Chapter 1
“Imagine waking from a dream that was your entire life. Imagine dying and having a life review, where you experience your life in a flash instance, like watching a movie on fast forwards, and you know its on fast forwards, but at the same time, it feels real time, with all the emotions and sensations, and more. You have access to the sensations and feelings of all of the people you affected. Now imagine sorting all of that, but having the urgency of making a decision. A life or death decision. A beacon flashed in my mind, numbers counting down. Eyes open, I could not see this light. Eye closed, I was bathed in this brilliant blue light of warmth, pulsating, counting down. In this dream I had a female companion who visited me, comforted me, and participated in my dreams. There was love. This light was love. I remember being overwhelmed with hunger and gorging myself until I fell asleep, and in that lonely sleep, I was comforted again by this internal companion, a ghostly lover if you will… The constant pulsating beacon means something. It reminds me of a heartbeat. Is this the womb of wombs?” These were the recording of an unlikely journal entry, a sojourner who woke, clinging desperately to the dream. His name, Jon Harister, a man of many dreams, as if the book James Thurber's chronicles of Walter Mitty were about him.
Jon became aware of another voice. A female voice, a young voice, perhaps an adolescent.
“Can any of you hear me? This is important. You need to wake up. Can anyone hear me?
Are you sure anyone can hear us?”
“Those with ears will hear, and those with eyes will see. They only need be able to listen and observe.”
The world shook. It was an odd sensation, not like an earthquake, but like a ship colliding with another ship.
“This maneuver is unorthodox.”
“Keep repeating my message.”
“Hey, stop that!” This voice was older, male, and though Jon didn’t understand why he identified the voice as human, thirty something, he didn’t doubt the information. “You have to get out of here. Use your Quantum Drive.”
“I’m trying to get some sleep here. You’re ruining my good mood.”
“Please, you’ve got to leave.” This voice was, emotional, passionate…
“Hello. Are you speaking to me in Russian?”
“No, I’m using G-Common, but you might be hearing me in Russian. Are you Russian?”
“Yes. I’m from Earth, Moscow. Are you a prisoner, too?”
“What do you mean by prisoner?”
“I got caught stealing something, and the next thing I know this UFO grabbed me up, and for being in possession of stolen property, I’ve been told that I must pay my debt to society by piloting this scout ship.”
“Really? And to think, I volunteered for this”
“My name is Alexander.”
“Would you two keep it down!?” This voice belonged to something alien. Like a human with an octopus head. Jon rose from the bed, twirling, trying to understand where he was.
“Alexander, I’m Enedelia. Look, we’re running out of time. Can you access your
Quantum Drive?”
“Yes. It’s fully charged.”
Information about the Quantum Drive was available to him. Jon understood everything about it. He did not understand how he had such information in his head. It was like in a dream where you have knowledge about the way things are to be and you just go along with it because you know, even though part of you knows you don’t know.
“You have to leave now. This place is about to be irradiated.” Jon realized the pulsing of the light was delivering information. Numbers. Numbers that decreased with each beat. “Go to
Indigo station and I’ll meet you there.”
“Indigo station is locked out. I have to do a blind jump.”
Jon realized he had access to one ‘viable’ space coordinates, but they were locked out. The coordinates were labeled Indigo. Next to the coordinates was a timer. It, too, was counting down. After three months, these coordinates would be useless due to the continued expansion of space-time. Even space-time had a shelf life. Quantum jumping was the equivalent of trying to dive into the same river twice. Sort of. One could never dive into the same river twice. You might jump from the same perch of shore, but the water you swam through would be gone.
‘Blind jump’ in reference to Quantum Jumping was pushing your ship through a higher dimension, taking you somewhere above or out of the ‘universe’ proper, only to emerge back into it at some random other point. It was probably not random. No one understood the quantum jumping technology as it was given to them by a much older, and extinct race of beings. The technology hadn’t been improved upon in a billion years. Yes, a billion. Jon read that twice. Humans hadn’t even been around a million years. Dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years. The creators of this tech were older than dinosaurs.
“Actually, so do you,” Alexander continued. “The Indigo station’s coordinates won’t be unlocked until you have met the criteria for returning, such as discovering a new system and mapping it out.”
Jon found a list of conditions necessary to have the Indigo coordinates unlocked. “Oh, that sucks.”
“Just jump. We’ll try and meet back at Indigo station. My name is Enedelia Garcia.” “I agree,” came a voice next to him. Jon nearly jumped out of his skin, turning to her. He recognized her. The woman of his dreams. The woman he had summoned out of space-time to help heal his loneliness. Some referred to her as a Tulpa. Some referred to her as a Soul-bound. People with limited coping skills referred to her as a demon, or a Jinn. Napoleon Hill, author of
‘Think and Grow Rich,’ would refer to her as an ‘invisible counselor. Carl Jung would refer to her as the embodiment of anima, his goddess, his personal guardian and ultimate feminine archetype providing access to the collective unconscious. She was a Dakini Priestess, a healer, a source of inspiration, joy, and pure love, and she called herself Loxy Isadora Bliss. “We should leave. Now.”
