Pluto Effect

By Stan I.S. Law

Read this book carefully. It might save your life.
 This is the most apocalyptic period in human history.

 

Ambrosia implements Quantum Tunneling while Simon's team pursues hypnotic regression to reexamine historical 'facts'.

Ancient history is drastically rewritten!

Under the influence of Pluto, the world order is on the brink of total collapse. Those who studied ancient prophecies will escape with their lives. Those who did not… will have to face the consequences. Earth will be changed forever. Hurry! Make sure you find your Sanctuary. These are strange times of rapid and unprecedented changes. Only a few will emerge unscathed. Others will be swept by the turbulent currents flooding the world. This is the onset of the power of the Zodiac—the Age of Aquarius.

 

The PLUTO EFFECT cleanses the old to make room for the new. Physically, politically, economically, and sociologically, the world is in unprecedented upheaval.

 

A few blurbs from 5-STAR reviews below:

 

Amazing!

Exciting!

Illuminating!

Wonderful Reading!

A beautiful continuation!

Book One Brought Me Here!

Lovely, deep and exciting book!

A fascinating philosophical novel!

Only the best from Author Stan I.S. Law!

Get ready to think and then be blown away!



Stan has the ability to make you laugh, cry, and think... all at the same time!

 

And many more…


 

Get the book and, please, write a review. Stan Law, the bestselling author, achieved expertise in ancient myths. He needs your input on how it relates to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: INHOUSEPRESS
• Release date: Sep 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781987864588

Book preview

PLUTO EFFECT

Prologue

Five years after Ambrosia registered her copyright for the quantum tunneling transfer, better known as the QT, we had more money than we knew what to do with. Our job was how to keep away from hundreds of people who, for a small fee, offered to tell us what we could do with it, and some of them weren’t that polite about it, either. I, on the other hand, had not been sufficiently polite to refrain from telling them what they could do with their advice.

Sorry, some of you may know what I mean.

Ultimately the professional advisers had given up, and that is where our story begins.

All around us, the world was rapidly collapsing, yet ours, Ambrosia’s and mine, continued to flourish. We kept busy and managed to be in this world but not quite of it. I know this sounds a bit biblical, or at least metaphysical, but, after all, I do lecture in comparative religion, so an occasional simile on the theme must be permitted. You’ll see. The world was becoming stranger than I ever imagined, perhaps stranger than anyone could imagine. Some called it the Pluto Effect.

Please, bear with me, and you might be as amazed as I was. Still am...

Simon Jackson

PART ONE

We are here on earth to do good unto others. What the others are here for, I have no idea.

W.H. Auden

1

The Flames

Mama Milos’s face on Skype looked frazzled. Her features usually so relaxed, perhaps just a little distant at times, now looked vacant, or perhaps just divorced from the reality in which we all, normal people, find our being. Her call came about six in the evening. It must have been well past midnight in Milos. People, those few who remained on the island, retired early. Mama could only have slept an hour or two. Things were tough in Greece: one had to save on electricity. For a minute or two Mama didn’t speak, as though gathering her thoughts. She often did that. Her mind seemed to operate on a different time scale from most of us.

I don’t want to wake Papa, she whispered finally, her lips hardly moving. Obviously, something unusual has happened. He seems tired lately, she added, in a tone of voice that sounded conspiratorial.

Hi, Mama? I said, wondering what was eating her. She ignored my greeting and went on as though I hadn’t spoken.

In case something happens I think you ought to know. You and Ambrosia, of course, she added, without so much as and how are you, Simon?

Something happens? Now this sounded ominous. What was she hiding, I wondered. I decided not to push it; to let her say it in her own time.

I’m fine, Ma, what’s new? I cut in, nevertheless. I tried to sound causal, although her voice, usually so relaxed, sounded unaccustomedly nervous.

This nervousness alone was unlike her. Mama Milos was the epitome of stoicism. Nothing ever upset her relaxed manner. I still remember when I’d first met her, some ten years ago, she’d exuded, perhaps radiated is an even better word, serenity. Now she sounded hesitant as though she wasn’t sure if she should be calling me at all. It took me a while to realize that she was describing her nighttime Phase experience.

