Chapter 101 A counter-attack

Wednesday 25th August

Mike Han parked his car at Folkestone railway station. He then walked around the town for nearly half an hour – entering and leaving shops by different doors and pausing in locations where he was concealed from those passing by.

He eventually concluded that he was not being followed. At that point, he was standing in a narrow alleyway.

He instinctively reached for his phone then suddenly remembered that he had left it at Shorncliffe. He could be away for a couple of hours without this seeming to be more than an accident. With luck, no one of significance would try to contact him during that time, and the excuse of forgetting his phone would not be needed.

Mike continued down the alleyway to a point where four concrete steps led down to a fire door in an otherwise blank and uniform brick wall. He looked at his watch. It was just before one in the afternoon.

Mike glanced back along the alleyway in the direction he had come. There was no one in sight. He then looked once more at his watch and observed the second hand as it completed its final ticks to reach one o’clock.

There was a click, and the fire door opened slightly.

Mike quickly descended the concrete steps and then pulled the fire door towards him, making a large enough gap to allow him to step inside. He then entered the building and pushed the door closed behind him.

He was standing in a dimly-lit basement. The only light was coming from a bare lightbulb in a ceiling rose, ten metres away. He noticed motion in the shadows on the far side of the room. A figure moved into sight and then disappeared behind a pillar.

Mike crossed the room and stood on the opposite side of that pillar such that neither he nor the other person could see each other.

A man’s voice spoke to Mike. ‘One nine four seven.’

‘Three eight five two,’ Mike replied, reflecting that PINs were a simpler identifier than the cryptic statements made by Hollywood spies of the past.

‘Have you a report?’ asked the man.

‘I can report that I have plans to sabotage the Western Starchild attack planned for the fourth of September. To avoid suspicion, I am currently acting as if I intend to follow through with the attack. I hope to disable the equipment in a manner that appears to be a technical failure. I might then be able to remain in my role while the failure is being investigated. Max Paterson, who has been managing the project with me, is the person most likely to identify such sabotage and be able to counter it. I intend to eliminate him when he returns from San Francisco. Can you pass this information to Colonel Li Xiu Ying?’

‘I will pass your report to the acting Chief of Intelligence at the Ministry of Public Security. Colonel Li Xiu Ying is being hunted by the Party. She is a traitor. She and two unidentified foreigners have breached and locked down the Starchild facility near the Balapuspika Monastery. They were assisted by an ex-special forces pilot.’

‘What do we know of their plans?’

‘Nothing. We assume they either intend to sabotage the equipment at the facility or employ it in some way. The latter seems most likely as sabotage could have been effected by Colonel Li Xiu Ying without external assistance.’

‘They can achieve very little without Teterodat.’

‘The Party leadership is making the assumption that they have a supply of Teterodat. The intruders took enormous risks to get to the facility. There was a firefight at Lhasa Gonggar Airport, and the helicopter in which they escaped was shot down before it reached the facility. It had been assumed they must all be dead, but no bodies were found during a search at first light. After that, the facility was locked down, and so we assume they all made it there.’

‘I agree that no one would take such risks to get to the facility if they could achieve nothing on arrival. What does the Party want me to do?’

‘There’s no rapid way to regain control of the facility. It could sustain a nuclear blast. It’s also totally self-sufficient. The Party leadership wants you to use the Starchild equipment at Folkestone to effect a hostile transmigration to one of the intruders. They then want you to take whatever action is required to temporarily disable the Starchild equipment in Tibet.’

Chapter 102 At the facility

Thursday 26th August

On their arrival at the facility, Zoe had located supplies and prepared food for Sam, Anna, Max and herself. They had all then slept.

Whilst haste was important in pursuing their plans, they were all physically and mentally exhausted. Max and Sam had concluded that being fed and rested was so important to the success of whatever they attempted that this should be given priority over beginning tests in the facility’s laboratory.

It was seven o’clock on the morning after their arrival, therefore, when Max began to boot up and review the status of the computer systems associated with the Chinese copy of Starchild.

The others sat in the main laboratory as Max powered up the computers. ‘This system is an exact copy of the one at Shorncliffe Army Camp – even down to the manufacturers of the hardware. There’s nothing new for me to become familiar with.’

