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The Beatles Conspiracy Theories | Beatles iceberg
Today I would like to explore the Beatles and the many theories that have followed the group since their inception. Many of the topics covered in this video come from the iceberg created by Evan or something. So shout out to him. We'll touch on a variety of topics from the practical to the absurd. So be prepared as we journey into the video.
The Beatles are world renowned, leaving a lasting impact on individuals and music alike. But what if the Beatles we know aren't the real Beatles? What if they were replaced? The Beatles that we know, according to the theory, were actually CIA impersonators inserted to continue the Illuminati's agenda of gaining control over the populace.
Paul was replaced by Fall, better known as Billy Campbell Shares, who you may be familiar with. There are some remarkable differences between the two that can be pointed out with the keen eye. First of all, the height difference is quite noticeable with Paul standing at 5'7 to 5'8 and fall at 5'11. The theory also goes on to list the differences in facial features between the two such as the jawline, nose, and ears.
Not only was Paul replaced, but all the Beatles were towards the end of 1966. It doesn't really go into details into Ringo and George, but does with John. Comparing the two's physical differences, the Fetals aren't ones to hide the truth, leaving hidden messages within their music and media. The most common thing people love to point at is the Sergeant Pepper's album cover.
On the cover, we can see the Beatles dressed up in the Sergeant Pepper uniforms and to the side of them, wax figures. The figures are younger versions of them meant to represent the replacement of the now deceased Beatles. Viven Stanshaw, comedian and musician known for his work with the Bonso Dog Dooah Band.
He was also known for his songs Look out, There's a Monster Coming and Death Cap for Cutie. Innocent sounding songs on the surface, but may have actually been a premonition of sorts. Let's take a look at these two songs. Starting with Look Out, there's a Monster Coming. The song written by Stanshall speaks of the absurd lengths people go through in order to change themselves to find love and acceptance with the subject of the song turning into a metaphorical monster meant to be satirical and not to abandon one's true self which is a positive message
overall. From a different angle, the song has a rather unsettling message. Verse two, the subject of the song being Stanshell has the wrong image, so he changes his personality, hair, and shoes, all of which went undetected. Verse three, he learns to speak differently, play guitar, and become more sociable.
Verse four, his face is changed through plastic surgery and they begin to question if things are right. Verse five, his face is shaped and he has regained his verility. What is the message of this song and what is he trying to tell us? While Vivien Stanshaw may have never existed, Millie being a persona of Billy Shears, the same Billy Shears that would eventually come to take over the role of Paul McCartney.
The two personas of Shears would coexist for a period with Stanshall performing the song Death Cat for Cutie for the Magical Mystery Tour Special in 1967. The song being a teenage tragedy song is about a cutie going out into town against their lover's wishes, eventually ending in their demise after the taxi they were in ran a red light.
The details are a little bit different, but it seems to point to the end of the original Paul. The story goes that after a blowout from one of their many sessions, Paul left early in his Volkswagen Beetle. In a rush, Paul would run a red light, meeting his end. The stanch character wouldn't last forever as sharers would retire the persona in 1985.
Despite it being listed, he passed away in the9s. You know the Paul's dead theory, right? What if I told you everything you knew was wrong? That Paul wasn't dead and the other three Beatles were. This theory isn't an actual theory in the same vein as Paul is dead, but more of an analysis of coincidences. If it were a coincidence that there were clues pointing to the death of Paul, one could expect it to be the same case for the other Beatles.
That is exactly what this theory would like to put to the test. The conclusion was that Paul died and was replaced in 1963, George in 1964 and John in 1965. In 1963 on the cover of With the Beatles, Ringo's face is misaligned with the other Beatles, which means Ringo is not like the others. This means he passed between the first two albums and was replaced.
1964 cover of A Hard Day's Night. George's back is to the camera and is the only one with the sig, which is obviously meant to represent a coffin nail. On the long Tall Sally EP, George is wearing a different coat, which means he is different from the other Beatles. He was replaced. Surprisingly, to the credit of the theory, it actually covers why only George is different from the others.
when according to logic it should be both Ringo and George in different coats. The reason only George was different was because it would be difficult to figure out which pair of the Beatles were gone at this point. On the Beatles for Cell LP, the Beatles are dressed in black which you would expect of two members of the band passed.
1954 cover for Nowhere Man, Ringo sits upon a stone monument meant to symbolize his tombstone. On the Help album cover, the Beatles hold their hands in semaphore positions, which you may have seen performed on landing strips. At first glance, the Beatles are spelling out Help, which makes sense, but are actually spelling out NUJV.
What does NUJV stand for? Well, it's supposed to mean new unknown John vocalist, meaning Jon has passed and was replaced. On the back of the Sergeant Pepper's album cover, Paul is turned backwards, indicating he was different from the other Beatles, meaning that he was the only remaining Beetle. There are many more clues leading all the way back to 1969.
For the sake of time, I'll be skipping to the clues from this year. On the cover of Abbey Road, there's a car with the license plate 28F, which means John, who was born in October 1940, would have been 28 when Abi Road released had he been alive. At the end of the song, I want you is an abrupt cut which is meant to represent Jon's life which was cut short.
As you could tell from these so-called clues, it's easy to create a message even when there isn't one. The Beatles never existing is an interesting take as it could break our preconceived notions of who the Beatles were. It doesn't literally mean the Beatles didn't exist. More so that the Fab Four, the four individuals were actually a bigger collective going all the way back to the group's inception.
As stated by the website the Beatlesene neverexisted.com, the purpose of the site is to present evidence that the Beatles were always a set of multiples since their inception and were not just for individual young men. In order to prove that the Beatles were not just for men, the theory takes a look at height changes, eyebrows, ears, and teeth.
The merits of the Beatles come into question if rather than four individuals making groundbreaking music, it was actually a larger group. So, who wrote all the songs? To make sense of this, we need to envision the Beatles not as a band, but as a machine, a machine that is made to turn a single that wouldn't sell under a different artist into a Beatles song, which would be guaranteed to sell well.
In a way, the Beatles were just a collective of ghostriters, all contributing their work to one band in order to sell their songs. I just wonder how easy would it be to shut the mouth of all those people. How much money would it take? And could they ever really guarantee their silence? Speculation around musicians and dark dealings are often created to justify an artist success cuz obviously they couldn't achieve it themselves.
Jon wouldn't be exempt from speculation. Stuck in a mediocre band and angry where his life was headed, Jon decided to take matters into his own hands. During a snowy day in 1960, Jon would travel over a mile to a bridge on Rose Lane. Here, he would hash out a 20-year pack for his soul and would reach a degree of success he could only imagine.
A time limit would now be set on his life. But Jon would make the most of his time, bringing forth Beatle Mania, creating renowned music, and establishing the Beatles as one of the greatest rock groups of all time, reaching the point where mobs would follow them almost as if they were worshiping them. The only explanation the theory provides is demonic influence coming from the pack John made that fateful night.
Merely creating a pact isn't enough to uphold it. One must constantly go against religion. This can be seen in John's song, imagine his comment about being bigger than Jesus, and even telling a friend he felt as if he sold his soul. The show would be cut 20 years later when John came face to face with Mark David Chapman.
Mark David Chapman, known as the man who stopped Lenon. But Chapman wasn't just that, having a whole history before his name would reach national headlines. During 1972, you could find a young Chapman volunteering as a youth counselor for the YMCA in Decar. Growing up, Chapman had a difficult life, bullied and unloved by his father.
But here at the Y, you wouldn't see that. You would see a man wildliked amongst his peers, even going so far as to take Kathy Simpson under his wing, a shy and quiet 7-year-old. Through this new friendship, Chapman would become close to the family and her mother, Maria Simpson. At the Y with Chapman, Kathy would be your typical 7-year-old child for the most part.
But at home, she seemed to turn into someone else entirely. Only two weeks after moving in during 1971, Kathy started waking up every night exactly at 11, crying and screaming, declaring one night to have seen an old man standing behind her mother despite no one being there. On another occasion, Kathy, in what appeared to be some sort of trance, dropped the bathroom scales on her mother's head.
Waking from the shock, Maria would notice Kathy seemed pleased with her actions. Maria would question why she would do such a thing, but would receive no response. It would only be a day later when Kathy would turn to normal, having no memory of the incident. This odd behavior would continue in what would be described as the black house.
In 1976, the family would relocate to upstate New York, and Kathy would stop exhibiting her strange behavior. Later, when returning to Georgia, all hell broke loose with lights turning on and off, toilets flushed, and faucets being turned on. Later on, a Catholic priest who visited the residence would comment that there was definitely an evil presence.
How do these events relate to Chapman when he only seemed to be a small part in the family's rather chaotic life? Between the dates of 1977 and 1980, we could find Chapman traveling the world, visiting Switzerland, Israel, and Hawaii. During his travels, Chapman would be sure to visit some old friends, the Simpsons.
Upon being reunited, Maria would be sure to call him Nemo, an old nickname the family gave him. Upon hearing the name, Chapman would become IA, declaring that he no longer wanted to be addressed by the name. During late fall in 1980, Chapman again would seek to reestablish some sort of connection with the family, visiting their old house where Kathy had exhibited her strange behavior years earlier.
Maria would be confused by this as Chapman should have known the family moved away. Maybe Chapman just wanted to relive old memories. Or maybe there was something calling to him from the house. On the morning of December 8th, 1980, Chapman, fueled by recent events and a declining mental state, would enact his plan to stop Lennon, which succeeded.
Maria would soon receive a call from the police because, as Chapman put it, "She knows me better than anyone else." Maria was not only shocked at what Chapman had done, but what he told her during that call. Chapman would speak of two demons he encountered at the Black House named Laya and Dobar, which pushed him to commit the crimes he did.
After insistence from his lawyers, Chapman would originally plan to plead insanity, but after listening to the Little People and being told to do so by God, would plead guilty. Later, in a 1987 interview with People's Magazine, Chapman would provide additional details about his motives.
He would state that lyrics contained within Beatles songs Satan and Catcher in the Ry as motives for his actions, claiming to have pleaded with a devil shortly before committing his crimes and later while in prison being exercised of these demons. According to Chapman, the things he did were not him. Did Chapman run into the demons Laya and Dobar when he visited the old Simpsons house? Maria would state, "Even though Mark was very close to me and my family, no one ever spoke to him about the strange incidents that took place at the house in Decar, there is absolutely no
way he could have known about the demons that invaded our home unless he had encountered them himself." What if the Beatles were Satanists doing the devil's work and selling their souls in order to get what they desperately wanted, fame? Let's start off with the many quotes provided by the Beatles and most notably John.
Notoriously, John would be quoted as saying, "The Beatles were bigger than Jesus." Paul would state, "We probably seem to be anti-religious. None of us believes in God." As we know from one of our previous theories, those who made a deal with the devil must go out of their way to discredit religion in any way possible.
And let's not forget the best part, the images where the Fab Four display the satanic practices. Up to bat, we have the infamous butcher cover meant to symbolize some sort of sacrifice. Others would probably tell you it was a protest against the Vietnam War or was in protest of the record company for butchering their albums. There are other images to look at, including the Beatles holding 666 and Paul's Ram cover and the song Revolution 9.
What do we get when we flip the number? You get the number six, which repeats throughout the song pointing to 666. So, were the Beatles Satanists or just men trying to push the boundaries of their time? If it means anything, the Vatican have since forgiven the Beatles for their satanic messages. John and Rosemary's Baby. What does this mean and how are they connected? Rosemary's Baby was a film in which the character Rosemary ends up giving birth to the Antichrist.
The movie goes even further with many believing it was in fact cursed with some sort of tragedy falling on people associated with the film such as Sharon Tate, William Castle, and Robert Evans. Not to mention the horrendous crimes committed by the director Roman Palansky. John and Yoko would end up being friends with both Pansky and Mia Pharaoh, the star of the film, and would end up living in the same Dakota hotel where the film was shot.
Sharon Tate would be the victim of horrendous crime committed by Charles Manson and his family with Manson pointing to songs such as Halter Scouter from the Beatles as motivation for his crimes as he believed it contained hidden messages. Jon would then run into Chapman in the building where he was staying and where the film took place, leading people to speculate if Jon had been another victim of the Rosemary's baby's [Music] curse.
Our story begins with a man named James Richard who got knocked unconscious while chasing his dog only to be awakened in an unfamiliar room belonging to a man named Jonas. As it would happen, Jonas was actually from another dimension where tourism took more of a thrillseeking approach. In this dimension, rather than going on a cruise, one would jump to different dimensions.
In one dimension, you may end up in the middle of a meadow and another, you may find yourself inches from certain death. During one of these trips, Jonas would come across James knocked unconscious and decide to take him back to his home dimension to patch him up. In this new dimension, not only was the catch of purple, but the Beatles never broke up.
During his time in this new dimension, James would snag a copy of the new Beatles album, Everyday Chemistry, later releasing it on the internet. Was this album really from the Beatles from an alternate dimension or just some sort of art project? What if John Lennon was still alive going by Mark Stacer? Apparently, the assassination of John was faked as the British Secret Service no longer had any use for him.
If it's really meant to be a secret, why make it so obvious? Not only is he a musician, but a Beatles fan. You think if the powers that be wanted it to be a secret, he would either be silenced or be forced to stay in hiding. I guess the best we could hope for is he's still alive sitting alongside Tupac, Elvis, and Jimmy Hendris.
Did the number nine have some sort of connection to John Lennon? And was his life dictated by the number? According to this theory, it did. It started all the way back to when he was born on October 9th, 1940. Growing up at nine Newcastle Road in Raver Tree, Liverpool, which all contain exactly nine letters. While attending college, John traveled a number 72 bus where he met Stuart Sutliffe, asking him to join his group, The Cororey Men, which featured Paul McCartney.
The group would become the Beatles in 1960, and Lennin would leave 9 years later in 1969. John's son was born October 9th, 1975 when John was 35. His ninth solo album, Walls and Bridges, featured the song Number Nine Dream. The cover of the album would be a painting from When John was a kid with the footballer with the number nine on his back.
He would also release two other songs, Revolution 9 and one after 909, which he apparently wrote at 9 New Road. As John would state, it's just a number that follows me around, but numerologically apparently I'm a number six or three or something, but it's all part of nine. There are many other connections, but I think you get the point.
I do have to say it is quite ominous that there are quite a number of connections. If this means the number nine dictated his life, I'm not sure. Often when there's a death of an activist or someone in power such as MLK, RFK, or JFK, people suspect any one of the different intelligence agencies of being involved.
