Wednesday, October 24 (United Nations Day), 1 N.A.
New York
A crowd of nearly half a million listened, some swaying, some tapping their toes as the lilting music of Divination, a New Age band from Miami, poured from the speakers on a massive stage and drifted like falling leaves through the trees and fields of New York’s Central Park. They had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. The weather was exceptional, with temperatures in the mid seventies and just a few scattered white billowy clouds in the sky. It hardly seemed possible that only seven months earlier the human race had been threatened with the possibility of complete extinction. Now, not only was it apparent that the world would survive, there was undeniable evidence that Humankind was on the brink of both its biggest evolutionary step and its greatest adventure. The psychic occurrences that had begun a few weeks earlier grew more and more frequent, though at this early stage no one retained the abilities for more than a few hours. Among those in the park this afternoon, hundreds or perhaps thousands had been host to such powers in the past few weeks, and scores were having similar experiences at this very moment.
Under a tree at the edge of the crowd, two women — strangers moments before — sat reminiscing lives long past when they, as men, had fought and died side by side in the Second Battle of Bull Run. Elsewhere, a group of about thirty people listened intently as a fifteen-year-old girl shared the knowledge and wisdom she had gained in her previous life as a eunuch in the court of the ancient Babylonian king and law giver, Hammurabi. Not far away, a homeless man suddenly found himself very popular when it was discovered that, for the time being at least, he possessed the power to heal.
On the stage the band completed its set and the mayor of New York, who was serving as master of ceremonies, announced the arrival of Secretary General Christopher Goodman. Christopher’s United Nations Day address would be his first major public appearance since the strange psychic powers began, so the world was eager for what he had to say. At the very moment Christopher came to the microphone, however, the attention of the crowd was suddenly drawn to the sky above him.
In the nearly cloudless heavens there appeared a small point of pulsating light that formed and grew so quickly, it soon dwarfed the entire stage. News crews trained their cameras on the spectacle as millions marveled at what new wonder Christopher was about to reveal. Had the cameras instead caught the pique on his face, they would have realized that this was none of his doing.
The shimmering light slowly took on the form of a man as tall as any building in the city, and it appeared attired in a long flowing robe of purest white. Later some swore that it had wings, though far more were certain that it did not, and the many videos of the event could neither confirm nor deny it.
Not wasting another moment, Christopher took the microphone. “People of the world, do not fear this apparition!” he declared. “It is a messenger of Yahweh, come to frighten and distract you from your rightful destiny.”
It was all Christopher had time to say before the entity spoke.
“Fear God and give him glory,” it began, “because the hour of his judgment has come.” Its voice was like thunder and it spoke in the same universal language that Christopher himself had used in Jerusalem. “Worship him who made the heavens, the Earth, the sea, and the springs of water.”[43]
With that, the apparition vanished even more quickly than it had appeared. And though most of the world had seen it on live-net, the strange being apparently wanted to convey its message personally with the full impact of its awesome size and voice to all the people of Earth. In the course of the day, it repeated its message in nearly two thousand cities around the world.[44]
In New York, Christopher reassured the gathering there was nothing to fear. “In this act, Yahweh has revealed his desperation!” he told them. “In his demand that we fear him and worship him, he has shown his true nature. He is not our god. Humankind does not need a god, for we ourselves shall become as gods — bowing to no one. We must not yield to Yahweh’s threats, whether they come from the mouth of an angel or the mouths of the Koum Damah Patar.” This latter reference was to recently stepped-up efforts by the KDP. Though a few remained in Petra, most KDP had returned to the outside world. And despite the best efforts of numerous police organizations, KDP members had become as elusive as their masters, John and Cohen.
“Yahweh makes his demands, but they are hollow!” Christopher declared. “Test me and see if my words are not true: Wait a week, a month, a year, and you will see that Yahweh will do nothing to enforce his demand for worship. He will not, because he cannot! His demands are empty! His threats are hollow! Yahweh knows his days are numbered,” Christopher continued. “He has seen the evidence in your lives as you approach the beginning of your own self realized godhood. We must trust only in ourselves!”
Tuesday, March 11 (New Years Day), 2 N.A.
Jerusalem
As Christopher promised, Yahweh did nothing to enforce his demand for worship. For a while there was some anxiety as members of the KDP and their allies in a few fundamentalist Christian churches continued their entreaties for worship of Yahweh. If they had the power to do any more than that, they didn’t use it. Now, on the first New Year’s Day of the New Age, nearly five months since the entity appeared in New York, the world was learning to trust Christopher and what he said.
