Grasping The Future Read online

  Grasping The Future

  P.I.V.O.T. Lab Chronicles™ Book Nine

  Michael Anderle

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2020, 2021 LMBPN Publishing

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US Edition, February, 2021

  (Previously published as a part of the Megabook, No Time To Quit)

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64971-499-2

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-500-5

  The Grasping The Future Team

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Billie Leigh Kellar

  Dave Hicks

  Deb Mader

  Diane L. Smith

  Jeff Eaton

  Jeff Goode

  John Ashmore

  Kelly O’Donnell

  Kerry Mortimer

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  The Skyhunter Editing Team

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Books By Michael Anderle

  Connect with Michael Anderle

  Chapter One

  “Hey, man.” Nick came into the conference room balancing a precarious stack of sandwiches. “I brought you lunch.”

  Ben’s stomach rumbled. “Argh. I wish I could, but…they’re putting me under again today and it means no eating for a while beforehand.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll get these out of your vicinity, then.” He looked at the now-closed door and made one attempt to open it with his elbow before he stepped back and swung a foot up to press on the door handle.

  “I’ll help you.” Ben stood up and the usual mismatch of ability and coordination resulted. When he hit the table with his legs, he sighed.

  He had progressed significantly from where he’d been immediately after the climbing accident, but his coordination was still far from where he instinctively thought it was. During his recovery, he had spent hundreds of hours within the virtual reality world of PIVOT to strengthen his muscles and work on fine motor control. What he had achieved there was a good indication of what he could still achieve in the real world.

  It would merely take time.

  Despite his initial clumsiness, he moved his hand onto the door handle on the first attempt. When he watched his fingers, it was easier to close them around the metal and push it down. Then, he had to back away and pull the door open at the same time, which entailed a fair number of motions he had to accomplish simultaneously.

  Predictably, he hit himself on the head with the door more than once. It was good, he thought, that Prima wasn’t there to see him.

  “Thanks,” Nick said when it was finally open. Politely, he didn’t mention anything about his lack of coordination. “I’ll be back in a few, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. He wasn’t quite sure why the PIVOT engineer would want to talk to him, but there had been such a constant stream of medical evaluations that he’d probably forgotten about one of the follow-ups.

  Ben hobbled to the desk to glance at the job summaries he’d worked through yet again before Nick returned. After getting his PhD in Chemistry, he had been unwilling to play the political and research funding games of academia and had disdained corporate jobs.

  He hadn’t considered military or defense work. His outlook on military action had been that war movies were sometimes cool to watch but that running people into each other in a war of attrition was a stupid idea. He hadn’t understood why people would sign up to be on the ground for those conflicts, and he hadn’t been interested in discovering why either.

  That outlook was one of many things that had changed in the past few weeks. Confronted by enemies who were determined to use violence, he had learned that sometimes, there was no way to avoid a war of attrition. He had learned to strike quickly and decisively.

  And, by doing that, he had learned that you needed to do your research first. If you were blinded by a desire for vengeance—or even by a desire for justice—you could cause harm to innocent people.

  Ben had known for a long time that you couldn’t control what the world threw at you. What he had failed to appreciate was that situations weren’t take-it-or-leave-it. He had always been an or-leave-it kind of guy who sparked fights with a hard-headed and brutally honest approach and then ran when things blew up.

  Now, he was willing to de-escalate, defuse…and stay.

  You couldn’t change things if you weren’t there to fight for them.

  As a result, he now took a second look at a number of things. From jobs to relationships, he was constantly in new territory. His treatment at the PIVOT Labs had been funded by their parent company, Diatek, a major player in defense contracting. Anna Price, the CEO of Diatek, had looked at Ben’s resume while he was inside the virtual world and had decided to send him job openings she’d found.

  As a thank you, he tried to give them a fair study and assessment.

  He looked up when Nick came in. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” The man stood in the doorway. “I forgot to ask if you wanted any company. I saw you sitting here in the dark, and…” He shrugged.

  “I could use a break, honestly.”

  “Do you want to go outside? It smells like cigarettes and pee but it is fresh air. Allegedly.”

  “First, don’t go into advertising.” Ben laughed despite himself. “And no, but not because of the smoke. I merely don’t want to smell food.”

  “I can understand that.” Nick came in and sat. “Are you looking at job openings?

