Generations

by Francis Rosenfeld

  Sarah experienced the spectacle bent over laughing and every time she looked at the eerie contraption she burst out again. Lily's visual commentary was so to the point that the redhead didn't even think to find the brains and hands behind this set-up, Sys, obviously, and chide her for participating. She raised her eyes just in time to see three sparkling dragons lift Lily out of the globe on a lectica that seemed to be made of pure light.

  "Lily, what in the..." Seth exploded with laughter.

  "Lily met with me this morning, I am Etherea, the soul of the wind. Lily likes me a lot, she said I should eat only wild berries and sleep on clouds. She always loved my graceful countenance," the girl formerly known as Lily stood up and twirled in a flourish of pirouettes, none of which touched the ground.

  "Could you please tell Lily to get back to me as soon as it is convenient for her? I would like to continue the discussion we started yesterday," Seth asked smiling.

  "Lily would be pleased to do that," Etherea curtsied graciously.

  "Mercy me," Seth thought, "sister Joseph is right. These kids have no regard for authority!"

  ***

  "I hope you enjoyed being an autocratic overlord," Seth asked a few hours later when a normal looking Lily arrived to the Prayer Hall, featuring the correct age, height and hair.

  "I was wondering," Lily started without skipping a beat, "if there is something you'd like to share with me about your experiences, for instance what did you feel when you decided to come here, were you afraid?"

  "Yes, of course. I wouldn't trust anybody who wasn't because they probably wouldn't be sane. But if you knew me better you would ask what it felt like to carry the responsibility of bringing everybody else here with me," Seth answered very softly. "Every decision of consequence is pummeled by doubt."

  "That's what I was trying to say about my mornings," Lily commented.

  "No, that's just mental refuse," Seth contradicted her with a harsher tone that she would have wished. "There is no value in putting yourself down and hating your food. Many people confuse challenging with valuable, don't waste any effort on unprocessed thought."

  "Do you think I'd make a good leader?" Lily asked directly.

  "I don't know, " Seth hesitantly responded. The most representative aspect of their life on Terra Two were the expectant possibilities, this clear path always within reach, not so challenging to make one lose heart but not so easy that it didn't dazzle, always revealing just one small step ahead as if their destiny were leading them across the raging river of life from stepping stone to stepping stone.

  "Sister Roberta is engineering a replica of Sys's subatomic particle modeler," she continued. "I don't know how this is going to affect our society but it seems to me in light of the infinite possibilities this tool opens that it becomes a priority to learn how to make our own wishes and desires beneficial. There is no greater test of leadership than being in charge of your own mind. What do you dream about?" she asked Lily.

  "What's out there, beyond the visible horizon," Lily answered with an enthusiasm that made it obvious she had given this issue a lot of thought.

  "I guess at this point your prospect is very possible," Seth answered thoughtfully, staring deeply into Lily's eyes to learn as much about the girl's vision of the future as her thoughts could reach.

  ***

  "Did you mean that advice about looking at yourself as if you were another person?" Sarah asked through the interlink, amused.

  "You didn't really think my parents named me Seth, did you?" the leader answered calmly. Sarah had never questioned whether the leader's name was Seth, just why. This comes to prove that one can spend two centuries with somebody listening to their every thought and still find unknowns buried under the deep.

  "So, what did you tell Seth first thing in the morning?" Sarah pushed, amused.

  "Why don't you mentor Lily and then I'll make fun of you?" the leader answered.

  "It seems she already knows what she wants to do, don't you think?" Sarah continued.

  "Thankfully. I'm horrible at giving advice," Seth confessed. "Why did you volunteer me, anyway, I wanted to talk to you about that! I've never sweated more in my life, it feels like one of those dreams when you find yourself taking a test you didn't prepare for."

  "It's good to push your comfort zone every now and then," Sarah smiled. "Besides, it seems pretty obvious you are the best person to guide her, she is so much like you!"

  ***

  Seth walked through the virtual model of the purple language and the sinuous three dimensional weave sang like crystal as her fingers touched it. She kept refining the music by adding more thickness to some curves and slimming others, tensioning some of the lines and allowing others to flow freely like soft fuzzy waterfalls. The landscape of this strange crystal web was so familiar to her she could walk through it with her eyes closed without touching any strand unless she really wanted to.

  "What does it say?" Sarah asked. Seth turned around to see the redhead slide her fingers over one of the thin strings closest to her and make the entire web resonate like a glass violin.

  "You just played 'How wonder up like high the world above'," the leader smiled.

  "I thought this whole thing was an already written text," Sarah replied, surprised.

  "It is," said Seth.

  "Then how could I play something that makes no sense?" the redhead asked.

  "You are thinking like a human. Do you remember those old movies about the inhabitants of flatland who only perceived two dimensions?" she asked.

  "Are you telling me I was playing the shadow of a coherent message?" Sarah inquired.

