The Portal
Disclaimer: The standard words that someone else owns all of the main characters in this story.
Rating: R (Where's the fun, if you can't push the boundaries a little further.)
Chapter Thirteen
"Okay, Chloe. I'll bite. Why does the story start over 12,000 years ago?" asked Lex. "My Dad and I spent three weeks in Egypt when I was twelve. Although we were there mainly so my Father could attend some meetings, we did spend one day visiting the pyramids. I remember they were built around 2500 BC, which would have been about 4500 years before our time, not 12,000 plus years."
Clark jumped in nodding, "I did a book report about the pyramids a few years ago and I remember the 2500 BC date, also."
Chloe put on a pouting expression and with just a little lilt in her voice to indicate she wasn't too serious, she said, "Who are you going to believe, a book by a third rate historian or an eye witness account by someone who was there?"
Then smiling, she continued in her normal voice. "The pyramids were built about the time the scholars say, but the Sphinx is much, much older. A few radical archaeologists have proposed a more or less accurate dating based on the significant water erosion around the legs of Sphinx, but most of the traditionalists remain unconvinced."
"Perhaps before I start the story I better explain a little about the world of 12,000 years ago. Not how men were living in caves and finger-painting deer and bears on the walls, but rather how the map of the world was significantly different. You see, that time was at the height of the last great ice age. With so much water tied up in glaciers, the sea level was about 300 feet lower than it is today. One of the biggest impacts of this change was that a land bridge existed joining Spain and Morocco at the straits of Gibraltar which meant the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were completely separated. Now it turns out the Mediterranean doesn't have sufficient in-flow without the connection to the Atlantic to keep up with evaporation. Therefore by the time of this story, the water level in the Mediterranean was about 550 feet below the sea level of our times. The great Mediterranean Sea was reduced to a few large salt water lakes."
"The Nile was about the same as today, except the delta area at the current mouth to the Med. didn't exist. Instead it dropped off this tall cliff. Think Niagara Falls, but with four times the volume and three times the height, it was magnificent. However while the river was much the same, the landscape it passed through was very different. What today is the Sahara Desert across Northern Africa, back then was fertile farmland, not unlike Kansas or Iowa. While it was the food basket of the region, most of the large cities were located on what is now the floor of the Mediterranean, just like the major cities of the 18th century were located on the major waterways like Chicago."
At this point, Lex interjected, "So the civilization you were born in was wiped out without a trace by runaway nanobots and crushing glaciers. Then this civilization was wiped out by a great flood."
"Great flood?" asked Lana. "Like Noah's Ark flood?"
"How did this evolve into a story about Noah's Ark?" asked Chloe. "There isn't a flood in this story."
"Well, you are talking about cities at the bottom of what is now the sea. I guess I was thinking about stories of Atlantis sinking to the bottom of sea," explained Lex. "I wasn't really thinking about Noah's Ark."
"This story has nothing to do with Atlantis or Noah's Ark, it is about the Sphinx," responded Chloe. "But just to answer your questions so you can focus on MY story. The cities, countries, and civilizations in my story would evolve into Atlantis about four thousand years later. Atlantis would reign supreme for about 800 years before the melting glaciers would sink that civilization just like in the stories. Oh, and when the Atlantic final broke back through the land barrier at Gibraltar . . . Wow, the most unbelievable force of nature I have ever seen, it is impossible to describe a wall of water eight miles wide and hundreds of feet deep rushing through that gorge. You could hear the roar 100 miles away for over 20 years.
"As for the Noah's Ark story, I am not sure. The Mediterranean Sea took close to 50 years to refill, so it does not match the biblical account very well. A more likely candidate for the Noah's Ark story is in the Black Sea. I wasn't in the area at the time, but from the stories of the few survivors that straggled out, it refilled about 100 years after the Mediterranean in a matter of days and there were major rains at the time. From what I could piece together over the years, the melting and retreating glaciers had left a sea's worth of water trapped behind a wall of ice in the Volga river valley area. My best estimate is that the heavy rains finally weakened the ice wall and about 175 miles of it collapse simultaneously. The resulting tsunami wiped out almost every thing in its path for hundreds of miles."
Chloe looked at the others. "Any other historical questions you would like me to clear up now, or did you want to hear the story?"
Lana spoke up for the others. "Sorry we distracted you. It's just so cool to know someone who has seen and done absolutely everything, ever." When she saw Chloe's smile, she continued, "I, for one, would love to hear your story now, since it seems we may have weeks of time before we can catch the professor and then get back to the portal. So I think there will be plenty of time later to ask any historical questions we may have."
