Schooled

by Pamela Ruth Foland

  Schooled

  by Pamela Ruth Foland

  © 2019 Pamela Ruth Foland

  Lincoln, NE

  rinsoxy@hotmail.com

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 9781712274293

  Recommended order for reading,

  Factors, Sanctuary, Refuge & The Preserve Series

  Book

  1Everybody Loses

  2Trying Again

  3Sanctuary Rising

  4Invasive

  5Eyes, Love & Water

  6Minds, Mothers & Stone

  7Sanctuary Falling

  8Rise of Refuge (to be finished)

  9(to be written)

  10Escaping Towards Destiny

  11Rebellions & Reconciliations

  12Beyond the End of Everything

  13Shot in the Dark (to be finished)

  14Fade to Black

  15Memories Lacking

  16The Rift

  17Schooled

  18Hell-hound (to be finished)

  Prologue

  Rillian D’lliana DyRelevar knocked on Mae Amante’s door. It was her office as much as it was her home. She was nearly always found there. Three tight knocks brought one of Mae’s personal assistants to the door. Rillian knew his name was Mark. They would work closely on projects in the future, but this was the first time he will have seen her. Time travel could be hard to follow. She had discussed at length with his future self what she could reveal and what she could not.

  “Ma’am, how may I help you? Mae is busy at the moment but perhaps I can be of service,” Mark began.

  Rillian let him speak. She clearly saw Mae arguing with the leaders of the Factor Union. They were making demands she didn’t have enough information to deliver on at this time. Rillian wished she could tell Mae what she knew, but… causality.

  “Thank you Mark, I do believe you can help me. I discovered an abandoned settlement and school facility in an asteroid. All indications are that we are the ones who built it. The thing is it has been abandoned for thousands of years Preserve time. I think it is time for us to figure out how to travel backwards and build it,” Rillian stated.

  Mark blinked at her, he glanced at his pad. Rillian knew that he was in the middle of reading a report on the recent innovation in portal technology which allowed travel into the Preserve’s past. It was top secret. “Let me guess, miss, you are from the future?”

  “Quite,” Rillian stated, it wasn’t a word she normally used but Mark had been specific. She held a tablet out to him. “These are the specifications, and they have been countersigned by Mae and the future Chief of field Operations.” Brenda’s signature was suitably oblique that he couldn’t quite read the identity of the woman who had yet to arrive in the Preserve.

  “Okay, I can have this ready in...” he tapped at his pad.

  “Four days,” Rillian stated. He blinked and nodded, “I will need temporary housing until everything is ready. Once the crew and I go back, that tablet will inform you at the appropriate times for the other portions of my mission. Do keep a secure journal on this whole enterprise, we will make use of it later.”

  He tapped on his tablet and handed it to her. It would keep track of her temporary allotment during her stay, it also held a map to her temporary quarters. Everything was in order for the moment. The tablet needed only the input of her name to validate it fully. “Thank you Mark.”

  “You know my name but what is yours?” He asked right on cue.

  Rillian lifted the tablet to her chin and tapped the identify icon, “Andrea D’llen, headmistress of Aspirations Academy.”

  - - - - - - -

  Chapter One

  The Kids

  Lyla Amante awoke to the absolute certainty that her mother was going to come for a visit this afternoon. This was extremely odd. She never knew her mother was coming until she opened the front door and found her there. Her mother worked somewhere in Sanctuary, the de-facto capital of The Preserve. Lyla lived with her father in what would have been Nebraska if her world were a typical earth. Lyla bounded from bed and excited at the prospect of seeing her mother, Lyla went into her bathroom and freshened up for the day.

