The Riddle (Children of Two Futures 1)

By G. J. Winters

From the Publisher that brought you popular short story series Chains of Darkness, Song of Teeth, Soulyte, The Magaram Legends, Requiem for a Dream,and Children of Time, now brings you, Children of Two Futures....

THE CAUSES OF THE DISAPPEARANCE OF HUMAN BEINGS FROM THE WORLD STARTED FROM THE YEAR 7245 AD
AND IN THE DISTANT YEAR OF 7500 AD, THE HUMAN RACE WILL CEASE TO EXIST

In the year 6421 AD, reasons for humanity’s extinction remain unknown to the government and future historians alike. In an era where time travel is possible, historians and journeymen have been forbidden from exploring that time period for any purpose whatsoever.

Nobody knows what will cause human extinction, and nobody has a clue.

But with only a thousand years left to humanity’s existence, an frenetic kind of curiosity spurred the constabulary's highest officials to agree that the future has to be known. No matter how proven it is that nothing in the events of the past can change the future, historians cling onto the fact that a theoretical Zeta Disruption may exist.

The Zeta Disruption, according to temporal theory, is a person—or animal—capable of changing the future. The Zeta Disruption can change the entire course of humanity.

Savannah Proehl and Kenneth Yardrow are pulled forward into the year 7245 to do exactly just that. They are given the rare chance to make a positive change to the world by discovering the causes of human destruction and answering a mysterious riddle.

But as young as they are, even they themselves are unsure if they can fulfill this gargantuan task. Still, the fate of humanity lies in their hands and it is up to them to save humanity from its demise.

Will they be able to unearth the truth? Will they be able to save the humans from obliteration?

Only one way to find out....

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EXCERPT
Even after hearing the riddle, Savannah Proehl hadn't been able to make much sense of it, other than to figure out the number fourteen was important to her mission to save the world. After getting the Soonseen's Lonnan Nation to cease firing at a ship from their Kinnan Nation, President Kunan Slaan had asked her to stick around in the future for a while.

The problem of the human race dying out as a result of Hinjo Junta's actions had remained. Though the immediate danger from deflected energy beams striking the planet had passed, Savannah found that she could not return home as soon as she wanted.

She sat in the president's mansion in Jakarta. President Slaan had placed her in a room with three walls and several panes of glass connected to each other to form one great transparent wall. The evening sun streamed in through the glass, shining upon her braided hair which lay over one shoulder.

An empty white can lie before her on a glass table. The can had once contained the same kind of gray nutrients she had eaten in Alexandria. She wouldn't call it food, not since she had come to regard it as little better than puppy chow.

President Slaan had promised to bring her food from the Temporal Constabulary. The nearest constabulary base lay in Okinawa, which was further away from Jakarta....

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandra Ross
• Release date: Sep 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301110674

G. J. Winters

G.J. Winters “fell into” writing when a well-meaning teacher of his submitted his Creative Writing assignment for publication in the school paper. The local paper picked up the article and asked G.J. for publishing rights, to which the young G.J. agreed with some hesitation, as he felt “that wasn’t one of my best writings at the time.” The reality was that this article was written when G.J. was a junior in high school.The article, which was a fictionalized version of a local myth surrounding a famous abandoned house near a swamp, was an assignment turned in as part of a mid-term exam. The teacher, Miss Mendez, thought G.J.’s writing was “exemplary” and showed “natural, raw writing talent for a person his age." The assignment called for “providing details to a local urban myth – provide background, using a local resident’s POV, and close with a vague hint of authenticity and realism."The story, entitled “The Old Mansion by the Swamp,” appeared in the high school paper as a short story, but was later serialized in the local paper in 6 parts. G.J. added more characters and even a sub-story (which later became a story of its own, “I Was Shirley Massey” – a story which centered on a member of the fictional family who resided in the Massey Mansion in the late 70s and disappeared without a trace).With the success of both of his original series, G.J. thought to venture into writing longer stories, this time with futuristic themes, as he has always been fascinated with travelling through time, future crimes, apocalyptic themes, and stories set in civilizations from the future.G.J. identifies with sci-fi writers such as Isaac Asimov (“Kept me awake through most evenings in college.”) and Margaret Peterson Haddix (“My girlfriend at the time had fits of jealousy over my fanatical tendencies towards this author.”).G.J. holds a degree in Chemistry, is an intern at the R&D division of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, and lives with girlfriend Deidre, a magazine editor.

Book preview

The Riddle

By GJ Winters

Published by Publications Circulations LLC.

SmashWords Edition

All contents copyright (C) 2014 by Publications Circulations LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

~ ~ ~ ~

Present Day

CAROL WREN SAT in the doctor's office, wishing she was anywhere but sitting on the curvy beige examination bed, waiting for her test results. Ever since the inexplicable kidnapping of two students from Leonard Dunkelson's class in Bristol Area Middle School, Carol's knee had felt as bad as it ever did.

She hadn't been able to explain how her knee caused her so much pain that it made her fall when Kenneth Yardrow and Savannah Proehl had been kidnapped by a person in a heavy-looking spacesuit. But her knee had hurt too much, and those poor kids were gone, and she could not tell anyone where they were taken because she could not possibly know.

She had tried telling the investigating detectives all that she'd seen, but they had only laughed at her. She had felt embarrassed, then guilty at being embarrassed, and then angry at the police officers for making her feel guilty, because she only told them the truth. Why would she even think of making it all up?

Finally, she just decided to tell them that she didn't know much of anything about the incident since, a doctor could confirm, she had been immobilized with an injury. A teacher had fallen asleep at his desk, though no toxins had been found in his blood that would indicate sedation. The classroom floor had been ruined with the man's large tracks. Carol thought of him as an astronaut who must have weighed quite a lot to leave such deep indents in the tile. Yet those things were just hard to explain.

No one around the school had seen anyone coming or going-not the janitor who had been mopping the girl's bathroom floor, not the security guard at the front entrance who had been sitting at his station watching six black and white security feeds, and none of the teachers. Certainly not Leonard Dunkelson, who had been placed on administrative leave pending a psychiatric evaluation.

Carol Wren did not want to be placed on administrative leave pending a psychiatric evaluation. There was no way she could defend herself. The surveillance tapes had revealed nothing.

No DNA samples had been found on the scene, except those of the children already present. A K-9 unit had uncovered nothing at the school that might lead to the presence of narcotics. A search team had combed through the area in a ten-mile radius, but had uncovered nothing useful.

Every abandoned building in Bristol had been searched, many left over from the heyday of the steel boom from fifty years ago. Volunteers had spent mornings and evenings searching through the township with flashlights, night vision goggles, and even metal detectors.

No one had been able to find a single clue of any kind relating to the two missing children, though they had found in the course of their search, a lost sheepdog and an illegal campsite made by two people who had eloped.

The case of the disappearing children had made national headlines. The police continually repeated evasive statements which meant absolutely nothing. Though the story had been a media sensation for a week, they lost interest when no new information came up.

She followed the story with intense interest, while her knee had not improved as it should. Full-blown attacks continued through the days and weeks that followed. She struggled through the rest of her classes until school finally let out, and then scheduled an appointment with her doctor across the border in Canada.

She felt fortunate to live a short flight away from Canada. The first time she had wrecked her knee after stepping into a groundhog's hole a while back, she bluntly asked about the price of everything. She learned very quickly that medical procedures in Canada cost far less than they did in America. She paid out of her own pocket for the surgery that left three white scars on the skin of her kneecap. Mile long runs in the morning finally drove the memory of the painful recovery away.

If only