Genesis of the Seventh Earth Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Alex Wayne.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission request, contact the publisher at the address below.

  [email protected]

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  First Edition 2018.

  For my family

  Contents

  Book One

  Chapter 1: Brainchild

  Chapter 2: Somewhere In Time

  Chapter 3: New Horizon

  Chapter 4: Have Planet, Will Travel

  Chapter 5: The Great Hustle

  Book Two

  Chapter 6: A New World

  Chapter 7: Good Tidings

  Chapter 8: Public Offering

  Chapter 9: True Colors

  Chapter 10: Spilled Beans

  Chapter 11: Go With the Flow

  Chapter 12: Choppy Waters

  Chapter 13: The Terminus

  Book Three

  Chapter 14: Earth

  Chapter 15: Palisade

  Chapter 16: Jannah

  Chapter 17: Nirvana

  Chapter 18: Arcadia

  Chapter 19: Paraiso

  Chapter 20: Elysion

  Book One

  Chronicle of the Discovery

  Chapter 1: Brainchild

  Where did all these cars come from? … Scattered thoughts occupied his mind … Cody was too distracted to enjoy the scenic drive along the beautiful harbor of San Diego in southern California on a sunny and balmy afternoon. Rush hour traffic had a way of ruining things.

  Embellishing the street were perfectly lined palm trees. Exquisite and impeccably polished yachts anchored in the harbor glistened and swayed lazily under the coercion of a gentle wind while seagulls soared gracefully above. The picturesque view that could evoke dreams of paradise in most people was largely ignored by Cody as he tailgated the car in front of him, seeming to believe that it would magically make the traffic move faster.

  After a drawn out day at work, he was growing impatient and couldn’t get home fast enough to resume work on his pet project. Maybe luck will be on my side tonight.

  As the stop-and-go traffic eased slightly, so did his frustration. His wandering mind relaxed a little and flashed back momentarily to one memorable night in the distant past when he was just ten years old. He was in the backyard stargazing with his dad, Joe.

  Pointing to a twinkling object in the sky, Joe had said, “That’s the North Star. But, what you’re seeing is not how it is at this moment. You’re actually seeing how it was 434 years ago because that’s how long it took for its light to travel to Earth.”

  “So then, how do we know if the North Star is still up there in the sky right now?” Cody had asked with a boyish enthusiasm.

  “No one knows really. I guess you'll just have to wait 434 years to find out.” Joe tousled Cody’s hair as Cody gave a light crackle at his joke. Aiming to further illustrate the mind boggling vastness of space, Joe pointed to a bright speckle and said, "See that object with a reddish tint? That's the planet Mars."

  "How far away is it?"

  "Well, let's say you were on Mars, and your sister called you from Earth. Your phone wouldn't ring until fourteen minutes later," replied Joe.

  "So if I answered the phone and said hello, would it also take that long for Kate to hear me?"

  "Yup, it sure would."

  "Man! That's going to take forever to have a conversation!" Cody exclaimed.

  "Well, it would certainly make it much harder for you two to have a fight on the phone."

  Cody chuckled out loud as he neared his destination and turned the car into his subdivision. That fond childhood memory never ceased to make him laugh.

  In the years that followed, he would often spend long hours with his dad pondering what could be out there in the night sky. "Are the other solar systems and planets anything like our own?" "Are there primitive life-forms or advanced civilizations?" As he advanced from adolescence to adulthood, his insatiable curiosity and the burning desire for answers only grew more intense.

  Approaching his house in short order, he shifted his thoughts away from his dad, Mars, and the nightmarish traffic. While turning the car hurriedly into the driveway, he carelessly bumped the plastic garbage can, causing it to bounce on the concrete stiffly like a stricken bowling pin before settling on its side by the curb. Conscious of his clumsy driving, he looked around to see if anyone saw the gaffe, and to his relief, there was no one in sight. After pulling into the garage, he went out to retrieve the toppled can.

  Now that he was finally home, he just wanted to get dinner out of the way. Preparing for a long night, he slapped together a club sandwich, poured a large coffee, and quickly grabbed a bag of chips as he padded off to the lab where he had set up his experiment. He had transformed one of the bedrooms of the house into a lab years ago. It was only last year that he became the sole resident after his parents retired and moved into their small but cozy beach house an hour away.

  Cody hastily devoured the sandwich while he powered up the equipment and adjusted the settings. The idea for this experiment came to him four years ago after an intriguing lecture on the theory of quantum entanglement in his college physics class. He was fascinated by the idea that two particles could become entangled, as if linked by an invisible bond, such that a change in the quantum state of one particle would have an immediate effect on that of the other, regardless of the distance between them.

  For this phenomenon to occur, the entangled particles had to be connected by a wormhole, Cody rationalized.

  He visualized the wormhole acting as an invisible tunnel or portal that connected two places in space, allowing an object to enter one end of the tunnel and reappear instantly at the other end. If he could pinpoint the entangled particles, he could gain access to the wormhole connecting them. The implications for space exploration through wormholes was the impetus for his project.

