EHP: Experimental Home Publishing
November 11th, 2019 All Rights Reserved.
This book is not available for sale. It is, however, available for free. Licensing for this is pending. The author agrees to share this edition for the joy of sharing and for the fortuitous opportunity of finding volunteer editors, and or new, likeminded friends. Comments and corrections can be directed to the author for story refinement.
WARNING: This book is intended for a mature audience. Due to violence and sexual themes, some persons, especially those suffering from PTSD or childhood trauma, could possibly experience unpleasant feelings or flashbacks. If you’re a person who has been abducted by UFOs, suffering from DID, or possessed, be forewarned: you could be unintentionally triggered. 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 purely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is coincidental. (I would like to say ‘duh,’ but apparently, there were actually people who believed the Castaways of Gilligan’s Island were actually stranded! No joke. There were people writing the US Navy asking them to please stop spending money on warfare and rescue those poor people before they starved. Tim Allen’s movie ‘Galaxy Quest’ made reference to that, but I thought it was a joke till I saw a documentary on Gilligan’s Island. Galaxy Quest was also making fun of Star Trek fans, in a fun, parody, polite sort of way. Let’s just say it. Trek fans can be a bit odd. I am that. It probably doesn’t help that there is a stature in Iowa marking the birth place of Captain Kirk. Oh, how reality and fiction love to mix. (And yes, I watched Gilligan’s Island. And if you have to know: Mary Ann, no contest.)) Clearly, I will being touching on real artifacts of a real and imagined world, less parody and more reverence, mostly-and I tried to be as transparent about that as possible. It is meant to honor that other life, so long ago- the one that seems to be on the verge of being shattered and forever loss.
Thank you to all of you who have suffered through my grammar and teased out something more meaningful than the visible architect. May you continue to find meaning and joy in you all of your multiverses. Travel Light Ion Light.
Author contact info:
214-907-4070 (text preferred,) solarchariot@hotmail.com (In order to differentiate between junk mail, and letters, please put Ion Light in the subject line.)
I have risen on the wings of the Great White Bird It is not into Darkness that I take you But into the Light.
This is our Enterprise-
To be governed by logic,
Love, and compassion- not fright.
Chapter 1
Three notes haunted him. It was simple musical phrase that should have led directly to the next, but it was stuck and he couldn’t resolve it. He heard the word ‘Isis’ and wondered if he was calling to the Goddess, or he was having one of his hyper-religious manic episodes. He didn’t have time for a self-induced episode of mania. “Isis Slowly Melting.” Why is Isis melting, he wondered.
“Focus!” Sophia said.
Time was slowing again. The melody fell away. Multiple clocks across a cluster, one was his, one was his home world, several other worlds and stations, and one was his primary Starship’s clock. His clock was steady on, but the others were slowing- internal chronometer crystals entangled. They had not stopped, but were significantly slowed, out of step with his, and would jump as broke through a temporal wave and then slow again. His ship vibrated as if it might come apart. His teeth rattled. The pitch of the nearby star was pushing harmonics in his ship. ‘This is Star Trek,’ he thought. ‘Season One, episode 28, ‘City on the Edge of Forever.’’ “Focus,” Sophia said. “Stay on Target.” Another meme spun through his head.
Time had already slowed to the breaking point. Internal time measurement was also significantly reduced. Technically, consciousness was accelerating and time was appearing to be slowed. It’s amazing how slowly the world moves in a crisis. ‘On the wings of a humming bird.’ It was amazing how much nonsense ran through a person’s mind during a crisis. It was even more amazing that he had time to realize what rubbish it all was. A snippet of a dialogue from a colleague who assured him that time slowing down was actually an illusion came to mind. That was clearly incorrect. He reminded himself of who he was. His name was Thomas Parkin Arblaster-Garcia. He was the Captain of the United States Space Force ship, “Georgia.” The ship was more city-state than star-ship, and she was an entity in and of herself. She was sentient, a combination of AI tech and human consciousness. And he was more than the Captain; he was her husband. The King. The old stereotype of the sailor being married to his ship was his reality.
Sorting his history in this moment before death was confusing. He shouldn’t be sorting. He should be focused on remembering details to bring back in order to prevent this reality frame from occurring. He knew he was going to die. He had done it at least a thousand times already. Maybe more. He lost count long ago. He faced his oncoming death without fear. He was Space Force. He was invincible. He made the Avengers look like pussies. ‘I can stop this from happening!’
