GAIA Read online

  The Gaia Trilogy I

  GAIA

  Morton Chalfy

  READING BONUS

  SAMPLE CHAPTERS MORTON CHALFY’S GAIA II: GROWTH & ANTLER’S POINT

  STRANGE PARTICLE PRESS

  ISBN: 9781615088560

  Copyright 2016 Morton Chalfy

  Reprinted by arrangement with the author.

  This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein and any other person or fantasy archetype, living, dead, or commercially viable; any such resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Strange Particle Press is an imprint of Digital Parchment Services.

  Front page and back cover imagecopyright 2015Donald Chalfy Photography LLC.

  MORTON CHALFY’S GAIA TRILOGY

  I. GAIA

  II. GROWTH

  III. GLORY

  OTHER BOOKS BY MORTON CHALFY

  ANTLER’S POINT

  THE CAVE OF LOST LOVE

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Epilogue

  READING BONUS

  The Gaia Trilogy II: Growth

  Antler’s Point

  Chapter One

  The screen image was dimmed to its lowest level yet still shone brightly in the darkened room. The sound was off so only the changing vote tally, superimposed on the shot of the Speaker of the House, relayed any information. The man watching the vote count stirred in his seat and grunted slightly as the final tally appeared.

  The vote was 261 to 211 with 50 abstentions against mandatory chipping. The man pushed his chair back and sighed. The anti-chipping bloc had prevailed again but the vote was closer this year than last, the abstentions were more numerous and in his opinion the anti-chipping coalition would be beaten in a year or at most, two.

  He sighed and grunted again as he rose from his seat. He had expected the result but had wanted to see it happen in real time for himself to know exactly whose votes had shifted. The debate had run late and it was 3 a.m. when the final tally was in.

  He had known in a flash that the oncoming victory of the chipping forces meant his life would change radically and he felt badly conflicted about it.

  “I need sleep,” he thought, “and a quiet time to consider my future.”

  As he left his office the hall light illuminated his name and title on the door, Harrison Barnes, Urban Studies, History Department. He was sixty three, tenured, respected and seriously considering throwing it all away over the chip.

  “I need to sleep on this.”

  His part of the University resided on the thirtieth floor of the Mission block, a huge cube with a ten acre footprint that reached one hundred stories into the sky and rode on massive gimbals to protect it from earthquakes. It was a city within the city housing twenty thousand residents, floors of merchandise malls, a hospital, floors of dining and night life and its own security staff.

  Robots continually cleaned the common areas and surveillance cameras monitored all hallways and entrances. The average apartment measured 420 square feet with spaces for impecunious singles starting at 125 square feet and penthouses of up to 1000 square feet. Harrison lived on the 60th floor in a 420 square footer as befitted his status. He tiredly leaned against the wall outside his office and waited for one of the robo-cars that patrolled this corridor. When one arrived he climbed aboard, was ID'd by the robot and told it to take him to his apartment. Quietly the car whisked him along the deserted hallway, into an elevator built to take the cars, up to his floor and soon deposited him at his door.

  His thumbprint unlocked and opened the entryway and he slumped inside. As the door slid shut behind him a faint sound from his sleeping area froze him in his tracks. His ears strained to identify the sound and he crept forward as silently as he could. Beyond his bedroom door, which stood ajar, he made out the sound of a soft snore. Surprised, he gently pushed the door and could then see a form on his bed. In the darkness he could not make it out and so snapped on the light. Startled, his visitor sat sharply up on the bed and sprang to his feet.

  “Oh, Grampa, you scared the shit out of me.”

  The speaker was his grandson Lucas who, he thought, should have been in Washington at his job and who shouldn't have been able to to get into his apartment.

  “What's going on? How'd you....” He stopped before he could say “get in here?” because Lucas was holding a finger to his lips and frantically waving him to silence. The young man had pulled an electronic pad from his clothing and written on it, “This place is bugged. Where can we talk privately?”

  Harrison sat down heavily, his mind quickly assessing the importance of the questions popping up. At last he gestured to Lucas to follow him and led the way out of the apartment and to the bank of elevators. Silently they took one to the topmost floor and then walked to a door marked Maintenance which opened onto a flight of stairs up to an enclosed walkway built around the perimeter of the rooftop. Still gesturing for silence Harrison led the young man halfway down one side until they were under an air intake for the air conditioning system. The flow of air kept up a constant whooshing sound which effectively masked any conversation yet was not so loud as to require yelling.

