Decipher, p.55
Decipher, page 55
Two supreme forces slugging it out in a pressure-cooker until ultimately an equilibrium could be reached. Enormous magnetic field strengths would be produced in the region of ten to the power of twelve times greater than the earth’s. The neutron star, like any star, would start to spin. But unlike the sun, whose single revolution would last thirty days, a neutron star’s spin cycle could be anywhere from weeks, up to many times per second. The magnetic fieldlines would be severely entangled, beams of radio waves would be blasted out across the cosmos as the star rotated like beams of light from a lighthouse.
That was the theory.
Which meant this sort of activity could not possibly be occurring on an ordinary star like the sun. A star that still had plenty of fuel left, enough to burn brightly for another 500 million years. It was nowhere near to becoming a neutron star.
It was a strong theory.
But the theory was wrong.
All stars were pulsars, in one shape or another.
They experienced oscillation, resonance—rhythm. There was a pattern to the life of all things. An ebb and a flow. A zenith and a nadir.
There was chaos and there was order.
That was the way of things.
To all things there was a rhythm, measurable, most assuredly. But to all things there was a timescale by which it was measurable. The life of a star was a long and winding one. It lived on a scale that was simply too large, too incalculable for humans to comprehend.
The sun was a pulsar.
Not in the sense of a neutron star. It did not blast out radio waves in a beam at regular intervals and spin wildly, but it did suffer the consequences of warped and tangled magnetic fieldlines. No, the sun’s build to ultimate pulsation may have been a slow one, but like the Hare and the Tortoise, it was just as unstoppable.
As the sun rotated about its axis the twisted knots and loops of its magnetic fieldlines buckled and tangled, grappled and twisted. Until ultimately the entire surface of the seething ball of nuclear fusion could take it no more.
Once in every 12,000 years, the entire surface of the sun would peel off like removing the entire top layer of an onion—whole and unbroken. It would swell and expand outward in all directions. Such was the instability caused by the departing sphere of matter that it would make the inner mass temporarily wobble and change shape, thus altering its density and affecting its impact on the fabric of space.
Space itself would then undulate, like a rug being beaten, and the undulation—the gravity wave—would carry this escaping shell of stellar material with it at speeds approaching the speed of light.
And one such occurrence was happening right now.
SCOTT AND SARAH
They nestled into the integration receptacles and waited.
It did not take long for something to happen.
Their minds were suddenly alive with thoughts and images. Snatches of ideas here and there. Half-formed words and concepts. It was like—
Bang!
Scott couldn’t help it. He pulled his head away from the head-rest and looked around the room with a gasp. He glanced down at his hands. His body. Already his fingers had started to melt into the wall. He struggled, but they wouldn’t come away. He was overcome with panic and grief. And although he couldn’t feel a thing, as the process had obviously already cut the nerve impulses to his brain, his instinctive reliance on fear had gotten the better of him.
Sarah had her eyes closed. He could see her physically melting into the wall on the far side of the room. Turning a pale, pale blue.
The same thing was happening to him.
And then the feeling passed. He could hear the voices again, reassuring and generous.
He glanced around at the clear crystal surfaces one last time, and put his head back.
Closed his eyes.
Sarah had this itch. It was a deep itch, right in her toes. She tried to wriggle them and felt a sudden sensation of heat and sand, followed by a deeper sensation of depth and movement and of liquid.
She realized that she was beneath the earth, in the molten core of the planet, examining geologic densities, watching the inner convection currents of the mantle. The closer to the center of the earth, the denser the rock. As these inner layers moved, so the effect was magnified at the surface where the crust lay. Convection currents in three dimensions were incredibly complex, yet she seemed to suddenly grasp every nuance, every facet of the inner workings of the planet. To quasicrystallize the mantle would require at least seven different types of standing wave.
Scott was aware of this blinding light off to the left somewhere. He turned his head to see. At least, he had the sensation of turning his head. He reached out and became aware that he was interacting with some kind of device, in a jungle somewhere. Maybe South America. He could be no more specific than that.
He reached out with his other hand and knew instinctively he was operating a similar device somewhere in the depths of Russia. Like the crystal constructs under the pyramids at Giza he had the sense he was moving entire pyramids of Carbon 60 and shifting them into position, rearranging beams of crystal to complete circuits.
A global machine. A global network, on a planetary scale. It was as if the earth was one entity and he was part of that now.
He was revealing to Atlantis that he knew of this network, knew its potential and its capabilities. And in turn, Atlantis was getting to know Scott. Soon they understood each other.
Remotely, from the heart of Atlantis, Scott and Sarah took a light-speed tour of the entire global network. The more information they requested, the more information they were given until ultimately, they knew everything.
Like seconds ticking on a clock, one by one the other fifty-nine languages encoded in the Atlantis glyphs were revealed to them and the lost history of their own planet was laid bare. Each language was accompanied with the collected stories of each civilization that used it.
And the revelation was great.
