Chapter 1

It started out as just an ordinary day. Mom was passed out on the sofa. I should explain — Mom had gone into a serious depression after Father left. She would make sure that Charlie and I had food and clean clothes — I guess she cared. She just couldn't stand the times alone. So as usual, this morning she was passed out on the sofa after her date last night. Charlie and I had to get ourselves up, get ready for school and pack our lunches without making a sound loud enough to wake her up.

The school bus, when it finally arrived, was packed with all of the other kids from our side of town. Charlie found her usual seat with her friends. The only seat left for me was next to the biggest bully in the school, which I was loath to take. I stood in the aisle for a long time, hoping the bus driver wouldn't notice me standing there, but a delayed glance toward the front of the bus let me know that wasn't going to happen. The ol' witch was a stickler for the rules and wouldn't move the bus until everyone was seated.

I gingerly slid into the seat next to Billy, just letting the edge of my ass rest on the corner of the torn vinyl. As I expected, I got a sharp kick in my back from Billy's foot and ended up on the muddy floor, accompanied by a chorus of derisive laughter from the chumps in the seats around me. The same thing had happened yesterday and the day before and so on. It was my own personal version of "Groundhogs Day." It was going to be a long school year.

My name is Douglass, with two 's's, and a high school senior at age 14. Yes, I'm smart — so sue me. I'm also small for my age and mad as Hell at all of the abuse I get heaped upon me for what I am. It's not like I'm making it harder on the other students; I made a deal with the school a long time ago to separate my grades out from the rest of the class so that I wouldn't screw up the curve for the other kids, but that almost made things worse. Being the smallest kid in the school, not just my class, made me the target of anyone who was frustrated with their lot in life, I guess. And that included a lot of the teachers and staff.

Physical Education, or P.E. as it is called, was pure torture for me. I swear only sadists apply for jobs as P.E. teachers as I had never had one that didn't relish humiliating me in front of my classmates. Fortunately, after a particularly embarrassing episode last year — one that made YouTube — I settled out of court with the school district. I was excused from any and all P.E. for life.

Being what I am, a girlfriend was out of the question. Of course, up until last year, I hadn't given that particular gender any special thought, although recently, well, I knew all about hormones and stuff; I just wasn't prepared for them to be so overwhelming. I was beginning to be obsesses with girls. They intruded on my thoughts during the day and my dreams at night. Of course when a 9th grade girl dreamed of dating a senior, mine was not the image that came to her mind. And, with rare exception, a 9th grade girl's mind was not all that appealing to me.

The only bright spot in my school life, other than my sister Charlie, was my physics science class. Mr. Griggs was an anomaly among the faculty in that he actually knew what he was teaching. In a former life, he had been a physicist for some major engineering company and had a number of patents filed in his name. He donated the residual income from a couple of those to the school and had been able to fund a physics lab at the high school that was better than most university labs I had visited. I spent every free class and most afternoons working in the lab. If it hadn't been for the Math and English requirements I needed to graduate, I would have spent all day in that quiet sanctuary.

Charlie was a senior, too, but she was 18. She was smart, too, just not quite at my level. She was everything I wasn't and more. She was a cheerleader, Class President and very popular. If I hadn't been her brother, I think the daily torture I experienced would have been worse than it was. I never complained to her about any of the bullies, a fact which surprised a couple of her dates. She had dated a couple of jocks who had taken particular pleasure in making my life a living Hell before they had hooked up with her for a date. When she didn't say anything to them about their behavior, one or two of them had assumed it was OK to beat the shit out of me and had harassed me in front of her.

It was funny to watch their faces as the full fury and wrath of my sibling ascended upon their crotches. Charlie only knew one move and that was a swift kick in the gonads and she didn't pull her punches. The realization that they had screwed up generally flashed through their eyes milliseconds before they passed out from the extreme pain of their balls being mangled. But Charlie couldn't be around to protect me all the time, especially in the boy's restrooms. I was intimately familiar with each and every toilet in the school and several of the lockers. I had figured out how to get out of the lockers — it took me about two minutes to get out the first time when I was 12 years old — but it is harder to escape when someone is holding you upside down by your ankles and dunking your head into the swirling water. I had learned not to carry anything in my pockets, as I had lost two calculators and three house keys that way.

