The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright ©2013-2014 by Alan Seeger. All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Find out more about this and other books by Alan Seeger at www.alanseeger.net

  Paperback:

  ISBN-13: 978-1505626308

  ISBN-10: 1505626307

  Kindle edition ASIN: Coming soon

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  PINBALL

  THE FIRST BOOK IN THE GATESPACE TRILOGY

  To Sammie…

  So glad I found you.

  “Nothing could go wrong because nothing had... I meant ‘nothing would.’ No — then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations — conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”

  — Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

  “Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”

  — Dr. Michio Kaku, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003

  “Time travel. It's a cornucopia of disturbing concepts.”

  — Ron Stoppable, Kim Possible

  PREFACE TO PINBALL

  I’ve been a writer since I can remember; I used to make up stories and fill spiral notebooks with them back when I was eight or nine years old. Then at the age of fourteen, I started writing songs, and that pretty much took up all my time for the next thirty years or so, with the exception of the odd tale (and sometimes they were very odd tales indeed) now and then.

  I’m pretty much fascinated with the subject of the future; when I was a little kid, I read about things like the great Comet Halley, last seen in the year my Nana was born, 1910, and due to return in 1986. I did the math and realized that I would be a doddering old man of 27 when that occurred. I was very excited about the prospect of seeing Halley, and I was very disappointed when 1986 came and went without my having seen so much as a wisp of its tail. I did sort of make up for it in early 1997, though; I happened to be outside doing some work in my yard in rural Oklahoma one evening when I glanced up and caught sight of Comet Hale-Bopp, hanging there in the northern sky, as pale and diaphanous as a ghost, its twin tails clearly visible — the pale, yellowish dust tail and the bluish gas tail.

  So anyway — back to the future (see what I did there?). Here we are in the two thousand teens, and while we do have the hand-held computer tablets that give us access to petabytes of data at our fingertips — a concept I imagined in the early 1970s — we still don’t have Star Trek-style transporters, faster than light space travel, hotels at the L4 or L5 points of Earth’s orbit… hell, we don’t even have Jetsons-style flying cars. What a letdown. Oh, well.

  Anyway, one of my greatest regrets is the loss of a story I wrote in my late twenties that was called “Swappers™.” It was set in the future (duh!) and concerned a technological achievement that allowed two people to swap bodies, essentially — person A’s consciousness into person B’s body, and vice versa, for a period of time. This was done for all kinds of reasons; work-related (perhaps person A had skills that were needed in a place where his health didn’t permit him to go, so person B volunteered his extremely fit and athletic body to do the task), sports-related (an elderly or disabled person Swapping her mind into the body of a 20-year old in order to go skiing, or scuba diving, or spacewalking), or even sexual (once again, person A with a body ravaged by age or disease swaps into person B who is in the prime of life in order to go out and party like it’s 2499). Soon there were commercial enterprises called “SwapShops” where a person could go to rent a body for a specified period of time; soon, however, abuse was rampant as people figured out that a Swapped body was the ultimate disguise for those who wanted to commit a crime, and other people who had some sort of physical shortcoming would conveniently fail to return, absconding with their new, studlier or shapelier Swapped body.

  It kind of sounds like I have told you the entire story that I claimed was lost, but in truth the original story, written in longhand in a spiral notebook that has since been lost to the sands of time, was much, much better.

  At any rate, at long last, here is something that I have dared to put out for public consumption. I hope that you enjoy it.

  Alan Seeger

  January 27, 2013

  CHAPTER 1

  “Oh, I am way the hell behind,” Steven Denver thought to himself, looking at the daily calendar on his computer screen. It was the first week of November, and the deadline that had been set by his publisher for initial completion of his third novel was looming less than ninety days away. He’d made a number of false starts and was juggling three or four possible story lines in his head, but the insanely busy day he’d had yesterday had completely distracted him from the project at hand.

  Steven sat at his desk in the corner of the master bedroom of the small white frame house where he lived with his wife, Lynne, and their four children. He was staring out of the window at the Bridger Mountains of Montana, fading blue into the distance. He was not quite in full panic mode, however. Not just yet. I can do this, he told himself, running his hand through his thick mane of brown hair. He noticed that it was increasingly shot through with silver these days; deadlines were just excellent for causing that.

  His first book, Montana Moon, had been published a little more than four years ago. It had sold fairly well for a first book from a new writer. It was set in the Old West and dealt with the influx of white settlers into the area from the time that it became Montana Territory in 1864 until Montana became the 41st state of the Union in 1889 and described what life was like for them in the rugged frontier that they had chosen as their new home.

  He’d managed to get a three-book contract with his publisher, Bordeaux House, based mostly on his successful track record as a newspaper columnist, initially for the Helena Independent Record and later for the Billings Gazette.

