Ascension Series: Books 1 - 3

by Ken Lozito

Genres: Visionary & Metaphysical; Cyberpunk; Science Fiction Fantasy; Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Alien Invasion; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

Zack is good at finding things, but when he discovers a global conspiracy, life as he knows it is over. Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. It traps you instead.

Kept secret for 60 years, the discovery of an alien signal forces an unlikely team to investigate a mysterious structure discovered in the furthest reaches of the solar system.

Join the crew of the Athena, Earth’s most advanced spaceship on the ultimate journey beyond our wildest imagining.

Strap yourself in. The Ascension series: Books 1 - 3 includes the first three books in this action-packed space opera series. Readers describe them as “a cross between David Weber and John Ringo.” If you like space opera adventure stories with clever heroes, impossible situations, and chilling discoveries, then you’re in for a fun nonstop thrill ride.

800+ pages. Find out why thousands of readers have fallen for Ken Lozito’s thrilling series!

Buy the box set to get three books you won’t want to put down!

Release date: November 25, 2016

Publisher: Acoustical Books LLC

Print pages: 496

Sample

Chapter 1

Fort Meade, Maryland, 1986

Bruce glanced toward the window where dark skies peeked in along the edges of the blinds and didn’t know whether it was late in the evening or early in the morning. Either way he was in deep shit with Kathryn. Late nights spent reviewing reports and attending last-minute meetings were becoming a common occurrence in this line of work—not something the mother of his three young children wanted to hear. 

He glanced at the picture of his family that took up prime real estate on his desk. It had been taken when they were on vacation in the Florida Keys. Kathryn loved the beach. The children missed him, and the thought of his constant absence from their lives hit him like a blow to his gut. Perhaps he would take off work tomorrow. Shoulders hunched, he stiffly rose out of the chair and switched off the lamp. 

As he slipped on his gray suit jacket, the desk phone rang. The special line was flashing red, indicating that the call was coming from the pit. Eric was on duty and wouldn’t call if it weren’t important. He had probably called the house first, waking Kathryn and the children. Maybe those damn pagers hadn’t been such a bad idea, but security protocols for Dux Corp mandated that the use of pagers was forbidden because they left more of a trail than using the telephone.

He strode back to his desk and picked up the phone.

“Bruce, thank god you haven’t left yet. You need to come to the pit right away. We have an incident.”

Incident was code for "get down here now," and this was all that could safely be mentioned on a phone. 

“I’ll be right there,” Bruce said.

In the late seventies the U.S. Army had commissioned an intelligence-gathering project to test the validity of the "psychic warrior." These specialists were used to spy on enemy installations and provide preliminary reconnaissance deep in hostile territory. Bruce Matherson was a project-lead contractor for Dux Corporation, and at thirty years old he had a proven track record for getting solid results. At this point, the project only received laughable support from the U.S. military, but Bruce didn’t care. The brass didn’t know the team had stumbled upon a veritable goldmine in intelligence gathering, but they wouldn’t have been able to see beyond its militaristic application. There was more to do than spy on enemy nations. Research institutions—both domestic and abroad—warranted closer scrutiny, and the insights gained were truly enlightening. 

Bruce was using the program to test subjects who showed an inclination toward a sixth sense, with none of the hokey, new-age bullshit that went with it. The program fed the army some useable intelligence reports with a marginal rate of error. But Bruce, along with his partners, Eric Bridges and Jeffry Radford—the rising stars at Dux Corp—had agreed that in order to maintain the most influential role in the project, they couldn’t be completely honest with their findings. Intelligence was the world’s currency, and Bruce knew the Russians had similar programs running.

The pit, where the magic with monitoring and reconnaissance happened, was located in the old wooden barracks, well away from the real action at Fort Meade. Housing them there had been intended as an insult, but it suited their needs quite well and was far away from prying eyes. Bruce hopped in an old army Jeep they used to get around the base and drove down to the barracks. 

