Charger the Soldier (38 page)

Now you're confused? Yes, you're quite right,
it couldn't have been Charger the Hyborg, because he wasn't yet in
existence when Danny was in the cave. He was still an innocent
young man called Henry, working in a gas station.

I'll just finish James's story for you. He
found a wife and they had a good life together; their daughter
Suzie was named after Danny's first love. The family line endured
through the Tasker war and the aliens' invasion of Earth, and fled
to Ceres just before the Day of the Black Rain. Ceres was the one
planet the Grays never attacked, which was always puzzling because
they clearly knew of its existence. Most historians later theorized
that the extreme cold and subterranean nature of the colony was
what saved them.

I can see you're still thinking about
Charger. Have you figured it out yet?

Of course! He was traveling through time,
from far in the future, after he had been resurrected. That's what
happened on Neo Terra, too, when the Mahouds were living in the
hollow black planet. It was Charger R/T, ricocheting back and forth
on the time line, who exploded into their laboratory and killed one
of the workers who tried to interfere with him.

No, not today. But I will tell you that whole
story. Yes, and I'll tell you how time travel works, too.

>>>

Charger, banished to Mars and helping to open
up settlements on the barren red planet, could still watch
humanity. It happened, slowly at first, then faster. Humanity's
need to feel safe meant that things of the past had to go. The
Hyborgs and Lycans were monsters who had served a purpose, but now
they were a drag on the world's economies.

So it was said.

Racism, prejudice, and phobias of the past
ruled humanity as much as they ever had. A program had been set in
motion to move the Hyborgs and their Lycans from Earth, which meant
that at first they would be employed in restoring Mars to a useful
planet, but if killed or injured, they would not be repaired.
Besides, it was reasoned, things that were so close to being dead
could not have souls and should not be regarded as having the same
significance as the living. General Harris's rants about these
unholy demons of humanity's own creation remained legendary, in
spite of the fact that he'd been the one to create them.

The Hyborgs had never represented a threat to
humanity. Drawn largely from the downtrodden members of society,
they tended to readily accept being commanded, which made them
ideal soldiers. They were not so stupid, however, that they
couldn't see what was happening to them.

It made sense for humans to use Hyborgs for
work on Mars, for they didn't need much air or sleep in order to do
what was needed in terraforming the planet. The new human society,
the survivors of the war, experienced little in the way of crime,
and wanted nothing to do with Hyborgs for fear of creating problems
they hoped never to deal with. Everyone had a good-paying job, and
it was common to see families with six or more children, all being
supported by a society on the mend.

As people grew prosperous, the Hyborgs began
to be seen as even more of a blight on humanity's rise to dominance
once again. Sending them en masse to replenish Mars just made good
economic and political sense. So, as humans came and went on the
planet, the long-lived Hyborgs worked on, creating a subculture on
Mars, one that had the potential to be violent, but was generally
peaceful. This was a culture that Charger had been tasked with
eliminating, a culture to be destroyed by one of their own.

He thought about the situation for long
hours, becoming bitter as the years went by. He had been programmed
to obey humans and, so far, had not been able to figure out how to
break that programming. Rejected by humanity and labeled a
malediction by others of his own kind, he went on working, with Mac
and Jill by his side, and sharing his thoughts only with them.

>>>

Jack, Beth and Henry's son, grew to be a
strong and proud young man. He enjoyed life in the high North, and
was at peace with the lands. When Jack was twenty, he built a cabin
thirty miles north of the village, married a young Inuit girl, and
fathered two boys. The oldest boy found work in the new cities of
Earth when he came of age, but the youngest, like his father, was
in love with the high North, so he remained and worked in the new
industries that were developed.

This youngest boy, Maxwell, also married an
Inuit girl and they had a daughter. Named after her great
grandmother, young Beth hated the North but grew to worship the
stories told by her namesake. She learned of the adventures her
great grandmother had while surviving the invasion, raising a
family, being accepted by the Inuit and, eventually, becoming mayor
of the village.

When Beth was very young, one Christmas her
great grandmother gave her a necklace. "This is a special necklace,
dear," Beth's great grandmother said in her old woman's voice as
they sat together in the living room near the Christmas tree. "It
was given to me by my first love. He was your great grandfather. He
was a great man who fought for the freedom we have today. I never
knew if he was killed in the war, or if he even survived the
invasion, but I've always loved him."

Her great grandmother placed the necklace in
Beth's hands. It was truly one of a kind. Henry had fashioned it
himself, using various sized piston rings from different car
motors, welding them together to create a representation of our
solar system. On each of the nine rings, Henry welded a small
polished nut to represent a planet. For Earth, Henry welded a small
steel ball with grooves to represent the planet's surface. At the
heart of the solar system, the sun was represented by a large
yellow diamond that had once belonged to his mother.

"His name was Henry, dear," Beth's great
grandmother said. "He gave this to me with the promise that even
the entire solar system would never be powerful enough to destroy
his love for me." The necklace was not small or dainty, qualities a
guy would never think necessary, but Beth's great grandmother had
worn it from the day he had given it to her until now.

Because Beth's father and grandfather had
married Inuit women, Beth looked Asian, except for her eyes. A
genetic throwback to her great grandmother, she had ice-blue eyes,
a color uncommon in ninety-nine percent of the world's population.
She also had a taste for adventure. When Beth completed her
university education, she decided that after the death of her great
grandmother, she would travel to a place no one would have expected
her to go. Beth chose Mars.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

Well, Reader, at this point in time, Earth
was enjoying a golden age. Although it celebrated the heroes of the
past, the main thrust was for the future, for scientific
progress.