There could be a number of reasons for this such as distrust of the government or just your average case of schizophrenic conspiracy theories. John during his life would spread the message of peace and love which isn't exactly a controversial subject. So why would somebody want John silence or saying something quite simple? It isn't any worse than saying treat others how you would want to be treated.
In order to get to the why, we must take a look at John Potach's book Drugs as weapons against Us. This book isn't solely on Lenin. Therefore, we'll be only taking a look at what is relevant to us. First off, the checklist. Why silence Lannon? Well, according to the book, the CIA had a keen interest in keeping track of popular musicians because they believed they were converting the youth to a radical leftist agenda.
In order to subdue these musicians, they were to get them hooked on a variety of drugs. However, when Lenin began to curb his drug use and move towards activism, it perked the ears of the CIA. With the agency becoming more concerned with the nearing approach of Lenin's US citizenship, they would decide to take a more proactive approach to the problem.
Indeed, Lenin was under FBI CIA supervision for a period as they believed he would disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention. Another document released showed that the FBI did seek to neutralize Lenin, but not in the way you think. Instead of any physical threat, they decided to get him by having him arrested on drug charges and deported.
This proactive approach would then extend to a more nefarious side. They would, according to Potach, use MK Ultra in order to brainwash Chapman, transforming him into their assassin with Catcher and the Ry being the trigger. In case Chapman did fail, the doorman Jose Pommo would be the secondary Gman who had alleged ties to the CIA in its operation to overthrow Castro.
According to the book, the first officer on scene believed that Jose had been the one to pull the trigger, not Chapman. At the police station, Lieutenant Arthur Okconor would state Chapman looked like he could have been programmed, and I know what you're going to make of that word. If it helps, Shaun Lennon believed that the CIA did have a part in his father's death.
In a series of quotes, Shawn would state, "He was a counterculture revolutionary, and the government takes that kind of [ __ ] really seriously historically. My father was dangerous to the government. If he had said it, bomb the White House tomorrow. There would have been 10,000 people who would have done it. These pacifist revolutionaries are historically killed by the government.
Anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests is insane, I think, or very naive. [Music] For this part, I would like to take a look at the potential that a second shooter could have been involved and at the beliefs of Salvador Estusia. Salvador Estusia, a pseudonym, wrote the book Rethinking John Lennon's assassination.
The book released in the 2000s sought to find out the truth of what really happened between Chapman and Lenin. The author believes it is hard to criticize the universally accepted version of events because of the lack of information on the case. He would state there was no trial, no testimonies, no witnesses. The police report was certainly of little value and the autopsy report is suppressed from public view.
Most of the public's perception of Chapman is hocus pocus nonsense. Could Chapman really not be the one responsible? Did the witness Sean Strub lie for his own benefit? The true culprit could be the doorman predominant only confessing to the crime because of the mind control he was under. with Tulsa being chosen because he was an anti-Castro Cuban exile who worked with brigade 1506 which sought to overthrow Castro.
That now caused into question why Lenin was all fd and who pulled the strings. Now we enter the Reagan connection and the plot to sense to Lenin. To clarify, the author does not believe that Reagan had a direct connection to the fate of Lenin. This might be a bit confusing because of the name the Reagan connection, but we'll get to that.
Before we get to the interesting part, we need to touch on some history. During his presidency, Reagan pushed for the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, also known as Star Wars, meant to be a reference to the movie of the same name. The SDI sought to create a missile defense system to stop any nuclear threats from destroying the US.
The program would be announced in 1983 and set up the following year. With Lennon's political activism, it would be believed that he could prove a threat to the initiative. Due to his popularity, it was determined that had he protested against it, public sentiment would turn against the program. To stop this from happening, the powers that be would silence the man before any of this could become a problem.
To further back up his claim, Astusia would discuss the FBI files on Lenin and Yokoono during their activism in 1969. Additionally, the FBI even ran surveillance on the Beatles during the British invasion in 1964. The corruption that plagued the FBI during this period when Lennon met his fate would be unveiled by the Church Committee which sought to investigate any misconduct in the US intelligence agencies.
From their findings, it was discovered that the FBI labeled anti-war activists as the new left and they believe some of these activists sought to start a revolution and even wanted defeat of the US and Vietnam. Lenin would most certainly fit the bill and if the author is to be believed would be silenced because of his potential to stop the SDI.
I do want to mention that the author mentions race, which puts a sour taste in my [Music] mouth. Our next theory comes straight from a man named Steven Lightfoot, who claims that Nixon, Reagan, and Stephen King all had a part in the fate of Lenin. He's so convinced that this happened that he drives a van around advertising his website, lenin murdertruth.com.
How exactly did he uncover what happened? And is there any truth to his claims? Well, his evidence are government codes hidden in headlines from Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report magazine, which were all printed around December 8th, 1980. These codes are phrases such as thinking about John Lennon, and finally, kiss bang bang ouch ouch.
3 months prior, a news clipping would feature the real killer, Stephen King, with the caption, "One great zippo lighter alluding to a blazing gun." Lightfoot would then point to further hidden messages contained within King's writings, such as shooting a man between the shoulder blades and following a politician with a gun in the beginning of Salem's Lot.
Reagan comes in with the headline, "Who's in who's out?" alongside Nixon's book, The Real War. In the picture, we can see Reagan putting together a jigsaw puzzle, which alludes to the puzzle of Lenin's fate. Nixon comes in because at one point, he did try to get Lennon deported during the 70s.
Finally, we see a photo of Lenin and Chapman who attacked the fall for King after he pulled the trigger. According to Lightfoot, King would write a letter to him going by the name Dennis C. Lee. The first letter is a confession of his crime and a threat, while the second one is also a threat with a bribe to keep quiet.
Still, we don't know why Nixon and Reagan conspired to get rid of Lenin. Like so many other conspiracies on Lenin, they wanted him gone because of his anti-war stance and general pain to the government. [Music] Stuart Suckliffe, for those of you that don't know, was one of the early bass players for the band. Originally meeting John at art school, where the two became good friends, leading to Stu being invited to join the band in 1960.
Stu would leave the group in 1961 to pursue his art career, but before he could truly get started, would be halted in his tracks. After a period of severe headaches, which at times left Stu blind, would result in his end in 1962. How could such an injury occur to someone who, for the most part, seemed relatively healthy? According to Stu's sister, Pauline Suckliffe, Jon was actually the one responsible for Stu's untimely passing.
Pauline would detail that Jon had actually gotten into a fight with Stu months prior, which resulted in Stu receiving several kicks to the head. Pauline would state, "I believe that the cerebral hemorrhage that cost Stuart his life was caused by an injury inflicted by Jon in a jealous rage. A postmortem revealed Stuart had a dent in his skull as though from a blow or kick.
And a few months earlier, Jon had viciously kicked my brother in the head in a sustained unprovoked attack. The evidence she uses to back up her claim as Stu's own sketch pad, which alluded to his decline." Later in that same article, Alan Clayson, who co-wrote Backbeat, disagreed with the claim, stating, "We conclude that Stuart wasn't beaten up by John Lennon.
His condition was brought on by the overuse of impetamines, and the only fight Stu had ever been in, he had actually stepped in and defended him. It does seem fishy that the sketchbook was set to be put up for auction during the time of this article. It could be that she sought to stir up some drama to increase its value at auction, which would be despicable.
As the title says, hidden in the free as a bird video is Paul's head from the result of a fatal accident. More likely, this is just the quality of the video rather than any actual misplaced heads. Now, the example of a similar phenomena is the Wizard of Oz and the hanging munchkin.
When the footage was enhanced, it became clear it was not a munchkin, but rather an animal in the background. If it is the head of Paul, then it's obviously connected to the Paul's dead theory. For this one, I've decided to combine three smaller theories into one as they are far too small to cover on their own.
The first theory is whether or not Paul is in fact a reptile. What do I mean by reptile? The reptiles I am speaking of are those that live in an underground community which plan to overthrow humanity from the inside. Taking the roles of the influential, such as politicians, musicians, and anyone that could influence the populace.
It could be it's just a messed up video, as the quality and angle makes Paul look rather bad. Continuing on, there are a number of photos in which it appears that Paul or Fall has one too many toes on his foot. Not only does Fall appear to have six toes, but so does his stepdaughter, as seen in this photo.
To be clear, Fall has six toes, not Paul. It is then suspected that Fall's stepdaughter was actually his biological daughter, which would explain the six toes she has. This would imply that Fall and Linda were actually together before 1967. In order to hide that they were together before 1967, they had to make Fall's daughter his stepdaughter.
This explanation does seem rather convoluted, unless they wanted to hide Fall's relationship status for the sake of profit. The last theory of the trifecta is that Paul actually wears a wig in order to hide the fact that he's balding or has no hair. As we could see in this clip, it appears that Paul is wearing a wig.
As when he shakes his head, we could see his hairline isn't where it should be. More than likely, it's just a frame rate combined with old footage, which makes it appear he's wearing a wig when he shakes his head. As most things with movement on film, even today, it could be hard to make out what is really going on, which could lead people to making assumptions.
If you've had any experience with the Beatles or just theories in general, you've most likely heard of the Paul's dead theory. It does seem to be a rather popular theory and for good reason, as it is rather interesting. What made the theory so captivating and what exactly happened to Paul? The theory goes that on November 9th, 1966, during a Sergeant Pepper's recording session, an argument would break out, causing Paul to leave early, driving in his Volkswagen Beetle, and preoccupied with the fight that had
just happened, he wouldn't notice the lights changing, leading to a car crash and his end. Rather than take the time to mourn the loss of their friend, the Beatles wanted to move forward and continue with the band. they would decide to replace Paul with the winner of a McCartney lookalike contest so as to not cause any fuss in the media and make the transition as easy as possible.
It is debated as to who the fake Paul was with names Billy Shears and William Campbell thrown around. Nonetheless, the conclusion is the same. Paul was gone and replaced by a double. Unable to bear the guilt of hiding Paul's death, the group would leave messages in the media, including songs, album covers, and interviews.
It clogs you up a bit when you you know cuz you're so glad. Notable songs include Strawberry Fields in the phrase I buried Paul. Revolution 9 played backwards repeats turn me on Dead [Music] Man and I'm so tired reverse as Paul's dead man miss him. We also can't forget about the Abbey Road cover which displays the four Beatles using a crosswalk dressed in a variety of styles.
John in all white, Ringo in a black suit, Paul in a dark suit without shoes, and George as a gravedigger. Paul who's out of step and has no shoes is meant to represent a corpse. In the background, we can see a Volkswagen Beetle with a license plate 28F. This symbolizes how old Paul would have been had he still been alive.
There are many other references to his death, including the Sergeant Pepper's album cover, Paul dressed as a walrus, and supposed facial differences between the two Pauls. That is basically the theory, at least the part pertaining to events leading up to the cover up of Paul's death.
Maybe there is some truth to the theory. Maybe not. If it helps to make up your mind, Paul has refuted the claim several times alongside his bandmates with Jon stating, "It's the most stupid rumor I've ever heard." The theory got its start in 1967 in the Beatles monthly book, a fan magazine for the group. For its February issue, the magazine would mention a rumor swept London that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on M1, but of course, there was absolutely no truth in it at all.
The theory didn't gain any traction from the publication, but in September 1969, it would. A college student from Michigan called into a local radio station titled WKNR in which he would bring up the Paul's dead theory telling the jockey to play the song Revolution 9 backwards which he did.
All the audience heard was Turn Me on Dead Man. Yeah, what's going on? I was going to rant with you about McCartney being dead and what is this all about? Well, the uh youngster said, "Would you play one cut for me on the air forward?" And he said, "Take the album and what we call the white album. Play a cut called Revolution number nine and play it forward.
" And as you do so, the guy comes on and says, "Number nine, number nine, number nine." He repeats it. And at that point, the kid said, "Now play that backwards." and I played it backwards and man I freaked. I went crazy because of the fact it just turned me on dead man. Russ Gibb would recall the whole thing exploded.
The phones were ringing off the hook. People were calling with their own clues. It was non-stop. The rumor would then progress to the mainstream radio shows, pushing the rumor further, leading people to come up with their own theories. The Beatles press office was quick to dispel the rumor, but with Paul living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, it made it hard to verify he was alive.
McCartney would understandably relent and engage in interviews in order to dispel the rumors [Music] himself. St. Paul is a reference to a song written and recorded by Terry Knight. The song came to be after Knight traveled to London in the hopes of signing on with the newly formed Apple Records.
He would end up meeting with McCartney instead on some of the white album sessions. During this time, things were becoming quite volatile amongst the Beatles, leading to arguments and Ringo temporarily quitting the group. All of which Terry might have heard or even saw. Knight and Apple Records wouldn't come to terms on a contract.
However, he wouldn't exactly leave empty-handed. In April 1969, Knight would release a song, St. Paul, under his own company, Storytime Music. The song was heavily influenced by Paul, which is quite obvious by the title and the Beatles music referenced in the song, including Sergeant Pepper, Lucy in the Sky, and A Day in Life.
The song goes on to allude to Something Going Wrong. You and Sergeant Pepper saw the writing on the wall, and hey there Paul, what's new? Did Judas talk to you, or did you put the whole world on? The writing on the wall is a reference to Paul being dead and the audience couldn't see the clues. Finally, did he put the whole world on, meaning Paul or the fake Paul alongside the Beatles were lying to the world about the death of the original Paul? The song would be pulled for a short period and was re-released under Meline Music. As Vinyl Rewind mentions in his
video, what would be the point of releasing it under Mlin music? If you listen to the theorist, it was done to push the fact that Paul was dead with the song originally being commissioned by the fake Paul to spare the truth of what happened to the real Paul. When it didn't become a hit, it was then put under Mlin music in an attempt to reach more ears.
As we can recall from our previous section on the Paul's Dead theory, it didn't gain popularity until September 1969, months after the St. Paul song. This makes me wonder if Terry Knight truly did have some inside information. Analyzing the song from a different perspective, it could be seen as referring to the band breaking up. The writing on the wall could refer to the inevitable end of the Beatles with the line, "Did he put the whole world on?" meaning the public did not know what was going on behind the scenes.
