The Omega Project (25 page)

Luring an unknown quarry into the fire cave was central to the trap. Creating a dummy to replace Oscar inside the plastic pod proved the more difficult task. In the end I settled on segments of thick roots and mud, which offered the appearance and feel of mass, and smeared cephaloped blood on the interior glass to prevent a clear inspection.

Hopefully, the hunter would spring the trap before the ruse was discovered.

The sun had nearly set by the time I had finished camouflaging the last snare. Climbing into the upper branches of another redwood, I concealed myself behind a blanket of leaves, set the binoculars on night vision, then waited.

Hours passed. I rolled over on my back and gazed up at a redwood canopy set against a backdrop of stars—stars that would allow my bio-chip to recalculate its chronometer. Instructing ABE to alert me to any unusual sounds or movements, I closed my eyes and slipped inside the warmth of my forest cocoon.

*   *   *

INTERNAL ALERT! NEW ENTITIES PRESENT!

I opened my eyes to an ABE-evoked rush of adrenaline.
Where are they?

FIFTY-SEVEN METERS TO THE WEST. DESCENDING FROM AN ALTITUDE OF 792 METERS.

Looking up, I could see nothing but the dark outline of the redwood treetops and a sprinkling of stars. Then I held the night-vision binoculars to my eyes and the invaders became visible.

The platform was hexagonal and dark and I would have missed it except it blotted out a section of stars twenty-feet long. Hovering above the forest canopy, it appeared to be motionless, lacking any obvious means of propulsion. Zooming in on the undercarriage, I saw a faint pattern of spinning circles, the movement generating a soft green glow in my otherwise olive-tainted field of vision.

I was looking at the bottom of the hovercraft when a life-form appeared above the treetops, rising eerily toward the levitating object. At first I thought it was one of the giant bats, only the creature wasn’t flapping its wings, it was using them like a kite, catching the wind to increase its altitude. As my eyes adjusted to the starlight, I saw a pair of dangling biped legs and then arms—human arms. The faceless head, the fleshless skin … everything was cloaked in black to blend in with the night.

Rising in tow behind the flying biped was a pod trap, and there was clearly something thrashing about inside. ABE quickly confirmed it to be a cephaloped.

Was it Oscar, or another one of its kind?

Cursing under my breath, I parted the leaf blind and searched for the primary redwood limb with my binoculars, tracing the highway of bark and ferns back to the buttress. My heart pounded in my chest as I peered inside the fire cave, staring at the dark silhouette of another winged being poised just outside the entrance. For a long moment the biped simply remained there, its head slightly cocked as if evaluating—

Womp!

There was no scream or screech, just the report of a vine snapping beneath the weight of the now dangling log and the panicked flutter of leatherlike wings beating the night air as one of the trap’s snares wrenched tightly around the ankle of my quarry, flipping it upside-down and pinning it to the ceiling of the fire cave.

Got you, you bastard! How’s it feel to be—

DETECTING AN INCREASE IN PARTICLE WAVES. WARNING: INTRUDERS CAN DETECT YOUR THOUGHT ENERGY.

Huh?

Before I could muzzle my mind, a blinding white searchlight ignited from the platform’s hexagonal undercarriage, the beacon cutting a swath of day in my direction through the chaos of foliage.

There was no time to react. One moment I was scrambling to hide beneath an illuminated umbrella of greenery, the next I was swept off my feet and into the air, a viselike grip squeezing my rib cage into my lungs, the assault as sudden as it was terrifying. Helpless and frightened, I bellowed a bloodcurdling scream yet uttered no sound, my mouth filled with goo …

No, not goo, it was a tentacle!

Oscar?

SILENCE
.

The searchlight followed us as we moved through the trees, two of the cephaloped’s tentacles wrapped snugly around my waist and legs, the others grappling for vines and branches. Crashing through curtains of leaves, Oscar dropped in a dizzying, stomach-churning free fall into darkness—and then we stopped.

Oscar released me just long enough to pin my back against the trunk of a tree. Splaying its head and tentacles, it blanketed my body, its flesh changing colors, camouflaging us with a cluster of thick surface roots amassed around the moss-covered base of a two-hundred-foot sequoia.

I could feel my guardian struggling to control its gasps. My own breaths were somewhat stifled, my face covered by a semiporous sheath of stretched tentacle skin.

