EXPANSION
BY
S. E. CYBORSKI
To my parents, David and Joann, who taught me to always reach for my dreams.
To Nicole, John, and Kylie for their endless patience with rough drafts and frantic questions.
To every single one of my writing buddies. You guys are awesome
To Nicole for the amazing cover art. Seriously, it’s awesome.
Chapter 1
Five weeks. Five long weeks since she and the others had broken out of the warehouse and fled. They’d come here, some dusty little town in New Mexico, to try and keep under the radar. She, Amy, and Michael were valuable now, most likely considered property by the faceless corporation that had funded the medical trial they’d participated in. After all, how many people had abilities like they did? Sandra glanced up from her folded hands, staring at Amy and Michael. The sun shone down brightly on them all, casting the field they were relaxing in in gilded light. They were using their abilities, Amy conjuring a little fireball and Michael causing it to bounce up, down, and sideways by altering the gravity around it. Sandra felt little sparks against her skin, which she had come to associate with glee, along with the simple warmth of happiness. It was definitely interesting, being an empath. While Sandra had read stories of them, wondered what it would be like, she’d never expected a physical feeling to go along with the emotions she felt.
“Come on, Sandra!” Michael said suddenly, throwing her an excited grin. He let the fireball go and it plummeted towards the ground before Amy could make it disappear. She rolled her eyes at him but let it go. Amy had learned that Sandra was the whole of Michael’s world, lately. Which was exactly as Sandra wanted. “Why not have a bit of fun? You’re always so serious and distracted.”
“Because I am trying to keep us alive and free,” Sandra retorted, snorting quietly. “If it were up to you, we’d be lying on some beach somewhere, probably about to be captured again. Do you really want to be lab experiments because of our abilities? Or do you want to follow my plan and become rich?”
“Speaking of your plan,” Amy cut in, settling down on a little hillock that had sprouted underneath her. While earth was not Amy’s favorite element to manipulate, that didn’t stop her from using it as it suited her. “When are we going to start? All we’ve been doing since we ran is running and hiding. I’m bored with all this. Where are the crowds of adoring people, the money pouring in that you promised us?”
“We needed to wait and make sure we couldn’t be found,” Sandra sighed, glaring at Amy. The other woman had started to fight her control recently, sadness and nostalgia tingeing her thoughts. The sadness was like a cold ooze creeping over Sandra and one emotion that she didn’t enjoy. But nostalgia was different. Nostalgia was a puff of dry air that just felt golden. There was no other way Sandra could describe it. “I don’t want to go back. Besides, do either of you have an idea for what we can do? How we can use our abilities and not be found out?”
Absolute silence greeted Sandra’s words, Michael hanging his head while Amy just looked confused. Something nudged, just at the edge of her conscious thoughts. Memories clawed for Amy’s attention but were felt at a distance. George featured heavily in many of them, his green eyes twinkling at her. For a moment, Amy couldn’t quite remember just why she had broken up with George. Or even what they’d argued about. But just before she was about to make the choice to go back, to find George and figure out what had happened, Sandra pounced.
Sandra wove her way through Amy’s emotions, spiking her anger and pain. Jealousy followed, like sliding her thumb over the sharp edge of a blade. While Sandra couldn’t control just who Amy thought of with such jealousy, there really was only one target: Billy. The telepath had become a close friend to George and Sandra had played on that. It had been absurdly easy to magnify their interactions in Amy’s emotions, to convince the other woman that she was being pushed out. Absurdly easy and incredibly fun as Sandra reveled in the wash of emotions.
“I didn’t think so,” Sandra said, satisfied that her control of Amy was not going to slip any time soon. Michael was far easier to manipulate. A little bit of lust tied to a desire to please her, along with some very pleasant interactions, and Michael was hers. Yet there were things that Sandra didn’t want to decide unilaterally. After all, it was simpler to have Amy and Michael’s conscious support for what she had in mind. “But I do have an idea for what we can do, how we can use our abilities. I was thinking we could be a travelling magic show. With Amy’s use of the elements and Michael’s control over gravity, we could rival any magician out there now. Money would pour in as people came to see our shows. We wouldn’t even have to work at it for very long. Just long enough to get a respectable amount of money to put my next plan into action.”
“I like the idea,” Michael grinned, eyes sparkling as he thought through the possibilities. “I could levitate people, cars, animals, anything. We wouldn’t even need a plant in the audience to volunteer because there would be no wires for them to find. You, Sandra, could do a mind-reading bit or something similar. With your empathy, I’m sure you could amaze people.”
“And I could play with fire,” Amy cut in thoughtfully, summoning a small flame to the tip of her fingers. She played with it, rolling it across the back of her hand. “I could pretend to eat it, juggle fireballs, things like that. This could really work.”
“Of course it could,” Sandra snorted, shaking her head. “You really think I would have spent this long to come up with a stupid plan? Please. But we shouldn’t use our real names, even offstage. We should come up with stage names or something like that. Something that the others can’t use to find us.”
