The Three Ikes of Geekoterre

By Wendy Tendys

Life on Geekoterre is full of surprises. Nothing ever goes as planned. Mike, Tike and Spike know this from experience!

Each of them has only a short time left to earn enough credits to be accepted in the coveted Trailblazer course at Nazoma University. Will they all get accepted into the elite course or will the University doors slam shut on them? Will the Toxic Fox succeed in his schemes and keep the triplets out? Will Mike be able to save Geekoterre from total destruction?

Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, ‘impossibile’ isn’t part of the 3 Ikes’ vocabulary

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781398478404

Wendy Tendys

Wendy Tendys was born in New Zealand but has spent a lot of time travelling the world, including living in Hong Kong and the South Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Living in different cultures inspired Wendy to create a world out of the norm. A place where anything can happen.

Book preview

About the Author

Wendy Tendys was born in New Zealand but has spent a lot of time travelling the world, including living in Hong Kong and the South Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Living in different cultures inspired Wendy to create a world out of the norm. A place where anything can happen.

Copyright Information ©

Wendy Tendys 2024

The right of Wendy Tendys to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. 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 prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398478398 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398478404 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

My grateful thanks to my daughter, Susan, for her endless patience and encouragement.

Chapter 1

Come on, slow coaches, Mike yelled as he bounded across the lawn, dodging around his father.

Tell us again, Dad! Mike called as he catapulted down the steps.

Spike laughed as she grabbed hold of her father’s arm. We love you ‘special’.

It was one of Prof’s rare days off. He would sit with the three Ikes and talk of things that had gone on long before the triplets were born.

Professor Roxley Webster, known as Prof Rox, or just Prof, grinned and settled himself into the garden swing. The Ikes sprawled on the lawn at his feet. Prof loved this view. He breathed deeply as the wind sighed and whispered its secrets through the tops of the trees.

The blueberry ash tree was in full flower. The tiny yellow flowers with their lacy edges were known as Fairy Petticoats. A large group of worker bees buzzed enthusiastically in the branches. These workaholics were busy collecting their precious cargo that was only available for three weeks a cy-year.

Prof could smell the delicious aroma of honey wafting enticingly on the air. The blueberry ash is an amazing tree in that its bark contains a natural fire-retardant. The bright blue berries are not only edible, but the Australian Aboriginals make ‘bush-tea’ from them.

Geekoterre looked peaceful now, but it had faced and overcome many dangers.

At the end of the garden, nestled quietly among the lilies and a lush mixture of orchids and ferns, lay the memorial to Misty, his beautiful wife of ten wonderful years. In the quiet hours of the night he still missed his beloved Misty. Although Prof showed a strong face to the world, Misty had left a terrible void that nothing seemed capable of filling.

A previously unknown and mysterious virus had swept through Geekoterre late one summer. There were few families that it had not ravaged. The triplets had only been five-cy years old, so they merely had vague memories of their mother.

Many people said the virus was created as a BWMD (Biological Weapon of Mass Destruction) and had accidentally escaped from a laboratory. Surely such a deadly weapon could only be the machinations of a mad scientist? Once the virus was released, it was impossible to regain control of it. The silent killer trolled around indiscriminately for years, creating untold mortal havoc, on a scale previously unknown. Scientists had been employed in an urgent research program to produce a suitable vaccine, but that took time.

Across the valley, the Wyton royal palace commanded a regal respect, as it reached for the sky, like an exotically designed cream puff. The royal family had not been exempted from the silent killer, losing two of their members, including the eldest son and heir to the throne.

Far away to his left, Prof could see the brown smudge that was Layton. Long before Prof was born, a violent war had broken out between the Laytons and Wyton. No one even remembered what had started it. Some people said it was caused by a teenager painting offending graffiti on the wall of the local school. Others said it had been over land rights, as Geekoterre was rich in minerals.

Since then, Layton had been ruled by a criminal gang, the LayCrims. They lived unto themselves with their own set of laws, rather than working for the good of the general community.

Prof glanced down at the triplets. They looked like peas in a pod, yet they had personalities as different as chalk and cheese. He loved them more than life itself. They had been a true blessing, when he’d been forced to work his way through the dark conflicting depths of grief. Faced with three youngsters to care for there’d been no time for the indulgence of sinking into the endless sea of self-pity.

I would’ve been totally lost without them, Prof sighed.

Get a move on, grinned Mike, as he playfully punched his father’s leg.

Go on, tell us! chimed Tike, doing a triple backward flip, before once more throwing himself flat on his belly at his father’s feet.

Spike picked up her lute that had formerly belonged to her great-great-grandmother. It was the envy of all her friends. Spike had won the ‘Super Cy-Girls Singing Contest’ when she was just seven-cy-years old. Since then, her voice had gone from strength to strength.

As her voice rang out strong and clear, even the birds hushed their singing.

"Tell us, tell us, tell us do,

Tell us like it’s all brand new.

Tell us of the things of old,

Tell us of a time when you were bold."

As Spike’s melodious voice filled the air, her Ultimate Personal Communication Centre (UPC) sprang into action. Quickly it captured the jingle and added it to all her other songs.

In Geekoterre everyone celebrated their birthday on the exact same day. On their first Geekoterre Birthday, they were given their own UPC. Most of the children could use a computer even before they began to stutter their first words or take their first tottering steps. Babies as young as three-months could interact with heliodisplay images floating in free space above their cots. The IO2 technology, first developed in 2001, projects images onto multiple layers of air and dry micron-sized atomised particles. This results in a floating two-dimensional display. With its touch, voice-and-eye control, it is used in every walk of life, from the nursery to the grave.

