Ideas for working titles

The Inside World Trilogy

Book one: Seedling
Book two: Plantasia
Book three: Expansion

Re-Invention is a Fine Art.

Doctor Irea Damarri knew that Paetreyl was a telepath from the start of the experiment.  In fact, she had designed him to be the best one possible. 

The question was: could he remain sane?  

It was always tricky with telepaths.  
 

Incoming...

The tech looked at her, lip curled in disbelief. “It's an Earth signature madam.”

“Earth?!”

Of all the possibilities, she had not expected that.

“Yes, madam. The nanotubes inside belong to Ancient Earth, M class planet in the Milky Way galaxy. Jet ship.” The tech shook his head in confusion. “But...how can this be? Isn't Earth...?”

“Yes, Enaran,” Irea snapped. “This couldn't be the signature of Ancient Earth. It's impossible. The sensors are wrong. Why don't you run the scan again?”

They waited another few tense seconds. Enaran shook his head. “No, director,” he said in a mystified voice. “Those nanotubes belong to Ancient Earth. At least...at least the sensors say so. But...how can this be?”

With a growl, Irea surged to the screen. She irritably shoved Enaran out of the chair and maneuvered herself in his place. “The sensors are wrong,” she snapped. She mumbled under her breath, “They have to be wrong...”

But they weren't wrong. Irea stared at the results of the scan herself. Earth, the M class planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, had sent a vessel to the Plantasian biosphere.

This is impossible, she thought in disbelief, head spinning. Enaran's gaze fixed on her, watching her response, panic in his own eyes. In desperation, Irea ran the scan again. A few bleeps, and then she got the same answer. Earth. She ran the scan again. Earth. And again, and again.

Earth.

Earth.

Earth.

The object headed towards the biosphere with a pixalated blink, blink, blink. Irea found her knuckles clenched beneath her chin. She bit her finger and shook her head.

“How can this be?” Enaran asked in confusion.

“I don't know. Unless the ship is a relic from the Ancient days.”

“It's headed straight for the biosphere.”

“I can see that,” she snapped.

“What do we do? What if...what if it...has a weapon aboard?”

“I don't know.” Irea was beginning to grow tired of saying that. Usually she was the one who knew everything. But this sudden appearance by a ship from Ancient Earth was entirely unexpected. Plantasia had never encountered one before, in all its history to her knowledge.

Doctor Irea Damarri regarding Host 14: The Being Known as Prem

 "Prem creates monsters, and monstrous situations. He is the personification of human greed, arrogance, fear, death, madness and just about every negative emotion there is. He brought so much misery, death, destruction and trauma to the world, that just the mere mention of his name twenty-years later brings anxiety to all on Axia Station."

“Rowan Hanso made the decision to create a super-seed. He accelerated the evolution of the seed, and placed it into a host designed to receive it. The host was Prem.”

“What was Prem good at?” I asked curiously.

Irea's mouth folded in a line. “He was good at everything. Telepathy, teleportation, kinetics, metamorphing. His specialty seemed to be transmutation. The only thing he couldn't do was to tell the future. Therefore he was obsessed with it.”

“We couldn't keep up with him. No boundary was too much for him. His teleportation was too powerful. He could move himself from every barrier. He wouldn't be contained. He could leap from place to place inside the Station. He came and went where he pleased. Besides from being just an experiment, he became involved in our work. He stopped being the experiment and started being the psientist.   He made us all his test subjects in sick and twisted experiments.  And there was little we could do about it."

“The situation got out of control very quickly. His obsession with the future became all he could think about.  Strange events began to occur on the Station, fractures in space.   We began to suspect Prem had an ability to jump timelines. We knew we had to contain him. But how do you contain something that won't be restrained in any way?”

“Prem started changing. When his seed became activated, we knew he was powerful. But we didn't realize how devastating he could be. Or could want to be. Geneva are intelligent beings. We knew that from the beginning. We thought that meant we could reason with geneva and communicate on the same levels of understanding. But this is impossible when you have beings so powerful with so little life experience and with very strong egos."

Prem's primary ability was transmutation. He could make anything become anything he wished. He was so good at it that he shouldn't exist. The fabric of space-time would ripple in every space he inhabited. He would break the world if he continued to be alive and if his seed continued to activate. He could change everything fundamentally about the way humans experience existence. So we decided to kill him. Rowan Hanso decided to go to war against Prem."

 “It didn't turn out well. Prem opened a gate to Hell. It still drives me mad how casually he did it. He brought so much ruin upon the Station that it's only a miracle that it's still here. The exposure to so much psin radiation took my youth and beauty from me. I wilted in the face of all that black terror.   We all did.  But at least we finally contained the problem.   Nobody outside of Axia Station even knows what happened."