by Adam Sea Klein
- Crescent Roads Publishing -
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Adam Sea Klein
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapters:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 - 24 - 25 - 26
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“Despite all odds,
I was compelled to keep going.
In that matter, there is no other choice."
Adam Sea Klein
1.
Lights flash among moments of darkness — whirring sound grinds through the air, surging deep, long pulsations. The trees swirl above, winding branches whip, as steady winds push hard against everything above the soil and road. The engine of my truck races. My heart pounds hard; it's all I can feel.
The stream of adrenaline bellows through my body. “ I shouldn't be here now.”
“I should leave while I can.”
The voice of my mind is different... small, loud, terrified. As the sun set, as the dark clouds of spring rain cover the sky, across the horizon, there is a lighted form. It extends from left to right, so far away... so large; it’s an object long and wide, 80 miles from side to side.
I hear the screaming horns, the traffic has turned toward me; they run in panic, like gazelles that flee from crocodiles. I can feel their sense of fear, like blood.
Why I turn towards that thing… that monumental shape floating in the sky, that thing unknown, that ominous object, is beyond my ability to understand.
I feel terror, intrigue, and something more. I feel pulled.
To see that massive shape and push towards it while others run away, which rips a hole in my understanding. When that gargantuan object revealed first glimpse, something inside me changed. I felt a new reality begin.
Everything I was as person has been ripped away. My past disappeared, my future... our future, erased.
As I stare at a super massive... alien object, my eyes cannot deter. I already want to forget, but I want to know... what are they... are they good or wicked. There is no time to sort this out, not within me, not now.
I am being pulled.
I must know.
I must be there.
I don't know why.
Lightning arcs across the sky.
The giant thing is moving.
I have to focus.
2.
45 minutes pass, foot pressed on the accelerator, driving dangerously. I twist the radio dial, it all sounds bad, frantic voices, alarms, crowds murmuring as they ran. Reporters on edge, shrieks, women crying, men hollering as though death looms. They're all afraid, frantic, without information. No contact yet.
When I can take my eyes off the massive ship, I see strange things.
The cows are running away, the birds leave in troves, thousands of them.
There's sleet, rain, wind, not the normal kind, it's plowing my truck in rows, then pausing, then hitting in sheets.
The sky looks ominous, brutal, as the sun pushes into the dark, the ship takes on a pale-yellow glow.
I feel an urge... it's not normal. I'm fixated.
I feel my attention fully change, some shift, a proactive stance I cannot shake. I think strange things, like peace and surrender.
My adrenaline suddenly dives off. The change is confusing. I feel like something is controlling me.
I want to hold on... but I can't.
3.
I don't know what happened. I whited out. I have no memory of the last 30 minutes. I am still driving. I’m driving in a mental white-out. This scares me more than I can grasp.
My mind feels divided.
Why am I doing this?
My body won't let me turn around; it's fixed — it won't let up. I'm driving too fast now, it's reckless.
There's no one around.
I swerve to avoid objects, tree limbs, roadside floods.
I'm getting so close, but the ship is still far... yet in front of me,
the ship takes up most of the sky.
The size is remarkable.
4.
I white out again, 15 minutes has passed. I'm losing control of myself. It’s a bad feeling, reckless, sabotaging.
The ship is emitting a closely bound yellow light — a light clings across its entire surface. It radiates a sound, an incredibly deep constant whir, different from an engine, like an energy, a felt noise, lush, powerful, steady.
I turn the radio dial again,
the broadcasting has stopped.
A part of my mind is rushing away. “What am I doing?” I say aloud with great distress. I look in the rearview mirror, “ What am I doing?”
The road is long and straight, pedal to the floor... 90 mph...
100 mph.
115 mph.
I try to let up, but as I do, something overtakes the urge to slow down. It's like I'm falling towards the ship.
Nothing can stop what I'm doing, and it feels insane. My breathing has changed. It's hard to inhale; not heavy, but thick and slow. I'm being forced not to hyperventilate. I'm about to white out, everything in me is screaming stay awake.
I remain in limbo, almost here, nearly gone, back and forth, over and over again, in and out, thick breaths, I almost fade...
5.
I'm only aware of time every few minutes. I'm breaking up. At unwise speed I push the last stretch of distance.
I'm almost under the ship.
To be under that gargantuan thing is not easy, it is an object of great fear. It's the largest thing I've ever seen. There is no way to describe how this feels, setting below this alien craft — it must be the size of New York City.
The deep whirring sound moves right through me, the energy is insane. The ship seems almost monolithic from beneath, subtle features only.
