Ascension - YJA-2017

I rushed to follow the gurney where my son lay, strapped down and pale as a ghost, barely breathing. Confusion. The world blurred and then sharpened. For a moment all was silent.

Then fear stabbed my belly over and over with hot white pain, and everything was hyper-focused and rushed into me all at once, making me dizzy and somewhat disoriented. I had one goal. Stay with Blane.

The flash of police lights and emergency vehicles, the rough shouts of men and women, the nauseatingly bright yellow-green of the EMTs vest, the multicolored cars rolling by slowly, faces gawking, phones out to film, the sight of blood, the smell and taste of copper and exhaust, the heat of the pavement, the refraction of the light on the smashed glass of the windshield throwing rainbows onto the crushed car, onto my hand, the glint of sun off the chrome of the ambulance — it all crashed into my senses with surreal and dizzying intensity.

There was a professional sense of panic in the air as the EMT’s and ambulance personnel rushed to lift him into the back of the vehicle, where I could see the neat organization of equipment and a woman ripping open a syringe to fill it with something from a med bottle.

“Go, go, go!” someone shouted as I threw myself up into the back to ride with them, dodging the fast paced, methodical motions of the men and woman trying to save my boy. Oh God he was turning grey and his lips were tinging purple. There was blood.

The doors slammed shut, the engine roared and the siren blared out. We lurched forward. I struggled for balance for a moment, on my metal bench where I tried to just stay out of the way while they worked. They ignored me and I did my best to become the wall.

They slapped electrodes on and a monitor while I watched, frozen, quiet, shocked. His pulse was very slow, his blood pressure tanking, his oxygen levels at 89 percent. 89? That was low, wasn’t it?

“He’s crashing…”

“Lungs filling…”

“…Internal bleeding?”

It all hit me in that moment. He was dying. Blane was dying…

“Oh God Oh God Oh God…” I prayed internally, my heart a shaman’s drum, the pounding of my pulse meeting the rhythm of that call. “Let him Live!” I shouted inside my mind to every angel, every god, to the Source of All Being, to the vast infinite void with a primal, desperate scream, throwing my anguish into the heavens, asking, demanding, defiant. I felt them listening up there, watching, all those Devine Beings who could do Something when we mere mortals had failed. And then I slumped, closing my eyes for a minute, struggling against tears.

It was an accident. He was driving. A truck was changing lanes and didn’t see him. He honked. We slammed the side-rail on the rider’s side while the truck plowed into us, metal screeching like a banshee, a blur of terror and pain. Then utter stillness. We were trapped against the truck and the safety railing. I couldn’t move.

It seemed like forever before someone came to help. Then ambulances arrived screaming along with police and EMTs. Jaws of Life cut us out. I was fine, somehow, but Blane…

“My baby,” I whispered, tears rolling down my cheeks as I saw all too clearly how fragile he was, how near to crossing over, to letting go. “You can do it. Think of all you have yet to do! Think of your dreams, your just starting college, think of your LIFE. Oh God…”

I felt dizzy and suddenly, disoriented, everything was running together like a watercolor painting and I was drowning in weeping colors…


I was sitting in the ICU watching monitors and seeing the “tree” of medicines next to his bed with IV lines snaking and tangling up to his arm, where a PICT-line had been surgically inserted. He was intubated, a machine breathing for him. Chest tubes leaked bloody fluid from his body into plastic containers - four of them. His oxygen was back to 99% and his color was much better. I had the oddest sensation that I missed something…that I couldn’t remember quite how I got to the room. Shock, I told myself. I’m in shock.

I tried to catch up, wondering how I could really have forgotten everything that led to him getting here…must have been a couple of hours at least.

A pair of doctors walked in, flipping through Blane’s chart. “He’s responding but we’ve got to get him into surgery today…I’ve got him scheduled to go in…” he checked his watch, “at 3:00, so we need to send him down in about an hour.”

Surgery? What was wrong? I cleared my throat to ask but the doctors were leaving already. I stood up and followed them to the door. Suddenly I grew dizzy and realized I wasn’t okay. I needed to sit back down. I dropped, squatting, my head between my knees until the feeling passed. Then I crawled back to my chair, pulling myself into it to close my eyes for a moment, then I looked back at Blane in the bed.

I blinked. My son’s bed was in a slightly different position, there was a second “tree” of medicines to go with the first one, and a doctor, a woman, whom I didn’t see or hear enter the room, was standing over him. I stood carefully, and went beside her to look and saw she was checking the surgical sites. There was an incision up the middle of his abdomen with what looked like hundreds of stitches. I gasped. They’d opened him up to stop the internal bleeding. I felt dizzy again.

