The Order of Diosis

Somewhere on the planet Diosis, Nathaniel the green Dromaeosaur strides up to a candy bar and orders a peppermint fudge cube. He is followed by his crew of furry Gruezhlings – Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill. All around them are traders, explorers, spies, mercenaries, smugglers, and pirates. This is the place to go when looking for a job or looking to hire someone for a job, whether legal, illegal, or anything in between.

“Hey,” says an approaching yellow Humanoid. “By any chance, do you need any problems solved? I solve problems.”

“What kind of problems?” Nathaniel asks.

“Mostly the people kind. If you have a problem person, I can solve them permanently. I’m good at it – and cheap,” he says.

“Oh, that type of work we always handle ourselves,” Nathaniel answers. He was not lying.

“Okay, no problem,” the yellow Humanoid promptly walks to another table, still hoping to land a job.

Nathaniel receives his fudge and takes his first bite. It is wonderful. He is so enthralled, he doesn’t notice the second creature approach him. “What are you looking for?”

“Hmm? I’m not looking for anything,” Nathaniel responds.

“We’re all looking for something,” the creature says. It wears a white robe and seems to have a head that is just one big compound eye. Nathaniel is not sure where its voice is coming from.

“I came looking for fudge, and I found it already,” Nathaniel says.

“What about immortality?” the creature asks. “What about escaping the constant worry of what will happen to your crew when you are gone?”

This was something Nathaniel had worried about for some time. His Gruezhlings (also called Stuffians) were kept alive by his play energy, only awake as long as he was. He looks at the robed creature intently. Finally, he asks, “Do you have the secret of immortality?”

“No meeting occurs by chance, for the future, past, and present are part of the same timestream. Everyone who is ready is invited into the order, and all who are invited into the order are ready. This key will get you inside the mountain temple.” The creature sets down a large key on the bar with clawed hand.

Nathaniel picks it up. It holds the image of a running Dinosaur dressed just like him. “Hold on, what order are you talking about?” he asks, but the creature is already slipping out the door.

Diosis is a snowy planet famous for its “blood” volcanoes. In several dozen places, the ground leaks a dark, red fluid. There are also many ranges of short, but steep and rocky mountains. Nathaniel and his crew walk to the nearby mountains just outside of town where a giant stone building sits. “Is this a temple?” Doctor Bill asks.

“We can test the key to find out,” Haticat suggests.

The key fits perfectly and soon they are inside. “Praise Y,” a robed creature mumbles as it walks by. Many creatures walk the halls. Nathaniel counts at least twelve different species. Ninos, Humans, and Extolons are among them. They all wear white robes. “Praise Y,” another says.

“This is nothing like any church I’ve been to,” Doctor Bill says.

“At last you have come,” says a robed Nino from behind them.

“Who are you?” Nathaniel asks.

“Your teacher and guide. We must begin your training right away,” the Nino says.

“Training for what?” Nathaniel asks.

“Immortality,” the teacher says.

“How do you know why I’m here?” Nathaniel asks.

“If you were not here for what I said, I wouldn’t have said it, for no meeting occurs by chance,” the teacher says.

“That’s what the other one said,” Nathaniel says.

“Of course. Now, I will find a storage place for your Gruezhlings. You won’t be able to see them until the training is over. Their psychosymbiosis is too much of a distraction,” the teacher responds.

Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill are placed into a small room onto what looks like a comfortable bed and told to wait. The door is closed, but not locked. “So, how long does immortality training take?” Nathaniel asks.

“It depends on the individual – and it depends on their level of patience,” the teacher answers.

“Oh, so how long then?” Nathaniel asks again.

“If you have to ask, you don’t yet have the patience to win,” the teacher says.

“Oh,” Nathaniel says. Six seconds later, he says, “What about now?”

“Patience comes with time,” the teacher says.

“How much?” Nathaniel asks.

Ignoring him, the Nino teacher says, “Identity is only maintained by retaining one’s self against the background mental energy of the universe. One must not let outside forces dictate who you are. The first part of your training involves meditating alone in an empty room so you will have no distractions but yourself.”

“What does any of this have to do with immortality?” Nathaniel asks.

“If your identity is strong enough, it will survive your biological death and enter another being upon its conception. It will stand uncorrupted against the cosmic mental background radiation. This was the great discovery of Diosan mentalicist Fartone,” the teacher explains.

“I’d like to learn more about that,” Nathaniel says.

“In time, you shall. Patience is a key that unlocks many doors,” the teacher says.

Nathaniel is left alone and attempts to meditate upon himself. Soon, he takes notice of his fingers and starts to play with them. He imagines each as a different character and gives them different voices. Then, something he says gives him an idea for a new airlock design. He starts to pace back and forth, lost in thought. The lock would be based on artificial gravity to keep environmental fluids separate and would need no doors. He considers different means of focusing the required negative energy to the correct levels of resolution. “So, how is your meditation going?” the teacher asks.