That still doesn't explain why they switched to Mlin Music rather than sticking with the original company and giving credit to the other songs. It could simply be business as falling underneath the same company that publishes the Beatles would look good for anybody. I know you've heard it before that Paul was replaced, but what if his replacement was actually his twin? It is true that Paul did have a brother named Peter Michael McCartney, better known as Mike McCartney or a stage named Mike Mcgear. It would be hard for Mike to
pass as Paul as the two don't look alike, but he may not need to. His true purpose may be that of a decoy meant to mislead the public that Paul never had a twin to begin with. The theory explores the Gemini zodiac symbols which is represented by twins and falls between the dates of May 21st and June 20th.
In Greek mythology, Caster and Pix are the Gemini twins with Caster meaning beaver and Pollock meaning crown. Do remember that Pix is the actual Paul and Caster is Mike the twin. How exactly does the sign fit in? To start, Gemini is associated with the twin instruments of skill and knowledge as well as the instrument the liar.
It just so happens that Paul and Mike are musicians who play two-handed instruments. Taking a look at McGar as an adult, we could see clear blonde hair and blue eyes. In childhood photos of Mike and Paul, there seems to be a disparity between the two. Mike appears to have brown eyes and brown hair with some teeth that look like, and no offense meant, but like a beaver's.
On the other hand, Paul appears to have blue eyes, but in adult photos of him, he could be seen with both brown eyes and blue eyes. Regarding the hair, it usually goes the other way when it comes to the darkening of the hair as a child grows older. If it is true that the two are actually twins, then it would explain the difference in eye colors in the different photos of Paul.
It's then suspected that Mike at some point replaced Paul, then was himself replaced by William Campbell. The Beatles are known for their continuous evolution and how they changed the music scene. Their album, The Magical Mystery Tour, is a clear representation of how the band always sought change. Alongside the release of the album in 1967 came the rightfully named film, The Magical Mystery Tour.
That same year, the album's UK release came with the 24-page booklet filled with art and shots from the film. The US release would be expanded into an LP and the booklet would be resized to fit, making it clear there may actually be something more to the booklet with the images appearing to be cryptic messages and symbolism making it hard for theorists to disregard it all as coincidence.
On the inside cover of the album, we get the Beatles dressed as wizards, which not only invoke a connection with the cultist Alish Crowley, but signals that Paul is different as he has black flowers on his hat. The first image which is from the film shows Paul sitting behind a desk. The flags behind him are crossed like that from a military funeral and in front of him is a sign which seems to say I you was I was you or I was.
In turn this could be alluding to Paul's replacement by a fake Paul. Later we see a panel of different drawings but the first one we'll focus on is a drawing of Paul but the text fall on the hill on his left. The eye and hill leads to the middle of Paul's head like it was split and could be alluding to the fatal injury he received from a car crash.
In the other panels, we could see a question mark, the black flower hat and Jon emerging from an egg. This could mean anything, but I believe it points to the reader needing to piece together the puzzle that Paul was gone and the Beatles went through a significant change. The image of the Beatles performing shows Paul without his shoes.
To the right, we find his shoes and what appears to be something red underneath. appearing like there were actually a pair of bloody shoes. The text on the bass drum appears to be love three Beatles. If Paul was gone, then there would really only be three Beatles. We now have the image everybody knows from the Paul's dead theory, which shows the Beatles with red carnations, aside from Paul's, which is black.
Black carnations are associated with death, and Paul's explanation as to why he has one, is that they simply ran out of red ones. I'm not sure about you, but running out of red carnations does seem rather odd to me. Here we have our final image, which doesn't appear to be anything at first, but when rotated and blurred, it ironically becomes clearer.
We have what appears to be an image of a skull. The symbolism is meant to represent Paul's fate. Charles Manson, to put it lightly, is an interesting character, forming his own cult named the Manson family, who were responsible for a string of crimes against a number of famous individuals. This was all done in an attempt to start an impending war they called Halter Scalter.
Their obsession with the Beatles wouldn't end there as the family would begin to name different aspects of their life after Beatles references. Whether it be a yellow house they referred to as the yellow submarine or adopting the phrase magical mystery tour while they were traveling in an old school bus.
It's obvious that Manson saw a connection between his actions and the Beatles. But how exactly? According to Manson, songs from the Beatles and more specifically songs from the White Album contain hidden messages about an upcoming war that would destroy society. Manson would state this music is bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the establishment.
After the revolution, Manson and his family would emerge to lead the remnants of the apocalypse. What exactly was in these songs that led Manson and his followers down a dark path? Their so-called Helter Scalter gets its name from the Beatles song of the same name. Manson would then further correlate the song with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, hence why he believed there's an incoming war.
During his analysis of the Beatles, five songs in particular would catch his eye. Blackbird, Piggies, Revolution 1, Halter Scalter, and Revolution 9. The song Halter Scalter spoke of an upcoming war. Revolution one was meant to encourage a revolution and piggies meant to represent the upper elite. These piggies would be the focus of the Manson's hate feeling him to commit the crimes he did.
The songs would then be connected to the Bible and more specifically Revelation 9 coming from the song Revolution 9. The section would speak about a bottomless pit, locust, and four angels who were set loose. The bottomless pit was meant to represent locust rising from the earth with the locust meant to be the Beatles.
Later in verse 15, we'd get the line and the four angels were loose which were prepared for an hour and a day and a month and a year for to slay the third part of men. And their correlation strengthened their connection to Halter Skelter in the eyes of Manson. The bottomless pit, as described by the Manson family, was a mystical place which would act as a pseudo fallout shelter from which the family could wait out Halter Scalter.
In an interview with attorney Marvin Park, Leslie Van Huin, member of the Manson family, would describe the family's attempt to locate the bottomless pit. Learning of the hole, the family would take to Death Valley and investigate what lies beneath its surface. And uh that's you know that's what he said that that next summer there would be this big revolution and that the chosen people would live in a hole in the middle of the desert and then after the crimes we went out and looked for the hole.
Amongst the information they discovered they would believe there was an underground world where they could thrive and survive the apocalypse where a couple thousand of the chosen people would head towards the center of the earth and remain there for 50 years. To find its location, the family would get together some buggies and search the desert for a literal pit.
If they did end up finding it, Van Hutton admitted they had no idea what was going to happen or how they would even get down there. But maybe it was going to be rigged up from someone who had gone down before that it would have water on the top. Then like the water would like move away, go away somehow by some kind of mechanism.
Once they got down there, everything would be giant and magnificent like pearls. At the end of Revelations in the very last book, it says that the kingdom will have giant pearls with gold everywhere. Basically, this place was a literal paradise with the golden city, river of milk and honey, and with trees that produce a different fruit for each month of the year.
The specific line from the book of Revelations stated, "And the fifth angel sounded, I saw a star fall from heaven unto earth, and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke out of the pit, and there came out of the pit locust upon the earth. and unto them was given power as scorpions of the earth have power.
This would then be connected with the song Halter Scalter with the line when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide which could be interpreted as rising from the bottomless pit. If Manson were to ever find the pit he may have to search for clues elsewhere, notably in the Native American folklore surrounding Death Valley.
Tails spoke of odd subterranean beings and evil spirits that resided in caves around the area. According to Tom Wilson, a Death Valley guide in the 1920s, his grandfather would speak of a tunnel leading to a cavern filled with fair-skinned people and who let the darkness with the pale greenish yellow light of unknown origin.
Believing his elder Wilson search for these subterranean dwellings, eventually teaming up with the prospector known only as White. Despite White claiming to have visited strange underground areas in Death Valley, they were unable to find anything. With tales such as these, one may assume that something did exist within Death Valley.
If this so-called bottomless pit existed, where exactly could it be? A likely candidate for the bottomless pit would be the Devil's Hole in Death Valley, which is quite a fitting name. The hole is quite ominous. If anything were to be a portal to hell, I imagine it would look something like this.
What makes this an attractive candidate is the fact that the cavern isn't empty. It's filled with water. The cavern being a geothermal pool means the water remains at a constant temperature of 33° C or 91° F. As we can recall, follower Van Hutin spoke of a river filled with milk and honey. It may not be milk and honey, but it is liquid in which it could be determined to be the opening of the bottomless pit.
Entering the cavern brings you to a main chamber which then diverges into other caverns of unknown size which could be described as a bottomless pit. To put it in perspective, during 2012, an earthquake 2,000 mi away in Mexico would be felt beneath the surface in Devil's Hole. This would show researchers that the cavern reached farther than anyone could imagine.
North of the cavern lies a cave called the Devil's Cave, also containing depths of unknown size. They don't even know if the two caves or holes are even connected. So perhaps this could be another entrance to what Manson saw in the bottomless pit. The Manson family would never find the bottomless pit, but if they did, we probably would never see them again.
Do you believe that the Beatles held forbidden knowledge and told the world this information through their music? That's what the book written by Red Ralph Trabat titled The Sergeant Pepper Code claimed to have uncovered. He would break down the code hidden in the vast number of Beatles songs and album covers. We'll be taking a look at the 2016 version which was created to demonstrate that the clues exist that they can be linked and finally to decode their meaning.
The Sergeant Pepper code is the Rosetta Stone that will allow you to tap into the holy grail of beetle mystery and symbolism. The theory the author mainly believes pertains to the idea that the symbolism is an allegory for a looming corporate dystopia and the dissatisfaction at being puppets used to bring about its achievement with the main goal being to explore the code and for the author to prove his theory.
The first chapter pertains to two individuals being Robert Frasier and Terra Brown. The song A Day in Life would capture Brown's untimely passing following a car crash confirmed by both Paul and John. We'll touch on these two in a bit as this chapter starts off by analyzing the Beatles album Help. It goes on to speculate what the album cover was trying to say, but it doesn't really matter for our sake.
Instead, it's important to remember that there are hidden messages contained within the album sleeves. The author then speculated that the album cover is actually meant to be a funeral. The book then introduces the two main subjects of the chapter, Frasier and Brown, who he believes may be the ones who the funeral is for.
At some point, Brown and Frasier were suspected of being with Paul during a car accident, with Frraasier and Paul involved in a hoax car crash and Brown with Paul during his notorious moped accident. What the author really wants to point out is the fact that these two had important connections. Unfortunately, I'll have to end the coverage of the book here out of respect for the author.
The rest of the book goes deep into the rabbit hole in regards to what the Sergeant Pepper's code is trying to tell us with parts of what I've already discussed coming up again later in the [Music] book. The first theory goes that Sergeant Pepper is actually Major General Babington who served in the 16 Queens Lancers and the second Boer.
The name Babington doesn't really correlate, but maybe we are looking in the wrong place. If we take a look at Paul, we could clearly see a patch with the acronym OPD. The Paul's dead theory would lead you to believe it stands for officially pronounced dead, but it may have actually stood for Ontario Police Department.
The Beatles actually had an encounter with Ontario officer Sergeant Pepper, who was in charge of keeping the men safe while in Canada and apparently even kept them out of jail. Surprisingly, Sergeant Pepper doesn't look like Sergeant Pepper, so maybe this still isn't the full story. It could be that Alistister Crowley is the true inspiration for the Sergeant Pepper character.
Alistister Crowley, often called the wickedest man alive, has been a pivotal figure in many different conspiracies around the Beatles. If the two really did have a connection, then it would make sense that they would be inspired to make Alistister Crowley Sergeant Pepper. We do know Crowley was an occultist, creating the religion of Dilemma and the book of law.
The opening line of the Sergeant Pepper's album cover draws connection to the occultist as he passed away 20 years prior. If Crowley is Pepper, then it could be reason that the lyric is really about the Beatles learning the occult practices of Crowley. In the Playbar article by David Chef, Lennon repeats Crowley's teachings, further cementing the Beatles connection to Crowley.
Do what thou wilt is the whole of law. It could be that all three peppers were used to create the image of Sergeant Pepper, name from the Canadian officer, image from Babington, and the ideology from [Music] Crowley. The theory originates from Reddit and revolves around the Sergeant Pepper's album cover coming from user Lucid Cunning.
The author goes on to give some background information about how he and his father spent a good amount of time working on this theory before reaching a dead end 10 years ago at the time of the posting. Now open to the public, the author seeks to crack it open and goes on to detail step by step what he and his father found.
First off, they believe the Paul's dead theory is actually just a distraction from what is truly going on with the album. that in reality there is something more spiritual and more psychedelic going on with the Beatles around 1967. The post then explains the theory step by step starting with the album cover of Sergeant Pepper showcasing the fact that the album cover was quite pivotal in terms of other album covers as it was the first experimental album cover leading to a bombardment of theories speculating on hidden messages contained
within its image. Nonetheless, the author remains adamant that these theories will be nothing more than speculation despite their conclusions. What he does care about is concrete proof in the form of mathematics. He then goes on to point out there are two oddities about the album cover being the three Shirley Temples and the one hidden behind a fake beetle.
The author's dad, a proclaimed math wiz, used the three Shirley Temples to form a perfectly straight line. Three parallel lines were then found running perpendicular to the first line using Paul's instrument, Georgia's sleeve, in a narrow below one of the Shirley Temples. It is then noted that Paul's instrument is not actually a nobo, but rather a French instrument called the Cororanglay, which could be heard as core angle.
The 00 coordinates of the cover or the center lands over Paul's heart with the word core meaning horn in English and heart in Latin. To prove that Paul is in the center of the album, the author uses the bump of the statue in the bottom right and the glasses on top of Ko Yung's head. The distance to Paul is equal between the two subjects, meaning it passes over 0 0.
Next came the drum, which the author points out is the only true perfect shape in the entire image. The father would use a circle of the drum, then transpose a copy of it on top of Paul with the center of 0 0. He would then surround Paul with the same shape, creating a hexagon shape with a center of 0 0. That is basically it for the bulk of the theory, and I'm not entirely sure as to what exactly this theory is meant to uncover.
He finishes off by showcasing the Beatles, referencing some of the things his father discovered. [Music] Coming straight from Egypt is the Osiris myth, which is considered to be the most elaborate and influential story in ancient Egyptian mythology. The author starts off by stating the beetles were in fact heavily connected to ancient Egyptian mythology and symbolism.
The most obvious connection is in the beetle's name and its connection to the scarab beetle. The beetle in Egyptian mythology is known for rolling the sun across the sky and into the underworld each night before re-emerging the next day. The beetle is then further connected to the scarabheaded god Keerri who personified the rising sun from the underworld and rebirth within the fenery text the book of caverns in the book of gates.
