Bridgers 3_The Voice of Reason

by Stan C. Smith

  September 4 - 3:49 AM

  Trucks, backhoes, and forklifts now occupied the training lawn behind SafeTrek. LED floodlights lit the area as technicians and machine operators worked furiously to set up and install the generators.

  “Well, this isn’t what I had in mind,” Desmond said to Infinity as he propped open the back door to the SafeTrek facility with the empty water bottle he’d just drained. He had hoped they would be able to sit on the grass in the silent darkness one more time. After all, these were their last few hours on this earth. After dinner, they had slept together in his bunk for ten hours, and now they both felt the need to get out of the building for a while.

  “This way,” Infinity said.

  He followed her to the edge of the lawn and into the forest, finally stopping at a half-buried granite boulder the size of a minivan. They crawled on top of it and sat facing away from the harsh lights. Infinity took a drink of her protein water and set the bottle down between them.

  A few seconds later, the ground began quaking. After about twenty seconds of moderate tremors, the quake intensified, and Desmond had to grab the bottle to keep it from tumbling off the rock. The rumbling went on for what seemed like a full minute. Desmond heard some of the workers swearing in frustration.

  He turned around to check on the SafeTrek building—no visible damage. Fortunately, the block-like structure had been designed to withstand natural disasters, although no one at the time could have known what was coming.

  Infinity scooted her body in front of Desmond’s and leaned back against his chest, a position in which they had both found comfort since the first night they’d spent together. On that night, they had been hiding from killer bird men, high in a tree on another version of Earth. Huddling together had been nothing more than a survival tactic that night, but since then this position had become more meaningful.

  Infinity turned her head to the side to avoid resting her stitches against Desmond’s skin, and they sat this way in silence for several minutes, staring up through the trees at the stars. The sky seemed non-threatening, with no aurora borealis to foretell the devastating disaster that would soon destroy every living thing on the planet. No one and nothing would escape. Unless they were lucky enough to bridge to an alternate world in which humans had never used bridging technology.

  “I suppose you’ll lose your stitches when we bridge,” Desmond said.

  Infinity shrugged slightly. “Didn’t really need them anyway.”

  Desmond put an arm around her, resting his hand on her belly. “Everything feels different this time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This time we aren’t coming back.”

  “How about we don’t talk about tomorrow,” she said. “I just want to be here in this moment, this night. With you.”

  “Okay.” He gazed up at the stars. “You and I have been through a lot. We almost didn’t make it this time. And I suspect both of us have been changed as a result. I still can’t quite believe I can talk to people with my mind.”

  “It’s kind of creepy, but I suppose it could be useful at times.”

  Desmond thought about this. He hadn’t had much time yet to consider the ways his ability could be useful. On a whim, he envisioned the most erotic scenario he could think of. It involved an isolated, sun-drenched beach and several mutually-climactic seconds of love making with Infinity. He then pushed that mental vision from his mind into hers.

  Infinity inhaled sharply, and her entire body stiffened. She moaned and pressed herself back into his chest. “Yeah,” she whispered,“your ability could definitely be useful now and then. But if you ever do that to someone else, your life might be suddenly shortened.”

  He pulled her even closer. “Deal.”

  She let out a brief chuckle.

  After a few more minutes of silence, she slapped his knee with her palm. “You said you thought both of us had been changed. How am I changed?”

  “Well, now that you bring it up, I was thinking about your ordeal with the venomcrook. Apparently rapture is pretty much the most pleasurable feeling a human could ever experience, right?”

  “You do remember it almost killed me, right?”

  “Yeah, well. My point is, how am I supposed to compete with that?”

  She slapped his knee again, this time harder. “Are you serious?”

  It was his turn to chuckle. “Not really. Well, only partially. I kind of meant it as a joke.”

  She actually laughed aloud, and her laugh carried on for many seconds, as if she were finally releasing an immeasurable burden.

  “Okay,” she said after her laughter trailed off. “You want to compete with rapture? A few years of practice would be a good start.”

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  Author’s Notes

  Some of you may have questions. So I have decided to offer my thoughts on a few things related to Bridgers 3: The Voice of Reason. These topics are in no particular order, and they may not even be important to most people. But I like to contemplate things like this.

