Integration.

Dr Daniel Tore,lay on the hospital bed with his family around him.Cancer,he had seen it and treated it in so many others and now it was his time to go.

His wife of 40 years held his hand and he felt himself slipping.The beeping tone of the monitor tracking his vital signs changed to a high pitched monotone and he was strangly aware of a sudden frantic increase in movement around him.

Then he sensed he was floating.He was a regular church goer and belief came easily but he had read too many reports on the effects of oxygen deprivation on the brain and knew of the euphoric experience that it could cause and so he noted it down as just the final chapter in a long and fruitful life.

Yet still he floated higher.He still felt in some way attached to his body which he could see below him and as he seemed to rise it felt like his soul was being stretched between his body and his viewing point.Higher and higher he arose until his soul seemed to extend one hundred feet in a thin line and then it gently parted from his lifeless corpse and he continued upward.He took one last look at those that he had loved in life and then looked upward to where he was being drawn.

Higher and higher,so high he couldn't guess and then he saw a light,a huge ball of white light that got bigger and bigger as he approached it until it filled his entire vision and then a small black hole like a tunnel which he felt himself drawn to became visible.As he aproached the tunnel,still as a long thin extended line of consciousness,he could sense the great heat coming from the circumference of this great ball of light.He entered the tunnel and somehow perceived that he was of some value and he continued towards the core of the light.He did not reach the core itself but he estimated he was nearer it than the white hot circumference and he felt some relief at that.

And then,quite simply,he became integrated.Other lines of consciousness intersected his.Many questions.His entire lifes experience drawn on.He too had questions and they too were answered as he intersected other streams of consciousness.

He no longer worried about his family because he had sensed what he had become part of and he understood the great design and the family he had left behind was just part of that great design as he had been and was still now just in a different way.

He understood so much now.He was not simply in heaven he was actually part of it.He had become a small integrated part of,what he would have called , God.

He understood for instance that the uncooporative,anti-social,and immoral souls were integrated into the white hot circumference of this multi-conscious sphere.In life the body produces the energy required to nurtutre the soul, without the body the free soul still needs energy to function.The souls of the damned were now part of the process of converting Solar energy and Cosmic radiation into power which was then conducted to the core where The First resided.

Surrounding The First was the product of It's initial design and outward like an onion the products of further improved designs layed outward.The souls of strange non-human beings from different planets where The First had planted life and harvested the souls aeons ago.

In time the cycle would repeat itself yet again,once enough energy had been stored for the journey to the next planet which met the right criteria.Already he sensed that that time was near.When that happened a new core would separate from the sphere in an act of procreation and The First would leave it's prodigy to harvest the souls of those yet to die until this well had run dry and it too would move on.

[edit on 30-7-2004 by John bull 1]

I like the basic idea of the story, interesting and thought-provoking. Good work!