Dreamy & Deep Read online

  Pathway to the Stars:

  Part 8, Dreamy & Deep

  Author – Matthew J. Opdyke

  Publisher – Matthew J. Opdyke

  Copyright © MJO Publications, 2019

  All Rights Reserved

  Paperback Edition

  ISBN – 978-1-951321-05-5

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2019918460

  Disclaimers

  This is a work of science fiction and utopian fantasy. The names, characters, businesses, places, incidents, locales, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious way and with the utmost of respect toward all parties.

  Reading this text and enjoying it may take you on a journey that is enjoyable while increasing your reading comprehension level as well as your philosophical, emotional, intuitive, and creative literacy. If there are any blatant errors or constructive suggestions, please advise the author through email, at:

  [email protected]

  This book was written using the mind and heart of the author, and in many cases, it was written completely “off the grid.” In brief moments if there is a quote, the author uses quotations and directly sites the author within the text. In many occasions, the author wrote prose and phrases that are spoken every day, or in the past, and should never be taken from any artist since a major part of any amazing story brings a sense of normalcy. Otherwise, this text is original in every sense, wherein, in this book the author also suggests we search for the well-being of those around us as well as ourselves.

  Table of Contents

  Pathway to the Stars: Part 8, Dreamy & Deep

  Disclaimers

  Table of Contents

  Preface by Author

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Long-time Friends

  Chapter 2: Training & Meeting

  Chapter 3: Concerns & Learning

  Chapter 4: I Can Do This!

  Chapter 5: Welcome Back

  Chapter 6: Music of the Heart

  Chapter 7: Resting in Cambridge

  Chapter 8: A Delightful Day

  Chapter 9: The Virtual Universe

  Chapter 10: Carrying On

  Chapter 11: Improving Reality

  Chapter 12: Music and Prose

  Chapter 13: The Lyrics

  ~ Embracing Love and Life ~

  ~ Above ~

  ~ Longevity ~

  ~ Brevity ~

  ~ Loneliness ~

  ~ Power of Our Minds ~

  ~ Personal Guidance ~

  Chapter 14: Inspiration & Writing

  Appendix

  Appendix – Character Summaries

  Appendix – Glossary

  Appendix – Artwork & Inspiration

  Appendix – Bio of Author

  Appendix – Published Works

  Appendix – Thank you

  Appendix – Farewell for Now

  Preface by Author

  This book contains the eighth segment from A Cosmic Legacy: From Earth to the Stars and is thus the eighth book in the Pathway to the Stars series. Dreamy & Deep focuses on two characters and some of their back stories.

  Najem Grace battles her concerns over whether she wants to be fully optimized, while waiting for her dear friend, Vesha Celeste to finish her training in the Virtual Universe. Vesha’s results will help her to make that decision.

  This science fiction booklet also contains some of Joanne Gallant’s back story and how she became a member of the Pathway organization. A musician, lyricist, singer, lover of Earth, and humanitarian, Joanne learns that despite her awards and acclaim, she still has potential just waiting to surface she’d never even dreamt of.

  Enjoy this story, as we continue this Space Opera saga!

  Very Respectfully,

  Matthew J. Opdyke

  [email protected]

  https://www.mjopublications.com

  https://matthew-opdyke-ftb.com/

  https://smile.amazon.com/author/matthewopdyke

  Epigraph

  “Nature and humanity can be amazing, but likewise, it can be brutal. Brutality, as far too many know it, is unnecessary if we consider and implement one thing, innovation with purpose—a good purpose is brutality’s ideal replacement, and it comes minus unnecessary misery. It’s starting to become clear to me now what it is that we can do and how we can do it.”

  - Eliza Williams

  “Brutality has never been strength, it has always been myopia and cowardice, it has never led to lasting success and never will, it has always been a failure to raise the bar for humanity, and it has never given us the seeds of hope, because brutality is akin to uncontrolled chaos and as a result it is a failure to give humanity a legacy worthy of preserving.”

  ~ Yesha Alevtina

  “The young and innocent, the kind and those that care should never know sorrows so deep as those they have known through centuries of mistreatment, inherited disease, or an environment that breaks them down.”

  - Eliza Williams

  Chapter 1: Long-time Friends

  Database Moon Archive, Celestial-Sol Entry Date: 2018 December 25. Yesha Alevtina trains Vesha Celeste. In this part of her training, leading and following her awakening, Vesha witnesses Najem Grace as she works out her doubts about optimizations with Eliza Williams. Prior to that we experience the awakening of Vesha Celeste, which plays a significant role in Najem’s decision. These memories are a collaboration from the minds of Najem, Vesha, Eliza and many others within the Virtual Universe. Vesha, Yesha, Najem, and many others are interfaced via biopod within the Pathway Melrose Campus. Input by Yesha Alevtina, President of Pathway Industries, 2015-2022.

