Chapter One

Bishop Kimble would be dead before the day was out.  Of course, he didn’t know this as he drove his mint condition cherry red convertible corvette down Pacific Coast Highway on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol that would make Janis Joplin seriously consider treatment options.  The fine white leather car seat was sticking to his sweaty back as he pulled the hair whipping around his face from his blood shot eyes for the umpteenth time.  Not that he noticed any of this, he was what is known in the drug taking business as being in the zone.  The perfect high where he was functioning at peak mental output, where people would be surprised to learn that he had consumed a fifth of Jack Daniels, a hit of acid, and multiple lines of coke.  He was also casually smoking a large joint and sipping an ice cold Miller Lite as he rolled down the highway.  He knew this sensation and also knew that the next sensation after the perfect high was the horrible crash, or worse yet, a blackout in which he would remember nothing and do something stupid, vile or both.  His had awoken from his last blackout in a holding cell in Reno, with a litany of charges ranging from lewd sexual conduct to public urination to prostitution.  He was still miffed at how he could actually be charged with prostitution when he was the one who had hired the 3 prostitutes for his own personal pleasure.

He was coming up on his favorite part of the PCH, Pebble Beach Golf course.  There was a pull off where he always stopped to marvel at the beauty of this tiny piece of earth.  The way the golf course blended into the ocean as it came out of the hills and seamlessly folded itself around the waves lapping up against the rocks gave him chills and made him believe there was a God, albeit the moment was usually fleeting.  It was a brief glimpse into a beauty that brought him back to his childhood when his father used to take him to play this course annually before sex, drugs and rock and roll had taken over his life.

Upon reaching the pull-off, Bishop took off his sunglasses, and squinting in the late afternoon sun, noticed that something wasn’t quite right about the golf course.  The piercing blue water was lapping up on the crags of rocks and lightly splashing on the fringes of the course and the famous 80 yard par 3 that jutted out into the Pacific.  That was normal.  The undulating greens and spectacularly manicured fairways were glistening from a recent watering from the sprinkler system.  That was normal.  The late afternoon golfers running around the course in a panic and pointing at the spaceship that had suddenly materialized in the middle of the 18^th fairway, now that was not normal at all.  Bishop had to rub his eyes, squint, and rub his eyes again, as he thought the cocktail of drugs was playing tricks with his mind.

It wasn’t a particularly interesting spaceship, as they go, but clearly its effect was quite shocking to the golfers running around trying to figure out if they should flee in a panic, or try to make contact with it.  A few of the golfers just stood there, shell shocked and unable to comprehend the gravity of what they were viewing.  To more advanced life forms, it was a run of the mill star hopper, with too much mileage and not enough upkeep, much like what the inhabitants of this planet would call a “lemon” from a car salesman.

In interviews with the media after it ultimately left just as quickly as it had arrived, people described the ship as the “millennium falcon” from the Star Wars movies, a horribly inaccurate depiction of space travel and intergalactic wars that was designed from the fertile mind of one of the inhabitants of this planet.  The general description meant that it was flat, oval and grey, with a noticeable bridge on the front right of the ship.  It was always amazing that humans had to describe things in relation to things that they had seen, usually in pop culture, rather than describing them as they actually saw them.  This was a serious design flaw in the human race that would eventually have to be addressed.

What the people that witnessed this event didn’t know was that it wasn’t a spaceship at all, but a spectacular machine unlike this world had ever seen.  Although its design left a lot to be desired and that would also have to be taken up with the planning committee, it had a single purpose with a very few inhabitants.  And while it could travel in space, that was not its primary purpose, it was designed to fix the misery that was the human race, and could travel is both space and time.

Shortly after noticing the spaceship, it would take off and the proximity of Bishop to the afterburners from the engine would cause Bishop to internally combust, killing him instantly thus answering the age old question, is alcohol flammable?  Fortunately, in his advanced state of being wasted, he never noticed.

But this is not the story of a spaceship and its inhabitants sitting in the middle of the 18^th fairway of God’s golf course, nor is it the story of a drugged up ex-rock star who happened upon it while experimenting with the limits of drug induced mind invasion, or his untimely wrong place/wrong time death.  This is the story of everything that happened up to the moment of the spaceship, and why it ended up there in the first place.