For the Greater Good

[thoughts from ~burning woman~ ]
What is the one sentence used by anyone in some position of power over the rank and file that should set any intelligent mind tingling?

”It’s for the greater good.”

Yeah right: The gambling casino advertising that’s its sole reason to exist is to give people free money.

Any semi-intelligent mind has to know that the last thing those in power are interested in is “the greater good.” So why use that particular line then? Because it works, it always works. Even those who know better; those who do not want to believe, end up believing. Or if they don’t believe at the very least they’ll want to “do something” and if it’s an election they’ll cast for “the lesser of evils” as if there ever was such a thing.

That was as far as I got that other evening when I realized the late hour, the need for sleep to face the next day’s ordeal.

Today I’m thinking maybe such an obvious observation should just be deleted like I’ve deleted thousands before. Yeah,

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
(excerpt from “Everybody Knows” – Leonard Cohen)

So why repeat it, then? Seems so pointless. Yet the question won’t go away: why, despite all evidence to the contrary, do people continue to believe in and support “the System”?

The next obvious question is what would happen if just for once “the people” stopped believing and supporting?

The answer to the first question is programming. People are programmed to believe. They really can’t help themselves. Even if they get really mad and violently uproot one gang of predators (France, Russia) and kill them, all they can manage is establishing something as bad or worse (Napoleon, Stalin). That likely explains why in these times people are unwilling to step over the line drawn in the sand by their elites and kill them off. Public education has made too many of them aware of the hopelessness inherent to violent revolution, and if not violent revolution, then what?

There is nothing in their programming to replace the status quo. I’ve read thousands of books, articles, essays ad nauseam, looking for something that proposes genuine, radical change, the kind that would eliminate any and all aspects of the status quo. Many describe the evils of predatory capitalism and the military industrial complex. Many describe the evils inherent to traditional religion. Many propose “changes” within these evils but none ever lay out any real change, any total change.

“The people” exist within a choreographed dance of chaos and confusion and never was this more obvious than in today’s world. We exist within the most corrupt system of “rulers” this world (of man) has ever experienced. The corruption is endemic to the point where the “average Joe” thinks only of getting his own piece of the rotten pie. He still lines up dutifully; if reluctantly most times, at the slaughterhouse door convinced that this time, this particular time, there will be something personally beneficial for him when he steps through that door and punches his time card.

To the second question, if people stopped believing and supporting, the “System” which is nothing more than a cheap game board with a few loaded dice, would simply collapse. The only way the vile, corrupt, self-serving, predatory elites can continue to play their game is because they know how to take advantage of the programming imposed upon the peons (pee ons). They didn’t create the programming; they just discovered uses for the power over the herds of sheeple it gives them.

Could eight billion Earthians survive without the System’s madness? Could they exist without the folly? No, they could not. Therefore they would have to learn to live instead of simply existing. Not as easy as it looks. When you’ve spent an entire life as a believer, as a non-person, as the un-dead, it’s not easy to look at the world and think, “Hey, wait a minute, under all the fakery, the bullshit and the technocratic anti-life machinery there’s an actual natural living world and I have a natural, physical body that I can adapt to that living world. I don’t need this so-called civilization’s shit and its crap rules. I am a person. I can be a natural person. I can live not just off of, but with, this natural environment. I can let nature take its course instead of treating it like an enemy.”

That, of course, would spell the end of the programming. That is why it can’t happen: the programming was put in place by ultimate predators no one (no normal Earth mind that is) can become aware of or the game would be up. The programmers need their victims: solar systems, planets, sentient life, everything, to maintain their empire; to attempt to satisfy their insatiable hunger. What they fear most isn’t rebellion but the awakening of intelligence throughout their conquered worlds. Their fear is real. It has already happened on some worlds; it is happening on many more. But never fear, Earth isn’t one of those.

Most readers will immediately discount that last paragraph as delusional or at the very least, highly imaginative science fiction. Pay attention to that, it’s telling “you” that your programming is working to perfection… to continue believing and subconsciously destroy everything good you always dreamed of as a possibility. On Earth, no good deed remains unpunished.