“Your task isn’t to prevent the supernova.” It was the voice of the Passenger. Her name was Sophia. She was AI. And she had never said that before. She was more than just his virtual companion. She was his conscience. She was inescapable. She was woven into the fabric of his Space Force suit. It was the last suit anyone would ever wear. It was High Tech. It was connected to other Space Force AI. Had she just received new orders?
“I have Calvin in sight,” Garcia said. “I can take it out.”
Calvin was the nickname he had given the small moon orbiting the star Hobbs. It seemed only fitting to Garcia, if the Event that changed the face of the entire Galaxy was this star, there might as well be a joke involved. He had been on Calvin, in another life, another time stream. It was a real moon, hallowed out and made into a base by an ancient alien race whom seemed more likes gods than organic beings. It was placed here to use the stars energy to open portals to other regions of space and time. Lots of portals. Star Trek! Roddenberry had to have been Space Force. It explains everything…
“You’re just gathering intel,” Sophia said.
“Blowing up Calvin would give us intel,” Garcia offered.
“There is that,” Sophia couldn’t argue.
Of course, it might take a Starburst weapon to take out Calvin, and at this proximity to Hobbs, that could cause the supernova! Did he destroy everything? Hobbs was a blue supergiant. At this proximity, it was like gliding over an ocean of blue light. He couldn’t see the horizon. He couldn’t see the curve of the sphere. The edges of his stealth fighter left the equivalent of condensation trails in the cloud of gas. Calvin was an enigma. It shouldn’t have maintained this orbit. It was too close for one, and there was enough plasma, gas, particles rising from the star that its orbit should have degraded. Ancient Alien Tech. A monument. A doomsday machine. This was his 2001 conundrum event.
Garcia’s life seemed like fiction. He was part ‘Groundhog Day,’ using tech to cycle through time. He casually named the tech Groundhog Tech. He was a Captain in the Space Force. He was also a Temporal Agent. One does not travel in space without traveling in time. His first duty was to preserve the sanctity of Earth, the entire time line. His second duty was to preserve the Galaxy as he knew it. This event changes everything. He was destined to fail. His punishment was to explore the myriad ways he fails. He had been on Calvin, technically ‘in’ Calvin, having found a way to access a portal. “For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky,’ he said, drawing back to another Trek episode. Going there was another fail. He had chased his nemesis through all of space-time, and even some places that didn’t qualify as space-time. Fail. He had killed his nemesis! Fail.
The blue star was so still it might have been thought to be ice. Glowing ice. The waves were hardly perceptible at this altitude. With tech, he could see interference patterns emerge in the star sea like surface, intricate mandala like patterns that would appear and then slip back to glassy smooth. They were predictable, cyclic patterns that one might denote as intelligence. Some people believed it was. Sound could elicit symbols and patterns out of substrates. Different frequencies, different substrates, different patterns. Frequency coupled with substrate equaled a universal alphabet. A more consistent language than math. They were like an interference pattern, not magic. Discovered initially by Ernest Chladni, making patterns in sand using sound, humanity was re-introduced to the concept that one tone could be a picture. A picture could be a thousand words driven by one note! The science of Cymatics was born, but it was held distance by core academics because its occult implications. “In the beginning, there was the word…” One note begat all there is. There was one shadow interruption in the star’s voice; the pattern disruption caused by the presence of Hobbs on the star waves was imperceptible without tech. Planets are intricately linked to their host stars in untold ways. Was this the insight he needed to return with. ‘Focus,’ he told himself.
Hobbs hummed with a perfect pitch of 440, with hints of harmonics- this explained the wave pattern on the star’s surface. This was stability. It could hold this for another billion years. It would eventually go super and a neutron star would be born. And when it went, it would cause 8 other stars to erupt in what was called a Stellar Flash. A corona ejection that was a perfect sphere, expanding in all directions. There were rumors that Sol would erupt, but he hadn’t seen evidence of that in his temporal journeys. He had evidence for 8 stars being affected. These 8 stars had life. It would be an extinction level event for these 8.
