by S V Hurn
The Otherlings
And the Crystal Amulet
S. V. Hurn
Copyright © 2019 S. V. Hurn
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
www.theotherlings.com
Table of Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
TIME
In outer space far from home
Time slows moments grow
The others life continues
Eons fly past in those same moments
Our lives end so quickly
Yet far away I last, my life stretched thickly
I awaken from a lasting cold
A new life I must be bold
My home so far from when I knew
Lost asleep my spirit caught
A glimpse to the side of which I sought
If only there for a second
Other lives had lived so long
I meet them there the bond so strong
All I knew and all I loved
The ones I loved were there for they were waiting
I came only moments later
Together again for just a second
Ripped away eons later
Thrust alive; awakened
The core of my life extremely shaken
New life, new friends, new way of thinking
The life I had gone for good
I now explore as I know I should
My life anew continues
I’ll grow and live and love again
For I know they’ll be waiting
My life will continue
This new life is mine and long
For living through this will make me strong
I smile for I know
Life is to live however drawn
After a life of searching
They knew it was a life worth giving
I know it’s a life worth living
DEDICATION
I am dedicating this book to my departed husband. He bravely fought two stage four cancers and had been nicknamed Miracle Mike by his doctors. He refused to surrender to the terrible side effects of numerous treatments over countless years. He swore he was not going to allow cancer to get him. Mike considered every day to be a good day if he woke up without a toe tag. He told his doctors countless times, “Your job is to keep me alive and not tell me how to live.” That is exactly what he did for as long as he could. His pain and illness were only noticeable to the ones closest to him. He never complained and never gave in. Walking the beach and going for a coffee and a smoke was his daily medicine. When he became too ill for that one simple pleasure, he still tried to make the best of things.
In the end cancer did not take his life. Two tiny holes in his colon did that. He bravely decided to go to hospice and had a peaceful night sleep and passed the next morning within only minutes of Wicky and I arriving to his bedside. He waited for us and when he knew we were both there he traveled to the Other Side.
He never got around to reading my book, I suppose he thought it best to stay out of it. Towards the end I would sit beside him and read to him and he decided I was a good writer after all.
I hope I can make him proud.
Mike Woolford lived an incredible life from July 7th, 1946 to September 29th, 2019.
I will see you again soon, my love.
INTRODUCTION
I would like to start by saying, “I’m not a physicist.” In fact, I am not a scientist, not even close. My passion has always been science of any kind. I once had a physicist say, “that I knew as much about physics as his cat and his grasp on physics was tenuous at best.” I laughed so hard I almost fell over. My response was, “Well maybe he and I should discuss it over a can of tuna fish.” That’s fine, you can’t blame a gal for trying.”
With that being said, I asked many credible scientists for help with getting the science at the very least to plausible. I was told if it is reasonably consistent all practicing in the field should find it so. If it is laughably ridiculous, again, all physicist will find it so. My thought on that, is when dealing with anything that might fall beyond ‘The Standard Model’ of physics, all bets are off! I have never seen a grumpier bunch that didn’t agree on anything. Don’t even get me started on Quantum Field Theory!
When I started to write this tall tale, I had no idea where it was going to take me. Stephen King said, “If you’re going to write about something, write about something you know.” Very true indeed but I like challenges, and this book had many. But getting the science right was my biggest challenge. If not anything else I learned a lot.
Within this story you will find tidbits of genetics, astronomy, archeology, and of course physics. This is a work of FICTION. But I suspect back in the day when Leonardo DaVinci sat and created his flying machines and submarines there were probably some folk that may have thought him to be half-baked. Now, centuries later, we will soon find ourselves on Mars. For me nothing should be laughable, and everything should be considered plausible. Because if not for our imagination where would we be?
So, for those of you reading this book a little insight on The Large Hadron Collider at CERN and why it exists and why the human race has always tilted our heads to the stars or picked up a fist full of dirt and wondered about the furthest points of light or the tiniest bits of matter.
