OF ANGELS AND ARC STONES
In which Phinneas Vaughn trades the keystone of the
Arch of Solomon’s first temple for a new body.
What is life then?
Is it a sudden and ultimately inexplicable quantum moment when overlapping brain based reality condensing modules chemically combine with others in like manner to weave an intricate and overlapping illusion, the outcome of which culminating in that profoundly shared and awesomely intimate moment of ‘Now’, spurring us to shout dramatically from the roof-tops “I-am-Alive”?
*(Crap!) thought space ship captain and occasional pirate for hire, Phinneas K. Vaughn.
1 point zero seconds tick through a neural realized moment.
-An unstressed eye blink. - A Linnux reboot. -Time it takes a school of Calparian vegnoots to strip an aquatic reavor to the bone.
It was tiny fraction of Phinneas Vaughn’s life so far, and it was all the time he needed to recognize that the afore mentioned life was about to reach a most unpleasant end.
In the next one point two seconds he became hyper-conscious that the mysterious pulse foretelling his life’s end did not, in fact, come from the distant blue Beam Ship sizzling in an anti-grav field 100 meters off to his right. The Beam Ship would belong to the Garthang he was supposed to contact for this illicit and highly eccentric transaction. He observed this all in a rather detached manner under the conditions.
He twisted his head to the left and two more seconds roll past as recognition and realization hit him like a pneumatic hammer blow. His eyes registered a tell tale red and blue glittering bump on a knoll several hundred meters in the distance. It seems his escape was not as clean as he had hoped.
Riesli security drones. (Crap again!)
‘Looks like Bone Bridger finally got the hint and hired professionals after their recent string of home turf security debacles’, Thought Vaughn, as the pulse wave neared his position on the surface of this lonely crust of a moon.
Thoughts of continued existence raced through his mind in an irrational burst of optimism, suddenly he was sure he could outrun the pulse! He had actually turned to sprint away when the pulse ripped through his thin gray atmosphere suite and turned his flesh into un-bonded carbon mush.
Darkness ensued as he slumped in a formless heap to the rocky moon’s surface.
Then, after no time, or lots of time, sparks cascaded through Vaughn’s inner vision. He had thoughts.
What were these points of light?
They were stars spilling from the mouth of a giant multi colored octopus.
The sparks then rushed with purpose toward the central point of his perspective, coalescing to create a single bright, blinding light. The light then grew to fill his inner vision. It was all around him and inside him simultaneously. Awareness bloomed like old fashioned film tape running jittery on the reel, with images and memories of his life pulsing in staccato bursts building on bits of his memory as a visual slide show, discordant scenes shot on the inside of an over inflated balloon depicting overlapping segments of the Phinneas K.Vaughn Show.
In full color.
The lights dimmed and the moonscape spread out before his vision, life segments fading into a swirling mass of mouth like portals roiling with unreal colors. Below him, the blue Beam Ship rippled as it spun up her engines while hovering above the moon’s monochromatic surface. For a moment, it bounced on a cushion of air, like a bobbing insect preparing to pollinate a flower. On the ridge in the distance, the Riesli security drones joined mechanical tails and emitted another scorching red pulse, sending this one roiling toward the Garthang Beam Ship. Then, in a nebula of hallucinogenic colors, the Beam Ship disappeared from temporal time space, slipping like a slug down a drain into an induced dimensional wormhole. Vaughn began to wish he could slip away into the darkness as well.
He watched the Riesli pulse send a wave of debris and dust ahead of it through the empty space where the ship had been seconds before.
Wait a minute. What had happened to himself? Somewhere in the vastness of his present sphere of consciousness, he believed he had given up the ghost and been turned to vegetated pulp. He was dead, wasn’t he?
Vaughn then managed to look down at the body lying prone below on the moon’s surface. His body’s blackened skin was bulging and his insides had exploded out of various orifices, filling the atmosphere suit with a disgusting soup of liquefied organs. Yes, defefiantly dead.
Still joined together by their pulsing red glowing tails, the Riesli security drones whirred into action from their position on the knoll, heading towards Vaughn’s dead body. Roughly twice the size of a human and bi-symmetrically designed to look something like an overgrown ostrich with four spidery arms and a oblong head resembling mythical metal dragon, they ran on two robotic legs each, skipping over rocks and bouncing across little ravines until they loomed in an evenly spaced triangle around Vaughn’s blackened body.
