The Chronicles of Qi Read online

  The team practice with their Plasma Rifles, targeting cyborg dummies on the shooting farm. The dummies make gestures that they’re shooting back, but nothing comes from their weapons.

  “The third week, you'll get your hands on the latest plasma rifles,” General Ma’s words return once more to Wang’s mind, who picks up his rifle and lines up with his new friends.

  He takes the stance he had learned from Philipe, standing sideways with a firm grip, he brings the gun to shoulder level, steadies his hands and fires in quick bursts. Each of them is a good hit, clearly a lot of improvement for Wang thanks to his teammate.

  Meanwhile, Philipe has already fallen in love with his ‘Plasma Megatron’. He loads the weapon, presses the buttstock firmly against his chest and peers through the front-sight on the barrel, seamlessly.

  “Je m’apelle Megatron. Plasma Megatron. Blasted, not fired,” he says to himself with a chuckle, making a joke on the ancient James Bond movies.

  The cyborg dummies appear quickly and Philipe shoots repeatedly, exuding precision and finesse.

  “Yee-haw!” he shouts, Adrenaline pumped.

  A frown creases Jodie’s forehead and Sniper moves to her side, adjusting the grip on the front hand guard. She fires but misses the dummy completely.

  He takes a step closer behind her and shifts the position of her shoulders and her waist. The touch is gentle but fleeting. She’s blushing, trying to keep her knickers clean this time as Sniper manages a nod, and Jodie fires again. It’s a head shot. She extends an appreciative smile to Sniper over her shoulder, once more blushing and feeling her Mamasita having a next round of tingling.

  Philipe jealously follows the close interaction between the two. He has been noticing them exchanging side glances since the incident at the pool but passed it off as Jodie trying to show gratitude to Sniper for saving her life. Now, however, it seems like something else, something more serious, and he thinks about the cliché of a teacher-student romance, shaking his head.

  “Classique,” (classic) he says sarcastically.

  Next dawn, the team stands in front of semi-autonomous bipedal combat droids, parked in the VR Hall (Virtual Reality Hall). Each droid is twice the height of a man at least, with a symmetrical face most similar to that of a canine with a flattened nose. Their digitrigade legs are affixed to the ground beneath them, with what could be called a foot, and four ‘fingers’ spreading outward in the same number of directions, for the most balanced of movements. Their hands, fingerless, are essentially plasma rifles affixed onto their elbow joints; and despite moving very quickly on foot, possess jet-like propulsors on both shoulders.

  “You will learn to partner with semiconscious bipedal combat droids, allowing them to act as your surrogates,” General Ma’s voice echoes once again through the hall.

  Equipped with their VR Visor and dressed in a suit, controlled by sensors and actuators, they get the droids started, letting them march out of the hall.

  Wang is on the VR platform, punching and kicking while his combat droid performs the same moves on the field against a cyborg.

  “Your VR Visor and the brand-new sensor suit will directly connect with the VR platform and put you into a simulation mode for ground, air and naval battles,” the voice continues to echo in Wang’s mind.

  Jodie is on the VR platform next to him, sitting in a 360-degrees spinning VR chair. She’s highly concentrating on her simulation and fires at targets while the droid copies her every move simultaneously in the sky, hitting aerial dummy drones.

  These air-droids are designed after their humanoid counterparts and could be best described as a ‘Mech’, which in its appearance looks as it is able to hold a single human inside itself, in a manner befitting an exoskeleton, though it is in truth nearly autonomous. The Mech is encumbered with a good amount of weaponry. Aside from the energy rifles of its hands, it also carries a few missile payloads on its shoulders and four pronged wings for drag resistant propulsion during flight.

  Meanwhile, Philipe busies himself on another VR platform, using his hands for shooting while his droid, a variant of the bipedal and the air-droids, with digitigrade legs and a Gatling gun attached to its underside, right below the cockpit, large enough to hold a pilot, performs the exact moves on the open sea against naval dummy drones.

