SCALAR [ Copyright (c) 1990-1992 ]--MT: http://pweb.netcom.com/~mthorn/quetzal5.htm Super Cooled Memory dictates negative random fluctuations today. No Surprises. Even so, the morning emerges free from regulations. Almost self- consciously, the restive dawn stretches out tentative fingers, misty relief in conflict with the turbulent, warm darkness below. Harsh thermals distort a scene of vast, merciless industrialization as far as any eye could see or bear to look at for long, lest any suggestion of benevolence within the universe be placed in serious interrogation. Natural versus unnatural, the feverish atmosphere - molecules wrapped trapped whirling in that elusive demarcation line between night and day - first pulled one way by glacial cold, then swirled another by factory heat. A confused, shimmering phosphorescence appears poised to speak within the waning darkness. "Too much light!" would never be a complaint heard here in this labyrinthine run of rampant technology. Bifurcating towers channeling off some mysterious, noxious exhaust. Characterless structures engineered by destiny. Manifestly, here all and everything is applied, manufactured, designed and dreamt up; and it is just another morning in an endless series of eternally recurring, productive mornings at the Complex Symbiosis. Inorganic and organic: entropy in manic remission. "Hast thou exhausted thy inner world?" A literary vanity this imposition of realities within symbols and words. To cast a spell, who speaks? The Muse is abusive at times. Nevertheless, there must be continuity, to wit: Two labor intensive figures may be discerned in the gloomy heights walking along an intricately braced gangway, their synchronized steps reverberating in the heavy metallic webbing. The similarity of their coveralls announces who they are: C.S. Sector Supervisors, known collectively and not very affectionately by the workers beneath them as *The Twins*. Volatile "Quad", and cool "Chronos". Chronos is articulating some obscure, esoteric equation, doubtless another cherished statistical anomaly, while Quad is distractedly pointing below at a singular, bearded "laborer" toiling beyond their vocal range. Quad laughs, revealing yellow, pointed teeth, microcircuitry glistening in the enamel. Like an oppressive grey light piercing the dull gloom, he interrupts Chronos' monotonous commentary to make a few derogatory remarks aimed at the laborer below. The bearded laborer, as if subliminally conscious of being observed, hestitated ever so slightly; an aura of deja' vu descended heavily as he halted his dexterous manipulations to shake off the unfamiliar mood. The laborer looked at his hands while Chronos turned to Quad: "Do you suppose his inconsistencies stem from a kind of performance anxiety relative to his brief exposure to this sector?" inquired Chronos. Quad didn't answer his partner immediately, but gazed at the numerically inclined Chronos with feigned - and at heart, genuine - revulsion. Extracting an oily rag from his pocket, colours spilling out rainbow spectrum, he makes a half-hearted pass at wiping his brow, then, symbiotically accessing the "troubleshoot file", he recites an abbreviated work history on the bearded laborer, for the benefit of the speculative Chronos: "Three documented genetic endowments: one in spacial engineering, one in heuristics, and one in neurobiology. Two cycles as an operator on the cybernetic simulation platforms, three cycles as an atmosphere analyst, and now transfered here to troubleshoot environments on the nutrients hatcheries. 'Performance anxiety' my ass! I can spot a potential seditionary to The Complex when I see one. Chronos, your obsession with statistics is turning your mind to shit." Meanwhile, the bearded laborer, designated "Thodol" by the Complex Symbiosis, pushes out the strange deja' vu from his psyche. Standing at a junction console, switching to manual, he thereby disconnects the neural link. He adjusts a few dials, punches several keys, scribbles some notes in an ubiquitous, hyperconducting 'clipboard', and finally moniters a long row of holographic gauges. Feeling satisfied with his inner calculations and readings, he takes a rare moment to ponder the vast, rectangular water tanks comprising the over populated nutrients hatchery under his care. Sin-ugly "fish". Functional mutations altered profoundly. Bloated meat packages without fins nor eyes. Unrecognized from the ancient noble creatures that once spawned in lake, sea and pond, now occupying a critical juncture in the industrial food chain. Living their brief existences in warm, nutrient-rich packets of geometric viscosity. Genetically recycled sewage, basically. The massive, uneven flow of water surrounding him lulled Thodol into the beginnings of a seditious reverie: "What is our place? How were we designed? Are we