The Watchtowers- EarthWatch Read online

  Praise for The Watchtowers (EarthWatch)

  “What happens when the watcher becomes the watched? Fifty centuries from now, we’ve messed things up so badly, we have to send ‘watchers’ back in time to figure where things all went wrong. In this romantic-chase-sci-fi-buddy-movie-thriller, technology is an organic and not-completely controllable thing […] Your pulse will try to keep pace with how fast you wind up turning the pages. Your pulse will lose.”

  L. C. Fiore, award-winning author of The Last Great American Magic

  “The master of mind bending and time bending, J.D. Cortese, is at it again with his new novel, THE WATCHTOWERS (EARTHWATCH). It’s an adventure of epic proportions that will keep you saying, ‘Just one more chapter!’”

  Padgett Gerler, award-winning author of The Invisible Girl

  “In THE WATCHTOWERS, J.D. Cortese invites you into a future dystopian New York using time travel, action, and sci-fi. The descriptions are vivid, and you can almost smell the desolation while feeling the clock-ticking countdown. Masterful world-building that immediately grips you and keeps you engaged until the end.”

  Tracie Barton-Barrett, award-winning author of Buried Deep in Our Hearts

  Praise for The Sound of a Broken Chain

  “This exciting story irresistibly combines Mission Impossible-like action and intrigue with rich character and magical realism elements […] Echoes of Allende’s wonderful The House of the Spirits and at the same time another favorite, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. Rich characters, engaging historical setting and events, and a fast-paced plot. But this historical situation is also very topical and relevant today.”

  Gregg Cusick, author of My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible

  “I was struck by how Buenos Aires became a complicated character in the book. I could hear the traffic, the noise of cobblestone streets, the cheers from the soccer fans coming from the homes and the stadium, and the sounds of gunfire. I could see the quaint squares in different parts of the city, the many and often frequented coffeehouses, the apartments, the cemetery and the prison-like buildings. I felt the pulse of the city through Edgar Weston's race to find and his attempts to save Mariana.”

  Kathryn Watson Quigg, co-author of To Any Soldier: A Novel of Vietnam Letters

  “Prepare yourself for a fascinating and suspenseful ride. In this novel for teenagers, The Sound of a Broken Chain, author J. D. Cortese takes readers into the city of Buenos Aires in the mid-1970s, a time of tyranny and terror under a ruthless military dictatorship […] Yet this is no ordinary adventure story, but a multi-layered sci-fi novel where past and future intersect with the turbulent present.”

  Miriam Herin, award-winning author of Absolution and A Stone for Bread

  Opportuna Libri, LLC

  Timely books for every time

  Durham, North Carolina

  Copyright © 2020 by Jorge D. Cortese

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, whether graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or storing in any kind of information retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or critical reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. All the characters, names, and events, as well as places, incidents, and organizations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real events is entirely coincidental. The city of New York serves as backdrop to this story, but its future modifications as represented in this work are pure speculation.

  Published by Opportuna Libri, LLC. For any further information about specific rights, ordering, and the copyrighted use of this book, please contact Opportuna Libri at [email protected]. Mail should be addressed to Opportuna Libri, LLC, 3710 Shannon Road #52406, Durham, NC 27717-6327.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7325590-5-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957807

  Cover Design and Interior Formatting by Tugboat Design

  Author’s cover photography by Portrait Innovations Professional Studios

  Edited by Word Works Editorial Services

  Published by Opportuna Libri, LLC (North Carolina, USA)

  To my children, Carina and Alejandro,

  for building many things with me,

  even a time machine,

  way before they started to build our future.

  To New York, a city that is as deep as tall.

  “I have known all that you have said:

  I knew, I knew when I transgressed nor will deny it.

  In helping man, I brought my troubles on me;

  but yet I did not think that with such tortures

  I should be wasted on these airy cliffs,

  this lonely mountain top, with no one near.”

  Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus

  “Across Time and Space in crystalline glitter

  stands this moment a platinum city—

  a ship drifting leisurely,

  like a large bird, resplendent in variegated hues.”

  Platinum City, Yuang Hongri

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Epilogue

  Origins and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To understand the upheaval of recent times, I have taken on an Old Earth custom and started a journal with Dhern's help. My name is Agdinar and I'm only seventeen, not old enough to drive our air-vehicles but old enough to get into a lot of trouble with one of them.

