INTO THE GRID
HEIDELBERG, GERMANY
FEBRUARY 16, 2006
GENERAL ARI KRIEGMACHER had been stationed in Fairbanks at HAARP when his Adjutant handed him a satellite call from a blocked number. It was a proposition for an interview with a private organization, such as came from the private sector every few months. Usually his aides intercepted these before they reached him. But this one got through the net, and he was required to report it.
To his surprise, his superiors already knew of it, and he found the meeting had been cleared all the way through the Pentagon, suddenly more an order from the brass than a request from a post-retirement suitor. Two days later he was landing in a private airfield outside Mannheim, Germany, and was ferried around normal Customs procedures in a nondescript Mercedes sedan that drove south then up a winding forest road around the back of Heidelberg to alight at the Königstuhl—the King’s Chair—home of the Max Planck Institut für Astronomie.
Instead of finding German students or scientists in plaid jackets and white coats in the hilltop campus, he was welcomed by a frosty blonde woman who carried a tired air of indifference for both his rank and the long journey he had undertaken at short notice. Not even when he called her ‘Blondie’ did she take the bait and talk to him.
She escorted him into a large darkened room with drawn shutters over the windows, where a video projector carved a narrow beam through air laden with blue curls of smoke.
Just out of sight behind the light he could make out a row of a dozen or so men and women waiting for him to be seated on the single metal stool in the center of the room. He lifted a yellow manila folder of documents from the stool, and sat holding it in his lap. In the meeting that followed, he never once saw anyone’s face except the blonde’s.
“Welcome, General,” said one man in a crisp Oxford accent that almost covered his Saudi origin. “This meeting never happened and you were never here. You have been selected from your peers for a special detail. Certain facts will be presented. They will be outside your experience but are to be taken at face value. They are not open to debate. In the end you will be invited to accept, whereupon we will require an answer. Do you understand and agree?”
He had agreed. Blondie appeared at his side with a computer tablet, and he imprinted his thumbprint. The screen pulsed blue, and his thumb tingled sharply.
A woman’s voice next, the hawkish clip of old Boston breeding unmistakable. “Your nation provides funding to you. We provide funding to your nation. We are the government behind governments. The Elite. You have heard of us?”
Of course he had. Every good soldier understood the chain of command, but leaders like him dug deeper to understand the power behind the throne. In doing so he had learned of the banks and the bloodlines. He told them so.
A new voice now, old and shrill, maybe Austrian. “Our world is dying, General, and it’s more than ‘an inconvenient truth’. The problem is not ozone or fossil fuels or the disappearance of bees. It’s to do with a region of space our solar system is about to fly through.”
The projector beam flared with color and a short video played out on a whiteboard behind him. He swiveled to see a computer animation of the Earth and other planets orbiting the Sun in circular arcs, which pulled back until all were shown inside a blue bubble moving along a red dotted line within a spiraling arm of the Milky Way. Ahead of the oval was a hazy arc of orange and yellow stars, this one perpendicular to the dotted line, like a mill saw cutting into a plank of wood.
The Austrian continued: “Consider our solar system as a large bus and our galaxy as the autobahn we travel around. Within three years we will intersect another autobahn, a dwarf galaxy that our Milky Way is consuming. This is called the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy15. It is dense with suns and planets of its own, moving in Helmi streams at right angles across our path. You must understand that this is not an intersection with any traffic lights or off-ramps. Do you understand the implication?”
Staring wordlessly, Kriegmacher saw it immediately. “If this is correct then the risk of collision, not to mention the tidal forces affecting our orbit . . . How many centuries until this happens?”
A number of heads bobbed at each other in the gloom, approving of his mental dexterity. They had selected well.
Boston answered: “Centuries? No, not even decades! We have less than three years until we hit the debris field. Our solar system already entered the outskirts several years ago. We have since seen a rise in sunspots and solar flares, plus new torque in the dark matter lattice we glide upon. We may not visibly observe our planet twist and groan as a result of these forces, but we do see the side effects.” The woman leaned forward through the dark, the tip of her nose and glass lenses catching the blue light of the projector while the rest of her remained in shadow. Colorless lips affected a cruel smile. “It will be biblical.”
The Austrian coughed for attention. “Not even Cecil B. DeMille himself could have directed the grandeur of this solar epic. Our planet’s core is convulsing. We’re about to see activity at the upper end of the Richter scale, creating tsunamis that will claim islands and coastal cities, while volcanoes fill the skies with corrosive clouds. God forbid any nuclear plants collapse and give us another Chernobyl. Above us we’ll see new asteroids and meteors not charted before, all extra-solar, in fact all extra-galactic material, flying sideways across Earth’s path through space. It’ll be like one giant cosmic game of Frogger.”
