The Push Chronicles (Book 1): Indomitable
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Indomitable
The Push Chronicles: Book 1
By J. B. Garner
Copyright 2014 J. B. Garner
Cover art illustrated by Felipe de Barros
In memory of Jon Compton, my dearest friend, without whose constant support this book would not have been written. He passed just a few days after this work was first published.
To Reyn and Dave, who gave me the encouragement and opportunity to write these words. They are my family and I love them dearly.
Thanks as well to Shay, Tessa, and Aaron for their support and insight
A Special Thanks to my Kickstarter Contributors:
Stephanie Urch
David Garner, Jr.
Cryolite
Silver Games LLC
Eric Finch
Matthew Smith
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Theft
Chapter 2 Skyway
Chapter 3 Whiteout
Chapter 4 Push
Chapter 5 Grave
Chapter 6 Rise
Chapter 7 Facet
Chapter 8 Icarus
Chapter 9 Agency
Chapter 10 Mask
Chapter 11 Ride
Chapter 12 Sympathy
Chapter 13 Capitol
Chapter 14 Epiphany
Chapter 15 Charge
Chapter 16 Speeches
Chapter 17 Schuller
Chapter 18 Unity
Chapter 19 Division
Chapter 20 Pyrrhic
Chapter 21 Cycle
About the Author
Other titles by J. B. Garner
Chapter 1 Theft
The night it all began, I had stopped by the lab on the Georgia Tech campus for a few minutes, intending to start the print job for my morning presentation to Dean Tyson. Considering the subject of said presentation was my pet project, something I thought of as my life's work, I wanted everything to be perfect. Even if I could have known ... well, what was in store for me, for the world ...
It was for the best that I was there that night.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to record these events in as close to the correct order as I can remember them.
Let's get back to the lab.
The building was almost deserted that late at night with only a few restless researchers much like myself as its only inhabitants. My own group’s rooms were totally vacant. As I turned on the lights, everything seemed normal. When I opened the door to my own office, it became quite obvious that something was very wrong. The locked cabinet, the one we were using to store our prototype and research data, was swinging freely on its hinges, devoid of its most important contents.
Until that point in my life, I had always considered myself hard to shock. I was quite good at taking most things in stride, dealing with set-backs and adversity with a calm and cool head. This, however, was something I didn’t take in stride. It took a long moment for the full realization of the theft to set in as I was standing there, one hand still on the doorknob, staring at the empty space across the room where I was trying to will the device back into its proper place. After that plan failed to pan out, I managed to shake myself out of the mental daze, walking around my desk to examine the cabinet close-up.
The thief hadn’t taken everything. The binders of research notes were untouched, as well as the solid-state drive with electronic copies of the same information. In fact, the only thing that was missing was the physical prototype itself. In its place was a crisply folded piece of paper which had my name written on it in a very familiar compact handwriting.
The recognition made me a little numb; there was a certain detachment I felt as I sat down in my office chair, still looking at the folded note in the cabinet. Though my emotions were bouncing around wildly, my rational mind was already trying to turn this situation into something understandable. Even as I reached out to read the note, a few odd events from the past week were beginning to make sense.
Where my keys disappeared to for a few hours on Monday, why my boyfriend had seemed distracted as soon as I had told him the good news about my final prototype, and even why he had a sudden interest in tinkering with closed-circuit television cameras; I had made note of all of those things. I had never even suspected anything was really wrong though. Was I stupid or naive for that? After the fact, from my perspective now, I think I was just trusting in the man I had known and fallen in love with over the past year. After that moment of clarity, I opened the note to read.
Irene,
If I have come to understand your habits as much as I think I have, you have found this note after I have taken the feedback device but well before anyone else has been to your laboratory. You are certainly putting together this event and several other things I am sure you have noticed over the past week, if not for longer, and have come to the conclusion that I have used our relationship for this particular end. I am truly sorry to have been dishonest with you in this fashion, especially as I believe I have truly come to love you over our nine months together.
Let me assure you that I have taken the device for only the most vital of reasons. If there had been another practical option, I would have exercised it. I fully intend to return it, assuming my final experiment goes according to my calculations. Either way, it will be finished tonight. I beg of you to please keep the knowledge of my theft to yourself, at least until my experiment is finished. After that, either I will return the device or things will be in a state that the crime won’t matter.
Eric
I was angry. Angry is actually a horrible word to describe how I felt. Volcanic? I don’t know. Angry suffices to paint a general picture. I crumbled up the note into a tighter and tighter wad, then flung it as hard as I could against the nearest flat surface. My first rational thought outside of a parade of anger-induced fantasies was that, as nonsensical as it seemed, I shouldn’t call the police. I wasn’t going to do it because of Eric’s request; it was because Eric was a genius. Despite my own scientific acumen, Eric was an order of intellect higher than just about anyone else I knew and I could already predict he would have thought of every precaution against the police and then some. I was sure, touching back on the things I had already remembered, he had made a copy of my office keys and had already thwarted the security cameras. There may have been some witnesses who saw him in the building this evening, but that was unlikely. The note was the only evidence there was. A damning bit of it, too, but I figured he had some way around that as well.