On this day I escaped from the confines of the bus without too much more damage. With Charlie there, none of the kids other than Billy did anything too overt as they all wanted their balls to remain undamaged. But they still managed the occasional clandestine kick or shove. I made the dash to my locker and slipped into my first class, English, just as the bell rang. Mrs. Bascom glared at me with a private little grin softening her harsh features. She seemed to know what I was going through — she hadn't turned as ugly as she was recently; she had been born ugly and had grown up ugly. But she was a good teacher and had a good heart. She had survived and so would I, but that knowledge didn't mean I had to like what happened to me while I was surviving.

I endured the class time and then the advanced Math class. The Math class was a new free-study style class for advanced students who had finished the regular curriculum, but still needed to fill the class time. Other than Charlie and I, there was only one other student in the class. There were several textbooks on advanced and theoretical math for us to work through, the idea being that we would finish one textbook during the year, then take a final. Charlie had started her second text book already; the other student was still on the second chapter of the first text. I didn't really have anything to do as I had done all the work including taking the final exams for this class over the summer vacation. I had tried to get out of the class, but they needed my butt in the seat for this hour so they could get the government's money.

I was finally able to run to the science building, my sanctuary. Mr. Griggs wasn't in yet, so I set up the labs for the first class of the afternoon. It wasn't normal for Mr. Griggs to be late, but it had happened before — he was dating the French teacher, Ms. Brisard, and sometimes he waited too long before leaving the teacher's lounge to get to the science building on time. So I didn't think too much about his tardiness.

When he hadn't arrived after lunch, I began to get concerned. I prepared to teach the lab — I had done that before — and started to look around for Mr. Griggs. I had just checked in his office and hadn't seen his coat and his keys when the bell rang for class. That wasn't unusual if he was over with Ms. Brisard, but he usually stopped by the lab first to see if everything was OK. He kept joking with me that because of some of my experiments, he half expected one day to just see a large crater where the lab was.

I ran through the lab with the bored students, helped a few of the slower groups, put out a fire started by a couple of idiot jocks and locked up after they had all left after class. It was 1:00 and I had the rest of the day to work on my own projects or to help Mr. Griggs on some of his projects.

I took the keys from Mr. Griggs desk and unlocked the door to his private lab. I thought perhaps he had gotten involved in something, but it was all quiet and dark. I locked his lab back up and put his absence out of my mind for the time being. I had a couple of knotty problems to solve on my own project and I was already focusing on those.

Mr. Griggs let me work on the second floor. This was a place for future expansion and additional classrooms, but as yet, it was just me and my equipment on the second floor. I had one project with a set of lasers Mr. Griggs and I had built from surplus military parts and I was fine tuning the output to reach power levels that were approaching the incredible. I could get it to blast through almost anything, but it was unstable and undependable after about 10 minutes. I had just gotten it to stabilize by adding a cooling fan. I had wanted to talk to Mr. Griggs about that, as that shouldn't have made a difference. But it did and I was stumped for a reason why it did what it did. I know you're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I was always looking anyway.

The other side of my lab was dedicated to some ceramic and magnetic superconductor projects. This was mostly tinkering on an odd theory I had had one night about the interrelationship between gravity, magnetic forces and time. For the past couple of months I was just playing around with three large ring magnets set at right angles to each other. I had just re-wrapped the wire around them last week. The 4 X 4 inch thick iron rings were two meters in diameter and were fixed in each of the X, Y and Z axes. It had been a bitch cutting the notches at the 90 degree intersections of them and then getting them all joined together, but Mr. Griggs had talked the shop teacher into letting one of the graduating seniors use this as his senior project for graduation. Mike had done a great job on it — I think he was relieved as he was looking at not graduating if he didn't complete a senior project. He was more of a 'hands-on' kind of guy and was hands-off the books. He wasn't dumb, but he had a tough time learning things in a classroom environment. But give him an engine or a piece of wood and he was a whiz.

Mike and I had developed a strange relationship, both of us somewhat in awe of the other's capabilities, but not jealous of them either. He was one of the few seniors who wouldn't torment me and I was one of the few people who didn't talk down to him. I wouldn't say we were friends, but we were comfortable around each other.

Mike helped Mr. Griggs and me around the lab when we needed muscles, like building the test beds and platforms we used for some of our projects. He had just finished the laser test bed last week and I was anxious to get it set up. I had been able to get the laser mounted and a couple of the mirrors, but that was all.

