Rise of Atlantis: Young Gods

By Robert Estape

Zach is a brilliant teen and much more than meets the eye. He’s actually a demigod and the newest member of a secret sect of technologically enhanced young men and women called Olympians. They follow in the footsteps of the extraterrestrial mythological gods of ancient Greece who terraformed and colonized planet Earth.

Zach and his fellow divine descendants must continue the work of the ancients to save the planet from ecological disasters and intervene in human affairs, preserving all life at home and in the galaxy. However, Zach is a teenager, and he still struggles with teenage problems like infatuation and dealing with an overprotective mother.

In the face of environmental and other calamities, these gods, transhumans, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence work behind the scenes in anonymity to save humanity. However, will there come a time when a madman or woman, a fed up god, or an unfeeling AI, or an alien decides humanity isn’t worth saving? Zach and his cohorts must keep that from happening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665701815

Robert Estape

Robert Estape studied literature and creative writing at Florida International University before joining the United States Navy and later graduating with honors as an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. He has practiced internal medicine for thirty years. He is board certified in anti-aging, nutritional, and functional medicine. He has worked as a gynecology oncology clinician and surgical assistant, including robotic surgeries, for the last eleven years. He is also a patented inventor, a published author, a medical consultant, a health insurance agent, a radiation technologist, a certified food management specialist, and a grocery/restaurant owner.

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Copyright © 2012, 2021 Robert Estape.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including

photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval

system without the written permission of the author except in the

case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0180-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0179-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0181-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021901270

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/11/2021

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

T o my children,

brilliant and full of wonder, who like Zach left their father at a young age. May you grow up to be more than I could ever be, full of love and happiness, and live without regrets, blame, or sorrow. May you reach for the stars, solve the ageless mysteries, create universes, and achieve the impossible. And may each of you be reunited with Pops, who will forever dream an everlasting dream of holding both of your hands, walking into the sunset, and setting sites on the next greatest adventure.

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PROLOGUE

T here had been plenty of close scares before about asteroids and other extraterrestrial things on a collision course with Earth, but then, always at the so-called last minute, which was never really the last minute at all, disaster had been averted. It seemed as if these stories needed to be invented to keep the scientists in unnecessary jobs when the government threatened to pull the plug on the funding, or something like that.

It was different this time, because this thing was huge and headed for China, not some wilderness area, or the vast ocean, but an actual United Nations veto power delegate, the heart of the industrial world. This would impact and possibly shatter the world economy. This was Covid-19 on a much grander scale.

Once the impact’s location was known, the rest of the population of the world, the one’s that still cared, watched with bated breath, in horror, as a large dull-gray multi-sided oddly shaped asteroid tumbled through space, like a freaky acrobat, without balance and totally out of control. Its surface displayed holes and cracks, frown-lines and wrinkles, like some old familiar uncle you hadn’t seen for a while, probably because it was too familiar a sight in the heavens with so many asteroids, so many close calls, as the ant-like humans continued their stressful and hectic lives oblivious to the dangers just above their heads. This rude and unwelcomed uncle had first streaked past some old friends, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, who, throughout ancient history had taken the brunt of many collisions, saving our projectile-launching, low-orbit-space-faring, and lunar-landing race.

This was exactly why the scientists were baffled, there was no rhyme or reason to its target, or to how it escaped the massive gravity of our planetary neighbors, especially our Sun’s unignited gas twin. The angle was wrong. The trajectory kept changing. Each pass by a planetary body was a near miss and a new angle following the laws of motion, a new trajectory, homing in on a target like a smart missile, accelerating with each vector change, one near miss after another.

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was no longer funded by just North America. Due to government funding cuts, ongoing international projects, as well as private corporation contracts outsourcing the newest rocketry and technology, it should’ve been renamed the IASA, the International Aeronautics and Space Administration, like the ISS, the International Space Station, but it wasn’t. No one had gotten around to changing the name, probably out of national pride and international dependence, so everyone put their eggs in one basket, and NASA, with its deep taxpayer pockets creating a huge safety net was it.

It was also the only place left on Earth where you could smoke in a public building. They figured if they were going to be involved in end-of-the-world shit, there was no sense in worrying about your health, as was evidenced by the massive mess of coffee cups and cigarette butts strewn all over the floor.

The NASA chief looked like he hadn’t slept for weeks. His eyes screamed of sleep deprivation; his head was wrapped in a cloud of blue cigar smoke. He stood in front of his red-faced Native Americans of the day without a clue. He had racked his brain for a solution, not that anyone cared, not even the Chinese, whose country was the target, were staying the course, with no evacuation and no changes being made. The Chinese people had discovered Christianity, blue jeans, cigarettes, fast food, silicone chips, and some rare precious metals that were being uncovered by its abundance of cheap labor. What we call a human rights violation, they consider it a volunteer counter revolutionary reformist work force. Of course, if you didn’t volunteer for reconditioning, you were never heard from again.

