Parallel Worlds
The Heroes Within
Edited by
L. J. Hachmeister & R.R. Virdi
Copyright © 2019 by Source 7 Productions, LLC
First Edition
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events and situations portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Cover design by Nicole Peschel
Edited by L. J. Hachmeister and R.R. Virdi
Source 7 Productions, LLC
Lakewood, CO
Created with Vellum
Contents
Introduction
Dead End Rhodes
Look Me in the Stars
The Dead Who Care
Myth Deeds
The Shadow of Markham
Davy Crockett vs. The Saucer Men
Dead Run
Unnamed
Prisoner 141
Valentine Blues
The Tragedy of John Metcalf
Effigies in Bronze
Daily Bread
The Demons of Arae
A Tale of Red Riding: Seduction of the Werepire
Threshold
The Last Death of Oscar Hernandez
The Magpie and the Mosquito
Monsters
CALL TO ACTION!
Introduction
By L. J. Hachmeister
Authors write for a variety of reasons. Some, for hobby, others for their profession. What motivates us can be monetary in nature, to build worlds, or a burning passion to express ourselves and connect with others. And, of course, everything in between. I think for all of us, though, the story, no matter why we initially write it, and no matter how distant we think we are from the characters, is part of us. Many times, it parallels our own world.
This anthology sparked from a conversation between me and fellow author R.R. Virdi. We both found it fascinating how heroes and villains are essentially born from the same place, and what truly enlivens a story is sourced from our own experiences. We also discussed how some of the best stories are the ones where we know something about the author, and what motivated them and the plight of their characters. This connection brings us all closer together, allows us to see the world through another person’s eyes.
These nineteen stories are all very different, ranging from epic stories with inspirational heroes to darker tales of the beleaguered rapscallion that must overcome the impossible obstacles to right their world. In the end, though, they represent us, and the heroes – and worlds – inside us.
Dead End Rhodes
Sarah A. Hoyt
Of all the criminals in the known universe, borgers are the worst.
They are the worst both in law and in my own mental hierarchy of crimes. I loathe murderers, kidnappers, slavers and all those who treat other humans as objects for their convenience.
But borgers make people into objects. They steal the brain, discard the body, and entrap all that remains of a living human in a glassteel body, cut off from its normal senses. They murder the person and keep what remains entrapped in a body so unlike that of humans that the poor creature goes insane. As far as we can tell, and of course, the operation is so highly illegal that our statistics are probably flawed, borgers end up wasting seventy five percent of those they take and on whom they manage the operation, because the resulting cyborg is too crazy to function, even for limited purposes.
Borging is so heinous, and so severely punished, that if you are even caught near a cyborg you haven’t denounced to the authorities so they can give the poor soul the peace it deserves, you’ll be executed as a borger. Even if you had nothing to do with the making of it.
Why do the borgers do it? Profit. Money. There are certain asteroids and moons in which the atmosphere will eat through skin, the radiation kill any human, the temperature boil anyone not encased in layers of glassteel. Cyborgs are powered by batteries created by an alien race. They don’t eat. They don’t sleep. They don’t excrete. Many of them can’t even think in any sense. But they can do the repetitive and boring actions needed to mine rare metals. And they do.
I’d cross the galaxy – and have – to kill a borger.
So you’ll wonder why I live with a cyborg, and why he’s technically my boss in my mobile investigations business.
Sometimes so do I.
The poor soul who is the head of our investigation business calls himself Nick Rhodes, which is not his name. He assumed Nick Rhodes’ identity, after being borged. I think the self-identification came from watching too many sensis in the series. He believes that he is a veteran of some ancient war on Earth called World War One or The Great War or The War to End all Wars, and that he lives in a city called New York, in a country long forgotten, in a world that was the cradle of humanity and like all cradles ultimately abandoned. He believes he’s a private investigator. That last is real.
As I said, most people go insane when borged. But at least he can think. Boy, can he think.
To keep him happy, the inside of our spaceship – a serviceable two floor Flitja of ancient model – is set up as the house of Nick Rhodes in the sensi serial of the name.
I slept in the front bedroom upstairs, and he in the back. Yes, I know he didn’t sleep, but I’m not sure he knew. Our office was in the front of the spaceship, just off the airlock he insisted on calling “the foyer”. In back was the kitchen, which baffled him, until he’d convinced himself all kitchens in New York in the 20th century came with automated cookers and huge refrigeration units as well as dried food storage with foods from all the human worlds. He’d written these into the memories of Nick Rhodes’ from the sensis and would now regularly cook for me, since he could not eat.
Awareness of his condition remained, but in his mind it was Nick Rhodes who had been set upon, in a back alley, and turned into a cyborg. Fighting the condition would only distress him.