Things like wrapping the wire around the magnets were a bit beyond Mike's grasp at the moment, but he had watched me carefully, asking surprisingly apt questions. If we needed to do another wrap, I was going to let him do it.

Tonight I needed to finish connecting the wires inside the magnets and to do that I needed to be inside the sphere they created. It was weird inside those rings and I went in as little as possible; it gave me the creeps. I also had to strip to my skivvies and make sure I took off my Father's old watch. It was the only thing either Charlie or I had left of him and we shared it, she wore it one week; I wore it the next. Mom never talked about him — nobody talked about him. It was very frustrating, not knowing. Was he a hero? Was he a turd? Both Charlie and I had tried everything we knew how to do, and I knew how to do a lot. It was like he had just disappeared.

The watch was all we had, and my name. I was Douglass Kirby Hornsby, Jr. I guess I took after my Father; I was slender, brown hair, dark eyes and skin so fair I could get sunburn from a box of Raisin Bran. Charlie was a twin of Mom with blonde hair and blue eyes, both were around 5'6" or so, slender and each had a body that wouldn't quit, Mom's is just a bit more mature. Yeah, I know they're my sister and my Mom. I'm 14, not blind...

I was inside the sphere and had just finished with the wiring. My legs were cramping, sweat was dripping in my eyes and I wasn't paying attention to anything else in the room. I get pretty focused when I work. Charlie says I could shut out a stampede when I am thinking about a problem.

I heard the High Voltage Output generator spinning up and then the switches that powered up the magnets were flipped on, way too fast. I started to turn to see what was going on, but my muscles wouldn't work. My mind noted that this was an odd effect of being inside the three magnetic fields. I also noted that I was no longer touching the bottom rings but was now suspended in an approximate fetal position in the center of the sphere. I tried to turn my body to the right and rotated away from the direction I wanted to go at a right angle. Eventually I was able to bring my line of site around so that I could see into the lab.

What I saw angered me. It was an odd emotion for me to feel at that moment or at any time. I didn't get angry. I had no offensive weapons, other than my mind. I was the proverbial 90-lb. weakling. I had long ago decided that anger was not a productive response for me, as there was very little I could do about anything anyone ever did to me. In retrospect, while it may have seemed a mature thing to do at such a young age, it probably caused me more grief, as many of my tormentors seemed only to want to see me get mad. My being stoic wasn't nearly as satisfying for them and in their tiny minds, I suppose they felt justified about increasing the violence.

So, anger was a rare emotion for me and it was, at that moment, focused on that asshole, Billy; the bastard from the bus. As I watched him, I realized he must have been watching me in the lab for a several weeks, as he seemed to know his way around my lab fairly well. He had known to spin up the HV generator before engaging the magnets, though he had probably fused several circuits by doing it so fast before the output stabilized. Still, the fields with the new wrapping seemed to be holding nicely. He also knew how to turn on the laser and engage the aiming HeNe (Helium Neon) beam first. And he knew about the mirrors, too, as I saw him adjust the HeNe beam towards the sphere.

I noted absently that the light of the HeNe beam didn't penetrate the exterior magnetic fields very far; just enough to make a visible spot on the field outside the magnetic sphere. Billy probably didn't notice, but I did. I also noticed it was 5:37 in the afternoon and the second hand had just swept past the half minute mark.

He wandered over to the sphere and looked at me trapped inside. I cringed away from the hatred I saw in his face; his vacant eyes, the sneer.

"So long, Dickwad," he said. "If it's any solace, you'll get to die in a cage, just like your ol' man."

He saw my Father's watch and slipped it into his pocket. I hardly registered the theft, as I was still stunned after hearing what he said. That fucking asshole knew things about my Father, our Father. I was so preoccupied I didn't even notice him go over to the laser and turn it on. I did notice the searing pain that seemed to radiate to every nerve ending in my body and every synapse in my brain seemed to short out.

5:47 pm. That was the first thing I noticed. I had survived the laser! Billy was beating on it with a big wrench. Of course! The safety switch Mr. Griggs had made me install that shut it down after 5 minutes of continuous use. The laser would only come back on after it had been reset internally and Billy probably didn't know that. It had been off for 5 minutes and I was still alive!

Billy came back over to the sphere and peered inside. I didn't move, I didn't breathe. I was still bunched up, frozen by the magnetic fields, so moving wasn't really an option. The way Billy was looking inside was odd, like he was trying to see past me, as if I wasn't there.