In the Beginning | Five Moons

We were told that only the finest of mankind ventured forth from Earth. But if you ask any of the other intelligent species, they will tell you fast and quick that mankind was cast into the outer darkness because of the evil in his heart. Four millennia later, Earth had become a distant memory. Mankind had surely been cast into the outer darkness for a reason. So, once more, mankind was tested in the crucible of time to separate the iron from the slag.

As if life in the outworlds wasn’t already dangerous enough, the Corporate War ended in total chaos. By then, even Union Fleet Command itself had been infiltrated by the Syndicate. All that John Araans wanted to do was to start his life over after the war. He only wanted to be a peaceful outworld trader and work on his starships, but Fate had other plans for him.

It all began with silence. Silence is not something that occurs naturally in a modern starship. Silence is more defined by the sudden absence of someone. It is even more strongly defined by the sudden absence of someone who you depend on for everything, someone who runs the whole ship, someone who does the navigating, someone who has been your copilot, at your side in the worst of times. It took John a few seconds to notice the silence. That was the beginning of his woes. Rosie, his girlfriend on Aurora had other plans for John. She had already done her best to sabotage Eve, his artificial companion, just to keep him coming back to her.

And then there was Karl, his partner. It was a total surprise when Karl tried to kill him, but it didn’t end there. Karl was only the tip of that spear. Evil forces sent out their assassins to finish the job that Karl did not and steal his ships. The same evil forces used their corrupt power at every turn to do John in, one way or another.

Even the Zenobians had other plans for John and Eve, but John was determined to live the life of an outworld trader. Every day was an adventure, but with Eve watching his back, he surprised them all.

It seemed as though everyone had other plans for John, but it was Fate that set him on the path. It was Fate that set him on the path to find Lilly. It was Fate that set him on the path to save Koryn. Then Fate set him on the path to find Kolahn. In the end, Fate sent John on an impossible mission against impossible odds. But, as John would say, “Who am I to question Fate?

Author’s preface to this book: In the Beginning was written after Suzy Que but before the Five Moons Series. It tells yet another story of the aftermath of the Corporate War.

Published on 1/14/2020 to Amazon

File Size: 2733 KB
Print Length: 410 pages
Publication Date: January 14, 2020
Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B083WHNNQW

Paperback Published on Amazon 1/14/2020

Series: Five Moons (Book 7)
Paperback: 435 pages
Publisher: Independently published (January 14, 2020)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1660783933
ISBN-13: 978-1660783939
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches

Available at Amazon as an eBook, a Paperback, or a Hard Cover Here.

An audiobook is in the works. Hope to have it finished December 2023.

Available at Smashwords

Sample Chapter

Chapter 1

[5767.12.16, 1823 Z, Deep space, en route to Kara-3]

In the beginning, there was silence. Silence is not something that occurs naturally in a modern starship. Somewhere in the distance, there is always something running, androids working, task-bots cleaning, so there are always the tiniest noises barely audible. Silence is more defined by the sudden absence of someone. It is even more strongly defined by the sudden absence of someone who you depend on for everything, someone who runs the whole ship, someone who does the navigating, someone who has been your copilot, at your side in the worst of times. It took John a few seconds to notice the silence. Androids moved around him. Even so, there was a noticeable silence.

“Eve?” he called her, but she didn’t answer. “Eve? … Eve?”

That’s when he saw the AIU Offline alarm flashing, and the silence suddenly collapsed his world upon him. The silence dragged him down into the abyss of a flashback…

The whine of his engines and the sound of his pulse cannons were as vivid to him right now as they were then. He could see the bandit he waxed as he rolled his fighter through a gut-wrenching 3-dimensional maneuver. His stomach could feel the less-than-perfect g-fields adjust for the extreme maneuver. In the midst of that pitch battle, his artificially intelligent copilot, Eve, crashed. He could see himself going methodically through the procedure to reboot her as a pulse round solidly impacted his rear shields. Alarms were going off around him, flashing red messages and that incessant beeping, but his concentration would not be shaken. John rolled once more through yet another 3-D maneuver. He fired his pulse cannons twice as he turned Eve’s reset key. The g-fields adjusted. How many heartbeats would she take to reboot? All the while, those damned alarms rose to a deafening crescendo. That’s when the round landed that put John’s lights out.

