Terraqueocosm

By Anthony Ayoub

In desperation, a young couple who happen to be scientists, successfuly manage to transfer the dying man into the body of a mentally damaged young woman.
He successfully joins with the woman's subconscious and is able to access the full potential of their joined intellect.
Their new enhanced potential allows them to launch an effort to raise humanity to a new level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Ayoub
• Release date: Jan 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452328041

Anthony Ayoub

Hi. My name is Anthony Ayoub. In my life I have specialized in travelling the hard road. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a rather quirky memory impairment that allows me to forget the worse things that happenned to me, while,at the same time I have learned from them.Got thrown out of kindergarden at the nunery in Nairobi, Kenya, for taking a look under a five year old's girl skirt, with her permission of course. Moved down the lane to the monastery. Then, the University of Notre Dame in Bukavu, the Belgian Congo, followed by a rather long walk back through the jungle when the Belgian Congo became something else. A couple months in school in Alexandria, egypt, after spending six weeks in isolation in case we were suffering from the heeby-jeebies. Then, back to Kenya, tanganika, London,lytton,five miles north of Dover on the Canterbury road where I attended Pilgrims school for boys. They took my family to court in a benevolent effort to keep me in one place long enough for the dust to settle. Rome, where I attended St. Georges and finished my more formal education. A little more to come...

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Terraqueocosm

By

Y-Not

Y-not born

Anthony Ayoub

43636 Cariboo hwy

Hixon

B.C., Canada

VOK-1S1

250-565-4857

250-617-1711

[e-mail]

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010

By Anthony Ayoub

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. His e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person that you share it with. If you’re reading this e-book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work.

Chapter One

The Beginning:

The jangle of the alarm bells were screaming shrilly through her mind while Barbara’s fingers raced to complete the necessary connections. Her hands were flying through the tangle of electrical cables with a sureness that she didn’t wish to confuse with thought.

Hang on Alec. Just a few moments more. She reassured him. Don’t you die on me now love, I promise you that I won’t forgive you.

She spent a precious instant of her time to snatch a glance at his face and took the image away with her, superimposing it over the raw machinery that surrounded them. His eyes were riveted on her. His teeth clenched with his iron determination. His hair, his dear face and forehead, were drenched with rivulets of sweat driven by the concentration of his pure will to defy death for just a small minute more.

No mistakes. No mistakes. She mumbled the mantra to herself. No time for mistakes. She made another connection, and one of the loudest alarms shut itself off, leaving a ghost echo of itself still ringing in her ears.

Good.

Hang in there sweetheart, were almost there. Her fingers were a blur of motion, until, with a yell, she lunged across the makeshift table and slammed her clenched fist against the large green ON button.

Instantly, an eon later, a tiny click shattered the silence, followed by a deep reassuring hum which quickly filled the room. The lights dimmed to red momentarily throughout the Hospital, as the giant capacitors in the corner of the laboratory finished inhaling their charge rapaciously.

Then. A voracious torrent of power.

Three million watts, at eight hundred and eighty volts; enough power to light up a fairly large town poured out of them unchecked through cables thicker than her wrists.

A new bank of gages sprang to life with a crackle of electrical static as the machines accepted the power and converted it into not a thing. Everything in the room seemed to become transfused in a strange green glow. She thought that she could see the bones in her hands through her skin. The very air seemed to sizzle and dance. For a moment Barbara wondered if the room was exploding in slow motion. No. Still here.

Draped across the rough equipment, Barbara could feel the small hairs in her nape standing ramrod straight, responding to the immense static field that the power had created.

In counterpoint to the immense imagined noise, the room was deathly quiet. The smell of ozone, and her own stale sweat, rankled her nose making it itch.

She took her courage, condensed it, and took a flinching look at Alec. She caught the end of his soundless sigh, as his eyes faded and became vacant. His body seemed to silently implode and recede beneath her as he left it. He was gone.

Well, that was it. Panting from her efforts, she pulled herself together and turned to face the rather overwhelmed day nurse, who visibly flinched from her look.

