Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : Rising Earth and a Shadow of the Moon’s Conspiracy: Part II of VII

CLICK HERE to Read Part 1

After putting on the EPS and exiting the depot, Jordan takes a final look back. It’s a small shack, unilluminated and uninteresting, barely detectable in the starlight. He makes the first yawning jump that will take him back to civilization. Jordan has grown up in an environment 1/6 the gravity of the Earth. He has never set foot on the terrestrial planet. He is forever haunted by its presence in the sky above the Colony.

The blue planet, with its rust-red clouds, is a haunting reminder of a mystery inaccessible to the children of the Colony. Jordan’s memory has changed; it’s more vivid and filled with things he has never experienced. Jordan understands that there were once white clouds instead of a halo of dark globulosity preventing any view of the surface. He hears river rush and canyon echo and has no context to place them with. He smells food vendors in the Metropoli and sees people on a constant rush to get somewhere else. His olfactory recalls the putrid aroma of billions of humans he has never met nor seen. The heart is playing tricks on him.

It takes roughly two weeks of constant moving until Jordan views the Earth bright and full in the Moon’s sky. The Tranquility Colony will be within sight in another two days. He has passed the Very Large Array of telescopes. They learned in class that these telescopes could see farther into space than their Earth cousins could, without the veil of the Earth’s atmosphere and it’s air mass blocking their view. But these telescopes still cannot see beyond 10 e-43 seconds after the Big Bang, where the Universe was born as an explosion of space.

Jordan has not eaten and isn’t hungry. His body no longer craves human sustenance. He needs food of a different kind. He is hungry in mind and heart. He feels as if he’s been hungry for twelve million years. His stomach clenches around ideas that are not his own. They belong to another time. They belong outside of time, where thoughts cannot exist. He starts to think about time and what it means to be outside it. His head hurts. He travels on.

When he approaches the colony, he waits outside the main gates that lead to the decompression chamber. This chamber is the only barrier between the constant meteor showers that bombard the Moon with sand-sized stones, and the sanctuary of what is left of the human race. A rover vehicle rolls out and Jordan knifes his way in. He removes his suit and places it on a hook of the wall. He looks around the room. It is white paneled with four giant steel beams. The panels have millions of puncture holes. These are simple pockets of diatomic Hydrogen gas, meant to ensure gravitational stability within the frame. There are two doors, one in and one out. He pushes the button for entry. He submits his voice code, retina scan, and thumbprint. The computer still recognizes him as human.

The guard gives him a passkey to the Temple of the Elders and tells Jordan he is expected. As he climbs the temple steps, Jordan turns to look at the colony. He sees people hustling around through the windows of their homes, much like Jordan’s vision of the cities on Earth. He understands that humans are a creature of habit and these habits flow through the genetics of the species. He pictures rats running into walls, bumping containers of food and bubbles in water bottles moving to occupy space at the top. He turns and approaches the first door to the temple.

No citizen has seen any of the Elders in over 37 years. The Elders do not associate with the citizens and the citizens have no direct contact with the Elders. The temple was built when the colony was built and the first generation that dwelled amongst the Elders has already passed on, leaving them a perfect and concrete mystery. Only Jordan’s mother remembers and she is insane by the standards of any age, bombarded with constant mood altering chemicals from an altercation she had with the elders when Jordan was little.

The passkey opens the door and Jordan steps inside. He puts his voice, eyes, and thumbs to the inner doors and is allowed access into the holy of holies. The temple is rather plain. There are paintings hanging on the walls of the hallway Jordan walks down. He sees landscapes unknown to the colony’s eyes. He sees people and scenes that are as foreign as the voice on the other side of the wall in the depot. The depot seems like a thousand parsecs from this moment.

As he approaches the end of the hallway, a door slides open, revealing an oval table with seven humans; calcium-white forms seated and looking at him. A man with white hair and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache motions for him to sit down. The rest of them are bald like Jordan. He has never seen hair on a human being and Jordan’s eyes grow large and shrink again. He is amazed at the depth it gives the human body.

