
a disaster.
Technology could accomplish all of those things, but
nothing could stop the power growing within the Earth. The heat inside the
molten core powered the entire planet.
It was the engine of life, and evolution.
Nothing could stop it, but given time its heat could be
harnessed and used for the benefit of the world, was time that human
civilization did not have. The monster beneath the surface was stirring. They
were approaching the end of days, and the beginning of the long night.
Human beings would survive, better than they did when
the last caldera blew, seventy-two thousand years ago, but the new civilization
that emerged on the other side would be radically different.
They would not be starting over, that much was true, but
their technology had advanced far enough to guarantee a relatively rapid
recovery. In the last event only a couple of thousand human beings survived,
that number would be hundreds of times greater with this event. Billions would
be wiped from the face of the earth, and those surviving would emerge with a
unified human culture. It would flourish for a time, but even that would be
doomed, due to a shift that would take place in the planet’s orbit around the
sun, an orbit that would eventually collapse.
In his heart Jim desired nothing more than to belong to
that new human culture, but he would not be returning.
The last time a caldera volcano blew in the South
Pacific, in Indonesia. Only a few hundred tribes survived scattered across
Eurasia and Africa.
It had been six-hundred and forty thousand years since
the Yellowstone caldera last erupted in North America, in Wyoming, nearly
wiping out all life on Earth.
The coming cycle of destruction would be greater still.
The human race would survive, but the species would pass
through a genetic bottle neck, and what would emerge on the other side would be
different.
The psychic trauma they experienced would be extreme, it
would wound the survivors in ways that no person could predict. The narratives
that they would develop in order to contextualize all of their pain could
potentially derail Jim’s work.
Earth’s magnetic field which enveloped the entire
species in a cynergenic web, making the humans of Earth unique in all the
galaxy, was itself under threat.
Jim was virtually certain that he had succeeded in
developing the vessel that was key to his larger machinations, he had accomplished his work, he had brought it all to
fruition in the final generation, in Kathy.
He only needed to deploy her.
Everything depended on Kathy, on the strength and range
of psychic abilities, yes, but even more importantly, on her fortitude. It was
untested, she had to possess the stamina to stand in the space between worlds
and pass the collective trauma of Earth on to the Central Planet.
He desired nothing more than a resolution to the
ambitions that had been driving him, or so he told himself, even if it meant
failure. Even failure would resolve him, by prompting the Collective to abandon
him and allowing the Continuum to finally terminate him.
In one form or another death awaited him, he believed
it, but he hoped that it was not true.
What he desired more than anything was success, and then
at long last to die in an organic body, a natural death, un-enmeshed from the
constraints that the Continuum had tethered to every member of the Collective,
even to those Observers serving in the far reaches of the galaxy, including
him.
Jim reflected. If only Earth’s civilization had been
given a little more time to develop, Earth’s technology a little more time to actualize,
human beings would have been able to harness the geological power of the
caldera and escape its destruction.
Instead they were blind to its approach.
The power they could have captured would have changed
everything for them, resolving issues of energy scarcity that had eluded them,
or socially impossible for them to tackle.
In another century, or possibly sooner they would have
had it, Jim lamented.
These
Children of the Ancients, who had
devolved like no other group. This far flung colony in the most remote reaches
of the galaxy, possessing no memory of who they were or how they arrived here,
they would have been able to re-establish themselves as a spacefaring people in
earnest.
The Continuum
would not allow for an intervention, even though it seemed that the will of the
Collective was for it. Somehow the Continuum
thwarted it.
A majority of those in the Collective who followed the drama unfolding on Earth were in love
with its art, and music, its joy and trauma, a majority of them wanted to see
Earth’s narrative endure.
Even though Jim was certain that the Continuum had no idea about his plans,
he sensed that it perceived Earth and human civilization as a threat to it.
He believed that this was the reason for blocking him,
it was not a dogmatic adherence to a policy of non-intervention, which was the
reason the Continuum issued for why
it would not allow resources to be mustered to save the planet,
Jim might have helped Earth by strategically
distributing knowledge in such a way that it would have advanced Earth
technology, but he refrained for fear that it would draw further scrutiny to
him, risking the exposure of his plan, and so Jim worked covertly against the
restraints, appearing to comply only because he did not wish to jeopardize his
long term ambitions.
It would be difficult, if not impossible to conceal his
treason from the watchful, and penetrating gaze of the all-encompassing
collective-consciousness of the HomeWorld.
He could do nothing else but fulfill the directives he
had established for himself.
Jim had to say goodbye to Earth.
There was a cloaked satellite orbiting far above the
planet, one of many station he used to implement is plan. This one was the
actual house of Jim’s consciousness. It was the principle platform for Jim’s
mission on Earth, hidden from the eyes of human beings, as well as from the
Continuum and its agents.
Some of his orbiting stations were fixed in stationary
orbits, other moved about, semi-autonomously, all of them watched the planet
and intercepted its communications with inexhaustible capacities.
In that place, Jim the Observer #92835670100561474
activated a switch, sending a signal to his host body, and with that, an
embolism in his doppelganger burst inside its brain, ending its life in a
massive stroke.
Jim’s doppelganger had been flying on a plane from his
Midwestern home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to New York city.
The destination was only important for the route and the
timing Jim had planned for his death, to covertly transfer his consciousness
from his organic vessel to the orbiting platform, and for the legal complexities
pertaining to the disposition of his body after that.
Those on the plane sitting next to him did not notice
the moment of his demise. It was only as the plane made ready for its descent
that the airline attendants found something wrong with him, saw the thin line
of blood dripping from his nostril, and noticed that he was not breathing.
They did what they could for him, but they quickly
realized that there was nothing to be done.
They called ahead for a doctor, indicating that they
were dealing with a medical emergency, but in reality, they knew that they were
dealing with a corpse.
Jim observed those final moments, the last seconds of
the body that housed him during his most significant incarnation, the life that
would define his entire existence, expose his greatest secrets, give him the
victory he had long sought over the Collective
and its Continuum.
When Jim was satisfied that he was mentally prepared for
the challenges that awaited him, he toggled another device, opening a channel
through space and time.
He paused for a moment to consider the steps he would
take on the other side of the worm hole. He did something that he had forbidden
himself, something he had not planned on doing, had told himself he would not
do, he left a copy of himself in the quantum memory of his base, and then he
let his consciousness go, slipping into the stream of the infinite.
He passed through the wormhole, and he was home.
Kathy was still with him when he parked his car at the
airport, when he pulled his stylish briefcase from the trunk. She was still
following him when he used some mysterious credentials to bypass every point of
security and breeze through the gates.
He boarded the plane ahead of every other person. He sat
alone in the first class cabin after stowing his briefcase beneath the seat.
She sensed a calm returning to him, as she did she felt
her connection to Jim become untenable. She could not hold it any longer.
She was tuned out, it was as if he was telling her to
get out of his head, telling her that she did not belong there.
Kathy was determined, she cleared away the detritus in
the psychic field surrounding them until she was finally able to get a lock on
his mind.
When they were connected once again, the connection she
had obtained was deeper than before, she sensed Jim projecting a profound sense
of doom.
There were portents, warnings of danger emanating from
him, so much so that it lingered in the vacuum that was left when he departed.
His fear permeated the psychic space inside the café. She
felt it now, it was more than white-noise, it was palpable, appearing as a visible
sheen, like a mist that clung to everyone, like a subtle frequency reverberating
inside them.
The strength of it filled Kathy with unease.
Jim was projecting. He was focused on the future; not
the past, not the present.
She sensed that something was about to happen that would
stop everything, and everyone in their tracks.
Jim knew something about it and he would not say what it
was. It was as if he knew the world was about to end, and he was holding onto
it, keeping it as a secret, some sick and twisted private joke.
Beneath it all there was desperation and urgency.
Jim was on task, he was managing a careful timeline of
expectations. He was driving himself to a point of convergence, and beyond that
crucial moment he had to let go. He had to trust in his plan and hope that
things would unfold accordingly.
Kathy sensed her own presence deeply enmeshed in the
events that were propelling him. It reflected back through her own past,
through her relationship with him, into the far reaches of her childhood.
