Black Jack (25 page)

Like a sightless, crouching creature that must scent its prey, he did not try to raise his immobilized eyes toward the pale light that filtered into that terrible place, but tried desperately to sniff out the faint sound.

‘Look through my eyes.’

That voice - barely audible, but he thought he recognized it - brought the first crack of movement into his congealed, terrorized body. He turned his grateful face toward the heavens, but the immediate effect of his release from the complete lockdown was the flowering of a new agony, white hot, inescapable. His skin hurt so much that it was as if he was being flayed. His throat unlocked and he moaned soundlessly.

‘Are you there? Oh, God, are you there?’

Every small movement was followed by immense pain, but it was better than his hellish frozen state, and his stiff fingers grasped and pawed painfully in that eternity of bleakness for something that he could latch onto. Anything with some color or movement. There was nothing.

He fell upon himself, destroyed and defeated. It was hopeless. He must have conjured up the sound. No one traveled this damned road. The freezing gray of the place had swallowed him whole and sucked everything out of him. He could no longer think like a human being. He cowered with blind fear, his mouth as dry as ashes. The cold was getting colder.

‘Look through my eyes.’

There: that sound again.

Black’s mouth moved silently. ‘Green.’

Despite the intolerable agony, he raised his eyes, the needles in them plunging deeper, and tried to peer into the half-opaque nothingness that enshrouded him. But it remained impenetrable. He began to cry hopelessly. His tears burned a path down his cheeks. He was damned eternally. It was only his mind playing tricks with him.

Then he felt it, the first miraculous rush of warmth inside him. The warmth grew. He was not alone. Green was inside him. Suddenly he was no longer looking through his eyes but Green’s. And how the maze changed. He began to make out shapes. As he looked he saw the black pits of nothingness and…escape. A narrow, blackened path lit up as his eyes fell upon it. His limbs were warm once more, his skin amazingly painless. He moved his legs toward the path. His gait was confident, tall.

‘Thank you, Green,’ he tried to whisper, but his voice was like sandpaper that rasped his throat and made it burn. As soon as his foot touched the path, Green was gone. His limbs were so weak that he could not do more than drag his body slowly along the path. On either side miles of icy twilight. Not daring to look left or right, he kept his eyes fixed on the path ahead. The path he traveled came to an abrupt end. A steep drop into a yawning black void. It was so vast that Black knew if he fell he would be falling forever. He was but an ant in that dead landscape.

‘Jump,’ he heard in his head.

Black didn’t hesitate. The blackness of the void was infinitely preferable to the desolation and madness he would leave behind. The air rushed against his ears and grasped at his body like long, freezing cold fingers. He screamed and the screech reverberated eerily in his own ears. He could vanish without a trace in this blackness. But he didn’t vanish and he didn’t crash.

He was caught.

The fractal tunnel had appeared out of nowhere and connected itself to the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. His euphoria was unimaginable. The tunnel released him as suddenly as it had taken hold of him. He dropped out of it and landed on his hands and knees. In his vision were the ends of Green’s watery robes. He sat back on his haunches and slowly raised his head and looked into those beautiful eyes, so dear and yet so unfamiliar.

He could no longer hide behind the truth that he had ignored because it was more fun to pretend otherwise. Green was not a human boy with skin that lit up and glowed. He was a being who was infinitely, indescribably, and incomprehensibly more advanced and intelligent than any human. Those few seconds of seeing through his eyes had changed everything. It was not just the vividly saturated colors or the incredible celestial sounds.

In Green’s world, time did not flow as humans perceived it, but was simultaneous, which was why he could access any time or place on Earth and come and go as he pleased. And since every thought and action is recorded and all real communication in the cosmos is telepathic, nothing appeared to be hidden from him and others like him.

In those few moments Black had understood the entire universe and accessed with breathtaking clarity and detail its workings, but those moments were slipping out of his fingers. His own mind could not stretch to those heights of perception. Soon even those would be gone forever. The life humans experienced using their five senses was but a pale, artificial dream by comparison.

