One Story Inside Another

By Victor Gordon Cullen

The existence of Gulls is unquestionable; that they exist in the way portrayed in this book is for you to decide. The existence of off shore oil rigs is also unquestionable, and their becoming Spike Moulds Standing Upright in the Bright Mother Sea enhances rather than subtracts from their designed purpose. The wonders emerging from the Ocean of Energy are for you alone to investigate; they exist for your looking and laughing. The Ocean of Energy, like its much smaller water-filled sisters, is in constant motion with an inherent efficiency of the highest magnitude possible. What once was is recycled, and from this recycling, things are made anew, for what is important is never wasted. Appreciation of such wonders is, of course, an individual calling, and sadly, there are many amongst us today who seem convinced they actually own what the Ocean of Energy has freely created. The myriad of habitats created as havens for the life forms that followed the Beginning is a wonder greater than all else. The needs essential for daily survival were built unreservedly into the system so that they could be used freely whenever required. The record being left behind by my own species proves the system can be misused and abused. This misuse and abuse, so far as understood, seems to be tolerated because it is made from energy that has no inherent intelligence of its own. Come now, let Thag-Sea-Wolf and Humber-Current-Holly guide you through their remarkable journey while Harry Lloyd, living in a reality closely linked to Gulldom, guides you through his own story and the story of the oil industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490733395

Victor Gordon Cullen

I was born in the northeast of Scotland and spent a happy childhood there under the guidance of loving parents, both now sadly deceased. I left school when I was fifteen years old with only a very basic education. I went to sea when I turned sixteen. I remained at sea until 1970, when I went to work in the oil field. I joined the first rig that I ever worked on, and through the years until now, I slowly worked my way through the ranks to senior tool pusher. This represents working from the bottom to the top of the ladder. I reached my sixty-fifth birthday on January 9, 2014, and could have retired but have elected to work at least another three years. I love my job, and a good salary is a great bonus. I felt qualified to write One Story inside Another because I lived in this story while I wrote it, and now that it is written, it shall always be a part of me.

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© Copyright 2014 Victor Gordon Cullen .

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination which is used fictitiously, though references may be made to actual events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3340-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3341-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3339-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014906675

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Appendix

Synopsis

PREFACE

The words used to form the book One Story inside Another only became neighbors after careful selection. Since becoming involved with this creation, greater appreciation of issues hidden from our everyday senses became easier to understand. This long making now feels like my own children. They sleep together in easy peace throughout long summer nights then lie content beneath the moon’s pale mantle. We assume a truer expression of ourselves if we go on toward a belief that the things physics has unified becomes possible only because one connection flows directly into the next. Routes only faintly appreciated, for now manage this.

One Story inside Another flows into everything around it throughout the realms and dimensions held in place by existing conditions. They will remain invisible until thought finally makes them visible. We become established and then connected with everything across a multidimensional space-time. Hidden realities softly whispered, and then became insistent, as the beginning of living pathways became clearer, paths that witnessed a slow expansion of understanding which in turn led to the end of this story. Contentment, at last, paid a visit when the time arrived for looking back along a shaft of golden sunlight that was, quite suddenly, forty years long.

The beginnings of what became One Story inside Another lies twenty-five years back, along this same beam of sunlight, close to a rising and ever-expanding radiance. Doc Halliday and others of his caliber shared parts of this journey through the times and spaces we lived in together. A private time has now arrived to remember them all. We each harbor such memories, memories of times and of the people who helped us fill them. We remember how they smiled and how the winds of warm summers long since passed moved their hair. Join us now on a road filled up with laughter but spiced through with tears that led us from there to here.

CHAPTER 1

The world that everything lives in took a while to form, about 4.5 billion years, to become what we now recognize. The Earth, weather conditions, plants, animals, fish, and birds did not suddenly appear. Instead, life very slowly evolved over aeons of time and space. What is common to life-forms and natural phenomena is that the slow forces of evolution connected them together so that every single one of them becomes one story inside another. Nothing can stand alone and unconnected. This single connection carried the simplest life-forms that ever lived into the animal known to biology as Homo sapiens. About seventy million years before the shadow of mankind fell at midday, great beasts ruled the Earth. These were the dinosaurs and the best known among them was Tyrannosaurus rex.

Tableau-the-Ancestor was having a bad day. During his short and violent life, he had learned to absorb the hard knocks, along with any associated pain. He governed his day-to-day existence with a formidable sense of rage, coupled with a brutal and total aggression. In his many battles, he had given and expected no quarter, depending instead on his great physical strength to see him through each of his almost daily battles. The suffering he was now experiencing was a completely new and dreadful affair. On this particular Friday morning, his pain was greater than all his former battle wounds added together and then multiplied by four times four.

Tableau-the-Ancestor had finally met his match, which coming from such an unexpected source served only to further his misery. Along with his great physical pain came a sense of betrayal, even if dimly perceived. By midday, the pain forced Tableau-the-Ancestor to lie down beneath a palmlike tree. He was now too distressed to go roving about his hard-earned territories. An open wound brutally inflicted by Maragarth-the-Terrible went bone deep as it tore its way down and across his right flank. She was his mate and the mother of his many sons and daughters, all brought forth in order that Tableau-the-Ancestor might feel worthy and proud. He lay partially concealed beneath the foliage of a giant fernlike tree standing over forty meters and not seen upon Earth for over sixty-five million years.

