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Description edit
Rafa thinks he's safe in witness protection until a former FBI partner is murdered, and he's arrested for the crime. Has he been set up? He can't divulge enough truth to get off--it would endanger his new family. Sentenced to life in prison and heartbroken by his wife's rejection, he trades... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Summary edit
Viking is the story of Rafael Orosco, a former FBI agent who has entered the witness protection program. Falsely accused of murder, he can only exonerate himself by breaking cover and endangering his new family. He reluctantly remains silent and is sentenced to life in prison.
The... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
Characters/People edit
- Rafa (Rafael Orosco): A husband and father, college cross-country coach, and former FBI agent who's entered witness protection to escape old enemies. Convicted of a murder and sent to prison for life, he signs up as a "viking" (vicarious reality-implanted employee) to explore newly discovered planets; he hopes this will provide for his two daughters and give them some honorable memory of him.
- Julie Sterlyn Orosco: Rafa's estranged wife.
- Mara Chen: A female viking who's had medical training. She became addicted to joak during medical school, and dropped out to support her habit by working as a high-priced call girl. Her drug addiction causes escalating attacks that will eventually kill her.
- Tristan Abbott: A viking that is friendly to Rafa. Abbott is from Jamaica and has some adult children who bitterly resent his history of drug addiction and drug dealing.
- Gideon Heward: A viking who acts as commander of the crew during off hours. Heward is a brutal man, cocky and cold. Veteran of other missions, he has no sympathy for the rest of the crew and is happy to facilitate his employer's illegal plans.
- Dr. Mike Satler: A senior exobiologist at MEEGO, the company that funds the viking expedition. Satler is assigned to be Rafa's earthside control.
- Biana Oristano: A proud, selfish female FBI agent who is blackmailing MEEGO with evidence of its illegal activities.
- Darnel Geire: Biana Oristano's boss at the FBI. Contacted by Julie, who wants the FBI to investigate Rafa's apparent death.
- 1291: A pufferbelly--a massive alien creature that floats in the air and has dangling tentacles. Looks something like a jellyfish. 1291 gets her name from the prime number that defines the frequency at which she broadcasts conversations to the rest of her pod. 1291 is curious about the odd broadcasts she hears from Rafa, who she thinks of as a "speaking earthbound."
- Ray Gregory: The FBI agent who arrested Rafa and built the case that got him convicted. Julie appeals to him for help.
- Samantha Oberling: Add a description of this character.
- Lauren
- Diane Harrison
- Jerry Whemper
- Anton Bezovnik
- Bryzinski
- Ruth
- Eccles
- Sandra
- Rafael David Orosco
- Dr. Edvardsen
- Montaño
- Palomita
- Tearle
- Kyrie
- Madison
- Nakamura
- Fazio
- Bruce
- Estrellita
- Compton
- Lydia
- Mr. Whemper
- Raul
Quotes edit
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“Choose to love her anyway. You are free to choose.”
Rafa (to himself) -
“I may die lonely, but none of my friends will.”
Rafa -
“The truth is the only way to love somebody.”
Chen -
“Love is giving somebody your naked self and letting them make their own decisions. Sometimes they hurt you and you keep on caring. Sometimes they hurt themselves.”
Chen -
“Prostitution’s nothing more than two people lying to each other and one lying to himself. There’s no love in it anywhere.”
Chen -
“He spread-eagled wearily on the bare rock to wait, his eyes closed against the nearly horizontal rays of sunshine. What a strange picture this would make. He imagined an old-fashioned postcard of himself, sunburned and haggard, stretched prone on the rock under a metallic crescent. 'Wish you were here,' the card would say across the top. What would Julie do with such a memento? Throw it away? Stick it in a musty old scrapbook somewhere? Would she come one distant day, when this planet was safely domesticated—impelled by morbid curiosity, perhaps—only to find his bones picked clean and open-armed to the pitiless heavens?”
-
“Good night, sweet prince.”