It was a cool fall evening with a hint of moisture in the air. Through slightly foggy windows, Bruce noted the vacant buildings lining the road. They were old and hadn’t been used since the seventies. The glowing lights of the barracks were the only indication that anyone was working at this part of the base. 

Eric was outside waiting for him, waving excitedly as Bruce parked the Jeep and got out.

“You’re not going to believe what’s happening,” Eric said, holding the door for him. 

“It must be important, since we’re not supposed to leave the pit until we’ve been relieved,” Bruce mildly chided.

“Radford is there. I had to call him in too,” Eric said, leading him down the hallway and into the pit, where a grouping of eight reclining seats was equipped with leads that attached to the viewers who occupied them.

Remote viewing enjoyed a time-honored status that lingered between "ridiculous" and "flights of fantasy." Most people confused a sixth sense with deductive reasoning, but Bruce’s team had been able to demonstrate a way to delve deeper into the capabilities of the human brain. Although shamans used hallucinogens to reach a receptive state and eastern monks spent years meditating to achieve it, with the help of the army, the team had been able to run a series of tests on candidates to determine how receptive a person was without those practices. If the candidate qualified, they were brought into the program for more training. Bruce’s work focused on bringing non-military personnel into the training program. 

They normally ran sessions with three viewers at a time, tasked by various intelligence agencies to observe and report on assigned targets. Usually by the time the requests came to them, the investigators had exhausted all other avenues. Coming to them was, in essence, a Hail Mary pass at the end of the fourth quarter, and the clock had already expired. 

The viewer’s vitals were constantly monitored while they were in the "cradle," which was a reference to the recliners the viewers sat in during a session. Monitoring vitals was essential to the validation of the viewer’s report. This kept both the viewers and trainees honest. Even the best liars had a "tell" of some sort, be it an elevated heart rate, a twitch, or some other physical movement.

Bruce entered the pit. The viewers all had their eyes squeezed shut. Their heart rates were elevated, and beads of sweat dotted their foreheads. Bruce bent over one of them and snapped his fingers in front of their face, but there was no response. He checked their vitals again, but they hadn’t changed. It was as if the viewers weren’t aware of their physical surroundings.

“What happened? How long have they been like this?” Bruce asked.

“They started the session normally, studying this evening’s targets. About fifteen minutes into the session, Lewis began muttering about space and something called "the nine." Started saying all kinds of strange things. We’re still recording, but we can see a video of it in Observation,” Eric said.

“Have you tried to wake them?”

“They’ve been unresponsive to all attempts so far.”

Bruce frowned, studying the viewers. “Call the nurse in here to start IV bags with saline for each of them. That should prevent dehydration.”

Observation was a room away from the pit where they could monitor the viewers without causing distraction. Jeffry Radford was standing to the side as they entered, speaking to three young men in army fatigues. Each had a notebook out, recording the time and instrument readings.

“Great, you found him,” Radford said when he saw them.

Bruce took in the room for a few seconds. There was a quiet flurry of activity as each person focused on their assigned task. The readings from the instrumentation for monitoring the magnetic field in the room were erratic, as if something was upsetting the field. 

“What’s causing all this disruption?” Bruce asked.

“You got me. This all started about an hour ago—the same time the viewers in the pit became unresponsive,” Radford said.

The phone rang, and Eric went to answer it.

Radford waved Bruce over to the TV with a video player. He pushed in the VHS tape and pressed the play button.

“This is from earlier,” Radford said.

Bruce watched as the viewers got in the cradles and had the electrodes connected to them. Each of the viewers used their own techniques for achieving the state of what the project team called the "observant mind," and Radford fast-forwarded through this process, slowing the tape as one of the viewers—Lewis—started shaking his head back and forth. As he did this, the lighting dimmed and there was momentary interference with the video. When it cleared up, Lewis’s mouth was moving, but Bruce couldn’t hear him. He raised the volume.