Antierra Manifesto – blog post #109

This blog post concludes “The Antierra Manifesto” – thanks for reading.

What is Antierra thinking as she stands there?  She looks up into the stands, makes the “mercy” gesture and points at the two young girls beside her.  Her gesture is greeted by spitting and cursing.  She turns to the two children and while they are looking at the approaching men wide eyed and shaking, she puts her sword through their hearts.  Then she turns to the men and utters the loudest blood-curdling shriek that place has ever heard.  I had never heard anything like it and it made me shudder.  It seems to come from some awakened beast, not of human voice. Long it echoes along the high walls and through the compounds; so loud it is, it intimidates that wild and unruly crowd to utter and cowed silence.
End blog post #108
—————————-
Start blog post #109

She then walks alone to meet the line of men, suddenly no longer an ugly and limping old crone who is nothing but skin, bone and sinew but a tall regal figure who knows her purpose and means to complete it.  The deadly sword flashes red in the plasma lights, the blade still dripping from the blood of the dead girls, and it performs a series of lightning movements that leave a trail of utter carnage until she drops dead, not of wounds but simple heart-stopping exhaustion.  This I can vouch for as I was standing close enough for my sensors to detect her heart stop beating.  She had taken her human body to its final limits.

One of the surviving challengers shouts his cry of victory but no one in the stands picks it up.  For once that crowd is stunned by what it is seeing.  Twenty-three men lie dead and dying around the body of the Desert Beast.  Where is the victory?

The remaining men rush upon the standing group of defenders and kill them one by one, still taking heavy losses.  Only nine men remain of that last ‘rush’ to claim their victory and all of those bear some kind of cut or stab wound.  The last female to remain alive kills herself with her dagger rather than submit to rape.  A new power has arisen on T’Sing Tarleyn.

Even in death the Desert Beast scores.  Never has this place seen such devastation at the hands of a few trained fighters against what, by comparison, can only be called an army of men.

The “harvesting” and trading of female body parts carries little excitement today.  The price paid is much too high for any male to find his enjoyment therein.  The greatest price lies in the message sent to the thousands who came to see women tortured, raped and mutilated before they were even dead.  What they saw instead was a severely organized stand by twenty three female fighters, most of these untrained and certifiable crazies, and an additional twenty females with no fighting skills whatsoever, kill one hundred and ninety-one armed males. 

A sobering set of statistics for the men to mull over.  Not all males are beyond the ability to use some reasoning or exercise wonder.  Many, I would guess, are glad their number was not called.  In previous orgies the ones called were always considered the lucky ones.  Not so today.

Of note:  The scavengers carefully avoid touching the body of the fallen Desert Beast.  No one approaches to cut off any of her parts.  They know she did not die of wounds inflicted by men and having no understanding of such a concept as spontaneous death through the shut-down of body functions as in a massive coronary, they still fear her presence.  After they leave, eunuch slaves and female fighters enter the arena to remove the bodies of the women and take them to the waiting carriers.

Of note:  There is a definite reverence among eunuchs and fighters as they pick up and carry the bodies.  These fallen women are heroes to those who remain behind.  This too is new.  Whatever else the Teaching may have accomplished in the few years it has been verbalized in the fighter compounds, it has made the fighters and some male staff aware that perhaps there is such a thing as life beyond death. This Antierra asserted constantly.  That idea was basic to the Teaching. This we Cydroids cannot know as none of us have “died” the real death. Those of us who were killed, such as XBA9 at the hands of the Warmo’s inquisition, were re-grown and are alive, all the more aware for our experiences.  Perhaps what Antierra taught is a similar process.

As to the women fighters, they are proud this day.  Among them, and perhaps among the compound male staff as well, the exploits of Antierra and her magnetic way of expounding any kind of Teaching, be it in tactical, weapons handling, relationships or ethics and her more questionable ‘spacer’ stories will live long and inspire generations to come.  I say this because I have known her.  I say this because through her I, Cydroid XBA3, became more human.  I just have this wish, that I had been able to join her in those rushes in the arena, to stand by her and use my considerable strength to protect her.  Something I know would have expanded my developing consciousness.  I wish I had been able to practice that special “touch” with her I saw the women do constantly for one-another.

