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Synopsis
What if your child has special powers and can get people to do almost anything? What happens if the child is abducted?
Izzie and Tristan were never mere humans. They are Charismites, with almost god-like powers of magnetism. And they couldn’t be more different. Izzie is a reckless, playful megastar whose popularity far exceeds that of any other celebrity. Tristan is a nature-loving recluse, almost completely unknown to anyone beyond a protective biodome.Their worlds explode when they are abducted by The Fist, a power-hungry political group with a master plan to control the hearts and minds of all people on Earth and satellite colonies beyond. But the plan only works with the help of Charismites.
Their families don’t have much to go on until a feisty, street-wise teen, Cheeta, discovers clues about the Charismites within a strange metaverse filled with millions of missing messages. But will they actually find them? And can they destroy The Fist before they take over the planet?
Filled with an eclectic cast of characters, a slow-burn romance, humor, and wonderful descriptions of a sensual and sometimes violent world, Universe of Lost Messages is a stand-alone sequel to Janet Stilson’s beloved novel, The Juice. Fans of William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, dystopian novels and science fiction thriller books will devour this masterful adventure.
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Editorial Review
“With Universe of Lost Messages, Stilson shows herself to be one of the very best of new SF writers. This is a terrific thriller but it’s also a deeply incisive political novel, holding up a mirror to our celebrity-obsessed culture. The dangers Stilson writes about are set in the future, but they may be just around the corner. An original, vibrant, entertaining, and thrilling work of fiction.” Jonathan Oliver, multi-award winning editor and the author of The Language of Beasts.
Release date: May 14, 2024
Publisher: Dragon Moon Press
Print pages: 381
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Universe of Lost Messages: A Novel
Janet Stilson
1
SHAKE
EVERYBODY’S BLIND IN their own way. But I was stupid blind on that morning, when the splintering, howling, thump-thump throbs of music from my sister’s room ended. In the upside-down world that Izabel always created, sweet silence was my morning alarm.
Now, you could say that there was no way for me to guess what was about to happen—that I would drop into a vortex of devastation and the sublime. But fact is, I should have seen the signs. Not all of them, but some of them, some of them weren’t that hard to grasp.
My cranky eyes let in the Los Angeles light, the savage heat ready to lunge like a tiger when I stepped outside. Stumbling into the bathroom, I peered in the mirror at my mottled brown and light face, shock of fine black hair. “Shakespear Cardinale, you talented son of a bitch,” I told myself. “You can sleep while you’re awake.”
My sister was staying in one of my guest bedrooms for reasons that didn’t make complete sense. The racket began every morning around 2 AM when she came home with her latest one-night stand. It lasted until well after sunrise.
There were usually a few nights a week of peace when I visited the women I was seeing at the time. They didn’t need to be told why I was suddenly more willing to travel to their own turf—in Bangkok, Vancouver, and Ciudad de México. My sister’s location was tracked by gossip newshounds, who screamed information about her at all times of the day and night —everything from when she lifted her left pinky to her latest acting gigs. My friends would have gladly suffered the excruciating music to get a glimpse of the most dazzling celebrity gracing Earth and all the outer colonies. But they didn’t know who she really was: a Charismite, endowed at birth by extraordinary powers of charisma.
She was a freak of nature, and I wasn’t about to tell them, or anyone.
Only a few of us knew what Izzie really was. When she trained her startled gray eyes on someone, they saw themselves differently than ever before. Her intense interest made them feel so clever, sensual, witty—more than anyone had ever made them feel. They didn’t realize that she could shape what they believed and felt far beyond the normal levels of persuasion. Sure, other famous people were good at that, but they didn’t come close to what Izzie could do.
I’d known about her special gifts ever since we were young and had some ability to resist her because I realized what she was. But it didn’t come easy. Which was why I couldn’t convince her to cut the sound. “Sleep is so overrated,” she’d laugh when I complained, low voice drawing out each syllable between those delicious lips.