At the same time, one by one each Carbon 60 device dotted in subterranean enclaves around the globe was switched on and made ready. Information was exchanged. Lost monuments were rediscovered until the entire network was humming with anticipation.
Finally there was nothing more to do and curiously it all stopped. Scott and Sarah had fulfilled their fates. Atlantis’s response would be an automatic reflex now, triggered by whatever actions were taken by the sun.
And equally curiously, it was the sun that Scott and Sarah now found themselves admiring. For they were standing on a hill overlooking Atlantis as it had once been, 12,000 years ago. A shining jewel in a lush valley, in a landscape that was lost to time, if not to memory.
Standing at the gates to this majestic city, monument to Man’s achievements, were 10,000 well-wishers eager to greet them and welcome them to their new home. So as the sun shone down upon the sparkling canals of that now sunken city, Scott and Sarah exchanged heartfelt emotional looks, cupped their hands in each other’s—and went down to meet them.
In the control center of Atlantis stood some consoles and podiums and two empty receptacles.
It was barren other than that. Desolate, except for a pair of black leather combat boots and a sense of expectation.
STORM FROM THE SUN
Planet, from the Greek, meaning “wanderer.”
The planets were in crisis.
Within two minutes, the tiny ball of superheated rock known as the planet Mercury, had been entirely engulfed and overtaken. Since its surface was incapable of sustaining life or supporting an atmosphere, the damage inflicted upon this tiny world was difficult to calculate. Perhaps a slightly altered path in its orbit. A lengthening of its overall year, or an extra twist upon its axis had caused a decrease in the length of its day or night. Whatever the effects, they were inconsequential to the people of earth, for as planets go there was no comparison.
It was when the total coronal ejection had continued its relentless expansion throughout the solar system for a total of five minutes that they began to feel the effects, for the human race it was at this point that the stampeding cataclysm intercepted the orbit of Venus.
It was ironic that a planet named after the Roman goddess of beauty and love was about as far removed from those qualities as possible.
Venus’s year took 240 days. It spun retrograde about its axis, meaning in comparison to the earth it spun backward making the sun rise in the west at dawn. It barely had any magnetic field and was almost perfectly spheroid, suggesting its core was more solid than the earth’s. Its atmosphere was 96.5 percent carbon dioxide, with sulfuric acid in its upper cloud layers. Its atmosphere was also 95 times more dense than earth’s and due to all the carbon dioxide, it trapped sunlight to such an extent the average surface temperature was 480 degrees Celsius, or 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Even on a cool day on Venus it was hot enough to melt lead.
Other than that, it was just like earth.
And for the purposes of a pulsar ejection impact—it was identical.
For Venus was a landscape dominated by volcanic features, faults and impact craters, much like the earth. But where many of the earth’s geological hot spots were often obscured by life, Venus’s volcanoes were her prettiest feature. In many vast areas of the planet’s surface there was evidence from satellite imagery of periods of multiple lava flooding with lava flows seen piled one on top of the other. One higher region, known as Ishtar Terra, was a lava-filled basin the size of the United States with the Maxwell Montes mountain located at one end.
And because there was no water and little wind erosion on Venus, its extensive faultline network was clearly visible as a result of the same crustal flexing that the earth experienced. But since the excessive heat of Venus weakened the rock structure, cracking the crust in multiple regions, it prevented the planet from forming tectonic plates.
And as a result the huge lava features across the planet did hint at one other extraordinary feature. From time to time, vast continent-sized swathes of Venus turned completely molten, as if the planet was attempting to turn itself inside out. The mechanism for such an event was completely unknown.
Or had been, until now.
To call the pulsar wave that hit Venus an exercise in pure rage was to underestimate the severity of the gravity wave.
The speed of the wave that hit Venus’s upper atmosphere could be measured in microseconds. Its impact was so severe that it immediately took the outer layers with it, peeling the atmosphere back like taking the rind off an orange.
The resulting compression set what combustible gases there were in Venus’s atmosphere ablaze, setting into motion a chain reaction that penetrated up to a mile down into Venus’s atmosphere and causing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to glow to the point of molecular collapse. Suddenly the twin atoms of oxygen broke away from their host carbon atoms and exploded.
The entire outer layer of Venus had been transformed. It had ignited, and become pure flame.
As the ever-expanding fireball that was the sun’s final, total coronal shell ejection blasted ever outward and impacted upon the volatile planet, for one whole second Venus knew only fire. There was no distinguishing between which part of the maelstrom was Venus on fire, and which part of the fire was merely the coronal shell passing through that part of the solar system.
There was only flame.
But coupled with this, of course, there was the gravity wave.
It swept through the planet in less time than it took to give a blink of an eye. And in much the same way that the series of preceding gravitational fluxes had built up an oscillation effect within the liquid mantle of the earth, so too had these same pulses been churning up geological turmoil across the planet Venus.
If anyone had even thought to correlate the geological data accumulating throughout the solar system they would have seen a pattern emerging from planet to planet. They would have seen that the volcanic and earthquake crisis on earth was not unique to home but part of an overall solar-system-wide catastrophe.