Alec’s gone. Cover him. Don’t touch anything else.

Barbara turned her suddenly aching, bruised body away from the greatest joy in her life, and stumbled on shaking, jerky legs, towards the alcove that was both her office, and more recently, her bedroom.

Beaching herself on her desk chair, she reached deep inside the lower left hand drawer and removed an amber bottle clearly marked with a red skull and crossbones. Pulling the cork with her teeth, she spit it aside, and tipped up the bottle. She gasped, as the raw whiskey burned her gullet on its way towards her empty stomach. The fumes were fire in her nostrils, the pain, heat in her belly.

Good. She mumbled, feeling reality ebb, stolen by the creeping warmth that was running rampant through her veins.

Good.

In the other room she could feel Alec’s body slowly turning cold.

The Continuance

It seemed to Barbara that time had come to a standstill, and, perhaps for the first time in all of man’s history, it really had: held up in awe at the temerity shown by two humans who refused to accept the laws of God and nature.

She leaned back in her chair, bravely savoring the peace that reigned in the dim twilight of the room, the only light spilling in through the open door. She closed her eyes and allowed it to engulf her.

Her mind and body felt numb. She had a fleeting thought that the whole thing had been some kind of a movie, and now it was over. No, she thought. It had never been a movie. Whatever it was, it had been real. Still was real.

She thought about how this moment was such a remarkable counterpoint from the previous glare of furious action that had seemed to overwhelm her for such a lifetime of long. She felt lost through inaction. Such a strange stillness.

She allowed her mind to roam back over what now seemed to have been an endless supply of hours, each filled with the excruciating effort that it had taken to bring them to this point.

At random, she tasted incidents that had stood out for their seeming impossibility to overcome. Somehow, though, frantic in their determined desperation, they had always found a way.

They had developed a system that would allow them to feel, examine, taste the crux of their immediate problem; then, finding a chink, they would wriggle through.

If a solution seemed impossible, they would go over the hazard, or, if necessary, tunnel under it. Finally, failing that, they would ignore the problem and continue, trusting that something in the next leg of their journey would shed some backlight. A hint that would allow them to connect the dots.

She knew that it seemed ridiculous. Even in her own mind, when she told herself that what she had just been through was likely to have been the easy part of the journey that they had embarked upon. However, as she was very well aware, there are different kinds of hard in this world, and, waiting and hoping are perhaps the hardest kind of all to have to suffer through. Ask any ten year old on Christmas Eve.

She consciously willed her aching muscles to relax, and, one by one, as she concentrated on them, they did. She took slow, deep breaths, consciously extending the tightness in her chest. Her hair, tumbling forward against her breasts, looked like a tangled mop infested with cuddies.

Well, she thought ruefully, they had certainly thumbed their noses at the Gods this time. Now it only remained to be seen if those beings had a sense of humor, or, if for all their bravery, expertise and fine thoughts, would all their megalomaniac efforts amount to naught.

To be truly honest with herself, she more than half expected to hear a chastising voice from heaven, or perhaps just a bolt of lightning tearing through the ceiling to fry her sorry arse. She could not help but hope that the Gods were rusty and perhaps out of practice.

They might miss, she told herself aloud. I mean, it could happen.

Caught up in the scenario, she wondered for a moment if it would not be wiser for her to present them with a moving target, then decided that she simply could not find the energy.

Go on, she taunted them, feeling a faint spark of rebellion warming her blood on the heels of the whisky, See if I care.

She chewed at her lip, reconsidering the advisability of tweaking the nose of such powerful people. Bravery was all well and good, but not when it verged on stupidity. Hedge your bet.

Sorry, she mumbled, trying to look properly chastened should there actually be a God, or several, listening to her insane ramblings.

By nature, Barbara was not really a gambler. She had never wanted or needed more than life had ever freely given her. However, she thought, they had certainly made up for lost time in the last couple of months. She and Alec had perhaps cast the dice in the biggest game of all time played on the macrocosmic table of life. It now only remained to be seen how those spinning dice would come to rest when they finally chose to.

