The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  The Northern Star

  Trilogy

  –The Beginning–

  –Civil War–

  –The End–

  By

  Mike Gullickson

  Cover Illustrations by Eric Tilton

  Copyright © 2015 Mike Gullickson

  -These books are available in print at most online retailers-

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  Acknowledgements

  The Northern Star novel series – in one semblance or another – has been in my head for nearly a decade. Time has helped bring it out, but so has the effort and encouragement of many friends and family. In no particular order (except for my wife, I live with her):

  Melissa Gullickson

  Put up with an absentee & moody husband.

  My Parents

  Listened to me lament over the phone when they just wanted to talk to their grandson.

  Eric Tilton

  An amazing artist & graphic designer.

  David Gatewood

  Editor for Civil War and The End. He made a world of difference.

  James Aiden, Josh Newell, John Bruno, Brenden Clark, Brooks McLaren, Dan Snow,

  Wes Ryle, Nick Bobetsky, Justin McWilliams

  Read each novel and gave me notes (and insights) on how to make them better.

  Table Of Contents

  The Northern Star: The Beginning

  The Northern Star: Civil War

  The Northern Star: The End

  The Northern Star

  –The Beginning–

  Prologue

  –Chicago. February 21st 2048. 4:00 a.m.–

  Cynthia Revo hadn’t slept in three days. She and her team were close, very close. She’d imagined this day a thousand times over and the reality didn’t match the ideal. She had pictured herself awake, no bags under her eyes, her short red hair neatly combed. Fresh clothes without a wrinkle. Champagne. Smiles. Maybe a celebratory lay. That’s where her daydreams took her. But like all dreams, they were more fantasy than truth.

  Her team of researchers had forced her to take a break. She dragged herself down the hall to her office and collapsed at her desk. Twenty foam coffee cups littered its surface, each with different levels of the fuel that had kept her upright. Five large computer monitors were mounted on the wall. The keyboard and mouse were lost somewhere in the maze of cups. A lab rat could find them, but it would take Cynthia a second or so. She was out in an instant.

  The door crashed open and she shot her hands out, clearing the desk. Days old coffee splattered against the monitors and spilled onto the carpet. It took her a moment to realize where she was.

  Harold Renki, one of her top programmers, looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  “It’s working! It’s working!”

  She looked at him like he was speaking another language. Not until he yanked her out of her chair did she understand completely. He dragged her toward the door until she got her legs moving to match his.

  “When?!” she asked. She was still bleary and nauseous from the abrupt wakening.

  “Just now, a minute, maybe. Tom’s burning through the test. It was what you thought.”

  “Thousands?” she asked.

  “Five thousand at this point.”

  Five thousand micro-frequencies, to penetrate the brain and read the synapses as they fired. They had started with two, now they were up to five thousand. They had started with four meager servers. Now six hundred of the best supercomputers money could buy were in a machine room cooled to -50 degrees Celsius.

  They rushed down the dull white hallway with its fluorescent lights and cheap decorations. An unremarkable place for the greatest invention the world had ever seen.

  They slammed through the doors onto a landing above the testing floor. Thirty other scientists were below them—some biologists, some programmers, some physicists, some doctors—and they all turned with smiles that said it was worth it. That the five years were not in vain, not a dead end like some pundits opined. For visionaries, showing the rightness of their vision was always the most difficult, because the vast majority of people look in front of their feet, but rarely ahead. When the visionary was right, then the masses nod and line up, happy to be a part of it. Happy to think that they would have thought of it too—it was so obvious, after all.

  Cynthia pushed past Harold and ran down the stairs. The crowd parted like the Red Sea and she saw the twenty by twenty Plexiglas cage where they kept Tom & Jerry.

  Tom saw the short redheaded person press herself up against the clear wall. He was eating a banana and he understood that if he kept doing this thing the hairless monkeys wanted, he would keep getting bananas.

  Jerry was bummed. Tom was eating bananas and he wasn’t. Jerry held a keypad. On it were four buttons: one green, one red, one yellow, one purple. In front of him was a computer monitor and at the bottom was a mirrored image of each button. When a picture appeared above one of them, he was supposed to press the corresponding button. Easy. He could do six per minute.

  Tom didn’t have a keyboard. He wore a metal helmet on his head. Attached to it was a wire that ran outside the clear cage to another place and then back. Tom wanted more bananas and with the red headed pale ape watching, he knew this was his chance. He looked at the screen and played the game. His images flashed by at one per second.

  Cynthia’s mouth was wide open. She watched Tom, the test chimp, tear through the image choices on screen using nothing but his mind. Jerry, the control, slapped at the keyboard every ten seconds or so.

  The mind was finally free from its prison. Cynthia Revo closed her mouth and watched as Tom the chimp performed a miracle. This would change the world forever.