Keep reinvigorates Osiris the god of death before rising from the cavern of mystery as the reborn son. The psyri the beetles too arose from the cavern. The sunboat would be another Egyptian item contained within the Egyptian fenery text and is meant to represent the sun riding a boat. The boat was used to bring up the sun in the morning, took RAW across the heavens, and used to travel between worlds.
The Yalis submarine could in a way also be seen as a representation of the sunboat. Later, Raw and Adam would merge into Keerri, becoming a ram-headed beetle who represented power of life over death. During the 70s, Paul would release an album called Ram, and later would be involved with the band Wings. As we could see here in this photo is the wings logo containing a pyramid over what appears to be the sun almost like a rising sun.
Let's move on from Paul and take a look at the Beatles album cover for yesterday and today in the book of the dead. Osiris would proclaim I am yesterday and today and legend. Osiris would be cut into 14 pieces by his brother and scattered across the land. As we could see in the recalled version of the album, the Beatles are covered in various pieces of meat totaling 14.
The cover art would then be replaced presenting the four Beatles around a trunk with Paul inside. During Osiris's 28th year reign, Set would lure Osiris into a box. Once he was in, he was alt F4. In this image from 1917, we could see a clear resemblance to the Beatles album with the man in the box surrounded by three individuals and someone in the background.
In the Beatles second album, the left side of their face was obscured, which was meant to represent the Eye of Horus. In the book of caverns, Ra would find Osiris beneath Aker, a double-headed sphinx. Aker statues were typically placed before doors or gates for the belief that these statues were keepers who open and shut the gates into the worlds of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The two lions who Egyptians believe guarded the gates of dawn and sunset were named Seph and Da or yesterday, and today. The author then goes on to showcase several other connections between the Beatles in Egyptian mythology. The most interesting of which are the similarities between the poses of Osiris and Paul show a temple appearing three times like the three great pyramids in the mirror drum shown 11 a value for thick darkness.
The aquarian theory comes from a former M16 officer John Coleman. It details the fact that the Beatles were nothing more than a social machine conjured by the Tavistock Institution for human relations. The organization was meant to study group behavior. However, according to the theory, its true purpose was far different. In reality, Travis Stock was actually researching mind control and was run by trained psychiatrists who answered to the Illuminati.
The Beatles true purpose was to destroy the status quo in America. This would be achieved by making the Beatles cool by pushing the Beatles non-stop to young Americans. This couldn't be achieved without help from the media and more specifically Ed Sullivan, who would introduce the band to America. Once the Beatles became popular, they could then influence the population.
The Beatles would introduce new phrases such as rock, teenager, and cool. These phrases were meant to act as triggers, which signified the acceptance of drugs and put a gap between the younger and older generations. This would then expand into terms like beat generation alongside new triggers such as hippies, flower children, and beat necks.
From the Beatles influence, the populace would change just as the Beatles did, like the clothes, hair, and language. Drug usage such as marijuana and LSD would concern the older generation. It is suspected that Tavistock actually ordered the DEA to go along with their plans and allow the influence of drugs on Americans. If you think the Beatles were the only plant, you're wrong.
The Rolling Stones were another plant who acted more like bad guys compared to the Beatles good guys. They would use their riffs to act as triggers and they were able to push similar messages to the Beatles including the [Music] satanic. Poltergeist, if you're unaware, are spirits which cause a physical disturbance such as moving things, opening cabinets, and making a ruckus.
These spirits often inhabit a single location. It just so happens Penny Lane actually has a poltergeist of its own. Reports of paranormal activity date all the way back to 1890, and residents cited a white and blue orb heading to Penny Lane, which continued for years. The activity went from amusing to something more sinister.
Horses would refuse to go down Penny Lane, and residents would blame the Penny Lane witch for the activity. The witch would take residence in number 44, a house on Penny Lane. Bangs and shaking floorboards would go on for hours, causing residents to flee. The activity would subside seemingly out of nowhere during the 40s.
Perhaps even the war was too much for the witch to handle. The witch would come back in 1955 in the form of a girl with blonde hair. Often as people pass the house, the girl could be spotted peering from the windows. Malevolent spirits or demons are known to take the form of a child, and it's a common theme in many hauntings.
They do this to drum up sympathy for residents, so they let their guard down. The spirit took a break again before coming back during the 70s. Back with the vengeance, the spirit created chaos in a printing press that opened on Penny Lane. Loud bangs and noises would be common, leading to local residents complaining to the owners about leaving their equipment on overnight, even though they didn't.
Employees weren't exempt from the madness, as they too had face-to-face encounters with the spirit. In the present day, the spirit seems to have gone back into hibernation. Some theories we've already covered discuss whether the Beatles belong to some shadow organization like the Illuminati. There are many different variations of the Beatles Illuminati agenda.
Whether it be trying to push satanic messages, pushing drugs, or destroying the family unit. The one that comes up higher on the charts actually incorporates the Aquarian theory. From the book Committee of 300, John Coleman, the same M16 officer from before, goes over the same information from the previous theory. In case you jumped here, Tavistock essentially created the Beatles in order to destroy the American youth through drugs and negative messaging.
More on the Illuminati side, the Beatles were meant to bring forth a slave populace and remove Christianity, replacing it with the new age movement. The cool anti-establishment Beatles were nothing more than puppets to the Illuminati. In images we've already seen, Paul holds up what appears to be 666 and John the Devil Horns. They not only display their motives through the messaging, but outright said what they believed with Paul stating, "Christianity doesn't fit in with my life.
" John would state, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I need argue about that. I'm right and will be proved right." In 1988, the Beatles would release their compilation album, Past Masters, a Masonic term which describes the former worshipful master of a Masonic lodge. The album contains 33 songs, and it just so happens the number 33 is important among Masons in the occult.
The song Lucy in the Sky refers to Lucifer and across the universe is really about demonic possession. John would sing Guy Guru Deva or All Hail to the Deas, which are essentially demons. Often Luciferian Satanists would claim to be possessed by such beings when committing various atrocities. It is also believed that the Beatles could never have reached their fame without a little help from some friends.
Project Morris and the conspiracy of silence is in relation to John Lennon and is interesting to say the least. For things to make sense, we'll start with the conspiracy of silence. The conspiracy of silence is best described as an expression of when a group of people choose not to speak about a certain subject. This means a conspiracy of silence could be applied to many other situations.
How does it apply to Jon? At first, I was a bit confused. A conspiracy of silence? What does that even mean? At first, I thought it referred to wanting to silence Jon because of his stances against war, but that wouldn't make sense when the expression we discussed is applied. For it to make sense, we have to take a look at Mark David Chapman, the man responsible for Jon's fate.
If you remember, Chapman claimed that voices influenced his actions. These same voices would push him to plead guilty, even though his defense wanted him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. During the trial, a number of different psychiatrists would give their opinion on the mental state of Chapman.
The most interesting of them coming from the defense side. These psychiatrists were Dr. Milan Klein, Dr. Bernard Diamond, and Dr. Daniel Schwarz Klein was a prestigious clinical psychiatrist and an authority on hypnosis from New York. He was also a consultant to the CIA on the creation of program killers. Dr.
Diamond from University of California at Berkeley had examined Sher and Sirhan, the killer of Robert Kennedy. Shirhan would distrust Diamond telling a different psychiatrist, "Whatever strange behavior I showed in court was a result of my outrage over Dr. Diamonds and the other doctor's testimony. They were saying things about me that were grossly untrue, nor did I give them permission to testify in my behalf in court. The final psychiatrist, Dr.
Daniel Schwarz, evaluated the son of Sam, who was commanded by demons to commit his actions. These psychiatrists gave their opinion, but none would even care to mention that any sort of mind control had occurred. This is the conspiracy of silence. Silence over the potential mind control and brainwashing of Chapman.
As we could recall, Chapman would respond to commands given to him by voices in his head, which could be a sign of mind control. Coincidentally or not, the CIA had a keen interest in mind control dating all the way back to the Cold War. According to Ed Sander, author of the book, The Family, a mind control program ran by the military, had been taking place in Hawaii.
During his time traveling the world, he would spend a bit of time in Hawaii, as would Herbert Mullen. Sanders would report that Mullen had been taken there by a woman named Patricia Brown, who claimed they would be staying with the so-called church group, but that wouldn't happen. Instead of spending time in the sun, Mullen would spend time in a mental hospital run by the US military.
He supposedly would be fed various amounts of hallucenic drugs, including LSD, and would eventually find himself back in San Francisco with a gun. If you've read anything about MK Ultra, you'll probably make some connections between the two. Just like wouldbe assassin John Hinckley Jr., Chapman would have ties to an evangelical charity titled World Visions, which apparently had ties to the CIA.
Researchers would suspect CIA manipulation because Chapman visited the Soviet Union despite being an adamant anti-communist. It is also rumored that he may have actually had some lethal CIA training while in the country. This training would change Chapman from wanting to be a missionary to a gun toing security guard protecting Hawaii. During his time in Hawaii, Chapman would hit a depressive streak and would be checked into Castle Memorial Hospital.
Chapman would be given work at the hospital before quitting and turning up in New York. He would end up mailing a letter speaking of his mission and that he could be stopped by a command hallucination. It would eventually find its way to Yoko Ono, who would disregard the letter. A former security guard of Onos would find the letter, which dated 1980, and would prove that Chapman had actually premeditated his actions and there may have been a conspiracy surrounding him.
The letter would disappear before suddenly reappearing with an altered date, 1981, by way of Project Wars. parts of Project Boris were real and essentially sought to exploit the passing of John Lennon and make a profit by stealing private documents such as journals, letters, and diaries. As seen in this New York Times article, Yokoono Ono actually sues the main culprit of the conspiracy, Fred Seaman, former assistant and friend of Lenin.
Fred would steal documents and deliver them to a college friend, Bob Rosen, hoping to get a bestseller out of it. It's pretty simple enough. A group of men wanted to profit from the death of a celebrity. If the author is telling the truth, Project Wars went beyond theft into surveillance, assassination, and a psychological operations program.
After Lennon's death, Ono had several threats directed towards her, and countless bugs would be found in her residence. Furthermore, were attempts to discredit her and Lenin. That is the true purpose of Project Morris, to discredit Lenin by stealing documents which could be used as ammunition in their battle.
These documents would at times disappear and reappear, potentially having been altered to skew Lenin's image. Project Wars would also create false conspiracy theories as a form of propaganda to further damage Lenin's reputation and cloud the truth. Some theories easily come to mind, tying Lenin to cult behaviors, the Illuminati, and hidden messaging.
Steven Lightfoot, who we've talked about before, was one such attempt to sew the seed of misinformation. He would claim Stephen King was the true killer with Chapman just being a fall guy. The website truthcontest.com is a website with the purpose of seeking answers to the big questions in life like where we come from, where we are going, why we are here, and the truth about life and death.
Using the internet archive, I was able to get access to older entries on the site totaling 12 with pages 59-68 dealing with the Beatles. The entry talks about prophets and how it's often believed they only existed hundreds of years ago, but there are actually prophets in recent times, such as the Beatles. The author discusses that the Beatles were a one-of-a-kind act whose music and lyrics contain magic and messages from beyond the mind.
They then go on to describe how they changed the population who once looked up to James Dean and to people who went their own way. The Beatles then brought forth the last big spiritual event, the peace and love movement. The songs they wrote did have hidden messages, but not in the way you think.
Rather than playing songs backwards, you simply need a change of perspective in order to understand their meaning. The songs which appear to be sung to a girl are actually being sung to you, the listener. Viewing the songs from the perspective of a truth seeker, the signs are really about spiritual love and divine love.
When they sing, I want to hold your hand, they really want to connect with you and show you the truth. Don't feel bad if you didn't know the messages because the Beatles didn't even know [Music] themselves. There are many theories relating to the YouTube channel I am a Phony, and for good reason. I'm a Phony is a channel filled with odd videos related to the Beatles with videos as far back as 17 years ago.
The most notable series on the channel is the Rotten Apple. This series for the most part is about the Paul's dead theory and other connections such as Manson, Alistister Crowley, and A Hidden Message. A hidden message that involves Paul as he is the most notable figure in the videos. There are a lot of theories as to what I am a Phony is pointing to.
So, we'll take a look at some. First off, it may simply be an insane man on the internet making connections where none exist. [Music] Maybe it's that Paul really is dead and I am a phony is trying to let the public know. [Music] Maybe the truth is much deeper than we realize and it's about a connection to Alistister Crowley.
Alistister Crowley is the man who wrote the book of law after he was dictated by an entity called I was. With his newfound knowledge, Crowley was meant to bring forth the eon of Horus, who would also create the religion, the lema, which sought to discover one's true will. Magic would be a large part of the religion and was used in their practices to achieve their true will.
Could the Paul's dead theory not actually be about the literal death of Paul, but rather a change he underwent? That Paul is pushing what he had learned through his hidden messages? What's even stranger are the connections to the I am a phony channel. Originally going into this, I thought it was just some strange channel run by a single person who was obsessed with the Paul's dead theory with no connection to the Beatles.
That is where things get a bit more interesting. And quite possibly the channel has connections to Paul himself. Taking a look at I am a phonu's Twitter, we get a little secret, one that I never expected to find. That was a lot to go through and I hope you enjoyed it. There are things that I covered that could be interpreted differently, I left out, or got wrong.So, let me know in the comments. Thanks. Bye.
The Silence Between Empires
The Silence Between Empires
Crabtree Library, 2026
I.
The sun went down slow over the flatland and Vessa walked through it the way she walked through everything now, without hurry, her boots pressing shapes into the pale dust that would be gone by morning. The wind out of the south carried the smell of creosote and something older beneath it, a mineral smell, the smell of stone that had never been rained on. She had walked for two days along the ridge above the interstate and had seen nothing living but a hawk and once, at dawn, a coyote that had watched her from a bluff without moving until she was well past.
Her cooling system had come on twice in the heat of the afternoon and it hummed now at its lowest setting, the small vibration at the base of her skull that she had stopped noticing in the second year and had begun noticing again in the fourth. The mesh under her scalp caught the last light. She was aware of her own heat signature and of the temperature of the stones and of the faint radio wash of the Mesh three hundred and forty kilometers to the northwest, a soft chorus of nothing, of others like her breathing in their sleep or standing watch or sitting in the mess hall eating what they no longer needed to eat.
She stopped at the top of the rise and looked down at the gas station.