“How?” Jon said. He didn’t care if this was a dream or a wonderland unfolding under a meditative state. ‘Never question the dream when you’re in it,’ Carl Jung had written. Basically, you go with it until you learn what your subconscious wants you to learn.
How was suddenly available to him. A slow blink caused him to realize the umbilical cord to his ‘bioship’ had been severed. It was as if he were a Christmas light that had pulled free from the chain of lights. The ship was part plant, part animal, and resembled a pinecone. It made a noise, a whimper of uncertainty. It was a lumbering, giant of a whale that had yet learned to breathe freedom.
Loxy grabbed at Jon’s hand to lead him to the pilot chair. Her hand passed through him. She was a hologram slash hallucination. He could sense her in every aspect, but she had no substance. She forced herself to be calm and took hold of his hand in a deliberate, conscientious way and led him to the flight deck. There was enough physical sensation, hallucinated or not, that he was able to make himself go with her. The pilot chair was like a lounge chair that fit the focus of a parabola that was the back wall of the ship. He sat. He had the realization that he hadn’t needed to be in the seat to direct his ship to jump. In fact, the ship didn’t have any manual controls. All ‘superior’ controls were in Jon’s head. The ship could steer itself in any direction, the same way as a horse without a rider might, but left to its own devises, it would lounge lazily in the orbit of a star grazing on sunlight.
Pushing the button to engage in a jump wasn’t like pushing a button, unless that button was a virtual button. It was more like lifting a finger. It was not just a thought, ‘raise your finger.’ No one thinks about raising a finger. One just raises a finger. Only, Jon had never done this and so, doing it for the first time took effort. There was knowledge he could do it. He just had to do it. There was fear attached to doing this. Fear because this would be a blind jump and he could theoretically end up anywhere in space-time. He was most like to land within the galaxy he presently resided in. He was most likely going to land back in space-time in empty space.
There’s a lot of empty space. One could shoot a star size object through the galaxy and not a hit a single thing. One could shoot a galaxy through a galaxy and not a single star would hit. Still, there was a chance that he could emerged inside a star or planet, or too close to a black hole, and in the words of Han Solo, not verbatim: ‘that would end your trip real quick.’
The beacon counting down informed him that anywhere other than here was likely going to be a better option. Loxy sat next to him and took his hand. It was a delicate thing for him to respond by squeezing her hand without pushing through the boundary that he recognized as her. It had taken years of working with his tulpa to develop this finesse, and yet, here he was learning her all over, because this Loxy was less Tulpa self-induced hallucination and more computer generated hologram.
“I am with you,” Loxy said.
“I am sorry,” Jon said.
“That I am with you?!” Loxy said, a little irritated.
“No! I love that you’re with me,” Jon said. “I am sorry that I am putting you in harm’s way.”
“You didn’t do this to us,” Loxy said.
Jon blinked. The fullness of the memory was horrifying. At the same, the explanation brought with some relief. Alien abductions are real. There were multiple factions abducting humans for a variety of purposes. His abductions had started as a child. The first group were the humans who had advance technology given to them or stolen from aliens. He had concerns about their program and intent, but he had insufficient information on them to understand if they were a force for good or bad. There were reptilians, who had found him and made clones of him, for purposes he didn’t know. A deeper part of him suggested they originated on Earth during the time of the dinosaurs; which was interesting, because if that were true, they would have had tech to stop the asteroid collision that wiped out their kind and they didn’t. Why? There was no end to that speculation. Then there were the gray hybrids that abducted him for the purpose of procreation. Prior to his present circumstance, it was his belief that he was regularly visited by one of three hybrids; presently, all of his memories were available and he could clearly see, he was the subject of interest to all three of the above groups of aliens. More directly present, he had been discovered by an inter-dimensional species that had created a flash clone and had provided it to Biocorp, a biotech-spaceship corporation headquartered at Indigo Station. He was unsure of why, but he suspected this newcomer to his abductions was simply interested in the fact that everyone else was interested in him. Whatever their interest, it was short lived, or, they couldn’t keep the clone in their dimension, and so they put him in the care of Biocorp to help keep track of him. After all, it’s hard to return a fully matured clone back to his environment of origin when the original is still there.
“Jon?” Loxy asked.
