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Parallel Visions: City of Angels City of Demons ebook and trade paperback available on Amazon (or here).
The question of whether Vance was dead or not became more than academic when he found himself in a bathtub up to his chin in ice water like some forgotten cocktail garnish, a demonic woman standing over him, and no memory of how he got there.
Read free chapters of Parallel Visions: City of Angels City of Demons here
The Red Rook, sequel to Dispensing Justice and the second novel of Nova Genesis World is now available for Kindle or as a paperback at Amazon.
Read free chapters of Dispensing Justice here (or get it here).
Read free chapters of The Red Rook here (or get it here). -- Fritz Freiheit

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Parallel Visions: Shell Game - Chapter 1 — This Is Your Life…

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Chapter 1 — This Is Your Life…

The transport module doors swung open. Before I could say or do anything an arm reached in and dragged me out.

The arm was connected to a woman in a bright red jumpsuit. My heart surged at the sight of her despite having been fooled in the past by encounters with women who were similar enough to my assistant Audrey to have been her sister if not her twin. The elation quickly deflated as my obsessively methodical side began cataloging all the differences, starting with the “Marina Malinin” name patch above here left breast. Her features were not as quite as sharp as Audrey’s, nor did her brown eyes have the obsidian flecks. At about five foot four, she was a good six inches shorter, with wavy black hair cropped short rather than shoulder-length. The determined set to her lips was exactly as I remembered them from when I first met Miss Audrey Doolittle, the secretarial assistant from Hell. It was probably all that red that had misled me. Or it could have been that I had just been roused from the typical deep sleep that accompanied most of my transport module rides.

“Vance, you’re cutting this awfully close,” she said. Her voice also set her off from Audrey, rougher, with a hint of an accent—was it Russian? “How many times do I have to tell you not to go off on one of your all-nighters right before a mission?”

At least whatever name Marina had called me had been turned into “Vance,” a transformation that included both the audible and visual components so that I seamlessly saw Marina’s lips form my name. Convenient, as it prevented me from having to learn a new name in every realm. This magical-seeming manipulation of my perceptions was performed by AMBR, that wondrous system whose charming acronym “amber” was so much easier to say than “Adaptive Mimetic Boosted Reality.” I had come to love and hate AMBR in nearly equal measure. Hated because it hid reality from me and loved because that sensory overlay to an otherwise drab reality was rich and colorful, detailed and nuanced.

“I—” I started to say as I looked around the short corridor of metal I tried to spot the colorful lights of a jukebox.

She cut me off, continuing to drag me along by the arm. “I don’t care how enticing the groupies are, I need you at the top of your game, not hungover and dick weary.”

“I didn’t—”

“Yeah, yeah, tell it to the pity bloggers. And what did you do to your trench coat? It looks and smells like you woke up in some alley with a drunk taking his morning piss on you.”

“If you’d—” How could I explain that what she thought was piss, was really elder god ichor? And even if I did, AMBR would probably censor it. I didn’t know how strict the rules were in this realm, but based on prior ones I had visited, I wasn’t going to push my luck.

“Let you talk? Hardly.”

By this time she had not-so-gently guided me into a high-tech locker room. There were only a handful of lockers, each with what looked like a motorcycle helmet in a cradle above it. I curled the fingers of my left hand, digging my fingernails into my palm and focused on the pain, looking for a surge of adrenalin. It was slow in coming.

“Do you have it?” Marina said.

I bit off my urge to snap “Have what?” at her and focused on the anger at being dropped into a new situation with no clue as what I was supposed to do, and used it to bring up a surge of adrenalin. My vision shifted with the usual discomfort of reminiscent of hot wires being run along my optic nerves. The light was now sourceless and starkly white. I focused on Marina’s face, but rather than being smooth and mannequin-like as I had expected, I found her features hadn’t changed. So, she wasn’t an android NPC or non-protagonist character, but a real human. I glanced around the locker room. Unlike Marina’s normality of detail and color, it was, as I had expected, simplified into uniform featureless surfaces composed of shades of gray and white.

“Don’t go all dreamy and innocent on me,” Marina said. “Do you have it?”

“Um, have what?” I said, as calmly as I could manage. I uncurled my fingers and let my parallel vision fade. I started patting my coat pockets.

“Seriously? You’re not telling me you let one of the groupies scam off with it, are you?”

Before she had finished, my pats revealed a couple of things that hadn’t been there when I first entered the transport module. One was a pair of glasses in my jacket’s inside pocket and something flat, metallic, and more enigmatic. Guessing which one would be what had gotten her into a lather, I pulled the second object out.

I held up a flat square of black metal. It was about the size of a cigarette case and surprisingly heavy. “No, I’ve got it,” I said with a false confidence that I had been honing ever since waking up in a bathtub full of ice and no memory of my past.

“Brass tits, Vance! Put it away.”

I did. Seemed like I was supposed to have it, but not show that I had it. I filed that tidbit away for later.

Marina continue implacably on, “I was about to tear you new one and demote you from ‘Most Favored Driver’ to ‘Exhaust Sucking Wrench Monkey.’ Now get out of those stinking clothes.”

I caught a glimpse of a shower stall. “Do I have time for a shower?”

“Yeah, but make it quick. In fact, that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since you got here. I can’t imagine getting into the cockpit with you smelling like that.”

“Thanks, you’re too kind,” I said, letting the sarcasm drip.

I spotted a locker labeled “Vance Coreman,” wondering what it really said, but not feeling the effort of shifting into my parallel vision—or more succinctly—p-vision mode was worth it. A mode that let me see the world as it really was. On second thought, the label probably wouldn’t even be in the real world as it was almost certainly just part of the elaborate sense overlay provided by AMBR.

I opened the locker and started to shrug out of my trench coat. I pushed aside what looked like a white body stocking and an armored jumpsuit looking for a suitable place to hang it when Marina chimed in behind me.

“Phew,” she said. “I take it back, it wasn’t a drunk, it was a racehorse. You should just burn everything.”

I turned and caught Marina making a face. She had wrinkled up her pert nose and lines of disgust had gathered around her eyes.

“You know,” I said. “You’re right.”

Next Chapter

Chapter 2 — Saddled with a Newb

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