Breaking the mold

Chapter 2: From humble beginnings comes death

As I sat on the park bench in that dismal square of land they called a park, I thought first about how much I hated these humans for all sorts of reasons that amounted to nothing; I had trapped myself in the mother's womb, I had ejected the human soul in order to inhabit this body and I was here now in this stupid park thinking about how feeble their attempts to cultivate aesthetic beauty were.  I really had no one to blame but myself that I now stewed in this corporeal devolved meat suit.

Still, In my head my memories could almost manifest the things I missed so much.  The swaying of a mane and a snout and the feeling of the wind through my wings was almost enough to make me believe that they were still there.  Reality is a hard thing to snap back into when you have the weight of memories in your head, both foreign and domestic.

As I leaned my head back, my eyes closed and all of a sudden I was transported to another time and place.  It was like a dream but one that I could not wake up from.  It felt as I felt now: unattached from this body and moving through the world while thinking my way around without actually moving at all.  It's hard to explain for how is one to explain the feeling of not being connected to a physical form with physical needs to someone who's never known the experience?

I remember watching as if from outside the plane of existence.  my vision was all blurry at the corner of my visage as if I had been crying but there was no physical manifestation of tears so perhaps it was more as if I were in a very dense fog that clouded my vision all but that which was directly in front of me.  I watched my mother's large form come bounding into the room where others had just witnessed the impossible.

This may need some background: You see, unlike my father, I never did experimentation alone.  The common question is, "Is that so you'd have somebody to help you if it went wrong?" NO!  I experiment in front of a crowd because I want them to see what I did.  I want them to know that whether an experiment fails or whether it succeeds that I was the one who perpetrated the act.  A failure is simply an idea that was attempted.  Without the attempt, ideas do not exist and without the audience, successes or failures have no control group; so they really aren't experiments at all in that case, are they?

This was to be an experiment that represented my father's life work, not to mention a dangerous one that could kill me and one that could mean great strides for our people, so I invited a myriad of different people.  Teleportation at this time was still in its infancy and would remain there for a long time until the black wings sufficiently researched it and put it into practice in their new society that would exist after we were gone but I digress.

There was a crowd of dozens of scientific minds of all sorts in the room that day and they sat behind a large pane of glass in the Ministry of Science while I worked on the sunken floor below with the various components.  You would refer to our energy generators as looking like a pirate ship's wheel as they spun very quickly around creating friction with a filament high above.  This power source, along with the power supply, was inside a protective  covering though, so nobody could really see it but I thought you might have some interest in the process.  There was a platform at the center of the room and a computer on a small table next to the generator that was supposed to capture all data as the experiment progressed.

Inside the platform and around the walls of the room, there was every kind of sensor available to our people so I would miss nothing in terms of data and neither would my colleges.  If I happened to disappear as my father did, I wanted everyone to know how it happened, where I could potentially be and what exactly happened.  All information was fed into that computer as well so there was a hard copy on it and via a hard wired connection and a wireless one, there were processors on many floors of several cliff faces that would both remotely and through a LAN record all data from the experiment.  I was wired in and nothing would stop this, not even my mother.

My mother the chef.  I don't expect a human to understand as we would more than likely look monstrous to you but my mother was one of the most beautiful creatures our kind had ever known.  For being a chef, she had still managed to keep in impeccable shape and she represented the kind of woman that was perfect in every way.  She loved me with all her heart and she had loved my father.  She loved our family and she loved it so much that she never even dated after all the time that my father had been gone.  Her family and friends asked her why she never dated and why she kept so attractive if she was not going to go out and get a man that might be a new role model for me but she was content to thinking that somewhere, my father was not gone and patiently, she waited and loved him forever as she had vowed.  To the day that she became one of us without form, she would remain the way she was: never knowing anyone else but knowing that he would return.

She looked so soft and distant as she watched her boy and as proud a face that she wore for my colleagues, I could see and feel her heart breaking.  I believe the moment before I disappeared she said, I love you son to the glass and when I was gone, she wept silently on the teleportation pad for hours.

Back to the experiment: as the energy started to flow, I stepped onto the platform and into history as they all looked on.  The amount of energy that was being generated was controlled but it set forth arks of sparks all throughout the room like your Tesla coils but rather less controlled in movement.  The energy bolts began to spin around me and for a second, it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen and then I saw a flash of light and soon I was surrounded by the light.

As my vision began to restore the light began to seem far away and it felt as though I was walking through a long tunnel before I was surrounded by light and the reverberations of every living thing began to pulse right through me.  As I looked around, I noticed that my peripherals were extremely impaired and yet, I felt all things in every moment.  Being pure energy, I found that time did not matter to me anymore.  Nothing really did.  It also occurred to me, however that I was no longer corporeal or able to be seen.

I felt the silence around me though and watched my mothers distraught face as I had now completely vanished like sand in an hour glass.  In this form, I could truly sense all of her worries and pains and as I permeated through her, I wanted to cry but according to the laws of physics, I knew I no longer existed.  All of a sudden, a voice began to speak in my head.  It was filled with authority and seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

"Son..." Said the voice.

