by Brandt Legg
“Are you getting anything?” he asked Gale. “Their language is circular, using telepathy to go around.”
“Mind to eyes to eyes to mind,” Gale said.
“Yes.”
“He’s saying the Sequence is about everything. It has all been shown to you.”
“Maybe I’m not smart enough,” Rip said.
“No, it’s like Sani-Niyol said, the three parts of learning. You’ve seen it, now you just need the experience, and time to kick in.”
“Time?” Rip said. “Do you think we have a lot of time?”
“I think he said that there are two questions with the same answer.”
“Where’s he going?” Rip asked.
As Crying Man left the building, he turned and shook his head and the Eysen went dark.
Chapter 71
Monday July 24th
The vibrating buzz of the X34 phone startled Rip awake. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and left the tent. Gale hardly stirred.
“Senator Monroe is dead,” Booker said.
“How?”
“Assassinated. The initial intel chatter says it was the Mossad.”
“Wow. But he didn’t even have the Eysen.”
“Apparently our theory was wrong. The prospect of a Monroe Presidency already made the Israelis nervous. The fact that he might also possess an Eysen was too much to take. They obviously have a mole inside the NSA or the Vatican.”
“Probably the two most secure entities on Earth; how could they?”
“Don’t underestimate the Mossad. But there is no other way they could know that the NSA and the Vatican have a pact to share the Eysen in order to keep the Catholic Church alive. And the neutral party that would keep the Eysen was Monroe.”
“Incredible. Either way, we may be better off without him in the White House, but the thought of being unable to avoid the other Divinations is sobering.”
“Terrifying.”
“I think I have an idea about the Cosega Sequence. I need to do one more thing. I think we’ll be ready to leave here in a couple of hours.”
“I want you out now.”
“I need an hour.”
“BLAX is on standby to pull you out.”
Only Rip’s complete exhaustion had allowed him to sleep. He’d been upset by the disappearance of the Crying Man, feeling as if there was never enough time with the Eysen to figure understand it. But in the night he’d remembered something Sani-Niyol had said.
The information inside the Eysen was too much to take in all at once. Those three steps of learning were the key. Time; Clastier had had forty years to study the Eysen and he didn’t even write about what it was or explain the Sequence. He had used it to glean the Attestations and Divinations. But Rip’s purpose was different. He needed to know what the Sequence was, and that had overshadowed Rip’s first question, as an archaeologist, “What is the Eysen?”
The two questions that the Crying Man had referred to: What is the Sequence? What is the Eysen? They were two questions with one answer. If he could find that answer, would he be able to stop the Divinations? He knew what to ask Sani-Niyol now. Are the past and the future the same thing? When he saw the Cosegan city up close, far more advanced than any futurist had ever dreamed, he had to wonder, is time a circle? He scribbled a note for Gale and then left to find the shaman.
“Gaines,” Barbeau yelled.
Rip froze, but he knew the voice. Slowly he turned and faced Dixon Barbeau. Surprisingly there was no gun pointed at him. The FBI agent was only holding a book.
“I’ve got something for you,” Barbeau said.
Rip, trying to catch his breath, looked around for the ambush.
“Another lucky day for you, Gaines. Because I’m not going to arrest you today either,” Barbeau said. “There are enough FBI and NSA agents around here to do that. But if you do get away, I want you to have this.” Barbeau handed him the evidence bag.
Rip still didn’t speak.
“Inside you’ll find a book about Clastier that I picked up in San Cristobal, as well as a translation.”
“Why?” Rip asked, unsure how he’d made such a friend in the FBI agent who’d been tracking him for weeks.
“It’s nothing personal, Gaines. Let’s just say I’m doing it for the greater good.”
Rip was about to say something but a bullet cut through him and he fell to the ground.
Barbeau pulled his weapon and ducked, but before he could find cover or the source of the shot, he got hit. As he fell, his gun landed inches from Gaines.
Seconds later, two Vatican agents, a man and woman, emerged from the scrub. “Kill the other one, but we’re supposed to try to keep Gaines alive,” the woman said.
Just as the agent was about to shoot Barbeau, Rip got the gun and fired at the man. Miraculously, the shot hit his neck and the agent folded over and collapsed. The female agent yelled, “Drop it, Gaines, or I’ll shoot.”
Before Gaines could decide what to do, Kruse shot the other agent in the head. “Number five,” he whispered to himself.
Gale had been on her way to meet Rip at Sani-Niyol’s. She heard the shots and ran to Gaines. “It’s my side or my thigh, I don’t know, too much blood.”
Barbeau rolled over, “Thanks, Gaines,” he moaned.
Kruse pivoted and trained his weapon on Barbeau.
“No!” Gaines shouted. “Don’t shoot.”
Kruse kept his weapon aimed, but turned to Rip.
“He’s on our side,” Rip said.
“I guess I am,” Barbeau said, thinking it for the first time. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Eight minutes later, one of Booker’s presidential-type helicopters landed and suddenly Gale and Rip were airborne. Kruse stayed behind; he had a plan. After getting quick approval from Booker via an X34 phone, he made preparations, while waiting for a BLAX unit of mercenaries to arrive. Kruse talked to Barbeau, while giving him first aid. It would help if he lived.
