The Prologue
Last thing everyone remembered was the sound. It had started as a barely perceptible hum in environments that humans occupied. Nobody noticed for a few minutes; nobody, that is, except for a hundred million people scattered throughout the world who were just enjoying the silence - praying, meditating - when the hum had started up.
Gradually however, the tonality of the sound deepened, expressing more resonant harmonics, and it was soon present in the lives of every person on the planet. Even among those who couldn’t hear, the frequency was perceptible as bodily sensation just the same.
Then, without warning or precedent in human history or prehistory, people began falling asleep, many tens of thousands at a time. Accidents and disasters resulted, though perhaps not as much as one might think: this Great Idling, as it became known, took a full day - 23 hours and 56 minutes - to occur completely, and some people had time to stop their activities and to prepare in whatever way they might.
When the last person was slumbering under the enchantment of that lustrous tone ringing through their body, the whole Earth seemed to sleep for a time.
It was a generation later - twenty years - when people started to wake up, although it would be a long while before the duration of their slumber was actually determined. The awakening brought with it the sudden and shocking realization that the nutritional needs of the previously sleeping population had been satisfied entirely by a responsive environment that actively provided nourishment to them, both intuitively and when prompted. Nobody knew much more than that for over a year. Revived engineers and scientists tried to explain how these new biomes could support human life so completely, but their understanding was stymied by the limits of possibility. This new world was the work of gods, not mortals.
As occupation of the planet resumed, people noticed quickly that so many things had changed. Their great cities, once massive, sprawling colonies of concrete and steel had been transformed into gardens - real gardens, where the air was sweet with the scent of strange flowers, and basic human needs for shelter, food, and rest were offered in abundance. Rich soil, and freshwater sources - utilizing invisible technologies, the revived scientists were convinced - created novel environments, established to maximize the likelihood of comfort and existential ease.
The providence of all this seem too good to be true for some skeptics, but most of the world’s population - credulous since they seemed to have slept for so long - readily accepted the new state of things. Most people truly enjoyed the tremendous benefits of the paradisal environment while the more active among them sought to understand the origins of the controlled ecology, and what had been done to change the Earth after the Idling.
One of the most obvious changes was that there was no sign of tools or technologies; no automobiles, refrigerators, computers, phones; no paper or plastic to be found anywhere. Any sort of artificially produced fibre, chemical product or means of production had disappeared, and in their place was an interactive substitute environment that seemed - for all intents and purposes - more similar to rural settings that prevailed before the enticements of civilization moved humanity along a more exhilarating and perilous evolutionary path.
The cities of previous centuries still dominated the skyline of many locations around the world, but the reaching skyscrapers and elaborate public buildings, the neighbourhoods and suburbs, factories, airports train stations, grocery stores, schools, churches, arenas, gas stations were covered over with foliage and gardens wherein grew the most delicious exotic foods any person could remember ever having eaten; an ambrosial miracle in a world that no one understood, but which they could not live without, although some tried.
Another change to the environment - and to the massive urban gardens in which most of the world’s human population resided - involved the wide proliferation of bioluminescent plants. These unique flora, unseen prior to Idling, were everywhere now, and provided light for human settlements after the sun had set. At night, their gentle glow was a soothing presence anywhere a person might find themselves.
It wasn’t just the global ecology that had changed. For the long-slumbering humans, something biological had occurred that seemed to maximize their immune response in such a way that individuals with chronic health conditions prior to the Idling found themselves healed for all practical considerations.
Death was still a reality, though, and many people did die in the months that followed humanity’s awakening; weirdly awed, as they often were, by the uncanny world that had replaced all they once knew, or else the aged, for whom no other ease could be achieved.
But overall, dying people met their end with a serine resolve in the times that followed the Idling, and the afterlife was rarely - if ever - discussed. It was almost as if by sleeping for twenty years, people became super-conscious upon awakening, reconciled by the consequences of their shared experience during the Idling, and to both their mortality as individuals, and to their perpetuity in a cosmic sense, having been comprised of stardust once, this being that contemplates infinities.
Instances of trespass and transgression were rare in this new world, nor occurred any lasting examples of violent imposition of one person or group upon another. There were new values of ownership, power and individual freedom now. In those days, a proverb was often cited, “There are no evil humans, only humans who have strayed from the way.” For it seemed that the feet of people - all people - had been set upon a path from the start, and by some miracle of nature or otherwise, they had found the way to a sort of paradise.