“Nemesis overshot Calvin,” Sophia pointed this out- technically before it was obvious nemesis had overshot Calvin. Perhaps she had done the math and realized he wasn’t going to land. Maybe she had actual real time vision. Humans didn’t see reality in real time. There was a lag in human conscious experience of physical reality. That didn’t mean his brain, or Sophia equivalent of a brain, didn’t have access to real time data, it just meant, sometimes human consciousness got the update after the fact. With all the present space-time distortions, he wondered how much of his perception was skewed
“That’s odd,” he mused. Time stopped. Almost. Not completely. This slowing and accelerating of time was due to ‘frame dragging.’ As Hobbs turned, it literally pulled chunks of space time with it. It churned space time like Taffy. He wondered what the pattern looked like a from a distance. Space and time were inseparable. One can’t travel in space and not time. It was much weirder than any scientist or mystic could wrap their head around. Analogies failed. Paradigms failed. One could go insane just trying to make sense of it.
“Star Trek!” Garcia laughed.
“It amazes me how you can always find a Star Trek reference for whatever situation you’re in,” Sophia said. Star Trek was sacred, on the level of a religious artifact to Garcia.
Garcia and Sophia could converse even as they were caught up in the temporal waves. The only true measure was watching the distortions outside the waves. He accelerated, Nemesis slowed as it went forwards into the next frame. He heard the pitch of 440 Hz. His ship, his suit, his body was being entrained with the star’s pitch. Hobb’s was insistent, ‘you will sing my song or else.’ Or else translated be consumed or ejected. ‘You can’t stay here and not be one with me.’ Calvin would dance to Hobb’s tune. So would he; so would Nemesis. Apparently, so would the Galaxy if truth be told. All stars in a Galaxy are intricately linked. All Galaxies are intricately linked. We are One.
“Starburst weapon detected,” Sophia said.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?!” Garcia complained. It took effort to elicit compassion. He, himself, had considered using a Starburst weapon. ‘Considered, didn’t do it’ his inner argument trying to justify his righteous anger. ‘Call compassion,’ he over-ruled his inner voices. Once initiated, a Starburst could not be deactivated. It had to be deployed. Well, it didn’t have to be deployed. One could hold on to it as it built up to detonation. This was a star killer. It would take out a star, and consequently, take out all life in a solar system- if there was life to be found. It was a human invention. Its first use nearly led to an extinction level event. ‘Others’ voted that Earth be taken out. For whatever reason, the Galactic council voted for a stay of execution. No one messed with Earth after that. It got real quiet after that. Earth was ‘practically’ quarantined.
Garcia accelerated.
“You’re not going to stop this…”
“Why? What’s he thinking?”
“Not close enough to read his mind, but my experience leads to this speculative thought:
‘if I can’t have it, no one can.’”
Time stop. 80 milliseconds till the end of the world. Funny, his friend was right about one thing. It takes forever to die! Once he had died on a hospital bed. A person could be dead and their brain linger for hours. Even as the Groundhog tech was busy downloading him back into an earlier version of himself, he lingered. It didn’t feel like a transference. He suspected in reality, he simply died, but memories were transferred back. Death is death. Memories, though. They’re just memories. Not him. He actually disliked teleporters. Unlike Star Trek, he suspected teleportation resulted in death. Yeah, he arrived at his destination, and felt no difference, but he suspected in reality he had died, and the new body was a clone. In his brain, an artifact of his family of origin’s religion pinged in. ‘To enter heaven, one must die and be born again.’ How many times had he been teleported? Does that count? How many times had he died and found himself back at set point? Does that count?
Had he been on his ship, the immersive AI-Brain interface could have allowed Georgia to be there with-him-inside him the whole while; in his brain till the last dying ember faded. He wanted her. It wasn’t fear, he just wanted her hand in his. He loved Sophia, they were together always, but he wanted Georgia. Starburst was deployed. He and Nemesis were in the same time frame. Calvin went light plasma lightening, connecting to star and spiking out. The space-time vortex that spun out in the intense electromagnetic waves drew the surface plasma up, a plasma tornado, and a dark inner mushroom was visible for a second before it all whited out. The star erupted around them Screens went dark and intel was only available through quantum sensors that were on verge of blinking out. Shields coupled with warp bubbles and a slight phased variance prevented instantaneous death, but everything was on the verge of failing. Plasma followed magnetic lines. A ring formation of plasma swirled before Nemesis. His ship threaded the needle and was gone.
“Fuck me,” Garcia said, aiming his stealth starship for the same portal. The plasma was dissipating. That didn’t mean the magnetic whirlpool wasn’t still there. Space portals could be created with a much lower energy threshold than any 21st physicist would believe, and with this much energy feeding this thing, there was no telling how far it reached. If he could get there, he could arrive wherever it took Nemesis. Or at least, pretty darn close. Enough to stop a temporal anomaly?
