Spanner Intro: Press the Reset Button

Book 1 “Rock City Blues” begins here.

Chaos Angel Spanner Book 1 is dedicated to
John Ralston Saul.
The British Crown may have shut him up,
but he left his instructions in ’ninety-two,
in which he taught us how to turn
a novel into a bomb.

“Dieu n’est pas pour les gros bataillons,
mais pour ceux qui tirent le mieux.”
Voltaire

Finally, after almost 20 years, Chaos Angel Spanner is ready to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting reading public. It may not be the manga I originally envisioned back in 1992, but I still intend to do that sometime in the future, depending on whether I actually succeed in learning how to draw.

Finally, after four years of participation in NaNoWriMo (as of November 2010), one of my WriMo novels is ready to publish and is being posted. You’ll now be able to see what I’ve been doing since my first NaNo in 2006, and you can now find out just what has been obsessing me for the past two decades.

So what do you do when you have to cancel the future? Start all over again in the present and make your future. This is not a spoiler: it’s the entire story.

Now it’s time at last for the main event...

Chaos Angel Spanner
Intro: Press the Reset Button

the end.
Nuclear bombs explode all over the Earth, cracking its diseased skin open and making it bleed fire. Billions upon billions of microscopic robots transform the planetary substance into more of themselves. The infection penetrates deeper and deeper to reach its hot molten heart. Not even entropy can stop these tiny cannibals from devouring all matter they touch. Eventually, the planet’s stony flesh becomes so weak that no amount of gravity can hold it together anymore. The Earth explodes.

For a century, the Sol System has been ruled by Corporations. They, or the unholy abominations they incarnated, were the master race, the replacement for Man, the new species of gods driven by an absolute lack of conscience and by absolute faith that what they called the Law of Social Darwinism commanded them to conquer the universe. They had constructed their mental and physical power far beyond human understanding. They assimilated computers, robots, artificial intelligences, human beings. They escaped human control and made themselves independent lifeforms. Some of them were once human themselves.

But we humans were a persistent species, and we always clung to life with ferocious tenacity. Resistance leaders arose to lead us into revolt against the new gods’ tyranny. We were on the cusp of our next evolutionary quantum leap; we had to advance into the future, or we would become extinct like all the human species that came before us. Two enemies were determined to stop us at any cost. One, a nation-eating AI named Echelon-Norad, claimed to be the Old God Allah who had held us in subjection for thousands of years and threatened to destroy us by the ancient mystical plan of the Book of Revelation if we dared throw off our chains. But the more dangerous enemy claimed possession over the Law of Evolution itself. They wanted to replace us. They called themselves the United Corporations. They were united against us.

We nearly succeeded in saving ourselves and our planet. A hero named Kira Richter-Thomas gave her life to destroy Echelon-Norad-GOD and liberate its billions of human exobodies from its mind slavery. We discovered the secret of the Corporations and nearly brought them back under our control. We thought we had secured the future for our children.

We were wrong. Our struggle to control the Corporations drove them mad. They decided to take us with them into extinction. They brought back GOD from the dead. To fulfill the ancient Plan and bring about the long-promised Eschaton, GOD manifested itself in its final form as the ultimate horror: Nanoclysm.

The explosion expels the ruined planet’s fragments from it, spreading the seeds of its fatal disease outward. The first extraterrestrial objects to go are the Orbital Arcologies the Corporations created as new bodies for themselves before their hatred of humanity drove them to mass suicide. Soon enough, the infection will reach the moon, the planets, and the Sun. The exploding Sun will spread it to its neighbour stars. In time, it will spread throughout the Galaxy, and from it to the rest of the Universe.

I am the last human being left alive. No hope is possible anymore, but I do not allow despair to darken my reason. I let the tears flow freely for my people and my planet, but I do not allow them to blur my vision. Our task is too urgent. I remove my glasses for the last time. I want to see everything.

