Vostok (32 page)

MAJESTIC-12 was one threat. The other, besides my diminishing air supply, was the bull sperm whale. It was still out there, but it had just fed.

If I kept my pace slow and steady…

I redressed in my long johns and every article of extreme weather gear I could find, then I started up the engine. The GPS unit was useless, but by reversing the sub’s last course I was able to plot my way back to the bay with little effort.

I wiped blood from my night-goggle lenses and adjusted them on my face. Then I dived the sub to three hundred feet, set my speed to ten knots, and engaged the auto-pilot.

“Huh?”

Exhaustion and a steady ride had gotten the better of me. I opened my eyes, stunned to find the nose of the
Barracuda
beached before a restless herd of sea elephants. Having fallen asleep before reaching the plateau, I don’t know how I had managed to cross the
Livyatan melvillei
nursery without disturbing the females. Perhaps they had been feeding when I had passed through the channel. Perhaps it was divine intervention. But somehow I had made it all the way back to the bay.

Climbing over my seat into the aft compartment, I searched the backpacks for supplies. I had my climbing axe, magnetometer, three flashlights, and, to my surprise, Ben’s sensory device. Leaving the Colonel’s instrument behind, I packed the other items into my bag, along with water, snacks, and the two iPhones. Gingerly sliding my thawed feet into my climbing boots, I zipped up my jacket, secured my facemask and hat, and bound and wrapped every inch of exposed flesh before slipping on my gloves. Ready for the cold, I popped open the cockpit’s hood.

Vostok greeted me with a golfball-sized chunk of hail that
splattered across the
Barracuda
’s bow.

I dragged, pulled, and pushed the sub out of the water and onto the beach, then resealed the hatch, having decided to leave the bow lights on. Yes, I needed to conserve the batteries, but power was useless if a six-ton sea elephant decided to squat on my submersible as a nest.

Locating Ben’s and Ming’s imprints in the snow, I followed the tracks to the northeast.

The path my deceased companions had used on their return to the sub kept to the coastline as it circled the island around to the east, then south. Though a bit longer, it was far easier to negotiate, and even as I began the ascent up the base of the mountain, the snow accumulation at its worst was only calf-deep. The fog bank was barely intrusive.

What did I expect to find? An ancient spaceship? A gateway to a parallel universe? To be honest, I had no clue. All I knew was that Ben and everyone else in charge of this expedition had gone to great care and expense to access this snow-covered mountain, and I needed to know why.

I had crossed the fissure and had reached the base of the mountain when I remembered the magnetometer. Retrieving it from my backpack, I powered it on.

What in the hell…

The instrument registered 305,000 nanoteslas, a huge jump from the reading I had taken hours earlier on the shoreline with Ben and Ming.

Seeking answers, I pocketed the device and gripped my axe. Approaching an exposed section of rock, I repeatedly struck the volcanic geology with the spiked end of the climbing tool. A dozen whacks and I had chipped away an eight-inch-wide, six-inch-deep divot. Turning on my flashlight, I shined the light upon the hole.

The exposed surface was dark and rough, possibly uniform. It was too hard to tell from the small sample size.

A strange tingling sensation gave me pause just then, and I realized the hairs on the back of my head were rustling beneath my wool hat.

I turned slowly and saw the bear-dog. Having followed my trail through the snow, it was watching me, growling in the darkness, its eyes glowing olive-green in my night-vision lenses.

Seven to ten strides up the slope and it would be on me.

Gripping the axe tightly, I spun around and slammed the spike as high as I could into the rock above my head. I pulled myself up so that the toe of my right boot found the divot, my left hand searching for a ledge as I heaved myself off the ground.

Don’t look back. Just climb!

I managed to dig the cleats of my left boot into the snow-covered rock by my waist and drove the climbing spike higher, pulling myself up and just out of range of the animal’s snapping jaws.

I gasped heavy breaths through my mask and looked down. The predator was standing on its hind legs, clawing at the rock. My muscles were trembling with cold, fear, and fatigue. Balancing on my perch, it was just a matter of time before I’d lose my balance.

Above me awaited a precarious four-story climb up a thirty-degree twisting rock face covered in snow. I doubted I could make it up, but given the choice between the vicious predator and falling to my death, I decided to climb.

Hugging the wall, I wiggled the climbing spike free and struck blindly above my head. Testing the grip, I shifted my weight to my left leg, dug my boot into the snow and pulled myself up another three feet.

Wheezing breaths, rotating grips. Teary eyes blinking, snot freezing cold in my mask. The growls below faded, muted by the snow crunching against my jacket and pants. Where was I going?

Give it up. One last heave away from the mountain and it’ll be over.

My gloved hand found a hole in the packed snow. Glancing over, I saw frozen spike marks, the trail zig-zagging to my left.

Ben’s tracks
.

Looking up, I saw something glowing.

Adjusting my course, I assaulted the summit with renewed vigor until I found myself staring at a dark, rough, exposed metal surface displaying ten radiant orbs. Ben had left one of his climbing axes behind when he had fallen. I worked my gloved left hand into its loop and pulled myself up so that I was eye-level with the violet, light positioned at the bottom of the icon.

