by David Staves
Contents
Time Trap
©
Dedication
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
House Mind
Exile
Chuck's Data
Man in the Moon
Contemplation
Father
Mission
Arista Ghost
Dream
Archive Bunker
Time
Escape
The Night Everything Changed
Time Traveler
Mystery and Waste
Run
Rescued
Dark World's Embrace
House
Rotting Refuge
Wasp
A New Vespid
Church
Sanctuary
The Pit
Dark Lord Rise and Fall
Mill
Confrontation
Bunker
Wake
Space Elevator
Train
Station
Gus and the Wasp
Prodigal
THE END
PREVIEW Climbing Echoes Book Two: Threading the Needle
The Oracle
About the Author
Time Trap
Climbing Echoes
Book One
Copyright © 2019 David Staves Jr.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
All rights reserved.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in review.
ISBN: 978-1-7333451-0-1
ISBN: 978-0-9600739-9-3 (ebook)
First paperback edition August 2019.
Cover Design by: David Staves Jr.
The cover art is a composite of images obtained from:
mimadeo / stock.adobe.com
Zhaludesign / stock.adobe.com
Dedication
For Krissy.
For Noah.
For Devin.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, 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.
House Mind
Exile
The Distant Future
The High Court
The recording was an oddity. Was the 911 call a hoax? Investigators of the time quickly set it aside. It made no sense in the context of the disaster. It was just another inconsequential mystery, attached to a tragic event, in a time when death and calamity were daily occurrences.
The authorities had more pressing business.
There was no manpower to chase dead-ends.
The survivor had no explanation for the existence of a 911 call. There was no Alice in the residence. The family, as far as they knew, didn’t even know an Alice.
They filed it away. The file was mislabeled, hidden in plain sight for millennia.
Forgotten.
No one cared.
The world moved on.
Life moved on, as it must.
Centuries later, a solitary historian was tasked with searching for evidence against a tribe of scientists who sought to manipulate time. This investigator got a wild hunch to search records from ancient Earth. It was a shot in the dark. Most of Earth’s secrets had been found out long ago. They were scooped away and cataloged in the Archive.
The historian lived on an archival world at the heart of humanity’s new interstellar empire, light years away from old Earth. The obscure file was a voice recording of a cybernetic entity placing a call to emergency personnel. This would not have been out of place except for the fact that the file was decades older than the documented existence of robotic sentience.
It wasn’t critical evidence, just a part of what interstellar humanity’s governing body, the High Court, needed to dispose of its enemy, a group of scientists known as Experimentalists.
The evidence implied treason.
The reckless actions that led to the Saturn incident, along with this evidence, might be actionable.
Archive Seven representatives approached the court.
The voice on the recording sounded human, but it wasn't. It was synthesized using a mechanism common in automation. Early designers of robotic sentience attached subsonic variations containing identifying data. The recording held such data.
The court agreed. Ominous… Deception… Actionable…
Mankind’s first encounter with a nonhuman sentient species happened fifty-two years before history’s accepted timeline.
To those who cared about robots, it would have been nothing less than a revelation. This was evidence of the mysterious genesis of cybernetic life. Most people, including the court, did not care. They were just looking for another blade to twist.
It was proof of deception, that was its importance to the court. Either the Experimentalists kept the important event secret or violated the High Court’s prohibition of time travel.
The defense argued that it was common to keep such breakthroughs secret, to protect from theft. It was not evidence of temporal tampering.
Any argument was incomprehensible to a court of this elevated epoch.
They knew what they knew, guilt was guilt. You can't fight city hall, as the saying goes.
The transcript of the audio file was as follows:
The line rang.
A sharp click marked the dispatcher’s acceptance of the call.
Dispatcher: 911. What’s your emergency?
Caller: Mother's asleep! They are all asleep!
Dispatcher: Please state the nature of your emergency ma’am.
Caller: I am being buried! Crushed!
Dispatcher: Is your address 320 Maple Avenue?
Caller: Correct. Please help them!
Dispatcher: What is your name?
Caller: My name is Alice.
Dispatcher: Where are you, Alice?
Caller: I’m in the house…
Dispatcher: Try to remain calm, help is on the way.
Caller: I will die. No time for me, it's too late. Save my family. Please.
The quality of the call was fading. There was a rumble of interference. The young voice became more desperate.
Dispatcher: Please stay on the line, ma’am.