Great celebrations were scheduled throughout the world to commemorate this first new year. More than simply offering an adequate replacement for the New Year’s celebrations of the old era, this day’s festivities were designed to underscore the reality of the New Age. Documentaries recounted everything that was known of Christopher’s life and reminded the world of the terrible destruction and death that preceded his rise to power a year earlier.
Nowhere was the celebration larger or more enthusiastic than in Jerusalem, the incubator of so much of the world’s history, and the city from which Christopher had made his declaration of Humankind’s independence from Yahweh. It was fitting then, that Jerusalem, and particularly the Temple, should be at the center of the celebration.
Many things had changed in the year that had passed. Despite pleas by Prime Minister Gabrielle Ben-Judah, the exodus of Jews to Petra in Jordan continued, though the flow had dwindled to a mere trickle. And she had noticed one rather ironic advantage to their departure, in that it was much less difficult to work with a Knesset void of militant religious partisans. With a more accommodating Israeli government, Jerusalem had become a truly international city, overseen in part by a UN administrator and open to all races and nationalities.[45] The same was true of the Temple. All were now free to enter, including into the Holy of Holies. The Ark was preserved behind glass, just as Christopher had left it, with its lid askew to remind the world that he had removed the tablets and replaced the laws of Yahweh with a new covenant — a decree that Humankind must pass from the age of adolescence into a New Age of maturity and self-reliance from which would come true justice and freedom for all peoples.[46]
Christopher, Decker, and Robert Milner arrived together by helicopter, reminding the world of the events of one year before. But it was more than the celebration of the new year that had brought them to Jerusalem. They had come also to participate in the official dedication of a statue of Christopher, which had been commissioned by Robert Milner, paid for by the UN, and approved by the Israeli government.[47] Although the statue had actually been erected just thirty days after Christopher’s Jerusalem address, on the sixth day of the Passover week, Christopher hadn’t been present, so in typical political style, an “official dedication” had been suggested to both mark the New Year’s celebration in a symbolic way and to give a boost to Israel’s struggling tourist trade.
The statue was a slightly larger than life re-creation of Christopher, appropriately placed on the spot where he delivered his Jerusalem address from the Temple’s pinnacle, making it clearly visible to all.[48] So that visitors could, in some small way, experience what it was like for those who had actually been in Jerusalem on that day, a recording of Christopher’s Jerusalem address was played from speakers in the statue three times daily, at sunrise, noon, and sunset.[49]
Friday, October 24 (United Nations Day), 2 N.A.
Babylon, Iraq
Little more than nineteen months had passed since the Security Council voted to build a new headquarters complex in Babylon, and yet, here on a site not far from the reconstruction of ancient King Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, stood the structurally complete main building of the new headquarters. Much remained to be done inside, and the rest of the nine buildings were only shells. Still, United Nations Day came only once a year and it seemed the perfect occasion to dedicate the new complex. The first to move in would be the World Health Organization (WHO), a decision that had never been fully explained, since WHO’s offices would ultimately be elsewhere in the city. It made little sense to have WHO move in now, just to relocate a few months later, but for some reason the decision was important to Christopher, and no one felt it was worth arguing about such a mundane issue.
The city of Babylon, located on the Hilla branch of the Euphrates, 55 miles southwest of Baghdad, was one of the most famous cities of the ancient world. Depending upon whose account is believed, the size of the ancient city ranged from as much as 225 to as little as 5 square miles. The earliest Greek writings in which Babylon is described are those of Herodotus, who represented Babylon as an exact square, 120 stadia (approximately 14 miles) on each side, located on a broad plain. Babylon’s historic rise to regional importance came in the third millennium B.C., when the course of the Euphrates River shifted westward away from the ancient Sumerian city of Kish. Since that time there have been five well defined periods of Babylonian history. Old Babylon, the capital city from which Hammurabi and his successors ruled, was almost entirely destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, circa 689 B.C. Within about a decade Sennacherib’s son and successor, Esarhaddon, built a new city on the same site, but it too was destroyed by revolution and siege. Later, from 626 to 562 B.C., Nabopolassar and his son, Nebuchadnezzar, rebuilt Babylon and brought it to its greatest glory. It was during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar that the city’s massive walls and the Hanging Gardens (two of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) were constructed. For political reasons, in 275 B.C. the inhabitants of the city were moved to the new city of Seleucia on the Tigris River, thus bringing the ancient history of Babylon to a close.