  It maneuvers through the water naturally, able to serve as a submersible craft that can rise to the surface and support its weight, as well as initiate propulsion through its dimorphic legs which transform to water running wheels at a moment’s notice.

  During their last week, Wang, Philipe and Jodie lie on hovering med-tables waiting for their health examination.

  As Wang observes the technology around him, he remembers clearly what General Ma said about their fourth week in training. “In the fourth week, the SPIONs injected into your bloodstream will allow us to holograph your body and detect any health issues.”

  That very moment, an automated medical machine extends its spider-arm across Wang’s body and inserts a needle into the vein of his arm, injecting his bloodstream with SPIONs (superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles) that illuminate his extremities on the holo-screen. This kind of nanoparticles were four centuries ago first used in vivo applications such as a contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), tumor therapy and cardiovascular disease. The SPIONs are usually coated with biocompatible materials and can be activated with drugs, proteins or plasmids while being targeted through external magnets.

  Two human scientists use an iPad-sized, translucent scanner with a very low frequency wave that receives back algorithms. They move it over Wang’s and Philipe’s body parts.

  “The low frequency GPR (ground-penetrating radar) allows to zoom into your body, all the way to the actual cell that might be damaged, and zap it to cure you from whatever disease or wound you might suffer from,” General Ma continues sounding in Wang’s memory.

  Light shades of red pulse over the holographic image of Philipe’s knee. The Scientist reviews the old injury while the device shoots low frequency back-scattered waves at it, regenerating and strengthening his bone marrow.

  Jodie watches Philipe from her peripheral vision and is instantly nervous when the projection of her holo-scan reveals a dark, red mark beneath her scapula on the back.

  It’s the same spot hurting her since the time of the mountain drill. Her heart rate increases, and she inhales sharply as the scientist looks over the scan.

  He moves to Sniper at the side of the examination room and whispers something into his ear. The team leader’s expression hardens, and he crosses the floor to Jodie, “Looks like you’ve been carrying a serious virus with you for weeks. Why didn’t you report to me?”

  “I didn’t want to fall back,” Jodie says. “I needed to be strong, for the team.”

  “Strength is, to accept the warning signs of your body,” Sniper lectures his still naïve yet strong-willed recruit. “What you did, was reckless. In a life or death situation you would have jeopardized the safety of the entire team.”

  He bends over, and whispers in her ear, “You are one lucky red-head.”

  Jodie is struggling with the fact that Sniper referred to her by her hair color and not as ‘soldier’. She presses her lips embarrassed against each other, avoiding direct eye-contact with him who falls back into his initial position and continues with further instructions.

  “We will now repair the infected cells through A2M (Alpha 2 Macro Globulin) and block all inflammation. You should be ready to get back out there in a heartbeat."

  After the exam, Wang finds himself lingering in a small, darkened room. He reads out loud to himself from the holographic wall message, “Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience, yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality.”

  Wang has practiced the art of lucid dreaming since his monastery childhood and can already guess what this nano-engineered exercise will put him through. After his parents were killed and Wang’s nightmares
didn’t stop, the abbot taught him how to control his dreams and use them as a therapeutic tool to heal his mind and soul. As the months of intensive training came to an end, Wang finally was able to manage the illusory nature of reality through his lucid dreams. The core teaching helped him to understand an ancient quote of Zhuangzi which described the power of mind and the transformation of things:

  “One night, Zhuangzi dreamed of being a butterfly — a happy butterfly, showing off and doing things as he pleased, unaware of being Zhuangzi. Suddenly he awoke, drowsily, Zhuangzi again. And he could not tell whether it was Zhuangzi who had dreamt the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming Zhuangzi. But there must be some difference between them! This is called ‘the transformation of things.”