But they had not. And by the time the light from Venus would have reached the earth and given a clue to the type of experience the people of earth could expect to face, the wave would have already been and gone.
For the speed of light was the speed of light. It could not beat itself in a race.
As a result, no one on earth could actually see the surface of Venus buckle and bend. No one could see the countrysized chunks of crust get tossed up into the air and flipped over like pancakes on a giant conveyor belt. No one could see whole continent-sized areas of Venus suddenly heat up within seconds and turn molten. Nor could anyone see the various chunks of stellar matter and debris that had been caught up in the wave, rain down upon the planet’s surface like glowing, white-hot hailstones, and smash whole new valleys into existence.
From a human vantage point on earth, should they survive the next three minutes, Venus would appear more than ten times brighter in the night sky than normal, for a century, as its molten surface churned and twisted and settled into its new formations before cooling.
Fortunately for humankind there was already a force in existence that did not need to see the catastrophe to know that it had to do something about it. For the early warning system that Atlantis employed did not rely on light. And it did not solely rely on mathematical predication, but rather quantum gravitational effects. It detected changes within the very fabric of space itself. It was based on a type of physics mankind had only just begun to rediscover—super—string theory and its interaction with the zero point field. The idea that two points in the galaxy could be intimately—and instantaneously—linked.
Atlantis tapped into the shortcuts of the universe. For it knew that just like a tsunami on earth: if a person could see the wave coming, it was already too late.
Atlantis didn’t have to see it coming. It just knew.
PHASE I THE CASIMIR EFFECT
It was originally discovered by Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir in 1948. A quantum theory that dealt with virtual particles in a continuous state of flux.
The physical manifestation of this was that if two conducting plates were placed in a vacuum uncharged, due to quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, the plates would still be irresistibly attracted to each other despite no power being inputted to cause this.
The Casimir Effect proved the existence of zero point energy.
And the odd puzzle as a result of its mathematical proof was that this effect was plugged directly into the realm of gravity. Zero point energy was linked directly to warping effects on space-time. In other words, if the fabric of space was caused to curl up and ripple it would have an immediate effect on the ability to unleash zero point energy.
In Atlantis that meant one thing. The natural interaction between zero point energy and gravity through the fabric of space meant that the very energy source the city intended to use to save the planet, also acted as an early warning system to alert the city to an imminent gravitational attack.
Which was the signal it was receiving right now. It doublechecked its command center. It had indeed completed the integration of two new units of information. The crucial prerequisites had been satisfied.
It could therefore initiate its primary response protocol. Using all manner of standing waves to effect quasicrystallization in all types of matter, it was time for Atlantis to shield earth.
PHASE II QUASICRYSTALLIZATION
Gant was close to passing out. The Golem pressed down on his windpipe and squeezed so solidly that the marine could feel his tongue being forced out between his teeth.
He was not alone. All around him he could see the others in similar predicaments. Utterly helpless. He didn’t even have enough space left in his throat to choke out a warning to Hackett as the physicist blasted a Golem to atoms, oblivious to the attacker that was coming up behind.
And it was then, as Hackett’s assailant grabbed him and swung him around that Gant began to realize that in the distance, all around the city, there was movement. Beyond the inner skyscrapers, out toward the suburbs of the city—past them, in fact, at the outer canal—there was a shimmering. A glistening. A kind of snake-like writhing as the entire contents of the canal, millions of tons of water, rose up out of their confines and started to travel in a vortex-like motion around the outskirts of the city.
It was as if they all stood in the eye of a twister as chaos surrounded the city. Higher and higher the water climbed, while above their heads the energy twister was building into a maelstrom of its own.
All of this Gant could see, as blood vessels burst across his eyeballs and oxygen was cut off from his brain.
And then there was a sea change in their predicament.
The air became thick and syrupy. Motion became blurred and slow. And there was the rumble. The sensation that the surrounding area was being bombarded with a multitude of low-level and high-level sonic waves.
The result was that sound within the ordinary range of human hearing started to dull and lower itself in pitch, before finally it was replaced altogether with that hissing noise they all remembered from the glass of Coke that had undergone quasicrystallization back at CERN.
Slowly … excruciatingly slowly … everything stopped. The whole world ground to a halt and was frozen. Crystallized.
It was as if Time stood still.
In the middle of the South China Sea a Great White Shark was battling three dolphins that were viciously ramming into its side to warn it off when they suddenly pulled back, their sonar indicating that something massive and perfectly solid was closing in on them all. The creatures turned sharply and set about racing away, but the nemesis, whatever it was, was closing in fast.
A thousand feet below them, the six Chinese submarines that had set out to support their fleet in the Antarctic were equally surprised to encounter the same phenomenon. Ping after ping of the radar system revealed that a huge mass was approaching, like a wall that stretched from the sea bed up to the surface of the ocean and in all directions.