The tainted debris is fast approaching the Tangram. She is the most advanced ship the Cartel got around to building. Theoretically, she’s capable of reaching speeds faster than light. The Wrecking Krewe and I stole her from Yoyodyne Orbital as soon as Nanoclysm formed and began the Eschaton; they sacrificed themselves so Tangram and I could escape. She really is a “she”: decades ago, the Cartel began cyborging its ships to their pilots so that the ship became their body. Right now the Tangram is using the Moon as a shield as we prepare to make a desperate jump. The Moon is beginning to break up, so she puts up her strongest energy shields. All life on and around Earth is now extinct; only she and I are left, and not for long. I speak to her. “Tansie.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Give us warp speed, now.”

A dozen nuclear explosions give the Tangram’s engine the force to accelerate out of the ecliptic plane. At first she must fight inertia as the tainted debris begins slamming against her shield. Once up to speed, she uses planetary debris to find the solar wind currents, surfing from current to current until we find the right one.

Before Nanoclysm, the Earth sent out countless radio signals as if to joyfully remind the universe that it was alive. Now there is only one gigantic coherent signal, and its message is universal death. A nanite tentacle reaches out, trying to catch us from behind. Its assimilant mind tries to overpower Tangram’s and my own. Even the nanite-boosted immune systems in our own blood cannot protect us for long.

“I’m afraid, mother,” she says.

“Of what?”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Yes, child. But if we can generate a reality distortion field powerful enough to cancel out our present, we’ll be able to save other futures. So I’m not afraid at all.”

“I’ll be brave for you, mother.”

“I love you, child.” I give her an affectionate wink she can see on her bridge camera.

The solar system may be arranged on a plane (the ecliptic), but the space between the Sun and the Oort Cloud is roughly spherical. We may be out of the way of the asteroid belt, but the ice blocks and comets that form the Oort Cloud pose an equal danger. Tangram plots the best path through the cloud and waits for the right time. Luck is on our side this time: we find our window of opportunity within mere days of former Earth time.

“Ready to accelerate to light speed,” says Tangram.

Tangram helped me develop the equations required to create a reality distortion field generator. Tinker and I kludged the device together. On Earth, it worked well enough to allow me to escape the destruction. Now Tangram and I are about to put the RDF generator to its ultimate test. I cross my fingers.

The warp engine detonates a series of nukes to bring us near light speed. “Activating inertia damping.” Tangram uses her navigation system to ride the solar currents and thread her way through the Oort Cloud. Time slows down; everything feels heavier; space contracts into a tunnel. Only Tangram’s diminishing force fields keep her from flying apart. Only the inertia compensator keeps me from being obliterated by the crushing acceleration force.

“Activating reality distortion field generator.”

With an audible click, the whole universe silently shudders. Matter loses all substance. Space dust passes through us like neutrinos. What once seemed empty and solid now floats and flickers as if it were underwater. We pass through the dark matter like ghosts.

“I love you, mother.”

“I love you, Tansie.” I let myself cry.

“Do it?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

“Activating FTL hyperdrive.”

Tangram detonates her entire remaining fuel at once. It is only a matter of seconds before she flies apart. We are beside ourselves with excitement. We reach 0.99c... nines pile up on the holodisplay in front of me... the stars race past us at ever faster speeds, then galaxies and quasars... And then the display flashes 1.0c (we did it!) — Nanoclysm screams — reality tears apart — the whole world goes simultaneously black and white — I am nothing and everything and we are one and we are God—

And then...

the beginning...

