Introduction

My name is Bill DeFoor and I am the author of the Intervention Series and the 2129 Series. Both Series deal with how computers, androids, and technology in general, will impact every aspect of our lives in the mid-twenty-second century.

What I believe: the world one hundred years from now will be our best days ever and they will only get better based on our acceptance and integrated use of technology.

What I don’t believe: the dystopian environments predicted by so many writers and filmmakers, because I believe in the American people.

There will always be swings in where we as Americans stand on issues and politics, but the overwhelming majority will always find themselves centered, and they will always stand tall when threatened or given a chance to respond when our values are threatened. America and her people are good. All Americans, not just those of a single belief or political persuasion, share a bond of fairness and have an adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit. It’s who we are.

Therefore, the world of discoveries and adventures presented in the Intervention Series is a reflection of those beliefs, as was the 2129 Series which preceded it.

Not surprisingly, I also believe within the next century, alien visitations will occur and they will help us achieve even greater things for all mankind. I believe they’ve been here before, but until we can take full advantage of our technology, cool the politics of destruction, and eliminate the ability to destroy mankind, they’re waiting in the clouds.

This is who I am.

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Before we begin, here’s a word from our sponsor.

Please visit my website where you’ll be introduced to all my writings and my background which I hope you’ll find interesting. Plus, there are pictures of the entire family, which many of you’ll hear referenced in the books because I’m not creative enough to come up with original names.

Website: www.billdefoor.com or Facebook at

https://www.facebook.com/BillDeFoor.author/

Also, I truly hope you’d consider signing up for my email list. There are frequent things I share, background stories, free stuff, advance notice of launches, previews, discounts, and other interesting adventures I may get into. You’ll also find a link to IN THE YEAR 2129 which explains how we get from 2017 when Bill Bailey dies, to 2129 where the adventures begin.

https://witty-innovator-4311.ck.page/6da583fa51

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In 2017 our hero (Bill Bailey) dies in an auto accident.  He’s cryogenically frozen until awakened in 2129.  These are the two important dates of the 2129 Series. 

Bill’s values, personality, biases, and memories are from 2017. His adventures and our storylines take place in 2129 and for the following twenty years. These adventures and discoveries are covered in the books of the 2129 Series. They are books about relationships and discoveries as told from the perspective of our hero.

The relationships are between Bill, the android Griffin, and the many people he interacts with pursuing his adventures. Of special interest are their adventures with beautiful lady spies, in gender-reversed roles, known as the Band of Sisters.

The discoveries center around Bill and Griffin sharing the ability to communicate telepathically, and their ability to telepathically read memories of those they come into contact with. Other discoveries deal with the continued advancement of androids.

These android advancements, and the birth of Bill’s two gifted children enable aliens to visit with Bill and further the discoveries he and Griffin participate in.

The 2129 Series sets the stage for the Intervention Series.

Everything that happens contributes to being ready to adventure out, helping distant planets and civilizations, in the same manner, Bill and Griffin were given help from Bill’s two alien mentors, thus the name: Intervention Series.

Spoiler Alert: I’ll be covering some of what happened between 2129 and 2149. I’ll try to make it general enough to not spoil your reading enjoyment of the previous Series, but it is important to set the stage for this Series. It will provide what you need to know to make Interventions believable.

Making the storylines interesting, fun to read, and believable are my main goals.

Chapter 1 – My Background

(Establishing my credibility to write on these topics) In writing the Series, I tried to make the environment in 2129 and beyond as real and believable as possible.  

I stayed away from the dystopian environments predicted in many other science fiction books and movies.  There are no ominously-dark always-raining skies, no millions of scary people clogging each street where it’s always raining or containing war-ravaged buildings.  No flying cars are buzzing around everywhere in the sky.  As I envision America in 2129 and 2149, there are not twenty or thirty billion people living on top of one another either.

The everyday living environment was modeled, by taking into consideration, the changes occurring over the past one-hundred-twelve years (from 1905 till 2017), since the story in the 2129 Series begins one-hundred-twelve years into the future from Bill’s death in 2017. 

I looked backward to project forward.

I found living conditions, had changed very little in the time between 1905 and 2017.  The actual living environment was very much the same.  So, I incorporated refinements to travel, entertainment, and communications to predict the living environment in the future. In 1905, we lived in apartments and homes and went about our lives very much the same as when we did in 2017. 

What we will do in 2129 is what’s different, particularly given the technological advances we will enjoy, even though the environment will be very similar. Here’s a little history lesson from an old programmer.

My I/T background – COMPUTERS

I started in I/T in 1968 when it was known as IBM because it dominated the industry.  The first machine I worked on as an operator was an IBM 360/30. It had 32k of internal storage (power).  

