Audiobook: Soulwaves Insertions One to Six

Insertion 1.

The Scroll.

This is going to hurt.

These were the last words I remember before the accident.

The rest was a blur.

The taste of blood in my mouth.

Feeling loose teeth.

The pain in both my arms.

Seeing a bone sticking out of my leg.

Thanking God my helmet lessened the blow to my head.

Worrying about my new electric bike.

An elderly woman coming towards me from her car.

I didn't see you.

I am so sorry.

The paramedics asking,

Pamela stay with us.

The neck brace going on.

The mask being placed over my mouth.

Feeling almost giggly with whatever gas they were giving me.

Then the pain dissipating before I lost consciousness.

I have no memory of getting to the hospital or going into the operating theatre.

The next thing I remember was floating above my body.

Seeing a throng of doctors and nurses patching me up.

Just vague memories of what was said.

We're losing her.

Clear.

It must be about then that I went through the light tunnel and emerged in a chamber.

I think there were 12 of them,

But I only remember one of them clearly.

I am unity,

I think she said.

I remember she sat on a cube between two pillars that seemed to stretch to infinity above her head.

Her head had a strange crown with a luminous globe on top of it.

She was beautiful and both youthful and as old as time.

She rolled up a scroll she had been reading and handed it to me and said,

All you need to know is in here.

This is yours now.

Clear.

Time to go back,

Unity said.

I will walk in with you.

It took three months before I could walk without crutches again.

The elderly lady,

Mavis,

Came to see me each week.

Out of guilt,

I think.

The first thing I said to her was,

You don't get many Mavises these days.

I told her it wasn't her fault and that I had just got excited on my first day out on my new electric bike.

The insurance company never did pay out.

The letter even explained how it wasn't generally known that modern speedometers kept a time and date stamp record of all speeds above 15.

5 miles an hour when the battery was engaged.

The cloud was keeping tracks on the minutiae of so many human activities these days.

What I didn't tell Mavis was that she only had a year before she was to return to the light.

I didn't tell any of the doctors or nurses that I knew the day that each of them would die too.

It was just a new knowing.

I did tell Adrienne,

My occupational therapist,

Not to get engaged to her bullying boyfriend Ken.

That was the learning as I had a bit of a relapse after that session and needed to go back on morphine.

It was around then that Unity started talking to me.

At first,

This was in drug-induced doses and in my dreams.

It wasn't long though before I could ask a question and she would answer back.

It was always in my right ear.

It was also then that I found the scroll.

Look in your backpack,

She'd said.

I hadn't opened it since the accident.

How do I open it,

I asked.

You don't,

Unity explained.

Just touch it and you will know what it is you need to know.

Like the lottery results?

You don't need to know them as you won't need the money,

She said.

And don't tell anyone anything if they don't ask.

But what about things I want to know?

Unity said.

What like?

Can I ask about the date of my death?

You can ask that,

Unity said.

But you might not like the answer.

Go ahead.

The answer came back in a soft male voice in my left ear.

The 4th of March,

2080.

But that's the date of my accident.

Exactly.

That's when the old you died,

Unity explained.

We are the new you now.

Can I ask when the new us die then?

You can ask anything,

Unity assured me.

I learned right then that the scroll didn't always give an answer.

When I questioned Unity on this,

She merely said,

You will only get an answer when you ask the right question.

While I was in hospital,

I tried asking this question again a few different ways,

But to no avail.

When I got out of hospital,

Events took over,

Such that it never came to my mind to ask it again.

Tracy,

My cleaner,

Had kept my flat looking spotless.

Thank God it was on the ground floor.

My worry of getting into work without a bike disappeared when I learned I was being made redundant.

It will take us less than 6 months,

Unity said,

When I asked her if my redundancy payment would tide me over before I could get another job.

I'm not sure exactly how the word got out,

But the first client just approached me out of the blue.

I'd only been out of hospital for 2 weeks,

And I was managing to get around my flat with a walking stick.

I suspected it might have been Adrienne,

The therapist,

Who had recommended me.

This was because,

At first,

The clients just wanted relationship advice.

Should I dump my girlfriend?

Should I leave my husband?

Which dating app should I use?

The advice from the scroll must have been right,

As nobody asked for their £50 back.

I never told any of them that I also knew the date of their death.

It was also around then that my dialogues with Unity abated.

The male voice in my left ear also stopped.

I just knew things.

Strangely,

I felt no sense of abandonment.

It was a new feeling of contentment.

I felt assured and comfortable in my own skin,

For the first time in my life.

Lucy and I became one.

Unity was right.

In less than 6 months,

I was earning more each month than I ever did in my dead-end job.

Things were about to take off in a way I could never have expected.

One of my first paying clients,

A shy but very pleasant man called Paul,

Got back in touch.

I'm getting married and have never been happier thanks to you,

He told me.

And my wife-to-be asked if she could use your services.

It turned out his wife,

Gillian,

Was a high-flyer in the city and an expert in something I had never heard about called futures.

So you know I know nothing about the financial world of stocks and shares,

I explained on our first session,

Which she insisted on paying £250 for up front.

That's exactly why I want to engage you,

Said Gillian.

So,

At the end of each week,

She sent me what were,

In essence,

Three multiple-choice questions.

I didn't understand many of the questions or the significance of any of the answers.

Each week I saw another £250 ended up in my account for something that took me and the scroll less than five minutes to do.

So how much does your psychic relationship advice line generate each month?

Gillian asked on our third call only three months later.

I admired her directness and replied,

Last month has been my best,

Just over 5K.

Gillian asked on our second call only three months later.

How would you feel if we doubled it and added some bonuses on top?

Another month in and I stopped giving out relationship advice.

I told Paul and Gillian not to mention to a soul anything about my previous services at their very lavish wedding,

Where I was somewhat embarrassed to have been seated on the top table.

The best man never knew why I spurned his advances.

I knew right away that he had slept with the chief bridesmaid only the night before,

And now her husband had turned up.

He was short of a conquest on the wedding night.

Two years later I'd amassed over a million pounds of spare cash,

Which thanks to Gillian's help was earning more in interest than I could ever spend each year.

So I moved out of my cosy two-bedroom flat in Slough and moved to a custom-built low-energy house with the most amazing views over the Moulton Hills.

The sunsets were sublime.

Gillian's task got more detailed and complex,

But never took much over an hour or so for me to complete.

So I found myself two tutors,

One to teach me piano,

And the other who taught me the art of watercolouring.

After five more glorious years,

I got a surprise from Gillian to tell me that my services were no longer required.

Apparently their AI algorithms had learned enough from my predictions and could now do the job just as well.

This was no ordinary redundancy though,

As Gillian introduced me to two new lucrative private clients.

The signing of both non-disclosure agreements cost me well over £250,

000,

With a top lawyer that Gillian had introduced me to.

She'd factored his costs into a massive golden goodbye payment.

The first client was no less than Pope Joan,

The world's first female pope.

She wanted my help in choosing the elements of which religions could be kept intact,

Which needed modification,

And which was past its use-by date.

I found the research into comparative religious studies fascinating.

It was a real window into the human condition.

The scroll was an invaluable aid in helping to differentiate between what was God-given and what was man-made.

The Ecumenical Project spread over seven years and involved many visits to Vatican City.

Pope Joan and I became good friends.

She of course never learned about the existence of the scroll.

At our very first meeting,

She had said,

You have another worldly quality to you,

And look so young for someone in their late fifties.

I had of course noticed that I'd not aged one bit since the accident.

I never met the other client,

Nor learned of his name or location.

His questions were mostly of an off-worldly nature and arrived only by email.

His payments were out of this world too,

Not that I needed the money.

I'd even been accepting priceless artworks from Pope Joan rather than cash.

Are there any more impactors that can hit in the next 30 years?

Which of these nanofan configurations will give the most lift?

Are the Bajie dolphins really extinct on earth now?

I guessed from this last question that this enigmatic client was based in China.

What was weird was the scroll remained silent on any of my own questioning about this client or his business.

I knew not to force the issue.

My work with Pope Joan was taking most of my time and attention,

And the second client sometimes only sent one question a month.

They were getting more and more obscure and somewhat unsettling.

How many more pulses are due before the big one?

How many should we transfer to the moon base?

How many tets should we take to Mars?

There was no mention of any moon base or Mars mission in the news.

Human space exploration had pretty much stopped by the time I was born in the thirties.

The loss of so many souls on the meteorite collision with the ISS had seen to that.

Unsettled by the questioning from my second client,

In 2090 I moved to Switzerland.

Partly to minimise my tax liability,

But mainly to get as far away and high up as possible from the coast.

The sea level rise was real.

I could also get to Rome in just an hour by maglev.

My new house was halfway between Wisp and Zermatt,

On a west-facing mountainside.

My route up from my garage was via a private funicular railway carriage.

Above ground there was a single-storey,

Semi-circular,

Quadruple-glazed panoramic open-plan lounge and kitchen-diner,

With a master bedroom and a wet room in a side annex.

