The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition
Page 35
“Who are you?” Terry asked, an incredulous look on his face.
“Nigel Cummins, formerly of North Central Positronics, now Deputy Director of the Consolidated Time Teams, Granite City, Northeast Corridor, at your service,” the man answered.
Terry looked over at Randall, then at Rick.
“Hey,” said Rick with a half-smile, “Your turn to have a great adventure.”
Terry and Sarah nodded at each other. They clasped hands, walked over to Nigel, and the three of them stepped inside the Gate and faded from sight.
The Gate collapsed in on itself, leaving only a slight residual smell of ozone behind.
EPILOGUE
In the decades ahead, continued research was done into the nature of the Gatespace and the technology that permitted access both to it and through it.
The HOT6 technology was kept proprietary and carefully controlled by ChroNova until the death of Randall Warren in 2046. Later that same year, a presentation was made before an annual meeting of the World Organization of Physicists. News organizations picked up on the story, and within hours the internet was buzzing with discussions of the “breakthrough,” and more than a little consternation over the fact that it apparently had been kept a secret for more than three decades.
Once the details of the science involved were revealed, labs sprang up all over the globe attempting to duplicate ChroNova’s work. Certain aspects of the original HOT6 technology were patented in an attempt to control access to the Gatespace, but it was less than eighteen months later that a group of researchers in Germany reported success.
That organization, Zeitarbeitet Gesellschaft, released the details of its work freely, saying that knowledge should “flow like a river,” and by 2050 time labs were common in nearly every developed country. The name of the new science morphed from “chronophysics,” as ChroNova had dubbed it, to the Germanic-sounding “kronophysics,” in recognition of the way that Zeitarbeitet had freely given the technology to the world, snubbing ChroNova’s contributions.
They also took it upon themselves to rename the chronon, referring to it as the kronon or kronos particle. The good people of ChroNova — Rick Harper, who became the CEO of the company upon Randall’s passing, and his staff — took this to be a deliberate slight against their company, but nothing much could be done about it.
It was later revealed that the kronos particle seemed to have a trifold nature. If a Kronon spun in one direction — generally referred to as “right spin,” it moved into the future; this was the default state of the Kronon in nature, hence the reason why time naturally flows forward. If, through whatever means — in ChroNova’s laboratory, it was done by means of the HOT6 — the Kronon’s spin was set in retrograde, referred to as “left spin,” it would move into the past.
If a field of kronons was created that were all attuned to either left spin or right spin, the Gate effect resulted. Opening a Gate without further tuning simply results in an opening in space which leads to what was variously referred to as the Gatespace, interspace or warp space.
Varying the parameters of the six intersecting energy fields as produced by the HOT6 and its later derivative machines allowed the resulting Gate to be focused so that one could direct the route of the Gate to a specific destination; later refinements that came near the turn of the 22nd century allowed the production of a Gate at the time and place of one’s choosing.
By 2078, Gatejumping salons were common, and while derivatives of ChroNova’s original Three Rules were still enforced, things seemed to become more and more relaxed each year. After all, most people seemed to think, people have been Gatejumping since 2016, and the world hasn’t come to an end. It can’t be that big of a risk.
But that’s just how things happen; you never think you are going to get a traffic ticket until you do. You never think you’ll get a terminal illness until you do.
And you never think the world’s going to end until it does.
PINBALL reveals the existence of the Gatespace — a green nothingness between worlds, like the gaps between the books in a library — and the mysterious Gates, green whirlpools that allow people and objects to pass through to other places, other times, even other worlds.
REPLAY introduces the employees of ChroNova, Inc., who discover the means to artificially open Gates and thereby access the Gatespace, and tells the story of one man who attempts to use the technology to change his own past.
In TILT, the third and final installment in the Gatespace Trilogy, decades have passed since ChroNova’s original discovery of the Gates, and the company’s prohibition against using the technology for things like sightseeing have become all but ignored — which may result in the mass extinction of the human race.
TILT
THE THIRD BOOK IN THE GATESPACE TRILOGY
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright ©2014 by Alan Seeger
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Find out more about this and other books by Alan Seeger at
www.alanseeger.net
www.facebook.com/Five59
For my parents
Wish you could have been here.
Amos Andrew Seeger
July 22, 1925 – June 24, 1990
Bonnell Marie Nesler Seeger
December 31, 1927 – January 20, 1988
Praise for PINBALL:
“Hints of Stephen King, also Dean Koontsish in its strange-happenings type of way. Would definitely recommend this book!” – M.G.
“A full-fledged sci-fi adventure [with] some reasonably intricate temporal logic… If solving the Grandfather Paradox isn't your cup of tea, you may not enjoy this book, but if you can follow Arthur C. Clarke or Star Trek, you're going to love it. The only close comparison I can make is Asimov's The End of Eternity, which also dealt heavily with time travel and paradoxes, but it moves faster and is quite a bit more engaging.” - S.R.