  Steven’s second novel, Greasy Grass, was published two years later. It was based on accounts given by eyewitnesses to the Battle of the Little Big Horn, otherwise known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass to Native Americans. In this well-known clash, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry was decimated by a force of Lakota and Northern Dakota warriors led by Sitting Bull, Gall and Crazy Horse.

  The book was an attempt to put faces on those Native warriors and make them flesh-and-blood human beings, something that Steven felt was missing from most of the historic records. The fact that he was one-eighth Blackfoot had always made Steven feel a connection to Native Americans, many of whom still lamented the loss of their land, culture and heritage, more than a century and a half later.

  Even to Steven, however, Greasy Grass seemed to lack the vibrancy he felt was needed for a historical novel, and he openly admitted that many passages in the book read like a high school textbook. It didn’t sell well at all; sometimes Steven joked that he thought his mother had bought a thousand copies to help boost his sales figures. The project Steven was working on now was his last chance to demonstrate to his publisher that he deserved another contract, but he was stuck for a concept; w
ithout a solid plot idea, there was no new project.

  Steven’s own personal deadline for having the book at least at the rough draft stage had sneaked up and bitten him squarely on the ass, and now he was a full two weeks behind schedule. Deadlines, Steven believed, were the brainchild of some chemically challenged, emotionally stunted and extremely twisted soul, probably a frustrated English teacher from Poughkeepsie.

  His personal work goal as a writer was to produce an average volume of 50,000 words a month. That’s an average of 1,666.666 words a day, Steven grinned to himself. I shouldn’t have issues with the last two-thirds of a word, but the first 1,666 might be a problem. He thought of the twin 666s in that figure and tried to shrug off the obvious joke as a little too easy, but couldn’t resist the thought of his publisher’s head adorned with a pair of Satanic horns and a wicked little goatee.

  CHAPTER 2

  Steven sat staring at the computer keyboard, lamenting the fact that he often fell somewhat short of his daily goal, humans becoming easily distracted as they… Hey, look, Spongebob’s on! Oh, wait. Must concentrate on writing. “Back to work, slave,” he said to himself out loud.

  It may be true that I sometimes have trouble finishing my projects, he thought to himself — he had a file cabinet that contained at least seven partially complete novels of anywhere from a thousand to 7500 words, along with at least thirty short stories in various stages of completion which he had written over the last twenty years — and sometimes I admit I come up with some pretty shitty writing, but I do have a publisher that seems to think I’m halfway decent; at least they thought I was good enough to have signed a contract with me, so I guess I had better quit procrastinating and get on with it.

  He normally had to give himself this mental pep talk three or four times a year, but now he realized that this was the fourth time this month that he had lectured himself in this way. Hmmm… Plot. Characters. Motivation. Setting. He stared at the hand drawn poster on the wall behind his computer. His wife Lynne had created it for him in acrylic paints. She was a teacher at the local elementary school, but created quilts, paintings and other artistic endeavors in her spare time. The poster was a parody of the religious bumper stickers that had been popular a few years before; this one said WWSKD?

  What would Stephen King do? He tried to remember the tips the famed horror writer (some dared to call him a talentless hack, but Steven strongly disagreed; somebody was enjoying all those books the guy had sold in his career, and Steven could only hope to someday attain such success) had shared in On Writing. Start with the character? Start with the situation? He couldn’t recall. It had been a couple of years since he’d last reread it. He thought that he might have to dig in the bookshelf and find it, but there was no time now; November was a-burnin’.

  Felicia Naumova was a spy for the former Soviet Union

  No.

  No one knew that the man in the bunny costume was actually

  Oh, God, no.

  As the dramatic theme music of his life began to play, Arthur Ball opened his eyes and groaned. The music was merely his clock radio which was blaring, and it was six a.m.

  Hmm. Maybe.

  He sadly filed away the Stephen King analogy and thought to himself, “What would Hemingway do in this situation?” Well, first of all, Hemingway would likely have been rip-roaring drunk, even though the clock showed that it was only 8:32 am. I like a little nip now and then, but I’m not the type to get my wick lit this early in the morning. I’ll settle for a nice root beer over crushed ice. Coffee would be good, too, but I don’t feel like making it.

  “Okay,” Steven said out loud, “I’m back in prime writing mode now, all revved up and rarin’ to go.” The kids were off to school, Lynne was off to work, and there was nothing to distract him from… The phone rang. Oh, damn it, who could be calling at this time of the morning?

  “Hello? Yes, this is he… what? Oh, yes, certainly. I’m pretty sure that my wife mailed you a check for that several days ago. No, I’m sorry, I don’t have the check number right here handy. She’s not here right now, but I… what? No, I’m not going to do an electronic check over the phone, I told you, she’s already mailed it. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Thank you for calling.” Click.

