The End of Slavery
By Craig A Maciolek
Copyright 2012 Craig A Maciolek
*****
*****
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
About The Author
*****
Prologue: Chance
About 530 million years ago, a very large school of fish drifted with the currents in an impossibly large ocean. These fish had never been seen by the eyes of humans; not even their fossils. They looked a little like what we know to be a fish today, in shape and motion, however, these fish were extremely simple. They had no eyes or any other sensory apparatus except for a single invisible cluster of nerve endings in the flesh of their foreheads. From their forehead, the nerves traveled down their spine and into the muscles along their length. These fish survived by drifting along with the currents and filtering food from the water. They were not great swimmers, although they did jockey around a little within the school.
The current that carried this large school of fish flowed over, and collected, the super heated water of an underwater volcanic vent. As the water became warmer, most of the fish experienced the firing, or stimulation, of the nerve endings in the center of their forehead, which caused their muscles to react and made them swim faster; straight forward to their deaths. Some of the fish experienced no nerve firing at all and drifted slowly to their death. A very small number of these fish had nerves that fired and caused their muscles to react, making them swam faster, but for some reason they turned and swam away from the hot water, out of the current, and to their survival. Not all of the fish that turned, survived. Some were not strong enough swimmers and were carried to their deaths by the current. Some were turned again by bumping into other fish. Also, some of the fish that reacted by swimming straight forward, survived because they were bumped into turning out of the current and harms way by a fish that had turned.
Over the millennia, the fish that reacted to the hot water by swimming away and the fish that were bumped out of harms way, evolved into two separate species.
*****(Top)
Chapter One
Michael was late. He hated when he was late. Working as fast as he could without making a mess or missing a step, he put all the cleaning supplies away and rinsed out the mop. When everything was in order he looked at his watch and saw that he was behind by three minutes. He checked that his clothes were in order and left the janitor's shop. He ran up the the three flights of stairs to the main level, paused at the door to compose himself, and came out of the stairwell by the elevators as usual.
He was happy to see that the workers were only just starting to trickle in, that he had not missed the mad morning rush, which gave him a moment to decide where he was going to watch from. The main entry to the federal building had an L shape to it. The entryway itself was recessed into the building by a funnel shaped courtyard that was about fifty feet from the parking lot. Once through the front doors the lobby opened up into a large area with couches to right and the main security desk directly across from the entryway. Past the security desk, to the left, was the elevator lobby. However, to get to the elevators the workers had to go through a security checkpoint with metal detectors and armed guards. To Michael, there was a noticeable difference between the desk guards and the armed guards.
He used to like the security guards behind the desk, watching the monitors and answering the phones, but he had not been in the mood to watch from behind them for a while. When he stands behind them they talk to him under their breath about the people walking in. In the past that was alright because it made him feel like he belonged, but his interest in the people had changed and he found it to be a distraction – the talk came from a bad place he didn't want to associate with anymore. Michael was trying to be more confident and he recognized that laughing at other people only gave the illusion of confidence, and that illusion did more harm than good. Michael James was a little ashamed that it took him so long to figure that out.
There were three other places that he liked to stand and watch. The first one was all the way out front, to the right side of the main doors, where he watched through the glass as all the people were herded together into a few doors by the narrowing courtyard walls; the people would acknowledge one another for the first time and engaged in simple organization. The second place was on the corner where the main lobby turned into the elevator lobby, just behind the metal detectors and the heavily armed guards, where he would watch the interactions between the people as they organized themselves further and their interactions with the guards who processed them. The last place was behind the elevators at the far end of the elevator lobby, where he could watch all the people waiting. Today, he decided he was going to watch from the corner behind the metal detectors.
He called it watching, but he didn't really technically watch much of anything, just the shoes going by. He called it watching because he didn't have the full understanding or confidence to call it what it really was. He knew he was actually feeling the people, feeling their emotional energy, but since he couldn't explain it completely and clearly to anyone he kept it all to himself. For him, feeling other people's emotional energy was like watching, or listening. To him, emotional energy was as real as light or sound.
As Michael came out of the elevator lobby and took his position on the corner, the guards gave him a quick glance and then looked at one another as they did their work. They smirked and made their usual quiet comments. Michael took out his Grandfather's old watch chain, that he had used a pair of pliers on to make into a smooth loop, and began to rock a little while working the chain through his fingers, link by link, with his hands directly in front of his chest. His eyes stared past his hands to the floor, open but useless, as he put his entire focus on that part of him that received emotional energy.
The flow of people coming into the building began to pick up and Michael was in his place; physically and emotionally. In the fourteen years that he had been doing this, he had become quite good. He had learned that everyone had an emotional fingerprint in two ways. The first was the frequency that their emotional energy was transmitted. To him there was a spectrum of emotional energy and he could receive a certain swath of that spectrum, a majority of it, but there were a few people who transmitted outside of his range. It was either that or they did not transmit anything at all, but he simply could not accept that option. Emotional energy was such a large part of his life it was impossible for him to believe that there were people who were completely silent. The other part of each person's emotional fingerprint was their bass rhythm. To him, people were like music. They had a persistent, but quiet, emotional bass rhythm playing underneath the louder and more varied melody. It was Michael's belief that this bass rhythm was absorbed and learned from the environment people grew up in. It was a long term conditioned piece of music. The melody, on the other hand, was the day to day dance of mood and temperament that can change instantly in response to the days events. What was very interesting to Michael, something he had learned about seven years ago, was that the melody was tied to the bass; that two people's happiness or sadness were not the same. Our melodies were dictated by our bass rhythm. A person with a dark heavy bass rhythm had a happiness that was different than a person who had a lighter and more playful bass rhythm, even if they appeared to be happy about the same thing in the same way.
Recently Michael had been focusing on the interactive nature of this music. How the melodies can change, morph and adapt as people bounc
ed off of one another, and all the while the different bass rhythms maintained their tempo. Most people had similar rhythms. Rhythms that would synchronize to one another if the people remained in contact long enough. Most people were very similar; he guessed from growing up in the same general way. However, in this dance, there were a few people who had a very unique bass rhythm. Michael called them the "untouchables". They were the ones who had been teaching him the most, simply because there were so few of them swimming in a sea of darkness. It was these few people who had convinced him that there was an emotional energy spectrum. Because the people he could not feel at all would respond to them like others did. If everyone had the same general kind of bass rhythm, then it would be hard to say that the people he couldn't feel didn't simply learn the dance steps and were faking it. But, when they interacted with a person who had a very different bass rhythm, they responded spontaneously like everyone else did. Thus, Michael was convinced that, while he could not feel these people, others had a range of frequency that included them and were interacting normally.
The traffic into the metal detectors and guard station increased and the emotional dance picked up. In the fourteen years that he had been working at the Federal Building, there had only been three security issues. At those times the guards had been perfect. Like most people, the guards used the mystical terms “instinct”, “intuition”, or “a feeling in their guts” to describe why they knew someone was planning something bad. Michael knew better. The rest of the time it was all a choreographed dance that was only preformed for the sake of the dance. It was a game of mood, temperament, and ego. Sometimes the guards gave someone a hard time because the person was feeling good and strong, and other times the guards would pick on someone because a guard was feeling low and weak. The six people who had the unique bass rhythms were the anomaly. The six "untouchables" where never bothered by the guards. Michael thought it was because they had learned that those people were above their game. He had watched, one time, as a new guard put one of the “untouchables” through all of the paces, but the person never stopped being helpful and polite, and ended up leaving the guard station feeling the exact same as they did when they approached. The guard felt worse and ended up taking it out on someone else to regain his self esteem. The lesson to Michael was that it takes emotional energy to try and drain someone of emotional energy, so if the other person had more and was better at managing it, then it was not worth trying.
