Heart of the Future E-Book

Robin Brande

• Herausgeber: Ryer Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Heart-warming stories of love, courage, and compassion from a not-so-distant future.

Step into a future of space travel and alien communication—where love, friendship, and kindness guide the human heart.

HUMANS’ NATURE: An apprentice spaceship designer risks her future for a group of explorers on a dangerous mission.

THE REFUGEES: A volunteer helps the alien refugees fleeing a planetary disaster.

TIME MAP: A mechanical genius joins a top-secret mission to learn about alien technology from the aliens themselves. What he discovers changes everything.

THE WINDS OF A YELLOW PLANET: An explorer discovers a distant planet that might hold the key to life and death.

LOVE AND WAR: On a billionaire planet playground, lawsuits are part of the recreation. But this time the fight is personal: attorney Lyrie’s opponent is the man she once loved.

Leseprobe

HEART OF THE FUTURE

HEART-WARMING STORIES OF LOVE, COURAGE, AND COMPASSION IN A NOT-SO-DISTANT FUTURE

ROBIN BRANDE

RYER PUBLISHING

HEART OF THE FUTURE

Heart-warming Stories of Love, Courage, and Compassion in a Not-so-distant Future

By Robin Brande

Published by Ryer Publishing

www.ryerpublishing.com

© 2025 Robin Brande

www.robinbrande.com

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Darkmoon_Art, S. Salman, and Frozenbunn/Canva

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-952383-75-5

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-952383-76-2

“Time Map” was first published in Pulphouse Magazine #20.

* * *

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Humans’ Nature

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Refugees

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Time Map

Time Map

The Winds of a Yellow Planet

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Love and War

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

More from Robin Brande

Secret Code for Heart of the Future Readers

A Mind for Mysteries

The Secret Juror

The Truth Chamber

The Miraculous Unknown

About the Author

Also by Robin Brande

HUMANS’ NATURE

1

Wood and stone were soothing to the soul. But they weren’t efficient. They weren’t functional.

At least that’s what Dary’s supervisor said.

Only the specialized metals were light enough for transport. There would be no natural materials. Too heavy. Too expensive, fuel-wise.

Her supervisor, Mr. Marsh, had shown Dary around the facility six months ago. It was as modern as any place she had ever seen. A large manufacturing floor. Fifty worktables set up in two rows. Everything very clean. Bright. Sterile. The tiling on the floor was new. Dary could still smell the adhesives and the synthetic coating.

Mr. Marsh was very proud of the workspace, as he should have been. It meant his company had passed all the rigors of bidding and competition. After two years of tense waiting, he finally received word that it was a go. He was the one.

Dary was secondary.

She had a reputation, of sorts. A good honest worker. Gave a full day’s work and then some. Was a problem solver. A team player. All the recommendations you’d want to see for a girl only twenty. What did she know. But she was good, within her limits. Everybody said.

“Here are your supplies,” Mr. Marsh told her the first day she arrived at the workspace. She would have her very own large steel-topped table, no one to share it with. That alone was an improvement.

At school, Dary stood shoulder to shoulder with eight other students every time she needed to work. It was why she did her designs at home, pencil on paper, old style. Feeling her way through.

Everyone else—everyone—used the latest computer programs and graphics. Their designs looked sleek and perfect. Always so perfect.

Dary’s were messy. Too organic, her professors cautioned. Not practical. Not here, not anymore.

Mr. Marsh gave her a full-body workshop apron, a lovely pine green, with two deep pockets in front. Dary slipped it over her head and tied it behind her waist. The apron was for someone much taller, but she didn’t mind the feel of it hanging all the way down below her shins. It was official. Professional. She was a maker.

Mr. Marsh pointed to the screen mounted on a hydraulic arm just above her worktable. That way she could pull it toward her, push it away, twist it, turn it so she could see it no matter what she was doing and where she worked at her assigned station. “There’s the list of what we need,” Mr. Marsh told her. “I’m counting on you. We’re already behind.”

“Yes, sir.” Dary tied back her dark hair. Tightened the bow on the apron strings at the back. Watched Mr. Marsh go on to the next worktable where another student from the Craftsmen Academy waited for his instructions.

