Breaking the mold

Chapter 5: The conversion

It occurs to me at this juncture that I have left out an important detail to what I am and the story of my people.  I left out the quintessential part that I mentioned in the beginning of this story and then forgot to explain.  I left out why I am not the only one.

In the beginning of our evolution, there was only myself and my father who went from Taylorn to pure energy.  As time went on, our race searched for us and our experience produced a sense of duty to evolve the rest of our bretherin as we had been evolved.  First, however, we had to find a way to communicate with them as pure energy beings can only communicate with each other when we try to do it directly.  The Taylorn were not capable of telepathic speech as most of the extra terrestrial movies try to claim.

For weeks, my father and myself tried inhabiting our brethren which killed a few and simply didn't work with others and the strange deaths only made people afraid.  There was talk amongst our people of a dark time that had come to the Taylorn and a viciousness that befell them because of unforseen forces.

There really was no god amongst my people.  Not because we didn't believe in a higher power but simply because each of us had our own interpretation of the same thing and it had not been a priority to a people who didn't think like humanity did.  So when this dark time came and Taylorn began to die because of our attempts to possess them, they viewed it, at least at first, as a defect of their science and then of nature and then finally evil spirits and a higher power punishing the Taylorn for their rapid advancement.

As an energy being, we felt what was described by some as god.  We felt the nature of the universe and the physics that moved all things.  A burning bush that didn't burn, as described in the human bible would be the only way that a god could exist without us sensing him because nature and physics was us.  To be god was to be what we could not explain or be a part of and even as pure energy, there was a lot.  God existed to us as energy because of the Holmsian quote, "Once all that is possible has been eliminated, only the impossible remains."

I digress again.  At last I stopped my father from his attempts at communication through direct contact and steered his consciousness towards a more indirect means: the electronic communication.  Electricity and technology are a requirement for any civilization that becomes advanced enough to call its self a civilization and my people were no different.  We had communications arrays and space stations and vast technological resources. Just because we had wings on our backs and our devices were slightly larger to fit our differing physiology and sociology doesn't mean that we ceased to explore.  We had been to the outer edges of our solar system but because of the huge expense and material needed to construct one of 2 ships we had with the capability, we had halted at a slow incline of growth.

The idea of a matter transporter as my father saw it hadn't even been considered for space to ground yet and the entire idea was still revolutionary for its time.  However, for us to get it to work again, we needed a corporeal creature to understand its value and to put the process into action.

[Father, do you remember the formula still] I communicated.

[Son, you know that we never forget in this form. You are now the imprint of all life lived past present and future; although we are an echo of what they would consider living. What would you suggest for communication?]

[Father, we are energy. We exist as the one thing we knew how to play with as corporeal beings.]

[You suggest manipulating machinery. What crass communication. Allow me to try something else first.]

In my young and petulant state, I went forward with my plan and reached a few Taylorn with the message but his show was so much more grand.

With his form, he became heat and began to light up the rocks in the houses of every Taylorn as a message began to burn into those walls of every Taylorn in our entire civilization. He became the planet and began to transmit fierce lightening bursts through the clouds that formed messages and spoke to those who saw it as they soared from cliff side to peaks. He became a mist and rewrote some Taylorn brain signals which are essentially electricity and sent a vague message inside their brains (so as not to fry them like before) to build and use the device that made us what we were.

The things he did could be interpreted by the weak minded as a message from God but we knew that God would have been far more impressive than utilizing energy in a closed system. It's simply a matter of size. A planet is relatively small when you're pure energy as well as the laws of physics which dictate that in a closed system like our planet that was surrounded by an atmosphere, all energy was connected.

That being said, if my father had done something like create energy that wasn't already there or try to do all those feats at once, it might have been impossible but doing it very rapidly and one thing at a time was exhausting and draining but possible. By the time he was done, he had to regenerate by draining power from several cities to get back to normal and still be hindered enough to restrict him from transference travel.

This may need explanation. Transference travel is the words I use to describe to you as humans: adapting energy to our forms and becoming that energy at any point in the universe. We know it simply as a concept but humans have such colorful language and labels that I thought I'd give it a try. Do you like it?

Digression. In any case, this display was enough to lock my father to our planet for at least 100 years but for me? I used no energy adapting a computer to spell out my message. In fact, I gained energy by draining the computers of their current while I spelled out our message on the screen. Just enough energy to transfer travel to a little blue rock lightyears away called earth.

The process went quick once our entire civilization got the message. Most of them got my father's message though. At least 99% of my people ignored me and heard him. I would venture, however that 99% of those Taylorn would also not venture out into the universe when they became energy beings. Only a small fraction of them were explorers. I knew because the last thing I did was watch the glow of light on the surface of my planet as I was surrounded by light and the quiet glow of a sunrise from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Breaking the Mold

Chapter 4: Born in Exile

Being born conscious is what it means to touch the veil.  Who was this child whose life I would replace?  Where would the life inside of him go?  These were questions I didn’t know how to answer.  The being that I was, I didn’t care enough to answer them because “right and wrong” and “up and down” are corporeal concepts that are limited to the creatures that are fallible because of dimension and mortality.  I experienced neither and the only thing I truly feared was that what humans know as god and what we know as, “the benevolent and unexplainable force that allows us space and consciousness as pure energy”; or that’s how one would describe it if it weren’t more of an understood concept than something definable. I feared that this might one day not exist and I would cease to be.  I enjoyed existing and I think, as humans enjoy not being dead, so too we enjoy existing.

               Death is not a concept known to one of pure energy.  How can one fathom an end when there is only a sure time of beginning with patches in between that can only be defined as a loose concept?  As I remember being born, I think of the struggle that it was just to become a living thing.  There are hundreds of ways that being born can kill you and I suppose the same can be said of the process that made me pure energy.  One wonders how many others, who tried devices to teleport themselves, simply exploded and were no more?  How many of them simply met death and that was it?

