the curse of the domino people
a short story by minkle linkle
absolutely no reproduction permitted except for identical computer files fully intact as cached by browsers or copied in full, including this message, for local viewing. the terms of this copyright are as such because the nature of this document is --a work in progress-- and shall be restricted from all public domain under applicable copyright law until its final draft.
    (c) 2003 katrina kidwell johnson
    http://disillusioned.org/youare - not cogs but chips
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    http://noun.org - the noun text archive
    http://www.tortuga.com - The World Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement - The truth Law of Time

eons ago, almost unimaginable to the "modern" human mind, a race of men existed on another planet, in another star system -- really, not too far from here. these men and women, so much like us, evolved and lived harmoniously with their own planet. like us, they had science and technology, but with unity through honor in the traditions long ago established by their forefathers, thousands of years before them, perhaps even millions -- their technology was dominated by their experimentation with creation, not weaponry and domination (or 'defense' as our limited "modern" human minds are so cleverly decieved by the notion).

this race, whose name i can't pronounce with my ludicrious and limited alphabet (in comparison with theirs) lived in a different space in time, with a different system of measure, different number system, and a completely decentralized government with almost no trade in currency. think of it as like a human outgrowing the board game monopoly(tm). their system of measure, their number system, discovered long ago by their ancestors, was not /created/, but rather, mapped by men who were like ancient shamen. in their "pretechnological/prehistorical" civilization, their applications for technology were very different from the humans'. the shamen of this civilization lived in a decentralized but unified empire, perhaps similar to the vision of the United States' forefathers. this empire was very, very different from our own course of "progress". these men themselves, their bodies, as creatures, and their minds; they were far more advanced than most people can imagine. so i will leave it up to your imagination to their appearance. but my point is that this race was established in communication, and their entire planet was unified by their common language for numbers, time, and technology. they had also evolved into the creative and innocent mind, as the traditions upheld by these people were strong, and there was no will to feel power through trade or over others. these people were involved in the advancement of themselves and their families.

of course this all sounds utopian to humans, but these people lived in a real world. there were more flora and fauna species than they could define, even after thousands of years of records. they spoke different dialects of a globally similar language and had different alphabets as we do. they had natural disasters just as we do. people were born with or developed disabilities. people died of illness and old age, some died at birth or during infancy, and even on a very rare occasion, due to overwhelming passion- even suicide and rarer still- murder. there were artists who challenged common systems of thought and spurred controversy through their works. there were scientists who experimented with creation. this story is about the people, and one thing in particular that was created. this story is also about the nature of humans.

our human minds are in a stressed cycle of evolution and deevolution. we have become dependent on an artificial construct of time and an inferior system of measure due to the simultaneous rapid advancment of techonology, population, and technological saturation of the people. though we see this as progress, and we are very much comfortable with our belief that this is a better way of life, (even as i type this into a computer i will say) that technology created in an imbalanced time and measure system will inevitably become useless as a spade to concrete. this seems like a moot point, one thinks, "of course it will become useless, we will eventually replace it with better technology," but that is not the scope of the vision i am showing to you. it is not only that human technology is created in an imbalanced time and measure system, but that it is created for the purpose of advancing control over things that occur in the very artificial time and measure we have established for ourselves in the first place. our planet moves on in its revolutions without seperating time zones, without regard for the commerce, but it is definitely effected by the trade of its resources.

the Venivgad race i will call them, had long ago mapped out a time and measure (number) system based on the planet itself and its natural cycles while they themselves used a primitive system of measure based on old thinking and long habit, but they never had economies dependent on a divided sense of time.

there was a point in the time of the Venivgad, a time that i cannot refer to numerically due to a nondecimal number system, a time instead referred to as lameine (think of it as an annual holiday). during lameine the philosophy of the ancient Venivgad was revered, and it was during the time of reflection that several scientists in Parswig, a coastal city much like New York (though arguably smaller, it was one of the artistic and literary centers, and most science was studied further south). these scientists were research scholars tasked with what humans would refer to as simulation, or artificial scenario analysis. they were studying evolution themselves, and the scenarios they ran were demonstrations of possible futures. it was at their leisure that these scientists worked on the idea of populating the planet third in orbit around a certain star, which they had observed to be populated already by hominids with remarkable similarities to the prehistoric Venivgad ancestry.

it was the Venivgad's toy project, Gaia. the Venivgad thought it novel because the hominids referred to their planet with a grunt. "urth". the scenario they ran was a plan to send a small number of Venivgad young adults of the social equivalent of monks to Gaia. these Venivgad would be genetically and surgically modified to look most similar in appearance and to adjust them for the different temperature and atmospheric extremes. the Venivgad monks would teach them arts and architecture and live an extended lifespan on the planet to oversee their evolution. so the scenario is run.