  How devastating was the mongrel invasion of this version of Earth? This story is based on the idea that a bizarre species of intelligent life, the mongrels, bridged to this version of Earth in 1927 and basically reformed the entire surface of the planet into what they thought was its most natural state. They transformed all cities, machinery, paved roads, and other human-made things back into soil, along with many of the human inhabitants. In 1927, the world population had just hit two billion. In the region of Missouri forest depicted in Bridgers 3, there are about 250 painted natives and 50 ferals in a four-square-mile area, which is about 75 humans per square mile. Assuming this population density is uniform throughout the state of Missouri (a very iffy assumption), and since Missouri is 69,700 square miles, this means the population of Missouri would max out at 5.2 million. This is only 10 million less than the population of Missouri today.

  Based on those calculations, you might assume that almost as many humans could live on Earth with the mongrels present as would be possible without the mongrels. But this assumption would be wildly off the mark. Why? Because the mongrels do not allow humans to construct shelters. The mongrel bailiwick in this book is in an area of Missouri that happens to have a number of caves where humans could take shelter in the winter (although those caves are typically only 55-58 degrees F, that is a far cry better than sub-freezing Missouri winters). Most other places on Earth do not have caves or any other natural shelters. And many other places are far more hostile to
human survival than Missouri.

  So, the mongrel invasion was indeed a devastating event to this world.

  How did the mongrels get to this world? That depends on whether you believe what the mongrels have told Desmond. They definitely arrived via bridging technology. But did they bridge their huge 60-foot, fluid-filled domiciles, too? Good question. The answer to this depends on whether you believe they really do have a “key” that unlocks the limitations of the bridging machinery imposed by the Outlanders.

  What is this “key” all about? The mongrels claim that the Outlanders embedded a key to the bridging technology somewhere in the instructions the Outlanders transmitted into space. If you believe what the mongrels have said, this key allows certain civilizations to unlock additional features of the bridging device. For instance, it allows you to override the limitation of only thirty-six hours for each bridging excursion. And it allows the device to be used without creating the heavy particles that drift to the core of the planet and cause the planet’s destruction. In other words, it could be a very useful key.

  Are the mongrels the Outlanders? This depends on whether you trust them to be truthful. They told Desmond they weren’t. Were they telling the truth?

  Did the mongrels really evolve on an alternate version of Earth? I think this is certainly possible. As Desmond said, it all depends on how far back your divergence point is. If they came from a version of Earth with a divergence point of two billion years ago, this was about the time multicellular life appeared. At that point, the future direction of complex life forms was wide open. Considering we have nearly-transparent aquatic creatures such as jellyfish, is it too far fetched to imagine that transparent, intelligent creatures could evolve in a liquid substrate? And if they did, it seems to me that a big step in that species’ gradual expansion over the planet would eventually involve mobile—perhaps even living—domiciles allowing them to move out onto the land. Kind of like the opposite of our submarines. So, yes, it’s possible the mongrels originated on an alternate earth. The question is, did they?

  Why don’t the mongrels have machines? The mongrels have developed a different kind of technology. Instead of mastering the manipulation of solid raw materials such as stone and metal, they have mastered the manipulation of biological systems. Their “machines” are living things. Their domicile bubbles are living things. Even their weapons, such as the venomcrook, are living things.

  Where did the musk monkeys come from? These creatures either originated on the mongrels’ own version of the earth (assuming you believe the mongrels aren’t aliens from another planet other than the earth), or they are creatures the mongrels picked up from another version of Earth they visited at some point. Due to the mongrels’ obvious physical limitations on dry land, they need musk monkeys to carry out many tasks they cannot or prefer not to do themselves.

  Why do the musk monkeys and local humans talk the way they do? Well, remember that the mongrels arrived on this version of Earth in 1927, and they immediately brought a halt to human industrial progress. In this rural region of the Midwest United States, the language continued to evolve, but not in the same way it would have without the mongrels’ presence. Most references to man-made objects eventually disappeared, and all phrases typically became derived from the context of living in a wilderness setting. And, of course, there are some phrases that survived from the time period of the early 1900s. Since Abel (and the mongrels) needed to communicate with the local humans, they adopted the local language and phrases.

