Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

She blinked a few times, but that failed to dispel the illusion, or the altered reality, or whatever it was. It looked as real as anything she had ever seen.

Jianyu was turning uneasily in a circle. “How is this possible?”

The Archon waved a hand, and the people disappeared. “Technology is wondrous, but we have the most amazing machine of all inside our heads. Though we understand very little of the human brain, I have spent a lifetime unlocking its potential.”

As the twins watched in silence, the Archon paced around them in a wide circle, one palm held downward, the gloved hand emitting a ray of light that inscribed a golden ring on the floor.

Suddenly Daiyu wondered whether the Archon was even in the room at all. How much of this was digitally enhanced illusion, and how much was real?

By the time the circle was complete, Chelsea Lancaster had stepped outside the ring of light. Both the twins were still inside, which made Daiyu anxious—but she dared not move.

The Archon continued to pace the perimeter. “A poet once said that if you draw a circle a hundred feet in diameter any place on the planet, even in a desert, that within the circle are one hundred things no one has ever seen and one thousand that no one understands. I believe those numbers are vastly underestimated—and we are just one planet circling one sun, in a universe of a billion trillion stars.”

Daiyu cringed when the Archon turned to face her. “Consider: your laptop, cell phone, the futuristic cityscape of Shanghai, your country’s sophisticated rockets and satellites that probe outer space—all of these wonders derive from a very small group of primitive hominids that emerged from the jungle and began to flourish less than two hundred thousand years ago. A speck of dust in the geological eye. We are not even children in the eyes of the universe. We are embryos. Zygotes. Imagine, just imagine for a moment, that which our species has achieved in comparison to all others. We have not just made progress or evolved—we have made vast and unexplainable leaps.” The Archon stopped to face the twins. “And yet our journey has barely begun.”

As the line on the floor dissolved into motes of golden light, the Archon lifted both arms and began to move them in small circles, whipping the motes into a frenzy, concealing the twins from view behind a wall of illumination.

Oddly, Daiyu began to taste dry air on her tongue. A sound like the whining of a teakettle arose, softly at first and then louder. She whipped her head back and forth, straining to see outside the wall. When the motes of light dissipated, the library had disappeared, and she and her brother were surrounded by hundreds of ziggurats dotting a vast arid plain. The steplike pyramids were made of smooth stones in dozens of brilliant hues—obsidian, sandstone, limestone, granite—and looked recently constructed. They reached hundreds of feet high, proud sentinels framed against an azure sky. Gardens and stone dwellings were interspersed among the ziggurats, an entire city which resembled nothing Daiyu had seen in a history book. The whining sound became the whoosh of a hot sere wind rushing into her face—she could feel it—and she noticed hordes of people moving up and down the ziggurats and through the gardens like a colony of human ants.

When Daiyu turned, she was startled to find the Archon—but not Chelsea Lancaster—standing behind them inside the circle. The eerie voice behind the mask rose above the fierce wind. “Human potential is unlimited, but our achievements thus far are parlor tricks. Scraps at the table of the gods, fallen to Earth like feed for domesticated animals. Yet we will never settle for scraps. We will become gods ourselves and plumb the depths of reality and grab the source of all things by the throat. We will save humanity and advance it. Perfect it. Those insipid fools who dare call themselves the Leap Year Society have long withheld knowledge from us, but they have failed to grasp the enormity of the indications we found in Dr. Corwin’s lab. It is my firm belief the Enneagon can open doors of science that have never been unlocked.”

The gloved hand lowered, and all at once it disappeared: the dusty ziggurats, the vivid sensation of dry earth in Daiyu’s mouth, the people, and the howling wind.

Stunned by what she had witnessed, Daiyu realized she was gripping her black jade key so hard it bit into her palm. The Archon must have set up the illusion beforehand, using hidden XR equipment. Even so, how had it felt so real? How had she smelled the smoke of cooking fires on the wind? And what was that place? Reeling, she glanced at her brother, who had a wild and strained look in his eyes.

“Do you believe now, Jianyu?” the Archon said quietly.

When her brother found his voice, asking what the Archon needed them to do, his words no longer resonated with ingratiating concession, but with the power of conviction.

   5   

Andie and Cal were squeezed into the rear of the helicopter, flying low in a moonlit sky, sitting side by side on fold-down plastic chairs behind a cockpit with the faint odor of a well-used gym bag. The towers of Bologna had receded from view, and they had seen no signs of pursuit since escaping the basilica. Thank God no bullets pierced the fuselage, Andie thought.

The pilot sitting right in front of them was wearing a baseball cap and beige fatigues. Andie could tell he had a lanky build, and the hands gripping the controls were freckled and white.

“Will they follow us?” Cal asked, glancing nervously out the window.

“This baby has anti-radar curves and is coated with RAM.” The pilot tapped a flat silver box, about the width of a Rubik’s Cube, attached to the control panel. The box had a short antenna sticking out of each side.