  Chapter 1

  –Iran. 2058–

  “Man, you’re lucky to be black,” Eric Janis said to the hulking soldier in front of him. They were off duty and in line to Mindlink with their families. It was summer in Iran. Sweat poured down the soldiers’ faces. They used every ounce of shade they could find, even each other. They had long since torn down the analog thermometer outside their barracks, but the soldiers stationed there could guess the afternoon temperature within a degree. Eric guessed right on the money: 125 degrees.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that,” John Raimey said. He was dark skinned, with gray eyes that stuck out like a wolf’s. A hooked scar curled around his right eye from a shrapnel blast. He and Eric had met in basic training almost twenty years before. Like most soldiers, they came from one of two places: Raimey, the ghetto. Janis, a microscopic town in the middle of Nebraska. The military is the true melting pot and despite their disparate backgrounds, they bonded immediately. In Chicago, their homes were within walking distance. Together they had served in various special operations units. First as Green Berets, then Detachment Delta, and now small clandestine units without official designations.

  “I just mean here. I don’t mean, like, anywhere else,” Janis joked. “You don’t burn, right? Because I’m fucking getting fried.”

  “Your Irish skin isn’t meant for this.” Raimey looked up into the sky and wagged his head as if he were soaking it in.

  “How much longer d’you guess?” Janis asked.

  “Two weeks, maybe more. We need to get the rest of the family out.”

  The Imperial Royal family. There were a lot of them. Second cousins, third cousins twice removed. It had been their only task while the rest of the Coalition Forces cordoned off the population for
“oil sanctions.” It was a group effort in the Middle East. China’s camp was ocean side and the EU was north to the U.S.’s west, but in other oil-rich lands, sometimes it was one, two, or all of them that occupied. The oil was almost gone.

  Off in the distances tendrils of black smoke rose into the air. The terrorists had lit an oil field.

  Not terrorists. Locals, Raimey reminded himself.

  “Raimey, you’re up. Five minutes,” a soldier called, referencing a tablet.

  “Tell Tiffany and Vanessa hi,” Janis said.

  Inside the tent were what looked like ten dentist chairs. Eight were already occupied and the soldiers in them looked asleep. A thick wire ran from the head of each to a terminal outside the tent that had a satellite dish pointing to the sky. Two large fans uselessly blew hot air, turning the tent into a convection oven.

  “You’re on the number two Mindlink,” a woman inside said. Raimey walked over, sat down and the woman handed him a machined aluminum headpiece that had glowing LED’s on the inside where it touched the head. He leaned back in the chair and put the Mindlink on.

  As he did, the smell of burnt shit and sweat, and the scorching heat, vanished from top to bottom. He was in his living room. Some soldiers chose outlandish backdrops when they connected in, he knew a guy who always met his family on Mars for some reason. Janis—who didn’t have family—had bribed the head tech with booze to go to virtual Filipino hooker dens. “It’s not real, but damn, it feels real,” he nudged while detailing his exploits at the mess hall. But Raimey preferred seeing his home. It gave him an anchor to what was truly important. It reminded him why he had to make it back.

  His wife Tiffany sat across from him on the couch. Caramel skin, long wavy black hair. She looked ten years younger than forty. Raimey appeared across from her and he immediately jumped over to the couch and they kissed.

  “How are you holding up?” Tiffany asked.

  “It’s fine. Janis says ‘hi.’”

  “Are you safe?”

  “As safe as I can be. It’s pretty bad over here. It’s the worst at the refineries and the wells.” A red light appeared in the air and flashed slowly. It reminded Raimey that the military was listening. No mission details. “We’re . . . off mission.” The light vanished from the air like a mirage.

  Concern washed over Tiffany’s dark brown eyes.

  “Hon, it’s fine. We only have a few more missions and I’ll be back.”

  “Vanessa!” Tiffany yelled. She looked around; there was no sign of their daughter. Tiffany’s body vanished down-to-up and then almost immediately popped back into existence. “She’s in the bathroom.”

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Raimey smiled.

  “There was another terrorist attack in Chicago,” Tiffany said.

  “I heard. We may be re-assigned there. I might actually be home for once.”

  “New York had three last week. Just yesterday, a train blew up over one of MindCorp’s Data Nodes right in the center of the city.”

  “That’s why I moved us out to the suburbs,” Raimey said. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Just Mindlink, don’t go into the city.”

  A ten-year-old girl appeared near the fireplace. Other than having her father’s dark skin, she was a mirror of her mother’s beauty. She wore pink pajamas.

  “Daddy!” she hugged Raimey. He hugged her back, pressing his cheek against hers.

  “Hey love,” Raimey said. He held her at arm’s length and looked her up and down.

  “What time is it there?”

  “Two.”

  “And you’re still wearing pajamas?”

  Vanessa shrugged. “I’m just online.”

  “Alright, but when I get home, pajamas are for nights and mornings, that’s it. Tell me about school.”

  Vanessa did and Raimey listened intently. A few minutes later, a soft ping like a wind chime filled the air signaling his time was almost up. He kissed Tiffany on the lips and snuggled with Vanessa one more time.

  “All right my lovely ladies. I’ll see you next week.”

  He disappeared from the room, as did they soon after.