Jordan speaks first and the members of the council stare at him without reaction, “Why have you sent for me? Who are you? Why do you isolate yourselves in this temple? What is the meaning of the heart? How did my father die…”

He is cut off in mid-sentence by the white-haired man, “Jordan, we know you have many questions and they will all be answered—to the best of our knowledge. There are things you must understand, and they all link back to the heart you have consumed. That heart is a part of you now, which means you are a part of us and we are a part of you.”

“I don’t understand. I just…”

The man cuts him off again, “Boy, you will understand, but you must be silent and allow us to speak. No one here wishes any harm to come to you. And if the heart has worked its miracle, I assume that all fear has left you.”

Jordan thinks for a moment, “Yes, I no longer fear the elements, or not turning in my assignments on time, or displeasing my mother. I am only agitated by a mystery of identity.”

“As are we boy. As are we. But first we must tell you what we know. Do you agree to listen?”

Jordan says, “Of course. Please continue.”

The men are wearing suits of Lycra spandex. The suits are the same colors, gray and beige. Jordan focuses on the man as he begins to speak. The man with the white hair has a pronounced forehead. His clothes differ slightly in color from the others. His shirt has a streak of yellow running parallel to the beige stripe. They seem to be a group mind, the way they all focus on the person speaking.

The white-haired man says, “In order to understand what we are, we must begin with the history of the heart you now carry in your chest. This heart once belonged to an ancient being that arrived on the Earth about the same time the ancestors of humans were sliding out of primordial mud in the form of simple chains of amino acids. This alien fed on these amino acids and the protein gave it sustenance. The alien is immortal. We have no knowledge of its origin, but we suspect it was sometime around when the first quasars were formed in the Universe, some ten billion years ago. We do know the creature is approximately that old. We do not know how the creature came to this planet, what sort of transportation it used, or what thought process it operated within. But we do know that it fed.”

Jordan cuts in, “How do you know what it fed on and how old it is?”

The man nods his head, “After we are done, you will understand that we just know some things to be true without empirical evidence.”

The man continues, “This alien fed on the creatures of the ocean and when the creatures of the ocean crawled onto land, it fed on the land. It fed on our reptilian ancestors. It consumed the giant lizards, although it was not much bigger than the human frame we all occupy now. When mammalians made their rise after the Chixclub meteor struck the Earth; the creature fed on mammals.

“We know it became fascinated with the blossoming human species. Here was a species that, for the most part, refrained from eating its own kind. It banded together in tribes. They buried their dead and grieved for lost family members. The creature observed this all with great interest, and the creature eventually consumed the heart of man as its only meal.

“This creature is immortal. A more accurate statement would be that the heart of this creature is immortal. The body can be sloughed off, but the heart and the spirit of this creature’s hunger cannot die in the sense that mortals understand what death is. Every person at this table is immortal,” he gestures to the members of the council and points to Jordan, “and so are you, boy.”

Jordan leans back in the chair and crosses his arms. “So the heart I have consumed was originally the heart of an alien being, billions of years old, that fed on the protein in biological organisms?”

The man nods, “Yes, but the heart has physically changed. It’s the spirit in the blood of the heart that is immortal. This spirit is subtle matter and you will not find it on the operating table. It’s an invisible channel of nature that is ever flowing and cannot be closed by any known means.”

“How many owners has the heart had before me?”

“Unknown. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, boy. Allow me to finish.”

Jordan uncrosses his arms, and leans forward against the table with his palms face down on its surface. The man continues, “This alien was also being watched by humans. As a group, they approached and subdued it. Several members attacked it and mortally wounded the flesh of the body. One human; one man, cut out the heart and ate it raw. This man was your direct ancestor Jordan, both genetically and through the spirit in the heart itself. We have spoken of the spirit and the genetics will become clear through time.

