The Heads Inherit the Earth

Before mankind had been all but wiped from the world, deep in the Peruvian jungle a successful young tech mogul was marching through the bush in search of answers or really one answer. The answer she has searched for her whole life. The one question we all have sitting in the back of our minds, the one answer that is the most elusive. The question that has formed hundreds if not thousands of religions. The question that has haunted Julie most of her life. What is beyond death?

Julie was forced to confront this question younger than most. At the age of 9 her parents were caught in a fire, their house in Paradise California burned along with the town. She had narrowly escaped only because a burly firefighter had risked his life to break through a burning wall to save her. Those memories still haunt her today, the soot covered face of the firefighter, the screams of her parents as they burned alive, the horrific smell of the smoke and worst of all the feeling of loss, the feeling of having no control. She was haunted every night by dreams of the world itself burning along with all of mankind.

She was quickly swooped up by social services and landed in a San Francisco orphanage named Edgewood. It wasn’t long after the fire that the firefighter returned to the orphanage to give Julie a small fire proof safe that was all that remained of the her parents belongings and all that was left of her old life. Julie's green eyes glaring up at the firefighter “John can’t you take me in I don’t want to live here” Julie said. “No Julie my work is too dangerous and I wouldn’t want to put you through more loss” as John left she opened the safe with teary eyes and within was a gold heart-shaped locket with a picture of her father on the left and her mother on the right, a note they must have written just before they had died that said “Julie if you make it out of this we want you to know that we love you deeply and we promise we will see you on the other side” She took the locket and put it around her neck it slid past her black hair. That gold locket would rarely leave her skinny neck.

She quickly became obsessed with researching death, reading books from many religions and researching first hand accounts of near death experiences. She searched for anything that might explain existence and what came after. Julie saw the computer as a companion and a point of fascination she started to learn how the computer ticked. Her teacher Michelle a middle aged woman with a kind face and blonde hair took a liking to Julie and helped her learn to code. She was gifted at creating archetypes of computer systems that closely resembled the human brain and it’s memory system. With each day her talent and obsession grew.

In her teen years the weight of the sorrow led her to rebel against the stringent rules of the orphanage. She created a fake ID and snuck out creating a persona in the party community of San Francisco as a young tech wild child. She used her inheritance to get into exclusive clubs for the rich and famous. She would hob knob with techs biggest names. One such club was called The Battery a classy yet dimly lit social club with leather puffy chairs. This is where she met a young entrepreneur Jimi with short mousy brown hair, his green horn rim glasses drew her attention. She could tell he was different. He would inspire her not only to start her own company but to sneak off to Burning Man which would lead to one of the most life changing experiences she would have.

While at Burning Man she danced for days and saw a wild and different side to life. This was the first time since before the death of her parents she experienced joy. She had read that the hippies of the 60s had spiritual experiences through the use of psychedelics. So she slipped four tabs of LSD onto her tongue and experienced for the first time a deep connection to the universe and it’s eternal love for all, she felt like all things were meant to be and that she had a purpose within this life. As the day went on the experience got stronger and stronger until she had a vision that was more real than real life itself. Her vision showed her memories turn to code and integrated into a computer. Seeing the code floating through the air she finally saw the answer to the problem she had been trying to solve.

Once she had finally graduated from the orphanage she founded a company whose mission was to map the human consciousness and memories then download them into a quantum computer so that no child would ever have to lose their parents again. She used the rest of her inheritance to found the company along with the investments she acquired from her the friends she’d made in the clubs. Her company was a fast success and through her other brilliant inventions she quickly became one of the worlds billionaires.

