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Authors: Steve Alten

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“Guess that’s why I became a marine biologist and not a quantum physicist.”

Joe smiled. “We’ll table the subject of reality for the moment and talk about time.”

“What’s the point? You told me time doesn’t exist in the
upper dimensions.”

“True, but before you access the portal, you need to understand that time is not an absolute.”

My heart raced. “I’m to use the portal?”

“Or perhaps you already have?”

“Maybe you are Joe. He used to drive me crazy with his riddles, too.”

“And perhaps you really are the skinny runt I took under my wing as an eleven-year-old import from Drumnadrochit. Ah, but what if I hadn’t? Would you have still been a scientist? Would you have gone on to Princeton? Married your childhood sweetheart? If my roommate Troy hadn’t trained you as an athlete, perhaps you would have drowned in the Sargasso Sea. The person you are today is based on a million variables, all manipulated by your conscious thought.”

“How is that possible?”

“It begins with desire and setting goals, and all the hard work and perseverance you demonstrated in both academics and athletics, but it goes way beyond that. All matter possesses a frequency. The atoms that make up matter are fluctuations of energy within a huge void. What appears solid to your senses is a construct of how your brain interprets the frequency of those electrical signals. Change the frequency and you change both matter and energy. The soul achieves this through conscious thought.

“Young Zachary Wallace desired to be a scientist. The intensity of that desire affected Joe Tkalec, and the protégé
magically
has his mentor. Young Zachary was bullied in seventh grade by a ninth grader, and the exposed weakness created a desire to lift weights. Enter Troy and his conditioning regimen. New parallel universes divert from the old as you learn the game of football. Would you have become a marine biologist without my involvement? A running back without Troy’s coaching? Perhaps. But of all the possible outcomes you could have experienced, the ones you did experience resulted from the ability of your
consciousness to alter the frequency of matter—the so-called aligning of the stars. The phenomenon is real, and those who discover how to control it can remove the chaos associated with existing in a dimension so far from the energy source. Then again, others can abuse their conscious thoughts for themselves alone, creating chaos.

“Now let us add the variable of time to the equation. Recite the two theories of time authored by the philosopher John McTaggert.”

I sat back in my cushioned chair and rocked. “McTaggert’s A-Theory stated that the only real time is the present. The past is gone and the future exists only as a probability distribution, a potentiality of the possible things that can happen. Since the future isn’t set, it’s not real.”

“And his B-Theory?”

“That the past, present, and future all co-exist simultaneously. Since the past determines the future, everything that has happened since the Big Bang was predetermined. Quantum physics is based on B-Theory, that everything that could possibly happen has already happened, or, as you say, time is dependent upon the observer.”

“And what do you say, Zachary? Is it possible to alter the present by changing the past?”

“I don’t know. If you were to go back in time forty years and murder my father, then you would have changed my birth parents. Still, who’s to say I would have turned out any different? My new father might have been a womanizing alcoholic just like Angus. If everything is predetermined, then you might board a different train but all tracks lead to similar outcomes. In the scheme of things, consciousness may not have the big effect you’re alluding to.”

“Let’s hope you’re wrong.” The entity appearing to me as Joe Tkalec closed his eyes and rocked quietly.

Joe or Alien Joe, I knew better than to interrupt.

He opened his eyes. “Zachary, in a previous communication
we discussed the frequencies of the ten dimensions and how their wavelengths—let’s call them vibrations—corresponded to different colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. There exists an eleventh dimension exiled from the ten, a dimension associated with darkness, which is defined by the absence of light. The darkness feeds off the slow, dense vibrations generated by negative energies: fear, ego, lust, greed, hatred, and violence.

“A very radical alternate reality is threatening to bring chaos to the physical world. It is being driven by a fear-based dichotomy, dictated by a minority that is controlling the masses through their desire for the accumulation of matter.”

“You mean money. Why would a species capable of interdimensional travel give two shits about a bunch of greedy rich people?”

“The negative elite responsible for creating these fiefdoms are destabilizing the natural order of things. By unknowingly feeding the darkness, they are generating random shifts that have self-organized into higher complexities, creating chaos. We will show you the particular chaos that concerns us, so that you can decide whether you are the one who can help alter the collective consciousness.”

“More riddles. And don’t think I forgot what you said about Moses on Mount Sinai. If that was a portal, then he should have foreseen his people losing faith while he was getting the Ten Commandments.”

“That was an encoded story. The Ten Commandments were the ten dimensions; the gift was immortality. Moses denied the Israelites the gift when he realized they were not ready.”

“So what’s the gift I’m supposed to—oh no.” I stopped rocking. I stopped breathing.

The generator…

“Free, abundant, clean energy for everyone on the planet. Yeah, Joe, that’s a game-changer. And the negative elite, the fiefdoms, they’re going to be a lot worse than the guys building the
Golden Calf. The idol worshippers of my time start wars to keep the status quo. Don’t get me wrong, what you want to do is fantastic; I just don’t think I’m the right guy. Maybe the president? Or Bill Gates?”

“The methodology and the means remain yours to decide.”

“You’re not listening. Bringing a product like this to market takes money, and I’m nothing but a piss-poor scientist. Until recently, the only thing I could afford to feed my family was mutton. Ever eat mutton, Alien Joe? It tastes like it sounds.”

“Zachary, you used the analogy of multiple trains following converging tracks. Not all multiverses run together or even parallel. Some deviate radically from the norm. Humanity has shifted its collective consciousness to on the same track our ancestors found themselves on long ago. Unless diverted, the train will derail and take your species with it.”

“Show me.”

