The Rapture of Michael Pryor

A Novel

Kent Richter

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666727494
• Print ISBN:
  9781666733136
  9781666727487
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

When technology solves the problems of energy, transportation, and physical health, the last problem to solve is humanity's spiritual unhappiness. Into this global scene comes Dr. Richard Gesar, brain physiologist and Tibetan tulku, who develops a spiritual technology, a way to measure and create spiritual experience. With his union of science and spiritual wisdom, he comes to create a humanity happy, whole, and at peace with God and with one another. It is at last a human completeness; or is it a final deception in which the only people able to see it are those willing to remain unhappy? Michael Pryor, skeptical and atheistic investigative reporter, and his brother Daniel, a Christian without peace of mind, come to similar conclusions from very different sides. A novel of intrigue and deception, philosophy and spirituality, in which the desire to find God is itself the lure. An end-times novel in which the Christians lose the final battle.

Book One

Where the Body Is . . .

1

Michael Pryor

Michael Pryor awoke slowly, rolling over easily between the soft sheets and reaching gently for the form beside him. She was warm, as she always was, and he nuzzled her blonde hair, drank the smell of it. He would have thought of sex, but he was already growing more aware and awake and he knew how deeply Desra slept. That was why she needed an alarm; Michael never needed one, had never used one in thirty years of life. He felt a curious pride.

Michael slid away from Desra’s sleeping form and lay on his back, his eyes finally open to the soft morning light. “Time,” he whispered into the air, and instantly digits appeared on the ceiling overhead: 6:48, still twelve minutes before Desra’s alarm would go off. He decided simply to lie still, and, as he often did, he considered the day ahead. Busy, of course, especially with the press conference in the afternoon, not to mention Desra’s meeting about her designs for the Japanese condominium complex. For a few minutes, her day filled his mind more than his own, as he considered how important her professional achievements were to her sense of fulfillment, and he allowed himself to want for her what she wanted for herself. She was, after all, a good woman, perhaps the best companion he had ever had. She had guts and drive, put up with none of the nonsense of professional manipulation, and sought to do great things on her own strength. She was, he realized, a lot like him, and he liked that. He, too, was disdainful of nonsense and the pitiful self-indulgences of modern professionals, and he imagined himself at today’s press conference being incisively obnoxious. He smiled crookedly.

Desra moaned and rolled onto her back. Her alarm must have been going off, though, of course, Michael could not hear it. She had gotten the alarm implant while she was in college, and she insisted that, far from being a techno-copout, as so many implants were these days, this was a recognition of her biological inclination to sleep late and, at the same time, an act of self-discipline. Seven o’clock every day, no matter what the day, work or vacation. For there was always something important to do, something to learn or consider, news to watch, maybe even something to read. She was, after all, still one of those people who read. It was another reason Michael liked her.

Her alarm must have been beating at her cortex pretty hard by now, for she winced and rolled her head, finally moaning, “Okay, okay,” as if that would make it stop. But she had to be erect, she knew, and erect for five minutes continuously, or it would start again. The chip could, moreover, adjust itself to a dozen different frequencies and made automatic alterations whenever one stimulus began to lose its rousing effect. It was physically bonded to sensory neurons in the parietal lobe near the pain centers and felt sometimes as if her teeth were vibrating, at other times as if her nose itched. The one that made it feel as though her back were tensed up was genuinely unpleasant; the others were just sufficiently annoying to be useful.

Beside her, Michael folded his hands behind his head and watched the events of her awakening. He had seen them before, but it was often entertaining, since her facial expressions were occasionally comical and, even grimacing against the implant’s stimulus, Desra was beautiful. Her hair strayed across a softly tanned face and across her thin shoulders to the straps of her pseudo-silk gown. Beneath that gown, he knew, the curves of her body were soft and delicious, something she offered him as a gift, but something she maintained for herself. Her regimen of diet and exercise was as controlled as her work schedule, but was, according to her very vocal insistence, a point of pride for herself alone, a psychological empowerment independent of the force of beauty in the social and business worlds. The independence of a woman’s psyche, she told him often, like the independence of the woman’s body, was sacrosanct.

Finally, Desra sat up, and with a few sighs, resigned herself to being awake. She stretched a little, her thin, smooth arms, making a skyward V in the dim light, and then reached down to pat Michael’s leg through the thermal sheet. Eyes barely open, she looked back to him and smiled. He beamed back at her, his eyes wide, his torn smile announcing his own wakefulness in contrast to her own condition. “Smart ass,” she said.

Desra struggled up and managed to leave the bedroom, calling up the lights in the bathroom and stating in centigrade her preferred shower temperature. She ordered horizontal spray and a sonic rinse of her hair, so it wouldn’t need drying. There was a good hour and a half before her meeting on the Japanese condo designs, but she wanted to phone in early, just to be prepared.

“There’s lots of time, isn’t there?” Michael called form the bedroom, hearing Desra’s commands and recognizing their meaning. “When is the meeting?”