Continuing to sit quietly, she let the calm coolness of the room seep into her bones, her essence. She could not help but wonder where this adventure would lead. Excitement stirred, spluttered, then fizzled.

There was little doubt in her mind that they had embarked on a wondrous quest, but the outcome was a little nerve wracking, not to say the least. But exciting, oh yes, really exciting. Boring was not likely to become part of her future vocabulary for quite a long while. If ever again.

It was nice to know that what they had already achieved could never be taken away from them. They had pitted themselves one on one against death, and it seemed that they may have won; at least the first round.

Wasn’t there a song about that? she thought, then corrected herself, the song had been about beating the devil at something. Who knows, she thought, perhaps it did apply to what they had just done.

Wallowing in introspection was something that she rarely did. Now, in the calm that was the eye of the storm, she allowed herself the luxury of slipping back in her mind for the first time since her life had been shattered, and this adventure had begun.

She thought back to a place and time, not so long ago, when she had been young, and life had tasted so good; a kaleidoscope of pleasures that she had relished to the fullest with Alec, who had been the most fulfilling lover, husband, and the very best friend and companion that any person could have had to share the road of life with. Then, as if the World couldn’t allow something so beautiful to exist for long within its bounds, the news had come that Alec had won the lottery and was suffering from a terminal illness. It seemed that she was soon to be robbed of all that was beautiful in her life.

Barbara thought ruefully about how she had always half expected something like this to happen. She must have a streak of pessimism within her, or perhaps, she had simply had a strong premonition of the danger to come. During odd, quiet moments in her life, she had felt a mild dread as if she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Occasionally, without consciously thinking about it, the suspense would get to her and turn her moody. Alec, more of an optimist, would laugh, setting himself to charm her out of the doldrums, and always succeeding; sometimes with no more than that special sharing look of his, which always managed to melt her insides, and make her so hot and horny she would steam. Then she would be unable to think of anything else but him. His looks, his taste, the way he cringed when she suckled his nipples. The look in his eyes as he entered her.

Nevertheless, for all their too-human faults, no one could ever have accused them of having abused the privileges given to them. They had reveled in each other, enjoying themselves to the fullest. Life had been a frolic, and there was hardly a place, or a love position, that they had not enjoyed.

It was the common consensus amongst their friends at the hospital, that one day they would be caught by the director fornicating madly with each other while hanging from the main candelabra in the lobby. The fact was, she chuckled to herself, that they might well have given it a try, if only there had been one. She knew that when it came to Alec, her first and only lover, she had definitely been a shameless hussy. It hadn’t been the sex that had been so addictive, it was the joining and being one being instead of two individuals.

It was perhaps this sense of the special overwhelming success of their relationship. The quality of it, and of having just too much to loose she thought; so much more than even other happy marriages, that had made what they had set out to do not seem so strange in the desperation of the moment, so extraterrestrial, so downright unscientific and Disney-ish. At least in the beginning. After that, it hadn’t mattered what anybody had thought, there had been no time for fruitless speculation. Just a frantic race against time and god-awful reality.

Shit, she thought to herself wonderingly. What convoluted paths could they possibly have traveled to bring two such competent scientists to even consider trying such a crazy thing as what they had just accomplished?

Right now, she was very grateful to accept the haze of recollection that surrounded the memories she carried of the first few hours of their journey. She knew that she had been cocooned by shock, and the desperate driving need to move ahead; else, her misery might well have caught up with her and killed her.

Well, that was water under the bridge. They were now faced with a ‘fait accompli’. Good or bad, they had made their bed and would now have to lie in it. The thought was terrifying.

The discoveries that they had made had found their time and purpose, and could no longer be crammed back into the universe of not being. Nor, at this point, could the experiment be reversed.

She understood clearly that, like all scientists and twelve-year-old girls, she was trapped by the reality of her own genius. Like the nubile young girls, she was capable of producing true wonders, while remaining totally incapable of understanding the extent of where the path would lead. One could only hope for the best.

