by Stefan Bolz
I was present when some of Tevis's children were reunited with their families. I wish Aries could have been there to witness it. I hope she knows what she has done, what this means to them. Tevis has turned the Forgotten Floors into a school for the gifted. Some of the kids who were with her, like Tuari and others, have stayed with her. She insisted on continuing down there, even though there were other spaces available, mostly in Tier Six.
Once the servers had been reset, we began calculations on the energy output of the machine. The numbers were off the charts. It seems as if the machine in its current state can draw energy through the wormhole in perpetuity. Nobody knows where it's coming from yet, but for now it seems we'll have enough. More than enough. And another thing happened when Aries activated the machine—the others followed. Deep below the other four buildings, we found (except for some minor differences) the same setup as in ours. Since Aries and the others have used the light beam and the pods to travel to another place in the known or maybe even unknown galaxy, nobody has used it.
A while ago, we began to send probes to the outside, the area surrounding the high-rises. When the machine was activated, most of the androids' core control centers were destroyed. For a while, we tried to build new ones but the project was eventually laid aside. But something happened to the ones who weren't affected by the electromagnetic pulse, something I still cannot explain to this day. They became aware. They became conscious—first of themselves, then of their surroundings. Some of them volunteered to go outside, to take samples of the soil, air, and water, and document everything. Not only did we find that the outside is habitable, the water drinkable, and the soil clean, we also found a compound at the edge of the city that had been inhabited by the board members of SELKom for the last twenty years.
There are still far more questions than answers. One of them is where the wormhole leads. What's on the other side? We have not found any other guide stones and we're not sure if we can and should use the beam to travel without them. But we're on our way to figuring everything out.
Why am I writing all this? I thought there should be a document. For future generations. They should know what happened. You deserve to know what happened. So you can watch the signs. You see cameras being installed anywhere in the name of safety? You see power slowly shifting from the people to individuals or certain groups? You see schools and whole educational systems disintegrating before your eyes? Be watchful, my friend. And be ready. Always be ready.
//end of final upload**file44LK.11-2:kiire_understaad/notes/aries_and_the_eight/log4.0059//
The End
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Thank You
Throughout the process of writing this book I have become indebted to many people. Without them this would not have been even remotely possible. But before I get to that, I need to make a confession. We writers are thieves. Thieves in the night. Thieves without honor. We steal from others, from better, from far better writers. I stole from writers I admire. Okay, you might call it inspiration, or borrowing. But let's be blunt. I have used other writers' amazing imagery, fascinating plot points, characters, and more than my fair share of incredible twists and turns, and somehow cloaked them in different outfits so they could make my story better. For example, I "borrowed" from my favorite author of all time—the brilliant and lovely Robin Hobb and her Farseer books, which have stayed with me for the last twenty years. I have blatantly absorbed every little ounce of Aaron Sorkin's writing. And even though the story you are about to read was conceived before I knew his books, I'm pretty sure I stole from Hugh Howey and his Wool series. How could I not? They are absolutely brilliant. So thank you, fellow authors, for inspiring me to take from you and to shamelessly say, "This needs to be in here—somehow, someway. It's just too good not to be."
Allow me to thank you, Chloe Mosbacher, for your fierce and inspired drawing of Aries Egan, before I even got to know her. Your illustration gave me the strength and the guts to write down her story and go through with it. It was so good, in fact, that Jason Gurley used it as a template for his inspired cover. Thank you, Layla Mosbacher, for plainly and simply being a younger version of Aries and for lending your name to Born-of-Night. Thank you, Amy Mosbacher, for telling me countless times that you couldn't wait for this one to be done so you could finally read it. I would like to thank the children that made it into the book as characters. Mila, Tuari, Amber, Max, and others whose names have been changed to serve the story (Christian, you are an older Kiire for sure, and you, Vroni, very much remind me of Tevis). You have all been a continuous inspiration. This is your story.
Thanks to everyone who I have spoken to or who has read bits and pieces of the book over the last year, including all the incredible beta readers—Diane, Lynn, Chloe G., Kimberly, Lina, Herr Rick, Jess, Kelly, Jackie, Karen M., Jennifer B., Patricia, Ali, Leslie, Jenn, and my good friend Jay. Your encouragement was invaluable. I would like to thank the kids and young adults in my karate classes. Your strength of spirit inspired some of the characters in this book.
Thanks so much to my indie author friends from all over the world. It is a distinct honor to be able to call you friends. Each of you has held up a torch through the darker times of writing this. In doing so, you are—in greater part than you might recognize—responsible for me crossing the finish line.
Lastly, thank you, dear reader, for coming this far. This story has been close to my heart since its inception. It is a story of courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It is a story of reaching for and grabbing on to your destiny, however far away it might seem. You can do it. You can do anything.
