Daughter of Time 1: Reader (32 page)

The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful. 
—Olaf Stapledon

    I have lived in the mind of this author for a while now. It’s taken
forever
to get him to write this story, to listen to me, to stop putting it off, to neglect his other duties and tell this crazy tale. I’m bone-tired of massaging his mind, dealing with his personality quirks, his dreadful insecurity problems. But it is done.

After destroying many minds, and after many minds destroyed my words by taking the threads of my story and spinning them into books and films of shapes glorious or ghastly, yet all distortions, I finally found a mind that could survive my manipulations and tell my story effectively.

Of course,
effectively
is different from
accurately
. Looking over the words here, I am aghast at the absurdities that have crept into the story, the distortions of ideas, events, alien worlds and beings, chronology. But the main message is here, the terrible loss of Earth, the power of Readers, and the plan we have to save our planet—here, for the first time, the story in essence
is true
.

And that is the only point. I could never reach all the Readers of the past one at a time. But if I could find a medium to spread the story so that many Readers over time would come to know it, and if I could use this author of your time to make you believe, then perhaps,
just perhaps
, you might take that final step.

And you must
. You
must
remember my story, my pain, my struggle, the terrible place humanity finds itself in, both in your time as slaves, and in mine, as nearly extinct. Please, I have never begged for anything like I am begging you now –
believe in me
.

I know it seems impossible.
Ridiculous
. The author himself does not really believe it at all. But
you
must. Even for a few moments, you must believe and channel that belief into prayer. If you don’t like “prayer,” then meditate, think deeply, focus – your energies must be channeled, you latent Readers.

I’m sure that you’ve never had a book beg you to believe its story before, let alone ask you to pray with conviction with all your heart and mind towards the future.
But you must
. Only if enough of you do so can the handful of Readers among you become a large enough number to provide us with the power we need to change history.

What history will we change? This is the object of your prayer, the place you must focus all your thought toward. The Dram altered the course of a large asteroid and sent it plunging to Earth. You must seek to change that event, to push the asteroid off the course the Dram had calculated so that it will fly by and miss Earth. That is all we need from you. A little push, and the belief, the trust, to focus your thoughts toward that reality. Your energies will be channeled to me by the Xix, and I will spin them into a force that will bridge time and space and impact momentum.

It doesn’t matter when this happens. You could pray earnestly tonight, next month, three years from now. Others could pray in ten or twenty years. The threads of time do not need to come from the same spool. We only need to collect them and weave them together to create a force to warp the space-time in front of a rushing asteroid and send it harmlessly off course, sparing billions of lives and giving the human species, and all of life on Earth, another chance.

I nearly despair to convince you. I must plead my case through the mind of another person who imperfectly transfers my words to print, who himself has not lived through our time of terrible tragedy. How can I touch your heart so that you will be moved? Had you seen it all, experienced it, and stood before me in this instant, I know many of you would fall on your knees and pray that we may be delivered from this nightmare. Just a single viewing of Earth, the charred and lava-stained mutilation alongside our Moon, would forever change you. But here, in the pages of this sterile book that can be tossed aside with no repercussions to you or your life –
how do I reach you
?

My life, my losses, my pains, my dreams, my hopes—you have walked with me through them to this point. You have shared in the wonder and horror of a universe that exists right outside your ability to see it.
Faith is the confidence in things not seen.
Belief reaches across the finite, limited powers of our senses and minds to cross the chasm between what we can’t see and what is
true
.

If your heart has been touched by our pain and our love, then what isn’t seen has been made real to you, and we exist within the awareness of your soul. You can
feel
me. If you do, and know within yourself who I am, I now ask you to
believe
me and take this final, crucial step. If you cannot, all will be lost.

The story must spread for there to be any hope. We need you. This is my last attempt. There will be no more minds touched, no more stories or plays or films inspired by my efforts. The cold is creeping over me at last. It is covering all of us. One by one, we are falling into listlessness. Perhaps it is simply an understandable depression. But I feel otherwise. I feel it deep within.
The withering
of the branches.
We don’t have the heart to continue anymore. Our love binds us together, but together still we are ill. Our end comes.

