Bendik Texier ascended three steps onto the presentation platform, and the roar of conversation began to trail off. As he strode to the center, his eyes took in the anxious audience. Over two hundred bloggers, journalists, and government officials were present. The last few muted conversations puttered out, leaving the room silent with all eyes fixed on Bendik. Against the quiet, his soft-soled steps whispered eerily, refusing to break the stillness.

Bendik slowed and rounded toward them at the spot he liked to present from, fully taking in their expectant faces. He quickly picked out five, seated upfront, that would try and steal Texier secrets today. Each was paid by a competitor, via shell companies, to use events like this to release tiny nanobot swarms designed to infiltrate systems locked behind deterministic walls. Bendik wasn’t worried. If anything, inspecting the captured nano-swarms would provide some comparative data.

Texier Interstellar, a subsidiary of Texier Quantum Labs, was a heavy user of the parent company’s most advanced nanotech. For that reason, the secrets in this building were worth billions. With a prize so large, the attempts were expected. Still, he could have held a grudge.

Bendik didn’t, though. To resent them, he would need to believe they understood the stakes or at least understood the game, which none of them did. No one in this room was that close to the truth. Of them all, the proud, square-framed man standing the back was probably the closest. General Clark Leven. The General was a good man and one of Bendik’s most staunch supporters. He met Clark’s eye, and the two men shared a nearly imperceptible smile.

These people were ignorant and afraid. Even if they didn’t know it. Of the two, fear was by far the more viscous. Fundamentally speaking, fear was his actual foe. Unfortunately, it was also a devil with a million faces. A more personal solution was required to effectively fight fear. The old stalwarts of inspiration and therapy were both unpredictable and fleeting. Even the newer guided psychedelic treatments were not good enough.

Bendik thought of his recent conversation with Austin. His son might just have the seed of an answer to that problem… a virtual universe designed around how the human mind evolved. Bendik’s mind swirled with the possibilities.

Today he would fight ignorance with images of the impossible made real. Although inspiration was no solution, it was still a useful tool.

In so doing, he would quietly lay breadcrumbs for the few who cared enough to question the talking heads. Those glitter-toothed media faces who spat bile where-so-ever they were directed.

That they were all bought and paid for–owned in every sense but legally–was a poorly kept secret. Behind the secret though, was their existence, their lives. And nearly to the last, they willfully blinded themselves to truth with an internal monologue of justification.

Although the message of these internal voices varied, they held a single common denominator. Serfdom was a small price to prop up their self-image. A meager pittance to reassure their inner demons that they were in fact, better than the masses.

Even knowing this to be true, Bendik also knew most of humanity was no different. The talking heads, the very existence of their positions, were merely a symptom. A distraction in every sense of the word. The cause of the quiet that drove them was buried far deeper.

It had taken years of epigenetic research, but the work had paid off. Bendik now understood where the cause lived. In humanity’s very DNA.

And that was not all. Embedded there beside it, plain as day but inaccessible, was the cure. Sufis and Mystics and now Bendik knew this. More, they knew that access to the cure started with truth. And, inspiration could help some to start down the path.

Knowing the truth was dangerous, Bendik had long ago begun preparing himself. And those preparations, weapons and defenses both, waited quietly, hidden from all. But resting comfortably in the back of his mind, they were to him, a warm blanket.

His plans would soon begin to show around the edges, and the back-channels would fill with demands and threats. When those didn’t work, the puppets would be given their talking orders: Bendik Texier was hoarding power, he was dangerous, and needed to be pulled down.

At least the first two parts of that message were correct. He was gathering power, and he was dangerous.

Only, it was more power than they knew, and he was far more dangerous than they could possibly conceive. The puppet-masters simply lacked the creativity to realize what he was capable of imagining.

In the case of men like himself, that capacity to imagine was the fuel on their productive fire. In the space where lateral thinking and deep insight met, nearly anything was possible.

The lingering polices of public education and resultant belief structures held by the general populace were a vestigial organ. A persistent leftover from the machine that carried humanity through the time of Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.

The boom of decentralized commerce and the free-lance artisan over the past 40 years had put a dent in the iron grip of those beliefs. Unfortunately, what remained clung to humanity’s metaphorical hull like barnacles in a typhoon. There was simply no way within the existing system to shift beliefs en-mass.

The so-called robber barons, their international counterparts, and their bankers had been ruthlessly effective in dragging civilization into the industrial era. Nearly two centuries later, the legacy of those tycoons, their philosophy of control, lived on in the minds of their progeny and others like them.

Of them all, Bendik had a particular distaste for the bankers. If there was a Devil, a figure head directing an army of scarcity brokers, it was no doubt a banker.

Now, it was time to evolve. The wide-spread capacity for deep understanding, for comprehending the web within which humanity was snared, had to become the norm, not the exception. If it did not, the lie of scarcity many never well and truly die.

The line of the old money families had become the heavy-handed distributors of society's most destructive forces. The demons named ignorance, fear, and distraction.

Through the constant drip of these into the subconscious of civilization, they’d been hoarding power for centuries. All the while, comfortable in their cynical belief that because they could, they should.

They played the grand game to a standstill, each actor supporting the others in a global circle-jerk of mutually assured greed and excess.

Should a new player rise up, looking for a seat at the table, the pack of entrenched power-brokers saw to it they were quickly suffocated by scandal, back-office dealing, murder, and blackmail.

These time-worn tactics did not fail. And if they did, they were taken as a rite of passage. This, Bendik knew all too well.

But Bendik knew them now, and he played in the one way they feared–from the front with pieces of his own creation.

His vectors of attack were hidden and specifically built with the implicit purpose of ending the game entirely and for good. They were right to fear him.