merely a transformative phase for the evolving Complex Field?" These disruptive thoughts and questions occurred deep within Thodol's mind as he studied the endless, cellular tanks. He knew these ideas were dangerous for him to ponder for any appreciable length of time, yet a preoccupation with the weird events of the previous night: "the accident" and the subsequent performance by the Complex Symbiosis, all conspired to keep alive a new-found doubt in his mind... lingering. Surreptitiously, he removes a concealed note from under his clipboard and reads it yet again. A Flash of Bright in your Mind's Eye As Real as a Candle Flame Reality Inhale, Exhale, Consume and Delightful Disposal Melting Wax Planets, too small to be real Approach the Perpendicular, Gaseous, Blue, Yellow, Unknown Destiny AS Secure as a Star He heard these nonsensical phrases, and others he could not quite catch, emanate from the twisted frame of a small, dying worker. A child, he presumed at the time, had fallen from an extinguishing height. A strange smile and a final utterance were "its" last act before the filaments arrived. The shock of witnessing the filaments for the first time shook Thodol to his very core. A terribly efficient reabsorption process performed by The Complex, normally in secret, was revealed to Thodol in all its glory. For some unknown reason, The Complex had dropped its guard and allowed Thodol to see the trillion luminescent filaments emerge from "everywhere" and consume the small form of the child's body. Spawned in the tanks, the child was rumored to have been an experimental prototype that had somehow gone awry. Thodol the laborer was perplexed by the child's last words so he wrote them down on paper for future scrutiny and concealed the paper in his clipboard. Reading the note once again this morning to lock into his memory, Thodol crushed the bit of paper into a small sphere, then tossed the sphere into the nearest tank to be consumed by the nearest aquatic meat package. Quad intercepted the paper's trajectory before it hit the water. The laborer suddenly felt ill. Quad, meanwhile, carefully unfolds the crumpled sheet and briefly scans the few scribbled lines. With studied method and deliberation, the intractable foreman makes some hypnotic maneuvers with a small, metallic cylinder attached to a chain around his neck; and the bearded laborer, designated "Thodol" by the Complex Symbiosis - recently transfered to this sector to troubleshhot "fish" - is suddenly no more. "How unfortunate." Offers cool Chronos, thinking of statistics. "Get a replacement!" Growls volatile Quad, as he feeds the offending evidence to one of his meaty charges. "And when you get a chance, report the infraction to the genome police." The factory darkness grows in turbulence as it also grows brighter and hotter. Steam rises, dissipates and is gone. The Field shudders. No rain will fall today. Thus began the changes. Part 2 SCALAR I AM ONE OF MANY: SCALAR. I AM ONE OF MANY: SCALAR. I AM Veritably Myriads Countless legions comprise our number, yet, if the essential truth be told, all of us - without exception - could be perceived as ultimately ONE. Multiplicity devoid of all barriers, hence singular. An annoying mystery perhaps; consider then the oscillating, infinite scales of Ouroboros: that mythical, cosmological serpent, having ingested the tip of his own tail, he thereby enacts the ubiquitous, grand circumference with no fixed epicenter, as it is eternally consumed and eternally regenerated. Magical at first glance, founded upon elementary principles upon a secondary look, and, in the final analysis, simply and unavoidably a paradox. Ouroboros. Dissimilar to our rather curvilinear, one track minded ancient friend of infinite segments we instead possess boundless, soaring, multipartite sentience of no easy measure nor simple expression. Imagine your wildest facsimile of absolute emptiness and you will misrepresent us in every attempt. Formless energy is our lot, truly rambuctious in our thought. Yes we soar in profundity and do thoroughly enjoy ourselves almost to a fault. You see, if there were an area in our experience where we might get just a trifle carried away, it would have to be, I suppose, our uncontainable hilarity. Laughter, we solemnly proclaim whenever the occasion dictates, is the mother's milk of the infinite. An archaic epitaph, left over from a time we knew death intimately, which generally dissolves all traces of solemnity and plunges us into a cacophonous hysteria reverberating for aeons. The pervasive energy known as laughter is the very fuel asisting our temporal occupations which are, if you haven't already deduced, the generation and rotation of the great vortices. Finding amusement in watching those fine, delicate lights gather into whirling masses, creating magnificent