Vostok

by Steve Alten

  The Colonel approached me, one hand reaching out to grip my right arm above the elbow, the other poking the gun barrel against my temple. “You look surprised to see me. Did you think we lacked the knowledge to access this ship? MAJESTIC uses a neutrino light detector to track E.T. vessels as they enter our dimension. Then we bring ’em down and reverse-engineer them. Been doing it since your father started making young girls cry.

  “You didn’t really think his ploy would fool us, did you? We practically invented disinformation and misdirection tactics.” He leaned in. “If I had a dollar for every time one of our guys kidnapped some dumb hick farmer and put him through an alien abduction… Of course, I’m sure a few of them actually enjoyed the anal probes.”

  Without warning, he struck me on the top of my skull with the butt-end of the Beretta’s magazine.

  I dropped to one knee, warm blood pooling around the wound.

  Then I lost it.

  With a primal yell, I drove my right shoulder into the Colonel’s gut as if he was a blitzing linebacker, slamming the older man flat on his back. The guards stayed with Jonas, allowing me a few seconds to pummel Vacendak’s face into a bloody pulp before one of them dragged me off him.

  Furious, the Colonel regained his feet and aimed the gun’s barrel between my eyes, his body trembling. For a moment I was convinced my life was over—but I’ve been there before.

  Spinning around to face Jonas, the Colonel fired.

  The force of the gun blast startled me, the sound echoing in my ears. I saw a puff of smoke leave the barrel as it burped a slowly spinning lead projectile through gelid air, which appeared to ripple outward from the Beretta.

  The bullet made it a third of the way to Jonas’s brain before it stopped. In fact, everything stopped except for yours truly and Joe Tkalec, who now stood beside me, observing the frozen scene.

  “Joe, is he going to die?”

  “Yes. But he served a greater good. He brought you here.”

  “To the portal?”

  “To a state of universal consciousness known as Da’at; a place of infinite light, energy, and perfection, where all ten dimensions are united as one. Physical beings who are giving, like your friend, are able to draw from its energy. Those who receive for themselves alone cannot access it. One who has awakened Da’at is able to perform the miraculous. Are you ready to perform the miraculous, Zachary?”

  “What miracle, Alien Joe? What are you asking me to do?”

  “I cannot say without jeopardizing your free will. However, if you choose to bring your consciousness into Da’at, then the multiverse you entered seven years ago and everything hence forward shall become the reality.”

  “Whoa, hold on. You’re asking me to sacrifice William and Brandy, now Jonas and his son, plus all the people that these bastards killed in D.C.? For what? For some alien race on a distant planet that died long ago? Why are you placing that burden on me? I mean, come on, isn’t that God’s will?”

  “God has given you the will to choose.”

  “Okay, so what happens if I choose not to go to this Da’at place? What happens then?”

  “Then you’ll return to seven years ago to the ice tunnel, and whatever reality has manifested as a result of your decision. Of course, this time, instead of entering this vessel, you’ll simply come to a dead end.”

  “In my last lucid dream, I was much older. Brandy and I were still together; William was a man. And the Yellowstone Caldera erupted… Was that real?”

  “It was one reality among a multiverse of possibilities.”

  “You know what I’m asking! Will it really happen, or did it occur as a result of my decision to enter Da’at?”

  “Entering Da’at resolves nothing. It simply returns your soul to a past life.”

  “You mean Avi Socha?”

  “He is known on his world as a soul searcher. Once you enter Da’at, your consciousness will awaken to his reality. You will retain no memory of ever having been Zachary Wallace.”

  “Then how do I get back to this life?”

  “There’s no guarantee you will. The soul is immortal, of course, but the only certainty once you enter Da’at is that you will live and die as Avi Socha, and the course of action you take, or refuse to take, may determine the future of your species.”

  The blood drained from my face.

  There are times when life shits on your head, when reality unravels with a diagnosis of cancer or paralysis or the loss of a loved one. That’s the moment you realize your contentment was all an illusion, that you never had any control, that the money and notoriety and long hours and better job titles and great sex and the whole rat race chasing after the pursuit of happiness was all bullshit. Because if and when you do find yourself alone in that foxhole or on that surgical table, in a sinking boat or a hospice bed or trapped on a dying planet, and it’s just you and your fear—that’s the moment you realize the only thing you have left, the only thing of substance that life can’t strip away from you, is your faith in a higher power.

  For me, Dr. Zachary Wallace, lord of the skeptics, I had to believe because the alternative—going back seven years to the ice tunnel—was a death sentence.

  Sometimes, better the devil you haven’t met…

  “Okay, Alien Joe, I’m ready. Send me back.”

  I felt myself sinking feet-first through the floor, my body atomizing as my consciousness was inhaled into the center of the whirling electrogravitic rings.

  Part Three

  Before the Beginning…

  39

  “There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity

  was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair.

  That way lays defeat and death.”

  —Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

  I awoke on an alien world as another person.

  Avi Socha—mated to three, father of ten.

  Avi Socha—born into servitude, subcitizen of the Kohenim Tribe.

