Confrontation Read online

  CONFRONTATION

  ____________

  Volume 3 of the Darkside Trilogy

  William Hayashi

  Copyright © 2015 by William Hayashi.

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2015914337

  ISBN:

  Hardcover

  978-1-5144-0418-8

  Softcover

  978-1-5144-0419-5

  eBook

  978-1-5144-0420-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  Rev. date: 09/28/2015

  Xlibris

  1-888-795-4274

  www.Xlibris.com

  636320

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Solitary Man

  Chapter 2: Good Vibrations

  Chapter 3: We Can Work It Out

  Chapter 4: Lovely Day

  Chapter 5: Under Pressure

  Chapter 6: Stand By Me

  Chapter 7: Strangers In The Night

  Chapter 8: Our House

  Chapter 9: Games People Play

  Chapter 10: If You Want It, Here It Is, Come And Get It

  Chapter 11: Treat Her Like A Lady

  Chapter 12: Changes

  Chapter 13: Nothing From Nothing

  Chapter 14: Mea Culpa

  Chapter 15: Fantasy

  Chapter 16: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

  Chapter 17: Smiling Faces

  Chapter 18: Spaceman

  Chapter 19: Daytripper

  Chapter 20: We Are Family

  Chapter 21: Ride Captain Ride

  Chapter 22: Watching And Waiting

  Chapter 23: It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now

  Chapter 24: New Day For You

  Chapter 25: Pathway to Glory

  Chapter 26: Where To Now St. Peter

  Chapter 27: Suspicious Minds

  Chapter 28: Time Has Come Today

  Chapter 29: Go Down Gamblin’

  Chapter 30: Right Place, Wrong Time

  Chapter 31: Burning Bridges

  Chapter 32: Bad To The Bone

  Chapter 33: Way Back Home

  Chapter 34: Colors

  Chapter 35: Riders On The Storm

  Chapter 36: Work To Do

  Chapter 37: A Walk In The Night

  Chapter 38: Nitty Gritty

  Chapter 39: Fight The Power

  Chapter 40: Unfinished Business

  Chapter 41: Woke Up This Morning

  Chapter 42: Won’t Get Fooled Again

  Chapter 43: Back On The Block

  Chapter 44: Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Dedicated to the wonder of imagination,

  and all of life’s “what could have beens”

  PREFACE

  So, The Darkside Trilogy is complete. Some three quarters of a million words later (I really should work on that brevity thing) the saga has come to a good landing point even though as in life, the lives of the characters go on.

  Along the way, life has changed for me as well. Surprisingly, I have been honored for my writing, something I did not expect, at least not before the trilogy was complete. Florida A&M honored me with an invitation to be a panelist for their 7th Annual Spring Literary Forum. There have been invitations to forums and panels on the AfroFuturism movement, a term and movement that I had no knowledge of when I began to write. And, I was characterized as an AfroFuturist before I ever knew the existence or definition of the term.

  So, wanting to know what I was being characterized as (accused of?), I looked it up and found a definition that stated that Afrofuturism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism.

  Darkside began as my foray into writing science fiction in the same vein as the science fiction authors from the Golden Age. I was reading Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Clarke and countless others well before I was in high school. I was also enamored with Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift series and the writings of Madeleine L’Engle as a preteen. The first movie I remember seeing in the theater was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. My father was a fan of science fiction and had a subscription to Analog Science Fact & Fiction (Now Fiction & Fact) as far back as I can remember, and I always grabbed each new month’s copy to read when it came in the mail before he got home from work.

  Since those early days, I have been a serious fan of science fiction primarily because it dealt with that “what if” factor. What if we met beings from another civilization on another planet? What if they came here? What if telepathy and empathy were far more prevalent than we find today? What if our civilization became an oligarchy and money ruled … oops, that one came true. But in all this reading, I never gave a thought to writing a sci-fi story, let alone a book or series. I won’t rehash the whole story of how I came to write Darkside. But it came about when I thought of what I believed was a great ending to a story, then sat down and wrote about 330,000 words to get to it; yes, that brevity thing again.

  Discovery was really only going to be a stand-alone novel, but less than halfway through writing it I realized that the full saga would take several books to tell, and I loved reading those authors who wrote broad, expansive series; Foundation, Robots, Dune, Rama, Midnight at the Well of Souls, Dragonriders of Pern. To follow known characters from volume to volume was a joy because I got to live with them, sometimes for years.

