Vostok (36 page)

Before me stood a big man about my father’s age dressed in surgical greens and a white lab coat. He had long, graying blonde hair and a goatee. My eyes focused on his identification badge.

“Dr. Chris Stewart. Levels twenty through twenty-six.”

“Good, the fog is lifting.” I detected a trace of Scottish Highlands tucked into the physician’s British accent. As he backed away, I realized I wasn’t looking at him; I was watching a flatscreen monitor on my left. The man’s face suddenly multiplied, as if he were looking into a mirror that was facing another mirror, only everything that appeared on the screen was originating from
my
vision.

“Let me turn that away from you, it’s too disorienting.” He pushed the monitor around on its swivel arm.

I heard a hiss of air pressure as a pneumatic door opened behind me. I caught a whiff of cheap aftershave and knew it was the Colonel.

He positioned a stool on my right and then spun my chair around to face him. “What did you know, Zachary?”

“I don’t understand.”

“In your last memory emergence you said, ‘I already knew.’ You were at Loch Ness, the day your best friend, True, died. What is it you knew?”

“That he wanted to die. That he was wracked with guilt over the deaths caused by the
Purussaurus
. I knew when I saw him circling in his boat that he had rigged the keel with explosives. How did you know I was dreaming of that day?”

He pointed to the optical scanner. “I know because this machine reads the electrical signals perceived by the brain and plays them on this monitor for me to watch. In the last seventeen days, I’ve dialed up every pertinent memory you’ve experienced, and it’s been quite an adventure. Your life is a paradox, Dr. Wallace… No, let me rephrase that: Your death is a paradox. I’ve watched you die so many times that I feel I owe you flowers. From your drowning as a young boy in Loch Ness to your drowning in the Sargasso Sea, to at least a dozen horrible deaths in Lake Vostok. And yet, here you are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I had a few near-death experiences, so what?”

“Not near-death, my friend. You
died
.”

I laid my head back, feeling lightheaded.

Dr. Stewart leaned in with an apple juice, which I sipped from a straw.

“Thank you.”

“Let me know if you want more. And if you feel like you have to urinate, go ahead. We have a catheter in you.”

I felt queasy. “Why am I here? Is any of this even real?”

“Good questions,” the Colonel said. “Over the years, many individuals have experienced a close encounter with an extraterrestrial, either physical contact or a mind-to-mind interaction. What determines the extent of the experience is the level of consciousness of the E.T.; the higher the being, the more positive the interaction. Seven years ago you channeled soul to soul with the highest being our paranormal experts have ever found trace memories of in a close-encounter subject. That makes you a conduit into another dimension. As a result, your consciousness has the ability to selectively route your soul through a multiverse of infinite probabilities.

“Let me give you an example. On your ninth birthday you caught your father cheating on your mother. Incensed, you rowed out on Loch Ness by yourself to test your sonic lure. Your invention attracted a school of salmon, and one oversized Anguilla eel, which sunk your boat and left you flailing in near-freezing water. At that moment your consciousness created a dozen possible scenarios, all but one ending in your death. Call it multiple forks in the road. The thing is, your consciousness bypassed the eight-lane superhighway and followed a torturous dirt road, and the life of Zachary Wallace miraculously continued.”

“So what? So I cheated death a few times. Every day, every person chooses between infinite possibilities. Some days we avoid death and never know it, simply because we took another route to work or didn’t book a plane ticket or didn’t trip on the cat and fall down the stairs. How is my life a paradox?”

“Because you’re here. Because you made it out of Vostok alive when there wasn’t an escape option—No, that’s not true.
I
was your escape option. Unfortunately, Captain Hintzmann told you a conspiracy tale that obviously painted me as the bad guy. I’m not the bad guy, Zachary.”

“Bullshit. You threatened to leave me stranded in the borehole.”

“It was only a threat. I didn’t trust the personnel inside Vostok Command, and I needed answers. I never expected you to climb out of the sub and disconnect the umbilical. That’s what’s known as being hero-stupid. Suicidal. And yet, in a hundred multiverses of death, your consciousness managed to find the one possible outcome that led you back to that extraterrestrial vessel. And that, my friend, was your emergence point into the higher dimensions.”