  She had aged every day with charm, grace, and brilliance of mind and although she was an honorable member of Pathway, she was still concerned with the idea of age reversal—at least where it affected herself and her beliefs. While she still clung to her religion when it came to her hopes in her personal life, both Vesha Celeste and Eliza Williams had helped her to understand that advancing as a civilization, understanding our Universe, making discoveries of the unknown, and being healthy so we could not only learn but compound upon our wisdom—using our greatest talent, our brains—was a blessing.

  Preserving life rather than watching it wither away when we could do something about it, would most definitely be considered noble in any deity’s eyes. She started to see, after such a long life, that there may be another passion she had never even considered, and her friends at Pathway certainly gave her moral support, no matter her personal decisions. They just helped her to see things from a completely different standpoint—especially after all her visits to Pathway’s Virtual Universe. She had done a lot with Pathway already, but she knew she could do more and despite her age, she yearned to travel the stars still.

  As per the agreement presented to her, she became an honorary member of Pathway many years prior and arriving at that point Najem had been given a couple of options—she had chosen the second one, to hold off on bringing youth to her personal appearance. Najem Grace was ninety-three years old and instead of reversing her aging, for now, she had gone ahead with the choice of internally healing both her physiology and her neurology, but she wasn’t quite yet ready to let her friends outside of Pathway witness her become younger and optimized.

  Today was her friend, Vesha’s big day, she had been a fellow honorary member who had chosen to live completely natural, and she suffered from dementia before she passed away. She had been allowed to participate in Pathway affairs due to her experiences with NASA, as was Najem, but she had chosen not to be healed at all, for the sake of science. Najem remembered the day of her funeral, and how sad it was to lose her. Her family had been there, dressed in black, and tears st
reaming down their cheeks. Vesha held a special place in each of their hearts. When Vesha had passed away, per request and agreement she would be revived later, after the family had had a chance to grieve, which they had. Until her family was read-in, however, she would likely never see them again.

  There she was, lying silently in the heavily-monitored room, which represented her room at the Princeton Assisted Living Home, and Najem was sitting in another room not too far away overlooking where Vesha appeared to be sleeping. Vesha and Najem had spent a lot of time at the campus facilities together, and now, since she had passed away, Najem had come by to visit her many times over the last two years. She had visited on many days from Triton, orbiting Neptune, after carrying out her daily duties, to see the progress on Vesha’s comatose and lifeless body, as it was being optimized. The optogenetics teams kept Vesha’s mind shut down until everything was ready for download. Najem was an observer many times, going through shared experiences in the Virtual Universe, with her friend, Vesha Celeste, who, in a twenty-two-year-old body, was about to be reawakened—a stark difference from when she passed away at the age of eighty-eight.

  Vesha had been a colleague of hers throughout the years since the 1950’s and a dear friend since they met when Najem had sponsored an astronomy club in the Washington, DC, area when women were still struggling to be accepted in the hierarchy of science. Lost in thought, sitting there in the technologically advanced observation room, Najem had missed Vesha in the real world, greatly, over the last two years since she had passed away and she looked forward to talking with her friend again. Her unique personality had gone all too soon, plagued with dementia throughout the last of her days, yet somehow, she could practice self-reflection and retaining much of her ideas as to who she was and the experiences she had gone through. Dementia impacted her by causing her neurons to fire in non-stop loops, so on many occasions, she had to take sleep medication otherwise she would have died of fatigue—nonetheless, she passed away, and Najem’s friend was about to be brought back.

  Seeing her friend reawakened might just change things for Najem. How this went down would determine whether Vesha would be brought back to a physical appearance like that which she had when she was twenty-two but optimized. She would be brought back, but with a few interesting, non-harmful, and artsy side-effects. However, and even more important to anything else, Najem Grace would be there as a close friend, to witness the proceedings and able to tell if this beautiful construct of the highest sophistication known to humanity, really was Vesha on the inside.

  Although she wouldn’t be able to greet Vesha Celeste until she had been awakened, and due to the unique nature of this occasion she would need to wait further until Vesha had received her Virtual Universe training, she couldn’t wait for the moment when she could welcome her back. Najem Grace had been looking forward to seeing her favorite astrophysicist in her new form, her new body, completed and ready, as well as with her reawakened mind following two years of tests and she couldn’t wait to see if there were any personality changes or subtle advancements that might lend to her own clarity as to the choice, she, herself, would make.

  Much of Najem’s work currently revolved around working with the very handsome James Cooper, sending Eliza’s, Vesha’s and Anastasia’s particle jump sensors, or sensors, out to explore the furthest reaches of the universe for a robust and accurate map, as well as to plot the mission locations that the Intergalactic Mission Contingency, or IMC, would visit on its journey through the observable universe. Very similar to but much more compact than jump gates, these sensors acted like control point mechanisms and robust transceivers that could go anywhere throughout the universe using a three-dimensional grid system of the cosmos, which could be zoomed in for accuracy, to detect existing sensors, could transport spacecraft and all of its contents in a blink of an eye, and much more. For now, they were using them to gather information pertinent to the IMC mission, and she was always excited to see the universe from so many different vantage points. She saw constellations of different places in different galaxies, had derived locations of pulsars, neutron stars, suns that had met their end and promising new and young stars with countless planets that could sustain life—things that wouldn’t be seen by the telescopes on Earth for many, many years.

