The pen is the beginning; the sword is the end
The pen is mightier than the sword.
The pen flows the sword glows.
We bleed ink they bleed blood.

/“The sword cuts but the pen heals,” the professor said looking up at his students at Allendale PHD Site. Two sharp beeps rang out signaling the end of the lesson. The students stood up and put away their books, before heading out of the classroom in a single file. He sighed and adjusted his pince-nez on his nose.
Laughter was heard outside the door followed by a whisper. He knew the students found him funny at wearing such old school visual aids. Not only that but he was the oddball since humanity had taken a very forward leap in technology. A visit to the general doctor would have his eyesight corrected in under five seconds.
Gone were the days where an ophthalmologist was needed. Neither otolaryngologists, dentists nor even surgeons were needed. With a wave or rather a push of a button, ailments were gone and any broken bones mended. The only reason for the existence of the general doctor was to have the human touch.
The same human touch that was needed to be a PHD or professional heuristics dispenser. Not that it was impossible to have human-free classrooms but it led to a generally better performance. This was experimented on three hundred years ago and it was decided to have PHDs or teachers as they were known as in the first two millennia.
He moped his brow and arranged his desk. Students were only to be taught for four hours per quotidian. Quotidian, what used to be formerly called day. With very little to do, they were now reduced to silly debates and discussions. After the last war, in the second millennium, humanity had a serious meeting with themselves.
It was decided that they were too selfish even for their own sake and the remnants took a completely different route. Six world wars was what it took to wake humanity wake. The last two world wars being fought on a nuclear level with no thought of the future. From thirty seven billion people before The Fourth War, the number dwindled down to a paltry eight million survivors.
Texts from previous centuries had been discovered and at first they all thought that the eight million were a prophetically foretold number of people from a small religious movement. Something Witnesses who said they would inherit the earth. Ironically, in this present Millennia, religion was not practiced.
Yes science was the order of the day, but so was what was previously known as magic. In fact many of the achievements attained in the seventh millennia would have been called magic. From instantaneous teleportation, to achieving FTL transport to creating wormholes that enabled planetary travel.

The issue with planetary travel was the silence from the skies beyond. A few test drives had been done to Venus and Mars but there was no sufficient data to show any signs of life.

With that the appetite for space travel had all but died out, after all there wasn’t any threat of the human population exploding necessitating the need to travel and terraform other planets.

Only a few scientists still dabbled in searching for alien life. It looks like Fermi’s Paradox from the twentieth century would still hold water this far in the future.

Humanity has accepted the fact they were the only sentient species in this neighborhood of the Universe.

On the flipside, magic had led to a humungous leap in the healing side which led to increasing the lifespan of humanity. The average age of a human since the third millennium had shot up from the 85 years to 200 years and the current figure was 1120 years. This was for voluntary body retirement. It was possible to transfer your consciousness to another body or upload it into The System.
Only a handful of people had the resources to maintain their body thanks to high-speed cellular regeneration past the 1500 years. It just wasn’t worth it for most people and after a millennia of living most people voluntarily passed away.
However, there was a new technology that was in its final phase. With it, it practically made resurrection possible. However, there were mixed reactions about it. A number were ecstatic that they could effectively bring back to life people from the past millennia and give them a chance. Others were against it as they were afraid that if brought back to life they would just cause more mayhem.
Yet, others just didn’t want more humans on the planet. One billion, one hundred and twenty million humans was enough. That was the perfect number to establish and maintain the equilibrium. Also to be considered was the fact that only humans had access to the long life span, the only living organisms that could rival them were trees. More specifically Bristlecone pines and Sequoia trees.
In the third millennium, while humanity was slowly fighting its way back to the top of the pyramid, they experimented around with immortal jellyfish and planarian worms as well as horseshoe crabs.
Other than humanity, the second biggest beneficiary of lengthened lifespan were cephalopod or to be precise the octopod order.
A mad scientist bordering close to insane had been experimenting on octopus. Not in an evil maniacal way but he was obsessed with octopi. He wanted to give them a chance to evolve.
He had finally managed after doing a two-pronged attack. One was convincing the female octopus to eat as it watched over the eggs. He did this by first playing videos of how most mammals looked after their young.
It wasn’t a success but with subsequent generations he managed to get three females to do just that. He also managed genetically alter them not to lay many eggs.
As he was doing that, he used his results from experimenting with other “immortal” organisms and perfected the serum for octopods. As soon as the eggs hatched, he separated the hatchlings from their mothers and treated all parties to the serum.
You wonder where the authorities were when this was happening. They couldn’t lay a finger on him as he was the developer of the immortality serum for humanity. He disguised the testing on octopus as a step to ensure it was safe for human usage.
Well he handed over the serum and disappeared few years later off the face of the earth. The authorities found his lab all but destroyed and a massive worldwide search never been seen before was put up.
But it was like he had vanished. No one saw him ever again. But his notes showed his work and experiments and though they couldn’t prove it they suspected that he helped the octopus to evolve. After all in his notes he mentioned three octopus by name, Amaterasu, Odin and Zeus.
The ocean was still a highly unexplored corner of the planet though massive effort had been put in place to map it. So far fifty percent of the ocean biosphere had been identified. That was how they discovered the highly intelligent lords of the sea.
Humanity ruled the dry land, while octopods controlled the sea.