I came into the office, early morning, before him, and took my place at the desk that, in Nick’s memory belonged to his secretary Stella D’Ori. My computer carefully disguised as a typewriter, I sat about reading the morning mail, answering it, confirming appointments, charting our course when we left this world, when the current case was – hopefully – solved.
Nothing in my background had prepared me for this. I’d been a socialite in interplanetary society, known for my dancing. Sensis of myself dancing with some gallant or other had graced the press of all the human worlds, particularly in my native Human Commonwealth worlds. I’d lived without a care for money or survival, until I got married. But my father had disapproved of my marriage and disowned me, and this was now how I must earn a living. I managed, more or less.
Nick came into the office while I finished the last of the correspondence. He wore a suit that would befit the 1930s in New York city, this one in a soft brown, with a pale yellow tie upon the immaculate white shirt. The surfaces of his cybernetic body left exposed as between his hat and collar gleamed, soft golden glassteel. He removed his hat and hung it on the coat tree, and though his face was, of course, motionless, I imagined he smiled at me as he rumbled “Good Morning, Stella,” in a voice that sounded less electronic every day.
I said, “Good morning, boss,” as he sat at his desk and turned on the privacy shielding.<
br />
He had no need to sit, of course, just as he had no need of wearing clothes to disguise his sexless body. But he did anyway. The shield, that made the area in which he sat into a nebulous, swirling, impenetrable confusion, not unlike wind-blown clouds, was a necessity. And like everything else, Nick had rewritten it into his memory, deciding that Nick Rhodes – the fictional hero – had used this shielding to disguise the horrendous facial scarring from The Great War and avoid scaring his customers.
The ringing of someone at the outer entrance to the airlock – not functioning as such while on the ground in a planet with Earth atmosphere – announced the arrival of the client who had brought us here: the man who had paid enough for the services of our detective agency for us to come to Peura Planet and land in its paltry spaceport and endeavor to solve the client’s problem.
Because Nick’s brain had become renowned throughout the Galaxy, people assumed his pseudonym was a nod towards the old serial adventures by some recluse celebrity or genius. There were speculative articles on who he really was, but despite my presence, right there, and my once-well-known looks, no one had landed on his real identity. Perhaps because I’d changed so much these last five years, living with a cyborg.
Just as well.
The client was middle aged, prosperous – he would have to be – wearing a relatively fashionable one-piece in blue-grey with dark red accents. For this region of the galaxy practically avant-guard. My father had worn a similar one twenty years ago, but we’d been in a far more populous and wealthy area.
He was well built, with steel-grey hair and eyes, which seemed to coordinate with his suit.
He rushed into our office, ahead of me, and stopped, staring at the privacy shield. Then turned to me. “What is this?” he said. “I thought I’d paid for an audience with Nick Rhodes. How am I to know—”
“If you know who we are,” I said. “You know Mr. Rhodes always meets clients from behind a privacy shield. Please, won’t you sit down, Mr….” I faked hesitancy but of course, I remembered the name. Without his wired advance we wouldn’t have come this far. As well, though, to make him think he was one of many and unimportant.
“Mr. Peura.”
He gave me a half-annoyed look, as though he didn’t like to be reminded that he was not special, and realizing he wouldn’t be the first to meet Nick Rhodes face to face, without the shield.
I saw him consider protesting, and give it up, then throw himself down on the chair in front of Nick’s desk as though he held a grudge against it. He glared at the privacy shield.
Behind it, Nick’s chair – specially made to accommodate Nick’s weight – creaked, and out of long habit, I could visualize him shifting, leaning back, waiting for the client to speak.
It took a moment. Peura was not unusual in feeling uncomfortable talking to the blankness of the privacy shield. I turned my chair slightly so that I could see him, and so that he could see me and smiled slightly, encouragingly.
If he thought my costume of bright, short dress, the ribbon holding back my platinum hair, were strange he said nothing. I presumed he thought I was keeping the atmosphere to match Nick Rhodes sensies. He wasn’t wrong. He was just wrong about the reason.
“It’s my son,” he finally said. “He’s gone missing.” As though having said it he’d performed a major and difficult task, he took out a hanky in one of those nano-cleaning fabrics out of his pocket and mopped up his forehead. “I don’t know what to do.”
The chair creaked. The shield shifted and rotated slightly, indicating that Nick had sat up straight, and Nick said, “I presume you’ve contacted the authorities.”
Peura swallowed hard. I could hear the sound and see his Adam’s apple move. “There aren’t… many authorities out here. Most of the investigators work for me. You see, I own the mining rights to this world, that’s why it’s named after me. All three cities in this world are built around mines. Hence their names: Mine One, Mine Two, Mine Three. The security are my security guards, who are supposed to keep peace for me. I don’t know if you understand that they aren’t police as such. More company security.”
