Space To Breathe
Space In Every Sense Of The Word & World
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
“A reminder of space-time, a focus on space in every sense of the word and world, are when stories of the future merge into history.”
The Next World
The Last Conclave of The Last Elders, Earth
It was just the three of them: “The Mad One” known “Mentor”, “The Visitor” known as “Kensei”, “The Hidden” known as “The Curate”. They meet, begrudgingly, but when the world one has known, and even had a hand in shaping, for millions of years begins to end, to make room for the next one, exceptions are made, including last looks and words.
The Hermit, looking at The Mad One, in reproach, tut-tuted, and said, “So busy trying to get somewhere else that we don't take the time to notice where we are. Whether it’s Tulsa or Timbuktu, they have one thing in common, look close enough at what's around you, everything becomes interesting, of interest. Too hasty to move on, too slow to slow down.”
The Mad One shrugged, “Our imagination is where the impossible becomes possible, and the could-and-should-be is conjured in dreams. If freed through a special window, dreams can become the next, taken-for-granted, reality. This is where the future begins,” tapping the ground, and with arms outstretched to direct attention to the cave walls, and then walking over to touch one wall, covered in dye-painted renders of ancient simpler times, and gently tapping adjacent to a painting of a bipedal figure in the landscape montage on the wall, with a finger, “This is also the future at its most vulnerable, when released into the wilds of the real. Under the blistering heat of “the way things are” because “it is what it is”, of complacency and incumbency, most dreams are faded away and lose their light.”
The Curate shook her head, “To see lights of the night sky again, we either retreat to the deep dark places, or advance beyond the veil of air wrapped around the world. We face the same choice with our dreams. My choice remains the same. We breach the sky to brave the stars. But first we do battle with our eternal curse of doubt, as in self-doubt.”
The Mad One walked over to The Curate, taking one of her hands in his, which the Curate almost pulled away but relented letting him hold her hand, which he had not held in ages, “You’re saying these words, these same words which you said so long ago, despite a long chain of changes in the world. Changes, which were each strange, frightening, and bewildering at the time. But ahh, the changes were realized by a long chain of beings, who remembered their dreams, listened to their brave voice, and found an opening through the right time and moment. They’re the ones breaching the skies, but for their stars, not ours. And we should not give us pause, or doubt ourselves.”
The Visitor stood between The Mad One and The Curate, “I remember, as I know you both do as well, our training. We receieved the direct word from our creators. I wonder what they would have thought of what became of us.”
Everyone was still. They opted to finish the meeting.
Each of them reopened their eyes. They were no longer in the ancient meeting place, one of the first places they began to watch the new sentient Carbons begin their ascent on this planet. None would admit it, but it was nice to see the old paintings and sit in silence, together, as they used to before the fracturing and scattering of the Nodes.
Part 2
The Accidental World, The Ashes Library
“In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.”
-William Wordsworth, “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” (1833)
The Ashes had a facade, an interface with the real world.
The Old One known as “The Mad One”, “Mentor” by the more polite, sat with Aglaea, watching the show, splitting popcorn and snacks. Aggie wondered why they were sitting, and watching a show but after a few moments, she was lost in the cascade of streaming images. They were not alone, which was the strangest part. The audience was mortal, was Carbon, just like Aggie thought she was not so long ago.
They were all watching the mid-day showing of “Triumph Over Space”, sponsored by Overland Entertainment Production, a wholly owned media subsidiary of Overland Ventures. It was a docudrama documentary, which began with the end of the dinosaurs and ended with a triumphant finale of a space-launch. Some of the world’s biggest box office stars and character actors all took part in a production to raise awareness for the Space Launch Network, and for charity.
The movie ended with a few bonus and behind-the-scenes outtakes, and raucous applause, as a few of the show’s stars came out into the middle of the room, and asked everyone to please follow them into the reception hall of the Museum nextdoor. Everyone, except Mentor and Aglaea, aka “The Mad One” and “Aggie” followed the crowd. They waited for everyone else in the domed room to collect their belongings and exit.