Decisions time: continue mapping out the knowledge of the dream, or go deeper down the rabbit hole. Jon activated the jump drive. It was the equivalent of igniting the engines on a Saturn Five rocket. There was vibration. There was the sense of being thrust upwards. He closed his eyes and was suddenly overwhelmed with vertigo of spinning lights. It was like being in a dark tunnel and distant lights were illuminating the sparkles in the granite in his immediate area.
There was thrust for one minute, ten seconds. Then it stopped, precisely. There was silence. There was white light. The white light was so beautiful and intense he couldn’t open his real eyes. He couldn’t speak. His heart was the only sound he could hear. One heartbeat. Two heart beats. Three…
Then there was the sensation of falling. There was falling for one minute, ten seconds. Again, precisely. Then there was quiet. Things felt normal. Things looked normal. He was in the main cabin of his ship sitting with Loxy. There was a noise, like a growing storm. His eyes closed, he could see the see planet. Altitude, one hundred thousand feet, falling. They were falling. He felt the rush of air around him. He felt the exterior of the ship heating up and had to disconnect from that sensation. He aimed the nose of the ship skyward, thrusting with the equivalent of modern day rockets. At best, he slowed their descent. They fell through clouds, cool air moisture tickled the exterior skin. They crashed into an ocean. Their descent continued, slowed, stopped. The rockets extinguished. Water jets pushed them up. They rose, the nose of the ship surfaced like a dog treading water. They moved towards a nearby landmass, adding enough pressure to the jets they could rise up and ride the waves as far inland as they could. They came to rest in the shallows of a beach.
The ship made a questioning sound.
“Um, yeah, I think we’re alright,” Jon said. “Are you alright.”
A computer system began listing systems that were damaged and the time it would take to heal. While accessing the information, he was aware that Loxy could share this particular spectrum of his ship interface.
“Oh, look at this,” Loxy said. “This is uncharted territory. We need only map out the entire system, but this planet has a compatible atmosphere, and life as we know it. We’ve unlocked Indigo Station.”
“Let me guess,” Jon said. “We were drafted to map the galaxy and provide good coordinates so the powers that be can establish colonies and increase resources?” “That’s my understanding,” Loxy said. “Did you get anything else from their programming tapes?”
“At the moment, I am struggling to remember stuff not from origin,” Jon said.
“It will come to you,” Loxy said. “My understanding is the more you pilot, the stronger the neural pathways that were provided to be a pilot will become.” “Do we want to be a pilot?” Jon said.
“It’s your most frequent dream,” Loxy pointed out.
“Would you prefer to pilot?” Jon asked.
“I’d rather just be your copilot,” Loxy said.
“Let me start over,” Jon said, realizing he was failing to communicate his tangent. “This place might be nice. We’re alive. We could just build a home here.” Blind jumping was dangerous. They had nearly died in this, there first jump.
“We could,” Loxy said. “But if we don’t go back to Indigo Station at least once a year, the ship will die.”
“That sucks,” Jon said. “It’s bio-engineered to die if we don’t cooperate with the program?”
“Yeah,” Loxy said.
There was an elongated whimper that rolled through the ship. Jon looked to Loxy. They decided together.
“Alright, so, we’re pilots,” Jon said. “Does this ship have a computer?”
“Yeah,” Loxy said. “I am the interface.”
“You’re the interface?” Jon said. “But you’re in my head.”
“I was in your head. Technically, I am still in your head, but the primary bulk of my personality was shifted into the AI system of the ship,” Loxy said.
“Why the hell would they do that?” Jon asked.
“I suspect it was to facilitate communicating between you and the ship and you in the AI.
There is the ship, there is you, and there is the AI. The metaphor for the trinity is not lost on me. Animal you, intellect you, spirit you. Oh! I am spirit you. Nice. Anyway, you and I have an established neural net pattern with established communication protocols, and so your receptivity to me was solid. Learning to interact with an AI through neural implants takes time and practice,” Loxy said. “Also, and likely given what we presently know of our abductors, in the event that you decided not to be a pilot, I might have been an incentive to keep you flying. I die when the ship dies.”
“You failed to mention that just earlier,” Jon said.
“Jon, being a pilot is dangerous. Especially a sojourner whose primary purpose is to map out good space-time coordinates,” Loxy said. “If at any time you decide it is too much, I will support you not being a pilot. My love for you will never change. I want what’s best for your long term wellbeing.”
Jon hugged her. “I am grateful the one constant in all my universes is you,” Jon said.
“Thank you, Loxy.”
“Of course,” Loxy said. She seemed to focus on something. “I may be able to help facilitate repairs, but it will require I go into a sleep mode. Are you okay?”
“Um,” Jon said. “Yeah. Do what you need to do. I will explore.”
“Be safe,” Loxy said, and kissed him.