The Light Read online

  About the book

  The ultimate breakthrough in power technology has simultaneously been made on Earth and on a distant alien world; both separated by uncountable millions of light years.

  The technology promises complete unrestricted access to the purest, most powerful source of clean, renewable and unlimited energy – finally making a true ‘green energy’ revolution possible. It is set to change everything forever.

  Yet, those that are in power are determined to stop it before it does anything.

  But on a backwater moon something else is discovered. Something unexpected, that would not only change the destiny of worlds, but that of the entire Universe itself.

  “If you’re craving mind expanding, crazy, epic sci-fi, then you’ve come to the right place. Read this book.”

  - A message from the Author.

  THE LIGHT

  Copyright © 2017 by James T. Crichton

  All rights reserved.

  KINDLE EDITION V1.2.7

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.jamestcrichton.com

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  For my wife

  Table of Contents

  About the Book

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Highway

  Chapter 2: The Jungle

  Chapter 3: Alien Safari

  Chapter 4: Dream State

  Chapter 5: The Forest

  Chapter 6: The Jungle Crickets

  Chapter 7: The Jungle Wisps

  Chapter 8: Awakening

  Chapter 9: The Creature

  Chapter 10: The Monster

  Chapter 11: Recovery

  Chapter 12: Jasperville

  Chapter 13: Space

  Chapter 14: The President

  Chapter 15: Discovery

  Chapter 16: Praxima

  Chapter 17: The Hill

  Chapter 18: Earth

  Chapter 19: Rapture

  Chapter 20: Ascension

  Chapter 21: Pursuit

  Chapter 22: The Portal

  About the Author

  Chapter 1: The Highway

  Space is infinitely massive. Out there anything is possible. Now, what if the ‘impossible’ came knocking at our door?

  Something that is so completely alien and utterly against our comprehension. Will we bury our collective heads in the sand and stubbornly refuse to accept that what is right in front of us is real? Because if it is so impossible, then how could it possibly be real?

  – Professor Ben Franks, lecture at MIT

  The heavy peak-hour traffic was at a standstill as Mark, dad of two, looked in the rear-view mirror. Damn, I look tired, he thought.

  He had just noticed a couple of new grey hairs that had sprouted up near his temple, when the traffic started moving again.

  Like most mornings recently, this one started off a special flavor of crazy, with the twins fighting and screaming, wreaking havoc and generally being near impossible to control and get ready for school.

  He felt seriously exhausted and disheveled. It had been hell since Stacy left to take care of her elderly mother, whose days were unfortunately few.

  Due to work and school commitments Mark and the kids stayed behind, but would eventually make the long flight to Gran’s city when the day finally came.

  Unbeknownst to the twins, goodbye was essentially already said about a week ago, when they had flown over for one last family get-together with Granny.

  Juggling his project and looking after the kids had been one the hardest challenges he’d had to face. Sometimes he wondered how Stacy managed to do all this without going totally crazy.

  The hilarious thing was, as it was with life sometimes, that this could not have come at a more inopportune time.

  Mark had been right in the middle of the most complicated, hardest, busiest and stressful part of his project when all this happened. The nature of the work meant he had to put in a lot of extra hours, usually late at night after he had put the twins to bed.

  He was hectically sleep deprived and was struggling; it felt like he was perpetually set on Zombie mode. But he had no choice but to try and finish his damn project and cope with everything somehow.

  He called it the Reactor. It was the most important project of his career and after all these many years was at last culminating – finally reaching working prototype phase.

  Most of his peers had thought that his idea was too far out, stupid and impossible. They told him that it would never work, that his mathematical proof was made up and that he was insane for even trying.

  Even though he had been well respected before, many of his colleagues had begun distancing themselves, probably for fear of being associated with a disillusioned lunatic.

  He battled to get funding, with every research institute and large university he approached turning him down – hard. Some even called him a whack-job to his face. It was difficult, but he believed in his dream and that it was possible to achieve it, so he kept trying and one day he finally found a tiny university that was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was awarded with a small, but hopefully sufficient grant.

  The pay when he first started was little, but it had been just enough for the two of them at the time. He and the university had a profit share agreement should the project ever work out and be commercially viable. If it was successful, he’d probably never worry about money ever again.

  He immersed himself in the work and made slow but steady progress in the next few years that followed. But when the twins came unexpectedly, their financial situation changed dramatically, upping the pressure drastically to complete the project as soon as possible. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before he had to look for employment elsewhere in order to make new ends meet, probably at the larger universities, doing more conventional stuff.

