All Time: Voidbound (An All Time Quick Read)

By Mack Leonard

The first book in the All Time Expanded Universe and a great launch pad into the series!

The dawn of time travel is here! But it will be the sunset of mankind?
After decades of unforgiving labor, the channeler Brightside and his team of physicists at Broken Clock have cracked the secret of sending explorers into history. But all is not as it seems with Broken Clock. In the shadows of their scientific idealism, a cynical manipulator plots to highjack time travel to his nefarious ends.

Seen first as a shell of his former self in All Time: Book 1, Brightside emerges here as a tragic figure, plucked in his youth from a lowly role on a robotic assembly line before rising to the pinnacle of achievement and class, only to be humbled by the treachery of his masters. All Time: Voidbound chronicles the first stage of his unwinding, brought on by a terrible revelation: that his life’s work may responsible for breaking the history of the universe.

Be sure to check out All Time: Book 1, the first book in the TWISTING, HEART-WRENCHING NEW SERIES THAT CAPTURES A DYSTOPIAN THRILLER, A TIME TRAVEL ODYSSEY AND A LOVE STORY SPANNING THE AGES—FROM THE WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL JAMES WHITE AWARD FOR SCIENCE FICTION*.

PRAISE FOR ALL TIME: BOOK 1

"Mack Leonard belongs in the same league as Eoin Colfer, Jonathan Stroud, and Rick Riordan." - Shaul Behr, Readers' Favorite ★★★★★

"Beautifully lyrical science fiction with the flavor of excellent fantasy." - Mallory A. Haws, Haunted Reading Room Reviews ★★★★★

*The James White Award for Science Fiction 2015 hosted by the British Science Fiction Association.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mack Leonard
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019

Mack Leonard

Mack Leonard is a winner of the James White Award for Science Fiction and an Honoree of The Year's Best Science Fiction of 2015. His works have been published in the United States, United Kingdom and Italy. In 2017, he released Chambers of the Endless Heart, a collection of short stories. His latest work is the All Time series.

Book preview

1

Part One

S o you want to hear about death.

Brightside lowers his hand from his eyes. These eyes are a testament to the way that time can both steal and confer beauty in equal measure. Older model human-type free growths, straight from the cold storage section of a fabrication plant, similar to the eyes you might see glancing at you and then quickly away in the play of neon and shadow on certain city streets by night. But these particular units have a nice patina. They’re received many forms of light, and each has left its own, unique impression.

You want to hear about lives tragically cut short, he says, sitting back in his chair, foam protruding from cracks in the seams of the leather upholstery. You want to hear about the injustice of the universe. Is that what you mean, when you say I should tell it all?

Across from him sits a man in a rumpled blue shirt: Jefferey Hawking, his therapist, operator of the Hawking Refuge for Troubled Channelers. He has a binder on his lap and a pen in his hand. This is his office, and he blinks with the ticking of the clock.

Hawking opens his hand. If that’s what you want to talk about.

Brightside inhales deeply. His face bears the ruggedness of long erosion by waves of uncertainty and hardship. What if I want to talk about something more?

More than death? Hawking says, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

What if I were to tell you, Brightside says, of a crime so big, it imbues every aspect of our being? A crime so big that all crimes that have ever happened are owed to it. A crime so big that its repercussions will multiply on and on, forever, to the end of creation?

Hawking tips the pen in his hand.

In other words, Brightside says, what if I told you about life?

Then… be my guest, Hawking says.

Just don’t come complaining to me, Brightside says, leaning forward in his chair, removing a box of cigarettes from his hip pocket, a lighter from his jacket.

Complaining about what?

Trouble sleeping, Brightside says, flipping open the box.

You can see the damage here. In these black spots.

So this is what my personal grim reaper looks like, Brightside thinks, studying a holographic representation of his rib cage. A scattering of small black spots can be seen on the ends of two ribs, mistakable for signal error, dust on the sensor of the imaging device.

He’s been wondering if it would be a gunman, a manufacturing error, a flaming autocar. In fact, his grim reaper has come in a form of tiny black spots. How typically mundane.

I’m going to ask you this question once, and once should suffice to elicit an honest answer, says Altrius Rhines, the old man sitting beside him in a labcoat, the lines on his face given depth by the glow of the hologram. Have you been smoking?

Smoking? Brightside says. No. Never. I have some self-respect.

Brightside is a channeler, a being native to the 24th Century, alike to the humans who created him but with one key difference: a hyperband antenna integrated into his ribcage and spinal column, right up into his cerebral cortex. This antenna allows him to connect directly to OMNIUM, a master intelligence far away in space, instilling him with the supercognitve properties needed to resolve the pressing scientific and mathematical issues of his time. For nearly a century, Brightside has been working on a project known as Broken Clock, an initiative to discover a means for humans to travel in time. Slowly aging but not ageless, he has watched generations of human peers join the project and then fade away into retirement and death. Finally, it seems, it his turn to join them.

I ask because there are only a few causes for this type of damage, Rhines