Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series
Mindscape
(2nd Edition)
by Jasper T. Scott
http://www.JasperTscott.com
@JasperTscott
Copyright © 2016 by Jasper T. Scott
THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS
FOR THIS BOOK
Reproduction or transmission of this book, in whole or in part, by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or by any other means is strictly prohibited, except with prior written permission from the author. You may direct your inquiries to JasperTscott@gmail.com
Cover design by Tom Edwards ( http://tomedwardsdmuga.blogspot.co.uk )
This book is a work of fiction. All names, places, and incidents described are products of the writer’s imagination and any resemblance to real people or life events is purely coincidental.
Other Books by Jasper T. Scott:
New Frontiers Series
Excelsior (Book 1)
Mindscape (Book 2)
Exodus (Book 3) Coming February 2017!
Dark Space Series
Dark Space
Dark Space 2: The Invisible War
Dark Space 3: Origin
Dark Space 4: Revenge
Dark Space 5: Avilon
Dark Space 6: Armageddon
Early Work
Escape
Mrythdom (Revised Edition Coming October 2016)
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Other Books by Jasper T. Scott
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Summary of the Previous Book
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: ENEMY UNSEEN
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
PART TWO: ENEMY REVEALED
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PART THREE: ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
EPILOGUE
WHAT'S NEXT—EXODUS
SPECIAL OFFER
APPENDIX—RELATIVISTIC WEAPONS RESEARCH
CONTACT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Acknowledgements
I owe a great big thank you to my wife for her support. Without her there to weather a perfect storm of domestic crises, I would never get anything done! Stay-at-home parent is one of the toughest jobs there is.
Next up, I’d like to thank my editing team. My professional editor, Aaron Sikes, and my two volunteer editors, David Cantrell and William Schmidt, were invaluable to perfecting this manuscript. You three made a half-decent book great.
I also owe a big, big thank you to all of my beta readers. These are the brave souls who volunteered to read an early draft of the book. They waded with me through typos, info dumps, logical inconsistencies, boring scenes, flat characters, and a host of other literary obstacles on our way to the finished manuscript. Thank you, Allan Clark, Bill Gassoway, Carmen Romano, Charlene Carney, Daniel Eloff, Dave Topan, David Smith, Davis Shellabarger, Duncan Mcleod, Emmett Young, Gary Matthews, Gaylon Overton, George Dixon, Gerald Geddings, Gregg Cordell, Gregor Hinckley, Ian F. Jedlica, Ian Seccombe, Jay Gehringer, Jeff Belshaw, Jeremy Gunkel, Jim Meinen, John H. Kuhl, John Parker, Larry Lemma, LeRoy Vermillion, Mary Kastle, Michael Madsen, Paul Birch, Raymond Burt, Susan Stearns, Steve Sharp, Susan Nelson, and Victor Biedrycki.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who helped me with my research into the impact event described in this book: Rudy Adkins, Tim Ross, Robert Weyer, Daniel Eloff, Gray Browne, Greg Kirkpatrick, Robert Weyer, Lyle Diediker, Joe Czolnik, Lloyd West, Henry Straley, Andrew Wilson, Cash Monet, John Treadwell, Jeff Morris, Dylan Dinh, and Henry Espinoza. It was great consulting with you all!
For the Muse.
Dramatis Personae
The Crew of the Adamantine:
Bridge Crew (White Deck)
O-7 RDML - Admiral Alexander de Leon
O-5 CDR - Commander Viviana McAdams
-Ship's Executive Officer (XO)
O-5 CDR - Commander Eduardo Stone
-Starfighter and Drone
Command/Head of Security
O-3 LT - Lieutenant Guillermo Cardinal
-Weapons Chief
O-3 LT - Lieutenant Luis Hayes
-Comms Officer/Senior Information
Systems Technician
O-3 LT - Lieutenant Frost
-Sensor Operator
O-3 LT - Lieutenant Rodriguez
-Chief of Engineering
O-3 LT - Lieutenant Bishop
-Helmsman
Alliance Leaders
President Wallace
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Admiral Durand
-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Fleet Admiral Richard Anderson
-Chairman of Naval Operations
General Russo
-Commandant of the Marine Corps
General Eriksson
-Chief of Staff of the Air Force
Ministers/Cabinet Members
Donna Harris
-Secretary of Commerce
Jacob Jackson
-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Senators
Senator Catalina de Leon
Senator Harris
Solarian Republic Leaders
President Luther
Captain Vrokovich
Civilians and Other
Dorian de Leon A.K.A. Angel Hunter
-Director at Mindsoft
Phoenix Gray
-Owner of Mindsoft
Orochi Sakamoto
-Owner of Sakamoto Robotics
Benevolence (Ben)
-AI prototype from Mindsoft
Captain Grekov
A Brief Summary of events in Excelsior (Book 1)
Warning! If you have not read Excelsior (Book 1 of this series), the following summary contains spoilers from that book. You can buy Excelsior on Amazon here: Excelsior (New Frontiers Book 1)
30 Years Prior to the events in Mindscape…
It is the year 2790 AD, and Earth is in the throes of the Second Cold War. The world is divided between two governments—the First World Alliance in the West and the Confederacy in the East.
