329 Years Awake

by Ellie Maloney

  “Step back, I will not repeat myself!” he barked at Otis and shoved him further from the line of the military personnel.

  The officer was very persuasive, thought Otis. That was when he noticed one kid climbing on the straw-covered metallic beach umbrella. It was a brilliant idea, and Otis made his way through the crowd to the umbrella and climbed as close to the top as he could. This way he was able to continue recording.

  Meanwhile, the coast guard soldiers spread a force field in front of them. Every thirty meters, a soldier tossed in the air a device the size of a large grapefruit, and it disassembled itself into hundreds of smaller marbles that levitated in the air in a chessboard formation, creating a shield.

  When the wall of airborne marbles was established, Otis’ video was recording through the punctuated grid, and yet the visibility was still good enough to be able to make out the leading dome, as it slowly exited the water and stopped. Otis could clearly observe that the sphere was actually a half-sphere moving on thin long limbs with multiple joints. Then the half-sphere of the alien ship gracefully landed on the sand, and all the tentacles folded themselves on top of the sphere. The crowd gasped, awaiting annihilation by the laser beam, or some other freaky alien technology. But the aliens waited too.

  Otis could hear the soldiers passing the orders: under no circumstances to fire first. The soldiers sweated and prayed to all the gods in the universe. The waiting was unbearable. The nerves were tight like a string, and all the epic nature of the moment was so thick in the air, Otis could have sliced it with a knife. Indeed, humans were witnessing the First Alien Contact.

  What happened next, no science fiction writer could have predicted. The crowd heard the music. The sound surrounded them from all directions at once, as if they were in a concert hall. From the first notes, Otis could tell that the piece of music belonged to humans, and it was centuries old. Otis directed his wristlet to identify the piece – it was Bethoven’s ‘Brandenburg Concerto’. He, like everyone else, had no idea what to make of it. Were the aliens greeting humans with their own music? Did they come in peace? Or was it some kind of a diversion, while an elaborate takeover plan was taking place?

  Millions of ideas floated in Otis’ head, but in the next moment everything became somewhat clearer. From the base of the sphere, an opening formed and a clear box, the size of a pizza delivery box, started moving toward the crowd. Something yellow and shiny was inside the box. Otis zoomed in on the object – it was a golden disk, flat, the size of a pizza dish. Otis even could make out the grooves on his pixelated screen.

  Someone in the crowd yelled: “Voyager!” and ushered at the nearest coast guard officer, who immediately threw the man to the ground and dragged him to one of the armored vehicles. While the coast guard tried to contain the situation and completely missed what the guy was saying, Otis realized that the man was absolutely right! They were witnessing one of the two Voyager golden records, sent in space at the birth of the human space era, in 1977. These records were recorded to introduce potential alien civilizations to the human race, and contained various pieces of information, including the Brandenburg Concerto.

  Otis immediately jumped down from his observation post and sprinted to the nearest soldier. “They come in peace! Listen to me, they come in peace!” he yelled.

  The soldier turned out to be the same square-shaped giant. Otis was met with a hard blow to the chest, and swiftly thrown to the ground. While Otis was flying to the ground, his brain fired one single thought: why a man’s knee should feel so hard? The soldier’s knee firmly pinned Otis to the ground, making him spit sand, while the soldier cuffed his hands behind his back. In the next instant, as Otis was dragged to one of the military vehicles, everyone heard the shots. They unmistakably came from the human side, but Otis could not tell what caused them. The crowd of the remaining observers spooked and ran away from the line of fire. Otis was almost positive he did not hear the aliens firing back. But then, how would he know? They could have had a weapon that operated without any sound. After all, initially the military was determined not to open the fire first. Something must have provoked the soldiers to open fire…

  The last thing Otis heard before he was stuffed in the police car with blackened windows were the huge splashes in the ocean. One by one, all the eleven domes submerged and retreated beneath the waves.

  3

  JEROEN’S DIARY

  YEAR 1912.

