by Duncan Long
Anti-Grav Unlimited
Duncan Long
There’s a new “Man in the Moon”—and the corporations exploiting Mother Earth are in for an ugly surprise.
Phil Hunter has just discovered the invention of the age—working antigravity—when he’s laid off from his job, the entire department shut down. Phil decides this is what he’s been waiting for—a chance to become fabulously wealthy with his own company, Anti-Gravity Unlimited. With anti-gravity, not only is space flight a cheap possibility, perpetual motion is also possible. With a couple of anti-gravity rods, it’s easy to hook up a generator and create unlimited electrical current. All of mankind’s environmental problems are solved—as are any issues with poverty. Phil sees a new utopia—until his house is blown up and all of his former co-workers are listed as killed in the paper.
On the run, Phil heads for his best friend’s house, only to discover that his best friend has abandoned his long-time girlfriend (and clone)—where a hitman disguised as a bag lady tries to gun both of them down. Together, Phil and Nikki try to figure out how to stay alive for long enough to mass produce enough anti-gravity rods to allow him to start his business. Still, where on earth can they hide if the entire world corporate government is after them?
Author Duncan Long creates an intriguing dystopic future where corporations have taken over the government and are gradually replacing workers with robots, forcing the masses into poverty.
Duncan Long
ANTI-GRAV UNLIMITED
For Maggie, Nicholas, Kristen, and Chad, with much love.
Chapter 1
I drove up the gravel shoulder to the edge of the highway and held my steering wheel as the giant vehicle trained its guns on me. I tried to look friendly. I gave a quick wave to go with my biggest, fake smile. As the road train thundered past, the gun crew waved back and then I held on as my van rocked in the wash of the twenty-six car chain of gray and black composite.
I let out a deep sigh of relief, thankful the gun crew hadn’t done a Swiss-cheese number on me and my van. Then I pulled onto Interstate 70 and quickly matched speed with the road train so I could tag along behind it at a steady 150 klicks per hour.
We hurtled down the ribbon of concrete traveling westward through the barren, treeless grassland that had been baked brown by the summer sun. Only a few abandoned farms and remnants of fencing showed that men had once lived in the area. The only trouble I had from there on was avoiding the wreckage that bounced alongside us from time to time as an old wreck was swept off the road by the train’s “cattle guard.”
The rest of the trip to New Denver was pretty much uneventful except when the road train smashed through a roadblock and shot up some hi-pees. I hoped the gun crew knew what they were doing; the government generally frowned on blowing away their employees. But since the road train kept going without having a fighter plane pound it into the pavement, I decided that the hi-pees must have been renegades.
Which just goes to show that you can’t trust anyone on the interstate.
Hours later, we left the grassland and crossed most of the barren Col-Kan desert. Soon the shadowy, cloud-like Rocky Mountains were barely visible in the distance, and shortly thereafter the spires of New Denver came into sight. Gradually, black charcoal piles that had long ago been houses started to dot the rock and sand alongside the roadway, slowly giving way to rows of rubble separated by sand laced with burnt bricks, bits of charcoal, and scrub brush. I was in one of the suburbs that had surrounded old Denver in its heyday.
It was hard to imagine what the sprawling city must have been like before the water shortage and the terrorist attack. The destruction of this city and a few others had also spelled the beginning of the end for national superpowers; filling the vacuum were the international corporations which took over and formed the world government.
Seeing my exit, I turned off the interstate with a wave to the tail gunner on the road train, then headed down the new plastic roadway leading to New Denver. Fifteen minutes later I neared the glass and steel buildings that looked like tall glistening jewels which had sprung out of the desert around the space port. In the distance, a rocket thundered upward to arch toward some far away part of the earth; the crackling of hot air crackled as the plume of white smoke and fire lifted the vehicle.
After driving through the valley formed by the high, needle-like skyscrapers on either side of the street, I parked three blocks down from Craig and Nikki’s high-rise complex.
And waited.
I wanted to be sure that someone wasn’t onto me before I headed for my friends’ place. After the deaths of my lab team, I didn’t want to bring any trouble with me.
Hearing a scratching sound at the window, I whirled around, drew my Beretta, aimed, and nearly squeezed off a shot in a blur of motion. Realizing my mistake, I eased up on the trigger, and the hammer lowered to half cock. My breath came rattling out as I realized that I had nearly shot a bag lady.
The scraggly woman had more wrinkles than a prune. She didn’t seem to see me through the van window; she twitched a little, brushed at the dust on the van, and then turned away. I decided the light must be shining so she couldn’t see me, or my embarrassment, through the heavily tinted windows.
I tried to gulp down my heart which seemed to be beating in my neck as the rag-covered lady stumbled on down the street. Finally collecting my wits, such as they were, I stepped out of the van and carefully locked its door, shivering in the cold shadow of the buildings. I pulled my jacket down to be sure it covered my pistol which I’d stuffed back into my waist band. Yes, I was definitely becoming paranoid.
But that gun made me feel a lot safer.
I paused a moment and wondered if my friends could really help me or if I was just dragging two more innocent people into hot water but I just couldn’t see how the Kaisers would be endangered as I approached their building. But surely no one could know where I was.