At first, there were little more than tiny flickers of flame... like matches lit at a distance and held in perfectly still air. That was enough to draw my attention. Almost instantly the flickers grew into torches, which exploded upwards, then sideways, until the conflagration filled my vision... I tried desperately to avert my eyes, which seemed anchored by invisible chords to the fire. The flames rose higher and higher... until they disappeared into a dark, convoluting clouds of smoke forming above. Buildings, many buildings, burning... I could feel the heat... the air swirling all around me... feeding the roaring fire...

It all sounded hesitant, with frequent pauses. Finally, her voice trailed off into silence. She stopped, probably waiting for my reaction. By now I was sure that she hadn’t been describing a nightmare. She was definitely recounting her OBE, or Phase experience.

This was the problem with OBE, the Out of Body Experience. The Soul Travel. The Phase. By any other name, they all meant the same. So Mama has said.  Apparently Mama had left her body and travelled, by some nook or crook, to see things that were miles and miles away. In her soul? How should I know? After ten years of intensive practice I was still only a beginner. She was an exponent of all of them, although, as I mentioned, they were all supposed to mean the same thing.

Her image on Skype was drifting away.

Ma...? I was getting worried.

Mama Milos could be in and out of the Phase at a moment’s notice, seemingly without leaving the here and now. A very rare gift. They said that about Father Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin monk, little more than a century ago. They called it bilocation in those days. I lecture on Comparative Religion, don’t forget. Such tidbits of information are almost my bread and butter. Anyway, the Padre was delivering a sermon in his chapel in southern Italy, and at the same time visiting someone in South America. Hundreds had tried to refute it, hundreds had failed. There had been just too much evidence that it really happened. There had been also just too many other examples of his ability. And now Mama seemed endowed with the same gift. And she wasn’t even a nun!

She’d said that the inner reality she entered seemed much more real to her than one could possibly imagine. I wondered if Mama Milos recognized the buildings that were being, supposedly, swallowed up, totally consumed, by the flames. Just that. She saw no people, no arsonists—just the buildings. At least, that’s all she shared with me so far. There are often no people in the OBE. It is as though we had to put them there, like in a dream. Although most of us didn’t realize it, we populate our dreams ourselves.

What burned, Ma? What buildings? I had to ask.

"The Vouli ton Ellinon," she almost whimpered.

I heard that name from Ambrosia. They were the Greek Houses of Parliament. The Vouli ton Ellinon. The heart of the Greek democracy. Now gone? Apparently, so was most of democracy. There was obviously nothing I could do. I promised Mama that Ambrosia and I would be there, on Milos, as soon as possible. Since Ambrosia perfected Quantum Tunneling, this meant virtually at once.

Finally Ma Milos recovered her posture and seemed ready to share more of her vision.

After I woke up, I could still feel the heat, practically searing my skin. It was only when I’d turned my attention to Papa, still sleeping besides me, that the temperature returned to normal.

Papa Milos was Mama’s husband, of course, Ambrosia’s father, my father-in-law, and the benefactor of our splendid penthouse in the heart of the Golden Mile of Montreal’s real estate.

Normal? I asked. Obviously she must have been still in her bed at the time. 

You know me, Simon, I’m not given to hysterics. But in all my OBEs I’d never felt that the Phase reality followed me into the here and now.

I couldn’t quite grasp what she was saying. The OBE experience coming through to the waken state? The two realities merging? That was just too much.

Surely, this couldn’t happen. Not to ‘normal’ people. On the other hand, Mama was so much more than normal.

A moment later she apologized for bothering me and, without another word, cut the connection. This, too, was not normal. Not for her. Not for the smiling, ever self-contained, relaxed Mama Milos. Usually she’d ask about her daughter, if nothing else.

I began to wonder what she meant by normal. Nothing was normal ‘there’. In the OBE, that is. In the Phase. Or here, for that matter? Normal is whatever you or I decide was normal. Mrs. Milos knew that. She was the expert at Soul Travel. In her early days of exploring the Phase she had told us that she would not have been sure if she’d dreamt her visions or had actually experienced them. Now she knew, without the slightest shadow of doubt. And tomorrow, tomorrow morning, her husband was going to fly there, to Athens, in his own plane. She felt that she had to act to protect him, only she had no idea how.

Ambrosia and I will be there a.s.a.p., I said to the blank screen. Please relax... I added. I tried to sound as confident as I could, although her face had already disappeared from my iMac’s screen.