patterns, colorful disks, or iridescent globules; stimulating all manner of internal, dramatic events. We enjoy our positions of detached clarity, seldom, if ever, becoming involved in any of the events we observe. I, however, appear to be the rare exception to this informal rule. Perhaps my not so detached laughter lacks the radiant gusto of the others specifically because this current state of being (or non being) is a recent one to me; hence, atavistic fragments or relative attachments may continue to linger. Also, I find it so fascinating and tragic to watch what I call "their brief gyrations." All those agitated, ephemeral little entities: condensed sorrow and small joy, endlessly springing up out of the vortex, around and about, then disappearing equally sudden and mysterious. Ah, such pathos... I really cannot help it. I do seem to get involved, though I never interfere, relishing as I do the exquisite sensations accompanying our practice of absolute restraint. On the other hand, there is one particularly obscure "Event Drama" which has been profoundly absorbing to my attention lately, and I do believe that I may have some mysterious involvement there which I think I shall attempt to concretize for you by focusing upon one of Ouroboros' multifarious, luminous segments. I deliver myself to the task and thereby lose sight of our expanse. Space and time are singularized, folded and stretched. A glistening, infinite sword forged on a terrible searing anvil. The infinitesimal filaments approach incandescence as they are pulled and spun. The fabric is cut. Shape shifting sword: I am absorbed, changed, another voice speaks; is it me? The vortex manifests - blinding me yet I see. It begins: Like a dream. The great promise and their third leap out, or so went the prevailing assumption. After near calamitous failure with their first two colonies, Chikhai: their supposed place of origin and debarkation point unto the stars, and her sister moon, Chonyid: the parasitically fouled "second chance," this tertiary cultivation (Sidpai),was meant to produce the enduring, shining jewel of their universe. Notwithstanding, back unto the dim, whisperous reaches of memory, like an ambiguous horizon which recedes in proportion to one's futile pursuit of all imaginary lines, it has long been held that the dominant, sentient species occupying the weary orbs called Chikhai and Chonyid have always been of two distinct minds. A fundamental dichotomy between two schools of thought which has only acquired any symmetry as a recent culmination following strife filled, languishing aeons. Simmering conflicts, political and scientific, eventually stimulated joint, migratory ventures. One school of thought, the Mythopoeicans, invested their beliefs in the arcane tradition which suggested that their primary world, CHIKHAI, was seeded in prehistory by interstellar nomads from a legendary world called GAIA. The other school, the Pararealists, put forth a sumptious, ontological banquet which included meticulously collected artifacts and archaeological anomalies that suggested (in their minds at least) that life emerge spontaneously from the random interplay of forces and materials which constituted the very essence of the early planet: CHIKHAI. Surprisingly, this minor discrepency in consensus had far reaching effects on first, the primary world, and subsequent to her moon's colonization, the two worlds together. Thus, this latest migration highlighted the irrefutable evidence that the spirit of sentience was easily deceived by the conceptual limitationns of uncertainty and inseparability, with disasterous repercussions at many a turn, but the overriding will to survive and diversify seemed, ultimately, to transcend the gravitational pull of those twin Strange Attractors: inertia and regression. When the latest round of stellar probes transmitted their priceless electronic riches on the inner cluster systems, of particular interest was the remarkable features of one unique gas giant, designated: Sidpai. A name evoking the rebirth spirit. If the probe's instrumention could be trusted, and it was a long, bygone era since the torpid, unpredictable days of non self-replicating or non self-calibrating robotics, then the new found, gaseous orb appeared to be generating one of the strongest concentrations of scalar fields ever detected in local space/time. Always on the fringes and long shrouded in mystery, known only to a few of the more eccentric scitechs, scalar fields were believed to possess neither velocity in time nor direction in space; in other words, a wave without a vector. Yet as a field carrying pure and concentrated information - and after all, isn't everything known in the universe really just a form of information - it's hypothetic power was presumed immeasurable; hence, the elusive field was ever sought