• • • • •
“It is beginning.”
D’raak’s voice betrayed a hint of worry. In front of him, the hyperrealistic holographic image of the Sun glowed brightly in the center of the huge room, dwarfing everyone. All fifty members of the council stood in small furtive groupings on one side of the enormous three-dimensional image of the star, which floated just a few meters above the smooth rock floor and illuminated the vaulted pyramid ceiling to the apex. Wavering light beams bounced off the walls and reflected muted glows on the long flowing robes of the Council of Elders. The entire group stared at the noiseless apparition as the detail in the hologram showed the surface of the star roiling with color like the deepest burning ember in a bonfire, and it shone back in red from each of their azure eyes.
While the entranced group of elders watched, the surface of the Sun began to form a large, dark circle in the middle of a gigantic swirl of glowing yellow-white plasma. The hole deepened in color, becoming burnt sienna surrounding a brownish-black whirlpool. Suddenly, the dark eyehole of the giant nuclear hurricane burst open, and a bundle of monstrously large solar flares shot out of the hole, reaching high into the vaulted ceiling and out over the group.
No one had spoken since D’raak’s announcement. All of the Elders stood silently with their necks craned up as they watched the flares dance above their heads. After a moment of staring at the wispy ribbons of solar energy, Council Elder D’raak slowly looked down and turned to face the group. Elder G’raizi approached from his side and bowed her head gently toward D’raak. Her robe draped elegantly across her tall frame and flowed softly with her graceful long-limbed movements.
“May the wisdom of the Ancient Elders guide and protect us today—”
G’raizi froze as D’raak suddenly snapped his eyes to meet her gaze. D’raak was enormous even among a race of giants, almost eleven feet tall by modern measure. His chest and lungs were scaled even larger to accommodate the increased physiological and metabolic needs of a giant. And like a large musical instrument, his vocal cords created low rumbling words that had a physical power to them. When he spoke, the ground seemed to tremble, and it filled the quiet chamber.
“The wisdom of the Ancient Elders had nothing to do with this plan.”
The sound amplified as it echoed off the stone walls and the acoustically tuned vaulted ceiling of the upper level of the pyramid-shaped complex, which was bigger than an indoor stadium. All eyes and ears were on D’raak now.
“This Council of Elders hold responsibility for what we do here, today.”
His pale blue eyes burned into the group as he turned and surveyed the entire council with one sweeping glance. D’raak knew that he alone opposed this plan from the beginning, and he alone now stood with his back to the holo-display.
“For twenty six millennia, we have known this was coming. And for all of that time, the Great Councils held to one plan for when the day arrived. That plan was the only guidance the Ancient Elders had to protect us.”
Behind him, the gigantic hologram dissolved into a high resolution image of a timer. Where the glowing hologram of the Sun had been a moment before, was now a giant set of seven colored rings nested from largest to smallest, like a thick target without crosshair marks. The outside violet ring began sliding slowly away from the twelve o clock position and untraced in a counterclockwise direction. The remainder of the rings were shaded in the rainbow colors of the spectrum of visible light. The next smaller ring inside the violet one was indigo. Then the rings got progressively smaller in the familiar colors of blue, green, yellow and orange. The smallest center ring was bright red. The countdown timer used a logarithmic scale, and each ring moved faster than the one above it. The final ring took only 2.76 seconds to complete rotation and end the timer. The period for each ring to rotate fully around was a multiple of the time it takes for light to travel through a fixed length rod of crystalline carbon diamond, which was their equivalent of the vibrations of a cesium 133 atom used by modern scientists to define a second.
Before the outside ring had moved a distance equivalent to a few seconds of silence, D’raak continued. But the power seemed to leave his voice with the disappearance of the hologram star.
“This action today… is a gamble…”
After the light from the holographic sun faded and the room grew dimmer, D’raak felt tired. Maybe, everyone was right. Maybe, he was too old now. He would be 898 years old at his next counting. He was the oldest of the Elders on the Council. He was actually the oldest Elder ever to be on the Council, though there were a dozen just a few decades younger. Although their lifespans had been extended to almost one thousand years through medical and genetic advancements, those who were already several centuries old by natural age did not retain the same vigor of youth as those born after the advanced treatments were first developed almost seven hundred years ago. D’raak felt a thousand years old at this very moment.
