The Prometheus Objective

31

Stumbling along the ice-covered ramp, his toes still tingling inside his fresh and warm boots, Caleb leaned on the soldier and for a moment as they approached the doorway carved expertly into the incline of the massive pyramid, he thought about just shoving the man over the side.

Consequences be damned.

Although he knew three things that made such a move preposterous.

One: his true enemy was ahead, waiting just inside. All in scarlet, older than this body he was using currently, so killing the shell would accomplish nothing. Two: the twins were inside, and the other members of the team were far too far away to act. And third: whether it was curiosity, pride or just plain admitted arrogance, he wanted — no, needed — to see what was inside.

The fact that he was receiving visions tying the inception of his quest, those many years ago in Alexandria as a wide-eyed, naive and bitter college grad, to this current objective, where the weight of the world and perhaps the fate of humankind rested with him, meant he had to proceed.

“Do you know what’s inside yet?” said the man at his right, helping him along with no great sense of urgency. In fact, there was more an air of humility and reverence for where they were about to go.

A flash: and Caleb saw the recent visit of some dignitaries, all bundled up. One with a shepherd’s staff, another with a guard detail, told to remain behind. Similarly, they entered, heads bowed, hearts on their sleeves. As if the mere validity of this perfect architectural wonder’s very existence alone, at this location on the earth, shattered the entirety of their beliefs and faiths.

“I…” He paused for a breath, taking in the cool air sweeping up the thirty-degree incline of the pyramid, spinning ice particles into the sunlight, causing rainbows and stars to sprinkle into his vision.

“Can’t see it? You must know its age, that where we’re standing used to be at a much different latitude.”

“That, I do know,” Caleb said, feeling a bit of energy returning. Strength coming back, and along with it, his thoughts and reasoning, and memory. “A lot of theories out there, placing Antarctica as Atlantis before a pole shift, before the earth’s axis shifted — whether due to a cometary strike or just the sliding of the molten core tipping the continents in some massive upheaval.”

“How long ago?” asked the soldier in that otherworldly voice.

Caleb shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Plato’s ten thousand years, or hundreds of thousands. Millions, if you believe the fossil records showing evidence of modern man alongside the dinosaurs. Then maybe…”

“You have a lot of maybes, for a guy who can see anything, anywhere and anytime.”

Caleb glared at him. “I also fell into a frozen bay, had my friends shot, and I’m a little too preoccupied about my imminent demise to focus.”

Laughing, the man hauled him ahead. “Well then, there’s something to be said for the element of surprise.”

He steadied Caleb as they neared the entrance, where the archway, carved with absolute precision, loomed at a height over fifteen feet. The winds swirled but avoided the dark aperture, where a soothing warmth exuded. He smelled the hint of something citrus, carried along a humid breeze.

Apples?

Then the snow cleared from a center block in the arch and revealed the one sign carved deep into the basalt in the otherwise unadorned arch.

“Oh no,” he said. “That again.”

He’d come full circle for sure.

“Now do you know?” came the voice in his ear, as the soldier pushed him gently ahead. It was clear that now, Caleb walked alone. He had a glimpse of a shape ahead, a figure waiting in the shadows. A hint of red.

“The Caduceus. I’m guessing it’s neither a doctor’s office or a barber shop up there, so…”

A vision formed in his mind: a serpent slithering through vegetation, weaving through thick bushes, lush plants and vibrant crops, scaring off insects and birds as it heads into a great shadow of something impossibly tall and wide.

Caleb shivered. Hesitated, then let everything out of his mind.

No more seeing. No more questing.

The end of all his searching was straight ahead.

This enemy was right.

If what he believed was through that doorway, looming and living and thriving inside this pyramid as old as time itself, then there was no more need for the right questions. The right frame of mind, the right anything.

There was only action.

One foot in front of the other.

Enter the unknown and see for yourself.

Experience the truth.

About everything.

Inside, the darkness stubbornly remained as he walked alone, and the ice gave way to tempered stone, almost like marble but with a soft feel that felt like he had left the tundra and stepped onto a playground surface. Dim lights flickered in his vision, and a figure in red stood still like a statue until he could adjust and see.