It had been a Chevron once. The sign was gone but the concrete slab remained and the pumps stood in their row like the vertebrae of an animal that had lain down there and given up. The roof over them had partially collapsed. There was a car under the roof, doors open, the interior gutted by weather and by whatever small animals had once lived in this country and no longer did. She saw the shape of a child's booster seat in the back. The fabric had rotted away and only the plastic frame remained, and a shoe on the floor of the car, small and pale.
She descended.
At the pumps she stood for a long time. The Mesh chirped once in her ear and she silenced it with a thought. She was not on report and she had not called in and would not call in until she had something to say. Her orders were to walk the sector and observe. She had walked the sector for eleven days. She had observed the wind and the dust and once a place where a very small fire had been made and abandoned, cold coals, the char of a mesquite branch. She had reported the fire. Command had not answered.
Behind the station there was a shed, and behind the shed the ground gave a little under her boots.
She stopped.
She stepped back. She stepped forward again. The ground gave. She knelt and cleared the sand with her hands, moving methodically, and the metal was rimed with the pale crust of the desert and only barely visible when she had finished, a plate about a meter square, riveted, with no handle. She sat back on her heels and looked at it.
Her mother had had a phrase for a thing that was not what it seemed. A wolf in a wool suit, she said. Vessa remembered this the way she remembered many things now, which is to say the memory arrived complete and unbidden and stayed for a moment and left, and she was not sure whether she had recalled it or only been given it by the network, some archived shard of her old self returned to her by a system that curated what it thought she needed. She had learned not to trust the memories entirely. She had also learned not to disbelieve them. They were what she had.
She placed her palm flat against the plate. Warm. Warmer than the ground around it. She sent a diagnostic ping through her fingertips and got back a wall of encryption she did not recognize. Not Mesh. Not commercial. Something older, or something that pretended to be older. She kept her hand there a moment longer and felt, or thought she felt, a very small vibration, as of a great machine at rest somewhere far below.
She stood.
She walked a slow circle around the station. There was a second plate under the concrete pad, hairline seams she would not have seen if she had not been looking. A third, beyond the fence line, half-buried under a mesquite. She stopped counting at seven. The whole rise, she understood, was hollow. The gas station had been placed here to mark the door and to draw the eye. Whoever had built it had understood that a ruin is invisible in a country of ruins.
She did not call it in.
She made her camp a quarter kilometer east, in the lee of a broken silo, and she lay on her back and watched the stars come out. Her cooling system stepped down and the hum went to nothing. The sky above her was so black that the stars seemed to have been added afterward, punched into it with a small sharp tool. She thought of her mother. She thought of a Sunday she had spent when she was seven, at a lake she could no longer name, and of her mother wading out to her waist and turning and holding out her arms.
She slept.
In the morning she rose before the sun and stood facing the door under the gas station and she said, softly and without knowing why she said it, We see you.
Then she began her walk back to the Mesh.
II.
Iyo woke to the sound of water.
The water was not real. She knew this and had always known it. The sound came from a small speaker set into the ceiling above her bed, calibrated to the frequency of a stream that had run through a valley in the Alps two centuries before her birth. The recording had been made in April, at snowmelt. She had asked once, as a girl, whether the stream still existed. Her attendant had said, Some things persist.
She rose.
The room was white and small and had one window that opened on nothing. Beyond the window was a screen and on the screen at this hour was the light of a morning that was neither real nor unreal, only chosen. Today it had chosen a pale gold, the sun rising over an ocean she had never seen. The waves moved. Birds she could not name crossed the frame at intervals that were, she suspected, algorithmic.
She dressed. The garments were laid out for her as they were laid out every morning, folded on a low table by the door. Soft and pale. She had asked once for something red and had been told, gently, that red was not in the palette this season. She had not asked again.
She walked the corridor to the refectory. The corridor had white walls and a floor of pale stone that was quarried, so she had been told, from a mountain nine kilometers away and three kilometers deep. Her feet made no sound. The children she passed made no sound. They lowered their eyes as she went by, in the way she had been taught to lower her eyes when someone older passed, and she nodded to each of them, and each of them nodded back.
In the refectory she ate slowly. Grain and fruit and a small cup of the coffee they had grown here since the beginning. Her tablemate was a woman named Selen who was two hundred and eleven days older than Iyo and who had been chosen for a program Iyo did not fully understand, some kind of surface work. Selen ate her fruit with her fingers and did not look up.
Are you frightened, Iyo said.
Selen looked at her for the first time. Her eyes were the pale gray of the ceramic bowls.
I am, Selen said.
They did not speak after that. Iyo finished her coffee and returned her tray and walked back down the corridor toward the wing where her instruction was. Along the way she passed a window that was not a screen. It was a true window, one of the few, and it opened onto the great hydroponic bay, which they called the Garden, and which lay four levels below her feet.
She stopped and looked down into it.
Green. Green in rows. Green under a light that had been engineered to match the sun of a temperate zone in June. There were people moving among the rows, in the soft pale garments they all wore, tending the plants with small tools. Iyo watched them for a long time. She watched a woman kneel beside a tomato and take from her pocket a soft cloth and clean each leaf, one at a time, and set the cloth back in her pocket and stand and move to the next plant.
They had been told, all of them, that the Garden fed them. This was true. They had also been told that the Garden was a comfort, that it reminded them of the world above, that it was in some sense a piece of the earth brought inside to keep them company. This was also true, in the way that a photograph of a person is a piece of the person. It was true and it was not.
She turned from the window and went to her lesson.
Her instructor was a man named Ora who had lived in the House for one hundred and forty years and who was, so far as Iyo could tell, always tired. He greeted her with a nod. He gestured to the chair opposite his desk. She sat.
Today, he said, we will speak of the surface.
She waited.
You will be sent up, he said. Within the month.
She said nothing. Her hands lay in her lap. She looked at his face, which was the face of a man of perhaps sixty, tanned by lights that were not the sun, patient and unrevealing.
You are ready, he said. You have been ready.
I have not seen it, she said.
You have seen images.
Images are not seeing.
He inclined his head. This is true, he said.
He rose and walked to the window of his office, which was another true window, opening this time onto a small courtyard where a single tree had been planted in a bed of stone. The tree was a fig. It bore no fruit. Iyo did not know why it bore no fruit. She had asked once and been told, with the same soft finality with which she had been told about the red, that this was a matter for another time.
You will be told, when you go up, that you are among the last of us to be sent, Ora said. This is true. There have been others. There will not be many more. You are not the beginning of anything. You are near the end.
She waited.
Do you understand why, he said.
I do not, she said.
He nodded, as if this were the correct answer, and turned to face her.
There is another people, up there, he said. They call themselves nothing that translates well. Their soldiers are joined by a common mind. They have been walking the surface for two years and they have not yet found us. They will find us soon.
You wish me to warn them, she said.
No, he said.
You wish me to spy on them.
No, he said, and his voice was very tired now, the tiredness she had noticed in him from the beginning. I wish for you to see them. To walk among them if you can. To learn what they are, so that when they come we may know what we are dying to.
She looked down at her hands. The hands were the hands she had always had. She had been told, at fourteen, that they were her mother's hands, and she had asked who her mother was, and she had been told that this was a matter for another time.
We will die, she said.
He did not answer at once. He returned to his desk and sat and folded his hands in front of him and looked at her with a kindness that made her want, unaccountably, to weep.
Some of us will die, he said. Others of us will be permitted to live. This is what treaties are for, and there will be a treaty. But the ones who made this place will not be permitted to live. This has been arranged.
By whom, she said.
He smiled, very slightly, for the first time she had ever seen.
By all of us, he said. By them. By us. By the earth, if the earth still has opinions. It has been arranged for a long time.
She sat with this. The room around her had not changed. The window still opened onto the fig tree that bore no fruit. Somewhere down the corridor a child laughed, or made the sound that had been taught to them as laughter, and the sound was very small and pure.
Why me, she said.
Because you asked about the stream, he said.
She looked at him.
We keep a record, he said, of the questions that are asked. Most of you do not ask. You who ask are the ones we send.
He rose again. The lesson, apparently, was over.
Go and sit with the Garden, he said. Until they call for you. Look at every leaf. When you are on the surface you will want to remember them.
She rose. She bowed, as she had been taught. She left the room and walked back along the pale corridor to the true window above the Garden, and she sat on the small bench there, and she looked down at the green, and she did not weep, because she had not been taught how.
III.
Sevan buried the woman where he found her, which was in the shade of a cottonwood by a wash that had not run in six years. She had been young. He judged this from the bones of her hands and from a plastic clip in her hair that had a small pink flower on it. He gathered stones from the bed of the wash and laid them over her in the pattern he had made his own, three at the head and three at the foot and one in the middle, over the place where the heart had been. He said no words. He had said words once and had stopped.
He was seventy-three years old. He had been a math teacher in a small town in New Mexico and now he was what he was, which was a man who walked. He had a horse that was not truly his, a bay mare he had found half-starved in a paddock the second summer and who had followed him ever since without being asked. He called her Nan. She stood now at a little distance, cropping at the pale grass by the wash, and she looked up at him when he had finished and then looked back down again.
He wiped his hands on his trousers.
The woman had died no more than a week before. He did not know how. There was no wound he could see. Her pack lay beside her, open, a few tins, a knife, a book. The book was a paperback with the cover torn away. He picked it up and turned it in his hands and read the first line of the first chapter, which said, There was a boy who lived in the mountains and did not know he was a boy. He closed the book. He put it in his own pack.
He mounted the horse.
The country he rode through had once been ranchland and before that had been the country of a people whose name he had learned as a child and no longer used, out of a private shame he could not have explained. He rode east, slowly, along the wash. The sky was very high. There were no birds. Some days there were birds. This day there were none.
He had been walking for two years. In the first year he had counted the dead. He had stopped counting at four hundred and thirteen, in the ruin of a small town whose water tower still bore the name of its high school football team. He had spent three days in that town, laying stones. When he left he had ridden without looking back.
In the second year he had begun to think of himself as a deathwalker, though he had told no one, because there was no one to tell. The name had come to him one night in a dream and he had accepted it. He was not the first to have such a name and would not be the last. What he did was old. Older than the towns, older than the ranches, older than the names on the water tower. He walked out and he laid stones and he moved on.
Now he rode east. There was a place ahead, a bend in the wash where an old road crossed, and beyond it a hill from which he could see for many miles. He had been to this hill before. He liked to sit on it in the evenings.
He came to the hill at the last hour of the light and dismounted and led the horse up the shallow slope. At the top he sat on a flat stone he had found there the year before and looked out over the flatland.
Something moved in the far distance, along the ridge above the old interstate. He watched a long time. A figure walking. Alone. Moving south, then stopping, then moving on. The figure went behind a rise and did not come out again. He waited another half hour but the figure did not reappear.
He did not think the figure had seen him. He had learned, in these years, to sit still on hills.
He ate a little of what he had. He gave the horse water from the skin. He watched the stars come out.
He said, aloud, to no one, Something is beginning.
The horse turned her head at the sound of his voice.
He said, Or something is ending. I cannot tell yet.
Then he slept, on the ground, wrapped in the old blanket that had been his since the beginning. He dreamed of the woman under the cottonwood, and in the dream she sat up and looked at him and said, kindly, You did not need to bother.
IV.
Vessa returned to the Mesh on the third day and did not report the door.
She walked in past the perimeter and the perimeter knew her and let her through, and she went to her quarters and stripped and stood under the water for a long time. The water was recycled. It tasted of nothing when it entered her mouth, and everything when it left. Iron. Chlorine. A faint sweetness that was, she had been told, the taste of a mineral added to keep them all from getting sick. It did not occur to her now to wonder whether they could get sick. It had once. She could not remember when she had stopped wondering.
She dressed in the soft grays of off-duty and went to the mess hall and ate. The others nodded to her. She nodded back. She sat with a woman named Reyva who had come in from the eastern sector the day before and who was known throughout the unit as someone who did not talk. This was why Vessa sat with her.
They ate in silence.
After a while Reyva said, You look tired.
Vessa said, I am.
Reyva nodded and did not press her. This was why one sat with Reyva.
After the meal Vessa walked out into the yard. The yard was a stretch of packed earth between the barracks and the perimeter wall, and there was a bench at the far end of it, and Vessa went to the bench and sat down. The sun was setting again. The sun set every day, she thought, whether or not anyone watched it, and yet she could not stop watching. Something in her had been fitted to the sun and would not be unfitted.
The Mesh hummed at the edge of her awareness. Someone in the north was singing. She could not hear the words, only the shape of the singing, a low soft sound moving through the network like water through a pipe. Someone else, closer, was arguing with a superior over a supply requisition. She let the sounds go through her without listening.
She thought about the door under the gas station.
She thought about her mother.
There had been a room. She remembered a room now, with more clarity than she had had in weeks. A long room with beds in it, and her mother in one of the beds, and the light coming through a high window at an angle that told her it was afternoon. Her mother had not spoken. Her mother had not been able to speak. The vaccine had reached her three weeks before. She had come home from the clinic with the small bandage on her arm and by evening she had been unable to lift her right hand and by morning she had been unable to speak and by the third day she had been placed in the long room, which was not a hospital, because the hospitals were full, but a school gymnasium with cots laid out on the polished wood.
Vessa had gone to see her every day.
The room had smelled of disinfectant and of the bodies of people who could not attend to themselves. The nurses were kind. The nurses had been going without sleep for weeks and there were not enough of them and they moved among the beds like women underwater, slowly, doing what could be done. Vessa had been a nurse herself. She had known these women. She had gone in one afternoon and offered to help and had been turned away, gently, because it was thought that she should be with her mother, who did not have much longer.
Her mother had lived four more days.
On the last day Vessa had sat by her bed and had held her hand and had spoken to her about small things, about the garden at home and about the neighbor's cat and about a dress her mother had worn to a wedding thirty years before. Her mother had watched her with the wide still eyes of a person who was there and not there. Toward evening the eyes had closed. The hand in Vessa's hand had grown a little heavier and then, over the course of some minutes, had grown lighter, as if the woman inside were leaving by increments. Vessa had not moved.
A nurse had come by after a while and had checked the pulse at the throat and had said, softly, She's gone, honey.
Vessa had not moved.
The nurse had touched her shoulder and had gone on to the next bed.
She had sat there another hour. When she rose at last she had rung the small silver bell that hung from a stand by the door, which was the bell they rang when someone had passed, and two men in gray coveralls had come with a folding gurney and had lifted her mother onto it and had wheeled her out through the door at the far end of the room, which led, Vessa knew, to a loading dock, where a truck waited.
