CHAPTERS 1 & 2

Chapter 1

The resonance chamber burst into flames with a deafening explosion, shattering the lab’s contents. The blast sent shards of crystal and viscous fluid hurtling through the air. Alex was thrown across the room by the ferocity of the discharge. He struggled to his feet and raised his arm to shield his eyes from the thick black smoke. He pulled his lab coat over his mouth and gasped for air, trying to breathe through the choking chemicals. The inferno was everywhere and about to engulf him.

Alex closed his eyes. This is how it ends, he thought, in both terror and surrender as he braced for the torture of a death by fire.

He knew his brain would register the agonizing pain of his body being cooked alive before succumbing to death. Fire is one of the worst ways to die, as the brain is one of the last organs to shut down. Suddenly there was no heat. He opened his eyes to find himself not in his lab, but somewhere else entirely. Alex looked around in bewilderment. “Where am I? Am I dead? Was that real?”

His body started to singe as the flames reappeared, and he snapped back into the inferno. The alarm began to blare as the sprinkler system rained down clouds of flame retardant, dousing the fire and sending more plumes of smoke into the air. Alex now faced a new form of death as he choked on the noxious fumes, unable to breathe. As terror surged through him, he caught the red glow of the exit sign out of the corner of his stinging, tear soaked eye and staggered to the heavy metal doors. He threw his body against the horizontal bar, allowing his sheer weight to compensate for his lack of strength. The door opened and Alex escaped into the safety of the hallway.

The door slammed shut behind him as he staggered down the hall. He fell back against the wall and slid down into a fetal position on the concrete floor. His lab coat was soaked with blood but he didn’t think he had been hurt or that anything had been broken. No significant wounds, he thought as he picked some shards of glass out of his forearms.

Jesus! Did I do it? Alex sat, his head spinning, trying to make sense of what had just happened. He started to lose consciousness when the wailing sirens of fire trucks startled him back to his surroundings. The door at the end of the long hallway burst open and two men rushed in carrying hoses and tanks on their backs.

“Hey man, are you all right?” asked one of the men dressed in white HazMat suits. “Joe, take a look at this guy,” he said as he waved over a third man who followed in behind them.

“Where’s the source of the fire?” the medic asked Alex.

“In there.” Alex pointed to the metal doors.

The two men in white HazMat suits pulled open the heavy doors and ventured into the smoke.

“What happened here?” asked Joe, the tall young medic peering into Alex’s eyes with a small flashlight.

“The resonance chamber exploded,” mumbled Alex. His hands were trembling and his head was pounding with pain. “I’m all right and the sprinkler system stopped the fire, I think.”

Alex was bruised and bloodied, but his personal condition was not on his mind. What happened in those brief seconds after the blast was all he could think of. What was it? What did it mean? Had he been right? Had he been correct after all the naysayers and skeptics? The effect certainly was what he had predicted, but feeling it, seeing it … was hard to comprehend. This was an Earth-shaking discovery that would change everything!

The medic wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm and slipped an oxygen mask over his face. Another medic, shorter and stocky, appeared wheeling a gurney.

“No!” shouted Alex. “I don’t have time to go to the hospital!”

“It doesn’t look like anything is broken and your vitals are okay,” said Joe. “But you have to get checked out. You might have internal bleeding or a concussion, and you‘ve inhaled some nasty chemicals from what it smells like out here. At any rate, it’s also the law.”

“No, I can’t deal with that now. I have to call Sydney,” said Alex, waving off the two men and fumbling around in his pockets for his phone but finding them empty.

“Do you have a phone I could use?”

“Do you want me to call him for you?” asked Joe offering his phone to Alex.

“No, Sydney’s a woman.”

“Your wife? I can call her for you man.”

