Earth: After the Relief

Albert went home. Everyone went home. Work as they knew it stopped. But basic services continued as the new work began. Everyone had something to do. They worked without pay. There was no need for pay. They worked for the joy of it. Great things were to be accomplished and their needs were taken care of. Finally, everyone was equal. No one had more than another because everyone had enough.

 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 otherwise 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 aluminum 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 in the mother ship, to become part of future Universal Explorers to come. Nothing was wasted.

 It was necessary for the Projectors to disappear as soon as possible. By turning night into nearly day, the Sense Projectors would have eventually 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 moon, even more luminous than the first, the Collective communicated through all of the Earth's communication systems, enlisted for the Reformation.

 The relief made everyone feel good. All diseases were cured and other infirmities disappeared, but physical defects had to be dealt with. Doctors and technicians were able to assist by recreating all of anyone's missing or damaged organs or body parts with ease. Deaths stopped. Births became the option of each 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 age at any time, so experimentation with childhood and old age was possible. Many tried it. to their delight.

 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 Northern Hemisphere, 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 previously thought bad, were really good. Ideas held up for good that were not, 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 habitats. Natural habitats that had been damaged were 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. Pets were returned to the wild. Farming became a matter of gathering crops, insects, birds and weak animals from fallow fields and forests. Previously unthought-of processes extracted nutrients from wild plants, insects, and animals without disturbing their populations or reproductive cycles.  Natural selection and species diversification continued as it had for millions of years before man’s intervention and domestication.

 The Choosing, Six Months Later

 The Reformation was 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 University had been turned into a huge laboratory overnight. Albert worked long hours there, from dawn into late each night, and 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, Albert and his students 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 were being constructed from the elemental components of asteroids, small moons, and space debris. The required energy was gleaned from the Sun and the processes themselves. Harvesting the asteroids removed the long present great danger of collisions with the Earth and its emerging colonies. Mining ships traveled great distances into the Oort Cloud to harvest comets and other debris used to build the ships, which were near identical copies of the Universal Explorer. Soon, more than 5,000 had been built. Those selected to build and man the ships 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 came the time to choose: who would stay, and who would go with whom. It was a simple process. 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 its life in the life of its sun, perhaps fifteen billion years more, baring those cataclysmic events, so rare, that would render the entire planet or solar system 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 asteroid, 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 the Explorer and its sheer complexity. While 951 Gaspra and thousands of asteroids and comets like it would be sacrificed for the Reformation, the planets and their satellites, with the exception of a few very small, gaseous ones, would go unscathed. Albert 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, Albert chose to join in the adventure of bringing relief of others to come.

The Wish

 As a reward for choosing, each person was given a wish. Albert's wish was easy. He wished to be with Esther again. His wish came to pass. Esther's restoration was a task Albert 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. And then, taking the lock of hair he'd saved from the accident site, grew the first cell. The cell divided. And 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, Esther's clone 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 had shed tears at her graveside. It was a lovely spring day. The hillside was alive with the color of redbud, forsythia, and azalea. The sky was a deep blue and the new grass greener than ever. Everything was more vivid than he remembered from the Greenback days that seemed so long ago now. Honeybees 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 setting fit for what Albert was about to do. The warmth of it all buoyed his heavy heart.

  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 great historical significance, would be eroded or overgrown until they became a part of the natural landscape. The beetles, worms, and microbes would have long since consumed the last visages of the beings that had been so carefully lain there.

 Albert had come to exhume her physical memory. The remains of Esther's crushed body were still there, encapsulated in a closed coffin in Puerto Rico that had never been opened. Though he'd never been there, Esther's gravesite was easy to find. Albert placed his backpack on the ground 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. Her brain tissue was still remarkably intact, containing all of her memory in the dried remains of what once had been living neurons. It took Albert only five minutes for a non-evasive probe to replicate Esther's memory chemically in the memory cells of a liter-sized container he carried.

  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 his beloved Esther. A half hour later, Albert landed in the courtyard at Howard, and, carrying the memory cell in his hand like a running baton, leapt up the steps three at a time to his lab. She looked so peaceful--now fully grown, floating with her eyes closed in the embryonic fluid. Occasionally Esther's clone 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.

 To be fully Esther, Albert had to bring back her memory of him, minus that fateful night of horror. With an instrument similar to the one that exhumed Esther's mind, he infused her stored memory back into the young brain of her other self.   Her eyelids twitched, but otherwise, she did not respond.  Albert could feel the emotion overwhelm him again.  Albert wept.

 Albert still wept as he fled the lab, impatient to hold his love again in his arms. He would have to wait only two days, the scheduled time of Esther's rebirth. But, at the pace he was going, it seemed a lifetime—too long.  With each minute his anxiety grew.

  Latasha, one of his former interns, passed him on the way out. Noticing his rush, his failure to acknowledge her, and a tear in his eye, she cried out, "Dr. Repaul. Are you crying?" 

 "I'm sorry, Latasha. I didn't see you. I'm so happy. My wife, Esther, will be back soon." Albert stepped down for a moment from his cloud of excitement to assure Latasha 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 near another S-Type asteroid. Albert acknowledged Latasha with a smile and emerged from 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 Esther out of the fluid. As she transitioned from breathing the oxygen-rich fluid to air, Esther gasped a bit, but soon her breathing returned to the normal rhythm of the fully-grown sleeping beauty she now was. Albert lowered her to the leather upholstered examining bed next to the tank, removed the sling and began toweling the clinging fluid from her now restless body. As he wiped the fluid from the eyes and face of Esther's perfect twin, Albert couldn't help but kiss her lips. Albert was surprised to find this newborn beauty 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. And then there was a terrible pain in my side I couldn't bear.... And 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 like the child she was 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 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 Upper Peninsula retreat for a week in the wilderness, just emerging from heavy winter snow. In another week, they would be boarding for 951 Gaspra.