The High Council

By Michael HH Warren

It’s going to take genius, teamwork, and a little bit of luck to turn back time and save the world.

Iain has spent his whole life downplaying his genius just wanting to be a normal, if slightly nerdy, kid. After finding the QUINN device with Kevin and Lisa, he was the first to realize they were stuck in an infinite time loop.

They’re not the ones resetting time, so logic dictates there’s a second device and someone is using it to prevent them from reaching their goal. They know the nefarious Shadow Sect is after them to obtain the QUINN device, so it can’t be them. Contacting their spy, Dust, and meeting with the mysterious High Council they’ve spent infinite loops trying to avoid may be the only way to stop time resetting again.

They will all need to work together to stop the loop, fix the mistakes of their past selves, and return to their lives as three very different friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael HH Warren
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224689149

Michael HH Warren

Michael HH Warren began writing about his life during the South African winter of 2009. Driven by a strong desire to tell his story, what began as a creative outlet would eventually become his first book, In The Name Of God. The writing bug has bitten, and Michael has since published several novels. A far cry from his memoir, these books are aimed at teens/young adults who represent Generation Z (GenZ). Still having a passion for the world of non-fiction, Michael has several ideas presently evolving into draft manuscripts. He lives with his wife, two children and three Jack Russells.

Book preview

The High Council

Quinn Book 3

Michael HH Warren

© Michael ‘Double-H’ Warren 2024

www.generationz-books.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the author. Brief excerpts may be cited in book reviews, provided the narrative quoted is verbatim and due credit is given by way of the book title and name of the author.

This is unquestionably a work of fiction, with little basis in fact or certainty in present-day reality. For this reason, kindly accept that no apologies will be forthcoming for any offended sensitivities.

Names, characters, places, incidents, and events are products of the author’s imagination and therefore used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or having the seemingly impossible likelihood of imitating any actual incident or event, is purely coincidental. Should any artifact, business, event, incident, institution, name or place be found to be evident and occur in public domain source documents and resource repositories, then accept that they are true to life and therefore factual.

Book design by Leila Summers

Storyline Advisor and Editor: Nicolette Stephens

Print ISBN: 9798324885878

Contents

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgments

Dedication

For Kelly, Caden, and Generation Z.

Author’s Note

The High Council is the third and last book in the QUINN series.

It’s going to take genius, teamwork, and a little bit of luck to turn back time and save the world.

Iain has spent his whole life downplaying his genius just wanting to be a normal, if slightly nerdy, kid. After finding the QUINN device with Kevin and Lisa, he was the first to realize they were stuck in an infinite time loop.

They will all need to work together to stop the loop, fix the mistakes of their past selves, and return to their lives as three very different friends.

DISCLAIMER: This series assumes a spinning globe earth, or heliocentric model, where the sun is the center of our solar system. However, if our earth is geocentric, and the center of our solar system is a stationary flat earth, having a dome or firmament above us, then this book is truly beyond the realm of science fiction.

Michael HH Warren

May 2024

Prologue

It wasn’t the first time the device had failed. Over and over, time and again, the team of scientists working on perfecting the Quantum Manipulator had been left baffled by minute inconsistencies in the calculations. But none of them had as much to lose as he did. None of them had as much to gain once they were successful either. He couldn’t blame them for their apathy towards the project, their lack of enthusiasm for the long hours he insisted they put into perfecting it. As passionate as they all were about science and invention, his colleagues had long since refused to work past sunset, even as he ignored the sun peeking through the windows as he worked in solitude through nights that blurred into a haze of desperate exhaustion.

It was on one of these nights, that Mercufoso, bleary-eyed, slipped the last nano-chip into position, clipped the casing over the back, and pressed the button to activate the holographic interface. As before it started seamlessly. Holographic technology had long been a stable of Resubian society. He pressed a few more buttons, cycling through the startup routine. As before, the processes ran swiftly, silently, without any glitches. Then he stopped. Took a deep breath. Pressed the button to activate the quantum network connection. Previously, this was always where the device failed. Either it wasn’t able to connect, or it threw up an unknown error, or worst case scenario and as had happened previously, the small device was unable to sustain the power needed to maintain a stable connection, instead blowing all its circuits.

Unlike before, none of that happened this time. Instead, the additional interfaces required for interacting with the Quantum Networker lit up, giving the Resubian thousands of choices of movements available to him. The holographic screen shifted, revealing a linear graph, a single solid line - his own lifeline - moving at a constant rate. As he watched, considered the options he could take now, the solid line began to break. With every new course of action he thought of, the line frayed and split, diverging and converging a multitude of times, until it was so tangled and woven, that the only part of it that was still solid, were the moments leading up to the creation of the device.

His heart racing, Mercufoso felt not only the exhilaration of having succeeded. He experienced the fear of having done so. There was no way he would be able to follow through on his plan. The sight of his lifeline frayed and damaged beyond measure had done what dozens of his colleagues had been unable to do. While they had spent months, years, even, entreating him to reconsider his plans, begging him to put aside his foolhardy endeavor, Mercufoso had ignored them all.

He’d known it could be done. Others had done so before them but always the devices had been destroyed and the warnings sent out. Changing time itself was too dangerous to risk contemplating. In his arrogance, he’d thought he could find a way to achieve what others couldn’t, to simply go back to that one moment and fix his mistake. Mend the broken second that had cost him all he held dear. Holding that much power in his hands, he’d recognized his hubris. While he considered every angle, dozens more tore at the fabric of his reality, shredding it beyond recognition. He would never be able to go back, to change the course of existence itself without affecting lives beyond measure.

A sob rose in his throat, sorrow for everything he’d lost, everything he was finally letting go of, choking him. Carrying the device over to his console, he slumped into the chair, lying back as it hovered in the air. Mercufoso stared at the glowing blue light, that still showed multiple frayed lines, slowly, oh so slowly, converging back into a single solid thread. The visual representation of his decision to finally say goodbye to the past felt like a physical punch to his gut. At the same time, he could hear the lilting voice of Melete telling him how proud she was of his decision. She had always been the smart one, always the one to urge caution. Still, he couldn’t help the soft whisper of guilt that trickled through him as the holographic timeline finally solidified once more.

I’m sorry, Melete. He whispered the words as he pressed a button on the device and watched the blue glow of the display fade. His exhaustion crept up on him, his chin dropping forward as his eyes drooped shut. The Quantum Networker slipped from his lax fingers and clattered to the floor. There was a flash of blue light, and it vanished as though it had never been.

In another time, another space altogether, a flash of blue light blinded a lone driver on a winding road. As his brakes squealed on the wet tarmac, he heard a distant cry of terror and anger. The mountain roared up to meet him, and then everything vanished in another flash of light.

This was not the first time the device had failed. It wouldn’t be the last. As it spiraled through time and space in an ever-widening loop, constantly trying to weave the fabric of time back together again, it caused instead, a growing web of tangled, frayed cords. With every severed thread, a new loop was created to try to mend it, until the chaos of the quantum network spanned galaxies, universes and timelines so vast there was no way to comprehend the measure of its existence in mortal terms.

On Resuba, when Mercufoso woke to discover the device missing, the fabric of the universe shredded beyond recognition, he set out to try and fix the mistake he’d made. Only as he traced the destruction caused in its wake, he recognized the magnitude of the problem. And so he set about recreating his device, this time to ensure he could recover the lost one. When it was finished, when he knew it wouldn’t fail again, he pushed the button to power it up. Watched the blue glow of the holographic display reveal the chaos and the three strands that would pull them all together again. With hope for his redemption resting on them, he gave himself permission to use the only thing he had more than enough of—time.

Chapter One

Iain sent his message to Kevin first, then Lisa, before sighing and slumping back in his chair. A headache pounded behind his eyes, a side effect of the looping memories he kept replaying, trying to make sense of them. So far he’d pieced together several different sequences of events, all culminating in their return to this day, this moment.

The first couple of times they’d traveled back, he’d been aware of it. Had known what they planned and had thought they could do so with no ill effects. Then he started seeing things, flashes of other memories, other timelines, overlapping and replacing theirs, with no memory of how they’d gotten back. It startled him, to begin with, but when neither Kevin nor Lisa seemed to notice, he assumed it was just because he was smarter than them. It wasn’t ego either. Iain’s mother had had his IQ tested and he was a certified genius. Literally. That he preferred to use his intelligence to beat high scores in computer games irritated Mrs. Fitzhubert to no end, but as he often