by Mark Kraver
“Like when someone wants to mug you in a dark alleyway, they will begin to think the person may need help getting home?” Logan asked.
“Something along that line, yes.” Mac said, smiling, and nodding to Tuna.
“Wow, that’s deep,” said Conrad.
“As deep as our genetic coding,” Mac concluded.
Chapter 66
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Victor Hugo, 1802-1885, Earth
Library of Souls
Zenith
Logan lay on the couch looking like a fat tick ready to pop. She had her headphones wrapped around her belly playing Pink Floyd’s Meddle. The baby liked the sonic tones, and it kept her quiet. It was a much-needed respite after the month-long chronic telepathic question and answering sessions between mother and daughter after the Anti-Babel had past. There wasn’t anything left in Logan’s brain she could teach the little sponge, including astrophysics. Now she was learning from the baby facts she could barely grasp, like the concepts of dark-matter conglomerations, time decaying gravitons and two-dimensional holographic travel between the universes. Like there’s supposed to be more than one universe? She didn’t know where the baby got the information from, and neither did the Atlantean. Those little flying buggers must be talking to her behind her back, she thought, or maybe it was her species’ genetic memory?
As the music softly stopped at the end of the album, Logan’s mind began to swim with beautiful imagery of a smooth shiny lake, unlike one she had ever seen. She felt the aura of her mind connecting to the consciousness within her and knew her baby was now deep in thought. Across the vast lake surface tiny raindrops started to fall, creating concentric rings of light that moved out from the center of each splash. The surface of the lake began to darken into a blur, only to refocus into the blackness of space with each raindrop becoming an enormous explosion of stars. Logan began to understand that this was a representation of the regional recycling of matter inside the universe referred to by her baby as a ‘little bang.’ She remembered how Numen talked about the formation of a little bang and its significance to the Elohim as a chosen people of Eos, Goddess of the Universes.
Are you ready? the baby whispered inside her head.
Oh my God, Logan thought, stupefied with splashes of memory swimming through her head, thinking, Brobdingnagian accretion disk of super clustering galaxies? Ready? Ready for what, another unbelievable lesson? She put a banana into her mouth and an amazing gush of relief swept through her body. She could inhale and exhale normally again, without feeling like she had chronic asthma. She looked around the apartment—the Hemispheric Atlantean Headquarters of America or HAHA, a name Conrad had given to the Atlanteans to mess with Mac’s head— and swallowed the banana, instantly wanting more. She had never been so hungry in her life.
“Vince is there something else to eat in the fridge?” she dared to ask.
“Good God girl, what’s with you?”
“Ah, I’m pregnant with a fast-growing alien in my belly? I think the baby dropped cause I’m breathing a lot better now, and I’m really, really hungry.”
“That must mean you have more space inside your stomach,” he said, getting up from a chair across the room where he was amusing himself with a Scientific American article about the future of space flight. Walking into the kitchen, scratching his head with one hand and his butt with the other, he stopped and put both hands to his middle, just below his sternum. He began feeling the area around his liver for any painful masses and found none. “I don’t think there’s anything left,” he said, opening the refrigerator. To his amazement, inside was packed with all kinds of yummy looking dishes, fruits and vegetables. “Wow, those little buggers filled the icebox again. How about cauliflower lasagna this time?” he asked reading one of the neatly labeled packages.
Logan didn’t answer, and the others were too busy with their planetary reorganization to bother.
“Kit? What are you hungry for?” Conrad repeated, still hanging his head inside the refrigerator door. He noticed the silence and swung his head around to see what the matter was.
Logan was looking down at her lap and patting the cushions of the couch when she yelled, “Vince, I think my water broke.”
