by Jan Kopia
Immortals
Book 1
The Olympus Key
Author: Jan Kopia
Year: 2019
“ Men will wrangle for religion, wite for it, fight for it, anything
but live for it.“
It was amazing how many colors were hidden within broken glass. Patrick saw oranges, purples and blues ricochet off one another as the glass shattered. His first instinct was to reach out for Tess; he thought he’d heard her scream, but couldn’t be sure. The anguished, fearful sound could just as easily have come from his own throat.
“Tess,” he tried to say. But the words were lodged in his throat and couldn’t claw their way out. He tried again, but her name was trapped inside him.
He reached out, hoping to find her within his grasp. But what he found instead was pain. Maybe he was dying. Maybe he was already dead. Patrick had no sense of where he was or what was happening. All he knew was that he had to reach Tess. If he could touch her, he’d know she was all right.
But the pain wouldn’t stop. It reached into his body and wrapped its scaly, gnarled fingernails around him. Was this what it felt like, having the life squeezed out of you?
Patrick felt a tug. It was a tug that pulled him out of the pain and made him feel like he was floating. “Tess?” he whispered. “Where are you? Where am I?”
He had no eyes, but he could still see. He saw waves made of purple clouds and mountains that floated from place to place like leaves in the wind. He was going someplace… but where? He’d never been here before. He was excited to see what was beyond but at the same time, a nervous fear gripped his soul.
A spasm shivered through him. A spasm of wonder, of ecstasy… of enlightenment. He looked past the purple clouds and the floating mountains. There was something else beyond it: something bright and beautiful. Something was calling out to him. No! Someone was calling out to him.
Could it be? Was it possible?
“Tess!”
She was there… just beyond his reach. Her soul was so beautiful Patrick could feel its powerful energy, its soft warmth reaching out to him.
Then something changed. Dark energy appeared as if from nowhere; it was like the sun was setting and casting everything into shadow. A black cloud with tendril-like arms reached out and engulfed Tess’s soul.
Patrick reached out. “No –!”
Piercing pain -- angry, plaintive, desperate pain -- coursed through Patrick. It weighed him down. It pulled at him. It stabbed him from all sides, leaving plumes of hot smoke in its wake.
“No,” Patrick said. “No, no, no… stop!”
But it was too late. He could feel his body again. He was back. And Tess was gone.
Prologue
In the darkness of the lab, Vasily sat staring at the screen, its bright glare dazzling his eyes. Each little spot of brightness moved with its own rhythm as if dancing to a tune nobody else could hear. He stared so long his eyes began to water.
The lab’s radiation detector had been switched off weeks ago; the energy surges had started overheating them. Vasily had been forced to rely on other means to measure the phenomenon. But he’d still come no closer to understanding the movements of the strange lights in the sky.
“What are you doing?”
Light flooded the room, and Vasily turned to the silver-haired woman standing at the door. Her eyes were trained on his screen.
“Sasha… I was just watching the lights,” he replied. “Trying to figure out –”
“They’re not lights,” she interrupted, cutting him off.
“We’ve been studying them for months now,” Vasily replied. “They’re lights, Sasha. What else can they be?”
“Light doesn’t carry that much energy,” Sasha said. “Look at our monitors… each one of these so-called ‘lights’ emits enough energy to power a whole country… and not a small one either. Nothing on Earth has that much energy.”
“So… aliens?” Vasily asked, wondering if Sasha would laugh at him.
She hesitated and looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “It would be foolish at this point to rule it out, don’t you think?”
Vasily raised his eyebrows. “Everyone will say we’re mad.”
“Let them,” Sasha said disdainfully. “Everything is considered madness before someone proves it’s true.”
“I was thinking…”
“Yes?” Sasha encouraged.
“Why don’t we… follow one of the light sources?”
Sasha cocked her head to the side. “There are too many…”
“We’re looking at the whole country right now. What if we narrowed our focus field?” Vasily asked, getting excited now that Sasha seemed receptive to his ideas. “We focus in on a ten-mile radius and see if we can capture the coordinates of one of the lights.”
“We tried that when we first discovered them,” Sasha reminded him. “The monitors went wild… we nearly broke the machines.”
“But this time is different,” Vasily said, even though he wasn’t sure why he felt that way.
“How?”
“I just… I have a feeling. It’s tied to the dimming of the sun. How much is it now, Sasha?”
“Two point three percent. Down from yesterday.”
“The dimmer the sun gets, the brighter the lights become,” Vasily explained. “I think the only reason we can see them at all is because we’re losing the sun. Six months ago, they were so weak… we barely picked up their energy on our monitors. Now we see them coming in loud and clear. I think if we try to focus on a single light source now… we might be able to catch its coordinates.”
Sasha looked doubtful, but Vasily could see that she wanted to believe his theory had merit. “Okay,” she nodded. “Let’s try it.”