It also had a cinema room and an art studio with sublime light.

I never needed any of the three spare bedrooms,

Each with its own en-suite.

The outer layer of glass was photovoltaic,

I was told,

Coupled with a wind turbine and a bank of batteries,

I generated more electricity than I could use.

The arrival of my grand piano,

By heavy-duty lifting drone,

Was quite spectacular,

And timed for a relatively wind-free day.

Where the house got interesting was below ground,

Cut into the mountainside.

There was a whole duplicated living area,

Which was hermetically sealed with its own air supply that could last for weeks.

It was illuminated in the daytime by a light pipe from the surface of the mountain.

My questioning of the scroll yielded nothing.

Will I ever need to use this underground facility?

Why have I moved here?

Pope John's work dried up in 2095,

And the enigmatic client went quiet on me around the end of 2096.

For the first time since the accident,

I was at a loose end without a plan,

So I asked the scroll for direction.

For the first time in many years,

The male voice appeared again in my left ear.

Write THE book.

Not the book,

Or a book,

But definitely THE book.

So I started working on a life opus,

Using the scroll to direct and guide me.

I decided to write it longhand too.

The title that the scroll gave to me was the Duodex.

It was a cross between a contemporary bible and an operating manual for humans.

The work became all-consuming,

And I had no idea that I would never see it published on the earth.

Each of the twelve chapters was taking the best part of a year to research and write.

Pope John had kindly arranged for me to have unlimited access to the Vatican libraries.

In my work with Pope John,

I'd learned some Aramaic,

Sanskrit and Greek,

And became fluent in Latin.

Writing the book was so consuming that I hardly noticed the turning of the old century and the start of the new.

But towards the end of the first decade of the 22nd century,

The end finally came in sight for the book.

I was completing the twelfth chapter.

This brought it all together.

The meaning of life,

Why we were born and why we had to die,

Where we went in between lives.

It even explained near-death experiences,

Walk-ins,

And the nature of otherworldly beings like unity.

I finished it around dusk on the 16th of March 2109.

Unity unexpectedly spoke to me again the very next morning,

When I awoke from the hypnopompic state.

Her voice was unmistakably in my right ear.

Get downstairs and into the sealed area,

We have less than an hour,

And bring your manuscript.

I moved quickly,

Even though I still had a fair old limp.

An hour later,

Everything went quiet.

Very quiet.

I switched on the news channels.

Nothing.

There was no access to the cloud either.

I felt strangely alone.

The even stranger thing still was the light from the pipe.

It was much brighter than on the sunniest of days.

Unity spoke again.

A supernova has terminated all life on the planet.

We are the only one now.

Humanity's time on earth is over,

As is ours.

You mean I am about to die,

I asked?

Not die,

Ascend,

Said Unity.

And you were taking your book with you.

I grabbed my manuscript,

Which was quite heavy by now.

The next thing I knew,

I was floating up the life pipe with Unity,

Out of the mountainside and taken high above the earth.

I watched the planet being enveloped in a white mist.

In every direction around me was the brightest of lights in a myriad of colours.

Ochres,

Azures,

Teals and intense violets.

I was in outer space with no space suit or protection,

But there was no panic,

No gasping for air,

Just a sense of peace and a job having come to completion.

Before I knew it,

I was back in the centre of the chamber,

Surrounded by twelve beings.

Unity was sitting back on the throne.

She was holding the scroll.

I looked down and saw I was holding a leather-bound tome with the words,

The Duodex,

Embossed on the cover.

Insertion 2,

Dua.

When you have been around for as long as time itself,

You have a lot of time on your hands to experiment and optimise in order to get things just right.

Dua,

Counsellor 2,

Had been tasked from the outset with managing the planets so they could harbour life.

For the first few billion years,

He had little to do.

The stars weren't ready.

When you sit outside space and time,

Hanging around waiting for matters in the density,

To be ready takes no time at all.

He was never bored,

Just always ready.

Before Dua could get started,

He had to wait for the second generation of stars to die.

This was so there were enough heavy elements around for accretion disks to form around the third generation of stars.

The star systems handed over for Dua to begin his task looked like two fried eggs stuck together,

Each with a tiny yolk of a central star,

With one inverted with respect to the other.

The Counsellors referred to any solar system with such a disk as having reached the Saturn phase.

Dua had no preconditions set upon him,

Other than to stabilise the new solar systems,

So they were ready for life to be inserted.

He also had billions and billions of permutations to play with,

Billions of star systems in billions of galaxies.

Counsellor Seven had said to him that if he got just one viable solar system in each galaxy,

The Higher Counsellor would consider that a success.

She didn't tell him that in other universes,

Mixing of intelligent lifeforms too early had led to whole galaxies becoming unviable before their time.

Dua's brief was to focus on solitary stars only.

The High Counsell had a different role for binary and tertiary systems.

They would be the life-givers and takers.

Clusters were to be used as portals.

It transpired to be relatively easy to create life.

Dua just had to wait for the accretion disk to crystallise to form rocky and gaseous planets.

The problem was always in getting the life to stick around for any meaningful length of time.

Atoms naturally want to form molecules,

And molecules naturally clump together to form larger conglomerations.

Getting the macromolecules to replicate is just a matter of giving them enough time,

An electric spark,

And cooking them at the right temperature and pressure.

The challenge that Dua faced was giving them any meaningful lifespan.

It was much easier to create self-replicating molecules in gaseous giants.

Most only lived for a fraction of a second,

And nanosecond was typical.

With some exceptionally popping in and out of existence for around a millisecond.

This gave no time for evolution to kick in.

An insertion was called for.

Actually,

Multiple insertions were required into billions of planets with life-bearing potential.

The solution was the same on each.

A counsellor who lives out of time can be inserted into the density of space-time in an unlimited number of instances.

The entry point is the very centre of a planet,

Which happens to always be a tiny black hole.

A point of infinite density and no time.

It provides an instantaneous bridge between the void and the density for a counsellor.

So at the same time,

On a near infinity of planets,

Dua entered the density and got to work literally putting a spin on things.

The reason replicating molecules had trouble stabilising was that they had loose ends,

And they would unravel as soon as they formed.

If Dua had hands,

He would have waved them.

If you could have been in any gaseous giant at that time,

You would have seen a translucent egg shimmering and floating around with dark patches where arms and legs might have appeared.

The egg was spinning at an incredible rate.

The eddies created in the primordial gaseous soup whizzed the protolife into longer and longer chains.

Life was being spiralised.

Not long after Dua's extraction back to the void via the central black hole,

Did protolife's strands form vast chains that encircled the whole circumference of planets.

The gas giants became vast breeding grounds.

The bombardment phase was next.

This was a brutal period when life was brought to the inner rocky planets.

Each solar system was surrounded by a circular cloud of water-ice objects.

As the space between stars was still littered with wandering planets,

It was easy for Dua to create a temporary black hole and gravity well near to a solar system.

This would attract such interstellar wanderers to come crashing into the water-ice clouds.

The disturbance pushed many objects into the inner solar system.

They were attracted to the gas giants and most were absorbed by them.

Some,

Though,

Grazed past,

Skimming off the upper atmosphere like a pebble on a pond.

Many of these ended up in the central star,

But there were enough to take spirals of replicating life molecules with them in the inner rocky planets.

They were about to become enlivened.

A billion or more years of linear time would pass before the inner rocky planets cooled enough for the next phase.

In the interim,

Dua used them as ultra-slow cookers for primordial soup.

The water-ice clouds contained all sorts of exotic liquids,

Which combined with star water to form lakes,

Seas and oceans.

While H2O was abundant,

Lakes of H6O3,

H12O6 and H1809 could be found,

Alongside veritable soups of liquid methane,

All kinds of alcohols,

Acids,

Aldehydes and ketones.

Dua appeared as an egg on selected target planets from time to time,

To stir up the cocktail and to observe goings-on in the density for himself.

He started to build walls around spiral molecules with a variety of attributes.

Some of these cells gained the ability to self-propel themselves around by expelling jets of fluid.

Next,

Rather than just macromolecules themselves replicating,

Dua engineered it so cells could make copies of themselves.

Dua experimented joining cells together and adding external structures to increase solidity and give rise to form.

Some of these ventured out of the seas onto the land.

Many perished of course,

But none of them looked up at the stars and wondered where they came from,

Yet.

Another billion years passed before in one galaxy it was time to try a new experiment for the first time.

The problem that Dua was now faced with was the current rate of evolution was not fast enough to produce self-aware life before the host star would run out of fuel.

There was an average-sized star in quite a dull galaxy that harboured six inner rocky planets and four medium-sized gas giants.

The gas giants were still teeming with self-replicating molecules,

Some of which had spontaneously evolved into multicellular life.

The third planet out was a tidal-locked binary planet where there were two equally-sized planets orbiting at the same distance from the home star but diametrically opposite to each other.

