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The Traveler
by John Twelve Hawks
Big Brother is Watching The Traveler and the Harlequin
Over the years I’ve read novels depicting technology’s ability to provide sinister power to control the citizenry. In the middle of the last century George Orwell with his novel “1984” and Aldous Huxley with his work “Brave New World” were typical of the genre, I enjoyed. With the advent of the computer, came the concept of the despotic machine. No where was the idea more terrifyingly portrayed than in “Colossus the Forbin Project,” a science fiction film released in 1970 based on the novel “Colossus” by Dennis Felthan Jones. The movie is dated, especially its technology, by today’s standards but in its time told a story of the U.S. developing a supercomputer that controlled all the nuclear weapons in the country’s arsenal. The computer was given unquestioned power to protect the U.S. against attack. The computer finds the Russian have a similar supercomputer and the two machines decide to merge and create a single machine that subjugates all of mankind for the good of mankind. The humans who built this thing made it completely invincible: the perfect example of technology run amok. The movie ends—I didn’t read the book—with Colossus telling every citizen of the world that they will obey and live in harmony.
Over time technology’s dark side has taken on different forms and most all involve computers. The most recent work to come along and turn technology into a terrifying bogeyman is “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks, a work that describes a world where a powerful, wealthy organization has harnessed the enormous power of information technology to their ends. For example, the narrator describes a truth room where the villains’ computers monitor the biometric activity of occupants and detects who is lying. The villains are called the Tabula. Their computer systems can access every computer anywhere in the world that is tied into the net. They can even access the cameras installed throughout every major metropolitan area globally, as well as those used by immigration services worldwide to screen passengers entering or leaving a country—find someone they want to detain, they simply flash a warning on the screen and that person is detained. The Tabula’s omnipotent power resembles that employed by the NSA in the Will Smith movie “Enemy of the State”, right down to bugs in the clothes to track someone; satellite imaging that can locate an individual on the ground and track his/her movements, etc. As in “Enemy of the State” the Tabula’s system can also access the myriad of transactions any citizen performs each day: bridge and highway tolls, airline tickets, ATM activity, even being able to track the movement of a vehicle, and control its on-board systems—locking its doors, disabling the engine. This is the dark side of On-Star if you’re the owner of the car and you’re trying to get away from the bad guys. This does happen to one of the good guys in “The Traveler.”
The good guys come in two flavors. The first are the Travelers. They are humans with the ability to leave their body and enter other dimensions, where other life exists. In this story life in one of these dimensions, has technology that far exceeds that found in our physical world and they want to build a bridge between the two. The Tabula has been able to crudely communicate with it and it’s been giving the Tabula information on how to create more powerful computers as well as other information such as how to bioengineer killer hyenas that are tough to kill. The Tabula now need a Traveler they can control to make the journey and speed up the transfer. The other good guys are the Harlequins who are the sworn protectors of Travelers and their job is to ensure the Tabula never takes control of their charges. These bodyguards are a kind of Knight Templars who are trained from birth in every form of martial art and every kind of personal warfare. His/her trademark is a sword—think “Kill Bill”—which each carries in a case slung over his/her shoulder. This book draws from most of the other popular icons of today’s youth culture, containing elements of “Star Wars,” “The Matrix,” “The DaVinci Code”….
The narrative centers around a reluctant Harlequin named Maya, daughter of Thorn, who has turned her back on her father’s world and is attempting to make a life for herself in the 9-to-5 working world of London. She can’t, or course, because she has no real identity—she lives a contrived life based on false documentation and invented personal history. Thorn summons her to Prague, where he entreats her to protect two brothers, Gabriel and Michael Corrigan, sons of a Traveler, reported to have been killed by the Tabula. The pair are living in Los Angeles neither aware of their father being a Traveler, neither suspecting they may have inherited his ability. However, both are aware of the clandestine life their parents lived and Gabriel has continued living an assumed identity in a rundown area of Los Angeles, with few modern amenities and no paper trail, Michael has thrown caution to the wind, living under his real name, and working on making a killing in upscale LA real estate. Their mother is dying of cancer in a hospice as the story begins.
The fast paced novel switches between the bad guys searching for the two travelers and the good guys, Maya and Gabriel trying to elude them. As you might have guessed Michael the material guy, is seduced by the dark side. The other main character of this narrative is the information technology that the Tabula has harnessed to carry out their evil plot to capture both travelers and to destroy the harlequins and anyone who aids and assists them. The harlequins have devised ingenious ruses to combat this technology. For example, Maya distorts her face by injections, applies a false fingerprint over her finger, and employs contact lens to change eye color…
The author himself has created additional mystery by proclaiming himself “off the net.” He lives without creating any information trail that anyone can use to exert control over him. He communicates with his publisher by a satellite phone, presumably one that can’t be traced. He disguises his voice over the phone to prevent voice prints being made. The man is living his story.
In this book, the heroine Maya has plenty of fight scenes, some solo, others alongside a black martial arts expert named Thomas Hollis who she has hired to help her protect Gabriel from the Tabula. There is his love interest: Victory from Sin Frazier—Vicki for short, a member of the church of Isaac T. Jones. The founder Jones was reported to be a Traveler who had been arrested and was to be hanged. A Harlequin had come to his rescue and died trying to protect him from the lynch mob. Some church members like Vicki believed that the church owed a debt to the Harlequins and belonged to the debt-not-paid branch of the religion. The other sect, Vicki’s mother and others did not hold this view. Vicki’s act of rebellion is to help Maya in her effort to protect Gabriel. She introduces Maya to Hollis.
The author creates a tension in his two characters Maya and Gabriel. The reader can sense a relationship beginning to build. Both are attractive young people thrown together and forced to depend on one another—Gabriel does his part in the fight scenes. Maya is doubly conflicted, forced back into the life of a harlequin away from her desire for normalcy in the workaday world and also developing feelings for the Traveler she is to protect, knowing that theirs can never be your typical man-woman relationship. And the two are easy to like so you grow anxious when you know the Tabula have outwitted them.
The story has lots of instances that would not stand up to scrutiny but the reader suspends belief to get on with the story. And the issues the author raises about the use of technology against enemies of the state have plenty of examples in real life to compare with—take the recent revelation of NSA monitoring phone calls or the secret and not so secret prisons the CIA have set up to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists without due process. The likelihood of an unfortunate innocent become a Kafkaesque victim is pretty high. Though the story raises the readers conscious about the real possibility of power being abused, make no mistake, this is not an exposes, this is an action adventure read, pure and simple. That become clear in the marketing of the book and the fact that this is part one of an ongoing story. The ending isn’t an ending but rather a major battle that goes to the Harlequin and her charge. It’s only a matter of time before the Tabula will be back with a vengeance.
The book reads fast, too, but in the end you’re left waiting for the second part of the trilogy to come along and pick up where this one left off. The book is being heavily marketed by publisher Random House. It has built an interactive webpage http://www.randomhouse.com/features/traveler/ where the visitor is immediately dragged into the current story with an assignment issued by the Tabula as you, the visitor, are one of them. If you continue as directed, you’ll be confronted with an array of monitors that show all the Tabula’s tools for tracking and locating their enemy. There is a display depicting fingerprints, video surveillance, audio surveillance, satellite surveillance. Other monitor show credit card transactions, police reports, and GPS vehicle identification activity. Beyond the web, there is a movie in the making based on this first installment. There’s a video game and other marketing tie-ins to keep the cash register ringing. If you’re in the mood for a fast paced action-adventure thriller, “The Traveler” delivers. It will keep you occupied on a long flight between San Francisco and Taipei.
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