Preserving Will

by Alex Albrinck

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Assignment

  Illusion

  Redemption

  Parting

  Alone

  Student

  Protection

  Employment

  Encounter

  Construction

  Life

  City

  Seeds

  Test

  Farewell

  Choices

  Altered

  Contingency

  Fate

  Forgettable

  Direction

  Spectator

  Eyewitness

  Chances

  Transition

  Emergence

  Angel

  Author's Note

  PRESERVING WILL

  ————————

  THE ALIOMENTI SAGA - BOOK 5

  by Alex Albrinck

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Alex Albrinck. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design: Karri Klawiter (http://artbykarri.com)

  BOOKS BY ALEX ALBRINCK

  ————————

  Get notified of new releases AND access to free short stories here!

  THE ALIOMENTI SAGA

  A Question of Will (2012)

  Preserving Hope (2012)

  Ascent of the Aliomenti (2013)

  Birth of the Alliance (2013)

  Preserving Will (2013)

  “Book 6” (2014)

  “Book 7” (2014)

  PROLOGUE

  Sixteen-year-old Will Stark sat in the back seat of the family’s four-door sedan, twiddling his thumbs. Thus far, everything about the day had gone well. They’d gotten out of the house without incident, and he’d soon complete a major life milestone.

  But history suggested his parents would find a reason to deny him that accomplishment.

  As long as he could remember, he’d been treated, not as their beloved only child, but as some type of disease to eradicate. Only public opinion prevented them from leaving him on the side of a road somewhere and forgetting he’d ever been born, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to rely on that type of pressure to keep his life… minimally tolerable.

  He knew the smart move was to stay quiet, to let events play out, to talk about this later, after they’d gotten home, or even a week from now. But he couldn’t avoid asking, and had the haunting suspicion that this conversation would be the trigger to changing this positive experience into one he’d rather forget.

  He cleared his throat.

  Rosemary Stark, seated in the passenger seat, whirled around, her eyes full of loathing. “What do you want? We’re taking you to get your driver’s license. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Thank you for that,” Will replied, his voice quiet and timid. Most people would be startled at his mother’s tone, for Rosemary presented a sweet, gentle persona in public. The public didn’t see this side of Rosemary, though.

  His mother nodded, as if his apology had appeased her wrath, and she started to turn away.

  “But,” Will continued, “once I’m able to drive myself around, I’ll need to get a job.”

  “You’re not getting a car,” Richard Stark snarled, glaring at his son from the rear view mirror. “We’ve discussed this.”

  “I’m not asking you to buy me a car,” Will replied.

  “And we can’t waste time driving you around, so getting a job is out of the question,” Rosemary added. “Don’t we provide you enough as it is? You get an allowance, and…”

  “If I get a job and can walk or ride my bike to and from,” Will said, speaking quickly, “I can save up the money, buy my own car, buy my own gas, and then nobody would need me to drive anywhere.”

  “There’s the insurance cost, however,” Richard said, in a tone that was both cold and bored. “Are you accounting for that in this plan of yours?”

  Will nodded. “Of course. The insurance cost goes up whether there’s a car in my name or not, so…”

  “What?” Rosemary whirled on him once more, eyes blazing. “I was under the impression that insurance costs only kicked in if there’s a car registered to you.”

  “My friends at school said that the insurance costs for their families went up as soon as they became registered drivers,” Will replied, his voice fading. The conversation, as he’d feared, was veering off course, and not in his favor. Just as it always did.

  Rosemary directed her gaze back at her husband. “Did you know that, Richard? Did you know that this boy’s going to cost us more money when he gets his license?”

  Richard glanced in her direction. “The boy didn’t see fit to tell me, either.” His eyes flicked briefly in Will’s direction via the rear view mirror. “Thought you’d spring that little surprise on us after the test was over and the damage was done, did you?”

  “No!” Will shook his head in protest. His hands pressed against the seat, and his knuckles turned white as he gripped the edge in his desperation and despair. “I thought you already knew. It’s why I want to get a job, so that I can help pay for the increase…”

  “Help?” Richard interrupted. “Help? You’ll be fully responsible for those increases as soon as they begin. Thought you’d drop something like that on us when you know full well my hours have been cut back, how tough times are, and…”

  “I never tried to hide anything!” Will snapped. Then his face fell. “I mean… that’s not what I… that didn’t come out right.”

  Rosemary snorted. “It didn’t come out right? You’re trying to con us into an extra expense that you know we can’t afford, and you have the gall to sass us when we catch you?” She glanced at Richard. “There’s only one way to punish the boy.”

  Richard nodded. “I’ll turn around up ahead.”

  “What…. what do you mean?” Will asked. But at only sixteen years of age, life had taught him to anticipate exactly what his father meant.

  “You’re not getting your driver’s license,” Richard hissed. “And that’s final. When you’ve saved up enough money to fund the increase in insurance costs, and your own gas money? Then we’ll talk.”

