Maria and the Third Appearance

Maria had come to Phoenix to look at the world history templates once more. They were contained in the huge data bank maintained by the International History Foundation. They had moved to Phoenix from their original home in Vienna in November 2120.

This had been a godsend for Maria. The trips to Vienna for her research were expensive and she had trouble with the interpretative guidance system. The guidance system government workers had said there was nothing wrong with her ear transplant, but she knew better than to believe them with all of the scandals they had been involved in last year.

Maria had been writing her own history template for the past three years and she had reached the turn of the century when the world moved from the late 1900’s into the year 2000.

The work was laborious. The facts were always there if she took time to assemble them, but so much of that time period was difficult to understand and now she labored under a great dread that she would be considered an expert on a piece of world history that she might not fully understand herself.

The blue and green glow of the history templates left her with a slight headache after a few hours and she would have to stop reading and close her eyes. When she did this she would try to think of appropriate and creative ways to describe what she had learned while at the same time remaining true to the facts.

The problem she faced was that the world she was describing was dark and held unimaginable horrors for the people of 1999. Trying to be creative with these facts was demanding even for her considerable writing skills and she would feel overwhelmed. She thought about the need to try and bring some hope and light to the lives of these people that inhabited the templates. The fact that they lived so long ago and had now been gone so long made reaching any of them on the spine connection impossible, so she had no direct access to their individual perspective apart from speeches she would read in the templates. Maybe she could talk about their lives in a way that made their harsh reality seem to have a point to today’s history students.

There was the confusion over Jesus and Mohammed. Nations fought wars over three separate religious ideologies. Not until many years later would carbon science technologies discover that the men were one in the same, the very same son of god writing an identical message in four different languages. The texts had fallen into the hands of interpreters that craved power for material gain, and a different text had emerged from each language. This had lead to generations of destructive wars where they routinely took one another’s lives.

The people of that time had also missed the second coming in the person of Mother Teresa. They thought she was important, but somehow missed the idea altogether on what she actually represented. Her teachings after the third appearance were first fully realized by the people of China, and were now the recognized belief system in the world, but completely unknown to these people.

They were satanized by a disease known as ‘cancer’. It never occurred to them that by eliminating printer’s ink that the problem would go away. Millions of these people had died from this horrible disease with no idea how to stop it.

There were the giant prehistoric airplanes that flew 30,000 feet above the earth in a very strange attempt to escape gravity rather than merely taming it.

They had a curious way with animals. They kept the animals locked in cages, unable to communicate with them using the animal’s language. It was written that they had not a clue what the animals were saying. Research with dolphins and monkeys and the development of the tone integration systems had finally changed the way animals were treated. Only then would they leave their cages.

Maria was tired. She was overly fatigued from the work of her troublesome history template and she was hungry too.

She felt sad now at this moment, alone in Phoenix without her family. She wanted to talk with her grandmother but she knew that the only spine connection would be dominated by others at this hour of the evening.

Maria put her head down on the edge of the glowing reading tray. The beam of its colors reflected off her forehead and highlighted the edges of her hair. Her watch spoke the hour to her inner ear and she realized how late it had become.

She was too tired to go on researching these long ago sad people. She had tried not to cry all day. It was no use now as she could feel the tears wash up behind her eyes in a pressure that demanded release. The first drop from her left eye moved in a steady current across her cheek and dropped with a gentle sound onto the tray below. It glistened back at her eyes seeming to ask permission to return home.

Her ear transplant vibrated the calling signal of her genetic twin Raina. She had picked up Maria’s stress rhythm on her internal sensors and knew Maria was crying. She didn’t know why, but then Maria wasn’t really sure either. “Hello Raina,” she said, “yes, I know but I’m OK really, I just got really sad for a minute, but I’m going to go get some nutrition now and maybe try to call grandmother later. Do you want to call her with me?”

Copyright 2005