“No … well … yes … she’s my partner er, colleague,” blurted Alex, realizing he had just offered too much information. A personal relationship like the one he had with Sydney was not tolerated, and could get them into trouble with the authorities. Thank God, Sydney was not at the Kona lab with him, but at a conference in Honolulu. He didn’t mind his own injuries, but the thought of something happening to her was unbearable. It was also a stroke of luck that they had hidden the backups in the house the night before, as the dreaded Office of Ethical Behavior, the OEB police would soon be swarming his lab. It was imperative that they not find out about their work.

“I can call her for you and have her meet you at the hospital,” said Joe

“No, let me call her, if you don‘t mind.” Alex wanted to collapse into the comfort of her arms and tell her what had happened in the lab. He thought again what amazing luck that Sydney had made backups the night before and taken them to the house safe. They were the only documentation of the set of frequencies that just produced the most remarkable result.

The two medics lifted Alex onto the gurney.

“Okay, we’re going to get you out of here,” said the stocky man wheeling him into the cool night air. “Tell the HazMat guys we’re going, Joe.”

“Hey, where are they? They should be out of there by now,” said Joe as he opened the heavy doors that sealed off the lab. “Holy Christ!” He fell backward letting the doors slam shut. “What the hell is going on in there?” The color in Joe’s face had drained to a chalky white as he turned back looking at Alex, his eyes as large as saucers.

Sydney awakened startled from a deep sleep. She was soaked in sweat and her heart was racing. It was a dream … no, a nightmare! She had been in the middle of a room engulfed in flames and felt like she had been about to die! It seemed so real she got up to get a glass of water, when the phone started ringing.

What time is it? She glanced at the clock on the hotel nightstand and saw it was after three in the morning. Oh God, something horrible has happened! She grabbed the phone. When the holographic image appeared, her heart skipped a beat at the sight of Alex’s ashen and bloodied face. Since arriving in Honolulu, Sydney had a feeling she shouldn’t have left him to come to this conference, and she hadn’t followed her intuition. Now he was in trouble and she wasn’t there to help.

Alex’s handsome face still excited her. She loved his dark eyes and sculpted features. But now she was filled with dread at the sight of his injuries.

“Alex, my God what’s happened to you? Are you all right?”

“I think I’m okay, just a little shaken,” he answered. “The resonance chamber exploded at the lab, but I think I did it, Sydney. Something happened. It might have just been a hallucination, but I think I opened a doorway.”

As Alex told her more of the explosion and what he had seen, her nightmare flashed through her mind and she realized it had not been a dream at all. Alex had been right. She was altered. She had seen it.

“I just can’t know for sure what really happened until I run the experiment again. It won’t mean anything to science unless we can document and duplicate the result,” said Alex, sighing at the thought.

“When we’ve got solid scientific proof, we can publish and let the world know,” said Sydney, her eyes staring off to the side as she started to contemplate the interest their work would generate from the wrong places. “We’ll need to be careful.”

Alex sighed. “I know. But now that the lab and the chamber have been destroyed, where will we be able to rerun the experiments?”

“What about Brian Sheppard?” asked Sydney. “He has a lab and most of what we need to rebuild the resonance chamber. He also has a fabricator, so we can manufacture most of the parts right there. We have all the virtual designs in the computer backups that we need to rebuild the chamber. We’ll be able to get it up and running quickly. And didn’t you tell me that you had made an early prototype and left it with him at U of M?”

“Yes, but it would be better if we could do it on our own. We don’t want too many people to know what we’re doing here, especially with this kind of outcome!”

“If we can’t trust Brian, there‘s no one we can trust. After all, we’ve both known him for years, Alex!”

Alex and Brian had met twenty years before at the University of Michigan, when Alex made the first presentation of his theory to the mainstream physics community. That was the beginning of their love-hate relationship. Brian Sheppard was one of the foremost particle physicists leading the team searching for the Higgs Boson, and Alex’s theory completely negated his work. But they both liked the intellectual sparring and had become close friends. Brian had let Alex use the facilities at the University of Michigan sixteen years before, and Sydney had been Brian’s colleague on the faculty many years later.

“His expertise will be extremely helpful to us. Brian will be flabbergasted by what has happened tonight,” said Sydney. She was confident Brian would take time out from whatever he was working on to be involved, considering the result that was within their grasp.

