by Richard Gohl
by Richard Gohl
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author's imagination and are not to be constructed as real. The events in this book are entirely fiction and by no means should anyone attempt to live out the actions that are portrayed in the book.
Copyright © 2015
California Times Publishing, Los Angeles
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Margherita, without whom this book wouldn’t have happened.
Thanks to Tom Flood and Kate Hogan for editing and feedback Thanks to Anne Smith and Graham Gohl for the faith.
Thanks to Phillip K. Dick, Peter Carey and artist Pange Niemoeller for inspiration.
Foreword
Sonnet 12
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, and summers green all girded up in sheaves,
Born on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defense Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
– Shakespeare
Chapter 1
Jaguar Gods
AS A NAPEAN city guard, Shane was often required to track down rogue members of his own people; individuals who had taken to the pastime of “getting real.” He had personally dealt with more than fifty incidents, where Napeans in altered states had enacted their violent fantasies as creatures of prey on the Subterranean population.
There were buriers, burners, burrowers, bashers, baiters, biters, and all manner of physically augmented weirdos from the extinct pantheon of wild creatures: bats, cats, wolves and weasels, lions and leeches, insects, birds and reptiles.
These activities were carried out, sometimes by individuals, often by small groups of Napeans who abducted or killed Subs for their own nefarious purposes. It was a form of hunting role-play in which Napeans would use the latest in surveillance technology, evade guards, somehow leave the city, and hunt their underground prey. Sometimes it was murder, sometimes rape; occasionally, torture had been involved, and sometimes, Shane had seen evidence of all three.
He couldn’t understand such social dissolution: these were Napeans—men, usually—with the world at their fingertips, who had become bored and broken off from regular ETP use to start their own club. They preyed exclusively on Subs.
Shane had once followed a group called “Jaguar Gods.” They altered their bodies to make themselves more feline: had fur implants, retractable claws, and dental alterations to include carnivorous incisor teeth. They could have done all this in the virtual world, but they had to make it real.
When they were fully clothed this particular group looked like any other Napean fashionistas, but after arresting and jailing two of them, Shane had seen a sight that haunted him for a very long time. A jaguar was caught sneaking in through the Crafers gate one morning. It had taken three guards to restrain the creature. He had been placed in a cell and Shane’s old colleague, Captain Charles Crompton, had called him up to the Crafers watch-house. “You’ve got to see this,” he said to Shane on arrival. “Caught him with his hand in the biscuit barrel.”
“Congratulations. Getting serious up there, are you?” asked Shane, teasing. “… A regular night for us, really…” replied Crompton.
“So Jag-man was down there overnight, was he?” asked Shane. “We don’t know how long he was down there.”
“How many?” asked Shane.
“Three dead in Crafers, but we don’t know how far this Tom-cat’s been roaming.” Shane walked through the ground floor of the building to the cells at the rear, and there in all his naked glory was a Napean known as Warwick Smith. He had short black hair on his torso, arms, legs, and face—but it had grown somewhat unevenly, and amongst it there were patches of exposed red skin. His nose had been flattened and a few wiry whiskers added. His dead eyes were a silvery color. He was lying down with tail curled up between his legs.
He was truly insane. Over many years, his fantasy had taken hold and later manifested in the body as a fully realized monstrosity. On many occasions he had satisfied his desire to taste Sub flesh and blood as part of the jaguar ritual.
Shane whistled in astonishment and asked, “Does it talk?”
“I’ve tried. Nothing,” said Charles. “Just territorial angst. You try.” Shane stepped up to the bars.
“Good morning, Warwick. How are you today?” No response. “What were you doing down in Crafers, old chap?” Warwick sat on the bed perfectly still, hands resting on his knees, and just stared coldly.
“Let me in there—I’ll have a quiet word.”
“Going to unleash some of that famous Wing charm?”
“Oh no, nothing like that…” said Shane.
Charles opened the cell door. Shane stepped in, leaning forward, hand outstretched: “Mr. Smith, I …” Warwick Smith sprang up and a surprisingly loud snarl escaped from between clenched teeth and curled lips.