‘It was all copied to the letter,’ Zoe confirmed. ‘We were not sure what was really important, so we wanted to make an exact mirror image.’ Zoe smiled. ‘Much of the hardware you used was Chinese anyway.’

Max looked closely at a screen. ‘There does seem to be one difference from the British version. I thought there were a very large number of computer racks around here. There’s a whole room full next door, and they’re all connected to this system.’ He turned to Zoe. ‘Do you know the designed quantum volume of this system?’

‘I understood what you said on the plane about the metric, quantum volume, being a measure of the power of a quantum computer. I never understood the details of our system sufficiently to ask about that. I certainly didn’t realise that if the system was sufficiently powerful, it could reshape material reality.’

‘I can run a couple of tests to get an approximation to the QV of this system,’ said Max.

Sam, Zoe and Anna sat in silence while Max typed rapidly on a keyboard.

‘Wow,’ said Max finally. ‘I think you’ve got a system here with a QV of around twelve hundred and eighty.’

Sam thought back to the conversation on the plane. ‘You said twelve hundred and eighty could be enough for Starchild to interact with the Underlying Consciousness to the point of reshaping the material world in the same way that Starchild can reshape mind.’

‘Yes. I’m not surprised about what we’ve found here though. We were assuming that we’d created our current subreality here at the facility. To do that, we’d need a system such as this.’

Zoe looked puzzled. ‘It’s not just the latter part of your plane flight and the other events on the way here that have been affected by this subreality. My familiar surroundings had changed in Beijing yesterday morning, and the worlds of the people you contacted by phone from the plane were also different from the world we had all previously experienced. How can you possibly generate the quantity of input data required to model all that?’

‘I couldn't if I was working from the parts to the whole. It’s been an assumption in western thought that parts are primary and the whole is constructed from them. This reductionist approach has investigated matter at smaller and smaller scales until there appears to be nothing there at all. That’s because there is nothing there at all. The fact is that the whole is primary. Consciousness is primary. We’ve got all the input data for the subreality we’re currently experiencing within our own minds because we’re already living it.’

Anna spoke for the first time. She was obviously struggling to make sense of what Max was saying. ‘Everything that happened yesterday is in the past. You’re going to program that into the computer now, in the present, to create a past through which we’ve already lived.’

‘There is no past or future,’ Max explained. ‘There’s just an eternal now. Think about it. Have you ever been somewhere other than here, and have you ever been in a time that wasn’t now? The passing of time is a construct of the mind. You might like to visualise a block universe in which every event in time and space is represented by a point. In the material world, we can move in any direction in what we perceive as space, but only in one direction in what we perceive as time. In fact, space is the same thing as time. Space turns into time and time turns into space within black holes. The block universe is an analogy to the eternal now. Every point in space-time is there. More importantly for us, however, every possible point in space-time is there. That’s why subrealities can be built.’

‘How much extra work will you need to do to incorporate restructuring of the material world into the Starchild algorithms?’ asked Sam.

‘The algorithms are already there. The underlying logic is exactly the same as for transmigrations or sub-ego imperatives. The interfacing is straightforward because that’s provided by the channeller.’ Max looked at the others. ‘Or in this case, the channellers. I think the four of us have all the information required already in our minds. We each just need to inject a syringe of Teterodat and put on a helmet.’

Chapter 103 Following orders

Thursday 26th August

It was shortly after midnight when Mike Han began to boot up and review the status of the computer systems in the laboratory at the Shorncliffe Camp.

He had returned to the base immediately after his encounter in Folkestone, but he needed to be alone in the laboratory, uninterrupted, to carry out his orders. He had therefore waited until after midnight. The intervening period had also allowed him to program the coordinates of the Chinese installation into Starchild’s geographical database.

Mike sat down at a keyboard and typed the command for voice activation of the system. ‘Check systems for integration,’ he ordered, in part to confirm the voice activation command.

‘Loading interface software,’ said a voice that he could not distinguish from that of Siri.