He lay there abandoned and alone, panting in painful spasms, accompanied by a raging thirst that threatened to drive him completely insane. When his terrible life-threatening injuries took place, Tableau-the-Ancestor weighed an impressive five and a half tons, while Maragarth-the-Terrible weighed up to three tons heavier. Both of them were in their prime of life. The relationship existing between this male and female represented Tyrannosaurus rex at its finest. They spent their lives ruling as savage monarchs during times and spaces belonging to the Mesozoic period. In this savage world, not one of these animals then alive had any inkling of the strange creature called man, who would one day inherit Earth and rule over it with a type of power that dinosaurs could never have known.

The world they lived in was filled with violent savagery, and instinct drove them forward as they fought their way through life. The naming ceremonies, later used by humankind, would have meant nothing to them; blood-red meat and reproduction were the only stimulus that held enough power to move them. The last one died without ever realizing it was a Tyrannosaurus rex. Their earthly journey ended quite suddenly when they passed into that closed and silent corridor named extinction. A raging infection rampaged through the body of Tableau-the-Ancestor. It had entered into his pulsing bloodstream through the dreadful wound Maragarth-the-Terrible had inflicted with her enormous and very badly contaminated teeth. The quarrel had been over sexual matters, and these misunderstandings were fated to carry forward into the era when humanity would finally enjoy absolute lordship over the entire Earth.

The spreading fernlike tree, under which he lay, had existed during a time in space that supported no veterinary surgeons, and this meant that Tableau-the-Ancestor had a really big problem. He was condemned to a slow and lingering death, greatly amplified by his terrible thirst and raging fever. Just before his slow death became an accomplished fact, Maragarth-the-Terrible found him and witnessed the final and extreme torment of his passing. She paced around the site then lay down beside his lifeless body where, for a brief moment, her senses registered feelings that were close to regret. Her remorse only lasted a short time then Maragarth-the-Terrible sprang back up onto her extremely powerful rear limbs in order to survey and better appreciate the meal now lying before her.

It was still warm, and this excited her quivering nostrils. She plunged straight into a feeding frenzy and began tearing off fifty-pound chunks of raw meat from the bones that had once supported Tableau-the-Ancestor. Maragarth-the-Terrible greedily swallowed the large blood-red chunks of flesh, and after this was over, she never mated again, for in her free meal lay the seeds of her very own destruction. A tremendously bloated feeling swept through her, forcing her to lie down beside what was left of her mate. Flies, even bigger than present-day domestic cats, had already covered his shattered remains but did nothing to disturb the increasingly torpid state of Maragarth-the-Terrible.

The cool breezes of evening brought enough relief to enable her to journey another twenty miles to the south. An ever-increasing thirst caused her to experience feelings of anger, and she knew things were not what she understood as being normal. The following morning found Maragarth-the-Terrible lying beneath a fern tree, much like the one that had witnessed the death of Tableau-the-Ancestor. This cousin tree towered over sixty meters above the turnings of a body laced through with a hot, raging infection. The meat so greedily torn from the body of her mate transferred the infection, which ended his life, into her own now volcanic bloodstream. It could be a justice of a kind, only no intellect was present to witness or record it. The ability to do such things lay with a creature that had not yet evolved.

A microscopic bacterium easily brought down the eight-and-a-half-ton female. The poisonous contamination that killed Tableau-the-Ancestor worked its way deep into her intestines and, on its way there, released deadly toxins into what had become a totally infected bloodstream. It brought on the most intense pain as it pulsed its contagious way through her now laboring heart so that she knew her own time was close. She looked up at the waving ferns so high above her head and made ready to take her final passing from the landscape. Her raging infection eventually passed into the forgiving Earth, completely unnoticed by any later accounts or accountants. With both parents now dead, their eldest son, Yannel-Yap-Yap ruled over the savage kingdom left to him. His own ancestors carried on this tradition for another ten million years before the extreme majesty of Tyrannosaurs rex passed forever from the blue planet.

These creatures successfully ruled the Earth for one hundred eighty million years; it was a period ending some sixty-five million years ago. A huge extraterrestrial event occurred when the gravitational pull of the Earth attracted a large piece of space debris left over from creation. This asteroid possessed the power to seal the fate of the dinosaurs. It struck the Earth hard and buried itself deep beneath what is now the Yucatàn Peninsula. The impact caused a nuclear winter that scourged the almost fatally stricken Earth; the result was the elimination of nearly all life-forms then living on the surface of the planet. If this catastrophic event had not occurred, it is almost certain that the mammals would never have evolved into a position where they replaced the dinosaurs as the supreme rulers of Earth.

Whatever is the truth of the matter, the fact remains that the creatures we named as dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth within a very short space of geological time. However, this may not be the complete story because the fossil record now indicates that before their final extinction took place, the dinosaurs were busily downsizing. Evolution was preparing them for a lifestyle that would include the power of flight. It is believed that Earth was struck by an asteroid, and after long periods of time and space, a much-ravaged Earth recovered its former equilibrium so that evolution was able to resume its course and bring about many strange and remarkable changes. If it is true that the birds evolved from the dinosaurs, then only genetics could have held the power to engineer these enormous changes.

