Here' the first chapter of 'The Antikythera and the Source, my sixth book, due to be released in March-April of 2015
To Purchase The Antikythera and The Source in paperback click this link http://www.amazon.com/Antikythera-Source-PanOrpheus/dp/1500473677/ If you prefer the Kindle version click the Kindle box on the link.
Chapter One…The Antikythera
The Source was on a regular patrol, flying through the currents of the sea of time. ‘Mystery always finds me’, she thought, realizing that in her earliest incarnation as Theoclea, the Delphic Oracle she had used that phrase many times. Occasionally she would get away from her duties at the Middle Way and The Watchtower to fly the ship, a new one named the Firefly, and wander through Plateaunia, a two dimensional flatland between spiral arms of the galaxy. Music was playing quietly in the background. It was a song by a group called Protocol—Earthly Realm music from the last half of the twentieth century, the sixties or the seventies.
***
“Upon the seven seas we sailed
through storms of darkness and light
Always seeing always knowing
that beyond the veil of sight
there was the land of day and night.”
***
This time there were some new tracking devices on the ship. She would simply follow the currents. What was there to see? There were infinite individual holographic moments in time, five or more for each second. She could pick any one of an endless number, swoop up through them as if they were cards in an endless deck, watching ‘time’ as it advanced into the future, somehow clustering the more probable moments together no matter how far apart they seemed to be in the ‘before’.
She could follow this path or that, as if the paths were like branches of a tree, and then escape through the spider webs and spaces between the branches, and descend in another direction picking from any number of possible ‘nows’, and seemingly run through the snapshots backwards as if entering one or another possible ‘pasts’.
It was her way of reminding herself of how things really worked. There were clocks on the walls of the Firefly, and she was surrounded by the sound of numerous tick tocks and chimes...a relaxing sound coming from the action of escapements, pallets, crown wheels, mainsprings, and hairsprings all acting in accordance with certain mechanical rules of nature. Yet she knew that the ‘tick tock’ sound was an illusion, just like the ‘up and down, past and future’ of Plateunia—a flatland, a seemingly two-dimensional flatland covered with a blue mist.
She listened to the sound-forest of tick tocks. There were actually five different sounds to the tick tock. The first three almost coincided—the actions of three different devices made the ‘tick’, and two others made the ‘tock’.
She piloted the ship almost effortlessly as she looked at her right hand on a lever. Her hand and arm were changing colors, going from red to orange to yellow, through brown to blue, violet, pink to white, and then back to red. The change was slow and steady, so that one could see the rainbow of all of the colors in her skin. Indeed her whole body worked like that…her eyes and hair changed color too. Her facial features changed as well, by slow degrees. The Mage was the same way. They could stop it at any time, and assume a particular identity when they wanted to. After all they were who they were.
She invariably assumed a form and hair color of Louise Brooks, an early twentieth century Earthly realm movie star, with a ‘helmet-cut’ hairstyle that The Source liked. It was the same hairstyle that she had when she was Theoclea, The Delphic Oracle, countless eons ago.
Suddenly, all of the alarms on all of the clocks went off. Something was wrong. She changed course, and moved from the branch that she was in—to slow down and hide behind a larger branch, moving away from the ‘flow’ of time. She flicked some switches and the Firefly stopped. It was as if her new ship was a real firefly that had suddenly decided to rest behind the branch of a tree, surrounded by spider webs and the blue mist.
The Source gazed at the viewscreens on the Firefly. Slowly approaching what seemed to be the entire tree of Plateaunia was a huge ship, or device of unknown design and origin. She could barely make it out, but it was there. She adjusted the viewscreens to go through the realm of frequencies, testing some new instruments that measured frequency, magnitude, resonance, and other evidence of movement. The object was huge…much larger than the branch that she was exploring, and even though there were countless infinite numbers of trees, branches, and webs in Plateania, the object was huge by any standard, and it was approaching. Yet, her gauges showed it to still be a considerable distance away.
As it approached she enlarged the view on the viewscreen. No wonder it had taken so long to see it. It was made of Dark Matter...a solid made of Dark Matter! She adjusted the device that allowed her to see it, until it appeared as dark gray on the viewscreen. Suddenly the object, seemed to change from dark matter to a new state…it became brilliantly visible. Its size was off of the charts, there were no gauges and readouts that made any sense to her, as if the object were the size of a large planet, like Jupiter, that enveloped her view completely, blotting out space and time.
It was as if the object had suddenly come to life, and had changed its substance from Dark Matter to The Light. Emblazoned in bright gold on the side of the ‘ship’, or object was a name. She recognized the language. Memories of her first incarnation as Theoclea the Delphic Oracle came back to her. The world-ship, if indeed that’s what it was, was called the ‘Antikythera’. In comparison, her ship, the Firefly was almost infinitely tiny.
