It’s the near future, and mankind’s long awaited convergence of technologies has faltered. Misguided efforts have created multiple crises across the globe, and spawned unthinkable atrocities. Thousands have died, millions are threatened, and international tensions run high. In an effort to reassure the public, the global community bans all research in these fields. Violations are dealt with harshly, and those responsible are designated as enemies of humanity. But rogue nations persist, and a secret project is launched that results in one of the most heinous acts of terrorism that the world has ever seen.
But on the day of the attacks everything changes… A man acts to rescue the little girl he loves, revealing superhuman abilities so terrifying that the world is left in shock. Now those responsible for the attack are seeking him, and a struggle is coming to define the future of mankind, and the fate of the world.
In a future where science has become God, how does the world deal with a man whose abilities cannot be explained?
Targeted Age Group:: 13+
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
Basically an idea I couldn’t get out of my head.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
Hard to say. They just arose organically as I wrote.
Book Sample
March 17, 2031
Bao-Zhi drifted.
With his arms extended, he undulated the webbing between his fingers, feeling the flow of the current. Letting the river carry him and his team along like this was a welcome change. A typical mission for him usually involved critically tight schedules and it took a lot of effort just to move around undetected. He was unaccustomed to being able to relax like this. But the downtime gave him time to reflect, and so he allowed the gentle swells and ebbs of the current to slip him into something like a meditative state. Occasionally, one of the muted signals of the river’s transports would tone out a warning or hail. They filtered down to him, taking on an otherworldly aspect, like the eerie calls of unseen leviathans.
The isolation that came with this kind of underwater travel suited Bao. It distanced him from the normal frenetic drumbeat of his life and he was grateful. So he quieted his mind, and allowed the water to embrace him, granting a moment of drifting stillness.
In the constant bombardment of information that was his world, this was the closest thing he knew he would ever find to peace – this small moment of quiet. So as he flowed through the aquatic environment he drank it in. He knew there would be no golden years for him. He would not spend his last days in the quiet of a well-earned retirement. There would never be a warm home filled with the tiny footsteps of children.
No, Bao knew that his end would most likely be very different, filled with pain, fear, and desperation. He would not spend his last moment surrounded by family. His only companion in death would be the aching loneliness known by those who perish alone.
That thought, and the inevitable chain of self-recriminations that followed, were abruptly cut short by the soundless click of his neuralytic comm.
Target in four hundred meters.
One minute twelve seconds to range.
Passive sonar engaged.
In response to the last phrase, deep green light illuminated the waterway ahead, showing him a tightly gridded rendering of every surface. Bao mused, not for the first time, about the clear sterility of the voice of the feed. Impersonal as it was, the intrusions of this factual data had grown comforting and familiar to him. Over the years it had become like an angel on his shoulder, whispering, and feeding information directly into his cerebral cortex. Like a sixth sense, this toneless voice gifted him with a knowledge of his world that went far beyond human perception. With fearful dread, and an oddly perverse feeling of superiority, he knew that its loss would bring him a silence so profound that it would unquestionably lead to madness. He also knew that this was probably the very last thing he should be dwelling on. If he were to ever devote himself to creating a list of the reasons he had for fear, it would stretch beyond the horizon long before he finished.
So Bao had embraced this strange new window into the unknowable. It was his own neurolytic seraphim, his beacon, and his personal line to the digital gods. Although removing it would tear out an irreplaceable part of his soul. Bao was resigned to the fact that he would more likely face death before the loss of his muse. It was one of the few cold comforts he had.
Initiating sensory integration.
One hundred fifty meters to target.
Twenty seven seconds to acquisition range.
Bao felt the sickening but familiar wave of nausea as the alien input of his teammates senses streamed into his occipital lobes, hypothalamus, midbrain, and auditory neural clusters. It slammed and jangled across the taut strings of his disciplined mind like a chorus of broken instruments or shrieking animals. Unlike the other “gifts” from the state, his neurology was not adaptable to this overload. Secondary systems kicked in to filter and tune the flood of sensations to something he could process. Slowly, it dampened and smoothed itself out, eventually gliding over his own perceptions like the cool skin of a woman’s caress… or perhaps the reptilian slither of some more bestial bedmate. Often the sensation would revisit him before sleep and he would struggle to distinguish which it was – or which he would prefer. But the query was moot and he knew it. This new life precluded either the caresses of love or the creeping sensations of serpentine touch. The donning of war’s armor requires payment and his price had been intimacy.
He sometimes wondered how the women of his unit experienced these things. Were their sensations the same, or sexually inverted in some way? Did it touch them with the strong calloused hands of some past lover, while also simulating some equally revolting counterpart? Bao had never ventured to ask, even during the transformative years when they had each left their humanity behind. There had been many larger issues to concern themselves with as they learned their new bodies. There were things that were lost. There were things that were gained. There were things that remained difficult to define, even now. An overwhelming sense of physical dislocation had been something they often suffered back then. It was a struggle for them all, but for some it had reached crisis proportions. One of the men had failed his psychiatric evaluations and been summarily decommissioned. One of the women – Li Xia, code named ‘Two’, had edged dangerously near to madness. But Bao had intervened, stepping in to bring her back from the edge. It had taken months of mentoring, meditation, and therapy for her to recover. Now she was his most trusted teammate, and more importantly, his lover.
She was a passionate woman, attacking their feverish and sometimes painful couplings, as if she sought to wring every last drop of experience from what was left of her femininity. He enjoyed their time together immensely, but like everything else that made them who they were he knew it would eventually fade. Such things were inevitable as he and his teammates travelled down what they had been conditioned to know as the golden path. Family, friends, and flesh were the price of the irreversible course they took and it gave no quarter to those who sought to tread it.
Ten meters to target.