  With her thick blonde hair still dripping from the shower, Lyla wiped the steam from the mirror. Her blue eyes stared back at her, so much like her mother’s. Most of Lyla’s features could be attributed to her mother’s genes. It seemed most of what she got from her father fell into the temperament and personality characteristics. Her father was easygoing and patient, but his anger was solid and irrepressible. Lyla brushed her teeth thinking of her parents. Her mother spent almost all of her time working in Sanctuary. She seemed much stiffer and more formal than Lyla’s father. She rarely showed emotion. When she did occasionally crack a smile, or even more rarely she cried, it was as though a dam had broken and everyone in the room could feel for her. Lyla didn’t know how her parents even fit together, but then again perhaps that was why they lived in two different places.

  Lyla danced back into her bedroom to get dressed for the day. As she searched for the pair of cutoff overalls she wanted, Lyla hummed, “If you’re happy and you know it...” Still humming, Lyla descended the farmhouse stairs two at a time. She practically danced into the kitchen, startling her calico cat, Peaches.

  Her father turned from the breakfast he was making to face her, “What’s up buttercup?” His accent was subtly different than many of the other local farmers. The local farmers were from all over various parallel earths. Lyla assumed he wasn’t from an earth. It wasn’t a totally preposterous idea, the omniverse had been expansive, and in its many realities there were billions of inhabited planets though the number of intelligent species were relatively small. Still, Lyla assumed she and her father were essentially human. “I am certain mother will be visiting tonight!”

  Lyla’s father dropped the frying pan he held, and swore as it landed on his shoe. Grumbling wordlessly he eyed her, “How do you know?”

  Lyla scooped up a green apple with just the slightest blush of pink from the fruit bowl on the counter. Apples were one of the few earth crops her father cultivated on their largely automated farm. “I don’t know, dad. I just felt it when I woke up.” She bit into the apple, it was just as juicy and tart as she expected it to be.

  “What time was that?” Her father asked nervously.

  Lyla eyed her father. She couldn’t understand his uncharacteristic reaction. This wasn’t the first time she made a declaration like this. Her father always responded with the same speech about how her mother was very busy and a visit just was not likely. Why would today be any different? “Like half an hour before I came down.”

  Her father looked at the clock on the media screen across from the stove, which served as the main bulletin board of the house in addition to playing most types of media from sound recordings to 3d videos. Lyla could almost read his mind as he counted back from that moments. He mumbled to himself in a language he only used when he was flustered, “What did it feel like?”

  “Like mom was telling me she had cleared her schedule and made time for me today,” Lyla was actually a little frightened at the third degree. Her father rarely got flustered. It had really only happened a few other times in her experience. One time, which she would never forget, she remembered telling him that several of the cows had told her a tornado was coming, half a beat later the house AI had informed them it had raised the storm shields and braced the farm for what it termed “Inclement weather…” it was the euphemism the program used for things like tornadoes. Lyla had been six. The next day Lyla had fallen ill and her father nursed her back to health. It seemed every time she made statements to him like that she turned up ill. Lyla eyed her father and knew she would shortly fall ill. She knew it with the same certai
nty that her mother would be there, and that it was somehow her father that made her ill.

  “Maybe you’re right this time. How about we work together today and bake her a nice cake?” Her father suggested.

  Lyla decided she was going to make herself scarce until her mother arrived. She might even spend the day in her secret clubhouse. “I don’t know dad. I had plans for my day… I was going to check on my patch of steakfruit and tanerian breadfruit. You know that is on the other end of the farm...”

  “I could take you,” her father suggested, reaching for her.

  Just as certainly as she knew her mother was coming, Lyla knew she could not let her father touch her. “I’m cool!” She smiled, snatched another apple, and dodged out the door. She was well on her way to the patch before her father could set foot out the door. She stopped after a while to chat with one of the android ranch hands. The artificial intelligences inhabiting the androids of the farm were some of her only friends. “Kenobi, how are the basketball melons doing?”

  “Well, well Miss Lyla, the crops are doing well. How are you feeling? You look a little pale, perhaps you should check in with your father?”

  Et tu Kenobi? Lyla smiled. Of course her father would recruit all the agricultural AIs. “It is okay, Kenobi. I feel fine. I promise if I begin to feel sick I will call my father immediately.”

