Title: This Soul’d World: The Rise of Consciousness
Author: William Disdale
Genre: Speculative Fiction / Magical Realism / Spirituality
Book Blurb:
This Soul'd World is the trial, tribulation and revelation of materialist space-time scientist, Callison Trebla, who has a destiny calling from a parallel dimension.
Upon retirement from his almost life-long employer, Quanta Laboratories, Callison 'borrows' equipment to complete an as-yet unproven time-portal and smuggles it home to go solo on the project.
At the same time, his life takes a strange turn and offers him coincidences and synchronous events that begin to ripple through his awareness. The ripples build to unstoppable waves of change, culminating in a mysterious unfolding of the secrets needed to make the time-portal work.
The day he actually opens the portal, Quanta come knocking and reveal their dark, conspiratorial, lethal intent. They claim the portal is their intellectual property to do with as they please, including suppressing it and keeping the knowledge for themselves. Callison's only route of escape becomes the newly opened inter-dimensional doorway.
He makes the leap and unwittingly falls down a rabbit hole of infinite depth, exploring behind the veil and in the process learning how to get around Quanta Laboratories. He also learns how to process the mystery of life itself and the loss of his young son 30 years previous.
This Soul'd World is a story of hope for the coming age, that pulls the reader down parallel realities and explores all the space between. It's a medley of Science Fiction, Forgotten Philosophies and Spiritual Enlightenment, and readdresses the balance between the search of the world for answers, and the search of the self for questions.
Excerpt:
Close of chapter 1, “You’re Retired”, where Callison retires from the secretive Quanta Laboratories, taking with him equipment needed to build another time portal and continue the research…
The afternoon meeting with Heinrich was more awkward than expected. Heinrich remained falsely upbeat, while Callison, knowing that he was breaking the contract laws he had to sign, became overly helpful and chummy. He signed the secrecy documents as Heinrich witnessed. Then he was read out the security and legal spiel by his soon-to-be ex-boss which amounted to outright threat, reminding him that he now had no power to reveal anything he’d witnessed during his long tenure with the company; and he’d witnessed much. Heinrich even reminded him of Quanta’s successful legal history.
Unlike most of the meeting, the final, ‘good luck then – good luck yourself’ conversation felt surprisingly natural and genuine, and Callison felt almost sad that they wouldn’t meet again. Perhaps, he mused, he needed a nemesis.
At the end of his last day, as he started his car to leave for the last time, he thought, I’ve done it. I’ve retired. He wasn’t out of the woods yet though, and Callison was acutely aware of his contraband cargo. He reversed the car slowly out of A. Fitzwilliam’s spot hoping that, just like normal, they wouldn’t search his car on the way out. They’d never done so before, but today the stakes were higher.
At the security gates, there was an unusually long queue of cars as if to prolong his agony. He was so preoccupied about what he was carrying that he even forgot to put on the radio. He turned it on, trying to appear as normal as possible. His heart pounded.
Hurry up, hurry up, he mentally told the cars ahead.
A different shift was now on duty and the guard wasn’t the one from this morning. He looked rather authoritarian checking the cars ahead.
After an eternity, Callison’s turn finally came and he turned the radio off again. The security barrier came down and he opened his window as he drove up. He no longer had an electronic card to proffer, and the security guard spoke to him.
‘Err, I’m retiring today, so I’ve handed in my card,’ Callison explained.
The guard stood back and radioed a query. ‘Tango 45 to tango 3, can I check the status of…’ he spoke to Callison, ‘What’s your name, sorry? …Callison Trebla. He says he’s retiring today.’ There were a few moments of silence as the guard waited for the reply in his earpiece.
Callison’s heart was now racing as he sat listening to the idling engine, waiting also. It felt like an eternity.
The guard finally dropped his shoulders, and seemed more human, ‘Okay, sir, off you go. Good luck!’
The barrier rose and Callison smiled back, nodding. ‘Thanks, see you.’
Not wasting a moment, he drove through the checkpoint not too fast, but not too slow either and with relief filling him with every metre, until he was free. He’d finally done it; he now had all the material he needed to recreate the Eye at home. Time travel is up to me now, he thought, and smiled at the prospect contentedly as he made his way for home.
But later that evening, Heinrich Muller entered Callison’s laboratory to retrieve the hidden camera. “Insurance” is what the Eye’s investors called it.
The investors of the Eye project; the hands that fed, were Quanta’s oldest and most reliable investors: wealthy aristocrats and influential members of the power dynasties for whom any sum was a mere flick of a pen away. In return for their creation of wealth, however, they always insisted on total discretion and secrecy; Callison never had any idea who he was really working for. They also expected to be informed of any developments on their investment.
Back in the new wing, in the privacy of his own office, Heinrich uploaded the camera’s footage to his computer and watched Callison on his screen taking the magnets.
With a deep breath, he picked up his phone and dialled.
‘Hi, its Heinrich here, could I speak with Harold?’ A code-name.
Before long a reply was forthcoming, ‘Hello Heinrich,’ came a deep, and assured voice, ‘For what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘There’s been a development on X109C.’
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Author Biography:
William Disdale was born in 1980, and grew up in Reading, UK. He’d been divided between science and art at school having an aptitude for both, but science won him over and he studied engineering at university, going on to gain a PhD in mathematical simulation in 2007. Upon graduation with the big wide world beaconing, he fell into motor racing instructing for 8 years (you might get an inkling of this in chapter 17).
During this period, and all initiated by a strange coincidence, he came to question whether life’s experiences generated thought, or thought generated life’s experiences. In his words, it was like there were things happening ‘out there’ in the real world, so-to-speak, somehow enabled by a parallel experience of things happening on the inside; emotion, thought and imagination. After more wondering and searching, and more synchronous events, he came to concede that there was a subtle, hidden aspect to consciousness that was outside of time and space in nature, and commonly referred to as spirit: a life-changing paradigm-shift.
In 2014 William moved to Dublin, Ireland where he currently lives with his wife, Siobhra, and where he edited and rewrote the story that became This Soul’d World. It was actually first released in 2012 in a different guise called "A 21st Century Copernicus Effect", however it became clear after release that the general public’s knowledge of Copernicus was not as widespread as anticipated, and the title didn’t work. After a professional edit, a subsequent plot change and a full re-write and rebrand, ‘This Soul’d World’ was born and hit the Amazon shelves in late 2018.
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