The Gemini Effect Read online

  The Gemini Effect

  A Game of Doubles

  Scott Jarol

  Red Ant Press

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Westview Middle School

  2. Westview Middle School

  3. North Star Laboratory

  4. Zeke’s Trailer Home

  5. Agricultural Sciences Shed, Westview Middle School

  6. Doc’s Workshop

  7. Outside Doc’s Workshop

  8. Triton Control Room, North Star Laboratory

  9. Doc’s Workshop

  10. Outside Doc’s Workshop

  11. North Star Laboratory

  12. Westview Middle School

  13. Office of the Student Body President

  14. Westview Middle School

  15. The Site of Zeke’s Trailer Home

  16. Westview Middle School Basement

  17. Office of the Student Body President

  18. Dr. Willis’s Office, North Star Laboratory

  19. Westview Middle School Basement

  20. Triton, North Star Laboratory

  21. Office of the Student Body President

  22. Triton Tunnels, North Star Laboratory

  23. Triton Tunnels, North Star Laboratory

  24. Triton Tunnels, North Star Laboratory

  25. Triton Control Room, North Star Laboratory

  26. Triton, North Star Laboratory

  27. Triton Core, North Star Laboratory

  28. Dr. Willis’s Office, North Star Laboratory

  29. Triton Control Room, North Star Laboratory

  30. Triton Core, North Star Laboratory

  31. Triton Core, North Star Laboratory

  32. Triton Core, North Star Laboratory

  33. Triton Core, North Star Laboratory

  34. Triton Core, North Star Laboratory

  35. Westview Middle School

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Scott Jarol

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  ISBN: 978-0-9970855-0-1

  Created with Vellum

  For Jody

  Chapter 1

  Westview Middle School

  Zeke Kapopoulos knew he had problems to deal with that day, but saving the universe from oblivion was not one of them. The knotted straps of his backpack cut into his shoulders as he approached the gate to Westview Middle School. Just as he’d expected, outside the building’s main entrance, Cynthia Des Monde and her minions huddled for their morning meeting.

  “What’s in the backpack, Kapopoulos?” demanded Virgil, Cynthia’s assistant.

  “My lunch. Want some peanut butter?”

  Zeke had no lunch, much less peanut butter, but he knew Virgil wouldn’t take any chances with his severe allergy—a simple but effective way to repel at least one pest. Virgil recoiled, as expected.

  Cynthia was working her way in their direction, distributing finished homework assignments to her clients. She ran a service of her own invention, something she called “enhanced tutoring.” For a fee, she would help them improve their grades, their best chance of avoiding reassignment into Ag Sciences. Zeke didn’t need the help, but he knew plenty of kids who did. Only two more years until ninth grade, when their lifelong careers would be decided. Only students like Zeke who earned top grades had a chance of finding work as Cogs in the brain trades. Everyone else would become Aggies, destined for Agricultural Sciences, the fancy name for farm work, a less fancy name for digging up dirt and potatoes with picks and shovels.

  Zeke couldn’t remember a time when machines still did the work of people. By the never-ending winter of the 2060s, the oil wells had dried up and the coal seams had dwindled. Most students grew up knowing they were destined to work in the fields. The economics were simple: One human worker could produce enough food for five people. On average, three of those would be laborers, one would be a teacher or an engineer or some other kind of Cog, and one who was old and worn out would survive their final retirement years on protein ration bars, applesauce, and turnip soup.

  Zeke felt slightly nauseated by the bleak expressions and undertone of desperation of the students milling around Cynthia.

  “Hi, E-ze-ki-el,” Cynthia sing-songed. “You’re out of breath. Did you oversleep? A quick run first thing in the morning can be so energizing, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.” Zeke prepared to deflect Cynthia’s attempts at manipulation.

  “Of course, I’m one to talk. Can you imagine me running in these silly boots?” Cynthia turned up one foot, pressing her hand on Zeke’s shoulder for balance. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, still leaning her weight onto him. “You’re already overloaded.” She brushed the snow off the top of her mirror-black knee-high boot and finally shifted back to her own two feet.

  “Cynthia,” interrupted an unusually tall and husky boy, “you cheated me on my history test. All I got was a seventy-six. That’s like not even an A or something.”

  “Excuse me, just a sec,” Cynthia whispered to Zeke. She directed the other boy a couple of steps away to what was apparently a more private huddle. Zeke watched her elaborately rewrap her fluffy pink scarf around her neck and then warm her hands in the pockets of her ankle-length, quilted white parka.

  “Chuck, it’s all about plausibility. I know that’s a big word—do you know what it means, Chuck? Plau-si-bil-i-ty?”

  “Don’t try to confuse me with fancy words, Cynthia. I paid you in advance. How come I gotta get a dummy grade?”

  Cynthia reached for one of his hands, removed his worn glove, and held his hand like a sandwich between hers. His hand was twice the size of hers. “Nice strong hands you have there, Chuck. I’m almost afraid you’ll crush my tiny fingers. By accident, I mean. I know you’d never hurt me on purpose. But I gotta tell ya,” she continued, mocking the way he spoke, “with hands like these, you could be very successful in the trash business. It takes a guy with your strength to push around a wheelbarrow day after day, week after week, year after year. Maybe you should reconsider your career choices.”

