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Authors: Simon West-Bulford

The Soul Continuum

BOOK: The Soul Continuum
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Medallion Press, Inc.

Dedicated to my wife, Ruth,

who would probably stop baking me cakes and biscuits if it weren't!

Published 2015 by Medallion Press, Inc.

4222 Meridian Parkway, Suite 110, Aurora, IL 60504

The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

Copyright © 2015 by Simon West-Bulford

Cover design by James Tampa

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

Typeset in Adobe Garmond Pro

ISBN # 9781605426471

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No matter how much thought and effort an author puts into writing a novel, it would fall short without the support of many good people. This book is no exception, and I am very grateful to everyone who helped me.

My wife, Ruth, is the cornerstone of that support, enduring many an hour of me talking at her about plot holes! Then there are the other writers whose talent and critical eye never fail to amaze me and improve my writing. Top of that list is Gayle Towell, but Grigori Black, Nicholas Karpuk, and Brett Fowler all helped shape the early draft.

There are a lot of friends I want to acknowledge too. I am always stunned that there are people out there who love to read the crazy stuff that comes out of my head, and it's their enthusiasm which keeps me excited about writing. Beverley Champ and Ned Dunkley, Carrie and Andrew Anderson, Gill Clark, Jenny Gray, Gill Davidson, Barry Moore, Bruce Lecus, John Steadman, Michelle, Mo, Jazz, Richard—thanks, guys! I wish I had room to list everyone.

As always, I am very thankful to Medallion for publishing my work, but I am especially glad to have worked with Emily Steele and Traci Post, who did a fantastic job with the editing. And not forgetting James Tampa: I love the cover!

PROLOGUE
salem ben

Am I alive or am I dead?

Trapped inside a corpse's head.

And is it you I see through now,

With fitful heart and fevered brow?

“No,” you say?

What makes you certain?

For all have drawn that final curtain.

I
do not trust the man before me. Standing there sinister and intimidating. The wide smile on his face reminds me of reptiles: cold-blooded. Measured. Calculating, as if he knows my every move before I decide to make it and wants me to know it with one simple look. He smells of blood—not literally, but I sense the stench of a million deaths clinging to him, and it seems he is proud of this persona; even his clothes boast of danger. He wears a shocking red suit I recognize only from a brief period of Old Earth's twenty-second century, and the press is so immaculate it gives me the impression he slid inside it like a snake. Together with his night-black shirt, bloodred tie, sleek ebony shoes, and pristinely smoothed blond hair, this man has all the poise of a character the people of his era might have considered to be the devil himself. Though I know he is not. But what chills me more than anything else about him is that I know those burning eyes, because they are mine.

He has a ring on the third finger of his left hand, but his right hand is gloved, and he holds a fat jewel that is pulsing with indigo light. He tosses it up as if it is an apple or a ball, and he tells me he took it from the cane of the crumpled old man in burnt monk's garb now shivering at his feet, probably in shock. I have no idea who the old man is, but I feel even more trepidation about him than about the snake in the red suit.

“It's understandable that you don't trust me,” the reptile
man says, still toying with the jewel. “You're not quite yourself yet, and it still might take a few more minutes before you are. Unfortunately, our circumstances don't permit us to delay. For now you just need to use your eyes. You can trust those . . . can't you? Just look around.” There is no joy in his eyes as his smile stretches like plastic.

“It's not a question of trust,” I tell him. “I can't think clearly yet.”

“That's exactly why it
is
a question of trust. You have to do what I tell you. If you don't, you will live out the rest of your days in regret. Is that what you want?”

Despite his protestations of urgency, I am in no hurry to answer him. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing he has the
advantage, though my temporary identity crisis and fractured memory make it obvious he does. Instead I turn my back on him to survey the scorched shell that is barely recognizable as a Soul Sphere, trying to piece together some semblance of the man I was, whilst trying to take in everything this man has been telling me. He tells me that the Soul Consortium was almost completely destroyed while I was living Jamelia Strong's life. My entire home—almost every sphere that makes up the Soul Consortium—has been crippled by our conflict with the feeble old man at the reptile's feet, or the malign presence that apparently possesses him. It almost succeeded in altering the universal laws of physics to fulfill a desire I could never comprehend, the reptile Salem tells me. The entire universe would cease in its eternal cycles, and future life would never have the chance to rise again. Or so he says.