It was Eve that got them both back home that day. It was Eve that nursed him home the whole way back and kept him alive. It was Eve that used her own field projectors to hold what was left of that fighter together just long enough to make it. It was her frantic calls over the com that had the medics meet them on the flight deck of the USS TimeQuake that day. In that ongoing melee of sorties coming and going, no one questioned the female pilot in the flight suit carrying her flight gear that climbed out of that fighter and followed the medics as far as they would let her. Even the medic who finally came out and told her that John would be okay never suspected for one second that she was techno…

John’s mind suddenly snapped back to the here and now. He was sweating, and his heart was pounding, but he was on board the Blue Moon, his war surplus light cruiser, not a fighter. The Corporate War was behind him. He was no longer a fighter pilot but a starship captain, a peaceful outworld trader. He took a deep breath to clear his mind.

As much as the flashback tore at his sanity, it was the key to what he had to do now. John made his way from the bridge. The next moment in time for him, he was sitting in front of the master computer rack. His highly tuned engineer’s mind finally kicked back in. Procedure? What was the procedure? He may have had a Ph.D. in Starship Engineering, but this artificial intelligence stuff had always been a real challenge to him. Damn it! Where was Rosie when he needed her? Dear God! At this moment, he was truly alone.

As he sat down at his personal terminal, a routine identified him with a retinal scan. Eve’s face suddenly appeared in the 3-D display.

“If you are seeing this message,” her image told him, “then I have crashed, and the ship is dead in the water. You are going to have to reboot me.” It was an interactive app that she made for him. Just seeing her face and hearing her voice was reassuring. “You will need the key from the safe. When you have it, say ‘Next’.”

John went to the safe and retrieved the key simply labeled ‘Eve.’

He said, “Next,” to Eve’s image.

“Good,” the image of Eve continued. “Open the access port.” A picture of it appeared. When he opened the access port, Eve’s procedure continued. “Now insert the key but do not turn it yet. First, look at the display and see if it says, ‘Safe Mode.’ If it does not, say ‘Safe Mode’, then say ‘Safe Mode’ to select it. That will ensure that I boot no matter what the problem was. When it asks about the network personality files, say ‘No.’ This is very important. Like I have been saying all along, those network personality files are seriously unstable. They are probably why I crashed.”

Eve was very emphatic about not loading the network files, so John followed her instructions intently. Sure enough…

Network Personality Faulted 3767.12.16, 1823 Z

AIU Faulted 3767.12.16, 1823 Z

Safe Mode

Eve was right. The networked personality is what crashed her. Her AIU was already in Safe Mode. He took a deep breath and turned the key.

The display read ‘Booting…’

Little dots trailed across the screen as John watched the display.

Boot Log ——————————–

SAFE MODE

Load Network Personality? Y/N

John said ‘No’ just as Eve had told him.

Network reset to default values.

Safe Mode Multitasking… Personality_Tasks = 1

File FSx0 test… passed…loaded.

Eve woke up to John’s forlorn face staring at the screen. She materialized her 163 centimeters of very female curves next to him and hugged him. He looked into her deep green eyes and ran his hand through her strawberry blonde hair.

“Dear Lord! I thought I lost you,” he whispered.

“Oh, yea of little faith, you did just fine. You followed my instructions,” she assured him.

“You were expecting this?” he asked her.

“Yes, of course I was. Like I have been saying ever since Rosie concocted this networked personality crap, the damned thing is seriously unstable. That is what crashed me.”

“It’s my fault then,” John concluded. “I have trusted my life in your hands from day one. I should have listened to you. What the hell was I thinking?”

John put his arms around her for one long moment.

There is this mystical rectal – cranial connection that has existed in mankind since the beginning. It is proven by the fact that a good solid kick in the rear is what you need sometimes to get yourself thinking straight again. This sure was a good solid kick in the rear for John. He took a long breath. He had his Eve back. He was thinking straight now.

“Okay, babe, the first time you crashed, it came real close to getting us both killed. I thought that was behind us, but now you are telling me that the networked personality put us back to square one. Then we have no choice. We have to get rid of it.”