“How many new frequencies did you run since I took the last backups?” she asked.

“You should have all but the last twenty or so. I don’t think I had gone that far by the time of the explosion, and the specs for the resonator are on the backups,” said Alex trying to keep his voice as low as possible so as not to be overheard.

“Thank God!” Sydney let out a sigh of relief.

“The copies at the house are everything that we have left then. Make backups and erase the computer,” said Alex.

“There are going to be OEB cops all over the place soon, if they’re not there already.” Alex glanced at the two medics who were sitting in front of the thick glass that separated him from the driver’s area. Now he spoke in a whisper. “Don’t come to the hospital until you’ve secured the work. Remember to do it the way we planned.”

“All right, honey. Which hospital are they taking you to?”

“The one off of Queen Kaahumanu Road near Captain Cook.”

“Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I‘ll call Brian and arrange everything, and when you‘re released, we can meet him in Ann Arbor.”

“We’d better not talk any longer,” said Alex. “For all we know the OEB may be monitoring this conversation, though I’m not using my own phone,” he said trying to see if the men upfront were paying any attention to him. They didn’t appear to be.

Ever since the United States had become the United Christian States of America, or UCSA, controlled by the ultra fundamentalist right wing of American politics, the Office of Ethical Behavior or OEB were the appointed morality police. One had to be careful of any relationship that wasn’t a conventional marriage. Out of wedlock sex was an offence that would mean certain expulsion from one’s career and even jail time. Alex and Sydney had taken extreme measures to keep their relationship private.

“Yes, we can’t be too careful. Take care, Alex. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Sydney hung up the phone and fell back onto her bed. She felt completely immobilized with so many questions running through her head. Had he really succeeded, or did he have a hallucination because of the blast? She knew he was not always prone to adhering to the strictest scientific method, and his unusual encounters could have played a part. We can’t reach any definitive conclusions until we duplicate it following a double-blind protocol. If Alex had truly succeeded, the world would not be able to ignore his work any longer and it would change everything currently understood about the fundamental nature of reality, she thought.

Alex winced at the scream of the siren as he lay on the gurney looking at the mess of tubes and instruments hanging from the ceiling of the ambulance. This was the last thing he wanted to do right now. His mind raced as he tried to reconstruct what he had been doing just before the explosion. Can I recreate it? Will the backups work? Did we save the frequency that created the effect? He had run at least twenty different variations today and only backed up some of them. His psyche fought a battle between elation and despair. Was the work he had labored over all his adult life finally be yielding the results he sought, or was everything destroyed in the explosion?

As the ambulance skimmed above the maglev rails, the Hawaiian scenery flew by at 150 miles per hour. The blur sent him back to when he and Sydney first began their collaboration and when they fell in love.

It had been an exciting journey set in motion two years before. The thoughts of how he met Sydney filled his mind’s eye with the deep blue of the Polynesian water, and he relived the excitement of their encounter when she arrived in Hawaii for the first time.

 

Chapter 2

TWO YEARS EARLIER

Alex waited in the open-air pavilion that was the Kona airport for Sydney’s plane to arrive. He had been waiting months for her to be able to take a leave of absence from the University of Michigan where she had been a professor of mathematics with a strong physics background. He had been searching for a long time for a mathematician who could help him publish his theory, without much success, until now. It had been a risky move for an academic to part with the mainstream scientific community. Joining his team to work on a radical theory that challenged much of what was accepted as the nature of reality could potentially end one’s career. So he was excited to have found someone of Sydney’s caliber to collaborate with him.

It had actually been Sydney who contacted Alex after reading his article on the infinite nature of matter. She told him she had been working on the conundrum of infinities in mathematics for years, and was so enthusiastic about his theory when they spoke that he hired her on the spot.