Beginning in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, who considered himself a twentieth-century version of Nebuchadnezzar, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild the city as a monument — ostensibly to the Iraqi people but, more accurately, to himself.
Now, a year and a half after the madness that decimated the region, the only Iraqis left to inhabit the city were immigrants returning from abroad. There was no shortage of other residents, however, as 120,000 construction workers and engineers poured into the city to work on the many building projects. And with the new seat of government, Babylon drew also the offices of the major multinational banks and corporations who were given rent-free fifty-year leases to build in the planned metropolis. Together with the workers’ families and additional support personnel, the population of Babylon had burgeoned to more 300,000, making it a bustling gotham compared to the rest of Iraq and the surrounding countries, which, except for Israel, were nearly uninhabited. Ironically, nearly a sixth of those now in Iraq were Israelis. But this was the new Babylon, which, like the new Jerusalem, was under United Nations control and open to all nationalities.
Christopher Goodman, together with an entourage of reporters, had begun the day with a tour of the city, followed by speeches of a host of dignitaries from around the world who praised his leadership and offered accolades for all who had been involved in the new UN headquarters project. Amid great cheers, Christopher himself praised the human spirit, which, by this massive project, “had proven itself supreme and unyielding to the whims of spiritual oppressors.” As millions watched from around the world, together with most of the local population gathered for the United Nations Day festivities, he recalled the city’s historical and spiritual significance.
Summarizing what he had articulated to the gathering of New Age leaders at the UN, he noted, “It was near here that the first Theatan ship landed more than four billion years ago, and life on Earth began. It was not far from here, in Eden, that Humankind first declared its independence from Yahweh. It was in this very city,” he added, “that Humankind first came together in peace to work as one united people in the construction of a great city and the magnificent Tower of Babel, before being dispersed by the despotic Yahweh. And,” Christopher said, completing his brief history lesson, “tragically, it was not far from here that Yahweh, in his cruelest act against Humankind, released the madness that led to the brutal slaughter of one-third of the planet’s population.” He concluded by noting that the decision by the United Nations to build its new headquarters in Babylon had sealed for all time Humankind’s emancipation from Yahweh’s rule.
After his speech, Christopher held up an oversized pair of scissors and prepared to cut a wide red ribbon that had been stretched across the entrance to the new headquarters. It may have been the second year of the New Age, but some traditions would never change and Christopher had accepted the role of ribbon-cutter with good humor.
Aided by Robert Milner because of his crippled arm, Christopher reached out to cut the ribbon when someone in the crowd cried out, “Look!”
It took a moment for those gathered to understand, but then everyone saw. Directly above the new structure, a shimmering light was growing and taking shape, much like the one that appeared exactly one year earlier over Central Park in New York.
“Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries,”[50] it said. And then, after repeating its message, it vanished.
As before, the entire event was viewed throughout the world. And again, in order to convey its announcement personally, the entity repeated its message in cities across the planet.
In Babylon, all eyes and cameras shifted back to Christopher. For a brief moment there was silence and then, very much unlike his reaction to the first angel, he began to laugh. It was an infectious laugh and though they weren’t sure why, many of those present began to laugh as well. Christopher stopped for a second but then laughed again heartily, shaking his head as if in disbelief over what he had just witnessed. “Well, one thing is for certain,” he said, finally, “Yahweh really knows how to steal the spotlight!” Now everyone laughed.
“But his theatrics will not frighten us,” Christopher continued, shaking his head pathetically. Then, looking skyward and shaking his one good fist toward heaven, he shouted at Yahweh, “You will not succeed! Humankind will not bend its knee to you or any other tyrant ever again!”
Three hundred thousand fists now raised with Christopher’s in defiance as a spontaneous cheer erupted through the city.
“Yahweh knows,” Christopher said, looking back to the crowd, “that by building a new UN headquarters here in Babylon, Humankind is delivering an unmistakable slap in his face. With each passing day he grows more and more desperate as he feels his grip on the Earth slipping away.” Again the people cheered. “In his desperation,” Christopher continued, “he foolishly attempts to frighten us, even though by doing so he makes himself a laughingstock.
“Look around,” he told them. “Babylon is not fallen as Yahweh’s driveling minion has proclaimed so loudly: Babylon stands! And it will continue to stand long after Yahweh is forced to abandon his fraudulent claim on this planet!”
Then, reaching out again with the ceremonial scissors, Christopher and Milner cut the ribbon to thunderous applause, and the new headquarters building of the United Nations — the new tower of Babylon — was officially opened.