“It takes a few minutes,” came the voice, and now above the red neckline, Caleb saw the charm, burning green and radiant. Soothing, powerful, alluring. It banished the shadows the more he stared, and it cleared his blind spots, lifting a veil.

As close as he was to that power, to the merest fragment of the very thing that had resonated throughout the ages, he still felt too terrified to look away. Although something of its nature had been in his possession more than once (and had caused the tragic death of his Lydia, as well as nearly destroying the planet under Mason Calderon’s schemes), and he should have been used to it, he couldn’t summon any other emotion than abject fear.

Raiden kept speaking, and Caleb heard every word, but his eyes and his full attention were riveted not only on the walls and the frescoes popping into view like a child’s glow-in-the-dark stickers, but on the relics, the statues and the artifacts lovingly arranged along the descending and winding path…

…around the open center of the pyramid, which had been built around the Tree.

The Tree.

A dead, fossilized or petrified thing of monstrous beauty and sickly grace, like a twisted parody of what Michelangelo would have gracefully set in a sunlit Eden-esque scene. Hundreds of feet tall, this entrance level came in at about its midpoint, and in the gloom, backlit by the emerald-hued radiance clinging to the network of branches like diseased moss, he couldn’t see the extent of its width, or even the far wall.

“Impressive, isn’t it Crowe? You stand before the oldest living thing on the planet. Although, to call it ‘living’ may be a stretch.”

“Petrified,” he whispered.

“Almost,” Raiden replied. “We’ve had our world’s best scientists and biologists come here to examine it. X-ray spectroscopy, bark sampling, outright chain-sawing…” He grinned, teeth flashing green in the radiance. “None of that worked, of course. Can’t break it with conventional means, or rather — it won’t let you.”

“Won’t?” Caleb moved closer to the edge, where there was no railing, just a sense of a great height over darkness and gloom. The jade radiance gradually diminished into the black, and looking down, he felt like Jack at the top of a beanstalk whose base was nowhere visible.

Raiden bent down, picked up a piece of rubble. Hefted it, then tossed it high into the branches above. A flare of brilliant crimson-orange shot out and back toward the path of the toss, searing the air and causing Caleb to flinch back. Sulfur assailed his nostrils and the glare stung his eyes.

“Defense mechanism?” he asked as his eyes readjusted, and he looked up in wonder.

“Something like that. Can’t get close, although, come. See there—?”

He pointed around the next bend in the path to a metallic, bridge-like extension toward the tree — which ended abruptly, unfinished. “Tried to get to it up here. Lost four architects and two workers. Incinerated.”

“I see.”

“They call it the Sword of Fire.” He sighed. “I’m sure you know the reference.”

Caleb blinked, calling up again the image of a renaissance painting. Adam and Eve cowering before an elegant tree (hiding a serpent), and a blazing sword barring their path.

“After the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, after Adam’s betrayal — seeking the illicit promise of knowledge offered by the Snake — god put a flaming sword before the gates to Paradise, and barred entrance forever.”

“There ya go,” Raiden said, pointing to him without looking. “And here we are. Unlikeliest of places, I’m sure you’d agree. Everyone thinks Syria, or Jordan. Palestine maybe even or somewhere in Africa.”

“As the theory of evolution grew more popular, it made sense that our origins began there, so…”

“Yeah. No.” Raiden met his eyes for a moment before Caleb looked back to the tree, and then again, over the edge, longingly wishing to get to the bottom and explore. Thoughts of anything else were distant pursuers at this moment, as this astounding revelation took hold.

“Pole shifts. Continental drift…” He whistled. “Our race is old. So much older than any conventional archaeologists would dare to admit. But not beyond some theories. Vedic beliefs, Atlantis and other lost civilizations, even those hinting at much older remnants…”

“Want to know for sure?” Raiden asked as he began walking again, descending. They passed a mural depicting great aviary beasts like dragon-dinosaur hybrids, and women on their backs, soaring above cities of alien architecture and bizarre landscapes. Beasts and plants of unfamiliar size and even colors gave way to maps and diagrams. Formulae and scripts interspersed with the etchings and murals; diagrams of the heavens, charts of constellations no longer familiar…

They passed statues with heads of hideous yet beautiful beasts, and the sights stirred something in Caleb’s memories. And it was almost as if he was being struck with a cattle prod, right to his heart. He groaned, staggered. So unfamiliar, and yet…

“I know these things,” he whispered, rubbing his chest as he approached one humanoid statue with a head the cross between a crocodile and a praying mantis. “And this!” He stopped before the dimly-lit fresco depicting a colossal, dome-like building and an army of men and women in purple robes, all gracefully transporting cylinders toward some futuristic-looking block-shaped storage facility.

