[Friday, September 11]

Zachary groggily opened his eyes and peeled his face from the keyboard. The movement caused the computer screen to awaken. His neck cracked and he realized how much his back hurt from sleeping in such a position.

‘That’s right, I fell asleep at the computer,’ he realized. ‘Ow!’

He checked the time on the computer in front of him.

‘Six o’clock?’ he wondered.

Fighting his stiff muscles, Zachary shuffled back to his room. He checked his alarm clock to see what time it was set to go off.

‘It’s set to my normal time of 7:00 am. But since I’ve been biking to school, I’ve needed to wake up earlier.’

Zachary quickly reset his alarm for six o’clock, rather than seven o’clock, so he wouldn’t be late for school anymore.

‘Too bad it's already Friday,’ he sighed inwardly. ‘It’s almost pointless to do this now.’

However, since he already finished resetting it, Zachary just left it as was.

‘Since I’m already awake, I might as well go back to what I was doing,’ he reasoned with a shrug.

He sat back down at the computer and continued to research things until it was time to get ready for school. Because he was up so early, he was able to make himself a proper breakfast, pack a proper lunch, and head to school in a timely fashion.

This time he made sure to ride his bike slow enough that he didn’t crash into anyone again. Although, he didn’t see the girl he crashed into, so he couldn't apologize.

He walked into his first period and saw Saya already at her desk, like always.

“You’re here early,” she stated. “What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing,” he responded curtly. “I just didn’t sleep well.”

He plopped his but down in his chair and sprawled his body over the desk in front of him.

Moments later, Jacob Langer entered the classroom. He greeted the few people already in the room. Then greeted Saya and Zachary simultaneously.

“Hi Saya and Zachary.”

“Morning!” Saya replied cheerily.

Zachary grunted as his reply.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jacob asked Saya.

“Don’t know,” she shrugged. “But I’ve never seen him so early to class.”

“Bad dream.” Zachary explained, “It kinda carried over into real life.”

Saya made a face of sympathy, then perked up. “Hey did you see the email I sent you?”

Zachary made a confused look.

“Email?” Then realization crossed his mind. “Oh my gosh! I totally forgot to check my email yesterday. I’m sorry.”

Saya giggled again. “It’s fine, Zach. I got the email addresses of everyone in my culinary class, so I still had other people to talk to.”

Zachary hid a dejected face.

‘Gah!’ he thought, ‘Then that means she already has more addresses than me. I only have hers, my mom’s, and probably my grandma’s if I ignore the fact that mom is setting her up with one now.’

Jacob was sitting a few seats away, playing with his signature football and yawning to stave off the drowsiness before school started. When he overheard what they were talking about, he tried to join the conversation.

“Hey, that’s cool. You got an email set up?” he asked Saya.

She nodded.

“Then, would you like to exchange emails with me? I mean, I won’t be able to message you all the time, since I have practice…” he said.

“That’s fine! I have an extracurricular class after school too. Let’s exchange emails!” she said cheerily.

Zachary’s face became even more sullen. He curled his arms under his head, hoping he didn’t look as jealous as he felt.

Over the next couple of minutes, people flooded into the classroom. First period was always weird like that. At 7:55 there was almost no one in the classroom, but by 8:00 all the seats were full. Of course, you had early birds like Saya and apparently Jacob, but in general this was how most of the school behaved. It always amused him how everyone after 8:00 sharp could be considered stragglers, though this was entirely subjective and he wasn’t one to judge.

That was why Zachary noticed when Frank came in at 8:01 with bruises on his face.

“Doctor Thompson, where is my report?”

“It’s right here,” responded Paul while handing his superior a clipboard. “Readings from the AM medium wave receiver show general radio static everywhere except inside five hundred to six hundred kilohertz. This is a very low frequency. In this range, it is dead silent, as if the STA is absorbing everything within this range.”

“I see. Anything else?” she asked.

“Take a look at this chart here. This data is from the EMF/LFE. It shows a similar silence across the entire range it should be able to pick up. At first, I thought it wasn’t working. But when I went to get a drink of coffee on my break, the device was still on and I saw the readings spike. So I reevaluate the readings again, this time with the surroundings and sensitivity of the instrument in mind.

