Read Online New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet by C.J. Carella - Free Book Online

told her about the 1945 incident. For a wonder, Christine listened quietly until he was done.
    “That’s gotta be one of them,” she said when he was done. “Which means they’ve been trying to get into your head for a while. Trying and failing. The Outsiders don’t do too well in places with a lot of matter and energy, so they mostly hang out in deep space and send their agents to do their dirty work, to try and twist the Cosmic Nerd’s gifts and use it against us, against all sentient beings, basically.”
    “And the, ah, Cosmic Nerds gave us our powers so we could join the fight against the Outsiders?”
    “I didn’t get all the details, but I think that’s their plan; the powers were meant to prep us for the conflict. A quickie upgrade so we could contribute to the war effort. Which makes us a bunch of primitive natives getting some shiny new guns so we can go fight for our new overlords. Don’t know if I like that.”
    “I’m not sure I like it either, but it answers the question of the century,” John said. “People have been wracking their minds for decades trying to figure out where the Source came from.”
    “The Source? That’s what you call the Spooky Energy thingy?”
    “One of my colleagues came up with the name. It has a nicer ring than Einstein’s Spooky Energy or Oppenheimer’s Gifts of Shiva.” John had met Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer a few times, but the unbridled hostility both human geniuses felt towards Neolympians had cast a pall on those meetings. Daedalus Smith had coined the more neutral term.
    “Yeah, it sounds better,” Christine said. “Anyways, the Source came from the Cosmic Nerds. And the super-writing, that was the next step of the process; when we were ready, we would figure out how to use it, and that would give us, our entire species, a leg up, a full uplift thingy, so we could go join the local Elder Races in their giant tree house at the center of the galaxy. That’s where they live. By the way, one thing I learned up was pretty neat: once you are in the tree house you can communicate with the other tree houses in all the galaxies, even those beyond our current particle horizon, eighty billion light years away and more. It’s like a Cosmic Internet that spans the entire universe. I have no clue how they don’t violate causality and a gazillion laws of physics along the way, but again, Mayan priest, meet nuclear power plant. Good luck making sense of it. I might manage one of these days, though.” She smiled at the thought.
    Christine’s enthusiastic rant reminded John of Kenneth Slaughter when he got carried away about something or other, except Kenneth hid his excitement a little better. He smiled back at her, and quietly prayed that Kenneth was innocent of any wrongdoing.
    Much like Kenneth when he was on a roll, Christine wasn’t done. “Anyway, the Outsiders don’t want us to join the Elder Races, so they are trying to mess with the process. I think people touched by the Outside end up hating reality, just like the Outsiders hate reality, and that would make them pretty evil from our perspective. They have been destroying populated worlds all over the universe, and we’re on their to-do list.”
    “For over seventy years, we haven’t detected any signs of intelligent life in the universe. The Outsiders must be the reason,” John said. “One of my friends actually went on a twenty-year trip to explore the galaxy and seek other civilizations.”
    “Wow. Did he find anything?”
    “He wouldn’t talk about what he found, actually. That’s the thing, whatever he saw was so terrible he doesn’t want to share it with us. He’s been back for over a year, and all he’s done since then is drink himself into a stupor. We were worried about him. If it wasn’t for my own problems, I’d have tried harder to talk to him.” Kenneth Slaughter’s words came back to John. ‘Cassius… yes, he also worries us all.’ What had Cassius Jones