Warped and Wired

Book I of The Wryter Chronicles

A novel by Joshua Caleb

An excerpt from "Warped and Wired" by Joshua Caleb

"What Happens when You Mix the Technology of Tomorrow with the Magic of the Yestermillenia?"

Mlina Cruis liked normal. Normal was good. It was explainable. Trustworthy. This however, was not normal.

She stood on a large rock outcropping that gazed across the Pacific Ocean. Or at least that’s where she had been two seconds ago; now her vision was flickering, phasing in and out like a hazy mist. She began to make out two vaguely familiar people standing in front of her. As her vision cleared, she found herself in a steel-walled room that looked like a computer graveyard. Every imaginable electronic device or component she could think of lay scattered in about five pieces around the room. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. Was she dreaming? If so, why could she still smell the salty air and feel the rock-pocked ground beneath her?

“Mitchellina? Mitchellina, can you hear me?” A soft feminine voice bounced through her ears.

“Of course she can hear us,” a male voice answered. Mlina stepped toward the people, but they didn’t move any closer. She stepped forward again, almost losing her balance. Again, everything slid forward along with her, keeping her eternally three feet away from the people.

“What’s going on?” Mlina managed to ask. “Who are you?”

“Don’t be afraid.” The woman smiled assuringly. “Everything’s all right.”

“Yes, this message is being fed into the auditory and visual centers of your brain through my ingenious—”

“I still don’t like this,” the woman interrupted. “She’s not some kind of computer.”

“I know, but we already discussed this,” the man answered. “It was necessary. Now can we get on with it? You’re wasting memory.”

“All right.” The woman turned to Mlina. “Now that you’re eighteen, I think you should know the truth.”

Eighteen? She wasn’t eighteen yet. She wouldn’t be for another year or so. Before she could point this out, the man started talking again.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with Uncle Albert. We hadn’t planned on leaving you, but—”

“But it was becoming too dangerous,” the woman interrupted.

“Yes, we had to keep you and my invention safe. Hopefully you aren’t aware of it, but you…static…serious…static…rain…static…vention…”

Mlina’s vision and hearing blurred again, before snapping back into focus. The sights and sounds of her jungle island washed over her like a tsunami. Looking down, she almost tumbled headlong off the sheer cliff and onto the rocky reef below.

“Mlina!”

Mlina stumbled back from the edge. Turning, she saw Mom running toward her, panic clear in her voice and face. She grabbed Mlina and jerked her further from the cliff’s edge.

“Mlina? Mlina, can you hear me?” Why did everyone suddenly think she was deaf? Mom grasped her face in her hands and gazed into Mlina’s eyes.

“Yeah Mom,” Mlina replied, slightly dazed.

“Are you all right? What happened? What were you doing so close to the cliff?”

Mlina had to think for a moment to decide which question to answer first. When she finally decided which one to answer, she heard Dad rapidly approaching.

“Did it happen again? Is she all right?”

Mlina broke away from Mom’s grasp. “Why are you both talking like there’s something wrong with me?”

“You just about walked off that cliff without even looking,” Mom replied.

Okay, she had a point. Having lived on an uninhabited jungle island her whole life, Mlina was a very agile and skillful climber. She didn’t just walk off a cliff because she wasn’t paying attention. But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to tell her parents about…whatever it was she had just experienced. She didn’t know if they would understand; she didn’t even understand it.

“I…thought I saw…people,” Mlina said hesitantly. “And, some kind of…room.”

Dad sighed, rubbing his beard. “I thought we were over this.”

“Over what?” Mlina asked. “What are you talking about?”

Now it was Mom’s turn to sigh. “You’ve had these episodes before. When you were much younger, you’d frequently have nightmares or hallucinations. We thought you’d grown out of it.”

Mlina frowned. That explained it. Sort of. It still didn’t explain what this hallucination meant, if anything, or why her parents didn’t tell her about them. Obviously they could be kind of dangerous if she wasn’t expecting it. She didn’t remember anything about hallucinating when she was younger. Heck, she could hardly remember anything from her childhood. The earliest thing she remembered was finding a troop of spider monkeys when she was seven.

“Why don’t we go back to the house and you can lie down.” Mom took her by the hand, leading her down the rocky slope.