Scene 16:
In Beijing, senior Party officials cruised the streets in $230,000 Audi A6's. They counted among their friends the 50,000 Chinese with fortunes greater that $10 million and of course the 200 with fortunes over $100 million.
Scene 20:
In Washington, the CENTCOM request for WMD release authorization was received by the White House Communications Office at 2:43pm local on June 4. The request was directed to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House East Wing. There, President Bush reviewed the CENTCOM request with General Peter Pace, Chairman of the JCS and SecDef Rumsfeld. Vice President Cheney participated via encrypted video from his official residence, across town at the US Naval Observatory. Since 9/11, at critical times like this, the policy of Bush and Cheney had been to be physically separated, to ensure redundant survival of the U.S. National Command Authority, the NCA.
Scene 31:
Under Governor Gallagher, a "safe" Kansas was a vision of what America could and "should" be. Privately, among his supporters he'd joke, "I'm Red, White and Blue...and I'll make sure you're Black and Blue if you're a bad guy!"
Act Two, Scene One:
Indeed for the Palmer Administration and the world, the clock was ticking... on a geologic scale approaching infinity. For 13 million years, a spreading center in the deep siliceous granite bedrock "basement" rock beneath the Utah/Wyoming border had been tugging inexorably at the Tetons, the spectacular mountains that form the western flank of Jackson Hole...
When the 7.2 magnitude earthquake's shock hit the town of Jackson at 2:09:32 MST, an entire wing of the Circle S Motel came apart. Downtown, the balcony facade of the Opera House broke free and crushed three college friends from Ohio who had been out drinking. Later, FEMA estimated that only 14 people died in the initial pulse...200 more died by morning, trapped in their homes with no hope of rescue in 12 degree temperatures with a minus-10 wind chill factor.
Scene 7:
Among the university faculty, the federal government's paranoid American Research Security Act was a joke. For them ARSA was "The Horse's Arse Act." Bill Ferguson's stomach turned when he saw Donna Mason, the new university vice president for security. There were a few things Bill found genuinely creepy about Mason. First, she had no academic background at all and had been installed straight from her retirement as a former Major in U.S. Army intelligence. The second thing was her butch gayness, which of course was no big deal for Bill...until he heard Donna Mason had been asking around about Joan's background with her former girlfriend in Berkeley.
Scene 17:
Prior to leaving Wyoming, Major Li showed his extreme military analysis skill, doing fast and comprehensive analysis of the Yellowstone plateau. Adding insult to the injury his analysis would cause, he'd used access Geology School access to the new supercomputer in Cheyenne. Major Li was an expert in nuclear targeting for the PLA. Previously, he'd targeted subsurface structures in the Philippines, Taiwan and the Spratly Islands. At the University of Wyoming, Li planned the largest explosion in history, gigatons of nuclear yield when the volcano went off.
Scene 20:
Aboard the Chinese space station, Captain Tsien finished the target set updates of the 10 re-entry vehicles. On his control panel, he could see that each 8,000 pound Trans Atmospheric Vehicle warhead carrier was registering nominal status. Upon re-entry in the fringe layer of the upper atmosphere around 400,000 feet, the winged TAVs would begin randomly programmed autonomous evasion of any ground based interceptor missiles that would be certainly be fired from Vandenberg AFB at the flock of incoming "Black Cranes." Despite random evasion, each TAV would hit their designated target coordinates around the rim of the Yellowstone caldera- within 5 seconds of optimal time-on-target. Tsien understood that at least eight surviving Crane's thermonuclear warheads needed to be in that time-on-target window, to induce the shock effects needed to activate the magma chamber's eruption to the surface and the catastrophic effects this attack was designed to cause.
Act Three:
As Bill died, his consciousness entered the quantum foam at the edge of what he had always perceived as "Heaven." Behind him was the membrane of perceived reality that had previously bounded him and Joan...and all humans... into the illusion of "reality." Bill was not returning to dimensions. He would not be reincarnated. He sought to adjust his quantum observation of this new reality, so he could find Joan in her own foaming infinite possible realities. There was only one dimension now, Bill's singular determination to find her. Bill's consciousness laughed at the notion of him suddenly having a God-like singularity.
READER NOTE:
The couple's happy reunion gives life to a new solar system in the spirit of human goodness. This is a precursor to a story coming in 2014: another storyline in a novel that will establish a baseline paradigm for human consciousness to understand, accept and become responsible for acting as aware, individual (quantum observational) people. To achieve this goal, "behind the scenes," the author is also working on implementing two things he's invented: QUANTUM POLITIK (to replace political party and "machine"-based policy formation) and supporting global economic modeling (using a theory of his that was published in 2001; and which is now under funding consideration by a foundation for modeling on a supercomputer in Cheyenne Wyoming.)
As a creative, the author's goal is to use science fiction to enable a non-threatening "possibility" in people's minds that (quantum, human) shared values are the only thing that might enable the world to survive a century with 10 billion people by 2050 and 11 billion by 2100.
Thank you for your interest in the EDGE OF HEAVEN.