by Steve Alten
‘Mick wasn’t schizophrenic!’
‘He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic by two major institutions.’
‘It was all a setup. Pierre Borgia wanted him put away permanently.’
‘Perhaps. But consider the possibility that Michael Gabriel showed signs of oncoming dementia-signs that, emotionally, your heart refused to allow you to see. And with Jacob, the Hunahpu gene appears much more dominant.’
‘What are you telling me? That I should institutionalize my son?’
‘If not now, then at the first sign of dementia.’
‘Forget it, I won’t do it, and he’d never stand for it anyway.’
‘And that, in itself, is a problem. An adolescent with Jacob’s strength and intelligence makes for a very difficult individual to rear, let alone control. What will you do when the schizophrenia takes over and Jacob starts responding to commands from his Mayan warlords? What if he claims to be receiving messages from his long-lost father? You were a psych major, Mrs. Gabriel. You know the ramifications if you fail to act. Jacob could easily hurt himself, or worse, he could hurt his brother.’
‘We can medicate him. There’s so many new prescription drugs that-’
‘Nothing strong enough to handle this. Mrs. Gabriel, Jacob needs to be placed in a controlled environment where we can properly monitor his condition while protecting him from himself.’
‘Just call it what it really is, Doctor. You want to imprison him in one of your fancy labs.’
2:17 a.m.
Small waves lap at the beach beneath a cloud-covered night sky.
Fourteen-year-old Jacob Gabriel settles himself into a lotus position and closes his eyes, focusing inward.
Jaaaaacob. The female’s voice seduces him from beyond the mist.
Cut it out, Lilith, I can’t speak with you now.
You never seem to have time for me lately, she pouts.
Hey, you’re the one with all the friends.
Jealous?
No.
Liar. I have loads of friends and you only have your stupid brother, and he can’t stand you.
Whatever.
By the way, Brandy says she wants to come with me when I meet you. She’s already checked into bus tickets.
Lilith, I told you, my mother won’t allow you into the compound. If she even suspected I was talking to someone with Hunahpu blood, she’d never give me another moment alone.
Well, we can’t allow that. You’d never be able to play with yourself.
Shut up.
Do you think of me when you masturbate?
God, Lilith… I think you’ve been hanging out with Brandy too long.
Does your mommy expect you to be celibate all your life?
I told you before, it’s the whole Abomination thing. It makes her paranoid.
Jacob, we weren’t created in a lab. There must be a thousand other people out there with Hunahpu blood. Maybe ten thousand. As for this crazy Abomination thing, I was born a full eight months after you and your brother. Want me to e-mail you my birth certificate again?
No.
Then sneak out of the compound and meet me at a hotel.
I can’t. Lilith, I want to be with you, but things are crazy around here right now.
How can we ever get married if we can’t even arrange a simple date?
What makes you so sure I want to marry you?
Because we’re soul mates and you love me… and you like girls with long hair and big breasts. Want me to e-mail you another picture?
No, I mean, uh yeah, sure. I like that last one. Just make sure that crazy old bastard doesn’t catch you in the bathroom with the digital.
If I don’t meet you soon, maybe I’ll just have to let Quenton have his way with me.
Shut up and go to sleep.
Bye lover. Say hi to daddy for me.
Bye.
Jacob waits until her presence disappears before refocusing his mind.
Father? Father, please answer, it’s been so long since our last communication. Father, please, there are things I need to know I’m here, Jacob. I’m here.
Finally! Where have you been? I’ve tried for so long to reach you.
The movement of space-time affects our ability to communicate. I missed you, son.
Me too. There’s so much I want to tell you. Is it safe to talk?
Yes. I can feel newfound strength in your communication, making it harder for the Abomination to track our thoughts. How old are you now?
Fourteen.
Fourteen. My God. How is your mother?
Not good. The passage of time is causing her to lose faith. She’s doubting her existence as First Mother.
The journey’s hard on her. You haven’t told her about me?
No. She couldn’t deal with it.