I understood him perfectly well. He was the local boss thug and all the thugs in the world responded to him. He didn't say that, of course, but it was understood.
"Of course when I realized my son had disappeared," he said. "I had all my security men look for him. Of course..." He hesitated and mopped at his forehead again. "They're not exactly what I'd call brainy, you know. They're more... more."
"More hired muscle?" Nick rumbled, his voice, from behind the privacy shield sounding more gravely than usual, in a way that disguised the mechanical timbre.
I expected Peura to take offense, but he made a strange laugh-cough sound at the back of his throat, as though he were afraid of laughing, or perhaps unused to it. "You could say that," he said. "You could say that. What they are is convicts, from... well, from more civilized worlds, who have trouble keeping them behind bars, and so they rent them out to these far-flung worlds to act as security. Well, that is no big difference. Most of the miners are too. They're brought here for punishing labor that would give the government bad press in their worlds."
I felt the encouraging smile fade from my face. And I heard Nick shift in his chair. I'd heard of the system, but I didn't have to approve of it. I didn't know if Nick had. I never understood, in any case how he reconciled the fictional ancient New York city in his mind with the real world of multiple human planets with their differing law codes and different ways of getting around those laws. I don't know what Nick thought of this penal arrangement. I knew in the fictional New York, in the long-vanished country of the United States, prisoners had done some work, and it was judged not to be slavery, and was in fact paid, if at a lower rate than any other.
I didn't know if Nick perceived the difference between that and what was going on here. As for how I felt about it, well, I did tell you I hate slavers, right? This was not much different from outright slavery.
Sure, in the more "civilized" worlds these men might be given some limited sentence, but once that became "let's rent convicts to people who desperately need labor in lawless outer worlds" the sentences had a way of being extended, of becoming fluid, of having years added to them arbitrarily for misbehavior or infraction, with no court supervision. If the rumors were right – and I'd recoiled from verifying them as one flinches from a sore tooth, because when it is something the United Human Planets, the Human Hegemony and the Human Commonwealthagree on, it's nothing I can change – temporary punishment became life-long slavery, and what was supposed to be a quiet way of punishing really bad criminals became the normal punishment for everything from misdemeanors to felonies.
Worlds have different ideas of what is criminal. Some are so barbaric as to forbid means of personal defense to individuals. You can get a hefty sentence for possessing a zapgun in a dozen of them. Others forbid certain foods and drugs. Others yet reserve punishment for murder or kidnapping or crimes commited against others. But all of these worlds rented their “convicts” to people like Peura in distant worlds, where no one would supervise their treatment.
I narrowed my eyes at Peura. He didn't notice. He was staring ahead at the privacy shield intently. He sighed. "You see, my son wasn't... we weren't on the best of terms. He wanted to go off world and study... he wanted to be a starship pilot. I told him no, because he was my only son and would one day inherit all this. But he wasn’t happy about it, so he’d often go into town, this town or another to drink. He often came home very late. But one night, a month ago, he didn’t come home. And no one has been able to find any trace of him.”
“I presume you have traced his movements until he disappeared though?” Nick rumbled.
“Oh, sure. He was out with a group of… well, he’d say a group of friends, I think, from the spaceport. Not locals. People who landed here, you know, we import… That is not only do my family and I require some luxuries from other worlds, but we import a lo
t of our food for the men in the mines. Narcis, my son, he was… He didn’t like associating with the miners, not that I can precisely blame him, you know. I mean, they are servants and people with a bad past. In fact, we discouraged our children associating with them from the beginning.
“So he has friends among the people who do regular supply runs. One such party was in town, young men from one of the companies that supplies food and liquor. We have… well, with men such as the ones we get here, you have to provide some diversion, so we have bars in the cities, and he and his friends were at one of the bars, drinking into the night. Until they all left.
“No one seems to have seen them on the street as such, but the young men he was with said that he had left them at the door and headed down towards the other bar in the town, while they went back to the spaceport. They did clock in at the right time. But Narcis was not seen again.”
That was the crux of the case. The rest was summarized. He hadn’t been able to keep the young men here, of course. Their employer, a world called Cinzan, had called them back and to their distribution route. Cinzan was mostly an outpost that purveyed luxury goods, anything from mink stoles to liquor to sex bots. You wanted it, and it was sinfully decadent? You could get it from Cinzan.
And whether they were on Cinzan or in their spaceship, or in one of the many isolated planets to which Cinzan shipped, we could call them at Peura’s expense. Peura had secured from Cinzan the promise the three men who had been in the ship would be available for our interrogation, if we so wished.
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