Vanguard of Man (eBook)

JD Lovil (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
198 Seiten
JD Lovil Publishing (Verlag)
978-0-00-009895-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Would You Sacrifice Your Humanity?

Dying of the Metaflu, Eric did. He volunteered for the Vanguard program. The Program changed him, and made him stronger, faster, smarter, and nearly indestructible. He became Enki of the Vanguard.

A desperate Humanity created the Vanguard to be the immortal crews of Ark ships fleeing a dying Earth, hoping to seed Mankind among the stars. Sexless, independent, and intelligent beyond measure, Enki's bonds with humanity grow weaker over the centuries.

Can he complete his mission, and seed the final colony, before he loses the last of his humanity?

Read Vanguard of Man and find out.

I enjoyed the story and characters, the original way the author brought everything together.- Sheryl Painter
If you're an avid sci-fi reader, I highly recommend this book!- Chad Grills
Well written and thought provoking- Norma D.

Textauszug

I AM VANGUARD 46. WHEN I was human, I was called Eric Hamilton. That was long ago and in another life. I am human no longer. I remember his life in shards of memory far sharper than any remembrance of his. I remember his relationships; I remember his losses and his pleasures. His lifetime plays in grassy fields within my mind, but I am not he.

We are poised on the threshold of the greatest accomplishment of Man, and the best possibility of his survival. I have decided to record the events and actions that are happening around me so that an unbiased record will survive to fill a future need. Although in most cases, I will be inscribing the recount of activities a matter of hours after the event, this will not always be the case, and so I will refer to any recent activities in the present tense, to avoid confusion.

Of my brothers, there are only seven who were converted before me. Thirty-eight failed in the conversion process, and are no more. There are only fifty-one of us who are of the Elder Vanguard. Fifty-one survived of a total of 114 trials. After that, the humans changed the rules.

In 2069, the production of Vanguard was switched by the humans to Laboratory in vitro birthing. It was decided by the Powers that Be that the residue of our old human lives was a potential liability, and it was decided to bypass this problem. By means of artificial wombs, they created another 218 Vanguards, with no mortality. In 2071, the last of the New-Born was decanted. There were a total of 218 of the New-Born created.

In the intervening years, three of our brothers have fallen. Two of the New-Born have died, one on a sortie into Africa, where he was ambushed by a division of soldiers carrying anti-aircraft guns with explosive rounds. The other was lost when his cargo shuttle was impacted by a stranger asteroid, and the explosive decompression ejected him into space. His systems induced a hibernation state in him, and so he was unable to do anything when his body began reentry into Earth's atmosphere. The third loss was one of the Elders, Vanguard #87, who was destroyed when he went into a burning building looking for survivors in distress, and the building collapsed on him.

The Vanguard Fleet awaits us in orbit. Next month, 250 of us will board the five massive Ram-scoop Core Ships assembled in Earth Orbit. The nanobots are putting the finishing touches on the ships now, and fifty of us will board each ship as crew, shepherding the sleeping millions to their new homes in the stars. Our sixteen remaining brothers will stay on Earth or in the station against the day of need.

I was human twenty years ago, dying slowly of the Metaflu. The mortality from the flu was nearly one hundred percent, and I could tell that I would not be one of the lucky ones. I was in the hospital in Ark City, and ready to die, when I first met Megan Orgly and Harold Sims.

They told me about the Vanguard project and offered to let me be one of the volunteers. I knew that my best hope of survival was in the project, but I would have gladly volunteered even if I was healthy. I had spent forty years of life spinning my wheels, managing to stay alive through the troubles, but very little else. I was ready to do something worthwhile with my life.

During the next week, I met all seven of my potential future brothers. I thought them to be an odd lot, almost flickering about in their activities. While two of them would be playing chess, they would be carrying on a conversation with their chess mate and several of the others, which almost seemed to consist of them finishing each other's thoughts for them. I did not know how accurate that was at the time.

By the time my turn came for conversion, the process was completed by my brethren, and Megan and Harold were relegated to the roles of bookkeepers in the procedure. After the nanobots had been injected, the T-virus and a cocktail of enzymes and hormones were transfused into me, and I lost consciousness for a brief time.

When I woke, a day had passed, and I felt different. One can never know how contained they are within a storm of instinctual needs and limitations until that storm is passed. I woke with a clear mind for the first time in my life.