“… so much space. The void is empty. The cold burns. The nine is the key … we must get to the nine…”

Lewis suddenly started spewing random numbers. At this point the viewers all sat up with their backs arched and their chins raised toward the ceiling. After a few moments they laid back down as if whatever held them had eased its hold.

“They’ve been like that ever since. Sometimes the others speak, but it sounds like gibberish,” Radford said.

Eric came over to him. “It gets better. Eight other viewers are in the same state as the ones on duty. We’re checking on the rest.”

Bruce turned toward the monitor showing the pit. “Is everything being recorded that can be?”

Eric nodded.

“We need to bring in the other viewers. I don’t care if we have to pull them from hospitals,” Bruce said.

Eric headed back to the phone and started dialing.

“This is going to bring us a lot of attention,” Radford said.

“We have to risk it,” Bruce answered.

“What do you think this is?”

Bruce chewed on the inside of his lip. “It’s like someone is trying to tell us something, but we can’t get the full picture. We’ll observe and record like usual. Then we’ll compile all the data and see what we’ve got.”

“But Bruce, how long can we let them stay like this?”

“Let’s get the on-call MD in here,” Bruce said. 

He took off his jacket and tie, placing them on the hangar by the door. So much for going home tonight. Bruce promised himself that he’d make it up to his family as he pulled on his lab coat and headed back out to the pit. Entering the room, the hair on his arms stood up as if there was a lot of static electricity in the area. He went over to Lewis, who was among the most gifted viewers the program had ever produced. Lewis was whispering, and Bruce brought over a stool and sat on it.

“They are coming … they are coming … must go … go,” Lewis whispered.

The nurses quietly checked vitals but couldn’t wait to put as much distance between themselves and the viewers as possible. Bruce stayed by the viewers. As hard as he had tried in the past, he didn’t have the inclination they had. His talents lay with disseminating the information the viewers produced.

The hours went by like quicksand, and the pit filled as eight other viewers were brought in. All of them were in a state of unresponsiveness. Five of the viewers were connected to the open cradles, and cots were set up for the rest. Bruce and the team ran out of equipment and had to borrow some. 

The doctor on call tried a few different ways to get the viewers to wake up, but not even adrenaline or smelling salts worked. Whenever one of the viewers did speak, it was mostly gibberish that they couldn’t make heads or tails of. 

They brought in transcribers who would review the recent video tapes and record each and every word spoken. The gibberish was subject to interpretation. Bruce retrieved a few pages of it and pressed his lips together as he studied the data. Not having any luck looking at individual pages, he grabbed some Scotch tape and fastened a few pieces of the transcribed notes together, sticking them to the wall. Before long he had a ten-foot section of wall filled floor-to-ceiling with them. Bruce rubbed his eyes and rolled his shoulders, trying to keep exhaustion at bay for a little while longer. He cocked his head to the side and studied the meaningless jumble of numbers and symbols. 

Eric came out of Observation and glanced at the wall of paper. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Bruce forced his tired mind to focus on the papers, looking for some pattern. “It’s like some kind of code. Do you think this is all some sort of message?” 

Eric frowned, taking a closer look. “You might be onto something here, but doing it this way is going to take forever. We need access to a mainframe.”

Bruce nodded. “We need a search algorithm that can identify patterns at the highest level, and then we can work our way deeper.”

Radford stuck his head out of Observation and shouted, “They’re waking up!” 

Bruce and Eric ran to the pit. All of the viewers appeared slightly disoriented. The nurses and doctor kept telling them to remain seated while they went around to check them. More than one had to be told where they were. 

Bruce and Eric went over to Lewis, who was sipping some water. He kept looking around as if he didn’t trust what he was seeing.

“How are you feeling?” Bruce asked.

Lewis set his cup down. His hands were shaky, and they all saw it. His breath began coming in gasps, and the monitor showed his blood pressure spiking. 

“Lewis, look at me,” Bruce said, squatting down and placing his hand on the viewer’s shoulder. “You’re all right. We’re here at the base.”

