The Story Behind Ghost
of the Gods
by
Kevin Bohacz
The last 5 years of my life have been filled with strange
inexplicable synchronicities. My wife, Mazelle and I noticed these events and
found them impossible to explain in any scientific way. I’m a scientist and for
much of my life I’ve approached mysteries guided by the scientific left side of
my brain. If I could not perceive something with my five senses then
extraordinary evidence was required. I’ve always been spiritual but not the
least religious and find those two realms are often in bitter conflict with
each other. My spiritual side is guided by intuition and not rules. When I was
younger, I was a seeker weaned on the philosophies of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
with a solid helping of Castaneda’s dream-work, but as a scientist I always
remained optimistically agnostic about things spiritual such as near death
experiences or the soul. This all changed for me, everything in the universe
change for me when Mazelle, my life, my best friend of 17 years died in my arms
with us looking into each other’s eyes. They say life wrenching crisis can
transform us or break us. First I was broken by grief and emotionally
dismembered then I was transformed and reassembled but not completely.
In the time that followed after Mazelle’s body had died,
when I was in the deepest reaches of grief, I could hear my wife whispering to
me, “Write my love… Write.” So I wrote. I wrote so hard that my arms grew sore.
I wrote so hard that I gave myself tendonitis but the pain in my arms did not
slow me. When I was writing my heartache dimmed. My writing saved me from grief
that was dark enough to crush the life from anyone. I completed Ghost of the Gods in a short period of
time while also simultaneously working on two new novels.
Something else came out of this dark time of transformation.
At some point in the middle of it, I looked back over our lives together
focusing on the odd pattern of events. Two years before Mazelle was diagnosed
she began telling me that the world was spinning out of control and we were not
going to live to an old age. She did not tell me this with any kind of fear but
more a matter of fact kind of observation. I told her that was not going to
happen. Science was going to help us live for a very long time. Yet I too was
plague with what I considered “irrational” fears. When at rest stops on our
frequent road trips from the Southwest to Laguna Beach,
if Mazelle went inside to get some coffee or whatever, I would suddenly be
gripped by gut wrenching illogical fears that she was not coming out, that she
had vanished from the face of the Earth never to be seen again.
One night while we were in a Walgreens drugstore, her 15
year old very expensive custom solitaire engagement ring literally exploded off
her finger. The gold band shattered in two places and parts of the ring went
flying across the store in all directions. In wordless panic we scrambled
across the floor retrieving diamonds and shards of gold. By the next day we
were at the jeweler getting the ring remade and adding a few more diamonds. The
jeweler was baffled and could not explain the simultaneous fractures or how the
pieces could have been literally launched from her finger flying in different
directions for dozens of feet. Once the ring was back and better than new, we
were soon joking about the entire event. I would tease her that she secretly
broke the ring so that she could get an upgrade. Two years later to the day and
almost the exact hour that the ring exploded is when she died in my arms. I now
have a very long list of big “coincidences” which occurred in the three years
leading up to her leaving this world. In our last ten months together, after
Mazelle had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer these inexplicable synchronicities
grew in intensity and frequency. Mazelle and I discussed them and noted their
otherworldly nature. What were these events? The scientist inside my left brain
has given up trying to explain them while my right brain simply calls them
premonitions.
So it was with this cauldron of grief bubbling up in my
heart, inexplicable mysteries dizzying my mind and finding their way onto the
pages of my novel, and with my lost wife whispering, “Write my love… Write…”
that I wrote the hope filled sequel to Immortality,
titled Ghost of the Gods.
The epic tale of Immortality
and Ghost of the Gods was intended
from the beginning to be a two part story about many things: physical
immortality as well as nonphysical immortality, love, the end of an old world,
lucid dreams, and inexplicable mysteries answered while exposing the darker
sides of human nature to antiseptic of bright sunlight.
The tale of Immortality
was first and foremost created to be a wild and twisting road that will keep
you guessing until you reach the very last word of the very last page. Yet at
the same time it was intended to be highly thought-provoking. Woven through the
tale are deep philosophical ideas, but these ideas are an integral part of the
mosaic and so they serve to reinforce the action and suspense. The professional
reviews of both my novels confirm this... Publisher’s Weekly STARRED review of
Ghost of the Gods: “Bohacz provides mind-bending portrayals of factions vying
for power and reflections on the essence and fragility of humanity. But
philosophical concerns never obtrude on the fast-paced plot…”
After completing the last page of the story it did not
escape me that leading up to my wife’s diagnosis of cancer I had written a
novel about physical immortality through transhumanism nor did it escape me
that after her death is when I completed the epic tale by writing the second
half which was about nonphysical immortality, the opposite of transhumanism. I
have learned the world is a much stranger place than we can possibly imagine.
Ghost of the Gods
by
Kevin Bohacz
Techno-Thriller
Mazel & Sechel, 437 pages
Paperback/Kindle
Purchase at AMAZON
Was it the accumulated wounds to the
environment that had finally triggered the nano-tech plague or was it simply one
more step in a shrewdly crafted plan to replace us with humans 2.0? As I write
this at least one pair of these trans-humans breathe the same air as us, and
there are likely many more. They may look like us, they may even be almost
human, but they are also cybernetic and will live for an extraordinary length
of time. Trust me, their goals are not the same as ours. It was not a natural
plague that almost drove humankind to extinction but an attack from within, turning
our own biology against us. Scientists discovered all too late an artificial
entity, a sentient machine foolishly created in the image of god, had been
studying us and genetically altering us for longer than we can imagine. Perhaps
it is because of this god-machine that we evolved into creatures who can think
and speak and know our own mortality? This silicon god is so different from us
that we may never truly understand it, but what we do know is that it is
terrifyingly intelligent and it hates us. What we do know is that it tried to
eradicate us from the face of our planet and then stopped for no discernible
reason. What we do know is that its work is not done.
I am Kevin Bohacz the bestselling
novelist of Immortality and a lucid dreamer… Welcome to my dreams. I am also a
writer for national computer magazines, founder and president of two high
technology corporations, a scientist and engineer for over 35 years, and the
inventor of an advanced electric car system – the ESE Engine System (circa
1978). I was also a short order cook for I-Hop, flipped burgers at McDonalds,
and delivered Chicken Delight. All of those careers and more are behind me now
that I am a full time storyteller, a catcher of dreams. Thank you for reading
my stories and making this all possible.
His latest books are Immortality
and Ghost
of the Gods.
Visit Kevin’s website at www.kbohacz.com or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/kevinbohacz.
No comments:
Post a Comment