by Robert Brown
© copywrite 2011 by Robert H. Brown
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copywrite holder.
www.AbneyPark.com, [email protected]
Text set in Times New Roman
Designed by Robert H. Brown
Cover art by Robert H. Brown
ISBN: 9781618429520
Book I
Prologue
First Motion
The Chronofax
An Ill-Fated Vessel
Skepticism
Impact
Introductions
Scavenger Hunt
Grease
The Best Gimmick Ever.
Viral Piracy
New Plans
The Battle Of Arcot
What the Hell Was That?
A Stolen Monster
Entropy
Book II
The End Of Days
Airship Pirates
A Minor Redemption
High Tortuga
Automaton
Reunions
The Change Cage
Beautiful Decline
The Emperor’s Wives
The Wrath Of Fate
BOOK I
PROLOGUE
Show me a man who grew up with a happy childhood, no blood or broken glass in his youth, and I will show you a man who likely has nothing to contribute to society. The same wounds that can turn a man into a villain, might instead turn him into a hero, an artist, or a leader.
Scars add character.
The history of mankind is like that, too. If you could go back in time and erase the wounds, take away the Holocaust, take away slavery, take away every time two cultures were forced to blend, take away every time something so horrible occurred that it forced the rules to change – forced people to change – if you could take away the pain of history, mankind would not be as strong as it is today.
… for better or for worse.
FIRST MOTION
There are Moors just south of the ancient and tiny town of Whitby England. Greenish-brown grass on rolling hills so steep that from the top of a hill you cannot see the bottom of the valley around it, and from the bottom of the valley all you can see is the sides of the hill but not what is on top of them.
At the top of one of these hills stood a tall wooden platform. At twenty-feet high it was almost a tower, freshly built of raw unadorned lumber. Standing on top of the this was a man, gray -bearded and balding, wearing a herringbone coat with a fur collar. His eyes sparkled with excitement and mischief, in them you could see a nine-year-old boy, breaking some very important rules just for the sake of breaking them. Also behind those eyes was an egotistical man who knew without a doubt there was no one within a hundred miles who could understand what he was up to even, if he had stopped to explain it to them, which he certainly would not have. Protruding from his pockets was a collection of slide rules, broken pencils and little rolls of paper, upon which there were little sketches and equations. He had a fresh cut on his right hand that was bleeding a little but he would not notice this until he sat down to lunch, if he even remembered to have lunch. Around the edges of the platform were a series of glass orbs, and inside each was a coil of copper wire wound around a ceramic spindle. Each glass ball was also attached to the other by series of thick copper pipes, which fed into a large machine on the edge of the platform. The machine was covered with gauges and dials, along with one very large throw switch – the kind you would see in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. There was a small cage filled with a half dozen rabbits. The old man pulled up the sleeve of one arm, and reached into the cage. Grabbing a rabbit by the scruff of its neck, he gently lifted it out of the cage, and limped to the center of the platform (he normally walked with a cane, but today he had mistakenly left it at the bottom of the tower), he set the rabbit on top of a pile of carrots, before hobbling back to the machine at the edge of the platform.
Making sure he was outside the circle of globes, he took a deep breath, and threw the switch. His eyes flickered down the now trembling pipes and rested on one of the glass orbs. It quickly filled with a glowing pink gas that swirled slowly, glowing the color of sky during a lightening storm. The rabbit flinched. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew on its fur like a tornado, the rabbit’s eyes widened in surprise, and it was gone. So were the carrots and the center of the wooden platform, gone as if they had been cleanly sliced right out of the tower in a perfect circle. The tower creaked a bit, adjusting to its new weight, and lack of rigidity.
“Oops. That was unexpected,” the man murmured to himself, as he clenched the railing for support.
He was a man of science, but his passion was not for learning. It was for building. Long hours of research held no joy, this was simply a means to an end. He would take his knowledge and run towards his creations with it – sometimes literally. Even upon finishing one project, he didn’t rest, as he was always in a hurry to achieve his next creation.
The end-result was that he sometimes overlooked very important details. In this case, his experiment nearly left him on a collapsing tower twenty feet above the ground. This hardly mattered to him at the time of his calculations. The goal was the bunny.
He pulled a golden watch from his pocket, and pushed a button on it. Exhaling impatiently, he sat down on the platform and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. As he took the first bite, he noticed the cut on his hand. He looked at the cut, and wondered where he had gotten it.
Presently, he saw a boy running up the hill. The boy was wearing a vest, knickers and page-boy cap, and was waving a letter in the air. This letter was an invitation to meet with financiers regarding his experiment today. In his haste the old man had already reported to them success, and now he was going to get funding to turn this little test into something much grander.
