Epilogue - Eternal Vacations of the Future - part 4

"The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it." -- Revelation 21:24-26 NIV

The Journey's End and a New Beginning

The first mystery that greeted the survivors of the million year journey was the true nature of all but three of the twelve Perfect Futurists. The great secret that had been hidden from them all, even preventing time-travel back to their past to learn of their origin, was that the Originators and the first three of the twelve to die, were the only actual humans ever involved with the interstellar voyage. The remaining nine, as well as all of the other passengers on the star craft, were cyborgs, implanted with memories of ancestors and with an almost uncanny respect and awe for the three human Futurists. Of course, it was not known to them that these three unique Futurists were not like them. All had been designed to see, but not see, the reality of the three master Futurists. When these three died after only a hundred years, they were given special burials without any of the usual rituals all received. Thus the myth that their deaths after a hundred years were no different from the death of those in their own species that only lived for a hundred years was able to persist even after an occasional analysis of the records of their voyage. It was too improper to voice those discoveries to the rest of the travelers, thereby ensuring that no one realized their own true nature and the different nature of their designers, the Originators. All imagined themselves humans and normal descendants of the Originators, though some doubted the stories of proto-humans with almost animal instincts and abilities that were believed to have been of the same genetic structure as the Originators, and thereby, of themselves as well.

The second mystery took some time to dawn on them, for they were so glad to finally have reached their long-desired Homeworld, that the newness of their permanent world and its various moonscapes and intriguing flora and fauna, kept them distracted for what seemed years or decades, or centuries. Time had lost its earlier meaning and intelligent life-forms and what constituted family bonds had also lost their meaning as they had learned and accepted the remnants of biological humans that they had been able to rescue from Earth's past. Both humans and their transhuman descendants lived in mutual respect and unity with each other because of their common ancestry and because each had needed the other to survive Earth's eventual destruction by the Supernova, as well as the equally essential origin of the transhumans with their para-human consciousness and increased longevity for the journey through the galaxy which had enabled them to rescue the descendants of the race that designed them.

After what seemed like years, or decades or centuries, only along the shore of their oceans did some begin to notice odd footprints in the sand that seemed to appear out of thin air, and because of the relentless surf, to disappear as quickly. Also at times, they were able to make out wisps of evanescent structures in the early morning along the beaches of what appeared to be floating structures in the skies. These were so transparent that it was often thought that they were mere tricks of the light in the early morning or of the human or transhuman eye.

After much theorizing, speculating, and scientific experimentation, they were able to piece together an amazing reality. They were not alone on this world. There were previous inhabitants, but these seemed to exist in another dimension in close proximity to theirs. Further mystifying them, was the realization that the structures they were seeing were not structures on the land masses of their world, but in the very skies. The last perplexing discovery was that these co-inhabitants with their wispy sky cities were not being seen as they actually were now, which was not fully understood, but as they would be centuries hence. Many minds were devoted to the task of contacting their planetary neighbors that were out of synch with their own time, and to hopefully realigning both time lines and dimensions, if practical, so as to jointly share their adopted home world as well as share each other's knowledge and culture.

It had been hoped that more could be learned about the Cosmic Cloud Entity that had made their survival possible and had found them instead of letting them continue venturing out of their own galaxy in search of what eventually came and found them. It was known that the Cosmic Cloud enveloped the Seventh Moon, and though they were permitted to orbit the Seventh Moon, and sometimes seemed to enter its inner atmosphere, they perceived or were perceived by the Intelligent Being inside the Glowing Sphere, yet always found themselves in orbit around the Seventh Moon, and thankfully returned to their own world until they felt need to try to perceive or be perceived by their Source of Beauty and Light.

The third, and possibly the last, mystery was not revealed for a thousand years. Though unspoken, all the wise men of the Homeworld were ever aware that in trillions of years they would have to be uprooted, with the Cosmic Cloud Entity as their guide and Prime Mover, in search of another universe to recolonize for the next life cycle of their new universe. Though the larger multiverse had no possible end and they would always be able to find another doorway into a new future, this did not satisfy them. Their common goal was to finally discover--if such a discovery was permitted by the Omega String theory given to them by the Cosmic Cloud Entity, centuries earlier--a perfect alternative to the transmigration every trillion-year cycle. They had enterprises that would require more than a trillion years to perfect and reperfect. An interruption of even a thousand years would set them back a million years. Some realized though, that this ever-elusive final solution to the ever-changing location of humanity's descendants was similar to the mind-expanding struggle and creativity that had set them on a course towards the stars and the galaxy's edge millions of years in their past.