Deception station rise o.., p.1
Deception Station: Rise of the Anunnaki, Book 1, page 1
Copyright and Disclaimers
Deception Station
By C.A. Gray
Copyright 2024, C.A. Gray
All Rights Reserved
No Portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, audio recordings, facsimiles, photocopying, or information storage and retrieval systems without explicit written permission from the author or publisher.
Published By:
Wanderlust Publishing Tucson, AZ
Also by C.A. Gray:
Piercing the Veil Trilogy: Intangible, Invincible, Impossible
The Liberty Box Trilogy: The Liberty Box, The Eden Conspiracy, The Phoenix Project
The Uncanny Valley Trilogy: Uncanny Valley, The Silver Six, Jaguar
Dreamscape Adventures, Inc.
The Atlantis Bloodline
The Kairos Makers: Christmas Night 1776, Jamestown’s Deliverance, The Tunguska Asteroid
Biblical Retellings: Messiah, Daughters of Zion, Blood Covenant Origins, Blood Covenant Fulfilled, All Things Are Possible
Caves of Glass
Prologue: An Unexpected Diagnosis
Thierry Voltaire felt as though he were in free fall.
The billionaire philanthropist and chairman of the Order for the Global Brotherhood was among the most powerful men on the planet. In his late 60s, he looked as if he were in his early 50s, and was getting physically, biologically younger all the time. Once balding, he now had a full head of thick, silky black hair, and an almost boyish look about his face. His sharp black eyes seemed to snap from one place to the next, missing nothing. He saw all. He knew all. He was as close to invincible as it was humanly possible to be.
Yet all his carefully laid plans had suddenly come crashing down around him.
The doctor who sat across the table from him was one of the most preeminent neurosurgeons in the world, Stanford-educated and head of the department at Mayo Clinic. He was still speaking, but the words jumbled together. All Voltaire had heard were soundbites: “brain tumor.” “Inoperable.” “Few months, a year at most.” “Get your affairs in order.” The rest was all white noise.
“This is impossible,” he heard himself say, as though in a tunnel. The doctor said something in response, but Voltaire spoke over him. “You don’t understand. This is literally impossible. Do you know how I’ve spent the last twenty-seven years of my life? I wake up at 4:30 every morning and I do a cold plunge. I eat all my meals before 11:30 in the morning and do intermittent fasting the rest of the day. I do three triathlons a year, and train the rest of it. I take thirty-six supplements a day. Thirty-six! I juice, I do meditation retreats, I do yoga—I even drink my seventeen-year old grandson’s plasma! My entire life ambition for almost the past three decades was not to die. I’m at the cutting edge of biohacking! I have the best doctors money can buy—”
“Mr. Voltaire. Mr. Voltaire. Mr. Voltaire,” the doctor said patiently over and over again throughout this increasingly passionate diatribe, holding up a hand. “I understand. This is the first stage of grief, it’s called denial. It’s perfectly natural—”
“Don’t tell me what’s natural! This is unnatural!” Voltaire shoved back the chair and leapt to his feet, pointing at the MRI image on the doctor’s screen of the mass with tentacles throughout his brain. “My father died of this. I vowed it would never happen to me, and it’s not going to happen to me!”
The doctor sighed, removing his glasses and polishing them on the lapel of his white coat, before putting them back in place. He said nothing, but just watched Voltaire, waiting for him to calm down.
Belatedly, Voltaire remembered his meditation training. He closed his eyes, centering himself on his breathing. On this moment. Right in this exact moment, nothing was wrong. He was just given some bad news, but it was for somewhere out in an indefinite future. It was not here, it was not now…
And besides, despite what the doctor said, he did still have options. While he’d spent the past almost thirty years trying to optimize his physical body, he’d also hedged his bets. He’d invested in a number of projects in transhumanism—bionics, AI, even uploading consciousness to the cloud. Many of them had already failed, but a few months ago he’d gotten an update on the Immortality Chips, an implant controlling injectable nanotechnology that could dial back the clock on cellular aging, indefinitely. The recent rat trials had been very promising. They’d told him it wasn’t ready for human trials yet, but he didn’t have time to wait, apparently.
“If you have no other options for me,” he told the doctor with impressive calm, sliding his coat back on, “then I will find one myself.”
He’d controlled everything in his entire world, all his life. All of it had led him to this moment. He would master death, too.
Chapter 1: Ten Years Earlier
“It worked! Yes!” Ethan DeTournay pumped a fist in the air, and then spread his palm for a high five the moment his tall, lithe girlfriend Elle Watson walked in the door of his dorm room. She raised her eyebrows, bemused, but obliged him by slapping his palm with hers.
“Yes!” echoed Ethan’s roommate and business partner Graham Roberts, sitting on his bed across the room. He pumped his own fist in the air, half a beat too late. Elle cast Graham a brief glance, and her lips twitched.
“Sorry… what brilliant idea was it this time?” Elle took a seat in Ethan’s swivel chair, while Ethan paced before his white board, twirling a dry erase marker between his fingers. After dating him for nearly four years, Elle recognized the almost manic signs of Ethan’s next business idea: fidgeting, pacing, pupils dilating, and mind somewhere far, far away. He was ‘in the zone,’ and probably had been since that morning, judging by the t-shirt he wore with holes in it and his perpetually uncombed dark hair. Ethan was never too bothered about his physical appearance or surroundings.
