take a straw

and sip a toast

to the new year

anacondas smile with cheer

wrapped around a branch

in a river that flows

through Brazil

Merry Holiday to the Amazon

from The Pale Green Mermaid.

PAKAL AHAU

“Here, here and here is where the perimeter may have been weakened. ” Jane said.  “We need to send out scout teams to see if a response is needed.  If the RND has penetrated the forest we will need to locate and neutralize them.  It is best to break out in pairs.  So, Gustav, Ahmed, Ju Li, and Pete break apart into units as you please.  Take your aural transponders and send back a message as soon as you verify the integrity of the enclosure has been broken.

” Pete, you are with me.” Said Ahmed.  ” What are the coördinates for the home base?”

” Sixteen degrees latitude and thirty-two degrees longitude.” said Jane, ‘that leaves Ju li and Gustav, your coördinates are… 52 longitude and 45 longitude.”

Jane took off her watch.  ” Synchronize -12:39 PM, transponder check wavelength yellow-orange.  And were off to the races.”

” Pete keep close, I want you to watch my back.”  Ahmed said as he pressed open on  the vacum door walked out into the waterfall with Pete in tow.  Green vapors rose off Pete’s body as they disappeared into the  jungle.

” I hope he doesn’t dissolve into 2-d in the forest.” Sam said, ” I will coördinate the messages and notify all of you if any CIDs decide to go for a swim.”  Jane lock the back door,and remember to use code jaguar for all units messaging back to home.”  Sam rubbed his eyes.  ” Break a leg everyone”

” Candy, you and I will be heading out to the z coördinates.” Jane said, loading up her back pack with extra transponders and the edit mechanism for Pete in case he needs a flush of his computer programs.

Sam’s beeper buzzed.

” We’re leaving.” Said Gustav as he and Ju Li exited the cave.

Sam clicked open the receiver to view the message.  He saw the name Tonlic and pushed the message button. It read.

” The Royal Counsel has broken with the RND leaving an opening to gather the majority support needed to push the forest amendment through the 50/50 deadlock.  The vote will take place within the next hour.  If you can hold out until then and the vote succeeds, the CIDs will be notified to cease the advance through the autobreak system on their decisions mechanisms.  Will keep you updated, Tonlic.”

” One hour to go, I will blitz this message to all team members cell receivers. ” said Sam.

” One hour we can surely manage that.” Candy said.

To be continued…

PAKAL  AHAU

” Your kidding right?” Jane put down black rimmed glasses. ‘ This means we will have to send out a security detail right away.  If the integrity of the perimeter is breached the animals could drift out into the dead zone and their immune systems could be compromised if they digested the bio-engineered plants. ”  Jane pressed the inner edges of her eyes to stop the tears  from falling.

Five days with little sleep was finally taking its toll.  Her move to close the park to the CIDs and evacuate all personnel to prevent a takeover of the forest , her plan,  was slowly cracking into dust.  As a last resort she contacted Eco-City International on the underground net which had been running since most governments started censoring the WWW in late 2020.  They sent a team of five members.

After the reserve was evacuated of park personnel, she opened up a secret part of the bio-sphere that covered the jungle’s atmosphere.  The size of the hole the team dropped through in  the early morning hours ,was miniscule.  An error of one centimeter this way or that and they would splat like bugs on a windshield.  It was a feet first dive into a two by two foot opening.  Any larger and it would have been detected by the RND, which would have meant instant vaporizing since there was a sensor system surrounding the edge and top of the bio-sphere.

All Eco-City members made it safely into the jungle.

Pete came to life this time in 3-D.  You could put your hand right through him but just looking at him you could barely tell the difference between his 3-D image and Ahmed.

” My sensors are showing that a life form is approaching.  Do you want me to take evasive action? “  Pete said.

” No Pete.”  Said Ahmed.  “We are expecting company. “

Jane looked out the peep-hole.  It was Ju Li drenched in sweat with Sam following behind.

” Open the door Pete.’  Jane said.  Ju Li came bounding in.

” The humidity must be a hundred and fifty percent.”  Sam wasn’t far behind dragging a stem of bananas.