  “Okay,” said Harrison. “No one can hear you now.”

  With a nervous glance around Luca
s put his mouth close to his grandfather's ear and said, “I need to disappear. You told me we had relatives living in the Outer Lands someplace. I'd like to go to them if it's possible.”

  “Why? What have you done?”

  In answer Lucas pulled a small object from an inner pocked and flashed it at Harrison.

  “It's a hard drive with the plans for building an anti-chip device. Renders you invisible to the chip readers.”

  Harrison felt a chill run down his spine as he realized that Lucas' actions had pushed his own decision making aside and forced the issue of his own leaving. In his office he had known without articulating it that the vote in Congress would force him to leave his comfortable position for someplace else but he thought he'd have more time to plan and prepare for it. Lucas on his doorstep meant the time was now and planning must be done quickly.

  Lucas' day job was at one of the Intelligence hives in D.C. where he and thousands of other twenty-somethings handled and managed the rivers of data that flowed through their machines on a daily basis. What Lucas specifically did was Top Secret so he, and his purloined loot, would obviously be missed and sought after.

  “Do they know you're gone? And with that thing?”

  “Not yet. I left a note for my boss saying I was coming out to see family and would be back next Wednesday.”

  Harrison thought for a while. “How'd you get into my apartment?”

  Lucas held up his thumb which had a piece of tape wrapped around it with another thumbprint, obviously Harrison's, imprinted on its face.

  “Where'd that come from?”

  “Tell you later, when we can talk.”

  Harrison clenched his teeth to stem the flow of questions and leaned in closer. “Go down to the public entertainment floor and wait there for half an hour. Then take the public elevator down to ground level and wait for me near the Broadway door. Don't let anyone pick you up.”

  Lucas nodded and followed Harrison back into the building.

  Harrison was thinking furiously about what he could safely take along and what he would have to leave behind. A sudden break and departure would leave many dangling threads with nothing he could do to help if his absence was to be innocently explained. He first returned to his office to send a carefully worded message to a seemingly innocuous address, “Can't attend family gathering. Romance beckons. H.B.”

  The message was routed through a server that stripped his identifiers from it, replaced them with fictitious ones and then sent it on. He hoped it would get to its object and be understood. He was using a set of code phrases he hadn't used for a decade and just had to trust they would still convey his message. He closed his office and carried only his communicator. His work was all saved in the ether and could be retrieved from anywhere. His notes came with him but all his personal effects were left in place. If things went well they would be evidence of innocence, if things went badly nothing would matter.

  In his apartment he took an all weather jacket and changed into sturdy walking shoes and looked longingly around at the comfortable den he had created and was sure he'd never see again. His last action in the apartment was to summon a robocar built for the interstate system and then went off to find Lucas.

  Making his way through the corridors to the Broadway door he was just in time to rescue his grandson from the clutches of a strolling sex worker of indeterminate gender offering, “any sort of good time you want.”

  The robocar pulled to the curb and its display panel showed his name, H.BARNES. His thumb unlocked the doors and he and Lucas slid into the seats. Harrison manipulated the control screen and indicated Las Vegas as their goal. The robot digested the information, gently advised that all safety harnesses must be in place before it could leave and then smoothly merged into traffic. Lucas started to speak but was silenced by Harrison's finger to his lips. Harrison was fiddling with his tablet and then said, “Okay, we can talk now. I've turned on the interference generator.”

  “Why Las Vegas?,” asked Lucas. Every place there is wired.”

  “Las Vegas is where we'll change transport. Relax.”

  The car inserted itself into a line of cars forming a train heading east with a certain amount of mechano-electronic flair and Harrison repositioned his seat to be able to face Lucas. “We have a long drive,” he said. “Tell me what's going on.”

  Lucas seemed to squirm slightly in his chair and looked out the window at the landscape slipping by.

  “Do you know they voted on mandatory chipping last night?”

  “Yes. I watched the vote.”

  “So that's what's going on. I knew what the vote would be and I can see that next year or the year after it will pass.”

  Harrison nodded at him.

  “And when it passes it will mark the beginning of the end of freedom in America.” Lucas looked grim. “I felt forced. As though I was cornered and the hunters were coming to get me – so, seeing an opening I ran for it.”