And your brother?
Manny still shows no signs of becoming Hunahpu.
You need to be strong for the two of them.
Father, I want to talk more about humanity’s fate. I need you to teach me more about my journey to come.
Imagine time as multilayered highways of energy. As third-dimensional beings, we can only move forward along our own particular level at sublight speed, which we equate to the present. By increasing our speed beyond that of light, we can sling ourselves farther up the highway in relation to our sub light-speed friends, but we cannot move backward in time unless we access an off-ramp that takes us back down the highway from which we began. Wormholes are such highways-gravitational conduits, powered by the massive black hole located at the center of our galaxy. Wormholes provide us the means of looping backward or forward along the space-time continuum.
Sometime in your near future, humanity will find itself following a section of highway that splits our species. The survivors will be taken down a wormhole off-ramp that loops sublight time. The rest of humanity will blindly follow a stretch of road that leads to a dead-end… the end of our species.
The Popol Vuh ’s Creation Myth tells of the Hero Twins’ presence in Xibalba, an event that already happened.
Correct.
Father, if it already happened, then why are we reliving it?
The Popol Vuh tells of what we hope will come to pass, but the myth is not accurate. The truth is, you and your brother failed in your first attempt.
We failed?
Yes. Fortunately, humanity was granted a second chance when the Guardian took the Balam back through the wormhole and ended up at Earth, 65 million years in the past.
And what’s to prevent us from failing again? Manny’s not even Hunahpu. I don’t see how we can win over this Abomination.
You’ll win this time because I’m going to help you. I can be your eyes, advising you which road to take. I can prepare you in much the same way the Guardian tried to prepare me.
Then do it, teach me! Tell me what happened to you after you entered the serpent’s mouth and disappeared.
I didn’t disappear, Jacob. I entered the Guardian’s pod and moved beyond light speed. As the stars passed by like taser fire, I realized the reality of my decision. What seemed like seconds to me would be decades to everyone on Earth. You, your brother, your mother-everyone of my era would be long dead by the time I arrived on Xibalba, wherever that hellish world might lie.
I panicked. I screamed. I ordered the Guardian to return me to Earth.
But it was too late. The highway I was traveling on could only move forward-and it was a dark road that led to the origin of man’s evil.
The Guardian promised they would never abandon me. Those were the last words I remembered hearing before I lost consciousness.
When I awoke, I was shocked to find myself aboard an Earth shuttle, bound for Mars.
I don’t understand? Were you remote-viewing the scene, still unconscious aboard the Guardian’s transport pod, or was it real?
The event was real, only I was living it as someone else, someone from my past but your future. Let me tell my tale, and you’ll understand.
What clued me in to the time period was the space vehicle itself. It was not a shuttle like those NASA had designed and flown during my teen years. This vessel was infinitely larger, with private berths to accommodate fifty-two passengers and a year’s worth of supplies. Nor were we alone on our voyage. There were eleven other shuttles accompanying us, twelve in all, like the twelve tribes of Israel-all crossing the great desert of space on our journey to the Promised Land
… Mars.
You were on a scientific expedition?
No, I’d say it was more like a pilgrimage. The great holocaust I told you of had just overwhelmed humanity. Billions had perished, and billions more were destined to die. Something horrible had happened back on Earth… a cataclysm that caught the general population by complete surprise. But the upper echelons of the government knew, and that’s why we were aboard those space shuttles.
They kept it a secret?
A secret shared only by a privileged few. Years from your present time, clues about the coming cataclysm will be discovered. It will be kept from the public. Only those in power will know, and they will create a secret coven-in essence, an Earth evacuation plan, concealed behind an aggressive program to colonize Mars. Humanity, at least a certain privileged segment of it, would go on. Thousands had already arrived on the Red Planet. Our twelve shuttles would be the last to join our fellow survivors.
As we began our perilous four-month journey and Earth disappeared from our viewports, we cried and prayed and cried some more. Our salvation was Mars Colony, but we would never arrive, for what lay ahead was an off-ramp-the entrance to a wormhole.
