Michael knew the caterpillar was blind; his tutor had told him that when the exercise had commenced almost an hour before. He rapped his knuckles against the inside of the thick glass jar, a sense of claustrophobia building.
Sensing the disturbance, the caterpillar’s head rose to investigate. For several seconds it blindly searched along the inside of the lid before dropping again to circle.
What do blind caterpillars want?
How does a blind caterpillar even know it’s blind?
And then it came to him, sparked by his reading assignment.
“It’s a metaphor.”
The hologram of Amy Shau joined him inside the jar. “Elaborate please.”
“It’s a metaphor for humanity, prior to the D.E.”
The attractive Asian woman smiled. “And how is a blind caterpillar sealed in a jar a metaphor for humanity prior to the Disclosure Event of 2017?”
“The caterpillar’s blind, so it doesn’t know it’s sealed inside its jar, therefore it must keep searching.”
“And what is it searching for?”
“A branch to spin its cocoon from; without it, it can never fulfill its destiny.”
“And what is its destiny, Mr. Sutterfield?”
“Its destiny is to become a butterfly. See, that’s the metaphor. Humanity’s destiny was to sprout our wings as a species — you know — live in peace… explore the galaxy. Only we didn’t, we just blindly walked around in circles for over a century until the D.E. finally occurred… at least that’s what I read in my history book.”
“Very good. And who placed humanity in the jar?”
“Uh… I don’t know.”
“The answer, Mr. Sutterfield, are the ones who profited from keeping humanity sealed in the jar. There was an old expression used before the Monetary Reforms of 2022: Always follow the money.”
“I don’t get it.”
The jar disappeared, Michael once more finding himself seated across from his tutor.
“The seventh grade curriculum is quite different from Grammar school. In addition to an introduction to the new sciences, there is a great deal of focus on consciousness and spirituality. You will be taught the most effective ways to meditate. Assuming you pass all of your prerequisites, you will join twenty-four other classmates on three week-long CE-5 training retreats.”
Michael smiled. “I am so ready for that.”
“Not yet. Before any student can begin CE-5 training, they must understand the circumstances that led to humanity being trapped in a jar during the 20th and 21st centuries.”
“Why is that so important, Ms. Shau?”
“Because Michael, if the Disclosure Event had not happened when it did, the entire human race would have become extinct.”
1
The platform measured over ten thousand square feet and had been built from scratch, its construction “officially” initiated when a single nail was ceremoniously hammered into a plank back on September 11, 2016.
Two thousand VIPs were seated on the riser, huddling beneath scarves and umbrellas… anything to stay dry in the cold rain. Another hundred thousand visitors encircled the Capitol Building beneath a smoke-gray winter sky as the forty-fifth American ever to be elected to the highest office of the land took the oath:
“I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
The new President of the United States accepted the congratulations of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court before kissing his wife, Melania, to a loud cheer from the partisan crowd—
— while millions of demonstrators protested the event across the country and around the globe.
Adam Shariak located the TV controller beneath a stack of folders and muted the flat screen television mounted on his office wall. Politics had never interested the former Apache helicopter pilot and decorated Iraqi war vet until he had become managing director of Kemp Aerospace Industries. With billions in defense contracts at stake, Adam’s CEO, Dr. Michael Kemp, had made it clear which politicians he expected his staff to support. Of course, that gesture paled in comparison to the seven-figure donation Kemp Aerospace made to the Super PAC which forwarded the defense contractor’s agenda.
A history buff, Adam could only imagine how America’s founding fathers would have reacted had they known about the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling which allowed corporate interests to dwarf the rights of the individual. Given a rewrite today, he imagined the authors of the Constitution would have imposed some serious limitations on D.C.’s “professional politicians,” no doubt beginning with term limits.
Adam reached for the Levitron Anti-Gravity Top — a gift from his girlfriend, Jessica, on his thirty-ninth birthday. With an expertise born from a thousand twists, he pinched the tip of the device between his thumb and index finger and gave it a sharp spin, the torque causing the top to lift away from its magnetic pad like a flying saucer.
Watching the anti-gravitic device caused his thoughts to wander.
What had ever happened to the promise of flying cars… or the exploration of our galaxy? Forty-five years had passed since man had last set foot on the moon — a full eight years before he was born. By now mankind should have had thriving lunar communities with space travel having become as common to humans as commercial air travel. We certainly had the ingenuity; Kemp’s teams were providing technology to the Defense Department that far exceeded anything NASA had contributed in the last twenty years. Even the new laptops and PCs possessed more computational power than anything on board the space shuttle.
Had we simply lost interest in our own evolution?
Adam glanced up at the TV set, the split screen showing the new president’s supporters on one side, the demonstrators on the other. Fifty years ago America had found itself in a similar tug-of-war over its own morality. Five decades after Vietnam, a different kind of war dominated the news.
Fifty years. No space travel, no cures for cancer, same old gasoline-fueled combustion engines… same old hatreds — only now the venom could be shared more efficiently and impersonally by email and Twitter, the country hopelessly split down the middle by two political parties that refused to compromise.
He had found himself in a similar conversation two nights earlier at a Defense Department dinner.
“Don’t fret it, Shariak. What’s important to us is that the new president knows war is good for the economy.”
Adam Shariak was born into the life of a nomad. The only child successfully conceived by Air Force Colonel William Shariak and First Lieutenant Sara Jernigan-Shariak (there were two prior miscarriages), the boy had “redeployed” seven times in three different countries before he had entered kindergarten. By the time he was given the standard military ID card issued to children with parents in the Armed Forces, Adam had forgotten half the places he had lived.
Being raised on a military base can be especially challenging for a child. Friendships are short-term with moves frequent, forcing one to become resilient to change. Conversely, the military life encompasses rigid routines, with family members often treated as soldiers, forced to accept a code of honor and self-discipline foreign to their peers. While these traits are valued in the work force, a “military brat” often feels like an outsider in the non-military world.