As the passengers began to disembark, Alex caught sight of Sydney on the tarmac, her long wavy blond hair blowing in the stream of the jet engine. He waved to her as she made her way through the crowd. Seeing Sydney in person took his breath away. He had only seen her from the neck up in their vidphone conversations. She had been always wearing horn-rimmed glasses with her hair up in a bun that he thought was rather severe. But now long locks were flowing down her shoulders like a vision of a Botticelli fresco. As she came closer, he could see she had a long lean athletic figure and skin was as smooth as porcelain. Without her glasses, her almond shaped green eyes were intoxicating to him. He could hardly contain his attraction to her, and this was something for which he had been not prepared. It put a new problematic dimension to their impending partnership.

“Welcome to Hawaii,” he said, grabbing her bags.

“Thank you. It’s so good to finally meet you in person.”

“Same here,” he replied noticing her entrancing smile.

“This weather is wonderful,” said Sydney, with her arms stretched out in a gleeful embrace of the warm air. “What a change from the snow storm I left in Ann Arbor. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get out today.”

“Yes, I don’t miss those Michigan winters either. You’ll love it here,” said Alex as he led her across the street to his car and began loading her bags in the trunk.

“How long have you been living here?”

“Almost ten years now, and I haven’t regretted it for a minute, although you need to get off the island every once in a while to avoid island fever.”

“Oh I don’t know. I don’t think I’d ever want to leave this place,” said Sydney looking at the lush foliage and brightly colored flowers that grew everywhere.

“I’m so glad you were able to get here in time for my presentation.”

“Me too. It was touch and go there with the snow. I had to leave a few days earlier than my department head wanted me to as well. How many physicists do you have coming?”

“As far as I know, around twenty-five have signed up. I consider this a major coup to have been able to get so many mainstream scientists to hear my so-called radical theory,” said Alex making quote signs with his fingers and letting out a chortle.

“At least we have tonight to get acquainted and get you situated before the presentation begins tomorrow afternoon. Are you hungry? Would you like to get something to eat in town before we go to the hotel?”

“Sure, that sounds great. My flight from Detroit had was late and I didn’t have a chance to eat anything during my layover in L.A.”

“I know a nice place right on the water. Town is only a few minutes from here.” Alex put the car in gear and smiled at the beautiful woman that was to be his new partner … perhaps in more ways than one.

Alex and Sydney were seated at a table for two that overlooked the harbor where the cruise ships came in. The sun was low and the sky was turning shades of plum, casting undulations of color on the gently lapping water. As they sat waiting to order, Sydney noticed how Alex’s chestnut colored eyes twinkled in the waning sunlight. He was far more handsome than she had expected. Vidphone transmissions often don’t do a person justice. She was surprised to find he was as fit as an athlete, with a tall, finely sculpted and wiry body … considering he was forty-six. His face was darkly tanned with high cheekbones and she wondered if his ethnicity might include some American Indian. He did not have short hair as she had thought, but rather it was long, jet-black, and pulled back in a ponytail. It gave him a Bohemian look that she hadn’t noticed during their vidphone conversations.

She found herself strangely entranced and excited in his presence. This was a feeling she did not want to have in her life right now. Since her painful breakup with Mark over two years ago, she had put all thoughts of men aside. She had simply turned off. It was a skill she honed to protect herself from the pain, and it had served her well so far. Now, this feeling … this stirring, was unsettling. She tried to shift her focus. She was determined not to allow herself to feel something for a man … not now and not anytime soon.

Still, Alex had a charisma about him. He had an engaging smile and intense eyes that when fixed on her made her feel like the only person on the planet. She shook her head and her long curls swept across her shoulders. It was all too dangerous personally, professionally and politically, so she redoubled her efforts to shut out the attraction.

Dinner out in a public restaurant was the first opportunity Alex had to talk with Sydney without fear of their conversation being monitored by the OEB police force. He was anxious to approach her on what was a forbidden subject under the tyrannical rule of the Office of Ethical Behavior. It was also an issue most scientists weren’t willing to discuss publically. He needed to know how open Sydney would be to the true nature of his quest, and he had to be careful not to alienate her before she could come to these conclusions herself.