I roll the windows down, the air is a perfect calm, but the sound is so present it drowns out everything.
“Why am I here?” I yell.
“Why am I here?” I'm desperate.
“Why am I doing this?”
“...WHY?”
6.
I've whited out. I open my eyes, and I am looking down... from the sky, beneath the ship — I'm floating in the air, moving upward. Down below, my truck is stopped, headlights on, door wide open.
I am suspended arms outstretched, no control.
I am being taken.
The terror is gone, no sense left,
emotions are paused, my mind is stuck in a glitch of calm.
I am in their control, my will removed, as I fall upward towards the ship, the glowing yellow ship. I move towards that giant thing.
A massive doorway opens, a sheer blinding light overwhelms my sight.
I close my eyes, open them, close them, open them — the blinding light will not go away.
I cannot stare.
In the end, I cannot think.
7.
I open my eyes, my heart thuds a new kind of thud, I can feel it in my hands and feet. I have been pulled into a large chamber room.
My whole body feels nearly paralyzed with trepidation. I don’t want to be here, surrounded by these foreign walls.
A staggering, bright, white light fills the area around me in pulses. I am now on a lighted floor. I climb to my knees, then to my feet. I move to the walls; they are cool like glass, solid as stone, behind them, a light source. There is a doorway, so large, almost seamless to the wall. The expanse of the situation is crippling. I don't want to move.
I fall to my knees, my mind spools as I look for understanding. I feel anxious, I feel longing, and my mind ratchets into frantic search and the prayers of panic.
30 minutes pass, the door begins to glow. A fractal pattern emerges from the door itself. The door shifts and begins to disappear as though the geometric pattern dissolves the door with tiny tracks of light. This amazes me.
In front of me there is a great hallway. I stagger down the hallway, my feet heavy, so heavy. The hallway is cold and blue, and dim.
There's a 30-foot-wide door at the end of the hall, and I pound on it, and it is unmovable like marble, so my fist does nothing.
I wait. The wait is excruciating.
8.
After an hour, the door energizes somehow. The door exudes that geometric texture, lines of faint light, the pattern emerges, evolves, and somehow opens these shapes — the door merges into itself and disappears.
There is a room beyond: it is a massive chamber room and in the middle of the room there is a great squared column.
Around the sides of the room there are other doors opened or opening, I see other people. My whole body sighs, but also blooms with compassion and a little shock, to know we are all lost.
The looks on their faces are like nothing I've seen before, absent of pride and humanity — wide open expressions of terror, sadness, surrender. We are rats on a foreign ship, and we have nothing to hide, no home, no persona, nothing but simple confusion.
A man yells, “We're... not dead yet. What have you seen?”
A woman cries, “They do experiments, we will be used and killed. Why did I come here? They made me keep going.”
The man yells back horrified,
“Have you seen the experiments, have you seen what these things are?”
The woman says in a long, drawn-out pitiful voice, “Noooo .”
I look to the ceiling and yell to the room itself, “Why have you brought us here?”
Others yell the same words. I walk to the beam in the middle of the room; it has fine surface breaks, the shapes of which look almost like a console.
The many doorways begin to close, the people murmur; some scream in fear.
My pounding heart fills my body. I realize the sound of true fear as a foreign concept; it cuts to the core like a freezing sting running across my heart.
I claw at the beam's surface breaks. These materials are something new, incredibly solid, metallic but glassy. I pound my fist and it feels as solid as pure granite.
I do a quick head count; there are nearly 40 people in this chamber, and when the doors close fully, the central beam in the middle of the room reveals itself, the metallic material shows a viewing screen, as though the nature of the material just changed.
The screen has foggy edges, but shows a birds-eye-view of the land — a second view shows the shape of the ship: it’s so wide, but has a longer, narrower front, a simple contour outline with modules, ports, and lights.
The image changes to a view of the entire world, like a satellite, but the view moves fast and freely, as though coming from a hovering camera.
We see the terrain around the ship; the scale is so hard to grasp. It makes a mountain range seem small, a massive object of incomparable size.
Then, on the screen, we see written words...
“CALM”
“SAFE”
I feel the slightest relief, but do not believe. My reality has changed. A small round portal opens from the console. What emerges is a spherical object that glows, a floating object in the room among us. The sphere moves 10 feet from the wall, by itself, and initiates a sequence of small lights, then emits a beam of light below.
From that light there is a shape: a hologram of a human male, 5 1/2 feet tall, wearing robes, ambiguous ethnicity, expression friendly.
