I thought of Grace’s ability to turn completely transparent.
Me: In a way, but it’s not paranormal. Maybe it’s more superhero-ish.
Luke: Okay, I’m hooked, tell me more.
Me: That quick, huh?
Luke: Lol. As long as it isn’t paranormal romance.
Me: I’m not selling out, dammit! Okay, so the book starts on a dark and stormy night, when this guy is just chilling in his apartment and this random woman shows up.
Luke: And is she naked?
Me: Yeah, she’s naked.
Luke: Sexy?
Me: Incredibly.
Luke: Okay, that’ll be a way to start a story, at least you’ll get people to the second chapter.
Me: Well, that was the plan.
Luke: And then what happens next?
Me: She shows him that she’s a shifter by turning into him, and after some confusion, they eventually go to sleep.
Luke: I see a hole in the plot.
Me: Hit me.
Luke: Wouldn’t he just call the cops if a naked woman showed up at his doorstep? Especially if she was a shifter. She doesn’t threaten him or anything, does she?
Me: Nope, not a plot hole, but she won’t let him call the cops. Or call anyone. She will let him call for pizza, but that’s later. She uses her psychic abilities to prevent him.
Luke: Ooo… she has a secret!
Me: Definitely.
Luke: Okay, what happens next? Do you have an action scene or something that gets things going after that initial kind of shock intro?
Me: Yeah, I do. They go outside the next day and run into some government security guard type guys with advanced weaponry. Black armor, mil-spec shit. You know the drill.
Luke: I love advanced weaponry!
Me: Hell yeah, you do. That gun crafting system you used in Star Defacer was legit AF. Anyway, she uses her powers to stop them, which really kick-starts everything.
Luke: Oh man, that sounds fun. I don’t know what I would do in that situation.
Me: Well, I had the protagonist decide to throw it all away and just join her and whatever escapades she was about to get them both into. Break bad.
Luke: Break bad!
Me: So they go to a hotel, and she uses her psychic abilities to trick the receptionist into thinking they booked a room. Then they order pizza.
Luke: That’s it?
Me: Then he realizes he can plug into her neck and modify her stats.
Luke: Ah, the LitRPG element. Better put that in. People love that shit. Crunchy or light?
Me: Light, so maybe more gamelit.
Luke: Give the people what they want! Does he have sex with her?
Me: Not yet.
Luke: Might as well make that happen sooner or later. I mean, some of my fans prefer if I hold back, but it sounds like you got a chance for sex going there, and you’d better introduce some of that soon. Besides, who wouldn’t want to have sex with a shifter? That’d be crazy.
Me: Working on it.
Luke: So, what did you want to show me? You wanted to video chat earlier …
All the blood rushed to my head.
It was a cool idea. It was my best idea. And it was actually happening to me at that very moment.
Plus, there was something else going on, some bigger government conspiracy – definitely a government conspiracy – and this story needed to get out there. If other people were going through the same thing, they could hear about the story, and maybe we could connect in some way.
I would publish all this. My next manuscript would be about what was currently happening to me. And I’d continue to talk to Luke about it, under the guise that I was working on Breakpoint Online.
Me: Luke, you’re brilliant.
Luke: Me? Thanks, buddy. But what did you want to talk about?
Me: My new idea, which we’ve just discussed. Looks like Breakpoint Online is going to be a sweet book. I’ll need to change the title at some point, but that’s fine.
Luke: I’m totally excited to hear where it goes.
Me: As am I.
Luke: Cool, well I have some editing to do. We’ll talk soon! Remember: action, action, action. That’s what this crowd is after, lol.
Me: I’m sure action is coming in the next chapter or so. Thanks for the advice, and happy editing!
Chapter Seven: Data Breach
Three thousand words wasn’t bad, and it had only taken me about an hour and a half to write them. I could have written more, but as I started the next portion, Grace began to stir.
She yawned and turned to me with a smile on her face. Not as tight as it had been before, as if she had really started to relax some and come to grips with our new life together. Weird saying it like that, but we really were in it together by this point.
“Are you ready to do some more sleuthing?” I asked.
“Sleuthing?” She scooped her hair out of her face. In an instant, her features were perfect; she no longer looked like she’d just woken up from a nap. I guess that was one advantage of being a shifter.
“Did you use your abilities to make it look like you’d just woken up from a nap?”
She shrugged.
“That is an entirely inventive way to use shifter abilities. Anyway, do what you have to do, and we’ll get started.”
She took this to mean use the restroom. The question was: Did she intuit this, or did she read my mind? There was no way of telling, nor would there ever be a way for me to know if she was reading my mind or not. As we later grew closer, this would continue to be an issue for us.
Grace returned and lay on the bed, angling her neck toward me again.
Once I plugged her in, I went through the same login procedure and soon, I was in.
“There’s so much here,” I said as I perused the files. Many of them only linked to one or two subfolders, most of which contained binary data and other info that I couldn’t parse. I found some quotes from books, some past weather information, and a bunch of other random shit.
