Persist (Discipline Book 3)

by P. S. Power

  Discipline: Book three

  Persist

  P.S. Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Copyright 2016

  Chapter one

  Ben was slammed into the wall on the far side of the room hard enough that he knew there were going to be bruises the next day without having to check under his gray tunic. At first he didn’t realize what had happened, it was so very unexpected. In fact, as he sat there, on the floor, he looked around him, checking to make certain that there was nothing to tell him that he was actually in a hyper-realistic VR, or a personally created delusion.

  He did that now. A lot.

  Get lost in his own, or worse, other people’s, mind. That, or made up realities that should have been neat, and like another super power, since it was like living things for real. Things like this kept happening in them. Being beaten, tossed around, or having to watch boring lectures from virts, or even being back when he was a schoolboy. It could even hurt, so he was a bit surprised when the familiar orange sphere that floated off to the left wasn’t there. That only showed up when things weren’t real, however. This, apparently, wasn’t one of those times, then.

  It would explain why everyone was still standing around, looking at him with their mouths open. Not that it was all his people, or anything like that. Just Dave, the in-shape, blue haired guy that worked the cameras for him, who was still doing his job of recording things, Beth, who did all the archive work for them, and Mags.

  His friend.

  Ben guessed that was the word for it this week. They’d done a few things in the past, in bed, but not regularly enough for it to count as dating. Then, her sister had been visiting for a while, and in the same house they were, so that could have been what kept them from doing more. Ben also hadn’t asked about it. Due to being so busy, having terrorists from a different reality scheme kick his ass remotely, as it turned out that day. It was, he had to admit, an impressive, if not very good, excuse.

  “Um… Ouch.” Ben tried to keep his voice wry, and stand up, like his chair hadn’t been overturned as he flew backwards nearly five meters. Thankfully, whatever had done it, that mental wall that he’d tried to push against to follow people to another reality in his mind, wasn’t that powerful. There was mild discomfort when he stood up, but not enough to indicate things being broken inside. It felt different when that kind of thing happened.

  Mags nodded at him, her all black eyes sparkling a bit as she pasted on a fake grin.

  “So, the answer to finding where they came from is no, for now?”

  Ben took a deep breath, rubbed at his large nose and wrinkled it as he found his feet.

  “Seems so. We have the first ten locations for the attacks, but there are more. So many. We really should get to that, I guess. I…” Taking a few steps forward, he looked over his shoulder at the wall. He’d ended up by the door, and had nearly hit the ceiling as he’d flown, missing it by only twenty centimeters at the highest point along the way. There was no dent to show where he’d impacted however, and the slide to the floor had been partially taken by his feet and legs, so the impact didn’t do any real damage. Luck had played more in that than skill, most likely, Ben wasn’t some kind of gymnast. If anything he was kind of the opposite of that. A person that was used to sitting in place and not doing interesting physical things very often.

  A couch critter of the highest order.

  At least that used to be the case. Now he was a genetically altered super-psychic. The plan had come with enough physical extras that, while he was nowhere near as strong as the people with him, or as fast, he still did a lot better than he had as a fat twenty-odd year old working at a coffee shop. The extra exercise and training didn’t hurt that way either. Not at all. Even working a lot, he’d managed to make the morning meditations every day for the last three.

  Focusing and using his body as intensely as possible, even if there were dozens of countdowns in his head, showing where different terror attacks were going to take place soon. Many of them had been located, as to where, and even roughly how bad they would be. Even with ways to possibly beat them. That part had caught him a bit by surprise. Anything they did was still a risk, since the future wasn’t locked in stone, but every time he’d come up with a plan, and it had been submitted to the government, things had changed. Not for the better either.

  It didn’t take a genius to work out that there was a leak along the path of data. Probably more than one. Ben wasn’t the biggest fan of the federal, or even local, government. Any kind of it, since those had been the people that had killed his father two years before. They’d claimed that him being falsely accused of child trafficking and putting him in a cell with three inmates that nearly had to try to kill him had been a simple mistake. They’d even locked up the men that did it, sending them all away for so long that it was very likely they wouldn’t see the light of day again.

  Which didn’t bring David back.

  Except that, on occasion, lately, Ben had been hearing his voice. Very like his own, claiming not to be a ghost, but simply not dead at all. Even though, clearly, he was. It was a thing that he hadn’t mentioned to anyone yet, having been far too busy for him being insane to be useful to anyone.

  Not that he wasn’t losing it.

  It was simply getting harder each day for him to tell which world he entered was the real one for that, to be something for him anymore. Sanity. Smiling he tried to stretch a little bit and not make too big of a deal about what had just happened. That part, why it had really taken place, came to him in words. Nicely printed ones in glowing blue, that hovered slightly to the left of his main point of visual focus. Inside his head.

  When it came to him why he’d been tossed around, it was a bit more technical than Ben could understand, consciously. The basic idea was clear however. It hadn’t been an attack from some kind of psychic power that the Swarm had at all.