Lex nodded his head and Clark gave Chloe's arm a gentle squeeze.
"Okay," said Chloe. "On with my story. I said the story starts 12309 years ago, but actually it is the culmination of a chain of events that started seven years earlier."
"You see, seven years earlier was my 5000th birthday and I went a little overboard celebrating."
Lex sprouted a big grin on his face. "What?" asked Chloe.
"I have this reputation for partying from when I was about 17 and I was just trying to imagine what a person of 5000 would consider 'a little overboard'." answered Lex.
"Hmmm, you have to understand Lex, in case you ever get married, a girl's 5000th birthday is a pretty big deal. I had been preparing for it, off and on, for several hundred years. I dipped into some of my emergency caches, that I keep scattered around the world, to fund the ultimate, year long festival. At the time I was running a small country, well more like a small province with only five modest towns and a castle on a hill. This was on a pleasant, out-of-the-way, little river feeding into the Caspian Sea in what is today, Azerbaijan.
"So, with money no object, I brought in shipment after shipment of the best wines, perfumes, incenses, and fabrics. And the best singers, poets, artists, musicians, and dancers within two thousand miles. Can anyone guess what happened?" asked Chloe.
Lana and Clark shook their heads while Lex gave a slow nod.
Addressing herself towards Clark and Lana, Chloe tried a different tack. "Imagine for a moment that Smallville didn't have a Lex Luthor. Further imagine that the mayor of Smallville, who no one outside of Smallville has ever heard of before, threw a festival and the 100 top bands in the world all agreed to perform. And the top 10 Broadway shows all closed up for the season and moved to Smallville. And the 25 best, most expensive stand-up comedians all agreed to perform at the same time. What do you think would be on everyone's minds?"
"I guess everyone would wonder who this mayor was and how he was paying for it," responded Clark.
"Bingo," exclaimed Chloe. "We have a winner."
"This event attracted way too much of the wrong kind of attention. Several groups decided there was a lot of easy money to be made in this obviously rich little country. Bottom-line, four months into the festival three separate armies marched into my country. Before it was all over most of the best performers in the world were dead, my country was devastated, and I was running for my life. The perfect end to my 5000th birthday," said Chloe with a sigh and a shake of her head.
"That's so sad," said Lana. "What happened then?"
"After running, and hiding, and living off the land for about six months, I made it to another of my estates, a pleasant seaside villa on what is now the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. Fortunately, back then the climate was much more mild than the current harsh, wind-swept desert."
Lex looked across at Chloe. "So far you have told us you have estates here," and Lex gestured with his arm to indicate the current Roman year of 37 AD, "in at least Arelate, Rome, Egypt, Spain, and Greece." Chloe nodded. "And so far in your story you had at least two significant places plus these 'emergency caches'." Again Chloe nodded. "And I have been trying to estimate the modern day cost of this festival you were telling us about and the cost I come up with is in the range of the entire Luthor family fortune."
"Is there a point to all of this, Lex?" asked Chloe.
"I was just wondering how you ended up just a small town girl in Smallville?" continued Lex.
"When did I say I was just a small town girl?" stated Chloe. "Just because I choose to have a modest lifestyle in Smallville doesn't mean I don't still have estates and 'emergency caches' scattered all over the world."
The direction of this conversation finally dawned on Clark, who asked, "How rich are you?"
"Now, Clark," began Chloe, "While I am sure you and Lex and probably even Lana are curious, that is hardly a polite question to ask. Let me answer it in a sort of round about way. My father, my real biological father, made sure as part of my nanobot gift that I clearly understood the importance of one concept - the principal of compound interest."
For the moment Chloe dropped into teacher mode, which she had been on many occasions over her incredibly long life. "Let's say you have $1,000. If you earn a meager 3% interest, after 40 years it will grow to $3,262. Not real impressive, but this is the time span most people have to deal with during their working years. However I am able to work on an entirely different time scale. After 500 years that $1,000 grows to $2.6 Billion, which is a large amount, but only emphasizes how impressive a job Bill Gates has done to amass his incredible fortune in a mere 20 years."
"Continuing, $1,000 at 3% and jumping from 500 years to 750 years grows to $4.2 trillion, which is in the range of the Gross National Product of the entire United States. After 750 years, the numbers start to become so large as to be meaningless and remember I have been around for over 17,000 years. Oh, countries fall and you lose all of your money there, so you learn to spread it all over the world. Every few thousand years most of civilization collapses due to disease, or glaciers, or whatever; and you learn to stash away hard assets like gold and jewels."
