The Anachronistic Code: Memories from Tomorrow

By Dwayne R. James

It’s 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen again ... and he’s being watched.
Josh has decoded a message from the future, but he’s about to find out that there’s a group that doesn’t want him to follow the clues it’s pointing to. That’s not his biggest challenge though. He still has to figure out how to tell his parents that he's leaving and how to say goodbye to the girl he left behind the last time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dwayne R. James
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781928015246

Dwayne R. James

Writer and watercolour artist Dwayne James lives outside of Lakefield, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his very forgiving family.Dwayne studied archaeology in University, and as a result learned how to write creatively. "The most important skill I learned in University," he says, "was the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."With no formal art training, Dwayne has always preferred the self-guided, experimental approach. In fact, he taught himself how to illustrate archaeological artifacts while completing his Master's degree at Trent University. Said his thesis supervisor at the time: "There might not be much in the way of coherent theoretical content in Dwayne's thesis, but damn, it looks pretty!"After spending close to a decade as a technical communicator at IBM, Dwayne opted to look at their Jan 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay-at-home Dad for his young twins, and pursue his painting and creative writing whenever they allow him to do so. It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Book preview

The

ANACHRONISTIC

CODE

BOOK THREE:

MEMORIES from TOMORROW

by

DWAYNE R. JAMES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 by Dwayne R. James

Smashwords Edition, 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 Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Synopsis

It’s 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen again … and he’s being watched.

Josh has decoded a message from the future, but he’s about to find out that there’s a group that doesn’t want him to follow the clues it’s pointing to. That’s not his biggest challenge though. He still has to figure out how to tell his parents that he has to leave and how to say goodbye to the girl he left behind once before.

Table of Contents

Chapter 17: Sometime in October, 2034

Chapter 18: Abbott and Costello redux

Chapter 19: The Adventures of Swellman

Chapter 20: If You Leave. . .

Chapter 21: Later the same day, October, 2034

Chapter 22: The Future’s on Back-order

Chapter 23: The List

Chapter 24: The Severing

Chapter 25: The Secret Life

Chapter 26: The Girl who Almost Floated Away

Chapter 27: Moments later, October, 2034

Chapter 28: The Girl with the Roller Skate

About the Author

Also by Dwayne R. James

Chapter 17

Sometime in October, 2034

She’s a real beaut, Dad! crackled Matheson’s excited voice through the tiny speakers of my facemask communications system. I had just powered on the underwater light array that surrounded the vintage Volkswagen microbus on the seafloor below us, so this would be his first chance to see the oblong vehicle, at least in person.

My son swam forward until he was floating upside-down, hanging above the bus on a slight angle, touching her front windshield with his gloved hand almost lovingly. It was sweet, but I was pretty sure that it wasn’t nostalgia he was feeling. He wouldn’t have any memory of this kind of vehicle from his youth, at least not the kind of fond memories that I had. For him, he was responding as would anybody from a post-apocalyptic society where so many of the survivors were using non-operational vehicles as living spaces: he was no doubt thinking about the extra room this was going to afford him and his growing family, mostly by giving his spirited teenaged daughter a much-needed space of her own.

Get a room, ye two, grumbled McTavish, although not as unkindly as his gruff Scottish accent would have otherwise implied. The old Scot had been just as smitten with the lonely microbus the first time he’d seen it, on our first dive three days ago when we’d begun to clean away the silt and vegetation in preparation for today’s recovery. I’m gonna need a hand wi’ the front jack, Mat. That is if ye can take yer hands off her for a wee bit.

Matt and I exchanged a glance, and I could tell by his eyes that he was smiling. We’d both known Mac since even before we’d taken up residence on the Pucks some four or five years ago. A gruff man about my age with a grey mustache so stereotypically big that I’m surprised it fit inside his full face mask, I had worked with McTavish on the construction of the Pucks. As an electrical engineer, I had been involved in some of the electronic design and installation on the hydroponic aquatic farms, and the Scotsman had been one of the commercial divers who had worked to secure the floating Hexapod complex to the seabed of the Northumberland Strait.

The man didn’t countenance idiots, so I considered it a bit of honour that he had agreed to help me out on so many of my salvage dives over the years. In my youth, I had logged hundreds of recreational SCUBA hours but didn’t have anywhere near Mac’s level of expertise. Not only did he know seemingly every nook and cranny of Prince Edward Island—having been born and raised here—but he was an absolute wizard at balancing the mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium that made it possible for the three of us to work in 80 feet of water for an extended period of time without running the risk of nitrogen narcosis.