As the BLAX team landed in their military helicopter, the sky above filled with NSA paratroopers. “This is insane,” The BLAX commander said to Kruse.
“I know, but we can do this. We have to end it.”
The mercenaries loaded the bodies of the Vatican agents onto the chopper and the BLAX pilot readied to lift off; then, at the last moment he bailed. Barbeau was still too close to the helicopter and could be injured, but they had to risk it. As Kruse and the BLAX agents retreated into the canyon, they fired a shoulder-mounted missile at their own chopper. The explosion was far greater than would have been normal due to a fifty-five gallon drum of fuel already on board with the dead Vatican agents.
DIRT agents reached Barbeau a few minutes later and called in an air-ambulance. A fiery plume had blown over him. Most of the burns were minor, but the pain helped him act convincingly when the first NSA Special Ops commandos showed up a couple of minutes later. Once they IDed him, they asked him the whereabouts of Gaines and Asher.
“They shot me as they got on that chopper,” Barbeau said, as he winced in pain.
“Who?” one of the Special Ops soldiers asked.
“Gaines and Asher,” Barbeau said, as though it should be obvious.
“The suspects are in that?” another solider asked, pointing to the intense fire, and shielding his face.
“Yes,” Barbeau said. “That’s not one of our choppers! Now, can someone get me out of here? It’s a little hot.”
“EMTs will be here any minute,” a DIRT agent interjected.
“Who blew it up?” the first NSA commando asked.
“I don’t know,” Barbeau said.
A classified theory quickly emerged that the Eysen had caused the explosion to be larger and more intense than normal, because of the extraordinary materials that must have been used to make the artifact.
Later the attack would be blamed on the Mossad. The only one who didn’t buy it was Jaeger, but the pressure proved too much for him. Within hours of Monroe’s assassination and the
purported death of Gaines and Asher, Jaeger suffered a massive heart attack while jogging outside the command center. His superiors suspected the Vatican, Booker, or the Mossad might have caused his death to appear natural, but his wife refused to allow an autopsy on religious grounds; they were Jewish.
Chapter 72
On Booker’s spacious helicopter a medic tended to Rip’s wound. He was very lucky the bullet went through his upper thigh. It didn’t hit anything vital and made a clean exit. Rip read the translated copy of the San Cristobal journal, while Gale read the original. A devout follower of Clastier had written it.
An entirely new section of Clastier’s work was contained in the pages called Inspirations, which were short quotations taken from his many sermons, such as “Judgment, anger, hatred, and jealously are some of the poisons of fear; why would you allow this venom in your heart?” But it wasn’t the Inspirations that excited them most.
Buried near the back of the book was a new Divination. Even though the Empty Man one (about Monroe’s assassination) had already come to pass, they called this new one “the sixth final Divination”. It described a utopia, after a great plague. Clastier, himself, was confused whether it was 2065 or 2115; but in either case, it was a wonderful world.
Humankind had completely quit using fossil fuels; using solar and wind powered everything in its place. It had been decades since war of any kind, and even illness had been all but been eradicated. Hunger did not exist, as food was abundant. Space exploration was the leading industry. However, the most startling aspect of this future that Clastier had described more than a hundred and fifty years ago was that the Earth’s population was nearly three billion. A figure that might have seemed staggeringly large to Clastier, when in his time the total number of people barely topped a billion. “But we have more than seven billion people. What happens to four billion people in the next fifty to a hundred years?” Gale asked weakly.
“There is only one answer,” Rip said. “In order to reach the glory of the sixth Divination, we must go through the horror of the others.”
Gale opened her journal. “Monroe is dead. Next, the Catholic Church falls. Then the global pandemics and super-viruses wipe out vast numbers. And, after that, climate destabilization.” Gale looked at Rip unable to read the last one. The devastation in her eyes pained him.
“And then World War III, or something like it,” Rip said. “You wouldn’t think we’d have much fight left in us.”
“Humans always seem to be ready for a fight, but we have to find a way to stop his prophecies,” she said.
“If we do, we might miss the utopia,” Rip said.
“So?” Gale interrupted, visibly shaken. “If we don’t, four billion people are going to miss it anyway!”
He took her hand, “Don’t worry, we’ll try.”
“Professor,” one of the BLAX agents interrupted. “We’ll be landing soon. The rest of your journey will be by boat.” Booker wanted them well off the radar and had arranged one of his luxury yachts to take them to a private island off the coast of Mexico.
Once on the yacht, Gale and Rip settled into a spacious cabin and took out the Eysen. The Sequence projected across the room and soon, they were back in the Cosegan city. Rip’s leg wouldn’t allow him to stand, but he was still able to direct the action from bed. They went into some kind of science hall filled with stars, planets, volcanoes, and churning oceans, all life-like; the technology was beyond imagination. Every detail could be split and analyzed down to the subatomic level. It reminded them of Booker’s Universal Quantum Physics project because everything contained a glowing energy. It was the one unifying element among each thing they encountered. Rip told Gale that when he’d first seen a projection appear outside of the Eysen, it was of himself. “The miniature version of me peeled layers of myself; just like we are doing with these objects, and the same light-energy was inside me too.”
