The Blueprint

By Frank Van Dongen

The Blueprint is a philosophical thriller about our dark, distant future, stranded on an unknown world, entangled in a brutal war against our primordial nature and against an alien, hostile life form, struggling on the brink of extinction. The story shows from different perspectives the restless and compulsive search of the main characters for a life force of unknown origin, locked in fossilized fragments: the Blueprint. One of the first readers describes well what kind of book it is: The Blueprint is a dizzying road trip through the consciousness and cosmos of Ralen, the main character. In the false world in search of truthfulness, freedom and happiness. A world in which Huxley's Soma world fades into a cozy tea party. Hallucinating, without mescaline or alcohol, like Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. But with a kind of orgasmic mysticism and a penchant for brutal violence. An intelligent contemporary Easy Rider. A must read for anyone fed up with the psychobabble and micro-stuff of most novels. The Blueprint takes the reader on an intriguing quest and a ruthless battle with a fossilized alien life force that has not yet lost its dark and destructive powers. This quest and struggle gives the book's main characters, the Travelers, a grand and compelling life, in which they are torn between hope and fear, love and hate, friendship and alienation, victory and defeat.

People seeking for Blueprint fragments are called Travelers. None of the Travelers knows where the Blueprint came from, why it stranded on their world, and what caused it to split into six zones and shatter into thousands of encapsulated fragments. But every Traveler who ever comes into contact with the Blueprint has been captivated to the end of his days by an unreasonable search for the Blueprint and an unbearable desire to reunite all its fragments. Centuries ago, the first finder found the very first fragment of the Blueprint, a fossilized black egg the size of a human skull, at a depth of miles, in the strata beneath the foundations of the compressed tunnels that undercut all continents and oceans. Since his discovery, the first finder has been a-mortal, driven by an unbearable desire to find and reunite all the fragments, without being able to identify where this will lead.

Centuries ago the a-mortal Ralen discovered the first fragment of the Blueprint. Due to his unnaturally long lifespan, Ralen has forgotten that he is the legendary first finder. In the course of the story, when he reads archives in which Travelers have recorded their oldest memories, Ralen rediscovers that he is the first finder. Ralen comes from another world, but that too is a black hole in his memory. During his quests across and underneath continents and oceans, he occasionally experiences flashbacks of this bitterly lonely journey through the forbidden void, reminding him that an unknown enemy from afar is on the way to this world. These are rare moments in which Ralen realizes rationally why the Blueprint should be reunited at all costs. It is the only means that can keep mankind from extinction. Together with Casten, his only reliable ally, Ralen tries to forge the warring Travelers into a united tribe in order to reunite the fragments in time. Ralen's character does not cooperate in this. By nature he is a restless solitary hunter, who prefers to retreat to the jungles. But every time he gives in to that desire, the call of the Blueprint catches up with him and forces him back to the endless tunnels, in search of the last undiscovered fragments and the underground archives in which the excavated fragments lie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Van Dongen
• Release date: Nov 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005611927

