Steve Alten - Vostok

My mentor smiled. As I watched, his appearance changed, morphing into the Gray I had conversed with earlier.

“No, Zachary. The being you conversed with during the zero-point energy transfer was the consciousness of Avi Socha as it existed 3.75411 billion years ago. I speak with you now as an Avatar, a servant of the Light, the effect of the cause.”

“What happened to you after you returned to Charon?”

“The information you transferred to me gave our ships the ability to escape the caldera eruption. From there we left the solar system but were denied interdimensional travel for another four generations until every last child of the Miketz had passed on, including myself. Only then were the tribes of Charon of a high enough morality to be allowed to access the Upper Worlds. This was our punishment for allowing our enemies to die.”

“Wow. That seems pretty harsh. How can a people who were tortured to death be expected to save their abusers?”

“Zachary, stop thinking like a physical being and think like our Creator. If you desire mercy, you need to show mercy. There is neither hatred nor judgment in the Upper Worlds, no greed or violence — just love. And this is why humanity should never fear their E.T. brethren, because we could never have been permitted access to traverse the universe through the higher dimensions without exemplifying this morality, a morality that refuses to consider vengeance upon a hostile military regime that downs our vessels and kills our kind.

“There is a plan in effect, Zachary Wallace, and all multiverses lead to it. The question is how much pain and suffering we must endure from incarnation to reincarnation before we realize the simple truth of existence — that we are all children of the Light, the sparks from one unified soul, communicating through one universal consciousness.”

“I get it, Avi. But looking back at my last seven years, how am I — my tribes, my people — expected to collapse the paradigm of the rich and powerful, a shadow nation that shows no mercy, a group that controls the media and the message and hides the truth about E.T.s and zero-point energy and other technologies that can save our planet? What happens when our caldera erupts?”

“There are things we cannot see, Zachary, because our perspective is so small. The Miketz appeared to us as a curse, a time of chaos that would lead to our extinction. Instead, it turned out to be the cause that led to the birth of your world and the salvation and evolution of ours. Both our oppressors prospered by understanding that without a threat there is no need for a cure, or a cause. Those who choose an existence in darkness will suffer their choices before they are permitted to access the Upper Worlds. Each of us has a role to play, including the villain. In some cases the bad guy is a magma pocket that forces a species to evolve… or die.

“But make no mistake, our choices lead to our destiny, and the soul chooses its next life before a new life is born. Our soul chose us because it knew that we would not sell out our people for a few pieces of gold. Use the last seven years to guide you. If you decide to introduce zero-point energy to your world, then a new multiverse of possibilities will unfold for humanity. The enemies of true freedom are everywhere. Your first vanguard shall always be the masses. The public needs to be part of the solution if the technology — and its caretaker — are to survive the launch.”

“Huh!”

I opened my eyes to my heart pounding rapidly in my chest. The chamber was dark, the only light coming from floor-to-ceiling windows offering a breathtaking view of Loch Ness and the snow-covered peaks of the Monadhliath Mountains rising above the far eastern bank.

Am I really back ?

Excited as a kid on Christmas morning, I flipped open my laptop to verify the date, only to be confronted by an article in the Science Journal … today’s Science Journal !

Life on Earth — Death on Mars: New Evidence

Scientists agree that life on Earth began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, but exactly how it began has long remained an unanswered question. Biologists theorize asteroids — space rocks containing water molecules that created the precipitation that filled the oceans — bombarded our still-evolving planet. But Dr. Sankar Chatterjee, a professor of geosciences at Texas Tech University, believes that in addition to bringing water, these asteroids contained the chemical constituents of life that ultimately gave rise to living cells.

My eyes quickly scanned the rest of the article.

About the same time that Earth’s primordial soup was spawning life, death was occurring on Mars with the eruption of Olympus Mons. The largest volcano in the solar system, it towered sixteen miles above the surface of the Red Planet — three times higher than Mount Everest — and is roughly the size of the state of Arizona. Olympus Mons contains six collapsed craters known as calderas. These magma chambers are stacked atop one another to form a depression that is fifty-three miles wide at the summit. The worst of the lot are resurgent calderas — geological time-bombs responsible for massive eruptions and extinction events.

In the United States there are three resurgent calderas less than 1.5 million years old — the Long Valley Caldera in California, the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The last caldera eruption on Earth occurred 74,000 years ago on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. The Toba caldera complex generated nearly three thousand times more pyroclastic material than Mount St. Helens and unleashed an ash cloud that encompassed Earth’s atmosphere, which led to a decade of volcanic winter that wiped out nearly every hominid on the planet.

I closed the story.

I was back. I was really back, back at Loch Ness! My family was safe and intact, True was alive, and David Taylor was just a middle school kid hitting puberty. Vostok hadn’t happened yet, but Ming and Ben would be arriving any minute to make their pitch .

Screw them!

Avi Socha had allowed me to retain the knowledge of my past multiverses, and in this reality I’d be ready .

Creating an encrypted file on my laptop, I typed furiously, describing every detail I could about the zero-point energy generator and the Yellowstone Caldera.

That gave me pause.

A cataclysmic eruption had transpired on ancient Mars, ending an autocratic rule while pushing a civilization to venture into space. Yet, only by vanquishing their egos were the descendants of Avi Socha allowed access into the higher dimensions and taught how to traverse the cosmos and mingle with other races.

For thousands of years, advanced species of extraterrestrials had kept an eye on us. That relationship changed once we had discovered how to split the atom. Like an adolescent with a new gun, we had become a threat to ourselves and others.

Much had changed since Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Roswell.

Forty percent of the wealth on our planet was now controlled by one percent of the population. Two billion people lived in poverty; another two billion were starving. Meanwhile, we were polluting our oceans and atmosphere, our forced addiction to fossil fuels causing the earth to warm, the ice to melt.

Could zero-point energy save us?

Would the shadow government allow it?

If not, was the Yellowstone Caldera the catalyst that would advance our species… or end it?

I made myself a quick reminder to meet with Jonas Taylor and convince him to incorporate airbags into his Manta sub blueprints. I thought about providing him with details about his main attraction’s pending escape and death, but preventing the monster’s demise didn’t seem like a good thing.