A satisfying smile crept across Mark’s face. “But you know that already. He was able to dodge your F22… You got something else to go after him with?”
Sabre was unmoved by the comments. There was now a subtle, refined warning in his tone. “Keep in mind we are specialists in gathering intelligence, including extracting intel from unwilling participants. You think about that for a while. If you need a demonstration of our methods, you just let me know when I return.”
With that Sabre left the small interrogation room followed by his guard. Mark stared on after him, his expression turning grim as the closed door was locked from the outside.
*
Natasha sat at the table alone in the interrogation room. She ignored the one-way mirror to her side, her focus trained on the small room’s single door.
As the door opened, Mr. Sabre stepped in. He studied Natasha with a practiced calm, but she saw danger in his eyes. It was as if his stare was encroaching on her personal space, inducing mental claustrophobia. He took the single unoccupied seat opposite her.
After a short pause Sabre finally spoke. “Why did Jake run to the canyons?”
“He felt like an early morning ride,” she said, her blue eyes testing him. “Why am I here?”
He smiled, clearly appreciating the question. “You are here because one of our citizens seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. And we need to know where he’s gone.”
She felt a fury rise from deep within. Almost to the bottom of a cliff because of you!
Mr. Sabre continued. “Who was he there to meet?”
She stared at him, offering no response. There was a tense silence.
“Where is Jake?”
“You should tell me!” she declared, her piercingly blue eyes boring into him with rage and resilience. “I’m just a messenger.”
“Is that so?” he said, amused.
She glanced away.
“And what would be the message?”
Natasha slowly swung her gaze his way, like an artillery cannon traversing: “That we are not alone.”
CHAPTER 80
“How’s your health?”
Mr. Sabre stood in front of the closed door of the interrogation room holding Dr. Charles Reilly. The scientist sat calmly at the small table in the center of the room.
“Why, Stephen? How long do I have?”
Sabre said nothing. Reilly sensed from his eyes that the NSA agent knew more than he was willing to reveal.
Dr. Reilly took a patient breath, his expression a mix of disapproval and disappointment for his former colleague. “What are you doing, Stephen?”
“No, Charles!” Sabre retorted, his tone intensifying. “I need to ask you, what do YOU think YOU are doing? Why were you helping Jake?”
The scientist gave a compassionate smile. He could see the dangerous combination of emotion in the agent’s eyes: anger, confusion, betrayal.
The agent’s tone was suddenly harsh. “We used to be on the same team!”
“And whose team is that?” Reilly asked. “Ours or theirs?”
The agent was fuming now. “THEY have kept the population shielded from the harsh truth for over half a century. You were the one who explained that if there was a public disclosure, it would show an ancient connection between an extraterrestrial civilization, earth and the emergence of the human race that would collapse the fundamentalist orthodox belief systems of every religion on earth.”
More to the point, the scientist knew, was that the theological and philosophical implications would be immediate. The world’s religious leaders would need to come to terms with a universe where humans were no longer the sole intelligent life. Current beliefs in creation and God would need to evolve to accept the existence of intelligent sentient life elsewhere in the universe.
Dr. Reilly had led the group charged with managing contact with interstellar biological entities, or IBEs, as well as the study and integration of their technologies on behalf of the National Security Council. Agent Stephen Sabre was assigned by the NSA to control and contain the secrecy that accompanied the scientist’s activities and deep black programs.
“DAMN IT!” Sabre said, his patience wearing thin. “You wrote the manual on ET crash site retrieval and sanitisation. And you know better than anyone with a seat on the NSC what ET tech will do to the world energy infrastructure. It would destabilize the entire Middle East region OVERNIGHT.”
The agent didn’t need to finish. Reilly understood he was speaking of the world’s biggest industry – petroleum. Once the world learns that Reilly’s team had reverse-engineered from the ET technology a viable, readily available, economically producible energy source, oil would be devalued overnight and bring an end to the petroleum industry.
Governments and groups who had invested trillions of euros and dollars into existing petroleum infrastructure would find their assets and resources instantly worthless.
Middle Eastern states that are reliant on oil export will no longer have a demand for their product. Dictatorships like Saudi, the UAE, Bahrain and their neighbors would also lose their power over their citizens. Geopolitical unrest would be inevitable and spread across religions where tension between governments, citizens and neighboring countries were already critically high.
This scenario had been repeatedly examined by the keepers of the secret, and they kept arriving at one inescapable conclusion: mass geopolitical unrest could erupt in the Middle East as a result of the devaluing of their resources and currency. Existing security treaties and alliances would force the hands of the superpowers to get involved on both sides. Although not public knowledge, there are a number of nuclear weapons in the region being controlled by nervous Middle Eastern interests. After previous decades of tension and fighting, the resulting war has potential to be nuclear. If it were to start, it would affect everybody on the planet. And if left to escalate, it would have the potential to set back human civilization hundreds of years.