  “But I can still get a job, right?” Will asked. “I can walk, or ride my bike, or…”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Rosemary told him. “It’s too dangerous to be walking or riding your bike around at night.”

  “So… you’ll drive me, then?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Richard replied. He glanced at his wife, who nodded at him to continue. “I think you need some time to learn your lesson, boy. It’s not right to lie to your parents.”

  “But I thought…”

  “Nobody cares what you think!” Rosemary snapped. “You’re not worthy of having an opinion. Remember?”

  Will winced as if slapped, and his head drooped, crushed by the latest disappointment in his life. Sometimes, he wished it would all just end.

  Rosemary shook her head. “Seth never would have given us this kind of trouble,” she muttered. “It should have been him, not Seth.”

  The single tear escaped Will’s right eye and slid down his cheek, and he turned to face out the window. He wouldn’t let them see him cry.

  But even in his despair, he felt something. A tingling sensation, a strange sense that someone out there, someone he’d never met cared about him. It might not make up for his parents’ apathy and antipathy, but anything helped. His life might not have meaning to those who’d brought him into the world, but maybe, just maybe, it would have value for others.

  He’d be happy to make a difference for just one person.

  The car swerved, and he slammed into the door.

  “Look out!” Rosemary screamed.

  “I see them!” Rich
ard shouted. Will snapped his head forward and leaned to the middle of the car. He could see the men loafing around in the middle of the street.

  Will heard the horror in his father’s voice. “The brakes are out! I… I can’t stop the car!”

  “Richard, do something!” Rosemary screamed.

  “I’m trying!” he shouted. In the last act of his life, he glared at his only living child with complete loathing, a look assigning blame for the accident underway.

  Will saw it. But he had no time to dwell on that final look of disgust.

  Richard swerved right to avoid hitting the men in the road, a sense of incredulity forming as the car accelerated, even as he tried to activate the parking brake. The car slammed into the guardrail with a sickening thud, with a force sufficient to snap the seatbelts of the car’s occupants. Richard and Rosemary hurtled forward into the dash, heads slamming hard, their deaths occurring in an instant.

  Will, held in place by some miraculous force he couldn’t explain, was the only survivor of the initial collision, the only one conscious and able to experience the shock as the guardrail fell away, as the car slowed just enough to teeter on the edge of the road, dangling precariously.

  Will wondered if he’d be able to escape and survive… and then the car tipped over the edge and plummeted to the street forty feet below.

  I

  Assignment

  1995 A.D.

  They moved through the lightly traveled hallway, their footsteps echoing in the absence of people or material to absorb the sound. Purified, oxygenated air wafted against them as they walked, feeling more like a natural spring breeze than the forced, stale air one might normally find indoors. As she walked, the young woman observed the construction and layout with a practiced eye. The young man accompanying her presented a casual air, walking with his fingers laced behind his back.

  “We have one room set aside for teleportation at present,” Joshua said. “It’s been sufficient for our needs until now. But with the increased Alliance presence in this part of the world, we’re starting to see…collisions.”

  Ashley nodded. “We had the exact same issue at South Beach, and Sahara’s just now implementing the procedures necessary to resolve the problem. There were too many travelers vying to use a finite number of safe teleportation landing spots.”

  She’d arrived here not long after she’d finished a six month stint at Sahara, the underwater Alliance port city off the southern tip of Africa. Her expertise in designing a teleportation traffic management system for the heavily-utilized South Beach location was being put to use in the lesser-used ports. Collisions—incidents in which multiple people tried to teleport to the same spot at the same time—were avoidable catastrophes. And as their presence in the Eastern hemisphere grew, the Alliance preferred to meet the challenges of increased teleportation traffic in a proactive manner.

  “How do we fix the issue here?” Joshua asked.

  Ashley considered. The current teleportation hub was a single room of modest size. It featured unique objects teleporters could use to travel into the space. The problems were obvious to her experienced eye. “I can answer by explaining what we’ve done at the other facilities. First, we took a single large teleportation room, much like you have here, and divided it up into a number of smaller rooms. The room you have today is large enough for a dozen people, for example; you’d do well to divide it up into seven rooms. That’s what we just did at Sahara, by the way. Once the smaller rooms were built out, we painted each a unique color of the visible spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, blue, violet, and white.”

  Joshua frowned. “That’s only six rooms. You skipped green and indigo. And white’s not really part of the spectrum.”

  Ashley sighed. “Purple and indigo are similar in appearance and could be confused. To fix that issue, we substituted white for indigo.”

  Joshua acknowledged his understanding with a nod. She wasn’t providing a science lecture; they were looking for easily distinguishable colors. “What about green?”

  “The green room is a larger room than the others, able to accommodate multiple travelers at once. We had seven single-person teleportation rooms, but we found that recruiters would try to teleport in with one or more recruits, and…”

  Joshua laughed. “Squish. I can see where that might be a problem.”

  Ashley wrinkled her nose. She didn’t find the idea of teleporting three people into a room smaller than a human telephone booth amusing. Painful? Yes. Amusing? Definitely not. “The green room is larger, able to hold at least three people. More, if there’s sufficient space.”

