The Voyage

by Douglas Falk

  “That’s my husband. And yes, they are twins. You’re not a genius if you so guessed, Mr. Wilander!”

  “John. My name’s John—we can disperse with the titles, since you set the bar for that yourself.”

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself…John. Let us continue. Where were we?”

  “About to get to the matter at hand,” said William loudly from the back. “First off, thank you for granting me and my reluctant friend here an audience.”

  John rolled his eyes.

  “An audience! How very pompous that sounds. I may be an astrophysicist for fifteen years now, but that doesn’t make me the Pope, does it?” said Celeste and took a seat behind the large wooden desk.

  “Well, I figured your schedule must be pretty packed, would it not? Someone with your stature surely has requests from left and right to tend to and lectures to hold.”

  “You’re not wrong, William. But you caught me in an opportune moment. I have a couple of hours to spare, for sure,” she said and glanced at the beautiful solid oak pendulum clock at the wall and surmised that she had about three or four hours of leisure time today.

  “Jolly good. So…I’d like to cut to the chase,” said John and raised his voice.

  “William brought me here because he thought you could change my mind about something. The two of you share the same…uh…fringe worldview, so to speak? Is this accurate?”

  Celeste’s smile was as good as wiped off just as soon as those words were uttered, and she glanced at him with a stern look on her face.

  “That is true. We’ve been in touch for several months about this. Somehow it is much easier to open up about one’s secrets over the internet than it is face to face, despite the fact the both of us were complete strangers and anonymous as well. Eventually William gained my trust enough to the degree that I was comfortable to share my real identity with him, and he did the same. You will understand that in no way, shape, or form are you, or William, to disclose what we will talk of in this room today. Not a soul—my reputation and image would be shattered if it was known what I personally believe about cosmos, rather than the official version that I actually teach to students. As a wise man once said, ‘Reputation takes a lifetime to build…’”

  “And only seconds to destroy,” said William, proud that he was able to finish her sentence.

  “We both understand perfectly.”

  He looked at John, who nodded back.

  “Our lips are sealed.”

  “How exactly did you get to know William? If you could be more precise. Just curious,” asked John.

  Celeste complied. “On an internet forum, wherein this topic was brought up. We were thrust into a lengthy argument concerning Foucalt’s Pendulum, and then some time later we got to know one other by sending private messages over time. We eventually formed a strong, lasting bond…he’s a good lad.”

  William blushed. “You’re too kind, Dr. Wood.”

  “I told you, it’s Celeste. For the last time.”

  “Celeste. I admit that I was sure you were pulling my leg when you first wrote about your credentials. Surely, a renowned astrophysicist would not argue against the heliocentric model of the universe in the comment section of some cesspool website. I did not believe you until you sent me pictures of your diplomas. There are many on the internet who assume false identities for some personal game, usually money scams.”

  “And I did not think you were the William Milton, Oscar’s son! Everyone knows of your father, of course. He’s one of the richest men in Sweden and by far the nation’s wealthiest entrepreneur. One could even argue that he is the Elon Musk of this country, although I am hesitant to use his name as a compliment these days. I did not know that he had a son until I looked it up. It was you indeed. Where is your father as of now? I seem to recall reading something in the paper the other day about a Lockheed Martin conference in the Far East.”

  “That is true. Lockheed Martin is launching a new, as-of-yet secret project in Asia, and he is currently in Jakarta. He was there when last we spoke, anyway. A couple of days past, I couldn’t swear it on my life that he’s still there as I am not privy to his travel schedule. I sure wouldn’t mind trading places with him. I would take the humid, blazing heat of Indonesia any day over this freezing spell we have to survive through over here in the Venice of the North.”

  John anxiously fiddled with his set of keys in his left pocket.

  I want to get this show on the road now. Let’s get this freakshow over with, sooner rather than later.

  He decided to rock the status quo. “Doctor Wood…hrrm, I mean Celeste,” he added when he saw her raising a finger as if to correct him. “Celeste. An astrophysicist denying the heliocentric model. Isn’t that something of an oxymoron?”

  “Absolutely. No doubt about it,” said Celeste with a chuckle. “Kind of like a football coach who hates football, or a bank clerk who hates money? So, you can imagine exactly how arduous and painful this process has been for me, reaching this conclusion…a conclusion drawn, that I never would have seen coming if I so lived to be a hundred.”

  Celeste walked slowly to the drawer behind the desk and grabbed hold of a large globe Earth model on a stand and placed it on the desk. She put her hand on that dusty miniature model and looked at it closely.

  “That this Earth we call home, this blue marble…is nothing but a fantasy. Fiction. An illusion. Call it whatever you like—the point is that we have all been hoodwinked, and the Earth cannot be a sphere. It simply cannot, as it does not hold up under scrutiny. And if something is incorrect, it needs to be corrected. No matter the costs. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”

  The famous quote by Jim Garrison in front of the jury at the JFK trial, pleading to the masses that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have possibly been the lone gunman. I’m starting to like her already.