• 2112: God King Dictel sacrifices itself in a ritual that kills billions of sentients to resurrect GOD in its final form as Nanoclysm: Earth destroyed, beginning of the end of the universe
• 2111: The Robot War ends with the Battle of the Orbitals: Corporate warships succeed in destroying Europa, but Terran forces retaliate by destroying all the Orbitals, killing all Corporations but two, God King Dictel and its old partner Yoyodyne, which dies soon afterward, while the God King plots its revenge as it dies
• 2108: Kira Richter-Thomas detonates a mind bomb to destroy GOD and defeat the Corporations in the Battle of New Mecca, killing over half the sentients remaining on Earth
• 2104: The Battle of Saturn ends in defeat for the Alliance with the destruction of its Outer Fleet by Corporate forces and the destruction of Titan
• 2099: The destruction of the moon bases in the Battle of Luna
• 2091: Echelon-Norad becomes the first of the God Kings by claiming to be GOD, Supreme Being of the nearly extinct human religion of Islam
• 2087: Corporate space warships destroy the terraforming colonies on Venus and Mars
• 2084: The Robot War between the Earth Alliance and the United Corporations begins
• 2081: Terraforming of Venus, Mars, Titan, and Europa begins
• 2075: The first true interplanetary spaceships built
• 2069: The first permanent moon bases established by the Earth Alliance
• 2058: The Corporate War ends with the defeat of the United Corporations; the surviving Corporations cede the devastated Earth to the human Earth Alliance and retreat to the Orbitals
• 2055: The Corporations attempt to destroy the Alliance by dropping near-earth asteroids on Terran population centers and military bases in the Rock Bombing; the Alliance retaliate by destroying Corporate botnet satellites and Orbital bases
• 2045: The first true superhumans engineered through nanotechnology and genetic engineering, eliminating the Corporations’ evolutionary advantage over humanity
• 2042: Nanotechnology advances to the point where resurrection of cryogenically preserved humans becomes possible for the first time
• 2039: The United Corporations declare war against Earth’s human nations, forcing all the former enemy superpowers to end World War III and unite into the Alliance of Earth: the Corporate War begins
• 2035: Construction of the Earth space colonies known as Orbitals begins
• 2033: Nanotechnology reaches the first major milestone in its development with the first commercial nanobots
• 2030: The last of the United Corporations eliminate their final independent human employees, becoming sentient beings known as the New Gods, with minds evolved from AIs controlling masses of robotic and human exobodies
• 2024: The private army called Dictel Corporation achieves total automation, fires or kills all its remaining human employees, begins its third attempt to take over the American Empire by fusing its corporate AI called GOD with Echelon-Norad
• 2018: The complete nuclear obliteration of the Islamic Caliphate by Israel ends the Armageddon War in the Middle East
• 2016: Triad-led coup in China overthrows the Communist régime, establishes the Black Dynasty
• 2015: The first Assimilant forms out of the fusion of America’s Cold War-era AIs called ECHELON and NORAD, using techniques developed for Russian botnets; America and China declare war to dominate Earth, beginning World War III
• 2013: The United Corporations established to replace the United Nations and establish worldwide corporate dictatorship; fourteen-year-old Kira Richter-Thomas dons the mask of The Civet and begins her campaign of terror
• 2012: United States overthrown by its own empire, Corporatism established, President Obama assassinated — and 12-year-old Shira Thomas killed in the explosion...

...or was she? What if Shira survived?

Chaos theory states that perfect foreknowledge of the development of a system is impossible, and that the slightest change in one variable changes the future of the system completely...

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 1 index...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...
Back to Spanner’s World...

Copyright © 2010, 2012 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 1.1, 11/23/10: Corrected typos and one grammatical error; restored missing link to Chapter 1; added character details, one technical detail, and one character-related continuity nod.]
[Revision 1.2, 11/27/10: New layout for the entire series.]
[Revision 2.0, 5/30/11: Second draft, with minor revisions to match the major revisions in the rest of the story.]
[Revision 2.0.1, 6/1/11: All previously unused NaNoEdMo 2011 revisions now merged in.]
[Revision 2.1, 9/8/11: Corrected all remaining text errors and revised the introduction.]
[Revision 2.1.1, 10/12/11: Shortened and revised the introduction to remove the original disclaimers that I now find gratuitous. The original full introduction is now in the Chapter 1 index.]
[Revision 3, 10/13/11: Added the Book 1 dedication that will, unlike the post title and introduction, will make it into the final book. The meaning of the quotation in English: “God favors not the big batallions but the best shots.”]
[Revision 4 Final, 7/2/12: A few final additions to bring it fully into Revision 4 continuity.]