  Avi Socha—discredited scientist and soul-seeker, now a prisoner of the state.

  Avi Socha—a forgotten man on the verge of death.

  Nearly one solar year had passed since I’d been arrested in a seaside cave by the Council’s secret police. My neighbor had turned me in, hoping to acquire “loyalty credits” for the lottery, a contest in which a thousand subcitizens would be chosen to board a transport vessel that was to safely orbit our doomed world, Charon, when the Miketz struck.

  The lottery turned out to be another Council lie designed to stave off civil unrest.

  Weak from hunger, I remained in my sleep sack until the midday sun beat down upon me. It shone through from octagonal openings in the two-story-high ceiling of my quarantine. Using my soiled tunic as a tent, I curled beneath the fabric to shield my light-sensitive eyes.

  The prison cells were occupied by the dead and dying, but our jailers were gone. They had abandoned the facility three weeks earlier, when a massive earthquake had rocked the continent, spawning a planet-wide exodus thirty-nine days ahead of the anticipated doomsday event. Once the cartel and their military capos had gone, the republic’s infrastructure collapsed, chasing the vendors who had serviced the elite into the mountains—my jailers among them.

  Hundreds of ships now orbited the planet, linking together to form clusters, their pods occupied by past and present Council members and their families. The rest of us were forced to remain behind, waiting for a volcanic eruption that would wipe out all traces of life.

  Left alone to die, I was surviving on the rainwater that poured in from the ceiling and a solitary green leaf a day, taken from what little remained of my four-plant garden.

  Being locked away in exile is a perception-altering experience. Initially there is pain. Pain comes in a variety of forms, from the physical agony brought about by incessant hunger, to the mental anguish of being confined to a small cell, to the emotional torture of being deprived of seeing your loved o
nes.

  The first few weeks were by far the hardest, the darkness accompanied by nightmares, birthed by the screams coming from the other prisoners. I adapted by stuffing my earholes with torn fabric from my tunic. My stomach gradually adapted to starvation by shrinking, my mind to the tediousness of endless time by creating a routine.

  Yet even that was not enough to slow the onset of madness.

  Being held in solitary confinement brings waves of insanity, time melding into lucid dreams and waking delusions. The first episode happened one scorching day. As the heat baked me alive in my cell and the noonday sun reflected off my stone floor to blind me, I sank into a panting, heart-pounding delirium, muttering a long-forgotten mantra as I welcomed death.

  It came with a blissful release of pain as my consciousness rose out of my body to the ceiling, my mind’s eye looking down upon a tortured being lying in a hammock. I had become so emaciated that at first I didn’t recognize myself.

  My skin hung loose from my skeleton; my black eyes were sunken and red. Having left my body, my consciousness floated joyfully out an open vent to the prison courtyard.

  At the time of my first passing, the facility was being abandoned by the guards. There was chaos and fear and uncertainty, the violet horizon laced with vertical rocket plumes from ships racing into orbit ahead of the mobs.

  Moving over the prison walls into the city, I witnessed a crime spree evolve into a bloodbath, as decades of military rule gave way to the inevitable “whatever it takes to survive” mentality. Looting, murder, rape, intoxication—I could feel my species’ life force sink deeper into the mire as they turned on one another, trading morality for survival.

  And then a force of energy summoned me, its white light intoxicating. I floated toward it and was enveloped in the love of my birth parents, both of whom had been put to death by the last regime eight solar years ago. Bathing in their aura, I wished only to join them; however, they told me it wasn’t my time. They said the upper worlds had tasked my soul with a mission—to lead my people off of our dying world.

  Before I could inquire how I was expected to do this, I found my spirit moving over water, heading for a desolate coastal region known as the southern rift valley. Meteors had impacted the terrain eons ago, leaving the geology pockmarked with enormous craters. Some had formed lakes. Others remained dry beds. One of these had been outfitted with camouflaged netting, concealing a rebel camp.

  As my spirit toured the facility, I recognized physicists and engineers whom I had known from my adolescent years at the academy. As members of the twelve tribes who suffered as a subservient class under the Council’s autocratic rule, these scientists and their skilled laborers had been working together in secrecy to design and construct a fleet of saucer-shaped starships. Unlike the conventional transports now in orbit over Charon, these vessels were powered by an electrogravitic propulsion system, a generator that produced an anti-gravity vortex that would theoretically make interdimensional travel possible. The technology had threatened the Council’s carbon-based hold on the economy and had therefore been banned, and now the planet’s twelve tribes—Charon’s lowest rung society—were on the brink of using it to flee our star system in search of a habitable world suitable for colonization.

  It would have made for a delicious irony had the propulsion system actually worked.

  With a sudden wave of pain, I found myself back in my cell, once more imprisoned in a dying body.

  Pain is part of the physical condition; suffering is a choice we make. Having been given a task, I decided that I would no longer suffer my fate. I would use it as a means to save my people.

  First, I needed to be free.

