The Oklo Device

Evelyn Gilmore, a headstrong black anthropologist, is onto what she hopes is the discovery of a lifetime when she begins an excavation in the northern Brazilian town of Salvador. But what she anticipates as the uncovering of relics from a 19th-century slave revolt becomes the deconstruction of everything we know about human history—as she finds in a 900-foot-deep cavern modern technology from a time before man ever walked the earth.

Gilmore’s ex, Cornell Nye, a specialist with NASA’s LINEAR team—which detects asteroids and other near-Earth objects—meanwhile has been hand-selected for a crew tasked with manning a device to protect the planet from a colossal body that NASA has recently discovered is heading for Earth. Nye and other top LINEAR personnel are flown to a small town in the eastern savannas of African Gabon, where the United States has maintained a secret base for several years. At the abandoned Oklo mines, a pre-ancient technological marvel has been uncovered; years in the works, a special U.S. team of scientists has resolved its functionality—it is a device from the same prehistoric time as Gilmore’s discovery in Brazil. It is a device meant to protect Earth from cosmic debris.

Gilmore teams up with historical linguist and former colleague/lover C.L. Brody to unlock the mystery of an ancient language she has found in her discovery in the Brazilian cavern. After talking with her ex, Nye, they determine that their structure is intricately linked with the device in the Oklo mines—halfway across the globe. Gilmore solves the puzzle of the link: When all the continents were one—millions of years ago—the northern coast of Brazil was merged with Gabon, in the supercontinent known as Pangaea. Gilmore’s find in Brazil is the key to making the Oklo device work properly to protect Earth from the titanic asteroid plunging through space.

As the asteroid hurtles inbound, Gilmore and Brody in Brazil work with Nye in Oklo to change the fate of the planet. They then uncover the real, harrowing truth about the ancient technology—and about the true history of mankind.