  I should clarify that, like many other young people, I live in New York City; my world, however, lies five thousand years in the future. My people and I have been here for many centuries, watching. But I'm already digressing, and before Dhern takes over, I want to say something for this record.

  A great Old Earth physicist—I don't remember if it was Enrico Fermi or Stephen Hawking—argued that there is no time travel or time machines. Otherwise, where are the travelers from the future? These primiti
ve humans, even the brightest ones, get it so wrong sometimes.

  We have come from the future and brought our artifacts and cities piece by piece, over millennia. We constructed immense floating fortresses all over the world, to observe mankind and some day intervene to prevent its falling. They are here, our cities, and I am most of the time in one of them, watching New York.

  That's what we do. We watch.

  It is that our cities, like us, are invisible.

  Chapter 1

  The floor had turned transparent once again, making Agdinar feel that he and his watchstation were floating above the Chrysler Building. The city below was breathtaking, beautiful in its decay, as all cities with a long past should be. He imagined that their cities in the future were also magnificent, but about how they'd look, nobody had shown images to the Watchers, saying that they wanted their watching to remain objective. At least, this was the standard answer of Management.

  Another known reason for not being told anything about the Watchers’ origin was that their contact with the future had been severed by time itself. The space-time wormhole that allowed the passing of their space armada to the neighborhood of the solar system had drifted away; the Sigma12Tau bridge was now so deep into the galaxy they couldn’t reach it in another millennium. But Management had never told them anything beyond generalities about their original trip, and Agdinar suspected more secrets were hiding behind their silence.

  By not having access to his own time, Agdinar had learned to love the present—2056 of the Old Earth calendar—and those crazy New Yorkers.

  Agdinar suspected that there was some decrepitude in their world. Otherwise, why had they kept hiding it from their young citizens? And why had they escaped it to supposedly help their primitive ancestors?

  His console might have been suspicious of his latest distraction, as it started to send low-level alarms to his sensory connectors. To focus his mind, the watchstation resorted to increasing the flow of four-dimensional images, and then opening more floating windows, coming off like petals from the three screen arrays that surrounded his body. Their views were shifting faster, digging violent details from the city cameras, and the barrage enveloped him, as if ready to drown him in the city's reality.

  Trying to control the tsunami of city views, Agdinar extended his right hand to signal the screens to flock to his palms, shrinking as they formed a cascading deck that disappeared in midflight.

  Agdinar knew that the artificial intelligences who ran everything in Tower City could take care of the watching themselves. But they preferred captive observers who would monitor any weird events diverging from pattern, probably because they didn't want to waste inordinate time in calculations. Lazy AIs, after all.

  The only reason to have people in charge was—and it had taken Agdinar five years out of stasis to find the word—something like random luck but hard to simulate, what the down-world humans called serendipity.

  As he couldn't keep his mind focused anymore, Agdinar decided to take a break, a long, secretive, and illegal break. Once a week, he would steal an air-vehicle and watch the city from up close.

  He forgot that Vaxeer, his next-station colleague, was given to chit-chat in any rest point they had. Conversations that, to his surprise, had turned into a growing friendship. Vaxeer was shorter than Agdinar and his hair quite light—a rare natural color in Watchers, what pre-engineered humans would have called blond. Agdinar couldn't have been designed to be more different. He had dark hair and was quite tall, so in this century he could have passed for a basketball player, perhaps one from Eastern Europe. His light blue eyes would support that possibility, but it was all just computer-generated genetics to keep variety.

  Vaxeer was observing him intently, with a knowing smile. They watched the outside, but also each other, and would tell when the Overseer was near and could jump on them.

  “Hey, Agdi, what are you doing?”

  “Leaving.”

  “But you just came.”

  “A long time watching, and nothing's happening.”

  “No, friend, it's not nothing, look here.” Vaxeer was quite professional, and his hands could make signals to allow data flow better than any third-line Watchers of their age. “See? Twenty-six auto-car crashes, two louts, and a bridge closed by the Hawks. In a few hours there'll be a confrontation between the police and demonstrators. A heated confrontation.”

  Agdinar stood and looked away, as if ready to leave. But then he reached to the upper row of Vaxeer’s viewers and unleashed a wall of panels to illustrate his point. “And don't forget the rest of it,” he said. “There will be five warehouses exploding, sixteen people taken by the medics, and one who would be declared dead tomorrow morning, with a busted spleen. So what? We already know all of this.”