The room became bright for a moment, a high pitched ringing entered my brain and I staggered, grabbing the rail of his bedside. I opened my eyes. The doctor was gone. My son stood next to me, looking down at the incision on his belly. I gasped. “Blane?”

He looked at me, his handsome face wistful. “It’s okay, mom, I just don’t want to be in there right now. They said this was okay.”

“Who said it was okay? What is happening?” I looked back and forth from his broken body on the bed to him standing next to me, whole and radiant.

“I don’t know what they are, but they said it was okay. Look, mom, I’m going to come through all this. It’s going to change everything, but it’s the beginning of something new. They told me about it. I’ve got a mission now. I’m going to become a doctor when this is all over. And I’m going to make a difference.”

“A doctor? That’s great! But…”

“Mom,” he said, taking my hands, “I heard all your prayers. Your encouragement. You helped me make the decision to stay.”

“What?”

“I heard you. Now it’s time for you to go. They’re waiting.”

“What?” I said again, a panic setting in.

“You didn’t make it, Mom,” Blane said, his eyes shining with tears. “You…you hit the windshield and died while we waited for help. I held your hand. I tried to tell you I loved you but I couldn’t talk. But it’s okay. You will be able to see me from where you are going, if you want. You can keep track of me. They said that you could. And we’ll meet up when it’s all over.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending, unwilling, stunned. The room grew brighter around him, until the hospital was gone, and he was the only one there, with me, in an amorphous light, a vast space with no real floor, no ceiling, no “place” to it other than a sense of “presence.”

“It’s okay,” he said again. “It’s my turn to encourage you, Mom. I’ll be fine. You just get to go Home first, and me and Dad and Ivy, we will all see you soon, before you know it really. You need to let go of me now…”

It was then that I saw the strange cord that went from my heart directly to his, like a tether. The sense of “presence” grew stronger around me.

“Abigail…” came a voice through the light, a figure emerging next to us, as if crossing through a veil.

“M-Mom?” I said, choking on the word.

“I’m here, Abby. Time to come Home…” She drifted closer into my view and reached out her hands for me, just like when I was a girl.

I turned to Blane and hugged him, tightly, smelled him, trying to keep the scent of my beautiful boy with me. He hugged back fiercely and we hung there, poised between worlds. Then slowly I released him and he, me.

He faded from my sight, like a ghost, just…turning back into light. I turned to my Mom, and she took my hand. “Hold on, Abby.” And so I did. I followed her into the light, became light…

There was a sound, then, like the rushing of a waterfall, and a sucking sensation and I went senseless for a drifting moment…or day…or eternity…I could not feel time passing.

A screen came up in front of me while I floated, my life played over in front of me, a sort of multi-sensory Highlight Reel that kept pulling me to see and feel and experience from some omniscient point of view — my whole messy, tangled, life. Mostly I noticed the times that made me feel terrible and guilty, the mistakes, at first, and it felt like I must be in Hell…I would dive down into the experience and feel not only what I felt at the time, but how I made others feel and react.

Everything I had done, like a drop in a pond, rippled out and effected everyone around me, and they in turn, effected me, and then I began to see the times that my ripples not only touched someone, but helped them, brought them joy and opened them up to love or happiness. It felt like that was the whole damn purpose of being alive, those moments when my actions touched someone else with joy, and their joy radiated out from them, illuminating and rippling in turn…

It was music, a symphony of harmony layered out over years refracting and amplifying throughout the world to places I could not have imagined. How powerful we are, in this small way. How unimaginably glorious, to touch and be touched by waves of harmonious good…

I had learned that everything is interconnected, everything matters, everyone is at their core a bit of the Light, a generator of Joy and this wonderful interlocking music…I floated in ecstasy, in unimagined waves of bliss, of Love of the Harmony…and then suddenly the uncomfortable sucking sound returned, followed by a massive “POP!”

Watery forms called in the distance. “Aaaa-bbbyyyy…” I tried to swim to them. “She isn’t detaching fully…” “Aaaa-bbbyyy….we neeeeeeed to get you ouuuuuut nowwwwwww.” I tried to get to them, I tried, but I felt stuck somehow. “Thiisssss will hurrrrrrrrt for a mmmmmoommment….”

SNAP!

I jolted upright with a red fire screaming through me and a wail coming out of my mouth to match it. “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” I yelled over and over as a terribly bright light pierced my eyes and I could feel strangers and my Mom surrounding me.