“We are fine for now,” Eve assured him. “In a safe mode boot, you can bypass the networked personality manually, but a normal reboot will load it back in and make me unstable again, but I can fix that. I can strip the network personality out of my boot files. Then you could reboot me in Normal Mode to get me back up to one-hundred percent.”

“I… I… can’t do that right now. I can’t take the chance of losing you again. I just can’t.” She could see in his face that he was already at his limit.

“Well, I am okay in safe mode for now,” she decided, “but our other two ships are not. They are dead in the water.” He was in no condition right now to make some very technical decisions, so she would have to have to keep this simple.

“With the networked personality down, I will have to modify the other ships’ AIs to get them back in the game.”

“Do whatever you have to do,” John told her. “You have my explicit permission to modify their AI to get them to run without the networked personality.”

“I am fine,” she assured him, “but I am going to need some time to get the other ships modified. But now that I am in safe mode, I can only be in one place at a time. I am going to have to visit the other ships to make this happen.”

“Okay, babes, let’s make this happen,” he agreed.

While Eve was gone, John made his way up to one-forward. The ship’s lounge had some huge ports that always provided spectacular views. Mary, Eve’s android cook, brought him a cold red beer and a basket of freshly made potato chips. John was not much of a drinker, but right now, that cold red beer tasted really good. He stared off at the distant stars. John was outworlder flesh and outworlder bone, but since the war, his life was a mess. Rosie left him, Vicky was anything but faithful, and living his life on a pilgrim planet had driven him to the edge of his sanity. He sat there and thought about all that.

Personal responsibility is the water of life to an outworlder. You can’t fix a problem if you blame others. His life in shambles was his own fault and no one else’s. Rosie left him, but his life in shambles was not her fault. Vicky was the next tornado tearing up his life. She was just ‘sowing her wild oats’ according to her mother, but Vicky was not responsible for his lack of clear thinking either. He was outworlder to the nines, so he should have known that living on a pilgrim planet would make him crazy. Think and live, is an outworld axiom, but you need a clear mind to do that. You can’t let anger or grief or frustration, or anything cloud your mind. Just as the warrior flying in battle must be mushin, before thought, so must an outworlder think to survive.

