by Zen, Raeden
We renounce any leader of the thirty territories who follows the thirty precepts;
We renounce the bygone strike teams, which no longer act as the protectors of the people they once were;
We renounce the Harpoon Exams and Harpoon Auction adhered to by the thirty territories;
We renounce the Lower Level and anyone who perpetuates its existence;
And we renounce the Fountain of Youth.
From the fifty-first day of the year 308, After Reassortment,
We recognize that the members of the Liberation Front are in rebellion against the Great Commonwealth;
We recognize our duty to fellow members and friends of the movement, to provide them bread, shelter, and safe passage throughout any territory inside the Earth that adheres to the thirty precepts;
We recognize the Formation of the Underground and the liberties it ensures;
We recognize allies and safe havens of the Liberation Front and will protect them against all agents of the Great Commonwealth;
We recognize that unlike those under the influence and in acceptance of the thirty precepts, death may come to us at any time, in any place;
And we recognize that our objectives will not be complete until the thirty precepts are dissolved and the unregistered, illegal residents of the underground are given equal rights under the laws of transhumankind and the gods.
Song of the Jubilee
Our scientists searching, sealing, Healing Reassortment sorrows, Giving faith to our tomorrows, When we watch the sun arising.
Our partners outpour gratitude, While we beg the gods for mercy, For a volunteer surviving, For our hopes and dreams reviving.
Our trial fearing, freezing, roams The island filled with fertile loam, Reassortment waning, weary, Weeping island now not dreary.
Our engineers fly upstarting, Planting, fishing, celebrating, Reconstructing all the surface, Where we’ll cherish all resources.
The Fountain
Through this inferno, through this labyrinth, You’ll find me here, upon a fountain plinth.
In this steaming underground, we are young, We are immortal, we will move as one.
Down the marble walls, flows the sea and earth, Down my body, I can’t conceal my mirth.
Here we share in Athanasia’s Kiss,
A godly gift, we live in endless bliss.
We dip and dance, we breathe spicy vapors, With new genes, we outlive our ancestors, And one day we’ll rise above, hand in hand, And rise with our comrades, to wonderland.
The Fountain of Youth is where we gather— The Fountain of Youth binds us together …
Synbio Thief
I see who you seek, the synbio thief,
I see crows circling beneath moonlight, I seek escape from this maze with relief.
I see the future, a Janzer gunfight,
I see through walls and falls an oasis, A place to bury bodies out of sight.
When starlight recedes and water freezes, The thief leads you into blade and mist, Swarming, swinging, the thief tantalizes.
The cloud abounds, surrounds the iron fist, The thief confounds, this battle will be brief, In the field, the thief’s a reductionist.
Deadly with diamonds, the thief causes grief, I see who you seek, the synbio thief.
Appendix 5
Transhuman Theology
The Twin Gods of the Cosmos initiated creation with the Big Bang. But the gods won’t ensure our survival. Only through dedication to our research will we find solutions to the aging and Reassortment enigmas, delaying the inevitable death and extinction that awaits all species.
—Atticus Masimovian, 168 AR
The following is the transcript of Supreme Scientist Solstice Rupel’s guest lecture to a Harpoon class in 277 AR. Though its central topic was transhuman theology, the lecture also covered subjects such as the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly, the Death Wave, the Second Hundred Years’ War, and the zeropoint field (ZPF), among others. Solstice disappeared from Marstone’s senses in 286 AR, three years after Jeremiah Selendia, her eternal partner, was demoted from Project Reassortment. She was later killed during a search and destroy mission led by then-Sergeant Marius Arnao in 353 AR. The transcript is stored in Marstone’s Database and is considered classified government property.
Scholars have argued for centuries about the causes and effects of the Second Hundred Years’ War. Some have gone so far as to instead call it the Resource War, reasoning that if the war was fought over nonrenewable resources, then that could be its only cause. Others suggest that humanity’s tendency toward disorder and self-destruction angered the Twin Gods of the Cosmos, who struck us down the way they did the dinosaurs; our survival, and defiance of the gods, it is assumed, will lead to an even more painful and complete death than Reassortment exposure. Another view, which has gained more traction recently, is that it was the Earth itself, with a consciousness of its own, that caused the war, as the planet sought to rid itself of its human “parasites.” This is utter nonsense, in my opinion, while the effects, the utter decimation of the transhuman race, the regeneration of the Earth’s surface, and the alteration of the Earth’s atmosphere and soil—with Reassortment a permanent, and growing, component of both—shouldn’t be part of this discussion. They are observable. They are known.
The argument over the causes—a lack of resources, angry gods, a dying Earth—all miss the mark.
Let’s go back in time. The year 400 BR. Asteroid mining was a nascent industry. Over the next three hundred years, humanity depleted the Earth’s nonrenewable resources via traditional and bacterial methodologies in the continental and oceanic crusts. Advances in synbio technology, designed, in part, to extract raw materials from the Earth, were also used to enhance the human genome at a miniscule cost: a virus with the necessary instructions to alter human DNA could spread easily through a village, town, city, or country.
