Jame, a dreamer whose dreams became the new reality. Jame Smith [whose name was pronounced like Jane] was born into a poverty stricken, incest riddled, religiously handicapped, bigoted, bible bashing family in a temperate climate where it was not difficult to survive with little effort. Jame was a small, quiet, blond boy who was despised by his family and society because he was clever and no good at nor interested in sport nor indeed any other activity that was perceived to be manly. That his ideas and suggestions when family or neighbours were in trouble usually saved them a great deal of money and so hardship, money they didn’t have, did not make them like him, for such ability they considered to belittle them, so instead of being grateful they beat it out of the ‘smart arse’, so he stopped helping them and left them to cope with the hardship. Constantly bullied and abused, after a while they realised he had an uncanny ability to escape his tormentors, almost as if he could disappear, for he’d walk through a door or round a corner and when pursued he wasn’t to be seen.

Jame spent a lot of time away from family and neighbours in the wilderness. It was a puzzle to them how he could survive for weeks at a time taking nothing with him. Just before he was ten a group of older boys decided to follow him the next time he walked out. Intelligent, Jame knew it would happen sooner or later and that they would not only beat him nearly to death if he didn’t prevent them but that they would gang rape him as well, for he’d heard their plans when he was unbeknownst to them almost on top of them. They followed him for days, not understanding why they couldn’t catch up with him. After eight days had gone by, Jason his eldest brother asked the others, “Where the hell are we? There’re fruit on the trees everywhere and it’s mid winter back home. We can’t have walked that far south and anyway we’ve been heading west.”

Billy, a big and particularly brutish cousin of Jame’s, said, “What of it? If we head due east we’ll get home. He’s just over there next to that big rock. Let’s grab the little bitch before he disappears again and have some fun before we go home.”

The boys headed towards Jame who acknowledged their presence but did not run. They were within five yards of him with feral grins on their faces when he stepped behind the large boulder. They ran after him to find he had disappeared and there was a foot of snow on the ground. Walking round the boulder did not take them back to the temperate climate they had left. All they could see in every direction was arctic tundra. They were never seen again by anyone, for no one lasts long in minus fifty Celsius [-58º Fahrenheit] with a stiff wind and inadequate clothes. Wolves leave little evidence, wolverines even less.

When Jame returned home none asked him had he seen the others for that would have been an admission they knew he’d been followed. Over the next two years several other groups set out to follow him including a group of men who wanted to know where he went that obviously fed him so well when they were just about managing to keep body and soul together. None returned home. His father decided that Jame had to be forced to tell them everything he knew. After drinking for days waiting for him to return, a group of a dozen men decided to wait till Jame retired and grab him when he was asleep. As they walked through the door into the loose box where Jame slept with a couple of plough horses the back wall of the loose box disappeared to be replaced by a landscape lightly covered by what appeared to be Scots pine trees with snow on the ground which was not dissimilar enough from their surroundings to be a surprise. What was a surprise was the pack of twenty-odd wolves that came out of the trees and immediately attacked. In the sight of the fifty or so members of the not entirely sober community who had followed Jame’s father to watch events the wolves killed all the men in the loose box and dragged them back to disappear from sight. A girl appeared from behind the loose box door. She said, “Goodbye,” and in front of their eyes walked farther into the loose box and disappeared as the loose box rear wall reappeared closing the forest off from view. There was a door in the back wall that opened onto the woodland behind the farm. None remembered the door having been there before, but since the entire community, women as well as men, could at best be described as well pickled with liquor the entire time none mentioned it just assuming they’d forgotten about it.

That was the last any saw of Jame. It didn’t take long before it was all put down to alcohol induced hallucinations which were commonplace familiar incidents. When any tried to raise what they had seen they were told, “You were as drunk as the rest of us. The ones who vanished will have frozen to death in the forest when drunk. The wolves and other beasts will have cleaned them up by now. We’ll never find them. Just be grateful when you got drunk you stayed home. And it wasn’t a girl it was Jame in a dress. Stupid little faggot must have been eaten by those wolves that ran off out of the stable back door too. Good riddance. Pass that liquor over here, or are you planning on drinking it all?”

For the first time in her memory Jame was happy. She had decided she was a girl. It was not a big deal, but now safe and able to slide at will from one place to another, few of which had any population, she had enough to eat and that which she valued most, time to think. She rarely thought about gender issues, but her body gradually changed to match her personality. Eventually she came to realise that her new world came to be what she thought about, and the more she thought about something the faster it changed to match her thoughts. She realised that was why she had changed so slowly, because she rarely thought about herself. That was the point at which Jame decided to consider what kind of a world she would like to live in.

