Chapter 96 The onward connection

Wednesday 25th August

The helicopter flew west into the darkness.

Sam looked at her own hand and noticed it was shaking.

Max glanced sideways and then put his hand on top of Sam’s. His was shaking too.

No one had spoken since Max had asked about Chun during takeoff. Initially, the silence had been due to fear of machinegun fire bringing down the helicopter. Subsequently, it had related to shock. The flow of adrenaline had now subsided, and they were no longer totally preoccupied by the action that had filled the minutes between leaving the aircraft and Anna piloting the helicopter clear of the gunfire. There was now time to reflect on how close they had all come to being killed.

‘How are you doing, Anna?’ said Max, conscious that the one person who didn’t have the current luxury of reflection was the pilot.

‘I don’t know. I might complain to the airport authorities at Lhasa Gonggar. That’s the worst airport transfer I’ve ever experienced.’

Zoe, Sam and Max laughed. They all welcomed a joke to break the tension, and Anna’s comment also implied that she, at least, was in control.

‘You seem remarkably calm,’ said Max, by way of checking that implication.

‘It was scary,’ Anna replied. ‘But, when I told you that I’d been a pilot, I didn’t mention that I’d been a helicopter pilot for Chinese special forces.’

‘Just another day at the office then,’ noted Sam.

Anna glanced at Zoe. ‘We wouldn’t have made it without your bodyguard, Li Colonel. Who was he?’

Zoe sat in silence for an unusually long time. ‘When we got off the plane, I knew his name was Chun and that he was a personal bodyguard who’d been with me for about five years. Now I think back over those five years, I’m struggling to recall any situations in which he was with me.’ Zoe paused again. ‘Maybe it’s just the shock of what’s just happened, but it’s almost as if I only met him in a dream.’

‘I watched him as we flew away,’ said Max. ‘That tarmac was very well lit. Chun just vanished into thin air.’

‘Like an out-of-phase waveform disappearing,’ said Sam softly, so that only Max could hear her clearly.

Zoe had registered that Sam had said something, but had not discerned what. ‘What did you say, Sam?’

‘I think we might know what’s causing your disrupted memories of Chun,’ Max clarified, ‘but let's get to the facility before we explain.’

Sam had been so focussed on recent events that her mind had not looked forward. ‘How long will it take us to get to the facility?’

Anna glanced at the instrument panel. ‘It’s one in the morning now. We should be there before dawn.’

Chapter 97 Sending out for a pizza

Tuesday 24th August (Wednesday 25th August in Tibet)

Mike Han dropped the empty Teterodat syringe into a sharps bin. ‘What did you think of the design changes to the helmet when you tried it on earlier?’ he said as Ollie Fenchurch rolled down his shirtsleeve.

Ollie looked at the helmet, which was supported on a stand beside him. ‘The improvements are good. Having the shoulder supports taking all the weight is much better.’

Mike lifted the helmet from its stand. ‘The padding inside the helmets has been improved too.’

Mike guided the helmet over Ollie’s head.

‘Is that comfortable?’ asked Mike when it was in place.

‘Yes. It’s a lot better than the ones at Diss. What do you want me to do this afternoon?’

‘You don’t need to do anything. I just want to take some final measurements. You were the best subject we ever saw at Diss, and so it seemed best to complete these tests with you. Are you ready?’

‘OK.’

Mike walked to a nearby desk and sat down in front of a screen and keyboard. He pressed some keys.

Ollie moved his head slightly. ‘I always think the noise from the helmet sounds like a light sabre from Star Wars.’

‘Everyone who hears it says that. Are you experiencing any sensations?’

‘It’s just like at Diss. My peripheral sight has gone, and I can see a dot of light in the centre of my vision. I can’t see anything in the room anymore. If I hadn’t done this before, it would be quite scary.’

‘That’s another reason we chose you to help us now. As you’ve experienced the effects before, they shouldn’t present any problems for you.’ Mike typed further on the keyboard. ‘Tell me about any perceptions, thoughts or feelings that come to you.’

‘I can see a hotel.’

‘Any signage to say where it is?’

‘Yes. It’s the Grand Hyatt Hotel at San Francisco airport.’

‘What’s happening now?’

‘I seem to be moving along a corridor and into a room.’

‘Anyone in the room?’

‘Yes. I recognize his face. I think I met him at Diss. Dr Paterson, isn’t it?’

Mike smiled. Starchild had no trouble in locating a specific mind-body in the consciousness field. ‘What about now?’