It took Lewis a few seconds to process what Bruce was telling him, and after a few moments he calmed down.

“Can you tell us what you saw?” Bruce asked.

Lewis cleared his throat. “It was all black, like something grabbed hold of me and pulled me down,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Space. It was so vast and cold, but … not quiet.”

Bruce shared a glance with Eric. They both knew that the most vibrant viewings affected all five senses.

“It took control of me,” Lewis said, his eyes darting around, looking for some nameless threat.

“It’s not here. We’ve been at your side this whole time. Can you tell us anything else?” Bruce asked.

“Regret. There was regret and desperation. I’m sorry. I just need some time,” Lewis replied.

“Just take it easy for a few minutes. The nurse will be coming around with the standard questionnaire. I know it seems routine, but tonight was definitely different. Don’t hold back any detail, even if it seems insignificant,” Bruce said.

Lewis nodded, and Bruce and Eric stepped away from the pit.

“This is huge. They can’t possibly pull our funding now,” Eric said. 

They were both tired, but the relief of having their viewers return from whatever had held them pushed the exhaustion back.

“We can’t tell them,” Bruce replied.

Eric’s brows shot up his forehead. “What do you mean we can’t tell them? Bruce, this is too much to cover up. We need more resources to run analysis on all this data we’re collecting.”

“If the brass catches wind of this, they’ll take the project away from us. Then they’ll likely misinterpret the data and keep it locked away somewhere to be forgotten. We know something extraordinary just happened, but we need time to run our own analysis. I’m not just going to give this up,” Bruce said.

“If we get caught, then all of us could be brought up on charges of treason. Do you understand what treason means? It’s when they either lock you away and tell your family you’ve had an accident, or death by firing squad, which amounts to the same thing minus the rotting-away-in-jail part,” Eric said, trying to speak in hushed tones and failing miserably at it.

Bruce held his hands up in front of his chest. “Listen to me. Our deal with the military was never going to last. There are rumblings that the project is being transferred to the jurisdiction of the CIA. It would be treason to hand this over to them. They’re bogged down in more politics than the military. I won’t let this become another black ops program.”

Eric sighed. “I just don’t want to end up in jail, or worse.”

Bruce smiled. “We won’t. We’ll take the data and leverage our connections to piecemeal the analysis. This is going to take a while—years, in fact—but it’ll be worth it. The viewers kept talking about space. We’ve only sent out a few probes and been to the moon. If whatever the viewers saw pertains to some kind of threat in space, then we’re not ready to deal with that. Not by a long shot.”

Eric frowned. “Aliens?” he asked with a half-committed chuckle.

Bruce shrugged. He didn’t want to venture any guesses at this point. His gut instinct was to get this program out of government hands, and the sooner that happened, the better, even at the expense of reputations. Their work had just begun, but it might be his grandkids who would deal with the brunt of it.

“Come on. Let’s get back inside. I need to give Kathryn a call to tell her I’ll be a while,” Bruce said.

“She’ll understand, even if she doesn’t like it,” Eric said.

Bruce nodded and made a mental note that he needed to make up these more frequent absences to his family.

Chapter 2

Chicago, Illinois, 2046

Illusions. Everyone had them. Some people needed them to get through the day and others needed them to wake up. The world was an infinitely less friendly place once awakened. That had happened for Zack nearly nine years ago in 2037 when he dropped out of MIT, despite being only a few credits short of getting his Ph.D. He was nineteen then and part of the Gifted Prodigies Program. He was lumped in with a small group of twelve other prodigies. All of them had demonstrated exceptional aptitude toward hard sciences and engineering disciplines. Everything had a pattern, and one of Zack’s talents was deciphering those patterns. 