As I think about it, I believe I was actually in love with Antierra.  Perhaps not as humans speak of love between man and woman, but there was something about her mind I found irresistible.  I “wish” I could believe her stories about reincarnation and crossing at will through dimensional barriers from world to world so I could hope to see her again as my sisters believe they will. 

For anyone who may some day read this data, think of it this way: Antierra was a human being who was able to make even an AI see life through a new dimension.  She made me, not less Cydroid, but more human.  I felt compassion when I watched her in the arena on that day.  I felt something hurt me deeply when she slid her sword through the two girls’ hearts to kill them instantly and painlessly.  What I felt was her pain, the pain she used to activate her decisive power.  Now her sorrow and her inevitable joy are forever a part of my brain patterning or shall I dare say, my human understanding. 

Signed: Cydroid XBA3, Doctor Balomo Echinoza Cydroid Family.  Location:

Arena Fighter Compound, Hyrete, Capital of the Kingdom of Elbre, T’Sing Tarleyn, Autumn, Year 1341.

_______________________________________________

After watching and listening to this ancient holorec report I sit for a long time alone in a darkened room.  I sip on a glass of sherry and find my favourite drink insipid as I consider the implications therein. 

 It is useless to try to dismiss it as exaggeration: Cydroids, like our Androids, could not lie.  Even one touched either temporarily or permanently by ‘real’ feelings would still be incapable of this kind of fabrication.  Only if someone’s life was at stake and a story need be made up to create a chain of confusing events or a diversion  would a Cydroid “lie” – but it would not be a lie to them, just an alternate temporary reality to complete and terminate a program loop.

 Let XBA3’s words stand forever as history; as our history. There will be no changes, no apologies, from me.  What I just wrote from the memcard records is an actual event and I am concluding my report as is. I raise my tepid glass of sherry to the crumbling stone walls of this ancient keep and toast Antierra: “To the Fighters of Hyrete!”  And from the walls comes an echo of many voices in reply, the once silent voices of the women who trained, loved, fought and died alongside of their Teacher:  “To the Goddess!”

Signed: Michele Dellman

(Personal comment – not to be included in the official report.

My work of chronicler accomplished here, there remains the daunting task of trying to understand what all this means to me personally, as a woman with the remnant of a small voice, in a greater galactic and universal world once more strangling in ever-expanding webs of male-dominated religious oligarchies, plutocracies and centralized brutal military dictatorships, all and still, in the name of God, Trade and Security where women’s voices remain taboo or all too symbolic beyond the confines of home, workplace or entertainment palaces; when men by and large continue to oppress and kill our spirit, our mind, if not always our bodies.

 And I ask myself this resurgent and damning question: what, ultimately, is a woman’s purpose in the scheme of human affairs?  I realize I just shrugged as Antierra was wont to when a question asked was not giving her the logical answer she could accept and truthfully verbalize.  

Maybe the worst part of this question is that I know what she would say: “As below, so above.  You are a woman.  You exist.  You are real.  So you continue.  The goddess lives in you.”

(“M. D.”)

April 19, 1979

[my life by   ~burning woman~  ]

And now, by popular request – thanks for being my cheering section George! – a little true story that will neither seem true, nor is it so little.

It’s a dark, cold and cloudy late afternoon in Chilliwack. It’s April 19, 1979 and I’m at the end of my rope, parked in the back of an old hotel, (now long gone) the kind that rents rooms by the hour and I am seriously contemplating suicide. Nothing left to live for, it seems.

I’m 33 years old and I’ve just been advised by several surgeons and medical experts that my debilitated back condition was not fixable. I was looking at spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair probably within months. That was an unacceptable option.

Yes, I had already spent money and time on the do-it-yourself self-healing things; the vitamins, the exercise things, the special chairs and mattresses things. This was it: the final choice.