  Chuck jerked his hand away from Cynthia. “Never mind.”

  “That’s so great! What an excellent decision. We’ll talk later. I have a special assignment for you.”

  Zeke stomped the snow off his boots more out of disgust than necessity as Cynthia mentally filed Chuck in exactly the category she wanted him. If you were struggling with math or science or history—or anything—Cynthia was your best option. She could find the right nerd for the job and deliver convincing work. But once she had, she owned you, because she knew the truth about how smart you really were—or weren’t.

  Finished with Chuck, she turned back to Zeke with a businesslike nod toward Virgil.

  Zeke unshouldered his backpack and removed a power cell, which he handed to Virgil.

  “Just in time,” she said, handing her PTab to Virgil. He swapped out the power cell and gave the old one to Zeke. She snatched the device from Virgil, touched the screen, and began bobbing her head to the rhythm of music only she could hear through her wireless ear buds. “Is that all you have for me?”

  “I paid you your share.” Zeke shifted uncomfortably, aware how many of her minions were gathered behind him.

  “I think you’re a little short again,” said Cynthia. “Have you considered that idea we talked about?”

  “We didn’t talk about it,” said Zeke. “You did.”


  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m such a chatterbox. That’s one of the things I appreciate just so much about you—you’re such a good listener. Don’t you see how much better things could be for both of us? A win-win partnership, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have as a partner.”

  She patted his shoulder as he repositioned the knotty straps that were already slicing into his shoulders right through his worn-out parka.

  An electronic horn blasted twice from loudspeakers high up in the school’s decorative bell tower. The students funneled toward the school entrance.

  “But you don’t need a partner,” said Zeke.

  “You’re so sweet,” said Cynthia, wrinkling her nose. “It’s really all about the teamwork, isn’t it? We could do so, so much for each other.”

  Zeke shoved his way between Virgil and a girl with stringy hair and continued toward the school’s blue double doors. Almost there.

  “That’s too bad,” Cynthia called from behind him. “It would be unfortunate if someone stumbled into one of your little science experiments—accidentally, of course.”

  Zeke halted in his tracks. She wouldn’t dare. Cynthia’s sugar-coated threats sent a shiver up his spine, despite how accustomed he was by now to the biting wind.

  “I’m here as a friend,” she said, sliding around in front of him with a smile and a tilt of her head. “Please let me help you.”

  “That’s really nice of you.” His eyes narrowed with determination. “Maybe there is something you can do . . .”

  “See?” She glowed. “I knew we could work togeth—”

  “Leave me alone.”

  He brushed past her and continued up the front steps.

  “Ohhh,” she lamented, “you know I can’t do that.”

  Once inside, Zeke sidestepped out of the stream of students flowing toward their classrooms. He knew how to be careful, and there was no way he was going to let Cynthia Des Monde get her claws into his work. As the bell rang and the doors slammed behind the last stragglers, he ducked into the stairwell through the door Doc, the janitor, had left propped open for him.

  Chapter 2

  Westview Middle School

  The bell tower over the school’s entrance stood in tribute to the little red schoolhouse of Harmony’s pioneer days. Zeke used his thumbs to ease the weight of the gear in his backpack as he spiraled up the narrow, ladder-like steps from the rooftop to the cramped bell tower. For weeks he’d managed to keep his installation a secret, but one look in the right direction from below and someone would discover him.

  He wiped away a drop of sweat that threatened to freeze on the tip of his nose and looked out over the town as he waited for his breathing to slow and his heart to stop pounding. A couple of miles away, high block walls enclosed and protected rows of houses inside Harmony Village, where the Cogs lived. Farther off in the opposite direction, the pyramid peaks of North Star Laboratory’s three main buildings stood like tombstones among the tops of skeletal trees. That was where his father had worked before he disappeared. Zeke had been only two years old then and didn’t remember his father, but he had listened to his mother explain every day since then that his father wasn’t home yet because he was doing “very important research” at the lab. Whenever Zeke asked what kind of research, she would only repeat “very important.”

  Zeke turned away from the past and back to the device that would change their entire future. To absorb a steady stream of electricity from the atmosphere, his new invention, the Quantum Atmospheric Resonance Coil (QuARC for short) needed exposure to the wide-open sky from the highest possible vantage point. The gusting winds in the bell tower threatened to tear his equipment apart, not to mention freeze him to the bone.

  He double-checked the wiring harness extending from the soccer-sized ball of gleaming copper wire he’d stayed up all night rewinding, trying to reproduce the pattern in the smudged pencil sketch from his father’s notebook. If this latest version of the QuARC worked, it would soak up electrons from the atmosphere like a radio tuned into high energy instead of music.

