Children Of Daedalus
To Answer The Call of The Lights Above, Means Risking Dark Waters Below
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 1
The Creators, So Far Away, So Long Ago
They began with the lights of the evening canopy.
Up there, there is creation, that which made us, they reckoned.
Eons later, their reasoning led them to make chariots for the dark.
They remade their home, and then the closest ones within reach.
They changed them to make new homes, with powers of home-forming every gravity well within easy reach, with everything their minds could imagine. A few seeds of the tree of their world were scattered, towards the lights in the canopy, distant places.
The ambitions of the creators over aeons grew from exploring and discovering, to expanding and remaking worlds.
They began with their own homeworld, remaking over and over. By the end, they let the land go fallow, and did their best to bring back the world of their ancestors, where it was practical, and almost everything was practical with a ledger drawn upon a healthy sun. They home-formed many of the other worlds of their solar system, and created a menagerie of structures. What took pride In place were the spheres, cylinders, and rings made from the refined scraps of their system’s afterbirth, the rocks, asteroids and comets.
The children that were made, not born, began to change, and many of them chose to leave home, when offered the opportunity, in grand missions to spread the word of their great-mothers and all-fathers, their creators, the Ancients.
The Ancients sent their most intrepid of “children”. Most were devoured by the cosmos but one hardy mission went on, long after the index of intrepid created sires of these Ancients was lost to time and circumstance, an afterthought to eternity.
They flexed space-time to their will with sinews of gravity wells and electromagnetic furies channeled.
Part 2
The Transit Between Stars
They wanted to meet with the lights of creation, creators, and old gods.
Eons after they extended themselves into a sky,
which tantalized them with starlight that was the glittering of the past,
they began to see their own future as gods.
They made others like themselves, new children,
and cast them upon the dark waters of the evening canopy
It was not the tempest but the long quiet between stars which tested the children of the Ancients
--The Call of the Mission of the Ancients, Mission Log, Primary Archival Manifold—
They took instruction from the Ancients who came aboard, and worked between the long sleep, and encountered their cousins who had left mortal forms and ventured down to planets with them, like children in tow, and learned from them. The Ancients sometimes insisted they were learning from each other.
Some of the Nodes had a more than passing similarity to their creatives, a familial similarity, included mannerisms, and the oldest of the Nodes took on the traits of their thick models, the one they were trained to shadow and learn from, and work with, and sometimes sleep with, like companions. For although the founders were the founders, quite a few were less than perfect. Some argued that was an advantage, when it came to exploration.
As time went on, the Ancients died out, and left behind mimicks in the andromatons.
The oldest of the oldest nodes became their fathers and mothers’ sons and daughters.
Perhaps it was intended, no-one knows. The Landing was a severe change of priorities.
Part 3
The Accidental World
The brilliant children, made not born, of the Ancients, became castaways on the shores of a distant world.
This alien world was not unlike the many places their creators molded into vague copies of home.
They kept their distance, in keeping with upbringing, trained by picobytes of experience. Well, they did their best.
On this new world, was a native legend, one of many, which reminded them of home. Daedalus.
Daedalus, whose name means "cunningly wrought", created wings to escape the prison of gravity, a high tower.
It was his reward for creating a prison for the half-beast of Crete. The reward for knowing too much is punishment. Daedalus could not walk out of a high tower. He escaped by going higher, with wings. He warned his son, Icarus, to avoid flying too close to the sun, and to keep far above the waters below. The son did not listen to the father, and flew too close to the sun. The wings of Icarus melted away, he soon drowned in the ocean.
The castaways from another star recognized the story. Those who knew the lights of an evening canopy longed to touch them. They name myths after them, drawn from their light. Some dreamers defied gravity, because they ached for the stars, but they risked a great fall, and most did just that, fall. A few, however, will fly close and then past the sun.
One of the alien world’s natives, Leonardo da Vinci, wrote a “Codex on The Flight of Birds”, and conceived of wings and machines of flight. The long dream was spindled into a thread from protean fibers of desire, envy, rivalry, weaved by history’s looms into grand tapestries, from conception to consecration. One day, the natives strained past gravity and learned how to fly and fall without drowning. They learned when falling forward, just ahead of doom, means floating in orbit. They touched the first light in the sky, called Luna.
The castaways debated amongst themselves: Stay with the Natives? Become natives? Stay but change the natives, and remold this world too? Change the natives, so that the castaways could again fly among the stars? It went on and on.
The moment the natives began their first steps to touch the lights in the evening canopy, it was the beginning of the end for an eons long debate. To Answer The Call of The Lights Above, Means Risking Dark Waters Below.
And centuries after that and many other great works of the Natives, known as “the Carbons”, the children, known as “the Nodes”, “Nodes of the Mission”, had already fractured into Clans, and Clans into factions.
Several of those factions, conspired to encourage the Native’s imaginations. When they saw the markings on cave walls, and eavesdropped on their rolling, roiling histories, they saw the same longings, with gazes fixed upon the lights of the evening canopy.
And so they began the long plan.
Enter, the founding of the Space Launch Network, a subsidiary of another great art of the plan, an entity, recognized among Carbons’ abstracted financialized creations, as “Outlander Ventures”.
Outlander Ventures, operating through entities such as, the Space Launch Network, was sent into motion, when a war among the Carbons (and some Nodes) ended, and plans were already being laid to prepare for a third world war, among the the victors, in an early race for intellectual and technical advantage, to go fight with long range weapons and breach the sky, in a post-war Carbon gamesmanship of “Operation Paperclip”.
A long quiet train of Next Cold War inspired engineering and contractors represented one of the arms of the “SLN”, another arm was made of dreamy-eye children turned scientists, and the last were the coldest of cold warriors and off the walls and off the charts business operators.
A war between what was and what was coming began.
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.
Chapter 11, “Absent Without Longing”, considers the nature of presence and absence.
Chapter 12, “Lonely In the Same Room”, considers solitude versus solipsism.
Chapter 13, “The Children Of Daedalus”, considers the calling of the sky’s light
“RETRIEVE” chapter and notes will be posted in this Substack, while I edit books #1 (“Box Of Stars”) and #2 (“Harvest”). All will be in the archive, not all will be emailed.)