Chapter 13 Wal-Mart

Copyright David A. Kearns

“…But as Aztlan began to sink into the waters of the sea, the sons of feathered lizard saw their chance to strike at humankind, to send him into a very dark time, so feathered lizard son kind could feed on the rose of all his youth over the whole word for thousands of years.
To do this feathered lizard sons had to eliminate the knowledge those of Aztlan and Posaztlan had gained. It set the two cousin nations, who had always been at peace, to war with each other as the calamities of the earth approached.
For in Kractumbam, the white land of death, a mass of ice as large as Aztlan itself was preparing to fall into the sea, and feathered lizard son knew this, and knew the timing of it. There are some who say once feathered lizard sons knew of the approaching day arranged and timed for the falling of the ice into the sea. For once in the sea it would cause waves, floods that would eventually cover Aztlan and Posaztlan.
Quetzalcoatl, and his sons of the feathered lizard kind, had learned you see, over ages of existence, the secrets of the shifting earth, of the stars that fell, and had demarked the timing of these events as much to demonstrate their power to mankind as to plan for their future. They could predict the shadow which swallowed the moon and the sun, and make the peoples of many nations bow down to them, though this event is a simple thing as we know it to be.
Quetzalcoatl, and feathered lizard-kind, tricked factions of Posaztlan and Aztlan to regard each other as enemies.
Two great religions existed on both islands, and these religions spread to the long island as well, named Arawakumba. The long island was in the process of receiving power and the light, as was the smaller island Layayakos and mankind was nearly ready to unify all islands under one banner of peace, tolerance and wisdom, with a say for all who lived there.
But feathered lizard sons could not abide this, for he needed the knowledge of his existence to disappear, so he could harvest mankind, as would a gardener plant and pluck cacao roots specifically for his needs in all parts of the world.
Feathered lizard sons needed to appear to man as a god from the stars so that mankind could never gain an advantage over him, yet would always be there to serve his needs as a provider of bahk and blood for consumption.
Now in the land known as Posaztlan there had been a very wise man named Guhengetus, who had learned the power to heal with his mind, and had learned the power to see events in the future, and had learned the power of peace as a means to create a new age.
This feathered lizard sons could not abide, and in the man’s fifty-second year, which many consider the midday of life, feathered lizard sons contrived to have him executed, by using the Council of The One on the ruling island of Aztlan to deem this man heretic to the established order of things. Though he was a wise man, concerned only with the progress of human kind, that wisdom was dangerous to the well-being of the feathered lizard sons who had bought off many humans with gifts of (technology) that made them wealthy.
Yet still, two religions sprang up after the man’s death that debated the nature of Guhengetus. Was he the son of Ra, as one religion believed, or was he son of woman, as are we all? And this was the belief of the other religion, that his bahk may have been just as human as ours was but his wisdom came from Ra, as did light which, like wisdom, comes to us all if we but remove the shades we place in front of it.
Now, for a thousand years of Ra, the two religions each believing the other had it wrong, managed to live and commerce peaceably, agreeing if not on the nature of the man, then his teachings.
But as the falling of the ice shelf approached, feathered lizard kind, stoked the fires of hatred between these two groups, such that war erupted, and those believing Guhengetus to be the son of heaven were forced to occupy only Posaztlan, and those believing him to be the son of woman, only Aztlan.
Arawakumba and Layayakos became battlegrounds of both as recruits for the soldiery of both islands were sought. The big mountain island to the south and east, likewise.
Now the state was in order for feathered lizard kind, as the day approached, when the ice shelf was preparing to fall into the sea.
A human explorer named Backtun, managed to gain information from sky-seers, and from his own personal derived observations that the ice shelf indeed was about to collapse and that mankind needed to stop the wars, and peacefully work together for an orderly evacuation of both main islands, parts of Arawakumba and the entire smaller island of Layayakos.
Backtun knew of the lands of Kembe, to the north and west, and though the passage was treacherous with the current of the sea, and the creatures of Kembe were giant and ferocious, Kembe would make an excellent place to start Aztlan over again.
Backtun’s life work became a quest to make contact with those native peoples of Kembe, giving them knowledge they needed to survive against the creatures which terrorized them, in exchange for a place by the seas to live away from the eyes of feathered lizard kind. But Backtun, like Guhengetus, was denounced by the Council of The One as devil-speaker and executed.
Yet his children, and his followers continued his work through the creation of a secret society that worked through the guild of builders and architects, as this group was known for calm, rational thinking whose moral character remained beyond reproach. As no amount of bribery could make a building stand longer if its base was not designed correctly…”

-The Book of Aztlan


July 2, 2011 8:30 p.m., Melbourne Beach
“Jesus, what took you so long, man? That beer’s got to be warm by now,” Russ said as I entered Jay’s house with the envelope and the case of beer.
“Trisha and I got to talking,” I said.
“Old times, huh?” Russ asked.
“Yeah, old times. She still looks great. I guess she’s got about fourteen days left on her stint in there. She says she doesn’t want to do that crap anymore,” I said.
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” said Jay opening a bottle of rum.
“Jay, I am sorry for what I said earlier, man. This thing has me pretty tense,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. Gary told me all that stuff you found in Ryan’s room. They have it all in boxes in my garage. Can’t tell me how much this thrills me, old buddy,” he said.
“You still don’t believe it,” I said.
“Nope. Not a wit, Tim. You weren’t in town when everything was going on with Ryan. He was going insane, and he was taking your ex-girlfriend right along with him man. Not to mention cheating on his wife,” he said.
“Jay…”
“No Tim, he was banging her in my office. I didn’t appreciate it at all. I began to look like the town pimp for bringing those two together again,” he said.
“But you didn’t…”
“Perception is everything in business. If there is a case for even saying something, it can be used against you. Hell, people are still whispering,” he said.
“Sorry to hear that, Jay. Sorry he disrupted your life,” I said.
