Dystopyum (The D-ot Hexalogy Book 1)

by Chris Finkelstein

  The audience was getting confused with these classifications, and Jason could tell that his description of Type IIIs was not getting through well enough, so he plainly said, “Type IIIs are where sociopathic killers originate.”

  The group before him seemed to get that, so, going on, he said, “Although a pure Type III baby is rare, we are all a blend of the three types. That is where we try to narrow down the soul-typing of the baby. We do this in order to provide customized training to overcome the negatives, and grow on the positives each child has.”

  Jason paused, and looked down at the lightly stained natural oak grain on the podium. Should I? He asked silently. Tread lightly, the voice said. Jason took another deep breath, and went on speaking, “I am a specialist in what some others call “devils”. These children are always Type III. They usually have a background of childhood trauma, but a surprising number do not. When we eliminate genetic, nutritional, and environmental factors as causes, we are left with one conclusion — these are some seriously retarded souls, and all effort must be made to avoid irritation of these souls, from childbirth on.”

  Jason gave an example, “Think about a puppy or a kitten. We tell our children, ‘don’t play rough’ with them, because the pet will start biting or scratching too easily. That ‘button’ can be ‘turned on’ in older pet, even though years of gentleness have kept the pet peaceful. They will become ‘bitey’, or ‘scratchy’, when simply trying to pet them. That is how it is with Type IIIs, except that they can wait to bite. They rarely appear these days, and my team has developed our own classifications of them. The wheels of research turn slowly. Although these theoretical ideas have not yet been fully embraced, I obviously believe that we may be correct in our hypothesis. I am actually here because my superiors want me to prove these theories or shut up about them. In any case, since this is a lifetime mission, they won’t have to face me anymore if they don’t want to.” Jason gave a wry grin, “Perhaps they chose me for this mission, if only for that reason.”

  He paused.

  No laughter. Nothing.

  “I have a very strong feeling that we will need to use these theories on this planet, if we are to be successful. It will also help us to refine our guidance of these dissociative souls, and broaden our understanding of our own souls as well.”

  “I don’t understand your reason for negativity,” another person in the audience complained.

  “Please let me explain further,” said Jason. “Everything about this planet is unkind. It is like a very nasty jungle, without the jungle. The humanoids that lived here before must have had those predatory traits. God only knows what kind of lives they lived there. The souls still there have been bound to that planet for thousands of years, held as if by gravity, exactly like the other dead planets we have colonized. They are burning with the desire to do something to move on — but are imprisoned. When we arrive, I believe the hungriest souls will force their way into our newborns, regardless of the parent’s genetic phenotypical passive harmonics. Our first generation of offspring will be their first avenue for incarnation in one hundred thousand years.”

  Jason continued, “Please look to the screen to my left. There you can see anatomic illustrations of the D’ot8 humanoids, generated after medicrobotic dissection of one of two well-preserved bodies recently discovered. These bodies were found inside recently discovered suspended animation containers. The containers were still powered, after all these millennia, and I find that amazing.”

  The audience started talking among themselves. This was the first they had seen of the anatomy of the D’otians.

  Jason went on, “You see that they had scales, and also had bodies similar in shape to ours, but about fifty percent larger and heavier. Their faces were amazingly humanoid, considering their reptilian roots. This specimen was almost nine feet tall. They have what appears to be a nuchal crest on the tops of their heads, similar to our lizards. The two we’ve seen in suspended animation had different colors of nuchal crests.

  “We have found some remarkable things in our robotic dissections of one of the bodies. To understand what I am about to say, please look to the diagrams on the screen.” He showed a picture of something that looked like three vertical tubes, side by side, each with a bulge in the center. “These are diagrams of three brainstems. The first one on the left, with a small bump in the middle is a lizard brainstem, a reptile. The second one, the one in the middle, is a dog’s brainstem. It has another layer over the bump in the center, making it thicker. This is what is associated with a mammal’s ability to fear and love, and it is what allows a mammal behave differently from a reptile. A reptile is only interested in basic body functions, but it does understand pecking order, and can follow certain animal behaviors we would call ‘ritualistic.’ It follows ‘routines’. What the reptile does not understand are emotions like fear or love. If you were to call someone cold-blooded, you are saying that he or she is emotionally cold like a reptile.” Jason took a Freudian glance at North, who was looking in Jason’s direction with a blank face.

  Jason went on, “Let us go on to the third brainstem on the far right. It is a human brainstem. It has another layer making the central bulge even bigger. It also has a more complex limbic system, and a huge cortex, compared to the first two illustrations. We have studied the medical illustrations of the D’otians’ central nervous system anatomy. We can see in this next illustration that they had the roughly the same size cortex as humans. However, the thicker, emotional layer of the brainstem is very thin, compared to ours.”

  He stopped. What’s the best way to say this? He went on, “I have consulted with a number of anatomical experts, and they agree that their limbic system appears to be vestigial. What they mean is that these humanoids once had a well-developed, human-like brain stem, limbic system and neo-cortex. Something happened over a long period of time to cause some sort of devolution. Not only did their limbic systems regress to something more like the reptilian brainstem, their female breasts had become vestigial as well, and ceased to function. This probably happened because although they were mammals, they retained many reptile-like characteristics, such as their scales, nuchal crests, and their tails, which also had caudal crests.”

  He looked at their blank faces. I’ve lost them. Jason elaborated, saying, “Form follows function. Evolution follows function, and so does devolution. If you don’t use it, you lose it. We believe the growth of that middle bulge on the brainstem in humans is a result, not a cause. It is a result of their growth in channeling love over many millennia.”

  Now that he had completely bewildered most of the listeners, Jason nonetheless continued to make his case. “What I am trying to say is that I believe that it looks like the D’otians’ brainstems regressed because they stopped using love — love ‘left’ their society. They devolved emotionally. We know from the library records that constant warring among themselves eventually caused their extinction. I fear that these are the souls we will be receiving on D’ot8, and I need to get you be prepared, for this mission to succeed.

  “Your mission is my mission: To spend the rest of our lives organizing the recycling of the souls bound to this planet so that they may help us re-inhabit the planet, bringing it back to life for humanoid souls. We provide avenues for their minds to evolve and remember their soul’s purpose, just as we are doing for ourselves.

  “Our section of the universe will have another world to love and learn from, trade with, and according to the teaching of the Guild, bring more balance and harmony to the dimension of time. History has shown that the salvaging of a dead planet brings good fortune to not only the colonists there, but to our home planet as well.

  “In psychology, classic dissociation happens when a person has a part of their mind split off. This dissociated part is unknown by the conscious mind, yet is given a will, and operates from the subconscious.

  “The Guild postulates that we have all dissociated from love, and that is why we need to ‘swim’ tow
ards love. When we swim towards love, we swim towards our deepest eternal home, which is invisible to those who find their soul drawn to the dimension of time.

  “Our team takes it a step further: All soul-types, including myself, must dissociate, split, if you will, from awareness of part of our spiritual minds in order to find ourselves in the dimension of time. Time is a nonreal temporary arena for souls to learn that ‘one thing’. You all know that the Guild professes that the dimension of time was allowed to be made, or better, temporarily exist, by our eternal Author, the Source. The Author did allow this because souls have the free will to direct their attention as they please. There is a safety control here, based on free will. We are free to wander, although that is not our creative purpose. However, you cannot walk away from the light without walking into the dark. Eventually, the dark becomes so painful and fearful that we turn around. Unfortunately, the deeper one is in time, the less they can see or hear the light of spiritual sanity. Our spiritual minds become blinded by the physical senses. It can take thousands of years and many lifetimes to for the prodigal son to get a solid footing on his way home.”

  Jason paused, and took a drink of water. They are listening. He continued, “That is where we come in. Even though we are learning our way back, we are also the brothers to those who are more lost, but can communicate with us. They learn our ways, and we speak to them of the Author of life, peace, happiness and love. By doing so, we perfect the lesson ourselves.”

  He waited for a moment to let the thought sink in, then continued, “Guild dogma says that our wandering souls formed dissociations within dissociations in the dimension of time. This considerably complicated the problem, with further splits from love on various mental levels we made. Our memory of our true home in the dimension of eternity was lost, buried in the darkness of time. That memory resides in a part of our invisible subconscious, which we fear to look into. It is like the child who is skipping school, and is afraid to face the schoolteacher, who ironically is waiting in concern for the child’s return. Through the Guild’s teaching, we have learned how to reverse this. We did this by using love in every way and action. We discovered, and have now proven, that love actually affects time, similar to speed or gravity. We have tremendous agreement among top physicists on this subject, and are very close to proving the theory with the Guild’s new orbiting gyroscopic particle collider.”

  Jason noticed the Love by Duty people, mostly Survival deputies, crossing their arms, and shaking their heads in disagreement ever so slightly.

  It disturbed him that they were so firmly set against love’s potential as a real, measurable entity. He took a breath, shrugged it off and continued.

  “Re-inhabitation of planets has been done enough times that some experts feel that it has been perfected. Each of us does his or her job because our society developed us by properly elevating our minds and souls. Our society, guided by the Guild, promoted the obvious answer. We promoted the swimming against the tide of time, swimming, if you will, in the opposite direction. The love we use and carry attracts thoughts that harmonize with order, happiness, and keep us pointed us in the direction of eternity. This keeps us on the path, swimming against the river of time, with success! Harmonizing our thoughts with the love that extends from eternity brings truly natural order and peace to all those living in time.

  “Let us swim!” Jason pronounced the familiar blessing loudly, and the audience reflexively chanted back: “We travel to love together, or not at all!”

  This ritual broke the boredom in the room. After all, they had been going to the temple classes all their lives. This was rudimentary soul science. Still, Dr. Ata had added a new twist to their perspective. In the end, his theory said that the destination they were all “swimming” to spiritually was not just heaven alone. It was the other hidden side of their own eternal selves, which resided in the home of the Author, the dimension of eternity.