  For Mark, it sucked that his project’s and his own future depended on money so much. Sure, he liked the stuff, but it wasn’t his be-all and end-all. He’d love to never worry about it again, to forget about it and just focus on his work, his goals and family. He was a dreamer and since he could remember, he had dreamt about space exploration and of a world run completely on clean energy.

  Yes, there were solar and wind power, but none of these so-called green energy technologies were the actual answer to the world’s energy problems.

  They were just not potent enough to create a true green energy revolution, which could cure the world’s energy shortage and addiction to oil – permanently. His technology had the potential to do just that; and much, much more.

  By being able to harness a truly unlimited, unimaginably powerful and completely pure source of energy, humanity could finally journey among the stars. Some even believed that it was possible to build a real functioning warp drive; there just wasn’t a reactor powerful enough to run the thing.

  Well, now we have one, Mark had thought with a smile.

  The promise of this new technology didn’t just stop at the energy aspect. Far from it – Mark knew its potential was far greater and that there was still plenty left for him to explor
e next.

  He dreamt big and had many wild ideas. He wanted to go beyond a warp drive, to a new type of transport altogether. Similar to a game engine, where you could effectively move any object instantly anywhere in the game-world, irrespective of the distance involved, Mark suspected that the holographic universe had something similar.

  He wanted to see if he could find it and hack it to enable vessels to travel instantaneously to any point in the universe, thereby bypassing the need for fuel and cutting out travel times completely; changing exploration forever, more than a simple warp drive ever could.

  His discovery posed so many questions and hinted at so many possibilities which, Mark knew that he and other scientists – once he’d won them over with his reactor – would spend the rest of their lives exploring and that this discovery would ultimately change the future for humanity forever.

  Next to the birth of his beautiful children and his first date with Stacy, Mark had never been so excited in his life.

  Last night he received his very first invitation to the White House. He had no idea that they were aware of the project as he had first wanted to make sure that it actually worked before he unveiled it.

  But he was super excited, and called Stacy immediately afterwards to share the great news. He had an amazing and uplifting feeling that his world – in fact, the entire world – was about to change in a most dramatic and awesome way.

  Mark looked at the time anxiously. The kids could still make school. His flight and meeting with the President, however, might be a totally different story.

  The President? Of all people! Shit! The meeting of my career, of a lifetime! And I’m going to be late! He thought.

  He was just about to honk at the car in front of him to hurry up, when a couple of weird-looking lights in the distant sky caught his eye.

  They seemed to have appeared suddenly and out of nowhere. He was so tired that he could’ve been seeing things, so just to make sure, he looked again.

  No, they appeared to be real...

  They like looked like stars and were drifting down slowly, peacefully and patiently, like large lazy jellyfish from the deep blue, icy morning sky – hundreds of them.

  They were mesmerizingly beautiful, gloriously radiant, brilliant orbs of light. It was a strangely unthreatening, serene and almost divine sight.

  They appeared to be floating towards the long line of gridlocked vehicles that seemed to snake like a lazy snake over the rolling hills ahead, the early morning sun gleaming on its long metallic body.

  The twins were oddly quiet; some welcome silence at last. Thank God, he thought.

  “Daddy, what’s that?” asked little Harry as one of the orbs drifted properly into view. This one was nearby, maybe a mile or two away. It looked like some sort of large, bright, glowing orb-ish, blob-ish thing.

  Mark was suddenly and inexplicably overcome by an overwhelming sense of dread.

  Before he could completely realize what he was doing, he had unbuckled the twins, got them out of the car and was running down the highway, one child tucked under each arm. Away from the lights and away from the car – which was still idling.

  As he ran past the stationary vehicles, he noticed that drivers and passengers alike were all staring transfixed and motionless at the strange sight ahead of them. It was as if they were caught totally off-guard by this completely unexpected event in morning rush hour.

  He appeared to be the only one running. And as he continued running, he saw people beginning to get out of their vehicles to get a better look at the lights ahead.

  Suddenly, he felt what he thought was an electrical sensation in the air. He imagined that he could almost smell it. He paused and looked back just in time to see one of the brilliantly white orb things drifting down to land softly, with a gentle flopping sound, on several vehicles some meters behind.

  Only, instead of landing, it swallowed the vehicles whole – just like jelly, totally encompassing them. Squinting, Mark could make out, through the bright haze that was the blob, the vehicles and their surprised-looking occupants.

  Weird-looking threads of electricity were arching and crackling over the metal bodies of the vehicles.