G’raizi stepped toward him again. They had been friends since they were both children and even if they disagreed more often than not, she respected him immensely. Her aquamarine eyes were soft and glowed like crystal under her raven black hair. She stood before him; arms slightly bent with open, forward palms crossed at her midline. Even as large as she was, this posture presented a serene expression that was mirrored in her soft smile. Though her voice carried the same deep tone of all the giants, it was unmistakably female, and her words were characteristically gentle.
“I understand your position D’raak.” Her voice exuded calm and resonated like soothing chords from a cello. “But the Council believes Tokor L’roki is right. He is our greatest mind. His advancements have eclipsed anything in the history of our people. We asked him to come up with a better solution. This is his plan.”
D’raak suspected it would be one of the others who began the defense of what was happening here. He was surprised that G’raizi took the lead. He spat out his response a little too harshly.
“And yet, L’roki is not here.”
Over his shoulder, the second ring began rotating in the opposite, clockwise direction as it began to slowly disappear. But the indigo band was moving at a faster pace than the outside violet ring had traveled.
G’raizi’s face smoothed and softened as she smiled at her old friend.
“D’raak, please. You know he is with one of the science teams at the Beta site. He’s monitoring the field regeneration.” G’raizi moved only her lips. Everything else remained perfectly motionless. Her calm serene never wavered.
Though still stoic, D’raak was more animated in his reaction.
“Nonetheless, here we are. And I would remind you, my old friend, that L’roki no longer holds the position of Tokor. The censure he received from us over those blasted tiny machines and his ranting about immortality cost him his teaching position and title.”
Then he spread his arms toward the throng of Elder listeners, the white and tan of his Council robe flowing out from his body like a sheet.
“That was barely a hundred years past. It seems everyone has forgotten. L’roki has swooned every member of this council with his amazing inventions… and now this!” He pointed behind him with his large, muscular arm. “He has manipulated this council as it has never been before.”
D’oret, who was the most vocal supporter and the original proponent of L’roki’s plan, had been listening from the beginning of D’raak’s speech. Now, he stepped forward with the palms of both hands open to the front and his straight arms slightly spread apart to the side, as customary when openly contradicting another Council Elder.
On the timer, the second ring finished and the blue third ring began unrolling around the circle; switching direction to counterclockwise again. But no one was watching the timer any more. Instead, the entire group of Elders were watching and slowly moving closer to the two senior Council members. D’oret bowed his head once, to signify the interruption, before he began.
“But with
respect, Elder D’raak, the Council voted on this course of action. L’roki had nothing to do with it. The vote was only opposed by your ballot. We all decided—”
“It is not the decision that I question, Elder D’oret. It is the method by which we reached that decision. We are the Council of Elders. It is our duty to question the wisdom of this action. But we did not do that.”
D’oret looked at him with confusion as he returned his hands to inside the sleeves of his robe and dropped his arms by his sides. “We voted. Is that not the correct method by which to reach a decision?”
“But we didn’t question the wisdom of this plan, D’oret. Don’t you see? We let our fear dictate this decision. This event is so burned into our genetic memory, that we are terrified of its arrival. As the day has gotten closer, we have allowed ourselves to be pushed into this course of action out of fear. After L’roki’s dramatic presentation showing those vile computer generated scenes of destruction the Great Event can cause, the council voted out of fear, not knowledge.” His voice was booming, now. “It looked so real, our reaction was visceral. Anything that could possibly prevent those images from occurring would have been chosen at that point.”
The blue ring on the timer finished unwinding, and the green middle ring began moving faster in the opposite direction. Just then, a deep rumbling hum started coming from beneath the enormous chamber.
Elder G’raizi smiled. “See D’raak, the star-engine has begun. Just as L’roki said it would do. Everything is going to be fine.”
