Vostok

by Steve Alten

  Vostok greeted me with a golfball-sized chunk of hail that splattered across the Barracuda’s bow.

  I dragged, pulled, and pushed the sub out of the water and onto the beach, then resealed the hatch, having decided to leave the bow lights on. Yes, I needed to conserve the batteries, but power was useless if a six-ton sea elephant decided to squat on my submersible as a nest.

  Locating Ben’s and Ming’s imprints in the snow, I followed the tracks to the northeast.

  The path my deceased companions had used on their return to the sub kept to the coastline as it circled the island around to the east, then south. Though a bit longer, it was far easier to negotiate, and even as I began the ascent up the base of the mountain, the snow accumulation at its worst was only calf-deep. The fog bank was barely intrusive.

  What did I expect to find? An ancient spaceship? A gateway to a parallel universe? To be honest, I had no clue. All I knew was that Ben and everyone else in charge of this expedition had gone to great care and expense to access this snow-covered mountain, and I needed to know why.

  I had crossed the fissure and had reached the base of the mountain when I remembered the magnetometer. Retrieving it from my backpack, I powered it on.

  What in the hell…

  The instrument registered 305,000 nanoteslas, a huge jump from the reading I had taken hours earlier on the shoreline with Ben and Ming.

  Seeking answers, I pocketed the device and gripped my axe. Approaching an exposed section of rock, I repeatedly struck the volcanic geology with the spiked end of the climbing tool. A dozen whacks and I had chipped away an eight-inch-wide, six-inch-deep divot. Turning on my flashlight, I shined the light upon the hole.

  The exposed surface was dark and rough, possibly uniform. It was too hard to tell from the small sample size.

  A strange tingling sensation gave me pause just then, and I realized the hairs on the back of my head were rustling beneath my wool hat.

  I turned slowly and saw the bear-dog. Having followed my trail through the snow, it was watching me, growling in the darkness, its eyes glowing olive-green in my night-vision lenses.

  Seven to ten strides up the slope and it would be on me.

  Gripping the axe tightly, I spun around and slammed the spike as high as I could into the rock above my head. I pulled myself up so that the toe of my right boot found the divot, my left hand searching for a ledge as I heaved myself off the ground.

  Don’t look back. Just climb!

  I managed to dig the cleats of my left boot into the snow-covered rock by my waist and drove the climbing spike higher, pulling myself up and just out of range of the animal’s snapping jaws.

  I gasped heavy breaths through my mask and looked down. The predator was standing on its hind legs, clawing at the rock. My muscles were trembling with cold, fear, and fatigue. Balancing on my perch, it was just a matter of time before I’d lose my balance.

  Above me awaited a precarious four-story climb up a thirty-degree twisting rock face covered in snow. I doubted I could make it up, but given the choice between the vicious predator and falling to my death, I decided to climb.

  Hugging the wall, I wiggled the climbing spike free and struck blindly above my head. Testing the grip, I shifted my weight to my left leg, dug my boot into the snow and pulled myself up another three feet.

  Wheezing breaths, rotating grips. Teary eyes blinking, snot freezing cold in my mask. The growls below faded, muted by the snow crunching against my jacket and pants. Where was I going?

  Give it up. One last heave away from the mountain and it’ll be over.

  My gloved hand found a hole in the packed snow. Glancing over, I saw frozen spike marks, the trail zig-zagging to my left.

  Ben’s tracks.

  Looking up, I saw something glowing.

  Adjusting my course, I assaulted the summit with renewed vigor until I found myself staring at a dark, rough, exposed metal surface displaying ten radiant orbs. Ben had left one of his climbing axes behind when he had fallen. I worked my gloved left hand into its loop and pulled myself up so that I was eye-level with the violet, light positioned at the bottom of the icon.

  And then something strangely familiar happened. The ten luminous objects bled the colors of the spectrum, from red to orange to yellow, darkening to green and blue, and indigo to violet before consuming me within their warm radiant light, which simultaneously blinded me and absorbed me into—

  —energy.

  24

  “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  I can’t say for sure wether I opened my eyes because I don’t remember having shut them. All I remember is that one moment I was freezing, trembling, exhausted, and cleaving to the side of a snow-capped summit—the next, my consciousness was consumed by ten glowing orbs, which condensed into one warm, white, soothing light.

  There was no pain or fear, no growling predators or ice sheets, nor was there my physical being. I just seemed to be floating merrily along. I think I was even giggling.

  Am I dead?

  A red dot appeared. Lacking the perception of either below or above, the singularity simply grew larger until it became a doughnut-shaped object. As it continued to magnify, its details became clear and I could see three circular ring plates divided by blue magnetic fields. As the object expanded beyond my field of vision, its gaping hole swallowed me, changing my view from outside to inside, so that I was now in the center of the ring.

