by Steve Alten
The pilot’s voice interrupts. “Approaching fifty thousand feet. Activating rocket boosters in ten seconds. Nine … eight … seven …”
“What do you mean, ‘the cause of the cataclysm has shifted’?”
“I’m going to show you.”
Manny’s body is suddenly crushed into the thick padding of his chair as the space plane’s rocket boosters fire, accelerating the vessel to 2,500 miles an hour, three times the speed of sound. For twenty seconds the roar of the engines overwhelms the cabin, then silence takes the ship and his body floats off the seat.
Lilith unbuckles her harness and he follows her lead, the two of them swimming in liquid air, frolicking in zero gravity. He maneuvers to the nearest window and stares at the Earth, transfixed by the planet’s beauty, moved by the emotional reality that supersedes war and hatred and greed—that this warm blue world, surrounded by the vast cold emptiness of space, is a life-harboring gift.
Lilith squeezes in beside him. She points to the planet’s curvature that reveals Earth’s atmosphere, a thin protective envelope of blue set against the black cosmos. “That tiny layer of atmosphere is the only thing that separates Earth from Mars.”
The pilot’s face appears on the cabin multiple screens. “We’re moving into a near-polar orbit as you requested. Everything is ready for your space walk.”
Manny glances at Lilith. “Space walk?”
H.O.P.E. astronaut Ryan Matson is waiting for them in the airlock hatch, located mid-deck, directly below the passenger cabin. Six space suits of varying sizes are secured to one wall. Matson takes a quick look at Manny’s physique, then floats over to the largest space suit and frees it from its coupling. “You sure you want to do this, fella?”
“Why? Is it dangerous?”
“If you consider tethering in space to a ship traveling through a shooting gallery of debris at ten times the speed of a bullet dangerous, then yeah. Ever wore one of these suits?”
“Only to clean my pool.”
Matson is not amused. “This suit has eleven layers, including a liquid cooling and ventilation garment and a pressurized bladder to keep your blood from boiling. There are five layers of insulation, allowing you to operate in temperatures ranging from minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit to plus 250 degrees. You’ll be breathing pure oxygen, but we’ve been pumping it into the cabin, so you should be fairly acclimated by now. Don’t panic if you hear the internal fan going on and off, it’s designed to remove excess body heat to keep your helmet from fogging up and causing dehydration. The Kevlar outer skin should protect you from micrometeroids, but there are several million far more lethal objects orbiting Earth, so try to stay close to the ship.”
“Okay, hypothetical situation. Let’s say I accidentally puncture my space suit.”
“In that case, your suit would depressurize immediately, causing anoxia and rapid death.”
Manny glances at Lilith, who is already dressed. “You’ll be fine.”
“That’s encouraging. Are space walks part of your standard package for paying customers?”
“We don’t offer EVAs to our clients. Way too dangerous.” Matson hands Manny a headset. “As per Lilith’s orders, I set the comm links to allow you two to talk in private. There’s an override switch on your belt that will open a channel with the flight deck, just in case.”
The astronaut sprays the inside faceplate of Manny’s polycarbonate helmet with an antifog compound, checks the internal lights, then fits it over his head. “Ready?”
They exit the cargo bay into silence. There is no wind or sound in space, nor any real clue as to how fast they are actually moving as the ship passes over the Middle East, following a near-ninety-degree orbit designed to pass over the planet’s northern pole. Manny does a quick calculation in his head, dividing the Earth’s circumference by their ninety-minute orbits, determining their velocity to be 4.63 miles a second. The information renders him dizzy.
“Manny, are you okay?”
“Why am I here, Lilith?”
“To answer that, we need to observe the Earth from the Nexus.”
Manny feels the blood drain from his face. “That’s extremely dangerous. The pressure alone … it’ll be like swimming in lead.”
“I’ve done it three times. It’ll be a bit disorienting at first, and yes, it will be difficult to move, but it’s necessary. In the end, I guess it comes down to trust. Are you willing to trust me? If the answer’s no, then we have no future together, and I mean that in more ways than one.”
“Why was Lauren Beckmeyer killed?”
“Who’s Lauren Beckmeyer?”
“She was my fiancée, a geology major at Miami. Lauren’s dad was an engineer. They were working on a plan to vent the Yellowstone caldera using a robotic device called GOPHER.”
“It wouldn’t have worked.”
“She was assassinated, Lilith! Along with her mentor, Professor Bill Gabeheart. Recognize the name?”
For a long moment, the two astronauts hover silently in space, the Atlantic Ocean passing beneath them.
“I wasn’t the one who gave the order, but I was involved in the decision to keep everything quiet. Gabeheart figured out the data coming out of Yellowstone had been doctored. I imagine he told your fiancée, so they killed her, too. It may not mean much to you, but I truly am sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Tears flow from his eyes, the change in humidity causing his suit’s internal fan to blow cool air on his face. “Where’s the justice in this world? Who pays the price for decisions that steal the lives of the innocent?”
