Book Seven of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series
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Jonathan James Commer, trapped inside a solid chromium tetrahedron after his murder by an opportunistic rival, now finds himself reconstituted as a lower-class robot in service to the Wounded, a race that destroys stars for kicks. But once he rises to captain Balloon Ship Armageddon on a barren waterworld in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light-years away, Jack Commer’s rebellious son realizes he’s programmed to destroy Sol and a vast swath of the Milky Way. Or possibly the entire universe.
Published by Sortmind Press paperback: cover art by Michael D. Smith |
Synopsis
Jack Commer’s son Jonathan James wakes in a secret hospital on Myndar, second planet of Iota Persei, astonished to find himself transformed into a bio-robot, a soldier of the Wounded race that blows up stars to create quasar artworks. Dr. Amy Nortel, a Wounded Class J robot, has just separated him, rogue mutineer Rick Ballard, and ancient Martian robot T’ohj’puv out of the solid chromium tetrahedron in which the three had been trapped.
Ballard and T’ohj’puv explode in spectacular cascade failures, which Amy concludes were due to hidden contamination in Jonathan James. She declares she’s now in love with him, but that he must submit to medical evisceration for the good of the Wounded. But Jonathan James punches her out and steals a spaceship to journey to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way 163,000 light-years away.
When Jack Commer and his wife Amav journey to Myndar to investigate, Amy claims she’s merely a rejuvenated archivist who also happens to have been Jack’s English AP teacher in high school. When fingered as a Wounded Spy, she threatens to kill the Commers, then flees in their personal saucer in pursuit of Jonathan James, kidnapping the Commers’ robot dog Edward in the process.
Jack readies the as-yet-uncertified Typhoon VII to chase his son, but robot Laurie Lachrer 283 decides she’s much more qualified as Jack’s Typhoon physician/engineer than the human Colonel Lachrer she’s modeled on, and unfortunately the Marsport Automated Transport System AI, having taken over the ship with emergency powers via a secret protocol in its United System contract, agrees with Laurie 283 and forces Jack to choose the cheeky, flirtatious robot.
After eight hundred years on the Anti-Dark Energy world of Ailyuae, Jonathan James has risen to captain Balloon Ship Armageddon. For millennia the leaderless Wounded robots deposited on this planet have fought senseless wars in balloon ships floating above the worldwide toxic ocean, and when Jonathan James defeats the last enemy ship, he becomes the Wounded master of a dying planet, a world with no electricity down to the subatomic level. Yet his ship still carries the Holy Chamber in the cargo hold, with its inexplicable map of the universe and an unnerving depiction of an n-dimensional space in the Large Magellanic Cloud labeled “The Uninhabitable.”
Dr. Amy arrives with deactivated robot dog Edward to advise Jonathan James of this crippled world’s destiny to destroy the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, including the troublesome Sol which has resisted Wounded attempts at takeover. But the inert Edward is the only one who understands that the Chamber describes the invention of a button that anyone can press to nullify the entire universe.
Background
While my Tarot card of “Balloon Ship Armageddon” is dated August 8, 2003, I didn’t think of the phrase as a writable novel until I digitally colorized the card in June 2015. Even then it was just a concept with no plot. Since then I’d idly mused about Jonathan James, or else Jack Commer, captaining a Balloon Ship Armageddon, but the February 2018 dream below was the first spark of getting anything underway. Within a month I’d committed to writing Jack Commer Seven. In April and May 2018 I interviewed twelve series characters at length and published the interviews on the blog (links below). The interviews were an unusually high energy warm-up to beginning the novel.
The February 2018 dream of space wars and empires: In the ongoing warfare, a huge spherical sector of the universe has been made uninhabitable. An exotic, medieval-looking two-dimensional map of the entire universe has been made on the black stone floor of a thirty-by-thirty-foot room in a castle. Astrological symbols are inscribed along the sides of the map. On the floor sits a basketball-sized object representing the uninhabitable region, rendered to scale in the universe. One must try to wrap one’s head around the fact that this 3-D spherical rendition is sitting on a 2-D map, thus: what would it look like or represent in the actual 3-D universe? In any case a basketball-sized object in a thirty-by-thirty-foot room is a definite amount of space, but certainly not taking up too much of the universe; it can be avoided with some thought.