He’d performed his first computer hack at age ten. His teacher had had it coming to her. She’d cheated on her husband and used social media to meet with the other guy, not to mention the pictures she’d posted. The school district’s homepage had never been so popular. Zack smiled at the innocence of that first hack. With a few keystrokes, he had slain the beast. Ms. Harding had been no one’s favorite teacher, and Zack had almost gotten away with it, but the local cyber crimes unit, or CCU, had traced the change back to his house. Even with the police in their living room, which was enough to scare a boy of ten, Zack could tell that his father wasn’t mad at him. The crime, as it were, hit close to home. After the police left, Zack’s father hugged him and said he was proud of him. A cheating spouse was a sore point for his father as well. It had been just Zack and his dad for a long time. He could barely remember his mother. 

Zack’s exploit caught the attention of one of his favorite teachers—Mr. Hammond of the Computer Engineering Department. Zack learned that despite breaking the law, which he had ultimately done, there was such a thing as social justice that people respected, even if they weren’t allowed to say it openly. Mr. Hammond had taken Zack’s hobby to a whole new level, and Zack had become much better at covering his tracks.

Zack’s attention was pulled from this reverie as the coffee-timer in his kitchen blared its golden herald that the brew was done. Some people used supplements to get that early jump in the mornings or to burn the midnight oil, but Zack enjoyed coffee. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the bare walls of his apartment, pulling him back to the past and Saturday mornings with his father. They’d never been rich by anyone’s standards. His father had worked as an auto tech, repairing computer systems that ran in cars. Cars used to need just mechanics, but the smarter they got, the more attention they needed to keep them in good working order. One of his father’s few indulgences had been gourmet coffee, which they ground themselves.

Zack poured his cup of ambition and added cream and sugar. Not real sugar. God no. Heaven forbid. Sugar was poison; everyone knew that. Even though it seemed that his wiry frame should be able to handle sugar, his bio chip said otherwise. His genes indicated a tendency toward diabetes and obesity, so he avoided most sugars. He supposed that twenty or thirty years ago he would have been the fat kid diagnosed with diabetes and put on medicine that might have caused more harm than good. Not even he could argue with his own genome. Maybe he would hack that someday.

He went over to his makeshift work area. Most people had living rooms, but Zack’s apartment was a jungle of electronics. Some things he had built himself and others he had purchased. He sold some of the things he made to amateur hackers. The money was enough to get by on and didn’t garner much attention, which he avoided in his line of work. 

The two-dimensional holographic display showed multiple bronze-colored flat screens that were slightly transparent. Each window had data streams running the various tasks and traces he had going. Zack stared at the screen without really registering what he was looking at. He had been feeling a bit nostalgic lately. This tended to happen when he approached the anniversary of his father’s death. He’d been away at MIT at the time, almost on the eve of getting his Ph.D. on Adaptive Systems and Artificial Intelligence. The accident report had said an electrical short stemming from a faulty battery stopped his father’s heart while he was running diagnostics on someone’s Ford. Despite the EMTs’ best efforts, they couldn’t revive him. Zack felt a slight flutter deep in his stomach. It had been over ten years, and it still got to him. Every September. He raised his cup of coffee and nodded to the sky. 

Zack had done his own investigation into the flaw that had taken his father away from him. The faulty wiring had been due to a manufacturing defect. At first he’d thought it was the fault of the car company cutting corners and saving money, but he’d been wrong. While there were different automakers out there, the principles for battery technology used in all of them were the same. The source for such principles led back to DARPA, but it was the battery maker that was responsible for the defect—something Zack exposed despite that corporation’s best efforts. 

Between big corporations and the military, MIT was a place for both recruitment and monitoring. When Zack had found out how much people like himself were being monitored, he began poking around at how deep the rabbit hole went, and he hadn’t liked what he’d found. Freedom was an illusion. He, in essence, woke up. Everyone was a prisoner of some sort—imprisoned either by crushing debt, a thankless job, or some other marketing that told them to want something they didn’t need. The rich weren’t any freer than the poor. It was then that he decided to walk away from everything he’d ever known and become anonymous. In ten years, he’d never owned any property other than the clothes on his back. The lease he had on his apartment was sublet, which he paid for in cash. He moved around a lot. What had started out as an investigation into the death of his father had turned into a crusade against the people who were in control. He took his time, gathered information, and uncovered enough dirt to bring those running the corporations and banks to their knees. No system was totally secure, and no one had been able to trace what he’d done back to him. Kick enough rocks over and you’d be sure to find something. The code he’d written during his time at MIT was still being used for securing anything from bank transactions to a Fortune 100 company’s crown jewels. 

