The Kafir Project

by Lee Burvine

  His eyes were glassy and his voice cracked when he could speak again. "I told him. And then I thought he'd actually beat them. When he got out of Fermilab alive. Did he..." Kazemi choked up again. He blotted his eyes with a coat sleeve. "Did he have a chance to tell you how you inspired all of this?"

  "What?" Rees thought he must have misunderstood the man. "No, that's not correct."

  "Well there's my answer. Yes, it was some years ago, you did an interview with Skeptic Magazine."

  Rees vaguely remembered the interview. "Yeah, but I'm pretty sure we didn't talk about time-viewing."

  "No, but you did discuss how you were no longer a Mormon, in part because of what you learned about the history. And also because archaeology didn't support the Mormon scriptures. Jewish tribes in the ancient Americas, and other such nonsense."

  Something from the interview came back to Rees. "I said the Abrahamic religions were fortunate in that their origins were lost in the distant past."

  "Yes. Fischer was well into the theoretical work by then. He told me you got him thinking. What might happen if they weren't? Lost, I mean. The origins of those religions."

  The revelation stunned Rees. He had trouble refocusing quickly. Kazemi had just asked him a question he didn't entirely catch. "I'm sorry, Professor, what was that again?"

  "Your new companions," Kazemi said, "are they all right now? I've been reading about you three in the news. Livermore Labs."

  "It's four of us now, actually. And I'm not sure how they're doing. Not at the moment. But if everything works out, they'll be meeting us at the Ferry Building plaza around five-thirty."

  "I look forward to that." Kazemi steered them left at the corner, up Clay Street away from the waterfront. "But first we have a little errand to run."

  As they walked, Rees tried to prioritize the million questions he had waiting. Finally he decided just to start throwing them out. "Dr. Fischer said you had the data. That's the time-recordings, right?"

  "Yes. And the artifacts' molecular signatures. You know about all that?"

  "I understand the principle. Fischer also said someone he was calling Anaximander had the recovered historical artifacts. The lectionary codex."

  "Among other things, yes. His real name is Randolph Osborn. He was one of the project archaeologists. He's coming in from Jerusalem today. We're set to meet at the observation area on the south side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Six o'clock. I didn't want to risk bringing us all coming together at one time and place. Not yet."

  "I guess that makes sense."

  "But the thing is, I don't have the time-recordings."

  "What?" It came out about twice as loud as Rees had intended. Thankfully no one was passing anywhere nearby.

  Kazemi gave Rees's shoulder a reassuring pat. "I know where they are, Dr. Rees."

  Rees ventured a guess. "In the cloud? Distributed storage? It must be massive."

  "Oh my, no. Edward was adamant about that. He was afraid they could be traced and deleted. No, it's up there." He pointed up the street ahead of them.

  Rees looked to the tall buildings ahead and on the left. "The Embarcadero Center?"

  "A few blocks further there's a UPS store. That's where we're going. That's our little errand."

  Once again Rees thought he must have misunderstood. "Fischer mailed the data to you? But ... isn't it something like five hundred exabytes?"

  Kazemi nodded. "Something like that, yes. Anyway I have a rented mailbox. That's how we communicated secretly. Everything by mail. Ink and paper, he would say. That's how we'll beat them. Ink and paper. You have a gun, you said. In your bag?"

  The change of subject had come so abruptly, it took Rees a beat to realize he'd been asked another question. "Oh, yes. It's in here."

  "Right. You stand watch then, while I pick up the time-recordings."

  That sounded like a spectacularly bad idea to Rees. "I've never fired a gun in my life."

  Kazemi gave him another reassuring pat and smiled. "I'm sure the people you'll be shooting at won't know that."

  "That's hilarious, Professor," Rees said, in atone of voice he generally reserved for funerals.

  CHAPTER 56

  AS HE HURRIED up Clay Street, Kazemi glanced over at Dr. Gevin Rees, walking beside him. The man didn't look happy about his new job as an armed bodyguard.

