d4 Read online

  d4

  An Interactive Novel

  by

  Sherrie Cronin

  Copyright 2014 by Sherrie Cronin

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. First Edition. Published 2015

  by Cinnabar Press, Montgomery, Texas 77316

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941283-44-8

  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 use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for review.

  Cover design and illustration by Jennifer FitzGerald of http://www.MotherSpider.com

  This book is a work of fiction and, with the exception of news items, public figures, and cultural information, the events, characters and institutions in it are imaginary, as are the organizations d3 and y1. No individual character, organization, or group of people included as part of the fictional narrative is intended to represent any real person or group. The author is not responsible for the content of third party websites.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the quiet energy source that is my middle child. She is imagination in motion, charging ahead into the future, never looking back. I love her for the way that she believes that she can do anything and I thank her for the many times she has reminded me that I can too. May her high tech touch with tomorrow always sparkle with a web of possibilities, and may the best of those come true.

  Author’s Notes

  Tomorrow is a funny thing because it quickly becomes yesterday. This novel is intended as a tribute to those who live their lives trying to understand the future and who must watch some of their predictions disintegrate into reality each day. Here’s to the science fiction writers, weather forecasters, stock market analysts, solution designers, inventors, trend predictors, climate change specialists, school curriculum influencers and all of the other pretend, hopeful and real psychics of every flavor. May their prophecies steer all of us towards kindness, and may their visions converge on a long and happy life for this marvelous creature we call humanity.

  For those readers whose love of math is meager or memory of high school calculus is weak, allow me to remind you that the letter d is used in equations to denote a rate of change. d4x/dt4 describes variations in the change in acceleration, and is arguably the initial derivative involving space and time that is beyond our ability to comprehend.

  One of my hopes in writing this book was to encourage others to look ahead well beyond their own lifetimes and consider our future as a species. I tried to get a reader to think over two hundred years past tomorrow. A group called The Long Now foundation has taken this idea much further. They are designing a clock to run for the next ten thousand years, in the hope that people will ponder whether the human race will be around as long as the clock is. You should know that if you paid for this book, you have contributed to their project as ten percent of my proceeds from d4 will be donated to The Long Now Foundation.

  Table of Contents

  Before

  1. 1993

  2. 2009

  Part 1. Touching the Sky to Save the World

  3. Winter Begins in 2011

  4. Winter in Dublin

  5. In the Heart of Winter

  6. Winter Light

  7. Winter in Ilulissat

  8. Winter Ends

  9. Spring Begins

  10. Spring in India

  11. In the Heart of Spring

  12. Springtime on the Golf Course

  13. Spring Ends

  14. Summer Begins

  Part 2: d4, Jerk and Snap

  15. Summer at the Blue Lagoon

  16. Summer Light

  17. In the Heart of Summer

  18. Summertime in the Gazebo

  19. Summer Ends

  20. Autumn Begins

  21. Autumn in Oslo

  22. Autumn in Reykjavik

  23. In the Heart of Autumn

  24. Autumn in London

  25. Autumn at the Beach

  26. First Day of Trading

  27. Last Day of Trading

  28. Autumn in Seyðisfjörður

  29. Autumn Ends 2012

  After

  30. Christmas 2026

  31. All of 2047

  32. March 2064

  Thanks

  Resources

  Links

  About the Author

  List of Locations

  Alphabetical List of Characters

  A note to my readers using electronic devices:

  This book can be read just fine without ever using the underlined links that are imbedded in the text at the rate of about one per chapter. However, these links will take you to blogs, websites and news articles that provide photographs and information that could enhance your enjoyment of this novel. There are also nine links to songs enjoyed by the main characters in the story. Clicking on the name of the song will open a video on most devices. Listen for a bit of extra ambiance before returning to the novel.

  If you prefer sticking to one document at a time, or if you are reading this in a format that does not support hypertext, then these links can be used as starting points for more flavor after the book is finished. The full URLs are given in the acknowledgements at the end, and there are live hyperlinks at the website given below. Both locations also contain links to video recordings of live performances of the songs that are mentioned in this novel. URLs will be monitored periodically to ensure that they remain live. If you discover that a link is broken kindly contact the author at [email protected]. Readers are encouraged to support the referenced artists, news outlets and sites referred to in this book.

  Because this novel has many characters with unfamiliar names and takes place in locales likely to be new to the reader, this book contains a list of people and places. This list can be easily found on most reading devices as it is located at the very end. There is also live link to it in the Table of Contents.

  Please visit this book's website, Touching the Sky to Save the World (dtothepowerof4.org), for more information about Ariel’s skills and adventures, and about the previous and upcoming novels featuring other members of her family.