“Thought you might,” Raiden said. “I know you, and who you may have been, through the ages.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know. The Apple…” Raiden smiled and set a hand on Caleb’s shoulder, squeezing it gently. “…doesn’t fall far from the tree, in any life.”

Caleb blinked at him, and then back to the tree.

A flash in his mind, and he was there, before that massive, cubed structure. It was full of thousands of circular slots, each one full or ready to accept a cylinder scroll from one of the purple-clad scholars. In his hands, reverently offered, one such scroll — its alien script dazzling in the sun and his eyes. And he knew every word, every sacred phrase, every shred of knowledge it sought to preserve and protect.

And he was back, frowning in confusion at Raiden’s questioning look. But then his guide turned and continued walking. “Not much farther now — to that walkway we attempted.”

“What? Why there? Can’t we get to the bottom? I want to see… where the Garden had been. What is it like, why was the pyramid built around it?”

“Protection,” he said. “Partially, but mainly — to hide it and preserve it. The world had done its part in that direction, by the way. After the comet and the pole shift so many years ago, when most of life on the planet had been eradicated, the earth essentially shifted all this trouble and temptation to the most inaccessible point on its surface.”

He sighed, crimson cloak whisking behind him as he picked up the pace. Caleb moved faster to catch up, reluctantly foregoing study of the walls, the statues and other artifacts glinting like the holiest of treasures as they passed.

“It was here all along, waiting for us. For when we were ready, skilled enough to traverse the deadly oceans, to navigate by the stars…”

Caleb continued: “To recover ancient knowledge, find old maps…”

“Or maybe, to glimpse things through other eyes.” Raiden turned to him as they neared the broken bridge. “Once the questions got more precise, of course.”

“But this was blocked. The veil of Blue, covering areas even the best remote viewers weren’t allowed to see.”

“But that only made you more curious, didn’t it? Or was that, just maybe, the whole damn purpose of blocking certain areas?”

Caleb slowed, then thought about it. “You’re right.”

“Of course I am. You know it’s true. You have a child. Tell him not to go looking in the basement, what’s he going to do?”

“Go looking there.”

“Or at the very least, wonder about it. Research it, ask around, try to go at the problem from other ways.”

“Like go outside and peek through the dirty windows.”

“Exactly. They forbade it so you wouldn’t figure it out too quickly, not before you were older. Before we were older, as a species, maybe. After we’d grown and expanded and hopefully come together in some sort of peaceful civilization to handle what’s truly being offered here.”

“Which is?” Caleb asked, but he knew. Knew what it was, just not what form it would take.

Raiden continued as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Only problem was, we didn’t get the itch to go exploring — or the means to do so, or the motives — until the height of World War Two. Until we were at each other’s throats, literally at the point of blowing the whole thing to hell. And that’s when…”

“Admiral Byrd came calling,” Caleb said. “And found this.”

“Yes. But he wasn’t the first.”

“No, but he prevailed. Somewhat. And created all this secrecy, but which led the joint ventures, to study, and maybe…” He looked at the tree, at the branches. He thought about the sword, the defense mechanism, and…

And he was back, bursting through the cracks in the blue sphere, shattering a whole section and glimpsing beyond:

To this place, lit up with hundreds of standing lights. Generators all over. The base… a wide-open floor of ice and basalt and obsidian. Two giant sentinel statues flanking the trunk of the fossilized tree. Giant roots had upheaved the floor in the ancient past, and sickly petrified vines hung like strands of unwashed hair, draped onto the ground.

