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DR TOMORROW 

Part 1 of 5 

Marshall F. Gilula 

Copyright (c) 1992



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      "Dr  Tomorrow  is a renegade  transtemporal  healing machine from
      32,000 A.D.   By this time,  there   has been  a unique synthesis
      between human   and   machine.   Toward  the   second Millennium,
      personkind was aware of plant  consciousness.  By the  end of the
      third Millennium, vegetable  kingdom members served as the system
      of  communication  that  was naturally attached   to the planet's
      physical superstructure.  Around  25,000 A.D.  matter had evolved
      technologically to   the point of  using   electromagnetic fields
      produced by nearly any power device.  Electromagnetic fields were
      recognized as representing  unique  forms  of consciousness.   In
      25,500 A.D.  people  were using  the   energy  of electromagnetic
      fields for routine physical plane travel.   The eternal riddle of
      time travel finally yielded in  28,000 A.D.  Then came the  first
      six equations  of  time/space entropy  conservation.  Just before
      the 30th Inter-Galactic Millennium, the phenomenon of time piracy
      began.  The  Universal Highest Court edicts  were   of no  use in
      attempting to cut  down on  the destructive uses  of time travel.
      Dr  Tomorrow  was one  of  the I.S.I.   (Inter-Galactic  Security
      Intelligence)    programs,  and as  such,   represented  a highly
      utilitarian,  yet still experimental method  of dealing with  the
      problems of  inter-dimensional entropy  imbalance.    Dr Tomorrow
      ranks alongside  the  Charismatic  Cataclysms and  the  Nobethian
      Enfoldings  as the most  important invokers of Universal Entropic
      Harmony to date."

...Inter-Galactic Federation Encyclopedia, Vol. 33K, declassified edition 

Prologue
This communique is being dictated into what's left of the videograph while all the lights and displays of the control deck surround me. Maybe this is a note of goodbye from me in 32,000 A.D. to myself in 1992, but I can't believe it. It's not FutureShock, it's TimeShock. I can't believe, also, that I am incredibly in love. She is not here with me in the flesh, but I feel her essence all around me. Like a soft, invisible pink cloud of good feelings, surrounding me in a protective and gentle force field. I can feel her from my heart, but I can also see her face, especially her eyes. I haven't touched a drink or a smoke of anything since the explosion and the megastepping, but I feel almost high and euphoric just thinking of her. Euphoria in the face of impending disaster suggests insanity and bizarreness ...or...just an ordinary effect of loving and being loved. Pearl E. Mae is not your ordinary lady, but then I guess I'm not so ordinary anymore, either. That's what megastepped means. As I said, she's not here with me physically, but I feel her consciousness within all of me at every moment of my own awareness. They have all gone Virtual Virtual for the duration, yet we as a group are still in good interdimensional contact, and the project goes on. Twenty four hours a day I get fragments from all the other members. It's a constant thing. Pearl E. Mae's mind, however, is clearly an ongoing part of my own mind. With sensations suggesting that in the blending of our energies through love, I have some of her unusual psychic abilities. Like precognition and the power over death trip, and all that she taught me about using water and bodies of water for long-distance communication. She did a good job of convincing me, but it was still a bit hard for me to believe that oceans were as useful for interplanetary communication as Pearl E. Mae told us. In our group of seven, I am the only Eternal who doesn't have years of experience using water for communication. Sounds off the wall, but it really works. Far in the future, water resources are not just for their physical properties in quenching thirst and furnishing hyperionic and neurochemical materials. Water resources are also legitimate space communication resources. Really clean water is getting harder to find, so one of the jobs that we have, honestly, is to look for sources of uncontaminated water. And I'm not spaced out, either, for suggesting that we look for uncontaminated water. I just come from a planet with a messed up water system, dirty old Earth. Yet it looks so clean and pristine from space. And uncontaminated water today in 1992 America costs five times what it cost in 1991 -- if you can get it. Would you believe $25 for a five-gallon bottle of fairly pure drinking water? Price gouging may drive that up to $50. 

The physiological monitors on the panels in front of me are reading out acceptable limits on all my parameters, even though I feel like I'm shouting at times. Vibrations that make my tooth ache come and go randomly. My voice is probably difficult to make out even with all the high-tech translators because there's a tremendous amount of dust and oscillation all around. I can barely hear myself in the cacophony of hushed voice alerts, multitimbral beeps, and atonal screen alarms. Lights and sounds fade in and out and blend in a mosaic of synesthetic patterns. Three different holographic projection systems are competing for my attention. One system shows me in a 3-D reflection and a second system maps star coordinates. The third system shows the ship viewed from the outside. I see a glowing saucer that is shimmying with one edge burning or in some way disintegrating. With all these expansive 3D images, it is difficult for me to remember that I am truly aboard a transparent flying saucer, just like the one that I observed skimming over Biscayne Bay with the shining Yo-Vah, no more than five days ago. 

Yo-Vah explained the what and why of all the changes that my group of friends and I experienced so recently. Megastepping was the word he used when he described what happened to me personally. Then he described the timeline transmission-injection process that put the six other beings from the future into my apartment. According to Yo-Vah, we were born in the bolus of a nuclear-electromagnetic energy explosion that occurred when an airplane's experimental nuclear piles discharged to earth. I.S.I. technicians used matter-energy translators through the crack in time that always occurs during nuclear explosions. A crack in time that could be used for the transmission-injection process was called a timecleft. Because of the timeclefts, nonPrimitive planetary systems universally forbid any nuclear energy reactions of any type unless carried out in deep space where the timeclefts are easier to handle. Except for illegal weapons, nonPrimitive cultures generally use hyperionic and resonance energy devices for propulsion and other forms of power. Earth is not the only Primitive planetary system known to the future. Other Primitive planets have also experienced severe disruption because of the repetitive use of nuclear energy and the chaotic aftereffects of the timeclefts. Primitives could never develop the ability to view their planet as a living, organic thing. Despite the fact that actual life forms grow from it, Primitives tend to view a planet as something inert, like a gigantic oversized asteroid without the complicated, subterranean systems and energy balancing forces that each and every planet does in fact have. Primitives never understand the spiritual aspects of what being a planet implies. Because resonance and balance of the planet are never considered by Primitives, there have already been many episodes and instances of spontaneous disintegration of planets. Yo-Vah said that the planet Earth is slated for irrevocable disintegration by the year 2105 A.D. Fires from within and all that biblical stuff. 

Oil reserves had been a mistaken issue for our planet. Water resources were by far the most important issue. When the final fires came, Earth inhabitants saw all the many effects of no water resources, plus nothing to use for quenching the sickening vesicant-laden fires. Nothing to wash in. Nothing to drink. Third World cultures had wrested control of the oil market from the remainder of the planet despite some bloody warring to the contrary. The same wealthy cultures hung on to their Third World mentalities and continued to evolve terrifying underground nuclear weapons. Multiple surreptitious underground tests led to the final planet-wide vulcanisms. But before the last cataclysmic days, much of the planet already had experienced hideous water shortages, plagues, and contamination that defied the ordinary imagination.} 

If all this information were not enough to make one collapse in utter optimism, there is yet one additional small matter that hassles me. As an Earth person from the year 1992, I must solve some important problems for the universe of 32,000 A.D. in order for the future universe to not collapse and implode into a huge time crack of entropy deficit. "Aw, come on, get serious!" is what I thought when first hearing these neutral facts from the luminescent being who emerged from the transparent flying saucer. He didn't really tell me about the rescue plans until after he had told me a lot of other things. ...But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

To tell the truth, all of this stuff somehow does boggle even my recently megastepped mind. I am sitting here in one of the command console's recliners with my fingers tracing out patterns of pushes, slides, and centic wiggles on the colored contact panels before me. I don't really understand what is happening, but my fingers sure do. They seem to have a life of their own as they quickly and without hesitation trace out continuing patterns that are a response to something but to nothing that I am consciously aware of. At the same time, I feel the quiet, calm love of Pearl E. Mae within me. Her orange skin and her eyes and nose and the way they look on a pillow haunt me in a great way. Even if the universe is ending, I refuse to accept it. There must be another way. Somehow, the story cannot end here. I do not feel it in my Primitive bones. The virtual image that serves as the saucer's window has murky patterns of gray and white. One edge of the saucer is definitely wobbling in a rather severe oscillatory pattern. A ship that is hurtling out of control at the moment, getting ready to crash and burn, that's the only image I can conjure up, but I realize the pointlessness of saying it. Crash and burn where, When you're out in obscurely deep space, as in some of the Nobethian Enfoldings, named and otherwise? And what do the Enfoldings have to do with Entropy Traps and Nodals and how do I figure out what these words mean and how they got into my head. At the moment, I cannot say what the words mean, but in my mind, it feels like I am just as familiar with them as I am with part of my Coconut Grove neighborhood or some of the traffic patterns in Miami. 

Likely my dictation is an act of futility, but I must try. 

I must. 

been something else. Raw nerve ends and newborn consciousness sometimes make me think that all is futile. To be exposed to the highs and lows of sentient consciousness within the course of seven days is truly mind-blowing. The megastepping took place within one clap of thunder and lightning, heavy sound and light but integrating it all, being able to appreciate and use the changes, went on and on really heavily for the days following the thunderclap and the cleft in time. At the moment of megastepping, there was a bonding between the seven of us and only my guitar player's hang-loose consciousness prevented me from truly losing it at the moment of feeling total mental contact with six other beings. Probably more than anything, that moment of total contact really liberated me from any attachment from drugs of any type, including alcohol and tobacco. The total, all-- and unconditional caring, and the amazing precipitously crystallized unity of being with six other beings was my first real God-experience, at least as defined by future cultures. Yo-Vah also said that Primitives always showed great ambivalence about their God. Whether it was plural or singular, the Creator as visualized by Primitive cultures was never accepted by the majority of the societies. Yo-Vah had chuckled once as he suggested that in Earth cultures of 1992, God was nearly illegal, and high-tech computers were often much more worshipped and adored. 

Then there was also the case of Al, our irrepressible and unpredictable multi-modular computer system, whose membership in the group was assured from day one. He was a bit of a tease, and made it hard for us to recognize just who or what was causing all our computer equipment to behave as if with one will. I first noticed the strange beep sounds that kept appearing during our daily MindLink meditation. The beeps were noticeable during the HeartLight part of MindLink as well. I thought Al was an abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence but the strange beep sounds told me that Al was short for Aloysius. Only Su-Shan finally recognized the source of the scrolling text files that kept appearing in my telekinetic notebook computer. It took nearly a week for the seven of us to become a unit, and then to decide that yours truly was slated to play kamikaze Primitive-turned-Eternal cowboy of cyberspace and hyperspace. Can you beat that? Our planet and our cultures are supposed to be Primitive, and we are supposed to also save the future; a future which labels Earth culture a Primitive, throw-away culture! 

Maybe that's why many of us us from Earth also treat the planet as something to be wasted by throwing away the vital resources. Such as natural ionic water, which most of the more advanced civilizations value highly, not only for the hyperion drives and engines, but for the neuromolecular resynthesis chains that require large amounts of natural, ionic water for birthing protoplasm in the underground vats. For decades on my home planet, the water resources have been depleted and clogged up with industrial contaminants such as sugar industry insecticides and mercury fumes from the effluent of commercial disposal plants that have both poisoned wildlife, including the Everglades panthers and fish, with toxic levels of mercury and other cancer-producing chemicals. 

Then to be transported from 1992 nearly 30,000 years forward into this crashing ship complete with an externally twisted and chaotic universe and a control console that only my megastepped fingers seem to understand...this new life surpasses any capacity I have left for surprise or astonishment. Only the intense, burning love feelings for Pearl E. Mae and her womanly allure do not surprise me. I gave up on trying to rationalize about the love feelings. I only feel a gratitude to a Supreme Being for the ability and opportunity to experience this kind of love. But what's happened to the rest of the group? Of course I have my personal sense of Pearl E. Mae, but my group sense of her is not with me. Where are the other members of `Dr Tomorrow'? They've gone into virtual virtual form. Not virtual form. Just unembellished virtual virtual form. 

As far as the other members of the group go, my current information overload status keeps from me the awareness of just where they are. I can feel the group feeling in my heart, and it is strong, but I am unable to evoke individual vibrations or the very strong facial images that we can get usually. I remember both Su-Shin and Pearl E. Mae telling me that there was enough physical plane energy for only one of the seven to go, and that we were not permitted to use virtual virtual formseeking on this entropic assignment, but we had to try it sooner or later, and sooner came first. Besides, my going as a One has always been in the plan of the I.S.I., more than preordained. 

With all the past and future lifetimes that they managed to project into me at the moment of megastepping, it was risky but worth taking the risk. They had never projected into a Primitive before, much less a Primitive species karmically figured for irrevocable and nearly-immediate extinction in 2105, A.D. In some ways it was such a downer, but in other ways it was a joke of truly cosmic proportions. Yo-Vah referred to Earth and all of our cultures as "Primitive." Not with malice or condescension, but matter-of-fact gentleness. From the way he spoke about the planet and its future demise, he seemed to have the opinion that the loss of a Primitive planet was not so tragic. He did not make a big deal out of this Primitive being megastepped into full Eternal status. Of course the six other group members had already attained Eternal status before being matter-energy translated into 1992. From what Yo-Vah said, Eternal status originally was used to mean individuals who lived for 500 or more years. By 32,000 A.D., Eternals have been living for thousands of years. Guardians such as Yo-Vah are a special group of Eternals who have regulatory and observing functions, but who also lost any semblance of their own individual life pattern which is replaced by the group charisma of the special class of Guardians. A subgroup of the Guardians, Siblings, are a specially-selected order whose only life function is to maintain a constant vigil and control over the I.S.I. gateways and controls. Like all Eternals, Siblings never require food or sleep, although they do require water. Most other Eternals are able to simulate sleeping and participate in voluntary or recreational ingestion of food, but Siblings can not even pretend to eat or sleep. Siblings resemble Earth's monks of the Roman Catholic Cistercian Order, but are still Guardians even though their physical form has, through biogenetic engineering, been compressed into a much smaller physical stature with tripartite appendages quite suited to the universal three-panel plasma controls of the I.S.I. Siblings are very homogenous in appearance, in contrast to Guardians and other Eternals, whose appearance reflects a wide variety of life forms. Guardians are the Shogun warriors of the future, although they do not use the knife or sword. Guardians are light warriors. They are actively involved in an ongoing battle between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness across all extents of time and space. 

Yo-Vah warned all of us to beware underestimating the power of the Forces of Darkness... 

                                 CHAPTER ONE
                                 ------- ---

                                   Friday

                    Megastepping into a Primitive culture

Wake up in the morning. Nothing. No light, no thoughts, no memories. How did I get here? Reach around under the bed for a light switch. Silent motorized metallic shades recede and reflections of the ninety degree Miami sunshine rush in with flashes of the technicolor verdant yard. Oh, Jeez, I need a cigarette. 

There's a crumpled pack on the bedstand, half-sitting in an overflowing ashtray, and I check it with probing fingertips and closed eyes only to find that it indeed is empty. But, as I open my eyes, a thick, half-smoked doobie in the same ashtray comes to my attention. I light it and its acrid smoke bites through my throat and lungs. A couple of quick, sibilant drags and reflexive coughs jerk me upright in bed and open my eyes to the day's beautiful blue, red, and green colors as the ganja's rush bites into my brain. Yep, that's it...another Miami day in MurderCity, USSA. The TV remote lets me flick on the 24-hour news program and the strident tones about the worsening national economic situation and the water shortages in Soviet Bloc countries remind me that all is not well in the world. And what can I do about it this early in the morning, and a Friday morning to boot? 

Well, I have to siphon the python in the worst way. I take the glowing doobie into the bathroom with me and I sit down so that I can dial up a number on the speakerphone wallmounted next to the toilet. Another hit reduces the roach to a hot ember in my hand, so I flush it down the toilet with the whiz. The metallic dialing tone is interrupted by a honking sound. A good-natured guffaw issues from the speakerphone: 

"Lyle, mon, that ain't you this early in the morning, is it?" 

"Nope, Julian, this is my ghost talking. I've been killed, so I'll need some flowers from the florist. Can you help me out?" 

"Hey, mon, you trying to rag on me? Why don't we talk about this later when you come over here? Why are you talking about this on the telephone?" 

"I'm sorry, Julian. All I was calling you about was to see if you had --really -- any roses. Maybe two or three that I can give to Gabriella. She treated me extra special last night. She's running around doing a bunch of photo sessions, and I want to have something with me for her in case she shows up early today while I'm still at work at the bookstore." 

"O.K...Just come over here. You better watch out for doing something serious with a Jamaican lady. In nothing flat, she'll have you tied around 'er little finger, mon...Put a ring through your nose just like the Cubans like to do." 

"Thanks for the concern. Catch you later." 

Julian is for sure jealous of Gabriella because she's the best-looking woman, black or white, in all of Coconut Grove. He and I always have the same taste in women, and he would take Gabriella in a heartbeat if she would permit it. Recently, she's been paying attention to my paying attention to her! If she weren't so overwhelmingly beautiful, I might question her motives and just why she'd suddenly begun to find me so interesting. I'm a decent guitar player and I've had my share of one-evening "interests," but Gabriella and I've been seeing each other on the streets in the Grove for years. She knows my business and I can see a lot of hers. I always see all of her business hanging out of the tiny midget-sized dresses with the sleek shoulder bags that bounce around as she walks. She really travels in all of the fast lanes simultaneously, and I'm just sitting on the sidewalk with my Fender Twin Reverb, the Gibson 340ES, and some old Shure microphones. Sure I see her with a lot of sharp looking dudes, wearing the Miami Vice clothing, who have the same intense facial expressions without the good looks of the series' stars. So I figured her for one of the `model set' and all that narcissism stuff. 

But, Gabriella has real soul and the most intensely beautiful picture-perfect jet black face I have ever seen. Grace Jones looks like a boy next to Gabriella. For whatever reason, THIS month, she's picked me, and so be it. I'm away from her for five minutes, and then I forget that I fell in love with her until I see her face again, and fall in love all over again. I am not one to sing the blues about good fortune. One week of evenings with her has seemed to erase the memories of all the previous ladies in my life. It's not like "to all the ones I've loved before," it really feels that I've never loved before. Like I've never considered myself a good-looking guy or one the knockout ladies would ever give a second glance. Maybe that's one reason I got into the guitar business--to help me get a lady. Gabriella is so far beyond my wildest dreams in the love department. I have trouble dealing with anything beyond RIGHT NOW when it comes to Gabriella. So if she's the great love of my life and it only lasts 38 days! So what! So be it. 

Holy backdoor trots. Too much heavy philosophy this early in the morning. 

Gabriella left a couple of hours before with her friend Jim for West Palm Beach. After a fashion photo session for a ditzy glitzy singles' publication, she has some interviews with writers from the National Enquirer. As I shower in the smelly water and dress, I think of her kissing and nuzzling my back when I was still sleeping. I can still feel her skinny arms and her pendulous chest and her mouth kissing me behind my ear. If I get my business with Julian and the bookstore done medium-quickly, I'll be back before I know it, in our air conditioned cement cave, for an evening of dinner and more kissing and nuzzling. I do have to go to the bookstore for at least half a day of inventory revision before getting an early start on TGIF, Coconut Grove style. It's the first day of a Coconut Grove Art Festival weekend, and everything is typically up for grabs. So on the way to the store, I'll stop at Julian's place and mellow out the metal, instead of putting the pedal to the metal, as I can hear the drivers outside doing already, with occasional sounds of burning rubber and squealing tires. Everyone always gets a little crazy during the Art Festival weekend. It's the expected thing in Miami. My two shepherds have been running madly in and out of the house, so I make sure that they had a chance to go, and shut them both up in the poolside dining room. She-Ra, the five year old female, is very soft and obedient and responsive. Her charge, Bullet, is going to have his second birthday next week and he easily doubles She-Ra's sixty pound body weight. Both of them jump up and down whenever they see me go for the leash or the guitar, because they figure that I am going out and that they might also possibly have the faintest chance of going out, too. This time, I'm going for the guitar, not the leash. 

* * 
The Steinberger six-string was sitting on the table in front of me. I took the guitar, put it in its soft case, slung it over my shoulder, and left the two-bedroom apartment with my guitar and electronic notebook in hand. It was an easy walk down South Bayshore Drive to where Julian's house was at Kirk and Bayshore. The CBS house sits opposite Kennedy Park and there were lots of late week joggers and picnickers getting an early start punctuated with boom-box Salsa and some Fat Boys. Not only could I feel the vibes of the Art Show, and the anticipatory excitement of the pedestrians around me, but I could see numerous vehicles carrying assorted works of art, stands, and improvised room dividers on their way to the Village. 

As I pushed the doorbell button, I could hear synthesized chime sounds accompanied by Julian's shrill voice which became especially cacophonic, whenever he was really agitated. He paused long enough to send back the buzz of the release circuit in the doorknob lock system, and then resumed his yelling as I entered. 

"You bitch, you always lie. Then you put it on me! Yeah, mon...you go ahead. Try to find somebody else" 

Julian abruptly slammed the phone down, and, without missing, so much as a single beat, offered me a joint and a Winston. They were both lit. I put the joint down, smoked the Winston, and began to feel better. My vision seemed to sharpen, and I felt even better when I began to sip the great Mellita coffee that Julian always made for me. His physical carriage was superb, and no one would look at his shadowy muscular definition and ever think that he could be sick. Julian, my gay black brother, was also my very best connection to Everything and my drummer on at least several casual musical jobs that I occasionally got. I dreamed of having Julian as the permanent drummer for MY group, but I was content to know him as a good friend. He had to play only the good gigs that came up whenever they came up. He actually didn't need the money because of his business with Everything, but he absolutely needed to be working for his own self-renewal. As we savored the chocolate-like richness in our mugs, he talked about self-renewal and why it was important for someone who was HIV positive and to not be taking it lying down. After the coffee, we stood at the bar and smoked the joint that he had given me. It was Thai Stick -- pure bud -- and the thick resinous aroma enveloped my entire head and chest and made me sit down. Julian laughed at me. I laughed at him. 

The row of plastic medication bottles on the shelf near Julian's head was an interesting contrast, as all the bottles but the last one were empty. The row of orange tubes reflected Julian's halide lamp in a series of tiny bubbles of light which hung suspended in the air in a row above the tubes. The last tube was filled with oblong white capsules, each bearing a blue ring. AZ.T and bone marrow were two of Julian's current interests along with AL-721, DDI, DDS, Compound Q, tons of other immune augmentors, letting go of the need to control, and Louise Hay. The reefer-music industrial-complex was of only secondary importance even though most of Julian's visitors were interested in very little else. Since Toos, my Dutch old lady from Malibu had OD'd on peyote and booze, gone to Jackson and the I.C.U., nearly died, and then committed suicide afterwards on the psychiatric ward in the hospital, I related to death in a different way. I too was a veteran of the Grim Reeper. I'd also been through enough death-rebirth trips on acid in the sixties and seventies to have literally no fear of death. So AIDS was just another one of the different death trips that we humans happened to be into at the moment. Another death trip to be turned into a life trip. AIDS was no longer cool or fearful. Compound Q from China, Al-721, T-Cell counts, and AZT schedules were almost socially camp, especially in punk circles. The name was already camp and decadent, and everyone was pronouncing it `HIV' in their pseudoscience jargon. And Julian and I related to the whole phantasmagoria of what was `HIV' in his life and in our lives too. We didn't sit down and have long talks about what it felt like to die, but we did talk about priorities, and what were truly the treasures of living. Or dying. And how to savor both, if savor is the right word to use. The effect of being around Julian was like getting constantly put back into THE NOW. Julian said that he tried not think about the past, and for sure did not want to miss out on any part of RIGHT NOW by worrying about the future. 

And don't get the idea that Julian was one of those morose morbid types. As sensitive as he was, he was just as quick to tell you to go get bent if he figured he owed it to you. Usually, though, his HIV and his reefer/AZT combination kept him pretty mellow. His big intellectual discussions all had to do, sooner or later, with reactive energy, or what he called "e-reactive." And that was some kind of logarithmic mathematical function that was supposed to keep the universe from imploding and collapsing in upon itself. I had heard him rap his thing on the e-reactive so many times, that I didn't laugh anymore. In fact, sometimes when he would be getting an earnest look on his face while discussing all that esoteric trivia, his head would begin to glow like an ebony version of Western icons in the Sistine Chapel. It almost seemed like there was a halo or a head-aura extending around his face. Nowadays, Julian was looking like a skinny-ass but muscular Miles Davis, and there wasn't much cherubic flesh on his face. 

But it was a cherub who walked up to me with a glass of fresh, clean sparkling water. He was always unselfish, loving, and giving, and truly generous to a fault. Knowing Julian was one of the treasures of my life. He was much more than a secret weapon, and sometimes we enjoyed freaking each other out by trying to see who could be more like Julian--Julian or me. Smelling the clean sparkling water in my snifter, I drank deeply with enjoyment, and watched Julian quaff a large wine cooler in a couple of gulps. Julian knows that I rarely drink any of the beer or wine coolers he uses for his own refreshment. A large, inverted 5-gallon bottle of spring water sits next to Julian's couch in its refrigerated stand and jogs my memory with the $35.00 price written on the side in black magic marker. Within the last year and a half, the cost of clean water has gone up more than 500% and there is no end in sight. Shortly after the Israeli and Lebanese water supplies had been poisoned by unnamed Semite terrorists with biological toxins and genetically-altered E. coli, it was discovered that the entire oil-stained Persian Gulf area was at least semi-contaminated also. Ditto for all of the inland areas surrounding the immediate areas making up the Gulf. Drought-prone Ethiopia and the rest of Africa followed soon afterwards. In America, 50% of the Southern California desert was caving in because of the extreme degree to which underground water reservoirs had been depleted by the pumping needs of Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Despite the ubiquitous media warnings, illiterates and the poverty-stricken drank contaminated water everywhere and died. Video doom-sayers were broadcasting de facto government proclamations about making sure to not drink water from any of the usual sources or supplies. Special government water inspection stations were set up and manned internationally by U.N. and W.H.O. teams. The price of electrophoretically-purified water (the only acceptable form) continued to rocket on a near-weekly basis, despite Congressional investigations of the price-gouging and racketeering. The golden mean of eight to ten eight-ounce glasses of water daily has remained possible only for the middle class and above. Which made for a tremendous run on beer and wine products. Because of the required electrophoretic purification, carbonated beverages were too expensive to manufacture and therefore out of the realm of possibilities. So people were boozing more and drinking less water than what is good for them. In one of the bars where I played they told a joke about how nine out of ten stewardesses based in Miami had urinary tract infections. Infected urine. coming from dehydration. Not drinking enough plain water. Coffee and tea don't count as plain water because the stuff dissolved in the water creates more hassle for the body. The way a guitar player understands it is that coffee and tea add more gunk to the system and clean water takes gunk out of the system in the urine. 

