"JAYCE" now available on Amazon!
Still searching for a Christmas present for that YA-loving teen/adult in your life?
My debut novel tells the story of Jayce Loman, a teenage genius who hijacks an untested time machine into a future where his is the most hated name in history.
Why not support a writer you like (ME!) and get a sweet-action gift for your bibliophilic friend?
My six-year-old says this is the best book I've ever written and then read out loud to him. Don't take his word for it, though. He's only six... what does he know? Find out for yourself by reading the first chapter, below.
Chapter 1
It
was hot and sticky that night, but Jayce was inside. Where he was it was cool
and dark, and there was an endless corporate-air hum throbbing through the
duct-work, so that even in his thick black pants and pullover he was hardly
sweating as he walked down the long, narrow hallway. His shoes were soft-soled
and he stepped lightly, barely making a sound beneath the tangle of thick
cables lining the walls and masking much of the track lighting overhead, so
that the space was filled with weird, snaking shadows.
Jayce looked like what you’d expect
from a teenager, I guess: medium-height, medium-dark hair, medium build. But
there was a look in his eyes that—no… wait. No, I’m not gonna let you see his
face, just yet. We’ll start off behind him, watching him pace away from us into
the jungle of shadows, his head silhouetted in an eerie, blue glow. We’ll look
at him from behind for a moment, because I want you to get a sense of who he
was first, without focusing too much on what he looked like. So note, if you
will, the black and neon-yellow backpack. Neon not to be trendy or ironic, but
just him, because even then, I think
he had it in him to value the old, neglected things that nobody else seemed to
want. He was sixteen at the time, and even though I’ve described him as
medium-build, he thought of himself as smaller than average, and made up for
this imagined deficiency by being smarter than everybody else, even when he
wasn’t.
“Turn left up ahead,” a young,
female voice said, “you should be almost—”
“Yeah,” Jayce answered, cutting her
off, “but I—” he stopped mid-sentence and ducked into an alcove on his left,
twiddling his blue-lit fingers as he did, so that his glowing blue halo
disappeared. He pressed into the shadows as a beam of light played across from
a side passage up the hall. Jayce could suddenly hear his own breathing and it
sounded sharp and loud over the heavy clump of boots, as a security guard
stepped into view at the “T” up ahead.
The guard stopped and shone his
flashlight in Jayce’s direction. He, too, wore all black. But his was the
jackbooted, carrying-an-assault-rifle-like-my-third-arm sort of blackness. The
kind of blackness you don’t want to meet in the middle of the night in a
shadowy hallway, down deep in the bowels of a government installation where you
don’t have permission to be. The guard took a step toward Jayce. Jayce’s heart
beat a little faster, but there was nowhere for him to go. He scrunched himself
hard into the darkness.
The guard lifted his arm, exposing a
fitted black band on his wrist. Projecting out from that band was a light-blue,
glowing pattern of circuitry that seemed to trace the veins on the back of his
hand and then extend out along his fingers. He scissored his index and middle
finger and a rectangular holographic screen appeared, floating over his forearm
as he held it out in front of himself. On the screen was a maze of passageways,
and at an intersection of two of those passageways blinked a green dot. The
guard took another step toward Jayce, and the green dot moved along with him, marking
his place. There were a few other green dots, as well, but none nearby. The
guard moved his fingers again and the rectangle disappeared with a small,
electronic blip. Jayce carefully
exhaled as the guard resumed his walk off down the other arm of the “T.” He
waited a moment, then leaned out into the hallway. Clear.
Jayce had a thin, angular face, with
a smattering of acne. He had eyes that sparked with a deep intelligence, but
seemed hooded and withdrawn. Maybe because of his dark eyebrows, or maybe just
because he was always lost, a little, deep down inside himself. He lifted his
own wrist, revealing a band similar to the guard’s, and scissored his fingers.
The electronic holo-circuitry on the back of his hand lit up brighter, and he
began to move his fingers in quick, practiced twitches. A light blinked on a
small, black electronic device in his ear, and then his blue halo reappeared,
as a holographic display extended out from the earpiece to wrap around in front
of his face in a translucent screen, a few inches from his nose.
On one side of that screen was the
video-image of a teenage girl, freckled, and with an unconventional appeal
found not so much in her fair features as in the direct, unaffected confidence
of her manner. Under her feed was the name “Aerli,” and she was piping mad.
“What the HELL, dude?!” she said,
the moment she appeared (hers was the voice he’d been talking to, before).
“There was a guard. I had to cut you
off.”
“What!? Did he see you?”
“No, of course not. He’s gone. But look
what I found.” Jayce turned to the back of the little alcove he’d ducked into,
to where a ladder ran down the wall to a hinged, metal grate on the floor.
Aerli made a dismissive sound.
“Why weren’t you running that
tracker program I sent you?”