Breathing, escaping, awakening … none of it was important. Wrapped head to toe in the cephaloped’s embrace, my only priority was to manage the building waves of euphoria that were causing my body to shake uncontrollably as every square inch of my being was submerged in what felt like a pool of pure energy. My cells cavitated, the neurotransmitters in my brain rapid firing as if touched by the hand of God.

Thankfully, ABE stepped in. Channeling the onslaught of echolocation, my bio-chip recalculated my brain waves on the fly even as it escorted my mind’s eye on a journey through another sea of consciousness that melded the cephaloped’s consciousness with mine.

Oh … my.

Through an emotion-laced prism I stole a glimpse inside my host and discovered my soul … and Oscar’s soul … and the redwood’s soul—each a spark of purity that bound every life-form that existed, had existed, and will ever exist not only to a higher power but also to one another. Call it the soul, call it energy … what I saw, what I experienced was the essence of creation—love without pretense, giving without receiving—a marrow of caring so honest and perfect it defined selflessness.

It no longer mattered whether I was asleep or awake, dead or alive. In this one brief moment of clarity I had resolved the meaning of life, the very reason for us being—and this simple simplistic understanding stripped evil of its purpose and boiled hatred and greed and corruption down to its naked truth. I saw the Creator’s essence in its design and I wept, my newfound wisdom setting me free, robbing death of its impact; revealing the soul’s immortality.

And then I slipped out of this echolocation-induced magic carpet ride as my being was swept down a dark funnel.

And then I saw through the cephaloped’s eyes.

What I saw was evil.

The biped was hovering twenty paces before us, its outstretched batlike wings catching the wind, its face masked by the predawn night. Reddish brown eyes shimmered catlike in the darkness as they inspected the redwood trunks, ours one of five sprung from a fertile limb that hung two hundred feet above the forest floor.

Uncertain, the sentry remained.

Dawn announced its intentions, first as a morning mist, then as filtered gray light—gray light that vanquished the night and with it the demon’s silhouette.

I could see the wings, but not well enough to tell if they were organic or artificial. The demon, however, was quite human, its flesh muddied and pasty and camouflaged in a tight-fitting cephaloped hide that barely concealed the sultry female’s breasts.

That’s right, the hunter was a huntress—a vixen of the forest. Her long raven hair hung in dark coils past elfish ears and down her muscular torso; her lips, thick and full and pouting, launched a thousand memories.

The vixen was
my
vixen, and I ached at the sight of her through the cephaloped’s partially closed eye stalks.

For her part, Andria continued to scan the flora and fauna, the coldness in her brown eyes and the barbed electrified lance coiled in her fist enough to suppress my overwhelming urge to reveal myself.

Brighter curtains of gray filtered through the redwood labyrinth, dawn’s threat chasing my long-lost lover back into the forest canopy where she boarded her awaiting chariot.

Oscar and I remained bound to the tree until the gray bled gold and the nightmare melted into day, our thoughts and emotions fusing as one.

22

I believe that we are all standing on an evolutionary threshold in which we have the possibility not only of creating a new culture, but actually becoming a new kind of human being that will understand how to live with connection with ourselves, with each other and with the earth. So much of the suffering and acts that will happen in the meantime, we have to be prepared for. But if we can work with it instead of resist it, that evolutionary leap may be possible.

—C
AROLYN
B
AKER
, therapist and survivalist

Oscar released me and I fell to my knees on the forest floor, my brain buzzing from echolocation sickness as if I had overdosed on LSD. I rolled over and saw a frog belch colors; I looked up and willed a centipede to tap dance on a branch—the branch growing … reaching out for me—ABE quickly adjusting the serotonin levels in my cerebral cortex, dousing the bizarre effects of synesthesia.

The sound of a pan flute disrupted my recovery and my eyes resettled on my cephaloped guardian. The creature was exhaling forcibly through its breathing organ, attempting no doubt, to communicate with his own kind.

If they were out there, none would emerge from hiding.

It was me they feared, or my species … or my girlfriend, or whatever ghoulish being she was made out to be. Why had she been thawed and not me? Were the rest of the
Oceanus’
s crew with her? Who had supplied her with the antigravity wings and the hovercraft?

And why the hell was she hunting cephalopeds?

It dawned on me then, and I smiled at my stupidity.
Asshole! It’s all part of the dream. Andria … her hair long and wild—just like the day we met in that Virginia forest. Back then she was wearing a camouflage suit; this time around my mind has her decked out in full warrior gear to match the setting. But why were she and her mates hunting poor Oscar?

