The Mayan Resurrection

by Steve Alten

  America would receive its wake-up call on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1. Responding to a race the United States was clearly losing, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA would take control of space away from the Armed Forces and absorb all existing research centers.

  NASA began by focusing the bulk of its hundred-million-dollar annual budget on Project Mercury—a series of launches and experiments designed to evaluate whether humans could survive in orbit. Thirty-one months later, Alan Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space. Mercury’s success led to the Gemini Project, an extension of the human spaceflight program that utilized a spacecraft built for two astronauts.

  President John F. Kennedy recommitted the nation to space in 1961 by announcing his goal to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade. It was a specific goal—exactly what NASA needed, giving birth to Project Apollo. On July 20, 1969, eight years, eleven missions, and $25.4 billion dollars later, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

  Mankind would take a giant leap backward in 1967, when politics once more interfered with science.

  The Outer Space Treaty was a document initiated, negotiated, and rammed through Congress by a group of National Security and State Department officials whose only desire was to use fear to shut down the space program so that monies could be redirected to the Vietnam War. Within four short years, space funding had dropped a crippling 45 percent.

  Had this not occurred, the momentum of the Apollo program might have led to the establishment of a moon base in the 1980s and a Mars colony before the year 2010, uniting the global superpowers, preventing the nuclear war of 2012.

  More devastating political decisions would follow.

  A 1969 task force was asked to come up with three long-range space options. These were: a manned Mars expedition; a space station in lunar orbit with a fifty-person Earth-orbiting station serviced by a reusable ferry, or the Space Shuttle, a vehicle designed to take off as a rocket and return to Earth by gliding home like an unpowered airplane.

  President Nixon opted for the Space Shuttle.

  On April 12, 1981, the shuttle’s first mission, STS-1, took off from NASA’s launch operations center, now renamed the Kennedy Space Center. For the next six and a half years, the STS Fleet would perform brilliantly as their crew conducted a wide variety of scientific and engineering experiments in space.

  A Space Shuttle launch costs approximately $600 million dollars, yet this extraordinary price tag has little to do with the laws of physics or engineering. In simple terms, the business of space never had any cost constraints or competition, leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

  As an example, Lockheed Martin, the largest aerospace contractor in the world, rarely accepted hardware contracts on a fixed-cost basis. Instead, they ‘suggested’ what a space vehicle might cost, then added 10 percent as a profit. Once contracted, a myriad of managers and planners are added, driving up the cost of the vehicle—along with Lockheed Martin’s profit.

  Besides making space extraordinarily expensive, this tactic created an ‘old boy’ mentality that stagnated progress in space technology, resulting in no new U.S. launch systems in development. Instead, NASA continued to use an antiquated vehicle, armed with pre-Pentium electronics inferior to most video games, and fragile heat-dissipating tiles designed before breakthroughs in materials science.

  Cost overruns and White House cuts would lead to even more serious negligence.

  Following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and the public’s realization that the development of the International Space Station held no scientific purpose, the Bush and Maller administrations forced a ‘reorganization’ of the space program, refocusing its strategies not on space exploration, but space missile defense systems reinforced by policies of fear. Six years and $120 billion later, the only major accomplishment of SDI was to jump-start the second Cold War.

  And once again, the future of humanity stumbled.

  What the space program lacked was vision and a clear set of goals. Landing probes on Mars was important only if it led to the colonization of the Red Planet in the foreseeable future. What the public really wanted was space tourism. What had happened to all the promises of the ‘Buck Rogers’ era? Space, like politics, had become the frontier of the elite, each mission becoming more prosaic. Tax-payers could care less what temperature aluminum oxidized in a vacuum; they wanted to be a part of the action. The Wright Brothers’ invention had led to the advent of commercial airlines. Space had led to the sale of personal computers.

  When would John Q. Public be afforded the same opportunity to take his family into space?

  The Russians would be the first to give space tourism a go, funding the Cosmopolis-XXI (C-21) space plane, a craft designed to be piggybacked atop an airplane and released at 56,000 feet. From there, the space plane’s solid-fuel rocket engine would propel it to an altitude of sixty miles for three minutes of weightlessness.

  At $98,000 (or $540 per second) it was hardly a bargain, and the space plane was fraught with mechanical problems.

  President Chaney’s ‘vision’ speech moments before Jacob Gabriel’s murder was turned into a rallying cry that recommitted the American public to the space program. Two months after the Gabriel twins’ death President Marion Rallo and a new team at NASA announced its Manned Mission to Mars Project (3-MP), an ambitious 143-billion-dollar project designed to establish a series of habitable hubs on the Red Planet’s surface by 2049.