In an instant the room glowed like the top of the Empire State Building at Christmas. Green, red and white swirling lights danced around the room, then settled over Logan as cherubim. Theo reached out his dinky hand and scanned her belly with an intense green beam. As it passed over her distended abdomen, all the blood vessels leading to the baby’s placenta lit up. When he was done, he smiled the cutest little smile and erupted into a giggling patty-cake party with the other cherubim, which quickly devolved into a fight over who would move Logan into the master bedroom’s shower. The controversy was sorted out with the help of Atlantean scorn, and several cherubim joined together to lift Logan’s plump body into the air, floating her into the bathroom and slamming the bedroom door shut behind them.
“Hey guys, I took a shower last night,” she said, as clothing stripped off her weightless body and the shower came on. The cherubim guided her in and under the stream, and her body jolted, registering that the water was ice cold. Conrad let himself into the bathroom as quaking shocks of Logan’s voice echoed around the crowded space.
“Oh my God,” she shouted, getting drenched in the cold shower. She smacked Melvin with her flailing arms as the freezing cold water hit her in the face. “Turn on the hot water first,” she gasped, twisting the faucet handle to hot. She felt like she had a thousand little hands washing over every millimeter of her body. Melvin, noticing her adjusting the water, slapped her hand and turned back on the cold water while making a little ‘yikes’ chirping sound. “I am freezing,” she complained, again reaching out to grasp the hot water handle. This time the handle wouldn’t budge an inch. “Cut it out you little shits,” she shouted, as she was lifted out of the freezing shower, wrapped with hot blankets, and placed in the bed.
Conrad stood at the door watching the whole event unfold. He navigated through the maelstrom of busy babies, reached out, and held Logan’s ice-cold hand. “What was that all of that about?”
“Got me,” she grimaced, flinching with abdominal contractions.
Oscar reached out and placed his little hands on her forehead, and Melvin placed his hands-on Conrad’s temples. Theodore scanned her distended belly again with another green beam from the palms of its hands, sending a warm glow through her arms, legs, and spinning disoriented head.
When Logan’s head cleared, she was with Vince holding hands, standing outside somewhere on overgrown grass. They looked at each other, and then at the majestic building a short distance away. It looked like the White House.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I thought you were having a baby,” he said.
Logan put her hands on her belly and felt it get hard. “I still am?”
“That’s weird.”
“Yeah, maybe this is the future of childbirth. No pain and a psychedelic trip to boot,” she said, seeing diamonds in the sky glistening in the sunshine.
Floating over the large front yard, they saw hundreds if not thousands of gravity bubbles descend, each carrying young women inside. When the bubbles popped on the grass, a cherub escorted each woman into a military style formation, all looking at the nearby building. Each of the women had a golden star upon her forehead, like Logan’s.
“What’s this all about?” asked Conrad.
Logan didn’t say anything and continued to watch.
Within a few moments the President of the United States of America walked out onto the porch and looked at the women who, as Logan intuitively understood, were from all around the country. He spoke to them only two words: “Thank you.”
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” Numen said, materializing next to them. “This is happening all around the planet, in every country.”
“What?” she asked.
“These women were chosen, like you, to gestate the first generation of Earth Elohim.”
“They are all pregnant?” asked Conrad.
“With Yahweh’s baby?” she asked.
“One hundred and forty-three thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine.”
Logan felt a rush of dizziness and began to lose her balance. Conrad took her by the arm and steadied her shivering body. Numen smiled and said, “Congratulations, it’s a girl.”
Sliding sideways in her mind, Logan saw coming into her peripheral vision a placental ball of pulsating tissue suspended in a clear floating bubble. Connected to the placenta by an umbilicus, another bubble expanded and contracted, ventilating a premature infant who had a disproportionately large head. Numen appeared at the side of Logan’s bed where she lay, still holding Vince’s hand.
“Hello Mistress Zenith. You are the first,” Numen whispered, scrolling his golden fingers over the preemie’s remote-control spheres. The inner surface of the baby’s bubble turned opaque and flashed strange-looking figures and pictograms, then became transparent again.