“Although we’ve kept the electricity around the STA to a minimum, the EMF device should still be able to pick up the frequencies coming from the lights and the coffee machine, for example.”

Carlure gave him a frown. “Doctor Thompson, you really need to lay off that caffeinated crap. Get to the point. The bureaucrats leading this investigation won’t understand all this technical jargon. Summarize it in twenty words or less. They are very busy.”

“R-right. The frequencies being absorbed are electrical increments. So we think the STA is a powerful grounding source for electricity.”

“That was very skilled of you, but what does that mean in English?” she queried.

“The STA eats electricity.” Paul said dejectedly. “It eats electricity like nobody’s business, yet it’s charge doesn’t change.”

Carlure nodded sagely. “Thank you. Those are words that even those politicians would understand. Have you, hmmm, fed it anything else?”

“Other than the tape measure we lost last night, and the pen that the construction manager lost when he found it, no. We haven’t touched it since yesterday.”

“Good.”

Paul stood nervously nearby while Carlure continued flipping through the pages of notes on the clipboard.

“Um, Doctor Carlure,” Paul said hesitantly. “I’d like to propose the next stage of testing.”

“Hmm?” Carlure gave him a sideways glance. “What is it?”

He cleared his throat. “I’d like to start off the particle bombardment testing with electrons. Then slowly increase voltage and current to see what changes are observed.”

She scoffed. “Particle bombardment. Ha! You make it sound more dangerous than it actually is.”

“Technically, it’s the truth since we can’t physically touch the thing anymore. Although, on the molecular level, particle bombardments are already happening. Photons from our light bulbs, radio waves from the nearby town, even the air itself is exerting pressure.

“We haven’t made much headway for three days because all of the tests we’ve conducted are based on limited physical observation. Applying an electrical current should be easy to test and will be the first truly chemical test we perform.

“The readings clearly show that the STA absorbs all this electromagnetic radiation, so we can assume that electricity is safe enough to experiment with. But, of course, if something does change, we will stop testing immediately. I know we shouldn’t throw caution to the wind.”

“Fine.” Carlure said with a sigh. Frankly, she was just as fed up with the lack of progress as Thompson was. “I’ll run it by the general. Perhaps with a good argument, we can get started right away with your idea.”

After English, Zachary went straight to the nurse’s office to talk with Mrs. Cherrymore. Just like the day before, he was going to measure his vertical. Only this time, he had more reservations about revealing his world switching problem. On one hand, he dearly wanted someone to talk to. On the other, he didn’t want to go to jail… again.

He walked into the room and briefly wondered why Frank wasn’t there too. Those bruises on his face looked rather painful, but it wasn’t Zachary’s business.

“Hi Mrs. Cherrymore! Sorry about yesterday for leaving so suddenly,” he apologized.

“Ah, Zachary. It’s good to see you again,” she responded with raised eyebrows, trying to act professional and not question his motives. “I’ll continue to humor you. But I’d like to have an explanation.”

“Oh, it’s nothing serious,” Zachary lied. “I had another strange dream again, that’s all. And I’d like you to take my vertical again. Can you please, uh, humor me?”

“Forgive me for asking, but I fail to see what your strange dreams have to do with your vertical?”

“In the dream, I can improve myself and achieve amazing feats. And I also think it carries over to real life, but I’d like to see how much.” Zachary had intentionally let a bit of hysteria seep into his voice and threw the nurse an innocent smile.

As expected, Mrs. Cherrymore’s demeanor changed and she laughed. The request wasn’t outrageous. It would only take her a small amount of time and she didn’t have much else to do. In fact, she hadn’t taken someone’s vertical since the days she worked as a personal trainer, so it made her nostalgic.

As for Zachary’s reasoning behind the request, no one would actually believe such a silly story, even if it were true. Plus he had frazed it in such a way that betrayed his own disbelief, so she was actually more inclined to humor him.

“Very well,” she said. “But if these dreams continue, you should probably see a real doctor or therapist.”

