World Wright Incorporated (World Wright Inc. Book 1) Read online

  World Wright Incorporated

  Vlad ben Avorham

  Copyright © 2021 Vlad ben Avorham

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover design by: Art Painter

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Launch

  Not Kansas

  Strangers in a Strange Land

  Meet the Flintstones

  From Camp to Keep

  Return Triumphant and Victorious

  We keep growing

  Preparing Foundations

  No Place Like Home

  Festival

  New Experiences

  What a party

  Everything Has Changed All Over Again

  Winter is Coming

  Growing Pains

  New Perspectives

  This had better be important

  Winter

  New Year, New Start

  Broader Horizons

  Priorities

  About The Author

  Launch

  Launch

  The faint hum began to build into an ear-splitting whine. Commander Davidson winced slightly. Even with all the sound dampening precautions, he thought he would never quite get used to the sound of a launch. It wasn’t so much an assault on his ears, but rather the high-speed vibrations that turned the ceramic composite plate in the base of his skull (a souvenir from his days as an A-10 pilot) into a tuning fork.

  Blocking out the discomfort, he focused himself on the checklist. Power: nominal, and building smoothly.

  Next came coordinates. ‘such as they are’ he thought to himself with only a slight cringe, which quickly faded as his adrenaline spiked. The numbers were right on the computer. He sighed quietly. Numbers on a screen do not translate into proper translation across the dimensional rift, nor to an exact location on the other side of the jump. What they were was a close approximation. “Close” didn’t help much if you materialized through the rift into a tree, a building, or even just a few inches below ground level. Still, they were supposed to be correct for this jump.

  Auxiliary cooling breakers, set and press to test valid.

  The BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) band test was actually the most fun for him. With the ringing in his head, the before launch test were not as much, but any other time, or while actually in flight, the sheer amazement of simply thinking what you wanted this bird to do, and having flight controls, thrust vectoring jets, and even emergency maneuvering thrusters all responding to the slightest impulse. It made piloting the XDC-131 Insertion Craft the most rewarding experience of his long career. This and the instincts of the pilot were the real reason most crew’s first jump in this beast wasn’t also its last.

  Inertial suppressors showing green.

  Mag locks engaged.

  Communications: “Control, this is Davidson. Preflight coms check.”

  Davidson couldn’t help but grin a little to himself when his old friend Mike ‘Doc’ Lauffler’s gruff voice rasped back through the headset. “Yeah, we hear ya. Up links check green.” a couple of heartbeats later, “Down links a go too.” Doc was ninety if he was a day. He’d been with the company since the late 2000s, one of the first hired on. No one else could have gotten by with running a control room that informally, but Doc, after nearly thirty years of taking all of his annual bonuses and 401K contributions in company stock options didn’t need the money and his experience couldn’t be replaced at any price. So Doc was kind of a rule unto himself. If Doc wanted something bad enough, he had enough clout that he could bully weaker members of the board to get it. A NASA refugee, Doc often bragged that his first day on the job was the launch of the last Appolo mission. He was also one hell of an engineer. “Young man,” (Doc always referred to him like that, despite Davidson, at 62, being the oldest pilot still allowed to fly) “you’re at T-2 minutes and counting. God speed, and don’t screw the pooch!”

  Davidson’s grin broke out into a wider smile. “Roger that Doc, and thanks for the vote of confidence.” He looked over to the youngest pilot in the company sitting in the co-pilot seat next to him. “Johny, coms are yours. Give them the running count until launch.”

  “Roger, wilco David.” Johny replied with a bit of a gleam in his eye. Like pilots of all generations before him, John St. Claire was an adrenaline junky. Polite terms like “thrill seeker” just didn’t do it justice. At just seventeen he had needed special waivers to even test for his license, but with his reaction times, no one could really object to his being there. Highest ever recorded. What he lacked in experience was made up for in speed.

  It was the combination of Davidson’s decades of experience and St. Claire’s freakishly good reflexes that made them far and above the best team of an already very elite few. It was the computer that actually did the flying, but it did so based upon the information provided to it through the BCI of both pilots. The learning algorithem was finely tuned through more hours and days in the simulator than either pilots would care to remember, as well as mission data logs from their first dozen or so missions. For the first half second prior to launch and the first tenth of a second after translation back into the physical world, the computer relied on young St. Claire’s remarkable reflexes, weighting them just over three to one. Then it would calculate the best course of action between its past records, its own calculations, Davidsons’s experience and St. Claire’s reactions and phase the craft back through the dimensional rift into real space again.

  Their longest flight on record was thirty-seven seconds, their shortest mission was just under one. Total distance? Seven hundred and forty-three light years in the rift, and less than two inches when they come back to real space. Davidson gave himself a headache every time he tried to think about it too much. He was just the bus driver; he reminded himself. Understanding the inside of the rift was for the eggheads in the back. Yeah like most other accomplished Air Force Officers who had transferred over to the new US Space Force back in the mid-2020s, he was no slouch in the brains department even eventually finishing a double doctorate in Mechanical Systems Engineering and Military Science but didn’t really apply.

