Domain

by Steve Alten

  She dashes ahead of him, then takes a fighting stance, fists up, blocking his way. Okay, buddy, don't force me to kick your ass.

  Mick stops. He looks up, the rain streaming down his angular face. You let me down.

  I'm sorry, she whispers, dropping her fists. Why did you lie to me about the guard attacking you?

  A pained expression. So truth is no longer to be judged by your heart, but by your ambition, is that it? I thought we were friends.

  She feels a lump growing in her throat. I want to be your friend, but I'm also your psychiatrist. I did what I thought was best.

  Dominique, I gave you my word that I'd never lie to you. He lifts his head, pointing to the three-inch scar along his jawline. Before Griggs tried to rape me, he threatened to cut my throat.

  Goddam you, Foletta. Mick, Jesus, I'm sorry. At our last meeting, when you flipped out on me-

  My fault. I got excited. I've been locked up for so long-sometimes, well sometimes it's just hard to stay calm. I don't socialize well, but I swear, I never would have hurt you.

  She sees tears in his eyes. I believe you.

  You know, being outside has helped. It's caused me to think about a lot of different things . . . selfish things, really. My childhood, the lifestyle I was raised in ... how I ended up in here, whether I'll ever get out. There are so many things that I've never done ... so many things I would change if I could. I loved my parents, but, for the first time, I realize that I really hate what they did. I hate the fact that they never gave me a choice-

  We can't choose our parents, Mick. What's important is that you not blame yourself. None of us have any control over the deck or the hand we've been dealt. What we do have is total responsibility as to how we play the hand. I think I can help you regain control of that.

  He moves closer, the rain pouring down both sides of his face. May I ask you a personal question?

  Yes.

  Do you believe in destiny?

  Destiny?

  Do you think our lives, our futures have been . . . never mind, forget it-

  Do I think what happens to us is prearranged?

  Yes.

  I think we have choices. I think it's up to us to choose the right destiny to pursue.

  Have you ever been in love?

  She stares helplessly into the glistening puppy-dog eyes. I've been close a few times. It never seemed to work out. She smiles. Guess they weren't meant to be part of my destiny.

  If I wasn't... incarcerated. If we had met under different circumstances. Do you think you could have loved me?

  Oh, shit. . . She swallows hard, her pulse causing the base of her throat to twitch. Mick, let's get out of the rain. Come on-

  There's something about you. It's not just a physical attraction, it's like I've known you, or knew you in another life. Mick-

  Sometimes I get these premonitions. I felt one the moment I first saw you.

  You said it was the perfume.

  It was something more. I can't explain it. All I know is that I care about you, and the emotions are confusing.

  Mick, I'm flattered, really I am, but I think you're right. Your emotions are confused, and-

  He smiles sadly, ignoring her words. You're so beautiful. Leaning forward, he touches her cheek, then reaches out and loosens the knot of jet-black hair.

  She closes her eyes, feeling the length of hair unravel down her back, becoming heavy with the rain. Stop this! He's your patient, a mental patient, for God's sake. Mick, please. Foletta's watching. Could you just come inside? Let's talk inside-

  He stares at her, the ebony eyes despondent, revealing a soul tortured by forbidden beauty. 'She doth teach the torches to burn bright. It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night, as a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear-'

  What did you say? Dominique's heart is pounding.

  Romeo and Juliet. I used to read it to my mother at her bedside. He lifts her hand, bringing it to his lips. 'And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight, for I never saw true beauty till this night.'

  The rain subsides. She sees the two orderlies approach. Mick, listen to me. I forced Foletta to sign off on assigning you to a rehab team. You could be out of here within six months.

  Mick shakes his head. We'll never see the day, my love. Tomorrow's the autumnal equinox- He turns, becoming anxious as he spots the men in white. Read my father's journal. The fate of this world is about to cross another threshold, vaulting the human race to the top of the endangered species list-

  The two orderlies each grab an arm.

  Hey, go easy on him!

