SF novel: Chapter 1

We live on a planet of beauty. White snowy hills. Lush green grass growing beneath the snow. The climate is mild. The snow that falls down is sometimes large as falcon’s feathers, sometimes fine as the most exquisite powder - but warm in temperature. The rivers are shallow red: a mixture of blood and water. Blood is what we - the fraction of humanity still left on earth - drink these days to keep ourselves alive. It is healthy and nutritive in an effective package. Small fish glittering of gold and silver abound in the water. They chase and spawn and breathe through their gill slits like thus far.

On the ominous day when 66,6% of earth's population (as of today in 2004) had died, rivers transformed to blood in most of Europe. This took place on 13 December 2016 as each soul still present well recalls. But now, almost four years later, there are still fewer of us left: only 5% of the original inhabitat. Even amongst us, a good part are mentally or physically disabled.

Lines of people carry up clear, ice cold water in wooden handmade pails from underearth springs which the blood has not managed tarnishing. We cultivate soya beans, rice, root crops and hyper vegetables: newcomers from space the appearance of which is something between kelp and mung beans. Nobody has been able to digest meat for years. Not under these conditions. Not under these frequencies. We drink blood and water and non-alcoholic home-brew made by the earth spirits which is so thick that even without swimming movements one floats on it. The liquid is golden yellow and sparkling like champagne of the old days. It is not advisable to drink it too freely though, since it raises one's sexual desire sky high. One is left wondering what wicked liniment the gnomes have instilled to it while wheezing in their under earth cellars.

Then there exist the underworlds: remote black corners located far from the continents' energy centres and inhabited by a retarded minority: coarse and beast-like in soul and form; unintelligent but raw. They consume meat of genetically modified animals and sometimes that of each other. They eat, fight, fuck and procreate: a grim life span that can be compressed into one sentence. They are the dregs of society that evolution for a reason unknown has allowed to remain as splash of colour on Tellus. Perhaps in order to remind the rest of us of our own past? Even when one's feet are firmly rooted in future, it is wise to keep the past projected on the backscreen of one's consciousness for purposes of comparison and a weak moment. Hence one does not grow too proud and on the other hand does not sink into the eternally false nostalgia of the "golden" old days.

It is the middle of August 2020, in the former Finland Proper. The land is covered with waving fields of rye, rice cultivated in terraces, handmade systems of irrigation - on the pristine land of former Scandinavia even today nothing streams in rivers but water - and the scenery bathes in bright midday sun. Blissful and happy, one might think. Yet there lurks a snake in every paradise - more meticulously disguised in some paradises than in others. In this instance the snake takes the form of a global tyranny. In 2008 the great Ironhand forced the world under its spell by fear and horror and by imposing a subtle form of psychic control. He presented himself as the blessed saviour in a world torn between chaos, anarchia and local wars. What followed was a worldwide tyranny where no soul may feel safe. Almost in the blink of an eye, a massive army of 300 million personas was formulated from the people present: an army of robotlike slaves in whom the last drop of original thinking is destroyed. Although predominantly used in strictly secular tasks, this army exists to guarantee the safety and longevity of Ironhand's regime.

The signs for such a future were out there to be seen for decades - but whoever would deliberately pay attention to such things. Ironhand desired the minds of the people under his command and control. As to their bodies, he wished killing them from the inside rather than from the outside: rigidifying them into dead inorganic substance that yet stands and walks and operates.

There exist islets which even the Ironhand cannot reach. One such oasis is our community here in Scandinavia and other patches exist on the terraines of former Ireland, Iceland, New Zealand, the Saharan area of Africa, Mexico, New Mexico and the rest of the central USA. On every continent there are communities of spiritual people to some extent, but smaller in size and carefully hidden from public eye: they must be, threatened by Ironhand from all directions. We keep contact to each other as far as possible: by space ships and communication devices based on telepathy. The world has grown denser and smaller in size. Race and nationality as dividing features between people have been wholly replaced by one's spiritual inclination. Either you are part of "us" or part of "them". The in-between has been swept into non-existence by means of death and polarisation. The pressure has been enormous. Not surprisingly, not many souls have lived through it.