  CENTRAL ITALY

  Wilfred reluctantly eyed a hill drowned in verdant greenery. At the top of the hill, like a monarch’s crown, nestled a monastery. Villa Mondragone was located in an isolated place. It was past noon. Monks conducted their business in the city early in the day, so hoping for a carriage ride from one of them was pointless. Wilfrid had to hike three kilometres up the hill that towered 416 meters above the sea level, having no clue if this exhausting treasure-hunting trip would even be worth it. Wilfrid was barely making ends meet.

  A former dissident, who nearly escaped death at hand of agonizing Russian nobility, he was living in London, trying to fit in and make a living. “An immigrant needs to think creatively,” Wilfrid reasoned. The locals had the luxury of going through the motions and steadily climbing the ranks. At age forty-seven, Wilfrid had already attempted success in too many things: a chemist and a pharmacist, a proletariat sympathizer and a revolutionary, and now an antiquarian. “Normal people stick to one thing in life,” Wilfrid chastised himself, panting like a dog and sweating profusely as he climbed the forsaken hill along a dusty path. There was no time to start all over again, and if this antiquarian business were to fall through, he would be officially declared a failure. The pressure was on.

  As soon as he peeled his eyes in the morning, the anxiety creature on his chest was immediately awake as well. It followed Wilfrid everywhere like an annoying street beggar, and always invaded his head, taking over Wilfrid’s thoughts. Three stops later, Wilfrid finally made it to the front gate of the monastery. In order to get to the front door of the building, Wilfrid walked through a large park – its glory days were still noticeable, but obviously belonged in the past. The shrubbery grew out of control, losing beautiful shapes once given them by a talented gardener, who had probably passed away. Somewhere on the other end of the building, Wilfrid imagined that one could see a breathtaking view of Italian cities. The hill was overlooking the neatly organized Frascati houses swimming in the blue-green haze of trees. At the heavy ornate door, Wilfrid grabbed the massive iron ring and knocked.

  A monk in brown garb appeared and inquired of the guest’s business. “My name is Sir Wilfrid Michal Voynich,” said the guest in broken Italian heavily laced with a Polish accent. “I am an antiquarian from London and would like to trade with you for any old books you might have.”

  “Praise the Lord in Heaven!” cheered the monk. “We are in need of money. As you can see, everything is in disrepair. We indeed have writings of our brothers from centuries ago, I imagine dating back to the sixteenth century, when Villa Mondragone was built.” The monk gave Wilfrid a friendly pat on the shoulder and encouraged him to follow him inside.

  YEAR 1461.

  S-HERTOGENBOSCH CITY, NETHERLANDS

  Eleven-year-old Jeroen was dreaming. He dreamt of sitting on the cool fuming soil among tall flowers of his family garden. He observed busy ants trotting back and forth with heavy loads on their backs. Right above his head hung a peony in full bloom emitting a dizzying sweet smell. Jeroen pulled the branch in his line of sight to study it closer. At first, he looked at the entire branch - flower, stem, and leaves. Then he looked closely at one single leaf. The leaf seemed to possess a structure - intricate patterns that divided the leaf in sections. Then he looked closely at one section and to his astonishment realized that the small section also had structure. Jeroen strained his eyes, trying to see as deep into the structure as he could. Then he closed them.

  With his eyes close
d, floating in a kaleidoscope of lights and shadows, he saw the green leaf clearer than before. He focused on the smallest section he could identify and, all of a sudden, his line of vision was pulled inside the leaf: woosh! Inside, the leaf was not flat, but filled with chambers, pools of water, and swimming creatures. His mind hovered over the structures as if wandering the cities with fortresses and walls and cannons peeking from the walls. These cities were in perpetual jittery motion. When Jeroen took a close look at one wall, he gasped as it too consisted of infinite sections. His mind was pulled in and he saw a whole new level of complexity. For as long as he could see, this level looked like pearl strands. They were strung tight and vibrating as if someone pulled the threads sending them in a swinging dance, but there were no threads holding the pearls together.