  Then, unexpectedly, as if out of a strange dream, the vehicles glowed for a couple of seconds, and then vanished completely for a brief moment before reappearing again. The passengers seemed to be in the vehicles and still alive.

  What the fuck? He thought in shocked disbelief.

  He made sure he still had the kids and ran away as fast as he could.

  Somewhere, the city’s emergency sirens started wailing and overhead, the sounds of fighter jets could be heard rushing across the sky.

  Chapter 2: The Jungle

  After more than three weeks in this remote, hot, humid and generally inhospitable place, conducting ecological studies and cataloguing the various unique and diverse fauna and flora, Grex and his team were more than ready and eager to return home to their families.

  They were here to assess the environmental impact that the nearby mining operation was having on the native ecosystem. So far it was no different to what was found everywhere else where triterium mining took place.

  To have said complete and utter destruction of the natural environment would’ve been a major understatement.

  The impact was profound: the by-product waste produced by integral chemicals used in the mining operation was highly toxic. When introduced to the environment, everything it came in contact with would irreversibly be poisoned and would slowly start mutating beyond recognition.

  As DNA became corrupted, the metabolism of any organism affected would speed up exponentially, causing it to mutate, burn out, wither and die.

  To make matters worse, the waste was highly unstable, making it very expensive and therefore financially impractical to store and contain.

  Although it was required by law to do so, it was usually much easier and cheaper for the mining companies to just pump it back into the environment, especially on remote frontiers such as this moon, where environmental laws were not enforced.

  Even in territories where the law was supposed to govern, the authorities turned out to be generally toothless and the waste somehow made it back into the environment anyway, eventually and irreversibly turning it into a poisonous, barren and dead wasteland where nothing could survive.

  This transformation took a long time to fully manifest, with the worst effects of the poisoning only becoming fully visible long after the mining had stopped and the companies had left.

  The effects were downplayed, ignored or just blamed on other causes.

  The energy generated from this precious mineral, on which Grex’s civilization was totally dependent, was used for everything, from the household to cities, to the drives of starships.

  As all major, easy-to-reach deposits had long since been depleted, and because it wasn’t exactly the most abundant mineral in the universe and no real viable alternative existed, the mining companies were forced to look further and further afield for the next deposit to try and meet demand, getting more and more desperate as they went along.

  It was the most valuable commodity, and the companies and individuals who controlled it ultimately held great power, both in government and, by extension, the military.

  Greed and addiction forced rational thinking to diminish, and most research into new and novel alternatives were either squashed, sabotaged, or delayed indefinitely through pending regulatory approval tactics and the like.

  This did not decrease demand, however, and the desperate thirst for more inevitably led to conflict.

  In this case, with the inhabitants of the nearby neighboring star system, the Axari, who happened to have two habitable moons just filled with the stuff orbiting their home world, Axaria.

  When peaceful negotiations for mining rights broke down, conflict was inevitable.

  It was triggered by a terrorist attack in the Praxima capitol, where a couple of members of a so-called Axari terro
rist cell blew themselves up at a busy marketplace in the main financial hub.

  Thousands died in the gruesome and shocking attack, orchestrated on the busiest shopping day of the year.

  The event was quickly branded as the worst terror attack in Imperial history. The remaining Axari suspects were rounded up and swiftly executed.

  Thereafter, it wasn’t difficult to motivate for war, with hundreds of thousands of civilians willingly volunteering for military service to avenge the attack. It wasn’t long before all-out war broke out.

  And although the Axari started off as equals in might, offering fierce unrelenting resistance, the Imperium, with the momentum of revenge and surprise on their side, managed to gain the upper hand, due in part to the brilliant strategist and leader, admiral Prox, but also because of some untimely bad luck and questionable tactical decisions on the Axari side.

  Finally, their armada was obliterated, their cities bombed into oblivion from orbit, their space-faring technologies and capabilities annihilated and their once proud and powerful civilization was brought to its knees – for good.

  Now, only small pockets of civilians remained, soon to be moved into reserves and out of the way, as new plans were put into place to mine not only the moons, but also the few remaining pockets of unmined triterium ore planetside.

  Two years after the war, the Imperial fifty fifth fleet still orbited Axaria, no longer with a sense of urgency, but with a slumbering dormancy, like a great giant monster napping after a feast, patiently waiting but always ready to pounce on the next unsuspecting prey that happened to stumble into its lair.

  Grex’s team was sent here to Axaria’s second moon, Kryxo, by the Royal Imperial Natural Society. Established more than two hundred years ago, the Society was a relic of a bygone era, when more emphasis was placed by the Imperium to preserve and protect natural resources.