God of God

by Mark Kraver

  Twelve such base stations had been erected strategically around the world, designed to support the planet’s twenty-four-hour clock rotation as it was being towed through the cosmos by the massive transplant station. Spread out over this and the other eleven stations were the remaining population of six hundred sixty-six thousand Homo sapiens. As survivors of the genesis millennium, these humans were genetically bred to reach the maximum intelligence quotient a human being could achieve with their limited brain power.

  They had been taught since birth that they were the chosen ones of their masters, the Elohim. The Elohim depended on these Homo sapiens as breeding surrogates to continue their species into the future. Now the earthlings’ sole purpose was to maintain the base stations around the Earth during the long voyage through the Halo to the star Heaven.

  Namibia Base Station was built identically to the other base stations around the world and was gripped by a deep glacier over iron-ore-rich deposits of sedimentary rock. Each of the stations had an advanced gull-winged, wedge-shaped, deep-anchored superstructure, with the forward pointing bow cutting straight through the center of an oncoming glacier. Inside the base of the megastructure, deep under the ice, was a honeycomb of connected geodesic domes designed to house workers and to protect them from extreme elements of the now and future planet. Nestled at the bottom of each station, a fusion reactor with enough fuel to keep the base self-sufficient for over one thousand years hummed with limitless patience, waited to be used during the exodus.

  Massive lightning rods jetted from the top of the base station into the frigid sky, focusing a steady stream of atmospheric energy into grounded large-capacity battery banks. The banks comprised tall crimson red columns of deadly lithium-platinum salts used to power the everyday domestic consumption of the station's electrical demands.

  During his journey to the Namibia base station, Armilus had his minions establish a point-to-point communications relay to put him in contact with the leader of another location: the moon base. The moon, still looming silently over the Earth as it had since its creation three billion years ago, was now settled by a population of workers called moonys. The moonys had long ago left the earth to live and work there, mining the moon for valuable resources by tunneling through the lunar crust and mantle with giant machines called lunar crickets. They call the barren, lifeless rock in space home and resented sacrificing it for the always-privileged Earth’s exodus out of this solar system.

  Joop, the established patriarch of the moonys, was stunned when he heard the caller introduce himself as Armilus, chief seraph to Lord Ra. He listened intently.

  “I have been wrongly imprisoned for the last millennium by the heartless Elohim,” Armilus told him. “I would like to inform you of their plans to trick you out of your lunar homeland. There is no reason other than heartlessness that you and your people have to lose your heritage.”

  Joop was already a deeply skeptical man who hated the idea of leaving his moon behind, and the unexpected message confirmed his suspicion about the Elohim plans once and for all.

  “Do not defy your masters while still on the moon or you will be left marooned to face the red giant alone,” Armilus warned. “Meet me at your Earth base Namibian destination. I already have a plan in place. One of my minions will present you with those plans so you can study them on your way to Earth.”

  When Joop ended communications on the moon, a cherub materialized and handed him a small memory chip. Joop turned to his wife Soleil and daughter Reeze with fire in his eyes. “My suspicions are confirmed,” he seethed. “Every moony must know of this blatant act of deception by the Elohim.”

  Chapter 68

  The essential ingredient of politics is timing.

  Pierre Trudeau, 1919-2000, Earth

  Library of Souls

  Jerusalem

  Zenith rode inside the transparent gravity bubble like a fiery chariot through the penumbra of her dying star’s sunset. Below her orbit lay the frozen planet Earth she had called home for the last thousand years. She mused at how much change could happen in half her lifetime. No ordinary lifetime, she thought as she smiled and rearranged the white silken hood over her large bald head.

  “You need to see it to believe it,” she said to her young, slim passenger.

  She had picked up her passenger on the moon to be a token representative for the final testing of the new transplant station before beginning the exodus of the Earth to Heaven. The young lunarian had achieved this distinction by being the only child of Joop and Soleil, the moon’s monarchy. Her epigenetic physical features were typical of her lunar race, with high cheekbones, large cat-shaped brown eyes, a broad smile and long limbs. She was an amalgamation of every race born to Earth over the ages, and at eleven years of age, she was quite intelligent. Her young face was transfixed on the celestial vista spreading out before the transparent bubble.

  The Elohim had existed with gravity bubbles for over a billion years. They were as ubiquitous as automobiles had been on old Earth before the genesis, and they made space travel between the Earth, the moon, and the station very convenient. Their sphere of bio-synthetic filaments polarized by tiny graviton emitters allowed visible light waves to pass freely through the structure. As carbon dioxide built up inside the impenetrable shield, graviton emitters ripped the carbon atoms from the molecules and expelled them by quantum tunneling to the outside vacuum of space, leaving behind single atoms of oxygen that quickly rebonded into breathable air. Zenith’s gravity bubble was being drawn through the heavens by an invisible beam emanating from the nearby moon and Earth.

  “The world was a much different place when I was born,” Zenith mused. “No one feared an Ice Age. It was all about global warming.” Timing is everything.