The question is whether or not this was the only force with enough power in achieving such great results, as well as setting the mammals off on a parallel course with what were now birds. It seems that evolutionary process also produced the great apes from which the human race, as we know it today, evolved. The birds had been flying over the surface of the Earth for some sixty-two and a half million years before the first animal that produced the human beings of today first appeared. Contemplation concerning the beginning of things reaching far back into prehistory always faces the huge problem of finding any believable evidence of the actual occurrence.

We believe the first blooming of organic life occurred on Earth around 3.5 billion years ago. All life-forms living upon the bright shining Earth in ancient times were unable to leave any recorded evidence of their existence because they did not possess the congenital powers to do so. These creatures lived and died through repeated millennia before humanity first appeared as recently as 6.5 million years ago. In geological time, this represents just seconds ago. The only thing that extinct creatures left behind for us to find were their bones, and they became a witness to the time they spent upon the bright shining Earth. Their fossilized relics became lonely beacons and confirmed they once enjoyed the sunlight and the rainfall. Their lives were stepping stones leading toward the evolution of a creature that would be able to leave a recorded trace of its own existence for life-forms of its own kind, as yet unborn, to uncover.

With hindsight, it is easy to understand that a creature would eventually evolve equipped with the power required for leaving evidence of earthly existence other than its own bones. These events changed the course of the world that we now live in. Early man became the up-and-coming animal with just enough reason trapped inside his cranial regions to not only be aware of his own life-and-death cycle but also to master self-learned abilities in recording his own complete life-and-death experience. Early man left behind him a vivid record of his art on the walls of deeply hidden caves when he depicted the animals surrounding him and upon which he depended upon for his daily survival. He created hauntingly beautiful images applied with an evocative sense of imagination. In this way, he began weaving a fabric of beliefs that he was able to use to enrich the harsh existence into which he had been evolved.

Here was the very beginning of a mental capacity powerful enough to advance the unborn generations of his kind onto even higher planes of understanding. After this all-important event became a fact, his lifestyle became far richer than the other animals surrounding him during his earliest days upon the bright shining Earth. Humankind found himself forced to learn many diverse and essential survival skills as he continued his enhanced life cycle before finally joining forces with final cessation and death. In this, he became the only animal to be truly aware that one day he would pass out of the state he now enjoyed into a state that caused him some real concerns and still does so today.

He wanted to believe that death was not the final event but merely a mystical gateway standing between two very different worlds. In this way, he became an animal given over to things that were secret, dark, and magical. Animals driven by instinct will feed contentedly by day then, when darkness falls, it seeks a sheltered place to sleep safely for the night. In the case of nocturnal animals, the opposite behavior is true. It behaves instinctively as its forbears did without any form of logical consideration. Early man, with his ever-growing awareness and sense of the environment, would have been acutely aware on the sun and the moon and the seemingly endless cycles of light and darkness.

He would have noted all the seasons and the migration of all the animals on which he depended upon for food and his basic clothing. With no inherited reference points at his disposal, early man would most likely have been in awe of all the powerful aerial displays taking place high above his head on a regular daily and nightly basis. The power of natural phenomena, such as the solar and lunar eclipses, thunder and lightning, comets, fire, and the aurora borealis, must have severely frightened him. He would have observed that the world around him was an extremely fierce place filled with creatures larger, stronger, and faster than he was. He would have found himself frequently forced to shelter and conceal his relatively weak body at the back of a cave or in the dark recesses of his own suspicious mind. During the development phase toward what he is today, mankind may very well have attributed the behavior of the sun and the moon, of the light and the darkness, to a superior force that was capable of thought greater than his own.

From this point on, it would have been a natural step to view the heavenly bodies as being something very special, and from this, he may have formed rituals of thanksgiving to these majestic orbs of light and heat that offered him life and some comfort in the skies above his head. He may have believed that the forces he could not directly access were hard at work in his world. Such beliefs may have evolved with the help of those around him, that is, individuals who were like himself and formed his own home tribe. This was a monumental step toward a vivid concept of personal ownership as he began to view his surroundings not as the world but as his world. He now saw the animals around him, driven by instinct as his subjects, to use as he saw fit because he knew he was by far mentally superior to them.

The cave paintings he left behind show that he venerated the natural world. It would have been a logical a step to develop rituals of Earth worship that his distant descendants would revolutionize into religion, a situation which has plagued his world ever since. These inherent mental abilities that allowed him to reason, something he believed the animals around him were unable to do, led him to believe the supernatural forces who ran the world had selected him as its chosen one. He accepted that his world was under the control of a deity that existed in all his surrounding daily life. All he had to do to stay in the good books was to honor the deity by offering gifts and, above all else, his eternal gratitude. This act took away a lot of his fear; it was nice for him to believe that he was being looked after.

Early man had no way of realizing that life evolved on this Earth only because of its climate. That which is on the Earth is of the Earth because climate was the original giver of life, and early man worshipped this colossal idea in the only way that he could. When he first tried out these things, he set up a preference that has continued throughout all the succeeding ages of mankind. It has survived and reached out to touch us deeply in what we understand as being the twenty-first century, that is, in the way we record the passing of time and the endless expansion of space.