  His grand plan was to explore the universe by sending a nanoscale camera through one of these tiny wormholes.

  After a few years of failed experiments, Cody finally had some success in detecting entangled particles that occurred in nature. Not long after that, in two separate attempts, he succeeded in sending a molecular-scale camera through a wormhole. However, retrieving them was another matter – he had not figured out how to control or retrieve the camera once it passed through the wormhole.

  But today he would try out a new idea.

  I will fuse the mini-camera to an entangled particle to prevent the camera from passing through the wormhole …

  The camera should still be able to peer through the wormhole and see what was on the other end located who-knows-where in space. If all went well, it would yield the same effect as placing the camera in space.

  Soothing light rock from the radio at low volume was percolating through the lab, helping Cody to relax and concentrate. At half way through the bag of chips and with the coffee nearly consumed, he finally succeeded in fusing an entangled particle to the nanoscale camera. Feeling slightly nervous, he switched on the monitor that was linked to the camera and promptly saw a clear image of the lab through the eye
of the camera.

  "Here goes nothing ... or hopefully something," Cody mumbled as he activated and tweaked the controller for the newly built particle-camera device. Almost immediately, he saw flickers on the monitor from the toggling of two images: one of the lab, and another of a dark background with a speckle of random white dots.

  "Is that ... could that be ... stars!" Cody gave out a loud yelp in excitement and raised both arms triumphantly as if he had just scored the winning touchdown.

  Bypassing the victory dance, he was gung-ho to move forward. "Now stabilize the particle so that the camera is seeing only the other end of the wormhole," he directed himself anxiously. With further tweaking, the picture on the monitor finally settled on the image of a large group of stars. He could not take his eyes off the screen. While one end of the wormhole was in his lab, the other end was clearly somewhere in outer space. He could not see any large objects in the camera’s field of view at the other end. It was just a sea of undisturbed calmness, a velvet blackness shrouded by distant celestial bodies that were reduced to glowing white dots. But there were so many of them; so many more than what he could see from his backyard with his naked eyes on a clear night.

  Still mesmerized by what he was seeing on the monitor, he almost unconsciously picked up the phone and dialed his parents' number at the beach house. After several rings, Joe finally picked up.

  "What's up Cody?" Joe said with a deep, sleepy voice.

  "Oh sorry Dad. Did I wake you up? Look Dad, I've got the universe on my monitor. I've just made the biggest discovery in the history of ... of my lab! I'm seeing outer space! It’s unbelievable how many stars there are. Remember the new idea I told you about? It worked!"

  "That's great, son." Joe gave a big yawn. "I think I might still remember this when I wake up in the morning, but can we talk about it tomorrow? I have to get up at 4 a.m. to go fishing with Billy."

  Cody looked at his watch and was surprised that it was already past midnight. "Oh so sorry Dad. I didn't realize it was this late. Okay, I’ll let you get back to sleep. Good night."

  After hanging up, he continued to fixate on the image on the monitor. He realized that he needed to turn in himself because he had to go to work in the morning. After fifteen more minutes of watching the mesmerizing image, he reluctantly retired for the night.

  ***

  Cody jumped out of bed when the alarm clock went off and hurriedly got ready for work. He could not wait to tell Melinda. She was already at work when he got there. They were only four cubicles away from each other in an open area consisting of several dozen cubicles at Nanocomps.

  He whispered to her secretively as he walked by, "We need to talk, during lunch!" She raised her eyebrows and nodded with wide, curious eyes.

  Cody had a difficult time concentrating that morning. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. When lunchtime finally came, he told Melinda, "Let's go somewhere other than the cafeteria." Melinda obliged, and they set out for a popular local sandwich shop. During the short drive, he told her what happened in his lab last night.

  "That's crazy! I can't wait to see it!" She exclaimed.

  "Well, do you want to come over after work? We can cook a nice dinner and then go look at this thing in the lab."

  Cody and Melinda Banks had been dating for a year and were very comfortable with each other, even though their relationship was still rather casual.

  "Absolutely not! Are you kidding? I want to go straight to the lab to look at this thing!"

  Cody cracked up. They had hit it off almost instantly when she joined Nanocomps a year ago right out of college. It was a bit surprising to Cody that a slender, beautiful brunette like her would be attracted to an average Joe like him, with his unremarkable looks, medium build, and a scruffy, brown mop for hair – nothing to boast about. He figured that it must have been their shared passion for astronomy and anything related to space exploration that brought them together.

  Both were engineers at Nanocomps, a small company that manufactured lightweight composite aircraft components using nanotechnology. Cody started to share the details of his experiment with her about half a year ago; she took on great interest and offered useful ideas to help him develop the mini cameras. In fact, it was her recommendation to use photon quantum optical amplifiers which would allow the cameras to "see" great distances. Her intelligence did not make him feel insecure or threatened. On the contrary, it was one of her many qualities he found attractive.

