Doug — and seemingly the rest of the Sternum Island population — are cozy in the New Atlantis Sweat Lodge. Now who should show up but Tiberius Organ himself — new age guru and CEO of InnovoSol (among other things), and even though he’s a busy man, he’s got a lot to say…
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THE STORM OUTSIDE was growing. Along the base of the tent, the textile ruffled in the wind, making flashes of brilliant daylight flicker in, lighting up the hazy air. A low-pitched, pulsating drone started rumbling throughout the tent. The drone intensified, rising like the string section of a symphony orchestra. Doug rose blissfully with it.
A holographic figure of a man flickered into life, glowing out from the middle of the tent. It hovered above the crowd. Perched on a holographic stool, he was smiling with an open, welcoming expression. Trim and dressed in a grey collarless suit jacket over matching trousers, a white t-shirt underneath, moccasins on his feet. He had a five o’clock shadow, its stubble a soft, hazy white against his dark skin, a sparkling upside-down halo. The luminescent figure emanated success.
“Hey folks,” he said. “My name is Tiberius but all my friends call me Ti. Since you’ve been generous enough to come along today, I’d like to think we’re all friends. So please call me Ti.”
“Hello, Ti!” a few of the audience members called out, groggy sounding from the heat.
“I wanted to join you in person today. But, I got delayed. And now, with all the hoo-ha around the storm, I can’t make it, I’m afraid. That said, I’ll be coming up to visit regularly, and so hopefully I’ll see you there soon, we can all grab a coffee in the village sometime…”
The hologram of Tiberius shimmered a bit. Doug suppressed a giggle.
“… Anyhow, I’m here to tell you a bit about Golden Years. I’ll try and leave out all the boring parts. There’s more than enough material in our archives, if you’re interested in hearing more.”
A large image lit up on the main stage’s backdrop. It was an historical painting, like the ones from old National Geographic magazines. In dark, moody swirls the painting depicted a beach. Stormy grey waves frothed out to the horizon. Far in the distance, a large volcano erupted plumes of black smoke and veins of red magma. On the beach, in the foreground, was a small group of prehistoric humans, filthy and dressed in ragged animal skins. They were huddled together, their faces grimacing in terror at the ashy flakes falling over them.
“Now, there’s a wolf in our midst,” Tiberius said. “A shark in the shallows where we wade. You hear stories about it. A hunter is out trekking for weeks. They sense they’re being followed, but only ever on the cusp of their consciousness. Then, when they finally see the wolf, when the wolf allows its presence to enter the consciousness of the hunter, it’s too late. The hunter has been got.”
The spectral Tiberius stood up and started to pace back and forth above the audience, a worried look on his glowing face.
“I’ll get back to the wolf shortly. But, fear not intrepid audience. It’s a presence we can actually do something about.”
A warm smile returned. “If you know anything about me, then you’ll know I love science. I love its processes, I love its history, and I love how it never ends. The kind of truth that science creates is always just our best guess at the time. From the perceived facts at hand, of course. But it’s contingent. Science tries to cast light onto things, and expel the dark ghosts of ignorance. Kill the beasts that stalk us, banish the…”
A gust of wind shook the tent violently. Tiberius flickered, and several distorted lines coursed through his body from head to toe. The noisy lines sputtered with colorful static, little pops and sparks of green, blue, red and white falling off him. His entire body warbled in a rainbow, then snapped right back to well-postured form.
“Science can also create ghosts,” Tiberius continued. “After all, it’s a deeply human pursuit, despite what some people might claim. And us humans do tend to haunt our world with our own hopes, fears and desires.”
The image on the screen cut to a close-up of the prehistoric humans on the beach. Three dirty and terrified faces forming a triangle of dismay, horror and resignation.
“But the enlightenment of science aside, not so much has changed since the times of early humans. We might now have a dazzling amount of creature comforts, especially compared to our forebears. But the cosmos is yet a terrifying place. Just now, it’s terrifying in new, and different ways.”
Tiberius nodded, and gave off some more bright little sparks as he passed over mayor Mike, Stan, Dr Hubble and Osmar, all still swaying and humming.
“These wretched looking beings, trapped between a volcanic eruption and the stormy sea, are scared witless. And let’s face it: this does not look good for them. Indeed, from our luxurious vantage point, we know they’re not long for this world.” Tiberius paused and threw his hands up in the air. “Some things never change!” He dropped his arms and shrugged, chuckling as he looked around the crowd.
Tiberius turned back toward the image. “This is an artist’s interpretation of the Toba Supervolcanic eruption which took place about seventy-five thousand years ago, give or take. It happened on the island of Sumatra, in present-day Indonesia. The eruption spewed out around seven hundred cubic miles of magma, and then covered the entire expanse of South Asia in about fifteen centimeters of ash. Now, there’s a theory that says it started a ten-year volcanic winter, in which the Earth’s climate fell by about fifteen degrees centigrade. A deep freeze whose effects would linger for a thousand years. That theory also holds that much animal and plant life was decimated, including the human population. Some people think that we were reduced to about ten thousand reproducing pairs. And so, those survivors, would be our ancestors.”
