With Slayton’s enlistment the team was fully assembled, and the work of disrupting humanity’s collective understanding of its own past was taken up once more. Two of the group’s projects mounted at this time will serve to illustrate the increasingly powerful effects of their work. The first, fueled by Malcolm’s belief that there had been no greater inspiration for violence and destruction in the entire saga of human experience than Christianity, was another project for Tarbell and Fouché, whose many months of work culminated in the creation of the famous document that has since come to be known as "the Fifth Gospel."

Purportedly written by the disciple Paul in the mid—1st century, the text describes the need to lie about the life and supposed miracles of Jesus Christ in order to spread the new faith. The results of this "revelation" I hardly need record–for while the Alexandra the Great and Churchill controversies were focused, at least initially, on academic and political circles, most of the world was immediately swept up in and polarized by the battle over the Fifth Gospel, which inspired the creation of an unprecedented number of websites and online journalistic organs devoted entirely to the debate. How all those millions of confused, passionate souls would react today to the revelation that their crisis of faith was created and manipulated by a mere seven people aboard a mysterious electromagnetic vessel I can’t say. For my part, I still stand in awe of the feat.

But Malcolm’s team, rather than pausing for self-congratulation, immediately turned its attention to that greatest of secular religions, science–specifically, evolution. The work here involved the creation of a deceptively simple set of artifacts: a group of partial skeletons and skulls, assembled by Jonah and Eli and molecularly fossilized by Julien Fouché. The bones were those of several modern human beings of relatively small stature that the Kupermans covertly placed deep in a remote archaeological dig in South Africa. When found, the remains ignited a fire storm, for Julien had done his work so convincingly that even the most skeptical scientists could find no way to dispute that the bones were at least 5 million years old. In other words, there was no longer a question of any "missing link" between man and ape, because the entire theory of evolution had apparently been discredited: humans very much like us had, apparently, existed alongside more primitive types of man.

What the Fifth Gospel had done to Christianity, the aptly dubbed Homo inexpectatus did to science; in less than three years, two of the most powerful faiths in the world had been thrown into disarray. Add to all this the numerous smaller jobs that the group undertook merely to keep their collective hand in, and the truth of Malcolm’s claim–that it would be nearly impossible to believe the extent to which contemporary conventional wisdom and popular debate had been choreographed by his group–becomes apparent. Like those individuals who were manipulated by "recovered memory" therapists during the late 20th century, human society began to view itself, as a result of Tressalian’s hoaxes, in an entirely new experiential context. Its utter reliance on information technology caused people–even those who, like me, vainly fancied themselves to be skeptics–to accept the shocking new "facts" that those systems were delivering.

As I say, while my companions were explaining all this to me, they were also imparting instructions, about the thermostatic controls of my body armor, as well as the firing mechanisms of the various hand weapons around me. Things in Afghanistan, Colonel Slayton said, might get "hot in more ways than one." But given my state of mind, understanding all this technical information became a thoroughly unrealistic proposition. I became overwhelmed by the need to get away from them all, if only for a little while, and try to absorb matters on my own. Pleading exhaustion, I begged my companions to let me go to my quarters and rest, and soon I was nearly running down the corridor, ready to slip into bed and surrender myself to sleep.

But this treatment turned out to be very nearly worse than the ailment, for I was awakened far too soon out of a deep and disorienting slumber by the ship’s pulsing alarm. Apparently we had arrived in Afghanistan.

MORE >>