Copyright 2000 Stewart Dickson and Rebecka Dickson
Julia becomes a hero among the group protesting Gya Mon's
activities.
================
Larry settles into his journey aboard the Large-scale space-shuttle
en-route to Mars Colony. It will take months.
The people on-board are all brilliant -- all races and nationalities --
scientists and artists... Larry has ample time to meet and talk to
them.
Larry finds that everyone he meets has had the same experience of
enlightenment through
Feel-U-Feel-Me sessions.
============
A week into the flight , Larry is sitting with another traveler, who is
sighted.
"Well, you can make out the planet we're heading for now. It's no
longer just another star."
It is only on the final approach to the planet Mars that it grows to
fill the porthole.
============
The shuttle has landed on the Martian colony.
To Steve, the architecture is at once intimately familiar, for he
has 'built' all of the buildings in his computer in full three
dimensions. And it is excitingly unfamiliar, for he has never been
physically inside the City. He has built all that is here by remote
control. He has simply 'willed' it all into existence, but only now
is it part of his own existence.
The layout of the city and the form of the buildings happens to be
the same as in Julia's Mayan Civilization dream at the start. Now, one
can recognize that the ornaments on the buildings are none other
than imprints of Artifacts from Cyberspace.
Steve and Larry are disembarking from the shuttle. They gather
their flight bags and exit. They hear a voice calling their names.
They look up. Steve can see
nude
human figures moving about, their
bodies glowing brightly with internal energy. One figure moves
quickly toward them and extends a hand.
She speaks, "Hello, I'm Sally. I'll be helping you get settled here.
Come this way." She adds, "Quickly, please."
Sally grasps Larry's hand to guide him away from the shuttle.
In his "point-of-view" is the field of phosphenes over black, the
background noise of his inactive visual cortex.
A pool of image forms as a visual sensation in Larry's mind -- it
is Sally's POV. This image is soon followed by others as one-by-one
the vision of other inhabitants of Mars Colony are impressed upon
Larry's brain.
He is a little alarmed. He is being hustled away, all the while being
bombarded by unfamiliar visual images.
Trying to focus on Sally, he asks, "Why, what's going on?"
Sally answers, "Please, we must move quickly."
Steve says, "Larry, give me your bag, and you'll be able to go faster."
"What's going on?" Larry asks, "I don't understand."
Suddenly there is a loud explosion. They are thrown to the ground.
Larry loses Sally's hand, with it the visuals, and starts panicking,
"Tell me what's going on!"
Steve says, "We blew up the shuttle."
Larry asks, "We did what?"
Steve goes on, "They were grounding the program. The government
was going to make us all go back They were going to tear down all
my buildings."
Larry is still agitated, "But, my visual sensations -- it's like
FEEL-U-FEEL-ME."
Sally explains, "That was just the beginning of quantum neural
training. We have discovered the technique for sustaining the
connection without the electronics."
Steve says, "We all agreed. We need to stay here. There is too
much work to do. We can't go back to the lower planes. We have
evolved too much."
Larry says, "They'll just send other shuttles."
Steve chuckles, "No, they won't. Those shuttles don't work any
more."
Larry cries, "What? Are you mad?"
Steve muses, "Hmm, good question. We have all the great minds up
here. It took a few years, but we've got all the creme de la creme."
Larry is stunned with disbelief, "You took everybody who knows
anything and brought them up here?"
Steve says, "It may take the ones back on Earth years to re-learn
how to fix those shuttles."
Larry cries, "They'll die! They'll all die! They don't know what
they're doing. The whole world will collapse. Everything!"
"We'll see." Steve remarks simply, "We left everything else there in
good shape. If they screw it up, it will be their own fault."
Larry says, "Well, I hope I'm going to like being stuck here."
As Larry begins to relax a little, Sally takes his hand again. As the
images return, with them comes the reassurance of a thousand
confident minds.
As they walk through a City square, at the center, up on a pedestal
is a
sculpture of a nude woman in a "Winged Victory" pose -- it is
Julia's
scan from the Cyber-Cafe.
Through shared eyes, Larry scans the panorama of the New Mars
surface. It is so beautiful, he wonders how anyone would not like it
here.
Copyright 2000 Stewart Dickson and Rebecka Dickson
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