Dive into a deep space sci-fi thriller that chronicles the rise and fall of a world long lost. From gods and wars to aliens and depravity, Glendale Makoto takes us by our imaginations and guides us through the last days of his world as he saw it… and we never want to leave his side. Check out HAYWARD’S REACH today!
Hayward’s Reach
Hayward’s Reach is a series of short stories told by the last survivor after an unexpected cataclysm destroys the birthplace of Pan-Humanity and its attendant species.
Glendale Mokoto, now as a Scout of the Corvan Empire which rescued the remnants of Pan-humanity, has time on his hands and uses it to study temporal records in which the entire history of Old Earth is embedded. Looking though time and space he reminisces about an Earth that no longer exists.
In these tales, Mokoto studies both the past and the future of Pan-Humanity, its allies and enemies, and learns even in his current state of in-humanity what it really means to be truly human.
Hayward’s Reach is divided into four sections:
The Fables of Old Earth: Stories about humans as we might remember them still struggle for survival against a world which only seems to be under their control; instead a hidden reality is just beyond the sight of these early humans, a reality which affects the ultimate destiny of the species.
A Time of Troubles: The quest for wealth and power affects the choices of both man and god alike. Dark pacts are often made in order to satisfy avarice and the innocent are its first victims.
Entering the Penumbra: Tales of the darkest nature; a descent into depravity, deprivation and destruction. Each tale reinforcing the horror of the last. But even in this time, a single hope always flickers, a voice brave enough to claim victory, at least some of the time…
The Diaspora of Earth: the final tales of the Human species after the destruction of Earth. Six adventures of Pan-Humanity’s struggles in a hostile universe, more alien than they imagined with creatures whose powers are only hinted at, capable of altering matter and energy which hint at even recreating the Earth, for a price.
Excerpt from Hayward’s Reach
Two hundred years ago, I was nothing special. I had no extraordinary abilities or talents. I was not blessed with superhuman strength like members of the New Order, genetically manipulated to be the perfect human specimens, trained and bred to be the ultimate warrior protectors of the human race.
I did not augment my mind with sentient mechanical intelligence like the Cognoseti, who became human predictors of the future of man. It was their wisdom that discovered the Earth’s greatest hidden secret; that we were not the first creatures on Earth to evolve into sentience. These human machine hybrids would later house the first true machine-descended intelligences in human history.
I did not mingle my DNA with those of animal species to garner advantages lost by the development of our bigger brains. The Transformed, whose malleable DNA allowed them to absorb genetic traits of other species would lead Humanity in the exploration of new worlds after we lost our home in the Sol System.
You see, I was just a baseline human, good genes, nice teeth, good skin, and until it fell out in my fiftieth year, a nice head of hair. Two hundred years ago, I was also the most celebrated hero; indeed, I was the last hero of the Exodus of Man. They named a starship after me, they named a continent after me, they named thousands of children after me. And to me that was a strange thing, seeing how I did not actually survive the experience.
To ponder this, and to explain why you are now able to know any of this, you have to know a bit more about Old Earth.
I remembered the stink of the war. It got up into your nose and never left. You could smell the burning flesh, the expended rounds, the fear, exhilaration, the blood-lust, the sheer terror of the Henrenki boiling up out of the ground in every major city on the planet.
I remembered the fighting, the endless fighting, the bravery of our young ones, their ceaseless dying, wheat before the scythe. When we retreated, the Henrenkai came, wave after wave, like the ocean filling in the beach of our dead.
I remembered them as they swarmed over our positions with machine guns blazing; our bullets tearing into their nacreous, resilient flesh but they kept coming.
Things looked hopeless until the New Men appeared, with their mysterious talk about the Art of War, talk of the brush strokes of their weapons, their mastery of their mysterious battle-trance. In those days, all we knew of war was the spastic struggling of the uninitiated to battle. We had been too long at peace.
Our struggles for survival, even before He came all but absorbed our attention. But even after generations of peace, we were still a warlike species and returned reluctantly to the field of battle. Every man woman and child was armed because this was a war without quarter and without mercy.