               I digress as I ask too many questions in my story but life is full of more questions than answers.  A person’s day can go, “I woke up, had some cereal and played video games until I went to bed,” as many of my childhood days would be in this life I was about to undertake, but then there are questions within something even as simple as that.  How many opportunities did I miss by not interacting with other people?  Would this young, portly version of me have been better with a walk rather than a video game?  What percentage of my enjoyment of said video game were my own enjoyment and what percentage was enjoyed simply because I was able to connect with another human being who had spent the same ill-conceived day as me, on this video game?  Then there were deeper questions that human beings never asked such as was this part of some greater plan?  If I had gone outside those long days inside, maybe I would have gotten hit by a car, suffered heat exhaustion, been hit in the head and lost the ability to conceive my own ego.

               So many questions that make up our lives and we never ask or answer them because it’s easy to worry about things known. I know I can get hungry; I know I can die; I know I have a strong sexual urge and that the girl telling me to go into the tent alone with her might lead to satiating that urge.  This is the simplicity of the average human and with this corporeal form I had taken, I realized that I had come in contact with a civilization that was far less interesting than my own… or was it?

               By mid adolescence, I had begun reading books that evoked emotion and I began to experience wonder in the most mundane things.  With the birth of my human child, I experienced love in a way that no energy being ever could.  I experienced a different more shallow and animalistic view of beauty than my people ever had.  The passion of these beings was unmatched and as an enlightened one, I had long debates over things that were higher minded than video games and as my groups of friends evolved so too evolved my toys.

               The most interesting thing about humans to me was their hesitation.  When there was a decision that could benefit the whole of their society, they weighed concepts and liquid ideas with decisions.  There could be the most elaborate order in the chaos that was man. 

               A question like should we take unused stem-cells and use them to cure diseases like we never were able to before, was debated in courts rather than a small gathering of arbiters making decisions based on absolute logic.  To humanity, life was not a puzzle; it was a painting and one that took the entirety of their existence to paint.

               In my 27^th human year, I began to recall what it was to be a Taylorn and then also what it felt like to be in this foreign form. I remembered the feeling of power and prowess that came from being high born and yet as a human I was serenely focused on being unfocused and different with sore spots on my back where I felt my wings should have been.  I remembered my beak and felt it like a phantom limb the same way I perceived my wings.

               My empathic abilities were also intensified as a human. As a Taylorn, we had the ability to sense others around us and their intents as an instinct; as an energy being, we communicated telepathically so empathy was simply an added bonus because energy beings do not have emotions but humans have them like an overflowing teapot.  A telepathic connection, however dulled, could easily pick up on emotion and they were everywhere.  The little child pining over a fallen ice cream scoop, the investor pining over a net loss of $500,000.00 and how he would pay his child’s tuition; the great sorrow of humanity was overwhelming but there was also great joy.  A child who gets to go out for their birthday to the water park; a man who catches his child’s gaze for the first time; such joy as the latter could never be described as just joy but the point is made.  Experiencing a walk in the park was a dizzying experience for me if I did not distract my mind and senses with something.

               Then there was sex.  Taylorn women and Taylorn men had sex as an animal instinct.  It was no different than the rage of battle or the need to breathe air when one has been submerged underwater.  In this right, men and women were prone to having concubines for the soul purpose of sex and nothing else.  Did my father love my mother? Of course he did.  He did not want anyone else to be with but when she was having issues that made her not want the sexual urge, he went to places and others he could relieve himself with and they understood this in written contract that came with all Taylorn marriages.  Human beings have such great passion and emotion that it does not surprise me that they channel at least some of it into their sex lives.  Who damns the success of a man quite like a woman can?  Pitiful creatures…  Both sexual urges were archaic to us when we became pure energy though.  Sex was not required as energy is constantly created and destroyed in space as the parameters of physics allow.  There’s no need for sex and even the urges of a solid being are weeded out so that neither species that I have been is included.

               Questions and opportunity, desire and want, a sensual nature; all of these were paltry pleasantries enjoyed by man.  The Taylorn shared some of them as well but to devolve to something so ephemeral was, at best an experiment in futility.  Why did we exist was the question that human beings always asked and if I had to answer it, I would say, “…because the will of the universe which is conscious and alive provides us the space to exist and to ponder.  At our very core, it allows us to experience things that we might never have thought possible.” That was my answer for humans and Taylorn alike but my answer for what I never could escape, the energy being, the highest form on the evolutionary scale which I had experienced was a world of difference.  Why do we exist? “Energy beings exist because of a mistake in a matter transporter which gave us the ability to be a part of all things.  We exist to lubricate and experience existence itself.”

               I stopped in the park where I sat on a bench under a blue light and looked out onto a vast pond, pondering all these things.  “We exist to experience existence itself…”  In a way, I was experiencing existence by looking at things through a human’s eyes.  The only reason I even made it this far out into the universe was because matter and energy existed here, similar to that of my own planet.  On our planet, we had an Oxygen/Nitrogen balance in the air that we breathed and our sun also gave off ultraviolet radiation which caused temperatures on our planet to stay between 50* and 90* depending on the season.  There was also electricity in the air that was similar to earth.  Through the clouds, great bolts of blue lightning struck the hillsides in times of stormy weather.  There was rain and there was water and the elements were in sync with the planet.  Although I never ventured to the oceans on our world, I imagine there were currents similar to those of the earth and that life existed similarly to that of the earth although its inhabitants evolved differently.

               It was because of these things that I was able to adapt to the earth and look in at human beings with the desire to try and become one.  It was because of these things that I did become one and as I looked through their eyes, it was because of these things that I missed the energy being I would have to find out how to become again.