The Omega Project (29 page)

Exhausted and hungry, I yelled out, “Vanilla sway, vanilla sway, vanilla sway.” My voice reverberated through the cavern, the echo causing the words of the useless phrase to overlap.

OSCAR WISHES TO KNOW THE PURPOSE OF YOUR ROAR.

Tell our friend the roar refers to a persuasive deception. A well-crafted lie. Sort of like this dream.

ROBERT EISENBRAUN IS NOT DREAMING.

Yeah, yeah … tell it to the judge.

The river twisted to the northeast, its rocky borders forming a serene pool of water. Oscar paused at a flat stretch of limestone and laid down my grunting female colleague.

ATTENTION: DHARMA YUAN HAS REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS.

I knelt by her side, adjusting her blanket to conceal her breasts. The sickly pallor was gone, replaced by a healthy flush. Her brown almond-shaped eyes were open … staring at me, as if her brain knew who I was only her vocal cords hadn’t quite caught up.

“Good morning.”

INCORRECT. IT IS EVENING, 19:22 HOURS.

ABE, silent mode.
“Dharma, squeeze my hand if you can understand me.”

She power-gripped my fingers until I had to pry them loose. “Stay calm, we just thawed you from your cryogenic pod. Does everything seem to be working, other than your voice?”

She nodded, then attempted to move. I helped her sit up, watching as she tested each limb—never noticing Oscar, who had slipped into the river, the ceph’s camouflaging hide disappearing among the rocks.

Refusing my assistance, Dharma stood on wobbly legs, the action causing the blanket to fall away, exposing her nakedness. The Chinese-Indian beauty accepted her sudden nudity as something completely natural, lacking ego or embarrassment.

My response was typically Western male, although I did avert my gaze until after she turned her back. She treated me to quite the show, performing several yoga stretches before she began a tai chi movement, each form flowing from one position to the next, freeing up her blocked neural pathways like an internal massage.

Was I aroused? Hell, yes. But Dharma’s allure was something far more than sex, the grace and simplicity of her maneuvers unencumbered by her nakedness, her serene expression exuding an inner peace that had always eluded me … or my past lives, if the Buddhist therapist was to be believed.

Dharma stretched until her muscles shook. Turning to me she spoke, her voice scratchy but strong. “I have questions, but first I must bathe.”

She waded chest-deep into the river, her swaying hips clearly sending a message. As I watched, she massaged the tetrodotoxin gel from her skin before submerging to cleanse the residue from her long ebony hair, her features luminescent in the riverbed’s soft emerald glow.

After just a minute or so she surfaced, her hands smoothing her silky hair back over her forehead. “Join me.”

My heart pounded, the increased blood flow registering in my groin. “Don’t you want to know where we are?”

“Are we safe?”

“For the moment.”

“Then be in the moment and join me.”

I disrobed like a clumsy teen on prom night and took two strides into the river, the cold water (reported by ABE to be 52°F) blasting the air out of my lungs while shriveling my manhood into something more deserving of a diaper. “Gee … zus, it’s like ice! How can you stand it?”

“The meditation of
g-Tum-mo
frees the mind to control the central nervous system.”

ABE, redistribute my body heat by—

“Wait. Before you use your bio-chip, allow me to guide you.”

By now my teeth were chattering, my body shaking uncontrollably as she waded over and hugged me. The sensation was incredible, her torso exuding the heat of a stoked fireplace on a winter’s night, and I clung to her like an addict.

“Do not just feed off of me, create your own heat. Close your eyes. Now imagine your belly is a furnace, your lungs the bellows that brings the flame. Breathe in slowly and inflate your stomach. Feel your heart move the liquid heat into your extremities.”

With each breath I inhaled, she exhaled; with each exhalation she inhaled. After seven breaths I stopped shaking. After three minutes the feeling returned to my fingers and toes.

When I reopened my eyes, I was fully aroused.

She smiled her approval. “What a good student you are. Tell me, Robert, how long has it been since you have engaged in the art of lovemaking?”

“About twelve million years.”

*   *   *

We exited the river forty-five minutes later, my body tingling more from the wild Kama Sutra ride than from the cold. Dharma allowed me to wrap the blanket around her, then she sat on a rock and watched me dress.