‘You interfered?’ he whispered. He owed Green a debt that he could never repay.

‘I did.’

‘Why did you risk getting stuck in the lying matrix? I’m losing the game, anyway.’

‘Take my hand and I’ll show you why.’

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.

 
-
Aldous Huxley

‘Where are we?’ Black asked, throwing his head back to look at the tree trunks soaring up, straight and tall toward the skies all around him. The ground was thick with undergrowth and there was only a dying light left to the day, but the air was still hot and humid, and filled with the clamor of insects and birds. He heard the sound of running water nearby.

‘In a Malaysian rainforest.’

‘What are we doing here?’

‘We came to see him,’ said Green, pointing to a flying mosquito. The mosquito froze in mid flight.

Black went closer. There was a bubble around the mosquito. Up close, the insect was intricately built with compound eyes, a feathery antenna, a diamond-shaped thorax, and beautiful white markings on his slender legs. ‘What’s so special about him?’

Green came to stand next to Black. ‘
He
is a transgenic mosquito, released to combat dengue fever. The farthest he will fly is two hundred yards, and being male he will never attempt to consume the blood of a single living creature, but he is created in the hope that during his lifetime, which can be measured in days, he will mate with a wild female mosquito and cause her to produce defective offspring, which they believe will, if not eradicate the disease eventually, then at least contain it. Millions like him are being released in other parts of the world with the same intention. The next planned project will tackle malaria.’

Fascinated by the mosquito’s stillness, Black gazed at it in wonder. He wished he could see the world through Green’s eyes again. What would this little creature look like? Breathtaking slices of condensed light and stunning color? But he had only his own limited five senses and feeble mind. ‘A good thing, surely. Malaria kills millions, mostly children,’ he said, repeating what he had gleaned from the TV.

‘Remember this, Black - bacterial DNA always becomes part of the host’s DNA, but don’t draw any conclusions just yet. We are playing connect the dots.’ He extended a long, slender finger and touched the bubble. It broke and the mosquito sailed away. He turned to Black with his hand outstretched. ‘Next dot awaits.’

Suddenly they were standing in a remote, snow-covered tundra. An icy wind blew across the desolate wilderness.

‘We are in polar bear country, thirteen hundred kilometers from the North Pole, on the island of Spitsbergen.’

There was no sign of life that Black could see, and the only sign of civilization was an imposing concrete structure that jutted out of the mountainside. They were, in fact, standing on a road that led up to it. A pair of solid steel doors formed its entrance.

‘That,’ Green continued, pointing to the tall doors, ‘is the sole entrance to what some call the doomsday vault. Built deep into the mountain it has been designed to withstand the melting of the ice caps, earthquakes, and even nuclear strikes. It is unstaffed but monitored around the clock and formidably protected by blast doors at the entrance, a second door approximately a hundred and fifteen meters down, then finally two keyed, air-locked doors.’

‘What are they so fiercely protecting?’

‘Seeds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores samples of three-quarters of the world’s seeds.’

‘Why? Are they expecting a doomsday scenario?’

‘Not that I know of, but here’s a little coincidence for you to consider. Building started in 1984, a year after the first genetically modified seeds were created.’

‘There’s that word again - genetically modified.’

‘Good. Let’s go,’ Green said and held out his hand.

Black found himself seated next to Green inside an airplane.

‘First class view of the American skies,’ said Green.

And indeed the seats were wide and plush. There was only one other passenger and he seemed to be fast asleep in his tracksuit. From behind a curtained cubicle, Black could hear ice clinking.

‘Air hostess preparing drinks,’ explained Green.

Black looked out of the window.

‘See that whitish line.’

Black noticed that the sky above the line was bluer than the sky underneath it. ‘Yes; I see it. What is it?’

‘That is the geo-engineering spray line. The official stated reason for the chemical releases is to ameliorate global warming. The truth is a different matter. Aerosol cause global dimming, which translates to twenty percent less sunlight getting through to the planet. However, the white haze is a highly advanced smart dust composed of metallic oxides, synthetic fibers and engineered biologicals. These nanoparticles bloom and spread out over great areas and shred the ozone layer, which allows more of the sun’s thermal energy to penetrate, which in actuality causes global warming. CFCs and carbon emissions are negligible factors.’

