The Mayan Resurrection

26

8:56 a.m.

The black stretch limousine is waiting for him outside the practice facility.

Samuel Agler takes a quick look around. Seeing no members of the media, he tosses his bag over his shoulder and jogs across the street, climbing in the backseat of the vehicle – failing to notice the maroon Chevy Corvette L-9 coupe parked at the end of the block.

Lauren Beckmeyer is in the cockpit of the slick roadster, watching as the limousine pulls into traffic. ‘Family emergency, my ass. Let’s see where you’re really going… and with whom!’

She activates the power switch, sending the sports car’s massive hydrogen fuel cells growling to life.

‘So, where are we headed?’ Sam glances at his mother, who is wearing a loose-fitting cream-colored bodysuit, made of the latest breathable fabric.

‘Cape Canaveral.’

‘GOLDEN FLEECE?’ A chill races down his spine. ‘Is this really necessary?’

‘For security purposes, yes.’

Up front, Mitchell Kurtz finishes programming the limo’s onboard navigation system, then adjusts his seat to a reclined position and closes his eyes. Ryan Beck is in the passenger seat beside him, engrossed in a game of Situational Combat Training-Level 4.

Kurtz opens his eyes. ‘Hey, Pep, I need my beauty sleep.’

‘Nag, nag.’ Without missing a beat, Beck reaches out a muscular arm, activating a soundproof barrier that sections off the front cab of the limo.

Like all cars approved for America’s new supersmart highways, the limousine is equipped with an autodriver, part of a ‘telematics program’ featuring navigational sensors embedded in the roadway, linked through Global Positioning Satellites. Designed and approved in 2017, with the first million miles on-line by 2019, America’s new computerized highways regulate traffic patterns and speeds, prevent accidents, and reduce crime rates by giving law enforcement officials the ability to override any suspect or stolen vehicle traveling on their interstate. With infants being tagged at birth with microchips, kidnapping became a thing of the past, the ‘crime net’ able to locate a missing child instantly while overriding the kidnapper’s vehicle.

By fall of 2023, all registered vehicles had been required to have hydrogen fuel cells and autodrivers on board, the technologies hailed as the ultimate solution for congested roads, the disturbing rise in vehicular accidents involving alcohol and drugs, and America’s dependence on OPEC.

The limousine pulls onto the northbound ramp of SH-95, the autodriver directing the vehicle to the far left lane before accelerating to 130 mph. Lane speeds are determined by pre-reserved destinations and current traffic density.

Traveling in a non-rush hour time slot, the 210-mile journey to Cape Canaveral will take ninety-six minutes.

Dominique turns to her son, attempting to ease tensions. ‘How was yesterday’s practice?’

‘I’m not really in the mood to talk.’

She shoots him a hurt look, then reaches under the seat for her sensory-deprivation headpiece. Positioning the visor over her eyes and ears, she activates the program. Classical music replaces the limo’s hum, her consciousness instantly transported to an azure lagoon surrounded by a lush tropical jungle. A cool breeze stirs the palm fronds. Dominique climbs onto a foam cushion, lies back, and floats.

Sam stares at her face, watching his mother’s stress lines wash away.

While virtual reality has replaced all other forms of entertainment, many critics claimed the devices were more addictive than heroin. New shutdown safety features were now required after hundreds of VR bangers had literally starved themselves to death while using the machines.

Sam activates the recline button of his own slumber chair and closes his eyes, thinking about Lauren – unaware that his fiancee is following him, less than ten car lengths behind.

Situated on 140,000 acres of wildlife refuge, located northeast of Cocoa Beach, Florida, are the two barrier islands housing America’s gateways to space.

The smaller barrier island east of the Banana River, bordering the Atlantic Ocean is Cape Canaveral, former home of the Cape Canaveral Air Station and its unmanned launches. Just west of the Cape is Merritt Island, situated between the Banana and Indian Rivers. This larger land mass belongs to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), which includes the facilities of NASA and her sister organization, 3M-P (Manned Mission to Mars Project).