Kriegmacher shifted in his seat, a look of wry incredulity across his face. “It’s a story you could sell to Hollywood,” he said dryly.
Oxford joined: “Yes General, we’ve fed film producers a steady diet of disaster scenarios that has pushed discussion away from any serious forums and into film blogs where it will simply be lost in the noise. We can’t afford a panic so soon. Because unlike filmed entertainment, General, we don’t have all the answers just yet, and can’t simply walk out for popcorn. Even if our technology allowed a secret cache of spaceships equipped with biospheres and adequate fuel to take survivors away, where do you fly to when every star between Rigel and Polaris is about to be hammered? We can’t outrun this in any conventional direction, even if we had the engines to try.”
Kriegmacher asked what any of this had to do with him. It was then that they told him of Project Sidestep.
A thickly accented Belgian voice rang out in the darkness, female, as the projection changed to show two concentric circles, slightly offset. “General, you may be aware of the publicity surrounding the world’s so-called ‘black hole laboratories’: the Fermilab Tevatron16 in Chicago and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider17 under the Franco-Swiss border. To make an unpublished and complex discovery very, very short: in digging below molecules we found atoms, under atoms we found gluons and quarks, and below them all we found photons and bosons—light and ‘interpreters’ of the light.
“It turns out that when you go small enough, the matter we’re all made from is the equivalent of light particles—photons—coded to take physical form as solids, gas or liquid. It’s the boson that interprets, or codes, how the light should manifest as gas, liguid or solid, and with what properties. A kind of photonic DNA, if you will.”
Kriegmacher snorted in amusement. “So when my pappy used to call me ‘Sunshine’, he had it right.”
“More or less,” said Belgium. “Now stay with me here. When you pass light through a prism, it breaks into a rainbow of colors we can see in the visible spectrum, plus others we don’t see that are beyond our vision. Each color exists at a separate frequency, all riding the same beam of light. So if solid matter is actually made of light, what do you think you’d find if you could project reality through a prism and split it out to its different frequencies?”
The General had read enough science journals to know something about M-theory. “The current thinking is you might find parallel dimensions, an infinite number of copies of the universe . . . Wait, you’re not telling me—”
Boston interrupted: “All in good time, General. There’s another concept we want you to grasp first. We are at the early stages of being able to program the bosons that instruct photons how to function and which frequency to project. In our early experiments we found that when two photons are entangled, one will take the other’s characteristics. Like a carbon copy. Once joined through this process of entanglement18, even when we separate and place them miles apart, whatever we do to the master photon also happens to its copy. Like remote control but without any conventional form of connection, physical, wireless or otherwise. We discovered that waves of dark matter provide that link. Dark matter forms the majority of the universe, normally invisible to us, and it functions like a nervous system that connects everything, everywhere, at the same time. In fact, tapped into the right way, the same object can exist in all places at the same time.”
Straightening a crease from his dress pants as he processed the information, Kriegmacher asked: “So what’s your plan here? Clone everyone’s particles, and use dark matter to send our duplicate bodies across the galaxy in the twinkling of an eye? That’s mankind’s Great Escape?”
The Austrian cleared his throat and a moment of silence passed. “General, it is healthy that you are a skeptic, but this will go faster without sarcasm. To answer your question, using this spukhafte Fernwirkung we have teleported photons only, not complex structures, and only for several miles. When we do there is a ten percent degradation of material, so we are a long way off any practical human application over distance, even if we knew of a suitable planet, which we don’t, despite Hubble’s best efforts. However . . .”
The projector brought up a new image, a schematic front and side line drawing of what looked like a window.
“. . . if you entwine specially charged photons on a simple object, say a thin sheet of glass, and cause one side of it to vibrate at a different frequency of reality, it becomes part of the dimension that exists in physical form there, which is invisible and immaterial to us here. But with the glass being transparent, you can look through.”
“To where?” Kriegmacher asked, curiosity rising.
Oxford picked up the thread: “Another world, General. An overlay, in the same location as our own, physical in its own right but not connected to the events in our dimension at all.
They let that sink in.
When the General finally spoke again, he had joined the dots. “Easier than sending people to the other side of the galaxy, you want to send them nowhere, just a different version of here!”
A thought struck him. “But if Earth flew into a sun or was hit by a planet-killer asteroid, you think this other dimension wouldn’t be affected? If what you say is correct, surely any dimension of the world is tied to what happens on the physical planet itself?”