  "No, I'm telling you that you can only perceive the shadow of the coherent message you just played, however we can reassemble the multi-dimensional text from all its three dimensional projections. The message you touched has four lines of harmony," Seth clarified, "and it says

  'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are!

  Up above the world so high,

  Like a diamond in the sky.

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are!'"

  "Twinkle-twinkle?" Sarah grinned. "Really?"

  "I told you it was complicated," Seth continued, slightly annoyed at the lack of enthusiasm. "What are you doing here, anyway?" she continued brusquely.

  "Nice to see you too!" the redhead quietly revolted.

  "I'm sorry," the leader continued gently. "What's up?"

  "Sister Roberta has a rough prototype for the subatomic particle modulator, she asked everyone to come over for the test run."

  Chapter Twelve

  Of Alchemy

  "I'm telling you they invented a time machine!" Jenna announced, excited.

  "No, silly! There is no such thing, they are testing the alchemy equipment," Lily replied with a very assured tone and a somewhat superior attitude. Jimmy burst out laughing.

  "Why are you laughing?" Lily said outraged. Sister Novis passed them by and ran towards Roberta's lab. "Sister, what are you working on?" Lily asked her.

  "An alchemy device," sister Novis answered, then picked up the pace and smiled enigmatically.

  "See?" Lily turned towards Jimmy who stopped laughing at her and focused on getting a better view through the back windows. He only wished he could get inside the lab to experience the events first hand but alas sister Jesse was guarding the front door like a smiling incarnation of the Cerberus. The rules were clear, no children were allowed in for the experiment, which was so unfair because Sys was there to fine-tune the machine. Jimmy noticed a draft had pushed the back door open and slid through it before it slammed shut, then showed up on the other side of the window pane gesturing to Lily and Jenna to come in. Quiet as whispers the girls tiptoed inside the lab and hid behind one of the tables, all eyes and grins and stifling giggles.

  In the center of the lab stood the contraption, a table sized set of titanium alloy spherical mirrors constant
ly washed by the thin film of a viscous liquid. Sarah was standing next to sister Roberta commenting on last minute details and trying to fix a stubborn strand of Sys's hair. Um shuffled to free itself from excessive maternal doting an focused on the dishes, a little anxious about the possible results of the experiment. All around them the sisters were rushing to adjust settings and set-up the data stream for the experiment.

  Sister Mary-Francis walked so close to Jimmy's toes she almost stepped on them. The little boy moved quickly out of the way, knocking over a little aluminum cup in the process. The cup wobbled on the metal counter but the noise got lost in the racket and excitement of the room. Jimmy breathed out slowly, looking at Lily and Jenna who were gesturing to him to keep quiet.

  "Are we ready?" Seth asked as she approached the central space. Sister Roberta was still fussing about, nervous as she always was before trying new technology. She was mumbling under her breath raising the tension in the room and making the other sisters go over all the possible mishaps of this endeavor. Sarah thought having Sys there was a terrible idea even though Seth had explained to her that if anything went wrong um would be the only being able to fix it.

  "You don't want to spend the rest of eternity as an energy ball, do you?" the leader had asked the redhead. Sarah didn't respond but thought if not for the immortals that was probably what she would be right now. She then remembered people were supposed to have bodies in the afterlife, made of a different essence but bodies nevertheless. She pondered on what a body would look like if it were made of pure energy, then considered the particle/wave duality and realized there is not such a clear distinction between energy and matter anyway, at least not at a very small scale.

  "Focus!" the leader snapped the redhead out of her reverie over the nature of Heaven. "Sister Roberta is about to change air into potatoes, I think that's worth your attention!"

  "Why potatoes?" Sarah wondered quietly.

  "Because gold would have been too cliché," the leader answered through the interlink, then continued out loud. "When can we start, sister, it's noon already!"

  Sister Roberta took a deep breath and gave the machine the instructions to start. A potato congealed slowly adjusting its spin as more matter was added to it and its axis of inertia kept shifting.

  "Can you turn it into something else?" sister Benedict asked? Sister Roberta turned the potato into a bubble of coffee. The sight of coffee pushed Sarah back in contemplative mode and she wondered if there was an equivalent of coffee in the thereafter. She liked coffee. And cats. Seth's fearsome stare brought her back to reality.

  Sister Roberta noted with relief that the experiment was a success, reverted the coffee to thin air and turned the mirrors off. A polished rock instantly materialized and fell to the floor exactly half way between the mirrors. The sisters went dead silent, staring at the byproduct and trying to understand how the machine defied the law of conservation of mass.

  "You called it an alchemy machine, what do you expect?" sister Joseph retorted annoyed.

  "I'm sure there is a lot of atmospheric gas in that rock," Seth offered.

  "Actually there isn't," sister Roberta responded with a baffled look on her face. "The system was closed, I created an isolating field around it, I didn't want us to turn into potatoes too."

  "Pumpkins, more likely!" sister Joseph commented, morose.