Let's call these two planets A and B.

If you had a telescope on one planet you would never be able to see the other as it was hidden behind the central sun.

You would also not be aware that one of the planets contra-rotated with respect to the other.

Planet A revolved the same way as the central star and planet B the other way.

Dewar only had one solar system in one galaxy to play with that had two planets that behaved this way.

Life on each of the planets had reached a similar level of evolution but the multicell life on planet A would primarily move in clockwise circles when compared with the proto-organisms on planet B.

It didn't require an insertion from Dewar to pull off the next trick.

He aligned the four gaseous giants such that they were stacked up behind planet B.

The gravitational tug pulled it away from the sun by just enough that its orbital speed slowed down relative to planet A.

Only a few hundred thousand years later planet B sank back down into its original orbit right on top of planet A.

The collision was cataclysmic.

Much,

But by no means all,

Life was wiped out.

When the two planets recovered the light mantle of both planets coalesced into a large moon orbiting the new parent planet.

The parent planet was at quite a tilt now which led to a seasonality in light and weather conditions.

The extrusion of the moon would also give rise in time to a clock which more advanced lifeforms could time their ovulation to.

When it came a little closer to the parent planet in two billion years' time it would also give sentient life something to ponder on.

They would wonder why it was the same size as the host star when viewed from the surface of the parent planet.

These spin-offs were incidental though to what then happened to life.

The moon had a brief phase where life flourished on the surface but it soon lost its atmosphere and both life and water went underground.

They would lie hidden there till many years later.

On the parent planet things started to kick off at a pace.

Most of the clockwise spinning life on the original planet A came from the largest gaseous planet.

On planet B the anti-clockwise spinning life mostly came from the next largest gaseous planet adorned with a resplendent ring system.

An explosion of crossbreeding was triggered.

Whole new strands of life emerged lichens,

Ferns and grasses as well as some tiny worms.

Some of these quickly evolved into flattened tapeworms hundreds of metres long.

Not that anyone was around to measure them.

Water-based creatures sprouted fins to propel themselves around and gills to breathe in the acrid air.

Some of these breached the surface and started to fly.

The flying creatures went from plant to plant and accelerated their evolution.

The planet was coming to life like no other planet in the cosmos.

Dewa was congratulated by the other counsellors for his innovation and patience.

Now the moon was in place it was time to instigate the next major phase of evolution.

The odd-numbered counsellors possessed an essence we now refer to as female.

They were intuitive and devoted themselves to the big picture.

The even-numbered counsellors were male in essence and like Dewa,

Delighted in getting down to the nitty-gritty and the devil in the detail.

It was now time to imbue these essences to life on the newly merged planet.

It was time for the division of the sexes.

Insertion 3.

Sol.

There was to be no hunting today.

This wasn't just because two members of the tribe died yesterday and that their flesh would keep hunger away for those remaining until the next sunrise.

It was because Ada and Eva had given no instructions to their menfolk of when or where to hunt.

They knew today was a day for the group to stay together.

Such instructions were not verbal as hominids had yet to gain the power of speech.

Ada and Eva had developed an elaborate map of the territory around them.

The map was carved into a flat area in one of the larger branches of their treetop dwelling.

The edges of the map changed over the seasons so the menfolk could still go out just before daybreak and return before dusk.

Ada and Eva just knew the hunting territory intimately.

They could sense the movement of creatures and they knew when they would go down to the water to drink.

This was when they were easiest to kill.

Ada and Eva showed their menfolk where to go each day to find the weakest and safest prey.

The less time the menfolk left the protection of the canopy,

The better.

They remembered every single kill in the version of the map encoded inside their hippocampi.

They even knew when new life came along,

When it would be ready to kill and how to ensure pregnant mammals were spared.

This kept their food supply constant and the food chain intact.

After their menfolk returned,

Each evening Ada and Eva created an energy shield around their treetop home so that predators could not penetrate at night.

This included the smallest of venomous spiders and tree frogs,

The sneakiest of snakes and the most dangerous of the large cats.

They could not protect their menfolk when they were out hunting though.

That's why this evening's meal would be from their own kind,

As two of them got too close to a jaguar.

Nothing could be wasted as the margins between life and death were so slim.

While cannibalism sounds barbaric to humans who might be listening to this tale many millions of years after it unfolded,

It played a vital role in both survival and evolution back then.

The young that ate their elder tribe picked up on their experiences.

With no formal education system and short lifespans,

This meant ten-year-old males were ready to hunt and females of the same age ready to bear the next generation.

Ada and Eva didn't know it,

But they loved each other.

Their hearts had been entwined since they first separated at birth.

They didn't share thoughts,

As self-awareness had yet to come,

But they shared the same feelings and the same knowings.

The twins didn't share their menfolk,

But they did share one thing that was unique amongst early hominids.

They shared a mother who was still alive by the time their own children had reached puberty.

With an average longevity of only around 20,

Not many children still had a granny when they reached their tenth summer.

The maternal instinct was strong in early hominids.

As granny provided the childcare,

This created much time for the twins to wander and to wonder.

After feeding their young,

During the daytime they descended to the forest floor and communed with nature around them.

With a touch they knew what plants were safe to eat and which berries they could pick.

The trees told them where to tap their bark so they could extract healing poultices for cuts and abrasions on their tribefolk.

Both of them had the touch and even animals would come to them for healing,

Even those who might be hunted and killed by their menfolk only a few days later.

On this particular day,

Not only was there to be no hunting,

But the twins had a sense of foreboding and knew that any foraging was off the agenda too.

It was this innate wisdom of the twins that had attracted Trinity's attention.

The Council of the Light had given Councilor Three,

Who was known as Trinity when she inserted into the density,

Quite a weighty task,

With an unknown outcome.

Trinity was responsible for micromanaging the next phase of evolution for both cetacean and hominid consciousness.

She had made great strides forwards with dolphins and whales,

But the land-based candidates were still some hundreds of thousands of years behind.

This is because undetected insertions were that much easier into the oceans than on land.

Her form was undetectable by sonar and invisible at night,

Or in the daytime more than 30 metres down.

Ava was unaware that Ada was called Ada,

And Ada was oblivious that Ava was called Ava.

These were names by which Trinity referred to them.

Proto-humanoids like the twins were the smartest of the smart primates.

Jua's work had led them to possessing a unique bilateral consciousness in their two brain hemispheres,

One hemisphere gnosis detail and the other the bigger picture.

It was now Councilor Three's turn to install the third aspect.

The twins would be the first.

On the day of Trinity's brief insertion,

What would constitute breakfast for the tribe consisted of nuts and berries.

As the sun came to the ascendancy that morning,

The forest went unexpectedly quiet.

No birds,

No animal calls.

Even the trees stopped talking.

Ada and Ava's mother had experienced this once before and got the whole tribe to huddle around the large central trunk of their abode.

All that is except Ada and Ava who ignored their mother's shrieks.

They climbed to the highest point in the tree that would sustain their combined weight,

Just in time to see a bite being taken from the sun.

They were about to experience their first and last total eclipse.

When the light from the local star is removed from the front and back of a planet,

The veil between the void and the density becomes very thin.

At the very point of maximum occlusion,

The councilors can step in momentarily.

As the sun became totally consumed,

Ada and Ava were in awe and not scared.

They did not see the translucent ellipsoid form that spontaneously appeared and hovered behind them.

They also didn't see two ethereal wisps emerging from the dark patches at the top of the egg.

They did feel something strange though as the tendrils touched the tops of their heads.

They both shivered as the energy entered their crowns and enveloped their bodies.

They put the chill down to the lack of sunlight.

Beneath the surface of their cranium,

On the left and right hand sides,

Two new areas of neurons spontaneously grew.

The twins felt faint as the splendour of the eclipse was replaced by a kaleidoscope of coloured flashes.

Four million years later,

Earth scientists would be able to peer into the brains of people while they were alive and see these language sensors light up when they spoke.

Trinity withdrew from the density as the ring of the sun became visible again and Ada pointed at it and uttered the single word,

Sol.

Eva knew what she meant and pointed at Ada,

Saying,

Ada.

And Ada pointed back at her sibling and said,

Eva.

Trinity was pleased to announce to her fellow counsellors the word has been made flesh.

She knew she would only have to wait a few more years for the consumption of the flesh of the twins before their newfound ability was passed on to the others.

Insertion 4.

The Quad.

It was Triton's observational and mathematical prowess that had brought him to such prominence.

Emperor Min had no idea he was useless as a magician and sorcerer,

Even though he was the head of the School of Keys.

Triton helped Emperor Min make all his decisions based on observations he made on the wandering stars.

He had six retrograde movements to play with,

Where he generally would advise caution.

Three of such movements came from the messengers.

The crescent planets,

Maya,

Ter and Afro,

And three from the demigods of Zus,

Kronos and Aura.

When two or more planets reached conjunction,

Triton encouraged Min to move forward on crucial decisions.

This was his only real and not inconsiderable talent.