Frank Van Dongen

As a child I wrote fantastic stories and I never stopped with that. The origins and future of humans have always fascinated me. That's why I started studying paleontology and writing science fiction stories. During my study evolution biology and paleontology I was a race rower and I developed the first ideas for my SF novel The Blueprint, an exploration of a distant, dark future. It took me 25 years to finalize this life’s work.After my military service as infantry platoon commander, I started working in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, in commercial and strategic positions where my creativity and leadership skills come in handy. In my career I have launched more than twenty new therapies and products, from product manager in the Netherlands to global vice president marketing & sales. I have three daughters (18, 23 and 27 years old) and live with my Mexican wife Diana in the woods of a nice area in the Netherlands.Besides my work, I am always writing. Between 2009 and 2015 I worked on unpublished fiction and non-fiction pieces about the original form of society of man, the tribe. It was during this period that my idea arose to write a novel about the near future of man: Alfaman. I have been working on the novel every day since 2016. In Alfaman I sketch how the world could develop from now until the end of the century, seen through the eyes of my alter ego Jack Newman, who will be born in 2036. The changes in society that I have seen happening in my life are nothing compared to the dramatic developments that Jack is a part of in the latter half of this century.The Blueprint was first published in Dutch as ‘Het Bouwplan’ in 2009 (Publishing house Verschijnsel, ISBN 978-90-78720-16-4). I would like two of the first reader reviews. ‘Dizzying road trip through consciousness and cosmos of Ralen, the main character. In the false world in search of truthfulness, freedom and happiness. A world in which Huxley's Soma world fades into a cozy tea party. Hallucinogenic, without mescaline or alcohol, like Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. But with a kind of orgasmic mysticism and a penchant for brutal violence. An intelligent contemporary Easy Rider. A must read for anyone fed up with the psychobabble and micro-stuff of most novels.’‘An intriguing, addictive, fascinating, philosophical, ambitious and innovative science fiction debut that certainly doesn't belong to the 13 in a dozen category! It has been a long time since I was so impressed by a debut book. When I started, I had my doubts, because it turned out to be a book written in the "I" form and that is generally not my favorite writing style. But the fluent writing style and the oppressively realistic world in which the story takes place quickly removed this objection. The book gets a hold of you and you want to know if Ralen is achieving his goal: understanding The Blueprint.’

Book preview

About the Future

If you could glimpse into the future, how far would you gaze?

Many people would want to see ten or a hundred years ahead.

I looked beyond the scope of generations.

To see the last human.

And the Blueprint.

And why.

About an Unbearable Yearning for the Unknown

Acrobat girls!

The white buildings in the First City rose up high and symmetrical around me. The cloud cover broke, thickening the wet cement-smell in the late summer air even more.

Market square was thronging with men. Over half of them were dressed in the dreary garments of the Retort. We elbowed our way to the front. Nobody dared stop us.

Acrobat girls were somersaulting through the rain, their skins slick, fat drops of moisture sweeping from their hair. Liquid pheromones. I remembered seeing other women move like that once, filled with an animal life force and smoldering passion. That had been in another life. Old desires rose up inside me, and for a moment I felt like a predator.

One of the girls met my gaze. She had black eyes and white skin.

My breath faltered. She was colorless. Utterly colorless. I could see right into her. As if we had been entangled at some point, in a past of which nothing but echoes remained in my dreams.

What was it that this colorless woman evoked in me?

I gazed at the man standing beside me: Bilder’s eldest son, always watching me, watching over me. A man in the prime of his life, straight-backed both literally and figuratively. Still, he let himself be blinded by the same desires I did.

I worked my way through the crowds, toward the entrance to the acrobats’ tent. Sheltered between the dripping ropes, I spied on my prey.

Finally, she danced back toward her lair. My gaze stopped her. I could not find words as we looked at each other, breathing heavily. Two strangers, trying to gauge each other.

The girl pulled me inside, into a separate compartment behind a hanging. We were immersed in twilight, almost toe to toe. Her chest heaved, pressing her ribs and breasts against her wet top. She wore a chamois leather skirt. Every now and then a drop of moisture fell to the ground.

You’re a stranger here. Her breath caressed my face.

So are you, I said.

She laughed. Her teeth were very white.

I had trouble making informal conversation with her. Where are you from?

From the North.

What’s it like in the North?

Her smile slipped. Men and women are free and equal. We choose life, instead of the Word and the Retort.

So what are you doing here?

She pulled the hanging aside, leaned over and looked out across the market square from beneath the awning. With an effort I detached my gaze from her body and crouched as well. No one was taking any notice of us.

There’s not a single man who wouldn’t confide in me about his life, she said earnestly. I collect information about the enemy. How about you? Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing here?