The origins of KSC and America’s space program can be traced back to the first Cold War, when the conflicting ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union blossomed into a full-fledged race into space. In an attempt to keep pace with the Russians, America formed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), ordering the Department of Defense and other ‘rival’ national organizations to step up their own research in the fields of rocketry and the upper atmospheric sciences. Unfortunately, the lack of a unified program and the typical in-house bickering among the Armed Forces combined to severely hamper the nation’s progress toward achieving their number one goal: human spaceflight.

America would receive its wake-up call on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1. Responding to a race the United States was clearly losing, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA would take control of space away from the Armed Forces and absorb all existing research centers.

NASA began by focusing the bulk of its hundred-million-dollar annual budget on Project Mercury-a series of launches and experiments designed to evaluate whether humans could survive in orbit. Thirty-one months later, Alan Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space. Mercury’s success led to the Gemini Project, an extension of the human spaceflight program that utilized a spacecraft built for two astronauts.

President John F. Kennedy recommitted the nation to space in 1961 by announcing his goal to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade. It was a specific goal-exactly what NASA needed, giving birth to Project Apollo. On July 20, 1969, eight years, eleven missions, and $25.4 billion dollars later, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

Mankind would take a giant leap backward in 1967, when politics once more interfered with science.

The Outer Space Treaty was a document initiated, negotiated, and rammed through Congress by a group of National Security and State Department officials whose only desire was to use fear to shut down the space program so that monies could be redirected to the Vietnam War. Within four short years, space funding had dropped a crippling 45 percent.

Had this not occurred, the momentum of the Apollo program might have led to the establishment of a moon base in the 1980s and a Mars colony before the year 2010, uniting the global superpowers, preventing the nuclear war of 2012.

More devastating political decisions would follow.

A 1969 task force was asked to come up with three long-range space options. These were: a manned Mars expedition; a space station in lunar orbit with a fifty-person Earth-orbiting station serviced by a reusable ferry, or the Space Shuttle, a vehicle designed to take off as a rocket and return to Earth by gliding home like an unpowered airplane.

President Nixon opted for the Space Shuttle.

On April 12, 1981, the shuttle’s first mission, STS-1, took off from NASA’s launch operations center, now renamed the Kennedy Space Center. For the next six and a half years, the STS Fleet would perform brilliantly as their crew conducted a wide variety of scientific and engineering experiments in space.

A Space Shuttle launch costs approximately $600 million dollars, yet this extraordinary price tag has little to do with the laws of physics or engineering. In simple terms, the business of space never had any cost constraints or competition, leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

As an example, Lockheed Martin, the largest aerospace contractor in the world, rarely accepted hardware contracts on a fixed-cost basis. Instead, they ‘suggested’ what a space vehicle might cost, then added 10 percent as a profit. Once contracted, a myriad of managers and planners are added, driving up the cost of the vehicle-along with Lockheed Martin’s profit.

Besides making space extraordinarily expensive, this tactic created an ‘old boy’ mentality that stagnated progress in space technology, resulting in no new U.S. launch systems in development. Instead, NASA continued to use an antiquated vehicle, armed with pre-Pentium electronics inferior to most video games, and fragile heat-dissipating tiles designed before breakthroughs in materials science.

Cost overruns and White House cuts would lead to even more serious negligence.

Following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and the public’s realization that the development of the International Space Station held no scientific purpose, the Bush and Maller administrations forced a ‘reorganization’ of the space program, refocusing its strategies not on space exploration, but space missile defense systems reinforced by policies of fear. Six years and $120 billion later, the only major accomplishment of SDI was to jump-start the second Cold War.

And once again, the future of humanity stumbled.