The Belgian answered curtly: “Theoretical physics is just that, General: theoretical, until put to the test. That’s where you come in. We’re assembling a team to prove the science by co-opting Fermilab in Chicago. We want to do more than just look through windows. The goal of Project Sidestep is to evaluate our colonization options, General. Since we can’t travel away, we hope to travel through.
“Surrounding this venture we need global security in our world and whatever lay beyond. That will be your contribution. The operation will be funded as a write-down from the debts various governments owe us. In effect you’ll have a blank check to cash as you need to. Your time horizon will be five years so we can commence live transfers before the winter of 2012. During 2011 we will start winding down the commercial projects and academic grants to Fermilab, nudging it more under our full control, and allowing you to operate more overtly. At the same time we will bring pressure to bear on the CERN facility in Switzerland, and cause it to go into ‘maintenance mode’ so we can avoid stretching the dimensional membranes too thin19. We’ve already been testing our luck too far in that respect. During this assignment you will retain your status and all other privileges with the U.S. Army—with a few bonuses and, of course, passage through the portal with our colonists when the time is right—all the while the Pentagon will list you on ‘special assignment’ to the U.N.”
The General understood what they were asking of him. It was just that he didn’t believe it. These people sold a good story, but he wasn’t buying. He made up his mind.
“This sounds like a fancy clambake, no doubt. But the truth is I’m an old Army mule two years away from retirement, and I’m stars and stripes through and through. I thank you for the briefing, gentlepeople, but I do believe we are done here.”
As he stood to leave, the shutter on the window panels lifted on silent treads, revealing a view to the outside through three glass panes. The dark blue sky of evening had crept up since he’d arrived on the mountain, and to the south past some mottled trees could be seen silhouettes of the twin domed silos that housed the Institute’s telescopes, bathed in a dull yellow-brown glow of security lights.
Standing in the still air of a snow-covered foreground was the blonde woman who had first greeted the General, now wearing a heavy duffle coat and white scarf against the cold. Behind her a long groove of footsteps could be seen in the white slurry. There was an audible click from inside the dark room, a slight flicker in the middle window, and the woman, her footprints in the snow and the buildings vanished as trees erupted across the field of vision.
Kriegmacher stood very still, taking in what was seeing. Snowflakes blew on a winter’s breeze through the thick copse of fir trees that pressed tightly against the glass. The light in that sole windowpane appeared as at sunset, cast with red hues.
He took a few steps sideways to look through the right-hand window, and the former scene returned of a neat frosted courtyard, manicured gardens, distant white domes under a blue sky, and Blondie. Only the middle rectangle showed the rust-hued winter wilderness.
Oxford’s voice: “You’re looking into what few have ever seen. It is literally, our planet, without us in it. And it exists right alongside us, all the time. Were we to examine the other side of the window one micron deep we would find it wet with melted snowflakes from that place, as it is quite literally facing into the physical plane there and interacting therein. By studying such droplets we know the water and air is identical to ours, and so is the pressure. We have taken portable panes to a dozen sites, and never once encountered more than flora and fauna. It appears completely unoccupied. An Eden.”
Kriegmacher sucked in a long breath, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, his eyes transfixed, mind racing. “It looks like physics just gave you a Hail Mary pass to get this working! But as you say, it’s only any good if you can do more than watch at a distance, and surely only if it really is unaffected by what happens to the planet in this dimension.”
“Moving from window to walkway will be the primary mission of your command, General,” said the Belgian. “And in doing so, you will be rendering a service not only to your country but to the survival of our species. You want those stars and stripes to keep flying? This is the surest way. There’s no greater act of patriotism, as a letter in your folio spells out for you. Read it.”
He looked down at the manila folder in his hand, and opened the cover. On top of a thin ring-bound file was a white sheet of paper headed by an eagle clutching an olive branch, arrows in its talons, and a striped shield with stars on its chest. Below the Seal of the President of the United States was a handwritten note, addressing him by name.
It spoke of founding principles, of freedom and liberty, and of the pioneering spirit that marks every great leap forward. It reflected on courage and faith being touchstones of a national legacy, and invited him to exercise faith now to believe the unbelievable, and to serve the needs of all nations whose needs were as One Nation, One World, with One Destiny.
Scratching his short grey hair, General Ari Kriegmacher tried to collect his thoughts. His gut was a reliable compass, and he knew he didn’t trust these people no matter how impressive their demonstration. He didn’t like the idea of secret societies operating on his home soil. But he followed his commander-in-chief. And he knew he’d sleep better knowing that if such an operation were to be run, it was watched over by someone who could be trusted to preserve his own country’s interests.
Someone like himself.