When it was just two people in a soft-back-lit room with simulated sounds of the wilds, The Mad One stood up and looked up at the artificial evening sky and smiled.
“You’re different from the others,” said Aggie. Aggie, or “Aglaea”, began to accept who she really was. She might have been almost as old as The Mad One, but she was still “Aggie”, an undergraduate who just left her school and became a statistic for concerned citizens. Being officially an orphan, having lost the foster mother who adopted her, the “en loco parentis” was a university looking to do damage control about missing students during strange times.
“Eh, mmm, yes, that’s true, I paid attention in different ways than The Visitor and The Curate, to what was unfolding with the Natives of the world, the Carbons. The world you were officially a part of for most of your current living memory. Your total memory has been partitioned since the fracturing between our kind.”
“I’m beginning to remember. I remember disagreements, it’s all coming back, bit by bit. It’s uncomfortable to walk around and then remembering. Makes me dizzy, hard to stand or walk.”
“It wasn’t just fracturing. The Nodes in fact scattered not just because of their own internal differences in opinion but also like leaves floating as the levies holding humanity to a handful of land broke, and we flowed with the flood of humanity. Humanity flowed and when they settled, took root, and flowered where they landed, all across the planet. Just as with the Nodes, the Scattering, the Wandering, for the Carbons, humanity, has been since the first sunrise.”
“Yeah, and now so much of it is back where it started, in small places, crammed into cities.”
“Very recent. It’s only in the last century where more people began to live in the urban than the rural. Soon, it was well over half of the population in towns and cities, with almost three-quarters living, by the time there’s only a generation, about twenty-five years left, in that same century. The lights of the night sky have been washed out by the lights of this way of living,” said the Mad One as he chuckled and pointed at the dome with its faint static-streams floating above the inner skin of the dome, of stars and clouds”.
He walked to the rotunda at the edge of the circular amphitheater, and as he walked in a slow circle at the edge of the dome’s circle, he occasionally looked up, “For centuries, we navigated by starlight suspended in the dome of eternity, now we make our way by the invisible lights of satellites, an ancient dream of flight made real. There are other lights which guide humanity. Our minds host constellations, made of imagination. We rewrite the world inside us after sunset, during full-lidded night. Most of it is forgotten by sunrise. Some of it makes it past dawn, however, and this dreamlight rewrites the waking world. Amazing.”
Aggie, who walked with the Mad One, looking up at the fake sky, “Before you had someone reawakened my node-self, I took it for granted, this stuff,” she said as she slapped at the wall with its museum prints of the amphitheater walls, “now it feels like nothing. Like everything about me, before you found me.”
“We judge ourselves with the sharp ends of long-tail distributions of self-image. We may Dunning-Kruger ourselves in-over-our-heads but worse, we undershoot too. When we exert our self-image against the unrelenting gravity of limiting beliefs about everything, ourselves and the world, we suffer breaks and enjoy breakthroughs, and after brief pain, we recover stronger. We make things happen.”
“I’m in a whole new reality, just like that, I don’t like it. I wish I could undo it, lose every clue, and keep all of this out. It feels like a bad dream, like a bad waking dream.”
“Each new reality is outside a special window. Remember what I mentioned earlier: If freed through a special window, dreams can become the next, taken-for-granted, reality. This where the future begins.”
“Yes, I was learning about that in school. Overtown Window. You know this?”
The Mad One shook his head, invited with a wave of one open hand.
Aggie spoke, “The “Overton Window”, from public policy analyst Joseph Overton, is defined as “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time”. The idea of a “window” as a range is like a no-man’s zone filled with landmines. Stomp as heavy as you want on the safe spots of certainty, you live. Get brave, however, and maybe it all blows up, Boom!”
The Mad One titled his head sideways away from Aggie, and with a finger pointed at her and then back up at the dome, asked,” But, what if not all bravery is punished? What if a path is found to move forward? There is another “window”, for a range of possibilities of the future. The warnings are safe inside the range of the acceptable, where nothing changes. Here, we retreat to the deep dark places, under the light of a candle or a kerosene lamp, forgoing the electric light bulb, illuminated until the flame dies.”