The Emperor thought it was magic,

Only because he didn't understand it,

And Triton kept his source of guidance secret.

Such surety in his leadership had led Emperor Min to be adulated by most of the populace,

And even deified by some.

The Emperor was oblivious to Triton's brilliant treatise on the movement of the Wanderers.

Unlike the fixed stars,

Triton had correctly theorised that they were all planets like their own Lemu.

Furthermore,

That both the Wanderers and Lemu orbited Sol,

Their central star.

Triton knew that the High Priestess Zara would see it as sacrilege if the notion leaked out that Lemu was not the centre of the cosmos.

Triton preferred his head to be attached to his neck and shoulders,

So shared his theories with only his own inner circle.

More accurately,

His inner circle was the square of four of his most talented acolytes from the School of Keys.

They held their sessions in a quad at the very centre of the school,

Which was only accessible by a set of secret doors and passages.

He gave Shin,

The brightest and most talented of his four,

The task of checking his mathematics from his new treatise.

Shin was only three Sols old.

He confirmed that Maya,

The Red Wanderer,

Orbited Sol exactly twice for every single Lemu orbit.

The Blue-Green Tear took around four orbits for their one,

And the Orange Afro about five.

The three other boys in the group were all four Sols old and worked together checking Shin's workings.

They didn't particularly like the young know-it-all.

Shin was able to confirm that the Outer Wanderers were ponderous in their orbits.

Zeus took three times as long as Lemu for one tour around Sol.

Kronos went around the star seven times more slowly,

And the orbital period of Aura was twelve times slower than that of Lemu.

The High Priestess would have had Triton doubly decapitated if that was even possible.

If she learned that he taught his quad of acolytes to use the mathematics of Base 60,

Rather than using the sacrosanct number 12 for their calculations and computations.

Not that Sara knew what Base 60 or Base 12 was.

Her magic was not that of numbers.

Seasonal variations on the planet Lemu were mild.

Triton had even worked out that the inclination of their home planet was around 12 degrees relative to its orbital plane.

He had also established that their moon Celes made exactly 12 orbits of Lemu every time they made one orbit of Sol.

It was almost as if somebody had placed it there as a cosmic timekeeper of their months.

Sara and Triton would never learn how aligned their models of the cosmos were.

Sara believed affairs on their planet were influenced by the patterns in the fixed stars that changed their positions at night over the seasons.

Her advice to Min was based on whisperings she received when in a drug-induced trance from what she only knew to be the Council of Twelve.

It was a shame Sara and Triton mistrusted each other.

Each of them vied for Emperor Min's attention and Min fed this disquiet between them by telling each of them that he favoured the advice of the other.

Min knew this was the best way to keep each of them on their toes.

Sara also had her acolytes from the School of Wu.

Her inner circle consisted of seven of the most talented Wu.

Unlike Triton's quad,

Sara's inner circle were all at least seven Sols old.

They were called the Siv.

Min favoured using Sara and her seven Wu when he wanted to alter the elements in his favour.

The Wu were as adept at weather manipulation as they were at modulating Min's moods.

Limu was the smallest of what Triton did not know were the rocky planets orbiting Sol.

He didn't know either that each of the rocky planets was miniscule in size when compared to what he also didn't know were the outer gas giants.

On the day that marked his acolyte Shin's fourth orbit of Sol,

Triton was about to discover that he wasn't Limu's leading authority on the goings-on in the heavens.

Are you sure?

He boomed,

His voice reverberating around the quad.

Yes,

Said Shin meekly.

Over the course of one Sol,

The inner messengers changed speed.

Shin had become adept at making measurements of the position of the wandering stars with the device Triton had developed,

The stellarometer.

It sat in the centre of a huge sphere not far from the quad and the faint light from the planets was reflected and refracted onto the opposite wall of the sphere.

This meant the measurements were much more precise than could ever be achieved by eye.

So there must be another messenger influencing their orbits,

Confirmed one of the other boys,

Who had been checking Shin's calculations.

It's called Hermes,

Announced Shin,

And it orbits Sol 16 times faster than we do.

So very close to Sol,

Mused Triton.

And there's another demigod called Poseidon,

Said Shin.

What was concerning Triton was not only Shin's surety and greater knowledge,

But that he was naming these hidden planets.

Shin had not finished with his revelations.

There's also a small wanderer much further out called Hades,

He announced,

Adding meekly,

I've not worked out its orbit yet though.

That'll be all for today boys,

Said Triton.

But you stay,

Shin.

Triton was pleased on the one hand that Shin had given him even more sources of data with which he could direct Emperor Min.

On the other hand,

He felt he may well be grooming his successor.

It wasn't just that Shin was more gifted as a mathematician than Triton had been at the same age.

What concerned Triton was that Shin seemed to possess some of the skills of a Wu.

From when he'd first took Shin into the school,

He'd noticed him disappearing from one side of the classroom and appearing on the other.

This was something he'd only seen Sara do,

Along with some of her acolytes.

It was time to confront him.

I'm so proud of your observations,

Shin,

Said Triton.

But tell me where you get the names of the wanderers from.

The egg,

Answered Shin.

Alarm bells went off in Triton's head.

He'd heard Sara telling Min that she had also seen a mysterious egg.

So where can I see this egg?

Asked Triton.

Shin was too young to have the guile to prevaricate,

So walked to the centre of the quad and just came out with,

It always appears right here.

I see nothing.

When does it appear?

Triton was getting excited,

While Shin was getting more and more nervous.

He knew his game was up.

Shin could sense what was coming and with a circle of pee ran down his leg,

Under his tunic,

Onto the floor of the quad.

I come here after dark,

When we are all supposed to be asleep,

Shin admitted.

Inwardly cursing,

He did not know how to lie.

But the secret doors are locked,

Protested Triton.

Never for me,

Admitted Shin,

Knotting his hands together in a strange contortion.

I just make this shape and they open.

And when you are here,

Does the egg just appear?

No,

I have to summon it,

Said Shin.

Now,

Shin walked to one of the corners of the quad and whispered,

By the fire of Zeus I call thee.

In the next corner,

With the waters of Maia,

I call thee.

In the third corner,

From the air of Afro,

I conjure thee.

And in the final corner,

Into the density on Lemu,

I command you to appear.

The air fizzed and cracked,

And right in front of Triton's eyes,

A translucent egg appeared,

Appearing off the ground and spinning slowly.

It changed in size slightly as it spoke,

To vibrate the air around it.

Counselor Thor said to Shin,

How can I serve you today?

Shin didn't know the egg was a counselor,

Or anything about the council of the light.

He just knew his name was Quo.

Can you show my master and teacher what you showed me,

Quo?

The egg expanded in size,

And subsumed both Shin and Triton into its form.

It started spinning faster,

And before they knew it,

They flew high above the quad and the school.

The egg took them out higher still,

So for the first time,

Triton could see the whole of his home planet,

From above one of the poles.

The two continents were clear to see,

One on each side of the planet.

He noticed the gap between their northernmost points was much closer than he thought.

He'd only seen them outlined on maps before.

Few from his continent of Shad had ever crossed the shared ocean to the slightly smaller continent of Fluor.

Shad and Fluor had been in a kind of war since as long as anyone can remember.

The peoples of the very mountainous Fluor were largely sea-going and excellent sailors.

It took much longer to cross the inner highland terrain than it did to sail around its coastline.

There had been much pillaging of Shad's less protected coastal villages over the centuries.

Of the few people from Shad who had set foot on Fluor,

Few ever came back.

The Egg took them further out into space,

Right over the top of the central sun.

From there,

The planet Hermes that Shin had mentioned was clear to see.

The Egg then spiralled out across the whole system,

Above each planet in turn.

Shin had taken this trip before,

So was less in awe than was Triton,

Who noticed Afro contra-rotated,

And Ter had a large single moon.

The Egg had to come closer into Maya for Triton to spot its two small moons.

The Egg took them out further still to see the majesty of the gas giants.

The bands of Zeus and its great red storm spot were spectacular.

The rings around Kronos were a glory to behold.

Aura was less dramatic,

But tilted on its side.

Just as Shin had said,

There were another two planets out there.

Pose was bluish with few features,

Other than a dark spot.

Hades was so small and so far out,

That from there Sol appeared like any other star.

Then in the blink of an eye,

The Egg deposited them back in the quad.

Triton didn't know if he'd actually travelled into space or just had a vision.

Shin woke him from his blurriness.

So now you have seen what I have seen.

The Egg vanished.

Triton needed to think.

It was getting dark,

So he ushered Shin off for the evening meal in the refectory.

By the time the pupils retired to the dormitories,

Triton's plan was hatched.

Several of the boys,

Including Shin,

Took various medications and potions before bed and upon awakening.

While they were still dining,

Triton had swapped Shin's for a sleeping draught.

For extra measure,

He placed a guard on the doors of the dormitory and gave them strict instructions not to let anyone leave until dawn.