“I’ll be Akasha,” Amy said decisively after thinking for a few quiet moments. She saw the puzzled looks the others gave her and elaborated, “It means spirit. Or, alternately, a combination of the elements. It seems fitting.”
“Akasha,” Michael repeated, nodding. “I like it. Well, I want to be called Gravitas.”
“Doesn’t that mean serious or dignified in Latin?” Sandra asked, raising an eyebrow. “Why would you choose that?”
“I know it does,” Michael retorted, glaring at Sandra for a moment. “But Latin has no word for gravity. They had no concept of the idea yet. But it sounds a bit like gravity and I like the actual meaning as well. Besides, I’m not as much of a clown as I act sometimes.”
“It sounds good to me,” Amy said in Michael’s defense, patting his shoulder. “What about you, Sandra? What name are you going to choose?”
“I’m going to be called Sin,” Sandra said quietly, relishing the sound of the word on her lips. “I love the feel of the negative emotions, the vices people try and hide from themselves. The vices I can draw out of them. I’ll be the Sin they can’t admit to themselves.”
“It’s perfect for you,” Michael told her, taking her hand and twining their fingers together. The real tragedy of his emotions was that, before Sandra had started manipulating him, Michael had actually been attracted to her. He’d planned, when the trial was over, to ask Sandra out on a date. And, depending on how well it went, maybe a few more. Of course, if Michael were ever to be released, or break out of, Sandra’s hold on his emotions, that would never happen. He would never be able to trust her, or himself, after this.
The three discussed options for their theoretical show, ways their abilities could be put to use. Sandra let Amy and Michael dominate the conversation, content to sit back and observe. She’d taken this position often in the past few weeks, that of queen surveying her subjects. It provided a tangible sense of power, of order, and Sandra had b
ecome addicted to it. Her dreams of becoming a lawyer, of working for the good of all by putting criminals in jail, had been long forgotten. They were small and petty compared to the world Sandra imagined now. With her abilities, no one could stand against her. The world was hers for the taking and Sandra would take it. There was no doubt about that. The only question was how?
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“We know that it works,” a high, nasally female voice said. The voice had the cooing timbre of someone trying to convince another that they were in the right. “Dr. Carnesby has stated his doubts but I sincerely believe we can make him continue the trials. After all, we can ruin him and he knows it. Gnotret did create, or perhaps unlock, superhuman abilities in these five subjects. That three of them have subsequently fled is inconsequential. What’s important is that it works.”
“Would you have us create more villains, Katrina?” a deep male voice cut in, the edge of a laugh under every word. “We have three people who are very gifted with offensive abilities running around on their own. Who knows what they’re thinking or what they’re going to do? For all we know, they could come after us for changing them.”
“Really? Paranoia, Lucian?” another male voice chuckled, a nasty sound deep in his throat. “As well say the sky is falling or that the world is going to stop spinning.”
“And you never think of the consequences, Aaron, you never have,” Lucian snapped back, glaring at the third member of their little council. Many in the Corporation didn’t even know the council existed and these three would keep it that way. “That paranoia, as you call it, has kept me alive for years. Has kept me out of the hands of my enemies. Can you say the same?”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Katrina said, raising her hands to forestall further argument. “This is getting us nowhere. The question we have come to discuss is whether or not to continue testing Gnotret on human subjects. These three rogue subjects are inconsequential. What is important is that this is the first time we’ve succeeded and the first time we’ve had willing volunteers. Do you suppose there is a correlation?”
“There very well could be,” Aaron replied thoughtfully, tapping a finger on his lips as he thought. “While these five had no idea what was going to happen, they were open to something happening. Perhaps the subject’s mental state has an effect on Gnotret’s efficacy?”
Lucian didn’t reply right away. Instead, he thought carefully, letting his eyes wander around the room. It was a very sterile and spartan place. White walls led to a white ceiling filled with fluorescent lighting. The bulbs cast an unliving light over the three of them but they had long gotten used to the effect. Besides, those bulbs were the only source of light. Having windows in this room would be folly. None of the three wanted their activities to come to light. What could not be changed could be endured. The small table they sat around was made of ebony wood, glossy in the lights shining down from above. While electronics such as phones and laptops were not allowed in here, voice recording abilities, pictures, and all that, a notebook sat before each of them. Their chairs were made of the same ebony wood and the cushions were flat with wear. After all, this was where the council came to plan everything and to discuss what had gone wrong. There was no more secure place as most of the employees in the Corporation had no idea this room even existed in the heart of the building. Or what the council had accomplished.
“We can’t ignore the possibility,” Lucian finally said. He was the de facto leader of the group, mostly through force of personality. He turned that force on Katrina and Aaron, pinning them with a decisive glare. “But we also can’t ignore that it could very well be a coincidence. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to run two trials, side by side. One, we use the... ahem... volunteers from the jails. The other, we use volunteers much like these five. We keep everything the same and see which group succeeds.”
“But what happens if neither group does?” Katrina asked, a whining tone coming into her voice. She didn’t like being forced into something like this and fought whenever Lucian tried to do so. “What happens to your vaunted experiment then?”