In front of the display, D’raak didn’t let up. He suddenly felt a sense of urgency.
“We have come a long way since the last storm. We know our pyramids will protect us. Why must we take a chance—”
D’oret interrupted him. “What about the rest of the planet? We cannot continue to ignore the rest of our home.”
D’raak could feel the emotion in his voice, but he couldn’t stop himself, now.
“Our home is here, not the rest of the lands on this savage planet—”
This time, it was G’raizi who calmly interrupted him.
“The planet is our home… all of it. Have the last thousand years of our remote probing of the Solar system not proven how interconnected we are to the entire planet? Our ancestors have always held that we are part of our precious home. Each part equal to every other part and all pieces of a cherished whole. But our home… this island… is also part of the planet. The time has come for us to change our isolationist nature. We must change our traditions.” She looked softly into his eyes. “There are others who live on this planet. They are our distant cousins by the grand code of life. What of them? We have evolved forward while they have not yet begun. The storm will devastate their numbers, just as it always has when the Great Cycle returns. It is wrong to abandon the rest of life here while we hide in our stone pyramids safe on our protected island.”
The giant holo-image of the timer finished unwinding the middle green ring, and the next smallest ring started moving counterclockwise. The yellow ring began disappearing at an even faster rate than the one before it.
D’raak glanced at the timer and realized he was running out of time. He suddenly felt a wave of anger roll over him, and he lashed out at his old friend before he could stop himself.
“Those tiny, primitive savages have no interest to me. Maintaining our way of life is of more concern. Don’t you see? That was why we censured L’roki when he tried to use those medical nano-bots to prolong our lives indefinitely. It’s one thing to use them for medicine, but if everyone lived forever, what would become of the Council of Elders? That technology would have destroyed the very essence of our society.”
No one else was talking, now.
D’raak’s emotional outburst was without precedent and stopped all of the whispers, which had quietly started back up among the group. Even G’raizi was now wide-eyed and silent, as she stared at the Council Leader with visible shock. D’raak paused to take a deep breath.
Beneath their feet, the hum coming from far below the massive pyramid changed pitch slightly and began to reverberate through the cavernous apex room.
“This star-engine he has created below us… how do we know it will not damage the protective field? If left alone, we know the planet will heal itself in only two hundred years, maybe less. Our people can survive this. We have before. We have no way of knowing if this machine will work.”
Above all of their heads, the timer began the orange ring moving clockwise and significantly faster than the last yellow ring.
D’raak could feel himself getting more agitated. He didn’t know why, but suddenly he had a very bad feeling; a feeling he had never experienced before. That feeling was dread. Deep beneath the floor, the pervasive hum became louder. As the group of Elders exchanged nervous glances, D’oret tried to respond.
“The computer simulations confirm the device will cause the field to heal almost immediately.”
“I don’t care what the computer says!”
D’raak’s voice boomed across the room like a cannonball. Perspiration was now beading up on the dark cocoa skin of his forehead. He suddenly realized the feeling rolling over him like an ocean was not dread; it was terror. Then his eyes became blurry, and his head started to spin. D’raak tried to inhale, but his breath was caught in his chest. He began gasping for air, and his vision began blurring in waves that were in time with the thrumming in his head.
“Something is wrong… something is terribly wrong.” D’raak could barely hear his words over the roaring noise in his mind.
He spun around in time to see the final bright red ring spin around and snap into thin air.
Instantly, a gigantic hologram of the Earth popped into the space where the timer had been. The huge floating globe exploded into color as the massive solar wave hit the magnetic field of the planet and lit up into an aurora.
But the color lasted only a moment.
The holo-image started to waver and then disappeared with a muffled exploding thump just as the humming from below reached a fever pitch. All at once, the entire group of Elders jerked their eyes to the floor as thin white beams of brilliant light emanated up through microscopic seams in the expansive smooth stone like blades of energy slicing up from below. Suddenly, they all grabbed their ears in pain as the throbbing noise jumped another level and the room filled with a blinding white light.
