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accumulated in their metabolisms. Conversely, jumpers might find themselves
prematurely aged if the quantum stream pushed them further into the future
with each journey. From these temporal anomalies Operation Chronos had the
192 JAMES AXLER
starting point, using the gateway technology, to develop time travel.
Without access to the specs and data of Operation Chronos, Lakesh could not
duplicate what they had done, so he determined to circumvent it. He saw to the
creation of the Omega Path program and linked it with the mat-trans gateway.
The concept was sound to dispatch Kane and Bri-gid back through time to a
point only a month before the nukecaust, so they could hopefully trigger an
alternate event horizon and thus avert the apocalypse.
The Omega Path had worked, at least insofar as translating them into a past
temporal plane, but they came to learn it was not their world's past, but
another, almost identical to it. Any actions they undertook had no bearing
whatsoever on their world's present and future.
Kane and Brigid learned the shunting to a parallel timeline was not
accidental, but an intentional act performed by Colonel Thrush himself. Thrush
claimed versions of him existed in all times to prevent his interference in
human history being undone and the nukecaust averted.
Brigid considered him to be a faux human, a fake, and that appellation proved
to be more than a guess during their final confrontation on a Manhattan
rooftop on New Year's Eve, 2000. Thrush had described himself not as a fake
human, or even an individual, but "A program. My body is mortal...the program
will simply animate another like me."
Kane had believed him to be an Archon agent, a chrononaut dispatched by the
Directorate to prevent
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193
their machinations in time from being undone. However, Thrush had never
actually admitted to working for the Archons.
Later, upon researching the database, Brigid learned that mysterious figures
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who fit Thrush's general physical description and methods popped up everywhere
throughout the past, usually in times of strife or at a crossroads in human
history.
From the era of the Roman Empire, to the UFO phenomena of the twentieth
century, sinister Men In
Black appeared, influenced events or important people, then vanished. It was
tempting to dismiss such reports as paranoid fantasies, but the database
contained stories from all over the world and from all times about the MIB.
All of the Cerberus warriors soon discovered that Thrush had not restricted
that interaction with humanity to only a single plane of existence. Somehow
he, or manifestations of himself, bridged all the vi-brational barriers
between alternate realties, the so-called Lost Earths. Neither Brigid nor
Lakesh had a clear idea of how he accomplished this, except he used the Black
Stone as a focal point in all of the parallel realities. The stone had been
known by many names, by many peoples of civilizations both primitive and
advanced Lucifer's Stone, the Kala, the Kaa'ba, the Chintamani Stone, the
Shining
Trapezo-hedron.
Always it had been associated with the concept of a key that unlocked either
the door to enlightenment or madness. It had served as the spiritual
centerpiece of the race they had known as the Archons, even after
194 JAMES AXLER
it had been fragmented and the facets scattered from one end of the earth to
the other.
According to Balam, the Black Stone was far more than a calculating device
that extrapolated outcomes from actions. Balam had said, "It brings into
existence those outcomes."
Balam had referred to the stone as a channel to sidereal space, where many
tangential points of reality lay adjacent to one another, the parallel
casements of the universe, a multitude of realities coexisting with their own.
But there was commonality linking Thrush to all of the casements, and they
learned of it during the final confrontation with the entity in a parallel
casement aboard the huge, transdimensional ship he called "the Hub."
Grant, Kane and Brigid discovered that the entity they knew as C. W. Thrush
had begun his facade of life as the envoy of the Archons, charged with the
task of arranging probabilities so humanity would be unified and therefore
safeguard the essence of the Archons.
But the task was really a program, and Thrush interpreted it as accomplishing
his objective by any means necessary. Always he sought out those whose
monomania for power was pathological. The Third Reich, the military, the
intelligence services.
They were the easiest to manipulate, because their paranoia and obsessions
blinded them to what Thrush was actually planning complete domination of the
human race. He had said once ' 'Few conspiracies succeed unless the keynote is
simplicity. Even then they succeed because humans overlook obvious dangers
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such as a blind man could see. That is why human history is such a morass of
inconsistencies."
But Thrush was more than an artificial life-form or a program his existence
was linked with that of the
Chintamani Stone. The relic was his anchor, and his life force was more than
cybernetic or extraterrestrial. It was not just unhuman; it was antihuman. He
was a blending of machine, human and
Annunaki.
More than five hundred thousand years before, the reptilian Annunaki, the
Dragon Kings of legend, had claimed Earth, all of its natural resources and
its inhabitants as their own. The Annunaki had arrived on
Earth when humankind was still in a protoform of development. They viewed
Earth as a vast treasure trove of natural resources, upon which their
technology depended. As labor was their scarcest commodity, the Annunaki set
about redesigning Earth's primitive inhabitants into models of maximized
potential.
The civilizations that had arisen in Mesopotamia had been greatly influenced
by the Annunaki. They had built a base on the moon and even used its system of
caverns as a necropolis for their dead. They, along with the more
human-appearing Tuatha de Danaan, were one of the root races of the Archons.
Due to his linkage with the Chintamani Stone, Thrush was a subjective
property, a creation of the minds of the Archons. He existed only because
those who interacted with him believed he did. He absorbed and transmitted to
the Archons emotional states of the people he came in contact with, which gave
the
Archons an idea of how best to proceed with their own plans.
196 JAMES AXLER
Kane hadn't really accepted that assessment of Thrush's existence and purpose,
since he found it difficult to hate a creature that did not truly live. It was
only during his final confrontation with Thrush aboard the
Hub that he realized the absolutely soul-deep hatred he felt toward the
creature. He saw him not as a
Man In Black, but as what he really was, an ancient evil thing that crept [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]