Break a rock in half, and you get two stones. Take one of these ston
es and throw it at the other and it will break again producing gravel. Throw gravel again against one another and this time it does not break. Does this mean you didn't throw it hard enough or does it mean it cannot be broken down any further? Is gravel the smallest particle that constitutes rock, or is there anything smaller? This question has been following us for millennia. Breaking down smaller and smaller rocks we ended up discovering molecules, then atoms, then we discovered the structure of the atom—a dense nucleus made of protons and neutrons surrounded by a cloud of electrons. But we kept going, throwing protons against one another in the hope of breaking it. This is no easy task, even the strongest microscope is not powerful enough to probe a proton. We built particle accelerators; large machines fueled by large magnets and pumps. We were able to extract a proton out of its atom and send it up to nearly the speed of light before colliding it with another proton. Then we broke down the proton to even smaller bits which we named quarks. For one question answered we were left with a hundred unanswered questions. When we probed further and further down, we found nature to be ever stranger. We saw anti-matter, a mirror partner of the matter we know which all has seemingly vanished from the universe. We discovered thousands of particles which should be building blocks of the universe yet even if we combine them all we cannot describe the structure as we see in the cosmos. We saw that gravity’s interaction is fundamental to our daily life but absent in the microscopic world. We saw particles that could fly through the earth as if it were the vacuum of space and could spontaneously transform in one another. We discovered what we thought to be the fundamental symmetries governing matter only to later observe particles breaking said symmetries. We kept searching and designing more and more powerful experiments. The first particle accelerators were the size of a room and they are now the size of a city. In Europe, at the border between Switzerland and France lies deep underground a 27-kilometer-long ring; the Large Hadron Collider. CERN is the European organization for nuclear research. The LHC is the biggest machine ever built by mankind; a masterpiece carefully crafted by thousands of scientist and engineers over decades. It uses large magnets and enough energy to power a city. It accelerates and collides protons at incredible energies then probing their remains and trying to answer many of these questions that have confounded us from the beginning of time.
For now, the LHC is allowing scientist to find what makes up our mysterious Universe. In the future there will be many upgrades made and eventually newer and more powerful colliders. So, who really knows what is science fiction and what is science fact?
The year is 2063 and I died . . .
But my journey has just begun.
PROLOGUE
John Rosen stood on the conning tower of a Russian submarine. His narrowed green eyes shone bright against his bronzed, weathered skin. The day was still as death, the sky a hollow grey in endless twilight. The cold was a bitter thing that felt as if it were cutting right through him. Eerie, strangely shaped icebergs in brilliant shades of blue and aqua floated past. They had been molded by the strong winds that blew across the otherworldly landscape. Beneath him, the water was a deep purple so clear that the ice of the bergs could be seen fading away into the depths. This place was a most hostile environment, its secrets buried under a mile of ice formed over thousands of years. Whatever mysteries remained were slowly being exposed with the polar melt, but nonetheless the place still boasted to be the coldest and the most unforgiving environment on the face of the planet.
John stood quiet, filling his lungs with icy air . . . better than the small confines of the last long days that seemed to pass so very slowly with anticipation of what he was sure to find. The stress of being trapped in a metal tomb with tons of water looming overhead threatening to crush him at any given moment had caused an uneasy feeling in his gut, a paranoia that nagged at him. Perhaps it was simply a deep tiredness rising to the surface from deep within.
Simon Bedford lumbered over, pulling a woolen cap onto his bald head and hugging thick winter gear around his shivering body. Simon had been John’s loyal friend and business partner for many years; bond of brotherhood defined their relationship.
“Damn, Johnny, tell me again why we didn’t make this trip in the summer months? I think my face is going to freeze right off!”
John ignored his friend’s comments on the weather and looked off into the distance as they slowly approached the ice shelf looming ahead. John said, a slight smile on his face, “Because we don’t want all those tons of ice to come crashing down on us . . . that sort of thing can bring this mission to an untimely halt, messing up a perfectly good sub.”
“Oh, right,” Simon said halfheartedly, as he pulled the hood of his parka tight around his face, “I forgot that minor detail.”
From behind, they heard the Russian sub commander approaching, footsteps resonating against the steel hull. His coat unzipped, he breathed in deeply, weathered bare hands gripping the rail for stability. Frost was already forming on his white beard. His grey eyes matched the colorless sky and his deep voice echoed across the vast emptiness. “Ah, just like beautiful Russian morning, this climate makes man strong. Not like your California sunshine where everyone drives convertible cars with designer sunglasses. That climate makes men weak and puny.”