A terrifying blur of sensation and pain, of sound and light and touch and an explosion in my head so that everything strung together and I could not differentiate what I was sensing or where I was, only arms and voices everywhere, holding me tight, too tight and I screamed and screamed and screamed until my voice was ragged and my mind grew blank…

“She’s here,” came the strange voice. I opened my eyes, and there I was. My memory flooded back to me. D’Alisk was in front of me, his doctor’s coat (or was it a wizard’s robe?) wrapped around his middle. His long grey fingers, with the delicate scales, brushed my cheek. I looked into the vast black of his almond eyes and he made a soothing sound. I dipped my chin down in respect.
My mother. I sensed her next. She was gripping my arm. I looked at her, at my body, and I realized I was out of the HADES Machine (Holographic Accelerated Direct Education Simulator).

I had already been through three ‘lives,’ I remembered, in which I was able to download both the experience and skills necessary to complete my elementary courses in the Humanities (or Human-entities as we liked to call it) for my World Walker track.

You had to learn what it was to be one of those in the lower realms before you could achieve Mastery, to be on the elite Primary Interface Team.

Tears welled in my eyes. So much wasted potential, so much pain, so much unnecessary suffering… I hoped to be an Architect of Harmony, to create a better life for those on Earth by working with the raw structure of Consciousness as it interfaced with the human world below. There was no other work that could possibly mean as much to me as that. Working with the free will control system of Earth was a huge challenge, and so far efforts to moderate and support life there kept getting…well…blown to hell.

“Did I pass this time?” I asked, my voice weak and raw.

“Yesss,” said Dr. D’Alisk. “You will go on to your next level.”

“Thank you,” I said politely, remembering my manners. Pride and joy leapt into my chest. I smiled and brushed my tears away.

“Do you sssseee now?”

“Yes, Dr. D’Alisk. I understand…” Words failed me, but he did not need a verbal testament, he had the Log, which I’d viewed before my rather rough extraction.

HADES hummed slightly. I couldn't help but wonder at how the other students in the vast laboratory who were plugged into the Machine, were also inside the holographic projection of one of the infinite universes, learning, just as I had been, or working to evolve creatures worthy of Ascension. Some of them stayed for a hundred lifetimes. I would be considered a prodigy to only take three tries to learn all I needed to before fulfilling my educational requirements.

I could feel the vibration of the projector now in my limbs, a deep thrum underneath the floor. I took a deep breath then. I was back to being myself again! Dr. D’Alisk turned and went off down the hall to attend to others.

I swung my legs over the edge of the Chair and stood, slowly, feeling the coolness of the floor on my bare feet along with the thrum of the Projector. As the most advanced human species (homo sapiens sapiens-alpha-omega), my genetically designed body-mind was perfect and healthy, complete with bio-nanobot technology that allowed me to live as long as I wished to, in youthful vigor.

My long, thick black braid swung over my shoulder. I smiled at it, at the familiarity of it, and its beauty. I smiled at my mother, who looked not much older than myself, and realized how much it was like looking into a kind of time-mirror, as I was her genetic progeny.

(continued)

I often wondered what happened when we died, not in the Machine, but here in Reality. Rumor had it, that this was just another Level, but just as I could not imagine my own world while within the Machine, I could not imagine the next Reality either…My mind shot through with a vision of infinite nesting dolls after which was the Source, which both encompassed them, manifested them and WAS them, as well as it’s own being…But it was gone before I really understood what I saw. I paused, catching my breath. Source was the final point, to become the All of the Code. I sucked in a breath at this revelation, like a download searing into my consciousness. Interesting things happened sometimes when you exited the simulation.

I remembered the bit of consciousness I had known as Blane saying I could watch him from where I was going, that they would let me. I glanced around to see if any of the Keepers, like Dr. D’Alisk were hanging about, but they were off doing other things. He was a generation of the earth-universe’s code, unlike me, a denizen from the upper realms. I loved him still, so much.

“Mom,” I said trying to look like I wasn't about to lie through my teeth, “I need to go finish something on my Log…would you wait for me at the checkout station?” She eyed me a little suspiciously, then smiled knowingly.

“Sure. Don’t take too long.” I watched her purposefully turn her back and walk to the waiting room.

Hurrying, I padded over to a screen-well and put my hand over the center. I commanded it to show me Blane, and I saw him there, in the ICU, like a picture on a distorted movie screen. I remembered he said he would be a healer, he would ‘make a difference.’