On my way Mac, answered Mat as he pushed off from the VW. Spinning gracefully in place, he let a bit of air out of his buoyancy compensator as he scissored his finned legs a few times to propel his body towards the seabed, finally settling down beside the Scot. While the two of them worked at clearing the remaining debris out from under the vehicle’s bumper, I opened the utility box on the Persephone (the motorized subskimmer that I’d named for Nick Adonidas’ tug boat in the classic CBC Beachcombers TV show), and pulled out the underwater hydraulic jack.

Our plan was to attach a separate floatation bag to each of the vehicle’s axles just behind the tires and, even though each of those tires had been completely flattened by water pressure, we would still need to lift each end of the bus a few inches so that we could slip a nylon harness strap around and behind each of them. That’s where the underwater jack came in. It wasn’t unlike the kind of floor jack that you might have seen in a pitstop back when car racing was actually a thing, but it was a lot smaller, and I’d had to adjust its wheels for use in an uneven underwater environment. Luckily, an uneven surface wasn’t too much of a concern for us today since the microbus had settled on a rocky outcrop with only a slight angle to it, so we had a good solid base on which to place the jack.

It was still very much beyond me how the bus would have gotten out this far into the Northumberland Strait in the first place. It wasn’t like somebody could have driven it off the end of a pier or something, and it was too far away to have fallen from the Confederation bridge during the… well, the severing. I shivered involuntarily despite the toasty warmth of the polypropylene long johns that I wore under my dry suit at the thought of the tangled mess of metal in the waters surrounding the broken pillars of the thirteen-kilometer bridge that used to connect Prince Edward Island to the New Brunswick mainland. When it was blown up in 2025 to guard the island against the spread of the Yellow Death contagion, there had been vehicles on it. Vehicles with people in them. Although the Ensee had organized a recovery operation a few years back and had gathered as many of the human remains as possible, (as well as a number of the larger vehicles that could be used as much needed living spaces), the place still had ghosts.

Well, most of the world has ghosts now, but that place is different.

Mat and McTavish had cleared enough debris and silt out from under the front of the Volkswagen to leave about three inches of empty space, which was more than enough for me to work with. I slid the floor jack underneath so the tiny rubberized lifting platform was directly under the once-chrome bumper. Then, with my two diving companions holding the skateboard-like tool in place, I attached the long handle to the hydraulic mechanism and pumped it until the lifting platform had risen high enough to be in contact with the vehicle’s underbelly. Two more pumps, that weren’t nearly as difficult as I had been expecting, and the front of the ancient microbus was free from the seabed for the first time in decades.

Wohoo! exclaimed Mat into his facemask speaker, even as he and McTavish each pulled a nylon harness out of the utility bags hanging off their shoulders, before looping it around and behind their respective tires. Once they had their harnesses secured in place, I lowered the front of the car while they moved to the back of the vehicle so that we could repeat the entire lifting process.

So far, things were going a lot more smoothly than I had hoped and planned for. McTavish and I had been out twice already in the last week removing vegetation from the bus and blowing the silt back and out of the way. We’d also broken into the van’s forward trunk and wedged the passenger side door open so that we could investigate the interior to make sure there weren’t any surprises waiting for us in the way of human remains. On the whole though, the bus was completely bereft of anything of interest, I mean, beyond the Grateful Dead 8-track that was still inserted in the dashboard player. Otherwise, it was surprisingly boring, as if the entire vehicle had been completely sanitized before having been scuttled. There was a story behind it, I knew, but I was likely never going to find out what it was.

The work on the back of the van was even easier than the front and, in seemingly no time at all, I was returning the jack to the subskimmer’s utility box as Mat and McTavish were attaching a floatation bag to each of the four harnesses. A single bag had a 2,000 lb capacity, so having four of them was definitely overkill considering that these Type 2 Volkswagen microbuses didn’t weigh much more than 2,500 pounds soaking wet. There was a separate tank of compressed air attached to each of the bags, with a dedicated air-hose that passed through an electronic control box so that buoyancy could be adjusted remotely. But that would be something that would be happening later. First, we had to get the old girl completely up and off the seabed.