What the space program lacked was vision and a clear set of goals. Landing probes on Mars was important only if it led to the colonization of the Red Planet in the foreseeable future. What the public really wanted was space tourism. What had happened to all the promises of the ‘Buck Rogers’ era? Space, like politics, had become the frontier of the elite, each mission becoming more prosaic. Tax-payers could care less what temperature aluminum oxidized in a vacuum; they wanted to be a part of the action. The Wright Brothers’ invention had led to the advent of commercial airlines. Space had led to the sale of personal computers.

When would John Q. Public be afforded the same opportunity to take his family into space?

The Russians would be the first to give space tourism a go, funding the Cosmopolis-XXI (C-21) space plane, a craft designed to be piggybacked atop an airplane and released at 56,000 feet. From there, the space plane’s solid-fuel rocket engine would propel it to an altitude of sixty miles for three minutes of weightlessness.

At $98,000 (or $540 per second) it was hardly a bargain, and the space plane was fraught with mechanical problems.

President Chaney’s ‘vision’ speech moments before Jacob Gabriel’s murder was turned into a rallying cry that recommitted the American public to the space program. Two months after the Gabriel twins’ death President Marion Rallo and a new team at NASA announced its Manned Mission to Mars Project (3-MP), an ambitious 143-billion-dollar project designed to establish a series of habitable hubs on the Red Planet’s surface by 2049.

Mars is the only other planet in our solar system endowed with the natural resources necessary for human civilization. Its soil possesses carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as water frozen as permafrost. Its atmosphere is dense enough to protect inhabitants from solar flares, its solar light ample for greenhouses.

The 3-MP’s mission was based on an exploration approach developed in 1990 by Robert Zubrin, then a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin. The key to the ‘Mars Direct’ plan was to travel as light as possible, with rotating crews establishing habitats that would allow them to live off the land. The soil on Mars would provide for food, water, materials, and rocket fuel.

By September of 2029, the ERV (Earth Return Vehicle), a new multistage rocket constructed using parts from already existing vessels, was sitting on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, ready for takeoff.

Everything changed six weeks later, when the private sector officially stepped up to the plate.

Project HOPE (Humans for One Planet Earth) was conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA years earlier because of the agency’s ‘good ole boy’ policies. Unlike other private rocket companies, they were not interested in launching satellites. HOPE was interested in space as public recreation.

The key to HOPE’s future was a design for a new space plane, one that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the passenger vehicle into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.

All HOPE needed was a major investor, one that could provide factories and the financial backing to launch the company.

Enter Lucien Mabus, CEO of Mabus Tech Industries.

Lucien had inherited MTI, but was bored with running his father’s company. What he needed was a challenge, something he could call his own.

At the urging of his intoxicating fiancee, Lilith, Mabus struck a partnership with HOPE’s directors. Fourteen months later Project HOPE went public, offering investors an opportunity to claim their stake in the future.

The response from the global market was mind-boggling. Opening at 22, the stock closed the first day of trading at 106. By week’s end it had split twice and was still soaring at $162 a share, making majority stockholder and HOPE’s CEO Lucien Mabus the world’s first trillionaire.

Attitudes in Washington changed overnight. Cape Canaveral Air Station, which controlled the barrier island and all launch facilities east of the Banana River, offered to move the Air Force’s Forty-fifth Space Wing in exchange for a long-term lease with HOPE. Lucien Mabus turned them down, preferring to erect a new complex in the city of Cocoa Beach at half the cost.

On December 15, 2029, HOPE’s first ‘space bus’ took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway. On board were 120 passengers, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, a dozen members of the media, and a crew of twelve.

Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The sixteen-hour flight was smooth, the service first-class (just eating in zero gravity an experience unto itself) and the view-well, the view was both spiritual and humbling.

Within two months, HOPE was shuttling four space buses a week at a cost of $100,000 per ticket. Even with its high price tag, there was still a fourteen-month wait.

By April of 2032, three more space buses had been added to the fleet, dropping ticket prices to $39,000. By 2033, over eight thousand people representing every nation had orbited the planet.

