DR TOMORROW "Without warning, the teachings
of the Masters were suddenly
by Marshall F. Gilula being externalized right
before my eyes and it was
Part 4 of 5 everything I could do just to
keep up."
Copyright(c)1991
Chapter 4
Monday
Logos Who?
This morning I'm not in the least freaked by anything. It seemed like we got back around sunrise, but I'm not certain. I regret still being Primitive enough to need my sleep, and when I wake up, there is a 120 pound German Shepherd lying in the bed between Pearl E. Mae and me. Bullet looks at me, puts his nose under my pillow, and attempts to beat me to death with his wagging tail. He knows that he is not supposed to be in the bed, and Pearl E. Mae giggles as turns and licks her face in an attempt to gain her approval. She is sitting by the side of the bed observing us and waiting for someone's permission to jump up on the bed. I slide out of the bed onto the floor and hug She-Ra, whose tail is now wagging with pleasure. She is such a joy, compact and tough, but soft and gentle, and she has done over a year and a half of unpaid baby-sitting with Bullet, whom she has raised to be a soft and gentle dog despite his large economy size and his ferocious demeanor. Her good nature extends to the way that she tolerates Bullet's nose and his massive presence jealously intruding into the intimacy She-Ra and I are having. When I pet one, the other demands it. She-Ra, Bullet, and I all get tied up in a pile of paws, arms, tails, legs, three heads, and two sets of very sharp teeth. All three of us are making growling, grunting sounds. The only problem with being a "member of the pack" is that occasionally the four-legged members bite on me in the same way they chew on each other, and I have to quickly withdraw from the pretend fracas because my skin is literally not thick enough. Pearl E. Mae and my other Eternal room mates gathered around the pile of Lyle plus dogs on the floor. They had never observed any of my special communication with Bullet and She-Ra. To me it was just part of an ordinary day. As I wiped some dog spittle out of my eye, I noticed that both Quail and Pearl E. Mae were smiling and crying as they watched us on the floor. They understood that some Primitives are evolved enough to really communicate with other species in the universal languages of love and play. Quail explained that my playing with the dogs reminded her of what her last aquatic life form valued most in existence
What a naive attitude. Considering everything that I had just been exposed to over the past few days, I should have known better. What about my megastepped mind? Why did I not sense or see that it was about to hit the fan with all the ugliness of the universe? I guess even megastepped Eternals are human and have their flaws. For me, it was a matter of the newness - new friends, new music, new old lady, and new philosophy. Without warning, the teachings of the Masters were suddenly being externalized right before my eyes and it was everything I could do just to keep up. It almost felt like jet lag, with a vague combination of weakness, headache, and disorientation. All the previous study, meditation, psychedelics, music, and generally righteous living did not equip me for what was to follow. Well, of course that was true! Why else would the megastepping have been necessary? It felt like everything was going too fast. And what was the reason? Why was all of this happening? Was all of this for real?
And I wasn't too sure how much of the disorientation was coming from the megastepping procedure. Of course, I really appreciated the numerous changes in my physical body. Who wouldn't? I loved Pearl E. Mae's near-perfect body, but mine was pretty much the same, too. My opinion about the changes in my mind was not clear: I had mixed feelings. It is much easier to see what your abdominal wall looks like, but how do you visualize your memories? I can understand that certain synergisms are possible during MindLink/HeartLight, but you are experiencing the effect of seven minds. When MindLink/HeartLight is over, I don't have as much confidence and belief in my individual mind, I guess. Before becoming an Eternal, I never spent much time questioning my own mind. Not that meditation doesn't involve the mind, but what I usually have done in meditation requires that I still my mind, not explore all its nooks and crannies. And since the megastepping, I only know that my mind hooks up with others very easily during MindLink/HeartLight. My mind appears to have many more nooks and crannies than I ever imagined. Other than this, I really don't know.
The door bell begins ringing its "Close Encounters" melody. She-Ra and Bullet both run across the apartment to the front door, but neither one is barking. Sure sign that it's either Julian or Gabriella.
And it is Julian with a lit Winston and a large rolled spliff behind his left ear. He absentmindedly hands me the Winston, and I hand it back to him. Julian is very cool. He pretends that he doesn't notice my quick return of the cigarette, walks in a bit stiffly, and sits down on the couch. Bullet immediately gets up on the couch and tries to put his massive head into Julian's lap. This blows Julian's cool because he is a sucker for dogs too.
