Cascade LI'MA Saga Book II

By Arai Creek

CASCADE The LI'MA Saga Book ii:

In Book II - CASCADE What if the unthinkable happened?  What if in less than a few weeks' time the entire surface of the planet Earth was attacked, decimated, and then destroyed ... causing the extinction of every living biolo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aria Creek
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088162057

Book preview

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This Printed/ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; and may not be resold or given away to other people. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this Printed/e-book, or portions thereof, in any form without written permission except for the use of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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

The LI’MA Saga

Cascade

Book II

Copyright Aria Creek 2012

All Rights Reserved

The LI’MA Saga, Cascade, Book II, is an independently published Book/eBook,

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Cover Illustration by Aria Creek

Cover Design by Aria Creek

Published Independently by IANOM Press

https://www.ariacreek.com

ISBN: Trade Paperback 9781088067888

Hard Cover 9781088101056

ePub 9781088101148

First Edition: 2023

Table of Contents

Also by Aria Creek

CASCADE

1: Conundrum

2: Brainiac

3: Destiny

4: Family

5: Friendship

6: Prime

7: Decision

8: Memories

9: Janice

10: Progeny

11: Opportunity

12: Contact

13: First

14: CIA

15: Mystery

16: Crisis

17: Spooks

18: LimaLime

19: Sex?

20: GMO

21: Cotton

22: Contamination

23: Hemorrhagic fever

24: Evolution

25: LimaHong

26: Hazmat

27: Jonq

28: Tossed About

29: Cascade

30: Africa

31: Tack

32: M16-0083

33: Names

34: Protocol

35: Microman-killers

36: Evaluation

37: Lima, LimaHong, LimaPrime, LimaLime

38: Bonds

39: Seriously Dangerous

40: Intentional

41: Specificity

42: C/Syn

43: Files

44: Repercussions

45: Safety

46: Bunker

47: Detour

48: Too Late?

49: Fractal Generation

50: Bonding

51: Billy & Pen

52: Beta Testers

53: Pilotless

54: Anxiety

55: Hike

56: Help

57: Camaraderie

58: Tack

59: Emotions

60: Planning

61: Exposure

62: Reactivated

63: Reservation

65: Report

66: Lockdown

67: Mistrust

68: Matriarchs

69: Assets

70: One-Way

71: Good-Bye

72: Data

73: The Cascade

74: Dying

75: Untethered

76: Beca

77: Borders

78: Overpopulation

79: Paper-Economy

80: Isolation

81: Implacable

82: Seal 1

83: Plagues

84: Accusations

85: Too Young To Die

86: Survival

87: Trust

88: Illogic

89: Escape

90: Fear

91: North

92: Livestock

93: Obfuscation

94: Skycrane

95: Co-Op

96: Instructions

97: Lilly

98: Left Behind

99: Life or Death

100: Desperation

101: Cascades

102: Construction

103: Children

104: Pride

105: Climbing

106: Realization

107: Spa

108: Intervener

109: Star Travel

110: Return

111: Pods

112: Viral Wars

113: Psychosis

114: Nano-Bees

115: Oceans

116: Acclamation

117: Isolation

118: Death

119: Graves

120: Evolution

121: Burials

Afterwords

The ReBoot

LI’MA Saga Book III

Acknowledgements, of a kind.

Also by Aria Creek

Prime Hollingsworth Suazo

Vengeance

The LI’MA Saga

I Think, Therefore I Am

Book I

Cascade

Book II

The Class ’94 mystery Series

The Exchange

The Letter

Siddhartha, The Brahmin’s Daughter

Translation

CASCADE

1

Conundrum

Dr. Jessica Brown, sat perfectly still… hands tightly interlaced in her lap… ignoring the small box she’d placed squarely in the center of the glass table in front of her.

Refusing to open it, her attention wandered around her well-appointed tenth floor corner apartment; overlooking a brilliant view of the Thames.

Every time she walked through her front door, she felt giddy.

Her apartment was a large spacious affair starting with a grand formal foyer, royally set off by high ceilings throughout. A dozen large original casement windows from the last century, displayed ever-changing scenes of life in the city below.

Artfully tucked away in the rear of the apartment was a new kitchen that any le Grand Diplôme International le Cordon Bleu chef would demand. The entire apartment, including the kitchen, was wired with an electronic marvel of a Comm/Sound System of her own design. Music and visuals were weaving their way throughout the entire space as she sat there forcibly ignoring the box.

Never in her wildest dreams would she have ever imagined that Damocles was hovering above her with his deadly sword ready to strike her down dead.

.-.. .. -- .-

She continued to sit, ignoring the little box. Her hands were shaking now.

2

Brainiac

Jessica Brown loved views.

Her last residence had been a very tiny, practically miniscule bedsit, with one single narrow window. She had existed in that space for the five years it had taken her to get two master’s degrees and a PhD. Small and cramped it was, but that room did have one redeeming factor. Through its tall narrow window, she could see a brilliant view of the Oxford Botanic Garden.

Six months after graduation, she had turned in the key to cramped bedsit, hopped onto her eye popping outrageously detailed three-year-old, 50cc stroke scooter and rode the scenic route into London. Other than the scooter, she took the eclectic assortment of clothes on her back, her brains and a messenger bag filled with her diplomas, photos, makeup, a treasure box, a portable Vis/Comm and her passport.

.-.. .. -- .-

Jessica Brown, recently unchained and ready to pounce into the fray, was a bundle of kinetic energy. With eyes wide open and arms stretched to the heavens (in order to grab the quicksilver of life by its tail) she was ready to ride the whirling dervish for all it was worth.

Her first stop once she reached London was at her new abode. Her second stop was at her new job.

Once ensconced in the six-figure job she had accepted, before the ink on her latest diploma was dry, she’d been successfully implementing the specs, program and software leading ultimately to the building for deployment of OSSMs (Orbital Solar Shield Management systems).

The prototype intended to be launched within the year.

The OSSMs were a self-sustaining-solar-shield device, which she called an umbrella. It was a slotted membrane of solar collectors with microscopic pinholes, a blanket of sorts, made up of thousands of flexible interlocking polygons, deployed into space to shade the Earth’s hottest spots.

Eventually, Jessie planned to augment these umbrellas for a secondary use. She had plans to expand their capability to act as recharge ports, for objects orbiting or traveling back to Earth .

Life was good for Jessie Brown. Her world was chaotic, climate-change-challenged and overpopulated, but her generation grew up in it; and this was the way life was for them – they knew no other.

Jessie was a brainiac, young, healthy, adventurous, and, she had enough money in her pocket to explore the London night scene every weekend from top to bottom. There were clubs, music, theatre, dance, art galleries and artists, museums and lots of restaurants and a splendid cadre of friends from Oxford who worked or lived in or around London to hang out with.

No matter where her mind wondered, there sat the little box screaming for her attention.

3

Destiny

The rumpled letter had been there for years; jammed in between the other bits and pieces of personal trivia inside her pretty wooden inlaid treasure box.

Jessica had kept the box safety tucked away in a drawer - unless, like today, it lay on the table in front of her - shattering the silence and reeking the odor of Pandora.

While she procrastinated (continually adjusting her position on the only place to sit in her living room, an extravagant but much-loved present from her parents, a Gustavian couch) she couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding that surrounded her.

It’s just a letter! she tried to convince herself as she started to reach for the lid for the umpteenth time.

4

Family

The year her grandmother, Dr. Janice Brown, had become ill, Jessica had been given the little inlaid box. That was the year Jessie had graduated from MIT, her grandmother’s alma mater.

Jessie’s grandmother, Dr. Janice Brown, a Pulitzer prize winner (and one of the three scientists who had created a Living Sentient Machine, some fifty some odd years before) had been invited to speak at her granddaughter’s graduation. But she had been too ill to accept.

In order not to miss out on the event, Dr. Janice Brown watched the live feed Vis/Comm that Jessie’s parents and siblings, who were in the audience, were sending back. When Jessie was called up to receive her honors and diploma her family went ballistic. Janice had to cover her ears. It sounded like a herd of angry buffalo were stampeding across her bedroom.