The first one on the scene, and closest to Vaughn’s head exuded a long needle from a silver forearm, which it then inserted through the tattered atmosphere suit into his blackened and peeling neck. Security drone # 2 inflated a transparent bag and fitted it over his head, sealing it around his neck just above the needle insertion point.
Apparently, his brain was not quite toast, and the Riesli drones were obviously trying to save its functions in an extreme effort to discover what they could about his most recent heist and subsequent frustrated transaction with the Garthang.
Vaughn now contemplated that fact that he was thinking at all, without a body or brain to spit the correct neural transmitters into the right gates. He spent an untold amount of time contemplating the existential paradoxes his current situation presented. Thought #1. Some part of his mind must be alive and active to be thinking at all.
Thought #2. If he was his body, why was he looking at his body from an elevated position?
Thought #3. Without eyes, how could he ‘see’?
These thoughts quickly disappeared as the air around the drones split into a chaos of fractured space. Giant Beam Ships worm holed into real time directly overhead, shredding the air with their messy tau-reality fields. The drones, running their processors at full tilt, snapped their vid visors back and forth between the three huge Garthang military looking ships and the smaller, blue one hanging back in the distance. Before anyone could hitch up their knickers and yell Aunt Maddie’s pickle jars, or for that matter, charge an anti-matter pulse cannon, the Beam Ships opened up their small caliber evisceration guns and began to pummel the armored drones into scrap metal. With each resounding blow, the drones lost more of their surface area, until something astonishing happened. Each battered drone tottered into close contact with the other. They then linked tails and began shimmering in a vortex of bubbling red light. The Garthang shots screamed when they hit this field and were dissipated into useless puffs of ion vapor. Apparently, they had activated some kind of valence shield, effectively protecting themselves from the intense barrage.
Then they rose up as one shimmering unit and hit back. The three drones unleashed a torrent of nuclear pulses and Veerhoven Matter cannon blasts that rocked the Garthang ships in their hovering fields. Phinneaus watched the Beam Ships shudder and screech as their own protective shields were visibly dimming and quickly absorbing less of each blast as they built up heat and energy.
From his detached observer’s position, Vaughn contemplated how the drones could store so much military ordinance in their almost completely demolished metal chassis. The answer was made apparent by a dark void shimmering between the drones above his body. From this black point the size of human head there materialized a snaking tube that connected to one of the drones. Energy and armaments could be seen streaming into their mechanical shells providing unlimited firepower from some other location in time and space.
Then the beam ship nearest Vaughn’s body acted with astounding focus and unimaginable control. It disappeared in a wave of un-reality, it’s wormhole activated, and reappeared seconds later directly above Vaughn’s blackened chest. A mere foot separated the bottom of the beam ship and Vaughn’s bubble encased face. The wormhole drive clung tight to the ships hull and was so steady it did not waver even a fraction of an inch. What it did do was encase each of the drones in the wormhole field, cutting them off above their knees. With a slight humm, the beam ship disappeared again taking with it the upper bodies of the drones, subsequently leaving the dimensional portal and a wildly snaking energy conduit flapping in the vacant moon’s lonely atmosphere. Soon it too winked out of existence, collapsing into itself like a deflated balloon.
While their upper bodies were encased in the Beam Ship’s lower cargo bay, and subsequently jettisoned into deep space, the drone’s lower legs toppled in heaps around Vaughn’s body lying dead on the surface of the uncharted moon.
Phinneaus Vaughn watched in fascination as the smaller blue beam ship zipped down to enfold Vaughn’s body in a webbing which snapped him up into the ship’s semi sentient medi-pod, there to enclose the tatters of flesh and bone in a matrix of wires and fluid..
He witnessed a shudder within his sphere of vision, and the scene spun into a blur. Phinneaus felt in that moment his corporeal connection to his body had finally reached termination.
The final safety of darkness descended like a curtain closing the Phinneaus Vaughn Show forever.
What then is forever in this illusion?
He swims in self-deluded circles, never quite reaching the edges of his awareness. He feels an inner need to be something more than what he was/is, and feels the tickle of embarrassment, keenly aware of his shortcomings but always imagining a distant shore toward which to crawl, hauling himself up out of the muck reaching for an evolutionary ideal, ultimately involving the release of these physical bodies and it’s animalistic desires, and it’s limitations. Phinneaus imagines humanity as a perfected galactic citizen, no longer fighting to survive, no longer struggling with fear-based, soul constricting boundaries.