  My entire 360-degree field of vision was occupied by rollers, tall canister-shaped, magnetized columns of metal that were rotating around the innermost ring like ponies on a merry-go-round. Though the rollers were revolving at an incredible speed, their velocity was such that they remained uniformly visible, like the rotating blades of a helicopter. This effect allowed me to count twelve of them, aligned side by side within the innermost ring. Held in place by the lower and upper plates, the twelve rollers were not actually touching the plates; instead they were floating upon a magnetic field like a high-speed monorail.

  Most bizarre. As my consciousness hovered in the ring’s hole, I could feel a rush of negatively charged electrons racing through the positively charged core. How did I know these particles were negatively charged? I have no idea. But in my present state of existence I found that I could sense it, just as I sensed the electrons forming pairs within the gap, then compressing as they rushed outward into the rotating rollers. There was a powerful magnetic field in play, created by the alternating alignment of the poles in both the rollers and the plates. And I realized it was the outward flow of these paired bosons that was causing the twelve cylinders to rotate within the inner ring plate.

  Hitching a ride along the electron current, my consciousness was inhaled through a magnetic layer that carried the particle stream through a second ring plate that was even larger than the first. There were more rollers here, and they revolved even faster.

  Exiting out of the second ring, the stream of electrons passed through a layer that tasted of copper before accelerating into a third and final ring plate, this one composed of even more rollers whirling at an even faster velocity.

  I realized then that I was touring an electrical generator, a never-ending circuit of electricity powered solely by the internal tensions of the atoms themselves—atoms whose negatively charged electrons were being perpetually drawn into the device’s positively charged neodymium core like bees to honey. There was no build up of heat, no fuel expended, nor toxins released. Powered by the infinite ocean of atoms that surrounded us, the alien device was, quite simply, a source of endless, clean, free energy.

  As these thoughts came to me, I felt my consciousness drawn out of the centrifuge and away from the shrinking power generator, so that I was again gazing upon its ring plates. The object progressively grew smaller until it shrank once more to a red singularity and disappeared.

  And as it disappeared I felt my own atoms reappear, gainin
g mass as I re-entered the physical dimension, materializing inside the private home library of my mentor, Joe Tkalec.

  The moment I saw the alien entity, I remembered everything—every missing minute of existence, every experienced death, culminating into the now.

  “Welcome, Zachary. But not ‘welcome back.’ Tell me why.”

  “Welcome back refers to a past moment lived. Had I actually experienced any of those moments other than this last one, I would not be here.”

  “Correct. And yet you experienced all of them, each choice creating its own branch of reality, each decision generating its own parallel universe. In some of these universes, you never made it back to your submersible. In others you returned injured, only to find Ming dead and Ben piloting the sub. Countless parallel universes created by a multitude of choices, and yet in only one distinct set of circumstances did the life of Zachary Wallace culminate in his returning to the mountaintop. And because time and existence are dependent solely upon the consciousness of the observer, all of the other multiverses have now disappeared.

  “Or have they? Do you remember our discussions about the two theories of time?”

  “I remember discussing McTaggert’s theories with Joe…”

  “How can you be so sure I’m not Joe?”

  “Stop it.”

  “What if I told you I am your old mentor and friend, that I was summoned to this moment by the same forces responsible for your being here? Only your belief system is preventing you from accepting me as the real deal, despite the fact that your five senses tell you I am Joe Tkalec.”

  “Common sense tells me you’re not.”

  “Funny. Common sense tells me that I am the real Joe and you are Alien Zachary.”

  “It’s your show, pal. You want to waste time playing mind games, go for it.”

  “But the physical dimension is riddled with mind games. Take our sense of sight, for instance. Tell me, Alien Zachary, how does the human eye see?”

  “It doesn’t. Images are constructed in our brains based on electrical signals sent from our eyes.”

  “So then, if we see a Miocene sperm whale, in reality the whale is the electrical signal interpreted by our brain.”

  “Your point being?”

  “What if everything that surrounds us, everything we perceive as matter, is also simply an electrical signal? How would you know the difference? The human brain, after all, is designed to interpret electrical signals sent from our five senses. How do we know an external world even exists? What if our perceptions are originating from another source, the same source responsible for our dreams? According to quantum physics, matter doesn’t even exist; the material world is simply an illusion, an electrical signal perceived by the brain to convince the soul that the universe is real.”

  “Guess that’s why I became a marine biologist and not a quantum physicist.”

  Joe smiled. “We’ll table the subject of reality for the moment and talk about time.”

  “What’s the point? You told me time doesn’t exist in the upper dimensions.”

  “True, but before you access the portal, you need to understand that time is not an absolute.”

  My heart raced. “I’m to use the portal?”

  “Or perhaps you already have?”

  “Maybe you are Joe. He used to drive me crazy with his riddles, too.”

  “And perhaps you really are the skinny runt I took under my wing as an eleven-year-old import from Drumnadrochit. Ah, but what if I hadn’t? Would you have still been a scientist? Would you have gone on to Princeton? Married your childhood sweetheart? If my roommate Troy hadn’t trained you as an athlete, perhaps you would have drowned in the Sargasso Sea. The person you are today is based on a million variables, all manipulated by your conscious thought.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It begins with desire and setting goals, and all the hard work and perseverance you demonstrated in both academics and athletics, but it goes way beyond that. All matter possesses a frequency. The atoms that make up matter are fluctuations of energy within a huge void. What appears solid to your senses is a construct of how your brain interprets the frequency of those electrical signals. Change the frequency and you change both matter and energy. The soul achieves this through conscious thought.