in the scenario, the monks arrive to Gaia in a region we refer to as the country India, and meet the hominids. the hominids are naturally curious and instinctively afraid and aggressive toward the monks, but the monks are patient and give them gifts and show them colorful things they had not seen before. the monks begin to demonstrate cooperation by building a multilevel dwelling together, welcoming the help of the hominids, and soon their languages are combined. several generations of hominids live and die and the monks age very little. but they exercise no power but the power to guide the hominids and their temple project is working wonderfully. after several hundred revolutions around the "Sun" the monks get tired and wish to take a rest, and though they care very deeply for the creatures they've been looking after, they long to return to their own planet. they miss seeing their own people, their own intricate art. they grow sad that no provision was made for them to return of their own accord, that they are invariably marooned on this simple planet. so the monks little by little allow themselves to interfere with our evolution. little by little, detail by detail, the monks change us; and in balance, we change them. a female Venivgad named Miedier eventually becomes ready for motherhood and tries to mate with a monk. they are unsuccessful and many harvests pass. the generations of hominids have thus far clung to the monks but when Miedier shows sadness for having been unable to concieve, some of the hominids start to wander away, looking for answers, praying to their spirits for her happiness. some of them start their own communities without the monks and lose communication, and oral tradition governs them for hundreds of Suns.

one day, a volcano erupts in a near region and a typhoon hits. their tribes are cloaked in darkness, wind, lightning, and a terrifying black rain. the Venivgad and their hominid people hide in their temple until the sun again shines, and when they go back into the world, their villages are destroyed. but Miedier has finally concieved. the hominid people are afraid, many leave the villages and reunite with hominids who knew of Miedier through the oral traditions. they begin to make up stories that Miedier caused the great black rain, they began to imagine that she will give birth to an evil being, and they conspire with other hominids from the villages surrounding the temple. a distinct seperation grows between the mass of hominids united in war and the hominids who refuse to believe bad things about these undying people who have never harmed them before. the distant villages are furiously driven by their desire to conquer the monks and claim that their oral tradition prophecised that when the day came that Miedier concieved, that her child would have the power to cause great black rains and rains of fire.

the Venivgad monks are sorrowful and desperate, for they love their people, and it is against all that they have ever believed, to kill, even in defense. they isolate themselves with the few faithful hominids who have remained by their side, in the temple that is now the only thing that has lasted as long as their existence on the planet. they have the majority of their lifetime on Gaia now, and they never imagined that they would see such desperate days. they don't want to leave the temple because they are blinded by their sadness to see that they must leave and live elsewhere.

not many days pass before they realize that there are no more people outside. the skies have grown black again with smoke from the volcano. the birds are gone. dogs howl in the distance. it begins to rain.

the army of men have decided to approach the temple from 5 directions, surrounding it in formation, and set all of the wood ablaze with oils. but the rain has started and the chiefs have decided to use axes too. in the distance, the volcano began to erupt lava, driving the chief's fury for what they believed. they ordered the attack, and with the great rain of fire, they destroyed the temple.

the Venivgad monks and the few surviving men that survived the temple's fall were horrified to see their loved ones killed by other men, and the other men were horrified to see their fellow warriors killed by the debris from the tower's destruction. the monks and their men fled from the ruins while the warriors mourned their fallen and cared for their wounded, in the chaos of the muddy black rain and soot.

the Venivgad scientists observed the simulation in a virtual environment over the course of an afternoon in a condensed experience. it fascinated them, for they knew of no such vengeful and power hungry creatures. since it was a simulation, none of it actually happened, and none of the individuals in the scenario actually died-- they were never born, never real. they discussed what would've actually happened if they'd sent actual monks, to Gaia, they discussed the variables of the Gaia scenario as their own philosophical art. the idea of interstellar travel was like the most exotic of all notions of 'pretends' -- a game played by children of Earth.

