The Creators

11

Jacaranda dug into her string bag and pulled out a small, jeweled box. She opened it and took out three sugared balls colored like the rainbow. They seemed to have an iridescent glow about them.

“Here, take one each and chew,” she said.

“ Are you sure?” asked Gorge.

“Trust me,” said Jacaranda and she took one. As she chewed the pill, her neck shimmered like a rainbow, the glow spread to her body and then, she could not be seen anymore! Only the other two sugared pills remained visible. They seemed to be standing in mid-air.

“Hey! Where are you?” said Gorge.

“Show yourself!” said Jasmine.

“I can’t …not for the next hour anyway. This is the result of the invisibility pill. You both take yours, then, you will be able to see me. I can see you. We can start our hunt then. Hurry!” said Jacaranda.

Jasmine and Gorge picked up the pills and chewed. They too shimmered and disappeared.

“Hey, I can see you now!” said Gorge.

“Okay. We are all set now,” said Jasmine. “We should enter the building and look for Jasper, our technological self.”

Saying this, she moved towards the lift door under the rooftop shelter. She pressed the button. The lift came up. As the door opened, a man wearing a mind police uniform came out with a weapon and a radio. He could not see them. He was looking around but could see no one. He went back into the lift. The three of them slipped into the lift with him and descended into the building.

The mind policeman went back to Jasper’s office.

“There was no one in the lift,” he told the officer. The mind police seemed to have set their headquarters in Jasper’s office.

“It is strange that the lift should be called to the rooftop by no one,” said the officer. “Perhaps we should investigate. Kaspar, you keep an eye on things here. The rest of you, let us go up.”

Jasmine, Jacaranda and Gorge had followed the policeman down. They watched and heard the mind police. But the mind police could not see the three standing in the middle of the room.

Jasmine gestured to the other two to follow her. She stepped quietly into the corridor and ran down. Then she entered a room that seemed empty.

“Have they got Jasper?” Jasmine said in a loud whisper to the other two.

“How can we find out?” said Jacaranda.

“Perhaps, if we can get out of here, I can connect with the universal mind stream and find out,” said Jasmine.

“What if they spot your thought wave and come for us?” said Gorge.

“They still cannot see me. So, if I close my mind again, they will lose us,” said Jasmine. “Let us first get out of this building. Look for exit signs.”

The three of them ran out again. They were wearing rubber-soled shoes. As they walked past Jasper’s office again, they could hear voices.

“Why do you think the lift was called up?”

“Do you think that boy could still be in the building or has the girl got here?”

“No. It could not be the girl. She has that uncontrolled mind of Golliwog with her. JaJa cannot shut off her telepathic mind ever…”

“JaJa was not with her in the dragon cloud, remember. We lost them in the sky…property of the dragon cloud the Doom gang said…”

“Wonder if they are still in the sky above us…”

“Strange the way we lost that lot and the boy…”

“Will you shut up and focus on finding them if you value your necks,” said an angry voice which belonged to the commanding officer.

The three ran past the door. As they descended the staircase, they could see guards standing at the door. How could they step out without being noticed, eventhough they were invisible.

Again, the three ducked into an empty room near the exit. This time Gorge came up with an idea.

“You both run for the exit. I will drop something in this room and run and join you. That way when the guard comes to investigate, we can slip out. Do not wait for me. Open the door as soon as the guards enter this room,” said Gorge.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Jasmine.

Jacaranda and Jasmine headed for the front door. As they reached the door, they heard a loud sound. Gorge had picked up a glass paperweight on the table and dropped it. It had smashed to smithereens. One of the guards ran to investigate. Gorge was heading for the exit.

“Hey, you better join me here,” shouted the guard in the room. “There is broken glass all over. No one seems to be around. No one has left the room. It is bizarre. Please come fast.”

As soon as the second guard entered the room and the door was left unprotected, Jacaranda opened the swinging door and the three of them slipped out.

As they ran on the snow, which was coming down fast now, they could see their footsteps leaving marks on the soft white snow that covered the ground. There were round tables and chairs covered with snow in what had been the garden of the building.

“I think the falling snow will cover our footprints,” said Gorge aloud.

“I need a shelter to stand and focus. It is freezing here,” said Jasmine.

“Let’s go under that shed,” said Jacaranda. It was the shed for the parking the flying cars of visitors. The three went in and Jasmine closed her eyes for a couple of minutes. Then she opened them. Her eyes looked frightened.

“Quick, let’s run. I have blocked my mind again. The mind police has figured out that we are hiding here,” she said.

As she was finishing her sentence, the door of the building opened and the mind police started filing out. The three of them ran towards the building. The mind police continued pouring out of the door and running past them towards the parking shed. They, of course, could not see the invisible trio. The three of them slipped in through the open door without bumping into the guards and got into the building.

Again, inside an empty room, the three spoke in whispers. There were still voices of the mind police in the building.

“We need to pinge out to a safe spot,” whispered Jasmine.

“Where?” said Jacaranda.

“Have they got him?” asked Gorge.

“No. But they are angry to have lost all of us. They will kill if they spot any of us,” said Jasmine. “We will need to locate him from a safer spot. Let us go back to that favorite island of yours Jacaranda…the isle of wonder in magicland.”

“We need to hurry. It is past fifty minutes since we took the invisibility pills. The effect of the pill will wear off soon,” said Jacaranda.

Jasmine had the tongs in her hand. Gorge and Jacaranda held on to her shoulders as she clapped the tongs. They pinged. They were still invisible when they landed on the grass of a meadow on the island.

“We will lose our invisibility in few minutes,” said Jacaranda. “We need to find shelter once we are visible.”