“Look, Tim. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting how close you guys were. It only makes me mad he is still dragging you guys down with all this UFO bullshit. And that he would paint up his room like he did, even makes me more mad at him. So much talent and energy. Such a waste,” he said.
I had nothing to say to that. I couldn’t and wouldn’t judge Jay anymore. He was right. I hadn’t been here in town. Or so I thought for the moment.
I also began to believe he was being sincere, that he really didn’t remember, nor believe in what we apparently had all been through and nothing I said was going to change that. Being under his roof and hospitality I had to respect his thoughts on the matter.
I only hoped he didn’t talk about Trisha and Ryan when Sean got back into town. If he got back, better stated.
“Any word on Sean?” I asked.
“His mother called,” Gary said. Gary was bus reading the pieced-together account of what had been found on the wall.
“Sean is flying into Patrick Air Force Base sometime this evening. He should be here before ten. He wanted us to wait up for him and not hit the booze so hard we didn’t recognize him,” Gary finished.
“I’d know Sean anywhere, under any condition,” Jay said hoisting a rum-sunrise and slurping the frosty lip of the glass.
“Here we go again,” Tom said with a smile. “Only problem is, Timmy took so long getting back with the beer we have to resort to the hard stuff first.”
We decided to pool all the material and read the account of this entity called “The Book of Aztlan.” Jay of course, decided now would be a good time to go fishing down on the beach and no one dared disagree.
“Let me know when y’all are finished with the hokum,” Jay said.
“Roger that,” I replied.
Tom read Ryan’s Declaration of Human Independence.
“I have to admit, this does seem pretty wild, Tim. He’s calling for violence, kidnapping, destruction of public property against human collaborators,” he said. “This makes a pretty good case for the goons out in front of his house. Maybe he was dangerous, or at least getting there.”
“I suppose that’s true if everything he’s saying is false,” I ventured. “But, some of us in this room know that at least some of what he’s saying is true. Don’t we Smokey?”
Russ just shook his head and said ; “I…I’d …I ?”
“Smoke, spit it out, man. You’re among friends here,” I prodded.
“Timmy, I don’t know man. This is all just so damned strange. Think about what you’re saying,” he said.
“I haven’t said the first damned thing, yet, Smoke. And you guys are all ready to toss me under a bus, as a whack-o, a loon,” I said. “Now, why is that? Were you there too? And you Gary? Were we all there at least for the lights? Did we, or did we not, see them?”
“Ryan is saying there’s about to be a huge war, here. That it will start in the next year or so with the destruction of the internet. Now where in hell does all that come from?” Russ asked.
I went out to the garage and dug through the boxes until I had the document I was looking for.


Dear Tim:
Two months ago I squirreled away some cash for you and put it into a bank account in Belize. The information can be found taped to this letter. You’ll be able to wire this to an account here in the states if you like.
I tinkered with the Internet, some credit card payment websites, some of their major accounts, and some off-shore banks. You’ll find a CD with the software package to do this yourself should you find yourself in a position to get to a clean machine. You tweak the credit payment site with a couple little tools, get their major account information. From there you charge each major account: of which there are literally thousands, about $5 each for nefarious line- items, send the credit card extractions to an offshore. Then send the money back to the states, walk in and cash a couple of checks.
The money I got for you took about an hour of screen time to procure. It was easier than stealing candy from a baby. I know you can do it if you need more.
If you follow the footsteps, or better stated, the bread crumbs I have left for you, you will enter a world where you will need clean, untraceable cash resources, until cash itself is no longer valuable. It is the world you will likely inherit within the next few years after I am gone.
What I did was highly illegal but, I have a feeling after the internet crashes, the mess will be so great they’ll never catch this and you are going to need this money now. Soon after that, the money will be worthless anyway until a new currency comes to town.
There’s a good chance, that if this all goes down, beginning with my death, my family is also in danger. I hope I can save them but, I am so dialed in, they know my every move.
They have to keep others quiet so, they’ll do it to prove a point for the people still working at Camerdyne.
Here’s what I know: certain strategic faults have been dialed into all Savante Systems to be hacked into on January 3, 2012, with a bolis of unknown code from an “unknown” origin.
These events will coincide with heavy sunspot activity which will disrupt major grids at the same time. The world goes into chaos. No power, no cell, no banking, no commerce, no travel, no navigation to ships at sea, no guidance systems for missiles.
Within the time frame in question the upcoming wars are going to be about four things: religion, fishing rights, water rights, and food shortages. Credit, banking all of that goes to shit with the collapse, which is when they will sweep in for the kill. Read on in other places for the specifics of that.
I have discovered caches of the new language in our company main frame, again through hacking, these caches containing new code. Ostensibly this is being created to back-stop what we assume will be a cyber attack from China and eastern European corporate mob allies. Both the attack and the backstop are created by an entity I have been taught to refer to as “the customer,” however, you and I know him by another name. He is back in the building, Tim. This time he plays for keeps.
I know that surveillance of us as a species continues after the collapse of power and world markets. Our homes, our cars, our offices, GPS tracking our movements on the planet. All of that stuff remains intact but under the nose of our friend, not anyone, or government you and I are familiar with.
I also have found caches of code containing a construct for what I believe is an artificially intelligent internet programmed turn itself on again continuing all of the above functions at the flip of a switch a few years after we have fully been brought to heel as a species. I have therefore concluded that there is a separate hardware system of fiber optics stashed deep underground at key locations to handle the workload of the entire world.
One of those locations is likely located somewhere outside Mexico City. The only evidence I have to go on in this regard is heavy traffic over the last few years of our friends and their bio-entity tools.
Do you remember a girl named Jen Epstein? She was a couple years behind us in school. She works in San Diego at the space systems lab. In the event of my death, she expects you to show up with the documents I have provided you. You have to be very careful how you approach her or they will kill her.