Suddenly, Nathaniel realizes he is no longer in the room and has wandered down the hall while lost in thought. “Oh, I…got distracted.”

“Good. Then you have passed the first test. You did not let me define you as something in that room. You focused on yourself and forgot about me. Yet, there is much more to learn. Follow me,” the teacher says.

From there, Nathaniel is trained to focus on the nature of things alone, divorced from the names that things are given. He actually begins to forget the names of things sometimes – including his own. The other beings in the temple do not refer to each other by name at all. After three months of this, he starts to get very bored.

“How much longer will this take?” Nathaniel asks.

“Days? Centuries? It will last as long as it must,” the teacher says.

“But I’m so…uh…the opposite of excited,” Nathaniel says.

“Bored? Good,” the teacher says.

“No, not good. That’s…um…the opposite of good,” Nathaniel says.

Nathaniel spends the next several months reading about mental science and meditating. He misses exploring planets. He misses his friends. One day, while eating a bowl of cereal resembling sequins in the campus cafeteria, his teacher enters and sits next to him. “Today, we enter phase two. Your key will open new parts of the library now.”

“You were keeping knowledge away from me? Why?” Nathaniel asks.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” the teacher says cryptically.

“What does that mean?” Nathaniel asks.

“Have patience,” the teacher says.

Nathaniel spends the next year practicing shifting his focus without moving his eyes, thus further separating his consciousness from the trappings of his body. Meditation happens while sitting, lying down, standing in awkward positions for hours at a time, and while swordfighting or doing other tasks. He learns and gradually masters one hundred styles of fighting.

He then finds that he is better able to endure boredom than before, since boredom is a function of not having enough stimulus, and he is now able to choose his stimulus. He allows a single thought to capture his mind for hours at a time, then moves on to another. He has always been easily distracted, but with practice and proper coaching, he achieves ever-higher levels of focus. Then he reaches a plateau and starts to get worse.

“Keep trying,” the teacher encourages him.

“I am trying,” Nathaniel says.

“Try harder,” the teacher says.

“I’m so scatterbrained. Maybe I need to change my diet, or maybe I’m not…Hey, have you noticed that the corner of this room isn’t a perfect right angle? It’s more like eighty-seven degrees,” Nathaniel says.

“Focus!” the teacher shouts.

He keeps trying, but only succeeds in entering a paradoxical state wherein he is sometimes very easily distracted and sometimes very hard to get the attention of. This also means he is sometimes very easily startled and sometimes impossible to startle.

“Are you focusing on the spoon?” the teacher asks.

Nathaniel bolts upright and almost spills his cereal. “How long have you been there?”

“We’ve both been here for forty minutes. We’re in the middle of a training session,” the teacher says.

“Oh yeah, I remember now,” Nathaniel says, staring at the wall. Suddenly, an Extolon turns over a nearby table and it hits the floor with a bang. Nathaniel slowly turns around and asks calmly, “What happened?”

“Your test. You passed. Tomorrow we move on to phase three,” the teacher says.

“What? I’m still too easily distracted,” Nathaniel says.

“You are only distracted by things because the thing you are told to focus on does not distract you anymore,” the teacher explains.

Next, Nathaniel practices all the powers he wants to keep in his next incarnation. He rapidly heals from injuries. He electrocutes things. He tests his intelligence with puzzles. He moves his body as fast as he can. He identifies compounds by their smell. These were all powers he acquired long ago. Drinking the smart juice and the healing juice made him both very smart and allowed him to regenerate his tissues. Being out of phase with the rest of the universe allowed him to turn The Electrobot’s power against itself and give himself the ability to manipulate electrons by thought alone. Being exposed to time crystals under special conditions allowed him to slip into a faster timestream. Having his atoms altered in Atomica by the hypercomputers gave him the ability to smell nitrogen, carbon dioxide, alpha particles, and neutrinos, as well as deduce the statistical properties of any gas. He also continues to practice swordfighting. “The more you use these powers, the more likely you will be able to carry them with you into your next life,” the teacher explains.

When Nathaniel graduates to phase four, he is told there is one new power that all members of the order are given – the ability to wait out times of cold, starvation, or dehydration by entering a self-induced coma. “This is a power all living beings can achieve with the proper direction,” the teacher says.

This is one ability that Nathaniel picks up quickly. However, since he is sometimes left in a coma for as long as three months at a time, it takes over two years to graduate to phase five. “You are almost ready now. There is one final lesson and it will not take long,” the teacher says.

“Thank you, teacher,” Nathaniel says.

“Be here tomorrow morning, and bring your sword,” the teacher says, walking away.

When Nathaniel arrives the next day, there are over sixty robed teachers waiting for him. He is invited to stand at the center of the room surrounded by the others. Then his teacher steps forward. “There is one final lesson.”

“Yes?” Nathaniel says.

“Never ever commit suicide. Never stop fighting for your life or you will lose it. It is only those who strive to live who will live on in another body when their body is destroyed. Do you understand?” his teacher asks him.