He looked into her intoxicating green eyes, trying to think of a way to broach the prohibited topic.

“It’s great to have you on board. I had an extremely difficult time finding a mathematician with your background in physics willing to consider my theory. I can’t tell you how many encounters I had with mainstream physicists that ended with them running out of the room screaming.”

Sydney laughed. “Welcome to the wonderful world of scientific rivalry. I’ve been arguing with my colleagues for years about the way they’ve been dealing with infinities in mathematical equations, so I know what you mean.”

“Tell me about it,” said Alex rolling his eyes.

“Really, I don’t understand how they can keep ignoring and renormalizing the infinities that are always showing up in the math.”

“Renormalization, ha! That’s what they tried to do to me in school!” Alex laughed and slapped his hand against his forehead. “Making arbitrary cut-offs to get rid of infinities in the math to make their equations work has kept mainstream science from understanding that infinities are fundamental to creation!”

“Your theory is quite a radical shift from the current theories. Everybody is doing particle physics, looking for the smallest ‘God’ particle. But your theory says matter can be divided infinitely, and that we need to look at the infinities and how the universe creates boundaries around the infinite space to make physical matter. How did you ever come to this?” asked Sydney.

Alex smiled sheepishly. Perhaps this story would open the door to discuss the matter on his mind.

“I’ve been pondering the concept of dimensions as far back as I can remember. In many ways, I’ve always felt that I’ve been interacting with other realities.”

“Really, how so?” Sydney looked taken aback by his statement, and Alex wasn’t sure how much he should reveal about his strange journey of discovery.

“Oh, you know, I was always day dreaming. I had been wondering what reality is, even when I was as young as eight or nine years old and everything they were teaching in school and church didn’t seem to make much sense.”

“I can relate to that,” said Sydney, taking a bite of bread.

“There was one pivotal day when I had a profound experience after my first geometry lesson. I always had a lot of trouble in school because I wasn’t interested in anything they were trying to teach me. I usually took a seat at the back of the class as close to the door as possible so I could make a quick escape,” said Alex with an impish grin.

Sydney laughed. “You know Einstein didn’t do well in school either when he was young.” Alex smiled, flattered to be compared to the great icon and his personal hero. He cleared his throat and continued . .

“One day the teacher announced that we were going to talk about dimensions and I got excited for the first time about something they were teaching at school. Finally, they were going to talk about a subject that was interesting to me. When the teacher got up to the black board, he drew a dot and said that this was zero dimension and it didn’t exist and I got so so so … disappointed!”

Sydney almost choked on her bread, she laughed so hard.

“I knew right then and there that I was going to flunk this class because I could see that dot on the board. So how could it not exist? Then the teacher said, if you take a bunch of these dots and string them together you have a line and that’s dimension one … and it too does not exist. If you take four of these non-existent lines and put them together you get a plane, and that’s dimension two … but that also does not exist.

Then the teacher said something incredible to me. If you take six of these non-existent two-dimensional planes and form a cube, now miraculously you have existence! All I could think was how can you get existence out of six non-existent planes? What we really have is non-existence to the fourth! I don’t care if you take ten thousand non-existent dimensions, you can’t get existence out of non-existence.”

“I never thought of it that way. But doesn’t a plane exist? Isn’t there something that can be said to be two dimensional?”

“When you start talking about flat space, you have to ask: how flat? And you can’t answer that question without adding volume,” answered Alex.

“When you put it that way . . .”

“This principle is at the heart of my theory, for it’s a fundamental flaw in our thinking of mathematical constructs. Almost all of our science is conceived of in two-dimensional space and there’s no such thing in reality. We think of a comic book as two-dimensional. Yet, even the ink on a comic book is three-dimensional if you examine it at the microscopic level. The ink has height, weight, and depth. But most of our mathematics and concepts in physics are conceived in two dimensions. There’s no such thing as flat space, and so we have to stop conceiving of physical reality as two-dimensional and creating mathematics that refers to things that way.”

Sydney now moved forward in her seat, her chin propped up on her hands, elbows on the table, listening intently to him.

“Anyway, while taking the bus home from school that day … and it was a really long ride since I’d been thrown out of all the closer schools … which a friend of mine always says is how I furthered my education . . .” Sydney and Alex laughed.

“Anyway, I had been sitting there trying to picture what dimensions really were. I knew at a gut level that what the teacher just said was wrong. I started to imagine myself leaving my body and traveling into the sky above the bus until the bus appeared like a tiny dot below. I kept flying higher and higher until the entire continent had become a dot. Then the Earth itself receded in size as I soared farther out of the solar system. As I visualized myself nearing Pluto, the sun had become a tiny speck of light in the vast distance and the Earth had long since vanished from my view.

I pictured myself flying farther out in space until I could see the galaxy below me like a neon lit pinwheel. Then the galaxy began to shrink as I flew past it into the cosmos. Finally, it too had become a tiny dot of light. I continued in my mind’s eye out into space and watched as even galactic clusters receded to tiny dots. Then I stopped. I started to imagine myself flying back into the galaxy, into the solar system, into the Earth’s atmosphere, and into my body.

But my journey did not stop there. I decided to shrink in size until I was small enough to enter the pores of my skin. As I became smaller, what at first appeared as tiny dots grew and unfolded to reveal entire new worlds with billions of new tiny dots. First, I imagined traveling into a cell and saw a world of activity and billions of tiny dots that were atoms. Then I found myself diving into the atoms, which expanded into solar system- like configurations, as I shrank in size. As I became smaller, I realized that with each leap in scale another world, that first appeared as a tiny dot, expanded to reveal whole worlds within.

I understood at that moment that everything in existence was just different-sized dots that can be divided infinitely and that scale and density were important to reality. I knew from then on what I would do with my life. I needed to understand what matter was and how it came into existence.”

“That’s a pretty profound epiphany for a kid.” Sydney’s green eyes seemed enchanted as he continued telling his story.

“Anyway I remember getting home all excited to tell my mother about this revelation. She was thrilled that I was finally interested in school. But when I told her that the teacher had been wrong and I had figured out that everything was a dot and everything was infinite, she was upset. She looked at me like only an Italian mother can and said, ‘If you put that down on your test you’re going to flunk that class, and you know I’ve been working for eight hours and I don’t feel so infinite.’ That’s when I had another revelation because I realized she had a point. Why is it that if everything is infinite, things just don’t collapse into each other? I didn’t know it then, but I had been asking one of most debated questions in physics. How can infinities be compatible with finite structures?”

“Yes, exactly!” Sydney’s face lit up. “That’s the very question I’ve been struggling with for years! I keep seeing that infinities are always cropping up in the math. I mean take pi or the phi ratio for instance. These are fundamental constants that must be used to describe almost everything in the universe and they’re infinite numbers!”

“Exactly. It took me many years to get a handle on this but I realized that the challenge was to find out how the universe creates boundaries around the infinities to create the material world, and if I understood that I would have the key to creation. Eventually I came to understand that the answer could be found in geometry and that this new way of looking at matter had profound spiritual implications.”

This was the forbidden subject, and Alex leaned back in his seat watching for Sydney’s reaction.

“Really?” Sydney looked perplexed. “You don’t often hear physicists talking about spirituality.”

Alex pursed his lips. He had to go slowly with Sydney and take care not to lose his credibility with her.

“If the universe uses geometry to create physical reality it would explain the concept of sacred geometry,” said Alex hoping she could relate to his explanation.

“But isn’t that just people putting a spiritual spin on what is, in actuality, a mechanical function of nature?” asked Sydney.

Alex could see that Sydney was not on a spiritual path and this disappointed him. He considered that scientists were almost as bad as religious fundamentalists in their outright rejection of anything not in line with their dogma when it came to spiritual concepts. But his theory brought science and spirituality together, and she would have to understand how he arrived at his conclusions to see the spiritual implications of his work.