  Are the venomcrooks really alive? And how do they work? As stated above, the mongrels mastered biological (organic) technology, rather than mechanical/electronic technology. They can create and transform living tissue at will. The venomcrook is just one example of this. These living weapons were created to help musk monkeys subdue local humans and keep them in line, often by forcing them to become addicted to rapture. Venomcrooks were designed by the mongrels in such a way that the “venom” administered could be altered by manipulating an exposed tendon on the handle. In this way, the user (usually a musk monkey) could choose between pain, rapture, or any number of other terrible consequences. The venom crooks were intended to be used by musk monkeys, but that didn’t prevent the mongrels from providing some for the natives and the refugees, just to make the imminent conflict more entertaining for the mongrels to watch. Those mongrels and their shenanigans!

  Why the title, The Voice of Reason? This title refers to several different aspects of the story. In a very literal sense, it refers to the actual voice of the feral named Reason, which Desmond had to learn to emulate in order to initiate communication with the mongrels. In a more figurative sense, it refers to the challenge of getting the painted natives to listen to and agree to Desmond’s plan for combining the two herds.

  Okay, what about the rather mind-bending concept of the possible existence of infinite parallel universes?

  While there are certainly cosmologists who are skeptical of the concept, it is important to point out that multiple parallel universes is not a theory. Scientists did not simply come up with the idea using their imaginations. Instead, the concept is a mathematical consequence of our current theories in physics, particularly quantum mechanics and string theory.

  If we assume that quantum mechanics and string theory are not completely wrong, then it is important for scientists to examine all of the mathematical consequences of those theories. Even if those consequences (such as parallel universes) seem strange to us. This is often how science moves forward.

  There are at least five plausible scientific theories that suggest the existence of multiple universes (the “multiverse”). My favorite of these is the concept of “daughter universes” suggested by the theory of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics describes things in terms of probabilities, rather than definite outcomes. The mathematics of quantum mechanics suggest that every possible outcome of every situation actually occurs—in its own separate universe.

  Everything is made up of tiny particles, and what this “daughter universes” concept boils down to is that there could be infinite parallel universes, each of them differing by the position of only one particle.

  The concept boggles the mind. But it certainly makes for a fun story.

  Acknowledgments

  I am not capable of creating a book such as this on my own. I have the following people, among others, to thank for their assistance.

  When it comes to editing, my son Micheal Smith is extremely talented, and his tireless and meticulous suggestions are invaluable. If you find a sentence or detail in the book that doesn’t seem right, it is likely because I failed to implement one of his suggestions.

  My wife Trish is always the first to read my work, and therefore she has the burden of seeing my stories in their roughest form. Thankfully, she kindly points out where things are a mess. Her suggestions are what get the editing process started. She also helps with various promotional efforts. And finally, she not only tolerates my obsession with writing, she actually encourages it.

  I also owe thanks to those on my Advance Reviewer team. They were able to point out numerous typos and inconsistencies.

  Finally, I am thankful to all the independent freelance designers out there who provide quality work for independent authors such as myself. Jake Caleb Clark (www.jcalebdesign.com) created the awesome cover for Bridgers 3: The Voice of Reason.

  About the Author

  Stan Smith has lived most of his life in the Midwest United States and currently resides in Warrensburg, Missouri. He writes adventure novels and short stories that have a generous sprinkling of science fiction. His novels and stories are about regular people who find themselves caught up in highly unusual situations. They are designed to stimulate your sense of wonder, get your heart pounding, and keep you reading late into the night, with minimal risk of exposure to spelling and punctuation errors. His books are for anyone who loves adventure, discovery, and mind-bending surprises.

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  Feel free to email Stan at: stan@stancsmith.com

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  There’s More To This Story!

  That’s right—Bridgers continues. Infinity and Desmond have much more work to do. Will colony ST6 get a chance to bridge out?

  Be sure to check out the next book in the series, Bridgers 4.

  Available November, 2018.

  Also by Stan C. Smith

  The DIFFUSION series

  Diffusion

  Infusion

  Profusion

  Savage

  Blue Arrow

  The BRIDGERS series

  Bridgers 1: The Lure of Infinity

  Bridgers 2: The Cost of Survival

  Bridgers 3: The Voice of Reason

  Stand-alone Stories

  Parthenium’s Year