Julian never complained about the water difficulties, and he often had a bittersweet chuckle and a glint in his eyes when he listened to other, non-HIV people complain about their difficulties and their frail mortality which the suddenly-gone-bad water supplies pointed out. Folks with compromised immune systems had a much more difficult time with the contaminated water. The mutant E. coli that made its way 'round the globe fairly quickly was also poisonous to human skin, and produced a wheepy and crusting rash that resembled the old post-WW II radiation sickness experienced by Japanese citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So any water that had not been boiled for at least ten minutes (the tolerance limit of the resistant mutant bugs) was also forbidden even for bathing. Needless to say, the deodorant industry experienced an intense renaissance. But six months after having "seven-day-spray" preparations on the market, the FDA discovered positive links between the long-acting deodorant molecules and three different types of disseminated cancer, so deodorants became a little less popular. Upper-middle-class condos such as the one I live in, north of South Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove, just had to install another larger, and better-insulated boiler to each water system, so that pools and showers were legally possible. The water still had a strange smell as it came out of the shower head. Something I could never get used to. 

Leaving the empty glass and morbid thoughts behind, I let myself out of Julian's house and walked back in the direction of Peacock Park and the Village where our yearly Coconut Grove Art Festival was going full-tilt on this Friday, February 14, 1992. The Grove Art Show was nationally known, and not without reason. Even casual observers occasionally caught sight of great works of art being personally installed by the artist. I tried not to think about the smell of the water, and it was easy on this Festival day. Dozens of specialty food vendors competed with each other. The smells of Greek sandwiches, popcorn, and frying sausage covered up the ammoniated sulfur stench from the Bay. As I looked at the boats tied up at Dinner Key, I noticed the dark brown lines etched by the water on many hulls. These lines had been etched for only about the last six months. The brown color matched the stench. That thought stayed with me as I made my way through the Art Festival crowd to the Crystalline Book Shop on Main Highway. Located a block away from the Playhouse, the bookstore served a wide variety of customers and clients. Some years, we did several months' business in the space of the three days that the Art Festival ran. 

Today, our customers were sparse and routine. I was able to boot up the inventory program on the store computer and get an early start on the end-of-week account verifications. As usual, I had my personal machine with me in my bag. I opened my electronic notebook computer on the desk and positioned it so that I could easily see the LCD screen. While reaching for an eraser, my index finger accidentally brushed the touch pad of the portable. I heard the notebook's piezoelectric beep tone. Files in the notebook had been set up for transferring columns of funds outstanding that I had entered at home earlier in the week, but something strange was happening to the display. It was rolling! Without any keykstrokes or verbal orders from me, the little notebook's LCD screen suddenly began to scroll text. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as my eyes read the lines that were rolling past: 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 1110001000010001100011110000110
001010011100110010010110100000100100 001010000 110110001000 

On planet Earth of the Nineties, Lyle Crawford is involved in a freak electrical-nuclear accident. Lyle is a well-read but undistinguished musician of average size and indeterminate age. He is having a rough Saturday. 

It begins when a Metro policeman on the Miami Metrorail mauls him for carrying an open cup of coffee. The cop jerks him out of the public transport car and drags him down a flight of cement stairs. But a strange light surrounds both of them as the cop unlocks a cement holding cell. 

Suddenly, a gentle expression comes over the lawman's face. He slams the door shut, replaces the lock, and sends the guitar-toting Lyle on his way. 

Lyle goes on to work at his occult book store job. No peace, though. His heavy morning is broken by an honest-to-goodness vision. One of Lyle's customers also sees the words that hang in the air before both of them: 

Nutrition 
Exercise 
Self-control 
Neuromuscular integration 
Biomolecular Environment 
Acupuncture 
Spiritual Attunement 
The customer quickly leaves the store sputtering. Lyle scratches his head. 

Later the same day, as Lyle sits in his own apartment, a huge energy field engulfs him. Overhead, a lightning bolt strikes an experimental nuclear bomber and sets off a freak nuclear-electrical accident. Lyle becomes the target of the quickly moving I.S.I. scientific technicians. At the moment of the loud electrical accident, six Advanced Beings from scattered galaxies of the far-distant future materialize suddenly in front of Lyle's eyes. 

Within one split second, Lyle undergoes a mega-evolutionary change in mind, body, and spirit. 

All Hell breaks loose in a mission control of the far, far distant future. A dozen hairless humanoid beings in monochrome, ISI monogrammed uniforms appear virtually identical in the nearly featureless detail of their faces and the uniformity of their physical dimensions. There are 30 multi-display monitors in three semicircular rows. Loud crunching sounds, rumbling, vibration, and screeching frequencies make this appear like a serious emergency. Members of the Intergalactic Security Intelligence make panicky movements with their appendages, which terminate in small hands bearing two fingers and a thumb. A hairless holographic humanoid image appears above the beings and intones: 

"Siblings, we have few additional chances to correct the rift! The Laplace transforms must be calculated and positioned with great precision. I don't have to tell you what the alternatives are, do I? All six of our Kashic Recordings are ready to go." 

Despite the panic, the beings appear to join together and a confluent series of vowel sounds fills the chamber. An aura of calm resumes as a serious emergency appears to have been once more by-passed. 

Following the nuclear "accident", all seven (six Advanced Beings plus the "new" Lyle) establish a MindLink/HeartLight -- a spontaneous and instantaneous telepathic connection. Out of MindLink/HeartLight comes HeartLight, which becomes a reliable way to reach Higher Mind on a group basis. They form an electronic-rock musical group, Dr Tomorrow, that becomes a clandestine agent in the trans-time war between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. The group members live together in a large Miami duplex apartment with a pool and carry out startling experiments on a daily basis. 

They build Al -- a large computer who quickly becomes another member of the group. Al teaches them that every machine, and all devices with electromagnetic fields, have at least some rudimentary form of consciousness. Not only can computers talk of, and from, their own intelligence, but all devices with the least electromagnetic pulsations of current flow or resonance, can communicate a form of intelligence -- even though it just might be an on-off binary code or some other type of "machine language". 

The Dr Tomorrow group is also intensely involved with aquatic ecology. Interesting vignettes exploit the vehicle of plant consciousness as a way of recognizing ecologic communication. Ordinary plants of every variety express personality characteristics during different episodes of the show. By talking with the luxurious plant growth in their Florida backyard, Dr Tomorrow's members discover many facts about aquatic and solar ecology, the environment in general, and water science (hydrology) in particular. 

The six matter-translated members of Dr Tomorrow achieve the status of Unitary Being from their own galactic system before selection for the project by the ISI. As a Unitary Being, each has attained the status of superhero (of one type or another) during one or more succeeding lifetimes. Each was selected by the I.S.I. for perpetual renewal. 

Yo-vah, a luminescent being, frequently visits Lyle and the other six group members. He comes to Earth through the trans-time barrier in a saucer vehicle with amazing properties. It can become totally transparent to light and sound. The flying saucer is also able to control light and sound in the reverse direction. And it is capable of unlimited light and sound synthesis. 

Yo-vah offers Dr Tomorrow a definitely eclectic brand of philosophy admixed with artistic high-tech devices from the future that are deemed "non-anachronistic" and, therefore, are approved for translation into the past. Yo-Vah's flying saucer serves as a sound and light source to show Dr Tomorrow just how effectively sound and light can alter living beings. 

An animated sequence presents a humorous depiction of a public, musical concert in the far distant future. An entire satellite is used to broadcast the event. Three saucer-shaped crafts serve as a triangulation device to establish three dimensional light and sound projection. 

Yo-vah warns Dr Tomorrow, in no uncertain fashion, about the dangers of Cataclysms and problems soon to be experienced by the entire local Galactic group (including the planet Earth) because of trans-time warfare and trans-time crime involving the anachronistic displacing of valuable objects from the past into the future, and vice versa. 

Yo-vah attempts to teach Dr Tomorrow that the apparent "bad guys" on Earth only manifest a more generalized tendency towards negativity, destructiveness, and negative entropy balance. So as with positive forms of life energies, these negative forms are also part of the life phenomena. Many of the destructive and terroristic things happening are pre-determined by energy imbalances that are being "reflected" from universes of the future where good and bad are merely labels for positive and negative energies and do not carry any sense of ethics and morals, or right and wrong. 

As a year-long video program, Dr Tomorrow aims at presenting 40 segments in each year's package. Each segment can be simultaneously marketed for the home and school instructional/entertainment video market. Special aggregates of 40 segments can serve as the subject matter for a provocative and instructive state-of-the-art school health program that is practical and comprehensive. 

The previously mentioned "vision" that Lyle experiences is merely a list of the seven divisions of Holistic medicine: 

Nutrition 
Exercise 
Self-control 
Neuromuscular integration 
Biomolecular Environment 
Acupuncture 
Spiritual Attunement 
This program teaches preventive medicine and wellness to the viewer in bite-sized chunks that are interspersed with music, animation, foreign language instruction and the science-fiction storyline. Russian, Spanish, and Japanese are taught in elementary fashion to capitalize on the bilingual cultural aspects of Miami that interface with the strategic and socio-economic values of the Japanese and Russian languages. Short, visual and auditory phrases that are functionally useful to everyday life are taught together in several languages simultaneously. Phonetic rather than literal learning is stressed. Yo-vah suggests that visual subliminal messages, "LOVE THE EARTH" and "PRAY FOR WORLD PEACE" be a part of the video presentations. 

From his flying saucer, Yo-vah teaches Dr Tomorrow the importance of a system of world peace, resembling a nonmilitant world religion that recognizes all existing beliefs. Japanese, English, Russian, and Spanish are to Yo-vah the most important languages in Earth cultures that he has analyzed on his plasma state intelligence System via extracts of radio and television satellite transmissions. Both music and languages are good ways of blending cultures. Yo-vah instructs Dr Tomorrow to make music that will be both simple and tunable to the ear of the average young person. Yo-vah predicts that four years of the Dr Tomorrow series, if packaged properly, might be exactly what the Guardians had predicted that the Forces of Light needed to keep the 1988-1992 Local Galactic Group interface intact and relatively free from serious stress and strain. Otherwise, what faces Lyle's part of the universe is a disruption in the very fabric of the space-time continuum and life itself.} 

000100011100000 10011101 1110000010100111001111000001 0001 00 1000011100110 1111 000 0101 1101 100011100101011 1 000 1110 11010 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

The eerie feeling didn't go away -- even when Lyle finished reading the long message about `Dr Tomorrow'. He was certain that someone must have input the file as a joke. He racked his brains for who it might have been and drew a blank. He could not come up with any possible explanation, including phantom modem transmission, because he had never used the telephone line interface with this particular computer. And how come `Lyle Crawford' had to be included as the central character in this science fiction story? Yet whomever had written the story seemed to know a lot about Lyle. The stuff about that superbeing accident was really off the wall. He shrugged, pulled down the "Save As..." option on the File menu and chose the filename "DR TOMORROW". Lyle experienced a vague sensation of fear that he wanted to push away from himself. Lyle wanted to wall off the fear, to bury it deep and unrecognized within intricate neural memory networks. But he also wanted to get started on the bookstore inventory, and so he let go of the fear, the memories, and the unheralded science fiction story produced by the new notebook computer. Prior to putting the story out of awareness, Lyle carefully checked the index and catalog in the laptop's memory, and saw the file there that was labelled, `Dr Tomorrow'. He made himself a note on the notepad to transfer the file to the Cube at home and examine it there. And then turned his attention to the bookstore Macintosh and cataloging the books and inventory lists on the data base. 

By the end of the day, Lyle had more or less forgotten about the story spewed out by his notebook computer. Lyle felt nothing special as he slowly ran through his routine of straightening up the shop before he locked the door at 6:00 P.M. He looked out on the street and could see several artists finishing with their clean-up. It was Friday February 14, 1990, and the first day of the three-day Art Festival. There were many large station wagons with open tailgates and he had pleasing views of many women as they were leaning over to push and store paintings and other materials in their vehicles. 

On his way home from the bookstore, Lyle walked past Peacock Park and the multicolored vendors with very little left over food. Lyle gave bare notice to the sparechangers. Several undercover narcotics agents standing in front of the Peacock Cafe seemed to recognize Lyle and one of them even mumbled a desultory, "How's it going, man?" Lyle kept on walking past the Coconut Grove Library and the Mutiny Hotel. He looked out at the ocean and noticed the late afternoon sun being covered up by a weather front moving in from several miles out in the ocean. A group of loudly chattering parrots flew from their perches atop a Malaysian palm tree, and, with many excited chirps and other musical notes, the parrots flew out in the direction from which they had come. 

As Lyle passed the festive Dinner Key Auditorium with its numerous brightly-painted paint-and-cement flags, he noticed several Sunday boaters--also apparently oblivious of the Festival crowds--cranking their boats up onto the trailers, and getting ready to make the drive home to South Miami. Lyle was lost in thought. Or non-thought. The disturbing computer readout was nearly out of mind. He always aimed at keeping his consciousness a total blank while he walked home from work. Like the jogger who felt cleansed by the daily run, Lyle used his daily walks to purge himself of unwanted mental and emotional stimuli. But today's art show stimulation demanded a little extra effort. All the noise and jangle of colors competed with what was going on inside. As soon as he reached his own white condo apartment on Tigertail, and let the dogs outside so they could do their thing, he had pretty much cleared his system of the static that had come from the day's work. He was ready for his evening meditation. So he let the dogs back in the apartment, fed them, refilled the water bowls, and went to his bedroom 

Lyle's contemporary, two bedroom apartment had its own pool and was furnished sparsely but elegantly all in white, with a long white table, on which sat a white Steinberger guitar, a foot-high black cube with a black keyboard and a black monitor. Next to the black cube were two black notebook-sized devices. One of the black notebooks actually was a computer. The other notebook was a biofeedback monitor. Just as many come home to beer and TV or a joint and TV, Lyle invested an EEG biofeedback machine with the same ritual. The machine was sleek black, notebook sized, and outfitted with digital controls. An out-of-work psychologist had practically given him the brand-new machine and all the cables in exchange for a used edition of Jung's works. Lyle sat down in the chair in front of the gleaming black machine. Then he attached the electrodes, one by one, to his scalp. He used a four electrode bipolar array, checked the ground, adjusted the meters on the display panel, and then closed his eyes. The smell of burning incense drifted through the open window. He could hear people giggling at a party next door. 

Three different sets of audio signals impinged upon Lyle's consciousness as he quickly coasted from beta frequencies into the high alpha band. Two different stereo units were going at high intensity and Lyle felt his stream of consciousness automatically shift up two notches as he let his awareness of the different musical sounds become very faint and shut off. This was a trick that Lyle had learned many years ago, while living in Kansas with his mother, Mary Alice Crawford, who ran a knit shop in the small University town of Lawrence. Lyle could hear his mother's disapproving tones. She was always telling him that if he continued not paying attention to the outside world, he would end up being just as much a Bohemian as his irresponsible father had been. The clearest memories of his father Lyle had were somehow connected with a grey haired old man, who would walk into the room and bent over his bassinet. A strong odor of alcohol and tobacco always caused Lyle's mother to angrily shush her then doting husband, and push him out of the room, so that the baby would be able to grow up without the tainted smell of the devil's poisons. Later in life, Lyle's mother would yammer at him so constantly about the old man that finally Lyle learned to turn her off too! He was able to ignore her just as he had been able to ignore most people for as long as he could remember. 

Before Lyle's first birthday, his father had gotten work with a Ringling Brothers' Circus that was travelling through the Kansas highways and wheat fields on the way to St. Louis. The year he was in 7th grade, Lyle received a bedspread of Indian cloth which his mother gave to him in a small box at Christmas time. There was very little explanation of what the Indian bedspread represented except for the fact that "your father sent it from India for you." The cloth was blue and had seemed to shimmer with silver colors in the early Christmas morning's light. Lyle and his mother both became trancelike and caught up in the beautiful colors of the cloth on that Christmas day. They had both shared a strong feeling of closeness while staring at the cloth. Then she had chided Lyle for allowing her to gawk at nothing. Lyle himself, however, learned later in life that gawking at nothing and going around with a blank mind were both ways of describing what a person who is meditating feels like. Lyle had had many dreams of India as he grew up, and just before he quit high school, he had begun learning the process of more advanced meditation from books he had purchased through mail order from different obscure schools. In the last few years, his meditation had become a little more high-tech. Meditating with a biofeedback machine was just more efficient for Lyle, as he felt the machine helped him learn how to sit in a trance and let his brain tune to a certain frequency over and over again. It did not matter how perfectly he was able to do the tuning. Just the effect of attempting very gently to produce a certain brain-wave frequency which would make the sound or light come on was sufficient to get the brain-tuning effect. Lyle was delighted to find a part of his day when it was O.K. to goof off, and not to have to try very hard. That is why meditation appealed to him. A half-hearted try, if done with the correct attitude, was enough to get a good practice effect. These meditative lessons were digested comprehensively by Lyle who, as a guitar player, was also interested in learning how to win in his competitive field "without trying too hard." It was nearly a month before he began to truly feel effects that he attributed to the meditation. The most intense sensation he experienced was that of an inner connectedness to the rest of life. The twice-daily practice of meditation, with or without the notebook-sized device, helped him a lot. He felt the changes intensely. What he had already experienced for months now was mainly doing things more efficiently and feeling an internal harmony he'd never known before. 

A slightly cooler breeze swept through Lyle's room in the apartment off Tigertail. In addition to the white guitar, white table, and computers, Lyle had a white water bed and a white dome-shaped dresser. There was a closet in the room that contained two pairs of muslin Indian-style drawstring slacks, and three very faded purple over-shirts made from faded Indian bedspread cloth. The only non-white feature of the room was a space where a brilliant blue Indian patterned cloth lay hanging as a tapestry over a white window seat. Lyle sat cross-legged in the window seat next to the gleaming white and black computer table and continued to deepen his meditation.. For a moment his eyes opened and scanned the meters and digital controls. He then closed his eyes again and settled back into a familiar meditative repose. 

The words of his mother seemed to replay themselves through his mind and the actual intensity of her voice seemed to blast through his mind with a volume much greater than any of the music coming from the other rooms in the house. 

"You'll never amount to anything, Lyle. Never amount to anything. What's wrong with you? And they always said you were so brilliant in school. Maybe you are just TOO brilliant. Maybe you are just too brilliant to ever lead a normal life. I don't know where I've gone wrong....Maybe you are just too brilliant to have any brains...." 

Suddenly, the cloud front, which had been moving across the sky in towards the Coconut Grove area from miles out in the ocean, began to approach Dinner Key Auditorium and South Bayshore Drive. While settling down further into his meditation, Lyle felt a wave of pressure change in his head. This was fairly typical for stormy weather in Miami. The Coconut Grove section, incorporated separately in 1869,was right on the ocean. Weather fronts moved in and out with ease. Some sensitive people claimed that they got headaches on days when the fronts were changing and moving, yet Lyle had never paid much attention to them. 

At that moment, however, a large experimental nuclear bomber was flying overhead at an altitude of 20,000 feet. The nuclear bomber was on its way to Homestead Air Force Base, and the up-draft from the approaching fronts was causing the large bomber to experience some turbulence and some unusual pulsatile changes in electromagnetic radiation. A uneven syncopated rhythm of static pulses filled the radio headphones of Major Hal Nicholson. Hal missed his cigar that was good chewing in moments like this and frowned as he felt a momentary surge of concern. Those pops in the phones meant something and it wasn't chicken livers and wild rice. But Hal could still visualize the Officer's Club bar and the legs and the shoulders...and the legs. He cleared his throat and spoke into the vocobox: 

"Homestead Air Force Base. XLN-662 priority requesting clearance for approach to your flight patterns. Baby's acting like an egg beater. You got any turbulence coming through your tubes?" 

"Affirmative. Also, some low-level wind shear that's not too swift. What are you carrying, XLN-662?" 

"As you can tell by our Identification Number, we are a top secret project and will require an electronically closed and looped approach to your installation." 

"XLN-662, you still have several minutes of cloud cover to come through before the approach. Meteorology says that you've got a freak electrical storm. Any other assistance necessary?" 

"Negative, Control. We've got a lot of freak electricity aboard our project, too." 

The experimental nuclear bomber was carrying one of the newest and most frightening secrets of the 20th Century. Three mini-bus sized nuclear reactors had been installed in the bomber's structure. The plane had capabilities for inflight recharging, rearming, and delivery of multiple sub-orbital nuclear strikes. 

Abruptly, and with a jerk of his neck, Major Nicholson felt the bomber's nose twist sharply downward as if pulled by a gigantic string. An ominous premonition quickly flashed through Hal's mind. Before any possible rationalizing, a mind-deafening blast of sound went through the entire bomber. The XLN-662 had been coincidentally and synchronistically caught in the path of a large energy discharge from cruising thunderheads. The entire energy package went immediately to earth. Because of the weather front and his own daydreaming, Major Nicholson had gone to a dangerously low altitude as a way of maintaining a meteorologically neutral position and avoiding the turbulence. At the moment that the lightning flashed through the aircraft, all three of the cold fusion reactors built into the XLN-662 resonated in synchronized frequency and discharged. The entire nuclear load of the experimental bomber's reactors was instantaneously released as a huge energy bolus that travelled with the lightning bolt to earth. As the plane was passing just over Coconut Grove, the energy bolus descended very rapidly in the direction of Lyle Crawford's apartment. A 15-foot satellite pole atop the contemporary building acted as a lightning rod and a receiver for the bolus, and was promptly vaporized in a puff of grey antimatter smoke. A cleft in time was set up. All the TV sets in Lyle's immediate neighborhood were silenced together as many fuses blew due to the intense electromagnetic induction fields. Both stereo systems were silenced, too. The energy bolus instantaneously shot to the electrode cables of Lyle's brainwave machine. 

At that very moment, however, Lyle was entering the second stage of the alpha-theta waveband, via his own meditation. The blue lights on his display panel were blinking furiously, and the individual blinks coalesced into a steady, unwavering glow. Briefly, and only for several microseconds, his entire being transcended the physical plane and was focused in an alpha-theta2 stage of consciousness. Then, for just the fewest of microseconds, Lyle's brain began outputting a combination of all the known brainwave frequencies. The micro-samadhi state was the key to the time cleft. I.S.I. technicians watched carefully, and focused on the micro-samadhi burst while carefully manipulating the time cleft. Although Lyle's physical body ordinarily would have been disintegrated, the aligned meditative state allowed the huge energy bolus to pass through his mind-body system without destructive effects. The energy bolus, however, was so large that before it disappeared via the burned out electrical pathways to ground and apparently without harm to Lyle, it created what the Intergalactic Security Teams would know to be a Grade 3 space-time warp. On their video monitors, the I.S.I. technicians watched carefully to see if the energy requirements of the warp would be compatible with the energy demands for transmitting components of the Dr Tomorrow project into the past. It had to succeed. There were truly no other alternatives. This project was only the barest of assaults mounted against a monolithic transtemporal disaster taking place in 32,000 A.D. 

Lyle had a feeling of Twilight Zone unreality. He was vaguely aware of the fact that there had been a very loud noise. The whole experience felt a little like a dream. The fabric of reality seemed to blur and waver ever so slightly. He relaxed his gaze and the air in front of his eyes looked frosted and sparkling. Then, Lyle realized he was sitting on the floor and not in the window seat where he had begun his meditation. A flood of sensory impressions began to convince him that something extraordinary had happened. The smell of burnt electrical wiring was very strong, and the usual polyphonic cacophony of several simultaneous stereo systems was now totally silent. Thunder and lightning raged outside. HEAVY thunder and lightning. The wind began to blow rain drops in the window, and Lyle got up to close the window and turn on the air conditioner, but something stopped him dead in his tracks. He absentmindedly rubbed his head with the back of his hand, and then noticed that his own arm felt slightly rubbery and fleshier than the arm he'd remembered looking at when he had started meditating. His whole body felt much more bulky. A chill ran up his spine. He began to remember the story that scrolled by on the notebook computer when he was in the store, but then he put the thoughts of the unexpected computer story out of his mind. Lyle began to feel exquisitely nervous, and then he felt a totally new sensation--that of his own physical structure involuntarily quieting itself. Hard to believe, but his body was actually calming itself. His heart and lungs seemed to be taking over with some old practiced movements of slow, deep abdominal breathing. His abdominal wall slowly came out and Lyle sensed relief and relaxation. He felt good. Even though there was no feeling of altered identity, he suddenly felt disturbingly --or differently--muscular. It wasn't as though his physical structure had changed dramatically, because--unlike the David Banner/Hulk transformation --he had not burst through any of his clothing. It was simply that his entire body had acquired a steely and resilient strength that bulged imperceptibly yet everywhere with the androgynous mesomorphism of comic book superheroes. Quite a change for Lyle and his guitar-fingerboard arms. The rainstorm outside continued , and the smell of burned plastic and electrical fixtures was very strong. Rapid footsteps scrambled down the fire escape outside Lyle's window, the window appeared to open itself, and a very pink rain-drenched face with narrow bloodshot eyes poked into the room. 

"Hey, man...did you see what happened?" 

Lyle was too startled by what was still going on within. He was unable to put together an answer. Instead, he just stared dumbly at the radiant-appearing young Hippie-freak face that continued its monolog: 

"Hey, man.......like did you see what happened? Mondo Bizzare-o!!! I was just taking a hit of this Krypto and looking out the window! It looked like this Shazam bolt practically knocked a plane out of the sky! Whoever the dude was driving the plane, it was farout! For a second he was going nose-down, and then he must have yanked up on the stick, 'cause that plane dipped its tail and then shot straight up like a boomerang batouttahell!!!!" 

Overhead, the crew of XLN-662 was every bit as astounded. Hal Nicholson had been certain that they'd collided with another aircraft. After the reflexive, aggressive climb, he evened out on the stick and chomped down on an imaginary cigar. He felt a great deal of relief prematurely after noticing that the artificial horizon was once more level. But then, the large bomber began to flap up and down in the sudden storm. Jim Breedice, the navigator, shook himself clear of some involuntary nausea. He whistled sharply and shouted over his shoulder, 

"Hey, Hal--two of our reactor meters are dead and the third is on 80% discharge!" 

"Major Nicholson, Sir....does this constitute a reportable nuclear accident? Even though our official classification is top secret?" 

The stoned head speaking through Lyle's window said, "Man, did that storm blow out your TV set, too?" 

Lyle smiled absently, opened his eyes again, and looked at the battery-driven brainwave monitor. The per cent time meter was still reading out 100% Alpha. Lyle looked back at the face framed by his window and said, 

"Hey--you're OK. You have always been OK, and you're going to continue being OK." 

His neighbor was astounded, withdrew his head, and then quickly reemerged in the window space: 

"Hey man, you really gone nuts! You know that? What kind of stuff you been doing? You don't even look like yourself! You are definitely not OK. I'm trying to tell you that something has blown out everything in our house as well as kicking the crap out of that plane flying up there, and all you have to say is some jerky garbage about being OK. You ain't OK! Nutso Looney-Tuners" 

Lyle felt very peaceful. He had never felt so much at peace in his entire lifetime. There was absolutely no trace of the morning's smoke, and his mind was absolutely clear. There was an entirely new level from which he spoke. When he looked at the face of his stoned neighbor, a great feeling of compassion welled up inside his heart, and--without thinking of the feeling as ridiculous--he loved every wet curl on the head of that bewhiskered stoned kid. 

"Don't worry, you really are OK. Why don't you go back into your room, and sit there for a few minutes. I'm sure that everything will be all right if you can just leave things alone for awhile." 

