Free Sample from the most recent draft of JUDGE OF AGES

This is to show you, my dear readers, who are also (really) my employers, that I am hard at work.

From a scene I work working on yesterday:

Soorm the Hormagaunt, from AD 6850, is talking with Menelaus Montrose, accidental posthuman, from AD 2401. Both have been thawed circa AD 10515 from long-term hibernation, along with a prison camp full of men from various eras between the near and the far future apparently by a somewhat ruthless group of archeologists, who have broken into the buried hibernation faculty that Montrose built. What or who they are seeking is unclear.

Menelaus is one of several from the Hermetic Order, who are star travelers, but he broke from them and is now their foe. One of the scientific discoveries the Hermeticists discovered on the alien Monument orbiting V 886 Centauri was a predictive calculus of history (Cliometry, for you fans of Mike Flynn, or Psychohistory, for you fans of Isaac Asimov).

Montrose and the Hermeticists, led by Ximen “Blackie” del Azarchel, have artificially augmented their intelligence to superhuman levels, and been using the predictive calculus to create historical trends: but Montrose and the Hermeticists have mutually incompatible visions of future human evolution, and so the two opposing groups interfere with the historical trends introduced by the other. (Imagine Asimov’s FOUNDATION if one rebel psychohistorian had decided to prevent the rise of the Second Empire, and lead history toward democracy instead.)

Naturally, among the mortals, these posthumans have become legendary almost godlike figures. This is the scene where Soorm discovers who Menelaus is. Read more