  Kazemi understood completely. It didn't particularly thrill him that his only defense against trained assassins was a middle aged TV astronomer.

  Rees burned with questions, of course. Kazemi listened attentively as the man served up another one.

  "Dr. Fischer had a flash drive with him when he and I met. My friends have it now. It had some video recordings on it."

  "Ah, yes," Kazemi said. "We abstracted sounds and images from the full data sets. They don't prove anything by themselves, of course. They're like an impression made in clay, revealing only the surface. The full data sets record down to the molecular level in four dimensions."

  Rees nodded along excitedly. "That's why you can trace the artifacts forward along the time axis, and locate them now."

  "Or backwards to their origins. It's like digging for an underground power line. It might be hard to find at first, but once you do? It's quite easy to follow."

  "I saw two of the videos," Rees said. "One of them looked to be from the Cretaceous Period."

  "One of the first test runs."

  "I thought so. I also saw a celebration of the Eucharist."

  Kazemi remembered the first time Fischer had played that clip for him at SF State. How emotional it had all been. "That would be the lectionary sequence. I take it you understand the significance."

  "Only because I've read your work on the subject, but yes. I do." Rees paused. He seemed to be steeling himself for something. "There was another video I didn't see, because it wouldn't open. The people who are helping us have seen it, though. It showed a ... crucified man."

  They stopped together at the corner to wait for the light to change.

  Kazemi turned and looked very directly at Rees. "You know we expanded the range of the project, beyond the original design."

  "Yes, I know about that."

  Kazemi spoke slowly, giving the words the weight they deserved. "Then you already understand, Dr. Rees, exactly what is in that recording."

  Rees looked down at the sidewalk for a moment. When he looked back up, Kazemi saw pity on his face, and deep sadness in his eyes.

  "They just left him like that," Rees said. "I never imagined. Never. Of course, tradition has it he was taken down before sunset. Because of the Sabbath."

  Kazemi took a moment to consider how best to come at it all. Rees was a scientist. What he'd want were the unvarnished facts, plain and straightforward. "The Romans were brutal overlords, Dr. Rees. They were well aware of Jewish sensibilities regarding burial rituals and the Sabbath. How delicate an issue it was. Far from being accommodating, though, the Romans used it to their advantage."

  Rees frowned. "How do you mean?"

  "They found they had an even more powerful deterrent. Better than the execution itself. They let the bodies remain until-I'm sorry, there's just no delicate way to say this-until they rotted off. I don't know if you've read Crossan, but essentially he was right there."

  "That's ... it's horrible."

  "Yes. And yet the practice made sense from the Roman point of view. The thought of his body ending up like that would've given serious pause to even the most zealous Jew. To be denied a decent burial. To be left for crows and dogs. It would have been, for a devout Jew, literally a fate worse than death."

  The crosswalk light changed to walk. The two men continued up Clay Street.

  "Okay. So then what you really have is a recording of a Roman crucifixion," Rees said. "How did you know that it's..."

  "Him? A multiplicity of factors. Including the correct time range. It was thirty-three C.E., by the way. And we have the location of the executi
on, on a rock formation near the walls of Jerusalem. A formation that does in fact resemble a cranium. But what fairly sewed it up was tracing his origins back to Nazareth. Which was a tiny, tiny little village, by the way. Although I was more or less certain even before that."

  "Because of those other factors?"

  "Yes, and because two days before his crucifixion, this man and his followers caused a major disturbance in the Temple. Which is why he was arrested. We also have a time-recording of him addressing a small gathering. He recites a parable about a mustard seed. I have to tell you, I damn near fainted. Further research with the same technology will only, I believe, confirm that who you saw there in that video-that is in fact Rabbi Yeshua, the Nazarene. The man who came to be known as Jesus Christ."

  Rees went silent for a while. Kazemi assumed he was either digesting what he'd heard or deciding what to ask next. They stopped again at the last intersection before the UPS store and waited for the walk signal.

