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Prolog: - Disintegration Highway 911I had a dream. It is rare that I dream so intensively that I awake with tears, and more so that I remember the details long past the moment of awakening. This dream was such an exception. It seemed as if a year's worth of dreaming had been all rolled into one. I remembered everything as clearly as if it really happened; though I wished I hadn't. I wouldn't have had to deal with the dream vision then. Perplexed by it, and somewhat afraid that the details would fade from the mind before I understood their significance, I told everyone about the dream. I described every step of it as soon as we got together for breakfast. They all listened quietly, Ross, Heather, Sylvia, Tony, Dag, Al. They all agreed that the dream needs to be kept alive, because no one could tell off hand what it might mean. The dream was as strange as dreams often are. I was living with my dad on one of the top floors of a building several hundred stories tall, a golden tower situated on the crest of a mountain ridge. It appeared that we occupied an entire floor. We were surrounded by sunshine all day long, not by clouds. We lived above the clouds. Our world had become a world of easy living, of sun-filled days that had become taken for granted, and at the center of our world appeared this thing. It seemed to be visible in some form everywhere one looked. 'The Thing' was literally everywhere but also nowhere. Everybody knew it, not just us. Millions had seen it, but no one had ever been able to touch 'The Thing,' or one of them, nor had a single specimen ever been captured. It just was, and was always out of reach. It wasn't a machine, so it seemed, or a biological entity, but it had a definite shape and color. Its 'color' seemed richer than the rainbow, and its 'shape' seemed so profound that it was echoed in works of art, such as paintings, sculptures, and stories, even in public art in the parks and plazas. 'The Thing' had appeared first on television a long time ago. It had appeared time-sliced between the ads. People were puzzled at the time, as I recalled, but then they let it be as one of those things that simply can't be explained. Nor could its effect be explained. The effect that I noticed was that the television became bigger, and its picture clearer and brighter. Everything seemed to be effected by 'The Thing' in some way. Our world became less confined, richer, and brighter. Our houses became bigger, the world cleaner, the cities more beautiful. And above all of that, which our world became, loomed 'The Thing' like an all-pervading ghost that no one knew precisely and yet everybody 'knew' instinctively from the bottom of their soul for the simple realization that the world had been transformed by it. We learned in later years from astronauts that the universe itself was being transformed by it. They had spotted 'The Thing' on Mars, and by the time they came back to it the barren planet had become a green oasis with an Earth-like atmosphere, and soon thereafter it became ripe to be colonized with people. Many people revered 'The Thing' that had no name. They revered it and gave it noble names, but by and large its name remained simply, "The Thing," just as everyone had called it from the beginning. Some people also feared 'The Thing'. They feared that that the boundless development it caused would overburden our planet and thereby destroy it. However, those were but a few and their fears were ignored in the sunshine of the joy that this profound development unlocked. The joy became like the sand on the beaches, an ever-present reality that gets into ones hair and clothing, except in a nice way, that would be missed if it didn't. || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
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