I don’t know how you’re going to do it but I hope you do. There’s a lot more here. Keep reading my instructions.
You must also get your car, your house, your life debugged. I know they have been digging into our cell phone conversations, so they are likely now monitoring you.
I would say keep in touch but, that’s likely impossible now. Hate to get weepy on you brother. But, you have been a brother to me.
Good luck, see you on the other side,
Ryan. July 2, 2011

“Tim, what the hell does all this mean?” Tom asked. “This sounds insane.”
“Check the date,” Gary said. “You’re saying he knew when the letter would be opened and read.”
“Just like the date on his declaration, which you guys so easily have dismissed in your mind as bullshit,” I said.
“Tim, Ryan was seriously intelligent. He was also a paranoid delusional, man. He was bi-polar. We all knew that. For Christ sakes, Tim, he heard voices in high school. He drew pictures of engines he claimed could whisk you to the center of the galaxy and back in a day. He thought intelligent lizards were living under the ice in Antarctica,” Russ said.
“Since when were you up on all this, Smokey?” I asked Russ.
“Tom knows it too. Unlike you, Tim, Tommy and I got high with the guy a few times. He was brilliant, but he was also nuts; as in out of his freaking mind.”
“If he was so crazy why was he working for our defense department?” I asked. “Now, he was either a lunatic or he wasn’t, right? Does it make sense them hiring a nut-job?”
“Does it makes sense for a functional illiterate to be in the White House for eight years? Does it make sense for the federal government to pay $1000 a pop for airplane toilet seats?” Russ fired back.
“Why don’t we let Tim tell us what he knows about this letter, about this story,” Gary said.
Dave and Chuck came downstairs now and everyone, apart from Jay sat around the living room ready to listen to me.
“Years ago Ryan and I started dialoguing as he called it, pertaining to certain events we knew had happened in our lives, that for one reason or another, we could not clearly recall.
“A few years ago he started work on some project that involved some super advance computer language. His team’s job was to break down the tasks of this advanced language and translate it into something our computers could use,” I said.
“So?”
“This new language, whatever it was, was apparently so advanced it began to freak people out. Gave them nightmares,” I said.
“Why couldn’t they just use this new language on our computers? Explain to me why it had to be translated?” Russ asked.
“Well, either way you broke down the tasks, you know you have to flow it out…”
“Stop right there, genius. What do you mean, flow it out?” Tom asked.
“To run a task on a computer, a job you have to know what the task is, what it’s doing at any time in the progression. You can break down tasks either by data flow or task flow. Flow charts are like a paragraph describing what a program does, right?”
“Okay, just say “flow chart” next time and I’m with you,” Gary said.
“Sorry, well most applications can be broken down into diagrams that are viewable in 2-D. This stuff they were getting was both elegant and complex. You had to task flow it out in three dimensions, or even four dimensions. The diagrams looked like shapes, like rambling helixes and spiral, three-dimensional worms that criss-crossed.
“That was the beginning of the nightmare. Then you had to take bits and pieces of it and task that to like, a thousand nodes, or regular computers, synthesize it, then run that back into the master, a Cray Supercomputer. They kept hiring and firing people right and left to get them working on this stuff.
“The most successful people doing this, had no clue what they were working on, only that working in this new language made them mentally ill, well, most of them with an IQ less than 130 or so.”
“Yeah, okay their jobs were demanding, so what?” Dave said.
“Well Ryan who has an IQ off the scope, he began to see the elegance and the beauty of this new language, after he got over feeling weird about it. He started asking himself why the company was forcing the translation into language that could be utilized by Savante, who as we know, took over where Windows left off, right?”
“And?” Gary demanded.
“So why do it, right? Use this new language, whatever it was. The Savante shit is full of holes and faults. It cracks like glass-wear, he used to say, if you shake it just a little bit. Well it turns out the architecture we run everything on now is fundamentally flawed, like, stone-age, compared to this new stuff.”
“How so?” Chuck asked.
“All computers running today can’t tell the difference between data and code. Imagine how stupid that is. Your home security connected to your email connected to your Smartlife car systems, you cell, all of it running on flawed software and architecture,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll bite, what’s the difference?” Russ asked.
“This was how Ryan explained it to me. You have a bottle plant; that’s your computer processor, right?” I said.
“Right,” Dave said.
“Your orders for the staff and machinery are five-hundred bottles an hour: that’s the code. Your data..”
“Are the bottles?” Tom said.
“Exactly. Well, since the beginning of computing we started out building processors that were tricked into believing data and code are the same thing. All our systems are now based on this. He saw that here was a language whose very nature bespoke a different kind of computer architecture. So why not adopt it? Cut costs, build the thing to handle this new Mega Language and off you go,” I said.
“And?” Gary asked.
“That was apparently the wrong question to ask. Way wrong. They wanted to shut him up. But his mind keeps on it for years and begins to wonder…?”
“Why?” Gary demanded.
“Exactly. Why do that? Why all this waste? Why did the human mind suffer such decompression sickness dealing with this shit in the first place and, off you go with your wild theories,” I said.
“Left to its own devices and in the absence of information…” Dave said.
“The mind unravels,” I said finishing his thought.
“Fascinating,” said Tom. “Really and truly.”
“You haven’t heard the best part yet,” I said.
“I can’t wait,” Tom answered.
“Ryan began to believe there was a purpose for keeping everyone on the old Savante systems, which in the presence of new technology should get better over time not worse, right?”
“Well, it turns out that the newer the version of Savante, the worse it actually is; the more flawed it is, the crappier it is, understand?”
But Gary had an answer for that. He felt good to finally add something to this discussion.
“So, look at Bill Gates before he retired; that’s just a corporation with a monopoly producing junk because they have cornered the market and they know they can get away with it.”
But I fired right back.
