Christina
The library that we excavated turned out to be part of an old university. We found a sign with an overview of the campus that gave us an impression of how large an area the university had covered.
Looking around the now lush area with forest and fields, it was hard to imagine that four hundred years ago, students and professors had walked here at what used to be the University of British Colombia. I tried digging for more information on the Internet, but after four nights of searching I gave up. If I’d been back in the Motherlands, I could have searched the Wise-Share, but I doubted I would have found any information there either.
Most of what we dug up was so deteriorated that we couldn’t use it, but there were some gems that we’d saved. Bruce Lee, one of my team members, found a glass jar with different things inside it and almost discarded them as rubbish. Luckily, I came by and spotted something I’d seen once before, albeit with a different design.
“Can I see that?” I asked and picked up the small thing when he handed it to me.
“What is it?” Bruce asked.
“It’s a device to store digital information,” I explained and turned the small thing in my hands. “And this one is in incredibly good shape. There was a logo on it that read UBC.
“How does it work?” Bruce asked me.
Carefully, I removed a cap and showed him what was inside. “Look,” I pointed to a small connector. “They would insert this part into a computer and that way they could read whatever information was on it.”
“Ahh,” he nodded and broke into a shy smile. “I have to be honest with you – I really wasn’t happy when I was ordered to help out here, but I’m starting to be intrigued. It’s like a treasure hunt of sorts.”
I smiled brightly. “Exactly. Back in the day, archeologists lived amazing lives full of dangerous adventures.”
“They did?”
“Yes, they were considered heroes by many and people even made movies to honor them.”
“Wow, that’s something. I wish someone would make a movie about me.” He smiled at me and I flashed him a grin.
“Maybe if you become the new Indiana Jones, they will.”
“Who?”
“He was a celebrated archeologist from the twentieth century and I’m a major fan of his work.”
“All right.” Lee looked down at the small thing in my hand. “So is there any way to find out what’s on it?”
“Uh-huh,” I said with excitement. “I brought a converter that we use when we come across things like these, but it’s back at the mansion.”
“Well, can we go and get it? I’m curious,” Bruce leaned in to see it better and his shoulder touched mine.
“What’s going on?” Boulder’s voice was low and menacing.
Bruce and I both whipped our heads toward Boulder and an audible gulp came from Bruce.
“Why the fuck are you rubbing against my wife?”
Lee had already moved away and shook his head. “I didn’t, we were just looking at…”
“Boulder,” I said – cutting off Bruce. “You’re being unreasonable. Bruce made a promising discovery and we were merely discussing it.”
Boulder’s gaze fell to my hands. “What is it?” he asked.
“I’ll explain it to you on the way back. I need something from our room.” I was already up and walking toward the hybrid, turning my head back to Bruce and the others. “Carry on, I’ll be back later.”
“What is it?” Boulder asked again when we were in the drone and flying back to the mansion.
“It’s called a flash drive.”
“What’s a flash drive?”
“An old-fashioned device to store information.”
“And how does it work?”
“Good question.” I held it up so he could see it. “What’s your first thought? How would this work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“Okay. I’m thinking there must be a way to activate the projector that shows the content.”
“There’s no projector in this thing.”
He frowned. “So how do I see what it has stored?”
“Try again.”
“Is it one of those water hologram things?”
“No.”
“Then tell me.”
I smiled smugly. “People carried this around but it was useless without a computer.”
“What do you mean? I’m still confused. Are we talking implants?”
“No. Before that. These things were used back when computers were something with screens and keyboards.”
He nodded but kept his eyes on the road. “They should have never done implants,” he said quietly.
Around fifteen years before the Toxic War, implants had been rolled out as a must-have item. People had jumped on board and paid huge sums to have computers implanted in their brains. It offered them the ability to speak more languages and access all the information on the Internet without the use of a device. Of course, none of those people back then truly understood the price of their upgrade until years later when the war broke out.
