Gimbal

Gimbal’s backstory is the epilogue, but the backstory of the most important of their three personas, Kamaehu, isn’t reflected in the book. This backstory is, of course, from our future.

Kameahu Paeniu’s great-grandparents were the last generation of Tuvaluan people to live on the island nation before it was swallowed by the sea because of climate change. His ancestors were just one of many peoples from nations around the globe displaced by the effects of climate change. The rest of the world had to absorb the refugees and Kameahu’s family ended up in Kenya, where his grandparents and his father were born. Two generations of his family, who never knew their homeland, tried to keep their culture alive, but it was difficult to do in a land-locked camp run by a relief agency on the other side of the world. Kamaehu’s mother, a humanitarian aid worker from The UK, met his father at the camp and they fell in love. The couple travelled back to the UK, where they were married and had their first child, Kamaehu.  

The point of that backstory is that although Kamaehu considers himself to be a Brit, he longed for a deeper connection to his culture. Part of his motivation to stop Alexander Mantis from changing the future is to prevent what happened to his ancestor’s homeland to others. In Kamaehu’s history, humanity changed course too late to save Tuvalu, but was in time to save many other communities from the ravages of climate change. Kamaehu is concerned that Mantis will prevent that course change, dooming other peoples to becoming climate refugees as his family did.

In Kamaehu’s time, humans live in balance with nature and each other. There is no war, poverty, little in the way of crime. The super narcissist, Alexander Mantis, would selfishly de-rail all the progress humanity made to enrich himself, build his empire, and feed his damaged ego.