Zachary nodded.

He followed the nurse to the wall with the piece of tape from his previous measurement and performed another vertical jump. Mrs. Cherrymore marked the spot with a piece of tape yet again. The new piece of tape was slightly higher than the other piece of tape.

The nurse pulled out a tape measure and read the markings out loud for Zachary.

“This marking is almost 60 inches. Yesterday’s marking was about 58 inches, if we round down,” she said with a slight frown.

Mrs. Cherrymore was confused. To improve by two inches in one day was not completely unusual. However, these were already high measurements. The learning curve, so to speak, gets higher the further you train.

For example, improving a bench press from 50 to 100 pounds is much easier than improving it from 250 to 300 pounds. The same could be applied to a vertical jump, a sprint, or any other human limitation.

“Actually,” she continued while looking at the tape measure again, “it seems that you jumped exactly 152 centimeters today, and exactly 148 centimeters yesterday. What a coincidence,” she remarked. “But Zachary, how did you improve so much overnight?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know,” he lied again. “Maybe I was actually holding back yesterday and didn’t know it.”

“Right… Right!” Mrs. Cherrymore shook the ridiculous thoughts out of her head. Of course no one could improve themselves to this degree in their sleep. “Hahaha, of course. Then you could interpret your dreams as a sign that you can improve yourself with a change in mentality, young Zachary. The mind is a powerful influencer in our actions and it’s where we get the term mind-over-matter. If you ever feel discouraged about your physical ability, a change in mindset might help you.” Of course, with a vertical of 60 inches, there won’t be much to feel discouraged about.

Just like that, the nurse rationalized something impossible to fit her own understanding of the world, dismissing the truth for something more comfortable.

Suddenly, another patient barged into the nurse's room. It was Frank. His bruised face was clearly the cause of concern.

“Jeez man,” Zachary remarked, “Why didn’t you come here earlier?”

Frank’s expression crumpled, “Shut up. Not all of us have it as easy as you. Now get out.”

Taken aback by the hostility from Frank, Zachary held his hands up in surrender.

“Um, thanks Mrs. Cherrymore, I guess I’ll let you get back to work.”

He bid the kind nurse farewell, then he left the room.

Somehow, he could hear the last bits of conversation as he walked away.

“Hello again, Mr. Gamino. That was rather rude of you, you know,” the muffled voice of Mrs. Cherrymore said to Frank. “Was it your father again?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Just give me the all-clear to play football, then I’m going back to class,” he lashed. “God knows how many bad grades I have. One more ‘D’ and I’ll be...”

Zachary sighed, feeling guilty for overhearing something so private.

Frank finished getting checked up by the stupid nurse, then went back to class. He struggled to learn the stupid material. The only thing Frank was good at was using his body, but when he went to his next class, he had little success at pummeling the shrimp, yet again.

As a football player, he had the urge to drop the dodgeball and just tackle him. However, he couldn’t do this with Mr. Jornager watching. So all he could do was watch the shrimp compete on equal grounds, even though he exercised three hours every day and should have the advantage in every aspect. It made him feel like all his effort and training was in vain.

After PE, he changed back into his school clothes and went to lunch. Stopping along the way to wait for his girlfriend, Marci. She had been absent yesterday and no matter how he asked her on the phone, he couldn’t make heads or tails about what happened to her. He only knew she was distraught.

“Hold me,” a girl suddenly threw herself into his arms.

“I missed you yesterday,” he said honestly, embracing Marci with all the warmth he could find in his heart. His grudge against Zachary started to slip from his mind as his heart was calmed.

“And I did too,” Marci said while frowning at his face. “Do you still love me?”

“Of course I do. You’re very important to me and I would do anything for you.”

“Good, if you’re a gentleman, you need to have a talk with Zachary Trenner,” a bit of hostility seeped into her voice.

Yet the conversation came right back to the shrimp.

“Huh? What do you want with him?”

“Yesterday he ran into me, soiling my best clothes and didn’t apologize. I need you to do this for me. You wouldn’t let anyone disrespect your girlfriend, would you?” Zachary had ruined an hour's worth of makeup and she felt so humiliated that she refused to come to school yesterday.