With gratitude,
Stefan Bolz
New Paltz, NY, June 2014
The Forgotten Floors — The writing of The Fourth Sage
I am a huge fan of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have admittedly watched it close to two dozen times over the years. But what I like as much as the movies is The Making of The Lord of the Rings in the extended box set DVDs. There you'll find all the intricacies, the obstacles and triumphs, the ways some scenes happened and others didn't, together with a closer look at the massive machinery that made up the production of the movies.
If you liked the story you just read, and if you're a little like me, I thought you might be interested in the process of writing it and how the story came about, how it developed and blossomed from a tiny spark to a four-hundred-plus page book. Everything began with The Three Feathers—a fable about a rooster, a wolf, and a warhorse and their quest to find three feathers deep inside a mountain.
I wrote the last twenty pages of The Three Feathers in a kind of haze. I was sick with flu-like symptoms and, wrapped in blankets and layers of clothing, I finished it, crying profusely during the last chapter. After I wrote the epilogue, I realized I had a few more lines in my head. I was done and the book was finished and the ending didn't really leave any space for an immediate continuation of the story. But those lines didn't go away and I decided to write them down. Here they are:
"Aries closes the book, holds it in her hands for a while longer. She feels the worn leather cover under her fingers, traces the remnants of the now undecipherable title. The outline of three feathers in its center is almost completely gone, as are the two eyes above it. Only slight indentations are left."
You might recognize this in slightly edited form from the beginning of wh
at is now Chapter 0. I thought, what if The Three Feathers was a book within another story? What if the main character, Aries, has read the book and has taken great inspiration and hope from it—a hope she needs in order to fulfill her destiny and free her people from oppression? I wrote what is now Chapter 0 in one sitting and thought originally that this would be the ending of The Three Feathers and simultaneously the beginning of The Fourth Sage.
One of the very nice people who read the book before it was published, told me, however, that as much as she liked Aries and her world, this chapter completely took her away from the experience she had while finishing The Three Feathers. She mentioned that it might be more marketable with that ending but she didn't think it would do Joshua's story justice if I tacked this chapter to the end. I agreed with her and took it out.
Then came editing and publishing The Three Feathers, which happened toward the latter half of 2012. At the end of 2012, I wrote The Dawning of the True Self, a spiritual companion to The Three Feathers. Editing and publishing that took until March of 2013. After that, I participated in my first NaNoWriMo. It was called Camp NaNoWriMo. The national novel writing month, usually in November, offered an additional month during which writers could participate in the 50,000-words-in-one-month challenge. I went back to The Fourth Sage, read Chapter 0 again and decided to work on it during the thirty days of Camp NaNoWriMo.
During that time, Aries's character became clearer and moved more toward the forefront of my awareness. My experience as an apprentice electronics technician at a large German corporation, I believe, gave me the foundation for Aries being an apprentice in Electrical. I knew what it meant to exchange neon lightbulbs on thirty-foot ladders or to repair faulty motors in narrow spaces. When I wrote about Aries's work in the first few chapters, I could smell the solder iron, the grease, and the fine dust of the motor brushes. I knew how her feet felt inside her steel-reinforced boots, I was familiar with coveralls and the weight of the tool belt. I put as much as possible of my own experience into those first few chapters and because of it, the writing experience felt visceral.
Another thought that I held in my mind was the idea that The Three Feathers was part of a much bigger picture, a world that I had not yet explored, or if so, only on its periphery. For example, in The Three Feathers, Joshua, the young rooster, and Grey, the wolf, discover a crater that is identical in aperture to the opening in the building’s core in Tier Zero and, subsequently, identical to the large opening far beneath Aries's building. The machine generating the light beam is the same machine generating the beacon in The Three Feathers. Of course, Joshua and his friends don't know anything about that and it is not mentioned in The Three Feathers. The reason for that is I didn't know what generated it when I first wrote about it. Joshua and his companions simply see the beacon and know of legends that surround it but nothing more. The same was true for me. There are symbols on a stone plate in The Three Feathers that are part of a poem. That poem is written in Amber's language. I only realized that when I met Amber for the first time, down in the Forgotten Floors.
It became clear to me while writing The Fourth Sage that this was becoming much bigger and more interconnected than I could possibly have imagined at the outset. Then my good friend Maxine told me about a baby hawk that had spent a whole night in her gazebo. The hawk couldn't get out, even though the door was open. I knew that Aries would have a friend and that friend would be a baby hawk.
Now, here is the interesting thing. When I wrote what is now Chapter One, that starts with:
"Aries opens her eyes. The clear night sky above her reflects the light in myriads of stars. The trace of a dream lingers, not quite ready to disappear. In it, she found herself soaring high above the desert plains, dropping in and out of the clouds while traveling toward a cluster of structures..."
I had no clue about Born-of-Night at that point; Maxine had not yet told me the story about the baby hawk. This reinforces my theory that the subconscious—a writer's best friend, in my opinion—works outside and completely independent of time and space.
There was a point in the story, in Part Two of The Fourth Sage, after Aries flees and before Ty catches up with her, when Born-of-Night tells Aries about the Forgotten Floors. Here is the sentence when it is mentioned for the first time:
"Aries opens her eyes. What do we do from here?
