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When Paul Verne comes home from overseas for the funeral of his billionaire father, his brother is not in attendance. In fact, John Verne has been missing from his prosperous new tech firm for weeks. Unbeknownst to Paul, John has found a device that can transport him to the Museum, a system of captured worlds collected by the Curators, members of a powerful alien race, and he has been using it to take his colleagues, Adrian Ash, Morris Miles, and Julia Wilde, on visits to the alien worlds in the museum. John and his friends especially enjoy the sensual pleasures of the White City. As he’s leaving John’s penthouse apartment, Paul is kidnapped by a cross-dimensional bounty hunter (cyborg, android, synthetic hybrid?) named Myn, and teleported to the Museum’s Gateway where he is told that John and his colleagues have transgressed against regulations by organizing Extreme Excursions that allow visitors to perform unspeakable acts of cruelty they cannot be held accountable for on Earth. Together, Paul and Myn must search the Museum worlds to find John and his colleagues and bring them to justice. Meanwhile, something has happened to begin powering down the system and some of the worlds are crumbling. As he explores strange worlds, Paul must come to grips with his brother’s likely responsibility for inhuman crimes and the ruination of the Museum’s protected worlds. When he falls in love with the enigmatic Myn, he fears she will never accompany him to his world because she has scanned all the depredations of Paul’s fellow Earthlings throughout history, information gathered by the operating system embedded behind her right eye.

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First Chapter

DIMENSIONS
By Richard Bellamy

C Copyright by Richard Bellamy - 2013
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Chapter One: I Don’t Know Where I Am

Sometimes I don’t know where I am.

When I tried crossing Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, and almost got hit by a passing gardener’s truck, a blast of diesel fumes placed me in Errachidia, Morocco, where Ford lorries belch clouds of exhaust into the hot air. I felt like I was on my way back from visiting a Relief Outpost in the Sahara, one of the twenty-five humanitarian aid stations my billionaire father had established and funded all over the world. It often happened that way. A smell, a sound, a taste in the air made me feel like I was in another country. It was a strange side effect of traveling so much. A recent arrival in another country was always a tenuous thing for me. At any time, forces might conspire to snatch my mind away and send me thousands of miles overseas to another land.

It was like that for me that sunny Saturday in June when I found myself back in the States after nearly a year visiting locations all over the world. What had brought me back was the death of my father.

The funeral had done little to orient me. It had established another kind of limbo, the otherworldliness of an unwanted occasion that makes your head ring with adrenaline. You go through the motions of your life settled into the security of routine, but then a significant tragedy comes along to alter that routine, and the normal flow is interrupted. You are sucked into the moment of whatever exigency inevitably arises in your life, yet there is little awareness of your surroundings. The people around you demand your attention. Custom and ritual require your focus. The event could be taking place anywhere.

“Your father did so much for so many, Paul.”

“Thank you.”

Yes, my father was a HUMANITARIAN. A hard act to follow. He had given billions to research a cure for the cancer that had killed my mother when I was five; a London socialite, she had used her beauty to ensnare my father and his fortune only to fall in love with him and help establish his clinics and aid stations all over the world. I had a lot to live up to. Would I become a HUMANITARIAN?

“Your father was a model to us all.”

“Thank you.”

All the internships I had done in Relief Outposts all over the world had been in response to my father’s HUMANITARIAN model, unlike my brother who had emulated my father’s model as a successful moneymaker.

“Your father was a genius.”

“Thank you.”

I had a sneaking suspicion I wasn’t genius material.

“What will you and your brother do with all those . . . ?“

“Uh, billions? I know. I don’t know.”

Robert Verne, my father, had been the founder and CEO of Verne Technologies. His perfecting of a voice-activated operating system as well as his innovative advancements in thought-activated operating systems had earned him world acclaim and the billions of dollars that occupied the minds of many of the people attending his funeral.