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Alex The Inventor-Chapter 5 (Pt.1)

Book 2 of an Illustrated Sci-Fi Trilogy

By G.F. BrynnPublished 7 years ago 4 min read
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Book 2 - The Ghosts in the Glass Tunnels

Read Chapters 1 - 4 at: Deep Sky Stories

Chapter 5 (Part 1) - A Distant Voice

The morning did indeed break sunny, bright and new after such a restless and disturbing night. Alex Faraway awoke to see softly floating dust-fairies caught within the rays of sunshine which angled through his bedroom window to shine on the floor at the foot of his bed. A quiet smile touched his face as he awoke to a single wonderful thought, "My dad is alive and loves me and I'm going to see him very soon."

Quiet contentment overtook Alex and he did nothing for the next five minutes except lay there thinking and wondering. What will it be like when he first walks up the steps to our front porch and starts knocking? Will it be a loud, hard knock or a quiet tap-tap-tap? He thought over that simple detail for a few more lazy minutes as the dust-fairies continued their tiny dance within the warm rays of sunlight.

"Hello, Alex, how are you son?" That was what John Faraway had said at the very beginning of his video-message. Miss Vee, the old yet still-young woman had left it with his mom the previous Friday night. Shortly after leaving the gift, Miss Vee and his best friend Rainah escaped back to Mars in the amazing Biosphere Ship his father had built years before; the botanist to continue her preparations to re-seed Mars with its rejuvenated plant-life; Rainah because Mars was her, "Homeworld", as she called it.

"I don't belong here", she had told Alex before she left, "and maybe you don't either!" How very strange his life had become in barely a week's time. Alex finally stretched and sat up to look round his small, patchwork bedroom.

In the early morning light, there was still a dimness to it which did little to mask the impoverished appearance of it all. The room was nearly bare actually, except for an old dresser containing well-worn old clothes and rather over-worn pajamas. A wooden lamp sitting on top of the dresser provided the only light for Alex's dismal room but in the far corner, adjacent to it stood one very special piece of furniture.

It was an old roll-top desk that his father used to worked at, "far into the early morning hours", as his mother always described it. John Faraway loved Elizabeth and Alex very dearly, yet his passion and life's work was devoted to studying the far-flung stars and newly discovered worlds beyond the Earth's horizon; beyond the simple country town of Delta.

And it was within a hidden compartment of that old oak desk that Alex had first stumbled upon the special career that his father moved within. The long-hidden, top secret documents hinted of a whole new world of mystery and challenge for Alex. He felt that he had only just scratched the surface of that world when Dart, the Martian Dragonfly, Teresa Vasquez and Rainah Onyahee revealed their secret lives to him the week before.

The documents themselves also included detailed blueprints - invaluable step-by-step instructions which showed Alex how to build a smaller model of the spaceship his father flew away in eleven years ago. That night was a night of strange happenings in the countryside not far from Delta-Town. It was midnight when the earth shook and some of the town's folk claimed they saw a shooting star swiftly streaking up instead of down.

A large fire burned a swath of destruction in Brinnel's Bog that night too and Alex still recalled being starkly awakened, not so much by the deep rumble of thunder or the trembling earth, but by the uncanny knowledge that his father was no longer in the same world with him. Alex later discovered that his dad and the botanist, Teresa Vasquez traveled to Mars on a mission to reclaim the seeds of the ancient plant-life that had been discovered by Deep Sky Aerospace Mars Rovers, only a few years earlier.

However, an unknown accident also befell Teresa Vasquez, because when she returned to Earth in the Biosphere Vessel, with the ancient Martian seeds, she was physically changed as well. The accident, whatever it was, caused Teresa to age many years before her time, so she changed her name to Miss Vee.

What they found on Mars though was not only the expected dried and frozen seeds of dormant Martian plant-life but also the ancient remains of a long-dead people. Yet, not all dead. They found Rainah among the crumbled ruins as well.

Chapter 5 (Part 2) - The Giant Resurrected and a Daydream

Alex attempts to drive a severely damaged Big Ben back to the workshop for repairs, but is soon stuck and lost in the maze of the scrapyard. It is then, while in a moment of despair, that the lonely boy hears the voice of another boy; the same voice that he heard while in a trance that morning. And Alex sets out through the maze to find that other boy...As of 2017-09-24, Chapter 5 (Part 1) is at: Deep Sky Stories

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About the Creator

G.F. Brynn

G. F. Brynn is a self-taught writer & illustrator whose sci-fi stories weave a rich blend of youthful adventurism with ancient myth-fantasy. The characters move in a world in which the divide between dream and reality is thinly shaded.

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