  “As you will Miss Lyla,” Kenobi cocked its head to the side and went back to monitoring the less intelligent AIs maintaining each of the plants in its sector.

  Lyla changed course. Her father thought she was headed for her garden patch, and he wanted to get her home so bad he set the help after her. Lyla knew if she stayed on the farm one of the androids or other AIs would rat her out, so Lyla headed to the road for town. She wasn’t running away exactly, just relocating until she felt the situation was more favorable. Lyla had gone to town unannounced before. It was easy to thumb a ride from one of the other farmers on his way to Stratton, the closest town. Out in the omniverse, its population usually fell to around four hundred by the turn of the twenty-first century. Inside The Preserve, Stratton had reached a population of nearly a thousand.

  Lyla made it to the road quickly and without encountering another supervisory android. The lesser AIs she passed probably weren’t specifically tasked to keep an eye on her, so they probably wouldn’t report her position. On the Road, Lyla began walking towards town. By mid-morning she wished she had thought to bring more than an apple to eat. She ducked off the road and harvested a not quite ripe Tanerian breadfruit. It was on the smaller side and much starchier than she liked, but it would reduce her hunger.

  Not long after she finished the fruit, which was more like a dinner roll in texture and taste, Lyla crossed the territory line onto the nearest neighbor’s farm. Tau specialized in heirloom legumes. He was a bean man. He harvested daily and drove the day’s harvest into town for immediate sale or processing. It took her another half an hour to come up even with the driveway to his farmhouse, but her timing was good. Tau was just a short distance down his drive, on his way to town.

  Tau stopped and rolled down the automatic window of his classic farm truck. “Hey, Ly, going to town?” He shook his long auburn hair from his eyes. He had a comfortable, gentle expression on his face. He wore the stereotypical farmer out fit of a striped shirt and pair of overalls with one strap unfastened.

  “Yeah, Tau, can I hitch a ride?”

  Tau smiled at her, “As long as you help unload. Tossy is nurturing a young program and today she is downloading it into its new body.”

  “Tossy? She finally managed to have a ‘droid worthy offspring?” Lyla hopped in the cab of the truck.

  Tau continued on towards town. “She is a good AI, not always the most organized and tends to cross code lines with the lesser AIs but this time Kenobi was the father!”

  Lyla smiled. Kenobi was her favorite of all of her farm’s android AIs. “She finally made a good choice. What was it last time? The vacuum?”

  “Actually it was the lawn mower,” Tau laughed. Lyla liked Tau. Sometimes he tutored her in music appreciation. He had been a violinist in a major orchestra on the earth he came from. His native universe had been destroyed a few years before Lyla was born. He had lost the use of his right hand in the evacuation. Though Sanctuary’s medics had restored most of the use of the hand, he was no longer capable of symphony level performances. According to Tau, gardening had been a hobby and farming seemed a good choice for a new career.

  “So what variety are you bringing to market today?” Lyla glanced over her shoulder at the stasis boxes in the bed of the truck.

  “It is a variety called rattlesnake snap beans. They are supposedly very tasty,” Tau stated.

  “Haven’t you tried them?”

  Tau laughed, “Believe it or not, I hate the taste of beans! I grow them because they grow well for me.”

  Lyla laughed. The way Tau talked about his plants, she thought he loved them. This was the first time she had heard otherwise. “I guess it also helps keep you from eating your profits.” Lyla’s stomach chose that moment to growl. She had thought the breadfruit would suffice, but apparently her stomach thought otherwise.

  “You missed lunch again, didn’t you?” Tau scolded. Lyla nodded sheepishly. “Girl you are growing every day and you need to keep a foundation of good nutrition to reach your full potential.” Tau had given her the speech many times, and she just nodded. He seemed to think she had more potential than she did. Faintly Lyla thought she heard Tau whisper to himself, “The girl is never going to live up to her mother’s shadow if she doesn’t take care of herself.”

