Chapter 7
Fast travel was a powerful tool, but it was somewhat useless until he had some transit points connected to the network. Which, for an eleven year old in the middle of nowhere, was more of a catch than he’d anticipated.
That said, he remembered that he and his mom were due for a road trip down the coast all the way to Orlando in a year.
That’ll definitely open things up, but until then…
Seb had to keep working, focusing on what he could do and not think too much about what he couldn’t.
For the moment, that meant writing and building a bit of a reputation and a name for himself.
This was a lot easier with the internet.
Getting short stories published was a trial, but getting novels even in front of a publisher was the next thing to impossible at this point in time. There were only a handful that even accepted unsolicited work, and only a couple of those were likely to look at his work much past the titles.
If he had his old manuscripts in a format he could feed to the dot matrix printer he had with his commodore, he would just drop two or three to each publisher that was open to unsolicited work and wait for the rejections, cycling them around until something hit.
Getting works converted over from late twenty-first century formats to commodore 64 formats, however, was going to take time.
So, short stories it was.
Thankfully he’d gotten lucky off the cuff, and had one accepted for a minor zine. That paid a couple hundred bucks and made his name slightly known. A couple more had been snapped up shortly after, and now he had the writing address of three editors of a couple minor scifi-zines.
It was a start.
The summer was moving on, leaving Seb with a strange feeling of being caught in a bubble of frozen time… barely able to move… yet somehow, simultaneously, hurtling along at breakneck speeds into a disastrous future that he couldn’t do anything about.
A solid part of his morning and evening rituals had become just telling himself over and over that slow and steady was the way forward and he was doing just fine.
Whether that’s the truth or not, I have to believe it.
*****
Seb found a spot in the basement, cleared out a bunch of junk that had all but rotted there, and ran an extension chord down so he could have power and lights. Once that was done, he got to work on a priority list with Al’s help.
It was basically a shopping list at the moment, ordered by how quickly he needed them.
A CRISPR garage setup was technically feasible given the year, though Seb was far from confident in his ability to precisely manage the retro-viral components. Unfortunately, it appeared that the optimum time for applying the CRISPR based boosts were during adolescence.
And I do not want to know how they figured that out.
Seb wasn’t sure if he should be glad, or not, that much of Al’s training was buried in Neural segments rather than the original training files. He suspected that he would have had some trouble sleeping if he could see those.
Project Black Hand is beyond my resources at the moment, and not by a small amount, but there are a few handy pieces of other projects that I might be able to adapt to my needs.
Mostly all he could do was plan, however. There just wasn’t an electronics store, a computer store, or labware to be found in the local area.
Until, of course, it was time to go to town.
*****
Heading into town was a bit of a big deal, or it had been to Seb when he was this age the first time around. A couple hours drive, and then the towers loomed in the distance. For much of his childhood those towers meant that he was going to eat fast food and get into Zeller’s toy aisle for a bit.
Now, he was just thinking about Radio Shack and whatever might pass for a computer store.
With a little over four hundred dollars to his name, Seb would have once been in absolute heaven, planning everything he was going to buy at the mall.
This time, well he had other things on his mind.
*****
Eve watched her son as he headed straight for Radio Shack instead of the Zeller’s storefront, mild surprise echoing through her.
She’d have been more shocked a while ago, but his clear shift in interest had been apparent for some time now, so she wasn’t shocked that he was focusing on electronics over toys at the moment.
He was somewhat more focused in general than she’d come to expect from her occasionally flighty boy, but that was a good thing… right? She hoped so, thought so… but time would tell, she supposed.
She watched as he carefully collected up a bunch of electronics components, a couple project boxes, and other such sundries such as a HAM operator’s logbook, that meant little to nothing to her.
None of it seemed dangerous, though, and short of that she wasn’t going to police what he did with his personal money.
Eve doubted that any of it would see any sort of practical use, of course, but even if he only learned not to waste money on frivolities she would call it a lesson well learned.
*****
That should be everything I need, well everything I need that can be acquired here at least.
Seb could have wished for a hell of a lot more, but honestly the selection at Radio Shack was surprisingly decent when he considered the likely market as it stood locally. Of course, most of the components didn’t take up much room and they certainly didn’t perish on the racks…
Plus, none of these pieces are going to be rendered obsolete in six months.
The speed of advancement, combined with the corporate push for built-in obsolescence in everything had killed a lot of hobby storefronts when he was growing up the first time around. Only large warehouses could keep stock in play and move enough to remain profitable in that sort of environment.
For now, though, that was mostly just a problem on the horizon.
So Seb packed away his purchases and headed out to their old pickup with his mother as they got ready to move on to the next stop.
He did take a moment to fiddle with the piece of gear in his pocket, though, and logged a fast travel point in a quiet and sheltered corner near where they parked the truck.
