The Human Experiment

There was no sound but the clip of her boots against the remnants of the city. No breeze stirred. There were no signs of life here. A piece of glass ground beneath her heel as she stopped sharp and surveyed the scene before her. Cracked bitumen and crumbling brickwork, beer bottles, litter and debris, rusting frames of automobiles. Fleeting reminders of human civilization and all that remained of the Old World, slowly being taken back by Mother Nature. 

She sneered, dark lips pulling back to reveal sharp white teeth, blue gums, and a tongue as red as blood itself.

Arrogant creatures.

Not unlike the disease of cancer they had so unsuccessfully failed to cure, they had spread across The Great Mother Earth, a veritable haven of infinite resources, and had infected every corner of the planet with their greedy, toxic touch. No better than a swarm of locusts, they had sucked the planet dry of all resources, consuming the very life force they were so dependent upon.

She drank in the destruction, the tip of her red tongue poking between two wickedly white incisors. Human hubris was a veritable bounty for The Goddess of Destruction. She knew that chaos was a necessary catalyst for change in the physical world, be it disaster, natural or man-made. Only with the dissoluton of the old could the ego be destroyed and the illusion of duality liberated. Only then could the truth be heard and rapid changes made in evolutionary leaps necessary for the survival of the human species and all life on earth.

The Experiment depended on it.

Flashes of images crossed her mind's eye, of wars, disease, nuclear bombs, suffering, famine, pandemics, and protests. She flicked through the archives of time and slowed to the image of a drab city hub bathed in monochromatic hues, low cloud cover drizzling over a sea of people dressed in a blend of black, white, and grey, shuffling around one another like sleepwalkers set to a pre-programmed existence.

Hijacked by their own egos and enslaved to a fear-based system, poor Lambs.

Kali Ma strode through the crushed dream of human civilization. Time flicked at her heels, the pages of history turning with each clipped step. Around her the ghosts of people rose from the ashes, buildings righted themselves, weeds and vines shrank backward as though mother nature sought to retreat from the scene. Picking up her pace images flashed past her in rapid reverse as she turned back time.

The city returned to its prime, competing spires forming a phalic salutation to a patriarchal civilization; then began to shrink back to its origins, buildings vanishing back into the dreams of their Architects, people returning to whence they came, roads erasing, returning to open expanses of cleared land, trees righting themselves as the wilderness restored itself to it's full, unbound glory.

She took no small pleasure in the fleetingness of humanity's so-called greatest achievements. She walked back through lost times in history, long denied by the governing dogmas that veiled the truth from its people. Lost civilizations from times that predated the monotheistic recordings of human history by 280,000 years. The Roman Empire had known that to control the people, was to control the truth, and therefore any truth that contradicted the Church's doctrine had been destroyed. They had known that to control the people was to control their Knowledge.

Kali Ma came to an abrupt halt, her boot now coming to rest on a grassy cliff ledge overlooking vast oceanic horizons in all directions, the scene punctuated by small isles like bejeweled Emeralds amidst a Saphire landscape. Turning west propelled her to the center of a desert, her boots coming down onto sun-baked red earth. She closed her eyes and felt the drumbeat thrum of the land in her blood, the pulse of the flightless bird's feet pounding across the wide-open expanse of land and sky, the cross point between the material and spiritual worlds.

Turning another ninety degrees to the north, her right heel ground into the arid earth of the desert, and her left touched down into a footfall of snow. The snowy landscape was bathed in the cloak of night, the wind spirits shrieking their cold fury at the world. All-seeing vision allowed her to discern the colorful spires upon rounded domes poking out from under icy sheets from decades of relentless frost. Snow whipped across her face and clung to her long black overcoat as a crooning, haunting music filled the night sky. Colored lights lit the depths of darkness as though called forth by the melodic sounds that accompanied the screaming winds and distant wolf howls.

Spinning upon her heel once more, this time to the south, Kali Ma touched down on the moss-covered steps of the pyramid of Montegrande. At the highest point of the mighty pyramid overlooked a jungle wilderness stretching in every direction. The Amazonian Rainforest performed the sacred role as the lungs of the planet, the trees alchemizing carbon dioxide into oxygen and thereby creating a viable environment for life on earth. Humans wasted so much time and energy trying to prove their viability, rather than sustaining the very conditions that were paramount to their existence.

A river wound across the landscape in a serpentine fashion. With a respectful bow over five sets of bejeweled hands centered in prayer, Kali Ma honored the water serpent, the river shifting and undulating through the trees in the spirit world. The Serpent turned her head and flicked her tongue, tasting the air. The roar of Lionesses on the hunt could be heard across the dimensions.

Shifting north east bought her to the rocky overhang of a mountainside overlooking an ancient valley studded with rocks, shrubbery, and the occasional gnarled olive tree.

Looking to the sky she read the signs, pursed her lips, and folded her five sets of arms across her chest.

"You're late," she said when she felt a presence materialize behind her.

"An empty concept in a timeless realm."

"Figuratively speaking of course," Kali Ma smiled with a gleam in her fiery gaze as she regarded her companion "You haven't changed Gogyeng Sowuhti."

The Old Women stepped forward, long grey hair falling across a weathered face and ancient eyes. Her hair was strung with white feathers that fluttered in the breeze, tugged on by cheeky elemental spirits.

"Ah, it's nice to hear the ancient tongue. You look well yourself Digambari. Though clad in space you are not. Why do you uphold this partial glamour?"

"Even a wolf in sheep's clothing may grow accustomed to a certain way of life."

