0-Time: PUSH*
The 2012 Trilogy III
A novel by
Peter Galarneau Jr.
e-Book Copyright © 2011 by Peter Galarneau, Jr.
All rights reserved
Published by PTW Publishing Company at Smashwords
e-Book ISBN: 978-0-9825129-6-8
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author or the author’s designee.
0-Time:PUSH* is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are the culmination of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is available in print from http://www.0-Time.com
In memory of
Arah Edgel Galarneau Cox Maloney
Fiction by Peter Galarneau Jr.:
The Edge of Hell (1994, 2010)
The Worms Within Us (1994, 2010)
Blood Barters (1996, 2010)
Muldoon’s Nursery (1997)
The Cubit: The 2012 Trilogy I (2008, 2009)
The Djed: The 2012 Trilogy II (2009, 2010)
0-Time: PUSH*, The 2012 Trilogy III (2010, 2011)
*****
Foreword
The 2012 Trilogy
Ever since the print publication of the first book in The 2012 Trilogy, The Cubit, I have been asked numerous times if I know how the world is going to end. I always answer Of course. Don’t you?
It ends the way it began, I say. With a Big Bang. With the galactic mouth opening up and spewing forth any number of immortal humanoids. With a snake and a tree and an apple. Nobody I tell this to believes such nonsense. They want me to tell them the truth.
Except, really, that’s not what The 2012 Trilogy is all about. It’s not about truth. It’s about antithesis. And, therefore, I promise not to rain great chunks of earth or sky or ocean onto the heads of my characters by story’s end. I promise that I will not crush our great planet in one fell swoop that cheats the intelligence or copies cardboard climaxes so often found in doomsday adventures. My Trilogy does not end with a magnificent techno-ark built by clandestine scientists who will use it to ride the wave of another great flood to a moon or planet or through some hyper-dimensional space rip. I can’t promise you that there will not be fire and brimstone—every apocalyptic story has had little bit of that in it—but I can promise that you will not be cheated. And this is because the Trilogy is about people…the good ones and the bad. Antithesis.
With this three volume adventure, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy (it’s been categorized in different ways by different readers which thrills me to no end) you will meet common people thrust into uncommon circumstances. The date, December 21, 2012, looms as the Trilogy’s forced moment of climax, not as the end unto itself that almost all End of Days stories tend to promote. If you are looking for verification that Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha will materialize and save the hapless humans on this date, I cannot help you. If you want to get an inkling as to why humans even think this way, take the journey that the Trilogy offers, decide for yourself, live with the characters. You are any one of them and all of them:
You are the college dropout, the surfer and the non-believer—if it can’t be categorized and statistically rendered then it isn’t real. You are the victim of an adulterant, of psychological spousal abuse, a soft person whose lost love for life forces only one, singular belief: that paradise does exist but only in the form of sandy beaches and crashing waves. You are one who has lived a hundred years in the body of a fifty-year-old, a self-loathing beggar whose one dark secret has driven him to the brink of financial and spiritual ruin. You are young and lost and trying to find your way through the blight of bad jobs, bad bosses and just plain bad timing. You are an ex-marine, a video journalist, a desert tour guide, a puppet. Yes, a puppet. Strings attached. Fate determined. Manipulated. Lied to…
But hopeful. You can’t give up. Especially since you’ve found out the truth. Not because Peter Galarneau Jr. has made it a plot point but because, like the Trilogy’s characters, you have found the dark side, you have seen the cubits not only in battle but also in yourself and you have fought them with the weapons provided to you by centuries of others so that you may live.
You are Billy, Joel, Stephanie, Janine, Marcy, John, Cooper and Michael. And you are a little bit of Richard Manson as well. We all are to some degree. Evil.
Sorry if I’ve ruined what you might have thought to be the natural progression of any story related to the Mayan prophesized End Date. I just can’t see such a simple solution to our 0-Time and I hope that the Great Spirit does not either. I can tell you, however, that there will be a Big Bang, one that ruptures the souls of innocent lives and places hope on the precipice of fear. I can tell you that the stars and animals (and you, perhaps) have always been and always will be connected to any beginning or end that we all share. And yes, snakes and trees and apples as metaphors are promised to be woven intricately into the thousands of words that follow this Trilogy.
How will the world end? Like it began. With humankind.
Thank you for joining me as, together, we journey toward the end. And I promise you, it will be like nothing this world has seen before.
*****
Foreword
0-Time
Why in the world did I call this final volume of such a long and labored love, 0-Time? And why oh why did I decide to spread the third volume out into three pieces, creating a trilogy itself?
Why indeed.
I suppose the most logical reason for the 0-Time title reflects an end point, a running out of time. A Judgment Day, perhaps. But I can honestly say that this was not the initial reason I chose it. And it wasn’t because 0-Time is easier to pronounce than the titles of the first two novels in the Trilogy. 0-Time came about as an amalgamation of ideas presented by the Mayan Long Count and by a man named Terence McKenna.
You may have heard of the Long Count. It was one of the calendars used by the Ancient Maya which has as its end date December 21, 2012. This date is the last of a 26,000-year cycle. It is the alpha and the omega. It is when one Age ends and another begins. It is 0-Time.
McKenna, however, you may not know. He was the “mushroom researcher” whose mathematical transformation of the Chinese classic text I-Ching inspired what is known as Timewave Zero. Timewave Zero postulates that time ebbs and flows as moments of novelty. Unfortunately for humanity, McKenna’s Timewave ends with a singularity. And the date of this cataclysmic event? You guessed it.
Mathematics plus prophesies plus ancient texts and calendars. Antithetical chunks of knowledge that all lead in one purported direction.
0-Time.
As for the second question: Why a trilogy within a trilogy? Foremost, the reason concerns timing, both in the use of my own (time) and that which ticks forever closer to 0-Time. As a full-time professor, I basically have three to four months (known as summer) with which to totally become absorbed in the characters I have created. The Cubit was written over four summers and The Djed, over a six-month sabbatical from teaching. I did not want my dedicated readers to wait three entire summers for the third volume. Besides, writing 0-Time this way would provide a means to integrate a bit of reality from the surrounding craziness that this world seems to have fallen into. In a creepy way, the Trilogy is mirroring much that is going on, influencing the fictional portrayal of these last few years and making them seem more realistic.
Another reason for the three-part third volume came about only after I started to write it this past summer. In May, a unique idea surfaced. Could I write these parts (at least the first two) as self-contained novelettes that did not necessitate the reader having consumed either of the first two books? Could I write it in a way that moved the story forward from the end of The Djed for my dedicated readers while providing an enticement for others to begin the Trilogy? This was a new challenge for me as a novelist so, of course, I accepted it.
0-Time: PUSH* can, indeed, be read and enjoyed without prior knowledge of the Trilogy’s main characters, plot, settings, revelations, etc. It introduces a new character to the epic who will make a lot of sense to those readers already involved, but who can also stand by himself in this (his) self-contained adventure.
Personally, and unrelated to the Trilogy itself, the reason I wrote something shorter is because I just felt a desire to write something shorter, thus recapturing my long love of the short story form. However, in all of this reconfiguration of the story pieces, something frightening transpired.