The professor headed to the teleportation gate, outside the school. He looked at the silver metallic platform shaped oddly like an old school bus stop. It resembled a sheltered bench having five seats facing the street.
There were quite a number of transportation facilities starting from the slowest that was walking. It wasn’t feasible though to walk the distances between places because part of the restoration had been destroying and rebuilding zones.
The residential quarters were all to one side of each urban development. Before humanity had decided on one pattern, there had been squabbles and all sorts of ideas had sprung up and tried. From sky cities to underground towns to even Atlantis; though the water overlords had made it clear years back they wouldn’t stand for sea encroachment.
Each of the earlier options had more downside than benefits. Ground dwellings lacked proper ventilation and it led to sunlight deficiency. Sky cities led to blockage of sunlight as well as air traffic due to flying cars and not counting the pollution from both cars and floaters.
Finally it was decided to use 20th century building plans but to limit the height of buildings. The tallest buildings were twenty-five floors and that was only for non-residential buildings. Residential buildings were capped at five floors for apartments, and two stories for maisonettes and mansions. Again apartments had to be built as far way as possible from the others affording them privacy.
Because of the zoning, industrial centers were at the middle. Further out were other light industries and businesses. Between the residential and light industries there was a green belt.
The green belt acted as a breaker and buffer providing peace and tranquility to residents at home. The green belt was a standard two-kilometer wide band of trees and plants. It was this band that if one wanted to could walk through.
However the professor was a little tired, he preferred to be zapped home. He was one of the few who refused to fully embrace all technology. This was why he used public teleportation rather than personal teleportation.
Personal teleportation or PPT as it was called was the fastest as it allowed one to travel at almost light speed. However, it usually made him feel a bit queasy, with all the breaking down and restructuring of his individual self.
To the past civilizations, teleportation was magic because though they may have had the theory, it was impossible to. Do in practice. He had read books about how they thought teleportation was a Theseus ship argument. Because it was just cloning with extra steps.
However, with current technology it was possible. The first step of teleportation after inputting your destination, was uploading of the conscious self to The System. This was done in less than a picosecond.
In old world analogy, this was the equivalent of saving a game before attempting the next scene.
After that you’d then have your neural network disabled and a statis field would envelope you immediately. This field would then protect you from any outside forces while simultaneously scan and copy you down to the atom and then begin breakdown.
Almost immediately, your destination would then have the same reaction only instead of breaking down it would build you up. Once the physical transfer was complete, The System would download your consciousness to your body.
This whole process took only a second. The only pain was a slight tingling sensation as microvolts of electricity were zapped to wake up the neural network. This was what led to the queasiness.
With private teleportation, the silver wristband around the arm made it possible to teleport anywhere minus the zapping. This was the most expensive form of transport available.
Just like old century air control at the airports, PPT was controlled by high-speed intelligence. Using a program called Laplace’s Function that could determine the exact position of atoms, this function was then added to a supercomputer that controlled teleportation.
With Public teleportation, the control was easier as there were designated portals just like old world transit lines and stops.
Another area that humanity had developed was in the information Technology sector more so Artificial Intelligence.
The System was AI. It was The AI. It monitored and controlled everything down to the atomic level again thanks to Laplace’s Function. It could predict weather for the next twenty years with a point trillionth of marginal error.
Back in the late twenty first century, AI had been seen as a threat to replace humans. In fact the third world war has been the direct impact AI. No it wasn’t an AI verses humans affair, rather it was AI and human vs AI and human.
Each major power had developed its own powerful version of AI to aid in battle. This became known as the 10 Cyberwars.
Ten wars fought over a period of ten years, on and off. That was until the last war that saw the collapse of the worldwide web.
The group responsible for that wasn’t a major political power but an anonymous group. They did their damage and disappeared. Few days later most telecommunication structures had been destroyed leading the planet to an information dark age.
Ironically the years that followed was a golden age for the African Continent. Unlike the major powers and the rest of the world, it’s ‘backwardness’ had spared it from ravages of war. This saw the rise of the African continent as the only global power since resources were and still are vast.
