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Apocalypse, Aliens, New World Order, Illuminati...
Is it possible to control the weather? Is it
possible to make it rain on demand or to chase the
clouds from the sky? Controlling such things would mean
saving the planet from drought, living in a world
without hurricanes and storms, always having abundant
crops and keeping the glaciers safe.
According to Lewis P. Higgins, this was not fantasy, but
reality. He was aware of the fact that the technology he
was in the process of completing would, in the wrong
hands, be a weapon for the destruction of the human
race, but, idealist that he was, he felt he was working
for a good cause.
Lewis was a strange character with a troubled life but
also many successes and achievements: an eight-year-old
son of whom he was proud; a nearly completed device that
would be able to stop earthquakes; a time machine that
allowed one to travel into the future for twenty seconds;
many objects of varying type and importance; and the
Cloud Buster, which was practically complete.
Whom to present his inventions to, how to present them,
how to be sure that no one would put these resources to
terrible use? Those things mattered little right now.
Before overcoming the moral difficulties, he had to deal
with the practical ones, namely testing and improving,
making reliable machines that were not dangerous to
operate. It had been with one such prototype of a
machine to control earthquakes that he had seen his wife
die. During the testing process, Jenny, a scientist like
him, had lost her life in an explosion. Lewis had not
been able to come to terms with the event, and the pain
grew when he saw in his son's eyes the look of his
mother.
As a result of
this tragic experience, during tests on the Cloud Buster,
he decided to be alone in his bunker and to leave his
son in the laboratory in Montauk (a small nearby town)
with his new partner, who was also a scientist. Elzebeth
Tesla was not happy having to give up attending the
experiments, but she loved the little boy (Tobias
Higgins on his birth certificate, but known to everyone
as Tachy, a shortened form of "tachyon") very much and
respected his father's wishes. Nevertheless, she was
able to be attend the events via monitor. Nothing could
happen to them ten metres underground in a bunker that
was identical in every way to the one where the
experiment would take place and that had every comfort;
as well as the time machine, there was ample food, a CD
player, all kinds of video games for Tachy...
In 1953? Yes, the time machine provided a few "out-of-place"
possessions, but Lewis did not take things too far and
went out of his way not to incur paradoxes, at least,
not dangerous ones... some clothes from 1985 for
Elzebeth, a few DVDs for Tachy and some electronic
components with which to complete his machines. The
important thing was to appear in the right place at the
right time (who said "thief"?). Completing the
time-travel project would not be easy. Unfortunately,
the time jump worked one time in a thousand. Sometimes
he was able to see his entire invention in the future,
in 1974, to be precise.
Everything was ready for testing in the laboratory of
Doc Apocalypse, as his college friends had renamed him (his
ideas were often the grounds for scorn or great terror).
He pressed the start button and the enormous propeller,
set on top of the nearby mountain, hidden from view by
ancient trees, was set in motion, projecting an energy
flow towards the menacing clouds covering Serenity.
After twenty minutes, a widening path was dissolving the
impending storm and the camera pointed at the sky
clearly demonstrated that the experiment had been a
success.
Unfortunately, something went wrong.
Bolts of energy ripped through the sky and accumulated
in the area torn apart by the rays from the propellor.
The last thing Doc Apocalypse was able to observe before
the monitor signal was lost was gigantic shadows and
indistinct swarms.
Immediately he warned Elzebeth and Tachy to remain in
their bunker until he arrived. Collecting the car keys,
he suddenly halted. The speakers in the laboratory
filled the room with the screams of terror of the
inhabitants of Serenity. Horrendous roars alternated
with screams of terror: ten metres above his head,
something terrible was exterminating the populace. He urged his family once more to
remain where they were and ran to the control panel,
rapidly pressing buttons and gathering reams of data
understandable only to him.
After twenty hellish minutes, the speakers relayed what
he feared: horrifying explosions silenced everything.
The gauges in the laboratory indicated high levels of
radioactivity, but from the speakers there was only
silence. The experiment had gone decidedly wrong.
Something awful had crossed over through a portal that
had appeared with no logical explanation, and the army
had responded with the only resource deemed appropriate,
a hail of nuclear bombs. From the extent of the
explosions, he realised that this was not a new
Hiroshima but an onslaught of multiple bombs of smaller
size than the one used in the 1945 event.
How widespread was the disaster? How many creatures had
emerged from the portal and how far had the bombing
extended? He had no way of knowing.
The auxiliary power system switched itself on, and he
was still able to communicate with Elzebeth despite
there being no electricity (or anything else) coming
from outside. He could not leave or he would die. He
could only wait, watching the radioactivity gauge.
According to his calculations, he could not open that
damned door for eight months, at which point he would
suffer only minor damage (more or less). He explained
the situation briefly to his beloved and they said
goodbye to each other for the last time thirty days
after the bombardment. After that, there was only an
anxious silence, with none of his apparatus working and
four blue light bulbs powered by small solar panels
placed outside, which had fortunately remained intact.
Eight months passed.
He took the atomiser, the heart of the time machine (he
had not been confident leaving the mechanism active
while Tachy had been around), opened the door and took a
deep breath. The air-regenerators of own his invention,
which had been active in the bunker, had done their
work, but breathing real air, albeit still contaminated,
was satisfying in an entirely different way.
He had to find his family, force his way through the
rubble and survive in the face of anything he might meet
out there. Activating the time machine (fortunately it
did not require electricity, only the atomiser) would
have been easy, however it was a much more complex
matter to program it for a jump into the past. He was
not yet capable of doing that, although the idea of
being able to save his wife, before he had met Elzebeth,
would spur him to overcome the problem.
His mission was a simple concept, but confoundedly
difficult to realise: to go and warn himself, eight
months earlier, to prevent the Apocalypse.
Inspirations & Thanks: Pierluigi Ighina, Nikola Tesla,
Wilhelm Reich, Zecharia Sitchin, Corrado Malanga, David Icke,
X Times, The Secret & Adam Mack, The War of the Worlds, Fire
in the Sky, 6 Days on Earth. |