"Hopefully that more or less answers your question. Could I throw the modern day equivalent of my 5,000th birthday bash? Sure, but I don't want the modern day equivalent of three invading armies destroying my life and friends, so I just maintain a lower profile."
Chloe thought that was enough on that topic, but before she could steer the conversation back to the Sphinx story, Lex jumped in with a final question.
"But Chloe, there have never been banks in continuous operation of that long of time periods, to maintain that growth in a purely business environment . . . after the business size exceeded some threshold, it would take incredible computer systems to manage the business and continue the growth. Oh, right . . ." Lex trailed off.
The others looked from Lex to Chloe. Finally, Chloe spoke up. "Lex just realized that my nanobot network made me the most powerful computer system on the planet, still am for that matter, even in modern day Smallville. Plus, I never need paper records or hordes of accountants. See Lex, the secret is to grow your business as large as is practical for that time period; then liquidate the business turning 95% of it to gold, which you stash away for the future or an emergency and use the remaining 5% to start the whole business cycle over again."
"I remember reading an article in some magazine, Forbes or Fortune, I think, about the history of Gold," said Lex. "The things that stuck in my mind were that all the gold mined in the last 5000 years would fill a football field 10 feet deep. The other thing was that all the gold in central banks, like Fort Knox, plus all the gold estimated to be in jewelry in public hands only accounted for about one half of the total. For a substance that doesn't corrode away, that always seemed like a lot to have been lost."
"Well," said Chloe with a big smile. "As I said, I have always been really good at stashing it away for emergencies."
"Now," said Chloe with a tone that implied this whole subject area was closed. "Do you want to hear the story of the Sphinx or would you rather spend the afternoon discussing Economics 101?"
Lex realized the subject was closed for now, but he dearly wanted to choose Chloe's version of Economics 101. She must know of so many business methods that would impress his father. Wow, was impressing his father really important to him? It was amazing how every day since coming through the Portal he had had to keep revising his opinion of Chloe higher and higher. From wishing to hire her someday when she was out of college, to now wishing he could spend a few years working for and learning from her. But that was a subject to be broached another day, for now he yielded to the obvious and said, "Chloe, I think the Sphinx story would be nice about now. Hopefully, you won't mind if I drift off occasionally and think about this conversation."
"Okay, then on to how mine was the original face on the Sphinx." Said Chloe.
End Chapter 13
Disclaimer: The standard words that someone else owns all of the main characters in this story.
Rating: R (Where's the fun, if you can't push the boundaries a little further.)
Chapter Thirteen
"Okay, Chloe. I'll bite. Why does the story start over 12,000 years ago?" asked Lex. "My Dad and I spent three weeks in Egypt when I was twelve. Although we were there mainly so my Father could attend some meetings, we did spend one day visiting the pyramids. I remember they were built around 2500 BC, which would have been about 4500 years before our time, not 12,000 plus years."
Clark jumped in nodding, "I did a book report about the pyramids a few years ago and I remember the 2500 BC date, also."
Chloe put on a pouting expression and with just a little lilt in her voice to indicate she wasn't too serious, she said, "Who are you going to believe, a book by a third rate historian or an eye witness account by someone who was there?"
Then smiling, she continued in her normal voice. "The pyramids were built about the time the scholars say, but the Sphinx is much, much older. A few radical archaeologists have proposed a more or less accurate dating based on the significant water erosion around the legs of Sphinx, but most of the traditionalists remain unconvinced."
"Perhaps before I start the story I better explain a little about the world of 12,000 years ago. Not how men were living in caves and finger-painting deer and bears on the walls, but rather how the map of the world was significantly different. You see, that time was at the height of the last great ice age. With so much water tied up in glaciers, the sea level was about 300 feet lower than it is today. One of the biggest impacts of this change was that a land bridge existed joining Spain and Morocco at the straits of Gibraltar which meant the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were completely separated. Now it turns out the Mediterranean doesn't have sufficient in-flow without the connection to the Atlantic to keep up with evaporation. Therefore by the time of this story, the water level in the Mediterranean was about 550 feet below the sea level of our times. The great Mediterranean Sea was reduced to a few large salt water lakes."
"The Nile was about the same as today, except the delta area at the current mouth to the Med. didn't exist. Instead it dropped off this tall cliff. Think Niagara Falls, but with four times the volume and three times the height, it was magnificent. However while the river was much the same, the landscape it passed through was very different. What today is the Sahara Desert across Northern Africa, back then was fertile farmland, not unlike Kansas or Iowa. While it was the food basket of the region, most of the large cities were located on what is now the floor of the Mediterranean, just like the major cities of the 18th century were located on the major waterways like Chicago."