  “Young Zachary Wallace desired to be a scientist. The intensity of that desire affected Joe Tkalec, and the protégé magically has his mentor. Young Zachary was bullied in seventh grade by a ninth grader, and the exposed weakness created a desire to lift weights. Enter Troy and his conditioning regimen. New parallel universes divert from the old as you learn the game of football. Would you have become a marine biologist without my involvement? A running back without Troy’s coaching? Perhaps. But of all the possible outcomes you could have experienced, the ones you did experience resulted from the ability of your consciousness to alter the frequency of matter—the so-called aligning of the stars. The phenomenon is real, and those who discover how to control it can remove the chaos associated with existing in a dimension so far from the energy source. Then again, others can abuse their conscious thoughts for themselves alone, creating chaos.

  “Now let us add the variable of time to the equation. Recite the two theories of time authored by the philosopher John McTaggert.”

  I sat back in my cushioned chair and rocked. “McTaggert’s A-Theory stated that the only real time is the present. The past is gone and the future exists only as a probability distribution, a potentiality of the possible things that can happen. Since the future isn’t set, it’s not real.”

  “And his B-Theory?”

  “That the past, present, and future all co-exist simultaneously. Since the past determines the future, everything that has happened since the Big Bang was predetermined. Quantum physics is based on B-Theory, that everything that could possibly happen has already happened, or, as you say, time is dependent upon the observer.”

  “And what do you say, Zachary? Is it possible to alter the present by changing the past?”

  “I don’t know. If you were to go back in time forty years and murder my father, then you would have changed my birth parents. Still, who’s to say I would have turned out any different? My new father might have been a womanizing alcoholic just like Angus. If everything is predetermined, then you might board a different train but all tracks lead to similar outcomes. In the scheme of things, consciousness may not have the big effect you’re alluding to.”

  “Let’s hope you’re wrong.” The entity appearing to me as Joe Tkalec closed his eyes and rocked quietly.

  Joe or Alien Joe, I knew better than to interrupt.

  He opened his eyes. “Zachary, in a previous communication we discussed the frequencies of the ten dimensions and how their wavelengths—let’s call them vibrations—corresponded to different colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. There exists an eleventh dimension exiled from the ten, a dimension associated with darkness, which is defined by the absence of light. The darkness feeds off the slow, dense vibrations generated by negative energies: fear, ego, lust, greed, hatred, and violence.

  “A very radical alternate reality is threatening to bring chaos to the physical world. It is being driven by a fear-based dichotomy, dictated by a minority that is controlling the masses through their desire for the accumulation of matter.”

  “You mean money. Why would a species capable of interdimensional travel give two shits about a bunch of greedy rich people?”

  “The negative elite responsible for creating these fiefdoms are destabilizing the natural order of things. By unknowingly feeding the darkness, they are generating random shifts that have self-organized into higher complexities, creating chaos. We will show you the particular chaos that concerns us, so that you can decide whether you are the one who can help alter the collective consciousness.”

  “More riddles. And don’t think I forgot what you said about Moses on Mount Sinai. If that was a portal, then he should have foreseen his people losi
ng faith while he was getting the Ten Commandments.”

  “That was an encoded story. The Ten Commandments were the ten dimensions; the gift was immortality. Moses denied the Israelites the gift when he realized they were not ready.”

  “So what’s the gift I’m supposed to—oh no.” I stopped rocking. I stopped breathing.

  The generator…

  “Free, abundant, clean energy for everyone on the planet. Yeah, Joe, that’s a game-changer. And the negative elite, the fiefdoms, they’re going to be a lot worse than the guys building the Golden Calf. The idol worshippers of my time start wars to keep the status quo. Don’t get me wrong, what you want to do is fantastic; I just don’t think I’m the right guy. Maybe the president? Or Bill Gates?”

  “The methodology and the means remain yours to decide.”

  “You’re not listening. Bringing a product like this to market takes money, and I’m nothing but a piss-poor scientist. Until recently, the only thing I could afford to feed my family was mutton. Ever eat mutton, Alien Joe? It tastes like it sounds.”

  “Zachary, you used the analogy of multiple trains following converging tracks. Not all multiverses run together or even parallel. Some deviate radically from the norm. Humanity has shifted its collective consciousness to on the same track our ancestors found themselves on long ago. Unless diverted, the train will derail and take your species with it.”

  “Show me.”

  The room dimmed, and I felt myself growing lighter, as if gravity were leaving with Joe Tkalec and his library… and the density that was my atomic structure. And as my being again danced and flitted and floated about in the higher dimension, the dot reappeared. Only this time it was blue. The singularity grew larger until it became a ring that encompassed my entire field of vision, until its gaping hole drew me into the center, looking out at the spinning rollers.