About the same time that Earth’s primordial soup was spawning life, death was occurring on Mars with the eruption of Olympus Mons. The largest volcano in the solar system, it towered sixteen miles above the surface of the Red Planet—three times higher than Mount Everest—and is roughly the size of the state of Arizona. Olympus Mons contains six collapsed craters known as calderas. These magma chambers are stacked atop one another to form a depression that is fifty-three miles wide at the summit. The worst of the lot are resurgent calderas—geological time-bombs responsible for massive eruptions and extinction events.

In the United States there are three resurgent calderas less than 1.5 million years old—the Long Valley Caldera in California, the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The last caldera eruption on Earth occurred 74,000 years ago on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. The Toba caldera complex generated nearly three thousand times more pyroclastic material than Mount St. Helens and unleashed an ash cloud that encompassed Earth’s atmosphere, which led to a decade of volcanic winter that wiped out nearly every hominid on the planet.

I closed the story.

I was back. I was really back, back at Loch Ness! My family was safe and intact, True was alive, and David Taylor was just a middle school kid hitting puberty. Vostok hadn’t happened yet, but Ming and Ben would be arriving any minute to make their pitch.

Screw them!

Avi Socha had allowed me to retain the knowledge of my past multiverses, and in this reality I’d be ready.

Creating an encrypted file on my laptop, I typed furiously, describing every detail I could about the zero-point energy generator and the Yellowstone Caldera.

That gave me pause.

A cataclysmic eruption had transpired on ancient Mars, ending an autocratic rule while pushing a civilization to venture into space. Yet, only by vanquishing their egos were the descendants of Avi Socha allowed access into the higher dimensions and taught how to traverse the cosmos and mingle with other races.

For thousands of years, advanced species of extraterrestrials had kept an eye on us. That relationship changed once we had discovered how to split the atom. Like an adolescent with a new gun, we had become a threat to ourselves and others.

Much had changed since Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Roswell.

Forty percent of the wealth on our planet was now controlled by one percent of the population. Two billion people lived in poverty; another two billion were starving. Meanwhile, we were polluting our oceans and atmosphere, our forced addiction to fossil fuels causing the earth to warm, the ice to melt.

Could zero-point energy save us?

Would the shadow government allow it?

If not, was the Yellowstone Caldera the catalyst that would advance our species… or end it?