Chapter 1

1931 Hours, 3 June 2014 Earth Time.

Trying to find the cause of my distraction, I widened my focus to cover the entire galaxy. Normally I try not to monitor the whole galaxy at one time. It's a lot of information to process. The thoughts and emotions alone of all the sentient beings are overwhelming. Imagine knowing everything, about everything that has or every will happen in a galaxy at any one time or across multiple parallel universes.

Yeah, it can be overwhelming.

I quickly zeroed in on a small planet, 3rd from its sun, as the cause of the trauma I felt. It was in a system that I have not been to in a couple billion years. The last time I was there the whole place was ice. I refocused on the planet and started to get some generalized information from it. Mostly water, 4 seasons of weather patterns, it rotated on its own axis due to its core, and its rotation around its star seems to be favorable to life forming.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a sentient species, calling itself humans, had conquered most of the planet and near space. There were approximately 8 billion of them going about their lives. I focused on an area close to the center of a particularly large area of landmass as the cause on the intense emotional stress I could now feel so strongly. It seems that someone or thing had detonated a relatively primitive (to me anyway) bombs of some sort and killed a couple million of these humans.

It seemed like a lot of the humans didn't like this very much so there was a lot of activity in various areas of the world. Also, some really just didn't care and others were beside themselves with joy that millions of humans were killed. Personally I really didn't care about it but because of the large population, the variety of emotions and thoughts on this issue caused the build up of psychic energy that I could feel even from the other side of the galaxy.

I felt the variety of thoughts of each of the "continents" and discovered that language was not universal on this world. Although there were two languages that were spoken most prominently, it seemed like there was no coherent world government. There was a "United Nations" but after reading the minds of the planet it's clear that they were not "united". Some of the continents had a single government while others were fractured among varying sizes of "countries".

There were also "races" of these humans that seemed to be most concentrated in certain continents but there was some overlap. Several of these races hated each other so much that there were whole countries devoted to a single race and forsaking all others. One seemed to be the exception though; it had the most diverse population.

I focused on this "America" and found that it seemed like the most stable of all the other world governments. It had over 300 million humans, was the most technologically advanced country, and had asserted itself as the dominate power on the planet. It seemed like most of the humans in this country got along and tried to be reasonable with each other. Most were worried about mass extinction of humans on the other side of the planet and what it meant for them. America's military power was also positioned all over the whole and concentrated in an area near where the bomb exploded.