  Mick turns to face her as he is led away, the humidity rising off his body like steam. 'How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears.' You're in my heart, Dominique. Destiny has brought us together. I can feel it. I can feel it...

  JOURNAL OF

  JULIUS GABRIEL

  Before we continue on our journey through man's history, allow me to introduce you to a term unfamiliar to most of the public: forbidden archaeology. It seems that when it comes to the subject of human origins and antiquity, the scientific community is not always open-minded to evidence that may contradict the already established models of evolution. In other words, sometimes it's easier just to refute the facts than attempt to come up with a feasible explanation of what can't be explained.

  Good thing Columbus used a Phi Re'is map instead of the accepted European version, or he'd have sailed right off the edge of the world.

  When man thinks he knows everything he ceases to learn. This unfortunate reality has led to the suppression of much important research. Because one cannot get published without the approval of a major university, it becomes nearly impossible to challenge the dominant views of the day. I have seen learned colleagues try, only to be ostracized, their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined, even though the evidence supporting their controversial viewpoints appeared insurmountable.

  Egyptian Egyptologists are the worst of the lot, hating it when scientists seek to challenge the accepted history of their ancient sites, becoming especially nasty when foreigners question the age and origin of their monolithic structures.

  This brings us to methods of dating, the most controversial aspect of archaeology. The use of carbon -14 dating on bones and coal residue is both easy and accurate, but the technique cannot be applied to stone. As a result, archaeologists will often date an ancient site according to other more datable relics found within the vicinity of the dig, or, when none are found, merely by conjecture, leading to a wide range of human error.

  Having stated this, let us return to our journey through history and time.

  It was sometime after the Great Flood that the first civilizations began cropping up across the world. What we now accept as truth is that recorded history began in Mesopotamia in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, sometime around 4000 BC, with some of the earliest urban remains found in Jericho dating back as far as 7000 BC. But new evidence now indicates that another civilization, a superior civilization, had flourished even earlier along the banks of the Nik, and it is this more ancient culture and its wise leader who left us the first of the mysterious wonders that may ultimately be responsible for saving our species from annihilation.

  There are many temples, pyramids, and monuments spread across the Egyptian landscape, but none compare to the magnificent marvels erected in Giza. It is here, on the west bank of the Nile, that an incredible site plan was laid out, consisting of the Sphinx, its two temples, and the three great pyramids of Egypt.

  Why am I speaking of the great pyramids of Giza? How could these ancient monoliths possibly be related to the Mayan calendar and the Mesoamerican culture, halfway across the world?

  After three decades of research, I finally realized that, in order to resolve the riddle of the doomsday prophecy, one must put aside the preconceived notions of time, distance, cultures, and surface impressions when analyzing the ancient clues
surrounding humanity's great mystery.

  Allow me a moment to elaborate.

  The largest and most unexplainable structures ever erected by man are the pyramids of Giza, the Temples of Angkor, located in the jungles of Cambodia, the pyramids in the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan (also known as the place of the gods ), Stonehenge, the Nazca drawings, the ruins of Tiahuanaco, and the Kukulcan pyramid in Chichen Itza. Each and every one of these ancient marvels, built by different cultures in different parts of the world at vastly different periods in man's prehistory, are nevertheless related to humanity's impending doom referenced in the Mayan calendar. The architects and engineers who erected these cities all possessed a vast knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that easily exceeded the knowledge base of their day. Furthermore, the location for each of the ancient structures had been painstakingly set in accordance with the equinox and solstice, and, incredible as it seems, to each other, for if one wished to divide the surface of our planet using distinct landmarks, then these structures would easily complete the task.

  But it if what we cannot see that forever links these monolithic structures to one another, for at the heart of their design lies a common mathematical equation that demonstrates an advanced knowledge-a knowledge of precession.

