by James Harris
The tutor was fairly conclusive. Anti-matter could not travel faster than light and was governed by the same mathematical laws as matter. There was a theoretical, mathematical possibility of a time warp as matter traveled through the universe. However, anti-matter was prone to annihilate all matter it came into contact with and could not make the journey without encountering space debris. Once it collided with matter, the anti-matter annihilation would convert the anti-matter into ionized matter. This process would severely rob the anti-matter of momentum, and thus the speed of the exploded star’s matter-antimatter cloud cluster would decrease to well below light speed. The cruisers were traveling at over one hundred thousand miles per second. They were safely out of range of the debris.
Later in the journey, Asunda began to listen to the sweet harmonies of the thousands of antique musical recordings that he had accumulated over his lifetime. They soothed him, causing his thoughts to drift and bringing him peace of mind.
The universe – sound waves, light waves, radio waves, other forms of radiation – is harmonic. The ebb and flow of all of cosmic nature is harmonic. The changing of the seasons – falling leaves, then new spring shoots, life, death, then life again, buds and flowers and fruit, the songs of the birds, the crashing of waves on the shore, the moon and the tide – are all harmonic. We, as human beings, no matter where we reside – along with the molecules, DNA, cellulose, and cells of all living beings – are an integral part of that harmony.
While most humans had a range of about 2 percent of the visual electromagnetic spectrum – the part that they received in the form of light – Asunda had about a 10 percent range. From time to time he could see lower frequencies like infrared and higher frequencies approaching x-rays. In the extreme ranges, there was no real pattern or consistency. His ability to see them came and went. Back on Sargon, he sometimes caught himself seeing a double image of another human as two frequencies in his visual range overlapped each other. Not identical, but similar in appearance, the two human forms were layered, one on top of the other, occupying the same space in the same moment in time. Neither was aware of the other. He imagined he could see two humans, but were they both alive? Who knew? These visions troubled him. He knew of no scientific labs that could offer answers.
He reclined the chair on the flight deck and relaxed. It was like a chair in a dentist’s office, except it was precisely molded and S-shaped. Asunda placed his hands on his chest like a corpse in a casket. Closing his eyes, he began his meditation routine. His breathing and his pulse slowed. He channeled the incessant chatter of his brain to a side rail, focusing on his inner peace.
Entering into a state of well-being, he let the modulating waves of nothing-thought, gray-white space, increase in frequency and intensity. He drifted deep into himself, deep through himself until he became transparent and then matter-less – and then he dwelled in his Being. It was like a veil, a shade, being lifted from over one’s head to reveal another reality. Not the reality interpreted by our busy minds, but the purity of Being that is simply us. The true “us,” not the “us” that our minds have arbitrarily created and defined.
Several weeks later, Asunda headed below decks to see to a secret cargo he had stored onboard. He believed that no one knew, not even Amonda or Alexia.
The walls of the corridor hummed softly. Ambient light glowed from all sides, allowing no shadows to fall as Asunda padded along silently. He took a moving walkway along the circular path to E-deck. Intuitively he knew what he was doing was dangerous. His pulse quickened as raw fear began to set in.
An electromagnetic security door blocked his way. He raised his eyes to the scanner and imaged a soft command. The door whooshed open for him. He hesitated for a moment and then entered. The door flicked shut behind him, sealing him in the room. A low-level light began to glow in response to his presence. Lined up in a row were twelve black obelisk crypts. The faint light danced off their gleaming surfaces. He could see his reflection in their ebony, blue mirror-like finish. The silence was almost painful. It was stifling.
He walked tentatively toward the gleaming statue-like obelisks. Before him stood the last remaining Ancients from Sargon, the most powerful humans ever to have developed, smuggled aboard in direct defiance of the ruling king.
Suddenly, there was a rush of mind energy as many voices spoke. The message was garbled.
Then one voice stood out.
“I see you also, Great Ones,” Asunda replied, speaking to no obelisk in particular.
“The universe needs your wisdom. I have a duty, an obligation, to preserve your lives.”
“I have a fortunate lineage. It is a line that goes back through hundreds of thousands of years of wizards.”
“My ancestors have passed on much knowledge about you.”
“It confounds me, Great Ones. You appear to live the existence of a statue. Your bodies are like stone. Your eyes are shut, so you cannot see. You do not eat. You appear to sleep the sleep of the dead.”
“Do you dwell in the land of the dead?”
“I don’t understand. Surely time is an absolute?”
“Do you foresee the future of this expedition?”
“Can you predict the outcome?”
“You will just stay here in limbo in these crypts for several hundred years until we find our new home? You will certainly die, or at best, you will age.”