The residual impact upon humanity was profound. ‘One Planet-One People,’ became HOPE’s mantra. Many believed it was no coincidence that the last oppressive government fell to democracy during the space bus’s reign. Religious and racial tensions eased. The global economy boomed as technology raced to keep up with the exploitation of space, and the exploitation of space created new Earthbound technologies.

By focusing its energies on the heavens, humankind had finally grown beyond its childish adolescence.

Plans were soon revealed for Space Port-1, the first space platform/hotel designed to accommodate the paying public. When completed, SP-1 would contain three main structures, each configured in the shape of a bicycle wheel. The upper wheel, known as the ‘hub,’ would house a restaurant, bar, gymnasium, and, at the very end of the structure, a nonrotating zero-gravity observation deck. Below the hub, connected by a main elevator shaft surrounded by spokelike corridors was the middle wheel, or ‘Spotel.’ The largest of the three structures, the 1,950-foot donut-shaped living quarters, rotating one revolution per minute, would provide guests with a third of Earth’s gravity. Below this massive wheel, connecting to the Spotel through an access shaft were SP-1’s control room, infirmary, crew and staff’s quarters, and the Space Port’s docking station.

Seventy-five private guest modules would afford SP-1’s clientele five fun-filled days in space. No amenity would be spared. All suites would be equipped with videophones, Internet uplinks, twenty-four-hour-a-day room service, and private viewports. Activities would include space walks, guided tours of the command center and engine room, and full-body, gravity-free workouts in the gym. For another $30,000, a lucky few could even board a lunar shuttle for a two-day excursion around the moon.

Advertisements were already flooding the global market: SPACE PORT-1: Join the 220 MILE CLUB. Total standard vacation package (including round-trip launch fare) a mere $120,000 per person.

Six months after its plans were revealed, SP-1’s reservation list (nonrefundable 15 percent deposit required) was already two years long, and three more hotel chains were negotiating with HOPE to build a Spotel on the moon.

Undaunted, NASA’s MP-3 program continued moving toward the successful construction of its Mars Base. With the global economy humming and humanity focused on space, the U.S. Congress increased the space program’s budget to levels previously enjoyed by the Defense Department, allowing for the design and construction of a moon base and lunar observatory/radio telescope.

Not to be outdone, young Lucien Mabus and his new bride announced that HOPE was in the process of completing final designs for its own Mars Colony. The first Mars shuttles carrying engineers and supplies would arrive on Mars in winter of 2047-two full years ahead of NASA.

NASA officials were incensed. Lucien Mabus’s plans were clearly pushing the envelope of safety and science, all in the name of profit.

The Mabuses scoffed. For sixty years NASA had kept the exploration of space to itself. Had the program been run efficiently following the Apollo Program, man would already be living on Mars. Given NASA’s time schedule and its propensity for overanalysis, it might take another six decades before the first civilians could experience the Red Planet’s wonders. Like it or not, humankind was evolving, pushing for new sensory experiences in space, and he, Lucien Mabus, cosmic pioneer and heir to the Mabus fortune, was driving the herd.

Unbeknownst to Mabus and the White House, the frontier of space was about to take on an all-new meaning.

A wisp of thought, in the consciousness of existence.

As the transhuman, Bill Raby, I had managed to use telepathy to open the sealed vault of our alien hosts. Heart pounding, I stepped inside the entrance of the ancient megaplex-a dark antechamber that went instantly ablaze with piercing violet lights, projected from multiple angles.

I was being identified.

The antechamber led into a great hall, and somehow I knew that everything man had ever known about his existence was about to change.

They were everywhere, stacked vertically along invisible shelves of energy. Millions of cryogenic glass pods, eight feet tall, four feet across… specimens in a zoological library, a thin layer of frost concealing their contents.

Approaching the nearest pod, I wiped ice from the outer glass and peered inside.