I reviewed the path of my former life in the first few seconds of my new life and was mildly amused by how stupid I had been. I would have been embarrassed, but I was beyond such social responses in my new state. I remembered in exquisite detail every time that I had misread my fellows, every answer given that was wrong, every choice made that led me to the wrong path.

All of those things which feed the fire of emotion; sex, ambition, social pressures, all of those things have been taken from my life, but I am the richer for it. Sex and relationships feed the need of propagation of our genes. In order to perpetuate them, one must continually lie to oneself about the relative value and merit of the persons and circumstances that are part of these phenomena for you. A person that you would avoid interaction with on her own merits, you would convince yourself of her worthiness of your attention and possible future sacrifice, ultimately based entirely on her sexual and genetic value alone.

My reflexes are as fast as the transmission rates can make them, and every move I make feels as though I am dancing. My ability to follow a chain of reasoning and my ability to concentrate my attention on problems to be solved are seemingly without limit. My body can take massive punishment without stopping, and if the environment is too severe, I will go into a resource hoarding hibernation state until the conditions are better. I won't say that I can't die from oxygen deprivation, but you might die of old age waiting. I will still be just as young and pretty when you do as I am now.

It is difficult to describe the motivations I feel now. Virtually none of the motivations of the old life exists for me now. Surviving and reproduction were the reasons for those motivations, and I am beyond them now. I do not feel tied to humanity in any of the ways that I was before, but I do feel an abstract desire to protect the species.

All of my motivations have a quality of abstraction now. I have a powerful but still abstract desire to learn and to see everything possible. Perhaps the best way to describe the quality of my attachment to the humans is to compare it to an attachment in my former life to my favorite chair, or my favorite book. I feel some urge to protect the life of the innocents, but I would turn to the next task if in the course of things their lives were forfeit.

To put it simply, I am asocial now, with some similarity to antisocial patterns in the sense that I am not involved in various bonding relations. I enjoy solving problems, the bigger, the better, and it is a real joy to do so with others of the Vanguard, working as a unit and at a pace that could not be imagined or met by any among the mundane.

We solve problems every day, and far into each night. We work on the various components of the great colony fleet that we will crew in its voyage to the stars. We have reworked the simplistic coding routines that the mundanes were using to run the nanobots, and we have tweaked most of the design specs for the Ram-Scoops to increase efficiency, thrust, and durability.

The Space Station is a twenty-mile diameter Ferris wheel in space, in no small part due to the efforts of my Brothers and me. We have begun to work on the problem of building a space elevator to service the station. The big problem is finding proper tether materials for the purpose. We are looking for ways to amplify the sp2 bonding in various materials, to increase the tenacity of the bonding of one atom to the next, so that the material can support a much larger load.

As I have previously stated, the launch date for the fleet is in about a month, February 19th to be exact. I have been assigned to the Relentless with 49 of my fellow Vanguard, and with 11.4 million sleepers as cargo and future colonists. The Relentless will carry a complement of short-range Plasma Drive ships to do recon, defense, and exploration. The ship's contingent of Vanguard will evaluate any potential threats to determine if extreme measures are needed. The survival and safety of the Relentless will be of ultimate importance in our deliberations.

Once the fleet has launched, the Earth Ark Union military forces, led by the sixteen Vanguards that will remain in the Earth vicinity, will systematically pacify the remaining wild territories, and the application assistance or force as needed. Once the Colony ships leave, the purpose of the EAU will be continuance and protection of what is left of the Earth's biosphere.

When we leave Earth orbit, there will be ten of the Elder Vanguard on board, including me, and forty of the New-Born Vanguard. That means that there will be a society of nine other persons on board for me to work with, and create with. The New-Born will be available too, of course, but they lack a depth of personality and creativity that the Elders have.

The legacy of the Elder's human lives gives us a richer dream life and a range of personality that the New-Born seem to have missed out on.  The New-Born have what may become a hive mentality in the future. They are complex, and they are smart, but in some ways, there is no them there.

In order for you to understand the circumstances which brought us all to this point, it is necessary to recount a brief history from the middle 2010s to now. I have spliced the record of some representative parts of that history together from found journals and audio-visual records. The...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.8.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 0-00-009895-7 / 0000098957
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-009895-5 / 9780000098955