“If neither group develops abilities, we merely run the experiment again,” Lucian shrugged, careless confidence in his own voice. “There is no shortage of jailed subjects nor poor college students. Besides, we don’t pay the criminals and we can handle the amount of money for the college students.”
“What if all this has something to do with... it?” Aaron asked quietly, revulsion and horror tingeing his words. He was not comfortable with the biggest secret the three of them kept, the secret hidden in the deepest vault in the building. “What if it really is sentient? You know what the scientists were saying. How excited they were when we got the confirmation from Carnesby that the trial was a success. It... responded.”
Katrina laughed loudly, a sharp crack in the small room. She enjoyed Aaron’s discomfiture about it greatly. Personally, she’d always believed something like it could exist. With everything else she’d seen, and everything humanity as a whole hadn’t seen yet, how could it not? If she were being completely honest with her fellow conspirators, which Katrina made a special point never to do, Katrina would explain how thrilled she was with the discovery. After all, how often do you find actual, living cells on a meteor that had made it through the atmosphere intact enough to impact on the Earth? And to have those cells begin to multiply once they were in a stable environment?
The scientists the Corporation hired had been beside themselves with glee studying them. Then one of those scientists had had the bright idea to inject a few of the cells into lab rats. The results, frankly, were astonishing. The rats had developed different abilities, some able to disappear at will, others causing food to appear at their side while still others could levitate or even grew wings. The winged rats were studied the closest as they were the only ones to have an obvious physical change wrought on them. But there was only so much the scientists could learn from rats so the Council, after much furious debate, decided to find human test subjects.
The first couple sets of subjects had absolutely nothing happen to them. They were convicted murderers, stuck in jail for life or sitting on death row, waiting for the day their life would come to an end. Each was offered an incentive, most choosing a lessening of their sentence in exchange for their cooperation. Of course, they had not been told they would be experimented on. The convicts had believed they were participating in a psychological experiment, gathering information on why they did what they did. The Council had no desire to give more information than it needed to and lying was second nature. The cells were injected and the convicts were watched for a month. That was the longest it had taken the rats to show exotic abilities. When each man, and a couple women, was still exactly the same as when the experiment began, they were released to their respective prisons and forgotten.
The next set of subjects had the first fatality, even among the lab rats. A woman, in jail for killing her children, her husband, and her husband’s parents, reacted badly to the injection. Immediately afterward, she appeared to go into anaphylactic shock. Her face and throat swelled and her esophagus closed up. The scientist running the trial had immediately injected epinephrine and Benadryl followed by a steroid but it had done no good. The woman suffocated five minutes after the injection of what the scientists had dubbed Gnotret. No other deaths happened during that experiment but no superhuman abilities appeared either. Several more sets of experiments were run with no further changes. That was the point that Lucian decided they needed to expand their research. After all, every single rat they’d injected with Gnotret had developed some sort of ability, and some of the invisible ones were still running around, so why weren’t the humans?
Katrina had suggested offering payment for participating in a medical trial. There were ads on television and on college campuses for people who needed money and they got enough volunteers. Why not try it themselves? Five thousand dollars wa
s the agreed-upon price for having to sit in a facility for a month. It was something they could pay easily without even making a dent in their coffers and a reasonable amount they believed just about any college student would jump at. Doctor Adam Carnesby had been the logical person to carry out the experiment in the city they’d chosen. He was a professor at the University of Chicago and had worked for the Corporation before he’d become a professor. And Chicago was large enough to ensure some diversity in the trial while not being too large to pull attention to what they were doing. Secrecy was vital, especially as the rest of the world believed that they were alone in the universe. At least, officially acknowledged alone.
But after Billy Layfield’s abilities manifested, Katrina had to wonder. There were obviously some psychic abilities associated with the cells. How intelligent were they, really? Was it a single organism or many? And how much of what had happened had been its idea? How affected were they all by the cells and how would they even tell? These troubling thoughts kept Katrina up at night but did nothing to stop her from proceeding down the path they’d all decided on. Whether or not the idea had been theirs in the first place, it was a good one. There were several powerful dignitaries that would pay small fortunes for even one person with enhanced abilities. An entire army would be so lucrative even Katrina, with her avaricious heart, couldn’t imagine how much money they would be paid. Besides, once the first person was revealed, every other government would want their own superhuman soldiers. Everyone would be buying and the Corporation, with the Council as its secret head, would be the only supplier.
“So what if it does?” Lucian shrugged, completely unconcerned with Aaron’s fears. “If the entity is truly intelligent rather than just a collection of single-celled organisms, perhaps we can reason with it. There is obviously something choosing who gets abilities and who doesn’t. From all the research I’ve done into these five subjects, they were all fairly moral and decent people. People you wouldn’t expect to hurt others or go rogue as this Sandra Johnson has done. None of the criminals we injected developed any sort of ability and that one woman even died. I’ve had my suspicions that she was developing abilities and the entity killed her to keep that from happening. Can you imagine someone with no conscience with some sort of superhuman ability? They’d be unstoppable.”
Expansion (The Accidental Heroes Chronicles Book 2) Page 1