Black Jack (8 page)

‘Green and Black?’ he exclaimed. ‘I like that. It’s fitting… For now, anyway.’

Black felt a surge of pride and joy that the beautiful being liked his choice. What are you doing here, Green?’

‘The alarm bells are ringing for mankind. Not from now, but from far in your future. I am on assignment to find the purest human on Earth, and should he agree to serve humanity by facing a great challenge, it is my duty to help him learn big things and hand him the sword he will require in his confrontation with the dark hierarchy that threatens the future of mankind.’

Instantly, Black felt sadder than he had ever been in his short life. You’ve made a mistake. I’m not the one.

Green shook his head, smiling gently. ‘Only the catalyst, and only during the year of the dragon in the rain, can attain the morphic field pure enough to enable me to step down into this reality. And only that soul will be able to perceive me. If you can see and hear me then you are the one.’

But I’m totally paralyzed.

‘The body is a tool with which to experience a realm and express oneself in it. What if I told you that you are the product of a meticulous design? That your entire life has been a hidden initiation grooming you for this very moment. Do you think it is by accident that you have never met the real god of this dimension?’

Who’s that?

‘The god of money. While you cried that you had not been invited to sup at the banquet of the damned, your solitary existence earned you the distinction of never having harmed a living thing by thought, word, or deed. Likewise the world has not been able to sully you with its baser instincts and preoccupations. Without your useless body you would not be the holder of the purest, highest vibration of your kind.’

Black wondered if he should let Green know that he was dying.

Green smiled. ‘That won’t be necessary; all humans are in the process of dying. You must believe me when I say you are most suitable for the job at hand.’

I still don’t understand what I can possibly do in my condition.

‘Something very important, but a task that ultimately requires great sacrifice and loss.’

But I have nothing to lose.

‘You have more to lose that you can imagine now.’

What do I have to lose?

‘Impossible to speculate. There are unpredictable functions to the information fractals. The future and even the past are fluid and mutable.’

What happens if I fail?

‘Then it will not be the first time. Every human attempt to improve this world has failed and served only to make the evil ones stronger, giving them more reasons to crush and oppress mankind. You will have to be very pure and very strong in the face of the ultimate evil.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘However, the chances you will succeed are very favorable indeed.’

What happens if I refuse?

‘I leave and you carry on as before.’

Black didn’t have to think. His entire life had been spent in joyless isolation. There was nothing he wanted less than to be left to carry on as before. Yes. I will help.

‘In the next few days you will learn many important things. Some of them will cause you great grief if you do not keep foremost in your mind the most important knowledge of all - that physical incarnation is only the chrysalis in which one may transform. Will you do that?’

I will.

‘Be ready for a most extraordinary adventure.’

An adventure? Black looked at the incandescent entity standing over him, at the mathematical formulas that repossessed themselves deep within his being and appeared as constantly moving, never-ending geometric patterns on his splendid skin, and experienced his first burst of unfretted excitement. It was a great feeling.

‘Much more to say, but time to go. Same time tomorrow, Black,’ Green said, and turned into something similar to a heat distortion in the desert, one that disappeared the moment his mother turned the door handle. He had not heard her key in the downstairs door or her tread on the stairs.

‘What is it, my son?’ she cried fearfully from the doorway. Her son’s large catlike eyes were shining in a way she had never seen before.

Not knowing a thing could not be done,
they went ahead and did it.

 - Karate DoJo

Black watched the next day drag with agonizing slowness on his clock face: 2 p.m. Where are you, Green? At exactly 3.29 the dry rain came and Green’s luminous figure appeared inside it. He stepped up to the bed, held out his long, narrow arm with its ever flowering geometric fractals, and said, ‘Take my hand.’

I can’t. I told you, I haven’t any control over my limbs.

‘And I told you, you are not your body. Now come out of that body,’ he ordered firmly.

Thinking about it afterwards, Black could never quite make out how he did, but without any warning, just as if uncorked from a champagne bottle, he slipped out of the relentlessly oppressive weight of his body. Oh, but the sensation! The lightness. The freedom. The sheer delight of it. In disbelief he looked down at the twisted body lying so still in the bed, the eyes frozen open. He could have been dead. Only he wasn’t. So what was he now? He looked down upon his new self. Barefoot and dressed in the same childish Pooh Bear pajamas, everything intact. He moved a finger. It moved!

He was so exhilarated by what was happening to him that it was some seconds before he realized that he was moving away from his inert body at considerable speed and would soon hit the ceiling. He put his hand out to stop himself, but his hand simply went through it.

‘Quit messing about and come back down,’ called Green.

How?

‘Use the power of your mind. Think you want to come down.’

‘Instantly Black found himself floating inches over his inert body.

‘Upright on the floor as if you are standing upon it.’

Bubbling with excitement Black righted himself.

‘Try to keep your feet from going through the floor. It looks better that way.

Black bounced upwards

‘Now take my hand.’

Black reached out and found that, though his hand had gone through the ceiling he could not only touch, but grip Green’s hand. It was solid and warm.

‘Your spirit body has substance,’ Green explained, ‘but because it is too subtle to be felt in the material realm your hand went through the ceiling. In your present state you will be able to grasp things from other dimensions but not of the third, which is too coarse.’

Black opened his mouth and tried to use his vocal cords. ‘Hello,’ he said and found he could. He had a voice - not the thick, strangulated sounds of someone who has never spoken in his life but a clear, finely modulated voice. ‘Wow, this is brilliant,’ he shouted, and began to laugh with the sheer joy that speech brought.

‘We have much to do and less time than I originally expected. Nevertheless, first...’

Once again it happened so fast, Black did not even feel the transition from his room into the blackness of outer space. Green released his hand and he began falling, freewheeling through the vastness.

‘Heyyy!’ he cried out, alarmed.

‘Let go. Have fun. You can’t hurt yourself here,’ Green said, and after completing a few cartwheels, spun like a Catherine wheel firework until Black was certain he must be utterly dizzy, but he wasn’t. His bright, radiant form laughed and shot off in the opposite direction. Black began tumbling then soaring after him. He had never felt so happy or alive in all his life. He couldn’t even blink; who would’ve thought he could fly? With an indescribable euphoria he projected himself forward at great speed. It was amazing.

Ahead Green came to a sudden standstill. Black found that he too was easily able to accomplish the abrupt stop. He parked himself right next to Green and grinned. Green tucked his arms to his body and raced head first toward a twinkling star. ‘Look at me,’ he shouted. ‘I’m a shooting star.’

Black plunged down to join him, marveling at and reveling in the closeness he felt toward Green. Amazing how quickly he had lost his awe for Green. Replaced by an intense but old love. He was his only friend.

Green executed an elegant half-roll. ‘Are you ready to begin your initiation?’

Black copied him and nodded.

Green made a circling motion with his hand and suddenly, a few hundred miles away, an incredible celestial orb came into view. It was full of gigantic structures, monoliths, pyramids, towers, crystalline domes, and steps leading to buildings with massive entrances.

‘Wow! How did you do that?’

‘It was always there. You simply needed to be dimensionally shifted to perceive it.’

‘What planet is that?’

‘That’s your moon.’

Black was astonished. He knew the moon as a gray and deserted entity. This was a full color, and obviously inhabited piece of real estate.

‘There are many things that are hidden from humankind. But, for now, focus your attention on planet Earth and the area surrounding her.’

Black looked behind him. Many thousands of miles away Earth sparkled with breathtaking beauty; a blue and green jewel in the velvet blackness, all the details very clear. But as his focus sharpened he observed something very strange. The planet was glowing brightly and pulsating. In many places it appeared almost liquid. Every once in a while flares of dazzling light shot out. Sometimes they died down; sometimes they became even brighter and began to spread. It reminded him of a great forge where things were being shaped.

