Realizing he was being ignored he finally asked aloud, “What about me?”
Preparing alongside Lion, Jax nodded at the stray. “Yeah, Lion: what about him?”
The leader of the group hesitated, pondered, came to a decision. “Either he’s in the group or he’s not, and I guess at this point he’s in. Monarch says to keep him close, so that’s what we do.”
Looking across the room toward where the others were donning the last of their gear, he raised his voice.
“Castle, Hummer! Find a coat for him.”
The bigger boy growled, “A coat? He knows things, da, but we don’t know him. He is a brave nobody. How come he rate a coat?”
“He has to have something else to wear,” Lion replied, “and if he’s going out with us I want him to blend in.”
He stared hard at the phlegmatic newcomer. “This is only on a trial basis, you understand. A longcoat must be earned. Or . . .”
“Or taken?” the younger boy asked, eyes of steel.
Lion considered before replying. “Just hear me when I say that to wear a longcoat even on a temporary basis is a greater honor than you can imagine.”
At this, Eastwood’s eyes softened to take on an appropriately reverent glimmer.
Eventually he would figure this kid out, Lion mused. It was just a matter of time. Unintimidated, Eastwood stared evenly back. Could he be older than he looked, Lion wondered?
Naw.
“And get him a ‘nose’. He can be a Sniffer on this run.”
6 Scholars agree that Sumerian cuneiform on the Kish tablet dates to 3100BC. The earliest Egyptian inscriptions include a seal impression from the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa’ab (2900BC), the Narmer Palette (3200BC), and clay container labels uncovered at Abydos in 1998 by Günter Dreyer (3200BC). There remains debate in academia about whether writing accompanied or followed the dissemination of knowledge by oral tradition. Research suggests that the latest techniques for dating prehistory fully support the Longcoat archives. See also: Robert E. & Carolyn Krebs: Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Ancient World (2003); Pollock, Sheldon: The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (2003); Mayrhofer, Manfred: Die Indo-Arier im alten Vorderasien (1966); and George, Andrew: Babylonian and Assyrian: A History of Akkadian (2008).
7 The Greek poet Hesiod (750BC) wrote in Works and Days (Εργα καì ‘Ημέραι) that after the origin of the world people freely migled with gods in a Golden Age which later devolved in civility and knowledge through inferior Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages. His Theogeny (Θεογονíα) bears similarities with the Hittite Song of Kumarbi (1300BC) and the Babylonian Enûma Eliš creation tale (1100BC). The Hebrew bible’s court tales of Daniel interpreting the dream of Nebuchadnezzar II speaks of a statue depicting a Gold head, Silver arms, Brass thighs and Iron legs as representing different kingdoms. Hindu writings tell of four Ages named Satya (Gold), Treta (Silver), Dwapara (Bronze) and Kali (Iron). The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (b.43BC) wrote of the Earth having four Ages, called Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron. The Aztec held that the present world was preceded by other cycles of creation and destruction on this Earth. The legends of the K’ich’e Maya preserved in the Popul Vuh writings (1714AD) tell of the first three Ages being considered a failure by the gods, with this Fourth Age available for the redemption of Man. While the intended metaphor and length of years attributed to each Age differs from culture to culture, it is clear that early peoples (from opposite corners of the world and therefore unlikely to have shared stories through trade) had an identical belief that civilization was in fact unwinding from an advanced origin (from Gold to Iron), and that each epoch constituted an Age.
8 On December 21, 2012 the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar used by the Maya civilization completes its ‘great cycle’ of 13 b’ak’tuns (3114BC—2012AD) marking the end of their current Age. This coincides with the sun peaking in its current Schwabe cycle wherein the sun’s magnetic poles will reverse. See: The Sun Does a Flip, Science@NASA, 15 February 2001.
9 For a list of particle physics laboratories, search for “list of accelerators” in Wikipedia. Those most active are in Geneva Switzerland (CERN), Chicago IL USA (Fermilab), Brookhaven NY USA (RHIC), Frascati Italy (DAΦNE), Beijing China (BES III), Novosibirsk Russia (BINP), Bonn Germany (ELSA) and Oxfordshire England (RAL).
10 Superstring cosmologists believe dark matter is made of ‘weakly interacting massive particles’ (WIMPs), which move like fluid through physical matter on 11 different dimensional planes without colliding. According to the FLRW metric, dark matter constitutes 80% of material in the universe. See: Guzman, Matos, Nunez and Ramirez: Quintessence Like Dark Matter in Spiral Galaxies (2000); Zwicky, F: Die Rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen Nebeln (1933); Schirber, Michael: New Cosmic Theory Unites Dark Forces (2008); and Kane G. and Watson S.: Dark Matter and LHC: What is the Connection? (2008).
