by Alten-Steve
“Lilith’s scientists had stabilized the wormhole’s opening in their time period; now it was just a matter of waiting until the exit point returned to Earth-space on the winter solstice of 2012. Knowing the biological creature would awaken on this date, the Guardian orbiting the Earth in the Balam set a plan into motion: they would remain asleep until modern man evolved, then land the Balam and begin cultivating civilizations to erect monoliths that would conceal the Balam’s array. They also seeded the Maya, Aztec, and Inca with low doses of Hunahpu DNA so that one of their own bloodlines could access the Balam in 2012. Our father emerged a thousand years later as One Hunahpu—their genetic messiah.”
“Let me get this straight: humanity was really destroyed in 2012, only this Doomsday device opened a wormhole in 2047, creating an alternate universe that bypassed the Doomsday event?”
“Not bypassed entirely. When our father activated the Balam on December 21 in 2012, he not only destroyed the biological creature, he destroyed the Doomsday anomaly.”
“Then we’re cool, right?”
“No, Manny. By not coming with me to Xibalba, you unraveled one end of the time loop. The free end is the wormhole that will appear in two months on July 4. If Lilith’s shuttles enter, then time will loop again, only to an alternate past where there is no biological creature buried in the Gulf of Mexico. The anomaly will simply appear on the 2012 winter solstice, annihilating the entire planet.”
Manny closes his eyes, his mind struggling to wrap itself around these bizarre cause-and-effect scenarios. “What do you need me to do?”
“Enter the wormhole when it appears on July 4. Because Earth no longer exists in the future, the wormhole must open sometime in Earth’s past, prior to the 2012 event. You must enter the wormhole and go back in time, then find a way to destroy the Doomsday device before it is activated.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“Seek Lilith’s help.”
“Seek Lilith’s help? Jake, why do you think I’ve avoided accessing the Nexus these last fourteen years? Your wacky girlfriend is a psychopath. Her soul’s as dark as they come.”
“The soul is a spark of perfection. Lilith’s darkness originates from her own tainted past. If our souls are entwined, Manny, then she is your soul mate, too.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no. That crazy bitch killed my true soul mate minutes after you left Earth. Her assassin murdered Lauren!”
“Go back in time and Lauren can live again.”
“Huh?” Manny’s thoughts race. “Yeah … that’s true. Wait, what about Chilam Balam and his people … er, my people? What happened to them?”
“When Chilam Balam and his followers fell into the sacred cenote, the sinkhole manifested into a wormhole, again created by the Doomsday device that destroys the Earth in 2012. By entering the wormhole, you and your Mayan brethren created another alternate universe, one that circumvented Doomsday but deposited you into a future where Earth was thawing from a ten-thousand-year ice age, caused by the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera.”
“The caldera? Jake, Lauren had been working on a solution to the caldera, the University of Miami was funding her work.”
“Lauren’s death may have been necessary; it served the alternate universe created when Chilam Balam and his people entered the wormhole in the 1500s.”
“Necessary? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Chilam Balam and his people arrived in a post-caldera alternate existence. His Mayan colony thrived. A thousand years later, his society—your society—succeeded in harvesting zero-point energy to colonize other planets. It was Chilam Balam’s future generations that evolved into the Hunahpu—the post-human species encountered by Lilith’s Mars colonists. It was the Hunahpu who built the Balam. They built it for us, Manny. And they named it after you.”
Manny lays his head back against the sand, feeling dizzy. “Jake, about Lilith—”
“The greatest transformation of darkness yields the greatest light. Lilith transformed on Xibalba. After I died, I cleansed her soul.”
“What about our parents? Did you cleanse Mick’s soul, too?”
“Our parents never died. Their collective consciousness remains trapped.”
“Trapped? Where? Jake, where are they trapped?”
“On Phobos.”
“Phobos? As in the Mars moon, Phobos? How the hell did they get there?”
“Our parents were taken aboard a Guardian transport before the sun went supernova. The transport entered the wormhole, followed by the Balam. The wormhole deposited both vessels far into the past. Phobos isn’t a moon, it’s all that remains of the Guardian’s transport vessel. Our parents are held inside, their consciousness trapped in cryogenic stasis.”
“They’re still alive? Jake—”
The sun’s brilliance peeks over the horizon. Jacob disperses with the golden light—
—his presence replaced by armed commandoes. Dressed in black, they aim weapons at Salt and Pepper, the two bodyguards bound in neural cuffs. The commando leader kneels to reach Manny, snapping a sensory collar around his neck.
“Immanuel Gabriel, you are under arrest for treason. This collar monitors your brain waves. Attempt to access the Nexus and the change in brain activity will activate your friends’ neural cuffs, electrocuting them.”
6
At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilization have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.
—BRIAN COX, CERN PHYSICIST
MAY 5, 2047: NEPAL
The Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal is a landlocked country shaped like a five-hundred-mile-long east-west bacon strip situated between China and India. While Nepal’s southern lowland plains maintain a tropical climate, the two elevated regions to the north drop quickly into alpine temperatures as the geology rises into the Himalaya Mountains. Formed by the tectonic collision of the Indian subcontinent meeting Eurasia, the Himalayan arc makes up the northern part of Nepal and contains eight of the highest elevations in the world, including Sagarmatha, better known as Mount Everest.