The continent was divided into three Federations: Lower Southern Africa, Upper Western Africa and Greater Eastern Africa.
Greater Eastern Africa was the first block to rise up considering it had eighteen countries. Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo Brazzaville, Central African Republic and Zambia had all joined willingly giving it access to both Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Egypt, Sudan and South Sudan gave it access to the complete Nile Valley too.
This made it the water powerhouse in the continent. It became the food as well as clean energy powerhouse due to hydroelectric dams before switching to solar and wind farms.
Libya, Chad and Cameroon going westward was the Upper Western Africa rich in oil and minerals.
Angola Mozambique and Madagascar going south was the Lower Southern Africa Union. This union controlled the nuclear energy as well as led in technological advancements.
The three zones traded with each other, essentially locking out other players and during the aftermath of 10 Cyberwars they guarded their unions very much that it was thirty years later when the rest of the world had slowly got back to its feet that they discovered the utopia that was Africa.
This was the time for Africa to shine, and shine she did. The next six hundred years saw great bounds and leaps.
They reclaimed the Sahara Desert much to the chagrin of the Amazon (both the forest and the corporate entity). This was the start of the fourth world war.
With proper communication channels and having Ubuntu, the continent started by creating and teaching one language that was based on Swahili.
Each zone had its different financial markets but they all traded in one currency called the Kwanza. Swahili word for First. Any other country wanting to trade with Africa had to use Kwanza. This was the second reason for the next war.
The first foray into the wary was when an alliance of seven former world powers tried to attack Somalia under the guise of fighting off pirates.
Yes piracy was there, but this was due to one or two individuals and not a country. With that a landing force landed on the coast of Somalia in the dead of night.
However, one thing none of the other countries counted on, was the rapid response and speed that the entire African Union raised up the army. The African Union was the only body from all the previous world organizations that still existed though it was more of a cultural outfit than political one.
In less than twenty-four hours, each zone had sent in their disciplined forces. East Africa had the army ready, Western Africa sent their squadrons of fighter planes and Southern Africa surrounded them with fleet of naval ships.
Without firing a single gun, the enemy was defeated. They were stripped of their weapons and vehicles and sent back to their countries. This was the third reason for the war. The shame of being beaten without firing a shot.
After that Africa was left to its devises. But the federation started to crumble internally. Every three years, the Federation elected members of the Chambers from each individual country. Each round of voting led up to the Zonal Presidency.
When each Zonal President had been elected, their names were cast in a bin along with each of the three zones. Then a neutral person would randomly pick out a president and what zone they would lead.
That way balance was maintained. But the last three elections had seen two candidates repeatedly winning the ballot. A secret inquisition was done and it was discovered that Western and Southern factions had decided to gang up and overthrow the Eastern Federation.
The Eastern Faction felt they were unfairly targeted as they felt they were as transparent as possible. It was them who had come up with the switch-president idea because in as much as in terms of population they were the smallest, their importance as the breadbasket couldn’t be overlooked.
The Southern Federation felt that it was too much for Eastern Federation to have access to both Atlantic and Indian Oceans, conveniently forgetting they too had access to two oceans.
The Western Federation was jealous that the Suez Canal was not under their control, but they forgot that Egypt and Sudan voluntarily joined the faction.
A terrorist attack that targeted the last two remaining hydroelectric plants on the Nile, killing about twenty people was followed by an explosion at the nuclear power plant two months later.
With that, the final nail in the coffin was struck. Both the West and South Federations attacked the East. The east though had highly experienced military and had home advantage. They fiercely defended their grounds and yielded not a step.
This was where external forces stopped their underhanded shadow activities that fueled the cold war and openly supported either faction.
The Eastern Faction couldn’t stand up to the combined effort of both sides and they resorted to scorch earth policy.
Unfortunately, their scorch earth policy was more of a biological fire rather than physical fire. Years prior, the administration at the Eastern Federation had a secret meeting and they knew they were the weakest of all factions, so what they did was to administer a super vaccine that made their citizens immune.
They did this buy unleashing a deadly viral strain and using the excuse of finding a cure they vaccinated their citizens.