“Yeah, right but like I said, everything we have, all of our markets, our beloved new God the internet, banking, home Smart Life Systems, your car, missile guidance systems, jet fighters, air traffic control, ships at sea, credit cards, huge damns holding back megatons of water, they all run on these flawed platforms by Savante or are intimately attached to them and the programs are only getting worse.”
“Problem brewing,” Dave said.
“And yet, you have all these people in rooms exposed to technology that shows these flaws glaringly by making them look at something so immensely better it’s almost laughable,” I said.
“I still don’t get what you’re driving at?” Gary asked.
“He worked with people from China, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, every single day. Here we are training potential enemies. These people, when they frustrated with what they were doing, they just check out, go home. Get on a plane,” I said.
“Security threat,” Dave said.
“Right. Big time. Meanwhile, the government is monitoring our home systems, our email, everything under the auspices of National Security. Does this make sense to you?”
“Not unless you were trying to start a cyber war,” Dave said.
“Exactly. Not unless you were daring the monkey to blow up the dynamite stick by giving him a lit match,” I said.
“The monkey?” Dave asked.
“That’s how Ryan began to think of the human species after working with this software over the last few years. He felt like a chimpanzee in a cubical directing other chimpanzees to tinker with a bomb using sticks and bricks,” I said.
“So he began to believe the software was…” Gary asked.
“Exactly, not from around here…” I said. “Not from around here at all. Alien.”
“Whoa, now you lost me, sport. Suppose it’s..?”said Tom searching for any name or nationality he could think of but Tim knew where he was going.
“Russian? Chinese? Arab?...They’re spying on us, remember? They need to come to our schools to get trained on this stuff, on how to run a computer, how to program, remember? We’re the top of the food chain. So that leaves who?”
“Maybe some new computer genius locked in a room somewhere because he’s so smart,” Tom said.
“Cranking out code that only works on technology no one on earth has developed yet?” I said. “Believe me, you and I are having the same discussion that Ryan and I had two years ago.”
I continued.
“Ryan double majored at school in computer science and electrical engineering. He was at the top of his game before he died. He knew everything that was happening in computer software design. If there was someone out there developing a new language he would have known who it was and what they were working on,” I said.
“So that leaves what, some bug-eyed alien? Tim, I’m not going to become one of these guys writing blogs about UFO’s. I’m not going to hang out in the desert with a bunch of losers looking at lights through a telescope,” Gary said.
“Sometimes that’s the gig,” I said.
Dave had a thought here.
“Let’s say you’re right for a second and the big bugged-eyed alien is behind all this. Why not just have us off ourselves with our own nukes? Why cyber war?” he said.
“Cyber war is sort of like that one bomb they supposedly had that left the buildings standing but killed all the people. You throw society into chaos, wars may break out but they don’t go nuclear on a large scale. Most or all your infrastructure remains: conquest begins,” I said.
“To Ryan, that seemed to be the plan. That’s when he started digging up all that old stuff from his dad’s locker about UFOs, trying to remember what happened to us back in 1981, and checking around the company for indications, from what other people were working on,” I said.
“Guys, our buddy Ryan was no freak in the desert dressed in camo.’ He was a seriously intelligent engineer with a future, with a wife and kids, you know. Society classified him as a winner, one of the chosen to lead,” I said.
“Who also frequented strip clubs, and was cheating on his wife,” Jay clarified as he entered the room.
“Who also went to strip clubs, correct,” Tim said. “A perfectly natural, human male response to pressure. Who goes to strip clubs, Jay? Guys do. You ever been to one?”
“Sure, plenty of times,” Jay said. “The problem is, I wasn’t an insane forty year old man. I was a kid,” he said.
“Bully for you Jay, really. Bully for you, and God bless you for never having the slightest bit of marital trouble – ever,” I said.
“Timmy, you haven’t been around. Ryan was meeting some serious strangoids at strip clubs. Cops knew, and told me all about it. Creeps who were part of some ring of nationwide UFO whack-jobs. They thought they couldn’t be spied on if they met at strip clubs and at South Beach Willie’s.”
“Hey, those places are noisy, Jay. It does make sense. They’re random and noisy. Sounds like a place I’d want to go if I were exchanging sensitive information,” I said.
“South Beach Willie’s? That place is a damned dive, Timmy. It was since back in the day,” Jay said.
“You knew he was going there, again, didn’t you, Jay?” I said.
“No.”
“Whoa, easy cowboy. What the fuck does that mean?” Gary asked.
“Nothing, but like you said. It’s kind of convenient that somehow nefarious locations are now part of the lore, part of the urban myth under creation here as we burn down the memory of my best friend in the whole world. Dovetails nicely. I’m beginning to think that suited their plans pretty well,” I said.
“Whose plans?” Chuck asked.
“Who do you think, Chuck. Them, those them. They! You know….” Dave said with a nervous smile as he pointed up, and now I felt like a true lunatic.
“Thanks guys,” I said.
“C’mon Timmy, I’m just giving you shit, man,” Dave said.
“So Tim, you’re saying that the invasion has already happened. That they’re here already?” Gary asked.
“You forget, Ryan was saying this, and now he’s dead. What do you do to an enemy in times of war?”
“Kill him?” Tom answered.
“Kill him, right. Well, maybe someone declared war on Ryan. And if so, some of what he was telling me was true, if not all of it,” I said.
“Maybe it was an issue of National Security. We have jihad going on now, you know, and here he is in this declaration talking about violence and so forth. That’s not dangerous?” Jay said.
“All right, let’s look at warfare on a large scale, and Ryan and I had this conversation also. War: what is it, how do you commit war on an enemy? What are the steps? As on a playground, as on the stage of nations, step one is what?”
“Uh, find out about your enemy?” Jay said.
“Right. Know who he is, his strengths and weaknesses. Is he a righty or a lefty? You gather intel,” I said.
“Espionage,” Jay said.
“Beautiful word. Exactly. One of the first signs that someone is at war with you is finding a foreigner in your land, unbidden, unwelcome , gathering intelligence on you,” I said, adding, “And we’ve never seen this, huh?”