"Bullet, get off me. I need to put my head in your lap! Maybe you ain't seeing ghosts."
"Julian, that dog loves you whether you're seeing ghosts or not."
"Hey, Lyle, mon.... Gabriella's ghost be messing with me mind big time."
"Gabriella's what?"
"Her ghost be irritating me, mon. No matter what or how much I hit the spliff, her spirit still be there talking to me."
"Julian, are you being straight with me?"
"Lyle, mon, me be as straight as possible. It be Gabriella because I know her for sure. You remember that I know her before you, mon. We go back to Kingston."
"Why are you irritated by someone's spirit? If it's Gabriella spirit, why is she hassling you?"
"I say irritate, mon. I mean irritate. She be telling me foolishness. She be saying Watch out for Lyle like you be bad, mon. Like maybe you be killin' or hurtin' people. She look like maybe she have the bad spirits with her. Say you be with the Evil and Bad side."
"Gabriella never believed in any of that stuff."
Which is the truth. Gabriella shunned psychics and astrologers generally. She felt that such people took advantage of the poor and the ignorant. She would even point out examples of the well-heeled socialites pictured on video with their own seances and proclaim that the socialites were poor and ignorant also because they believed in such things. And Julian was conveying messages he feels came from Gabriella now in the thick of things in the spirit world which she maligned so much. Julian put out the Winston in the ash tray and fired up the lovingly rolled spliff. Bullet left his place on the couch and padded over to the other side of the room to avoid the billowing clouds of smoke from Julian and the spliff. Julian passed the spliff to me. I held it for a moment and, in a practiced gesture, passed it back to him. He seemed to ignore that I wasn't smoking because he didn't comment on it. Instead, he took a few deep tokes, and then passed the spliff to Pearl E. Mae, who also held it briefly and then passed it back to him. There was a moment of tension as Julian consciously decided to just hang on to the spliff himself. He continued:
"Gabriella, she say I must save you from those who are Evil. She sound very scary to me. I don't know how she knows, but she say to watch out for your new group. `Be crazy, but that's all. No more. Just that. Now maybe you feel like not me bro...."
"Hey, man...don't be silly! How can the best drummer in Coconut Grove not be my bro? And all the deep stuff we been through? Maybe Gabriella didn't believe in spirits, but I do. I'm sorry that her spirit is causing you so much pain. Maybe you're worried that I didn't know you were married to Gabriella in Jamaica when you both lived in Kingston."
Julian became very pale, because evidently I had hit upon something that had been a secret. Just after the words left my mouth, I realized that there was no reason for me to know this information, if, in fact, it were true. But I just didn't know why or how the knowledge came to me. Somehow, I had access to this information
"How you know this, mon?"
"I don't know, Julian. It just came into my mind."
"Well it be true. Blow me away because I never tell you. I never tell no people not Jamaican. How you know, mon?"
"Julian, maybe it's a part of my megastepped mind."
"Mega-who?"
"Megastepped means what the electrical nuclear discharge did to me. You remember. I already told you all about it, and you saw the changes in my body, immediately."
"Sure, sure. Your body look like for sure Man of God in Babylon. So why not same thing with your mind."
"So you understand. The mind has been transformed too. More sensitive and maybe more powerful. Because you and I are close already, I'm just much better now at getting into your vibration. Picking up information about you and Gabriella is probably a very simple demonstration of the transformations that my mind has been going through."
"You not be working for the Darkside. I don't feel it. If you were, I know I feel it. But why Gabriella say so much about you in danger and you work for Evil."
"I don't know, Julian. The truth is what I have told you. My understanding is that we Eternals are definitely on God's team and working for the good side. If the Eternals and the Guardians all believe in a Supreme Being, and manifest themselves on the physical plane in light, how could you consider any other possibility. Beings from the Forces of Darkness cannot manifest themselves on the physical plane, although they can affect physical plane events."
"Heavy, mon. Maybe me mind not be ready for all of this."
"Don't take it in all at once. You don't have to believe any of it if you don't want to."
"O.K., mon. But I want to tell you that I been with Gabriella this week, and last week, too. I did not want to screw my brother's woman, but I had a very strong feeling about never see her again. Couldn't help myself, mon. And I used a rubber, both times, too."
