The Rising

failed story idea from July 2009

Greetings, my name is Horace Coleman. I’d imagine if you are reading this after 2041 Common Era, you are probably quite aware of who I am. If not, then then this is my chance to try and change everything.

To those who know who I am: This work is to make the account clear and to the point, not to leave room for rumor and gossip to delude what has been and what is.

To those to whom I am only meeting now for the first time: Beware the extremists. Take the lessons of my life and help fight for the future.

Before I go through and properly tell you my story (to set the record straight), I want to forewarn you, there is no end. Its been said before, it will be said again. There is no end. I also must add, that this account is intended for those who truly seek the truth. For seek and ye shall find.

 

The proper place to start is before my birth. It was a desperate time. The world economies disintegrating. The rise of China, if you will recall, became the world’s economic success story due to its Socialist economy working more efficiently once Capitalist nations were all in recessions and depressions. One by one, former Soviet Block States and other former Socialist states major economic reforms, Socialism was reintroduced. The United States, the country of my birth, the birth of the fall of Capitalism. Things looked grim in the land of Jennifer Holiday and George Coleman. My parents. My mother was from a place called, Grand Rapids; my father was from a place called, Cocoa Beach.

Mom had been an all A student in grade school, going on to achieve top honours at university, her parents supposedly had come into money by buying up the Iraqi oil field rights and reselling them of the oil companies for a hefty profit. They’d used the money and the connections to propel them into a string of lucky investments and social ladder climbing. Mom was the third of 3 children. Her older brothers had been real dimwits from the way she would describe them. One of them became paralysed from the waist down because of a 4-by-4 accident when he was “mudding” with his friends. The other one became a used car salesman. A bad one at that. He later died of a weak heart. 

Mom apparently had received all of the brains in her family’s gene pool. She went on to get her doctorate in biology and went into pharmaceuticals. She also would build her own new equipment for use by Medical Doctors. She later to retire off of her earnings for her breakthroughs in medical technology such as her _____________. She was 27 when she met my father.

He only had one sibling, his little brother Gaven. Gaven was a weakling. He wet the bed, rain from fights, told secrets, he’d rat in a heart beat. My father used to beat him when he’d catch him in a lie. My father was a very honest man, he never tolerated lying, ignorance, or failure. My Uncle Gav was all three of those things personified. What was the worst part is that he became a vicious little man. He’d pick fights with my dad, he’d intentionally push his buttons until he’d get beaten down. It was like he was a masochist. It later got him into trouble, and into jail when he picked a fight with the wrong cop over a speeding ticket.

My dad was the opposite of my Uncle. He’d grown up on the beaches of Florida. He pumped Iron with his friends, he was on the Wrestling team, he read philosophy. He studied the stars. He once told me he had gone to the lake with one of his steady’s at the time, and they’d been in the middle of a heavy petting session, when his eyes caught hold of the stars. He told me it was like the girl was no longer there, he spent the next hour just staring at the stars. They amazed him. He dedicated all he knew to astronomy and Physics. Went to college and also did okay. Not spectacular, but my father had perseverance. His only source of advice were the ancient wise men, such as: Socrates, Sartre, Voltaire, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Jesus, Berkeley, Heidegger, Kafka, Plato, Moses, Zarathustra, Aristotle, but his favourite was Nietzsche. Upon graduation, he was offered a job at NASA at the space centre as part of the Mission to Mars project. He never could tell me really any more than that. It was all hush hush-stuff, with the second Space Race in full swing and all.

So how’d these two very different people come together? Why naturally, Online. After exhausting all of the typical dating outlets in person and online, both apparently had resigned the search. No one was quite on their level. I know, it sounds biased, but it’s true. My father was physically impressive, and he had a mind to match it. He understood power dynamics. He understood how to make people not only like him, but want to do things for him. He was like Tom Sawyer mixed with Ulysses. My mother in her day was a looker, but not necessarily model pretty. She was the girl next door, she wore cutesy glasses and in high school apparently had been a bit of an Emo Kid. She didn’t have a flaw to her physically, but she simply was a bit offbeat in her presentation. Partially, I think she did this as to drive away people who would only be interested in her for her looks, when what she felt was her best asset was her mind.

They met as members of the same web community, a group online that shared messages on the subjects of Philosophy and Science. She was there to help generate ideas for new devices to make and what new technologies were on the horizon. He was there to share his thoughts on his two greatest passions. They’d exchanged messages a dozen times online before either took the other one seriously. The topic that changed everything was genetics. Apparently 2 generations before my parents, men had attempted to engineer the next stage of evolution by “eliminating” all those who were unlike them. A way to shrink the gene pool, only allowing the healthy and strong to live. Other people looked at creating human hybrids. Western Societies shunned on these “mad scientists in the East”. So by the time my parents were around, the entire idea of genetic engineering seemed almost as taboo as incest.

The group got onto the topic somehow, but the discussion back and forth between a dozen people or so got down to the arguments of two groups. One group felt that human cloning of the strongest and the elimination of the weak was the way to go. My father led the charge on that side. My mother led the charge that the marriages of the best to the best alone would increase the chances for the same effect and cause no unnecessary death. If the best of society came together and all agreed to a pact to intermarry and arrange marriages between their children, the chances for a higher evolved human would increase. The argument spanned weeks, eventually it resulted in phone calls on the subject, then video chatting, then they met and discussed it personally. In the end she convinced him that she was right, by seducing him and making me. She quit her job at the Pharmaceutical lab, and moved to Florida, not long after they were married. I was born December 21^st, 2012 at 6:11am EST. It was the end of the last world.