  This map of the North Atlantic is approximately to scale and shows cities and regions that play a role in this story.

  Before

  1. 1993

  “Why? Why would you hit your brother over the head?”

  Ariel’s mother looked more surprised than annoyed as she stared at her five-year-old daughter, who held a heavy three-ring binder tightly in her small hands. Ariel glared back at her mother with all the defiance she could muster. Her seven-year-old brother Zane was crying and rubbing his skull.

  “He told me to,” Ariel insisted. “He did.”

  “I don’t believe you,” her mother said.

  “He was kicking over my blocks, Mommy. He kicked over almost all of them and I told him three times to stop it and I said it nicely. He wouldn’t stop.”

  “Zane? You kicked over what she was building?” The boy fidgeted while he looked at the floor.

  “Then he said ‘make me,’” Ariel declared, nodding, her bright red hair bobbing up and down for emphasis. Her icy blue eyes bored into Zane with disapproval. “So I did.”

  Her mother burst into a laugh and Ariel wondered why this was funny.

  “Okay. Zane, I guess in a w
ay you did tell her to do it,” her mother agreed.

  Ariel tensed inside as her mother turned to her. Hitting other people was clearly on the list of things she was not supposed to do.

  “You’re not in trouble, Ariel,” her mother said. “I don’t want you hurting people, sweetie, but if someone is doing something bad and needs to be stopped, well, then you stop them. Like you just did.”

  Oh. It was okay? Ariel thought in surprise. Her mother reached out to pat her shoulder and as the large fingers brushed against her small neck, Ariel felt her mother’s words circle around in her head. You stop them. The sounds of the words and her mother’s touch made that weird thing that happened in her head sometimes happen again.

  Ariel couldn’t explain it. It was sort of a twirling feeling, like the one that she got when she spun around too fast on the monkey swing. Only her body didn’t turn—something inside her mind did. Like everything had been one way and now was kind of different even though nothing in the room changed at all.

  Ariel shrugged. Adults must have ways of dealing with this because they never seemed to mention the problem. The one time that she had asked Zane about it he hadn’t known what she was talking about. Maybe Zane was odd and it didn’t happen to him. Ariel knew that the feeling would pass. It always did.

  Right now, she was going to go outside and play. Being outdoors and away from people always helped steady her when this happened. She’d figure this other stuff out as she got older.

  ******

  Baldur was one of those boys who grew slowly, and at twelve years old it embarrassed him that his younger brother had become taller and stronger. As the first touches of spring started to shatter Iceland’s long winter, ten-year-old Oskar began to lord his new physical superiority over the older brother who had once ruled his world. Baldur was lucky that he remained quicker and smarter than Oskar, or as the long days took hold he would have endured more frequent beatings than those he got.

  Over the summer, Oskar never tired of taking advantage of Baldur’s slight stature, and Baldur finally realized that this had become more than a little brother’s revenge. Yes, Baldur had enjoyed skirmishing, and okay, he had enjoyed winning the skirmishes too. But, hard as he might try, he couldn’t remember ever enjoying hurting Oskar the way that Oskar seemed to enjoy hurting him. His younger brother had a cruel streak that went beyond resentment fueled by years of being on the losing end of sibling fights.

  Mother intervened a few times when Oskar’s beatings began to take a turn towards brutal, and Baldur was sure he had seen growing concern in her eyes. He was hopeful that the adults would keep this situation under control, as well they should. However, his father surprised Baldur by telling his mother to stay out of her sons’ fights.

  “They’re boys. Baldur needs to learn to take care of himself. You make him weak every time you step in,” his father had said, and the criticism in his voice was clear.

  Very well. The adults were going to be of no help, as usual. Baldur was a logical boy, and he knew that he had to find a way to improve his situation. He clearly could not make his body grow faster, and he could think of no way to make Oskar less cruel. So he would teach himself to fight better, even though it annoyed him that such behavior was exactly what his father intended.

  The best he could do about his father was to vow that under no circumstances would he ever ask the man to help him with anything. If the old man had hoped that his son would turn to him for instructions in self-defense, Baldur would let the fool see just how wrong he had been.

  Baldur scoured the library for volumes on martial arts and boxing and other fighting techniques. He already liked to read just about anything, and he knew how to study. Some books were in Icelandic, but others were in Danish or Norwegian or even English, so he worked hard to learn to read all of the languages better. Being a bright boy had its advantages.