At this point, Lex interjected, "So the civilization you were born in was wiped out without a trace by runaway nanobots and crushing glaciers. Then this civilization was wiped out by a great flood."
"Great flood?" asked Lana. "Like Noah's Ark flood?"
"How did this evolve into a story about Noah's Ark?" asked Chloe. "There isn't a flood in this story."
"Well, you are talking about cities at the bottom of what is now the sea. I guess I was thinking about stories of Atlantis sinking to the bottom of sea," explained Lex. "I wasn't really thinking about Noah's Ark."
"This story has nothing to do with Atlantis or Noah's Ark, it is about the Sphinx," responded Chloe. "But just to answer your questions so you can focus on MY story. The cities, countries, and civilizations in my story would evolve into Atlantis about four thousand years later. Atlantis would reign supreme for about 800 years before the melting glaciers would sink that civilization just like in the stories. Oh, and when the Atlantic final broke back through the land barrier at Gibraltar . . . Wow, the most unbelievable force of nature I have ever seen, it is impossible to describe a wall of water eight miles wide and hundreds of feet deep rushing through that gorge. You could hear the roar 100 miles away for over 20 years.
"As for the Noah's Ark story, I am not sure. The Mediterranean Sea took close to 50 years to refill, so it does not match the biblical account very well. A more likely candidate for the Noah's Ark story is in the Black Sea. I wasn't in the area at the time, but from the stories of the few survivors that straggled out, it refilled about 100 years after the Mediterranean in a matter of days and there were major rains at the time. From what I could piece together over the years, the melting and retreating glaciers had left a sea's worth of water trapped behind a wall of ice in the Volga river valley area. My best estimate is that the heavy rains finally weakened the ice wall and about 175 miles of it collapse simultaneously. The resulting tsunami wiped out almost every thing in its path for hundreds of miles."
Chloe looked at the others. "Any other historical questions you would like me to clear up now, or did you want to hear the story?"
Lana spoke up for the others. "Sorry we distracted you. It's just so cool to know someone who has seen and done absolutely everything, ever." When she saw Chloe's smile, she continued, "I, for one, would love to hear your story now, since it seems we may have weeks of time before we can catch the professor and then get back to the portal. So I think there will be plenty of time later to ask any historical questions we may have."
Lex nodded his head and Clark gave Chloe's arm a gentle squeeze.
"Okay," said Chloe. "On with my story. I said the story starts 12309 years ago, but actually it is the culmination of a chain of events that started seven years earlier."
"You see, seven years earlier was my 5000th birthday and I went a little overboard celebrating."
Lex sprouted a big grin on his face. "What?" asked Chloe.
"I have this reputation for partying from when I was about 17 and I was just trying to imagine what a person of 5000 would consider 'a little overboard'." answered Lex.
"Hmmm, you have to understand Lex, in case you ever get married, a girl's 5000th birthday is a pretty big deal. I had been preparing for it, off and on, for several hundred years. I dipped into some of my emergency caches, that I keep scattered around the world, to fund the ultimate, year long festival. At the time I was running a small country, well more like a small province with only five modest towns and a castle on a hill. This was on a pleasant, out-of-the-way, little river feeding into the Caspian Sea in what is today, Azerbaijan.
"So, with money no object, I brought in shipment after shipment of the best wines, perfumes, incenses, and fabrics. And the best singers, poets, artists, musicians, and dancers within two thousand miles. Can anyone guess what happened?" asked Chloe.
Lana and Clark shook their heads while Lex gave a slow nod.
Addressing herself towards Clark and Lana, Chloe tried a different tack. "Imagine for a moment that Smallville didn't have a Lex Luthor. Further imagine that the mayor of Smallville, who no one outside of Smallville has ever heard of before, threw a festival and the 100 top bands in the world all agreed to perform. And the top 10 Broadway shows all closed up for the season and moved to Smallville. And the 25 best, most expensive stand-up comedians all agreed to perform at the same time. What do you think would be on everyone's minds?"
"I guess everyone would wonder who this mayor was and how he was paying for it," responded Clark.
"Bingo," exclaimed Chloe. "We have a winner."
"This event attracted way too much of the wrong kind of attention. Several groups decided there was a lot of easy money to be made in this obviously rich little country. Bottom-line, four months into the festival three separate armies marched into my country. Before it was all over most of the best performers in the world were dead, my country was devastated, and I was running for my life. The perfect end to my 5000th birthday," said Chloe with a sigh and a shake of her head.
"That's so sad," said Lana. "What happened then?"