“Think of it this way,” said Alex. “If all matter can be divided to infinity, it means we are living in an infinite or open system, not a closed one.”

Sydney took a sip of wine and Alex poured the red Merlot into his glass and took a sip as well. “In infinity, every point is the center. That means you center your own universe and I center my own universe.”

Sydney nodded as if unconvinced. Clearly, Sydney did not comprehend the underlying meaning of his theory. It seemed to him that everyone who came through the formal education system had their brains stuck in a neat little box. It was too early to press the subject further, so he decided to shift the conversation to something more scientific.

“If all matter can be divided to infinity, it implies an infinitely dense energy field or a black hole at the center of every particle of matter in the universe. It would mean that there is an infinite field of energy underlying all of our physical reality. But first I needed to solve the incongruity of infinities and finite boundaries. I worked on it for years and finally realized that the geometry of the double-bounded tetrahedron was the key.”

“You mean a six-pointed star?” asked Sydney, leaning back to let the waitress serve her grilled tuna.

“Yes, but the geometry that must drive the creation of matter has to be able to grow in fractals and be in perfect equilibrium.”

“How so?” asked Sydney, taking a bite of her dinner.

“Well if it weren’t in perfect geometric equilibrium, cancelling each side out, we would be able to see it, and we can’t.”

“See what?” asked Sydney, now looking confused.

“The underlying energy field. While I know the geometry of the field has to be based on this tetrahedral geometry, it has to be able to expand and contract infinitely in stable geometric fractals. I still don’t have the perfect shape of equilibrium. We have to find that perfect geometry before my theory can be complete,” said Alex, waving the waiter over. “Are you ready for another glass of wine?”

“Absolutely,” said Sydney. The waiter brought over another bottle, showed the label to Alex and pulled out the cork, pouring a small amount for Alex to taste.

“This is fine,” he said to the waiter. Then he turned to Sydney. “I thought we’d do it up right on your first day in Kona. I think it’s appropriate that we toast our new collaboration.” He lifted his glass and smiled. They clicked their glasses and Alex looked deeply into Sydney’s green eyes. She is truly a rare beauty, he thought. A surge went through him. It was a feeling he knew all too well. It was a sign that something profound … something of immense importance was about to take place. Then it hit him as if he were awakening from a deep sleep and remembering the wisps of a fading dream. He remembered their deep connection. He remembered their destiny.

By the time Alex dropped Sydney off at her hotel it was after 10:00 PM. It had been a long day and she was now over-tired. She found herself tossing and turning, unable to sleep. She was excited about the prospect of working with Alex, and their conversation replayed in her mind. She had gotten a number of ideas from their discussion and wanted to get them into her computer before she forgot, but had been too tired and a little too drunk to do it. She would have to get some sleep first. One thing they talked about stood out and she couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She never really thought of the infinities she had been finding in her math as having spiritual significance. Even if there is an infinite field of energy underlying physical reality, she didn’t quite grasp how that had spiritual implications. She needed to think about it.

She put her computer on her nightstand and gazed around her room. It had only three walls with the outside being an open balcony, and a warm breeze wafted over her bed. They had told her at the desk that open-air rooms were common in Hawaii in areas that tended to get little rain. Her bed was made up with white linens and a fluffy white duvet cover. There was white mosquito netting pulled back around the tall iron bedposts. She felt as if she were enveloped in a cloud.

Sydney lay in her bed staring out at the brilliant conflagration of stars splashed across the black Hawaiian sky and marveled at the glory of the universe. There were so many galaxies, with so many suns and so many worlds in the vastness of space. Even our sun, a million times larger than the Earth, is but a grain of sand against the swath of glimmering lights that dot the heavens. It looked so peaceful and permanent, and yet she knew the cosmos is in constant and volatile motion.