“The introduction of alien blood into human culture initiated an age of tribalism unlike any in previous human history. With the ingestion of the alien’s blood, mankind was opened to awareness of the movement of the stars and planets. In essence, they became self-aware through logic and rational thought. Rational thought was something that the human brain was capable of, but never achieved before the introduction of the alien spirit. It was a wave of revolution. The genetics of the human brain changed immensely. Everyday objects were now connoted to symbols that had been fashioned in the mind. This symbolism lead to the first writings on cave walls and eventually to written language itself.

“I can’t express to you the importance of language in the evolution of the human species. Words that were symbols could now be preserved and communicated far beyond a normal human lifetime. Knowledge of experience became a separate organism from the individual brain. These symbols eventually formed systems of government and religious institutions.

“Religion is a constellation of metaphors that are symbolic of a given society at a given point of history. Out of the countless religions, an idea eventually came about of an omnipotent creator of the Universe. We are not aware of when this belief of something greater became a central element in human thought, but we are positive that it had something to do with the alien’s spirit being infused into man. We believe that the a posteriori knowledge of this creature infused itself into the psychological symbology of the human species.”

Jordan stops the man, “So, are you saying that this alien believed in a higher being even though it was immortal?”

“I am saying something far more radical, Jordan. We believe this alien might have been directly connected with a higher being and had been since its inception into the Universe. Our knowledge of this alien is completely vague. We know it existed. We know it fed. We know that the heart of this being was consumed by ancient human beings and that the alien blood led to a revolution in the mind of man.”

Jordan shakes his head, “I don’t understand. If there was only one heart, then how are all of you immortal as well?”

“That’s the best part boy. The alien was pregnant when it was murdered. We don’t know the gestation period of its offspring, if it reproduced asexually, or through coitus. But we do know that it had children and we are the proof of it.” The man gestures to everyone sitting around the table.

Jordan looks at the floor for a few seconds and then back to the men, “Each of you carries the heart of the offspring?”

The council nods. Jordan continues, “Then why wouldn’t you also have a knowledge of such a being if you are this creature’s direct spawn?”

“We are the original tribe who cut the hearts out of the young and consumed them after being roasted on a flaming spike. The barrier of progeny is great, but that combined with the barrier between species is impossible to breach and gain such a lost knowledge.”

Jordan asks, “Can you die?”

“We can. And so can you.”

Jordan says, “How can we die? I thought we were immortal?” The thought of death is intriguing to him now that immortality has been Jordan’s life for the last two and a half weeks.

The man places his bone-white palms on the table and glares intently at Jordan. “You’ve been brought here to explain the end to us.”

Jordan senses a hint of fear in the man’s voice, “What do you mean ‘end’? The man who brought the heart to me said there was a mystery that needed to be solved. Of what did he speak?”

The man says, “Our Universe is closing in on us, Jordan. It’s been noticeable for sixty years now. It’s unexplainable to our understanding of the nature of time, space, matter and energy. But it is completely undeniable fact that the size of the Universe has been decreasing at an exponential rate and very soon there will be nothing left.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do we. That’s why we’ve brought the heart to you my boy. We were hoping that maybe you could tell us.”

“I have no knowledge of that which you speak,” Jordan responds.

“That is why you must understand the history of the heart and how it passed to your father, how the war on Earth commenced, and how you were born to this colony. Jordan, the file we are about to give you contains things that no human being has ever read, nor even imagined existed. We know the history of our civilization well, for we created and shaped it. We do not give you this file to be judged because we are beyond morality. Morals are a human limitation that we’re not plagued by. We give you this file in hopes that it will shed some light on what is happening to our Universe and if it’s reversible.”

The white-haired Elder slides a computer chip to Jordan and motions to the laptop at the far end of the table with his index finger. Jordan notices the man’s untrimmed fingernails. They are claws on a human being, shaped by time.

The man closes the conversation, “We’ll leave you to your reading. You have three days. We will speak then. Pay attention to detail, boy. And for humanity’s sake, record any vision or dream you have!”

The Elders file languidly out of the room and the door slides shut with a high hiss. Jordan puts the chip in the computer and begins to read.

photo credit: şãÐ FέëŁίήg™

CLICK HERE to read Part III