Somehow I felt that, in her own inexplicable way, she could still hear me. You never knew with Mama. She was not like any other woman I’d ever met. I had no idea what else I could have told her—other than to offer to QT to the island. I was the last man qualified to give her advice. Mama Milos was advanced head and shoulders over me in the OBE department.

More advanced than anyone I knew. She was like Father Pio, or some other saints; or people who’d suffered, or was it enjoyed, a near death experience—only Mama was very much alive. Whole and hale.

Over the years, Mama had become adept at manipulating the Phase. It went under different names, but the effect was the same. One entered a reality compared to which the world we all lived in, here, on Earth, was a poorly structured facsimile.

I think I guessed what must have happened.

Last night she went to sleep, and around eleven, still just nodding off, she’d decided to check up on Athens. We all knew that Papa Milos was determined to fly there the next morning, and she thought she’d just check how things were. Would be? People have been unpredictable lately. Rebellious one day—just sitting around and humming songs the next, strumming their guitars. That was the new modus vivendi of the unemployed. For two or three generations the government had wasted countless billions of ordinary peoples’ money on nonentities. They cheated each other until no one had any more money to be cheated out of. And now there were masses of them. The unemployed, the disillusioned, the often hungry and hopeless people roamed the streets, day and night; ever since the bottom fell out of the Greek economy, a good decade ago. Not that the rest of Europe was in much better shape.

Mama and Papa Milos were an oddly matched couple. They couldn’t be more different from each other.

Papa was a very unique character. He inherited the house on the Greek Island, Milos, from his father and his grand father before him. Then slowly, over the years, it would seem that he’d inherited most of the island. Hence his name. He became synonymous with the island. First he became the mayor of Milos. Then, as the economy slipped into a slump and people left Milos in search of jobs on the mainland, he bought out their houses. He’d paid them more than the houses were worth in the market that had plummeted since the beginning of the economic collapse.

Neither he nor the people had any choice. He thought of the islanders as his extended family and helped them all he could. Over time, he became the owner of practically all the real estate. His money had come from tourism when it was still flourishing, in the good old days. Others had spent their money, he invested his. Whenever possible, he’d maintained contact with the people who’d left the island. Now, it seemed, his adopted family stretched out all the way to Athens.

Papa Milos was trying hard to reach the mindset of his compatriots. He was like that. He was always concerned with the masses. With the common folk. Not that he looked down on anyone, but he recognized, instinctively, people who needed help. I suddenly realized that I’d never learned Papa’s first name. Nor Mama’s for that matter. I must have been told, some ten years ago, but never, not even once, had anyone used either of their first names in my presence. He was Papa and she was Mama, not just for me but for all the people I’ve met on the island.

Ambrosia had once told me that her father had changed his name after he’d been ridiculed, in England, when completing his studies. The only place you could find his real name was on his passport. I recall Ambrosia writing it down for me. I still have it on my iPad.

Abioud Agamemnon Damokles Maripeloponissos.

Even now, I can hardly pronounce it. No wonder he changed his name to Milos, to the name of the island he loved. But even there, in my notes, his first name was missing. Unless it was one of the three names above. Abioud? I suppose that could have been his first name, but not any more. Papa would remain Papa, forever. He cared about people. My people, he called them. It used to refer to the inhabitants of ‘his’ island. Lately, I think he meant all the Greeks.

Individuals can take care of themselves, he’d often told me, it was the simple men, women, the many...

I think he had been talking about the many that were called versus the few that were chosen. Who had chosen to be more than... than what? Than part of the milling crowds?

...the many that are lost, he’d finished, seeing my questioning gaze. Always lost. Swaying with the wind, the currents of time, pushed and pulled but the few, unable to find a solution to their problem. They need... his voice had also trailed off into a pensive silence.

Wild animals can feed themselves, but they...?

I was beginning to understand his message. Great socialist leaders dating back to the French Revolution, then the many Communist oligarchies, then the trade unions that had sprung up to protect the many yet, later, they too have all become the exploiters of the masses. The many have become the victims of the few. And not the least among them were the so-called democratic governments, let alone the various religious organizations, the churches, which amassed great wealth at the expense of the masses.