“Always strive to live. Reincarnation is a last resort. I understand,” Nathaniel says.

“Then you are ready,” his teacher says. One second later, the ground suddenly gives way and Nathaniel falls into a pit. Boulders crash around him. He stands up and spits out dirt.

“Hey! What’s going on?” Nathaniel asks. The teachers stand around the edge of the hole staring at him silently. “Is this a lesson? What am I supposed to do?” he yells. There is no response. He searches for his sword, finds it, and sees that there is a rough passageway to the side he can crawl through into a lit cavern. He climbs into the main cavern to see that there are high, smooth walls and lights on the ceiling. The teachers start to line up along the top, still watching him. He yells at them a couple more times and tries to scale the walls. Why didn’t he practice wall-climbing? While still attempting to find a foothold, he hears a sound. Something big is scraping itself along the floor. Then around the corner comes a dragon.

Seeing him, it arches back its neck and then thrusts it forward, opening its mouth to reveal large, blue teeth and releasing a stream of white-hot plasma. Nathaniel barely makes it around the corner, feeling the wave of heat behind him. No wonder the walls are so smooth! They get periodically melted!

He tries to escape by running up and down the walls, building up speed by coming down one side before running up the other. The problem is that even with his superspeed, it takes too long and the dragon is upon him before he can finish.

The cavern curves back on itself in a large circle and the dragon continues to follow him around. Repeated eruptions of dragonfire heat the rock so it glows red. There is no way he can climb it now. Even the floor heats up and Nathaniel is slowly cooked. He will not last long this way. Finally, he runs up the back of the dragon for a moment of relief. It is only a moment, since the dragon rolls over every time it is touched.

Nathaniel tries stabbing the dragon with his sword, but it has no effect. Its scales are like steel. The hours pass and he becomes weary. So do the teachers. He watches them come and go from their perch high above.

Finally, he gets in front of the dragon. It opens its mouth to blast him – and he throws his sword into its throat. It gags and coughs. The teachers look concerned. Nathaniel collapses from exhaustion, not caring about the scalding stone. He has won himself time to rest and plan.

Forty-five seconds later, the dragon spits out the sword. It resumes blowing fire, the teachers look relieved, and Nathaniel runs. He runs and runs and runs. Finally, thirty-six hours after he fell into the cavern, he is hit. The dragon burns him over and over and then stands on him. He looks up into its gigantic blue teeth one last time. Then he looks past it and sees a young Nino boy staring down at him. He can see his memories.

Five years ago, the Nino boy was handed a key with the image of a green Dinosaur and invited to the temple. He always felt a burning need to go and see it, but finding transport to such a distant location was difficult. On the way, he picked up hyperintelligence in a leaking psychospeeder accident, picked up the ability to control electricity after being teleported through a bad thunderstorm, and was then infected by nanobots that ultimately reached a stalemate with his immune system, giving him superspeed (at the cost of his stamina), the ability to detect any compound through his nose, and the ability to put himself into a coma. Later, he was hired to smuggle time crystals as the cost of transport, ended up swallowing them, and the nanobots pulled them apart and used them to rapidly heal wounds and slow his metabolism and extend his life. Only minutes ago, he entered the temple and was led to the observation platform – just in time to watch Nathaniel die. Suddenly, Nathaniel’s consciousness is inside him and their minds have fully merged. Two parallel life experiences now exist in the same Nino body. The Dinosaur is dead.

“I feel weird,” Nathaniel says, touching his smooth, white skin and black hair. It is strange not to have feathers.

“Your first reincarnation is now complete. You are a full member of the order. Your key will open all parts of the library,” a robed Meekon says.

“We were worried for a second that you had killed our dragon, for there is only one spacetime interface artifact like it, and it is only by being killed by a bluetooth dragon that one can enter second life,” another teacher says.

“You lasted far longer than any other, and this will give you many lives. Most only achieve eight or nine. Some might manage twelve or so. You are now living the second of thirty-five lives,” another teacher says.

The library is packed with information. Nathaniel learns that upon death, ripples are sent through time to places and times where he has previously been, sending him a body such that it arrives right on time. The ripples always travel at the speed of light both forward and backward so that the creation of the next body occurs precisely the same number of years ago (or hence) as it is light years away. The more points in spacetime he visits, the more points he can summon a body from and the better his future is assured.

Nathaniel has now lived on Diosis for nine years. He is forty-three years of age, not including his childhood on Ninosa before merging with the mind of the Dinosaur. It’s time to go exploring again. He wakes his Gruezhlings, still in the same bed where they were left. “Who are you?” Haticat asks.

“Nathaniel. This is my new body. I’m ambidextrous now, although my sight and hearing are slightly worse. I have thirty-four lives left,” he says. The four friends exchange old memories as Nathaniel verifies his identity. Then he takes his crew back to his spaceship and they leave Diosis. The adventure has only just begun.

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