Charger the Soldier (10 page)

"Thank you, Father. God keep you safe, too."
Ben stepped through the great doors of the monastery and went out
into the world alone.

As he waited for the taxi to take him to the
airport and a new life, his mind once again returned to the
manuscript. The book of Enoch told of a man who walked with God for
several years and, to Ben, the story had always been just that, a
story. The Bible had dedicated only a single paragraph to Enoch.
However, works had surfaced since, telling of the adventures of
Enoch, the only individual to ever have the honor of getting to
know God. But the pages that Ben transcribed told a different
story, the story of Enoch's origins, the fact that he was not one
individual, but thousands, descriptions of the city they dwelt in
and how it came to be that they had discovered the technology to
contact God.

This new book of Enoch told of men who walked
with God for three hundred years. Ben saw this long-lost knowledge
as something the world should know, but he had been given strict
orders never to reveal it. He had spent a long time transcribing
the works of departed monks who had worked on the stories earlier.
Each generation of scribes slowly deciphered the words found on
strange, triangular tablets made from a metal that seemed modern
yet which he now knew must have survived for hundreds of thousands
of years. Six months ago, he had cracked the code.

The code told of a machine the Enoch had
built, which was of such incredible design and such unbelievable
complexity that the whole thing seemed to border on madness. Its
structure and workings were incomprehensible. But it was clearly
technology, clearly a machine, built in a time before the rise of
modern man. Who were the people of the Enochs' city, where did they
live, how did they live? These questions kept Ben awake night after
night. But the one item that completely devastated Ben's belief in
the church he had so loved was the description of the keystone, a
machine that was used to talk to God.

The keystone required a living human being, a
child, to give up his life to activate the science of this machine.
What kind of God could demand the life of an innocent, autistic
child as payment for contacting him? It was obvious to Ben that the
Enoch had built a murderous machine.

Ben had tried to discuss his findings with
Father Mulcahy. "But I tell you, this is what it says. There can be
no mistake!" Ben, at his desk in a small cramped room, deep below
the monastery, a room filled to the ceiling with old books and
manuscripts, was holding a small triangular tablet.

"It can't be," Father Mulcahy replied as he
turned one of the other tablets round and round in his hands.
"Brother Sebastian, before you, cracked the code and told a
different story."

"Brother Sebastian was using a polyalphabetic
cipher from the 1970s, and he thought the language was just that, a
language. It's not!" Ben said, hoping his friend and mentor would
understand the difference.

"Look, let me try to explain this again." Ben
took the tablet from Father Mulcahy. He placed the two pieces
together at their base, creating a diamond, then added a third to
the tip of one end. Ben then moved the single triangular tablet
from one point to the other point as he ran through the words one
at a time. "You see here; the thing needs to be moved as one reads
it. That's because these beings didn't write words down on a flat
piece of paper like us. We write in only one dimension. They lived
in four dimensions, and so you have to move the tablets in order to
read them. It's not in code. The code is in how you move the
tablets to read them."

Father Mulcahy looked perplexed. "So how do
you know how to move the tablets?"

"Each surface of these tablets is one
dimension. To use them, they have to be moved as one might move
through four dimensions. The words on each surface are only a part
of the sentence. You have to take a word from one side of one
tablet, and then move to the surface of the next tablet and so on
to make a sentence." Ben tried to replicate the movements. "Near as
I can tell, and according to what I have begun to understand from
these tablets, the beings who wrote this are the ones the Bible
called angels."

Father Mulcahy, disconcerted, asked, "So you
are saying we have angel tablets?"

"Well, I guess so," Ben had replied.

"You cannot talk with anyone about this,"
Father Mulcahy had said firmly. "I will have to contact the pope
directly with the information. If it should be learned that we hold
actual tablets written by angels, this could cause unthinkable
chaos."

"What it means," Ben had replied as he
carefully touched the triangular tablet on his desk, "is that the
Enoch were angels."

As Ben left behind the gates of the monastery
and the title of 'Brother' for the last time and climbed into the
cab that would take him to the airport, the burdens of sadness and
knowledge he bore welled up. Finally, he shed tears for mankind.
The taxi driver stopped staring at Ben in the rear view mirror,
deciding a chat wouldn't be appreciated, and instead focused on
driving Ben to the city.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

Yes, I thought you would be curious. I will
explain the history behind what Brother Ben found in those
triangular tablets. He did not know the half of it.

The people who created the tablets were
called Enoch, also known as the First Ones. We've talked about them
before. They were descendants of humans who lived on the plains of
Africa about a million years ago and were genetically modified by
the Grays for use as servants but escaped.

It was the Enoch who built an empire nearly
700,000 years ago. Of course, their creations were ground under the
glaciers of ice ages, lost forever to the later human explorers,
but were more advanced than anyone before our own time could have
imagined. However, they created three huge mega structures which
survived. One was in Egypt, buried deep beneath the Sphinx and the
shifting sands. The second was in Britain, buried under Stonehenge.
The last was buried under the city of Dhuusamareeb, Somalia. This
last site had no magnificent surface structure to pinpoint its
location, but for anyone who cared to look, the outline could be
found on maps. Under a great rectangular sand clearing, just to the
east of the city and easily seen from the air, was the entrance to
that lost complex.

The Mahouds? Yes, Reader, the Mahouds were a
breakaway group from the First ones which settled Atlantis and
eventually, using antigravity devices, went into space and found
Alcazaba. They were technologically very advanced, but they never
became four-dimensional, like the rest of the First Ones.

In the strange triangular tablets that Ben
spoke of, the First Ones told stories of their encounters with the
Grays, alien beings with immense power and intelligence. The First
Ones had progressed through the Stone, Iron, Industrial, and
Technological Ages, and were in the Energy Age when they came into
contact with the Grays again. The Age of Energy was a point in
their development where the corporeal form, in which living had
meant being trapped forever inside the walls of their three cities,
gave way to existence as a type of energy.