Dr. Reilly had always thought this catastrophic scenario was first predicted by Einstein when in 1947 he remarked, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Sabre’s growling voice pulled the scientist back. “The cost of maintaining this cover-up is far less than the cost of letting it out in the open.”
The scientist’s voice remained cool and calm. “And what of the costs of Dr. Steven Greer, Dr. Vladik Primakov and numerous other brilliant minds you’ve sanitized over the years? Were their lives justified in the cover-up?”
“Collateral fallout!” Sabre spat back. “ACCEPTABLE numbers when weighed against the potential thousands that could be impacted. WE were working toward the same cause.”
“Perhaps once,” Reilly said, his tone composed. “But we are not the same. I was exploring new possibilities in science and physics to produce new energy systems. You are a killer.”
The agent was in a boiling rage. “The nation on earth that first acquires this technology will be the dominant force on this planet militarily, economically and politically. WE took necessary actions that others don’t have the stomach, the balls or even the conviction to prevent the possibility of…”
“Yes, the possibility of one single state or nation monopolizing this new technology,” Reilly said before he could finish, his voice gentle. “But that’s just it; we became the very thing we had set out to prevent by keeping what we learned hidden.”
Stephen Sabre stared at the scientist in disbelief.
“We’re not in a cold war any more, Stephen. And the earth is still in the 1800s as far as energy generation and transportation is concerned. Gas, oil and coal are still our primary sources of energy, and the combustion engine runs our way life. They are also equally the primary causes of our air and water pollution.”
Dr. Charles Reilly paused, letting his words soak in, as the argument was paradoxical.
In the 1950s there was little concern about global warming, ecosystem collapse o
r ozone depletion. What was needed in the World War II era was stability, not the introduction of ET-derived technologies that would usher in a new world economic and geopolitical paradigm.
Disclosing the ET presence would bring with it back-engineered technologies derived from the physics of their energy and propulsion systems that would change the world forever. In a time when superpowers were amassing nuclear arms on both sides, facilitated by an economy ruled by oil and coal titans, disturbing the fragile balance of power was to be avoided at all costs.
The disclosure of the existence of ETs also meant the disclosure of ET-derived technologies that would instantly devalue and disrupt the entire technological infrastructure of the globe.
Seventy years later the planet is straining under the burden of overpopulation and degradation of its biosphere. With only 50 to 60 years of oil reserves left, the earth’s ecosystem could not sustain another 50 years of exploitation and abuse. The application of advanced ET energy systems would completely reverse this situation.
The paradox is as such: the current secrecy surrounding the ET presence serves to maintain the current way of life and geopolitical balance of power, but it is fueled by 1800s energy systems that continue to erode the biosphere. To disclose the ET presence and ET-derived clean energy technologies will forever change the world’s economic, technological and geo-political landscape.
The risks of disclosure are now far less than the risks of continued secrecy. Should secrecy continue, the earth’s ecosystem will collapse.
Mr. Sabre reached the end of his rope. He exploded, “So you turned your back on your accomplishments?”
“From the particle beam weapon for the Strategic Defense Initiative program,” the agent continued, “to kinetic energy weapons and chemically driven molecular-sized micro-processors that run billions of times faster than conventional computer chips. How do you justify walking away from your sworn oath of secrecy? Instead you’ve been helping to bring all this out into the open!”
“I also left our work on genetically engineered biotoxins and neurotoxic weapons for biotoxic warfare,” the scientist countered. “Let’s not forget the multiple impact re-entry vehicles with six nuclear warheads to each ICBM. We created weapons that could take out six cities in the one shot.”
Charles’s voice was heavy with emotion. “I’m tired, Stephen; I’ve existed in the gray area between right and wrong for far too long.”
Sabre looked at him as if he was insane.
“Let the kids go, Stephen. You have the specimen, you have the report, the key people who could have disseminated the information are dead, and I don’t have long to go.”
The agent averted his eyes, saying nothing.
A moment past and the scientist smiled. “I’ll take your silence as your intent to not release them.”
“Well, then,” Dr. Reilly continued, “you know how chaos theory can be described by a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa consequently causing a hurricane over the Atlantic?”
“The butterfly effect. What’s your point?” Sabre hissed, forcing a smile.
“Well, Stephen, I would suspect that the particular butterfly you seek is about to flap its wings.”
CHAPTER 81
The depths of Jake’s amazement at witnessing the splendour of Jupiter and its moons with his own eyes seemed limitless.
With a renewed vigour, he tried to gather his thoughts about his idea.
Casting his mind back to his physics classes in college, he remembered it took light eight minutes to reach the earth from the sun. Similarly, it took light 43 minutes to reach Jupiter from the sun.
He raised a hand to feel the stubble of his chin. It was almost the same dark stubble that shrouded his jaw when he and Natasha busted out the front door of his house that morning to make their getaway toward the desert canyons. That meant it didn’t taken the extraterrestrial spacecraft days or weeks to arrive at Jupiter’s doorstep, despite it taking NASA’s probes decades to traverse the same distance.