After the ceremony, the whole family stood together in front of the Vis/Comm , which was perched on its extended tripod, and waved and yelled as they held up Jessie’s arms like she had just won the world heavyweight boxing championship. It was one of those magic family moments that some people are blessed with.

Janice Brown was enthralled with the spectacle that was playing out before her eyes on the roll-up monitor hanging from the wall in front of her hospital bed, in her bedroom.

Her husband Jack and her good friend Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo surrounded her. Prime had flown in from Arizona to watch the graduation with her.

Prime was holding Janice’s hand while Janice cried a bucket full of joyful tears. While Janice was into her tears-of-joy-extravaganza, Jack snuck out to the kitchen and returned with the bottle of champagne Prime had brought. It was chilled to perfection. The cork was popped, the bubbly poured.

In unison, they all toasted the new graduate, with all the kids at the graduation screaming ‘save some for us’!!

5

Friendship

The years since that graduation had been bumpy, fraught with hidden tripwires and outstanding tech-successes. Through it all the five-foot-nine, red-haired young woman with mocha skin, like her grandmother’s, and yellow-rimmed brown eyes, like her mother’s, had found her way into semi-adulthood. And now, here she was, procrastinating like a petulant child not wanting to take its medicine.

Jessie opened the box - her hands still shaking. She reached in and took the letter out with two fingers. She had gotten this far many times before.

On the outside of the envelope, written in her grandmother’s familiar script, were the simple instructions: ‘To be opened after Janice Brown and Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo are dead’.

Her gran had died years ago, Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo had died last month.

Jessie had attended Prime’s memorial service, on the Reservation, where Prime had lived the last decades of her life amongst the people of her ancestry.

Jessie had attended the service on behalf of her grandmother. She had stood in front of the assembled mourners and talked about the close friendship and mutual respect the two-women had for each other. A friendship, which had spanned fifty years.

Five decades, during which their lives intertwined with the four SI’s (Sentient Intelligences) three of whom sat in attendance at the back of the high school auditorium.

After she finished her recollection, she took her seat and listened to the other stories being shared with the people assembled in the filled to capacity auditorium. Somewhere into the third or fourth reverie her mind wondered into the past.

6

Prime

She drifted back in time to her graduation from high school.

After a boisterous celebration, she and her grandmother took their drinks, and headed out to the chairs under the old magnolia tree.

Let me tell you about Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo.

The gamer? Jessie asked.

Oh! She’s much more than that, Dr. Brown began, "imagine zigzagging through a gauntlet that slingshots you, without brakes, from brimstone and fire to cellular chaos to arbitrary lunacy.

"Life for Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo is screaming across high Mesa country at 150 mph with her hybridized classic P1800 Volvo barely touching solid terra firma, which was due to its hover treads.

"The treads seemed the most logical solution to Prime; who wanted to solve the problem of achieving exceptional fuel economy when trying to get from point A to point B (barring electric cars, walking, riding a bike, roller skating or running) so, she came up with the treads.

"Her basic premise was rather simple: If you want to use less energy (whatever its source) just make the vehicle lighter. But you don’t want a car made out of cardboard and toothpicks, it would crumble in the rain, so the other solution is to lift the vehicle off its wheels 84.698 %.

The design and model for the treads were fabricated in her garage/lab with the assistance and imagination of her first class of students, or gang as she liked to call them, from Tuba City High School.

So you’re telling me this story because you think it’s age appropriate? Jessica asked her grandmother.

Well, yes, Janice smiled and then continued, Prime’s second vehicle was a solar hover tread car, which she called Frankenstein, because it was put together with a thousand different parts from everywhere; and her gang built the whole thing in the high school’s hot shop.

How did she afford to do this? Jessie asked.

Profits from her 5in1 computer/net game, her grandmother answered.

That game’s been around, like forever.

Decades actually. It provides the funds for college educations, and, other interests that Prime gets involved with.

Did all of the kids in her gang go to college? Jessie asked as they got up and took the trailhead behind the great old tree.

Not all. Ellen Begay was the first of her students not to go to college, Janice reminisced. "Ellen went straight from high school into environmental landscaping, and thereafter was seen at dawn, every morning, heading out in her dump truck with backhoe attached, to a job site.

Her solar truck was another hot shop Frankenstein that Ellen’s class, of the best and the brightest, worked on throughout her four years in High School.

AND!

She’s still using that truck, Janice smiled at the recollection. I saw her and her daughter sprucing up Prime’s native landscaping the last time I visited. They stayed for lunch and I laughed till I almost embarrassed myself as Ellen told us some of the crazy stuff they came up with in Prime’s class, and of course she told me about the preverbal and prerequisite blowing up of the chemistry lab.

Ouch! Jessie said.

Exactly, Janice said.

Anyone else didn’t go the college route? Jessie asked.

Oh yes! There was John Lightfoot. He didn’t go to college either, Janice Brown said gazing into the past.

Why are you smiling?

Well, Prime and her best friend Elana Davian, you know, the Chief of Police we visited when you were young, Janice asked as she kicked a large branch off the path.

Yes, I remember her, Wonder Woman in disguise, Jessie said laughing.

Yes, that lady. Well, just before Elana retired as Chief of Police of Rehoboth Delaware, she and Prime went out and tracked down John Lightfoot who had not gone to college, but who had used his fertile imagination and inventive brain in a most brilliant but illegal way, which hurt a lot of innocent people, Janice said, as Jessie listened transfixed.

"Prime warns every student, at the beginning of every class, that if they choose the dark side, she’ll hunt them down, toss them in jail and throw the key away. But John didn’t believe an old lady of 60 could be a threat regardless of the stories about her.

Well, when Elana and Prime took him down and bagged him and made him walk back the eight hundred miles to jail, with proof of his transgressions, he was mortified, Janice said as Jessie gave her a skeptical jeer.

And the best part of the story is that they didn’t use guns, knives or blackjacks, even though Elana was carrying! Janice said enthusiastically and then added, they just tossed him about a bit… and no… nothing was broken or permanently bruised, she said, to the now wide-eyed stare of her granddaughter.

How’d they do it then? And what do you mean by ‘tossed him about a bit’, Jessie asked spellbound.

Prime and Elana are trained operatives. I think if they wanted to, they could poke a person to death. Prime in action is like watching a no-nonsense, fast thinking old time marvel comic heroine, and Elana, well, she can scare the pants off of anyone, Janice said as she turned to face her granddaughter who was standing there gawking at her.

And the tossing bit? Jessie exclaimed.

They tumbled him around like a basketball I’ve been informed, until he gave up, Janice said.

How big was he? Jessie asked as they resumed walking.

Over six feet if my recollection is correct, Janice said smiling as the image crossed her mind of Lightfoot passing David Shikoba, who was a bit over that lofty height.

What did they do with him? Jessie asked.

On the day John went to jail, the whole school, a few hundred alumni, and the police, as well as Prime’s husband the Mayor of Flagstaff David Shikoba, and Max Griffin, Elana’s husband… do you remember them? Janice asked.

Vaguely, Jessie responded.

Well, they were all waiting along the roadside as John was force marched to the jail house, Janice said as Jessie gave her a disbelieving look.

That really happened? Or are you just making it all up as you go along? Janice asked suspiciously.

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Janice said, holding up one hand and putting the other over her heart as she laughed.

Holy shit! Jessie said.

Exactly, Janice said smiling.

What happened to John?

Oh, John! Well after jail and community service and restitution, he went on and got himself a PhD.

In WHAT!!? Jessie asked incredulously.

Something in banking and finance, what else? Anyway, after the Lightfoot incident, no one in Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo’s class went over to the dark side, even though some didn’t go on to college.

Wow! Jessie said.

Are you suggesting that I don’t go to college?

OH! GOOD GRIEF NO! Dr. Brown exclaimed in horror. That good brain of yours must be trained. I’m just reminiscing about Prime and high school students."

It’s a good story, Jessie said as she and her grandmother turned around, going back to join the family.

7

Decision

Upon Jessie’s return to England, after the memorial service, plus a side trip to see her family, she had taken the box out of the drawer what seemed like a thousand times. And, she’d replaced it a thousand times.

Now, here she sat, once again, with the little box staring at her.

But this time, instead of slamming the box back into a drawer, she lifted