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had since been incarnated many times, always with her consciousness located on a higher celestial plane than most of the other people stuck on this metaphysical backwater, the Earth. Subsequent visions instructed the reincarnated monarch in spiritual techniques which she subsequently taught to her disciples. According to her own account, around the same time as the “Nepher-Ankh-Hotep Revelations,” as they were subsequently called, McCullum also began to experience another series of visions terrifying in their violence and destruction: communities ravaged by earthquake and fire, flood and tidal wave. These visions were first experienced in black-and-white, like an old newsreel, but by 1989 McCullum was receiving in full color. Eventually, with the aid of a disembodied Atlantean spirit guide named Louise, McCullum was able to piece together the narrative thread of her visions.
    In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.
    Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.
    Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.
    Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business.
    And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.
    “Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain crazy!”
    “How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to help people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”
    Actualized. There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like actualized or negative thoughtform or color vibration, and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?
    They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant, You have to stay here and like it.
    “And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said. “Lots of people have received catastrophe revelations. They all agree that California is going to be destroyed.”
    “So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her. “Dad is going to be killed?”
    His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they do die, it’s because they chose it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”
    Jason could feel his brain de-focusing under this onslaught— he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios— but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.
    “What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma