Five Women

By David Young

What would the world be like in three generations if power and money continues to be increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands? In Five Women one person, Karnetta Monad, comes control the world. Karnetta is totally despotic, hedonistic and hates men. Five Women tells the story of good versus evil through the stories of five women, Karnetta, Helen, Lady Jane, Stella and Edith. It is also the story of gender and sexual politics and as such contains sections of highly descriptive sexual encounters.
Because of a freak discovery of an immortality pill Karnetta is able make herself immortal and becomes the self styled One True Living God. Karnetta attempts to kill the test subjects, Lady Jane and her husband Michael, and everyone who knows about immortality, but Michael escapes death when he is rescued by the underground resistance. Michael becomes the base subject for the creation of an immortal army becomes known as the mythical Soldier One. Michael is the thread that connects the stories five women, but it is they who are the real villain and heroes. The stories of each of the five women are complete in itself, but each story adds a different perspective that come together to form the complete story through their relationship to Michael.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Young
• Release date: Aug 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215032107

David Young

I was born in a working class district of East London and migrated to Australia as a young adult. In Australia I entered the university system and eventually gained a PhD from Curtin University in Western Australia. My area of research was why different groups in society cannot understand each other. This was a direct result of a working class lad studying at university and finding that the two different ways of thinking could not be further apart. I have now expanded into researching thinking and consciousness through creative writing, novels and non-fiction. To download my original research for free go to https://www.davidyoungresearch.com

Book preview

Five Women

A Novel by David Young

Book one of the Monad Trilogy

Copyright 2023 David Young Published by David Young at Smashwords. 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 enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All artwork Copyright 2023 David Young

Warning

Five Women contains sections of high-level sexual content suitable for adults only.

Table of Contents

Helen

Lady Jane

Stella

Karnetta

Edith

Helen, Lady Jane, Karnetta and Edith

The Games

Helen

Helen lay dying. The classic Greek goddess beauty of her face and long flowing hair not suggesting any sign of her massive internal injuries as she lay in the hospital bed. The peace on her face accentuated her outward physical perfection without betraying her brutal internal injuries. The soldier hoped that Helen would open her eyes just once so he could see those deep blue pools of dancing laughter before she was gone. Above all it was those beautiful blue eyes that had instantly caused the breaking of his rule of survival. Never fall in love. Falling in love is common for humans, even for the immortal kind. Or at least they think they are in love when it is more of an addiction to love than a reality. He had been consumed by lust on occasion, but he had truly loved only once before, and that was a long time ago. That lady had been destroyed by the One True Living God, the Great Monad, or Karnetta Monad, as she was named at birth. Because of the Great Monad he could never love without the fear that his love would be destroyed. He would never fall in love. But never is a long time, and now Helen was being destroyed at the end of his eighteenth new life because he had lied to himself. The gods of Mount Olympus have shown many times that when an immortal falls in love with a mortal human it is unlikely to end well, but nobody listens to the gods anymore.

The Resistance doppelganger had done a magnificent job of setting up the soldier's next new life. It had been sent to test the soundness of concept and any minor issues that needed to be smoothed out. Failure at this stage would have meant the loss of the doppelganger, but since it was a biological machine, programmed to behave in a way mirroring the ways and mannerisms of the Resistance soldier, there had been no danger to the soldier. It would be an expensive loss, but no danger. The new life set up by the doppelganger was only the base for the soldier to form his own connections and networks. Doppelgangers were only machines, and as such had no real feelings and were kept away from any in-depth human communication. This new life was a skeleton, and the soldier gradually was moving away from the life the doppelganger had established to make the life his own. Any slips and the soldier would be immediately pulled out and the doppelganger reinstated until the soldier understood the fullness of his new world. This was important because any possible inconsistencies might be noticed by the new friends of the doppelganger, which would put the soldier in danger. There were far too many ‘citizens’ willing to report any strange behaviour to the Great Monad’s 'peacekeepers' for the substantial reward on offer. The real danger was that if a soldier stayed too long in one life someone would notice they did not grow old. The only person in this boring world who did not grow old was Karnetta Monad, the Great Monad, the absolute ruler of the world, who hadn't aged a day in one hundred and eighty years.

The Resistance knew from past experience that it was impossible to predict with accuracy who would succumb to the offer of big money. For this reason, it was essential that the life the doppelganger had created for the soldier was as simple as possible so that the soldier could mould new life to his own personality. There was one constant. It would be a boring life. All the life in the Great Monad's world were boring, except for the extreme thrill seekers choose the Resistance.