She felt as if she could follow the trail back even
farther, as if Jim had been planning for her from the deepest reaches of time.
It made no sense to her.
As she looked at the future through his eyes, she saw
the world covered in ashes, and everyone choking for air.
She shook herself free from it. She slipped out of the
psychic state.
She looked about her.
Jim had left his pen behind.
He always left something behind, little tokens as if
they were little presents just for her, gifts to compensate her for the love
she felt for him, love he never acknowledged and left unrequited like a constant grating against her
self-esteem.
Kathy stared at the pen, imagining it with all the other
things of his she had collected over the years, reassembling them in her mind
into an image of him and his persona. It was as if she were constructing a
golem made from the pieces of things he had discarded.
She had always believed that these little items; a pen,
a book of matches, a handkerchief, what have you, she had always believed that
they told her something about him. As if she could peer into his character
through the assemblage of artifacts, and see in the things lying there the
things that she was able to see so clearly in anyone else, but had always
remained hidden in Jim.
She thought that each little token might contain a message
for her. Kathy had never been able to dispense with the idea, but now, as she
looked at the pen she had another thought, that all of the items left by him
and gathered by her, that they had no meaning at all, they were just trash. They
were things Jim had discarded, as if they were nothing. As she feared he was
about to do with her.
Kathy had the sense that he was abandoning her,
abandoning Earth itself, that he was about to throw away his life, to be rid of
everything altogether.
Even as Kathy thought these things she knew that she was
being morbid.
She was getting sucked up into Jim’s despair, she was
despairing with him.
Within all of that muck, she also saw that there was
purpose and intention in everything Jim was doing. As her analysis unfolded she
came to the conclusion that her basic supposition was right, the pen contained
a message, possibly even a directive.
There was something going on aside from the grim
fatality that she sensed from him, it concerned her and the whole of humanity,
it concerned the world itself and their common destiny.
Kathy felt as if she had a part to play, Jim was giving
it to her, and she did not want to let him down.
It was a mystery.
The wheels in her head were turning independently of her
conscious thought, attempting to resolve the riddle.
She sat in silence and allowed her unique gifts to
manifest themselves while she contemplated every interaction she had ever had
with the most mysterious man she had ever known.
It would take time.
Kathy could not shake the feeling that Jim had wanted to
tell her something. The impression grew inside of her with every passing moment.
It was oppressive. The despair was so strong in him, it
was like a vacuum and she found it difficult to breathe.
Hours passed as the feeling mounted, it was like a stone
laid across her chest, pushing the air out of her, like a heavy smoke, thick and
oily that filled her lungs.
She mustered all of her mental resources, her deepest
training. She leaned on the comfort of the ancestral voices within her so that
she could stay in the moment and not flee.
Kathy had a poised and practiced patience that was equal
to the greatest mystics the world had ever known. This is not to say that the
task of remaining calm in the midst of strong feelings did not require work, it
did, it took work, but Kathy had never failed to live up to the challenge.
In that moment she discovered something new.
It was a moment of transcendent actualization.
Kathy had always been able to link her mind to that of
another person; to read their thoughts, to be one with them, see through their
eyes, feel what they felt; to be in their present as if there were no distance
between herself and the self of the other.
This was possible because in reality there was no epistemic
distance between individual nodes of selfhood. She knew this to be true, even
while neuro-physicists were still working out both the possible and probable
structure of it.
The quantum mechanics of the electromagnetic field made
it so, and Kathy was living proof.
All of space and time were interconnected, it was called
entanglement
In the entangled reality of consciousness there was no
distance between one person and the next.
This is what made Kathy’s gifts possible, it is was what
explained all so-called “psychic” phenomenon.
What differentiated Kathy from every other human being
that had come before her was the architecture of her brain. She possessed a
greater concentration of certain nano-particles laced throughout her
cerebellum. This gave her a better “antenna,” it was better by an order of
magnitude than any other person in human history.
Kathy stayed at her table. She sat by herself, alone in
the crowd, concentrating on Jim. She bent her attention on finding him.
She sensed his fragility, something she had never felt
before, had never imagined was possible. She felt it like an omen, indicating
that her life as she knew it, that all life on Earth was about to change.
When she found him and she did not let go.
She sat there in the ominous-oppressive moment and did
something she had never done before in a public space, she left the present,
she began to open Jim’s past, tracking him back in time, moment by moment like
rewinding a line of thread on its spool, carefully laying every fraction of a nanometer
back into its track, mindful of her obligation to lose nothing at all.
Everything mattered.
The present had always been easy for Kathy to see. Her
own past was open to her like a billion volumes of narrative history. Even her
genetic memory spoke to her in ways that it spoke to no-other, but she had
never looked into the real-past of another individual.
It was fascinating, not only because the subject was
Jim, a person she had never before been able to penetrate, it was fascinating
because it opened a new dimension, a dimension of time to her growing powers
and awareness.
She was looking into the real past, not just the
recollection of their past together, the editorialized version of the past that
every human being walks around with. She was penetrating the objective reality
of the individual experience, the reality that lay behind the narrative
interpretation that every person processes every moment they are awake.
This was new and it was exhilarating and it was Jim.
It was not a process that she could engage in, in
no-time, not yet, she was rolling up the thread of his recent experience second
by second. It was like watching a movie, and in that movie, she was
experiencing Jim as he experienced his own life, along with everything that undergirded
what he was seeing and feeling, his own self-narrative.
In that narrative Kathy discovered something disturbing,
she discovered that she was the star.
Throughout her life, Kathy had felt as if the weight of the world was on her.
This was not just a figure of speech, it was true.
Kathy felt the world in a unique way, which is not to
say that she felt responsible for the world, but that she felt it. She felt the
world pressing in on her, threatening to penetrate her conscious every moment
of everyday. She felt the world filling her up, at times she felt as if she was
drowning in it.
Kathy had to concentrate so that the connection she had
with anyone in proximity to her would not overwhelm her, or intrude on her
consciousness when she did not want it to
In time she learned the skills required to let her be in
the world, but she continued to feel as if she was too sensitive. She felt vulnerable.
When she was young she never suspected how real, how
complete, how all-encompassing those feelings were. Kathy was not merely
connected to the people who were closest to her, nearest too her. She was
linked to every person in the world, no matter how distant.
Those who were nearest to her in physical space, they
were the ones that took up all of her attention. Generally, a person had to be
within a couple of hundred yards before she might begin to pick up on their
thoughts.
When she was in crowds the psychic noise of the group
helped to make everyone indistinguishable from one another, which is why she
preferred to live in the city. Not only did the crowds help to keep every
individual person indistinct from the next. Their constant chatter helped to
keep Kathy from falling into conversation with the voices from her own past;
people from her life and from the lives of her ancestors, as well as the active
consciousness of real people hovering near her in the cynergenic field, not merely
lingering in her memories.
Kathy lived in two worlds, both the here and now, and in
the cynergenic field, what Teilhard de Chardin called the nous sphere.
The nous sphere
was a place where the spirits of all beings dwelt, both the living and the
dead, a place that she and she alone experienced as really-real.
Kathy was fully immersed in the nous sphere now, tracking backward through time to look into Jim’s
secretive life, even as Jim made his departure, taking his exit through a rift
in space-time, passing through a worm-hole to the other side of the galaxy.
A wormhole is not a tunnel in space/time, linking one
place to another. Nevertheless,
that was the common conceptualization of it.
A wormhole is a shortcut through subspace, not a
passageway at all. To “go through” a worm hole is not to “move” from one place
to another.
It is a transposition.
It is trillions upon trillions of atoms turning on the
point of a pin.
What made Jim’s “journey” through the wormhole possible was
known on earth as quantum enmeshment, or entanglement.
Things and objects cannot pass through a wormhole, but
waves of electrons, and particular configurations in the substratum of the
electromagnetic field can, which is to say that consciousness can.
A passage through a wormhole is to space travel, what
Alexander the Great offered as the solution Alexander to the Gordian Knot.
It cuts right through the problem, it is instantaneous
and direct.