“Frickin’ pain in the neck!” I grumbled to myself as a little shaving bot did its work along my jawline. The mobile device in my right contact lens triggered an air screen, which popped up next to the mirror. It launched into a report about some asteroid that had crashed outside the Phoenix Zone. Like Los Angeles, it was one of many Treasure Zones within United America—a nation that extended from the Arctic Circle region of North America down through most of South America. The asteroid landed three days before. A lot of rocks from outer space got deflected, but somehow this one got through.
news spot was just repeating what everybody already knew. Must be a slow news day.
The screen pinged softly, and I answered a call in private mode, hiding my naked state from the face that popped up. Phineas was one of my old drinking buddies and one helluva an air race jockey. He was in a show that I was producing for Nuhope, the largest media conglomerate in the world. I was a lead content producer, and this was my biggest production to date: Space Ace. In two weeks, Phin and four other speed demons would take off from Houston. Destination: dwarf planet Ceres. With a whole lot of guts and technical skill, they’d race from Ceres to Mars.
Phineas was an ex-fighter pilot for the Republic of Europe, another one of Earth’s great super nations. He looked like a weathered elf—a giant one, that is, at over six feet. His brown hair was flying in some places and matted with sweat in others from the helmet that was now cradled under one arm, coiled air tubes dangling down to his knees.
“Hey Patch Man,” he said, referring to my skin. His Irish brogue was comfortable as an old easy chair, even when he was agitated, like now. He’d been testing out his ship and spotted a malfunction. “You know I love you, but there’s no way I’m going to fly in that.”
“Hold on. I’m gonna get our top mechanic on this.” I shrugged on a bespoke suit jacket. “Your ship will be fixed in a day. Better than ever.”
“Give me a little bonus bump? I know you can make my girl fly faster.”
“Fly fair, or don’t fly at all, pal.”
He laughed. “And when I win, we got to do a sake binge in Tokyo.”
“Yeah, and it’ll be all on you.”
As we threw information back and forth about the ship’s electrically accelerated ions system, I walked down the hall, trying to ignore the musky smell of sex and smoking sticks coming out of the guest room. Through the door crack, I could see Izzie’s golden, slumbering face above black silk sheets. The hairy forearm of someone that pumped a lot of iron stretched across her middle. His shiny blue hair spilled down the sheet like water from a faucet.
The call with Phineas
ended, and I dove into another with the head of advertising. A client wanted more of its branding on Ship5. “You know it’s way too late for that, right?” I asked.
Mumble, frickin’ ridiculous excuses from the exec.
“Beth, I get it. TigerBryte is an amazing sponsor. But can’t you offer them something else?”
Her pleas went on as I stumbled toward the kitchen, craving my first sip of cappuccino. Nearly tripped three times. Water Man’s leather jacket wrapped around my ankle. Food globules oozed between my toes. A half-eaten Indian feast and bottles of beer were strewn between the inevitable heap of guitars and keyboards that companies routinely sent Izzie with the faint hope that she’d use one during a performance. She had five whole rooms of them in her Sonoma mansion, which was undergoing a massive renovation.
Izzie had told me she was tired of sleeping in hotels, wasn’t going to be here that long. But she’d already overstayed her welcome by two-and-a-half weeks. Something else was going on.
About the time Beth’s call ended, I sliced my gooey toe on the metal edge of a racing air blade. I winced. “Fuck you, Izzie!”
“That’s been taken care of.” Izabel’s husky voice held a vulnerable tremor. I turned to see her in the doorway, flexing her dancer’s body, in black boxers and a cropped T-shirt. Hair stained copper and black, sticking out like the points of a wildfire. Sensual lips curled in a teasing smile. It was hard to ignore the electricity in the air, the feeling of being pulled toward her, but I’d learned to control that over the years.
“When did you say you’re moving out?” I reached for a towel to take care of the gunk.
“Don’t you remember? I said I was moving in permanently. Selling Sonoma after the reno. This space is so dope.”
“Oh yeah?” Why was fear coiling out of those gray eyes? I was too annoyed to ask. Instead, I programmed the foodster for an Italian brew. “Not sure I’m going to hold onto it. Changing gigs.”
“Wait. What? Not at Nuhope?” she asked.
“Some place new.”
“Does Memere know that?” That’s what we called our only living parent.
