‘The sign of the Guardian.’ Jacob points to an eight-foot-high access plate. ‘Go ahead, close your eyes and command the entry to open.’

‘How?’

‘Just imagine the panel opening.’

Immanuel closes his eyes. Concentrates.

Nothing happens.

‘Concentrate!’

‘I am, asshole!’

‘Here, watch.’ Jacob closes his eyes. A second later, the panel retracts with a gush of compressed air, revealing a passageway.

‘You’ll get better with practice. Come on.’ Jacob leads his twin inside.

The interior is dark and warm, the corridor’s arched ceiling rising a good thirty feet above their heads. The curved walls are barren and smooth, composed of a highly polished, translucent black polymer. Behind the tinted glasslike surface Manny can make out elaborate circuits and machinery.

‘The ship is divided into different levels. We’re on the upper forward section, heading toward the bridge. These curved walls are actually interface panels linked to a central command computer, which in turn, responds to the frequency of our Hunahpu thought-energy patterns.’

‘Does this thing have a bathroom?’

Jacob smiles. ‘It has everything. But here’s the most amazing thing—this ship is not just a spacecraft, it’s sort of a living composite machine-organism.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s artificial intelligence. At the center of the ship is its brain—a crystalline biological organ situated in a fishbowl the size of a truck. Running out of the brain stem are billions of microcircuits and exotic metal conduits that feed like blood vessels throughout every square inch of the ship. This ship not only reads my thoughts, at times I think it talks back to me.’

‘The Guardian created all this?’

‘No. The ship was made available to them, by who or what I have no idea.’

The end of the corridor opens into a massive, onion-shaped control chamber. Rounded walls radiate a faint electric blue. At the very center of the cathedral-style, domed ceiling is a five-foot-wide passage, which rises straight up like a chimney.

‘Is this vessel … operational? Jake?’

Jacob is standing at the center of the room, his eyes closed.

A pencil-thin blue laser light blinks on above his head, its beam kissing his white hair.

Manny jumps back as the chamber instantly powers to life. Blue LED lights illuminate from behind the tinted walls and floor panels, revealing a myriad of alien conduits and circuits, machinery and biochemical plasma ducts.

‘Listen and learn. We’ll call this first lesson Guardian Astronomy 101.’

A volumetric projection takes shape just above the polished floor, the image—a spiral galaxy, rotating like some luminescent cosmic pinwheel in the vastness of space, hauling more than 500 billion pinpoints of light around its slowly swirling vortex.

‘Welcome to the Milky Way.’ Jacob points to the galactic bulge, a swirling cloud of brilliant cosmic dust. ‘Computer, magnify galactic center ten to the power of six.’

In a dizzying zoom, the galactic bulge expands across the entire chamber.