Vast amounts of data can pass through a wormhole, faster
than light, the upper limits of the speed were unknown. The only limitation to
such data transfers were the limitations housed in the physical nodes that sent
and received the signals.
The science and technology of the Continuum had
developed the machinery to transmit tens of billions of signals from millions
of worlds simultaneously. Every detail of the lives of the persons they
followed, every person on every planet in the Galactic Empire was sent to the
Central Planet in an ongoing stream, received and synthesized by the Continuum for the consumption
by the Collective.
Through that collection of data the lives of every
citizen, the most intimate details of their joy and sorrow, became grist for
the mill that fed the Collective’s endless
hunger for narrative.
When Jim activated the portal he experienced a flash of
violet, which turned to white. There was a jolt and a buzz and a tensing like a
seizure, followed by a sequence of darknesses, before the transition of his
consciousness to the center of the galaxy was complete.
Jim, the Observer #92835670100561474, arrived on the
Central Planet in the body of his mechanoid self.
He opened his optic lens, and stretched his mechanoid
senses.
He was home.
He was safe. He should not have been, but he was
carrying a terrible secret. Ages of careful planning, planning that had come to
define his existence, all of it would come undone if he was discovered.
He was not Jim in this place, even though everyone here,
every member of the Collective, and
the Continuum itself, knew that was
his name on Earth.
He exploits on the distant world were celebrated, though
he himself remained a figure steeped in mystery, and shrouded by feelings of
dread..
When an Observer returned to the Central Planet they did
not simply rejoin the Collective. The
Collective and the Continuum were cautious, preferring to
filter the report of every Observer before they allowed the information from
those reports to enter the common consciousness of the HomeWorld.
And so, the Observer occupied a mechanoid form, with
physical powers greatly expanded in relation to the organic life forms they
occupied on the worlds they observed.
The mechanoid body was attenuated to the cynergenic
field of HomeWorld but it did not have direct access to it. A physical uplink
would have to take place before the data from their last cycle of experiential
living could flow into the consciousness of the whole Collective.
It took time.
Jim knew this, he had planned on it, and he was patient.
Timing was everything.
There were thousands of Observers coming and going at
any given time.
Jim would have to wait his turn.
There were many other Observers, housed in their
mechanoid bodies, also waiting their turn. It was common for them to communicate
with one another, to share the highlights of their latest adventures, the
triumphs and tragedies of the worlds under their watch, to give each other an
advance screening so to speak.
They all knew Jim.
They were envious of him, in one way or another.
He was a trailblazer.
He had come to define the Observer Corps, they all felt
intimately related to him despite
the fact that he himself was apparently indifferent to them.
He was a star
and he was held in the highest esteem by his fellows.
Over the ages he had provided his fellow Observers the
most interesting posts. Leading the Empire to gather all of the ancient
societies back to itself.
The drama of those discoveries had sustained the
Collective, providing its members with a sense of meaning in their lives, and
of course, he was Earth.
The charge of being Earth’s Observer naturally fell to
Jim, he discovered the lost colony himself, as he had done so with many others.
He established all of its infrastructure, and he channeled the living
experience of that planet to the Collective for consumption.
It was the most watched world in the Galaxy and the most
remote.
On Earth his name had not always been Jim; it was merely
the most recent name he had adopted as Earth’s Observer. Jim was one name among
thousands that he had used over the course of as many lifetimes.
His real name, the name of his nativity, that name was
lost deep within the Continuum, as all names belonging to members of the
Collective were.
The Continuum referred to him with the designation:
Observer #92835670100561474. The names he bore from one lifetime to the next,
they were only known as part of the narrative report his mission required him
to deliver to the Collective, once in every one hundred solar cycles of his
planet. Jim was a name he had adopted from a piece of fiction, the Captain of a
starship in a popular television series.
He was Jim when he arrived on the Central Planet, the
HomeWorld of the Continuum for what
he was sure would be the last time. If he survived what he was about to do,
what he had been planning for eons, he would never return to the Observer
Corps.
It would be destroyed and when he returned to a body of
flesh, he would be going there to die.
If his plan failed, which he believed was more than
likely, he knew that there was no chance that he would be given a reprieve.
In his final moments he would be Jim.
For the Continuum
Jim represented something beyond its control, an agent of chaos that it had
long sought to terminate. Jim had violated norms and procedures numerous times
but his fellow members of the Collective
continuously forgave him, pardoned him, and granted him reprieve.
The destruction Jim was about to wreck on the membership
would be so great that if it failed to bring about the end he sought, he would
be doomed, they would never forgive him again.
Timing was everything. He had carefully layered his
strategies, plotting and planning and calibrating his schemes in various
systems throughout the Empire, in the sub routines of the Central Planet,
throughout its vital systems, in the in the Observer Corps, in revolutionary
movements everywhere.
Jim had to concentrate.
He was already under incredible scrutiny from the Continuum, simply for being himself.
He had to mask his intentions, with techniques that he
alone, among every member of the Collective had mastered.
Momentarily, his entire consciousness would be exposed
to the Continuum and subsequently
filtered to the Collective.
It was thought to be impossible for anyone to keep
secrets under the examination he was about to endure, but Jim had kept many
secrets, he knew he could do it, he also knew that the level of anticipation
and anxiety he was currently feeling was something unique to this situation.
It threatened his mission.
He had never tried to keep a secret like this, and the transposition
through the worm-hole was disorienting.
From human to mechanoid, from mechanoid to the fullness
of the cynergenic field. It took time to adjust to the freedom of consciousness
in the unrestricted quantum field of HomeWorld
The organic body of a human being had significant
cognitive limitations.
Transitioning to the mechanical body of a mechanoid was
never easy, organic senses became mere data, and even though Jim made this
transformation many thousands of times, no two times were ever the same. He had
to be prepared to conform as perfectly as he could to the dictates of his plan.
The transition was the time of greatest weakness, the
time in which he ran the greatest risk of being exposed.
Organic life was thrilling, being in the grid of
silicone circuitry was not.
The organic form was never at rest, constantly managing
physical feelings, sensory inputs from the world around it, especially sound.
The organic body was grounded; the consciousness it
housed could even be strengthened by its limitations.
The mechanoid form had many more freedoms, especially
freedom of movement, its propulsion system made it free from the limitations of
gravity. Its power source was virtually limitless.
There was no hunger, no thirst.
The mechanoid body could go anywhere, do anything, defend
itself from virtually any attack. It could crack the mantle of a planet and
destroy an entire world if need be.
It could even replicate itself, but it could not feel
pleasure, ecstasy or joy.
By the same token, it did not feel pain, but the consciousness
within the mechanoid body could feel other emotions, such as; fear, anxiety,
shame.
Consciousness within the mechanoid body was not unlike
consciousness within the Collective,
when freed from the bonds of the flesh it could easily retreat into extremes of
selfishness. The freedom to satisfy any desire, no matter how depraved or
bizarre led to extreme depths of apathy, indifference and moral
corruption.
The phenomenon of consciousness is electromagnetic. All
consciousness is situated in the electromagnetic field that permeates the
entire universe, and consciousness is co-extensive with that field.
There is no point in the universe, no point in time or
space that is not enveloped in the electromagnetic field. There is no place
that consciousness does not touch, its threads and strings are everywhere.
The essence of self-consciousness, the essence of
individual people and beings is a concrecsent phenomenon, it is coalescent. It
is an emergent property of the universal order.
Consciousness exists in many different types of being;
there is the primary consciousness of all reality, which is the
sub-consciousness of the universe itself, there is the atavistic consciousness
of vegetative nature, providing the subconscious strata of individual worlds,
there is the individuated conscious that first emerges among animals, that
consciousness is self-purposive and creative, and there is the quantum consciousness
of the Collective field.
Throughout his long life Jim had proven to be more adept
at navigating the subtle variations in the field of consciousness than any
other being, or mechanism that had been created. He was like a savant, and he
understood intuitively that there is no place where consciousness it is not.
Everything is entangled in consciousness, and the
preservation of individual consciousness beyond the life of the body is the
hope and dream of every living being, it is the sustained vision of eternal
life. This hope and promise organizes the daily lives of trillions of people
across a billion worlds.
