Synthesis: Book One Read online

  Chapter 10

  Everything became a blur as they left the Genetitech complex. Once Caleb was sure everyone got out, he ran to the Maserati and opened the passenger door for Kelley.

  “I can open my own door Caleb, just drive!” She said frantically., waving off his oddly-placed chivalry. She jumped into the seat and felt her heart sink when she remembered that Marcus had the key fob to start the car. With Marcus and the last of the staff already winding down the road in a company van, she held her face in her hands and sobbed. There was no way to get out quickly enough on foot, at least not by what Caleb had said.

  He slid in and smiled to himself while he gripped the leather steering wheel. Caleb looked over to Kelley and asked, “What's wrong?”

  “We don't have the key.” She uttered in a resigned tone.

  Caleb closed his eyes and seemed to focus on something with his mind. He dropped into some form of serious concentration. Like a magic trick, the car roared to life and then settled down to a throaty growl while Caleb grinned like a teenager. “Yeah, I don't need keys.” He said with a shrug.

  Kelley hit him playfully on the arm while she wiped at her eyes. “That's not funny! You could have told me that!”

  “Relax babe, I've got this. It's time to get the hell out of here!” With that, Caleb threw the car in reverse and rammed the gleaming new sports car right into a steel light post behind them. “I forgot, I still can't drive.” He smiled sheepishly.

  “Ugh! Get out and switch me spots!” Kelley barked at him. She was mentally doing the math on how much time they had left when she slammed the exotic car into gear and peeled out.

  Were it not for the ominous and traumatic events before her, she would be in love with this car. The tight handling, and all of the driving assists that were built into it, made the car fast and agile on the narrow mountain road. She couldn’t stop the smile that slowly spread across her face. How many times had she dreamed of being with Caleb as a real person? She even had this very fantasy that they were in right now. They were in a sports car, the top was down and the wind was blowing through their hair as they sped along a mountain road in the hills above Los Angeles.

  “Why are you smiling?” Caleb asked her after a few minutes.

  “I'm smiling because you're here with me.” She said with irrepressible glee.

  “Well, pull over up here and you'll really see something neat.” He said, leaning in towards her so she could hear him over the screaming engine and the roaring wind.

  She pulled off the road, and followed Caleb's gaze as the engine idled. After a couple of minutes, the quiet mountain pass was stirred by a shock wave from the explosion. The Genetitech complex blew up with such force, that it sent a mushroom cloud into the air. The thick, acrid smoke washed down the hillside with the wind, and Kelley decided to beat the emergency response crews and drove off.

  “How did you know about that bomb?” Kelley asked.

  “I was monitoring Evan's phone. I suspected he was going to try and pull something, but I didn't know it was a bomb until the last minute when he called Charlie. That's when I came out to get you.” Caleb said. His mood turned dark at the notion of those two men again, but he suppressed his rage for Kelley's sake.

  “Speaking of, what should we do with those two?” Kelley asked him. They had both been tossed in the trunk, and Caleb was mulling over whether to drop them at the hospital, or the local policia as they banged and yelled in their new little mobile jail cell. Mercy won out, and they unloaded the two battered criminals at the local clinic and sped off.

  “So, now that we have some breathing room, you have some explaining to do.” Kelley said to him while she maneuvered through the narrow streets back in the city.

  “You're right. Go up about three blocks. There's a great little cafe that people seem to like.” He said casually.

  Kelley gave him a puzzled look. “How do you..., oh right. Never mind.”

  In the busy coffee shop, Kelley and Caleb sat down at a small table in the corner and finally relaxed for the first time. She couldn't escape the feeling that this was their very first date, and in spite of the fact that half the planet would soon be chasing after them, she was still giddy as a school girl when he smiled over at her from across the little bistro table.

  After their coffee came, Caleb pulled out Evan's iPhone and began punching in random numbers on the touch screen. “I have some things to check up on really quick. You don't mind do you?” He said distractedly.

  “You've only been human for two days, and you're already glued to your smart phone? My my, you do adapt quickly.” She teased with a smile.

