THE HUNDRED YEAR MAN

Chapter 2

He was Draxor, the philosopher king, on his way to see - who exactly? Certainly no one of importance to him. And what planet was this? As if anyone but the Plenarium even cared. He probably should have better quizzed the pilot who was dropping him off, but he couldn't imagine why this world would be all that different from any of the others.  

That was the problem with a technocracy sprawling across - how many galaxies was it now? Again, what did it matter? Asides from minor curiosities in geography, one world had two suns, another three moons, the real marvel was just how many temples to mediocrity the human race would see fit to erect before calling it quits on the human project all together.  

Madacor, that was it. They called this place Madacor. And its lapis lazuli sky beat down on him with its royal blue hues implying stateliness the place hardly deserved.  

From his perch on the rocky ridge overlooking the valley, his long black overcoat flapping in the breeze, he imagined he resembled an Arastian eagle ready to swoop down and gobble up one of those rats they called Madacorians. People who lived seven hundred years and made it look like no time at all. They were as incapable of evolution as the red ants that stung his feet back on his home world. Only twice as annoying.  

They grew to four feet in stature, though their ability to reach for the skies was an accident of genetics. Why they just didn't crawl on all fours, which would be far more in character, was testament to nothing other than an absentee God. They could talk for hours about the most insignificant things, entirely convinced of their ability to entrance a serpent not to strike. That serpent would be Draxor. Though he was convinced even an earthworm in earshot would have given up and committed suicide by devouring his tail all the way up to his head. Each time Draxor watched his brains bleeding out his ears he wondered if they weren't truly a species of psychic vampires who fed on the gullible in just this way.  

Oh Draxor, how is it you hold on to your sanity as the last of the philosopher kings - surrounded by self-important simpletons who have laid claim to the heavens for themselves? Clearly, you're more saint than philosopher.  

When exactly had humanity stopped producing the gene for deep thinking? No one was quite sure. But as the theory went, countless generations of hearty pioneers hardly needed it. And Earth, which gave rise to all of this, was now devoid of sentient life. To hear the historians tell it, all telcom systems had gone inexplicably silent when the last of the human holdouts chose to enter Singularity State-perhaps as a consequence of Mother's eternal prodding. After all, they were extensions of her, and so were holding her back, if only marginally with respect to the rest of her nearly divine sentience. So, one could hardly go back to mine the human gene bank for better versions of him. You'd think someone would have thought to store the requisite genes in a bottle somewhere. Hell, they managed to hold on to whales and dolphins and tigers that way. Just not to any capacity for deep thinking. And now look... 

He couldn't save them all.  

On the upside, from one world to the next, the ones who didn't revere him like a God were too comparatively feeble minded to be much of a threat. He was like a shark at the top of the food chain with no natural predators. Save his own demons of course. And they played hell with him these days.  

So far the experiments had all failed. No matter how much of his blood they took, no matter how they intermarried his genes with God knows what, so far at least, not even one promising disciple.  

Draxor suspected this was not a fault of modern day-science but a fault of the soul. True integral thinking arose with the will to truth, the spiritual decision to refuse to lie to oneself about the nature of reality, and one's own path, despite all temptation to the contrary - and there would always be temptation aplenty.