“I don’t want to have to kill you in the hallway, Mr. Melas. But I will,” Nikhil said and then smiled. A smile that said he was quite at ease with what he was doing.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
I felt safe. We were on our way to the airport. And with each step I made toward getting to my house in Cleveland, I felt that much safer.
Nikhil had us leave him alone with Simon. He had told us to go back down to the car with Micah and that Micah would know what to do next.
“And do it now,” he said, without even looking at us or wiping that smile off of his face. “I’ll take care of things on this end.”
So we went down and found Micah. He took us to the hotel to get our things and by that time, Nikhil was in the lobby waiting for us.
“Ma,” Logan turned to me. I was sitting in the backseat of the car. “We have what we need for me to get permission for a dig in Panama. And with you in with the Senator . . . Don’t you think . . .”
“Yeah. I think so.” I knew exactly what she was asking. We both were so much calmer. It seemed like the last few hours almost hadn’t happened.
Almost.
“There’s our plane.” I followed Nikhil’s finger.
“Oh my goodness. Nikhil. Who’d you steal that from?”
He laughed.
“When you said you had a plane for us, I thought you meant like a little Cessna,” I said. “This is as big as Air Force One.”
“Not that big,” Nikhil said.
We climbed aboard and got settled.
“I have to go up front,” Nikhil said.
“You’re not flying this are you?” I asked.
“No. Just checking in.”
I buckled in and gazed out my window. I would be glad to leave the jungle. Logan could have it. It was a good thing for her. And I would help her. I’d talk to the Senator and she’d get permission to dig in Panama. But definitely I wasn’t going to be on that team.
“It’ll be a few minutes before we can take off.” Nikhil stuck his head the door of the cockpit. “Micah. Come on back. Let me show you around. Justin, you and Logan can get buckled up. It shouldn’t be too long.”
“I’ve got reading material.” I pulled out the codex from my carryon and showed it to Nikhil. He nodded and disappeared back behind the door.
“Ma!” She got up and stood over to my seat. “You’re supposed to have that safely packed away.”
“It is.” I patted my bag. “Right with me.” I opened it up and turned to the first pages. I hadn’t had a chance to look at it since I took it from the cave.
“What? Do you think you can just open it up and read it like it’s a library book?” She slid into the seat next to mine and leaned her head in trying to see inside the book. I pulled it away.
“I picked my one book carefully. I just didn’t grab something convenient,” I said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
I opened the book so she could see it.
“Oh my goodness. What is that?” She looked at me accusingly. “That isn’t Mayan.”
“I know. It’s Sumerian cuneiform.
“You can read that?”
“Yep. I can read it. Just like a library book. Looks like my part of the world found me here.” I smiled and waved her away. “Now go so I can read.”
Nikhil was right, it wasn’t long before we took off. Micah back in his seat, he and Logan had dosed off almost immediately. Nikhil hadn’t made his way back from the front of the plane, which was fine. I wanted to read and not be disturbed. With the blue sky and white clouds out my window, I searched inside the codex to find out why ancient Sumerian was in the Maya library.
I didn’t have to read long to find out the reason. After the first ten to fifteen pages of cuneiform, the language changed. I guess I should have expected it. What I had already read was something I knew all too well.
It was the Mars origin story. Written in Sumerian cuneiform, hidden in a Maya cave, in Panama.
But after those first few pages I found the now familiar mix of Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. Just like in my AHM Manuscript.
I looked over at Logan sleeping. This would crush her world. The codex was about our ancestors from Mars.
I inhaled with purpose and blew it out.
I started skipping pages because I soon found that the mix languages were an exact copy of the AHM Manuscript. And all of that was permanently etched in my brain.
The advanced knowledge they possessed. Experimentations on Earth. The destruction of Mars due to some nuclear event. And then the selection of people to send down here and the rest of the people that found out about it and sabotaged the plan.
But then I stopped. Stunned. This was something new. Now I understood why only one race of people was sent. I understood why the saboteurs were left to die. The saboteurs – the people who refused to be done away with and escaped here to be with the one race chosen by The Elect. Did they know the truth? Is that why they defied the edict of The Elect.
The reason only one race of people were chosen didn’t have anything to do with prejudice as I had originally thought.
It’s the reason why the Maya were sacrificing themselves.
They were running from the Ancients.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
I had made it back home. I sat in the quiet, the lamp on my desk the only light illuminating the room. It was dark outside my French doors. I got up and went to my bookshelf and pulled down a book on ancient Sumer. Opening the book, I flipped through the pages until I found the ancient Sumerian mythological god of mischief and creation. Enki.
One story about him tells how he met with gods who had gathered for a feast. He compelled them all to listen as he explained his new solution for the problem of human overpopulation, a concern in a 3,000 year old myth that I never could understand until now. Enki proposed that the gods create new creatures who would be less fertile than the last ones they made. Declare that women were restricted in bearing children, allow demons to snatch infants away and cause miscarriages he advised to the gods. And they could consecrate all those that remained virgins.