To Purchase The Antikythera and The Source in paperback click this link http://www.amazon.com/Antikythera-Source-PanOrpheus/dp/1500473677/ If you prefer the Kindle version click the Kindle box on the link.
Chapter One…The Antikythera
The Source was on a regular patrol, flying through the currents of the sea of time. ‘Mystery always finds me’, she thought, realizing that in her earliest incarnation as Theoclea, the Delphic Oracle she had used that phrase many times. Occasionally she would get away from her duties at the Middle Way and The Watchtower to fly the ship, a new one named the Firefly, and wander through Plateaunia, a two dimensional flatland between spiral arms of the galaxy. Music was playing quietly in the background. It was a song by a group called Protocol—Earthly Realm music from the last half of the twentieth century, the sixties or the seventies.
***
“Upon the seven seas we sailed
through storms of darkness and light
Always seeing always knowing
that beyond the veil of sight
there was the land of day and night.”
***
This time there were some new tracking devices on the ship. She would simply follow the currents. What was there to see? There were infinite individual holographic moments in time, five or more for each second. She could pick any one of an endless number, swoop up through them as if they were cards in an endless deck, watching ‘time’ as it advanced into the future, somehow clustering the more probable moments together no matter how far apart they seemed to be in the ‘before’.
She could follow this path or that, as if the paths were like branches of a tree, and then escape through the spider webs and spaces between the branches, and descend in another direction picking from any number of possible ‘nows’, and seemingly run through the snapshots backwards as if entering one or another possible ‘pasts’.
It was her way of reminding herself of how things really worked. There were clocks on the walls of the Firefly, and she was surrounded by the sound of numerous tick tocks and chimes...a relaxing sound coming from the action of escapements, pallets, crown wheels, mainsprings, and hairsprings all acting in accordance with certain mechanical rules of nature. Yet she knew that the ‘tick tock’ sound was an illusion, just like the ‘up and down, past and future’ of Plateunia—a flatland, a seemingly two-dimensional flatland covered with a blue mist.
She listened to the sound-forest of tick tocks. There were actually five different sounds to the tick tock. The first three almost coincided—the actions of three different devices made the ‘tick’, and two others made the ‘tock’.
She piloted the ship almost effortlessly as she looked at her right hand on a lever. Her hand and arm were changing colors, going from red to orange to yellow, through brown to blue, violet, pink to white, and then back to red. The change was slow and steady, so that one could see the rainbow of all of the colors in her skin. Indeed her whole body worked like that…her eyes and hair changed color too. Her facial features changed as well, by slow degrees. The Mage was the same way. They could stop it at any time, and assume a particular identity when they wanted to. After all they were who they were.
She invariably assumed a form and hair color of Louise Brooks, an early twentieth century Earthly realm movie star, with a ‘helmet-cut’ hairstyle that The Source liked. It was the same hairstyle that she had when she was Theoclea, The Delphic Oracle, countless eons ago.
Suddenly, all of the alarms on all of the clocks went off. Something was wrong. She changed course, and moved from the branch that she was in—to slow down and hide behind a larger branch, moving away from the ‘flow’ of time. She flicked some switches and the Firefly stopped. It was as if her new ship was a real firefly that had suddenly decided to rest behind the branch of a tree, surrounded by spider webs and the blue mist.
The Source gazed at the viewscreens on the Firefly. Slowly approaching what seemed to be the entire tree of Plateaunia was a huge ship, or device of unknown design and origin. She could barely make it out, but it was there. She adjusted the viewscreens to go through the realm of frequencies, testing some new instruments that measured frequency, magnitude, resonance, and other evidence of movement. The object was huge…much larger than the branch that she was exploring, and even though there were countless infinite numbers of trees, branches, and webs in Plateania, the object was huge by any standard, and it was approaching. Yet, her gauges showed it to still be a considerable distance away.
As it approached she enlarged the view on the viewscreen. No wonder it had taken so long to see it. It was made of Dark Matter...a solid made of Dark Matter! She adjusted the device that allowed her to see it, until it appeared as dark gray on the viewscreen. Suddenly the object, seemed to change from dark matter to a new state…it became brilliantly visible. Its size was off of the charts, there were no gauges and readouts that made any sense to her, as if the object were the size of a large planet, like Jupiter, that enveloped her view completely, blotting out space and time.
It was as if the object had suddenly come to life, and had changed its substance from Dark Matter to The Light. Emblazoned in bright gold on the side of the ‘ship’, or object was a name. She recognized the language. Memories of her first incarnation as Theoclea the Delphic Oracle came back to her. The world-ship, if indeed that’s what it was, was called the ‘Antikythera’. In comparison, her ship, the Firefly was almost infinitely tiny.