  It is my hope that Darkside will be that kind of joy for readers everywhere. For those who have gotten this far and have enjoyed the story, rejoice. There are seven volumes in the entire Darkside saga, a total of two trilogies and a seventh volume that winds up the tale.

  14 August 2015

  William Hayashi

  INTRODUCTION

  Read the next paragraph, stop and try to imagine what would come next in today’s United States of America:

  If an African American think tank came up with the secret means of controlling gravity and doubling the life span of man, and the U.S. government caught wind of it, what would happen in this day and age?

  This was the genesis of the story arc of The Darkside Trilogy. If you’ve read the first two installments, then you know how the story began. Confrontation takes little sociological, political or military license in concluding this tale.

  Yes, Darkside is speculative fiction. And yes, Darkside is just one person’s vision of the world in which we all live. But given the headlines today, it’s quite obvious in what low regard America holds black lives. And if blacks in this country had the secret of gravity-based propulsion, or the medical knowledge to double the life span of man and wanted to keep the inf
ormation strictly for the benefit of African Americans, what could we reasonably expect to happen to them in America? This is the essence of Darkside with one caveat: this time African Americans can say no—and make it stick.

  For those who have not read Discovery or Conception there are spoilers ahead.

  The elevator pitch for the series is: The Darkside Trilogy tells the story of what happens in America when the country finds that African Americans have been secretly living on the back side of the moon since before Neil Armstrong arrived. The story was crafted using the closest possible predictions of causality given America’s current culture.

  To have boyhood friends form a bond that, among other things, fostered the invention of gravity manipulating technologies that enable them to steal NASA’s march to the moon was too good to resist. And to have these same boys grow into men who have had enough of the daily slights, so many horrific murders almost daily for simply being black, to dream of moving somewhere where they can live without molestation or death is a perfectly reasonable premise despite what one reviewer on Amazon said of Discovery.

  First and foremost, Darkside is a speculative fiction drama with deep science fiction roots. The story was written in a similar vein as stories from the Golden Age of science fiction. The goal was a story of epic proportions, with believable characters that one could meet most anywhere in the country. There was also a requirement that the characters be the kind of African Americans who simply don’t exist in the American lexicon: educated, middle class, and with no criminal record. These are the kinds of people who were all around me as I grew up, people of so many races, from a myriad of locations across the globe and from all levels of social and financial strata in the Hyde Park community in Chicago.

  However, after all is said and done, hopefully people find the characters, and the entire story, compelling.

  Chapter 1

  SOLITARY MAN

  Former detective John Mathews was still quick on the draw, only now it was with the handle of the tap of a domestic microbrew or an imported dark. He let the head foam up, his precision in the pull preventing any of the thick foam from spilling over the side of the tall glass.

  “There you go. Can I get you anything else, Tom?” he asked.

  “Nope! That’s just perfect, John. How’s the crowd been tonight?” the new regular inquired.

  “Slow, but steady. I think the change in barometric pressure is keeping them away, it feels like it might rain any minute.”

  “Probably right. I just needed a couple of tall ones before I head home,” said Tom, a twice-a-weeker, as Pete called them.

  Pete’s Place, a staple of the elite jazz and blues lovers in the Atlanta area, boasted the most sophisticated sound system in the state. To spend any time in Pete’s was to have a live music experience without the benefit of any musicians. The sixty speakers, a whole wall of expensive power amplifiers, and the advanced, computerized digital sound system was an audiophile’s dream.

  To have the sounds of live jazz and blues without the overhead of musicians was a value proposition Pete appreciated every time he did his monthly profit and loss statement.

  John, a middling computer jockey at best, appreciated the evening-long playlists Pete had the good sense to assemble for the times when anyone manned the bar in Pete’s absence.

  John knew he would never acquire the same encyclopedic knowledge of the thousands of selections stored on Pete’s music server, but his own love for jazz was a point of convergence in their shared interests. Truth was, he didn’t even have a sound system of his own at home. His music hardware consisted of two clock radios, one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen.

  As a cop, he never had the time to devote to a hobby like music. He even had an older tube television with the government-sponsored digital converter box so he could pick up the local sports broadcasts; no cable or satellite service for him. He always considered it whenever one sport or another went into their playoff season, but he never followed up on the notion.

  Now that he was no longer employed by the Atlanta Police Department, his hours were skewed from starting work in the morning to beginning late in the afternoon. Sports had lost their primacy in his life, except for reading scores in the newspaper.

  Ten years ago his life was very different. As the lead missing persons detective on the Atlanta force, he faced investigations of teens gone missing instead of working a high-tech music system. But that was before the astounding discovery of a colony of African Americans secretly living on the back of the moon.