  Again, a brief explanation:

  As our planet floats through space on its yearly journey around the Sun, it rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. As the Earth spins, the gravitational putt of the moon causes it to tilt approximately 23.5 degrees to the vertical. Add the Sun's gravitational pull on our planet's equatorial bulge and you have a wobble at the Earth's axis, similar to that of a spinning top. This wobble is catted precession. Once every 25,800 years, the moving axis traces a circular pattern in the sky, relocating the position of the celestial poles and equinoxes. This gradual westward drift also causes the signs of the zodiac no longer to correspond to their respective constellations.

  The Creek astronomer and mathematician, Hipparchus, is credited with having discovered precession in 127 BC. Today we know the Egyptians, Mayans, and Hindu understood precession hundreds, if not thousands of years earlier.

  In the early 1990s, archaeoastronomer Jane Setters discovered that the Osiris myth of ancient Egypt had been encoded with key numbers that the Egyptians had used to calculate the Earth's varying degrees of precession. Of these, a particular set of digits stood out among the rest: 4320.

  More than a thousand years before the birth of Hipparchus, both the Egyptians and Mayans had somehow managed to calculate the value of pi, the ratio of the diameter of a circle, sphere, or hemisphere, to its circumference. At 481.3949 feet, the Great Pyramid's height, multiplied by 2pi, precisely equals its base (3,023.16 feet). Incredible as it seems, the perimeter of the pyramid comes within 20 feet of equaling the diameter of the Earth, when our planet's dimensions are scaled down to a ratio equaling 1:43,200, numbers representing our mathematical code of precession. Using the same ratio, the Earth's polar radius is equal to the pyramid's height.

  It turns out that the Great Pyramid is a geodetic marker lying almost exactly on the 30th parallel. If its measurements were projected onto a flat surface (with its apex representing the North Pole and its perimeter the equator), the monolith's dimensions would equal the Northern Hemisphere, scaled down to, again-1:43,200.

  We know it takes 4,320 years for the equinoctial Sun to complete a precessional shift of two zodiacal constellations or 60 degrees. Multiply this number by 100 and you have 43,200, the number of days noted in the Mayan Long Count calendar equaling 6 Katuns, one of the key numerical values the ancient Maya used when they calculated precession. A complete cycle of precession takes 25,800 years. If you add up all the years of the Popol Vuh's five cycles, the time period equates exactly to one precessional cycle.

  Hidden within the dense Kampuchea jungle in Cambodia are the magnificent Hindu Temples of Angkor. The bas-reliefs and statues proliferating on the complex include precessional symbols, the most popular being a gigantic serpent (Naga), its midsection coiled around a sacred mountain in the milky ocean, or Milky Way. The two ends of the serpent are being used as a rope in a cosmic contest of tug-of-war featuring two teams: one representing light and good, the other, darkness and evil. This movement, combined with the churning of the Milky Way, represents the Hindu interpretation of precession. The Puranas, the sacred scriptures of the Hindu, refers to the four ages of the Earth as Yugas. Our present day Yuga, the Kali Yuga, has a duration of 432,000 mortal years. At the end of this epoch, the scriptures claim the human race shall face destruction.

  The ancient Egyptians, Maya, and Hindu-three distinct cultures located in different thirds of the world, each existing at different intervals in our past. Three cultures who shared a common, advanced knowledge of science, cosmology, and mathematics and used their wisdom to create mysterious architectural wonders, each structure constructed for a single, hidden purpose.

  The oldest of these structures are the great pyramids in Giza and their timeless guardian, the Sphinx. Lying to the northwest of the temple known as the House of Osiris, the magnificent limestone figure of the human-headed lion is the largest sculpture in the world, towering six stones high and extending 240 feet in length. The creature itself is a cosmic marker, its gaze oriented precisely due east, as if waiting for the Sun to rise.

  How old is the Giza complex? Egyptologists swear by the date of 2475 BC (a period that just happens to fit Egyptian folklore). For a long time it was difficult to argue, as neither the Great Pyramid nor Sphinx left behind any determining markings.

  Or so we thought.

  Enter the American scholar, John Anthony West West discovered that the 25-foot-deep trench surrounding the Sphinx exhibited unmistakable signs of erosion. Upon further investigation, a team of geologists determined that the damage had not been caused by wind or sand, but purely from rainfall.