Breaking the mold

Chapter 1: The before times.

 

The Taylorn weren’t always as we are now.  There was a time when we bore corporeal form.  Great seven to eight feet, per human standards, winged creatures; with sharpened beaks and long muscular arms that were attached to 3 digit claws with an opposable third claw.  There was a time.  With our stubby little muscular legs that resembled lions feet but with defined musculature and visible talons, we could sprint short distances but our wings would do most of our movement for us.  Our faces, besides the beak, were much like humans: we had eyes in the front of our heads and ears that resembled those of elves from your story books; our manes stretched down our back and we were covered in hair with the exception of our wings which were feathered, at least amongst the prominent families which I was from, with great white feathers as pure as a summer cloud.  It was a glorious time but progress waits for no man or beast as you humans seem to suspect.

The difference between my race and yours is that our drive for purity and progress was united amongst the strongest, to the middle of the road, of our society.  We were united to overcoming all limitations and things that made us weak.  Through this, we began experimentation on a great many things.  Most of our experiments on the Taylorn genome were a devastating disaster.  The progress we made created great strides in our medical fields but they fell short of creating the god like image we hoped to achieve.  Our abilities to become non-corporeal and transcend physical form happened quite by mistake.  It happened through experiments that had nothing to do with our physical forms at all.  Our non-corporeal forms happened as a result of the desire to move about the universe in no time at all.  Through a glitch in a matter transporter.

Our abilities to become non-corporeal and transcend physical form happened quite by mistake.  It happened through experiments that had nothing to do with our physical forms at all.  Our non-corporeal forms happened as a result of the desire to move about the universe in no time at all; through a glitch in a matter re-locater.

I believe it was may of my twenty seventh year that I began to remember the accident. There is no doubt in my mind that others who might walk amongst us may have had glimpses of it and formed religions and cults around it but nothing so perfect as the beings that we were.

Listen to me talking about perfection as if I even knew what it was. If I had been perfect, you'd think I would have found myself in a situation that didn't implicate such reprehensible and perhaps moral repercussions.

It was all such a haze but I suppose I'll start at the beginning:

My father was a tinkerer and my mother, a chef. The two of them were the most disorganized wild beasts our race had ever known but they were wealthy in a society of freedom and they were wealthy from other Taylorn's love.

My mother's cooking had not only given birth to a renewed respect for cooking and a cook book that gave individual Taylorn women respect from their husbands, but also a chain of successful restaurants world wide with staff so devoted, it could only be compared to the cults in earth terms.

They weren't violent like a cult though, they just served a higher purpose and they served it for the love of preparation and feeding and they served it for a few chips at a time.

The prices were so low and the food was prepared so well from such easy to find materials that it was practically irresistible to any passerby.

My father's tinkering was a bit more complicated to explain. It started off when he was young: fixing old toys and toasters for older Taylorn women but his complex mind and ease of craft would never be satisfied with such paltry pursuit. His experimentation began to evolve as he grew, moving from simple matter resequencers to the very first  transporter.

In his 370th year, he disappeared while in the midst of an experiment that ended in a massive power surge that shut down power for the entire cliff side.

My mother was cooking a fried bhat bhat loaf in the kitchen and I was playing by the cliff's edge. Every once and  while, I'd purposefully dive off the cliff, swoop down and around and then hit the cliff entrance to our home so hard that it dented the front porch.

I was only 98 at the time and as a young Taylorn, I was anxious and what was more dangerous to our poor front porch, I was getting hungrier with each wafting of my mother's fried Bhat Bhat.

The Bhat Bhat is a winged rat and they are usually fluffed up with meat on their stomachs like your earth turkey as they are clumsy in their landings. Some keep them as pets and find it barbaric for us to eat them but I was not about to trade in a fried Bhat Bhat for stewed cave moss and Cobbnobs. Sure they'd go well with the Bhat Bhat but it is the same way I do not understand humans who will order broccoli without the benefits of chicken when they order Chinese food.

"Djinn! Djinn, you awful thing!"
She burst out laughing as I skulked the edge of the cliff, feigning falling off and slamming back into the edge when she peeked out the window to scare her.

"Djinn, go get your father, remind him that cold Bhat Bhat means the crust will get soggy."

As I flew forward, I saw a blue flash through the tiny window of his room and his physical form collapse like sand granules. As I hit the cliff, the explosion came and all the lights went black.

I wouldn't know what took him until I reconstructed the entire experiment and used a far safer alternating form of current so as to control the process.

It was in a wind that gusted through the city that reminded me of that day. The day I watched my hands turn to dust and then into pure energy. Energy that was made of the electrical impulses in every being. As for my father and myself after that day, we simply had no form holding those impulses together except for the energy loop that was our pure form looping around into its self. We were a Möbius strip of energy and soon to follow was our entire species.