“You’re talking about sightings, of which there have been thousands of cases and only a handful unexplained,” Jay said.
“Glad you brought this up. This is what the debunkers always say. But of this one small percentile, there have been solid cases, photographs, dozens of witnesses and we still don’t have an answer,” I said.
“Like what? Give me an example,” Jay asked.
I went out to the garage and found another document. Coming back in the room I began going through it:
“In Trinidade Island six hundred miles south southeast of Brazil. In 1957 a photographer working for the Brazilian navy photographed an object that looked like the planet Saturn only flattened out, oblong. It has never been explained. More than thirty witnesses were on deck and saw the thing. I could go on but, that seems to be a pretty good piece of evidence so far,” I said. “Those boxes out there have thousands of cases compiled in there by Ryan and his father over two generations. Sure I could go on…”
“So. One sighting maybe,” Jay said.
“Yeah, but what a sighting and here’s the picture Jay! The object was huge. Look at it! It soundlessly moved around a mountaintop, hovered, stopped, seemed to know it had been observed then very cautiously carefully moved out over open sea,” I said.
“Clear case of espionage. It’s not from here. It meets intelligent creatures. Does it stop and say ‘hi’? Hell no, it takes off. Not the actions of a friend,” I said.
“Maybe it was shy,” Jay said with a smile ordering another round for everyone in the room
“Yeah right. Shy,” I said. “You’re not even talking about our sighting Jay. You’re conveniently forgetting all about that.”
“Timmy, we were stoned kids,” Jay said.
“As I recall, you didn’t smoke or drink anything that night,” I said.
“That’s not exactly true,” Tom said with a smile. “Can I tell them, Jay?”
“Why, you Bogarting hold-out,” I said to Tom. “You had weed and you didn’t tell me and Ryan?”
“When?” I asked.
“Earlier,” Tom said.
Jay smiled knowingly and now I knew, Jay had tried marijuana at least once. Likely for the first time that very night we had our encounter. That begged a question: I looked at Gary who was also smiling.
“Et tu Brute?” I asked.
“Yep. Me too, Timmy,” Gary said.
“Beautiful, so no one believes me,” I said.
“We just don’t remember, Tim. It was a long-assed time ago. Those lights could have been anything,” Jay said.
“Did you inhale, Mr. President?” I asked him.
Jay smiled and started mixing another round of drinks.
“Well, in Tim’s defense. I remember a lot of it, although it only started coming back to me recently,” Dave said.
“I do too, guys,” Chuck seconded.
“Well great. Let’s call in The History Channel and they can interview you three nut-jobs together,” Jay said derisively.
“You know what, Jay? I’m not going to argue with you because that’s precisely what they want,” I said.
“Those they again. I’m beginning to think of them as immense, imaginary pains in my ass,” Jay said handing drinks out to everyone.
“All I remember is driving some goddamned lunatic veteran to a hospital in the middle of the night with a bullet lodged in his calf. Then I remember the police arresting him and hand-cuffing him to the hospital gurney. I remember my dad pissed as shit at Gary and I. Remember that Gary?” he said.
“I sure do, man. God was he pissed at you guys,” Gary said.
“Who?” I demanded.
“You guys. The Surf Road crew. You Smokey and Tom and Ryan. Said you were all a bunch of stoners and we should stay the hell away from you guys,” he said.
“Whatever happened to him?”
“Who?” Jay asked.
“Alka-Hank,” I said.
“There’s a blast from the past,” Tom said with a laugh.
“He was arrested for parole violation that night. Then when his brother turned up….dude, he went bye-bye,” Jay said.
“Why can’t I remember that?”
“Yeah, he went from Starke, and from there up to some fed-prison, nut-house up in Milledgeville, Georgia,” Jay said. “Or so the story goes.”
“So, he was a federal lunatic,” I said flatly.
“He had done something in Cambodia or Vietnam; something very bad,” Gary said.
“Wasn’t he a sniper for the military?” Tom asked.
“Another urban legend probably,” Chuck said.
“No, that’s what he was, part of this sniper-op called “Lamplighter”, and at some point instead of whacking commies he flipped on acid and zapped his damned CO, but since he was so young back then, something like seventeen, they sent him to the army shrinks in the Philippines and they gave him a nice, quiet section-eight out of the military,” Gary said.
“How old was he when he went in?” I asked.
“I heard he lied on all his applications,” Gary said. “That’s why the army gave him a pass. He should never have been over there.”
“You know who would know the real skinny on all that?” I asked.
“Who?” Gary asked.
“Shakes,” I said. And everyone laughed recalling that variation on Ryan’s nickname. “He was the only one who had the guts to talk to him.”
“Hell even Myles was terrified of him,” Tom said.
“Not to change the subject Tim…?” Dave said.
“Shoot,” I said.
“You mentioned this new super language. What did it actually do? Even though the tasks were bits of a larger picture, surely the programmers had to get some sort of idea what the software did,” Dave said.
“Some of it was communications and surveillance stuff for satellites far superior in capability to anything Ryan had ever seen,” I said.
“Some of it was a kind of stock inventory program to monitor world food resources, but Ryan said he could see another use for it,” I said.
“But, from the way you’re saying that there’s more to it?” he asked.
“The double use,” I said.
“The software had another use?” he said.
“Code within code. Like the letters the Civil War spies would write, ostensibly between mother and son. He’d say ‘you can’t imagine how complex and paranoid their minds are Tim.’ Apparently their code is like gigantic segments of double entendre, double and triple uses, multiple ways to look at it and utilize it, a form of communication surpassing anything we have.”
“That did other things?” Dave asked.
“The creepy shit, stuff I had serious trouble believing,” I said. “Ryan saw shapes, spirals and so forth, that criss-crossed,” I said.
