Page 31 - Unlikely Stories 3

Gaea Omphalos

turf and they might have had concealed weapons. At any rate, they let
me go. No doubt the moment I left they went right into that
bathroom and checked their stash. Had I left any kind of trail--
smudges on the hatch door, journal slightly out of place? I had to
play it straight, pretend I had seen and heard nothing extraordinary.
Back in my room I sat down and tried to digest what I had read.

It was almost too much to digest. According to Alexa’s journal, she
and the other two are not simply clerk-typists, but high priestesses in
some weird cult. Their deity is called Gaea Omphalos, which cannot
be a coincidence. Foucault is their servant, not their boss. The entire
project has been manipulated from the start to follow their bizarre
agenda, not the scientists’. The drilling site is (in their twisted
cosmology) the navel of the world; also (I guess figuratively) the
navel of that deity, the goddess Gaea Omphalos. And down here, on
the bottom of the ocean, they are performing a ritual of purification.
Not just omphaloskepsis on a planetary scale, but an attempt to
release the destructive strength of their goddess, like the homicidal
fury of the Hindu deity Durga in her terrible aspect. Thus GAEA
serves Gaea--or so these crazy women believe. The engineers and
scientists, who think they can harness the heat at the earth’s core, are,
according to this document, in actuality the unwitting dupes of this
cult. These women are, at minimum, incredibly misanthropist: they
are convinced that all the ills of the modern world result from male
ideology, male technology, male arrogance. They intend to establish a
new matriarchal social order on the planet, based on worship of Gaea
Omphalos and the rule of high priestesses (themselves, of course).

Like other doomsday cults, this one attracts and entraps its followers
with end-of-the-world prophecies. Such groups have always had to
retrench after the magic date comes and goes, surviving if they can
sell the idea that only their intercession prevented catastrophe (an
outcome they previously had considered inevitable, if not
supernaturally ordained). Not so this group: their prophecy will be
self-fulfilling. Through Foucault and their distortion of geological and
process control data, the shaft is heading straight for a gigantic dome
of compressed toxic gases trapped for eons beneath suboceanic rock
strata. When the Faustian phallic drill penetrates the lowest layer of
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