and never found, least of all harnessed or utilized. The problem was that a basic source of scalar fields could never be extrapolated in theory, nor virtualized in simulation; thus it came as something of an invigorative, collective shock to discover, at first measure anyway, an apparently enormous source of the quasi-mythic "waves" in the distant, blue, yellow body of an ordinary gas giant. The secondary, attendant mystery was the inexplicable malfunction and simultaneous termination of the "zero defects," cluster system probes. Nothing like a major anomaly to elicit a common acknowledgment of intrigue from the polluted, increasingly overcrowded, jaded planet-states designated Chikhai and Chonyid. To suggest that the scientific, political, industrial, martial communities reached and sustained a high level, "beta brain wave pattern" would be a remarkable understatement. Their neurological excitement was only matched by the frenzy of their machinations to procure first rights and funding. In any event, forty nine months following the ambiguous discovery, the first migratory/exploratory ship, Vanguard, had nearly achieved orbit around the exquisitely anomalous, thrice born, would-be- annexed-world of gaseous blue, yellow Sidpai. END OF PART TWO SCALAR Part 3 Deep within the trapezoidal, black, hollow core of the journey-pitted vessel, a preeminent member of the crew, decked out in a translucent, circuit-saturated body glove with dangerously glowing head accessory, is consciously experiencing a most unsettling and significant nightmare. A thoughtful, intense, red-clad medico enters the chamber, seats himself next to the dreamer, and reaches towards her luminous head. "You are aware of the harmful, iatrogenic effects of doing that, I presume?" queried the concerned medico. "What?" her inaudible reply, intuited rather than actually heard. "The suit!" His prodding whisper is transformed into a reverberating shout, diminishing with an echo. She was totally disoriented now, and would remain so until the simsuit's contacts were fully released and disconnected from her neural network, a procedure gradually done in sequence unless circumstances dictated using the emergency catch. The benign intruder attempting to retrieve her mind from another reality is Doctor Kala Nath, biotech innovator and theoretician. He was selected for the Vanguard largely for his early, comparative studies in bioelectricity and scalar fields. His once controversial, now partially vindicated theories, quickly advanced his name to the top of the short list as one of the most qualified to study the long term effects of the newly discovered emissions on biological organisms. The intrepid psychonaut under his attentive gaze is Professor Bardo Thodol, exo-psychologist, socioarchaeologist par excellence, legendary boundary crasher and Kala Nath's sporadic "soul mate." Dousing her synapses with a clarity inducing, vasopressin analog, Dr. Nath trips the simsuit's catch, disengaging her nervous system all too impolitely. "Sheared circuits! You son of an insane deity! Wrathfully and most definitely not appreciated!" and other friendly exclamations. "Sorry, no time to bring you down by the sequence codes. If I knew you were so inclined..." Nath gently pinches the body glove while lifting her visor. "...I could've hooked you up to an entire battery of cerebrum tuners, cauterize your psyche just fine and neurotunnel you a sweet new persona." "Thanks, but no thanks," she oozed." Rocking her head back and forth to clear out her own abused circuitry, Bardo Thodol said: "I've seen the converts, wrecks and dregs, a sorry bunch; anyway I forgot to preset the REM interupt, and fatigue did the rest." Dr. Kala Nath wore an amused, wistful expression on his face as he scrutinized his dazed, glassy-eyed friend while she removed the cybernetic simulation suit, a still experimental ORLOG MUSE-3 prototype, from her lithe, muscular body. "You of all people should know better than to splice your circadian with a virtual reality. No less interfaced with a deep delta-wave loop. Ah yes, accidents and all that; must have been a most scintillating respite all the same... Do tell." Her glazed, inward stare bore witness to some dark sojourn better left to the unconscious. A luxury not afforded to her by the simsuit's unique ability to focus ambient, cognitive events into a cohesive beam, igniting her mind with an anvil shattering, chain reaction of memory. "Yeah, a stygian trip indeed," she began tentatively. "An eerie mood of archaic futurism - if that makes any kind of oxymoronic sense at all - terribly alien... To call it a lucid nightmare would be putting it mildly. Like a dream, but it was so real, more real than this..." She flips the ORLOG MUSE-3 headset at Nath. He catches it and her kinesthetic point, all the while surreptitiously