SERIES FICTION | 'Nothing Left To Subtract - The First Sequel'

To read the first book in this series 'Some Die Just To Live' by Jennifer Gulbrandsen - click here.

The human condition is to truly know nothing, while demanding answers to everything. It’s why we are desperately looking for the meaning in everything around us.

What if we as humans were given a limited understanding of the cosmos on purpose? While we’re all taught to believe that we were made in the image of one divinity or another; what if that is a made up platitude mankind orchestrated simply to close the mental loop of simply not knowing?

Humans are simple and don’t even know it. It’s almost a punishment of sorts, really. All of that reasoning and logic limited to the four corners of the earth? Having this indelible need to make everything fit snugly into the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth… and then destroy anyone and anything that challenges that.

What if the truth is that humans had that knowledge once, but had to have it stripped away because they couldn’t be trusted with it? What if those stories of fantasy and mythology are just the tales of humans with great understanding behaving badly like the animals they truly are? Nothing but heat seeking missiles out to gratify their basic limbic urges? Maybe Zeus was just a dude who couldn’t help himself, and God was a megalomaniac who pouted and smote whenever he didn’t get his way? Kill your son to show me how important I am to you sounds more like a DSMV diagnosis rather than divinity.

Human knowledge was limited on purpose and storytelling was invented to reconcile that. A select few are given the insight into things beyond common knowledge, but by design, they are ostracized and not to be believed by most.

Occasionally, you’ll see someone on the news who had a very specific recollection of a near death experience. They’ll return to life with knowledge of events they could never have known, speak different languages they didn’t learn… But almost always, that ends in being forgotten because the lesson was lost in the human need for recognition and reward.

The human given the gift of spiritual insight rarely knows what to do with it, so it is taken from them.

So what is it all about? How did everything… the collective we experince as humans come into being?

Let’s begin with a mountain, for the oldest thing on this Earth is well, the earth. Many people will look at a mountain and view it as an obstacle; something that needs to be traversed, crossed, overcome. The Greek Gods lived on Mt. Olympus because how on earth could mere mortals exist on such a higher plane here on Earth? We believe Angels live in the clouds for this exact reason. Once a concept leaves a human’s eyes, even the most enlightened human’s, it becomes inconceivable.

Again, this is why they were kept simple. They could’t even be trusted with a week in paradise.

Let’s come back to the mountain and take another look. What if instead of thinking the mountain was a majestic figure outside of the human scope, it was viewed as a necessary ecosystem? A mountain can appear to simply stand there solid and unmoving, but what if you saw it as the cornerstone of an ecosystem completely dependent on everything being interconnected? From where you are, you see a giant hulking rock that is massive, impressive, and surely daunting to climb.

If you were to climb that mountain, you would only be focused on the task at hand of getting to the summit and how it relates to your current reality. Chances are as you clipped in to your safety rope, you would not concern yourself with how your presence on this rock impacted the ecosystem around you. How your footprints move the microorganisms in the soil. You would not be aware of how your presence impacts a mouse. Are you thinking about how your hands full of bacteria impact the stream as you shove them into it when you become hot from the sun and the thin air?

No. Humans are simple. They believe the bigger and more ostentatious something is, the more impactful it has to be. Look around you. No one praises the ‘small life’ of small things and contentment. No one holds a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the same regard as a steak dinner even though they are both food that will keep you alive.

Humans confuse quality with simplicity. That’s why they’re never satisfied or get an answer to anything. Further complicating things is what sustains the species.

If we take the concept of mountain as grand unappreciated ecosystem where everything is interconnected and apply it to humankind or even yourself, what do you know about you? I assume you know your parents, and I assume you know your grandparents and maybe a generation or two beyond that. You may know some storytelling narrative about your origins, but what do you really know about anything? Do you know how the person you fell in love with and sleep next to every night came to be in your life? Did you just swipe right, or was that ball put into motion three generations ago during a World War? Do you realize that the death of one woman, the survival of one man, an immigration to a country thirty years apart resulting in a string of incidents, glories, tragedies, trauma, birth, and death put that person in that bed next to you tonight?

There’s a reason humans invented family trees. Those who got the sight and kept it were hoping to pass that on indefinitely and needed to keep the clues handy while keeping the storytelling alive.

With all of that being said, I am going to tell you how the world is and how you came to be. Nothing you have learned is false. All religion is true. Yes, everything. All of it. The Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Astrology, and all of the beliefs under the sun are true. None of them are wrong. There are angels, there are spirits, there are ancestors, there is a heaven, there is a hell, and there is a nothing. It’s all an ecosystem that sustains itself outside of what your mind can comprehend.

My name is Ig, and I am an Angel, and once human like you. I will explain what kind of Angel later. I exist throughout all of the planes of the universe. I will also teach you of the planes of the universe and how they form the ecosystem of one’s existence on the plane you call Earth. You only spend a very short time on that plane, so I will not need to explain any of that to you.

But I do need to explain the rest. To do this I am going to tell you about a girl who has been given insight because of the circumstances that led to her existence. Her name is Ellie. Ellie knows her origins like many of you do. There have been tragedies in her family tree. She lost a grandmother to suicide, an aunt to murder, and countless traumas and triumphs in between. That isn’t unique.

Ellie is unique, however, because no matter what plane manifests your current existence, there was an action and reaction that brought you there. Only in Ellie’s case, her existence happened entirely outside of the earthly plane giving her great power. Your plane hasn’t seen a human like her in thousands and thousands of years.

I have been called to guide Ellie on this journey to save her from the events that brought her into existence, for if I don’t, you won’t have an existence, either.