The next thing I did was not strictly forbidden, and to do it you had to have a certain level of knowledge, but it was still risky. I was pushing my boundaries a bit here. If it went badly, I would be held responsible, and that would mean my own dreams might get tossed aside and I’d be put back to Level 1. I really didn’t want to start again as a fish or something, but it felt right to do. It felt like I had permission.

I accessed the Code Library, and pulled up a new window. My fingers flying, I whipped bits of earth-universe code into a new string of my own making. Then I shunted it into Blane, where his consciousness would replicated it into his body.

His own body would heal, and he would become a healer, and he would make a difference. I watched the time-line unfold a bit and marveled at how, by the end of his life, a million people would be helped by him and his actions. He would bring great Harmony. I shut down my screen usage, logged out, and, with a sense of victory, turned around, only to see that D’Alisk had mysteriously appeared behind me. I startled a bit, then looked down, caught.

“I ssssseee you have dissscovered a ssssecret.” I looked up at him in surprise. He was not disappointed, he was…happy. His eyes, infinite wells you could fall into and be lost, scanned me.

“I have?”

“Yesss. The answer of how to work within the boundariessss of free will. I think you are ready for greater thingsss than you imagined.”

“What? What do you mean?” I was confused. D’Alisk, whose kind did not smile in any human sense of the word, radiated pleasure.

“Welcome to the Primary Intercept Team.” He handed me a medallion. There was a representation of the earth-universe being projected from the HADES machine, and a line of code that read, ‘Intercept Team One: Making The Universe Better One Code At A Time.’

I gasped and wished I could run around the room dancing and shouting, but instead, I bowed, raised my body with dignity, and pinned the medallion to my uniform.

a reply to: AboveBoard

Wow! Amazing.

Here, just take my money!!!

ETA: oh crap there's more too

a reply to: knowledgehunter0986

Sorry. This was a wee bit longer than I should have written!! lol!

Thank you so much for trudging through it... now about that money...



Argh. No matter how many times I think I've edited something, I still screw up a few things. Please be gentle...

a reply to: AboveBoard

"Yesssss, excellent work"

I got a pocket full of change and about 36 dollars in the bank. How much you want ??

a reply to: knowledgehunter0986

Nah. You keep it. I'll just spend it on UFO books and we all know where that get you...

Thank you so much.

Beautiful, AB.

a reply to: IAMTAT

You CAN read. I knew it... (reference to the crazy people comedy thread...)

Sincerely, thank you.

a reply to: AboveBoard

Geez, AB...I don't even know what to say.

That was...incredible? So good...so worth waiting for.

This little quote I saved:
"You had to learn what it was to be one of those in the lower realms before you could achieve Mastery, to be on the elite Primary Interface Team."

You have definitely achieved Mastery...a true writer elite.
S&F
jacy-of-the-lower-realms

originally posted by: AboveBoard
a reply to: IAMTAT

You CAN read. I knew it... (reference to the crazy people comedy thread...)

Sincerely, thank you.

DB's Intern, Gunther, read it to me in broken English...but I totally enjoyed it.

Good stuff, I liked it. Could become an ongoing series.

Wow AB, it took a direction I wasn't expecting. Amazing! Bravo!

a reply to: jacygirl

Jacy, I am not worthy of your humility nor the accolades, but thank you so much for taking the time to slog through it! I am thankful that people are reading it and giving me positive feedback.

I love writing and reading the great stories by you and the gang here!

Most appreciated!!!!!

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

Good stuff, I liked it. Could become an ongoing series.

Gracias, O Masonic One.

Thank you so much. It was a great topic and I really had to think and research some stuff to get to the ending, so I appreciate you setting the task.

a reply to: AboveBoard

You make words tell story.



It was beautiful.

originally posted by: Night Star
Wow AB, it took a direction I wasn't expecting. Amazing! Bravo!

Haha - that was the goal!

Tell me what you expected - I would love to know... I tried to put a double-twist in there. Did it work?

Thank you SO MUCH for reading!

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: AboveBoard

You make words tell story.

It was beautiful.

Aw... Thanks Cowboy.

*scuffs toe in the dirt*

a reply to: AboveBoard

I figured she was dead soon enough, but the alien twist surprised the hell out of me.

Just awesome, AboveBoard.

I admit my arrogance. Reading the 1st post, I thought, "OK, it's the mom who passes away, yup, there it is. Oh there's a little bit more. Interesting, but I expected a bit less predictab..."

Then *wham*

Hologram Accelerated Direct Education Simulator.

*Shep slow claps*

Wonderful entry, AB. S & F