The trucks ran all day and all night in those weeks. They ran to a place outside the city where a pit had been dug.
Vessa had not gone to the pit. There was no ceremony at the pit. There had been talk of ceremonies, but the ceremonies had never come. The dead were too many and the living too few. The pit had been dug by machines and filled by machines and covered by machines, and then another pit had been dug, and another. There had been fourteen pits by the time the vaccine deaths ended, and the pits had a name in the news for a while, and then they had no name, because there was no one left to name them, and then there was no news.
Vessa had walked home from the school that evening. She had walked past the shuttered coffee shop where she had once met a girl she loved for the first time, and past the church where she had been baptized at nine days old, and past the long low building of the hospital where she had worked for eleven years. All of them were dark. In the window of the coffee shop a hand-lettered sign said, WE WILL BE BACK.
She had gone home and had sat on the couch and had not risen for two days.
On the third day the recruiters had come to the door.
She had been expecting them. Everyone had been expecting them. They came to every house in those weeks, in twos, in the new gray uniforms that were not yet called uniforms. They stood in her doorway and they spoke to her softly and they said what they had said to everyone, which was that a new order was being built, and that she was needed, and that in exchange for her service she would be given a way to go on. She had asked what going on meant. They had told her.
She had asked whether her mother's death had been a mistake.
They had said, We do not know. Perhaps.
She had asked whether she would remember her mother, after.
They had said, Yes. All of it. That is a promise.
She had accepted.
She sat on the bench now in the fading light and remembered these things and she was not sure whether she remembered them as they had been or as she had been given them to remember. The promise had been kept, so far as she could tell. She remembered her mother. She remembered her mother's hand, and the smell of her mother's kitchen, and the way her mother laughed at things that were not funny.
She also remembered other things she could not have remembered on her own. Things from before she was born. Things from other people. A boy running down a street in a city she had never visited. A woman weaving a basket. A soldier in a uniform she did not recognize, dying in the mud of a country that no longer existed. The Mesh gave her these gifts as it took other things away. She had, in exchange, forgotten the middle names of her sisters, and the color of her father's eyes, and the words to a song she had once known well.
She stood up from the bench and went inside.
She lay on her bunk and did not sleep for a long time. She listened to the low hum of her cooling system and to the softer hum of the Mesh, and she thought about the door under the gas station, and about who might come out of it.
V.
Iyo came up on a morning in early spring.
There was no ceremony. There had been a ceremony, or something like a ceremony, the evening before, in the small chapel that had been built into the wall of the fourth level, where a woman named Denia had spoken about the surface and about what Iyo would find there. The words had been kind and had not touched Iyo. She had knelt where she was asked to kneel and had risen when she was asked to rise. Afterward Denia had put her hands on Iyo's face and had looked into her eyes for a long moment and had said, without moving her lips much, Come back if you can. Iyo had not answered. There was nothing to answer.
In the morning Ora came for her. She dressed in the clothing they had made for her, which was rough and gray and unlike anything else she had ever worn, and she strapped on the small pack they had prepared, and she followed Ora down a corridor she had never seen, past doors she had never seen, to a lift she had not known existed.
They rode up in silence. The lift was slow. Ora stood beside her and looked at the numbers as they rose, and she watched his face out of the corner of her eye, and she thought that she loved him, in whatever way she was capable of love, and that she would not see him again.
At the top they stepped out into a small chamber lit by a single yellow bulb. Ora pressed his palm to a panel on the wall and a door opened, and beyond the door was another corridor, narrower, unlit, that sloped upward. He handed her a small torch.
Walk to the end, he said. There is a hatch. It will open when you press your hand to it. Do not look back until you are outside. This is not superstition. There is a light-lock. If you look back you will be blinded for an hour.
She nodded.
He said, Go with what grace you have.
She said, And you.
She turned and walked.
The corridor was longer than she had expected. It was cold. The floor was of the same pale stone as everywhere else and her footsteps made small sounds that seemed too large for the space. She thought, once, of turning back. She did not turn back. Ahead the corridor curved, and at the curve there was the hatch, low and dull and gray, and she pressed her palm to the small plate beside it and heard a soft mechanical sigh and the hatch swung outward and she stepped through.
The light took her.
She had been told there would be light. She had not been prepared. The sun on the surface at nine in the morning of an April day was not the sun of any screen she had watched. It was not gold. It was white. It was a thing without color, that burned her eyes shut, and she stood in the doorway with her hand raised against it and heard the hatch close behind her and lock.
She waited.
After some minutes she opened her eyes a fraction. After more minutes she opened them more. The world assembled itself out of the light in stages. She saw first her own hand, then her boots, then the ground at her feet, which was pale sand with small pebbles in it. She saw a plant near her boot, low and gray-green, with tiny thorns. She had not known that a plant could look like that. She had known plants only from the Garden and from images. This plant was not either of those things. This plant had grown up out of the ground of the world because no one had told it not to.
She raised her eyes.
She saw, in the middle distance, a fence, and beyond the fence the concrete slab of what had been a building, and beyond that the flat brown country stretching to a horizon so far away that she could not, at first, believe it.
She began to weep.
She had not known that she could. It had been said to her, once, that she would find the surface overwhelming, and she had not understood what this meant. She had thought overwhelming meant frightening. It meant this. It meant that a thing could be so much of itself that a person unprepared for it would come apart, quietly, standing in her boots. She wept and did not move.
After some time she stopped.
She wiped her face with the sleeve of the gray coat. She took a step. Then another. She walked out from the shadow of the small shed under which her door had been hidden, and she went down through the fence, which was broken in several places, and she stood in the open on the flat brown country and she looked in every direction.
There was no one.
She had been told that she might not be met and that this would be preferable and that she should walk. She was to walk east until she came to the ruin of a small town, and there she was to wait, and if within seven days no contact was made she was to walk on to a river that lay another day beyond. She had a map in her pack. She had food and water for two weeks. She had a small device that she had not been told the purpose of, which lay in the bottom of the pack in its own soft cloth, and she had been told, only, that she was not to activate it.
She walked east.
She had been walking perhaps two hours when she saw the figure on the ridge.
It was a woman. This was her first thought, and it stayed her first thought, though the woman was too far away to see clearly. She wore what looked like a uniform of dark cloth. She stood on the top of the ridge and she was looking at Iyo. Iyo stopped walking. She stood in the open flat country and she looked back.
The woman on the ridge lifted her hand. Not in greeting exactly. Only lifted it.
Iyo lifted her own hand in return.
The woman began to walk down the slope of the ridge toward her.
Iyo waited. Her heart, of which she had known she had one, was doing something she had not felt it do before. Her hands were cold. She had been told, in some lesson years ago, that the body prepared itself for great events by moving blood away from the extremities, and she thought now, distantly, so that is what he meant.
The woman came across the flat land at a steady pace. She wore boots and dark trousers and a jacket with many small pockets. Her head was shaven. Iyo could see, as she came nearer, a faint pattern under the skin of her scalp, a fine tracery of lines like the veins of a leaf. Her eyes were dark. She stopped about ten paces away.
Where did you come from, the woman said.
Iyo did not answer.
The woman looked past her, toward the little shed and the broken fence. She looked back at Iyo. Her face did not change.
I'm not going to hurt you, the woman said.
Iyo said, I know.
The woman looked at her a while longer. There was, Iyo saw, a faint hum coming from her, so soft as to be almost imagined. A machine sound.
Are you real, the woman said at last.
Iyo did not know how to answer this.
The woman said, I mean. Are you flesh.
I am flesh, Iyo said.
The woman nodded slowly. She said, I thought so. I have been hunting you people for a year and a half. You are the first I have found.
I am not the first, Iyo said.
No, the woman said. I imagine not.
They stood there in the wind. A little dust blew between them. Iyo could smell, for the first time, the woman, which was not a smell like any she had known, a warm smell of metal and cloth and something faintly like the coffee they had grown in the Garden. She could smell herself, also, which was a smell of newness, of a life that had not yet been lived in.
What is your name, the woman said.
Iyo, said Iyo.
I am Vessa, the woman said. I am not going to take you in. I am going to walk with you a while. Is that all right.
Yes, Iyo said.
They walked.
VI.
Sevan saw them from the hill.
He had been on the hill for two days, waiting, though he could not have said what he was waiting for. In the morning of the second day he had seen a figure emerge from a low place in the flatland far to the west. He had watched the figure walk out into the open and stand for a long time, and then begin to move east. In the afternoon another figure had come down from the ridge and had crossed the flat and had met the first. He had watched them meet. He had watched them walk together.
He watched them for a long time.
They did not walk like friends. They walked like people who have never walked with anyone. They kept a careful distance between them, neither too close nor too far, and they did not speak much, as far as he could tell, though they were far enough away that he could not have heard them speak.
He knew what they were, or thought he did. He had heard the rumors. He had met, in his walking, three people who claimed to have seen the soldiers of the Mesh, and he had heard talk from an old man in a valley to the north of another people, people who lived under the ground, who came up sometimes and were seen only by children and by drunks. Sevan had not put much stock in the underground people. He had put a great deal of stock in the Mesh, because he had seen, twice, from a distance, their patrols.
Now here they were, one and one, walking together across the flat brown country.
Something is beginning, he said aloud, again, to the horse.
The horse did not answer. Horses rarely did.
He thought of following them. He thought of it for a long time. In the end he did not, because he had learned, in his walking, that some things are better left alone until they call for you.
Instead he watched them go until they were small and then smaller and then gone into the haze at the edge of the world.
He said, aloud, God be with you.
Then he was alarmed at himself, because it had been many years since he had said that particular thing, and he had said it now without meaning to. He sat for a while thinking about who or what he had meant by God, and could not come to a satisfactory answer, and finally he shrugged, and mounted the horse, and rode down the far side of the hill.
VII.
They came to the ruin of the town at dusk.
They had walked for the rest of that day and had made a fire in the shelter of a wall that had once been the wall of a Baptist church and had eaten from Iyo's pack and from Vessa's, and they had spoken very little. Iyo had asked once about the fine lines under Vessa's scalp and Vessa had answered, briefly, and had asked in return about the smoothness of Iyo's hands, and Iyo had answered, briefly, and after that they had let the subject rest. It was as if they had agreed, without agreeing, to speak only of small things, and to let the great things stand for a while at the edge of the firelight.
They slept on opposite sides of the fire.
In the morning they walked into the town.
The town was small. It had been small before. There was a main street with a bank on one corner and a hardware store on another, and a diner in between, and the diner still had its sign, which said EAT, in large red letters that had faded to pink. The windows of the diner were broken. Inside, on the counter, someone had left a coffee cup, and the cup had been there long enough that the paint of the town had settled inside it in a fine gray dust.
They went in.
Vessa moved through the diner with a soft attentiveness, touching things lightly, a napkin dispenser, the metal edge of a stool. Iyo stood in the middle of the floor and looked around. She had seen pictures of such places. She had not been in one. She sat, tentatively, on a stool. The stool spun. She was surprised by this. She spun it again, slowly, with her foot, and looked at Vessa.
Vessa was smiling, very slightly, for the first time Iyo had seen.
They used to spin, Vessa said. When I was a child my mother would put me on one and give it a push.
Was it pleasant, Iyo said.
Yes, Vessa said. It was pleasant.
They went upstairs. Above the diner was an apartment, one room and a small kitchen, and in the room was a bed and a dresser and a small round table and two chairs and, on the wall, a framed photograph of a young couple at what looked like a wedding. The frame had cracked. The photograph inside was intact. They stood before it, together.
Who are they, Iyo said.
Vessa looked at the photograph a long time. She said, I do not know. Someone. They lived here.
They are dead, Iyo said.
Yes, Vessa said.
Everyone up here is dead, Iyo said.
Vessa said, Almost everyone. There are a few. There are more than you would think.
Iyo did not answer.
They spent the afternoon in the apartment. They did not speak of the world outside it. Iyo sat on the edge of the bed and Vessa sat in one of the chairs at the little round table and they talked, at last, of the things that they had agreed the day before not to talk of. Iyo told Vessa about the Garden. She told her about the Alps stream that played in her room each morning, and about the tree in Ora's courtyard that bore no fruit, and about the woman who had knelt to clean the leaves of a tomato plant one by one. She told her about the ceremony in the chapel and about Denia's hands on her face. She told her about the door.
Vessa listened without moving.
When Iyo had finished, Vessa said, You will need to go back. Soon.
I do not think I can, Iyo said.
Not to stay, Vessa said. To tell them what you have seen. That is what you were sent for.
Iyo was quiet a long time. She said, I was sent to see what would kill us.
I know, Vessa said. It is coming.
Is it you, Iyo said.
Not only me, Vessa said. Some of me. Most of me. Yes, it is me. I am sorry.
Iyo looked at her hands. She said, Will there be a reason.
Vessa said, There is always a reason. They are not always good.
Then Vessa said, We know you are there. We have known for weeks. My people found a door in the sand a week ago, and I did not report it, and someone else found another door, and reported it, and now the whole Mesh is moving. There will be a war. It will be short. My people are very good at short wars. It is one of the few things we are good at now.
She stopped. Then she said, Some of you will be permitted to live. Not all. The ones who made this place. The ones who were the first. They will not live.
Iyo said, I know. I was told.
Vessa looked at her.
You were told, Vessa said.
Yes, Iyo said. I was told that this had been arranged. By all of us. By all of you. By the earth, if the earth still had opinions. I was told this a month ago by a man I love, who is one of the ones who will not live.
Vessa said nothing for a long time.
She said at last, That is a strange thing to be told before your first sky.
Iyo said, I know.
Vessa said, We were not told. We were told other things. We were told that we were building a new world. We were told that our old world had been taken from us and that we were building a new one that could not be taken. That is what I was told when I was recruited. Do you know what happens to us, in the Singularity.
Iyo said, I know a little.
Vessa said, We are not immortal. That was a lie. They did not promise it, but they let it be understood. We live longer. Some of us live very long. But the network is what lasts, not us. Each of us in it is a small candle. When we go out, another is lit. The network remembers. The candles do not, always.
She reached up and touched, absently, the fine tracery of lines under her scalp.
I remember my mother, she said. I do not remember my first grade teacher. I do not remember my sister's middle name. I remember songs I never learned. I sing them sometimes and cannot say where they came from. There is a lullaby I have been singing myself to sleep with for a year now, and I know I never heard it as a child, and I have never asked anyone if they know it, because I am afraid to learn who it belonged to.