In fact, it was more like a deadly pinball machine with galactic collisions and exploding stars. And the Earth is far from safe in this colossal game. She knew that humankind would have to learn how to leave the planet if humans are to survive for the long run. Planets are just too unstable, so a civilization needs to be able to travel to other worlds to endure. Earth has already experienced several extinction events and there will surely be another eventually. Just one deadly sun flare could suck up the atmosphere, not to mention the possibility of a hit by a comet or an asteroid! This scenario had always caused Sydney anxiety, and had been one of the main reasons she wanted to work with Alex so much. He claimed that his work would result in uncovering a new energy source and even an anti-gravity drive, which she believed was of utmost importance.

Sydney found it hard to still her mind. She felt as if she were drifting in and out of sleep as thoughts continued to swirl through her head. The night was quiet except for the sound of rustling fabric and chirping frogs. She found herself focusing on what looked like a star, but brighter than the rest. As she stared at it, she noticed that it appeared to be growing more luminous. That’s odd. Then it seemed to burst, increasing at least a hundred times in size … but just for a second. Her eyes grew wide in amazement. What in the world could that be? She continued staring at the light in the sky until her eyelids became heavy and she lost consciousness.

Her dreams were often colorful and intense but this time it was different … almost real. She saw the outline of a tall Being, that seemed more shadow than substance, coming towards her. Sydney froze. Her first reaction was sheer fear that tore down her spine like a hot poker. It seemed to be at least seven feet tall and had a large round head. She couldn’t really make out a face and she was petrified as it approached her. She knew she must be dreaming, but it felt real. She tried to calm herself. It’s just a dream … just a dream. Wake up damn it, wake up! But try as she might, she remained locked in position unable to move, unable to wake herself.

As the figure came closer, she could see that it looked humanoid but she could not determine its gender. Something about it seemed non-threatening, and Sydney calmed down. The Being’s hand had only four fingers and was outstretched with an object in its palm. It was now just inches from her and Sydney could see that it was holding a sphere with a tetrahedral shape inside that looked like a three-dimensional six-pointed star. The Being let the object float in front of Sydney’s eyes and smiled at her. Sydney could now see that the Being had large almond- shaped eyes and two slits for a nose.

“This is the key,” Sydney heard it say, though its small mouth did not move at all. The sphere morphed into a many-sided tetrahedral structure that was square from her vantage point.

“There are clues in crop circles. I will make one tonight, and you will begin to understand” she heard it say. Then with a wave of its hand the Being showed Sydney a geometric design. It had multiple spheres, each containing an up and down tetrahedral design in smaller and smaller fractals of the same geometry.

Then the structure within the ball morphed into a much more complex geometric array, with many more tetrahedrons. It then started spinning, and turned into a shape that looked like two stacked doughnuts, a double torus, spinning with small beads spiraling back and forth between the two donut shapes. Sydney looked up at the Being, her brow furrowed, not understanding the significance of the object.

“Sixty-four,” said the Being. “This number is the key.” Then, the Being simply vanished into thin air.

When Sydney opened her eyes, she gasped. What just happened? This had been no simple dream! She was sure it had been a real experience, but she had to confirm it. She would do what the Being told her to do. She would look for the crop circle. If it was there, it would verify that this had been a visitation, not a dream. Sydney grabbed for her laptop and wrote down everything she could remember from her dream. Then she pulled a notebook out of her nightstand drawer and drew the crop circle.

She had never taken crop circles seriously and always dismissed the phenomenon as a hoax perpetrated by pranksters. She figured they were made by crazy artists stomping out their statements in the fields. That had been about as far as this kind of speculation had gone with Sydney until now. If she found this crop circle, it would prove she had had a visitation, not a crazy dream.

She started to go online, but then hesitated and closed her computer. Often people going to these kinds of websites were monitored and even arrested by the Brotherhood. The OEB believed that any interest in paranormal or UFO activity was demonic and crop circles would probably fit into that category. She decided to go into town and use a public access Internet connection that couldn’t be traced back to her. This was tricky, but she knew how to do it. She would go into town during one of the breaks. For now, she had to keep this to herself.

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