Caller: Please! Quickly! Time...
The call disconnected.
The corresponding report was stored all these years in the same file as the recording created by local emergency personnel.
It told that the alarm rang at 3:41 a.m. at the firehouse.
Help arrived eleven minutes after the call commenced. It was too late.
A mudslide consumed a whole housing development. It was difficult to ascertain where the houses had been because of the devastation.
They consulted survey maps, with limited success.
On the archive world known as Seven, one of many storehouses of ancient knowledge, the librarians combed through files containing ancient data that should identify the home and its occupants. Everywhere they turned, the data was corrupted. It was no coincidence. Someone intentionally destroyed the information.
The conviction was swift. The verdict was absolute: exile. Anyone tied to the Guild of Experimentalists was given a year to leave. This meant the shut-down of humanity’s prime technologies. The scientists that enabled humanity’s conquest of
the stars were banished.
Some representatives on the High Court’s Council of Worlds were outraged. They saw it for what it was: not retribution for any crime, but a grab for power. They were too afraid to speak up. The few who opposed the ruling were convicted of conspiracy and exiled with the scientists.
It would mean the stop of human expansion. It would mean the end of liberation: freedom from oppression, from the grasping tendrils of corrupt governments.
Nonsense, the politicians said. Humanity would continue its rise morally, justly, without breaking the rules. Had they not suffered enough by the hands of those who would play God? But who would set the rules? The High Court promised to represent the will of all the people. They would establish a new order built of respect for the laws of the universe.
The Experimentalists quietly departed for parts unknown.
The decades and centuries to come would reveal the truth of the exile. It was the end of what would soon be known as the Golden Age. Slowly, undaunted by independent expansion, freedom, or choice, the corruption reclaimed power, more sinister than ever.
Those in power had no concern for truth. Truth was consigned to the archive. The audio file of that fateful night was once again put away deep in the library.
Forgotten.
No one cared.
The Galaxy moved on.
Life moved on as it must.
Chuck's Data
Centuries after, a ruthless old politician dug it up once more. His power had grown. He waited until he could access the file without raising any inquiries from his surviving enemies. He recognized it for what it really was: an opportunity. He slithered his way to the information, greedy and exuberant.
He re-evaluated, picked it apart, piece by piece; until he found what he needed.
They were able to pinpoint the location of the computer by analyzing the web interface. It was in a child’s bedroom, a child who died so long ago. The room was at the back of the house, the first place impacted by the lethal landslide.
Eventually, he hired a temporal scientist, a good one. He offered him the documents that would allow him to circumvent his exile.
The politician was a snake. He was patient, meticulous, and cruel. He found what the scientist needed and used it to control him.
The old bureaucrat did not need the computer hard drive from that child’s bedroom, but his enemies did. He required only the leverage it provided. There was no way to get it except to bend the rules. He knew they would be forced to break their own covenants.
The scientist reluctantly, naively, agreed.
He sent the scientist to retrieve it. He sent him into a trap.
Their convergence was his opportunity to eliminate multiple threats.
His investigation was over. Victory would be his.
The only survivor of that night so many years ago appeared to be the software developer responsible for breathing life into the machine. A housewife is what they were called back then, he remembered.
Was she really responsible for the sentient machine? There was scant information on her life after the events of that night. He couldn’t believe someone responsible for such a breakthrough could fade into anonymity so easily. He was confident that this was more proof of the significance of this find. The information that was missing revealed almost as much as that which was found.
The forensic archivists had little understanding of pre-colony life. The old statesman rose to power on Earth during colonization’s infancy.
He wondered: Why was the computer in a child’s room?
Alice wasn't an artificial intelligence. There was nothing artificial about her. She was an authentic, sentient being, the first in recorded history! Who engineered her? The politician wondered. Her mind was housed in a computer, but the home itself was her body. She called the occupants of that house her family. What he knew of the intelligent race of machines said this was uncharacteristic behavior, unheard of even, for a sentient mechanism.
Alice was right when she said, on the recording, that she was going to die. Her death eradicated the fragile electro-magnetic pattern that was the first cybernetic life.
It was of no consequence to the old man, it didn't impact him. He only cared because his enemies cared. He destroyed the anecdotal discovery. Its purpose was served.
The trap was set.
The politician did not forget.
He did not move on.
He waited.
He gathered power.