  Even lacking guards, escape was out of the question. The cell door was bolted from the outside, the open ceiling slats too high to reach. Physically, I barely possessed the strength to stand. Even if I could replicate my out-of-body experience, it offered no means of communicating my dilemma to others. And while I still maintained the ability to communicate with my past lives, there was nothing they could do to release me unless …

  I had been raised and educated on the scientific, philosophical, and spiritual belief that life is interconnected through a single consciousness that pervades all existence. This universal mind is present everywhere at the same time. One must simply know it, believe in it, and apply it through meditative practice, and miracles can happen.

  The miracle I would seed was a visual message, a map that began in the rebel camp and led to my prison. At the culmination of this dream, the dreamer would witness a functioning electrogravitic propulsion system whirling away in my cell.

  My targeted viewers would be the scientists working on a means to escape Charon, half a continent away.

  Solitude and starvation made for intense meditation sessions that bordered on delirium.

  For weeks, I teetered on the brink of death until one late afternoon when my cell door was wrenched open on its rusted hinges.

  The rebel leader was tall and lanky, his youth and dark complexion revealing his lineage to be one of the eastern tribes. Three other males accompanied him, one of whom performed a quick physical examination on me before feeding me intravenously.

  I felt the warmth spreading through my blood vessels, easing my pain. Through heavy eyes I gazed up at the octagonal holes in the ceiling, watching with amusement as they started to spin.

  I must have slept for some time, because it was dark when I awoke. We were in the main cabin of an aerial transport, the leader immersed in reading my prophecies, which he had recovered from my cell, recorded in a series of word gusts on a transmitter scroll.

  He acknowledged that I was awake. “You are Avi Socha ben Amram.”

  “And you are Zaphenath Paneah. I remember you from our days in the science academy.”

  “And I remember your theories on soul searching that got you expelled.” He motioned to the scroll. “May I?”

  I nodded, finding the strength to sit up for the first time in a month.

  He selected a recording I had made before weakness had replaced my anger.

  Epithet to an Extinct Race

  Beneath violet skies and silent screams,

  and shadowed faces

  fleeing burning streams;

  whose shorelines danced with lifeless limbs

  and hallowed halls

  and hope turned grim.

  Scorched by greed.

  Death laughs.

  Lies and smiles

  and justice without trials,

  wrapped in bundles of hope

  and no one can cope

  except we did.

  Who asked you to thicken

  our air until it was rendered unbreathable,

  to poison our food, to safeguard the inconceivable?

  We did.

  In the end of times, when an uprising was needed, we ignored the call. The victim was its own executioner; the seed destroyed the soil; our hatred taught a child. The caldera was left to boil.

  In an epithet to an extinct race, only ignorance shall reign forever.

  For several silent moments he reflected upon my words. Then he walked over and sat on the floor before me, a gesture of humility. “The Miketz shall arrive in less than a month. Its eruption shall destroy all life remaining on this planet. A team of scientists from the twelve tribes have been laboring in secrecy for many years on a means to escape not just the Miketz but our star system altogether. For weeks now they have shared the harsh reality of their failure with a dream that appears to point to you as the one who holds the key to their success. You are responsible for this?”

  “I am.”

  “Translate the vision. Tell me what you think you know.”

  “I know your scientists have created a propulsion system capable of travelling faster than light. I also know there is a flaw in the design that affects the electromagnetic field. As a result, the anti-gravity vortex isn’t strong enough to provide inertial shielding. Without it, your ships won�
��t be able to survive transdimensional flight. Like the Council’s fleet, you will be stuck in this star system until your supplies run out and you perish.”

  “And you possess a solution to this challenge?”

  “Not yet. But with your help I will seek an audience with one of my soul’s future incarnations, who lives in an advanced society powered by these devices. What he knows I shall know.”

  “Avi, I think imprisonment has affected your mind. How can one communicate with an individual who hasn’t even been born yet?”

  “The soul is immortal. It belongs in the Upper Worlds, where time does not exist. In order to earn its way into the higher realms of existence, it must live out many lives in the physical world. Each incarnation of the flesh is judged, each judgment influencing the next incarnation. Inflict pain upon another in this life, and in the next you might suffer a disease. Treat others with love, and in the next life you may have bliss. Commit atrocities like the members of Council, and you might live out your next life as a slug. Each incarnation bears its own consciousness even though they share the same soul. By tapping into the soul’s energy stream, I am able to locate these incarnations and communicate with them using the universal consciousness. Because time has no bearing in the Upper Realms every inevitability has already happened, including the lives of every incarnate that will ever accompany each soul. As long as the future caretaker of my soul will one day exist, I can find the means to communicate with him.”

  The leader shook his head, unsure. “Avi, I sent a transport to collect your family. Your senior wife, Lehanna, claims you soul searched for a future incarnate before you were arrested. She says you failed and that there are no future Charonian incarnates out there to connect with. This suggests our mission will also fail.”

  “Things happen for a reason, Zaphenath. Even the Miketz serves a purpose, one we cannot see. Prison gave me time to reflect. Among the thousands of probabilities that will end in the death of our people, I believe I have found the means to set one alternate reality into motion, one that could alter our species’ fate. And the implications of our actions are incredible.”