“Yeah.” I was about to explain, but a bear-claw voice yelled out a “Hey” from down the hall. Water Man.
Want me to get rid of him? I asked Izzie silently. She nodded “no.”
A heavyweight champion emerged behind her—at least, that’s what he looked like, wearing my black silk bathrobe. The concentrated darkness of his eyes spoke of ancestors from the Indian subcontinent. He shifted under my chilly stare.
“Meet my big bad brother, Shake. This is …” Izzie snapped her fingers.
“Prill.”
“Right. We met last night at the air blade race. He’s super-fast. Beat me.” He pressed the bulge under the robe into her butt. She flitted away, fiddling with the controls of my foodster.
Wasn’t hard to imagine a scene from her previous night, the bunch of feral young things zooming on air blades a foot off the ground on pressurized air, weaving between trees and buildings, then across the desert in a mad dash for some Vegas goalpost.
The foodster spurted an espresso into her cup. “Hey. You should do a show on air blade races.”
“Sure, if you star.”
“No way.”
She started to program a chocolate mousse, but Prill blocked her hand. “Hey. Fuck the machine, Babe. I’ll make you some breakfast from scratch.”
“No thanks.”
“You’re gonna need more energy—”
“No. Get dressed. It’s time for you to blow out of here.”
Prill’s voice cracked. “You don’t want that.”
“Sorry. I’ve got rehearsals.”
“Maybe tonight?”
“No. This would be it.”
Tears welled in his eyes. “But can’t we …?” Be together forever? Make love every day and
night? I tried to hide a smirk. Seen it a million times.
“You know how I roll.”
“Yeah.” He fingered a stray guitar pick in a dried, sticky puddle of last night’s beer on the counter and held it up. “Souvenir?”
Izzie took it from him, washed it off with soap and water, dried it and handed it back respectfully. “Yeah.”
Prill pulled away and dragged himself back to the guest room.
She swished over to me and tamped down my hair with her fingers. “You know what the problem with you is?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Beside that.”
“What?”
She steered me over to a long mirror: her golden face, my darker one, spotted like a frickin’ riding-stable pony. “You don’t realize what girls think about you. Sure, they’re impressed by who you are. But that look of yours is raging.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not kidding. That Chav-ness.”
Chav. The massive lower social class I was born into. Izzie wasn’t my biological sister. She was born an Elite—a class largely composed of super wealthy people who were genetically modified to emulate all different races on Earth blended together so that their skin tone was golden. Even the Middles class looked that way.
I’d never be a “natural fit,” the way I looked. And yet I wasn’t just any Elite; I was a prince. Our mother, Petra Cardinale, was CEO of the gargantuan media company where I worked, Nuhope. She’d wanted a kid so bad when I came along, a stray from the streets of the Boston Treasure Zone. An orphan. Hard to say who needed who more, Memere or me. Then a few years later she did the in-vitro-fertilization thing
and had Izzie.
I finished college at the age of sixteen, worked for Nuhope’s most talented producer, churning out ideas for shows and new games so fast nobody questioned my position. Not just nepotism. Wouldn’t let that be true. And now here I was, a top producer at age twenty-three.
And yet. And yet. In the small hours of the morning when I stared out at dark blinking Los Angeles, I was disturbed by what I’d become. I hated myself for being an ungrateful wretch, but there was no denying that something was missing. This wasn’t who I should be.
Izzie wrapped her arms around me from behind, her surging warmth so soothing. “Remember when you screwed the professor and then screwed his wife?”
“Izzie. That was you.”
She laughed. “Really?”
“Why are we talking about this?”
She didn’t respond. I peeled myself away and turned around. She was biting her pretty lip. “I singe you. Again and again.”
“Silly duck. Think I can’t take it?”
Her brows furrowed as she straightened my jacket, even though it was about as straight as it could get. Tears puddled her ghost gray eyes. “I just want you to know that I’m sorry. I didn’t ask for any of this.”
No, she didn’t. Our mother had conceived Izzie by using the sperm of a Charismite that she’d fallen in love with. A guy named Dove Brown. After he died, she stored his sperm until she was ready. It was a big secret. Hardly anyone knew what she’d done.
