MOTHER SHIP part 4

Copyright (c) 2016 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

By R. Peterson

I’ve often heard that just before death a person’s life flashes before their eyes. As the nuclear warhead launched by Sabah Karga streaked from the Fodiator toward the female form inside the glowing white sphere, not just one life flashed before my eyes, but every life that had ever been. Death is an illusion; it does not exist. There is only one single everlasting life manifesting itself in an endless variety of different forms. I understood that mother was me and you and that all life on Earth was a part of her. I remembered every moment and each and every life, from the beginning …

Nearly four billion years ago, the same light surrounding the female-figure that Sabah had launched the missile at, gave me/us the gift of change and caused matter to become a living thing. From a combination of chemicals I became a single cell powered by sunlight and capable of absorbing nutrients from sea water and the sea floor and I used these materials to expand.

I thought there would be no limit to how large I could become, but I was wrong. At one point I felt myself in conflict, being pulled apart and I divided … not once but again and again. After a thousand centuries I was not one living thing … but millions and every single part of me had the same gift of change, a capacity to grow to change and to evolve.

A million centuries later I was no longer limited to single cells but forming complex organisms in an infinite variety of designs before dividing, and I filled the ocean floors. And then in the short space of another billion years I developed the ability to free my root systems from the ocean bottom and to move freely in the water. And at that moment I became both plant and a new life form that we now call animal.

And as an animal I was becoming complex and the elaborate systems of locomotion I had evolved for my millions of species capable of free movement demanded nutrients of much higher quality and I began to pursue and kill other parts of me swimming in the oceans and to nourish myself with differing life-forms. For over two billion years I ruled the oceans and I knew horror and fear and I also grew teeth and I learned to like the taste of blood.

As various plant forms, I often scattered my seeds in the winds that blew above the surface of the water and sometimes they did not return to the sea but took root in another emerging world apart from the vast oceans.

During the next four hundred million years, I acquired by necessity the ability to leap from shallow waters and learned of a strange place above not completely covered by liquid and I was the hunter and the prey in a hundred-billion struggles to survive as the large fed on the small. I was a terrified Colelacanth (tetrapod) carrying fertilized eggs who was driven away from my mate and a school of other fish by rival females and who wandered far in search of food. It was I who first leaped from the water to escape an open mouth filled with teeth and also the Acanthodii (spiny shark) who missed his meal while I flopped on a sandy beach in hopeless despair before re-entering the water … and I lived and I learned and I passed along the knowledge of my miraculous escape to my offspring.

Two hundred million years later I was leaping from the water regularly to avoid being eaten and I began to stay on the rocky beaches for longer and longer time periods as my lungs adapted to the new environment. My tetrapod fins slowly evolved into legs and carried me across and through a strange world of shallow ponds, ruled by exotic plant life that had discovered dry-land a half a billion years before. And as all life forms, I also followed those who escaped onto land and I continued to hunt and to kill.

Over three hundred million years I evolved into the most massive life forms the world has ever seen, and as a million species of Dinosauria (terrible reptiles) I feasted on all other life … plant and animal.

The Earth was a world of terror when mother returned sixty-five million years ago and with her eternal light she destroyed the vast majority of life in the world. And I who had billions of years before became a “we”, moved inland and continued to change.

A little more than a million years ago, we left the trees and learned to search for food on the open plains and we walked upright. And we dominated and ruled the world of animals before we knew good and evil and then we began to fight with ourselves. We discovered fire and lived for thousands of centuries in caves, sheltered against the cold winds as the ice ages came and then receded and then came again. Always it was that which sought to destroy us that made us change.

We built shelters of hides and wood and our villages turned into cities. Humanity evolved side by side with evil. We learned to dominate others who were weaker and we became kings … and slaves … rich and poor. Wars raged across the land and on the surface of the seas and we built monuments to our Gods … stone pyramids reaching to the sky and rock monoliths arranged to catch the orbits of heavenly bodies … all memories of our mother long forgotten. Every single lifetime was replayed in exacting detail up to the present time when I left New York City in the Fodiator and then traveled along with Alvin Sullenger and the others to the Caribbean and the ancient site of mother’s last visit.

Captain Smith, Abniel and I left the flying submarine and walked toward the glowing sphere and then I saw Sabah launch the AGM-88D again. The missile had barely gone beyond the point where my memories replayed the last time, when the memories began again from the begging.

The three and a half billion years spent evolving in the oceans was relived in exacting detain along with the five hundred million years that followed as I moved onto land, ever changing, ever growing with each generation. The last million years I once again relived the evolution of man through steaming jungles, windswept plains and through countless ice ages huddled together around fires and into the dimmest parts of recorded history. It was Déjà vu and I had been here before and I remembered. Time upon time I tried to change history. 

I found myself a woman, the wife of Pontius Pilate, during the trial of Jesus in Jerusalem in the year zero and I tried to warn my husband of the world-shaking consequences of his actions … but my husband washed his hands of the entire affair.

On April 11, 1865, I was a soldier guarding the inside of the White House and I told a sleep-walking Lincoln that a coffin would lie on a catafalque in the White House East Room and that the dead man it contained would be the president. He dismissed the encounter as a too-real dream and ten days later met his fate in Ford’s theatre.

In November of 1941, I was boxing oranges at a warehouse in California and mailed a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt warning up the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor … but my letter was ignored.

Finally the flight across the Caribbean was replayed and this time I paid special attention to Sabah as he stared at the missile launch controls aboard the Fodiator. I knew what he was going to do, but was I helpless to stop him? It was only as we walked toward the glowing light that contained mother and heard the whine as the hydraulic levers lowered the missile into firing position that I was able to force myself to deviate from this particular timeline of events. As Captain Smith turned, cursed and then ran back toward the Fodiator I grabbed Abniel and this time dragged her forward toward the glowing sphere that contained Mother.

Just before we entered the glowing orb and just as the nuclear missile was launched from the flying submarine, I saw a doorway open in mid-air and an outstretched arm pull Alvin Sullenger through it. Time and the impending doom appeared to stand still. Alvin’s eyes caught mine for an instant before the door closed and I heard his brilliant scientific voice in my head offering an explanation. “I must go back, but you two must go forward. I’m sorry that there was only one lifeboat on this voyage capable of pulling an individual back from destruction. Fate is a drama written in the bedrock of time and its principal players can be changed only with the greatest of difficulty. Captain Smith and the religiously mad Sabah must go down with the ship and the world that it has destroyed. Hang on and I promise I will return and bring you back.”

-------2-------

Abniel and I were both aware of the nuclear destruction going on outside of the sphere but we were in a safe place, a kind of intergalactic womb and we were protected from all harm. We were in immersed in a dielectric dream, coddled by a mother’s warm and infinite love as we discovered the vast and improbable secrets of the universe, delivered by the soft sounds of an unspoken lullaby.