"After running, and hiding, and living off the land for about six months, I made it to another of my estates, a pleasant seaside villa on what is now the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. Fortunately, back then the climate was much more mild than the current harsh, wind-swept desert."
Lex looked across at Chloe. "So far you have told us you have estates here," and Lex gestured with his arm to indicate the current Roman year of 37 AD, "in at least Arelate, Rome, Egypt, Spain, and Greece." Chloe nodded. "And so far in your story you had at least two significant places plus these 'emergency caches'." Again Chloe nodded. "And I have been trying to estimate the modern day cost of this festival you were telling us about and the cost I come up with is in the range of the entire Luthor family fortune."
"Is there a point to all of this, Lex?" asked Chloe.
"I was just wondering how you ended up just a small town girl in Smallville?" continued Lex.
"When did I say I was just a small town girl?" stated Chloe. "Just because I choose to have a modest lifestyle in Smallville doesn't mean I don't still have estates and 'emergency caches' scattered all over the world."
The direction of this conversation finally dawned on Clark, who asked, "How rich are you?"
"Now, Clark," began Chloe, "While I am sure you and Lex and probably even Lana are curious, that is hardly a polite question to ask. Let me answer it in a sort of round about way. My father, my real biological father, made sure as part of my nanobot gift that I clearly understood the importance of one concept - the principal of compound interest."
For the moment Chloe dropped into teacher mode, which she had been on many occasions over her incredibly long life. "Let's say you have $1,000. If you earn a meager 3% interest, after 40 years it will grow to $3,262. Not real impressive, but this is the time span most people have to deal with during their working years. However I am able to work on an entirely different time scale. After 500 years that $1,000 grows to $2.6 Billion, which is a large amount, but only emphasizes how impressive a job Bill Gates has done to amass his incredible fortune in a mere 20 years."
"Continuing, $1,000 at 3% and jumping from 500 years to 750 years grows to $4.2 trillion, which is in the range of the Gross National Product of the entire United States. After 750 years, the numbers start to become so large as to be meaningless and remember I have been around for over 17,000 years. Oh, countries fall and you lose all of your money there, so you learn to spread it all over the world. Every few thousand years most of civilization collapses due to disease, or glaciers, or whatever; and you learn to stash away hard assets like gold and jewels."
"Hopefully that more or less answers your question. Could I throw the modern day equivalent of my 5,000th birthday bash? Sure, but I don't want the modern day equivalent of three invading armies destroying my life and friends, so I just maintain a lower profile."
Chloe thought that was enough on that topic, but before she could steer the conversation back to the Sphinx story, Lex jumped in with a final question.
"But Chloe, there have never been banks in continuous operation of that long of time periods, to maintain that growth in a purely business environment . . . after the business size exceeded some threshold, it would take incredible computer systems to manage the business and continue the growth. Oh, right . . ." Lex trailed off.
The others looked from Lex to Chloe. Finally, Chloe spoke up. "Lex just realized that my nanobot network made me the most powerful computer system on the planet, still am for that matter, even in modern day Smallville. Plus, I never need paper records or hordes of accountants. See Lex, the secret is to grow your business as large as is practical for that time period; then liquidate the business turning 95% of it to gold, which you stash away for the future or an emergency and use the remaining 5% to start the whole business cycle over again."
"I remember reading an article in some magazine, Forbes or Fortune, I think, about the history of Gold," said Lex. "The things that stuck in my mind were that all the gold mined in the last 5000 years would fill a football field 10 feet deep. The other thing was that all the gold in central banks, like Fort Knox, plus all the gold estimated to be in jewelry in public hands only accounted for about one half of the total. For a substance that doesn't corrode away, that always seemed like a lot to have been lost."
"Well," said Chloe with a big smile. "As I said, I have always been really good at stashing it away for emergencies."
"Now," said Chloe with a tone that implied this whole subject area was closed. "Do you want to hear the story of the Sphinx or would you rather spend the afternoon discussing Economics 101?"
Lex realized the subject was closed for now, but he dearly wanted to choose Chloe's version of Economics 101. She must know of so many business methods that would impress his father. Wow, was impressing his father really important to him? It was amazing how every day since coming through the Portal he had had to keep revising his opinion of Chloe higher and higher. From wishing to hire her someday when she was out of college, to now wishing he could spend a few years working for and learning from her. But that was a subject to be broached another day, for now he yielded to the obvious and said, "Chloe, I think the Sphinx story would be nice about now. Hopefully, you won't mind if I drift off occasionally and think about this conversation."
"Okay, then on to how mine was the original face on the Sphinx." Said Chloe.
End Chapter 13