Behind the boy, in the middle of the air above the center of the valley due west, at the exact height of the platform on which the doctor stood, with a puff of wind a tiny cloud formed, then quickly dissipated, revealing a circle of wood. On it was the pile of carrots and on top of that – one white rabbit.
Wood, carrots and rabbit hovered in the air for just a moment, and then gently fell out of sight to the valley below.
THE CHRONOFAX
When my father sold our family home I was told I could go back for one last visit before the new owners took possession. The house was filled with stacks of boxes, and furniture covered in white sheets. As I walked from room to room, the sheets gave the place a spectral feel. Chairs and tables were now merely the spirits of what was once my childhood playroom, family room, and dining room. My father’s workshop, where once we built toys, was now a series of empty tables. The music room was just tile, dust, and darkness.
Now that I am many years older than that young troubled version of myself, exploring the ruins of my childhood home, I can’t blame my parents for running away from our family. I had an older brother named Samuel, and he had…issues. When he was six he was so strong willed he would terrify his babysitters, and they would run from the house. When he was ten he fought with my parents, screaming at them, and they would scream back at him like he was an adult. When he was sixteen he chased my mother around the house with knives from the kitchen. When he was eighteen I was forced to lock myself in my bedroom to get away from him, and he took an axe and chopped through my door. I escaped through a window, and found my way to my grandmother’s house, where I stayed for days until my parents’ return. He was a monster, and my parents told no one about him, because
they somehow blamed themselves for his disorders. My parents’ guilt became his validation, and our family’s destruction.
This left the younger children constantly in an emotional dichotomy. We hid because we didn’t want to be noticed by Samuel, for fear he’d lock us out of the house or hurt us. At the same time, we wanted love and attention from mother and father that we couldn’t get because they were always dealing with Samuel. If there was a conflict between one of us and him, my parents would unfairly weigh the scales of justice. “You should have known not to make him mad, this is Samuel!” They would say, as if the great crime was that we didn’t cower to him soon enough. We should have known better. My parents feared him as much as we did.
This is where my pain comes from. This is the source of my hunger to be important, to be noticed, to be a hero, and not the wounded little boy. As I became older and stronger, I tried to stand up to him, to protect my sister and my mother. I wanted to be their hero, but standing up to him made me the villain, since I should have known better than to stand up to Samuel. As I walked through this dead home, this shell of a broken family, I felt a mix of fear and hatred towards those memories.
But not everything about my childhood was dark, and horrific. As I entered my parents’ private office, I noticed it hadn’t been touched in years. The office walls were bookcases, and were still filled with hundreds of dusty old books on anthropology and psychology, some of which had been written by my parents. Masks, headdresses and weapons from various tribal peoples lined the tops of bookshelves collecting dust. Models of the human brain sat on the massive oak desk. My parents had grand careers which I believed I could never measure up to.
Maps, prickly with the pins of a hundred expeditions, lined the walls. These expeditions were no mere family vacations: this was the field research of my mother. India, Thailand, China. I made forts of coconut fronds on Polynesian sands when I was four. I played in ruined temples in the jungle when I was eight. I lived in houses made of sticks, built on stilts over elephant paddocks in the jungles of Thailand when I was sixteen.
When we traveled, I rarely saw my brother Samuel, and life was good. Samuel would be put into a boarding school, or left behind with my father often enough that I saw travel as the perfect life. It was the only time I had a happy childhood.
On the old oak desk, I found a photo of myself, at age five climbing the steps of beautiful ruins in Delhi, India. Next to it was a photo of me in Bangkok on my old rented motorcycle, a young man of fifteen, with a beautiful girl’s arms wrapped around my waist. I remember racing gas-powered rickshaws in the crowded streets, and although I don’t remember the girl’s name anymore, I still miss the motorcycle terribly.
As I looked over all the aging artifacts, I thought, This was my childhood. The life of an explorer, as exciting and romantic as anyone could hope for – as long as my parents’ marriage held together, and as long as we were traveling.
But now that my family had ended so had the adventure. I had been living on my own long enough to feel like a complete failure. I had a series of lame jobs. I bagged groceries at Safeway. I sold clothes at the mall. I was even the only employee at an umbrella store. These were miserable, degrading wastes of time compared to the illustrious careers of my parents.
I hated my life, and I hated how I turned out as much as I hated the violence of my childhood.
My only remaining dream was music. Music was part of my mother’s family. My Grandma owned a music store, and my uncles were musicians playing in bands with their children. Music to me was symbol of loving family, and I was good at it. I wrote music and song lyrics constantly. I dreamed of making this my life. I was often reminded by my parents that this was a pipe-dream, but it took me away from the misery of not living up to their achievements.