  Rees turned to Kazemi. "You needed some relevant historical artifact too, though. It's the nature of the technology. You have to recover something material to prove that a specific time-recording is genuine."

  "That's right. And we did. The obvious one. Not much survived until the present. But the signatures verify what we do have."

  The light changed. Rees was either ignoring it or hadn't noticed. "Bones, then," he said. "The bones of Jesus Christ."

  Kazemi nodded. "Fragments of bone. And some dentition. But you're wrong in an important way." He pointed up at the traffic light. "Let's go."

  "Wait, how am I wrong?"

  Kazemi stepped into the street and Rees followed right on his heels. "They aren't the bones of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is a quasi-mythical figure. What we recovered are the mortal remains of Rabbi Yeshua. A spiritual revolutionary. A brave and wise man, who died opposing repression by the Roman state and the Temple authorities as well."

  They reached the other curb just as the light changed to red. Rees looked like an older version of one of Osborn's religious history students now. Eyes wide with wonder and filled with questions.

  "And the empty tomb?" Rees asked.

  "What do you think?"

  He didn't hesitate. "There was no tomb."

  "Of course not," Kazemi said. "Which is why Paul never mentions it. That was later legend. Yeshua was a penniless, itinerant faith-healer from a backwater village. He had no family or friends in Jerusalem. If a homeless man from Appalachia died in New York City, what are the chances his remains end up over in Woodlawn, in a three hundred thousand dollar, marble mausoleum? It would've been the equivalent of that kind of money we're talking about."

  "And the Joseph of Arimathea story?"

  "Well, first of all there never was a place called Arimathea, not then. The name itself is a kind of pun."

  "A pun?"

  "A pun or a play on aristos mathetes."

  "Best disciple."

  Kazemi smiled. "Ah, you have some Greek. And the word ending there, ea-that's a suffix that indicates a town name, like ville or burg would in English."

  "So Arimathea would be read as ... Bestdescipleville?"

  "That's exactly right. Joseph of Bestdescipleville. A fictitious name for a fictitious character. A literary invention to make credible a story that involved physical reanimation. Which is not even how Yeshua's early followers understood the idea of resurrection!"

  "Yes, I've often wondered about that."

  "Well, read Paul carefully. A seed goes into the ground, he says. And what comes out of the ground in no way resembles the seed. What dies is the natural, the corruptible. What rises is the spiritual. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, he wrote. Now, does that sound like a corpse with holes in its hands?"

  "Something happened to galvanize those men," Rees said. "That much is inarguable."

  "Oh, certainly. Their leader, the man they believed to be the Messiah, who would restore Israel's independence from Rome and so much more, was executed by his enemies. Can you imagine the cognitive dissonance? Intolerable. Absolutely intolerable. It had to be resolved somehow. And abandoning everything they cherished and believed wasn't the way to do it. You know about Rebbe Schneerson, don't you, in Brooklyn?"

  "I've heard of him. But my interest in Judaism has always been historical."

  "Well, many of his followers hailed him as the true Messiah too. When Schneerson died of complications from a stroke, the idea that he would resurrect spread through the Lubavitcher community like a viral video. Sure enough, a number of his followers, including a prominent French Rabbi, believed they had seen him again. So he's not really dead, you see."

  "They found a way out of the mental conflict, the Messiah's work being unfinished-which isn't possible if he's really the Messiah."

  "Exactly. Just as Yeshua's followers did." Kazemi gestured to the UPS store coming up on the right. "And here we are."

  Rees had not run out of questions by any means, and Kazemi promised him a more complete review of the project's results as soon as it became practical.

  When they both were ready, Kazemi stepped inside the UPS store, and left Rees to guard the entrance.

  * * *

  REES HELD THE gun inside the gym bag, and tried not to look like he was about to have a heart attack every time someone passed by.

  A middle-aged woman in a long winter coat sauntered past, walking some kind of toy breed dog.

  A few minutes later a teenaged boy in tight orange pants rolled down the far side of the street on a skateboard, wheeling toward the waterfront.

