by Steve Alten
I didn’t disappear, Jacob. I entered the Guardian’s pod and moved beyond light speed. As the stars passed by like taser fire, I realized the reality of my decision. What seemed like seconds to me would be decades to everyone on Earth. You, your brother, your mother—everyone of my era would be long dead by the time I arrived on Xibalba, wherever that hellish world might lie.
I panicked. I screamed. I ordered the Guardian to return me to Earth.
But it was too late. The highway I was traveling on could only move forward—and it was a dark road that led to the origin of man’s evil.
The Guardian promised they would never abandon me. Those were the last words I remembered hearing before I lost consciousness.
When I awoke, I was shocked to find myself aboard an Earth shuttle, bound for Mars.
I don’t understand? Were you remote-viewing the scene, still unconscious aboard the Guardian’s transport pod, or was it real?
The event was real, only I was living it as someone else, someone from my past but your future. Let me tell my tale, and you’ll understand.
What clued me in to the time period was the space vehicle itself. It was not a shuttle like those NASA had designed and flown during my teen years. This vessel was infinitely larger, with private berths to accommodate fifty-two passengers and a year’s worth of supplies. Nor were we alone on our voyage. There were eleven other shuttles accompanying us, twelve in all, like the twelve tribes of Israel—all crossing the great desert of space on our journey to the Promised Land … Mars.
You were on a scientific expedition?
No, I’d say it was more like a pilgrimage. The great holocaust I told you of had just overwhelmed humanity. Billions had perished, and billions more were destined to die. Something horrible had happened back on Earth … a cataclysm that caught the general population by complete surprise. But the upper echelons of the government knew, and that’s why we were aboard those space shuttles.
They kept it a secret?
A secret shared only by a privileged few. Years from your present time, clues about the coming cataclysm will be discovered. It will be kept from the public. Only those in power will know, and they will create a secret coven—in essence, an Earth evacuation plan, concealed behind an aggressive program to colonize Mars. Humanity, at least a certain privileged segment of it, would go on. Thousands had already arrived on the Red Planet. Our twelve shuttles would be the last to join our fellow survivors.
As we began our perilous four-month journey and Earth disappeared from our viewports, we cried and prayed and cried some more. Our salvation was Mars Colony, but we would never arrive, for what lay ahead was an off-ramp—the entrance to a wormhole.
There was no way to avoid it, no way for our pilots to even see it. A sudden surge of the shuttle’s gravity-wave detectors and whoosh—we found ourselves hurtling through the conduit’s funnel of energy, time and space distorting as we plunged through our Galaxy’s version of a rabbit hole.
Imagine falling from a thirty thousand-foot precipice, knowing your life is about to be extinguished, your screams squelched by the length of the drop. In those final minutes everything becomes clear, and you realize how much time you wasted on petty nonsense.
As frightened as I was, I could not tear myself away from my viewport, my mind mesmerized. We passed through gray interstellar gas clouds whose cosmic glow brightened into visible light, drenching us in pastels of crimson and yellow and blue before yielding to a hydrogen field of fluorescent pink.
Voices cried out in the darkened cabin, some identifying the gas cloud as the Orion Nebula. If accurate, then we had traveled some fifteen hundred light-years from Earth in the blink of an eye.
And then the cabin pressure increased and the spacecraft shook violently, and I closed my eyes to die.
How much time passed, I cannot say, but when I awoke, I was still on board the Mars shuttle, only the stars had stopped moving. We were through the wormhole, all twelve of our ships—and somehow we had survived.
I say ‘we’ yet I still had no idea who I was or what I was doing on board the vessel, but the sheer delight at merely being alive … it was too overwhelming to question.
In the distance I could see a red supergiant—a star so large that had it been Earth’s sun its girth would have stretched across the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. In close proximity to this monster was a planetary nebula, its fluorescent-style ring of gases appearing in shades of violets and blues.
I heard voices in the dark debate the red supergiant’s identity, the consensus agreeing it was Betelgeuse, a star over three hundred times the diameter of our sun and ten thousand times as luminous. If correct, then we had been transported to another section of the Orion spiral arm.
And then one of my cabin mates turned to me and addressed me as Bill.
So now I had an identity. The consciousness that had been Michael Gabriel had hitched a ride in the body and mind of William C. Raby. I … or should I say we, were a marine geneticist, selected for Mars Colony, not by merit, but by extensive international private bank dealings that had helped fund the journey.
Like many of the other passengers, Bill Raby had known the right people to bribe and had the means and political clout to save himself.
But you weren’t really this Bill Raby, were you?
That’s just it, son, in every sense, I had become him. My consciousness dominated his, I felt his fears as if they were my own. I had his memories, and his overwhelming sense of guilt, for like me, Bill Raby had also left a loved one back on Earth, and it was tearing him up inside.
The desperateness of our situation quickly spread throughout the cabin. Our trip through the space tunnel had destroyed most of our ship’s electronics, damaging our outer hull, crippling our engines. Like the rest of the fleet, we were hurtling through space, out of control, being reeled in along powerful gravitational forces that our damaged sensors could not identify.