“I've been reading SF for over 50 years. Pinball is a great and new take on time travel. [Seeger] keeps the action moving, the characters have depth, and it is easy to follow the multiple story lines.” – J.C.
“The effects are not easily foreseen, and tachyons hit the fan.” – A.C.
“[I’m going] cold turkey […] until the next book comes out.” – P.K.
“The ending is perfect. It's most definitely one of my favorites.” – A.M.
“A great roller coaster ride, and aptly titled. Some great spins on alternate realities, and the juggling of both time and reality. You will feel like a pinball long before this story ends, and enjoy every minute of it!”
– Terry Schott, author of The Game Is Life
Regards for REPLAY:
“I kept screaming, ‘No! You can't do that!’ to the protagonist, but he kept right on trying to arrange an earlier meeting with his one true love. ‘You weren't ready for each other, to be together, until you were together,’ I'd say, but he kept slipping through that time machine he built trying to change the world to his liking… Can you imagine what might have happened if Jane Eyre had slipped through a wormhole trying to meet Mr. Rochester before his disastrous first marriage?” – M.H.
The first book in the Gatespace Trilogy, PINBALL, reveals the existence of the strange Gatespace — a green nothingness between worlds, like the gaps between the pages of a book — and the mysterious Gates, green whirlpools that allow people and objects to pass through to other places, other times… even other worlds. Steven Denver, a struggling author, encounters one of these Gates near his Montana home, and his life is altered forever.
The second book, REPLAY, i
ntroduces the researchers of ChroNova, Inc., who discover the means to artificially open Gates by means of technology and thereby access the Gatespace, and tells the story of Rick Harper, a man who attempts to use the Gatespace technology to alter the circumstances of his own ravaged past, with near-disastrous results.
In TILT, this third and final installment in the Gatespace Trilogy, decades have passed since ChroNova’s original discovery of the Gates, and the company’s prohibition against using the technology for things like sightseeing have become all but ignored — which may have the minor side effect of resulting in the mass extinction of all humanity.
FOREWORD TO TILT
A World of Pure Imagination
Alan Seeger’s Gatespace trilogy is unparalleled in my experience. Here’s the thing: as a writer myself, I understand how series work. You create a set of characters, set them a long term goal, then sit back and watch them work toward that goal while they solve shorter term problems. Just like that, you’ve got a series.
Not Alan. I think that was too easy for him, so he had to set about making the rest of us look bad by coming up with a brilliant new way to create a series. If you’ve read the first two books in the Gatespace Trilogy (Pinball and Replay), then you already know that although the books are set in the same universe (or universes) they don’t follow the normal rules of a series. There’s no single overarching question posed in the first book and answered triumphantly in the last. There’s no will-they-or-won’t they romance that takes 700 pages to resolve. Instead, Mr. Seeger has created, to borrow a phrase from a favorite film, a world of pure imagination. Then he did it again. And again. I admit, I’m a little jealous.
Most writers don’t suffer from a dearth of ideas. In fact, it can be just the opposite – we are overwhelmed with ideas (sometimes called the shiny new toy syndrome) but we lack the time or discipline to flesh them out and get them down on paper. Nonetheless, most of us settle for one idea per book, or series. I’m happy to say that Alan sets his sights much higher than the exploration of a single idea or theme.
In Pinball, Seeger explored the impact of the fantastic (a gate that opens into a multitude of worlds) and how it impacts the everyday (the life and dynamics of a single family.) In Replay, the story of that single family was left behind in favor of an exploration of what happens when the fantastic meets that most powerful force: love.
And now, there is the finale, Tilt. I won’t give anything away (that would be bad form, wouldn’t it?) but it is incumbent on me to let you know that Alan has once again gone in a completely different, albeit wholly satisfying, direction.
By the way, you may have noticed a few loose ends in the first two books. Initially, I thought they were plot threads that might have run slightly amuck, taking on a life of their own, never to be resolved. Rest easy, blooper spotters, all unanswered questions are answered and every thread is tied up and made into a lovely bow in Tilt.
Tilt brings The Gatespace Trilogy to a close. It is a singular accomplishment, impressive in its breadth, accomplished in its humanity, and in the end, a satisfying read on every level. Enjoy. I know I did.
Shawn Inmon
Enumclaw, Washington
August 2014
PREFACE TO TILT
“Science Fiction writers treat with people, things and events in terms of possible consequences. In the Middle Ages we might have been theologians, and we probably would have been burned as heretics.” — Roger Zelazny
Wow. Imagine that. Ironically, once upon a time, I was something of a theologian, and most of the people I knew back then would likely consider me a heretic now.
