Gone
– is a serial short story that will be released here over the next
several weeks. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to follow my blog in
order to get the latest. - Peter-John Campbell
Chapter
1
The
music flared as a crisp animation played out. The tune was catchy and
it felt more like a song heard on the Top 40 than the respectful
anthem that it parodied. The slick graphics finished, revealing the
Seal of the President of the United States of America. The modern
version of Hail to
the Chief
took another rift and the music dipped and began to fade. “Ladies
and Gentlemen!” an announcer with a very commanding voice said.
“The President of the United States!”
The
camera pulled back and the President entered the shot dancing,
spinning, and bouncing. His gyrations seemed more suited for a late
night talk show host rather than the leader of a country. But then
again this was President Ego; he was tall, handsome, and the people
loved him.
“Welcome
Ladies and Gentlemen and thanks for joining me for my weekly Fireside
Chat.” A stool appeared out of the floor as he sat down. It was all
perfectly timed. “We have a lot to cover this week, so I hope you
have your phones ready. First, the current Welfare Reform Bill that
Congress passed today is layin' on my desk now for my consideration.
But I have some concerns. I feel that it doesn't give enough back to
the people. And you know I love ya'll, but before I vetoed it I
wanted to know how you feel about it. So text in your answer right
now to let me know.” A graphic appeared on the lower part of the
screen: 2768 for
Approve
and 8386 to Veto.
The
ultimate populist, he never made a move or spoke a word until he knew
the direction of the political wind. And it worked. The people loved
him. The youngest man to ever be elected to the office of President,
he had run his entire campaign online. Without a single
in-person event. His whistle stop tour consisted of live real-time
video chats with every home in America, and the people loved it. They
got to speak to the man himself for as long as they wanted. But in
the end, he won their votes because he was “cool”, not because he
knew what he was doing.
“So
while you're texting in your votes,” he continued, pointing to a
band on a stage, “Let's hear it for General Sherm and the Rangers!”
With that, music started and the camera whipped to the musicians.
They had a unique sound; it was mostly punk with a goth overtone.
Behind the band a group of women dressed in modified Army uniforms
danced seductively. The camera focused on one of the women, and then went
to break.
“Danny!”
A distant voice echoed from the next room in between the sound of
metallic bangs.
“Danny!”
Daniel
“Danny” Flint, was hunched over his work, soldering a circuit
board. The TV sat next to him on the work beach, blaring the
President's program. Suddenly the intercom squelched loudly,
startling him. An annoyed voice said, “Danny turn that idiot off
and get your butt in here.”
Getting
up from his workstation, Danny crossed the vast warehouse that served
as his office, a junkyard which was virtually a museum of the history
of aeronautics, now only scrap used for parts. The room was full of
countless assorted planes, missiles, and rockets. When Danny had
arrived this room was a disaster, but after years of sorting,
cleaning, and cataloging it was now at least an “organized mess.” Danny ran his fingers down the smooth hull of a Titan II rocket as he
passed by. He loved the feel of these old ships; they felt realer,
for
some reason. They
were elegant beasts, created in the mind and engineered with a
slide-rule unlike the 3D computer modeling of today.
Graduate
of MIT, top of his class with honors, Danny stunned the engineering
community when he published his master's thesis
on “The Obsolete Nature of Microelectromechanical Devices and the
Future of Electrical Engineering” He
was a rising star, no doubt, with multiple job offers waiting for him
upon graduation.
It
was around then that the Chinese began buying up engineers wholesale
and sending them to their mainland. Those who could not be bought
were persuaded to
relocate. But Danny wasn't interested in building an empire or
destroying others. On receiving his “letter of employment” from
the People's Republic, Danny did the only thing he could do.
Disappear.
Lost
in the forgotten fields of Kansas, he had changed his name and waited
tables at a small diner outside of Wichita. The world was shifting at
a dramatic pace, and for someone like Danny, this was the price he
had to pay for his freedom.
Tuesdays quickly became Danny's favorite day of the week. Like
clockwork she would enter at 11:35; tall, thin, amber eyes. Danny
could hardly pay attention to anything else while she was in the
room. She always sat in the same booth, ordered the tuna salad, and
spent her time writing in an old notebook. It took Danny weeks to
build up enough nerve to talk to her beyond taking her order. But one
day, while bussing the booth next to her's, he caught a glimpse of
what she was working on. To his surprise, it was a page filled with
equations.
“Excuse
me.” He spoke quietly.
She
turned, a little surprised by the disruption. “Yes?”
“I'm
sorry... I couldn't help noticing, but I think the value of B
is
wrong.”
“I'm
sorry, what?” she said, amazed.
“Well.”
Danny looked around for a moment, but his other customers seemed fine. He
leaned in. He could smell her perfume. Danny forced himself to focus.