I'm sorry. I have very limited information. But I do know that we need to reach the Forgotten Floors."
You have to understand that, up to this point, I had written what unfolded before me. I had no knowledge of anything beyond this moment in the story. I knew exactly as much as Aries did. That was during NaNoWriMo, when you're supposed to write with as little planning and editing as possible. When Born-of-Night told Aries about the Forgotten Floors, I had no clue whatsoever what they meant, who was down there, or what it had to do with anything. And just as Aries had to trust her friend, I had to trust Born-of-Night as well. She was the one who pushed the story forward. She was a messenger of sorts, but she also had only very limited information. As did I. At that point it was me, Aries, and Born-of-Night. We had to trust each other. I had to trust them not to lead me astray and they had to trust me to tell their story, even though they didn't know where it was going from here.
I think part of this has its roots in the fact that the story is written in third person, present tense. I have never seen a story written that way. It was very much an "in the moment" kind of thing. I couldn't plan ahead because the characters didn't know what would happen either. It was an awesome and utterly terrifying place to be in. As a writer, the thrill of discovering the plot at the same time as the characters is probably the single biggest reason why I love to write.
So, the Forgotten Floors began with one sentence, "spoken" by a baby hawk who had come into the story because of a friend telling me hers. Up until Aries and Ty reached the Forgotten Floors, I had thought that the book was about Aries and that she would free her people from oppression. But the children in the Forgotten Floors changed all that. At that moment, everything shifted. And out of nowhere it seemed, the number eight came into play. At some point during the time in the Forgotten Floors, I experienced a small explosion in my head. I can't describe it any other way. Like when you discover a hidden level in your favorite video game.
Aries went from this lone hero to someone who has to bring them all together under a common purpose and fight the Corporation. As it probably (hopefully) became clear to you, none of the eight would have had a chance against their formidable enemy by themselves. Only together could they overthrow them. I remember the exact moment when the Eight came into play. I was looking through some of my other blog posts and one of them has an 8 lying on its side—the symbol for infinity. That's when the explosion occurred.
But that's not what is so interesting about it. From a writer's perspective, this is obviously a cool thing to happen. But believe me when I tell you that the number 8 came into the story on page 37 of my manuscript. I had no clue what it meant. It was a throwaway additional trait that Aries had. I took this passage out during editing, but include it here:
"That's when the geometrical patterns appeared for the first time. They came out of nowhere and seemed to come up in her mind's eye after a few minutes of lying still and listening to the music. She has not been able to identify any of the patterns or symbols. One of them was an 8 lying on its side..."
So, the 8 was there this whole time. I had no idea of its meaning until the Eight were revealed. From the Forgotten Floors the story took off, and C.J. and the others came more into the foreground. C.J. was mentioned in the first few pages of the book but I had no idea what role she would play. The sex trafficking was something I thought should be included, as it would probably be part of their world as it is part of ours. Greed is not limited to money.
The children in the Forgotten Floors began to have special meaning as well. While I wrote the story, I met a young reader at a book signing in a school. She was probably i
n the fifth grade back then. Her name is Amber. Here is what she wrote after she had read The Three Feathers:
"Thanks a lot for the book. Yesterday at Lenape. It's Amber here and I read your book last night. I stayed up until 3:25 am last night reading your book. It was great. You should make a sequel. :) This book of yours inspired me to start writing my own books :) I hope I get as far as you did one day. :) I think you should dictate one of your books to me lol. I've asked a lot of authors they all said no. Don't have to just a thought. Well thanks for the book and thanks for inspiring me!" - Amber
This post affected me in a way that I can't explain. I knew Amber needed to be in the story. Then I met someone on Facebook who had created a beautiful cover for a writer friend of mine. I contacted her and found out that she lives in Russia. Her name is Mila. We wrote back and forth a bit and she had an idea for the cover of The Fourth Sage that she sent me. I loved it for what it was, but she told me she didn't know that much about cover creation, etc. I eventually enlisted the amazing Jason Gurley to do the cover but Mila had found a place for herself in the story. She is obviously good at drawing things. Tuari is the son of a good friend of mine. Max is my son. He is older than Max in the story and hears quite well, but I always envisioned him when I wrote about Max. At one point, I told him jokingly that there is a little bit of a romance going on between him and Aries :-). Kiire is a much younger version of my younger brother, Christian. His brilliant computer skills made it into the story as well. The name Tevis was an interesting addition. It came about before I had thought about the Forgotten Floors. I had sent Part One of the book to my sister-in-law, Jackie. She messaged me back and asked, "Who is Tevis?" When I asked her why, she told me that there is a sentence that starts with Tevis. Tevis is a friend of mine and I must have copied and pasted her name by mistake. The name Tevis, besides being a very strong name, is also a really cool name, in my opinion. I wanted to include it, especially as it made its way into the story anyway.
