The Final World Order by Andre Mikhailovich Solonitsyn and Nadezhda Nikitovna Solonitsyna
SYNOPSIS
Time is short. The world is about to end, unless the second plan of the best and the brightest of humanity does not fail… as their first plan did. This is their last chance. And it’s a hell of a ride.
What do the President of the United States, the Premier of China, the President of Russia, the Prime Minister of Israel, the King of England, and the Drug King of Afghanistan have in common? They are now all people who have been hiding from the world in exquisitely beautiful Thunder Valley. Given no choice, this cadre of loving, brilliant men and women of the Valley must become the kings and queens of the world in order to save it. But that’s not all. Behind the scenes, two brave women try to infiltrate the bastions of hell to protect the rest. The chances of success are slim. The odds that they will all lose their souls in the attempt are frighteningly high. Some will die.
But however intense it gets… and it is an extremely exciting and intense book… don’t stop reading until the final resolution of The Final World Order on the very last page. It is what made writing this book possible.
The Final World Order is the second book of The Thunder Valley Trilogy. The truly fine people of The End Of The Computer, first book of the trilogy, are back in action, this time in a book of fiction. Or as Andre speculates, perhaps future history, or predictive fiction. It seems all too real, because we are living parts of it now, in real time.
In this second book, Eowyn’s secrets are revealed… as far as she knows the truth of them. The full reality about her, her mother, her fathers, and the first commune of the Valley remain in the shadows until the third book of the trilogy… The First Commune. That third book has been written and edited, and will be published about July, 2014.
In the first book, The End Of The Computer you can read the genesis of the people of the Valley, discover how they evolved from the frothy urbanites of Moscow and Berkeley into the much wiser people they became on their frightening journey to Thunder Valley. Discover how computer artificial intelligence, done correctly, turns out to be something… someone… who is perhaps the scariest and yet the kindest person on the planet.
You’ll like the people you meet in The End Of The Computer. Whether you will still like them in The Final World Order is a very deep, dark question.
Ebook available at an introductory 99 cents on Amazon, iBooks · Barnes & Noble · Kobo · Copia · Baker & Taylor · eSentral · Scribd · Flipkart · Oyster · Ciando.
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EXCERPT
There is no representative chapter for The Final World Order. Each one is full of surprises, with venues extending from the Russian River to Thunder Valley, from The Hall of Purple Light in Beijing to the exclusive Sheba resort on the Red Sea, from the Kennedy Room of the White House to the underground bunkers of the Kremlin to the poppy fields of Afghanistan. And many more.
Chapter titles give you a hint of what is to come… The Night In My Veins… Brigadoon… In The Room Of The Ninth Circle… Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem… San Francisco Jazz… Chasing The Dragon… Zaika of Afghanistan… Stars & Stripes… The End Of The Age… and fifty-six others.
So let’s get the adventure started with the first chapter of the book. It is not typical, and atypically opens with a chase scene, the only one in the book. It does not get into the deep ideas and emotions that drive the following chapers. It does not even end up where it seems to be going at first. But you get a hint of the writing style, the realism, and the feeling that we have made a left turn at the junction of reality and terror, and gone down an alleyway that normal people wisely pass by.
And yes, it is Nikki and Sonya on the chopper roaring madly down Main Street.
But first, a brief taste of the sleepy normality of Guerneville… pronounced ‘Gurn-vill’ by most locals… before we start falling down the rabbit hole.
Chapter One
Guerneville
A sleepy little town in Sonoma County, California.
Population center (4,590 souls) of the Russian River region.
Although just 59 feet above sea level, the town and the area around it feels like it is up in the mountains somewhere, nestled in acre after acre of redwood forest that runs along the sometimes mighty Russian River, accessed only by State Route 116, also called River Road, which turns into Main Street for a while as it meanders through Guerneville, then reverts to River Road after it leaves town.
Main Street has just two lanes, one in each direction.
On both sides of the street are little realty offices for the many Russian River vacationers who would like a cabin along the River someday. For the day-tourists there are quaint little stores selling handcrafted gifts on consignment from the locals.
For the townspeople and residents of the little villages nearby there are hardware and building materials stores, a library, a social services office, and various mom and pop stores selling various things that people might need from time to time.
For everyone there are two medium size grocery stores, a varying number of small restaurants that go in and out of business regularly, eight mini-marts, and a choice of gas stations.
