"Thomas Gossfield: 12 July 1982 - 09 January 2013
Known for his pioneering work into the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, first theorised to exist by Fritz Zwicky in 1933, Thomas Gossfield expanded previous theories to include the study of Dark Energy and harmonic resonance states to deterministically prove that Dark Energy was intrinsically linked to a state of Consciousness. His discovery led to the now commonly accepted fact that Dark Matter - non-baryonic matter that makes up almost 22% of all matter in the Universe - was a physical effect that arose from living matter. Furthermore, his proof led to the discovery that Dark Energy - non-baryonic matter that has not yet coalesced out of an energistic state and makes up 74% of the Universe - consists solely of the combined thought waves of sentient and non-sentient life forms.
What has become known as the Gossfield Meditation was the beginning of the end for structure human civilisation when the ability to realise and project changes on reality by thought alone...."
The page was torn, the rest of the text missing. Damned Gossfield - it was inquisitive minds like his that took us down, peering into the dark corners of reality and unraveling God's handiwork to make us all Gods in our own right. Anger flashed across my mind and I cast the book from me in disgust. It arched across the room, torn pages fluttering in the wind, leaving a bright tail of ragged scraps of dust and paper as it fell. At the last moment I clasped it from the air with my animus and dropped it gently to the floor where it lay accusingly. I pushed some debris and garbage over it and threw myself into the air. This search, at least, had been fruitless. The fractured carcass of the library receded below me and the cool night air welcomed me home.
I guess we were all Angels now, Angels, Demons or Gods. Gossfield's proof led inevitably to the realisation that we ourselves, the human race, contributed a grand proportion of Dark Energy to the localised sentience field around Earth, and the conclusion was drawn that if that was so, we really were the architects of our own reality. Technically speaking, it wasn't actually Gossfield that invented the Gossfield Meditation, that was some unremembered guru or mystic who first showed us how to enter the state of mind where we could change our reality directly. It seemed that we might enter a new Golden Age, an age where all we had to do was imagine something and it became reality.
December the Twentieth, 2012, knowledge of the Gossfield Meditation was published on the 'Net, offline media picked it up immediately and broadcast it around the globe. It seemed innocuous, a young man, knelt, meditated and proceeded to levitate while a single apple materialised beside him. The steps were simple, simple enough to learn after only one demonstration. Simple enough that the great unwashed hordes of stinking ignorant humankind could unleash their own personal visions of what was real and what was right onto the world around them. It took, by all estimates, 45 minutes for the first reality-altered homicide to be committed. A man wished his wife would simply shut up and she suffocated when her mouth was erased from her head. Chaos was quick to follow. Faster than the speed of news, faster than we could have ever thought, unthinking and careless people entered the Gossfield Meditation and fractured the world. Before we could realise what was happening and warn people, our simplest and most bestial desires just ... happened.
In a terrifying realisation of the ancient prophecies of Nostradamus, and coinciding with the end of the Mayan Calendar, on December Twenty-first, 2012, the world ended. Reality was forever changed, and irrevocably broken.
The first and most unschooled desires of humankind were suddenly fulfilled. Untrained and chaotic thinking minds conjured the devils and demons of all human imagination down upon us. When people gasped in shock, and if they were quick enough to think it, the corresponding "erasure wish" wiped out both the conjured imagination or demon, and a sizeable chunk of the environment with it. Chaos reigned, those who had no meditative training, no stillness of thought, no capacity to maintain control over their own wildly fluctuating desires, perished in gruesome ways. Torn apart by their fears made flesh, ripped apart by those around them, divided and traumatised by the terror around them, many simply wished they were dead, and that wish was granted in abundance.
There were cul-de-sacs of calm, of course, those of us who had a greater self-understanding those of us who had learned to still out minds, those of us not inherently terrified by our own rampant minds, we survived. The ultimate truth was that we could each control our worlds, and nothing could hurt us unless we allowed it. Shoot a bullet at me and all I had to do was deny its existence and I was unharmed. Most of us, unfortunately, did not have the quickness to realise that.