I’m on my own, Dary thought.

Finally.

2

At the Academy the professors taught innovations. It made sense. The world was not what it was fifty years ago, they reminded everyone, as if anyone had to say it.

Trees were a fond memory. When the water dried up, it was humans first, livestock second, plants a distant third or fourth or more.

Livestock first, pets second. So they were the next to go.

Dary knew the history. She knew it too well. She loved the old books with their nostalgic pictures. People tended to move on. It was too sad, too tragic, too difficult. True. But it was so beautiful, that past. Full of life and greenery, full of forests and jungles and wildlife. Now green was a manufactured color. The smell of pine trees and maple sap were replicated and bottled. You could buy a substitute for moss by the sheet, like it was fabric. Same with grass if you wanted it around your house or even inside it. Lay it down in squares, squish your toes into it. Doesn’t that feel nice?

But no one dared to say, Don’t you miss it? What was the point of that?

Dary’s parents couldn’t afford the richest upgrades. Someone gave her a little book when she was four or five with squares of things she could touch: this was leather. This was fur. These were feathers. Feel them. This was what a fern frond used to be like. Isn’t it strange?

Like listening to recordings of bird song. That was her mother’s favorite. Nights next to the player listening to some broadcast from a century before when a woman played her cello out in her garden and a nightingale sang along.

Just stories, maybe. Everything could be made. Sounds, textures, colors. When she was little Dary used to ask her parents, “Is this real?” when they showed her something in a book or on a recording. It was hard to tell what was made or what was truly a part of the past.

“If you can see it, it’s real,” her father would say. And often he added, “If you can make it, even better.”

He was a weather forecaster at one time in his life, before Dary was born. Then there was very little weather to talk about. Always the same: dry, windy, dusty, hot. Not much call for nuance after awhile. He gave up his job. No point to it.

They lived in what was left of the woods near what was left of a lake in the small town of Star Lake, Wisconsin.

For a while, only a short while after Dary came along, her father still found bits of wood to make things with. He treasured them. Never wasted them. When they were gone, there would be no more to take their place.

He made Dary little carvings. Little toys. A box, large enough to fit five books lying flat side by side, and with a small thin secret drawer along its base that you only knew was there because someone showed you.

In the extravagance of her tenth birthday, he made her a real bookcase, a cabinet three shelves high, with a glass front made from glass he salvaged from a window in their little house. He said it wasn’t a good view out of it anyway, and boarded it up. But Dary knew it was just so he could make her this one last beautiful thing.

After he died, Dary took a moment every day to open the glass door and stick her head in and breathe in the scent of wood. She knew that over time that smell would fade, but she wanted to savor it as long as she could.

This is real, he taught her. Wood and stone, water, trees, grass. All real. I’m so sorry you missed it.

But the skills he taught her still worked. How to design useful things. How to make them as beautiful as you can, even if it’s just to please yourself. Even if it’s just to lift your own heart. Because other people will be lifted, too, even if they don’t understand why.

Dary studied the list on the screen above her worktable. None of the items were hard. She was just another worker. Some things still needed a human touch. Design ideas were still useful. Problem solving was still useful.

Efficiently, practically, real. With the materials on hand. With what the world still had for its own use.

And with what was left, to fashion new furniture and equipment and living space for the people who would need them on their journey out beyond to where maybe there were still trees and water and colors and pets and birds.

The explorers. The ones who might never come back, but would be able to send messages: Yes, here. No, not there. No … not anywhere. Maybe. Nobody knew. It was just a hope and a wish. But you still had to try things, Dary knew. You still had to put in the effort. Because how would you know otherwise? You couldn’t just curl up and die.

Her father taught her that. And her mother while she could. They didn’t give up. Dary watched them. They both tried, all the way to the end.

How could she possibly do less?

3

Six months felt like long enough in the beginning, but as the days sped by, everyone in the workspace was feeling the panic. Mr. Marsh came in three times a day to check their progress. Never fast enough. Never good enough. More. Better. Hurry.

At night, after the overhead lights were shut off and everyone sent back to their rooms, Dary drank a slurry of coffee and black tea and sugar to stay awake and remain focused.