  Joshua stroked his chin, nodding. “I think I’m beginning to see the logic here. The six smaller rooms provide unique teleportation targets for individual travelers. The larger green room provides a landing spot for someone coming in with one or more recruits. It would also provide space for those bringing in weaker members of the Alliance who might not be able to teleport far enough on their own.” Joshua frowned. “Do people…just pick their favorite color and teleport there?”

  Ashley shook her head. “No. We did try that for a while. People would pick a random color and pop in. However, certain colors got picked at a much higher rate than others. Then people would try to pick unpopular colors. There aren’t a lot of simultaneous teleportation efforts, mind you, but there were enough that we’d get two people coming in at the same time once a week, and the high percentage of collisions helped us realize that we needed to take an additional step.” She stopped walking. “We used the example of reservation systems—say, for hotels—from the human world and applied it to the problem.”

  Joshua cocked his head in interest. “Go on.”

  “With hotels, they maintain a schedule of which rooms are in use and which are not…and more importantly, when. If someone calls looking for lodging, they can determine quickly which rooms are available during the requested dates. It’s similar to what we’re dealing with here, but the timelines are far different. With a hotel room, people might call hours, weeks, or months ahead, and they’ll stay anywhere from a day to a week. Here? If someone calls in, they need to get here immediately. And they only need to hold the room for a few minutes.”

  Joshua nodded. “So the solution you’ve developed requires people to reserve the teleportation rooms.”

  “Correct,” Ashley replied. “We have volunteers sit in a central space with visibility into each of the teleportation rooms. The volunteers are typically people who are new to the Alliance, familiar with Energy but not yet strong enough for long-range teleportation or work on the Outside. We keep two people in that observation room at all times. Everyone traveling to the Outside now has a comm link. We provided specific comm links just for those on duty. If someone needs to teleport, they activate the connection to the comm units at the observation desk.”

  “I’ve heard about that,” Joshua said, nodding. “I’d heard that concept, having a single link for emergencies, was developed for the Defense Squad.”

  “It was,” Ashley agreed. “But, thankfully, it’s only needed once or twice a month for that purpose. Instead of connecting to the nearest Defense Squad, the comm system now lets us contact the people on duty if we need them. The request to teleport comes in, the person taking the call gives them a room color, and…”

  “And they teleport in without concern of collision.” Joshua rubbed his chin. “I can see where that will be helpful for us here as we get more traffic.” He frowned. “Why two people? And what if they assign the same room at the same time?”

  “Excellent questions,” Ashley replied. “We keep cards matching the colors of the rooms on the desk where the volunteers sit. When a call comes to one of them, they take the card on top to indicate that they’re reserving that room. Once they’ve communicated the destination to the caller, the card remains in front of them, color-side down, until the room is available for use once more. At that point, they flip the color side back up and put it on the bottom of the stack. It’s n
ot complicated, but it works.”

  “Simple is often the best approach,” Joshua agreed. “And why two people?”

  Ashley’s eyes took on a distant look. “Emergencies can happen.” She took a sip of the sweet fruit drink Joshua had supplied. Emergencies took many forms, from calls of nature, to the events she’d experienced back in South Beach… and the time she’d met him.

  Seventeen years earlier, she’d been sitting at the volunteer observation desk she’d helped establish when the call had come in. Judith, one the Firsts, had been gravely injured, and Eva needed to teleport her in to get the medical attention the woman required. Archie had assigned them the green room, and had immediately intervened when he realized the extent of the damage. Eva had been knocked unconscious from the massive Energy expenditure, and Judith was slowly dying from her injuries. Archie had notified the medical teams of the severity of Judith’s situation, and had ensured Eva had a place to rest and recover, before returning to his duties. Had Ashley not been there as well, no one would have been there to handle the three rapid teleportation requests that came in while Archie dealt with the life-or-death struggle.

  Had Ashley not been there, she wouldn’t have met a man who’d not hesitated to help two women in their time of greatest need.

  She’d not seen Archie since those days, but they’d gotten to know each other quite well during their shifts. Their time together hadn’t lasted long enough. Once his initial six-month shift had finished, he’d headed back to the Cavern, further developed his skills, and had headed Outside. While she’d remained at the Cavern, developing deep expertise in modern human computing technologies, he was off on missions in New Zealand. He’d have to come through Coral Beach on his way back to the Cavern. It might be childish, but the knowledge that he’d be there at some point had been a key factor in her acceptance of a request by Joshua to visit the undersea port to offer her particular expertise.

  Coral Beach bore strong similarities to the South Beach and Sahara ports she’d already lived in. Like the other sites, it was built beneath uninhabited landmasses, and the port’s exterior was covered with a variety of substances the Alliance had created as part of its never-ending fight to avoid discovery by Aliomenti and human alike. Human radar scans wouldn’t find the port, or the submarines arriving and departing each day. If someone happened upon the port city and looked directly at it, they’d still see nothing. The port was invisible.