There is power in passive resistance, Papa’d said on another occasion. Look at India. A single man, weak and fragile, Mahatma Gandhi, destroyed the British Empire single-handedly. Then he’d looked me in the eye, as though daring me to contradict him. A Great Soul, he added, his accent capitalizing the G and S. I knew what he meant. After all, as I keep reminding myself, I was teaching Comparative Religion.

Papa’s theory was a slight exaggeration but Gandhi had been at least co-instrumental in the British packing their bags and going back home. All thanks to passive resistance of simple people. Of the many? But Greeks were no Indians. They were not Hindus. Hot blood coursed in Greek veins, probably mixed in equal measure with Metaxa—the smoothest amber spirit under the sun, they called it. They loved it even more that the Italians loved their Grappa. Perhaps that was why they drank more of it. At any rate, the hot blood mixed with Metaxa made it difficult for them to do nothing. All they could do was to just sit around and holler. Even when the Greeks played, which was most of the time, they did so intensively. They put heart and soul into their activities, as though to satisfy their hedonistic desires. For crying out loud, they broke perfectly good plates at their weddings!

If only... Papa had said the last time I saw him, if only they could channel the same intensity into their work.

Papa was sixty-five going on seventy, though, when happy and relaxed, he looked half his age. Well, more than a half but still... Even though, he’d remained a workaholic.

And now the flames were awaiting him, and there was nothing I could do to help.

––––––––

Even in Canada, there was a certain malaise that often sweeps people at the end of spring. By now nature has fully recovered from the vicissitudes of the weather, which followed winter storms. Nature seemed wide-awake after the hibernation that never brought rest but rather hunger for something better, something more rewarding. People still haven’t shed the winter blues. They still remained in a semi-dormant state.

People no longer seemed part of nature.

Usually by the end of spring, people are excited by the prospect of summer. But not this year. Spring came really late this year. Yet even now, rather than cleaning up their gardens, cutting the barely sprouting lawns which, like people, seemed unwilling to awaken from their winter slumber, they remained huddled in their houses, their condominiums, as though not believing that blizzards were finally over, that the punishing Canadian winter had left them for another year.

The weather may have been partially responsible for that. The long announced global warming had different effects than expected. At the north and south poles the ice really melted in great abandon, raising the sea level by almost four inches, setting off great chunks of icebergs to set sail as far south as the northern shipping lanes. Near misses had been reported by many tankers, in danger of spilling their precious oil into the already over-polluted ocean.

On land, however, the opposite effect left its mark. Gales from the north delayed the arrival of summer by weeks on end, and though in Canada this had little effect other than depressing people already depressed by winter still further, lower down the map, in mid-America, the winter descending from the north met the summer approaching from the south with such rapidity that spinning masses of air resulted in quite unprecedented hurricanes and tornados. Of late they formed not only over vast expanses of water, but also over extended planes, which threatened farmers ability to feed America, let alone the rest of the world.

Farmers, no longer trusting the established almanacs, delayed tilling the soil, hoping for a more reliable climate, for more stable weather. In the meantime the prices of food skyrocketed, raising complaints and accusations of foul play.

Those were not easy times.

We, Ambrosia and I, remained unaffected by the vicissitudes of the surrounding environment. For five days each week our children remained in the boarding school, visiting us on weekends. At home there was a great, if unexpected, stability in our lives. It was Lazy. As mentioned before, Lazarus, or Lazy, the cat whose life we’d saved, unwittingly, through our very first QT experiment, accompanied us on most hops to Milos. He seemed to prefer that than being left behind. I have been told that cats attach themselves to a familiar place rather than to the people in it. If this is true of most cats, it was most certainly not true of Lazy.

Wherever Ambrosia was, that was his place. If dogs are said to follow people then Lazy must have acquired some dog genes in his murky past. He followed Ambrosia exactly as a dog would, and when she shut herself in her laboratory, Lazy would wait at the door until she’d come out.

Lazy displayed one other peculiar trait.

Each trip seemed to have rejuvenated him to a younger disposition. Our cat must have been at least twelve years old, yet he acted like a kitten. For him, time appeared to have stopped during his first quantum trip. I wished that could have been true for me. The QT hops did something positive to my body, but not to my mental disposition. Each time I emerged from the nanosecond passage flexing my muscles like a young man looking for a fight. The next instant I remembered that I only lived in this body, and that the me within it still carried the years I’ve built up since I entered its generous hospitality. I began to treat it with a degree of affection, with a certain unspoken gratitude for allowing me to use its incredible complexity. Before Ambrosia developed quantum tunneling, I tended to take my body for granted and, if anything, complained at it whenever it failed to respond to my every wish. Now, and only now, I’ve become aware of its almost miraculous nature, of what an amazing biological construct it was; a wondrous result of millions of years of evolution.