"Digambari has grown accustomed to wearing women's boots?" the old woman quirked an eyebrow.

Kali opened her arms wide, one set at a time, as celebrated by many traditional Indian dances. "If one must partake in earthly dramas, one might as well sample the earthly delights," she said, nonetheless dropping her glamour revealing a garland of dismembered arms and a skirt of severed heads atop deep blue-black skin. She sat atop a large lion the size of a horse who shook his mighty red mane out and roared, startling a pair of ravens into the sky with disgruntled caws.

"And you, Grandmother Spider? You judge me whilst wearing that human glamour?"

The elderly woman smiled, white teeth flashing against time-etched dark skin. "Am I?"

Out of the corner of her eye, the image of a large spider sprouted from the old woman's chest. The spider grew to the size of a mammoth, towering over The Goddess of Destruction upon her lion. Then in a blink, the image shifted revealing the old woman once more. "I am both forms, and I am neither. I am that which others expect to see ."

Kali rolled her eyes to the heavens and laughed with the roar of a hundred lions.

"The signs are nigh." She gestured towards a red glow in the sky with three bejeweled right hands. "One has to admire the delicious justice of Karmic Law. It is a simple matter of cause and effect that predetermines fate. 'Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you; wish for others what you wish for yourself'."

"Will they learn do you think?"

"That is for the Experiment to decide." Grandmother Spider smiled, closing her eyes and feeling the interconnected web of all life that was bound by her Being. She smiled over all her children caught up in the play drama of life. They toiled to and fro, searching so far for what was inside. But it was up to them to see beyond the illusions. It was up to them to believe again.

Gifting them with sentience and sovereignty, she had no control over their actions. Like all mortal parents, Grandmother Spider could only watch over and guide her children. But it was up to them to heed her guidance or fall into the defeatist grips of the illusions perpetuated by the Dark Ones. They were the Creators of their story, the Authors of their times Narrative. They had the power to create their own heaven or hell on earth.

The choice was ultimately of their choosing.

A white flash lit the sky as the meteor pierced the atmosphere, erupting into a flaming ball of space rock as it aimed towards the sleeping world.

Kali held up three fingers in each of her ten hands.

"Three."

She lowered her ring fingers.

"Two."

She lowered her middle fingers.

"One".

She waved her arms in a theatrical Ta Da flourish as the meteorite crashed into the land in a fiery explosion that repercussed across the globe, setting off latent volcanos, earthquakes, and hurricanes as it shifted the earth's crust and played havoc with the weather patterns.

"A grand entrance, though a touch melodramatic if you ask me," Kali commentated, the lust in her eyes belying her words. She shivered, delighting in the cataclysmic chaos as ash and dust rained over the land and the Deities.

"I suppose it is a valid means of convincing the people that you are a Sun God, to crash into the planet in a fiery blaze," she said as tiny figures, veritable giants to the average human but made small by distance, poured forth from the wreckage of the meteorite. Not unlike a disturbed horde of angry fire ants, the self-proclaimed Sun God's spread out over the site of impact and surveyed their newly acclaimed empire.

"Do you not find it strange, that the Confederation is entrusting the fate of the Cosmos unto human beings?"

"The Geneticists insist that they were the most structurally appropriate vessel for the purpose of the Experiment. You have doubts in the Design?"

Kali drummed her long nails against the severed head she carried as a talisman of liberation from ego and attachment to the body and form.

She waved an airy hand. "A mere concession of concern. It is, after all, a colossal gamble with near damning odds and we are placing all our chips, so to speak, upon the human species."

Sliding from her loyal lion she shrugged and pulled a large sickle sword from its sheath revealing a curved blade and ruby-encrusted handle. "Not that we can't sway the odds in our favor," she mused with a salacious grin.

Grandmother Spider smiled widely, the dust-hazed light flickering her form from old woman to giant spider, both images superimposed over each other. Reading the signs in the air and the earth she began to spin her web, creating new threads of thought-forms into life.

Kali Ma moved to stand at the center of a spiritual nexus, the invisible eye of the serpent that encircled the entire planet. She closed her eyes and felt the thrum of energy, the quickening of the earth, the grinding gears of time and space. Human beings had been asleep for 12,000 years.

It was time they woke up.

Lifting the Sword of Knowledge above her head she thrust it into the ground. The land cracked with the sonic boom of an earthquake. Holes opened up in time and space depicting flickering scenes of life upon earth. The rise and fall of civilizations, eras, consciousness. Wake and sleep cycles. The full glorious dance of life. Wars were lost, empires fell, corruption reigned. In one window the remnants of the Old World collapsed, teetering buildings toppling in implosions of dust.

Releasing the sword Kali Ma began to dance in the rain of debris from the Old World and the New World, chanting in tongues and waving her arms and fingers in intrinsic mudras. The many skulls and dismembered arms of her skirt and necklace knocked together in a percussive beat to her passionate celebration of the Creative and Destructive forces of the Universe.

The ground continued to rumble as the tectonic plates rubbed against one another, the clack of thunder adding to the base as a wild wind whipped her long hair into a seething dance of snakes. Thunder crashed as the heavens released a deluge of rain and lions roared in the wind.

Grandmother Spider sewed new seeds into the uprooted fields that Kali Ma ravaged. Planting new seeds into old soils. Breathing new life into old stories.

The Deities knew the importance of Circles and Cycles.

As suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Clouds of a distant dream and a different time melted away as the people stirred, waking up from a long enchanted sleep.

The New World was born.

The Human Experiment had begun.