Condemnation (STAR-DUST 23) E-Book

Jens F. Simon

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 96

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Sigurd's spirit is transferred to a world of the future that perished 200 years ago. The continents are radioactively contaminated and biologically polluted. Mutants now populate the surface of planet Earth, more than two thirds of which have been destroyed. Obscure creatures rule over the rest of the former human race with brutal sanctions and unnatural-looking technology. Sigurd wakes up in a body that is about to die of thirst on the edge of a desert. He has absolutely no memory of his old life.

Leseprobe

STAR-DUST

Under the spell of nanites

Volume 23

Condemnation

© 2025 Jens F. Simon

Illustration: S. Verlag JG

Publisher: S. Verlag JG, 35767 Breitscheid,

All rights reserved

Distributed by: epubli a service of neopubli GmbH, Berlin

ISBN: 978-3-819055-17-1

The work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. Any exploitation without the consent of the publisher and the author is prohibited and will be prosecuted under criminal and civil law. This applies to electronic or other reproduction, translation, distribution and making available to the public.

The soul is firmly connected to the human body. However, the spirit, the mental I, is something separate, something independent in the Christian faith. If, by chance, the firm connection between soul and body should ever be severed, it is unalterable that there is no going back. Is that so?

We are often not aware of how much we are influenced by a person's appearance. Only when we also get the opportunity to look inside, we will find the truth. But is it really the whole truth?

Table of content 

Prologue

Sgrull

The way of the brave

The power of the para-mutant

Majenna

The Insectoid Man

Raid

Path to new world

The departure

Prologue

I was sitting in the old wing chair with a leg extension that still came from my grandmother and had the eBook reader in my hand.

The window was wide open, and I could hear distant engine noises from the country road that wound up a hill three kilometers away.

There was no breeze. It was already dawn, and the temperature was still well above 22 degrees Celsius.

STAR ADVENTURE was the name of the SCI-FI series I had just downloaded.

Thoughtfully, I let my eyes wander over the bookshelves that stretched along the walls from floor to ceiling around my bed.

They were full of old books; the pages long since yellowed. I had started to make the switch from print books to eBooks.

At the beginning, it was still very difficult for me. Somehow the constant contact with the paper pages was missing.

It also lacked the unique smell of printed books while reading. What was positive for me was the possibility to have constant access to thousands and thousands of books with the eBook Reader.

Also, one always had the right lighting and was not so dependent on the ambient light.

It was such a pleasant dusk to go to distant galaxies and experience romantic, dangerous adventures.

I thought about it for a moment, put the eBook reader aside, got up and went to the window.

Next week I would move in with my friend Gaby. We had been a couple for a quarter of a year now.

It had been kind of strange.

The first time we kissed, there was suddenly a strange thought in my head and the face of a very pretty woman flashed briefly in my mind.

She looked at me with big, expressive eyes and I thought I could detect the smell of peach.

Sometimes I had the impression that reading so much really didn't agree with me.

My mother had always spoken of fantasies that distracted me too much from my real life.

After all, I was thirty-one years old and unemployed. I watched the cars on the country road, lost in thought.

They looked like little match box cars from here. The quiet, almost steady roar of the engine sounds made me feel tired.

My gaze wandered and my eyes began to fall shut.

Then I startled. There was a strange flash of light next to the barn that belonged to Gaby's father and that stood about ten meters from our house.

A cold but bright source of light suddenly caught all my attention.

Before I could try to concentrate on it, the door to the room opened abruptly.

Sigurd, something has happened," I heard my mother say softly.

She held on to the door frame for a moment, and at that moment I suspected something bad. She just stood there and looked into my room.

"What is it?"

I walked slowly toward her. She still didn't say anything and then her eyes started to get watery.

With a deep sigh, she let herself fall into my arms.

"Dad has left. Now we're alone!"

At first I didn't know what she meant. Then it slowly dawned on me.

My father had died.

"What, where...?" I could barely think straight myself and tried to pull myself together.

My mother looked at me with tear-filled eyes.

"Downstairs, in the living room. He's sitting peacefully in his chair," she said quietly, with choppy words.

The family doctor had issued the death certificate; second heart attack.

Sigurd was listening to the engine noise of the hearse when suddenly Gaby was standing next to him.

He had not heard her coming at all. His mother was lying in bed with a weak sedative that the family doctor had given her before he had left.

"Oh, Sigurd, I'm so sorry about everything!"

Gaby sat down next to him on the couch and took his hands in hers.

He stared at the armchair where his father had been sitting when he had simply walked away from them.

There was nothing but emptiness in Sigurd's head. No thoughts, no rebellion against the final, only emptiness.

His mind had not yet properly recovered from the separation from his nanite body.

The still para-psychically gifted mind was trying to recover almost extinct memory of what had happened.

The fate tablets had changed his soul, his mind as much as the magical energy still present in him in small quantities.

His subconscious had experienced a new kind of quality that still lay dormant deep within him but could erupt at any time.

All that was missing was some kind of initial ignition, that is, an event that interacted with his subconscious, that could build a bridge to his other life, to release the spirit from his body again in a

One such experience was the sudden death of his father.

Elemental forces of infinity, which had burned themselves deeply into his spirit, into his soul, suddenly burst to light.

