Chapter 3
Judging from the appearance of giant swords, his calmness around the undead, and his little conversation on the phone, you, the reader, had probably guessed that Marcus wasn’t an office worker who gave over the phone maintenance to toaster users. No, his real life is a bit more complicated than that. Marcus is in truth an operative for a freelance organization called The Science Theory Covenant. Their job is to take technology ideas that do not work and use theoretical science that borders fiction to make it work. It is them that keep your microwave ovens from ripping holes in space and keep your refrigerators from causing second Ice Ages.
Marcus was a drafting specialist, and he made the schematics for half of their creations. Whenever the government needed something built, Marcus was the first to receive their plans and the last to see the mechanism before it was tested. Remember the conversation at dinner? When Marcus joked around about his office blowing up? It wasn’t a joke. One of the new toys did not pass by Marcus’s eyes, and some moron activated it in the lab. The resulting explosion released another experiment, which was supposed to cure cancer, into the atmosphere. It happened once before, and their latest project was meant to protect them from the cure.
Said project, “Titanstone” as they called it, was meant to replace every cell in a human’s body with “Super Cells” created by the lab’s bioengineer, Isaac. He made it possible to change how one looks when activating the Titanstone and everyone in the lab did as they pleased. The super cells would give them immunity to any disease, any virus, and any disorder of the human body. When the cells died, the other cells would absorb them and remake the old ones, rendering a being ageless. Such things would make a person immortal.
Of course, there were risks. One such risk was an error like improper size or pieces of your mind getting ripped apart. Marcus warned of the dangers of untested “fail-safes” as he called them. The night before Marcus left the lab, he changed the scale to something more resembling titans to make the name more accurate. Apparently, his little change probably killed whoever was working that night and probably caused the user to spontaneously combust. It happened before, and it may have happened again. Marcus wondered if his stone survived the lab’s deconstruction.
As he ran around the garage, trying to explain how his little secret was kept from them for so long. They all grabbed anything useful and piled it into the Camaro’s trunk. Three minutes later, Marcus felt a light tremor and knew that his friend was close at hand. He yelled, “When this door opens, there’s no going back. Are you prepared?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Sorry I asked,” Marcus said as he pressed the emergency release of the garage door. He jumped on the hood of the car and used his sword to dismember anything on the other side. Dirty hands tried to grab him, each with the need to get something into their mouths. He cut them all to bits; his blade slid through the oncoming crowd like a knife through air. There were much fewer here than he expected, and he guessed that the undead dispersed in search of easier prey. When they were free, Marcus’s father slammed on the gas and Marcus jumped into the back seat next to Liz.
As they pulled out of their driveway, the same car that almost killed Marcus earlier that day almost collided with their car as he drove by. Marcus got a good look at his face and saw that he was scared out of his mind. Marcus wondered why he was in a hurry, and looked in the direction he came from. He saw a glint of gold pull away from that direction and told his father to take a right. They drove toward the gold and as they approached it, it pulled itself away from their vision behind the next turn again. It was getting annoying, and they pulled around the final turn before the road turned to a strait line.
Marcus’s father slammed on the breaks and almost flipped it over. He turned off the car. Marcus wondered whether his family was afraid or awe stricken, for the great beast before them was both terrifying, massive, and beyond the natural boundaries of beauty.
Marcus was a drafting specialist, and he made the schematics for half of their creations. Whenever the government needed something built, Marcus was the first to receive their plans and the last to see the mechanism before it was tested. Remember the conversation at dinner? When Marcus joked around about his office blowing up? It wasn’t a joke. One of the new toys did not pass by Marcus’s eyes, and some moron activated it in the lab. The resulting explosion released another experiment, which was supposed to cure cancer, into the atmosphere. It happened once before, and their latest project was meant to protect them from the cure.
Said project, “Titanstone” as they called it, was meant to replace every cell in a human’s body with “Super Cells” created by the lab’s bioengineer, Isaac. He made it possible to change how one looks when activating the Titanstone and everyone in the lab did as they pleased. The super cells would give them immunity to any disease, any virus, and any disorder of the human body. When the cells died, the other cells would absorb them and remake the old ones, rendering a being ageless. Such things would make a person immortal.
Of course, there were risks. One such risk was an error like improper size or pieces of your mind getting ripped apart. Marcus warned of the dangers of untested “fail-safes” as he called them. The night before Marcus left the lab, he changed the scale to something more resembling titans to make the name more accurate. Apparently, his little change probably killed whoever was working that night and probably caused the user to spontaneously combust. It happened before, and it may have happened again. Marcus wondered if his stone survived the lab’s deconstruction.
As he ran around the garage, trying to explain how his little secret was kept from them for so long. They all grabbed anything useful and piled it into the Camaro’s trunk. Three minutes later, Marcus felt a light tremor and knew that his friend was close at hand. He yelled, “When this door opens, there’s no going back. Are you prepared?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Sorry I asked,” Marcus said as he pressed the emergency release of the garage door. He jumped on the hood of the car and used his sword to dismember anything on the other side. Dirty hands tried to grab him, each with the need to get something into their mouths. He cut them all to bits; his blade slid through the oncoming crowd like a knife through air. There were much fewer here than he expected, and he guessed that the undead dispersed in search of easier prey. When they were free, Marcus’s father slammed on the gas and Marcus jumped into the back seat next to Liz.
As they pulled out of their driveway, the same car that almost killed Marcus earlier that day almost collided with their car as he drove by. Marcus got a good look at his face and saw that he was scared out of his mind. Marcus wondered why he was in a hurry, and looked in the direction he came from. He saw a glint of gold pull away from that direction and told his father to take a right. They drove toward the gold and as they approached it, it pulled itself away from their vision behind the next turn again. It was getting annoying, and they pulled around the final turn before the road turned to a strait line.
Marcus’s father slammed on the breaks and almost flipped it over. He turned off the car. Marcus wondered whether his family was afraid or awe stricken, for the great beast before them was both terrifying, massive, and beyond the natural boundaries of beauty.