“So, Robert, now it is time to fill in the blanks, as you Americans like to say. Since we are in Vietnam, I must assume the cryogenic process caused serious damage to my memory. It has been many years since I last set foot in Hang Son Doong cave; the first time my uncle brought me here was on my eighteenth birthday. But of course you knew that from my bio. I love the underwater lights—what a beautiful effect. How long has it been since I was unfrozen?”

ABE fed me the answer. “Six hours, twenty-eight minutes.”

Her smile cracked. “I don’t understand.”

“Dharma, this isn’t Vietnam, we’re still in Antarctica. Something terrible happened shortly after we were put to sleep … a cataclysm.”

Tears formed and her throat constricted. “What sort of cataclysm?”

“An asteroid. It struck the moon so hard it altered its orbit, blasting away massive city-size chunks of rock that would have been caught in Earth’s gravity. The impacts must have been horrible … planetwide firestorms; debris clouds that clogged the atmosphere, essentially cutting off photosynthesis and the sun’s heat. We’re talking major Ice Age, the end of humanity. I know it’s hard to fathom—”

“How long?”

“Honestly, it’s still all conjecture. ABE was frozen. I suspect the bio-chip was damaged.”

“How long were we asleep, Robert?”

“The A answer is twelve million years and change. Trust me, you don’t want to know the B answer.”

“Twelve million years? Then my family … everyone I knew—”

“There’s more. From the evidence back on
Oceanus,
it appears that GOLEM may have gone a bit stir-crazy. The rest of the crew … we found some serious genetic mutations.”

“We? Who else was with you?”

“A friend. Another species.”

She smiled. And then she giggled a half-mad, half-adorable giggle. “Bravo. You actually had me, the whole thing … it feels so real.”

“You think this is an Omega-wave dream? Hate to tell you, but that would make it my dream, not yours.”

“So sorry to remind you, Robert, but Hang Son Doong cave is my memory, as are you. Our lovemaking just now … it traces back to a desire I felt for you on the first day we met. I can understand your confusion. These Omega waves … they’re really quite powerful, how they mine the subconscious.”

She was practically giddy.

“So this friendly species, when may I meet it?”

“It doesn’t like human females. Apparently there’s a few genetic clones of Andria prowling the forests, hunting down cephs.”

“Cephs?”

“Short for cephalopeds—my name for Oscar’s species, not his. Oscar, come join us please.”

Dharma followed my gaze to the river. “Robert, there is no one out there.”

I waited another thirty seconds, then peeved, waded back into the freezing river and tapped the nearest rock formation—which materialized into a maze of hairy tentacles and an oblong head whose stalked yellow eyes looked at Dharma with malice.

“Dharma Yuan, meet Oscar.”

Oscar rose to his imposing nine-foot height, towering above the five-foot-four-inch China doll—my own heart skipping a beat as every rock formation in and out of the water suddenly melted into a pack of cephalopeds! Adults and juveniles, males and females, some holding squirming infants—all advancing on poor Dharma, who was a stone’s breath from fainting dead away.

Fearing for her life, I waded to shore, only to find my path blocked by a gyrating wall of gelatinous bodies. Swimming to a limestone ledge, I dragged myself out of the river and climbed onto a boulder, looking down upon what I construed to be the cephaloped equivalent of a Texas lynch mob.

The arbitrator was Oscar. One of the big fella’s tentacles was looped around Dharma’s slender neck, its fin coming to rest over her heart. Two more tentacles reached out to two more cephalopeds, who in turn reached out to four more creatures, each member continuing the process until every one of the intelligent beings was part of the bizarre group configuration.

ABE, what are they doing?

THE PROCESS TRANSLATES TO AN UNVEILING OF THE SOUL.

For what purpose?

IN THIS INSTANCE—TO DETERMINE WHETHER DHARMA YUAN SHALL LIVE OR DIE.

25

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.

—H
IS
H
OLINESS
T
ENZIN
G
YATSO
, the fourteenth Dalai Lama

Eyes closed, Oscar began swaying, setting off a chain reaction among the other thirty or forty cephalopeds. Truth be told, I couldn’t accurately tell you how many of them now encircled Dharma; from my vantage all I saw was an interlocking quilt of hairy brown bodies.

