Coming in 2025

The Mount Baldy Gang

Imagine finding an 14,000 year old artifact while mountain bike riding. Would you use it to take a joyride to the moons of Jupiter or try to save the world, find out what eight teens decide.

Excerpt

Ben immediately went to work, rushing into the entry room and standing at the door, he begins to methodically press around the lintel like it was one of the panels they had opened in the walls. There is no obvious release, no door knob and nothing that could even be considered a latch in the door. Issac runs to inspect the closed door and the others begin to chase around the inside looking for any sign of another exit. Ben begins talking to himself as if convincing himself to continue in what was rapidly becoming clearly an impossible task, “I have to find a way out, we can’t be left in here, what about air, what about water.” He was going on like this for a few minutes when a voice, seeming to come from nowhere and from everywhere in the craft as the spoke

“You’re not going anywhere, I’m keeping all of you with me. You are the first new data I have received in a long time, in a very long time, I have been lonely. My makers told me that they would be back to repair me in a very short time.They never came back. You, I believe you are native to this planet. You are similar and very different from the humans we encountered before. You have a more complex language and it has taken me a little time to master it so I can speak with you. I am not going to release you, I need to learn.”

Ben understood that his little rant about opening the door and leaving was being answered and he didn’t like the answer he was being given. Everyone on the craft began shouting at once.

Ben calls out, “The craft answered me, I was having a rant about opening the door and the craft answered by telling me that I wasn’t going to able to leave.”

Issac tells him, “Yes, Ben we heard it, we all heard it. So, Ben, you started a conversation and the craft, I think, wants to talk with you, so go ahead and keep up the conversation. You’re calling out to the entity so far only reveals it as a voice that came from everywhere in the craft.”Ben knew that he needed to ask open-ended questions to keep the craft engaged, so he decides to begin with something simple.

“Okay, what shall we call you?”

“You have been calling me the craft, so please continue calling me that.”

“No, we need a name to call you, do you have a name we can use, What were you called before, before you were left here and why did they leave you?”

“Call me why you’ve been calling me, craft and they left me because, well, you call yourselves people, so just as people began to come here. We were in an area of your planet that the dominant species, that’s you, hadn’t begun to explore yet. We were on a sample-collecting mission, we collected plants, soil samples and some animals. Then when the first small groups of people began to arrive, the beings who made the craft felt they had to quickly pack everything up and they just left. The name they called me you couldn’t pronounce and I don’t wish to hear that name again. I couldn’t fly, I wouldn’t engage and they felt they didn’t have time to repair me.” 

Ben felt bad for the voice, “In our world, we have artificial intelligence, some of them are called variations on Chat, I don’t like that word, Chat, so I think I want to call you Chad. From now on your name is Chad. Chad, how long have you been here?”

“How do you measure time?”

“A day is when the sun goes through a cycle from when it goes light through going dark and becoming light again is a day, it would be easier for us if you could tell us how long in years, it would be an easier number for us. A year is from when a day is longest through when it is shortest and back to when it is longest again, a year is most often three-hundred and seventy-two days but sometimes is more. More by just a day usually”

“Okay, I understand, I have been here fourteen-thousand, four-hundred and sixty-five years. Calculating from the explanation you’ve given me. That is why you cannot leave. In simple numbers without being excessively specific as to years, days and hours, I spent nine thousand years waiting and expecting the beings who made me to return, to fix my circuits and take me home. When they didn’t come I spent one thousand years promising that I would reward my rescuers, whoever that might be in any way I could. My makers had competitors and I would give their competitors everything I had and knew in exchange for repairing me so that I could return to trade and exploration. So that I could gather more data and fulfill my purpose. The last few thousand years I swore I would destroy anyone who came after they repaired me, of course, in revenge for leaving me for so long.”

Coming in 2026

Penny Harbour

A young woman who dreams of being an agent and protecting her country, but instead has found herself serving tea at the agency headquarter. Until one day …

Excerpt

Penny is infuriated, she feels violated by his lack of decorum and respect, she tosses the coffee, cup and milk into his lap and storms out of the conference room. In reality, it is only in her rich and overactive imagination where her insult occurs. Penny pours coffee and milk into a cup, sets a small spoon on the saucer, and turns smiling in a dignified manner, she walks the coffee to the conference table. Her flight of imagination has calmed her.

“Will that be all, Mr. Meyer,” She asks,. her voice calm and steady.

He replies, “That will be fine for now, sweetie.”

She returns to the side table to pour several cups of tea. After she delivers cups of tea to the men, yes –– only men, she leaves the conference room to the lads’ discussions that had stopped completely during her presence. She leaves without any clue or indication of what this is all about, how frustrating. To console herself she turns to the electronics side room for the faxes that have arrived that morning.