Dozens of men in parkas, white and black, set up drilling equipment besides banks of computers, servers and memory tapes. Cameras roll as a large drill extends something in a robotic arm toward the tree’s trunk. A diamond needle, with tubing and cannisters…

Back…

“I saw it.” He swallowed hard as they paused, and in the darkness ahead, in a section that spread out toward the unfinished bridge, he thought he could make out other forms. Tables, glowing monitors, two hulking statues, and more tables arranged almost like in a hospital triage room.

“Saw what?” Raiden asked, mild curiosity in his voice. “I’m sure you’re seeing a lot of things now. Peeking into past experiences, all without asking to be shown anything.”

Caleb stopped, doubling over.

Even as he heard the words, they came: an unrelenting sequence of glimpses into other places and times, strangers all becoming familiar: relatives, friends, lovers; parents and children he never had. A succession of homes and worlds, of unfamiliar horizons, unknown shores, passionate embraces, longing kisses and mournful goodbyes, heartbreaking loss, uncontrollable bliss, achievements and failures, books read, so many books read, some written, some spoken, some taught, lives changed, minds expanded, lives upon lives he’d never lived and yet…

He’d lived them all.

“Oh my God,” he said, and now Raiden smiled.

“You know now, don’t you?”

Another glimpse: back in the Sno-Cat just now. Freezing, teeth chattering, battling hypothermia… the canteen…

“You gave me something in the tea.”

Raiden whistled. “You really are good at this.”

“The same thing they drilled for in 1951.”

Raiden just kept smiling, a smile of pride and amazement. “I was there, you know.”

Another flash: a short man, old and wizened, in a bright red parka. General stripes on his arm, pointing, directing the action. The drill… pushing through the crimson shield that reacted only weakly to the intrusion…

“The flaming sword,” Caleb said. “Some kind of gate between dimensions. Ours and… wherever this tree really is. It resonates, vibrates and repels with accelerated force, anything attempting to break through. But a minor, millimeter wide diamond needle, inserted gently, slowly…”

“So freaking slowly,” Raiden said, closing his eyes, as if remembering…

Caleb sees again: the general in red, impatiently looking at the clock on a desk, waiting as the needle drill extended and extended — fifty feet past the surging, sputtering fiery entrance point, localized over a six-foot oval section around the needle. Cameras rolling, filming, computers reading energy levels off the charts, but the needle still progressing. To the tree, and drilling into its trunk. Slowly, slowly, millimeter by millimeter until…

Through the fossilized bark, through layer after layer of something beyond carbon and organic molecules, beyond anything natural. To the next layer and the next until…

The tube began to turn golden-hued. And a nectar the consistency of honey surged backwards to the tanks…

Caleb gasped, returning to the present. He stared, wide-eyed at Raiden, and now all his strange proclamations about long life, past glories and deemed worthiness came back to him. He asked the question, in his mind, as well as in his soul:

“Who were you?”

To which Raiden grinned even wider, prouder, and almost laughed out the response, lost in a wave of images and sights bombarding Caleb’s senses.

“You won’t be all that surprised,” he heard echoed off the branches, the ancient walls, the lonely statues and artifacts, as the images came:

Scenes of men in familiar places, and women on thrones. On horseback, leading armies, decimating cities on their orders, riding into battle after battle. Conquering, laying waste, enslaving and eradicating. Building and expanding. The familiar sights of Egypt, of Alexandria, even the Pharos itself.

“Oh…” he heard himself say.

Familiar barren terrains in Mongolia, yurt tents and an army raising drinks to a leader on horseback…

“Genghis… Alexander… Cleopatra… Hannibal… I think. Other generals and leaders and…”

“You get the picture,” Raiden said. “And you know now, not only are we linked, in our past as well as our present, but I was destined for this. To lead. To conquer, to rule.”

He spread his arms wide, blocking the sight of what was beyond: of who was beyond. Who are on those tables? And who are those two forms standing guard over the six adult-shaped bodies, and are they asleep — or dead? And in the center, two… smaller ones!

The twins! Caleb’s heart raced. He had to move, but the realization of what he had just seen held him back.