He waited for a while before he went back into the quad.

Although he was not blessed with the propensity for magic,

He had a perfect memory.

He went to each of the corners of the quad and repeated Shin's incantation.

The Egg appeared when summoned and of course knew Shin had not called him.

The Egg vibrated and asked of Triton,

How can I serve you?

Triton said,

Can I ask anything of you?

Quo replied,

Yes,

Anything that is possible for us to manipulate in the density.

Triton had never really heard those terms before and gingerly asked,

Can I ask you if you will only respond to a summons from me and not from the boy?

You can ask that.

So Triton did.

Is there anything else?

Asked Quo,

Who knew he would have to call a meeting of the council when he returned to the void.

Triton was surprised this next question left his lips.

Do other stars have planets too?

They do.

And can you take me to them?

Asked Triton.

No,

Quo said firmly before he vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

He did not need to ask for his fellow councillors advice on this one.

Epoch 3 civilizations were not ready for such jaunts.

Triton repeated the incantation to no avail and assumed correctly that perhaps the Egg didn't always appear.

Triton didn't sleep that night,

His head buzzing with possibilities.

Not least,

As he had been summoned the next day for a meeting with Emperor Min and his nemesis Sara.

At the meeting,

Min asked them for ideas on how he could expand his empire to take control of the continent of Flua and so become the emperor of the whole planet.

Triton listened to Sara go into a monologue that he'd heard many times before about the spells and incantations that she and the civ could launch at the populace of Flua.

She espoused that with mind control alone she could make the peoples of Flua acquiesce or even turn on themselves.

Emperor Min was somewhat bored by such suggestions and a little scared that if true such powers could be ranged at him.

Any suggestions from you?

Triton he asked.

From a vantage point above the planet Triton had seen the point where the two continents nearly touched.

We could build a land bridge for our armies to cross he blurted out knowing he could use the power of the Egg to help him on this.

How long would this take?

Asked Min.

We have magic forces with which we can make it happen in days Triton replied.

Sara was taken aback by his answer to which she had no retort.

Min told Triton to make it so and instructed his armies to move north in readiness.

That evening the Egg appeared when summoned with Shin soundly asleep,

Drugged again.

Triton sensed a change in its tone when it agreed to move the ocean floor upwards to create the natural land bridge.

It only took a day for it to form but two days to dry out so that it could be crossed.

The annexation of the continent of Flua by Shad only took a further three days.

There was no bloodshed with no land forces to defend themselves.

The people of Flua just surrendered.

Flua had put its entire navy to sea but the flotilla was turned back by unnaturally strong winds and tides before they got close enough to Shad to fire their salvos.

This was another request from Triton of the Egg.

The day after the surrender Min met with Emperor Pol of Flua halfway across the land bridge.

He declared himself Emperor of the whole of Lemu with Pol as his regent still in charge of Flua.

This way he captured the hearts and minds of the people of Flua.

It was more like a merger and acquisition than a takeover.

That day Triton won another war as Min cast Sareh out of his court.

More salt in her wounds was applied when Min formally appointed Triton as the regent for the continent of Shad.

She vowed revenge and was not one to go easily.

That evening she used the civ's powers of scrying to remote view inside the School of Keys to see if she could work out what magic Triton was conjuring up.

It took the combined power of the civ to penetrate the quad but they managed it.

Sareh witnessed Triton's incantations that brought the Egg into existence.

She had seen eggs like this before but never knew their purpose or as she was just imagining them.

She knew she would have to take swift action when she heard Triton's request to the Egg but was encouraged by its reply.

Yes,

I can make you Emperor,

Said the Egg but I cannot directly cause a death in the density.

I cannot stop you from doing that though but I must warn you of the consequences of using magic for your own betterment.

Triton asked,

Well could you arrange for Min to transfer complete power to me?

I can do that,

Confirmed the Egg.

While Triton slept soundly that night,

Wandering in dreams of grandeur Sareh hatched other plans.

She did not know that a cosmic domino was about to topple over.

The civ drew a square from salt and lit a candle in one corner placed an eagle feather in another a cup of impure water in the third and a pile of earth taken from the land bridge in the fourth.

Sareh walked around inside the square of salt and as soon as she incanted what she didn't know were Shin's words,

The Egg appeared.

Before she could put her plans in place that would end up with her taking over as Empress of all Lemieux the Council of the Light decided enough was enough.

The civ was rendered speechless as the Egg appeared and enveloped Sareh's form.

She and the Egg then vanished.

She had been whisked away by the Council for reprocessing.

The Epoch 3 experiment,

Where Counsellors could be conjured from the void directly into the density,

Would have to be terminated.

This wouldn't be allowed again until Epoch 7.

Until then,

Only the Counsellors themselves would choose when an insertion was necessary.

The Counsellors orientated the vortex coming out of the red spot of Zeus the white spot of Kronos and the blue spot of Aura so that they converged on a point just ahead of Lemieux in its orbit around Sol.

As Lemieux strayed into the path of their convergence the mantle was ripped from the core of the planet.

Just before Lemieux was converted into millions of tiny asteroids the Egg surrounded the slumbering Shin and took him back to the void.

His work was about to begin.

Insertion 5.

Obscurity.

The Council of the Light allowed the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because there was no chance of escalation.

The USA was the only atomic power then.

When tensions increased in the late 1950s and through into the 1960s the chance of Epoch 5 ending under its own volition and before the planned time became a threat that required direct intervention.

Counsellor 5's insertion would neither be detected nor ever known about.

Her extraction however would be seen by millions and leave everyone wondering what just happened and how.

Numerologically it was inevitable that she would end up in a key role right inside the Pentagon.

Counsellor 5's method of insertion was one that was first used very often back in Epoch 2 when early mammals were still birthing their offspring via eggs.

An additional egg or three never got noticed.

Counsellor 5's insertion was in January 1956 in a very large egg from which she emerged as what people would take for a fully grown and very naked teenager.

The egg was inserted high up in the Appalachian Mountains so that it would not be noticed or chanced upon.

As for all insertions she was given a brief in the void but once embedded in the density it would be hidden from her self-aware mind,

Locked in her unconscious.

There were only two things to remember after breaking through the shell.

First that she would be yards from an Appalachian trail cabin.

The second was that she had less than a minute to get inside before succumbing to the cold.

With egg-borne insertions in Epoch 2 there was not much requirement for concealment as the lifeforms then had no idea if another strange beast or apparition came along.

The magic was still strong in those times.

In Epoch 5 everyone had to be someone and there were records held on most humans since birth.

When Counsellor 5 safely got inside the cabin there was a neat pile of high quality mountaineering clothing in a body-shaped pile on the floor.

Next to it was a rucksack.

The cabin was still warm and the embers in the wood-burning stove were just going out.

Two days earlier two mountaineers ended up in a whiteout and were engulfed by a small avalanche.

The female broke her left femur.

When the blizzard cleared they found they had fortuitously been carried down the mountain virtually right next to the cabin.

The male mountaineer made his wife as comfortable as possible and set off down the mountain to seek help.

He had no idea that her leg break had also resulted in severe internal bleeding.

That evening she lost consciousness,

Her life force waned and the counsellors voided her.

All her atoms left the density and her soul was lovingly accepted back in the void for reprocessing.

When her husband returned a week later there was no trace to be found.

She went down in the annals of mountaineering history as a baffling missing persons case.

The 35 year old,

Auburn haired Mary Malone would never be seen again.

Her clothes of course were the perfect fit for Counsellor Five.

She waited until the next day break before making her way gingerly down the mountain.

The rucksack had enough food to see her by before she reached the small town of Galaniga,

One of the early gold rush settlements but in the late 1950s a popular tourist destination.

The rucksack was its own kind of goldmine as it contained a wallet with over $2,

000 in it.

Counsellor Five took a taxi 22 miles to Gainesville where she stayed overnight in a small hotel near the station.

Before taking the Amtrak to Washington DC she bought a change of clothes and disposed of the mountaineering apparel in a dumpster.

When an 18 year old blonde called Mary Malone appeared in Washington DC and applied for a secretarial job in a company that supplied computer hardware to the Pentagon,

Nobody ever made a connection between her and the missing climber.

She would never get ill so would never need to visit a doctor.

This was just as well as the absence of a navel would raise an eyebrow or two.

The company that the blonde Mary Malone inserted herself into had a lucrative installation and maintenance contract with the Pentagon.

For the last few years it had been primarily responsible for installing and repairing the KW-26 computer systems that were used to encrypt communication between the Pentagon and its allies and military craft right across the globe.

Counsellor Five or Mary Malone kept herself to herself and spent very little.

Her only extravagance was to invest in an evening class where she learned electronic engineering.

After only a year she applied for a vacancy in a company as a junior technician and aced the interview and practical exam.

She worked on bench repairs for a year and a half before one of the old entrusted hands came up for retirement and a vacancy in field support arose.

