Evolution: The Revelation

by Reilly, Jim

  Evolution

  The revelation

  By Jim Reilly

  Sayville Books

  www.sayvillebooks.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Jim Reilly

  All rights reserved. Published by Sayville Books. Associated logos are trademarks of Sayville Books.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. Such actions are illegal and punishable by law. For information regarding permission, contact Sayville Books Permissions Department at

  http://www.sayvillebooks.com.

  Published in the U.S.A.

  First Edition, February 2016

  Acknowledgements:

  Editor: Susan Macri

  Cover: Leonardo Borazio

  Copy editor: Joseph D’Antoni

  Other works by the Author:

  Evolution

  Seaville

  For Mom and Dad. They gave me the gift of life and never gave up on me during my trials and tribulations through life.

  Chapter 1

  31st Century.

  “Thirty survivors?” asked Steven Moran. “It can’t be! There were only twenty-nine of us!”

  He quickly jumped up out of his sickbay bed and grabbed the Super Homo sapiens nurse by the arm, “Can I see the list of survivors? Please, it’s important.”

  The enhanced woman waved her hand and a virtual reality image illuminated the list of survivors.

  The former Kansas wrestler with Midwestern rugged farm boy features and an impressive muscular physique, even for an enhanced Super Homo sapiens, viewed the list and asked, “Are all of them out of the sleeping pods?”

  “Yes…” she replied, with wonder in her voice about his motives.

  “That name there, Walter Sikes. He survived?”

  “Yes, he’s resting comfortably on a lower deck two floors down.”

  “Show me where I can find him?”

  She showed him a diagram of the tremendous spacecraft traveling a great distance from Earth. “Why do you want to know about him?”

  He dashed out of the ship’s sickbay room without looking back. “Because he died on the mission and shouldn’t be here.”

  The nurse sounded the alarm, but Steven was already halfway down the hallway grabbing an orderly to take him on the lift system to get to the right floor and Walter Sikes’ room.

  As the lift took him two floors below, a hologram of the ship’s captain, Commander Christine Carroll was projected in front of Steven. “I understand we may have a stowaway?”

  “That’s right,” he responded, “I personally witnessed Walter being killed in the initial battle aboard the alien craft. He was cut down by the mysterious entity ruling the Ancient Visitors, aliens or whatever they were. I helped set every one of the survivors in the sleeping pods when we escaped the Ancient Visitors ship’s destruction. I can, without any doubt, say that Walter was not one of them. Whoever that is, it isn’t Walter Sikes.”

  “Well then, we’ll need to talk to Mr. Sikes,” said Commander Christine Carroll, an old by-the-book veteran leader, as she mentally linked the conversation to her security detail. “Please apprehend Walter Sikes for questioning and use extreme caution.”

  When Steven reached Walter’s sickbay room, he and the arriving security detail found a pair of unconscious nurses lying on the floor next to the recovery bed.

  The leader of the security detail tapped his earpiece linked to his mind and the hologram of the ship’s captain reappeared. “The target is not here and is on the run. He is also not showing up on our sensors.”

  As security personnel attended the fallen nurses, Steven looked around at the empty sickbay room. He detected the holographic screens that were used to scan patients. “How would he escape the ship?”

  Without answering Steven, the Captain ordered, “All security personnel report to the transport docking bay immediately.” Images of Walter Sikes began showing in every corner of the ship.

  When Steven and the security detail arrived at the docking bay, they were met by the Captain in person who ordered the door of the docking bay to be opened. When the door wouldn’t open as requested, she ran to the large window looking into the bay. Many of her personnel were scattered along the floor, at the very least, unconscious. It was then that one of the transports powered up and fled the docking bay into space. Without the interior pressure, the transport glided up and out of the docking bay into space. The various unconscious bodies began floating up and out following the transport as the docking bay’s atmosphere was sucked into the darkness of space. Seconds later the wide metal doors shut; the Captain mentally initiated the containment field.

  Steven, in all the confusion going on, wondered out loud, “We shouldn’t have come back. Look what we did. We brought one back, and it may be the worst of them all.”

  Hearing Steven’s words, the Captain responded, “We’ve had to deal with them in the past, our ancient ancestors had been changed by them. Then there was Bishop Terapion during the Followers of Divinity conflict. It didn’t stop there as there were others.”

  Steven ran his hands over his face and through his hair then said, “There were others?”

  As the Captain tracked the ship heading toward Earth on the computer in her mind, she ordered the helmsmen to set a course to intercept and then alerted her communication officer to warn Earth Command. She then looked at Steven and repeated, “Yes, there were others…”

  *****

  21st Century.

  About a thousand years earlier…

  As he slinked low through the tall grass outside of the makeshift tent city under the still of the clear nighttime sky, the lone stealth individual peered toward the flickering light coming from a small tent on the outskirts of the city. As midnight struck, the flickering light stopped and was replaced by a steady glow for only sixty seconds indicating his contact was ready to speak. Knowing he had only seconds to get there before the contact would vanish, he sprinted the last fifty meters toward the opening of the canvas shelter.