Julian hung out with us that morning in the duplex. We did our MindLink/HeartLight and let him sit in the circle with us. As a Rastafarian person, meditation was nothing new to him. He even went along with eyes-closed format and afterwards claimed he received a profound healing. He teared, spoke with obvious lump in his throat, and emotionally hugged each of us in turn. After letting the dogs out into the fenced yard and pool area, we closed up the apartment and all went down to the Peacock Cafe for breakfast. That is to say, Julian and I ate breakfast and the rest of us sipped on diet uncola.
So when we got back to the duplex and found the dogs dead, it was a stark, sadistic shock. Both Shepherds were floating, limp in the pool. Reality had just ripped the screen out from under me. I felt the universe crumbling in on me. It was not possible for both my dogs to be taken from me. At the same time. Bullet wasn't even full grown. They could not be dead. I turned on Bruce's GSR translator and speaker. The organic security system was fairly specific. According to Bruce's steady, buzzing GSR response, there had been no one there since we last left. It was simply too much for me to assimilate. Even with my megastepped vehicle. Grief is grief, and there was no way to get around it. Things became gloomier and gloomier, and I simply went mute. Julian took over and called the animal hospital. He told Dr. Michaels that I was getting ready to go off the deep end because we had just discovered both of my Shepherds floating dead in our pool. The vet from the office around the post office came over right after we called, checked out the animals, and then offered to have the dogs cremated for us. He saw what he said were classic findings of cyanide poisoning, and he drew blood specimens for later corroboration. I appreciated his offer to cremate She-Ra and Bullet, but refused. In a cracking voice, I told him I would take care of their burials.
The vet was tired-looking. Even his handle-bar mustache seemed to droop. We forced him to take $100 from us as payment for the house call. As he left the duplex, I felt myself start to lose it. I burst into tears. The machinery ground to a halt and I could only feel my pain for my beloved shepherds. I could see both She-Ra and Bullet alive and rough-housing around the apartment. It was exquisitely painful for me to look at either of their corpses. When I walked over to where their stiffening bodies were and sat down and hugged both of them, something really snapped inside me. It was fair for them to be dead and I really didn't know why it should happen, either. I sobbed uncontrollably and felt great pain within my chest in the heart space. As I continued to sob, the pain in my chest became transformed into a sensation of fire, and then into a sensation of liquid fire. My heart was filled with liquid fire. The common-sense objections to having liquid fire in one's chest were pushed from my consciousness in the grief of the moment. The molten liquid gushed out of my chest into the bodies of both dogs. The gushing continued for some moments, and then I realized that the Eternals were all sitting around me. Our HeartLight had turned on without my conscious awareness. I sat up, closed up eyes, and entered the second MindLink/HeartLight of the day. Yo-Vah appeared to us and asked what had transpired to cause him to hear and record my subjective grief and our collective distress. He was worried that it might have been some problems with dyssynchronisms because of the megastepping. His face grew more concerned when he heard about Bullet and She-Ra. Yo-Vah said that the Forces of Darkness had already begun their attempts at intimidation by extracting life energies from our pets. He reminded us that we would have no trouble reanimating them if we hurried up about it. The challenges of the problem, however, would evoke from us the requisite abilities. In fact, the liquid fire gush from my chest to the shepherds was one of our first signs of "the requisite abilities." Yo-Vah officially invited us to meet him at Kennedy Park that evening at which time the Eternals would get a tour of the saucer craft. He suggested that we leave the dogs inside with Al when we were gone, and he gave us a listing of hexadecimal code that Al could use for generating a randomly shifting pattern of low volume dissonant tones. These tone patterns could be used as a sonic net to protect the Eternals from transtemporal field-induction linking. Like the linking used by Forces of Darkness. This transtemporal application of field-induction linking enables the Forces of Darkness to parasitically drain the life energies from others who are in some way compromised. As Yo-Vah's image faded from our annealed One Mind, the group cohesion swiftly lifted me out of my paralyzing grief. The molten fire in my chest was transformed into blinding white light which surrounded all of us and temporarily blocked out awareness of anything other than the light. Although we were all enclosed and protected within the One Higher Mind of our MindLink/HeartLight, we could still feel an overall flickering of the light that happened two or three times. I sensed that this interruption was a purging of FOD induction links. This was a purging of the FOD transtemporal field-induction links that had been going up for the past few days. Our formation as a group and as an I.S.I. project for sure didn't go unnoticed by the FOD. And in clearing out whatever negative links were responsible for the shepherds' physical plane deaths, we had also made an energy connection to the Negative. Awareness of garbage is sometimes necessary before it is possible to flush it or vent it, even on an etheric, astral, or mental plane. Because we were aware of the Negative, we Eternals would have a more functional knowledge of MindLink/HeartLight by understanding FOD energies as random garbage to be carefully and assiduously cleaned out on a regular basis. Like tooth brushing and flossing.