Can anyone among us today say that what we once believed was mistaken or somehow immoral? We still harbor these unforgotten hopes and ancient tribal beliefs in early pagan gods. This primeval age of magic filled up a terrible void that feeling alone then represented. The original ideas of man were incredibly potent emotions and set a pulse that we still use today to mark out the rhythms of our existence here upon the bright shining Earth. So it is that way of thinking will be the main vehicle for the recounting the story that is named here as being one story inside another. It runs in harmony with the original ideas mapped out by early man. More modern dogmatic religion will also appear in this story; it becomes justifiable according to the way in which we conceive things in our lives of today.

The animal named by himself as Homo sapiens liked to set out easily followed patterns. Human beings of long-gone ages devised methods that would empower him to take the first step toward a world he could subdue and, sadly, damage most terribly in the process. These early systems of belief helped toward pulling him out of the harshest of realities connected with what he had to endure before death made that final release, often at a very young age. Given increasing time and increasing space, the power stored up in the codes used by the ancient design and named here as being genetics mutated and produced the basic structure of a creature that fought and died throughout the latter ages of the great beasts that once roamed freely over the landmasses making up a beautiful and very magical Earth.

The creatures starting this process was the early mammal, in the sense of a creature that gives birth to live young and then suckles them in their infancy with warm milk produced by the mother’s own body. This was the line destined to become the supreme masters of the Earth and survived through the long ice ages of Earth to triumph over much-fiercer mammals equipped with big teeth and claws. These creatures were bigger than the largest African elephant ever born. They were also a lot friendlier toward the world in which they lived than the average London bus of today. Man studied and worked with stone, flint, bone, and wood that lay all about him; the dexterity of his hands as he shaped these raw materials into tools and weapons soon made him the most proficient toolmaker that ever evolved.

This self-taught proficiency in making things was enough to guarantee him the outright lordship of the Earth. His rapidly developing social skills led him into other areas so that he no longer felt quite as vulnerable within a world that he perceived as being unsympathetic toward his own continued existence. He found learning how to do things easy, and his given intelligence allowed him to become a very strong survivalist. This feeling probably intensified as he began improving upon the reality in which his forebears endured their short lives in a stoic silence that must have been very depressing. When the following generations of man started to pick up an established rhyme, he began to realize that he was very exposed and unsafe from even his own kind, those that were outside of his home tribe.

He soon realized there was something he could do about this in order to readdress the balance, and the making of weaponry escalated. He learned to mistrust his own kind because he felt afraid, especially when they came creeping up on him in the night with the intent of stealing his females. Early human beings banded themselves together in order to gain maximum security and to perfect his developing skills and crafts. They sought out ways to strengthen tribal bonds within the individual groups they had elected to live in. This behavior may well have given rise to the concept we understand today as being marriage. Early man learned that in matters of security, cunning counted for as much as numbers but not always. It may have been at this time that he domesticated the dog or perhaps vice versa.

In the beginning, banding together was a matter of necessity, if there ever was one. This creature now developed the startling ability to falsify, lie, cheat, steal, and even kill his own kind. He may have eaten the bodies of those he perceived as being enemies. When he became intellectual enough to commit his thoughts to writing, the telling of lies escalated—a sad day for Homo sapiens indeed. It may have happened when the idea presented itself to him that he could benefit in the short term by telling lies about his daily dealings on Earth. The planet that supported him as well as the other creatures was suddenly not enough. Greed entered the world of man, and now he wanted more and more.

With his precious red ocher, he adorned his sacred caves and painted mystic designs on to the faces of his dead so they might be made powerful in a life just beyond the one that had so recently been given up. In dark secret places, he held somber rituals of mourning in the deep, and in moist darkness of the mother’s womb, he reenacted strict and magical ceremonies using both blood and semen. Our existence had now begun as time and space stretched to expand evenly in all directions, just as time and space always shall. Over long periods, conversations have taken place in every society relating to a whole array of possibilities, many of which evolved into truths. They attempt to explain methods, other than natural selection, that could have given rise to the life found on the surface of the Earth.

Some assumptions state that the essentials responsible for life came into existence because conscious thought belonging to a deity manipulated matter, and this led to all we see around us today. Stories created to show how this achievement came about are very powerful and appealing. They explain that, by a process of faith, the species to which we belong to are superior to all others that have ever lived in this world because the creating deity created us in his own image. This brings satisfaction to anyone who wants or feels the need to believe that his or her creation is an exact copy of the power that performed the original creating. It very soon became obvious to him that this belief can bring along forfeit or reward in its wake as the case may be. It strongly appeals to mankind to imagine he has the total right to assume lordship over the creation, which dealt him out such a strong hand to play with.

For the further telling of this story, let us imagine things from the prospective that conscious planning occurred for all the Earth’s life-forms, including mankind especially, and this did in fact lead to the world we moderns live in today. It is nice to consider that the Blue and the White Nile run along on separate courses before joining into one and flowing down into Egypt to find a delta that witnessed the greatest of all human civilizations, all as a gift from the gods. Ultimately, you must decide where your own heart lies and feels the most comfortable. The result will finally come to you by the way you see things that are around you. Our family as well as all the other families alive today are undergoing slow evolutionary process, but these events are too slow for direct observation to substantiate them.