Where’s the good stuff? I thought as I continued to click through folders.
It was nothing like the movies, where some guy just hacks in and finds exactly what he was looking for. Nor was I typing like a madman as information splashed across the screen, my face lighting up a la Edward Snowden as I perused government data.
But I continued to dig, just like an archeologist, and eventually, I stumbled upon a folder that had some of the contract info between …
Yale and the FCG?
Jackpot.
There wasn’t a lot of detail there, but I could tell that whatever program Grace had taken part in, and the program that had given her the powers she possessed, was most definitely funded by the FCG in conjunction with Yale’s newly remodeled Rose-Lyle facility.
The FCG, or Federal Corporate Government, was part of a government rebranding effort in the 2020s, especially after the fake news era had passed and the government took this to mean that people wanted unrestricted transparency.
So, they called it what it had become: the Federal Corporate Government. And while I was old enough to remember when it was just the American Government, I found myself using the acronym from time to time as well. It also coincided with lower corporate tax rates, to the sweet tune of ten percent, and another tax hike on the middle class.
I imagined my writer buddy, Luke, telling me to cool it with the backstory at this point, but really, if he could have seen what I was looking through – dozens of contracts with both the FCG, vendors, a private security company called MercSecure, as well as some of the reports – he’d feel the urge to mansplain as well.
Again, this wasn’t some complex Dan Brown all-the-way-up-to-the-Vatican type of conspiracy novel. I mean, it was pretty much textbook at this point: a superpowered woman who was part of a secret government and university funded experiment escaped from captivity and showed up at my doorstep.
This got me thinking about the difference between superhero powers and magi
c powers.
Didn’t the X-Men and all the DC Comics people and Marvel heroes and heroines simply have magic powers? I mean, not Batman, of course, and a few of the other ones like Tony Stark, but what was the real difference between a magic power and a superhero power? Why did we feel the urge to differentiate?
At any rate, it didn’t matter now, and I could parse through all this later and debate with the voice in the back of my head until I got tired of listening to my own shit.
What mattered was that I uncovered something big.
And I mean really big.
The first discovery came to me in a subfolder of a subfolder, so a sub-subfolder.
There are others.
I found pictures of a dozen or so test subjects, and two, in particular, stood out to me. One resembled Grace, yet she had shorter hair and a much fiercer face. The other was a man with long black hair and an incredible physique.
After a little more digging, I found pictures of Grace as a young girl and wondered if she had a mother. The reason I wondered this was because of some of the scientific papers I’d found in this collection, which talked about growing a fetus in a lab and creating a superhuman or super soldier type of person.
I know, I write science fiction, and I should be better at describing these things, but in my defense, all my science fiction was bullshit. This stuff was real, and I didn’t have a photographic memory – aside from when it came to book quotes – nor was I quickly able to interpret scientific papers that broke things down to the molecular level.
But I got the gist.
And that could have been the end of the story if I hadn’t stumbled upon a photo of myself.
I gasped as I saw a picture of me taken when I was about five years old.
It was me. I knew it was me. I could tell by the cowlick and by the eyes. I mean, who doesn’t recognize themselves as a child?
“What the fuck am I doing in here?” I mumbled.
I wasn’t paying attention at the time, but had I been looking at Grace, I might have seen her smile a bit.
No, I was too focused on clicking my photo, clicking through to whatever I could find about the test subjects, and parsing through more data – data that was way out of my league. Talk about your scientific jargon; the research quickly moved from something I could easily interpret to something that was practically a foreign language to me.
There wasn’t any info attached to my photo, aside from code and science jargon. Even if I had looked up each word, I doubt I would have understood it.
The burning thought that remained at the back of my head was the fact that this research project had a photo of me.
“Relax, Writer Gideon.”
“This, I …”
“It is a lot of information, but relax for now. Your thoughts are too fast.”
“You can read my thoughts, that’s right. Grace.”
She looked down at me, her eyes slowly morphing from white to blue.
“Yes?”
“Why is my picture in here? I know why you’re here; I mean, I know why your picture would be in here, but why is my picture in here?”
She sniffed, and a tear began to fall down her cheek.
“Writer Gideon.”
“Please, Grace, tell me something. Just put these pieces together for me, and then we can figure out what the next step is.”
Was I a test subject?
God, that sounded stupid to think.
I’d lived just about as normal a life as an American could live. I’d never been abroad, never been in trouble with the law, never had a speeding ticket. I had a degree from a state university and paid my taxes on time every year. Surely that shit counted for something.
“Please shut down the computer,” she said. “I want to go outside.”
“Outside?” I considered it for a moment. No one seemed to be after us just yet. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be someone after us in the near future, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to get some fresh air. Especially because we were going to be spending at least a night or two in this hotel, considering all the data I had to comb through.
“Sure, let’s go outside for a little bit. I think we can walk to the beach from here. It’s not much to look at, but it’s not too bad.”
“And for dinner?”
“Are you hungry again?”
“No.”