He told them of his acceptance and the blonde lady entered the room, shed her coat and brandished her tablet computer, motioning for him to raise his hand to its glass surface.
“Blondie, I already gave you my print,” he snapped.
“Yes you did,” she replied flatly. “And now I’ll administer the antitoxin to the film of poison you pressed your thumb against last time, just in case you refused the role. Consider it your first bonus, General.”
THAT HAD BEEN two years ago, and today like most days as his timetable grew shorter, Lt. Gen. Ari Kriegmacher was in a lousy mood. He angrily snorted out thick plumes of smoke from a Cuban Cohiba he was mauling between capped molars.
Complicating his smooth running of operations, logistics and security, espionage was becoming a real headache. Spies like that Russian scientist now nosing around the base. Did she think him blind? He’d been running black ops when she was still in diapers—every secret keystroke may as well have sent up a flare! He was in two minds about how to deal with her.
Publicity around a security breach in so sensitive a facility would only panic an American public already wound up way too tight since 9/11. She should be handled internally and quietly. He was sure the county authorities would sweep any action under the carpet in the interests of national security. And it would send a message to the other foreign embeds who he knew were onsite, picking their way through Fermilab’s encrypted databases for their own governments.
He’d have someone deal with it20. So much of his operation was now spent working on plausible deniability.
It was inevitable that someone, somewhere would put two and two together and throw certain ideas into the public arena. To head that day off, standard practice as taught by those funding him was to run concepts out through film and tabloid press as lightning rods to allow inquisitive minds to spend their energies away from the government domain, where such topics would dissipate as mere fictions.
But no matter how tight a lid he kept on things, there was no denying the incident logs: their experiments—both in Chicago and those in Geneva—were weakening the membranes that divided the dimensions he was chartered with opening a gateway between. Strange creatures21 were turning up in fields and fishing nets. Others were being filmed swimming free in deep oceans, creatures that scientists had only seen before in the fossil record.
No, there was no keeping a lid on it anymore, not since the soft-bellies in Washington let the Internet slip into the public domain. Websites were full of evidence, much of it more accurate than people knew. So misdirection was key.
Kriegmacher knew that if the same effort behind all the deep field telescopes and satellites sweeping the skies for signs of alien intelligence had been directed instead to look down, or rather to look sideways with the right lens as his team were doing, the public would find alien life teeming all around them.
But of course preventing that was where Kriegmacher’s team came in. The General flicked a glance at his unit’s flag in the stand next to his desk, the fabric starched for display amid several others that draped various crests, shields and keys, none of them belonging to a nation but instead to a number of prominent families and guilds. The scrolling motto of his flag stood out in yellow letters on a black background above the image of the Earth cupped in two hands:
Gens Reformo Ianua Deduco.
The Latin words that formed the mnemonic ‘GRID’ spelled out in no uncertain terms what their function was, always a reminder of the true mission they were entrusted to fulfill. However, only those who understood the planet’s fate would appreciate the obscure phrase, which translated as: ‘Those who open the door and lead the colonists out.’
For the benefit of others they had concocted a cover name using the same letters: the Global Regiment for Intelligence & Defense. They described themselves as a militarized version of Interpol, commissioned to counter an escalation in international security threats. It only ever took the mention of a few of the more infamous of such acts for people to nod sagely and agree on the need for an organization like this. Few asked for more details, especially after seeing the breadth of their hardware or the depth of their budgets.
Today, as if he didn’t have enough to deal with, now his phone screen was filling with text about thefts of weaponry and gear from Burroughs Labs. Private sector concerns weren’t normally of interest, except the stolen material had been under closed contract exclusively for GRID’s use. The thief’s presence had not been detected by Burroughs’ excellent security, exhaustive examination had failed to reveal how the intruders had penetrated the secret subterranean work area, and they had left nothing behind.
Burroughs Labs’ Chief of Security Alexander McGregor had no leads. He knew McGregor’s reputation. Competent and dedicated, far from the typical corporate drone, McGregor was taking the thefts as a personal affront.
Kriegmacher’s suspicions naturally fell first on CERN trying to play catch-up. But it might also have been another group, recently brought to his attention. Called the Cassandra Foundation and ostensibly an art restoration and historical society, there seemed to be much more going on behind the Foundation’s walls than met the eye. His people had confirmed political party contributions being made in many countries for many years by the Foundation. Big contributions. It wasn’t the size of donations that looked odd, but the number of countries whose politicians they had access to. It was more money than most modern corporations dispensed, and if the records were to be believed, for much longer than the present industrialized age.