Strange events often take place in areas where the vision of the eye and the logic of the mind cannot accurately penetrate. The land where the gods live is surely such a place; divine creation follows strict rules set in motion by a divine creator who, after directing his forming, has no further influence in his making; he has given mankind the authority to govern on his behalf. Any animal armed with this knowledge can do anything. It seems this has to be so because if any creature turns into what amounts to a life-form that is unable to compete for its own space in life will go extinct. Seabirds are our main point of interest as we follow the complex route followed by One Story inside Another. For the purpose of this book, a seabird is one that only visits dry land in order to reproduce its own kind.

When the gulls arrived at a form we see today, they separated into three distinctly separate confederations. At the very beginning of gulldom, a single confederation held true for all then living on the great ocean. Rifts began to emerge as the core beliefs overseeing the single confederation slowly began to change. The gulls divided themselves into three separate confederations. These communities went on to become the confederation of the Varlseen gulls, the confederation of the Nendral gulls, and the confederation of the Lapsian gulls. These far-reaching events had already been in place for countless centuries before mankind appeared upon the surface of the bright shining Earth.

Humanity was destined to become the dominant and most exploitive species ever to inhabit what was already an ancient and splendid environment when he first entered into it. Looking at this in another way, mankind’s awesome intelligence seems to have brought him more than his fair share of sorrow. He allowed unfairness to assume the upper hand whenever he was dealing with an ecosystem that, in reality, he depends upon for his survival. He shamelessly repeats the same mistakes in his dealings with the other life-forms of the Earth who are unfortunate enough in having to share their home with him. As the years pass, he is driving himself ever closer toward his own extinction. When humanity first decided to band together and live in cities, the man described above had not yet evolved. It was the very start of a journey destined to leave a trail of brutality and carnage in its savage wake.

Early man was in balance with nature and had not yet developed the dangerous thought patterns that would one day become his hallmark. Early nomadic man shared his home fairly with all the other animals around him. When men began living in cities, he failed to realize the ways in which this would weaken him, and this remains hidden, even until this time. The animal, Homo sapiens, was destined to evolve to a point where he would become powerful enough to invent a form of living that was completely divorced from the reality that had first sustained him. He devised many complex and successful forms of communication. This ranged from his first oral grunts to his early art and then went on to the written word followed by his mathematics and then an endless flowing list of music, academic achievements, and dance to finally plunge down to subterranean levels that would contain mass genocide against his very own kind.

He did not perform these terrible deeds alone; he always did it with God on his side. All those early gifts that started to shower down upon him seemed like gently falling rain, and there was a great sense of rejoicing during the making of his bright shining ale and the devoted husbandry of a fruitful land that now sustained him. It was gifts from God or Earth to her inhabitants. The man with a family to feed also took full advantage of the gifts that the sea offered up, and in the evenings; after the perils of the sea were safely over for that day, he would work the land with his plow before lying down totally exhausted upon a warm love-soaked bed. These blessings eventually became unable to satisfy him, and it is fair to say that the next step enjoyed by man brought upon him more than his fair share of sorrow.

It seems to be an unchangeable reality, but even so, his awesome intellect drove him relentlessly onward. His toolmaking abilities allowed him to visit some very extreme and isolated locations where there exists no free oxygen to satisfy even his most basic respiratory requirements. He set his powerful imagination to work upon this problem, and very soon, he had solved these inconveniences so that it became almost easy for him to draw life-giving breath out in the vacuum of space or in the deepest oceans named here as the abyss. Perhaps this particular location, more than any other environs he has explored, brought back to him all those dark tribal memories that seem closest to him.

These abilities and spirit of adventure nudged humanity toward a huge realization that in his hand, he now held a key that was powerful enough to develop technologies that would allow him to step completely outside realities into which his flint-knapping forebears were born; the roller coaster, fast-moving technology he is now pursuing will one day allow him to live in the most diverse locations that are not part of, or even physically close to, the blue planet that witnessed his birth. This man, when he is fully developed, will become, for all intent and purposes, a very new and separate branch of Homo sapiens evolving into a classification known as Astro sapiens. Of course, we who are alive today will not see nor hear him, but we have all seen his earliest form, standing proudly upon the surface of the moon.

When the time finally arrives for his exodus to take place, man will, for sure, take his dog and cat along with him to live somewhere out there among a far distant galaxy of stars. It must surely come to pass that earthlings will be born that have never seen the Earth just as there are Indians being born today who have never been in India. People will eventually join the family of man who will never know the word or the concept that we now associate with that grand term our Earth. Unbearable and fatal injury will occur to the less mentally able animals that are left alone and abandoned upon a seriously poisoned Earth. Better by far, for the other creatures, if the species Homo sapiens should go extinct before he has found the time to develop the technology that will transform him into animal Astro sapiens.