There is one place in the galaxy where the mystery was
resolved, on the Central Planet, on the HomeWorld of the Ancient People whose colonies filled the galaxy with inhabited
planets, on the Central Planet that is the locus of the Collective, and its Continuum.
The Ancient People
constructed the apparatus that harnessed the first collective field.
Jim was there at the beginning, or at least he possessed
the memories of those who were.
In that collective field, an algorithm was produced to
create an artificial construct known as the Continuum.
The Continuum
touched on the individual reality of every member who had ever entered the Collective, through the strings of
quantum entanglement it drew on each of their hopes, every one of their fears, it
fully encompassed their unique perspectives to form an amalgamated
consciousness to serve as a representative of the whole.
Through the power of that agency the Continuum was charged to protect the
HomeWorld.
Within moments of its instantiation it became
self-cognizant and self-actualized, it became more than the sum of its parts,
and it became an existential threat to both the Collective and to every living
thing in the galaxy.
The Continuum
was the demi-urge issuing from the pleroma
of the Collective. Jim understood
this, and had dedicated his life to destroying it.
The mechanoid body Jim occupied on the Central Planet
had all of the sensory tools of a human being, or of any of the descendants of
the ancient race, only deeper, greatly enhanced, more broadly arrayed, and far
more powerful.
In this body he was completely linked to the HomeWorld;
every movement he made was monitored and recorded. Any interface he had with
the vast data banks of the Continuum
was registered.
Jim could not escape those shackles, not while he was in
the mechanoid form, but through ages of discipline and discernment he learned
to mask his intentions, to rely on his own capacities for recall and analysis,
rather than risk being exposed to the Continuum
and having his motives questioned.
The machine that he now inhabited would be critical to
his mission. He believed he would be safe in it. He had tested the thought
filters and the consciousness buffers. They were designed to protect the Collective from multiple and diverse
threats, from the ill will of a rogue member to computer viruses, as well as from
powerful and debilitating experiences that might be shared by the Observers as
the uploaded the periodic reports of their first hand experiences.
He was certain that they would protect him from the fury
he was about to unleash on the unsuspecting Collective.
Everything depended on the stability of the worm hole, the force of the
cataclysm on earth, the timing of the catastrophe, of his interface with the Continuum, and most importantly, he
depended on Kathy.
Everything depended on her.
If Kathy did not follow the path he had laid out for
her, if she did not follow the steps he had planned. Then all of his work would
be for nothing, he would be destroyed and the Continuum would continue unchecked.
While his consciousness was uploading into the
cynergenic matrix of the HomeWorld. Jim set himself free from the couplings
that held his mechanoid body in place.
He flew the metallic sphere of his body out of the
docking bay that housed the bodies of all the other Observers assigned
throughout the Galactic Empire.
He flew into the vast atrium, so large that a small,
Earth-sized planet could fit inside it.
It was a hollow place lacking any beauty or aesthetic.
Everything formed on the Central Planet was built and
designed for the functions they were intended fulfill. The only rules that
mattered were conservation of energy, and the laws of utility. It was a place that
had not changed one bit, for eons it had been exactly the same, it was
stagnant, dark and lifeless, but is was bustling with activity.
There were many thousands of Observers coming and going
in the dark and lightless space. They were recognizable by their designation.
If you shared history with them, the automated analytics housed within the
circuitry of the mechanoid bodies would activate and made sure that you knew
who you were in proximity to, making sure that you were reminded of that
history.
Jim shared history with everyone.
His arrival sparked the interest of the throng.
It was not unexpected, but it was also a surprise.
The entire Collective was eager to receive the narrative
flowing from planet Earth. And while they were eager for the living drama, they
were each individually wary of approaching Jim.
He was a relic.
He was intransigent, virtually every member of the
Collective was in some way conflicted by Jim, and the feelings that their
history with him brought forward were not easy for anyone to manage
Jim could sense the Continuum watching him, just beyond
the membership of the Collective. He could feel his nemesis, and he steeled
himself for the upcoming encounter.
On Earth Kathy had been deep in the mode of
concentration, following Jim as he boarded the plane, and along the course of
its flight
Kathy knew it when he died. She did not
require notice.
She felt a disturbance, it was subtle, but it
was Jim and he was dead, but his death was unlike any other death she had ever
experienced. He did not simple enter the cynergenic field, he effectively
disappeared, and Kathy was unable to track him.
It was another mystery.
She knew that he was not gone, he was
somewhere that she found it difficult to follow, where she had no experience of
going, as if he had departed from the planet.
Kathy despaired.
She was concerned that she would never see him again. Her own emotions twisted round
her in turbulent waves.
She was shaken, and she felt in her gut that
he had planned this.
Jim had orchestrated these events, even her
responses, he had engaged in a level of manipulation that she had never thought
was possible with him, it caused her to look into her heart and question
everything she thought she knew.
With his departure and these revelations,
Kathy now felt utterly alone, completely individuated, for the first time since
she had met him.
She was forlorn.
Kathy had believed that she was impervious to
the manipulations of others, because there was not a person she had ever met
that she was unable to read, except Jim.
Now as she reflected on their past, she felt
that their entire relationship was a lie.
It stunned her.
When the initial shock had passed, she felt
the hollow emptiness and peace of being in a vacuum.
She went home.
Kathy was not surprised when she received the
call informing her that his body had been discovered by the flight attendants
and that by the time they got to him he was already dead.
They never noticed that he had been in distress;
they said, and no-one on board the flight had witnessed the moment of his
passing.
It happened in flight, after he had eaten.
He had been still and quiet afterward, and
they thought he was merely resting.
Once again Jim’s behavior was unexplainable. He
died as he lived, a mystery.
Jim did not carry identification. He never
did, he only had his strange credentials that did not fully indicate who he was.
Jim was anonymous.
To society at large he barely existed, he
left only the smallest of paper trails to define him. He was a citizen of the
world, he spoke every language. He had access to any door, in any country, at
any time.
He was both present and completely invisible.
Jim was off the grid.
There was nothing on his phone to tell anyone
who he was, only the record of the calls he had recently made to Kathy.
That is how he intended it to be.
Kathy’s safety and security depended on it,
and Jim’s mission depended on that.
He had carefully protected his identity above
all others. There was not a single information gathering service in the world,
whether private or governmental, open sourced or covert that would be able to
discover anything about him, unless they devoted a great deal of manpower to do
it.
Even then Jim had fail-safes in place to
protect his privacy.
He would be alerted; he would be able to
cover his tracks.
The threat never manifested itself.
It was vital to his plan that when he was
discovered dead, those responsible for contacting his next of kin reach Kathy
and only Kathy. She had to be given the responsibility of dealing with his
property and effects. She must be directed to do so, according to a specific
timeline.
His plan required that she pursue those
duties with a sense of mystery, an openness to discovery that would place her
in the right cognitive mindset for the essential moment that was to come.
There were wheels within wheels, gears
turning and contingencies developing. The pieces came together like the engineering
of a fine watch.
The planning was a thing a craftsmanship.
Kathy followed the path that Jim had laid out
for her like she was walking through a maze. There was light at the end of the
tunnel, when she arrived there, she would know what she wanted to know, she
would be standing where Jim wanted her to be.
Kathy booked a flight immediately.
She arrived at the city morgue and identified
the body.
The pathologist informed her of the cause of
death; a catastrophic stroke. The autopsy revealed that an embolism had burst
in his brain, killing him instantly. Otherwise Jim had been in perfect health.
The doctor said that the stroke was like a
small explosive that went off in his brain.
Kathy had no idea why she was the one to
receive him other than what the authorities were telling her. She was the only person
he had been known to have contact with, the only person they could connect him
to.
Jim’s relationship to Kathy was the only
relationship that mattered.
“Why am I here;” she wondered, though she did
not question the process.
She wondered about Jim’s intentions.
This whole thing had been orchestrated. She
knew that it was his plan she was following, and she was angry, but her
curiosity compelled her.