  He memorized an ancient Chinese book on fighting strategy called The Art of War, and he skimmed The Five Rings, a Japanese samurai book on victory. He learned the human body’s vital points and he drew himself diagrams of where and how to punch. By the time that autumn came, he was sneaking out of bed and spending hours in the barn, engulfed in layers of thermal underwear, practicing kicks and punches by the flickering light of an oil lamp. If his teeth began to chatter, he worked out all the harder to keep himself warm. His mother and father never came out to check on him, and he suspected that both of them knew exactly what he was doing.

  It was only a matter of time before Oskar managed to sneak out of the house too, and find him in the barn. Baldur heard his brother coming and knew that he was finally prepared for this encounter. It was time to let the big lunkhead know that the power structure had changed again. Baldur went so far as to yell out something insulting to Oskar before he ran up to the loft, giving Oskar the impression that he was trying to hide. A surprise ambush would only add to his advantage.

  Oskar easily fell over Baldur’s outstretched leg as he came up the last step, and as Baldur straddled him and raised his arm for a decisive punch to Oskar’s throat, he steadied himself against Oskar’s shoulder with his left hand. His fingers brushed against his brother’s bare throat.

  The quick whirly thing in his head happened like it always did when he touched someone skin to skin. Baldur had never questioned it. It had happened to him for as long as he could remember, and he just assumed that it was an artifact of human contact, so normal that no one ever mentioned it, just like no one ever talked much about swallowing or exhaling.

  The quick flicker of what was about to happen was always followed within a second or two by the happening itself, and then the whole phenomenon was gone. It was useless and sometimes mildly annoying, and he figured that it was probably why people didn’t touch each other all that often.

  Only this time, the flicker was not what Baldur expected. It wasn’t Baldur delivering the punch. It was Oskar biting into his left wrist hard, drawing a strong spurt of blood before Baldur could do what he had planned. Baldur jerked his arm off of his brother before the painful reality could follow the image, and then in outright anger he swung his fist harder than he ever had into his brother’s nose.

  The blood that spurted everywhere was all Oskar’s, and Baldur wondered if his father would be proud of him or be angry about this. It didn’t matter. Oskar was holding his nose in pain and eying him with a new level of hatred.

  Baldur realized two things. The first was that he was going to have to be excruciatingly careful around his brother, probably for the rest of his life. The second was that the flickers could apparently be useful, at least if something surprising was about to happen.

  Why hadn’t someone mentioned that before? Why didn’t others use this more to their advantage? Or maybe they did. Baldur had a lot of questions, but while straddling his angry, bleeding brother was no time to sort them out. He’d figure out those other answers as he got older.

  2. 2009

  As a child, Ariel assumed that a certain degree of knowledge about both the past and the future was simply part of being human. All people seemed to hold memories in their minds, fragments of what had happened yesterday or last month or even years ago that were brought back at will, or by sounds or smells or random thoughts. The recollections weren’t always complete or accurate, but they were close, and everyone functioned just fine with memories intruding, sometimes at inconvenient times.

  The reason that young Ariel figured that people all had the same sort of knowledge of the future was that everyone talked like they did. Adults, especially the people on the never ending news shows that fascinated her mother, went on and on about what was most likely to happen tomorrow, or how something was improbable, exactly like they knew it was so. It wasn’t until Ariel was ten that she finally realized that other people had memories like hers, but in spite of what they said, they had no data about the future. Not like she did.

  For all that they pretended otherwise, everyone else was only guessing, and they had been doi
ng so all along. Ariel felt misled and even lied to. Why hadn’t all the grown-ups just admitted that they didn’t know? Ariel thought about asking her parents, but to be honest she was a little annoyed with them too.

  By seventh grade, Ariel figured out that her anger wasn’t justified. No one ever admitted that they were guessing about the future because it never occurred to any of them that they could be doing anything else. It turned out that there was a word for what Ariel thought of as her future memories. They were called premonitions. Most, if not all, sensible people did not believe in such things and considered any claims to the contrary to be a lot of superstitious nonsense.

  Ariel was an analytical child. She reasoned at that point that if she suddenly spoke up and declared herself to be a lifelong psychic, she’d probably just get in trouble. Kids got grounded for making things up. Her parents wouldn’t believe her, and she couldn’t prove them wrong.

  The biggest problem was that her forward memories were even less reliable than her memories of the past. Not only were they incomplete and sometimes vague, but they had an additional fuzziness to them because nothing from the future was ever certain. That’s how it was different from the past.

  She didn’t know how to explain it, so she decided to just keep things to herself, at least until she understood it better. Now, at twenty-one-years-old, she was still trying to understand it, and it had become her deepest secret.