” This ought to keep our energy level up, fresh bananas for one and all.”  He slammed the cluster on the table. Everyone grabbed a couple jamming the extra in pockets.  Food that is not genetically altered was next to impossible to buy.  The structure of most altered food had little taste and rotted within days. The avatar reached for a banana.  Jane watched as the hand went through the last banana. Then was caught by the edge of his last finger which knocked the fruit on the floor.

” I felt something. ” Pete said.

” Look Guys, Pete nearly grasped that bananna, he is evolving just as NAVP said this type of life form would.”

” Catch this.”  Ahmed threw the TX43 at Pete.  The laser slipped into his palm forcing Pete to accidentally set it off.  The laser bounced off the ceiling and walls until Pete opened the door and was released into the waterfalls.

” Well, well, well.” Candy said, ” we have a new recruit.”

” That’s up to Pete, “  Sam said, ” So, Pete are you up to the fight?” 

 Pete put out his hand toward Jane the person he had the most familiarity with.  She hesitated then thrust her hand towards his grasping it with a firm handshake.  It felt to Jane like Jello hardening.

“Ok , Pete, let’s try you out.”

” Now, down to business. Jane pulled up the latest red line data map.

To be continued…

Speaking of Faith is a radio show on NPR hosted by Krista Tippett in it she speaks  of many topics concerning all faiths.  Recently she had a show that discussed the moral response to the destruction of the planet including the Amazon.

www.publicradio.org

Look for,

Speaking of Faith -

The Moral Math of Climate Change
Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and writer who has been ahead of the curve on this fantastically complex issue since he wrote The End of Nature in 1989. We explore his evolving perspective on human responsibility in a changing natural world.

Pakal Ahau

” Look.”  Jane shook Ahmed’s arm.  The bubbles beneath the water continued.  Gustav’s face burst through the surface.

” Hi, Lieblings.”  He leapt up onto the stone and proceeded to shake like a wet dog.  ” That underground cave is getting longer and longer.”

“Where is Candy? “  Jane said.  Gustav surveyed the pool.  ” Here she comes.”  He pointed to the center of the water.  Candy’s brown braid twisted through the ripples like a water moccasin snake.

Candy slithered to the edge of the pool flopping her arm on the stone base below the cascading waterfall.

“Wow, that was monumental.  Those stalagmites were enormous.”  She wretched herself up to a seating position, her legs dangled in the water.

” Historically the caves were used by the Maya to worship underground gods.”  Gustav said, ” Did you see the pictographs on the wall?”  Gustav was an archaeologist in one of his former lives.

” There was a series of hands and feathered…”

” Enough chit-chat, time is ticking there are less than  thirty minutes left.”  Ahmed said.  Gustav punched in his part of the code, then Candy.  The rock started to move.  Entering the cave  they were hit with blue shining light from a wall of computers – a pseudo rising sun.

” Hello Ahmed.” The computer avatar said.  ” red line data search required.”

” Thanks Pete.”

” You are welcome Ahmed.  Don’t forget to recharge the power system as we are at maximum drainage.”

” Ok, Pete, shut down.”  The face on the screen dissolved and Ahmed removed the battery cartridges snapping them into his solar power pack.  ” It should take ten minutes for the recharge , in the meantime Pete has put out this red line data – and it doesn’t look good.”

Jane touched the screen where Pete had appeared.  ” I still can’t get used to those virtual assistants, they seem so real.”

“Real enough to have their  own protection agency, the  WVAP.”  Sam said pulling  out a card from  his back pack and handing it to Jane.

” We have more dire circumstances  to focus on.  Look at this data.  Perimeter P, Z and X have been compromised.”

To be continued…

www.worldwildlife.org    This organization is doing a lot of grassroots work in the Amazon. The Amazon is the world’s largest  rainforest and river basin in the world. 

” PAKAL AHAU”

Jane grabbed the water bottle with one hand and gingerly held her transponder with the other. She was the last one out.  She watched the ceiling begin to buckle as she pulled the trap door over her head.

Jane and Ahmed, now standing on the back=end of the reserve, watched as the left side of the building collapsed in a loud whoosh.  They headed into the jungle.

It took two hours to reach their first coordinates.  They sent a digital call on a secure link to the other members of the team to see if anyone had been detected.   They were all clear so they headed to the second set of coordinates located under a string of waterfalls that were created when the Amazon  was forded. 

