Ethan felt Shanny pressing against his back. Lying still, he listened, only hearing the sounds of the interstate and the occasional car or truck pulling into the rest area. Once, he heard a dog bark, but he remained still. The feeling of her spooning against him, pressing against his back, her breath inches from his ear, brought back hundreds of luscious memories. Her arm was draped over his midsection, hand cupped as if to keep him there.
Although his bladder screamed for him to do something about it, he didn’t dare move. It was a perfect moment, one in which his father could still be alive, where they weren’t being chased across America, where the Six-Fingered Man wasn’t after them, where a girl he’d always loved was even now embracing him in her sleep. He synced his breathing with hers, feeling their union in the wide-open expanse of his heart.
They stayed that way until a car pulled up next to them and the door opened, then slammed.
Shannon jerked, then pulled her arm free and rolled onto her back. She stretched. He rolled onto his back, as well. She sat up and looked around, then turned to him, smiling. “I dreamed I was a giant and ruled the world.”
He started to smile, then felt it slip. “I had the same dream. I remember… I remember…” He put a hand to his head. “Ugh. It’s gone.”
Shanny still smiled. “Must be something we read.” She pulled on her pants, then hunted around for her shoes. “You watch the car, I’ve gotta run to the girls’ room.” She popped open the back door before he could say anything, danced for a moment as she struggled to slide on her shoes, then jogged to the bathroom.
He flipped open the laptop and continued reading to pass the time. The more information he had at his disposal, the better he might be able to react.
FACT: Ancient Incans believed in the Ayar Auca race of giants. When the human race began moral decline, these giants caused the sky to tumble down, which created floods that obliterated much of humankind.
More proof that the Bible was plagiarized by the so-called saints —Matt
Interesting that the flood myth is so cross-cultural —Steve
Ethan grinned. With the comments, it was almost like his father was having a conversation with his old friend Matt.
FACT: Irish mythology holds that the Fomorians arrived in what would become known as Ireland after a great flood. They are attributed with, among other things, creating the Giant’s Causeway, which is a geologic formation consisting of massive basalt columns.
FACT: The Ne-Mu were a race of giants from the island of New Guinea. They were said to be lords of the earth before the great flood. They taught the peoples of New Guinea how to farm and build but were wiped out by the raging waters of the flood.
FACT: Fijians believed that Burotu, which was their ancestral land, sank when the heavens fell down. This caused great flooding, which in turn wiped the tribe of giants known as the Hiti from Samoa.
FACT: Pre-Columbian peoples believed in a bearded, white-skinned giant who, when the people began to ignore him, dropped the sky on them. This also destroyed the giant and his family.
Ethan found the connections interesting but remembered something a professor of his had said in a freshman-year anthropology class about attributing meaning to coincidences, especially when it came to the origin stories of different cultures: “Just because a culture has a belief that they came from a god or a giant or a dragon doesn’t make it true. When two or more cultures believe that they came from a god or giant or dragon that appears to be the same as the others, this does not lend weight or credence to this or any other belief. Call it coincidence. Call it a cultural response to the need for an emotional connection to a maternal or paternal deity, which, because of similarities in cultures, is often very similar in narrative.”
Additionally, his advanced statistics professor, Hans Mueller, loved to talk at length about apophenia, which was seeing patterns or codes in seemingly random objects or sets of data. He liked to use the specific example of pareidolia, which was associated with finding the faces of religious figures in different objects, such as a piece of toast or the frost on a car window. He loved to pass around a jar of roasted peanuts, then ask everyone to remove one and not eat it. Then he told them that when they broke the peanut apart, they would see the face of Jesus. But none of them saw the face of Jesus. Then he’d asked the class if they’d seen anything. Half the class raised their hands, while the other half didn’t. Finally he’d asked if they saw the Indian head in the peanut, and within seconds, the whole class had. He’d explained that this manipulation of their judgment was caused by the brain’s desire to make sense of objects it sees that are similar to other objects, in this case a raised circular indentation with two vertical objects rising from it on the peanut half, much like Indian headdress feathers.
The continual recurrences of the flood story, or possibly the comet theory, if the heavens’ falling could be attributed to a cosmic event, could very well be a form of pareidolia. Or it could be real. Statistically, believing that just because all the examples provided were true because of the number of them made no difference. One, ten, twenty examples, Ethan had to treat each one as a separate case. It was an example of a type 1 error, also known as an error of the first kind, and asserts that a given condition is present when it actually is not present, or when the null hypothesis is true but is then rejected.
Professor Mueller had gone on to provide creationism as an example. “Science and fact indicate that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that man was the result of evolution. Creationists reject this hypothesis and believe instead in a timeline that conforms to the Bible and the appearance of man by supernatural means. This is a type 1 error and is most prevalent when dealing with superstitions and other suppositions in which fact doesn’t necessarily apply.”
So how was Ethan to treat the information in the master document? He knew he couldn’t count on the sum of the information, therefore he had to count on the evidence, even though it appeared that many held the fact that evidence didn’t exist as evidence.
What had his father said? The way Ethan’s mind worked was why he’d been chosen. If that was the case, Ethan needed to treat this problem as he would any other.
So these were his hypotheses.
He’d concentrate on finding proof for the A, then, when and if he found that proof, he’d seek to prove B.
Shanny returned from the bathroom and frowned. “No fair reading without me.”
He handed her the laptop. “Just reading about the flood myths.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Speaking of water, you really need to clean up.”
He grinned and grabbed his kit.
Heading to the bathroom, he couldn’t remember being more alive.