  Steven breathed a heavy sigh, his eyebrows twisting toward each other, and shook his head. He hated those phone calls. Yeah, so what if they were a little behind on their bills? Who wasn’t, in this economy? If he was to be honest with himself, however, they were more than a little behind. Their only regular income was Lynne’s teaching salary; Steven got a small quarterly royalty check from the two previous books, but that didn’t amount to a whole hell of a lot.

  They had paid off the house when Steven got his advance upon publication of Montana Moon, so there was no mortgage payment to be concerned about, but there were plenty of other bills to deal with. The utilities could get sky-high during the frosty Montana winters as well as during the hot, arid summers. There was an unpaid hospital bill from when Lynne had had her appendix out the year before — which is what the phone call had been about — and a fairly sizable car payment as well.

  Now, where had he left off? “Back to work, dammit,” he snapped. He cracked a mental whip at himself — I’m a Gemini, I can do that, he thought — and stared at the keyboard.

  As the dramatic theme music of his life began to play, Arthur Ball opened his eyes and groaned. The music was merely his clock radio which was blaring, and it was six a.m. His pathetic little life had begun its next chapter, and

  Staring at the words on the screen, he discovered that he was unimpressed — no, make that extremely unimpressed — with what he had written. If I were writing on paper, he thought, I’d crumple it and take a shot at the trash can-slash-basketball goal. As it was, he held down the backspace key and relegated Arthur Ball to the bit bucket.

  Okay, Steve, what the hell are you going to write about? The melody of “The Book Report” from You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown entered his brain and began dancing around like a group of college drama geeks impersonating a bunch of precocious second graders. “A book report on Peter Rabbit…” He smiled to himself, despite his frustration. He sang out of tune: “How can they expect us to write a novel of any quality in just ninety days? How can they conspire to make life so miserable, and so effectively, in so many ways?” How appropriate was that? Ah, well.

  Now there was a knock at the door. What the hell, he thought. No one ever came to their door. They lived just outside the booming metropolis of Three Forks, Montana, population 1,900. Steven was fond of saying, “We live right in the middle of Fricking, Nowhere. You ever been there? Let me tell ya, it’s nice.” If it’s a Jehovah’s Witness, he thought, I swear to God I’m gonna go find something sharp and pointed.

  But it wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, or a pair of Mormons on bicycles, or even the local Baptists out on visitation. It was the UPS delivery guy. Steven had ordered half a dozen sets of guitar strings the week before from an online supplier. He scribbled his John Hancock for the package and headed back to his office, tempted momentarily to take the time to change the strings on his beat-up Telecaster, but he exercised self-control and sat back down at the computer. Now can I get back to writing? Please?

  There was a box of donuts on the kitchen table. Maybe if he ate one — or a few — it’d give him that little spark he needed to get going. He went into the kitchen and took the whole box back to his desk. There were the little powdered sugar ones and the chocolate ones… Mmm. Good. Sugar rush.

  He sat staring at the screen, mentally juggling plot ideas. Soon he felt his eyelids beginning to droop. Should have had… coffee… with the…

  CHAPTER 3

  Oh, my God, Steven thought. What was that sound? There was the sound of grinding gears, as if a piece of heavy road equipment was outside — or Mecha-Godzilla. But they lived nowhere near Tokyo, although their two oldest daughters desperately wanted to live there. To Steven, it sounded as if someone were digging up a se
wer line. I’ll go peek out the window and see what’s going on, he decided.

  It wasn’t Mecha-Godzilla, but much to Steven’s amazement, it was some kind of huge monster machine. It appeared to be devouring the ground right down to the bedrock and was headed right for the house. He stared in shock. What am I gonna do? I don’t have a car — Lynne had taken it to work — and I can’t possibly run fast enough to escape this thing. It looks as if it’s gonna swallow the entire house, one bite at a time!

  He awoke with a start after having nodded off and realized that the roaring was the sound of the washing machine, out of balance during its spin cycle. He stomped into the laundry room, rearranged the bunched clothes in the washer, and restarted it.

  Fuck it. Now he really did need that cup of coffee. He wandered into the kitchen, hoping that his wife Lynne had left him some java this morning when she left for work, but the carafe was empty. He looked in their sparsely stocked refrigerator, mildly irritated and significantly hungry, and scrounged up the ingredients for a pretty decent little sandwich. Sliced tomatoes, a couple of slices of Cheddar cheese, Miracle Whip and a piece of sad looking lettuce on white bread. He slapped it together and inhaled half of it before he arrived back at the computer. It might not be a breakfast sandwich, but it was still very good. Wow, he thought, I was even hungrier than I realized. Maybe I’ll be able to write now.

  On the way back, he raided the bowl of leftover Halloween candy. Living far out in the boonies as they did, they normally didn’t get very many trick-or-treaters; most years the only ghouls and goblins that came to their door were when Lynne’s cousins brought their preschoolers, dressing them up as ballerinas, pirates, flowers and the like. This year two of the little ones were in matching Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes — they were so cute!