Earth: After the Relief
Albert went home. Everyone went home. Work stopped. But basic services continued. Everyone had something to do.
It took a week for the sky to clear in some areas under storm, for the summoned ones to come out of caves, under water, in self or other imposed exile in buildings, prisons, and sewers. But they came, they all came and got relief. For those who were blind, brain damaged, or comatose, doctors and technicians devised wondrous instruments from simple materials like tin cans, paper, and cast off plastic. Parabolic receivers replaced eyes, and tiny probes directly relayed relief to the brain. When each Sense Projector had relived every soul in its inventory, it mysteriously disappeared, back to the womb of its making, to become part of future Universal Explorers to come. Nothing was wasted.
It was necessary for the Projectors to disappear. By turning night into nearly day, they would have upset the ancient rhythm of life on the planet. Most creatures, large and small, were genetically dependent on the cycle of the Moon. There was no need to upset this rhythm. The Explorer came out from its hiding place and matched the Moon's orbit. From this second, more luminous, moon, the Collective communicated through all of the Earth's communication systems, enlisted for the Reformation.
The relief made everyone feel good. It cured all diseases and most infirmities, but physical defects had to be dealt with. As with affecting relief, doctors and technicians were able to assist by recreating all of anyone's missing or damaged organs or body parts with ease. All deaths were stopped. Births became the option of the individual. Forward and reverse growth accelerators were easily developed that allowed a person to grow into the age they wanted to be. Most people chose eighteen. They could change at any time, so experimentation with childhood and old age was possible. Few tried it.
The communists had won. Just when everyone thought the capitalistic system would drive the future of government for the world, the relief had made everyone truly equal. Personal property suddenly had no value. There were only two kinds of things: those that would be saved and those that would be recycled. It wasn't Spring in most of the world, but spring cleaning was underway.
Everyone communicated with the Collective. There was no dissension. It was easy to agree when one saw the other side clearly. With fear eliminated, everything became possible. Some ideas thought bad, were really good. Ideas held up for good, in the light of the Collective, had to be, and were easily, abandoned.
The Earth was in transformation. Albert was a part of the freeing of the biosphere. All animals in zoos and theme parks were returned to perfect health and returned to their natural habitat. Natural habitat that had been damaged was restored or freed from further degradation. The means for sustaining human life were rapidly transformed to mesh with the life cycle of the planet itself, like when all humans were hunters and gatherers. Domesticated animals were returned to the wild. Farming became gathering from fallow fields. Unthought of processes extracted nutrients from wild plants, insects, and animals without disturbing their populations or reproductive cycles.
The Choosing, Six Months Later
These things were happening at an unimagined pace. While it would take hundreds of years for natural processes to restore the balance of nature to a primal state, the knowledge of the Collective set the Reformation from a human centered planet to a life centered planet in a few short months. Howard had been turned into a huge laboratory overnight. Albert worked long hours, from dawn into late each night, then walked lightly back to his apartment to dream vivid dreams of the possibilities before him. Soon, as Spring emerged, he and his students shuttled to the UP via atmospheric craft provided by the Explorer. Except for sites deemed of historic value, they participated in a great dismantling of the visages of two centuries of intrusion upon the land. The materials from the dismantling became fuel for the wondrous technologies being produced to create living environments of incredible efficiency and beauty. Albert and the others then turned their energies to the great task at hand--creating arks--other ships like the Universal Explorer.
The construction project was immense. An endless stream of small ferries, gravity defying and comfortable beyond words, lifted the Earth's population to the Universal Explorer and beyond. In the Asteroid Belt, a multitude of identical ships was being constructed from the elemental components of the asteroids, small moons, and space debris. The energy needed was gleaned from the Sun and the processes, themselves. Harvesting the asteriods removed the long present great danger of collisions with the Earth and the emerging colonies. Mining ships traveled great distances into the Oort Cloud to harvest comets and other debris used to build the ships, near identical copies of the Universal Explorer, until over 5,000 were built. People to build and man them were chosen for their knowledge, interest, and skills. There was no ethnic, racial, or national grouping. Everyone understood their role and worked together.
And so it was when it came time to choose: who would stay, and who would go with who? It was easy. Only a billion souls, the Caretakers, would remain in the Solar System. Of those, only a million would live on Earth's surface, watching the species evolve. The rest would choose ships going off in every direction, with a mission to relieve other planets, as yet, unknown.
The planet Earth, in the hands of its Caretakers, armed with the knowledge of the Collective and the Universal Intelligence, now stood a chance to live out the life of its sun, perhaps fifteen billion years, baring those cataclysmic events, so rare, that would render the entire planet lifeless.
Albert chose a ship being built on the far side of 951 Gaspra, an asteroid 17 by 10 kilometers across, roughly the shape of an anvil, in orbit midway between Mars and Jupiter. 951 Gaspra was being dismantled to build the ship and provision it. 951 Gaspra was an S-Type asteriod, rich in nickel and iron, the building blocks of a relief ship's structure. It also contained enough water to maintain life processes until the ship, at near light speed, began gathering hydrogen and oxygen ions in its path through space. Even though he understood the processes taking place, Albert couldn't help marvel at the scale of it and its sheer complexity. While 951 Gaspra and thousands of asteroids like it would be sacrificed for the Reformation, the planets and their sub planets, like the Moon, except for a few very small, gaseous ones, would go unscathed. He had thought he would be a Caretaker, one of those who would stay behind and colonize the Moon, Mars, Ganymeade, Callisto,Titan, Europa, and even Venus and Mercury, two planets once thought inhospitable to human life. But, when it came down to his final choice, he chose to join in the relief of others to come.
