METAVERSE: New Earth

Timothy New

Turning off the music, he thought about the Now — the Moment.

In that moment he got up, walked across the wooden planks of the floor, and opened the door.

OOO

Walking onto the soft green grass of the park across the street, he bent down and took off his shoes. Kneeling in the grass, he assumed the lotus position and began to meditate.

The sounds of electric motors buzzed in and out of his distant earsight, while the birds' chirping stood out above all.

"We are always in the woods," Timothy thought as he opened his eyes.

Though in the city, he looked upon a cluster of lush trees branching out, with grass protruding upwards between portions of the park's sidewalk.

"Nature has this under control, like a being who breathes in and out. It's living all around us."

His thoughts turned inward, as he was conscious of the wave patterns that he was sending out from his mind.

 "This ripple effect," he wondered, "how wide could it be? Somewhere it has an impact."

Like an action, mind-waves make an imprint. An action can be seen and can be thought. The physical display of pure action is apparent to everyone with the ability to see.

"Who hears and sees a thought? A feeling?

"What upper level soul-conscious beings are spectating?"

Timothy did not bother to ask these questions to anyone else. They just rattled around inside of his head like in a tin can.

Living in the Midwest, he really had met only a few people in his hometown who he could talk to — truly talk to. In the sense of two people being captivated by each other's conversation.

Now it was purely a solo endeavor.  

There was no one else out there that he could connect with. Even if he could talk to upper level soul-consciousnesses, how could they talk back other than in symbols, allegories, and brilliant narrative signs?

He sensed these beings, but he was an incarnated man.

Out of his pocket, he pulled his miniMON, the rectangular device that connected the world.

Before turning it on, he thought back to childhood. He smiled as he reminisced about the days before handheld miniMONs.

As a youth, Timothy's family had only one MONscreen in the house. "What a different world it was back then," he thought. The MONscreen had a grainy, black-and-white picture that showed programs from decades before.

It was like staring into a shadowy cavern.

As Timothy felt the sunshine on his forehead, he remembered how childhood was primarily an outdoor phenomenon. Playing sportsball on the lawn, swimming at the local pool, cavorting among the gardens and woods. Days felt like they lasted for decades — summers were lifetimes.

His mind moved forward in time. Timothy had spent a summer in the country as an adolescent, right before his freshman year in college. For the whole summer, he left his miniMON turned off in the car, which sat on a gravel road on an organic farm. The modern world was at a distance: he stayed off the interprovince highway, never touched instant-food and worked as a volunteer on that humble farm.

A series of images floated across his mind's eye:  images of him kneeling in the dirt to harvest greenleaf herbs, pulling buckets of root vegetables to the wash basin, bagging them to be sent to the market. He felt gratitude for these memories, for the images which he recalled were simple gifts bestowed upon him by a benevolent consciousness.

"I've got to get back to the country," he thought pensively.

At that moment, he realized he was in the city and a steady stream of electric cars were rolling past him at a distance. He closed his eyes and let the vision return.

"The dream," he thought, "will lead to my destiny." 

OOO

In a parallel reality, he never left his home. He was still inside.

The lightbulb lit up the room like a glowing, radiating, incandescent sun. It illuminated the space — a symmetrical box with wooden floors constructed of a lightly tanned lumber, almost blonde in color. The wood covered all sides of the interior, including the four walls and the ceiling. Pure and clean, it featured ergonomic furniture which folded out of the wall panels to fit whichever activity he was performing. With the touch of the miniMON or the sound of his voice, he could ask the house to transform.

For lunch, the house swung a counter out from the back wall and lifted a chair from the floor. In the past, these tasks were performed manually. They had long since been automated in cities such as Los Antiville. When he finished, Timothy pressed the touchscreen on the miniMON, and the room quickly emptied itself of its contents. What remained was a spare, silent space—perfectly situated for Zen meditation.

Timothy sat quietly in the stillness of the room.

Atlas watched this from outside of Timothy's eyes.  In this reality, he was an invisible spectator, still able to hear the young man's thoughts.

"Ebb and flow. All of creation moves towards greater complexity and greater awareness," were the silent words that he heard from the young man.

When he stood up, the lightbulb was near his head. The scene reminded Atlas of Crucible, a great scientist who ensconced himself in a laboratory with giant electric arcs radiating about.

The room was the pure geometry of a cube— modern with very sharp, angular architecture.  The curved, spiraling forms of nature were outside. The spherical bodies in the heavens arced above the horizon. Out in the city, the green plants were breaking through the pavements, alive with the energy of the outer planets.

The room was silent. Timothy sat motionless with his thoughts, partly directed by what he saw outside his window. He gazed at the birds flying over the tree tops, the line of hills beyond Los Antiville, his hometown known for its burgeoning floral gardens.

As he scanned the horizon, his mind drifted to his years working as a technology executive. His thoughts became filled with images of plane flights from coast to coast, meetings with venture capitalists, and nights spent in a grey office that was about the same size as his room.

He had left that all behind, starting over at Square One.

His focus wandered back to the present. He noticed a pair of extraordinary blue birds flying in midair above the trees.

Looking out of the window, all suddenly turned to light, and out of the bright magnificence a vision appeared. It was of the pyramids of Giza, emblazoned in his mind's eye before him.

The phrase "center of the world" echoed in his consciousness as if it part of his internal memory. It was something that he knew innately. The vision was stark and desertified, much like he had seen in pictures. The sand was scorched by the sun, the vegetation bare. The edifices themselves were as powerful a sight as three giant mountains arising out of the desert floor, like structural titans upon the Earth.

The vision disappeared as quickly as it came, and Timothy looked upon his window sill, where a single potted plant stood in the sunshine. A date palm, blooming in the warm summer sun.