It was a gangly bipedal humanoid, seven feet tall, floating within a clear liquid gel. The hairless skull was elongated, just like mine, only the bands of blood vessels traversing the scalp were infinitely more pronounced. The skin was mouse gray, more silicon than flesh. Protruding from its lipless mouth was a thick tracheal tube, the hose of which connected to a control panel somewhere within the hidden base of the glasslike container.

The nostrils were plugged, as were the earholes. The eyes were wide-open, the pupils twice the size of our own, twinkling a luminescent azure blue.

Star-shaped electrodes pulsating violet flashes were affixed to the crown of the being’s elongated head, the center of its hairless brow, and along the base of its throat.

Kneeling, I scrapped more frost from the glass, hoping to see the lower torso.

The being was hairless and naked, yet contained no noticeable sexual organs. The five fingers of each hand were long and slightly webbed. From my poor vantage, I could not see the toes.

More star-shaped electrodes flashed over the solar plexus, heart, sacrum, and feet. I recognized these seven spots as chakra points, the body’s energy centers. Hindus had long believed the body’s chakra points channeled spiritual energy.

I estimated a million of these humanoids were being held in suspended cryogenic animation, stacked one atop the other within invisible energy fields. It was impossible to tell how many of them there were, for the stacks disappeared high overhead into the darkness, and wound around the entire interior of the building.

I knew they were alive, and I knew what they were, for somehow, I could sense their unified presence observing me.

They were posthumans. Alive but not alive, unified yet all alone… unable to touch or feel.

Unable to love.

In the chaotic months that followed, every member of our colony would complete the transhuman metamorphosis. Coming out of our comas, we were like infants suddenly made aware of our bodies, each day revealing wondrous new discoveries about our genetic transformation. Besides the obvious leaps in intelligence and body strength, we found we could communicate concepts telepathically.

More astounding was our ability to extend life expectancy.

Numerous factors cause aging and death among Homo sapiens. One is telomerase, an enzyme that elongates the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, telomerase shrink. When the length drops below a set threshold, Homo sapiens cells stop dividing and mortality approaches. Other proteins, like apolipoprotein E, can postpone aging, but are present in limited quantities, as opposed to free radicals-the highly destructive, oxidizing molecules produced by the body itself that lead to senescence and disease.

Given the gift to control our own cellular functions, we found we could now isolate and eliminate free radicals from our bodies while increasing the production of apolipoprotein E and glutathione. Further, we could reduce the loss of telomeres, potentially increasing life expectancy tenfold.

Perhaps more.

Our newfound focus was not just inward. Telepathy allowed us access to all of New Eden, including its recorded history, and we soon discovered the aliens’ society had been a dichotomy of existence.

Long before we arrived, the world we had named Xibalba had been a planet influenced by two distinctly different cultures. The first was the transhuman race responsible for constructing the floating city. The dwellings, the landscaping, the agricultural pods and environmental controls-all were designed for these beings. Little was known of their origin, but it was obvious they had cultivated their domain over thousands, perhaps millions of years. They were space travelers, masters of genetics, and were far superior to us in every way.

At some point in Xibalban history, a fantastic scientific discovery was made that allowed these ever-curious transhumans to transcend their third-dimensional physical world and enter the realm of the spiritual. The decision to pursue or ban this science would split the Xibalban race in two. The group that rebelled against the discovery would leave the planet, traveling to God-knows-where, while the other group remained behind, intent on evolving beyond their physical forms to walk in God’s shadow.

Self-programming, immortal, and unlimited in power-the group that remained behind would evolve into the posthumans. The beings held within the cryogenic pods were their physical remains.

It is the traces of posthuman DNA, Jacob, that makes us Hunahpu.

Professor Ian Bobinac was the most accomplished geneticist in the colony. On Earth, he had pioneered the use of ‘Vee-Gees,’ vaccine genes-genetically engineered cells used to produce antibacterial, antivirus, and anticancer substances directly into the human body. On Mars, his work in genetic manipulation would have been applied to alter reproduction schedules among cloned livestock.