She sneaked out adhesives and other compounds. She made things by the light of her single desk lamp in the small room assigned to her in the row of small rooms everyone in the workspace slept in. If she slept four hours a night, it felt like too much. She could go without for now, for this short window of time when it might matter what she invented and imagined. When the project was done, she might never work again. No one could make any promises.

This was it. Her chance to make what she could make.

The finish date loomed large on the calendar on their screens. Five weeks away, now four, three.

The explorers, twenty of them, were already in isolation. They had said goodbye, maybe—probably—forever to their families and friends, and now they just waited to do what they were ready to do. For them, maybe three weeks seemed unbearably long. Let’s get on with it.

There would be the unveiling. Just a private ceremony for Mr. Marsh and the workers at the workspace and the explorers. Because if anything was bad or wrong and the explorers hated it or said it wouldn’t work, there was no point in having that humiliation made public. Bad enough to have your designs and your work thrown away at the last minute, your last six months a waste. Your education and your hopes a waste.

Dary sneaked more supplies back to her room every night. She built things. She tried things. Discarded bad ideas, tried again.

During the day she risked looking around at what everyone else was making. Their furnishings looked clean and sleek. Their storage containers and lighting units and useful equipment for the explorers’ cabins and dining space and showers and toilet cubicles all looked top of the line and perfect. Made of the lightweight metal Mr. Marsh’s company specialized in. Made with space travel in mind, practical and efficient and real.

And Dary’s furnishings looked that way, too. They had to. Her shelves that turned on a spindle, where explorers could store their private supplies like eating utensils and clothing and mementos from home. That had to fit in a tight corner of a small cabin of a speedy modern ship. Everyone was mindful of the weight. Nothing extra. Nothing frivolous.

At night Dary studied pictures of old seaships, of how the cabins were arranged, where the sailors stowed everything, how they were able to live at sea for years at a time and still live good lives. Dary thought about that: about giving the explorers good lives. Even if they were short lives and the explorers were never coming back.

Like her father wasting good glass and the last of the wood to make Dary that beautiful cabinet for her tenth birthday. Maybe a hundred years from now some of it would still exist, rotting away, but still real. Real wood. A reminder of what used to be.

Dary wanted to give the explorers at least that: a reminder of what used to be. As real as she could make it in these times when the old was no longer real, but just pictures and old recordings and memories from people who were there.

One week, five days, two days.

Dary slept just a few hours a night. She could sleep later. After this project was over, what else was there for her to do but sleep?

Finally the day.

Mr. Marsh agreed everyone could make it a bit of a show. Cover their creations with synthetic tarps and remove the coverings with a flourish. Why not. Everyone worked so hard. This was it. Might as well enjoy a bit of flash.

Mr. Marsh looked as if he had given up sleeping several months ago. His face was so much thinner. His clothes hung on him like they belonged to someone twice his size. The bags under his eyes took up half his cheeks. If he survived this, Dary doubted he would survive very much longer. He had run himself to the end of his cord. Just like her father. Trying, trying, all the way to the end.

The workspace was bright with overhead lights and lights brought in for the individual worktables, to make sure everything looked as sharp and clean and perfect as possible.

Dary wheeled in her creations. Four of them, on movable stands, that she had kept hidden in her room the past few weeks while she continued working on their prototypes at her worktable as if they were what she would present.

Their small rooms, they had all been told, were roughly the same size as the cabins the explorers would travel in. So try to imagine what they needed and what could reasonably fit in there. Be practical. Be efficient.

Dary had moved the four pieces around her room, trying out various configurations. She knew what it would feel like for an explorer to be lying in bed and want to reach for something or store something. How it felt to stand within the space and feel comforted. Feel loved. Feel treasured.

Dary felt that way just from keeping the cabinet her father made. The smell of the wood. The beauty of the design and craftsmanship. The love that went into creating it and giving it to her.

It was in storage now while she waited to know where she might live next. It had been right beside her bed at the Academy, but they were told not to bring anything with them to Mr. Marsh’s workspace. No room for anything but their single duffel of clothing.