The Two Travelers Episode 2: The Pacifists' War

By Richard Phillip Hoffman

Two lovers awaken one thousand years into the future amid what remains of the world they once knew.

As they seek out each other, and other remnants of their old lives, they discover strange and often hostile kingdoms spawned from the last breath of what had once been the United States of America.

Laura’s thousand-year sleep ends with an awakening in a land of pure pacifism.

There are no athletics, all forms of aggression are outlawed, and any activity that expresses anything remotely like violence, including film, games, and art, is banned. The sole exception is a form of robot whipping boys used to fight off aggression who battle robot to robot and are useless against human beings.

The citizens are therefore utterly helpless against a group of psychotic raiders whose raping and pillaging coincide with Laura’s arrival. She, a trained soldier, predictably clashes with the invaders but, contrary to the teachings of the society she finds herself in, does not regress her into a monster. This knowledge contradicts the core beliefs of the society, resonates with many of the people, makes nervous the aristocrats who dominate and abuse the lower classes, and has the potential to unravel everything.

(Rewritten, edited and expanded from 2012 original)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Phillip Hoffman
• Release date: Oct 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463590256

Book preview

The Two Travelers

Episode 2

Aberdeen, WA

The Pacifists’ War

-------------------------------------------------------

Richard Phillip Hoffman

PUBLISHED

Richard Phillip Hoffman at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 / 2018 / 2023

Richard Phillip Hoffman

PUBLISHERS NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals is entirely coincidental.

LICENSE NOTES

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook 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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Table of Contents

Series Recap

Chapter 1 – The Last Museum

Chapter 2 – The Living Art Piece

Chapter 3 – The Savages of Greenland

Chapter 4 – A Different Kind of Girl

Chapter 5 – The Outsider

Chapter 6 – Visitors at Meal Time

Chapter 7 – Rest and Politics

Chapter 8 – An Evening of Quiet

Chapter 9 – Giver of Information

Chapter 10 – The Price of Peace

Chapter 11 – Enemies of the Greenlands

Chapter 12 – The Lord of Aberdeen

Chapter 13 – Dawn of Change

Chapter 14 – The Road to the Seattle

Chapter 15 – The Cathedral

Chapter 16 – Interview with the President

Chapter 17 – The War Comes Home

Chapter 18 – Daughters of America

Chapter 19 – Banishment of Evil

Chapter 20 – The Final Confrontation

Series Recap

The Two Travelers is a series of adventures primarily from the perspective of two people, a young man named Justin and a young woman named Laura, who fall in love at the end of one era and then awake a thousand years later in another. As with any such long book series, it is always recommended to read from the beginning on, but here is the short version of what transpired before.

The adventures begin one thousand years after nanite bombs have killed most of the population and destroyed our societies. For Justin Biryukov and Laura Adler, nothing has changed, two teenagers frozen in time while asleep in their pods while the world shifts to the great winds of time and society. Kingdoms have risen and kingdoms have fallen but there are hints to what was before in the strange new world they awaken in.

***

But before all that, in the prelude, Beyond the Glass Wall, Justin and Laura are placed in a concentration camp called Reclamation Facility 59 in Washington DC.

In our close future, parts of the world have fallen back into fascism and the nanite bombs of a great holocaust are about to fall. The fascist United Country Law Divisions, or Faction as they are often styled, control many countries, including the United States, while the remaining free countries of the world have allied themselves together in what was called the Alliance. As the stalemate between the two sides begins to break, the fingers of the powers that be inch ever closer to the bombs’ launch button.

Justin was a member of one of the last groups of the United States Military before they were disbanded and was being groomed for one great battle against the Faction that was to free the United States from its grasp. Before that happened, a small nanite bomb killed the remaining soldiers and Justin and his friends were spared only by the sheer happenstance of being too young to be part of the mission, Justin being only seventeen at the time. When the Faction had learned of their part in it they were hunted down one by one until second to last, Justin himself was finally caught.

