The Great Organizer

by Vincent Pet

  ***

  The years passed and the Great Organizer grudgingly recognized he was having difficulties. He had to send his report to the council and was struggling to find the words that would not put in peril his newly acquired responsibilities. The results were not as he expected. He came to that sinking realization that he needed to change course of action to salvage what was left. It seemed, no matter what he did, that the line of events followed more or less the same pattern.

  Whenever a group of individuals obtained power, they segregated and ruled by force. Instead of sharing the wealth and their technology, the Egyptians created castes of varying social degree among themselves. Those wealthy didn’t even consider the poor. This was a terrible model for social evolution. Those that could make an intellectual difference and had the misfortune of being born poor had little means of influencing the society that they were part of. This created an intellectual destabilization and prevented the society from advancing. Worse still, if the ruling class had limited intelligence, it could become catastrophic for that society.

  Another characteristic he noted, again and again, was that the race had very little regards for the heavens. He had tried repeatedly throughout their history to bring their attention to the stars, but this had only inspired incomprehension that had lead them to create fanciful stories to explain the universe around them. They called it religion.

  What amazed and frustrated Uric was that as religion spread from Mesopotamia, each culture had the arrogance and selfishness to place itself as the central protagonist from which all revolved. Each culture was stubborn enough to kill for this ideal. As with many things, Uric failed to understand the subtleties that drove the race. Yet, an idea was forming in his mind that perhaps he could to use this religious theme to his advantage.

  The more Uric thought of it, the more he became convinced that this time he had the right approach. He had to shake the foundation of this society. It was either attempt what he had in mind, even if bold, or start again with another group. Uric was getting tired of having to start over. He was getting tired of remaining on Earth. He wanted a new assignment – one that would provide fewer problems.

  He communicated his plan of action to the council and waited. He wasn’t sure that the council would approve. He couldn't remember anyone ever having tried something similar. That they finally did accept his scheme was an authentication of the high esteem they placed in him.

  When the first ship appeared out of the blue sky, the Egyptians started fleeing in every direction that would take them as far away as they could from the object. They cried out in fear and bewilderment as the ship slowly hovered over the ground and touched down in front of the royal palace. The pharaoh screamed at his men and managed to muster them to take position in front of him as he menaced to cut out their hearts.

  He surrounded himself with as many soldiers as he could. He peeked over their shoulders at the round, shiny object in front of him. It was huge and all in solid gold. More gold than he had ever seen. More gold than he thought existed! Someone whispered in his ear. A nervous grin creased his face for a second. Was it really a gift from a god?

  All of a sudden a hole appeared at the side of the object. Out stepped a giant, three times higher than any man, all in gold, covered in sparkling ornaments. They all gasped as they stumbled back and covered their eyes with their hands. He seemed ten times brighter than the sun. Some of the men closest to it launched their spears in fear. They simply bounced off the giant.  

  Uric glared at the men in front of him and turned his fiery eyes to the pharaoh. In a deep, booming voice that threw half the army down to the ground, he said:

  “I am the sun god, Ra. You will obey me and I will give you the power to rule over the world. I will give you immortality.”

  So it started. He had been able to obtain a small ship from the council. His intention was to make them focus on the sky and to make them eventually understand that there was something up there worth pursuing. He hoped that this would eventually lead to the observations of the stars and planets. He hoped that this would expand their minds and spur them to discover new things beyond their borders.

  With his ship, he helped them carry the first stones that were intended to build the first pyramid. He showed them how to transport them by hand. All this was intended to raise their awareness of the heavens. He wanted them to think big, to solve problems together and learn how to cooperate with each other. He knew that the project he asked of them was so huge that in order to succeed all the groups of their society had to work together.

  To ensure that his wishes were done, he promised the pharaoh immortality after death. He promised him that when he died he would become a god like him. When the pharaoh demanded proof, Uric came back in the shape of his dead father, two times higher, and laden with gold. The pharaoh was so impressed that he quickly ordered his men to construct the pyramid. Soon, however, a few cracks in Uric’s plan started to emerge.

  In his haste to build the pyramid, the pharaoh decided to raid the neighboring societies around him. He went as far as sending his men east through the desert to bring back whole tribes of slaves. Uric was disappointed. How could this race aspire to become great if their first concern was their personal greed? Such was the pharaoh’s quest for immortality that on the day the pyramid was completed, he took a dagger and pierced his own heart. 

  The generation that followed was not much better. Soon the pyramids started to be used for other purposes than that originally constructed for. High priests started to appear as sacrifices and religious connotations were given to the structures. The race had failed Uric once again. They would never be able to use the clues and work out the calculations needed to advance to a new awareness. If the Egyptian society had matured as he expected, they would have one day discovered that the pyramids ultimately indicated some of the intergalactic highways of the galaxy.