The darkness is just an illusion, and thought precedes consciousness just as photons bring the light.
Phinneaus awakens within this unfathomable dialogue and startles a figure hovering near him. The being turns in a smooth arc that seems to take a lifetime to complete, it is gigantic, and bends down to inspect Phinneaus’s face. Alive, wet eyes encased within a golden visage resembling a human face infused with blinding white light fills his entire visual field.
He tries desperately to squirm away but feels as if he encased in cement, and no matter how hard he strains, his muscles do not respond. He is trapped and feels like a mouse being eyed by a hungry owl. Tendrils of light drift off in all directions like smoke, giving the being a strangely familiar halo.
Suddenly a memory toppled loose from the library of his mind, and this frightening creature acquired a name.
Elohim. Phinneaus now recalled clearly a momentous news occasion in recent Earth history, which circulated a highly provocative interview with just such a creature.
A single Elohim had mysteriously descended from the sky above The United Global Nations compound in a ship of delicate beauty composed of whirling concentric circles. Which in and of itself was not as strange as one might think given that intergalactic travel to Earth by extraterrestrials was 200 years historical, and since that first official contact Earth had often received random unannounced interplanetary emissaries. Though the interview was short, consisting of one entirely cryptic interaction between the single Elohim and some UGN officials on the front lawn, three years of conjecture had filled volumes of e-books and vid-net cubes with controversy, conspiracy and supposition. What was strange by all accounts was the Elohims’ inability to make its self understood, given plenty of good tech translators standing by. It had gabbled in a resonate voice sounding like the ringing of bells in a church for about 5 minutes with the UGN representatives standing around looking at each other in bewilderment. Then the most amazing turn of events occurred in the interview on the lawn. Suddenly mid gabble, the Elohim was shown to cock its head as if listening, and then it said in fluent and clear ancient Hebrew,
“We seek the Arch Stone of the Wise.” A pause, listening to nothing, then it continued,” Also, the original Garments of Glory….and the Ephod of the Priests of Melchezidek…. and the Shining Breast Plate of the Macroprosophus.”
The representatives were slack jawed and staring incoherently as the translators spoke the words in EarthGal 4.0.
The Elohim stared down at the representatives with an expectant countenance, if one could read such expressions into a ball of fire with a vague human face. He then proceeded to spout out a litany of numerical quotations lasting exactly 12 minutes.
Amid a milling congregation of aides and officials, the Elohim stood towering two feet above the tallest, turning in a slow circle as they tapped away on portable e-cubes, trying to find references to the words and numbers. Of course embarrassment carried the day as the Elohim jumped aboard his vehicle once it was obvious the humans had no clue what any of the items were, let alone where they were.
Ultimately, not much was officially registered about the Elohim or why they had come, but their common look, which man for ages has termed ‘angelic’, usually gave rise to biblical or religious connections to a God imposed End of the World. At least Earth world. Nobody found the items the Elohim asked for on Earth, although it was rumored they did exist.
Phinneaus was dumbfounded, and fear spurred his own thoughts of dark conspiracies. The threads of his recent past began to coalesce into a tattered theory and the light bulb clicked on in a dark room of his thoughts. His most recent deal very well could have been one of the items the Elohim had requested all those years ago. But he needed more information before being sure.
The Elohim spoke with a voice sounding like distant bells, translation programs communicating with clear efficiency in a steady EarthGal 4.3
“You have had a close call, Phinneaus K.Vaughn. We are pleased though, to have saved your… essence from complete destruction.” Something about the way the Elohim said the word ‘essence’ made Vaughn mentally flinch. But he noticed even as an uncontrolled reaction, his body didn’t move in the way he remembered. In fact, when he tried to turn his head to look around, a slight but audible whirring followed percieved view. When he tried to raise his hand to his face, a strange bunch of wires and tubes floated into his field of perception. He moved a finger, and one of the tubes swiveled to and fro. Realization descended into his reality like the warmth of a liquor buzz slowly dulling his senses.
His perception was translated through a series of vid nodes and sound apparati. What would be his eyes were sensitive video cameras, attached to micro net of wires, which were in turn attached to…He followed the wire bundles with his own new video eyes, which responded like eyes should, but instead relayed information through a tube of compressed nano-structured liquid into a dense crystalline globe., and floating in that globe was something he could not begin to believe in a million years. It looked like a shelled walnut, but wet, gray and plump. He stared for a mesmerized moment, until his consciousness caught up with the reality of his brain floating in a tank of fluid.