Laura was a former member of the Faction military, dishonorably discharged for refusing a direct order, and had been attempting to build a life as a professional racecar driver. However, when her friends from the academy days joined a Faction splinter group that was moving to replace the former United States as an anti-Faction force to return the country to the way it was, she was taken as well, despite not participating.

The world was about to end and everyone knew it. When one bomb fell, they would all fall, creating mutually assured destruction on a global scale and all there was to do was wait. Justin and Laura, were scheduled to wait in Reclamation Facility 59.

Life in the reclamation facility was unsurprisingly hard but also bizarre. The male and female sides were segregated, blocked off from each other by a glass-like wall in the center of the quad, and the prisoners within were separated by class. The white tags appeared to be normal everyday people, and quite expendable, while black tags appeared to be educated and or trained people who might be useful, such as Justin, a bionic engineer, and Laura, a highly trained Faction Ranger. The last group was the red tags who were once-in-a-lifetime talents such as world-famous great artists, engineers or architects who tended to be world famous.

It was the white tags who suffered the most, doing what is called law labor, where they disappeared from the camp to do brutish, unnecessary work somewhere outside of the facility. Everyone else remained in the facility and time seemed to stretch on forever. Justin and Laura soon began to find the days so similar that they would psychologically merge and one day would become impossible to determine from another.

The guards were primarily Faction Law Enforcers, the equivalent of police officers, who were not particularly sympathetic to any prisoner, regardless of tag or former affiliation. They were equipped with bionic augmentation armor, bio-armor for short, hidden in molecular form inside their bodies that could come out at will over their clothes. With the high-velocity vibration blades that were part of it, they were almost invincible to the unarmed civilians within.

As former soldiers, Justin and Laura had bio-armor as well, along with artificially intelligent companions, or AICs for short, which were given to all soldiers on either side. However, their armor was blocked from use by artificial devices on their neck known as bio-blockers and that left Justin and Laura as helpless as everyone else was.

Justin fit in well with the prisoners as a former soldier of the deeply respected United States Marine Corps but Laura was immediately ostracized due to being a former member of the Faction. She also had the immediate attention of Captain Rupert Jackson, who attempted to coerce her into a sexual relationship. Upon her refusal, he claimed the prisoners would band together and savage her but they were too afraid she was a spy to do anything but shun her.

One day, not long after entering, Justin and Laura looked through the glass wall and saw each other. When they spoke, there was an instant connection and within a shockingly short amount of time, they became inseparable. They were both surprised at the romantic elements of their situation as neither considered themselves particularly romantic.

The days stretched off into infinity and people started disappearing in the night. The white tags went first, in bed one evening, missing the next, off to places unknown. Near the end of their run, one white tag named Juan Reyes accidentally smirked at a guard who had embarrassed himself, and he noticed it.

To teach a lesson to Reyes, and everyone else, Rupert Jackson pulled Reyes and several other white, black and red tags, including Justin, out into the back of the facility. To psychologically assault Reyes, Jackson attempted to use his Catholicism against him, religion being something the Faction despised from the religious riots that preceded their arrival. He murdered a ten-year-old boy named Denzel Kelly to push the blame of his death upon Reyes; but when that didn’t work, he murdered Reyes as well.

It was a sign of the end as Denzel Kelly was the son of a world-famous red tag artist named Joan Kelly. He had been used as a tool by a high-ranked Faction officer in order to get Joan to be his personal painter. The indifference to the loss of such an individual indicated to Justin and others that the end must be very near indeed.

Afterward, Jackson attempted one more time to coerce Laura in a sexual relationship, attempting to rape a waitress and assaulting an inner-circle member of the Faction’s daughter in the process. He tried to gaslight Laura into taking responsibility for it, promising to free both of them only if she submitted, but she knew he wouldn’t and it didn’t work. If the murder of Denzel Kelly did not do it, the assault of an inner circle member’s daughter killed whatever doubt Laura herself might have had about what time remained.