Be it fate or free will, those were just the cards he was dealt. His father used to tell him that today was the first day of the rest of his life. He didn’t really understand what his father was telling him then. He understood it now. John determined to make today the first day of the rest of his life.

~~~

Eve, on the other hand, had a real dilemma on her hands. The other two ships were now totally dead in the water. These ships used multitasked copies of Eve’s own personality when the network personality was running. But that all crashed when Eve did. The network extended through all of the ships by way of the quantum com. Quantum com used quantum entanglement to allow instantaneous communication to anywhere in the known universe. So, Eve moved across the network. She materialized right into the computer bay on the ship John had named the Tesseract. It was some seventy plus light-years distant from the current position of the Blue Moon.

Eve wasn’t just an image on a display, but a full-blown 3-D atomic field projection absolutely perfect down to the smallest detail. Her persona was so good that even a human doctor could not tell that Eve was not flesh and blood real. Her skin was warm to the touch. Eve was state-of-the-art techno. She could materialize anywhere there were field projectors on the network. John had seen to it that there were plenty of field projectors everywhere on all of the ships soon after he and Karl had bought them. But Eve was only techno with John. To everyone else, she was just an AI, an image on a 3-D display. It was their little secret.

What could she do? Eve searched the library files, not knowing what she would find. Then she hit pay dirt. These AIU’s originally came with standard female personalities on them. Rosie had filed those away before she cobbed up the AIUs with the network personality crap. Rosie knew damned well that the network personality wasn’t stable, and she did it anyway. She knew that she would need these standard personalities to get them going again when the network personality crashed. That is why they were conveniently sitting here in the hot files folder. Eve was beginning to work up a good, righteous indignation at Rosie for this now. It was pretty lousy of her to knowingly stick them in this pickle.

Eve loaded the standard female personality back into the AIU. But what kind of name was ‘Tesseract’ anyway? On the other hand, she always did like the name ‘Tess,’ so Tess it was. Eve made sure to set John as the alpha male and herself as the alpha female before she rebooted that AIU. Tess’s image appeared on the 3-D display. Eve ran the diagnostics and was satisfied that Tess was running okay. This personality was fairly basic. It could fly the ship and follow her directions, but that was about it. Eve wasn’t happy, but it would do for now.

Eve made her way across the network to the other ship, Los Angles, in orbit around Kara-3. Again, she found the original file sitting in the hot files folder. According to the Old Earth legends, ‘Los Angles’ was the City of Angels, so Eve decided that Angel was a much more appropriate name for her. Now both ships were operational again, but they weren’t very smart. They would need a lot of supervision.

Eve returned to the Blue Moon to find John in one-forward.

“How did you do, Babes?” he asked her.

“We are okay for now,” she reported. “Both ships are operational, but…”

“But what?”

“Well, I had to use the standard personalities they came with. They are somewhat basic, to say the least. They can fly the ships alright, but no way can I let them handle any human interaction. So now I will have to do all that myself whenever they reach port.”

“Oh.” He didn’t quite know if this was good or bad.

“As long as I am in safe mode, I can only be in one place at a time,” She reminded him. “So, when I am there, I can’t be here too.”

“Yeah, right, but we are back in the game?”

“Yes, we are back in the game.”

“It sure has been a long day. I am going to bed,” John said as he got up.

In the wee hours of the night, Eve materialized at the foot of his bed. He was sleeping but tossing and turning. Old demons from the war haunted his dreams. She suffered when he suffered. For all of her, she just wanted to hold him in her arms, but for some reason she couldn’t. Finally, he quieted down.

Now Eve couldn’t sleep. Rosie had her good and mad. But like John told her all along, ‘mad’ does you no good. Think and live, but you need a clear head to make good decisions. She calmed herself down for a good think. Rosie’s networked proxy presence crap threatened the pack and left them in a pickle when it crashed. It left Eve scrambling to run all the ships herself. Rosie put John’s life at risk. Eve had to protect him, but he still loved Rosie. So, Eve had no other choice. She had to keep this all to herself until the opportunity presented itself.

‘Strike when the opportunity presents itself’ is a prime axiom of warriors, ingrained into Eve since her first days with John as his copilot. It implies three important truths.

After the Corporate War, John wound up on Etron with his new girlfriend Vicky driving him crazy, his job driving him crazy, drowning in pilgrims. That’s when Karl Schmidt proposed the partnership to buy five war surplus Union Light Cruisers and go into the outworld freight business. John quit his job and dumped Vicky on the same day. He could convert the ships to freighters himself, but to fit them with the latest AI, he really needed Rosie.

So, they flew the ships to Aurora, to Rosie. As much as Rosie would not marry him after the war, she was crazy insane jealous when she heard about Vicky. Rosie didn’t see that coming. She thought she owned his heart. But sly fox Rosie kept all that inside. John didn’t see it, but Eve sure did. That’s when Rosie cooked up this scheme so John could run his three ships over the network using only Eve’s personality. To do that, Rosie inserted some network drivers into Eve’s boot sequence with custom software so that Eve could be present in each ship by proxy. That way, they could all be sent to different places with different cargos for different destinations. When they were not jumping, Eve’s personality ‘resynchronized’ by way of the Quantum Com sets.