Although without remorse she’d brought about the deaths of going on for a hundred persons because they were going to kill or brutalise her, in general she was not in favour of mass extermination. However, in order to bring about a better world she considered that the world needed to be bigger in order to provide new places for decent human beings to live and leave other spaces for those she considered to be scum to live in. She spent considerable time anguishing over the dividing line between decent persons and scum and came to the conclusion that since she was the one with the ability to make it happen it was her responsibility to make the decisions and she’d just have to live with the consequences of that knowing that she would make mistakes. Anyway she thought she would not be doing anything to the scum, she would merely be offering new possibilities for those she considered to be decent. None had a right to her opportunities, so those she rejected would merely be living in the world they lived in before, the world of their own making.

As a result of her lengthy pondering new space emerged, space twice as large as Eurasia, and there her new society was born and took root. The planet grew, its linear dimensions were seventeen percent larger which gave thirty-seven percent more surface area and sixty percent more volume. She’d no idea what took place inside the planet in order to keep the gravity the same, and wasn’t over bothered. The new world space was four pole to pole slices of about fifteen degrees longitude and four slices parallel to the equator of about seven and a half degrees latitude. None of the slices were geometrically perfect and all took into account the existing geography and environmental structure of the planet.

Essentially Jame’s new areas were just that, new, but selected parts of Earth, mostly areas under threat in some way, disappeared into them: the Galapagos islands, Tibet, Kyrelia, the Murmansk peninsula and more or less all of Russia north of a line drawn through Archangel and St Petersburg, Alaska, Jammu Kashmir, Svaalbad and a large slice of ocean straight down the middle of the Pacific which took in Alaska, a large piece of Novosibirsk which was everything east of a line connecting Cherskiy and Birobidzhan which included the city of Vladivostok, the entire west coast of Canada, everything to the west of and including the Siera Nevada and Baja California. Numerous vulnerable parts of the oceans were taken too.

All this was a great shock to world powers which they all tried to keep quiet but the truth became obvious to all once time had been considered, for the day became twenty-eight hours long and the day lengths throughout the year had changed. The world was bigger by a sixth linearly but a disproportionate part of the new area was inhabitable land. None could work out where the missing land and folk had gone. Any who approach a new zone without the appropriate “key” were unknowingly instantly transported across it to the opposite side, which was usually though not always, where they would have expected to be, or if the other side were now sea they simply were placed back where they had been before with the sea before them.

The portions of old Earth that had been included in the extra land were populated by the “removed” folk. Those deemed by Jame to be antisocial were given a choice, they could choose to be returned to as close to their previous home as was possible with a large resettlement grant that would enable them to buy somewhere to live or to be rendered socially acceptable but pliable without real free will. Many chose the former option, but most of those who were sought by the authorities and facing gaol sentences chose the latter. It was not long after having chosen their new lives that most of the latter group became just like their neighbours, so their their free will was returned, though they were not told it had been. It was the returnees who provided the established authorities with explanations concerning what had happened. The authorities were angry that ‘their’ new land had been stolen and spent a lot of time, money and effort trying to invade what they could not see. Jame eventually allowed the invading soldiers through, but they arrived weaponless and without any equipment or food. They too were given the same choices that the removed folk had been given, but this time most stayed and few returned.

Gradually more and more decent folk from the old areas were invited for a test period to join the new society and most accepted the offer. One effect of that was that the average decency level in the old world decreased. Many cities were complete no go areas for the authorities and run by what had been a criminal underworld but which was now out in plain sight and the de facto government of their area. Jame had not been correct in that she was doing nothing to the remaining inhabitants of Earth, as the original part of the planet was now referred to as. By syphoning off the decent population the remaining criminals had fewer to steal from and parasitise so they became more violent and the death rate due to casual killings soared. The remaining decent persons banded together for protection and were soon taken to join Jame’s new population in the new world.

There was much discussion concerning a name for the new world. Since it had its population from all over the globe many said, “We’re nearly all immigrants. That’s just like how America became populated, so why not ‘New America’?”

“No!” Jame was adamant in her reply. “I do not wish us to be a new version of anything that has gone before us. We are apart and particularly considering what America has become I wish nothing to do with it at all. As a new nation it squandered its opportunities to become something wonderful when it threw off the yoke of colonial oppression. It stole everything from its indigenous peoples and turned a clean new continent into the biggest garbage heap on the planet. There is nowhere in America that is so remote you cannot find abandoned cars, domestic appliances and household garbage. It is the land of the discarded coke can, a visitor could be forgiven for thinking coke cans grow on trees like leaves, and like leaves they all end on the ground in the fall. My family were just like all our neighbours, uneducated, unskilled, dirty, smelly, uncouth and violent. There was some excuse for that, for they lived in total squalor because of their poverty. Their pseudo patriotism revolted me because it gave them an excuse to do anything no matter how despicable if some how they could argue it was what a true American would do. All that I pledge allegiance crap and reverence for the flag was just an excuse to do what they wanted.

