For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

Jacob streaked across the night sky, consumed, and then returned to wholeness again and again by the orchestral power of the heavenly note roaring through him. He felt as if he were on fire without burning, submerged in ice without freezing, and outside it all... calmer and more confident than he ever thought possible. He and the song of heaven had become one, a perfect harmony with a resonance that went on forever. His acceptance of his destiny had finally brought a measure of restoration to his soul and some of the pain and suffering he had endured over the last decade had been healed. He now knew what the song truly was and he was beginning to understand what God was asking of him.

So he reached out… and the fabric of reality in front of him pulled outwards in all directions, creating a pocket of slight dimensional vacuum, while behind him the reverse occurred. Then he harnessed himself between the two and was accelerated exponentially by this makeshift dimensional drive Later, NORAD would report tracking him travelling at speeds exceeding Mach thirty before he was lost over the Pacific. His ability to see the fiery bloom of energy trailing behind Jessica made short work of tracing her re-entry path for him and within seconds he had her in sight. Like an apocalyptic vision, she was plummeting towards the earth at the center of a roaring envelope of fire and smoke. So with a spiraling maneuver, he entered her flaming plume and plowed through it with such power that it dispersed like fog under a blazing sun. Then he carefully slowed until he was matching her speed and gently took her into his arms. Then he slowed them to a manageable speed and dispersed the heat she had generated with a wave of his hand before looking her over.

What he saw was horrifying. Her body had grown so hot that her surface had been reduced to cinders. White hot flames still licked greedily across her entire form and she glowed like metal in a forge. All along her back and right side the gleaming armor he had seen protect her from the StarLance had been stripped away and the exposed synthetic flesh had melted into a liquefied slag. Her inner workings were exposed through dozens of holes that had burned completely through her. Circuitry flickered and sparked, fiber optics pulsed in chaotic patterns, and synthetic fluids wept from every wound.

But there were also signs of hope. A viscous blue fluid had begun to ooze vigorously from somewhere inside of her and clotted over the worst of her injuries. Her head and face also didn’t seem to have been burned that badly, but when he tried to lift her visor he was astonished to find it deeply integrated into her head. Where the black glass met her armored skin the surfaces were fused and he was at a loss to see how they could ever be separated. There were also no openings for her to breathe through and he couldn’t detect a heartbeat. But he had no idea if those things were even necessary for her anymore.

So, unsure what else to do as he turned their descent through the atmosphere, he switched to examining her energy patterns - and was utterly astounded by what he found. The elaborate mosaic of power circulating through her body was beautiful beyond his ability to describe. Even with the damage she had sustained, the intricacy and artistic craftsmanship he saw far outstripped anything he had ever thought possible. Spirals and whorls flowed in overlapping mandelbrot patterns from four of her fusion generators, and were gently spindled into looping threads as delicate as lace. They wound throughout her entire body, filling everything to create an interwoven universe of dancing light.

But then a brutal and chaotic power surge exploded out of her fifth generator, arched her body into a bone-snapping spasm, and knocked several of her systems offline. In horror he watched as the delicate beauty of her system was savaged and the light within her flickered. She was so weak that it wouldn’t be long before her system would begin to shut down. He had to get her back to Sheng! In her current state the AI and his chrysalis might be her only hope.

So with a powerful burst of concentration, he re-summoned his dimensional engine, shielded Jessica with his arms, and accelerated to a terrifying speed as they traced a parabolic curve back over western Canada. As he flew he prayed with all of his might... and pleaded with God to spare her.

But just as he re-entered US air space another jolt of power hammered out of her malfunctioning generator and lanced through him like fire. The pain disrupted his ability to maintain the dimensional engine and he had to fall back on harnessing the earth’s magnetic field to stay aloft. How had she survived dozens of these surges already? Her generators had turned out to be even more terrifying than Eddie and Elena had imagined.