When she would have only been the age of 21,

Or that's what people thought,

She had a new role at the company which came with the associated security clearance to work on the many KW-26 mainframes right inside the Pentagon.

The KW-26 was fabulous when it worked and its messages well nigh impossible to crack,

But it was notoriously unreliable,

Especially its card reader.

Mary fast became the favoured technician to be called in as she seemed to have the knack of getting the machine back and running in the minimal amount of time.

The Pentagon was always on the lookout for such talent,

As much as it was keen to spot any infiltrations.

Even in the late 1950s,

The Pentagon were thorough in their background checks on new recruits.

While the Council of the Light could not affect matters in the density directly,

They were adept at the manipulation of soul waves.

Accordingly,

They could easily make people forget to perform actions,

As easily as they could insert bright ideas right inside someone's brain.

So when the prodigious talent of Mary Malone was spotted,

Those responsible for such checks simply didn't get around to doing them.

The comms department that Mary ended up working with as a coder just assumed her background was impeccable and that her clearance was above board.

She was held in high regard as the only operator of the KW-26 inside the Pentagon who could also fix it.

By the end of 1959,

Mary had been headhunted by the encryption department,

Or more specifically,

The decryption department.

She fell into this even more secretive world like a duck to water.

Over the course of 1960,

With the help of a DEC PDP-1,

She had halved the decryption time for the substitution cipher alphabet generated from the Russian FIALCA rotor encryption machines.

They were nowhere near as sophisticated as the KW-26.

They were merely more advanced versions of the German Enigma machines from World War II.

Of more significance was that she could generate a reply to a message in less than an hour.

This meant that the Russians could not detect if it wasn't from one of their own FIALCA machines.

Mary sent the return message to a field agent,

Who tapped into the Russians' wires inside the embassy in Havana and responded with Mary's prepared messages.

The Russians would have no idea until towards the end of the decade that their transmissions could be read and that replies could be emulated so easily.

It was Mary who had the bright idea that prevented one of the first nuclear escalations of the decade.

In October 1961,

Tempers had escalated on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

The US and Russia had tanks armed and primed just 100 meters apart from each other on either side of the wall.

The US Strategic Air Command levels were raised and B-52s armed with nuclear warheads,

Ready to take to the skies from bases all across Western Europe.

Mary prepared two messages that would arrive with each tank commander of the opposing sides at exactly the same moment in time.

One went by KW-26 and one was inserted by the field agent to be picked up by a FIALCA stationed in East Berlin.

The result was that General Anatoly Gribkov and General Bruce Clark issued the orders to retreat within seconds of each other.

A relieved Gribkov never knew that his orders came directly from President Kennedy.

Mary's brain was consumed by the intensity and impact of her work.

She didn't have time to reflect on her childhood or to wonder about her parents.

This was just as well as she had no memory of either,

Nor the desire to go looking.

This was probably the reason she had no friends and no social life.

She attracted at least one date request a week,

But took seriously the advice from her boss not to go out with anyone at work.

The Cold War fears were running high on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The time she would have devoted to a social life was spent on study.

She became fluent in Russian and was promoted from her role as a coder and decoder to analyst.

So by the time of her second intervention that diffused a potential nuclear conflagration,

She had been invited to the White House to brief President Kennedy himself on a number of occasions.

It was actually Mary's idea to create a naval blockade to prevent any more missiles from reaching Cuba in October 1962,

When Russian missiles and bombers were removed from Cuba and the US's Jupiter MRBMs were removed from Turkish soil.

It was also Mary's idea to set up a direct hotline between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

She didn't need the credit that JFK took for the few years of non-proliferation that followed.

This led to a reduction in US-Soviet hostility for several years,

Until both parties began to build up their nuclear arsenals even further.

When JFK was assassinated in 1963,

Mary cried for the first time in her life.

When Lyndon B.

Johnson took over the reins,

Mary quickly formed what would be a lifelong bond with his wife Lady Bird Johnson.

Lady Bird was fascinated and captivated by the very intelligent,

Graceful young analyst who seemed wise beyond her years.

Initiating potential interventions by President Johnson by briefing Lady Bird became a much more direct way for Mary to influence policy and prevent potential nuclear escalation.

When USS Scard was sunk by Vietnamese divers in the port of Saigon in May 1964,

Ending the war with a Hiroshima-style show of strength was very much on the cards.

Lady Bird,

With Mary's prompting,

Persuaded her husband to take his finger off the button.

From the counsellor's perspective,

Fewer lives might have been lost in Vietnam if the war did end then.

The chance of any escalation,

However,

Would have taken most of the human race out,

Never mind the impact on the biosphere and noosphere.

It was in early 1965 when Mary got her hands on one of the first DEC PDP-8s.

The amazing processing power meant that FIAWCA traffic could be decrypted and replied to in near real-time.

This was to be the last of her technical achievements,

As now the process of decryption and encryption could be handled by technicians.

It was Lady Bird,

An avid reader of authors like Graham Greene and Ian Fleming,

Who came up with the idea for Mary's next role.

She was to become a double agent,

And she was to be controlled by the CIA,

While still operating in the comms department of the Pentagon.

The contact to her handler was made by Mary's Russian teacher,

Who incidentally nobody knew was also a double agent.

Mary feigned dissatisfaction with US policy in Vietnam,

And also at her meagre salary.

This was to be topped up in rubles,

Straight into a Russian bank account,

Should Mary ever have to defect there.

She was to sleep inside the Pentagon until disinformation had to be leaked out.

Her first opportunity came in January 1966,

When a B-52 carrying four nuclear warheads got entangled with a refuelling plane over Spain.

Seven airmen lost their lives,

And three warheads landed up on Spanish soil,

But did not go nuclear.

There was some radioactive leakage,

Though.

The fourth warhead could not be found,

And would be a wonderful find for the Russians.

Only when the US had located it on the seabed did Mary leak its location.

The two men submersible,

Piloted by two divers from the Spetsnaz,

The Russian special operations force,

Got there only to see it being lifted out of the water by the USS Petrol.

They left as silently as they arrived,

Undetected.

Mary had done her job.

For the rest of 1966,

And all of 1967,

Mary gave the Russians information that the US wanted them to have.

The transmission of information to a handler was as simple as it could be.

Mary used a cipher devised by Francis Bacon back in 1605,

Which she modified to map onto the Russian Cyrillic 33-character set.

To encode her messages,

She replaced each letter by a combination of the letters A and B.

So the word nuclear,

In English,

Would look like A B B A A,

B A A B B,

A A A B A,

A B A B A,

A A B A A,

A A A A A,

And B A A A A.

When scribbled down on a bit of paper,

It looked like gibberish to anyone who might come across it by chance.

Especially when the source language was actually an old Russian dialect,

Last used by some Russians that occupied a part of Alaska called Ninilchik in the 1800s.

Mary's undoing came in 1968.

The USSS Pueblo was a spy ship masquerading as an environmental research vessel.

It was captured in January 1968,

Along with its 83 crew members.

During the next 11 months,

The crew were interrogated,

And the captain,

Commander Boucher,

Was tortured.

The chief cryptographer from the ship had been trained by Mary herself in the decryption of Fialca traffic.

Through him,

It became known to the Russians what exactly their agent inside the Pentagon had been responsible for.

This was unacceptable,

Especially as it was information about potential nuclear escalation from Mary that led to the release of the crew.

When Commander Boucher and his senior officers attended a welcome home party on the White House lawn in January 1969,

Mary was also invited.

A crew from ABC television were live broadcasting the presentation of medals for bravery and honour.

This was President Johnson's last official engagement,

Before handing the reins over to Richard Nixon.

It was a crisp and dry day,

And the sniper had a clear view of all the attendees from his position on the 9th floor of an apartment block half a mile away.

His brief was to shoot at will,

But only to take out the target.

There was to be no collateral loss,

Especially of the outgoing president,

His wife,

And the recently repatriated crew of the Pueblo.

The threat of retaliation from any such calamity would be enough to trigger a conflagration at the end of what had been a very trying decade.

It was only when Lady Bird moved from Mary's side and towards the officers to present their medals that the sniper could fire.

A microsecond before the bullet reached her forehead,

Mary's atoms were reabsorbed to the void.

All Lady Bird heard was a whoosh and a thud as the bullet hit the wall behind her.

The sniper,

The TV crew,

And millions of live TV viewers could not believe their eyes.

Fortunately,

Nobody had home VCRs until the 1970s,

And the only recording was in the outside broadcast truck.

Two men in black appropriated the tapes before the ceremony had finished,

And any mention of Mary or her actions were obliterated from the history books.

Insertion 6.

Hex.

Meshkiangasha knew he was coming to the end of his reign over Uruk.

He had been overseeing the growth of what was at the time the largest city on earth,

Now with a population of over 50,

000.

His reign had been largely peaceful,

And one where trade with all the neighbouring city-states of Eridu,

Nepal,

Lagash,

Kish,

And Ur had grown significantly.

He had been on the throne for over 300 years now.

