The Parental Circle

By age 42, Ayhe had lived many more lifetimes than most people around him -- a military childhood. Further, his inspired adolescence had made for some unsustainable conditions throughout his young life. He had seen it all.

Lifetimes take their toll, however. Reincarnation is not without cost: Every attachment is rendered obsolete. Sorrow is inevitable.

Ultimately, the body's heart strings can no longer play to the volume and timber they once did. Someday, the body even wishes to retire completely from the wheel.

It was at close to this point that Ayhe decided he should like to perpetuate himself in a different manner: Via Cloning.

And so he did. A young babe of the exact same genetic make-up as himself was handed to him (a proud father?) after nine months of incubation.

Ayhe had not wanted the unpredictable conditions of a human carrier to grow the child, so he had opted instead for the mechanized incubator.

Ayhe figured that early womb life was where a body's first grand adventures happened, and he remembered in his own life that birth -- that awful squeeze and Mother's pain -- was a horrendous end to the most galactic lifetime Ayhe had ever known or ever knew again.

Why take that from a child? he wondered. What if an imaginative mind (such as his own) were given a chance to go forth into the world not traumatized by the birth? Could such a child be in a position of consciousness to live in another dimension entirely?

Ayhe wagered so, and set out to raise just such a model.