Live Forever: Human Gods, #1

By Joe Jeney

Human Gods, Dark Matter, Galactic Love. More than fiction. Everything is possible...when man is God.

Chris Mathews puts his life on hold in the eighth millennium and leaves behind his beloved wife Leanne to join Professor Andrew Reichstein and Hailey Missentra on a ride to a slipstream at the edge of a black hole. They plan exiting the stream a few seconds into the future to prove that time "emergence" is possible. However, they emerge into a time beyond their reckoning and find their worlds changed forever. Chris, in particular, must decide whether to travel even farther into the future, into an infinite future, when man becomes God, and seek the missing information that will bring his wife Leanne back to him. But not all is as it seems and he starts questioning if the futuristic world's enigmatic Priest stands to benefit more than he will from his efforts. And what will this mean to his friends and their survival?

Who can you trust in the future when the past is all you have?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Light River Books
• Release date: Mar 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780980322958

Joe Jeney

Joe has practiced law and worked professionally in legal education for many years. During his early working life, he worked in building, engineering, and agricultural fields. He has spent much of his life writing stories. Joe also writes under the pen name "JJ. Co."

Book preview

Prologue

An explosion ripped through the galactic traveler, Dolphin. The dark energy scientist Andrew Reichstein lay flat on his back, ten dark speed days from Lanthanum’s Transcender Station, and just two dangerous dark speed hours from Messy Tessie, the galaxy’s celebrity black hole.

He gathered his senses and tried extricating himself from a bizarre psychological cascade of numerical images, and reasoned that some sort of a surge from Tess had belted the ship and knocked him to the floor.

Two maintenance workers, the pilot, and a young odd jobs woman, Hailey Missentra, made up the rest of the crew.

The team had been checking out and repairing Icon, the seven-hundred-year-old beacon that measured Tess’s unusual emissions. Until Icon broke down, it had reliably sent the information to Lanthanum, which relayed it to Earth.

The journey was routine for everyone except Andrew, who hadn’t any space legs at all. The Dark Energy Power Corporation hired him to assess why surges from the black hole had killed off Icon’s propulsion unit, leaving it to orbit Tess’s outer horizon slackly.

What was going on? For the first time since 7300, the black hole’s emissions knocked Icon out for the count, as a prelude to swallowing it in a blink in two years’ time, when it slipped across the horizon proper.

As intriguing as the question was, if the power corporation hadn’t approached Andrew with its anxious request for him to join the space crew, he would have remained at his desk on Earth analyzing these things, not floating around in spacecraft at dark speed.

Twenty-one-year-old Hailey leaned over him, expelling pellets of air, and by the bye spoke with her flat, no-nonsense Lanthanum accent. I didn’t see what happened, she said. I don’t know what happened.

She held Andrew from behind like a sack of potatoes and helped him sit up until he steadied himself.

I sensed that the ship bent from bow to stern, like a lizard chewing its tail. Her voice rose involuntarily with fear. On the one hand, I felt a bump, while on the other a catastrophe. Are you okay? She didn’t wait for his response and pleaded, Let’s find the others.

Andrew guessed that she wanted the companionship of the rest of the crew, the security, the humanity in galactic space, as she dragged him, a middle-aged scientist, to his feet.

At the time of the explosion, Andrew and Hailey were in the mess hall, located in the middle of the ship. They were playing Leaf-game, Hailey’s favorite.

Now, pushing him from behind, she hurried him toward the back of the seventy-meter ship, where Bob and Angie, the two maintenance workers, had been running diagnostics on Icon’s navigational equipment before the explosion.

As they ran and hobbled through the brightly illuminated corridor, Andrew looked for signs of damage to the ship, but couldn’t find any, even though he looked very hard.

During the explosion, he experienced what Hailey had experienced: the highly rigid ship, coated with Denneron, the substance that mimicked dark matter, bent from tip to toe.

Now he expected to find evidence of serious damage. But nothing.

Then again, as Hailey suggested, the actual physical sensation during the explosion amounted to a gentle bump. Nothing more.

He kept walking, Hailey pushing him from behind, but lost his thoughts, as a series of psychedelic numbers invaded his thinking space in a way that made him feel like every room in the house lit up.

The ship’s workshop was very large, around one hundred and sixty square meters.

When they arrived, Hailey’s young body lost its confidence, and her no-nonsense voice broke with emotion and fear. Where...? she asked.

They couldn’t find Bob and Angie. Yet they found a very fine, thickly deposited dust. It covered almost everything near the inner wall of the stern, like shadows or ash-forming identifiable patterns, over a relatively small area.

The force of the explosion seemed to have cast the shadows from equipment and workshop objects.

Now they looked at the remains of the Gabron molder, robotic arms, various wrenches, and even screwdrivers.

Andrew took his turn to lift Hailey from the floor, where she had collapsed. He comforted her as he did so. She turned and pressed her face into his chest, wanting that human comfort he instinctively offered.

As he held her, he saw what she had seen.

Tessie’s blast threw Bob and Angie, mid-conversation, into the inner wall of the ship’s stern. Now their remains became part of that same dust splattered pattern.

