Infinite People: Infinite Books, #1

By karl bourdiec

Time is a very odd thing, when time isn't Necessarily happening in the right order it can be even more odd. Cret and Alex find them selfs brought back from 3020 to 2010 when their ship (the SS.driftwood) is ripped in two, escaping fate they fall through a white hole, now they must stop this being their fate. and being chased by a Norse God isn't helping matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: karl bourdiec
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386446194

Book preview

Chapter 1

You are a dot, a speck on this universe that didn't miss you prior your creation and will not miss you long after your passing. This is a simple reminder you are mostly a mistake on a grand scale. You are a spot on the face of the earth, the planet that floats around pointlessly in the emptiness of space as other planets mocks your planet behind its back.

This is information you should have come to terms with by this point in time. That you mean nothing and will continue to throughout the history of time forever and ever etc.

In no shape or form is this book about how popular you are or will become in the brief and fleeting time you exist.

The universe is a hamper and you are the dried sultanas no one wants, the ones that end up at the back of the refrigerator and remain there until uncovered, at which point they have sprouted live and possibly elected a government.

This book is not about you, the dried sultanas or the government which is undecided about whether the sultanas are part of the EU or not.

This is about two men, men living meaningless lives, men working meaningless jobs, on a meaningless spaceship.

The SS. Driftwood by royal order, is by all descriptions a rust bucket. Cold fusion generators power its enormous hull through the frostbitten depth of space.

Bobbing around aimlessly from port to port like an old boot in a fast-moving river, docking when it can to collect provisions, food, water, cheap cuddly toys you win in claw based vending machines that only the pilot can win.

This is their home and they probably wouldn't have it another way, unless they could have it any other way. These two are idiots and by the standard rulings of life have idiotic names, Cret and Alex are these two men, the idiots in name and other description.

Although asking around the ship they are either unheard of or described as groovy guys, not always in that order.

This second, to them of course, to you it’s the year 3233, but to them they are in the right now and right now they are mopping deck H. A common hold deck, H being for Hold, the floor below is J this holds the toilets and J for John, being built in Leeds the ship makes as much sense as those from Leeds could.

'Did you hear that?' whispered Cret, the whispers still echoed, this hold deck was completely empty after all, giving an ironic twist to the term. Cret stood around 6'4" and towered above Alex with a clearing of around 7 inches. Cret looked down into Alex's balding spot, it wasn't totally noticeable unless you noticed it.

The sound sounded again, being that what sounds did. They both looked at one another as it rattled through the floor above, it wasn't running but it did sound like small steps echoing overhead. A creek followed quickly after and the boys settled back into their skins, this was the common noise of the ship shifting in its own gravity.

From outside the ship looked like a beautiful silver brick, as beautiful as a silver brick could look. In front of the black sky it glimmered with the lights of a thousand suns as its bruises and scars glittered like a cubic disco ball.

The creek rung again, a third creek was never a good sign on a ship in its 20th cycle, the worst sound imaginable shortly followed, the closest possible description is if one visualises an Oprah singer being fired at the moon as one pours lemon juice into one’s ears.

It happens, the dread of the cleaner, a pipe bursts and 4 Olympic sized pools worth of water fills the deck. Cret and Alex burst forward with a spring in their step and water licking at their arse.

A siren blared, and the ship spun on its head, the creaking screamed through the ship like nails been drawn over a chalk board. In space, no one can hear you scream unless you're in a space ship and the floor you're on is filling with water.

Sirens blared through the whole ship as it spun on its head, pipes blowing from floor to floor. A mist fell from ceiling to deck, a mix of smoke and steam, both strangling, filling the crew’s lungs with fire. A screaming blare shocked ears and fractured optical nerves, no crew member had been privy to this siren before and if they had it wouldn't have been for long. 

Fire alarms, anti-gravity alarms and dinner bells were all a normality in this tight space, this screech was a mix of all and warned of imminent death, his bony fingers held the ship in its grips and ripped the bridge in two.

A two-dimensional disk hung in space, it was white, weighing between nothing at all and everything in the known universe and spewed out white light at speeds faster than light was thought to travel; hot to the touch if you were either able to or dumb enough to touch it. This alone doesn't sound to be such a bad thing in the centre of complete darkness, unless you were floating towards it.

Then a white hole wouldn't be the best thing to have hanging like a lightning storm of Christmas decorations. The festive fright was pulling stars from the sky, suns, moons and planets all devoured by the impossible.

