XII
XII (Twelve) chronicles of the Old and New Testament for teens and Young Adults: from Genesis to the Crucifixion sensitively and often thrillingly dramatised for teens and above.
It will be released in a collector’s Hardback edition and Paperback edition
Pub date: 15 October 2021
Extract
It’s a small world
Imagine a time capsule hurtling through space. It dates from the early 1970s and it sits within the alloy casing of the US space probe, Ulysses. The contents are:
- A gold etching of a man, a woman and two children (one girl, one boy);
- Digital and analogue recordings of music – Mozart and Elvis, to be precise;
- Charming handwritten messages of peace from some school children in Texas;
- A bound copy of the Bible encased in heat-resistant glass (but no other religious texts: it was launched from the Midwest of America in less enlightened times, after all)
- A copy of our DNA.
The small but plucky Ulysses leaves our green and blue planet – never to return – on 12th August 1974.
It travels for a very long time.
In fact, it takes Ulysses 17,720 years to cover a light year. After nearly 100,000 years it reaches the neighbouring star system Humans once called Alpha Centuri. There, it encounters a wormhole and so, before it has had a chance to make any kind of difference in its protracted but spectacularly uneventful life, our time capsule winks out of existence.
Pop!
Gone …
Nano seconds later, or perhaps after several million years – for the gravity around the wormhole has distorted Time so as to make it unrecognisable even to itself and indeed many of its closest relatives (namely, Space & Continuum) – it re-appears, washed up on the fringes of an Empire more vast than the Milky Way and older than our Sun.
It bobs about for a bit … uncertain, like someone arriving at a party on their own … then begins to drift in the direction of a sentient clutch of asteroids.
For this little capsule has sparked interest from beings we cannot comprehend; evolved entities of almost infinite power and wisdom, as to be gods compared to us.
Its contents have caused more than a few raised eyebrows amongst these super-beings.
Or it would, if they had eyebrows.
Initially it is the DNA that snags their attention – for it is mysteriously close to their distant ancestry. They look closer: Elvis and Mozart are discarded, the two-dimensional picture considered and put to one side, for later … but the Bible they pore over. It is a puzzling, yet somehow rather pleasing object: they are sure this four-sided, flapping item contains data.
They ponder what they’ve got, their vast intellects sparked.
Eventually, after grafting our DNA onto a carbon-based life form common enough in their system, they are able to make a human avatar in a closed nitrous bubble; one capable of relating the contents of the book in terms they readily understand. They are justifiably very pleased with themselves and sit back with the alien equivalent of mugs of cocoa to hear what the avatar has to say.
And, as they listen, they fall into deep thought … and wonder: for this battered tome, sent by beings whose very existence was considered rumour, contains something that fascinates and delights them.
For it tells our story …
And it is their story, too.
