The Skywalkers: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 5)

by JC Ryan

  By then, every busy adult and many teens had cell phones as well. They were constantly connected to each other by messages that seemed to have taken a step back, technologically speaking. Text messaging was the realm of the young, until their elders recognized the only way to speak to their kids was to learn how to type on a tiny keyboard - with their thumbs. The dominant cell phone company soon heard the cries of men with bulky fingers and developed a voice recognition application, so the message could be heard, converted to text and sent to the recipient, all if the speaker could make the application understand his or her peculiar accent or speech habits.

  Not to be outdone, the next biggest cell service provider developed a better one. Only five years ago, it wasn't uncommon for every person in a family, from a two-year-old to the very elderly, to be connected to mass communications by no fewer than three devices--their cell phones, portable computers in either laptop or tablet configurations, and usually still a desktop, though those were beginning to be relegated to stuffy offices.

  Daniel had lived through that era, boy and man. Only now was he able to articulate his concerns about it to Salome.

  “People have stopped talking to each other in person, Salome. Instead, we sit across from each other at the dinner table with cell phones in hand, texting, surfing the internet, or playing video games.”

  Salome smiled. She was a couple of years younger than Daniel. None of this was new to her, nor very alarming. “Go on.”

  “You know, even though I’m not of the generation when children played outside all day, my parents made us go outside. Everyone then was concerned because children were joining the obesity epidemic. Kids who hadn't seen the latest viral YouTube video were made fun of — it even happened to my brothers and me. No one was speaking out about it. Even those who occasionally thought it was an issue weren't willing to give up their own electronic tethers. It set us up for what’s happening now.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You’ve been telling me there may be some insidious force behind these trends. We may be the only people on Earth who have any idea that a handful of the wealthiest men in the world are quietly destabilizing every long-held value in their respective countries.”

  Daniel was referring to the media undermining Great Britain’s royal family by printing stories about the future heir romping in bed with someone other than his wife. Of course, it had long been tradition in the media to undermine American confidence in their elected leaders by, among other things, spreading rumors on the internet that the President hadn't been born in the US as required, or the Secretary of State was a lesbian. The insidiousness was compounded by the same media then printing articles assuring the public that those things weren’t true, prompting cries of cover-up, which further undermined confidence.

  The truth or lack thereof wasn't the point. The point was that no one could believe anything they saw in print or even in a photo anymore, but everyone believed anything they were told often enough, with or without facts to back it up. What could have been the greatest boon to mankind, an archive of every bit of human knowledge, free for the asking, had become the greatest disinformation machine in the history of mankind.

  “Salome, don’t you agree that this environment is ripe for enslaving the minds of ninety percent of the earth's inhabitants by those who would exploit it for their own ends?”

  “I do. It’s happened so slowly, compared to the growth of technology that almost no one noticed.”

  “No one but you, Salome.”

  Daniel resumed his rant. “It’s dangerous, having everyone think the same way.”

  They agreed: It was an election year in the US. All year, the news had been full of campaign rhetoric, accusations, mudslinging and more and more bitter recriminations by candidates who were behind in the polls. They accused the dominant party of lies, but the more they did so, the more their approval ratings sank.

  After exhausting the subject, which was easy to do since there was no argument - each agreed with the other’s assessment, they also agreed that there was still no immediate threat they could identify. But both of them were even more worried now about the upcoming election.

  Chapter 33 - I pray you find it

  Four hours after he had returned to his own office, two people who could very well have been ghosts, walked into Daniel’s office without knocking.

  Sinclair said without preamble, “Daniel, we have a serious problem, have a look at this.” He handed Daniel the piece of paper containing the full translation.

  Daniel read:

  Person of the Future,

  I have very little time. I beg you to read this letter entirely, I beg you to heed the warnings in this letter and to take all action to stop this evil from happening ever again. I beg you to not ignore this – we have met our end because we did not pay attention, we gave away our freedom, we gave away our blood. We became slaves because of our unwillingness to give up our decadent life of luxury and carelessness for our fellow humans.

  The end is near and I do not know whether I will be able to complete my task. With this letter, I leave a brief history of the end times of our cycle, so that in the event someone from a distant future, or a distant world, may find our remains and wonder, they shall be warned. You will find our history locked up in The Room of Knowledge on the 4th floor of this place of all evil. I beg you to find it and to read it and to learn about us.

  Our world has developed out of the ashes of the cycle before us, after their destruction by fire from the sky. Our world has long been stable, it was perfect, with no dissent, no war, no disease and no poverty such as in the old days. We should be happy, but we are not. We have no freedom, we are oppressed, we are controlled because they have our blood. I beg you again read and be warned! The Council of Selected provides us with all our bodily needs but they own our spirits and our thoughts. Our happiness, our being belongs to them. We are their servants, because they own our blood.

  Within my lifetime, a movement has arisen to throw off the yoke of thought control imposed by The Council of The Selected. At first, known dissenters were taken away and re-educated, to return and recant their subversive opinions. As more dissenters appeared, a mysterious illness began to befall them and many died. A fearsome beast was released against all citizens. We learned to guard our words carefully, lest we be among the victims, yet growing displeasure with our way of life made more and more speak out as more and more died.

