In a world where a human volunteer, smart, yet bold and lacking common sense, journeys into multi-parallel universes in order to save his nation and kind from extinction, takes an unexpected turn of events and enters a different, exotic world where...
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THE PENTAGON'S CONCOURSE had high and low ranking military officers and civilian officials conversing between one another that echoed in the large, concentric complex. Ryan, having been in the Pentagon more than he could count, whenever he'd trained for his long-awaited mission in the lower levels, found himself on the Southeast side, concentric ring E, the second floor, exiting the Pentagon Metro Station. This area is mainly where visitors entered the building, as a series of bays and corridors (corridor one and ten on the Southeast side) intersected each of the five concentric rings that made the pentagon-shaped structure.
The two hundred and eight-year-old stripped classicist building seemed like an ancient building like the White House every time Ryan stared from the Northwest side of concentric ring E, overlooking D.C. and its tall skyscrapers across the Potomac River, the stretch that meanders between Arlington and Washington and teems with filth and toxins, and its surface bubbles with thick, white foam. The Pentagon was the headquarters of the Department of Defense where Army, Navy, and Air Force specialists, strategists, military, and government officials met and discussed information classified from the public. Informally known as "Ground Zero," a presumption that the complex would be targeted, along with other government buildings in D.C., in the outbreak of "Total War of Annihilation," a name given for today's advanced wars that could easily lead to humanity's extinction without further details.
If this was Ground Zero, then this place is the most secured facility in the entire world—but also the most dangerous—he surmised.
Ryan neared a Pentagon Force Protection Agency officer in full uniform, standing guard at the metro station entrance, looking bored and careless like his colleagues around him. Ryan flashed his holographic clearance card at the officer, who simply waved him off, giving him access without further questioning.
This place might as well be a perfect target for terrorists, he thought bitterly. It wouldn't be hard to place a pyro-sonic bomb in a complex like this and get away with it!
Then he remembered Yawm ad-Din, "The Day of Judgement." Within a few minutes, fifty metropolitan cities including Cairo, Tehran, Baghdad, Kuwait City, Gaza, Riyadh, Dammam, Dubai, and, of course, Mecca, were completely wiped off the face of the earth simultaneously by limited nuclear attacks. A hundred million died within minutes, and millions more died from the fallout or the subsequent wars that broke out between remaining Middle Eastern countries who speculated each nation conspired with terrorist cells.
Of course, the worst incident in humanity's history occurred nearly ninety years ago. Now the Middle East was a radioactive, godforsaken wasteland of forgotten rich, ancient histories and horrific, nonstop, conflicts. This was all before its well-to-do deposits of crude oil and natural gas production, fossil fuels that once powered the superpowers of the world, now dried up and left in the long annals of history.
Ryan shook the dreadful thought from his mind, chills running down his arms, imagining the Internet pictures of the Middle Eastern cities in ruin with the thought of ghosts of its inhabitants still lingering all around shattered roads and buildings. Even though Ryan wasn't too religious, he wondered what made this direct action justified?