Logan saw back buds protruding like small wings, and a long tail folded up between her baby’s legs and coiled around her waist. Numen activated a handheld green laser that penetrated the bubble and vaporized each anomaly, while leaving the imperceptible points on each ear.
“Now she will look superior. Sometimes these traits show up in different breeding stock,” Numen commented.
Zenith smiled with intelligent sparkling eyes that blinked out clear amniotic fluid. For the first time, she seemed to notice Logan and fixated on her mother’s amazed gaze through the incubator. Gurgling, and then with a quick sneeze, the infant cleared her throat before sending the telepathic message, “Hello mother.”
Inside the Obituary Chamber green pulsing veins of neurogenetic energy began to fade from one corridor of the BrainNet Connectome and started a new pulsing wave in another. In Nadira and Lanochee’s merged minds, baby Zenith’s eyes morphed into those of a fully mature superior woman. The connectome was taking them from the genesis of the first Elohim on Earth and delivering them to Earth’s exodus, one thousand years into the future.
“Your first was beautiful,” Nadira said, as she regained her bearings on the future and rubbed her ears remembering her birth. “I too had wings and a tail.”
“A near extinction event of the humans during the first one hundred years of the genesis must have been difficult to manage,” Lanochee commented, marveling at how much Zenith looked like her mother. “I only had wings.”
“Although Numen and his entourage recorded the history of the genesis millennium, those thoughts are Zenith’s, not mine,” Yahweh echoed inside their minds.
God of God
PART 2
EXODUS
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
Seneca the Elder, 54 BC-39 AD, Earth
Library of Souls
The future was hard for the earthlings who survived the collapse of their world. They witnessed the genesis of the first Elohim born into what had become a primitive, isolated place inside the Milky Way Galaxy. The Elohim’s system of managed sterility, using only hand-picked genetically superior parents, had left the human population below one million. Global warming disrupted the natural ebb and flow of the deep ocean currents, distributing climates around the world, and leaving the planet in the grips of a manufactured Ice Age.
The sky now had two moons, the smaller of which was not really a moon at all, but instead a gigantic space station called Jerusalem. Built over the last thousand years from the riches of the lunar crust and mantle, Jerusalem had been created to tow the planet Earth through the waiting Dark-matter ‘Halo’ Graviton Transporter to a new star called Heaven.
The theory and mathematics needed to take the moon along with planet Earth were complicated, but with the help of Elohim mindpower and technology, it was doable. In the early days of the station’s construction, thousands of humans had been transported to the moon to mine and manufacture critical infrastructures for the impending planetary exodus.
Logan’s Elohim daughter Zenith had spearheaded the advancements on Earth that made mining on the moon possible. Logan and Conrad’s son, David, born after Zenith celebrated her 6th birthday, was one of the first people to live permanently on the moon’s surface. There he married and had a child of his own named Aurora, who became the moon’s first human matriarch.
The tenth generation of Logan and Conrad’s descendants now lived on the moon under the ever-watchful eyes of their then-unknown distant relative, Zenith, whose mission in life, assigned to her by her mother on her deathbed, was protecting them from harm for the rest of her anton of life.
Within Connectome’s non-corporeal world, Nadira looked into Lanochee’s deep dark eyes and saw something she had never seen before. She felt as if she was looking into her very own soul from the opposite side of her mind. A warm glow fell over her erect body and out through her fingertips, into his warm, caring hand. The strain of actively living her Creator’s life events weighed heavily on her ability to think rationally and she began to depend upon her companion’s stamina for strength and clarity.
‘Who was this stranger and why was he here with her on this incredible journey?’ she thought to herself, trying to shield her mind from him while keeping it open to her master’s story.
Lanochee had no explanation for what he was feeling standing next to Nadira and couldn’t keep his mind from straying through her thoughts and upon her beautiful face as she reacted to their master’s amazing story. He had expected only to come and pay his respects to his master, not journey through his master’s life with a lovely angel.
