The Remnant

By Linda Boroff

Young newlywed Dar Beaumont is trapped in a box of her own making that keeps growing tighter, smaller, and scarier. On the surface, her life is blossoming. Her handsome husband, Roc, has just won his dream job as an assistant district attorney in a town on the beautiful California central coast. Amid beaches, redwood groves, and a lively counterculture, Dar sets out to become the perfect wife. But Roc, caught up in his new job, reads to Dar from files about ghastly crimes and creepy cults. She becomes frightened of a strange young man who looks prehistoric to her, but keeps her fears to herself.

 

Since childhood, Dar has believed that traces of a person who died many years ago have found their way into her mind.

 

Could she have lived a past life?

 

She calls these memories "The Remnant." Now, as her anxieties grow, she begins to drink and hide bottles, terrified of being caught. But The Remnant is becoming more demanding and persistent. It has a life and a story—and it will not be denied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books To Go Now
• Release date: Apr 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215932414

Book preview

Excerpt from The Remnant

The professor brought the class a human brain in a jar of formaldehyde. A brain, he said, has the consistency of pudding. And yet it sizzles and seethes with electrons, with electrical force; it’s the matrix for an incalculable amount of power and energy. Your consciousness arises out of billions of neurons interacting—100 billion of them in your brain alone—with each neuron connected to as many as 10,000 other neurons. Do the math."

The professor turned to the blackboard, and the chalk scratched, thumped and squeaked as he rapidly wrote: You have a total of 1,000 trillion synaptic connections in your brain, he spoke, writing the number ten with three digits of superscript. "Your consciousness arises from the interactivity of all of that energy. Your consciousness is something, and it is something physical, said the professor. It exists just as you and I and this little fellow—the professor pointed to a tiny, alert chameleon in a terrarium, poised on its mossy branch—exist."

When you die, where, then, does this amazing volume of energy go? Does it instantly become nothing? Is there even such a thing as ‘nothing?’ Even though your brain is composed of a soggy matrix-like pudding, you do not feel that you are pudding. The class tittered. "That’s because your consciousness is what we call substrate-independent. Your consciousness could be housed in a computer if we could build one powerful enough. And you would still feel like you. You would still be conscious. Just as you are now." 

Copyright

The Remnant

Copyright © 2020 Linda Gordon Boroff

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First eBook Edition May 2020

Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and storylines are created from the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

Chester instantly seized the eye, and once your gaze had landed, you couldn’t wrench it away. To Dar, he looked as if he belonged not to Homo Sapiens, but to some earlier hominid species. From what Dar knew of children’s cruelty, he had probably been called a missing link more than once. But he must have grown used to the double-takes and outright gawking and even seemed to revel in them now, strutting and showing himself off like a rock star. Word had it that he was the son of a doctor, part of the mythology surrounding him.

Chester worried Darlene, and for no logical reason. She had never even met or spoken with him, and yet, he disturbed her sense of equanimity, of security. Recently, he had begun to inhabit her consciousness like background noise, a vague awareness of danger lurking unsuspected, until it suddenly emerged in the form of a car bearing down on you or your house on fire. So Dar’s fear became a sore that she could not resist picking at.

Chester was tall, and his arms hung toward his knees, the long-fingered hands curving inward slightly as if with the muscle memory of eons spent brachiating. His legs, short and bowed, were powerful. But it was his head that truly arrested attention, with its nearly bridgeless nose, nostrils prominent in the underdeveloped midface. His chin receded, but the jaw muscles on either side looked powerful enough to crush anything that the agile lips could maneuver into place. Sometimes he strode around town in a wife-beater T-shirt or even bare-chested, his abs well-defined, without even a hint of a dad bod.

Darlene’s husband, Roc, had a bit of that, she smiled, but only because law school had forced him to spend endless hours tethered to his desk, hardly allowing him time to sleep, let alone exercise. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Roc was perfect, and Dar loved him exactly the way he was. In fact, life itself was perfect now; Dar was blissfully happy, except for that little Chester thing, as she called it.

She and Roc made a handsome couple, she felt. He with his clear blue eyes, thick, wavy caramel hair and symmetrical profile. Dar herself was a vivid contrast: midnight dark curls tumbled past her shoulders, and her eyes were nearly amber, so that people sometimes wondered about her heritage, even asking her to her face. Then, Dar would have to confess that she was only Jewish, rather than something more exotic. She thought she looked Greek, or even Roma—a gypsy. To herself, she was Gina, a secret name she had created at age 13 that fitted her better than the dull, prosaic Darlene. She would line her eyes in deepest black to make them tilt up at the outer edge, a look that Roc called her Mata Hari.

It Begins

Chester’s condition was doubtless some genetic anomaly with a long scientific name. The first few times Dar noticed him, he didn’t register as a threat but merely a curiosity. In fact, after some initial disquiet, Dar forgot about him for weeks, busy as she and Roc were with moving up to San Marcos and getting settled in.

Then, one afternoon, she had strolled downtown seeking a lipstick to match her new russet sundress, and she spotted Chester lounging near the drugstore just as she entered. Later, when she continued on to the post office to mail a package, why there he was again, this time sweeping the steps. Was that his job, or did he do it just to occupy himself? And Dar suddenly wondered if she was seeing him more often than was likely by mere chance: could he be following her? 

At the thought, a tsunami of fear surged over her; she grew dizzy, her heart missing beats, and her knees wobbled. But how ridiculous! Quickly, she began to reassure herself, using a method she had devised as a teenager, acting the part of a stern but sympathetic interrogator: Had Chester ever looked straight at her? No, not even once. Okay, had he shown any awareness of her at all? Never! See? She was panicking over nothing. Her fear was groundless.

Now, as Dar passed Chester on the steps, he barely glanced her way, only moving aside a little so as not to sweep dust toward her. He wielded his broom with flamboyant grace, almost like a Fred Astaire dance prop. Surely, he was oblivious of her. You’re so silly;