Shane pulled his hand back and both arm
s went up in the air in a non-threatening gesture. “Easy, easy…” A faint hissing noise could be heard and Shane even saw hackles on the creature’s neck and shoulders upstanding.
“Okay, look, I just wanted to point out that… I know you don’t like Subs, which is fine,—I don’t like them either, even captain Compton here, isn’t mad on them… but we don’t eat them, do we? Doing that can cause big problems…” Shane continued like this for some time, but Mr. Jaguar was exercising his right to remain silent.
Shane had to agree that Subs lived like savages and were parasites on the Napean people, but treating them cruelly, worse than animals, was not good for business. Pound for pound, Subs were faster and stronger than Napeans, easily angered and when driven by revenge, almost always fatal to members of the Napean population.
The desire for retribution had fuelled various Sub forays into the Napean network and indeed the city, often with catastrophic results. It was up to Shane to keep the two groups separated to prevent such escalations, and they had to work together to keep it civil.
Shane completed his work from day to day, enjoyed the company of his wife when required, had an active game life and, at times, was called away on business to see after some security threat or other.
Shane could have gone on like this indefinitely. He enjoyed his life. His health was impeccable. For some people, Nano-Enzyme Therapy never agreed with them and euthanasia was the inevitable outcome, but not Shane. Since becoming a Napean he had enjoyed an excellent run of health. He had lost his eye sight once (for two months), been severely burned eleven times from friendly laser fire, shot with old school guns too many times to remember, died twice (heart attacks), had six transfusions, and a broken back. Shane was a survivor and a testament to N.E.T. He was well-adjusted and living in a truly civilized society. Napeans had free time. Time to play, time to think, time to learn and love. Most of them, however, were rather too bored to do any of this, and indulged in elaborate forms of escapism.
Napeans enjoyed freedom from the tyranny of a material world. Society had never known such freedom. They were living at the apex of humanity. What did they do with this rare historical opportunity? Absolutely nothing.
Sure, there were do-gooders worrying about the state of the race, the future, the planet, the environment, and the plight of the Subs, etc. But hell, Shane was a hundred and forty years old; if he had have cared so much, he would have taken that trip out to Saturn thirty-eight years ago with all those other well-intentioned guinea pigs... and where would he be now? Sucked into a black hole somewhere. The intrepid five hundred interstellar explorers had vanished. There were no signs of foul play or mishap—they just vanished. Understanding of black holes and the dark energy force mortifism was then scant.
Now, there was far more confidence in space travel, ever since mortific energy patterns could be seen and predicted. Mortific anomalies in space—best described as being like weather cells on the Earth’s surface, but without the limitations of air, land, or water. The energy was all around, was passing right through us like an aquifer rising and falling through a body of land. Mortific energy came through the universe in tides. Once called a black hole, a mortific vortex had unimaginable gravitational suction: an invisible, million-year-old vacuum cleaner which would one day collapse in on itself and make a new galaxy. Some were as big as a fingernail, others, the size of a planet. The energy was now being used to power space travel.
Shane was not particularly interested in scientific theory. Whether or not they were to find utopia on another planet was not his concern. Seriously, he didn’t think it existed and in the meantime he was at the head of his field keeping Napea free from Sub parasite infection.
Chapter 2
Singularity
IT WAS JUST as well that Shane had little interest in history, because the first one hundred and twenty years of his life were a blur. Physically, he was fine: fit and healthy. He just couldn’t remember what life used to be like all those years ago, when people lived under a blue sky and ate and drank and had children and… died. He had lived through the period of change, when food ran out. Shane had been one of the affluent people who had chosen a new way of living in a protected above-ground mountain city. The rest tried to hang onto the old way of living and moved underground.
People had always wrangled with survival and many species of the human kind had lost the battle. One group of survivors accidentally created fire. Later, in the Stone Age, one of them envisioned a hewn blade in a rock; another solved the problem of metallurgy in the Iron Age. In the industrial age they mechanized production, buying profit and time to develop a new lifestyle.
And where the ancestors sat grooming one another for parasite morsels, the personal computer age brought us a modern equivalent in electronic social networking. But that novelty soon wore off, as the software was internalized. They called it Singularity. Meanwhile, the geneticists lifted a curtain, revealing the pulleys and levers of the human body: useful, but limited without electronic extension.