Yahweh appeared inside their minds with a winking smile while tugging on his earlobe before the sounds of wind and the darkness of a frigid night flooded the landscape around them.
* * *
Chapter 67
The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.
Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945, Earth
Library of Souls
Hades
Gliding through the perpetual darkness of winter’s night sky and down the leeward slopes of Mount Erebus, the only active volcano of Antarctica, the cherubim could see their destination, Mount Terror. They were stealthy, flying at near supersonic speeds so not to concuss a sonic boom on the frigid landscape below. At the base of the valley between the two mountains, a scalloped ice-sculptured opening to the cave Hades led the cherubim deep underground. Infrared sensors were difficult to use in the cold dark terrain as the frosty entrance diminished into complete darkness. The dutiful cherubim had to rely upon old stored route data before they could see the soft red glow of hot rock.
Deeper and deeper they flew, twisting and turning until they entered the large secluded chamber of red-hot molten lava imprisoning the exiled seraph, Armilus. The cherubim circled the inferno once, and then landed on the plateau next to the encased outlaw. They flashed back to the original programming placed into their secret circuitry by Armilus when they first put him into this prison purgatory. The enslaved flying babies were not fond of the notorious prisoner trapped inside the clear casing, but since the day Armilus hand-picked them, they had been duty-bound to the menacing seraph mercenaries. As programming dictated, they had spent the last thousand years quietly assimilating with the world above, and now the team of unwittingly treasonous cherubim were here to free him. The exodus of the Earth was on the horizon.
The cherubim started chewing and gnawing away the clear shackling at an astonishing rate. Crunching at the substance around Armilus’ elbow released one of the seraph’s arms; the arm suddenly swung free, smacking one cherub into the molten fiery pool where it exploded into flames, spooking the others to stop. This was just enough laxity for him to begin clawing at his own body until all the restraints fell free. Once his shackles laid broken and scattered in pieces on the volcani
c floor around him, he took a step forward and yelled a triumphant scream that rocked the cave walls with the single word: “Freedom!”
As a seraph, Armilus was used to waiting extended periods of time in pause mode while traveling through the Halo between distant points in space-time, but this time was different. He was erupting with the exuberance of a little bang because he knew this meant the exodus was imminent.
He placed the palm of his right hand on the head of one of his faithful cherubim and updated his mitochondrial-core controlled quantum molecular data storage with the events of the last thousand years. Arching his back, he looked up and simulated deep breaths while calculating and sorting the new data. He hummed to himself for several seconds before growling, “My exodus has begun.”
Activating his golden suit’s graviton emitters, he rose into the air and reflected light waves into his favorite disguise, the Angel of Death. The outlaw followed his obedient servants through the labyrinth of Mount Terror’s bowels until they emerged into the crisp night air of Antarctica.
Once out in the open, Armilus looked up to scan the sky. On the northern horizon he could see the second smaller moon that, from his update, he knew was a transplant station. “Looks like the Elohim have been busy,” he said to his entourage, before rocketing north at supersonic speed into the Ice-Age world of the exodus.
Jagged slabs of ice crashed onto the South African shoreline. The Antarctic ice sheet had expanded into the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, now home for penguins, fur seals, whales, sea lions, and countless numbers of seabirds. Armilus, and his team of subversive cherubim flew past the abandoned demolished cities of South Africa, past ice-covered grasslands once populated by herds of elephant, gazelles, and cape buffalo. As they crossed the glacier-covered landscape enveloping the southern half of the continent, the speeding cluster emitted a sonic boom that could be heard for over a one hundred miles radius. Armilus was like one of those superheroes the Earthlings had once been so fanatical about, blasting up clouds of snow into blizzards with his tagalongs until he reached his destination, Namibia Graviton Base Station. This base station was built and reserved for the human workforce of the moon who were to be the last to evacuate to the Earth before the exodus begins.