monitoring her for stress; he finds Bardo Thodol within elevated, albeit tolerable parameters. Nefarious Dangerous She continues: "I was some kind of eclectic technician, with a beard no less! I was apparently well trained and highly skilled in something having to do with water management or marine life-support systems. I was suspected of some nefarious activity, and I was considered a potential danger to the infrastructure." "You? How bizarre," put in Nath. Some nagging theories were beginning to swarm around a hidden place inside his mind. Gone but not forgotten. "And why not?" she said. "I can conjure chaos as well as the next rebel." "Yes, there is that." "But the planet! Now that was really weird. Awesome industrialization. Not a single square meter that wasn't made over by synthesized mechanization. Imagine an entire world interconnected into a complex labyrinth of remorseless, interfaced engineering. Terraformed monolithic madness!" She became more animated as she spoke, heightening Nath's vigilance over her slightly fried, central nervous system. "They took manufacturing skills to incredible heights, devoid of all restraint, possessing the fundamental secrets to matter and energy, and apparently willing and able to utilize those secrets. Within this bold realm, however, resides a nightmarish quality, in so far as their method of development and motivation. Some tremendously horrific distortions manifest there. For example, the planet's sentient inhabitants were structured in a rigidly controlled hierarchy, with an ethical system unrecognizable from what we value: uncaring, cold, indifferent to personal freedoms; everything and everyone served the arcane purpose of the all- controlling 'complex,' and the 'complex' used everyone mercilessly." "Wait, save that thought," interrupts Nath as he extracts a small audio recorder from the red folds of his clothing. He frowns at the cube and says: "Listen to this." With the device activated, she hears the synthesized, metallic voice of a man she didn't immediately recognize: "...and there was something really odd about these people. I was as if their minds were exclusively utilitarian in nature. Nothing superfluous to the task at hand, as if the pleasure centers of their brains were nonexistent, or evolved a subordinate function in relation to this enormous structure..." "How did you know about their minds?" Kala Nath's synthesized inquiry. "It was as if I had access to one of them, or rather, I was one of them..." Nath turned off the device. "Interesting... Just what in chikhai is going on here, Kala old friend?" "That was Pretas, a nutrients specialist aboard this wandering trapezohedron." Bardo Thodol remembered as Dr. Nath said: "About halfway through the outer cluster systems, Pretas began having this recurring 'dream', and, to put it kindly, it's had a slightly deleterious effect on his functioning abilities. It would seem that connecting to an exclusively work oriented mind has, ironically, disturbed his own performance in that area. This is not an isolated case either; some of the other crew and passengers are also beginning to experience similar disruptions in consciousness. My guess is that our increasing proximity to the apparent source of the scalar field is correlated with this unusual psychic phenomenon." "Sounds logical to me." she understated somewhat sardonically. "Obviously consciousness fluctuates, especially in deep space; but this scalar field's 'stationary wave' paradox certainly does add an anomalous tangent to he equation. So, what's the grand plan Nath? You didn't come all the way down here to my chamber just to unplug my head from a waking nightmare..." He stood to pace the floor awhile, wondering if his long sought goal: the understanding of the Scalar, would prove itself beyond all comprehension. "No," he finally replied calmly, professionally. "Our trajectory's been placed on hold pending further data. I came down here to your wired chamber to personally enlighten you, bring you up to speed on current events as it were. When, what do I find? A cybernaut: a gestalt jockey soaring on the electric wings of a feedback demon; only now, after hearing your parallel reality tale, it would seem you've strongly tapped into whatever this phenomenon is, and undoubtedly have infinitely more to tell than to hear. And so, please do continue your tale." He finally stopped pacing the floor. "I'll wager much is riding on it... like our destiny, and maybe our sanity." Positioned opposite to Thodol's field of view, Nath descends upon a form-adjusting chair, reactivating his recorder with a subtle motion. Thodol glanced at the device as if it were a hungry ghost. "Okay Nath, where would you like me to begin?" The recorder drones: "...and the complex used everyone mercilessly." "Right," she began. "Pretas caught the