Filled with a surge of renewed hope, Vasily jumped to his feet and moved towards the largest monitor. “There,” he said, after stabbing the keys in front of him. “We’re looking at a one-kilometer radius, two kilometers from where we are right now… Leninsky Street, at Nikolskaya Avenue.”
Vasily and Sasha stood side by side, staring at the screen as though it had hypnotized them. The screen showed a collection of coordinates but no light sources, not even a flicker.
“Nothing,” Sasha said.
“Maybe we should extend the area?” Vasily suggested, unwilling to give up just yet. “Three kilometer radius instead of --”
Sasha gasped. Vasily felt goosebumps prickle his skin. The screen had just lit up, with lights glittering in front of them. There were seven in total, and they had appeared as if from nowhere. Neither Sasha nor Vasily could take their eyes off the screen.
“Seven lights,” said Sasha in a low voice. “They’re rising… can you see?”
“Of course I can see, and they seem to have different strengths too. These two--” Vasily pointed at the screen. “They’re brighter than all the others. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, leaning in a little closer to the screen. “Wait… look.”
Just as two lights rose up and disappeared from view, one light started moving back down.
“I’ve never seen it do that before,” whispered Sasha.
“Let’s go,” said Vasily. “We’ve never been this close before. We could drive to Leninsky Street right now and–”
Both Vasily and Sasha fell silent as they heard the sounds of sirens outside the windows of their laboratory. Vasily went to the window, opened the blinds and peered outside. “Ambulance… I think there’s another one coming.”
“Which direction are they going?” Sasha asked.
“North West,” Vasily replied. “Which is… which is…” Why were the words getting stuck in his throat? Why did he suddenly feel like throwing up?
Sasha was pal
e-faced as she reached for the remote and turned on the television monitor. She flipped to the local news.
The screen was filled with images of a motor accident. A bus had collided with a jeep. There were several people involved in the crash. Vasily could see stretchers and paramedics and bloodstains in lurid patterns on the street. The volume was on but it was strange that Vasily didn’t hear what the reporter was saying. All he could hear was the blood rushing to his ears. The runner at the bottom of the screen read ‘Two people dead in head-on collision.’
“Where’s the accident?” he asked, his voice shaking. “Where did it happen?”
Sasha turned to him. She looked grey and shaken… much like he felt.
“Leninsky Street,” she whispered. “At Nikolskaya Avenue.”
Chapter One
Antonia looked at the odd energy spikes that seemed to follow the equator. They left an intriguing pattern, almost like a cosmic constellation right here on Earth. She was certain it would lead them to the answers… if only they looked close enough.
Her table was cluttered with research that she’d collected over the last four years. She’d been through each piece with painstaking care again and again, but they’d offered nothing new. All she had was the same strange collection of phenomena that she had no way of explaining.
The sun had decreased in strength over the course of several years. But it had done so in small incremental amounts—increments so small they’d almost gone unnoticed. But in the last five months, something had changed. The process had accelerated, and now even the most skeptical minds could no longer deny that something was happening.
Antonia heard rushed footsteps outside her office door before it was thrown open by Caleb. Rebecca was right behind him, and they both looked excited.
“What is it?” Antonia asked.
“Turn on the television,” Rebecca told her. “They’re giving their first live interview: Vasily Petrov and Sasha Lebedev. Channel forty-two.”
Antonia fumbled with the remote in her rush to turn on the television. The screen flashed to life and she saw the two scientists who had given her the first glimmer of hope in years of research. They were an unassuming pair. Vasily Petrov was a tall, lanky man with thin red-blonde hair and large glasses that took up half his face. Sasha Lebedev was blue-eyed, stony-faced and unexpectedly young despite her silver hair. They sat next to one another in rigid postures opposite the interviewer.
“You claim you encountered this strange phenomenon over the course of the last year?” asked the interviewer, with a tone that contained a kernel of doubt.
“Ten months ago now,” said Sasha Lebedev. Her accent was thick but her command of English was excellent. “We used quantum mechanical theories and measurements to try and understand what we were seeing –
“Hold on, Doctor Lebedev,” said the interviewer. “In layman’s terms… can you explain what quantum mechanics is in the first place?”
“Of course,” said Sasha nodding impatiently. “It is a branch of physics that attempts to explain the strange and sometimes bizarre behavior of all particles that make up the known universe, like photons and electrons. When we studied the bursting lights, we could pick up the energy fields surrounded them. But we couldn’t succeed in accurately interpreting them.”
“Why is that?”
“Because physics has taught us that the universe is made up of dark matter, dark energy and atoms. And yet the energy surrounding each light… it doesn’t fit into any of those categories. For months we studied them, but we kept running into dead ends.”
“Until something changed?”
“We decided to search a smaller area,” said Sasha. “We wanted to narrow our search. To focus on one light, so we could find its coordinates and understand what it was.”
“And now you claim you did find out what it was,” said the skeptical-looking interviewer. “You claim the lights aren’t lights at all, but souls… human souls.”
“He does have a flair for the dramatic, doesn’t he?” Caleb said, with his eyes trained on the television.