This was a world without war, without poverty, but this had come at a price. The price was no progress, no questioning, no thinking. That is the problem with perfection. Nothing can be 'more perfect' than 'perfection', so nothing changes. The world had stood still for two hundred years, trapped in the image of what one person saw as perfection. It didn't help that the person who defined that perfection was immortal, so all there was to look forward to was more of the same for eternity, or until the Great Monad had been destroyed.

To overcome the boredom, the world had been designed like the mythical Roman games, with the people playing the gladiators and spectators at the same time. Boredom was kept at bay by thrill seeking games of every sort. Most of them had the appearance of great danger, but with the possibility of death or serious injury reduced to near zero. The more extreme the thrill more likely this could be the one time there might be a serious injury. The life of the soldier was one of filling in time until the final battle with Karnetta Monad, with every lifetime as perfect as the last. But it was worse than that. He could not form long term relationships and had to start again every ten years, without even death to look forward to.

The Resistance was part of the game, or at least the amateur (semi) visible Resistance was. The real Resistance was invisible even to itself. The public Resistance was the ultimate thrill-seeking game where if the player lost, they died. Not just died but executed in the most horrible way by incinerator beams that caused them to be publicly destroyed by a blue glow that starts deep within their naked body and slowly worked out to their skin to leave nothing but a small pile of ashes. It was all part of the spectacle. What would the Roman games have been if nobody died? If there weren’t any executions for awhile, and the people were growing impatient, it was always possible to round up some of the Great Monad’s imagined enemies and label them Resistance fighters. It happened every time there was no real resistance to execute, but the people were growing restless and wanted blood.

The amateur resistance was about thrills, being part of the game, the ultimate thrill of opposing the Great Monad. The second, invitation-only invisible Resistance, was determined to end the game. It was unfortunate that all the real Resistance could do was to stand by helpless as people died for the hideous crime of being bored and seeking greater and greater risk without understanding it was not just a game. Some may also have preferred physical death to being brain dead. For the waiting real Resistance soldier there was the rule that they would be completely law-abiding, stay away from the amateur resistance, and be the most boring of the boring. They must be invisible. One day, when the time was right, they would rise-up and have their full revenge on the boredom that had tried to consume their lives.

For the immortal soldier, the Resistance it was not a game. A new life every ten years was interesting, at first. No permanent partner, no marriage and no children were hard, and many times heart-breaking. For female soldiers, no children were often particularly hard. The Resistance geneticists had determined that immortality starts from the moment of conception. For female soldiers this would mean that the moment of conception would last for eternity. For an immortal male soldier, the results with a non-immortal partner were not clear, but it would probably be an immortal foetus that did not grow from the moment of conception however long its host lived. No wives, no husbands, no children were not good for the soldiers, or the morale of the Resistance. This was the rule the soldier had broken. Helen had been his permanent partner for ten years. Why this had been allowed to happen he had no idea, but happen it had.

When the immortal Karnetta Monad, the One True Living God was gone the problems of lonely immortals would have to be solved. It was a pity that reproduction was such a problem for immortals. Breeding could have meant sufficient immortal soldiers sooner to rise-up-against the Great Monad, as she was known before she become immortal, and end two hundred years of the self-styled One True Living God whose blameless mother had given birth to the perfect daughter of God, and who would rule humanity for eternity. One saving grace was that the immortal One True Living God could also not breed. For the real gods living on Mount Olympus, this was a relief.

The Great Monad had been careful to model her story on old myths/religions of ancient times when she had transitioned to the title, the One True Living God, so as to preserve continuity with the past, even to the extent of explaining her existence and immortality as the second coming. There was even a period of casting doubt on the gender of past heroes before she announcement her immortality, all she did was confirm what ‘everybody’ knew already. All the great gods were women, while the male gods were the baddies.

For the soldier hoverboards had only been a constant for his last two lives. Although he did not know any other soldiers, he knew a hoverboard attack had been identified as the Great Monad’s defence weakness. He understood this because hoverboard riding, together with tactics, was part of his training program. The Great Monad's protection forces could repel any attack from any conventional uprising, but the idea of a mass attack by well-trained hoverboard troops was literally under the radar. Training in the open, using public hoverboard parks, was dangerous because soldiers must never knowingly meet. The real danger was the Great Monad making the connection between hoverboarding and the Resistance, and the setting up of private training parks by the Resistance would soon be noticed. By being careful not to select friends who were into hoverboarding, and because each life was remote from the last, it was reasonably safe to use public parks.

His doppelganger had collected his new board. Always the doppelganger so the soldier would never know where the board came from. It was the latest Space Rider with his personal training program embedded. As with the standard non-Resistance army board, the memory function displayed manoeuvres onto the face visor. The difference was that his was a specific training program for him to learn Resistance army tactics. The term 'visor' was the old word that persisted even though the old physical helmet and visor head protection had long been replaced with an invisible head protective force field.

The soldier had been trying out a race circuit at a track not previously used by his doppelganger, learning his new tactics, but was not having a good day. As he tried the first manoeuvre another rider cut in front of him and slowed down. The soldier had to abandon the manoeuvre and pull to the inside of the track to overtake. As he went to the high side of the track at the steepest embankment of a turn to test the top speed of his new board a rider came alongside on the high side and so he could not move up the embankment. He thought that maybe this was part of his training and started finding ways to avoid the pesky rider intent on testing his patience. And then he fell off. The soldier was far too good a board rider to fall off without help, and his fall was the result of a knock from behind. He was entering the Brooklands bend at full speed for the first time when he was hit from behind. Not a full-on crash but just a little nudge that left him wobbling for several seconds before he would have regained his balance if it had not been for the second little nudge. If he had not known otherwise, he would have thought that his falling off was the tipple trick where the force field under a board rider could be disrupted by passing the nose of your own board quickly under the rival's board. But this was a public park and such tactics were for professional racers. On the second nudge he fell and bounced off the apparently solid concrete track that was really an air barrier designed to cushion falling riders from injury. On the second bounce he collided with the other rider who had also fallen off. They had come together face to face and automatically clung to each other. They bounced, slid and rolled, still holding each other tightly until they come to rest at the infield. How was it possible to lie in the grass holding, and being held by, a goddess who is hysterical with laughter with tears rolling from amazing dancing blue eyes, not to instantly be in love? But it was more than her tall slim athletic body hugging him, and her beautiful face that overcame his barriers to love. It was that he could feel her eyes reach down to her soul and he knew this was a person who knew and loved herself, and could radiate that love to others in a way few humans can. This amazing woman did not just look like a goddess, she radiated goddess from inside her being in a way that said, I am a complete person.

This was only the second time the soldier had known such a woman. The first had been his wife, Jane. There was a difference in that Jane had been manufactured by the Great Monad as a goddess solely so that she could be destroyed to satisfy the unimaginable evil that was Karnetta Monad. It was not until just before Jane's death that the soldier had understood that Jane truly was the image Karnetta Monad had created. For the first time in his life the soldier felt immense joy and the depths of despair at the same moment. The joy of the moment and the despair of his wife's death so many years before. He had just been knocked off his hoverboard by a living goddess and felt his desperate plea to the gods as he lay with her in the grass.

Please don't let this woman be another of Karnetta Monad's creations. He said quietly to himself. I must not love her.

The first thing she said, after many minutes, and still clinging around his neck was what's your name It was all she could think of saying.

He said John. He had completely forgotten who he was supposed to be in this new life.

John who? John Doe.

That utterly silly answer made her laugh again while he lay there trying to remember who he was supposed to be while being held tight by this amazing woman. It took a while to remember but it was a good way of starting what he hoped could be a quick romance before moving on. He knew it wouldn't be a quick romance, he knew that, but at least he could try to pretend. He needed to pretend. If he grew to love again the way he loved Jane how could he ever move on? Soldiers always had to move on. Male or female it didn't matter. That is how it needed to be.

And what is your name? the soldier asked.

My fun name is Helen, she said, but my boring name is Edith.

And so, the soldier met Helen Edith James for the first time.

Her face came even closer, and it seemed to the soldier that Helen was about to kiss him when she whispered, Shall we continue?

Helen pushed the button on the back of her glove and her board answered the summons and came over to hover beside her. Helen got up and jumped on her board, turned her head protection back on, and sped off. The soldier took up the challenge, summonsed his board and gave chase. The afternoon was spent in playing every trick possible to avoid getting caught by the other. At one point the soldier decided that maybe chasing Helen was a mistake and he slowed down to a gentle glide heading back towards to the clubhouse. Helen responded by weaving back and forth in front of him until he resumed his chase. Some human games seem to have stayed forever. During the games another female came between them, looked closely at the soldier and gave Helen a high five before speeding off. Helen laughed and sped off with the soldier in pursuit. For a while he forgot he was a Resistance soldier and just enjoyed being human playing human games.

Later, at the clubhouse, the soldier met Helen's friend Margaret, and Margaret's partner, Brian. Margret and Brian were the embodiment of the perfect middle class couple. They were both good looking and well dressed in the latest fashionable hoverboard riding outfits. They were the perfect modern couple that on first meeting were the same as any other perfect couple. But Margaret and Brian were friends of the goddess Helen, so it was inevitable that they beneath the veneer of ordinariness, there were 'real' people.

The clubhouse was the same as any other hoverboard park. Square, simple and painted white. The Great Monad had seen in