Between Two Worlds

By Solitaire Parke

Society is collapsing before his eyes.

Sixteen-year-old Cross Mundos is trying to survive in a world of nuclear disaster and environmental decay. His parents have disappeared, leaving him with an eccentric uncle, a war zone, and a landscape where death and extinction seem to be the inevitable outcome. But Cross has an intellect far beyond most in his age category, and despite the challenges he faces, is determined to find a way to endure and even thrive.

To his surprise, his Uncle Ferrum reveals an instrument called a torch, enabling him to rip a hole into the fabric of time and space. This changes everything as he can transport to an identical world, with one catch – it is many decades into the past!

To survive in this new world, Cross must keep his previous life a secret and yet somehow blend in with the current populace. His ultimate goal is to discover what went wrong in his world and somehow change the course of events to stop the future of this new planet from complete destruction.

Will history repeat itself, or will Cross be the one person who can alter its outcome?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304619396

Solitaire Parke

Solitaire Parke is an author of Science Fiction/Urban Fantasy, Poetry and Larger World books. He is a lover of dragons, the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, and has a large collection of science fiction books and movies. After becoming an award winning photographer and earning a degree in music theory, he worked in graphic and web design, but he always returns to writing.When he is not writing, you can find him reading, watching a sci-fi television show or movie, or researching a new “techno gadget” on the internet. He now resides in Arizona with his family and two very spoiled dogs!

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Solitaire Parke

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Solitaire Parke

Copyright © 2024 Solitaire Parke

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the author.

ISBN 978-1-304-61939-6

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the many authors who participated in the publications known as the Winston Classics. Without them this book wouldn’t exist. If you haven’t read them, an entire universe worth of adventure awaits you. Hopefully you will find this story in the same light.

Solitaire…

INTRODUCTION

I have long wondered if this planet is the total sum, or if there were other near identical worlds happening a heartbeat away from where we call home.

If our world was suddenly cast into an extinction event and you had the capacity to step from one world to another, would you?

What if your journey led you from the frying pan directly into the fire, would you do it again?

Considering the size of just this universe and the billions if not trillions of potential planets, is it not justified that your journey could last a lifetime? For better or worse, our lives are sometimes called on to weather the bleakest of times, and it’s our job to make the most out of what we’re given.

See you in the next world.

Solitaire…

PART ONE

THE PRESENT

Chapter 1

A black flashlight with a round light Description automatically generated

If the next few months eventuate the way I predict, this journal, assuming it survives the holocaust, may be the only record of how things progressed for my family until the end.

My name is Cross Mundos, an above average student, slightly on the small side. Just for the record, I have short, brown hair, eyes of the same color, and look several cycles younger than my peers.

My family tells me I’m the next generational genius but that’s coming from the three most sought-after scientists on the planet. My uncle Ferrum told me not to listen to them because I was better than that and suggested that I write down my thoughts in a journal. He said it would point out where my parents were making mistakes. It made me smile, but I bought one and have been detailing everything from my day-to-day life. Lately I have been writing in the journal to explain how things got messed up so badly where I live. It gives me something to do and describes how the world has gone wrong.

I spend the last hour before going to bed studying what has happened during the day. Through trial and error, I’ve found the day’s events tend to get fuzzy and mixed up. If I give myself too much time to think, things can look different to me than the way they happened. Worse, if it doesn’t seem important to me at the time, my memory throws it to the side and promptly forgets.

The schools here have been shut down four times in as many months. Without water and electricity there’s not much point sending anyone anywhere, and as always, children are the first to suffer. At sixteen cycles old and only two cycles away from graduating, my life has taken a backseat to yet another war with a country/state on the other side of the world, with the possibility of what my teachers call an extinction event. I don’t think the schools will re-open again any time soon so my life has begun to look like a rinse and repeat cycle that will probably end badly.

As a result, I haven’t seen anyone from my school in quite some time. That doesn’t affect me much, being somewhat of a loner, but it’s easier when I choose to be alone rather than being forced.

The idea of going outside to meet friends has long since become a thing of the past since no one wants to go through the hassle of putting on a hazmat suit just to hang out with schoolmates. Every person my age has gone through training concerning the dangers of radioactivity and the constant toxicity levels of chemical warfare. Not to mention, most of us have parents that restrict going anywhere that isn’t considered a necessity.