That’s when “it” happened. I was caught in some sort of trance and pulled into an alternate reality. I can still see the scene. I was in two places at once. I was standing, painlessly I might add, and talking with a very tall, slim individual in a white floor length “gown”. He had long straight white hair that flowed over his shoulders and a very kindly looking, very serious face. I was also lying down on what seemed like a hospital bed and there were three other entities around me doing “medical” stuff much as you would see in a modern Earth hospital minus all the hardware – but for the bed, there was none. (Maybe that was a ninite bed, eh, George? – ref to: https://randomwalkthroughintelligentuniverse.wordpress.com/)  

I remember how good it felt just being there. The tall one spoke to me and I realized he was part of the healing team, giving me advice on how to proceed to live my “new” life once they were done. He said much more than I could absorb but the great thing about these types of communications is they are given in “zipped” package format which can be opened and drawn from, bit by bit over time. I didn’t know that then and I didn’t care.

 

What I cared about was hearing that my body was being fixed and I was being “sent back” to my old life to “work things out” so to speak. I did not like that idea. Going back to what I was, even minus the back pain, was unacceptable. We had a “discussion” in which I tried to explain why I did not want to go back, and he explained that first of all it wasn’t a choice I could make and secondly there was a very good reason for going back. His explanations, in brief, as I remembered afterwards.

“Know that every *ISSA being who chooses to incarnate does so with, and for, a purpose. It is because these purposes are seldom remembered, least of all completed, that worlds like yours (there are so many!) remain in their terrible darkness of pain and sorrow. You will need to awaken to the purpose you set for yourself before you reincarnated on Earth and you will need to activate that mind template of yours to complete your “this life” tour of duty to your world. The life we are returning to you, and returning you to, is not meant to be lived selfishly any longer. You will find that not to be a burden, but a source of bliss and joy as you get used to it.”

“Could I not just forget this, end this, and start again somewhere else, clean, free of the memories of the mess I’ve made of this life?”

“No. Too many things left unfinished and to jump you out of your responsibilities, even if it was permitted, would serve neither your ends, nor ours as regards your world. We have a stake in how you and others like yourself perform when they return to the reality of their particular societies. Your request is non-negotiable. We are now returning you to your life exactly at the point where we intercepted it minus any physical pain or dis-ease, such as your back disruptions and allergies. Those are already gone.

You will not be left alone to work things out. People, whom you will call “Teachers” will be assigned to you, to provide advice and answer the thousands of questions you will have. Do not get attached to them. They will fulfill their own duty towards you and when done, leave you with all the information you will need, safely stored in “information packets” which your mind will tap into at need. They will teach you how to open your information packets based on need. Nothing and no one will be able to remove that information from your mind, nor can it be faked. When doubts and confusion arise, as will constantly happen, that is where you go for confirmation and support. But be very diligent in transferring any information you open into personal thinking patterns and into action. In other words, we have changed your body but you must change your own mind using that information.

That’s how it all started, 40 years ago. I can just imagine some reading this thinking (or saying) “Well talk about programming! She’s one to talk.” And it’s true, it is a form of programming if the information was simply accessed and put into a “faith” folder or used to write self-help delusion novels; if it was turned into a proselytizing process, like Christians and Muslims do with their particular information.

There are massive differences to the faith-based belief systems. One is, this remains a personal matter. Two, I am personally acquainted with its source and I’ve tested its reliability, consistency and trustworthiness. Three, I can talk about it to anyone who asks questions but I’ve always said that what I “have” inside is not transferable except as words bereft of any kind of manipulative force or any hidden power agenda. Individually or collectively people can tap into what I say and what I do but there is zero access to what I possess of cosmic knowledge. Only I have the key and I cannot “loan” it to anyone nor can the information be extracted through any form of duress. If it was it would be in a code that nothing could crack.

Having opened up this can of worm, I’ll just leave it open…

*ISSA: Acronym for intelligent, sentient, self aware

 

 

 

 

 

We Improve but we do not Progress

[an essay by   ~burning woman~  ]

Time, or the lack thereof, has become my enemy. Of course I realize that from the larger picture, time is not relevant, but I also realize that as a physical entity possessed of an Earthian body, I have to reckon with the time constraint, a real pain! I exist in a mental cage, a Matrix-designed prison in which no “greater thought” is meant to exist. Time, or what Earthians like to call past-present-future, controls thought, awareness, expectations. Nothing here is expected to exist outside of time – that would be unthinkable. Think, how important have time-measuring devices been throughout man’s various attempts at defining itself through his so-called “civilizations.”