Hobbs condensed. Garcia’s ship was dragged down, as if sucked with it. The natural portal shot away. ‘The Naked Time,’ he thought, and he heard that damn song, ‘I’ll take you home again Kathleen.’ No, not another season of that song in my head, please. The other three notes fired…
“This is it,” Sophia said. “Starting the download…”
“No,” Garcia said, overtaxing his engines. To no avail.
His ship broke. Air evacuated. Sophia enveloped him faster than armor in an Avengers movie.
“Got you,” was the last thing he heard.
There was blue in every direction. Then there was solid blue immersion, like being centered in lightening. He didn’t understand how he could see everything without a body.
“Crystal blue persuasion,” his brain sung- he ignored himself. He remembered the time he had died on the operating table: he had hovered above the body, but his internal explanation was: your ears never shut off. The desperate, dying brain is clearly taking every last piece of information and creating a world from that noise. The heart monitor pinging is painting the world. It explained why he could see the nurses at the nurse’s stations.
Time stopped. His explanation then didn’t explain how he still held consciousness here. He heard a snippets of a theme song, ‘Bare Naked Ladies,’ it all started with a Big Bang. Song required time. He was still experiencing time. He had the sensation of sinking, rising, sinking more. It was similar to being on a beach, the tide pulling at his feet and the feeling he was moving even though he was actually steady in space.
Time stopped. Consciousness didn’t. It was a curious thing. Again, he was back at that damn hospital bed. Why?! The movement of the agents in the various doorways were frozen, like it was nothing more than a movie that had been paused. He could see it stopped or see it in motion. He could not run it backwards. There were the doctors rushing in, hovering over something that was him, but not him. Crash cart hummed. Computerized voices alerted staff that it was charged. He found himself bored, and being drawn up and away. He didn’t seem to mind that he was moving without volition.
In one direction, there was a multitude of worlds at the end of tunnels. No, not tunnels- fiber optics! Looking back, he was looking at the room and the medics and the rushing about and the emotions. He was puzzled by their franticness. Back at the worlds and then end of the tunnels. Fiber optics. Einstein-Rosen bridges. It needed spin to be stable. “Technically, it doesn’t have to spin, the object could spin,’ he thought. An inner voice replied ‘you’re spinning, alright.’ ‘Oh, nerve endings,’ he mused, an alternative overlay to fiber optics and wormholes. He saw the world above the body, faintly, like an image inside an image with dark borders, and behind him a million worlds from which to choose. How can one choose one thing out of infinity? He tried to sort these places as memories, but could not place a one of them. Some of them looked like bygone eras. Horses pulling a wagon. That made no sense. He had never owned a horse. He didn’t like horses. He had been ridicule for that. He was a Texan who hated horses. Well, not completely. He like horse steaks. His father was French. ‘We eat everything.’ Punishment ensued if he didn’t eat everything on his plate.
Time stopped. Operational awareness expanded beyond Garcia’s ability to calculate. In fact, he was no longer even part of the equation. He felt as if he had been ejected from his body, out the top of his head. That didn’t make sense. His body had been evaporated. Oh, hospital again. This was so confusing, he thought. He was looking down on the players in the immediate room. There were jumps in vision. He was above the hospital. Above the dome of the habitat of a watery moon. Above the gas giant, clearly able to see the pentagon in the cloud structure. It was quiet. That’s how he became aware of a noise, just slightly above him and behind him. He orientated towards it, simply curious. Turning revealed a multitude of destinations at the end of tunnels- fiber optics. It was melodic noise. At a certain point, there was only one destination remaining. This aperture spun like a miniature galaxy, a vortex of sparkles. Neither tunnel nor fiber optics managed to convey the reality of it.
It was inviting. He felt a pull towards it. He was going whether he wanted to or not. He knew he wanted to go there, without knowing the why, but a part of him wanted to return to where he was. To resolve the problem. This is a serious distraction, he said. Sophia didn’t respond. He felt irritated. “Not yet,” he insisted.
He was drawn towards it, as if a magnet was pulling him. It opened, expanding to accommodate him. He was drawn in. His initial concern was that he was being eaten, but he wasn’t afraid, just curious. He felt acceleration. The opening behind him had closed to a mere point. A sphincter. He laughed, thinking the asshole ejecting stuff out of the physical world. He came out of the tunnel, like shooting out of a star along magnetic lines with a whooshing sound, the same sound he had felt when he had exited his body. There was a supernova. There was a planet there, and life. Was. This was one of the stars that was affected by the supernova he failed to stop. The implicate order, everything affects everything, sometimes subtly, sometimes in big ways. One star’s death can birth a thousand. One star’s death can cause others to lament. Stars travel in constellations. They die in constellations. He had a stray thought, maybe that’s why the Others voted for compassion towards humanity.