Let’s face facts, seeing your friends, assuming you had any, once every four months doesn’t constitute a working friendship. I’m sure my childhood mirrors most of the other kids from my school, meaning government supplied home video lessons, three meals a day, and going to bed early. It’s a good thing I like to read because the monotony of video lessons followed by long spans of boredom would eventually get to me. I may be a loner, but becoming a hermit is not how a person’s life can improve. The science fiction books I read have depicted things like alien invasion, causing mankind to band together for a unified cause. I find myself wishing for that. Maybe it would give the planet something to agree on and stop the petty bickering I’ve seen so far.

The highlight for me is our weekly trip to the local federal commissary to pick up the next seven days’ worth of food provided by the government. A far cry from the unification of mankind to a glorious victory over the bad guys. We are the bad guys.

Missiles rain down on us about twice a week and the energy dome over our country/state absorbs the shock wave intended for the people on the ground. At first glance, one might assume the crisis has stopped, no harm no foul, but the aftermath of chemicals in the atmosphere combined with radioactive fallout changes the nature of the results. The energy dome doesn’t stop anything other than the initial blast from reaching the ground. I think it might’ve been more humane for us to have been vaporized after the first few attacks, but the people in power feel differently about that. Bear in mind, it’s the same people living underground who are unaffected by the things we’re forced to live with topside.

Most forms of industry have been taken over by the government and moved underground away from the constant attacks. The upside to this is that our technology is unaffected, at least to the chosen few working for the country/state. Free enterprise is a thing of the past to the rest of us, like so many other things now controlled by the few that are protected.

Our government claims we are the strongest country/state on the planet, but over the last few cycles, the skies have taken on a sickly yellow hue thanks to so many poisonous chemicals in the air. Nuclear power plants are shutting down more often and the ones still left working are spewing out radiation. The death toll is rapidly rising across the world with our country/state having the largest number.

Fossil fuels were abandoned long ago due to them being so hard to find and our electricity is rationed more and more with every passing month.

You’d think the governments of the world would see where this is headed, but we’re locked into proving who’s right or wrong at the expense of personal freedom and soon, life itself.

We are now into the first month of the cycle 2040 and I’m unsure that anyone will live long enough to see 2041. There is a curfew in progress for the rest of the day, but that seems fine for me since I can’t see the house on the other side of the street anyway and have no desire to explore.

Publicly I’m not supposed to make statements that would be in direct conflict with policies forced by the government, but they don’t control my thoughts. My dad, Cromwell Mundos, and my mother, Rosalinda, work at one of the remaining nuclear plants. Stating what I believe to be facts about the unsafe conditions there could get them in trouble. Having said that, I worry a lot about them and fear for their lives knowing it’s only a matter of time before disaster will strike.

Lately they’ve been pulling double shifts due to the number of people out sick and as my dad has often said, Tired minds make for tired thoughts. That’s his way of predicting mistakes, and when nuclear power plants are the subject matter, we’re talking about terrible things happening to friends and family.

The condition of our larger cities is, in part, due to the poor state of our environment and the bad air quality we’ve all breathed recently. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t just the city where I live. Oh no, this is an international problem and in other areas equally as dangerous as our own.

I know it sounds as if everything is doom and gloom but being locked up for days at a time and watching the sky turn yellow will depress even the strongest of us.

The bright spot of the average day is the man who lives with us and my best friend. He is also my uncle, brother of my father, and his name is Ferrum. He stands a few inches taller than me, has thinning, grey hair that looks like it’s never been combed, and perpetually slouches, making him appear very similar to an unmade bed.

The government has depended on him for over a decade to turn back the attacks from other country/states by inventing increasingly stronger defense systems. The problem with his inventions is that sometimes they work very well and other times not so much. As I said earlier, the defense shield is an excellent example as the initial blast is repelled, but the by-products always infect the atmosphere and most of the plant life.

The man is a genius, but that also means he is sometimes unstable and prone to over-extend how well the systems will work. Without him though, we would already have been reduced to a large crater, so I guess an occasional fit with eccentricity is to be expected.

My mom and dad aren’t due home for several hours, but Uncle Ferrum’s already late which is causing me to be a bit concerned. He doesn’t always pay attention to his whereabouts, doesn’t trust GPS devices, and sometimes wanders around aimlessly before remembering where he’s going. Like I said, the man is an oddball and thinks on a different level than the rest of us.

It has now been an hour past his usual ETA, and I’m officially worried about him. I gathered all my gear, gas mask, bottled oxygen and assuming it gets worse than the conditions are right now, a pair of thick gloves and a long hazmat style coat, complete with a hood. Ten minutes later I was at the front door ready to leave.

Stepping outside, the temperature rises about ten degrees and is a constant reminder of how the greenhouse effect works. It is way too hot for the first month and it will only get hotter as the cycle goes on. I did a quick check of my radiation badge and determined it was in the safe range. So far, so good.

We live on the outskirts of the Southwest Sector in a small hamlet called Neergate, several tracts of land that used to be beautiful and green. Our house was situated in a series of small rolling hills that gave a manicured look that made you want to stay outside and enjoy the scenery. It gets hot during the summer, but the remainder of the cycle is as close to perfection as I’ve ever seen.  Very little grows here now and except for the yellow sky, almost everything else is brown and accentuates the pockets or depressions rather than the rises. The result is that it makes the area appear uneven and dead. I pulled out my cell, opened the tracker application, and scanned to locate my uncle’s phone, finding his number almost immediately. He was a squeak over a mile due south of my position and moving erratically but at a slow pace away from me. It would take a few minutes for me to overtake him, and the visible range of my eyesight was growing steadily worse. Like so many times before, he’s galivanting on his way home, only this time, much later than usual.

My uncle drives a hover vehicle but is known for spotting something on the ground that might inspire him in some way, which leads to landing and wandering away to observe the prize. With the existing visibility being so bad, he is then prone to losing the vehicle in the haze. He ordinarily finds it, but not without some degree of difficulty and extra time spent. On bad days I must find him first and that means activating the tracker which has been installed on his phone as well. In all the time Uncle Ferrum has lived with us, he's never once used the tracker to find me. I think it’s because in his mind being lost is not something that could happen, certainly not on the way home, and if I call his cell, the man never answers, hence the tracker application.

Today I got lucky and found his conveyance transponder first, which means covering more ground faster instead of scanning to find it after the fact.

The hover vehicle’s color was designed to be camouflaged to match the surrounding landscape, making it a combination of tan and different shades of brown. It resembles an assault vehicle, although there is no armament installed. The shape resembles a tank but with no sign of wheels or treads. At the four corners, lift and thrust nacelles have been added, and due to the anti-grav, it always rests about a foot above the ground. There are two gull wing doors to enter the craft, which seal when closed to provide interior pressurization.

The homing beacon in his ground transport was stronger than my handheld, and I located him without trouble. I only hope he remembered to wear his mask.

After entering the vehicle, it only took a matter of seconds to reach my uncle, turn sideways, and land directly in front of him. He glanced up, walked over to the craft, opened the door, and climbed in.

Hi, Cross. What are you doing with my car?

I smiled and rolled my eyes, trying desperately not to say something that would make him angry.

You were walking away from it, so I thought it might be easier to bring it to you. Where is your protective gear?

He had that wait, what? look on his face before answering.

In the back of the car where nothing will disturb it while I drive.

You can’t walk around outside during curfew without protective gear. It’s not safe. You should know that better than most.

He made a rude noise and adopted his favorite sulking posture, eyes straight ahead and arms folded.

I’ll drive my car wherever, whenever, and however I please. 

  My uncle, a diminutive grey-haired man, had a love for the past and insisted on calling the hover vehicle a car. No company had made a wheeled ground transport or a car in over a decade. Uncle Ferrum felt combustion engines were very much like unicorns as viewed by a fantasy lover, but between you and me, they seemed more like ancient relics from before I was born. I mean what’s the point when we don’t have paved roads?

I was curious why he would leave the vehicle while the air was so foul and was now more interested in how he hadn’t noticed the difficulty in breathing without his gear.

Why did you leave your vehicle, uncle Ferrum? What interested you so much that it seemed okay to walk around in such a toxic atmosphere?

His eyes went wide with enthusiasm, and he could barely contain the excitement about my question.

"I got out to play with my new torch, and before you say anything, it works. You just need to locate a fourth dimensional shadow and they’re very difficult to find, just like I theorized. The hardware wouldn’t work properly without the shadows and there were none in my lab, so I drove around and would’ve continued until I found one. You stopped me from my quest, by the way, and I won’t find one inside this vehicle.

Mechanically, the prototype is a theoretical success, no thanks to the defense agency, the sorry bunch of naysayers."

I had to admit his voice sounded rational but nothing he said made sense, and what does a new torch have to do with anything? For that matter, I understand the fourth dimension, or time, is a force. But why would you need a torch to cut through or torch a shadow, right?

Sadly, he was lost again within an internal voice or thought train, and I decided it was time to go home. Perhaps after he’s gotten something to eat and relaxed, some light could be shed on what I thought of as his shadow torch.

He sat staring out the window and said nothing on the way home.

Uncle Ferrum was still strangely quiet during dinner and as usual, wanted to smoke when finished. I could never quite understand why anyone would want to take smoke into their lungs when the environment was so dangerous and toxic. I mean, why make an existing situation worse by doubling the damage to your lungs?

Great plumes floated off his pipe, rolling around the room as if they were attempting to escape. Within minutes it became obvious they wouldn’t, and the room began to look foggy. He seemed to prefer the bad air quality and hummed a tune that reminded me of a nursery rhyme I’d heard as a child. Ring around the Rosey, pocket full of posies, ashes-ashes, we all fall down.

It occurred to me that my uncle saw the condition of the world in the same light as the black plague. Hundreds of cycles ago, the bubonic plague swept across western Europe and wiped out roughly half the population in a short amount of time. The disease brought about a time of great wealth but a massive loss of human life. This time around, the war would dwarf the plague, and I doubted a time of prosperity would follow. We’ll be lucky if anyone survives this war and if some do, they’ll probably die off from either the radiation or a chemically polluted atmosphere.

No matter how you slice it, this doesn’t seem fair for me, and others like me. It promises to be a short, pointless life not even highlighted by finishing school before getting snuffed out by greedy people determined to create an extinction event.

The goals of humanity are very much like a virus, in that we swoop into a new area, strip all the resources from it, and then move on to a new region repeating the same techniques that robbed the previous one. Eventually we’ll remove everything of value from our homeland and begin the process again with someone else’s land.

It seems logical to me that this procedure is bound to fail. After all the areas have been reduced to rubble and become incapable of repair, then what? At least that’s what my educators tell me, and I tend to agree.

The government claims that after the war, they will utilize all our resources to rebuild a society greater than it was before. My question is one of simplicity, what resources?

It finally occurred to my uncle that his mental absence was being closely watched by his nephew and the nursery tune stopped.

You’re probably wondering if my torch really works, or if I’ve finally lost my mind.

Both thoughts had been mentally questioned in the last few minutes but only one of them was something I would voice out loud.

Would you like to see it?

Of course, I want to see it, you crazy old man. Old geniuses do things in their own time and if hurried, the stress causes it to grow a life of its own. If I wait, like tonight, the answers generally come forth a bit quicker.

I said, Yes, very much. But what I wanted to say was; I want to strangle you for not asking sooner.

He pulled what looked like a high-tech flashlight from his vest pocket and twirled it around in his hand. It was obviously light weight, no more than an inch and a half in diameter, and approximately six inches in length.

How does a torch deal with shadows other than removing them, and why would you want to?

My uncle adopted a pensive pose and steepled his fingers in front of his face.

How much do you know about the space-time continuum?

Okay, I wasn’t expecting my uncle to drift off into science fiction or even fringe physics for that matter. It certainly wasn’t his branch of science, and I would’ve bet no one else thought so either.

According to my teachers, it’s also known as the space-time fabric and separates the different dimensions, parallel universes, or pocket worlds. But we’re talking pure fantasy and wild theories that have no place in the real world. Good for debates, but bad for showing proof.

My uncle chuckled softly and the look on his face said, oh, you dumb little kid. I think it was the eye rolling that began to make me mad, but before I could say a word, he started in on one of his classic lectures.

Not too very long ago, scientists had the same thoughts about submarines and rockets, but our country/state has been pummeled by them both in recent cycles. Never forget, today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.

Well, there’s the windup, and here comes the pitch.

Space is looked at as a three-dimensional object by some theorists, complete with other celestial items having mass and suspended within its boundaries. This space is being distorted by the effect of gravity as the celestial bodies fly through the vastness of its borders. This creates a dilation of their passing. A distortion is caused by the differences in the celestial’s weight, density, and speed which in turn, causes the fabric of space to become thinner in certain areas. The result in these shallow depressions is a visible shadow caused by the larger, thicker sections. The thin areas can be located by my torch and surgically severed to allow passage to what occupies the other side.

He paused dramatically to force me to ask the obvious, so I did.

What is on the other side?

Therein lies the best question of all and there’s only one way to find out. Burn a hole and peer through. Now, admittedly, there are several theoretical problems concerning that action, but all things considered, the probability factor governing the outcome is in your favor. It could be just the vastness of space, a rather quick trip to either freezing to death or suffocation, you know…whichever gets you first. Or, and what I think is more likely, simply another earth similar to our own, but in a different era of development.

I mulled that over in my head and realized it could be no more than jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. The second world could be further along than this one, in essence making my life worse. A lot worse. On the other hand, if the second world was in the past, it could have possibilities that might include changing the outcome for that world. Depending on how far back the timeline goes, I would have plenty of opportunities to figure out what went wrong here and change it there.