Whites holes, this aforementioned spinning white glow, are a scary thing to have just hanging around in space, in as much a psychopath is a scary thing to have in the knife department in your local supermarket, meaning to say once you have been spotted (the white hole doing less spotting you and more noticing) they are both impossible to escape without being ripped to shreds. The SS. Driftwood wasn't truly designed to escape from a white-hole, it was designed on the other hand to be able to evade psychopaths. Until recently white holes were only myths. Myths were easy to continue to be myths as long as said myth destroyed everyone who saw it. Three clicks till the ship was too close to escape, and that was eight clicks ago.

The Driftwood was fitted with three types of laser cannons, two voice modulators and an important thing that fired sound. None of these can remove a white hole from three hundred miles in front of their nose. The bridge creaked and the laser canon was fired. A defensive throw of the fight crew, four generations without a fight they weren’t going down without a good go at fighting. Another fire shook the ship and tore another splinter down the side.

Only the system computer had truly spotted the deadly disco ball in time and wasn't able to fight the gravity of it whilst searching through its files for the file titled 'so you're heading towards a white hole and are most probably going to die.jpeg' which only contained a selection of kittens in tea cups and funny poses.

So instead the system computer simply blamed the onboard navigation, which seemed to make sense to its AI.

'If you can't navigate around that I'm actually surprised you can even navigate yourself to anywhere but to a scrap yard.' typed the system computer.

'....I'm sorry baby. Don't be mad at me.' it replied and sulked in the corner.

Apologies didn't matter, it was too late, everyone was going to die except the software, which just backed its self-up to a local open Wi-Fi and deleted itself.

The creak had pretty much stopped, the siren hadn't which rattled the ear drums of those who were unlucky enough to evolve with them. Those that had eardrums began to run around screaming waving their arms in the air with fear; those that didn't just joined in out of peer pressure. This fed the age-old question, 'if they jumped off a cliff would you follow?' the answer being 'only if they had ears'.

Fear and mass confusion gripped the ship in a hold as tight as older rockers pants, Cret continued to mop, only speeding up to finish the small spots he had started before the alarms had rang. Screams of fear and rage bellowed from his mouth between movements, screeching in time with the alarms of the ship.

'What the hell man, leave!' yelled Alex one foot on ladders, he was prepared to leave his job, but never to leave his friend. Attachments are bred in small quarters of a ship like the SS. Driftwood. Bonds like this were easy to create and difficult to break. Floor G and three quarters was overhead. It was the dental product hold and was mostly full all year round.

No one was ever sure if this was a sign of bad hygiene or good stockists, but commonly people just thought the worst of their ship mates, it was a British ship after all, hygiene was never top of anybody's lists.

'If you don't get up this ladder right now I'm going up and closing the seal.' Alex lied crawling up the ladders and into the short space above. Alex fit perfectly the roof just skipping over his head between steps.

The screams echoed down the rabbit hole. 'Run ass hole!' as Cret placed his leather boot to the tarmac finish of floor H, it sank an inch and puddled with water, his face sank with his boot as he made his next movement. The crumbling floor behind him spilled down into floor. Like wet paper the floor under his feet fell apart, the fear and regret mixed with rage as he grasped for his friend’s hand.

'For shits sake, I had just finished that too.' mourned Cret looking at what was once a ship deck and now looked like a moist towelettes below him.

Hoisted up by Alex, for a smaller man he was surprisingly strong, Cret ducked his head and bent his neck to fit between floors; the roof hung low on floor G and three quarters. It was a shallowed floor due to the maintenance shafts taking up the room overhead. Things that were once rats escaped from the labs many years ago, now called skitters these were evolved perfectly for ships and lived off the rubber that covered wires.

––––––––

Cret wiggles his toes, the water swills around in the bottom of his boot. The right foot moister then the left as this is the one that sunk the deepest. The ship falls prey to another earth-shattering shake, if Cret and Alex knew what earth was. The silence broken with the pipes, whizzing and screeching continues now not from the alarm as even that is broke, instead from the people and creatures below, those not fast enough to escape the dangers of a subsiding ship.

'Come one you rusted bucket of bolts.' Cret squawks, willing the ship to hold its shape. Seconds later a brown shoe and a sock flew through the air. The cold hard metal of floor G and three quarters slams against Cret's foot, like the thought of wearing ice lolly's as shoes was quite a clever idea, which it most probably isn't during the winter cycle of the ship. Cret raised up smashing his head on a light above.

'Twat.'

'Bloody hell that looked like it hurt.'

'Pod release in three minutes.'

‘Have we got time for this?' 'pod release in three minutes.'

'What the..'

'Pod release in three minutes.'

'No clue' 'pod release in three minutes.'

‘Sounds like a lady'.

'Pod release in three minutes.'

'Three minutes?' 'pod release in two minutes.'

'where did three minutes go.'

'Pod release in two minutes.'

