Read Part I at ForthMagazine.com/Charlie-Thomas

Not involving himself in the mess of reporters frothing over Tony Growen upon his release from the hospital—a local miracle by any standards—Chester Goldsmith focused rather on the young man standing next to the newly awakened coma patient. Seventeen-year-old Tony stood now in front of cameras and questions, bright-eyed and freshly recovered from his head injury, while his friend Daniel Rogers was quietly ushered to the outskirts of the frenzy by a woman in large sunglasses, pulling the teenager by the hand. Chester squinted from a distance, trying to make out the face of the woman. Ah yes, he smiled. That was her indeed—Daniel’s mother, Bobbi, to whom Chester hadn’t spoken in several years, not since the release of his book on Daniel…the Wonderchild. While the ignorant local press affiliates drooled over their supposed miracle boy, Chester slipped back into his car and carefully followed Daniel and his mother away from the scene.

Chester took a moment outside the Rogers’ home, writing notes for himself before walking the small driveway to the front door. What a shame, he thought. Here they were, living in such meager circumstance in a small town in suburban Colorado, while Chester lived in a Penthouse on 5th Ave and mingled regularly with entertainment executives and politicians and famous folk—important people—and all of this due in great part to the success of his book on the Miracle Child—a success which might have been more distinctly tapped into by Daniel and his mother if only they hadn’t disappeared soon after the book’s release. Chester shook his head at the thought upon ringing the doorbell.

Opening the door casually, Bobbi Rogers quickly lost her breath. She stood wide-eyed for a moment, speechless and searching her memory for the face she vaguely recognized.

“Hello, Miss Rogers,” he smirked.

“Ch– Chester?” she said carefully. “What are you– How did you find us?”

“I’m a reporter, Miss Rogers. It’s what I do.”

Bobbi’s stomach tightened, curling at the thought of being tracked. Her breath became heavy.
“A reporter. Sure. Well, then you should know that it’s Copper now. Bobbi Copper.”

“Oh…right,” he said smiling still. “I just heard about your son’s friend Tony—his marvelous recovery—and had to make my way west to find out more. You know how much I enjoy stories on miracles, Miss Ro– Sorry, Miss Copper.”

“Yes, well–”

“No blood to the brain for seven days, and then suddenly a full recovery? No brain damage or rehabilitation or… Quite remarkable, isn’t it? Quite…impossible, huh?”

Bobbi sensed where this was going. “Well, as you can imagine, Chester, Daniel is pretty shaken up about the whole thing, Tony being his best friend and all.”

“He was there when the accident occurred, wasn’t he?” asked Chester.

“Uh…yes.”

“And present in the room when Tony first awoke, right?”

Bobbi again stared for a moment. “How did you know that?”

“I think we both know what happened in that hospital room, Ms. Copper,” he said. “I think we both know whose miracle really occurred, don’t we?”

“And I think you better go now.”

“Can I see Daniel?”

“It’s time for you to leave, Chester. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you so afraid–?!” he began, but Bobbi shut the door, forcing him to yell through the thin wood. “Your son has a gift, Miss Rogers! I have always believed it, and I know you do as well. Daniel Rogers has powers and the world should know, and he shouldn’t be forced to–”
“Leave us alone, please, Chester!” came her shaky voice through the door. “We just want to live a normal, simple life. Please!”

Chester chuckled to himself. Simple, he thought. How ridiculous. His rights to Daniel’s narrative had expired almost a decade earlier, but this story was picking up again, and this was his story. Chester already had a plan in mind. The young man needed to know for himself, needed to believe in himself, as Chester believed in him. But as long as the boy’s mother was around, she would keep Daniel from exploring his true nature. Now…how to get Daniel to the rocky Mountain Convention Center in Broomfield four days from now, without his mother? That would be the challenge.