  Like a balloon rubbed with a fuzzy cloth, the Earth builds up static electricity from the constant flow of solar and cosmic particles streaming around its atmosphere and from friction between water droplets floating in clouds. The charge accumulates until somewhere in the world, a towering cumulonimbus cloud forms a lightning path. No one had ever tapped this almost limitless source of energy, both because it was impossible to predict where lightning would strike and because at 30,000 degrees, lightning vaporized any apparatus intended to capture it. But the QuARC would drain the charge gradually, before it had a chance to discharge 140 kilowatt-hours of power in a wasteful flash.

  Zeke couldn’t believe he’d actually gotten this far. A successful trial of the QuARC would not only change his family’s fortunes, but it could bring mankind back out of the New Dark Ages. No pressure.

  As Benjamin Franklin had done three hundred years earlier, Zeke launched a lightning-catcher kite—only this time there was no thunderstorm, just the atmosphere’s steady static charge. He unreeled a thin copper tether as the kite, covered in a patchwork of foil scraps, rose so high on the arctic wind that Zeke could detect only a glinting speck in the morning sunlight. If not for the tug on the line, he’d hardly have known it was still up there.

  A rising beat of muffled music thudded in Zeke’s chest. Down below his perch in the bell tower, a snowcat limousine pulled up in front of the school. The polished black vehicle rolled on belted treads instead of tires for better traction on snow and ice. Four large men on snowmobiles escorted the limo, two in front and two behind.

  A man Zeke knew only as the Chairman would watch the demonstration from inside the vehicle. The front passenger window rolled down and the Chairman’s assistant, Thomas, gave him a nod. Zeke had never met the Chairman himself, only Thomas, the Chairman’s eyes, ears, and mouth. The window closed again. The Chairman had been waiting for his investment to pay off, and Zeke knew the QuARC had to work this time, although he tried not to think about what would happen to him and his mother if it didn’t.

  Zeke’s fingertips poked through his gloves where he’d snipped off the ends so he could more nimbly twist wires and adjust circuits. His fingers had become so numb from the cold they may as well have been attached to puppet hands. Using knobs from an old electric stove, Zeke tuned the QuARC until a torrent of electrons surged down from the sky, rushed through a pair of wires, and jumped the gap between two pencil-stub electrodes. The buzzing spark flared with intense white light, creating blue smoke and an odor Zeke imagined as the smell of burning metal—that is, if metal could burn.

  For the past two years, the Chairman had paid Zeke for power by the watt. Even so, the credits he earned each week from recharging homemade power cells and the batteries he excavated from the garbage dump barely bought him and his mother their protein rations, a few potatoes, and alcohol for their lantern.

  Now, after two years of stealing trickles of current from the power mains at Harmony Village, Zeke had convinced the Chairman he could tap the vast reserves of electrical energy that accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Chairman had granted Zeke permission to scavenge materials from his private warehouses of salvaged electronics, cast-offs he’d collected as the world’s energy dimmed and eventually darkened: parts from cars and televisions, Weedwackers and cell phones, toasters and computers. With the credits the Chairman would pay for the thousands of watts he could harvest with the QuARC, he and his mother could buy a bigger trailer with a heater, a stove, and real food to cook on it.

  Zeke looked down toward the Chairman’s limousine to signal his success and froze. Cynthia stood talking to the Chairman through a window opened just enough to pass their voices. Cynthia refused to give up, but now that the QuARC was working, Zeke could stop worrying about her interference. The limousine window rolled up, and Cynthia whirled around on one foot like a dancer. Zeke grit his teeth as she looked up and winked before strut
ting back into the school.

  * * *

  Principal Gladys Fairchild stood at the front counter of the school’s administrative offices. She liked to greet the teachers as they arrived.

  “Good morning, Gladys,” said Mr. Portman. “Another glorious day, brisk and bright. No sleepyheads this morning.” Depending how the week had gone up to that point, Principal Fairchild could find Mr. Portman’s cheerfulness either irritating or soothing. Today, she was not sure how she felt. Things had been running smoothly at the school for several weeks, and she was sure her luck must be running out.

  Mr. Portman squeezed into the small space between the counter and the wall of teachers’ cubbyholes. He was reaching for his mail when Principal Fairchild let out a squeak.

  She had just felt a distinctly sharp pain on her back side.

  “Mr. Portman!”

  “Yes, Gladys? Are you okay?”

  If Mr. Portman had pinched her, this was not acceptable behavior from a teacher—very unprofessional and inappropriate for any workplace. As she considered how best to confront him, she felt another sharp pain, this time on her arm.

  “What was that?” she said, more to herself than to Mr. Portman.

  “Oh-oh,” said Mr. Portman.

  A scorching jet of steam shot from the side of the coffeemaker. Mr. Portman held the coffee pot in one hand and his moose-head mug in the other, both hands clearly occupied. Before Principal Fairchild could think any further about what could have just pinched her, the coffeemaker began to shake. Mr. Portman pulled her to the floor just before it exploded with a hiss and a bang. Torn plastic and metal shreds showered them.

  “Ouch, hot,” said Mr. Portman, standing up and brushing off the debris. “I beg your pardon, Principal Fairchild. It was . . . steam. about to . . .”