Bobinac was a genius even before his brain had been affected by transhuman metamorphosis. Having ‘evolved,’ he now spent most of his time living inside his own brilliant head. What finally brought him out of his self-evolving ‘funk’ was the mystery surrounding the alien lines and glyphs flashing along the exterior of the great posthuman hall.

Bobinac soon discovered a communication emanating from the structure-an audible communication-translated at a refresh rate of 267,000 cycles per second. By comparison, the spoken word is transmitted at a mere 16-20 cycles.

What Professor Bobinac had discovered was a posthuman language, composed of 212 distinct graphemes (English uses only forty-six phonemes). Most bizarre, the posthumans’ collective mind was still dispersing their communication across the planet.

But to whom?

The moment I heard of his discovery, I asked to be transferred to Bobinac’s team. As marine geneticist Bill Raby, I immediately recognized the 267,000 harmonic cycle as one shared by a sea creature back on Earth – whales.

While the effects of our genetic metamorphosis were universal, our newfound powers affected each of us differently, magnifying our own unique personality traits.

Lilith Mabus and her son, Devlin, craved power. As time passed, the olive-skinned Adonis grew increasingly belligerent, his sociopathic tendencies, combined with his mother’s influence, driving him to lead the life of a modern-day Caligula.

Whiffs of wild tales spread through our small community. Some told of private gatherings hosted by Devlin in a transhuman dwelling he had taken over, referring to it as the ‘president’s mansion.’ There were rumors of lurid orgies and Satanic rituals led by the bewitching Lilith, though nothing could be substantiated.

In truth, most of us were too involved with our adjustment as ‘superior beings’ to take the time necessary to investigate these tales. But as the fourth anniversary of our arrival on Xibalba grew near, there was a growing movement to oust the planet’s self-appointed leader and his wicked parent.

Devlin and Lilith had other plans.

Prior to abandoning the planet to hunt the Xibalban transport in Earth-space, the Guardian had taken DNA samples from posthuman subjects. Ten thousand years in our past, they had introduced dilutions of this super-elixir into Homo sapiens, genetically altering our species, driving us up the evolutionary ladder.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the colonists, both of Devlin’s biological parents had possessed Hunahpu DNA. Cold and calculating as a human, Devlin’s evolution as a transhuman gave him the extraordinary ability to decipher and manipulate polygenic traits within his own DNA.

In short, Devlin Mabus could self-evolve.

Evolution can be traced back to the first bacteria that took life from Earth’s primordial soup. Housed within our DNA is a record of every phase of our evolution, from ocean dwellers to reptiles, from the first insectivorous mammals to our primate cousins.

Remaining in isolation for weeks, Devlin had tapped into his genetic code, manipulating a master gene that would help him reengineer his entire being.

On the morning of our fourth anniversary, New Eden’s colonists gathered in our adopted public square.

It was Lilith who stepped out of the shadows of the president’s box to address the crowd.

‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts, who has reached across the cosmos to save His Chosen Ones from death. He has led us to the New World and Blessed us with its wonders. He has given us a taste of His wisdom, and transformed each of us into something better than what we were. And now, He has heard the cries of His children.

‘Who among you has sinned? Who among you suffers inside? Which of you are consumed in guilt? Raise your hands and be made accountable!’

In unison, we raised our hands, many of us weeping at the memories of the deceased loved ones we had abandoned back on Earth.

‘Do you seek salvation? Speak the words aloud.’

For such a small crowd, our shouts were deafening.

‘We are here today because of a miracle. Long ago, my son, Devlin, was given a vision. In this vision, he saw the incubator Earth cast out humankind. Like a modern-day Noah, he was instructed to build a fleet of spaceships-cosmic arks-in which he would lead the chosen few to salvation. Look around you and tell me this is not so. It was Devlin’s vision that led to our rebirth. It was because our true creator touched him that we are here today.