More than that, damn him, he knew me. He knew that I had the same scientific curiosity he did. I now wanted to know what exactly a quantum physicist wanted with a bio-feedback reinforcement device. What allure did a machine constructed to help people deal with autonomic disorders have for him? I rose out of the chair and began to pace. I always did my best thinking in motion.
Whatever it was, I wouldn’t find out here. Obviously, Eric wasn’t using his laboratory here at the university for this experiment. Another circuit around the room came and went. Pieces suddenly dropped into place.
Eric had made a big deal a few months ago about trying to spend time at the gym, something about wanting to be in better shape to keep up with me. I couldn’t help that I was brought up in a house of athletes and my field of study was physiology and physical therapy. It made me very health-conscious. Regardless of the reasons, Eric swore he was too embarrassed to work out with me, so he did it on his own time. That was his story anyway.
I was always a little suspicious of that. First off, after a month of working out, Eric should have shown signs of improvement, which he didn’t. Second, his gym clothes didn’t show the evidence of hard work, at least
none of the clothes I washed. Lastly, while sorting through our mailbox one day, I found a letter for a Mr. Heinrich Flynn from the Skyway Apartments, a low-rent place near the campus, popular with some of our poorer students. Eric’s father was named Heinrich, but Eric’s parents had been dead for years. Eric dismissed it as junk mail, but was awful eager to keep a hold of it. He said he would double-check it with the company and that was the last of it.
That had been five months ago. Just how long had he been lying to me? Our whole time together? Longer? This morning when we kissed after breakfast, Eric had said we'd meet up after work, no matter what. Was this what he meant? I felt that raw unfocused anger welling up again, mixed with a liberal dash of pure unadulterated hurt. I clamped my eyes shut and willed the tears to stop and my blood to stop boiling.
I was not going to let myself weep and moan and thrash unproductively right now. I wasn’t going to go meekly wait back home to see what brilliant little Eric was doing. No, I was going to go to Skyway, find where he was, and confront him right this minute.
I didn’t bother with the tightly crumpled note. I didn’t even bother to relock the storage case. I angrily snapped the lights off, slammed the office door, and stalked off to the parking garage. As I mounted up on my motorcycle, I glanced at the time.
It was 11:23 p.m. I wouldn’t be at Skyway for at least a quarter of an hour and it might not be until midnight until I can figure out where he was there. For some reason, that thought of midnight gave me goosebumps. I promptly ignored the gooseflesh, buckled on my helmet, and fired up the bike.
Chapter 2 Skyway
As I parked my bike in the apartment lot, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Something was wrong. There wasn’t any rational reason to believe that but I still couldn't shake the notion. At the time, I dismissed it as an effect of the environment and my extremely high stress levels.
The Skyway apartments were a dinosaur, you see. Back in 1996, when Atlanta hosted the Summer Olympics, the entire area around Georgia Tech was upscaled and renovated. Gone were the government projects, the crime, and the poor, except for this one sole relic of a more unkind city. An errant beer bottle rolled down the sidewalk as I dismounted. It was definitely being in a last remnant of urban decay at near-midnight that was putting my entire body on edge. Definitely.
I scanned the rest of the parking lot. No sign of Eric’s Taurus. That didn’t mean anything. There were a dozen pay lots and streetside parking areas within easy walking distance, not to mention a MARTA train stop, all of which made more sense than leaving another thread for any potential pursuit to follow. I stared up at the two buildings standing side by side, lit up by the full moon overhead in defiance of the light pollution all around, wracking my brains. I had to take advantage of the one thing I had that the police wouldn’t have: my intimate knowledge of Eric.
First, what were his needs and desires? He needed a workspace. He needed privacy. He would desire something with easy access in case of an emergency. He was afraid of heights.
Obviously, Eric would have tried to get a ground floor room, as large an apartment as he could manage. It wouldn’t be a corner room with multiple sides of windows. What windows there were would be curtained or shuttered heavily. Probably curtains, they wouldn’t draw as much attention and they were more effective than most blinds. I stole a glance at my watch.
It was 11:39. I broke into a jog, my boot crunching on some unidentifiable bit of glass debris. I couldn’t put my finger on why the time was important, other than Eric had a certain sense of the dramatic. The thought of our six month anniversary came to mind: Eric had concocted a 'follow-the-clues' hunt like this to lead me to our dinner at Dante's Down the Hatch. Was he doing something like that now? Was this trail of subtle clues intentional?