Chen (quoting Horatio in Hamlet) -
“Wanted to kill myself. Came close a few times. Only thing that stopped me was Ruth. I’d been awful to her, and maybe suicide would make it worse. Or maybe not. I argued back and forth, finally decided to flip a coin. Heads I jumped in front of traffic as soon as I walked out the hospital door, tails I signed up as a viking so they’d send me somewhere I’d have to stay straight. I figured either way I’d be dead, and I was rooting for heads all the way because it was quicker and easier. But it came up tails four times in a row.”
Abbott -
“A wave of anger swept through Rafa as he drew his knife. He’d battled despair in every thought, every emotion since his arrest. He’d told himself it couldn’t get any worse. But fortune seemed determined to prove him wrong. Well, this time his enemy was not faceless, impersonal injustice, not cold exile or harsh decree. It had blood and tissue and presumably a beating heart, somewhere under those bony plates—and he intended to get his pound of flesh before he was through. A scream tore from his throat and ripped the prairie.”
-
“On the road to the shuttleport it really hit home that I was helpless. It was sweet to nail the scumbags, and I wanted revenge so bad it was killing me, but there was no way I could afford tit-for-tat. I knew too many innocent people. And obviously somebody had escaped the roundup and was out to get me. My mom was all that was left family-wise, but Oberling had a whole quiver of little brothers and these wonderful, fat, freckled parents who’d fed me Thanksgiving dinner once. I couldn’t drag her in. And Mrs. Sandoval next door, who used to pinch my cheeks and try to set me up with her daughter and talk for hours about Havana—she was going to be lying in a burn unit for weeks.”
Rafa -
“Look, officers, you may think your questions are critical to this investigation, but I can tell you you’re totally wasting your time. Everything you’ve asked is based on the premise that my husband is a sinister man who might attack someone to cover his tracks. But he’s not like that at all. He’s a great husband and father. And he has no hidden life of crime to cover up. He doesn’t have any secret income. He’s not addicted to anything. He doesn’t even have any vices except a fondness for red meat and hot showers. I suppose you get the indignant wife speech all the time, but tonight it’s the gospel truth.”
Julie -
“To tell you the truth, Mrs. Orosco, we do hear that sort of statement occasionally. And let me tell you, nobody hopes it’s true more than I do. Don’t blame us if we seem a little cynical, though. In our line of work we constantly get slapped in the face by the nastier side of human nature. After a while we start thinking that’s the way most people are.”
Agent Ray Gregory -
“Let’s hope we just saw the top of the food chain.”
Rafa -
“It was the tone you might use with a dog, Rafa thought, when you had a gun and you warned it off your property—and you liked shooting things, so you didn’t really want the dog to hear you.”
-
“There’s a reason why I’m in command, you know. It’s because I’m meaner and smarter and stronger and faster than the rest of you. If you ever begin to doubt that, I’ll be happy to set you straight. Or you can ask Bronx or Fatso or whatever his name is.”
Heward -
“Julie speared a sausage onto her plate and stared glumly. For a moment the sight of it, lying brown and shriveled, all alone on the white porcelain, raised such visions of vapid mundanity that she had an urge to burst into laughter. 'Rafa’s dead. Have a sausage.'”
-
“Julie donned new jeans and a baggy, well-worn sweatshirt, then swabbed at the mirror with a towel. As she pulled the brush through tangled copper hair, her eyes sought the dripping mirror and ran unbidden over backwards letters that said UCLA Cross Country. She put the brush down. Her fingers softly traced the words as she recalled the 'Orosco' stretching out of sight between her shoulder blades.'This is how haunting really works,' she thought. 'No frightening phantom at the top of the stairs—just a hundred reminders woven so deeply and naturally into the fabric of a life that they remain part and parcel even when the threads are cut and the weaver is gone.'”
-
“Death is a nurse mother with big arms: ‘Twon’t hurt you at all; it’s your time now; you just need a long sleep, child; what have you had anyhow better than sleep?'”