When I began working on PINBALL, back in the dark ages of 2009, I had never written anything longer than a short story, other than plays and musicals, with which I had a pretty good track record. I had no idea that PINBALL was going to demand to be turned into a trilogy. I was muddling through, simply determined to finish. To be perfectly honest, when I did finish, I was unsatisfied with the results, and glad to have it over and done with.
It wasn’t until the end of 2012, more than three years later, that I went back and reread PINBALL and realized that it actually appeared to have some potential. I rewrote large portions of it and found that it was really a pretty decent story. Since then, it has gone on to garner many five star reviews on Amazon, a fact that still astounds me. REPLAY followed about six months later, and earned a similar response.
So now I present to you TILT, the third and final volume of the Gatespace Trilogy. Where PINBALL was about discovery and REPLAY was about love, TILT is about the ultimate game of life and death, played across a battlefield of centuries. I hope you enjoy it.
I have to thank all of those who were so encouraging during the last two years; my family, my friends, and the many authors, editors and reviewers that I have become acquainted with, particularly the members of the BookGoodies Authors group on Facebook. There are too many of you to name you all individually, but please know that I appreciate every suggestion, every kind word and every helpful tool to which you pointed me.
Alan Seeger
September 1, 2014
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas.
A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.”
— Freeman Dyson, professor, Princeton University
“When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.”
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall
“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?”
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
THREE SIMPLE RULES FOR GATEJUMPING:
Rule #1: No commercial GateJumping. The HOT6 and its successor machines and/or derivative technologies, if any, are never to be licensed for use in a commercial setting, i.e. for sightseeing trips to the past. There is simply too great a risk of issues arising.
Rule #2: No interaction with the past. See rule #1. Any interaction, however slight, has the potential to change history.
Rule #3: Be careful to maintain observer status only. Again, see rule #1. If you must visit the past, remember that you were not present when these events originally occurred. Your presence could have unintended consequences.
— The Rules as established by ChroNova, Inc., 2050
INTRODUCTION TO TILT
In 2016, the employees of a corporate thinktank and laboratory called ChroNova, Inc., located in St. Louis, Missouri, and headed by Randall Orwell and his colleagues Rick Harper and Terry Cambridge, discovered a technology that allowed them to build the Harper-Orwell Temporal Unit-6, or “HOT6” — often cheekily referred to as the “Hot Sex” — which was capable of opening a portal in the very fabric of space and allowed passage to other places and times.
In the decades that followed, continued research was done into the nature of both the Gatespace itself (so named after a description of a similar portal in a science fiction novel published a few years before by Montana author Steven Denver, originally thought to be fictional, but later revealed to have been based on the author’s actual experiences) and the newly discovered technology that permitted them to gain access to the green void. The HOT6 technology was kept proprietary and carefully controlled by ChroNova alone until the death of its founder, Randall Orwell, in 2046. Later that same year, Rick Harper made a presentation unveiling the Gatespace technology before an annual meeting of the World Organization of Physicists. Mere minutes after his speech ended, news organizations picked up on the story, and within hours the internet was buzzing with both discussions of the new tech and more than a little surprise and even shock at the news that the ability to traverse both time and space had apparently been kept a secret for more than three decades.
Once the details of the science involved were revealed, labs sprang up all over the globe attempting to duplicate ChroNova’s work. Certain aspects of the original
HOT6 technology had been patented in an attempt to control access to the Gatespace, but it was less than a year and a half later that another group of researchers managed to duplicate Chronova’s discovery.
A German company called Zeitarbeitet Gesellschaft released the details of its work to the public domain, and within two years, time labs were common around the world.
The way the Gate technology worked was fairly simple; ChroNova had discovered a new particle in nature, which they called the Chronon (later Kronon) or Chronos Particle. If a Kronon spun in one direction, referred to as “right spin,” time flowed into the future; this was the default state of the Kronon in nature, hence the reason why time naturally flows forward. If the Kronon’s spin was set in retrograde, referred to as “left spin,” time would move in reverse — into the past. This could be done by means of the HOT6 or it occasionally would occur spontaneously through unknown means. Spontaneous Gates were known to be extremely rare, however.
A field of kronons, all attuned to either left spin or right spin, would result in the Gate effect. Initially, a clunky interface allowed the HOT6 to be focused in various ways, resulting in a gate to the past, the future, or simply another place. Later refinements that came near the turn of the 22nd century allowed the production of a Gate at the time and place of one’s choosing, subject to limitations imposed by Nature herself.
The Three Simple Rules were agreed to by a congress of Gatejumping researchers, headed by the staff of ChroNova, in 2050.
By 2078, Gatejumping salons were common, in violation of Rule #1, and while derivatives of ChroNova’s original Three Rules were still given lip service, things seemed to become more and more relaxed each year. After all, most people seemed to think, people have been Gatejumping since 2016, and the world hasn’t come to an end. It can’t be that big of a risk.