The image on the screen cross-dissolved into an animated cluster of purple, root-like lines. Creeping upwards, they multiplied into a blossoming mass against the black of outer space. The lines contracted into a focused ball of violet fire.
“Now, that’s a theory scientists call a genetic bottleneck,” Tiberius explained. “That happens when a population is greatly reduced, and their diversity is limited. Like, way back seventy-five thousand years ago at Toba — that is, if you follow that theory. But whatever, from a tiny acorn grows a giant tree. And the roots spread as far as they can.”
The image on the screen had grown into a vast, plasmatic accumulation of interconnected lines, its tendrils spiralling around each other so tightly that they became one again, their end-points twinkling like those of fiber-optic cables.
“Now, you might be asking, ‘what the hell is this guy blabbin’ about?!’ Well, besides being something that I’m just kinda interested in — y’know, like how it speaks to our shared history of migration, expansion, catastrophe and on and on and on — it’s also directly relevant to the history of Golden Years.”
An animated map of the planet appeared, then a glowing, blurry counter rapidly ticked through billions of years. Continents shifted, collided, fractured, then slowed its countdown, showing verdant patches of green around the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, Indus, and Nile. Blinking blue dots appeared around the rivers, marking the location of cities built by early civilizations; Eridu and Babylon, Harappa, Thebes.
Tiberius nodded gravely. “Golden Years’s oral and written histories are older than ancient. Back to the first dynasty of Egypt, and before that, back to Sumer and the Indus Valley. Right back to our friends huddling on the shores, cowering under the erupting Mount Toba. The history of Golden Years is told in numerous languages and scripts. It’s a diaspora. It’s a history that meanders, like a serpentine river through human history. Our oral traditions tell us that our history precedes written language. It’s in our blood.”
The screen now showed dozens of people, of all colors, creeds, ages and genders: a shaman in furs, a Nubian priestess in gold and purple, a Buddhist monk in orange, a North American Native in feathered headdress.
“Members of the Golden Years tribe have always been present. We know this through our secret scriptures. Through the histories of our host civilizations. Indeed, we like to flatter ourselves in thinking that wherever we have travelled, language and civilization have followed. But so much has remained hidden, even to us. Time passed so quickly, and so much was so very urgent all the time. Before writing appears, the world is dark. Full of noise.”
The screen showed a series of caves dotting a rocky cliff over a beach, their jagged openings gaping out over crashing waves.
“Ongoing research into our beginnings leads us ever further back. Back through forgotten civilizations, back to what you see here. Sites PP13B, PP9, and PP5–6 Upper and Lower, as our palaeoanthropologists friends call them. Or, if you’re a tourist, you’d call this Pinnacle Point in South Africa… It’s right next to a fantastic golf course and spa, if you’re into that kind of stuff,” Tiberius winked and a flicker of glowing static shot from his eyelashes. The trail of sparks reached out into the middle of the tent, lighting up the sweaty, half-naked audience. Doug’s eyes were stinging from the beads dripping down his forehead.
“Early modern humans inhabited these caves from approximately one hundred thousand years ago. And up through the supervolcanic event in Toba. In fact, scientists have found ashes from Toba across South Africa, including this site. Yet, counter to the volcanic winter hypothesis I mentioned earlier, life flourished at Pinnacle Point, during and after those catastrophic years. In our tribe’s stories that have been passed down through millennia, Golden Years finds its origins here. Right here. Our Garden of Eden. Arcadia. A paradise of caves on the shore…” Tiberius paused and a wry look crossed his sparkling face. “All that hope, right under a golf course!”
A lazy wave of laughter passed through the audience.
“So. The wolf in our midst.”
The map of the continents returned. Their speed greatly accelerated. Sequence after sequence of tectonic plates shifting, colliding and rupturing, billions of years into the future.
“We are not eternal. We all know that.”
The blue dots took over the world, then reshaped into vectoral slices and wedges across the globe, the cities were growing into superstructures, consuming vast swathes of the Earth, leaving only some areas untouched.
“But there are things that remain, relatively speaking, constant.”
The continents had sped up so fast, and the overlays of blue vectors mutated so rapidly, that the screen was now a blur. Gradually, out of the mess emerged the silhouette of a dark craggy peak rocketing up into the sky over a beach. The three wretched prehistoric humans from the apocalyptic painting, were now sitting with their backs to the audience, gazing out over a calm ocean, and up at the looming peak.