  Just him fucking up.

  “It seems like I accidently tried to move between realities and got it wrong? So, boom, flying Ben. It would have been better if I’d stuck the landing. Anyway, enough of that for now. I don’t know that finding them in a different world will help us that much anyway. We can’t just go there and stop them. No more than we can get at them here.”

  That bit was fairly certain. If part of the government was behind the attacks, using mech armored soldiers, tanks, and flying insect robots that produced an absolutely lethal venom, the rest of the system wasn’t at all. Ben didn’t love what that meant, since he’d been far too busy to find out who, or what, was really behind it all. They had some leads, but looking for Winston Mills, the Cymeds old lawyer, hadn’t gotten him anywhere yet. Just to a blank and empty space that meant the man no longer existed in the world. Not that Ben could see.

  Bethany, who was cute, looked about sixteen through the face and a bit like a female bodybuilder otherwise, set his soft chair back up for him. After all, being tossed around like that, seemingly by magic, wasn’t going to get them out of doing their job. That it was a thing for them just made sense. There were, in the whole world, about a hundred real psychics. Genetically altered people that didn’t just get a hunch or two about what was going on around them, but instead had the information flow into them so strongly that they actually knew things. What people were thinking. What might happen.

  Most of them were nutjobs after a while. It was possible to genetically modify people to have that kind of power, but so far the very best of them all went insane after a few years. It hurt, having too many people in your head at once. A thing that got worse over time. It built and built, until the psychics couldn’t think right, and started to avoid others. One way or another.

  Until Ben came along.
One of his powers let him kind of shut off most psychic abilities, more or less. Only when the others touched him. And then stayed close. Within a hundred and seven feet, more or less. That did vary a little, given the day and how focused he was, from what they could tell, but no one knew why yet.

  For the psychics there, at the compound, it meant they could rest, and take a break from the pain and suffering. Just getting a good night’s sleep had let them all reset a lot. Ben got that same relief as well from the deal, which was nice. During the day they had to stay out of that kind of thing, for work, but at night, or at meals, they could hide away from the world and almost pretend to be normal. It wasn’t perfect, since now he had three friends that basically tried to sit on him for over half the day, but they were all alive, and not flailing around alone, hurting all the time.

  It let them be part of things too, which both Lissa and Clark were off doing. What that work was, he didn’t know. Lissa acted as a medical assistant, or had for a while. Then a real doctor had come and everyone had been shifted around a little. He probably could have found out, if he wanted. The truth was, even though she was really attractive, Ben wasn’t that wild about Lissa. It wasn’t really her fault, but she had issues with a capital I on the front. Ones that made her think of him as a substitute father image, even if she was older than him by two decades.

  Her dad had been a bit weak, and while he’d tried to protect her, the government had stepped in, and basically let her mother keep her as a rape slave for most of her life. That woman hadn’t done it all herself, but passing her daughter around in Hollywood as a snack treat for perverts was just as bad. Worse in a way. If she’d been doing it herself, that could have just been mental illness, and possibly stopped, with the right drug treatment plan. The woman had been smart though, and controlled the family’s money, which let her keep the father from saving his little girl.

  Ben knew that it wasn’t a rational thing in any way, but thanks to him having the ability to save her from the pain of being her, Lissa had glommed on to him as her personal savior. A job that held impossible standards. Everything was a test of his resolve to protect them all. Even when it wasn’t sane, or something that they couldn’t handle better than he could. If a fight came, Ben just knew the woman was going to try to hide behind him, even if she were about twenty times the fighter he was. That guess might be a little off, but it wasn’t too much so, he didn’t think.

  Everyone else there had been trained to fight. Against people in mech armor, which was supposed to be impossible for regular human beings. They could do it, thanks to their mods and training. Ben had been shown how to run away, and only been through the beginning stages of even that program yet. After all, he’d only been there for about three months.

  It had been a busy, and not that comfortable, time. Which meant that he didn’t have a lot of the skills that the others did yet. Even his full complement of mental abilities hadn’t kicked in. That was a bad thing however. He was already a pretty powerful psychic, and the other things he saw, heard and felt were making it so his life was kind of hard to live already.

  In a year, Ben doubted that anyone would be able to even hold a conversation with him. Not consistently.

  Which was something for another day, since they had terrorists to thwart. He grinned, and set to work, throwing himself at the issues, searching and finding things, as Bethany called out suggestions as to what he needed to be looking for. It was harder than it sounded like.

  Living the scene he was in made what he perceived very accurate, but also meant that he was being dropped into things blind, most of the time. Most cities didn’t have their names up all over the place, for instance, and while there were a few things that even he could get pretty easily, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, most of the places just looked like big places with people in them. They had buildings that were old seeming…

  Which was, in the end, not that helpful.