  After a distracted afternoon of constantly checking the clock, they were finally able to leave work and headed straight for Cody's house. They chatted excitedly like two kids in a candy store. Once in his lab, he turned on the equipment, activated the particle-camera device, and what appeared to be the same picture that he saw last night popped up on the screen. Melinda stared at it with her mouth agape for a minute before she was able to speak, uttering her words soberly in an awe-inspired voice.

  "Do you have any idea where the camera is and what stars we are looking at?"

  "Nope," said Cody. "I was hoping you could help me figure it out."

  He had been studying the sky with his dad since childhood, and Melinda had minored in astronomy in college. Nevertheless, there were so many stars that it took some time for them to identify the Big Dipper in the Ursa Major constellation. "I wonder where the camera is. Can you pan or tilt the camera?" She asked.

  "I think so." He started to adjust the device. "I have to be careful not to break the entanglement between the particles and lose the wormhole ..."

  The camera started to turn slowly, and soon the Big Dipper slipped away from their view. As the camera continued to sweep through space, an unusually bright star came into sight. She pointed to it and said, "Maybe that's our Sun! If it were, then we must be pretty far out because it's so small."

  After a short pause to contemplate, he said, "I'm going to zoom in on it. We should be able to recognize some of the planets if it really were our Sun. That would help us to determine the location of the camera."

  As he started to zoom in, some half-lit planets started to sprout out of the darkness, and he quickly pointed out Jupiter and then Saturn with its familiar rings and said, "Yup, it is our Solar System!" As the camera zoomed in further, he pointed to a dot with blue tint and declared, "That must be Earth!"

  "Well, keep going," she urged, remembering how happy he was when he first tested the incredible zoom capabilities of her optical amplifier. "If the camera's no more than couple light-days away from Earth, we should be able to zoom in on cars and people on the ground. So let's see if we can see anything."

  The camera zeroed in on the blue dot, and gradually the white patches emerged as clouds, the blurry shades of green and brown evolved into land, and eventually some buildings became discernible. Cody was the first to recognize a landmark and said, "Look, the Eiffel Tower!"

  "Are we in Paris? Wait, I see a pyramid. What in the world? … Oh wow, it’s Las Vegas!" Melinda exclaimed elatedly. They had both been there multiple times and were familiar with the landscape. After a brief survey of the Strip, an idea popped into her head. "Hey, if you move the view to the west coast, maybe we can find ourselves."

  "Great idea. I've always wanted to snoop on you," he said agreeably as he moved the view towards San Diego. After some wandering of the camera view, he was able to locate his street and pinpoint his house with the camera.

  At that moment, they saw his car speeding down the street.

  "Hey, that's your car," said Melinda. As the car turned quickly into the driveway, it knocked down the trash can. "What? Did you do that, Speed Racer?" She started to belly laugh.

  Feeling a bit embarrassed, he lowered his head and said while avoiding eye contact, "That was yesterday coming home from work. I thought nobody saw that … at least not until now." Trying to change the subject, he perked up and went on, "Well, let's see, that happened about twenty-four hours ago. So, if the camera were just now receiving that picture, that would mean it is about
one light-day out from Earth. Where would that be?"

  The digression worked as Melinda stopped laughing and pondered for a moment. "Hmm, it should be beyond the heliosphere in interstellar space, but still some distance to the Oort cloud."

  Cody zoomed out from his house and stared blankly at the monitor. He kept nodding his head and started to ramble, "Okay, this is good … this is good. I think we got lucky this time figuring out where the camera is so quickly. But I need more cameras hooked up to these particles so I can focus on the same object from different angles at the same time, or to look at different places in the universe simultaneously ..."

  "Well, Einstein, I would love to stay and brainstorm with you, but I really need to go home to check on Chloe. Maybe we can continue tomorrow?" Chloe was Melinda's two-year old Shih Tzu. She started to get up from the chair.

  "Okay. Hey thanks for helping out with the Big Dipper." He gave her a kiss and a long hug. "We are such a great team."

  "Anything for you sweet pea," Melinda said cheerfully. Even though they teased each other constantly, their parting moments were usually tender and affectionate.

  He walked her out to her car, gave her another kiss and hug, and then went back into the house to get something to eat. As he put a frozen pizza in the microwave, the phone rang. He could see that it was his dad.

  "Hey Dad. So how many fish did you catch his morning?"

  "Well, Cody, we ended up not going out after all. Long story short, Billy's boat wouldn’t start, so we spent the whole day working on it. I just got home. Boy, that was exhausting.

  "Now, I remember having a strange dream last night that you made some kind of big discovery, something about the stars. But Mom said it wasn't a dream because she heard me talking to you on the phone. So what's that about?"

  "Oh Dad, you've got to come over and look at my discovery!" Cody went on to tell Joe the whole story of what happened since last night.

  "Wow, that's fantastic! This is a huge breakthrough, real cutting-edge technology! You should be proud. All of your hard work is finally paying off.”