“That’s why you were crying yesterday on the phone?” he asked. Then his voice started changing, becoming more infuriated. “He’s the reason!?”

Sensing his anger, Marci smiled slightly. “Yes! He’s so disrespectful and inconsiderate. He shouldn’t even be in our grade, he’s too young. When he bumps into a girl like me, he doesn’t apologize. As my boyfriend, you have every right to knock him down a few pegs. What has he done to you?”

“Get this. Yesterday I was minding my own business during class, just like usual. But then afterwards, he had the gall to stand up to me for no reason!”

“No!” she said in mock disbelief.

“Yes,” he nodded.

Suddenly, a fiendish-looking Michael stepped out from behind a corner. He was going to join them for lunch, and had overheard everything.

“What’s this I hear about having a good talk with my buddy Zachary?”

Zachary went through the rest of his day casually. After lunch he went to his computer class. Since he already had a good grasp with technology, he ignored the instructor, Mr. Lundy, and continued researching medieval culture, and anything else that would help him in his next world switch.

After that he went to history, where he watched Mr. Warren drone on and on about insignificant events preceding the US Revolutionary War.

His last class of the day was with a man called Wang Xiu Ying who taught his Mandarin Chinese class. They spent the period learning a few words and memorizing some new characters. Then after the class, Zachary approached the man with a handful of words he memorized from Vera.

“Mr. Wang, do you recognize what language these letters are?” he asked politely.

“Hmm. Let me see.” The man studied the letters quietly. “These words? Do you know what it means?”

Zachary politely corrected his teacher’s grammar, much to the teacher’s embarrassment, but also delight. After all, he was both a teacher and a learner who even asked his own students to correct him when he was wrong.

“This word means ‘Stallion’ and this word means ‘Stones’ plural. They are words I got from a few place names.”

“If you already know these words, should you already know the language?”

“In most cases that would be true, but in my case, no. Sorry.”

Seeing as he wasn’t going to offer any more information, Wang Xiu Ying spoke his mind. “I have studied a few languages, English and Chinese, and Korean, but I do not recognize these characters.”

“I see.”

Zachary didn’t expect anyone to identify what language it was, since it wasn’t from Earth in the first place, but it was worth a try.

“Is there anyone else I can talk to about it?”

“Hmm,” Mr. Wang thought for a moment. “The Principle is actually very adept in most romantic languages. You should ask him.”

“Okay. Thank you very much.”

“Have a good day, Mr. Trenner.”

Zachary walked out of the school, preparing to grab his bike. He was already thinking about what he would make for dinner, but when he reached the location of his bike, he found a note instead. Someone had stolen his bike!

He looked around wildly for the culprit., but didn’t see anyone with it. Nor did anyone look suspicious.

Cursing himself for not leaving it locked up with a chain, he picked up the note and tore it open.

‘Come to the bleachers behind the football field on the East side,’ was written. ‘If you don't come by 4:00 the bike will be pawned. Don’t bring anyone else.’

He briefly wondered who would do such a thing, and what the culprit could possibly want from him. Money? He didn't carry very much on him, and what little he had he spent on food at lunch. It would be better to rob him of his lunch money before school, not after.

In the end, Zachary decided he had nothing to lose, except for the bike which he had become more fond of. He also figured the theft was just a prank in the process of going too far. So he walked to the bleachers anyway, prepared to stand up to the pranksters.

When he got to the location he saw his bike being held by Marci Doyle. She tapped her foot impatiently, examining her nails and occasionally checking her makeup with a small mirror. When she saw him she smiled menacingly.

Suddenly he staggered forward. Two boys in full football gear were behind.

"Hey! What's the big idea?!" Zachary said.

"We want to have a talk. We figured this was the best way to do it." Michael explained with a strange glint in his eyes.

"What do you want to talk about? Why did you have to take my bike? This isn’t a very funny joke."

Michael grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and pushed him into the nearby chain link fence, pinning him against the steel mesh.