  In the end, lucid dreaming helped Wang to enhance his motor skills by simply thinking of them in his dreams and therefore creating new neural pathways for real-life rehearsal. And that has been his secret all along. Before every exercise at the monastery or every drill during the past four weeks, Wang would go to bed and in his lucid dreams create a synthetic dimension that allows him to perfect his routines with high-risk actions but without getting hurt or being dead when he woke up. The psychological state of mind by changing the person-orientated focus to a situation-oriented focus was improved, as well as his primary performance anxiety and low self-confidence.

  He basically programed patterns of behavior in his dreams that would alter the way he acted in reality. But now, he’ll be facing a pre-programmed simulation in form of a shimmering neon capsule.

  Wang studies the glowing object in his palm before swallowing it and within seconds, is brought to his knees by a dizzy-spell.

  “During your LD (Lucid Dream) session you’ll be faced with your worst nightmares and the most painful memories, fighting against logic and emotions,” General Ma opens the lucid dream with his familiar voice ringing one last time in Wang’s mind.

  The room around him blurs up and he slowly lies down on the cold floor, having his consciousness lead him to the day when he lost everything in his young life and the worst nightmare of being completely alone in this world, suddenly became true.

  As Wang opens his eyes, he clings to the cliff-face of Mount Hua.

  “We’re almost there,” he hears himself say.

  His parents are revealed behind him, their faces covered in shadow, as a strong wind hits the mountain, and the wooden plank under his mother’s feet breaks. She loses her balance and slides down a section of the cliff-face.

  “Mom!” Wang shouts, his heart raising.

  His father attempts to reach his wife, but falls down past her, right into the abyss.

  “Dad, no!” Wang screams while his mother claws at the protruding rock, roaring her lungs out. He finally comes close to grab her outstretched hand.

  “Don’t give up!” he says. “I almost got you.”

  Their fingers are just about to touch when a rock loosens, and his mother tragically follows her husband into the darkness.

  A flashback of Anna, his humanoid nanny, sliding into the abyss reels through Wang’s imagination. He looks away, and when he turns back, the nanny is no longer there. He stalls with the revelation, relieved and closes his eyes.

  “It’s not real.” Wang takes careful motion to the edge of the plank and stares into the howling emptiness below him. The shadows of the bottomless pit seem to rise and swallow him whole as he takes a step over the edge and jumps.

  Wang awakes from his lucid dream, freezing and very thirsty. He reaches for a blanket and a bottle of water as a new holographic message on the wall pops up for him to read.

  “The frequency of your emotions is the most powerful weapon in this universe.”

  The Lyr-ans

  * THE YEAR 1930 *

  On a hill in beautiful Wisła, Cieszyn Silesia, Southern Poland, stands the spacious villa Sfinks (Sphinx) of Agni and her husband; sticking out of the picturesque landscape in a complementary manner, surrounded on all sides by lush greens in the form of trees and grass, stretching into every direction.

  Since the 1920s, Wisła has become a vortex point on the esoteric map for the influences of different nationalities and denominations. It is a center of esoteric publications, among which the Odrodzenie (The Revival) and Hejnał (The Bugle Call) are the two main magazines that discuss on important topics such as alternative medicine and related fito-therapy as well as astrology and spiritual advice.

  Vila Sfinks is a meeting place for Agni’s spiritual followers and patients who seek guidance or are sick and need to be healed. The row in front of the house grows every minute. On the entrance door hangs a sign: ‘Hejnal Spiritual Knowledge Office’, with a black and white image of a man reaching out towards the brightened moon.

  The Hejnałmariacki, also known as the St. Mary’s Trumpet Call, is a traditional, five-note Polish anthem closely bound to the history and traditions of Kraków. It is played every hour on the hour, four times in succession in each of the four cardinal directions, by a trumpeter on the highest tower of the city’s Saint Mary’s Church. The noon performance is then broadcast via radio to all of Poland and the world.

  Agnieszka and her team therefore decided to use the symbolism of the Hejnał for their own monthly esoteric newsletter, the Hejnał Spiritual Knowledge. Since its founding, the newsletter has attracted many believers from all over Poland to come here and get a firsthand help.