  Jason continued, “A dissociative patient is brought to wellness by breaking through the dissociation and joining the separate parts, so that the unreal may be left behind.

  “We know in psychology that the more severe the dissociation, the split, the more difficult the case. An interesting observation is that when the split is great, the other side relegated to the sub-conscious will usually expose itself in a less frequent, but more exaggerated way. This expression can be loving or not.

  “I find it fascinating that these people were so advanced in studying themselves, and their world, through microscopes. The paradox is that they had almost no science in looking around themselves, in reaching outward through better travel technologies, or flight. Their historical records indicate that when they did travel afar, they did so for purposes of conquest and war.

  “We have seen a trend in past re-inhabitations of other planets. We know from past planetary expeditions that if most of the creatures are generally plant-eaters, the souls from that planet make for happy babies. The higher percentage of predators always appears to correlate with experiencing more problems with the babies. The ones born on such planets take more work, and never quite make it to their parent’s level. It will take those planets a few generations before the babies make for good citizens. Still, we have never had a planet quite like D’ot8. Soften it up. If I believed we could not succeed, I would have tried to stop this mission. However, nobody would have listened anyway, because of the enormous profit potential of the hydrosplitters and the agrist.”

  The room started laughing at that, which surprised Jason. He smiled and looked around. He caught a glimpse of Marshal North. He wished he hadn’t when he saw a look that would burn a hole in his head of it could. Jason had an unusual flash of apprehension, and quickly looked down. What was that look about?

  He was about to continue, when North unexpectedly got up out of his seat, laughing with the rest of the people. As he was moving toward the podium, North said, “That was great, thank you, Dr. Ata, but we must be moving on now. We have nap-time ahead!” He came over to Jason and firmly took hold of his arm, and guided him away from the podium. He was laughing as if Jason himself was joking the whole time.

  Jason was caught off-guard, but he still wanted to make a good impression. This is embarrassing, he thought. He was not happy about having his authority undermined so callously. Jason looked at the Social Director, who was to handle the transitions of speakers.

  Social Director Rini Hay appeared flustered and confused — and before she could step in, North just took over her job by introducing the mission’s Medical Director, and now she looked insulted. “We had better move along. Dr. Reiter, would you please take the podium?” North said this as he was “helping” Jason from the podium. They took the first steps away from the podium.

  Jason figured he had to interrupt North’s public control of him, and so with North still holding his arm, he stopped, like a rock. North did not want to make it too obvious he was forcing Jason, so he had to stop, too. North looked flustered, having assumed he had the situation controlled.

  Jason turned to the Social Director, nodded and thanked her. He then concluded with his recognition to the audience. “I want to thank you for your kind attention, and I encourage you all to read the manuals I have provided to you and your teams.”

  After Jason finished his parting words, he left North standing there as he returned to his seat. The Medical Director was just rising, confused as well at the break of protocol. Jason thought, North is a “Love by Duty” party member. Jesus, those guys assume they are so right in their ways — they should control those who aren't just like them.

  After Jason sat back down, he had a daydream/flashback of a class he once lectured:

  “The Guild asks us to invest love in all thoughts and actions, whenever we can remember. Not to do so is not a negative, in as much as it is simply a reflection of the level of value placed on the goal of love. In the first century of the Guild, a certain number of members in the Guild agreed that they could not accept the concept that l
ove extends from our Author from the dimension of eternity - and is channeled by humans. However, they did acknowledge the value of the emotion of love in society. Indeed, it was difficult to refute. Over the centuries, the research had shown this fact was indisputable. The active teaching and support of remembering a continual awareness of love in the homes and workplaces of Guild members increased productivity in the long run. Yes, there was a limit to love’s productivity, because love rejects slavery. However, the quality of life in a loving society is so elevated that the bit of productivity that is lost is not important. In any case this group, which has grown, and is now called the ‘Love by Duty” party, accepts that love should be a major goal in society, but they choose not to express love with intimacy and words, but rather by work and duty. They have the motto, ‘Actions Speak Louder Than Words.’”

  Jason broke out of his daydream of that classroom experience, and resumed his attention to the proceedings — well, for a minute or two anyway. Sniff. Definitely caramelized.

  Dr. Hans Reiter was speaking now, but Jason’s mind was on other things — many things. Once again, because of pure habit, love came to his consciousness, and he could look at the people there without worrying. He thought about it. They’ll be able to handle it. Sure, they don’t know now, but they will learn. They will be up to the task.

  Jason was concerned about regression. Regression would yet occur on earth in various groups of people who lived in non-Guild areas that still had high populations per square mile. Harsh environments and the resulting stress were common predictors of regression as well. When you put those two elements together, the percentage grew. Regression into primitive human traits like possessiveness and obsessive control of things and people, along with the disharmony and violence that followed, had become fairly easy to re-direct, if caught quickly within Guild areas. Unfortunately, the ones involved in the regression had to be separated and re-located in order to be successful. It could take years before the regressed parties could come together again for successful release and closure.