Fiction

Earth in 2277. Jodex: A former ball player with imperfect DNA in a world of perfect people must solve a rare missing person’s case, uncovering a secret movement with the potential to alter the course of technology and forever change the philosophy of money.

What if you could choose your offspring’s DNA, buy your dreams in a bar, park your car in the future and be the first person to taste the last bottle of water found on Earth?

With the help of his team and one previously unknown sentient being, Jodex gets beyond his own hangups and adventures his way into a new chapter in this Technocratic Earth.

Thank you to Wikipedia and the unknown photographer of the Baobab tree for the generous use of your lovely image. 

Digitata • Sample 

Chapter 1

Wednesday 8am Zone 2

The room was so bright white, I could see my reflection on her corneas, my dark face, in her amber colored irises. She handed me a blank bit card and leaned in closer than any boss should, maintaining hard eye contact. I could tell she was pissed by the tension in her hand as I took the card with my left hand and clicked it into the reader on my right forearm. I held her gaze. I’d been certain she’d called me up to level 345 to fire me. But so far she hadn’t. Morgan was too dry for me to figure out most of the time, but today, annoyance was oozing out of her pores. 

“Jodex, it pains me to give this to you. This, water. Real, I’m hoping.” Morgan said, her eyes moving from mine to the bit card.

I finally glanced to my readout. Only one word appeared, Helene. I didn’t need to know anything else. Except for why. I knew this dealer didn’t usually deal in water. But if the boss is handing it to me, there must be a reason or she’d never have bothered. Morgan never had shown any interest in even creating an environment where I could succeed at my work. I always generated my own leads, never with any help from aquisitions. True, none of my connections had brought in any valuable samples, though I had the skills to know if it was real, should I ever find any. I knew I did. I looked back up to her eyes.

Morgan says, “The dealer requested you.”

I felt pride start to puff up my posture and I had to resist letting it show but I was never any good at hiding. Then I felt it coming.

“Does she know you as a diviner or is she a fan?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Neither,” I said, wishing I’d cut her off before that last part. I’d felt it coming. I let my shoulders open up and took a taller stance. “I’m a collector. She’s a seller. I bought an artifact from her about a year ago.” Though the truth was, Helene was also a fan.

Morgan folded her arms and took a half step back. As always she was in grey and white, her silver hair pulled back neatly at the neck. She seemed to study me with a mildly different air. Outside the window behind her, the skyclimbers glinted in the sunlight. Flight pods and air cycles streamed around and through the massive buildings while vertical trams wormed up and down the skyline, lit up and filled with people. Up this high you can see miles of the new horizon, alight by the fireflies of urban airspace. It felt minimizing.

I adjusted my focus to see myself in the massive window. Not bad. Dark skin, dark hair, freshly self-cut, 18 hours of beard with another 18 to go until the next shave. Hard cheekbones. My preference for attachable walkabouts showed in the silhouette of my suit’s reflection. I had on a mini satellite receiver on the right shoulder, holo-projector on the left, long range and macro cameras at the breast, full sized arm key pad with wrist readout and several micrones running top to bottom. The sounds from outside were muffled to a mere backdrop of ambient noise. I blinked back to Morgan.

“I hope this isn’t a ploy by her to get your attention.” Morgan tilted her head forward a bit to make her point. “You did manage to identify the elements in the last test batch from the mixologist. So I’m allowing it. I hope you weren’t cheating.” 

That comment made me flare in the face. I was good at this job.

I said, “She could have contacted me directly.” Hoping Morgan wouldn’t give in to the embarrassment. The lines in her face deepened. 

It was a dig. I need to check myself. 

“She didn’t contact us, Jodex. We contacted her.” She said, barely opening her mouth.

I felt even better now.

“And she requested me?” It was hard to hide the excitement in my chest, I had to stand up to stand up straight to take in a full breath. I could see over her head. I felt pleasantly tall, one of my imperfect flaws.

Morgan turned away, shaking her head ever so slightly. “You’re not even my tenth choice.”

It probably hadn’t been an incoming request, Baobab Water was seeking something in particular and they found out Helene had it. It must be something they really want, and they had to give the tasting away to me. Because the dealer might have a crush. On me, I’m an imperfect, with no seniority. My boss must really be in pain. She’d unwillingly allowed my promotion to diviner, it had come by way of a favor from higher up. But I had wanted the job, badly. DNA from an ancestor chef, known for knife work, and his hands, which is why they chose it. But it had come with his sense of taste and smell. I tried to bring myself down a level. I’m prone to ruining things.

“When,” I said, while I got control of my attitude.

“Now. Transport is waiting upstairs. Nobody is to know. Bring it directly back to the lab. And if it’s real, get all of it.”

Again she held out her hand. This time she had a small round pip in her palm. I held my words back, took it carefully and snapped it onto my jacket collar. I could get in anywhere now, well, almost anywhere, and I could afford to buy anything, until they found out. But at least I could do it. Who knew how long she would let me wear it.

Again she tilted her head and almost cracked a smile. “Why you try to hide your emotions Jodex, I’ll never understand. Let me be clear, you’re representing Baobab in public now, be sure to hold up our image.

