GAIA

Endgame Horizon

Part Three – Endgame Horizon

Chapter Nineteen - Sojourn

- 6640 AD -

Sitting upon a mossy boulder under the silvery light of the Orkney moon, New World Order Director Parrington Levens took time away from his ponderous thoughts to marvel at his surrounds. Orkney. It was a series of islands off the north-coast of Scotland that housed some of the worlds nicest towns, at least as far as he was concerned. Orkney however, had also been home to a long lost neolithic civilisation. Abandoned and forgotten, its ruins lay either ignored or buried for millennia. By the end of the 2nd millennium AD, these sites slowly re-emerged to become a moderately famous tourist attraction. Some millennia later again, and the neolithic structures of Orkney had been forgotten once again. With dozens of thriving planets and several hundred colonised moons to explore, the human race was simply over-spoilt for choice when it came to tourist destinations. It suited the director just fine.

He had just spent the last couple days living in secret in the neolithic and perfectly restored coastal town of Skara Brae. Though officially on a protected world heritage list, the site of stone built homes and green, green grass had over the centuries been rebuilt back to its original glory. Perhaps glory was overstating things but the neolithic town was comfortable enough for those content to live the simple life. It had enjoyed a brief return to civilisation during the 5th millennium but fell into disuse again soon after that. Basically, Skara Brae had become the town people live in when they wished to conduct secret experiments upon the east lying Ring of Brodgar.

Had the original settlers of the land constructed the not too distant Ring of Brodgar as a means of making life in their chosen part of the world more bearable? Or had they purposefully sought out the mystical nexus the Ring seemed to sit upon from the outset, then built their civilisation around it? Or where they completely unaware of its mystical properties or perhaps incapable of unlocking them? Chances were none would ever know. It was too fanciful to believe that people of the 4th millennium before Christ could have possessed knowledge so great as to seek out or fabricate a cross dimensional nexus such as the Ring sat upon. But the Ring of Brodgar stood never the less.

Biting on his lower lip in anxiousness, the director wondered if even the druids of Orkney's long ago heyday had ever to deal with a dilemma such as he faced. Grasping the crystal topped staff that had been leaning across his knee, the director rose to his feet. Whatever his decision might prove to be, he would have to make it on the move. The stars were almost aligned, and the Ring of Brodgar was an hour's march away. It was vital he should come to be standing at its centre when the star-bridge shone.

Though the moonlight was sufficient, the director blinked hard twice and switched to night vision by means of a very common surgical enhancement, just one of a million wonders humanity had devised by the 7th millennium AD. Smiling, he wondered what the world might think if it was to learn the origins of one of the most important discoveries of all. For it was in the year 4666 AD at the very place he was heading that mankind stumbled upon the secret of how to build the wormhole sustaining gates that allowed the rapid expansion of its interstellar civilisation. Perhaps the druids of old were indeed space travellers themselves, but as far as top secret files were concerned, the secrets of the cross dimensional nexus at the Ring of Brodgar had been uncovered by the New World Order in the 5th millennium.

Just a thousand years later and an intergalactic transport network had been established allowing instantaneous travel across thousands of light years between hundreds of colonies. Human civilisation had achieved true greatness and though the official credit went to a fictitious research department, it was all because of the Ring of Brodgar, or as known thereafter by those with high enough security credentials, Brodgar's Gate.