I was never so happy to get a wet tongue in the face as when I came out of MindLink/HeartLight this time. Bullet, hair matted from his time in the pool, had crawled into my lap, and was licking my face. Talk about roller coaster highs and lows. Because She-Ra was still groggy on the floor, Pearl E. Mae brought out the spheres and we Eternals focused our energies consciously on the small gray shepherd by using the spheres together in the way that Yo-Vah taught us. Pearl E. Mae had even given the eighth sphere to Julian so that he could meditate on She-Ra with us and maybe understand how we were using the spheres. A small cloud of brilliant white light surrounded She-Ra. The energy cloud pulsated around She-Ra for what seemed to be a long time. I thought that our heart rates were all synchronized into the pulsation rate of the brilliant white light. At the moment that I perceived our synchronized heart rates, She-Ra was back up and in leaping good form. She jumped up and down in the air several times to express her general joyousness at finding all of us suddenly there. Tail wagging, she carefully went around to each person in the group to let them know how glad she was to be back. Julian, who had been cool all the way through, was now the one who was crying silently with the uncharacteristic tears staining his dashiki-shirt.
And I would really like to know why there were so many warnings
about the Forces of Darkness. I understand about what happened
with the dogs, at least about the part where we were able to bring
them back. But that's just good Eternals and new and improved
Medicine of the future. How the bad guys (or the bad energies) got
to my dogs I'll never know. The metal spheres were certainly an
unusual tool for Yo-Vah to gift us with. The spheres turn out to
manifest themselves at many different levels of reality - on the
physical plane and on the astral plane, for example. We were given
the spheres while all of us were out of body. We then took the
spheres with us back to the duplex while we were still out of
body. Then, after the MindLink/HeartLight, we were able to touch,
feel, and handle the metal spheres at a physical plane level.
When Yo-Vah spoke of virtual reality, he reminded us that the
Forces of Darkness were much more powerful in the provinces of
virtual realities. In a virtual universe, the FOD could run
roughshod in uncontrollable fashion. Terror, intimidation,
apathy, destructiveness, and hatred were all very possible and all
amplified as much as was allowed. But the obverse could easily
obtain. In a virtual virtual universe, everything was truly up for
grabs. The FOD was just as likely to be absolutely helpless in a
virtual virtual universe, because the operational rules were so
much more obscure and symbolic. The Forces of Light routinely
patrolled reality at multiple levels. The saucercraft travelled
just as well in virtual universes as in physical plane
here-and-now universes. Patrolling the physical plane occupied
most of the FOL's attention, given the temporal span that had to
be covered. Navigating virtual universes posed a severe
mathematical conundrum for any guidance system, so each Guardian
saucercraft usually comes equipped with a plasma guidance system
that does require a rocket scientist, or at least a good hacker to
operate it.
I really don't know how to find the plasma guidance area in the
controls. And I'm not sure about what is going to happen when I
press the various multicolored contact plates. The high-resolution
graphics look nearly three-dimensional and have chromatic
holographic patterns that are visually quite arresting and
distract me from learning what their functional significance
really is.
____________________
Julian said that he was going home and going to bed. That it had been much heavy a day for him already. We logged Julian on to one of Al's terminals, set up an account for him in the Unix network, and gave him a password and high-level access. Su-Shan explained to Julian how he could get into the apartment and inactivate the hexadecimal tone generator by letting Al recognize him. He always has had a key to my place, and now he was concerned about helping us see to it that the two shepherds were safe. We told Julian that we would be going out this evening and leaving the dogs in with Al. We walked him outside, and he and I hugged.
"You be clean now, mon. I know it. No problem, mon. God be with you. Truly sounds crazy, with all the stuff that's been happening. But it feels all right in my stomach, mon. You be O.K. Maybe Gabriella's spirit be telling me something different than what I hear, now."
"Thanks for telling me about Gabriella, man. Both of us still love her, and I'm glad we're straight on her. Maybe Dr. Tomorrow will have the privilege of two acoustic drum kits when you aren't busy with some other gig. You and Su-Shan open up a hole in the Earth's atmosphere, for sure."
"For sure my brother. I think you are into the big time now, mon. Your guitar even sounds better. I play with you any time, Lyle. But please be careful with evil and the dark side. Better not be mixed up with your music. I can sing for Jesus, and for The Lord, mon, but don't get me mixed up with any of that Devil stuff. Not your style, mon."
"Just for throwing out the garbage and housecleaning, Julian. Nothing else."
"The dark side be all around. Don't need no flying saucer man to tell me. But where you get the metal balls?"
"Those silver spheres? From the flying saucer man."
"I believe you, but don't mess with me mind. Make sure to talk to Bruce before you leave on that journey. Godspeed, mon."
We took leave of each other in the sweltering Miami sun under a couple of Royal Palms. By the time Julian got down to Bayshore Drive, he realized that he still had the silver sphere in his pocket. He would call later.
The Eternals were a bit sombre during their music rehearsal. Al was also unusually quiet. Yo-Vah had said that "the requisite abilities" would appear. That was definitely happening. "Requisite abilities" were appearing all over the place. Where did the recognition of the FOD, the dark side, or evil come in? All the negative was a necessary concomitant of the positive, and vice versa. Yet it was good AND evil, not good OR evil. There was a huge difference. Primitives nearly never grasped the philosophical implications of this difference. The Eternals did. They discussed it. Noman, who had spent at least one lifetime on a penal colony made a strong case for some musical compositions which had a mixture of dark and light features, so as to more efficiently process both positive and negative energies through the music and the music-making process. The reality of Life includes both positive and negative in the process.
The process loop included the musicians, so by extension, all the Eternals would be required to process potentially huge amounts of negative and positive energies while performing before an audience. The megastepped physical vehicles would be much more efficient than ordinary Earth bodies. The Eternals would be capable of processing the very energies that often facilitated horrendous excessive substance abuse by musicians who took the substances to feel more comfortable while processing the high-intensity energies. Precisely because of his megastepped condition, Lyle developed an exquisite understanding of how any performing musician could have trouble handling the energies of high-volume music production and a large audience to boot. But during rehearsal now, the Eternals aimed at producing a mixing board mellowness. The DAT recorder worked fine, and Lyle made a stereo mix off the board while they were rehearsing. The long minimalistic tune in open E minor was turning into a good Time Tunnel. Lyle programmed 200 bars of the tune into an older Yamaha keyboard that had built-in rhythms, and the tune synchronistically just turned out to loop nearly seamlessly at bar number 200. So it made for very long and drawn-out jams on top of a background suggesting Eastern themes and meditation. After the rehearsal, Lyle made a cassette dupe of the DAT and popped an ultraWalkman and ear buds into his bag with the notebook computer. Never know when they might have a chance to review the tape before the next rehearsal. And on a modern flying saucer, well, things would probably be so automated that listening to the tape would give Lyle something to do instead of twiddling his fingers.
The Eternals dressed in the Indian bedspread tunics that Pearl E. Mae had put together for the group. We were a little squeamish about leaving She-Ra and Bullet alone in the house, but we reprogrammed Bruce the talking Geranium and set up Al's hexadecimal sound net. We hugged both dogs and left. It was getting pretty dark by the time we got to Kennedy Park on South Bayshore Drive. We had to walk by Julian's house, but I didn't notice any signs of activity. We walked along the thin inlet of sulfur-smelling mangrove that divided up two lobes of the green running areas. At the ocean's edge, the park was bounded on one side by Rockerman Road and its canal. There were too many boats in the canal for anyone else to be able to get in there. So it seemed to me that the other green lobe of running area would be a more likely landing place for Yo-Vah. We walked over the curved wooden bridge at the ocean's edge that led from one side to the other. The sound of Monty's outdoor band was already reflecting off the waters in the islands and anchorages of Dinner Key. The side of Kennedy Park that was away from the urbanization of Rockerman Road had an area of quiet mangrove facing Monty Trainer's groups of Docks.