And now here we were, with Izzie all teared up. Had to make her laugh. “Yes, you are the epitome of the term ‘ill-conceived.’”
“Oh, shut up.”
A booming voice sounded from the guest room. “Hey, Izz. Coming back?”
My sister rolled her eyes. “That one was totally not worth it.”
“Why?”
“Something’s off. And I …”
“Izzie!”
“… was thinking it would be nice for you and me to grab some lunch. You know, talk.”
It didn’t hit me, that something was really wrong—that I should have drawn her out
before anything else happened, yanked her out of there, down the hall, out of the building, get someplace where she could tell me, whatever it was. Even though I now realize that her eyes were like warning signals.
Like I said: blind spot. But at the time, Prill didn’t seem that different than her other castoffs. And I really frickin’ had to solve Phin’s ship problem right away. So all I said was: “Yeah. We can do that. But you mean dinner, right?”
She walked toward the bedroom, calling over her shoulder, “Whatever you want to call it. Tonight around 7, at that Churrasco place you like on Wilshire.” They had a private dining room. There would be a bit of a crazed scene with the other diners when Izzie walked in, but we’d get through it.
“I thought you were a vegetarian.”
“Eh. You know they’ll make anything for me.”
The time readout on my air screen was scary. I was way late. It took an extra push to get my front door open. As usual, there was such a pile of bouquets and other gifts from Izzie’s fans. The building’s staff knew to just leave them at the door. It was easy to glide over the mess on my air shoes and then down the hall. I was calling up the Space Ace mechanic about Phineas’ airship when…
BAM
The blast sent me
flying. My head socked hard against a flower vase. The shards punctured my temple. Ears rang like a blistering siren. Green and yellow fireworks of light.
I crawled back in the apartment’s blasted-open door, blood dripping. “Izzie!” The white door of her bedroom was black now. Why?
Strong arms helped me up. Two of the building’s security guards. Max and Hank. “You okay, Mr. Cardinale?”
I babbled something about my sister, pointing at the awful door. They were spooked but dragged themselves toward it. Looking in, their mouths dropped. I stumbled through the debris, pushed past them. Furniture, mattress, all Izzie’s personal belongings were charred. Where was she? And Prill?
Her thrilling aura was completely gone. Didn’t have to look for body parts to figure out that there weren’t any.
Nothing.
Disbelief clamped down on me. My utterly annoying, absolute best friend. From the time she was born. Just vaporized? I was in shock, couldn’t trust my reactions at first.
No. Something else was going on. But what? Stumbling to the shattered window, I studied the pavement thirty floors below for any signs of a broken body. But there was no trace of her or the guy, just a crowd of people that got larger, larger, larger.
She isn’t dead. There wasn’t any reason why I should be so sure, but I could almost taste it. If that was really true, where the hell was she?
***
THAT WASN’T THE first explosion that ripped my mind to pieces.
When Petra adopted me, she had no experience with kids, let alone one who was messed up because a bomb had blown up his life. My whole family died. My birth mama, wide shadowed face, harsh love in a deep voice, papery hands. My squeaky sister, Lilya. My rebellious big brother, Deko.
When I was taken in by Petra, I wailed and wailed. She was beside herself, trying to figure out how to help me. Called in a whole battery of shrinks.
“You’re not my mama! You’re not!”
“Oh darling, I know. Never replace her. Never.”
It took some time to figure out what I’d call her. And what came out was Memere, an old Creole word. That was my family’s roots. Although when I was at Nuhope, I sometimes called her Petra. After all, she was the boss.
After a while, Memere and I became nearly inseparable. She brought me to work all the time, and I was a little wandering cat that trailed after her. I could almost sense her nerve endings, knew how she felt about someone, or some situation, before she was even completely sure of it herself. And now that I was working at Nuhope as a producer, people seemed to think of me as her wunderkind sidekick.
Memere and I would arrive at some fly party in Paris, Sidney, Shanghai—all of them filled with celebs and assorted fat cats. We were the royalty that everyone wanted to talk with. She had a trademark look, with elegant silver hair that reminded me of old jewelry. A lock swooped down into a curl on her forehead. Her clothes were usually black and gave off an air of simplicity and gracefulness. More than a few of her staff acolytes had tried to copy it.
