Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) (9 page)

Booker’s submarine, propelled by a Cosegan water-powered turbine, surged toward an unlikely destination. The propulsion system plans had been gleaned years earlier from the Sphere, and made the sub by far the fastest in the world. Equipped with the latest stealth technology, it was also almost completely undetectable. Even without the special attributes of the sub, Booker hardly thought the Americans would be looking for an underwater vessel. It was a guarded secret that Booker even possessed a fleet of such crafts, more advanced than the US Navy’s best, but Booker was preparing for more than just evacuations.

Along with the glimpses of the future they’d seen in the Eysen-Sphere, Booker had also spent more than a decade studying a long-hidden secret manuscript relating to the Sphere, known as the Clastier Papers. Clastier, a nineteenth century priest, had also found an Eysen, and had written extensively on what he learned.

His papers were divided into three sections: the Attestations, the Divinations, and the Inspirations. It was the second section which haunted Booker. The Divinations were Clastier’s prophecies, and the final four tormented all who had read them.

1. Global pandemics and super-viruses wipe out vast numbers of the world’s population.

2. A utopian period after a great plague.

3. Climate destabilization resulting in uncertain levels of mass destruction.

4. World War III, a conflict of such proportion that humanity might not survive.

Clastier had accurately foretold the rise of the United States, Hitler’s atrocities during World War II, the development and dropping of the atomic bomb, the moon landing, the fall of religions, and many other significant world events, long before they’d happened. Booker, Gale, and Rip had extensively debated on the order of the Divinations, specifically when the predicted events were expected to occur, and the actual impact of each. The three of them were somehow determined to stop them from happening.

Booker enlisted the help of the leaders of the Inner Movement. The Movement, or “IM,” as they were usually known, had begun years earlier, and had gained traction when a group of young people, who were reported to have supernatural gifts, exposed government corruption and demanded an end to war. Although the claims of extraordinary abilities had never been proven, many believed that the human mind had unlimited potential and could achieve remarkable things. Indeed, the discovery of the Eysen-Sphere and its seemingly endless stream of data emboldened those beliefs. Consequently, the Movement had grown.

The prophesized fall of the world’s religions had left a void which IM filled for many. The ranks of IM were full of people who could be categorized in one of three ways: those still seeking something bigger than themselves, those searching for answers to the great questions of life, and those who thought the world should find a way to avoid war and violence because humans were meant to live in a perpetual state of peace. Most fit into all three categories, but the IM had slowly and quietly become something of a force in the world. Not surprisingly, Booker secretly funded most of its operations, and he also knew that the Aylantik Foundation wanted to destroy the Movement.

The Foundation had three natural enemies who were preventing it from putting its Phoenix Initiative into action. Booker was one. The US government was another. The Aylantik Foundation could not put its plan into place while the United States remained the world’s sole superpower, but Booker knew from Gale and Rip’s Eysen research that the Foundation would soon find a way to circumvent the US government. That was the reason the Foundation’s third enemy, the Inner Movement, must be strengthened.

In one of his secret offices, Booker sat in front of a large bank of Eysen-INUs. He was about to contact Linh, the leader of the Inner Movement, to update her on the situation, when he noticed Gale and Kruse in a heated conversation. Booker had micro-cameras everywhere. It was another technology he’d discovered in the Eysen-Sphere, and it allowed him to instantly monitor people and events all over the globe.

He listened in on Gale and Kruse.

“How are we going to get to
El Prison
without the NSA, or who knows else, finding us?” Gale demanded.

“We’re going to put you on a commercial flight from Nadi Airport,” Kruse said.

“We’re going
back
to Fiji? And I’m going to just walk through security and board a regular plane?” Gale looked flabbergasted. “Am I at least flying first class so I’ll be comfortable when they shoot me?”

“We have a way to bypass security. We’ll get on while they’re prepping the plane,” Kruse said. “We’ll fly in the crew rest area, behind the cockpit. No one will see us. But US intelligence, if they’re still even checking flights out of Fiji, will assume security would pick you up trying to board. It’s actually the private planes they’ll be triple-checking.”

“Wait, if we’re going back to Fiji, I can see Cira,” Gale said, her face suddenly lighting up.

“No.”

“There must be a way.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Then you’re going to have to drug me again to stop me.”

“Fine.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Gale, if you went near that hospital, Cira would be doomed.”

“You’re right,” Gale said after a moment, staring into the distance, lost in thought, unknowingly looking right into one of Booker’s cameras. “Okay then.”

Booker spoke quietly into Kruse’s earpiece. “Drug her. She’s going to make a break for it at the airport.”

Kruse closed his eyes. He’d had the same hunch, but he knew if he drugged her again it would likely mean he’d have to be reassigned, because there’s no way in hell Gale would ever trust him again, and it’s impossible to protect someone who doesn’t trust you.

—O—

While trapped under trillions of gallons of water, Gale pondered the thing that had caused all of this, the thing that could fix it all.

The Sphere.  It could show them any point in time across billions of years. Booker’s study of Universe Quantum Physics had begun prior to their discovery of the Sphere, almost in anticipation of it, and although they had never heard an actual voice from the Crying Man, they could feel his communication.

Somehow the Cosegans built a machine that could contain all the knowledge of the universe,
she thought, as she had hundreds of times since they had first realized the power of the Eysen-Sphere.
How did they accumulate that knowledge? How did they get it into a small, basketball-sized sphere that could withstand the passage of millions of years?

These questions had burned in her mind for seven years, and with each stunning view into the Sphere, they were more amazed, but seemingly no closer to the answers. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Sphere was that it had exact, and one-hundred-percent complete, detailed visual accounts of the eleven million years since its creation, continuing on indefinitely into the future.

Gale recalled the pivotal conversation she’d had with Rip after discovering she was pregnant with Cira.

“What do you want to do?” Rip asked somberly after first embracing Gale and telling her how much he loved her.

Gale took a deep breath. She understood his question and its implications, not because they didn’t want a child, but because they both knew too much about the future.

“This child could be important,” Gale said.

“A lot of parents believe that about their children.”

“But in our case it could be true. We have the Eysen-Sphere. We have the Clastier Papers. This child will be a descendent of the Builders.”

“The child will grow up here on El Perdido in hiding, and could lose her parents at anytime.”

“Her?” Gale asked, catching his reference to the yet unknown sex of the child.

“Just a guess.”

“Have you seen anything?” Gale asked, wondering if the Sphere had revealed something about the child’s future.

“No, I would have told you.” Rip looked at her. The blue of her eyes had changed him as much as the Sphere had. He called them “magic eyes,” and often, when he struggled for an answer to some dilemma, he would find the solution in her eyes. “Gale, if we have this child, she may not live through the plague. She’ll be eight or nine when it starts, ten or twelve when it completely ravages the world. Could you take losing a child? Because I know I couldn’t.”

“What if she survives?” Gale asked. “She’ll grow up learning from the Sphere. She’ll inherit it one day.”

Rip nodded.

“Somehow we escaped,” Gale continued. “Clastier and the Sphere will protect her . . . as they’ve been protecting us.”

Not long after they made the decision to have Cira, the Sphere showed them a scene of the future so awful that they reconsidered, but by then it was too late to safely terminate the pregnancy. They wanted the baby, but could not imagine bringing her into the world that was coming. Plague and war, a pause, and then more war and another plague. It was one thing to read Clastier’s Divinations, they had committed their lives to preventing the Final Four, but to see them projected from the Sphere, as if they were watching footage of something that had already occurred, was horrifying. Viewing the world that their child would face made Gale and Rip more determined, desperate actually, to find a way to stop it.

—O—

Gale found herself wishing the Crying Man was real instead of just the face of an ancient computer. Maybe he could save Cira.

Why hadn’t they seen this coming? Even after seven years of seeing everything inside the Sphere, Rip didn’t completely buy Gale’s theory that the Eysen-Sphere was what many people called the Akashic Records. Akasha, an ancient word meaning sky, had been used to describe all the accumulated knowledge and experience that has ever occurred, or ever will exist. They were somehow stored, and could theoretically be accessed in the ethereal.

Although the Sphere seemed to match the description, even exceed it, Rip needed a more scientific explanation. Gale had argued that it didn’t matter what you called it—the Sphere fit the story. The Akashic Records had long been considered part legend, part myth, and a matter of faith for many, but perhaps the story had originated from someone who had seen a Sphere hundreds or thousands of years earlier. They knew there had been at least two others, but what if there had been
hundreds
? What if a carpenter in Nazareth found one, two thousand years earlier? What if Leonardo da Vinci, Nostradamus, or Einstein got a glimpse into one? What about Hitler?

They had asked every question, but even while holding this object Rip called “an instrument to view eternity,”they were not able to find the answers they needed most, those they labeled the Five Cosega Mysteries
.

1. What is the Sphere
2. Who were the Cosegans?
3. Where did they come from?
4. Why did they leave the Sphere?

5. What happened to them?

They were constantly frustrated because, while possessing the most powerful object in the universe, they were mostly navigating blind, like an infant with an INU. Yet inside the Sphere, Gale knew there were the answers, not just to the Five Cosega Mysteries, but also how to save Cira, and the future.

Savina flipped her dark, luxurious mane behind her lean, muscled shoulders, flexing them as she took the call from the Judge in her private office. Although he was considerably older, he’d made his feelings clear. He was in love with her, would leave his wife, do anything for her, but she viewed him as a father figure.

“Infatuation,” she’d told him, many times. “You love my mind because you love power, and what is more powerful than a brilliant mind?”

He agreed to not pursue a romantic relationship, but only reluctantly. In either case, an affair with her would have complicated the mission, and the Phoenix Initiative was already complicated enough.

“So you think you can find him?” the Judge asked as he sketched a lingering detail into his latest mechanical drawing. A frustrated engineer whose pursuit of perfect artificial limbs had somehow landed him in the pharmaceutical industry. He now controlled one-third of the world’s prescription drug market. His father had become a quadriplegic after an accident when the Judge was still a teen. Seeing his father suffer, the Judge was determined to create artificial limbs and sleeves for amputees and paralyzed patients. Many advancements had been made, but he still worked constantly, always seeking the elusive miracle solution. 

“I’m almost certain of it,” Savina responded.

The Judge was delighted with her answer because he wanted the other Eysen-Sphere. He had no doubt that Savina was smarter than Gaines, and therefore had progressed farther into the Sphere than the archaeologist, but only a Sphere could stop the Phoenix Initiative. With a second Sphere, the Foundation would discover more of the Cosegan secrets, secrets they could use to ensure the successful launch of Phoenix. Perhaps even more important would be taking away the greatest power from the Foundation’s greatest threat—Booker Lipton would be much easier to defeat.

Savina wanted to know what Gaines had found, wanted to see if his Sphere was different, if the two Spheres together would be more powerful. She knew there was more than just eleven million years of information to traverse. The Sphere actually held what was equivalent to the size and age of the entire universe. How could the exploration ever be completed?

“We may find Gaines before you do,” the Judge said as mini robots walked across his desk. “But when it comes to slipping away, his track record is perfect.”

“The Sphere can lead us to Gaines,” she said, her voice filled with excitement. The Eysen-Sphere had become her life. Beyond all the extraordinary discoveries already made lay the real addiction, the infinite possibilities.

The Judge had shown her how the flaws of the future could be corrected, how the world could be saved from itself. She believed in the power of that, and even more. Savina was certain that her reason for existing, the purpose of her life, and the most important job on Earth, was to use the secrets of the Cosega Sequence to ensure the future of humanity. In that, she and Gaines were very similar, but their methods, motives, and vision made them diametrically opposed to one another.

“Let me know when we get there.
If
we get there,” the Judge said.

“
When
we get there,” she corrected.

“Savina!” one of her assistants yelled. “Come quick!”

She ended the call and ran back into the main lab in time to see the Eysen-Sphere spinning so fast it’d became a blur.

“How long has it been doing this?” she whispered.

“It started just before we called you.”

“What was happening before it began?”

“It showed another Sphere!” one of them said. “Another Eysen-Sphere appeared inside this one.”

Savina walked around the spinning Eysen, worried that at any second it might fly across the room, that it would somehow destroy itself by rising up to the ceiling and crashing back down to the floor.

In order for Spheres to levitate and project elaborately, they required a second ancient artifact known as an Odeon Chip. The Foundation’s Sphere, formerly belonging to the Vatican, no longer had its original Chip. The Vatican hadn’t even known they needed one until Savina figured it out. The Judge discovered an obscure mention of it while reviewing NSA files on Gaines’ time in Mexico before his “death.” As it turned out, the Vatican also had a Chip in their secret archives, but had not known what it did, or if it was even connected to the Eysen-Sphere. The Judge acquired the Chip and the Sphere after the Church fell, but it was not the original Chip for that Sphere. According to Archive records, the Church had come into possession of the Chip in the year 321, and they didn’t capture the Sphere until the mid-1800s. Savina had long been concerned that the mismatch might cause problems or limit her access.

