Earth Beyond story series

My new story series, Earth Beyond, comes from a compelling dream I had a couple of weeks ago. 

It starts with an alien species making First Contact with Earth. 

They come bearing gifts in the form of advanced technology. Very advanced. 

But there is a price. 

They want Earth to provide their finest scientists, engineers and university professors for a one-way trip to an alternate Earth. That Earth is still fairly primitive and needs the kind of technology that we on our Earth are already very good at. 

But… given it’s one-way trip, anyone selected for the program has to first die naturally from disease or old age. Suicide or murder don’t count. 

Which rubs some people the wrong way given it sounds like the  passage to the afterlife that religions are based upon. Have the aliens provided a technological back door to Heaven?

The aliens train a staff on our Earth to tune the Avatars and do the brain scans required to merge with them on this new world (apologies to James Cameron). 

This becomes an SWM story when the person in the Avatar Lab on Earth discovers that there are far greater capabilities in the Avatar system than were revealed by the aliens. 

Clever monkeys that we are, that leads to an exploration under dire circumstances where the hidden controls are revealed and pushed all the way to their limits. Into forbidden regions. 

And thus begins the core of my story… with a few twists.

Hope you enjoy it. I anticipate the entire story will require at least four Parts to complete. 

Shadar
 

Part Two of my new story is now up, and it's a fair bit longer than Part One. I could have made it into two parts, but since it was ready and Part Three was well under way, I figured why not post all of what I've got.

The saga continues as I start getting Charli (who used to be Charles) deeply invested in figuring out how Miranda's amazing Avatar works. Along with lots more details and conflicts with the local Neanderthals (who call themselves Nanders) and with several other Avatars who came across just before the attack on the Lab back on Earth. 

One of those other Avatars is a rather amazing girl, who herself was likely a warm-up for the Avatar Miranda made for herself.

Mabel was 98 when she died, still with a sharp and brilliant mind, a Professor Emeritus who wanted to experience the teenage years she'd missed due to serious illness when she was young. So the oldest becomes the youngest, but in a world of Avatars, anything seems to be possible, and the rules we know don't apply.

But it does create some confusion when the way someone looks now is so completely different than how they were inside their original self-image. 

Everyone who was selected to move into an Avatar upon death is an accomplished scientist, 100% eggheads. Except for Charli, who might have been a college professor at one time, but wasn't a world-class scientist. But then, Charli is in the wrong Avatar, one that is Miranda's idea of Supergirl that she made for herself. 

That's starting to cause all kinds of problems.

Shadar