Today, I can’t think of any piece of equipment or any device that isn’t significantly more powerful.  Cell phones, watches, well everything needing some form of computing power is much more powerful than the corporate machine I began my career on. 

The first computer itself was also totally different from the computers of today. For example, data storage in the 1960s consisted of tall, stand-alone magnetic tape drives and Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD). Many reading the books of the Series, will never have seen a magnetic tape drive so dominate in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dominate then, never to be seen now, this is the story of technology.

DASD resembled a series of thick, orange, vinyl records, stacked with space in between each one where a mechanical finger would shoot in and out between the fast-spinning “records” to extract small portions of data. Many reading this, may not even know what a vinyl record is.

In 1968, around 7 megs of data could be stored on a DASD device.  Each was a self-contained piece of equipment that sat on the floor in a three-foot by three-foot by four-foot-high space with a hinged glass top, allowing you to observe and change the fast-spinning discs. 

Along with the computers and tape drives, DASD was a major corporate expense in 1968. Today, you can buy a thumb drive containing twenty terabytes of data storage for about twenty dollars. 

That’s how far storage technology has progressed. 

During the late 1980s, I was with a large Pharma company that dedicated thousands of square feet of space to their state-of-the-art computer room. We had a celebration when we had one gigabyte of DASD.  We thought we had really arrived.  A million megabytes (one thousand gigabytes) comprise one terabyte of data. The size and capacity of storage devices are perfect examples of the acceleration I refer to. It’s been amazing and shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Today, server farms have replaced computer rooms, and the power, speed, and storage capacities are virtually unlimited, and for the most part, could fit in a large closet.

SOFTWARE & SYSTEMS

When I began my programming career in 1970, the language I used to create programs was BAL (Basic Assembler Language).  It was comprised of about three dozen main instructions on a single green card that gave a programmer all they needed to know about how to create applications.  When folded in its native state, the green card was about 4” x 8 ½”. 

We dealt in bits, bytes, and words.  We were talking directly to the machine in its most basic language.  Our instructions (code) were keypunched into cards and then read into storage by card readers.

I wonder what happened to all the card readers and keypunch machines of the past? At the time, we thought they were incredible machines.

Networking would not be invented for another decade and the internet was a couple of decades away. Are you getting the picture?

Data, in most cases, were input from cards and were stored and accessed in flat files, like columns and rows of a spreadsheet.  The first commercial database was invented by IBM for manufacturing Bills of Materials (BOM).  The first commercial database management system (DBMS) was appropriately called BOMP for Bill of Material Processor.

Even today, everyone in our field loves our acronyms.

The first screens were primarily invented to take the place of keypunch machines before accessing and displaying data as applications. Green screens as they were known, took up a lot of real estate on desks and tables for a couple of decades. Now, color-flat screens are only a couple of inches thick and can be subdivided for multiple views of multiple applications.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was introduced in the 1980s. Algorithms can be thought of as an advanced form of AI. Both are a result of the complex layering of decision tree logic interacting with massive amounts of pertinent data that can only be supported by the powerful resources of today.

I wonder what the next generation will be called.

Personal computing arrived in the late 1980s and has refined itself from the original lug-around to the hand-held device of today.

The cellphone was a phone during the 1990s when it began its evolution. Now, it’s impossible to think of them without photography capabilities and integrated apps. Integrated apps make the cell phones of today much more powerful than any commercial computer that existed in 1968.

The under-the-skin implanted receiver/transmitter talked about in the books, isn’t widely in use today, although it does exist.

The point of this brief Memory Recall example is this: in equipment, coding languages, applications, and presentation; I/T has accelerated in discoveries and development, while other environmental elements have merely grown over the last fifty years or more.

What is currently being done by social media giants (platforms) mining and correlating data is yet another, perhaps more frightening example of accelerated growth in the technological arena.  Google was formed in 1998.  Now it controls a large portion of technology that didn’t even exist two decades ago.  Facebook came along in 2004, a date that will live forever in infamy…

Those of us in the industry thought IBM made the right decision to let Microsoft spin-off in 1975.  At the time, we thought it was a worthless promise, but what did we know? The rest is history.

So, when you read the 2129 Series, think about how close we are today to the 2129 environment as it is explained. It’s not that great a leap forward.

For example, you can ask Alexa to control your heating/cooling systems, control your lights, or find a favorite program on your streaming big-screen TV.  You can speak into your cellphone and google nearly any question you might think of.  And today, driverless cars are in final testing.   

SUMMARY

I think it’s important for you to understand my background. It gives the Series and its technical discoveries credibility. I hope you can agree; it’s not a great leap of faith to envision my predicted environment of 2129 and move forward to 2149.