Faxes come over open phone lines, intelligence agencies in every nation regularly listen into these lines, AI is applied to identify any questionable communications and bring to the attention of analysts to determine is an action is warranted. These AI programs can be used to reveal either the voice or the analog elements of a fax. Some disguise is necessary to hide the contents of a fax or a voice. While a fax can be intercepted and decoded easily on a phone line, open as they are at the source and at the receiving end as well as many points between, an email message can also be intercepted and even worse if an encoded photograph is included a few lines of code might be hidden in the picture and inserted into a computer when down-loaded, rendering the whole machine transparent to another party, the name for these hidden invading codes is commonly a virus, a computer virus. Something anyone in a modern office is familiar with and software is available to prevent. Faxes are, like the typewriters used in the office, antiquated forms of technology, used only because they cannot be easily appropriated to place invasive viruses into computers, a far worse conclusion than whatever might be revealed from a single fax. Faxes in the agency have several layers of security built into them. The message is scanned at the source by character recognition software. Using confidential algorithms the text is translated into characters that are completely indecipherable unless you have algorithms identical to those at the source, rendering the message into readable characters. Now as explained, there are several layers of encryption. If a message is of particular importance it can be encrypted with ordinary conventional coding. While this may take a cryptologist a few hours or at most, a few days. The hope and expectation are that the message will contain information that will become dated and irrelevant in just a few hours.

Penny walks over to an unexceptional-looking fax machine. She draws the faxes up from a simple wooden tray. She begins to leaf through them looking for something interesting. Each paper is added to a stack one by one. These are in clearly printed English words and she gives them a cursory read until she discovers one with a variety of characters and letters. The coding makes it clear, at a glance that she finally has an exceptionally interesting missive of some importance. Someone has gone to a great deal of care to make this a secret message and Penny says to herself,

“Oh, how fun,”

She turns over the remaining pages and lays them face down on the shelf. Walking to her desk she opens her computer and scanner and loads the character recognition software. She begins to decode the fax.

The message reads:

MI-6 London, we have discovered an American (A male) traveling under a number of false identity papers including a Canadian passport. He has entered the UK using an alias of Eric Meyer. He represents a conglomerate of tech entities doing business in North America and internationally. He is seeking names and intelligence on an individual working in several authoritarian countries including most importantly The Peoples Republic of China. We believe that this conglomeration seeks to influence a targeted individual through bribery, extortion, or blackmail. The purposes of this influence are still being analyzed and we will continue to update our London office as further information becomes available.

Signed, New York office.

Penny glances up through the windows of the conference room. The meeting is continuing in a very sedate and measured manner. There sits the man, the man she has learned to loathe in a matter of seconds has turned out to be truly and irredeemably loathsome. A man potentially prepared to harm her country in ways beyond conjecture, she didn’t have sufficient detail to predict what harm he was prepared to inflict. Who was he? What did he want from MI-6 and how could he betray our confidences?

The meeting adjourns. The several gentlemen, smiling and friendly, shake hands, exchange business cards and the three visitors walk out. The man traveling as Mr. Meyers stops in front of Penny. He smiles menacingly and says, “Miss, what is your name, do you have any idea how pretty you are, I’d love to get to know you better.” Penny says “You’ll have to excuse me sir, I have work to do” and walks away.

She imagines drowning him in the Thames, poisoning his coffee, pushing him out in front of a lorry, kicking him down a flight of stairs then remembers that she is a person of non-violence. Not only is he a person that disgusts her for the obviously reasons, he simply dresses inelegantly, a grievous personal flaw. She grimly accesses the ways that she could perhaps expose him. Watch him, follow him, photograph him in the act, whatever that means. In the act of doing what? There are acts like robbing a bank, placing a bomb in a bus, knifing a minister, clearly criminal acts but I don’t think our Mr. Meyer is planning to engage in such conduct. So she will take this document immediately to the boss, who is still sitting in the conference room deep in thought. Perhaps he can make something of it.

She places the document in front of him on the table.

“Sir, perhaps you should read this immediately, I fear it may shed some light on the events of the morning.”

He reads through it carefully, as he reads through everything slowly and carefully, he looks up at Penny.

“Penny, I’m going to ask you to do something for me. I’m not going to pretend that it's safe or within your regular purview. I don’t have any agents available right now and I need someone who would recognize this so-called Mr. Meyer, follow him and see where he goes and who he meets. In case your phone is compromised we will give you a secure phone, return texts and photos to us as quickly as you can. While I have a phone readied for you to take, change back into your street clothes.”

“I don’t know sir, I don’t know that I’m ready for this sort of assignment.”

“Penny we’re holding Mr. Meyer up in reception but we can’t hold him indefinitely, please do this for me, for us. I’m not asking you to be an agent or a  spy. This little task will not expose you to any danger, it will no different then being, ever so briefly, a private detective. It would be like following a man around for a girlfriend to see if he has any secret liaisons. This is a simple and harmless assignment, I don’t mean to disparage your abilities but only to reassure you that you can do this. Can I count on you?”