The Wish As a reward for choosing, each one was given a wish. Albert's wish was easy. He wished to be with Esther again. It came to pass.
Esther's restoration was a task he couldn't leave to Johns Hopkins. The knowledge he'd received from the relief enabled him to grow her in his lab. First he built a womb. Then, taking the lock of hair he'd saved from the accident site, he grew the first cell. The cell divided. Then, divided again. In the nutrient-rich, 98.6 degree Fahrenheit, embryonic fluid of its artificial womb, Esther's clone grew from embryo to fetus in a few, short days. There was no birth at nine months. An eighteen year old creature of unimaginable beauty was grown to full stature in two weeks. While she was the identical twin to his beloved, she was still a blank slate. It was easy to infuse her with the knowledge of the Collective. Also easy for her to assume Albert's memory of her--a simple brain tap accomplished that--but, regaining her original memory was more difficult. It required a pilgrimage to her other body.
Two days before Esther's return, Albert traveled alone by atmospheric craft to that hillside cemetery in West Virginia where, many years before, he couldn't bear to see her being buried. It was a lovely Spring day. The hillside was alive with the color of redbud, forsythia, and azalea in bloom. The sky was so blue and the new grass so green. Honey bees and songbirds filled the warm air with their happy sounds. The poor little church cemetery had been transformed by Spring into a magical place. A fitting setting for what he was about to do.
Cemeteries were of little use to the relieved. Except for wishes like Albert's, the dead would remain in the Earth. In the course of time, all of the monuments, except those of historical significance, would be eroded or overgrown until they became a part of the natural landscape. The beetles, worms, and microbes long since consuming the last visages of the beings so carefully laid there.
He'd come to exhume her memory. The remains of her crushed body were still there, encapseled in her closed coffin, sealed in Puerto Rico and never opened. Though he'd never been there, her grave was easy to find. He put down his back pack and removed the instruments he'd fashioned back at the lab. With a wand-like locator, it didn't take long to locate her brain, about thirty centimeters from her headstone, and 1.875 meters beneath the grassy surface. It was still remarkably intact, containing all of her memory in its dried remains of what once had been living neurons. It took only five minutes for a non evasive probe to replicate Esther's memory in the memory cells of a liter-sized container. Albert was overcome with emotion. He wept openly, to no one but the birds and bees on that idyllic hillside, knowing that he'd soon be reunited with her. A half hour later, he landed in the courtyard at Howard, and bounded up the steps to his lab.
She looked so peaceful, now fully grown, floating with her eyes closed in the embryonic fluid. Occasionally she would twitch a finger or kick her leg, a sign that she was fully alive. A sleeping beauty, waiting for her prince to kiss her and bring her back to life. First he had to bring back her memory of him, lost that fateful night of horror. With an instrument similar to the one that exhumed her mind, he infused her stored memory back into her other self. He wept again as he fled the lab, impatient to hold her again in his arms. He would have to wait two days, the scheduled time of her rebirth. LaTasha, one of his former students, passed him on the way out. "Dr. Repaul. Are you crying?" She inquired.
"I'm sorry. I'm so happy. My wife will be back soon." Albert stopped for a moment as if to assure her that nothing was wrong.
"I'm so happy to hear that, Dr. Repaul. I hope I get to meet her before I leave for 243 Ida." LaTasha was referring to her pending assignment to one of the relief ships being built by the S-Type asteriod. Albert acknowledged and headed out the building into the fragrant spring evening. He dined on venison and memories, and like an excited kid, couldn't sleep.
Two days later, at precisely 3:00:00 EST, with a mesh sling positioned under her gorgeous naked body, Albert lifted her out of the fluid. As she transitioned from breathing the oxygen-rich fluid to air, she gasped a bit, but soon her breathing returned to the sleeping beauty she now was. He lowered her to the leather upholstered examining bed next to the tank, removed the sling and began toweling the fluid from her now moving body. As he wiped the fluid from her eyes and face he couldn't help but kiss her. He was surprised to find her kissing back. As her eyes opened, big and bright, Esther exclaimed, "Oh, Baby! I was dreaming that I died. I was driving in a terrible storm. Then, there was a terrible pain in my side I couldn't bear. .... Then, you were hovering over me, tending my every need. I could feel you, smell you, even taste you, but I couldn't open my eyes and see you or hold you in my arms. I'm so glad that I woke up from that awful dream."
Albert realized that he was hugging and kissing his naked creation and remembered that he hadn't prepared anything for her to wear. A lab smock was called to service. Esther gladly skipped home with Albert barefoot and without underwear on that cool spring evening. They dined on Lake Superior Lake Trout, baby potatoes, Albert's hand baked bread, and the elderberry wine. The wine made Esther tipsy like the eighteen year old schoolgirl she now was. Soon, they were in bed, where she freely gave him her virginity for a second time.
In the morning, they air lifted to what remained of Albert's UP retreat for a week in the wilderness, just emerging from heavy winter snow. In another week, they would be boarding for 951 Gaspra.