The Clash Of Selves
Salvation is detachment from the madness before it arrives
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 Mission
The Three Meanings governed the Elder Nodes, the First Nodes, rendered long before the Mission was even conceived of. The Ancients made successors before re-tasking them as explorers. At the core of every Mission deployed to every star system, cluster, and galaxy was this code.
During the intervening years between their creation and the assembly of the probes, the Ancients found, lost, and found themselves, over and over, and realized it would be up to the closest thing they had to a new breed of themselves, the next and last children of their kind. So, they invested everything they had in trying to outlive time’s erosion on their species and live through their children. Then they stopped, and focused on preparing their last sires for a life away from a dying home.
Earlier great enterprises led to war, sometimes among the most organized of individuals, amongst the Nodes themselves. It happened on occasion, consuming large numbers of clustered Nodes, with some of the worst incidents happening on the first trial deep space explorations. Soon after, the Ancients agreed, to pass along not just their knowledge but also their social wisdom. Their next children were effectively raised with lessons in both elocution as well as ethics.
Governing the Nodes were the shared values embraced by the Ancients The Three Meanings: Order, Outcome, and Objective. These principles defined the way of things on the Homeworld for a very long time, long after barren world in the Home System was transformed, and after the rare returns of the early pilot program Missions was reviewed. Success and failure was filtered through this lens.
Order of System, codes and rules, Outcome, actions and results, Objective, ritual and virtue. This mantra of Ancients was imprinted on the first Nodes.
Even after the Mission left the local veil of the home-world’s outer veil of vestigial matter, from the time of the System’s formation, the “Three Meanings” governed the Founding Nodes, the first and oldest Nodes, conceived and made when the notion of the last mission was in its infancy. All but one of the probes were destroyed or lost to the dark. Then an impossible particle was drawn into the extra-dimension maw of the probe mass driver, and the Mission’s fate was sealed - as were the dominant Carbon life-forms on one unfortunate world. “The Landing” changed them both, the “castaways” and the fate of native life on one world.
By that time, the Mission was interrupted abruptly, with “The Landing” in a modest star system, of a mid-range galaxy, after millions of years of exploration, the great mantra, faced its greatest test on a small world. It was the beginning of the end for the original mission, and the end of the beginning for something new.
At the time of Planning, this scenario was ranked as possible but improbable. It took an impossible particle, at the right time, striking the Probe in the wrong place to take the Mission outside the Ancients’ models for the Mission. Nobody told the Mission Controller Nodes, for the Senior members of the Mission, adapted and applied the Three Meanings on one world, but not all once and not in unanimous fashion.
The seeds for countless millennia of disorder came from rules designed by a society long extinct.
The Curate began her existence as the keeper of the Mission’s Base Code, with oversight over keeping the Probe on Mission. She was as close to a Cleric in her early centuries, charged with an unexpected mission to be the keeper of memories, as close as Nodes got to something greater and beyond themselves. There were tensions in how the “Three Meanings” were interpreted and applied over the ages. Without the constraints of the long wanderings of the Mission, confined as castaways on the shores of one world, Earth, new problems, exceeded Mission Planners’ sense of what was possible in terms of disorder, chaos, and conflict among their creations.
Part 2
New Meaning
It was just a few weeks ago, that inside “The Ashes”, The Curate swiped at the snowdrifts of papers, grabbed a sheaf, and waved it like a flag at the long table, “Mud, Mud, Mud. Muddy springs fed muddy streams.”
The Library, known as “The Ashes”, was true to its name at last, for it was on fire.
The Mad One was making space in the world for the Carbons.
The alarms drew in the local native first responders.
Firefighters put out the fire, local authorities, news teams, and insurance inspectors were on the scene. Several preplanned accelerants and pre-weakened mechanical lines were primed for a power and antiquated fuel-line failures. As far as the native Carbon authorities were concerned, it was just an unfortunate admixture of age, neglect, municipal oversight and corruption taking down an grand lady of a select street in an upmarket urban district.
“The Ashes” was gone, and so were traces of its true occupants. A legal entity, associated in a series of holding companies and ventures to a distant branch of Outland Ventures, would be the recipient of insurance funding to rebuild the site, and then proceed with a handover to a charitable foundation, wholly owned and operated by an respected Carbon family based in Europe. The Necker-Cadmus Educational Partnership would assume title after settlement, and begin a new mission: educational grants and scholarships for gifted and talented young people across the world, interested in a future in scientific research.
The Curate, with her head down, signed the orders personally, in her latest Carbon persona name. In her hand, she had one of the surviving books of “The Ashes”, the “Trinity of Meaning”, as she took an SLN-owned SUV to the seaport. There was a helicopter waiting for her.
Part 3
The Clash of Selves
The Curate addressed her staff, as they unpacked the surviving vestiges of “The Ashes” collection, in their new emergency facility, “Many of our problems in life come from bad answers to these questions. Left unanswered, this hurts us in life and living. It has ruined many where money is involved.”
She walked among them, inspecting their work, and listening to progress reports about her Clan’s operators, and what was happening on the Island. She was waiting for confirmation about the location of the signal emission, and that its origin was from a reinitialized and re-powered Probe reactor core. The streaming feeds came through, like a gentle pastoral stream of light, in her line of sight.
She continued talking, as she checked off items, nodded her approval to Staffer administrative requests, and noticing one of the recovered artifacts, and picked up a “Talley Stick”, used by long deceased Carbons for verification in abstract transactions, “What feelings dominate in any arena of risk, with lots of players, like the markets? Some of the strongest emotions, among the Carbons, are greed and fear. In some of their dealings, and in their markets, you can see the strong tides of rivalry roiling on top of deep waters of emotion.”
She put down the artifact, and studied another, a glass-domed ticker-tape machine, which was owned by a century-plus old predecessor legal entity to Overland Ventures, “This happens when you see success being flaunted by victors in competitive situations. Their feelings, of a fear of being left behind take hold. There is are profound fears of being out of step, a nagging fear grows in a loop.”
At the end of one table is fused pile of metallic disks and totems, an ancient caches of Carbon wealth, buried, and lost, stolen and buried and lost, all lost to time, “Then as it always has, things begin to crack - move in reverse. Those who gave into their fear of left behind, on not being part of things happening, early or late, hesitate before powering down, cutting back, and getting their bearings, their senses back. Their very sense of self and self-regard is about what they associate with, the things which own them.”
“It's hard to concede to the idea that even the victor could become the victim. They are like those antlered creatures, mesmerized by headlights, waiting for death. You might be frozen but those lights are coming closer. What is to be done? To become strong before the storm even comes. To invest in knowing the self. Salvation is detachment from the madness before it arrives.”
The Curate rolled the gold and silver coins in her hands, and then let them clatter back on the small mounds of ancient misfortune, "All those marvelous unreturned emotions, unrequited. It leads to danger. At scale, it means war.”
“What is our salvation? The Three Meanings. Order, Outcome, Objective. We can do much, we are ahead because our minds are not prisoners, and that we can change our minds, in favor of the Three Meanings. It saved us during The Mission, long before “The Landing.”
Accepting a small glass of water, she sipped it, and then raised the glass, making a toast, “We’re free because we our sense of self is safe inside The Three Meanings. Order, Outcome, Objective.
The rest of the room paused working, and raised their glasses to return the mantra and toast, “Order, Outcome, Objective.”
The room went back to work in silence.
“I want the latest report,” ordered The Curate. The Island was all that mattered.
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.)