Yet, at the same time, as the number of our QT trips increased, I’ve become strangely detached from my physical body. While I treated it with respect, even admiration, my principal admiration was progressively directed not at its cellular structure, the atoms and subatomic particles of which my body consisted, but rather at the mathematical, or perhaps mental patterns according to which it has been put together. And even then, I knew, or at that stage just suspected, that the patterns had been derived from an idea as perfect as that which stood behind the whole universe.

At the time, I had not had the slightest suspicion that I had anything to do with its development.

On the other hand, or perhaps even more so, the QT trips went a long way to explain Ambrosia’s absurdly youthful looks. Ten years after our first QT, she remained an identical facsimile of the girl I fell in love with. I say facsimile because, each time we quantum tunneled, her body, even as mine, has been rebuilt, atom by atom according to the pattern we’ve transferred electronically to the destination. If we continued to use QT, and do some regular OBEs, we were both in danger of becoming babes in arms. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought that it was my image of her that I’ve fallen in love with and not with herself, so to speak. Perhaps it had been a miracle that she really was—a goddess incarnate.

It just so happened that it was a risk I was well prepared to take.

2

Hopping across the Pond

The moment Ambrosia emerged from her lab across the hall—she often worked late hours—I told her about Mama’s telephone. Within minutes she used her inimitable method of travel, the QT, to get to her mother. Lazarus didn’t like being left behind at all. He showed his displeasure by banging his tail down rapidly on the floor, then on the bed, and finally on my lap, which he regarded as poor substitute for Ambrosia’s presence, let alone her lap. Frankly, I agreed with him. Nevertheless, Ambrosia was in Milos before I went to bed. It was just a hop across the pond—across the Atlantic, as fast as neutrinos could fly.

She needs me, she’d said on her way back to her lab. Go to sleep, I’ll be back later.

Before disappearing once again into her holy of holies, she looked back over her shoulder with a smile. The both of you, she added, her tone a lot softer.

Lazarus obeyed immediately, for me it took a little longer. I didn’t like it when she tunneled on her own.

Yet before I could think of a suitable repartee, she was gone. I don’t mean to Milos, but to her lab where her QT equipment, which, when not in use, is kept under lock and key. I did have the means to get in, of course, but only if I were to suspect that her life was in danger. Which was very unlikely, and if it were, I’d most probably have absolutely no idea what to do. I’d known, and still knew, just about as much about nuclear physics, let alone electronics, as my aunt Fanny in London. She’s been dead for years.

Bon voyage, I called out, even as the doors slid shut behind her. Hopefully, she would be there just before Ma and Pa Milos took off for Athens. I joined Lazarus on our bed. I hoped I might dream about Ambrosia. Even a dream would be better than nothing.

She told me about her trip over breakfast. That’s right. She came right back.

Mother told me that I wouldn’t believe this, but that in spite of all her experience in lucid dreams, she’d woken up covered in perspiration. She’d also said that there was nothing you or I could do. That dad was determined to fly to Athens. With that she dismissed the matter as a foregone conclusion, and told me to go to bed.

I looked up from my toast.

To bed in Montreal, silly, really. For her our hops across the pond seem as natural as they are becoming to you and me.

Ambrosia smiled though her face showed signs of stress. The moment she gave me the first news, after a single glass of orange juice and a slice of toast, she commandeered me, in fact both of us, to go back to bed and catch up on lost sleep. She knew that I, too, have been working very long hours, lately.

I haven’t mentioned that Ambrosia QT’ed back to Montreal directly to our bedroom. She installed a mini ‘GPS’, though hardly global but rather a PPS, or Penthouse Positioning System, which run in tandem with GPS. She could transfer any item from any place on Earth to a specific location in our apartment. The same was true in reverse, on Milos.