Such longevity was normal in Sumeria in those days.

Time was different back then.

This was mainly because nobody was counting it correctly.

His son would change that.

What his son,

Enmerka,

Lacked in the way of the physical strength and stature of his father,

He more than made up for with his looks,

His intellect,

And his deft magical touch.

It was when he took over from his father that the city of Uruk would truly come of age and its population double.

The ziggurat he would build would be visible from many miles away,

And would act like a magnet for all those wanting wealth,

Power,

And learning.

From the outset,

Enmerka had been taught both by the priests and the priestesses.

He had become adept at playing the lyre,

Under the tutelage of High Priestess Sara herself.

On his coming of age,

He had been gifted one of the rare lyres of Ur.

The floor-standing lyre looked like a bull with its headpiece adorned by golden horns and eyes of lapis lazuli.

The soundboard made from cedar generated the most melliferous tone.

From the priests,

Enmerka learned how to write with a stylus,

Using pictograms on play tablets.

He also learned the mathematics of base 60,

With which he would create the time system that would be used right up to the end of Epoch 5.

Neither Enmerka nor the priests knew that their maths was base 60,

As it was the only way they knew to count.

It served them well though,

Both in architecture and in the paying of wages.

Both the priests and priestesses also taught Enmerka what magic they knew.

He became masterful at creating healing potions to the alchemical recipes of the priests,

And at charming snakes with the music from his lyre.

Perhaps the crowning legacy of Meshki Angash's reign was the division of labour.

He introduced the concepts of specialisation and barter.

Some people toiled in the fields,

While carpenters built and maintained their ploughs.

Others made bricks in moulds,

With which the masons would design and construct houses and temples.

They would stand for centuries as they used mathematically rigid dimensions.

The disparate trades of jeweller,

Accountancy and banking all emerged during his reign.

Surplus crops from Uruk and its hinterlands were traded for chlorite and lapis lazuli from the Persian plateau,

Accessed by the great river Euphrates.

Rugged textiles and carpets made their way by sea to the east,

And silks and spices came back by return.

Goods were moved around the city,

Via a complex system of canals.

Uruk was the Venice of its day,

With merchants aplenty.

There was no need for warring any more.

An early form of communism meant everyone got paid the same,

Regardless of their level of artistry and skill.

Everyone was happy,

And everyone got fed and looked after into their later years.

Nobody complained.

Early in Meshki-an-Gash's tenure,

He had regular contact with the gods.

His father,

Utu,

Was one after all.

The priest-king would never know his DNA resonated strongly with Counsellor Tu's essence.

This was why he was so even-handed.

Once he was fulfilling the Council of the Light's objectives,

The visitations from the clouds abated.

He knew,

Though,

His son was of an age when similar visitations would start.

He also knew his son was going to be an even greater ruler,

And he had no qualms about handing over the reins.

Sure enough,

When En-Murka had just turned the tender age of 60,

He first met with not one,

But two of the counsellors.

En-Murka was alone one evening in the central square of the I-Ana Temple,

Playing his lyre,

When what he took to be a golden chariot descended and hovered above him.

Two tall beings descended down a shaft of light.

From murals in the temple,

He immediately recognised them as the god Enki and his goddess-daughter Inanna.

The Sumerians had no idea that Enki was actually Counsellor Six,

And Inanna was Counsellor Five.

Towards the end of Epoch Five,

Counsellors tended to insert themselves in the density by assuming either the human or cetician form.

Often they operated incognito,

And mostly unaware themselves of their own mission.

In the early days of Epoch Five,

Though,

Such subterfuge and obfuscation were unnecessary.

They descended in full glory from the clouds in these golden chariots.

Actually,

They flew in using commandeered Epoch Seven spaceships,

But that's another story.

En-Murka felt strangely safe as he ascended into the craft,

Held on both sides by Enki and Inanna.

What about my lyre?

He asked.

It is safe,

Inanna assured him.

We will be back in no time at all.

Inside the craft,

The walls were a warm sienna,

And Murka had a brief flashback to when he was in his mother's womb.

Enki stood by a large display panel which had a map of the city of Uruk,

More accurately drawn and scaled than En-Murka had ever seen.

Enki waved his hand and the city shrunk into a pinprick.

On the first trip,

Inanna and Enki took him up,

Just to the level of the clouds,

As they didn't want to freak him out.

They travelled to the north to show him the vast Nile Delta and the edge of a large sea,

Then down over the great pyramids and temples of Egypt.

Who made them?

Asked En-Murka,

Wondering what peoples might build something so large and audacious.

We did,

Said Enki,

A little too fast and vehemently for Inanna's liking.

They travelled east to the vast plateaus of Persia,

Before heading down over the gulf and back up past the neighbouring city-states,

And Murka recognised.

It was fascinating too,

To see how much bigger Uruk was in comparison.

He got a new sense of his father's achievements,

And the legacy he was to inherit.

Only Enki descended down the light tube with him when they arrived back over the temple.

Speak to nobody about this.

Be here at the same time tomorrow,

Enki said.

Play the same tune to beckon us down when you are alone.

The chariot disappeared in the blink of an eye,

And Murka felt what he'd experienced was both real and unreal.

The next evening,

He knew he hadn't imagined it,

When he ended up back inside the chariot.

On the second trip,

He was taken higher,

Across to what Inanna explained was the Indus Valley,

Over a vast mountain range and the expansive lands of China,

Down the Yangtze River to an ocean that curved into the distance.

These are all places you will open trade routes with,

Explained Enki.

On the third trip,

The following evening,

He was taken north,

Over the sea he'd seen on the first flight.

They then crossed another snow-capped mountain range,

Which straddled what Inanna told him was to be named Europe,

And up to what she called the Northlands.

It was then that Enmika saw a vast white pole,

Capping the earth,

Bathed in sunlight.

By now he could see the earth was curved,

And understood both how small the lands he would rule one day were,

And what potential lay beyond his borders.

On the fourth trip,

He was taken over the continent of Africa,

To an even bigger ice cap,

Which was fully in the dark,

Illuminated only by moonlight.

They crossed over the pole,

Then up a very long mountain range,

Over the whole of a new continent,

Again with a vast ocean to its west.

They flew over a thin strip of land that connected to yet another large continent.

Enki told him these were the Americas,

Just as they arrived back at the North Pole.

His fifth trip was even more mind-blowing and mind-opening.

He was taken up into space,

Right above the North Pole.

He could fully see,

For the first time,

That he lived on a globe.

Enki waved his hands over the display,

And the earth started spinning faster beneath them.

It was time to show Enmika how to measure time.

Several lines of what Enki told him were called longitude,

Appeared superimposed on the globe.

Enki explained,

There are 24 of these.

As quick as a flash,

Enmika said,

Each 15 degrees of arc,

The priests have trained you well,

Said Inanna.

Enki further explained,

Each of these is what you will call an hour,

And each of the 15 degrees on the earth can be subdivided by 60 again.

These are earth's minutes of time.

Enki pulled out a small,

Incredibly slim and light round disc from his tunic.

It had 24 symbols around the circumference that Enmika did not recognize.

It had two big,

Illuminated hands,

And a smaller one,

Rotating quite quickly.

With this device,

You can watch time go by,

Said Enki.

Around the edge are the hours.

Then see these divisions,

These are the minutes.

Then each minute can be subdivided into 60 seconds,

Counted by this hand.

He handed Enmika what he said was a time watch.

This is yours to keep,

But show nobody.

And make sure it is hidden in your clothing before you die,

Said Inanna somewhat ominously.

This must be buried with you.

In the blink of an eye,

Enmika's temporal learnings for that evening finished with him back on the temple floor next to his lyre.

He had a sleepless night watching the seconds tick by on his precious disc.

He didn't know that the sixth trip was to be his last for a good while.

He was taken way above the earth,

And on the display,

Enki sped time up so the moon was whizzing around the earth.

For every time the moon goes round the earth,

Count the number of earth days,

Said Enki.

Just as he had been taught by the priest,

Enmika used the phalanges of the fingers of his right hand to count up to twelve.

On his left hand,

He counted the twelves.

So two twelves and one six,

Posited Enmika,

After he'd observed six moon orbits.

That's about right,

Really well done,

Said Enki.

Work on the exact number when you get back down to earth.

The chariot then raced off so that it was right above the sun,

And Enki sped the display up again.

Now watch the earth go round the sun,

Enki said,

And pay close attention to how many times the moon orbits the earth.

Enmika didn't know Enki had enhanced the display so the moon and earth were much more discernible.

Enki had also hidden the planets of Mercury and Venus.

It was not time to reveal their nature to humanity.

It took three earth rotations of the sun for Enmika to announce,

Thirteen?

That's right,

Said Inanna.

These are to be the new years from now on,

So each will have thirteen months with a day of celebration before the start of each new year,

Explained Enki.

Up till then,

People had been using the comings of the rains to count years.