Horror. Freak out! Darkness.
Vaughn awakened again and felt calmness replace the horror of his most recent realization. Some drug infused his emotive centers with a cosmic bliss. He felt grateful and resigned to his new state of existence. Worse things could have happened, ultimate death among them.
He imagined he still had a body, feelings of hands and feet tricked him into moving as he would have. But what he noticed moving was not a hand of bone and meat, but a hideous tangle of wires and metal gears, rotating and waving as if it were his flesh.
The mind brandished it’s appendages with halting control at first, but Phinneaus was determined to master his new robotic appendages.
Sleep would find him suddenly, without preamble. One moment he would be wrestling a needle out of a plastic bag, the next he was staring up at the sky blue ceiling of the Beam Ship.
The glowing Elohim were now three, intense golden bodies hovered around his tank, waiting for him to respond to their queries. He answers them once he is certain this is not a dream.
“Yes, I can still get you the Stone.” They act strangely overjoyed, twittering like children at the prospect of a new toy for Christmas. “But, my price has just quadrupled, the cost of my unfortunate condition reflected as such. And…. I have some questions that need answering”
The Elohim confer amongst one another for an untold time, then happily accept his new price, though they know it would be easy to receive the artifact and then shut his brain off once it was in their possession. Lucky for Vaughn, these beings are extremely moral and always honor their agreements. One of the Elohim sidled up to his sensory encasement module(Himself) and posted a question,
“What are these answers you seek ? Before we agree completely to your conditions, we must subject your questions to….security parameters.” He/she/it says after a pause.
Phinneas answered slowly, through a cloudy moment arranging his thoughts ” What’s the big deal about this Stone I found for you?”
The three recoiled and twittered amongst themselves again for an extended moment, flaring into an occasional nova burst of emotion. Two Elohim wafted somewhere off to other parts of the ship leaving the one called Beelkiva to placate him with delays.
‘”We must confer further with others whom hold the security protocols for our race, and they must translate this knowledge acquisition and relay the terms of it’s release. I hope you understand, this information has never been released to Human civilzation, and it’s discovery may change the course of your evolution towards un-harmonious vectors.
Phinneaus continued the tedious exercises presented to him by the Medmech-unit for an unknown amount of time, clocks seemed to be off limits for now.
Finally Beelkiva returned, his glow subdued and somehow reverent.
“Your request has been agreed to, on one condition.” “You are to asked to sign a contract of bonding, engaging your services and life stream in close collaboration with our specialized galactic unit.” Phinneaus was stunned and wished he could have a drink.
“Show me the contract.” Was all he said. Immediately the contract flared up in his inner vision, like another room had opened in his mind and he was sitting at a desk with a single page of written English words before him. He imagined himself picking it up and reading it. The experience was delightful after his months?years? days of feeling no body. He could feel his toes and fingers as they touched the table top, and marveled at his senses as they picked up the paper. He read through the short document, which basically bound him to service with the Elohim for the rest of his life, if he chose to further his inquiries and thus become a confidant of the Elohim race, and it’s greater galactic purposes. What the hell, his life was over as he had known it, anyway you looked at it, The mystery having hooked him, he signed the document without great preamble. His imagined body remained in the deep comfortable chair as Beelkiva walked into the room. Except Beelkiva wasn’t a man, instead a woman of astounding beauty swept into the office. She wore a single blue and white floor length gown, had black hair pulled back with a simple crown of silver. Beelkiva picked up the page and glanced at it, smiling. Phinneaus sat stunned and unmovable, so strange was this experience.
”We relish the inclusion of your life-stream, Phinneaus Vaughn.
Now we can divulge secrets released only to the most inner agents in our service.
She sat opposite in a comfortable chair that suddenly appeared as if it was always there, and continued.
“A long time ago, your race was trapped in the darkness of sub sentience, and wholly animalistic in your consciousness. Your world was discovered accidentally by roving galactic pirates, whom illegally claimed your DNA as booty. But their actions triggered an expansive police action because your level of sentience and capacity for extra physical activity through a uniquely developed emotional body indicated a unique scenario potential. We argued and literally fought to keep you out of their filthy hands.