  –New York–

  The founder of MindCorp, Cynthia Revo, followed her bodyguard through the surface debris of the New York Data Node. Sabot could have been a linebacker; he was half black and Samoan, six-five and thick. His dreaded hair hung past his shoulders. Cynthia was tiny, five foot, and thin boned. Her bobbed red hair had become her trademark. A ‘Cynthia’ was in vogue now. Behind them trailed an army man in his 60’s, wide and fit with a plate of medals on his jacket and a small, soft man with square rimmed glasses and a weak chin hidden behind goatee fuzz.

  “This is why we need to work together Cynthia,” Secretary of Defense, Donald “WarDon” Richards said as they picked their path through the office wreckage. Ahead of them, a tank revved up and dragged away a subway car. It was apparent that no one in it had survived. Construction workers and firemen cleared the wreckage. Above them two cranes raised new rail to replace what had fallen down.

  “They didn’t take us off-line. We routed to the other Data Nodes in the region out of protocol. This is cosmetic. The Data Core was unharmed,” Cynthia said.

  She had come a long way from the day that Tom beat Jerry choosing images with his mind. The Mindlink arrived when the last of the accessible oil disappeared. There were articles and books (digital anyway) that stated she had saved the modern world. They were wrong. She had made the modern world obsolete. She had erased national borders. She had turned the earth into an apartment by creating a better one online. She had kept the company private and her personal worth was well into one trillion dollars. Ninety-five percent of the civilized world, including government, including military, used her technology to function. “We’ve had this happen before, Donald.”

  “But not this successfully,” the pudgy man said. “Their weapons are the same, but they’re getting more strategic. They used C4 and long range detonators.”

  Cynthia stopped and Sabot was immediately her shadow, scanning all entry points. There was a military perimeter around the wreckage, but bullets could thread the needle. He had recommended against her coming here.

  “Who is he?” Cynthia asked WarDon.

  “This is Dr. Lindo,” WarDon said. “I should have introduced you. Sorry. He’s my advisor.”

  “I’ve heard of you. You developed the analytics program for the military,” Cynthia said.

  “Yes.” Evan had come out of nowhere at the age of twenty-two when he created an artificial intelligence software that recognized trends in seemingly unrelated data and predicted future patterns based on this data with incredible accuracy. At its root, “Nostradamus” was a bit-torrent application, but instead of taking known bits of a file from registered locations to create a replica, it took pieces of data that had no recognizable relation and formed a hypothesis of action. Technology had always been the U.S. military’s greatest weapon and Nostradamus was considered revolutionary for strategic warfare. At its best, it put them in the mind of their enemy. At its worst, it stacked the deck in their favor. It had won battles, saved lives, and predicted seeds of unrest. Evan was thirty-one now and the army’s prodigal son.

  “Why didn’t your software predict this?” Cynthia teased. Lindo bristled but remained quiet. While he was soft shouldered and round, his eyes burnt with intelligence. She thought it was odd that he wore glasses given how cheap corrective eye surgery was. An affectation of some kind.

  “That’s why we’re here,” WarDon said. They made it to a construction elevator that had been quickly installed to replace the crushed one. The elevator shaft was undamaged.

  “I’ve given the U.S. its own network,” Cynthia said. “How much cooperation do I need to provide?”

  They stepped into the elevator.

  “Any more dead?” WarDon asked.

  Cynthia sighed, but it felt forced. Her mind was racing.

  “They found one. Our re
ceptionist,” Cynthia said. “Sabot, be sure to compensate the family.”

  “Yes.”

  They went down. For one hundred feet they stared at solid concrete and then it opened up into a cavernous space. It reminded Evan of an airplane hanger. The MindCorp technology was client-server. The Mindlink that a customer used at home was an interface, a glorified keyboard. All of the computer processing was done offsite at the Data Nodes. This was one of Cynthia’s brilliant maneuvers. The technology was proprietary and extremely well-protected. Even the government didn’t know exactly how it worked.

  The style of the space was industrial: exposed beams around the perimeter, metal walkways throughout, snaked with ventilation. At the center was a giant black tube over twenty stories tall. WarDon whistled.

  “You’ve never seen one?” Cynthia asked.

  “No, just pictures.”

  “This is a Colossal Core, there are five of them in the U.S. It can handle over forty million users.”

  “And all of that got offloaded to the other Cores?” Evan asked. Cynthia nodded with pride.

  “We keep headroom on all of our Data Cores. The re-routing was completely transparent to the user.”

  As they descended, the ants turned into hundreds of workers. There were metal beds surrounding the Core like petals of a flower. Evan counted fifty. Men and women sat on the beds and waited for technicians in lab coats to go through a checklist with them. Afterwards, the person put on a Mindlink and laid down. Other techs manned controls near the base of the Core.

  “Are those the Sleepers?” WarDon asked, pointing to the people in the beds. Cynthia nodded.

  “They program and maintain the system,” she said. Evan and WarDon exchanged glances.

  “I’ve heard they can do more. Quite a lot more,” WarDon said.