A few minutes later he spotted the heat trail the rail gun projectiles had left in the atmosphere and traced it back to Valley Falls. But just moments before he could bring them down, disaster struck. With a distorted and vibratory pitch, the malfunctioning generator spun itself up to a suicidal speed and let out a sound like thunder as it released another cataclysmic surge of power. The searing agony produced by its fury quickly reached unimaginable proportions as it they hammered through him. He desperately tried to calm himself and stay in control, but the unbearable pain caused by the generator’s convulsions grew too great for him to endure. There was a horrendous wrenching sensation as his concentration broke and he felt his bond to the planetary magnetic fields snap.

The entire team, along with the General and his aides had been completely mesmerized as they watched Jacob’s rescue of Jessica. But now something seemed to be going horribly wrong. Explosions of energy powerful enough to raze cities had begun to explode from Jessica and slam through Jacob as his face rapidly alternated between concentration and pain. They watched as he faltered, recovered, and faltered again several times under the onslaught. Then, just when they were close enough to be in visual range there was an explosion of energy so strong that the detonation rolled down over the landscape like thunder. Jacob seized in agony… and careened into free fall.

Quickly, the team scrambled for whatever equipment and medical supplies they could grab and ran from the tent to scan the night sky. Elena quickly spotted them to the north and as they streaked towards the earth igniting trees, grass, and soil in their wake. With a terrible roar, the plume of atmospheric incineration passed over them and Tammy cried out in despair as it careened out into the open country. Then she was a hundred yards ahead of the others before she even realized that she was running and deaf to their voices when they called out.

She had to do something… this tiny girl that she had grown to love so much was falling to her death like a shooting star. The child had been her responsibility and she should have done more to protect her. She had always known the truth about what was inside the creatures they had brought here from Corsica. But she’d done nothing while the government had Eddie open them up to play with their parts like tinker toys. She’d allowed him to inject his own version of their disgusting essence into her body so she could walk again. She’d allowed that infection to spread and rot out her soul while it hardened her body. She’d made a bargain for her health with the very devils that destroyed her life at Corsica – and now she had become one. She was the monster… and the results of her choices were going to kill a little girl.

HER little girl.

This thought filled her with even greater rage and fueled her feet as she pounded across the lawn at dramatically increasing speeds. Things were going to change. She was going to be there for the girl this time... Nothing was going to get in her way. Nothing was going to stop her. Not even the massive crevasse left by the facility cave in that was blocking her path. Another reminder of the consequences of her silence… an evil that now filled her with a hate so complete that it consumed her body and soul. A deep and blood colored fire that licked along her bones and burned through her fears, her selfishness, her pathetic desires, and even her sense of self-preservation. It obliterated everything until it was all there was. She had become hate itself and that gave her the power to annihilate whatever got in her way.

So as she leaped from the edge of the chasm, she let out a scream of fury that propelled her completely across the nearly one hundred and thirty-foot gap and landed her with such force that the soil exploded out from under her feet. But then she lost her balance and tumbled across the lawn for a dozen yards as her strangely all-consuming hate winked out like a candle.

For a moment she laid face down in the grass and tried to take stock of herself. But she wasn’t hurt as far as she could tell. In fact, she realized with a bit of shock that she wasn’t even breathing hard. There was no burning in her calves, no sweat on her brow, and no pounding to her heart. Instead, her body was behaving as if nothing had even happened!

So she slowly pulled herself up and looked back in amazement at the faces of Eddie, Ginney, and Elena. They had stopped when she leaped, and were still staring slack-jawed at what she had done. But before she could even begin to question it, she heard a tremendous crash and felt the earth tremble under her feet.

Turning back in the direction she had been running, she saw that Jessica and Jacob had struck the earth several miles away. Flames, arcs of electrical power, and thunder roiled from the impact point. Panic and fear rose up in her again and the dark hate reignited to take over. It was faster, easier, and more seductive this time and she streaked across the remaining lawn, easily leaped the twenty-foot security fence, and began racing through the fields and woods faster than a thoroughbred horse. Her heart pumped no quicker, but the burning ember of hate it held drove her like a Juggernaut towards the child that she loved.

