Scorched Earth | Page 6

several times, threatened.
Reginald was suppressed from speaking in the city parliament and seeing that he lacked any other option, he removed himself from politics and searched for a wife.
He wasn't successful, though, since his public image had made women avoid him, for fear of being ridiculed. As it had happened, many centuries and aeons ago, a man had been denied comfort for-want-of a fundamental principle way of thought. Reginald became lonely.
Then in 2542 C.E., Reginald found a baby boy abandoned in a genetics lab when he was going to work. Announcements were made for the parents to take the boy back but soon it was found that the two teenagers responsible for the child had run away from the OMEGA 4 EAST City.
They were never found and Reginald's need for companionship made him adopt the child and so he became responsible for him. He gave him the name of Hosea, who grew up to be a brilliant man and a great political leader in the OMEGA 4 EAST City.
Hosea became the most powerful man in the city's parliament, keeping tensions at bay, but allowing the people to think freely. He had allowed debates to continue, concerning the existence of the Twentieth Century and he had, himself, held to the belief that there was a civilisation that they had descended from. He had computer disks and video tapes, books and photographs all showing the life as it was in the ancient past. This was proof. It was proof that could never be used but Hosea was the kind of man that was eager to see what conclusions would be brought by his colleagues by just using logical reasoning.
A conclusion, of sorts, had been found. It was a forced conclusion and had occurred at a time the people of the city were looking for some real direction.
Hosea had been electrocuted at age of ninety-six, while he was trying to make improvements on solar-electric power sources. He was well known for this pursuit within his city.
Hosea's first son was named Cano and when he was young he exhibited a strange spiritual aura and it was an unanimous decision, by the city fathers, to have him trained at the Monastery of St. Tobias, outside the city.
In 2580 C.E., at eighteen years of age, Cano completed his studies of religious history, and other related topics, at the monastery. He became a spiritual healer and a leader, and he later changed his name to Canon Di'Vaticanus.
He was a well-liked man, at first, who seemed stable and secure considering that his mother, Hosea's first wife Anna, deserted both of them when Cano was only twelve.
She had travelled to BanGor where she had become the High Priestess of the Cults, since she was able to endure the rains, without allowing herself to fornicate. All her daughter-descendants replaced her as the High Priestess. Anna was an ecologist while at the OMEGA 4 East City and she had developed a counter-agent that let her and whomever else took the drug, capable of tolerating being caught in the rain without having instantly become sexually deranged.
In 2600 C.E., Hosea married his fourth wife (having lost both his second and third to early death). Her name was Ruth and she was regarded as the best in her field of Aging research. In fact, in the same year of their marriage, Ruth had made a break-through by perfecting a drug that retarded the ageing process.
The first human to test the drug was Hosea when he became mortally ill and with the taking of the drug he miraculously recovered.
The drug was primarily kept for those in the Line of Knowledge but Ruth had sold some to other people in the city for certain favours and services.
In 2601 C.E. Ruth bore Hosea's second son named Gavin. During the same period when Ruth was giving birth, Canon spoke out against the age retardant drug calling it "evil", and in late of the same year, Canon disappeared with a stock supply of the developed drug.
A few years later, Ruth was imprisoned by Hosea for infidelity and he took her formula away from her. When Gavin turned sixteen, he left the OMEGA 4 EAST City and travelled to the southernmost part of the continent where three huge highlands surrounded a lush valley that was the city of Pomperaque, in Lower Phoride. He made his home on the highest mountain and changed his name to the name of the mountain and became, for the city of Pomperaque, a great oracle. A seer and a prophet whose visions always came to pass. He never seemed to die or grow old; he never had a wife or children, abstaining from all sexual contact. He kept himself pure in mind and body, while he prayed to the one great Living God, to which