essence. A utilitarian populace indistinguishable in function from the machinery. Hideous! There I existed, an essentially skilled tecchnician by our standards, regarded 'there' as nothing more than a necessary yet disposable laborer. "I was in charge of a labyrinthine series of tanks which constituted a 'fish' hatchery, only this aquatic herd resembled nothing fishlike that I'm familiar with. "Genetically mutated life forms, whose sole purpose to the complex was, apparenty, to nourish the sentient biologicals. Why this elaborate, autonomous construct would even bother to maintain a presence of biologicals - since the complex functions on its own - is a mystery to me. Perhaps there were some archaic directive to never roll over their existence: a sort of programed loyalty built into the system to protect the original sentients. In any case, an exponential distortion occurred over the millennia, and the biological's natural evolution was halted... or was it?" "What does that cryptic remark mean?" Asked Nath. "I'm not sure... not yet. Wow!" She snaps her head back, eyes closed. "What is it?" "Nothing... Just a heavy shot of Deja Vu." "Probably your neurotransmitters rebalancing." Said Nath. "Is that it then? The dream?" "No," She spoke slower, measuring her words. "Just prior to your disconnecting my beloved Orlog Muse, something unexpected happened." - It Came Out Of The Tanks - "The Complex, in spite of itself, slipped up. Or did it? ....Weird... An anomalous mutation appeared in the midst of the population. Its emergence from the hatchery is an enigma. The best analogy I can come up with is this comparison. Imagine an ordinary Chonyid Maggot metamorphosing, not into the ubiquitous Lazefly prevalent on our world, but instead into a fully developed Loka: rare with sophisticated nervous energy and intelligence capabilities augmented several quanta. "Herein lies the Deja Vu. The mutation was already a young child when I, as bearded laborer, became aware of it. A male of the species with an imagination and a sense of wonder. A tragic aesthetic in a functional sterile world, attributes fully alien and useless to the complex. When I found him, the child was dying; how he managed to survive so long under such conditions is another mystery. "His last utterance was some childishly obscure mataphorical reference to cosmology and space travel which, of course, was at that time unknown to me or any other biological. "Then suddenly and inexplicably, the mutation's corpse was immediately 'reabsorbed' by the complex. "That which was relevant to me during this painful sequence was witnessing my own liquidation and subsequent replacement at the hands of my immediate superiors. I was able to sustain a marginal continuity throughout my own reabsorption phase and gathered that I too fell under suspicion merely for hearing the child's final pronouncement. - Cause And Effect - "The last thing I remember: an 'Information Storm' hit the complex, honeycombing down to the planet's core, then, nothing... except for my rude awakening. As far as dreams go, I wouldn't rate this one high on my list. It was the realtime, cognitive factor that made my flesh crawl. So, what do you think?" "Interesting," Nath's terse comment. In one fluid maneuver, Nath picks up the simulation suit, grabs Bardo Thodol by the wrist, and navigates both their way out through the chamber's portal and into the narrow, serpentine corrider. His thoughts are decisive on facing the scalar maelstrom: The Scalar Field, a sea of information. What was the term used in the ancient texts he once perused in his youth? Morphogenetic Fields? Something like that. An archaic, debunked theory it was claimed by all reasonable investigators. The Sea of Information; indetectable to all instrumentation except consciousness itself. A passing mystical fad - but now he was not so certain. "Where are we going?" Thodol asked with some vexation. "To Sidpai," replied Nath; and then: "To square the circle." What would democracy be without a little chaos and confusion? And the far flung black trapezoidal star vessel reeked of it, 'democracy', that is. The travelers wisely made a provision for this unavoidable contingency of confusion and chaos within all power struggles by implementing the idea of a rotating "first among equals", which, in this case, fell upon Dr. Kala Nath. So, following many heated debates, intensified equipment consultations, and endless adrenaline rushes from unruly conferences spun off from more moderate conferences, Nath presented the results, and their self-determined subsequent course of action. It was determined upon closer inspection of the nearby orb that Sidpai was not an ordinary gas giant as previously thought, but was a dense, strangely honeycombed world with a very unusual atmosphere. It was believed that the intensity of the