• • •
From orbit, the giant protective shield of the planet continued to burst into color as the enormous cloud of invisible solar radiation impacted the leading edge of the magnetosphere, releasing trillions upon trillions of minute pulses of plasma. As the main body of radiation washed over the planet, the brilliant shimmer of the fantastically bright aurora disintegrated almost instantly; blowing off in a sprinkling haze of light that could only be seen in the shadow of the Earth. When the field was gone, the radiation waves burned their way through the layer cake of atmosphere, destroying virtually every particle they encountered with their high-energy death grip. Microscopic water droplets vaporized instantly, disintegrating clouds from the top down until there were no more.
After it had burned through the clouds, the leading edge of the radiation wave continued down and slammed into the ocean. As if a gigantic blast furnace were sitting inches above the surface, the water molecules exploded from liquid to gas. A layer of steam uniformly rose up like a white cotton blanket growing across the ocean. The image of the smooth white sheet remained clean and unbroken only momentarily, as dead fish began to pop up to the surface causing ripple waves in the white blanket of misty burning water. But the blanket of steam didn’t stop the evil light. The radiation sank far into the surface of the water. The crystal azure and emerald green color of the deep blue sea bleached white and clear, as the intense radiation burned everything in its path down to the atomic level.
The foundation of the food-chain of life on this planet, the seas of plankton swarming through the ocean like clo
uds of grain, were destroyed en masse as the rays reached uniformly into the water. The invisible radiation cut a swath of death through the floating community of small green life like a giant flat blade had reached into the water and simply cut off the top portion of the colony.
Nothing near the surface of the sea survived the direct onslaught of the massive solar outburst. Sanctuary was found only in the deep darkness. All of the whales and dolphins began to gather below the radiation reach line, holding their breath. Predator and prey alike lined-up below the demarcation line of life and death like smooth, wet soldiers in formation on a parade field.
On the land, it was no different.
The first to feel the cleansing fire of sterilizing rays were the continents of the Americas. Clouds disappeared moments before the canopy tops of every tree in the hemisphere began to smolder and brown. Every airborne speck of dust was blasted into ash. Nothing with wings stayed in the air for more time than it took its charred body or ashes to fall to the ground. The entire sunlit side of the planet started to burn in the radiative glow washing over its unprotected and defenseless surface.
On the North American continent under the full brunt of the radiative beating, the snow-capped peaks of every mountain range from Mexico to Canada began to melt, sublimating directly into steam. Shallow bodies of water, like ponds, rivers, and lakes began losing their depth at visually measurable rates. Every creature in these drying pools of liquid life tried to swim as deep as their watery homes would allow. But only the deepest of these transient geologic features would last the five hours this storm would torture the Earth.
The side of the planet facing the Sun became a living hell, and neither water nor snow could keep out the light of death. Only the Earth itself, deep, dark holes and caves, offered a chance at life.
Every creature of every size crowded into these holes, regardless of whomever was lying next to them in the sanctuary of the dark.
And they waited.
But the coming death had only just begun.
• • •
Outside the pyramid of the Council of Elders, everything was burning from the unfiltered solar radiation. The large plazas were empty of anything and anyone, but all of the cities of pyramids were smoking and charring on the outside. Beautiful manicured gardens, many as large as a modern city and spread over the tropical mid-Atlantic island in wondrous abundance, began to wither and smolder in the ultra bright sunshine. A deafening electrical sizzle accompanied the sound of burning foliage.
Suddenly, the ground beneath the pyramid of the Council of Elders, the largest of the dozens of pyramids on the central plateau of the major mountain range, began to rumble and shake like an earthquake. The deep sound changed pitch, and a brilliant white light shot out of every opening in the great pyramid. The light was so strong it seemed solid, even in the bright sunlight from the radiation wave.
Then abruptly, the pyramid exploded into a nuclear fireball 150 miles across.
The entire surface of the island was blasted outward from the enormous explosion followed by the nuclear heatwave. As the fireball spread outward, the ground of the island seemed to fall away into a gigantic hole in the Earth.
Within moments, the island was gone; replaced with a hole of magma glowing red under the blinding white light of the explosion.