By the time hacking of implants really took off, people were frantically trying to get rid of them, but only a few succeeded and the rest died horrible deaths.
“The young people are getting implants back home,” I said.
“You’re kidding?” he asked with surprise.
“No, they say they’re safe, and it’s been so long since the war that nobody thinks it could happen again.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to pass on having anything implanted in my brain.”
“Me too.” I held up my wristband. “I like the old simple days better.” Releasing a deep sigh, I held up the flash drive. “Cross your fingers that we find good stuff on this thing. It will make the whole journey worthwhile for me.”
Boulder grew quiet and his jaws hardened. Maybe he wanted me to say getting to know him had been my highlight, but saying something like that would just give him hope that I would stay.
I couldn’t stay! Could I?
No, the thought was ridiculous. I had a life to get back to. My roommate and my friends were probably missing me like crazy. There was no way I could stay.
But I’ll miss him, a small voice peeped inside me – one that I quickly silenced.
Back at the mansion I almost ran to our room and fell to my knees, searching through my bags for the converter. I gave a small shriek when I found it and brought it to the coffee table.
“You wanna see?” I asked him.
“How could I miss it?” he said sarcastically. “After all, this is the highlight of your journey here.”
Ignoring his comment, I plugged the flash drive into the converter and projected the content up in the air.
“What is this?” Boulder asked in confusion.
“It’s the coding. Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” I muttered and navigated to get an overview of the content. “I see some videos, images, and text files. This should be interesting.”
“What videos? I don’t see anything.”
“Give me a second, I have to find a way to play them.” It took me a few moments but I finally got the first video to play.
A young woman came into view, her hair in a short bob, her nose big, and her eyebrows pierced by a ring. The camera shook slightly and her face scrunched up in concentration. “Smile,” she said and leaned against a young man who looked up at the camera, pushed his square glasses in place, and squinted a bit. He had stubble, unruly hair falling down his forehead, and a shirt that was wrinkled.
“I’m getting tired of all your selfies,” he said with a hint of annoyance, before he flashed a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Wait, you have it on video.”
“Oh, sorry.” The clip ended with the girl frowning.
“I hope that wasn’t the highlight of your journey?” Boulder said dryly.
“No.” I pushed the next video: a noisy food hall with young people sitting, standing, and walking around. “Hey, Mom.” A quick flash of the girl from before showed that she was filming. She waved at the camera. “Let me show you our fine dining restaurant here at campus.” The camera was turned around for a panorama of the dining hall. “Say hi,” the young woman called out to a group of young women at a table.
“Are you putting it on Facebook?” one of them asked with a stiff smile.
“No, It’s for my mom.”
“Oh, okay.” Two or three of the women gave small waves. “Hey, Nicole’s mom,” one of them said politely.
“And this is the feast I’m eating,” the woman who had to be Nicole narrated, and zoomed the camera in on her plate.
Boulder reached out to enlarge the picture flowing above the converter. “Meat!” He pointed to the two drumsticks on the plate that lay neatly next to a baked potato and some salad.
“Shh,” I said and kept my full attention on the film.
“So you see, Mom?” Nicole’s face came back into view. “I won’t starve, in case you’re worried about that, and I know you are because you worry about everything. Remember I love you and I’ll shoot some more video from my room later.” She blew a kiss. “Bye, Mom.”
Boulder crossed his arms while I eagerly brought up the next video. It showed Nicole in her room, and she introduced her roommate, a shy-looking young woman with lots of black make-up and blue hair.
“Wow, you think that was the fashion back then?” Boulder asked me. “The blue hair, I mean.”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see any other people with blue hair in the dining hall.”
There were other short videos of Nicole showing her mom around the campus, and every one of those videos was a treasure to me. Then there was a music video with something that made me blink from the heavy use of the bass.
“This is great!” Boulder grinned and rocked his foot to the rhythm. “The girl has good taste in music.”
“She’s not a girl, but clearly a young woman,” I corrected him, “and I don’t think that awful music has any positive vibrations.” I reached out to stop the music but Boulder wouldn’t let me.