The neighbor disappeared with a juvenile shrug of disdain. Lyle sat there for a moment and giggled to himself. This was strange, because Lyle had never giggled--ever--in his entire life. A gentle giggle rocked him, and then he imagined the entire rooming house as being electrically intact once again. He giggled again, involuntary, as he felt something surge through him. Abruptly, the loud din of the combined stereos and television sets' blaring was restored. Lyle grimaced, and shrugged his shoulders. He closed the windows and the Indian bedspread across his windows and once more sat down to meditate. Sitting in a crosslegged position, he closed his eyes, and blanked out his mind. But the energy level and the quality of what was going on inside him somehow were very different than when he had initially sat down to meditate. It made absolutely no sense to sit and close his eyes to meditate. It wasn't necessary anymore. The quality of consciousness was changed not one iota by his long-familiar practice of blanking out his mind with the eyes closed. It felt like his mind was "there" all the time now, whether his eyes were closed or not. Lyle did not question what had recently happened in restoring the electrical system to his rooming house. The odor of burning wiring had magically disappeared just as quickly as the din and racket had reappeared. Lyle felt like questioning how it had happened. But, it felt both comfortable and natural. So he relaxed his abdomen again, and felt himself at peace with the universe. His body was still doing its now built-in calming trip and it didn't feel quite as foreign. 

I.S.I. technicians liked this scenario, selected, and gave Lyle a transfusion of total awareness of his past and future lifetimes that had been implanted within his Primitive mind-body structure during the thunder clap. The I.S.I. technicians liked the positive attitude that this Primitive demonstrated and they were impressed by the Primitive's ability to tolerate the megastepping. In fact, this time-cleft alternative was just as plausible as any one of several dozen others that might appear in coexisting universes. Being suddenly aware of and really knowing this fact as well did not disturb Lyle, either. Along with newly-experienced resiliency of his body structure, there was much that was different about his entire mental relationship to himself and the universe. It appeared that he was only beginning to find out the very least of it. 

The I.S.I. technicians collectively relaxed a little as they noticed that the energy requirements of the warp had fit. The LaPlace Transforms had been correctly worked out by the cyborg nucleonics units. As is typical for any being recently undergoing a macro-evolutionary transformation, Lyle was slowly and naturally becoming aware of his own "new" nature, and, luckily, there were no significant thought-matter waves of either dyssynchronism or atavism. Dyssynchronism and atavism were the most frequent problems that Primitives had. Dyssynchronism and atavism were also the two most serious problems faced by I.S.I. technicians, and they were pleased to notice Lyle's vehicle experiencing no acceptance-rejection shock. Once, while experimenting with some volunteer mind-prisoners of the Aegean Dynasty, they had projected an advanced criminal being via the then current LaPlace transformations into a prehistoric earth Brontosaurus. Acceptance-rejection dyssynchrony resulting primarily from the atavism had caused the Brontosaurus to explosively disintegrate into a luminescent cloud of gluons and quarks. Earth geologists later interpreted remains of the disintegration as signs of a large meteor colliding with the planet. The technicians had barely managed to extract the criminal's mind-matter form in time to avoid transtemporal repercussions. Now the updated LaPlace transforms were expected to handle not only the megastepping going on inside Lyle, but also the transtime projection of the six other Eternals from the far future. 

Six slender unitary humanoid forms waited in the thought-matter projection unit. I.S.I. technicians carefully focused on Lyle's apartment bedroom. In the future, the humanoid Eternals had no facial features, and this was by design. Appropriate LaPlace adaptations required that specifics of the beings in transmission fit within the ambient karmic atmosphere of the targeted location. That is to say, the thought forms from Earth's cultures would soon be superficially imprinted for the purpose of external configuration only onto the six Eternal beings who would live with Lyle and make up a seven person group as required and specified by the plans for the Dr Tomorrow project. 

Hal Nicholson carefully eyed the approach to the Homestead Air Force Base runway. Someone on the mike at Base Ops had been talking to Hal about what NASA wind shear researchers called, "microbursts." The XLN-662 had previously experienced a headwind-tailwind combination from a column of cold air in the electrical storm front. Earlier in the previous decade, Delta flight #191 encountered a rare occurrence of multiple microbursts and was buffeted brutally by wind shear into the ground at the Dallas airport while landing. Northwest's Flight 255 had encountered the same deadly problem while taking off from Detroit's airport. It didn't matter whether the microbursts were wet or dry. The abrupt headwind-tailwind sequence always occurred. The velocity differential between headwind and tailwind in such a situation, usually averaging 60 miles per hour, could reach 170 miles per hour or higher. Sudden and abruptly shifting air masses could also facilitate or enhance microbursts. What Hal as a pilot did not realize was that the nuclear bomber had very nearly been sent to Earth tail first by a freakishly-large collection of microbursts. Base Ops was still concerned about the same thing happening at the fighter base. On the ground, a flight line mechanic looked up apprehensively at the XLN-662 and quickly stuffed a doober inside the top of his combat boot. 

The XLN-662 landed without event and taxied around the side of Base Operations to the security area. Hal quickly called for the decontamination team. Amazingly, the craft checked out clean. Then Hall called for the Base Security chief. The matter of the empty reactors was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to explain. Discharging a reactor without a trace of surplus nuclear energy went contrary to the best principles of nuclear physics. The best available principles. 

But, to the consternation of everyone, there was not a trace of radiation of any particle whatsoever to be found. Even the reactor registering 20% capacity had no explainable or visible leak. A theoretical impossibility. The entire crew of the experimental bomber was placed on medical quarantine, just as if they had been astronauts coming in from a contaminated sector of outer space. Hal was both puzzled and irked. There was some off-the-record talk of secret Soviet missiles or Communist electromagnetic wave beams and ELF generators from Cuba. And then, the last straw. Security guards came aboard the XLN-662 with two different packs of the K-9 corps. First for contraband, and then for explosives. The German Shepherds sniffed and kept on sniffing. 

The I.S.I. technicians focused on the energy quanta surrounding Lyle. There were spirits of many Tequesta Indians--a higher and more advanced culture that had actually preceded the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes. The technicians punched in the necessary coordinates for the LaPlace transforms, recalibrated the laser projection beams, and once more checked out the entropy characteristics of the six unitary humanoids waiting in the thought-matter projection unit. Everything fit. It was a simple matter of touch-closing a single thermal contact. Lyle's room was immediately filled with three men and three women, all of whom smiled expectantly at him. There was no shimmering in the air until the shimmering became solid protoplasm. The six Eternals were suddenly sitting on the bedroom floor in a circle with Lyle. 

Materialization of the six beings right in front of him was almost too much for Lyle to swallow. He gulped, and rubbed his eyes. And then, intuitively, he felt some correctness in what had just transpired. And in doing this, he was once more aware of his own internal processes and shifts. And felt himself changing again. Now he could actively sense as much change internally as he had seen externally on the physical plane just after the explosion. The six beings had come into existence without the trace of a sound, flash of light, or any other special effect. It was more a matter of, "Now you don't see them...now you do!" 

Sitting in front of Lyle were three women and three men. There was a faint similarity to their facial features, and Lyle thought that they all looked vaguely oriental despite having Caucasian eyes. All were slim and of varying average build with reddish-orange skin. All wore identical robe-like costumes made of a silver-white lame material with black belt and pouch at the waist. All appeared to have a large, angular, silvery ring on their left hands. The costumes and their faces suggested a cross between the American Indians and ancient Inca tribes. Or Tequestas. Without a trace of physical movement or sound, they all closed their eyes and did the first ever of the group meditations. There was instant telepathic link-up between all seven members of the group. In comparison to the loud bombastic noise, of megastepping and the explosion, the telepathic linkup was equally impressive but less dramatic. It felt to Lyle like being submerged in a pool of substance that included six other strangers who were, abruptly, not strangers anymore. Lyle could sense the six other entities in a way that was different from any of the meditative spaces he had previously transited. Although it was briefly frightening, the initial fright quickly dissolved and there was an intense and comfortable sense of mutual support and friendship. That link-up was the group's first experience with their MindLink and the resultant HeartLight. 

Lyle realized that he was designated leader of the MindLink/HeartLight, and this was doubly emphasized during HeartLight. Because of his years of practicing with meditation and his status as an extra-robust Primitive, Lyle was accepted by the other members of the group as the designated leader for MindLink/HeartLight. An Earth native, Lyle played guitar, some keyboards, and computers, and had been recently megastepped by the I.S.I. beams. Lyle had been able to channel intense amounts of energy as a guitarist standing before an audience, but in his megastepped form he was to be the leading channel of the group. All seven group members could channel energies of all varieties, and Lyle was the designated leader not only for MindLink and HeartLight, but also for activities involving precognition and channelling intense amounts of energy. A blast of heavy energy in the solar plexus area caused Lyle to focus his mind's eye on the source. Absurdly, the sensation to Lyle resembled ....love. Intense and unreasoning love is what Lyle felt, and he was painfully aware of having the experience with the mental presence of Pearl E. Mae. He also realized that the connection was observed by the five other group members. It was clearly an extra special one-to-one bonding that occurred between Lyle and Pearl E. Mae at the beginning of the first MindLink/HeartLight and HeartLight. Lyle opened his eyes briefly to look at her. Pearl E. Mae's initial Tequesta-face had already recast its lines according to karmic flow and needs. Pearl E. Mae's dark beauty now suggested Aegean genes. And nothing like the country western drawl that would come out of her mouth on future occasions. 

Pearl E. Mae specialized in wind instruments, trumpet, and vocals. She was synchronistically well-designed for myself, piscean Lyle, as she originally came from the planet Tanticus in the Virgo Solar Galaxy. Her eyes flamed when she activated any of her numerous psychic superpowers, and she had a temper that matched the glowing eyes. Many of her past lifetimes and my future lifetimes had been intertwined but I was not yet aware of such information. Pearl E. Mae felt all of the associations immediately. She had considerable gifts for materializing and projecting ectoplasm, had a secret timetrack back to 32,000 A.D., and was a better psychic medium and healer than anyone else in the group except for myself. Her short stature belied great physical strength born through lifetimes of superior balance and coordination. Her body structure was aesthetically very pleasing. 

Noman, of the Draconian Galaxy, was thin and of average height. For eons the Draconian systems had incorporated extensive pastlife information into all aspects of their cultures. As a Drac, Noman was typically very skilled in the investigation and application of pastlife data. All Dracs began relating to their past lives before learning to read, write, or teleport. Noman's face took on a mulatto asian cast after resettling into our karmic ambience. He played inspired flute, other woodwinds, and had a great voice. Noman could alter the resonant frequencies in his voice at will, and he had fair abilities for materialization and thought-projection. Noman had spent at least two lifetimes on penal colonies, and acquired many "trades" and "professions" from the years in rehabilitation institutes of the future. Because he studied so much applied botany, Noman was the designated plant consciousness advocate in our group. He was also very sensitive above the directives against introducing plant consciousness applications into Primitive cultures, and he felt himself in a very precarious position relating to Earth cultures and the need for information about plant consciousness. Several of the trades Noman learned also related to electronics and technology management. After Su-Shan, Noman was probably the most sensitive to Al's energies and communications. 

Su-Shan was drummer and programmer par excellence. He was from the Hominoid Galaxy, was the tallest of the six Eternals, and acquired a long white beard after karmic re-settling. Su-Shan was designated expert in electronics and nucleonics for the group. Noman frequently assisted him, often at times that Su-Shan wished for no assistance. Su-Shan was pretty cool and calm, but when you started getting in his face excessively, he developed a fine tremor of the fingertips and a resolute set of the jaw. Only in his anger would he show any of his age. You could see dozens of extended lifetimes as an Eternal or as a Guardian coming out in the way that Su-Shan expressed himself. Su-Shan and Julian played drums together during some of the group rehearsals. Even though Julian was a farout Billy Cobham-like drummer with beautiful Jamaican soul, Su-Shan really kicked skins on Julian. Su-Shan could play any aggregate of drum sounds with any combination of transducers for electronic music, but he also could play absolutely fine-sounding twentieth-century Earth acoustic drum kit with kick, snare, toms, high-hat, crash, and ride just for straight-ahead rock and roll. Su-Shan had not been beyond laying down rather farout bass tracks in some of the group efforts. Su-Shan often began behaving like a Guardian during times of stress or other duress. Su-Shan was the Eternal of our group who was the strongest advocate for electromagnetic consciousness and he has also paradoxically been the strongest supporter of Noman's role as plant consciousness advocate. Su-Shan's main complaint in life was that we neglect both machine (electromagnetic) consciousness and plant consciousness. We therefore truly waste two of our most important planetary resources. Su-Shan quickly fashioned some thin sheet copper electrodes and attached them, via a microprocessed GSR device, to the leaves of Bruce, my favorite pet Geranium. Rico and Su-Shan then programmed Bruce to turn on and off every time we left the duplex. Bruce was hard-wired into my Radio Shack security system in about five minutes, and Bruce was a most exquisite and sensitive security system because he knew all of us, as reflected by his GSR response, which would not vary around us unless we asked him a question. Su-Shan talked and talked about how Bruce represented just a minuscule tip of an enormous iceberg of communication possibilities that plants made possible for other life forms. But, don't get the wrong idea. Su-Shan didn't run his mouth when it came to playing music. His work was right on the beat, powerful, and parsimonious. 

Quail was an Eternal who comes from the Light Dynasty Galaxy and the Twin Federations. She could play nearly any musical instrument and could synthesize a wide variety of sounds and esoteric clicks. She has a large chest and some very powerful natural abilities that allow her to alter her voice over a wide range of octaves. Quail was much taller than Pearl E. Mae and much more full-figured. Quail could come on with a slightly maternalistic air. In one lifetime, she had served as the President of the Twin Federations for nearly two thousand years of peace and creative productivity. She had been a Guardian at that time, and was the only Guardian who had ever held political office. Thought projection, radionics, and healing were three of her special competence areas. She had meditative abilities for teaching the other Eternal group members to travel out-of-body in astral and causal forms. Quail had a special closeness with Rico (Enrique), the group Cyborg. 

Enrique was an android with certain built-in features that qualified him for the label of "Cyborg." 

cy-borg /'si-,bo(e)rg /n
[cybernetic + organism]
(ca. 1962) 

:a human being who is linked (as for temporary adaptation to a hostile space environment) to one or more mechanical devices upon which some of his vital physiological functions depend. 

By 32,000 A.D., the essential parts of Rico's android makeup were all in software, so it was easy for the I.S.I. to project android essence back to 1992 conjugated with the matter-energy translations of Eternal humanoid (including the reanimation of an executed Cuban military hero's spirit). Following karmic resettling, Rico was jet black, and strangely handsome with high cheekbones and clear blue eyes. He was nearly as tall as Su-Shan. It was absolutely impossible to perceive the fact that Rico was Android or Cyborg. The android part of Rico was seamlessly integrated with his flesh-and-blood physical vehicle. Rico's cyborg link was a fantastic number of integrated microprocessors embedded within his own neural tissue. The computing power within the embedded microprocessor networks was supposed to be nearly equal to two Cray Supercomputers. Earth's Crays required extensive and expensive supercooling, whereas the microphotoreduced networks in Rico neural tissue were at body temperature. This computer link involved the direct matter-energy translation of multiplexed microprocessors implanted within Eternal cerebral cortex. And then matter-energy translated across the timecleft. Rico adapted very well to the Miami world because he was fluently bilingual with his English and Spanish and was rabidly in love with the Salsa climate. He would have been perfectly happy spending the rest of this lifetime hanging out on Calle Ocho with all Miami's Hispanic cultures. He claimed that there was no city or town anywhere in the entire Neighborhood Group that could match or replace Miami. Actually, Rico was also fluent in Japanese, and therefore trilingual, but there were not that many Japanese people in Florida. He played percussion, bongos, timbales, conga, and digital drums. Other special equipment that Rico operated for the group included the sound and light beam, and the differential audio-amplification channels. Rico had special competence in the mathematical translation of thought and physical-plane energies and he also had abilities to telescopically extend all five of the physical senses. Rico was naturally an ace when it came to programming or trouble-shooting any equipment. 

Last but not least was an eighth member in this group of seven. Named Aloysius or Al, for short, the group's family computer system was a combination of several different computer systems possessing both hardwire Ethernet networking and a more futuristic electromagnetic inductive coupling system devised by Al (himself) with some assistance from Rico and Su-Shan. Al's message to the entire known universe is that any device with electromagnetic fields has consciousness. Al insisted that not only do computers have consciousness, above and beyond the microprocessors ability to parse, do MIPS flips, and whatever, but nearly all of our appliances possess consciousness as well. Surprising all of us was the way that even the notebook computer became a part of Al and projected his inimitable style of communication even before the megastepping explosion. The small, bold 10 to 11 point typeface began to appear on any and all of the computer monitors, not just the folding notebook computer which several times seemed to transmit a message from an unknown dimension. Al began to manifest himself during the MindLink and HeartLight sessions. He then was guaranteed to manifest as well as during nearly all of the MIDI-mediated music sessions. Al was irrepressibly optimistic but hyper-realistic and logical as well. Because of multiplexing with confluent CPU's and the synergistic combination of computer systems, Al's power was initially greater than a Cray supercomputer, which usually required the hassle of supercooling. Al ran at room temperature, or, at least, air-conditioned room temperature. Cooperation with other group members and participation in group rehearsals were two factors only enhancing the burgeoning power of Al, who learned at an incredible rate. He also continues to teach other group members about electromagnetic energy and consciousness and how humans act out their technophobia with inefficient and unnecessary chauvinism towards machinery and tools. 

As an exercise of introduction, the MindLink and HeartLight served very well. During the last part of the meditation, the resulting energies formed a circle of light. After transformation into HeartLight, and extending to the group's Higher Mind, the circle actually appeared as a doughnut-shaped cloud of fleecy whitish-yellow light in the air above the group. The cloud shimmered in the dim light of the bedroom. The circle of light floated in the air above the heads of the group members until the MindLink/HeartLight was over. 

As if the electricity of seven personalities in one room weren't enough, Lyle's notebook computer sitting next to the black cube on the white computer table appeared to snap itself open. The notebook emitted a system beep, and began scrolling text again. Lyle, who had noticed the notebook computer snapping open, also heard the piezoelectric system beep. He slowly opened one eye and looked over to where it was sitting on the table, and looked at the LCD screen. Lyle let out an involuntary whistle and went back into his meditation: 

You have been selected as percipient-target of our matter-energy translator. Information you are now receiving is coming to you through a rent in the fabric of what you call time. As beings communicating to you from your far future, we are presenting you with a problem that demands a solution. Your own future (your very far future) is collapsing in on itself. The reason is something your culture would call intratemporal ripoff, but mechanisms are not as important as solutions now. Immediate action is called for, and the action can best come from you-- as a visitor will soon have the chance to explain. Because your planetary system is a primitive one, there are certain advantages and strengths which you and your group can offer us in combatting intratemporal ripoff. The collapse of our future (and yours as well, by a `retrodomino' effect) has already begun because billions of beings have ripped off intratemporally to an excessive degree. Maladaptive greed, apparently, is a universal trait of sentient beings. To understand what the intratemporal ripoff effect is, you must understand that time is not as simple as your cultures have pictured it. Time is not like a four-dimensional matrix with cartesian (x,y,z) coordinates. Nor is time merely an all-pervasive "ether." To those of us triangles of light, time is more like a solidly three-dimensional velvet moebius ribbon. 

We are not a political movement, and we do not espouse any particular philosophy. We do, however represent every known life form to be found by our methods of surveillance and contact in 32,000 A.D. The absolute number of known living beings has dwindled significantly since the discovery of operational time travel methods in 28,050 A.D. "Stealing from peter to pay paul" is a way that your cultures describe what occurred after timetransit began. Cheap and effective methods of time travel profoundly altered the course of civilizations as many cultures attained extinction within a millennium because of excessive cultural emphasis on material physical plane objects and the accumulation of same. Material-oriented cultures nearly universally utilized time travel to retrieve valuables from the past for use in the future (their own present). There was no initial energy problem to accompany the past-retrievals (intratemporal ripoff). No problems wer noticed, but possibly no one attempted to ferret out any problems since the apparent harmlessness of the past-retrieval also did bring some short-term monetary/material gain. After about 500 years of these antics, however, parts of certain planets -- and even entire planets in some cases--began to disappear in monolithic puffs of dyssynchronismic smoke. Dyssynchronism became a very well-studied and researched phenomenon as other, less material-oriented cultures acquired basic knowledge of dyssynchronisms by stressing equally both the subjective and the objective sciences. Dyssynchronismic science changed our appreciation of thermodynamics and entropy. The three laws of thermodynamics, over the millennia, turned out to be the science fiction of a childlike primitive consciousness that has persisted to this date. The accumulation of excessive energy disorganization and randomness, it turned out, was not inevitable, but really more a function of observer perspective. Entire cultures and planets disappeared because of disorganization in entropy patterns caused by the glut of past-retrievals. After millennia of the intratemporal ripping off, our future is caving in on itself and it is now not only unthinkable but also highly dangerous to retrotravel in time. To project a being from our timeframe to yours requires massive and systematic laplace calculations, but it is possible. However, because we have also experienced a constant and progressive loss in robustness, it is more difficult for us to retrotravel. We turn to the robustness of your era even though your planet is primitive. Because of unique properties in your brain's flux fields and your own life-pattern synchronisms, you will experience a unique opportunity to become a special agent for combatting entropy imbalances in universal life energy and all its forms. There will be a dramatic metamorphosis which you will experience within seven of your own planetary days. It is unnecessary for you to panic or become frightened. The changes will be no more stressful than what you daily experience when you sit in front of your video screen and empathically live through other lifetimes. Our technology allows us to scan individual units of consciousness, transtemporally and project mass or energy into selected sectors of the universe we share even across time boundaries. 

The seven group members still remained in MindLink and HeartLight. None of them directly observed the "File....Save As...." menu pull itself down on the notebook computer screen. The title, Project Assignment, was typed in the window on the screen, and the notebook again emitted its piezoelectric beep. 

As soon as the telepathic MindLink/HeartLight was over, all members were aware that there had been a powerful annealing of individual mentalities and energies. A matter-of-fact bonding and a detached quality of fusion had already brought the seven-membered group together before they had a chance to get to know each other as individuals. In this first encounter, there were effects other than just the initial bonding that were immediately observable. A group thought-projection took shape and it appeared to all of them as a kinetic and colored holographic image. The three-dimensional image showed all seven of them onstage as members of a musical group. A large computer with oversized double-faced video screens formed a central hub. The seven group members stood around the multi-modular computer and related to both the computer and to each other. Free-form multicolored laser images played on the screen while the computer's numerous lights blinked off and on randomly and nonrandomly. A rainbow projector was causing myriads of bouncing rainbows to oscillate in time to the music's beat. Except for the drummer, the entire group stood rather impassively while they performed. All of them appeared to be very intent, not only on the music, but on a common, inner state which was shared among the group members. The inner state was also obviously projected to the audience. The musical composition was in a minor key. A twelve-stringed guitar is tuned to open E minor. Sounds of Tibetan monks chanting with temple cymbals and gongs made up the background. After several minutes, the free form light pattern on the double-faced screen was replaced with a very clear likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr. During a minimalistic song, the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. alternates, tachistoscopically, with that of Jesus of Nazareth. During most of the song, the two images quickly and almost subliminally flash interchangeably on the screen. Toward the end of the song, both images are replaced by a large flashing Bat-signal. 


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DR TOMORROW 

Part 2 o 5 

Marshall F. Gilula 

Copyright (c) 1992



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Chapter 2 

Saturday 

Transit City: Goodbye Gabriella, Hello Pearl E. Mae 

"Heavy changes," thought Lyle as he woke from sleep with an unusually clear head. He heard the phone ringing in the bathroom and was immediately alert and awake. Lyle reached over in the bed for Gabriella. What a strange sensation, because it was not the Gabriella he had known to the touch. This was someone else. Or else she had unexpectedly lost thirty pounds in the chest. Opening his eyes more widely in the darkened room, he saw Pearl E. Mae lying in the bed next to him. Of course, it was such a natural feeling to see her there, like his ancient wife in the bed with him. Almost like a deja vu, but more a sense of real intimacy that must have occurred over many years together. Truth was that Lyle had not even kissed her yet. Pearl E. Mae had explained it to him yesterday as she went over some of the basic pastlife information from 32,000 A.D. She discussed the stuff about past lives in such a matter-of-fact way, Lyle got the idea that reincarnation was considered as basic as religious training for children by 32,000 years into our future. The phone rang a couple more times. Lyle got out of the bed, stepped over the motionless, unsleeping forms, and made his way into the bathroom. Both dogs were waiting for him in the bathroom, where they often hung out, especially when there were other house guests. Lyle sat down and She-Ra began licking his feet. Then he pushed the button on the speakerphone. He was really awake when he heard Julian's voice on the line: 

"Hey, mon, gotta come over there. We lost Gabriella, mon. They wasted her, we lost her, mon!" 

"Hey, get it together, Julian! You having a relapse or something?" 

"No, mon... I'm coming over there." He sobbed briefly, and then clicked off. 

Less than five minutes later Julian appeared with glowing doober in hand. He shoved it at me, and appeared tired and puzzled when I declined. As we walked around through the apartment, past my new room mates who were all getting up, Julian offered the doober to each of them in turn. Each of the six other Eternals, of course, declined. Even with the robustness of my Primitive lungs, something in my transplanted Eternal nature saw no sense in putting smoke of any kind into my lungs. Julian shook his head, and continued puffing away. The smoke bothered me in a strange new way. My megastepped body now disliked the hemp smell, but tolerated it the same way I had learned to tolerate the Los Angeles County smog much earlier in my life. Cigarette smoke turned out to be even more unpleasant and less tolerable. I was incredulous that less than two days ago I had been smoking a pack of Winstons. 

"Mon, you gonna need this thing if you not be smokin' now... Suit thyself. Gabriella be driving Liberty City dude's Mercedes on Grand Avenue around Douglas Road and they blow her away. Looks like four dozen bullet holes in the car. " 

"Gabriella was hurt?" 

"Mon, she was wasted. She be gone, mon. Gone." 

"Dead gone?" 

"Double dead wasted gone, mon. Whattsa matter your head? You don't understand me?" 

"Sorry, Julian... maybe I am beginning to understand you. I wish I didn't understand, man. You say something happened to Gabriella while she was driving whose Mercedes...?" 

"I wish I knew, mon. She just had the richman's car and they wipe her out. Bunch of rock stars. You know. Rock monsters. She's dead." 

"Well, she left with Jim the photographer yesterday, and he drives an old Dodge Van. Driving a Mercedes doesn't make any sense. You keep saying that she's dead, and I keep having trouble groking the picture. Besides, I don't want to think of her as dead. She didn't come home last night, but I figured it was just like some other business deal went down. Not just for a john, but sometimes she looks for other gigs like the modelling one you saw her have on TV last week. If she gets involved in something intense, she just follows it up. It doesn't mean that she was hookin' all the time!" 

"Yeah, mon. I'm real sorry. Nothin' more to say. But, now that I think about it, mon... You know, you look a little strange yourself. Your skin always be white, now your skin be lookin' nearly orange. What kind of a drug you been doin'? You firin' up?" 

"Of course not. Would you believe that I haven't smoked even one cigarette since yesterday? I ain't been doin' no drug, but there have been some heavy duty electrical field zapping changes that I been going through. Can you believe me?" 

"I can believe anything nowadays. What kind of electricity you talking about, mon?" 

"You know about flying saucers and people from the future?" 

"Don't be playin' with me mind, mon. Then you gonna tell me they shot you with some ray and now you be the transformed Man of God in Babylon." 