Medical advances allow us to engineer our children and even stop people from aging. These engineered, immortal offspring are called “geners” while those who were naturally born are called “de-gener-ates.”
In the Confederacy everyone is a gener, and they’re all engineered to make communism work, while in the Alliance only the children of the wealthy are born geners.
Alexander and Catalina de Leon were born in the Alliance state
of Mexico. Soon after they get married, Alexander joins the Alliance space fleet to buy them immortality and citizenship in the utopian North.
After ten years of serving in the Navy, Alexander becomes Captain of the Lincoln, but instead of retiring from service, he is sent on a classified mission through a recently discovered wormhole to a habitable world, code-named Wonderland, and he will be forced to say goodbye to his wife for as much as another decade.
Just as the Lincoln is embarking on its voyage, the Confederacy sends a fleet to challenge the Alliance’s claim to the wormhole. Conflict breaks out, and both the Confederate and Alliance fleets are decimated. Alexander and his crew barely make it through the battle and into the wormhole to start their long voyage to Wonderland.
Back on Earth we learn via Catalina that the conflict led to a brief nuclear war that wiped out the largest cities on both sides. Catalina ends up in a dangerous refugee camp and meets a man there, David Porras, who becomes her guardian inside the camp. Many months pass, and having heard nothing from Alex, Catalina fears he was killed in the fighting. Her grief brings her together with David and she falls pregnant.
Alexander and his crew reach Wonderland and begin exploring the planet. The air is breathable. The plants move. Dinosaur-like monsters roam the jungles. After just a few weeks, a group of dinosaurs destroy their camp and they’re forced to leave Wonderland and return to Earth early.
On the way home, one of the Lincoln’s crew turns out to be a spy reporting the results of the mission to the Confederacy.
Upon returning to the Earth side of the wormhole, Alexander discovers that both the Alliance and the Confederacy have been racing to put together colony fleets to go to Wonderland.
Meanwhile, Catalina has had her baby—Dorian Porras—and he is now six months old. The boy’s father has revealed himself as an abusive alcoholic and an illegal immigrant in the North. Catalina leaves him, taking baby Dorian with her.
The Alliance and Confederacy race each other to the wormhole, but the Confederacy is faster and enters the wormhole first, only to be ripped apart by tidal forces.
Surviving Confederate ships turn around and surrender, but the Alliance fleet now guarding the entrance of the Wormhole fires on the surrendered ships, destroying them all. Alexander is the only one who refuses the order to attack.
Alexander returns to Earth a hero for his honorable dissent. President Baker of the Alliance asks Alexander to help fix the mess by running a PR campaign to make the Alliance look better.
Then a news story breaks revealing that the mission to Wonderland was really intended to trick the Confederates into sacrificing a large part of their fleet in the wormhole, thereby tipping the balance of power in favor of the Alliance.
Following this shock, Alexander helps negotiate a peace treaty between the Alliance and rebel Confederate forces. Alexander and Catalina are reunited, whereupon he learns about David’s abuse. Alexander is furious, and uses Navy resources to hunt down Catalina’s ex and deliver him to Alliance authorities.
Over subsequent years increasing automation leads to record-high levels of unemployment, and the unemployed masses find virtual fulfillment in the Mindscape, a collection of immersive virtual worlds where people are able to indulge their every whim.
Now, the story continues in the Mindscape…
Note: If you would like to read a short summary of events in the previous book, Excelsior, click here, or go back to the previous page on your device.
Prologue
2819 A.D.
—Twenty-Five Years After The Last War—
Utopia. That’s what people call it, Dorian thought, shaking his head. They’d even gone so far as to name the world’s most popular political party the Utopian Party. People were losing their jobs left and right to automation and artificial intelligence, but they couldn’t be happier. They received a universal basic income, just enough to pay for necessities, and with the Mindscape to virtually satisfy their every whim, who needed more? It was ironic that after a hundred years of fighting communism, now it was a necessity for people to survive. Without the dole, billions of people would die of starvation.