But life goes on... In our Finnish community there are roughly 3000 members and over 10 000 "laymen" to add to that. Their origin derives from the entire globe. One thousand individuals from the core group hold up tasks where they keep moving between countries, continents and throughout space. Sixty people are responsible for the community planning worldwide. The remaining fraction lead a more stable life focusing to cultivate earth, to develop advanced forms of healing, organic building materials, scientific discoveries and art. There exists no strict division of tasks. Each soul concentrates on the field which he at the moment feels to be his own. I hold the post of a scout and a spiritual "scanner" between different worlds; particularly in touch with the enemy forces and the henchmen of the Ironhand. I gather information by all means available, infiltrate into organisations and social situations adapting the orders given. Sometimes I improvise. I was by sublime means trained for this task during the years of the violent socio-spiritual transformations that took place immediately before and after the year 2000. Those were years of inner turmoil, anguish and deep despair for me - yet now it seems but a distant fleeting nightmare.

I was born on 7 April 1976 in the Finnish archipelago. Both my parents earned their living doing handicrafts and inhabited a grey hut-like house which was heated by wood and surrounded by an orchard of apple trees, black fertile ground and fruitful but unpredictable fishing waters. I was their only child and christened Tania Katarina. They were both over forty years old when they had me, but in good health, and even in the whining whirlpools of the 21st century they lived a long and vigorous life and lasted until the year 2013 when a natural death came to collect their souls only days apart from each other on two cold and stormy January nights. I received my education at the university in what I always called earth sciences (biology, herbalogy, ecology, vulcanology, soil physics) although I took random courses in liberal arts as well. It was a joint degree that I never finished but which earned me half a dozen jobs in laboratories and in field work conducted on the mythical grounds of Iceland, Scotland, Finnish Lapland and the Norwegian fiord regions. What was the real purpose of those expeditions and the knowledge received I only learned years later. Life took its own course while I was a faithful if sometimes blind follower.

I work within a loose group of seven people. Two of them are children of eight years of age, while the rest are adults: two men, two women and me. One of the children is my own son Aleksei and one is Inka, the daughter of an acquintance who accidentally died only weeks after the birth of this child. My husband and I adopted Inka and raised her together with our son until the age of six when both children started practical training under the guidance of their respective and carefully hand-picked spiritual teachers thereafter visiting us for the last week of each month only: either at home or on a field mission where I may pass along to them some of my skills while simultaneously being myself taught by the children who in so many respects are more evolved individuals than I am. The rest of the month the children reside in various training stations located roughly as far detached from Earth as planet Mercury. Each year we take ourselves a holiday of four full months away from our practical duties. We spend it all together on Earth: wild and carefree, in the idyllic settings of a house made of natural stone and wood painted mustard yellow by the edge of a pine forest.


My husband has been located in China since January. He works there in an under earth laboratory as a scientist and due to the nature of his research, has been held half-captive in the place unable to reach me or the children by any other means than telepathy. He has been allowed no exit from the place nor a simple phone call. His name is Merir and he is half-Celtic, half-Slavic by origin. His mother was born in Krakow but defected to Ireland with his Corkish newly met fiance at the end of the 1950s. They had stumbled at each other on his guest lecturing event in town. They settled down on the countryside of south-west Ireland, not far from Kenmare. Merir was born on 16 February 1962. His mother ran single-handedly a luscious farm with horses, sheep and a dozen gorgeous goats aside taking care of Merir and his twin sisters.

Prior to his disillusionment with corporate aspirations and hence a decision to become a freelancer, his father worked as an inventor for a large company with headquarters in both London and Cork. He worked on the company's semi-secret department which developed prototypes of modern computers, nanotechnology, and conducted primal research on substances the density and properties of which can be manipulated so that they become invisible, elastic, gaseous, power-generating and so on for different applications and purposes, yet can effortlessly be retransformed to their original state without losing any "information". These findings were further exploited in teleportation and the immaterial transference of objects from one space to another afterwards retaining their original physical form.

I met Merir in May 2005 on a very unofficial mission of mine where I was privately gathering information on the power structures of the present world and due to my own carelessness ended up being uncovered and thrown to the basement of Westminster Abbey in London. Merir, in his turn, was investigating a group of 13 men meeting up regularly in the cellar chapel of the abbey. He had used his standing in society to talk himself into attending one of their ceremonies as a spectator to be initiated later, and in the course of the hypnotising ceremony - while the full attention of the 13 attendants lied elsewhere - exploited the opportunity to search around a little hence finding me locked inside a sarcofagus made of black obsidian: still breathing but nearly without consciousness. He managed carrying my languid body up the narrow slippery back stairs, hastily shaking me awake, and squashing to my still lethargic hand his business card so we could meet up in future in order to discuss our respective missions and exchange information. I was too perplexed to utter a word apart from a meek 'thank you' but while Merir descended the stairs back to his designated observant's place, I sneaked round the second floor, came by another pair of stairs leading down to a thick cement door painted black and noticed I could safely follow the singular ceremony through a crack in the door.