Most people didn’t expect a powerful woman to be as feminine as Memere. She was the commander of Nuhope—with its legion of ten thousand employees all over the globe and on several of the most important satellite outposts. But there was no brittle edge to her. Her face was radiant and open. Hidden far below was the hot lava that surfaced during
battles with Nuhope’s board of directors and key corporate lieutenants. She had to call upon all her hard strength during the occasional rounds of layoffs when the economy dipped. How she hated that.
Memere was the person I needed to see now. I’d sat in my living room for hours as a battalion of detectives from first the LAPD and then the FBI grilled me, scanning every inch of the apartment. When they finally let me go, I jumped into my mag-lev car on the building’s roof and crossed United America in ninety minutes flat with supercharge boosts from hyper-tubes in Denver and Indianapolis.
Nuhope’s headquarters in the New York Treasure Zone knifed up through the black sky over lower Broadway. It was lit by a carousel of promotional holograms that were each ten stories high. On any normal day, the promos would have been dedicated to upcoming shows, like Space Ace. We’d recorded jocular interviews featuring the five Ace pilots for those wallscapes and a ton of others, all over the world. Now their holos were nowhere in sight.
Instead, gigantic images of my sister were plastered all over the building: news stories from Nuhope’s reporting team, with poignant closeups of Izzie’s beguiling face as a voiceover reported on the mystery surrounding her presumed death; teasers for shows that she’d starred in; concert clips that featured her pipe-bright voice soaring up to the stars. The building had become a monument to Izzie. Buildings all over the city were like that. She was all that anyone wanted to think about or see.
I landed my ride on the roof, then glided down a private elevator to Petra’s inner sanctum. The security bots recognized me immediately. Walls sparkled away, and I shot down a corridor that was entirely wrapped in a holo of crashing waves. Always made me feel like Moses parting the waters. It was a replica of an ocean bay in the El Central Treasure Zone, a place that used to be called El Salvador. Memere liked to go there every now and then.
Her private office wasn’t exactly cramped. Rip it apart, and you got yourself the floor space for four basketball courts. As I came inside, the walls were a sea of holographic news feeds about Izzie from media outlets all over the world. My mother stood in the middle of it all, close to
drowning.
“Hey.”
Memere turned around abruptly, flicked a hand, and the images vanished. “Finally!” She came toward me quickly, arms spread wide; I fell into them. She seemed even more petite than usual, against my six-foot frame. We were locked together with howling terror. But for my mother, there was an added element of guilt. I pitied her for that.
A savage friction had developed over the years between Memere and Izzie. My sister blamed our mother for making her a monster whose powers of attraction and influence far exceeded what even the most naturally charming celebrities were capable of. If Izzie told people to jump off a tall building, they’d be sorely tempted, if they didn’t actually do it. Because of that, Memere guarded her like a human weapon who kind of recognized her own power when she was young, but she was pretty reckless. Memere did the best she could by limiting Izz’s appearances in the outside world to almost nothing, but the isolation was tough on Izz. And there was more to it.
My sister hated that Memere had used Dove Brown’s sperm to conceive her. He was a legendary talk show host who had passed about twenty years before. “Fanatic” didn’t begin to describe how people felt about him. His most obsessive fans could recite every line of his screen appearances backwards, they’d watched them so much. He was just about the first Charismite ever created. It wasn’t a natural gift; he was cranked up on this substance called the Juice. It was a chemical concoction that amplified his human levels of charm way off the spectrum of what was normally possible.
Izzie didn’t need the Juice at all. She was proof that, if there is a God, he has a very black sense of humor. Because somehow that frickin’ Juice altered Dove’s genes, his sperm, and she inherited all his extraordinary charm. No chems required! Charismite 2.0, you might say. Memere couldn’t believe it.
When I was about sixteen and a much more cynical lad than I am now, I asked her how the hell she would take a chance like that, using a dead Charismite’s sperm. How could anyone who ran a multi-trillion Americo
business, who was a goddamned captain of industry, have such crappy personal judgement?
