Everything
Falls Apart
Book 4 of The Experiment
Micah Edwards
- Copyright -
Cover art by isoga via http://www.shutterstock.com.
Copyright © Micah Edwards 2017.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Basically what this boils down to is that if you steal my stuff that I worked hard on, I’ll be sad. And I’d rather not be sad. So help me out on this one, would you?
First printing, 2017.
ISBN-13: 978-1974027002
ISBN-10: 1974027007
Want to talk to the author? I want to talk to you! Send me your thoughts at [email protected]. If they’re not mean, I will respond. If they are mean, I will delete them; please see the above note about not wanting to be sad.
The production of this book was made possible by CreateSpace (http://www.createspace.com), an Amazon company.
- Table of Contents -
- Prologue -
- Chapter One -
- Chapter Two -
- Chapter Three -
- Chapter Four -
- Chapter Five -
- Chapter Six -
- Chapter Seven -
- Chapter Eight -
- Chapter Nine -
- Chapter Ten -
- Chapter Eleven -
- Chapter Twelve -
- Chapter Thirteen -
- Afterword -
- About the Author -
- Prologue -
There's an old saying: beware the Ides of March. It's an inauspicious day, one on which Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by his friends. And throughout history, there have been...probably wars or something? I actually can't think of anything else bad that's happened on the Ides of March, even though it's got a Friday-the-13th kind of vibe in my head. But I mean, Caesar got stabbed over two thousand years ago. It can't be just him and me. Not that I got stabbed but – well, as usual, let me back up.
This particular story starts at the beginning of March, but the whole thing began early last year. That was when I got assaulted by a super-strong ape-man while at work, and discovered I had superpowers. Nothing convenient and reliable, though, nothing I can train up and learn to use over a long period of time; my powers crop up solely so I can deal with a specific nemesis, and fade once the threat is handled. It's a real pain in the neck, to be honest.
I'm Dan Everton, by the way. I'm your average white American early-thirties blue-collar male, a little bit slow on the uptake, a little bit wide in the waistline. Less so than I used to be, in both of those cases; remnants of super-intelligence helped with the thinking bit, and working in construction helped with the extra padding. I've still got some there, but my belt's a couple of notches tighter than when I was working a desk job, and there's a solid core of muscle under it all now. I don't like to brag, but I could probably pick up the back end of my car. If I had a car. And to be fair, some of that strength is left over from another faded superpower, too. This is why I don't like to brag. I'm not very good at it.
Anyway, since last year I've been personally involved in the destruction of two buildings, one by storm and one by fire. I've been punched, kicked, shot, beaten, hit by a car, hit by lightning and generally persecuted. Plus I've been fired twice. It's been a rough year, is what I'm saying.
I've been in and out of the hospital often enough that I've made friends there. One of them, Doctor Simmons, just wants me for my body. More specifically, the nanomachines I was somehow infected with that are causing these superpowers. She's a lady on a mission, is Doc Simmons, and you do not want to be between her and her goal. She's taken enough blood and tissue samples from me at this point to build an entirely new copy of me. Shoot, for all I know, she's done just that. I haven't heard from her in a little bit. It’s entirely possible that she's grown a new Dan to experiment on.
Honestly, I'm glad that Doc Simmons is so intent on finding out how these nanos work, because otherwise she'd be the best candidate I can think of to have created them and stuck them in me. She's brilliant, she's driven, and while she's not amoral, exactly, she's...let's say that she's not one to let minor impediments stop her. When I do finally track down the mysterious Dr. A, the person behind the nanos, I'm probably going to need to keep Doc Simmons from finding out. Otherwise, there's a decent chance that she'll steal his notes and continue his work. I mean, she'd probably get volunteers for a study and run it in a controlled environment. As long as there was funding, and not too much bureaucratic red tape. “Probably” might be a slightly strong word here.
My other hospital friend, an EMT named Brian, has rapidly risen in the ranks to become my best friend. Admittedly, the ranks mainly consist of people whose posts I sometimes “like” on Facebook, so that wasn't that difficult of an ascension. Still, he'd be my go-to guy even if I had a dozen friends. I'm sure that some of you are laughing right now that the number I picked for “can you imagine having this many friends?” is only twelve, but whatever. I like my privacy, I like my solitude, and I don't need a bunch of people chattering around me all of the time to keep me entertained.
Speaking of which, my temporary roommate Regina found a job and moved out a couple of months back, so I've got my place to myself again. My parents' place, fine, but I rent it, which makes it mine. The point is that although Regina's great, it's fantastic being able to walk around in my boxers and sprawl out on the whole couch again. Plus it was always sort of awkward since, while under the influence of nanos, she'd tried to kill me with lightning, and I'd made her magnetic and gotten her temporarily committed to an asylum. We were past all of that, but it still sort of lingered. You know how it is.