Simon shot back in his jovial way, “Yeah, but our women are better looking.”
Their captain roared with laughter, slapping Simon hard on the back and almost sending him over the rail into the frozen depths below. “You go to Moscow, you find long-leg beauties there,” he bellowed, rubbing his fingers together to indicate cash for love, and he started to sing the Russian anthem in a gravelly baritone. The robust man stopped at the hatch, still singing, sweeping his arm around to encompass the sub. “Everything has its price.” John stared back at the salty old captain, holding his feelings close in hidden pain knowing only too well that someday the ultimate price would have to be paid.
The captain pondered this mission and said, “Ah! We go now . . . but maybe you want to swim? This water is good for the brain, it cleanses away bad ideas!” John and Simon ignored their captain’s views about their mission and turned away from the railing. They took a few quick breaths of chilled air before going below. Climbing down into the musty confines of the sub, they secured the hatch behind them.
The sub began a slow descent into the frigid darkness. Patiently waiting on the command deck was the small team of scientists John had hired for the mission. A multi-billionaire could procure any type of expert and secure access to any means of transportation. This day was no different from any other day. When John Rosen wanted to get to the bottom of things he sure as hell did, without wasting a breath.
One of his team members scrutinized the data as it came in and said, “We are approaching the opening to the cavern at a depth of 478 meters. We will be clearing the ice shelf shortly.”
John nodded his approval and asked to verify, “All satellite images confirm the entry is large enough, correct?”
“Yes, the imagery confirms the cavern and its water entrance are both adequate to accommodate our size.” Simon was about to comment about the melting ice which was beginning to expose the structure within its cavern and underground lake, but he knew the importance of secrecy. Approaching from the top would, no doubt, be detected by anyone watching. John owned most of the satellites focused on Earth, but not all of them.
Suddenly, a loud crashing and scraping sound coming from above echoed through the sub’s interior. The jolt sent everyone not seated tumbling to the deck. The captain shot a look of disapproval at the helmsman and shouted something in Russian that made young seaman squirm in his seat. He responded nervously, “Yes, Captain, I will avoid the ice best I can.” Sweat formed on his brow. We are entering the tunnel now with approximately ten meters to spare on all sides.”
The Captain stroked his beard. “Ah, very tight fit, but no problem. How you say? If the shoe fits.”
Moments passed slowly and the crew cringe
d with every little creaking sound the sub made as it slid through the sunken tunnel. The guidance system indicated their path with a sharp pinging sound piercing the dull red glow of the cramped command deck. The sub crept through the pitch blackness, slowly approaching the opening above. The helmsman announced they were clear for ascent into the lake and cavern covered by hundreds of meters of ice.
John let loose a sigh of relief as he anxiously waited for the sub to break the surface of the lake. Outside there was just enough light filtering in from above to illuminate the vast cavern with a ghostly haze. The water appeared black and flat as an oil pit. The conning tower broke the surface with a hiss, like some kind of mythical beast emerging from the depths of the ocean.
John was the first out after the captain, climbing up the steps and exiting through the hatch, the cold still air hitting him squarely in the face. Slowly the structure came into focus as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. High tilted walls arose with their apex a mere shadow under the hazy, fading light from above. John smiled broadly as Simon came up behind him, wrapping a scarf around his face that muffled his shouts. “Holy shit, I’ll be goddamned, now that is one hell of an ancient power plant.”
The sub’s crew was already busy prepping a Zodiac inflatable boat at the water line. In no time they were making their way across the frozen blackness. The hard rubber sponson crunching against the icy shore ground the Zodiac to a halt. Looming before them was the most perfectly preserved pyramid in the world standing just over sixty-one meters tall.
One of the Russian crew jumped over the gunnel onto the ice, slipping and almost falling into the freezing water. John tossed him a line and the crewman managed to drag the bow of the boat up onto the shore and tie off the end of the rope to a huge boulder of ice. John, Simon and their team of scientists leapt ashore, and with joints frozen and aching, their heavy boots dug into the ice as they made their way up to the edifice rising in front of them, the stone steps nearly buried by a sheet of hardened slush.
John had always known the significance to such a find and would now, finally, be able to prove his theory of the origins of mankind on Earth. But, for the time being, he would keep this information to himself.
