Colleen reached for the sheet covering the body’s face, but before her fingers reached the linen of the sheet, the black funnel pulsed again, and this time the spirit belonging to the body who had been named Anthony Pacino was pulled into the tunnel made of thunderclouds.
He floated into the dimness of the tunnel and felt himself move away from the opening, gliding into the depths of the tunnel. He watched as the light from its opening got farther way with each moment until the rescue ship’s reality completely faded from view and the only thing that existed was the tunnel, its storm cloud walls lighting up eerily every few seconds. For the longest time, he felt like he was absolutely stationary but the tunnel was moving around him, pulling him in deeper. He continued floating for what seemed hours, seemingly covering miles. The tunnel extended infinitely in each direction. Finally, after a long time, the tunnel stopped moving around him and he floated at a stationary point, and it came to him that he was waiting for something.
Then he heard the sounds. Voices. No, not sounds and not voices, but thoughts that communicated. They were indistinct and the words or ideas couldn’t be made out, just that a conversation was happening on the other side of the tunnel wall where he floated. He remembered nights as a young child, lying in the back seat of his father’s sedan at night after an evening of his parents’ socializing, when he’d lie sleepily on the seat on the way home and he could hear his parents talking or arguing, their words blurry but their meaning clear from the tone of voice each used.
Here in the tunnel, he could hear one dominating voice, louder than the others and deeper. There were what seemed half a dozen others talking with the deep-voiced one, their voices softer and more feminine. The father figure, if he could be called that, was insisting on something, but the feminine beings were arguing together against his intentions. The words became clearer until he could understand the point of the argument going on, some of it lost on him, but he gathered that the females wanted to admit him to the other end of this tunnel, to what they called “the world,” which seemed strange to him, since he had just left the world — or perhaps that was just his world and the one on the other end was a different one. Then it came clear to him that the destination was to these beings the real world, which would make the one he’d just departed what? A virtual world?
The females insisted that the life that had been chosen for Anthony Pacino was too hard for him, that the suffering of it would crush him. The father figure roared his response, which seemed to be that Pacino had to go on, that the plan — they said it as if it were capitalized, The Plan—needed Pacino and what Pacino would do in his future.
The argument seemed stalemated until the father figure made a picture appear on the wall of the tunnel, with images that Pacino could see, and he imagined that the arguing entities on the other side of the tunnel wall could see it too. It was more than a two-dimensional projection. He could see it in full three dimensions, but there was more — he could sense the thoughts and emotions of the person in the projection. It was an image of Pacino in scuba gear holding on to the hatch of the submarine Piranha. He was locking out of the ship and about to ascend to the surface only thirty feet overhead to rendezvous with a boat that would take him to shore, because he had been ordered evacuated from Piranha because the submarine was sailing into a combat zone and had search-and-destroy orders for the hacked and compromised robot drone sub that was searching for her. Now watch, the father figure commanded. You watch this.
From the darkness of the ocean an object could be seen traveling absurdly fast until it impacted the submarine’s hull forward of Pacino and a tremendous explosion shook the ship, and as the blast was rocking Pacino, another speeding object sailed in and exploded a hundred feet aft of Pacino. He gripped the side of the hatch desperately as the shock waves rolled through him, and he could hear the thoughts of his past self, thinking it was a miracle that the explosions hadn’t killed him. They had, however, blown off his scuba mask and pulled the regulator out of his mouth.
He watched his past self look upward at the waves overhead and he could hear his thoughts that he could just push up and away from the torpedoed submarine and swim to safety. But then the figure hanging on to the hatch looked back down into the hatchway. The youth seemed to freeze for a long instant, then he looked at the surface again and shook his head. He purposefully pulled himself back into the submarine’s escape chamber and pulled the hatch shut after him.
The male spirit stopped the movie, or whatever this image was. Did you see that? Did you see what he did? He didn’t try to save himself. He deliberately swam back into a sinking submarine to try to help his friends! Or to die with them! He knew what he was doing the entire time! Do you seriously think The Plan continues without this soul living his full lifetime? Do you?
The female entities were quiet for some time, and then one softly said the word, agreed, and suddenly he was moving again in the tunnel, the projection screen fading behind him, his motion back in the direction of where he’d started, his velocity increasing until the tunnel walls sped by him dizzyingly, until he could see the circle of white light that opened into the rescue ship’s passageway, and he came to a stop floating a few feet behind Colleen as she reached for the sheet covering his dead body’s face. As her hand moved to the sheet, he suddenly was pulled into his body so fast that the shock of it made him tremble and he opened his earthly eyes to find himself staring directly into Colleen Pacino’s light brown eyes. He blinked and coughed weakly.
“Medic!” Colleen screamed. “Doctor! Midshipman Pacino is alive!”
BOOK 1:
“THE MONDAY”
1
Lieutenant junior grade Anthony Pacino cut the engine of the old Corvette, the self-doubt and fear infecting him despite the colors of the ribbon of the Navy Cross shining over his left breast pocket.
He looked down at the ribbon for a moment. It sat there, next to the national service ribbon and below his airborne wings, the ribbon a simple blue field with a small stripe of white in the center. He’d shown up at his last command without wearing the ribbon, still feeling unworthy of the medal, the full citation itself so classified that his service jacket would only say the bare bones of the reason for the medaclass="underline" “Awarded for classified action in the service of the U.S. Submarine Force during a mission in which Midshipman First Class A. M. Pacino — at great risk to his own life and without regard for his personal safety — performed a heroic sacrifice that saved the lives of three crewmembers.” Pacino had insisted once to his father that an award like that should be given for more than just saving a few people.
But when he’d reported for Submarine School without wearing the ribbon, he’d gotten the reprimand of his life from visiting Vice Admiral Rob Catardi, the former captain of Piranha and one of the three whom Pacino had saved, who had nominated Pacino for the award and told him quietly and intensely that not wearing his Navy Cross dishonored the day Pacino had done what he did. What he’d had to do. So Pacino had worn the ribbon on his uniform ever since, not so much for himself or Navy regulations, but for Rob Catardi.
It occurred to Pacino then that his storied father had earned the medal himself twice, both times with citations too classified to tell anyone about and both times from incidents in which his submarines sank with most of their crews lost. Perhaps, Pacino thought, that was the thread that bound him and his father together — not their mutual suffering or their struggles in the submarine force, but that something in their karma seemed to demand that they survive catastrophes while the people around them died, with the twisted result that they would be honored by a Navy that couldn’t see the reality of their losses and only rewarded courage rather than victory.