  “What?” asked Reeze, hearing something about ‘timing’ inside her head. Without taking her eyes off the planet’s sunset, now stretching from pole to pole as a great arc across Africa below, she shook away the faceless voice. At the rate they were traveling, she estimated, within an hour the entire view of Earth would be swallowed by darkness. She knew her escort was the one called Zenith, first born to Earth during the genesis, and felt honored to have been selected out of everyone on the moon and Earth to witness the exodus firsthand.

  “It’s all about timing, Reeze. Impeccable timing. A great deal has happened in the past thousand years since the people of Earth discovered they were not alone in this universe. Back then, over eight billion people lived on our tiny planet. The people of old Earth were so wasteful with their energy. Even at this distance, you could see coastlines glowing with power streaming out into the heavens for only the stars to appreciate. Incredible.”

  “How was that possible? There are less than a million humans on the planet now. How did they feed them all?”

  “Good question. Overpopulation, disease, malnutrition, famine, wars, and unspeakable cruelty. When a population of Homo sapiens become too dense on a planet, it only takes a few wicked individuals to wreak terror over the weakened populations. The centuries before our Lord Yahweh’s first resurrection on Earth were fraught with violence, slavery, wars, corporate greed, and terrorism.”

  “And pollution?” Reeze added.

  “Pollution is bad anywhere it exists but poisoning the atmosphere with carbon dioxide was a good thing.” Zenith said, smiling at her moony companion.

  “Good? When we have carbon dioxide buildup inside a gravity bubble or shuttle or even the lunar domes, it can be dangerous.”

  “Yes, it can be toxic in a closed environment, but on Earth it acted as a greenhouse gas and caused global warming.”

  “But the Earth is covered with ice,” Reeze said, looking down at the Earth.

  “Global warming was a product of antons of planning by Numen and the famed Atlanteans. Once the population of the Earth began to explode, industrialization became rampant. That, combined with the insatiable greed your species exhibited, resulted in the use of more and more energy in the form of fossil fuels th
at spewed out tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for almost two hundred years.”

  Reeze shook her head, still marveling at the memory of those tumultuous years. “This in turn heated up the Earth, melting the ice caps and glaciers around the world at an unprecedented rate. But—” Zenith paused and smiled, “—this ‘natural’ melting was assisted by the Atlanteans melting the two most important reservoirs of frozen water on Earth—Antarctica and Greenland. All that freshwater flooding into the ocean’s deep basins disrupted the natural ebb and flow of heat transference around the world, shutting down the movement of warm waters around the planet.”

  “You’re saying we caused all of this ice?” Reeze asked, blowing back a wisp of hair from her painted face. Sparkling strands of light emitting hair twinkled as she moved her head to look up at her Elohim chaperone. Reeze’s full moon eyes were decorated with a non-reflective band of burnt-red makeup, masking her face from ear to ear. This type of make-up was originally meant to shield the eyes from the dangerous glare of unfiltered lunar sunlight but was now used by females on the moon as a fashion statement.

  Zenith nodded her head. “Not to mention the sun’s diminishing energy output, planetary axis wobble, and orbital eccentricities cooling the Earth. Billions would have died of starvation alone, if not for impeccable timing. We had already hit the point of no return before I was born. That is why our Lord Yahweh resurrected the first time.”

  “Will our Lord resurrect again?” Reeze asked.

  “Soon, very soon,” Zenith said, as their gravity bubble shifted trajectory and handed off to a new gravity beam. The new beam’s destination was now clear: the massive orbiting space complex dubbed Jerusalem by the humans of the planet below. The gigantic space station, built from the lunar riches mined over the last millennium, glowed a short distance away as a small crescent moon and had its own influence on the frozen oceanic tides of Earth, below. So much wealth had been extracted from the lunar crust and mantle to build Jerusalem that the crater left behind could be seen on Earth during full station illumination by the sun—resembling, some said, a sizable bite taken out of a giant glowing cookie.

  “Did you know the moon is much closer to the Earth today than it was when I was born?” Zenith asked.

  Reeze frowned. “We caused that, too?” she asked, folding her long slender arms across her petite chest, expecting another lesson from her hooded Elohim monitor.

  “Every time we use gravity to transfer cargo from one place to another it tugs on the moon and the Earth just a little. Tiny tugs here and there over a long period of time moved the moon and Earth closer than they’ve been since dinosaurs roamed the planet,” she said. She looked at the majestic lunar surface of her human companion’s home off the starboard side of their gravity bubble and repeated in her mind the word, Timing.

  “My father said we will be losing the moon soon.”

  “What else did your father tell you?” Zenith asked, squinting her eyes trying to read her passenger’s thoughts.

  “That you are planning to use the moon in our exodus from this solar system.”

  Zenith stood still, concentrating on the thoughts of the child’s family. Thoughts about her father were the most prominent. Deep inside her mind’s eye she could hear words of discontent, words of treason, words of revolt. “Your family has lived on the moon for a long time,” she said, probing deeper thoughts.

  Reeze remained silent, knowing it was a rhetorical question; surely Zenith already knew Reeze’s family had lived on the moon for the last nine hundred plus years. The ashes of her family were scattered on every corner of that rock.

