Chapter 35
Razor thin streams of purple soaked electricity rippled along the wings of the glass dragon, while on the ceiling deep aqua blues swirled and danced as sea creatures braved the light in search of food. Watching over the room from the screen on the wall like a concerned mother silenced by distance, the Earth slipped into the darkness of space with slow revolutions.
John adjusted the silver cushion pressed against his aching back as Bobbie nestled deeper into his lap. Beside him, Vanessa rested her head on Aaron’s shoulder as she soaked in the extravagance of the room. The boat journey had been dreamlike and restful, the weathered timber gently cutting through a glass like ocean in a windless and sundrenched vacuum as they had quietened their minds from the horrors of the day.
Eventually they had turned back towards land and pulled up alongside an isolated and barely standing jetty that looked as though not even a seagull had ventured in years, making the reason for docking even more dreamlike. Francis had lifted a small salt encrusted trapdoor and, like rabbits in a wonderland, they had ventured down into the darkness. As they had broken through to the light, John had been stunned to discover the same room that Talitha had emerged from the first time they had met. Beyond the open door, Hendrix had been awaiting their arrival.
Candice had embraced him like the colleague he was when they first laid eyes on each other, but now any warmth was resting on the back burner. Now he was sitting to attention at his desk as she paced back and forth along the other side, their frenzied conversation occasionally accentuated with the slap of her hand against the polished surface. Back on the sofa, John had given up trying to follow the intricacies of their argument and chose instead to look through the glass wall into the shadows of the sea.
“Nothing like two brainiacs going head to head,” Aaron joked under his breath.
“I’d love to know who’s winning,” John replied.
Hearing the murmurs behind them, Candice and Hendrix ceased their banter and faced the room as another surge of electricity crackled across the dragon. As a brief silence descended Candice walked to the sofa and squeezed beside John, clasping his hands with her fingers. Back by the window Hendrix scratched at his silver grey hair, pushed away from the desk and slowly moved to stand by the large screen. Tiny glittering lights reflected along the surface of his glass eye.
“I know this is all above my pay grade,” John began, “but judging by the heat in that conversation there’s a whole lotta details we don’t know about.”
Hendrix nodded his agreement. “The devil is always in the details,” he mused while staring at the floor before breaking the spell and looking up. “Doctor Garland was angry at my vanishing act, totally warranted I might add, but the truth is threads unravelled so very quickly and I was in no position to trust anyone in a government facility with my burden of knowing.” He smiled and ran a finger along the wing of the dragon. “The error was mine though, and now I’m nothing but glad she’s here.”
“You always did have a way with words,” Candice reminded him, “and you’re right, the devil is in the details and something tells me that vial of blood sitting on your desk is a good fit for a pitchfork and tail.”
Aaron cleared his throat before joining in. “While we’re sitting all nice and calm with some cute fish looking in through the window, I don’t suppose someone wants to explain why they were ready to tear the city apart for that damn blood?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Candice said. “The code we worked on is in all of us, wrapped tight in our DNA, so it’s unique whatever it is.”
“Unique to a certain degree,” Hendrix stated, “and very much in need of a pitchfork.”
“I’m sorry,” John said with a hint of frustration, “but I’m all out of patience for any more riddles. If there’s ever a time to lay all the cards on the table then now seems pretty good to me, because it’s been one hell of a fucking day.”
Hendrix turned to watch the slow revolving Earth with arms across his chest and back to the room. Beyond the glass wall to his right a small shark burst forth from the darkness and scattered a small school of black striped fish, the frantic moment reflecting upon the ceiling and shimmering against the blue lit walls.
“What we know is made up of vast amounts of what we don’t,” Hendrix said with a shrug of his shoulders. “In between, of course, is what we want to be, only that usually comes with disappointment.” He pointed at the image on the screen. “We know that our one true mother was once a molten rock hurtling across a chaotic solar system born of fire. Then came water and our mother cooled and spawned life from the ash of stars, or to be more accurate the new oceans instigated a molecular based self replicating program with virtually unlimited parameters. From a simple set of instructions animals of all shapes and sizes were born, constantly changing and surging forward with new genetic sequences. Being human, we tend to think of the process as an achingly long time, millions upon millions of years, but from a cosmic perspective it was nothing more than the blink of an eye, like sprinkling dust on the floor here and watching a zoo of animals rise in just minutes.”
John tried to imagine a lion emerging from a speck of dust on the floor and felt like he was conjuring a warped magic trick with his mind. It was fun for a few seconds as he pictured different animals bubbling up from the floor, but pretty quickly the visuals brought with them an unsettled feeling.
“So the program keeps running,” Hendrix continued, “the animals get bigger and a global ecosystem follows its own rules as Earth hurtles through the darkness of space. Life was rampant but it was nothing more than a set of complex commands. It didn’t look to the stars to question, it simply survived long enough to keep the program going.”
“You make it sound like some sort of computer game,” Aaron said.
Once again Hendrix shrugged his shoulders. “Considering we’re talking about a set of codes acting in a medium, that’s a pretty good analogy.”
