New Release
Rembrandt's Comet
In the spring of 2013, the Seattle Art Museum hosted an exhibit titled, "Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: Treasures of Kenwood House, London." A close friend convinced Gordon Kurby to go on this cultural outing because Downton Abbey, a popular PBS show Gordon had enjoyed, was partially filmed at Kenwood House.
The large self-portrait of Rembrandt that greeted every exhibit attendee had large circles painted into its background. A museum docent explained that after almost four centuries, the mystery of Rembradnt's circles still remained unsolved.
After the exhibit, three friends, two women and a man all post fifty years old, could not resist this curious challenge. Collaborating from West Coast to East Coast, they openly shared their ideas about the images in the painting. Every discovery led to more amazing ones, provoking questions no one had asked before.
What we bring you now is this extraordinary communication.
The Foldings
What if someone or something actually learned to fold time? They beat the paradoxes and can now time travel. Or they can time communicate across the cosmos.
Welcome to a most unusual collection of short stories. Please join our journey where there are no formal rules but a thousand paradoxes. This has always represented a brick wall to the possibility of time travel, or has it? We need to be clever as all the paradoxes have a thought solution fondly called gedanken by Albert Einstein.
Imagine we receive a time message, not in a bottle floating on water, but in photons washing over the universe in waves. Are we being contacted by our future selves or something else? From our observational position, it cannot be differentiated. And both sides of that coin have their pluses and minuses. Future humans may appear more ruthless and foreign than the worst of the sci-fi aliens created in our minds. There is a theory that sentients in the universe that are violent will self-annihilate before they become space faring. We all want to believe this or that future humans are the brilliant conquerors of all evil in outer space.
These short stories are structured for entertainment but are also a duality, or two things at the same time. Read these science fiction tales and start the discussion about time communication or time travel. Being sentients, our intellect views these events as magical occurrences with no discernible first cause and certainly few hard facts. Unless, of course, you are a time traveler or have met one in person.
Observe and proceed with caution. We are in uncharted waves of the universe.
Slim Island
On the day it happened, nothing stayed in the air.
Sam and his family had won a tropical vacation. They were flying from gloomy Seattle to Hawaii for ten days in the sun. Sam was playing a cool futuristic war game and winning. His mom was on her second free Mai Tai. The pilot checked his computer - they had just crossed the point of no return.
They realized something was wrong as they flew over the Mau airport when they should have been landing. Flaming wreckage scarred the runways. The large body jet banked and crash landed on the windward side of the island on a tiny airstrip. The rural town of Hana was overrun with people.
The world had ground to a halt without warning. Civilization began to unravel, not in days but in a matter of hours. Technology was no longer friend nor tool.
Paradise was turning into a nightmare. Hawaiians and tourists were now thrown together in a disparate society. Survival demanded they work together, but the Hawaiians had their own way of doing things that not all would survive. Starvation, raiding parties from other islands, and a clash of cultures was creating a brutal landscape.
A surviving handful of scientists from Sam's flight come forward and announce receipt of an extraterrestrial communication, a warning that had come in just before the world fell apart. The Earth would be destroyed by a comet unless humankind acted together to defend the planet. But what could be done without technology?
It falls to Sam to unite the warring groups, but how? He's still a boy - why would they listed to him? Somehow, Sam must be brave enough and clever enough to help them all survive.
Stratosphere
Scientists predicted a global winter after a comet strike known as a “planet buster” hit the Earth, the same sized object that had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Scientists plotted the trajectory and every method conceivable had been used to intercept or destroy the comet. Robust planetary defense systems developed a Plan B if the rock plummeting toward Earth could not be stopped. Back-up had been to construct fleets of giant airships that would get as many people off the surface of the planet as possible before the impact.
A thousand feet of glacier ice formed over Los Angeles and much of the surface of the oceans froze over. Airships circled above the cloud deck in relative comfort. After the five-year weather event ended, they would land and rebuild civilization.
The dirigibles formed up in fleets according to country, waiting for the global winter to abate. After five years, their supplies were dwindling, the weather getting worse not better.
Above the frozen Earth, the battle for survival has begun.