Raiden continued speaking. “You’ve seen for yourself, your own true lineage and past. You’re the scholar, the seeker of knowledge. And you’ve come here to the ultimate stage. To the storehouse of the infinite.”

Caleb’s mouth was dry, full of sand or brittle ice, ancient as lunar dust. He trembled, his heart raced, and he felt himself sweating despite the cold.

“This is no minor vault guarded with childish traps. No sealed off tomb or walled in chamber of secrets. This is it, Caleb. The Tree of Knowledge. Forget Good and Evil — those are human concepts. What’s beyond, what’s really beyond… once you drink of its Blood, eat of its Fruit, is the realization that what Adam consumed was just the first bite of something far more nourishing.”

He clenched his fist, and in the other, something flashed: thin and metallic, and in a heartbeat, he was behind Caleb, thrusting a needle into his neck and then withdrawing it.

Caleb staggered, feeling a rush of fire down the right side of his body. He spun around, teetered to the edge of the walkway, then staggered back, toward the center before the bridge. Into the circle of tables, where two hulking jackal-masked guards backed away, spears pointing at him. Caleb had the comical feeling they were ceremonial and yet, the deadliest foes any could imagine, set here to protect… whatever this was.

“The Children of Horus,” Raiden said, walking into the faint illumination. He tossed the syringe in the direction of the tree — and the localized flaming eruption lit up the area.

Caleb dropped to his knees, surrounded by six reclining forms. Sleeping — and dreaming?

“My brethren who have gone before me… induced into their astral state to allow them passage to become worthy.”

Astral state? “Worthy?”

“To pass beyond the sword. The only way. No physical bodies, we found, nothing but angels that could dance on the head of a pin… or a needle in the case of the sap we extracted.”

“Of course,” Caleb whispered, eyes glazing over. His body becoming numb. Had to think, had to stay here, and focus. The twins… Were they right there? Something was wrong. They weren’t moving. “What did you put in me?”

“First, you drank the tea. With the sap of knowledge.”

“Which expanded my mind, connected my… lives?”

“Yes. Reincarnation… or whatever the term. I’m sure you have a different sense of how it works, with the ultimate pool of shared consciousness, or what have you. But the sap lifts the amnesia. It lets you see, lets you remember your unbroken chain of lives — the memories and experiences that are rightfully yours.”

He made a fist again, clenching his teeth.

“That was the gift denied us at the Garden. The gift the serpent dangled in Adam’s path. Why forget it all and start over every time? A long, desperate climb just to remember everything you worked so hard for last go-around?” He almost spit out the words in disdain.

Caleb blinked. Tried to answer but could barely stay on his knees. Wanted to talk about writing, about learning, about passing on knowledge to the next generation, but he couldn’t find the logic in any of it. Not when his mind had been blown open, and the meaninglessness of individual moments and achievements paled before an unshakeable history of experience.

Raiden held up his arms. “Every life, I’ve tried to come back here. Something in my soul, programmed to try and get here, to regain that memory. But it wasn’t until a recent incarnation, a Japanese soldier and adventurer, that I found the means. And the opportunity. Found the charm…”

He held the piece of the Emerald Tablet, touching it lovingly.

“But I knew that life wouldn’t last, so I left clues for myself, knowing eventually I’d be pulled to Antarctica. I’d come here, seeking the truth as many others have. As I’m sure you know. The conspiracy theories. The world leaders taken here to see, to understand. To try to convince them that we’re all part of a greater legacy and shouldn’t be killing each other over recent squabbles or toddler religions when our history goes so much deeper.”

“Noble…” Caleb tried to say, but Raiden laughed him down.

“I stopped all that,” he said. “In this last incarnation. When I regained the truth, a journey that took two decades after meeting your father, to come here, to answer the desperate yearning in my soul instilled throughout the last lifetime. I would not be denied. After drinking the sap, convincing these guardians here of my worthiness…”

The two jackal headed sentinels bowed to him, and then stamped their spears down hard.

“I regained all the memories, and the greatest of which was where I hid this little charm.” He tapped it again. “I found that, found the other Children of Horus, the seekers of the truth, the ones whose path had always been to understand — and gain the secrets of immortality. We came here once more and finalized our plan.”