  That’s how, over the past years, Agni has made a name for herself as a herbalist, healer and clairvoyant, after having returned from Czechoslovakia, where she participated in a series of scientific experiments at the University of Prague and proved her precognitive ability to see events before they happen. President Tomas Masaryk and his daughter Alicia were so impressed by Agni that he even asked her to stay in Prague and work for him. But she refused and instead went back to Wisła.

  The reason why Agni has become such an icon of Poland’s pre-war esoteric scene and as a healer is because she understands illness as a part of a bigger cosmos. Her way of healing people includes explaining to them what part an infection or a wound play in their very own cosmos. It’s her vision of the world as a constant back and forth between good and bad, dark and light, day and night, health and suffer.

  In her opinion, we are to be ill because we create the ‘Small Cosmos’, in which we live and are subject to attacks by the darkness. Healing therefore follows the step-by-step elimination of this Small Cosmos by leading the evolution of one’s Qi towards the spiritual world. That’s how a person’s mind firstly understands his/her suffering as part of the process to then be able to activate the neurons for self-healing.

  Agni deeply believes that the cause of an illness is the impact of demonic spirits which are not only inherited by blood but mainly emerge through projections of manipulated thoughts and emotions that will become strong enough over a period of time to transform themselves into self-conscious entities she refers to as ‘Elementals’. The Elementals then begin to feed of the Qi, sucking out the life of a human being.

  In her experience, these dangerous shadow creatures can only be seen through the eyes of the spirit while we are in a dream-state, where the veil between two worlds is thin enough to be explored and confronted.

  Agni’s teachings circle mainly around Karma and the creation of the world in connection with the health of our body, mind and soul. In her view, man was created as an ideal spiritual being at the beginning of the cosmos, owning a variety of extraordinary demiurgic powers. But because every conscious soul possesses a free will, actions suddenly started to deviate from the original divine goal and the source, forcing the collapse of humankind into matter and therefore giving fuel for the rise of a Small Cosmos.

  These past events therefore created a cosmic, pre-programmed pattern in the lives of each human being, manifesting in their unhealthy choices and illnesses they suffer throughout their reincarnations. The only way out of this karmic cycle would be faith in the cosmic Christ and to understand and join hi
s higher realm of the Christ consciousness.

  That’s why Agni always stresses in her session with clients that any illness is curable if not connected with the Karma. Meaning, as a healer or doctor, one must firstly recognize the patient’s individual human Karma in order to facilitate the best treatment possible.

  In her opinion, we shall search for and realize our karmic traces which are able to cause a variety of ailments, wherefore the overall treatment of a patient cannot be limited to a medical solution but must include a spiritual examination of past lives as well, in order to break the series of transgressions that is burdening body, mind and soul in the current reincarnation.

  However, according to Agni, not all burdens can be completely cleansed or eradicated in one lifetime and must be treated over a course of many lives as a result of terrible deeds. This purification of the soul can not only be achieved through difficult experiences in life but also serious illness which acts as a ‘karmic template’ that materializes in form of a severe genetic disease, a chronic virus or sudden disability.

  While the queue in front of villa Sfinks is getting longer by any minute, Agni is in a session with a little boy who suffers from leukemia. The boy has scrawny arms which depict years of suffering from the disease. His mother sits beside him on a recliner chair by the bed and cries silently. The round room is eerily silent with Agni chanting some incantations, candles flaring in the background and the frescoes on the roof seem to dance as Agni’s lips move. The scent from the candles mixes with that of the lavender flowers outside the only window in the room. It makes for a heavy presence.

  The boy looks at his mother and parts his parched lips to ask her for a drink of water, “Mamo (mama), I need water”.

  The mother caresses his head and says, “It will soon be okay, let Doctor Pilchowa finish first and then you’ll get all the water you want.”