  “Yeah. Apparently, that’s a thing.” He rubbed his head. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to all of you that this treatment is being covered, that I’m not being…bankrupted. Not that I had anything for them to take. Blood from a stone. But when this is over, I’ll need to go back to the real world and that’s…”

  The engineer nodded and leaned back in his chair. Ben at first thought he was ignoring him, then realized that he was thinking.

  “I think the ‘real world’ is kind of a made-up concept,” he said finally.

  “Oh? Do tell.” He started—purely out of habit—his series of hand exercises. To so
meone who didn’t know what he’d been through, he looked like he was compulsively tapping his fingers on the table in a specific, staccato rhythm. The movements were still jerky but each day, he grew closer to doing them smoothly without looking at them.

  “Yeah.” Nick slouched in his chair and looked at him. “Have you ever noticed that when people say, ‘you have to learn how to live in the real world,’ they aren’t talking about the world. They’re talking about a specific compromise they had to make or a dream they gave up?”

  “I—holy shit.” Ben’s fingers stopped moving. “Holy shit, I hadn’t noticed that. Huh.”

  “Yeah.” The engineer gave him a gleam of a smile. “So I guess my point is, Jacob and Amber and I have lived the dirt-poor lifestyle, we’ve faced jail time for this, we worked out of this teeny tiny lab that we came in on the weekends to clean ourselves, and now, we have a shiny new lab and assistants. But even when things were grim, we weren’t living in the ‘real world’ everyone talked about because we were still trying to make this work.”

  He frowned. “Wait, hold up—jail time?”

  “Ohhh.” Nick sighed, then looked panicked. “I don’t want you to think we were being shady or anything. Also, I’m not sure I’m legally able to talk about it. Very long story short, PIVOT is a treatment that could take some market share and it turns out that people get nasty when profits are on the line.”

  Ben shook his head.

  “It’s fine, we have lawyers now.” The man shrugged. “The point is, when you think of the real world, what do you think about? What’s the concession you think you have to make?”

  “Working a job I hate,” he said. “Settling down somewhere, the same old thing every day, and stupid fights with coworkers that drag out for years. Work that doesn’t…do anything.”

  “There you go.” Nick spread his hands. “That’s not merely an objective look at the real world, it’s a set of concessions you don’t want to make in your life. So how do you make sure you don’t do the same old thing every day? It sounds like it could be consultant work or something—you know, traveling, meeting new coworkers, working on new projects. Or maybe you do work the same job but you travel every month. You see?”

  “I do.” Ben started his finger exercises again. “Okay, yeah.” He looked at the jobs and blew a breath out. “I think part of it is…all that stuff I don’t like, what if I needed to do it because the organization did good stuff—necessary stuff someone had to do?”

  “Ah, now you come to an actual dilemma.” The engineer grinned at him. “And I have my opinions on the matter but I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s uncharacteristic, I know. I’ve been informed that I’m the ‘nosy old biddy’ of the team, and it’s a responsibility I take seriously but sometimes, you have to let the young solve their own problems.” He mimed being old.

  “How very wise of you,” Ben said and snickered.

  “I think so,” Nick said peaceably. “Should we get you ready to go into the game?”

  He checked the clock. “Probably.”

  “Your coordination is certainly improving. You looked up exactly to where you wanted to and then back down.”

  “I did, didn’t I? Huh.” Ben gathered the papers, a process that was decidedly less graceful than his glance at the clock. He managed to get all of them into a folder—admittedly, not all facing the same way—and stood. “So you haven’t heard from the doctor yet about exact program specifications?”

  “Not yet. I get the sense that two PTs are hashing something out.”

  “So, two experts can’t agree on how to proceed,” he said. “That’s comforting.”

  “They might agree and they’re simply fine-tuning,” the engineer told him. “Don’t leap to negative conclusions.”

  “I’ll do what I want,” he told him.

  “Of course you will.” Nick held open the door with a grin.

  The two men progressed slowly down the hallway. The lab was, as always, buzzing with activity. There were several patients in the pods at present, almost all of them individuals who had been chosen to gain an idea of baseline physical reactivity to the virtual reality.

  Two others seemed to be something different and multiple people monitored the feeds at all times. He wasn’t quite sure what the situation was there, but no one seemed particularly panicked so he wasn’t worried.