I was speechless. No one ever asked me such questions. I was always the one doing the asking. Why did I exist? On what hidden island had I been born? How had I ever escaped that place? Or, alternatively, could it be that my roots lay in the mighty forests of the North?

I felt sure that my origins were hidden between the woodland giants, braving the icy storms of the dark polar winter and the eternal sun in the polar summer with equal effortlessness. Beneath this layered, evergreen blanket, in which all lives were woven intricately together, I had hunted and gathered; unhampered by any awareness of time, submerged in a rush of authentic desire and happiness, my spirit and will unfettered, my body protected from the elements and time by thick layers of moss and an impenetrable canopy. More than anything, I longed to return to the steaming jungles where my original being had disappeared. I had been wandering naked and blind for so long now, in a created world that was as empty as my mind. What had gone wrong?

I shrugged.

The colorless woman unzipped my coat and peered inside. Have you got those scars all over?

Everywhere. Goose bumps ran across my arms, and I waited for her to strip me of my second skin and fuse her body with mine.

In that case, I have a message for you. There’s an archive underneath the house of the Build Master. It must not fall into enemy hands, no matter what happens. Tell him to prepare for the final war.

What she told me was too surreal. And too wrong. Obviously, war was the very last option to consider. A yellowed film, stuck in my rusty memory projector for years, now played out a little. I closed my eyes and saw big black eggs, buried in the strata. The Blueprint reinserted itself into my life.

The acrobat girl turned her face up. Her female mouth was so close. She could not resist my gaze and ran into the funnel-shaped tent. Without looking back I followed her, dragged along in her wake of strangeness.

About the Forbidden Border

Bilder’s tribe sat around the table stretching across the full length of the kitchen. Sunlight entered in nearly tangible beams of light with dancing dust motes and insects inside them. I loved the intense flavors Bilder’s wives laid out on the table: rye bread, hard cheese and sausages, fruit and mushrooms, salted fish, dried meats, pickled vegetables and, for desert, chocolate and coffee as thick as molasses.

The travelers’ language undulated across the table like tropical waves, full of movement and life. In comparison, the language of the Retort was a canal of ice. No matter how much I enjoyed the food, the stories and the laughter, I was constantly aware that I was enjoying them. I never participated. I remained an observer. My real world was not here, but in the void that surrounded me. I could hardly wait to resume my search for the hidden fragments of the Blueprint. Alone, but full of yearning and hope. A predator in the impenetrable primal woods, dark and colorless, hunting forbidden prey.

Through the kitchen window I spotted Bilder entering the garden. He came from the hollow stone road leading toward the First City. During my training sessions in the woods I saw the hollow stone roads every day, most of them completely overgrown and no longer in use. They reminded me of old tunnels, their roofs collapsed and their walls eroded by the wind. Only the floors of the tunnels had remained, with the occasional crumbling wall.

I got up and raced toward Bilder. The water inside my coat sloshed around wildly; I had not yet refilled the reservoirs after my morning training session.

Bilder threw me an annoyed glance over his shoulder. I paid him no mind. He lived in a different world. Everyone lives inside their own world. That is why I never bothered to explain to him why I carried around so much ballast all the time. Two gallons of water, old crumbly cheese, chocolate, dried figs, knife, squeeze lamp, rope, a couple of old maps, pen and paper; all stashed into the lining. I never took my coat off. I even slept in it. The only time I ever shed my second skin was for a swim across the lake.

I addressed Bilder before he could lock himself in his study. His eyes were dull, his skin gray. He had his hand on the door knob and the key inserted in the lock.

A woman from the North claims that there’s an archive beneath this house.

That fact alone, he intoned, his back turned to me while he pointed at the floor, is more than you ever wanted to know. Forget it, just like you’ve forgotten everything else, and don’t speak about it to anyone.

Why not?

Bilder turned and pressed his finger into my coat; the zipper teeth bit into my chest. Even the tiniest scrap of knowledge about the nature of the archive is every bit as lethal as physical contact. It will tear down your originality. It will make you stop sharing. It will trap your free will. And then all you’ve got left to do is wait for the fatal conflict.