“Before that, can we get rid of these clothes? It is warm here,” said Gorge.

“Here goes,” said Jacaranda. She mumbled something and the three were back to their normal war.

“Let’s make a run for shelter,” said Jasmine.

“I know there is a cave near the hill,” said Jacaranda. “We could use that.”

The three ran for the wooded area and then started walking towards the hills.

“Are you guys hungry or not?” said Gorge.

“Okay. Here is a sandwich for each of us,” said Jacaranda, swishing her arms and mumbling a chant. She handed them a sandwich and a packet of milk each. They ate as they walked through the woods in search of shelter. They came upon a stream with fishes of all colors, shapes and sizes.

“We are close now,” said Jacaranda. “ This stream will lead us to the hills and the cave.”

They walked for another half an hour and they were at the foothills. The stream fell like a waterfall from the hill.

“The cave is just there,” said Jacaranda.

The three of them walked towards the cave.

Safe in his hideout in the technological dimension, Jasper was worried. After dinner, he told Matilda, “Tomorrow, I need to try to contact this girl. Perhaps, I will leave our hideout for a short while, fly out to the sky and try to reach her again telepathically…”

“I am scared when you go out like this,” said Matilda.

“I have to for our baby’s sake and our sake try to find a final solution. I did not want to be caught in this crossfire. We have to find a way out. Don’t worry, I won’t be caught,” said Jasper.

 

 

The Creators

    

1

Jacinth sat with a cup of coffee in her garden looked at the sky and started to write:

Lost in the crowd, in oblivion Jasmine walked. She was lost, lost in the turgid grey lights of the day. It was a grey day with grey people and grey skies. Life was growing into a set of lies that she had accepted to survive. In the city, people scuttled like tailless rats, forever running a race for meaningless things, wealth, money, success. None of it meant much to our race. We had been through these stages of civilisation. And had emerged in a time beyond these needs. What mattered to us was the need for a time and space continuum where we could meditate and think. When we thought deeply enough, things came to be.

Jasmine was a student. She had been pinged to a city in the earlier continuum to understand the need for thinking. And now, suddenly, we found we were losing track of her. She was blending into the city too well. Her thought waves were getting lost with the multitude of minds and noise that cluttered the city.

Occasionally, we did lose track of students from our zone. But, the mind police had always managed to find them. They were either moved to correctional facilities or their thoughts were wiped and they were left in the city to survive as best as they could. But, the police was unable to track Jasmine.

Jasmine had plans, plans to make changes. For that, she needed to switch dimensions and gather the best from each continuum and then think of a new world to create it. It was her dream project. She was strangely advanced for her twenty years of age. She could do flips with her ideas, that is move from idea to idea and see them from different angles and then put them together to create a totally different reality. This is what councillors did after half a century of thinking. The other thing that even after half a century of meditation most councillors could not attain and she was able to do easily was to block off others from entering her mind and observing her ideas.

In our dimension most of us had transcended bodily needs. We pinged babies from the other continuums when we found that they had minds that could harmonise and meditate to project our thoughts and create. Most people who lost their babies thought they had been kidnapped. But most of the time we pinged them.There were not many of us…only about one hundred and fifty. Our world had survived centuries and Jasmine could create havoc in our centuries old world. We live to be at least six to seven hundred years old. Our best creations come forth when we hit the age of about three hundred.

Our world was started by Lemurians who had descended to Earth about two hundred thousand years ago. They brought their advanced thought technology into the earth. Their own planet Lemuria was under the threat of destruction by nuclear radiation from their dying sun and damaged biosphere.The planet Earth met up to their physical needs. They started living openly on Earth. They thought up different species of life, including man. They discovered that the intelligent species couldnot always live peacefully with each other. They had wars. Some of the species had very advanced nuclear weapons and could destroy the whole earth.That is why they created different dimensions for each creature. This way all creatures could live in harmony, oblivious of each-other’s existence. In our world, we have creatures from all dimensions. The Lemurians live in a separate dimension but we have occasional visits from them.

Jasmine wants to create a world where all the species live together like in our dimension. She is very immature as she does not realise that those capable of intermingling from different species live in our dimension. The others are not ready and therefore continue in different dimensions.

Jacinth looked up as she paused from her writing. A bumble bee buzzed on a nearby flower. She looked up and smiled. Jacinth was a hobbyist. She wrote for fun and published occasionally. She was trying her hand at science fiction. She had been getting lines in her head automatically. She also had dreamt strange dreams. In one of them, she saw women streaming away as if from a natural disaster. Another time she found herself jumping from cloud to cloud holding a stranger’s hand till she saw a strange pirate ship and land as if from another world. Jacinth believed in many things including inter-dimensional worlds which existed in parallel universes or multiverses. She believed in God, multiverses, black holes, aliens, a world in harmony… Jacinth was wondering what would she do with Jasmine next? Should she describe her? Would Jasmine look like an everyday woman, bird, fairy or a dinosaur? Should she be green or purple? Should she come from a dimension where the clouds were made of candyfloss?

Jacinth took another sip of tea and looked up. The parakeet went into the hole in the tree where it was nesting and peered out giving a loud squawk. A koel called from a distant tree. Jacinth looked at the distant towering mountains which formed a picturesque backdrop to her garden.

And then she saw her, a frail girl walking up to her gate. On her shoulder was a strange creature which was part pink and part blue. It looked like golliwog with round button eyes and was wagging it’s head and singing in a strange language. The girl had brown gold hair. She wore a faded jeans and a multicoloured striped tee shirt and carried a knapsack on her back. She walked up to the gate and said: “Hi! I am Jasmine. Can I come in?”