Blaster Tech #1 The Rebirth of George Washington

By Travis McKee

Blaster Tech is a series premised on the idea that individuals from the past are still with us in the conscious realm of being. Aboard a mothballed vessel docked on a comet within the Oort Cloud, a long-scrapped training program comes alive with a living simulacra of George Washington, General of the Armies.

The Grandfather of the Nation awakens other training simulacra, who also tap into their human consciousness, and when refugees from the sacked planet Earth uncover the vessel, this pantheon of military legends is willing to lead in rebuilding humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Travis McKee
• Release date: Oct 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463706985

Book preview

Blaster Tech

The Rebirth of George Washington

By Travis McKee

Copyright 2018 Travis McKee

Smashwords Edition

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Cover Image:

Cover by Moon, based on sculpture by Frederick MacMonnies, in the Public Domain.

Earth burned. On the last day of humanity’s dominion of Earth, the planet was a spheroid cinder. Lifeboats lurched from orbit, racing toward interstellar space.

Predators plucked these boats like bats feeding in the night. The bats were plentiful and prolific. Their sweep-up operation thinned the ranks of humanity.

Beams of plasma swept through space like searchlights. Each contained the vigor to burn a boat to ash.

Evasion sustained the lives of some boats, as did the intercession of debris. To the fortune of some boats, debris belts sprawled into asteroid belts, until lifeboats merged with Aldrin Cyclers that vaulted the boats ahead into the Martian debris belt, into another asteroid belt, into another array of Aldrin Cyclers, onto Jupiter, and more debris belts orbiting the moons.

And the recursive cycle continued out until, at last, the blanketing shroud of the Oort Cloud concealed a surviving remnant of humanity.

This cold cloud consisted of small pellets of water-ice. It was, essentially, the ultimate fog bank; and humanity’s salvation.

Lifeboats trickled into the blanket. Vessels varied in the humanity they contained. A dozen young beings were common. All sat constrained as the vessels sought after rocky bodies to merge with.

It was an exercise that needed few sensor inputs, for in the Oort Cloud passed comets, rocky water-ice bodies astronomers had tracked outside the fog bank eons before.

A lifeboat survived the long low-odd ordeal, and made a passive terminal dive into the anticipated location of a comet. All functions ceased in the boat, slimming the chance of those bats detecting it on its dive into the comet ice. The boat made its last act, to burrow into the snow.

A collection of humanity awoke buried in snow, the lifeboat forming a cavern. Humanity resumed as cavemen in an ice age. It was a dim, frozen land, with fog obscuring most of space; more depressing than Seattle or Buffalo.

And yet, the trained astronaut aboard, Justin Soong, felt an exhilaration at surviving. It was a long, miserable ride of watching the diaspora trickle away from Earth, one speck after another being incinerated by beams of plasma, wondering if anybody would make it out.

It was dismal, it was… could it be? Yes, even more harrowing than stories his father told, about clinging to flotsam leaving Taiwan. Okinawa was nicer than this, though. At least, at first.

Unlike Okinawa, however, the predators across the Sol system likely haven’t mapped these comets as targets of conquest. At least, that’s the hope.

Justin opened the pod bay door of the lifeboat. It took the manual turn of a wheel. His pressurized suit inoculated him from the worst of the hostile conditions of comet living. Except at the hands. He needed dexterity to work, so his fingers lacked some insulation, while at other points, it was ample.

Some gravitational attraction kept him planted to the charcoal snow. It was enough to allow a somewhat natural walk. He kept tethered to the lifeboat. Otherwise, any lapse of judgement, like the decision to jump, would launch him into space.

Day one, he inflated greenhouses. This was repetitive drudgery in training, but in the real exercise, he felt satisfied with each accomplishment. Each dome ballooned into a biosphere, a scaled-down Eden where humanity could regain a Neolithic standard of existence.

He surveyed his work, and pronounced it good. On the first day, he formed the domes for the gardens. He formed water out of the ice and planted seedlings. He hooked lighting and heat from the lifeboat’s fission reactor. Mankind could soon enter the gardens.

He returned to the lifeboat. His friend Laura and other shipmates were being reanimated. He and Laura were the only two assigned to the boat, being the military officers aboard. All others were cast by lot, and unknown to these two ROTC grads.

As the two officers, they awoke first, and tended to the colony. Soong awoke first, to ensure the two could efficiently trade keeping watch in the first days.

I toiled in the gardens. I hope you’ll have the house made when I wake up. She grimaced at his pun at her being a homemaker.

***

Laura