Free The Theta Prophecy by Chris Dietzel

stones could buy in the Tyranny.
    After another discussion with Benio, this one focusing on what the tribe should do with a young man who refused to obey the town’s rules, Anderson thought about how the simple idea of locking him up might eventually lead to gigantic prisons owned by the rich to make them even richer.
    “What punishment should he receive instead?” Benio said.
    Anderson thought about all the people he knew who had been sent to prison for trivial actions, some not even real crimes, while the richest people in the Tyranny could kill entire families or run a drug cartel and not serve a single day behind bars.
    “Any punishment needs to be applied to everyone equally,” he said. “And you should focus less on punishment and more on helping them.”
    “Help?” Benio said.
    “The goal is not to create someone who wants to continue breaking rules but someone who is punished and then wants to return to the village.”
    The opposite was true in the Tyranny. Men were sent to prisons, many of whom had never actually committed a real crime, and once they were there they had no option but to live a life where they returned to prison over and over. The tyranny wasn’t concerned with rehabilitating its prisoners; it wanted people to spend their entire lives behind bars so the corporations running those prisons could increase their profits.
    Every discussion he had, every innocent query he answered, made him more desperate to keep the Tyranny from forming even though it wouldn’t form for another five or six centuries. His mind worked on how he might accomplish that. He could turn the Mi’kmaq into an army and drive off any foreigners who would claim the land as their own. He could convince the tribe to welcome the foreigners and act as their friends, only to turn around and give them blankets infested with disease, using the white men’s evil trick against them. But when he considered the implications of turning peaceful men and women into killers, each of these ideas seemed more insane than the previous.
    He couldn’t turn a peaceful tribe into murderers. These were some of the happiest, most content people he had ever met. All around him he saw villagers who were happy for everything they had, who laughed and treated one another with respect, who cared so little about the materials that made up their fancy necklaces and bracelets that they would gladly trade a gold ring encrusted with rubies for a lousy chicken, because for them, the chicken had more worth than some shiny metal and stones that could be pulled out of the ground.
    A light came on.
    For a moment, Anderson stared at the natives in the distance, unsure whether the idea that had just entered his mind actually made sense. As if testing his own sanity, he said it aloud: “They care more about a chicken than they do about all of their gold trinkets and red stones.”
    And then he knew how he might be able to prevent the Tyranny.

8 – A Cruel Temptress
     
     
    Date: 1803
     
    In the years following the pit’s discovery, plenty of other people visited Oak Island. None of them attempted to continue the excavation Daniel and his friends had started, however. There was no shortage of enthusiasts who went to the island with just that intention, but once they saw how far down the four boys had already dug, they knew the task was beyond their abilities. A thirty-foot hole in the ground is an intimidating thing to see when all you have are shovels and buckets.
    The lack of attempts didn’t stop people from talking about the hole and what might be buried down there. Every sailor who docked in Nova Scotia heard about the odd things that had been found at the pit. Hand-carved circular stones. Floors of wood every ten feet. When they left, they went home and told their families about the story they had been told. Almost everyone had heard about the mysterious flagstone and the wooden planks every ten feet, and each person agreed that a vast treasure had to