The Earth that we were born into, was now a world covered with seas and the sphere that contained us, skimmed the surface of the waters until time and the end of rain created for us a new destination. Mother planted us on a small patch of land rising above the all-encompassing oceans with a rich and fruitful garden to sustain us.

I tried to question the superior being who planted the first seeds of life if we were to be another Adam and Eve destined to re-populate the world just before she and her magnificent light vanished. Mother had no vocal skills … only eternal meditations capable of traversing the cosmos.

“No,” her thoughts assured me. “Only the past repeats itself … never the future.”

I made a few primitive tools and Abniel and I together built a shelter. I kept tract of the days by making marks on the trunk of a tree with a stone axe and in the evenings we sometimes watched the stars as they glimmered above the oceans that surrounded us.

            “Are we the last people on Earth?” Abniel asked me one day as I was weaving a grass net to catch fish. I had earlier constructed a raft to take me into deeper waters.

            “It’s hard to say,” I told her. “What the nuclear missile that Sabah launched didn’t destroy, five months of endless rain probably did.”

            “You remember when we were in the Fodiator,” Abniel said, “after we went below the water in the Caribbean and we saw the strange life forms?”

            “I remember everything,” I told her, “and a lot more.” I was thinking of my vast four billion year-long replay of the history of life on Earth, and I had now been though it three times.

            “I don’t think you should venture onto the oceans,” she said looking out over the waves. “I think there is other life other than fish there … horrible things that only water can hold.”

            “I’ve seen schools of fish swimming just beyond those rocks.” I pointed to where the ocean waves broke on a wall of just under the surface coral. “I’ve fished-out every spot I can reach from shore.”

            “I can’t afford to lose you,” Abniel said. She shyly patted her stomach that I noticed for the first time had a prominent bulge. “We … can’t afford to lose you!”

            “No child of mine is going to be raised on fruit and berries!” I kissed her with the passion only fatherhood can bring and then I laughed as I pushed the raft into the waves.

-------3-------

            I discovered to my horror that Mother had repopulated the oceans with the terrible monsters who had existed during the Mesozoic Era. Perhaps she thought land-based animals was an experiment that had gone bad and wanted a do-over. I was pulling my heavy net back to the raft for the first time when a giant Plesiosaur tried to swallow the captured fish in one huge bite destroying the raft in the process. I escaped death by swimming only because the long necked beast was feeding on my labors. Abniel and I watched from the shore as the giant sea-serpent circled the island obviously hoping for a free meal. “Don’t you ever do that again!” Abniel was crying as she beat on me with her fists. “I can’t raise a child alone … I just can’t!”

            Abel, named after Abniel not the biblical second child ever born, was just three years old when he spotted the ship while gathering shells and firewood and ran to tell us. A battered cruise ship the Carnival Breeze was listing badly when it drew close enough to the island for us to see the white robed people clustered on the numerous levels. We had been discovered and we were not alone. The ship was lowering a lifeboat filled with men brandishing swords when I noticed the skulls hanging from the deck rigging and heard a familiar voice call. “We Fish men survive destruction because we line the pathway to God with the blood of sinners!” It was Wolf Eyes the murderous religious zealot that we had escaped from once before. We had no weapons except for a few crude spears. I grabbed Abniel and Abel and we headed across the island to a hidden cove where I had secretly been building another much stronger raft. This time I didn’t think Abniel would mind.

-------4-------

            I could hear the Fish Men rummaging through our meager belongings as I loaded Abniel and my child onto the raft. Our lifeboat was much stronger this time, but horribly large sea monsters still circled us as we headed out to sea. One particularly large creature with a mother-to-be abdomen circled especially close to the raft. “She’s eating for at least three,” Abniel gasped.

A furious cry of indignation rose from the shore as Wolf Eyes and his murderous band discovered they had been cheated out of their latest round of self-righteous mutilation and torture. Twenty minutes later the Carnival Breeze stormed around the island to intercept us.

            “I thought you were just another James Bond wanna-be working for the National Security Agency when I first met you.” Abniel looked into my eyes and held tightly to me and Abel as the cruise ship turned death boat loomed before us. “A man who thought he was invincible and the world’s gift to women.” She kissed her son and pulled him closer.

            “And now?” I was out of ideas about how to escape the worms of this new world. I knew that this was most likely the end.

            “I haven’t changed my mind.” Abniel grinned. “I can only add to that, that you are bone-headed and you won’t listen to a thing I say.”

The six foot long front flipper fin of the toothy pregnant Plesiosaur rammed our raft at the same time that the cruise ship drew close enough to see the toothy grin of Wolf Eyes. I almost welcomed being eaten by the sea monster. It was better than enduring days of unspeakable horror and torture at the hands of the Fish Men. We decided to cast Abel over the side and then join him. It would all be over in seconds. Abniel leaned forward and kissed me. “I love you,” she said.

With the lightning-strike sound of ten million volts of electricity exploding in the atmosphere an aircraft suddenly appeared above us. We were lifted into the air by a beam of black light that obviously defied the laws of physics and especially gravity. Moments later we found ourselves in the cockpit of a much improved and sophisticated flying submarine.

            “I’m sorry I took so long,” Alvin Sullenger said. “But I had to go back a few years and build a time machine capable of transporting more than one person … of course I thought of the Fodiator with a few additions.”

            “Time machine?” Abniel gasped.

            “I’m sure Alvin will explain everything later,” I told her. “Right now I want to get out of this world.”

The world’s most brilliant scientist, the man who discovered and named all one-hundred eighteen elements of dark matter, punched several codes into a keyboard and an instant later we were airborne and laughing … glad to be alive, bouncing like joyful children on the stretched-fabric mattress of space time.

-------5-------

            “Something is wrong!” Alvin was staring at the flying submarine’s controls. “We should be moving across the fabric of space time much faster. My theory is we’ve hit a snag and a string is unraveling and causing drag!”

            “Time travel? String theory?” Abniel gasped. “How is this even possible?”

            “Time, like all mind, matter and energy in the universe, is just another element in the closed structure of infinity,” Alvin told her. He switched on an exterior camera view of the bottom of the Fodiator before he continued. “Imagine a counter clockwise spinning wheel of fortune only made of dark matter, the clicking pointer is always on the present and the next stop to the right is the beginning of everything. Every nanosecond new spokes are added to the wheel,”

He used a joystick control to make the exterior camera scan the bottom of the aircraft. “When you slide down any spoke to the hub you can choose to move onto any other spoke except the future … which does not exist.”

            We were flying over a constantly time-changing land mass that currently looked like a Peter Bruegal painting of medieval Scotland. The digital time display on the Fodiator’s  console showed the year 419.

“Oh my God!” Abniel’s scream caused me to avert my gaze from the side window. Alvin’s exterior camera display showed the same Plesiosaur sea monster that had been swimming around our raft, tangled in and chewing on the aircraft’s hydraulic cables. It was obviously still alive. Abel sensed his mother’s fear and began to howl.