Computer stores weren’t really a thing yet, at least not in town or anywhere near him at the moment. That said, Zellers had a whole computer section, and they even sold the latest Commodore 64 and 128 software and hardware, so that was the next stop he was excited about.
There, he acquired a modem and a wireless card to bring his Commodore 64 into the information age… albeit only barely. Though he had gotten lucky. The local Zellers had just received the new model 1670, a modem running at a blistering 1200 baud.
It hadn’t been cheap, but Seb considered it well spent… though he was going to need to find out some numbers for BBS access, and possibly see if he could get access to the NSFNet, though that would likely require a student ID from a rather larger school than his current one.
He would have to ask around, he supposed. He didn’t know anyone who would know the answer, but Seb was fairly certain he knew a few people who would know how to find out.
That was good enough for the moment. Before they left the mall, though, a couple new fast travel points were logged into his system, one inside and one out.
It may be a while before he could really expand his network, but being able to hop into town quickly would certainly be of value in the future.
*****
No toys.
Eve wasn’t certain if she was happy about that or not.
Toys were… not educational, and she had always pulled out all the stops to ensure that whatever education Sebastian needed…
he got, regardless of cost. So she was happy to see him focusing on educational items over the normal toys that caught his interest…
But, somehow it also made her feel… well, she wasn’t even sure how it made her feel. Like something was wrong, somehow, even though she could clearly see that wasn’t the case.
He’s still so young, and children should play.
However, it was just a passing thing, Eve was confident in that.
She’d seen his interests shift over the years already, and she expected that he’d be back playing with his G.I.
Joe and Star Wars figures before long, so she fully intended to back him on an educational push for as long as she possibly could.
Money, being tight despite Seb’s newly acquired hobby of writing and selling short stories, wasn’t to be overlooked of course… but Eve dug deep and slipped Seb the extra he needed to complete his purchases.
It was worth it.
*****
I hope this was worth it.
Seb was hunched over the bench he’d set up in the basement, an old trouble light hanging over his head as he worked.
I never did get the hang of soldering…
Basic circuits were the foundation of some shockingly advanced gadgetery, all it took was a little imagination and a good understanding of the science behind it all.
Seb didn’t have a lot of the second, but his mastery of the first was pretty solid and with Al’s help he could fake the second really well.
Shortly after the invasion had begun, alien transmissions had stepped up to the point where they weren’t hiding anymore.
During those years, when there was still a functioning internet, a lot of information was swapped back and forth by the sort of people who got obsessive when it came to something that grabbed their focus.
And boy did actual alien invaders grab some attention.
One of the early innovations that came out of that shared knowledge bank was a portable EMF detection system that could be linked up with others to provide shockingly effective triangulation and ranging.
Until the invaders changed their operating procedure, it was a system that nearly flawlessly led soldiers and, more importantly, artillery directly to enemy positions.
I don’t have the internet yet to properly sync these together, but at least I’ll know if any of them are transmitting nearby, Seb thought as he snapped the last connectors in place and closed the project box.
He plugged a nine volt battery in and started packing away his tools, only to freeze when the lights on the device turned yellow and a low warning buzz began to sound.
Did I screw up the connections? Seb thought as he stared at the box like a snake winding up to strike.
He didn’t think he had, but he really hoped he did.
Because the only other possibility was that there was an alien position transmitting from within the, frankly anemic, range of his home built detector.
*****
Several hours of work later, Seb was all but certain that he hadn’t screwed up the build.
So he found himself slumping in the chair at the small desk where he did his homework, staring at the detector while his thoughts raced.
Makes no sense. There’s nothing anywhere close to me that’s of any strategic value, why would there be any presence here?
He couldn’t believe that the invaders were just plastered everywhere, if they had that level of infiltration then he was already screwed. No, there had to be a reason for them to be in the area… even if it was just pure dumb luck and he’d grown up next to an invasion cell.
Anything else and he might as well just give it up and go back to his ‘hedonism of the gods’ plan for what he’d do if he ever time travelled.
Regardless, though, he needed to know which it was, and that was going to be a problem.
His little electronics store detector could pick up the enemy’s signals, even ones that were outside Al’s current frequency range… something Seb took a moment to make an actual note about fixing… but that didn’t mean he could track them with it.
The limited reach of the device gave him a roughly two to three hundred kilometer range to the source. Seb knew enough about EMF triangulation that he could probably get a directional vector with a little work… but more precision would require multiple simultaneous readings, synced up precisely.
Well, I don’t have the internet to synchronize them, but I do have the signal from the atomic clock in Colorado and the NRC here in Canada. But I’ll need at least a couple more of these… and I don’t have the parts. Damn it.
He also didn’t have the money, though Seb didn’t think it would take too long to get enough for a few more detectors. He reluctantly grabbed his notebook and once again adjusted his priorities for orders.
It’ll take a while, but time is the one thing I seem to have in abundance.
Hopefully.
*****