THREE
Something bit me. A bullet passed through my lungs. It escaped through a hole in my chest, taking with it what little air remained inside.
Blood sprayed from my mouth, filling the air with a pink mist.
I raised the pistol, struggling against the weight of the world trying to keep it down at my side. My finger groped the trigger.
The gun jerked.
The Mobius Cube in Malcolm’s hand shattered.
TWO
It'd be a tight race to see which would kill me first, the bullets or the Tracker. It didn't matter.
Malcolm collapsed to his knees with a smile on his face. The charred remains of the Cube fell from his hand while his other plugged the red hole that had appeared over his heart.
Then the smile slipped from his lips.
ONE
My eyelids were heavy. I couldn't resist their pull. Nanites placed in my brain since birth came to life.
I wasn't afraid. Diana swam through the darkness with me. Her hand in mine.
Somebody opened my skull and poured a bucket of bliss onto my brain. Truckloads of dopamine eased my transition into the nothing.
Memories of loved ones danced in fast forward across my mind's eye.
There was no future. The present was fleeting. All that remained was the past. Moments worth reliving; mistakes worth regretting.
I smiled at the faces of Raines and Diana etched across the blanket of darkness wrapping itself around me with its surprisingly warm embrace.
"I love you," I said, trusting Diana would hear. Praying Raines would understand.
Then I closed my eyes and let go.
ZERO
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Epilogue
A woman once brought him to the sea. She wanted nothing from him, a concept he could not then understand. They stood on shore listening to the water playing nature's melody upon the sand.
She called him Kurosu and taught him the skills he would need to unite the world. He had learned those lessons well. He succeeded where others had failed because he did what others could not.
That was many years ago, many lifetimes since past, and he could no longer remember her face. He'd loved her before time had taken her as it had with all the others. Her memory faded, but the name she'd given him lingered, etched on his heart.
He had many names, but that one he would never share.
The ocean air, full of salt and brine, blew in icy gusts off the channel, coating everything with its rotting touch. Kurosu inhaled deeply, filling his lungs and enjoying the burn. A sliver of orange rose at the furthest reach of the ocean's touch on the horizon.
A newborn day, full of potential. The early morning sun looked down at the irradiated land mass to the east, and its inhabitants, with the indifference it'd shown the day before, and the day before that.
And the day before that.
Stretching back further than anyone could remember, even Kurosu.
He closed his eyes, overrode the safety measures forbidding him to deactivate his nanocomp, and disconnected from the Stream. One by one, the nanobots coursing through his veins shut down until nothing remained active save what he'd been born with.
Citizens of Unity would never know the peacefulness of a mind untethered to the nanocomp. The constant chatter created a dull ache that could only be noticed by its absence. He noticed it now.
A seagull cawed in the distance, its wings beating in time with Kurosu's heart. He reached out his mind and grazed the edge of the bird's consciousness.
HUNGER.
The bird felt nothing save an unrelenting drive for food. A quest burning with unquenchable intensity. A raw emotion unfiltered by higher thought processes.
Kurosu knew that hunger. Perhaps too well.
He drifted past the bird's simple existence. Skimming the surface of the ocean, he sent tendrils of thought into the deep. He found a school of fish living and breathing in a single coordinated movement. A collective mind where the sum became greater than the parts.
His enemies thought him tied to the Stream. They didn't realize he'd evolved past that. That his connection went beyond the technology. That he was greater than the sum of their parts.
Until they understood that, they could not understand him. Could not stop him.
Kurosu thought of home, a place living more in memory than reality. He thought of loved ones past and present, but mostly past.
A familiar touch reached out and caressed the edge of Kurosu's mind. He finished his mental stretch and withdrew back into himself.
Angelou stood at the far end of the balcony, overlooking the ocean. His arms were outstretched, basking in the early morning rays of light stretching further across the sky with every passing second. Faithful Angelou, unafraid of a life lived in the middle, playing with enemies on all sides.
"Morning, Lou." Kurosu, sliding his hand across the clammy railing slick with mist, approached the younger man.
"Morning, Gatherer," Lou said. Another name. Another title. Each as meaningless as the last.
"Ya know, I've been locked up in the basement so long I'd forgotten how beautiful this all is," Lou continued, gesturing to the sunrise.
Kurosu sensed more to Lou's visit than merely the sunrise, but patience requires practice, so he smiled and waited.
Lou shifted his gaze from the water to the railing and finally to Kurosu. "Eve hit another Division Clone Farm."