This was the interesting dynamic in the interaction of emotional energy as Michael experienced it. Since people were not aware of their ability to feel emotional energy, they accepted responsibility for everything they felt. Thus, all of their actions were drawn from the bias that everything they were feeling was somehow about them and they had to control all of it in one way or another. It was like assuming that everything we heard with our ears was about us and something we must act on. A person would go crazy living like that. Especially if their ears were very sensitive. Michael was all too familiar with that. Slavery to the senses was what his life was like before he made the choice to walk his own path.
Suddenly, there was a change in the whole environment. Everything jumped up an octave and all the people were starting to show subtle signs of increased agitation. Everyone was feeling it even though they were not aware of it. Sometimes this happened because there was a glitch, like one of the metal detectors going off-line making everything more complicated, but Michael couldn't see anything out of the ordinary with his eyes. It was the beginning of the full rush and things seemed to be moving normally. That was when it hit him – a mixture of piercing fear and anger like he had never felt before coming from a single point outside in the courtyard.
He had to move, he had to get out of there, but where? He felt control slipping away from him so it had to be fast. He looked toward the elevators, but the lobby was crowded with people waiting. For some reason beyond his understanding he chose to move toward the sharpness. He quickly slid through the exit gate at the guard station and returned to the wall on the left side of the main lobby where he moved along quickly, trying to keep as far away from the source of the energy as possible. He made it to the doors and paused for a moment while waiting for a little break in the traffic, and then made his move.
His heart was pounding and he realized that he was not in control anymore. He had pushed two people to get through the door, and once through, with his eyes on the ground in front of him, he bounced off of people left and right. He heard their comments and protests, felt bad for what he was doing, but nothing stopped him. He made it back to the wall to the left on the outside and started moving away from the exit when he noticed something very strange; it made him stop and look with his eyes. The source of the fear and anger divided into two. The fear was approaching the entrance to his right and the anger was further away – out towards the parking lot.
Michael took a step in to get a closer look at the fear walking towards the door. It wasn't just fear, there was subtle sadness and frustration interwoven. He saw a man walking towards the entrance. He looked a little disheveled, like he was wearing someone else's clothes that were too big for him, and was carrying a large, old, briefcase. He stared straight forward as though in a trance and was whispering something over and over again. Michael looked him up and down and felt bad for this man. He wanted to help this man. But, then he lost all control. A dagger of anger stabbed right through him.
When he looked to see it's source, there were two men glaring right at him from a van at the far side of the parking lot. He turned and ran away. Running along the wall, he came around the corner and ran into a woman carrying a box of papers. The papers went flying and the woman landed on the ground. Michael looked at her, got stuck in her eyes for a moment, got into a half bend as though he was going to help, but froze. He knew this woman. Not surprising in itself because he knew everyone who worked there, but she was a woman who stood out because she felt very familiar to him. She was not one of the “untouchables", but Michael always noticed her when she was around. As some people started to gather to help pick up the papers, he broke his eyes from hers, quietly said “I'm sorry”, then jerked back from another stab of anger and ran away.
The woman sat up in disbelief and frustration. While she was sitting, she dejectedly started picking up papers. Someone helping said, “they shouldn't let people like that work here... I mean... ” She didn't agree with that sentiment, but she was too disappointed to say anything. She was alright, just felt so frustrated by not feeling she could get mad at that man. He being disabled and all. All there was for her to do was spend far too much time, time she didn't have, getting her papers back in order. She got up and said thanks to the people who had stopped to help. And just as she bent over again to pick up more papers she was suddenly thrown backwards through the air and onto the ground again. And as she laid on her back, dazed at the ringing in her ears, the tingling all over her body, and little pieces of something hitting her face, she marveled in wonder as everything faded out.