‘Why are they doing this, then?’

‘The answer is in the smart dust. The engineered biologicals are mostly desiccated human red blood cells that have been engineered in such a way that they exactly mirror the life form, but resist destruction and can self-replicate outside the human body. The other biologicals are pathogens that have been altered and cloaked so that the human immune system will not recognize them as foreign. The bacteria and viruses go to work altering the cellular DNA of a living organism slowly. If the host gets ill, the virus or bacteria will be wiped out by the body’s immune system, but after the illness is eliminated, the altered cells remain and continue to reproduce. The changes can be so subtle that the body continues to operate as previous, or so the victim thinks.

‘The other enemy lurking in the dust are the nanofibers designed to endure almost anything - extreme temperatures, chemicals, acid, bleach. They integrate themselves into the very cells of the living organism and create new processes that will override its natural system, then artificially and exactly mirror the ones they have overtaken.

‘The last piece to this jigsaw puzzle are the metallic oxides. They are there for many reasons but the two most important are these. They contain aluminum and barium. The aluminum when it is washed down to the Earth causes a slow, silent death to plants and trees that will require more genetically modified plants and trees.’

‘But I watched a program on the National Geographic channel about the minerals. Doesn’t aluminum occur naturally in the Earth’s crust, anyway?’

‘It does, but never as a bio-available particle blowing in the wind. It is always bonded to other elements and thus unable to leech into other living organisms and damage their DNA. These metallic oxides have also made both the air and the human body more conductive. The vastly increased electrical biofield provides the DC current to activate these synthetic organisms to self-assemble. And electromagnetic frequencies emitted by cellphone towers, HARP, and Gwen greatly increase the vitality with which these forms grow in the human body.’

Black suddenly remembered a documentary he had watched about a mysterious disease called Morgellons. Sufferers had colorful fibers, plaques, crystals and gel-like objects that looked eerily like worms and insects coming out of lesions on their bodies.

‘Morgellons is not a disease, but an unintended effect. The people with Morgellons are those that have bodies whose genetic make-up rejects the technology. Regardless of whether the Morgellons condition is present or not, every living thing on the planet is currently being colonized by these artificial life forms.’

‘Why are they doing this?’

‘Genetically modified food, tainted inoculations, poisoned air, and mosquitoes that introduce unwanted viral genetic information into the recipient host are all multi-pronged steps toward singularity.’

‘Singularity?’

‘Singularity is a point in space time where the rules of physics no longer apply. One interpretation is the arrival of the human plus. Or the rise of the artificial man and the hive.’

‘My God. If every human being is already infected, how far are they toward their goal?’

‘Not so far. Not by any means. This is their middle phase, but there is another first phase taking place. Let me show you.’

He held out his hand and Black put his into it.

They stood not far from a poor dwelling by a forest. It was cold, and the ground was thick with snow. A little boy, dressed in thick country clothes, was playing at the edge of the forest. Black could tell instantly that there was something not quite right about him. He almost had the face of a Down’s syndrome child, but not quite. Black immediately wondered whether this was what they wanted the human race to be. A dumbed-down herd of unquestioning worker bees.

‘No, no,’ said Black. ‘This is Yuri. He will remain in his forest home until his early death. He will never lead anyone or build anything of repute, but he is very special.’

‘Why?’

‘He has previously unseen DNA. Earth science has known only one other almost like him. A blind, severely handicapped boy with three strands of DNA. The scientists do their tests but they can’t understand why his junk DNA is switched on or how. Yuri has four strands. You see, despite all their efforts, the powers that shouldn’t be have woefully underestimated the human spirit. It is alive. There are already children born with livers that can process all the chemicals in junk food; children who are immune even after repeated infections with AIDS. Others can pass solid objects through other solid objects using their minds, see through various parts of their bodies, or fill glasses with water by simply looking at them.