  When he entered he found the interior empty except for a lone table and a portable light he assumed was remotely controlled from another point. Realizing he may have walked into a trap, he stormed through the doorway to escape back toward the field when two masked individuals who were hiding in the darkness between two structures, tackled him from behind forcing him to the dusty ground. Before he could react, he felt a pinch in the back of his neck and dizziness overpowered him until he fell unconscious.

  Later, just as he regained consciousness, he was overwhelmed by the smell of the dusty and moldy wool sack draped over his head. He could hear the rustling of feet moving around him.

  “Get this thing off my head and show yourself!” he demanded.

  A voice shrouded by a masking device answered, “Relax while we see who you really are.”

  “I told you in our initial contact, I’m Cameron Richards and I’m an inspector working for the United Nations Security Group. I handle homicides and missing person reports.”

  “Then you won’t mind, Mr. Richards, if we make sure you are who you say you are?”

  “Check my credentials and look online where I’m listed on the UN site along with my job history.”

  “I was once told don’t believe everything you read. I suppose that is a very old saying. But don’t worry, this won’t take long.”

  With the hood still over his head, he could hear one of his captors moving his arms around as if he were using a VRC or virtual reality computer. “I thought you people gave up all forms of technology. You live in tents and use the land to p
roduce your food. Any form of technology is strictly forbidden. Isn’t that so?”

  “For the people of the tent city, you are correct,” said the masked voice. “They are simple folk looking to live by long gone traditions. They are remnants of the former Followers of Divinity group. However, they want nothing but to be left alone with their religious freedom. We help them with some of their security concerns.”

  “I take it you had me meet you in the tent city to hide where you are really from? Maybe I should ask you who you really are as well. It’s been about thirty years since the fall of the Followers of Divinity movement led by Bishop Terapion and about another twenty years from the discovery of the Ancient Visitors’ ship that triggered the movement.”

  “We share some of the same beliefs as those simple people, such as the belief in God. We don’t adhere to their desire for an anti-technology way of life. We do, however, believe in God just as strongly. I suppose we are remnants of the Followers of Divinity as well.”

  “I didn’t come here to debate the finer aspects of religious life.”

  “No you didn’t. You, my friend, came here looking for information from a contact in the tent city. She was to give you details on the life of Mohammed Ishtar, the gentleman who went missing last week.”

  “That’s all I’m looking for,” he reassured his captors.

  “If you wanted information, all you had to do was contact the city elders, and they’d be happy to provide information on Mohammed. But you didn’t want the questions you were going to ask to get out to the public so you set up a meeting with who you thought was the city snitch in the cover of darkness. Needless to say, she was one of us.”

  “That’s just great. So the tip we got on the website was a set up. You just wanted to capture some security personnel?”

  Speaking from behind him, Cameron recognized the voice of the one who left the recorded tip. “No, not just any personnel, just you.”

  And then he felt the same pinch he felt earlier on the back of his arm, and he faded back to sleep.

  Waking up on the other side of the tent city just under the Pamir Mountains in Afghanistan, he could see, after his eyes focused, UN transports hovering above his location.

  One of the transports lowered its ramp and special detective William Davis ran down to see him. “You’re one lucky bastard. They could’ve chopped you up into pieces. We couldn’t even follow you. They had some sort of blocking device that made your embedded GPS chip invisible.”

  “Relax Will, I’m fine,” said the man of medium build. His black hair contrasted his fair complexion; the result of Caucasian descent with a hint of Asian characteristics. “I got the impression they had no intention of harming me.”

  “They?” Will asked. “What do you mean they?”

  “The woman I was supposed to meet with wasn’t who she said she was. Apparently, she and the others in the room were part of some security group protecting the tent city people. It was a diversion in order for me to meet them.”

  “What did they want from you?”

  “I have no idea. They knocked me out before I could ask them.” He noticed paper stuffed in the breast pocket of his own shirt. “Perhaps they weren’t finished telling me.”

  Will looked over his shoulder as Cameron studied the message. While they peered over the paper, the commander of the transport interrupted them. “Inspector Richards, you have a request from Command to turn on your communication device.”

  “Thanks, Captain,” Cameron said to the pilot, then turned to Will and said, “Give me a few minutes.”

  Cameron Richards walked away from the transports to an open field to take the call in private. He was surprised to hear the familiar voice, “What were you thinking?”

  It was Jennifer La Mont-Cho, Chief Scientific Officer for the United Nations. She had followed the operation from the United Nations Security Command Center with senior security personnel.

  Jennifer continued before Cameron Richards could say a word, “You know if they’d figured out who you really are, then we wouldn’t be talking right now.”