  In time, even the ship and his presence as a god had no effect. Only the small children who had never seen the ship would run and gawk at the sight. At times, the pharaoh himself would not deem it necessary to visit him when he landed. A high priest once came to inform him that the pharaoh was very disappointed and that Uric would pay for his refusal to help him defeat his enemies.

  “The pharaoh has sent me to tell you that you better hope that he lives long, for once he dies and becomes a god, he will come and destroy you with his own hands.”

  Uric knew that he needed to draw another plan of action. The Egyptians had failed him. As much as it bruised his ego to admit it, he would have to start again with another promising society. First, however, he corrected a great injustice that was directly linked to his coming as a god. He found that the tribes the Egyptians captured and enslaved showed a certain unity that might bode well for the future. Determined to free them, he purposefully became a slave. This did not prevent him to march them out of Egypt. The mighty Egyptian army was crushed under the sea that he parted to let the people through. It took forty years to cross the desert and lead them back to their land. He gave them ten simple laws on two tablets for them to follow, hoping that they would provide a solid foundation from which to build on. They called him Moses.

  A few thousand years went by during which Uric simply observed. He wanted to be certain this time that the winning conditions existed for a society to flourish. He didn’t want to rush and interfere in one that had limited potential. His patience was rewarded as he saw a promise on the other side of the sea from Egypt. Two cities had grown and were becoming important, Athens and Sparta. They were both aggressive, but what was interesting was that one had a military type mentality while the other a more culturally inclined temperament.  Uric thought that if he could combine the two together, they would form quite a civilization. It would be quite a task since the two were sworn rivals.

  Uric decided to become a philosopher in Athens, and meeting less opposition than he expected, soon was influencing the society around him. Finally, he had found
a civilization that was hungry to learn, where a single individual counted and had a say in everyday life. This society was interested in politics, creating a government where all the people had a voice.  He had to let this model grow as he protected it through the centuries.

  When the Persians attacked, Uric was there to lead the fleet that defeated the Persian navy at Salamis and then liberated the possessed Greek cities from the Persian forces. He went with Alexander the Great as they conquered the Orient. As the Greeks grew and expanded, they brought their way of life to the people around them. Uric was so involved with his ambitious plan to bring an order to this race that he ignored another culture which was starting to gain momentum, the Romans.

  Yet even before the Romans came to power, there were signs of decay within the Greek civilization that perturbed Uric. It seemed as if the culture had stagnated and was incapable of generating new ideas to rise forward and meet higher challenges. They seemed to have fallen back and had started to rely too much on their past. As Athens grew and different cultures mixed and flowed through Athens, classes started becoming more evident. The social fabric began to tear apart as the educated isolated themselves. Society became distorted as education became less readily available to all. The intellectual stimulation that had produced an artistic and philosophical community became less present in everyday life.

  This lack of cohesion among individuals eventually created a less driven and ambitious society. No one wanted to suffer for the other in a common cause, no matter how important the cause was. This alienation and loss of ideals ultimately lead to the downfall of the Greek world. Uric could not reverse the outcome and decided that he would have to continue his project through the new, upcoming power of the region, the Romans.

  Uric would never admit it to the council, but he was beginning to have serious doubts about the race. After taking a very active part in Egyptian history, he had taken a different approach with the Greeks. He had woven his plans quietly, assisting where he could to unify the society in a cohesive unit. That it had broken down at the root just when it was expanding made Uric question the motive. The species was ambitious, but it was of short-term duration. It was incapable of peering far into its future and make decisions that could benefit it through time or lead it to a specific goal a few generations down the line.

  That the race was broken into fractions with conflicting ideals and beliefs attested to the cognitive and emotional fragility of its nature. They were unable to make clear decisions by weighing the facts since its emotional part always interfered. Somehow this characteristic provided a short-term advantage which permitted the species to adapt quickly to its surroundings. This produced a form of creativity that was highly unpredictable and whose response was never the same even among individuals placed in identical situations. It was this unpredictability which prevented Uric from forming a practicable course of action. In spite of this, Uric still was confident in his means. He was, after all, the Great Organizer, maybe the greatest of all time.

  Uric decided to proceed in the same manner with the Romans as he did with the Greeks. This time, however, he would limit their creativity by steering them away from the arts and philosophical dilemmas. He had learnt early in the species history that two societies rarely came together to form one if not by force. The only way he would achieve his first objective of unifying the world was to take one society and conquer the rest. He would put all his energy in this conquest. This had to be done very fast, though. The quest of wealth was a stimulus, but once acquired it acted as a destructive force since it stalled expansion and eventually progress.