Behind her, the team had turned and run back towards the encampment. Moments later a glittering and insectile helicopter rose up from the lawn like an angry hornet before it launched itself towards the crash site.

Jessica quailed under the burning onslaught of her generator, desperate for an end to the torture. She had endured pain before. Pain in proportions most people could not comprehend, but nothing could have prepared her for this. The incredible durability and resilience of her cybernetic body had cursed her as it fought and extended a horrifying experience that would have exterminated her organic body in moments. It has also cut her off from her control systems, leaving her unable to flail or writhe in agony. All she could do was lie against the cold earth and burn.

Wait...

Earth…?

Cold earth..?

It was then that she saw through her fog of pain, disconnection, and fear, to realize that she could feel the ground under her... and her body was actually cooling a little. Her motor control systems were even sputtering back into life and micronites were starting to swarm through her to resume their war against her injuries. But another violent bolt of power made it clear to her that her ordeal was not over. She may have survived re-entry and made it through a crash landing, but her out of control generator was still on a collision course with an apocalyptic detonation. She had to do something or everyone within a thousand miles would be incinerated along with her. Maybe if she found a lake or river to cool it enough she could just reach back and rip it out. There was no way to know what that would do to her… but the way she saw it she didn’t have a choice. Death was better than killing innocent people.

So against the pain, the horror of her injuries, and her overwhelming desire to simply lie down and let it all end... she let out a long groan as she pulled herself back up onto her hands and knees. Without Sheng to help her the horrible tremors took hold again and she fought against the rattling of her frame as she tried to open her eyes. It took several seconds to adjust to the smoke, gloom, and disorientation. But once she did, she could see a long furrow in the earth trailing back from where she was. The swath of destruction covered more than a mile and ended in the impact crater where she knelt - a smoking hole of scorched and glowing earth nearly a hundred feet across.

And Tammy stood at its edge.

The nurse’s scrubs were torn and dirty and she shielded her eyes from the light and heat Jessica was giving off as she made several attempts to move closer. But the searing tendrils of energy arcing from her generator had created a deadly bubble of seething blue power that drove her back every time. Jessica could see the tears streaming from the frantic woman’s eyes as she worried back and forth like a caged animal, desperate to reach her young.

A gentle breeze caressed Jacob’s face, and he found himself blinking against the brightness of a midday sun when he opened his eyes. He was laying on his back in a copse of tall grass, and the pencil thin shadows it cast danced over him. Slowly he rose, and sat in stunned silence at what he beheld.

He was back on the hill.

A short distance away, the man from his turbulent dreams was bent over an intricate assembly of lumber. After standing, Jacob could see that it was an arch of beautifully married woods, lovingly fitted together through what had to have been thousands of hours of work. Each joint was seamless and even from this distance Jacob could tell that running a hand over any of the connections would reveal no edges. The variations in the types, sizes, colors, and grain seemed infinite and Jacob marveled at the impossible beauty of its artistry. Despite the overwhelming size and the uncountable number of pieces, there was no pattern to its construction that he could detect. Somehow a completely random chaos ruled the way it was assembled and yet the balance was perfect, the elegance of the composition sublime. Like the whorls and patterns found in the rings of thousand-year-old redwoods, it expressed an organic beauty that no human mind could have ever conceived.

Jacob watched as the man worked gently inside of one of the smaller spaces inside of an intricate lace of arches. A moment later he stopped and blew a dusting of shavings away and inspected hid work. Then he nodded to himself in satisfaction before he raised his eyes to Jacob and smiled. Jacob was astonished, in the decade since he last saw the man; he hadn’t changed in any perceptible way. He still had the same black curly hair and beard surrounding eyes that seemed to dance with an impossible mixture of mirth, seriousness, and compassion. He raised his hand in welcome and Jacob was still too shocked and confused to do anything else but return the gesture. Then the man indicated for Jacob to join him and went over to a wide table where a clay jar and two wooden cups sat amongst a jumble of tools.

