Final Countdown

Chapter 1

Earth. Mankind's final place of testing. For some, it's Heaven. For others, it is Hell. It is of no real concern to me, though. I haven't existed there for millennia.

This is not to say that I no longer live. No, that isn't it at all. I still live, but not upon the face of the earth. I say I no longer exist there, but I do—but only as a sort of bogey man who is the all-knowing, all powerful, and always present "God". But I am no god. Nor is my son the savior man thought him to be.

My name has been all but forgotten. Misinterpreted by successors to those we left to colonize and take care of the Earth, the true spelling and pronunciation has been lost over time until it no longer matters who I am or what my name is. To man, I am "God". Yahweh. Jehovah. Allah. But for you, I am Yom the Ancient.

My personality and ideals twisted to suit man, leaving my true nature or purpose as a footnote. I was not the creator, nor was I the lawgiver. I was simply the one who saved the original colonists from the ultimate end. It was I who convinced my race, in all it glorious colors and customs, to abandon our native planet and seek out safe havens where we could replenish our numbers and grow to dominate and care for the universe. After all, we had learned our lessons early in our existence and had abolished war, disease, and even intolerance.

We were a learned race, billions strong, that scattered among the stars as our world died. We had learned to evolve to adapt to any environment and atmosphere and our mental capacity was so far beyond comprehension that the secrets of the universe were no longer secret to us. In essence, you could say that we had become gods. Immortal, but to a point.

I had been a council member, then, wisest of all our people and put in charge of finding a solution to our impending cataclysm. Though the temporary treatment to the problem was to begin through colonizing those planets in our own system, we knew it was not a permanent solution. Rather, each colony within our system was to be a stopping point where food, necessities, and fuel for the arks could be obtained as we made our way outward, beyond the limits of our system. Just beyond, we set up inter-system stations so that we could springboard, catapult, ourselves to the next system. These were to be abandoned shortly after our system was abandoned, each one in succession as the last ark left them. The one at the edge of the new systems we found was to remain in case other arks, having headed in other directions, returned that way—though we doubted the others would turn around and seek us out.

Many of these stations later travelled from one border to another to become a new springboard rather than suffer the same death, though empty, as our system. My ark, the last to leave our system, bore witness to the destruction of our home world-if truly it was our place of origin-as our star grew to an immense size and engulfed the planet, then another, and another, until the star had taken all of the planets and incinerated them into ash...then imploded and formed a black hole.

I shed a tear at this, but wondered if this had been the same sight that my own predecessors had witnessed as they searched-if they had searched-for a new home. I could not imagine it any other way and pondered from whence they might have appeared when they found our home planet. Where had they come from? Where had they been going? Why had they stopped?

I had been the only one to think of saving the histories of our race, what we had of millennia of existence. I had saved our sciences, our technologies, and our language records. After all, I was the wisest. The most knowledgeable.

Of course, my ponderings had been spurred by the fact that I had stumbled upon references of a similar event that coincided with the beginning of our own race, our civilization. It pointed to the idea that our race had not, in fact, originated from the planet we had just left, but had been from somewhere else altogether. thus, the idea that we had been created on the world we had come to call home was not a rational one. But how many jumps had we made before we settled where we did? Where did the records of these possible jumps exist?

Were they among our own histories as a collection of oral histories? Were they a written record that had been left to be deciphered? I didn't know. I would have to look.

But I was beginning to see a pattern. We had grown to understand that war, hate, violence, greed, and negative traits were unneeded and harder to maintain than the positive traits of love, compassion, peace, understanding, unconditionality, and generosity. Once the negative were gone, we learned that it really didn't matter what gender we were or what sexual orientation tended to lean toward. The physical had no bearing on our intellect, spirituality, or overall ability to care and love without condition. Only hate hampered the prime directive.

But sexuality was a moot point, since many of us had become asexual and could divide like a cell into clones. Some still held to the old sexual traditions, but many had accepted our new abilities and had given up the old ways. Most of the evolutionary additions had been an answer to a growing problem as the number of women had begun to decline in later years. When the gender identities vanished, the need for sexual partners did as well. Though we continued to give male and female names, these names no longer held any special meaning.

They had become simply a way to identify each other. Otherwise, we looked exactly like our fellow beings...except we had a multitude of colors. Red. Black. White. Yellow. Not to mention colors you no longer see on Earth like green, gray, blue, and so on.