In front of the condo, I stopped a moment and toyed with my shirt collar while looking into the blue-mirrored front of the building, glancing as covertly as possible all around me. A few cars hummed by quickly and a modif-horse and rider clomped a block away. The only person on foot was the bag lady, now rummaging through a pile of garbage at the side of the street. The bot that seemed to be with her liberated a bit of newsfax as they rummaged in the trash and the sheet tumbled in the wind down the sidewalk, paused, and then was swept past me by another gust of wind.
Satisfied there was no danger, I tried to look nonchalant and walked to the portcullis of the crystal building and pressed the call button to Craig’s apartment.
The TV camera along with a remote laser gun swiveled toward me, “Phil?” It was Nikki’s voice.
“Yeah. Could I—”
“Hurry up. Get off the street.” The door flashed open and I stepped into the small cubicle behind it; the door quickly hissed shut behind me.
“Tenth floor?” the elevator asked and I nodded. It whisked me upward at a speed that made my feet swell as my blood tried to stay at ground level. With a gut-wrenching stop that sent the blood back up to my head, the elevator doors opened.
“Tenth floor, the apartment is to your right, number 1018,” the elevator told me. I glanced down the wide hallway before stepping out. Ceiling, floor, walls, and doors were all made of the same tough blue mirrored plastic. The doors to each apartment were almost invisible with only small seams and numbers marking their positions up and down the hall. I stepped onto the mirrored conveyer strip down the center of the hall and counted the door numbers as my infinite reflections. It looked safe. I started down the hall, quickly gliding by each door until I came to 1018, and touched the numbers to announce my presence.
I waited.
; No doubt they were checking to be sure it was me. Without a sound, the door dilated opened and I stepped onto the ocean floor.
Or, at least, it looked like the ocean.
Fish, plants, a sunken ship was off in the background, barely discernible through the murky turquoise of the distance. A wicked looking shark seemed to be eyeing me from a nearby cave.
The door closed behind me before I could jump back into the hallway.
Fortunately, Nikki stepped from behind a tall bed of pink coral and waved, “Just a minute…”
She stepped back behind the coral and suddenly everything dissolved as she turned off the 3V. I discovered myself standing in a stark, white room with thick cream carpeting that looked like fur.
The room was windowless and completely bare of furnishings.
“Sorry. You got up quicker than I expected,” Nikki said with a smile that turned into a quivering frown. She stepped toward me and, with a sob, was in my arms before I knew what was happening, her body shaking.
My first thought was that she was glad to know I was alive.
“Craig left me,” she said between tears.
So much for my theory glad-I-was-alive theory. But I could see why Nikki would be pretty torn up if Craig was gone. He was all she had in the way of family. Nikki was a clone. A modified clone.
Craig’s old man was a bioengineer. By the time Craig was fourteen, he was working on his doctor’s degree in MKC and knew more than most of his professors about bioengineering. While the other kids were making frogs and dinocows, he—we later discovered—was growing his own girlfriend on the side.
Not just any ordinary girl, either. Nikki had started out as a bit of the marrow from Craig’s bones but was altered to the point that she became almost nothing like him. Craig had, of course, started by altering the XY pattern of his cells to a double X to make her female. But his major accomplishment was in throwing in a lot of special odds and ends to demonstrate how much he could do. The end result was a black-haired, oriental-looking beauty with a well-built, full-in-the-right-places figure. And she was as smart—if not smarter—than Craig and had super-fast reflexes.
If ever there had been a candidate for a new super race, it was Nikki.
Yet her manner didn’t reflect her superiority. She never lorded it over people, was always friendly. And attractive: The girl that as a kid you always wished would move in next door but never did. She also was always loyal to Craig.
Perhaps that was because he’d left her in vitro the four years he worked on his degree (how he kept her a secret from the authorities is beyond me—such work was illegal back when we were kids). When he brought her out of “the vat,” as he called it, she was a full-grown woman with the mind of a baby. His next step had been to give her a three-year crash course in growing up via machine and human tutors. Craig was about the only “family” Nikki had ever known and they were closer than any two people have any right to be.
By the time I’d finished my schooling, Craig had turned twenty-one, had made his fortune, and had retired with money to spare. (After all, he was the guy that perfected the Martian goat and the Aqua-retrofit virus that’s used to turn ordinary people into Aquanauts. Yeah, that Craig Kaiser. He’s the famous one if you hadn’t already guessed. So you can imagine the money.) But Craig had become as bored as he was rich and had a nearly terminal case of narcissism; last time I’d seen him he’d become about as boring as he was bored. That was one reason I hadn’t seen Craig or Nikki much over the last few years. Though I considered him a friend, his restlessness made me uncomfortable. And he’d developed a cruel streak that often was vented on friends and especially Nikki. It irritated me and I had gradually seen less and less of them.
And yet, he had been my best friend; when the trouble began, it had been his home I had headed for. As for Nikki, I’d never gotten as close to her as I might have liked. It is hard to relate to someone who seems perfect even if they don’t act the part.
