The Big Return
A science fiction short story about returning to simpler times.
We’ve lived for about 100 years since the Big Return. Currently we are kind of forgetting what it even was about. Nowadays we carefully break down a sick world brick by brick back towards health and we receive those that will dissolve us towards heaven into our midst. Together we are returning to a simpler, more essential life, generation after generation. And all around us forests are growing and new species return to life every day.
Normally the diggers retrieve a new life from our Earth Mother. They carefully dig it up at a birthing site and bring the new life in its pod to a home or center, where a family will open the pod and after a few days, the new life will open its eyes and start to breathe surrounded by a receiving family. Others favour the birth by fire method, which seems more lazy. And there are weird cases when broken bodies have to be rushed to a broken car, put inside for the exact moment when both they and the broken car unfolds into the whole thing and the people within the car come back to us.
Most new arrivals need to be guided for a while until they are strong enough to walk and speak. Often these receiving families already had a home prepared for the newcomer. Sometimes they first need to go to a recovery home. Often they are frail because they are still so close to Mother Earth and not used to being separate from her. At first, for the newcomers their world is small, yet they still carry the wisdom of the earth with them. And only as their wrinkles start to fade, they become strong enough to help with the great work of our times, cleaning up the earth. Many begin with positions of paperwork before they’re ready for the more practical stuff. Yet in these positions, they often guide us with their earth wisdom and sadly sometimes with poisonous moods or ideas. Leaving the embrace of the Earth Mother makes some go bitter. Then it may take years before they find their true innocence back.
Our family had two strange occurrences that broke this pattern of body retrieval. The first was that for years we lacked a male father in our family, though we had a few pictures of him. We had worried about the lack of his presence for some years. Other families would ask us where he was, yet there was no pod location to be found at any earth birthing center. Then one day, just like that, he walked in from the forest, where he claimed to have been shot from the earth onto a high rock. We just knew he had to be with us. We pointed him to our pictures of him, and, by his looks, he took after me. Also that he walked straight to our house from this rock in about 12 days could be read as a sign from the Earth Mother.
He had been called to us. Our Earth Mother even had provided him with a backpack of goods to make the journey, including a tent. He kept this tent a long while before he returned it to a restore center. From here his tent would be brought to a dissolve factory, that would return each different part back to its natural state in several steps. So strong was our religion and belief in our Earth Mother that whatever strange material would turn up in our garbage bags, we’d repair it over time and bring it back to restores to be dissolved into true nature.
My father turned out to be a difficult man, who often took charge of everything. And if he felt things did go his way, he’d take his backpack and would walk out for days and sometimes even weeks. And he always returned to be a bit grumpy in a way that would take some time to dissolve. Why then go into nature if it made him unhappy? As always we understood this, because of his recent closeness to our Earth Mother; people like him lacked the patience we had with our ways. I had been grumpy too, around people, returning from the beauty of nature. I’d need time to feel charged enough to enjoy nature again. I respected his ways. I just knew it would be very appropriate that he’d become the finishing touch of my life. It felt destined just so.
The other was when I was about 24,, that my mother welcomed a six-year-old girl in our home as my younger sister. My mother had for several years put posters around the neighbourhood calling for a young girl and very often crying for her too. Even I felt a rip in my heart for missing her. Then one day, she appeared out of the blue on our doorstep. A strange rough man had brought her from a makeshift pod in a forest and woken her in his basement on his own, she told us. He had carefully massaged her broken neck whole until she could breathe just fine. Then he had driven her in his car to our city and just released her, just like that, from his car. From there she ran straight to us, grasping us, from this wonderful sense of belonging to us. I’d never seen my mother so happy. And my father softened up so much after this. That was when he brought his camping gear back to the restore.
I personally had to get very used to having a younger sister that would grow smaller much faster than me and would soon dissolve into my mother to find her way to heaven. Lucky her to dissolve so soon. It was a strange idea that my father would only then have the sacred sex with my mother to finish the final ritual of the heavenly journey of my little sister. Sometimes when such rituals failed hospitals would help out to perform this dissolution ritual. But I saw my parents grow closer over time, so I just knew they’d be fine when the time was there.
Around countdown 19 I started to grow smaller faster and like many people my age, and in return, I asked the bigger questions. I had time to do so, until under 10 when often people would go very childish and only be interested in their direct surroundings and conveniences. After spending years as a destruction worker and before that as an engineer, I now went back to school for the essential unlearning. In school, we were guided to let go of all the knowledge we had deemed important in life. The better we unlearned the cleaner we’d dissolve towards heaven.
