Decipher, p.46
Decipher, page 46
“To hell with the path-marker,” Pearce exploded excitedly, “what about those crystals? What about those rocks Ralph brought back?”
Quickly Scott set the computer to work decoding the set of glyphs it had in store already. The results were forbidding. He read them out loud:
“Within these walls lies the powers of the heavens eternal. A people dead. A spirit alive.
“Beyond these walls lie …”
“Is that word Nazareth?” November probed quietly.
“Not Nazareth,” Scott corrected. “Nasaru—it means ‘to protect’ …
“Beyond these walls lie the means to protect the sons of sons, the daughters of daughters. The children of we who were first.
“Read them aloud. Spoken like thunder. For they shall make men quake.
“Read them aloud. Spoken like thunder. If you have the means to understand.
“Behind these walls sit hope and terror.
“But upon these walls sit knowledge and power.
“Understand them. Proclaim them. Use them!
“To fail to heed instruction is to perish!
“The power of zero must be set free!”
atlantis
There’s no secret so hidden that it cannot be found, no voice so mute that it cannot be heard.
Dr. Steven Roger Fischer, Director of the Institute of Polynesian
Languages and Literatures, New Zealand, GLYPHBREAKER, 1997
CITY LIMITS
“Michaels, come in, Michaels! Do you read me? C’mon, Ray. If you can hear me, signal back.”
Hillman looked to Gant and shook his head despondently. Wherever Michaels had ended up, he was out of radio contact. The two men signaled the rest of the party to hold position while they scouted up ahead with Chow Yun.
The Chinese soldier had seen something. Something important.
Hackett watched with misgiving as they disappeared around the curve of ice at the end of the cavern some several hundred yards farther on, before scooting forward on his knees to join Scott.
“Great, Scott,” he said, full of admiration. “Y’know, this is uh, remarkable … truly, truly remarkable. You take an alphabet of sixty letters: if you write down the number of possible word permutations you can make out of an alphabet that size, you wind up writing a number with close to five or six trillion zeroes. That would take a thousand people nearly thirty years just to write down that kind of a number.”
“To get one word out of all these glyphs,” Pearce added excitedly, “a word that makes sense—is a coincidence, but three pages of text with something like ninety-eight percent accuracy? This, Richard, my friend, is the closest thing I’ve seen to a miracle.”
November glanced up from the computer and eyed her mentor warily. Was this for real? “Professor, this phrase is cropping up again. The power of zero must be set free. The power of zero? A big fat nothing?”
Scott shrugged. “I told you it didn’t make any sense.”
To the epigraphist maybe it didn’t. But to the physicist among them it sparked a deep-seated sense of curiosity. “The power of zero must be set free,” Hackett repeated studiously. “Does it mention any more about this zero?”
“Like what?”
“Does it say what kind of zero should be set free?”
“Jon,” Sarah said, suspiciously, “nothing is nothing. There is only one kind of zero.”
“No,” Hackett corrected. “There’s not.”
Scott turned squarely on the man. “What are you thinking?”
“Find me anything that might be an attempt to define zero.”
Scott reluctantly started trawling back through all his hurriedly scribbled notes and text documents on his computer. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he complained. “This is a nonsense, a riddle.” He ran his finger along the text until he found what he was looking for. “Uh, here, see? Unleash the power of zero. The spirit of nothing which is in all things. Nothing is everything. Zero power—”
“Stop right there,” Hackett begged, holding out his hand, looking Scott right in the eye. “Right there. That’s it. That’s our power source. That’s what our damn satellites have been picking up all this time. What lit up the eyes of the military and Rola Corp. The Holy Grail of fuels. Clean—free—power.”
“This makes sense to you?”
“Absolute sense,” the physicist replied. “It’s called zero point energy. Literally … something from nothing.
“You see, scientists in the nineteenth century believed in the existence of a substance called ‘ether,’” Hackett explained, “a material that occurred throughout the universe, a material that explained the wave propagation of light. Two guys, Michelson and Morley, did this famous experiment to try and detect this ‘ether’ and failed. It’s not important you understand what they did. It’s just important you know scientists have been looking for this mysterious stuff for a long time.”
The rest of the group took him at his word.
“They thought they’d pick up some kind of ‘ether wind’ as a result of the earth passing through this stuff. Einstein seized on the fact this experiment failed in order to support his special theory of relativity, the cornerstone of modern physics. Einstein maintained that space was truly empty, but his mathematics in turn led to the development and use of quantum mechanics. And in the ultimate circular argument, in the 1930s, quantum mechanics wound up creating a mathematical term for describing the ground state of any oscillating system and called it Zero Point Energy. The ‘zero point’ referred to the temperature: zero degrees Kelvin.”
“Which means what, exactly?” Sarah wanted to know.
Matheson, who was vaguely familiar with the term, answered on Hackett’s behalf. “It means energy exists even in the absence of heat. Energy is inherent in the fabric of space itself.”