‘And now another miracle has occurred. In your prayers for salvation, the one true creator has sent us his archangel. Behold my son, Devlin, the Seraph!’

Jude and I held hands, our breath taken away as Devlin stepped out of the shadows of the president’s box and into the light. A hush grew over the crowd as we ogled the creator’s handiwork.

He was completely nude, standing before us like some fifteenth-century sculpture of David come alive. Protruding from his genetically altered muscular back and spinal column were massive flesh-toned wings, the appendages spanning no less than twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip.

Devlin had used his Hunaphu awareness and transhuman powers to tap into the master gene cluster responsible for the development and evolution of mammalian flight. He had become Chimera-a genetically altered creature of incongruous parts.

He was Seraph.

As we watched, his wings animated, catching a column of air rising from a hidden ventilation shaft. Like a condor’s, Devlin’s wings spread as he rose, awkwardly at first, then more majestically, like a great bird of prey.

What a spectacle it was to behold. Colonists fell to their knees, tears streaming from their eyes, while God’s ‘appointed angel’ flew above our heads and ‘blessed’ us with his urine stream.

And how could we not have fallen in worship? Like the ancient Hebrews before us, we had considered ourselves the ‘Chosen Ones,’ selected by God to survive. Each day for us on Xibalba was a miracle. On the brink of extinction, our Savior had blessed us with the gift of transhumanism. We had overcome the ravages of age and disease, we had transcended the human condition. We were believers, as impassioned as the Children of Israel must have been after Moses had parted the Red Sea.

The scientists among us, myself included, were not so easily convinced.

Jude, a devout Christian, argued endlessly with me about this, swearing that it was divine intervention that rescued us from oblivion.

But Devlin Mabus… an angel? The Devil incarnate, more like it.

Flexing his newfound political muscle, Devlin ‘ordained’ that personal time each day would henceforth be dedicated solely to worship. One religious order-the ‘Church of Mabus’ was proclaimed, and it was mandated that all colonists attend services.

Those of us who doubted the self-appointed deity sensed democracy and freedom fading fast-replaced by a new theocracy, with its own brand of Inquisition soon to follow.

Something had to be done.

Carefully, and very discreetly, I began recruiting members of the scientific elite who I knew harbored similar misgivings toward Mabus and his mother. Over the months our flock grew to include several dozen engineers and astronomers, rocket scientists and mathematicians, all seeking freedom from a society we suspected would soon turn to ‘divine’ persecution.

Thus was born the brotherhood of the Guardian.

Ours was a secret sect, for to be caught opposing Devlin and Lilith meant dismemberment by their followers. Because our thoughts could be telepathically ‘tapped,’ each member of the brotherhood would only be addressed by his or her alias.

We decided upon historical names. As Guardian founder, I dubbed myself: Osiris.

Michael Gabriel’s identity surely must have screamed at me from the abyss of Bill Raby’s mind.

What our newfound Guardian brotherhood desired was a safe haven from Devlin and his growing flock. We had two choices; either relocate to another part of New Eden or inhabit one of the planet’s two moons.

Remaining on New Eden was only a temporary solution at best. Targeting the larger of the two moons, we made plans to steal a shuttle.

A former NASA rocket scientist, known to us only as Kukulcan, was convinced he could salvage enough fuel to get us to our destination. Another scientist devised headgear that would scramble our brain’s electromagnetic waves enough to prevent other colonists from eavesdropping. While this assured us at least some semblance of privacy while we prepared our escape, Devlin’s new religious decree meant we would have to work during our ‘sleeping’ shifts.

The three shuttles that had carried us into New Eden had remained abandoned atop one of the transhuman dome-scrapers for years. While the Guardian scientist, Kukulcan, worked on preparing one of the shuttles for spaceflight, the rest of us reconfigured the ships’ environmental suits for our elongated skulls. Agricultural pods were stocked, medical supplies secreted on board.

As the day of our departure crew near, we felt prepared for anything – never suspecting there was a Judas in our midst…