  She placed both hands on the globe and spun it, as quickly as she could, from west to east.

  “A thousand miles per hour, they say we are spinning at this very second; 1,040 MPH, to be exact. Meanwhile…” she leaned over to the window and looked up in the skies. “Meanwhile, we are also orbiting the Sun at the whopping speed of 67,000 MPH, while the whole Solar System is hurling through the Milky Way at the insane speed of 448,000 MPH. Does the lunacy end there, you think? It does not. In addition, the Milky Way is also in motion, racing towards the so-called Great Attractor…at the behemothian speed of 1.3 million miles per hour.”

  John looked at her, speechless.

  How did I not know of this? I thought I had a decent grip on how the universe worked. I did not have a clue about this very fundamental scientific data.

  “My friends. We are dealing with numbers so preposterous, that when analysing it with a fine-tooth comb, you realise that the entire cosmological model we have been taught is an insult to our collective intelligence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, as they say. And the proofs simply aren’t there to be found. Even the great Albert Einstein, hailed universally as the man of the century, never performed a single experiment to prove any of his claims. He only dealt in theories. So, what we are left with is mathematics and conjecture. Even the renowned George Ellis admits to this.”

  “I know who George Ellis is. What did he say, exactly? Would a leading figure within the field of theoretical cosmology admit that the heliocentric model is a just a mathematical construct without basis in reality? I find that rather hard to believe,” said John.

  “I was merely paraphrasing.”

  “What did he say then, exactly?”

  “What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that,” she quoted.

  Intriguing. I thought for sure that the scientific method, at its core, was invented as a way to let go of archaic belief systems and pre-packaged conceptions that would get in the way of truthful, scientific discovery. I suppose scientists can be corrupted, l
ike any mortal.

  Celeste walked away from the window and took a seat in her chair once again.

  “Had I been told that I would stand here and slam the very foundations of science a year ago, I would have laughed you out of the room. And yet—here I stand. Here I stand, after all my efforts of proving the sphere failed. My ammunition against it proved to be duds, and I eventually switched teams. I had to go with my gut feeling. At the end of the day, whether the Earth is flat or a sphere comes down to the question of faith. Do you trust the words of men, like we are asked to in the set paradigm…or do we trust our five senses, by using the real scientific method? If it isn’t repeatable, measurable, observable, testable, and falsifiable, then it is not real science. Period. No matter what the current self-proclaimed pontificates of science say, this is how it really works.”

  “Celeste, I can tell you this straight away. I am not remotely convinced…but I am intrigued. I have a curious heart and an open mind. I did watch a couple of videos yesterday that William recommended me about it.”

  “Which ones? Very good, John!” William was stoked.

  “A video concerning a curvature test. The guy in the video tried to prove that the alleged curvature drop between two points in California wasn’t there to be found. Jeran, I think his name was. And I watched another video that tried to debunk the good old claim of ships going over the horizon, which we were taught in school. I don’t remember precisely how they tried to explain it away, but the essence of it had to do with atmospheric lensing and perspective making the boat disappear hull first, rather than it slowly vanishing from our sight due to the curvature of the Earth, as we have been told in textbooks. He called it the law of perspective. The same guy was also adamant that bridges, tunnels, and railways are not constructed with the curvature of the Earth in mind. Now, I’m no architect or land surveyor, so I haven’t got the foggiest if they do take the curvature in consideration or they don’t. An argument I had heard before, by my friend over here.”

  John pointed at William and kept talking. “…Pointing out the same thing. It certainly is interesting, I will admit. All of this is, not because I share your belief, but because it has made me think about, and question, things I have literally never questioned in my entire life.”

  William and Celeste looked at one another in unison and exchanged knowing looks.

  John continued. “You have my attention. That said, I’m still not remotely convinced. I just can’t see it. I can buy the motive, but not the logistics and paperwork that would be required to keep such a massive conspiracy going like clockwork. Not to mention that I have about a thousand itty gritty science questions you would need to answer and explain and go in to detail of how they could possibly work on a flat, stationary Earth. I am all ears.”

  Celeste stared right into his eyes and tapped gently on the globe with her fingers.

  “It’s a good thing that you are sceptical. In fact, the only reasonable response when first hearing about something like this is complete and utter dismissal of the idea. It’s a crazy, stupid, and backward belief. A cult. A phalanx of society that belongs in the same category as the church of Scientology, voodoo practitioners, and witch doctors. If you would have gotten aboard the train without going through this initial process, I would have been worried that there was something wrong with you! We all go through this process, which takes time. A lot of time. But when you are finally there, staring at the screen, realizing that no matter how dearly you want to cling to your beloved blue ball we all grew up with is about as real as Santa Claus. There is a saying that was coined rather recently…a rather corny mantra, but a true one.”

  “What’s the mantra?”

  “Once you go flat, you never globe back.”

  John chuckled. “That sounds like a cheesy tagline for a B-movie.”

  “It does. But you will see how true the meaning of it is…soon enough.”