As incredible and nonsensical as it sounded,

This boosted the ego of the current priest-king,

Who it was assumed had commanded the rains to come along.

This is why the ages of kings went into the hundreds in the clay tablets of the day.

It's time to teach your people time,

Inanna said.

When will I see you again?

Asked Enmika,

As they sped back to earth and Uruk.

In thirteen moons,

Answered Inanna.

So in a year's time,

Quipped Enmika.

Enki and Inanna were proud of their protege.

They had chosen correctly.

In what Enmika now knew was an earth year,

Much happened.

Most notably,

The death of his father,

And his accession to the throne.

As was the custom in those days,

Meshki-Angasha was buried along with many possessions,

And enough food and drink to last him for many years in the underworld.

Sadly,

Forty-two members of his court were drugged and then stabbed through their hearts and buried alongside him.

Enmika's new courtiers were the first to be taught the new time system.

It quickly spread amongst the populace,

And out into the neighbouring city-states.

Nobody ever saw the time watch the new priest-king kept close to his chest.

They never knew why he was so timely in his running of meetings,

And why he insisted on moving the feast days of Enki and Inanna to be on the same day.

Their feast day would see in each new year.

It was when the city of Uruk was busy celebrating on the said new feast day.

Thirteen new moons after his last trip in the chariot,

There Enmika spent the evening alone playing his lyre in the temple.

Sure enough,

The chariot appeared,

Conjured down by a tune he had not played for an earth year.

Enmika was surprised that it was Inanna,

Not Enki,

Who descended down the light pipe.

He was further surprised that he was not taken into the craft.

Where is Enki?

Asked Enmika.

He is above,

Inanna said.

I am to be your tutor for the next three days.

She continued,

But without opening her mouth.

Tomorrow have enough provisions brought to you so you don't have to leave.

Place a guard around the temple,

And we will also need some clay tablets and plenty of reeds.

With this pronouncement,

She lightly touched his forehead with her right index finger,

And his head was filled with flashing symbols.

He then fell into a deep sleep.

When he awoke,

He acted on Inanna's instructions and felt dizzy the whole day.

That evening he struggled to play the lyre.

His head was in a fog.

He needn't have bothered with the lyre,

As Inanna appeared directly in front of him.

She took hold of the lyre and made sounds with it that he had never heard,

Hardly touching the strings.

As she played,

She recited a mantra,

Which consisted of all the syllables in Sumerian.

As she sang each one,

A symbol he had never seen appeared illuminated on the wall in front of him.

This is to be your new way of writing,

Announced Inanna.

But there are hundreds of them,

Protested Enmerka.

I will never remember them all.

Inanna placed her right index finger on his forehead again,

And,

As his head flashed inside,

Said,

Yes,

You will.

Use the clay tablets to write them down.

The next day,

On awakening,

And after a sumptuous breakfast,

As he was famished,

He picked up his reed stylus and assuredly made the marks,

As he'd seen them on the wall,

Onto the blank clay tablets.

That evening,

Inanna appeared for what would be the last time.

She congratulated Enmerka for capturing the syllables flawlessly.

We will call this method of writing cuneiform,

Said Inanna.

It is more than a language,

Though.

It will allow you to conjure anything you desire into the world.

Enmerka's interest was piqued.

How?

This you must learn by trial and error,

Inanna said.

Just use combinations of six syllables,

In the round,

On a single tablet.

Try it now.

Enmerka made six random marks that neither made sense,

Nor formed a word he knew in Sumerian.

A note rang out on the lyre,

Without him or Inanna touching it.

Exactly like that,

Replied Inanna.

Such combinations of six syllables will be called the Hex.

You now know the secrets of the gods.

You have no more need for us now.

Use this power wisely.

With that,

Inanna disappeared,

And Enmerka would not see her again,

Until he entered the afterlife.

The counsellors knew that their insertions would have to be more discreet in the future,

And also that giving humankind the power of the Hex would lead to several calamities.

It was a necessary progression in the advancement of the epochs.

Enmerka spent the rest of his life devoted to two tasks.

The first was the propagation of cuneiform around Sumeria and the neighbouring lands.

His first move was to teach the priesthood,

Both male and female,

How to replace pictograms with syllables on the clay tablets.

They then literally spread the word.

He kept the second task to himself,

And that was to discover what he could do with the power of the Hex.

It was this pursuit and obsession that eventually led to his undoing and demise.

His low-level Hexes became embedded in each home in Uruk and the surrounding city-states.

While people could readily copy them in theory,

Only the Hexes made by the priesthood seemed to hold any efficacy.

Tablets to bring good fortune,

To promote good health and to increase fertility were the most popular.

Indeed,

It was the latter Hex that Enmerka used on himself that led to the birth of his first son,

Lugalbanda.

He knew he was the problem by the fact he had had no progeny until that time with any of his thirteen wives.

After his trip above the earth,

He had taken a wife for each moon orbit in the year.

The arrival of Lugalbanda led to a sizeable family that required the construction of a new palace to house them all.

Enmerka also began on a more significant building project.

On the highest point in Uruk,

He built a round white temple with a central gold-capped ziggurat.

Central to the interior design of the temple was a huge 24-hour clock face,

Adorned with hexagonal mosaics based on the numbers 6,

12,

24,

30,

60 and 360.

The moon phases and seasons were captured too,

Along with divisions for minutes,

Subdivided again into seconds.

This became the place where the new time system was taught.

The central ziggurat could be viewed from miles away and became a renowned seat of learning.

It was a magical place and Enmerka was seen to possess a divine touch,

Which led him to being proclaimed as a god-king by his peoples.

The numbers of plagues decreased and the crops became even more abundant.

The neighbouring city-states acceded to Uruk's rule with no bloodshed.

They wanted access to learn the new time and language systems,

And to benefit from the blessing of the hex.

The Anu Ziggurat,

As it was known,

Was constructed to teach cuneiform to acolytes to the priesthood.

The lower spirals of the tower were enclosed entirely within the dome of the White Temple.

They were inscribed with legends of old and the history of the lands and rulers,

But in syllabic form,

Pictograms were banned.

Only when an acolyte could recall three complete legends in entirety and reproduce them on their own tablets,

Did they qualify to teach the syllabary and enter the priesthood themselves.

The qualification to enter the priesthood also meant they could pass through the ceiling of the temple to the second third of the Ziggurat.

The walls of the spiral steps were covered in hexes for all sorts of applications,

Such as healing,

Warding off unwanted spirits,

And conjuring up jinn to assist with overcoming toils and tribulations.

Enmerka had sealed the tower with a master hex so that demonic ghouls could not be summoned.

The top third of the tower was off-limits to all,

Even the high priests and priestesses.

It was where Enmerka had virtually confined himself to in the later years of his reign.

He had passed the running of his vast and growing kingdom to his son Lugalbanda.

He had loftier matters to attend to.

He was working with super-hexes,

Which were honeycomb structures of individual hexes.

They consisted of a central hex surrounded by six other hexes that boosted its power.

Groups of seven hexes could be further surrounded and amplified by other groups of seven hexes.

His first attempts were focused not at conjuring up mere jinn,

But in trying to get the gods to descend in their chariots again.

Enki and Inanna knew to ignore his calls.

Separation from the void and further densification was the only way Epoch 5 humans could evolve to the next level.

After several fruitless years,

Enmerka decided if the gods would not come to him,

Then he would have to go to them.

He was also desperate to see the curvature of his planet again.

He had been really successful with a new super-group of hexes,

With which he taught himself how to levitate.

By inscribing a super-hex consisting of 2,

401 hexes on his shoes,

He could float a cubit or so above the floor.

He had a single-seater golden chariot made and brought up to the upper third of the tower.

The four slaves that struggled to bring it up the spiral stairs and deposit it on a wooden frame were executed immediately afterwards.

After the original builders,

They were the first and last to see the upper spirals.

His first efforts to lift the heavy chariot by strapping hexes to its base failed.

He conjured up Djinn to help guide him and was told to make his hexes as small as possible and to engrave them on the gold of the chariot itself.

They also told him to rope the chariot down to stop it lifting off without him in it.

It took him three moon orbits before the rope started to really strain,

With the chariot pulling upwards.

By the light of the third full moon,

Enmerka sat in it,

Released the ropes and floated out of a window at the top of the ziggurat.

He ascended up above the thin cloud layer and started to shiver in the thin air.

It was just as he saw the curvature of the earth once again that he lost consciousness in the rarefied atmosphere and died of oxygen starvation.

For a fleeting moment,

He saw Enki and Inanna once more,

As they took his soul off for reprocessing.

Enki also removed the time watch disc from his tunic so it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands.

Without any assistive force from his soul waves,

The heavy chariot immediately lost the power of the hex and fell to earth,

Along with his mortal body.

The counsellor steered its descent such that it careered into the Anno Ziggurat.

The upper two thirds of the tower were destroyed in an instant.

It wouldn't be till the end of Epoch 5 that humans would be allowed to levitate again.