The Duadex: Chapter Zero

This is an introductory chapter to my next serialised audiobook on this app and the third book in the Soulwaves Anthology. The first two are Soulwaves: A Future History and Soulwaves: Insertions. This book is set in the far future and explores where we might be going and where we come from. Nothing in this book is true, yet none of it is untrue.

You will find the rest of the book in the Duadex playlist.

Transcript

I am Sharn,

A human-octopus hybrid.

I am a heptapod with just six tentacles.

I was made on the planet you know as Mars.

We call it by its original Epoch IV name,

The Maya.

To give my story some context,

It's worth me explaining a little about me and the proceeding Epochs.

I'm telling this tale in future retrospect from my seat on the Galactic Council.

It was only natural that I was given the sixth seat right next to Septima,

Who had stopped operating in the margins and was now fully incarnate in the density.

Septima was responsible for directing the activities of the other eleven Councillors of the Light in far-reaching points right across Universe 7.

My role was to direct planetary engineering projects.

I'd learn the do's and the don'ts a hard,

Yet quite interesting and innovative way.

We were only able to evolve to the Epoch VII level of consciousness by slowly working through the other six levels.

Up to the end of Epoch V,

Evolution was steered and monitored by the Council of the Light.

My fellow Mayans shepherded us through Epoch VI,

By the end of which we became the custodians and guardians of our planet.

We achieved such great things when compared with the decimation of planet Earth inflicted by our predecessors.

It's no small wonder that the Councilers terminated that experiment when they did,

And in the way they did.

I am more privy to some of their matters now than I rub shoulders with Septima.

I also understand why my maker,

Tristan,

Failed so spectacularly in his attempt to re-terraform Earth,

And how that was so not part of the plan.

I'll come back to those tragic events shortly.

Let me first give you an overview of the Epochs in a nutshell.

They explain why I am telling you this story now from a place and time millions of years into what you call your future.

To us,

Everything is just now,

At some time or other.

So Epoch I was all about getting macromolecules to self-replicate.

Counselor II,

Chua,

Supervised this process then,

As he does now,

But via proxies.

His lightbulb moment came when he got two contra-rotating planets to collide,

That later coalesced into your Earth and Moon.

This sequence is detailed in Insertion II.

Each planet had spirals of RNA that spun in contra-opposition.

Their lifetimes were in the order of microseconds,

Milliseconds at the most.

When the two planets collided,

And the Moon was extruded,

The resulting doubly-helical DNA provided the answer,

And life began to explode.

Nowadays the keys of how to do this are embedded in the Duodex,

And civilizations at Epoch 7.

5 and above are allowed to carry out the seeding process themselves on start-up planets.

Chua has now taken up a supervisory,

Yet avuncular,

Role.

As you will see,

The advancement through the Epochs is still going on.

It's just less haphazard than it was when you first went through the process.

The division of the sexes organ-in the start of Epoch II.

It was most successful on planets which hosted a Moon,

To act as a timekeeper.

Moon orbits rang out both birth and death nows.

In most cases,

The male organisms provided the seeds,

And the females the eggs.

As the counsellors were always tinkering and experimenting,

There were plenty of hermaphrodites,

And with species like seahorses,

Males at least nurtured the eggs.

In Epoch II,

Life exploded.

The true tales of horses with wings and cats with fishtails became folklore.

I kept my discoveries on Maya of such fossil records to myself.

I had a hard enough job on my hands defending Tristan's recklessness to the Mayan council.

They were not ready to learn about Maya's true past,

And never would be.

Epoch III saw the emergence of sentience.

In Maya's solar system,

The first humanoids conferred with self-awareness lived on Lemieux.

Only a belt of asteroids is now left from its termination and instant vaporization.

Where the Council of the Light made a big mistake was giving Lemieuxians full access to tap into their powers from the void.

Tristan would never know that he was the high priest on Lebu who caused the termination of Epoch III.

He was called Triton back then,

And I recently learned from Septima that I had a hand in its demise too.

I was a male back then and called Shin apparently.

I don't have any memory of that,

But I can resonate with the person Septima described to me.

He was a bright soul who just wanted to help,

But who was not immune from making the odd mistake due to his impetuosity.

That's me in a nutshell.

Septima also explained to me why I only found aquatic fossil records on Maya that I now know were from Epoch IV.

She wanted to supervise the development of sentience in Epoch IV personally.

She also wanted the sentience to be isolated and disconnected from the cosmos from which it came.

So Epoch IV on Maya played out on a water world,

Identical to but much smaller than Aquanine.

Humanoid eggs teleported over from Lemu in the folds of the tentacles of Octopi,

The interplanetary couriers.

They were harvested and nurtured and rebirthed as cetaceans.

This process would be reversed on Earth,

When cetaceans would eventually emerge from the seas once more and take to the land.

When they eventually stood upright again,

They would look back at the stars once more and wonder where they came from.

So dolphins and whales colonized Maya and lived happily in their water world.

They were completely in tune with the council of the light and connected with the void.

They maintained their fluidity and their density.

Teleporting around the Mayan oceans was a doddle for them.

The council limited such chaunts to their own planet for the time being.

The main outcome and success of a water world containing such sentience was the emergence of a newer sphere for Maya.

She became self-aware to the level of an Epoch IV cetacean.

This meant she had a sense of self and the knowledge of how to maintain an aquatic biosphere for life to thrive within her gravitational field.

As a backup,

An identical experiment was being played out on the planet called Aquanine,

On the opposite side of the galaxy.

This was to be the only galaxy where two sentient civilizations could coexist in Epoch V and Epoch VI.

Epoch IV,

Like Epoch VI,

Was quite short and more of a reset than a whole evolutionary eon and cycle.

So while it was establishing and stabilizing,

The next planet in was being readied by Council of IV Quo.

A low-level newer sphere was conferred on Mother Earth and seeding began.

Life as it knew it was wound down on Maya and teleported to Earth.

As humanoids once more emerged from the oceans,

They acquired a level 4 consciousness.

Unlike the then level 3 consciousness of cetaceans,

They could once again tap into the fire energy of creation.

They were born innovators,

Quite literally.

Epoch V augured in the separation.

Humankind became masters at manipulation of the density.

Only a few of them knew of or suspected the existence of the Council of the Light,

Or the Void.

All of them knew innately that they were once connected and part of something big,

But they had been reprogrammed to forget where they came from.

Their innovation led to them learning much about the cosmos.

They were able to see right back in time to the start of Epoch Zero.

Their fossil records held a complete history of the migration of livestock from Maya.

One of the ancillary reasons for the eventual termination of Epoch V was that their space probes were close to discovering life records on Maya.

The main reasons for their termination was their arrogance,

Ignorance,

And their newly acquired ability to disturb and disrupt the very fabric of the density.

This could also instantly make the Void disappear.

Septima could not allow this,

As all the universes on which the density was so finely balanced upon would also fall down like a house of cards.

Maya was then left dormant and sleeping for the whole of Epoch V,

While Sentience was respawned on Earth,

Or Ter as we call her now.

It was only reawoken when Shen turned up with the first Mayans in the Tets.

Apparently,

I am not Shen reincarnated or reinserted,

Septima tells me,

But I am blessed with his tenacity and capacity for innovation.

So now you know a little about me,

And the when from which I am recounting this tale,

Let me share with you some of the wondrous times that await for you all in Epoch VII.

Before I do that though,

I have to tell you about some calamities that befell us on Maya at the end of Epoch VI.