  Celeste kept spinning the globe.

  “I don’t think you quite understand just how indoctrinated we are, every single one of us. Once boys and girls graduate from school and make the leap into adulthood, the question of where we live is something very few ever revisit. Those who bother are probably mainly the science geeks who want to learn more about the universe for the sake of personal trivia. The fact that we live on a sphere is so cemented, and so programmed, that it has become an unquestionable fact that we stand on a floating, wobbling, tilting blue ball of bendy water hurling through infinite space. How did this come to be, do you think? Why is it heresy to question the shape of our world?”

  “A preponderance of evidence. Photographs from space. Satellites. GPS. This is fairly basic stuff,” said John calmly.

  “Hardly. It’s easy to succumb to the comforting idea that all those things are real, but I can assure you, everything you just mentioned are just different branches of the same mythical tree. No, the real reason why 99 percent of mankind believe what they believe is due to repetition. What is the first thing you see when you enter a classroom? Any classroom, at any given place in the world. North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania…it matters not.”

  John made an indifferent gesture.

  “I don’t know…a whiteboard. Benches. The Periodic Table hanging on the wall.”

  “True enough. But I am of course referring to this little toy,” she said and handed him the globe with a determined look on her face.

  “You saw this orb the first time when you were but a toddler, two or three years of age at the most. At this stage, the programming takes a hold of you, as the human brain is not fully developed until the age of twenty-five, two decades after you encounter the first globe. The brain of an infant is so very easily hijacked, since they don’t know any better. And why would they question what the adults say? They have no reason to believe that adults are lying to them, as the concept is completely foreign altogether. Ah, nearly lost my train of thought…yes. Yes! This thing you now hold in your hand…you will look at this toy in one form or the other for nearly every day of your life. If you skip school one day, no doubt will you see it pop up in movies and television shows. It’s an inescapable fact that the game is rigged—we all grew up with the ball, so it’s very difficult for us to unthink the ball as adults. It’s an arduous process.”

  “I had not ever thought of it that way, but I suppose you’re right in that sense. Had we grown up with maps depicting a flat Earth in every class room, maybe we would have grown up being more confused,” said John.

  “Deliberate or not, programming is programming. And few minds are so easily corrupted as the minds of children. The most effective way of bending a person to your will is repeating the information you want out endlessly. Eventually, they will believe it. Ask any expert in this field and they will agree, I can guarantee you.”

  “What field would that be? Never heard of someone taking a doctorate in ‘brainwashing young children’ studies.”

  “Don’t get cute with me, John.” She sneered but lovingly so. “Anyway—that is the primary reason. Coupled with the programming, you are also taught right from the get-go that there is no more land to be discovered on this Earth. Everything has already been mapped out and measured, right down to the last puddle of mud in Tasmania! If you believe that you live on a sphere where every inch of land and sea is already discovered, well, the only logical assumption any person, young or old, with half a brain to spare is that searching for additional lands would be a quest most futile. We are taught that there is nothing more to see, nothing more to the story, an old truth which needs to be revisited, for sure…in light of this.”

  John looked deep into the eyes of the elegant professor and contemplated.

  What is going on with my life? How did I end up in circles such as these?

  “We are taught that the belief in a flat and stationary Earth is the most preposterous worldview a man can have. An archaic belief, only subscribed to by desert-wandering nomads or Neanderthals, thousands of years past.
Or in more modern time, only shared by the most uneducated rabble of society, the lowest step of the pyramid…the bottom of the barrel. We were taught that the old cultures and societies were uninformed and unintelligent and that our five senses cannot be trusted. The key that unlocks truth’s protective layers is embracing your five senses and crafting your worldview from there and cast aside the old ways of just blindly following the words of men, which all three of us are guilty of, I am sure. You need to take a zetetic approach to these things. That is the road to enlightenment, in my opinion. I am a rare case indeed, a rogue breed in my professional field—had you asked a thousand colleagues of mine, only a handful would share my views. A handful, or less…at least officially. There was a documentary released a few years back called The Principle. The producers of the film were devout Christians who wanted to back the men of science into a corner and convince them to spill their guts on camera about the accepted cosmology we’ve all been taught, and asked them to provide ample proof. What the scientists let slip is truly astounding—many of them are quite clearly closeted geocentrists but cannot openly admit so for obvious reasons. When the film came out, every single scientist who appeared in the movie backtracked and claimed that they had been deceived—they thought they appeared in a mainstream science documentary. Maybe they were deceived, sure. But the fact remains that they revealed what they really believe, beyond all their equations and fancy titles. They are geocentrists through and through. However, when your career is as stake, one will fight tooth and nail before publically accepting an alternative view that opposes what your field of work relies on—in my case the heliocentric model of the universe and all that it entails. Your ego will not allow you to question the set paradigm. Seeing as we have been engineered ever since we were toddlers that the alternative is the height of stupidity and folly, it creates an appetizing scenario for those who are responsible for designing and upholding the deception.”