The Illumination Query: A #SciFi #Novel by Sarah Baethge

I was born in Houston in 1982. I grew up in Texas and Louisiana. I was an intern for Lockheed-Martin out of high school and got to work on computers at NASA Houston. I graduated with a national merit scholarship in 2000. In November of 2000 I was in a car wreck that left me in a coma for 6 months. After waking, I have written and self-published short fantasy and science-fiction stories.

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About the Book

The Eclipse is a company of evil.

Ronald Carpenter finds himself stuck helping them after they assist him.

Dr. Nigel Hunter gets caught up in mad experiments for The Eclipse, and doesn't know how he can escape once the company turns on him.

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Keep reading for an excerpt:

To regard bats as evil is silly, or so I’d always thought. However, when I came upon that dark shrieking, flapping cloud of shadows, the parts of my life that I’m most ashamed of started.

Before I ever got into business with The Eclipse, most people who saw me at work would say I was a zookeeper. I worked at The Central Park Zoo, in New York City. I might not have ever studied as a vet, but I probably do know some less ordinary bits of animal care that are slightly beyond what is needed for your everyday pets.

I suppose some would have no qualms with calling me a trainer, but I didn’t really train anything. That sounds to me more like what you would call someone who is putting together circus or theme-park shows.

I have actually heard some people say that using animals in such a way is cruel, but those performance animals are generally more loved and better cared for than many a child’s small pet in a cage (you know, that fish or hamster who can get left alone to starve if, perhaps, it’s owner might become a little distracted by something unrelated...)

Because I can usually get along well with animals myself, I was more than happy to spend my time working to provide the feeding and cleaning up that their comfort and display requires. Sure I dealt with escapes a time or two, on a need-be basis- if and when it happened, but dealing with escapes could hardly even be listed as the description of what my job was.

And while you could say that my successful escapee-recovery efforts ultimately led to the change there was in my career, you might also argue that the resourcefulness I used in my problem-solving chained me inescapably into serving as a zookeeper wherever it was that I finally ended up.

My name is Ronald Carpenter. Back at that time, I’d lived in New York for all of my life. I happened to be working, like I said, at The Central Park Zoo, at the time when I first noticed that something had changed in my working environment. On that day, I had one of those automatic split-second thoughts that I felt slightly reluctant to try explaining to someone else.

Don’t make me ask you to get your mind out of the gutter- my thought can hardly be construed as anything other than innocent. The idea that whizzed through my head as I heard the short motor run for the automatic bat-enclosure food-dispenser was: ‘That sounds too green.’