  Near his pod, Dr. DuBois and Jacob were deep in discussion. When they saw the two men, they waved them over.

  “How are you feeling?” Jacob asked Ben.

  “Hungry.”

  “Okay, then let’s get you into the pod.” The man checked his watch. “No food since last night, right?”

  “Yes,” he said plaintively.

  “Then, I’d say we’re good to go. Come this way and we’ll get you changed and prepped.”

  Thirty interminable minutes of prep later, he lay in the pod. It was difficult to feel comfortable with a feeding tube and multiple monitors, but he was already sliding out of this reality. He watched Nick counting down with his fingers and smiled.

  The instant transition to freezing cold and wet was abrupt and jarring.

  “What the fuck?”

  “It’s good to see you again, too,” Prima said.

  Ben wrapped his arms around his head to try to avoid the rain somewhat, but there was no good way to do that. The wind gusted in multiple directions and he got drenched no matter how he stood. It might be dusk or dawn, as there was a certain amount of light behind the leaden clouds, but there wasn’t much light and the rain didn’t do him any favors.

  He turned slowly to study his surroundings. A forest behind him was surprisingly dark and made noises he could hear even over the rain. He stood on a road, which meant he might get somewhere by going in one direction or another, and in the distance…lights, he realized

  With no point in waiting, he set off. His shirt was soaked through and stuck to his body, his cloak did do not a damned thing for him, and his boots were filling with water.

  Prima, he thought, was probably enjoying the hell out of this.

  “Tell me that’s an inn.”

  “It is indeed an inn. The one Orien mentioned to you.”

  “If I recall, he also said it barely deserved the name.”

  “He did. And he was correct.”

  “Great.” he sighed. “Well, as long as it’s warm and dry.”

  “You’ll be disappointed.”

  “You have to be kidding me. No? Seriously, fuck this.” Ben wrapped his cloak a little tighter—why, he wasn’t sure—and struggled onward.

  Chapter Two

  Initially, coming from the isolated island and into the rest of the PIVOT world was exciting. Caravans sometimes passed Jamie and Taigan. The cavalcades kept to themselves, however, and made a point of emphasizing the weapons carried by their guards.

  It took them a while to realize that they were worried about a robbery.

  “Do we seriously look like competent robbers?” she demanded and frowned at her brother.

  “Nope,” he said after a moment of thought. “Only nope for me but certainly nope for you. My clothing is halfway respectable. Yours is…a burlap sack?”

  “Well, excuse me, Mr. I Have A Belt Over My Burlap Sack.” She rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t mind a more comfortable set of clothes, though. And a bath. Are there baths here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe? Prima?”

  “There are baths here. Why wouldn’t there be?”

  “Well, I always woke up clean so baths didn’t seem necessary,” the girl pointed out.

  “Ah. Right.”

  After a pause, an icon appeared in front of them on the road. It was the size of a full-length mirror and displayed her in a much better selection of clothes.

  “See if you can make these for yourself,” Prima said.

  “Uh…” Taigan looked at Jamie.

  “She never had me do this,” he replied.

  “Righ
t.” She looked at the clothes, then at herself. While she could picture the garments, she couldn’t seem to replace those she presently wore. She tried to think about how it would feel to wear the new ones, which looked much softer, and got nowhere. “Prima, I don’t think—”

  Jamie disappeared and the world took on a bluish hue.

  “Dammit,” she said. “I world-shifted again, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.” Prima neither explained nor elaborated.

  “Bah. Well, if I’m not going to be in the real world…” Taigan dressed in a sweeping gown of blue silk. After a second’s thought, she added a necklace of fist-sized diamonds and swept her hair into a pile on top of her head. “Yes, hello, I am Princess Taigan of—ooooh, can I have a sword down my back like Wonder Woman did?” One appeared, nestled between her shoulder blades, and she craned to look over her shoulder. “Aww, yeah. I’m badass and—oh, hey, Jamie.”

  Her brother stared at her, his jaw hanging.

  “What?” She looked at the dress. “Oh, right.”

  “You, uh…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think you can appreciate how much seeing you in a dress cut down to there is bumming me out.”

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she retorted.

  “Oh, yeah? Then maybe I’ll wander around shirtless. Or…in a banana hammock.”

  “Ew, no, stop!”

  “I’ll do it.” Jamie jabbed a finger at her. “Get a dress with a front, or so help me—”