She's still dating Brian, though, so it's not like I don't see her on the regular. Honestly, this is the most active my social life's been in years. I'm not a hundred percent on board with it, actually. But I figure that relationships require sacrifice, and I can give up a planned quiet evening once in a while when my friends want to hang out. It feels like sort of a stupid thing to complain about, anyway. “Ugh, people want to associate with me when I have important Netflix shows to watch. Being popular is hard!”
Besides which, when we hang out, a lot of the time it's at home anyway. I had a persecution campaign run against me by a nemesis with the power of persuasion a few months ago, and although there were retractions issued and the authorities did what they could to clear my name, not everyone believed them.
“The authorities” in this case mainly consist of Officer Sam Peterson, a local policeman who's stuck his neck out for me more than once. He was there shortly after my first superpower kicked in, and managed to gain my trust over time with a mixture of apparent concern and the ability to put me in jail if I didn't open up to him. As far as I can tell, his concern for my well-being is real, as is his concern for the city. He's a good guy, and I feel badly for having gotten him into this insanity sometimes. He's helped keep my life from turning into a total media circus on more than one occasion, and I've basically done nothing for him in return.
On the other hand, he seems to have a lot of clout now for a random city police officer, so it's possible that being connected to me has done good things for his career. I don't ask. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would make me happy.
Anyway, despite his work to convince people that I was not a destructive vandal bent on ruin, many people still seem to just remember the negative press. I see a
lot of sidelong glances when I'm out in public, and hear a lot of whispering with my name in it. Hopefully it'll fade in time, but right now I feel like a celebrity who just got busted for drunk driving. Everyone knows who I am, everyone's talking behind my back and no one's saying positive things.
Again, I'm fine with that. My social interaction consists of getting up before the sun, working until early afternoon on a construction site (Tanger Construction, now under new management), then vegging out at home. Sometimes I go shopping for food. I have a couple of close friends and no one else vying to get into that circle, and that's exactly the way I like it. When you have too many friends, that's where you get into the kind of trouble Caesar had. You think that everybody loves you, but then it turns out that you didn't know any of them half as well as you thought you did. Next thing you know: knives in the Senate.
I keep my friends circle tight, and I avoid these problems. Or so I thought in early March.
So it's March 1st, and Brian, Regina and I have gotten together for dinner. I'm third-wheeling it up as usual, but Brian's the one who'd texted to invite himself over, so it's not like I'm crashing their date night or anything. We're hanging out post-meal, playing cards and snacking on chips while people scream and die in the background in some B-grade Netflix slasher offering.
Brian's phone buzzes, and he checks to see if it's anything important.
“You on call?” I ask.
“Nah,” he says, scrolling up on the screen. “Just a marketing email from the hospital, looks like.”
“Well, you going to bet, then, or what? We can skip your turn if you need.”
“Whoa, cranky, chill! All right, I'll call. Man, for a dude who spends half of the game staring at the TV, you're awfully fussy about this, you know?”
“Half, nothing! I spend two-thirds of the game watching the TV: your turn, and her turn. The remaining third – my turn – I spend playing.”
“Did you know you always get angrier about the game when you've got a good hand, Dan?” asks Regina.
“I do not!” I scowl. She's almost certainly right. I should really work on my tells. The disadvantages of a small friend circle, I suppose; I'm not good at social lies.
Brian, meanwhile, is still looking at his phone. “Hey, man, you might actually want to see this.”
He turns the screen around so that it's facing me, and I stare at it in confusion for a few seconds. “What? So the hospital's hosting some symposium on biomedical advances. So what?”
“So that seems like the sort of thing that people who are into cutting edge medical technology might be into,” he says.
“Yeah, and? I don't care about advances in medical technology.”
Brian looks at me like I'm an idiot. “Yeah, but people who build human-interfacing nanomachinery might.”
Oh. No wonder he's looking at me like that. I am an idiot.
- Chapter One -
Here's a fact of life: no one likes large social gatherings. Absolutely no one. I'm sure that there are people who think that they do, but they are wrong. What they like are the small social gatherings that they can have inside of the large ones, which is why you constantly have small knots of people forming, for some reason usually directly in the middle of the area where everyone else is trying to walk. Large groups are full of people you don't want to see, conversations you're attempting to tune out, and basically all of the parts of humanity that you try to avoid on a daily basis.
I mean the regular lousy parts, like feeling the breeze when someone coughs, or residual body heat on a seat when you sit down. Crowds are just sort of passively bad. There's plenty of worse stuff about humanity which the nightly news is all too happy to tell you about, but you're not generally going to see murder and mayhem on display in a crowd.
Not in a standard crowd, anyway. Then again, I am here looking for a mad scientist without a moral compass, so I suppose I shouldn't be too sure of that.
Also, I have the top button of my shirt buttoned and I'm wearing a tie, which does not put me at my ease. The tie is an ongoing dangling threat to my health and safety, and the top button provides a constant light constriction to my neck, just in case I'm ever inclined to forget about the tie.