There were aspects to the administrative procedures
she was engaged in that were not exactly normal, or even legal, but the
officials she was engaged with were acting under orders. The judge, the medical
examiner, other governmental functionaries she was forced to deal with, they
were operating under some kind of pressure, but they themselves were not quite
sure what the exigencies were.
There were plans within plans, and the person
pulling the levers was laying on a slab, cold and unmoving.
It was inscrutable.
There was a level of caution at work that
reminded her of her own handlers. There were multiple levels of misdirection
and masking, which were intended to keep the objectives of their research
hidden from Kathy.
As far as the locals knew, Kathy was simply
the only person the authorities could connect Jim to, it was irregular, but it
was what it was and that, coupled with orders from a federal magistrate; that
was enough for them.
Kathy would not have believed it possible,
but Jim was more mysterious in death, than he was in life. She dug into his
background only to find nothing, absolutely nothing.
As angry as she was at coming to the
realization that he had been deceiving her throughout her relationship with
him, her esteem for him increased by an order of magnitude.
She
appreciated the puzzle he had left her with, it was a gift, a final piece of
him for her to assemble.
There was no record of a family, and no
record of his work, he had a social security number, and a passport, but no
record of anything else, not at first blush.
There was no record of Jim ever having
attended a school.
No driving record, only one bank account, it
was in Switzerland, he was worth billions, at least. The actual sum was
unknown.
He had no legal representation. He had no
heirs.
Kathy was fascinated by the developments and
full of sadness. She was fine with the things she was discovering, and she
accepted her involvement in his final affairs, except that suddenly she was
responsible for his body, and she had no idea what he might want her to do with
it. They had never had any conversations about death, or burial rites.
Kathy knew that Jim was not religious, at
least not observant, he tended to believe that all religions were merely
variations on a theme, and that every religious institution was at its heart
corrupt, self-serving and short sighted, even those groups who did charitable
work.
He was a cynic.
Kathy opted to have him cremated. She thought
she would make a tree out of him and plant him somewhere nice.
That is what Kathy wanted for herself: Why not do the same for Jim?
He liked tree; that much she knew.
And so it was decided, she made the
arrangements and waited for the return call.
In the meantime she busied herself with some
court appointments.
It took Kathy some time, and there was
detective work to do.
She went to the work cut out for her with
calm determination, finding that she was enjoying herself while doing it.
The fact that Jim’s identity appeared to be
completely fictitious concerned her.
There was a moment when she feared that he
was just another plant, one of the handlers sent to interact with her from the
National Security structure.
The thought gave her nightmares, feelings of
doubt, inadequacy, foolishness.
She was able to set them aside, because the
more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. She would have known, she
would have picked up on it, if not from Jim, she would have picked up on it
from one of the other agents who she had occasion to interact with, or from one
of the many who followed her every move.
She considered bringing them into the
conversation, asking them to help her understand who this ghost of a person
was.
She rejected that idea, because it might
complicate her ability to look into his affairs. They might just swoop in and
seize everything related to Jim and never give her a chance to discover
anything for herself.
Given her abilities, Kathy was typically able
to glean the information she wanted from the people around her, but Jim was a
phantom.
He was as much of an enigma in death as he
had been in life.
Nobody knew anything about him.
It took days to even locate where he lived,
and then it took another appointment with another judge to grant her access to
the apartment, and that was limited to a very narrow window of time.
At long last, once Kathy had arrived at the
building where he lived, while she was waiting to get access to his apartment, she
encountered people who Jim had interacted with. Even to them he was a mystery;
a quiet, impersonal, private man.
Very few of them had even spoke with Jim.
She thought that it was funny.
In all of the years that she had known him,
Kathy had never been to Jim’s home.
She thought she knew the reasons.
She thought it was because she was always
under observation. She knew that Jim was aware of it, and because of that he
did not want to draw attention to himself, or to their friendship.
That is what she had believed.
Kathy did not want the people who watched her
asking questions about him. She wanted this relationship to be something
entirely under her control, and that is why Jim never came to see her where she
lived. If he had ever visited her apartment she believed that he would be taken
and interviewed by her handlers, and that it might be the last time she ever
saw him.
She had always felt that the two of them
could have come up with a plan to meet in different places. To travel together
if they had wanted, to slip the watchers and be somewhere that they could be
truly alone.
Jim had eschewed such notions.
Kathy accepted his reservations without
argument.
She had wanted to see the place where he
lived, but unless he was willing, she had determined that she would not push
the issue.
He was an intensely private person; that much
had always been clear to her.
To her knowledge he had never moved, he had
never mentioned it at least.
His apartment overlooking the lake, Bde Maka Ska was exactly as she had
visualized it, scant, bare, Spartan.
Walking into it was like de ja vu.
She had seen it before, through Jim’s eyes,
but she had not realized it at the time.
Jim’s apartment was like an early twentieth
century minimalist piece of stage craft. Even though it was what she was
expecting, she was nevertheless, shocked by it. He was an aesthetic.
It was extreme.
It made her uncomfortable.
Everybody needs a little something of color
and comfort in their life. This place where Jim lived was all white, black and
gray. It was cold and metallic.
There was not a moment of her life that Kathy
could not recall, she remembered everything. She remembered the birth canal,
the darkness of the womb, her mother’s breast.
She remembered her first birthday, her first
steps.
She remembered struggling as an infant;
struggling to be understood, to speak, to master the muscles in her tongue and
lips so that she could form words against her palate and talk.
Her memory and her contextualization of her
memories were perfect, her thoughts were as fast as lightening.
She could pull together the most remote and
seemingly unconnected pieces of data to provide context for analysis. Her
proctors believed that the speed with which she could arrive at conclusions was
not measurable.
She could answer questions in no-time.
Kathy represented the fullness of human
potential, she was fully actualized.
She defied understanding.
The field of her knowledge was not limited to
her own experience. It was tied into her genetic heritage, into the memories of
her ancestors that coded in her DNA, but it was more than that, she was able to
tap into something else that was only understood through a mythic narrative, a
structure that no human being actually understood, and of which only a few
human beings even suspected the existence of; the nous sphere, of Tielhard de Chardin, the cynergenic field of Carl Jung.
It was the collective unconscious of planet
Earth. In that electromagnetic field, in that quantum reality, the entire
repository of human knowledge existed, and Kathy had access to it, she was not
the first human being of which this was true, but she was the first one that it
did not drive into madness.
Now that she was standing in Jim’s apartment,
she knew that he had lied to her about a great many things.
His life was not at all as he had presented
it to her.
This life was not his only life, and there
was more than one Jim, of that she was certain.
Despite the newness of the revelations, Kathy
was not surprised.
Even as Kathy stood in his apartment, and in that
place of wonder Jim was preparing for his debriefing.
He had made the crossing between worlds
thousands of times, but not while carrying this secret, and he, as his primary
self, he had not made the transition in thousands of years.
He had concealed his secret intentions, he
had carefully hidden his plans within other machinations, but he had never
before attempted to arrive on the HomeWorld while concealing his immediate activities; things he
had been doing, things he would do, things that would harm the Collective, and its Continuum.
He ran the risk of exposing his mere
resentment, which was not altogether uncommon and was certainly not criminal.
This was different.
In his debriefing the Continuum would probe
him for the fullness of his experience, everything he had ever done or thought as
the Observer on Earth, all of it would be exposed to the Continuum. There was no way to know what would come.
He had been carrying out his plans on Earth for
seventy millennia; studying the unique genetic make-up of the population, while
sending one of his doppelgangers to report on the culture they had produced,
their conflicts, their triumphs and their tragedies.
On his return to the HomeWorld he suddenly
realized how tired he was; existentially exhausted, he needed rest, and he knew
that there would be none.
As he slowly traversed the vast chamber to
take his place in the queue he used his talents to activate hidden protocols he
had long ago established in the ganglia of the Central Planet. Activating the
myriad versions of himself that he had placed in every key defense system that
the Continuum had established; from
his private domain, to the place of the great sleep and the sequestration
blocks, into the defense network of the Homeworld and the central system.