Smoke clouds the emerald light of the huge sphere in which we stand, and it dims even the many lights of the recorded souls that fill this place. So many lives still to live and experience. So many memories to cherish or endure.
I have seen through so many eyes. I have gazed in terrified
awe at the sight of humanity's first sun as it devoured billions of years of history in a swell of interstellar fire; delighted at the sight of the first newborn dolphins on our first colonized world; exulted in the announcement that the Chaos Wars were over; wept over the last brushstroke of Van Borgorchev's final work of art; brushed my hands over the great walls of Mortis IV. I have experienced all of that and
so much more. I chose to live all those lives. But now this man asks me—as a matter of extreme urgency—to experience
a life that should not even be present among the archives of the dead: my own.

Even darker now that it is shrouded in smoke, the WOOM, the thing that immerses me into another's life,
waits for me in the center of the sphere like the chrysalis of some monstrous insect. The black shell, still glistening in the
emerald light like wet skin, opens its lips to invite me in.

“Are you going to take much longer?” says the reptile, the other Salem. He lifts his left arm, slowly pulling up his red sleeve to examine something with ticking dials on his wrist. “I did warn you that we won't have much time once we have removed him from the WOOM.” He stops tossing the jewel, taking a moment to examine it nonchalantly. “Don't be deceived by his appearance. Keitus Vieta here is the most dangerous entity you are ever likely to meet.” He gazes down at the shivering old man, who looks back at him like a child needing its mother. “He can't be killed—you tried. He can't be persuaded—you tried that too. And he can't be allowed to remember who he truly is. Subtracting him prematurely while he was living your life will confound him for a while—he thinks he's baby Salem—but he is not from this universe and Qod believed there is real danger that his true nature will resurface. Even if we place him in stasis, he'll eventually find a way out.”

“So how do you plan to be rid of him?”

“Be rid of him?” Red Salem laughs. “Didn't you just hear me? We can't get rid of him. Our only hope is that we keep him confused. I'll keep putting him in one of the WOOMs in one of the other spheres so that he keeps living different lives while you're in there living your own life.” He taps his temple. “Somewhere up there in that brain of your dead life is the secret to his demise and the means to return Qod to us. You remember Qod, don't you? Your only friend and companion?”

Qod's absence is something I cannot bear. Incorporeal intelligence or not, her presence when I am not immersed in somebody else's life is all that keeps me sane. She is my conscience when I think of ending it all and my companion when I don't. Where she has gone, I don't know, but Red Salem tells me that Keitus Vieta is responsible.

“You have to find it all out,” Salem says, “and when you come out, you'll have all your own memories back again. Won't that be good?” The fake smile has not left his face.

I know he is lying about something, but separating the lies from the truth is impossible for me in this condition. I had only a few minutes to reassimilate after I finished living the life of Jamelia Strong from the Palomino colonies. She was a young soldier who had lived a wonderful life until her last fifty days, when she was captured and interrogated by the enemy. Torture and brainwashing left her vulnerable and pliable before she was eventually killed, and this is what has left me in such a delicate state after immersion. It takes approximately sixteen minutes for the brain to return to normal after the neural flush is executed, but less than five passed before I was pulled unceremoniously from the WOOM. I had the vague notion that I was really someone else but was mostly convinced that I was still Jamelia, rescued from captivity in a war zone. I did not realize that the devastation around me was actually the swiftly collapsing Soul Consortium.

I was dragged out of the Martyr Sphere half-delirious and carried through dark corridors shuddering with explosions, falling girders, and electrical fires. And then I died en route. I think I died several more times, and with each death, the Soul Consortium genoplants brought me back, cloning my body and instantly mapping my consciousness into a freshly generated brain, but then the room I was resurrected in was destroyed and I was reborn in another genoplant and then another. One of them even lost power halfway through the process. I was incredibly fortunate to come back at all, but when I eventually regained consciousness in the final genoplant, the Consortium's nanodrones had managed to establish better control, and the rate of repair
started to overtake the rate of collapse. The Soul Consortium was safe again, and the damage wrought by the struggle
with Keitus Vieta would be reversed.

BOOK: The Soul Continuum
9.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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