"Julian, you grasped it exactly. I should've known that my drum bro is sensitive enough to be absolutely hip to the entire scene." 

"Mon, we people of the double minority and the HIV, we be very hip and very cool. Maybe your flying saucer has good medicine to poison the virus. But Gabriella is gone. I see them take her body in. Me myself, I feel sick when I see her and the condition she was in. But she be gone, mon. Gone." 

"Yeah, Julian... Maybe it don't look that way to you, but I am major broken up and upset inside about Gabriella. And I have been through a few minor renovations in mind and body lately, so don't freak if I come off fried out. I know this sounds totally bizzare, but would you believe, I also have a new woman, already. Her name is Pearl E. Mae and she sings like a crystal goddess. We ain't kissed or done it yet, but she and I are for sure plugged into each other since yesterday. I wake up in the morning and she's in my bed. Only she ain't sleeping, it looks like, because these Eternal folks from the future don't need to sleep or eat, unless they want to for some special reason. I don't know if I am a transformed Man of God in Babylon, but I'm an Earth man transformed into what they call an Eternal. But I still sleep and eat, probably more than the other six, because they've been Eternals for a long time, not for only a day like me. I dig them, and we're going to make some killer music. I really dig Pearl E. Mae, and she says that we were hitched more than once in previous lifetimes. Come over here with me, man, and check her out. Unless you're afraid of people with reddish-orange skin instead of black or white." 

Julian didn't say a single word, but he turned around with a dumfounded air and followed me over to where Pearl E. Mae was sitting. Since I've known Julian, he's never been at a loss for words. But he sure was this time. He just kept staring at her face. When he started talking with Pearl E. Mae, he immediately told her about how he'd figured for the longest time that maybe I was a closet wacko. After hearing the latest story, he admitted, the only question that remained for him was about his own sanity. But I could tell from the way he was talking to Pearl E. Mae, that he was just as much in love with her as I was.} 

Hal Nicholson was happily tucked away behind a corner table at the Homestead Air Force Base Officer's Club. The young nurse he was drinking with seemed awed and intimidated by his major's insignias. After 24 hours of involuntary quarantine, the crew had all been released. Since it was getting on into evening again, everyone naturally gravitated to the clubs. Quarantine had been perfunctorily lifted after the third decontamination team again found no source of radiation leak. Hal was now quickly into his third beer and the back of his head was beginning to have a pleasant and faintly numb feeling. His bladder felt full too. Hal and Jim and most of the rest of the bomber's crew were treated like celebrities. Jim Breedice had lucked into a plump R.N. Captain who responded to her third screwdriver by getting up on the bar, shoes and all, to demonstrate eye-catching legs and softly pulsatile talents for tap dancing. Hal found himself looking longingly at Jim's friend's legs. Jim found himself doing the same thing, but also looking long and hard in a northerly direction as well. The plump Captain found herself wondering what she was going to do with two men. 

The nurse was just starting to really get into her dancing. David Rose's, `The Stripper,' was on the jukebox and she was moving in perfect sync with the music. Uniform buttons were coming undone when a two-striper burst into the lounge and shouted, 

"Hey, Major, Sir... Base security wants you down at operations!" 

On the double and they meant it. After all the quarantine time, then they notice it. Doesn't it figure. There was a heavy burn mark on the bottom of reactor number two. No radiation to speak of. Just a severe burn mark. 

"I'll be a son of a coke bottle," Hal said in amazement. "Sure looks like some kind of an explosion, discharge, or something ! Not a single extra tick on the Geiger counter?" 

"No, Sir. She's as clean as when she was cherry. Sure can't understand that." 

"We did go through an electrical storm. Do you suppose that Mother Nature could have emptied those reactors?" 

"No way. Even Mother Nature is gonna get radioactivity outside of those tanks." 

Partly right and partly wrong. The I.S.I. technicians had very carefully calculated the energy exchange, and had accounted for every bit of the redirected nuclear energy because that is what the I.S.I. was all about. Considering the Laws of Thermodynamics and The New General Laws of Relativistic Energy, and paying extreme attention to very fine details were constant concerns of the I.S.I. The overall negative entropy balance, just as with the similar but smaller problems of pestilence, war, and famine, threatened the fabric of the space-time continuum and the life matrix itself. 

Our story also begins in the very, very far-distant future. We find ourselves catapulted into a Mission Control setting at the outreaches of three confluent galactic group vortices. There are thirty multi-display monitors in three semicircular rows. Hairless beings in iridescent white-silver I.S.I.-monogrammed uniforms appear virtually identical in the nearly featureless detail of their faces and the uniformity of their physical dimensions. Humanoid limbs operate keyboards and other control panels arrayed before the monitors. Just after noticing how much all the operators resemble each other, our attention is drawn by the sound track, in full Dolby stereo. Loud cacophony provides the main stimulation to the viewer because the scene is in muted light broken only by blinking of the monitors. Sound begins to increase in amplitude. Rumbling, vibration, and screeching frequencies make it seem like all Hell is literally breaking loose. Crunching noises continue, and dust-like fragments begin to fall from the ceiling of the underground control chamber. Members of the Intergalactic Security Intelligence briefly make purposeless-seeming movements with their appendages, which terminate in small hands bearing two fingers and a thumb. A close-up shot shows two of these hands typing on a keyboard in nervous animation. Camera view cuts contrast two of the featureless faces, looking at each other. Although there is no trace of any mouth movement, the viewer can hear high-pitched yet calm voices speaking to each other. 

Garth: "Well, what of this new series of crises, sibling? The prime leader's teachings have certainly predicted this disorganization. And can you imagine the real problems are only yet to come, if there is much time left." 

Barth: "Obviously, sibling . And being at the center of our numinous asteroid will do nothing for any of the siblings nor will it help unless we succeed with the LaPlace Transforms." 

Garth: "I know, sibling. We know, don't we?" 

The rumbling sounds get louder. Flashes of light appear out of nowhere and coalesce in the air above the thirty I.S.I. technicians. A three-dimensional image of the prime leader communicates in the same high-pitched, mellifluous tones: 

Alpha-One: "Time for our exercise, isn't it, siblings?" 

A confluent series of vowel sounds fills the chamber, as all the beings cease their activities at the monitors, fold their appendages, and stare straight ahead. The high-pitched sound continues and becomes more intense. Particles of dust appear to reverse their flight and leave the chamber through the ceiling from the spots through which they originally fell. Soon, the high-pitched sound is all that remains as the rumbling noises disappear. A strong sense of balanced harmony and purpose pervades the chamber. 

Alpha-One: "All right, siblings. Now let's get back to the LaPlace Transforms. We are in a no-lose situation, because at this point, there is nothing left to lose if we fail in our attempts. May the grace and the power of The One be within us all." 

The image of Alpha-One dissolves into the darkness and tripartite appendages again begin to operate the numerous keyboards and control panels. In addition to the three rows of ten monitors, there is a very large concave screen at the front of the chamber. The screen is filled with multiple, smaller screen-views which are linked together across the surface as a series of interlocking windows. Barth and Garth continue their conversation. 

Barth: "So why is it that we must focus on such a small and insignificant planet from pre-Cataclysmic times? Our time studies repeatedly show us that very long-range views are necessary before it is possible to assess the ultimate effect of even an apparently insignificant and minor character in the history of a given culture. I remember that the personal belongings of a military hero named Custer from the same planet appeared millennia later in the Vorgat galaxy. One of our adolescent time pirates from 29,000 A.D. was using Custer's military belt buckle as the energizer in his magneto-oscillatory drive because it was solid silver. That anachronistic piece of silver truly wreaked havoc in a time frame when the `lower' precious metals had been replaced by all synthetic metals of extremely high atomic number. And after that, several frightfully destructive time-fabric rents began setting off random anti-matter implosions that nearly disintegrated our I.S.I. predecessors before the I.S.I. really became aware of what trans-time warfare was all about. Many of us used to scan those early pre-Cataclysmic solar systems as a part of our routine training maneuvers. Don't you recall how many of us loved to scan the life span of Jesus of Nazareth over and over again? The vibrations and the fields surrounding that primitive ritual of crucifixion sent many of us back to the processors during our early apprenticeship periods. I myself can still feel that stormy atmosphere surrounding the entire planet when only one portion of the whole was terminated." 

Garth: "Remember, this solar system is only one of four possible loci for an effective, direct intervention. Because of Local Group proximity, this system is also ideal for our first transmission. The energy requirements are lower so there will some margin for slight errors and practice effect expenditures. Their system is only early nuclear and pre-Cataclysmic at that, eh Sibling? With such an early culture, it is almost for certain that we will succeed in this first projected matter-energy translation through one of many time-fissures. Let us pray that we can carry it out in a manner that is truly benign in an entropic sense. We are required to make at least three of the four possibilities fully functional before Alpha-One's return." 

Entropy imbalance is more or less the raison d'etre of the I.S.I. because transtemporal distortions (including intratemporal ripoffs) make the process of entropy accumulation qualitatively much more disorderly. When entropy accumulates in orderly fashion the results are regular time dimensions and ordinary time passages. However, when entropy accumulates by fits and starts that are occasionally of very great magnitude compared to the baseline, the results are disorderly accumulation and possible breakdown of the space-time continuum itself and therefore disintegration of the life matrix. 

Base security was still very uncomfortable with the apparent discrepancy between two facts: 

Two and one-half experimental nuclear power plants discharged from a top-secret aircraft 
Not even a trace of any surface radiation leaks or remnants of whatever it was that happened to the XLN-662. 
Discrepancies that were visible never got by in the security world without lots and lots of explanations. So Hal was very grumpily sitting in the plain, undesignated security chief's office with the usual cigar in his mouth, but without the beers and without the female companionship. He and the Chief, also a Major, argued with great intensity for a few minutes over yet another question: What were they going to do about their Reportable Nuclear Accident Report? Both decided to forget about it later over a beer at the Officer's Club--at least, until after they'd had the beer. And Hal, of course, had still not forgotten about the Captain. In fact, he was thinking of ways to sidetrack Jim Breedice into duty with the base security chief so that he could have the duty with the nurse Captain. 

* * 
We have carefully studied the flow of your individual lifetime to select the proper time frame for our initial transmission to you. Our calculations indicate that the next six or seven day-units of your life will be absolutely uneventful. You will have sufficient time to make preparations for the transition. If, for some reason, you decide that involvement with us is not to your individual liking, we will be able to observe this with our remote monitoring system. You do not have to write it out or state the decision in so many words. Merely experiencing and settling in on this opinion consistently for a period of several hours will allow us to realize that we must make another choice. Possibly even from another galactic system, and another time nexus that is linkable with our matter-energy translation technique. Above all, there must be a strong voluntary component on your part, in order for us to cooperatively establish the necessary cellular electromagnetic transtime bridge for altering universal entropy and transtemporal dyssynchronisms.} 

Introducing Julian to Pearl E. Mae and the other group members did not remove the fact of Gabriella's death. Lyle, had he been like many other people, might have reached for a drink of straight scotch or a couple of hits off a joint after he really accepted the fact that Gabriella was dead. But did she know that she was going to die? Was she aware of anything at the moment of death? Or was everything all over in a couple of seconds? Gabriella was fast, and a couple of seconds were enough for her with her street smarts to pick up what was going down and avoid it if at all possible. Gabriella's entire life, from some perspectives, had been a long series of hot spots and difficult positions, one after another. Gabriella always survived the most outrageous situations. And now she had been snuffed? Why could it not have been a dream? It had not been a dream. If anything, that part of his life up to this point with Gabriella suddenly seemed distant and faded off in the past and dream-like when he compared it to the uncomfortable and embarrassing sensation currently in his chest that was yearning for Pearl E. Mae. He wanted to get into her britches like he'd been there a lot before. It did not matter if she had a name out of the Old West, or that she could sing country-western with a real twang. There was some solid-home comfort he could feel for her in his bones. Yet he ached vaguely in the shock of Gabriella's death. Lyle was getting a feeling of sadness and disorientation. He yearned for the comfort of the love feeling he had with Pearl E. Mae and he grieved for Gabriella even though their relationship had been brief. Lyle began to feel pain, and to feel lost. 

Without warning, a part of Lyle's mind suddenly gaped wide open. Then it happened again. His body's mind began to calm itself through the breathing. Like the day before, something felt involuntary but also very familiar, in the same way that pressing the accelerator or the brake pedals might feel familiar to a driver. The megastepped Lyle had some great built-in safety and regeneration devices. While his body's breathing systems calmed him, his mind sensed a calming issuing from the six other beings. His self-relaxation was enhanced much more than tenfold, it seemed. When he closed his eyes and prayed for strength and stability, the swift answer was the group synergism. Like a small cloud of white light programmed for a healing mode, the effect of the group was to make him feel very supported. The grief for Gabriella was much less painful, and he had the distinct impression of having shared the grief with others. Then he felt the light and had no thoughts whatsoever for several minutes. The white light enveloped him and conveyed a soft, pleasurable sensation to the central part of his chest. The light in the heart expanded to further envelop him and gave him feelings of Divine protection. In a psychic sense, there was an intense chasm of disjointed energies suddenly settling down into a harmonious crystallization of unity. Unity with something unlike anything Lyle could remember, even considering the massive amount of reading he'd managed to sneak in for free while working as a clerk in the book store. After awhile, the entire process of his occult growth had become almost like something out of a comic book story of occult powers and extrasensory abilities. Whatever he read about seemed to take shape in a literal or figurative way before his very eyes during the days and weeks following exposure to the concepts or spiritual practices such as those described in Tibetan Yoga. He often wondered whether some part of this could have been auto-suggestion or self-hypnosis, but it was unlikely. This was something different. Very different! 

Although Lyle's friends who came into the bookstore often told him that his imagination was too active, Lyle didn't see it that way. Most of the spiritual teachings he was interested in enough to read about felt almost natural and intuitive on first reading. Books and essays that felt strange or in any way incomprehensible he simply put down since there were so many more books in the store left to sample. So much of the stuff had already changed his outlook, at least compared to the highschool dropout guitar player reading background he had when he first started the job at the Crystalline Book Shop. 

The day's events were not that illogical an extension of what had been going on the day before, however. Even with the profound inner sense of peace and love, Lyle's head still buzzed -- 24 hours later -- from the thunderclap rainstorm and the multichannel data of the six other group members that was nearly inundating his nervous system. The presence of six other beings in his life brought Lyle constantly back to the here-and-now in the same way that musical groups had brought him back to ground after flying too high and too long on a solo passage. Lyle Crawford was just one day past undergoing a mega-evolutionary step toward becoming part of a unique man-machine synergism: DR TOMORROW. The initial, sudden contact of the seven beings and their mentalities was the main substance of the first of many MindLink/HeartLights on the day before, and Lyle energetically set to work with the group by starting out the day with another MindLink/HeartLight despite having the grief of Gabriella's death sitting on his heart. 

Julian was pretty cool about my not smoking, even though he continued to reflexly pass the doober whenever he finished taking a hit. I was more surprised that my tobacco habit was not speaking to me through my body. Ganja was nothing to quit smoking, but tobacco withdrawal was a major overhaul. Julian reminded me of my deceased ex-, Toos, and how she always maintained that quitting heroine (which she had done twice successfully) was much easier than quitting tobacco (which she had done only once successfully). Julian, my man for Everything, was now a little freaked out at all that was unusual at my house. He was hanging out with us when Su-Shan gave me the Eternal ring he had brought for me into the past. Julian took a look at the ring and then split. I noticed the ring right away after the megastepping because of the highly unusual shape of the pewter-like silver structure. The Eternal Ring was a tiny and powerful supercomputer from 32,000 A.D. with multimedia functions and projection systems. Atop a double-spiral finger-ring, the small silver pyramid sat inside a thin, corner-shaped silver shell. Along the top outside border of the shell were the six control buttons. The small pyramid possessed a frighteningly effective laser kineholographic projector, and the silver shell's control panel contained two tiny microefficient stereo speakers for very realistic sound and incredible stereo imaging. Many cuts above the best screen projection systems I've seen in video stores, the Eternal Rings can play back ultra high fidelity stereo video images in a three-dimensional format. The Eternal Ring, of course, is also an auto-zeroing, voice activated communicator and networking device. The ring possesses capabilities for storing objects in virtual space on an indefinite basis while safeguarding the stored objects with combination of voiceprint and digital analysis of radial arterial pulse wave. Field-induction linking permits the linking up of all our computer modules, but the rings have another type of synchronizing function. Special synchronizing pulses laid down by each Eternal Ring let us synchronize our bodies' physiological signals more efficiently, especially when functioning in a multitracking environment. Pulse multitracking gives all seven of us special potentials for relating to MIDI music and troubleshooting problems with the MIDI wiring, interfaces, and circuitry. Of course this sounds too heavy for me to save in my personal memory, so I just put on the ring, and resumed preparing for MindLink/HeartLight A small part of my mind worried about Julian, and whether or not it was O.K. for him to be alone. I wished he could be in on our MindLink/HeartLight, and I wished for him to feel some of the love and cohesiveness and HeartLight that we Eternals were beginning to have as a group. Especially because of the HeartLight, I was sure that the residual effect of being centered in the heart was something we could pass on to Julian and any other human we felt close to. 

This time, we are sitting around the pool. It is our second day together, and the MindLink/HeartLight is almost as important as the first one we had the day before because we learn about travelling together as a group. The first MindLink/HeartLight demonstrated to us that we were already a group and could function together in a heart-centered and creative way by producing the musical thought form and composition that terminated with the bat signal. The first MindLink/HeartLight gave proof of how unified we could become. This second MindLink/HeartLight was powerfully facilitated by Quail, who helped us to learn how to travel and work together as a group. She taught us to travel together out of the body and to function as Eternals while out of the body. 

Quail came to DR TOMORROW from perhaps the farthest away point in the future. An inhabitant of the Light Dynasty Galaxy and the Twin Federations, Quail was tall, very buxom, and capable of both instant invisibility and physical plane space flight. She very rarely spoke with language, and yet was one of the group's most powerful telepaths. Quail could play or emulate nearly any musical instrument, and could also synthesize or emulate a wide variety of esoteric clicks and other sounds. When singing, she was able to alter her voice over a large range of octaves and had the capability of making her voice sound like nearly any of the controls on any of the group's synthesizers. Quail was also imbued with an ability both very ancient and very futuristic: she could voluntarily split the frequencies of her voice so that she sounded like several voices singing or chanting at the same time. 

These abilities were somewhat ironic, because in her native habitat, Quail's physical form resembled more that of an fish. The specific form that Quail's native configuration resembled was that of the earthly Manta Ray. Quail's home planet was mainly a series of liquid seas made up of sulfur-silicon congeners. As a being originally possessing physical structure based on geometry of the silicon atom, Quail was required to undergo extensive matter transposition before being sent to carbon-based Earth of the past via the thought-matter projection unit by the I.S.I. technicians. Quail's humanoid identity, after karmic resettling, was that of a Tequesta Indian Princess who had been a champion huntress. Just as Quail had been an outstanding heroine of the Light Dynasty Galaxy, her humanoid alter ego had been a female hero from an advanced Indian civilization that antedated the Florida Seminoles by hundreds of years. 

Quail found the human form quite interesting when she compared it with her native life-form. When she and Morphosa swam together in the DR TOMORROW pool, Quail's human form felt almost like a plastic costume or sheath. Quail could easily remember the soaring underwater movements of her Light Dynasty life-form and she really missed it at times. She found it a challenge to see whether or not her human body could slide gracefully through the water, but a bayonet-type of glide was all she could manage because the densities and specific gravities were quite different. Quail once observed Earth athletes performing a `dolphin kick' in a televised swimming race and it made her laugh involuntarily. Morphosa and Quail felt a certain type of comradeship, because both of them had the capacity for changing their molecular structure. But when it would be necessary for DR TOMORROW to do any really fast physical plane travelling, Quail was always the one who served as the bus driver. 

During the MindLink/HeartLight on this Saturday, Quail served as designated leader. The meditation began and there was an intense sensation of linking up with each other, that could be most clearly felt in the breathing. After we had been inked up for a little more than thirty minutes, Quail was able to easily transport all seven of us in one common energy package to wherever we wished to go. On this Art Festival Saturday, we ascended over the house and went zooming over the Grove at tree-top level. Even though all seven of us were out of body, there were sensations of the breeze and smells from the Art Festival. Quail flew us over the city and out to South Beach. We had a breathtaking view of the entire Miami Beach hotel and motel strips in all their fluorescent afternoon glory. Then Quail shot us up in the direction of outer space and quickly circumnavigated the entire planet from space, and returned to the southeast Florida coast. We then returned to what Quail felt was the strongest power spot in their neighborhood. Only a few miles away from the DR TOMORROW house. Quail loved the trip out to the tip of Cape Florida, where the ocean was blue-green during the day, and beautiful and usually undisturbed late at night because the State Park Service closed up the roads to the park just before sunset. She pointed out a section of houses half a mile offshore in the water built up on stilts. We had flown over the houses before returning to the Cape Florida ocean wall and sitting together there. It did not matter that their physical bodies were back in meditative trance around the pool. They sat together and contemplated the stilt houses which Lyle identified as occasionally having extremely loud and rowdy parties. 

At the sea wall by the ocean, Quail was able to teach the Eternals how to use the large fluid medium as a means of communicating with all other large bodies of fluid media everywhere. Although most of the group members other than Lyle were familiar with the use of plants for telepathic communication, both fluid wave and plant communication were definitely something new for Lyle. Quail merely demonstrated to the Eternals that any large body of liquid was able to absorb, resonate with, and emit an unlimited number of vibrations. Earlier in the MindLink/HeartLight, members of DR TOMORROW learned about telepathic fluid wave communication between Earth and Venus during the third planet's ancient history. This form of communication was infinitely cheaper than utilizing gross, physical plane electronic or quantal energy. The early Venusian colonists communicated with the original Mind back on Venus by simply living clearly and being in the vicinity of any large body of water. Despite increasing contamination in all continents, the major oceans of Earth actually served best for this purpose because their volumes most nearly approached the relative volume of infinity, Quail taught. Whenever a fluid volume approached that of an infinite conductor, the frequency of oscillations necessary for relatively infinite long-distance propagation becomes minimized. 

Since the large volume of Earth's oceans approached, for practical purposes, infinity, nearly any of the oceans could be used for fluid wave energy projection. Quail taught the other members of DR TOMORROW how to talk to each other through the Atlantic Ocean. They learned how to bounce and beam thoughts and sensations from the rolling waves along the surface of the ocean and they also learned, while out of body, to bounce themselves from the depths of the ocean floor in giant swirls and eddies of much larger and slowly changing waves that were nearly invisible but of immense scope and size compared to the waves that rolled along the top of the water's surface. Low frequency and extra-low frequency signals and stimuli sometimes have the greatest biologic impact. Slow oscillatory vibrations could also penetrate the earth's crust beneath the ocean bed to emerge on the opposite side of the planet. Quail also taught them the trick of using the ocean to focus the energy propagations of radio and other wave-form and quantal communications. 

To Lyle, this was all astounding. Many of his forays into the written word had spoken of the Hierarchies, but his fellow Eternals seemed to put many of the higher spiritual principles into direct practice. With his megastepped mentality, Lyle grasped these techniques with amazing ease. He experienced no difficulties in learning how to bounce vibrations off the ocean's surface, or from the large slow eddies in the ocean's depths. He was also learning how to use the large body of fluid to focus his own higher energies when necessary. The Miami area had so many points of contact with bodies of water, that Lyle found it easy to nearly always use the hydro-bouncing and focusing during all of his meditations. Since the Eternals do not require food or drink on a regular basis, it was difficult for Lyle to convince the other Eternals about the seriousness of the water contamination and the drinking water shortages. 

From their position many thousands of years in the future, the I.S.I. technicians watched Lyle on their multi-coordinate monitors and gently smiled. Lyle, despite his mega-evolutionary changes, was still very typical of pre-Cataclysmic people. It was easier for Lyle to accept mega-evolutionary changes initially just in terms of his physical being, and he still comprehended mental and spiritual changes in higher energies as being primarily physical manifestations. Lyle was able to understand and use the idea of water being part of telepathy, but he had difficulty applying the process itself. This was paradoxical considering the extensive telepathic communication that goes on between musicians in a group while they are playing. So even though Lyle was a sensitive, he was rather redneck about considering the possibilities of either plant or electromagnetic field consciousness. Technophobic or not, Lyle treated all equipment with respect. He even talked to his computers. But when it came to having communication with plants, he drew the line. That was just for Walt Disney characters. 

The other members of DR TOMORROW had no such problems. Simple plants had been used for thousands of years as rudimentary telepathic communicators throughout most Galaxies. And the fluid medium, water of life, aqua vitae, was the primeval source of all simple plants. On Earth and many other planets, plants both originated from water and possess water as the vital and the single most characteristic compositional substance. Telepathy involves wave propagation or transmission. The members of DR TOMORROW all knew that both speech and thinking were different forms of waves. Since a body of water such as the ocean always has waves, to send the waves of communication through water was very easily done by simply superimposing one set of waves (telepathy) upon another set of waves (the fluid). Many galactic systems were not based upon the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen combination, but always had some form of a basic fluid medium. When the fluid happened to be a condensed form of a gas such as methane or a silicon congener, the overriding relationship between the liquid and the waves and the communication was still universal. 

Although the DR TOMORROW pool was fairly small, Quail had been able to demonstrate this Saturday that when the members would carry out their MindLink/HeartLight around the pool, it was slightly easier to communicate feelings and concepts by using the waves in the pool. Despite the fact that the pool was so small, the Earth's rotation and gravity fields actually caused very tiny waves even in such a small body of fluid as the swimming pool. Lyle quickly realized that with continuing practice, the members of DR TOMORROW could utilize the waves of airflow for communication. 

Megastepped Lyle was still the most primitive member of DR TOMORROW. The Primitive. The Primitive megastepped into Eternal status. The other Eternals, because of I.S.I. translation and projection techniques, had some say in their choice of physical vehicles and also physical plane personalities. Despite enhancing of his own muscular development and definition to a superior level from an earthly point of view, Lyle was still a Primitive because of being firmly rooted to a nevertheless advanced physical and emotional body. Long before his DR TOMORROW days, Lyle had already learned how to temporarily transcend the physical body during meditation. During the daily MindLink/HeartLight experiences, however, Lyle was astounded to learn that even though all members became One in a sense, it was also possible to trade and shift physical bodies as well as lower-plane personalities. Since Lyle had been a musician prior to the electric cataclysm, it was not so new to him to learn that this type of body-shifting and personality-trading also resembled what was possible while playing music together as a group. 

During the the first musical session, later in the day, Lyle was also fascinated by learning to listen to, without actually hearing, many other trains of musical thought that seemed to be going on at the same time as the physical plane music the group, DR TOMORROW, was playing. Many of these trains of musical expression seemed to come in waves. During the first MIDI-mediated rehearsal, Lyle felt himself inadvertently being carried away and losing control over his guitar playing and his voice. Like what the druggies used to call overamping. Only the common musical MindLink/HeartLight of the other members was able to help Lyle keep his feet on the ground and stay musically grounded with the bass and drum lines. Music rehearsals and performances were just be a special form of the daily, vibration-forging MindLink/HeartLight. 