  So they’d sent out alerts, directly to most of the lettered agencies of note for that kind of thing in their own country and a few others, so that they knew to be on alert in general, and then tried for specifics. Not that anyone was really trusting them. After all, they weren’t a government agency, and if the people in question knew anything real about them, then they’d kind of figured out that they were, at least traditionally, actually a rebel group, trying to take down the federal government. At least a peg or two.

  The whole time he’d been there, not even one person had told him that they could win that battle. Really, the most effective thing he’d ever seen that way, was his father’s web agitating. Suggesting, politely, that people needed to protect their rights to free speech and privacy. For which the man had been killed.

  So they trained, and practiced, and were the subject of a mega corporation’s human experimentation, while doing very little to change the world. Until the terrorists had come, and suddenly their ability to have useful psychics and ultra-tough human fighters had actually come in handy. That didn’t mean the world, or the various agencies of the government, were going to have faith in them.

  Except for whoever was behind it all. They seemed to be taking them seriously enough to get the work done as to changing how the plans were being created and used.

  Bethany had him line up on the countdowns, mentally, and set her computer to record the right data for each one as he collected it. Then she grilled him without mercy, on location after location. His head reeled eventually, as he tried to take the data from first street signs and then, more effectively, from people’s minds. Telepathy seemed to work faster, and after they figured that trick out, they were able to get all of the times and locations set up correctly in a few minutes for each place.

  There was a meal after that, which meant that he and Mags had to go and find everyone, in order to deliver them food. They were both free for the time being and everyone else was either busy, or already gone, except the cooks. That part was kind of funny, since they were the last ones sent out on missions. Not because they couldn’t fight, either. Everyone just loved to eat enough that risking them was pretty far down on the list of things to do.

  Still, they only had two of them left, and while there was plenty of food laid out in the big dining hall, only six people were using it when they finally got back to it for their own meal. The place had a white and brown theme that wasn’t exactly nice, really. Like a school cafeteria, or perhaps one that you might find on a college campus. Ben hadn’t gone in for advanced education really. It had been far too expensive, and he was too stupid to get a full ride scholarship.

  You had one or the other if you wanted to attend that kind of place. Rich parents, or brains that were top end.

  Mags had gone. She was bright enough, but even she’d openly admitted that her father had bought her way in. The man had just started his first term as President about then, and his other daughter was a bit too broken to actually put out in public all the time, so Maggie Richards had to be the dutiful daughter and do her part to make the country great again. Ben had heard her mutter that phrase a few times now, so figured it had been a thing that was actually said in the White House. A place that his pal had actually lived, for a little while, he was willing to guess.

  Ben didn’t ask, just living the scene of her doing it, in three different streams. All playing at the same time, each as if he were there, being her. It was annoying, rather than painful.

  “I…” His voice was light enough when he spoke, being nearly cheery sounding. “Need to go for a run.”

  No one else had gotten it yet, but when he ran his mind stayed clear. He remained in the reality he was in, for the most part, or had so far. Even doing it in VR worked, as long as he was working hard enough. Though at that point, he stayed inside the virtual experience, and not reality.

  It didn’t work for everything, all the time, but Mags just nodded at him as she loaded up a tray of food that would have seemed normal to him once, back when he ate everything in sight. Not that he wasn’t g
oing to take just as much now. In a few months’ time, thanks to both starving himself and being changed like he was, Ben had lost enough weight that he was dangerously close to being skinny for the first time in his life.

  As in, too much so for it to be healthy. Several people had mentioned the need for him to eat more, though his old eating disorder being broken had been Glenda’s main concern. His mentor, who he thought about mainly because she waved them over to a table as soon as Ben had a plate of spaghetti, some garlic bread and a medium salad. That had a nice vinaigrette dressing, since he liked that kind best. It was more food than he’d been taking for a long time, and he was feeling a bit embarrassed about that as he set his tray down. Glenda noted how much food was there, the thought coming off of her rather clearly, but then it muddled and she moved to shield her thoughts from him.

  “The new doc mentioned she’d told you to increase what you were eating. That’s fine. I just don’t want you to get lazy with it. You won’t get fat now. Not as long as you keep being active. So, anything new?”

  She spoke to him, but Mags made a face, nodded, and stuffed a half a piece of buttery, slightly toasted, bread into her mouth. There was chewing first, before speaking, since she wasn’t trying to be an animal any longer. Not that she wasn’t a bit rude on occasion still. Mainly for shock value.

  Ben thought that was the case.

  “Ben and Bethany worked out how to get at the locations better. They have all of the possible terror attack locations we have times for. It should have been sent to you.”

  Glenda looked impressed, but ate first, before doing her own speaking. He decided to do the same, nearly starving, now that there was something there to eat. It hadn’t been that bad before, while he worked, but now it was intense. A nearly stabbing pain in his middle.

  “Impressive. So we have times, a basic outline of how it will happen, and locations for each place?” It was clear she didn’t think they really did for some reason, and that she planned to be a pill about it. Making fun of him, to let Ben know how much he still had to learn.