Their influence was present now in China, India and America as much as it had been in the former Soviet Union and in Britain during its expansion around the globe three centuries ago. Their support of different ideologies showed this Foundation didn’t play favorites. The British connections extended all the way back through that country’s French, German and Danish roots. They were referenced also in Rome, in Greece, in Israel and in Egypt. And even then, they didn’t seem ‘new’. This appeared to be a multi-generational organization, without allegiance to any one nation.
Yet as active as they seemed, they had no website and paid no taxes. When his people had looked into where they maintained offices, they appeared to hold property around the world for which no titles were on file, but which each government listed by as not being public land either. According to the public records, these sites simply didn’t exist.
Kriegmacher’s masters had listed the Foundation as irrelevant to the mission and told him to ignore them. But when one of his aides had furnished a map of the world with each Foundation site circled, it was a geometry he had seen before. In many locations their properties overlaid a different map GRID had made of ley lines and natural vortices—weak spots where the dimensional membranes were naturally thin22. That couldn’t be coincidence. It painted the Foundation as a player in his world. But both gut and reason inclined him to relegate the Foundation to the least likely category when it came to assigning blame for common thievery.
Terrorists, then. Ordinary, garden-variety, homegrown terrorists seeking advanced weaponry to utilize for their own unknown nefarious purposes. But that explanation tended to contradict itself. It would seem that any group capable of so thoroughly defeating Burroughs Labs tightest security already had access to technology more advanced than anything they were attempting to steal. It made no sense. The whole business made no sense.
Whoever was responsible for the thefts had left behind no clue as to their identity, purpose, or origin. To Kriegmacher as well as the baffled McGregor who he called this same morning, the absence of a single image of the intruders was the most ominous indicator of their capabilities. In his frustration, McGregor had said it was almost as if the thieves were capable of entering the lab facilities via ‘another dimension’.
Kriegmacher let out a gruff exhalation, the theft now squarely in his domain because if that possibility were to be considered it meant someone else had beaten his own scientists in a race where they had thought themselves the only runner.
He needed answers. Locking the door to his office, he went to a source most extraordinary. But to understand that source, one must first comprehend where it came from . . .
GRID PHYSICISTS using Fermilab’s facilities had made much progress in developing gating technology over the past years. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles had successfully flown through small seams opened into the world on the other frequency, and for minutes before the windows had collapsed they had collected instrument feedback. On one such sortie there had been the briefest blip, never repeated, of what appeared to be the thermal image of a human shape disappearing over the lip of a hill just before the camera feed was lost.
He had originally kept this knowledge from his masters until he had something concrete to report. But it reminded him of an oddity he had recently seen on the Internet, supposedly newly found footage from an old 70’s show about spirit photography, also known as Kirlian imaging.23
It was a fringe theory that had led scientists like genius energy physicist Nikola Tesla, Princeton’s Robert Van de Graaff and others to postulate that living things give off a coronal discharge that can be filmed when electrical current is used to accelerate electrons and protons. The television show’s silent unaired footage revealed a man sitting in a chair filmed through a normal lens, then on a split screen he was shown through a Kirlian lens. Blue and red shimmers radiated around him like an aura. Kriegmacher had seen films like this before.
What caught his attention was when the white-coated scientist running the session rolled up the man’s left trouser to reveal he was an amputee. Yet on the aural image, the whole leg appeared in place. He had heard of soldiers continuing to feel ‘phantom limbs’ after battlefield losses, but he had never seen photographed proof that after the body was gone, something of it remained as a field of light24.
Was this the spiritual plane he had heard about from Kabbalists and rabbis since he was a boy? Was this the evidence that photons comprised each person’s form on levels both physical and ethereal?
It was while he was considering this that the reason for the video being unaired and locked in a metal canister for thirty years became apparent.
Behind the man shown seated in the chair, another pulse of color appeared. It floated like a will-o’-the-wisp, orange and yellow, edging through the rear wall of that room. As it came forward, it took on shape. A shape unmistakably human in form, striding forwards through a gurney and desk, unimpeded by the physical objects.
The being walked out past camera frame, whereupon the image shook briefly with an almost imperceptible flash of light, and the man in the seat looked up with wide-eyed concern, mouthing silent words on the audio-less film as he quickly began disconnecting the cables taped to his face, chest and arms.
The Kirlian outline was then seen walking toward him, the man oblivious to its proximity and still wrestling with the wires. Standing behind the man, two shimmering arms reached inside the subject, plunging deep into his torso. The man froze, the look on his face changing, hands rising instinctively to his chest.
It was then Ari Kriegmacher witnessed the most alarming thing he had seen in thirty years of soldiering. The Kirlian being tore the seated man’s own aura out of his body!
