Chapter Eight: The Idealist Revolution

"That," Lucas said "Was an interesting tale."
Captain Forworth was sitting with his mouth slightly agape. He was part a para-military group, the Spacing Commision, who didn't lend themselves specifically to any of the seventeen families, but rather worked with each of them evenly, policing space. He had seen a few battles with pirates, but had never even imagines fighting to the scale that Jonathan Brooke has just described.
The Elders of the Orpheus familiy sat and pondered. Jonathan sat silent, knowing that at that time I would be fairly useless to try and press into their silent thought. Jonathan could not seem to shake the feeling that there was some sort of communication going on between the elders, however. They were silent, but they were silent together. It was perhaps one of the oddest sensations he had ever felt in his life.
before too long, the elders raised their heads as one. There was no doubt that they seemed to reach a conlusion at togher.
"Your tale varies from ours."
"There is one fundamnetal difference, in fact."
"We believed that we were leaving a dead world behind us, when we left. It was still going through the death throws at the time, but we knew that there was no clear victor to be had in World War Three."
"We never expected the Apocalptists, though."
"They were a complete surprise."
"The religious radical terrorists seem to have accelerated the process."
"But we thought that the world of Earth was lost forever."
"You see, although there are seventeen colonies, there were supposed to be eighteen."
The elders were all contributing to the conversation. What Jonathan heard was a continuous dialouge coming from six different people. It was as if there were working with one mind.

Sometime before the beginning of the Destruction, the Elders of the Orpheus family said, a radical development was made in the feild of Metaphysics. It is a long standing truth that as soon as a metaphysical question can be proven, in becomes science. Take, for example, the question of how the plants move. Logic could explain the movement of the Planets. Logic, in fact, dictated that they orbited around earth along with the sun and the moon. It seemed logical, and indeed it appeared to be true when studied by the pricipal of occum's razor -- that is, the most obvious explination is usually the correct one. For the ancient peoples of Earth, the logical answer to the movement of stars, planets, the sun and the moon was that they orbited the Earth. With the development of science, the realm of the movement of stars moved away from philosophy, however. It was proven, with science, that the universe does not revolve around earth. Thus, the Metaphysical became the physical.
The breakthrought that was made followed this example. It has been shown, with logic, that it appears that we all exist in the physical world. The breakthrough was when a philosopher by the name of Warren Jones realised that an old philosophical idea was in fact not only logically possible, but the scientific truth. As seen in the above example, when the metaphysical is proven true, it becomes the physical. Only, those words don't quite work.
The philosphical proposition found to be true was one that seeked to answer the metaphysical question of 'How the world is'. It is a feild of thought known, in general, as Idealism. It states that the physical world is, in fact, just a construct of the Mind, a set of perceptions.
The physical world that you are so used to Does not Exist. Only your mind and it's perceptions do.
The Mind is a constructer - maybe akin to God, maybe not - who co-ordinates all the perceptions of all the living beings in the universe.
Warren Jones noticed that the old idealist theories were perhaps inaccurate, but not entirely wrong. And furthermore, he realised that any being could, with the right training, access the Mind. Accessing the Mind would allow that being to change it's own perceptions.
Warren Jones began to gather followers of his idealist philosophy (if we can be allowed to call it that) and before too long, had the support of a seventeen large or powerful families on Earth. They funded him, and he in return promised to set them up with a place in the universe that they could call their own. A colony, a paradise outside of the solar system.
he was the most powerful of the early idealists. He could see the universe for what it really was better than anybody else could. You'll learn the ways of the idealist as you move around our cities.
At the time, he was the only man who could conceive of how to change his perception enough that he could take a ship and move it through space.
That last idea is misleading, Warren Jones never actually moved a ship through space, since nothing really moves and there is no space. But again, we can see the confusion on your face, perhaps you will better understand these matters in time, Jonathan.
He was preparing to take the families out into the universe, and show them the true ways of the World and the Mind. One thing, however, got in his way.
The War.
It was difficult to organise it, but Warren Jones managed to get an armada of his ships to travel to other worlds. He left... a disciple behind on Earth to contact him when the war was over, so the eighteen colonies could exist togther.
The disciple never answered to Warren Jones again. We knew that the disciple would never intentionally betray his... him. It was a simple matter to put togethert the fact that somehow, Earth had been destroyed. There was no other explination for why, but the people of old agreed that the graveyard roots of humanity would be a hallowed place, never to be visited again. Sacred ground never to be seen by human eyes. The philosophical reasoning behind this is less important to the overall picture.
The simple truth is, our society never returned to Earth, becasue we thought it was gone forever.
Up until now, we had thought that Earth was forever gone, and up until now, we did not know what had happened there.

Word Count: 13,737 (making this officially the longest counted work I've ever written)*
Days Left: 23
Sanity: Well... It's still here.
Cafinated Beverages: 2
* - I wrote a novel once long ago, but it was in pen, and I don't know how many words it was.