Around ten minutes passed. Mike knew that activity was occurring due to the quiet sound of various systems switching in and switching out in the silence of the laboratory. Occasionally Siri, as Mike now thought of her, would report on progress: ‘Software simulation complete. … Hardware interface activated.’

Finally, Siri announced that the initialisation of the system was complete.

Mike rolled up the sleeve on his left arm. He then picked up the syringe of Teterodat from where he had placed it on the desk beside the keyboard. He removed the sheath from the needle and then injected the full volume of the syringe into the muscle of his upper arm.

He put down the syringe and then lifted the helmet from the rack beside him, placing it over his head. ‘Set a twenty-minute safety disengagement,’ he said.

‘Thirty-minute safety disengagement set.’

‘Integrate.’

‘Integration initiated.’

Mike closed his eyes and began to take deep breaths.

Chapter 104 Navigating towards the future

Thursday 26th August

Max helped Sam, Anna and Zoe to remove their helmets.

‘Are you two OK?’ Sam asked Anna and Zoe.

They both nodded.

‘We’re all still here,’ Max observed. ‘I think that must mean the construction of the subreality that got us here has been achieved by the interface we just completed.’

Sam looked at him. ‘If this subreality is unstable, as you strongly suspect, I wonder how long it will last and what else we should be doing while it does?’

Max nodded and sighed, signalling that he had been thinking the same things. ‘This is the point at which we need more guidance. We have a comet on a collision course with Earth and nuclear powers on the point of attacking each other. It’s not clear to me which of the capabilities of Starchild can be employed, and in what manner, to stabilise the whole situation.’

‘Can’t you just change material reality to avoid the problems?’ Zoe questioned. ‘Isn’t that just an extension of what we’ve just done?’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Max replied. ‘We had a template for this current subreality in our minds because we’d each been living it. The fact that we appeared to experience this subreality before we implemented it is just an artefact of the way our minds perceive time. There’s no logical inconsistency. We don’t, however, have a similar model for a stable future material reality in which the comet is benign and no nuclear war is brought about by fear of Starchild.

‘Changing one thing changes everything, you see. We can’t predict what effect anything we change will have – because no one can. It’s about chaos theory. Anything that we change permanently is as likely to lead to the end of the material Universe as it is to a stable reality that’s close to the one we recently inhabited.’

Suddenly, Sam looked at them all with an expression of recognition on her face. ‘If you wanted to influence Maya, the illusion of material reality, to a specific end, then, as Max says, you couldn’t just introduce starting conditions and let reality play out. There’s no way to predict what would happen. It would be like trying to sail the Atlantic by pointing the ship in the right direction at Ireland’s west coast and not planning to touch the helm again until the boat docked in New York Harbour.

‘To successfully complete that journey, you’d have to continuously correct your course as events unfolded. I wonder if material reality could be steered in the same way.’

‘Is that possible?’ asked Anna.

‘Having just interfaced with the Universal Consciousness,’ Sam replied, ‘I think it is. As Max pointed out while we were walking here, the problem isn’t as vast as you might think. You’re all there is. In a sense, you’re God. I’m all there is. In a sense, I’m God.’ Sam looked at Max. ‘What would happen if I transmigrated not to a specific individual but to the whole field of consciousness.’

Max thought for a moment as he grasped what Sam was suggesting. ‘The field of consciousness is unmanifest, but with an awareness present, I think there would be a tendency to form a meta-subreality in which that awareness could abide.’

‘What’s a meta-subreality?’ asked Anna.

‘The Christian concept of Heaven would be an example,’ Max explained. ‘It’s an illusion that’s comprehensible within a human conceptual framework and obeys the same laws of self-consistency as the reality we know. The meta bit is about there being a global ability in that place to influence the material reality with which it’s associated. Think of Mount Olympus in Greek myth. Tolkien tried to capture the concept with his mythical land of Valinor.’

‘Could that meta-subreality house our ship’s helm?’ asked Sam.

‘Maybe. You could certainly experiment for a brief period and then return here to discuss what you find.’

Zoe tried to visualize what Sam and Max were discussing. ‘In a way, you’d be enacting a journey of the type described in religious myths in which people travel to a place beyond the mortal realm from which the mortal realm can be influenced. Do you have any intuition, Sam, that this is the direction in which you’re being called?’