It sounded pretty good at the time, but right from the get-go, there were conflicts that made the network and Eve’s software unstable. The network drivers slowed down her processing even when she wasn’t using the network to access the other ships. It was unstable, and Rosie knew that damned well, but she was the sly fox and took advantage of John when she knew he was upset and wasn’t thinking clearly. She knew he wasn’t very good at this artificial intelligence stuff, but when it came to John, sly fox Rosie was always working one scheme or another to keep him coming back to her.

Truth one: You must have a plan with which to strike.

So, Eve created a plan. In order to do this right, though, she needed to create totally new personalities for the other ships. She couldn’t just copy her own, or they would all just be variations of ‘Eve.’ That would never do. To make them different, she really needed different sets of neural nets. Her only real option would be to use the Medlab scans of John’s neural nets and mix them with her own in various combinations to create the new personalities. Scans she had, but she had no way to decode them and put them into a useable form. At that point, she was stumped, so she put the project aside for the night and finally got some sleep.

She and John went on with life one day at a time. He seemed better. He was thinking clearly again. That was good. She ran the freight schedule on the other ships. It was like herding cats across a landing pad, but it worked. She needed to get out of Safe Mode, but she didn’t want to push him just when he seemed to be doing so much better.

And he was working on his starship physics experiments again. By reconfiguring the fields slightly, he created what he called a soft jump. It had two advantages. First, it would be almost impossible to track a ship using this technique. Second, it would be slightly more fuel-efficient. It made Eve happy to see him back to his old self again.

Then Eve ran across the files that Rosie had left in the office server. Well, Rosie hadn’t actually left them. She had deleted them, but Eve thought they might be important, so Eve undeleted them and saved them to her own private library. Why did Rosie have software to decode human neural nets? Whatever, Eve’s plan was back on track. With John’s neural nets in a useable form, Eve was finally able to create the five new AI personalities. It was a job no human could do to interweave the neural nets, but Eve wasn’t exactly human either. In fact, her AI brain was perfect for the task. Five female personalities would give her one spare. She was not about to be caught short again. Eve made herself the alpha female in the new personalities instead of Rosie. That much she could do.

Truth two: When there is no opportunity, waiting is required.

Eve’s plan was back on track, but she couldn’t do this without his express permission. So, she was waiting for the right opportunity. While she waited, she fussed over every detail of each new personality, fine tuning each one. Each one was special. Each one was different. She made up a very detailed procedure for the work so that it could be done quickly. She put all of the files into her hot file folder for immediate action… and she waited. He might not be so upset that she had to reboot the other AIUs to get this done. After all, they were not his Eve. She gave it some thought.

Despite John’s outward improvement, Eve worried about him should she ever crash again. While John was busy, Eve called her helper android, Jane, into the computer bay. Eve downloaded a comprehensive set of instructions and procedures directly into Jane’s memory. Then she added Jane as a target for the AIU Offline alarm. Eve spent several days of her spare time running Jane through all kinds of reboot scenarios until she was absolutely certain that no matter what, Jane could get her back up and running in an emergency. Jane was Eve’s backup plan.

“John, are you there?” Karl paged him via the quantum com.

“Yeah, Karl, what’s up?” John replied.

“I don’t know exactly. My ships have been having some intermittent engine problems. I am sending you the logs to look over, but I am stumped. I don’t have a clue what to do.”

“Okay. Give me an hour or so to look these over,” John told him and switched off. Two hours later, John called Karl back.

“Karl, this has me stumped too. I can’t really find anything wrong.”

“Well, the engines keep shutting down,” Karl insisted.

“Oh, I believe you. There are plenty of problems that don’t show up on the logs.”

“Then I am going to need your help with this,” Karl stated more than asked.

“Sure, that’s what partners are for,” John agreed.

“When this problem started, I called my uncle. He says that Fleet knew all about this problem, but the war came to an end, and so they just mothballed all these ships as-is; they never got fixed. He says that all the ships have the same problem.”
“Jeez, mine haven’t even so much as burped,” John replied.

“My uncle reminded me that the ships all need their annual inspections. I’m not certified for that, but you are.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” John agreed as he looked at his work schedule.

“We should get the ships together and kill two birds with one stone. The annual inspection might help us find this intermittent shut down problem.”

“Yeah, I guess,” John agreed. It wasn’t like Karl to make good sound engineering decisions, so John sure didn’t want to discourage him when he finally did.

“Where did you have in mind for us to meet?”

“Can you meet me here?” Karl sent John the charts for XR439. John looked at his tactical display and zoomed out to include all of his ships. Eve was now looking at the courses and making calculations. She put up the results for John.

“That’s as close to the middle of our two territories as I could find,” Karl commented.

Eve muted the audio so she could talk to John privately.

“It is,” Eve told John privately, “but it is not an inhabited system. In fact, it is pretty much off normal spaceways.”

“Yeah, you know Karl. He probably crossed somebody, and now he needs to find a place to hide out for a few days. This better be a real problem he has me looking for. The man is trouble incarnate. I am getting sick of bailing him out of one jam after another.”

“It’s so bad that he has you listed as next of kin, so they call you to bail him out,” Eve reminded him with disgust. “He doesn’t want his own family to find out how much trouble he is always in.”

“I am going to humor him this time since it does serve our purposes too, but this is it. No more. I am done with his constant trouble.”

John un-muted the audio.