“Like many they arrived in America generations ago, poor peasants with nothing escaping persecution in Europe. The tragedy is they have remained poor peasants with nothing ever since. The land of opportunity gave them nothing because they never tried to better themselves. I, like a lot of my family slept in a stable with the horses. America is a wealthy nation yet more than half of its people do not get enough to eat. It is a place where persons like doctors and teachers live in their cars because they can’t afford to live in a house. The system is corrupt, for it abuses and takes advantage of the weak, the poor and the defenceless. What my family had no excuse for was they were proud of what they were and brutalised those like me simply because we were different.

“When I helped them they beat me up for making them feel inadequate, so I stopped helping them. Some of my relatives followed me one day with the intention of gang raping me. If I hadn’t prevented them they would have raped me and left me to die, so I opened a way into a new part of Alaska in mid winter and left them there. No doubt they’d have felt very patriotic had they known they’d died on what had been American soil. That happened several times and they all died because their intent was to hurt me and leave me to die. We need a name that connects us to our history, favours none of the places we have come from, a name that all can relate to and feel a part of. We use the name Earth to refer to the bits we left behind, so I suggest the term often found in science fiction, ‘Terra’. It means earth or land and is a very old word.”

The new land in Australia was given to tribal aborigines as tribal lands untouched by the white man. Uluru and its surroundings along with many other sacred sites disappeared into the new lands. Similar arrangement were made in all the new territories for those who had been dispossessed by the progress of the rich men’s trade that had led to globalisation and the destruction of civilised values and life in the old world. Those who could not or would not conform with the new world values of decency and respect for all were not punished they were merely returned to whence they had originated where their behaviour if not acceptable was at least normal.

Eventually Jame realised that if she thought long and hard enough on the matter others could develop her gift which would create a democracy and lift some of the crippling responsibility off her shoulders. Since becoming female she had never considered gender matters regarding herself, but without the cares of the world on her shoulders she had a little time to think about herself which took her through puberty. Eeriuffi, was a seventeen year old man from Greenland whose name meant warrior wolf. He was part way through the process of receiving Jame’s gifts and had been disappointed that Jame had not responded to his expressions of interest in her. They had been subtle, in accordance with the customs of his people, and he’d been culturally unable to be more obvious in spite of believing Jame had been unaware of his interest. She was not unaware, but had not been interested till she’d started to consider she too had a right to some joy. Completely out of the blue she’d asked him, “Eeriuffi, if you invite me to celebrate Sunreturn [dawn after the longest night] with you I would seriously consider your request.”

Eeriuffi, was stunned. It was not within the customs of his people for a girl to express interest in a man, though strictly Jame had not. She had gone as far as was considered acceptable, and intelligent she’d gone a lot further within that than any other girl he knew would have thought of. “Would you celebrate Sunreturn with me, Jame? I would be happy if you accept, and my family would be pleased for both of us.”

“Having seriously considered your request I am pleased to accept. Thank you, Eeriuffi.”

Eventually the boundaries of the new zones encroached on the old and the process of redeeming the human race and reversing its inimical effects on the planet accelerated. Politicians and bureaucrats in the old world began to realise what was happening and subsequently to their horror that they were not considered to be decent and the new world did not want nor have any use for them. Those with sense quit and started to work for a living even if that were only growing vegetables and keeping some livestock to feed their families not realising that eventually that would change them in such a way as to render them acceptable, but that meant acceptable as working folk not as politicians nor bureaucrats. The rest faced starvation when the taxes to pay their salaries dried up. It didn’t take long before the large corporations that had controlled world trade and hence politics too were isolated. Their shares were worthless and no one was buying anything they were selling. What Jame had always thought of as scum were increasingly left to their own devices. With fewer and fewer left to parasitize and their governments receiving less and less in taxes to hand out to them in benefits they started to work in order to live or they died from hunger. Most died.

Jame’s changes included improved health and longevity for all, a greater sense of responsibility regarding managing population and ecological responsibility. Greenhouse gas emissions plummeted, re-afforestation occurred at an ever increasing pace and global warming had been reversed. Within a hundred and fifty years, with the exception of St. Helena, Terra had taken over all of Earth because the scum had all died. Most had been killed by each other, some had died from cold or starvation and a few had been eaten by other predators who had been increasing in numbers as the pressure from humans on their environment had disappeared.

Jame had become a title for those who had received her abilities and the House of James was the seat of a planetary government based in Darwin. The James managed matters with as light a touch as possible and their belief was that there should be as little control and as few laws as society could manage with.

St. Helena, a bleak and inhospitable island in the mid Atlantic was twelve hundred miles from the nearest land mass. It was chosen to be an island of exile for any who were not considered suitable to live with the rest of society. There had never been more than twelve hundred inhabitants and they were unguarded and left to their own devices. They had to work hard to grow and raise enough to eat and all who’d tried to escape found it was not possible for the island was not a part of Terra, it was the last remaining part of Earth and there was no where to escape to. It had been chosen for it’s remoteness and bleakness just as it had been many years before for Napoleon. Those sentenced to there had wilfully and repeatedly refused to accept the Terran codes of behaviour despite having been given a more than reasonable number of opportunities to do so. A sentence to there was till death.