  “I know. I know,” he said quickly and tried to explain himself but was cut off by Jennifer’s tirade which continued to accelerate to the point that Cameron couldn’t follow what the enhanced Super Homo sapiens was saying.

  “Please! Can you slow down!” he yelled. But her rant kept speeding up. Finally, he blurted out, “Mom!”

  The line was quiet for a moment and Jennifer said with composure, “Sorry for that, but I’m still your mother Cameron Cho, and it’s a mother’s duty to worry about her son.”

  “Please call me Cameron Richards,” he said, favoring the Anglicized name over his real one.

  “The line is clear and it’s just us. Cameron Cho is your birth name, the name I will always picture with your beautiful face, and that’s how I’ll always remember it.”

  Cameron preferred his new name for two reasons. First of all, he wanted to be known for his own accomplishments, not those of his parents. Jennifer and David Cho were not only world famous for the discovery of the alien spacecraft buried in Ethiopia, but also for revealing the truth that our humanity was influenced by aliens. Now, both were leading the defense of Earth from the return of those aliens. Secondly, and more important to Cameron, his parents had made the change to the enhanced Super Homo sapiens. This was something that bothered him and was a wedge between his parents and him. His parents were some of the first to make the change. Once it was successful for them, they had their three children go through the procedure to be enhanced, but it was not as successful. His brother and sister were enhanced, but Cameron’s body failed to make the change, something that happened to twenty percent of the population at the time. Since then, he hated anything that had to do with enhancement. Sure the logic behind the change was sound: enhance the speed of evolution so that in the future the people on Earth could better adapt to combating the Ancient Visitors when they return to enslave humanity. Cameron turned away from that logic and was of the belief that making changes to advance evolution would harm our humanity. If humans make the change to Super Homo sapiens than what’s next? Enhancing our brains with powerful computer technology as has been suggested, and enhancing our bodies with highly advanced weaponry? If all that is left of humanity is that we are some sort of hi-tech cyborgs, then what is the point? The Ancient Visitors might win or lose in the battle for the human race’s future, but Cameron believed there was no point in humans winning if they lost their humanity in the process.

  Jennifer continued, “But if you insist, I will try in the future, but at the moment, instead of calling you the name you insist on, I will call you the name you have earned, Inspector. So please let me know what you have learned of the mystery in the death of Mohammed Ishtar?”

  “Fine,” he said relenting. “The body of Mohammed Ishtar was discovered two days ago by local kids looking for a grassy field outside of the tent city to play a game of soccer when they came across a shallow grave some animals had apparently dug up for food. In the grave was Mohammed Ishtar, a 33 year old un-enhanced human male with a mysterious weapon wound in the middle of his chest who had lived in the tent city. The city elders told me that he was a simple merchant selling fruits and vegetables. Although, some of his neighbors thought he was not happy with his lot in life and mentioned that he had had subversive ideas. There was, however, no evidence that he acted on his subversive ideas…”

  Jennifer interrupted, “And your source, what did you learn?”

  “I was getting to that,” he said, a bit perturbed. “It would seem that the city elders didn’t want it to get out that some forms of technology were found in Mohammad’s living quarters, a clear violation of city rules. I believe the technology was used to communicate in obsolete forms of the internet. The same forms used by some subversive groups trying to communicate. And that’s all I have so far.”

  “Okay Inspector,” Jennifer said. “Go ahead and inform your superiors of your findings,
but please keep the information about the wound as quiet as you can. The implications of that news could start a panic in the population. So hopefully it’s not as we fear. I hope to see you soon, son.” At that moment the communication ended.

  Cameron stood there momentarily staring into the distance and going over the conversation he had with his mother when Will approached him. “Cam, the transports are ready to leave. We don’t want to be here too long or the locals will start to question why we’re here.”

  “Tell the pilot we are heading to Peru,” he ordered as he held the note written by his former captives that just had a name and address on it: Jose Alvarado of Lima, Peru.

  Later that day, Cameron and Will arrived at the local Lima penitentiary where the trail for Jose Alvarado led. There, Cameron spoke to the warden, Juan Perez about his prisoner, “We are investigating a murder in Afghanistan and a tip led us here. Could you tell us a little about Mr. Alvarado?”

  The slightly overweight gentleman with a dark complexion, tightly cut dark hair, and a manicured mustache looked directly into Cameron’s eyes and said, “Alvarado had been convicted of mass murder after he walked into a government regeneration center and opened fire on the patients waiting for enhancement to SHS (Super Homo sapiens). He succeeded in killing thirty-six people and wounding ten. It turned out to be an easy conviction, as Alvarado denied nothing.”

  Cameron questioned the warden, “Did he belong to any organization or movement? Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Honestly, we couldn’t tell you,” he answered. “He had no criminal past, and he didn’t belong to any political party or organization that we could have looked into. Basically, he had some hard feelings toward the Enhanced, or the thought of people being enhanced, and believed it to be unnatural. It’s no different from the beliefs of about a billion other people.”