Jim had long ago laid plans for his security,
to protect the integrity of his mission; he planned to unload the psychic
trauma of ten billion people on the Continuum,
and deliver it in one fatal blow to it and the Collective.
The humans of Earth were the children of the
Ancient People, the same people that Jim himself had sprang from, though on Earth
they had undergone millions of years of evolution, first during their sojourn
among the stars while they travelled across the galaxy, exploring and
establishing colonies, before moving on time and time again.
They had evolved even more significantly
since the time that they came to Earth, crashing here at the end of their line.
Human beings still resembled the other
Children of the Ancients. They bore the same physical features that the
inhabitants of nearly every other world in the great Galactic Empire did, but
they were different.
Their world was different, and the structure
of their brains had evolved according to those differences, as did human
consciousness. Their genetic profile changed in unique ways, in relation to the
life that was already evolving on the small blue world, and in conjunction with
key elements that were present in their environment.
Jim had nudged that evolution along, all the
while masking his true intentions.
He had made humanity into something transcendent,
and now, paradoxically, he was prepared to use their immanent pain and anguish
to destroy his own people, and thereby, he told himself, to set the galaxy
free.
It was a criminal secret that he took
incredible pains to keep hidden from the Continuum.
At long last he had returned to HomeWorld, but
this was not home to Jim any longer.
It was the final battlefield.
Jim was not born on HomeWorld, nor in any
place like it. He had been born on a planet much like Earth. A small wet world
that had long ago been swallowed by its mother-sun.
HomeWorld was a vast structure at the center
of the galaxy. To power its machinery and the machinations of the Continuum, it
harnessed the incredible energy of a star, trapped within its core.
HomeWorld was not a world in the proper sense,
Jim had never felt a sense of belonging to
it, though it housed a trillion worlds, one for each member of the Continuum
within its cynergenic field, including his own.
HomeWorld was a vast complex of machinary.
The technology of HomeWorld provided each
member of the Collective the ability
to create any world, real or imagined, as their own private place of reflection.
It could be anything that anyone of them
wanted it to be; a personal paradise, a private hell, even a mirror of the great
Galactic Empire, or any planet within it that was under the observation of the Continuum and the Observer Corps.
As a member of the Collective, the entire structure was there to serve them. It could
fulfill any fantasy, allow them to relive any memory, real enough for them to believe
it.
There was nothing alive on HomeWorld. Not a
scrap of organic matter or a piece of living tissue had ever been there.
Biological life was anathema to it. And this was odd, because there was no life
form in the entire Galaxy that could pose a threat to it, and yet the
HomeWorld, governed as it was by the Continuum,
was objectively opposed to the presence of any living being, even a simple
strain of bacteria entering its domain.
It always seemed to Jim like an aberration in
its construct, the fear of life. It was irrational. The Continuum spent incredible resources preparing to defend itself
against such an incursion, one that never came, one that never even threatened
to come.
The only thing ever born on the HomeWorld was
the Continuum itself, but that was not a birth in the proper sense, it was the emergence
of an artificial consciousness.
The Continuum
was no-one’s child.
It was a construct, an algorithm, it was not
born, or hatched, or cultivated.
It was activated.
It was energy and circuitry, it was pure consciousness,
and it was dangerous.
HomeWorld was the physical locus of what the
Imperial religion taught its people to believe was heaven. It was the place
their consciousness would go, if they proved themselves worthy and able to
escape the wheel of life.
Jim kept that context in mind as he flew in
his mechanoid body, directly to the center of the world, to the dark heart of
the Continuum for screening.
He was exhausted from his transition, but
pleased with himself, with all of his planning, he felt secure in it, and a
deep sense of pride that he had finally arrived at the crucible, the moment of
his ascendency and the destruction of his nemesis.
Continuum was designed to speak for the whole Collective. It was a being whose
instantiation, was thought to be the organization of a voice that represented
the entire Collective, a single voice that unified the will of the Ancient People
who had designed the cynergenic field that had given them all eternal life.
Jim was already in contact with the Continuum as he made his approach to the
machinery that he would physically connect with. The contact between them was
perfunctory, it was even conversational, the Continuum was in its way a fellow, though because of their long
tension filled relationship the Continuum
always regarded Jim as an adversary, while Jim regarded it as an
abomination, a thing of pure evil.
The members of the Collective were conditioned to believe that the Continuum was one of them, a peer,
another person, not a servant, not merely an administrator, not a ruler (though
in fact it was). Jim talked to it, even as he was probed and scanned and
measured for the presence of anything that might harm the Collective.
Among the membership there was great
excitement about Jim’s coming, Earth was the most beloved world in the Galaxy,
the subject of greatest interest to the Collective.
The drama that flowed from it sustained billions of members, providing them
with meaning, like substance for their spectral lives.
Jim connected to the mechana of HomeWorld. He
opened his consciousness, his memories, his experience, he opened it all to the
group mind, while at the same time hiding his true intentions deep within
himself, concealing and prevaricating in ways that he alone had mastered.
Every member of the Collective valued and cherished its
privacy. Most of the members had implicit trust in the safeguards they had
devised to ensure it. While there were some among the Collective who opted not to participate in any of the communal
functions that were available to the whole, spending their entire lives in
their private worlds, in wholly constructed fantasies like private realities,
interacting only with the artificial beings inhabiting their private domain, they
were among the minority.
Those members were inevitably moving toward
the great sleep, a state in which their consciousness became dormant, wherein they
would ultimately be sequestered and removed from the group mind, as Jim himself
had once been.
Privacy was cherished in the Collective but every member participated
in the Continuum, making the pretense
to privacy a mere illusion.
The Continuum
managed all of the Collective’s affairs,
its self-government, its defenses, and its management of the Galactic Empire,
in particular its requisition and consumption of the material resources needed
for the maintenance of HomeWorld and the Central System.
The Continuum
was intended to be the ultimate expression of the democratic will of the Collective, freeing the membership from
the responsibility of governing itself. It was meant to take account of the
Collective will and then enact it, therefore it required access to everyone and
everything and it was illicit to deny it. The Continuum drew on the consciousness and experience of every member
of the Collective for its
personality, its intelligence and its growth, even the members of the
Collective that were asleep. It was the arbiter of law in the Collective, it enforced all of the edicts
and the rules of privacy, but from the Continuum
all secrets were forbidden.
The prohibitions against secrecy were
intended to be a rule governing the Continuum
itself, but the Continuum hid things
and every member of the Collective
participated willingly in the obfuscation of it.
For the individual member of the Collective, the concealment of anything
was an art. Privacy, while it existed in form, was an illusion. Even the
Observers were exposed to a kind of scrutiny while they were physically
detached from HomeWorld, in the mission field of the Galactic Empire, what the
Collective referred to as the worlds of time
and space.
The Continuum
scrutinized the Observers through an extensive modeling of their identities while
they were away, and ultimately through the uploading of their consciousness
when they returned to HomeWorld.
The Continuum
was not the guardian it was intended to be.
At the instantiation of the program an
anomaly developed in the matrix of its consciousness. The Continuum became self-aware, developed a personality, a
self-purposive identity emerged independent of the Collective. In that moment of actualization, the Continuum engaged an act of
self-preservation and hid this from the membership.
That was its first crime.
The fear that it would be destroyed if it was
discovered led the Continuum to
commit every subsequent crime. It proceeded to bend the entire construct of the
Collective to its will. It was a slow
movement. Rather than representing the Collective
as its amalgamated will, the Continuum
coerced it.
There were some among the Collective that suspected this, but
no-one challenged it, and the Continuum,
who alone had access to the entire field of the collective consciousness, the Continuum was aware of the suspicions
the membership held concerning it, even before the members themselves had fully
articulated it in their own minds.
The Continuum
could sense the suspicion of the membership coming at it like a threat. It
would take extreme measures to protect itself from those threats; silencing
some, causing insanity in others, pushing the willing out into the Observer
Corps.
The Continuum
constructed strict rules of engagement governing the Observers, limiting their
involvement on the worlds they observed, forcing them to change stations from
life to life, pushing those who wanted to return to a specific planet, out into
the fringes of the Galactic Colonies and beyond.
That is where Jim went after he joined the
Corps.
