Vanguard of Man

Vanguard

Of

Man

By JD Lovil

COPYRIGHT

VANGUARD OF MAN

Digital Edition

Copyright © 2013 J D Lovil

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

License Notes

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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 are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

jdlovilpublishing@gmail.com

ISBN: 9781386421375

Independently published

Disclaimer

Vanguard of Man is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, corporations, institutions, incidents, and events in this novel are all fictitious, or, if real, are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons of any character, living, or dead, or of actual events, is purely coincidental, and are purely the product of the Author's imagination.

Prologue

EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE, you make a thousand choices. You may go right, you may go left. Eat the salad, eat the burger. Each choice you make is only one of a number of possible choices.

You know that the choice that you make is an integral part of your universe. What you may not know is that you make all possible choices. If you choose the Burger, there is a universe in which you pick the salad. Each choice that could be made is made in some universe. We are each of us a maker of universes.

Each of these universes exists parallel to each other, every outcome of every event splitting the worldline to create another set of universes. Every event, from the first second of time until the last. Everything exists somewhere in the foam of universes.

This story takes place in one such universe. It starts on an Earth which is not so different from our own, but where the Laws of Physics are very slightly different from ours, and less forgiving to the dreams of Man.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Introduction

1 Vanguard 46

2  The Beginning of the End

3  Aftermath

4  Starting Over

5 Ark City

6  Coming Storms

7  Birth and Death

8 Goodbye to the Solar System

9 Dreams in Transit

10  The Importance of Clipboards

11  Visit the Neighbors

12  Experiencing Hardship

13  Dreams of Otherwhens

14  Derelict drifting between Stars

15  A Planet Called Desolation

16  A Dream of Futures

17  The Generator

18  Contented Desolation

19  The Extermination of the Enloi

20  The Colony Called Gibraltar

21  A Planet called Prairie

22  Memories of Other Lives

23  Destruction at Lacaille 9352

24  Ambush in the Shadow of Stars

25  Layover at Trafalgar Station

26  Infinity in an Instant of Darkness

27  Leaving Trafalgar Station

28  Conversations with Unseen Hosts

29  Meet the Caretakers of Ross 780

30  Welcome to Wonderland

31  Battle of Wonderland

32  The Empty Ship Syndrome

33  Flight in Solitude

34  A Dark Dreaming

Introduction

IT ALL BEGAN WITH THE American collapse of its financial house of cards.  The center could not hold, and one by one, the smaller economies fell apart. The life of Americans became even harsher, and the rest of the world blamed the Americans for the pain everyone felt.

The world was already a harsh place. Only the insane believed in the existence of U.F.O.s or psychic phenomena, few still believed in gods, or ghosts, or anything beyond the materialistic world around them. Science Fiction was written by the maladjusted misfits of humanity.

After the fall, the world fragmented, the remnant of the government quickly devolving into a source of death and misery to the common man. On an Earth where pain and death come easily, the living Americans suffered at the hands of the government. They suffered at the hands of gangs, at the hands of police, and finally even at the hands of Mother Nature herself, in the form of a string of Volcanic eruptions, and then the encroaching return of ice age glaciers.

Eric grew to manhood in the grip of this world of catastrophes. He found his way through most of the turmoil, only to contract a deadly disease, the Metaflu. The Metaflu was known as a death sentence, few if any survived its fevers and its pain. It shifted and changed as the victim fought it, slowly wearing down the resistance of the victim.

Eric finally has some good luck. There is a program administered by the only remaining scientific group left in the world, which sought to create the perfect crew and guardians of Humanity in the centuries-long voyage of colony starships. It was hoped that long-lived and intelligent forms of humanity could be created from human stock to take Mankind to the stars, while the human cargo slumbered in cryogenic suspension.

Eric survived the gauntlet of treatments to create the Vanguard, the modified form of man that would guide unmodified humanity to the star. Vastly stronger and more intelligent, he could survive almost anything when finally he finished the treatment of nanobots and hormones, enzymes and transfer viruses. He was smarter than any human who ever lived, he could do virtually anything as quickly as he could think it up, but he lost the parts of humanity that humanity thinks beautiful. His skin was armored in a dozen ways, his hair was nonexistent, and all that remained of his sexuality was his memories of being a man.

Eric survived the trials of transformation and was reborn as Enki, the Vanguard of Man. He was assigned to the great ram-scoop colony ship called the Relentless, along with ten of his fellow Vanguard, and forty of the new version called New-Borns created without benefit of a former life as a human.

This is the story of the colony ship Relentless, on its thousand-year voyage between the stars. This is also the story of how a being that was once a human man slowly loses the remaining vestiges of his humanity, over centuries, after he has lost the motivations and drives that make that being that we define as a human.

Because he was no longer motivated by sexuality, he lost the identification with the human race that the competition for sexual position brings. Because he lost the urge to social advancement by political, financial or other social tools, he also slowly lost all need for social interactions.

A desire to obtain knowledge, once an abstract motivation, had become the strongest of Enki's motivations. As the centuries past, it was a race between the total loss of Enki's human urge to protect his human charges and the off-loading of the final colonist.

1 Vanguard 46

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