The Venerable Doctor Hon-Yu Li was a world renowned spiritual leader—a traveling monk, spreading the message of an old-world, new-age philosophy, a teacher, a healer, and in some circles a prophet. There had been several books written by and about Ven. Li, cultivating his worldwide constituency into the millions and growing his speaking tours from outdoor gatherings to theaters to large arenas, where thousands would now pay to listen to his messages of truth and light, of peace and love and meaning. Among the many traveling spiritual gurus, Ven. Li was in fact one of the noble sages—a true believer in the virtues of inner peace and power, and in simple living, evident through his negation of surplus funds from speaking engagements or book sales, donating all excess to worthy causes and charities. He lived only on what he needed—the bare essentials. Which is why it took so many months to be convinced of an agreement in the authoring of a personal biography four years earlier by famed miracle and socio-cultural writer Chester Goldsmith. Their first meeting proved rather volatile, as the Ven. Li could sense a desperation and fierce worldly desire within the writer, energies that contradicted the monk’s general state of being. Though after a few further congregations, the Ven. Li inferred that it was not mere money which motivated Chester, but rather fame, significance, acceptance—the need to be loved. And it was through this understanding that Hon Li developed compassion for Chester and accepted the author into his life, with the hope of not only spreading his truth through the pages of another major publishing venture, but also perhaps to take on one more pupil, to help one more empty seeker of external gratification find his true self and real meaning.

The book sold marvelously. The mission to enlighten its author, however, proved fruitless. Which is why the Ven. Li still held much empathy for Chester and granted him welcome to his talk at the Broomfield Convention Center upon the author’s request. It had been at least a couple of years since he’d seen the writer, and Hon Li thought it to be quite synchronistic that Chester happened to be in Colorado at just the time his tour had taken him through the Rockies. Chester considered synchronicity as well, but from another angle. That Hon Li was about to speak in Broomfield, just three hours from Lonestar where Daniel Rogers was now living and just three days after Chester had discovered this fact was all quite miraculous. An unannounced crossing of his two former subjects could, Chester suspected, result in something very interesting. The Ven. Li was known for his ability to attract and discover clairvoyants and healers, but no one the monk had met, not even Hon Li himself, was a true healer, not like the one-of-a-kind teenage boy who Chester believed was living anonymously in Lonestar. The powers that be wanted this crossing, Chester thought, and he was a part of it somehow—the coordinator, the messenger, the facilitator—and the world must know this.

After following Daniel to school the next day and observing as the boy interacted with the other teenagers, he discovered Daniel was in fact now a very plain and regular young man. How shameful, thought the author. However, through this mild investigation, Chester noticed a unique bond between Daniel and a young lady with short brown hair and pale skin. A girlfriend, perhaps. At the very least, someone to whom Daniel was obviously attracted. And wagering on the power of teenage hormones, Chester took liberty to uncover the girl’s name and a piece of writing she’d discarded from a notebook. There’s a lot one can learn from someone’s trash, and Chester was an expert at this.

Within a day, he had mocked a letter from the girl and slipped it into Daniel’s locker:
Dear Daniel, I just realized that a great person is going to be in town and it’s someone I really believe in. I didn’t ask anyone else, but I want you to share the experience with me, if you want to. It’s tomorrow night and it’s at the Broomfield Convention Center. I know it’s sort of far, but if you REALLY want to be there…I know you’ll be there. But we can’t tell our parents and we have to meet there, inside at our seats at 7pm. I’ll leave your ticket at Will Call. And we can’t talk about it at all before we get there. I know this all sounds crazy, but I’ll explain later. Just please come. It would mean the world, Danny. You would be the true rock-God.
XX, Mona

Daniel Rogers was born on March 22, 2012 at 6:23 a.m. at St. Andrews hospital in Rochester, Minnessota. All the papers had reported it accurately. A picture of the Baby Rogers was on the cover of every local, national, and foreign newspaper, under large headings that read “Wonder Baby” or “Lone Rogers” or, according to translations of the foreign papers, something like “Miracle Baby.”