There was no way to avoid it, no way for our pilots to even see it. A sudden surge of the shuttle’s gravity-wave detectors and whoosh – we found ourselves hurtling through the conduit’s funnel of energy, time and space distorting as we plunged through our Galaxy’s version of a rabbit hole.
Imagine falling from a thirty thousand-foot precipice, knowing your life is about to be extinguished, your screams squelched by the length of the drop. In those final minutes everything becomes clear, and you realize how much time you wasted on petty nonsense.
As frightened as I was, I could not tear myself away from my viewport, my mind mesmerized. We passed through gray interstellar gas clouds whose cosmic glow brightened into visible light, drenching us in pastels of crimson and yellow and blue before yielding to a hydrogen field of fluorescent pink.
Voices cried out in the darkened cabin, some identifying the gas cloud as the Orion Nebula. If accurate, then we had traveled some fifteen hundred light-years from Earth in the blink of an eye.
And then the cabin pressure increased and the spacecraft shook violently, and I closed my eyes to die.
How much time passed, I cannot say, but when I awoke, I was still on board the Mars shuttle, only the stars had stopped moving. We were through the wormhole, all twelve of our ships-and somehow we had survived.
I say ‘we’ yet I still had no idea who I was or what I was doing on board the vessel, but the sheer delight at merely being alive… it was too overwhelming to question.
In the distance I could see a red supergiant-a star so large that had it been Earth’s sun its girth would have stretched across the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. In close proximity to this monster was a planetary nebula, its fluorescent-style ring of gases appearing in shades of violets and blues.
I heard voices in the dark debate the red supergiant’s identity, the consensus agreeing it was Betelgeuse, a star over three hundred times the diameter of our sun and ten thousand times as luminous. If correct, then we had been transported to another section of the Orion spiral arm.
And then one of my cabin mates turned to me and addressed me as Bill.
So now I had an identity. The consciousness that had been Michael Gabriel had hitched a ride in the body and mind of William C. Raby. I
… or should I say we, were a marine geneticist, selected for Mars Colony, not by merit, but by extensive international private bank dealings that had helped fund the journey.
Like many of the other passengers, Bill Raby had known the right people to bribe and had the means and political clout to save himself.
But you weren’t really this Bill Raby, were you?
That’s just it, son, in every sense, I had become him. My consciousness dominated his, I felt his fears as if they were my own. I had his memories, and his overwhelming sense of guilt, for like me, Bill Raby had also left a loved one back on Earth, and it was tearing him up inside.
The desperateness of our situation quickly spread throughout the cabin. Our trip through the space tunnel had destroyed most of our ship’s electronics, damaging our outer hull, crippling our engines. Like the rest of the fleet, we were hurtling through space, out of control, being reeled in along powerful gravitational forces that our damaged sensors could not identify.
Another wormhole?
No, it was a planet, its atmosphere vermilion, its appearance in many ways similar to that of Mars, though closer to Earth in size. Like the Red Planet, the alien world possessed two barren moons, one the size of Earth’s lone satellite, the second-a smaller potato-shaped body, perhaps fourteen miles in diameter.
Panic levels rose as our twelve vessels plummeted through this alien world’s atmosphere. With our heat shield damaged, our cabin began heating up like a furnace. Children screamed. Passengers held one another, hoping and praying for another miracle all of us knew in our hearts we didn’t deserve.
But another miracle did happen, coming this time from our gallant crew, who managed to angle the shuttle’s descent just enough to allow us to slip through the searing atmosphere without combusting into ash. A collective cheer embraced the cabin as the blackness of space morphed into a magnificent cardinal red horizon. Aerodynamics took over as our winged vessel soared like a plane high above an alien landscape. As we descended, we could make out a geology composed of barren volcanic rock, splashed with patches of moss.
Fear returned moments later as we continued losing altitude, dropping fast, with no suitable landing place in site.
