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| This picture is a photo of a video clip from a Nova documentary, courtesy of the International Space Staton. I have no rights to it's ownership. |
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Book 1: The Fault Lies...I remembered the last day that I looked over at my office wall at the large video display that it was showing me of live video feed from the
In the Shakespearean play, "Julius Caesar," the character Cassius did say unto Brutus, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Those words were written hundreds of years ago. Yet in spite of all our technological and social advances here on Earth in 2175, those words still apply to our human condition today. Just as Brutus did with Caesar, sometimes we give too much credit to those close to us, people who we consider destined for success. We fail to recognize that we are all men and women of simple flesh and blood. We forget that we too may be capable of accomplishing great things if we so chose to do so.
Moreover, when we abbreviate the aforementioned Shakespearean quote down to its more universal core: "The fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves" we come to an insight that truly resonates in the minds of all people. This shortened phrase is more direct in advising us that we need not look outside of our own selves to figure out why some things in our lives might be going poorly. It is not by chance, fate or the Heavens that things may be going wrong. Rather, in most cases, it is our own inner, spiritual weaknesses that may have brought about many of the negative events that happen upon our lives.
Every day, we have choices to make and must deal with the subsequent repercussions of those choices. Some of our decisions are influenced negative decisions, namely, our vices, our ignorance or even our mistaken learned behavior. Some of our choices are made with the proper education on how to create positive outcomes. Either way, we still have a choice to make...more often than not. It is these choices that can improve our lives, or prolong our own stagnation - or even worse, our own demise.
And that is how my own life story began. Because of my own vices and bad choices, I placed myself and my family into a situation that would shatter the wonderful life that I had built up. The model life that I had from the day that I was born, right up to my 34th birthday. You see, I was born the third generation immigrant African American on October 7, 2140. My family always had a passionate work ethic and a love for education that stretched from five generations of scientists, businessmen, computer engineers and political activists in Subsahara African politics in the mid 20th century. My father gave me the princely name of Peter Jelani Lumumba. I was the youngest of two sons.
My older brother both worked for NASA as did one of our older uncles. However, my father's youngest brother was a successful businessman. I followed in the footsteps of that younger uncle and his sons and right out of college I became a virtual "wiz kid" businessman in the ever changing, technological industry.
I had a wife, a son and young daughter. Today in America it was rare to see affluent couples with with more than two children. Most people had only one child to mostly signify that they were indeed married. In fact, most marriages didn't happen until both parties were in their mid 30's. We were more concerned about our careers and work ethic towards the greater good of our society than creating more mouths to feed. Those families who had more than two children, whether they were couples or single parents, were usually frowned upon. People with more than one or two children were usually people who wanted to work around the clock and for lower wages. Professionally minded people, like myself, really worried more about our careers than we did our children. This was the trappings of achieving money, success and paying duty to our greater society.
The intellectual drive to marry someone out of love and the desire for a monogamous relationship was always in a conflict with our biological drive to simply reproduce with whom we perceive as an attractive gene pool. Sometimes even when you may feel biologically and spiritually compatible to someone...there is always a curiosity for the unknown mate. Now there are so many dating compatibility tests that you to get to know your potential mate long you marry them. The end result is that much of the spontaneity and and primordial instinct to pursue your mate mate was gone. Everything now is pre-planned and hashed out on the dating sites that dominate the American landscape. Everyone is working and too busy to spend the time to engage in random dating.
I had a strong DNA profile for liking more random and passionate relationships. It was hardly a good match for my wife who was profiled as being once a lover in a lifetime type. However, our opposing traits complimented each other into a well balanced union. She pulled when I pushed and I pulled when she pushed.
Still there were times when she and I were both lost in our careers. We always found time for our jobs at times when we should have found more time for each other. But it was just too easy, too easy to always find time to go out and do things that allowed us to earn more money. Earning that money allowed us to own more things and to do more things. As a child, boredom and my inner desire for excitement always propelled me to break my homogeneous environment while growing up the son of a NASA engineer. Now as an adult, boredom triggered me to break from my monogamist behavior as a husband.
Her name was Sabine Metzger, she was the wife of Hans Metzger, the CEO and founder of the powerful Bio-tech company Leben Tech industries. Hans' biotech company had pioneered, nano technology along with the powerful biochemical medicines discovered from the immune systems in sharks. As the world demand for improving human health increased, Leben Tech moved in and became a powerful and wealthy company. As his company became larger, he was able to purchase and take over a huge high tech company in Japan.
Sabine and I could meet just about anywhere in the Western world within a few hours. Everyone on earth was plugged into the Net. Only those of us in the tech industry knew how to get off of the grid and keep from having our movements tracked. Ironically, Sabine and I met at a futures technology conference eight months before her husband's company even had me on it's takeover watch list. Who would have known that she and I would end up in such a tangled situation?
Dealing with her husband Hans was a dangerous situation for many businessmen and their companies even when things were good. Here in my situation, that possibility for danger was raised when you factored in that Hans had electronic eyes everywhere on earth. Even many rural areas were possibly under his watch. Still, Sabine who had a background in computer engineering for adolescent education, would choose to stay at a city near a country side so that she could fall off of the radar. She changed all of her identity codes and telemetry so that he couldn't see where on earth she had exactly fallen off the identity grid. I was not restricted to the same kind of stalking ability from my wife as Sabine would face with her husband. Still, even I had to be careful and hide my location as well. but by that time I began negotiating with Leben Tech taking over my nanobot technology company in exchange for me moving up the corporate ladder of Leben Tech.
Who would have known that our tryst had the potential to impact two companies that were on the verge of creating technological advances that would effect the entire world as we knew it. Little did we know that so many lives that would be effected...including our own.