  “Do you not understand the necessity of using the mass of the moon to propel the Earth into an exaggerated elliptical orbit around the sun, so we can rendezvous with the Halo? That is why the Earth is now frozen in the first place. If we didn’t have all that surface ice glaciating across our planet’s surface, the planet would spontaneously combust as we got closer to the sun. Without that massive gravitational push from ejecting the moon, we could not achieve enough shift angulation in our orbit, and we will all die when our sun evolves into a red giant star. That includes everyone on the moon.”

  “So, you say.”

  “It is not me saying that. It is the laws of the universe.”

  “Laws can be broken. We’ve all heard that the moon doesn’t have to be jettisoned at all. That it is a convenient ploy to hasten our departure. You speak of timing. It would only take a few more years to rendezvous with the Halo if we didn’t leave our moon behind.”

  “True. But this is time we do not have. Look, I cannot expect you to understand—”

  “Because I’m so primitive?”

  Zenith’s concentration broke. She could no longer hear Reeze’s thoughts. She had been outwitted by the human. This would have ordinarily annoyed her, but she was more surprised than angry. “What is it that you humans like to say,” Zenith asked. “Have faith?”

  “Faith that you will deliver us all to Heaven?” Reeze asked, with a suspicious crooked little smile that Zenith didn’t quite understand. Was it genuine or sarcastic? Somehow that little grin did look strangely familiar.

  “Here we are,” Zenith said, diverting attention to their task at hand. They were beginning to land on Jerusalem space station.

  The space station was the largest construction project ever completed in the history of the planet. It encompassed more mass than all other constructions completed since the first man-apes of this planet began to flourish, and most of Jerusalem was erected right there in outer space. The station consisted of a solar array that was just enormous—fifteen hundred miles on square—facing the Earth’s surface; a spherical fusion power reactor that was ten-thousand meters in diameter; a sprawling command module with maintenance facilities including room and board for over one hundred and fifty thousand personnel; and a sizable hibernation zoo, which the staff called the ark.

  The ark was the brainchild of Zenith’s sapient mother, Dr. Katherine Logan, over one thousand years earlier. She understood that all the animal and plant species of the Earth were genetically mapped and could be duplicated once the planet reached Heaven, but somehow that wasn’t the same. A rose may be a rose, but an Earth rose is special, she argued to win the biogenetic-biodiversity debate all those years ago.

  The gravity bubble slowed to a roll along the command module’s landing bay as it lined up with the automatic docking port’s gravity beams for landing. “It is an important day, don’t you think?” asked Zenith. “The station will become fully operational with this last test on the solar array.”

  Reeze could sense her monitor’s pride of accomplishment as the final plans for the exodus of this planet came to fruition, but she could not help but feel her own sense of loss. Losing the moon meant losing her home. The home her family had carved out of that inhospitable rock with toil and grime, and in the frigid cold of the moonscape, void of atmosphere. She didn’t want to think about throwing it all away, just disposing all the moon’s history. It was as revolting to her as cutting off her own arm, all for a few years’ jump start on a process that had taken a thousand years to complete. Unfair and selfish, she thought, and those plans had to be changed.

  “This is your first time to Jerusalem?” Zenith asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We have arranged special accoutrements for your visit.”

  “Accoutrements?”

  “Yes, you were born on a low gravity moon, so you will not tolerate normal Earth gravity.”

  “What do you mean? I’m not as weak as you think.”

  “Suit yourself. Everyone from a low gravity environment will require some assistance. Most will be issued gravity belts and/or boots, while we have reserved a fully integrated suit for you,” Zenith said, choosing not to argue with her young passenger as she prepared to disembark.

  The gravity bubble slid into the space station docking port and affixed itself onto what looked like a gigantic suction cup umbilical cord. The
walls of the bubble popped open and Reeze collapsed instantly into Zenith’s strong arms. Zenith lowered Reeze slowly, allowing her to slide to the floor, so she would not tear a muscle or break her bones. Lying on the landing pad, Reeze grimaced as Zenith hovered over her with a concerned look on her face. She had expected an ‘I told you so’ smirk, but instead received what looked and felt like compassion. Reeze struggled to sit up but lacked the strength.

  “Why is the gravity turned up so high?” Reeze struggled to asked. Flat on her back, she noted the way Zenith’s large bald head eclipsed the Earth through the docking bay integrity field.

  “So we don’t bounce around like we are on the moon, of course.”

  Two white-robed Elohim entered the landing bay. Both wore hoods over their bald heads, and one was carrying a neatly wrapped package. Reeze assumed one was male and the other was female, but without hair on their bodies it was hard for Homo sapiens to determine the different sexes of Homo superior.

  “Greetings,” the two exclaimed, slapping their right hands against their chests in an obligatory salute of welcome. Zenith didn’t introduce her companion, as they should have already understood who she was and why she was there. Reeze, oblivious to her role at the station, lay still, unsure of what to say.

  Zenith nodded toward the Elohim. “They will fit you with a gravity suit.”