If you’ve read the 2129 Series, I hope you feel that I’ve brought you along gently, to the point of believing we’ll have the communication and travel capabilities described in the Intervention Series. Both are essential elements of each intervention.

My point: technology will continue to advance much more rapidly than our normal living conditions and interactions.  Other than the adventures, I don’t believe there’s much fiction in the science-fiction technology of the 2129 Series. The capabilities and adventures of the Interventions Series are more about storytelling.

Just for a moment, if the world I describe in 2149 existed as I describe, don’t you believe we, the human race, would venture out to assist other planets?

Just a little something for you to consider.

Chapter 2 – Space Travel

(Let your mind wander a bit with me on this topic)

Space travel is one of those wonderful concepts we can engage in while writing Science Fiction. It’s essential to the storylines of both Series and a topic I find extremely interesting.

I believe there are two primary factors regarding how realistic my concepts are when describing my theories on space travel. They impact the characters and storyline of each book.

The first is aging or more accurately, how do you keep the age of the traveler in sync with those they leave behind?

I get the methods of “sleep” others predict a space traveler might have to endure while traveling to and from a destination. Many by today’s measurements are hundreds and thousands of lightyears away. I could believe in some form of technology-assisted hibernation, but that’s not the problem for me. But can you imagine leaving those you know and love behind for decades (of hibernation time) to get to a distant planet? You may have aged a day or a week or a month, while those left behind have all aged and passed.

Writing about Bill Bailey going from 2017 to 2129, I try to explain how that might feel to be the traveler. I wonder how many of us could adapt to a totally new environment when awakened. And, who knows what might have been discovered during the time we were asleep? Adjustments would be a major concern.

The second factor is propulsion. How would you ever store enough fuel to carry a payload to another universe and return?

What if either or both factors are prohibitive?

Perhaps we’re destined to be restricted to our own solar system. There’d be no fun in writing or reading books that contain space travel if that were the case. Besides, do you really believe we are the only human race in all of existence?

If you do, I’ve lost you from hello.

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So, when I look at space travel, the first thing I consider is Einstein’s theory of bending time and space like a piece of paper.

This theory suggested; that a starting point and a destination could be thought of as being on a piece of paper representing time and space. That piece of paper could be thought of as a plane or another dimension. Einstein suggests, that we could bend the paper aligning the destination over the starting point directly in line and above it.

I use that as a jumping-off point. Taken to a logical conclusion (to me anyway), that image sets up a vision of a wormhole. A shortcut between two remote points in space. In Einstein’s example, one is somehow placed directly over the other.

The wormhole concept has been popular for some time in the science fiction community. It facilitates travel and takes care of the aging issue with a single idea. It’s the ideal shortcut between two distant points.

However, the problem with a wormhole for our level of understanding is: who, or how, do you make one?

Obviously, I enjoy watching and reading about such ideas and there have been several. I like the Stargate movies and TV programs in particular and in thinking about it, it’s provided a couple of theories to pursue in writing my Series.

In case you’ve never heard of Stargate, it suggests the existence of a starting Stargate mechanism (two twelve-to-fifteen-foot circles of stone, one within the other, with a dozen or so symbols equally spaced around both) and a destination Stargate mechanism. The symbols on one of the Stargates rotate to identify the location or address of the destination Stargate. It turns multiple times until the destination is properly identified.

When they are aligned with a valid destination, people and objects can be transported through a membrane arriving immediately at the destination. Pretty cool, right? The issue with aging doesn’t apply to Stargates because it takes no time to transport yourself from your starting point to your destination.

So, I adopted the concept, in part. The part of movement between points with no aging problem associated with it. So far, so good.

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A major constraint of the Stargate process is, that there has to be a mechanism at both starting and destination points. Not very convenient for traveling since in the Stargate series, there was only one or two per planet. How would you get to remote destinations on each planet once you’ve arrived? I’ve never seen a rent-a-car or airplane in any of the episodes. I’d want to be able to travel to an unlimited number of destinations on an unlimited number of planets.

It would be a major limiting factor, not to mention having to explain who made the Stargates. There would have to be some divine entity and even then, they would have an unreasonable time creating one for every destination we’d want to visit. So, I went to work on that, and here’s how I came up with what I did.

We live in a three-dimensional world. To define two points in space requires an “X” horizontal axis, a “Y” vertical axis, and a “Z” depth axis. I think even Einstein had to cheat a little to put his paper-bending theory forward.

On a single piece of paper, he defined two points by their X and Y axis, where the paper represented his Z axis. It occurred to me, that by aligning and bending the paper, he was creating a fourth dimension. I decided to call it: location. Not very original, but it’s easy to understand its meaning.