‘Dr Peterson was in sharp focus in my mind. It was like I was in the room with him. Now everything’s very hazy. I get the sense of a lot of people being around, but there’s just a grey haze. I can’t see any of them.’

Mike knew this to be a more generalized focus on the consciousness field of San Francisco. Mike tapped further on the keyboard. ‘What were you thinking of eating tonight?’

‘Apparently, the cooks here make a really good pizza. I thought I’d go for that.’

‘Try to visualize your favourite pizza.’

‘No problem. It’s looking good.’

‘OK, let's close the experiment now.’

Mike pressed a key to activate the sub-ego imperative implanted in Ollie’s brain which suppressed memory of the results of any experiment while retaining recall of the physical process.

The noise from the helmet ceased.

‘OK, let's get that helmet off, and we can have some dinner.’

‘That was very quick. We don’t seem to have done anything.’

‘We’ve done all that we needed to do.’

Chapter 98 A bumpy landing

Wednesday 25th August

It was a clear moonlit night in southern Tibet.

‘We’re approaching the coordinates you gave for the facility, Li Colonel,’ said Anna.

‘There’s an airfield at that location. It won’t be lit, but we have the moonlight.’

Anna turned off the lights in the cabin and began the helicopter’s descent.

Sam noted treetops not far below them, their leaves reflecting a silver tinge in the moonlight.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang, and the helicopter jolted violently. It then rapidly descended, spinning as it fell from the sky.

Sam was conscious of Anna shouting, ‘missile’. She then lost consciousness.

Sam was aware of nothing more until she opened her eyes and registered that she was lying on the ground surrounded by trees. The rucksack containing the Teterodat lay beside her.

‘Are you OK?’ The voice of Peter Rogers confirmed that Max had also survived the crash.

‘I’m not sure.’ Sam rose slowly to her feet with support from Max. She wobbled slightly as she regained her balance. ‘I feel a bit bruised, but I don’t think I’m seriously hurt.’ She automatically picked up the rucksack and put it over her shoulders. She then looked anxiously around her. ‘What about Anna and Zoe?’

‘I haven’t found them yet, but I think they’ll be OK too.’

‘We’ve just survived a helicopter crash. What makes you think they’ll be OK if you’ve not found them?’

‘I think this worldline might be one on which we all survive – at least for now. I think we constructed it, or will construct it, with Starchild at the facility sometime in the near future. It seems to have the property that we can inexplicably escape unscathed from firefights and missile attacks. There probably aren’t many realities where that can occur, and it might explain why it’s not sufficiently in phase with our previous worldline to be stable. Maybe also, we didn’t want it to be in phase and persist because it’s just a means to an end.’

‘Max, Sam,’ Zoe’s voice could be heard somewhere nearby.

Sam looked around. ‘We’re over here.’

‘Told you so,’ said Max.

A flashlight flickered through the trees, and Sam could see the silhouettes of Zoe and Anna coming towards them.

‘Is everyone OK?’ said Max when they were all together.

‘God knows how we all got out of that,’ Anna replied.

Sam looked at Anna. ‘What happened?’

‘I think we were hit by a missile that didn’t detonate. I’m pretty sure I saw the outline of a JH7A fighter against the moon as we descended. We’re lucky we were so close to the treetops, and we’re lucky we had very little fuel on board so there was no explosion. I would have said what happened was unsurvivable, but here we are.’

Zoe nodded. ‘They’ll assume we’re dead and they won’t try to look for the helicopter until first light.’ She looked at her phone. ‘We’re eight kilometers from the facility. There’s a supply road about four hundred metres west of here that heads straight for the facility. I suggest we start walking.’

Chapter 99 The evening news

Tuesday 24th August (Wednesday 25th August in Tibet)

Ben poured a glass of red wine for Sue and handed it to her. ‘Do you mind if I put the TV on and catch the evening news?’

‘Go ahead.’

Ben picked up the controller, turned on the TV and then came to sit beside Sue on the sofa. They had just missed the last of the bongs that accompanied the summary of top stories. Huw Edwards was starting to expand on those headlines. ‘Amateur astronomers claim to have detected an unexpected change in the motion of the comet that has come to be known as Beth. Some say this puts the comet on course to become a satellite of the Earth. Some claim the new trajectory places the body on a collision course with the Earth. NASA has said there is no cause for alarm, although further analysis will be required to predict its exact future trajectory.’