Andrew imagined that Bob’s shadow smiled while Angie’s mocked him with a pretense of disbelief. Neither could have known what happened, not to the ship, nor themselves.

No one will ever know the joke they shared.

Andrew looked at the area in which the shadows laid. Then he looked where everything remained whole and untouched.

Bob and Angie might have lived unscathed if they had stood only a couple meters forward of where they actually were when everything went up in smoke.

A paper towel unfurled slowly, where it lay scrunched and discarded, no doubt by Bob or Angie minutes ago.

Andrew returned with Hailey to the mess hall and told her to wait until he scouted the cockpit for Bingo the pilot, and promised he would return.

Tough-minded people are really the softest ones. Yet, he thought, putting things in perspective, an incredibly difficult job, given the circumstances, Hailey was half his age, a girl trying to be tough, but actually responding to the world in an adult way for the first time.

Before he left her alone, she made him promise three times that he would return quickly and then made him double promise for good measure.

He ran anxiously to the cockpit.

Bingo’s death saddened Andrew terribly. He liked the guy in that rare, connected way. But also, he expected to find him alive. The cockpit was set back from the bow some seven meters.

However, fate chewed Bingo’s bones too, as it had the other two. He was too far forward of the cockpit during the explosion. Perhaps he gazed from the bow window at Tess’s emptiness, searching for what the modern world’s first scientists believed was her answer to the big questions.

It began with a bang, they believed; God had acted according to humanity’s capacity for understanding the laws of physics. How convenient!

Andrew couldn’t say why Bingo stood so close to the forward window. But he had been standing there, which meant he was in the dead zone when the ship apparently flicked back straight again.

Now he, Bingo, watched from his lumpy, silky shadow at the unraveling of the mysteries before him, with Bingo-like-bemusement.

At it all, Andrew thought sadly, as he returned to tell Hailey the bad news.

How are we getting home? Hailey cried. Can you fly?

She desperately and, very understandably, asked Andrew this important question.

His second of silence was enough to answer her in the negative and conversely propel her back from desperation and into action, her highly practical brand of action, as he had come to know it.

We gotta learn to fly this thing. It’s mostly auto, she told him.

Somebody can come and get us, Andrew suggested as an alternative.

There were risks with piloting the Dolphin, which would be natural while placing two inexperienced personnel in charge of humanity’s newest and best galactic traveling machine.

Also, even if they safely operated the craft at a very basic level, which their backup training provided for, they didn’t know how to transcend.

This meant that they would have to return conventionally and wouldn’t arrive back at Lanthanum Station for close to a year, instead of within ten dark speed days, the normal transcension period.

But Andrew had played devil’s advocate. Only one transcension cavity existed out here, and they filled it. Without an available cavity, rescuers, themselves, would need to fly out conventionally and could take ten months, not days, to reach them.

Neither of them wanted to hang around.

I want to get out of here, Hailey said, almost breaking down again, ricocheting, Andrew noticed, from her own hard surface. It’s creepy.

It is, he agreed.

They made up their minds.

One thing, Hailey said. I don’t want to go hibo, I don’t want to sleep. And I don’t want you to sleep. We can play chess for a year; I don’t care. But please, don’t make us go to sleep.

She asked this like a nine-year-old girl wanting to stay up late to watch a movie.

She was very scared, which Andrew recognized. He was scared too. He said he preferred Leaf-game to chess, an offbeat comment in the circumstances, but one that took their minds off things.

Whatever, Hailey replied.

They lost no time and radioed the news to Lanthanum Station, which told them to stay where they were until rescuers arrived. But they ignored that command and left Icon to oblivion.

Having made the plunge and taken control of the ship, they found that, at conventional speed, the Dolphin operated similarly to a satellite hopping Bubble.

Soon they settled into the big return home, or at least their return to Lanthanum’s Transcender Station.

There Andrew would connect with a commercial Transcender back to Earth, and Hailey would shoot back to the mega mining and manufacturing giant, Lanthanum, where she was born and raised.

DURING THE FORTY-SEVEN week journey, they played Hailey’s beloved Leaf-game, and chess, and talked a lot, like members of a crew, and never like friends. Sometimes they talked about Andrew’s wife, Marilyn, and his two-year-old daughter, Julia, but not often. They kept-it-simple-stupid. It prevented the deep-and-meaningfuls from probing into the disturbing explosion, or event as they now called it.

Hailey mentioned her disturbing number-dreams to Andrew only the once during the flight home from Tess, and he kept quiet altogether about his own dreams of a similar nature.

They sealed off their inner thoughts from each other in the same way they sealed off the workshop and forward section of the cockpit.

The authorities would investigate the scene upon their return to the Station, and they, Andrew and Hailey, would investigate and share their thoughts with each other when they were sure they couldn’t forget them first.

When they were back in the safety and familiarity of their own worlds.

Chapter 1

Good news arrived at last. I, Chris Mathews, aged thirty-four, am heading to Cerium, finally; I have my ticket off the Earth.

Andrew will be first to know. I am on my way to visit him at his large home in Apartment Tower 19,039, level 94. It will be the first time I’ve talked to him in person since he returned to Earth several months ago.