She wanted me to sleep on, but my curiosity prevailed. After a quick snack and a nap, we both QT’ed back to Milos, this time taking Lazy with us, which inspired him to practically purr his lungs out. Ambrosia wanted to be there in case her parents returned the same day. With the time differential things got really confusing, but at least there was no jet lag. We’ve both learned to take our biological clocks with us.

The villa in Milos was as much our home as the penthouse in Montreal, although our work did not allow us to use it as much as we would have liked to. Ambrosia had to get back to her experiments. She told me that she was on the verge of another breakthrough. I expected no less from her.

I know I keep repeating myself, but I can’t help telling you, again and again, that my wife is not only a goddess but a genius. If you don’t believe me, ask Lazarus. OK. She never asked me to put her on any pedestal, but if you’d waited as long as I had to lose my virginity, you’d know exactly what I mean.

But seriously...

I recall that in the old days she needed to control the destination of a transportee under hypnosis, and needed her brainwave generating equipment the size of a mega-computer. Now... well, those were the baby steps. It’s amazing what nanotechnology can accomplish. What’s more, given the right coordinates, one could pre-program one’s return to any place on earth.

I could well imagine what must have happened once Papa Milos had woken up the previous morning. In fact, about a week later, Mama confirmed that I was right in my suppositions, almost word for word. The conversation must have gone something like this:

Must you go? Mama would have tried again to dissuade her husband from flying to Athens. When he didn’t answer she would have added, today?

They are expecting me, would have been Papa’s response.

Mama and Papa have been married for more then thirty years. Usually, I recalled, Papa Milos was the best-organized man I’d ever met. Yet on that day, Mama confirmed, Papa, for no apparent reason seemed distracted.

I still hadn’t told him about my OBE experience, she remembered, but only later.

Mama had known there could be danger. There always was whenever mobs took over. On the other hand, that was when her husband was most needed.

I should have known better than to try to dissuade him, she confessed to me, I tried anyway. I’d told him that I felt a little out of sorts. That we might take it easy for a while...

She shrugged. It didn’t work.

’Darling, they are expecting me,’ he’d told me rather sharply, as if I didn’t know how he felt.  In Papa’s opinion there was no need for any other explanation.

Mama smiled. Almost immediately Papa had turned on his charm. ‘And you, Sweetheart, look just fabulous,’ he’d said.

Whenever there was even a semblance of an argument, Papa was in the habit of noticing his wife’s looks.

As mentioned, Mama recounted to me this conversation about a week later. As for her looks, she did look fabulous and, well, she knew it. She also knew why. It was the Phase, she’d told me. Just the Phase, she’d nodded, as though to convince herself.

Papa was as gentle with her as he was hard on himself. Duty always came first. Or what he considered his duty. Of late, he was concerned about the crowds roaming the streets of Athens. About the hordes of his compatriots who seemed completely lost in their comings and goings. They seemed to have no idea what to do next. There were still people in Greece, as elsewhere, who were rich beyond an ordinary man’s wildest dreams. No one knew where they were hiding their money. Their riches? Sometimes it seemed that no one cared.

Papa Milos was determined to act as oil on turbulent waters. He knew from past experience that the government would meet any act of aggression with force. With bullets, first rubber then real. It had happened before. He knew that, but people didn’t seem to care any more. They thought they had nothing to lose. Except for their lives. And the lives of the families they could no longer support. No longer feed. Almost. They survived on pittance. On the dregs discarded by those who still had access to abundant food. The few obscenely rich?

In Greece as in the rest of the world, there were quite a few ‘haves’, and countless millions of ‘have-nots’. In the past, whenever there had been such disparity, what followed had been a bloody revolution. First in France, then in Russia, finally in China. The Mao inspired revolution was said to have claimed between 50 and 80 million lives.

Human lives. When people are desperate, life is cheap.

And now Brazil was close to toppling over. Mexico, fuelled by the drug cartels, was in a state of war with their own people.  So far, the government was holding on to power. The rich in the USA were still holding on to their ill begotten gains, but no one knew how long they would last. There were rumors. And rumors of rumors. In Greece those rumors have already materialized.

Only we, in Canada seemed happy with what fate has dealt to most of us. Perhaps the fighting spirit has emigrated south. What remained were people who loved peace above all else. Perhaps there was an inherent peace seemingly inbred in our bones. Eh?

Greece was a very different story.

Papa Milos knew what was coming for quite a while. By any standards,