  “No, we don't. There could be changes—that's the reason we watch.”

  Agdinar touched Vaxeer’s shoulder. With his extended arm, he seemed to be inviting his friend to go with him. “It's only what they'd tell us,” he said. “I haven't seen any big changes in…six years? Twelve years? I can't even remember how long I've been out of stasis.”

  “Don't say that, you have the record in micro-events. They use your takes to teach micro-changes in the multiverse.”

  “The emphasis is in micro, my friend. In micro, micro, micro. One of my events was a dog peeing on a different tree. Truly world-warping events, if I may say so.”

  “You're going to get into a lot of trouble with the Managers.”

  “I am already in a lot of trouble with the Overseer, who tops them all.”

  “Don’t be so sure about it. The Management Trust can vote to set you in stasis; and, you know, there have been Watchers who were set in stasis for years.” Vaxeer glanced nervously all around the immense cylinder in which they stood, as if he were noticing for the first time that the entire floor flickered and turned transparent every twenty seconds.

  “I don't see any difference between been voted to stasis,” Agdinar added, “or forced into it by our leader's whims. I have doubts about the truthfulness of our leadership.”

  Vaxeer’s hand floated between their faces, and Agdinar could see it shaking. “And you should keep them to yourself,” Vaxeer said, his voice as shaky as the hand.

  “You're being too kind with our masters. They don't reciprocate, you know. We are just slaves, threatened with stasis.”

  “Please, Agdi. This's getting dangerous for you.”

  Agdinar was going to say that he was nothing to Tower City, just a handler of a watchstation in one of the many ring-like watchpoints over New York. But justification didn't matter much to him anymore. “You can tell the Managers that I'm quite enjoying the danger,” he said. “At least it gives me a sense of every minute counting for something. We're all in enough trouble, so close to the Great Descent.”

  Vaxeer, uncommon for him, snickered. “I thought that the story about a second descent of the world into chaos was a myth. Look outside, there's enough of a mess down there, after the first Descent, to need another.”

  “Well, it wouldn't surprise me if the Managers are using the threat of another Descent to keep us working.”

  “That's a little paranoid, don’t you think, believing in the Great Descent just to say it's a conspiracy from the leadership.” Vaxeer glanced again at other Watchers, as if worried they’d heard him. Theirs wasn’t a conversation to have in a public space.

  “You've got me,” Agdinar said. “But there's something sinister about a final collapse of the great city, driving the whole world into anarchy. It's too much of an easy reason for us to be here and do exactly what the Hawks would want, a break in world government, so the country is theirs to take.”

  “Oh, Agdi. We've reached the point we gossip like the Earth people who watch stories in their eye-viewers.”

  There was something in Vaxeer’s teasing that always made Agdinar smile. “I didn't know you'd become so attached to the down-world people,” he said.

  “I migh
t very well be, but at least I don't escape in unlicensed AVs to watch them.”

  “Hey, we are Watchers, and so we watch.”

  Vaxeer stayed silent, and the displaced intensity of his stare made Agdinar turn, to find the Overseer standing behind his seat.

  The Overseer was imposing, even though Agdinar was a head taller. Perhaps it was his girth, unusual even in senior Watchers. With the calculated diet they got from infusing dispensers, it would be hard to grow a belly like the one the Overseer sported under his long burgundy coat. He looked as if someone had draped a cape over a barrel where someone else had left an unsightly bald human head.

  The eyes were a different matter, and Agdinar shivered at those steely irises, full of animal violence and swimming with nanorobots. The Overseer might have believed that he was more than human, but he had become less than that to reach his post.

  Five seconds of that stare was all Agdinar could take, and he lowered his sight.

  “Have you finished the tracking project?”

  “No.”

  “You know our current task. We are building a synthesis of the parallel tracks, with data from Central Calculation and your peers.” The Overseer had said this while making a gesture toward Vaxeer, who followed its direction and walked away.

  “Yes.” Agdinar didn’t want to be alone with the Overseer and he put his hands behind his back, as if distracted.

  “Are you going to keep using single words to answer?” the Overseer said, seeking Agdinar’s sight. “It is a privilege to talk with the Overseers; you know that.”

  “Yes…I do.” Agdinar’s voice had softened with doubt. As the Overseer approached him, he shuddered.

  “I have asked you more than one question. And I want a much longer answer.”