Jacob made his way carefully down to the larger flat space the man was using for his work. The ground was slightly sandy, but a rich loam was exposed where his feet disturbed the surface. The greenery around them was lush without being overgrown and Jacob could see the same for miles in every direction. A river ran through the valley below them and a small flock of sheep lay near it, bleating softly.

The man poured water into the cups from the earthen jar as Jacob drew close and offered one to him. Jacob took it and drank a bit to be polite. The man laughed at this and then tilted his head back to drain his cup with obvious enjoyment.

“Aaaah”, he exclaimed with satisfaction and looked into the cup for a moment before turning his eyes to Jacob. “There’s nothing like a cool drink of water after a good day’s work. Wouldn’t you agree?”

But Jacob was still too dumbfounded to speak. The last time he had been here, his life had been changed forever in ways he still couldn’t comprehend. The memories of his time here had then been scrambled, muted, and spread out like an unsolvable puzzle. He knew he had been here. He remembered spending time with this man. He desperately wanted to decipher the floating pieces of the enigmatic conversation they had. But the answers continued to slip away, maddeningly dancing just out of reach no matter how hard he strained to recover them.

The man regarded him for a moment and then smiled. “Well… I suppose water is the last thing on your mind. Despite recent events, I’m sure you still have many more questions than you can find answers for.”

“You could say that.“, Jacob responded quietly, finally finding his voice.

The man laughed again, “Oh Jacob… That is what I have always loved about you... your gift for understatement. I wish it were teachable for there are many who could benefit from the lesson.”

“I… I don’t understand any of this”, Jacob replied quietly, “Ever since I was here, nothing has made any sense. My life has been... a mess.”

The man’s eyes softened at this, “Yes I’m sure that to you it hasn’t made sense”, the man replied, “But sense is just a word we give to things when we’re trying to reassure ourselves that we understand how they work. It doesn’t mean that we really understand them.” The man paused before gesturing to the arch he was constructing, “What might seem like a mess when seen alone could actually be a smaller component of a much larger piece of work.”

Jacob remained still, unsure what to make of the man’s response. Then he gathered his courage, and asked a question that had burned at him for a decade.

“Why... why can’t I really remember what happened here? What we discussed? What we did?”

The man smiled again and Jacob wasn’t quite sure what to make of what he said next.

“At times the importance of a thing lays only in its happening. Many great things have happened that no man can recall and yet they have shaped all of creation. Sometimes we just have to accept a truth that cannot be fully known... Sometimes things are evidenced in the very stones of the earth and yet men refuse to see.” Then he walked slowly over to the arch and after a moment’s hesitation Jacob joined him.

“Do you know what I love about wood?“, the man asked quietly, and Jacob shook his head.

“It’s a lot like the truth”, the man explained, “It holds up a house, keeps it solid, and grows stronger over time. You can’t really ignore that when you’re building. If you forget to use it properly... then the house cannot stand. Sometimes all that is required is for one beam to be untrue and the house will fall.”

“I... I don’t understand”, Jacob stammered and the man turned to lock eyes with him.

“Jacob. How is your house? Have you accounted for every beam and board? Is everything on which you stand true?”

Jacob opened his mouth to reply, but then closed it again. In the distance he heard a scream, and the wailing of a woman’s voice that sounded... familiar.

“Jacob”, the man prodded gently, “Who else stands under the shelter of your house? Who else needs it to be true?”

“I..“, Jacob stammered, “I don’t...“, but then the screams came again and the woman’s lamenting sounded like her heart was being murdered.

“Jacob...”, the man prodded again. “Do you refuse to see the stones beneath your feet? Do you know the rock upon which you stand?”