She let out a stream of air. “I don’t expect you to understand this now. But as you get older, you become a different person. Things you think you’d never do right now may seem exactly right later on. And things you did a long time ago will seem utterly foreign, sometimes painfully ridiculous.”
Her eyes shone into some far-off place filled with enchantments and nightmares. A long time ago, she’d agreed to take part in an experiment out of a desperate hope of finding the perfect mate. It allowed her to see visions of a child that she might conceive with the right guy. And the system said that man was Dove. She became addicted to him, like people were addicted to Izzie now After he passed, she was obsessed with that imaginary child the system had showed her she could conceive with Dove: a little startle-eyed girl. She hired genetic engineers to make sure Dove’s sperm would actually do what she wanted.
It was clear almost from the get-go that Izzie was gifted. Memere was terrified of her own child’s power. She wasn’t affected by Izzie’s charms as much as me—because I was naturally attracted to girls, and Memere went for guys. Although since I knew what Izzie was, I was able to resist her powers much more than an unsuspecting person. Took some mental concentration, but I could. Hardly anyone else was aware of why Izzie was like a goddamned love magnet. Memere wanted to keep it that way.
She only allowed two human helpers in her New York townhouse—a maid and a gardener for the courtyard in the back. It was a pretty lame decision. From the time she was three, Izzie screwed with their brains, making them do ridiculous things, like standing on their heads while eating a banana split. (Yeah, it was pretty messy.) One day she had the gardener raid the bar; he was so plastered. Memere replaced them with bots, since machines are immune. Didn’t help to yell at Izz or punish her. She just descended into tirades. Memere’s guilt tore at her insides. Even when the fights ended, and everything
was quiet, feelings bounced between them—guilt and rage, guilt and rage. It wasn’t fun to be around.
Eventually, Izzie figured out how to escape and turned into a bad girl of epic proportions on the nightclub scene. Our mother’s rage eventually caved in; she had to surrender. Long story short, Izz finally got herself under control, started taking performance classes, and turned into the biggest star in the celebrity firmament.
All of that history was zinging through Memere and me as we hugged each other in her office. She pulled away and surveyed my bandaged wounds, seeing deep down into me in a way that nobody else could. “Awful, awful, awful.”
I knew what she was thinking: me witnessing another explosion. Another person I loved was gone, maybe forever. I managed to grin. “Hey. It didn’t make me nuts, at least not in a meaningful way.”
She rolled her eyes. “Let’s raid the medicine cabinet.” The door to her bathroom sparkled away and she disappeared inside. She had an assortment of the best pharmas known to humankind. “What’ll it be?”
“Antacid.”
She poked her head out the door, aghast. “That can’t be all.”
“Boring has its charms.”
She foraged around to find some. “What did the detectives tell you? Do they have any ideas about what happened?”
“They’re stumped.”
“The wankers.” It was hard to have much hope on those fronts. The LAPD and the FBI were both hobbled by political bureaucracy and depleted resources. If they came up with much of anything, I’d be stunned. Didn’t matter that Izz was the daughter of such a high-ranking Elite.
Memere handed me the pills, eyes blazing. “Izzie’s alive. Has to be.”
“Of course. Have you received any ransom demands?”
“No.”
That meant they probably knew what she is. A Charismite. Someone who could convince anyone to do anything if she was forced. A massive number of humans all behaving, all thinking, in the way that some crackpot desired. How would they try to control her, if they actually knew what she was?
Or as Memere put it: “Why ask for a ransom when Izzie can get them all the money in the world?”
2
CHEETA
THE FIRST TIME I got sent into the Universe of Lost Messages, it didn’t make sense. I thought somebody had hacked my tech and sent me into some stupid game metaverse. There I was, free-floating in my old shorts and T-shirt in a kind of space-type place. But it was the color of a ripe papaya. The orange went on and on, like it didn’t have no end.
Instead of stars and planets, there were these bubbles. Thousands, maybe millions. Up close, they were the size of soccer balls, and way off in the distance they were these sparkling dots, small as a grain of sand. The surface of the bubbles had colors glinting off them. And I could see a face in each one, jabbering away, ...
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