“I wanna hear it.”
After three minutes suffering through the rock music I moved on to the next video.
“Hey, Mom, I hope you’re doing better and that the doctors will let you come home soon. I miss you so much and can’t wait to see you in a few weeks, but here’s a treat for you. It’s my favorite poem by Hera Bosley, and I hope it will speak to you as it does to me. It’s called ‘The Army of the Chosen Ones.’”
The video changed to a new setting. This time a pretty woman with long brown hair sat in a living room with a candle burning behind her. When she began speaking it sounded melodic but it wasn’t singing. It was spoken poetry and I leaned closer, taking in every word.
Grateful, but in the same breath, inadequate.
How could I ever possibly live up to the task at hand?
You see, my soul is not ascending.
My soul has descended to come here and live out this life.
Old soul is not an adequate description of me.
No, I am ancient.
I am beyond time and space.
I am beyond words and black and white definitions.
I am ethereal and I am light.
I am sound and I am vibration.
I am you and you are me.
We are the chosen ones.
We have been called here to transmute and transform.
What an honor,
Oh, but, what a fucking mess.
There are days where it would be easier to go back to higher dimensions from whence I came.
No, I cry, this is too hard. This is beyond repair. This hurts too much.
Why did I choose this?
Why would I have picked this time in history to come back?
Back to the ugliness and rampant racism.
Back to the sexism and the misogyny.
Back to the desecration of our mother earth.
It is so hard to watch but I am trapped.
Trapped between the veil of my soul and my human skin.
Paralyzed by fear.
Fear of not being enough.
Fear of never living up to the demand that has been placed upon my soul.
The massive undertaking of which we all have a part to play.
The destruction and the dissolution.
The rise and the fall.
The crumbling and the crusade.
The heroine's fucking journey.
Boulder laughed. “Did you hear that? She said fuck…”
I held up my hand and shushed him, wanting to hear it all.
It’s hard. And it is so dense.
It is up and it is down.
It is amazing and it is frightening.
It is everything and it is nothing all at the same time.
The reality of this reality is sometimes unbearable.
How do I witness without falling victim to it?
How do I surrender and take action?
How do I flow and stay grounded?
How do I honor myself and stay in service to others?
How do I balance the intensity of this duality?
The light and the dark
The love and the hate
The inspiration and the ignorance.
The enormity of what I’ve been called here to do is enough to swallow me whole.
And some days it does.
But not today.
No, today I am here.
Today I am ready.
Today I am filled with a reverence.
Unafraid and unabashed.
No shame, no guilt, no fear can hold me back now.
No, I have arrived at the feet of my destiny, my dharma, my purpose.
I was made for this. Quite Literally.
My skin, my mind, my cells, every fiber of my being was called here to this life.
To witness the rise, no, to actively participate in the rise.
The heroine’s journey.
I am you and you are me.
We are the chosen ones.
We shall stand in the face of this madness and we shall rise up in spite of it.
We shall give birth to a new generation of beings.
A generation with brilliant minds,
To inspire inventions that will counteract all the greed and all the hate.
A generation that will push back against the patriarchy.
A generation that honors the feminine and the masculine within us all.
We are no longer asleep nor are we afraid.
We are an army of chosen ones here to create change.
Unsure of what the future holds, but I stand steady in my grace.
The enormity of what I've been called here to do is enough to swallow me whole.
And some days it does,
But, not today.
Today, I rise.
Today, I fight back against all that has pinned me down.
Fight back? They say. A lightworker doesn’t need to “fight back”
And to that I say fuck you.
My journey does not need to look like yours to be effective.
We all have a part to play in this orchestrated madness.
My eyes are open to the light and the dark.
The winter of my soul would bring you to your knees, trust me.
Do not look at my fists of rage and judge me.
I look back at my life and see exactly when each finger was pulled down,
Fist forming,
Anger brewing,
Belly full of hot fire.