"Interesting," Kurosu said, following the orange ribbons of light spreading across the blue-black paste of ocean. "This conflict between Castle and Unity has escalated more quickly than I predicted."
"Really? It's been six months since Jennings' assassination. Doesn't seem all that quick."
Kurosu's smile deepened. "You're still young and you do not yet understand the true length of a minute."
Silence, a familiar guest, sat between the two men as they listened to the breeze carrying whispers of the past from the old land.
"Which facility did they attack?" Kurosu asked.
"Marseilles."
Kurosu considered the implications of this news. Eve would not have risked such a bold attack on a destination thousands of miles outside Unity airspace if she had not already known what lay hidden beneath that burnt sky.
"A daring move on Eve's part to regain her missing piece," Kurosu said at last.
"Is that a good thing or a not so good thing?" Lou asked.
Kurosu pondered the question, manipulating all the angles in his mind's eye, gently nudging and prodding all the seen and unforeseen complications. The variables inevitably tangled around a single black spot.
"It's too soon to say," Kurosu said. "The future is malleable where Tom Mandel is concerned. His presence complicates even the simplest situations."
The flesh on Lou's arm erupted in goose bumps. Kurosu sensed the apprehension settling in Lou's gut, the doubts rippling from his mind like a stone thrown in a pond.
Kurosu reached out with his mind and smoothed the man's inner turmoil with a gentle touch. The goose bumps receded. The tension ebbed from Lou's face.
"What do we do next?" Lou asked, not minding, or at least not mentioning, Kurosu's manipulation.
"We put our own piece back into play." Kurosu closed his eyes and let the warm sun bite through the early morning frost. "It's time to wake Alaina."
JOIN THE LAZY ROBOT ARMY!
Hey, you! Did you like what you just read?
Yeah? Really?
Well if you liked that, you’re gonna LOVE all the other titles at One Lazy Robot.
Need more convincing?
Okay, fine. Here are three reasons why your life will be 122% better by signing up for my NEWSLETTER:
Get a FREE book when you sign up.
Be the FIRST to know when my next book comes out!
Be eligible for give-aways and contests. You could win a trip to the FUTURE!
Alright, enough playing around. CLICK HERE to join the Lazy Robot Army!
&nb
sp; SPREAD THE WORD, LEAVE A REVIEW!
Thanks for picking up my book. If you used it as a paperweight-or a potential weapon in the next zombie apocalypse-that’s cool.
If you read it, even better.
If you liked it…well, there may be something wrong with you, but boy-oh-boy do I love you and all your weirdness!
Now, as a new author in the modern era of publishing it’s a real struggle to get noticed. There are so many writers putting out amazing stories every single day. To get noticed you pretty much have to light your hair on fire and run down the street leaving a trail of scorched meat and singed hair. Interesting fact, people don’t usually buy books from people on fire.
If that comes as a surprise, then you may be wondering—what does it take to sell books? The answer is simple: word of mouth.
In todays technological renaissance we have bigger mouths than ever before.We each have a megaphone that can be heard across the world 24/7. So where do you find your megaphone?
Easy. Go to Amazon, Kobo, Barnes &Noble, Sony, Goodreads, or any similar site and leave a REVIEW! As an Indie author trying to find an audience, your review can make all the difference.
If you have a few minutes, you will make a huge difference in how my story as an Indie writer unfolds. It doesn’t have to be long, just honest. Three sentences saying why you liked this will read like the best thank-you note I’ve ever received.
And because I’m asking you to go out of your way to do something for me when you’ve already given me the gift of reading my story, I want to give YOU something in return.
Send me proof that you’ve reviewed a story from One Lazy Robot and I’ll send you a free, never before seen short story for FREE! It doesn’t even have to be a good review. Whether you give me a one star or a five star review doesn’t matter, you’ll still get your FREE story.
All I ask is that it’s an honest review.
Why should you care? Because I want tell you more stories. I want to write until my fingers are bloody little stumps, and then I want to write some more, for your amusement. The only way I can do that is by finding people who want to hear my stories.
Want to help? Click on any of the pages on my Other Book’s page to be redirected to the Amazon page for the book you wish to review!
Thank you. Now quit reading this and get moving to the next book in the series!
Anthony Vicino
FIND ALL OF ANTHONY’S BOOKS AT:
OneLazyRobot
The Firstborn Saga
Time Heist
Mind Breach
A New World In Every Choice
Parallel
Love is a Beautiful Prison
Purgatory
An Edge of Your Seat Psychological Thriller
Free When You Sign Up For the Newsletter!