            “Sometimes I pick up more than I bargained for,” Alvin muttered sheepishly, “when I snatch people from death without extensive planning.”

            “We’re not taking that pregnant Jurassic Park monster back with us are we?” Abniel picked up her crying son.

            “I think if I extent the landing gear, and then retract it … perhaps skim a few waves, I should be able to shake the creature off,” Alvin told her.

We were flying low over a long stretch of dark water and a crude fishing boat, with two terrified peasants inside, capsized just before Alvin shouted his triumph. “Knocked the sucker loose!” he yelled.

This time it was my turn to gasp. “What’s wrong?” Abniel was dancing with Abel held tightly in her arms.

            “I recognized that dark misty water,” I told her looking back as time continued to change.

            “So what?” she said. “There are plenty of big fish in the sea … one more dropped in the middle ages won’t make that much of a difference.”

            “Loch Ness,” I marveled. “That lake we passed over was Loch Ness!”

-------6-------

            Alvin dropped us off in New York’s Central Park and strangely gave Abniel a weapon instead of me. There was communication between the two but I didn’t know what. I decided to ask her about it later. It was night. The time display on the aircraft’s consul read 4-19-06. We had returned to the city three months before we left. We had just ninety days to make the world a better place and to possibly save it. While Alvin had been converting the Fodiator into a time machine he’d also learned that Sabah was part of a radical Salafi jihadist militant group that had infiltrated the N.S.A. as a sleeper cell just before 9/11. They viewed the destruction of the infidel world as the will and desire of Allah. We might not be able to completely change the flood that was coming … but we had to try.

Several joggers noticed the aircraft vertically land and take off without obvious concern. Pot smoke drifted in the air like the fog we’d seen over the Scottish lake. People who live in the Big Apple claim that they have seen everything … perhaps they have.

We followed an elderly Woodstock looking couple past giant rhododendrons and hollies, to a circular pathway mosaic of inlaid stones. We kissed next to an inlaid stone memorial that said IMAGINE while Abel danced to the hippy couple’s softly playing i-Pod.  You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one …

It was late, we decided to get a hotel room. I flagged down a cab on 72nd Street in front of the Dakota apartments. Abniel was halfway into the back seat with Abel when I pulled her back. Sabah Karga sat behind the wheel. “I’ve changed my mind … It’s a nice night. I think I’d rather walk,” I told him.

Abniel’s look of horror quickly vanished from her face as she handed me Abel. “I still have things to do,” she said. “When my work is finished I’ll get us a room. I’ll call you when I’ve found something we can live with.”

“Are you sure?” Sabah hadn’t met either of us yet and so there was no way of recognizing us. Perhaps intuition warned him of danger. “This city is not a suitable place for an unescorted kadın!”

“Perhaps,” she told him. “But tonight I have my reasons.” She looked at our child with love in her eyes.

            “Where I come from it is haram for a women to be out alone at night,” Sabah muttered as he looked at the address Abniel had given him. The look of contempt in his eyes was unmistakable. “This is a very kötü part of the city. If you got raped and murdered the police might not show up for hours”

            I noticed the Smith and Wesson 38 special under Abniel’s coat as she slipped into the backseat.

            “Are you sure about this?” I kissed her as when she unrolled her window.

            “Yes,” she said looking at Sabah. “It is the only way.”

And as I held Abel in my arms the cab disappeared into the dark traffic of the city that never sleeps and I knew at least one of the world’s upcoming problems would be solved. I stood looking up at the stars and marveled at the vast universe above us all. And then I ran with my son to take shelter under a tree … it was beginning to rain.

THE END ?

MOTHER SHIP part 3

Copyright (c) 2016 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

By R. Peterson

Lightning penetrated the darkness for a brief instant and it showed relentless rain pouring cascading down the windshield, like Niagara Falls. Captain Smith tried flying the Fodiator through the gloom under manual control, finally gave up and switched to auto-pilot when the glowing spheres surrounding the vessel proved impossible to resist. Two flashing orbs entered the control panel and the navigation heading quickly changed to 15.634 degrees north and 75.419 degrees west. I was in the cockpit along with Alvin and Sabah. Captain Smith insisted that it would take four cockpit crew members to operate the craft where we were going. As we sped over America the lightning became more frequent, until every few seconds its strange otherworldly phosphorous light illuminated the land below us. I glimpsed the deserts Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico below us. They looked like islands in some strange inland sea. Still the rains continued.

“Mathematics is a wonderful thing,” Alvin said. What the hell? I thought, because he spoke as though we were all seated in his study, or some lecture hall. Completely misunderstanding my glare of impatience, he continued “Any problem known to mankind can be solved with equations.”

“Alvin Sullenger is the most famous scientist in the world not for his work with gravity but for his Balance Theory,” Abniel said as she brought us drinks and sticky buns heated in a microwave. She gave me a gentle smile, as if to say, humor him, please?

            “I’ve heard your equilibrium theory ridiculed by theoretical physicists like Peter Higgs, Stephen Hawking and Werner Heisenberg, as being too simplistic,” I told him. “What exactly is it?” The quirky scientist had simple answers to almost every problem that made his fantastic inventions and brilliant discoveries in physics that much more astonishing.

            “If A equals B then B must equal A,” Alvin said. “And it applies to all matter, mind, and energy in the universe.”

            “I understand matter and energy but what the hell is mind?” I asked him.

Alvin rolled his eyes and began to sing and wave his arms like Ray Bolger, the actor who played the scarecrow from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz “…and my head I’d be a scratchin’ while my thoughts were busy hatchin’ … if I only had a brain!”

I wasn’t the least bit offended; Alvin made me smile … and that was a very good thing.

“Then how do I become a rich man?” Sabah sounded skeptical. He sat quietly studying a console hanging over him that launched nuclear missiles when the Fodiator was in the air and atomic torpedoes when it was under water.

“Why do you want to become rich?” Alvin seemed more than just curious.

“To be happy of course,” Sabah blurted.

“Then,” Alvin said. “According to your beliefs, if riches equal happiness then by the laws of balance theory, happiness must also equal riches.”

“Then all I have to do to become the world’s richest man is smile?” Sabah sneered.

“You must act as if you already have your desires,” Alvin said, “completely and without faithless distraction. Then the universe is forced to put itself into equilibrium.”

“Perhaps in my infidelic imagination,” Sabah said. “The world’s insane asylums are full of self-proclaimed kings and movie stars, but what about reality?”

“Outside the fabric layers of the universe and inside all sub atomic particles there is only imagination,” Alvin told him with a shrug. “Believe what you want, but remember faithless distraction.”

“What is it about this specific location that is so important that we go there?” I asked the C.E.O. of Graviton Industries to change the subject.