How did we get here? Where the WOMEN are looked at as less than?
As second class citizens?
The Women? The life givers? The portals? The mystics? The truth tellers?
Who decided this? When did this come to be?
I’ve been in other lifetimes where we were honored and revered.
Where the blood that we menstruated was considered sacred,
Not shamed and hidden away like a dirty secret.
Not looked at as gross but honored in rituals for its literal life force energy and power.
I do not know how this came to be, but I am here, and I will fight back.
With a belly full of fire and a heart full of light,
Because I am allowed to be a beautiful juxtaposition of compassion and rage.
You see, we are all playing our part, our role,
and I’ll be damned if I bend myself to fit in your mold of what that should look like.
No, I have been bent and distorted,
I have been held back and I have made myself small,
I have walked on eggshells,
And I have bitten my tongue.
I have kept my opinions to myself for far too long.
I stand here with my scars and my broken limbs,
I stand here with my love and my anger.
My voice may tremble and my hands may shake,
But I refuse to sit on those sidelines any longer.
I stand here as a representative of the army of chosen ones
Here to create change.
The enormity of what I have been called here to do is enough to swallow me whole.
And some days it does,
But not today.
I swallowed hard, choking down emotions from the power in her voice and the knowledge of what this woman would have seen in her lifetime.
“What a bunch of nonsense,” Boulder muttered beside me, but I was too much in awe of this battle cry from a time long past to answer him.
I wasn’t sure exactly when this had been recorded. Nicole’s and Hera’s clothing, the flash drive, and the surroundings indicated some time between the years 2010 and 2020.
“I have to show this to Pearl,” I said softly, my heart beating like a drum from the excitement of finding such a treasure.
“What’s so special about it?” Boulder asked. “Except that it’s painfully long and boring.”
I looked up from my position on the floor. “Did you even listen to her?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“And what did you hear?”
“A lot of fancy words.” He sighed with annoyance. “She looks like one of those hesitators.”
“Hesitators?” I drew my brows together. “What are you talking about?”
He crossed his arms. “You know, one of those people who sit and do nothing in quietness. Feeling all big and mighty because they’re sitting and hesitating. As if that’s somehow better than getting stuff done.”
I tilted my head. “Do you mean meditating?”
He shrugged. “Is that what it’s called?”
“Yes, Boulder. And meditating is not the same as hesitating.”
“Looks the same to me. They don’t do shit. Just sit there and roam around their feelings and emotions or whatever. It’s all bullshit to me.”
I got up from the floor. “Have you ever tried meditation?”
He snorted. “That’s for Momsies.”
His answer provoked me, and already fired up from Hera’s feisty poem, I faced him. “Thank you. I know you mean it as an insult, but if you’re implying that you’re incapable of mastering your mind and it takes female power to do that, then I’ll take the compliment. Although, just for the record, it’s untrue. There are plenty of deeply spiritual men who master meditation. Nmen are just not disciplined enough to stay quiet for that long.”
“We could,” he defended himself. “We just don’t want to. It’s a waste of time.”
“You know what’s a waste of time?” I said without looking at him. “Discussing this with you. You’re not evolved enough to appreciate something as fine as that poem or meditation.”
“Hey, where are you going?” he asked when I gathered up the converter and the flash drive and moved to the door.
“I’m going to see Pearl, and I suggest you give me some space.”
“Space – what’s that supposed to mean?”
I made a frustrated sound in my throat and closed the door hard behind me. For a month, I had spent day and night with Boulder, and right now he was getting on my nerves. First his macho behavior with Bruce for touching my shoulder, and now his criticism of something I found beautiful.
We’re incompatible, that’s why. And it’s a good thing really. It would have been terrible if I’d fallen in love with him or something stupid like that. Thank Mother Nature that I haven’t.
Below my inner dialogue there was an emotion, as if a small part of me was trying to get a word in, but I pushed it down, refusing to examine what stirred down there.