  I am among the few left who dissent and I will be dead soon. The Council of Selected has lost control of the beast; no one will survive. All I have left to do is to leave you this sad and dark message. I hope you will learn from our mistakes and build a better future for your children than we did.

  In The Room of Darkness on the 5th floor of this place of all evil will you find the beast. You MUST destroy it; you MUST destroy everything that mentions it. But you must be careful — you must handle it with great care – others have tried to destroy it and were killed by it. In the room with the beast you will find the book that tells you how it works and in The Room of Knowledge on the 4th floor of this place of all evil you will find more about it. Don’t touch the beast until you have learned how it works, otherwise you will surely die.

  My time is here. The beast knows my blood, it knows my name, and the invisible messenger of my death from the sky is on its way now. I have but a few breaths left.

  It is not to be I cannot get to the beast before my death, we are all doomed.

  Reaching the last paragraph, barely able to hold the piece of paper in his visibly shaking hand Daniel read the rest of it aloud.

  Heed me, person of the future. You must seek the beast in this place of evil and you MUST destroy it. I pray you find it.

  The blood has drained from Daniel’s face, “Oh my God!”

  During several speechless moments, Daniel was released from his psychological paralysis when Sarah walked in and saw the three of them looking like death.

  �
�Daniel! Darling, what in the world is the matter?” she cried. Daniel wordlessly handed her the letter. Sarah read it, her face turning whiter as her eyes traveled down the page. When she’d finished, she sunk into a chair. “Dear God what now?”

  Despite his shock, Daniel was the first to recover his composure. “We need the whole team in here now, to address this new danger at the site. Matthews, too. We need all the brains we can get.”

  ***

  Even though everyone looked up to Daniel as their leader, the Rossler Foundation and in fact the inner circle even before the formal group was founded, had always operated more by consensus than by fiat. The inner circle had grown since the beginning, and sadly, one was missing; Nicholas. Yet, Daniel was comforted by the knowledge that he had the best minds he’d been able to gather around him in the past eight years to help him decide on the best course of action.

  10 minutes after Daniel sent for his team, they were all in the conference room and had heard Daniel read the letter aloud with varying degrees of shock.

  JR broke the silence first. “Well, what is this beast?”

  “That’s just it,” Daniel replied. “It doesn’t really say. Although I tend to think it isn’t really a beast in the literal sense.”

  “Whatever it is, we need to track it down and destroy it,” JR said, full of the conviction of youth, and the fire of a Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine, he was fond of saying. “Send me in with a few buddies I can call up. We’ll handle it.”

  “Now wait. I get the impression it isn’t going to be as easy as kicking down the door and shooting the shit out of it,” Daniel objected. JR smiled at Daniel’s uncharacteristic vernacular.

  Daniel went on.

  “This letter has cautioned us not to tamper with the thing unless we know how it works. I suggest we don’t go off half-cocked. Let’s get all the information we can get and then plan in detail what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. That is, if we are even the ones to do it.”

  JR looked around the room. Everyone was avidly following the conversation between the brothers, and no one looked as if he or she might have a contribution just yet. He answered, “Yes, you’re right about that not going in there half-cocked but let me tell you one thing, we will be the ones doing it. In the past we were always the ones doing it. Yes, we had help from others but we were always part of it. You’ll see — this is going to be no different.”

  Daniel nodded in acknowledgement. “Good, I’m glad we agree on the most important part for the moment. Now, let’s start by looking at what we know and what we don’t. We know how the 8th Cycle ended but we don’t know what this beast is that apparently ended it for them.

  We know where the beast is located and we know where to find its instruction manual - The Room of Darkness, whatever that is, on the 5th floor. No one, and I repeat, JR, no one, is going to attempt to destroy anything until we have translated and read that instruction manual. “

  Daniel glanced sternly around the room, noting the nods of approval before continuing. He hoped someone would have something to contribute soon, or he might as well have made all these decisions by himself. “All right. Does anyone have any ideas about this Room of Knowledge on the 4th floor where we’re supposed to find more information about the beast? Why do you suppose they have the user manual and the ‘more information’, whatever that is, in two different places?

  Salome raised her hand. Daniel acknowledged her, “Salome, we don’t stand on ceremony in these brainstorming sessions. Jump in.”

  She smiled. “Okay, well, we can’t know for sure until we find out what the other information is, but sometimes highly sensitive intel is kept in different places so that no one person knows everything about it. Like a security measure.”

  “Oh, okay. Good! That gives us an idea to work with, and it sounds plausible here. If this beast is so dangerous it could bring down an entire cycle, no wonder they wouldn’t have wanted all the knowledge placed in the hands of one person, or even a small group of people. Now, what else?”

  “The place of all evil,” Sarah said. A buzz of whispered conversations among two here and two there had broken out, making Sarah’s soft voice all but indistinguishable from the background noise. Attuned to her voice, however, Daniel heard that she’d said something.