“I, as well as my most trusted associates, believe that these particular co-ordinates define the exact location that the Mother Ship occupied when it last visited Earth sixty-five million years ago, just before the extinction of the dinosaurs,” Alvin said. He was texting into an i-Phone as a strange instrument floated in the air before him, something he had brought along from Graviton City. A hologram originating from the device projected 3D images of ever changing binary numbers, complex equations, and symbols on the aircraft’s ceiling.

 “I was taught in school that an asteroid impact filled the atmosphere with debris bringing on a centuries long solar winter,” Captain Smith injected. “And as proof, a thin deposit of clay in the earth’s sedimentary layers, at the same time dinosaurs disappeared, contains large amounts of meteor dust.”

Alvin laughed while he continued to send someone a message. He could obviously multitask even better than women. “It was no asteroid. The Chicxulub crater is merely a footprint, a one-hundred and ten mile wide impression … like the dust track made by Neil Armstrong when he stepped on the moon.”

            “The center of the Chicxulub crater is located under the Yucatan peninsula,” Captain Smith argued. “The co-ordinates, that we’re heading for, are five-hundred miles to the east.”

            “The North and Central American continents have been drifting westward at the rate of one half inch per year.” Alvin said. “We used to be attached to Europe and Africa.” He switched a button on the device and was now playing a holographic version of World of Warcraft with a hand-held controller. “That would be roughly 487 miles … close enough.”

-------2-------

            Thirty minutes later the aircraft ran into a patch of what appeared to be violent turbulence just as we were approaching the Gulf Coast. The Fodiator rolled twice before Abniel burst into the cockpit. She was obviously annoyed to see Alvin Sullenger still absorbed in his 3D adventure. “The world is coming to an end, we’re falling from the sky … and you’re playing a video game?”

I decided that even angry, she looked beautiful.

            “Sorry,” Alvin said without diverting his eyes, ‘it’s a guild thing … were attacking the alliance capital in ten minutes!”

The Fodiator pitched violently to the left and Sullinger lost his grip on his controller. The mouse-like device banged against the fuselage walls. A swarm of black fluttering objects had surrounded the aircraft and appeared to be battling with the white spheres. A dozen flying creatures that looked like a horror-movie cross between locusts and piranha burst through the jet’s reinforced aluminum and titanium exterior. Immediately wind and rain streamed through the jagged holes the creatures had created. Seconds later, the plane went into a vertical dive. Even as I gasped in terror; I heard Abniel’s shriek above Sabah’s yell and I gasped again when she landed in my lap. I held her like a wild rabbit that I’d somehow caught with my bare hands.

Alvin’s brown eyes were as wide as a cow’s. “So that’s what Gubs look like! Amazing!” he exhaled, more curious than scared. My stomach was in my throat, thankful I could not scream. I held tight to my lovely colleague as if protecting her.

            ‘I don’t know what these things are,” Captain Smith wailed, gripping the aircraft’s steering tiller, “but I think your new amazing friends just destroyed the wing elevator controls … we’re going down!” The terrifying creatures were like balls of airborne Fluoroantimonic super-acids instantly destroying any material they came into contact with.

An earsplitting whine rose in pitch and volume like a descending missile.

Alvin struggled to pull several objects from his coat pocket including an orange Pokémon marble bag and began to read from a French pamphlet titled. Instructions de réparation d’urgence robot micro. “Gubs are the dark matter equivalent of bugs with chemical weapons,” he mumbled.

The Fodiator had begun to spin. I began to feel weightless. My head felt as large as a pumpkin.

Abniel’s fear turned to anger. “We’re all going to die, and Dr. Frankenstein is playing with marbles!” She squirmed in my lap, flailing her arms, and knocked the bag out of Alvin’s hand. Six tiny flying objects spilled into the air then regrouped and spun about the mad scientist’s head like orbiting moons. Alvin frantically punched several codes into what looked like a Genie garage door opener and three of the micro robots began to fire tiny laser beams at the Gubs while the others attached themselves to the instrument panel and the inside walls and began to shoot sparks as they repaired the holes in the fuselage. “Every bit of matter in the universe has its dark matter equivalent,’ Alvin said as he watched the inside of the cabin become a battleground, “that goes for all life forms!”

A long minute later, Captain Smith was able to bring the aircraft under control. He instantly sucked all the acidic fumes from the cockpit and refilled it with fresh air. It was a two second blackout that I’d never get back.

“What in the name of Allah were those horrible things?” A bulging-eyed Sabah shook like a wet and terrified dog as he stared at the smoldering aquatic insects twitching on the floor. My ears popped as the cabin pressure stabilized. I didn’t like the way Sabah’s hand hovered next to the aircraft’s targeting and launch buttons.

Calmly, Alvin explained: “Gubs are the dark side of Angylions, the white orbs that have been following and guiding us. Every conceivable bit of matter, energy, thought or emotion has a corresponding opposite. It is what keeps the universe and all things in balance.”

The battle raging outside had also come to a conclusion. The Angylions appeared to have beaten the Gubs. The few remaining aggressors vanished in a lightning flash.

            “You would think,” Sabah said. “That a superior being larger than a galaxy would be able to defeat such small enemies. If this thing truly is God, then we are being punished for our sins, and we must all choose a more respectful and moral course that aligns with the wishes of Allah.”

The surety at which the cab-driver assigned by the N.S.A. sought to decide all our future morals and actions was beginning to disturb me. People of a right mind always contemplate and wonder … while those stricken with mental illness are always so dead sure of themselves.

            “I’m almost sure the Gubs come from within the mother ship,” Alvin said. “As well as much more terrible things that I suspect we will encounter later. After all, a supreme entity that can traverse the universe at a thousand times the speed of light must carry good and bad along with her, otherwise where could it be found?”

Sabah smirked as if he knew the answer, but the eyes staring out the cockpit window were filled with fear. I’d been with the N.S.A. long enough not to trust them. I had a feeling that there was more to our cab driver from Turkey than met the eye. The wide eyed ignorance he had displayed at the airport and at Graviton City now seemed to be disappearing. He was obviously much more clued-up than he pretended to be, and that scared me.

We were now over the Caribbean, a little south east of Jamaica. “It looks like we’re all going for a swim,’ Captain Smith said as the Fodiator began to descend. A swirling vortex of vapor at least fifty miles wide swirled on the surface of the dark blue water as innumerable white orbs disappeared into the center.

I looked at the still smoking holes Alvin’s micro robots had repaired in the cockpit. “I hope there are no more ruptures in the fuselage.” We slowed to what I thought was almost a halt just before we reached the water, still the impact was jarring, a sonic boom exploding under water and mixing with our screams of terror.

            “Quiet!” Alvin demanded. “Together with a group of mounted Horde. I’m about to charge the gates of Stormwind.”

