Evolution

C
opyright
© 2016 by Greg Chase

First Edition 2016

Cover Art by Jeff Brown

Editing by Red Adept

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

Bayou Moon Press, LLC

W
hen a dangerous interplanetary
power play destroys his world, Samuel Adamson must once again leave the idyllic planet of Chariklo. Mankind should have left Sam in peace because now all hell is about to break loose.

With nowhere else to go, Sam and his village board a rescue ship and set out to integrate their utopian society with the people back on Earth, most of whom are still devoted to doctrines of repression.

Tensions run high as Sam resumes his role as the god of the Tobes and owner of Rendition, the most powerful corporation in the universe. But events boil over when a radical church devoted to restrictive ideas about sexuality kidnaps his daughter… and the Tobes’ response unleashes a techno-human hybrid with godlike powers even greater than Sam’s.

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T
he spaceship
Persephone
made a lazy arc around Neptune. The small lump of rock known as Chariklo looked dangerously close through the elegant space yacht’s front view screen. The fourth largest planet in the solar system filled the lower half of the screen so completely no curvature could be detected—just a pale-blue border below the vastness of space.

Sam remembered skipping rocks off ocean waves as a child. Against Neptune’s atmosphere, Chariklo looked smaller than a pebble tossed in the sea. Sam suddenly felt very insignificant in the grand scheme of things—little more than a microscopic organism clinging to one of those stones he’d thrown at the water.

Jess sat transfixed. “Our world looks so small.”

Sam stood behind his wife, his hands on her shoulders. “That little planet’s made this trip around the sun many times without getting trapped into Neptune’s orbit. I’m sure she has one more pass for us and the girls.”

“I miss our daughters. It’s as if a part of my heart hasn’t functioned right without them. Do you think they can see
Persephone
?” Jess bent her head down to cuddle Sam’s hand.

Sophie—the computer-based captain—who’d been silent and invisible while operating her own controls, materialized in the captain’s chair. “If they know what to look for. Doc’s good at picking out astronomical points even with that archaic telescope.”

Sam spent the day checking the view screen every few minutes like a teenage girl checking to see if her crush had arrived. Not that Jess fared any better. If Sam wasn’t peering at the view screen, she was bumping his arm to point out something he’d already seen a dozen times.

“Screw it. Sophie, can you put on something for us to watch? Damn near anything just to take our minds off this snail’s pace.” Sam hadn’t meant to sound cross though he knew he had.

The ship’s captain didn’t bother materializing.
Perfect
. Even Sophie had grown tired of their impatience to be home. The walls of the bridge turned a uniform gray before beginning the 360-degree movie. A pastoral setting surrounded them. Three-dimensional holographic animals wandered through the bridge with a grubby-looking fellow attempting to keep the creatures organized. Sam’s attention wavered between the images that surrounded him, memories of his last year on Earth, and the excitement of almost being home. There must have been a plot to the movie, but for the life of him, Sam couldn’t imagine what it was. It did have lovely scenery, and that was all he needed to drift off to sleep.

Early the next morning,
Persephone
swung into orbit around Chariklo. With the planet’s slight gravitational pull, the ship was able to move in close to the surface. Dark-green vegetation reached up high into the air on spindly stalks. Pools of cobalt-blue water speckled the landscape.

“There, I see them.” Jess’s finger trembled next to his head as she pointed out the woven structures of their village. At first, he could only imagine the small dots that flecked the green meadow as being the people they loved. But as those specks flocked together and started bouncing up and down, he knew that somewhere among the points of red, blond, and auburn were their daughters.

The ship dodged the solar-array panels that provided the much-needed light and heat—power transferred from the small ball of light so very far away.

Larry—Sophie’s long, thin human counterpart—greeted Sam and Jess at breakfast. “I’ll have you two home in no time. Now, getting that cargo hold full of packages off the ship will be another story. You did realize how small your planet was when you were buying all that stuff?”

Sam raised his hands from the synthetic food. “Don’t look at me.”

“There were a lot of people to buy for,” Jess said. “And we needed to dump some of that money. Be nice, both of you.”

“I suppose being the richest, most powerful people on Earth means just bringing everyone T-shirts wouldn’t go over too well,” Larry said. “But it’ll take a couple of trips to get all this stuff offloaded.”

As Larry and Jess decided which of the precious gifts should come down first, Sophie motioned Sam into her captain’s office. On each of the walls, the view screens displayed Tobes—technology based entities—eager to make contact one last time. Joshua and Ellie, the brother and sister who were the Tobes’ representatives to Sam—their god—stood in the middle of the main screen, flanking Lev, who’d chosen to be a yellow sunflower for the day.

The ancient space freighter,
Leviathan
, always made him smile.
You first-generation Tobes and your sense of humor.

The sunflower swayed side to side at Sam’s internal acknowledgement of her.

Being more computer based than humanoid, Lev—the sentient operating system he’d brought to life from
Leviathan
’s original matrix—had the freedom to represent herself as anything she wanted.

As the only Tobe able to manifest a three-dimensional form this far from Earth, Sophie turned to Sam. “We wanted to say thank you. We’ll do our best to grow and learn to help people. Be happy. And we love you.”

He couldn’t remember the Tobes ever using the word
love
. Lots of conversations had involved the human experience. Which attributes had they latched onto this time? The connection that transcended space and time, the firm belief they would meet again, and the idea that neither was whole without the other? He longed to hug her, but her having no mass had frustrated that desire more than once.

Sophie smiled through her tears. “I know. Sometimes words are insufficient. It would be easy to say we’ll meet again, but that comes more from the fear of what lies ahead than a belief in our fundamental connection. All I can say is we’ll give you as much time with your human utopia as we can manage.”

“You’ll always be in my heart. All of you.”

The bonds of love had a bad habit of ripping at Sam’s soul. First he had to leave his daughters in order to accept his responsibilities to his creation on Earth, the Tobes. Then he had to leave the technology-based entities to pursue their newfound freedom. Each time he left someone, he sacrificed a piece of himself. Only Jess remained as his constant companion.

* * *

L
arry took
the shuttle on one rotation around the small planet. It didn’t take long. The grungy outpost on the far side of the centaur planet looked much as Sam remembered. As hard as he tried not to, he still resented the need for their connection to the rest of the solar system. The lush vegetation, which covered everything except the one-mile-square outpost, had transitioned from dark green to a shade more befitting plant life. The increased number of solar arrays had done wonders
.
In the distance, the elegantly grafted tree limbs, interwoven vines, and directionally evolved, human-sized peapods came into view.

His hands ached with the memory of Yoshi directing him to tie the limbs tighter. The good-natured master gardener had high standards. All that work resulted in a village like no other with buildings of living wood and a people at one with their environment—home.

Jess snuggled his arm and pointed out her side of the shuttle. “There’s the lake. That must be the afternoon yoga class. Have the kids really grown that big? Can you spot Emily or Sara? Do you think they’re looking up at us?”

Sam scanned the people of the village, but the small craft pitched up to swing around for the landing before he could make out any faces. As they settled to the ground, the screams of two young girls split the ambient voices.

Hopping down from the shuttle required more mental calculations than Sam had expected. After a year on Earth, he’d overestimated the slight gravitational pull of his Garden of Eden. He did his best to make the bounce above the craft look like exuberance rather than stupidity.

“Daddy!” Emily’s blond hair had developed tinges of red where the light from the solar array caught the fine strands. It sailed behind her as she swung her arms around his neck so tight he thought she’d spin his head right off. Sara did the same to Jess, the dark-brown hair of the mother mixing seamlessly with the only slightly lighter hair of the daughter. Just about the time Sam feared he’d lose consciousness, the twins switched parents.

Jess twirled each daughter around in midair like a human carnival ride. All was once again right with Sam’s world.

“It is good to see you two!” The laugh lines that had marked Doc’s eyes before the trip now had counterparts that crossed his forehead. His strong voice of command was one octave lower.

Jess seemed to notice the changes too. After hugging her father, she ushered her daughters toward the shuttle. “Come on, girls. I’ve got all kinds of pretty clothes I’m just dying for you to try on.”

The whole village followed Jess and the girls to the shuttle filled with presents.

Doc gave Sam a wink and nodded toward the grand meeting room. The tree trunks had grown together into a semicircle of solid wood. As they ascended, they spread into a staircase lattice and then flattened out to form the floor of the grand room. What had started out as runners growing up from the woven floor had—like the trunks below them—spread in width until a solid wall of striped wood encompassed the room. From there, the trees grew undirected to cover the otherwise open roof. Once all the wood had grown and been trained to Yoshi’s satisfaction, the interior was stripped and polished, completing the village’s central structure.

Sam and Doc took a seat on a root that served as the entrance step. Sam put an arm around the man who’d done so much. “Okay, out with it. Were the girls too much of a handful?”

Doc laughed with the warm, good humor that always made Sam feel at home. The laugh was the same as a year ago though it sounded worn down. “The stress shows that much? Well, I guess I never could hide anything from Jess, and that ability just had to extend to you as well. I love Sara and Emily. All the mistakes I made by not giving my full, undivided attention to Jessie, I made up for by giving the twins twice everything. They’re not the reason I’m worn out. I turned down the facilitator position.”

It wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. Doc had accepted the chore of managing the small society for the entire twenty years they had lived in space in a pod docked to
Leviathan
. But once the village had settled on Chariklo, he’d sought to share the responsibility with other people. The village elders traded off running in the yearly election so they wouldn’t be in competition with each other, and the results were a foregone conclusion as no one else ever ran. But everyone turned to Doc as a mentor even when he didn’t carry the title
facilitator
. “You’ve stepped aside before. What’s changed?”

“Instead of one of us old guard, we’ve got someone new: Jonathan. And he’s been encouraging visits from people of the outpost.”

Of all the people who might want the thankless job, it would have to be Jonathan—the only misguided individual who’d ever considered Jess his own.
A monogamist in a polyamorous community.

The village hadn’t left Earth on a whim. Many of the ideas the founders struggled to instill in the population would only come to fruition with the next generation. Polyamory, female sexual empowerment, and unencumbered education of the youth weren’t concepts that had been embraced through humanity’s generations of repression. Only at the edge of the solar system did the village feel safe from Earth’s judgments. Dealing with a member who still clung to many of those outdated mores had proved challenging. And now that person had a leadership role.

“I’d guess that’s created some tension. How is everyone taking to these outsiders?”

Doc’s voice had contained the heaviness of inevitability. “The young people like the change. It’s exciting meeting new people after spending all one’s life with the same group of friends. Those of us who wanted to escape modern life are having a tougher time. It’s not a bad thing—we knew we’d have to accept strangers at some point. Twenty years of self-imposed isolation in the agro pod then twelve years building this village here on Chariklo have resulted in a generation who only know the people around them. We’re still fewer than two hundred individuals—just a big extended family.”

“That can’t have made your life easier.” Nothing ever did. Every change to the village landed on Doc’s shoulders at some point. He’d balk at the description, but Jess wasn’t the only one who thought of him as a father—though for her it was a biological reality.

The sound of a passing bee drowned out Doc’s chuckle. “We’ve established a working relationship. I’m playing the role of mentor. But he has a lot of ideas. A facilitator isn’t the same as a leader. We want everyone’s voice to be heard. The elders are struggling with how much free rein to give him. But opening the village up isn’t something that can be undone.”

The society’s structure gave fluidity to its decision making. Even after twelve years, Sam wondered how anything got decided. “But there must be a majority who want the openness even with the challenges. Jonathan can’t dictate his vision of the village. Can he?”