“We all do. At least let me show you. Afterward, if you still want revenge, you can do with me whatever you please.” She loops the crook of her left arm around his right elbow before he can protest. “Together on three. One … two—”
Closing his eyes, Manny wills his consciousness into a higher dimension—
—his insides instantly crushed beneath several Gs of force. The pain dissipates as he opens his eyes, his mind taken by his suddenly altered perception of reality.
The Earth’s rotation has slowed to a barely noticeable crawl, reflective of the increased rate of speed within the Nexus—a corridor of space-time connecting them to the nine higher dimensions. As the physical world around him slows, he can now see things that had been moving far too fast only moments ago.
Debris orbits the planet like a flowing river of garbage. Tiny glittering granules of dust, paint flakes, and droplets of coolant expelled from rocket boosters form a geosynchronous ring around the equator while larger objects, dispersed in a low earth orbit, flutter like satellites. He spots a screwdriver spinning fifty yards beneath his feet, its torn cable trailing behind like a comet’s tail.
Then, as their shuttle climbs over Russia, another object comes into view, causing his blood to run cold.
Hovering ten thousand miles above the Earth’s northern pole is a starless black spot, its event horizon approximately twenty percent of the circumference of the moon. Blending in with space, it is visible only by its gelidlike swirling distortion and a thin trail of gray-green debris that appears to be unraveling along its perimeter, constricting in a tight string of energy that pierces the Earth’s atmosphere. Following the planetary axis, the singularity continues moving through the planet’s core—
—emerging from the South Pole as a cord of fiery red molecules that coalesce around the expanding orifice of a second black hole opening in space below the Southern Hemisphere, its event horizon twice the size of its shrinking twin.
“My God …”
“Keep watching.”
As the gravitational anomaly poised above the Northern Hemisphere empties, a new object appears over the Sea of Japan.
“A wormhole?”
The wormhole remains stable for the seven minutes and forty-two seconds it takes the remains of the northern singularity to be pulled through the planet’s core and out the other side. Then the wormhole disappears.
The starless black spot
of space poised over the Southern Hemisphere remains, the black hole’s event horizon slightly larger than its cannibalized twin.
“Lilith?”
“It’s called a strangelet, a type of black hole, most likely created by one of the Hadron Colliders. The first time I saw it was on my honeymoon on H.O.P.E.’s maiden voyage back in 2031. We were flying over the aurora borealis. Back then, the strangelet was no larger than a basketball, too small to generate a wormhole. The only reason I even noticed it was because the ship’s starboard wing passed through the singularity as it exited the Earth’s northern axis.”
“Did it damage the ship?”
“No. It doesn’t exist in the physical dimension, at least not yet, but the density of its mass is growing larger, and the larger it grows, the greater the effect on Earth’s tectonic plates. It’s the reason we’ve had so many earthquakes and tsunamis.”
“What about the caldera?”
“Two weeks ago, the magma chamber collapsed. The anomaly is pushing us toward a cataclysmic eruption. As bad as that will be, it’s nothing compared to what’s coming. At some point the strangelet will accumulate sufficient mass to exert a gravitational pull in our physical universe. When that happens, the fully formed black hole will make one last pass through the Earth’s axis before devouring the entire planet.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“Just the two of us, and Devlin. Humans can’t detect it yet.”
Manny stares below as they pass over Greenland, his being filled with rage. Despite all the warnings, mankind had finally done it, only it was not a nuclear weapon or engineered plague that would unleash the prophesied Doomsday Event, it would be man’s unbridled intellect, fed by his enormous ego.
They pass over the southernmost ice floes of the Arctic Circle. “Manny, we need to leave the Nexus.”
Manny doesn’t hear her, his mind too focused on the mission tasked by his brother in the holy land. The strangelet was unleashed years ago. I need to find out which Hadron Collider did the deed, and when.
The mere thought of the physicists responsible sickens him; while they collected their accolades and awards, their Doomsday particle’s fuse had continued to burn—
Manny! Lilith’s voice snaps him from his thoughts as she reaches out to him telepathically from within the Nexus. We’re passing over the polar axis. You need to leave the Nexus, it’s too—
There is neither a sound nor warning, just an eye that blinks open over the northern axis below his feet. For a harrowing split second he can see an orange-red speck that reveals the planet’s violated core as the singularity bursts out of the planet, rocketing upward at them at the speed of light.
His mind leaps from the Nexus—his consciousness caught within a cosmic tsunami of proton particles that passes through his being, delivering him into its soothing white light.
9
I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN, LETTER TO ESTHER SALAMAN, 1920
Perhaps it was the waterfall that caused him to wake, its mist dissipating across the azure lagoon, leaving cool beads of precipitation on his skin. Or the birds’ shrill call in the distance, masked by the ruffle of palm fronds obliterating his view of the sky. Regardless, Immanuel Gabriel opens his eyes and stretches out in the pink sand by the lagoon being fed by the waterfall in the lush garden, smiling at the thought that his soul has moved on, relieving him of his earthly burden.
No, Manny. Your soul has temporarily vacated its physical vessel, but you have not moved on.
“Mom?” He springs to his feet, not through muscular exertion but because he willed it. He never moves, instead it is the foliage that parts around him and the landscape that unfolds before him in a bubble of existence where time has been replaced by cause and effect.
The inverted tree is mountainous, its glory rooted in the heavens above and beyond his scope of sight, its upper three entwined trunks flowing down into a thick cluster of six branches before ending in the one.
The one, directly ahead, melds into a man and woman … both towering a hundred feet high.
They are standing back to back as if their vertebrae were fused like the teeth of a zipper, their nudity strategically concealed by vines that bind them further. The woman, a dark-haired Mesoamerican beauty, is on the left; the man, a youthful thirty bearing an athlete’s physique, on the right.
Michael Gabriel.
Dominique Vazquez Gabriel.
Manny drops to his knees in the Garden of Eden before the tree of life that sprouts his parents and wills himself to speak, only the thought is vocalized telepathically before his voice box can engage. How is it that I am here?
Because we willed it. His father never moves. His blazing ebony eyes remain unblinking.
Is this real?
No, his mother communicates. What you perceive is a manifestation of thought energy. We are bound to it by our terminal existence in the Malchut.
Is the Malchut a prison?
The Malchut is the physical universe, answers his father. The lowest of the ten Sefirot, the ten dimensions formed by the Tzimtzum … the contraction.
The contraction?
The effect you call the Big Bang.
Manny’s mind reels. What was the cause of the Tzimtzum?
The cause was the vessel Adam’s desire to be like the Creator and share. But the vessel Adam was created only to receive endless fulfillment. And so the vessel Adam shunned the Creator’s light and the Tzimtzum occurred.
The vessel Adam? They’re revealing the story of creation, the real deal …
Mother, before the Big … the contraction—what was there?
Before refers to time. Time does not exist in the infinite, therefore there is no before, there is only cause and effect. In the infinite reality of existence where time does not exist, there is the Creator, there is the unknowable essence of the Creator, and there is the light that comes from the Creator. The light exists in the Endless. The light is perfection. We can never know the Creator, but at His essence is the nature of sharing. Because there was nothing upon which to share, a reciprocal energy was necessary to complete the circuitry—a vessel to receive the Creator’s infinite light. And so the vessel Adam was created, and its entire purpose was to receive. The vessel Adam was the unified soul, and every soul that exists today is a spark from Adam.
His father takes over: The vessel Adam was divided into two aspects. The female aspect, Eve, was composed of negatively charged electrons; the male aspect, Adam, was the vessel’s positively charged protons. And the vessel had only the desire to receive, and the light only gave, and so there was boundless fulfillment. But as the light continued to fill the vessel, it passed along the Creator’s essence—the desire to share. The vessel Adam had no way of sharing. The vessel Adam also felt shame because it had not earned the endless fulfillment it was receiving. And so the vessel Adam shunned the Creator’s light. Without the light, the vessel Adam contracted into a singular point of darkness, which was the Tzimtzum.
But Father, if the Tzimtzum was the contraction, what caused the sudden expansion that gave birth to the physical universe?
To suddenly be without fulfillment was too much for the vessel Adam. In rushing to regain the Creator’s light, the vessel Adam expanded too quickly and shattered, its molecular structure exploding outward, releasing protons and electrons into a bubble of physicality, the infinite birthing the finite.
But why would the Creator allow the vessel Adam to shatter?
The vessel Adam desired to earn its own fulfillment. The Creator, who loved the vessel unconditionally, gave it the opportunity it desired.
What opportunity?
Manny, each living thing possesses a soul, a spark of the shattered vessel Adam. Life in the Malchut is an opportunity to earn the endless fulfillment. It is why we are here.
&nb
sp; Why ten dimensions? What is their purpose?
Each Sefirot acts as a filter, concealing the Creator’s light from the physical world. The upper three realms—Keter, Chochmah, and Binah—are closest to the Creator and do not exert direct influence in man’s physical realm. The next six Sefirot are enfolded into one superdimension, the Ze’ir Anpin. Beneath this bundle of six lies the Malchut—the physical universe. Light from the Ze’ir Anpin is accessible to those who seek it.
But why conceal the Creator’s light? If people knew—I mean, come on … do you know how much better life would be? No hatred, no greed—
—no transformation, interrupts his father. Fulfillment must be earned. The Sefirot veil the Creator’s light, ensuring free will. The Opponent ensures fulfillment will be earned.
The Opponent?
The Opponent is Satan. Satan resides in the eleventh dimension, rooted in the human ego as temptation and greed, lust and violence. To resist Satan is part of the test.
Always remember, son, darkness cannot exist in the light.
Father, why have you brought me here?
Man’s ego has allowed the serpent into the garden. The Creator does not wish the Malchut destroyed. You have been chosen as the cause that can change the effect.
And what is the effect I am to change?
The tree, the garden, his parents, and all their surroundings are filtered into a soothing white light, a light so intense that he cannot gaze at its infinite source.
When he opens his eyes, he is confronted by a serpent, its red eyes staring at him through enormous black pupils, its upper torso reared to the height of his chest.
Greetings from the eleventh dimension, Uncle.