I smiled at the strange woman. I had no idea what to make of her – still don’t. I looked away once she started to change her form into mine.
“Remember, no shifting in public.”
Chapter Eight: The Second Cherry Blossom Girl
I’m not going to bore you with the story about how we went to the beach, and how we sat there for a while watching the waves lash against the shore, or how some seagulls flew by squawking and fighting over a bit of garbage, or how the sun started to set and it was gorgeous.
As Luke would say, action, action, action, and boy, would this turn out to be the basis of my evening once we got back to the hotel.
Grace and I had both just gotten into bed when I heard something crash down the hall. I didn’t really think much of it … until the door handle shot across the room as if it had been loaded into a gun and fired.
The door flew off its hinges and crashed into the window on the far wall, shattering the glass and letting in a cold gush of air.
That was when I found out there was another cherry blossom girl, and she wasn’t happy.
I recognized her immediately; she’d been in one of the pictures I’d discovered on what I was now calling Grace’s drive.
The woman resembled Grace. She could have even been a sister.
She was tall, with short blonde hair, a light complexion, and a predatory face. She wore a tight black bodysuit that accentuated her curves as she stalked toward us. But before she could get any closer, she suddenly fell sideways and cracked her head against the wall.
My blood was pulsing, the ability to move obsolete, and my heart thundered in my chest as Grace turned to me, her eyes blaring white.
“Who is she?” I asked, barely able to get the words out.
Grace was breathing hard as well. She sat now in her original form, still wearing the clothes I’d given her back in my basement apartment.
“She’s like me.”
I had already determined that, but the confirmation helped me come to grips with what had just happened. I had just seen the door handle spear across the room and the door itself fly off its hinges. Of course she was just like Grace, but I had no idea what type of power she possessed or who else was after us.
This was on my mind as I finally scrambled to my feet and started packing. It was instinctive at this point: run, run, run.
If anything, I needed to bring my laptop and its charger; I needed to be able to plug back into Grace and figure out what was going on and why I was somehow a part of it.
I hadn’t forgotten about my picture, but I’d been too distracted by the beautiful woman and the beach over the last few hours to investigate further.
“We’re out,” I told Grace. “Now.”
“She killed three people.”
If my life were a movie, this would be the scene in which they play some ironic 1970s psychedelic tune while they panned the camera over my confused, befuddled, half-afraid, and utterly colorless face, as I realized just what I’d gotten myself into and tried to come to grips with what I was about to do.
“Writer Gideon, did you hear me? She killed two of the security guards and the receptionist.” She changed into the black woman at the front desk. “This one,” she said before she shifted back.
“The hotel had security guards?”
I didn’t remember seeing any muscle in the lobby. I didn’t remember seeing anyone, really, aside from a trucker, and a couple with an SUV. And the only reason I’d seen their SUV was because they pulled up in it while we are walking back from the beach.
“No, the same men from the cherry blossoms,” she said. “The sam
e type of men.”
Her hands trembled, and I wanted to throw mine out and grab hers and tell her it was going to be okay.
Only I didn’t know if it was going to be okay.
I was in way over my head, and it was only one day later, just about twenty-four hours since she arrived naked on my doorstep. I had no idea what was in store for me, but if it resembled what had just happened, we were fucked.
“Your mind is wild again, Writer Gideon.”
I clapped my hands together. “Sorry, just getting a lid on this. So, we taking her or not?”
Grace bit her lip.
“She’s like Magneto or something,” I said aloud, pacing before the bed. Needing to do something with my hands, I checked my duffle bag again and slung it over my shoulder.
“Magneto?” Grace’s eyes flashed as my thoughts became hers.
“Well?”
“Not exactly, but there are some similarities.”
“Okay that’s fine, but I really need to know if we’re bringing her with us, or if we’re just trying to get the hell out of here. I probably shouldn’t even order a vehicle – I probably should just …” I glanced at Grace. “We need to steal a car.”
“Okay,” she said, her eyes still white. “We can steal the SUV that belongs to the couple we saw earlier.”
“I may have to put a moratorium on reading my mind …”
She smiled at me. “Sorry, bad habit.”
“Let’s just get out of here.” I stopped in front of the other woman. She didn’t look very heavy, so I decided to try to lift her over my shoulder. Once I did so, I felt my energy dissipate from my body.
My knees started to buckle, but before I could fall completely, Grace placed her hand on the woman’s head and the feeling subsided.
“What was that?” I asked, my energy returning as I hoisted the other woman over my shoulder.
“It was her. She is like …” Grace paused for a moment as we entered the hallway, her eyes narrowing as she thought of a way to describe it. “She drains your life.”
“A vampire?”
She gave me a funny look. “Those aren’t real.”
“Sorry, I just figured … well, I have a psychic shifter with me, why not add a vampire? Also, I just finished reading a vampire novel by George R.R. Martin called Fevre Dream. A lot of people don’t know that he wrote a vampire novel. Sorry, thinking out loud.”
Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set Page 5