‘I do. While you were saying that, it somehow seemed obvious to me. I need to become one with the Ultimate Reality but also allow my awareness to maintain a link with the unfolding material reality.’ She paused. ‘I now also have the powerful intuition that Sahadeva did not just remain at the Aashirya Temple in this subreality, unaware of all that was unfolding. I think he may have gone ahead of me.’

‘Two days ago, I would have said this was impossible,’ Max admitted. ‘But with the quantum computing power of this version of Starchild, I can see that it could be done, and I too sense that it’s the direction in which destiny is pointing.’

Chapter 105 On the beach

Thursday 26th August and beyond times and dates

Sam sat at one of the consuls with a Starchild helmet over her head. She injected herself with a syringe of Teterodat.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Max as Sam put the empty syringe on the desk in front of her.

‘A bit anxious, actually, Max. It’s like standing on a high cliff and peering over an unguarded drop.’

‘Is the anxiety about what you might find when you transmigrate into the field of Universal Consciousness?’ asked Zoe.

‘I don’t think it is,’ Sam replied. ‘I think the fear’s more about what I might not find.’

‘Good luck,’ said Max, as he initiated the integration. ‘I’ll bring you back in ten minutes if you haven’t returned before.’

‘Good luck, Sam,’ said Zoe and Anna simultaneously.

The sound made by the helmet increased in intensity. Sam noticed her peripheral sight diminish and then disappear. A dot of light then appeared in the centre of her visual field. That dot slowly grew larger in diameter, as if she was moving towards the brightly lit exit of a tunnel. She actually felt the physical sensation of motion. After she had been moving for what she might have judged to be thirty seconds, she experienced her awareness leaving the tunnel into blinding light.

*****************************

‘Can you hear me, Sam?’ Max asked with urgency.

Sam had become very still.

Suddenly, the noise from the helmet ceased.

‘The safety cut-out’s triggered.’ Max looked anxiously at a monitor. ‘There’s no signal anymore. It’s as if Sam’s not here.’ Max walked up behind Sam and quickly but carefully lifted the helmet from her head.

Sam sat unnaturally still. She reminded Max of a model in a waxworks. ‘Sam,’ he said as he moved his hand forward to place it on her shoulder. Max stumbled slightly when his palm made no contact with anything solid. He steadied himself on the back of the chair. There was no substance to the form in front of him. His hand had passed through the image that appeared to be seated in the chair. Gradually, that image became increasingly transparent. Within half a minute, it had disappeared.

Anna and Zoe were visibly shocked. ‘Where’s she gone?’ said Anna breathlessly.

Max paused for many moments. ‘I don’t know.’

*****************************

Sam was aware of standing on a beach. She could see the sand, and she could both see and hear the gently lapping waves, but the light was dim – as if it were a kind of twilight. It was twilight as one might experience it in a dream – not exactly menacing; not exactly comfortable; not exactly real.

The day in this place seemed either close to sunrise or sunset. The sun’s red disc hung in the sky above the sea, a little way clear of the horizon. As Sam watched it for what seemed to be several minutes, however, the orb neither rose nor fell.

Gradually, Sam became aware of another unusual characteristic of this sun: a ribbon of red, of the same colour as the sun but tinged with yellow at its edges, connected the sun directly with the horizon.

Sam felt lonely, and she knew exactly why. Teaching spirituality and experiencing it from within the world of forms was not the same as directly communing with the Ultimate Reality.

Sam profoundly understood that she was alone. She profoundly understood what she had recently told Anna about being all there is – about being God.

Sam was now able to recall how she had stood on this beach on countless previous occasions. Every time, an impulse to flee the unfathomable depths of her loneliness had taken her back into the material world and into a more comfortable illusion. Today, she had a much clearer idea of what was really at stake, and so she sat down upon the sand in a meditation posture.

Her desire to become one with the Ultimate Reality had finally overcome her fears, and as she experienced this sensation, an indescribable sense of relaxation and peace came upon her. The Universal Consciousness had metaphorically breathed a sigh of relief.

Love, in that moment, had triumphed over fear.