-------3------- 

 

The strange dark matter substance that mixed with the semi-liquid atmosphere of the new Earth appeared to vanish as the Fodiator became a submarine. Abniel wiggled off my lap and strapped herself into a seat. She refused to look at me; perhaps I’d held her a little too tight.  Monstrous sea animals of mystical proportions maneuvered just outside the fringes of the powerful underwater lights. Shadows of fins, fangs, tentacles and other hideous appendages danced just beyond our limited view. “Oh my God!” Abniel screamed. A dark shape suddenly covered half the windshield and a suction clad tentacle with the girth of an oak tree attached itself to the port window. My head clunked against a support beam as the Fodiator was jarred violently to one side.

            “Don’t!” Captain Smith stared horrified at Sabah. The Turkish cab driver had a finger poised inches from a button marked TUBE FILL PRE-LAUNCH. A red light just above TARGET ACQUIRED was glowing. “These ADCAP Mark 48 torpedoes carry an atomic warhead that is supposed to be incapable of detonation less than one-hundred seventy-three nautical miles from any target. But in any underwater explosion,” he explained, “the surrounding water doesn't absorb the pressure like air does, but moves with it. Even at that range, the resulting concussion would still wipe us out, and at least half of the world!”

            “Are we going to let this thing tear us apart?” Sabah pulled back his fingers but not by much.

            “There are other ways,” Smith said. He opened a tiny door in the control panel and adjusted what looked like an elaborate spring solenoid voltage regulator. When he flipped a switch a moment later I thought we’d been struck by lightning. The entire exterior of the flying submarine instantly turned to vapor, blasting outward for a hundred yards in all directions. “I’ve just turned the outside of this vessel into one of Nikola Tesla’s direct energy weapons!” Captain Smith beamed.

            “I thought those experiments were a boastful failure,” I said. “A way to keep his genius in the public eye.”

            “Actually, for all but a few years after Tesla died and the government kept his confiscated papers secret, they have been relatively common place,” Smith said. “Since the turn of the century you can purchase a small one almost anywhere.”

I stared in disbelief.

            “A stun gun,” Alvin said as Regent Lord Anduin Lothar fell to his level one-hundred Shaman and a dozen others. “He made the submarine into a giant underwater stun gun.”

            “The public eye is a bad place for geniuses,” Abniel said glancing at Alvin. “Unless you have a protected floating city in the Nevada desert that you can escape to.”

            “Nicola Tesla could have built his own anti-gravity sanctuary but he made a crucial mistake and was tripped up by a common blunder,” Alvin said.

            “What was that?” I asked.

            “Faithless distraction,” Alvin shook his head. “He let another’s faithless beliefs influence his own.”

-------4-------

            The underwater giants that had threatened us before were becoming more plentiful, but this time they kept their distance. Giant octopus looking creatures as large as carnival rides, enormous squids with arms half a mile long and other horrible monsters swam just outside of zapping range. Some of the creatures appeared transparent and we could see their insides working. We were all amazed … some of us were terrified.

            “Obligate anaerobes are just micro-organisms that have always been here,” Alvin said. “Before this, you needed a time machine and a very powerful microscope to see them.”

            “These kafir demons are too large to be from our world,” Sabah said wringing his hair. He was sweating nervous perspiration that gave off a faint scent like burning almonds. My trainer at the N.S.A. had called the strange smell Nutella without the hint of a smile.

            “These creatures only look large because we are getting smaller,” Alvin said, “a lot smaller.”

            “I’m the same size I’ve always been,” Smith said staring at his hand. “What are you talking about?”

            “Ever wonder why huge things … stars, planets even galaxies can disappear into a black hole no larger than a pin head?” Alvin questioned.

Captain Smith shrugged his shoulders. “Squeezed together by tremendous gravitational pressure?”

            “Size is just another element in the closed structure of infinity,” Alvin said. “It doesn’t matter how small something gets … you can always cut it in half … forever.”

            “Are you saying what we are going into is something like a black hole?”

            “Something like that,” Alvin said. “Only the Angylions know for sure where they are leading us.”

“I wish I had with me, a copy of the Holy Koran,” Sabah covered his eyes as if shamed by where he was. “So that here, at the end of all things, I might align myself with the wishes of Allah. I must now cling to the second pillar of Islam”

“What is the second pillar?” Captain Smith asked.

“Prayer,” Abniel said.

I remembered my National Security trainer’s simple explanation as to the fragrance that permeated most mental health facilities. “It’s the smell of crazy,” he’d told me.

 Sabah unstrapped himself from his seat, knelt with his hands flat on the floor, closed his eyes and faced what I’m sure he thought was Mecca. His voice dripped with the distillation of overflowing terror as he listened to a religious message on his i-Phone and repeated the words as he put on earphones. "Aman Tanrım bizi yukarıda … bana sadık kulunuz … olmak yardım …"

We had problems larger than Sabah for the moment. The Fodiator, following millions of streaming Angylions, was moving toward a huge opening in one side of what looked like a massive underwater moon.

            “What is that?” Abniel gasped as we moved toward the glowing white sphere.

            “My guess would be cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane … a single living cell,” Alvin told us.

            “Are we going to die?” Abniel gripped my arm so hard it hurt.

            “We are all going to die sometime,” Alvin said. “I don’t have the itinerary but I think I know where we are going.”

            “Where is that?” I had to ask the question even though I thought I knew the answer.

            “To meet the one who planted the seeds of all life on our world,” Alvin said. “We are going to meet … Mother.”

-------5-------

            The inside of the sphere was filled with alternating pure white light and impenetrable darkness like a very powerful florescent light rapidly blinking off and on in an underground cavern. The Fodiator, with all systems functioning except the jet engines, which wound down instantly upon entry into the sphere, settled on a glass-smooth floor like the surface of a perfectly frozen lake. It was only during the dark pulses that we could see anything. The brilliant Angylions revolved around us like a vast asteroid field in the darkness and disappeared in the pulsing light.

            A hobo-stew of mixed sounds from the outside blasted incredibly loud into our ears, some of them violently objectionable, and all of us, except Sabah, screamed. The Turkish cab driver, wearing obviously sound proof headphones, was deep in prayer, his voice boomed louder than ever, and he seemed oblivious to our present danger. The exterior sounds gradually diminished in volume and improved in quality until every tone brought on a kind of tranquility and euphoric elation.

            “I’ve never felt this calm, happy and hopeful!” Abniel inhaled deeply as if the air we were breathing was some kind of exotic drug.

            “Where are we?” Captain Smith sounded like he was ready to laugh.

            “I think this must be some kind of examining chamber,” Alvin said, “where our host finds out what brings us pleasure and what doesn’t.”

Until then, I had forgotten what it felt like to be sixteen. I was suddenly full of a non-nervous energy and my legs felt like they could run five miles without slowing. The tranquil and euphoric tones now delightfully crisp and clear were still changing. They slowly arranged themselves into a song. I had never heard the Byrds’ Turn Turn Turn played live, but no group of musicians on Earth could have played the classic folk-rock song with such profound exuberance and mystical charm as what we heard inside the sphere.