For fractions of a second, memories appeared that normally no longer existed.

Alethea, the home planet of the Xxiin, Xelio, his adventures with the mages, the Ring of Srem, MAITRI and the organic spaceship Paurusheya, the Mellran Calgulla and so much more.

Sigurd's capacity for absorption was massively overtaxed, causing it to fall into a deep unconsciousness. His soul saw only one way out of the dilemma, escape.

The siren of the ambulance sounded particularly loud on this warm summer night.

Gaby sat next to the hospital bed, still holding Sigurd's hand. Thick tears kept rolling down her arm onto both her hands. She tried to stay strong.

The emergency physician had spoken of a coma into which Sigurd had fallen. He was in deep unconsciousness.

His pupils responded only dimly to light reflexes. His breathing had slowed down considerably.

The doctor spoke of a protective reaction of the subconscious. Gaby, however, could not understand it.

He had not suffered a serious injury to the head that could normally induce such a coma.

The death of his father had hit Sigurd hard, but his mind was strong enough to cope.

She was much more worried about Sigurd's mother. She would have to take more care of her in the coming days and, of course, of Sigurd. She sighed loudly, causing the doctor who was riding with her to look at her with concern.

Are you all right?"

She merely nodded. Sigurd lay on the couch like a dead man. Not a single muscle on his body was moving. His eyelids were closed. If only she knew what had happened to him; where his mind was at that moment.

The metaphysical gates of the universe were blasted.

For this, the residual magical energy still presents in Sigurd's mind, which had been constantly charged by his parapsychic endowment since his fall back into his old body, was enough.

His soul, his mental ego, spontaneously accessed an alternate plane of reality.

Due to a massive space-time curvature, which was formed by the creation of a black hole only a few light-years away from Earth, the Einstein space-time continuum became permeable to certain forms of energy.

Sigurd's spirit was naturally particularly susceptible to this by the already once carried out consciousness transfer.

His spirit-soul was torn with vehemence from his body, which thereupon immediately fell into a deep coma.

Despite everything, some of the natural constants still retained their validity. Sigurd's mental essens was still bound to the solar system of the earth.

However, it was on another reality level, so to speak in a parallel world, 200 years in the future.

His spirit-soul there took over the body of a human being who had a strong affinity to him and whose own soul was already so weakened and marked by death that it became easy to displace it completely.

He awoke from a deep unconsciousness under burning pain shortly before dying.

Sgrull

The cave dome was directly under the bungalow built of red sandstone bricks.

The house was still in good condition despite its advanced age of over two hundred and twenty-five years.

It was a typical American bungalow of the beginning of the 21st century of the old era.

Directly behind the house, a vast desert began to expand. There were no longer any boundaries or other landscape features that could have been used to determine the exact location. 

The old world had perished two hundred years ago. The continents, as far as they still existed, were still radioactively contaminated.

On the right side of the bungalow, which had a partial basement, there was an entrance into a subterranean vault complex that was partly natural and partly artificial in origin.

The entrance to the shelter was closed with a double door made of old oak wood.

A fierce, hot wind blew across the area from the south-southeast. The sun burned mercilessly down through the severely thinned ozone layer onto the emaciated land.

It was strangely quiet around this noon hour. Not a single animal sound could be heard, no death cries or sounds of battle, which otherwise formed the everyday background noise of the surroundings.

To the west, the image of a mountain range flickered in the haze of the hot air.

Although the promontory was still more than a hundred kilometers away, a mirage created the impression that it would begin after only a few hundred meters.

With a loud, creaking sound, the right part of the cellar door suddenly opened.

As if in slow motion, the door flap was pushed upwards and then stopped at a vertical angle to the entrance.

Shuffling, first a thick foot with an even thicker thigh pushed forward before being followed by a second foot with its accompanying relatively short torso.

Sgrull, father of eleven sons, sniffed cautiously at first with his flat nose, then sniffed loudly.

He had to be careful, as there was always some kind of critter hanging around here on the edge of the desert that was best avoided.

With a height of one meter thirty-three, he was not exactly a particularly feared fighter.

His corpulence and the spherical head, which sat almost unattached on his neck, conveyed rather a sedate way of life.

He was in constant respiratory distress and suffered from a bone anomaly due to a genetic mutation that affected the development of bones and connective tissue.

Sgrull's wife had died two years ago after the birth of his youngest son, and since then he had been taking care of all their needs alone.

He still remembered well the day she died. Life was already bitter and wrong, like the poisonous sand viper that had bitten her and killed her on the spot.

On the other hand, life had also brought Majenna to him. An admittedly strange young woman who knew nothing about her own past, or at least pretended to suffer from amnesty.

Majenna had appeared here about one and a half planetary orbits ago.

Since then she had been taking care of the youngest members of his large family and had become an indispensable part of their small community.

Sgrull was especially grateful to her, as she had immediately taken care of the newborn, who was only half a year old at the time.

Somewhat irritated by the memories that had invaded his mind, he sniffled loudly again and spat out green secretions.

Sgrull was a mutant, as were most of the descendants of survivors of the nuclear end of the world two hundred years ago.

He tried as quietly as possible to close the massive wooden door behind him but did not quite succeed.