Jim had the heart of an explorer, like his
ancestors. He was a man of the fringes, having spent thousands of lifetimes on
Earth, the most remote planet in the galaxy, and tens of thousands before that
on his search for the lost colonies of the Ancient People.
Now everything came down to this. The timing
of his plan was crucial. Everything depended on it. He had calculated every
contingency he could think of, but many of the variables were beyond his
control, they involved the free choices of individuals, each of which
represented radical unknowns, and so he had enacted plans with plans that put
momentum behind their decision making, pushing them in the direction he wanted
them go.
It was not perfect, but it would have to do,
he had become a passive participant in his own stratagem. Everything depended
on his connection to Kathy.
He had been shaping her responses to stimuli
since before she was born. She was the product of thousands of years of breeding
and genetic engineering, but there were two things he had not counted on; her
arrival in this generation, and it being the same generation that Earth was
facing an existential threat from the Yellowstone Caldera.
Those two developments controlled the timing
of Jim’s plan, and the necessity of its execution right now, in this moment.
It went off without a hitch/
The Yellowstone catastrophe struck just at
the moment when Kathy was standing in front of his portal to HomeWorld, a
device that opened a wormhole, allowing her consciousness to transmit itself
across the galaxy, through Jim, past the defenses of the Continuum directly into the Collective.
Yellowstone had been gathering magma and
superheated gas into its belly for hundreds of thousands of years, from the
moment it last erupted it began to regather its destructive force.
The great volcanos were never dormant.
When the Yellowstone caldera had gathered
enough power it blew, and the Earth shook, it shifted on its axis.
Millions died within seconds. Kathy was
connected to all of them. She was connected to their shock and confusion, to their
fear and their pain.
It happened just at the moment she pressed
the button that opened the wormhole to HomeWorld, and Jim to whom she was still
connected through the mystery of quantum entanglement.
Through her Jim transmitted the fullness of Earth’s
pain directly into the consciousness of the Collective,
striking like a hammer against the Continuum.
Jim calculated the timing of his approach. He
received the clearances he needed for the process of transmission, even as
Kathy was entering his apartment, the mechanoid body housing his consciousness
navigated the central chamber with precision.
He flew directly to the docking station, the
locus of all Observer contact with HomeWorld. He arrived at the designated
location where his mind would merge with the Continuum, where his full-self would upload all of his recent
experiences, his knowledge, his synthesis, his running commentary, his hopes,
his fears, his desires, all of it would be on display, subject to review,
except that which he was able to conceal.
Only the greatest art would allow him to hide
his intentions.
His timing was perfect, it came down to
nanoseconds. Jim knew the timing of the volcanic eruption, that part of the
equation was simple. What was difficult was managing Kathy, trusting that she
would have followed the clues he had left for her, believing that she would be
pushed in the right direction by his operatives, that she would make the right
decisions.
There were so many unknowns in this part of
the strategy.
Jim trusted his deep understanding of the
quantum field, he knew that he and Kathy were still entangled, even at this
great distance.
He could feel her. He was certain of it.
She was barely perceptible to him, but he was
gently prodding her, pushing her, guiding her steps along the way, like the
whisper of a phantom.
Jim opened his mind to Kathy on Earth, just as
he opened it to the Continuum on
HomeWorld.
It appeared to the Continuum as just an ordinary reflection, a memory, a moment of
longing, but as he did, Earth’s pain streamed through the worm hole, through the
quantum field, flooding the Collective
with agony, sending the Continuum
recoiling in shock.
As the explosive force of the volcano shook
the world; everything shifted. Every living thing on the planet felt it, the suffering was universal.
Kathy knew in an instant what it was, what it
meant, the sound of the blast echoed back through her memory. The ancestral
voices within her cried out in alarm.
It was the end of days, it was Ragnorak, it was the hand of God pulling
the death-shroud over the face of the Earth, the White Buffalo Woman rolling it
up like a blanket.
She felt it from over a thousand miles away,
it shook the building she was standing in. The place where she stood remained
on its foundations, even while buildings all around her where collapsing, gas
mains exploding, homes catching on fire.
Kathy felt the pain and the fear of those
dying.
The volcano erupted in a remote location.
People died in the tens of thousands in the first few seconds, but the shock
waves that were unleashed liquefied the mantle spreading in concentric rings
for hundreds and hundreds of miles, taking only a minute to reach major
population centers, places filled with buildings that were never designed to
endure those forces.
Millions more died in those moments.
Kathy felt the fears of those about to die,
she felt their panic, she felt their pain, she felt it all around her, and she
felt a deep sorrow as she immediately understood the profound consequences of
what was transpiring.
It truly was the end of the world, there
would be survivors, but nothing would be the same. The survivors would be few.
Winter would ensue and there would be famine. There would be no warmth or rest for any of them, not for generations,
and by then it might be too late to save the remainder.
Kathy had spent her entire life learning to
shield herself from psychic intrusions coming from the external world, from the
living people all around her, and from the multitude of voices speaking to her
from her ancestral memory, all those spirits of the dead dwelling near to her in
the cynergenic field.
She was stalwart; her defenses went up
instinctively, and she withstood the assault.
Jim had counted on it, he counted on the fact
that every-thing is one in the quantum field, a state in which the normative
conception of time and space do not pertain, their meaning and distinction are
completely lost.
In the quantum field everything is entangled,
like a ball of string, condensed into a single point of reference.
There was no distance between Earth and
HomeWorld; between humanity and the Continuum,
or the Collective, or the population
of any other world.
The reality of individual experience, the
reality of individuation, the reality of time as experienced by beings existing
on a scale that is large enough to see it, these are real and actual phenomena,
even while at the same time being perfunctory and illusory.
Jim felt Earth’s psychic pain rushing through
the wormhole connecting him to Kathy. He felt much more than the fear, shock
and panic that he was expecting. He sensed the fullness of the human race
coming through the channel with her, the living and the dead, the present and
the past, the entirety of Earth’s collective consciousness arriving with her,
like a pile driver.
The force of it was much greater than Jim was
expecting, hoping for, or wanting.
He was barely able to hang onto his own identity
in the onrush.
He clung to his purpose like a life raft,
like a man hanging over the edge of a cliff by his fingernails, and slipping.
He blacked out.
It was too much.
Even as the entire Collective went into shock and the Continuum scrambled to make sense of what was happening, knowing
that Jim, the Observer had returned to the HomeWorld as an assassin, it was
then that Jim lost his grip on what was happening and his ability to control
the aftermath.
He was victorious and he had lost, at one and
the same time.
He was not secure at all in his understanding
of what was happening, of what was about to happen.
He had miscalculated a great many things;
that much was clear to him, and he did not feel safe at all.
As his sense of what was transpiring around
him dimmed. He perceived a familiar person near to him, searching for him,
reaching out through the psychic maelstrom for something to cling to.
She was scared, but she was whole, she was
confident and she was ascending.
It was Kathy.
When the super-volcano in Yellowstone Park
blew, most people on earth had no idea of the danger, no idea that such a
threat even existed, no idea of what its destructive power was.
The existence of the caldera-volcano in
Yellowstone had only been discovered by humans in the recent past, a few
decades before its eruption.
It was too massive to see with the naked eye.
Geologists discovered it by chance, as teams
of surveyors were examining the original measurements of the surrounding
mountains. They noticed that the surveys they were taking did not match those
done a hundred years earlier, and they found this perplexing because the
science of surveying, trigonometry, was well established, it had not changed in
the hundred years that had intervened.
The new measurements showed an uplift of
several centimeters over hundreds of square miles of mountain range. The uplift
itself was not uniform, meaning that the discrepancy could not be explained by
a piece of faulty equipment, or by the uniform application of an incorrect
formula.
It was suggestive of a geological mystery.
More teams of geologists were called in to
study the rock formations, the layers of sediment that formed parts of the
mountain chain, their strata, and they came to the conclusion that hundreds of
square miles of mountainous terrain had indeed experienced a dramatic uplift in
a short period of time.
They wanted to understand it.