From looking at Miss Bobbi Rogers, one would not be able to tell from the outside, apart from the large hump in her belly, if she were indeed a female or a male. However, the compelling part of Miss Rogers’ story lay in the fact that one would be equally confused when viewing underneath the woman’s clothing. For in fact, Miss Rogers was not simply a hermaphrodite; she was, according to modern medical science, the only known living mammal in recorded history to have been born with both functioning female and male sex organs. S-he had ovaries that produced viable eggs as well as testicles, which produced fertile sperm.

Remarkably, with the right kind of positioning and a strange, slightly uncomfortable—though highly pleasurable—action, Miss Rogers could actually have sexual intercourse with herself and self-procreate. Hence, the miracle Baby Rogers. The first human to be born from the efforts of a single human since the Baby Jesus.

No one was quite sure what the Baby Rogers would be once out in the world. On the ultrasounds and cardiograms and other dozen medical exams performed throughout the birth, the doctors, who were baffled, saw nothing physically wrong with the baby from the inside. And they were quite right, as the baby was born perfectly healthy, which according to them was indeed a miracle of sorts. Though, no one could foresee in what state the baby’s brain would be. In other words, would he be challenged mentally in some way? Would he be deaf or blind or perhaps somehow intellectually deformed? A question that would prove impossible to answer until the child had reached an age at which normal infants begin to respond to regular stimuli. For now, though, the Baby Rogers seemed perfectly and wondrously perfect.

In the year 142,304, the original human star called “Sun” finally burned itself out, becoming the white dwarf it was always destined to become. Life on the original planet persisted for almost two millennia, adapting as it were to the cold, harsh climate of the planet they still called Earth. But finally, in Cosmological Decade 18, two full space decades earlier than expected for the Degenerative Era’s birth, the Sun’s dwindling energy had completely defused, and the original planet called Earth became uninhabitable.

I am fortunate to be a descendant of one of the Presidential Star Union members, the few who were afforded leave from the planet on the early Star Gazers in search of a new home—a new star that hadn’t yet completely lost its heat. We do not know what happened to the rest of the planet, for that was over forty-seven millennia ago, and our historic digitabs have only recorded vague images of the Earth as it once was.

And what a beautiful place it must have been. There are simulations in the digitabs of bluish skies and within them great, ashen clouds and the species called bird—the flying things that slid along the air with feathers and wind. And the natural oxygen pumping from the hearts of the species called plant, which existed in bulk all along the landscapes and underwater jungles—the species which exist now only in the growth tubes of Laboratories 5 & 12. Why they didn’t preserve the birds, we don’t know.

Though the Earth seemed tragic as well… If the records are true, they read of massive conflicts called wars, wherein groups of people fought with technology designed to expire one another over differences in beliefs about the reasons for existence and the proper modes of living on Earth. Those so-called differences are quite unfathomable now. All of us here, at Station House, understand the nature of humans as a singular, unique entity among the stars, a fragile and fairly insignificant creature, with no need to fight…for this is who we are, all of us together.

Still, I envy those early humans, what their lives must have been like when not fighting in wars. They must have spent all their time outside under the blue sky, beneath the burning Sun, among the plants and the birds and the other species; how they must have loved and appreciated every moment of their bright and colorful planet and the warmth of natural light.

Today the sky is black. There is no more light that is natural—only produced now by the generation tubes and star panels facing Codex. We are the descendants of the union, who found Codex 115—the star around which our station orbits, drowning the last whimpering pump of energy from the surface of this burnt white dwarf. It still emanates enough heat to be useful for our growth and sustenance, but creates no fresh nuclear fusion—that much we’re sure of—and so eventually, like the original star Sun, Codex too will go dark, and there will be no stars left to orbit, and the Degenerative Era will pass into the Black Hole Era, and all matter and energy of any kind will cease to exist.