The room dimmed, and I felt myself growing lighter, as if gravity were leaving with Joe Tkalec and his library… and the density that was my atomic structure. And as my being again danced and flitted and floated about in the higher dimension, the dot reappeared. Only this time it was blue. The singularity grew larger until it became a ring that encompassed my entire field of vision, until its gaping hole drew me into the center, looking out at the spinning rollers.

As my consciousness hovered in the centrifuge’s positively charged core, an image appeared on the wall of spinning rollers like a 360-degree movie screen. The projection showed a man who looked to be in his mid-forties, his hair silver-gray and long, pulled back into a tight ponytail. He was dressed in an expensive, charcoal-black Italian suit with a matching shirt and tie. He was seated in the back of a limousine next to an attractive brown-eyed blonde in her mid-thirties. The two of them were holding hands.

As I watched, the silver-haired man’s eyes rolled up and he slumped over. The woman grabbed him and shook him and called
out his name, but her words were distorted, rippling with echoes. Before I could comprehend what she was shouting, a tsunami of negatively charged electrons swept through my being and carried my consciousness outward through the portal’s spinning inner ring. That’s when I realized the man in the limousine was me.

Part Two
Endings…
25

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

—Albert Einstein

“Zachary! Zach, honey, wake up. Driver, pull over!”

I opened my eyes, my brain buzzing with electricity, my body weighed down by a sudden sensation of gravity.

“Zach, are you all right?”

I turned and stared at my research assistant and lover, and the buzzing stopped.

“Susan?”

“Thank God. I thought you were having a stroke.” Susan McWhite, Ming Liao’s former assistant, turned to the dangerous-looking fellow in a buzz-cut and dark suit leaning inside my open window. “Jim, tell the driver we need to skip the hearing and get Dr. Wallace to a hospital.”

I turned to my head of security. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just tired from the flight. How soon until we arrive?”

Jim Clancy checked the GPS on his watch. “Twenty-eight minutes. You sure you’re okay, boss? You look kinda pale.”

“I’m fine.”

The armed bodyguard waited until I closed the window before signaling to our motorcade over his radio. Then he climbed back into the front passenger seat, and we continued our journey through the District of Columbia.

The Subcommittee on Energy and Power falls under the auspices of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, its congressional members exercising control over the broadest
jurisdiction of any congressional committee on Capitol Hill. These powers include overseeing national energy policy, energy conservation and information, energy regulation and utilization, regulation of nuclear facilities and waste, the Clean Air Act, and all related Homeland Security issues.

Democrats sat behind a stretch of elevated wood-paneled tables at the front of the assembly room. Chairing this morning’s event was Congresswoman Cassandra Boyd of Texas’s twelfth district.

I found myself seated at a small table on the assembly room floor next to my attorney, Scott Schwartzberg, whose team of litigators occupied the first row of seats behind us. Behind them were my fellow defendants—inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. The rest of the galley overflowed with private citizens, all of whom had to pass through security.

I wondered if the members of the media who were seated on the floor by my table had been subjected to similar scrutiny.

Scott pointed out the woman seated behind my research assistant. “Jaqui Billups; she’s from the
New York Times
. She’s been hounding me all week to set up an interview. Next to her is Dawn Warfield, a video columnist from
The Huffington Post
. She wants to do a podcast before we leave the building.”

“I’ll do the
Post
. Forget Billups. The CIA will redact anything positive in her article. What about
60 Minutes
?”

“I’m still waiting for a confirmation.”

Congressman Boyd took her place behind the dais, adjusting her microphone. “The subcommittee will come to order. This morning we’re going to hear statements from members of the science community who oppose H.R. 1691, the Alternative Energy Fraud Act, sponsored by Congressman Jaime Watkins of Kentucky, and our esteemed co-chair, Lorey Schmidt. This much-needed piece of legislation will protect investors who have lost vast sums of money to charlatans who claim to have designed clean, abundant, and non-polluting energy sources, only to learn later that they were
duped.

“Our first witness is Dr. Zachary Wallace. It should be noted for the record that Dr. Wallace is not a physicist. He is, in fact, a marine biologist who earned his fifteen minutes of fame resolving the monster mystery at Loch Ness. Seven years ago, Dr. Wallace survived a manned descent into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. When the mission lost its funding, Dr. Wallace returned to his teaching position at Cambridge. At some point he left the university to work with John Searl, the British inventor who is best known for the Searl Effect Generator, a device Searl claimed could levitate like a flying saucer, though conveniently it was never filmed doing so. Dr. Wallace refined the design so that it functions as an electrical generator. He then used investor capital, most of it coming from the Tanaka Institute, to fund his own company, Wallace Energy, a privately held corporation with headquarters in Edinburgh and San Francisco.

“Dr. Wallace, you have been granted five minutes to explain to the subcommittee how this device works. Then we’ll open it up to questions.”

I waited while a large flatscreen television was rolled into position before the assembly and powered on. Using a DVD remote, I pushed PLAY.

Appearing on screen was a doughnut-shaped metal disk the size of a dinner plate. Spaced out along its surface were three one-inch-wide rotating rings.

“Energy surrounds us. The challenge is to convert it to power, defined as voltage multiplied by current to equal wattage. This is the Vostok, a closed-circuit perpetual generator. It produces a quantum vacuum flux field using zero point energy. It is powered by the electrons that perpetually surround us, producing clean and unlimited electricity. As you can see, its doughnut-shape design contains three circular ring plates. Held within these ring plates are rollers, each the size of a D battery. These rollers, along with their ring plates, possess a magnetic north and south pole. As a result, the
rollers float on the magnetic field without actually touching the ring plate.

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