Blade Cort's Books

7. Sord in Prosperity – Hope beyond the Apocalypse (Book 7 of Predictable Paths) immerses you in a futuristic dystopian Earth where survivors are attempting to create a new, lasting society

Blade’s futuristic dystopian sci-fi novel Sord in Prosperity follows Path to Entropy by decades, highlighting a teenager’s dangerous and humorous parallels with his ancestor’s life before the two Great Debacles.

SAMPLES FROM A FEW POST-DYSTOPIAN EPISODES

118 – SORD: “Why should I read this crap?” he wondered. “Nothing in this ancient prose has value for where I am today. Some flipping ancestor from a hundred-plus years ago? Doesn’t make sense she’d force this penance on her overburdened son.”

I’m a realist, I believe. Not stupidly hopeful that humanity will muddle through this next stage or filter somehow as it always has, despite its ignorance. Our collective languor was only a minor hindrance in the recent past, but that changes quickly as annihilation technologies are democratized. We don’t get a hall pass on this one. Not this time.

Unfortunately, we humans do not and cannot perceive ourselves as just another species on Earth. Another species with a finite lifespan, like the ponderous multitudes of previous earthly inhabitants forever lost in time.

119 – SIGHTINGS: “Naw, he didn’t have nothing like fingers and toes. I’d call it more like fins or flappy things that looked the shape of a tree leaf. He had a couple of those on each limb. Something like that.”

“It had flesh of some type, but my idea of a good time would not be watching two of these guys trying to create a little version of themselves, if you get my drift.”

“Oh yeah, I didn’t tell them yet about the foam and blade and all. Anyway, this thing had a head, like a big head that an eight foot tall man might have, but rounder, like soccer ball size. And you know what, I’ve kind of blanked on what its face looked like, if that was its face at all.”

“So I stopped the Jeep, and we saw what we thought was this huge guy, like a silhouette in the fading light, standing in the road and staring at us. If I would have kept going, I would’ve plowed right into him, then the Army wouldn’t have gotten their prized specimen.”

“So, we’re slowly walking up to it, talking all the time, and trying to calm it down like we were trained to do with drunk soldiers. And usually, you’d expect someone to react, but this thing didn’t even take notice of us. Like it was in its own dimension of space and had no idea we was there other than the Jeep with the lights that must have blinded it.”

“Hell, you don’t go stabbing your own chest if you’re having a nice day and enjoying the scenery. This guy, this being, was doing it on purpose. I think he was afraid to live, afraid we’d take him back and dissect him alive or whatever, so he wanted to end it as quickly as possible.”

120 – SOURS: “Better to cauterize and euthanize someone threatening to steal a warhead than having them cart a pound of fissile material home in the bed of their Chevy pickup.”

You get the picture. If you can move beyond your innate human primacy, the last thing you’d do is put your lips to that bullhorn. So what are the odds that when you blow the bullhorn, a friendly resident alien comes to rescue you from your predicament versus a velociraptor to shred you?

And I use the term ‘species’ very broadly there. We humans are far too constricted by our concepts of how things must follow natural systems. When a species can readily modify such systems, great variations are bound to occur. Plant, animal, virus, machine. Natural, synthetic. Sentient, non-aware, or super-aware. And all combinations thereof.

As indicated, we are average. Terribly average. Average planet, average intelligence, average filter passage, average species lifespan. Countless millions of similarly sentient civilizations have come before us, and many have reached where we are. But the duration of this last filter is so short and tenuous that it is rarely captured from our celestial peers. A hundred year span of RF transmissions is no time at all.

We’re just now approaching the next filter’s perimeter in these early twenty-first century decades, and our tech is accelerating far faster than our ability to control it.

Maybe they are already here and haven’t exposed themselves in any grand or obvious way because our hubris doesn’t allow us to request their help. It could well be they are out there, watching and waiting for that day when we make a plea to them.

122 – BECCA: “Disrupters. Anarchists. Entropists. Demagogues. Demigods. Autocrats. Tyrants. Too many terms for them. Those who prefer to tear apart, tear down, or demolish existing social structures that allow people be fair and equitable with each other, so they can own and control what remains in the bloody and gruesome aftermath.”

“Money and power just wasn’t enough. You’d eventually crave adoration, worship, and control over all beings and activities of the world. It’s an old story going way, way back in human history. Social Darwinism, the thought that you must be so wealthy and powerful because you are fundamentally superior to all others.”

“If they were close by and watching, why did they let us do it, particularly during the last few centuries? Why let us go through God knows how many wars and immeasurable pain and suffering? Why wouldn’t they say: ‘Don’t proceed. Don’t do it. Dangerous path?’ You’d think they’d have some compassion.”

124 – RACNINES: “What are they waiting for?” Sord complained. “Which one of us they’ll eat first? It’ll be the weaker one, the one with the fractured bone and bloody suit.”