  "Maybe it took energy from the isolating field," Seth offered.

  "No, it didn't, I monitored the energy readings, they remained constant," sister Roberta answered.

  "Is it possible that it was brought in from somewhere else? Remember how your energy bubble brought Jimmy from the beach?" the leader asked. Jimmy tried not to look excited about having had that experience while Lily and Jenna gave him envious stares.

  "I guess at this point anything is possible, but this specific scenario is highly unlikely," the sister commented.

  "Can you tell us what it is without touching it?" Seth asked.

  "Of course. It's basaltic rock, green, it looks like," sister Roberta described.

  "No! Good thing my eyes didn't deceive me, it really is a green rock!" sister Joseph mocked.

  "I doesn't seem radioactive," Roberta continued. "For all I can tell it's just a rock."

  "There is no green basalt on this planet," sister Felix said matter of fact and all the eyes in the room focused on her.

  "Are you sure?" Seth asked.

  "Of course I'm sure, I do all the geological analysis. I have not found green basalt anywhere, come to think of it there is no basalt at all."

  "Is the machine off, sister?" Seth asked Roberta who nodded in agreement. The leader bent down and picked up the mineral. The unassuming specimen stared her in the face asserting its disobedience to the laws of physics. It was polished to a lustrous shine and reflected its surroundings like a parabolic mirror.

  "What do you make of this?" Seth turned to Roberta in hope of an answer. The sister shrugged. Seth carefully placed the rock on the table. "Do you know what it is?" she asked Sys.

  Um shook its head 'no'. "Can I keep it?" it asked, excited. Seth agreed and Sys quickly grabbed the polished rock and placed it in its pocket.

  ***

  Seth came back to the lab a little later after everybody else had gone to find sister Roberta trying to figure out the physical impossibility puzzle. Between mid-day and late afternoon the sister had repeated the experiment a number of times and got random results at its completion. Sometimes she ended up with thin air as anticipated and other times a piece of mineral would manifest. There was a little pile of colorful rocks growing at her feet, not all of them green but all very hard, some crystalline and looking like black glass, some speckled with red and green dots, like porphyry, some dull brick red, like the dirt of the planet, some slate gray with blue undertones. All were polished to a perfect mirror finish and the light of the setting suns made the quartz particles sparkle. For a moment there Seth thought she saw the pile glow with its own inner light.

  "How many times did you run this experiment?" she asked with astonishment.

  "About twice as many times as you can count rocks in that pile. The laws of physics may no longer apply but the ones of probability sure do!" sister Roberta answered, frustrated. She groaned at the end of another experiment when she heard the now familiar thump of a bright orange potato shaped rock with mica speckles dropping to the floor. "I can't stand random stuff!" she started another experiment and her thunderous stare made clear to the leader that she would rather not have an audience.

  Seth picked up a bunch of rocks and headed for the door.

  "Have you talked to Sarah at all? It would be helpful if we knew the exact composition of this material, she can analyze it," the leader said upon exiting in a well intentioned attempt to be helpful.

  "Suit yourself," the sister thought but didn't answer, eager to be left alone.

  ***

  "I assume you are studying the composition of the rock," Seth said as she entered Sarah's lab. Sys and Sarah were so absorbed in the infinitesimal world they gazed at through their microscopes they didn't pay attention to the leader until she dropped the rocks on the metal countertops causing booming clatter. "I brought you more samples. Poor sister Roberta is at her wit's end, not being able to figure out any rules about this stuff is driving her nuts."

  "It's not a rock," Sarah said and returned to her microscope in silence.

  "Care to elaborate on that?" the leader asked, annoyed by the half answer.

  "I wish I could," Sarah answered. "It is matter, I think."

  "What else would it be?" Seth retorted.

  "Precisely," the redhead answered. Sys stuck to her microscope almost immobile, except for her hand which scribbled symbols and formulas with great speed. "Take a look," Sarah encouraged the leader. Seth adjusted the lens to see something that almost looked like an atomic structure in the sense that it had a 'nucleus' surrounded by a completely random electronic cloud. The opposite charge particles combine
d and split up every now and then for no apparent reason and the electrons ran wild, unencumbered by belonging to a particular orbital zone, occasionally passing straight through the 'nucleus' as if it didn't exist.

  "This rock doesn't exist!" the leader blurted, fascinated.

  "Sure it does. Try not to drop it on your foot, it's heavy," Sarah chuckled.

  "I saw an electron run through the nucleus," Seth continued, shocked.

  "Ah, no strong forces, you noticed!" answered the redhead.

  "What keeps the nucleus from falling apart?" the leader asked.

  "I don't know," Sarah answered. "You could ask me what keeps the particles together too. But they are not really particles, or nuclei."

  "Why are the rocks different colors?" Seth asked, but before getting an answer she noticed that the bright orange rock in her palm was now sage green, with glassy red and black dots.