            “Oh my God! This is my favorite song!” Abniel started to dance.

            “It’s defiantly on top of my list,” Captain Smith agreed.

            “I bought the 45 when I was thirteen and wore it out three times on an old Silvertone Instant Play record player,” Alvin said.

We were all smiling when the exit hatch opened seemingly on its own. As we walked down the aircraft stairs, none of us were frightened … just gloriously expectant. I blame myself for leaving Sabah inside the Fodiator. Abniel suggested that we bring him along but I said no. “He’s deep in prayer,” I told the others. “Let him worship God in his own way!”

A magnificent tree appeared in the distance with each dark interval of the pulsing light and we walked toward it. Perfectly tapered branches spread outward like an umbrella. As we drew closer I noticed the fruit. “What do you bet this will just happen to be the best thing we ever tasted!”

Alvin shook his head but he couldn’t stop smiling. “Whatever we are dealing with can obviously read our thoughts and also our minds,” he said. “What we are being presented with is our deepest desires and our basic beliefs offered as a gift.”

            “What’s wrong with that?” I said as I reached for what looked like a perfect snow white apple.

            “It’s the balance in all things,” Alvin said. “Nothing is ever perfect. You may not see the worm but it is there just the same!”

I took a bite, and it was as if my life-long thirst for knowledge had suddenly been satisfied. Problematic memories from my past now had easy and simple solutions. I knew more in an instant than I’d ever learned in eight years of all-night college cramming sessions. Undreamed of inventions settled in my expanding brain like patent ready pages in exacting detail and function. I knew without any doubt that life does not exist without death and that they are two parts to an eternal journey. The total amount of living things on our world is exactly equal to all the living things that have ever died from the beginning of time onward because they are the same. There is absolutely no reason to fear … change, because life will always become death and death turns into life and neither can exist without the other. I understood Alvin Sullenger’s Balance Theory and how it applied to all things in the universe.

            “We have a visitor,” Abniel nudged me back to reality.

A glowing ball of light appeared an indeterminate distance away. I could clearly see a dark silhouette of a human-like personage inside. We moved toward what became a her with no fear.  Joy, euphoria, and most of all gratitude, filled us to overflowing. A breathtaking love, longed-for for all eternity, was beckoning us forward. I felt more than wonderful. It occurred to me that we were children, lost for four-billion years and who had only now finally found our way home.

We all heard the mechanical whine, but Captain Smith was the first to realize just what the sound meant. Abniel and I turned with him. Four hydraulic rods on one wing of the Fodiator were lowering a sixteen-hundred pound AGM-88D nuclear missile into firing position. The missile was aimed directly at our newfound mother.

            “What does that crazy son-of-a-bitch think he’s doing,’ Captain Smith screamed as we both turned and ran toward the flying submarine.

My newfound mind powers were extraordinary. My vision was like a super high speed movie camera that I could play back frame by frame. I was only halfway to the Fodiator, when I actually saw the nuclear warhead as it launched from the aircraft. Without being told I knew it was a thousand times more powerful than the one that fell on Hiroshima, I also knew it was the end of everything.

 As Alvin had tried to tell us with his strange and over-brained Balance Theory. There is indeed … a worm in every apple.

To be continued …

MOTHER SHIP part 2

Copyright (c) 2016 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

By R. Peterson

 The rain continued to pour. Both sides of New York’s 94^th. Street entrance were littered with the crucified bodies of the cult’s victims, hanging from every darkened light-post, brick façade and doorway. My associate, Dr. Abniel Lecubarri, and I kept our eyes diverted from the horrifying spectacle as we alternately walked and ran splashing through bloody puddles toward La Guardia Airport. Sabah Karga, the driver of the wrecked cab who was assigned to me by the N.S.A., straggled behind staring at the bloody carnage with the bewildered eyes of a Turkish immigrant who probably still believed that somewhere in America, streets were paved with gold.

The dark energy that hung in the air like a burial cloth was at least breathable - for now anyway. I walked over to one of the glowing buckets lining both sides of the street while I waited for Sabah to catch up. Abniel followed looking in all directions for more of the aberrations who had almost made us part of their grisly decorations. The buckets were, as I had suspected, filled with dry ice but why the rising gas was now the only thing illuminating the pitch-black city was a mystery. “I’m no expert in chemistry,” Abniel said as she nudged one bucket with her boot. “But I don’t believe the solid form of carbon dioxide is supposed to radiate light when it turns into a vapor … at least it never has before, not on this planet.”

“We’re living in a new world,” I told her.

We both turned when we heard Sabah scream. A half dozen Fish Men wearing blood stained white sheets, armed with gleaming kitchen knives, no doubt pillaged from area restaurants, and with the determination of suicidal religious fanatics on their scowling faces sprinted stiff-legged after our terrified driver from the shadows of a darkened rental car lot. I tried once again to fire the semi-automatic 38 special issued to me by Homeland Security even though it had inexplicably failed me before. The fully-loaded and apparently intact gun still refused to work.

I grabbed one of the dry-ice filled buckets, and flung it at the pursuer closest to Sabah. It was a lucky shot; dry ice cascaded over the man-creature’s head. It howled like a movie-land banshee and clutched at his frozen face with long filthy fingers worked into bony skin hanging claws no doubt by numerous sacred murders. “Jesus will forgive you,” he wailed. “But you must find him on the cross.”

There were plenty of other citizens driven mad by rain and darkness, no more than a few steps behind - strangely most were now women and girls. Black, Goth-like lips dripping what looked like blood and too many for us to overcome, hissed like snakes. The next throw able bucket of glowing light was at least twenty feet away.

I pushed Abniel behind me, determined to fight the blades with my fists if need be, when a whistling ball of red fire blasted past my head and exploded into the face of a Fish Woman who had just seized Sabah’s shirt tail and was dragging him to the ground. A dozen security guards, mostly teens, armed with what looked like highway flare guns stood at a heavily barricaded airport entrance just ahead; a seldom used cement and steel solution to Islamic terrorists that had now found a new horror to resist. A minute later, we dragged Sabah through the entrance as the mob of female attackers howled and smoked with pyrotechnic vengeance behind us.

“Thrashy whores!” A uniformed security guard, with a name-tag that said Jason, wearing woven beads in his long pointed goatee and a Denots’ The Great War of Life, Death, and Weather tee-shirt exclaimed as we hurried past.  A hidden stereo system was blasting Anthrax’s Madhouse with enough intensity to make my nose bleed. “I have a headlining fully-automatic AR16 leaning against the wall over there that refuses to grind out the beef, but a little strontium nitrate and sulfur from our opening act displayed at the right time still seems to dazzle these gate-crashing, dick-bicycle bitches.” Jason explained.

“I’m glad you were here … and rock on!” I told him while holding my ears.