  The principal mission would for all intents and purposes start off with twelve drop-off points, one after the other, in essentially twelve zones throughout observable space, but this plan was of course amenable to change. To understand how the twelve zones were parsed out, essentially, they had divided the Earth into twelve geographical areas of responsibility as viewed at midnight—six in the northern hemisphere and six in the southern hemisphere. From there on Earth, they divided all of observable space into twelve zonal areas that would go out to the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, relative to Earth and each zonal command would be in charge of exploring, tagging, colonizing, and creating commercial space gateways for all planets, solar systems, and galaxies within their zone.

  In the meantime, here Najem was, visiting from Neptune’s Triton station, her home away from home, and sitting in a one-way viewing room on Earth—all to avoid overwhelming Vesha during her awakening, just in case too many changes all at once would startle her. Yesha Alevtina was about to give them their final brief, before commencing the reawakening. Yesha had been appointed by and unanimously voted on to take over as President of Pathway when Eliza Williams had handed it over when she ran for and became a US Representative and subsequently a US Senator in Washington, DC.

  Chapter 2: Training & Meeting

  Eliza was still the UP leader, and Yesha and James worked together to helm Pathway, both on Earth and throughout the Solar System. Eliza, as Senator, had commissioned Yesha and James to begin considering putting together all the necessary pieces for interstellar and intergalactic journeys, missions, and colonization. Eliza would visit Pathway regularly via the Virtual Universe interface via the biopod in her office at the Capitol Building and communicate with others using her neural link. But it was Yesha, the President of Pathway, who was giving everyone the final briefing on how things would proceed, before commencing.

  “Right when I knock on the door, the advanced systems in place will awaken her. To her, it will seem like she had just settled down to close her eyes after pondering on her life one more time, and then she’ll hear a knock at the door. Since everyone agreed that it would be best that I do this, as the President of Pathway Industries, I am doing this rather than Najem, with a gracious heart.” Yesha looked at Najem, “Along with Eliza, thank you for suggesting this, Najem, and each of you. You will get to meet her soon. I know you would like to meet with her, right away, but we need to make sure everything is running optimally, and that her body and her mind are truly hers. We need to minimize the initial contacts in case things go haywire, plus we don’t want anyone to become too attached right away. I’m devoted already as I’m sure each of us is, but you know what I mean—most of us knew and loved her then and if things were to go wrong it would be a major setback, not to mention heartbreaking.

  “We need to do the training first. While it may seem like several lifetimes in the Virtual Universe, it will only be a couple of hours. We have a lot more to train her on, to spin her up on, than usual. She was invaluable regarding her particle jump sensors. She had started the idea and brought it to Eliza’s and my attention when we were very young. Eliza had formulated most of the technologies before the formation of Pathway LLC, then Pathway Industries, then Pathway Industries and Associates, and later Pathway, and even though everyone here has confirmed or even improved via updates upon these technologies, she was the pioneer. Anastasia, Najem, and their teams finished the details to put them in Najem’s care for distribution throughout the known Universe. That said, once I take her into the Virtual Universe, the rest of you can join us and watch as observers, before you meet with her, but please make sure you do a good ‘repast’ of your own life’s experiences and shared and personal
memories for optimal cognitive frame working and upload to the Twelve Database Moons—we want to make sure everyone is backed up, just in case there is a worst-case scenario. She will be very powerful and capable—hence. Once Virtual Universe training with Vesha is done, I will broadcast to you that we are ready for the meet and greet. When I do, you will hear me say, ‘and, this is where we are now,’ and you will be pulled into a vast virtual meeting hall no matter where you are. Are there any questions?”

  Everyone was silent, appeared to understand all the pre-rehearsed steps, and shared an air of enthusiasm for what was about to transpire. No one had any questions since they had cycled through the steps several times before—dry runs. Now it was the real thing.

  Yesha then continued, “This is the very first test to see if humanity can store the mind, the DNA and the entire human genomic sequence digitally, grow and optimize the genes with the mind turned off through optogenetics and many other highly advanced technologies, download the neural mapping and network to her new brain—replete with her memories, feelings, her awareness, everything, and then turn her on. Once her mind is turned on, after growing the body in an accelerated manner with optimally encoded genes, with cells communicating all of the right things to the other cells, we will know from then on that we can successfully grow a human, aged twenty-five, in short order, and then turn her or him on in the hopes that it will be the individual who had passed away, but in a new body. This is it. This is humanity stepping it up and demonstrating to the universe that we were ready to preserve life, reanimate it, and protect the Universe itself from the laws of uncontrolled chaos—rather than destroy life or watch the universe expand beyond repair.”