Rafa (quoting Carl Sandburg)
Setting & Locations edit
- viking module on Erisa Beta II: A metallic cylinder 60 meters long. Contains equipment, cabins, supplies, communications, power. Provides shelter and serves as a base of operations for the crew during their mission. Ferried and then dropped on location by a spaceship, it is damaged by a mudslide.
- Erisan Bay
- MEEGO headquarters in Houston
- Wisconsin farm house belonging to Julie Orosco's parents
- a marshy jungle near the coast, on Erisa Beta II
- savannah on Erisa Beta II
Organizations edit
- FBI: An evolved version of the familiar Federal Bureau of Investigation. Its responsibilities now include regulating commerce and travel in space, not just within the borders of the United States.
- MEEGO: A fictional corporation that explores newly discovered planets for profit.
- Huntsman Cancer Institute: A philanthropic research organization, based at the University of Utah, that seeks to understand and cure cancer. See http://huntsmancancer.org.
First Sentence edit
Rain slanted down in sheets, threshing the grass on the hillside.
Themes & Symbolism edit
- Marriage: People who love each other might still have misunderstandings that lead to unhappiness and mistrust. But there is hope.
- Forgiveness: All human beings are flawed; we make choices that hurt those we love. When we have been hurt, we can still choose to be vulnerable and loving.
- Redemption: Even deeply flawed people can make choices that are noble and unselfish.
- Difficulty of Communication: Aliens (pufferbellies) hear radio broadcasts and attribute meaning to them without fully understanding their function. Humans have a hard time sharing their feelings--and their reticence causes deep difficulty and heartache for others. Julie is able to literally get inside Rafa's body, and although she immediately recognizes how little she has understood about what life looks and feels like for her husband, she still lacks confidence in his motives. Rafa finds alien writing and struggles to figure out what it means. Rafa says he has a million thoughts and feelings, but can't put them into words; Julie ponders that same weakness. She thinks about the wealth of meaning behind his inarticulate marriage proposal. The FBI has bugged some broadcasts. A blackmailer uses a a distorter to transform her voice. Julie is a translator and uses her professional contacts for code-breaking. Julie uses an "anonymizer" to communicate without her identity being traceable. Rafa's implants broadcast on more than one frequency, and people (and aliens) understand him entirely through a lens influenced by which frequency they hear. The power of accurate understanding is demonstrated by Julie's visceral reactions as Rafa's true situation and feelings are disclosed, as scientists come to understand the pufferbelly broadcasts, as MEEGO struggles to control the data leakage in their satellites, and so forth. Some of the aliens' ability to understand Rafa is connected with their own practice of scrambling signals in a way that resembles human cryptography.
- Rings: The planet has rings that are cock-eyed rather than girdling the equator. Rafa wears a wedding ring and refuses to take it off, even though he believes divorce is imminent.
- Drug addiction: Many of the vikings are addicted to drugs or have life stories where drugs figure prominently. Chen and Abbott--Rafa's only "friends" on the crew--have both had their self-respect and relationships destroyed by drugs. Chen is dying because of side effects. The company that hires the vikings mentions that "neural stimulation" can be used as a reward, but that they are legally limited in its use due to its addictive potential. Mild drugs called "tanners" are mentioned multiple times; they artificially change the color of a person's skin and are considered mostly harmless, though there is some social stigma to using them. An off-hand comment is made about hiring someone to take drugs and record their physiological reactions, then playing them back through vicarious reality "vids" so someone can experience a high without any side effects.
- Names: Many of the character names have symbolic meaning. For example, "Tristan Abbott" means "sad father" -- and Abbott is heartbroken over the rejection of his adult children.
- Astronomy: "Star-crossed lovers" is reflected in the actual physics described in the book. There's a binary star system that orbits each other (two lovers). One is blue and far away from the other. Rafa's planet is surrounded by rings (see comment about ring symbolism). It orbits an orange sun; Rafa can't break away from his wife, who has red hair. In one scene, two meteors flash right after Rafa mentions his twin daughters. The distance between the planet and home is emblematic of the emotional distance between Rafa and his wife.
Authors & Contributors edit
- Daniel Hardman (Author)
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