The trackers, whose job it was to keep an eye on all NEOs (near-Earth objects) via satellite, had naturally carried on tracking, with the aid of the latest equipment they had developed. They were strapped in, held in place, in front of their monitors, forced to watch a 360-degree virtual trajectory reconstruct, as the asteroid headed for a place they’d never visited, seen, or heard of, except, of course, on their world maps.

What’s the latest? The chief interrupted their concentration just to break the silence. You could have cut the tension with the latest laser guided tool.

There was a brief pause while the trackers gathered their thoughts, belongings, and employment cards, wary of using the orthodox passing-the-blame-down-to-keep-your-job technique, hardened to believe the data confronting them.

With a delayed reaction, the head tracker finished plotting his lines in a hurry, looked up, saw the Chief looking back at him, and replied tersely, Still the Chinese mainland, barring an act of God.

This stirred some dim, distant thought in the burnt-out memory of the old battle-scarred chief, of a younger self in junior high school class reading about the ancient gods of Greece and how they protected the planet, The great Zeus... Poseidon... the other gods... remember... no... maybe it’ll come back to me, when I’m least expecting it. Then he thought out loud, Does anyone else see anything different? Please chime in. There has to be a dissenting voice; there always is.

Nope, the junior tracker thought to himself, dodging the question, not the planet, his words finally materializing, Confirmed. We’re talking Chinese chow mien. The restaurant reference from a junior tracker confirmed the fragile state in which their uneasy alliance was held.

How many are going to fry? The chief continued the jingoist theme without effort.

Thousands, maybe millions, the head tracker estimated.

At a different time, the boss would have disciplined him for a lack of precision. But, without any research data, and only a sixty-five-million-year-old strike to rely on, the chief let it slide.

Meanwhile, the new Native Americans of their time continued to watch the big screen at the front of the room that was showing the corrections in the trajectory projection. The asteroid was growing larger as it came closer, like some experiment gone hideously wrong in a Petri dish in some BSL-4 biologic lab somewhere in the world, about to release a pandemic.

Still no evac? The chief asked but didn’t really care.

No, sir, the head tracker confirmed. They must believe it will mostly burn up in the atmosphere like all the five hundred or so meteorite strikes daily. But then, who cared for his opinion, or just cared in general? The Chinese obviously didn’t, even after being warned a dozen or more times, they still had not alerted their 1.4 billion people who were about to be vaporized.

Not this one. It’s too big, the junior tracker who’d shown the most promise piped up before any of his colleagues, whom he’d intellectually stepped on and who usually hoped he’d pipe down, had a chance to respond.

Then with a wave of his hand, a parting shot, and no tears, the NASA chief said goodbye, If you’re right, then it’s bye-bye Beijing or Wuhan or wherever it lands.

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CHAPTER 1

N ASA would never publicly admit that they’d had the wool pulled over their eyes. They had seen things they couldn’t explain, cloak and dagger shit that they preferred to keep to themselves for fear of losing their grants, prestige, and dominance of space.

What they hadn’t seen was an aerodynamic spaceship, its curved wings resembling a metallic grey and black manta ray, which was dwarfed by the solo free-falling rock. It had been cloaked but now had uncloaked to achieve a position parallel to the extinction-sized asteroid.

This ship, aka Manta One, wasn’t exactly unmanned, but it also wasn’t manned. It contained a young god, Zeus, aka Justin. More precisely, Justin was an apprentice Zeus, a direct descendent, as all of us are, of the Greek gods, the ancient astronauts who sought refuge on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. These were the gods our ancestors believed in, wrote about, and worshiped, who were now dismissed and relegated to fable and science fiction. Justin looked like a twenty-one-year-old Adonis: lean, chiseled, and confident. Attached to the back of his head was a cord that connected him to the ship’s computer.

Seventy-one point four two kilometers per second. Distance to asteroid: thirty-four kilometers, said a female AI voice from the computer.

Thirty kilometers, I got ya, Mr. Asteroid, Justin said after pausing for a breath.

As the ship had been caught in the gravitational pull of the asteroid, it began to shake, rattle, and roll in a sort of dicing-with-death dance. The heat in the cockpit started to climb as the asteroid and spaceship continued their tango toward Earth. Justin managed to keep his heart rate steady and his thoughts focused, bringing the spaceship into the Earth’s atmosphere along with the asteroid.

The funneling fire-ball effect behind the ship made it appear as if Hades were relocating hell.

