Today (A Farewell Story)
Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2010 1:53 pm
The sun shone high in the sky above him, and the sea reflected its light with brilliant glitter on every wave. Only a few white clouds hung here and there. Behind him the sanct of Wave Manifold stuck out from the water, its shadow a deep dark projection upon the surface of the ocean. He floated upright, the surface of the water quickly receding into the horizon in his sight.
If I just began swimming here, he thought, and swam for long enough, I could reach any shore on the planet. The Five Seas of Micras was a lie: There was only the One Ocean, connecting every shore of every continent into a space of boundless trade and enterpreneurship. And, a homestead on it - he had heard the idea a thousand times before, yet it was only in here that its meaning truly struck him - could be the perfect space for liberty and for choice, mobile and dynamic, unbound by constraining alliances: A theater for the human spirit to present its true capability.
For the first time in thousands of years, Dante McCallavre truly felt himself. So many lifetimes he had wrestled with his doubt and lack of self-confidence, so many lifetimes had been lost to him because of his shifting abilities, so many he no longer remembered because had wished to forget. Today, in this place and this time, floating in the open ocean, he had faith in who he was.
The ritual was not yet complete, so there was still time to reminisce the life this mind had used to have. He'd been born Everett Dax, son to a family with significant mathematical and artistic talent, one whose genes had in fact produced the Dante McCallavre that came right before him. From an early age he had been educated in architecture, civics, sociology, critical thought. The skills that would give him the ability to do the work of the first founding father of Straylight.
Eventually, at eleven years, he had been chosen. The education program he would go through had been first defined in the very first lifetime of Dante McCallavre and had ever since been regularly updated with ever more compressed insights, more efficient ways to introduce the elements of Dante's life to a talented boy of the present time.
It had started with a combination of the basics of McCallavre's life that he had already heard of from his parents, and of inspirational presentations he had already seen in school, but had gotten far more challenging very soon. There were so many details to learn. It was getting difficul to honestly remember it by now, but he was almost certain that there had been a point where it all seemed irrelevant to him, as if all of it was was things that had happened to someone who had died millennia ago (and, to a string of people who had lived between that time and now). But, over the years, he had come to identify with it, and then come to accept the idea of identifying as it.
Eventually, the idea of actually being Dante McCallavre had become so close to him that he was fully able to believe it. The memories in his head were no longer those of an independent personality - they were a snapshot of the most important facts of a much larger life, a life spanning millennia. The vast archives of text, sound and video recordings of Dante McCallavre no longer were external objects to be learned about, but memories of a single person, to be copied back into this mind that had forgotten all it knew about itself in its last death.
He was Dante McCallavre, in the blood and in the mind. A man with three thousand years of lifetimes, always learning new things, always compressing his insights for the next generation of Dante McCallavre to internalise them faster than the last one, hopefully to be a better person and a better Dante McCallavre than the last one was.
He started swimming back. Soon it would be time to finish the ritual - the formal role shift from being one person to being another, nothing more, nothing less - and get back to work. New designs, new ideas for societies were already bubbling up in his head. And then there was the woman he'd been married to all his life...
If I just began swimming here, he thought, and swam for long enough, I could reach any shore on the planet. The Five Seas of Micras was a lie: There was only the One Ocean, connecting every shore of every continent into a space of boundless trade and enterpreneurship. And, a homestead on it - he had heard the idea a thousand times before, yet it was only in here that its meaning truly struck him - could be the perfect space for liberty and for choice, mobile and dynamic, unbound by constraining alliances: A theater for the human spirit to present its true capability.
For the first time in thousands of years, Dante McCallavre truly felt himself. So many lifetimes he had wrestled with his doubt and lack of self-confidence, so many lifetimes had been lost to him because of his shifting abilities, so many he no longer remembered because had wished to forget. Today, in this place and this time, floating in the open ocean, he had faith in who he was.
The ritual was not yet complete, so there was still time to reminisce the life this mind had used to have. He'd been born Everett Dax, son to a family with significant mathematical and artistic talent, one whose genes had in fact produced the Dante McCallavre that came right before him. From an early age he had been educated in architecture, civics, sociology, critical thought. The skills that would give him the ability to do the work of the first founding father of Straylight.
Eventually, at eleven years, he had been chosen. The education program he would go through had been first defined in the very first lifetime of Dante McCallavre and had ever since been regularly updated with ever more compressed insights, more efficient ways to introduce the elements of Dante's life to a talented boy of the present time.
It had started with a combination of the basics of McCallavre's life that he had already heard of from his parents, and of inspirational presentations he had already seen in school, but had gotten far more challenging very soon. There were so many details to learn. It was getting difficul to honestly remember it by now, but he was almost certain that there had been a point where it all seemed irrelevant to him, as if all of it was was things that had happened to someone who had died millennia ago (and, to a string of people who had lived between that time and now). But, over the years, he had come to identify with it, and then come to accept the idea of identifying as it.
Eventually, the idea of actually being Dante McCallavre had become so close to him that he was fully able to believe it. The memories in his head were no longer those of an independent personality - they were a snapshot of the most important facts of a much larger life, a life spanning millennia. The vast archives of text, sound and video recordings of Dante McCallavre no longer were external objects to be learned about, but memories of a single person, to be copied back into this mind that had forgotten all it knew about itself in its last death.
He was Dante McCallavre, in the blood and in the mind. A man with three thousand years of lifetimes, always learning new things, always compressing his insights for the next generation of Dante McCallavre to internalise them faster than the last one, hopefully to be a better person and a better Dante McCallavre than the last one was.
He started swimming back. Soon it would be time to finish the ritual - the formal role shift from being one person to being another, nothing more, nothing less - and get back to work. New designs, new ideas for societies were already bubbling up in his head. And then there was the woman he'd been married to all his life...