Limbs kicked and thrashed for a moment, the physical leg being the first to fall still while the shimmering leg continued to kick as it was pulled backwards through the hip socket, then the arms stopped waving and the head slumped forward. The blue-red avatar was firmly in the grasp of its orange-hued assailant, and as it was pulled completely free from the now still body, a new shape appeared in the hand of the attacker.
Kriegmacher had played this section of tape many times in slo-mo. He couldn’t be certain due to the speed of what came next, but it appeared to be that the form of a dagger was plunged into the aural form of the abductee, and instantly his blue-red image broke apart like fireworks of white light. The orange Kirlian being then sheathed its weapon and walked behind the camera, out of range.
Moments passed as the seconds-hand of the wall clock clicked silently past a whole minute, the lifeless body un-moving in the foreground. Then a white coat sleeve appeared to the left, and slowly the scientist who had been conducting the session appeared. He walked stiffly past the dead body, not pausing to check the subject, indifferent to its fate. Then it reached the door, flicked off the fluorescent lamp, and walked through the wedge of light into the corridor beyond, the room turning black as the door closed behind him.
Though the footage was thirty years old, Kriegmacher knew what was true then would still be true now: beings existed on a another plane, they were capable of hostility, but a weapon existed for erasing them from that plane, in effect annihilating the very spirit, if that indeed was what he had seen on film.
If they found the parallel Earth occupied and if peaceful efforts to cooperate could not be brokered, he had to acquire this technology he had witnessed. It occurred to the General that with a massive particle accelerator at his disposal, the technique of Kirlian imaging might be modernized, with photonic magnetization employed as a safety protocol.
He would never forget the day they finally succeeded in isolating one of these creatures. The science geeks had not only isolated it so it couldn’t move, but had managed to manipulate the boson field that governed the being’s own photonic DNA such that a marker was embedded to allow tracking. They had released it and followed its trail, making careful note of where it spent any length of time.
Shifting their observation panes to these locations and then firing up the dimensional lenses, they hit the jackpot. There were buildings there, and other people seen milling around in what appeared to be physical form, now viewed in their own sphere and not through the simple heat signature view of the Kirlian field.
Now they knew Others existed. Plans needed to be drawn. But they needed more intel. The General had ordered their subject recaptured and held in containment, but for months it had not responded to verbal instructions in any of the multiple languages broadcast in frequencies detectable to both dimensions. Perhaps it was a matter of motivation, Kriegmacher had thought. But how does one ‘motivate’ a subject that cannot be touched?
Physics provided an answer, of sorts. The ‘quantum cage’ that held this being was rolled into position between two sections of pipe in the facility’s particle accelerator. Kriegmacher had explained to his captive through multilingual software that unless he received cooperation, he would again bombard it with energy, then unravel its photonic signature in an attempt to replicate what he had seen the ‘dagger’ do on the film. He had no time for moralizing about the act, even though this constituted First Contact with this particular alien race.
Receiving no response, they had been as good as their threat, but the scientists applied the concept of entangling this being’s photons with other light beams, which were projected into a separate bonding medium, effectively rebuilding this ethereal being particle by particle. Without the need to catalog the complexity of solid matter, the computing memory required to capture and render a copy had surprisingly only been in gigabytes instead of the yottabytes needed to store the photonic markers of a whole human being.
Keeping the creature compartmentalized in different buffers, the physicists had rigged up a way of manipulating the data so it could be visualized and stored within the parameters of secure software on existing communications devices. Then they reassembled all the files as an application Kriegmacher had later made them install on his latest iPhone.
The copy was much more accommodating than the original, the prospect of permanent deletion serving as the leverage Kriegmacher had needed.
It was called a Dae’mon. It was male, and his name was Warujja.
Through Warujja he first learned of the Four Ages of Man and confirmed the existence of four occupied dimensions. Four, not two as they had thought! He was told of the cowardly and greedy Fae’er who possessed technology that could save the planet from its impending doom, but who chose to withhold it. And of the brave Dae’mon faction who recently separated themselves from the Fae’er to help mankind in their time of need. Solid in their own dimension, the Dae’mon could only exist in Earth Prime in a non-corporeal form, unless they could find a way to cohabit with a mortal by mutual consent.
Months passed. Initially their relationship had been one of captivity, but the more new knowledge Warujja provided that advanced Project Sidestep, the more captivity morphed into collaboration, and collaboration into codependence.
Warujja slowly opened Kriegmacher’s eyes to knowledge much deeper than his mandate required. He learned of Earth’s origins beyond the six thousand years of established texts in his own Fourth Age. He learned of the different cultures, histories and people who had populated the planet, going back thirty thousand years. He was tutored in the science of its ancient kings, which had bordered on magic because the science reached down to the elemental level, much as Kriegmacher’s scientists were doing again now.
