Prologue

The Journey

Jyi’ntol enters one of the twenty journey pods. Here, her life force will be harvested by the complex machines that will guide her and the others on the journey. Her material body will be destroyed using ultrasonic waves instantaneously.

She could see the countdown timer for her release begin ticking back. This timer was for her alone. Each of the travelers were being released to the same planetary destination in timed intervals. She was the sixth of twenty that would be on this journey. There is no cancellation once the timer has begun.

The pod to her right activates and she looks into the eyes of her fellow traveler Wy’lei

as the spirit fades from them. In a crack like lightning, Wy’lei’s essence is sent off into the Abyss to their next home. In that split second where life has been drained from the body and pulled into the machinery, there is a whisper of an image of Wy’lei the body, inanimate, without life, inert flesh that is nothing but physical matter.

The elderly Jyi’ntol closes her eyes and listens to her pod build the charge required to drain her life force and dispose of her remains. Opening her eyes she could see the seconds count down. Looking to the console screens she could see the news holograms lighting up with reporters there to witness her departure. Those same reporters are now, inadvertently, being given access to the downfall of their society.

One of the workers in the room is headed toward the panel where the crystal that would begin that fall was housed. The light in the crystal in the fifteenth slot of the counsel dimmed just before the worker pulled it free. The contents of the crystal were already in the mainframe. The master key and all the rest of the Artificial Intelligence [AI] and virus housed within had departed. Within the slowed universe that is the panic of a mission coming to its crescendo, Jyi’ntol could feel her heartbeat for the last time in this life and then returned to the dormant nothingness that is the void before rebirth. She had returned to the abstract.

***

Officer Robert Jenkins awoke in his bed, the morning air was cold and fresh. The rain was rhythmically tapping on the roof and windows of his bedroom as he shook the last of the cobwebs of sleep from his head. Robert laid there for a moment and prepared his body for the day, stretching the hours of inactivity from his bones and rubbing his eyes. The weather has been beyond unpredictable this last few years. Last week the temperature was in the hundreds, when in his childhood the weather in August was rarely over eighty.

“Global warming.” He says to himself in a scoff. He got out of bed and felt the cold air touch his skin as he walked to the bathroom to prepare for the day. His civilian clothes were laid out and his gun was on his dresser with the magazine beside it, ready to be returned to the lockbox for travel to the station.

After his shower Robert had dressed and headed to work. He had not yet realized that this day would forever change his life.

Robert drove through the city to the station, the rain was pelting his Jeep in sheets. One of his audiobooks was playing over the stereo system, a novel about adventure and magic, dragons and demons. As he pulled into the station parking lot he could hear the rain turning to hail and pounding harder against the cloth top as the air within became cooler.

Officer Robert Jenkins walked from his Jeep to the station entrance with long quick strides and his morning paper raised up over his head to shield from the tiny balls of ice. This is odd weather for a Southern California August, but nothing about this year has been normal. From the numerous celebrity deaths last year, to the election of this failed reality TV president, the Nazis, hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes. Nothing has been normal this year.

“I never thought I would miss killer clowns randomly popping up across the country.” He mumbled to himself as he walked the halls of the station passing fellow officers, public defenders, and criminals alike.

He quickly put his personal things in his locker for the day, put on his armor and uniform, loaded his weapon, and went to his patrol vehicle without stopping for more than a polite head nod, or a “Hey” in passing.

Patrol was always a tedious and trying experience. You drive throughout the city looking for someone to break the law and pull them over. You give them a ticket and listen to them bitch and moan for ten minutes about why they don’t deserve to be given one. Sometimes they write down your badge number and name and posture about how, “You will be hearing from them.” You tell them to have a nice day and repeat with the next one that doesn’t get the speed limit, or obey a stop sign, or runs a red light. It was mind numbing.

Robert patrolled for hours through the city of Oxnard, a city that used to be a nice agricultural town. It was now a growing place and it was attempting to mimic Los Angeles or San Diego. It drove Robert crazy to have so many people just clustering around everyone. It created a lot of confusion, there was so much chaos in those big cities. Had he known he was going to end up in a city so large, he wouldn’t have become an officer in this area, if he had become an officer at all.

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With the news always talking about how cops are hated, for good reason in many cases, it was depressing to serve behind the shield. Robert prided himself as being one of the good cops. He even found himself reporting on other officers anonymously after seeing them crossing the line. A cop here that has prostitutes paying him to ignore their activities, a cop there that skips an area because the local gang has money on the street in drugs and gambling and they get a cut. Then there are the cops pulled over for speeding, or having expired insurance, or a judge that was speeding his lamborghini through a stretch of quiet highway at a hundred and ten miles an hour. Judges are the worst.

Robert had known Deputy Castenada, who had pulled that judge over, Judge McAfee, speeding through the quiet highway in the middle of nowhere. The deputy knew him, and he knew that man could get the ticket squashed, but it was the point of the matter. The man was breaking the law and he was recklessly endangering everyone else on that highway. The judge could have easily been hurt by a crossing animal in that rural area. There were safety issues.