  In awe, Jeroen focused on a single pearl. His mind fell inside it like in a deep well: woosh! He flew through a swirling tunnel until he ended up in a vast empty space that stretched for miles, where his disembodied spirit hovered free. Far away he could spot structures that he could only describe as tangled balls of yarn - various kinds of yarn - but the threads were made of light or sound or wind, he couldn’t quite tell. These balls of yarn were circling around the space as if tied to an invisible loom in the middle. Jeroen realized that this vast space was a transparent sphere, as if made of thin ice. Jeroen’s mind caught up with one of the spinning balls of yarn and probed to untangle it. This was not an easy task.

  The threads were held onto each other by the invisible force. But Jeroen was determined. He knew that there was definitely something inside, and he wanted to see it. It took enormous effort, but finally the threads budged and the yarn was about to untangle. Suddenly, a huge flash of light erupted from the yarn as the threads sprung loose. The force of light blinded him and penetrated every corner of his soul, like a great Judgment Day fire, cleansing and burning away all that was unnecessary, leaving Jeroen nothing but an unrestricted thought. It seemed like a lot of time passed until the light around subsided and Jeroen finally saw himself inside another layer of complexity. This one was undoubtedly the oddest and the scariest at the same time. He knew, there was nowhere deeper to go.

  This was it, the basic level of all that there was. Jeroen was standing on the road that only allowed him to move in one direction - forward, always forward. The only way to move along this road was to hop from one flat rock to another. In between those rocks, there was Nothing. Not something that he couldn’t see, but the ultimate Nothing, the kind that was before the beginning of the world. The Great Void. Jeroen looked around and saw his friends and family hopping on the parallel tracks alongside him. Each one of them had their own track and they all moved synchronously, in a rhythm of falling water drops from spring icicles: pop-pop-pop-pop. Jeroen could not see people’s faces, because they were also disembodied spirits, like himself. All the spirits were connected with invisible strands, forming a tangled root system. Once in a while he would spot a person glowing with a halo. Saints? No, Jeroen realized, they were not the saints. They were the enlightened ones.

  ***

  Somewhere deep in the Earth’s ocean, the head of the Unkari research facility Ennuturat was pouring through streams of data, immersing his long tentacles in the puddles of liquid mercury interfaces. Observing human evolution had been his job for the past millennia. He was looking for the ones who had the potential for an evolutionary leap. Outside the lab, the vast serene ocean enveloped the facility. Suddenly Ennuturat saw an outstanding set of data that belonged to an eleven-year-old boy. Watching human evolution was about as exciting as observing a black hole evaporate, but this set of data pricked Ennuturat’s curiosity. He opened the data stream and gasped: “Oh Universe, I think he just had a vision about splitting an atom.”

  YEAR 1930.

  NEW YORK

  At age sixty-five, Wilfrid finally possessed the one thing that would solidify his name in history: the fifteenth-century manuscript he had bought for a bargain from the Villa Mondragone monks. Because of the manuscript, Wilfrid moved his entire family to New York to be closer to the best cryptologists in the world. Fame and wealth seemed within his reach. Who among the antiquarians could boast of being an eponym to their possession? Wilfrid could. It became customary to call the manuscript by his name - the Voynich Manuscript. But the destiny had its twisted sense of humor. Wilfrid realized that he was tormented by a carrot on a stick: the closer he approached the solution, the further away it appeared.

  With a gloved hand Wilfried flipped through the pages of his most treasured possession. Over 200 pages of authentic fifteenth-century parchment filled with writing that nobody could read. The thought of passing away before decoding the manuscript was eating Wilfrid alive. Ever since he had laid his hands on the book, the secret meaning of the writing and the pictures consumed his imagination. The writing was like nothing he had ever seen. Was it a language? Was it a cypher? No matter how many experts he involved, none could solve the mystery of the manuscript. At first, he suspected that it was a book about herbal medicine. At a glance, it made sense: numerous herbs were catalogued and described throughout the book. Coding the text in that case made sense - to protect valuable knowledge. But years of inspecting the book led Wilfrid to realize that the plants could not be matched with any real plants on Earth!