His computer chimed, driving the remnant morning fog from him. One of his traces had finished running its subroutine, and the window was brought into prominence onscreen.

“All right, let’s see what we’ve got here,” Zack said, and sipped his coffee.

He’d been poking around companies that specialized in disaster recovery and data backups. He pulled up the directory of a storage array and went to work. He didn’t open any files, as that would trigger an alert that would appear in some security operations center, which may or may not be ignored. A couple of directories held file types he hadn’t seen in a long time. The FITS file type had been used by NASA to store images, as well as scientific data. It was positively ancient by current standards, but the names of the files intrigued him. There were directories for pre- and post-processing, along with one for shared. The name New Horizons kept popping up. He executed some code that would break the data down and encrypt the bits. The data would then be copied to multiple public mirrors used for storage. Then, later on, one of his other bots would collect it. The mirrors were located throughout the world, and his program would literally break the files apart, sending the pieces in all directions. Nothing would be able to trace them, and the partial data would appear as junk on the mirrors. Junk data would be deleted as part of normal operating procedures, and, let’s face it, no one really secured the trash. It was likely that whatever security operations center was monitoring this company’s data would never even sense the breach.

Since he had time, he made himself some breakfast. Eggs and bacon. If there was a god, surely bacon was one of mankind’s most precious gifts. Chocolate for women, bacon for men. 

Zack piped through his news feeds, on which the spaceship called Athena kept appearing in the headlines. Athena was the result of a multinational, joint space agency project to build a long-range ship constructed and fabricated entirely in space. Robots and drones did most of the work. Athena was slated to go to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, in the next few months. While Zack could appreciate the engineering that went into the construction of such a massive effort, he had no desire to leave Earth. Space was a one-way trip to a quick death as far as he was concerned. 

Zack checked his watch. It had been about an hour, more than enough for his latest data dump to process. He logged into the remote systems he used to retrieve data. A quick glance at his connection told him this system was located somewhere in Australia. Someone would have to back-trace him through so many nodes that only an actual machine could discern the pattern of where he was operating from. Even then, most security firms didn’t have access to comms satellites. 

Zack spent the next few hours going through the data he found. One of those things was New Horizons, a spacecraft that gained some notoriety in 2015 for being the first to fly near the planet Pluto. Nine years to get there. No wonder the program quickly faded to obscurity, which explained why he’d never heard of it. The manned mission to Mars was on everyone’s mental road map as one of mankind’s pivotal achievements, right up there with the lunar landings of the Apollo program of the 1960s. 

The raw preprocessing files were encrypted at a level for the truly paranoid at the time, something grade school kids could crack as part of their school project by today’s standards. Algorithmic encryption was a thing of the past. The directory held more image files. Once again, the names of the files caught his attention. There were numerous Pre-NASA and Scrubbed NASA references. Whoever had named these files hadn’t thought they would be accessed by an unauthorized user. Oh well, that was where the secrets were.

Zack brought up one of the preprocessed image files, and his mouth fell open. The image was a close-up of a region just south of Pluto’s equator. Nestled between two icy peaks was some type of structure. The image was tagged to bring attention to it, and the grainy structure was circled. Along the top of the image was a faint word for the software used to process the image. Zack expected it to say NASA, but instead it read Dux Corporation. 

Oh crap!