The answer came to me quickly, my outburst of laughter startling my eight-legged companion. “The squid hunt aboard
Oceanus
. Andria loves her calamari … no offense.” I pulled myself up with the assistance of a vine, shaking my head in amazement. “Kyle Graulus was right. These Omega dreams are pretty wild.”

Oscar looked at me with what I interpreted to be a quizzical expression.

“Sorry, pal. None of this is real. I’m Dorothy, you’re the Scarecrow, and my fiancée appears to be up for the role of a very sexy Wicked Witch. It’s all part of a seriously fucked-up cryogenic dream … and why am I explaining this to you?”

INCORRECT.

The voice in my head startled me.
ABE, is that you, or are you interpreting for Oscar?

ABE RESPONSE IS IN REFERENCE TO OMEGA-WAVE DREAM THEORY VERSUS EISENBRAUN HYPOTHESIS REGARDING ASTEROID 1997 XF11 IMPACT WITH THE MOON ON OCTOBER 26, 2028.

Your reference is moot. The dream overrides the impact hypothesis.

INCORRECT. BASED ON STAR CARTOGRAPHY AND SOIL ANALYSIS, EISENBRAUN HYPOTHESIS WAS CORRECT.

A chill ran down my spine.
Explain.

SOIL ANALYSIS FROM THE CAVE WALLS REVEALS A THIN LAYER OF HELIUM-3 OCCURRING AT A GEOLOGICAL TIME PERIOD EQUATING TO A 2028 FALLOUT. TRACES OF HELIUM-3 AND MOON ROCK ARE ALSO PRESENT ALONG THE SURFACE AND REDWOOD CROTCHES—EVIDENCE OF CONTINUED PLANETARY BOMBARDMENT FROM ORBITING SPACE DEBRIS. STAR CARTOGRAPHY CORRESPONDS WITH A DATE THAT YIELDS A 93.7 PERCENT CORRELATION TO THE HELIUM-3 FALLOUT LAYER. AS A RESULT, ABE CHRONOMETER HAS BEEN RESET TO THE POST COLLISION YEAR OF 12,233,776 P.C.… POST-CATACLYSM.

“Twelve million years?” I smiled nervously. “You said the evidence only yields a ninety-three-point-seven percent probability of being correct. What about the other six-point-three percent?”

THERE IS A SECONDARY CORRELATION MATCHING THE STAR CARTOGRAPHY.

“Thank God. And how many post-collision years does that amount to? And please, feel free to round it off, I won’t worry about a few extra years here or there.”

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO MILLION YEARS, ROUNDED OFF.

The blood rushed from my face; I felt my heart fluttering.

WARNING: BLOOD PRESSURE DROPPING. COMPENSATING …

“I couldn’t … that’s impossible. Vanilla sway! ABE, wake me up.”

ROBERT EISENBRAUN IS AWAKE.

“Bullshit!” I was approaching a full state of panic. “This is a dream. Your analysis is simply part of that dream. Prove that I’m awake!”

CRYOGENIC PROCESS DROPS SUBJECT CORE BODY TEMPERATURE TO −33°F. ABE CANNOT FUNCTION IN HOST CORE TEMPERATURES FALLING BELOW 84.5°F. ABE IS FUNCTIONING, THEREFORE ROBERT EISENBRAUN IS AWAKE.

I dropped to my knees.
Steady, Eisenbraun. ABE is functioning, but it’s only functioning within the dream, not inside your skull, which is still cryogenically frozen back in 2028.

Oscar reached out for me, sensing my distress.

Upon contact, I projected my thoughts to the cephaloped using the bio-chip.
Oscar, I need to check the trap. Can you take us back to the fire cave?

*   *   *

We arrived at the redwood buttress twenty minutes later, Oscar taking a circuitous route to make sure we were alone. The sprung trap had begun with a snare that I had camouflaged in the spongy floor of the fire cave. The vine ran up the wall and through the ceiling through a hole in the buttress where its movement had triggered a weight—a teetering log, now hanging over the edge of the redwood limb. The result of my ABE-directed labor had fashioned a near-inescapable trap that had resulted in our adversary being pinned by its ensnared extremity to the roof of the cave.

The cave was now empty, but there had been a mighty struggle inside.

Animals caught in a hunter’s trap have been known to gnaw off a foot in order to survive. This one had cut itself loose from the snare using a blade.