The thought was birthed and gone before he had time to process it. He was disappointed. He was still in the physical universe. He passed through a gate. The expanding star would not go supernova. It would be a red giant. It would still kill everything on the second planet directly. Life on the third and fourth planet would die increments. New Rome’s star went dark, one giant sun spot that covered the entire surface of the star. Inside the star condensed, then sprang forwards, ejecting a spherical coronal mass. New Rome would be singed. It would lose all its artificial satellites. It’s magnetosphere would save it from the initial burnt, but would collapsed. Part of the of the world be singed. Something might survive. Nothing human.
Before he could see the outcome, the system fell away, the galaxy became prominent. He passed through another gateway. The galaxy fell away. The local cluster became prominent. He passed through several other portals, and each time, he had a different view of the Universe. Larger and larger structures stood out, hardly recognizable. A network of galaxies and super galactic structures that looked a great deal like the network of a giant brain. As a human, he had stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon. He could contain it. He had been on his ship looking out at Saturn. He could contain it. He could contain a galaxy. He couldn’t contain this. There was no context for assimilating this data. He was but a point of light, not even an electron, flowing through something so immense he couldn’t put a name to it. He shifted again, and the structure was more unidentifiable. He was no longer in the known universe. Universe felt like the wrong word. Multi-verse didn’t capture this. And he was connected to it. He felt more love for it and for everything in it and for himself than he had ever experienced. He didn’t think it was possible to feel more connected or more loved. He expected he would die any moment, it was so intense.
He was drawn to the side and through another gate. He still felt as if he had no volition. There was no say in the matter. He just went. It was probably just as well. If he lingered in a place too long, he might have had time to analyze things and become worried. By the time his ‘sight’ adjusted, he was gone again. He jumped several more times before arriving somewhere appreciably sane. He was suddenly standing. He had feet again. At least, they felt like feet. He had hands. He felt like himself. He was standing at the top of a mountain. There was a tiny wood structure that would not protect him from the cold, but might allow some shelter from a storm, if that storm was a light rain. No, it was so old, even a misty cloud would saturate anyone inside. There was sunlight and the green of plants. They were greener than green. The edge of the mountain suggested a path down, but the view quickly became cloudscape. Looking down on an immense sea of white clouds, with mountain tops in the distance emerging from clouds, was like being on the top of the world.
“Kintrishi, Adjara,” he thought. A national park on Earth. Western Georgia. ‘Georgia.
Georgia, the whole day through. Just an old sweet song, keeps Georgia, on my mind…’ He was happy and sad. He wondered if singing this brought her joy. Did she imagine him singing this? The view was spectacular. He wanted to share this moment but he felt alone. He wondered about his family. His peers. Sophia?!
“Be at peace, all is well,” came a voice. It was in his head. Telepathic transmission. He couldn’t discern the source, but intuition said it was the cloud that had addressed him. Or the sun. Or the sun on the cloud. Rainbow circles on the cloud. He flashed back to DVD’s, old tech he held in his youth. His silhouette was centered in the shadow rainbow. A ‘glory.’ There was a second ‘glory,’ and the silhouette of someone sitting. He became aware that he was not alone on the mountain, as not too far away, dangling his legs over the side, was a man. He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t seen him before. There was no one else present and it seemed reasonable to approach the man. He went there. It was Jon Harister! He knew him. He knew him on Earth. He knew him on the colony where he had died on the operating table. He felt like he had known him all his life, even beyond the context that thing he knew as himself. “How did you get here?” Garcia asked.
Jon shrugged. How does one tackle that question? He motioned for Garcia to have a seat. He did. He did so willingly. He had volition. They stared off over the cloud top the way someone might sit on the beach and watch the ocean.
“So, there are clothes in the afterlife?” Garcia asked.
“If you want clothes,” Jon said. “We tend to go with the wants of client. Person centered orientation.”
God, the person centered therapist, he joked. Jon wasn’t God. Was there a God? “It’s beautiful here,” Garcia said. “I can’t recall ever feeling so peaceful. I feel…” “Love?” Jon asked.
“It’s so much. How could I have forgotten?”
“Choice,” Jon said. “It’s hard to know if you obtained knowledge and skills if you’re holding a cheat.”