Jacob looked down as the earth suddenly opened beneath him and then he was plummeting through heat and flame. There was a tremendous impact and he felt himself tumbling through the darkness as the fire fell away. Then there was another impact, and a third before he finally lay still. Beneath him he could feel stones and soil and his face rested on cool grasses like the ones from the hill. In the near distance he could hear the scream come again, louder and more insistent. The woman wailed and wept as well and he suddenly recognized them both.

Jessica and Tammy.

Slowly, and with a greater effort than he had ever known, he pulled himself up from his half-buried state. On trembling legs he stood and then stumbled back along the path of carved earth and broken trees created by his landing until he saw a light. It blazed and flickered as bolts and pulses of brilliant blue power exploded from it and then he broke into a run as everything came back to him. Massive trees and upended boulders were sent flying as he shouldered them aside in pursuit of his goal. Then he burst through the underbrush and saw them.

Tammy looked up just as Jacob erupted from the woods behind Jessica. His hair had come undone from its usual ponytail and flew wildly in snow white tresses around his haggard face. His shirt had nearly been destroyed by fire and collision and hung in tatters around him. His jeans had fared no better and somewhere he had lost both of his socks and work boots. Years of hard labor had obviously shaped his physique and Tammy was suddenly struck by the level of power he carried in his frame. It was unlike anything from the glossy visions of the feminized man the media constantly pushed and filled with the sort of flaws earned through hard labor. His heavily tanned skin was tinted a slightly reddish hue from overexposure to the sun. There were wrinkles and spots all over and the sort of body hair that she hadn’t seen on a man in years.

But all of this was barely noticeable compared to the scars. Precise surgical incision marks crisscrossed his chest in an odd pattern she had never seen before, and an equally strange series of irregular circular shapes were tattooed across his stomach. On his left side everything had been violently erased by a wide burn scar that rampaged down from his collarbone. It had obliterated his nipple, pulled the skin of his torso up towards his armpit severely enough to distort his entire stomach, and wiped out any trace of a navel. The damage continued down from there to leave his entire leg a mass of marbled white scarring and ended in a foot that had several toes fused together. But his left arm had somehow been spared for the most part and the scarring stopped just above his bicep.

But despite the severity of this disfigurement, the ruggedness of the musculature he carried underneath of it could not be masked. Everything about the way he moved sent a clear and unmistakable message… This was not a physique built from vanity or an obsession with staying healthy. No, this body had spent years moving the sort of iron you couldn’t find in a gym and did it under the worst conditions possible. It had forged its accomplishments under the punishment of the summer’s hottest sun and in spite of the biting cold of the harshest of winters. If the hairless, six pack sporting men Tammy had grown up seeing in the media were sports cars, this man was a diesel powered industrial farm truck. Battered, bruised, scarred, and dirty, he had always gotten the job done and made whatever sacrifices were necessary along the way.

Then as she watched, he stepped into the blazing blue dome of fire without hesitation. New scars were immediately inscribed on his flesh as fiery bolts of power seared across him like firebrands. But he didn’t flinch as his skin rose in bubbles and blackened into ash. Instead, he raised his arms and spread them open as if to embrace the surging fury of Jessica’s out of control power source. The light erupted from him again and Tammy was again left in slack-jawed wonder by this man as she saw every one of his injuries from the last few moments be erased. Dirt and grime fell from him, his shirt burned away, and soon he shone as brightly as the sun. Behind her she heard the hammering of a helicopter as it landed close enough to whip up a small tornado of wind. Moments later her entire team plus Gibbs and the General came up beside her. Then they stood together and witnessed the spectacle taking place within the dome.

