Final Countdown

Chapter 2

I must tell you now that we had not always been a peaceful race. In our youth, we were warlike and sought to "purify" our kind of any who were not the same as us. This included those who deviated from sexual norms, religious norms, color, and personal views. Even another group having resources we didn't have was grounds enough, as was greed, for waging war.

Money. Politics. Desiring the wife of another. Desiring their possessions. It didn't matter. Selfishness and the desire to control all drove us to near extinction. Much like the current inhabitants of Earth, religion played a big part of how we saw each other.

The myth of sin and the need for physical shows of piety drove us into long, drawn out religious wars. Little did we know that religion was based on lies. All lies.

There had been no creator. No holy mission. No easy truth. The truth was that we had been duped for millennia into believing a book that held no real history, no real instruction that was truly universal or unbiased. It had become so mired in our own desires that it had lost its validity.

But we still followed the "holy book" blindly and without error, at least in our own eyes. And we failed to understand its part in our slow approaching doom. We failed to realize that there wasn't going to be a rapture or any kind of end that would be anywhere close to the one promised...or, at least, not the way we had come to understand it in our own selfish ways. To us, we were going to be rescued from the evil and go into the hereafter as spiritual leaders. Instead, we were the very evil we wanted to be saved from. Even though we claimed piety, we were still hatemongers and greedy gluttons.

We were so hung up on our own personal desires and how we desired others to be, act, and believe-not to mention their skin color-that we had failed to see that our real journey was supposed to be within our own hearts, souls, and core being. Our true purpose was to be stewards of our planet and brothers in spirit, not blood or religion.

Religion had become a crutch, an excuse. It had replaced the reality that was our true journey with a physical regimen of rites and rituals that left us just as empty and false as we had been before the performing. The "faith" we felt was an illusion based upon a physical interpretation of a spiritual, an internal, path. Our piety was a cover for our own weaknesses, making us seem too perfect, too good. But we were despicable.

By the time we realized where our vision was supposed to be focused, we were nearing the end of our existence. Our planet was in danger of dying because of our over exploitation of the natural resources. Our food sources had all but become extinct, a small pool of genetic material being all that was left to us in order to reconstruct all that had been initially given freely, as long as we could show ourselves the stewards we had been asked to be. But who had asked us?

Had there been a creator? Had an entity greater than ourselves asked us to care? Or had it been a directive from those who'd established us upon the planet we had come to believe had been our point of origin?

Our philosophers argued over the point as did our religious leaders. But religion had failed and many had stopped caring what the priests had to say. Only reason and the heart mattered to most. Thus, religion died away, leaving us free to explore our inner selves and the universe that lay within us. There, we could perfect ourselves and become what we had been meant to be.

Slowly, the evils that plagued our world began to die. War. Hate. Greed. Selfishness. Conditionality. Carnality, or at least the concern of its harm to our being, since we had ceased being concerned with the physical world around us.

Faith, true faith, was reborn as was the desire to follow the universal path of truth and spiritual awakening. But the trappings that had kept us imprisoned had been removed and the blinders removed from our eyes. We were now naked before the universe.

The evolution was now free to begin and we were free to rise to the next level of being. And we began to do just that. One change at a time, we began to become something better. Something different. We no longer resembled the hominids we had been, but rather, something mankind now sees as alien and unearthly. But then, we were unearthly.

It seems amusing now, knowing how far the colonies left on Earth have fallen. But at the time, we were experiencing a rebirth. It was more than just physical, it was also an inner change. Everything was going to be different and we knew it.

Our bodies were becoming naturally immune to every known disease we had once suffered in ignorance that had been born from our dogmas and religious lies. Genetic weakness was disappearing little by little as other adjustments took place. But all these were physical and would eventually accommodate for asexual reproduction.

But the physical was only the beginning. Where it would lead was unknown. All we knew was where we had been. All the same, we opened ourselves to whatever the universe had in store for us.

It was at the end of the second round of evolution that we discovered that our planet was doomed. Part of it had been our own misguided abuse of our home, but that wasn't all. Our star, that body that had given its kind, lifegiving light, was growing and nearing critical mass. Sadly, we had limited time and it was given to me to find a solution.

I poured over our histories and found references to arks that had been used for space travel. Some of the references made mention of our race arriving upon our planet in this way, while others merely conjectured that the arks had been made for exploration. Both made me believe that we could use the arks, assuming that we could find them, to evacuate. But we had to build temporary ports on the other planets in our system as well as intersystem stations to serve as a way to get between systems and even galaxies.

And so, we began working on creating the initial arks and searching for the ancient arks that had been made millennia before. They had to be somewhere. Somewhere where they were easy to mistake as something else. Or maybe they were hidden inside an iconic structure, like a temple or a historical monument.

And so, I sent forth groups to investigate every possibility and every inch of the planet for the mysterious arks. I hoped that they would find what they were sent in search of, but wondered if their tasks were in vain. Only time would reveal whether my hunch was right or not. All I could do was wait. And work on the temporary arks.

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