“It gets better,” Hackett beamed. “The energy density, the sheer volume of stored zero point energy ready and waiting to be tapped at any point in space, is infinite.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
Hackett shook his head. “Believe me, many basic arguments in quantum mechanics do not work, unless zero point energy exists. Dirac first showed how electron-positron production could arise from vacuum fluctuations, and wound up inventing quantum electrodynamics. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle calls for quantum mechanical systems to ‘borrow’ energy from this zero point of electrical flux. Boyer used the Lorentz invariance to determine zero point energy as a function of frequency and—”
“Jon, what are you telling us?” Pearce asked, cutting the physicist dead.
“If you can figure out how to tap into it and unleash the power of zero,” he explained, “you’ll be tapping into God’s own private generator. That’s more power than you can possibly imagine.” He jerked a thumb in Gant’s estimated direction. “It makes the power of that bomb they’re out searching for look like a fart in the wind.
“If that’s what’s down here, if that’s what they picked up on satellite, a machine that has tapped into zero point energy, I’m telling you now that shutting it off by blowing it up is not a way we want to go. Zero point energy is the raw power of the universe. If you want to shut off a faucet you twist the top, you don’t knock off the tap head with a sledge hammer.
“If Gant blows up this machine, we’re talking major fucking devastation, folks. He could wind up wiping out this entire solar system.”
Hackett went quiet as the others picked over the implications.
“What kind of a machine are we talking about here?”
Matheson stepped up to the plate in response. “Nikola Tesla, back in the 1890s, was convinced it was possible to make an electrical motor that was completely wire-free, that tapped into what he called ‘the energy of nature.’ He claimed this energy could be accessed at very high frequencies. In fact, he eventually built a motor that had only one wire, but had no return circuit. The return circuit, he said, was being transmitted wirelessly through space.”
“Sounds like he was on the right track,” Sarah enthused.
“He was on the right track about a lot of things,” Matheson said warmly. “Tesla invented alternating current and radio, radar and—”
“Wait a minute,” Hackett interjected, deep in thought. “Alternating current. That couldn’t be invented without his inventing the electrical induction motor, right? A rotating magnetic field.”
“Right,” Matheson agreed happily.
“The South Pole,” Hackett pointed out, “is one end of a rotating bar magnet in space.”
“The South Pole,” Matheson added, “is also notorious for having the greatest concentration of low pressure weather fronts. Tesla discovered that gases at a reduced pressure become extremely conductive. It’s the same principle whereby strip neon lighting works.”
“Wait a minute,” Pearce chipped in. “Didn’t you once tell me superconductors and semi-conductors, the components used in computing and high end science, work best at extremely low temperatures?”
“Right,” Hackett agreed. “And what better place to build your machine than here?”
“This whole place,” November reasoned, stunned, “this whole place was chosen because the environment completely matches the requirements of this machine?”
“Not just this machine,” Hackett replied. “But the prerequisites you need to be able to tap into zero point energy.” He took a pen and started scratching out a plan in the ice. “This is what we think Atlantis looks like, right? Three huge concentric rings, many kilometers around, correct?”
The others nodded.
“Well, what the hell do you think the particle accelerator at CERN was?”
“Jon,” Scott warned, “you’re about eight steps ahead of us. More in my case because I just took a couple back.”
“Richard,” Hackett concluded, “I think Ralph here was correct with his initial assessment. I think maybe the entire city of Atlantis is one huge machine, if its purpose is to tap into zero point energy.”
Hackett continued to sketch the layout of Atlantis, as detected by the satellites, in the ice.
“Three concentric rings of Carbon 60, with two rings of water sandwiched in between, and a column of plasma coming down the center to connect it all together … It all makes sense.” He confronted the others. “There are a number of theories floating around on how to tap into zero point energy. One is Ion Acoustic Oscillation—the coherent oscillation of nuclei in a plasma, like, say, a solar storm. The theory goes that if the nuclei of the plasma can be caused to oscillate, the plasma will produce heat—more heat than the amount of energy taken to produce the plasma, which isn’t allowed under the current laws of physics. Take it one step further and the theory says you can do the same thing with solid crystals.
“Chemetskii, a Russian plasma physicist, claimed in the 1990s to have tapped zero point energy with plasma too. But his method was to get the plasma particles to undergo a cycloid motion. To go around and around in circles. He created a vortex ring plasmoid in the lab—you might know it under its other name—ball lightning. But you construct a device on a large-enough scale to create this ring in a controlled manner, like, say, through a particle accelerator—and you stand a damn good chance of harnessing the resulting power.” Hackett guided his pen around his ice map showing where the plasma might be being directed.
“The same theory hypothesizes it may also be possible to induce this cycloid motion within the nuclei of solid state magnetic materials. You’d wind up getting a solid object to pulse out acoustical waves of free energy. It particularly theorizes that crystal would be good for this.”
Hackett again guided his pen around the circles in the ice, this time directing everybody’s attention to the Carbon 60 circles.
“However, Schauberger, who works on water vortices, found that when he forced water through specially shaped spiraling tubes it induced an energy anomaly—a bluish glow in the center of the vortex,” Hackett said, drawing their attention finally to the rings of water.
“We have all three of those experiments going on right here, simultaneously. These people weren’t leaving anything to chance.”