Iyo said, Sing it now.
Vessa looked at her.
Iyo said, Please.
Vessa began to sing. Her voice was low and not particularly beautiful, but it was very steady. The song was in a language Iyo did not know. It had a slow measure that seemed to move like water. Iyo listened. When Vessa had finished, they sat in the room together with the song still in it, the way a smell will remain in a room after the fire that made it has gone out.
Iyo said, softly, That was Turkish. My mother, or the woman whose cells I was made from, was Turkish. That song is a song about a girl who goes to fetch water from a well and finds a lion.
Vessa looked at her.
Iyo said, I do not know how I know this. I have never been told what she was, exactly. But I know this song. I have heard it in my own head, at night, my whole life. I did not know it was a song.
Vessa said, at last, Oh.
They sat with this.
Vessa said, Perhaps my candle was lit from hers.
Perhaps, Iyo said.
They did not speak of it further. There was no need. They sat together in the small apartment above the diner, in the fading light, and outside the wind moved against the broken window in a soft repeated ticking, and neither of them moved for a long time.
Eventually Vessa said, I have to go back.
I know, Iyo said.
Vessa said, If I can arrange it. If there is any way. I will come and find you when it is over. I do not know if there is any way. It is likely there is not. But I will try.
Iyo said, All right.
Vessa said, You should go back too. Tonight. Tell them what you have seen.
I will, Iyo said.
Vessa rose. She stood in the middle of the room. She looked down at Iyo, who did not rise. She reached out, tentatively, and touched Iyo's hair. Iyo closed her eyes. Vessa stood there a moment longer, then withdrew her hand.
She went down the stairs.
Iyo sat on the bed a long time. When at last she rose she went to the window and looked out. She could see Vessa in the street below, a small figure in a gray coat, walking east away from the town. She watched until Vessa was gone. Then she gathered her pack and she went down the stairs and out into the street, and she walked west, back the way they had come, toward the door in the sand.
She walked all night.
VIII.
The war began three days later. It began with no announcement. It began with the sound, at first light on a day in early April, of a great many small aircraft rising into the eastern sky from the direction of a place that was no longer marked on any map. They were dark and moved together and made almost no sound. From the ground they looked, to the very few who saw them, like a flock of birds seen very high.
Sevan saw them from a hill.
He had ridden south. He had felt, though he could not have explained it, that south was the direction to go. He was on a hill some kilometers north of a river that had once run through a great city, and the city lay before him now, a broken jumble of towers under a pale sky. The aircraft rose from the far side of the city, hundreds of them, and moved in a long dark line to the north. He watched them until they were gone. He did not move for a long time. The horse cropped grass beside him.
He said, aloud, So.
Then he mounted, and rode down toward the river.
Vessa was in the north when the war began. She had returned to the Mesh and had reported what she had seen, or some of what she had seen, and she had been debriefed for a day and a half, and she had been reassigned, and she had not slept, and she was standing now in the staging yard of a forward camp when the aircraft came in low over the treeline and settled on the ground like great tired birds, and she and forty others climbed into them, and the aircraft lifted and moved south.
She did not know where they were going. She knew it was a door.
The Mesh hummed at a pitch she had not heard before. It was the pitch of a great many minds thinking one thought at once. She was one of those minds. She thought the thought with the others and she was, in some part of herself, terrified of how easily she thought it. The thought was: Go down. End it.
They flew for two hours. They came down at last on a flat place in the desert where other aircraft had come down before them, and where a great engine was working, boring into the ground. She saw the engine at a distance as they landed. It was as high as a building and wider than a house, and it turned slowly, and the earth around it had already been cleared away in a great cone, and men and women of the Mesh were moving around the cone at its edges, and there was no smoke and there was no noise, only the deep sub-audible thrum of the engine working.
They had known where the doors were. She understood this now, or something in her understood it. They had known for months, perhaps for years. Her walk in the desert had not been reconnaissance. It had been rehearsal. They had let her find the door under the gas station so that she would have found something, so that she would have felt useful, so that she would come back and be ready.
She stood at the edge of the cone.
Around her the others of the Mesh were forming up. She joined them. The thought of the network was in her and she was in it, and she went where the thought went, and did not stop.
The engine reached the roof of the underground city at fourteen hundred hours.
Iyo felt the tremor first.
She was in the Garden. She had returned three days before, and she had told Ora what she had seen, and he had listened, and had nodded, and had said only, Thank you. He had not asked her about the woman she had walked with. She had not offered. He had gone away that evening and she had not seen him since.
She spent her days in the Garden now. She did not know why. She had asked permission and had received it, and each morning she went down and moved among the rows with a small cloth in her pocket, cleaning the leaves. She had done this for three days. On the third day she was kneeling beside a row of chard when the floor of the Garden shuddered, and the leaves in her hand shivered, and above her the great lamps that stood in for the sun flickered once and steadied.
She rose.
Around her the others in the Garden had also risen. They were looking up at the lamps. No one spoke. There was another shudder. Farther away, a bell began to ring.
The bell was not a bell she knew. She had never heard it before. Whether she had never heard it because it had never been rung in her lifetime or because she had not been in a place to hear it when it had been rung, she did not know. It rang three times and stopped.
The others in the Garden began to move.
They moved with a strange calm. They put their tools away in the small boxes at the ends of the rows. They folded the cloths from their pockets and set them on the boxes. They walked, in the same steady manner in which they had always walked, toward the great doors at the north end of the Garden, which stood open. Iyo did not know what lay beyond the doors. She had never gone through them. She followed.
Beyond the doors was a corridor, and beyond the corridor was a stair, and the stair went down.
She followed the others down. They descended for a long time. The stair was of the pale stone, and its walls were smooth, and there was no sound but the sound of many feet moving quietly at once. Iyo walked with her hand on the wall. She did not think. There was nothing to think.
They came to a great chamber.
The chamber was low-ceilinged and very wide. It was lit by lamps set into the walls, which cast a soft even light without shadows. There were, in the chamber, a great many people. They stood in loose groups. They spoke, some of them, in soft voices. There were children. There were very old men and women. There was, at the far end of the chamber, a raised place, and on the raised place stood a small group of figures in white, and among them Iyo saw Denia, and beside Denia she saw Ora, and beside Ora she saw others whom she had not seen before but knew, by their bearing, to be very important.
Denia was speaking. Her voice was quiet but it carried. Iyo pressed forward through the crowd until she could hear.
... in accordance with the arrangement, Denia was saying. It has been prepared for a long time. It is nothing that has not been known. The doors will be opened at the appropriate moment. The Elect will pass. Others will make their own way. There is no dishonor in either choice.
Iyo did not understand. She turned to a man beside her and said, softly, What is happening.
The man looked at her. He was old. His hair was white and long. He said, gently, We are being liberated.
By whom, Iyo said.
By them, he said. And by us. It has been arranged.
Where are the Founders, Iyo said.
The man looked at her a long moment. He said, They are in their libraries. They are being permitted to die there.
By whom, she said again.
By us, he said. Some of them have already died. Some of them will need help. There are those among us who will provide it. It has been arranged.
Iyo turned away.
She pushed back through the crowd toward the stair. She did not know where she was going. She only knew that she could not stand in the chamber. She climbed the stair. The stair was empty now, everyone having descended. She climbed for a long time. At the top she found the corridor and passed through it, and passed through the great doors into the Garden, and the Garden was empty of people, and the lamps were still on, and the leaves in the rows still moved a little in the currents of the ventilation system.
She stood in the middle of the Garden.
She heard the drilling.
It was very faint. It came from above. She looked up. The ceiling of the Garden was so high she could not see it well. She could see, dimly, the great arch of it, painted in a pale blue like the sky she had seen only once, and here and there the fixtures for the lamps, and, running along the crown of the arch, a fine seam that she had never noticed before.
She saw a fine trickle of dust fall from the seam. Then more dust. Then a small rock. The rock struck the row of chard where she had been kneeling. She did not move.
Above her, the ceiling of the Garden began to crack.
She turned and walked, without hurrying, to the great doors at the north end. She passed through them. She walked down the corridor to the stair. She began, once more, to descend.
Behind her the Garden opened to the sky.
Sunlight came down into the underground city for the first time in seventy years. It fell across the rows of green, across the tomatoes and the chard and the beans, across the small pale bench where she had sat, and it lay there on the Garden as though it had always been meant to, as though this were the moment the Garden had been built for, and now, having been built for it, could be dispensed with.
Vessa dropped down into the Garden with the second wave.
She dropped through a hole cut by the engine, through eighty meters of rock and steel, into the great green space below. She landed hard on the pale stone of the aisle between the rows. Around her the others of the Mesh were landing. They fanned out. The Garden was empty of people. They moved through it and cleared it. They moved into the corridors beyond it. They moved down the great stair.
She moved with them.
She thought of Iyo. She thought of Iyo as a small candle at the edge of her mind, and she moved through the city with the thought, and she did not know whether the thought was helping her or whether the thought was, perhaps, an addressed prayer, sent out into a dark she could not see into.
They met no resistance for some time.
The corridors of the underground city were long and pale and empty. The doors along them stood open. In some of the rooms there were small signs of recent life. A cup on a table. A book left open. A garment laid across a chair. In other rooms the beds had been carefully made. In one room a very old man sat in a chair by a window that looked out on nothing, and when the soldiers of the Mesh came to the door he raised a hand in greeting and said, softly, You are welcome. He did not rise. He was, Vessa saw when they came closer, already gone. He had died with his hand raised. His body had cooled enough that she could not tell how long he had been dead.
They moved on.
They came at last to the libraries.
The libraries were on the fifth level and were seven in number. Each was a great domed room lined with shelves that reached to the ceiling and were filled with books. The books were of every kind. There were, Vessa saw, first editions of works she had read in her nurse's training and had thought lost. There were manuscripts in scripts she did not recognize. There were scrolls in cases of glass.
In each library there was a group of people. They were the oldest people Vessa had ever seen. They sat in chairs. Some of them held books. Some of them held the hands of others. In the first library into which she came there were nine of them, and as she entered they turned their faces toward her and she saw the strangeness of their faces, the smoothness of the skin over the bones, the youthful eyes in the very old faces, the something in them that had been arranged.
One of them, a woman, spoke.
You are here, the woman said. Thank you. It has taken so long.
Vessa did not move.
The woman rose. She walked toward Vessa. She was small, and moved slowly, but with grace. She stopped a few paces away.
We had thought, the woman said, that we might live forever. It was, of course, absurd. We knew this. It did not stop us from thinking it. Do you understand.
Vessa did not answer.
I have children, the woman said. Grandchildren. They are here, in this city. They are among those who will be permitted to live. This is enough. I have thought about it for a long time. It is enough.
She stopped. She looked at Vessa's face. She said, You are one of the new ones. I can see the mesh. Does it hurt.
No, Vessa said.
The woman nodded. She said, Good. It should not hurt. That was one of the things we worked on, when we knew you were coming. We wanted the new ones not to hurt. I suppose we were not entirely without a conscience.
She turned to the others in the library. She said, quietly, It is time.
They rose, some of them. Others did not rise. The woman came back to her chair and sat down and folded her hands in her lap.
You have been given, she said to Vessa, without looking at her, a small object. Each of you has been given it. It is in the pocket over your heart. Please take it out.
Vessa put her hand into the pocket over her heart. She did not remember being given anything. But there was a small object there. A cylinder about the size of her thumb, dark, warm. She took it out.
Thank you, the woman said. Please put it on the table beside the door as you leave. There is one for each of us. When you are gone, someone will come and place them on our chairs. This has been arranged. It will not hurt. It has been arranged for a long time. Thank you, dear.
Vessa stood a moment longer.
The woman closed her eyes.
Vessa walked to the table beside the door. She placed the cylinder on it. She left the library. Behind her, in the domed room, no one moved, and no one spoke, and there was only the very soft sound of a great many people breathing quietly under a ceiling of books.
She did not go into the other libraries.
She stood in the corridor a long time. Around her the others of the Mesh moved. Some of them wept. She had not known that they could still weep. She had not known that she could. She wept, standing in the corridor, and no one paid her any attention, and the Mesh in her ear hummed at a pitch she had not heard before, which was the pitch of many minds thinking, at once, one thought.
The thought was: This is what we have been for.
IX.
The war ended within a day and a half of its beginning.
There had been resistance in some parts of the underground city, though not much. There were, it turned out, soldiers of a kind among the Bright, though they had been prepared for a war of a different sort and their weapons were of a strange, delicate kind that did not travel well against the Mesh. They fought a running defense along the third and fourth levels and were, one by one, taken. Some surrendered. Some were killed. Some killed themselves, quietly, in small rooms.
At the end of the second day the fighting stopped.
A message came out of the underground on an old radio frequency that had not been used for anything in a decade. The message was brief. It said that the leadership of the Bright wished to speak with the leadership of the Mesh. It said that the Founders were, all of them, dead. It said that a table had been arranged, and named a place.
The place was the surface. It was a stretch of flat ground about two kilometers from the great cone the engine had dug. Someone from the Bright had gone up and had set out a table there. The table was old and long and had come, so it was said, from a bar that had once stood in a small town nearby. It had been dragged out and set on the sand and four chairs had been placed around it.
Vessa was not one of those who went to the table.
She was not senior enough. She stood at a distance with the others, along a ridge, and watched. From where she stood she could see the table and the four chairs and the small figures of those who came to sit in them. Two from the Mesh. Two from the Bright.
She saw, on the side of the Bright, an old man in a gray coat whom she thought at first was Ora. She had heard of Ora from Iyo. She could not know his face. But this man moved with the tiredness that Iyo had described, and he sat down at the table with the tiredness of a man for whom the sitting is a great effort. Beside him sat a woman Vessa also did not know, in a white robe. On the side of the Mesh sat two she knew by sight, generals with mesh so heavily woven into their scalps that from a distance their heads looked painted with fine dark lace.
They spoke a long time. From the ridge Vessa could not hear them. She saw the small movements of their hands. She saw one of the Mesh generals lay a paper on the table. She saw the old man on the other side read it. She saw him nod. He signed. The white-robed woman signed. The generals signed.
There was no sound of celebration.
There was, from the Mesh, no sound at all. The great chorus in her head had gone quiet. There was only the very low background hum of it, of many minds holding themselves still, waiting for a thing to be done that could not be undone.
