An Intimate Path Of Desires
What Was Wanted, Without Worry Of Others
Welcome to fiction “From The Future” for this entry.
Congratulations, you have stumbled on a work-in-progress, it will not be emailed. It will change. What you see right now, will not remain the same. It will change.
This is also a new drafted chapter for a novel, “RETRIEVE”, being written this year.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
These long pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen minutes.
Part One
Heavyville, Texas, On the Edge Of The 22nd Century
Raina asked herself the same two questions. Silence. She did it again, louder, “What do I want? What does my family want?” There was no-one around who heard or cared. She looked around the DaiPaiHall. Nothing. Everybody was wrapped up in their own stuff, except for one person, who wasn’t really there but was walking with her. The lady in the store, Nema, was somewhere else but a part of her, a render, as a Living Stream, was walking next to Raina.
“I understand, but I ask myself these things too, and I’ve never gotten it right. Took me a long time to get around to asking these questions, so you’re way ahead.”
“Thanks for making time, Nema, on your break. I appreciate it.”
Nema charged for a render by the nanoment, but she waived charges.
“My pleasure, honey. I wish I could truly join you there for lunch but I can keep you company.”
Sitting at the other end of the hall, a man played with his food, and tapped an earlobe for a call.
He whispered into his plate of savories, pakora, “You’re not going to believe this. I think I found one, and she’s been hiding in plain sight. That rich girlfriend of the kid, Land’s girl. She’s one of the ones you’re looking for. That’s right. Hidden. Maybe she’s a half-node? That takes some doing but her family has the resources to hide her. Her family and Outlander Ventures, yeah, that family. In plain sight.”
The man got up when the young woman got up and a living stream dressed like an “Auntie” started to walk through the hall, in search of dessert. He put his half-empty plate into a ‘cycler, and followed from a discreet distance. “Pallas, you can trust me. I’ll figure out how to bring her to you, or tag her for your poeple. No, I won’t be back in Mi-Ma or any urbanstances for awhile. She’s got company, there’s a living stream walking with her. I have work to do. Call you later.”
Oduze Odysseus Kephalonia signed off and kept an eye on Raina, and the stranger walking with her.
Part Two
A Fertile Crescent, The Deep Past, Unlettered Pre-Mythic Times
The Visitor, known as Kensei, closed his eyes, and remembered a memory. Just one of so many.
While the Curate has dispatched one of the Graces, Aggie, to go with that old fool, the Mad One, “Mentor”, at the SLN airport, the Visitor sent Pallas to make a reunion with Bella, and Eris, and arranged for the young Carbon, “Stephen Land” to join them, on a vessel made of steel. The Mad One goes, for his own purposes, but the Curate sents her minions as well, in an alliance of convenience.
The Visitor remembered sending the node named “Matty”, Amatsamaru, the Japanese maker deity, who the Visitor helped forge, much as Matty learned of Steel, to find the reluctant fellow maker, Hef. Hef never did forgive The Visitor for what he gave Pandora, who could have been the one to replace the node Aphrodite in Hef’s affections but he was in the The Visitor’s service. After the poison in the pithi killed the carbon minions of a rogue Node faction, Pandora took a cup to end her own life, breaking Hef’s heart. Hef disappeared for a long time, to escape his pain, and anguish.
Part of a long cold war, using Carbon proxies, much like the swarms of Sea Peoples fielded by a faction of the Curate’s clan, a wandering mass of sea-born fighters of Carbons and half-nodes, who were levied for destruction of rival factions and clans. Masked under the skin of these wars between Carbons, such as between Great Ramesses and a frontier force of Hittites, at Kadesh, were older ambitions. These were among the early, but not the last attempts, at the herding and culling of carbon forces from different places, to transform a region, to the lay the ground-work for the future. The Nine Bows, the label for the outlanders and enemies of whoever happened to be Pharaoh at the time, tried to take kingdom. They came from elsewhere, from a collection of rivals. Again and again. Over 30 centuries ago, just as at the SLN airport, the battle was about to be joined between empires. Again.
The Visitor, unmoved, thought to himself, they must all serve, like blades in scabbards, ready to be drawn at the right moment’s notice. The blades of the Visitor included Pallas and Matty, just as Bella served The Curate, whether she realized it or not, and Eris too with her shifting alliances (as long as there was combat it didn’t matter, she served). Aglaea, or Aggie as she preferred to be addressed during her carbon-hood as a dormant half-node, was an great win than the rumored baiting of the Mad One into action. (One of the three Graces, reawakened, at last!) Aggie, an awakened Grace Node, an unwitting asset of the Curate, but under the Mad One’s strange care. After what became of “The Three Fates” so recently, events have taken on an unnatural speed and course.