Walking over the crest of the mountains on one of the few manmade trails they headed to a pool at the base of the largest waterfall.  It was the ninth in a series of twenty waterfalls in the reserve.  In close proximity were a number of animals drinking and rolling in the emerald green water.  Below the main waterfall were a series of five falls that formed a ring.  A cloud of McCalls  flew across the morning sky into the mist broken only by a succession of rainbows.  Blasts could be heard  in the distance and a tinge of smoke hung in the air, otherwise  it was an idyllic scene.

They crept past the animals and walked behind the waterfall.  The building of this secret room had taken months  but Jane facing a worse case scenario  had allowed the Eco City members  to create a command center behind the falls.  Ahmed felt across the damp wall of stone hitting a soft spot, he pressed then pushed a false stone to the left and up revealing a small key pad. 

Jane keyed in her part of the code then Ahmed repeated the process.  Keying in one set of incorrect codes would result in the  destruction of the room.  The information in this room was vital to the Eco City members organization.  It would mean the eradication of the group if found by the CIDs.  The laser disc would self destruct if not copied every twenty-four hours.  They were 23.30 hours into the cycle for the last backup.

” What is taking Gustav so long to arrive?  He is in the best shape of all of us.”  Ahmed yelled.  Standing under the waterfall peering between streams of water Jane noticed a rustling of the surface near her feet.

To be continued…..

Note: For further research,

www.loe.org   Living on Earth, Radio show, currently has a series on the Amazon

www.nature.org  Nature Conservancy, lots of info on saving the earth.

“PAKAL AHAU”

A former president was working within the States Counsel on their behalf to organize a protection order for the jungle.

They decided to move to the end of the building.  To a room that was used in happier times  for bonfires and singalongs when the building was a center for eco- tourism.  The gear they were lugging included laser shooters, a mechanism that tempoarily blinds your  opponents with a light beam that bouces off the retina.  It is dropped in an umbrella formation over troops.  The other armament was a hand helds splicer used to disrupt the atoms in your opponent’s nerve system rendering troops helpless for ten hours.

The blasts were five times as frequent now.  Then in a second there was silence, only the shuffling of their boots across the stone floor could be heard, the AK97  Gustav was hauling fell to the floor bouncing over steps into the cellar.  Gustav put down a ZP player and snapped a banned Bruce Springsteen tape into the clip.  Music filtered around their ears. 

Jane reset the player to Badlands and turned up the volume.  She walked to the rear window and looked out.  Her heart was starting to pound normally.  It had been forty eight hours  since she stopped taking the medication that was now given tp everyone at the age of six.  It was a mixture of prozican and caffeine.  She had heard  this song a thousand times since Eco international City had taken it on as its signature anthem.  For once in her life she could actually feel the words and melodies of the song, they didn’t just wash over her senses.

“They must be planning an offensive, ” Gustav said.  Jane took off her government badge and tossed it to the center of the room then she removed the safety cover on her laser.  It was quiet except for Springsteen’s voice.

“Working in the fields till you get your back burned,

working in the fields, yeah till you get your facts learned, baby I got my facts learned real god right now,

You better get it straight girl…”

The player mechanism was hit. Gold sparks filled the room. “Stand back,” Ahmed said.  “they must be using one of those new carckerjack guided lasers that can turn corners once it locks on a target, even sound vibrations.”  He kicked the player into the middle of the room.  It continued to generate music.

“Old man want to be rich, rich man want to be king , and the king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything…” 

The box exploded into a purple shower of sparks and photon waves producing a cloud of ionized debris.  Everyone pressed  against the walls waiting for the cloud to disperse.  Pockets of heat and energy spritzed the floor.

“That’s it brother.  They are inside the security perimeter that we set up.”  Ju Li said.

“How the hell did they do that? The technology is original.  They should not have been able to break it,”  Said Sam  as he kicked the remnants of the ZP Player.

“Alright, everyone has water?” Ahmed said.  The group nodded  as they grappled with their gear.

“We will meet at the predetermined coordinates…series number…seven.”  He threw Jane a water bottle then ducked into the trap door disappearing into the basement.