What kind of progress? Oh, there were amazing
innovations! Two of the greatest advances were using a galaxy to
bend light to see stars in the distance, and bending light with
gravity of our own design. Another stunning achievement was making
a solar system into a gigantic telescope. And yet another was
making world lasers powerful and refined enough to core deep holes
in distant planets to allow mining to take place. Sustainable
stellar travel and quantum computers of immense power drove
innovation and ecological sustainability to new and fantastic
heights.

Settlements on Mars were being opened up.
Moon was a space station. Neo Terra was thriving.

Yes, everybody was happy. Except for Charger
and the other Hyborgs.

People were well-fed and industrious. Moral
behavior improved as the threat of persecution was removed, and
some of the less desirable traits of humanity seemed to dim. The
few remaining religious groups were pitied for their backward
beliefs and shunned, as science created great and wondrous new
understandings. A brave new world shone, a world of a better human
in a better place.

Advances in health care permitted longer
lifespans and made for smarter humans. Because knowledge had
expanded exponentially, schools all over the world increased
schooling to grade fifteen, then college or university for an
additional six years. So much had been learned in this time period
that the average IQ had risen by several numbers. Humanity was
healthier, smarter, safer, and better prepared for anything that
the galaxy had to throw at them.

Or so they thought.

###

Real world terms
and definitions.

antigravity
the antithesis of gravity; a
hypothetical force by which a body of positive mass would repel a
body of negative mass

Antikythera Mechanism
2,000-year-old
astronomical calculator built by ancient Greeks

antimatter
matter's twin, but with an opposite
electric charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate
each other, leaving nothing but energy behind. The big bang created
equal amounts of the two, but today the observable universe is
composed almost entirely of ordinary matter. This asymmetry is one
of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. Antimatter is not the
same as dark matter (see below).

Area 51
The US Air Force facility commonly
known as Area 51 is a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base,
within the Nevada Test and Training Range. The intense secrecy
surrounding the base has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy
theories and a central component to unidentified flying object
(UFO) folklore.

BCE
Before the Common Era. Now used in place
of BC (Before Christ)

binary language
the digital representation of
speech

black hole
a geometrically defined region of
space-time exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that
nothing—including particles and electromagnetic radiation such as
light—can escape from inside it

bunker buster
a bomb designed to penetrate
targets buried deep underground

CE
Common Era. Now used in place of AD ("Anno
Domini" in Latin, or "the year of the Lord" in English

cryo
a combining form meaning "icy cold"

cyborg
A cyborg (cybernetic organism) is a
being with both organic and biomechatronic parts. The term cyborg
is often applied to an organism that has restored function or
enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial
component or technology that relies on some sort of feedback.

dark matter
a mysterious substance; its
gravitational pull seems to hold galaxies together, like a massive
skeleton, but we can't see it. We only know it's there from
calculations of the speed at which galaxies move. The matter we
know and understand accounts for just four per cent of the known
universe; the rest is dark matter and dark energy.

Dhuusamareeb
Dhusamareb in English, also
spelled Dhusa Mareb, is the capital of the central Galguduud region
of Somalia. It serves as the center of the Dhusamareb District.

dimensions
Classical physics describes the
first three basic dimensions as up/down, left/right and
forward/backward.

Enola Gay
the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber
which dropped the first atomic bomb.

FEMA
Federal Emergency Management Agency.

fourth dimension
The fourth dimension is time,
which is not spatial, but a way of measuring physical change. We
cannot move freely in time but must subjectively move in one
direction.

Gobekli Tepe
An archaeological site, regarded
as of great importance, at the top of a mountain ridge in the
Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey.

Goldilocks zone
Also called the habitable zone
or life zone, the Goldilocks region is an area of space in which a
planet is just the right distance from its home star so that its
surface is neither too hot nor too cold and liquid water remains on
the surface of the planet without freezing or evaporating out into
space.

hertz
The hertz is defined as one cycle per
second. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine
wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications, such
as the frequency of musical tones. The unit is named for Heinrich
Rudolf Hertz, who was the first to conclusively prove the existence
of electromagnetic waves.

Higgs boson field
(nicknamed the 'god
particle') an invisible force field that stretches across the
universe, encasing us like a Jell-O mold, and giving mass to
elementary particles within it: the stuff that makes up stars,
planets, trees, buildings, animals and all of us. Without mass,
electrons, protons and neutrons wouldn't stick together to make
atoms; atoms wouldn't make molecules; neither we nor our planet
would exist.

hominid
any of the modern or extinct bipedal
primates of the family Hominidae. Used in the text as a term for
naturally evolving humans.

hominoid
same as above, but used in the text
to refer to human lines altered by the alien Grays.

Kuiper Belt
a disc-shaped region of icy
objects beyond the orbit of Neptune – billions of kilometers from
our sun. The Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort Cloud are
believed to be the home of comets that orbit our sun. The known icy
worlds and comets in both regions are much smaller than Earth's
moon.

LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide (acid) is a
psychedelic drug, known for its psychological effects, which can
include altered thinking processes, closed- and open-eye visuals,
synesthesia, an altered sense of time and spiritual experiences.
First synthesized from a chemical in ergot, a grain fungus that
typically grows on rye.