Thinking about it that way, the world seemed more of a dystopia than anything, but everyone was more than content thanks to the Mindscape. No one needed to confront the sad reality of their lives. Virtual worlds are literally whatever people want them to be, so why live in a world you can’t change? Supposedly, mindscaping made life perfect for everyone. But for Dorian, there was always a crack in the perfection—a noticeable seam.
His father. Not Alexander, but his biological father, Angel Porras,(A.K.A. David Porras). Dorian had searched high and low for him using both names, but without any luck. His parents refused to talk about it. They said his father was a bad man, and he’d probably gotten himself killed by now, but that just made Dorian even more curious.
It meant they were hiding something.
Dorian had spent a long time trying to figure out how he could get more out of them. Now, as a professional mindscaper and Senior Director at Mindsoft, he’d finally found a way. A virtual world that would pry the truth out of them without them even knowing it. Now, for Alexander’s 55th birthday, Dorian had invited both of his parents to join him for a few hours in that mindscape.
“It’s a surprise,” Dorian said, answering the dubious look on Alexander’s face.
“A nice surprise?” Dorian’s mother asked.
“Of course. Don’t worry, it’s not full immersion, so you can wake yourself up whenever you like.”
“All right,” Alexander said and sat on his living room couch. Dorian’s mother sat down beside him and they both reached for their neural hoods on the shelf beneath the coffee table. Those devices helped block out external stimuli for low-immersion worlds like this one. Dorian grabbed his own hood from the coffee table and sat down in the armchair beside his parents.
“Ready?” he asked with his hood poised over his head.
Alexander gave a thumbs-up as he slipped his hood on. Dorian’s mother smiled and nodded before putting hers on, too.
“Happy Birthday, Alex,” Dorian said as he followed suit and booted up the Mindscape.
The simulation was incredibly simple—they all started in their own empty box. For Dorian, that box was filled with both of his parents’ fears, seen playing out on the walls. His parents, however, were stuck in boxes that showed them fond memories from their lives, playing out in short clips of blissful nostalgia—something basic to distract them while he went browsing through the horrors that haunted their souls.
In hindsight it should have been obvious to him. He knew how to find out the truth. Lies cause fear of discovery in the people who tell them, so browsing through his parents’ fears was a sure-fire way to find the truth about his father.
Dorian walked past dozens of graphic scenes of violence, misery, suffering, death… all obviously fabricated by his parents’ subconscious minds. Then he came to one scene that struck him as unique. It was on one of Alexander’s walls. He saw a man he didn’t recognize, lying in a casket with a face as cold and gray as a winter’s sky. Alexander was peering into that casket with a grim expression. Dorian also saw himself standing in the background with eyes wide and his jaw agape. As Dorian focused on that scene, it swelled to fill the entire box, playing out on all of the walls simultaneously.
“You killed him,” Dorian heard himself say.
Alexander turned and shook his head. “I didn’t pull the trigger, and I didn’t aim the gun.”
“No, you just put him in front of it.”
“He was an abusive alcoholic who beat your mother within an inch of her life. He would have beat you too if she hadn’t left him.”
“And that justifies killing him?”
“He was an illegal. The law conscripted him. All I had to do was find him and write his orders for duty. He was trained and armed, just like every other soldier on that battlefield. You can’t blame me for this, Dorian.”
&nbs
p; “Except I do.”
Dorian watched his stepfather’s face collapse in dismay as the imaginary version of himself stormed off. He was so shocked that he woke himself up with a jolt and ripped off his hood. His chest rose and fell with deep, shuddering breaths. His parents were still locked in their virtual worlds, both of them smiling at whatever they were seeing.
Dorian scowled, tempted to rip Alexander’s hood off and confront him right then and there, but he’d already heard Alexander’s excuses. He stood up from his chair, quietly leaving the room and his family behind. By the time they grew tired of their trip down memory lane and decided to wake themselves up, he would be gone.
Dorian gave a sigh as he strode out of his parents’ home and into the hazy orange light of the rising sun. He took a deep breath of the crisp spring air, and climbed into his company car.
“Where would you like to go, Mr. de Leon?” the car’s driver program asked.
“Not de Leon,” Dorian said, shaking his head. That surname didn’t fit. It never had. He wasn’t Alex’s son.
“What would you like me to call you?” the program asked.
“Gray,” he decided. He would take his fiancée’s surname once they got married. His parents didn’t even know he was engaged, let alone to whom, or where he actually lived. He’d been planning to tell them all of that eventually, but now… now he’d have to think about it.
“Where would you like to go, Mr. Gray?”
“Anywhere but here,” he said, leaning his head back against the seat and allowing heavy eyelids to slide raspingly over his eyes.
“That is not a destination. Please specify an explicit destination or provide a list of criteria so that I may help you find one.”