Castaneda’s transfer to the old highway, even further in the middle of nowhere, wasn’t secret. Everyone knew exactly why the man had been transferred out there, but no one talked about it. The worst thing? McAfee still routinely drove his sportscar out to that old patch of road just to speed by the deputy. And each time Castaneda would pull him over and ticket him just for the judge to have it squashed by a friend of his on the bench.

“Crooked bastards.” Robert said under his breath as he continued down the streets now layered in the dark fabric of night.

He saw a brilliant flash down an alley as he was driving by. The light illuminated everything in the area around it. He slowed the patrol car down and looked behind him. The streets were dead near the powerplant and the industrial district. He put the cruiser in reverse and went back to look between the buildings where the flash had erupted. Robert used the spotlight to check down the alley.

His eyes widened upon what he saw down the narrow corridor of street enclosed by four tall buildings. Down the alley, near the intersection of the four structures, Robert could see a young man, no more than twenty five, darker skin tone with scroungy clothing standing beside a large glass tube with flashing lights and buttons, and… a man inside? A man inside the large glass tube? Robert turned on the rotators and slowly headed down the road.

He clicked the radio, "Dispatch, I’m out at the intersection of Fifth and D street, in the alley behind the Walker building, with two males. One on foot the other in a machine of some sort."

The young man bolted off down the street as Robert’s cruiser crawled into the alley, “Suspect is rabbiting, young male, possible asian or latino, approximate age twenty-five, headed North on Fifth. Older male on scene looks incapacitated dispatch Emergency Medical Transport [EMT] to location and….” He screams as the machine in the alley suddenly explodes and showers the area with pieces of metal and glass. He slams on the brakes to stop from running into anything. His car comes to a halt before he feels an impact, though he can hear the tires rolling over the scattered debris of the machine, he cannot see or hear anything from the resulting explosion.

“Officer Jenkins, Officer Jenkins do you copy? Repeat last. Officer Jenkins…” The radio squelched as his hearing slowly returned. He clicked the radio attempting to blink away the flash of light.

“This is Jenkins, the suspect had a device in the alley that exploded. More flash than bang, I’ll be okay, trying to blink my eyes clear. Send some uniforms here for backup, maybe a detective, McHenry if he is on duty.” He mechanically said to the dispatcher as he rubbed his eyes.

“The suspect is headed North on Fifth right now, see if we can get someone after him. Put out a BOLO [Be On the LookOut] for his description, we’ll need to pull his picture from my cruiser’s video.” He finished up, dropped the radio to the floor of his cruiser, and began rubbing his eyes in frustration.

“Copy that, I have three cars on route. Detective McHenry is on his way as well. Stay on scene.” The dispatcher replied a few moments later.

Robert cleared his eyes and opened his door to get out, he needed to see what was left of this tube and the man inside. He walked from his car, weapon drawn and using his flashlight to get a clear look at everything around. In the alley there was charring on the walls of two of the buildings and there is glass and bits of metal all over the ground. But, there’s nothing that looks like the parts of the machine he saw, no large chunks, no pieces of body. Searching the alley for anything that looked like the machine he saw when he started down the street, he found himself without a single bit of real evidence that the machine or the man, ever existed.

The other officers arrived a few minutes later and began cording off the scene with police tape. Detective McHenry arrived a short while after that.

The detective getting out of his plain wrap car was a true figure of his station. A tall muscular man that had years of service in vice throughout Los Angeles [LA] before coming to the small town forty miles south. Standing at least six feet tall, maybe a few inches above. He has tattoos adorned his arms and a couple on his neck from his days undercover. When his eyes met Robert’s, the man smiled wide.

“What did you drag me out here for Robert?” He asked in a deep gravelly tone.

“There was a machine here and a man in it. But, it went thermal and sent the whole mess into a cloud of fine junk.” Robert replied.

The large man looks over at Robert and then his gaze moves to the ground all around. “Explosion?” McHenry asked and reached down with a latex gloved hand to pinch up a bit of the debris. He examined the grit for a moment before placing it into a plastic evidence bag.

“Here.” he said and waved over a uniformed cop. “Take this to the lab and have it checked out.” The uniform took hold of the bag and the detective waved a hand gesturing to all the debris and continued. “I want all of this collected, a new bag every square foot, and don’t miss any of it,” he instructed.

Robert looks over the scene and nods. “Yeah, an explosion. Mike, there was a guy in that thing. When I saw the tube, he looked… still, I dunno calm, or drugged, or something. But, Mike. He was alive and he was in that tube.” Robert said and pointed at the debris around them.

“I see no evidence of a body here Robert.” McHenry replies doubtfully. “Maybe it was just some weird gag. You know kids these days, all these viral videos and public stunts for views, likes, click bait. This was probably something like that Robert, just kids screwing around and out of control. We are out looking for the kid you described. When we wrangle him up, we’ll get more answers.” He finishes and pats Robert on the shoulder.

“Yeah. Viral videos. Sure.” Robert humored the other man. “Probably.” He said hollowly, knowing there was something far more going on here