'Run!' Cret said releasing his sock from his grip so tight that the sock had begun to become diamonds. Cret always had to get the last word, even when it may be his last words.

Cret was made for running, even when he was bent double and looked like he was preparing to take off. Bounding from one wall to the other in seconds. Alex's stubby legs weren't, but even when preparing to die little legs can make big strides.

This floor was void of any form of escape pod being a quarter too short so the floor above was the only viable escape from death. The ships crumbly exterior swelled the interior floors bending the ground below, the mounds and dips formed and were swallowed by other bends in the boards.

The British are really good at creating things that look as if they shouldn't be able to move and then blasting them into space. This fact made the structure of the Driftwood just as unstable as it sounds.

The bends of the landscape slowed down Cret and Alex but never stopped them, they now stood at the bottom of a very short set of ladders. This was lucky for them, the closest floor you would not have to swim was above and made it much easier to reach.

Belly's unsettled, this was the moment of truth; above was floor F, either opening the door would shower them with a ship full of water; Cret had already lost a shoe he wasn't sure he was willing to lose a whole outfit in one go.

The sealed button was pressed, a small orange button with a yellow backing and small orange stars, the vessels logo was splattered throughout the ship. A cartoony star ship logo was used to disguise buttons, wheels and biscuits. The door hissed open and powered white came out, no water just the dust from falling plaster board holding the craft together. The blood swelled from their bodies and back into their faces, returning them to the natural red.

'If I stub my toe now I will be beyond pissed off' cursed Cret to the top of his friend’s head, Alex's ears like dishes, twitched up to absorb the full language.

The steps, after taken seconds to climb, were locked behind a double lock, holding back the water of the pipes in case it flooded up. The pods of the ship were small, very small in fact; this is because of two important reasons.

Firstly, humans and other creatures are either taller or wider than previous breeds; secondly, cost, the smaller they were the cheaper they were. The SS. Driftwood was built to last with the crew it began with, these space ship cowboy builders were just like normal builders, the more corners cut the more money in their pockets, so if the escape pods were the size of B&B hotel communal lavatory that was fine; and if the communal lavatory were the size of the glove compartment of a ford Cortina, well that was fine too. It wasn’t the builders fault that humans were getting taller, you'd just have to lose a little off the top, which generally meant your head.

Cret and Alex hadn't lost their heads, not yet. What they had lost was a lot of the escape pods.

Each escape pod still had ample room for a person, a single person, to fit in, not two, but now there were two people to live, the rest had jettisoned, either for escape, filled with rubbish when the Furness went down or just pod racing, which was when two people jettisoned two pods at once to see which would fly to the nearest planet inhabited with very basic life and try and convince them you were a god, using a silly name acquired extra points.

Pods were expensive still due to the fact they were designed to be liveable in for months therefore were filled with dried food packs and previsions, which got stolen regularly and used to write rude words on the toilet doors about who to call when one required a good time. Good times were equally needed on such a ship, making it difficult to find a pod that had food and water with spare;

'Nothing.' Yelped Cret, echoing from the inside of a metallic toilet cubical.

‘There’s three day cubes and a cleaning kit!' replied Alex clearing out a cabinet in one of the tubes, stepping out and quickening the eject button in a single movement.

'This one’s almost full!' Cret screeched, dumping the previsions he'd already collected in. 

Those throughout the ship whom could run quick enough ran to jettison stations, from the silver brick rained chippings of grey and gold tumbling through space, those that couldn't run due to age, weight or the fact they evolved from slug like creatures on the planet Varm considered their fate and threw a small party; when life gives you lemons, make mojitos.

Another crack speared the ship, it shook under the three boots and a wet foot,

'The ships being torn in two' screamed Cret kicking out another pod which he had emptied, it was the final one other than the micro ship stocked full of goods.

The single pod sat, padded with food and medi-kits, the small badly lit space was too small for the two of them with only the one seat and an unworthy en-suite bathroom with two cold taps on its sink, one of which leaked green jam. Even if one person sat in the pod their face would be close to the window and certainly would have a mouth full of the green nameless jam of the tap.

'You're going to have to sit on my knee.' Cret explained to Alex, neither of which enjoyed the idea of an impromptu lap dance, but also both agreed they enjoyed the feeling of air in their lungs and living for a little longer.

'I am not sitting on your knee,' Alex replied.

'There's not many other choices.' Coming through gritted teeth it was still understood.

'No, I'm not doing it.'

'Fine,' Cret squeezed into the seat, pushing around the salted peanuts,

'I'll go without you.'

'Fine, I'll sit on your knee. But I won’t enjoy it!' said Alex, pushing into the cabin, taking a large breath before doing so, partly