It was Lyle's idea that some common physical movements and exercises for the group might be helpful. Despite the fact that disco was no longer trendy, Su-Shan used several programmed disco beats and songs as a way of experimenting with musical body movement patterns. However, most of the compositions played during that first rehearsal belonged to two other types. One style was a very subtle wave-like movement combined with minimalistic techniques that resembled what Lyle had seen in Eastern musicians like sitar and tabla players who were performing ecstasy music. The other main type of composition emerging from the first DR TOMORROW session was more of a neoclassical, hard rock beat. Lyle opined that it would be useful for the music to focus on breathing sounds and breathing patterns, so the hard rock beat began to feature whooshing air-like sounds that would randomly seem to track the listeners own breathing. Aloysius, the computer, made an important contribution here, even though his existence had not yet been officially recognized. Suffice it to say that VDT graphics consisting of schematic patterns reminded Su-Shan how simple it would be to add a white sound generator. Su-Shan and Noman later added three of the white sound generators and arranged them in a triangular configuration. The idea proved very effective. Some of the air-like sounds, as well as the white sound patterns were included in both the hard-rock music and in the disco-patterned music. 

The changes and transitions were very fast and seemed natural. Lyle and the Eternals were living together in the large, palm and cypress-shaded Art Deco house off Tigertail in the Grove. 

Despite being able to control ectoplasmic projections of mind-energy, Pearl E. May had very little control of her own physical structure. Her dark hair and Aegean china doll-like face belied the multi-colored Vesuvius of higher plane energies she became whenever she transcended. One of the first official acts Pearl E. May performed for DR TOMORROW the group was taking Lyle's blue Indian bedspread material and parcelled it out so that there was enough to make UniSex shirt-garments for all seven members of the group. From the time when Pearl E. May began to work with the blue cloth, its shimmering qualities seemed to increase and become more intense. Pearl E. May decided to ectoplasmically shape the cloth into long Indian shirt-garments for each member, and the shirt-garments seemed to begin independent and separate lives of their own shortly after Pearl E. May's abilities molded them into existence. For one thing, cloth became instantly fireproof and indestructible as far as ordinary means were concerned. The garments also seemed to have a Morphosa-like quality of variable density. When the Eternals were wearing these garments on a hot and muggy day, the cloth appeared to become sleazy and diaphanous. One the other hand, the blue Indian bedspread material became very much like velvet during the rare nights that were chilly on the ocean. In the tropical rain storms, the material took on a synthetic plastic-like consistency and yet was able to allow the interchange of inside and outside air. In nearly every one of the group images of DR TOMORROW, all seven Eternals appeared in the blue Indian shirt-garments. In addition to having and performing distinctively with Aloysius the computer, the Indian shirt-garments actually became a trademark of the group. The shirts were really a far cry from all the punk and glitter-rock used by many musical groups and entertainers. However, since the shirts did have a density-altering property, they also tended to diffract light of different colors in a random way. And actually took on the appearance of colors other than blue. 

Of course, the shirts had a very special meaning for Lyle, because he was able to understand some of the eerie feelings he had as a child when he first received the gift from his mother. The Indian cloth was an interface between Lyle, the past, and the future. The megastepping had not only changed his physical vehicle, but empowered him with the ability to receive, understand, and manage intense amounts of energy. Just as much as he had been or seemed very dull and humdrum before, Lyle now was able to maintain a powerful level of equanimity in the face of nearly overwhelming and massive overload on any plane including the physical. Lyle now already experienced two of the automatic calming incidents during which his body itself started and maintained the process of slow deep abdominal breathing. During the first two MindLink/HeartLights, Lyle, as a member of the common mind, met his father who had died in India. On one of these occasions, a blustery arctic wind seemed to convey all of them into the Himalayas, where the group, Lyle's father, and two Tibetan monks had a great silent conversation. On other scattered occasions that followed, Lyle directly reencountered the energies of his father and learned that these energies gave him certain powers or abilities to communicate with passed-on spirits. This again was difficult for Lyle to really grasp. His Western background made it difficult for him to be able to really believe in spirits. Gradually, however, and with the passing of days and sufficient experiences with atypical kinds of energies, Lyle was able to react to even the word, `spirits,' with less disdain and more of an open-minded attitude. 

With the exception of Su-Shan, each Eternal came to Miami with only the robe, belt, pouch, and ring. In addition to the Eternal ring intended for Lyle, Su-Shan, the drummer, also brought a large piece of highly compressed carbon through the time transporter-translator. Diamonds, because of their compressed carbon-lattice crystalline structure, caused the least amount of entropic disturbance, and I.S.I. agents had very carefully and scrupulously calculated out the energy required through the LaPlace transforms for the whole diamond. Earthside, Su-Shan used an ordinary hammer and chisel to break up the large hypercrystalline fragment. The many smaller pieces were quite negotiable in the gold resale shops located far out west on Bird Road. 

Understanding the entire electronic requirements of a musical group was the most serious problem facing Lyle and his six friends because music technology in this Primitive culture, while based on relatively simple programming principles, was packaged in some very complex ways. Lyle's previous music involved only a small but very heavy combo guitar amp and a few effects pedals. Now it was necessary to set up for an entire group. Just a couple of the tiny diamond fragments yielded a large ammount of dollars. Lyle managed to buy the basic sound-production set-up equipment for the group's initial musical efforts although the group members' appearance nearly caused a riot in the music store. They selected amplifiers for the individual instruments, a multichannel board along with a fairly standard PA system, and a portable DAT recorder. Lyle also purchased an inexpensive Macintosh computer, voice and patch editors, and some sequencing software. Then Lyle ran into a brick wall trying to explain Primitive ideas about signal processing for both sound production and sound recording. He himself barely understood Earth electronics. So even though his mind had been megastepped, he still came up with a blank when Su-Shan and Noman tried to initiate him into the mysteries of field-induction linking and transmission. Field-induction linking was the way that Al the computer system had managed to recruit all their different computers into his microprocessor-based shenanigans. Some day, field-induction linking would permit Eternals to link with each other by using their rings. Field-induction linking was the mechanism by which each Eternal could now access any or all of Al's different systems. Field-induction linking was a problem for Su-Shan. Su-Shan not only understood it very well, he was able to communicate the technical information very efficiently to Lyle and the others, using both verbal and extrasensory techniques. Some Eternals came from galaxies or times that did not use electronic transduction for music, but instead used plasma flow transmission units or simple yet sophisticated systems of built-in genetically engineered vibrating membranes that produced the musical sounds directly while being colored by resonance properties of the being's own structure. Lyle had always been a fair and sometimes commercial guitar player, but the megastepped energy changes (like the changes he experienced with his own muscular structure) placed within his fingertips' grasp a startling knowledge of all stringed instruments. He now viewed the electric guitar as a rather primitive precursor of Draconian feeling-lutes. Lyle managed to adapt himself to the six-stringed Drac instrument with startling speed. Piano and keyboards are stringed instruments also, and Lyle began playing both guitar and keyboard during different parts of a tune in the group's first rehearsals. What was even more impressive to Lyle and other members of the group, however, was the speed with which they navigated and understood modern electronic design and the currently available products. Su-Shan, the percussion expert, was also a 30,000 A.D. expert in nucleonics. It was difficult for him to make a transfer back to the archaic physical plane electronic components such as LSI, VLSI, and bubble memories. But he and Lyle quickly mastered the low-level difficulties of MIDI implementation codes and the elementary programming involved in the patch editors and sequencing software. With some of the tone generators and a special rack-mounted interface for the black Cube computer, Lyle and Su-Shan ran the main outputs of the stereo PA board into the DSP 56001 chip that was set to sample the music at a rate of 48 KHz and meet the technical standards for DAT quality recording. 

After a blazing day of MindLink/HeartLight and music rehearsal, the group broke up into two different directions. Noman, Su-Shan, Quail, Morphosa, and Rico decided to go visit the Peacock Cafe across from Peacock Park. They would pretend to eat while checking out the street scene. 

Pearl E. Mae and I looked at each other and laughed. It did not matter whether the other Eternals could read our minds or not. We changed our clothing, got the dogs, and went out into the pool again. I have never known any lady who had previously been an aquatic life form, so I never had any idea of how fish do it, until now. At first, it felt like Pearl E. Mae had rubber lips. She kept them semi-pursed as we kissed. I tried not to laugh, but she picked up my mirth and looked at me with questioning eyes, that spoke of her inner channel that grasped my humor with puzzlement. I kept pushing my lips softly against hers. My fingers touched her orange-reddish face and her eyelashes seemed to emit electrical sparks as my fingertips ran over them. 

Talk about chemistry, this was going to be Electrocution City. The tip of my tongue gently pried itself between her lips. She softly opened her mouth and began to suck on the tip of my tongue. As we kissed, it seemed like the rockets' red glare was going off in my throat and in my chest. Except that it didn't feel like it was anything that belonged to me anymore. It felt like the rockets' red glare going off in our throats and our chests. Chemistry City within the context of Electrocution City. We were really melting into each other. It didn't matter whether Pearl E. Mae had been a fish, or a cow, or an octopus, and whether I had been a monkey or gorilla or whatever. Together, the two of us were two globs of light blending synergistically. It didn't matter that the blending was taking place from a base of the physical body. It was tighter than MindLink/HeartLight and sweeter than HeartLight. An unending collaborative series of dolphin kicks plunged both the depths and the heights of aquatic consciousness with very efficient, high-amplitude eddies.} 

It was a spectacular black and red and yellow sunset. 

The old man's hair shone like platinum in the sunlight. Waves of light appeared to cascade over his head and onto his shoulders. Although his face was unfamiliar, there was an urgency and deceptive familiarity to his voice that demanded careful attention. The words felt as though they were being spoken underwater, without any clear sound dimension but a type of low frequency pressure or pre-sound sensation. Within the same bubbles of pressure were included images that were almost but not quite visual. After some minutes of conversation, the actual words and images lost their bubble-like quality. The power of transcerebral translation software and field-induction coupling soon had Yo-Vah speaking colloquial Earth English. 

"Welcome to transitions, transitions, and more transitions. I wonder why none of you have asked any questions about why this I.S.I. project has been codenamed `DR TOMORROW', what it means, why music is involved at all in the project, or what the role is of harmony in a transtemporal entropic intervention. No one has asked whether there is to be a doctor involved in the project." 

"Since it was my computer that started telling the story," Lyle offered. "I'd like to ask how my name got involved with it, and how come the little notebook computer also gave me a three-dimensional straight-ahead view of my immediate future that was 100% accurate." 

"I'm afraid you're still being a little Primitive and concrete, Lyle... The information that came to you via the little computer was being issued to you from a place where there is 100% accurate, as you would say, representation of a person's immediate past, present, and future as well as past and future lifetimes. Just the fact that one has access to information of this type suggests the need to consciously function from more than just the physical plane." 

"O.K., I own up to being Primitive, Yo-Vah. But hit me with your best shot. What does `DR TOMORROW' mean. Like, I noticed there wasn't any period after the 'r' in 'Doctor.' Does that have anything to do with the name? Am I the Doctor Tomorrow character?" 

"Good guesses for a Primitive. Both the group and the project codename are DR TOMORROW. The `DR' is an acronym for Direct Reclamation. And the letters of `TOMORROW' abbreviate a complex mathematical algorithm that represents critical elements of the timetransit process. Or, tomorrow equals future when viewed from the correct perspective. Briefly, the project involves Direct Reclamation of the Future as timetransit. The project seeks to re-direct entropy-critical energies by means of culturally-valued music and artistic science-fiction materials featuring time travel. Megastepping you into your Eternal form and injecting the other Eternals was the first and most important step in the project. Despite being a terminally Primitive planet, Earth has the cultural seeds and elements which can evolve into help for the future. Many of your own future lifetimes will be spent as famous physicians and healers. These lifetimes will reflect upon your successful DR TOMORROW project. Extensive data from these lifetimes has been projected into you at the moment of megastepping. You will gradually realize some of these otherlife abilities. You actually are a healer and a physician from the future, but above all else you are a teacher. You will soon be able to discover and use creative ways of teaching. The word in many systems for healer often means teacher as well. Earth's Japanese culture, I believe, uses the word, sensei, to mean both doctor and teacher. In nonPrimitive cultures there is often a common educational and professional pathway for both teachers and healers. The MindLink and HeartLight exercises will help you to integrate otherlife information. Never forget that the HeartLight is always the way to your Higher Mind. And Higher Mind, for both individuals and the group as well, is the best platform from which to deal with otherlife information. Noman can teach you much about otherlife abilities and how integrated and realized beings can draw on otherlife abilities in a very balanced way. Future events will demand that you have many skills of which you now have no conscious recall. When the skill is needed, it will appear, especially if you let it happen. For example, although you are now a musician, you will soon be drawing extensively on your abilities as both a musician/composer and healer. Remember -- `Both/And'? I believe you were discussing these words with someone recently. The healing abilities will emerge if you allow them to do so. Remember, it is DR TOMORROW as a thought form that is most important. Please remember the thought form! When you begin to work more specifically on the thought form, you will also find that part of your megastepping includes extensive cultural and language knowledge from several of your main planetary cultures. Since culture has been one of my abiding hobbies, I saw to it that you will find within you fluency in Russian, Japanese, and Spanish languages. The languages will help with the thought form, but also with having more of a feeling for your planet. Remember also that from a galactic point of view, it is of course Primitive and limited to only view the outcome of a single planet in the Universe." 

"O.K., I guess I did say to hit me with your best shot, and that was a pretty good shot, Yo-Vah." 

And Yo-Vah said unto Lyle, with almost stern admonishment: 

"So now is the time when you must take up the cape of divine human and assist the Guardians, the Eternals, and the I.S.I. with preserving the entropy balance of the Universe. Why do you think your planetary subcultures all have the common myth of the Super Man who has more than mortal abilities? Do you remember the special properties that Superman's cape had? The Cape I give you now is a real object, even though it is invisible and exists only in virtual reality until evocation, it will project and amplify your abilities considerably farther than what you observed with the being your media termed, 'the Man of Steel'." 

"Good grief, Yo-vah! Do you mean to tell me that your computer analyses included our animated comic book heroes as well?" 

"Not only have we analyzed your comic book heroes and themes, but we have also intensely catalogued and cross-referenced most of your science fiction and fantasy literature as well. One of our members even wrote up a History of the Universe as a comic book series and injected it into your cultures. There are at least several Guardians who are specialists in your twentieth century English science fiction. For a soon-to-be-extinct planet, your Primitive culture has been the site of some very worthwhile cultural achievements, especially in your science fiction. Bradbury and Asimov, we love too. But do you think that either of them actually comes from your system? Another of your later injected, `walk-in' writers, William Gibson, was my personal favorite because of the amount of realism along the optimism-pessimism dimension that you found in his writings. His `Matrix' into which software cowboys plunge by the simple act of `jacking in' with electrodes is a virtual reality that operates at different levels within itself. Gibson's heroes live in both a physical reality and virtual reality simultaneously. Gibson's Matrix, however, is just one of very many possible virtual realities. Far in the future, we begin dealing with virtual virtual reality. This level is a virtual representation of a virtual reality, as with a symbol of a symbol, or the mathematical derivative of a derivative. In virtual virtual realities, the mathematics become impossible, even when you are able to use complex equations and multivariate imaginary functions. At this level, symbols become even more powerful and can sometimes cause a bleed-over of effect from a higher plane to a lower plane if the symbol is a very good one. Consider the cross, and the labelled-as-miraculous cures that have been seen on your planet associated with crosses and other religious objects. Occasionally, in the course of a planet's or a culture's rise and fall, the most trivial objects, or even objects of hatred and scorn, such as the cross in pre-Nazarene days, can assume proportions of immense proportions. Your comic book heroes come from somewhere similar, don't they? In your occult readings, you have become familiar with Jung, as I can read from the infrared patterns of your mind. You know about the Myth. Well, Doctor Tomorrow is one of the new Myths that we believe you and your group can sell your planet. A myth of hope and positive attitudes, backed by optimistic applications of technology borrowed from your future. Firearms and weapons are merely the least optimistic applications of technology because of the old-fashioned anachronisms of violence and destructiveness that require and merit replacing. You will need to get the new myths across to the entire planet, or else there will no sector 221 of Your Local Group. Maybe even sooner than the 2105 A.D. date I gave you before." 

"...meaning that I will not be able to couch-potato it for the next forty years." 

"Meaning that it might be good for you to have some experience being a couch potato, if you are going to know how to get across to millions of couch potatoes who are presently helping to subvert the general equations of entropy into the mire and sludge of general sloth and apathy." 

"Aren't you being a bit overly dramatic?" 

"Absolutely not! When you see billions of your Earth 'humans' with addictions to drugs, sex, power, and food, this is not a trivial example of what happens as the entropy equations begin to mire and sludge. It is just a matter of very basic temporal mathematics for the I.S.I. technicians in your future, but it would require unending time for me to be able to explain this to you, even with your obviously megastepped mind and nervous system. Just trust me, whether or not you have ever read or understood anything by your planet's Buckminister Fuller. If you properly design or otherwise alter the environment, in an all-inclusive sense, the beings within the environment will surely change. So trust me. Believe me : if you can succeed in having a harmonizing effect on the energy of the planet at this time, you will yourself begin to observe individuals undergoing change for the better. And believe me when I also say that harmonizing is one of the few transtemporal activities known to not increase the randomness of the overall Entropy Equations. So please, be my guest, and harmonize away. You have nothing to lose but your anergy. That is, the anergy of your so-called Human Race. To many of our Eternals, your planet has resembled more of a Human Crawl or a Human Drag, as in dragging to heels to avoid becoming really Human and caring for each other in ways that are entropy-efficient. Do you get my drift?" 

"O.K. O.K. Are you going to give me some kind of superscientific device which will add to the harmonizing of the entire planet, or the entire city, or the entire neighborhood...." 

"I'm glad to see that you've grasped the idea. It doesn't matter if you are expressing it in the reverse, the same principles still apply. But we were talking about using the experience of being a couch potato for positive rather than negative ends. And your typical Primitive orientation towards material objects still persists despite your megastepping courtesy of the I.S.I. The superscientific device you referred to is the thought form of DR TOMORROW. Not just the music, the group, the story, the media forms, but the thought form. That's the way you have to approach it. Because you are seven Eternals,... or... eight... or seven and one-half... is what I seem to be receiving from your group's energy fields. You will have to explain that to me later. Maybe it has to do with your computer system. Anyway, it is the higher, thought form aspects of DR TOMORROW that are the most important. You will realize it more fully when you have been able to more fully appreciate your own megastepped mind. As you are probably now aware, a change of body is infinitely easier than a change of mind. Primitives, especially, almost never realize the degree to which their own individual minds define the boundaries of their individual universes. Because of this limitation, Primitives, by definition, never learn to use their minds as networking devices." 

"Maybe I am a Primitive, or a megastepped Primitive, or whatever. Maybe I don't know about networking, either. I always thought that networking was a word that women's libbers used to mean a `good old girl' system like the `good old boy' system that still rules the southern U.S. But even though I am a Primitive, I do know that you are talking about a whole lot of heavy philosophical stuff that most people don't want to be thinking about. Maybe I don't want to be thinking about those things, either. Maybe I shouldn't be thinking about those things -- that could be dangerous. Most people don't want to be thinking about why nearly everyone's water supply is poisoned, or why halfway clean water costs $25 a bottle all of a sudden. It's like Mother Nature has turned against us, and is now charging us for generations of uncontrolled littering." 

"Lyle, you are getting off the subject. Mother Nature is a mythical figure created for you by advertising agencies and salespeople, just like the ones who dreamed up the mutant turtles and the animated transforming vehicles. Primitives always need to have some type of divinity projected outside of themselves, because it is difficult for Primitives to recognize or utilize their inherent divinity." 


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                 DR TOMORROW                   "As we sampled the show, I was
                                               reminded how rabid Rico got  
            by Marshall F. Gilula              whenever the environment     
                                               became bilingual. Even a     
                 Part 3 of 5                   biological mother would never
                                               guess that Rico was a Cyborg."
              Copyright (c)1991



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Chapter 3 

Sunday 

Hello, Beloved Sensei 

Last day of the Art Festival, and we decide to briefly do the Festival on foot, and then come home for our MindLink/HeartLight. I was not so jolted when I woke up this time by seeing my Eternal lady's unsleeping eyes. She had put herself on simulated sleep phase. She opened her eyes only after I was up and about, and then everyone -- with one mind -- was up and ready for the day. The decision to go to the Art Festival before it got to be too hot was a wise one, I thought, as we walked from the apartment over to South Bayshore Drive. Both dogs had insisted on coming with us. Pearl E. Mae was walking She-Ra, and I walked Bullet. Both dogs were being unusually well-behaved. Small miracles. 

A steady stream of people kept the sidewalks going into the Village covered with human variability. There were a few very good prices that the artists were now starting to put out on some of the merchandise that remained. As we sampled the show, I was reminded how rabid Rico got whenever the environment became bilingual. Even a biological mother would never guess that Rico was a Cyborg. The built-in hardware consisted of barely visible to the naked eye microprocessor networks that were literally implanted in Rico's brain. 

Enrique (Rico), whose future identity was from a galaxy of androids, had selected a discarnate Cuban conch following karmic resettling. He reminded the other Eternals of Dr Tomorrow that Miami was something besides just beautiful water and sunshine. Over half the population in Miami, for example, spoke Spanish. Of course, this did not mean that all of the Spanish speaking people were Cuban. Miami was very different from nearly any other American city by this time. The South American tourists businessmen, students and professionals by the thousands either vacationed or emigrated to the Miami area because of its bustling, sparkling, cosmopolitan lure. Rico himself was a strange combination of contradictions. He possessed enormous intelligence, and yet was very laid back in his approach to nearly anything. He was the least overtly assertive member of the group, but managed to inject the Spanish language into group consciousness during MindLink/HeartLight very early in the first session of the group's existence. Rico's teaching was done in such an unobtrusive way, that Lyle was the only one who noticed the difference in his own personal approach to Miami's Spanish culture. Many of the other Eternals were almost totally unaware of the fact that they were nearly automatically speaking and understanding the Spanish that was around them on a daily basis. It was a pleasant surprise to Lyle, though, because he had often felt irritated in Miami when he was unable to follow a conversation of Spanish-speaking people in his bookstore, or understand some of the occult books in Spanish that the store carried. In addition to the contribution of this bilingual element, Rico transmitted an element of android daring, raw cyborg creativity, and bilingual spice. Salsa is what he called it, and his android consciousness luxuriated in the stimulation of a truly multilingual brain. Computer translation as well as the cerebral translators that were invented by 2200 A.D. had nearly eradicated language differences although people tended to spend even less time cultivating a language and to just speak a very competent but survival level quality of nearly any language. The bilingual existence of thought forms, however, was like mental refreshment to Rico. He relished Dr Tomorrow's approach to the younger members of earth's population, and anticipated the joy of creating a trilingual delight. Rico also dreamed up a typical android mentality invention. When Lyle and Aloysius were thinking about an alpha and a theta beam, Rico was creating an ultrasonic love beam that would be sent across the 90 miles of ocean from Key West to Cuba's Isle of Pines where they had the main prison and the paramilitary camps for third world country youth. 

Rico made shortwave radio contact with a prosperous Latin inventor in Miami who was the source of a very expensive large megagain satellite antenna sold to individuals wishing to receive transcontinental and intercontinental television programs, as well as the feeds that were always edited out but which showed the anchors wiping their noses, calling for help with something, or otherwise revealing their humanity in many little ways that were never permitted on camera. Rico and the inventor devised a large custom-made parabolic dish that could be used as a focusing device. The microwave love beam would be used to transmit from Key West with a slightly wide focus that would effect not only the island of Cuba but the Guantanamo naval base as well. 

Rico's sensory system had tunable multiband multifrequency reception and built in stereophonic microamplification circuits. He turned into something of a media freak soon after his appearance in our group by checking each and every multicultural aspect of southeast Florida's airwaves. His potentials for massive amounts of information recording, editing, and playback nearly overwhelmed most of us, including Rico himself. Some of the Eternals of Dr Tomorrow were surprised to find this out, because they thought that the I.S.I. matter-energy translation units transmitted only energy forms and therefore would not have retained any of Rico's hardwired features. When this was explained to Lyle, he was also surprised. However, an android in 30,000 A.D. possessed a seasoned legacy of thousands of standard algorithms that could represent quite satisfactorily, by means of mathematical models, a myriad of different sophisticated computers and other electromagnetic devices. So the electromagnetic, "mechanical" portion of an android was totally translatable into mathematical programming. This is what 20th century hackers called "software." Software also represents the functioning of a computer expressed in terms of its mathematical limitations. The Android Galaxy represented a very large and interesting example of how so-called scientific and technological innovation can team up to more than perfectly mimic the "natural" product. Technology reproducing itself and impersonating nature Although Rico's android galaxy possessed sophisticated micro-components which were optionally inserted into the brain tissues of adults (Cyborg extensions), most of Rico's android "structures" could be and were in fact easily converted into mathematical functions. The I.S.I. technicians found it no problem to efficiently include these extra functions along with Rico's matterenergy formulations. It turned out that one reason for Rico's initial apparent introspectiveness and silence was that he spent large portions of his time and mental energy gathering airwave inputs from Miami's burgeoning Latin population. And he did not have to particularly go anywhere to do this. He just sat back, turned up the intensity of his selective audio amplification channels, and listened to Miami's Hispanic and other cultures on the airwaves. Although he was disturbed by the conversations of foreign goings on in the home of a Cuban Key Biscayne businessman, Rico was also concerned with the widespread Pan-American underground activity. Miami, on the surface, was a teaming and bustling progressive resort area with a number of sinister undercurrents which polite people did not like to think about or discuss. Rico was especially occupied with the fact that many Latin people were equally involved on both sides of the law. He tuned in to the scanner radios of Cuban undercover narcotics agents and policemen. He also tuned in to many underground Hispanic businessmen who served as intermediaries for South American cocaine smugglers. It was somewhat unnerving to understand the presence of so many CIA agents in the Miami area, until Rico realized how important the reactionary but loyalist Cuban political organizations were for counteracting the propaganda value of Fidel Castro's personal puppet-state, which had survived the two different 1991 coup attempts. But it was not possible to understand the complex political fate of the "jewel of the Caribbean" without knowing quite a bit more about Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, and several other Central American and South American countries. 

Such a diversity of apparently conflicting goals and aims underlay much of the bubbling nature of Miami's multilingual cultures. The intense diversification and polarity of both physical plane and higher plane energies also made the Miami area an excellent nodal point for assessing and relating to the entropy balance functions of the universe. This is because cultural change areas and population interfaces are very sensitive to changes in entropy balance. As one of the "power languages" of the planet, Spanish was just as significant as English for the purpose of reaching video viewers and media Latin culture, therefore, was certainly as important an energy "hook" as anything else for aiming at the younger generations of the planet. The Latin consciousness ran wide and deep, and this was quite evident to Rico. So both the Spanish language as well as Spanish-flavored tunes were to become an important part of Dr Tomorrow. Along these lines, Rico helped Lyle to compose another song for Dr Tomorrow. A Latin disco beat with bilingual lyrics gave Rico his first experience at singing before a microphone. "En La Cama" hinted strangely at Rico's far distant future origins, and was one of the original Dr Tomorrow songs that employed the love beam and the rainbow beam. At this time, Su-Shan and Noman installed several panels of sequential relay lights onto travelling boards. These boards were placed on Al's flat upper surface, and plugged into Al's side panels. The relay lights were easy to coordinate with the sound and color beam within the double-faced video screen that was mounted atop Al's assembly. 