  Mars is the only other planet in our solar system endowed with the natural resources necessary for human civilization. Its soil possesses carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as water frozen as permafrost. Its atmosphere is dense enough to protect inhabitants from solar flares, its solar light ample for greenhouses.

  The 3-MP’s mission was based on an exploration approach developed in 1990 by Robert Zubrin, then a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin. The key to the ‘Mars Direct’ plan was to travel as light as possible, with rotating crews establishing habitats that would allow them to live off the land. The soil on Mars would provide for food, water, materials, and rocket fuel.

  By September of 2029, the ERV (Earth Return Vehicle), a new multistage rocket constructed using parts from already existing vessels, was sitting on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, ready for takeoff.

  Everything changed six weeks later, when the private sector officially stepped up to the plate.

  Project HOPE (Humans for One Planet Earth) was conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA years earlier because of the agency’s ‘good ole boy’ policies. Unlike other private rocket companies, they were not interested in launching satellites. HOPE was interested in space as public recreation.

  The key to HOPE’s future was a design for a new space plane, one that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the passenger vehicle into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.

  All HOPE needed was a major investor, one that could provide factories and the financial backing to launch the company.

  Enter Lucien Mabus, CEO of Mabus Tech Industries.

  Lucien had inherited MTI, but was bored with running his father’s company. What he needed was a challenge, something he could call his own.

  At the urging of his intoxicating fiancée, Lilith, Mabus struck a partnership with HOPE’s directors. Fourteen months later Project HOPE went public, offering investors an opportunity to claim their stake in the future.

  The response from the global market was mind-boggling. Opening at 22, the stock closed the first day of trading at 106. By week’s end it had split twice and was still soaring at $162 a share, making majority stockholder
and HOPE’s CEO Lucien Mabus the world’s first trillionaire.

  Attitudes in Washington changed overnight. Cape Canaveral Air Station, which controlled the barrier island and all launch facilities east of the Banana River, offered to move the Air Force’s Forty-fifth Space Wing in exchange for a long-term lease with HOPE. Lucien Mabus turned them down, preferring to erect a new complex in the city of Cocoa Beach at half the cost.

  On December 15, 2029, HOPE’s first ‘space bus’ took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway. On board were 120 passengers, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, a dozen members of the media, and a crew of twelve.

  Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The sixteen-hour flight was smooth, the service first-class (just eating in zero gravity an experience unto itself) and the view—well, the view was both spiritual and humbling.

  Within two months, HOPE was shuttling four space buses a week at a cost of $100,000 per ticket. Even with its high price tag, there was still a fourteen-month wait.

  By April of 2032, three more space buses had been added to the fleet, dropping ticket prices to $39,000. By 2033, over eight thousand people representing every nation had orbited the planet.

  The residual impact upon humanity was profound. ‘One Planet—One People,’ became HOPE’s mantra. Many believed it was no coincidence that the last oppressive government fell to democracy during the space bus’s reign. Religious and racial tensions eased. The global economy boomed as technology raced to keep up with the exploitation of space, and the exploitation of space created new Earthbound technologies.

  By focusing its energies on the heavens, humankind had finally grown beyond its childish adolescence.

  Plans were soon revealed for Space Port-1, the first space platform/hotel designed to accommodate the paying public. When completed, SP-1 would contain three main structures, each configured in the shape of a bicycle wheel. The upper wheel, known as the ‘hub,’ would house a restaurant, bar, gymnasium, and, at the very end of the structure, a nonrotating zero-gravity observation deck. Below the hub, connected by a main elevator shaft surrounded by spokelike corridors was the middle wheel, or ‘Spotel.’ The largest of the three structures, the 1,950-foot donut-shaped living quarters, rotating one revolution per minute, would provide guests with a third of Earth’s gravity. Below this massive wheel, connecting to the Spotel through an access shaft were SP-1’s control room, infirmary, crew and staff’s quarters, and the Space Port’s docking station.

  Seventy-five private guest modules would afford SP-1’s clientele five fun-filled days in space. No amenity would be spared. All suites would be equipped with videophones, Internet uplinks, twenty-four-hour-a-day room service, and private viewports. Activities would include space walks, guided tours of the command center and engine room, and full-body, gravity-free workouts in the gym. For another $30,000, a lucky few could even board a lunar shuttle for a two-day excursion around the moon.

  Advertisements were already flooding the global market: SPACE PORT-1: Join the 220 MILE CLUB. Total standard vacation package (including round-trip launch fare) a mere $120,000 per person.

  Six months after its plans were revealed, SP-1’s reservation list (nonrefundable 15 percent deposit required) was already two years long, and three more hotel chains were negotiating with HOPE to build a Spotel on the moon.

