Her work will unveil the true nature of all things.
For centuries the «brightest minds» on earth had ignored the ancient sciences, mocking them as ignorant superstitions, arming themselves
instead with smug skepticism and dazzling new technologies tools that led them only further from the truth. Every generations breakthroughs are proven false by the next generations technology. And so it had gone through the ages. The more man learned, the more he realized he did not know.
For millennia, mankind had wandered in the darkness. . but now, as had been prophesied, there was a change coming. After hurtling blindly through history, mankind had reached a crossroads. This moment had been predicted long ago, prophesied by the ancient texts, by the primeval calendars, and even by the stars themselves. The date was specific, its arrival imminent. it would be preceded by a brilliant explosion of knowledge. . a flash of clarity to illuminate the darkness and give mankind a final chance to veer away from the abyss and take the path of wisdom.
I have come to obscure the light, Malakh thought. This is my role.
Fate had linked him to Peter and Katherine Solomon. The breakthroughs Katherine Solomon had made within the SMSC would risk opening floodgates of new thinking, starting a new Renaissance. Katherines revelations, if made public, would become a catalyst that would inspire mankind to rediscover the knowledge he had lost, empowering him beyond all imagination.
Katherines destiny is to light this torch.
Mine is to extinguish it.
CHAPTER 15
In totalAfter three years, youd think Id be used to thatThe «Cube» was a massive windowless box. Every inch of the interior walls and ceiling was covered with a stiff mesh of titanium-coated lead fiber, giving the impression of a giant cage built inside a cement enclosure. Dividers of frosted Plexiglas separated the space into different compartments a laboratory, a control room, a mechanical room, a bathroom, and a small research library.
Katherine strode briskly into the main lab. The bright and sterile work space glistened with advanced quantitative equipment: paired electro encephalographs, a femtosecond comb, a magneto-optical trap, and quantum-indeterminate electronic noise REGs, more simply known as Random Event Generators.
Despite Noetic Sciences use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science the untapped potential of the human mind.
The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities.
Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no «spoon-bending» parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm.
Mind over matter.
In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order
from chaos.
The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a «cosmic consciousness»a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body. . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggarts book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study theintentionexperiment.com aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherines interest.
From this foundation, Katherine Solomons research had vaulted forward, proving that «focused thought» could affect literally anything the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in ones own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by ones mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms.