The Dark River Book Two of the Fourth Realm Trilogy

by TWELVE HAWKS, JOHN

• ISBN13: 9781400079308
• ISBN10: 1400079306
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-29
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Afearless heroine.... A tale of brother against brother.... A battle for hope and freedom. Two brothers born into a race of Travelers prophets able to journey to different realms of consciousnesshave just discovered that their long lost father may still be alive. Gabriel, who could be humanity's savior, and his guardian, Maya, want to protect him. Michael wants to destroy him and with it humanity's hope for freedom. As they race across the globe, their frantic search puts them on a collision course, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Author Biography

John Twelve Hawks is the author of the New York Times bestseller THE TRAVELER.

Excerpts

1


Michael Corrigan sat in a windowless room at the Evergreen Foundation’s Research Center, north of New York City. He was watching a young Frenchwoman as she wandered through the Printemps Department Store in Paris. The surveillance cameras in the store reduced everything to black and white and shades of gray, but he could see that she was a brunette, fairly tall, and quite attractive. He liked her short skirt, black leather jacket, and her shoes—high heels with thin straps tied around her ankles.

The scanner room resembled a private facility for showing movies. It had a large flat–panel video screen and speakers built into the walls. But there was only one place to sit—a butternut-brown leather lounge chair with a computer monitor and keyboard on a pivoting steel arm. Whoever was using the room could type directions into the system or slip on a phone headset and talk to the staff at the new computer center in Berlin. The first time Michael sat in the chair, he had to be guided through the use of scanning programs and backdoor access channels to surveillance systems. Now he could do simple tracking operations on his own.

The young brunette was walking through the beauty–care section. Michael had checked out the store a few days earlier and was hoping that his target would take the escalator upstairs to the Printemps de la Mode section. Although surveillance cameras weren’t allowed in the individual changing rooms, there was a hidden camera in the public area at the end of the hallway. Occasionally the Frenchwomen would come out wearing lingerie so they could study themselves in a full–length mirror.


* * *

Michael’s presence in the scanner room was just another indication of his growing influence among the Brethren. He was a Traveler like his father, Matthew, and younger brother, Gabriel. In the past, Travelers had been seen as prophets or mystics, madmen or liberators. They had the power to break free of their bodies and send their conscious energy—their “Light”—to other realities. When they returned, they had visions and insights that transformed the world.

Travelers had always encountered resistance from the authorities, but in the modern era a group of men called the Brethren began to identify Travelers and kill them before they could challenge the established order. Inspired by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth–century British philosopher, the Brethren wanted to establish a Virtual Panopticon, an invisible prison that would contain everyone in the industrial world. The Brethren believed that once the population assumed they were being watched at all times, they would automatically follow the rules.

The true symbol of the age was a closed–circuit surveillance camera. Computerized information systems had formed a Vast Machine that could link images and information to monitor large populations. For thousands of years, those in power had tried to ensure the permanency of their particular system. Finally, this dream of social control had become a real possibility.

The Brethren had entered Michael’s and Gabriel’s lives when they were growing up on a farm in South Dakota. A team of mercenaries looking for their father had attacked their home and set fire to the buildings. The two Corrigan brothers had survived, but their father had disappeared. Years later, after being raised by their mother off the Grid, the Corrigans ended up in Los Angeles. Nathan Boone and his men first captured Michael, and then Gabriel. They transported both brothers to the Evergreen Foundation’s Research Center.

The Brethren’s scientists had built a powerful quantum computer, and the subatomic particles at the heart of the machine had enabled communication with the other realms that only Travelers had been able to explore. The new quantum computer was supposed to t

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Excerpted from The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks
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