  The last time the Nik Valley saw this type of weather was some 13,000 years ago, the resulting effects of the Great Flood, which occurred at the end of the last ice age. In the year 10,450 BC, Giza was not only fertile and green, its eastern sky also faced the very figure the Sphinx was modeled after, the constellation of Leo.

  While all this was happening, Robert Bauval, a Belgian construction engineer, realized the three pyramids of Giza (when viewed from above) had been plotted precisely to the three belt stars of Orion.

  Using a sophisticated computer program designed to account for all precessional movements from any view of the night sky at any geographical location, Bauval discovered that, while the Giza pyramids and the stars of Orion's belt had been somewhat aligned in 2475 BC, an infinitely more accurate alignment had occurred in 10,450 BC. During this latter date, the dark rift of the Milky Way had not only appeared over Giza, but would have mirrored the meridional course of the River Nile.

  As mentioned earlier, the ancient Maya considered the Milky Way a cosmic snake, its dark rift referred to as Xibalba Be, the Black Road to the Underworld. Both the Mayan calendar and the Popol Vuh reference the concepts of creation and death as originating from this cosmic birth canal.

  Why were the three pyramids of Giza aligned to Orion's belt? What is the significance of the precessional number, 4320? What was the real motivation that drove our ancestors to erect the monuments of Giza, the pyramids of Teotihuacan, and the Temples of Angkor?

  How are these three sites linked to the Mayan prophecy of doom?

  - Excerpt from the Journal of Professor Julius Gabriel,

  Ref. Catalogue 1993-94 pages 3-108 Floppy Disk 4: File name: ORION-12

  Chapter 5

  SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

  MIAMI. FLORIDA

  3:3O A.M.

  Michael Gabriel's dream unravels into a night terror. Worse than any nightmare, it is a violent, recurring dream that creeps into his subconscious-a whisper in his brain that takes him back to a pivotal moment in his past.

  He is back in Peru, a young boy again, not yet twelve. Staring out his bedroom window a
t the sleepy village of Ingenio, he listens to the muffled voices coming from the next room. He hears his father speaking to the physician in Spanish. He hears his father sobbing.

  The adjoining door opens. Michael, come in please.

  Mick can smell the disease. It is a rancid odor, an odor of sweaty bedsheets and intravenous bags, of vomit and pain and human anguish.

  His mother is lying in bed, her face jaundiced. She looks up at him through sunken eyes and squeezes his hand weakly.

  Michael, the doctor is going to teach you how to administer your mother's drugs. It s very important that you pay close attention and do it correctly.

  The silver-haired physician looks him over. He's a bit young, Senor-

  Show him.

  The physician pulls back the sheet, revealing a porticath tube protruding from his mother's bandaged right shoulder.

  Mick sees the tube and is frightened. Pop, please, can't the nurse-

  We can't afford the nurse anymore, and I need to complete my work in Nazca. We talked about this, son. You can do this. I'll be home every evening. Now concentrate, focus your mind on what the doctor's going to show you.

  Mick stands by the bed, watching the physician closely as he fills the syringe with morphine. He memorizes the dosage, then feels his stomach turn as the needle is injected into the porticath, his mother's eyes rolling upward. . .

  No! No! No!

  Michael Gabriel's screams wake every resident in the pod.

  Deep Space

  The lightweight probe Pluto-Kuiper Express soars through space, eight years, ten months, and thirteen days from home, a mere fifty-eight days and eleven hours from its destination, the planet Pluto and its moon, Charon. Resembling a high-tech satellite dish, the science craft continues broadcasting its uncoded signal back to Earth by way of its 1.5-meter high-gain antenna.

  Without warning, an immense ocean of radio energy blasts through space at the speed of light, the low end of a hyperwave pulse bathing the satellite in its high-decibel transmission. In a nanosecond, the probe's telecommunication subsystem and monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) are fried beyond recognition.