"So how come you’re still alive, even though you’re aware of the nature of the archive?"

Look at me! Can’t you see how torn and colorless I am?

And how was that thing or creature, or whatever it is that’s buried there, ever conquered?

The Blueprint hasn’t been conquered. That’s impossible. It has been sliced into six zones that may never touch again. The zones in turn were split into hundreds or thousands of fragments – no one knows exactly how many – and then cemented into the foundations of hermetically sealed archives, deep below the forbidden border. And it must stay that way, forever.

He pulled back his finger and left me reeling.

In the middle of the night, I pulled a drawer from my desk and withdrew my instruments from the empty space beneath it. I crept past the bedrooms. In passing, I glanced at Bilder’s youngest wife. Blond hair covered her face, resembling vines. Sometimes, after dinner, when I told her about my forest training or reminisced about the memory fragments from my previous life or expeditions to forgotten islands, she would hang on my words. She was the only who could, sometimes, keep track of my imaginings.

Within fifteen minutes I had worked my way into Bilder’s study. Carefully pressing the door closed behind me, I stood in the dark and listened. Nothing, except for the guard dogs padding between the poplars. I took a deep breath and inhaled the scent of paper, old leather and celluloid. I squeezed my lamp. As expected, his study was a maze, the walls covered in filing cabinets, files, film reels in lead or tin cans, and countless books.

Feeling my way, I descended the forbidden stairs and opened the door to the animal cellars, that turned out to be much bigger than I had imagined. I stole through dimly lit basements. I encountered doors and stairways everywhere; entrances into even deeper worlds.

I lost count of the number of steps I descended. The increasingly cloying smell of earth and the rising heat told me I was at a dangerous depth. Finally, the stairway led to a hatch. I put my lamp down on the bottom step, placed my hands on the locking wheel and tried turning it. It wouldn’t budge.

My eye fell on a small control box next to the trapdoor. I blew the dust off it. Twelve keys and an inscription in the travelers’ language: Number per zone.

Six numbers flashed through my mind.

I punched in the numbers. The wheel now turned effortlessly. After two turns and a series of quiet clicks, the hatch opened without a sound. A moist wind blew in my face, smelling of faraway places.

I climbed through and imagined myself to be in the hold of a capsized ship. Petrified rafters supported the ceiling. The wall on the right consisted almost completely of doors and hatches. The one on the left had a dozen round holes, three feet in diameter. Tunnel entrances.

Amazed, I stared at the materialization of my world image, an echo from my darkest days: a layered system of tunnels that started nowhere and ended nowhere.

Bilder saw the world as finite and closed, a building with nothing but an interior, and no exterior. The elementary particles were the building blocks, the forces the cement. From his very first architecture lesson, I had never believed it. Construction was not about the thickness of walls and the shape of supports, but about the space that was created within them. Even if the number of available building blocks was finite, something I did not believe in the first place, the number of possible shapes in which those blocks could be arranged was incalculable.

I ran toward the first hole and stared into an endless tunnel, overpowering in its size and length. A draft caressed my face, wet and cold. I smelled a strange mixture of resin and rust. In my mind’s eye I saw snowy pine forests on mountain slopes riddled with square mine shafts leading down toward iron ore veins. Would this tunnel go all the way to the boundary wall in the North? Where did the other tunnels go? Who had built all this? And for what purpose?

What I wanted most was to run inside, keep running for days and nights on end, until I found a doorway and I could finally explore the empty forests again. I had my coat on. I had filled the water reservoirs. What was stopping me?

My purpose for this night pulled me onward. But I stopped at every tunnel entrance, torn, to smell the air and let my imagination run free. The tunnels all looked the same. Only their breath varied. Six of them sucked air toward an unknown destination. Six of them blew the scents from their endless insides into my face. What was it that I smelled? Mountains? The sea? Deserts? Just like our big, heavy films turn yellow and crumble in time, so these smells had traveled too far to yield any clues of their origins anymore.