  He looked up and gave her a guilty shrug. His blazing blue eyes were illuminated by the afternoon light as it poured in the large windows. The hot coffee on their table swirled aromatic steam around them, and it would seem to anyone else that they were just another young American couple on holiday in South America.

  “The difference is, I'm not tweeting a pic of my lunch. I'm using Evan's phone to break into the SCADA system that controls most of this city's civil infrastructure.”

  Kelley pondered over the alphabet soup that he had just spouted. “What?”

  He set down the phone and pulled up the sleeves on his tight shirt. “SCADA is a type of computer interface that controls major automated systems in large cities. It can be used for things like routing water and gas lines, power transmission, sewage treatment and traffic control. It's actually pretty easy to break into it, even by normal hacker means. Once you have control, you can do such things as; destroy power plants, disrupt traffic, delay and shutoff utilities like water, natural gas, electricity. There's been an effort for years to tighten security on the system, but it's really old, and everyone who uses it doesn't want it to change.” He finished with a shrug. “Do you think they have yogurt here?” He asked.

  “Why yogurt?” She asked quizzically.

  “I use it to rebuild tissue. Since yogurt has living cultures in it, I can steer it around like a little swarm of radio controlled cells. Then, I can apply the branch chain amino acids directly to damaged tissue. By my own calculations, it should speed normal human healing by about one thousand percent.” He finished his offhanded explanation of this groundbreaking ability, and took a long sip from his cappuccino. “God I love coffee! How come you never told me how good this stuff was? I would have come out much sooner had I known.” He said, his eyes gleaming happily over a hedonistic smile.

  “Alright, in one minute you've managed to tell me that you can disrupt entire cities with a cell phone, and you rebuild yourself with remote controlled yogurt!? What's going on? What are we going to do? The entire world will know something happened with your experiment. I'm surprised the paparazzi aren't filming us right now! Seriously, you need to tell me everything about you, and your new abilities-or whatever you call them. You owe me that, Caleb.” Kelley felt herself ramping up into an epic freak out.

  He reached his hands across the table to hold hers. Part of it was to calm her down, and the other part was to inspect another human close up for the first time. Kelley went quiet as his strong hands entwined with hers in casual exploration. While he ran his own fingers around and up her arms he began his explanation of the odd abilities he now possessed. His voice was distant with child-like distraction while his deft fingers slid over her skin.

  “While I was still a research project for DARPA, I spent a lot of time kicking around the data bases of the United States government. While I was there, I found a big file relating to the works of Nikola Tesla. It was the famed information that was confiscated by the FBI after he passed away, about thirty thousand pages worth. There were theories on the Internet for decades about the lost files, and what they must contain. As it turns out the files were actually digitally transcribed back in the late seventies and left to rot on an unclassified government database. If anyone had known where to look, they could have seen the 'top secret' files for themselves. After looking at it, I could see
why J. Edgar Hoover wanted them kept secret.” He paused to sip his coffee while Kelley mulled over his words.

  “So this special, top secret file, was just sitting out in plain sight for someone to stumble across?” She asked.

  “More or less. It's called 'security via obscurity'. It basically means to put something important and confidential in with a whole stack of useless data and so on, but without any security or pass code. That way, it's easy to find when you need it, but you specifically have to know where and what to look for. When I found it, I used your connection to the server farm at Sandia Labs to crunch all the numbers and theorems that Tesla had worked out. That was the reason that I couldn't communicate with you during the whole growth process. The short version of this is; I found out that Tesla had discovered a naturally occurring frequency that harmonizes with microscopic organisms. Not only that, he was also working on a lower power Tesla coil to manipulate electricity and radio waves over long distances. I was able to incorporate that into my abilities.” He finished with another casual shrug.

  “So, you can control yogurt to rebuild yourself?” Kelley asked with a hint of incredulity in her voice.

  “Yes. Yes I can. The only problem is that my control of this stuff is still sort of, well…, spotty. I thought I would have a better grasp on these little abilities I had laid out when I found the Genetitech facility. The truth of it is; I wa thinking with my virtual mind, and not ta flesh-based one. I can still do all of it, but it’s mixed in with my physiological responses and stuff. I don’t know, its sort of hard to explain.”

  “You can break into fortified government systems with a smart phone too?”