• • •
High above the planet, a massive flash of light in the middle of the Atlantic momentarily overshadowed the beating from the cosmic shower. The flash faded almost instantly. The gigantic mushroom cloud growing over the glowing ball of magma sizzling in the Atlantic ocean took a few minutes longer. An epic battle of fundamental forces played out as the nuclear ball of exhaust fought to push up and away, and the solar tsunami tried to push it back down to the sea.
Before this Sumo match of atomic titans could finish, the dark-side of the planet lit up from within.
Almost exactly on the opposite side of the solar onslaught and the mushroom cloud battle, the temporarily protected side of the planet suffered a fate equal to the punishment her hemispheric half-sister was enduring. Massive pressure waves rebounded through the molten core of the earth and pulsed together at a point under the tiny island chain of Indonesia. The mega-volcano caldera under what is now called Toba awoke from its long geologic nap.
Magma shot up and out of the first crack to appear in the massive caldera. The stream of molten earth soared out far past the level of atmospheric layers, which now existed only in the protective shadow of this side of the planet. And then gravity took hold. The ash and rock began to fall out in a circle that reached hundreds of miles in all directions. The sky began to fill with black soot and smoke that was as thick as tar. Poisonous gas and acid rain began to pour out over the Eurasian continent and the vast Pacific ocean.
The radiation storm would last for five horrid hours. But the magnetic field would stay weakened and disrupted for almost 200 years before it regenerated itself fully and began to protect its charges once more. Until then, the Sun would not be a friend to whatever life survived the volcanic explosions and the deadly black blanket now spreading over the Earth. The rotation of the planet would bring Africa around into the path of the solar rays long before the clouds of Earth-made death covered it. But the solar storm would be over before the full, devastating effects of this horrible day reached most of the primitive humans of that continent.
The same would not be true for anything living near the shores of the great oceans. Monster tsunamis as high as two-thousand feet would inundate almost the entire surface of the planet over the next twenty-four hours, washing several hundred miles inland on every continent. The tectonic turbulence on both sides of the planet would keep the oceans producing gigantic waves for weeks.
But at least the waves put out the fires.
Within a week, darkness settled over the planet because of the amount of ash in the atmosphere. Nighttime was pitch black, and full daylight was no brighter than the moon shining through a cloud at night.
The volcanic eruptions continued like exhaust stacks over the Pacific rim for thirty-eight months after that. They created a layer of soot and ash that was miles thick in the atmosphere. The dust and particles reached far up into the stratosphere and striated into an opaque blanket covering the entire globe from pole to pole.
Sunlight was not able to penetrate this insulating blanket for over twenty-five years, and temperatures plummeted into a type of nuclear winter. Almost every living plant died. And the Sun did not shine fully again on the scorched and waterlogged surface of the Earth for forty-two years.
After the Sun returned, the planet entered an ice-age event that lasted for over 50,000 years. It was like a double whammy in extended temperature drops.
Almost everything was pushed to the edge of extinction; including us.
Known today as the Toba Bottleneck Event, only 1,500 to 2,000 individual primitive humans survived the massive solar-shower and the subsequent mega-volcano explosions that occurred in 76,000 BC. Almost all of the individuals that survived the initial event, and all of the ancient humans whose genes continued on to today, were from Africa.
Modern DNA tests have shown that every human living today is related to, and descended from, one of these 1,500 to 2,000 survivors.
That’s how close the human species came to extinction.
• • •
Nothing remained of our cousins, the race of giants. Their entire civilization went down with their isolationist island home. The only evidence of their existence is a common legend of giants among all of the ancient civilizations that followed on every continent.
These stories, passed down long before the advent of writing, tell astonishing tales of a group of technologically advanced but mythically peaceful beings from the dawn of humanity, who came and went mysteriously and had the ability to move mountains.
Far older than any other legend, including Atlantis or the Great Flood, this race of giant humans were known only as… the Anci
ent Ones.
CHAPTER TWO
917 BC – Olmec Gulf Lowlands,
Central America