The picture on the TV screen moved to the now-familiar scene of one or other religious group who held firm convictions about the outcome of Earth’s encounter with the comet. A bearded man, captioned as a spokesperson for the group currently being filmed, spoke to a reporter. ‘As the Bible has predicted, the comet has been sent by God to portend Judgement Day. We’re awaiting the end of this world on the fourth of September and thereafter the joyous entry of our followers into Heaven.’

The scene then moved to a similar group who had an Asian spokeswoman. ‘We believe that God will protect us, and the comet will enter an orbit around the Earth. It will be a sign from God of the dawning of a new age.’

Hew Edwards smiled slightly when the report ended, implying that the more extreme opinions expressed in the story would undoubtedly be viewed by him and the viewers as charmingly eccentric.

Sue signed. ‘Frankly, I’ll be glad when the fourth of September has passed. Some important junior staff at the hospital have just stopped coming to work as they believe that some epoch changing event, good or bad, is going to happen on Saturday week. Shops have had to close for the same reason. All these wild ideas about the comet are bringing the world to a halt.’

‘My mum thinks it’s a message from God too. I think I’ll drive down to Kent tomorrow to see her. I haven’t got any work booked until the week after next. There’s nothing more I can do at the rehab unit. I’m sure there was something very odd going on there, which is why they gave me so few files. Mind you, if they want to pay me to do a token review of the project, that’s fine by me.’

‘And finally,’ Hew Edwards prepared to add the final, light-hearted story to the bulletin as if offering some compensation for the unremitting negativity of all the other news reporting, ‘pizza has been the order of the day in San Francisco where the mid-morning demand today meant that queues developed and some people were turned away from Italian restaurants and take-aways. No reason has been identified for this. Experts say that it was probably just a statistical blip that escalated when people began to become competitive for fear of missing out – much in the same way that panic buying in supermarkets can get out of hand. Well, I hope you enjoyed your meal this evening – whatever it was. Goodnight.’

Chapter 100 Dharma Talk on the road

– Reality is a kind of dream

Wednesday 25th August

Sam, Max, Zoe and Anna had been walking along the supply road for about an hour and a half. No one had said anything for some time.

Anna was walking beside Max, looking at the ground and deep in thought. She suddenly turned her head towards him. ‘What’s causing all this, Max? Everything’s happened so quickly that I’ve just been reacting and not thinking. On the plane, we seemed to have transitioned into another reality – one in which your friend, Sahadeva, was no longer with us and in which the past we all remembered didn’t fit with our present anymore. I also saw Li Colonel’s bodyguard vanish as we lifted away from Lhasa Gonggar.

‘I keep thinking this must be a dream. I was even more convinced of that when the helicopter crashed. It would have been a miracle had one of us survived. It was impossible for all four of us to walk away from that with no serious injuries. This doesn’t feel like a dream though. I can’t wake myself up.’

Sam and Zoe were walking just in front of Max and Anna. They too could hear his reply. ‘I don’t think we’re dreaming in the sense one normally uses the word. Dreams arise in our own minds and have no direct effect on the world we usually experience.

‘The world we see around us can be described as a sort of dream, although our individual experiences of it are usually self-consistent and congruent with the experiences of everyone else.

‘Material reality isn’t the way most people perceive it to be,’ Max continued. ‘At its deepest level, everything – you, me, the trees, this road – are all expressions of a single underlying consciousness. We are not subjects looking at objects that are separate from ourselves. There is no separation – there is no duality. Each of us co-create in consciousness with the world we perceive.

‘The material reality we perceive is built from what we conceptualise as electrical signals in our brains. We have no window on the world as it actually is. In that respect, there’s no difference between the world we see around us and the world we see in our dreams. In a waking state, however, there appear to be causal interconnections that bind us together into the same reality. Time is also an illusion. It’s a way, but not the only way, of perceiving a fourth dimension such that we can process experiences in the material world. We merge with our true being in deep sleep, but few are able to recognise this because, in that state, there’s no subject to impose categories on an object. Am I making any sense, Anna?’

‘I’m Chinese. Buddhism, together with Taoist and Confucian thought, underlies our culture. It’s not the first time I’ve heard something similar to what you’re saying. It very much appeals to me, although I can’t claim to have grasped it at the depth to which you seem to have done.’

‘I’m not surprised to hear you say that, Anna, because that may be one of the reasons you’re with us. You have some understanding of what I just tried to describe, so you may be particularly suited to helping us.’