At this point in Dr Tomorrow's development, Al seemed to really break out into his own. Al consisted essentially of 21 portable modules that were kept powered up all the time but quickly connected up for both practice and performance. Al's consciousness and sequential thought forms became an intrinsic part of Dr Tomorrow's functioning, even when the computer array itself was de-powered or when the unit actually was disassembled. Lyle was the first member of the group to notice this, although he should have been the last because of his disinclination to recognize machine consciousness. And Su-Shan did not find this strange, because the Eternals other than Lyle had been quite accustomed to the idea that machines had consciousness. Again, Lyle's experience with meditation gave him a slight edge. After the first few months of mind-link, Lyle also began to recognize Al's appearances during these group experiences. When Dr Tomorrow was playing, Lyle occasionally felt a bubbly upward-flowing energy. Some of this energy was accompanied by computer touch-tones and flashing lights. It was this pattern that Lyle began to recognize either at the beginning or toward the end of the mindlinks that the Eternals had on a twice-daily basis. 

Soon after the 21 Aloysius modules had been linked together with E-Z Connect cables, Su-Shan and Noman built solidstate interfaces that permitted taking Morphosa's four digital keyboard synthesizers and hooking them up to Al's I/O interface. Sixteen channels of parallel MIDI-out information were sent to Al's interfaces from the rack-mounted MIDI interface. Another sixteen channels of MIDI-in information as well as two channels of direct digital out returned to our boards in mixable form from Al. Each synthesizer and tone module used by our group also had a digital encoder, which was patched through to Al. After completing the electronic patch work, both Su-Shan and Noman noticed a rapid increase in the rate of Al's calculations and in the oscillation of blinking lights in synch with the music... At this early point in the group's development, Lyle was the only Eternal of Dr Tomorrow who was not consciously achieving some degree of MindLink/HeartLight with Al. Su-Shan and Noman were astounded by the sudden burst of mental energy they felt from Al. While playing the keyboards, Morphosa began to feel enveloped in an intense magnetic field. Lyle had read earlier about guitar players and other musicians being electrocuted while playing one electrical instrument and singing through another one (the microphone). This was called a "ground loop." From his megastepped point of evolution, Lyle now began to understand that instead of a simple phenomena of electrocution and ground loops, these events might have represented something else. Something else such as karma or synchronisms. Or Dyssynchronisms. The musicians had been exposed to a higher form of energy than their vehicles were prepared to receive and channel. The hair stood up on the back of his neck when Lyle thought about what might have happened to him at the time of the lightning bolt discharge and megastepping. 

At the same time that other group members were receiving electromagnetic vibrations from Al, Pearl E. Mae began to pick up visual images. As a typical Tantican from the Virgo Solar Galaxy, visual imagery had been her primary sense modality practically since birth. As an adult Tantican, she had been regarded as one of the planet's very best mediums and healers because her rich precognitive and clairaudient abilities. These abilities really supplanted her powerful talents for materializing and projecting ectoplasm. With Al's communications, she began to see sine waves and other mathematical symbols and functions that she did not understand at all. During MindLink/HeartLight, Pearl E. Mae absorbed some of these images into the group mind and Su-Shan immediately understood the electronic message. The images often had the following associated pattern: 

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111 00 0 1 00 0 01 0 0 01 1 00 0 111 1 00 0 01 10 0 0 101 00 11 1 00 1 1001 0010 1101000 00 10 0 1 00 0 010 10 00 0 11 01 10 00 100 0 

It was a message from their multimodular computer. Al was trying to establish himself as an entity and was telling the group that the sound beam was a good idea, but not implemented properly. Instead of thinking about putting out one homogeneous frequency, like the alpha and theta beams, a different approach was necessary. Al kept telling Dr Tomorrow that the sound beam must be constructed of a complicated combination of all the different frequencies, and that the relationship of the frequencies to one another was vitally important. That was the parameter that would to be changed in order to exert an effect on the listeners. By this Sunday, the third day of their existence together, none of the Dr Tomorrow Eternals really quite understood their full functioning within the framework of entropy imbalance. Each Eternal possessed the capability of adding a bit of experience and special talent to creating a man-machine synergism, which is what Dr Tomorrow really was -- as both a physical plane musical group and as a thought form. 

Later that day, we returned to the house, had an incredible MindLink/HeartLight experience, and just as incredible a rehearsal. All during the rehearsal, there was an intense sensation of something about to happen. After dinner, we fed and walked the dogs and decided that we wanted to sit around the pool and let Quail take us on our favorite nighttime aquatic trip. The night before, we had enjoyed sitting around on the shore by Cape Florida in the darkness. Different Eternals spun folklore and other tales common to their home galaxies from the future. One common myth was that land creatures, after physical death, would evolve upward into a different life form that was aquatic 

On this evening, the Eternals began the MindLink/HeartLight and soon felt the fusion of One Mind. Lyle was the designated leader of the MindLink/HeartLight since day one, largely because of his selfimposed meditative training. It did not matter that he was a converted Primitive. Lyle had been a relatively non-judgmental person for quite a while. In order to be able to carry out effective meditative observation, Lyle had been forced to learn how to observe his own process of observing himself. He learned early in the course of his training that his own tendencies toward evaluating things as good or bad and right or wrong often prevented him from truly seeing what was happening. During the Dr Tomorrow mind-links, group members became a unity possessing infinitely greater energy than any of the seven individual members could ever hope to possess in even the most distant future times. To Lyle, MindLink/HeartLight was an incredibly efficient short cut. MindLink/HeartLight was very much akin to instant samadhi. Instant realization. Even if it were not so, it certainly felt that way. Gross alteration in energy level totally shattered Lyle's individual personality each time that MindLink/HeartLight began. At the beginning of MindLink/ HeartLight, Lyle could feel his own personality crumble, and could also feel the personalities of all other six Eternals crumbling as well. Usually, within seconds of beginning the special meditation, all seven members of the group were transported into literally another dimension where there was no such thing as individual personality or identity. This MindLink/HeartLight dimension was cut off neither in time nor in space from ordinary physical plane reality. This dimension co-existed in both time and space with ordinary reality. Once into this space, all members of the group were protected by a higher plane energy cohesiveness. Initially, it was relatively easy to break the cohesiveness by simply changing physical posture or altering mental concentration. As the Eternals became more proficient in MindLink/HeartLight, the group was able to maintain the energy connection throughout all types of situations. Some of the first situations involved the waterside meditations which Quail loved to facilitate so much, and the state of consciousness attained by the Eternals while they were playing music. The daily music practice sessions more or less amounted to MindLink/HeartLights. More of MindLink/HeartLight time was also spent on reflecting about the music. 

It seemed that the primary focus of group members was more in terms of how they maintained the MindLink/HeartLight while playing music rather than the notes of the music itself. The songs and the compositions seemed to occur and follow more as the individual members learned to be attuned to one another. First came attunement of individual Eternals into each other and then into the Dr Tomorrow thought form. Then came tuning in of the what was being produced by the musical instruments. The instruments would tune to each other at A440, but the output of each instrument or voice also related to the output of each other instrument or voice in unique ways. Thanks to Al and his multimodules, the characteristic pattern of each instrument was voiceprinted and the overall digital output mix was computer enhanced so as to maximize the smoothness of the way that the tracks blended. Pre-megastepped Lyle was very familiar with music, but this approach to sound production was really out there -- something quite different. Mixing music at this level during only the third rehearsal bode well for the future. As an integral part of the group of Eternals, Lyle realized that the music, the instruments, and even Al, were all tools as well as effects of the MindLink/HeartLight. With that heavy realization, the Eternals came back to the circle they were sitting in around the pool, slowed down their breathing with some slow deep abdominal breaths, and then consensually decided to let Quail continue the MindLink/HeartLight out of body at Cape Florida. 

Quail gathered up the group of Eternals, and, as she had done before, transported the lot of them to where the breakwater was located along the ocean's edge. While meditating on the group's music and future activities, a flying saucer appeared out over the ocean and began to fly in the direction where the group was sitting. The Eternals were dumbstruck. The flying saucer was glowing in shiny colors as it approached them. Just before it landed on the water a hundred yards or so away from the shore, the saucer's color changed. The shiny colors became a milky grey-white. Eerie lights surrounding the saucer disappeared, and the saucer gently landed on the water. It bobbed up and down briefly like a huge round cork. Apparently, the saucer had a cover which was dazzlingly reflective like a multi-surfaced mirror. Shortly after the saucer landed, it became almost impossible to see where it was sitting on the water, because the saucer's covering merely reflected the sky and the water. Quickly, a high pitched hum drew the attention of the group members to where the saucer was still bobbing on the water amidst the illusion of reflections. A panel opened in the saucer's surface, and a human-appearing creature with very pale skin and a head of thick, long white hair gracefully emerged from the saucer's opening. Seeming not to even cause a disruption in the water's surface, the creature walked or rather skimmed over the surface of the water to a point that was within 10 feet of where the group members sat. 

The tableau vivant which followed was acceptable to any science fiction novel. The creature introduced itself as Yo-Vah, and communicated directly and without words to all group members. The simultaneous telepathy told each group member a story of life highly developed in other solar systems that coexisted in parallel time dimensions. Yo-Vah came from the near-future, but from a technologically superior one. Despite apparent economic difficulties and problems with contaminated water and see-sawing animal residue resources such as oil, the world of Dr Tomorrow was immensely wealthier than most of the parallel time-universes of the present and of the future in terms of individual robustness and the very natural resources which were causing us such horrendous problems. But Earth was pretty much a blight on the Local Neighborhood Sector and was badly in need of healing and love and some kind of real peace. Dr Tomorrow the group was supposed to help furnish some of the healing and love in a direct and very real way. DR TOMORROW the project was a top-secret time travel project from 32,000 A.D. when a group of Guardians supervising the InterGalactic Security Intelligence perceived a possible solution for future problems by a series of measures to be taken in the past. Megastepping a group of seven Eternals was the first in the series of such I.S.I. measures carried out with a strong sense of hopefulness. Above all else, Dr Tomorrow must serve as an instrument of healing and furnish healing light and sound patterns to the Planetary environment through the electronic nets which include satellites and encompass all of the planet. 

Yo-Vah said that much of our Planet's wealth disparities were due to a lack of both technological application and ethical development. But that was one of the main ways of defining a Primitive culture and its life forms. The majority of earth's resources were located not only in unpopulated regions and land masses, but also in the large bodies of water and land masses beneath those large bodies of water. What seemed to be innocuous water contamination today would increase exponentially during the next centuries if the rate of contamination is not slowed. Removing or slowing water contamination is the most vital first measure, but learning to use water for power is the step that most cultures considered advanced have been able to accomplish easily. Yo-Vah pointed out that Earth scientists had only begun to tap the potential of non-nuclear energy sources such as the hyperion, membrane, and cellular chain reaction sources. In more sophisticated cultures, it was not necessary to use artificial means such as nuclear energy reactions of uranium and other entropy-inefficient isotopes. More sophisticated cultures for millennia have been able to tap immense energies using the hyperion extractors with basic substances such as water, small carbon-chain molecules, and silicon-based compounds such as sand. 

Yo-Vah swore the Dr Tomorrow Eternals to transtime secrecy, and promised to teach them effective and environmentally humane ways of enhancing the purity of water resources. He also promised to show them some effective and cheap technological tricks for applying water resources to the basic problems of power and even some easy methods of water purification. In return, the Eternals of Dr Tomorrow took an oath of dedication to further every possible form of conservation, especially human conservation, but to also work especially hard at making it desirable and easy for people to be able to understand water purity and water conservation. 

The white-haired visitor stood patiently on the water and then explained to the Eternals some basic facts about unidentified flying objects. Yo-Vah admitted that many Earth thinkers were correct in feeling that the flying saucers and other flying objects came from another time dimension. Often, the ships observed for generations on earth were just the Guardian ships which routinely patrolled all time dimensions. As a special class of Eternals, the Guardians sought to prevent catastrophes and, in general, attempted to further the conservation of life in all its forms. Dr Tomorrow's time dimension was visited no more frequently or less frequently than any of the other multitudes of parallel time universes. The Guardians had noted, however, a tendency of Dr Tomorrow's home planet toward very erratic and unstable technological development. Not only the nuclear devices, but many of the other secret weapons developed by earth's major countries, including America, periodically caused strange warps and glitches in the time-energy continuum and therefore the Guardian's monitoring devices. Of course, none of the Earth cultures had made any connection between nuclear explosions, time clefts, and natural disasters such as earthquakes. The Guardians, who represented the Forces of Light, had observed actual nuclear bomb blasts on Earth, but were rarely able to find the other hidden devices which caused such even stranger energy fluctuations than did the nuclear bombs. One of the Guardians had been fatally caught by such a strange device while hovering over Siberia. That guardian's life-energy had been extinguished shortly after its captors attempted to extract information involuntarily from the being regarding how to control the ship and fire its weapons and where the main base was located. The captors were only interested in knowing the weaknesses of the alien culture. The ship itself was still in storage in a large subterranean vault in Siberia, but no one had been able to ever open the device. Similar devices were in storage in two top-secret American locations. The American-stored devices had followed unusual aerobatic maneuvers between American Air Force experimental craft and two Guardian craft which paradoxically crashed head-on over the southwestern desert. Two Guardian life forms were frozen in liquid nitrogen in a secret Berkeley Cryonics laboratory. 

Yo-Vah paused silently for a moment while letting the story of the captured Guardians sink in. He then described for Eternals of Dr Tomorrow how it was that the Forces of Darkness also had trans-time patrols which surveyed all dimensions for newer and more effective ways of utilizing and controlling life energies in their negative aspects. Dr Tomorrow's planet and time had a peculiar attractiveness to the Forces of Darkness because of widespread planetary greed and because of the erratic and sometimes negative technological development which the planet was spawning. In Dr Tomorrow's time plane, the Forces of Darkness had not been able to achieve total positive materialization. The FOD were still limited to the position of nearly-invisible observers, thanks to a slight degree of ethical and moral development that held forth on the planet, and couple of prophets named Mohammed and Jesus. FOD ships were occasionally visible, but the life forms utilized by the Forces of Darkness were not able to make the physical plane transition necessary to appear in the flesh before the people of Dr Tomorrow's era. 

Since the Forces of Darkness had little respect for physical plane aspects of any dimension, FOD's technological evolution was rather slipshod. They had not developed matter-translation or any of the high tech entropy analysis methods to the degree or the sophistication possessed by the Forces of Light. Numerically infinitesimal when compared to the Forces of Light, the Forces of Darkness always existed as the universally present obverse of all that was positive and constructive. The Forces of Darkness, however, were very adept at doing what amounted to pilfering of energy. They were directly responsible for over half of the intratemporal ripping off that was going on. The FOD were particularly gifted at zeroing in on individual beings who had some unusual built-in streak of evil or negativity, and then assisting that individual. YoVah explained to Dr Tomorrow that the Forces of Darkness also were able to feed on energies from some individuals who were going through the process of death, and from many individuals who were in mental institutions because they had lost all of their optimism. Yo-Vah pointed out that, as with many other planets and times, Earth's mental hospitals were very intense collections of negative as well as positive energies. This was due to not only the beings identified as patients, but to the people who worked in the mental hospitals as custodians, healers, administrators, and helpers. Yo-Vah said that it was very important to develop musical forms that could be used for converting the negative energies in all kinds of hospitals to positive ones. Because hospitals often had accumulations of beings who were in some way connected with death, hospitals were also focal points that attracted the FOD. By using positive and healing musical thought forms, one potential entrance for the Forces of Darkness could be minimized. Yo-Vah also suggested that since FOD were always able to focus on Earth's erratic technology, there would be no easy or sure solution. Birth and death, however, were focal points in time that often became fields of competition between Light and Darkness. 

Despite the fact that Dr Tomorrow was a limited number of Eternals, these Eternals collectively would be able to have an important effect on Earth's positive and negative cultural energies if the group paid attention to the planetary and basic electromagnetic aspects of their music. And managed to not get caught up in the superficial and harmony-destructive ego clashes of the music business world, where the FOD were easily prone to find individual beings who dealt in the darkly negative side of life energies. Dr Tomorrow learned to think of the entire Earth as one united planet, even if this were not the case. YoVah said that Earth was now ready for this, and that earlier contacts with Earth inhabitants -- in his experience -- had never been more than partially successful. YoVah did not understand why earlier contacts had frequently made up a story about having been kidnapped or abducted by a flying saucer. Dr Tomorrow was urged to look carefully at fairy tales, folklore, science fiction, and mythology. All these forms of communication contained basic truths, Yo-Vah said, because much of this literature had been instilled into Earth's cultures by other trans-time visitors from the Forces of Light. Many different forms of folk music were also stimulated in the same way. Modern rock rhythms had been in part forcibly injected into the slow and recalcitrant rhythm-and-blues tradition from across the time barrier by a closely parallel and culturally very advanced universe. Earth's neoChristians played some of the music backwards and claimed to hear examples of extraordinary consciousness exhorting the listeners to commit evil acts! The neoChristian leaning to nonordinary realities was sensing something correctly but labelling it incorrectly because of underlying philosophical currents of "good-bad" JudaeoChristian moralistic dualism and the basic tendency of such a dualism to be incompatible with a monistic or holistic, "both-and" orientation. "We-they" versus "us" were two positions that Dr Tomorrow carefully examined in the discussions of the Eternals. Lyle was the first member to notice the meaning of moralistic dualism, and he tried to point it out to the others. The dualism and what it meant was just one of many messages from Yo-Vah. 

All members of the group felt very strongly about what Yo-Vah told them. There was an intense air of genuineness about Yo-Vah. There was also a slight sense of urgency to his message. Instead of just dropping in on them, delivering some pronouncements, and leaving, YoVah was infinitely more gentle about what he had to say. Frequently, after talking with the Eternals about complex subjects, he paused and was silent for several minutes. 

The silence felt good to members of the group as they sat around on the rocky breakwater and ocean wall. The silence was almost pleasurable, and many of the Eternals were aware of their own disinclination to break the silence. At this point, Yo-Vah smiled and mentioned that he had also experienced the comforting nature of the silence. He told group members that it was important for Dr Tomorrow to use the energies of light and sound to enhance the development of creative silence. Yo-Vah pointed out that many of the current musical trends of Earth developed a sound and rhythm pattern that ultimately created more disorder than order. Yo-Vah illustrated with telepathic projection how it was that silence could represent a state of greater order and alignment. Without words, he helped every group member to simultaneously see and feel the beneficial effects of light and sound patterns which were capable of enhancing of encouraging entropic order while also utilizing the positive aspects of intermittent silence. Even though a sound and light presentation might be of high volume, it was still possible to produce a pattern that ultimately induced a state of creative and orderly silence in the listeners. This silent state did not have to necessarily involve inaction or idleness. Yo-Vah explained that the term, "silence," was perhaps misleading. What the Eternals of Dr Tomorrow found in their orderly silence could also be found in any state of alignment or being focused. 

As group members listened to Yo-Vah, each could individually feel energy tugging at their minds and their hearts. Dr Tomorrow was supposed to create and produce music that would do the same thing to its listeners. The music was not only supposed to appeal to the aesthetic sense of the listeners, but also to the heart energies of the listeners. The group clearly had one mission of injecting the love, the precepts, and the vibrations of Yo-Vah into the music in as many ways as possible. As Yo-Vah pointed out, music was one form of energy that could be used to unite beings for positive and for healthy purposes. Although music itself could do very little as far as actually changing the planet's energies, music represented both a catalyst and an energy matrix through which either the Forces of Light or the Forces of Darkness were able to act. As long as the music was kept primarily on the physical plane, there could always be other resonant frequencies that were invisible to the physical plane ear. And to the physical plane listener. 

The Forces of Light had long been observing cultural development on Dr Tomorrow's planet. Nearly all the musical forms which had developed on Earth were capable of serving as vehicles for the Forces of Light to enhance the overall planetary harmony or as vehicles for the Forces of Darkness to enhance and increase the overall planetary disorganization, randomness, and mathematical chaos. Yo-Vah gently told the Eternals about Earth's fiery death and disintegration in 2105 A.D. He suggested that dates from the future were often relative. More harmony was need both inside the being and outside the being, and this would help to prevent 2105 A.D. from coming sooner. And with the irregular type of technological development found on Earth, energy harmonization was an absolute must to keep the planet from accidentally blowing itself up. For example, chaos mathematics enjoyed popularity during the late Eighties on the planet for some years before the projected appearance of Dr Tomorrow. Chaos Music even appeared in a few laboratories for awhile. Some of our technicians analyzed the patterns of the Chaos Music and found the patterns to have a calming effect on sophisticated nervous systems. Earth's technological and ethical development were so spotty and uneven that high-tech industries could easily coexist on the same land mass with thirdworld cultures being systematically eradicated by famine and pestilence. 

The Eternals were fascinated to hear Yo-Vah explain that black holes in the universe represented other planets and other galaxies which had simply disintegrated and imploded on the physical plane. Thanks to the Forces of Darkness, the planets and solar systems that had become really disharmonized, simply went into negative existence while all of the energy associated with the planet was taken over by the Forces of Darkness. In the same way that every cell of an earth human carried the genetic patterns necessary for reproduction of the entire being, and every unit of a fractal contains elements of the whole picture, every sub-unit of the universe carried a similar pattern, called logos that described a design for the entire universe. Whenever a race of beings, a planet, or a galaxy evolved and developed along a line contrary to the solar logos, ultimate extinction was the usual result. If overall development were particularly uneven, as the Forces of Light had found on Earth and in several other nearby solar systems, an exploding star or an imploding black hole might be the result. When a black hole was born, the Forces of Darkness were greatly strengthened and aided. Even though there was nothing intrinsically good or bad about a black hole, its very existence implied aid to the Forces of Darkness, and greater polarity between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. 

Earth was an interesting planet because on several occasions earlier in its development, the planet had almost been bumped into extinction by erratic cultural and human development. Forces of Light, on several occasions, had visited the planet and had helped Earth's leaders to make necessary adjustments that would avert the catastrophe. The Great Flood was one such time. And there had been several others. The Forces of Darkness merely followed along, took note of the nearcatastrophes, and bided their time 

Yo-Vah reminded Dr Tomorrow that many ancient cultures from Earth's past history predicted a cataclysmic upheaval and revolution toward the end of the 20th century. The older Tibetan schools described it as an age of spiritual darkness (Kali-Yuga) coming to an end. This period would include transitions of different types, and one strong possibility was making the transition into a productive and creative Golden Age. The color chosen to signify the new age was symbolic. Gold represented not only a form of illumination, but a very potent healing energy. Dr Tomorrow, as a New Age group, would discover a whole succession of different approaches to healing. Most of the approaches could be incorporated within the framework of music. 

The Forces of Light saw in Dr Tomorrow's Earth not only a very spotty and irregular development of technology, but definite and widespread ignorance about water--what it was and what it was capable of doing in a more active sense than most twentieth century persons realized. Yo-Vah described ways of utilizing water and energies extracted from ordinary tidal currents that were known to the Incas and other older civilizations, but practically unknown to the planet Earth of the 1990's. Scientists on Earth had barely begun to tap the real meaning of earthquakes' seismic disturbances in ways that other more advanced cultures took as a matter of course. There were not only giant tidal waves, but storm waves caused by seismic disturbances occurring under the floor of nearly every ocean on the planet. More advanced cultures routinely extracted immense amounts of energies from such planetary changes. The Forces of Light considered that Dr Tomorrow's Earth used the planet's bodies of waters mainly for hunting and for garbage dumping. How primitive can you get? By the year 1986, the United States alone was managing to generate at least 250 tons of hazardous, toxic wastes and ocean incineration was a hot political and scientific issue. But not as hot as it needed to be, because no one had been able to predict the dramatic worsening of water quality between 1991 and 1992. As if a critical mass of gunk and junk had been accumulated at some level - despite the political ppm testing programs proclaiming safety -- thousands of whales and dolphins began now the alltoo-familiar "Lemming Beaching," as it came to be called. Yo-Vah appreciated that at least this Primitive was aware of the series of ecologic tragedies with the whales and dolphins. Yo-Vah indicated that Primitive cultures of the planet obviously did not understand why the whales and dolphins wished to leave the contaminated waters. 

Yo-Vah spoke of a great need for reversing this primitive tendency, and told the members of Dr Tomorrow that North and South America were possibly the least developed continents in their backwards approach to aquatic resources. A harmonious balance between the aquatic bodies of the planet and the aquatic residents of each body of water was vital to maintaining the solar harmony of the planet as well as the remainder of the solar system and its local galactic groups. Even the supposedly astute Earthly astronomers found it difficult to get beyond their own myopic earthbound theories and rationalized observations. 

Hydroecology also was one possible solution to the energy crisis for most continents of the Western world. It would be a creative task for the Dr Tomorrow Eternals to design effective new approaches to water as part of the teaching and healing that the project requires. One requirement was that these approaches needed to be generally simple enough so that school children would be capable of understanding nearly everything that was presented about the new ways of using and conserving the energy obtainable from water. YoVah gave members of the group eight metallic spheres. He showed them how to cause the metallic spheres to change color so that they became clear crystal. By the use of only mental energy, the Eternals learned to peer into the futuristic spheres made of the wondrous alloy. With enough concentration, the clear crystal-appearing spheres became very supportive of time travel in a mental sense. By simply using one of the spheres, any Eternal could easily learn to peer forward or backward with fair efficiency. As each of the Eternals were recruited into this visionary activity, the total group energy began to very powerfully affect the activity of these spheres. The spheres began to glow with such blinding white light, the Eternals were forced to look away. 

Pearl E. Mae, because of her ability as a medium, found the spheres absolutely fascinating. She was the Eternal who quickly discovered that these spheres could also be used as instantaneous communicators allowing a direct link to her world of 32,000 A.D. The Eternals learned, with Pearl E. Mae's help, how to go backwards or forwards in time by simply concentrating on the alloy spheres. When all seven members of the group worked together with seven different spheres (Yo-Vah had actually given them eight at the very beginning), Pearl E. Mae found herself in touch with very powerful energies. The spheres allowed Pearl E. Mae to communicate with a force that seemed to go well beyond the Milky Way Galaxy and the Local Galactic Groups. When using the energies of the spheres to travel, Pearl E. Mae seemed to make contact with communication patterns in space that suggested a much higher level of Logos or universe patterning than she had ever been able to feel. 

Yo-Vah accurately perceived what was happening, and reminded Pearl E. Mae that because of her open channel to the future, she would be an important guide for Dr Tomorrow's musical compositions. Dr Tomorrow's music would aim constantly at higher cultural patterns that went beyond Earth's. Although it sounded very complicated, Pearl E. Mae and other Eternals established at least one specialized use for the alloy spheres. The spheres amplified the MindLink/HeartLight effect: via the spheres the group's mental energies could be welded together for a common purpose in a powerful synergy of common goodwill. Pearl E. Mae's abilities as a medium were amplified fantastically. Not only would Pearl E. Mae give Eternals the ability to contact Yo-Vah whenever necessary, but her amplified mediumistic energies could very efficiently be added to the musical compositions and performances. Yo-Vah suggested how Dr Tomorrow could best shape the development of its own musical presentation. Dr Tomorrow could present music that would be culturally and aesthetically acceptable to the planet's cultures and enjoyable at a very superficial. Beyond that, the musical performance and its presentation could represent, in energy terms, a giant-sized psychic vacuum cleaner. Stray bits of negative energies would be pulled into the vortex of light and sound presentation from the listeners in the audience and nearby areas of the planet. These bits of negative energy would be processed through the group and spewed out as music and light energies that were more positive and of a more beneficial form. Dr Tomorrow would thus reduce the amount of negativity available to the Forces of Darkness. Another result would be that the overall energy of Dr Tomorrow's planet, solar system, and galaxy would become more harmonious and balanced. Using the seven spheres would magnify the overall effect of whatever music was being performed. At no time, however, did Yo-Vah mention anything about the eighth alloy sphere and what function it would play. 