Jayce moved his fingers again, and a
holographic rectangle identical to the guard’s projected out in front of him, a
few feet from his face-screen. “I thought you were gonna ping me when they got
close,” he said. “I can’t watch everything.”
“I could,” Aerli said. And she meant
it.
For a moment, her confidence
bothered Jayce, but he refocused his attention on the ladder, and on an
electronic pad sitting to the right of it at about head height.
“Well, check this out,” he said, and
when he moved his fingers again, the pad lit up. He lifted his wrist in front
of the pad, and his wrist-band projected out a levitating holographic sphere
that quickly coalesced into a remarkably solid, remarkably real-looking human
eyeball, which floated at the end of his beam in front of the glowing security
pad. A thin beam of light projected out from the pad and scanned the eyeball.
Then there was a quick CLICK from somewhere in the wall, and an echoing click
down at Jayce’s feet as the built-in grate-lock popped open.
“How ‘bout that?” he asked. “How do
you like them, uh—”
“Not bad,” Aerli’s projection
admitted. “Now, let’s get going before that guard comes back.”
Jayce nodded. He bent, and lifted
the grate up and to one side. It was heavier than he’d expected and almost
slipped his fingers, but he managed to hold on. Jayce took a deep, relieved
breath. He nodded to himself, then adjusted the straps on his backpack and
climbed down the ladder.
Down, down, down into the darkness he
descended, until he started to wonder if the ladder would ever end. He paused,
looking down through the small pool of light cast by his face-screen and past
it, into the dark below.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he
muttered to himself (for in addition to his keen scientific mind, Jayce was
also a collector of old stories).
“What’s that?” Aerli asked.
“Nothing. I’mma turn you off for
while I’m in here, in case it echoes.”
“No, wait!” Aerli answered, “I wanna see what—”
But he moved his fingers, and she was gone.
When he finally did reach the bottom, Jayce
found himself facing a large, metal-walled vent. Using his wrist bracelet, he
pulled up another map—this time of the ducts—and started off down what became a
successively narrower sequence of ducts, until he was crawling on his hands and
knees. He reached another ladder and climbed up it for a while, and then across
again. At a junction, he paused to check his map, turned right for another five
yards, and removed a metal panel from between his hands and knees. Jayce
carefully let himself down onto the metal, lattice-work framing of a ceiling.
He froze, listening. Then he began to quickly move his fingers, scrolling
through lines of code on his face screen until he found what he wanted.
In the room below, the lights on the various
alarm-sensors blipped, but remained on.
Above, Jayce pulled up his map of passageway
schematics, noted the locations of the green guard-dots, and then gently pried
up a ceiling-panel beneath his feet. He set it to one side and, grabbing the
metal edges of the frame, dropped himself down through the ceiling. As he fell,
he scraped against the edge of a low, shiny-black counter, which deflected him
so that he landed a little too heavily on one ankle.
Jayce stifled a cry. He waited, listening for
the white noise of the vents to join the electronic whirrs of this room and
fill the space with an approximation of silence. When they did, he stood and
looked around.
He saw that he was directly in the middle of
the most advanced laboratory he could have imagined. It was a large space—perhaps
a couple hundred feet across in each direction, with a ten-foot ceiling covered
with matte-white ceiling panels that concealed the industrial-steel, I-beam
structure of the building. The full length of the wall to his left was
comprised of floor-to-ceiling glass in a metal-grid framework, with doors that
opened out at intervals into a passageway running the length of the room and
off to who-knows-where in each direction. The other walls were all a
featureless, unadorned white. Long rows of counters went off in each direction
from where he stood, and took up much of the room, with the exception of a
smaller, shadowy area off to his right. And while some of the work-stations had
the beakers, sinks and test-tubes you’d expect of a chemist’s lab, most were covered
with intricate, advanced electronic and computer circuitry, flashing all over
in little blips of holographic light and energy that moved and swirled around
pieces of machinery Jayce had until then only dreamed of. Something about the
space just emanated “Top Secret.” From the endless tubing wrapped in
intestine-like cordage around every corner and between every station, to the
glowing objects that were all interconnected throughout the room, it had the
cumulative effect of a place dedicated to the study of confiscated alien
technologies. But while the lab was secret and the property of the government,
there was nothing extra-terrestrial about it. This was the future, plain and
simple.
Jayce indulged himself with a long, low whistle
as he took all this in. He thought about turning Aerli back on so he’d have
someone to gloat to about it, but he didn’t know if he could get her signal way
down here, and he was still a little annoyed at what he saw as her unjustified
doubt.
Instead, he limped across the darkness of the
room, touching whatever he came to, in the light-fingered way of an acolyte
experiencing his first brush with the sacred objects of his respective
religion’s holiest of holies. And all the while, without ever really noticing
that he was doing it, Jayce was working his way through the counters toward the
darker side of the room, following the general flow and movement toward which
all the tubes and wires seemed to be oriented.