scalar field emanating from the planet's core was responsible for the cluster probe's, as well as their own instrument's, false assessment of the planet. Nath also announced (to a mixed reception), that it was his contention, albeit tentative, that Sidpai was probably "Gaia:" the legendary world, and that they, the travelers aboard the Vanguard, were undoubtedly the world's descendants; although not, he stressed, in the way the Mythopoeicans might believe. "It is the scalar field which holds the key." He said cryptically. Therefore, without any further ado and with minimal gnashing of teeth, it was decided that Dr. Nath, Pretas the nutritionist, and Bardo Thodol would be the first and possibly only landing party to descend and determine the planet Sidpai's actual nature. This choice of personnel was based on the apparent fact that Pretas and Thodol experienced the deepest "scalar connection" with the anomalous planet. Nath also experienced hypnogogic dreams of Sidpai, yet mysteriously chose to keep his 'visions' to himself. He more than suspected that Sidpai really was the current Gaian manifestation, and from deep atavistic rumblings, he also felt that although the world would be biologically long dead, the cyclopean technology would still be a profound force - if only dormant - awaiting a spark. It was the recounting of her dream, when Thodol mentioned the child with the augmented consciousness, that Nath recognized his own eternal dream. He was the child and his return to Gaia/Sidpai meant a continuance of healing to the abandoned realm: the death of one cycle and the beginning of another. Transcendence and completion. When the landing party penetrated the membranous atmosphere and finally stood upon the planet's tortured surface, awed by the endless, alien infrastructure surrounding them, it soon became apparent that two thirds of the landing party were completely unprepared for what was about to unfold. Pretas was appalled and struggled the most, as suddenly and quite unexpectedly, trillions of hair-thin filaments, eerily autonomous and emitting a brilliant iridescence of strange colors, emerged from all visible directions. Latching onto every square inch of Pretas' hidden body, the filaments absorbed his entire essence, molecule by atom. Kala Nath wore an inscrutable smile as he watched this scene. His was the next form to draw the attentions of the voracious filaments, yet, he easily submitted, knowingly, and the filaments responded in kind by emitting a truly astonishing hue as the awakening complex absorbed his essence. Although Bardo Thodol observed these events, she felt remote. Wearing the simsuit had insulated her primitive emotions; however, in a way beyond descriptive language, she became aware of the scalar field as a direct experience. The ground vibrated. Not unlike the fertilization of an egg, there occurred a gentle, deeply felt ripple in the scalar field. The combined "information" of the two men began to manifest as a slow restoration within the now synergistic planet. Finally, Bardo Thodol decided to sit and await her turn with the filaments, but nothing happened. She felt a surprising unfamiliar calmness. Sitting there with her back against an assortment of convoluted tubing and riotous geometry, she experimented with the simsuit underneath her protective garb to see what she could pick up. Still nothing happened. After awhile, what she was awaiting seemed to become a question that curiously stopped imposing itself upon her mind. It was when she deactivated all her external circuitry that the clear light of the scalar ignited. And she saw. "In recollection all former births passed before her eyes. Born in such a place, of such a name, and downwards to her present birth, so through hundreds, thousands, myriads, all her births and deaths she knew." She cried. She laughed. She disappeared. *** The weary black trapezoid - minus three - returned to its own biplanet system to await a future technological evolution when the inhabitants of Chikhai and Chonyid could better deal with the likes of Sidpai. Or so went the prevailing assumption. By now you may or may not have guessed that the life of Bardo Thodol was my penultimate existence within this beautiful vortex; although, it could just as easily have been the life of Pretas or maybe Kala Nath. In any case, my final such sojourn amongst these transient stellar entities is, I am informed, as indescribable as my current state of affairs, hence, shall remain unrecounted by me. My next transition, I am also informed, is of comparable obscurity. Whenever I ask about it, even for some hint or minor detail, the others gather about in their legion-like manner, most solmnly focus their attention upon my core and recite: "Laughter is the mother's milk of the infinite." -END- http://pweb.netcom.com/~mthorn/quetzal5.htm