  Uric used the senate through the early decades of Rome to lead them to build a formidable force. He used every opportunity he could to install within the people a conquering mentality. As the peasant society became aware of the world around them, they started to flex their muscles and feel that they could become just as strong as the others, especially the Carthaginians, their prime foe.

  He let them have a glimpse of the wealth around them and then told them it could be theirs. It became a matter of pride. As opposed to Greece, where the army was comprised mainly of mercenaries, the Roman people strived to be part of the army. They wanted to show the world who they were and what they were capable of. The Romans truly believed that they were the best and would stop at nothing less than rule the entire world. 

  Yet, despite Uric’s interventions in the senate, events were not moving as quickly as he wished. Too many political interests were starting to manifest themselves, so much so that the senate was becoming immobilized by its internal conflicts. Uric needed to regain the focus of the early years of the empire. In Julius Caesar he found a rare man, of astute intelligence and unrelenting determination. Uric became his mentor, taught him military strategies that he had seen in other societies. He taught him how to outsmart an opponent, how to influence a battle and how to manipulate a crowd. Nature had made man ferocious. Man had that innate ability to plan and kill like no other race Uric had ever encountered and Julius Caesar was the most ferocious and heartless of them all. What he didn’t understand, he conquered and changed. If they resisted, he killed and eliminated the problem.

  In little time, Rome brought the Eagle to all parts of Western civilization. When Caesar was away for long stretches of time, Uric made sure his name rebounded heroically through the streets of Rome. He sent messengers to other towns and cities to laud Caesar’s name. Julius Caesar could do no wrong. Even in the senate, whenever Caesar needed anything, Uric made sure that he always obtained what he wished for. The difference between the powerful determination of the victorious Caesar and the sluggish bickering of the senate eventually influenced the people. They made him their emperor.

  With Julius Caesar in control of Rome, Uric became more powerful than ever before. Together they planned the conquest of the north and drew the plans to conquer the Far East. Uric knew from experience that the control of such a vast territory was going to be complicated in the present circumstances. He needed to introduce automation, radio, and flight. He figured it would take about one hundred years to achieve all of this. Once unification was complete, then he could proceed to the next phase of his mission, the implementation of a solid social order favoring structure and efficiency from which intelligence could express itself and grow. In less than three hundred years, he intended to bring this race to the stars.

  Uric was so convinced and absorbed by his schemes that he never saw the end come. The death of Caesar in such brutal fashion was not part of any of his equations. On the ides of March, Brutus and his friends stabbed Caesar to death. Uric knew then that this was the end of Rome, at least the way he intended it to become. Uric would never again meet another individual quite like Julius Caesar.

  Uric didn’t want to lose any more time. The council would not take this setback well. He had never been in this position before. He had never seen an intelligent species self-destruct repeatedly in this manner. Uric searched hard for new ideas and came up with one he hadn’t tried before. At this point, he told himself, he might as well apply even the most unlikely concepts that seemed contrary to any logic.

  If he could initiate the concept of love among men, maybe progressively through time, man could learn to tolerate one another and be less prone to kill, making it easier for different societies to come together as one. The gods that the world knew were destructive, vindictive gods, capable of good and bad, of getting angry and holding grudges, of mocking the weak and boasting their strength.

  What he needed was the creation of a gentle god to teach the inhabitants of this world an altruistic lifestyle. First, though, he needed to find a place where religion was closely knit in the fabric of everyday life. He needed a place where the population was strongly united and could kindle and spread an idea. He found such a place in a Roman province at the end of the Mediterranean Sea. He had left them as Moses and now he returned to lead them again. This time he would not lead them with his might. This time he wo
uld lead them with his word.

  Uric acted swiftly. After having worked in the background for a long time, he decided to use a more direct approach. This time he would return to a visible role. He started to spread a message of peace and brotherly love among the ordinary populace, of a benevolent god who cared for each and every single one of them no matter who they were, no matter what burdens they had. This god loved them all with their flaws and miseries. The message was so powerful that in no time he had followers and the more miracles he performed, the more supporters he had.

  When he was nailed to the cross and left as dead in a cave, though, he meditated for three days alone before leaving that tomb in great confusion. Uric had never thought that such a peaceful movement would finish with such anger and violence. He had warned against the love of oneself over the love of all, but his simple message had threatened the very fabric of society. The quest for individual power was more attractive than the tranquility of a people’s peace. Personal gain was more important than the gain of all.