Before 24 Billion and Counting

Chapter18 Part 1 Back to Hawaii - But why?

I'm not sure to, or for whom, I am writing anymore. This account started as a record of something I did, but it has melded into a compelling story of the past, and a precipitous fall into a vision of the future. Whoever reads this now - you have to make up your own mind.

It is some time since I sat down to read Chris' files in Auckland, New Zealand.

This, I thought was to be the finalisation of Chris' contribution to the story, but maybe not a story, more a reality he had penetrated, or been invaded by, and in which I too, had become submerged.

I read Chris's novel that evening on his nearly sixty year old IBM compatible PC, in my bungalow in Auckland, but as I did so I found that what Alicia and I held as his manuscript, was truncated from the original that was in the antique computer. Moreover this was only a part of his total concept. Probably a third of the whole, just a central core. I concentrated on this part first.

24 Billion and Counting as put onto the once flourishing writer's site that had been submerged into some other social network by now, was ostensibly a piece of fiction dictated by the need to have a paperback story in length and content - a publisher's requirement. In truth I couldn't see where that need came from.

Yes, any author wanted acclaim, and that couldn't come from merely having written raw data down, and hoping.

But Chris had, however fortuitously, found and carved out with his mate Jess, a life in Turkey that worked so well for them at the pottery. What was that extra ambition or vision, that drove him? Not only had he written a huge volume of work, but in relation to his income spent a vast amount of money on the two models of the spaceship. And there was the strange incomplete picture that Chris' brother had painted. Where did that fit?

Yet having done all this he had taken a machete and hacked the central core of his creation to something more 'acceptable'. It did not seem logical.

So if I went through the same editing process as he had, what would I end up with?

I put my desk top computer to the task, having fed into it Chris' files, and a subtraction routine giving the start and end points of 24 Billion and Counting. The objective was to find out what was left. It wasn't an exact science, but our publishing program editing suite was pretty sophisticated.

I moved Chris' PC and monitor back to the workshop and covered them with a dust sheet.

It was by now two in the morning and I was weary. I made myself a nightcap from a malt whisky and water, and sat pondering. When does a search into the provenance of a piece of writing become an obsession, and should I let it go?

In the 24 Billion and Counting story Alicia and even her cat Lucy had appeared. Further the comet Rosetta and the need for its destruction was described, and my visit to Mauna Kia had revealed that necessity to be a plausible if remote possibility . The nuclear powered plasma space vehicle drive was an uncannily prescient inclusion in the story, that is if the accusations of the security people, before they were withdrawn, were to be believed.

These thoughts rotated like an atmospheric cyclone in my brain, and I decided to go to bed and review things in the morning. Maybe I would be able to rip a reality from the fiction invading my soul. As it was I felt I was drifting into insanity.

Despite being tired my whirling brain still wouldn't let me sleep and I left my bed to get another whisky.

Eventually the tiredness and the whisky overwhelmed my thoughts and I fell into unconsciousness.

Some two hours later the telephone rang. It penetrated my slumber, and I roused slowly. I saw a blurry image of the clock, four or five in the morning.