Cross-referencing Oscar’s behavioral patterns with hundreds of research papers on cephalopod rituals and echolocation, ABE offered my subconscious theoretical commentary:
OSCAR IS EVALUATING DHARMA YUAN’S CONSCIOUSNESS BASED ON HER THOUGHT-ENERGY PATTERNS. THIS EXPERIENCE IS BEING CHANNELED TO THE GROUP THROUGH PHYSICAL CONTACT.

The swaying and bobbing went on for several minutes until Oscar abruptly released his grip around Dharma’s neck and expelled a deep booming staccato sound from his breathing organ that reminded me of a shofar blast on Rosh Hashanah. The rest of the cephalopeds immediately joined in, creating a thunderous cacophony that reverberated through the cavern.

Perhaps the sounds were a “call to arms” because the grooved calcite walls suddenly became fluid with tentacles as hundreds of camouflaged squid scurried through the water and across the riverbank to join the gathering cephaloped Mecca.

And then there was silence—answered a moment later by Dharma’s wailing exhalation—an agonizing moan that echoed throughout the chamber and made my flesh crawl.

The cry died out, eliciting a chaos of pan-flutish bellows from the exuberant congregation, who converged upon Dharma and lifted her inert form high into the air, passing her atop the throng as if she were the lead singer at a rock concert.

The river of beings swept upstream like a brown tide, carrying my exonerated companion with them.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes and another mile’s hike produced a change in geology, the chamber narrowing, the elevation rising. The river twisted into white water, the rapids forcing the juveniles and mothers bearing young onto the bank. I remained at the back of the procession, Oscar by my side. Every so often a young cephaloped would dart in close, attempting physical contact, only to be intercepted with a stinging slap by one of Oscar’s powerful tentacles, chiding them away.

Up ahead, the ravine curved sharply. As we neared the river’s origin I could hear a roar of water, the thunderous sound devoid of echo, growing louder as the cave moved from night into day. As I rounded the bend, my skin was bathed in a cool mist, my senses once again overwhelmed.

We were standing behind a waterfall—a curtain of crystal liquid as tall as the Eiffel Tower, its bluster deafening. Backlit by the sun, the colors of the spectrum danced rainbows across the arching cavern walls. The flow cascaded into a shimmering azure-blue lake, its concealed northern end spread out before us, its spillway forging the river.

There was no longer a shoreline to follow, no path around the roaring obstacle of water. To continue on, one had to enter the lake and swim through the falls … which was exactly what the cephalopeds were doing—submerging beneath the pounding water and disappearing into the aquamarine ether.

I lost sight of Dharma, who must have already made the pass.

Oscar looked down at me. It was my turn.

We waded in together. The sun-drenched waters felt balmy—a wonderful relief after the icy cold waters in the cavern. Swimming along the surface, I approached the deafening roar as close as I dared, my heart racing in fear.

It is not child’s play to swim beneath the impact zone of a waterfall, Niagara Falls, as it was before I was frozen, dropped seventeen stories—the wall of water before me fell many times that height. And yes, while the flow from above appeared to pack far less volume than the Niagara River, I was still swimming into an unknown torrent—albeit a beautiful one.

I grabbed a lungful of humidity and ducked underwater. My brain was immediately overwhelmed by the chaos of white noise. Descending as deep as I could, I swam toward the crystal wall of foam—realizing, too late, that I was entering the freshwater equivalent of the three hundred foot tidal wave that had nearly drowned me days ago.

Liquid thunder bludgeoned my back and spine, forcing the air from my chest with the power of a battering ram. My immediate reaction was to turn back, only the falls held me fast, churning me into frightening somersaults that pried open my lips even as my mind screamed,
Vanilla sway!

I vomited water and inhaled the lake, the anxiety of drowning overshadowing my sudden acceleration through the falls … into unconsciousness.

*   *   *

SO MUCH ANGER, ROBERT EISENBRAUN.

Oscar?

YOUR ANGER RESTRICTS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF UNITY. THE ONE CALLED DHARMA UNDERSTANDS. LEARN FROM HER. ONLY THEN CAN YOU TRULY AWAKEN …

*   *   *

“Huh?”

Opening my eyes, I gasped a breath of daylight, as surprised to find my lungs pumping air as I was to be alive. Drenched and exhausted from yet another near drowning, I found myself lying in powdery pink sand along the shoreline of a tropical lagoon. Overhead, a cloud bank parted, revealing blue sky. Before me, a magnificent waterfall toppled a thousand feet over a mountain of rock that appeared to circle the entire perimeter.