The climbing party numbered eight. The two Americans, Shawn Eastburn and her nephew, Scott Curtis, were both from Oklahoma and the weakest climbers. Their employer, Sean Cadden, was Canadian; it was his travel company that had sponsored the trip. Jurgen Neelen and Karim Jivani had joined them in Kathmandu, the two Europeans far more experienced mountaineers. Ultimately, of course, the success of the climb relied on the three hired Sherpas, who not only led the way but carried the bulk of their belongings, each blue nylon bag weighing in excess of sixty pounds.
The five foreigners had arrived in Nepal’s capital on Thursday, the climbing permits alone costing $14,000 per person. Another $16,000 was spent on equipment rental, oxygen, insurance, and Sherpa fees.
While Sean Cadden claimed his assault on the world’s highest mountain was all about promoting his business ventures, deep inside he knew it was personal. The adrenaline junkie had attempted Everest three years earlier when a spot had opened on a February climb, only things had gone bad quickly. The weather had been vicious, an avalanche claiming two lives and ending the attempt at Base Camp III. Undaunted, the CEO had promised his employees that he would return to claim the mountain. Now he was back: granted, in May, when the weather was far more stable—if fifty degrees below zero and winds blowing in excess of a hundred miles an hour could be so defined.
After two days of preparation and equipment tests the team finally arrived at Lukla, making their way up to Base Camp at 17,600 feet. Shawn Eastburn, an insulin-dependent diabetic, was the first to suffer from high altitude sickness. At Sean Cadden’s urging, the forty-two-year-old district manager and mother of two had valiantly continued on to scale the Khumbu Icefall at 19,500 feet. Resting at Camp I in the Valley of Silence, she declared her climb over.
The others had pushed on, ascending to Camp II at 21,300 feet. The harrowing Lhot
se Face was completed by dusk, bringing the team to Camp III at 23,500 feet. There they rested, allowing their bodies to acclimatize for the nearly three-thousand-foot ascent to Camp IV, located in the “death zone.”
Altitudes in the Everest death zone exceed 26,200 feet. The air is frigid, requiring every speck of flesh to be covered lest frostbite set in. Atmospheric pressure is only a third of that at sea level, forcing all non-Sherpas to use oxygen. The snow is densely frozen, the icy surface leading to a greater incidence of fatalities from slips and falls. Climbers who are injured in the death zone have a high mortality rate. Those who perish here are usually left behind. Over 160 frozen corpses remain a permanent part of the Everest geology.
Scott Curtis is in his tent shivering, the howling wind abusing his shelter. The Oklahoma native wishes he had remained behind at Camp I with his aunt, or better yet, in Tulsa. Exhausted from having to gasp eighty to ninety breaths a minute in the oxygen-deprived air, he has been using his O2 tank since Camp III. Now, as the sun rises and the wind swirls into a white haze, he knows there are no reserves left in his spent body to even contemplate the final three thousand feet.
The weather window opens an hour later. The three remaining climbers and two of their Sherpa guides begin the final assault. Down mittens clench poles, masked faces breathe oxygen behind tinted goggles.
At precisely seventeen minutes after noon beneath a cobalt-blue sky, the five men arrive at the 29,035-foot summit, the highest point on Earth.
The view is like no other. Snowcapped peaks and billowing cloud banks. Heavens that hint at the darkness of outer space.
For twenty minutes they videotape one another and snap photos, sharing the same cruising altitude as the commercial jetliner that brought them to Kathmandu. No evidence of their presence will be left behind, no trash or debris jeopardizing their $5,000 environmental deposit and the mountain’s good karma.
The karma changes at 12:37 p.m.
It commences with a roll of thunder, low and deep, echoing across the valley of snow-covered peaks. Sean Cadden kneels in the snow, seven miles of mountain shaking beneath him. “Earthquake!”
The three climbers hang on to one another as the rumbling builds. Jurgen Neelen’s scalp tingles, his thoughts turning to his fellow climbers at the lower base camps, their location rendering them vulnerable to an avalanche. His head continues itching. He rubs a mittened hand atop his wool ski cap, generating sparks of static electricity. The loosened hat flies off his head, caught in an upswell of frigid air.
Snow flies past his face, followed by particles of rock that glance off his goggles before raining skyward. Jurgen looks up, mystified, his gray eyes following the trail of debris as it rises into the forming tail of a white tornado! The rotating column of air soars high over Everest—a massive churning vortex that twists skyward like a monstrous snake before disappearing into the event horizon of a gelid maelstrom located hundreds of miles above the mountain.
Sean Cadden stares at the hole in the sky, dumbfounded. “What the hell is that?”
Karim Jivani shields his face against flying debris. “Hey … what happened to the Sherpas?”
“They’re descending without us,” yells Neelen. “Come on!”
The three climbers head for the ropes as the updraft’s intensity increases, inhaling Karim’s camera right out of his hand. Cadden’s oxygen mask snaps free, flapping above his eyes. He grabs it by its hose, holding it to his face as he ducks low, following his companions down the rapidly disintegrating trail from which they ascended.