‘What is happening to it?’

‘Earth is not an ‘it’, but a sentient being who is in the process of evolving into the highest, most magnificent aspect of her being. She is being blasted with cosmic beams of intense energy and information so that light will be reinserted into her. Pay attention to her surrounding.’

When Black did, he noticed that for many miles around Earth countless millions of beings were suspended. Some were very large, miles long, and had shape. Others were simply formless wisps of grayish smoke, but every one of them was glowing in various degrees of intensity with the same light that was coming from Earth. He had the distinct impression that they were all waiting for something to happen. That sense of anticipation was so great that he perceived their collective expectation as the crackle in the air of an audience waiting for the start of a rock concert.

‘Why have they collected around the Earth?’

‘They have manifested from nearby energy systems, although not necessarily from your time reference, to witness, as you rightly perceived it, a very rare and exciting performance. Such an event will also signal their own upliftment. All your ancient civilizations foretold of this end-time.’

‘Oh! The Mayan prophesy. Is the world really going to end on the twenty-first of December?’

‘The world is not going to end - there are too many interested parties to allow such a thing to happen. It is not a date, but a season. In earth time, an eight-year process. An alchemical kingdom is about to be born where both Earth and human consciousness will drastically change. This change is an event that happens once in many tens of millions of Earth years. The best way I can describe it to you is as a convergence of a great deal of odds, which will then emerge as several probabilities and some possibilities. One likelihood may alter human consciousness to rapidly emerge from its limited time-space illusion into a unified energy system. But, as always, with extreme opportunity comes danger.’

‘Danger?’

‘Mass extinction is one, but the key danger is that Earth will become what you see in the futuristic, dystopian, police state music videos that your elite love to produce, and you occasionally watch. Where humanity has been turned into a micro-chipped, half-human, half-robot slave population. Watched by telescreens and controlled by faceless police in riot gear they no longer think for themselves, but have been assimilated into the hive and act in the ‘greater good’.

Black had watched and enjoyed music videos styled on just such themes, but it had never occurred to him to think of them as the propaganda arm of a harmful agenda deliberately propagated by ‘the elite’. He still didn’t. It was just entertainment. And it looked good.

‘There,’ Green continued, ‘are many moves afoot to sabotage the energy so that as many possibilities as possible remain unrealized. Your action, minute as it will be, is one of those random variables that may tip the odds in favor of humanity. Are you ready to begin?’

Black did not take his eyes off the waiting expectant forms, some of them so bright they hurt his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘Before we move to a place better suited for our needs, I have to ask. Would you like to remain in your bedclothes or shall we find something more appropriate?’

Black looked down at his clothes. He had often wondered where his mother went to buy clothes with children’s motifs in his sizes. ‘Can I choose anything I want?’

Green nodded.

As soon as he thought of it, he was dressed in blue jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots, and an open-necked tan shirt.

‘Very nice. Ready?’

Black nodded.

‘Hold on,’ Green said, and they were deposited on a bare, sun-torn landscape.

No man ever steps in the same river twice,
for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

 - Heraclitus

Black looked around him in wonderment. ‘This is amazing. All my life I have dreamed of standing in a desert.’

‘Glad to please. Look to the west. We are not alone.’

On a sand dune in the distance a lonely figure stood motionless beside his seated camel. He had lived in that furnace all his life and knew both the terrain and its inhabitants intimately. But always it had new secrets to share - a boy who appeared out of nowhere. He left his camel and began walking toward the boy, his robes billowing around him, the slip-face of the dune singing under his feet.

‘Can he see us?’

‘No one can see me, but you will be tangible to the rare adept. The ones who see even that which casts no shadow.’

The man came to a stop six feet away from Black. He had a savagely beautiful face; deep-set, coal-black eyes and skin of pure leather. ‘On the way to somewhere else?’ he asked in a tribal dialect that Black shouldn’t have understood, but did.