“Our souls are eternal. The tower of Babel too. Our rich world of incomprehensibility. It sings. How wonderful it is that our little planet is full of so many different universes. And ignorance of those universes need not be as scary as one thinks. With the correct mindset, it can be wondrous. We die, but our souls are an eternal language. Our souls are language… Hey, but, you might say, ’Ti, languages die out, don’t they?’ Yes. But when inscribed, they live on forever. They live forever. Take Sumerian, for instance. Take Egyptian. Take Latin. They die and their timely world with them. But not their spirit! Inscription is eternity, so long as eternity is human, earthly, cosmic. So the soul is inscription. The spirit in the written word, once breathed out and now encrypted in some graphos. But we must breathe life back into the soul. We must! So many souls have been entrapped in the past hundred years. It’s terrifying. But through our research, Golden Years have discovered this powerful link between inscribed language and the soul. And we now know how to unlock the power held within, the power that will push our world out from its doldrum… A transformation of the spirit — that which the soul enacts, the soul’s expression, its spirit of love and empathy. Exploding outward in an apocalypse that ends the mute and dumb world, and sets the soul free. But here is where our wolf has been lurking. And quite rightly, as this is where true power resides.”
An image appeared of Marcus, Bruno and Tiberius. They were in a cave, dressed in spelunking outfits, helmets, and headlamps.
“Our research led us to Pinnacle Point. And we were able to excavate, beyond the salted caves on the shore, deep under the golf course, through earth that hadn’t been stirred in millenia. And there, we found the bones of our long dead ancestors. But not only that…”
An image showed a cluster of dark glass shards among neatly piled bones.
“These shards here were buried alongside the people. They’re not simply curios or talismans, or some other ritual object. Analysis showed that these are all, in fact, human minds that were once, long ago, superheated into volcanic glass. And there are no volcanoes anywhere near Pinnacle Point. These shards were carried there, purposefully. The results of our tests puts the ages of these shards across various points in time, thousands of years apart, from one hundred thousand to ten thousand years ago. And all this tallies with the most ancient lore of the Golden Years liturgy.”
The image zoomed in to microscopic detail on one of the shards, revealing a jeweled complex of tendrils, like the rivers of a vast delta, seen from outer space.
Tiberius continued. “Inscribed memories. Streams of thought. Impressions, feelings cut into matter. Rivers waiting to be travelled down, with us like pharaohs on our ship, surveying our empire. Here are pictographs and hieroglyphs, cuneiform and runes. These rivulets of thought are there to be interpreted. Luckily, we have a Rosetta Stone, an index of the eternal soul. One that has been part of our rituals since Golden Years left Pinnacle Point many tens of thousands of years ago. When we began our long journey up Africa, to Asia and Europe and the Americas. Wherever we travelled, we left behind traces, under the silver moon…”
At the sound of the last word a grunt emanated from the audience, a harmonious wave across the space.
“… Written in numerous scripts, but always bearing the trace of our tribe, our mission: to ignite souls that lay dormant, to propel the ones we find aflame, to inscribe everywhere, so as to never regret…”
More harmonious grunts floated up around the spectral Tiberius.
“We are the humble keepers of the ancient human hand inscribing. The hungry soul-filled graph which encases the breath of human life, and will always refuse to end. The lines that extend that breath beyond the mouth, the actor beyond the space it speaks into, and gives witness to that breath inscribed into sand and dirt, rock, clay, wood, paper, metal, plastic, light. Whatever matter, whatever energy is at hand…”
The grunts this time held, steadying into a deep, warbling drone as dank as the light in the tent.
“The soul is the act of inscription. Encryption. The act of decryption. Rinse and repeat. The never ending cycle. Preserve the encasement, but cherish the decryption above all else, for that creative act is life itself, and energy attuned. Decryption is interpretation, and freedom, and liberation! That is our mission. The kingdom on the mount, a fortress of a tongue that we shall teach the world and everything in it, to speak with.”
The warbling drone raised in pitch, and stuttered slightly. From somewhere behind the stage came a delicate wash of arpeggiated sweeps on a harp, and then the modulated stonking of an old electric organ staggered in. A harsh gust of wind rattled the tent structure, nearly tearing it apart.
The image of the delta dissolved back to the faces of the prehistoric humans on the beach. But now their faces were clean, smiling, the skies behind them turned blue and clear. A dolphin leapt from the calm sea. A speech bubble came from its snout, with a large “Thank you!” blinking in it.
“Now, I need to leave you with my trusty colleagues,” Tiberius’s voice struggled to carry across the wind. “I have urgent business. But, I have set the stage for our wolf. Let’s try our luck. Just don’t let it bite you. Farewell my fellow travellers. We’ll meet again soon.”
At that, the avatar of Tiberius Organ spluttered out in a rainbow of sparkling noise.
CHAPTER 51: Tiberius Talks