And then something strangely familiar happened. The ten luminous objects bled the colors of the spectrum, from red to orange to yellow, darkening to green and blue, and indigo to violet before consuming me within their warm radiant light, which simultaneously blinded me and absorbed me into—

—energy.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

—Lewis Carroll

I can’t say for sure wether I opened my eyes because I don’t remember having shut them. All I remember is that one moment I was freezing, trembling, exhausted, and cleaving to the side of a snow-capped summit—the next, my consciousness was consumed by ten glowing orbs, which condensed into one warm, white, soothing light.

There was no pain or fear, no growling predators or ice sheets, nor was there my physical being. I just seemed to be floating merrily along. I think I was even giggling.

Am I dead?

A red dot appeared. Lacking the perception of either below or above, the singularity simply grew larger until it became a doughnut-shaped object. As it continued to magnify, its details became clear and I could see three circular ring plates divided by blue magnetic fields. As the object expanded beyond my field of vision, its gaping hole swallowed me, changing my view from outside to inside, so that I was now in the center of the ring.

My entire 360-degree field of vision was occupied by rollers, tall canister-shaped, magnetized columns of metal that were rotating around the innermost ring like ponies on a merry-go-round. Though the rollers were revolving at an incredible speed, their velocity was such that they remained uniformly visible, like the rotating blades of a helicopter. This effect allowed me to count twelve of them, aligned side by side within the innermost ring. Held in place by the lower and upper plates, the twelve rollers were not actually touching the plates; instead they were floating upon a magnetic field like a high-speed monorail.

Most bizarre. As my consciousness hovered in the ring’s hole, I could feel a rush of negatively charged electrons racing through the positively charged core. How did I know these particles were negatively charged? I have no idea. But in my present state of existence I found that I could
sense
it, just as I sensed the electrons forming pairs within the gap, then compressing as they rushed outward into the rotating rollers. There was a powerful magnetic field in play, created by the alternating alignment of the poles in both the rollers and the plates. And I realized it was the outward flow of these paired bosons that was causing the twelve cylinders to rotate within the inner ring plate.

Hitching a ride along the electron current, my consciousness was inhaled through a magnetic layer that carried the particle stream through a second ring plate that was even larger than the first. There were more rollers here, and they revolved even faster.

Exiting out of the second ring, the stream of electrons passed through a layer that tasted of copper before accelerating into a third and final ring plate, this one composed of even more rollers whirling at an even faster velocity.

I realized then that I was touring an electrical generator, a never-ending circuit of electricity powered solely by the internal tensions of the atoms themselves—atoms whose negatively charged electrons were being perpetually drawn into the device’s positively
charged neodymium core like bees to honey. There was no build up of heat, no fuel expended, nor toxins released. Powered by the infinite ocean of atoms that surrounded us, the alien device was, quite simply, a source of endless, clean, free energy.

As these thoughts came to me, I felt my consciousness drawn out of the centrifuge and away from the shrinking power generator, so that I was again gazing upon its ring plates. The object progressively grew smaller until it shrank once more to a red singularity and disappeared.

And as it disappeared I felt my own atoms reappear, gaining mass as I re-entered the physical dimension, materializing inside the private home library of my mentor, Joe Tkalec.

The moment I saw the alien entity, I remembered everything—every missing minute of existence, every experienced death, culminating into the now.

“Welcome, Zachary. But not ‘welcome back.’ Tell me why.”

“
Welcome back
refers to a past moment lived. Had I actually experienced any of those moments other than this last one, I would not be here.”

“Correct. And yet you experienced all of them, each choice creating its own branch of reality, each decision generating its own parallel universe. In some of these universes, you never made it back to your submersible. In others you returned injured, only to find Ming dead and Ben piloting the sub. Countless parallel universes created by a multitude of choices, and yet in only one distinct set of circumstances did the life of Zachary Wallace culminate in his returning to the mountaintop. And because time and existence are dependent solely upon the consciousness of the observer, all of the other multiverses have now disappeared.

“Or have they? Do you remember our discussions about the two theories of time?”

“I remember discussing McTaggert’s theories with Joe…”

“How can you be so sure I’m not Joe?”

“Stop it.”

“What if I told you I am your old mentor and friend, that I was summoned to this moment by the same forces responsible for your being here? Only your belief system is preventing you from accepting me as the real deal, despite the fact that your five senses tell you I am Joe Tkalec.”

“Common sense tells me you’re not.”

“Funny. Common sense tells me that I am the real Joe and you are Alien Zachary.”

“It’s your show, pal. You want to waste time playing mind games, go for it.”

“But the physical dimension is riddled with mind games. Take our sense of sight, for instance. Tell me, Alien Zachary, how does the human eye see?”

“It doesn’t. Images are constructed in our brains based on electrical signals sent from our eyes.”

“So then, if we
see
a Miocene sperm whale, in reality the whale is the electrical signal interpreted by our brain.”

“Your point being?”

“What if everything that surrounds us, everything we perceive as matter, is also simply an electrical signal? How would you know the difference? The human brain, after all, is designed to interpret electrical signals sent from our five senses. How do we know an external world even exists? What if our perceptions are originating from another source, the same source responsible for our dreams? According to quantum physics, matter doesn’t even exist; the material world is simply an illusion, an electrical signal perceived by the brain to convince the soul that the universe is real.”