EPISODE FOURTEEN
“A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME”
Ahneevah was born to fly …
… and all those within her near circle considered it a birth right. They recognized that everything about her physical and mental being said airborne. Her specific physiognomy allowed her to wear her primary training aircraft almost as if it were an extension of her life shell. Her intellectual prowess was at the very highest percentile on the Cerebral Assessment Scale. Even during her earliest educational period she showed a remarkable aptitude in practically all academic disciplines. Later on in her intermediate cycle, she excelled at every one of her advanced study modules, including aero-engineering, flight dynamics, photonic propulsion systems, virtually all other sciences, and most of her planet’s history and languages.
One reason for her exceptional learning capacity was that in her formative phase she was able to develop and put into practice the technique of lucid dreaming. This skill allowed her to pre-select and program specific dream subject matter before her sleep periods began. As a consequence, she was able to review and assimilate each day’s curriculum during the nights as she slept. Later on at the Air and Space Tactical Flight Center she used her highly perfected conscious dreaming ability to create a varied selection of mental flight simulators so that during her REM sleep phase she could fly almost any aircraft within the Air Arm inventory. All aerial control inputs, emergency procedures and combat maneuvers were performed over and over again and became auto-reflex actions ingrained in her subconscious-to-conscious memory nexus, making it possible for her to consistently perform every flight-related task instinctively and flawlessly. She also utilized her self-activated dusk-‘til-dawn sleep seminars to rehearse actual mission profiles, which prepared her to execute her duties and handle crisis situations with amazing fluidity, alacrity and perfection.
Though Ahneevah’s mastery of the lucid dreaming technique was indeed amazing, it represented merely a small fraction of her extraordinary natural arsenal. The most incomprehensible of all her abilities was her omniscient consciousness. She had the uncanny power to simultaneously hold and individually track a multiplicity of active thoughts. Even within her highly advanced race this was considered a one in a hundred-million phenomenon.
Ahneevah’s life mate, also a combat pilot, was a casualty of war. Although great honors were conferred upon him, Ahneevah was never able to reconcile the circumstances surrounding his untimely death. She always believed that the civilian leadership had failed in their oversight duties. Their dereliction resulted in the military being forced to overuse and overextend its forces and all other strategic assets until it had broken down. Ahneevah always maintained that her mate was an unnecessary sacrifice to the gross ineptness and negligence of those in power.
With the exception of the loss of her mate, the intrepid Ahneevah had never faced a difficulty she was unable to completely overcome. However, all of her mental focus could not conquer the unbearable sorrow deep inside her—the profound regret that her highly advanced race had been unable to avoid annihilation.