Synopsis of Epiphany
In 1970 Ian Fleming offers Joe Braxton, CEO of Braxton Security, $100,000 for a day of his time to meet Fleming’s client, Silas Marner, under mysterious circumstances. Joe agrees and meets Silas and Nathan Wu, a four century old Chinese. Silas is an ancient alien who needs Joe to trigger destruction of the Vandals, a race of machines intent on destroying all life in the galaxy. Silas can provide the technology, but cannot trigger the destruction because of pacifist constraints built into his species’ personalities. Joe agrees, and his reward is to be physically re-engineered to a level humanity will reach after several decades of genetic and cybernetic engineering, which includes a life span of roughly a thousand years. Previously Ian and Nathan had been recruited for the same task, but Nathan had refused on ethical grounds while Ian was rejected because he was a sociopath. Nonetheless, Silas had re-engineered them both because they had accepted in good faith.
After being re-engineered, Silas informs Joe that the Earth faced an ecological crisis of an imminent return to the depths of an Ice Age that is ironically triggered by global warming that melts Greenland’s ice sheets and dilutes the Gulf Stream. Joe is recruited to join Nathan and Ian in a syndicate to try to preserve human civilization through that disaster. It is a daunting task, but Nathan has already accumulated $1.5 trillion through four centuries of compound interest to support the venture. Joe agrees and is elected to head the team. Together they form a more detailed plan and begin to implement it. Joe recruits Claire van Cortland, his executive assistant at Braxton Security, to be his personal chief of staff without telling her about Silas or the re-engineering.
There are several major tasks required. Joe, Nathan, and Ian must build enclaves in countries near the equator to survive the Ice Age, and they also need to provide critical resources to last tens of thousands of years. To do that, they must accumulate vast wealth and influence in various countries. They do not have enough time, so they need to delay the return to the Ice Age by financing research into global warming and other areas to raise consciousness and reduce the generation of greenhouse gases. Their efforts must be clandestine to avoid governments co-opting them and trying to uncover the secrets of their re-engineering.
Claire eventually figures out there is some kind of re-engineering and she becomes critical to organizing Nathan’s financial empire, so Silas agrees to re-engineer her, too. To achieve their ends they have to engage in illegal activities, like bribery and blackmail. One of Nathan’s agents, Hesselring, plans a palace coup and Ian has to kill him. Their plans move forward through the 1970s. Then they discover that Silas was playing them and there were no Vandals. It was an elaborate ploy to set up Silas as a moral compass for Ian, who desperately wanted to be normal. Silas felt a sociopath was critical because of the necessary wet work in achieving their goals that would weigh heavily on Joe, Nathan, and Claire as the decades wore on.
Besides investments, the syndicate also employs outright theft to obtain funds. Ian had set up a mercenary unit as both a profit center and to eventually provide security for the enclaves. One robbery took $1.2 billion from the Botano crime family in New York, who ran a massive money laundering operation. Nathan and Claire needed to take part, so they had to prove themselves to the mercenaries by taking part in some training. When another robbery went awry, Joe was forced to kidnap Beth Peyton and her son, Tom, to escape. Beth was a psychologist and quickly saw through the assassin role that Joe was playing. When the drug lord’s people followed them, there was a shootout that left Joe wounded. Beth had impressed them so much that the syndicate recruits her.
Beth works with them for a few years and then eventually realizes that the others have practical immortality. Silas agrees to re-engineer her. However, he uses the carrot of re-engineering her son, Tom, later to coerce her to manipulate the others psychologically. But, Joe catches Silas. Joe delivers an ultimatum to Silas to stop scamming them. The syndicate needs Silas’ support, but they no longer trust him at all.
Their project proceeds on schedule through the ‘80s. They finalize their plans and settle on four enclave sites: Venezuela, Malaysia, Gabon, and Sri Lanka. However, the FBI takes an interest in them, and Ian is forced to blackmail the AD in charge into calling it off. When they are laying the ground work for entering Venezuela, Beth is kidnapped by a moonlighting group within the Secret Police. The syndacate rescue her in a bloody firefight and then use Claire as bait to ambush the Secret Police group. However, Umberto Rias, their main contact in Venezuela, connects the dots and links the fire fight and ambush back to the syndicate. He assumes they are CIA, which is a problem for him since he is a nationalist. So, they have to allay his fears.
In Malaysia the syndicate works with Rajiv Rao, an officer of military intelligence, to eliminate a group of bandits and drug dealers terrorizing the area where the enclave is being constructed. The syndicate encounters even greater problems in Gabon, where the French are running the country like a colony despite its independence. They decide the only solution is to overthrow the current dictator, and they execute a complicated plan that eventually leads to booting the French out.
Their plans move forward steadily. However, Silas’ concern with their mental health triggers a realization about what Silas’ ultimate motive is. Silas’ species, the Elders, regard humanity as a grave threat to the galaxy because of their unprecedented penchant for violence and irrationality; the Elders see humanity as potential Vandals if they reach space. Their only hope in avoiding having to exterminate humanity is to accelerate the development of humanity in the highly controlled environment of small enclaves. Thus, the imminent Ice Age was an ideal coincidence that would allow such channeling.
In 2005 Nathan’s enormously complex financial empire began to unravel. To remain hidden, it was constructed of an enormous number of shell companies and the syndicate used a large number of false identities. A series of small coincidences finally brought the empire to the attention of Homeland Security as a potential money laundering operation. The syndicate had to act quickly to pull every political string they had to shut down the investigation. Nonetheless, a small group with the CIA still saw the syndicate as a major threat, especially since the syndicate had penetrated various government agencies. So, they set up an ultra-secret operation in Area 51 in Nevada, one of the most secure locations in the world. The syndicate had to launch an action to shut the operation down, essentially by eliminating all thirteen members. Thus, their own secrecy would prevent further investigations once they were gone.
In 2013 the syndicate faced another threat. The same people who had engineered the Crash of ’08 were still doing the same things and Nathan’s models predicted they would collapse the entire world economy before the syndicate was ready to populate the enclaves. So, the syndicate initiated a complex combination of media attacks and direct assassination of nearly two hundred Wall Streeters. They were successful and the collapse was diverted.
By 2019 extreme weather from the oncoming Ice Age was causing the collapse of the world’s civilization. The US President wanted to set up in the Venezuelan enclave with what remained of the US government. When Joe refused, the US tried to invade. Assisted by Silas, the attack was repulsed in the shortest war in US history. The government in Sri Lanka collapsed, but a general tried to take over the enclave. That attack was also repulsed. The remains of the Malaysian government, after a military coup, attempted to take over the Malaysian enclave as well and failed. An even more serious attack occurred in Gabon when a large force of Nigerians attempted to capture the Gabon enclave. Ian was seriously injured in a mortar attack and Silas had to take extreme measures to extricate him. When Ian was being repaired, Silas also rewired him so that he finally got what he had always wanted – to be normal.
After the last of the battles, the Elders began their intensive acceleration of humanity’s development. Copies of the syndicate’s consciousness were downloaded into machines, which was the last step in evolution for all intelligent species, and they set off to explore the galaxy. The syndicate biologicals then settled down to the mundane business of preserving human civilization in the Ice Age.