Nut-and-bolt technologies of the early sixties reached a point where mankind was able to exploit the vast riches he found beneath the cold waters of the North Sea. North Sea oil was to become an event that stretched the toolmaking animal to his very limits, but he proved himself equal to this exciting challenge. In fabrication yards dotted around the UK, construction workers were working to a master plan. They fabricated oil platforms and built the tools mankind needed to extract oil from under the North Sea. He developed tools big enough for a man could walk around upon and keep him safe as accommodation and life-support systems were included in the initial making. I remember fondly the early days of the North Sea before the first of these platforms arrived, but of course, this is another story.

The time has now arrived for us to go on a trip to address the inspiration for One Story inside Another. We have to travel back in my own memory to a platform called Montrose Alpha to find a driller who worked there between 1980 and 1987. Oil platforms were first designed to burn off waste gases into the atmosphere by using custom-made flare booms, at the end of which specially designed flare tips existed. These waste gases were a by-product of the production process. Some platforms had twin flare booms, while others had only one. The singular flare boom on this platform ran out from the main deck of the platform, following a level horizontal plane, to meet with a support jacket piled deep into the seabed some three-hundred-meter distance from the structure of the main platform.

Other platforms have a single flare boom that run vertically into the air, not a very good design for any is going-about gull to roost upon. The horizontal flare boom of this other platform was very acceptable to the gulls who lined up along its length to settle any disputes or just communicate about ongoing daily issues. The driller assumed that the gull sitting nearest to the hot flare was the leader of the flock with the rest roosting along the boom in their descending order of importance. The leader sat at a comfortable distance to prevent his body from being cooked. The flame erupting from the end of a flare boom does so under a considerable pressure and, therefore, radiates a great deal of heat, which is great for the gulls but not so good for needy old-aged pensioners.

CHAPTER 2

That platform gulls should have a well-established hierarchy seemed to make perfect sense as other exciting thoughts began to cram their way into this driller’s very busy mind. For example, what did the gulls imagine that was the root cause of a flare that suddenly stopped burning brightly into the dark night sky? Were there any gulls still alive with a memory of times and spaces that existed when the North Sea was without the bright shining heat that brighten up the darkness? This driller felt it was unlikely for any gull to have a living memory of the darkness, but these times and spaces had most probably been recorded somewhere, in hallowed and secret gull lore.

If the flare boom shut down on any platform, it is because of a decision made in head office that a production plant overhaul or maintenance schedule of some description has been deemed as necessary. This driller working on the platform believed the gulls could never know about these human decisions made hundreds of miles away. Because of this, they could only blame themselves for such a terrible event occurring. Consequently, rituals of forfeit developed that eventually called for the sacrifice of six virgin gulls in order to appease the very offended god of fire.

After the executions had taken place, the lifeless bodies of the six virgins were committed to the cold flare tip. It was an extreme act of appeasement, and because of its high success rate, it slowly became accepted as necessary by certain renegade factions within gulldom. With essential platform maintenance completed and the flare reignited, it was easy for the driller to imagine that a puff of lonely white feathers blew out of a cold flare tip in those vital seconds before the flare ripped back into a roaring hot flame, thanks to the use of a rifle-propelled pyrotechnic. These days, this task is far easier to achieve by the use of electronic ignition systems, not unlike your mum’s gas cooker.

The gulls, thereafter, reassumed their roosting positions with the leaders and the most privileged placed forward in all the best and most favored spots. They could afford to relax safe in the knowledge that the fire god had accepted their most recent sacrifice. This fire god was a very scary concept and, in those days, had no real name other than the fire god. These memories always stayed fresh in his mind, and the driller would often wonder why. At the time of these original thoughts, the insights gained were never shared because it was not at all the type of rationale that a keen young North Sea driller would have been expected to entertain. He knew his thoughts helped him live his life.

Twenty-five more years of space expansion took place before the original inspiration opened up to this driller. When the event finally occurred, it did so in a quite spectacular fashion while he was working on another rig in the year 2001 after having drilled wells all over the world. I dedicated this book to a man who worked on this rig. His son, also named Robert McKinlay, gave permission for One Story inside Another to be dedicated to his late father.

Twenty-five years working in the North Sea as a driller is a long time until one day it happened that a particular piece of drilling equipment, called a link tilt, malfunctioned due to a built-in design fault. The link tilt is a component part of a larger piece of drilling equipment known as a top drive. The function of top drives is to drill out oil wells by rotating the drill bits used to cut their way deep into oil-bearing formations lying far beneath the seabed of the North Sea. This design fault occurred on the latest model (at that time) of top drive where the link tilt component suffered from gross under-engineering. When this became obvious through use, the head office suspended drilling on safety grounds to allow us time to remove the link tilt component completely from where it piggybacked the top drive.

The immediate cost was about four hours of rig time, but it would have been much worse if the fault had led to an injury or fatality. While the link tilt is very nice to have, drilling operations can continue without its assistance. We packed the link tilt after removing it from the top drive to send back to town for redesigning and reengineering. It happened during a quiet moment at the end of the removal operation. While looking up at the top drive, which now hung suspended thirty feet in the air, a large airborne gull came around the edge of the drilling rig and decided that he was going to hover there for a while inside a warm air thermal. Looking up at about a forty-five-degree angle, it was possible to see the top drive and this most beautiful white gull hovering effortlessly in the air behind and slightly above the top drive.