  Harrison considered the young man before him and seized on a hint given more by his attitude than his words. “What do you know that hasn't been published?”

  Lucas laughed, “Practically everything I know hasn't been published. I'm a walking box of secrets. Which is why they'll come looking for me as soon as they realize I'm gone.” He looked nervous, “You will be able to get me somewhere safe?” he asked.

  Harrison nodded. “Yes. That's not a problem.”

  “Then what is?” asked Lucas.

  “Oh, everything else. Me, for one. But about what you know?”

  For the next hour Lucas detailed aspects of the pro-chipping forces' strategy that hadn't come out in the media and aspects of the chip's use in Asia that had been suppressed by the governments there. The Chinese in particular had been aggressively using the chip for nearly twenty years and Lucas had statistics about its effectiveness in medicine, education and, in the opinion of himself and his colleagues, in the political arena for control of the populace.

  “Did the Chinese invent the chip?” asked Lucas.

  “No, they've just become the foremost users.”

  “Who did invent it? Not an American?” Lucas' voice rose half an octave.

  “No.” Harrison's history-rich mind raced over the facts. The rise of the chip had been stunningly fast in historical terms. It had taken two hundred years for the climate change wrought by global warming to produce the modern urban metropolis and the immense areas of re-wilded terrain but the chip was less than thirty years old and was threatening to sweep the world.

  “No. Not the Chinese. Two Israelis. Brothers. One an M.D. and one a physicist. Their mother had early onset dementia and took to wandering away. Between them they invented the implantable chip and, very importantly, the chip reader. The chip has a copy of your DNA at its heart so it's the ultimate identifier, has all your medical history and any governmental history you might have picked up along the way. Its signals are based on the quantum properties of the metal used in its construction and can only be read by a reader constructed of the same material.”

  Harrison looked speculatively at Lucas. “Do you know what the metal is?” he asked. “It hasn't been published.”

  “Yes,” said Lucas. “It was licensed to an American firm and we hacked their info.”

  “So they made the chip, implanted one in their mother and sold the Israeli government on the idea.”

  “And then the Chinese?”

  “Yes. Almost immediately. And as the health costs of the Chinese began falling precipitously after the first couple of years the sale of the technology picked up speed.”

  “It sure did,” said Lucas. “Singapore had everyone chipped in less than twelve months.”

  “Right. And they became the poster child for its use. Health care costs plummeted, crime dropped as they placed readers all over the city and control of the population increased. The potential for coercion by a government increased mightily once everyone was in the system, trackable and open to manipulation.”

&nbs
p; “But the citizens apparently genuinely love the security of it all,” said Lucas.

  “Yes they do and to me that's the scariest part.”

  “To me too,” said Lucas. “Mind controlled slaves.”

  Harrison nodded, “And you stole...what?” he asked.

  “I came across a Top Secret report of a purchase from the Israeli company of an item with no descriptor but with an inventory number. It all led me to a paper describing how to build an interferometer tuned to the quantum frequency of the chip and the reader. In effect it renders you invisible to the reader.”

  “Let me guess, the spies had bought it.”

  “Of course. But to me it seemed like the key to get out of the prison.”

  “And so it could be. What do you plan on doing with it?”

  “I thought if I could get it somewhere it could be manufactured by the millions and distributed to freedom lovers everywhere.”

  Harrison's face froze. The use of that phrase set off triggers in his mind. Lucas, seeing his reaction, quickly back tracked. “I was just using that hoary old chestnut for effect. But I do want to see them made in large numbers and distributed. To everyone. We all deserve our privacy.”

  Harrison nodded.

  “Can you help me?”

  “Possibly. Probably. We'll see.”

  The miles rolled by their windows while Harrison pried details out of Lucas. It had taken him months of fruitless searches before he found a reference to the inventory number and then more months until he uncovered the paper describing how to build it and the materials required.

  “You certainly persevered.”

  Lucas nodded and spent a long moment staring out at the landscape.

  “You know I get to see practically all the intelligence reports before they go upstairs?” he asked.

  “No, I didn't know that.”

  “Well, I do. I did, anyway. And the stuff out of Asia is scary.”

  “How?”

  “Well, Singapore has always been tightly controlled. Now China is almost as tight and the rest of the continent is moving that way as fast as they can.”