“It depends on the length of the journey.”
“What visions do you see? Am I, are we, in danger from some unforeseen event?”
A rush of air swirled about the cabin, unnerving Asunda.
“I will have to give this much thought.”
At the end of six months, Alexia and Amonda were both revived from suspended animation.
“I see you Amonda and Alexia. Welcome back to the realm of the living.”
“I see you Asunda,” they both said.
“Any dreams or visions?”
“None that I can recall,” Amonda said. “To be in SA is to sleep like the dead.”
“Anything new?” Alexia asked.
“No. The radiation from our dying solar system did not reach us.”
“Any more beacons?”
“Just one auto-beacon. No change in coordinates.”
“God, this is boring!” Alexia said.
They all laughed.
“I believe it is safe now to surrender ourselves to the transition,” Asunda said. “What say you?”
Amonda looked at Alexia, who nodded. “We agree,” they said.
“Confirmation,” Asunda began. He was mindful of the warning he had received from the Ancient Ones. “We will preserve our present human body forms by cryogenic means.”
“I agree,” Amonda said. “Then cryogenic preservation it is.” She had her own reasons to agree. Inwardly, she was delighted.
“Then it is decided. Good luck to you both.”
Final settings were calculated, courses were set, and systems were double-checked. Asunda, Amonda, and Alexia each went under sonic anesthetic and their essence was transitioned to their crypt-orbs. Their human bodies were cryogenically preserved and super-frozen. Their crypt-orbs were stored nearby in the transition room rather than in the general storage area so that when the time came they would be the first people to be recovered.
Had anyone surreptitiously boarded the cruisers at this time, they would have been met with an eerie scene. There was no crew and the ships were operating automatically, following the guidance of the instructions left periodically by the scout ships. They appeared to be nothing more than drone cargo ships.
For mankind, not ours, but Sargon’s, the long journey to a new home had begun.
CHAPTER35
THE NEW MEXICAN DESERT, 1944
The year 1944 is one that stands out as a pivotal year for the planet Earth, yet few are aware of its true importance.
It started off on a gloomy note, as war raged on every continent of the planet. Mankind was in the throes of a massive culling. It had been like this for years. Civilization would reduce its ranks by 25 percent before the insanity came to an end.
Nineteen forty-four was the beginning of the end. In the summer of that year, the Allies landed a massive collective force of army and navy on the shores of Normandy in France. Called D-Day, it was a savage slaughter of mankind’s finest youth on both sides. It was a collective effort – some say a last-ditch effort – on the part of the Allies, because the resources of Britain, Canada, and the U.S. were critically low. In the end, however, a beachhead was established, and the Allies moved east from there.
This moment was the turning point of World War II, which was fought in order to rid the Earth of the Nazi scourge.
In 1944 the Polish Home Army rose up against the Germans. The Poles had few weapons and suffered some of the worst atrocities meted out by the merciless German army. But what they lacked in weapons, they made up for in spirit. They attacked the demoralized Germans, captured their weapons, and attacked again with these renewed resources.
There were various other milestones for the Allies in 1944. They liberated Rome. And they fought the important Battle of the Bulge against the Germans in the Ardennes. There was a huge loss of life, but the Allies won. In the South Pacific, the Americans successfully invaded the Philippines.
But 1944 also brought with it an event of far greater magnitude to human history than any of the above. Some time in August 1944, before the end of World War II, a strange aircraft crashed in some part of continental North America. To this day, no one knows with certainty where exactly the craft went down. It is of little importance anyway, because the remains were carefully moved to Los Alamos Air Force Base under a cloak of military secrecy. Allied military advisors believed the craft to be of German origin – on a spy mission or a test flight to gather technical information about the aircraft’s capabilities. This theory made sense because Germany was at war with Britain and her allies.
Under the U.S. War Secrets Act, no mention of this discovery was tolerated. Any intelligence leaks could tip their hand to the enemy, so the discovery was kept under close wraps.
On discovering this strange aircraft, as the war was in its final throes, the Allies believed that the Germans, whose scientific prowess was renowned around the world, had perfected a Doomsday weapon or a super-advanced military aircraft or rocket. The crashed aircraft was unlike any production or prototype craft the Allies had ever seen. Was it on a bombing mission? What was its range? Where was it launched? Was it capable of carrying nuclear warheads and delivering a nuclear attack from Germany? Could Germany be planning an H-bomb attack on Britain and America?