At this point, breathing may have stopped while the driller fell into a sense of wonder as he listened intently to the most magnificent voice. It came out of nowhere and penetrated to the inner core of the driller’s mind where it made pronouncements in profound and pleasing tones. The gull presented here is named Linktilt-Sea-Wolf. Blinding light and a feeling of pure joy swept through the driller; it suddenly became obvious why the twenty-five-year-old memory of those gulls had stayed so constant and fresh in his mind. The driller looked over his right shoulder back along a shaft of warming yellow sunlight and again saw the platform where that now long-ago experience had taken place. It shone out brightly at the twenty-five-year mark back along that beam of warm light.

It was now understood with a clear certainty that a force greater than the driller wanted the story entitled One Story inside Another written down. It took only a few seconds for the driller to realize this, and looking back up at where Linktilt-Sea-Wolf had been, it was to find that he had vanished from sight, but from that moment onward, he never went far from the driller’s memory of him. In these times and spaces of the driller’s life, he had been working on another book entitled The Dynasty of Simon Lightfoot. Eighty-six chapters of this story were completed, and it was getting into the region of being enough material to revise and perhaps make two books out of. The experience that the driller went through that day was so overwhelming that for the next six weeks, he was unable to write even a single word.

The prayer was that Simon Lightfoot would not feel abandoned. The time of the great silence passed while the driller waited patiently for an answer to his often-repeated request. Please, whoever you are, grant permission for me to fly away with the gulls of the North Sea. The permission finally came when The Voice ordered the driller to devote his full attention to the writing of One Story inside Another. It was very clear to him that this was not going to be an easy assignment nor was there any wish for it to be having waited for the past twenty-five years just to make a start. He wished for the journey he was now undertaking to be the defining moment and experience of his life after waiting for so long for the opportunity to come knocking at his ever-open door.

That it did so in such a spectacular and breathtaking fashion generated pure wonder in the driller’s mind. The Voice had spoken straight into a heart that fully accepted the journey with no conditions attached. From early stages in the relationship, he understood that when one is dealing with The Voice, there was a need to be attentive, polite, and, above all else, careful not to argue in any negative sense. It was easy for the now not-so-young driller to accept these requirements. The hope now existing in the heart of the older driller is that every condition put in place for the telling of One Story inside Another is acceptable to you. It was never questioned by the author that things should be any different, for why bother when you are dealing with the beauty of The Voice.

Before moving on, we need to spend a little time looking at the different types of drilling rigs designed and utilized by mankind to assist him in his relentless quest for richer reserves of recoverable oil and gas. Earlier drafts of the story went into a dissection of five separate types of drilling rigs available for purchase. The previous four pages have replaced four chapters in the first draft because it became clear to me that all that needs to be known about drilling rigs is the fact that all five of them share a common feature and that feature is flare booms. They become the enduring and supporting structure of One Story inside Another.

CHAPTER 3

Sabre-One-Eye turned his head to face a distant gray horizon. He basked happily in this warm and life-giving heat after having felt so cold for so long. He knew the flock would quickly settle down after the bleakness it had been forced to endure over the past few days. Mullbank-the-Elder sat close to the sighted right-hand side of his body. She alone of all female gulls enjoyed this favored position dating back to the nesting sites of long, long ago. The empty eye socket had now healed over and faced sightlessly toward the strongly burning southwest flare. It was snarling and snapping its way into the late evening sky some twenty meters from his neatly folded wingtips. This fat and hungry flame erupted fiercely to lick then ultimately disappear inside the sharp sea air that surrounded its hot and fiery breath.

To the assembled Nendral gulls, it seemed like the breath coming from a raging dragon who spent all its time producing angry firestorms. The ritual of sacrifice was well received, my lord, crooned Mullbank-the-Elder. When the flare had suddenly stopped burning a few days previously, the twenty-four-hour time of proving had passed with no returning fire. Sabre-One-Eye wasted no time in ordering the sacrifice of the virgins, and his extremely barbaric order very quickly turned into a reality. Put another way, if the dead fire had returned before the twenty-four-hour proving time had passed, the virgins sacrificed would have lived to fly across another beloved skyline.

During what must have been a horrendous waiting period for the virgins and their families, the flare had failed to return to life, so the barbaric ritual of sacrifice took place in order to force the heat to return, and return it did, just as it always did. No other mortal gull held anything like the influence Mullbank-the-Elder exercised over her mate. She was now a full twenty-five-year-old, while Sabre-One-Eye was five years her senior. These two had far exceeded the life expectancy of your average going-about gull. All the other female gulls within the Nendral flock could only dream of the closeness and confidences that Mullbank-the-Elder enjoyed. Even if she was his much-advantaged and chosen matriarch, she knew of the many frightening and dark places buried within his deeply tormented psyche.

She quickly learned to fear these dark places, and she never dared disturb them. She knew that he had striven for most of his adult life to attain his icy sense of impartiality toward the suffering caused to those he had trapped within his baleful orbit. Mullbank-the-Elder felt he was directing himself toward deeper forms of cruelty, and this thought served to make her shiver, most deliciously. The same thing happened just by being close to him. She loved him, especially in private places when he made stern demands of her then treated her outrageously. Sabre-One-Eye was a ruthless gull who ruled his combined flock with a will forged from a vein of rare and darkly quenched power. It seemed to those around him that he had always sat high above them as their judge, jury, and executioner.