“That bacteria you told me about! The one that eats metal? I grew some cultures of it until they were nice and robust, fed my old smashed up hard drive to it, and voila—it ‘pooped out’ the rare earth metals in nice little piles, seventy-two hours later!”
“Three days!” Graham echoed unnecessarily, giggling with glee as his watery brown eyes leaked mirthful tears. Graham always seemed to screw up his face when he blinked, as if it took effort to squeeze his eyes all the way shut. Elle tried to ignore him, though Graham always set her teeth on edge. She didn’t think she’d ever heard Graham disagree with anything Ethan said, and she thought it bad for Ethan’s already overlarge ego.
“Wait… I told you about this?” Elle asked Ethan, confused. She was a pre-med biochemistry major, and she had a campus job working in a lab, but she’d never worked with bacteria that digested metal before. The concept did sound vaguely familiar, though… “Was that from the preprint paper I told you about from Professor Treadwell’s post-doc last month?”
“Yes!” Ethan interrupted. “As soon as I heard that, I figured, this is it! This is how we can solve the energy crisis! Mining rare earth elements is toxic and expensive, and recycling them has been nearly impossible up until now. But academia moves at a snail’s pace, obviously, and we haven’t got time to waste! So I went to Treadwell and got the name of his supplier, got some culture materials, and did my own experiment, and—”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” Elle held up a hand, and saw the flicker of annoyance cross Ethan’s boyishly handsome face. He hated it when she ‘rained on his parade,’ as he’d accused her of many times before, but she couldn’t help herself. Someone had to ground him in reality, and obviously Graham wasn’t going to do it.
“First problem,” Elle said, holding up her index finger, “the reason academia moves at a snail’s pace is because you have to get peer review, publication, and numerous corroborating studies before the scientific community is going to accept—”
Ethan waved his hand to cut her off. “Elle, I’m not in the scientific community. I don’t care about acceptance in academia; I care about what works in the real world, and bringing it to market as fast as possible!”
“But this is a bacteria,” she argued. “It’s not like this is something you can patent. You didn’t make it!”
He jabbed the bottom of his dry erase marker in her general direction with a triumphant grin. “That’s the most brilliant part! I can’t patent a bacteria, no, but people isolate, purify, and then synthetically produce natural substances and patent those all the time, right? Isn’t that the entire pharmaceutical industry? Treadwell’s post-doc, Williams, thinks that the bacteria has to produce an enzyme, maybe several of them but at least one, that allows them to digest the metal. If we can isolate those, and sequence them, how hard can it be to mass-produce them synthetically?”
“Boom!” cried Graham, making exploding gestures with his hands, and rocking back and forth on the bed with glee. He was a bit short and pudgy, and something about him reminded Elle of a roly-poly. Not that she’d ever have expressed such an uncharitable thought out loud. Elle fought the urge to roll her eyes.
“I mean, Elle, come on!” Ethan dropped the marker and crossed to her, taking her heart-shaped face in both his hands, his expression pleading. He wanted her to share in his excitement, and was often frustrated when she didn’t. “Every clean energy source I can think of, not to mention almost all technology these days, requires rare earth elements. And there’s nowhere near enough of them to go aro
“The thing that will fix that,” Ethan persisted, “more than anything else, is more rare earth elements! If these enzymes are this efficient, there will never be a shortage again! This will save lives, of the most vulnerable!” His lips twitched just a bit at this, as if fully aware of his own manipulation.
“And the fact that you think it might make you a fortune in the process is completely incidental,” she teased.
“Completely! Not the point at all!” he grinned back.
She couldn’t stop her own answering smile. He was giving her the look he knew she couldn’t resist: those big brown puppy dog eyes flecked with gold that she’d been such a sucker for since the day they met.
Ethan persisted, now not bothering to hide his smirk, “I mean, I’ve had some great ideas before, but this is freaking amazing, if I do say so myself.”
“And you always do say so yourself.”
“Hey, this is your bleeding-heart cause!” Ethan poked her in the ribs. “More energy rations to go around equals saving lives in the third world, doesn’t it?”
“It might,” she conceded. “There’s just a lot of unknowns still, and—”
“Stop right there. I’ll take it!” Ethan crowed, and planted a kiss on her lips. Then he glanced at Graham, who watched this display with a glassy expression that always gave Elle the creeps. Ethan never noticed. He clapped his hands and pointed at his friend, in CEO mode now.
“Okay. Graham, get us an LLC, and reach out to our investors.” They were both MBA students, and this wasn’t the first business the two of them had started together. So far the duo had done comfortably well with their business startups, so Ethan didn’t need to be any more specific than that. “I’ll get with Williams and see how fast I can isolate and scale the enzyme. If this works, didn’t you say one of our investors knows someone who knows someone who knows John Mortimer? If we could get him on board…”
John Mortimer was one of the most prominent men of the Order of the Global Brotherhood, second only to Thierry Voltaire himself. Elle froze, Ethan glanced at her, and rolled his eyes.