“I think in this case he’s justified,” said Antonia.
“If they’re right,” Rebecca added.
On the screen, Vasily Petrov spoke up. “They were human souls,” he said. “Definitely. That is the phenomena we’re tracking now.”
The interviewer smiled. “Of course the idea of a human soul isn’t a new one. People, particularly those inclined to religion, strongly believe in the existence of souls. We each have one, or so they say. But up until now, this has merely been a belief; an unknown theory backed only by faith. You’re both saying that you have proof?”
“There was an accident in the exact radius we were tracking,” Vasily Petrov said, with fierce conviction. “Only we didn't know it at the time. All we saw were seven lights in that area, and they were rising toward the sky. Then we heard ambulances drive past our building in the direction of the area we had been monitoring.”
“A coincidence perhaps?”
“There were seven people involved in that accident,” Sasha Lebedev cut in. “Seven people who were connected to the seven lights… we didn’t know it at the time, but we were watching their souls on our monitors. We watched as two souls rose up until they disappeared altogether. The rest floated downwards, until they disappeared too. There were seven people involved in that accident: two of them died and five managed to be saved.”
The interviewer nodded soberly. “There are many people who have come out in support of your findings. But there is a group -- some might even say a larger group -- that believe you’re both lying.”
“We’re not lying,” said Sasha Lebedev, with stoic certainty. “This is true, this is happening… and I think we need to accept the possibility that perhaps quantum theory and quantum metaphysics are more closely aligned than we thought.”
“Quantum metaphysics?” asked the interviewer, silently urging her to continue.
“Doctor Petrov and I are physicists. We study all those elements that make up the physical world. Quantum metaphysics is a belief system rather than a set of laws that govern our universe. It aims to explain the universe’s secrets by relating the principles of quantum mechanics to consciousness and spirituality.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the scientific community largely considered quantum metaphysics to be -- pardon my directness -- complete and utter poppycock?”
Sasha Lebedev looked resigned as she nodded. “I admit I was of the same opinion, until now. There’s a reason these light sources are becoming visible to us now. I’m sure of it.”
“And what do you think it means, Doctor Lebedev?”
“You just need to look around to see what’s happening with the earth,” said Sasha. “The sun is weakening, we’re having severe climate changes, we’re experiencing strange spikes in energy around ancient locations and structures that have been dormant for years… and now we’re seeing human souls. It can only mean one thing: the end of the world is near.”
“Thank you for joining me here today, Dr. Lebedev and Dr. Petrov.” The interviewer turned to face the viewer. “You heard it here today. The question is… do you believe it? When we return, we’ll be discussing the concept of souls with prominent religious scholars.”
Antonia turned off the television. She felt a tingling sensation in her extremities, and didn’t know if it was excitement or fear.
“Well?” asked Rebecca, her eyes trained on Antonia. “What do you think? Do you think their research has something to do with ours?”
“It’s all connected,” Antonia nodded. “It has to be. Scientists all over the world are watching, studying and measuring the same thing. The Earth is rebelling, and everyone is trying to figure out why.”
“But do you believe what they’re saying about souls?” Caleb asked. “Do you think it’s true?”
Antonia shook her head. “I’m not ruling it out yet. It could be true. We need to keep an open mind if we’re going
to get anywhere.”
“I’ve read their whole paper,” said Caleb. “It’s convincing--”
“It’s also assumptive,” Antonia pointed out. “They haven’t carried out enough studies to definitively prove that the lights are in fact, human souls.”
“Ahem,” said a voice at the door. “Knock, knock?”
Antonia frowned. There was a blonde man standing by the door to the lab. He was wearing a white shirt under a beige leather jacket and a smile that Antonia knew was meant to be disarming.
“James,” she said wearily. “What can I do for you and your newspaper?”
“I came for an interview,” he said, walking into the lab.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“Yet,” James added. “But if I’m right about you, Antonia, and I think I am… you’re only moments away from some big discovery.”
Antonia ignored him and turned to Caleb and Rebecca. “Egypt, Peru, and China -- especially China -- look into the energy spikes we found there.”
The two of them left and Antonia turned her attention to James.
“Egypt and Peru, huh?” he asked. “The homes of some of the oldest pyramids in the world. The Russian doctors mentioned something about increased ‘activity’ in ancient monuments, or something like that.”
“Something like that,” Antonia nodded. “Now I’ll ask again: what can I do for you?”
James smiled. With his sweep of blonde hair and his forget-me-not blue eyes, Antonia might have found him attractive, if only he hadn’t been so very annoying.
“I came across this article that was published online recently,” James said, leaning against one of the tables across from Antonia. “It hasn’t gotten nationwide traction or anything… most people who’ve read the article think the guy who wrote it is a looney-toon looking to piggyback off of the Russians’ findings. But I did a little research into his background and I thought you might be interested in knowing about this.”
“And why would I be interested?” Antonia asked.
“Tell me… does the name Patrick Dane mean anything to you?” James asked.