Zack surged to his feet. Dux Corporation was a military contractor that had its fingers dipped into everything. He’d come across multiple references to them over the years, and he knew enough to avoid them. They didn’t own New Horizons or the satellite that had sent the images back to Earth. What they did own was the software that processed the image. Zack brought up the image NASA had released to the public and compared it with the Pre-NASA marked image. Those sneaky, manipulative bastards. Dux Corporation had been sitting on the biggest discovery in the history of mankind for the past thirty-one years: proof of an alien structure on Pluto. Zack’s brain raced, thinking of the implications. The space agencies of the world pushed farther and farther into space, from mining asteroids to experimenting with maneuvering asteroids onto Mars. No one really cared if they miscalculated and sent a mineral-rich asteroid into the lifeless planet. They had even brought one near the moon. But no one had gone back to study Pluto. He did a few quick checks. After New Horizons, it was as if all the space agencies had begun focusing elsewhere.

They didn’t know.

Someone at Dux Corp must have decided the world wasn’t ready. Zack glanced out the window, expecting heavily armed men to come busting through. While a normal security firm wouldn’t be able to trace him back through satellite channels, a military contractor would have no issue doing so. He needed to move fast. His location was compromised, and they were probably already on his trail. A blast to major news outlets should help. He did a quick write-up for the images. There were more files in other directories, some referencing events from much earlier—all the way back to the 1980s. There was more to this than an alien structure on Pluto. There was a pattern here, and he almost kicked himself for not seeing it on his own. Humanity was being pushed to travel farther into space, but why? Space travel was a societal obsession fueled by a marketing machine that used every angle from scientific research to entertainment.

After he uploaded the images, the information would spread like wildfire. The news media would have no choice but to give it attention. Likely they would try to spin it as the latest in conspiracy theory. But the right people would learn of this and know he had their secrets. He had to run. 

Zack sent the upload. Then all the data windows came down at once as his purge routine ran its course, deleting everything and overwriting whatever was left. Nothing would be recoverable, but the important data was still out there. He had to move. He walked out of his apartment with just a backpack loaded with the clothes he could carry and untraceable credit chits. There was a bus station nearby. He’d head there.

Zack exited the building and came onto the busy streets where something immediately felt off. There was "normal" and then there was "too normal." Delivery bots flew overhead, racing to their next delivery. He had picked this neighborhood because of the high traffic, be it on foot or in a car. He glanced around, but couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong. No one gave him a passing glance. Zack pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and started at a brisk pace down the street. The bus station was only a few blocks away. Despite his own self-assurances, he started to jog.

Overhead he heard the high-pitched whine of a rotorless chopper heading in his direction. Zack turned to go back the way he’d come, and another chopper was hovering in that direction. Black unmarked cars appeared out of nowhere, and hardened men exited the vehicles with their weapons pointed at him. They didn’t close in. Just waited. 

That’s it, I’m dead, Zack thought. The breath caught in his chest. A large man dressed in black detached himself from the group. He removed his sunglasses, revealing intense dark eyes. The man looked as if he could snap Zack in half merely by thinking about it.

“Mr. Quick, we’d like to have a word with you,” he said.

Zack looked at him and back at the men surrounding him. Part of him wanted to run for it, but there was no way he could escape. Their muscles showed through their clothing. Any one of them could end him if they chose to do so. While he was wiry and enjoyed the occasional run, he knew he was no match for them. This is what I get for being careless. 

“Zack, calm down. We just want to talk. Let’s do this the easy way,” the man said.

People were starting to gather on the sidewalks to see what was happening. They weren’t going to kill him, not in front of all these people. Would they kill him if he went with them?

Zack pressed his lips together. “If I go with you, I’ll never be free again.”

The man held his hands up in a nonthreatening gesture. “As I said, we just want to talk. My orders are to bring you in unharmed. Please don’t make a scene.”

“Who are you?” Zack asked, and immediately regretted it. Any second now they would rush him, and it wouldn’t be gentle. Zack shook his head. He had no choice. They could have taken him by force if they’d wanted, and yet here they were asking him to come with them. What have I gotten myself into now?