When the Cognoseti revealed His existence, He rose from the oceans, the Ancient Enemy of all who live in our galaxy. We did not know He was legendary. We did not know what scars He and His kind had swept across the face of that, as yet unknown to us, galactic empire. We did not know what He wanted, only that He destroyed all that we had, with malice and forethought. We did learn one thing: when He rose from the Pacific Ocean, we realized the nature of our enemy, He had the might of an entire world, buried within our own.
Mechanically-sentient, He created weapons like the Henrenkai from His very flesh, the organo-mechanical body in which He fell to Earth billions of years ago and hid in the iron core of our planet. He hid because He was pursued by the greatest species our galaxy had ever spawned. He hid and waited until they passed away or forgot; we are not sure which. When He arose again, He had been all but forgotten by everyone in the galaxy. How could they not; nearly three billion of our years had passed while he slumbered.
So we were forced to fight Him on our own, tiny simians against a god-like machine who had tried to enslave an entire galaxy. He fought us on land, sea, air, and even in space. What could we do against an enemy so incredibly powerful? He destroyed a third of the human race and had barely awakened. We lost all hope.
Then we received a signal from space. It appeared on every communication band, every wavelength, every technology, all at once. If you were watching anything, listening to anything, it appeared and told you to be ready.
A prophecy had sent them back to us. They told us it was time to leave our world. They told us to gather as much of our world as we could carry. We did not understand, but we gathered our resources, every animal, every plant, every insect we thought we could find and catalog. We even set aside entire islands, marked with force fields to make them stand out.
We had no idea of what the Sjurani were capable of back then. We did not know what to expect, but their message gave us hope, so we fought on.
I remember the first time I saw their ships. They blotted out the sun. We fought a retreating battle to their designated pick up points. They gathered us up with tractor beams, entire cities, whole islands. It was rumored they took the entire African continent. Something about it being a template for our entire world’s DNA.
They landed in their reptilian regalia and fought alongside us, as terrifying as the Henranki in their own way. Garishly colored in silks and metal, reptilian, festooned with gem-encrusted scales, loud, large, and boisterous; think of Old Earth fraternity boys armed with plasma cannons and rocket launchers and you will know something of the Rex, a warrior-breed of the Sjurani.
They helped us hold the line against the Ancient Enemy while we fled. They claimed they were the descendants of dinosaurs who had been born on Earth hundreds of millions of years in the past. We were too desperate to care. And too foolish to realize why that was more important than we knew at the time…
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About the Author: Thaddeus Howze
Thaddeus Howze is a California-based author and essayist whose non-fiction writing has appeared in magazines, including Black Enterprise, Empower Me Magazine, the Good Men Project, the Examiner.com, the Astronaut.com and many others. He maintains a prodigious amount of non-fiction work at his own blog, A Matter of Scale (http://ebonstorm.wordpress.com). He has answered over a thousand questions on the Scifi.Stackexchange.com and Quora.com.
Thaddeus writes in a wide array of genres in speculative fiction including hard science fiction, climate fiction, fantasy, horror, wuxia, pulp and space opera. His fiction writing has appeared in blogs such as the Magill Review, ScifiIdeas.com and StartYourNovel.com. His collection of short stories can be found at Hub City Blues (http://hubcityblues.com/). He has recently led a writing challenge in May where authors write a short story every day called 30 Cubed (http://30cubedsf.wordpress.com).
His speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies including Genesis Science Fiction Magazine,The Future is Short Anthology, Visions of Leaving Earth, Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond, Genesis Science Fiction Anthology, Scraps, and Possibilities.
He has authored a collection of short stories called Hayward’s Reach (2011) and an e-book novella called Broken Glass (2013). He is planning on releasing Motus Vita, a sequel to Broken Glass and A Millennium of Madness, a new collection of prompt-driven short stories inspired by StartYourNovel.com.
Like many speculative fiction authors, Thaddeus has worn a variety of occupations before pursuing a writing career. Currently an information technology consultant, he has also been a corporate executive, an information specialist, an adjunct professor and a member of the United States Navy. He has also written tabletop roleplaying games, including materials for Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40K, and Hero Games.
An active martial artist and youth mentor, Thaddeus engages in autism advocacy, hoping to help his autistic son have more opportunities in the future. He also champions improving the environment using clean energy.
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