Prologue

David Mark couldn’t sleep. He turned from his left side to his right trying to find the proper position. The cool pillow turned warm. He flipped the pillow over, switched pillows and turned again. His mind retraced world and local events, hardening his resolve and dissatisfaction with life. He needed a solution. He needed to sleep again. He recalled a conversation with Lewis Chester about leaving Earth, and a news story about a new nano brain implant called the DTRIS that recorded the input of human senses and allowed for their playback.

After many sleepless nights with thoughts of escaping Earth, David Mark knew he had finally found the edge he needed when he agreed to accept the DTRIS implant. What Dave didn’t know was that although his timing for such decisions was near perfect, the result would plunge him into a struggle of galactic proportions and foreshadow a destruction of Earth.

Dave and his twin sister Darla were typical American citizens; mobile but geographically separated. Darla knew about David’s recent sensory implant procedure, the Davidson Thought Recorder Implant System, but she was unaware of the importance of this device, or that she would eventually have to transcribe the DTRIS contents.

Dave considered himself an agnostic, a precarious position for an irregular churchgoer, but like many others in his generation, he needed convincing proof that there was a God before he made any decisions about matters of faith. Right or wrong, Dave had more urgent things on his mind. He wanted to escape a nation that was no longer the nation his ancestors created; a nation now turned away from its original ideals, a nation that no longer studied its history, a nation of polarized residents and class warfare. Dave was weary of a growing government that was more interested in managing its citizens than protecting them, a nation where the term ‘resident’ was preferred more in official statements than the term ‘citizen’.

He remembered stories his dad told him about life in the 1950s and early 60s, a time of very low neighborhood crime, a time when the idea of home invasion was of little concern or even thought of, and when children could walk to school without an escort. With exceptions for low level mischief, it was an era when milk could be safely delivered to your front porch and many homes were left unlocked, a time when things you left in your yard were still there the next day and Sunday wasn’t just the first day of the week. However, that short post-war era passed, along with the freedoms and happiness that came with it.

Dave thought about his childhood in the early 1980s and how different it was from life in 2020. He wanted his freedom and peace of mind back, and was determined to find a way. Nevertheless, it was not until he found himself traveling across the galaxy in the company of strange people and creatures that he was forced to justify his mind set. The solution to his troubles would take more than just getting away. The politically popular paradigm of thinking was indeed misguided. It was time to take sides between good and evil. The fence-straddling days were over.

This is the story about the known and unknown, the visible and invisible; a story about the war of good and evil juxtaposed over the war between man against man and man’s impaired ability to discriminate between the wars. This is the time of galactic reorder, brought about by the wickedness of man and the spread of indecency, a time when man, blinded to his dark ways, would not turn back.

After two great wars, man seemed to have finally found a balance between spirit and environment but this era was short lived. Media tech and entertainment schemes were on the rise, causing distractions and self-indulgence. Man began to destroy himself because man turned solely to science or slick marketers for answers that didn’t consider right or wrong. Science was obsessed with an environment that would reorder itself without man. However, without morality, man’s life is shortened because it has no purpose and without purpose, there is no good or evil, there is only chaos. – Author