  As the egg heads crossed his mind, the BCI flashed the crew vitals across his HUD. The “Basket” was full today, but as he ran down the list, other than elevated vitals because of the pre-launch excitement, all six of the “egg heads” seemed locked in and ready. “T-30,” came a steady voice from one of the flight engineers at Control.

  St. Claire took a deep breath. “All readings nominal. All indicators in the green. We are a go for launch.”

  Davidson felt the old, familiar grin steel across his face. “Roger that. Stand by to release docking clamps on my mark.”

  “T-10” the calm voice said.

  The tension built... “4, 3, 2...”

  “Release!” Davidson said firmly.

  St. Claire pushed the last manual control they would need to operate until they had returned just as the voice from Control finished the countdown. “Released!”

  Instantly all awareness of the world
as they knew it vanished...

  Mayday Mayday

  Translation through the rift was complete, and their senses had almost returned when Davidson heard St. Claire let loose a high-pitched shriek. This wasn’t the normal shout of pain or discomfort but the primordial wail of agony in which all concern for appearances or dignity was gone and only mindless pain and instinctual terror remained. Davidson tried to turn to help the young man, but before he could even form the complete thought, St. Claire’s BCI responded to his attempt to recoil from the pain and sent the whole craft into a roll.

  Davidson didn’t have even a fraction of an instant to react before he too was thrown into this blinding pain. It was as if his entire body and mind were ripped apart, but it did not give him the grace of death. Floating in what he could only think of as a blinding white sea of darkness, every fiber of his being pulled apart and seared with a cold flame both inside and out for what seemed an eternity...

  The first thing he realized was that the pain was gone. Not just the mind numbing pain that he had experienced in that bizarre “otherness” of the rift’s hell scape, but also the dull ache in his knees and back as well as the stiffness in his fingers. He slowly forced open his eyes and realized that everything seemed just a little crisper. Hell, even that dull low grade ringing in his ears from too many years in an A-10 had gone completely away. He’d lived with that for so long, he didn’t hardly even notice anymore, but he noticed now that it was gone.

  Looking down at his hands, his eyes grew wide with shock. They weren’t the scarred and gnarled paws of a man who had spent far too many years in a dojo, tourney field, or forge in his life, but they looked as if they had never held a tool, or a weapon, nor struck another man in anger. It was only the cry of outrage from his co-pilot’s seat that snapped him out of his shock and back to more immediate concerns.

  “Look at me!” screeched a high pitched, almost whiny voice. “I can’t be older than five! What the fuck is this?”

  Davidson’s eyes were wide. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. In St. Claire’s seat sat a child, as he had estimated about five years old. The tiny body seemingly swimming in St Claire’s flight suit. The child looked over to him in rising panic. His full emotional melt down only interrupted by the sound of pure Bedlam from the other side of the cockpit’s sealed door. The “Basket” was awake, and by the sound of it, had their own adjustments to reality to deal with. A testament to the training and the maturity of the young man trapped in the child’s body. The sound of the chaos behind them helped St. Claire to regain his composure. “Go ahead and help them, sir. I’m useless for that like this, but I can still run status checks on this heap and see how bad the situation really is.”

  Davidson realized he was still just starring in a daze, grunted, “You’ve got this. Figure out what you can, while I try to un-fuck the situation in the back.” As he said those words, his voice sounded odd in his ears. It was stronger than it had been in years. Decades of accumulated smoker’s rasp just gone in an instant. He shook his head and stood up and almost fell back into the chair.

  Looking down, his leather boots and cotton socks were both just a fine powder on and around his feet. Only the heavy plastic soles were still there, loosely attached to his calves by some nylon reinforcement that had been used between the layers of the leather. Cursing softly under his breath, he carefully kicked his feet free. Placing bare feet that didn’t seem to know what a callous was carefully on the cool aluminum decking of the craft’s floor and making his way carefully back to try to manually force the pressure door between the cabins.

  Power was out all over. The only light was streaming in through a long rent in the fuselage's side. He didn’t want to think what that meant for structural integrity, but that was a worry for later. He had to resort to using the crash axe as a pry bar, but finally, with an audible hiss as the pressure seal broke, the door slid open. What had been a dignified team of late middle-aged scientists at the peak of their professional careers when they had launched not more than an hour or so ago, now looked like the cast of an 80s teen comedy in flight suits. Davidson would have laughed, if he hadn’t felt so much like crying.