“The nightmares came in full fury and he began to see that the flow diagrams themselves were telling him something, a form of code,” I said, seeing if anyone understood me.
No one did so I kept going.
“Look at some of the nightmare pictures and diagrams he drew, do you notice anything?”
“At first he doubted his own sanity but then he started to think back on the things we had seen in our childhood,” I said.
“He saw that the same patterns were repeated; the same unknown character strings that kept repeating themselves, and there were four of them joined with each other in combination sequences. And that arranged in the good-ole double helix…”
“Oh, I think I see what you’re driving at,” Dave said.
“Well do share, brothers,” Chuck said.
“Genetics?” Dave answered.
“Bingo. He got a wild hair one day and started substituting four common chemical base pairs, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine for those unknown character strings. He took segments of the code and fooled around until they made sense and he came up with something,” I said.
“What Timmy?” Tom said.
“He got pictures,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Complete DNA molecules, connecting to others,” I said swallowing hard. I had never told a soul about this because Ryan had trouble believing it and talking about it very frequently. When he did he might go on about it for a minute then dismiss it as all part of his runaway imagination.
“And? And? C’mon, don’t stop now!” Dave said.
“He then began consulting biotech people on the outside. With some help, he began building pictures of what the molecules made, and he got…”
“Genes,” Dave said.
“When added to more of the same you get what?”
“Organisms?” Dave answered.
“Unlike anything any of us had ever seen. They gave him serious nightmares and visions. The organisms were a patchwork of DNA from many species, including humans. They would have capabilities beyond anything we know of,” I said.
“Wait. How would Ryan know which base would go for which character string?” Dave asked.
“Took him a while, but he built a compiler to ask that very question. Eventually he got an answer with a high percentage of probability,” I said.
“So our government is building bio-weapons. So what?” Jay asked.
“You could look at it that way. That’s one way to view it, Jay,” I said, utterly exasperated with Jay’s mule intractability.
“Alright then why not tell us what Ryan thought,” Jay said.
“We’re unknowingly creating the creatures which will destroy a good portion of the world’s human population, if not all of it,” I said. “We’re doing so under the auspices of national security, or jihad, or political ideology depending on what part of the world you live in,” I said, adding, “Ryan’s mantra became ‘If we’re doing it, they’re doing it too and we’re all fooling ourselves.’”
“A different ‘they’?” Gary asked.
“Other humans we have been tricked into calling our enemies,” I said. “If you read the Mayan writing, this has all happened before. We’re just not aware of that fact,” I said.
“Oh? Why’s that?” Jay asked.
“Atlantis, the Bermuda triangle – stuff like that,” I said. “Major cataclysms which have erased our past versions of civilization.”
“Jesus,” Jay said witheringly.
“Hey, what can I say?” I replied.
“So, you realize how absolutely insane you sound right now?” Jay said flatly.
“So did Ryan,” I said.
“Where exactly did that Mayan writing come from?” Jay asked.
I went out to the garage and retrieved the photos of the Mayan glyphs and the letter from the archeologists in Honduras.
“These pictures. He copied them in sequence, then he worked with archeologists to translate them; although there’s a good chance he did most of the work himself and had them confirm his work for him,” I said.
“Mayan? Ryan translated Mayan?” Jay said.
“As poetic as it sounds, yes. We all knew Ryan was smart, guys. But we never had an appreciation for just how smart he was. On top of which, his clearances at Camerdyne gave him access to the world’s most advanced computer systems. It was a puzzle he couldn’t resist. It started with the lights back in 1981,” I said.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Jay said. “Where do these grainy underwater pictures actually come from?”
“That’s part of the mystery I haven’t solved yet. I am going on the theory they come from around here somewhere.”
“Around here. We have Mayan ruins, or the like, around here, in Florida?” he said derisively.
I shrugged. He could believe me or not. At this point I was tired of arguing with him.
“This is nuts, guys! Witness the great slurping sound of people getting taken in by bullshit,” Jay said.
“Jay, you don’t want to believe this. I can appreciate that. I just want you to ask yourself why Ryan would go to all this trouble to set up this after-death hoax that would take years to fabricate, not to mention involves real events that happened in our lives?” I said.
“You keep going back to that, Tim. And I guess I have to keep telling you, I don’t believe anything out of the ordinary happened back then,” Jay said.
“Myles Neiderman died! You don’t remember that? The kid died. Somehow we all conveniently forget that fact,” I said.
“His brother shot him!” Jay said.
“His brother shot himself in the leg. You said so yourself. Now, did he shoot his brother, or did he shoot himself in the leg? Which is it, Jay? Because I’d like to know myself, all these years I can’t figure out if maybe I shot him! How the fuck did that kid end up dead, does anyone in this room know?”
They were all silent except Jay.
“Hey man, ease off. I didn’t do it. None of this is my fault. Ryan’s dead because he shot himself. Maybe he was feeling guilty about cheating on his wife so much. That’s why we are here,” he said.
“I want you to quit talking about my friend like that, Jay. You have no right to judge him,” I shouted.
“I put up with his crazy girlfriend working in my office for a year, Tim. I put up with his phone calls to her interrupting the flow of work. You don’t know the goddamned half of it, pal. You need to shut the fuck up about what you don’t know!”
“That’s it guys. I’m taking a walk to cool off. This is bullshit,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever Tim,” Jay said.
“I don’t know why you invited us to stay at your house if all your were going to goddamned do is bad-mouth my best friend,” I said.
“Yeah, well, there are hotels all over the beach, Tim. Take your fuckin’ pick,” he shouted.
“You would know Mr. puke real estate,” I said turning around. “The beach looks like fucking Disneyland, I hope you know. Hey Mr. Mayor, why not put a damned Wal-Mart out here while your selling up the coastline, huh?”
“You’re just jealous because I figured out a way to stick around here and make money, and you didn’t,” he said.