"Don't talk, listen," Marci said coolly. "What you've done is unacceptable. Not to mention the way you've been talking to my boyfriend lately. You think you could get away with it? Why don't you apologize right now."

"What I said to Frank? Apologize? If nobody else is going to stop him for horsing around during class, then I will. I don't need to apologize for that-"

Michael pressed him harder into the fence, making Zachary gasp.

It hurt.

It was surprising how much it hurt.

Frank smiled, excited about how far his friends were willing to go for him.

"Ow. Chill out dude!" Zachary complained.

"Just apologize. If not to Frank, then to me." Marci reiterated.

"What for? What did I do to you?"

“You need to learn your place,” Michael whispered menacingly.

Zachary’s eyes widened, suddenly realizing too late that this was beyond some small prank.

“Don’t think yourself equal to us just because we are all in the same grade,” Marci began, playing with the bell on Zachary’s bike. “I don’t care how smart you are, we are your seniors and deserve respect. A shrimp like you doesn’t belong anywhere near us, and I think you know it.”

Michael started punching Zachary in all his soft areas and re-pinning him to the chain fence while Marci kept on talking.

“Now why don’t you apologize?” She continued.

Michael punched him in the kidney.

“Come on. Spit out an apology.”

Michael threw a slug at his exposed head, forcing Zachary’s face into the fence.

“Alright!” Zachary said desperately. “I’m sorry... for whatever I did.”

Michael punched him again anyway.

Marci snarled. “Keep pretending you don’t know what you did, and we’ll keep treating you like the degenerate antisocial that you are.”

“I don’t remember-”

Michael spun Zachary around to see his front. Zachary held up his hands, protecting his face as best he could, but Michael took that chance to plant a fist in his exposed stomach. He collapsed to his knees, gulping air like a fish out of water.

Seeing that Frank hadn’t joined in the fun, Michael turned to him. “C’mmon Frank, why don’t you take a few shots.”

"Sure," Frank said. "But let's hurry this up. We have practice in a couple minutes."

Frank sauntered up to the gasping Zachary and slammed his knee into his face. The chain fence vibrated again. Fortunately it was padded.

“Stop! What did I do?” Zachary mumbled.

Frank was gentler than Michael. He slapped Zachary on the head with his opened palms.

“This is for running into my girlfriend with your bike, and this is for making her cry all day.”

Zachary quickly put the puzzle pieces together after that.

“I’m sorry I hit your girlfriend with my bike,” he quickly explained. The barrage momentarily stopped. “It was an accident. I don’t usually ride my bike and I was distracted. I wanted to apologize but I didn’t recognize Marci after she fell in the mud. I’m really sorry. Please stop,” he begged.

Marci frowned. Even though he apologized genuinely, she hated him more for reminding her of the experience. More than anything, she was mad that he was asking Frank to stop, not her.

“Hit him again,” she ordered, and Michael unhesitantly obliged, followed soon by Frank. “I don’t think you’re really sorry. The sincerity in your voice is fake. You are just an ungrateful little prick without a single ounce of common sense. You are a worthless little liar that deserves everything coming to you.”

Michael and Frank resumed the beating. Attacking all of Zachary’s weak points.

Zachary tried to protect himself as best he could. He tried to roll away and escape, but between the two football players and the chain fence, he was cornered in. He tried to protect his body, but whenever he would defend his head, Michael would kick him in the stomach, and whenever he tried to defend his stomach, Frank would slap his head. All the while, there was the barrage of words from Marci that he simply couldn’t block out. She had a wicked tongue that lashed out at his insecurities.

“I’ve noticed you before today, actually. You sit alone at lunch, work alone in class, and you walk alone in the hallway. It is clear to me what kind of person you are. You can’t make friends. It’s like you don’t even try.”

Zachary grit his teeth. His senses sharpened as he carefully gaged the attacks coming at him, feeling the timing. Finally he clenched his fist when he felt an opening. The muscles in his arm tensed but didn’t move.

“Antisocial. Now you will get beat up alone too.”

Making a painful choice, Zachary unclenched his fist.