Just above Morgan’s office sits Baobab’s private VP transport deck. ‘In public now,’ was all I kept hearing in my head. What if this water is the real thing? What if it’s the greatest discovery since the last original water was found, seventy-two years ago? If it is, and I’m the one to bring it in, I’ll be in the public eye for sure, nobody can keep that secret away from the press hounds for long, no matter how hard they try. But try I would, the public is the last thing this diviner wants to face. The others would surely welcome it.

A hard wind blew against my body as the armored pod hovered over. I leaned into the pressure with stiff legs until the plinth extended so I could step aboard. Inside, the pilot wore a serious stun suit, but for his face he was covered in sensors with what looked like sensor hairs, he wasn’t otherwise armed, from what I could see. The flight pod was armed, however, and covered with a light refracting paint-on solar coating, to camouflage it from the naked eye and most radar sweeps. I had never even been up here before, much less whisked away in the most secure transport on offer today. This water had to be good. Maybe it would change my life for the better somehow.

As the hatch closed, I heard the echo of the zone clock, bonging up the skyscraper chasm from far below. 9 am for people in zone 2, which accounts for the commuter mayhem going on a half mile up from Original Horizon. I was happily living my life as a zone 1 occupant, I grew up zone 1, the default diurnal zone for Capitol City. For me it was exactly noon.

Chapter 2

❖

Stealthing anonymously through the City via piloted flight pod felt like having a very private, moving picture view. Windows flew by in the millions, like frames of film flashing subliminal messages into my pupils. Even in the bright midday sky, the lights shining below the new horizon were still vibrant and mesmerizing. Baobab’s sky logo cast its tree-shaped sphere.

The pilot flew us northwest over City Center, across the sky of rung 1, toward Helene’s preservation brownstone library in rung 6.

“Hold on, Sir,” said the pilot as we began to descend. “I think a drone is following us. He sent out a pulse that marked the position and type of every drone around us. He banked quickly to the right to try and get a better look. He pulsed again. There were a few long range drones beneath us. His control panel bleeped red, one of the camera drones was seen at the other platform. “Yup” he said and hit the descent with double speed, whipping around a corner and through the rung 6 entrance wedge. Pulse. Orange flash. “We’re losing it,” he said.

I felt glad for my seat restraint. And glad someone was paying attention. One more steep drop and a merge out of 30 lanes of traffic brought us down and out of the clouds to where people walked outdoors. Helene’s building was just ahead.

Pulse. Yellow, then green. The drone was gone.

“It could’ve been a coincidence.” I said, hearing how bad it sounded as it came out of my mouth.

An ancient relic in itself, Helene’s miniature four story building sits in the 6th rung out from City Center and 80 stories up from where it originally stood, constructed into the design of a 23rd century sky climber alongside 300 other palimpsests like it. The elevated walkway in front feels like a street out of old New York movies from the 2100’s. Except it’s no longer on ground level. It’s just a shelf to stand upon, someplace to pull over. Each doorway is painted a unique color, flanked by planters filled with conservation flowers. Pink and purple were popular. It feels charming and intimate, while remaining part of a massive, mixed use building, combining new school with old. I’d always wanted to live more like this.

The pilot gave a very composed snort and shook his head. “I’ll be looking for it while I wait for you. I’ll zap it if I have to.”

“You think the gossip jockeys are racing?”

“We sometimes get that coming from Baobab upper level.” He seemed unimpressed.

The pilot pulled quickly over to hover directly outside the door to Helene’s brownstone. Painted sapling green with ivory trim. I stood, straightened my jacket, felt for the pip on my collar, walked over and pressed the illuminated button. The door swung open and I went inside. 

Helene was coming down the wide, dark wood stairway. I have never owned anything made of wood. It must weigh a ton, all paneled with a carved balustrade and wide swooping rail. Dressed in a light thermal knit, black skimmer, her piercing dark eyes were down, possibly admiring her wraparound sandals, but then she looked up at me until she reached the bottom. She had light skin that contrasted starkly against her clothing. Helene was gene-perfect, no doubt, probably her family had been for several generations, she was medium sized, with chiseled cheekbones and exotic, thick eyelashes…

Novella • Crashland

Sample 

1

The landing brought us down hard and it killed Mickey. He was having some mild space dementia and refused to strap in. In the excitement of landing on Earth Terra 0, nobody took a moment to openly mourn. Branson and Jones put him in the nearest cryo-bed while the rest of us performed air quality checks.

We’d been awake in space for months, our stasis tubes abandoned after a small explosion knocked out partial reserve power and we woke up. Nobody felt confident enough to go back into stasis. Our trip had taken decades, from our home planet in delta quadrant to the planet where humans had come from. As far as ships go, ours was small, nobody expected to spend more than a week in a waking state.

Mickey had a difficult personality for close quarters. If we couldn’t restore reserve power, we couldn’t realistically go home. Not unless we wanted to age the whole way back. Our hope was that the source members of humanity had the knowledge we needed for a cure. If that meant we had to send back the data drone and remain on planet, so be it.

And it was looking like that could be the case.

There was no one on planet to meet us. No one at all. No communication, we found no detection of movement, use of energy, or signs of life of any kind. Landing pads had largely grown over and Sara used this as an excuse to explain the bad landing. If Mickey had just put his ass in the strap he’d be here. The city we landed on top of was massive. He said they called it New York and that it was once the most populated place on the globe. It was hard to imagine that such a thriving population had either died off or flown away. There was no record of either, everybody out in the galaxy assumed they were still here.