Colonel Vacendak popped a straw into another box of apple juice and held it up to my parched lips. “You asked me what is real. Every possible outcome in our lives creates an alternate universe, and every one of them is real. Our consciousness selects the routes. Who knows, perhaps somewhere out there exist trillions of parallel universes and hundreds of each one of us living out these alternative lives. But I’ve spent the last two weeks scanning your memories, Zachary, and you never made it out of Lake Vostok alive.

“I know you think you piloted the
Barracuda
through a subglacial river. I’m also certain you’re convinced that when you ran out of river and found yourself trapped, you were able to use the lasers to create your escape. But it never happened.

“That river you saw on the satellite chart, it wasn’t complete. To make it out through the Amery Ice Shelf, you would have needed a hundred Valkyries powered by a small nuclear power plant. Not to mention air. The most you had left while the umbilical was still attached was twelve hours. Even with two completely functional lasers fed by an endless surface supply of power, it would have taken you eighty hours to cover eight hundred miles through near-solid ice. So how did you do it? How did you manage to get to Prydz Bay and the airfield at Davis Base to board your father’s chartered jet, which just happened to be there to whisk True and his crocodile egg to safety?”

“I don’t know. I was out of it. I spent a month in the hospital. I remember bits and pieces, but the rest is a blur. Yet I was there, and I’m here. I didn’t die. You can’t go from being trapped beneath the ice to Davis Station without the journey in between.”

“Or maybe you can. Have you ever heard of quantum tunneling? No? When we examine the inner workings of an atom, we know that it is about 99.99 percent empty space. In fact, all matter is mostly empty space. So why, then, if that’s true, can’t we walk through walls? The reason is electrons. Electrons are tiny, but they pack a strong negative charge. These electrons are continuously moving around the circumference of the atom at the speed of light, repelling each other. It’s their repelling charge that prevents us from walking through walls. Did you know we go through our entire lives without ever actually having touched anything? When we stand, the electrons in our shoes repel the electrons in the floor, levitating us about a millionth of a centimeter. Of course, you already know that from having spent the last seven years marketing an alien electron generator.

“Quantum tunneling is the quantum mechanical process by which a particle can pass between two separate points without passing through all the intermediate points. Extraterrestrial aircraft move from point A to point B in the blink of an eye, appearing to stop on a dime when in fact they’re quantum tunneling. Oh, yes, we know a great deal about our alien visitors, and I want to share everything with you.”

I stared hard into his eyes. “Why? So you can start some bogus space war predicated on a false flag attack that your phony spacecraft initiated? How many innocent people have to die so you and your big-oil allies can stay in power? These beings mean us no harm. Why do you want to kill them, too?”

“Don’t be so quick to pass judgment. There’s a reason they gave you access to the higher dimensions, and it wasn’t so you could battle the Loch Ness monster and sell books.”

He looked up at Dr. Stewart. “Give us some privacy, please.
I’ll call you when I need you.”

“Yes, sir.”

I heard the physician leave, the door hissing closed behind him.

“I need to trust you, Dr. Wallace. More importantly, I need you to trust me. So I’m going to debrief you. In doing so, I’m going to reveal events so incredible they defy belief, things that are so shocking your first instinct will be to dismiss them simply out of self-preservation. The truth will sound like a combination of fiction and conspiracy theory, but it’s absolutely real. To keep these truths from the public, the Constitution has been trampled upon and the United States government subverted. Good, moral individuals like yourself have been murdered, including a world leader who attempted to derail the people who now hold power. If someone of this man’s stature was expendable, then you and I are barely an afterthought. And yet you may hold the key to saving our world, or destroying it. Thus, you need to know everything.