Things seemed to move even faster then. The white tags were soon gone in total and the red and black tags began to follow. The former police that assisted the Faction Law Enforcers were soon gone as well, them by legitimately leaving their job, then most of the Faction themselves, and then, at the very end, only Justin and Laura were the only prisoners left.

In their last moments together in the past, they stared at each other through the glass wall. They made one final move as the Faction came to take them away, reaching through the holes of the glass wall with their fingers and touching each for the first and only time in that age before they were beaten and dragged away.

They were both taken back to the airport they arrived in, taken away in two different ships but, strangely, to the same underground storage facility somewhere out in the world. They never saw each other, weren’t even aware of each other, and at the very end of the facility, there was a factory where people were put in cryogenic pods. One after the other, they were inserted inside.

The intention seemed to have been to freeze them for some modest amount of time, perhaps twenty to fifty years or so, when all the Faction and Alliance problems, along with their bombs, had long blown over.

But something went wrong and they instead wake up a thousand years later and in different parts of what was once the United States of America.

***

In Episode 1, The Kingdom of Angels, Justin awoke from his sleep in a chapel devoted solely to him in what was once Pomona, California. Disoriented, he stumbled out into a crowd of women and learned almost instantly that he was the only man around. What very few other men he did see appeared as extremely old, infertile, and weak, despite not even being twenty, and he realized then that he was the only healthy and attractive man the women had ever even seen.

The first thing he did was remove his bio-blocker from his neck with a pair of sheers, releasing his bio-armor from inside his body and his own AIC, a stuffy, serious-minded engineering model in the form of a flying, bumble-bee-like android the size of a hawk named Lincoln. Such technology turned out to be is far above the technology of the society around him, which appeared to somewhere in the twentieth to twenty-first-century range.

The Faction had vanished, and so had the United States, and everything else he knew as well and with no other options, he simply allowed himself to be taken under the control of Pomona’s strange society of women and their even stranger city council.

There were two kinds of women in their society. Some were called eminine who appeared as typical feminine women while the others were called asculine, who appeared very mannish and often quite a bit more masculine than Justin himself was. The asculine women were clearly the ones with power but all of them argued aggressively over what to do with him.

After he and Lincoln snuck away, he discovered an information booth left by a then-fallen Canadian Empire from three hundred years past. There, Justin learned that he was trapped in the kingdom of Angeles run by a queen and that no man there, ever, lived past twenty due to a scientific alteration in the Y chromosome set about by a misandrist female dictator shortly after the bombs fell. The remaining healthy men escaped to the east but they surrounded California with a barrier of genetically engineered giant insects and arachnids that kept the women there to that day.

According to the last Canadian imperial scout’s recording in the booth, the kingdom of Angeles was slowly dying in every possible way. They had millions of people after the bomb but only tens of thousands left presently. Justin knew that breeding was at the heart of that and it would soon become a very serious issue with the women around him.

While pondering how to escape, Justin distracted himself by fixing an old truck. Upon doing so, he inadvertently made himself even more valuable, suddenly finding himself the only individual capable of fixing almost anything, and they unsurprisingly become instantly dependent on him for that new reason as well.

At some point during that time, the queen of Angeles had been alerted to his presence, and she sent a high-ranking young woman named asculine Chelsea to collect him. Instead of meeting the council as was traditional, however, she met Sandra, one of the middle-aged eminine council members who has become deeply, and somewhat sinisterly, infatuated with Justin. He had been rejecting her, becoming more and more uncomfortable each time and avoiding her, yet Sandra claimed she had him in her personal possession.

Upon arrival, Chelsea sensed something was wrong but she was a huge, powerful woman bred to have a body bigger than most healthy men ever did. She intended to take Justin for herself, by force if need be, before delivering her to the queen and did not fear Sandra in the slightest.

When she drinks some water that Sandra gave her while entering Sandra’s house, she crumpled over in agony.