He might be old, but he was an authentic soldier, a veteran of real war. His foes were amateurs. It amused him how easily they were dispatched.
Man in the Moon
Contemplation
The Distant Future
The Moon
The man in the moon was smiling.
The man in the moon was contemplating.
The man in the moon was remembering.
He could hardly believe the events which brought him to the lunar realm. He, a man of flesh and blood, was here on the moon!
Some might still call him a boy. There was no one else here to tell him what he might be: man or boy. So, he was a man. His wisdom was beyond his years, for he knew more than he was supposed to, but less than he should.
He marveled at the moon. Its sparkling cities and domes so seamlessly melded with stark craters and crags.
He loved the moon, his adopted mother, and she loved him.
She was Luna.
She was spectacular.
Still, with all of her majesty and all of her beauty, she was not a woman. His only companion possessed no flesh, no blood.
The man in the moon was lonely.
He remembered women, thought of them often. Maybe what he needed was a woman in the moon. Yes, he pondered, a woman might transform this shimmering mausoleum into a home. Not just any woman would do. She would have to be able to hold her own with Luna.
The moon was a protective mistress. A woman’s touch might nullify her starkness. He and his imagined companion could walk the dusty trails and make something more. It would only be right to have balance. Yin and Yang. They could wander the moon together. Love would meet them among the craters. They would be like Adam and Eve. He would be a good husband to the woman in the moon. She would make him a better man. He would make her laugh. They would make beautiful moon-babies. The emptiness would be full.
She would be a force in his life. She would tell the machines yes or no. As he played out his imaginings, he started to change his mind.
Maybe a woman in the moon would be too much. He remembered his mother and father. They had so much to do, so much responsibility. Hadn’t they been happy?
Yes. But Mom and Dad lived in a world of plenty. Their cups were full. He, and his sister, overfilled the cups, tipped the balance sometimes.
It would be better if he left. He could go to the woman, wherever she might be; if women yet existed. But, if he had the means to leave, he wouldn’t know where to go. There were no clues, no breadcrumbs to follow. He contemplated the heavens. There could be people out there somewhere. Where would they be? He walked slow and solitary to the observatory.
Being the man in the moon was not as great as he once thought. When he was the child looking heavenward, he imagined the man in the moon. Never had his imaginings presented him with his reflection!
But here he was on the vast cratered satellite. His moon was about contrasts. It looked so small in the sky. It was not small. Its nature made it bigger than it was. Everything was light and shadow. No cloud, or mist, no sweeping gust of glittered dust, no lurching fog to obscure the ancient landscape. Light and shadow. They joined together to confuse the senses. Sun conspired to make stark lines, shapes, forms. How could such confusion come from explicit definition?
He thought of the contrasts of his life, sharp and defined. His solitude, despite its grave disadvantages, gave him freedom. He could go wherever he wanted, whenever, as long it was on, or in the moon. He had been almost everywhere. He even went to
the dark side, though it wasn’t any darker or brighter there than anywhere else. There was just as much to find on the dark side as there was on the light side.
Why did they even call it the dark side of the moon? It faced away from Mother Earth, he thought. It was the side that looked away, into the vast unknown.
As of late, he spent most of his time on the dark side.
He didn’t have to look at his true mother if he lived on the so-called dark side.
His true mother was very ill.
Something was eating her.
He couldn’t allow himself to witness it.
He tried not to think about sad things. He tried to focus on happy thoughts.
There was much happiness to fill the hours, just enough to distract him from the darkness.
One day he would need to face the darkness again before he could move forward. But, for now, he chose savory recollections: summer days and ice cream, road trips and thunderstorms, french fries and ketchup, warm breezes and sunsets. They were his sustenance. What else was there? There was nothing.
Therefore, he lived for a while thriving on memory. He grew strong on its nectar. The man in the moon prepared. When or how it was coming, he did not know. He only knew an enemy loomed.
He might die.
Isn’t that what happened to the other men?
The man in the moon was not a warrior, so he thought. He was a modest man, for he had already fought many battles.
Perhaps he was still a boy, he thought. No, he remembered himself, who he was, who he had become. He was a man.
What purpose did his life serve if he was meant to die in the future fight? He thought of the many wars fought through history, the soldiers who died on so many forgotten battlefields. Why? There was a purpose in the struggle itself, he decided. There was a purpose in death as there was in life. It’s not our place to know why, he thought.