Just behind the final entrance I found a monster made of granite steel. This had to be the Machine that Bilder had told me about. The legendary drilling locomotive that had been dormant for centuries. Powerful and menacing it waited there, yearning for a time when it had been allowed to pulverize anything that stood in its way. My squeeze lamp threw a pulsating glow on its indestructible armor plating, as if the drill were about to start moving. I rubbed its black curves. The material felt like a transitional state between metal and stone.

I let the light extinguish, because the sensation in my hands evoked a memory of unparalleled clarity. A pale man shining his light on a yellowed sheet of paper. It was a schematic drawing showing five cities, four points of the compass, and a dozen country roads and tunnel routes, just like the map in the inside pocket of my coat. In the center of the map was a gray dot. Capital. Central Archive, said the caption next to it, in my own handwriting. To the left, in the South, there was a white dot with the words First City. To the right, in the Southeast, a brown dot with Second City. In the North a pale yellow dot with Third City. In the East a red dot with the heading Fourth City.

The archives, I thought out loud. The archives are hidden beneath the six oldest cities. There are two more archives.

As my memories kept unfolding, I saw the white man stop squeezing, refusing to allow me any more light. I heard him snort in the darkness. At some point, the numbered cities were a kind of hidden outposts, isolated havens, backup stations in case the central archive beneath the Capital fell. But in fact it was the outposts that fell, picked clean by an enemy who had been among us ever since the first finding.

No matter how bad my memory was, I knew that what he said was not true. Not yet, at least.

My scars told me that the air pressure had changed. I was no longer alone. Something was forcing itself into the station. Would I be sliced up all over again?

Panicked, I threw myself on the floor, but before I had a chance to open the hatch underneath the Machine, someone pulled me to my feet.

Bilder aimed a blinding, almost unwavering shaft of light into my face. His lamp made a high, whining noise, like an enraged animal. Don’t you go down another foot! We’re standing on the forbidden border. Come back upstairs with me, before you destroy us irrevocably.

I tore myself free and pointed at the ground. We have to go back across the border, Bilder. That’s where we all came from. That’s where we tapped into the first fragments. That’s where the secrets of the Blueprint are buried.

If you stray now, you will point our enemy to the archives. You cannot abandon us again. The only way you can save us from destruction now, is by staying with my tribe.

I fervently shook my head in denial. I see everything clearly now, Bilder. For the first time I can sense what our existence really means. We are being viciously misled by our self-created world, by our worn-out systems. It’s a falseness turning back into itself, maintaining itself at our expense. A new form of life, ruthlessly battling against its own dismantlement, because that’s its predetermined nature and reason for existence. Waiting would be even more lethal than fighting. Time works against us. Everywhere, always. The original world is about to collapse. We should not crawl or bend our knees, but fight against the Retort. We should build arms factories, gather armies, and go to war. Fight against death. For this survival strategy, we need the knowledge contained in the archives. We have to read the closed books, play the yellowed films, and tap into the buried zones of the Blueprint.

Bilder sighed. We won’t be able to raise any more armies. Every available man is swept up by the Retort. Boger controls the tunnels. The only places left to hide are the cities and forests. We should wait there.

It was at that point that I noticed how hollowly our words echoed through the tunnels. This was all that was left for us to do in this created world. Producing hollow words. We were played out. I was getting close to desperation now. "But what are you waiting for?"

For the time when the archives may be opened again. When Travelers will be able to build unpunished again. When the last letter of the Retort has been erased; but in reverse order.

But who would help us if we cannot or will not fight, or if we’re not allowed to?

Bilder did not answer.

We’re letting fear and deceit guide us. Everything should have been ready for the final war by now. Haven’t you heard the message from the North? The enemy could march against us any moment. I’m going downstairs, my colorless ally, to search for the archives. Are you coming or not?