Sometimes I question why, what is the point of our own continuing. What is this tendency to survive that we inherited upon our delicate births? All things expand outward, all things change and grow. All things exist and then do not. What is it that makes us, the humans, desire for life? Is it enough to know that I will live as an individual, even though my species is dying away, and that eventually there will be no things, no history, no record at all of any human existence? What is this instinct, this need for self-preservation, when somewhere in the dark of time and space, all memory of us will be lost—unpreserved, unappreciated—and is this loss in record also the loss of meaning? Do we mean anything at all?

I look into my wife’s eyes, into my small daughter’s pure and smooth face, and I feel love and meaning and fear and despair all at once. In my small corner of the Universe, in my strange ability to think and contemplate the reason for my life, in their eyes, I find the wanting of more love…and the desire to transcend the fear. This is what keeps me moving, keeps me surviving, keeps me in meaning: This desire for love and relation and for overcoming the challenge of hopelessness. I will love and be loved. I will overcome this fear of non-existence and the despondency of non-meaning. And we shall continue to mean something and to survive, until we war with the gravity of a new era, sucked in bone-dry and disintegrated back to the nothingness from which we came. No yesterday, no future, only now, only this. Their eyes, my desire, my innate tendency, our legacy of survival, of being human, of living and loving and dying. This is our mission. This is our meaning. And that must be enough.

“I noticed you looking in my direction yesterday, in line for the lunch,” he said, taking a step toward Kendra. “But I thought nothing of it. I didn’t expect another incident. Of course, who would?”

Kendra took a step back, preparing to run if necessary.

“You noticed me doing what?” she asked carefully.

“Looking,” the man said. “It’s what you’re doing, you know. When you far-touch, it’s called looking, or seeing.”

“Seeing?”

“Yes,” he nodded, taking another step in her direction. “The Far-Touch is called Sight. And the brightness, the reason for all your far-touching, the heat emanating from the Top Fire—it is called Light. At least, that’s what the Far-Touchers used to call it. I haven’t known any for many years.”

“Who are you?” Kendra asked. “I am Doctor Lowell. I am the head doctor of the Home.”

“Doc Cramen is the head doctor,” Kendra said quickly. “What are you trying to pull?”

“Cramen is a figure head,” the man said. “Someone to play nice with the Homers, run the day-to-day, and he does quite well, but… I run the Home. And if anything goes wrong here, you understand, it’s my responsibility to rectify the issue.” He took another step forward.

“Well, nothing’s wrong here,” Kendra said. “Everything’s just right.”

“Oh, I’d have to disagree there.” The man took another step forward.

“Stop!” Kendra yelled. “Stop or I’ll run. What do you want from me?”

“You must come with me, Kendra,” the man said. “I have to teach you again, to live without the sight. It’s for your own benefit, and the benefit of all our people.”

“You want me to stop far-… To stop seeing, huh?” Kendra said.

“It’s for the best. Trust me.”

The Homers only ventured outside once in a great while, accompanied by the doctors and workers, and were told never to go more than a few feet away from the Home’s grounds, where the tree line started. But Kendra knew this is what she must do—she understood that Homers lived in the Home and that Far-Touchers went to the Far-Touch cities and lived among their people and in their strange world, whatever it may be. So Kendra waited for morning, when the Top Fire would be overhead, so she could stay warm on her journey into the unknown.

Justas Kendra far-touched the first sliver of white heat beaming through the cracks in the wall vents, she rose slowly, closed her eyes once more and took a breath in to prepare. She affixed her outdoor slippers tight, wrapped around her shoulders a winter shawl, and leaned down to kiss Elle’s cheek before heading away, perhaps leaving her friend forever. Elle smiled awake very gently—a sad smile.

“Goodbye,Ken,” Elle whispered, feeling for Kendra’s hand to squeeze one last time. “Don’t be a stranger.” Elle’s smile faded, and Kendra looked down, sadly as well.

“I’ll come back one day,” she said. “I promise.”