The transparent flying saucer was waiting there for us when we got there. As we approached the area that looked like trees and shadows from a distance, the saucer's outlines because quickly apparent. With a soft hum and a muffled vibration, a sparkling panel slid open to reveal Yo-Vah smiling at us. He extended a hand and we entered the craft single file. I was too overwhelmed by the novelty to notice the startled glance of recognition that Yo-Vah had given us for some reason. We were all impressed at how much bigger the saucer seemed inside. The internal structure was, for all intents and purposes, a forty foot geodesic dome with internal panelling made of a sparkling transparent material that resembled plastic more than metal. There were panels of controls everywhere that controlled, for one thing, the transparency or translucency of the individual walls. Some of the walls were not quite transparent, giving us a visual hint of the individual cabins looked like. The central chamber contained a tube-shaped compartment with a two level command center. Individual cabins were spaced like orange sections around the command center. Each cabin was subdivided into work and sleep areas. A superficial glance suggested that all the cabins were exactly alike with no variation in either furnishings or lighting.
The command center had more than enough recliners for all eight of us surrounded by a beautiful combination of different color displays and control panels. We manned the recliners at Yo-Vah's request and were treated a spectacular view of our own solar system as the craft left Earth's gravitational field with little more than a shimmy of the saucer. The g-force we experienced was barely more than your average jetliner taking off, but the craft itself was whisper quiet in comparison to a jet plane.
At close range, and when viewed in the flesh and from the flesh rather than an out of body perspective, Yo-Vah was less ephemeral and more humanlike. In fact, he really looked like an older guy with a lot of mileage. He had a grandfatherly air. There was still a strangely familiar cast to his face, but I could not catalog my response. Yo-Vah's ship turned out to be a high tech wonder, and not an imaginary reflective fantasy craft. The accelerated view of our solar system that was whizzing by on the full-circle surround screens resembled one of the PBS specials I have seen that showed the same view, except that it was simulated and much slower than Yo-Vah's craft which was deftly burning a path straight for the Milky Way. At least that's what it looked like to us. Now, even in my megastepped days, I am not an astronomer, but the simulated screen was showing what looked liked clumps of stars that seemed to be going by incredibly fast, and I said so. Yo-Vah laughed good-naturedly and explained that saucers always travelled in bursts of speed to help conserve power and cut down on entropy disorganization. He said that we were travelling at intermittent bursts that were ten times the speed of light towards what I called the Milky Way because that is where the closest Time Zone Interchange Area was located. These areas were set up by the I.S.I. to help preserve whatever degree of integrity still remained in the Entropy Equations. Making time transits through the Interchanges minimized the associated problems like entropic scatter, dyssynchronism, and time shock. I.S.I. agents set up the Karmic Ring defenses at Time Zone Interchange Areas to help preserve crucial relationships across time and other dimensions. The Karmic Ring defenses were also something like the metal and explosive detectors in our airports. Atavistic metals, as determined by Carbon dating or other isotope techniques, set off alarms in the Guardian network. Usually, the metals were gold, silver, or platinum or - in the case of Primitive travellers
I was the only Eternal who had never been in a spacecraft, but there was little time for incredulous wide-eyed reactions. Yo-Vah told us that the Karmic Rings allowed time dimensional shifts with minimum disturbance of universal entropy. He would be able to take us into our own future to demonstrate the truth of what he had told us. I reminded Yo-Vah that I was not able to understand any of the lettering or inscriptions on the control panels. He chuckled again, and there was something very familiar about the chuckle. The back of my mind reached for a memory, but I came up with a blank, and then forgot about the memory as I turned to my attention to what Yo-Vah was doing. He made some movements on the panel before him with his fingers and the main viewing screen went blank. Then the other screens went blank. The same pulsating flash of color now appeared on each of the screens. The pulsation continued for at least several minutes. It felt like I was getting a headache, which is very atypical for me because I never get headaches. After the headache sensation passed, a feeling of clarity emerged. My eyes could read the lettering and inscriptions on the control panel, just as though the panels had all been written in English. But part of my brain still somehow knew that the symbols were definitely not English. There were still a lot of mathematical symbols which I could grasp only with my imagination. It was possible to pick out one digital display which read "2105", and I wondered silently if I were going to have the chance to observe myself die.