  Lyla frowned, “What was that about my mother?”

  Tau glanced at her in confusion, “What do you mean?”

  “You said something about living up to my mother...”

  Tau shook his head, “I didn’t say anything about your mother.”

  Lyla wanted to contradict him but he said it with a conviction that chimed in harmony with her sense of his honesty. But what about what she heard?

  “I will buy you lunch at That’s a Pizza,” Tau stated.

  Lyla frowned, “Could we go to Brock’s instead?” She didn’t really care about lunch. Was she hearing voices now? Was it her imagination? Or did she have some kind of telepathy? The Preserve was full of telepathic races. Humans weren’t commonly considered one of them except in very extraordinary cases. Lyla knew she wasn’t extraordinary, but did that mean she wasn’t human? Her worries about her father’s sabotage left her mind. She had more existential questions to contemplate. What was she? And did it change who she was?

  They arrived in town in minutes. Lyla helped Tau unload the truck at the Co-op loading dock. She shuffled around in the parking lot while he negotiated the level of allotment his crops earned. Lyla watched the negotiations haphazardly through the plate glass window. She missed the resolution of the negotiations but immediately knew, from the jaunty tune Tau whistled as he left, that Tau was more than happy with the results.

  “How about lunch?” Tau asked.

  Lyla smiled and nodded. Tau led her diagonally across the street to one of the main restaurants in town. It specialized in home-cooked food and only had one food processor for molecular reprinting meals. Lyla loved the food cooked in the restaurant, sometimes it was absolutely horrible. In The Preserve horrible food was a rarity. It really was the chance that it could be terrible that excited Lyla. Of course for the most part the food was really good. They reached the restaurant. It was simply labeled, “Brock’s Bar and Grill.” Lyla had never met any Brock, and she was pretty sure the name was a holdover from before this earth had been sucked into the crunch-space of The Preserve. It was a small restaurant built as a quanset hut with a false storefront.

  Tau led her in, and they seated themselves at Tau’s favorite table next to the blackboard with the daily special written in colored chalk. Today’s special was roasted chicken, potato salad, corn on the cob, with iced tea and a bowl of lemon
pudding for dessert. When the waitress, who went by Sally Mae arrived, Tau ordered two specials. Lyla suspected that Sally Mae was not the waitress’s real name, or if it was, Sally Mae had chosen to change it. Sally Mae returned with their tea.

  Lyla couldn’t understand the impulse some people had to change their names. Why would anyone give up something that was as essentially theirs as that. It was how you identified yourself to others. It was the first thing most parents gave their children, sometimes even before they left the womb. Lyla shook her head from side to side.

  “Deep thoughts?” Tau asked.

  “No just silly ones,” Lyla answered as their iced tea arrived.

  Tau dumped at least four tablespoons of sugar into his tea and began stirring. “Lyla, do you want to talk about why you decided to hike into town this morning?”

  Lyla frowned. For half a second she thought perhaps her father had, “gotten to” Tau. “I just woke up feeling strange. I was sure my mom was going to visit this afternoon. After a morning of walking it seems a lot less real.”

  “Your mom is really busy,” Tau admitted, “but I know she loves you very much. You are her biggest treasure. I know she would do anything to give you a normal childhood.”

  “Then why does she spend so much time away?” Lyla felt tears threatening.

  Tau opened his mouth, closed it, and then took a large drink of his tea. He was obviously stalling in an attempt to come up with an answer. “Lyla, there is a lot you don’t know.”

  “Tau! Lyla,” Lyla’s mother called from the doorway of the restaurant. She went directly to their table.

  “Mom!” Lyla squealed.

  Her mother smiled and threw open her arms. Lyla ran into the embrace, “Lyla, are you sitting down to lunch?”

  “Yeah mom!”

  Lyla’s mother sat at the table across from Tau. Sally Mae rushed to the table, “Hello ma’am, what can I get you?”