Merir and I kept seeing each other for work-related causes regularly from then on but it took us well over three years to fall in love. It was like heating up a block of lead: for a long time nothing appears to be happening but once the heat is finally caught, it will stay there forever.

What was fascinating about the ceremony was the atmosphere floating inside the little under earth chapel: so thick and dense one could have cut it with a butcher's knife. The 13 men each wore a light blue cowl with a hood so spacious that the face was covered in shadows and could not be identified. The men were standing in circle holding each other's hands, chanting a hypnotising song and swinging in a lazy rhythm forwards and backwards yet keeping their feet firmly in the ground. There was something compelling about the chant: the forcefully building crescendos and diminuendos; the monotonous yet ominous melody; the changes of pitch that slowly but resiliently worked their way towards a pre-determined end point. No words were uttered; no mantras were muttered; the chant consisted of mere humming sounds produced by the men in a state of such complete concentration that it could safely have been called trance. I was reminded of Erik Satïe - one of the few classic composers I had taken a liking to on the course of my limited musical self-education. Even from my watch place behind the thick concrete, I could distinguish as bodily sensations the vibration of the waves produced by the combination of swinging movements and the mystical sounds. It felt as if the waves were building mass and determination as the time went by; it felt as if given enough of time, they would grow powerful enough to make a stone wall give in to their weight and shatter.

The inside of the chapel was golden and powder blue, ornamental, and built in the form of a Maltese cross. The circle formed by the 13 men was wide enough to fill the middle part of the cross leaving the four arms empty. In one of the arms, Merir was watching the ceremony, silent and motionless. In the middle of the room was a small round table made of black stone. On the table a peculiar object was standing on its own: a narrow, oblong, vertical statue depicting a creature that looked half-human, half-devilish with its face and body twisted spasmodically as if suffering. Just as the table, the statue was made of black stone that looked dense and heavy. To me it looked highly "concentrated", but I could not tell whether the impression was more due to the object's substance or its energies. Over the course of the ceremony and its aftermath, I noticed the men called the statue "demeter" or simply - in order to deviate outsiders in public settings - "the object". They said it was connected to the figure 777. I also found out the cloud of energy created by the men extended all over London and its suburbs thereafter falling down similarly with acid rain or smog - only more devious since no-one was in a position to physically see it and merely the most sensitive individuals could even guess at its existence by the effects created. It was rumoured the cloud of energy played its bit in making people dependent, sheep-like, unquestioning and governable by commercials, general opinion, mainstream politics and media.

Once the ceremony was over the 13 men removed their hoods. They represented the ruling classes of society: lawyers, lords of the upper room as well as lords through the long-since-outdated system of ranks in peerage. This was a room full of pose, power and self-confidence gained through age and experience: no-one in the room was below 50 and no-one had lived in such narrow circles he could honestly say he had not truly "seen the world" and remained ignorant of its habits and vices.

Perversely as the events of life get tangled up to each other, this remote London incident and the fact that my husband was now locked up in a cellar in China were linked. It was thanks to the body of information gained in Westminster Abbey that Merir was a year later invited to work on a "backstage branch" of a well-known banking house based in the City in London of which he had thus far been the Director of Marketing yet ignorant of the more marginal research the company was conducting. It turned out the banking business had merely been a front plus a channel of bottomless funding for something ultimately heavier. Merir's degree in philosophy spiced up with a good amount of financial studies had led him to the Marketing post and it was not until the abrupt invitation to join the company's circle of insiders that his practical training in the secrets of natural sciences started. But it turned out he was a natural talent and on the course of the years developed more inventiveness and expertise on the field than the rest of the group together.

The dozen or so personas making up the closed circle held motivations some of which were more and some less ethical. The general line of research, however, was such that greatly benefited humankind by offering new discoveries and techniques eg. in the use of subtle energies for producing polarised waves: technical devices could be catalysed and run by a focused effort of one's thoughts fuelled by one's feelings. It was one such device - a very advanced sort of flying device I was told telepathically - that Merir was now developing in China. The results achieved so far were by all standards phenomenal, and therefore Peter - Merir's immediate boss - had made a unanimous decision (with himself) to keep Merir locked up and under surveillance for as long as it would take to build a body of information so substantial that the new device was ready to be launched with a test crew.