I started to look a lot at these final ritual videos of the sacred exchange that would finish someone’s presence on earth to heaven in full. I was embarrassed to let my parents know how preoccupied I was with the finishing ritual of others. I mean, it was not as if I hadn’t had lots of practice with the ritual with the women I had been with. But you know, you build up a lot of hormones over a lifetime. Sex, this wonderful feeling when through an orgasm you’d feel life flow back into your penis, and always the rubbing itch afterward. Perhaps it was because I regrettably never had performed a real finishing ritual for a son or daughter. Some of my exes had, but it had never been my task to finalise a life to heaven.
During my early unschooling, I dove into books on our future. People wondered how such books got to our libraries. If this happened too much, books would be returned to restores to be dissolved back into trees. It was special to read that far in the future monks would dissolve books by hand, letter for letter. We weren’t there yet. We still preferred machines. Books on our past, we returned to be dissolved. Why study what was finished? Most people only wanted to look ahead to the great work of humanity, restoring ourselves and nature to one beautiful paradise. And most of them were not at all as we remembered.
Then one day, one month before I would countdown to 16, I found such a book about a history that never happened. At my age reading books is tougher. The logic is harder to understand. Reading a book from back to front makes sense. But at this age, some, like me, get the crazy idea, reading it the other way around would make sense too. And this history that never happened, called science fiction, invited me to read the story backward. I almost went crazy doing so. What if time had been flipped I wondered? I shared this crazy idea with some friends and they all laughed at me. I then visited a friend of my father, a wrinkled man fresh from the earth. He just had started to work as a professor. People let him. New as he was, he made academic knowledge so important, that it felt better to give way to his talkative nature about science. But I had found he was very smart at dissolving ideas no longer needed for mankind. And he would answer questions few others would give a second thought.
We sat in his garden where his new wife, as wrinkled as he was, was preparing flowers from a vase to become blossoming nature again. I loved the tenderness with which she glued the flowers back to their stems with her glue knife. I told this professor about the book I had read both ways, backward and forward. I told him how if time would go the other way, that might make sense too in a very strange way. Wouldn’t it be fun to just consider the idea the direction of time had changed? He smiled at the idea as he spits perfect cookies onto a plate. I showed him I could spit a few too. Late evening I had sucked up enough stink earth into my behind to have the resource to do so. Just imagine us destroying such cookies to turn them into stink earth.
He considered the idea. “If time had been flipped,” he asked, “who would benefit from it? What kind of intelligence would do so, with what purpose? Should we build a machine that might flip the direction?” Then he looked very purposefully at me. “Just consider that we’d change the direction of time. We’d be crazy. Just imagine us not dissolving all poisons from the air and earth back to nature. Imagine us rather destroying nature, to fill up the earth with the big terrible cities and the crazy overpopulation we once had.”
As my father rode me home in his latest CO2-sucking car, cleaning the air as we drove, I just knew I’d ask my father and teachers to help dissolve our capability to ever build a machine that could reverse time. We’d be crazy.
Elsewhere and earlier, eh, or later..
“Well, how are the earthlings doing?” asked Quezatle. Oelailea tuned out from her giant display that vibrated with a 1000 different worlds each displayed on a thousand frequencies. “I don’t think they’ll ever become a potential nuisance again. We reversed their space-time continuum and they seem to have totally accepted their new reality. They’ve started to, generation after generation, dissolve themselves back towards apes.” Quezatle smiled a thin smile with his three feeding gaps, “I always thought their self-importance so overrated. Even the way they thought of us was so childish. As if we’d ever come with warships. It was a projection of their own. They had such aggressive ambitions, much like termite-like scavenger species, destroying their own planet and then looking for the next one. Luckily all we had to do was to flick one switch. And it seems they weren’t capable of comprehending what happened or changing it back. It’s just as well. We couldn’t ever run the risk of them polluting our society of advanced species.” <
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NOTE (only read when you want to peek behind the curtain of the magic)
For those who wonder what that was about and would love to know some about the motivation behind it.
This we do all the time, making our own situation logical both to our understanding and to our own role in it. We are happy when our opinion and situation match. Hence too many people match them, rather than check deeper or daring to question their logic. We often make very crazy things in our world logical or even normal in our minds.
Academics love pointing out flaws in the reasoning of others, but changing their lives, and becoming activists, mmm, only a few. Police agents often build up a distrust of many. They think they are the order, even when their actions bring havoc in many lives. Etc. This too we see around topics, like education. The system is too much regarded as normal. Too few people dare take distance from the actual madness. Because challenging the madness out loud, may break the spell that keeps the status quo, eh.. the peace. Few will seek and find other activists and hoorah, finally. Most, if attacked, defend their position and say change must be slower (because they fear risking their own safety, let alone comfort of what they’re used to. And yes, there is reason in that too). Many others do not even dare to think such things aloud. For them, the activists are the crazy ones. And not like Steve Jobs meant.
Now when you read this and say, but, how come education isn’t sane in your idea, there are many questions you might start to ask. When you say, but do you dare rip your world apart when new insights question all you ever believed in? I say that’s a good question for me to face.