“Yeah, Mr. fucking big shot. Big waterfront house: bad goddamn manners. How original is that for beachside,” I said.
“Timmy, that fucking mouth of yours always did piss me off!”
He swung like he want to punch me but Dave held him back.
“What, Jay? Do it, man. Let’s go,” I said.
“You and Ryan, and your smart-assed attitude. How far did it get ya’ Tim? Who’s the big shot now? How much you pullin’ down as headmaster at the laughing academy? What fifty-thousand? Oh, and how was that your wife makes end meet? Oh yeah, now I remember, she’s a REAL ESTATE AGENT! Just like me!”
“Guys, c’mon. This is getting ugly,” Gary said calmly holding me back.
“The difference between me and you, Mr. Self-Righteous, is, at least I wear the pants in my family,” Jay said.
“Speaking of self-righteous, why didn’t you talk to your friend about what he was going through before you judged him as a scumbag, huh? Did you ever think to ask?” I asked.
“Like I said Tim, the guy was laying pipe like a fucking Kennedy in my office. There were beer bottles and empty cigarette packs all over the place. One morning we found the two of them in there curled up like a couple of pregnant teenagers. I need this shit in my life? My wife needs to hear about this from her friends? Just who the hell does he think he is?”
“He doesn’t think he’s anybody, Jay he’s dead – remember?”
“And I suppose that’s my fault too, like the hotels on the beach?”
I tried to land a punch but it went sweaty and wild. The rum was kicking in too, and I was out of breath. All I could do was continue to trash talk in a winding-down kind of way.
“You’re such an asshole, Jay!”
“Back at you tough guy…”
The guys tried to smooth our ruffled feathers but I had had it. I needed the night air.
I grabbed an open bottle of red wine, took the beach steps two at a time and was soon walking south into the dying twilight. I up-ended the bottle like a belligerent French painter.
I walked south on Melbourne Beach as the music from Jay’s house dwindled in the background.
When I stopped thinking about killing him, I wondered, just what the hell had gotten into Jay? I hadn’t pictured him becoming the moralizing prig he had turned into, not in a million years. Some marriages went bad. Sometimes they nosedived, sometimes they recovered. Odds were about sixty-forty against these days. Who was to say what would have happened to Ryan’s had he not died; had the paranormal element never taken root in his life.
It was no business of Jay’s what Ryan had been through there at the end. He was dead now and his so-called girlfriend was in rehab. Wasn’t that punishment enough to go around for any sins, real or imagined?
I really couldn’t understand Jay’s anger and venom, nor how rapidly it had erupted. He never hated Ryan before that I had known. And what the hell was going on with the rest of the crew? Was I the only one who cared to defend him? It was as if Ryan never existed.
Back in 1981 there had been a lot of cowardice going around, as well. Most of the guys merely backed away from the story we began telling. We told people because we lived it, we believed it, what we could remember of it, anyway. But then came the quieting, “sensible” voices of from the adults, and for a time there, the Surf Road crew consisted of myself and Ryan, alone. Yes, bowing to the wise advice of their parents, the other guys avoided us as if we had caused the events in the first place. They left us to our dementia and assumed somehow we had brought on a form of mass hysteria with our freakish behavior and so we had to be avoided for months to follow.
Now we were adults, and I supposed it was our task again was to act “sensibly” and not “go crazy with all this stuff.”
That “act sensibly” business really infuriated Ryan and now I had the bug too. Here we are in the midst of an invasion and the best so-called adults could do was urge everyone, especially children, to ignore it; the way farm animals were trained to accept the fact that an abattoir would be part of the program, somewhere along the line.
In a cruel twist, humans were told to perform an even more curious bit of mental gymnastics from very early on called, pretend the rancher doesn’t even exist.
After all, beef cattle seemed to know the rancher very well by sight, and had no problem identifying him as a separate entity, even if they didn’t immediately connect the cowboy and the whole slaughterhouse process.
Humans were coaxed to believe that if they saw the rancher, or his trucks whizzing about, they were going insane. And now they were so thoroughly conditioned anyone questioning the conditioning itself, became suspect.
How have we become such compliant, mental bovines? Maybe it all takes place waiting on-line at the super center, starting with the soft beeps emanating from dozens of cash registers that quietly pulse you into REM sleep, beneath humming and buzzing thousand-watt halogens that distribute the soundlessly-sinister microwave signals, “masticate, defecate, copulate, hibernate.”
The greeter waves at you as you wheel your cart past him. Both of you play your parts in the zombie-drama for the benefit of the store cameras which scan your every move.
“Thanks for stopping by!”
Jay’s reaction was now the standard for so-called “sanity.”
Crazy fuck - don’t interrupt my real estate deals with your talk of alien activity!
I up-ended the bottle again and kept walking. You didn’t see beef cattle holding up graphs and chart paper to their young with diagrams showing that the top creature on the food chain, the apex, was another beef cow. At least they didn’t delude themselves and mislead their young.
We did that in school to ours. And though we had opposable thumbs to hold up that chart paper, our collectively huge human brain couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wrap itself around the concept that uh-un, no siree Bob – you’re not the king of the hill anymore, and you haven’t been for some time. There’s someone else, see? And what’s worse is, that someone else has been fooling you for thousands of years – jackass!
Ego; that was part of the problem. Also, how do you explain that, if you’re the Air Force official? If you’re the last guy left holding the bag for decades of majors and colonels who knew the real score and slid out before you, what do you say? And do you deserve such a harsh spotlight?
“Well, uh, yeah. Okay. See…but the thing is, see? Uh…”
Jackass!
A hand from the reporter gallery goes over the eyes. The chin points skyward.
“Awwww man! I just fucking KNEW something weird was going on and I didn’t follow my gut.”
The other part of the problem is retirement benefits. Beef cattle don’t have these. We do. No one is going to admit the whole show has been a sham until they are quietly baking somewhere on a Caribbean island with a spouse they can’t stand anymore. Their goofy comments make good copy for the cable shows, but not much else happens. It always sounds the same. The shows always air in the middle of the night so the viewers are all half asleep.