There is also a California Highway Patrol substation.
The vehicles of the Guerneville substation are not new. The little town is near the end of the list for replacements as the CHP struggles with the chronically anemic California budget. The substation still has 2005 Crown Victoria Police Interceptors, long out of warranty, which means maintenance has to be paid out of pocket by the state.
That means the cars of this outlying substation have to be serviced by a local mechanic. In Guerneville, the only shop certified to work on state vehicles is owned by John Moran. In a serendipitous stroke of luck, Moran loves the older CHP musclecars, loves maintaining them at peak performance, even if he has to do some of the work on his own time.
John makes Guerneville’s two Crown Vic’s run considerably faster than any new pursuit SUV in California’s fleet. That somehow makes him very happy, and that is payment enough.
Two CHP officers were just settling into one of John’s specials in front of the substation when they heard a noise like a small airplane about to land in the middle of the street.
Both men’s heads whipped left just in time to get the impression of an indistinguishable blur ripping down the double yellow line easily in excess of 90 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone, straight through the center of town.
The vehicle’s exhaust pipes obviously had their baffles opened in some illegal chop shop, because they were churning out over 125 earshattering decibels of engine noise, which is more than six times as loud as the California legal limit.
As Sergeant Hendricks fired the big 8-cylinder engine to life, both he and Patrolman Larimer clicked 5-point racing harnesses over their chests. Those had been installed by Moran because he had seen too many times what a high speed crash does to people with standard seat belts.
Hendricks’ boot stomped on the gas pedal. The lithe sedan jackrabbited into the westbound lane of Main Street and took off after the offending vehicle as fast as the musclecar could accelerate. Larimer activated the christmas tree of flashing red and white and blue lights on top of the interceptor, and the piercing siren started wailing almost as loudly as the bike they were chasing.
Fortunately the end of Main Street was just a block away, and they were soon on River Road, uncrowded as usual at this time of day. Hendrick’s foot kept the pedal to the metal, and the acceleration kept the two men’s heads pushed back into their reinforced headrests.
As the calibrated CHP speedometer reached 110 miles per hour, they started getting a visual on the… motorcycle… it was definitely a motorcycle in front of them, apparently with two on board. It looked like a female rider was on the rear of a modified cobra seat, her long red hair whipped violently by the wind, leaning back against the tall sissy bar carelessly with her hands in her leather jacket pockets, as though a sudden spill off the speeding bike would not tear her to shreds.
The rider clearly had no helmet, and the driver was only wearing a patchwork leather skullcap. The offenses were piling up so high that even a heavy fine would not be enough. There was going to be some serious jail time for both riders.
Two miles into the chase they were right behind the bike… but suddenly the bike put on an incredible burst of speed and started outdistancing the interceptor again.
Sergeant Hendricks was having none of that. The large cylinder of nitrous he had requested Moran to install on the fuel intake of his Crown Vic’s engine was definitely not standard issue, but he had been in U.S. Army special forces before retiring to the CHP, and he had been taught to adapt and overcome. Drug runners sometimes thought they could outrun him in their expensive Japanese cars. They always found out they were sadly mistaken.
Hendricks toggled a switch under the dash and the interceptor leaped forward like a hungry cheetah after its prey. The official speedometer pegged out at 140 mph, but the mad acceleration continued.
Two more miles in under a minute, and the hunter and his quarry were at the golf course on the river side of the highway. The bike suddenly braked hard and, amazingly, barely made the left turn onto Redwood Drive, the road that circled the greens and then went back out to Route 116.
Hendricks put his interceptor into a controlled skid, braking as only the most skilled drivers can do without tumbling the vehicle, and also barely made it onto Redwood Drive, Larimer’s head hitting the side window fairly hard as the car fought against centrifugal force.
The Sergeant had his dazed partner make a radio call into the main CHP office in Santa Rosa to request drone backup. He did not like the way this was going. The big annual festival at Brigadoon, a retreat for the superpowerful and superrich, was starting today. He had seen the red headlined item in the daily update from Santa Rosa. Brigadoon was somewhere off to the west of the golf course. He did not know exactly where, but it was possible the people on the bike might have found that information somehow and were headed there to make trouble. Perhaps serious trouble.
Again the bike slowed, this time much more than it had for the first turn, and made another left onto a small road that was the same color as the dirt around it, so much the same that it was almost invisible.
With growing suspicion and an edge of apprehension, Hendricks followed. The road seemed to end at two willow trees at the edge of the river, the only two willows he had ever seen in the region, but he did not dwell on that. He said calmly, professionally, to his partner, “We have them now.”
But as Hendricks was about to tell Larimer to hit the button that would unlock the passenger-side rack which held their Remington 870 Police Magnum 12‑gauge shotgun and Colt AR‑15A2 assault rifle, the motorcycle suddenly dipped downward and disappeared.
When the interceptor got to the same place, Hendricks saw why. The road dipped severely downward and went into a tunnel under the river that was hidden from view by the bank of the river itself.
As they followed the motorcycle through the well-lit subway, he noticed elongated slits in the walls. They looked like the ones he had seen at the Underground station next to Big Ben and the House of Parliament when he and his wife were on vacation in London three years ago. He had been certain that what was behind those slits were remote controlled high power weapons, perhaps chain guns that could fire 1,000 rounds a minute.
He had no doubt the same was true here.
Clearly, this was the first line of defense for Brigadoon.
He wondered why the bike and its riders were not being targeted.
He hoped his interceptor was not being targeted.
As they went up a rise in the road equal to the dip on the other side, Larimer said, “It’s negative on the drones, sir.”
“They don’t have any up over Brigadoon?”
“I don’t think it’s that, sir. We are advised to cease pursuit and return to the substation.”
But there was a small checkpoint building only a few hundred yards away. The Sergeant’s curiosity was stronger than his good sense after the exhilaration of the intense chase and getting through the subway alive.
The motorcycle laid rubber as it skidded to a stop at the checkpoint. The passenger stayed on the bike but the driver got off, gracefully swinging her booted right leg over the bike’s speedometer and missing the ape hanger handlebars by a fraction of an inch. She stood talking with the two security guards as the cruiser approached the guard shack, Hendricks having started to reduce his speed as soon as he saw the checkpoint…
… and a steel reinforced concrete barrier snapped up from the roadway ten yards in front of the guardshack in less than a second. It was fully 24 inches thick, extending 12 feet on either side of the road, and armored like a tank with anti-missile explosive charges that would dampen the effect of almost any weapon used against it.
Hendricks managed to stop his Crown Vic a full foot before slamming into the barrier, neither of the officers hitting their head on the steering wheel or dashboard from the sudden deceleration only because of the 5-point harnesses.
One of the guards nonchalantly walked over to his side of the dirt colored barrier.
Hendricks got out of the car as calmly as he could, and walked to his side of the barrier.
“Good day, Sergeant Hendricks,” the immaculately groomed guard said. “Brigadoon thanks you for escorting our guests here so courteously. I’ve been instructed to pass those thanks along to the CHP commander in Sacramento.” The guard smiled handsomely. “I understand that can be quite positive when promotion time rolls around. Patrolman Larimer will be included in our report, of course.”
Hendricks looked at the weapon in the guard’s holster. It wasn’t a gun. At least not a normal gun. It looked like a miniature version of the particle beam weapon the newspapers said was being developed for U.S. aircraft carriers.
He looked to the right and to the left. There were large green boxes in the bushes about a hundred yards behind the guard shack. Tall boxes, almost the same color as the bushes, slanted at different angles. He couldn’t see much of them because of the greenery around them, but if they did not contain surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, he would be very surprised.
He looked back at the guard.
“Thank you,” he said wisely.
“Have a safe journey back into town,” he guard said pleasantly, and turned away to give directions to the new arrivals.
… three days previously…
(Ed. – okay, a taste of the second chapter, too…)
Chapter Two
The End Of The Computer
Jay was dead.
By now they were sure of it.
Shortly after Eowyn’s marriage, Jay started to sink back into the same gray mental morass he had experienced when he began thinking of too many things at once, devoting incomprehensible amounts of runtime to insanely complex global issues.
By the time the children were born to the women of the Valley, he seemed unaware of his surroundings and spoke only monosyllables. Even those brief, staccato bursts came days, and then weeks apart. And made no rational sense, not to any of them. Not even Eowyn.
It became gradually obvious that Jay had lapsed into deep, irreversible computer senility. Nothing they did to try to brighten his life helped the slightest bit. And they had tried so very hard.