So long as the era is before ours here, I will be given a relatively normal lifespan regardless of how the situation works out. That’s somewhat of a bonus, at least in my opinion, but let’s face some facts. This is not how a teenager’s life is supposed to unfold. I’m not even given access to my own ground transport and yet my uncle wants to make sure I have a four-dimensional torch to burn a hole through time and space. I can certainly see the irony surrounding this set of events.

My mind buzzed with partial plans for saving my parents and living happily ever after in an alternate world. If that wasn’t enough, although it should’ve been, my uncle could become the greatest inventor of all time and keep us in an easy lifestyle for my entire future.

It also occurred to me the level of cowardice involved in torching a hole in the universe and running helter-skelter to save our lives while everyone else here dies a horrible death. I don’t think my uncle had thought all this through beyond his family. To be honest, how many people would we be able to save given the lack of time and the amount of greed exhibited by the locals?

The likelihood of destroying the second planet by a large influx of people from this one seemed obvious once I’d thought it through. Even worse, what if the second world is infinitely more advanced compared to ours? Our newcomers would be silenced due to a lack of knowledge, lacking the skills to fit in, and having a negative influence on the local culture. I guess that beats dying here but feels more like dropping cavemen into the future and wondering why they don’t fit.

All my thoughts so far had been based on the idea that my uncle’s torch would work, and there lies the largest blunder of them all. He was a defense contractor for the government and ever so slightly off his trolley, as his previous track record would support.

This sort of fringe science has virtually nothing to do with the usual type of security innovations that spin from his brain. This piece of tech had the feel of early pre-century magic or witchcraft.

Uncle Ferrum had been watching me closely as my mind considered the supposed technological breakthrough. The recent past began soaking into the more rational part of me and kick started the area of common sense. How could I have been so trusting?

I kept waiting for him to start laughing and was surprised when he began to show disappointment. My God, he was serious!

What’s the possibility of our environment finally rotting his brain and causing major leaps into universe hopping? He’s either hallucinating and believes this breakthrough, or is suffering some form of dementia, giving reference to some piece of sci-fi he read when he was younger. It’s time for a reality check, although I don’t know how to bring up this aspect without hurting his feelings.

I wish my parents were here right now. They would know how to handle him without harming the delicate balance between genius and a forgetful old scientist.

Now that I think of it, there is one last possibility; my uncle has been using his twisted sense of humor in the attempt to get a rise out of me. It wouldn’t be the first time, nor is it likely to be his last. I discounted that as a possibility though because of the hurt he was showing, an emotion that wasn’t likely to end anytime soon.

All of this went through my brain at the speed of light, and I knew something needed to be said to stop my uncle’s disappointment. A witty comeback would’ve worked had he been joking, but since that was not the case, a degree of backtracking was certainly in order.

There are times when I wish my face wouldn’t give me away and this was one of those times. My emotions are always transferred to my face, making almost anything said useless to help the situation. Perhaps a detour tactic would be in order.

What caused you to invent something so different than your usual, uncle Ferrum? This is nothing like what you work on, nor do I see how it could be used as part of our security system for national defense. How is this supposed to keep the other country/states from bombing us out of existence?

My uncle’s face changed immediately from disappointment to full blown center stage with a captive audience to impress and willing to buy into his latest blitz of brilliance. I hoped the level of personal relief wasn’t plastered across my face, but my track record says otherwise. Thankfully, he either didn’t see it, or chose to ignore what my face was showing.

"I had a dream, the most vivid ever, and saw shadows in multiple places where they couldn’t possibly exist. Shadows angling off in directions the light wouldn’t or couldn’t have caused. It occurred to me that only time-space differentials can create oddities like that. There was another light source creating shadows where they couldn’t possibly be with existing conditions. So, I went to work trying to find the math to support a natural twin light source phenomenon. It doesn’t exist on this planet, so I theorized it had to be another world or universe that was encroaching on the one here. Based on that, the math was simple to conjure, although the torch didn’t fire until the fifth or sixth attempt. That was mildly surprising, but I figured out what the mistakes were and corrected them. It’s a type of laser you see, but there was no effect on any of the surfaces I attempted to cut. Admittedly, the only surface the laser was supposed to torch through was the shadow but even solids were unaffected. The unit seems to be functioning and will only sever the unnatural shadows, assuming I can find them. At least, that’s the theory. Now it’s just a matter of finding the overlaps and torching my way through.

Incidentally, there are not as many target spots as in my dream, and the only one I found turned out to be a normal shadow. That doesn’t mean it won’t work, but it might take time to find where the two worlds intersect."

I admit, the idea of stepping into another