Another wormhole?
No, it was a planet, its atmosphere vermilion, its appearance in many ways similar to that of Mars, though closer to Earth in size. Like the Red Planet, the alien world possessed two barren moons, one the size of Earth’s lone satellite, the second—a smaller potato-shaped body, perhaps fourteen miles in diameter.
Panic levels rose as our twelve vessels plummeted through this alien world’s atmosphere. With our heat shield damaged, our cabin began heating up like a furnace. Children screamed. Passengers held one another, hoping and praying for another miracle all of us knew in our hearts we didn’t deserve.
But another miracle did happen, coming this time from our gallant crew, who managed to angle the shuttle’s descent just enough to allow us to slip through the searing atmosphere without combusting into ash. A collective cheer embraced the cabin as the blackness of space morphed into a magnificent cardinal red horizon. Aerodynamics took over as our winged vessel soared like a plane high above an alien landscape. As we descended, we could make out a geology composed of barren volcanic rock, splashed with patches of moss.
Fear returned moments later as we continued losing altitude, dropping fast, with no suitable landing place in site.
With a sickening jolt, our tail struck terra incognita. The shuttle skidded, the cabin spun, and once more, everything turned to black …
TOP SECRET/MAJESTIC-12
WARNING: Unauthorized access or viewing of this document without the appropriate authorizations will result in permanent incarceration or sanction by authorized use of deadly force.
PROGRESS REPORT ON SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM
GOLDEN FLEECE
24 October 2027
STAR SHIP VESSEL: BALAM
1. Dr. David Mohr and the GOLDEN FLEECE team have been reluctant to speculate on the propulsion system of the Balam, ever since its arrival in Hangar 13 four years ago—this due primarily to the team’s continued inability to access the interior of the ship. A new theory and its related dangers, however, has led to some unanimous conclusions that m
ust be brought to POTUS’s attention.
2. Previous MAJESTIC reports have stated that the BALAM star cruiser most likely ‘surfed’ its way through Earth’s atmosphere riding its own massive shock waves, maneuvering at lower speeds/hovering utilizing an advanced form of magnetoaeroelectro dynamics. In this mode, the vessel’s polished gold external hull becomes the engine. Waves of negatively charged electron particles, embedded in the carrier frequencies of the electromagnetic waves ‘push’ the vessel through the air mass.
3. A second, infinitely faster method of propulsion is now believed to exist. Located underneath and between the two stern nacelle structures are multicellular exhaust nozzles. Upon further examination, Dr. Mohr’s team has reached a consensus, theorizing that these nozzles may have been designed to channel tachyon energy particles, leading the scientists to agree that the BALAM is capable of superluminal propulsion, labeled by NASA-BPP scientists as ‘Warp Drive.’
4. A third theory put forth by NASA-BPP concerns the BALAM’s ability to create an ‘exotic-matter’ force field, allowing the vessel to theoretically enter a gravimetric vortex (SEE WORMHOLES).
RELEVANT APPLICATIONS
5. The GOLDEN FLEECE team theorizes that the power produced to activate the BALAM’s Warp Drive would be enough to light and heat every city on Earth simultaneously and continuously for more than 100,000 years. The terawatts of power produced every picosecond by the BALAM’s interior reactor cores are the kind of power requirements hypothesized for hyperdimensional travel at superluminal velocities.
SAFETY WARNING / SECURITY ISSUES
6. In the opinion of the senior MAJESTIC team members and also Dr. Mohr: This Warp Drive propulsion system represents an extreme danger to the physical safety of Earth, possibly affecting the power grids and/or the ecology of whole continents if the system is accidentally activated.
7. Quantum-gravity physicists immediately expressed concern should the BALAM’s Warp Drive engines activate, producing a microwormhole. They stated that, should the magnetic containment fields that ‘bottle’ the quantum singularity collapse, the microwormhole could potentially expand to consume the entire vessel and perhaps whole portions of the planet itself.
8. The ability to create and navigate wormholes is the ability to traverse the boundaries of space-time. As per preestablished MAJESTIC directives, time travel is an uncontrollable threat to the security of the human species owing to the theoretical ‘Paradox’ effect (SEE EINSTEIN SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY).
GULF OF MEXICO / CHICXULUB CRATER
9. On 18 December 2012, Michael Gabriel confirmed that the Guardian’s vessel (BALAM) entered Earth space in pursuit of the alien object that crash-landed 65 million years ago. If the BALAM is capable of superluminal velocity, it therefore must be assumed that the enemy transport ship it was chasing was also capable of Warp Drive.
10. An extensive reexamination of the Chicxulub Impact Crater in the Gulf of Mexico reveals a Magnetic/Gravitational Field Anomaly. Recent discoveries of Magnetic Field Anomalies in both inner and outer space have led quantum physicists to theorize that wormholes may actually cross our planet’s path. These ‘GATES TO HYPERSPACE’ may cause the kind of magnetic/gravitational deviations experienced in an area intersecting the Chicxulub Impact Crater, expanding outward from the Gulf of Mexico into the Caribbean Sea to form an unstable magnetic region, better known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle.’