Target within acquisition range.
Bao focused his attention on the curved and mossy surface looming ahead. He knew he had to time this right and that he would not get a second chance. He had learned at the last bridge that the current here was swift, precluding anyone from swimming upstream regardless of skill or physical prowess. If he miscalculated he would simply slide off or bounce away. That would leave his second in command to lead the team in completing this part of the mission and Bao would have to rendezvous with them downstream. In all the time they had been together as a unit Bao had never let his team down and he wasn’t about to start now. In his peripheral vision he monitored the proximity readings cycling rapidly down to zero.
Then, in a carefully timed, but seemingly casual gesture he reached out and pressed his right palm to the green slimed surface as it slid by. Instantly his hand adhered to the underlying concrete and the current swung him around. Pressing his left palm to the surface gave Bao a second point for leverage and he used that to press the balls of his feet to the structure. Clinging there like an underwater Spiderman he paused to focus on the extraneous streams of information still coursing over his brain. Through his teammates senses he observed as they grasped and clung to the massive bridge support. Then he keyed open his comm and coded out their orders.
Two and Three – Surface, secure the perimeter and deploy counter surveillance
Four and Five – Prepare the grappler and wait for signal from Two
Six – Decant the ordinance
Seven and Eight – Secure the underwater skiff and await further orders
One click from each of them were the only acknowledgments he received. Four, Five and Six swung the watertight packs on their backs around to their chests and began quickly assembling equipment. Two and Three rose silently to the surface, barely leaving a ripple as they allowed only enough of their heads to rise out of the water to allow them to see. With as much speed as was possible while still remaining carefully adhered to the bridge support, they scanned the shorelines for hundreds of meters in both directions. Bao knew by skimming their shared perception that there was no movement or body heat visible across the many spectrums through which they could cycle their vision..
Then Three stiffened slightly and Bao felt a short, controlled burst of tension and attention across their connection..
Knowing from his years of experience with her that she needed no guidance, Bao kept his silence as she detached a small sphere from her belt and carefully adhered it to the cement an arm’s length from the water’s surface. In seconds the micro scanners within the device connected wirelessly to Three’s cerebral implants for targeting data. A half second after the connection was made, an invisible beam of light stabbed across the hundreds of meters to shore and focused in on a surveillance camera mounted above a riverside restaurant. The intensity of the light driven into the camera lens caused massive diffraction and ensured any viewer would see nothing but bright white haze.
Bao knew the tiny laser had enough power for thirty minutes. More than enough time for his team to do their job and be many kilometers away before the camera’s eye could see again.
Two signaled an ‘all clear’ through her comm, and in response the rest of the team rose swiftly to the surface. With military precision they unloaded the underwater skiff they had been towing. From within its watertight hold came tools, equipment, explosives, and a climbing device they had termed ‘the grappler’. A sinister looking thing, it had an angular body and long spindly legs that the team adhered to the bridge support. Once it was secure, Six connected a pitchfork shaped head to the device, detached the trigger, and sent a signal that they should move to a safe distance.
Silently the team sank back beneath the surface to a safe depth and Six triggered the grappler. A deep, powerful thud sent a pressure wave through the water as three serrated spikes rocketed upwards into the bottom of the bridge’s lower deck. Two embedded themselves less than 30 centimeters from each side, while the third sank deeply into the structure’s center.
Rising back to the surface, the team split into pairs to connect breadbox sized speed winches to each line. They clipped themselves on and ascended rapidly to their first rigging point. They skitttered up the cement surface like venomous black insects spawned from some screaming nightmare. Had anyone been watching, what they saw would have been the fuel for a lifetime of night terrors. For the black figures that rose from the water looked entirely human, but moved with an inhuman grace that would have chilled the blood, and weakened the knees of even the most battle hardened soldier.
None of the tiny moments of rest that checker every human effort were present. There was no leaning for support or pausing to let the lactic acid flow from an aching muscle. The dark figures simply scuttled effortlessly in defiance of the laws of nature. The initial horror incurred by the eyes of that phantom witness would not be the last though. For it would only be seconds later that the mind would scream out that something else was wrong about the demonic figures. Although perfectly proportioned and as ideal an example of the human form as had ever been seen, they were completely out of proportion to their surroundings. Quickly comparing them to the water level marks on the bridge would have confirmed that an instinctive horror was well founded.
Each of the languid abominations were easily twice the height of a normal person. Massive fists gripped lines and stuck to bridge surfaces. Powerful arms rippled with undulating muscles that never twitched, shook, or strained. Colossal legs held them in place without shifting or effort. And helmeted heads, imposing and expressionless through flat and glassy visors, swiveled on muscular necks. Naked though they were, they showed no sign of discomfort in the night chill. Their sexless black bodies gleamed and sparkled like ebony etched in a snakeskin pattern.
Setting to work efficiently, the team bored holes to the proper depth in the bridge support and mounted thier explosives inside. Once long range radio triggers were inserted, everything was covered with a fast drying foam that blended the holes seamlessly with their surroundings.
Bao was pleased, the setup of their fifth target was going as smoothly as the first four. If he still had lips he suspected he would have been smiling. In less than three minutes they triggered their winches in a perfectly synchronized dance and ascended again. Repeating the procedure twice more brought them to the bottom surface of the lower deck where each team extracted the grappler spikes, coiled up the lines, and began crawling upside down towards the second support struture.
Beneath them the cold waters of the Ohio swept on. This was not the first time the river had brought forth those with murderous intent, and it would not be the last.
About the Author:
Jason is in his early forties and currently lives near the small Kentucky town he grew up in. He shares his home with a very patient wife, several children, and one small and incredibly neurotic dog.
The Quantum Mechanic eBook Series is his first foray into writing.
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