In every ancient culture there is a story of population control. Some are about genocide. Mass destruction like the story of the Great Flood, appear not just in the Holy Bible but in dozens of other cultures, even, I found out, in Maya myths. And then there are stories, like the one of the god Enik, where its people are trying to control overpopulation in little ways, like restrictions on having children or now I knew, through human sacrifice.
I sat with my eyes fixed, staring at nothing in particular. Just thinking. I was so glad to be back home. Simon Melas was dead, and Aaron Coulter was a problem to deal with another day. I felt safe for now from them. But there was a new fear that was catching hold of my soul and it didn’t stem from physical harm.
I ran my hand over the cover of the codex. Its smooth leather cover was thousands of years old but what was inside wasn’t bound by time.
The words I read in the codex that I had taken from the underground library hit me like a ton of bricks. Just all of a sudden, all those ancient stories about population control came together and made sense.
Create the perfect world.
Those words were in the AHM Manuscript.
And they too, now had so much more meaning than ever before.
I looked over at the closed door to my study. On the other side were Mase Logan, Micah, Greg and Nikhil. Jack had called and said he was on his way. They were waiting for me. And I knew I was going to have to tell someone about what I learned, including my daughter Logan. I had to tell what I knew.
I understood the first time I read the Mars migration story in those manuscripts I got in Jerusalem that our ancestors thought themselves gods. And now I’d learned that their God complex had reached a pinnacle. An all-time high. Creating animals and people hadn’t been enough. They truly believed that they were God incarnate. They thought they could not only cr
eate as God had, but that God’s judgment could also be their own.
God always cleanses. Then He replenishes. So shall we.
Those were their words. The words in the codex I found in Panama. Our ancestors, sitting on Mars, had rid the world of disease and could whip up new DNA like you do a box cake. But then with no one dying, their coveted advances caused overpopulation and all the blight that came with it.
So they came up with a solution.
Our ancestors had committed genocide. Time and time again. I had learned from the AHM Manuscript that the Ancients created the dinosaur and when they grew tired of the creature they injected a virus to kill them off. Extinction of the species hadn’t come by a haphazard strike of a meteorite as our history teaches us, it came by design. The same method, I now knew, they’d devised to rid the world of its too many human inhabitants.
The Ancients had destroyed their planet, Mars, and sent disease-free, knowledge-free people here to start again. But too soon, the new inhabitants of Earth learned the old ways of their home planet. Maybe because of the saboteurs who bought the knowledge with them, but mostly because our ancestors couldn’t rid us of the one thing that’s not in those double helix strands – human nature. Man’s nature would lead him, without even trying, to expand his mind - to always seek to know more.
“Ma.”
I looked up and saw Logan. I had to tell her what I found, but now seeing her standing there, it was making me more nervous than telling the world about man coming from Mars. I didn’t want to ruin things for her. For her career.
“Hey, little girl.”
She laughed. “You know you should probably stop calling me that. I’ll be thirty in a couple of years.”
“You’ll always be my little girl.” I stood up. “So is everyone still out there.”
“Yep. Waiting for you. You just kind of disappeared.”
“I had stuff to think about. Stuff I needed to try and figure out.” I scanned my desk and glanced around the room. “But I’m ready to go back out there. I have something I need to tell you guys.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
“The Ancients started the Bubonic plague, the cholera epidemic, and AIDS. They thought too many people wasn’t a good thing,” I just blurted it out when I walked into the room.
“Hold up, Justin.” I could always count on Greg to challenge me. “The Ancients had been gone thousands of years before AIDS, even the Black Death, came along. No way could they have created them.”
I didn’t answer Greg. I turned to Logan. “And sorry, baby, but that codex we took from your dig was all about our ancestors from Mars.” I gave a look that said “Sorry.” “Hopefully nothing else in there will be and you can have your non-extraterrestrial find.”
“What did you find, Justin?” Nikhil spoke. He rarely talked when he was at my house and other people were around. I’d be surprised though if he hadn’t already known about this.
“Our ancestors on Mars had a population problem. And genocide was their solution,” I said.
“Justin, you’ve got to start at the beginning. Stop acting crazy. Tell us what happened.” Greg leaned forward in his seat.
I drew in a deep breath.
“So you remember how The Elect sent only one race of people and tried to send the rest – the saboteurs – out into space to die?”
“Yeah,” Greg said as if he was the only other person in the conversation.
“Well they did it to control the population.”
“Is this sort of like what the guidestones we saw in Georgia with Jairo proposes?”
“Exactly like that. The Ancients had created a world where sickness and death were almost non-existent.”
“Google. Georgia Guidestones.”
We looked over at Micah. He was leaning up against the sink talking into his phone.
“Get to the part about the Bubonic plague,” Greg said. “I always thought the government had something to do with the outbreak of pandemics.”