  Less than a minute later, a couple of young men exited the UPS store together, laughing loudly.

  Each time someone appeared, Rees tightened his grip on the gun inside the gym bag a little more. Despite the growing cold, a trickle of sweat ran down his spine.

  The minutes continued to creep agonizingly by.

  Rees became convinced Kazemi had been in there much too long. Something must have gone wrong. Should he go in? Should he wait maybe just a little longer?

  He started toward the door, and was reaching for the handle when it opened.

  Kazemi burst through the doorway with an intense look on his face. He passed Rees without slowing. "Let's go. Go."

  Rees trotted after him until he caught up. Kazemi was holding a padded mailing envelope in one hand. It had been torn open.

  "What the hell happened in there?" Rees asked.

  Kazemi pulled a book out of the mailing envelope and held it out to Rees. "Here."

  Rees took it. The book was clothbound. He opened it as they both continued down Clay Street.

  Handwriting inside. Dates and entries. Not a book, a diary. Rees felt his heart beating faster as he flipped through page after page of the now familiar, cursive script.

  He looked over at Kazemi. "I don't understand. What the hell is this?"

  Kazemi glanced back at him, then looked forward again and shook his head. "I haven't the faintest idea."

  CHAPTER 57

  REES THOUGHT DANNI Harris would never stop hugging him. And he didn't mind it one bit.

  It was drizzling intermittently and darkness had already fallen by the time Morgan showed up at the Ferry Building plaza with the rest of them. Danni was so excited to see him, Rees worried that she was going to inadvertently shout out his name as she ran across the plaza.

  When she finally released him, Rees introduced Professor Burhan Kazemi to her and the others. Naturally, everyone had a thousand questions. Rees asked them to set all that aside for the moment.

  "First things first," Rees said. "We're meeting the man that Fischer called Anaximander over by the Golden Gate Bridge at six o'clock."

  "Does he have the artifacts?" Morgan asked.

  "We think so. We don't have much time so..." Rees turned to Kazemi. "Professor, would you please show them."

  Kazemi brought out the food diary that they'd picked up at the UPS store and he
ld it up.

  "That's it," Rees said. "The diary I told you about on the phone. That's all we found in the mailbox Fischer directed the professor to."

  "I think I recognize that." Morgan reached for the diary. "May I take a look?"

  Kazemi handed it over. Morgan cracked the diary open, and squinted at the pages in the weak light out there on the plaza.

  Rees could see it on Morgan's face-the same confusion and disbelief he'd felt himself. "So," he said to her, "what do you think?"

  Morgan closed the cover and flipped the diary over, checking out the front and back. "Well, this looks a lot like what I saw Fischer writing in back at Fermilab. Saw it a few times. He said it was for posterity." She looked at Rees, her eyes hard now. "And it's all just food?"

  "Every page," Rees replied. "What he ate, where he ate it, and when. And detailed notes about each meal. I notice he's not particularly fond of steamed carrots. I'm sure that's very important."

  "Are we certain Edward Fischer really wrote that weird thing?" Danni asked.

  "That's a good question." Morgan was wearing Fischer's leather pouch. She reached inside and pulled out the green spiral science notebook along with some loose papers. The notebook had warped and expanded now that it had dried out some. She opened it, and held it up alongside the food diary.

  Rees stepped closer to get a better angle.

  Except that the food diary appeared to have been written with a different pen-the letters more scratchy-looking, less smooth-the handwriting matched perfectly.

  "It's definitely Fischer's writing," Rees said.

  Kazemi rubbed his fleshy face and growled. "This is ridiculous ... I knew the man. Yes, he had his eccentricities. No more so than many exceptional minds do. But the whole mad scientist business-that was just something the press enjoyed playing up. Like Einstein's forgetfulness." He shook his finger at the diary. "I will tell you this. Whatever that is, it's not insanity. That much I know."

  "Well, it's not the time-recordings either," Rees said. He noticed Morgan wincing, her eyes squeezed shut. "Are you okay?"