“Zach, scientists have known about the Yellowstone Caldera for decades. You think a dream is going to convince the authorities to take the threat any more seriously?”
“No, but I do think the dream serves a purpose. I just haven’t figured out what that is yet. What’s our ETA to Vostok?”
“How the hell should I know? We’re still over two hundred miles away. Who knows if we’ll even get out from under this giant ice cube?”
As if the glacier heard him, the passage suddenly reopened, depositing us back in the main river.
For the next thirteen hours, we forged our way to the southwest, averaging eighteen knots. We stretched and ate and relieved our bowels and bladder, and we watched movies over the computer and alternated piloting duties with restless catnaps. Finally, the waterway twisted to the north, the riverbed dropping away several hundred feet as the ice sheet receded overhead, creating a six-foot space of air into which we surfaced.
Lake Vostok. The northern basin.
We had arrived.
38
“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday — but never jam today.”
Migrating from the ocean, a salmon will fight its way upstream to return to the river where it was born so it can spawn and die, completing its circle of life.
My circle had begun seven years ago when an alien entity had redirected my life, sending me down a multiverse not of my choosing. Now I had returned, hoping for a do-over at the point where my consciousness had jumped the tracks into a radically different reality, which had somehow become my destiny.
Multiverses.
Ten dimensions of existence.
The theory that started it all originated in 1997 when a physicist by the name of Juan Maldacena introduced a model of the universe in which gravity arose from thin microscopic vibrating strings residing in nine dimensions of space, plus one of time. Quantum theory became a mathematical Rosetta Stone, filling in key gaps within Einstein’s theory of gravity. More unnerving were Maldacena’s implications — that the nine upper dimensions were the true reality, while our physical lower dimension of time was the equivalent of a hologram.
In 2013, two physicists from Japan’s Ibaraki University made huge strides in proving Maldacena’s theory when they discovered that the internal energy and properties of a black hole precisely matched the internal energy of our physical universe — that is, if there were no gravity.
Was our physical universe simply one big holographic projection?
Was time an illusion and gravity its shepherd?
Seeking to rise above “the hologram” and rediscover my life, I had returned to Lake Vostok, arriving nine hours after Colonel Vacendak and his MJ-12 maniacs.
Having entered the northern basin, I instructed Jonas to take us deep and go active on sonar, warning him that the lake’s bull sperm whale population was extremely aggressive when it came to safeguarding their pods. My concerns seemed unfounded, as we made it all the way to the plateau without a single sonar contact.
It took Jonas twenty minutes to locate the river we needed to follow inland. Reducing our speed to five knots, we entered the Livyatan melvillei nursery.
“My God… how could he do this?”
The Tethys had shown no mercy. The tributary flowed red with blood, the shallows clogged with the butchered remains of the Miocene whales. Beached cetaceans lined the snow-covered banks, bleeding out from laser burns that had effortlessly sheered blubber from bone. The dead were too numerous to count; those few still dying slapped the surface with their flukes as a warning, and the survivors clicked the waterway in search of their missing calves.
The scene sickened us. Once more, man’s ego had blinded him to recognizing that there was a universal consciousness in play; every negative action causing a ripple that would one day come home to roost.
The E.T.s were here as mentors, reaching out to those who demonstrated purity of heart. As such, I knew the Colonel and his fear-mongers would not be granted access into the alien vessel. And that would lead them to desperate measures.
“Jonas, we have to hurry before there’s no vessel left to access.”
Thirty minutes later we were moving through the partially frozen waters of Lake Vostok’s bay. Jonas used the ice floes as sonar camouflage as we progressively made our way toward the shoreline — like everything else about the island— was undergoing beyond which we would find the extraterrestrial vessel.
Aided by night-vision binoculars, I located the Tethys. The nuclear submarine was anchored offshore, only the shoreline, like everything else about the island, was undergoing a rapid transformation.
Teams of men dressed in ECW gear and wearing chemical tanks strapped to their backs were using flamethrowers to melt the ice and snow, exposing sections of what appeared to be a metallic, saucer-shaped vessel, whose diameter rivaled that of an aircraft carrier. While most of the crew focused on clearing fifteen million years of packed snow from the floating alien landscape, a dozen men had forged a path to the base of the mountain, their wall of flame focused on the summit. The intense heat caused great swaths of ice to fall away from a four-story dorsal-shaped mast, partially concealed behind swirling curtains of steam and fog.
Jonas stared slack-jawed through his binoculars, the sight of the E.T.’s vessel no doubt changing his attitude about our mission and energizing his hope to alter his son’s fate. “It’s real. Everything you told me is real. But how the hell are we going to get you inside that thing without being seen?”
“Dive the sub. There may be an entrance near the saucer’s belly.”
Jonas banked the Manta into a deep descent, giving the Tethys a wide berth as he approached the submerged alien hull. The superstructure materialized out of our olive-green night vision, its disk-shaped keel plunging ninety-six feet below the surface and its dark mass hovering above us like an enormous thundercloud.
Jonas powered on an exterior light in the Manta’s prow. Aiming the beacon, he illuminated a smooth expanse of dull-gray metal, its surface devoid of ice, rust, or barnacles.
As we passed beneath the vessel’s teardrop center, a blue ring of light sixty or seventy feet across materialized overhead, its luminescence bathing us in its aura even as it held us within its grip. A moment later a dark pupil opened in the center of the circle, its widening orifice slowly drawing us in.
The Manta levitated into the vortex until we were enveloped by a darkness so dense that even our exterior light couldn’t penetrate it. We registered the hull resealing beneath us and the pressure differential changing as water was vented from the docking chamber, leaving our submersible to settle on an unseen surface.
For several long minutes we simply sat there in the dark and waited. Then white recessed lighting flickered on like a swarm of fireflies, illuminating an auditorium-sized chamber. Our sub was situated in the center of a circular ring that resembled one of my Vostok energy generators, only this one was twelve feet high and large enough in circumference to corral a Miocene sperm whale.
The device looked like it hadn’t been operated since Antarctica was free of ice.
Jonas was busy running an analysis of our surroundings. Determining the air fit to breathe, he popped open the Manta’s cockpit and stood up on his leather bucket seat, groaning in pain from having been stuck in such a cramped space for more than thirty-six hours.