It is possible, however, for some of us to push our mental awareness through the bars of the time jail and see from infinity. It’s a bit like traveling several magnitude beyond the speed of light (time and light being artificially tied together in the Matrix) and feeling the mind stretch as she pushes out into the past in order to see the future she is going into – not, as is popularly believed, creating. I do not create the future (there is no such thing as “my” future – not yet!) but it is possible for me to see it take shape if I make the effort to “see” and understand some of the past, that which I have already experienced, forgot about and now must learn to recover in order to make use of.

The real past does not exist within the artificial boundaries imposed by an equally artificial time machine. It certainly does not exist in any “historical” recording, those being even less meaningful in terms of understanding what a human being was/will be. Only a recovered once-traveled and experienced past can have meaning.

I used to be fascinated by history, my favourite subject in high school and I kept on reading and studying history long after I escaped the academic world. Then I came to certain realizations about reality, what it is, what it isn’t. Man’s recorded history became about as valid as using Monopoly money to purchase goods and services: there was a credibility gap that could not be breached. Man’s history, the collectively remembered and the recorded, was not so much a lie as pointless. Pointless as an exercise in recording it, even more so in reading it.

How did I arrive at that? Simple: nothing, absolutely nothing, is learned from history and nothing is gained by having some knowledge of it. It is irrelevant. What is relevant is what I can personally “remember” of what I experienced of past events, how those changed me and re-made me and how, as I collected that awareness, it opened the only trustworthy and meaningful window on a future that my remembrances gave me to look out of.

This will be the third time that I have read Stephen Donaldson’s science fiction “Gap” series. The title of this “essay” is taken from book 4, Chaos and Order: the Gap into Madness. “We improve, but we do not progress.” I imagine that for a programmed entity, such a thought is, well, unthinkable. How could we not progress if we are improving?

The question is, what do we mean by improving, or do we even have a clue what it could mean? What does it mean, for an intelligent, sentient, self-aware being, to “improve”? Does it mean that as a society, better put as a civilization, we are palpably, noticeably improving, in keeping with our claim to be living on a human scale? Does it mean we are improving in terms of developing “new and improved” human values, as individuals?

Yes, technologically we are undeniably improving. Many of the things we surround ourselves with today and take for granted would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

But aren’t we existing as characters in a series of Marvel Comic books? Aren’t we in fact using Monopoly money to go shopping in our improved world? How meaningful to us as human being are any of our improvements? What are these improvements doing to us? Are they not stealing our minds and locking us in our “now” mental jail?

What is progress? What would it mean to progress? Wouldn’t progress mean becoming better people overall? More aware of our environment, of others? More eager to ensure that as we “improve” we are adding to the overall betterment of this world and all who live and exist on and within, it? Wouldn’t progress mean that we are breaking free of our killing rat race and our insane repetition of acts we time and again performed then swore we would never do again? Wouldn’t progress mean we strove to become more human by demonstrating our desire to display the quality of humaneness towards all life?

I will tell you, once again, what my window into the future is showing me. Think of the current baby pandemic called Covid 19, make it real and multiply that a million times. I see horror upon horror building up exponentially until the entire world is awash in desperation, violence, bloodshed and a total loss of humanity or humane expression. I see the utter end of this civilization and everything that made it possible – people and systems.

But then, at the end of all improvement, I see progress. A new beginning, none of it predicated on the old. I can see this future because I can see the past beyond historical/hysterical fake news and beyond collective memories.