  Add to that, the plants were not the only thing exhibited in the book. The manuscript was filled with astrological images - not any normal astrology either, but inexplicable calendars and star maps. Some of the maps, if set in spinning motion, created motion pictures, and motion pictures were invented in Wilfrid’s lifetime. The most inexplicable part of the manuscript contained strange drawings of naked women swimming in green pools of water. The water was deliberately green, rationalized Wilfrid, because the author of the manuscript used blue paint elsewhere, thus the blue paint was an option. Why was the water green? Why were the separate pools of water connected with intricate pipelines? Were the scenes sexual in nature?

  At times it certainly felt this way, because of peculiar poses and arrangements these women assumed. And if the images were the scenes of decadent love, why there were no men in them? Some suspicions Wilfrid decidedly kept to himself, because that sort of talk could have landed him in the mental institution. When he inspected the scenes with naked women for hours with a magnifying glass, letting his imagination run wild, he could swear that some of those women had male parts as well, and some male parts seemed to be scratched out from the parchment. Finally, there was that lingering suspicion that the entire manuscript was an elaborate hoax. There seemed to be some evidence supporting this thought.

  Each time Wilfrid thought of it, the anxiety creature ate away at his chest. The research seemed to point at the involvement of Edward Kelly with the manuscript. Edward Kelly was bad news. In sixteenth-century England, he was a polarizing figure. Some claimed that he was something of a prophet. According to Kelly himself, he could speak with the angels, could produce gold from the base metals, and was a pillar of occult medicine. Kelly duped important figures of his time, Bohemian Emperor Rudolph II being one of them. It was also proven that Kelly was caught producing multiple forgeries and pseudo-historical documents. Was the manuscript a hoax masterminded by the ultimate con artist of his time, Edward Kelly?

  Wilfrid hung on a thin thread of hope that the complexity of the manuscript, its authentic materials and such were impossible to produce by a mere con artist, and required a true genius. Two promising figures seemed to fit the bill. One of them was the thirteenth-century physician and genius of his time Roger Bacon. Another, and Wilfrid’s heart leaped with happiness every time he thought about it, was no less than the sixteenth-century genius Leonardo da Vinci. Wilfrid suspected da Vinci was not without merit. Since childhood, Leonardo had invented codes and kept notes in cyphers of high complexity. Leonardo also grown up in a family of some means as a half-child of Italian nobility. The author of the manuscript had to be somewhat w
ealthy, rationalized Wilfrid, because the price of quality parchment and inks was high back in the day. Another thing that pointed to a child’s work, albeit a budding genius, was the childlike style of the drawings. They were nothing like the masterful sketches of the matured Leonardo.

  Sloppy, often unfinished, they seemed to be the work of a child who was just beginning to learn the art of drawing. Days prior to his death, Wilfrid sensed that he had to somehow balance the score of his entire life. Was he a success or failure? On one hand, he had discovered a manuscript that puzzled the world. On the other, he had failed to uncover its meaning. With this question raw in his mind, Wilfrid quietly passed away in his New York apartment, leaving the unsolved mystery for the generations to come.

  YEAR 2274.

  FOURTH ORBITAL STATION

  “You’ll do great, Anika, stop stressing so much.” Anika gave Broner a miserable look.

  “Don’t give me that look, I know what I am talking about. I watched you for the past two years. If there is anyone on the Fourth deserving a doctorate at nineteen years old, it is you.”

  Anika may have been the embodiment of the iconic Fourther’s virtues when it came to research, but this bloody manuscript had buried more careers in human history than she could think of. The walls of Anika’s small quarters were peppered with holographic images of strange curvy writings and even more bizarre drawings copied from the Voynich Manuscript. “You are a good friend, Broner, but a terrible liar,” said Anika resolutely. “You know that my theory hangs on a lot of speculations, and there is nothing I can do about it. Any physical evidence that attributes the authorship of the Voynich Manuscript to Hieronymus Bosch belongs to history now.”