Once the Fir Bolgers were defeated and brought before the Galactic Council of A’Thuanan, your evolution could be developed to best accentuate your natural abilities. Human beings grew into sentience under the distant but protective care of the Galactic Council of Beings. But your special abilities, or at least the potential for these abilities to manifest, frightened some of the Council, and a great schism occurred in Gal 2344(*)
There followed intense energetic games for the right to oversee human growth. While the divergent groups met in high council, subversive splinter groups acted on their own to shut down the Human genomes responsible for intergalactic travel via emotive wormholes*. Because this was done without galactic approval, many thousands of years passed before the devastating truth became known.
The perpetrators were apprehended and made fallow in the Varn Confluence. But the damage was done and the best among us tried to reverse the trends. Our race was among those chosen to lead the effort to reintroduce the conditions present for humans to reclaim their ultimate power within the universe of beings. Our unit geeneered a group of people known historically as the Hebrew to nurse the damaged DNA back to it’s intended evolutionary track. Years and generations passed with successes and failures both, but always coming closer and closer to our goal. Then one day we accomplished the goal, the blending of special seeds, a being was born whom maintained the genome for your galactic potential. But this being, human as he was, also drew out another contingent of ancient Fir Bolgers whom had lain hidden within the ranks of the Synod of Rathbreasail, the council overseeing Earth and Human evolution. They built complex systems of defiance and resistance to the human evolutionary potential, undoing our years of work by our unit. We in turn gained a permit to remove the Fir Bolgers from the system altogether, which is still happening on other planes of space. Your race was abandoned in a safe plane while the Bolgers War rages on in real time. You have been safe to evolve the damaged aspects along with the positive for the last 6,000 years, hidden as you have been from intervention. 200 years ago, several groups found your planet in tau-space and eventually began messing with your evolution again. It has been decided that humans need to be brought on-line quickly before more irreversible damage is done. To do this certain special artifacts which have been harmonizing your DNA mutations need to be reintroduced and activated within specific sequence. The Arch Stone of The first Beit BetHaMikdash needs to be brought into Earth’s magnetic field and initialized with the blood codes being readied for human downloading. This will happen now that we have retrieved the stone from it hidden crypt, The Fir Bolgers were good at hiding it’s whereabouts for centuries. You Phinneaus Vaughn, have set your race upon the path of the first full galactic conversion in less than a generation. Children born from this day forth will be initialized with galactic codes enabling them to access their unique light vehicles for traveling across the universe without mechanical propulsion.”
Vaughn simply stared, wits dulled by to much information.
“I need some water.” Was all he said.
Beelkiva mistook his silence for skepticism, and quickly added,
“We plan to hire humans as flight coordinators helping other galactic beings traverse the wormhole vectors. They will be well trained of course,”
Later, alone in his dark tank after what seemed like hours of stories and disclosures, Vaughn reflected upon his life before, his black market deals and illegal contraband smuggling. Danger and intrigue had always kept him tight and fevered for more action. This last artifact he had stolen for the Elohim was his best heist yet. Vaughn, a purveyor of antiques and semi illegal museum pieces had come across it years ago at a auction on the planet Vega, in the Pliedean System, where he had snatched it from a World Bridger cabal of scientific collectors. The details of the snatch are documented in another journal, but suffice it to say the heist was of monumental stature and would feed a whole vidventure series in and of itself.
The Elohim had desired the arch stone of Solomons’s first temple, the Ashlar of Power hewn by Earth’s original master builder Hiram Abif, himself a geeneered extraterrestrial whom had built the first temple of YHWH. The arch over the Holy of Holies entrance was secured by this stone of unimaginable beauty and immeasurable hidden power.
It was hewn from a single piece of Lapis Lazuli that came from Earth Herself. As the key stone of the arch leading into the inner room it’s presence was more than physically necessary as an architectural element, it acted as an energy modulator and transmutator of the alien vibrational powers of the Arc of the Covenant. The Elohim told him that the 72 names of God were encoded in a crystalline matrix within the Stone’s body, and that these names were word codes in the ancient Hebrew language helpful in evolving the human ego. The stone and it’s subtle energies acted upon the subconscious of the then center of the world for only a few years before the temple was destroyed, and the stone lost as Roman era bandits hauled it off to unknown lands . The 72 names were eminently necessary in the re-coding of human DNA.
The Stone of Power, anchoring the energy of Earth’s first Beit HaMikdash, was now back in the hands of those who actually built the temple, those whom trained Hiram Abif and began the whole lineage of Master Builders of ancient Earth.