  “Please, everyone. Let’s stay focused here. Sarah, what did you say?”

  “the place of all evil,” she quoted. “I guess that’s the Canyon site?”

  Hearing no dissent, Daniel stood. “All right, throw those ideas out for discussion, people. And remember the only stupid idea is the one you did not tell us about. Anything is welcome,” Nodding at Raj, he continued, “Even alien theories. Nothing is out of order.”

  Salome turned to Rebecca, “Rebecca what do you make of those two references to blood? What is the author been trying to tell us?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it’s just a figure of speech. Do we know enough about their language to know colloquialisms?” Sinclair shook his head.

  Robert looked at Roy and then at Raj. “What do you guys think the writer meant by ‘invisible messenger of my death from the sky’? Some sort of death ray? An alien weapon? A satellite weapon? Invisible? Could it mean some sort of nano technology somehow?”

  Raj put his palms up in protest. “Slow down, my friend! One question at a time.”

  “Yes, it could be nano technology. We know from the Sword of Cyrus situation it’s possible to send nano-poisons and nano-bots.” Roy said, oblivious to the looks of consternation that appeared as soon as he mentioned the last evil group they’d been up against. Roy got up and strolled to the whiteboard, in lecture mode. “Those things are invisible to the naked eye, and could easily kill people or make them sick enough to wish they were dead.”

  Not to be outdone, Raj hurried to put his two cents’ worth in. “But it could also be things like invisible rays in the electromagnetic spectrum, alien technology that could kill you.”

  The room erupted in protest then, with JR’s voice winning the escalating volume contest. “If aliens were killing people fifty-thousand years ago, why aren’t they still here, killing people now?” He and Raj were glaring at each other in what at any other time would have been comical - the six-foot-ten ex-Marine looming over a slight, five-foot ten computer nerd. Daniel decided it was time to rein it in.

  “All right, I think we’re agreed that there are a quite a few options, but we can only think as far as our current technology understands. There could very well be something we have no knowledge of yet, with our current understanding of science.

  “Are we agreed that our first move is to locate this user manual for the beast as well as the Room of Knowledge? And is there any value in continuing to translate the material we already have?”

  “Aye, there is value in that.” Sinclair had something to say at last. We know what the word for the beast sounds like and looks like in the text. Why not have Raj input the rest of the foils immediately and search for that word? Then all the translators could focus on translating every bit of information we have on it, if any, while someone retrieves the user’s manual and the information from the Room of Knowledge, which I take to be a library.”

  The others looked at him in astonishment. His affected Irish accent, which he’d started with as he began to speak, had disappeared entirely in the longest speech anyone remembered him making recently.

  Daniel took the ensuing silence as an opportunity. “Okay, I think that’s a great plan. JR, you and Robert will go through the drawings of the facility we have so far from the architects. Use the information we have collected about the structure and try to find the 4th and 5th floors to see if the entire floor has been mapped and all rooms accounted for. Let’s narrow down the rooms you’ll have to open and go through when you go to retrieve the items Sinclair has suggested.”

  He paused only to take a deep breath, then continued, “Raj, you’ll throw every bit of computing power you have or can
acquire in a hurry at the disks we have now. You know what to do next to create those sound files and store them in a database you can query to find anything that sounds remotely like the words for ‘The Beast’. Then hand that off to Sinclair’s team.”

  Raj had been nodding since Daniel had said ‘you know what to do next’. He was practically jumping out of his skin to get started, and waited only until Daniel finished out of politeness, before bolting from the room to get started, with Sinclair right behind him. After all, someone needed to show Raj the text for the word and create a sample sound file with which to compare the data on the disks.

  Daniel was speaking only to Matthews at this point, but continued his thought for the benefit of the others. “Sinclair, Joseph and Stephen will work out a system with the translators to translate and transcribe that information at the best possible speed.”

  Salome took over at this point. “I’ll fill Luke in on everything we have so far and if he thinks it necessary, we’ll revisit the entire Foundation’s security setup. This information needs to be protected and secured at all cost.” She didn’t state the obvious, that from this moment on, their lives were in danger, more so than on any other occasion before. Because, whatever the beast was, someone with monomaniacal aspirations would stop at nothing to get it if the facts were known.

  Daniel took it on himself to inform John Brideaux. Since he’d been sponsoring this investigation from the beginning when Matthews discovered it, he needed to be brought up to speed. Daniel would also give him a chance to say if he was willing to continue to fund what came next — a new expedition to go and find The Beast and destroy it.

  Matthews kept his own counsel. He, too, owed John Brideaux a report, but evidently everyone here had forgotten it. And if he knew John Brideaux, he would bet a goodly amount that destruction wasn’t what Brideaux would want for this artifact. No, Brideaux would more than likely want to own it, just as he wanted to own every other unique and arcane artifact he’d ever heard of. But, could he safeguard what was apparently a very dangerous artifact? It wasn’t Matthews’ place to ask, only to do as Brideaux directed him.