Keeping his arms spread wide, Jacob braced himself as he leaned into the maelstrom of Jessica’s electrical fury and focused his face in concentration. For a moment nothing seemed to happen and Tammy could see Jacob’s arms tremble with the effort of whatever it was he was doing. Then there was a warbling shriek and they all clamped their hands over their ears as the sizzling tendrils of the electrical dome surrounding the girl began to bend towards him. One by one they pulled loose from the earth with a bone shattering crack and snaked over to connect with his form. Then he began steadily making his way towards Jessica and from what Tammy could see he was absorbing the output of her raging generator. Then he clenched his fists and the colors of the raging electrical storm warped across the spectrum as Jacob began pulling the energy out of the generator faster than it could produce it. From a vivid violet down to muted oranges and greens, the arcing bolts vibrated down the range of their vision as they lost their strength. Soon only one was left and it surged in a jagged line to his left hand.

Then his face changed, and he appeared to be listening as he adjusted the positions of the fingers. With each movement the bolt of energy connecting them changed, going across the spectrum of colors and warbling at different pitches. Then in an instant it all harmonized... and the raging chaos blinked out like a broken light bulb.

For a moment they all stood in silence Jessica fell forward from her half kneeling position into his arms. Then his light faded as well until he seemed as human as the rest of them. As soon as it looked safe Tammy ran as fast and slid the last few feet across the dirt to reach them. As she began running her hands over the child’s wounds in horror she sobbed uncontrollably. Jacob seemed as heartbroken and helpless as her as he cradled the girl in his arms and stroked her visored face as he gently spoke her name over and over. The rest of them crowded around and Elena and Eddie began pulling equipment furiously from their duffel bags. In seconds they had dozens of leads connected to her and hooked into an even greater number of devices. Eddie’s hands moved over his workslate faster than Tammy thought possible and multiple holos leaped from the equipment. Structures they had never seen before spun inside of each one, pulsing and moving in alien ways. Micronites were everywhere… a virtual armada working furiously to repair the damage.

“Holy shit!“, Gibbs yelled, and they all looked over to see a workslate be rapidly absorbed by a network of blue gel tendrils that had flowed out from one of Jessica’s wounds. In seconds it was gone, and the injured area filled rapidly with newly constructed synthetics. In the space of a dozen heartbeats it closed and her chromatic armor sealed it.

“Duncan!“, Eddie cried out, “Get back to the chopper and grab everything electronic that isn’t bolted down... and yank out anything that is! Then get your ass back here ten minutes ago!”

Tammy watched as the husky psychologist turned and sprinted across the cornfield. In seconds she could hear a heated argument with the pilot that ending with Ginney yelling something about surgically removing the man’s genitals. Two minutes later he was back with the pilot in tow and they had a portable stretcher piled high with every piece of equipment the helicopter held - including the pilot’s custom painted helmet. Ginney dragged all of this over to them, leaving the pilot to stare in disbelief from several yards away.

As soon as he could Eddie reached out and snagged a sophisticated looking radio from the pile. Then with an unceremonious swing he smashed it to pieces on the ground, scooped up the innards, and gently poured them into a gaping hole in Jessica’s torso. Immediately, blue tendrils flailed from the nearby exposed flesh like an army of enraged tentacles and enveloped the electronic components. The process they had observed in her hip quickly repeated itself and with a quickly shared glance the team began destroying the equipment as fast as they could. Even the General chipped in and Tammy was touched by how he broke his own mobile phone in half before gingerly inserting the pieces into a wound.

“Shit!“, Gibbs cried out again and they all looked to see a webbing of blue tendrils wrapped around her wrist and hand. Everyone froze and held their breath for a moment as they waited to see what would happen. But after a moment the tendrils simply slid away in search of more appropriate repair materials... and Jessica stirred.