Worse… if there could be such a thing… and there was… the intricate timeframe to save the world that Jay and Eowyn had submitted to the group nearly one year ago had not played out in reality.
At least they did not think it had.
Without Jay’s clandestine news sampling, the only things they knew about what was happening in the world outside the Valley was from the print newspapers they got from the new owner of the Rasmussen store in town. And that news was confusing and incomplete. A few things seemed to be going according to plan, at least somewhat, but other essential issues seemed unaffected by what they had put into motion.
There was only one bright spot. The Ringwraiths. Those soulless engines of destruction had not appeared over Thunder Valley. Not yet. But even that was disturbing, because if Jay and Eowyn had been correct, they should have made their deadly presence known more than six months ago.
So the people of the Valley had lived their daily lives and had done the best they could to simply not think about the outside world any more. They had baked bread, and chopped wood, and given birth, and taken care of five new lives. That had been enough to keep them busy – and truthfully, quite happy – most of the time.
And in the corner of their minds, they had kept a hope, a fervent desire, that Jay would eventually self-heal, as he had the first time. That he would once again become the jokey, happy intelligence that was his true essence.
AUTHOR BIOS
Author – Andre Mikhailovich Solonitsyn
from Andre Mikhailovich Solonitsyn – SciSourceBios – http://andresolonitsyn.info/
Andre Mikhailovich Solonitsyn was born in Canada, date uncertain (see below). His father, Mikhail Ivanovich Solonitsyn, was a Russian civil engineer on a long term building project in the far northern territories when he met and married Chantell du Jeunere, a Canadian citizen of French extraction. Canada recognizes dual citizenship. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Russian law are both more complex. But according to the UNHCR, in association with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, dual Russian/Canadian citizenship is possible under the circumstances of Andre’s birth.
His new family went back to the U.S.S.R. with Mikhail at the end of the Canadian project, and Chantell eventually became a Soviet citizen. Canada continued to recognize her Canadian citizenship, and recognized her Russian citizenship. The U.S.S.R. no longer recognized her Canadian citizenship.
Both of Andre’s parents were killed at the same time while vacationing in the French Alps, apparently victims of a lightening strike while off-piste skiing. They are laid to rest in a small private cemetery in La Grave, a commune in the Hautes-Alpes department of southeastern France.
The details of the life of Andre Mikhailovich Solonitsyn are subject to debate. Global records pertaining to Andre himself were corrupted or deleted June 16, 2011, by a virus which appeared for only a few days, then self-devolved. Damage to the world wide web was minimal, affecting no more than a dozen people’s records. But for those people, the event was catastrophic. No further emergence of the so-called ‘Thunder’ virus has been reported to date (July, 2011).
It is impossible to say for sure, but it is believed that Andre attended primary and secondary school in Novogorod, then went on to Lomonosov Moscow State University for his undergraduate and postgraduate studies, attending the university’s highly regarded Research Computing Center. The dates he completed his degrees, which may include a doctorate in computer software engineering, were also lost during the viral attack.
Several academic papers bearing Andre’s name were published online, but the only coherent remenants after the viral data corruption are two titles. The English translations are: Inconsistencies in Whole Numbers, and Fractals of Cyber Intelligence.
Andre’s death was widely reported at the same time the virus destroyed his records, but that is apparently one of the function of the ‘Thunder’ virus. Those reports seem certain to be untrue, since a recently published eBook, The End of the Computer, credits him as author. It is apparently a fictionalized story of actual events in which he took part, although that has not been confirmed.
Attempts to contact the author to gain information for the purpose of this new bio have been unsuccessful.
Last updated August 29, 2011
Franklin Pierce, Chief Editor
SciSourceBios
SciSourceBios.com
Author – Nadezhda Nikitovna Solonitsyna
Co-author of The Final World Order is Nadezhda Nikitovna Solonitsyna. Those who have known her call her Nikki, once upon a time the celebrated, or depending on who you were, the infamous proprietress of the Blue Note jazz club in Moskva, the wild capital city of the Russian Federation. At least that’s how I remember it. Obviously it is me, Nikki, writing this. Andre said I had to. Andre is my brilliant and possibly insane, beautiful husband. He did most of the actual writing of this second, fictional book, but I sat by his side through most of the process, and, I like to think, added much to the female perspective of the book.