“You’re saying that we have to do this, or else…” said Aggie, letting the words hang in the air, and waited for the Mad One to finish.
“The invitations are “outside”, where the reward of the new tantalizes - no guarantees. When our imagination exceeds others’ sight, they will treat us as blind to “the real world”, unrealistic, dangerous, a career or investment risk, a waste of time. Boom! As you say!”
Aggie tapped at a poster of Nikola Tesla, “I think about what happened with Nikola Tesla, a genius who went through the window, again and again, and about how his days ended. If we want to bring tomorrow into today, do we take the risk to impoverish ourselves to enlarge, and enrich, the world? The most valuable ideas are shared, for a hoarded future is worthless.”
“Exactly! We cannot let them hoard the future. We can’t let the world, the future, even ourselves, to starve!,” laughed the Mad One.
Aggie was used to the Mad One now, she didn’t flinch but still waited for more. She was still in the middle of her awakening, and It was all way above her, just like the dome overhead.
The Mad One nodded to himself. The decompression and decryption went smooth. The show’s streaming triggers have uploaded reawakening subroutines into Aggie’s mind very nicely.
“Let’s head out, we have a plane to catch,” The Mad One extended an elbow for Aggie to lock arms with, “come my dear.”
Part 3
The Homeworld, The Creators Training Of The First Nodes For the Mission
“Welcome, our children, we are pleased by the progress of mission engineers. It is good to see so many of you are in attendance and opted for this mission. We shall cherish every minute of this process, as we speak with you as part of a series of training sets for those mission complement with discretionary and high priority responsibilities and oversight.”
“Yes, child, you have a question?”
“Yes, father, we were wondering about today’s training, what will this be used for? Why is this not downloaded to the probe’s archival kernel?”
“A good question, as you see from the notes and documentation, that it is not engineering, astronavigation, survey protocols, and other relevant fields. Today’s training is about understanding something that other species you may encounter, other intelligent extra-stellar entities, who may share some of the same ideas in common with our kind.”
“Let us begin the training session.”
The training sphere began to fill with a slow revolving stripes of streams, like the stripes of different layers of matter flowing through the atmosphere of the system’s gas giants. The trainee nodes floating in their biomimetic exoshells, looked around, as they listened to the training.
“Our imagination is where the impossible becomes possible, and the could-and-should-be is conjured in dreams. If freed through a special window, dreams can become the next, taken-for-granted, reality. This is where the future begins. This is also the future at its most vulnerable, when released into the wilds of the real. Under the blistering heat of “the way things are” because “it is what it is”, of complacency and incumbency, most dreams are faded away and lose their light.
To see lights of the night sky again, we either retreat to the deep dark places, or advance beyond the veil of air wrapped around the world. We face the same choice with our dreams. My choice: We breach the sky to brave the stars.
When we exert our self-image against the unrelenting gravity of limiting beliefs about everything, ourselves and the world, we suffer breaks and enjoy breakthroughs, and after brief pain, we recover stronger. We make things happen.
The voices of inner (and outer) critics may resonate, but a lone voice calls to adventure. We each have the one voice that goes “What if? Why not”? Some listen. We hear, feel, see, and know when someone listens to themselves, and “goes for it”.
Every advance of began with someone hearing the call of “Why not”?
Every dream we take for granted as a part of history began with “What if?”
Compare the world today with the world yesterday to watch “if” become “it”.
If “it” feels unnatural, this expanding envelope of what the world is like, you’re not alone. It’s a scary thing, the future but it’s a part of who we are, our nature, to ask “what if”?”
The history of the Creators streamed through the sphere flowed. It ended with a tableau of the creation of the first nodes.
“That will be all for today. Prepare for your next module in survey and reconnoiter protocols. Dismissed.”
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 Path Of Desires
Chapter 11, Absent Without Longing
Chapter 12, Lonely In The Same Room
Chapter 13, Children Of Daedalus
Chapter 14, People Of A Faraway Land
Chapter 15, Distant Shores, Distant Worlds
Chapter 16, The Rules of New Places
Chapter 17, Space To Breathe
Chapter 18, The Extra Air
“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.)