Unfortunately, at least of a bit longer, he too needed to play their game in their world. So it was that he continued to use distraction, half-truths, and false trails to occupy their attention, all while he quietly pushed forward, edging toward a complete evolution.

This need to play had forced him to become quite good at the game, more than a match for his opposition. And this troubled him.

Bendik glanced to his right, to Pete. The brilliant, stoic man regarded him with that warm, almost smiling face Bendik so loved him for. Pete was his sounding board, his check against losing himself. He was what made Bendik’s role possible. Without a person like Pete, it was far too easy for the noble deceiver to simply become the deceiver.

He looked back to the silent crowd. The group held some people he was fond of, a handful of the bloggers, a pair of military men, and one from the syndicated bunch. The others were just tools until they proved otherwise. The majority of the people in this room would become dust in the years to come, anyhow. His plan could not save them all.

As it had always been, people had to self-select. The metaphorical beast at the gate could not be avoided. Evolution demanded self-selection. The guardian, the dark demon standing before each human’s realizing their potential, had not changed since the beginning of time.

The beast was the same now as it had always been; to evolve, everyone must face the perceived poverty of their soul.

And it had to be confronted willingly–no small order in any age.

In this grand unfolding, Bendik’s role was quite simple, actually. Simple, but not easy. History was the greatest teacher, and from its recorded pages and legends, he understood one thing clearly, simple but not easy was true with many great things.

Knowing this, today would be about inspiration and breadcrumbs–a bit more to mark the trail for those that would be the vanguard of evolution.

Clearing his throat, he began, “Four years ago, I announced Texier Interstellar intended to create a self-sustaining research outpost on the moon. You are, no doubt, aware that venture was successful.”

Behind him, a full stage hologram of a clear dome on the surface of the moon appeared. It was city-sized, and contained many smaller domes, most of them also circular with a few oblong exceptions. Some were large, but most were smaller and arranged in linked clusters. Among the bubbles, there were green areas, streets, people, and wheeled craft moving about. Everything connected by glossy dark grey paths.

“One hundred and twenty-seven days after that announcement, our lunar outpost was completed and christened, Bucky, the first lunar city.

Bucky has since been staffed by more than three hundred researchers, engineers, and adventurers who have been working tirelessly to forward the science of Exo-Terran human habitation.”

The hologram of the domed city shifted. It resolved into a trio of mechanics clad in burnt-orange overalls, repairing a six-armed rover in a high-bay workshop.

Then it faded and became a glass-backed lab with long tables of organized and labeled plants. Three women moved among the plants, periodically recording data on displays that hovered in front of them.

The vision smoothly zoomed to look through the glass wall upon a greenhouse vibrant and lush with mature plants. Their drooping imbs hung over the long paths where two men worked among the rows, harvesting food into low, self-propelled carts with multiple bins.

Bendik watched the crowd as the images rolled on. They were mesmerized.

The hologram changed again, displaying a herd of short-legged cattle grazing in a field of diverse grasses. They were thick, round animals, most with heads down chewing grass, and a few, already full, standing with heads erect, working their cud.

The view rose upward, passed through the pastured area’s low roof to far above, revealing a massive checkered grass field. There were eighty to a hundred squares, and only eight held small herds of cattle. The virtual tour rolled on moments later, and scenes of clean-room tech labs, a cafeteria, and simple dwellings were shown in larger-than-life detail.

The final holoprojection faded in on a small squadron of bulky, many-storied spacecraft, poised in a line on identical lunar launch pads. That image hung for several heartbeats begging the question–Where? Where are these going? When it faded, the room contained a tangible air of anticipation.

“The brilliant men and women working at Bucky completed all of their primary and secondary goals nineteen months ago.” He paused and panned his gaze over them. “Their achievements exceeded our expectations, and we reached a point of diminishing returns on the moon.” He held briefly, tight smile below bright eyes and scanned the room. “So, we decided to expand.”

Murmuring began and Bendik stepped to a small side table, lifting and drinking from a glass bottle of water.

Now that he’d shown them what was possible, it was time to build the bulwark. The data and details that would anchor the unbelievable into the world of possibility. Now that he’d shown them what they’d already achieved, it was time to offer a glimpse behind the curtain. Time to gift this group a glance into the world of manifesting dreams.

Here he would lay his metaphorical trail of breadcrumbs. One that would draw forth those who would become extra-terrestrials, if only given a chance.

Bendik replaced the bottle. “We set ourselves upon the task of creating self-sustaining outposts on both Mars and Venus. Unfortunately, we had to sideline the Venus outpost. Its extreme pressure and temperature brought too great a risk, even for our brave teams.

He flipped his hand over his shoulder. “That, however…” The back half of the stage filled with a projection of a red-soiled valley. “…was not the case on Mars.”

Rovers were scatted about its broad bottom, the bulk of them the same model with six articulated legs tipped by orbital wheels. The same as the unit they’d seen in the lunar workshop. But there were also several larger eight and twelve wheeled craft in one area.

The valley was held within a rocky mountain range of grey-blue stone peaks all dusted with red-orange like a stubborn spaghetti stain. Within the colossal basin, stark against the ocean of crimson, was an enormous black circle, and within it, many, many smaller dark rings.

The curves of some interlocked, appearing as adjacent soup bubbles. And each and every one was connected via at least one straight bit.

It bought to mind old crop circle pictures, although not nearly so symmetrical.

Bendick gestured reverently. “This is the unfilled foundation system for Imagine, the first human city on Mars.” The image panned slowly. The room hung with silence so thick it threatened to choke. Bendik smiled to himself.