“I heard about this engineer building a machine that may have tapped zero point energy,” Matheson told them. “Jim Griggs—yeah, that was his name. An engineer in Georgia. Invented this pump that turns cold water into steam without heat.”
“That’s impossible,” November objected. “I live in the South. I never heard of that.”
“The story goes he was doing some plumbing and found a cold-water pipe giving off steam because there was a shock wave in the pipe. So he built a device to reproduce these effects. He had this drum and drilled lots of different-sized holes all over it. Then he put the drum inside a large tube, then when the water was pumped in he rotated the inner drum. Millions of shock waves superheated the water. It worked so well NASA has it now. They’ve been studying it for ten years. Can’t find a thing wrong with it. And they get more energy out than they put in.”
“Water has the best potential for energy,” Sarah agreed. “On its own it’s harmless, but it’s made up of hydrogen and oxygen—two of the most explosive elements there are.”
“I know the military have been testing an electric gun,” Pearce revealed. “They used water as the projectile instead of a bullet. Shot a thimbleful at a three-quarter-inch aluminum plate. It cut straight through it like a laser, using more energy than they put in.”
“A cubic inch of space,” Hackett reiterated, “is filled with so much zero point energy it would run the world for a billion years.”
“Tapping this zero point energy,” Scott observed, “everything seems to depend on rotating or spinning something. We’re at the South Pole, the bottom of the earth—the axis on which this whole planet revolves. Does that make a difference?”
“Oh, yeah,” Hackett agreed coldly. “A whole world of difference. Laithwaite, a gyroscope physicist, noted that a precessing gyroscope that was displaced along a cycloid path would show signs of inertial and/or a gravitational anomaly if it came into contact with zero point energy.” He let the words sink in. “Precessing means basically ‘wobbling.’ That’s what earth does. The fact that it spins means it’s a gyroscope, but it’s also moving in a cycloid motion—orbiting the sun. And it’s wobbling about its axis. The wobble takes 26,000 years to do a complete cycle. It’s why thousands of years ago constellations like Orion were in a different position in the sky and the Pole Star used to be a different star. It used to be Draco—associated with Lucifer, the Fallen One.”
“A gravitational anomaly?” Pearce asked excitedly. “Like maybe anti-gravity? An anti-gravity wave, shielding the earth from the sun?”
“Bob, I like you, but I wouldn’t want to see you working with subatomic particles. You can’t shield the earth from gravity,” Hackett said, dismissive. “It doesn’t work like that. You can shield against light, electricity, magnetism. You can shield against all that. But you can’t shield against gravity. It’s not like you can create an anti-gravity wave to cancel the other wave out.”
“Are you sure about that?” Sarah asked provocatively.
“Nope,” Hackett retorted without missing a beat. “Besides, the effects Laithwaite described were time related. The pace of time would be altered closer to the anomaly.”
“Oh shit, talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Destroy the machine and we die,” Pearce said. “Do nothing while the sun goes ballistic—and we still die. Unless we do as the writing says, of course. Follow the instructions and unleash the power of zero.”
“That’s a lot of power to be tapping into,” Sarah sighed. “God’s own power station. What does Atlantis want it for? You don’t just tap into a vast reservoir of energy because you can. You do it because you want to use it for something. What?”
“Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet … Then came flashes of lightning, peals of thunder and an earthquake and violent hail.”
They all turned their attention on November. She was deep in thought, recalling her Scripture. She let her voice grow stronger and more resonant.
“I heard a sound coming out of the heavens,” she said. “Like the sound of the ocean or the roar of thunder … And I saw in heaven another sign, great and wonderful … I seemed to be looking at a sea of crystal suffused with fire …” She smiled, knowing she had their complete attention. “The Book of Revelation,” she said. “The sea appeared frozen like crystal—like my glass of Coke back in the lab, remember?”
“My God, is that it?” Matheson asked anxiously. “Could that be it? All those sonic streams pumping acoustic waves around the oceans of the planet? It only takes a frequency shift to start producing standing waves. To start turning the ocean into one giant quasicrystal.”
Hackett held his hand up as he chewed over the theory rapidly. He couldn’t see a problem. “It might be,” he said quietly. “It might just be. You can’t protect against a gravity wave per se. But you can take safety precautions. You want to protect an egg? You put it in an egg-box. You want to stop a flood? You want to stop the seas from swilling around and spilling all over the continents? You freeze the ocean.”
“What about the mantle?” Sarah asked.
Scott was nodding. “That’s right. Earth crust displacement. The entire surface of the earth was made to slide across the liquid inner molten core.”
“Well, who’s to say they didn’t think of that, and that these quasicrystal waves aren’t being pumped into the earth’s core as well?” November offered. “Make the entire planet one huge solid object for one brief moment.”
“It’s zero point energy,” Scott agreed. “It’s not like Atlantis needs to worry about where all the energy is gonna come from. It’s already been tapped.”
Pearce gave November the most admiring look. “You, young lady, might be a genius.”
November blushed a thank you.
“The only problem I have,” Hackett pointed out, “is that if you pump that much energy into a system, where does it all go afterward? It doesn’t just disappear; it had to be removed somehow. That much energy unleashed into a system would wind up causing as much damage as the gravity wave in the first place.”