-------2-------

A Navy flight officer paced alongside a top secret Fodiator on loan from the C.I.A. as the three jet-engine submersible-aircraft was being rolled from a government hanger. The sound of torrential rain almost drowned out the roar of portable generators. “I wasn’t sure this thing existed,” I gasped. “Are you sure it will fly in this weather?” The fidgeting airman was making me nervous.

‘The world has been building flying submarines since Germany in 1937,” he said. “This seven-billion dollar experiment will do forty-eight knots across the ocean floor and Mach four-nineteen in the sky!” Captain Stanley Smith released a hydraulic stair-ramp with obvious pride. ‘I don’t think a little rain is going to stop us.”

“A little rain?” I looked at the closest runway. It looked like the kind of private lake a profession water-skier uses to practice on. Abniel gasped and Sabah shielded his eyes as they entered the passenger space. The interior of the submarine/aircraft was as luxurious as a Gianni Versace. A ten foot long board-room table made of African Blackwood occupied one sixteen-foot length of the fuselage with a dozen high-back quilted-leather chairs. A sixty-inch flat-screen monitor hung from the ceiling showing a space-battle scene from Star Wars the Force Awakens. Captain Smith noticed our astonishment.

“We had to fly several Republican Congressmen to Hawaii for a weekend to obtain funding and Armed Services Committee members are used to living like kings,” he explained as he opened the cockpit door. “The wet-bar is through that other doorway …this Flying Fish is capable of launching four AGM-88D missiles as well as a half dozen ADCAP Mark 48 torpedoes,” Captain Smith went on, “but conventional targets are not what has me worried.”

“Then what is?” I asked. I noticed there was no co-pilot. The instrument panel was lit-up like the Las Vegas strip on Bingo night.

“That!” he said pointing out the cockpit windshield toward the end of the runway as I strapped myself into the co-pilot’s seat.

At least a dozen figures with white sheets billowing around bony broomstick-like legs and brandishing what looked like machetes vaulted over a chain-link fence and raced through the pouring rain toward us. They were pursued by several of the flare-shooters from the main gate.

Captain Smith fired up the engines and six two-thousand watt wing-lights cut through the gloom. “We had a full crew and a twenty-man security team before these monsters decided they were doing God’s work,” Smith said as the aircraft turned. The religious fanatics were almost upon us.

            “What happened to them?” I regretted asking the question almost as soon as the words left my mouth. The engines were coming to full throttle. “With all our convention firearms malfunctioning, including the 60mm machine guns on this plane, most of our forces ended up in enemy hands,” Smith said. “That’s why we persuaded those Thrash Rockers to help out with security.”

            “That sounds almost impossible!” I didn’t know any head-bangers that were pro-government, and blurted “That sounds almost impossible!”

            “Not when you have access to fifty-pounds of confiscated Columbian Skunk-Weed, a six-thousand watt stereo-system invented by the CIA to torture Islamic militants, and six cases of Jägermeister,” Smith snickered.

Even with that kind of compensation I thought the airport’s new security team was vastly outnumbered and under siege. “How long do these rocker guards usually last?” I asked.

            ‘We lose about two every hour,” Smith said, “but at least they die happy.”

The Fodiator was making its final turn before takeoff. The brilliant lights showed three white draped figures hammering nails into the feet and hands of a man being crucified head down against the brick façade of a terminal tower. I recognized Wolf Eyes from our earlier encounter. Evidently the white orb passing through his skull had merely rendered him unconscious. Exploding balls from flare guns fired by the advancing Thrashers showed an upside-down Denots tee-shirt and blood from a lacerated throat dripping into a steaming catch-bucket of dry ice. “Jason!” I gasped.

            “Damn!” Smith said. “I thought he would last more than one day.”

The jet began to pick up speed and was roaring down the runway when a fluttering of white cloth brandishing a knife, charged directly into our path. I saw the Fish Man get sucked into one enormous jet turbine like a paper-clip into a Hoover vacuum-cleaner and the roaring engine didn’t notice.

            “This thing is designed to suck-in a dozen migrating geese or a pair of Gallipolis Sea-Turtles without doing much damage,” Smith said. Seconds later, I felt the huge aircraft lift into the black sky. He pressed a button on the instrument panel and unfastened his seatbelt. “Feel up to a drink?” he said as he stood.

            “Who’s going to fly this thing?” I yelled.

            “It’s on auto-pilot,” Smith said, “besides I’m sure our new friends can guide us to Nevada.”

I stared out the window. Two strings of the same glowing orbs that had rescued Abniel, Sabah and I from the Fish Men were now flying in an apparent escort on both sides of the aircraft. There was nothing to do but stare at the blackness. After ten minutes I also left the plane to the new World’s fate.

Sabah was busy watching Han Solo’s wayward son Kylo Ren terrorize a group of resistance fighters and I found my now-much-more-relaxed mission-associate and Smith at a fully stocked wet-bar in the compartment beyond. “You must see this amazing bedroom!” Abniel gulped down a full glass of Armand de Brignac champagne and poured another before she dragged me toward a closed door at the rear of the plane. “You’re not going to believe this!”

Smith winked as I surrendered. “The Congressmen do like their pleasure,” he said.

-------3-------

Abniel was asleep and the Fodiator was in a near vertical dive when I fell out of the bedroom and crawled to the cockpit screaming “What the Hell?” Captain Smith had the jet on manual control and was now trying to stabilize the flight. “It’s these blasted white balls of fire,” he said. “They keep pulling us off course.”

            “Where exactly does Jerry Lee Lewis want you to go?”

            He ignored my sarcasm. “I keep reprogramming the GPS coordinates for Nevada,” he said, “but as long as the auto pilot is enabled, it keeps changing to a point that would put us smack in the middle of the Caribbean.”

            “How do you know it’s our white glowing friends?”

Captain Smith turned on the auto pilot and reset the coordinates, moments later three golf-ball sized glowing spheres of light passed through the fuselage without causing any visible damage and disappeared into the instrument panel. The target heading returned to 15.634 degrees north and 75.419 degrees west.

            “They don’t seem to have any control over our destination as long as I fly manual,” Smith said. “But they sure want to lead us in their own direction.”

The outside of the aircraft was illuminated as thousands of orbs swarmed over every inch of the fuselage.  “I thought I could shake them off my tail with a power-dive,” the Captain explained.

            “It worked on me,” I told him, remembering a giggling Abniel and the exotic bedroom with white sable carpets, a rolling king-sized half-pipe quilted mattress and satin sheets. “How long before we reach Graviton City?”

            “About an hour,” Smith said.

I almost went back in the bedroom, but chose a hot shower instead. I had to have a clear head if I wanted to find out who had turned out the lights, mixed up the laws of physics, and flooded our world.