Yo-Vah said I would not see myself. Ignoring my startled expression, he continued on to indicate that we would be at a very safe distance from Earth's solar system. We were not supposed to view the final cataclysmic event directly within the solar system because it might produce very dangerous debris. As we approached the Karmic Rings, there was nothing special to be seen on the viewer. Yo-Vah told us we would feel nothing in particular as we made a time-dimensional transfer other than the blinking lights because the technology of interdimensional travel had been made very safe and smooth by the I.S.I. techniques.
He tapped a rhythm on a part of the main control panel, and the large central screen abruptly switched to an excellent color version of Star Wars. I was the only Eternal who was shocked and surprised by us. Yo-Vah confessed that my Primitive planet produced some of the best albeit primitive science fiction entertainment. One paradoxical reason for the popularity of Earth's films was the excessive dwelling upon violent and destructive themes. Such art forms (except for Primitive planets and solar systems) were generally forbidden as negatively contaminating by the Guardians and the I.S.I. But Earth and its solar system were notorious throughout the future because of the entertainment value of Primitive violence. Even evolved beings occasionally appreciated escapism. As I watched the Empire trying to strike back, I noticed that the other Eternals were enraptured with the sleek Hollywood flash. We had not had much time to watch television during the past four days. Yo-Vah understood the fascination that the other Eternals had. All Guardians of the future were very very fond of Earth culture movies, books, and some music. Despite the extinction of the Primitive planet, science fiction movies of twentieth century Earth especially conveyed a powerfully charming view of the future for those beings who actually lived in the future. Possibly because of the vast numbers of forbidden behaviors to be found in Earth movies, Guardians enjoyed them as purely escapist, as physical violence and destructiveness simply do not exist on a regular basis during the times of the I.S.I. Of course there was still plenty potential for negativity. Destructive instruments of the future have become so efficient that the rare examples of violence and/or destructiveness can produce individual or planetary death with equal facility. But criminal types in the times of the I.S.I. are really rare. Since systematic detection of the intratemporal rip-offs began, the actual incidence of the crimes had been slowly down exponentially. The amount of intratemporal ripping off that occurred before the I.S.I. installed the Karmic Rings was so great, that a critical amount of negative momentum had been gained. The known universe was experiencing entropy imbalance to such an extreme degree that the imbalance had long ago began ripping through the time barriers. So the actual entropy imbalance of the universe reflected backwards into the past from the future. The sins of the children began to be visited upon the great great great grandfathers. Then the retrograde effects, once started, continued to manifest more and more intensely. Burgeoning violence and destructiveness began to amass into retrotemporal pockets of Primitive cultures where the behaviors were either permitted or actively sanctioned. The destructive retrotemporal effects were also cumulative, and the I.S.I. had become very alarmed with the recorded extinction of more than 50% of the Primitive planets known to and charted by the Guardians of the I.S.I. When two planets that were definitely not Primitive, but possibly borderline, began to show signs of cultural backsliding with intermediate scale physical plane violence, the I.S.I. reasoned that possibly the retrotemporal effects were beginning to threaten civilized cultures. Thus something had to be to slow or otherwise control the entropic degradation. So DR TOMORROW was born as a project, one of three aimed at helping to correct the entropy imbalance of the universe. Violence and destructiveness have largely been weeded out in the far future of 32,000 A.D., but the intratemporal ripping off that went on between the years 28,000 and 32,000 was enough to guarantee dreadful repercussions to the past. As long as the repercussions were wiping out only Primitive life forms, no one got too upset. But when life forms clearly not Primitive began having serious problems, and then started regressing into Primitive cultural activities, the I.S.I. clearly discerned a pattern of possible ultimate danger if unchecked or uncontrolled. The I.S.I. were never certain that entropy imbalance was a puzzle with a solution, but all the Guardians generally hoped that the imbalance could be cut off at its source and then also possibly harmonized.
Yo-Vah explained all of this to me. The other Eternals all seemed to be listening also with one ear but gluing most of their attention on the science fiction movie. I assumed that they already knew the facts we were hearing. What a universe!
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD) #1054, spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar, and a couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a Mac IIsi running MOTU's `Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part of a Ph.D. Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR TOMORROW is a project that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional wellness learning system. Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube, several Macs, numerous stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and Bullet. `DR TOMORROW' and `Project Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two scientific activities of Life Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588, Miami, Florida 33133.
DR TOMORROW will be continued next issue.
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu