Authors: S D Taylor
“Put your gun down and come out with your hands up. Now!” Doug yelled it in his action voice that left no doubt about his intentions.
Another gunshot followed, but again it was random and struck the rock wall harmlessly. Doug fired a burst from his AK-47 into the rock on the opposite side of the cave, for noise and effect more than anything else. “Toss out your gun or we are coming in.”
There was a silence for about a minute, after which an automatic 9mm pistol came flying out of the mouth of the cave and landed on the trail. What followed was beyond anything that Doug or Tom was expecting. A young Viking boy, no more than fifteen years old came out slowly with his hands in the air. He had similar clothes to what Doug remembered Arny and Hakkon wore, with a rough wool shirt and pants, and an animal skin cloak. He looked frightened but willing to face his tormentor and die bravely. Then he saw Doug and he broke into a smile.
“Doug? Is that you? You’re alive.”
Doug held his ground, pointed his rifle off to the side and tried to come to grips with what could possible explain this. The Viking boy, who had apparently just shot a stray pirate, knew him and spoke English.
Tom walked up and stood next to Doug. This caused the Viking boy to lose his smile as he was now confronted by two identical, alive-again Dougs. “Who is he?”
“My name is Tom. Would you know Erin, Katelyn and Alannah?” Tom guessed that they might have Viking friends if twenty years had gone by and the Vikings had stayed around. He remembered that there were some babies in the group.
“Yes. My name is Olaf.” He smiled slightly. “You both look like Doug, but he died two years ago. Are you his sons?”
Doug looked at Tom and they both laughed. “My name is Doug. I am just a younger version of old Dad. Tell me what happened here.”
“That dead man was one of the people who have been after us. They attacked our village last night. Right after the God’s brought us to this place.”
“What do you mean, brought you to this place?” Doug assumed he meant one of the vortex events.
“One morning we woke up and there were many new people in the village. Some of them were younger versions of our parents. Are you the same? A younger version of Alannah’s father? We decided that the Gods were playing some kind of joke on us all.” Olaf looked at Doug as he slowly picked up his pistol and put it in his belt. Doug nodded it was ok.
Doug checked the pirate and confirmed he was dead. Out of habit he took the man’s rifle, spare ammunition and the backpack he was wearing. “We are going to see Erin and the girls. Do you want to come with us? It will be dark soon. It would be safer to stay with us.” Tom scanned the forest in all directions as he said that.
“I will come with you, but I must return to the village in the morning or they will worry about my safety.”
“What were you doing when you ran into this guy?” Doug looked at him intently, trying to see if he could recognize any of Arny’s features in the young man. Could it be?
“A few of us have been helping the girls look for their mother, Erin. She disappeared a few days ago. Did the girls find you?”
“Yes. We were just heading to their place when we heard your shots. You aren’t injured are you?” Tom couldn’t see any blood on the boy.
“No. He was not a good shot so I was able to get him first.” He seemed like a proud Viking except for the part about using a gun instead of an ax. Doug found that slightly troubling.
“Where did you learn to speak English?” Tom was just as curious as Doug about that.
“Erin taught me, my brother and my sister. Our father wanted us to learn so we could help translate for him and the other older men. And now the new younger versions who also don’t speak English. Pretty weird situation, huh?”
Doug wanted to laugh out loud at the modern English speech coming from a Viking teenager who had a Glock semi-automatic pistol and lived in the nineteenth century. But he worried his laughter would be misinterpreted as ridicule. He just smiled and gave Tom a look as he stood behind the boy and nearly choked trying to stifle his own urge to laugh.
“Let’s go see the ladies, Olaf. I believe they will be interested to see you and I know that Erin will be glad to know that you are alright after the gunshots.” Doug turned to go.
“Will Alannah be there?” Olaf smiled as he contemplated seeing her again.
Doug felt his fatherly sense kick in at that question. “Yes she will. Why do you ask?” Doug gripped the rifle a little tighter and thought that Olaf better not say he thought she was hot.
“I think she is nice. I like to visit with her.” Olaf fell in next to Tom as they walked back down the trail towards the camp where Megan, Rin and the rest were waiting.
“I’ll bet you do. I’ll just bet you do.” Tom winked at Doug who turned around and sent a glare his way.
Olaf saw their look and laughed. “You don’t need to worry about me. Erin told me that she would cut off my cajones if I ever acted like a Viking raider around her daughters. I wasn’t sure what cajones were, but I don’t plan to take any chances.”
Tom and Doug laughed so hard they had to wait by the side of the trail until they could settle down a bit. “Good advice to remember, boy. Good advice to remember.” Tom slapped him on the back as they headed off to rejoin Rin and the others.
Chapter 21
They all slept fitfully in their cell since Peter still couldn’t move his legs and Gaby stayed awake most of the night to look after him. Erin couldn’t sleep from the adrenalin and anger that were circulating around inside her. But it gave her time to think through their plight. She concluded they had to try to appear more cooperative. If for no other reason than to deny Dara and her superiors the satisfaction of watching them jumping around and growling like a pack of hounds. They had to play it cooler and try to get some useful information that could help turn their cause around.
Just when Erin noticed she was hungry, Dara appeared in the hallway of the cellblock. As usual, her sudden appearance startled them. “Please come with me. All of you. Time for a little sightseeing.”
The half mechanical man stood behind her. Peter asked the obvious. “Is Insect Man going to carry me?”
Dara gave him a dirtier than usual look. “Yes, and he is not ‘Insect Man’ as you so rudely call him. He is a Hybroman and his name is Jelk. You might try to show a little more respect in the future. He could crack your skull like a walnut if he wanted to.”