Ever since the invention of the boomerang, right through to the PC, the political movement of the human was toward a merger with the physical world by becoming one with the tool. Desktop, laptop, handheld, wrist-bound, sub-cutaneous, and deeper, where it then vanished and was gone: self-powered, auto—renewing and completely invisible; cellular machines.
Of course, Shane didn’t remember any of this. He knew that in 2200, a solar flare directly destroyed life on one side of the planet. 10:15 A.M.; Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa had all been in the direct line of fire. Billions died. In these worst affected areas there were few survivors, people who, for some reason or another, had been underground during the forty-minute ordeal. But theirs is another story.
Indirectly, many others perished worldwide as the magnetosphere was temporarily disrupted. Without this protective buffer, much of the planet’s atmosphere simply blew off into space. Although the magnetosphere reestablished itself the atmosphere did not. Radiation baked the surface by day and deep space froze everything by night. The sun was just too strong; plants could no longer harness its energy. Panic took hold and a worldwide food shortage galvanized surviving nations into finding solutions.
If Shane could have remembered anything he learned at school, it would be the name of Australian geneticist Sydney Popper, whose work in the early twenty-second century on automatic cell maintenance started to be taken very seriously. He combined what he had learned about the human genome and disease inheritance with ideas—that he was accused of stealing—on the mechanical targeted delivery of enzymes. Using mice, Popper had successfully trialed a system of nano–cell therapy, which not only kept them healthy in the presence of any transmissible disease but seemed to extend their normally short lives. At the time, Popper was a media sensation who was said to have a fifty-one-year-old rat called Spencer who could allegedly read. Popper himself had been well into his hundreds yet had not aged over forty.
Normally, DNA evolved through genetic inheritance or mutation. Now Popper and his associates used the genes of one man and one woman, both of whom had been bred to be with a limited tendency toward cell mutation or disease. The first step in the process was to flood the body with artificial trojan lattice DNA, causing a chain reaction of growth over the existing chromosomes, transmutating the individual person into a copy.
Stage two introduced the enzymes to nourish, extend, and, where required, renew, every cell for that body type—without affecting the memory. Start taking the therapy and become either that man or that woman, living a life in a body that can be perfectly maintained without the need to eat. Nano-Enzyme-Therapy (N.E.T.) was nutritious and clean, whereas food was not only an inefficient form of nutrition, but also contaminated the body with a myriad of toxic by-products, clogging the circulatory system and causing dangerous mutations.
In his latter years, Popper worked with Shang Hai-based nano-technology innovator Chung Fun Wan, whose masterstroke was to put in place a method of digi
tal chemical renewal of those nano “swimmers.” The human body could operate on a monthly, digitally transmitted, hunger cycle. Internationally the technology was banned, until rich survivors in Australasia and the Americas realized that living without food was not only necessary but emancipating.
Shane was one such individual. He started his military career as security officer at the Port wharfs, had later become a bodyguard for the prime minister (a time when Australia used a political system from one of the ill-fated Euro nations), and had also inherited hills real estate, which had proved to be valuable turf in the following years.
He had always been a gadgets man, and had become something of an expert in personal electronic defense systems. So it was that Shane, after selling off some land, had the money to be one of the early converts to N.E.T. He felt such freedom and optimism that he became a spokesman for the new technology. His combination of innocence and strength drew people to him; he could be the butt of a joke, have everyone laugh at him, but then shrug it off with a smile. He could take a hit and have a laugh, but he also had the gift of the gab—all qualities that would make him a strong leader.
No one expected just how successful N.E.T. would become, not even the developers. Who would have believed that millions of tiny machines swimming around the body could keep you young and alive?
The language of science was never a compelling one, so when it came to “important details,” no one was listening. Great problems were solved, incredible devices invented, with only a few individuals being in possession of the knowledge. The knowledge of how things actually worked. These small few developed a very great power.
This power only increased when international production of N.E.T. materials went into overdrive. Those scientists became an elite class of billionaires who formed the various bureaus called “The Peoples’ Service.”