“Are we alone in the universe? Far from it. There are countless species out there vying to influence our evolution. The question now is whether humanity can survive the encounter. Although these visitations date back thousands of years, the first modern-day encounters occurred two years after the atomic bomb was used to end World War II. The crash outside Roswell, New Mexico, occurred when a new electromagnetic scalar weapon was switched on, causing two of the E.T. aircraft that were phasing out of super lightspeed to collide. Between January 1947 and December 1952, our EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon brought down thirteen alien spacecrafts: eleven in New Mexico and one each in Nevada and Arizona. Two other crashes occurred in Mexico and one in Norway. Sixty-five bodies were recovered, including one alien that was kept alive for three years. Of special importance was an alien craft, one hundred feet in diameter, recovered on a mesa near Aztec, New Mexico, on February 13, 1948. In addition to its dead crew, the vessel contained stored human body parts.

“In December of 1947, President Truman secretly approved Project Sign, a program that recruited America’s top scientists to study the alien phenomenon. A year later Sign evolved into Project Grudge, which included a disinformation campaign known as Blue Book. Special Ops groups known as Blue Teams were trained and equipped to recover the crashed spacecraft and their alien crew, everything overseen during these early years by the newly formed United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, the latter created to deal exclusively with the alien presence.

“On November 4, 1952, President Truman established, by secret executive order, the National Security Agency. The NSA’s primary task was to decipher alien communications and establish a dialogue with extraterrestrials. They were also charged with monitoring all communications worldwide for the purpose of gathering intelligence, both human and alien, and to containing the secret of extraterrestrials’ presence. Truman’s executive order exempted the NSA from all laws that did not specifically name the agency in the text of the law, essentially placing the NSA and its activities above the law, allowing them to operate free of oversight. President Obama learned this the hard way when he found out the agency was eavesdropping on the German chancellor without his administration’s knowledge.

“Truman’s actions created a plausible deniability buffer between the White House and the ‘do whatever is necessary’ tactics of his newly established intelligence agencies. In years to come, this order effectively prevented future presidents from accessing information from the intelligence communities regarding E.T.s. In other words, when it comes to aliens, these intelligence agencies report to no one.

“Truman’s Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, objected to the secret executive orders and was asked to resign. Convinced he represented a threat to their secrecy, the CIA tailed him around the clock. The resultant paranoia was diagnosed as a mental breakdown, and Forrestal was forcibly committed to the mental ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he was isolated and denied visitors.
When Forrestal’s brother notified authorities that he intended to remove James from Bethesda, CIA agents tied a sheet around the former defense secretary’s neck, fastened the end to a room fixture, and threw James Forrestal out the sixteenth-story window. The sheet tore and the fall killed him, his murder made to look like a suicide.”

“I don’t care about your conspiracy tales, Colonel. I’ve heard them all before.”

“Have you heard about the captured alien? He was a Gray. Grays come in different sizes, but they all share the same basic DNA structure. We’ve encountered reptile-like beings as well as humanoids, which we call Nordics. Each species has a different agenda, but I’ll save that for later. The first Gray was called Ebe, short for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. Like all Grays, Ebe was hairless, with a slightly elongated skull and big black eyes that had no exterior lids. A Gray’s neck is centered at the base of its skull, giving the head a top-heavy, unstable appearance. Their hands are thin and double-jointed, possessing three long fingers and an opposable fourth digit.

“Ebe’s sexual organs were internalized, but after two years of attempted communications, we were pretty sure he was a male. The alien’s internal anatomy was chlorophyll-based, and it processed food into energy and waste material in the same manner as plants. It had to be kept in a Faraday chamber, which disrupted its ability to control electromagnetic currents. Otherwise, Ebe would escape by walking right through the walls.

“We learned a lot from Ebe, everything compiled into what became known as the Yellow Book. Unfortunately, the Gray became ill in late 1951. Medical specialists were brought in to treat him, along with a botanist. In a futile attempt to save the being’s life and demonstrate our peaceful intentions to a superior race of beings, the United States began broadcasting radio signals into deep space. These distress calls, part of a project called SIGMA, went unanswered. Ebe died on June 2, 1952; Spielberg’s movie E.T. was loosely based on these events.