Don’t let us die. Don’t let Earth fall into fire and final darkness. We have this grand Xixian machine set to receive.
Send to us, please.

Can it hurt you to reach out with faith, just this once? The cause is just. Our fate, terrible. Our need, more than desperate.

Reader,
dare to believe
. There is nothing more to say, no story left to tell. Our fate is in your hands.

The final step in this journey—
is yours
.

Q.E.D.

Ο.Ε.Δ.

This is not the end.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

—Winston Churchill, November 10, 1942 

 Many Thanks

To my friends and family who were patient with this latest manifestation of my inability to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.

To my daughters, and several of their high school friends, who read multiple versions of the manuscript and taught me (painfully at times) that it is best to treat teens as the adults they are and stop trying to find a "young adult voice".  Wherever I have failed to convey Ambra's true voice, it is because I still did not get that.  I hope those instances are now much more rare.  

To my wife, Nina, and my parents who read early drafts and provided their feedback.

To all of the above and social media friends who provided their feedback on the artwork and design of the book covers as well as the video "
book trailer
".  

To Julia DeGraf, who agreed to step out from her day job at Prometheus Books to edit this solo voyage.  The errors that remain are due only to my inexplicable failure to implement all of her corrections.

And finally to the great science fiction writers of the last one hundred years who have laid the foundations for nearly everything the rest of us have written in the genre (and in several other genres).  You didn't know the details of possible science and technology, but your imaginations were so deep and broad that you anticipated all of them, and more that are sure to come.  Much more than that, you employed the limitless nature of the genre to expand the horizons of possibility, both physical and metaphysical, and forever enrich us all.

Erec Stebbins, April 2013, NYC

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

www.erecstebbins.com

I am a biomedical researcher who writes political and international thrillers, as well as undertaking excursions into other genres. My stories often come from the raw emotional conflicts created by contemporary events around us. I strongly believe that the best stories challenge us, so I try to create art with a certain kind of relevant edge, at least as I experience it.

I was born in the Midwest. My mother worked as a clinical psychologist, and my father was a professor of romance languages at the University Nebraska in Lincoln. In fact, his specialty, old romance languages and their literature, is the source of the strange spelling of my middle name: "Erec". It is an Old French spelling, taken from an Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes written around 1170:
Érec et Énide
. Had my brother been a girl, he would have been named Enide. Instead, he's Michael.

I have pursued diverse interests over the course of my life, including science, music, drama, and writing. My academic path focused on science, and I received a degree in physics from Oberlin College in 1992, and a PhD in biochemistry from Cornell University in 1999.

OTHER BOOKS BY EREC STEBBINS

www.erecstebbins.com

The Ragnarök Conspiracy

"
Outrageously entertaining
: epic, explosive, subversive, engaged and compassionate, like a Michael Bay movie written by Aaron Sorkin."
-Chris Brookmyre, author of
Where The Bodies Are Buried

A Western terrorist organization targets Muslims around the world, and FBI agent John Savas is drawn into a web of international intrigue. To solve the case, he must put aside the loss of his son and work with a man who symbolizes all he has come to hate. Both are drawn into a race against time to stop the plot of an American bin Laden and prevent a global catastrophe.

"Fortify your shelf of Armageddon thrillers with this promising newcomer."
-Library Journal

Buy from Amazon

Extraordinary Retribution

"
Startlingly dark
" -San Francisco/Sacramento Book Reviews

"
A labyrinth of highly charged action
" -Tome Tender

Sometimes evil is not born of madness, but madness of evil.

A rogue CIA agent partners with the brother of a slain colleague to uncover a conspiracy deep in the intelligence community. But a shadow follows them: a killer bent on a revenge so terrible, it is only matched by the crimes committed against him. In the end, no one escapes unscathed, no beliefs will go unchallenged, and no wrong will escape the terrible, final, and extraordinary retribution.

"
A fast-paced international thriller...the twists and turns of plot continue right up to the last emotionally-charged paragraph
" -Midwest Book Review