Profile: The Archangel
August 12, 2007
The voices in His head chimed like an unbroken chorus of song.
He was aware of not only His immediate surroundings, but also of being many different places at the same moment, across several different continuums, and across space and time. When he looked across the landscape, He did not see the expansive primitive grasslands or the brilliant gaseous giant that hung in the sky. He saw complex carbon compounds, amino acids, charged electrons and energy-matter convergence.
He saw the evolving mathematical precision of Creation.
He was certainly conscious of the struggling primate cub a short distance away. He heard its wailing in the tall reeds of grass.
It did not interest Him.
He was certainly aware of the group of primates foraging for food along a nearby ridge and the cub’s mother panicked at discovering her missing son.
It did not interest Him.
He knew the proto-humans would be moving on soon. They had to. They would extend their search for the cub as long as they could, but the survival of the group depended on finding subsistence and shelter and avoiding predators.
The life of a single cub was not as important as the life of the entire group.
Then, inexplicably, out of some distant sensibility, He turned. He took the cub in his arms and gazed into its bewildered eyes. He showed it the world, the landscape, the ridge where the other primates were and its relationship to them. He set the cub down and watched it scurry in the direction of its fellow proto-humans.
The voices in His head momentarily, ever so slightly, paused.
omegaMarat Daria
August 5, 2007
She was the younger daughter. Even at the precocious age of eleven Daria understood completely what that meant.
She would always be cared after. She could secure for herself a valued and influential position in the family’s maritime empire, or a Matriarchy in the House of the omega, or an appointment to The Parliamentary.
Still, Daria would always be the younger one. The lesser one. The lest liked. Daria would always be dependent on the good graces of her mother, and eventually her elder sisters. She would always be obligated. She would never inherit.
But she had a plan.
Obtaining nav-com access codes proved to be a challenge. However, when she set her mind to a task, Daria’s diligence was always rewarded.
She was proud of her own cleverness.
Daria maneuvered one of her schoolmaiden under the pretense of a dare. She deceived her into hacking the House security systems. Once compromised, she imprinted a drive failure from a maintenance simulation program into a certain sub-routine.
Feigning illness was the easy part.
Daria stayed behind that fateful morning. Daria watched in practiced protest as her mother and her seven husbands, her brothers and sisters, and many of the highest-ranking members of the omegaMarat court and their households boarded the family flying barge.
The holiday abroad, to the offshore fishery platforms turned palatial resort, had been planned for months and was eagerly anticipated. Daria cried on cue at the news of a mid-ocean crash. Daria despaired on-demand as time and weather worked against the search-and-rescue crews. Hours drew painfully into days. Days stretched into weeks.
All had abandoned hope. No one was more surprised than Daria when a sole survivor was miraculous found — her older sister Seneca.
Profile: Angela
April 12, 2007
Angela did not wish to go.
She did not understand why she needed to leave her home, her brothers and sisters, and everything familiar. Her mother tried to her best to explain and to reassure her precious daughter. But, none of her mother’s reasoned words belayed the fear and suspicion they stirred in Angela, that she was being punished.
Her mother told her little girl that the Sisters of Temple-at-Delphi would care for her, as she could not. They would provide her with the special training only the Daughters of The Goddess could bestow. Only among the Faithful would she win more authority than Angela could ever achieve as a matron with older female siblings.
Little psiSadewa Angela traveled many times to Temple-at-Delphi in her brief four years. She enjoyed the curious games she played with the Sisters. She relished the Sister’s delight every time she best them… and she bested them every time. But, to live there? The thought frightened her. The Temple, with its wide, open spaces, its towering eerie statues and its strange smells, was not a home.
Despite her protests, her mother brought Angela before the Temple Sisters. As she entered the main mosque she had an epiphany. A vision of a place outside of time and space enraptured her awareness. She found herself transported to a plane neither of familiar matter nor of energy, but of pure thought and essence. It was a place where the mathematical splendor of Creation unfolded itself in perfect order and beauty.
There were beings there, Angela perceived.
They were many and at the same time one entity. They nourished on the force of life that permeated their world. The collective consciousness took supreme comfort in the knowledge that all things must conform to a precise inflexible equation. That comfort was a light that warmed Angela and welcomed her with an emotion alien to that plane. The emotion Angela knew to be home.
The vision passed, become something as fleeting as a dream. Angela no longer feared to stay at Temple. As she grew to womanhood she always took comfort in her first vision. She knew if she tried hard enough that, one day, she might visit that perfect place again.
Profile: Seneca
March 12, 2007
The accident changed her life.
In the flash-ignition of plasma, when the drive of the flying barge exploded over open ocean, Seneca lost nearly her entire family. She too might have died had not her mother sacrificed the only life preserver to save her favored pre-adolescent daughter.
Seneca emerged from the experience with a new appreciation of the preciousness and frailty of life. Haunted by her mother’s sacrifice and the fact she alone survived the crash, Seneca set her mind to making the most of herself.
She traveled widely.
Over seven years she journeyed to places a maiden of her wealth and position would never dream of venturing. Seneca spent months providing relief aide in the ghettos of the Juda-Hon. She toiled on the plantations of Tar Iota Daafar. She joined the nomadic caravans of the desert-clans. She prospected precious metals in off-world Free Townships.
And Seneca recorded her experiences.
She wrote of the peoples she encountered. She spoke freely of the ever-widening disparate conditions and attitudes across Aideena.
Almost immediately Seneca’s publications became the subject of examination and debate at all levels of society.
Like the flash-ignition of plasma, Seneca’s writings sparked a fire in the minds of the privileged and the common alike. Her observations and sentiments flew in the face of convention. She was only nineteen and omegaMarat Seneca was being anointed the voice of her generation.
Paul Sebastian xiDuang
February 12, 2007
Azcoyotitec faded in his memory like a distant mystical dream.
The communal plantation of his ancestors nestled in a mist-covered playground. Sebastian xi Duang pleasured his youth among overgrown jungles, lagoons, and green rolling hills.
However, the fields barely yielded enough to support the struggling farming community. Centuries of pollutants building in the air and soil ravaged once rich fertile lands. The matron mother of his clan decided on the only course that would stay foreclosure within the xi family order and loss of heritable rights. In exchange for the yearly stipend Faith offered, the clan would give up twenty-two of its children to priestly indenture.
Sebastian was the youngest of eight in his household, male, and too small to be of any real help in the fields. He was chosen.
Though he did not want to leave Azcoyotitec, leave his parents, leave everything he knew, Sebastian understood his obligation to the clan. Indenture to Faith would put food on the table until he reached maturity or until the plantation’s fortunes reversed. Sebastian’s mother escorted her son to Temple-at-Corinth herself and presented him to the Brethren.
Sebastian was seven.
He saw his parents only once thereafter. At thirteen he was inducted into the Disciple of Paul. His mother, her husbands and several of his clan journeyed to Corinth to attend the public ceremony.
It was a strange haunting experience. He did not know these peasants who were so pleased and proud of him. He saw nothing of himself in the strangers.
Sebastian xi Duang never saw them or his homeland again.