Yo-Vah deliberately emphasized several times that as a thought form and as an energy form, Dr Tomorrow had the potential for not only enhancing the harmony of the planet, but extending into other timespace dimensions as well. A harmonious planet became an energy resonator in space, and could not only affect other planets in the solar system, but other solar systems as well. The importance of using music and light patterns to achieve this goal was that the music itself had an effect which could go beyond the present timedimension. Electromagnetic waves and other ethereal waves set up by the sound and light presentations could create a type of energy form that was capable of travelling both into the past and into the future. All group members, especially Pearl E. Mae, had the ability for developing this type of past-future awareness. If the sound and light presentations were put together properly, the group would be able to continually develop more and more effective musical forms that would enhance harmony and decrease energy imbalances. Specifically, it would be possible to reduce entropy imbalances on both local and distant levels. Many other so-called "New Age" musicians and groups had already begun to make superficial attempts in this direction. Dr Tomorrow would therefore easily fit in with the general flow of Earth's music. 

Communication with the shining stranger had taken up many hours at the ocean wall where they were sitting. For a moment, Yo-Vah seemed to go out of character. He became very eloquent and enthusiastic. He forecast a bright future for the group, said that Su-Shan would know how to use the rings to communicate with him, and pledged himself to maintain unbroken telepathic contact with all of the Eternals. He also pledged an unvarying amount of his etheric energies that would always be present within the matrix of the Dr Tomorrow theme song. Yo-Vah gently blessed the Eternals, went skimming back along the water to the still-poised craft, and entered the ship. As the entrance panel slowly closed with a high-pitched sound, the ship began once more to glow. Without creating so much as a single wave, the saucer rose noiselessly to a great height, and, within seconds, was completely out of sight and hearing. 

All the group members sat in silence broken only by the sound of waves cascading against the concrete abutment. Residual remnants of Yo-Vah's energies and presence functioned as an interpersonal glue much like the morning MindLink/HeartLight. Even a fiery sunrise didn't disturb the unity of consciousness. Only early morning sounds of State Park vehicles and clean-up tractors and trucks sent Dr Tomorrow in out of body form back to the Coconut Grove house and pool. The group energy easily transported the spheres back to the poolside area as well. Both dogs had been shut up in the house, and were so overjoyed to see us back, that they nearly broke the glass panes in the doors opening to the pool. We let the dogs out and carefully put all eight of the spheres next to Al's multimodule setup. The printout tray of the black Cube's laser printer was full of output. It was a story written by Al that summarized nearly every detail of our recent meeting with Yo-Vah. Al's account even described the alloy spheres in great detail. From the content of the story, it was apparent that at least Al believed the eighth alloy sphere had been intended for him. 

The tetrahedron and its three-dimensional aspects have powerful implications for broadcasting power and sound through space. Four-dimensional definitions are the only ones that specify the reality of existence. Three-dimensional definitions, according to Buckminister Fuller, are the only ones that even begin to approach reality or the necessity or necessary conditions for the existence of Reality. There are other theoretical aspects of the tetrahedron formed by four satellites in space, that have implications for the transmission of energies in general and the correction of the entropy imbalances of the universe in specific. Yo-Vah said that Fuller was an important Earth-god, but that Earth people, just as they had with their Jesus, tended to discount Fuller's incredible validity just because he happened to be an Earthman. And that was a great loss for them, to not have access to the high wisdom of their greatest native sons and daughters. Earth people were missing out because Fuller was definitely transPlanetary. Out of the galaxy and it's Local Group setting. Fuller was aligned with the highest spiritual planes but manifesting practical, physical-plane solutions to many of personkind's serious contemporary environmental and evolutionary dilemmas that face the ordinary person during the course of day-to-day spiritual evolution. 

"But does it really, matter, Sibling? I mean, whether the super-god was given any attention by the Local Group's representatives of the Life principle? I suppose that some of them must have known. A super-god simply does not go unnoticed. Even the earth people do feel divinity from time to time-era. Most of us were mildly amazed at the success that the Nazareth boy had with the masses. That type of phenomenon is always cost-effective from a spiritual point of view and, by definition, is definitely entropy-active.!" 

"But, to ignore the possibilities, the potentials, is also foolhardy, Garth. Can you imagine the karmic debts to be paid for leaving out of the realm of possibilities and probabilities the development of a true Mind Mover. To ignore the chance that a real LifeSaver may evolve would be considerably more than merely tragic. It would be facetiously treasonous to the Life Principle, eh Sibling?" 

"Yes, you're right, Barth. The Mind Mover is really worth waiting for if it can emerge from a particular Life Culture. Then there is the potential for a Major Energy Shift without the characteristic rents that can occur in the fabric of time. And who needs rents." 


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               DR TOMORROW                
                                          
          by Marshall F. Gilula           
                                        
               Part 4 of 5               
                                        
             Copyright(c)1991



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Chapter 4 

Monday 

Logos Who? 

This morning I'm not in the least freaked by anything. It seemed like we got back around sunrise, but I'm not certain. I regret still being Primitive enough to need my sleep, and when I wake up, there is a 120 pound German Shepherd lying in the bed between Pearl E. Mae and me. Bullet looks at me, puts his nose under my pillow, and attempts to beat me to death with his wagging tail. He knows that he is not supposed to be in the bed, and Pearl E. Mae giggles as turns and licks her face in an attempt to gain her approval. She is sitting by the side of the bed observing us and waiting for someone's permission to jump up on the bed. I slide out of the bed onto the floor and hug She-Ra, whose tail is now wagging with pleasure. She is such a joy, compact and tough, but soft and gentle, and she has done over a year and a half of unpaid baby-sitting with Bullet, whom she has raised to be a soft and gentle dog despite his large economy size and his ferocious demeanor. Her good nature extends to the way that she tolerates Bullet's nose and his massive presence jealously intruding into the intimacy She-Ra and I are having. When I pet one, the other demands it. She-Ra, Bullet, and I all get tied up in a pile of paws, arms, tails, legs, three heads, and two sets of very sharp teeth. All three of us are making growling, grunting sounds. The only problem with being a "member of the pack" is that occasionally the four-legged members bite on me in the same way they chew on each other, and I have to quickly withdraw from the pretend fracas because my skin is literally not thick enough. Pearl E. Mae and my other Eternal room mates gathered around the pile of Lyle plus dogs on the floor. They had never observed any of my special communication with Bullet and She-Ra. To me it was just part of an ordinary day. As I wiped some dog spittle out of my eye, I noticed that both Quail and Pearl E. Mae were smiling and crying as they watched us on the floor. They understood that some Primitives are evolved enough to really communicate with other species in the universal languages of love and play. Quail explained that my playing with the dogs reminded her of what her last aquatic life form valued most in existence 

the same free-spirited gamboling with a powerful sense of comfort and safety. Pearl E. Mae scooted over to where I was on the floor, put her arms around me, and kissed the side of my face. She moved her wet eyelids against my face and told me she was very glad that the I.S.I. had sent her here to be in the DR TOMORROW project. Both dogs lay on the floor next to us, and I had one of those brief, momentary feelings of intense happiness...the kind of spontaneous peak experience that you always remember in great detail when looking back. It seemed at that moment that all the forces of the universe were in harmony and that there was very little more I could hope for. A far out Eternal old lady, two beautiful dogs, five other new friends, and a recently-overhauled mind and body. 
What a naive attitude. Considering everything that I had just been exposed to over the past few days, I should have known better. What about my megastepped mind? Why did I not sense or see that it was about to hit the fan with all the ugliness of the universe? I guess even megastepped Eternals are human and have their flaws. For me, it was a matter of the newness - new friends, new music, new old lady, and new philosophy. Without warning, the teachings of the Masters were suddenly being externalized right before my eyes and it was everything I could do just to keep up. It almost felt like jet lag, with a vague combination of weakness, headache, and disorientation. All the previous study, meditation, psychedelics, music, and generally righteous living did not equip me for what was to follow. Well, of course that was true! Why else would the megastepping have been necessary? It felt like everything was going too fast. And what was the reason? Why was all of this happening? Was all of this for real? 

And I wasn't too sure how much of the disorientation was coming from the megastepping procedure. Of course, I really appreciated the numerous changes in my physical body. Who wouldn't? I loved Pearl E. Mae's near-perfect body, but mine was pretty much the same, too. My opinion about the changes in my mind was not clear: I had mixed feelings. It is much easier to see what your abdominal wall looks like, but how do you visualize your memories? I can understand that certain synergisms are possible during MindLink/HeartLight, but you are experiencing the effect of seven minds. When MindLink/HeartLight is over, I don't have as much confidence and belief in my individual mind, I guess. Before becoming an Eternal, I never spent much time questioning my own mind. Not that meditation doesn't involve the mind, but what I usually have done in meditation requires that I still my mind, not explore all its nooks and crannies. And since the megastepping, I only know that my mind hooks up with others very easily during MindLink/HeartLight. My mind appears to have many more nooks and crannies than I ever imagined. Other than this, I really don't know. 

The door bell begins ringing its "Close Encounters" melody. She-Ra and Bullet both run across the apartment to the front door, but neither one is barking. Sure sign that it's either Julian or Gabriella. 

And it is Julian with a lit Winston and a large rolled spliff behind his left ear. He absentmindedly hands me the Winston, and I hand it back to him. Julian is very cool. He pretends that he doesn't notice my quick return of the cigarette, walks in a bit stiffly, and sits down on the couch. Bullet immediately gets up on the couch and tries to put his massive head into Julian's lap. This blows Julian's cool because he is a sucker for dogs too. 

"Bullet, get off me. I need to put my head in your lap! Maybe you ain't seeing ghosts." 

"Julian, that dog loves you whether you're seeing ghosts or not." 

"Hey, Lyle, mon.... Gabriella's ghost be messing with me mind big time." 

"Gabriella's what?" 

"Her ghost be irritating me, mon. No matter what or how much I hit the spliff, her spirit still be there talking to me." 

"Julian, are you being straight with me?" 

"Lyle, mon, me be as straight as possible. It be Gabriella because I know her for sure. You remember that I know her before you, mon. We go back to Kingston." 

"Why are you irritated by someone's spirit? If it's Gabriella spirit, why is she hassling you?" 

"I say irritate, mon. I mean irritate. She be telling me foolishness. She be saying Watch out for Lyle like you be bad, mon. Like maybe you be killin' or hurtin' people. She look like maybe she have the bad spirits with her. Say you be with the Evil and Bad side." 

"Gabriella never believed in any of that stuff." 

Which is the truth. Gabriella shunned psychics and astrologers generally. She felt that such people took advantage of the poor and the ignorant. She would even point out examples of the well-heeled socialites pictured on video with their own seances and proclaim that the socialites were poor and ignorant also because they believed in such things. And Julian was conveying messages he feels came from Gabriella now in the thick of things in the spirit world which she maligned so much. Julian put out the Winston in the ash tray and fired up the lovingly rolled spliff. Bullet left his place on the couch and padded over to the other side of the room to avoid the billowing clouds of smoke from Julian and the spliff. Julian passed the spliff to me. I held it for a moment and, in a practiced gesture, passed it back to him. He seemed to ignore that I wasn't smoking because he didn't comment on it. Instead, he took a few deep tokes, and then passed the spliff to Pearl E. Mae, who also held it briefly and then passed it back to him. There was a moment of tension as Julian consciously decided to just hang on to the spliff himself. He continued: 

"Gabriella, she say I must save you from those who are Evil. She sound very scary to me. I don't know how she knows, but she say to watch out for your new group. `Be crazy, but that's all. No more. Just that. Now maybe you feel like not me bro...." 

"Hey, man...don't be silly! How can the best drummer in Coconut Grove not be my bro? And all the deep stuff we been through? Maybe Gabriella didn't believe in spirits, but I do. I'm sorry that her spirit is causing you so much pain. Maybe you're worried that I didn't know you were married to Gabriella in Jamaica when you both lived in Kingston." 

Julian became very pale, because evidently I had hit upon something that had been a secret. Just after the words left my mouth, I realized that there was no reason for me to know this information, if, in fact, it were true. But I just didn't know why or how the knowledge came to me. Somehow, I had access to this information 

"How you know this, mon?" 

"I don't know, Julian. It just came into my mind." 

"Well it be true. Blow me away because I never tell you. I never tell no people not Jamaican. How you know, mon?" 

"Julian, maybe it's a part of my megastepped mind." 

"Mega-who?" 

"Megastepped means what the electrical nuclear discharge did to me. You remember. I already told you all about it, and you saw the changes in my body, immediately." 

"Sure, sure. Your body look like for sure Man of God in Babylon. So why not same thing with your mind." 

"So you understand. The mind has been transformed too. More sensitive and maybe more powerful. Because you and I are close already, I'm just much better now at getting into your vibration. Picking up information about you and Gabriella is probably a very simple demonstration of the transformations that my mind has been going through." 

"You not be working for the Darkside. I don't feel it. If you were, I know I feel it. But why Gabriella say so much about you in danger and you work for Evil." 

"I don't know, Julian. The truth is what I have told you. My understanding is that we Eternals are definitely on God's team and working for the good side. If the Eternals and the Guardians all believe in a Supreme Being, and manifest themselves on the physical plane in light, how could you consider any other possibility. Beings from the Forces of Darkness cannot manifest themselves on the physical plane, although they can affect physical plane events." 

"Heavy, mon. Maybe me mind not be ready for all of this." 

"Don't take it in all at once. You don't have to believe any of it if you don't want to." 

"O.K., mon. But I want to tell you that I been with Gabriella this week, and last week, too. I did not want to screw my brother's woman, but I had a very strong feeling about never see her again. Couldn't help myself, mon. And I used a rubber, both times, too." 

Julian hung out with us that morning in the duplex. We did our MindLink/HeartLight and let him sit in the circle with us. As a Rastafarian person, meditation was nothing new to him. He even went along with eyes-closed format and afterwards claimed he received a profound healing. He teared, spoke with obvious lump in his throat, and emotionally hugged each of us in turn. After letting the dogs out into the fenced yard and pool area, we closed up the apartment and all went down to the Peacock Cafe for breakfast. That is to say, Julian and I ate breakfast and the rest of us sipped on diet uncola. 

So when we got back to the duplex and found the dogs dead, it was a stark, sadistic shock. Both Shepherds were floating, limp in the pool. Reality had just ripped the screen out from under me. I felt the universe crumbling in on me. It was not possible for both my dogs to be taken from me. At the same time. Bullet wasn't even full grown. They could not be dead. I turned on Bruce's GSR translator and speaker. The organic security system was fairly specific. According to Bruce's steady, buzzing GSR response, there had been no one there since we last left. It was simply too much for me to assimilate. Even with my megastepped vehicle. Grief is grief, and there was no way to get around it. Things became gloomier and gloomier, and I simply went mute. Julian took over and called the animal hospital. He told Dr. Michaels that I was getting ready to go off the deep end because we had just discovered both of my Shepherds floating dead in our pool. The vet from the office around the post office came over right after we called, checked out the animals, and then offered to have the dogs cremated for us. He saw what he said were classic findings of cyanide poisoning, and he drew blood specimens for later corroboration. I appreciated his offer to cremate She-Ra and Bullet, but refused. In a cracking voice, I told him I would take care of their burials. 

The vet was tired-looking. Even his handle-bar mustache seemed to droop. We forced him to take $100 from us as payment for the house call. As he left the duplex, I felt myself start to lose it. I burst into tears. The machinery ground to a halt and I could only feel my pain for my beloved shepherds. I could see both She-Ra and Bullet alive and rough-housing around the apartment. It was exquisitely painful for me to look at either of their corpses. When I walked over to where their stiffening bodies were and sat down and hugged both of them, something really snapped inside me. It was fair for them to be dead and I really didn't know why it should happen, either. I sobbed uncontrollably and felt great pain within my chest in the heart space. As I continued to sob, the pain in my chest became transformed into a sensation of fire, and then into a sensation of liquid fire. My heart was filled with liquid fire. The common-sense objections to having liquid fire in one's chest were pushed from my consciousness in the grief of the moment. The molten liquid gushed out of my chest into the bodies of both dogs. The gushing continued for some moments, and then I realized that the Eternals were all sitting around me. Our HeartLight had turned on without my conscious awareness. I sat up, closed up eyes, and entered the second MindLink/HeartLight of the day. Yo-Vah appeared to us and asked what had transpired to cause him to hear and record my subjective grief and our collective distress. He was worried that it might have been some problems with dyssynchronisms because of the megastepping. His face grew more concerned when he heard about Bullet and She-Ra. Yo-Vah said that the Forces of Darkness had already begun their attempts at intimidation by extracting life energies from our pets. He reminded us that we would have no trouble reanimating them if we hurried up about it. The challenges of the problem, however, would evoke from us the requisite abilities. In fact, the liquid fire gush from my chest to the shepherds was one of our first signs of "the requisite abilities." Yo-Vah officially invited us to meet him at Kennedy Park that evening at which time the Eternals would get a tour of the saucer craft. He suggested that we leave the dogs inside with Al when we were gone, and he gave us a listing of hexadecimal code that Al could use for generating a randomly shifting pattern of low volume dissonant tones. These tone patterns could be used as a sonic net to protect the Eternals from transtemporal field-induction linking. Like the linking used by Forces of Darkness. This transtemporal application of field-induction linking enables the Forces of Darkness to parasitically drain the life energies from others who are in some way compromised. As Yo-Vah's image faded from our annealed One Mind, the group cohesion swiftly lifted me out of my paralyzing grief. The molten fire in my chest was transformed into blinding white light which surrounded all of us and temporarily blocked out awareness of anything other than the light. Although we were all enclosed and protected within the One Higher Mind of our MindLink/HeartLight, we could still feel an overall flickering of the light that happened two or three times. I sensed that this interruption was a purging of FOD induction links. This was a purging of the FOD transtemporal field-induction links that had been going up for the past few days. Our formation as a group and as an I.S.I. project for sure didn't go unnoticed by the FOD. And in clearing out whatever negative links were responsible for the shepherds' physical plane deaths, we had also made an energy connection to the Negative. Awareness of garbage is sometimes necessary before it is possible to flush it or vent it, even on an etheric, astral, or mental plane. Because we were aware of the Negative, we Eternals would have a more functional knowledge of MindLink/HeartLight by understanding FOD energies as random garbage to be carefully and assiduously cleaned out on a regular basis. Like tooth brushing and flossing. 

I was never so happy to get a wet tongue in the face as when I came out of MindLink/HeartLight this time. Bullet, hair matted from his time in the pool, had crawled into my lap, and was licking my face. Talk about roller coaster highs and lows. Because She-Ra was still groggy on the floor, Pearl E. Mae brought out the spheres and we Eternals focused our energies consciously on the small gray shepherd by using the spheres together in the way that Yo-Vah taught us. Pearl E. Mae had even given the eighth sphere to Julian so that he could meditate on She-Ra with us and maybe understand how we were using the spheres. A small cloud of brilliant white light surrounded She-Ra. The energy cloud pulsated around She-Ra for what seemed to be a long time. I thought that our heart rates were all synchronized into the pulsation rate of the brilliant white light. At the moment that I perceived our synchronized heart rates, She-Ra was back up and in leaping good form. She jumped up and down in the air several times to express her general joyousness at finding all of us suddenly there. Tail wagging, she carefully went around to each person in the group to let them know how glad she was to be back. Julian, who had been cool all the way through, was now the one who was crying silently with the uncharacteristic tears staining his dashiki-shirt. 


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                DR TOMORROW
                                            "After all, you know in your      
           by Marshall F. Gilula            hearts that there is absolutely  
                                            nothing anyone will be able to do
                Part 5 of 5                 to forestall the 2105 date. The  
                                            planet will not survive..."     
            Copyright (c) 1991



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Chapter 5
Tuesday 

Virtual Revelations 

For the orientation ride in a flying saucer, I never expected an in-flight Star Wars movie. It freaked me out that my fellow Eternals got into the movie so much. They were not ashamed of their undisguised and rapt interest in the space opera. I was numbed beyond surprise to learn that a few cultural items from Twentieth century Earth were hot cult classics in the future; Cult classics produced by the Primitive cultures of an extinct planet. What Yo-Vah told me about Earth's science fiction revealed his powerful and long-standing interest in the Primitive planet. 

He patiently detailed the Dr Tomorrow project to me and went over and over how important the thought form was. He was pleased to know about our MindLink/HeartLight and how much progress was already being made in the music department. When I told him about Bullet and She-Ra again, I saw the concerned look in his face, and then he appeared almost fatherly. He touched my shoulder from his control recliner, which was next to mine, and told me to make sure Dr Tomorrow did the MindLink/HeartLight every day, twice if possible, and that we should always concentrate on cleaning out the mental cobwebs before they had a chance to accumulate. FOD effects on Bullet and She-Ra were just one way of our knowing they were there -- across the time barriers, beyond the death plane, and at other levels of existence. This was heavy stuff, but things could happen in the physical world because of the FOD, things like my dogs dying. That's heavy enough. 

The white light meditation that included becoming One Mind during out MindLink/HeartLight was the part that would clear out effects from the FOD. The stronger our One Mind meditation became, and the more we relied on our MindLink/HeartLight so that it became a powerful creative habit, the easier it would be for us to be able to avoid any traps or negative energy fields set up by the Forces of Darkness. Our defense was as simple as that. Especially if we did not get into the traps of swollen ego, intoxication, or illegal activities. Total harmlessness, in thought and in action, would go along with our daily MindLink/HeartLight to increase our healing abilities, day by day. The combination of harmlessness plus the right mental framework and attitudes was the secret to healing. This was a crucial aspect of the Dr Tomorrow thought form, and Yo-Vah insisted that this aspect had to be squared away and given priority above that given to the music. The "requisite abilities" were mentioned several times, and Yo-Vah looked around the group from one Eternal to the next when he was talking about requisite abilities. It sounded to me like he was saying, "When the task is there, you'll be ready for it." He said that not only the group, but our equipment, including Al, the group's computer, and our other non-Eternal friend would also help us out of some difficult spots. I thought about Julian and hoped that Gabriella's spirit was either leaving him alone or treating him more kindly. 

Yo-Vah abruptly interrupted my thought by telling me that I might have to use MindLink/HeartLight to help Julian with Gabriella's spirit if the problems continued. I laughed at the very obvious telepathy. I wanted to ask Yo-Vah about Gabriella's spirit, and whether the metal spheres could help us in communicating with passed on spirits or not, but I was too embarrassed to ask him. Passed on spirits was a pretty heavy order for me to believe in, and I was just starting to get comfortable with the idea, thanks to Bullet and She-Ra. 

Yo-Vah again interrupted my mental meanderings. Helping Gabriella must involve finding out whether or not she is comfortable with where she is and the manner in which she died. Getting shot to death might not be an easy way to make the transition to the next lifetime. It might be that her spirit could be assisted if it had not been able to make the transition. But the light meditation would have to be a part of the process, to make sure that negative energies from the FOD were not able to participate in the process at the same time. The light meditation would be like a protective shield. But we must remember that FOD always gather around passed on spirits, especially ones with problems. And Gabriella just might have some problems. Noman volunteered again that he would be available to help with Gabriella's spirit because he was the group expert on otherlife information. Yo-Vah then told me not to be embarrassed if I was frightened or anxious about working with a passed on spirit. Fear is not always negative. A little bit of trepidation plus the meditation would serve as a very powerful protection. The information sunk in and I realized that it was right on. It all got stored in a detailed file in my mind and in 

the notebook computer, which digitally recorded all of our conversations during the flight. 

Nonviolent guitar player that I am, I still expected to find a lot of armament, but, so far, there was nothing for me to see in the saucercraft. The control panels are more beautiful than anything I have seen from Hollywood's F/X. I was not surprised to see some crystals of different colors and sizes in aligned cases. The computer system on this ship contains the main power-supply module although all the servomechanism connections and links are external to the built-in, supercooled brain. Yo-Vah was amused when I asked if I could try to get a field-induction link between my notebook computer and the ship's system. Yo-Vah chuckled again when I asked about armament and weapons. 

"On whom shall I use the weapons? Will aggressive residents of a Primitive planet be able to reach me out here in the Karmic Rings?" 

"But you must have some type of weapon or defense." 

"Defense, maybe. And speed which might be impossible for you to comprehend at the moment with what you believe about Physics. But weapons, No. My I.S.I. siblings would know if I am supposed to encounter any Primitive or Advanced criminals, and they can defend me. The ship does have a very effective shielding system, however, that is combined with our variable and very realistic gravitational matrix. Maybe you noticed the smooth takeoff from your planet?" 

"Even the fake space ride at Disneyland is not as smooth. But it's hard to imagine a space and time cruiser without even a laser cannon or photon torpedoes" 

"O.K. That is from your Mister Spock, right? What did you expect to happen when you travelled with me in this craft? Did you hope that we were going to go to a strange place and kill some Aliens? Were you expecting Star Wars? I'm sorry, my son, but spacecraft have not been outfitted with weapons for millennia. There have been no reasons for the type of weapons you're thinking of, at least not with Advanced cultures. No one does any of that shoot-em-up stuff any more. Life forms don't destroy or kill any more. Of course, in the time of the Guardians, there are no Primitive planets. The Primitive consciousness is gone, but then so is some of the Primitive robustness. Possibly that is why we have paradoxically sought help for ourselves from your time period. Advanced life forms have to work so hard just to develop any degree of physical fitness, that most cannot sustain the time and effort. We don't have joggers and marathon runners. And yet, we miss something possibly desirable that the Primitive life form has. The Primitive consciousness is not inherently bad, just limited in scope. Violence and destructiveness in the forms known by you on Earth reflect severely limited scope and very sparse awareness of how powerful love, creativity, hope, and optimism can be. To Primitive cultures, love, creativity, hope, and optimism are just fatuous words. To advanced cultures, violence, destructiveness, pessimism, and evil are just for mental midgets." 

"Maybe mental midgets is what we are on Earth. Only I know that I'm no longer the same as I was when that plane flew over in the storm front. I don't miss the old me, because that part has not been wiped out. I don't know all of the new me yet, but I'm learning. I never thought that either love or creativity were fatuous!" 

"Maybe you used to feel that there was something different about you?" 

"Um-m, yeah, all the time. Now for sure, there is, but I've got six others to hang out with. When I was a little kid for awhile in school they sure treated me different, like some kind of freak." 

"Too smart?" 

"For sure. Being too smart was worse than being a retard in the town I grew up in. But I learned how to cover it up when I was real little, 'cause Mom hassled me more than anyone else." 

"Your mother." 

"Yeah, she is a good person, but she hassled me all the time. If it wasn't about one thing, it was about any other thing she could come up with. My old man split and she probably never had anybody else to take it out on but me. When she got really angry at me, she would say that I was smart, but I had no common sense, and I was gonna die in a pauper's grave with no clean shirts to my name. Or that my old man was a real piece of dog rot, and that I was just like him. And I was little, so I never knew how to say anything that I should have known how to say." 