11. Discovered within the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ are small, very deep, very anomalous underwater caves, known as ‘Blue Holes.’ Robert Palmer, former director of the Blue Hole Research Center in the Bahamas mysteriously disappeared while diving in one of these anomalies. Palmer had theorized that the underwater anomalies are being created by the continuous popping in and out of existence of microwormholes.
12. Dr. Mohr believes the larger Magnetic Field Anomaly originating beneath the Chicxulub Impact Crater is being influenced by a wormhole, but not a microwormhole, a larger one, perhaps originating/approaching Earth space from somewhere in another space-time, or another section of our galaxy. If true, we could be looking at the formation of a gateway into another dimension.
GABRIEL TWINS
13. It is the opinion of senior MAJESTIC team officials that former POTUS Ennis Chaney was too quick to limit GOLDEN FLEECE’s access to the Gabriel Twins. Now fourteen, the boys may hold the ‘mental key’ that unlocks the secrets of the BALAM and the Magnetic Field Anomaly in the Gulf of Mexico.
CONCLUSIONS
It is recommended that Dominique Gabriel (the twins’ mother and legal guardian) be ‘convinced’ that it is in the best interests of her family to allow her sons to join the GOLDEN FLEECE team. Narcotherapies, hypnotherapies, microvolt brain implants, and even control of access to family members must be held in reserve to enforce compliance. Threats and applied duress should also be held in reserve as an option.
Submitted:
W. Louis McDonald
GOLDEN FLEECE
24 October 2027
14
OCTOBER 27, 2027: GABRIEL COMPOUND, LONGBOAT KEY, FLORIDA
3:02 a.m.
Bloodred subterranean sky. Searing-hot wind. Dark clouds churn, their speed surreal.
Below, an alien lake smolders, its mirrorlike surface lapping upon an ominous shoreline.
Jacob approaches the alabaster tree, its trunk as wide as a sequoia’s.
An icy fog announces the Abomination. The mist swirls about the trunk of the tree, and then a pair of bright azure-blue eyes twinkle back at him through the haze.
‘Come closer, Cousin. Let me lick your wounds.’
With a bloodcurdling scream, Jacob Gabriel launches from his bed and darts into the hallway.
Dominique yanks open her bedroom door. ‘Oh, Jesus, another night terror?’
The door across from Jacob’s bedroom opens. Immanuel stares at his brother. Shakes his head. ‘Again?’
Jacob pants, trying to find his voice. ‘Just wait … you’ll go through the same thing someday.’
‘I doubt it. But until then, why don’t you move your bed into the training center.’
Dominique turns to the dark-haired twin. ‘Manny, go back to sleep.’
Immanuel slams the door, bolting it from the inside.
Dominique moves to comfort Jacob, but he pushes her away.
‘Jake—’
‘No. I need to stay strong … for all of us.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m going for a walk to clear my head.’
‘It’s three in the morning. Jacob Gabriel, don’t you ignore me.’
The back door opens and slams shut.
Dominique’s eyes tear up, her heart aching for the son who has refused to hug her since he was seven years old.
A tropical gust greets Jacob as he races down to the beach. Lunar light from the three-quarter moon dances across the Gulf, illuminating the breaking crests.
Jacob kneels in the cool sand. Closes his eyes. Tries to meditate, desperate to communicate again with his father.
For a brief moment he breathes quietly, then his chest constricts and his body is overtaken by sobs, the tears pouring from his eyes as he collapses facefirst against the wet sand.
Stop it! You need to stay strong!
The wind dies down, yielding to a haunting echo.
Jacob wipes his face, then looks around, searching for the source of the sound.
The high-pitched moan leads him north. He follows the shoreline another quarter mile, and then he sees them.
The animals are everywhere, lined up along the beach like giant logs. Grays and humpbacks, right whales and blues, adults and calves … the dead and the dying.
Jacob approaches the largest of the beached mammals. The blue whale’s head, as big as a tractor trailer, is half-covered in sand, the remains of its 105-ton girth disappearing behind it into the Gulf.
The teenager reaches up and brushes sand from the female’s eye, then jumps back when it ope
ns.
A thunderous snort as the dying whale gasps a breath through its blowhole.
A moment passes between them as beast and boy contemplate one another. It’s like it wants to communicate. Maybe it can? Jacob Gabriel closes his eyes, entering the nexus.
The night dawns olive green in his vision. Every muscle in his six-foot, 183-pound muscular frame seems to come alive, every vessel in his body pulsating with blood and adrenaline, every sensation magnified. Looking up, he sees stars racing across the heavens, the cosmos coming alive.
The whale moans, its dying gasp echoing in his brain.
Leaning forward, Jacob places both palms against the blubbery torso, registering deep, intense reverberations as his hands become a living stethoscope. The mammal’s pulse draws him closer, as a white haze envelops his mind—
