Working Chapter 11 of my Is it for us alone? novel in progress

Anders stood by the shore staring out to sea. It was as close to home as he could possibly get. To some part of him this was in fact home, but that wasn’t the part of him that was stirring at this moment. The Anders who left his home back in Marstrand, the home that he had not left until his fateful experiment proved catastrophically successful, was the part of him that was stirring. It was a rare occurrence on his long journey to put his kin to a right and peaceful rest. Anders had taken a back seat in his own body as he let others that swam in his consciousness and guided his body, like pilots taking over at each new harbour that they visited. This was too striking though and too similar to home for Anders to take a back seat to.

He wandered along the shore of this foreign place. For once he suppressed those other consciousnesses, a difficult feat even with all this time to have practiced, and allowed himself to walk the shore in his own mind and experience it singularly. The shore here wasn’t rocky as he was used to, but the water called to him. There had been plenty of sea throughout his journey, sure. Some of it was probably more like his home than this, but this was the first time that he drew himself out. He pondered that perhaps it was because he was in such a remote location now, an in between part of the world, that no one was clambering to the front of his mind and he was able to enjoy it for himself. For himself was perhaps the wrong term as his mind continued to swim with thoughts and feelings of others, even as he had control. He enjoyed it for as long as it lasted.

So far the journey had been a heavy one on his heart. His body, fit and young, had been able to absorb most of the physical strain and when he was tired he was quick to use his vast knowledge to find ways of making his movement from spot to spot more efficient. It was[ Where I stopped writing on 30/11

Tried to figure out how long it takes a human body to decompose, but couldn’t find an answer.

Realise there may be a fundamental flaw int he travelling around the world to bury bodies. As such, trying to reconcile that.s] not as if he could truly bury every person in the world, he knew this. Even with an eternity to spend on the task, the bodies would completely decompose before he made it all around the world. So it was that his journey was more one of memoriam rather than action. He was deep in thought throughout the journey, though clearly those thoughts were not always his own.

There were far too many evil thoughts swimming around in his head along with those that remembered the great and the good. There was haphazard evil such as Anders, along with the darkest dregs of humanity. Inevitably the voices of evil and their victims were suppressed – too hard to confront those horrors even after there is nothing to be done about them. It would have been some justice if the combined memories of humanity could have pulled together to understand this evil, but even a peak into it was too maddening for the group to consider a full excursion and do they were suppressed. It had weigh laid Anders and rendered him unconscious somewhere in Northern Italy close to lake Como. There were worse places to fall unconscious in the summer, but it was far from ideal losing control.

(He wakes up on the banks groggy but pulls himself together. He decides he must continue east rather than heading south through the rest of Italy even though his hearts pull him there)

Was it water that was lapping up against him? It could have been that he was floating in it, buoyed by the memories of a race now past and the water just reaching over the threshold to splash his face. Anders was struggling with the concept of reality on his trip. With all the voices swimming in his head it was hard the determine what was real – so many points of view that it was impossible to grasp what reality actually was. Though he was now certain that he was not in the water and he was not getting wet. All he bed do was open his eyes and the truth would be revealed to him.

The ground was dry beneath his body, but he was in earshot of the lake and could clearly hear the water’s slow and rhythmic sounds. This must have been the origin of his dream of lying in water. It didn’t matter now, the dream would be pushed into the ether. He sat up and looked around him. Mountains shot up in the background, snowy peaks that he had a great longing for. Many a time he could remember swimming in the lake and skiing down those slopes – joyous memories that revitalised him. This was all a relief from the pit he had stared into a short time ago. This was why those memories had to be suppressed.

His subconscious had brought him to this spot, because he recalled quite clearly being a couple kilometres away before falling out of touch with the world. It wasn’t for a distinct travel purpose so it must have been to calm the raucous within. The majority was with him on this journey and they were happy to ignore those that were most unlike them.

Clearly his situation was far more complex than he at originally imagined. Each moment that passed something new emerged. Now on the bluff overlooking the water, somewhere on the road to Istanbul, it was if the memories and consciousness within him were forming groups and voting amongst themselves to try and determine his course. “Their Course,” is what they thought, but there was only one body left. It was vastly unhelpful getting anything done when your body had turned into a purely democratic force without any framework.

These, his own thoughts on the new workings of his mind, lead to a violent groundswell of emotion from the others and a vying for attention in the consciousness. It was a physically unpleasant experience that he had on a reoccurring basis – everyone thought they could be as strong as Lina, but no one else ever succeeded with that level of control. That episode was a one off. It’s just hard to get people to believe it. “SILENCE!” Anders shouted out loud and he regained full control from the squabbling masses that made his stomach churn and head throb. He filtered out and suppressed what he could and the his own consciousness drifted back to thoughts of a time before he had become the ark housing the entire human consciousness.

Immortality had been his goal. It was not necessarily that he wanted to live forever. That’s not to say he hadn’t originally considered it – imagine what he could do with all that time. The problem was that those pesky statesmen had forced him into it. Without their careless actions to take the path of least resistance towards their survival rather than making difficult sacrifices, Anders would not have contemplated immortality and he wouldn’t have started down the path towards ultimate knowledge. They were down buried deep in his mind. There was no doubt that they were there – they hadn’t committed suicide or died before the wave swept over him like that baby in Gothenburg. No, they were in there, but they were quiet. They must have known that this was at least partially their fault.

The sky was a clear and the ocean a deep blue. It was a perfect day on the road to Istanbul along the coast. Anders pondered his two thoughts further – why did he find this place so familiar within his own mind and where were the memories of those statesmen who had doomed them all? To answer the first was an impossibility. Though, it was a nice thought to consider how two regions can feel so similar and yet be so far apart and so different. Something about the ocean pulled him in and gave him comfort. Sure, the ocean was different, but that same salty smell permeated the air and light wind whipped up against his face. There was more common ground here than not. It was peaceful and he felt as such.

Then he snapped back and considered his other question. He had stopped walking now and sat on a bluff before the beach so that he could look out on to the ocean. There was a fully tanked SUV down the road that he was going to walk towards shortly to give his journey a bit of pace, but he wanted to rest his legs for a bit first. He considered the names of the statesmen in question. What they were doesn’t matter, but he used their names to focus his thoughts. It was as if the rest of his consciousness allowed him to work at this question and somehow even tried to aid him – everyone had a stake in remembering these thoughts.