“So who wrote the damn code?” Vanessa asked suddenly.
“Ah!” Hendrix replied with a finger pointed to the ceiling. “You see, that’s the question isn’t it?”
“I know it’s a question,” Vanessa said as though the obvious had been missed, “but what about an answer?”
“The answer you’re looking for,” Hendrix replied, “may be as elusive as the first dream you had as a baby, or as close and deep as all the dreams you’ve ever had.”
“A quick look into my dreams and you’d be rethinking that idea.”
“But dreams may well hold a key to the answer,” he continued. “Before dreams though came the nightmare, only this nightmare was an asteroid intent on disrupting the running of the program in a big way. We all know what it did, but we should also be asking what it delivered.
“Are you saying…” Candice began to ask before trailing off.
“Exactly. I believe the asteroid delivered a new line of code to rain down into the soil, ready to use the existing program to develop a species that can truly dream, that can look up the stars and question. I believe our form was already predetermined and injected into the Earth with the impact to make use of the data already gathered by the cellular exploration, a software update I guess you could say. True consciousness was born when humans began to explore their garden, and deep inside the software update was a message waiting for activation.”
“We discovered it though,” Candice remarked, “and it took a hell of a lot of processing power to decipher. I’m not sure you could call that being activated.”
“Technically you’re right, but my theory is a different kind of activation took place thousands of years ago. We know light can carry information, and information can be a command or a set of instructions, and I believe something triggered the beginning.”
“Beginning of what exactly?” Aaron asked.
“Of a dreamlike madness that holds power even today,” Hendrix explained, turning back to the screen and retrieving a small tablet from hi
s pocket that brought his fingers tapping and swiping.
The stunning and silent Earth faded away, replaced with what appeared to be an old painting depicting a bearded man in the dark of a cave, his face lit by a small fire and strange animal like forms reaching out from the shadows.
“Visions began to surface,” he explained. “Not for all of course, but with enough occurrence that they began to sway the light of day. Some who had visions went mad, some kept silent and carried them as a terrifying burden, but every now and then someone born with a little more tolerance brought the essence of the visions into the community where it was interpreted in ways to suffice their needs and desires.” The painting disappeared, replaced with a photo of the great pyramids beneath a full moon. “All across the globe these visions became a currency of power. Pick any civilisation big or small and with a little digging you’ll find a fever like vision at the heart of their structure, a single person who believes they hold a fragment of the heavens.”
A variety of images began to flicker across the screen. Ancient structures one after the other from different times and different places, but all seemingly built not for practical functions but seemingly to worship the heavens and stars above. Soon the screen settled upon the interior of an enormous cathedral bathed in a sunlit spectrum made possible by the countless stained glass windows. Hendrix took a moment to study the architecture as though seeing it for the first time and then continued.
“Today we might call visions or voices a marker for schizophrenia, before that perhaps witchcraft or possessions. Any earlier and it was simply madness, but from the madness an underlying striving always arose. My theory, or maybe it’s just an educated guess, is that the activation lead to certain individuals bringing these visions to fruit and thus rippled across our world in three phases. The first phase was perhaps our new lust for the stars and heavens and the desire to join the Gods on their thrones. Death became the portal, and early temples appeared draped in sacrifices and ceremonial burials.”
“Those Aztecs were mean motherfuckers,” Vanessa whispered a little too loudly.
“That’s because the first phase represented the separation between our species and that which lay in the stars, a cruel distance that bordered on abandonment,” Hendrix responded over his shoulder, “so yes, it created some cruel motherfuckers.” He returned his attention to the cathedral. “Now the second phase gets a little more interesting. The ramblings of the mad began to inject a new perception to slither into our collective consciousness, this time bridging the gap between the great ones in the stars and our lonely planet. Strange beings began to visit, to mingle with us mere humans. We couldn’t travel there, so why not bring them here? Think of the fevered visions scrawled down that tell of fallen angels descending to our planet to breed with us humans, visions that are still today held as fact by so many. From peering into the starlit darkness to dancing with a myriad of gods and mythical figures, the second phase brought the mystery closer to home.”
As the speech washed over John he had to wonder how close the theory really was. He wasn’t exactly a history scholar, and wasn’t a big fan of religion even if he had danced with more than a few devils, but something about the picture that was forming kind of made sense. Most religions he did have a vague idea about seemed to have started with someone convincing a whole bunch of others that they’d received a message from God. Come to think of it, he couldn’t come up with one that began with a good old fashioned group consensus.
“What I’m trying to work out though,” he said with thoughts now racing, “is why go to the trouble of slipping some code or whatever the hell it is into our blood if all it does is give random people moments of madness, even if some use it to start cults and bullshit myths?”
Hendrix absorbed the question as he took two slow steps towards the statue and promptly sat down on the floor, the dragon in his eye catching the dragon by his shoulder. When he was ready to answer he leaned down on one elbow as though telling ghost stories by the fire, which in a way he was.