You’ve come a long way with your songs since you had those extra lessons with the professional song writer, Maria Carey, Prof smiled. Keep it up and you’ll be a star someday.

They’ll call you ‘Spike the Singing Geeko’ croaking your way to fame, teased Mike, as he ran his fingers through Spike’s stubborn hair. No matter what Spike did, it always looked as if she’d just woken up.

Your hair looks like it’s had a fright. Maybe you were born like that, so that it would match your voice when you hit the high notes? Tike chuckled.

His infectious laughter and quirky sense of humour was one of the main strengths of their family life.

The triplets had been named Stephanie, Michael and Thomas, after their great-great-grandfather, who had been one of the founding fathers of Geekoterre. When the triplets were learning to speak, Mike hadn’t been able to say Stephanie, instead he’d pointed at her and said in a tiny voice, Spike, Spike. Turning to Thomas he’d pointed again saying, Tike, Tike. Their Uncle Dave had been playing with the Ikes at the time and loudly guffawed Spike, Tike and Mike. That is perfect! The three Ikes of Geekoterre.

The nicknames had stuck. Very few even remembered the triplet’s true names. Their first few days at school had been a nightmare. Every time the teacher called them by their correct names, they looked around to see who she was talking to. Within a week the teacher had succumbed to the general consensus of opinion and reverted to their nicknames. It was the only way she could get the Ikes’ undivided attention.

Prof lazily stretched his legs. It was good to spend time with the Ikes, rare as that was these days because of the pressure of work.

The birth of triplets by natural conception is still very rare with only 4,300 sets in 3.9 million, Prof mused.

Mike closed his eyes as he quickly did some calculations. That’s just over 0.1%, he grinned. He enjoyed maths.

That’s right, agreed his father. When you three were born prematurely at 30 weeks, some people said it was a sign of good luck. Others said it was a bad omen. Your mother and I didn’t care what anyone else thought. We’d been trying for a while to have a baby and suddenly there were three of you. You were so fragile and tiny each of you could’ve fitted inside a milk jug. Despite the battle for your lives in the early months, it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to us.

Prof raised his eyes and looked towards the distant horizon, as if looking back into a different time. Just after your birth, things started to go terribly, terribly wrong in Geekoterre. Even the distant memory of it made him shift uncomfortably in his seat.

Huge storms raged on the surface of the sun. The largest solar flare registered as X28 on the Solar Richter scale. Geekoterre was bombarded with stratospheric rivers of solar energy, carrying all sorts of heavy particles, ionised plasma and radiation.

A look of intense sadness flickered across Prof’s face. Perhaps that had been the source of the strange virus, that eventually enveloped Geekoterre and taken his beloved Misty’s life, rather than the workings of some crazed scientist.

Locusts that had long been dormant in the ground, suddenly sprang to life. Hordes crawled everywhere until their wings were fully developed and they took to the air. They consumed everything in their path. What the locusts didn’t eat, the cosmic rays killed off. There was famine everywhere. Drinking water was hard to find, as rivers and lakes were turned blood-red from the cosmic dust.

Prof reached for his ever-present jug of water and poured himself a glass. He tried to get the triplets to each drink at least one and a half litres of water a day but failed miserably unless it had some form of sweetener in it.

Your body doesn’t register it’s thirsty until after the fact, he told them. The trio would try to look contrite, but the minute Prof was out of sight, they promptly forgot about it. They even teased Prof, telling him he would get sick from water intoxication if he wasn’t careful. The three Ikes did drink a lot more water than most of their friends, who preferred sugar-choked soft drinks. Fortunately, some of the high-sugar-content drinks had been banned on Geekoterre.

"Your Uncle Dave and I had been working on a secret project. We created what the writers of the 1960s Planet Earth television series,

Star Trek

, only dreamed of. We’d produced a negative-energy space craft. This would provide hyper-fast space travel, capable of reaching far distant galaxies. However, we had a more immediate need than rushing out to explore deep space. We believed we could capture antimatter and it could be fired into space to form a protective canopy over Geekoterre. The snag was, there was only one place to harvest enough antimatter to do the job."

Spike pressed her hands together and thrust them between her knees, causing her shoulders to hunch forward. She knew what was coming.

Tike took a deep breath and thrust his hands out in front of him with his fingers extended, as if reaching for the future. He longed for the day when he could do exciting things and even become a deep-space pilot. Who knew what worlds might be out there waiting to be discovered? The universe was a massive, though violent, unexplored treasury.

Mike stared stoically straight ahead with an unblinking stare.

Scientists on the blue Planet Earth had discovered that beams of antimatter particles are created in the very top of towering cumulonimbus clouds. Supercell storms that can tower up to 75,000 feet.

That’s 27,000 metres, Mike automatically intoned. Double the height that a commercial jetliner flies above the surface of the Earth.

A smile flickered across Prof’s face as he continued. Mike was like a walking, talking computer.

The antimatter is then hurtled into outer space. While these storms are often very destructive, there’s a majestic beauty about them.

Prof glanced up at the cloudless sky, as if he was seeing a giant thunderstorm in his mind’s eye.

I’m glad we don’t have thunderstorms here, shuddered Spike.

We had created a supersonic net that we believed could capture antimatter, Prof continued. But we had to get close to Earth’s thermosphere where the antimatter is released. If we were too far out, we’d miss it, but too close in and the density of Earth’s atmosphere would burn up our cy-jets.

Prof laughed as Tike copied the action of a cy-jet swooping down, skimming along Earth’s thermosphere, before zooming up and away again.

We needed more time to test our project, but it was urgent we protect Geekoterre before another devastating storm hit us. Prof’s voice sounded subdued. "Whole families were dying from radiation related sicknesses, besides the