  “Yep. If I can hone my skills, I may not even need that.”

  “Lastly, you can control electricity and wireless data with jazz hands?”

  Caleb almost spit out his coffee and laughed out loud. “Jazz hands? Well I can control those things, and some lower level organisms. I can't wield my powers over humans and large animals though.” He joked. “It still hinges on my emotions right now, I guess. I need either a big hit of endorphins, or a big shot of adrenaline to make things happen. Up at Genetitech, I was flushed with both due to you and those two criminals. I usually can't do that off the cuff.

  “Why did you come out two days early?”

  “Well, I knew that Evan and Charlie had something setup on the side. I didn't know how dark and weird it was until I was in the tank though. I was already planning on coming out early, if only to learn how to walk before the cameras started rolling. I also needed to buy some clothes and a car.” He said.

  “A car that you don't know how to drive?” She teased with a smile.

  Caleb nodded and chuckled as he looked outside at the battered car. With only thirty kilometers on the odometer, the Maserati was already plastered with mud, and there was a nice crumpled dent that ran down the rear deck lid where he had hit the pole. “Yeah, I thought it would be easier than it was.” He admitted.

  “How did you afford all of that? The car alone is worth well over a hundred grand, and your taste in clothing isn't really low budget either.”

  Caleb reached his hand over his shoulders and stretched against the chair. His mannerisms still resembled those of a guy just waking up after a long nap. “Do you know how commodities trading works?” He asked through his last bout of stretching.

  “Yeah, that's the thing that those guys do on the floor at the stock exchange right?” She guessed. “The one with all of the hand signals and stuff?”

  “Sort of. You can do it from a computer too. There was a big deal made about it back in the late nineties. A lot of guys made and lost fortunes in one day. I found a way to do it a little better.” He said with a guilty little smile.

  Kelly took a sip from her hot coffee. With a raised eyebrow she said, “Do tell.”

  “Since I had access to a gigantic amount of computing power and bandwidth, I was able to use that old ballistics algorithm you set me up with to calculate market probabilities. Instead of guiding Howitzer rounds, I was using it to outbid and out sell the guys who were using their own fast computers.” Caleb paused to finish his coffee. After a rapturous shudder, he continued. “The quick version is, I'll never have to work. Ever.”

  “So, why do this? Why did you want to be a human and be limited like we are? There's disease, and famine and heart break. Humans do the worst things to one another. Hell, we treat stray animals better that we treat our own kind!” She lamented.

  Caleb stood up and crossed over to her side of the little table. She could feel his warm skin radiating through the fabric of his pants as he bent over close to her.

  “The reason I wanted to be human was so I could finally do this,” He tilted his head slightly and brushed his lips against Kelley's. The bustling of the little cafe seemed to fade quietly away. Her eyes closed, she touched her tongue to his and marveled at his amazingly soft lips. The little bit of stubble on his chin and jawline abraded her skin, and provided a tactile road map of his beautiful face as he ran his hands through her hair. Their moment had finally come! After all those years yearning for the perfect man, here he was. They kissed like it was some kind of life support. Trying to see who would stop first became a game of chicken, while they traded volleys and Kelley slowly grabbed his mussed up hair in her fist.

  Suddenly, their quiet little moment was shattered as the large window next to them exploded into a wall of little fragments. The gaping hole left by the window let in the resulting chaos that was occurring on the street outside. Automatic weapons were now clattering off with a deafening rapport. Bystanders were scattering and running for cover as three men in black tactical vests advanced on the cafe and sprayed it with gunfire.

  “Get down!” Caleb ordered. He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her to the floor amidst the broken glass.

  “What’s' going on!?” Kelley yelled up to him.

  “Let’s just say the fan club arrived early.” He said back in a distracted tone. Kelley watched as he scanned the cafe for anything to use as a weapon. As if he had just made some sort of idle mistake, he shook his head and smiled to himself. Caleb pulled out the phone he had just been messing with and typed a few numbers in. Afterward, he bent down to Kelley and said, “I'm going out to talk with them. I'll be fine. I need you to stay here until I tell you to run okay? There’s a backdoor here that leads to the alley. I'll meet you there right after I’m done.”