Warujja observed that it wasn’t the first time such technology had been mastered on Earth, and warned how it’s at the peak of their powers and pride that nations are most prone to fall, unless governed with wisdom and strength. It was central governance that had led ancient king Anu to unite people of all Earth nations in the First Age, and through it, had nearly saved the Race, but for that final betrayal of Tiamet.
When Warujja asked Kriegmacher which president or king he trusted to unite the world today, the General found himself unable to answer with any conviction.
As his instruction continued late at night and in secret chambers, Kriegmacher found Warujja to be an excellent teacher and advisor. He learned of the merciless Builders who lay in wait to destroy the planet as it intersected with their own galaxy two years hence.
Eventually the Dae’mon volunteered an insight most intriguing. He spoke of the Scepter of Rule, a device of such power and authority that any who learned to wield it would become Defender of Earth, Lord of the Four Worlds, equal to the Builders. This, he was told, was the very device that lay at the heart of King Anu’s glorious rule, far more potent than even the Kirlian dagger that had first piqued Kriegmacher’s interest. The Scepter focused bosons, channeled dark matter. A person holding this could change reality at the photonic level, not by nanoscopic manipulation in the lab, but through the power of thought alone.
But only a wise man could command it. Only a pure man with the interests of his people at heart could serve as the focusing lens, free of cloud or distortion, unmarred by crack or schism. A heart with the clarity of crystal. A mind with the purity of fire. Such a person could have the universe flow through them, rearrange it at will, and see all matter from the smallest particle to the largest star move in obedience to their will.
But where could such be found?
Kriegmacher had never considered himself a covetous man, nor one of great ego. Naturally, he was confident, but this didn’t constitute pride. Any soldier whose steel had been tested and tempered in the fires of battle knew for a certainty of their own worth. His life had been one of service to his country.
Yet as Warujja told him of times past and of the struggles to come, he found himself understanding that his world’s entire history would be for naught if it allowed itself to be judged unjustly by the old outdated rules of those hostile Builders, and if it stood defenseless in its passage through the Rough Space that lay ahead.
Should the fate of Earth be dictated by greedy bankers and inbred nobles? Could the leader of any current nation be trusted with the fate of all? He found himself wondering. He had wondered about it from the start, hadn’t he?
Warujja had told Kriegmacher much more than the General shared with his superiors. Such knowledge would be dangerous in the wrong hands. He had no obligation other than to pass on insight that would advance the Project itself, and not this extracurricular wisdom.
Then one day he asked a question the Dae’mon had been patiently waiting for: “Where is the Scepter of Rule?”
Alas, that wondrous ‘reality beam’ had been lost Ages ago, along with King Anu. Both had fallen in battle and were lost to time.
Yet Warujja had heard that clues to the whereabouts of the Scepter may be in the custody of a group called the Cassandra Foundation, a cadre of meddlers he explained were even older than the banks and nobles funding GRID. Warujja could not say where members of this Foundation could be found, but he would start Kriegmacher on the right path if he was prepared to pay the price.
After hearing it, Kriegmacher knew he was willing. It occurred to him that his entire career had been leading irrevocably to this decision. A matter of fate.
The Dae’mon had only two requests for him.
A first requirement was for Kriegmacher to focus on techniques Warujja would school him in that would help polish the lens through which the Scepter would channel itself, that lens being the union of his own heart and mind.
The General would need to sculpt himself physically, emotionally and mentally to achieve balance. It would require meditation, exercise, proper nutrition and adequate rest for him to be centered, focused and energized.
He would explore physics and metaphysics to see how numbers and words underpinned the geometry of the universe. When he learned to see the connections between all things both on the surface and in the spaces between, he would become as pure glass, ready to channel the Scepter.
To help him understand, Warujja had told Kriegmacher that he was like the black lens cap to a camera, and he needed to make that lens cap clear for the light to fall through so any image he could think of would be etched onto the material world.
The second requirement was that as Warujja served the General’s interests, Kriegmacher would one day set him free from his digital prison.
WARUJJA’S INSTRUCTIONS had borne much fruit over the past year. So it was natural that Kriegmacher should call on him to deal with the thefts at Burroughs Labs.
Reaching into a pocket he pulled out his iPhone, slid the button, dabbed at the icon labeled ‘iSprite’, and entered the code that would unlock the being imprisoned in the matrix.
An image formed.
Warujja had no horns and sported no barbed tail. Dour of mien, dark of eye, he stared out with a human’s face, eyes and nose somewhat Eurasian in style, his white hair swept back over ears slightly pinched at the tips, a reflection of men who had lived in the First Age.