The Elita Theorem

[a short story by  Sha’Tara]
(Inspired, in part, by Isaac Asimov’s “Prelude to Foundation)

 Ansar and Elita were what you would call lovers.  Ansar was a member of the galactic arch-council located at that time on the pivotal world they called Juno.  Elita was mathematician and social historian at the famed university of Urtank, in the central high mountains of Sector T-41 of planet Quatl-Iln.  The following is a time-captured record of a brief exchange that took place in those long ago days after Elita worked out a program from a theory that stated that “time” was primarily a recording device in which could be read both past and future events.  The sharper the “reader” the more accurate would the reading of the sought events be.  It is all old hat now, as they say, but in the years prior to mankind’s initial scattering from his original galaxy (circa year 22,000 old reckoning) this was considered very naïve and pseudo-scientific.  But let’s hear what they were saying…

“We have a past, you know, Ansar.  A real past, which to this day society insists on dubbing a myth.  I’ll be brief.  We originated on one world only and you’ve heard that “myth” before, I’m sure.  You don’t buy it, but I do.  And then I don’t.”

“Make some sense, Elita.  Don’t speak to me in your usual riddles.  Either you do, or you don’t.  You can’t have it both ways.”

“No riddle.  Just simple fact which I can have “both ways” as you so eloquently put.  Our world of origin in the preserved language was called earth.  There mankind evolved, so it was thought, and taught, and from there he spread his wings and flew away to discover the galaxy.  And now, we are once more precariously balanced upon the horns of an old dilemma.  For centuries our real growth has been in decline.  At the same time, mankind is again looking beyond his doorstep, this time looking to jump to other galaxies and perhaps begin again.  And I can generally predict what is going to happen.  We are going to make the jump.  We will “begin” again and what we leave behind will continue to decline, to shrivel upon itself and die.  As did earth.”

“How do you know this?”

“Mathematical projection says so.  Observation says so.  Simple statistical projection says so.  Increasingly indolent ways of a pampered population says so.  Breakthroughs in non-ship-non-moving travel says so.  Shortages in resources marginalizing and starving millions of poorer planets says so.   The leadership vacuum says so.   Before rebellions and total war engulf the galaxy, you will have a scattering.  These scatterings are the seedings, and every time a group of humans seeds itself upon a new world as yet untouched by previous human presence and exploitation, that group is irreversibly changed.  Those who survive become, to the eyes of those left behind (if they are able to see) either monsters, mutants, or super-human depending on the point of view.  And, what was left behind fears these who have escaped.  Their authorities pursue them, hoping to control them and to feed from them.  Failing that, trying to destroy them.” 

“But what does any of that say to your belief that some mythical world called earth was man’s original world?”

“Don’t you see?  Earth man was a seedling.  It was planted on that ancient now long-gone world and it flourished there.  But it did not actually originate there.  It did not, as was then claimed, physically evolve from the muck and mire of the planet, anymore than we evolved from the rocky strata of this stony world.  The early people of earth were ruled and enslaved by their forebears but in their fevered discovery of new-found abilities, they shook off the yoke of their masters, of the sowers, and unmindful of the consequences, literally exiled themselves upon their world with no means of leaving, or of contacting any other possible sown worlds.  So engrossed did they become with self-discovery and exploitation of their world that they soon forgot how they got there.  New leadership, fearful of having to share power with galactic powers, ordered the re-writing of history and established religions that relegated the real-life human sowers to ineffable divinities to be idolized in worship.  

It would be thousands of years before the ever-present urge to resume the sowing cycle would obsess these Earthians and they would abandon their internecine warfare to concentrate on going to the stars.  Predictably they did so, for we are here.  And predictably, they carried with them the belief that they originated on earth, thus making that world the ruling world of the galaxy.  Sadly, that is why it was slagged by the “new” children who did not tolerate that a backward little planet so far from galactic centre would rule over the whole.   Much was lost in the destruction of earth but the greatest loss was in records of what happened so long ago, before Earthians were solidly established on their new world.  Records of previous generations, previous intelligences, previous star-farers who gave birth to Earthians and thence, to us.  We must re-discover those records.”  

“You make a persuasive argument but I remain unconvinced.  You have no real proof that what you have conjured could ever have some basis in  fact.” 

“Proof.  People put so much faith in that word.  But perhaps there is proof.  If I could actually and correctly predict a specific future event using certain formulas I’ve developed, would you consider that proof that we can draw out reality from the chaos of the unknown?”