I started a band, and we would play on the weekends whenever we could find the time or energy away from our life-sucking day jobs. I passed through my twenties, slowly starting to hate my life, as my prospects of becoming a rock star seemed less and less likely, and my dream of returning to being an adventurer was so far gone that just remembering I had once had the dream was heart wrenching.
Being young, money was always a worry. Bill collectors calling, a constant threat of losing my horrible apartment, always wondering how I could pay the next month’s bills. I never had the hope I could climb above it all.
So here I stood, in this empty house, at the source of all my pain, but also the source of all my longing and unfulfilled dreams, looking for…something. Here in the dark, between African masks with horrific expressions of pain and anger, between primitive weapons both deadly and rotting, between vacant headdresses of long dead chieftains, I found something. On a small table, hand carved with the faces of gods of old, sat the Chronofax.
The Chronofax had been in my family’s possession for years. It was a vintage novelty my father had purchased in London on the way back from one of our many expeditions. As far as my family was concerned, it was a one-hundred-year-old joke, like the sewn together ‘mermaid mummies’ you might see in a curiosity shop.
It looked like an antique typewriter, with a small greenish screen on the top that had the same sort of look as a Magic 8-Ball window. Its keys were round and laid out similarly to a contemporary keyboard. Just above the keys was an abacus-like slider, with dates on it. If I typed on the keyboard my words would appear on the screen. Then, if I pulled the lever on the side it would make a “shunk-chiing!” sound, and the words would disappear.
Supposedly, this machine would send a message forward in time, reappearing at whatever time was chosen. It worked, however, by clockwork not magic. It would simply delay your message, and show it in the future. Time Traveling letters! Magic!
When I was a small boy, I would type letters to myself to be read when I was an adult. The letters I sent were mostly warnings. I sent them to appear in twenty years, when I could obviously use the wisdom of an eight-year-old child. I think we could all use the wisdom of an eight-year-old child at times. I would pull the lever and the note would disappear. Then I would picture some adult reading it “in the future”. Part of me must have known this was futile, but I had few friends, so talking to myself at least felt like company.
So here I sat as a young adult before this Victorian wonder, this copper and brass magical marvel of horology. It was covered in old passports, travel journals, and a thick layer of dust, but under all the clutter, I could see the screen still glowed green.
I brushed off the old passports and maps, and wiped the dust off its screen with my sleeve. There was a letter! Probably the last thing I had typed on it as a child, I reassured myself. So I pulled up my father’s massive old riveted leather office chair and read:
Dear Mr. Brown,
One day I’ll be you, so I thought I should write to you and make sure you don’t change too much, or become anyone we’d hate.
Being a kid sucks. There has been a lot of fighting and yelling lately. It’s not fun here. I’m scared all the time. I can’t WAIT to grow up and get out of here.
Please please please do something cool as an adult. I need something to look forward to. Be an astronaut, or a pirate or something cool like that. Don’t be a loser with a lame job at a bank or something.
If you are reading this please reply and tell me what we are when we grow up. I need something to look forward to.
~ Robbie
Well, I guess the machine did work! Some desperate message from my eight-year-old self had reappeared, and I was reading it as an adult. The message stung, especially since life was not cool or glamorous. Here was proof that as a small boy I was hoping life would get better. It hadn’t, and it would get much worse for that small desperate boy. I felt like I had had the floor ripped out from under me.
Had I ever felt happy and secure? What would I say to this child, if I could respond? I worked a job I hated. After years of working for someone else, building someone else’s dreams for them alone to enjoy, I had elevated myself to t
he position of guy who sits in a cubical doing something with a computer. At least, that is the best way I could describe it to my eight-year-old self.
I angrily typed a reply. I did not think for a moment it would actually go back in time, but I just could not let that little boy have the last word, summing up my failures and fears so succinctly. It was really just me venting in the first way that came to me:
Dear Little Boy,
I’m doing my best up here, but it’s REALLY hard. I have to pay ALL these bills that I never make enough money to pay. I have to buy clothes I hate, so I can wear them to a job I hate, and I have to buy gas to keep my car running while I fight gridlock on the way to the job I hate. I even have to pay for parking at the job! All of these things add up to more money than I make, which means I now owe banks money for buying things (like lame cars) that I had to buy, just to go to the job so I could try to earn the money to give to the banks!
Being an Astronaut is silly, there are like maybe ten in the whole world. Being a pirate is dangerous, and illegal, and cruel, and it does NOT mean you have a cool old pirate ship, and a sword – pirates are not really like that anymore.
No, I am not something cool, I’m just doing my best to stay afloat, but I’m slowly sinking, and it sucks, and although you hate your home and family, I miss my childhood!
- Robert Brown
I was pissed, bitter, sad, my eyes stung, and were filling with tears. I pulled the lever and the words vanished. Then I felt a tinge of guilt: how depressed would any little boy get if he received that?