“The Mad One wants to wander the world, and help the Carbons. The Curate wants to shape the world for the Nodes. I want to find another way. We must be pragmatic, work with what is at hand. Copper. Bronze. Iron.”
And what was at hand? Steel. They have done so much with it. But if they only knew but they must live long enough. The Nodes near destroyed the world’s life with The Landing but perhaps these natives can be helped. The Curate wants to use them to go back to space and continue the Original Mission. The Mad One is unpredictable.
At the dawn of Steel, as the Iron Age was purified by fire and war, The Visitor knew what to do.
Then the end of Archimedes in Syracusa, was the beginning of the end for The Visitor. One of the greatest cities among the Greeks, five centuries old by the time the Romans’ came for a rich and mighty city, to become Rome’s portal and staging ground for other kingdoms within reach of “Mare Nostrum”. The orders were given not to kill the brilliant old man but a Roman soldier did just that. A pointless blade and a reminder.
It was time, the Visitor, thought, to move on and change. He wanted to help The Mad One’s mad dream for this world. Castaways on the shores of a tiny living world, the Visitor wanted to make the most of its natives and of the Nodes who survived the Landing and who were manifested later on.
The Visitor wondered if the Curate was somehow mixed up in it. How many potential great minds were taken or lost because someone with metal, which required one mind to conjure it from the earth, was twisted by another mind for violence? The Mad One, once known as “Mentor”, was neither inclined to trust or be allied with the Visitor but he relented. The Visitor thought the Romans were the better “bet” but marveled at this truculent genius speaking the local Sikelian dialect of Greek, protecting his home, old by then but still fighting for something he believed in. Wasn’t he fighting for even what all the Clans were too? A fight for “Home”? What might have been.
This talented Carbon reminded The Visitor of other great forgotten minds of the recent past, from only the last few thousand revolutions, and he wondered the ancestors of the Mission Creators might have been like these fragile creative ones. He took inspiration from The Curate’s own machinations with the “Sea Peoples” making sorties of war against Pharaoh a thousand years earlier, and devised naval stratagems for the Carthago’s breach of Roman naval blockades, and so Syracusa did not starve.
It was all so simple for The Curate to invoke “Artemis” in the minds of Syracuse, and that was the opening. A holiday would be weakness and Rome had its chance. Afterwards, respect for the grey eminence was not enough for ignorance with a gladius in hand. Following ignorance, cowardice and self-interest, the pragmatism of mortality followed, and an Iberian turncoat ended Syracuse’s dreams of reclaiming its independent past.
That was part of many reasons, enough for The Visitor to move along, back from where he wandered from, from the East to West, now back East, although he was tempted to return to the waters and venture towards another land, filled with sun-worshippers of a different variety, capable of great works, the greatest being counting and numeracy.
“Look at this. Metal heated and shaped. This began with falling stars. With iron from the skies. Then they looked past their feet, and dug into her, into the world, and found more. They have been learning. And what do they do with it? They build, they farm. They make war upon each other.”
The Visitor had had enough, very soon after, just a few centuries later.
“Some of it has been our doing.”
“You mean from among our kind, not us specifically. That will change too.”
“What will you do?”
“I will go east, with the traders. I will go in search of something new. Everything I do here, falls under the sword. It is time I become one. The Middle Kingdom and beyond.”
“Become what?”
“A sword.”
“There are plenty of swords where you are now.”
He stayed for a long time, like the Mad One. The Visitor was wary of others, for he was once known as “The Hermit” a long time ago, long before he became “The Visitor”. Iron smelting in the isles, later known as Japan, via the mainland of the Middle Kingdom, was the last stop from the slowly reawakening post-Latins and lands from the East. The Visitor, in time, was “Kunwu”, the Metalsmith, and as he drifted onwards, became known among the Nodes as “Kensei”, a Carbon word for Sword Saint.
Part Three
The Island, Pacific Ocean
Zero Seven Hours, Hour 6 of 48 Hours
Desire for a new idea is the lure, the line is cast, a net is needed, then a ship, deeper waters beckoned. An ocean to be navigated, the lights of port long since faded, a capsize is risked.
The ST12 Team’s recruitment included a contractor of unknown provenance. Nobody claimed her officially but nobody denied her either. The orders came through and she was a part of the team. The Skipper and his second were briefed, and the unusual happened. Same with the other operator, Eris, who earned her chits before Bella showed up but they seemed like two sides of the same.
The SSN Eternal’s diverted because Outlander Ventures scaled and began to imagine like a State. The old Nation States’ deep pockets have grown shallower, as new leviathans sprang from the brow of Mr. Market over ebullient decades, on the backs of the former geopolitical ‘South grown big and strong.
Bella kept her eyes open. There wasn’t just the instrumentalities flying around them, conjured by the Mission’s Living Reactor Core underneath the roots of the island. There was company. They may not be friendlies, not enemies, not even enemy of my enemies type of friends.
The “Ghost Ship” is near. They have their own people. Maybe a team is on the island too. Nobody except Bella knew. Not her assigned partner, Eris. Not even Pallas. At least she didn’t think he knew. No telling what his revered “Kensei” briefed him on. The “Ghost Ship from Bohai” is the left hand, just as “The SSN Eternal” is the right hand, of the true masters of Outlander - a tranche of Elder Nodes who play the long tail game - with the Island between them, as the ancient game players tighten their grip around a reinitialized tangle manifold reactor core, older than the oldest “passenger” for the mission, designed and built by long-deceased intelligences operating at the pinnacle of their own creators’ ambitions. Less than a handful existed at the time of launch. The prize revealed, at last.
She wondered, Did The Curate just throw me away? Is that a part of his plan?
The Carbons are at war again, between SSN Eternal and “The Ghost Ship”, were just two pieces on the Carbons’ map of reality, which was a War in everything except by name and executive declaration.
The same thing happened decades and decades ago. Just like in the wake of “Operation Paperclip”. The Carbon’s discoveries of rockets and spaceflight, to fight their wars, reopened the quest for space, accelerating the secret war amongst the Elders and their factions, all the way up to the biggest Clans.
At the behest of the Curate, Bella worked with the Clan’s Soviet proxies. At first it seemed to work but it wrankled on her nerves. Pallas did things that were beneath who he was but he did them, and his Clan’s proxies landed a man on the moon, but then did nothing with it.
And now, again at the behest of the Curate and her Clan, this was happening. After so long, was this finally the promised end to it all? First, the retreat as the Carbons began to master their world, then the plan to retreat with secrets in half-nodes asleep as Carbons, living a waking dream as a simple mortal human, then the Three Fates themselves. Was it any wonder then, it could all end on this island, in the middle of ‘nowhere’ by Carbon standards, after what became of the Fates? And now the Three Graces come into play, thought hidden, well hidden, to keep all the Clans from getting the upper edge over the other, and risk finishing the job of what nearly happened at the Landing, the destruction of a living world. Many worlds have died but never at their hands, at the hands of the Mission’s complement of explorers, the Nodes.
In the meantime how many lives were held hostage to fortune, in two secret wars, for nothing? There was neither logic nor honor in it, and Bella did not forgive Pallas, and even Pallas was near to taking her life, to the point of threatening a full burn, a denial of storage and salvation in a pocket archival manifold, under the thrall of the Fates to await reassignment to a new host and assignment. They came to blows and it was Pallas who risked a full death, or what death was for a Node, by not taking Bella “out” as Operation Paperclip played out behind and underneath the scenes.
AFTERWORD
Author’s Notes on what’s going on:
This “Book #3” project, “RETRIEVE”, is meant to be a prequel to two other books, “Box Of Stars” and “Harvest” but this piece could be read as a standalone story.
The prologue for “RETRIEVE”, “An Impossible Island”, was submitted as a short story.
Prologue: “An Impossible Island”, Part One and Part Two, and Part Three, was inspired by writing prompts from the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) creative community, beginning with an STSC Symposium monthly theme of “Beach”.
Chapter 1, “Older Than Bones”, was inspired by the theme, “Dinosaurs”.
Chapter 2, A Love Trinity Denied, was inspired by “Romance”.
Chapter 3, “A Forgotten Circle Of Hades” was inspired by “Superstition”.
Chapter 4, “Reading The Room” was inspired by an image of a wall-sized bookshelf.
Chapter 5, “The Bittersweetness Of Deep Times”, was inspired by “Isolation”.
Chapter 6, “The Weaving Of Split Infinities”, was inspired by “Dreams”.
Chapter 7, “Dead Languages”, was inspired by “Propaganda”.
Chapter 8, “Path Not Forsaken”, was inspired by “Risk”.
Chapter 9, “The Last Word of The World”, considers words as worlds unto themselves.
Chapter 10, “An Intimate Pick Of Desires”, considers the hidden nature of desire.