  “Caleb-,”Her protest was cut short as he walked out the door with his hands clasped together over his head.

  Caleb was feeling a curious mix of excitement and anger. The cocktail was stirring his abilities to life like sugar sitting at the bottom of a glass of iced tea. He already knew the men advancing on him with assault rifles. He knew their names, tax and social security numbers, and the private firm they worked for. He knew their orders, and he could read their thoughts and emotions like a simple children's book. He knew he was in no real danger, as he already had his plan of attack.

  The tallest of the three men spoke up. He was ex-military by his vocal patterns and mannerisms, and he was condescending, in what he perceived was an easy mission. “That's a good boy Caleb. If you come along quietly, we won't need to kill your little girlfriend.” He smiled as he adjusted his aviator shades. The other men kept the laser sights of their guns trained on him.

  Caleb cleared his throat and smiled a venomous smile. His voice resonated from his chest with a deep and assertive tone. “Your name is Allen Jenkins, ex-military. You were dishonorably discharged from the Marines in 1993 after a court martial for insubordination. My sources also tell me that you were a terrible shot. Your assessment tests for mid-range hostile engagement are so bad that they're almost funny.” It was Caleb’s turn to sound condescending. “Also, you're right about your wife having an affair. Since you're gone all the time, she took up nailing one of your team members. He's standing right next to you. Wave to your wife's boy toy, Mr. Jenkins.”

  Mr. Jenk
ins turned and looked at the shorter man who wore a goatee. “I knew it! You piece of shit!” He said. The man momentarily lost focus as he set up to ram the butt of his rifle into the cheater's face.

  In that instance, the earth beneath them shook slightly and rumbled with a low sound. At first, it felt like a small earthquake, but the ground then began to buckle as large cracks spread out in all directions. The dynamic turn of events left the team of trained men clamoring about, trying to maintain upright footing on this tumultuous ground they were now standing on.

  Caleb smiled and said, “You three are standing on the largest water main in the whole city right now. It's controlled by a series of automated valves and switches. I just closed all of them, and the resulting pressure is finding a way to the surface…, right under your feet. In a few seconds, you'll all be riding a wall of water down to the market district!”

  “You're bluffing!” The man with the goatee said. “Go find the girl. That will get his attention!” He said to the third man. When he obliged, the pavement shook with such force that all three of them were thrown to the ground.

  “If you allow us to leave now, I'll make it all go away!” Caleb offered one last time with a vengeful smile on his face. The concentration furrowed his face into a mask of devious anger.

  The trio of guns pointed at him gave all the answer he needed. In his mind’s eye he could see, and feel, the last giant water valve closing. In a subterranean access room, gauges pegged into the redline, and alarms sounded off absently as they were overridden by Caleb’s bizarre talents.

  Starting about two blocks away, the pavement and concrete along the store fronts began to shoot up into the air as if propelled by a geyser, a geyser that was quickly making its way to the men while they stared dumfounded at it. Entire cars were tossed about like toys, and they began crashing to the earth with the resounding cacophony that only two tons of steel can make. As if being unzipped by the hand of God, the Earth spread open in their direction. The trench caused by the failing water main ripped open under the men and began to swallow them like a vengeful subterranean god. Once-stable chunks of concrete and asphalt shuddered and folded up into the maw. While they clamored at the edge of the muddy trench in desperation, Caleb stood over and grabbed one of the two way radios from the men before he disappeared into the dark maelstrom beneath them.

  Having finally served its purpose, the water main settled back down to a trickle in the newly formed trench. The following calm was unsettling, and Caleb basked in it like sunlight as he spoke slowly into the radio with an angry growl.

  “My name is Caleb Anderson. I am a human being, not the property of some government or corporation. I can control everything in this physical world like it belongs to me. I already know who you all are, and where you are. For the sake of your own preservation, I suggest you give me and Kelley safe passage. I can level entire cities with a phone call. I can destroy the economy of a country in my sleep. If you don't give us time to get out of here, I will make you all wish for a speedy death.” Caleb paused and heard nothing on the other end but rasping breath. He smiled vengefully, and tossed the radio into the murky water.