Raiden stepped into the circle, coming now to the twins’ table. Their little bodies swaddled, yet on their stomachs, as needles were in their lower spines — extracting something.

“Spinal fluid from your sister’s children,” Raiden said. “The final ingredient. This… is nothing so sinister as a sacrificial rite, or whatever your psychic mind had seen and likely misinterpreted.”

“What more do you want?” Caleb managed to say as his blood boiled and his senses spun. Whatever he had been injected with was flooding his cells, lifting his thoughts. It felt like he was becoming detached from his body. “You have immortality… in a sense. This sap… drink of it every time you start again, and it will be like…”

“True,” Raiden said. “we could do that. Bottle the stuff and leave it around hospitals, but how do you know who to give it to? How many million births happen every week? Do we give it to everyone?”

Yes, Caleb wanted to say, but found his lips wouldn’t obey. But even as he wanted to say it, he wondered… The serpent. The admonition. Whatever this was, ancient parable or nexus for the intersection of reality and an ultimate dimension of consciousness, maybe it really was the best possible route. Not to remember, not to know it all.

We were given a choice, he wanted to say. To live and suffer in ignorance — that had its own simple grace. The other choice was to exist in perfect recollection and continue and start over in new bodies with new challenges, but to remember everything and continue to learn.

Pros and cons swirled in his thoughts even as he struggled to move, even as he fell — and hit the ground without feeling a thing. Face turned, he could see only the underside of the tables, where his nephew and niece lay.

He could, gratefully, still hear their breathing, their heartbeats — so faint.

“No, Caleb. Letting everyone in on the big secret is the very problem we’ve discovered with this reincarnation business.”

Which is?

“Which is, with modern advancements and science and health, we’ve reached a point where we are over-saturated. The quality of souls coming back from the pool of wherever they’re swimming between lives… it gets diluted as we’ve gone from millions to billions. Spreading all that cosmic sentience over so many more souls can only lead to what we’re seeing now: diminishing of human potential. Greed, violence, sin. Sin with a capital S, I, N.”

He breathed out and a cloud of steam glowed green in his gem’s radiance.

Ah, Caleb thought. Now I understand.

“Overpopulation has to be controlled. With a smaller, controlled group of loyal subjects, all working lifetime after lifetime in unison according to the plan, we can — and will — return to a golden age. And the souls that are reborn and recycled will be purer, less diffused and strained over so many bodies. And we will have a chance to improve and excel and grow as they were meant to.”

He lorded over Caleb, then took a knee.

“That’s step one. My plan you messed up with nuclear launches I will solve through other means. But that can come later, after I join my brothers in the other realm, beyond the Sword, where we will absorb the knowledge of the infinite, first-hand.”

No…

Caleb tried to warn him, as he saw the glimpse of a golden, shimmering tree of data: bits and bytes, ones and zeros and glowing strands connecting golden-hued humanoid forms…

It’s not what you think… Or maybe it is.

All the same. Beyond the sword. Beyond the veil of Maya, of Illusion, of Matrix. The Tree truly exists in that other dimension outside this world that may or may not be real, based on perspective, but it doesn’t matter. If you go beyond the veil, there may be no coming back.

Raiden leaned down close. “The DNA of your relations, we found that to be the key. They can separate between worlds, they’re the ones that were prophesied. Other psychics among us had foreseen this, and their coming, and now — injecting that spinal fluid into ourselves, we can do the same. As my friends have just done.”

He reached back and came up with another syringe, handing it to one of the Jackal-headed figures who took it reverently, and inserted it into Raiden’s neck, then stepped away.

Raiden lay down, getting comfortable beside Caleb.

“But don’t worry, dear friend. My thoughts of revenge are gone. Childish really. I wouldn’t dream of doing this next part without you.”

Caleb’s eyes fluttered, mouth opened, and he gasped as his pupils rolled up. A sudden flash of a vision, not of the past, but the present or near-future: Alexander, rushing ahead of the others, in front of Aria, Phoebe, Orlando… Heading to the pyramid, to the entrance — which had been sealed, and the door locked behind a deadly trap.

And the words of his enemy, still ringing in his ear…

“See you at the sword…”