Beneath her cowl, Jessica was a boiling cauldron of pain, confusion, and dismay. She had barely started scanning for nearby bodies of water when her uncle had burst from the woods at the edge of the crater. He had been nearly naked and covered in horrific scars that she had never seen before. Then he had... glowed. She had heard and felt the same soul-wrenching song she experienced in the bridge and something in her rampaging generator changed. The power began to bleed out at a tremendous rate... faster than was possible according to her system readings. The closer he had come the faster the power draw had become and then she felt the generator turning inside of her like the tumblers of a lock. Back and forth it went and the power frequencies rose and fell as he appeared to be... tuning it. Then it abruptly changed its output from a chaotic staccato to a perfectly tuned note so clear it was like church bells. Her other generators had instantly responded to this by cycling up and coordinating themselves to harmonic frequencies. Then as a single, precisely timed unit, they all cycled down and fell silent.

Now as she lay paralyzed again with her Micronite repair units devouring the electronics Tammy and the doctors fed into her, she tried to make sense of what she had seen. How could Uncle Jacob have done that? Why was he glowing? Why had she heard the note from the bridge? Why was he looking at her like that as he touched her face? She tried to move and give them some sign that she was alive, but she was still cut off from motor control by the emergency repair systems. She had no choice but to just lay there like a broken doll against the stone-hard arms of her uncle... and then it hit her.

Stone hard arms.

M#// Je#/#/#ca..

Sheng?

Yes M#ss Jessi//a. A##empting syst#ms re-ini//alization. Plea##e st#nd //y.

Moments later the boot up terminal in the upper left of her vision returned. Half of the system startup messages flagged red, but the process completed and her HUD gave her a nominally green status. She was going to be OK… but it had been close.

Sheng? Are you alright? Can you reset mode control?

Of cour#e Miss Jessica, o#e mom//nt...

I’m sorry but mode control is only partially available. Sixty-eight percent of the subcutaneous articulators are offline.

Can I shift my head and hands back to default?

Yes, but only the left hand. I’m afraid the right was incinerated during your re-entry and will require several days for me to reconstruct.

Geez! What is it with me and that hand?

Miss Jessica?

Nevermind Sheng. Just do it.

With a shudder, her head and left hand convulsed, returning to human appearance and drawing a collective gasp from everyone. She blinked several times to clear her vision and saw that Uncle Jacob was still looking down at her in a way that she had never seen before.

“It... it was you”, she tried to whisper, and was startled when her voice came out in a tinny, robotic tone. Her vocal speakers must have been damaged.

“Yes”, he replied softly, and then he stroked her face again. It was a strange thing to be feeling, the stony hardness of his touch against her cybernetic skin. But despite its oddity, it remained comforting. It was the most human contact she had felt in what for her had been nearly eight years.

“On the bridge. You did that... you saved me”, she croaked, her voice modulating closer to normality.

“No..“, he whispered, and she watched as tears welled up in his brilliant blue eyes. “I didn’t get there in time to save you. Maybe if I’d been truthful in the first place it just wouldn’t have happened. I don’t know... I just... I just couldn’t let you die.”

“It’s OK”, she murmured back, wishing that Sheng had been able to include tear ducts. “I guess I’m gonna have to owe you for two saves now.” Then she reached up and gently laid her hand on the side of his face.

“You don’t owe me anything”, he responded, “But I owe you the truth... Something I should have told you a long time ago...”

He was cut off mid-sentence though, because Jessica suddenly stiffened in his arms and appeared to be staring right through him. What he could not know was that she was staring in shock at the DNA sample her synthetic skin had pulled from his face. It was rotating on the HUD in her mind, key epithelials called out with annotations.

Miss Jessica...

But Jessica ignored him and the words she spoke drew a profound silence from them all.

“You... you’re my daddy?”

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About the author

Jason currently lives in Kentucky near the small town where he grew up with his very patient wife and several children. His first novel ‘For Every Action’ earned consistent four and five star reviews from both critics and readers. He has also written ‘Rise of The Embodied’, and ‘The Return of Heroes’ to complete the series. Jason loves hearing from his fans and makes it a point to answer every email he can personally.

Printed copies of The Quantum Mechanic books can also be obtained through Amazon and audiobook versions through Amazon, Audible.com, and iTunes..

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