Everyone can envision a three-dimensional model of space where two points are located representing a starting point and a destination. If I created a fourth dimension, like Einstein’s sheet of paper, that plane connecting the two points I’d call my fourth dimension. In effect, it would be his sheet of paper.

Once I had the fourth dimension named, I thought about the distance between the two points on Einstein’s folded paper (now my fourth dimension). Again, not being very creative with names, I called it time, representing the time it would take to get between the two locations on the bent piece of paper.

Another way to look at it might be to consider the distance between the two points, in my plane in terms, of the time to get from one to the other, given whatever form of travel you might use.

~ * ~

My version of the Stargate concept just became a discovery of two additional dimensions: location and time. The location of the destination would be needed to pinpoint a spot in outer space or another planet. The time represents how fast we wanted to reach our destination, given the distance between the two points and the method of transportation. You’ll recognize using both new dimensions for travel in both Series.

My aging problem had been solved. It also solved many of the problems associated with having aliens as mentors. They needed to have a way to get from their home to us quickly, that’s the way mentors work. Even if they only have three fingers and are seven feet tall, they’re very hands-on.

I also solved the dilemma of the Stargate concerning who and where the Stargates were created. By having the additional dimension, I could go anywhere. All I needed was a vehicle or vessel, a spaceship to penetrate the new dimensions I had just created, and I could end up where I wanted to be in the shortest period possible.

Unlike with the Stargate where people walked through a membrane, I needed to create a spacecraft and address transit and my propulsion concerns which had been somewhat mitigated with the new dimensions.

Since I was creating a couple of new dimensions, I wanted something a little more eloquent to fuel my fleet.

I’m fed up with the arguments about fossil fuels and renewables, so I created my own source: liquid energy. Just to make it fun, I decided it didn’t exist on Earth, but there was some on Mars and certainly, our friends from outer space had to have access to it. After all, they had been traveling through space for eons.

Coming up with liquid energy was fun, but I didn’t want it to be used in the firing of an engine. Again, I wanted something more exotic. So, I came up with the concept of like magnetic forces repelling one another and theorized that the movement of liquid energy, between the hulls of a vessel, would create thrust, and considering gravity as magnetic energy, it could repel itself to hover about Earth’s gravity. All I needed to do was to create a two or three-hull spacecraft and circulate the liquid energy to produce thrust and offset gravity.

~ * ~

Then I had to test my creation against existing (science fiction) norms of traveling in space.

Warp speed(s) is the popular method of jumping great distances between destinations in space.

Can you imagine the stress on a vehicle this would create? Unknowingly, the warp speed concept might be promoting my new dimension theory, except they’re doing it by pushing the speed of their spacecraft to unimaginable speeds, instead of imagining new dimensions.

But there was another problem to consider with warp speeds. If they were only dealing with the speed of the vessel, what about all the little rocks that might come into contact with a craft as it was speeding through space, let alone a planet they may have between them and their destination?

Have you ever had a bug hit your arm while it hung outside a car window at sixty miles per hour? I guess I’m showing my age with that question. I don’t know anyone today who has their car windows down while driving at sixty-miles-per-hour today.

And what about fuel for propulsion? Anti-matter is a great concept, but containment and availability was always an issue with Mr. Scott of Star Trek fame, so I let it pass. Besides, I’ve never heard a good definition of it or how it’s created.

I’m biased, but I can visualize liquid energy, like liquid lightning. So, if I’m creating an entirely new dimension, it should be pure and clean, without rocks or other obstacles to impede our travel.

The only thing left to consider is how to penetrate my new dimensions to get from one destination to the other.

I spent time on this in the 2129 Series. It was explained by our alien mentor Alpha. With the new location and time dimensions entered into our ship, there is a laser needed to penetrate, without burning a hole needing to be repaired.

Alpha will have to explain the rest if you’re interested in more. Also addressed in the 2129 Series was how the containment of liquid energy could be used for conventional travel.

When Bill and his family visit Alpha on his planet Sigma, they find it used for mass transit. Its properties which allow it to hover make it ideal for transportation via trains and subways. Computers would instantaneously react and adjust to weight being added or reduced with passengers and cargo. This would eliminate the need for tracks and with the propulsion being supplied by liquid energy circulation, we had everything taken care of.

Well, almost everything. Inertia was going to be a problem, so our space mentor also helped us integrate a gyroscope and how to counterbalance the circulation of liquid energy to take care of inertia. It’s only needed when starting and stopping, so we had to take care of the “G” forces during both times.

The books of the Visitation series that followed, capitalize on the inventions and discoveries of the 2129 Series. If you haven’t read them, I suggest you do.