11 Scientists say the sun’s volatile behavior could cause problems on Earth. “The problem is solar storms: figuring out how to predict them and stay safe from their effects,” said International Living with a Star (ILWS) chairperson Lika Guhathakurta from NASA’s Headquarters. In fact, the sun and Earth are actually connected by invisible...lines of force [that] can be traced all the way from Earth’s poles to the surface of the sun. “The Earth and sun are interconnected,” Guhathakurta said. “We cannot study them separately anymore.” If current forecasts are correct, the solar cycle is expected to peak during the years around 2013. A report by the National Academy of Sciences warned that a “century-class solar storm” could cause billions of dollars in economic damage. Scientists at the ILWS meeting are hoping to address concerns of a “solar Katrina” situation. Source: “Solar Flare Activity Continues To Increase” by Denise Chow, Space on MSNBC.com, July 19, 2010.
12 Physicists postulate that just as there are whirlpools in fluids and whirlwinds in air, there may exist similar vortices on land, at the nexus of dark matter spirals formed by gravity or magnetism around the planet. In atmospheric physics, a mesovortex can extend a few miles point-to-point. In quantum physics, a terrestrial megavortex (or landhatch) has a similar linear property, tunneling across the curvature of the globe to connect distant points. Attempts to map these land vortices have been made over the centuries by Plato, Bird, Becker & Hagens and others, but have often been regarded as pseudoscience. That the Long-coats’ operations manual includes several chapters on the science and operation of using ‘Holepunch’ devices to access these ‘Landhatches’ reveals they can be navigated with the right technology. GPS mapping tools can be found by pointing your search engine at “Earth Grid KML”.
HOUNDS OF HELL
DURING ANY WEEKDAY it was one of the five busiest places on the planet, but before five o’clock on a Wednesday morning the Financial District of London exhibited only slightly more signs of life than the surface of the moon.
Early-rising pigeons and scavenging seagulls wandering far from the coast scattered into the darkness as the seven Longcoats emerged from the tube exit. Hands in pockets, Lion in the lead, they started down a side street in the direction of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Hummer’s fingers expectantly fondled the weapon that suddenly materialized in his largest left-side pocket. Jax was starting to transfer gear invisibly between the coats. “What we look for this time, Jax?”
The French girl spoke without taking her eyes off the narrow street down which they were advancing, her scar casting a vertical shadow on an otherwise flawless face. “Don’t know, Hums. Only that its signature is smaller than last night’s Kraken.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Eastwood inquired innocently, thumbing an identical wristband to the one Jax was using, getting used to the dials and readout that sniffed their surroundings like sonar. This was what the Longcoats called a ‘nose’.
Striding along beside him, she had to chuckle. “You really don’t know anything, d
o you? Size is no indication of strength when you’re dealing with Inter-D’s. Matter gets warped. You can get this enormous thing in one of the other dimensions, and when it falls into our reality it can look tiny, but still carry the same mass. I don’t know why, but most things look smaller here than they really are.”
“It’s them manifolds,” said Vector.
“What?” snapped Jax, eyes still scanning data.
Wot they call Calabi Yau manifolds13. Where stuff in the different dimensions is shrunk, like. The older the Age it comes from, the further away it is from our reality. So the distance makes it look smaller when it projects here.”
“Oui, whatever.” Jax was distracted, swaying from side to side as instruments sniffed the bosonic plane for any hint of the breach they were searching for.
“This happens a lot?” Eastwood asked Vector. “Things from other worlds?”
“All the time, mate.” Tucker leaned in to the conversation. “But until their harmonics drop into tune, you never see the traveler. Different dimensions, different vibrations. It’s why we don’t spot them in normal conditions. Hence we use our visors.”
Castle added: “It’s not really different worlds though. They’re all from this world. It’s more like different Ages, like Vector said.”
Vector mimed a grand theatrical bow without breaking stride.
One eye in a quizzical squint, the youngest addition to the team blurted: “That doesn’t really help much. Most of what you said last night went over my head, me freezing and all.”
Castle and Jax traded a nod, and Castle slipped into stride next to Eastwood as Jax moved to the flanking position, one eye on her scopes at all times.
“Here’s a crash course then,” said Castle, his eyes glancing upwards as he collected his thoughts. “How old is the Earth?”
Eastwood tapped his head with a finger. “How old am I? Memory, remember? Pretend I don’t know anything about history before yesterday.”
“Right. Sorry.” Castle started again as they turned into a junction of several laneways and picked their way across cobblestones through an archway propped up with scaffolding and tattered posters.
“Common knowledge is that the Earth is millions of years old and people have been running around for hundreds of thousands of years since apes turned to men and started walking upright. Trouble is, when you pull your head out of the theories and look at the facts, most written histories and even the oral traditions all show civilization starting around the same time, and it’s much more recent than most people think.”
They were passing a huge courtyard of fountains and carved lions now. “How long is that?” asked Eastwood.
“Other than a few early cave paintings and flint arrowheads and the like, real civilization started about five thousand years ago, all over the planet at the same time. And the thing about it is you don’t see anything half-baked. Alphabets and counting systems all started fully formed, as if they were transplanted from somewhere else instead of being built up by trial and error.”
Tucker leaned in for a moment, one ear on the conversation. “Want to know why?” she teased.
Eastwood nodded as the street started to incline downwards. Castle cleared his throat of the damp morning air and continued: “Because they were transplanted. From former Ages of the Earth.”
Also listening in, Hummer saw the blank look on Eastwood’s face.
“Don’t worry, I make it simple: this area I know about,” he chimed. “Fellow countryman, genius like all Russians, was a guy by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky14. He was famous professor, a big fish like Einstein. But he fell out of fame because his ideas were, how you say, ahead of his time.
“He say that old history is mostly wrong, that things don’t always change slow when big things happen to Earth. Like dam bursts and next day it looks like a million years of erosion on canyon wall. Same with planet. It looks old because things changing slowly now.
“But there are other times, oh boy, everything go tipsy turvy, and bang!” He slapped his hands together like a thunderclap. “If comet fly too close or earth quake too much, whole face of planet can change in one night.”
Feeling like his brain was sinking in a pool of molasses, Eastwood didn’t see it yet.
Castle took charge again. “What Hummer’s saying is that a little more than five thousand years ago, the Earth went through a change. We look back through the fossil record, see bones trapped in stone and date them at millions of years. But if all the continental plates suddenly flipped over today, and every city, person and animal on the surface slid into the lava and was then squeezed by enormous pressure, your bones might end up buried in a rock a mile under the surface, their carbon leeching out like they’ve been there a million years because they’ve already been hammered a million year’s worth. An archeologist digs you up a year later, and based on their tests to date you, you look ancient. But you’ve only been there a year.”
Eastwood felt he was starting to understand when his armband winked red and Jax made a slow arc through the air with her right arm, pointing to a row of white terrace houses. The troupe turned in that direction. Castle continued as he absently pulled components out of his voluminous pockets and snapped them together, his hands working on their own from long experience.
“The buildings you see around you,” he began, clipping a net into a spring-loaded tube, “all the cities, cars, planes and technology we have all over the world and in orbit above us right now . . . all this has been on Earth before. The human race gets to a certain stage of development, and then around six and a half thousand years later the planet passes through some marker in space where there’s an inspection—”
“—a judgment,” Hummer corrected.
“Right, we pass what’s called a Line of Judgment where the human race shows we’re either ready to take on higher responsibilities, or it gets a makeover.”
Hummer slapped his hands together again for effect, his eyes wide like a mad man.
Eastwood got it. “You mentioned this last night. Right. And that’s when things flip over?”
“Exactly,” Castle mumbled distractedly as he struggled to lock an elastic spring into place. “They call it ‘replenishment’. The planet reboots to wipe out all traces of what came before, and a handful of survivors survive to seed the next Age.”
A giant hand slapped Eastwood’s shoulder. “This why we see oldest cultures start with complete language and math. It’s all part of the plan.”
“Whose plan?” Eastwood’s mind was racing. It all sounded so fantastic. But in his single day of memory and experience, how could he know what normal was meant to look like?
But he could tell these questions would have to wait. Looping his assembled weapon onto a belt hook, Castle slid a bandolier of darts with liquid ampoules up his forearm to his elbow, while further forward Lion was checking bearings from Jax’s display. Halting suddenly, Lion pumped a fist in the air and the group stopped in its tracks just outside a gated archway between a row of white stone buildings.
They’d arrived.
EASTWOOD GLANCED down at the satellite feed piggybacked onto his armband. Buildings displayed as blue lines behind a blue arc that was clearly the road. Seven green dots were clustered in front of that line. To the rear of each terrace house were small rectangles he rightly guessed to be inner city back gardens. And in one of these squares roamed a flashing red triangle superimposed with the words ‘Runner Class’.
They had found their target.
Out of curiosity, Eastwood pressed a finger onto the label, and was quietly delighted to see writing and illustrations appear. He found that the use of a fingertip allowed him to flick forwards and backwards through different sheets. No time to read it all now, but he did make out the words ‘fast and agile’ and ‘appears docile’ as he pressed a toggle to make the manual vanish. Noting other menu titles around the edges of the screen, he realized he had a whole library at his disposal to learn from later. He also learned
he had a knack for finding his way around new technology. Good to know.
Castle turned toward him, fully attentive again. “Right, now all you have to do is concentrate on dealing with the situation at hand. And you’d better stay sharp or you’ll end up like Rosen. You’ll be my Openzed. Stay on my left at all times, and if things get hairy, go to the center.”
Before Eastwood could ask what an Openzed was, Lion spread his fingers wide and the entire group snapped in unison to a Z-formation. Eastwood scrambled to take his position next to Castle. Lion stood in the hub as Captain, and diagonally to his front and rear were Hummer and Tucker in their Bouncer roles on each corner of the formation. At the open ends stood Jax and Vector as Toymaster and dual Sniffers, and in the center of the Z next to Eastwood was Castle as the Doorman.
Standard Longcoat deployments saw Sniffers find and track the Inter-D they were sent to intercept as it phased in and out of corporeal resonance. Bouncers hefted heavy artillery of their own and used sheer brute force to contain an Inter-D, if ever called for. It was the Doorman’s role to disrupt an Inter-D’s harmonics, push it to its own dimension, then seal the breach. Sizing up each situation on its merits and calling out deployment strategy was the Captain’s role. Backing up each squad, the Toymaster’s coat maintained an open quantum link with their base should they need to pull new gear out, and it fed equipment to each coat within its wireless radius when the Captain ordered it.
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