Sins of the Father
Finding Revenge Means Going Back to the Beginning
Standing Kill Orderlies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Vicino writes Science Fiction and Fantasy in Oakland, CA where it never rains unless he has to ride his bike someplace.
When he isn’t sitting in front of a computer screen contemplating the thousand different ways his character can escape the asylum with nothing but a fork, a shoelace, some hootzpah, and a lot of snark, he is no doubt out climbing a rock in the Sierra Mountains. If not there, you may find him in the ocean pretending to surf.
Anthony can be found on:
WEBSITE: onelazyrobot.com
BLOG: onelazyrobotblog.com
EMAIL: [email protected]
TWITTER: twitter.com/anthonyvicino
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/advicino
Author’s Note
Wow, you made it to the end. Let me tell you, that’s no small feat. For me it wasn’t, anyhow. The story you just finished began back in December ‘12 as a short story called Time Snatch. I didn’t think much of the story at the time, but the fans didn’t share that opinion. Every author loves fan-mail. I’m no different. I try not to let it rule my life, but I’d be lying if I told you I don’t print each and every sliver of marginally positive feedback and glue it to the inside of my unicorn themed diary which I keep safely tucked away beneath my pillows.
Well, that diary got stuffed full of emails from fans like yourself asking, begging, threatening, and batting their eyelashes seductively, for me to expand Time Snatch into a full-length piece.
“Fine,” I said, feigning disgust, but secretly geeking out that people liked it enough to even throw me an ‘atta boy.
The road to publishing Time Heist was weird. Whoever paved that thing did a god awful job. Potholes everywhere. Roundabouts with no outlets. A maze of side streets and through-ways that all inexplicably lead to the same location; nowhere.
People throw around the phrase self-publishing and sure, that’s what it is, but you wouldn’t be holding this book in your hands if I’d done it all myself. When I eventually got exhausted crawling across the publishing landscape, littered with the jagged remains of broken dreams of authors who’d come before, I stood up, brushed the dust from my Daisy Dukes, and asked for help.
It would take another novel just to give all the proper thanks and dues to those in my life who offered support and encouragement along the way, but here are a couple that were absolutely vital to the creation of Time Heist as you have now read it.
It probably goes without saying that I wouldn’t be here without my Dad, but beyond certain key biological donations some thirty years ago, he helped me unlike any other. Well before Time Heist was even a twinkle in my eye, my Dad bought me Stephen King’s On Writing, and regularly paid me a premium rate of 10 cents a word for short stories I wrote and signed over to him. Even then my Dad was working the long con, knowing on the unlikely chance I ever struck it big, those early stories might actually be worth something.
I can assure you those stories will never be worth the paper they were printed on. Their value lies in their sentiment. A sentiment that got me to where I am now, which is still just as lost as ever, but hey, now I got a book.
Katherine Vanderford probably did more work on Time Heist and One Lazy Robot than me. Between reading everything I put out, giving me the harsh feedback I needed to hear, working on OneLazyRobot.com, spending endless hours debating and getting geeked on silly plot lines throughout Time Heist, and putting up with the sort of hermetical lifestyle associated with my writing, she’s done it all. And with a smile. Without her, you would have read a lesser form of Time Heist. If you liked it, you should thank her. If you didn’t like her, you should kick her in the shin.
I’m not sure Zach Bramel can read, but his brother Nate can. Nate was a fantastic beta reader who read through the original iteration of Time Snatch well before it became coherent. I apologize for any irreparable brain damage he might have suffered as a result.
Zach, on the other hand, will probably never read Time Heist, but that’s okay because the book wouldn’t exist in its current form without the hours he spent in preproduction, helping me world build and story architect. His tireless support, encouragement, and general geekdom for all things Sci-Fi and Fantasy, gave me the much needed boost I needed when things looked the most bleak.
And to you, the reader. You’re a vague nebulous expression of the world at large, but this story would never have made it off my keyboard if I didn’t think somebody out there would want to read it. Knowing you were out there, and that someday we’d meet-if only I kept plugging away at the keys-had me slogging through the slushy middle when Time Heist seemed to get bogged down in its own bio-mass.
Thanks to all of you that came before, and paved the road.
Thanks to all those who came along for the ride.
Good luck to all those who come after.
Anthony Vicino
OneLazyRobot.com
OneLazyRobotBlog.com
Twitter.com/AnthonyVicino
Facebook.com/ADVicino
[email protected]
Time Heist Page 29