The lead dog approached, standing on its hind legs momentarily as if to survey the best tasting prospects for his imminent meal.

“What now?” Sord regurgitated hoarsely. “What gets worse than this?”

125 – DAISY: “Well!” Robbie boomed. “You ladies are so kind to take time from your critical studies to visit us. I believe this occasion requires first-person coverage of these daring adventurers, who, as fate would have it, ran into a rabid, vicious pack of fifty racnines after valiantly driving their moto in reverse for kilometers. One of them was already seriously injured, bleeding and nearly spent of oxygen.”

Sord hardly said anything. His heart was beating so fast from holding Daisy’s hand, he thought the nurses might rush in to give him some meds.

Sord had seen enough of Matt’s type to understand the reasons for high immigrant recidivism rates, and he was aware of many other instances where reconditioning had not worked effectively. Most of the stragglers and refugees arriving from various encampments of humans and hybrids often were raised in devolved societal states.

“An irreparable beast unleashed from its cage and roaming the city, deciding what to damage or devour next. Nothing will ever change that,” Sord would tell himself.

126 – KNOT: Matt was damaged goods. She knew that. But she wasn’t perfect, either. Her mom’s history was far from perfect. She felt lucky to be accepted into Prosperity’s society, in fact, since her mom was so closely aligned with the evildoer who set fire to globe with his terrible genetic aberration.

127 – CHONIA: Earlier that morning, he was lying face down on that carpet when his aorta burst. A surge of blood from the damaged vessel poured through his mouth.

“It was never her intent to get married. Now, maybe that was her surreptitious plan. Maybe she thought her pregnancy could be used to convince Chuck to finally divorce his wife and marry her. I don’t know how often they ‘did the dirty deed,’ obviously, and I hate to even think of that heinous act between those two.”

A self-absorbed guy will say or do virtually anything for a few minutes of sex, and he will continue to do so as long as the assurance of repeated sex exists.

128 – BEATEN: A few weeks prior to her two black eyes, I finally came to the realization that Chuck was hurting her in some way. Abusing her. That the arguments were not just two people yelling at each other any longer. This was a six-foot-three, two hundred fifty pound monstrosity tearing away at my one hundred twenty pound mother.

“What good would it do anyway if I had bullets? I’d need to shoot him directly through the eyes. He’s a big horse, and a lousy .22 caliber will only make him angrier and give him an excuse to kill me.”

“He’s working on her like he did me. Trying to connive her into selling her husband’s business. Schmoozing cozily with her daughter, so much so that the lady feels very uncomfortable about their relationship. ‘Maybe he’s just a really sweet guy to children,’ she says. Isn’t that a laugh?”

145 – ELI: “Yeah. Like a belief or hope or chance in a billion he’s still alive somewhere, perhaps in a different dimension. People just don’t disappear. Whole laboratories don’t just exit the cosmos, right? Look at this place. Whatever was here couldn’t have simply evaporated as if it never existed; as if he never existed.”

146 – ALCOVE: Dinesh grinned. “Honey, I’m not faulting you for engaging in this activity, only that this is not the appropriate place. Teens will be teens. I have a few myself, and I’ve been there not long ago myself. In fact, my chrono age is fifty-nine, but I’m heading back physically into my early twenties now, with a little help of course.”

147 – SWAT: The gang of neighbors, including some older and younger boys, formed a rough circle in the old man’s front yard. It was maybe the twentieth fight there in the past few years, and everyone knew just how much room to give to the combatants.

Her mention of playground momentarily distracted me. Sure, a lot of play happened there, multiple times a day by dozens of elementary school kids. And you might loosely term it as ‘ground’ as well. Indeed, if one dug deep enough through the fifteen inches of razor-sharp volcanic cinders, you could actually find good, hard, Northern Arizona soil.

Rounding the door into the anteroom, I looked up at that sacred place where the inviolable object was placed in waiting to violate some poor kid’s ass.

Not only was that November particularly snowy, but it was a long-staying Arctic cold front where daytime temperatures only reached into the teens. The ripe vegetables in our large backyard garden, used in part to cheaply feed our ravenous brood, had long since frozen over, leaving some of the vegetable leaves on the vine. I envisioned my poor brother being discovered outside somewhere, his limbs appearing just like those zucchini plants – dark green, stiff, and smelly when they finally thawed and rotted.

153 – RATTLES: Not only was it a scalding hot afternoon, but we twelve-year-olds had just captured three poisonous vipers in fifteen minutes. That had to be some kind of record, and we expected to gain bragging rights for years to come. It was a grand moment of inane, idiotic kidhood glory.

156 – YANKED: “Amazing tech,” he considered. “I am among the first humans of the many billions who have lived before even able to make that choice. A thousand years from now, maybe after I’ve experienced many dozens of long-term relationships with other people, will I still recall this elation and euphoria that I feel with Daisy?”