“Nine,” she called back, speaking easily over the hiss of the misting spray. “But I intend to show enthusiasm in approach. I’ve seen some of the competing designs, and I want it to be clear that I have every confidence in my own. Approach is key.”

“So what does the competition look like?” Michael asked.

“Highrises have no chance,” Desra answered with a kind of professional-sounding assurance. “They’re out aesthetically. And anybody who has done homework knows the Japanese want to fit into the hills, not stand over them.”

“Nice line,” Michael called.

Desra ignored his comment and told the shower to stop. “Even midrise will seem too extrusive, I think,” she went on, talking more to herself than to Michael, “and that’s why Brandon’s design won’t go, in spite of his ‘fluent Japanese.’” She wagged her head and mocked a snobbish tone at the mention of her colleague’s ability with Japanese. She was no fool; she knew the language capability was valuable, but there was nothing grand about Brandon’s abilities. His Japanese was, after all, only a chip on the side of his brain.

“So my stairstep lowrise use of the Kowa hillside is best,” she went on. “Of course, Tharese’s scattered lowrises plan is very similar to my version, maybe even gentler in space usage, but by the same token less efficient. I saw, of course, that stairstep terraces don’t have to be rectilinear, but can sweep and dip, adding an extra dimension to dynamics and matching again, in my view, the Japanese aesthetic. Tharese’s isolated multiplexes will make more use of the trees, and I guess that’s Japanese, too. She did her homework, all right. But the view-of-Ise idea was mine all along, and Kevin knows it.”

Michael took the long speech silently, ignoring its pauses and accepting it as a rehearsal as much as an answer to his question. He knew she would do well in the meeting, and he admired her work for its thoughtfulness and originality, as did Kevin, her office director. Of course Kevin was, Michael believed, something of a fluff, having the political insight necessary to run a design firm with international connections, but not with any genuine concern for creativity beyond sales. Kevin recognized talent well enough, but Michael knew in this case that talent might not be enough.

Desra knew Kevin even better than Michael did, and she knew much more than Michael ever could how undependable her boss could be. So even though she could assert her own skills and knew the value of her work, there were no guarantees that her designs would be accepted. She knew her own strengths, of course, and knew well the empowerment of appropriate boldness. Indeed, she knew how to present her ideas with a delicately tuned balance of power and politeness that was designed as carefully as her architectural concepts. But nevertheless, floating somewhere in the miasma of highly trained self-esteem, she had doubts, and as she reemerged into the bedroom naked, she felt Michael’s attention become visual and accepted it as evidence of another, unspoken power. She let him admire her and lingered before the closet mirror, pretending she had yet to decide what to wear. She admired herself, accepting her beauty as a mark of self-discipline as well as natural gift. Smoothly, she reached forward and touched the console, and gradually her own image became wrapped in her chosen apparel, as the lasers produced the clothed image in the mirror. Another touch to the console added a slightly deeper blue to the tint already chosen, and another touch dropped the neckline slightly. The skirt was mid-length, a mock denim but with a flow over the hips given a slightly lighter color. The dark boots were, for her, standard.

“Fine,” she spoke at last, and with a final touch to the console, she moved forward with gentle patience as the mirror slid aside. The buzzing of the assembly beams was barely audible. In seconds, the door was open, and her chosen wardrobe hung there, created of beamed-in paper particles.

Michael had watched with some amusement. He was often fascinated by the vision of Desra’s bare back alongside the clothed reflection in the closet mirror. He enjoyed her beauty as he enjoyed her intellectual abilities. Yet perhaps even more than both, he admired her forthrightness, her willingness to state her mind and play no games. Her slimness and beauty were the product of her own will, her own concentration and effort, as her architectural designs were the product of her own research and invention. When others took pills and got implants, Desra thought and chose.

Michael smiled at her as she slipped into her paper underclothes and paper dress. His smile was crooked; it always was. The scar that marred his left upper lip made every smile into a sneer, and that sneer had made him enemies and denied him friendship his entire life. He knew it was so, and knew it had been so since he was ten. But Desra, precisely because she was forthright, had liked his sneer. Or perhaps, Michael mused, she had taken her own ability to love his sneering smile as a form of safe rebellion. Just as Michael himself could sneer at the world whose opinions he could disregard, so Desra could let him sneer and treat the world’s response with the same disdain she portrayed in her pretended self-confidence. Perhaps it occurred to neither Michael nor Desra that each loved the other only as a reflection of each one’s private self-assertions. Even so, it allowed them to be themselves, and for some time it had passed as love.

Desra was dressed and disappeared back into the bathroom to brush her hair. Michael finally slipped out from the sheets and sat up on the bedside, stretching. “Wednesday,” he called out to the closet, and stretched again as he waited for the machinery to produce his clothing. He was not as concerned with his appearance as was Desra; indeed, he took a peculiar satisfaction in having the same clothes for any given day of the week. Even though he was somewhat in the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Book One: Where the Body Is . . .
• Book Two: The Vultures Will Gather