Working together, the three of us opened the valves on each of the tanks so that we could monitor the rate at which the floatation bags filled. Each one leapt up vertically pretty much right away, stretching the harness straps taught, but the water pressure at this depth meant that it was a few more minutes until we noticed a similar effect on our passenger. The front right side was the first to lift up, so Mac tightened the valve a little so that the other three could catch up. Then, just like that, with no complaints whatsoever, the tiny bus was hanging about a meter above the rocky outcrop that it had called home for so many years. The act had stirred up a fair amount of silt, but not nearly as much as it would have had we not spent so much time in the last week siphoning and moving the bank that had, over the years, accumulated against the left side of the bus.

This time, it was Mac’s turn to express delight. Yaldi! he called out, something that I’d learned a long time ago was a Scottish expression of delight. What’s yer pressure reading, laddies?

Working together, and at Mac’s direction, we adjusted each of the floatation bags so that the air pressure within each was a match and the van remained neutrally buoyant and hanging there more or less level. Then, with the bulk of the silt having settled down, we unhooked our flashlights and did a visual inspection underneath the vehicle to make sure that there were no snags or hangers on, and worked together to push it physically back and forth and forwards and backwards to make absolutely sure that it wasn’t hung up on anything we couldn’t see.

It looks belter t’ me, declared McTavish. "I think we’re good t’ go. Are we returning t’ the Pucks above or below, Josh?"

Let me check with our sky crew, I answered as I hooked my flashlight onto a large D-ring on my waist, where it hung beside my lucky spanner. Both were firmly tethered to my utility belt by way of coiled cables, not unlike the kind that had once been attached to landline telephone receivers.

Casey? I inquired into my headset.

The youthful voice that responded had that subtle synthesized feel to it that identified it as belonging to an AI system, in this case the AI that controlled the drone currently hovering some one hundred feet over the surface of the water above us.

Hi, Mister Donegal, returned the speaker immediately in response to my verbal cue. The sing-song quality of the voice, along with its hint of what might have been a British accent, made it instantly recognizable to anyone else from my generation who had been weaned on Canadian Children’s Television, specifically the Mr. Dressup Show.

Casey… I continued wearily.

I’m still here, Mister Donegal.

I’ve told you this before. My name is Josh. You don’t have to call me Mister Donegal.

Sure thing, Mister Donegal.

I sighed, and continued. Casey, did you understand what I just said?

Yes, Mister Donegal. I sure did.

I cursed Oskar under my breath, in part, I realized with amusement, because I didn’t want Casey’s young ears to hear me swear. When I’d built the drone a little over three months ago, I’d installed a rudimentary voice-command system that I’d cobbled together using Ensee tech, but it had some very obvious limitations, so I had approached Oskar about it. He’d never told me much about his former life before becoming my favourite bartender on the Pucks, but over the years, I’d been able to piece together that he had been some kind of computer genius. Still, when he had agreed to tweak the system by making it fully interactive with its own dedicated Artificial Intelligence operating system, I hadn’t honestly been expecting much, even though he had promised to give it the voice from one of my favourite television programs from my youth. Naturally, I had been expecting K.I.T.T from Knight Rider and had forgotten that I’d once told him all about my fanboy-like love for the Mr. Dressup show, and how meeting the man himself, Ernie Coombs, in my late-twenties during his college tour in the wake of the show’s cancellation, had been a thrill beyond reckoning. Oskar was American, and had never heard of the show, but had apparently done his research well enough to be able to simulate the voice and the mannerisms of the famous hand-puppet who might have been the main character’s son, even though he only ever called him Mister Dressup instead of Dad, or whatever Ernie’s given name might have been on the show.

It could be worse, I suppose.

Oskar had a foul-mouth and a dark sense of humour so, although he had restricted Casey’s programming from actually ever being able to use my proper name, he at least hadn’t programmed the AI to curse, something the innocent five-year-old inside of me just would not have been able to countenance.

Casey was still patiently waiting for me to give him an actual task, and I could see McTavish looking at me quizzically through his face-mask, so I decided to drop the subject and move on.

What are the conditions like topside, Casey?

The winds have picked up in the last twenty minutes, Mister Donegal, and there’s significantly more wave-action. Other than that, it’s an unseasonably hot and sunny 28 degrees Celsius, but the barometric pressure is dropping. It looks like they were wrong about the storm passing by to the North of the island, and I’m estimating that the worst of it will hit this area in about two hours.

I sucked at my teeth in thought as I absorbed what the drone’s AI was telling me. OK, I finally said. How about the underwater conditions?

I’ll ask Finnegan, offered Casey helpfully.