You see,the Venivgad ancients had discovered through the destruction of their own great civilization that the nature of matter was E=MC2. the destruction of matter created a series of reactions in all of spacetime, not the target of impact alone. the ancients discovered this and through the careful planning and painstaking archiving of all the technology and knowledge that was Good and by establishing their harmonic law of Time, they prevented atomic war from ever happening to their civilization again. they established that Alchemy was Forbidden. and with the harmonic law of Time to reunite their globe in communication, they carefully evolved their technologies to heal their globe of radiation and cultivate efficiently enough to undo the damage that they had done by overproducing their fields for profit. they established that Science was Sacred and that as long as the planet's beasts and plants were never harmed in any way, Science was not a Sin. these establishments provided the few people that survived the ongoing effects of radiation from global nuclear war with enough to provide their children the blueprints for the Great Kingdom, which lived autonomously without any further knowledge of interstellar travel because they concluded through their science that the only way to travel artificially, at speeds faster than that of light, was to tear the fabric of spacetime by destroying matter, which is forbidden by their first establishment.

sadly, that very lameine night, another space-age race was running a program of a different kind. the Fokreu was searching for crystalline mineral solids and elements that were found on the planet inhabited by the Venivgad. the Fokreu informed the Venivgad that their planet would be mined with or without their cooperation. the Fokreu had evaded an interspace judiciary committee which had once hired them to prevent interplanetary meddling. the Fokreu learned that a wealth of elements were found in abundance on certain planets and had already destroyed many that they were charged with protecting. the Venivgad recieved no warning for they had no use of their own for the unmined elements in their planetary crust.

the scientists quickly ran a scenario and saw that the Venivgad would be nearly annihilated for their resistance to slavery. the few that evaded capture fled to other systems, but all Venivgad that remained on the planet were captured and enslaved. the scientists made the decision to go to Gaia because they were fond of this project and had not pretended to live on any other habitable planet. they used a forbidden machine held in a Sacred Monument and assembeled all that they could to save themselves by projecting themselves to our planet with all that they needed to survive, and nothing more. but the circumstances were different, and the results of the Venivgad scientists inhabiting "urth" were very different.

they did not have time to alter their appearance or their genetic makeup to tolerate our planet's environment. their lifespan would not be as long as the simulation they ran. they quickly had children and their children very quickly evolved in appearance based on the environment. and the longer they spent with people the generations forgot the planet they'd left for ours.

thousands of solar cycles pass, temples rise and fall. civilization learns new tricks, and the Venivgad have eventually become able to breed with the hominids. the hominids become man. the Venivgad are all but forgotten. mankind goes on.

Venivgad elsewhere in the universe still have their technology, and their genes, and their recorded history. they happen upon Earth and discover hominids with a genetic makeup with remarkable qualities in comparison with their own. they recover a simulation from their scientific archives and discover the Gaia project. they realize that ancient Venivgad have meddled with the human population. they run a new Gaia simulation -- what would've had to occur for the human species to evolve to the same point without having interbred with the Venivgad ancients. they run another Gaia simulation: what would've simply happened if the Venivgad never studied them. but there is a flaw in this simulation, a flaw in ai backfires while simulating this scenario. the ai tries to repair itself by reprogramming itself while the Venivgad watch, bewildered. the ai ceases output on the simulation, and the Venivgad can no longer observe the results -- only the ai systematically reprogramming itself. this is the beginning of a philosophical breakthrough for the Venivgad- the nature of the mirroring of intelligence.

the mirroring of intelligence? so why did the Venivgad simulation become stuck in a loop? there is no simple answer to such a question. i hardly know where to begin. all i can say for certain, is this: in the course of time and all its' boundless possibilities, certain things are inevitable. for the Venivgad scientists who observed the simulation, they were terrified at first.

while in the simulation's beginning, they observed a condensed scenario begin to glitch and then come to a halt. this program was ancient and no archive existed recording any bugs or discrepancies. the scientists were veritably ejected from the simulation and from this point could only see its code executing itself innumerable ways within the machine construct. the scientists waited for many of their days before the machine finally came to a stop, reboot itself, and begin displaying a scenario again. the scenario tells the Venivgad scientists that the only way that they can remove their Kind from human civilization entirely is not possible without the use of the Tear Travel. The scenario presents to them the philosophical theory that although it is Forbidden for the Venivgad to travel by Tearing Time, the reason Tearing Time was Forbidden was because of the harmonic disruption it caused in the biosphere of a planet. However, the technology and knowledge was now made available to them by the races of Other Men who saved these Venivgad in the Great Preservation Alliance to prevent interstellar interference. Tear Travel would cause disharmony only if it did not occur in the pure vaccuum of deep space, which was within the reach. The machine suggested to them that because the purpose of the First Establishment of Venivgad was that the destruction of matter was forbidden, and that this law was established to prevent the development of weapons, that it would not be in violation of the intent of this law to build a device to put themselves on our planet for the purpose of removing all past interplanetary interference with their planet -- this was a very complicated scenario indeed. The machine had never been instructed to employ a scenario that would include an adjustment to their first establishment of the Forbiddance of Alchemy.