“Look, you're obviously using Biot-Sava's law to determine your
magnetic response, but you've miscalculated your magnetic induction
here,” he pointed at an equation, “causing your density p
to
have value of 0.8752, but it should be 0.08752, which would explain
why your value of B
is
off. And you're probably having some inconsistencies with the current too, or am I wrong?”
The
women sat back with a smile. “Pretty impressive for a farm boy.”
“Oh
well, it's just a hobby I picked up along the way.” Danny went back
to bussing the table.
She turned around. “That's a pretty unusual hobby. What's your name?”
“Dani...Dann...”
He caught himself, “My friends call me 'Steve.'”
“Well,
Steve,
I'm Elise,” she smiled. “Thanks for the help.”
The
next morning Danny arrived at the diner at 4:30. He had the breakfast
shift and was in desperate need of coffee. Pulling in, he was
surprised to see an old red pickup parked in front of the diner. A
man stepped out of the shadow and approached Danny as he got out of
his car. “I'm sorry sir, we don't open until Five.”
“Are
you Steve?” The man said in annoyed voice.
“Yeah,
why?” Danny replied, confused and a little scared.
“I
heard you were talking to my wife yesterday,” the man said,
stepping toward Danny. He had something in his hand.
“Whoa,
whoa man!” Danny stepped back defensively. “It's not like that! I
just saw she needed some help with her work...”
“You
think you're pretty smart, don't you?” He interrupted.
“I'm
not sure...” Danny stuttered. “No. No, I don't think smart.”
“Can
you solve this?” The man threw something at him. Danny fell back
onto the gravel. A spiral notebook
landed on his chest. After a moment, he sat up and looked at the
paper. It again was filled with equations.
“Ummm,
yeah, sure. There's a couple of things... First, it looks like you're
using Schrödinger's equation to determine your Harmonic Oscillation,
which is fine, but it seems that Heaviside's Step Function would work
better here. Also, your value of w
could use some tweaking. And, well, your sevens tend to look like
twos, so, you should work on that.” Danny looked up at the man.
The
man stepped forward and reached his hand out to help Danny up. “Why
is a guy like you working in a place like this?”
Danny
grabbed the man's forearm and stood up, brushing the dirt off his
clothes. “I'm not a fan of Pad Thai,” he muttered. "Who are
you?"
“Jackson.
Jackson Price.”
Jackson
Price, multi billionaire, aeronautical engineer, and daredevil. He
made the “Top Ten World's Sexiest Men” three years in a row.
Forbes Magazine called him “the perfect combination of Thomas
Edison, Albert Einstein,
and Steven Jobs warped into one.” “He is brilliant!” wrote
columnist Lindsay Walker of the Washington Post. “A man centuries
ahead of his time. A modern Leonardo da Vinci.” The only
thing that Jackson enjoy more than being famous was flying. But when
the Iranians took an interest in him to develop their latest fighter
jet, Jackson knew it was his time to depart.
Danny
stopped for a moment, perplexed. “I thought you were dead.”
Jackson
turned and looked east towards the horizon. The sun was beginning to
rise. “Then the media did their job.”
Danny
stood quiet for a moment and looked over the equations. “What are
you working on?”
Jackson
turned back to him. “Tell you what. You come work for me, and I'll
show you.”
165
Tuesdays later, Danny slid his fingers down the hull of the Titan II
as he walked across the warehouse. The bangs coming from the silo
became louder as he approached the launch pad. Slipping past the
four-foot blast door, he entered the massive chamber and looked up
for a moment to admire their work. The Sphinx. 110
feet long, weighing in at an estimated 231 tons.
He
looked around but didn't see Jackson. “Where are you?”
“Booster 2!” His voiced echoed from inside the machine.
Danny
climbed onto the pad and looked up into Booster 2. He could see
Jackson's arm dangling through the nozzle. “Can you hand me the ¼
inch? It's there by your left foot.”
“Sure.”
Danny reached for it. “Wait... Are you stuck up there?”
“No,
I'm not stuck up here, I just dropped it and can't reach it.”
“So
rather than jumping down to grab it yourself, you called me all the
way down here to get it for you?”
“Just
hand it to me and shut up.” Jackson was irritated.
Danny
laughed. “What was your plan here, exactly?”
“You
were my plan. Just give me the wrench and walk away.”
The
elevator door opened and Elise stepped out with her hands full of
groceries. “Hey Danny, can you give me a hand for a second?”
“Sure,
Elise.” Danny looked up and smiled at Jackson.
“Danny,
throw me the wrench.” He said quietly.
“Have
you seen Jackson?” She asked.
Danny
tossed the wrench up to Jackson and jumped down off the pad. “He's hanging around here somewhere.”
---
To read Chapter 2 click here.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Gone by Peter-John Campbell @2014
