Eye of the Beholder

Epilogue: Stovie Spills the Beans.

Looking for answers to ultimate questions, hoping to learn what it all is about, searching the storehouse of all human knowledge, turning to logic to figure it out.

Finally reaching the end of the journey, what is the ultimate fruit of the task? There's not just one route to ultimate knowledge, answers are many as those who would ask.

Frogo was in a funk because the gold was gone. 

Dutch was mooning over his dream goddess.

But Stovie was thrilled to know the Annunaki were real, and he had to tell the world. His story of what they had found on Mars was picked up by several news wires, and spread from there.

So now the world knew.

For a while it seemed like everyone on Earth suddenly remembered being an important Annunaki king or queen. The tabloids were full of their stories. Nobody seemed to mind that there were conflicting details among the reports. Often even between reports from the same person.

But that blew over as most people realized it didn't really change anything in their present lives.

Most people.

For a few, mostly New Ravens, it changed everything.

A drone expedition was organized to fly to Niburu and explore its chambers. Frogo and Dutch both went along. Frogo for the gold. Dutch for that too, but secretly he was still mooning over his dream goddess and hoped to find another link to her there. For him, gold was a metaphor for all that you value that remains out of reach.  

They all knew that Niburu could be almost a trillion miles away. It would take several months for the drones to fly that far, and possibly several more to find the planet if they were even a little off in the direction. Fortunately the drones would need only occasional attention until they got there.

When they eventually arrived, all the droners found was a very cold, seemingly dead world, with many chambers occupied by sleepers who appeared beyond awakening. But the droners were still only part time explorers, mostly living a very human life in Houston or elsewhere on Earth. So all the adventurers had ultimately risked little. They left the drones there, waiting for the distant planet to swing closer to the sun and warm up again. Many of them soon had a lucrative side business, renting access to their Niburu drones to others who wanted to explore the "planet of the old gods." A small contingent of archaeologists established an enclave there to catalog artifacts and decipher inscriptions.

Meanwhile Newt was helping to engineer and supervise the assembly of the first farm and family units in the lava tubes of Mars. All done by drones of course. Sections of the units were prefabricated on Earth, then shipped to Mars by drone haulers built for the purpose. 

Hauler pilots were in demand, for this and many other needs. It was another outlet for the New Ravens. These pilots had been absorbed into the Teamsters Union, which now had Union domes scattered around the world where the hauler pilots kept their human bodies.

It seemed odd to some that pilots were still needed, but fully automated transport had never quite lived up to its billing. When it came to decision making needed to deal with the unexpected, human intelligence was still better than the artificial kind. True, transport hauler vehicles needed little guidance to find their destinations. But just like the old railroads, when it came to the equivalent of a stray cow on the tracks, human intervention was needed. That's when the Teamsters earned their pay. A single Teamster might be able to monitor a whole fleet of haulers, but there would be times when they had to get help from their buddies.

The first human occupants of the new "tube cans" on Mars were mostly Annunaki deniers, New Raven miners who accepted the idea that the Annunaki had been there long ago and took some of the gold, but refused to believe they got it all. 

Frogo was a front-runner in this movement. He helped begin the human colonization of Mars in the process. He still did his mining with a drone, of course. But he had to get his human hands on any nuggets the drone brought back to the tube he now called home.

To the New Ravens, the ultimate message of the new age was, don't give up your day job. Life is your day job. You walk the knife edge, knowing that the essence of who you are cannot be cut. For all the new awareness of spiritual existence in the Q, the physical universe remained the only game in town. The game changes, but forever remains the same.

It was a revelation for mankind. Or more truly many individual revelations. After all, no two paths through the Q could be quite the same.

The biblical phrase "My Father's house has many mansions," took on new significance as people realized that they each inhabited one of those mansions. And they were timeless, these mansions, as timeless as the beings who dwelt in them.

Many people were becoming adept at exploring their own past, their own dreams, their own realms of existence in the Q, their realms of thought. But, perhaps surprisingly, interest in this awakened access to a long personal past soon faded, just as interest in the Annunaki had.

What remained was a vast new interest in shared remembrances. Sedna's World Dream was the prototype. It seemed to have become the gold standard for sharing experiences of reality. Her intentionally personal presentation, with its overtones of spiritual awareness, had made everyone feel at home in it.

The new realization was that this QAR dream was truly a shared home, and it was exactly this sharing that gave the real world its power. It was now widely understood that, while each individual existence was unique, it was the personal memory trace in the Q that made it so. Conversely, it was entirely the interpersonal resonance of experiences shared across the Q that defined physical reality.

The New Ravens were taking full advantage of this expanded reality made possible by access to the Q. The New Eagles were bringing an understanding of these possibilities to the rest of the world.

Part of this understanding was the awareness that inexpressibly vast and distant realms existed outside the limits of human reality. Individuals might tap into such realms, but such experiences remained Q dreams until they were shared.

Some of the Ravens had realized that not just other worlds, but other universes, might be accessible through the Q. The Eagles then began to investigate this phenomenon. Mathematicians were pleased to learn that when their theories had no relevance in their familiar reality, they might apply in another one. Storytellers were much more certain that this was true.

In the wake of this new understanding, science was redefined as accessing hidden realities and making them known. Literature was redefined as exploring and sharing new links in the Q, sometimes bringing distant realities to human experience. 

Sedna was satisfied. The climate crisis was over thanks to cozy domes with dark matter power. The nagging fear that human exuberance would destroy civilization and the planet along with it was gone. The squandered oil reserves and the consequent rise in CO2 were history. There had been no runaway global warming. 

Humans, like all life forms, thrive in times of plenty. And humans had proven extraordinarily good at exploiting Earth's bounty. Almost too good. Disaster had been averted once again, this time by turning from carbon as fuel to hydrogen. Not burning it now, but converting it to dark matter.

The economics of human life, divorced from reliance on solar energy, was fundamentally changed. The surly bonds of Earth had truly been broken. Hydrogen, the ultimate source of solar energy, could be tapped directly anywhere in the universe, and used to power a Sun Bottle. If the natural abundance of energy from the Sun on Earth was no longer enough, the Seeds of Gaia could be replanted anywhere.

Earth was in good hands with Dema, Cern, Tengri and the rest of the Coon Island crew, along with others like them, helping to guide humankind's growing awareness of the Q as the ultimate source of all life. Sedna's  brother Bear was settled in one of the domes on Haida Gwaii with Xayna. Sedna joined Newt on Mars, becoming part of the expansion of humanity to habitats beyond Earth. She was, as she had always been, optimistic about the future.

Paradise had been regained.