I didn't know and, frankly, after stealing my pride and joy, I didn't care. By 11:48, my mystery had been solved. No, I hadn’t managed to run the perimeter of two apartment buildings and deduced Eric’s exact location in ten minutes flat. I had, in fact, jogged up to the front of the first building, right by the building’s mailboxes.
Like a lot of other apartments, there was also a corkboard for pinning building notices and the like. While there were all manner of fliers, notices, and other less reputable things tacked to it, I caught out of the corner of my eye a notice about new apartment staff. There was a name that instantly jumped out and made me stop in my tracks: Heinrich Flynn.
I tore down the notice and started scanning the lines. There! New maintenance director, Heinrich Flynn, room 1127. First building, first floor. Complete match. I could feel another hot flash of anger building up: heart rate elevating, increased blood flow, flushing, and a million other things I could rattle off by rote.
Not only was Eric a liar and a thief, it seemed like he was somehow keeping up a second life to cover up whatever the hell he was doing. I shredded up the notice as a sacrifice to my anger before again willing the demon back into it’s bottle. Bits of paper drifted behind me in the wind as I pushed open the door to building #1.
My hand was literally on the doorknob to room 1127 when I paused. What exactly was I going to do? First, the door was probably locked (unless I was intended to be here). Second, while Eric was normally coldly rational, what kind of state was he in now?
I had thought I was progressing in a logical manner, but obviously I hadn’t thought this through to it’s conclusion. Still, I was too deep in now to simply back away. Sure, I could call the police now, lead them right here, but how would that end?
Maybe, just maybe, I could confront Eric, find out what was really going on, maybe even talk him out of whatever stunt he was pulling. I still couldn’t reason out what he was doing with my prototype. Something built to feedback and reinforce nerve impulses had little allure for a physicist. All I could assume was that some unknown stress or perhaps a latent mental condition was causing him to act out like this.
Rational Irene stepped back into the conversation. Right, that wouldn't explain the fact this has been going on for at least five months, if not the entire time you have known him. This was something bigger than some temporary mental imbalance. Who knew the depths of Eric’s problems to lead to this? Even more alarming, just what was a quantum physicist who also had training in nuclear engineering capable of when imbalanced? You should call the cops, I told myself.
The fact remains that I did not call the cops then. I must have made some noise or something, rattled the door knob involuntarily probably, while in my mental conference. Whatever it was, Eric must have heard it as I heard his voice calling from inside the apartment.
“The only person that could be would be you, Irene.” He was still soft-spoken, even with his voice raised, but there was a hint of irritation as well. “I would show you in, but I am at a delicate point here. The door is unlocked, please let yourself in.”
Busted. I twisted the door knob and let myself in.
The two bedroom apartment had been radically altered, that much was obvious. Except for a drafting table and a stool, any furniture there had been previously was gone, replaced instead by electronics, computers, and thick, steel-wrapped wiring. Even with my scientific background, I couldn’t even begin to place what half of this equipment was for.
More baffling was where Eric had managed to acquire it from. The university obviously kept tight control on all of the big-budget equipment. Had Eric cobbled together all of this over his years as a researcher? What purpose was this all for?
“Follow the main wires, Irene.” Eric’s voice was close now. “Maybe it was meant to be that you came here at this particular point, right when the experiment is about to commence.”
I didn't respond as I followed the largest cable, carefully avoiding contact with any of the equipment. It was obvious that safety measures were not high up on Eric’s priority list as I saw electricity arc in the open guts of one device. Curiosity warred with shock in my mind as I finally found Eric in what had once been the master bedroom.
Words escaped me for a moment as I stared at him. Was this the same shy, retiring man who had meekly asked me out after a faculty meeting just a year ago? At the time, I thought Eric had been put up to it by one of his few friends. That tongue-tied Eric didn't mesh with the intense, confident, and probably insane figure sitting before me.
“God,” I whispered. “What are you going to do?”
“Let me correct you, my dear.” His voice seemed to resonate and echo, as if it was being layered on itself repeatedly. “It is not what am I going to do, it is what I am currently in the process of doing.” He smiled. “And that process is saving the world.”
“From what? And how? What is all of this?” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the biometric readout on the feedback machine spiking to dangerous levels as sparks ran up the massively insulated wires in the apartment. The amount of energy required to cause that was insane to contemplate. I was certain everyone in this apartment building was going to explode in some accident of physics in mere moments.
“We have a few minutes until the feedback loop reaches maximum resonance, so I may as well explain.” Eric must have seen my eyes searching wildly around. “I would not disrupt any of the equipment. If the experiment works, the excess energy will discharge harmlessly. If you interfere with it, it will definitely discharge catastrophically.” Damn him. I willed myself to neutral and focused on Eric.