Ever since her trip at Burning Man she had been questioning reality itself and needed to know more. So she decided to take a vacation and visit the Peruvian shaman Inti a shaman renowned in the tech world for guiding people on extraordinary vision quests. Beneath the canopy of the jungle with insects buzzing and monkeys swinging from trees she made her way along with a group of fellow seekers to Inti’s hut where the vision quest was to take place. When they arrived he instructed them to sit each in a circle. Inti began his dance, his song and his offerings to the great mother. He danced around each of them singing and blowing tobacco on their heads. Once this was done the ayahuasca was passed around and the vision began. Julie felt she was being lifted from her body and she could see her spirit leave as she floated up far above the earth into space where she was greeted by a large old woman who embraced her. “Julie oh sweet Julie I’ve been waiting for quite some time for you to come.” as the old woman spoke, the sorrow of the loss of her parents was slipping away as if the woman’s voice alone was healing Julie. She was so overwhelmed she couldn’t speak but the woman was not offended “I’ve been trying to send you warnings in your dreams, the company you’ve built is breaking the cosmic laws of this universe and has caused the fire tribe great anger. No creature is allow to live forever and if you cannot stop your company then the world will burn.” As the great mother said this she snapped her fingers and the world below burst into flames. “If you cannot stop your company, you must gather those who care for the earth and bring them to where the last wild river is. There you will bring mankind back into harmony with the earth.”

She was back in her body and before she knew it back in San Francisco arguing with her board of executives that they needed to disband the company. They just laughed and called her superstitious, she was quickly voted off the company.

It wasn’t long after that the world did begin to burn and with all the worlds forests turning to ash the climate crisis accelerated, it became impossible to predict the seasons. One year winter was as hot as summer and spring as cold as winter. This caused mass crop die offs and with it starvation. The worlds water supplies were poisoned from the ash from the cities that burned. Nature itself had turned against mankind for they had broken it’s laws. Within 10 years almost the entire world had blackened and those who didn’t die in the fire, died of starvation or dehydration.

Only in a remote town in New Mexico on the edge of a wild river that banked a jagged mountain remained the last vestige of mankind. Julie had taken all her wealth and created an eco-friendly community that drew in people who believed as she did that mankind needed to return to nature. They created permaculture landscapes and food forests. Just as the vision had shown they were spared, the seasons remained the same in this small section of the world. As the years went on they would start to heal the surrounding areas. As their leader Julie sent out search parties and sometimes those search parties would bring back people who’d been lost in the ash for years surviving off canned food and bottled water. She soon found herself surrounded by people who had lost loved ones in the same way she had and this gave her a sense of belonging and building the community a sense of meaning. One day a party brought back a man barely alive his horn rimmed glasses blackened by soot. “Oh my god Jimi, is that you?” Jimi looked up and smiled “I’ve finally made it” he collapsed. Over the next several weeks the doctors nursed Jimi back to health and Julie came and visited every day. “I’ve been trying to get here ever since the world burst into flames, it seemed every time I tried something would get in the way, tornados, earthquakes, windstorms everything seemed to halt my progress. It wasn’t till I started to walk instead of drive that I could get anywhere. I’ve been so close to death so many times in the last several years I can’t tell you but every time I thought of you I would find food or the shelter I needed.” Julie and Jimi fell in love and eventually created a family in this new world they were building. As the years went by they had joy and faced challenges. Sometimes the ash would blow in and destroy their crops or some of their community members would get caught in the storm and not return.

After many years had passed, when her children were grown, Julie was walking along a forest path when suddenly the trees burst into flames around her. Thinking of her vision she smiled and said “this is a fitting end.” After she died just like in her vision she began to float out of her body into outer-space. She saw the Great Mother who smiled and waved and as if from a dream she opened her eyes to find herself surrounded by her parents and what appeared to be a nurse. Julie was sitting in a recliner with a wire attached to her forehead. “Let me get that” the nurse said as she removed the wire. “Welcome back to real life, we will take you through decompression in a minute as your memories of this life return” The look of confusion grew on Julie’s face. “I can see you have questions, the real world unlike the ING is a timeless place, where suffering and death do not exist, where you truly only live once, once being an eternity. In fact it was you that developed the ING as a means of giving greater meaning to this eternal life and as a well needed escape from the remembrance of eternity. Are you starting to remember?” Julie looked at the nurse with astonishment then Julie sighed “ah yes Interactive Neuro Gaming or ING” as she started to remember. Her mom smiled “I always thought that was a clever acronym.” Her dad looked up “I must say that was quite the rough one. All the pain and existential angst. Not to mention burning alive. I must say I don’t think I’d repeat that life.” Julie laughed “no me neither.”