Sabre-One-Eye had created then carefully nurtured the need for harsh punishment in the daily life of the flock. He had slain a countless number of gulls, with the guilty and the innocent vanishing together during the darkest hours of the night. Since the earliest days of his rule, any form of democracy or natural kindness had ceased to exist, and this would continue for as long as Sabre-One-Eye ruled. While the remainder of gulldom pursued a far more democratic process, the chosen gulls he had carefully placed around himself demonstrated a sense of unwavering aggression and harsh intolerance. These gulls monitored all the neighboring Nendral flock and would become immediately hostile toward any form of teachings that did not owe its origins to the master or the Darkwave Scrolls.

This became the common and accepted practice of the day so that within the many Nendral flocks, any sense of personal liberty or fairness became nonexistent, and members never expected it to be otherwise. Even if they lived in what was the most modern of days, it was no guarantee that their personal lives would be in any way enlightened. The paths they were forced to follow were pitiless and brought along with them the handmaidens of persecution in the form of a harsh martial law. Sabre-One-Eye had now moved so far away from normality that he completely lost all former knowledge of what it had once meant to him. All former memories died at the back of a deep and secret cave where he had first became the darkling gull. Grossly corrupt concepts had issued forth out of the darkness of that cave to form very detailed instructions that penetrated deeply into the very abnormal mind of Sabre-One-Eye.

His entire indoctrination had taken place based on material only to be found in the Darkwave Scrolls; they were housed within the dark halls at the Worlds Ending. The essence of these appalling teachings reached out to touch him in a moment of wild passion and secret lore. During this extremely disturbed period of his life, he so willingly absorbed many of his horrific concepts. Later on, as he slowly grew stronger in his evil ways, he mixed this secret and forbidden data into his own still-infant forms of neophyte wrongdoing. A glimpse of things to come began seeping into the lonely places that his original spirit that fled from in a desperate search for some form of continued existence.

His heart turned colder than the deepest abyss but somehow survived the journey that finally led him to places filled by subzero temperatures and emotions. In the lonely days ahead of him, muted and half-understood sounds mingled with his own sense of vitriol so that his evil teachings and outpourings soon made up the potent force of his extreme beliefs. During this dark and terrible period, Sabre-One-Eye had met up with Mullbank-the-Elder. It seemed to him later that she was born to be an elder, in the sense of all her natural intelligence and cunning. She soon proved herself capable enough to anchor down his struggling and very confused mind, enough to prevent it from spiraling away into another darker reality inhabited only by deathly darkness and some very deadly demons.

Early in their relationship, his rapidly developing sense of barbarism made her feel extremely excited, and he in turn enjoyed her many wild and abandoned passions. Eventually, their union became acceptable to forces that were hidden away from the sun in their dark and secret places. About this time, Sabre-One-Eye became aware of his future direction and began laying down the military foundations required to ensure his takeover as supreme leader of all Nendral gulldom would succeed. The few who were around him at this time became aware that Sabre-One-Eye was living in a blizzard of ice made far colder than the distant ice fields lying unspoiled to the far North of the world.

It would be difficult, but not impossible, to trace this severe coldness that invaded the place where his spirit once lived back to the dark lore of the ancient Nendral, back to a time when the immortals had scribed the Darkwave Scrolls directly on to the tanned skin of those sacred white virgins. Dark blasphemy and abhorrence developed to creep forth and invade a world that had previously known only innocence. With her basic structures catastrophically breached, all these events allowed a cancer to seep into the soft tissues of the Mother Earth, and it did her real harm.

In this way, evil slithered its way into the world long before humanity ever stood beneath the powers that first issued him. When people did arrive, they wondered about the light and the darkness, and then they came to their own conclusions. If they had been able to divine the truth, would it have made a difference in any intelligent way? During his rise to power, Sabre-One-Eye began to spend more and more time questing after the physical location of the dark halls at the Worlds Ending. He nursed a burning desire to retrieve the original copies of the Darkwave Scrolls in order to further and increase his evil desires. After a season or two had passed over him, Sabre-One-Eye began to realize that, for the time being, it might be wiser to seek out power sources that were more easily controlled.

When this dark blasphemy and abhorrence first escaped into the world, gulldom had already been split into three separate groups. Sabre-One-Eye began developing his own personality ready for taking control of the Nendral flocks in which he flew. He then established Mullbank-the-Elder as his matriarch. The Varlseen and Lapsian gulls began to realize that the divisions created at the split offered no real protection against the evil desires of the Nendral. Unknown to gulldom at the time, what these artificial divisions did establish was an ultimate sense of accountability for the paths each of the splinter groups chose to follow. Sabre-One-Eye lusted after the idea of becoming supreme leader of the triple confederations now representing gulldom. He felt he could easily achieve this goal by forcing his unbending willpower upon the collective lives of all those simple gulls that he had subdued and enslaved. After he succeeded in becoming the undisputed master of the Nendral gulls, Sabre-One-Eye turned his dark attention toward the other groups making up the confederation of gulldom, and to begin with, he was met with only limited success.

A plan to infiltrate the dwelling places of the Varlseen