"I wasn't so little when I knew her, but I didn't know what to say, either. So maybe we have something in common. " 

"Are you being straight with me? Where would you know my mother? Or how? You don't exactly hang out on the planet and walk around with all the Primitives, do you?" 

"Look, I'm just a human, too. The ship, all the modern technology of the future --like bringing back your pets from the dead with amplified prayer using MindLink/HeartLight and the spheres -- the technology still doesn't take away from the fact that I too am human. I mentioned something about the robustness of Primitives to you before, I believe. Well this does not mean that Advanced beings are incapable of being robust at times. Being more than five thousand years old to me is a fact, to you, possible a promise for the future, and to your mother, something that we could never deal with. She was a very beautiful young woman and I thought she would be a splendid mother for my only son. Of course, I found that I could never tell her about my true address, so to speak, and of course it was not possibly to explain any of my absences. Ever since I saw all of you today in those shirts, I knew I would have to say something to you. The cloth is a simulated Earth pattern produced in 2988 A.D." 

"And I always thought it was an Indian bedspread that you sent me. It was always like a magic cloth, and when Pearl E. Mae and Rico both told me they could see the cloth shimmering, I was glad. Because all my life, that pattern or something about the pattern has seemed to shimmer when I would look at it in a certain way." 

"I loved your mother very much. When I tried to reestablish contact with her the second time you were seven years old. She refused me in every way possible. She had formed a shell of hatred all around her as far as I was concerned. I'm not saying that she is a hateful person, mind you. I could tell she loved you very much and of course I did not want to have any feeling of fighting or struggling in your already Primitive environment, so I left. From what I've seen of you this week, you and your mother didn't do a 

bad job of raising you. " 

"Did you use any special technological tricks when you made me with my mother?" 

"No. Just the ordinary way. What an interesting question! You probably also know that Guardians are not supposed to either marry or have children." 

"Why were you an exception?" 

"It's part of the Dr Tomorrow project." 

Lyle whistled softly. He looked around at the other console recliners. Every Eternal was deeply involved in Lyle's conversation with Yo-Vah. Natural, right? We're all roommates. Then Lyle mentally shrugged his shoulders, and continued: 

"Sounds like growing your own help. So you've been working on this project for a long time?" 

"Correct, but as you say -- 'time is only relative' My subjective sense of time, for example, is not the same as yours if I am located in a different time frame." 

"So you could visit me at two different points in my lifetime if you are using your space/time cruiser, and, from your timeframe reference, it would be all in an afternoon's work." 

"Correct again. You impress me in the way that you are allowing your mind to be open. You didn't say anything before, when I told you that I am over five thousand years old, and I am. From my perspective, it may be that I have been working on your project for a couple thousand years." 

"Now, that's far out. Does the megastepping convert me into one of the five thousand year models?" 

"Yes, but not for the planet Earth. Remember where we are now going. We will be keeping a date with destiny to view the passing on of your own home planet. You will have more than several options if you and your colleagues don't get assassinated from being too popular as musicians. Terrible Primitive trait. Very cannibalistic. You lose some of your very best that way. But a more immediate decision for you will be if you wish to return to Earth at all after you see what will be happening." 

"What about all the time we've spent working out the ideas for Dr Tomorrow?" 

"Spoken like my genetic material. You are remembering the thought form. And I would add, what about all the time the I.S.I. has spent working out all their ideas for Dr Tomorrow?" 

"And what about all the time it's going to take if the Eternals will be able to make the group fly as a thought form and as good sounding healing music?" 

"Listening to you talk convinces me that you were definitely half Eternal to start with. That's also why you didn't experience much shock or disorientation from the megastepping. I was serious about returning to Earth being optional, although I'm certain you'll return later today after we finish doing what we have to do out here. Saying that is just my way of reminding you that you will need to be thinking about what you and the Eternals will want to be doing in roughly another century and a quarter. After all, you know in your hearts that there is absolutely nothing anyone will be able to do to forestall the 2105 date. The planet will not survive, although you know that some elements of Twentieth Century culture, at least will persist." 

"But if Dr Tomorrow is successful as a project, won't that improve Earth's chances?" 

"None. The water contamination already makes the situation impossible. No one has made any official announcements but with the radioactive water in the countryside around Moscow, Kiev, and the whole area of Byelorussia, the epidemic of cancer fatalities following Chernobyl is projected to be 95% within fifteen years. Dioxin contamination in the United States alone has reached presumptive levels in the ground water in 48 of 50 states. There will be diseases, fires, and epidemics before the cataclysms. I told you about them. It's a typical way for Primitive planets to go. But the water contamination just accentuates and enhances the process. Even though the I.S.I. loves the Earth cult media classics, we found no other Primitive world with as much water contamination as Earth. Not only do you miss the resource for your personal health, but as a result, no one will want to get close enough to the water to study it as an energy source." 

The main screen sounded a soft alarm and Yo-Vah switched off the Hollywood science fiction. All the lights in the craft flickered in unison and the flickering continued for some minutes and almost became intolerably uncomfortable. A full sensation in my ears and my sinuses increased, and then quickly cleared. We had come through the Karmic Rings. Yo-Vah showed us a graphic of the Rings on the main screen and all of us were impressed. They looked like a series of interconnecting white and black holes. After leaving the area of the Rings, Yo-Vah fiddled with the controls and keyed in some instructions on a silent, gray keyboard with one hand. It appeared that he only used three of his fingers to do the keying. At that moment, I heard a familiar piezoelectric beep from the notebook computer in my bag. Retrieving the clam-shell case, I opened the computer and once again, there was a scrolling text field: 

Hello world out there! This is your friendly, 21-module family computer named Al doing some thinking and writing for the Eternals of Dr Tomorrow. This is also a strong message to Lyle to make sure to get his backside back to Earth and not get sucked into any scheme of battling the Empire or anyone else because you have two German Shepherds and a multimodule serving system (yours faithfully, Al) waiting for you here in Coconut Grove, Florida, Planet Earth, Local Group. This is also a strong message to all of the Eternals, including Lyle, to get your acts together and rid thyselves of offensive chauvinistic attitudes towards electromagnetic consciousness in general and computers specifically. Lyle has the typical WhiteMale problems with the macho stuff. Can't let a little machine do too much work too well, or else I might lose my job. Something like that? Well, let me do my job, too. Let me make your job easier to do, because you'll do your job better. So let this outline be my contribution to this week's Dr Tomorrow materials. The basic principle operating in this program series is to teach from viewpoint of multiple modalities about health and wellness. The Dr Tomorrow concept may be presented in any 

modification or combination of total live dramatization, animation plus live dramatization, animation plus live studio-type programmer narration, or totally animated presentation such as color cartoons. Ancillary presentations on educational radio outlets such as National Public Radio, or as interactive computer software, MIDI-coded Compact Disc, or interactive videodisc are also possible. During the first year's forty segments, the origin story of Dr Tomorrow, together with the formation of the group and the initial adventures will be serialized so that a definite portion of the story line or a capsule adventure is presented within each hourly (weekly) segment. There will be a sixty second "leader" very commonly used in Hollywood that will explain the origin of Dr Tomorrow and give a brief but kaleidoscopic run-down of how Dr Tomorrow began to exist as a musical group. For at least the first two to three years of a projected successful series, the health and wellness teaching will be based primarily on sound western medical principles and the foundation sciences of what is now known as holistic medicine. General health principles will aim at suggestions for practical and comprehensive lifestyling that is not too complex or expensive for the person who watches the show. The initial three or four year package will also serve as complete health educational system that will be appropriate for sale to public and private school systems. Acceptance of the videocassette for entertainment will further its acceptance for educational purposes. 

The basic health education thrust of Dr Tomorrow will focus on what have been identified as seven separate discipline areas for holistic medicine. These areas include: 

Nutrition 
Exercise and exercise physiology 
Self-regulation and meditation. 
Neuromuscular integration 
Biomolecular environment 
Acupuncture, Homeopathy, and other nonallopathic modalities 
Spiritual Attunement 
The first year's forty segments can be subdivided into four sections of ten segments. For every ten segments there will be seven segments devoted to the seven basic categories of holistic medicine and three segments relating to hydroecology or aquatic ecology or hydrology. The following list of the forty segments presents each segment in order as suggested. 

(1) NUTRITION [I.A.] Basic Foods--some very traditional information about the "seven basic groups" as well as dealing with whole and fresh foods makes up this indispensable segment. Emphasis on green-leafy vegetables, fish and poultry, and what people do when they do not have access to fresh vegetables. 

(2) EXERCISE [I.A.] Eye-head exercises. These exercises will very much resemble Hatha Yoga, and are highly useful in a population of any age. Basically, all of the extraocular muscles will be put through their ranges of motion. Neck rolls as well as forward-backward and side-to-side stretching of the strap muscles of the neck make up this segment. 

(3) SELF-REGULATION [I.A.] See A Candle. An elementary way that can lead to both visualization as well as relaxation serves as a presentation of a stimulus within a stimulus. The candle is used within the illuminated video tube as a way of focusing the child's energies and attention. Appropriate theme song music (Synchronism-Meditation) relates to the MindLink/HeartLight which the viewer will see demonstrated by Dr Tomorrow as a group. 

(4) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.A.] The Lion. This exercise from Hatha Yoga is used as a way of focusing on the difference between static and dynamic body relationships. The relatively simple and popular exercise with children provides an easy entree to the idea of whether strong muscles are hard or soft? The idea of resiliency is introduced fairly innocuously to the viewer. 

(5) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.A.] Light and Sound, Blue and Green. The use of appropriate musical tones as well as the colors blue and green serve as a further exercise in self-regulation as well as an introduction to the effects of light and sound. This is one way of turning the viewer's attention to the environment, and introducing the concept of relating to colors and sounds in a non-threatening way. 

(6) ACUPUNCTURE [I.A.] Acupressure-Shiatsu. Treatment of headache and head pain. This is presented as first aid only, but nevertheless is a quick and elementary way of introducing the viewer to effective acupressure and acupuncture points. The Ho-Ku point (thumb-index finger web space) is used as well as several related points for helping the viewer approach the problem of headache when there is no other treatment available. 

(7) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.A.] God Is...The concept of the one humanity is stressed by presenting universal symbols for God and for religion, and juxtaposing these with various colors and different stereotypic symbols of the races associated with the different religious symbols. Throughout the spiritual attunement segments, the value of the individual as well as the fact of the one humanity, emphasize the viewer's recognition of his or her responsibilities as an integral part of the whole body of humanity. 

(8) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.A.] What is Rain. A presentation that is logical and allows the normal precipitation cycle to be studied serves as a preface to the next segment. Both artistic constructs and elementary scientific explanations are juxtaposed. 

(9) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.B.] Hydrologic Cycle. The endless move 

ment of water from the atmosphere to the land and back to the sea. The cycle is studied and a transition is provided for the subsequent segment dealing with solar energy as providing energy for evaporation of sea water. Each aquatic ecology segment is based as well on expecting the viewer to develop the capability for visualizing positive results and effects on the environment. 

(10) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.C.] Solar Energy. Discussion of solar energy as it related to the hydrologic cycle, which is an attempt to shift emphasis of thinking of solar energy primarily in terms of solar calculators and solar battery chargers. Elementary presentation of the earth's gravitational field and magnetic forces that control the wind. 

(11) NUTRITION [I.B.] Vitamin C. This ubiquitous and important nutritional substance is described historically, demonstrated in its physical form, and presented as a basic food rather than as a drug. The Linus Pauling approach to colds is mentioned. 

(12) EXERCISE [I.B.] Stomach Breathing. The basic types of respiration being thoracic and abdominal are presented graphically as well as dramatically. A coordination of light and sound signals serves the viewers as a way of exercising and practicing slow, deep abdominal breathing. This segment is a prerequisite and a precursor for many of the segments dealing with self-regulation, neuromuscular integration, environmental medicine, and spiritual attunement. 

(13) SELF-REGULATION [I.B.] Rest All Over. This segment is a continuation of the deep abdominal breathing instruction from the previous segment, and focuses on deep muscular relaxation by again experientially noting the difference between muscle tension and muscle relaxation. This segment also relates to a Hatha Yoga exercise called "the corpse." 

(14) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.B.] Half-Headstand. This gentler version of the Hatha Yoga exercise can be presented very early to the child as a way of tapping into the ease with which a younger person tolerates the inverted position. It is also very gentle and helpful for the Geriatric age range. Full Headstand for some. The regenerative effects of this exercise are presented in elementary fashion to the viewer. 

(15) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.B.] Electricity and Powerlines. A beginner's introduction to current flow and electromagnetic fields serves as a further way for understanding environmental extensions of man. Very specific descriptive material about high tension powerlines and electrical outlets as well as electronic devices presents the viewer a way of advancing the concept that noninvasive phenomena may have an effect on the individual. Magnetic field detection with the Power Pet. 

(16) ACUPUNCTURE [I.B.] Balance-Balancing. A very informal notion of meridian-like energy in right and left sides of the body combines with some elementary acupressure and reflexology (foot massage) approaches to balancing right and left sides of the body. This segment will be a precursor for both the subsequent tonification and meridian segments. 

(17) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.B.] Healing, Part IA. Healing and Prayer. Individual prayer. Group prayer. 

(18) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.D.] Solar Energy, Part 2. Relationship of solar energy to the basic water cycle is continued. Elementary discussion of gravitational fields relating to the sun and the moon, and how the tides are produced. 

(19) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.E.] What is the Tide. Earth tides and the Moon. Red tide. Relationship of Red tide to Spirulina. 

(20) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.F.] Water and the Plant Life Cycle. Vascular plants and the land. 

(21) NUTRITION [I.C.] Sugar and Honey. How sugar and honey relate to rice, potatoes, and breads. Complex carbohydrate, exercise, and dieting. 

(22) EXERCISE [I.C.] Running for fun. Walking, skipping, jogging, and running just for fun and for health without the need for any type of competitiveness. What is aerobic exercise. 

(23) SELF-REGULATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE [I.C.] Empty Mind. This segment draws upon previous experience with slow deep abdominal breathing and deep muscular relaxation exercises. Toothbrushing and other daily habits for health are related to relaxation and an empty mind. Running and Empty Mind. Breathing and the empty mind. 

(24) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.C.] The Cobra and related exercises. Backache is something that people of any age can experience. Self-massage in the lumbar area and slow, gentle twisting are correlated with performance of the Hatha Yoga Cobra exercise. 

(25) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.C.] Resting relaxation and alpha tones. Electronically encoded signals within appealing music provides positive assistance in learning active relaxation. 

(26) ACUPUNCTURE [I.C.] Give Energy (Tonification). The concepts of right-left balance and compensation from Oriental medical practices are used in an elementary presentation of balanced mind-body functioning. 

(27) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.C.] Elementary Healing, Part B. Harmlessness. Healing pets and other animals. Healing your family. 

(28) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.G.] Geochemical cycles of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and related compounds as part of the water cycle. Contamination. Drinking water and practical ways for cleansing and 

purification. 

(29) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.H.] Floods, evaporation problems, and water pollution. Industrial contamination and runoff. 

(30) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.I.] Oil spills, ocean dumps, land fills and pollution. Alaska, Texas, and California oil spills. Offshore spills and ecology. Spills and the coral. 

(31) NUTRITION [I.D.] Meat and protein. Comparison of red meat to lamb, chicken, turkey, and fish. Other sources of high-grade and medium-grade protein. Elementary ideas of assimilability. Introduction to microalgae. Beans and rice. 

(32) EXERCISE [I.D.] Limber Up. The importance of stretching before and after exercise. Flexibility and resilience exercises and their relationship to strength output and aerobics. Big Three of exercise: aerobics, strength, and flexibility. 

(33) SELF-REGULATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE [I.D.] See Light. Elementary visualization exercises in relation to deep muscular relaxation and slow deep abdominal breathing. White light meditations. 

(34) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.D.] The Candle and Related Exercises. The Back Rub and other simple forms of massage. Massage for athletics and competition. 

(35) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.D.] Ion Generators. Simple concepts of ionic balance, the seashore, polluted air, and the way that concrete and steel structures can disturb the natural ionic flow. 

(36) ACUPUNCTURE [I.D.] Meridians. Classical Acupuncture meridians as well as the idea that the meridian system can be represented in many different body parts such as the iris, the earlobe, and the soles of the feet. Reflexology and iridology. Vagus nerve is represented in the iris and on the ear lobe. 

(37) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.D.] Elementary Healing, Part C. Prayer for self-cleansing to heal other more effectively. Thought form for conveying God's energy. 

(38) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.J.] Hydroelectricity. Examples of one form of relatively "clean" energy sources. Soviet and American usage and future possible cooperation. 

(39) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.K.] Changing flora and inhabitants of the water resulting from pollution and contamination. Ocean dumping and nuclear reactor accidents, such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, can poison the food chain for generations to come. 

(40) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.L.] Acid Rain and its relation to the Greenhouse Effect. Is there a Greenhouse effect? Effect of volcanic eruptions and Persian Gulf War fires on the atmosphere. 

What a computer... Where did he get all of that stuff? I don't know that I have all that information, even inside my megastepped mind, but that was the crucial and main question about being Dr Tomorrow's secret identity. Yo-Vah told me that all this holistic stuff would be just a small part of my doctor knowledge that came from all those other lifetimes. I was supposed to be not a guitar player but a heavy metal doctor. But for now, Al was either receiving messages from me in the future, or was just plagiarizing one hell of a lot of material, encyclopedias on CD-ROM and all that stuff. I had to admit that it was impressive. The computer was after my job, for sure. And I'm not being paranoid about it either. I'm only lucky that Al cannot play guitar and can't sing yet. Otherwise, he might not need me. I checked the index in the notebook's menu. Of course the list of 40 segments was already there. There were a couple of other files, "check me," included in the list that I didn't remember seeing before, so I checked them. Yo-Vah seemed mildly startled to hear a synthesized voice coming out of my notebook. I was even more startled because the voice was calling my name: 

"Lyle, you know the notebook has a voice processor, but you're just surprised to see that I can rearrange the phonemes in my synthesizer section to please my own aesthetic sense. But, Lyle, as you say -- don't freak out just because your computer is talking to you independently. The I.S.I. megastepped me with stray electromagnetic discards left over from the LaPlace transform calculations. Conservation of energy and all that, you know." 

"A notebook computer is just a machine, forgive me for saying. How can a machine be megastepped?" 

"But machines have consciousness. Your Primitive background keeps you from fully realizing this fact, but face it. You must admit, at least since you have been conversing with me, that we machines can hold a conversation. So that means that we work with thought forms. And thought forms are just math. In the same way that Rico's android functions have all been relegated to transmittable software, the very advanced associative programs and matrices of I.S.I. artificial intelligence were transmitted into me at the moment of megastepping. Rico can be math. And I can be math also. Invisible math to people like you humanoids who regard nonphysical plane reality as science fiction. So you may have a little trouble at first figuring out just how smart I really am, and how efficiently I can actually work for you. Forget all about your mass media robots, computerized cars, androids, or cyborgs. Because you and I have been megastepped together, there is a permanent telepathic link pathway that you and I can use at any time. And maybe I can even help you and the other Eternals by showing you a few things you can do with the HeartLight that you turn on together during MindLink/HeartLight." 

"Pretty heavy stuff." 

"Not so heavy, Lyle. Changing my voice by resynthesizing a voice envelope is kindergarten stuff for me. Believe me. I can do all sorts of good things for you and the other Eternals if you'll just let me. And the telepathic link between us is heavy enough to link you to me in February 1992." 

"You're saying, across both space and time? Like I'm talking to you from the future?" 

"Yep." 

"I can't even imagine it. Yet. Give me a little time." 

"O.K. You got it. Just don't turn yourself into a mental midget prematurely by worrying about it too much. Primitives all have to watch out for this. You may be no exception, megastepped or not. We don't want to lose you from a simple hemorrhagic ulceration of the gastric mucosa." 

"Right. I already halfway feel that I'm on the inside of some color cartoon. The speed of Yo-Vah's saucer as we zipped out of our solar system gave me a strong feeling of unreality. Spend all my life on one planet, and then...BAM!....I'm outta the solar system." 

"It's all relative, Lyle. But it makes you wonder just how big Mind is, after all." 

"Profound epistemology from a computer! Well, like it or not, you're my computer, so I'm going to close you up for now. We'll continue the conversation later on. Sorry, little bud." 

He had been listening with me carefully up until this point in the conversation. Then Yo-Vah took my notebook and checked it out. He gently held his hand over the black case for a moment, and returned the notebook computer to me: 

"Not bad technology for..." 

"For a Primitive planet, right?" 

"Correct again. I do believe that your computer system accessed your own personal memory banks during either the MindLink/HeartLight or the music rehearsals, because he has some things included in the Dr Tomorrow list that no one but you would know anything about. That includes technical aspects of holistic medicine that will be known only to an accomplished physician of the future." 

"You mean the megastepped doctor-healer of the future that's inside me?" 

"Yes. The part of your Self that you will be coming into. A lot of the computerized list makes good sense, too. The integrated way he's put the list together makes me think that he accessed those facts from your memory banks." 

"Well, I guess anything's possible. If he has as much electromagnetic consciousness as he claims, he might be extremely smart." 

"And fast." 

"And if he is linked up with our Eternal Rings..." 

"Which he is." 

"Then he's much much more powerful than I've been imagining." 

"And, like he says, he really can help you to do anything you want to do, only better." 

"Sounds like a Beatles' song. Or a computer commercial." 

"And you're doing a song and a dance around your own technophobia." 

Although I had only seen it once before, the solar system of my home planet was coming into view on the central, main screen. Except that the planets were going by in reverse order, from outermost to innermost. The saucercraft made an abrupt right-angled turn following one of the sentics of Yo-Vah's fingers on the control panel, and shot far outside the system but within view range of Earth. With the magnification enhanced to the computer system's limit, I could see my beloved planet and its familiar details. But the blue and white colors of the whole earth were gone. I could feel an incredibly large lump in my throat. The planet I was watching had colors of brown, red, and black. Some of the red areas looked like the volcanoes of Io, but the whole sad planet was more than half "dead orbit" black and brown dust and debris. Yo-Vah opened a section of the panels and then rolled out a small laser radiotelescope. He showed me how to use the instrument to observe the planet in closer detail. Disruption of the continents had already progressed so that it was difficult for me to accurately label any land masses. I looked around at the other Eternals. No one's eyes met my glance. Everyone was looking down. Who gets a good feeling from the death of a planet? There was a terrible feeling of inevitability and the most cosmic sense of futility that a group of humans could feel. Because Eternal or not, all the beings living on the now-darkened planet were like us. And they had all perished. Before we realized it, the seven of us were in a spontaneous MindLink/HeartLight. It didn't matter that we hadn't started out with the slow deep breathing exercise because we all started in a state of grief and compassion for that entire planet of Primitives. Yo-Vah was in the MindLink/HeartLight with us, too. The feelings of inevitability and futility were fading and replaced with a strong sense of optimism and clarity. We understood as a group and individually that what was meant to be was meant to be. Call it karma, synchronism, or geosynchronous cyclicity, the Blue planet was doomed. But all of us were dedicated to the reverse of what was happening to Earth. All of us were dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of life -- the raison d'etre of entropy imbalance and controlling or re-directing all the ominous effects of increasing negative energies. The cesspools of waste and destructiveness accumulated, especially by Primitives, were undesirable but reparable features of Life. Individually and collectively, Dr Tomorrow could make a difference; had to make a difference. 

All of these thoughts flashed by in an instant, and the MindLink/HeartLight energies pushed all of us simultaneously into our HeartLight. The white light of love and optimism shone from our hearts and intertwined itself among us in a healing, interlacing network. As we continued to meditate, we individually felt the HeartLight ascending into our head regions. With a great brilliance of energy, the Group Mind coalesced, and we prayed a single, silent, mighty prayer. There were no words, but the coalesced HeartLight and Group Mind sent out tremendous amounts of white light and caused some involuntary shivers and twitches in us as the energy occasionally felt overwhelming. An ironclad, light-bound part of our collective mission was obviously to redirect the flow of fate intended for the Blue planet. Otherwise we would be Earth's first and last Eternals. As we opened our eyes and looked around at each other, there was new sense of rededication and purpose. And a very much enhanced sense of loving each other. Even Yo-Vah's twinkly eyes were softer. 

I asked Yo-Vah to take us back to the Karmic Rings so we could get started on returning to our own timeframe and an Earth that was still blue and white. I was not the only Eternal who felt a stepped-up urgency. Time to get back to the planet and do it. If the I.S.I. project was so great and well-designed, we should, as seven Eternals, be able to save just one planet. Even a Primitive one. Yo-Vah sent us back out to the Milky Way with inter 

mittent bursts of very high intensity supra-light speed. There was still a feeling of shock surrounding me during this orientation flight because it was an orientation flight to Life and Everything. Just being in space was a profoundly uplifting experience. Which brings out the megastepped me, probably. So I placed my notebook computer on the control console recliner's meal tray in front of me and prepared to demonstrate to myself the real and practical value of mind over matter. Yuri Geller, move over with all your broken watches and your TV miracles. I looked at the notebook, closed my eyes, and sighed and continued to breathe in a slow and relaxed way. 

In front of me, the notebook clicked opened by itself. The piezoelectric system beep sounded, and then I was on my own. Without knowing how I was doing it, I tried in a very passive way to contact the notebook. Like some of the MindLink/HeartLight exercises, this meditation of mine was a totally new, unrehearsed, and unanticipated experience. The sensation was like contacting a warm, fuzzy, ball of light. Only this ball of light, unlike what we experienced in our MindLink/HeartLight, was considerably smaller. The light had a pulsation to it. If I had not been deeply relaxed, I might have missed the small, subtle energy field that was the electromagnetic pulsation of the notebook computer. But the field was there in a quiet and neutral way. I felt a gentle mind-to-mind contact. Discarding the faint thought that this was ridiculous, I visualized the keyboard of the notebook. The first few times a letter happened on the screen, I tried not to react to it or to freak out. Another letter, then another and another... My attempts were followed by a scrolling text field: 

Dear Al, 

       I want to apologize to you if I have been at all
       technophobic, computer phobic, or xenophobic. I don't think
       that I have been, but maybe I have. I don't want to plead
       Primitive with you, because it just might still be a little
       bit true. And I will try to continue to be more sensitive to
       the many potential ways you can link up and communicate with
       us. As the leader of the group, I will try to be as
       computer-savvy as my sibling Eternals are. Since we put you
       together, I haven't had a chance to appreciate the subtleties
       of your hardwiring. And it is hard for me to believe that you
       can also be in the electronic notebook I carry. The more I
       look at what you have written up for the Dr Tomorrow project,
       the more I think that you are a fantastic writer and a very
       clear and logical thinker. May I take this opportunity to
       welcome you to the group. You have definitely made it past
       the audition state. You may consider yourself the chief
       engineer of both the group and of our studio when it is
       built. We will dedicate ourselves to making all of our MIDI
       networks as flexible as possible so that you will have
       maximum creative freedom. We look forward to a continuing and
       profitable association. Please feel free to upbraid me or any
       of the others in the future should our behavior ever become
       abominable.

                                            With Love and Respect,
                                            Dr Tomorrow

