Author: Andrew Hastie
The Infinity Engines – Tesseract is the fifth part in a book series by Andrew Hastie. It is a time travel series featuring an ancient Order whose members follow a non-linear life path and thus live longer and can travel in time. They fight attempts to change history and only do as little as possible to preserve the timeline and the continuum.
In this part, Zachary (Zack), a seer child of Josh and Caitlyn, the two main protagonists of the Order (she is a Head Librarian and he is the son of the Order’s father who is from a different timeline/continuum so Josh is a paradox) is kidnapped and the whole book follows attempts of Caitlyn, Josh, Lyra, Rufius and Caitlyn’s parents to save him. The kidnapping of a child also gets interest from the Order and Inspector Sabien also tries to follow clues as to what happened and how a person looking like Caitlyn could have kidnapped him when travelling back in time is not possible due to a child being kidnapped in a temporal circus organised for members of the Order only.
As it turns out, Josh has restarted the timeline over 400 times trying to save everyone and create the best possible outcome for all prior to Zack being kidnapped. That is why many do not remember all the previous events he mentions, which we as readers know, and that might have clues as to what happened to the child. This causes trouble in finding Zack.
Throughout the book, we learn fairly early that Zack was stolen by ancient Gods who have their servant species, synthetic, they call the Shabti (X-541) working for them, and this servant species can change shape and look like anything they like. The ancient gods are the Anubis, a jackal-headed god and Anunnaki, the children of Anu, again. In a previous part, Caitlyn learnt from them how to take a symbiote out of Josh’s body. Here, we learn more about their demise, in their timeline, and how memories of the timeless one (the Founder of the Order and Josh’s father) that Zack partially picked up could save them. We also find out that the Order was created by one of the gods escaping the destruction, coming to the Order’s timeline/continuum and giving them powers to live a non-linear path and time travel, which members of the Order, as we know, can do by touching various objects and going back in time. It turned out that the synthetic was instructed to also search for the last gods that remained after the extinction of the children of Anu and the instruction was given by The Forsaken or those who survived and constituted an Order in their own timeline trying to time travel and find ways to change their destiny. They also adopt a powerful seer, Zack, and give him extra powers so he comes to Caitlyn’s mind and tells her not to look for him but that he will find her when the time is right. That does not stop Caitlyn and the gang, and the search carries on throughout this book.
A lot of sci-fi in Tesseract, including not just plenty of time travel, the building of Tesseract (a wormhole) to cross between different timelines and recruiting Tesla, Einstein and Feynman to do so, but also a multiple universe theory and a lot of ancient mythology. The Infinity Engines – Tesseract is probably my favourite book in the series so far, apart from part 1, so even if you do not like all the books in the series, this one will be so good it will make up for it. I wrote reviews of previous books, which can be found at these links, Anchronist, Maelstrom, Eschaton, & Aeons.
Thank you for reading!