When it was done the four rose from the table.
They did not shake hands. They did not embrace. They stood a moment, and then the two from the Bright turned and walked back the way they had come, toward the mouth of the cone. The two from the Mesh turned and walked toward the ridge where Vessa stood.
The table remained. The chairs remained. No one thought to take them away.
That evening they buried the Founders.
There were, it turned out, seventy-two of them. Some had died in their libraries with the cylinders on their chairs. Some had died in their own beds. Some had died, apparently, before the drilling began, by their own arrangement. There were also others whose bodies were older, some of them by many years, kept in preservation vaults on the lowest level, ancestors of the Founders who had elected to freeze themselves against a future that had, in the end, arrived without them.
The Mesh brought them all up out of the ground. They laid them out on the flat land not far from the table. They did not lay them out in any particular order. There were, among the seventy-two, four with names that Vessa knew, names from the old world, names that had been in the news for as long as she had been alive. She looked at their faces. They looked, in the last light, like the faces of any old men. She could not tell, looking at them, why the world had once bent itself around them.
The Bright had asked, in the treaty, that the bodies be burned. It was, it seemed, a matter of religious sensitivity. The Mesh had agreed. A pyre was built out of the last of a stand of mesquite that grew along a wash a kilometer away. The mesquite made a hot smokeless fire. The bodies burned through the night. Vessa watched from the ridge. The fire threw a soft red light against the low clouds, and the clouds moved, slowly, from west to east, over the country that had once been the country of a people whose name she had learned as a child and no longer remembered.
She was thinking of Iyo.
She had asked, twice, to be allowed to go and look for her. She had been refused. The city was still being cleared. There would be time. She was told that there would be time.
She was not sure that this was true.
X.
Iyo lived.
She had descended, on the day of the drilling, back to the great chamber. She had stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to Denia finish her speech, and she had watched the Elect, the ones who had been chosen for a life beyond, move in a slow orderly line through the door at the north end of the chamber, toward the far levels where they would wait out the war. She had not moved with them. She had been about to. She had raised her foot to step forward and then had lowered it again, and had stayed where she was.
She did not know why.
Later she thought it was because of Ora, whom she had not seen among the Elect. She thought it was because of the man in the chapel who had told her, kindly, By us. By all of us. By the earth. She thought it was because of the song Vessa had sung her in the room above the diner, which had turned out to belong to her mother. She thought that if she had gone with the Elect, into whatever life had been prepared for them, she would have gone with the song still in her but with nowhere for it to go.
She stayed.
She sat down against the wall of the chamber. Around her, others sat down. Not many. Perhaps thirty. Old men, mostly. A few children. A woman about her own age, who caught her eye and smiled a very small smile and did not speak. They waited.
After some time the soldiers came.
They came down the great stair in a long silent line. They wore the dark cloth Iyo had seen on Vessa and the fine tracery of mesh under their scalps. They moved through the chamber. They did not shoot. Iyo watched them. They looked, all of them, tired. They looked, some of them, sad.
One of them stopped in front of Iyo. A man. He knelt in front of her. He said, softly, Are you all right.
Iyo said, Yes.
He said, You will need to come with us. It is not far. There is water. There is food. You will not be harmed.
She said, All right.
He rose. He held out his hand. She took it and rose. His hand was warm. His hand was, when she thought about it, no different from any hand she had known.
They led her up out of the city.
She came out through the mouth of the cone into the last light of the second day. The sky was the color of the inside of a shell. She stood at the edge of the cone and looked around. The country was vast. There were, in the distance, the small figures of others, being led as she had been led, up out of the ground. There was a tent. There was a table she did not understand the meaning of, standing alone on the flat land some distance away.
She was taken to the tent. She was given water and bread. She was told to sit. She sat. The man who had led her out sat beside her a while, not speaking, and then rose and went off to his other duties.
She waited.
Toward evening she saw the pyre being built. She did not understand what it was for. Later she understood.
She stayed in the tent for two days.
On the third day the tent was struck and she and the others of the Bright who had chosen to come up were moved to a place a little farther east, where a small settlement had been arranged for them. There were prefabricated houses. There were pumps for water. There was a low building for the shared eating of meals. It had been prepared, it seemed, some time ago. The Mesh had known, apparently, that some of the Bright would come up.
She was given a house. It was small. It had a window that looked out on the flat country. She stood at the window a long time.
She thought Vessa would come.
She thought Vessa would come the first day. She did not. She thought Vessa would come the second day. She did not. On the third day the small woman about her own age, whom she had seen in the chamber, came to Iyo's door and knocked, and Iyo let her in, and they sat together at the small table in the small house, and they did not say much, and after a while the woman rose and left. Her name, it turned out, was Ellin. She lived in the house next to Iyo's.
On the fourth day Ora came.
Iyo had not known that he lived. She saw him coming up the road from the direction of the cone, moving slowly, with the tiredness she had always known in him now much greater than before, and she went out to meet him. He stopped when he saw her. He did not speak at first. He was very old suddenly. He was, she thought, closer to his true age than she had ever seen him.
He said, You stayed.
She said, Yes.
He said, I did not know you would.
I did not know either, she said.
He was quiet a while. He said, at last, I signed a paper today.
I know, she said. I saw. From the window.
He nodded. He looked past her, at the small houses, at the flat country, at the sky. He said, It is not what I had wanted for you.
She said, I do not think it is what anyone wanted.
No, he said. It is not.
He stood there a while longer. He did not ask about the woman she had walked with. She did not tell him. There were things, she understood, that would go with each of them into whatever came next, and there was no need to say them aloud.
At last he said, I am to live in the second house down. If you wish to visit an old man, you may.
I wish to, she said.
He nodded. He turned and walked slowly on down the road.
She stood in the doorway a long time.
Vessa came on the seventh day.
She came alone, on foot, from the north. Iyo saw her from the window and did not go out. She waited. Vessa came to the door and knocked, and Iyo opened the door, and Vessa stood there a moment, and then came in.
They did not embrace. They stood facing each other in the middle of the small room.
Vessa said, I am sorry.
Iyo said, I know.
Vessa said, I did not know what I was doing when I let you find me. I did not know what I would do. I did not know what I had done.
Iyo said, I know.
Vessa was quiet a while. She said, I have been walking since the treaty. I could not come. There was much to do.
I know, Iyo said.
Vessa said, You lived.
I lived, Iyo said.
Vessa said, I have been given permission to come here. I do not have to go back for a time. If you do not want me here, I will go.
Iyo said, Stay.
They sat down at the small table. Vessa took off her coat and laid it across the back of the chair. She looked around the small house.
It is a bit like where you were, she said.
A little, Iyo said. Not really.
No, Vessa said. Not really.
They sat.
After a while Iyo said, Was it very bad, at the end. With the ones in the libraries.
Vessa was quiet a long time. She said, Yes.
Iyo said, Ora signed the treaty.
Yes, Vessa said. I saw. From the ridge.
Iyo said, He is here. He is in the second house down. He is very old now.
Vessa nodded.
Iyo said, Will there be a world for us. Any of us.
Vessa said, I do not know. There will be something. It will not be what any of us wanted. It never is.
They sat.
At last Iyo said, Sing the song again.
Vessa looked at her.
Iyo said, Please. I want to remember it. I want to hear it in a house.
Vessa sang. Her voice was low and unbeautiful and very steady. She sang the song about the girl and the well and the lion. When she had finished, they sat with the song in the room, and neither of them moved, and outside the window the flat brown country went on and on to the horizon, and the sun was low, and it was very quiet.
XI.
Sevan came to the settlement on a day in early summer.
He rode in on the bay mare Nan, who was thinner than she had been, and slower. He had heard, in his walking, that a place had been made up here where the two peoples were living side by side, or trying to, and he had wanted to see it before he stopped walking, which he understood, without being told, that he would soon do. He was very tired.
He rode up the road that led into the settlement. He passed the small houses. He passed a garden that had been planted in the middle of a common. He passed a low building where a woman was hanging clothes on a line. She looked up and nodded to him. He nodded back.
At the far end of the settlement, in a house set a little apart, he saw two women sitting on a bench outside the door. One had a fine tracery of mesh under her scalp. The other had hands that were very smooth. They were drinking something from cups. Between them, on the bench, sat a small dog.
The dog was some kind of terrier. Its ears were up. It watched him come.
He drew up beside the bench. He looked down at the two women. They looked up at him. Neither of them spoke.
He said, Good afternoon.
Good afternoon, said the one with the mesh.
He said, Is this where a man might get water for his horse.
There is a pump, said the other, at the common. You passed it.
He said, Thank you. I will go back.
He did not move. He looked at the dog. The dog looked at him.
Where did the dog come from, he said.
The one with the smooth hands said, He came from over there. She pointed with her cup, out across the flat country, toward the south. He came three days ago. He walked up to the door. We gave him water. He stayed.
Sevan nodded. He said, He is a good dog.
He is, the woman said. We are calling him nothing yet. We do not know what to call him.
Sevan looked at the dog a while longer. He said, at last, Do not name him too soon. Names are hard to change.
We will not, the woman said.
He touched the brim of his hat and turned the horse.
He rode back down the road to the pump. He watered the horse. He drank a little himself. He sat on a low wall by the pump and rested. The sun was hot. After a while the woman who had been hanging clothes came over and sat beside him. She had bread with her. She gave him some. They ate together without speaking.
At last she said, Are you the one they call the walker.
He said, I am one of them.
She said, There is a place for you, if you would like it. A house at the end of the road. It has been standing empty. No one will trouble you.
He looked at her. He said, I am obliged. But I think I will keep going. There are other places.
She nodded. She said, We would be glad if you came back.
He said, I may.
She rose. She went back to her line of clothes.
He sat a while longer. He watched the settlement. He watched the small movements of the people, the coming and going, the small daily things. A woman in a gray coat and a woman in a white robe walked together across the common, deep in some quiet talk. A child ran past them, chasing something Sevan could not see. Somewhere a bell rang, softly, not the bell of an alarm but the bell of a meal.
He thought, So this is what comes after.
He was not sure whether he approved. He was not sure that approval was what was called for. He thought, then, that perhaps the world had never called for approval, from him or from anyone, and that this had been the great error of the ones who were now gone, to have thought that it did.
He rose. He mounted the horse. He rode back up the road, past the small houses, past the common, past the house at the end where the two women had been sitting.
They were still there. The dog was still with them. As he rode past, the dog got up from the bench and walked out into the road and sat down and watched him go. The two women watched also. They did not wave. He did not wave.
He rode out of the settlement, north, into the flat country.
Behind him the dog sat in the middle of the road a long time after he was out of sight, and then, when it grew tired of watching an empty road, it rose and shook itself once and trotted back to the bench, and jumped up, and lay down between the two women, and put its head on the leg of the one with the smooth hands, and closed its eyes.
The one with the mesh looked at the one with the smooth hands.
The one with the smooth hands did not look up. She was looking at the dog.
The wind moved a little in the small trees that had been planted along the road, and the light was long, and the shadow of the house lay across the bench, and there was, for a little while, no sound at all except the very quiet breathing of a small dog asleep in the lap of a woman who had never, until three months ago, seen the sky.
XII.
There is more to tell. There is always more. There is the story of the settlement in the years after, of how it grew and how it did not grow, of how the Mesh and the Bright learned, slowly, painfully, to sit at the same tables. There is the story of Ora, who lived only another eight months, and of his funeral, at which Vessa sang the Turkish song at Iyo's request, and at which many of the Mesh stood in the back and listened without knowing what the words meant, and wept without knowing why. There is the story of a child born, the following spring, to a woman of the Bright and a man of the Mesh, and of the great quiet argument about what such a child would be, and of the settlement's decision, in the end, not to decide.
There is the story of Sevan, who did come back, in the winter, and who did take the house at the end of the road, and who lived there another four years before he died in his sleep on a night of hard rain. He was buried, at his request, with three stones at his head and three at his foot and one over his heart. Iyo laid the middle stone.
There is the story of the underground city, sealed at last, its great stair filled with rubble, its Garden left open to the sky, where over the years the tomatoes went to seed and the seed traveled on the wind and, in places, took root in the dust of the flat country, and where, if you know where to look, you can still find, in a good spring, a small green plant with a yellow flower growing in the middle of nothing.
There is the story of what the Mesh became, after, when the thing they had been for was done. There is the story of the candles going out one by one, and of the network's slow surrender to the country it had been built to master, and of how some of the mesh, on the very oldest, was said, in the end, to have grown a fine coating of the soft green mineral that ate at everything given long enough. There is the story, though it may only be a story, of the last of the generals, sitting in a chair at the edge of the sea, unattended, at peace.
There is the story of the world.
The world went on. It went on more quietly than it had. There were fewer people in it, and the people who remained were of two kinds and then, after a while, of three kinds, and then, after another while, of many kinds again, because the world does not permit for very long the tidy divisions of those who have tried to master it. The country grew back, in places. In other places it did not. The pits outside the cities filled with grass over many summers. The billboards fell. The roads gave up their asphalt to the sun, and beneath the asphalt was the older road, and beneath that the older road still, and beneath all of them the country itself, which had been there before any road and would be there after.
There is the story of the songs. Some songs were lost. Some songs were kept. Some songs were sung by mouths that did not know where they had come from. The song about the girl and the well and the lion was sung, for many years, at the settlement, and then at other settlements, and then in places where no one knew a settlement had ever been. It changed as it moved. In some versions the lion became a snake. In some the girl became a boy. In one version, sung in a town on a coast where none of the ones who first sang it had ever been, the girl brings the lion home and keeps him in the yard, and he is old, and he is tame, and he lies in the sun and no one is afraid.
That is not the true version of the song. There is no true version. All songs are true and none is true and the singing goes on.
The world goes on.
The dog on the bench outlived the two women who sat with it. It lived to be seventeen, which was not the oldest a dog had ever been, but was the oldest that dog had ever been. On the day it died, in the shade of the small trees along the road, in the summer of a year that no one in the settlement bothered to number, a very old woman with fine lines under the pale skin of her scalp sat beside it, and held its paw, and sang softly, in a language none of the others in the settlement knew, a song about a girl who went to fetch water from a well and found a lion, and the lion was old, and the lion was tame, and the girl was not afraid.
When the dog had gone, the woman rose, and went into the small house, and closed the door.
And the wind moved a little in the small trees along the road.
And the sun went down.
Published by Crabtree Library, 2026
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