If this was indeed a German aircraft, the Air Force would be forced to acknowledge that the Germans had the technology to develop an aircraft so far advanced that they could travel across the ocean and win the war. Nazi Germany would be victorious. All hope for a civilized mankind would be lost. Investigators from the newly formed National Security Agency and Britain’s formidable MI5 were sent to nearby Albuquerque to assess vital intelligence. Little was known about the details of that investigation beyond the conclusion that the origins of the craft were not German. Nor was the ship American – or the product of any other military power on Earth. It was unquestionably extraterrestrial.
Days later, a second spacecraft plowed into planet Earth. Its trajectory was almost identical to that of the first vessel. It crash-landed less than two hundred miles east of the first craft. The fate of this ship was different, however. The second vessel smacked into the desert, dug out a sizable crater, became airborne again, then skidded, spinning like a top, across the barren desert floor. A huge plume of dust rose into the air. It would have been visible from miles away. But no one was there to see it.
Compared with the first vessel, which had crashed into the side of a mountain, this one landed relatively unscathed. The fuselage cooled quickly, but not before a substantial amount of silica sand from the desert floor had melted to a molten glob around it. The ship looked like an island shimmering in the middle of a light brown lake. At one end, where the craft had come to rest, was a twenty-foot-high wall of transparent reddish-gold glass where the sand and rock had plowed ahead of the ship as it slid to a stop. There had been a huge wall of sandy rock there, which had melted instantly on contact with the craft. Golden plumes were frozen in the air as the hot silica cooled from liquid back to solid in milliseconds. Six strands of quick-cooled molten silica took on the uncanny look of a hand with fingers outstretched, reaching up from the desert. The hand is still visible today.
That same evening, after a glorious desert sunset, the ship’s silver fuselage popped open like a winking eye. Seconds later, a surveillance/recovery Bot emerged rather tentatively. It was a round, silver device three feet wide, with eight spider-like limbs. It stopped about twenty feet away from the craft and hovered, perfectly silent, a few feet off the surface. Its appendages retracted for a moment. The fading desert light reflected dull orange off its round body. Its sensors confirmed the location of a human about ten miles away. The multifunctional Bot was programmed to retrieve hosts for the occupants of the craft. In a blink, the Bot locked onto its target and disappeared.
The target’s name was Corey Wixon. Wixon was a thin but otherwise physically fit young Caucasian male with a permanently sunburned face. He was a twenty-one-year-old geophysics grad student working on his doctorate. He was studying the various strata of rock formations along the cliff walls of the desert. He was alone in his tent, examining his latest findings. A single Coleman high-intensity gas lamp hung from the center post, its hiss the only sound in the quiet desert. Wixon loved the solitud
e. He relished the opportunity to work in quiet concentration without distractions. He was a focused and intense youth with a bright future ahead of him. But that future would change tonight.
The Bot arrived at the camp in less than two minutes. There was no urgency in its movements. It hovered at five feet and silently circled the tent. The host was inside and actively awake. The Bot advanced toward the closed nylon door flap, hovering at chest height. Wixon looked up with a start. His eyes darted all about him. Nothing.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught the faint rustling of the tent flap as if something had brushed up against it. Always mindful of the danger of being alone in the desert, he reached over, lifted his pillow, and extracted his Russian-made pistol. Cocking the weapon, he walked to the door and flung open the flap.
There, observing him at face level, was a strange silver globe with tentacles flailing about. It looked like a bloated spider. Wixon screamed and fell over backward. Fumbling like an upside-down crab, he fired off two rounds. The bullets ricocheted soundlessly off the little machine. The machine stayed rigid. Then, three lights came on, catching him in a 3-D scan. It checked out his heart and other internal organs for disease or deterioration. Next it scanned his brain for similar afflictions. It checked out mental bioelectrical strength. Finally, it scanned for general radiation, rot, or terminal disease of the human’s whole body.
The machine found that the human was young, strong, and as uncorrupted as flesh and bone could be. The scan lights were replaced by a green glow that expanded outward from the Bot. That was the last moment that Corey Wixon would ever be truly himself.
The Bot projected an ultrasonic tone that rendered the victim incapacitated. The frequency of the sound wave worked on the human brain to cancel out functional processing thought, while permitting cognitive observation and recognition of the subject’s surroundings. His brain could watch, but it could not think. Wixon’s brain had gone numb. His body was completely relaxed and he slumped over backward as if in a swoon. His pistol slipped from his fingers. Rather than fall, he actually rose a few feet. His head bent back at an acute angle, so that it looked as if surely his back must have broken. His body, limp as a rag doll, was slowly extracted from the tent. The intensity of the green glow increased. The machine and Wixon began to rise in unison. They rose to a height of about twenty feet. Then, in the blink of an eye, both were gone.