Their friends and co-workers might well be excused for mistakenly supposing that, as they were both brilliant scientists and doers, they would apply what precious little time that was left to them to seek a cure for that dread disease. Therefore, it came as no surprise to the staff at the Roxborough Private Clinic, where they worked, when Barbara became galvanized into a veritable tornado of undeviating energy.

Barricading herself and Alec in the confines of their large research laboratory, she had maintenance set up cots in an adjoining alcove. Thereafter, she only extruded herself from this domain to pigeonhole poor Dalton, who was the Institute’s senior surgeon, and very harassed administrator.

This esteemed gentleman, and may he be forgiven by the God who looks after accountants, was really no match for this crazy woman, or her crazy demands. Caught like everyone else by the parameters of the situation, he tempered his good sense heavily with his soft heart, and blindly authorized her increasingly outrageous requisitions, while desperately hoping for some sort of a breakthrough, however small, to help justify the expenses incurred, and his job, both of which he was sure would be on the table for consideration by the bull mastiffs at the next board meeting. Bull mastiffs, he knew, never allowed themselves to be derailed from what was important, money.

He wondered what possible lunacy could have led him to accept a job in administration, when the greatest pleasures in his life had come from the good that his talents had achieved for others on the cutting room table. He was driven to the thought that if they took his job away, it would probably be for the best. He promised himself that he wouldn’t allow himself to regret it for more than a moment.

Barbara felt a ‘frisson’ run up her back when she thought at how close they had come to failing. As the realization of initial success became real to her, the shivers were quickly followed by goose bumps. She wriggled her backside in the chair, rubbing her soft sensitized flesh against the warm leather.

Right from the beginning, they had known that it was going to be a close race fraught with untold enormous variables. Many of those would be beyond their capacity either to understand, or to alter. Even now, there were things that they had achieved, things that they had done, that she did not understand, let alone be in a position to extrapolate to their true potential. It was like assembling a motor and then pushing the starter button. It ran, but she really did not understand half the technology that had come from her own brain, or for that matter, what the machines that they had created would be capable of doing in the future.

But one thing she did know. The hours had rushed into days, into weeks, seeming to accelerate ever faster in direct proportion to how close they had come to failing in their objective and being swept over the falls.

At times, Barbara had felt as if she was careening through a cosmos of obstacles like a large stainless steel pinball; not understanding many of them, but absorbing them all into her subconscious, while ever-forging blindly ahead trampling over everything and hoping for the best, forever caught in the convoluted madness of their covenant.

She concentrated on the pace of her breathing and tried to absorb the stillness of the room, trying to breath it in through her pores. Giving her brain some time to wind down.

A memory came to her of a time, a few years earlier, when she had gone on a fishing trip with Alec and some friends. One of the men had caught a mud shark and prepared it for dinner. She had been absolutely amazed that the head of the fish had remained alive, swimming on the boat deck for the longest time; either too determined, or too stupid to understand that it was supposed to be dead. She remembered being awed by such naked single mindedness. For a while, the small beast had seemed to be able to transcend death.

There were times in the recent past, when she had felt very much like that fish. Time had come to lose all meaning in the harsh glare of the laboratory lights. The missed meals. The days without rest, stretching the panic that had become a suffocating force that enveloped their brains in a dank fog of uncertainty. And always there was the driving distraction of the clock in their heads which counted down their meager resources of time, as they visibly dwindle away into excruciating dregs, while, at the same time, their problems had seemed to balloon to ridiculous, almost comical proportions.

Certainly, she thought, logic could never have prevailed in their venture, not for a minute. Just like that fish, she felt that they had simply been too stupid, or perhaps too stubborn to accept the reality of the hand that they had been dealt. They did not care that what they wanted to do just could not be done, they had gone ahead and done it anyway.

Barbara was determined to never let herself forget the lesson that she had so recently been taught, about how soon success could be snatched away from her clutches. She had Alec back, she was sure of it, and she was determined that she would not allow herself to let up on her concentration, not even for an instant while he recovered.

She was quite serious, she told herself, when she felt that the fates had tried to rob her of about forty good years, quality years that she would have spent in a frolic of joy with Alec. Their gall drove her to see red, and she fully intended to rob back their allotted time, by hook, or if necessary, certainly by crook.