As they lost their lands, the eastern federation gave the green light to release a plethora of diseases.
All sides suffered but in terms of population, the eastern faction retained the highest number. With the interference of the world, they also spread the diseases to their home countries and this was responsible for a sharp decline in world population.
It was only after seventy years that the rest of the world begged the eastern federation for help.

The professor hummed as he recalled all these facts. The only good thing that came out of that was the foundation for human immortality.
Unknown to them, that cocktail of bacteria reacted within a few of the Eastern Federation citizens and created an environment that was unfriendly to harmful organisms while it promoted and in some cases rejuvenated stem cell production.
Some of these cells were passed down generation to generation and he was one of those who have the stem cell production gene. Though he got it spliced and not naturally. Natural selection just didn’t work like that.

After the last two world wars, it had taken a lot of effort on the remaining survivors to work together.
Fortunately, most survivors formed groups that had like-minded people. Majority of them were survivors of the Eastern Federation.
Once Again the African continent had survived the ravages of war. Though it no longer resembled the old African continent as the nuclear wars had activated some old fault lines along with global climate changes the landscape was very different.
Right now African plate was divided into three and the eastern plate had joined the South American Plate effectively marrying the Sahara and Amazon.
Majority of the Eurasian Plate was under water except for the British Isles that remained vastly unchanged.
Well both British and Australian plates. Australia was vastly uninhabited and was a Darwinian paradise as well as the Devil’s backyard.
The British Isles was just as it had been a millennia ago except for a few people living there.
This was also the last known location of Doctor Iejyd.
The Professor stepped out of trees and looked around. It didn’t hurt to be cautious, just because he was here didn’t mean that he was alone.
After being certain there were no eyes, he walked across the tarmac road heading for the large stone monolith.
In previous years it was called Stonehenge and had a significance but now it had only use. A gateway.
He chuckled as he remembered how some humans had thought it as an alien invention or some portal to another world.
He touched the nearest fairly warm stone, flicking a hidden switch. This was the only function of Stonehenge: secret teleportation device not hooked to The System.
It also served as a smaller AI but that was known to only two beings.



The Professor stepped into the room and shed off his human skin exposing a long thin body having eight tentacles covered in suckers.
The octopus slid into the water and propelled itself down into the deep part of the bay, squeezing through an inch wide hole into the open ocean.

Doctor Iejyd, nodded as the octopus spy communicated telepathically with him. He sat back and closed his eyes, surrounded by millions of liters of water safe in the Marianas Trench.
His dream was finally complete. He hadn’t been experimenting to make humans live long, on the contrary he had been experimenting on humans.
His end goal was for the octopus to inherit the earth. All his planning had been for this end goal or rather part of it.
The only way that sentient alien life would ever take note of this planet was if octopus ruled the world. After all, octopus aren’t earthly creatures.
He chuckled and sighed contentedly. In his right hand he held a silver liquid, this was the real serum for humans. With this he could live forever without having to upload his mind and at the same time it made him almost invincible
He got to his feet and headed to the large screen and tapped on it. The screen came on illuminating the room in a blue hue.
“Commence with the resurrection.”
The resurrection as he called it was what would have been called a zombie apocalypse centuries back. The only difference was, he had in his database billions upon billions of human DNA.
With that, and a little tweaking of the teleportation system, he could create perfect body replicas of the said person. However, he didn’t want perfect bodies, just ones that would last at most ten years.
Using the information than the professor had acquired about the resurrection protocol he could then download the consciousness of long lost people and give them a new life.
He had a number of dictators he wanted to resurrect, as well as mass murderers and basically the lowest scum of society.
Within a few years, utopia will fall and dystopia will rise. When that happens, the forces of nature from the sea shall rise up and bring a tsunami of change. The flooding that shall happen will bring to shame Noah’s Flood.
There was enough water to submerge most of the world under 30 feet of water. Any survivors would have to endure three continuous months of torrential downpour.
All that was possible because of The System. His brainchild, or to be more precise children. He walked to. Another door to. His extreme right and opened it to reveal a very large dome completely covered in water.
In it were three cephalopod swimming peacefully. One of them saw they doctor and it swam towards him. It stretched out a tentacle reaching the glass that separated the two.
“Hi Zeus,”

The doctor nodded and the octopus signaled to the other two.
He chuckled and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
The name plaque on the door read:
THE SYSTEM





Table of contents

New Chapter

---