  Tasked with trying to uncover the whereabouts of a missing local black co-ed, the focus of John’s investigation turned out to be a college administrator who ended up leaving Earth to join that mysterious group of black separatists on the moon.

  The resulting investigation into his involvement with Dean Sydney Atkins turned his own life upside down for over a year. The countless times he was interviewed—or interrogated as he characterized it—served no real purpose except to single him out as the lightening rod for all the frustration and humiliation an embarrassed government felt toward someone for having been shown up by a group of blacks leading a hidden existence.

  The FBI’s embarrassment from having overlooked the disappearance of more than 2,000 blacks who vanished over more than three decades, manifested itself in their all-but-shouted accusation that John had known about the role that the dean of student affairs at Steddman College played recruiting women for that secret group.

  Admitting his romantic relationship with Dean Atkins served no other purpose than to provide a hammer with which his own department and the FBI used to try to beat a confession of conspiracy and guilt out of him.

  The bitterness festered and grew until John had had enough. He hadn’t planned on falling in love, as he fully believed he had done with Sydney Atkins. She disappeared from the Atlanta area only to be listed as one of the members of the group of space-based separatists, and was now somewhere out past the orbit of Mars, while he was literally stranded on Earth.

  He stuck it out on the police force as long as he could, but eventually it was made clear that he had lost the confidence of his superiors, despite the quality of his work.

  His fellow officers knew the experience had left John withdrawn. He couldn’t be enticed back into the activities he had participated in before, the ball games, friendly card games or just that drink after the day was done. It was as if the departure of Sydney had also taken a vital spark of life from him. He was still the most effective detective in the missing persons department, but the constant assault on his honesty and integrity took its toll.

  He waited until the very hour of his twentieth year of service arrived, then resigned to collect a modest pension and flip the bird to those superiors responsible for the continuous scrutiny of his every move.

  Having been driven out of the police force and up the wall sitting around the house with nothing to do, his good friend Pete invited John to hang with him at the bar. Their relationship had begun with the commonality of both serving in Vietnam years back. John even helped Pete install the grand sound system when Pete purchased the joint, although John’s major contribution was to hand Pete whatever tool he pointed to throughout the renovation of the bar.

  He never regretted leaving the police force, happy in the knowledge that neither they, the FBI nor anyone else were ever going to have the satisfaction of using Sydney against him again. As far as he was concerned, his involvement with her and the rest of the former missing persons began and ended when she drove away from his house in the rain that night a decade back.

  * * *

  Unbeknownst to John, he actually did have a direct connection to the separatists; he had a ten-year-old daughter living in the space colony.

  The final time John had seen Sydney Atkins, he was standing on his lawn in his undershorts in the pouring rain, watching Sydney’s car zoom off after they ha
d made love for the very first—and last—time.

  As he was tending bar at Pete’s, Sydney was raising their daughter, Joy, as a single parent in the separatists’ space habitat beyond Mars’ orbit. With a community totally dedicated to the support and nurturing of their children, raising a child as a single parent had no stigma for parent or child, and in the colony, no child was ever left behind.

  “I don’t want to study right now, I want to play with my friends,” Joy said with just a hint of a pout on her face.

  Sydney had heard this refrain too many times to count and knew that it was just a token bit of resistance done out of habit. She smiled and gave Joy a hug.

  “Really? You mean to tell me that you don’t want to play with Genesis? I thought she was your best friend, sweetheart.”

  “Is she really a girl?” Joy asked, not so easily mollified.

  “We’ve talked about this over and over. Genesis is anything you want her to be. And you know as well as I do that your friends love the fact that they can do their schoolwork at home just by calling her up,” said Sydney.

  “But she’s not a real person. I want to work with a real person today!”

  “Okay, Joy. Let’s see who’s teaching math today, shall we? Then you can decide whether or not to stay home and do your schoolwork. Genesis?” Sydney called out.

  “Yes, Sydney. How may I be of assistance?” the colony’s artificial intelligence replied.

  “Joy has a question for you this morning.”

  “Good morning, Joy. How may I be of assistance?”

  “Who is teaching math at school today?” asked Joy with no hesitation at all.

  “Does this mean that you and I will not be having the opportunity to work on your assignments today? I will miss doing so. Both Lilith and Stephen are scheduled to teach math classes for those who attend school today, Joy. Lilith has a new interactive presentation she wrote for your grade level on algebra that I think you will enjoy. She is scheduled to begin class at ten o’clock this morning.