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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Sortmind Press
Type: Fiction
Pages: 293
Copyright: 3/14/23
ISBN-13: 9798884766341
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Inexplicably transported onto Jack Commer’s doomed spaceship, Laurie struggles to assert herself as the new supreme commander.
Before he suicidally blasts his spaceship into a star to confront a dangerous cosmic irregularity, Supreme Commander Jack Commer resigns his commission, elevating genius physician/engineer Laurie Lachrer to take his place as leader of the United System Space Force. But now, inexplicably transported along with him, forced to share his ship’s doom, Laurie struggles to assert herself as the new supreme commander.
The five crewmembers aboard ship deteriorate in the unbearable cosmic radiation of the Anomaly at the center of the universe. But the Fools of the Fire who maintain infinite watch over the Anomaly will speak only with Laurie.
Meanwhile fascist elements overthrow the United System and declare Laurie a traitor. Naïve alien university students on an Alpha Centaurian planet mount a resistance in tandem with Laurie’s identical robot counterpart, Laurie 283, who builds Pegasus, a state-of-the-art flying saucer weapons platform, to restore Supreme Commander Laurie to power. Mickey Mal Michaels, a decades-old robot with a malfunctioning Sublayer Four who’s also in love with Laurie, writes Fathom the Doomboat Stars, “the greatest science fiction novel ever written,” to assert his own control over the narrative.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
Design Specs for the Typhoon VIII
Tuesday, May 19, 2076, 1630 hours
“That, sir, seems to be the only possible explanation,” Laurie said from the copilot’s seat.
Jack Commer frowned at his command console. “I just can’t wrap my head around this. You say you’re not really a robot? How’s that even possible? And you’re now telling me this after three days?”
Why didn’t he come right out and say she was crazy? She was certainly scrambled. Who could really say whether she was the real Laurie Lachrer or robot Laurie 283? Surely the med exam she’d just handed over proved she was human. But Jack probably thought he held a clever forgery.
The silence extended uneasily. Laurie and Jack were alone in the control room after she’d invoked a ten-minute Privacy Mode; copilot Ywer had grudgingly given up his chair and retreated to the empty communications office further down the fuselage. Beyond the curved cockpit canopy, the compact curved wing of the Typhoon VIII gleamed in the starlight.
It had been thrilling to conjure this lovely beast straight out of her mind. She’d followed the Typhoon Design Group’s rough draft specs, marveling how VIII concepts broke tradition with previous Typhoons. The familiar triangular wings had been transformed into semicircles merging into a more oval fuselage, and the ship looked more like a sports car than the dependable Typhoon family sedan of recent years.
She was exhausted. The Trans-Simultaneity had taken a lot out of her. Over the past three days she’d come to accept that its unexpected gifts were on the wane.
What imperfections might have arisen during those magnificent energy bursts? She hadn’t created the ship alone. Robot Laurie 283 had memorized the VIII specs as well as those for the destroyed Typhoon VII, and reconstructed the entire Know-How operating system everyone thought had been erased.
But recreating the VII and conjuring an VIII from scratch involved billions of technical decisions. Had Laurie screwed something up along the way? Was that why they now floated nowhere? Was that why she still couldn’t be absolutely sure she was the real Laurie?
She was drained. Three days of being stranded here, pretending to be a cybernetic machine even when she damn well knew she couldn’t be, had her nerves aflame. Yet all this time she’d resisted confiding in her captain, because how would Mr. Jack Always in Charge take it?
She drifted into calculations about Typhoon VIII Version 5.6.33. The Ywritt tweaks to Star Drive Four, ported over from the Typhoon VII, had downloaded fine. The Nav 13 equations should have taken the VIII right to the n-dimensional sphere. So where was it?
“I asked you a question, robot,” Jack snapped.
“Uh … sir?”
“I’m asking you why you would only realize this after three days.”
“Oh. Sorry. I was just thinking about the specifications, and our course here, and all. But really, I’m not the robot.” She pointed to the printed med report in Jack’s hands.
He flipped through it. “Did the flight through the star mess up your programming?”
“Look, Jack, all I can think is that Laurie 283 and I must’ve switched somehow. I mean, if I could just concentrate. I could look through the Trans-Simultaneity conditions again, see if there’s some logical explanation. But I’m so blasted right now.”
They all were. Not even Edward the robot, or the Wounded Amy Nortel entity jammed inside him, had been prepared for the horror of the star Wiioryvel coming directly at them. Plunging into the impossible brilliance. A millisecond of unbearable heat. Knowing it had all been an insane mistake, that you were now extinguished. But a second later you were floating in darkness, the ship crippled. Probably everyone thought they’d gone mad.
The first indication that something was amiss was when she’d begun ministering to the dazed crew as if she really were a human doctor. Jack had looked askance at software hubris from an upgraded Heroes and Villains of the Thirties robot handing out sedatives. Then again, the guy had assigned robot Laurie the physician/engineer duties, so why was he so bent out of shape? He’d probably figured 283’s medical database might be useful, but everyone caught him frowning at Laurie’s disturbing medical empathy.
She regarded Typhoon VIII’s dim, sleekly curving control room. Until now she hadn’t appreciated the specs’ emphasis on turquoise and forest-green throughout the vessel. But it was all lovely, in stark contrast to the unease churning in her belly.
Jack regarded the report. “I’ll need Ywer to verify this as accurate. If it’s true you’re the real Laurie … hey, what’s with your arm there?”
Laurie was startled by the wet cut on her right forearm. “Oh, wow, I didn’t even notice. Edward was roughhousing in engineering. I must’ve scraped my arm. He was complaining about his Amy partition getting riled up.” She grinned. “He told me he’d applied just enough force to knock me down gently. But that was anything but gentle.”
Jack looked away. “Do you think Edward’s malfing too?”
She frowned at the persistent implication that she, like Edward, was a glitching device. “No, he’s fine. I rechecked his parameters. He says it took him a while to get this Amy thing under control. He’ll be okay. She’ll be okay too, I think. Well, as okay as any of us right now.”
“Well, robots don’t bruise, or bleed, do they? I mean, that is, if you’re the real Laurie, and if it’s really possible you got … switched somehow?”
Laurie met Jack’s muddled brown eyes. “Well, given all the craziness we’ve seen, anything’s possible. Going into an anti-dark energy star and supernovaing it. Who knows what could happen?”
“No, what I mean is, if … if this is really you, and I just got through appointing you supreme commander and sending you back to Sol, I mean, God, if that’s screwed up now …”
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