To be continued…

From Pa Museum Phila Pa,

Evening Program:
The Douglas G. Lovell, Jr. Annual REPORTS FROM THE FIELD
Tuesday, December 8 at 6:00 pm

Don’t miss this annual event, where select Penn Museum researchers offer updates on their recent work! This year, two researchers transport you to two very different sites:

 

  

Deciphering the Painted Pyramid: Recent Epigraphic Finds at the  Ancient Maya City of Calakmul, Mexico

Simon Martin, Associate Curator, American Section, describes  
spectacular new discoveries at Calakmul, recently published in the  
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported in media internationally. Ancient Maya murals at the site of Calakmul, Mexico, buried for 13 centuries, feature unprecedented scenes of daily life. The murals rank among the most important yet found in the Maya region.

 

 

 

Check it out!

 www.penn.museum

 

“Pakal Ahau”

Their ad hoc resistance would be the last action taken by the environmental movement to protect the earth. ‘What a sad commentary,’ Jane thought.  Her mother attended the first earth day held in Philadelphia, Pa in 1977.  There, protests by the public surfaced demanding protection of the planet’s resources.  Progress was made in the ensuing decades.  Slowly the air and water across the country cleared of pollution.  Then a group of people came to power and through their policies of political bungling and secrecy joined with the publics complacency the scales were tipped and the earth’s resources began a horrific decline.

” Ouch.”  Jane said.

” Just a few more minutes Jane, “ said Candy, ” The chip has travelled up your wrist.  Were having trouble finding it with the scan and were out of pain lozenges for you to suck on.”

Jane’s eyes formed a slit.

“Wait, got it.  Sam will laser and clean the wound.  I want to give those blue suits at the RND a run for their money, ” Candy dopped the chip, as she had done with the last five , into a small airborne satellite programmed to fly outside the zoned reserve.

” That ought to keep them busy for sometime.”  She threw the ball into the air and it whizzed off into the direction of the dead zone.  The dead zone was delineated by a techno fence that separated the two areas.

The future of the Amazon was that bio-engineered forest of flora and fauna unless they could protect the reserve from a takeover by the CIDs.  CIDs were 1/3 computer and 2/3 cloned human .  They were bio-engineered in the last decade and used as an endless supply of military men and women when the general populations of the world, after a decade long war, refused to fight.  The last remaining oil reserves on the planet lay deep beneath the Amazon forest.

” Jane,” Candy said as she loaded her electromagnetic transponder gun, ‘put this thermo gear on so your body can not be detected by the heat sensor helicopters.”

“Thanks.”  Jane went to the back room  stripped down and put on the gear.  Her wrist ached even though it was healing quickly,  The scanner’s laser marks were almost gone.

They had a plan -sort of.

To be continued…

“Pakal Ahau”

Cast of Characters

Jane – American, Northern, Government worker from Philadelphis, PA, not an Eco- International City member – works in South America

Ahmed – Palestinian, former Seattle, Washington engineer, joined Eco-International 28 yeras ago

Candy – American from Tupelo, Mississippi , temp officer worker, oil painter -joined 20 years ago

Sam – American from San Diego, California, ex – detective, musician joined Eco-international 7 yeras ago

 Ju LI – Korean monk, from Yala, Thailand, joined 15 years ago

Gustav – German from Berlin formerly homeless till he joined , Eco- International  City, member  12 years ago

Eco-International City – Organization formed by the countries of the United Nations to enforce existing international environmental laws

CIDS - Computer Integrated Drones 

_____________________________________________________________________

Part One

The fight was over.  This was the last self perpetuating forest anywhere on the planet.  Smoke drifted over the canopy of the forest.  The security force’s blasts could be heard by the lone remaining park service ranger who was holed up in an old eco tourism building.  The forest ranger, Jane Cloud, and six Eco International City members were all that stood between the destruction of the earth’s last pocket of ecology and a man-made wasteland.

Jane had no plans to give it up, not without a fight.

The heart of the Amazon was at stake.

All were implanted with a GPS system chip as mandated by the States Counsel, they were in the process of removing those chips so their movement could not be tracked – a federal offense.  After this step there would be no turning back.  As the metal sliced through her skin she reminded herself of an old quote by Albert Einstein,

” Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.”

To be continued…

Somewhere in the Amazon a story awaits you,

stop back tomorrow same time same place -

Little known facts about the Amazon -

From   www.ladatco.com

Image from wikipedia

Amazon Flash Story Anthem – by “MUSE”    SONG  Uprising

www.muse.mu