-----
Michael was close to the other side of the parking lot when the explosion pushed him forward, making him stumble. He regained his balance and continued to run as fast as he could. A few moments after the explosion he put his fingers in his ears. While his hearing was very sensitive, he was not trying to block out any sounds. Putting his fingers in his ears was a reflex that he had when he wanted to stop any form of input from coming in, no matter if it was sound, light, or emotional energy. Shortly after the shock wave of the blast almost knocked him off his feet, a tidal wave of fear, anguish and sorrow had washed over him. He wanted it to stop.
-----
Agent Anna Elizabeth Spencer came to with an aching, groggy head, a loud ringing in her ears, and pain under her arms and legs. Looking around told her she was being carried by four people and that was why her arms and legs hurt. She couldn't remember if she was wearing pants or a skirt so she looked down, but couldn't make sense of what she was seeing.
She tried to lower her hands to make sure she wasn't showing herself to the world, but she couldn't reach. The effort caused one of the people carrying her by the arm to lose their grip and stumble a bit, then he grabbed again a little harder. Agent Spencer looked up at that man and saw him saying something to her. She heard the sounds he was making through the ringing, but they didn't make any sense. She grew a little panicked because she wanted to be sure she was properly covered. She looked up at the two men carrying her legs, each in turn, and then her eyes focused past them and saw smoke rising out the building where she worked. And then she remembered, and started to cry.
-----
Michael did not know how long he had been running, but he became aware of his Grandfather's old watch chain hitting him on the side of his face and that brought him back to the place where he could choose to be in control. He took his fingers out of his ears and came to a stop. Bending over and trying to catch his breath he wondered if the volume of fear and anguish went down, or if he had simply gotten used to it. He didn't get a chance to think about it very long, because even though he was not at a bus stop, a bus came to a stop next to him. The door opened and the driver asked if he needed a ride. Michael answered by getting on the bus. The driver was full of questions about what had happened, but Michael just walked past him and sat down without saying a word. The driver knew Michael, all the drivers knew Michael, and knew of his different ways. So, the driver did not stop talking to Michael even though Michael showed no effort to respond. Sometimes Michael wondered if they were listening to him in other ways, because often the things they were saying were in perfect sync with the things he was thinking and feeling; the driver would ask a question and Michael would answer it in his head, then the driver would continue on as though he heard the response.
-----
About one hundred yards behind the bus, a black SUV with dark windows patiently matched it's speed and path.
-----
Agent Spencer was sitting on a little grass strip on the far side of the parking lot where emergency vehicles were setting up their base of operations. She was checked out by an EMT and told that it appeared she just had minor cuts and bruises, but she should go into the hospital to get her head checked out. To Agent Spencer that was as good as a clean bill of health. Her head had cleared up and her hearing was much better, although there was still some ringing. She had things to do, but she couldn't help taking a few moments sitting on the grass, pulling on her pant leg, feeling guilty that she was so concerned about whether or not her panties were showing when so many good people had just lost their lives. Consciously she understood the whole disorientation thing and that her mind was muddled, but she felt that was no excuse. She felt as though she just witnessed an unconscious part of herself that she wanted to strangle.
Her first call was to her mother. It was quick and sharp; “Hello?... Mom, I'm Ok. Turn on the TV and you will understand. Please let everyone know and I will call when I can.” and she hung up. The next call was to her partner who she hoped and prayed was his usual late. He had to have answered before the first ring ended, “Where you at?” “On the grass over on the diner side of the parking lot, by the ambulances.” "You alright?” “Fine.” “I'm helping the firefighters so I will see you in a little while.” “Do what you gotta do, I will be here.” and she hung up. Her third call was to her boss who she hoped and prayed was his usual early. She got a little nervous as she listened to the fifth ring. Then he answered in a muffled but knowing voice, “Hello Agent Spencer, are you feeling OK?” She responds a little confused, “Hello... yes... where are you?” “Twenty feet to your left.” She looked over at the smoke-dirty man sitting in the grass with an oxygen mask over his face. She hung up her phone and moved over to sit next to him.
*****(Top)
The End of Slavery Page 1