“If, indeed!  Yes, if you could predict exactly a certain future event, I’d see that as proof.  But what about the past?”

“But don’t you see it?  There is no difference.  If we can accurately predict the future, we can just as accurately “predict” what happened in the unknown past.  Let’s say that your family drove to a certain town while you were in your mother’s womb.  Once in that new town, you were born there.  The family possessed a past that was not yours.  However, when old enough to drive, you could choose to drive forward from that town, or to, in a sense, retrace your family’s steps by driving back down the road into the past.  Some things would be different, but you could verify that the world they spoke of did in fact exist. 

I believe that my computer program and my calculations can do this for mankind and perhaps much more.  Certainly we will be able to “verify” not only where we are going, but where we come from. There are those who are so intent on destroying all vestiges of the old myths.  They want to destroy the old religions that have clung to mankind from the earth days to now.  The way to demystify the past is not by pretending or claiming it did not happen, but by proving it did happen, and demonstrating how it did so.  The ancient “gods” then become simple humans with what would be to us very primitive technology and were neither eternal nor all-powerful non-material beings as fabricated religions have falsely claimed for so long until now.” 

“Interesting.  With our funding, you claim you can develop this new science that will show not only how our future will develop but prove that the mythical past did in fact happen?  Will there be more to your argument when you present it to the Council for, what must certainly become, substantial additional funding?”

“Do I need more?  Are you not curious?  Would you not risk a few billion credits to find out where you came from and where you are going in, say, a thousand years from now?  If we, as humans, must continue to bootstrap our ways across parsecs and eons of space-time, can’t we at least secure stronger and longer straps for ourselves?  Must our existence continue to be an endless, chaotic gamble against the forces of time and the universe?  Must we forever be running from our enemies, be they competing intelligences or depleted environments, and towards unknown conditions that may test us beyond our abilities to resist and overcome?  I think that what we term “expanded awareness” has to include an ability to remember the distant past and to appropriate to certainty a much longer portion of the future.  We cannot continue to launch ourselves as dandelion seeds in the winds for the day will come when we will literally fall in among an inimical race that will destroy us, probably out of fear of our predatory ways coupled with our unnaturally prolific birthrate.  We are predators, Ansar, and represent a very real threat to any other intelligent species already established around us.  It would be extremely naïve to think we have not been noticed.  If we know the future, we can avoid such an encounter and prevent catastrophe to ourselves.” 

“My curiosity is certainly not as expanded as yours, love.  But I’ll support you on Council even though I don’t share your enthusiasm for socio-history.  I would be satisfied if you could predict the next day of windless sunshine so we could go mountain climbing.  What do you say to that?”

“Just the two of us?”

“Just the two of us.”

“Would you accept an educated guess?”

“I will, but I have one condition.”

“Ah?”

“Will you accept my ring?  It will be a year tomorrow since the last time you said ‘no’ to me.”

“I accept your ring, Ansar.  Without conditions. As to the weather, my guess is the wind will have to be reckoned with but safe enough for experts like us.” 

 It was ten years later that Elita’s group in Urtank saw the first fruits of her efforts.  It was another twenty-three years before the theory was fully tested when a no-ship “fleet” consisting of seventeen billion people jumping off from Juno would have encountered an enemy force that would have destroyed them had they not “seen” this prior to departure and changed course accordingly.  Two hundred years after that, as this inimical intelligence began to seriously encroach upon new human settlements, it was caught in a 5-pronged attack by humans and was annihilated.  These perfectly timed attacks were devised using the Elita Theorem of time recordings.  

To add a little explanation to this theory, let me just say that it resembles the reading of those old movie strips.  Once a “time line” is focused upon, the computer can “play” the “image frames” either forward or backward.  An identical “time line” can be read from any number of different places, even distant galaxies, without distortion.  Hence the possibility of simultaneous action at vast distances. 

And so we are in the process of conquering the universe.  What will we do, should we discover that our universal space-time model does not apply beyond our universal borders?  Who will break through the next mystery should the Elita theorem fail at that point? Are we still curious enough to dare go and find out? Do we even have a choice?