Bilder tossed his lamp to the ground, shattering it. I wish you had never returned! His footsteps echoed in the darkness. I could hear him climb through the hatch and run up the forbidden stairs, back to the world above, where no one enjoyed life anymore.

I opened the hatch underneath the Machine and lowered myself into the opening. My feet found a ladder. I closed the hatch behind me with a resounding thump and descended even deeper. The petroleum-drenched air burned in my throat.

After an exhausting vertical journey of a thousand rungs, I could go no further. I stood at the bottom of a shaft no more than three feet across. It was only then that I noticed my own panting and the sweat pouring down my skin. Life-carrying water was fleeing my body. I unzipped my coat, untied a tube and sucked up water that had taken on my body temperature. The bubbling in the reservoirs sounded frighteningly loud. I zipped my coat back up and looked around.

I was surrounded by trapdoors, numbered 1 through 5. Between my boots was another number: 6. So there was more down there. I twisted the wheel on the hatch marked with the number 1 and climbed into a room shrouded in palpable darkness. The ceiling was very close; I could feel it.

The pulsating light from my lamp revealed a flattened tunnel with a level floor and straight walls sweating drops of oil.

Finally I had penetrated the legendary system of intercontinental tunnels again, the one connecting all the ruined cities, subcities and islands, built eons ago by nameless constructors, a mile deep and even deeper where they led beneath the oceans.

I was overcome by the same desire I had felt for the acrobat girl, and underneath that an even more intense yearning for the Blueprint. I extinguished my lamp and floated in emptiness for a few minutes. Why had I been given life? And why particularly this life?

I pressed my face against the wall and lapped up the droplets that squeezed out of it. For the first time since returning from behind the forbidden border, I suddenly remembered a hint of my life from the time before my scars. An unreachable world, bending in on itself on all sides, just as sealed and misshapen as the tunnels I stood in now.

In total darkness I started running through the flattened tunnel. My hand slid frictionless along the oily wall, like an antenna. Finally I had some immediate contact with the world again. My mind meshed with the reality surrounding me. I could probably have kept going like that for days and nights on end, in a rush of strangeness and with a desire for even more strangeness, had my hand not bumped into something and made me lose contact with the world.

I squeezed my lamp and found myself before a door. The locks resembled metal fossils, deeply embedded in reinforced stone. My fingers stroked strange spinal cords made of iron, curved ribs and branched jaws made of bronze, rows of interlocked granite and steel teeth. It was almost as if these locks had been alive at some point, and then petrified by some kind of crushing pressure.

I had been an apprentice locksmith once; but I had no idea how these locks worked or with what kind of keys, words or numbers they could be opened. Even stranger was a glowing slab, bolted to the wall a few feet away from me. I approached it and placed my hands on the radiant marble.

My hands froze to the surface. No matter how I pulled, I could not free them. When the freezing cold had penetrated my bones, my hands were finally released and the slab opened. The room behind it smelled like the acrobat girl’s sweaty skin and was full of pipes and ribs. I climbed in and curled up. The slab closed with a bang and shut me out from the world. I drifted in nothingness and started dreaming about my disappeared lives, from the time before my mind had been cleaved.

From this night on, the dreams would never stop. They are colorless images that have been playing in my mind ever since, even though some of the images are starting to crumble. If these dark films were to be completely unrolled, they would cover a much longer period than the first 3600 time units of my awareness, the first 3600 days, months, years, or centuries of my life; all cut from my mind with surgical precision.

As far back as my memories went, I stood separate from myself and could see only my exterior. That exterior was heavily damaged. A repaired armor, painted in various colors, scratched with runes from the past that could no longer be explained, and these runes had been painted over with other symbols. My exterior could be nothing but a created, false shell, just like my coat was a second skin that did not really fit me.

What did I truly have inside; my true self, my original core? I was afraid to speculate. All I had were my returning nocturnal memories. I hoped that some of these eternal dreams were about me. I hoped that most of them were not. I was hoping that in another life I had roamed the most isolated forests of understanding, and that someday I would find these woods, so hostile to human beings, again. I fervently hoped that my true nature was that of a solitary hunter, stronger than all the other predators in the dark woods, a primal creature that was happy even in its complete isolation. A creature that could survive anywhere.

Why did I feel so empty and gloomy upon my return from the forests of understanding? Because my mind was too small to encompass the unshaped thing I found there and tapped into. My mind had been cleaved. My oldest half had taken off with my fundamental insights and had retreated deeper into the primal woods. And it had never returned. My remaining, hollow shell wanted to be big, strong and whole again, hungered for wisdom and knowledge, free of fear, dependence and adulation, liberated of all created desires.

About the Intruder

I sat at the table in my eternal dream, insignificant and vulnerable below an immense dome. The air smelled of oil and flint. I was eating canned beans by the light of a candle, surrounded by six enormous men and a colorless woman.

"The enemy returns, the colorless woman said. I’m going to prepare for departure."

I stopped chewing and looked at the men. Even the glow of the candle’s flame could not disguise their change in color. They had turned into birch trees. So the enemy really was returning.

I had to go see the petrified man tonight. Maybe he had been lying to me. Maybe he did know what the Blueprint was. Maybe I could get him to talk if I told him the enemy was coming. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but I had to try. It was my last chance.

I quickly finished my beans, my gaze aimed at the projector. Day after day we tried to get it to produce images and sound. But the film remained black and silent.

From my bed, I watched as the colorless woman undressed and undid her hairpin. She slid between the sheets and pressed her lips to mine. Her skin was wet, her smell stronger than usual. Had she been outside? I listened to her breathing and thought of the Blueprint.

When the colorless woman started dreaming, I crawled from the bed, put on my coat and snuck into the work room of the six men, where I spent every day studying their books, where they tried to document the workings of the world. Their weapons were hidden behind the book shelves. I slipped one of the pistols inside my coat and ran through flattened tunnels, one hand protectively covering my head. The six men could only traverse these tunnels while crouching low.

As soon as I pulled open the hatch, the world tumbled in and dragged me out. I crashed on to the plain with its ever-abysmal weather. The air was sucked from my lungs, and I had to breathe with a conscious effort in order not to suffocate. Clouds raced past. The wind howled. I turned over on my stomach and crawled toward the hole in the plain, a little over half a mile away.

Drenched, I rolled across the rim and landed against the pod, half buried in the crater. Its cover was open and whistled in the wind. I pulled myself up using the weathered edge and looked in. The petrified man was inside. His back and limbs had fused with the pod.

"Verlef," I shouted against the wind.

"Why the somber face?" His voice was snatched away by the roaring storm, but I had learned to read his lips. He could move nothing but his face and his fingers. His neck and wrists were segmented bridges between skin and stone.

"I’m not somber."

"What brings you out here in this awful weather?"

"The weather is always awful out here," I yelled back with a grin not shaped by my facial muscles, but by the wind blowing into my mouth.

"This used to all be steaming jungles, he mouthed. And the last city stood at the foot of the storm wall. Then the Blueprint came."

"What is the Blueprint?"

He did not answer me. The rain pattered down on his stone skin as it had for centuries, if his stories were

Reviews for The Blueprint

[Jack Tribeman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Blueprint is a dizzying road trip through the consciousness and cosmos of Ralen, the main character. In the false world in search of truthfulness, freedom and happiness. A world in which Huxley's Soma world fades into a cozy tea party. Hallucinating, without mescaline or alcohol, like Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. But with a kind of raw mysticism and a penchant for brutal violence. An intelligent contemporary Easy Rider. A must read for anyone fed up with the psychobabble and micro-stuff of most novels.