‘It’s still hard to believe that we’ve moved into a different material reality?’

‘If the equipment at the facility has been faithfully constructed from the manuals I created, it has the potential to influence the illusion of material reality in the way we’ve been experiencing. I know how I would have programed it to achieve that, although Starchild in England didn’t have sufficient computing capacity.’

‘How can just one person and a computer influence everything there is – however much computing capacity is available?’

‘That’s a good question, but that question is based on the misunderstanding that Ultimate Reality is somehow vast. You are all there is. I am all there is.’

‘So, you believe your machine has changed the world we are now living in?’

‘Theoretically, it’s possible to create other material realities. I think we’re in one of those subrealities now, but I also think this one’s unstable.’

‘What do you mean when you say this subreality isn’t stable?’

‘I talked to Sam about that on the plane. Think of our current subreality as being like a wave interacting with numerous other waves on the whole ocean. I think our wave is probably inconsistent, or out of phase, with many of those other waves. I think elements of our subreality will fade away as they become phased out by the more numerous, powerful and mutually consistent waves of the bigger ocean.’

Sam glanced backwards towards Anna. ‘We think that’s why Chun, Zoe’s bodyguard, vanished, and Zoe’s memories of him seemed to lack reality so quickly.’

Anna looked puzzled. ‘Where did Chun go?’

Max looked at her. ‘The localisation of the Universal Consciousness that was the real part of Chun will continue. Maybe he’ll be born again in one or other stable reality. I suspect that all internally consistent alternative realities persist as multiple worlds – each not able to interact with the next.’

‘Will we transition again to another reality?’

‘If this reality’s unstable, it’s likely our perceptions of material reality will change again.’

‘If we somehow created this reality, why would we make it unstable?’

‘My best guess is that this was a very rare, maybe even unique, reality in which we reached the facility alive. Whichever combination of us achieved the creation of this subreality must have reached the facility and generated the subreality that has allowed us to get to the facility to generate the subreality – and so on.’ Max smiled at the way his recursive explanation had underlined the inadequacy of normal language and logic to properly express a non-dual, timeless Ultimate Reality. ‘This subreality may also allow us to achieve something at the facility beyond simply getting there. I’m guessing that’s what you might call God’s plan.’

Anna went over the words of Max in her own mind and reflected on the illogicality of it all. She enjoyed the art of the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, and his impossible paintings came to mind.

Further discussion was halted by their arrival at a tunnel in a cliff face into which the road disappeared.

Zoe wiped the perspiration from her brow. ‘We’re almost there. One of the entrances to the complex lies just within the tunnel.’

They followed Zoe into the darkness and along a pavement which ran beside the road – separated from the carriageway by a high crash barrier.

Initially, it was difficult to see where they were going, but when their eyes became acclimatized, a series of green lights set into the wall of the tunnel at around twenty-metre intervals were sufficient for them to see the pavement beneath their feet. Despite this, no light could be discerned from the far end of the tunnel.

After one hundred metres, Zoe stopped. There was a door in the sidewall of the tunnel. ‘This was designed to be a secret entrance or exit,’ she said. ‘It might allow escape from the inside or unmonitored entrance from the outside. Very few people know of it.’

Zoe removed a handkerchief from her pocket and polished a shiny pad that was set in the tunnel wall by the door. She then pressed the tips of her right-hand index finger and thumb onto the pad. There was a click, and the door slid sideways into a recess.

Sam, Max and Anna followed Zoe through the door into a corridor that was also illuminated by green emergency lighting.

Zoe touched another pad on the wall in the corridor, and the door through which they had entered slid shut behind them. Once it had done so, white lights gradually increased in intensity until the corridor was well lit.

They all half closed their eyes to allow adjustment to the new level of brightness.

Zoe pointed along the corridor. ‘The main control room is about one hundred metres along here.’

‘Is there anyone else around?’ asked Sam. ‘When we spoke about this place before we left England, you talked of security personnel.’

‘There were four. Usually, a new detail arrives before the previous detail leaves, but I arranged from Beijing for the existing group to depart yesterday morning – before the new detail arrives tomorrow.

‘As soon as we get to the control room, I can lock down the complex. That means no one can get in or out.’ She looked at Max. ‘You won’t be constrained by fear of interruption here. The time pressure is all about how long it will be before either nuclear Armageddon or the impact of the comet.’

Max smiled and looked back at Zoe. ‘No pressure then.’