  Undaunted, NASA’s MP-3 program continued moving toward the successful construction of its Mars Base. With the global economy humming and humanity focused on space, the U.S. Congress increased the space program’s budget to levels previously enjoyed by the Defense Department, allowing for the design and construction of a moon base and lunar observatory/radio telescope.

  Not to be outdone, young Lucien Mabus and his new bride announced that HOPE was in the process of completing final designs for its own Mars Colony. The first Mars shuttles carrying engineers and supplies would arrive on Mars in winter of 2047—two full years ahead of NASA.

  NASA officials were incensed. Lucien Mabus’s plans were clearly pushing the envelope of safety and science, all in the name of profit.

  The Mabuses scoffed. For sixty years NASA had kept the exploration of space to itself. Had the program been run efficiently following the Apollo Program, man would already be living on Mars. Given NASA’s time schedule and its propensity for overanalysis, it might take another six decades before the first civilians could experience the Red Planet’s wonders. Like it or not, humankind was evolving, pushing for new sensory experiences in space, and he, Lucien Mabus, cosmic pioneer and heir to the Mabus fortune, was driving the herd.

  Unbeknownst to Mabus and the White House, the frontier of space was about to take on an all-new meaning.

  A wisp of thought, in the consciousness of existence.

  As the transhuman, Bill Raby, I had managed to use telepathy to open the sealed vault of our alien hosts. Heart pounding, I stepped inside the entrance of the ancient megaplex—a dark antechamber that went instantly ablaze with piercing violet lights, projected from multiple angles.

  I was being identified.

  The antechamber led into a great hall, and somehow I knew that everything man had ever known about his existence was about to change.

  They were everywhere, stacked vertically along invisible shelves of energy. Millions of cryogenic glass pods, eight feet tall, four feet across … specimens in a zoological library, a thin layer of frost concealing their contents.

  Approaching the nearest pod, I wiped ice from the outer glass and peered inside.

  It was a gangly bipedal humanoid, seven feet tall, floating within a clear liquid gel. The hairless skull was elongated, just like mine, only the bands of blood vessels traversing the scalp were infinitely more pronounced. The skin was mouse gray, more silicon than flesh. Protruding from its lipless mouth was a thick tracheal tube, the hose of which connected to a control panel somewhere within the hidden base of the glasslike container.

  The nostrils were plugged, as were the earholes. The eyes were wide-open, the pupils twice the size of our own, twinkling a luminescent azure blue.

  Star-shaped electrodes pulsating violet flashes were affixed to the crown of the being’s elongated head, the center of its hairless brow, and along the base of its throat.

  Kneeling, I scrapped more frost from the glass, hoping to see the lower torso.

  The being was hairless and naked, yet contained no noticeable sexual organs. The five fingers of each hand were long and slightly webbed. From my poor vantage, I could not see the toes.

  More star-shaped electrodes flashed over the solar plexus, heart, sacrum, and feet. I recognized these seven spots as chakra points, the body’s energy centers. Hindus had long believed the body’s chakra points channeled spiritual energy.

  I estimated a million of these humanoids were being held in suspended cryogenic animation, stacked one atop the other within invisible energy fields. It was impossible to tell how many of them there were, for the stacks disappeared high overhead into the darkness, and wound around the entire interior of the building.

  I knew they were alive, and I knew what they were, for somehow, I could sense their unified presence observing me.

  They were posthumans. Alive but not alive, unified yet all alone … unable to touch or feel.

  Unable to love.

  In the chaotic months that followed, every member of our colony would complete the transhuman metamorphosis. Coming out of our comas, we were like infants suddenly made aware of our bodies, each day revealing wondrous new discoveries about our genetic transformation. Besides the obvious leaps in intelligence and body strength, we found we could communicate concepts telepathically.

  More astounding was our ability to extend life expectancy.

  Numerous factors cause aging and death among Homo sapiens. One is telomerase, an enzyme that elongates the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, telomerase shrink. When the length drops below a set threshold, Homo sapiens cells sto
p dividing and mortality approaches. Other proteins, like apolipoprotein E, can postpone aging, but are present in limited quantities, as opposed to free radicals—the highly destructive, oxidizing molecules produced by the body itself that lead to senescence and disease.

  Given the gift to control our own cellular functions, we found we could now isolate and eliminate free radicals from our bodies while increasing the production of apolipoprotein E and glutathione. Further, we could reduce the loss of telomeres, potentially increasing life expectancy tenfold.

  Perhaps more.

  Our newfound focus was not just inward. Telepathy allowed us access to all of New Eden, including its recorded history, and we soon discovered the aliens’ society had been a dichotomy of existence.