“Sorry,” he apologized sarcastically, “I forgot.” Despite the Order’s nearly universally positive press, from their philanthropic causes to their altruistic goals to create a global utopia which eradicated all poverty, disease, violence, and inequality, Elle intuitively mistrusted their motives. She referred to the Order’s chairman, Thierry Voltaire, as “that snake.” Ethan, on the other hand, idolized the man; his fondest wish was to one day be invited to join the Order, an exclusive unofficial “club” of all of the most powerful people in the world.
After one too many fights, Ethan and Elle had agreed never to discuss the Order, its agenda, or any of its members, ever again.
***
The next few months passed by for Ethan in a blur. He didn’t remember sleeping. He ate somehow, but couldn’t remember it. He’d attended no classes, had missed one exam and two big presentations, and was very possibly failing the semester now, but he couldn’t think about any of that.
It had worked.
Somehow, between himself, Graham, Williams, several friends in the biochemistry and pharmacy departments, and contacts of a couple of their investors, they’d done it. They’d managed to isolate the enzyme responsible for digesting metals, sequence it, mass produce it, and get started on a patent for the process—that part would take awhile, but for now they could just say “patent pending”. The months had gone by in a frenzy of work with the genetic scientists, patent and contract attorneys, meetings with potential investors, and clever marketing analysts who knew exactly how and when and what to “leak” to the public to generate interest. They had an LLC, an attorney, several investors salivating for shares, and now—
“John Mortimer wants to meet with us,” Graham announced, breathless.
Ethan stood up from his work bench, chair scraping slowly against the tile. Graham watched him, wide-eyed, lips quivering with excitement. An ‘in’ with the Order had been his dream too, ever since it became Ethan’s.
“You’re kidding,” Ethan croaked.
Graham shook his head manically and squeaked, “No! We have a virtual meeting with him at nine our time tomorrow!”
Ethan let out a whoop of joy, drawing curious stares from the biochemistry students he’d enlisted.
“What are you gonna tell Elle?” Graham finally asked when they’d both calmed down.
Ethan shook his head, still grinning. “Nothing! Why does she have to know?”
“Have you talked to her at all this week?”
Ethan’s smile dimmed just a notch. “A little, here and there. Why?”
Graham shrugged. “I just hadn’t seen her around much in awhile, that’s all.”
Ethan narrowed his eyes at his friend. Elle had mentioned to him in passing before that she didn’t like the way Graham leered at her. Ethan had blown up at her—he already thought she was overly negative about everything that excited him, and he hadn’t been in the mood to hear anything against his best friend, also. Besides, the idea had seemed absurd to him. Elle was certainly pretty enough to elicit stares anywhere she went, with her thick dirty blonde hair, almond shaped hazel eyes, and long, tanned legs—but Graham was chubby, pasty, and phlegmy. Ethan didn’t think this in so many words, but the idea that he would even consider Elle in that way seemed ridiculous. Yet, it did seem a little strange that he was asking about her now.
Aloud, Ethan said, “I’ve been busy.”
“Does Elle know? About all this?”
Ethan shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. “She knows enough. Anyway, she usually pokes holes in all my ideas, and I wasn’t in the mood for that until it was a sure thing.”
Later that day, when Ethan saw that Elle was calling him, he sent the call to voicemail… and the next one a few hours later, too. He’d talk to her after their meeting with Mortimer, he told himself. No reason to have a fight with his girlfriend over it, if it all turned out to be for nothing.
The next morning, Graham and Ethan sat in stunned silence before Ethan’s laptop just after they’d finished the call.
John Mortimer had loved their idea.
John Mortimer wanted to invest in their concept, with an eventual investment to the tune of nearly a billion dollars, if everything went according to plan.
It would give Mortimer a controlling interest in the company, which meant he’d hire the team to take them to the next level—to take them global. If anyone could do it, it was him.
Ethan slowly closed the laptop cover, as if in a daze. Graham broke the silence first, with a sharp, shrill laugh. Within a few seconds, Ethan started laughing too, and then the two of them were in hysterics.
“This is it,” Graham breathed at last. “This is going to make our fortunes! You know what this means? We’ll be invited to the next OGB summit! We’ll probably be presenters!”
“I know,” Ethan sat back in his chair, trying to catch his breath. At last he shook his head. “Why are we still in school? We don’t need MBAs, and it’s wasting our time! Every waking second should be spent building this company!” He jammed his finger on the desk for emphasis.
Then suddenly, he remembered Elle. He grabbed his phone, and shot her a text: “Meet me for dinner at Alejandro’s at 7. I have something important to tell you.” Alejandro’s was “their” place; it was where they’d had their first date, and he’d taken her there for the anniversary of their first date, and for her birthday ever since. It was also right on the water, and quiet enough that they wouldn’t be disturbed. He didn’t ask to meet for lunch, though, because he had a lot left to do that day.
He was so busy setting up a meeting with the school registrar and some of his favorite professors that when his phone lit up with her response, he didn’t even bother to read it.