With a sickening jolt, our tail struck terra incognita. The shuttle skidded, the cabin spun, and once more, everything turned to black…
TOP SECRET/MAJESTIC-12
WARNING: Unauthorized access or viewing of this document without the appropriate authorizations will result in permanent incarceration or sanction by authorized use of deadly force.
PROGRESS REPORT ON SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM
GOLDEN FLEECE
24 October 2027
STAR SHIP VESSEL: BALAM
1. Dr. David Mohr and the GOLDEN FLEECE team have been reluctant to speculate on the propulsion system of the Balam, ever since its arrival in Hangar 13 four years ago-this due primarily to the team’s continued inability to access the interior of the ship. A new theory and its related dangers, however, has led to some unanimous conclusions that must be brought to POTUS’s attention.
2. Previous MAJESTIC reports have stated that the BALAM star cruiser most likely ‘surfed’ its way through Earth’s atmosphere riding its own massive shock waves, maneuvering at lower speeds/hovering utilizing an advanced form of magnetoaeroelectro dynamics. In this mode, the vessel’s polished gold external hull becomes the engine. Waves of negatively charged electron particles, embedded in the carrier frequencies of the electromagnetic waves ‘push’ the vessel through the air mass.
3. A second, infinitely faster method of propulsion is now believed to exist. Located underneath and between the two stern nacelle structures are multicellular exhaust nozzles. Upon further examination, Dr. Mohr’s team has reached a consensus, theorizing that these nozzles may have been designed to channel tachyon energy particles, leading the scientists to agree that the BALAM is capable of superluminal propulsion, labeled by NASA-BPP scientists as ‘Warp Drive.’
4. A third theory put forth by NASA-BPP concerns the BALAM’s ability to create an ‘exotic-matter’ force field, allow
ing the vessel to theoretically enter a gravimetric vortex (SEE WORMHOLES).
RELEVANT APPLICATIONS
5. The GOLDEN FLEECE team theorizes that the power produced to activate the BALAM’s Warp Drive would be enough to light and heat every city on Earth simultaneously and continuously for more than 100,000 years. The terawatts of power produced every picosecond by the BALAM’s interior reactor cores are the kind of power requirements hypothesized for hyperdimensional travel at superluminal velocities.
SAFETY WARNING / SECURITY ISSUES
6. In the opinion of the senior MAJESTIC team members and also Dr. Mohr: This Warp Drive propulsion system represents an extreme danger to the physical safety of Earth, possibly affecting the power grids and/or the ecology of whole continents if the system is accidentally activated.
7. Quantum-gravity physicists immediately expressed concern should the BALAM’s Warp Drive engines activate, producing a microwormhole. They stated that, should the magnetic containment fields that ‘bottle’ the quantum singularity collapse, the microwormhole could potentially expand to consume the entire vessel and perhaps whole portions of the planet itself.
8. The ability to create and navigate wormholes is the ability to traverse the boundaries of space-time. As per preestablished MAJESTIC directives, time travel is an uncontrollable threat to the security of the human species owing to the theoretical ‘Paradox’ effect (SEE EINSTEIN SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY). GULF OF MEXICO / CHICXULUB CRATER
9. On 18 December 2012, Michael Gabriel confirmed that the Guardian’s vessel (BALAM) entered Earth space in pursuit of the alien object that crash-landed 65 million years ago. If the BALAM is capable of superluminal velocity, it therefore must be assumed that the enemy transport ship it was chasing was also capable of Warp Drive.
10. An extensive reexamination of the Chicxulub Impact Crater in the Gulf of Mexico reveals a Magnetic/Gravitational Field Anomaly. Recent discoveries of Magnetic Field Anomalies in both inner and outer space have led quantum physicists to theorize that wormholes may actually cross our planet’s path. These ‘GATES TO HYPERSPACE’ may cause the kind of magnetic/gravitational deviations experienced in an area intersecting the Chicxulub Impact Crater, expanding outward from the Gulf of Mexico into the Caribbean Sea to form an unstable magnetic region, better known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle.’