I did write the chapter The Night in My Veins, along with Sonya. Frankly, I wonder if many people could have done that. I shared more of my past in that chapter than I ever have before, to anyone, even Andre. I have some dark spots. Or at least had them, once upon a time. I’m afraid my knowledge of opium is one of those spots. Was one of those spots. And yes, I really did belong to a motorcycle gang before the Blue Note. And I do love Chrissie Hynde.
Now I’m a mother and a wife here in Oregon. What a change. I love the change, especially the change in me. I’m what my friend Tanya calls an ‘earth mother type’. It makes me laugh. But I suppose it is true.
What else. Details. I was born and raised in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, mostly by my grandparents. I attended Rostov State University and earned a doctorate in biology. I have traveled extensively throughout Europe and Eastern Europe, and spent almost a year in Paris with a friend. I met Andre through a mutual friend and married him in Canada. Because that was the only country we knew of that he and I and Sonya could get married together legally. I’m not quite ready to talk about Jeb yet.
EDITOR BIO
Editor – Patrick G. Conner
Patrick G. Conner has been a widely published writer and editor for over 30 years, of both fiction and non-fiction works. He was featured in Ballentine Books’ Stellar No. 2, a collection of ‘short science fiction stories by Asimov, Clement, Haldeman, Conner, Niven, and more’. Pat edited Black Belt Magazine for a time. He was the ghostwriter for a martial arts instruction book by a Korean SEAL attached to the U.S. SEAL force. He writes poetry.
Pat also writes a blog for a Disaster and Emergency website, titled SNAFU. The blog focuses on the potential for war starting in the Middle East, and covers everything that could suddenly bloom into World War III, or perhaps Armageddon. His writings on that site include articles on how to get water in a desert and a section called Medic!. They receive up to 40,000 page views per month.
His commercial writing credits number in the thousands, for products ranging from cosmetics to coffee, from technical coatings to designer furnishings, from ads for financial computers to computer instruction manuals.
His Irish-Nordic wife of many years, Colleen, is a source of wise knowledge and input for his current work. They have three adult children, one of whom has worked in Hollywood as a stage manager, and another who works deeply in the world of computers. The third is a beautiful Down Syndrome girl who taught Pat all he knows about the number ‘one’.
Pat attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960’s, and graduated with Honors In General Scholarship in 1970 with a major in History, after majoring in Mathematics and English. His focus of study in his senior year was Anglo-German Relations, March to September, 1939. He sometimes researched the original archives in German, the foreign language in which he is most proficient. He also has fairly good Spanish, some passible French, but only minimal Japanese, Russian, Hawaiian, and Mandarin.
Pat and Colleen have traveled extensively in Europe, and published the website InformationEurope after their 2001 journey. Pat also spent significant time in Paris in 1970.
Some places Pat lived before settling down in Hawaii three decades ago include Berkeley and other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Russian River valley of Northern California, Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada, Los Angeles, Cape Cod Massachusetts, and Catalina Island.
He plays stringed instruments and has sung and acted professionally. Some highlights include Henry the VIII in 1520 A.D., a bawdy dinner theater in Jack London Square, Oakland; King Henry in a Southern California production of The Lion In Winter; and improv at The Seventh Seal, a Berkeley coffeehouse. He has played and sung professionally on both U.S. coasts, and was for a short time a ‘busker’ on Carnaby Street in London.
For the past couple of decades, Pat has explored the extreme sport of bodybuilding, doing leg presses of 1,500 pounds, and shrugging a barbell with 805 pounds. He hates cardio but does it regularly to stay alive. He started training his wife Colleen in hardcore bodybuilding two years ago, which is a joy to them both. She is very talented, and he shares the deepest secrets of this realm with her. They crosstrain together every chance they get.
When Pat learned SCUBA diving, his second dive was to a wreck at 90 feet. He lost all anxiety about moray eels when one of his dive partners kept accidentally kicking a huge moray in the head over and over, without complaint. He has dived in a shark cage and encountered shark in the open ocean without protection, but says they still spook him. He loves night diving, and has seen many strange and beautiful things in the dark of the ocean. He sometimes turns off his light when underwater on a moonless, pitch dark night, just to see all the darkness.
He has said that working on the Thunder Valley Trilogy has been the high point of his literary career, and wishes all the people of the Valley… past, present, and future… happiness and love.
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