These guys must be able to travel at the speed of light!
Jake did the calculation in his head. “Okay, so at light speed it would have taken us about 35 minutes to get here.”
As Jake stepped toward his interstellar companion to pitch his question, the room began to materialise around him as he moved away from the central control chair. With the walls now faintly visible, it was as if they were now standing in a glass room orbiting the Jovian system.
Jake didn’t let the change in the room’s appearance distract him. “How long would it take you to find one of our Voyager spacecrafts?”
“INSTANTANEOUS.”
Jake thought hard, trying to comprehend this information. The Voyager spacecrafts were launched in 1977. The two probes had set out to explore the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. By now Voyager 1 had left the solar system and was in interstellar space; Voyager 2 would soon join it. It would take light over five hours to reach Pluto, and both Voyagers were double that distance away from the sun.
“Instantaneous” would mean that they had the capability of travelling many times the speed of light to reach the closest probe.
Jake opened his mouth to ask his question, but the Zeta Reticulian had already headed past Jake toward the control chair. It waved its slender hand over the chair’s arm, lighting up a series of provisory unseen buttons on its surface.
It would seem that Jake didn’t need to vocalize his question. The small visitor had read his thoughts.
The floor in front of the chair reacted to the visitor’s gesture. It was as if its metal, which was still opaque, liquefied. It reached up out of the floor to form a large ring the size of the opaque wall immediately behind it. When it completed growing, it glistened a violet-silver as it solidified into what looked like a solid metal ring.
The human watched in mute amazement as small balls floated from either side of the violet-silver ring to collide and explode. Its intensely bright flash startled Jake and engulfed the room in a wash of blinding white. The explosion, however, was contained within an unseen force field, the only hint of which formed a large sphere inside the metal ring, protecting the occupants in the room from the energy of the intense blast captured inside.
At first Jake didn’t understand what he was witnessing. Contained within the force field, the explosion immediately caved in on itself to form a barely visible black dot that hovered at the center of the ring. The edges of the black dot appeared to glow as it grew larger to fill the area within the metal ring. The massive planet hanging outside was visible inside the glowing ring as it grew in diameter.
Trying to make sense of what he was seeing, Jake took a hesitant step forward. The glowing ring captured within the metal ring was energized and seemed to be spinning at such high speed it gave the impression of glowing.
The human’s jaw fell slack at what followed.
The image of the planet framed within the glowing ring seemed to zoom in, as if it was a window descending through Jupiter’s clouds, through its darkened core then out the other side to be filled with the blackness of space pinpricked by stars.
Jake blinked at the familiar shape that suddenly grew to fill the area framed by the energized spinning ring. Although the light reflecting off its surface was dim, there was no question in Jake’s mind as to what he was looking at.
Floating before him was a human creation.
“The Voyager!” Jake’s eyes bulged with excitement.
“You must have used antimatter somehow to spark off a matter-antimatter reaction to create,” Jake said, swallowing hard. “An Einstein Rosenberg Bridge. You made a mini black hole and turned it into a wormhole!”
So Einstein was right, he thought.
Jake was alive with wonder. “The only thing that can contain antimatter would be exotic matter, which is what the purple ring must be made of. But the energy needed to create a wormhole would be, well, a quadrillion times more than what we could ever hope to generate!”
Jake again studied the small visitor. If these guys can harness the energy of a star, they must be at least 100,000 years ahead of us!
“HUMAN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES IS COMING OF AGE.”
The thoughts that poured into Jake’s mind confirmed his observation. He had witnessed a small ball bearing-sized sphere of matter float across to touch a similarly sized ball of antimatter, interacting to release an unfathomable amount of energy that, for a fleeting moment, created a tiny star before his eyes. Being unstable, the star instantly collapsed in on itself into a single point of infinite density, and a mini black hole was born.
Although too small to see, the single point was actually a tiny ring formed by centrifugal forces as the black hole spun. The visitors’ technology enables them to use gravity waves to stretch the spinning ring to the desired size.
The wormhole, or Einstein Rosenberg Bridge, was kept open and stable via the manipulation of gravity waves, allowing instantaneous travel between two connected points in space. It distorted the fabric of space between the probe and the visitors’ spacecraft by shrinking the linear distance down to almost zero. The effect was like looking out a window. The Voyager probe appeared to hang in suspension on the other side of the portal.
Linear distances no longer held any meaning in the physics of wormholes, as the portals could be hundreds of light years apart. Travelling between these two portals was as simple as stepping through a doorway, or in this case, moving through the wormhole’s energized portal on board the visitors’ spacecraft.
In that moment, Jake knew he was in the presence of a very advanced, and very ancient, galactic civilization. He was reminded of the prediction made by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Humanity still has a steep learning curve ahead of it on the subject of physics, as mankind is nearly as far away from the understanding of the nature of the universe as they were 500 years ago. Even so, mankind is well on its way to ascending what its scientists term a “Type 1 Civilization.”
Disclosing the Secret Page 33