I had my suspicions that Peter had been brain-washed or bribed by Ironhand so as to serve his goals. Most likely both. His behaviour sounded uncharacteristic against his usual gentle and well-intentioned personality. Conveying my suspicions to Merir telepathically would have been far too dangerous, though, since telepathic transmissions are frequently, if randomly, intercepted. He was not the type to notice such changes in people's personality by himself. Therefore I had decided I would fly to the headquarters of Ironhand's reign and proceed to find out the facts by myself. The official headquarters were based in Lauderdale, New York, in a tall black skyscraper with more lead glass, hi-tech elevators and mahogany tables than in all former EU's banking buildings together. But the operational headquarters, where I would be heading, were some hundred miles north of there situated right by the edge of a steep canyon in the middle of nowhere. The operational building was a bulky construction painted glossy black with several chimneys like a factory and nothing to protect it from the outside but an energetic fence.

A stylised glossy-grey fan - at the time the symbol of the 13 men gathering together in the basement of the abbey albeit black - was now the official ensign of Ironhand. A small mother-of-pearl fan decorated the overalls of Ironhand's soldiers and the lower ranks of the secular staff. It was of an attractive shape, but the story behind it was sombre. In the 14th century a secret society called Black Tulip was established in the northern Europe with its headquarters in Amsterdam. It was an exclusive society with bankers, religious leaders and rich merchants of the time consisting its main body. Membership extended throughout Europe. Ceremonies with human sacrifices and other anomalies were rumoured to be conducted during the meetings. No-one lived long enough to prove it with evidence. Individual cardinals and popes tried attacking the organisation, shattering it from within, but with a secular and religious elite so corrupt, the task was not only desperate but also highly dangerous. A ring with a square-shaped seal was worn by the members. The square was divided diagonally with one side golden and the other powder blue: the same colours as in Westminster Abbey's cellar chapel. The symbol of the tulip was a closely-guarded secret and never to pronounced aloud nor worn in one's clothes. The only place where the tulip existed in pictorial form were the sacrificial textiles of lush black velvet on which the victim was placed for the course of the twisted and cruel rituals. The blood was never washed away.

It was for this reason the Ironhand had assumed an official ensign resembling a tulip which yet could easily be explained away as a five-leaved fan to curious journalists: a fan bundling together the five major continents - precisely as Ironhand had done prior to his rise in power by the middle of 2008. Curiously he had not bothered with New Zealand nor the regions around either of the two poles, but Australia was partly under his surveillance and considered a non-safe island for a resistance person to enter.

Up to this day, some of the sacrificial textiles of the Black Tulip have been retained in secret quarters of churches such as the Palace Chapel in Aachen, St Marcus's Church in Venice and various spots in France, Scotland and England. The Vatican and the rest of the Mediterranean region - despite wide membership in Black Tulip's ceremonies - had their own orders and organisations of similar nature. Today in the 2020s, it is the old money nobility of Scottish and English countryside that keep alive the traditions of Black Tulip and customarily wear the designated ring. They are sometimes seen travelling in ridiculously long powder blue limousines, wearing designer suits of the same shade and heading towards all-night ceremonies held quarterly at the Equinoxes.

I had once visited Ironhand's Lauderdale headquarters - prior to his rise to power. The building at that time held a branch office of the bank Merir worked for amongst a number of other high-flying businesses. The stink of money in the building was noticeable as was the stink of decadence in the openly greedy demeanour and the lack of taste and discretion in the rising generations. The sensation the world was finally reaching its rotten end after the elongated beginning was concentrated and tangible. The cold transparency of the glassy walls and elevators gave me the creeps. It reminded me of the experiments people used to do in the early 21st century, filming their grossly trivial daily activities on a video camera and showing it all on the internet. It was the same sticky, misplaced mix of voyerism and exhibitionism one felt in this skyscraper its ego bulging with glass walls more enormous than in any shopping centre. Venetian blinds could be but seldom were used. Office staff rather expanded their energies on a round-the-clock half-conscious image-building activity than the core of their work.

(....the chapter to be continued...)