  The Gang’s all here

  Looking around the small cabin, Davidson couldn’t help playing the mental game of putting the unfamiliar face with the well-known name. The esteemed Dr. Evita Young was well, young. Maybe fourteen or fifteen by the looks of it. One would never guess she was hiding a 168 IQ, doctorates in quantum physics and applied mathematics from Cal Tech, behind those long strawberry blonde locks and light dusting of freckles. He couldn’t help thinking, ‘we’ve got our Molly Ringwald’.

  Then there was Dr. Georgia “Stonewall” Stone, because trying to argue with her was like trying to argue with a stone wall. Her long gray hair, which was always worn pulled up in a severe bun, was now blonde and had tumbled loose and hung to her waist. Speaking of that, oh, what a change there. From her former Davidson estimated three hundred pounds, the new, maybe nineteen-year-old Ms. Stone might be a hundred and thirty pounds, and in all the right spots. Davidson had to force his eyes to move on. Looking like that during her school years, he thought, even with a 175 IQ how did she ever manage to find time in her social life to complete a Phd in Applied Physics with her accompanying six lesser degrees?

  He almost shook his head as he scanned over to Dr. Anju Gupta. Almost the poster child for the stereotype of the driven Asian overachiever. Davidson could believe Mr. Captain of the Chess and Debate team had his twelve, yes count them twelve, earned degrees, and more honorary degrees than Davidson’s native Texas in August. Even lost out on the Nobel three years running, (for political reasons Davidson suspected) and none of that surprised. If you said that he had a date with a real girl? That would be a reason to call bullshit. Regressing in age to 17 or so only made it worse, not better.

  Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum there was Dr. Marcus Godfreed. At 6’7" and nearly 300lbs of lean muscle, Dr. Godfreed got into The Citadel on an athletics scholarship to get his first degree in Statistics. He looked in his early twenties, and as if he just might be able to bench press a Mac Truck. Fortunately for the world as a whole, Dr. Godfreed didn’t pin all of his hopes on a career in the NFL. His statistical analysis algorithms were one key to letting researchers make sense of insanely large data sets without needing quantum computers. As the only crew member older than Davidson, he was the only one in the “basket” that looked like he could pass for an actual adult.

  Finally, his eyes fell on Josh and Sam Roth. These two looked like they belonged at a D&D or maybe Hacker’s Convention. The brothers, who now looked to be about twelve, had a terrifying 190 IQ. Limited social skills, limited concern for conventional matters. College drop outs, they had started their own internet company in the late 90s and won and lost more money than Davidson would ever see in his life. If it interested them, they could focus for days, neglecting even food or sleep. If it didn’t interest them, no matter how important it seemed to everyone else... Davidson figured it wasn’t their fault, it was a quirk of how their minds worked, but if they weren’t so damn brilliant no one would tolerate everything else that went along with it. He really was dreading a survival situation with these two.

  “No one injured?” Davidson asked. After getting head shakes all around, he just nodded. “Ok, well, if you don’t know how this happened, then you damn sure know that I don’t. The important thing is we figure out where we are now, and how to get home. We can worry about anything else after. Agreed.” He waited to see the worried nods all around. Then he turned back to see what St. Clarie had found out.

  Not Kansas

  Not Good

  St. Claire was just sitting in the chair, staring at his hands and feet, when Davidson returned to the cockpit. “John, are you alright?”

  St. Claire gave a harsh laugh bordering on hysteria. “How could I be?” His voice cracked and came out as a harsh whisper, “Eli, I don’t even have hair anymore.” />
  Davidson blinked, then realized what he was referring to and winced. Having to do puberty twice was a nightmare. Crying about it wouldn’t help though, he needed to get Johnny focused again, “I thought your generation was in to ‘manscaping’” he put added emphasis on the last word making it sound effeminate.

  “Not funny!” St. Claire snapped.

  “Yeah it was.” Davidson replied dead pan.

  St. Claire chuckled sickly, “Ok, maybe a little.” They both laughed harder than the joke deserved, but the tension eased.

  “So,” Davidson said with a sigh. “How bad is it?”

  St. Claire shook his head. “Pooch is thoroughly screwed and expecting kittens. No power and I mean none. No generators, no batteries, no back-up systems, even the plutonium battery that is supposed to last for a thousand years or some such is as dead as your sister’s cell phone after three days lost in the woods. How that happened, I have no answer for it.”

  Davidson sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. “Your boots still in one piece?”

  St. Claire looked at him funny, then fished into the footwell on his side of the cockpit. He pulled up two heavy nylon “jungle” boots, laces still tied. His feet simply shrank out of them. “Yeah, lot of good they’ll do me.”

  Davidson snorted. “I wanted them for me. My leather boots disintegrated, along with my cotton T-shirt and socks. Let’s just say I’m going commando in my flight suit and if I get extra pissed off, you’ll know that the chaffing has started.”

  St. Claire gave a rueful chuckle, “At least your flight suit fits.”

  Davidson nodded, “Yeah, there is that.” He began putting on the boots. “Damn, but your feet are small.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “What was that?” Davidson snapped back.