Steve Alten - Vostok

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

There were electrodes attached to my temples and forehead, and an I.V. bag dripped into a tube in my left forearm.

“Dr. Stewart, your patient’s out again.”

“Sorry, Colonel. We’ve got enough Dilaudid in him to numb a horse, but I’ll hit him with another shot of B12.”

“I want him coherent, not in a stupor. Give him something with a little kick.”

“Huh!”

My eyes snapped open. My heart was racing, my lungs heaving to catch up. I was dressed in surgical greens, my wrists and ankles strapped to a leather lounge chair.

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.