While Kriegmacher’s phone was a prototype version with cameras on both sides, he kept the lenses covered by a sliver of tape, denying the Dae’mon visual stimuli. The being stared without focus as a blind man, unable to see his captor.
“Warujja, I have a problem. Someone is stealing GRID material from Burroughs Labs in Britain. It’s batteries and other devices being developed for my teams to operate in realms where light and sound function differently. When we make our first Sidestep, it’s equipment my team will need. We have to get it back. I suspect an inside job, but Security hasn’t been able to pin the thefts on anyone. They enter invisibly, appear on no cameras, and leave no clues. They seem to come and go at their pleasure.”
Warujja considered.
“Do the scenes show residue of a dimensional crack?”
The General shook his head.
“McGregor wouldn’t know to scan for that, but I’ll send a team. Though I don’t see why the Fae’er or any Othersider would steal what would be inferior technology from us, especially when it’s unlikely to work where they come from.”
Warujja indicated assent.
“Unless they have agents who need it here. Or it may be the work of very skilled intruders from one of the tribes in your world whose aim is profit, power or the means to induce fear.”
“Terrorists.” Kriegmacher tried to conceal his irritation. “No. Our spooks would have intercepted the chatter. Unless I’m being lied to, other agencies are as much in the dark as to what’s going on at Burroughs as GRID is.”
Warujja smiled pleasantly.
“What is it you wish me to do?”
“I’ll upload the specs for the material that’s been taken. Plug yourself into the phone’s browser and run a scan. See if you can find any conflict where it might have been used. Also search the grey markets: find out if any of it has been offered for sale. We might be dealing with nothing more than burglary for the sake of raising cash.”
He took a deep breath. By the time he exhaled, the Dae’mon had completed seventy thousand searches through various online databases, though unable to leave the phone.
“Nothing presents itself. There is another possibility”, Warujja murmured, “that I am sure has already crossed your mind.”
“The Longcoats.”
In their sessions together Warujja had mentioned his suspicion of connections between the Fae’er and the Cassandra Foundation. Since first hearing of the Foundation, Kriegmacher had plumbed his networks for connections, an address, anything, and had found no leads. Warujja suggested that while he also did not know where to find them (the many properties and structures they owned were unoccupied), he was sure the Foundation was giving weapons to children in urban areas, forming a secret militia ready to rise up and take arms under the very noses of the authorities.
Kriegmacher had encountered such kids before, in Vietnam, Sierra Leone and Burundi, always recruited and brainwashed to commit acts of violence against those deemed the enemies of their gang’s ringleaders.
He had been even more shocked when Warujja had intimated these ‘Longcoats’ already existed in major cities worldwide, waiting for the command to rise up. The thought of it gave him chills.
He nodded slowly. “Yes, the Longcoats. They’d certainly want the equipment from Burroughs, and they’d have access to Fae’er infiltration tools through the Cassandra Foundation. It’s worth checking out.”
Then the General noted Warujja’s face was ashen, and asked his condition.
“You have stolen my light from one state and transferred it to another. From organic to electronic. Mark me, General, while I am pleased to serve you, I fear after all this time I am fading away in this unnatural place. I long to walk in the sun instead of this wretched darkness. Have I not proven loyal?”
It was not the first time the Dae’mon had asked, but Kriegmacher knew the software that held the being was not losing resolution.
“Warujja, when you meet your obligation and I have the Scepter in my grasp, I will meet my obligation to fully release you. But until then, I shall look into options to grant a broader range of mobility and interests.”
The Dae’mon’s face was downcast, the eyes baleful.
“Do not wait too long. There are many ways I can assist you, not all of them by remaining trapped in your pocket.”
“Warujja, I would rather you be in my pocket than I in yours.”
A flash of reaction, then the floating image returned to staring absently around the screen. Did he just look directly at me? wondered Kriegmacher. He watched a moment longer. No, impossible. Phone screens were not two-way.
“Great General, perhaps you should try to locate and question Longcoats in Britain. Even if it proved a dry well where the thefts are concerned, you need to assess their level of threat. I regret I cannot offer any physical assistance.”
Kriegmacher nodded. “A useful proposition. I will take steps.” Without giving the Dae’mon a chance to reply, he thumbed the phone off.
Terrorists. Rival companies. Inside job. Longcoats. The list of possible culprits in the thefts at Burroughs Labs was as long as it was diverse.
They would be identified, though. Identified and dealt with. Nothing would stand in his way.
As future ruler of the planet, nothing would dare.