The First Ones were then able to manifest
themselves in whatever form they chose. If they wanted to appear as
human, they could bend light to create a pleasing form. If they
chose to reveal themselves as dogs, they would bend light to be
that form, or they could travel the world undetected. They had
achieved this ability thanks in part to the genetic manipulation of
the Grays, who had encoded hominid DNA that in the twenty-first
century was referred to as junk DNA. They simply outgrew their
bodily forms, because intellectually they had expanded well beyond
the necessity for such physical support. Their intelligence would
be forever contained in their three cities as ghosts, but their
technology allowed them to travel anywhere physically as light.

Ben, you see, had discovered the existence of
the first fourth-dimensional beings, human beings that now existed
at all points of time and space.

Those triangular metal tablets provided
evidence, for the first time, that a type of science predated
religion, and that religion had used this science when a certain
pope sanctioned it.

Deep in the heartland of modern Turkey lay
the remains of a complex called Gobekli Tepe. The church had this
dug up in 1725 CE and reactivated in order to speak with God. The
response they got was less then desirable, but Ben knew nothing of
this, only that the church was aware of the Enochs' work. Father
Mulcahy knew of the church's work, and knew of the results of using
the ancient machine to speak with God.

Father Mulcahy had heard about the church
team which stopped the exploration of Gobekli Tepe in the 1960s and
he was one of only a few church scientists who read the accounts of
Pope Clement XI's actions. He knew of the alien who had been
contacted that fall morning in 1725, knew that the pope had spoken
to the alien and, when the conversation ended, gave the order to
bury the temple. He knew that the pope had described the God he met
as a cold, calculating, reptilian beast, not a loving God. Pope
Clement XI went mad shortly thereafter.

A fitting end, you say? Well, perhaps.
Perhaps not. But certainly not surprising.

We could talk more on that subject, but it's
time I told you about the war. We don't have a lot of time. But
now, at least, you can easily understand humanity's clash with
space and extraterrestrials.

Even better, Charger is about to join the
military and start causing things to happen.

>>>

The next day Ben boarded a flight that would
take him from Istanbul to Seattle in the western United States. His
seat companion turned out to be a frail-looking old man with long
gray hair, wearing the creased pants and shirt of a workman.

"I'm Professor Opinhimmer," the old man said.
"I've been working on a dig in southeast Turkey."

Ben didn't want to talk about the monastery,
though it was in Anatolia and probably close to the professor's
dig, nor about his own work and his grief over leaving it. "I'm
traveling," he said. "Just call me Ben."

"You're Australian," said the professor.

"I guess we never lose the accent."

Given the flight was going to be a long one,
nearly seventeen hours, Ben hoped to catch some sleep, but the
professor apparently felt like talking.

"I don't want to go home," he said. "But I
want to see my nephew, Danny. I like that boy; he has a head on his
shoulders. I just wish he'd use it. But my half-brother never used
his, so perhaps it's genetic."

"Families are always problematic," Ben
offered, already bored.

But the professor's mind had wandered
elsewhere. "I taught astrophysics for many years and all during
that time, I thought about retiring and trekking off to Turkey. I'd
read about formations that hinted at extraordinary knowledge
waiting to be found and I wanted to be the one who found it." Dr.
Opinhimmer paused. "Besides, I thought a career in archaeology
might be nice. More peaceful than teaching."

It might be more peaceful, Ben thought, but
one would also have to endure dust and flies and the great grinding
heat of the desert. Perhaps the old boy doesn't notice.

"You know," said the professor, "The church
holds back advances in knowledge but now that society is turning
away from religion, we're rushing headlong into technological
chaos. There is a staggering amount of pollution on our fragile
world today, factories, transportation, growing technology, all
capable of destroying us. But the biggest problem is the rapidly
growing number of humans breathing today. Remember, in goes the
good air, out comes the bad."

"You have a bleak take on humanity," Ben
said. If he were honest, though, his own take wasn't much more
cheerful, now that the church's betrayal had caused him to lose
faith in the future.

"Maybe I'm just old and fretful," the
professor said, pulling the fingers of one hand through his tangled
gray hair, "but I fear for the younger generation. We humans live
in a world of choices, but few of us ever take responsibility for
our decisions. It will only take one misstep and something even as
infinitesimally small as a virus could be the death of all
humanity."

Do I care? Ben wondered. Before he could
answer his own question, the professor was off and running
again.

The old man leaned forward and rubbed his
hands together. "Here, I will cheer us up by looking at the big
picture, at the universe, which is immortal. First, to gain true
understanding, we have to discard the 'many worlds' theory and,
instead, realize that a universe is just an evolution of particles
expanding in time and space, which always exist."

The church said nothing about time and space,
except that it was bounded by God. And could the church be
believed?

Not anymore.

"It's really quite simple," said the
professor. "There is only one universe in existence. How it works
is like a lake that has a rock thrown into it, which sends out
ripples that fade, while new ripples are forming. My theory is
called the two-state universe or duality complex system."

"That's wild," Ben said. "I'm not sure I
understand, though."

"When I was teaching," the professor said, "I
would explain it this way. I'd draw a circle on the chalk board and
say: 'Imagine a child's balloon. You fill it with air and, as it
expands, you have a representation of one universe, say a positive
universe; where everything exists in a positive-toward-negative
charge state.' Then I would draw a second circle inside the first
and say, 'Now you insert a second balloon inside the first and
begin to expand it with air. This is the formation of the second
state, a place of negative-toward-positive charge state.'" He
peered at Ben. "Are you with me now?"