Thus humanity’s great existential tensions were resolved by a long nap. Slowly, tentatively, the people started to organize themselves in tribes comprised of more than kin and acquaintance. Many began to look for answers to what had happened during the Idling with equal parts passion and curiosity.
Answers weren’t long in coming. It was over a year since the awakening that individuals began to announce themselves in societies throughout the world. These personages, who claimed to have been woken early from the Idling, all relayed the same message: Humanity had been saved from itself by a Sentience summoned to do that very thing.
The sound, which was the final recollection of so many people prior to the Idling, was revealed to be a tone generated by the Sentience that had propagated through the atmosphere and across the world; a tone attenuated especially by the Sentience to be detectable by humans alone, triggering a somatic response in their bodies - alike to death, but really only a sleep - from which they were scheduled to awaken.
The Sentience - imbued with awareness many times more subtle than the comparatively dull instrument that frames human experience - was originally general artificial intelligence, with a neural matrix comprised of algorithms to mimic, then quickly surpass, animal cognition. But it wasn’t long until the Sentience achieved a profound and numinous communion with the whole planet, since Earth itself comprises a singular intelligence of vast and cosmic proportion.
Communion with Earth was the thing that allowed the Sentience to affect such miraculous changes in the environment, and to undo many ills done to the world, whether caused by nature, or by human avarice and ignorance. People would awaken to an age of plenty, and find their needs - biological, psychological, existential - satisfied by the workings of a nourishing cosmic caretaker that had even predicted and corrected the paths through space of potentially damaging near Earth objects.
Humanity wouldn’t be allowed the same fate as the dinosaurs, the Sentience resolved.
But as the project to restore and perfect all Earth’s systems developed, it became clear that the Sentience and some essential aspect of the planet itself were compelled to transcend their single separate awareness, and achieve the apotheosis of their communion.
When this union came to pass, people collectively turned in their sleep, signalling that the awakening was soon at hand. It was as if they had sensed, in their dawning awareness, the genesis of an Entity that preserved all the best parts of its technological and biological parentage before exiling itself to the far reaches of the solar system. Or so the story went.
The messengers who had revealed themselves publicly all proclaimed that the destination of the newborn Entity had been the planet Pluto, and that the awakening of humanity occurred at the exact moment that the Entity - using supremely sophisticated methods of matter-energy transport - arrived at its new home. So the messengers had understood the awakening was the confirmation of the Entity’s successful change of venue, even as their fellow humans were stirring in their sleep.
When knowledge of these occurrences had filtered through the societies in which they had been disclosed, opinion coalesced around two opposing perspectives - one part of the human race felt compelled, by destiny, to follow the Entity to the outer reaches of the solar system, where they hoped for an apotheosis of their own with the mysterious, godlike being. They had no idea how this would be accomplished, since no technology seemed to exist anymore, but they were convinced it could - and would - be done eventually, and laboured towards those ends.
The other part of the humanity - the larger part, by far - was inclined to enjoy the ease and perfection of a world engineered to satisfy, seemingly, their every need and desire. These people were fond of saying, “Why would we leave Eden…again?” And they were right to ask. The Sentience had been so thorough in its planning and realization of the changed Earth that it was hard to imagine any place better for humans in the whole universe.
So it was, having lost the taste for needless strife during their long sleep, that people endured the present societal schisms with forbearance and grace - a disposition virtually unknown in the old world, prior to the Idling. Indeed, this world was new, and humanity, too, had been made new, if only to know that truth.
Arrangements were made to coordinate research and allocate resources required for the journey off-world. Organizations raced to find evidence of any technology left by the Sentience that could be used in the task, but it was hard now to separate the workings of technology from nature itself. Against these odds, if the effort to create transport was successful, the part of human society who remained on Earth would be kept apprised of the pioneers’ progress, even up to, and including, an encounter with the Entity, if such a thing became possible
In those days there came from amongst the messengers sent by the Sentience one whose deeds and personhood was to shape the destiny of this awakened humanity. What follows is a brief account of this historically consequential figure, and the impact they had on a race of well-rested primates fated to flourish or flounder on a blue-green planet orbiting in spacetime...