The Long Journey from The Martian Marauders to Balloon Ship Armageddon
Space captain Jack Commer has been with me since September 1962, first appearing in four of the thirty-four science fiction stories in my fifth grade Blue Notebook. He and his three brothers then starred in my first attempt at a novel, Spring 1964’s Trip to Mars, and the unfinished eighth grade draft of The Martian Marauders, a book which I happily rediscovered, completed, and rewrote as a modern novel decades later. Some blog posts flesh out this history:
A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook
Trip to Mars in Paperback
The Irregular Origin of the Martian Marauders
The idea for a seventh book to conclude the series originated with Jack’s wife’s declaration at the end of Book Six, The SolGrid Rebellion, that she and Jack ought to mount a search for their renegade son Jonathan James. But there was no plot beyond that, which Jack and Amav both lamented in their blog interviews with me this spring.
I didn’t kill off main characters in Seven, or otherwise make an Eight impossible, as, who knows, I may want to compose Eight a few decades from now. One purpose in declaring this the last Jack Commer novel was to open space for completely new writing after Book Seven. While the daily self may quail at not being up to such a task, deeper levels know there’s a vast unknown novel waiting, a blank at this moment despite recent unproductive idea strip mining experiments. But in any case I’m certain “space opera” isn’t my fate.
But the end of the book loads a teaser to a future Jack Commer novel: Jack and several series comrades have just embarked on a dangerous mission to the multidimensional Uninhabitable Sphere of leftover karmic crap from the beginning of the universe. This unresolved plot can both end the series and invite speculation for a sequel that nevertheless doesn’t demand to be written. A good place to be.
Twelve Character Interviews, April-May 2018
Rick Ballard, bombastic, ego-saturated seducer
T’ohj’puv, ancient tetrahedral robot for creating Martian Empress gowns
Jonathan James Commer, Jack’s troubled, insecure son
Amy Nortel, Wounded doctor and Jack’s old high school English teacher
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, United System Space Force
Amav Frankston-Commer, Jack’s wife and planetary engineer
Waterfall Sequence, cloudlike entity of the Ywritt race at the star Iota Persei
Ranna Kikken Commer, Joe’s Commer’s wife and negotiator with the Ywritt
Joe Commer, Jack’s brother, Deputy Supreme Commander, and perennial sidekick
Jackie Vespertine, Ranna’s sister, Joe’s former femme fatale, and influential exobiologist
Laurie Lachrer 283, insolent robot seeking to supplant the human she’s modeled after
Laurie Lachrer, the human version, Jack’s new genius physician/engineer
Contents
1. The Hospital
2. Contamination
3. Distrust
4. English AP Class
5. Arkonsky Stasis
6. Hologram Joe and Know-How
7. The Upgrades
8. Heightened Levels of Anxiety and Distress
9. Negotiations
10. Edward Unbound
11. Balloon Ship Armageddon
12. First Mate Henry Jannes
13. The Holy Chamber
14. The Uninhabitable
15. Enter Ballard
16. Tri-Sage
17. I Should Change into My Uniform
18. Snuggled Deep
19. My Apologies for Raising Your Blood Pressure
20. Coming To on Ailyuae
21. Priest and Priestess of the Carnal Mysteries
22. What One Second of Normal Time Equals
23. The So-Called Sphere Project
24. Disintegration
25. Quiet Death
26. Team Commer
27. I’ll Explode, Damn You!
28. The Grazing Shatter of Kl’alp’lor
29. She’s Your Best Physician/Engineer
30. Not Supreme Commander Yet
31. The Star
All words and images copyright by Michael D. Smith