Earth was devastated; consensus belief-made-real is a tough bitch to fight. If a thousand people thought there was a hole in the ground it was beyond one man to believe the hole away. Reality itself was stretched and sundered, ripped apart by conflicting demands of those of us unready to handle such Godlike powers. When every man is God, there is no God at all, only Hell. The cities were the first to go, the conflicting images of reality brought about by so many people in one place put an untenable pressure on the Universe and those areas simply ceased to be. Great craters that contained evanescent shadows of cities peppered the Earth's surface. It was impossible to tell from a distance if these mirages of buildings, streets and tormented people screaming were real or not. Even now, decades later, some areas of the Earth are still too bruised and fractured to approach. Reality there is unstable and unsafe, millions of people caught somewhere between alive and dead, existence and non-existence, still exerting their chaotic demands on the tortured fabric of the Universe around them.
Gossfield lived to see only the start. Torn by the realisation of what he had done, he tried to undo it. He sat in his apartment on the grounds of the University of Michigan, and tried to exert a calming force on his own surrounds. He succeeded. His concentration was such that he caused the very fabric of space-time to harmonise with his own belief, like a tuning fork that causes surrounding objects to also vibrate, he harmonised a section of the world into a standing wave of stability. The University was saved, but in his guilt at the death and destruction in the surrounding world, he allowed himself to think, in an unguarded moment, that he had never been born. He got his wish and his existence was eradicated from his own local Universe. Of course, all remembrance of him was NOT lost, a whole world knew the Gossfield Meditation and his existence was remembered by many millions, so many that when the University was eventually over-run, the non-existence of Thomas Gossfield was only truly fact in the exact place he died. Not more than 6 meters from his apartment door, he was remembered; walk inside however, and you lost all memory of him and all reality-changing powers you had. Walk away again and the memory bloomed full again. In his death Gossfield proved one more thing. Reality was bound to space, and this binding could be made to stick in such a way that no other could undo it. Thomas Gossfield's apartment became a self-contained Universe, immutable and unchanging, locked from the inside as it were, in a reality where Tom himself had never existed.
We used this property, dubbed Gossfield Harmonics, as a way to protect ourselves.
Every child now is educated at a very early age, although Gossfield Meditation really only becomes possible once a mind has matured at about age 10, to lock their own reality into a protective shell about themselves, such that another cannot directly affect them. Of course, we still eat, breathe, shit and interact with each other, so the human propensity to murder and maim is not totally prevented.
I drew myself out of my maudlin thoughts as the Golden Temple approached; I dropped down through the glittering shields surrounding my home and was greeted by telepathic squeals of joy as my feet touched the green grass of the Central Commons.
The Golden Temple was the base of my Order, the Scintillant Order of Light, SOL. We were one of the few shining lights of hope left to the human race. We were able to quickly band together at our Lodges to use the Gossfield Harmonics principle to protect ourselves, creating oases of order in the chaos the world had descended into. We quickly attracted others to us, those who had a modicum of self-control, those who had a strongly self-focused spirituality, Buddhists, students of Zen, many Eastern religions, those who meditated or practiced yoga, the highly self-aware, the focused, the self-controlled. We shone like a blazing star, our ranks swelled and our influence spread. We found that we were able to prevent the inward spread of the random chaos and terror onto our grounds, a dynamic front formed and with it we formed hope. Hope that we could resurrect our tortured world, hope that we could reverse the damage done by mankind's fracture dreams and terrors on the world, with a new passion and purpose; we set about recruiting more people, finding those who persevered in the face of the loss of sanity around them.
Despite the chaos, the future looked bright.
Of course, as human history has proved over and over, for every bright light there is an accompanying shadow. For every new Hope there is Despair. Only days after we begun our growth from a core of 200 scared men and women into an order that carried the sole light of hope for mankind, we met it. Despair; Chaos; Destruction. When the Chaos fell, humankind was unable to bear the burden of responsibility for what we had done. As every religion had told us for decades, mankind ascribed the evil about it to an external force, a devil, a demon. The consensus belief made it so and mankind created the means of its own undoing. You see, the Dark Energy itself had become sentient, it lived, and we gave it every horrific motivation we had not the courage to bear ourselves. We had no other name for it but the OverGod, and an Old Testament God it was, wrathful and vengeful in its fury. If we drew every loving impulse to ourselves it drew every dark and malignant thought ever conceived, and revelled in the destruction of hope. Every errant thought, every scream of fear, every bellow of agony, every tear, every curse and every dark moment fed it and it grew.
If we had become God, we created the Devil in our own bitter and warped reflection.