“The hall of science was so big that soon they realized it kept expanding as they went in further. Soon, people and animals were there and Gale could easily break them down into layers and always found the same light-energy. Whenever they tried to go beyond the light energy, it just got smaller but otherwise did not change.
“I finally get it,” Rip whispered, getting painfully to his feet.
Chapter 73
Gale moved until she was in front of him. “What?” she asked.
Rip limped around the cabin, eyes darting wildly, arms moving to switch the scene.
“Tell me,” Gale repeated.
“Don’t you see?” Rip said, breathlessly. “It’s the big bang.”
“How . . . ”
“It’s where we came from. That’s the end of the Cosega Sequence!” Rip pointed to the projected images. “Look.” He brought up the Sequence, then stood in the middle and separated the circles and dashes until the same central point of light emerged. “The Cosegans are saying the same thing that Clastier wrote, ‘we’re all part of the whole.’ But they’re showing us.” He moved his hands in circular motions. “The big bang wasn’t just the beginning of our universe, it was the beginning of us. We started as that point of light. Call it the God point.”
“God?” Gale asked.
“For lack of a better word,” Rip said, the irony not lost on him. They’d just exposed one religion; he certainly didn’t want to create another. “God, the universe, great spirit, collective consciousness, whatever you’d like to call it . . . but for this conversation; I want to draw a distinction between the matter and the spiritual.”
“All of it really being energy,” Gale said. “The same energy.”
“Exactly. That’s what I’m saying, what Clastier said, and what the Cosegans are showing us.” Rip moved his hands again, causing the projection to swirl. “Look, the big bang wasn’t just matter flying apart; it was us flying apart. The moment the universe formed in that violent explosion, we, as God, as Spirit, also exploded. And, like the universe, we continue to expand and move apart. We continue to shift and be in motion as we get farther away from God, us, each other . . . ourselves.”
“A shift in consciousness as we expand with the stars.”
“Yes! That’s what the Cosega Sequence is . . . more than the history of the universe, it is a demonstration of who, or rather what, we are.” Rip stared deeply into her eyes. “We’re pieces of light, flying through the darkness. Apart we are diminished, together we are everything.”
Gale and Rip remained silent for a moment.
“Then it begs the question, was the big bang some kind of colossal cosmic accident?” Gale finally asked. “Maybe ‘one with the universe’ isn’t just a slogan; maybe we should all be trying to get back together. Maybe that is the one way to find the truth about God.”
“Who knows?” He looked down at the Eysen. “I wonder if the Cosegans even figured out that answer. We have to keep looking, and now that the Sequence is unlocked, we can get inside and find all the answers.”
“And maybe stop the Divinations,” Gale said.
“I hope so,” Rip said. “They left it for us . . . We were meant to find it for a reason.”
The cabin went dark. For a moment, as they stood in such darkness, they believed they were dead. The Eysen had sucked all light from the room, and then suddenly, a burst of light exploded so brightly, they fell to the ground covering their eyes. The big bang progressed through the formation of the galaxies and individual planets. It took only fifteen or twenty minutes for them to see billions of years race by and eventually reach the part of the Sequence with which they were most familiar. The spinning Earth; shifting, tectonic plates. Then, it continued past what they had seen until billions of points of light covered the planet. The lights became people. The Sequence was complete. The overlaid circles and dashes – the language of the Cosegans – told the story of all creation, who we are, and where we came from.
They stood wearily, drained from the spectacle. Rip reached out to steady himself on Gale. Under the stars, on top of
the world, floating toward freedom, Rip kissed Gale, and they held each other with the passion of prisoners freed. When they finally let go, in her eyes he saw a fleeting glimpse of all he’d seen in the Eysen; all that ever was.
“Oh my God,” Gale said, looking at the images racing by behind Rip.
He turned and almost fell backwards. Every event of both of their lives played like a silent movie behind them, and then he saw Conway, and other lifetimes. In some Gale and Rip were together; it went on and on.
“Do you realize what this is?” Gale asked, without waiting for him to answer. “The Eysen holds the Akashic Records.”
“What?”
“Akasha is an ancient word meaning sky. Many people believe that all the accumulated knowledge and experience that has ever occurred or ever will, exists in the ethereal. It’s called the Akashic Records.”
“I’ve heard of it, but it’s a New Age myth,” Rip said.
“Is it?” Gale pointed to the images moving all around them. “You said yourself, ‘the Eysen knows everything, not just about Earth but the entire universe, even the future.’ That’s the Akashic Records, I can’t believe I didn’t put it together before this.”
“Then the Eysen isn’t just a computer,” Rip said, unable to deny the obvious proof before him. “The Cosegans somehow managed to manufacture an instrument to view eternity.”
“There is no way to comprehend the power we now possess.”
EPILOGUE
A year later Booker’s company began selling a consumer version of the Eysen; a computer so advanced that it couldn’t even be called a computer. It created a new category known as Information Navigation Units or INUs. Within the first eighteen months, more than 450 million Eysens were sold. It was the most successful product launch in history. Total sales were expected to reach a billion units in the next year.