The drone actually had two components. Both being thin disk-shaped units about the size of a car tire that could be used either conjoined or detached (when they were physically linked together one on top of the other, they actually bore a striking resemblance to the Millennium Falcon, although that had been entirely coincidental), each with instruments dedicated to their own specific environments. Casey’s disk told me what I needed to know about atmospheric conditions topside and the second disc—appropriately named Finnegan—monitored the underwater world, and was currently zipping through the dark water all around us, navigating by way of his sensitive sonar. Appropriately, Finnegan didn’t report to me directly, but conveyed his findings through Casey, another little surprise from Oskar, when he had decided to give the two halves of the rover distinct personalities appropriate to the characters their AIs were based on. True to his canine character on the show, Finnegan never actually spoke out loud, he just whispered what he wanted to say directly into Casey’s ear.

Finnegan says that you’re at a depth of 24 meters with a temperature of 7 degrees Celsius and the current running at 0.8 knots. Tidal action is nominal, but will begin to negatively impact your visibility in about twenty-five minutes.

OK good. How are your batteries? I asked.

Finnegan’s internal battery is at sixty-eight percent, Mister Donegal, and I’m sitting at ninety-seven.

I wasn’t much concerned about Casey’s battery, since his entire body was pretty much just a molded, high-efficiency solar cell plexi-panel so, given his position hovering above us in the bright sunlight, he’d be charging his batteries almost as quickly as he’d be discharging them. Finnegan was another matter. The submersible drone didn’t have his counterpart’s solar charging capability, so could only replenish his power when joined with Casey. He did have a larger array of light-weight high-capacity batteries to make up for this fact though, so I wasn’t concerned that he’d be tapped out before we were finished, especially considering that we’d been at it for about two hours so far today, and he’d only expended a little over thirty percent.

Nor was I all that worried about the reduced visibility that Casey warned me about through Finnegan because I could see just fine thanks to some enhancements that I’m made to my face mask (once again, something that I’d repurposed from Ensee tech and with Oskar’s help with the programming). So, as Finnegan was currently in the process of relaying all of his sonar readings back to Casey, the aerial drone was in turn analyzing them in relation to my own position, and projecting that information directly onto my mask display—which was actually a thin piece of curved LCD substrate that could display high-resolution graphics and images. Currently, I was using it to augment reality by having graphics superimposed over what I could make out of the darkness beyond the glass. In this way, I could see much farther in all directions, from the contour of the seafloor, to the debris to avoid, and even to local sea life that might get curious as to what was happening. In fact, were I in shallower water, and looked directly up, the ripple effect of the surface would fade in favour of an unobstructed view of the sky above, and show me everything within Casey’s visual and sensor range—all in relation to my own position of course.

I’d been ecstatic over how well the enhanced sensors on each of the two drones had worked harmoniously right from the start, because that had actually been how I’d found the old Volkswagen in the first place. It had been in early June, just after I’d finished the final assembly work on the drones and long before I’d let Oskar tinker with them, back when I had taken them both out for their first extensive test spin. Naturally, I had already put them both through their paces individually in the confines of the Puck environment, but this had been my first chance to test out their range and observe how well the two halves worked together in real-world conditions.

At the time, the drones had both been controlled remotely for the most part, although they were heavily automated in that they could pilot themselves autonomously and navigate around most obstacles. I had programed their route before dropping Finnegan into the water of my moon pool and sending Casey skyward through the opening at the very top of our Puck’s mesh dome. Then, I entered the virtual reality environment of my OVUM simulacrum where I could better monitor and direct them both. The output from their sensor and imaging devices were fed directly into the OVUM’s CPU and then drawn using coloured lasers on the inner walls of the semi-circular tent that I was sitting in, giving a very realistic 360-degree simulation of the rover of my choosing. So, that when Casey was zipping around through the clouds, or Finnegan was skimming along above the sea floor, it was as if I was along for the ride.

I was impressed that the underwater scenes I had observed on the trip down to the microbus on the Persephone were remarkably similar to the ones that Finnegan had broadcast back to me on the day we’d first followed his sensor readings to the half-buried microbus. Not surprisingly, Finnegan’s metal detector had raised the alarm before his side-scan sonar had relayed any readings. By that point, I was already on my way to the site virtually, having taken control of Finnegan’s navigation manually. I’d been over the area a number of times in regular SCUBA gear, but I could be forgiven for having missed the old microbus completely since the vehicle’s left side