The crowd encircles the hologram as it speaks “You are okay, yes, hello.”
The people yell, some are cussing. It's an uproar.
The hologram speaks again, “Yes, it is a dramatic process, indeed.”
The hologram asks of the crowd, “Please, please remain calm, for yourselves. You will not be harmed.”
The people grew calmer, but the air is harsh: they are terrified, they are chomping at the bit.
The hologram says, “I am called Ajax, and I will guide you. I am not an enemy.”
This entity, Ajax, continues, “I know every language of this planet, but all of you speak English, except you and you,” he said while pointing to two different people. “You also speak Spanish, and you, who speak Japanese as well.”
The crowd falls silent as two people nod.
“You have been chosen for this process, by a special method.”
The holographic man points to the console, “This great ship is called the Shangri-La — a name you might know, a name that stood for a mystical land of paradise.”
On the console screen we see the ship again. In the air around the ship, we can see other lighted orbs floating around it, and as the console image change it seemed clear these orbs are like cameras. The orbs look more like energy than objects, but it's hard to tell. They move quickly, suspended in air; they can move in any direction and seem to evade the laws of gravity with ease.
Ajax, speaks again, “We are entering a new experiment for this planet, a phase of... consideration.” The people move around Ajax as he continues to speak. The console images continue to change.
Ajax says, “This view displays the exterior of Shangri-La right now... we would like to show you the energy.”
The massive ship Shangri-La emits a sound, a deep pulse of indescribable sound, pushing out invisible energy that bends back the plants of the terrain like a smooth steady hurricane wind, followed by immediate calm. These changes are instantaneous.
“Again,” says the hologram, Ajax.
The ship emits the same energy, the same sound, wind, followed by calm.
“Again,” says Ajax.
It happens again.
“Now you can see, we are truly in control of this ship, and the energy.”
A woman with bright red hair speaks, “What is this thing... a ship or.... a weapon?”
Ajax says, “We are aboard a vessel of travel, and also, a great machine.”
The woman replies, “Why are you like a human? You're an alien, right?”
Ajax replies, “I am not a human.”
9.
With great severity, everyone asks Ajax, “What are you!”
“Tell us now!!!”
Ajax says, “In due time, you will know — for now, you must see the good side of the energy. May we have a brave volunteer. I would like to show you a positive experience. Then, if you like, others may follow.”
I am afraid, but need to know. It's how I am. I want to see the energy. I step forward and say, “It will be me.”
My eyes are watering, and I start to have a hard time breathing.
Ajax says, “Then it will be you, brave fellow.”
I am ushered toward a small chamber, a lighted chamber the size of a small bathroom. A door closes behind me. A voice in the room tells me the process requires that I remove my clothes. I don't like this, but slowly I comply.
I am slightly cold, until the lighted walls begin to emit more light; then I am warm. An energy begins to push against me, it's strange, I can feel my skin respond as though a subtle pressure is pushing all at once.
I feel tingling. The tingling grows. I feel energy inside my body. My heart is pounding, I have terrible fear.
The voice in
the room says,
“This is a process of healing.”
I feel my vision change into a blur, my ears feel pressurized, my joints feel full, my feet and hands tingle. I feel my skin shift, like it’s changing. My heart is pounding so hard I feel like it might explode. I am utterly terrified.
The energy stops.
The lighted room fades to dim blue.
My vision is so blurred, my eyes don’t seem to work right. I feel maimed and I'm scared. I feel around for my clothes and put them back on.
The door opens.
I can barely see faces, my sight is so blurred.
I hear Ajax's voice, “You must remove your contact lenses, Mr. Dorn.”
I stall when I hear my name.
I just freeze.
Then I lift up my finger and push my contact lens to the side. My normally bad vision is 100% perfect, my contact lenses are making my eyes blurry — I no longer need them, so I carefully pinch one out of my eye.
Ajax says, “Just drop them on the floor, Mr. Dorn, you will not need them again.”
The other people approach me... they can tell I am different. They’re saying things.
“He looks 10 years younger,” an older woman says, “This 40-year-old just turned 30.”
Ajax is smiling, he's beaming, “Who will be next?”
I look down at my hands and notice the deep scar on my left thumb is gone.
I say, “My scar is gone. It was a 17-year-old scar... as a teenager I worked in a factory and an industrial pulley almost took my thumb off. They had to rebuild my hand. It took three surgeries.”
The oldest woman of the group walks up to Ajax and she says, “Will my arthritis be healed, then?” She's sobs, “I have ached for so long.”
Infinity Machine Page 1