In short order, entire continents would be exposed to the gene therapies required to speed the evolutionary processes in unprecedented ways. Unlike untamed mutations, which, in addition to enabling sea creatures to walk on land, can cause deformities and retardation, directed alterations of the human genome accomplished what nature would take millions or even billions of years to accomplish through natural selection. Whereas the earliest human ancestor, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, with its flat face, brain size similar to that of a chimpanzee, and small canines, had evolved over six or seven million years into Homo sapiens, it took less than a century for Homo sapiens to evolve into Homo transition.
Compared to our ancestral Homo sapiens, we transhumans are taller, stronger, smarter, disease resistant, and more flexible to temperature and pressure fluctuations. Where the development of sophisticated language separated Homo sapiens from Homo neanderthalensis thirty thousand years ago, so too did our mind-body-cosmos interface separate us from Homo sapiens; you will all soon learn the power of the transhuman mind. We have greater control over our bodies, our emotions, and our consciousnesses than Homo sapiens, for our denser brains carry meshes and neurochips designed to tap into the network of the cosmos—the zeropoint field.
Metaphysically, there’s a background sea of quantum light, the electromagnetic zeropoint field, which fills the universe entirely; even in a true vacuum, there exists the field with its ceaseless electromagnetic waves. The field is the lowest energy state and unobservable, yet it is everywhere, inside and outside; it permeates each atom of our bodies, blinding us to its presence. We can only perceive its existence.
The impact of our connection with the field on our understanding of the physical realm, the nature of reality, the creation of the universe, the gods’ role in our lives, and on our history cannot be overstated. For the world of light the transhuman sees is the light that exists over and above the field. The field generates a force, which opposes acceleration when you push on any material object. The action of that quantum light is what makes matter apparently solid and stable, implying that (1) mass is created by light,
and (2) the continuous flow of light energy in the field is vital to the ongoing expansion of the universe.
All matter is interconnected by waves spread through space and time, linking all parts of the universe, and all molecules in the universe have a unique frequency, and the language they use to communicate is a resonating wave. Thus, molecules can communicate nonlocally and instantaneously; it is a uniquely transhuman ability to enable every neuron of the brain to connect to the field at the same time and speak to every other neuron simultaneously via the quantum processes within; our reality is our perception of reality; we all create our experience in the world each minute of each day. And as you learn to harness your mind-body-cosmos connection to its full potential, you’ll learn to telepathically communicate instantly over great distances, telekinetically move objects, and, for the highest skilled among you, to manipulate matter.
The universe is a dynamic cobweb of energy exchange, with a basic substructure containing all possible versions of all possible forms of matter. Nature is not blind, mechanistic; it’s intelligent, purposeful, making use of a cohesive learning feedback process of information being fed back and forth between organisms and their environment, reinforced by an infinite conscious intelligence with infinite potential.
The infinite consciousness is spread by the gods throughout the universe by the zeropoint field; it continuously shapes and directs matter. It constructs an infinite variety of laws and values for physical constants, then lets those laws and values evolve into the stars and planets and life forms of an infinite number of universes. As all beings are part of this infinite consciousness, how we treat with one another is independent of the gods; where our government requires we carefully control our emotions, the gods are indifferent to transhuman thoughts and behavior.
The Big Bang and evolution are the tools whereby our particular universe and its conscious life forms became actualized in unpredictable and creative ways. The material reality, the places we see, the objects we touch, the music we hear, the food we taste, the sensations we feel, are primary to our experience, not exclusive; there is an infinite consciousness in the metaphysical realm, which transhumans experience at a higher cognitive level than any ancestral hominid.
Our higher cognitive processes result from our interaction with the zeropoint field, which, at times, manifests in a physical realization of the Twin Gods of the Cosmos. Places exist in the universe where the transhuman connection with the cosmos is strongest; here in the Earth, those places are the Comb Cove and the Spa of Delphi. And it’s at the spa where our doors to perception are altered in a manner that creates a physical recreation of the gods before us.
That’s how we know the Twin Gods are real, the observations of the infinite consciousness in physical form, repeated and repeated, by the entire transhuman race. It is from Delphi that we learned the gods initiated creation with the Big Bang, balancing the energy of expansion with gravitational braking in such a way that allowed for the creation of stars and galaxies that exist as we know them, implying that you and I and the earth surrounding us are made of recycled cosmic dust. We’re part of an old universe, one that had enough time to develop the critical elements required for life.
In rendering the universe as a divided version of itself, the gods produced from pure energy all that now exists, including physical and metaphysical universes. Our world reflects a physical realm where creation is ongoing, constrained by laws of nature that result in some things that work, some that don’t, and some that work for a time. This imperfection allows the gods to enrich the infinite consciousness through experience, yours and mine and all transhumans that lived and will live, and all living creatures in the universe. Indeed, the gods live in the physical realm through us; we are one with them and they are one with us, and one day, whether transhumankind makes it back to the surface or not, our consciousness will return to them.