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From mainland China, above the artificial, hyper-neon evening lights of the downtrodden-by-multiple-disaster city of Beijing, the asteroid was seen as a shooting star to some, perhaps a sign of hope, or perhaps something else, even a wish. It left a long Me love you long time trail of fire in the sky, a spectacular New Yearish like fireworks display. Nonetheless, thousands of city dwellers stood rooted to the spot, putting their phones up, taking pictures and videoing, capturing this extinction-level event. People had forgotten how to touch and feel, their minds seemingly controlled by their computers and smart phones they had grown attached to, becoming oblivious to their surroundings and fate.

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Halfway around the world, at the haven of the Florida Keys Community College, tucked away behind mangroves and sea grape trees, students walked about the campus, in and out of the unassuming academic bay front buildings, around and about the twisted pieces of metal that were considered modern art, oblivious to the flaming-yellow peril in their own sweet cosmopolitan way.

Piercing even further inside the small-scale college, you could see Dean Papadopoulos, affectionately and sometimes unaffectionately known as Pops, a cantankerous old man with wiry gray hair that matched the color of his beard. He swayed as his sandals slapped the ground while he paced the room. His old, white, Greek-style toga floated above the thick, coarse hairs on top of his feet. His thick reading glasses made him look less capable, as if that were even godly possible. In his right ear was a black piece of plastic, his communication device. You would never know it from his laid-back style and flip flops, but this was the king of the gods.

His office was a 1950s retrofit if such a style existed, and it did exist, if only in his head, or memory map. It was just well hidden, next to all the knowledge in the known and unknown universe.

As usual, Pops turned his TV on. Although he was a god, he liked to stay in touch with human affairs, sometimes if only for his own amusement. He watched any news channel he could get a decent reception from, like an ongoing reality-TV drama. Unbelievably, given that he was a god, the TV reception was never good through the bunny ear antennas in his office, his home away from home. He had always refused cables, land lines, and satellite dishes because he thought the humans could somehow track him, and that he could never let happen. Today, the CNN transmission was decent.

A nonwarlock brass cauldron and a cup of chamomile tea were never far away from Pops, and today was no exception. He calmly filled his cup with the steaming liquid, pretending the spout was the mouth of an ancient fountain in his likeliness. Keeping the cup steady, he walked over to his seat, slowly sat down, and sipped his brew, listening to the chatter, once again feeling as if he were being sucked into the familiar Atlanta-based newsroom, ample with the usual well-dressed and articulate news anchor, Only a matter of minutes until the big one hits China. In addition to that, there will be other smaller meteor showers in China, Japan, and Russia.

Pops briefly speculated on why the news anchor would mention simple meteor showers when the end of the world was near yet again, but the fuzziness of his reception almost made him doubt what he was hearing. He got up with a frustrated look, walked past a large rolling chalkboard with a long, complex equation written on it, and adjusted the old, stringy antennas.

Happy with the less-fuzzy reception, Pops returned to his seat and touched his ear pod. The newscast continued apace, but in addition, in a sort of holographic manner, an image of Justin in his cockpit appeared to Pops as seen through the ship’s dashboard scanner.

Zeus, tell me you got it, Pops said before Justin had fully tuned in.

It’s Justin, Pops, the holographic projection said, You know I prefer my human name… We all do.

Pops was curt, as there was no time for an altercation, While you’re on assignment, you’ll use your given name, your godly name. You can use Justin when you’re out with your homies or whatever you call them, at some ungodly hour.

Justin had to see the funny side of Pops trying to act young and cool, L-O-L.

And don’t forget to tag the asteroid before reentry. This one needs about nine thousand kilos of vaporized displacement, Pops reminded him and commented at the same time.

Nine thousand ninety-seven to be exact, Pops. I’ve done this thousands of times, Justin said, dismayed that his hand still had to be held at times like this. He just wanted to shake himself free.

I’m just looking out for you, Pops said. It was rare that Pops would bother to remedy any potential harm he caused, but Justin was the closest things he had to an eldest son.

I know, Justin said. No one could be angry with Pops for long. The estimated loss of mass through the ozone is three hundred twenty-two kilograms, he reported and then asked, Are you taking your medicine?

After a small delay, being caught off guard, Pops responded, Of course! I never miss a day. Pops was lying and Justin knew it.

Parents are supposed to set a good example to their children… maybe by not lying? Justin laughed at his own rhetorical question/criticism. No words had to be spoken. Both knew the truth in it. He heard a crackle in his ear pod. He knew the moment was at hand. Pops! I’m going silent. The new kid will be arriving there soon, so be ready in one hour. Did you contact the others?

Of course, I did, Pops continued to lie through his old but still well-preserved teeth. The last thing Pops heard before radio silence was Justin’s laughter of disbelief, a sound that Pops needed to get him through the day. He knew Justin could almost see right through him and his