-------4-------

            Alvin Sullinger and a half dozen of his associates met us at the landing strip just outside of Graviton City. He was at the controls of a bus-like flying vehicle hovering without sound about sixteen inches off the ground. It was lit up like a Christmas tree. “I’ll never be able to understand the physics behind anti-gravity,” I told him as I helped Abniel into the futuristic looking vehicle. Sabah and Captain Smith sat in the seat behind us.

            “That’s because it’s not physical science … its satanic sorcery,” Alvin explained with an exaggerated sneer. “Dark Matter, and its equivalent unconfined energy, projects negative mass and therefore repels vivacity instead of attracting it … and by God! That makes me the Devil.”

Then he howled laughter, like he was in an old Lon Chaney movie.

            “I know you having a force field around your city that can repel a dozen Vanya Hydrogen bombs keeps my bosses at the N.S.A. chewing their fingernails,” I told him. “But I think that’s cool!”

            “North Korea offered me eighty-billion won and an autographed picture of Dennis Rodman if I’d share my secret,” Alvin said with a smirk, “but I go my own way.”

Alvin pushed a silver disk the size of a quarter into a slot in the dash and The Who blasted the opening riffs to Magic Bus as we lifted into the air. It sounded as if the British rock band was playing right in front of us. “Sixteen strategically placed channels each with its own cluster of speakers made out of air,” Alvin said as he cranked up the volume.

            “You invent the most amazing things!” Abniel giggled as sound waves began to flutter her hair like wind.

            “Oh this music system wasn’t my idea,” Alvin said over the heavy bass. “This is my associate Kim Jones’ contribution to our happiness … I only helped with the technology.”

A long, blond-haired man of undistinguishable age wearing a Woodstock baseball-cap smiled at the mention of his name. “Someone has to keep these nerds in line,” he smiled.

-------5-------

            Graviton City floated in the air above the scorched Black Rock desert a hundred miles north of Reno in Nevada. Although the ground two-hundred feet below was void of any discernable life, an exotic garden of magnificent flora surrounding the city had been given outrageous stimulus. We were passing over what looked like a city park. Orchids of unimaginable colors soared as tall as trees with blossoms large enough to sleep in. A hundred Frisbee players, whom Alvin said were on one of the six twenty-minute breaks attached to each production shift had stopped to eat slices from a watermelon as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. “We have learned through experimentation that when you alter the mass of even the smallest denier of space it affects all surrounding areas,” Alvin said. “We can make the things we like large and those we don’t … very small.”

            We landed on the base of a pavilion that appeared to be made entirely of crystal. Micro robots, many the size of insects or smaller, acted as gardeners and building maintenance workers. “We have made great advances in almost all areas of science,” Alvin said as we walked. “But our knowledge of humanity and the celestial arts is sorely lacking.”

A circle of light from an unknown source illuminated the area around us as we moved. The outer areas were bathed in starlight.

            “Celestial arts?” Captain Smith said. “I didn’t know you people were religious.”

            “Belief is not just one thing in the universe,’ Alvin said. “It is everything. When you look beyond the interior of sub-atomic particle layers or beyond the horizon of multiple universe field patterns, what you find is a mixture of pure imagination diluted with a small quantity of reality.”

Glistening waterfalls ran backward from ornamental ponds and disappeared into invisible spouts suspended in the air.

            “And this means what to a simple cab driver like me?” Sabah asked him.

            “It means there are no limits,” Alvin told him. “You only stop because you apply the brakes. You fail only because you refuse to believe!”

            “You’re talking mind over matter when there is such a thing as actuality,” Smith argued.

Everyone gasped as a large dragonfly, rainbow colors radiating from its gossamer wings, flew over the building tops dragging a full moon into place in the star-filled sky by what looked like a long silver thread.

            “Not really,” Alvin said. “Mind and matter are merely the product of imagination manufactured by acceptance. Reality is a point of observation.”

-------6-------

 We entered a vast dome-shaped chamber which must have been at least twelve stories high. Alvin wiggled his fingers in tiny beams of streaming colored lights floating in the air beside his left hand. The entire Milky Way star helix and a dozen other nearby galaxies appeared suspended over our heads. “That’s not real is it?” Sabah gasped. ‘It can’t be!”

Alvin laughed. “I’ve created this simulation to explain what’s been going on with our world.” He began to walk toward the center of the room and we followed. “About four billion years ago … about ten billion years after the universe was formed … a vastly superior being planted life on this planet and on other planets orbiting nearby stars. We’ve been left on our own for the most part. Oh there was a brief return about sixty-five million years ago to do a little weeding; sometimes troublesome life forms both plant and animal get out of control and must be eradicated.”

            “The dinosaurs,” Sabah gasped. “Allah returned so that he could destroy them.”

            “You’re right about the giant carnivorous and herbivorous reptiles,” Alvin said. “But this actuality is a she … not a he.”

            “How do you know this superior being has a gender?” Abniel was obviously intrigued.

            “Simple logic,” Alvin said. “In this universe, it is always the female of any species, plant or animal, who carries the seeds.”

One edge of the display over our heads began to darken. “Now that your Allah has returned…” Alvin looked at Sabah and smiled. “We have a chance to observe first hand just what our cosmic farmer’s intentions are.”

            “Extinction,” Sabah blurted. “Just like before. We are all doomed!”

            “I don’t believe so … at least not before talking to us,” Alvin said. “It seems our visitor wants very much to communicate with you.” He looked directly at Abniel.

            “But how?” she gasped. “This thing is so vast as to defy imagination. How can a simple earth creature like me ever communicate with it?”

            “There are ways,” Alvin said. He placed his fingers in the colored beams of light that had followed him since we arrived in the chamber. We were now witnessing an exterior image of Graviton City. Thousands upon thousands of the same glowing white orbs circled the city at a high rate of speed almost like a science teacher’s video example of free electrons. “I believe you were almost persuaded to detour to the Caribbean on your way here were you not?”

            “It took everything I had not to go along,” Smith told him.

            “Then we must all go along this time and see what our maker wishes,” Alvin sighed.

            “You will go with us?” I was astonished, elated and also a bit scared.

            “I wouldn’t miss it if you gave me the world,” Alvin grinned. “These small glowing lights are like fairy tale bread crumbs designed to lead us safely home.

Sabah was dancing and singing a song in Arabic. “Allah returns to bless his faithful and obedient children …” he crooned.

            “Don’t be too jubilant,” Alvin warned him. “My best guess is this is not going to be pleasant … or a reason to celebrate … remember, there is always a witch of some kind in every dark story. Where there is light there will be dark … hot does not exist without cold … good will always stand, not behind, but forever next to evil.”

            “And the world has never been darker,” Smith added.

“Then what?” Abniel asked. “Why has this cosmic farmer returned?”

            “I truly believe,” Alvin said, a queer note of melancholy distorting his voice, “to the best of my knowledge and ability …

… that it’s harvest time!”

TO BE CONTINUED …