“Yeah, that’s true. We saw them things. Them-thingy things, flying around and on radar and such back in the eighties. Then we filed a report see, but, uh, no one ever got back to us. If congress is having a hearing, I’ll be glad to go, sure. Wait, I have to take my heart pills here before my next round of golf.”
Where does it end, I wondered? What is their end-game? It’s not like they’d have to keep it secret anymore. We’d cover it up for them, or ignore it. Ryan’s opinion was, we are now so compliant, those of us who know what that end game is, are actually helping it along; maybe in compensation for booked passage on the escape shuttle. What if there is no escape shuttle?
“Then at least we go down fighting, and not handing out the typhoid blankets.”
I turned around looking for the owner of that familiar voice but he wasn’t there.
When I turned back he was standing beside me.
“Your friends now are all backing away from you and you don’t understand it,” he said. He was wearing an old, faded pair of blue jeans and a Big Audio Dynamite T shirt. I had no idea why.
“Yes I do, Red. Yes I do.”
“That’s good. You’re stronger now. They can’t hurt you by using the ones you love against you.”
I let the comment sit as we watched the waves together.
“Are you ready for more?” he asked.
“Sure, bring it on.”
“Then I will show you why I call you World Ender. So you can fully appreciate what they do and how they do it.”
“How?”
“By recalling, that this was something you did yourself, nearly five-hundred years ago,” he said.
He grabbed my hand arm and in an instant I wasn’t me any longer.
I found myself sitting on a wicker chair of sorts. I was sweating profusely.
Two men with piercings and plugs of gold through their noses and lips were bowing before me. They kissed their hands then touched the ground with the hands they had kissed, then raised their hands to their heads spreading dust over themselves.
In front of me was a bowl filled with cherry-colored fluid. In the center of the bowl was something fleshy that looked like….oh, my god, no. It couldn’t be.
I leaned over toward it.
Human heart.
I felt myself rearing back in my chair. My leathered boot accidentally kicked the bowl and the heart flopped out onto the straw mat on the dirt-covered floor.
The men on the floor replaced the heart inside the bowl and continued to remonstrate themselves.
“They say that if you do not like this one, you may select one of them, and eat their flesh, if it more pleases you, Teule,” said a pliant voice.
I turned to look at the owner of the feminine voice. She was an Indian girl of no more than fifteen.
“Teule? What does this word mean?” I asked the girl.
“It means one who brings the last days. The ender of worlds,” she said.
I looked around the room which was arrayed with white men dressed in sixteenth-century clothing and an equal portion of Indians who wore bleached white cotton and softened palm sandals. The men on the floor sported brilliant headdresses adorned with ostrich plumes, and the iridescent, midnight indigo feathers of another bird. On their feet were bangles of dried husks of some sort which were filled with seeds so that they hissed like rattlers when these men moved.
“Tell them, Malinali, that I want neither this heart in the bowl, nor those beating in their chests,” I heard myself say.
“You tell them, that we have a sickness of the heart, which only the gold can cure.”
The girl turned to the men and began berating them in a foreign tongue; verbally flogging them while they remonstrated themselves on the dirt floor with their hands flat pointed forward toward me and their eyes cast downward.
One of the men looked up, and in a supplicating voice began to speak.
The girl turned to me and translated.
“This one says your faithful lieutenant, Motecazoma, has sent another gift, so that you will know he holds your palaces, your retainers, your entire city ready and waiting for your return,” she said.
“What gift?” I asked.
The man who had said this waved his hand to someone outside the hut. Two men bore the statue into the room on a bier made of wood. It stood three feet tall.
The belly of the coiled serpent was segmented with rings of scales like that of a snake’s. However the back was covered entirely in long feathers where the scales would have been. The coils terminated on top in the giant head of the beast which flared open to reveal the fangs of a jaguar.
And there resting on the tongue emerging from the yawning feline mouth was the perfectly proportioned face of a man with pale skin and blue eyes.
“What is this?” I asked the girl as casually as I was able.
“It is you, my lord. It is Quetzalcoatl; the feathered serpent, ender of words,” she said.
Then later.
The image shifted and I was standing beside a coco palm speaking to another white man with blonde hair and a red beard.
“Fortune smiles on us, ever my lord,” the man said with an exaggerated bow.
“Indeed it does, don Pedro. I think neither to dissuade them of this misguided belief nor promote it to the hilt, for now. Let them keep guessing as to our nature,” I said.
“These Totonacs have no love lost to the Mexica, nor their lord, Montezuma,” I said.
“Motecozoma, I believe they called him,” the blonde man said to me.
“Whatever is the case,” I said dismissively.
“The demons cast in stone all over this land are truly terrifying, don Hernando. Some of the men wonder if we’re not at the very gates of hell.”
“Some of the men need to steel themselves, for they will see their lord feathered snake do things they thought impossible in the eyes of God. And we will cast down these stone monuments and the temples that house them,” I said.
“In the name of our lord, naturally,” the blonde man said with a flourish of irony.
“Naturally,” said I.

“Hey! Timmy!” came a voice. I turned to the north to see Gary jogging toward me.
“Hey man. Whassup!”
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“Yeah, just thinking about some things,” I said.
“Who was that you were talking to?” he said.
“Who?”
“Looked like an Indian, long hair, white T-shirt,” he said. “Looked about thirty-five or so.”
“You saw him?” I asked.
“Yeah. He took off when he saw me coming,” he said.
I up-ended the bottle again. What to make of that. Who knew? Another mystery for the books.
“He’s a friend of mine. Your brother wouldn’t like him,” I said.
“C’mon, Tim. Sean just arrived at Patrick Air Force Base. We should be there when he gets here,” Gary said.
“Best news I’ve heard all day,” I said.