Justin and the council learned of Chelsea’s coming, the council prepared to greet her the following day, but she did not show. Sandra, however, had arrived with an assistant no one knew about named Sally, who was a very skinny, petite young woman barely five feet tall with the same blond hair and blue eyes Chelsea had.

At that point, Justin had gained enough respect in the community for his engineering skills that they asked him to fix a factory. To his surprise, the factory was extremely simple, and only didn’t work because a long, dead woman had destroyed the control panel in a fit of rage simply after turning it off and without the controls, there was no other way to turn it on.

Meanwhile, the queen grew impatient and sent Chelsea’s grandmother to find Chelsea.

After refusing Sandra and causing her to explode one night, Justin is shocked to find a gorgeous, young woman throwing her body at him. She comes forward with far more experience than any of the other women around him had any likelihood of having, just about the sexiest woman he had ever seen. Until then, the women, asculine or eminine, seemed to have had no idea what they were doing or understandably even the value of their physical beauty from a man’s perspective.

Justin awkwardly refused her because he remained in love with Laura but, as she left in an insulted, heated rage, Lincoln noticed she shared the exact measurements of a very shy girl named Jeri that Justin had seen earlier. Justin had not recognized her because her personality had completely flipped from one extreme to another.

Curious, he followed Jeri to Sandra’s house.

There, Justin witnessed a scene he could not have imagined. Jeri was physically abusing Sally and he learns that not only was Sally Chelsea but that Jeri herself was Sandra and Sandra herself was another woman named Killian. According to her, she had lived lifetimes by murdering women and stealing their bodies and was even the same long dead woman who broke the factory.

She claimed she was a member of something called the Carousel.

When Killian discovered Justin watching and recording her confession of her true identity, she was released by the enchantment that kept her there. She thanked him while disabling Lincoln and temporarily blinding him before fleeing into the night to locations unknown.

Then while Chelsea’s grandmother dealt with the fallout of that, Justin was sent across the mostly barren, empty landscape of California to the remains of San Francisco, what they call San Fran, to meet Queen Veronica and her daughter Nicole. When he left, he barely escaped being assaulted by desperate women, who were on the verge of rioting over him.

In San Francisco, he discovered another man had arrived, one from his time and one that he recognized. John Haringer was a murderer for the Faction back in his time and so bad a man that even the Faction locked him away, but when Justin tried to warn the queen, she didn’t believe him and or believed she could control Haringer.

When Justin refused Princess Nicole’s advances afterward, she locked him in a tower and attempted to torture him into sexual obedience. At the same time, Haringer, sensing that Justin would eventually convince the queen, her daughter, or enough of the women around to be a problem, blew up the tower in an attempt to kill him. Then he murdered Queen Veronica’s twin daughters on his way out seemingly for no particular reason.

Justin escaped the exploding tower, saving Nicole’s life in the process, by leaping out of a window and clinging onto Lincoln’s legs with one arm and Nicole with the other. Then he rushed toward the Hollywood sign, accurately suspecting Haringer’s goal of blowing up San Francisco with the old imperial weaponry the imperial scout briefly spoke of on the recording in the booth.

They confronted each other before Haringer could send the missiles off and Justin fought and possibly killed him, dumping him into a long chasm at the bottom of the hill created by a satellite laser during his time. They did not find the body but Justin himself managed to survive and take refuge with the queen’s estranged daughter, Princess Vera, in Vallejo, which they call Sacrem.

Princess Vera instantly recognized the danger one man in a society of women could cause and on the next day, Justin was given a hovercycle and a pistol and allowed to leave the kingdom. He took his vehicle east in the same direction the men went a thousand years ago and headed toward Reno, Nevada, which according to the old information booth, was the nearest, normal city.

Chapter 1

The Last Art Museum

Heavy rain poured down on either side of the triangular roof of the art museum on W Marion St south of the 101 Freeway in Aberdeen City.

The museum was said to be a diversion into the wilder, edgier moments of humanity but was by no means considered harmless. Few people could handle art as it was and along with dancing, provocative clothing, face paints that were sometimes called makeup, video games and the savage emotions, it was never ever to be toyed with.

