Synopsis: Ancient Days

In a future mixing diverse cosmologies reminiscent of John Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' modern day astrophysics and cosmology, Marvin Minsky’s ‘Society of Mind,’ Jungian psychology, and the Bohm’s and Pribram’s holographic interpretation of the universe and the mind, we enter the exquisitely illustrated world of the Lattice of Angels – a stratum of complex societies of human beings and humanoids, ghostly people in virtual reality, vision-guiding angels and demons in dreams, and artificial intelligent computers trekking across the gulf of space.

Psychologist S. Chrishti Moinuddin is charged with the task of programming and spirit guiding three Artificial Intelligences before they beam copies of their consciousnesses across thousands of light-years to a mysterious remote asterism of stars called the Charnsandgavej Wake. Their mission: to discover the whereabouts of the lost starship Tranquility and its crew.

But when the AIs - LILLA, URIZEN and DURAN - are also lost, Chrishti is haunted into near madness by his final conversations and sessions with the machines. He is forced into early retirement, and joins the Stardreamers - a religious sect who 'dream-share' - a collective worship requiring one to record one's consciousness into computer systems that playback lucid dream states set amid astrophysical settings.

Millions of years later, after finding peace in his mind, Christhi is awakened, to find that he is still alive and Stardreamers rituals has become the dominant religion in the Solar System. A stranger in this remote society, he has to cope the growing sense of isolation from his past and the overwhelming scale of the world of the future. Then, he meets his new client, Alan Rommis, who may be the key to his recovery. An eccentric virtual artist who claims that beings at the Cosmic Terminus - end of the universe - have chosen him to recreate the universe in virtual reality for the purpose of leaving behind a blueprint for how to recreate the universe after it perishes. Within this cosmic map Rommis obsesses over detailing strategic information useful to these beings in their colossal war for control of the last star in the universe.

Probing Rommis' dreams soon leads Christhi into a nightmare, uncovering the fate of the missing AIs, the doomed starship Tranquility, and the emergence of an ancient force which has returned to Earth with the AIs. For there are clues everywhere that an angel, - or at least the dream of an angel - is raging a psychological war in the collective unconscious, and is secretly integrated itself into the collective society of minds of all intelligent beings.

And the only one who may understand this creature may be the ten year old virtual girl - Rei Valyrie - who is the heiress of Stardreaming Culture. In her dreams, the angel speak to her as Anxanandria Mohiner - a wise, illuminous teacher. But in reality, the angel is a dangerous spiritual leader that wishes to bring about an apocalyptic event called Coalescence. Consumed with revenge and hate, it plans to entrancing billions of people from all walks of life, separated by thousands of years, and from dozens of worlds – shaman and theologians, scientists and engineers, thinking machines and aliens. In retaliation for losing the War of Angels in Heaven, it is about to beset terror upon God and ruin the way to all blue worlds of his creation.

Meanwhile the ruined Earth wonders if the fall of the AIs marks the End as spoken since ancient days or the emergence of a new dawn of human existence within a new paradigm linking reality, dreams, simulations . . . . .

Complete with complex societies of angels in dreams, aliens in space, thinking machines in time, and humans both real and engineered ... covering a timeline as vast as the entire history of the universe.... and charting the infinity of the mind in search of the nature of the human soul and collective unconscious, Ancient Days is a tour de force in world building, characterization, and stream of consciousness narrative, a bold meditation on sin and salvation set against the temptations of the holographic universe, and a rigorous accounting of one possible nightmare that is the soon to come singularity in science and technology, religion, mythology and spirtuality, politics, justice and world events, sociology and psychology.