That said, the vague look of being ill-at-ease that this gives me makes me blend in with about sixty percent of the people milling about in the hospital lobby for this symposium right now, so it's a pretty good disguise. The remaining forty percent are bright-eyed, focused and all seem to be trying to sell things to anyone who will make eye contact. I buy a cup of coffee to help me avoid shaking their hands, and if I catch one of them looking my way, I do my best to pretend to be attempting to read the scrawl that is presumably my name off of the coffee cup until they find another victim.
I have a list of the topics being presented today, but the concepts are so foreign to me that they might as well be in another language. I recognize a number of words, like “robotic,” “imaging” and “arterial,” but not the context they're in. The word “surgery” shows up in many of the titles paired with things I don't understand, like “keyhole.”
It's okay, though. I have a plan, and it doesn't require me to know what's going on; I'm learning to play to my strengths. I know what Dr. A looks like, and he's very distinctive: it's like someone saw the animated brooms from Fantasia and thought, “Not bad, but if I tied these together and put them in a suit, I bet I could make them walk around like a person.” He doesn't have a broom for a face, obviously, but everything else from his toast-rack torso to his gangly arms and legs gives that impression.
This is how Brian and I came to give him the name “Ichabot,” after Ichabod Crane. I don't know if I'm going to stick with that name, but I refuse to fight a supervillain named “Dr. Adams,” or whatever his last name turns out to be. “Dr. A” is mysterious enough that I can work with it. “Dr. Adams” is a podiatrist name.
So the plan is this: loiter in the corner unobtrusively until I spot Ichabot moving through the crowd. If that doesn't work, start sticking my head into various lectures to scan the rooms for him there; even sitting down, he's head and shoulders taller than average, so he should stick out. Also, I've only ever seen him in one suit, so if that's still his go-to, that'll help in identifying him.
Once I've spotted him, I'll simply get close enough to read his nametag, and then voila! Ichabot's secret identity is revealed, and then we turn him over to the police. Or something like that, anyway. I don't actually have any real proof of wrongdoing by him yet, so probably I should get that first. And as Officer Peterson has made clear many times in the past, he'd really prefer it if I managed to do that in a manner that's at least passably legal. So that part of the plan still needs some work.
All of this is predicated on the idea that Ichabot is coming to this medical symposium, though, and as the day wears on, that's starting to seem less likely. My coffee has long since gone cold, and although I did manage to reheat it with my residual pyrokinesis, I got some weird looks when nearby people heard me whispering “Uuuuuuppp!” at my cup as I lifted my hand slowly into the air. I'm not generally overly concerned with what other people think of me, but since the point of today is to blend in, I'm trying to make a bit of an effort.
I haven't caught sight of Ichabot at the sign-in, and my plan to peer in the back of lectures doesn't pan out well. I'd been picturing these as taking place in big college-lecture-sized halls, but for the most part, the conference rooms in the hospital hold no more than thirty or forty people. That means that opening the door is noticeable and causes heads to swivel. It’s not exactly the subtle entrance I'd hoped for.
After I open one door that turns out to be located at the front of the room, directly next to where the speaker is presenting so that all eyes are immediately on me, I give up this portion of the plan as ill-conceived. I mumble my apologies and retreat to the cafeteria, figuring that most of the attendees will eventually filter through there for lunch.
I'm safely ensconced at a table
by the back wall, debating whether I should go check out nearby restaurants or just admit to myself that Dr. A isn't going to show, when I suddenly see him. He ambles through the door and heads for the food line, and although from this distance I can see that he's in the same worn black suit and he has a badge for the symposium, those are all the details I can make out.
Abruptly, I realize the flaw in my “go read his badge” plan: just as I know what Dr. A looks like, so too does he know what I look like. In fact, he's been to my places of business on at least two occasions, so he knows at least something about me, too. Enough to realize that running into me here would be no casual coincidence, at the very least. Learning his name isn't worth letting him know that I'm this close to him.
I text Brian:
found him
can't get close to him
he doesn't know you. Come help
Ichabot has gotten a table by the time the response comes back, and I'm practically biting my nails at the thought that we might miss this opportunity.
come help WHERE, o abrupt one?
That is the sort of helpful information I should have provided, yes. I shake my head at myself as I reply, still keeping one eye on my quarry.
cafeteria
same suit
he hasn't seen me. Don't acknowledge me at all
There's no response to these messages, so for the next few anxious minutes, I watch Ichabot progress all-too-rapidly through his lunch, methodically clearing his tray. He's on to the dessert before I see Brian walking toward his table, a tray with food in his hand.
I can't hear anything they're saying over the hubbub of the cafeteria, but Brian takes a seat across from Ichabot and they exchange a few words. Brian starts to dig into his meal, and after a moment, Ichabot unfolds himself to leave. Brian looks up and offers his hand to shake, which Ichabot accepts, then picks up his tray and clears out.
Everything Falls Apart Page 1