The destruction of all these things led to the Teachings of the Teal and an end to all violence.

For some odd, unknown reason, much of art had slipped through the cracks of the Teachings to survive. Many frowned upon it and almost as many regularly complained about it and yet somehow it always remained, always solid and stable, and as much a part of the Greenlands society as the Cathedral of the President in the ancient capital city of Seattle.

Matthew Michener stepped through the front doors of the rain and pulled back his hood. At nineteen, he was a slender, pale, smooth-skinned boy with short brown hair that hung forward to the tops of his eyebrows and round, chocolate-brown eyes that looked perpetually curious. He was soft as he did very little physical activity but that was not abnormal since he had not passed the aggression test that stated he mastered the Teachings of the Teal. Physicality activity without that test created violence, or so he had been taught since birth.

He wore the uniform of a typical Greenlands civilian: forest green robes with a darker green robe-like jacket over it, the latter shining, water-resistant and with a hood. He wore dark green gloves over his hands and bright white sneakers that had always looked weird to him but somehow ended up being formal wear.

And of course, he wore his dark gray arm computer.

It was buckled onto Matthew’s left arm over his robes and stretched from his wrist to his elbow. On the top of the forearm was a small computer monitor covered in a simple square cap set just above a small QWERTY keyboard with several round extra buttons all a bright-colored green save for its red power button. On the bottom of his forearm was a complicated joystick that he could have flipped out into his left hand quickly if it wasn’t broken.

Every citizen from low to high had an arm computer for only one purpose: to control the robot known as a mimic that walked behind every other citizen of the Greenlands. Its sole purpose was to act out the need for physical aggressiveness in order to spare its human the dishonor and dangerous temptation of doing it themselves.

Matthew’s mimic and arm computer were hand-me-downs from his grandfather and while he had upgraded both several times, they were still considerably less than perfect. The joystick on his arm computer barely worked, there was a long crack across the monitor, and the robot was even worse.

At some point, the veneer plating that gave his mimic a human-like form broke off revealing a skeletal shape underneath with only one glowing green eye remaining in its skull, the other lost in his grandfather’s time and so unbelievably expensive he could not dream of replacing it. It was also missing several fingers on its left hand, its left leg was messed up somehow making it limp and the sound of it clicking and clacking as it walked made Matthew rather nervous sometimes.

Despite all that, he found he had grown a deep affection for his robot, and he even gave him the nickname Muddy due to the brownish bronze color that the robot appeared to have after all the paint came off.

The moment the two of them stepped into the museum, Matthew knew he was in trouble.

All of the people in the black floored lobby were born members of the elite class with their gold sashes and medals, many of them in green to indicate they were still technically just a citizen like everyone else. However, a few of them were in the gold of low-level politicians and they were all drinking coffee with real, and technically illegal, caffeine while living off of easy positions granted to them for free by their birth and connections.

The owner’s wealth contributed a great deal to the condition of their mimics and they all had expensive and sophisticated versions. Most had heavy plates that looked to Matthew as if they were subconsciously designed to appear like the muscular savages that ravaged their society every decade or so.

Every person in that room pegged him for exactly who he was the instant they saw him: a nobody they could push around.

Matthew would have given a great deal of anything to avoid coming in on a day when the elites of Aberdeen were having a party but unfortunately for him, his deadline was too soon for that. For a moment nothing happened and, though he expected the worst, he thought they might be too busy to do more than recognize him.

And then Matthew heard a door shut and turned his head to the left.

James Jacques, the curator, had stepped out of the office door directly left of the entrance and was grinning at him. He was an older man, in his mid-fifties or so, with light blue eyes and straight white hair cut in the buzz style of the Robotics Military, which was stupid considering that Jacques had never actually been in or even a part of that organization. Stupider still, his connections afforded him so many gold medals on his robes that he appeared to have the most distinguished military