Kendra kissed Elle’s closed eyelid once more, slowly and deeply, saying goodbye to her sleeping friend and farewell to the darkness she had always known.

Kendra snuck quietly down the long entrance corridor to the Home, using only her touch now, for she knew the home better that way and the far-touch was confusing her. She found the outside doors to the Home, and with eyes still closed, pushed open the doors and stepped into the brisk morning heat of the Top Fire, which for the first time now turned the inside of her eyelids into a different temperature than that of her expected darkness. Slowly, Kendra squinted as her eyes opened into tiny slits, and… Great Top Fire, the most intense heat poured through her eye bulges like thunder through the walls! Her eyes became ablaze, her mind overcome with the sense of heat and stinging disorientation. This was almost too severe to far-touch at all. Kendra was immediately confused: Was she not meant to far-touch the outside? Was it too much for Far-Touchers to use their power under the Great Top Fire? But soon, Kendra’s new ability seemed to even out, to adjust, and the world around her gradually came into view. And Kendra—her mouth dropping into awe, her spine covered in shivers, tears welling into her eyes—fell gently to her knees, in total paralysis of what could only be described as utterly and inconceivably divine.

Kendra didn’t know what to make of this, how to understand what she was taking in, as though her mind had shut off and suddenly quit its central job of interpreting what the body sensed. Nothing was as Kendra had imagined.In her dreams of the outside world, in fantasies ignited by the storybooks and fairytales of distant far-touch cities, the Surrounding of her mind had been mostly bland shades and temperatures—more like the inside of the Home, where colors meant simple changes in heat and depth and shadow. But this place, the real Surrounding, the true outside… It was unfathomable! Everything was so vibrant, so different, so distinct from one another. This must be color! What the fairytales spoke of, what Kendra could only describe as varying degrees of hot and cold. So many different temperatures and shapes and sizes—some soft, some radiant, some large, some distant and small, some that cast large shadows about the ground, some throwing about sporadic veins of darkness like broken shadowed glass. Those must be the trees, the large ones with hundreds of arms and thousands of leaves of different spectacular temperatures. And behind the army of trees and bushes, Kendra found great arches in the land. They must be the mountains! But were they small or just far? She had no gauge of distance, but far-touching a path through the trees and out into the distance leading to the bases of the mountains, she could not sense their beginnings and so thought they must be extremely far away.

Facing up then above all the ground, above the great and distant mountains and into the sky, was a completely new color—a heat that seemed to exist nowhere below. The color was softer, but somehow bright, and there was no way at all to sense its distance or depth. The skies overhead were far and close all at once, as though she could touch it with her hand just by reaching out and yet never get close to it even if she could fly like a bird. Within the massive sky were enormous, puffy mountains of bright color, like the pillows under her head during the Sleeping Hours. And of course, high above beyond the soft and puffy bubbles, was the Great Top Fire—alive and hot and too intense to look directly at, but she could not help trying. Then, shutting her eyelids in its face, Kendra made out the imprint of a large circle fading gradually against the hot insides of her eyelids. Perhaps the Great Top Fire was after all a ball of fire, a sphere of some sort. No one had ever spoken of that. And opening her eyes again to far-touch the brilliant and luminous Surrounding, Kendra could somehow sense now that it was the Great Top Fire which may have been heating everything below, the very thing that gifted the world with all this color and depth and shade and…life!

Tears were streaming down along Kendra’s cheeks now, dripping into the soft dirt below her knees. Overwhelmed and mystified to the point of utter confusion, Kendra didn’t know how long she had been just kneeling and crying and far-touching the Surrounding. It could have been hours or just seconds, but the peace was disturbed by a gruff voice Kendra had never before heard, startling her mind and body back to life.

“When did it happen?” the voice said.

Kendra’s heart stopped. They would try to take her back into the Home, to force her into the darkness again, to take away her new life. She knew this even before she had turned to face the voice.
TO BE CONTINUED…