I should have voned my wife Leanne and told her the good news first. But delivering the news in person to her is best, which I can do later while we’re home together.

Also, I delay telling her, concerned that her heart is not truly behind the move. I cannot blame her if it is not.

Cerium is humanity’s most underrated planet. It is small, sparsely populated, recently colonized, and the most far from the galactic highway. But, in its defense, the Interplanetary Government threw resources at it for two decades, and now it functions as an ideas village.

You can come up with an idea as crude as a rock and, with Cerium’s help, you can see it through to the end. For a nanoengineer like me, that’s Eden.

Everything is new, brand spanking new. They even make plastic hearts on Cerium that feel love.

Earth is okay if you like venturing throughout its hemispheric ice caps and digging holes for rare minerals or growing veggies in the equatorial belt’s veggie towers. And there are the bureaucrats and lawmakers on Earth, massive galactic industries in themselves.

It is no place for a nanoengineer like me, with a flair for bio-integration. There is nowhere for innovation on Earth. Earth’s establishmentarians turn up their noses and drawl, You got that wrong, and this ain’t right. Hit the drawing board, son.

Earth could do with one of Cerium’s plastic hearts.

On Cerium, the sun pokes through the atmosphere warming the air. Leanne and I will wake to the sunrise every morning for the rest of our lives.

I wish I could tell my father.

He was a structural engineer.

He actually built things that he was proud of and that he could point to.

I want to spend my life doing things that make me proud, and that would have made him proud of me.

I hop from the pod in a veggie tower, at ground level plus twenty, which is six towers across from Andrew’s apartment tower. I want to walk off my excitement.

Also, I really want to check out places I might never see again. Veggie towers are on the list.

Each floor is a few hectares big. Two hundred floors in each tower grow veggies, and veggie workers live in the top thirty floors. Enormous air bridges and building ballast tie the sky scraping worlds together, as with other towers, whether industrial, commercial, governmental, or residential. Pumps bring water from the ice caps a few kilometers away. Heat is entirely dark energy generated. Enormous funnel catchments reach into the upper stratosphere, above the grimy clouds, and reflect what dust occluded light they can catch downward into every apartment floor and every living and working environment on the planet.

Produce stalls surround the floor perimeters.

In passing one of the stalls, I grab a tomato, neglecting to thank the stallholder, a fat old woman, who screams after me, You only get away with that because you’re cute.

I laugh and think, And because my spirit is soaring, old mother, because my spirit is soaring.

I jog along the connecting walkway at ground level plus twenty to Andrew’s tower, chomping and sucking the tomato.

A large lobby opens before me in Apartment Tower 19,039. I am puffing from my jog and want a rest, so I enter through the lobby and into the tower’s park. Like the veggie garden six towers back, the park covers a few hectares. Of course, there aren’t any veggies or vendor stalls here in Andrew’s upper-middle-class haven, just conifers, grass, ornamental bushes, mini hills, mini dales, and an assortment of wildlife, birds, ducks, squirrels and such like, and park benches.

Every second floor is a park. Higher up, as the rich get richer, apartments cover greater floor space. This means that, at the very top, each apartment has almost a half a hectare of parkland per family to play in.

No one goes outside, as in outside the towers, no one from this tower or any other tower, including the industrial and veggie towers. Outside there is nothing but concrete, service piping, and the machinery needed to keep these great towers alive. Building ballast and more service machinery fill even the twenty floors beneath ground level plus twenty.

Yet there is always an exception to the rule, and I am looking at it now, through the park window. I have to look beyond the muddy equatorial landscape and the marshes, tundra, and toward mining sector ZH, a hundred kilometers away.

From out of a shimmering basin, never to be confused with a lake, cranes and construction towers leap like tiny, distant fingers into a murky sky.

Even though I cannot make out the building work at such a distance, the construction corporation has erected promotional signs much closer to the apartment towers. Anyway, I know the name of the corporation and everything about it. Painted large are the words Preservco Facility, and the telephone number that you can contact for more information.

The project is big in size and idealization. Preservco took the galaxy by storm. So far, Preservco technology has succeeded in regenerating simple organisms, and big plans are on the way. Yes, Earth loves it. Establishmentarians enticed the corporation here with massive tax breaks to begin with, the local government throwing every imaginable incentive in its direction.

You do not need temples when you have Preservco.

The sight darkens my day. I know why even if I do not know the why behind the why.

I try not thinking about it anymore, and I hop up from the park bench, fully restored, calmed, and invigorated. I walk to the vertical tube, squeeze in, and shoot to level 94, a comfortable floor, yes, and bastion of self-satisfied mediocrity, excepting Andrew and his family of course.

I get out the elevator and walk the few meters to his door and reminisce about the time I spent at his apartment a couple of years ago, and what a tremendous part coming here had played in my life back then.

I worked here and lived a couple dozen floors below.

Andrew gave me a start in my first job, and I loved spending time with him and his wife Marilyn - such an old name for a young woman. He had just incorporated his D.E. (dark energy) consulting business, after giving academia the