“Whispers of music carried on a strong wind can never reveal the true intent of the symphony. Those rare individuals across time whose brains picked up concerto fragments were forced to contend with broken signals, though some heard more of the song than others. Which brings me to what I believe is the third phase.”
“Oh shit,” Candice stammered with a hand to her mouth. “I think I know where you’re going.”
“Having worked with you Doctor Garland,” Hendrix said with a smirk, “I have no doubt.”
“God knows your desires,” she whispered as shock widened her eyes.
“In an upside down way he just might,” Hendrix agreed, “because the third phase is where a vision doesn’t just ripple but trembles across the lands and seas. First there was the eternal divide between our bricks of rock and the inhabitants of stars, and then we put faces and personalities to gods and brought them down to mingle amongst the masses. And what next? A man has a vision that has helped ever since to divide the world, and that vision declared him a hybrid like no other, neither human or god but both.”
“And he ended up tortured on a piece of wood,” Aaron remarked as the penny dropped.
“He heard more of the symphony than anyone before him,” Candice said with excitement, “and he was trying to tell us! We were looking up to the stars for so long but we came from the stars, and the answer we were looking for is inside of us. The code in our blood, it’s been signalling us all along. I don’t fucking believe it!”
“And here’s what I think you’ll find truly interesting,” Hendrix promised, the joy at the revelations in the room obvious across his face.
“Believe me mister underwater man you’ve already blown my goddamn mind,” Vanessa assured him. Beside her John could only shake his head and whistle softly through his teeth at the complete rewrite of history, the ideas so strange and vivid that he almost forgot there was still a small matter of the end of the world on the way.
“Oh hell,” Aaron suddenly said with a scratch of his head, “I thought was following all this but now I’m not so sure.”
“Actually Aaron,” Hendrix replied, “this part is kind of up your alley.”
“Then I’m all ears doc.”
“You see I’m almost positive the crucifixion is the line in the sand, the division between the shadowy visions and the reality of the true quest, and with it came a new element to proceedings. Obviously we take most mythological history with a grain of salt, but within the symbolism there’s often a good deal of truth to be found. Take, for example, the spear of destiny.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be real though?” Aaron asked.
“As a physical object that acts as a symbol I’m sure it’s real enough,” Hendrix confirmed. “Here we have a man who brought us a vision that he is both human and a god, and it’s said that the spear was used to spill his blood. Of course, the story goes that whoever holds the spear cannot be defeated in battle, a tantalising promise that drove even Hitler to extend all efforts to take possession of what he thought was the authentic weapon. But I’ve always wondered, why would a spear that cut through the flesh of the man whose visions have trembled across lands further than most become a war talisman? The only conclusion I could come to is that the man on the cross, like a handful of others both before and after him, was genetically different in a way that could pick up the code transmissions at a higher level. The spilling of his blood, I’m pretty sure, was done in an attempt to infuse the unique genetics with darker human beings, unique minds who seem to have visions of a different kind. They’re few and far between and I’ve no idea of their purpose, but there exists a number of blood lines that I’m sure carries a slightly different code, a virus I guess you could say, that is not friendly at all with the sequence we all carry.”
“The blood on your desk,” Candice said, “it’s from a serial killer.”
“I thought as much, and if my guess is correct the man it comes from is a very ra
re member of a particularly rare club, which means it might hold key information regarding the darker code trembling in the background.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this,” John said with a rub of his temple. “There’s some sort of code in all of us, but only a few people pick up on the weird signals. Some pick it up more than others and start religions and stuff, others just go quietly mad, and this code came down with an asteroid impact. Good so far?”
“Sure,” Hendrix confirmed.
“Okay,” John continued, “so now thanks to good old fashioned science we’ve read the message in the DNA and it’s telling us about another impact, and as a bonus threw in instructions for some sort of brain machine. Now, the reason why Talitha is so important is that she was born with the ability to hear the symphony better than anyone and is supposed to be meeting god knows who or what somewhere between here and the moon, but she’s also jacked into the cloud like a ghost which I still can’t wrap my head around. And the cherry on the cake, if I’m hearing right, is that there’s another code pumping away out there and it’s the kind that carries a pitchfork, a type of virus that wants to do bad things. Tell me mate, am I on the right page?”
“I’d say you’re pretty close,” Hendrix assured him. “If you climb a tree and look down on the forest certain patterns begin to emerge. Different visions have emerged at different times throughout history, and we can find the footprints spread across the planet even today. From mystics and prophets to psychedelic shamans that ingest juice of the vine to talk with the architects of the universe, something inside of us has been slowly bubbling to the surface. But then there are powerful leaders across the same history, strong minds determined to bring horrible bloodshed and terror for reasons only they truly know.” He peered down onto the floor with a sudden profound sadness. “There are two elements at play it seems, and we’re reaching a critical point in the very reason for our existence. I don’t know the rules of the game but I know Talitha is the key to carrying what’s left of us forward, and there are forces at work that would rather she didn’t live. The Hallucigenia Project exists because we are returning from the stars, and our job is to make sure the enemy doesn’t reach out first.”
The Hallucigenia Project Page 65