Now Nikki told me her story quickly between sobs and crying jags.
There wasn’t much to it. Craig had cloned himself—again in secret—and—two days before—
had left with the new clone. He’d given Nikki three days to get out of the apartment and never be seen again.
If that weren’t cruel enough, the clone was male this time. An exact duplicate of Craig, only younger. And Craig had made no secret of the fact that the two were lovers. Certainly the ultimate in narcissism. When I heard it all through Nikki’s tears, I had to wonder how I had ever considered Craig to be my friend. Now, I felt nothing but disgust for him because of his abuse of Nikki. As far as I was concerned, Craig would give scum a bad name.
Poor Nikki. I held her tightly and tried to figure out what to do.
Finally, I pulled away to arm’s length, looked into her dark, bloodshot eyes, and said, “Can you make enough to get by as ship’s navigator?” She worked for the rocket line and I figured she must be getting top credit these days.
That question caused her lower lip to quiver, and then there was another outburst of tears.
I held her again and wondered what else was wrong.
“Oh, Phil. They fired me.”
I’d heard that the rocket lines were economizing, but had never connected that to Nikki. As a senior navigator, and a whiz when it came to computers as well as the ability to calculate trajectories in her head, I’d assumed she’d never have to worry about a job with the rocket lines.
Was I wrong.
“Everything’s being automated,” she sobbed. “No more… Humans. In the cockpit.”
(At that point I made a mental note not to fly any more in rockets. I knew how dependable bots were. Very. But not all the time. It wasn’t too hard to imagine that once in a while a computer might hiccup, sending a rocket flight on a quick trip to nowhere. Ending up in the ocean or at the bottom of a crater in the ground isn’t my idea of a fun-filled flight.) I held Nikki tightly. Then let go because I felt guilty. I was beginning to enjoy the feel of her lush body against mine.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and laughed. “Well at least I’m not dead,” she said. ” What in the world happened. They said on the news you were dead. I thought…” Her chin started to quiver again.
“No more crying. I’m very much alive.”
“Yeah. Enough crying. We’re all still alive. Sit down.” She kicked a hidden spot on the floor and the carpet twisted and a couch, which was covered with the plush fur as the carpet, popped up.
“Let me get cleaned up. I’ve been packing.” She retreated back toward the bedroom.
I sat in the quiet of the apartment for a moment.
The door chimed.
“Could you get that?” Nikki hollered out. “Must be Sarah. From next door. She’s been helping me pack.”
I got up, fumbled at the door’s peep hole and instead of opening it, accidentally dilated the doorway instead.
I was pretty certain it wasn’t Sarah standing face to face with me. It was the bag women I’d seen on the street. But not the way she’d been. Now, she cradled a needle rifle in her arm, pointing it with a very professional manner right at my navel. I watched as her finger tightened on the trigger.
Chapter 2
I stood there trying to get my feet to run while I fumbled with the door control. I couldn’t get the thing to close because with her standing in the doorway, its safety feature kept it open. This was anything but a safety feature for me.
Finally, my body got the message and I dived to the side just as her trigger finger activated the rifle. Though the gun itself made little more than a whishing sound, the tiny needles it fired raised a racket as they broke the sound barrier inside the apartment, their loud cracking was followed by the tinkling of broken glass and plastic as they crashed through the wall.
I was on all fours, dog paddling on the carpet toward the couch as the bag lady coolly trained her weapon on me, pulling the trigger so needles chewed up the carpeting behind me then clanged against t
he couch as I dived behind it.
I had lucked out; the couch was lined with some mechanical device, and it was thick enough to stop the tiny projectiles.
Remembering I was armed, I fumbled with the Beretta which thus far had only served to put a gash in my stomach when I’d hit the floor. Once the weapon was out of my waist band and in my hand, I peeked from behind the couch.
The bag lady spied me the same instant, racing toward me as another stream of needles bounced off the couch.
Now I wished I’d plugged the old bat on the street by mistake.
I heard her hit the couch with one foot and I fired upward twice as she jumped over it.
One of the bullets caught her on the left side of the head as she hurtled through the air. She flopped down on the floor, her fall releasing a chair that rose from the carpet a moment after she dropped, so she sprawled over it like a broken rag doll.
“What’s going on out here?” Nikki said as she stepped into the room. She was clothed only in a white towel that contrasted with her smooth, dark skin.
“Uh… Look out,” I cried. The bag lady was moving, turning toward me to reveal a crack down her face, the break radiating from a large dimple where my bullet had hit. “She’s got armor on,” I warned Nikki. “Get out of here.”
Nikki retreated down the hall and around the corner. I pumped four more bullets at the bag lady then decided to camp out behind the couch again as a swarm of hot needles chewed the air where I had been, then plowed into the wall behind me.
In theory an old antique Beretta 92 pistol holds a lot of ammunition. Fifteen rounds in the magazine; and I kept a sixteenth in the chamber. And even the new body armor can’t take multiple hits very well from the tungsten bullets I had loaded into the firearm. But the chances of hitting the exact same spot twice are small. The three or four times needed are almost impossible to achieve, even at such close range.