Another kick from Michael knocked the wind out of him. His vision clouded with dark spots. He curled up in a ball, but the beating kept coming from all directions. Each strike inflicted pain like he had never felt before, even on Vera where his body was visibly bleeding.

Marci’s words and Michael’s cruelty brought out the worst in Frank, spurring him further than he would’ve gone without them.

“So weak,” Michael said, with a look of dissatisfaction. “Why don’t you fight back?”

Finally, after five minutes, they stopped.

Frank had poured out all his frustration. He stopped hitting Zachary, feeling something inexplicable inside. When he looked at his hands and felt the bruises on his own face, he donned a haunted expression. “Okay, guys. Practice is starting.” He got up and walked away.

Michael planted one last kick in Zachary’s stomach and started walking away with Frank. Marci dropped the bike into a puddle of mud as her own physical revenge.

“After today, I don’t want to see your face.” She whispered quietly to him. “Avoid all the routes I walk along and don’t look at me in our classes. And don’t you dare mention this to any of the teachers. You might get a little bit of retribution, but after that, I promise even you will feel loneliness.”

Then suddenly, she giggled. The cruelty in her eyes was replaced by the innocence typical of a teenage girl. She jogged to catch up with Frank, wrapping herself around one of his arms and Michael laughed happily at a joke she just invented. Only Frank looked like he was walking away from a beat down.

Zachary was gasping for breath once more, his whole body aching. He wouldn’t be getting up for at least an hour.

Paul built a simple circuit for testing low level charges. With the approval of his supervisor, he was about to start the electrical testing with only a few millivolts of charge and high resistance. Then he would gradually increase the voltage to ten volts of charge, and record any observations. Since the STA seemed to be an electricity vacuum, it was reasonable to start the testing here.

“Test number one of electron bombardment. One millivolt. Starting now,” he said. Then turned on the circuit and touched it to the STA.

He jotted down the results of various machines as well as readings from his own circuit. Then he disconnected the circuit.

‘As expected, with this low level of voltage isn’t nearly enough to reasonably assume the resistivity of the STA.’

Paul quickly started testing the STA by the same methods with increasing voltages. The pace was excruciatingly slow, and he seemed to have been conducting this same experiment for most of the day. Eventually, after increasing the voltage by 1 millivolt, he finally reached the 1 volt benchmark. After testing the STA again with this voltage, he started increasing the voltage by 10 millivolts instead.

The goal was to estimate the resistivity of the STA if possible. Had it been a solid ball of rubber, they would have started with very high voltages. But since there was no way to know what kind of threat it posed, he was only allowed to start with low power and steadily increase.

Eventually, he increased the voltage of his circuit to 5 volts. After testing, he attached the circuit to a larger power supply so he wouldn’t have to later, when they resumed the testing after the 10 volt bench mark.

He got himself a coffee, then started gradually increasing the voltage yet again. The monotony was being burned into his soul. After a while, he was already testing with 9 volts. When he connected the circuit, he realized with halfhearted joy that he only had 100 more tests to go before he could start increasing the voltage by 100 millivolts instead of 10.

He touched the circuit to the STA again and started collecting data. His eyes widened. The resistivity reading of the STA had suddenly dipped to zero! So in other words, it was conducting all 9 volts of electricity.

He checked the resistivity again, only to find that the resistivity was negative. He had no idea what to make of these readings, only fearing that they were bad. So in a panic, he disconnected the circuit, pulling it away from the black orb. That seemed to be the worst move he could have made.

A tiny static bolt lept from the circuit to the black surface of the STA and back to the circuit.

Paul stumbled backward in fear as the STA started to split open. And the space around it, the air itself, cracked like a pane of glass.

Zachary’s eyes snapped back open and he immediately uncurled. He sat upright, propping himself against the chain fence. The pain was completely gone, and he couldn’t understand why.

He pinched himself, but nothing happened. He felt nothing, only an eerie sense of foreboding.

A sweet scent like chocolate fudge tickled his nose. Then it happened. A string of words appeared in front of his eyes promising to change his world forever.

[Endgame content has been activated prematurely. Adjusting difficulty.]

[End Chapter 15]