“Okay. On that I was just being dramatic. I don’t know that they caused those diseases. But I don’t know that they didn’t. I believe that they may have done things to keep the number of people in the world low.”
“The Georgia Guidestones say that the population of the world should be kept under a half billion.” Micah looked at everyone then back down at his phone. “Google. World’s population.”
“So what did the Codex say,” Logan asked.
“As an archaeologists and having studied history, I always believed that new technology would evolve to correct the exceedance of the carrying capacity of our resources.
“English, Justin,” Greg said.
“There are approximately 7,126,062,216 people in the world,” Micah announced. Then back down at his phone: “Google. Overpopulation.”
Micah was in his own world. He and Google.
“If there were too many people we’d figure out how to fix it,” I said in English so Greg could understand me. Vertical living space – high-rises instead of single family dwellings. Frozen food instead of everyone needing enough land to farm. We’d find a way to compensate for growth. But after I read the codex, I’m thinking about those things differently. Instead of technology making it better, now I think it makes it worse.
We keep accommodating for more people, and one day we’ll turn around and we’ll have more people than the current technology can fix.
“Like now it’s a street full of high-rises spreading out onto previously uninhabited land. Forested animals forced to come into cities to look for food. Farmers still finding a more efficient way of farming but first millions of people die from starvation, like in China in the 50s and 60s. Or the Ireland Potato Famine of the mid-1800s. Technology doesn’t correct the problem with overpopulation. The world corrects itself.” I took in a breath and pointed to Greg. “The Bubonic plague. Over population was a problem in Britain. The Black Death came in and killed millions. It corrected the population problem.”
“What does that have to do with the codex?” Logan said.
“The Ancients took notes, so to speak. When they felt there was a problem with too many people, they reset the balance. In fact, it was like a mandate. That’s why they left millions to die when Mars was no longer a viable place to live.”
“And the codex tells about this?” Nikhil asked.
“Not only tells about it, it tells how to do it,” I said. “Step by step, practically.”
“Another exaggeration I’m sure,” Greg said and leaned back in his chair.
Before I could defend my comment, Nikhil spoke. “You’re not thinking about giving this to the Senator are you, Justin?”
“Yeah. I guess so. I told him I’d give him everything.”
“But the other things you have to offer don’t espouse genocide,” Nikhil said. “Overpopulation is a serious issue. Putting that idea in someone’s hands or head. Someone in power, isn’t good.”
“I think that it’ll be in better hands than mine if it’s with the government. I just don’t see the United States not stopping something like this if it were to happen. Not protecting their people.”
“They didn’t protect us from slavery.” Greg was back in the conversation. “So don’t be too sure.”
“Greg,” I said. “I don’t believe that the U.S. would purposely kill off their citizens.”
“They might not kill anyone,” he said. “But they might imitate China and India and start monitoring how many children families can have, how much space people can have to live in. You never know.”
“Well, Bruce Cook is a republican. And they don’t believe in any type of birth control,” I said and laughed. “I wouldn’t ever vote for him, but I can trust him not to try and limit the number of our people.”
“Hey everybody,” Micah said walking over to the table. “The Internet says that overpopulation is a really big problem.”
ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ ϫ
“I don’t see the problem, Jack. Maybe you ju
st don’t see the whole picture,” I said.
“That is the problem, Justin. The whole picture. This could become a global issue. What NASA says is held as gospel all over the world. And they’re behind Senator Cook. At least the man over the Mars team is.”
“Do you think Senator Cook could be a bad person?”
“The short answer? Yes. I do. And I’ve discussed this with Nikhil.”
“You’ve talk to him about it?”
“I have.”
“Nikhil can be kind of scary. I didn’t know he could be . . . Well so scary.”
Jack laughed. “Listen, Justin. Bruce Cook could take what you’ve got – those scrolls from Jerusalem and the Voynich Manuscript and start, what could in effect one day be, a one world government. Europe is leaning toward it already with the European Union.”
“I just don’t know,” I said.
“Then with this overpopulation component. It’s just not good. It’s bending toward becoming a public policy issue. Population control is real. It’s happening now. Mostly in third world countries. They want help from us? Then they have to help themselves. Policy dictates it not be so many of them.”
“But like I told Nikhil and Greg earlier, this couldn’t happen in the United States.”
“Wait. Let me finish. Countries like Bangladesh, Iran and Singapore had adopted policies to reward smaller families. As it sits right now, it’s just in a few low to poverty stricken areas. Put the policy behind it will work in any country. And whoever takes the lead in this will be revered. It’s not a good for these things you have to land in the hands of just one person.”
“I’m tired, Jack. I’m tired of running from people because of it. I’m tired of keeping it secret. I want to be done with it.”
“Just because you turn it over to him doesn’t mean you could stop running. Or that you’d be safe. You remember that. But you do what you think is best. I’m behind you. It seems like this was meant to be your responsibility. You have the power to tell in your hands. No one else has it. It’s up to you to make the right choice.”
Incarnate: Mars Origin I Series Book III Page 20