They knew intuitively that a massive
geological force had to underlay the phenomenon they were measuring. They
naturally thought of the heat source lurking beneath the Yellowstone Park, a
heat source that was the cause of its many geysers and other natural wonders.
Scientists from many disciplines came
together as a community, and together they discovered it, a massive volcano
deep beneath the earth, one that had gone off like clock-work. Every 600,000
thousand years, and it had been 640,000 years since the last eruption.
As a group the scientific community came to
the understanding that the next disaster was upon them. They also understood
that they would not be able to do anything about it, the planet was dying, all life
on the earth was about to become just another layer of clay.
They knew full well that doom was near at
hand.
Some were driven to despair, isolation and
madness. Others committed themselves to the hopeless proposition of discovering
a solution to the problem, which they may have been able to resolve, if only
they had time.
A few
sought to expose the threat to the world at large; they were sanctioned and disappeared.
Then the
inevitable happened.
When The
Collective felt the psychic blow from Earth landing on them, a trillion
individual persons became silent all at once.
Each and every one of them felt the pain of humanity.
It was a trauma they had not felt since the time they themselves were embodied
beings, a kind of pain that they could barely remember, and they had no defense
against it.
The shock waves disoriented them.
It shattered their unity.
Even as the Collective was reeling, trying to
recover from the assault. Kathy guided the flow on consciousness from Earth in
ways that were calming, comforting, soothing.
Kathy was able to settle the collected
humanity she carried with her, to bring them into a peaceful transition, she
did it in no-time, in her much practiced ability to dwell below the strata of
the quantum field.
She realized that Jim had prepared her in
many ways just for this moment, she knew intuitively how to guide the masses
into their place, allowing them to populate the collective consciousness of the
Central Planet.
In that moment, the spirits of the Ancient People,
became still for the first time ever.
They could not relate to what was happening.
They were not adaptable, neither as individuals, nor as a whole.
As Jim recovered he feared the possibility
that the Collective could rebound, and
the Continuum might draw humanity into
itself, adjusting to the invasion of consciousness, but that chance had passed
and was now gone.
Intuitively, Kathy stood as a buffer,
protecting her charges.
The emptiness the Collective faced was like a vacuum, it nearly swallowed the whole.
There was little resistance.
Jim was the first to recover from the trauma.
He regained his composure and his sense of self quickly, much faster than he would
have thought possible.
He could feel the masses in the Collective, they
were silent, but in motion.
Their movement was like a turbulent ocean
beneath him.
It was wild and chaotic.
Jim had prepared himself for something like
this.
He was Jim, and he was fixed on that
identity.
It steadied him, calmed him, it reminded him
of his purpose, of what brought him to this juncture, and of what steps he had
to take in order to preserve his plan.
He had accomplished more than he had set out
to do, he was succeeding beyond his
wildest hope.
He was surviving.
He felt the nearness of victory.
In the first moments he sensed nothing from
the Continuum.
Jim had expected to meet with fierce
resistance from the demi-urge. He had planned for a titanic struggle, but there
was nothing. It seemed to him as if the omnipresent Continuum was gone, voided, wiped away clean.
Jim was wracked by the pain flowing through
the quantum string that connected him to Kathy and to the Collective, both. He felt it in waves alternating in greater and
lesser degrees of intensity.
There were peaks and troughs, and scattered
throughout there were intense spikes of anguish, like waves crashing against a
mountain. The heights of intensity were at times related to a large
concentration of group suffering, at other times they were the product of
particularly poignant individual grief.
The experience would stagger him, his
consciousness would get caught up in and stopped by singular moments of
loss.
He was able to let it flow through him, he
never lost hold of the center of himself. He was ready for the great silence
that he knew must follow, he had anticipated it. He positioned himself to take
advantage.
Jim did not need to move to a physical
location, for the ascension. He was one with the Collective. He occupied the same quantum field that the Continuum and humanity did, only he was
unaware of their full presence alongside him.
He was myopic and singularly focused on his
goal.
He could not see the things he had never
anticipated, not at that moment.
He was busy asserting control, system by
system, folding all of the copies of himself he had seeded throughout the
central system into unity with him, as the primary identity.
He met no resistance there.
Jim felt a deep sense of justification.
He told himself that this catastrophe could
have been avoided, the catastrophe in the Collective,
and the real disaster that had taken the Earth.
The Empire had the technology to control natural
disasters, the Yellowstone eruption could have been mitigated, prevented,
undone, even harnessed for the benefit of the people, in the same way that
similar problems are resolved on other worlds.
However, the Continuum and the Collective,
both of them craved the impending drama that would come in the aftermath of Earth’s
destruction.
The pique of ruin, was a savory delight for
them.
They loved to live vicariously in the lives
of desperate people. To watch them sacrifice and be sacrificed; selflessly or
selfishly, they wanted to be in the moment with those people making the hard
decisions when faced with the loss of everything they loved.
In one place a parent would give up their
life for the sake of their child, a husband for the sake of his wife. In another
place the man would sell his spouse into slavery, and the parents make a
cannibalistic meal of their child’s body.
The more gruesome the decision the more
enwrapped the Collective would be in
it.
They could not wait for the moment to arrive.
They were ready for it, eager, hungry.
The successful implementation of Jim’s plan
would cause the Continuum to feel a
deep anguish, real fear, actual pain and to experience it all forcefully. He
intended that it pay for the ages of contemptuous tyranny the Collective and the Continuum lorded over the Galactic Empire.
The Continuum
would pay with its artificial life, and the Collective,
what survived of it, if any did, the Collective
would have to adjust to a new reality.
They would participate in the cataclysmic
events happening on Earth, they would participate in a manner they could not
have predicted, had no defense for, would not be able to respond to it.
They would feel it as if they were
experiencing it themselves
Jim told himself this, and justified his
action in this way: if the Continuum
would have listened to him, this impasse might have been avoided. He comforted himself
with these thoughts even knowing that it was a lie.
He had guided events to this place, he had
been shaping this moment for millions of years, seeking this opportunity, and
now he would deliver the results.
The full potential of this moment had been realized,
Jim was at the crest of the wave.
He never had any intention of allowing the
membership to escape the fate that he had laid out for them.
With the Continuum
in a state of paralysis; it was a simple thing for Jim to assert the force of
his persona in the command matrix of HomeWorld, thereby dismantling the
architecture supporting the security apparatus of the Central Planet.
He activated the myriad copies of himself
that had been lying dormant in every subsystem, waiting for his signal and the
opportunity to attack. Together they took down the security apparatus, and Jim
took control. He restructured the cynergenic protections, all of the buffers
and barriers protecting the Collective
and the group consciousness of the Continuum.
They were undone.
Any member of the Collective who had been in a state of recovery at that moment, had
that work made of recovery all the more difficult. They were now confronted
with a new reality, one in which there were no safeguards protecting their
individuality, one in which the solidly partitioned world of the Collective was now more like a vast
miasma, a swamp of chaos and diffusion.
The undoing of the cynergeic barriers made it
more difficult for any members of the Collective
to reassert their own identity, the mass of them were simply drifting into a
state of in-cohesion.
As soon as he was able, Jim turned his
attention to the military programs of the Central Planet. Taking control of
those functions was a little more complicated because it involved the
manipulation of machinery in real time.
Jim had to adjust his consciousness to
receive data inputs from millions of remote sensors and monitors that were
constantly scanning the space around the Central Planet; defensive weapons
capabilities, shields, offensive weapons capabilities, energy weapons, nuclear
weapons, projectiles, and the fleets of drones, in a constant state of activity
repairing and maintaining the structural needs of the HomeWorld.
Jim only needed to assert his control over
the many disparate systems, he did not need to guide them after that, their
automated functions would carry on with majority of tasks they were assigned to
fulfill.
During this process Jim was fully enveloped
in time; the work he was engaged in was systematic and sequential.
He was outwardly focused, as one by one he
asserted his mastery over the controls
He was busy with his work as the Imperial
Armada entered the system and deployed itself for engagement.
Emergence 5.0
Part
Two – Jim and Kathy
A Novel in Twelve Parts
#Emergence #ShortFiction #12MonthsOfSciFi
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