To paraphrase our great chancellor, we Beimenians are truly one being.
We’re theoretically immortal and immune to most disease, including aging, and 99.9 percent of the Earth’s natural pathogens. The gods, however, are infinite rather than immortal, for they created space and time and are therefore beyond space and time. They enable us to perceive the world through the zeropoint field; they don’t dictate how we see or experience that world. From the field emerges infinite possibilities; it is through our perception, our selective subtraction, that the finite manifests in the physical realm. Thus, we transhumans place limitations on the infinite, creating real experiences in a world of imperfection.
Scholars who perceive the Second Hundred Years’ War as a conflict created by the gods or a dying Earth fail to account for the infinite consciousness. All transhuman life is valuable to this consciousness. It is this consciousness that creates our perception of physical matter, not the perception of physical matter that creates our consciousness. The universe is beautiful and unique, expanding and finite, random and creative. The chancellor’s precepts, which require transhumans to treat each other with respect and compassion, are a moral absolute, primarily because all beings participate in the infinite consciousness that created them; if we harm one another, we are harming ourselves.
The gods desire partnership, not servitude the way our commonwealth does. As citizens of not only the Great Commonwealth but of the universe, you must ask not what the gods can do for you in your immortal life but rather what you can do for your gods—not out of fear and not for their benefit, but for your own.
When you understand all of this, you will understand that we transhumans created the underground hell in which we live, not a lack of resources, not a dying Earth, and certainly not the gods. Neither the gods nor the Earth can be made unhappy or angered by transhuman behavior, for we’re all participants in the infinite consciousness. Then what, you are thinking, caused the war, our near extinction, and descent underground?
The transhuman desire for perfection, or put differently, the desire to undo the imperfections of our universe.
As all of you proceed through your development and take the Harpoon Exams, remember that you are not perfect; you are beautiful; you are intelligent; you are the most advanced species in the history of the Earth; you will enable the gods to experience the physical and metaphysical realms in ways they don’t yet imagine.
Don’t let the ghosts of transhuman past influence your lives today.
In short, never forget that your lives matter, in both the seen and unseen realms.
And with that I’ve run out of time.
Good luck to all of you in your Harpoon classes and on the Harpoon Exams. May you all serve Beimeni and live forever.
Appendix 6
Transhuman Terminology
In studying the events prior to and after the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly, the major zones of Earth (including the surface, Polemon, Beimeni, Middle, and Lower Level zones), and the Evolutionary War of 308–368 AR, many unfamiliar terms arise. It’s admirable for the studious and dedicated to try to better understand the world’s history and future. Hence, the glossary that follows.
A
ABSOLUTE ZERO: 0 K on the Kelvin scale, which is a thermodynamic (absolute) temperature scale, and -273.15 degrees Celsius on the Celsius scale.
AFTER REASSORTMENT: the terms After Reassortment (AR or A.R.) and Before Reassortment (BR or B.R.) are used to label or number years in the Livellan calendar. This calendar era is based on the traditionally recognized year of the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly, with AR counting the years from the start of this epoch and BR denoting years before the start of the era. (See Livellan calendar.)
AGE OF MASIMOVIAN, THE: began with the election of Atticus Masimovian as the first chancellor of a newly created commonwealth he called Beimeni in 168 AR.
ANSIBLE: also called the ansible communicator or the ansible; enables instantaneous interstellar communication through the ZPF; functional only on celestial bodies with weak or no magnetic fields. (See zeropoint field.)
ARTEMI
S SQUARE: the northern square in Beimeni City that contains three amphitheaters.
ASTEROID MINING: the extraction of raw materials from asteroids and minor planets.
ATHANASIA: the gene therapies designed to give transhumans a theoretically infinite life span.
ATHANASIA POOL: (See Fountain Square.)
ATHANASIA-QUALIFIED: included in classified dossiers in Marstone’s Database; an indication of whether or not a citizen is eligible for entry to Fountain Square. Service to the commonwealth generally assures access; the exceptions are for (1) citizens considered a threat to peace; (2) members of the Great Court; (3) Couriers of the Chancellor; (4) Harpoon candidates; (5) the deceased; and (6) Lower Level exiles. (See Fountain Square.)
ATHANASIA’S KISS: (See Fountain Square.)
AUTOCRAT, THE: the highest political and military office of the Western Hegemony. (See Western Hegemony.)
B
BEFORE REASSORTMENT: (See After Reassortment.)
BEIMENI ARISTOCRAT: an appointed position as either overseer of a district or ward within a village or city, or as a Harpoon developer. (See House of Development.)
BEIMENI CITY: also called the great city or the capital; the capital of Phanes Territory (founded and constructed in 197 AR) and the second capital city of the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni. The first capital city was Livelle City, Natura Territory (founded in 168 AR and constructed in 170 AR).