“Do you think it’s the Chip’s compatibility issue, or because the two Spheres are connecting?” an assistant asked.

“Maybe there can’t be two Spheres on the same spectrum,” she said, thinking out loud.

“I think the Eysen is way beyond the spectrum,” one of the assistants replied.

“Not the spectrum of frequencies or the energy spectrum. Not as we know it in physics. I’m talking about a dimensional spectrum,” she explained, moving closer to the Sphere. “Look, the spinning is causing friction with the surrounding particles. It’s going so fast that it’s distorting the space around it. Do you see?”

The assistants crouched next to her and stared at the Sphere. “Yes,” they both agreed. The air around the Sphere appeared wavy, like heat coming off a hot road in the summer.

“So it’s getting ready to move,” one of them asked, hesitantly, “into another dimension?”

“I don’t know what it’s doing,” she answered. “Look. It’s
incredible
.” She involuntarily moved her hand in front of her mouth, as if to silence anything that might disturb the moment.

The distortion moved out in ripples, micro-thin circles, similar to a pebble dropped into a pond. The ripples were difficult to see, but they were there. The assistants backed up a couple of feet, apparently not wanting to get hit by the waves.

Savina dipped her hand in between the ripples, gasping as her hand disappeared.

“Pull it out!” one of the assistants shouted.

Savina held it steady for a moment and contemplated how she could get her entire body into the distortion waves. “Do you realize what this is?” she asked in a mesmerized tone.

“Where is your hand?” one asked, still alarmed.

“Another dimension,” the other answered. “Savina, how does it feel?”

“My hand . . .  it . . . it’s as if I could fly. All the sensations from my hand are gone, but there’s no pain . . . Instead of what it was, now I . . . anything I think I feel, heat, cold, pain, pleasure, it’s instantaneous. It fills my body, but it comes from the place or dimension where my hand is.”

“Are we getting this?” one of them asked, looking for the indicator light on the recording master control.

The sound of wind came from the Sphere and Savina’s hand began to emerge; however, it remained translucent.

“It’s winding down,” one of them said.

As the Sphere slowed, its color turned a deep shade of purple. Images of galaxies radiated outward, transforming the room into a giant planetarium.

Savina looked down at her hand, already knowing it was back because the infinite sensations, as she would later describe, were gone. 

The Eysen-Sphere stopped, and then suddenly went black. Savina and her assistants looked at each other. Before any of them could speak, the entire lab went dark. Battery backups began beeping and emergency lights popped on.

“The generator will kick in any second,” one of the assistants assured them. He’d barely finished his sentence when the room dropped back into silent darkness.

“We’re totally down,” someone said.

“What’s going on?” the first voice asked.

“It’s the Sphere,” Savina said.

They turned to where they thought it should be, but the darkness allowed nothing. One of them reached for the penlight he kept in his pocket. He tried it several times, but it also failed.

“I’m telling you, it’s the Eysen,” Savina repeated. “Just wait.”

“For what?”

“I think we found the other one,” Savina whispered reverently. “We found Gaines’ Eysen.”

“How?” he asked, suddenly aware of the sensation of floating.

“Just before I took that call, I had inputted all we know of Gaines’ Eysen.”

“You can’t
input
anything into the Eysen-Sphere. It’s read-only.”

“Oh yeah? Look.”

The Eysen they’d all been staring at, without being able to see it, had, at its center, a pinpoint of light. Within the absolute blackness of the room, the tiny glow appeared as a spotlight.

“What’s it doing now?” an assistant asked.

The room instantly filled with colors, swirling in a vortex of exaggerated hues.

“We’re not getting this recorded,” an assistant reminded them.

“It doesn’t matter,” Savina shouted above a gathering roar of white noise, sounding as if an enormous waterfall was pouring in on them. “I’m not sure the equipment is in the room anymore anyway!”

The assistants looked around, finding that there was nothing left of the lab. No tables, no equipment, not even any walls.

“I don’t think
we’re
in the lab anymore!” one of them yelled.

“I-It’s as if,” Savina stuttered, but they couldn’t hear her above the roar. “It’s as if we’re inside the Eysen.”

“Savina, the Eysen has engulfed the lab . . . It’s consumed us!” one of them yelled.

“And it feels glorious!” she shouted back.

“Where is it taking us?”

“To Ripley Gaines!”