Chunks of frozen snow break loose like miniature icebergs, spinning into the air. A thirty-pound brick of ice bashes Karim in the face, shattering his goggles, which are quickly wrenched free from his head.
Jurgen reaches the ropes first. He snaps the carabiner attached to his belt around the line and begins a rapid rappel, his two companions right behind him.
The tornado’s suction rips the masks and helmets from their heads. The mountain peak shudders, shaking loose a million tons of snow in a blinding whiteout that sweeps the three men away from the rock and into the air, their feet splayed over their heads, the nylon rope all that tethers them to Everest.
Through the gravity-defying ice storm Sean Cadden looks up into the three-mile-wide radius of the anomaly, its gelid-clear orifice defined by the inhaled debris, its event horizon pushing closer.
The roar is deafening—a thousand freight trains vibrating every atom in the Canadian thrill-seeker’s body, swallowing his scream—
And suddenly there is silence.
The sky is clear, the anomaly gone. The three men gaze at one another, still suspended from their ropes, unsure of what just happened, or how they are still alive.
ORGANISATION EUROPÉENNE POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLÉAIRE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH
CERN RESEARCH BOARD MINUTES OF THE 162nd MEETING
OF THE RESEARCH BOARD HELD
ON THURSDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2003
STUDY OF POSSIBLY DANGEROUS EVENTS DURING HEAVY ION COLLISIONS AT LHC
* * *
J. Iliopoulos reported on the study made by a committee that he chaired, concerning the possibility of producing dangerous events during heavy ion collisions at the LHC. A previous study made for RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA) had concluded that the candidate mechanisms for catastrophe scenarios are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments, or both. Following their investigation, the committee members concurred with this conclusion. They studied the possible production of black holes, magnetic monopoles, and strangelets. They also reviewed the astrophysical limits coming from interaction of cosmic rays with the moon (or with each other), which, under plausible assumptions, exclude the possibility of dangerous processes in heavy ion colliders. Black holes produced in theories with extra-compact dimensions, for which the fundamental scale could be as low as 1 TeV, might be copiously produced at the LHC. However, only extremely massive black holes, beyond the reach of any accelerator, would be stable. It has been speculated that magnetic monopoles might catalyze proton decay. At each catalysis event, energy is released by the decaying proton, causing the monopole to move. They estimated the number of nucleons that the monopole would destroy before escaping from the Earth and found it to be negligibly small. Most of the committee’s study concerned strangelets, a hypothetical new form of matter containing roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. They may become dangerous if they can be produced at the LHC, are sufficiently long-lived, are negatively charged so that they can attract and absorb ordinary nuclei, and finally if they can grow indefinitely without becoming unstable. The committee found that, from general principles, if negatively charged strangelets exist at all, they would not grow indefinitely: they soon become unstable. Furthermore, the committee concluded that any hadronic system with baryon number of order ten or higher is out of reach of a heavy ion collider, and the LHC will be no more efficient at producing strangelets than RHIC. To be dangerous the strangelet would need to be stable from a very low baryon number, where production is possible, all the way up toward an infinite baryon number, a possibility that has been excluded by the stability studies.
L. Maiani thanked J. Iliopoulos and his committee for their work, and the Research Board took note of the report.
* * *
END MINUTES
Note: The official position of CERN assumes the theory of black hole evaporation is correct, though it should be noted that no empirical evidence exists to support this theory.
7
Earth News & Media
May 8, 2047: Albanian citizens continue to dig out from yesterday’s magnitude 7.7 earthquake. The quake’s epicenter was located twenty-two miles E-NE of the city of Tirana. Government officials estimate casualties will exceed three thousand.
H.O.P.E. Space Center Cape Canaveral, Florida
The eighteen-wheeled military transport follows its police escort east a
cross the NASA Parkway, crossing the Banana River land bridge to Cape Canaveral. The caravan of vehicles is waved through three security checkpoints, then led to one of twelve steel and concrete structures towering over the southernmost tip of the Project H.O.P.E. Space Center.
The left bay door is open. The military transport enters the facility, proceeding over a wasteland of concrete before arriving at the ten-story infrastructure and an interior tunnel sealed by a twenty-two-foot-diameter vault door.
A dozen cyberwarriors exit the truck. Dressed hood to boots in a bulletproof, explosive-resistant lining dubbed “camouflage skin,” the soldiers by their presence bespeak the importance of the three fugitives housed in the truck’s portable sensory prison.
The squad leader approaches the rear doors of the transport and touches his gloved palm to the computer keypad. The encrypted security codes are relayed from the White House through neural conduits in the soldier’s glove, the signal of which must match his own biorhythms before being uploaded.
The rear hatch opens, activating a ramp. The sensory prison—an eight-by-twelve-foot windowless lead-gray steel and acrylic cube set on a magnetic hover pad—is maneuvered out of the truck.
Devlin Mabus watches everything from his balcony on the sixth floor. The seven-ton steel vault door opens, its magnetic hinges whisper-quiet.
The sensory prison, escorted by the detail of cyberwarriors, is guided inside.
* * *