Endworlds - Nicholas Read [17]
2 Ansett Airlines was placed into administration in 2001 and subsequently liquidated in 2002 due to what was called a ‘financial collapse’. Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansett_Australia, or other media reports from the era.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohnpei
4 Google “fallstreak cloud” and click Images or Video. Sightings that show the outlines of large geometric discs are candidates for cloudship signatures. These are not materially dense enough to materialize in our dimension, yet they possess an electrical wake that pierces the bosonic plane enough to make their silhouette visible. The phenomenon has increased as dimensional integrity deteriorates.
5 Nan Madol is a ruined city that lies off the eastern shore of the island of Pohnpei. It consists of artificial islets—stone and coral fill platforms—bordered by a network of tidal canals. The original name was Soun Nan-leng (“Reef of Heaven”), according to Gene Ashby in his book “Pohnpei, An Island Argosy”. It is sometimes called the “Venice of the Pacific”. Google: “Nan Madol” for more information and maps.
UNDERGROUND
LONDON, ENGLAND
AUGUST, 2007
WITH ITS ERODED volcanic peaks, impossibly turquoise waters and singing waterfalls all now well in the past, Pohnpei was a dream of a tropical island. And if Pohnpei itself was a dream, then the brooding necropolis of Nan Madol was a dream within a dream. All subsumed in a romanticized mirage poking out of an ocean halfway around the world, another in a long line of the increasingly empty dead-end hopes Eisman had pursued for six highly controversial years.
They said he was mad. No longer a speculation confined to the business pages or the realm of eager political cartoonists, Eisman’s passion to find his daughter or at least some minuscule indication of what had happened to her had entered the lexicon of common cultural currency.
From actual news it had fallen over the years into cheap fodder for late-night comedians and former business competitors. By now even some of the latter had turned from laughter to pity.
Raef Eisman? Oh yes—brilliant fellow, once. But ever since that strange incident involving his daughter, well—poor chap. Claims to see her talking to him in windows and mirrors—surprising he hasn’t tried to step through one of them, like Alice. The blood loss might bring him to his senses. He isn’t stupid, though. Just, you know—eccentric. After all, he’s rich.
Oh, and remember the press when he bought an entire beach resort on the south coast of Brazil because some guests reported seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in some of the windows, and he’d rushed away from a conference to tear the place apart window by window, insisting it was his daughter they’d seen?
Then he’d attacked a camera team from the local television network. The old fool had gotten himself deported over that! Oh dear, those photos of him wide-eyed and babbling on and on about wild conspiracies and his ‘North Pacific Anomaly’.
What was it he had gone on about?
Something about how the Van Allen belt came closest to the Earth’s surface at certain spots so the planet’s magnetic field is weaker there. Protons get trapped in between dimensions, so why not his daughter? How sad. Although that bit about not even the Hubble being able to take pictures in those zones made it all sound a bit mysterious.
Such a shame, that Eisman. Poor man.
True enough, Brazilian Customs and Immigration didn’t care about magnetic dipoles, the consensus being that the raging Brit billionaire was in need of a little extra radiation shielding himself. He had been unceremoniously put on his private plane and told never to return. Let him reflect obsessively on his daughter elsewhere.
Not long after his forced departure, a private Foundation had bought the property that had so captivated Eisman and razed it to the ground, replacing it with an undeveloped nature preserve where the only reflections that remained were to be seen in the pale waves