Read Daughter of Time 1: Reader for Free Online Page A

right. Well, I can tell you—life isn’t fair.
    It took me a while to fall asleep that night. In the early hours of the morning, I awoke and was washed over deeply with a powerful vision. In the vision, I stood in an enormous chamber carved out of some strange and unearthly material, like some cross between marble and the sand of an anthill. Odd patterns in unusual color mixtures decorated the walls and floors. Huge moss-green pillars that seemed to grow like trees with numerous branches erupted from the ground and climbed toward the dome-like ceiling, supporting it in a hundred places. Rows of these led forward to a throne of some kind, on which sat a monstrous form, humanoid yet not human. I watched a young man led forward, obviously in pain, by similar humanoid creatures, their insect-like forms towering over him. As he was dragged to the throne, which sat raised above the rest of the floor by a set of many steps, I realized in horror that there were human shapes chained to the walls on either side of the throne.
    I won’t describe to you what had happened to them. You might could imagine terrible things, but this would be worse. The creature on the throne turned a set of three eyestalks on what might have been a head toward the man. An artificial sound filled the room as it spoke in a hideous tone. The language was English, if awkward, and clearly translated by some kind of machine, produced in a basso profundo with extensive lower frequencies that made the bone and artificial material in my skull vibrate.
    “Human Reader—you have lost the time. If you and we cooperate, you to be able to rescue your people. If you do not, these deaths here only a mild beginning will seem.”
    The young man was exhausted, yet a fire burned deep in his eyes. I watched him clench his jaw. I knew what he would say; I could not believe it. I wanted to grab him and beg him to stop the pain I saw around that throne and that I felt in those metallic, insectoidal words.
    “No!” he cried out. “You can do with me as you wish, but the Other will find her way. She will bring an end to you. You cannot hide—she watches even now!”
    The words shook me, and I lost the threads of the vision. The room came into focus. I sat on my bed, cradling my knees. Tears came pouring down my face, and I fell asleep crying like a little child.
    I awoke to the sound of my door being opened, and heard the rapid footsteps of someone entering the room.
    “Ambra, you must dress now. You must come with me immediately .”
    It was one of the women, an aide on the experimental team. Her voice dripped with fear.

10
     

     
I shall now raise an even deeper-reaching question of fundamental significance, which I am not able to answer. In the ordinary theory of relativity, every line that can describe the motion of a material point, i.e., every line consisting only of time-like elements, is necessarily non-closed. An analogous statement cannot be claimed for the theory developed here. Therefore a priori a point motion is conceivable, for which the four-dimensional path of the point would be an almost closed one. In this case one and the same material point could be present in an arbitrarily small space-time region in several seemingly mutually independent exemplars. This runs counter to my physical imagination most vividly. However, I am not able to demonstrate that the theory developed here excludes the occurrence of such paths.  —Albert Einstein
     
     
    The room was dank and yellow. Dank because they had raised the humidity to some absurd level so that moisture dripped from anything it could condense on—glass from the windows, metal on the walls, and the dark-green material like none I’d ever seen that made up the bulk of the funky alien spacesuit in front of me. Yellow because the lights in the room were only yellow, emitting few other wavelengths, which I assume was another effort to comfort Squidy as he (she? it??) swam in the sea of whatever liquid was