If that meant having to break every cosmic and natural law in the unwritten book, then, so be it. Let the chips fall where they might. She was not, however, going to be accused of playing dead while they took her Alec. She might have been the nice girl who lived next door, but, when it came to her man, she just was not the type to turn turtle.

In the progress of their venture, they had had to call in all their outstanding favors, and then some, in order to push the paper work through the innumerable channels necessary to get Crystal on a plane heading west.

It was not that Barbara begrudged that necessity, nothing could have been more important to her, than an inch gained in their fight against death, and she would have sold her left tit, both tits to the devil for that. However, the paperwork all took time, time that they did not have, and could ill afford to spend. The wheels of bureaucracy were very slow and begrudging in relinquishing their stasis and churning into monosyllabic motion.

In one very real sense, they had had an incredible advantage. Their reputations had preceded them everywhere that they had turned to for help. People that they had never met took a personal interest in helping the perfect couple succeed in their quest. Somehow, their friends had always seemed to have friends or acquaintances in the right places, and, time and time again, when they had expected to meet the usual wall of resistance from a stodgy bureaucracy, they had found instead a true understanding and fellowship, and real people ready to use their knowledge and experience to expedite the transfer of the body that was crucial to their needs.

What a surprise she thought, to find so many romantics still alive and kicking, and in the bureaucracy no less.

Even so, it had not been easy. Hell no she thought, remembering. The government, once it acquires a body, lived in or not, does not like to release custody, except in the most begrudging way possible. They had had to literally burn the phone lines to generate the required action in time. The fax machines had hummed themselves half way to extinction.

It did not help and further complicated matters that they were unable to give their helpers the real reason that they needed the body. They were attempting the remake of Frankenstein, and, if anyone, friend or not, had caught even a hint of suspicion as to what their true intentions had been, or for that matter, still were, it would have brought an end to everything. All their hopes would have come crashing down around their ears in one foul swoop.

On an intellectual level, she realized that such a disaster would not have been the end of the world. However, it would have been the end of all the things that mattered to her. Would have been the end of her world. Therefore, she had taught herself something new, she had learned to tell lies.

Still, even with everything that they had done, with all the seconds and hours of panic, and the desperation, and the pain, and the rapid hyperventilating. In the end, it had come to be so close.

Really, really, close. In the electric tension of the last few minutes, Barbara had wondered, if after all that they had done, all that they had been through, if success going to be snatched away from them in the last few moments?

Now, she felt that if it had not been for the incredible guts, stamina, and tenacity to life that Alec had shown at the end; God what an incredible man, She loved him more than life itself, it would all have come to a crashing end, right there, in the storming of the last few moments, while they were still madly interfacing Crystal’s body with the machines for the transfer.

Somehow, by sheer will and courage, Alec had managed to spit in the eye of death, and cling to life until Crystal could be made ready. Only then, had he gratefully relinquished his iron control, and, with a sigh, welcomed his capture within the life fields generated by the machines that they had designed together; the children of their genius.

Now she thought, for good, or bad, they had succeeded in their initial intention, or, at least she hoped that they had. Nothing had blown up as it might well have. The experiment had been conducted, if not concluded, and it remained to be seen if it would be a success, or whether she would have to search her closet to see if there was something black in there for her to wear.

Up until now, she had refused to concede even so small a victory to the disease, as the wearing of somber clothing, not that she thought she owned any. Instead, to cheer them both up, she had continued to wear her usual bright colors. And, dingy though they had become, they had seemed to help brighten the dungeon of their days.

Alec, to the end, had continued to tease her and make passes whenever she came within his reach. She wondered now, how she could possibly have appealed to him towards the end. She had not even had the energy to remove her clothing before falling, already asleep, onto the too small, too narrow bunk, which she had dragged beside his. A quick splash of water across her face had been the sum of her toilet, and, half the time, she had not even remembered to push a comb through her hair, wanting to take advantage of her first awakening thoughts before she lost them.

She now felt sorry that at the