“Why should I care? You are going to kill us all anyway.” Peter didn’t feel like being considerate or congenial.
“Because we could always arrange for a slower, more painful death if you convince us it would be your preference. So far, you are pretty well heading down that path.” Dara gave Peter her “try me” stare and she wasn’t blinking.
Gaby leaned over and kissed Peter before he could respond. Erin said quickly, “He is fine with whatever relatively quick death you had planned. No need for any special arrangements.”
Dara smiled. “Ok then. At least two of you are starting to understand. Now let’s go see the sights. I think you will be impressed.”
The gray sea and gray sky stretched out ahead of the boat until they merged on the distant horizon. A steady breeze was tossing the water into whitecaps but it wasn’t a bad day. Erin’s only thought as she came out on deck was that it seemed unusually warm for this far north. Until she saw the towers. Ahead to the north were a cluster of four towers that looked as though they were high enough to reach into the lower regions of outer space. Each tower was cylinder shaped and had a huge square block on the top. She could not see the bottom of the cylinder because it reached down to the earth far beyond the horizon. But the tops of the towers were touching the gray layer of clouds that appeared to surround the earth.
“What are those towers for? They must be the largest things ever built on earth!” Peter exclaimed as the Hybroman Jelk carried him out of the door and set him on a deck chair facing north towards this engineering feat that he couldn’t begin to comprehend.
“They are the Towers of Transarctica. The most powerful source of energy the world has ever known. They are over ten miles high.” Dara smiled as she spoke with pride of something she was sure had the biggest amount of “wow” factor that any of these three people from the past could imagine. “This sight never fails to impress. Even condemned people find it wonderful to behold.”
“I can appreciate that. They are an amazing sight. Why did they build them?” Erin bit her tongue to avoid the obvious “I’m dying to know” comment.
“They generate power for all of Transarctica. They replaced all the small scale and inefficient methods of generating power that were around in your time. We have been able to solve problems on a grand scale.”
Erin was impressed by the size of these seemingly global-scale phallic power towers, but the world as a whole, from the little she had seen of it, did not give the impression that all that many problems had been solved. Maybe it would be a lot worse if the future people weren’t so clever. She knew that would be Dara’s explanation. “How do they work?”
“They collect solar radiation and the large coils at the top create reverse polarity magnetic fields that interact with the earth’s magnetic field. Within each tower are millions of small cylinders containing a hybrid nanofluid that is superheated by magnetic agitation. The fluid circulates through the towers, powered by the magnetism and by gravity, and drives enormous power generation turbines. We have removed all the hydroelectric dams and generating stations of your day. We have no need for them now.”
“Are there any others like them?” Peter had hard time imagining how anything that massive could have been built once, let alone four times. He wondered how the rest of the world beyond Transarctica was able to generate power.
“No, this is the only installation of its type. The African Federation uses a deep bore geothermal technology that is essentially a remodeled version of volcano power. The Asian Alliance uses a mix of different methods. They have deep sea current differential turbines and they also buy excess power from Transarctica. As long as we are in peaceful times, there is no problem finding enough power on Earth. It is our food supplies and the potential for overpopulation that are the biggest challenges. But we have found social solutions that work.” Dara spoke with pride about her world, even though she had less than twelve months to live due to those same social policies.
“If you consider killing everyone when they reach their mid-thirties a ‘solution.’ Seems more like a cultural disaster to me. The effort it took to build those space towers could have been spent building high tech farms.” Peter thought their priorities had been misplaced. It didn’t surprise him given the rich tradition of doing that throughout human history.
“Why has the natural environment deteriorated so badly? With your world’s technology I would think that solutions would be at hand.” Erin could feel that stinging sensation in her eyes and throat, even though they had only been outside for a few minutes.
“We started in a more difficult environmental situation than you might imagine. The atmosphere was already heading towards an unrecoverable decline in your time and no amount of technology was going to reverse that. Things had to get much, much worse for humanity before they could begin to make the kind of difficult choices that would allow the world to recover. Fortunately, as most of the world suffered a century and a half of global warming, there were secret underground laboratories where some of the best research continued. Better understanding of the physics of dark matter and dark energy led to breakthroughs in energy generation. Cloning and genetic engineering advanced at a rapid pace, but the controls were not as strict as they should have been. The warm earth combined with genetic mutations resulted in a tremendous loss of biodiversity and the world still hasn’t recovered. But we are started on the road to recovery.”
Peter, Gaby and Erin looked at the towers and tried to imagine what the world was like in those centuries between their world and this strange future world. If the world they were viewing was after a period of recovery, the low point must have been pretty awful.
“How did people survive if they weren’t part of the protected class that worked on the technology underground?” Erin wondered how long after her time things got really bad.
Dara was happy to give a history lesson. She was a natural at it. “The world population continued to grow at a nearly exponential rate until 2043 when the first widespread famines began. There was a series of extra hot summers in key growing areas and the food supply could not keep up with the population. No matter how much they sold out the future to grow food in the present, they were unable to keep pace with demand. The aquifers were pumped dry, the fields were over fertilized with chemicals and pesticide use grew worldwide as there was ever increasing pressure to stop crop loss to insects. As more and more forests were converted to farmland, the amount of fresh air declined. Those who weren’t starving were having trouble breathing due to the lack of oxygen and increased pollutants in the air. Of course sea levels kept rising as the world got hotter.”
“Any happy part to this story? Bands of hard pressed peoples rising above the situation and overcoming it?” Erin was hoping for anything positive to balance what she saw as the decline and fall of humanity.