That side of the room was bathed in deep
shadow, but when he stepped between the last two counters and out into the
darkness, the room’s bio-aware system brought up a low, generalized glow,
revealing the Machine.
The Machine was a vaguely armchair-shaped beast
sprouting an insane tangle of tubes and wires and hydraulic apparatus, which
spread out not only to the various lab-stations around the room, but into the
floor and other walls, as well. A particularly dense shaft of this entanglement
protruded from the back of the Machine, running out like a thick, tumescent
umbilical cord to disappear into a far wall still shrouded in shadow.
“Ho-lay,” Jayce said, “She was not kidding.”
Jayce walked up to the Machine. He twiddled his
fingers, and a beam of light played out from his wrist over the surface of it,
highlighting various aspects—a control panel here, a lever or knob there. Jayce
began to work his fingers faster and faster, manipulating his way through lines
of code, until with a faint hum the Machine lit up, and a holographic
user-interface projected out in front of him.
“There you are, you little vixen,” Jayce said,
and he dimmed his face screen and lifted his hand to the interface, which he
began to manipulate directly. He muttered to himself as he went, speaking the
low incantation of those who’ve transcended computer literacy, past mastery
into the spaces where math, code, and physics all merge into a
barely-recognizable, alternate reality.
His easy confidence slipped for a moment, and
he wrinkled his brow in concentration. Jayce wormed his way further and further
into the digital guts of the machine, until with a low almost-growl it stopped
him, flashing an “ACCESS DENIED” message in friendly, oh-no-you-don’t blue.
“Shit!” Jayce spat. He brought his face-screen
back up, wondering for a moment if he should risk trying to get Aerli back.
“No. No… I got you,” he snarled at the machine,
and attacked the problem again. It took a few more tries, but then it said
“ACCESS GRANTED,” and he was in.
Jayce worked away intently at the machine’s
projected window, scanning through formulas and algorithms too complicated for
you or me to understand. For Jayce, it was child’s play… had been, in fact,
since he was a child. He scrolled through quickly, taking it all in at a
glance, and then… no.
“That’s not right” he said, as he backed away
from the Machine and scratched at his chin with his index finger.
Jayce stepped forward again and focused in on
one particular jumble of numbers, letters, and symbols. He dragged a hand to
expand the window, then began to grab bits of code and move them, re-arranging
and re-organizing faster and faster, as he sank deeper and deeper into what he
was doing. So deep, in fact, that he almost didn’t hear the sound of a clicking
door somewhere down the hallway outside the lab, and footsteps.
“Shit!” he spat again, and with a quick
hand-swipe shut down the machine and dove for cover behind a counter, just
before one of the glass lab doors opened to reveal a preoccupied, middle-aged
man in a white lab coat. The man paused in the doorway, feeling around in his
pockets and then up to his face, where he at last found the antique-looking
glasses he’d been searching for, pushed up into his hair. He giggled at himself
a little as he walked toward the Machine.
The man was somewhat aggressively heavy-set,
but he had a kind face. And although with his wild, uncontrolled hair he
perfectly fit the stereotype of the absent-minded scientist, it wasn’t just
abstracted preoccupation characterizing his behavior. There was also the sort
of gentle good humor generally found only in the best, most creative
minds—minds not too bound up in the fear of their own inadequacy to be able to
enjoy the exploration of the outer bounds of their ignorance.
I tell you all this because he will very
quickly become an important part of our story, and an important part of what
drove Jayce to do what he did and become what he became. So it is essential
that you know that he was a good man—or at least a man who knew his capacity to
be less than good, and fought against it. This is perhaps the best we can hope
for anyone.
Jayce was pressed hard against one of the low
counters, terrified that the man would notice the lights were up, or that he’d
messed with the code, or… or anything. He edged his way around to the other
side of the counter, keeping it between him and the man, as the man worked his
way across the room to the Machine.
Jayce saw a power cord dangling over the side
of the counter and carefully shuffled his way out and around it. But he failed
to account for his backpack, which somehow hooked the plug on the end of the
cord as Jayce slid past. Just as the man reached a hand up on top of the
Machine with an “Ah, there you are” and grabbed a small, tattered notebook,
Jayce’s backpack pulled the power cord tight, and the laser-solder at the other
end of it rolled off the counter to SMASH! onto the floor.
Jayce panicked, stood, and bolted for the door.
The man called out, “Jayce?”
Jayce slowed, but then kept going until the man
yelled out “Jayce!” a little louder, and with more authority. Jayce stopped. He
slowly turned and faced a man he knew very well.
“Hi, Uncle Glen,” he said.
Glen bounded across the room toward his nephew,
any traces of joviality vanishing as he grabbed Jayce by the arm and pulled him
to the floor.
- - -
Intrigued?
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