Title: Chance
Series: Graphene, Book One
Author: Archie Hellshire
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: July 2, 2018
Heat Level: 1 - No Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 26600
Genre: Contemporary, comedy, thriller, gay
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Synopsis
Daniel has spent his life traveling down
the same well-worn path, safe inside a prison of his own making, with tomorrow
promising no difference from yesterday. Then, one unremarkable morning, he
meets someone who throws his life completely off the rails. All he knows about
Nathan when he first sees him is that he’s beautiful, but it’s enough to get
him to board the wrong train instead of going to the office.
This one careless step off the beaten
path has unexpected consequences, as the mysterious passenger is being pursued
by a cadre of mercenaries after the parcel he’s tasked with delivering safely
to the other side of the city. Daniel has never considered himself brave, or
strong, or fast, and he doesn’t come prepared for this fight, but at the right
place, at the right time, someone can do the right thing and be a hero for a
victim in distress.
Together, staying just out of reach of
their pursuers and narrowly escaping tight spaces, they make their way to the
delivery point. And as the journey wears on, they learn more about what’s in
the parcel they’re carrying, and what it means for the world if they can’t
deliver it.
Excerpt
Chance
Archie Hellshire © 2018
All Rights Reserved
The progress of the human race has not
been pioneered by individuals overly preoccupied with safety. All the
advancements of our people can be attributed to a ragtag assortment of gamblers
with more courage than sense, diving headfirst into danger, compelled by the
faintest chance of a payout, armed only with a devil-may-care attitude and
maniacal laughter.
Somewhere in the world today, in a lab
dimly lit by a pile of burning grant money, a madcap physicist is working into
the wee hours of the morning, trying to turn a lump of coal into unlimited
energy. Though we may scoff at his wishful thinking, it was not so long ago
that our disdain was aimed at a pair of bike-shop owners who branched out into
making the first aeroplane.
Before that, it was a hobbyist who
decided to use new-fangled electricity to send messages across whole countries
in the mere twinkling of an eye.
But it was before that, it was a sailor
who tried to sail to the world’s edge and found North America instead.
But it was before even that, it was an
apothecary who wondered if mucking about with a corpse might yield medical
insight.
But it was far before even that, it was
one of the nomads of old who decided to try planting crops instead of chasing
mastodon across the continent to ward off starvation.
But it was before all of them, it was an
ancient ancestor who made the controversial decision to play with fire.
Inspiring as their achievements are, for
every success story, there are hundreds of gambles that met with total flaming
failure. Understanding this, the bulk of humanity has, throughout history,
chosen to build on the progress of others, well insulated from any risk to
themselves. These people are comforted by the predictability of their lives.
They benefit from the way things are and fear what they might lose if the rules
of the game were to change. They have created for themselves a system of
numerical precision, wherein all carefully selected actions lead inevitably to
a foregone conclusion, and reaching your goal is only a matter of time and
planning. These people are gamblers of a different kind; they have a system,
but no matter how carefully they play the game, something can still come along
to flip the board.
This story is about how the board was
flipped, the gambler who played with fire, the orthodoxy who built their empire
on the status quo, and the innocent people who got swept up in the tide and had
to decide which side they were on.
Daniel Wyn opened his eyes at 6:30 a.m.,
mere seconds before his alarm went off. He had been getting up at the same time
every morning for years and his biology had fallen into the steady rhythm.
He reached his hand out from under the
covers and tapped the screen of his phone to silence his alarm as it started.
While the thoughts of his waking mind were, as yet, unformed, he took in his
bedroom around him. Sunlight filtered in through the sheer curtains
illuminating four walls, bare of any pictures and with one flat-screen mounted
opposite his bed. An orderly desk sat in one corner. On it lay his briefcase,
packed and ready for work. A two-piece suit hung on the door of his closet, set
out from the night before.
Comforted by the familiar surroundings
of his bedroom, his mind gradually ramped into higher gear and queued up his
morning tasks. He swung his legs out of bed to deal with the most pressing
matter on the list.
After flushing the loo, he divested
himself of his pajamas and stepped into his shower stall. The warm water
cascading down his slim, toned body brought further clarity. As he worked the
shampoo through his wavy brown hair, the different parts of his consciousness
whirred into action after a night’s rest and began the work of assembling his
schedule for today. Every duty, every task, every errand was carefully
examined, tagged with a magnitude of importance, and weighed against all the
other demands with each risk and reward noticed and noted. The steady dance of
numbers that constituted Daniel’s worldview, a complex and harmonious rhythm,
like the delicate inner workings of a clock, had fully powered up.
Wiping the layer of steam off his
bathroom mirror, he shaved himself clean and appraised his appearance. Brown
eyes stared back at him from his pale face. He reached up and gave a small
swipe at a mole on his cheekbone with his fingertips, wondering, as he did
every morning, if it looked like skin cancer.
Once back in his bedroom, he took his
suit off the hook and dressed himself. This suit was one of three identical
suits he had, indistinguishable right down to his underwear. He buttoned his
top collar button, neglecting to put on his tie, since he didn’t own one; he
felt that was inviting strangulation. He grabbed his briefcase, but before
leaving his bedroom, straightened up his bed. He repositioned his pillow and
pulled up the comforter on the side he slept. He cast a fleeting glance at the
other side of his mattress, unmolested and empty, as it was every morning.
Once in the kitchen, he made himself
breakfast, the exact contents of which he had decided at the beginning of the
month as part of the regimen that insured he had all the necessary vitamins, minerals,
and nutrients suggested by his dietician, who really wished that Daniel would
stop calling him every month.
He turned on the morning news as he
prepared his oatmeal and was greeted with validation of his constant paranoia.
“Late last evening,” the anchorwoman
began to a backdrop of a smoking building, “an unknown number of assailants
broke in to the Physics Building at the University of Northumberland. According
to initial reports by the FBI, they planted and detonated a number of
incendiary devices.
“No one has, as yet, taken credit for
this attack, which the FBI is hesitant to label as terrorism, and they have not
yet released numbers for any injuries or fatalities. We could not reach Physics
Chair, Professor Geim, for comment. Now for the weather…”
At 6:45 a.m., food successfully ingested
and dishes cleaned, he left his apartment, locked the door behind him, and
headed to the neighborhood subway station. On the subway car, he diligently
avoided making eye contact with any of his fellow commuters and touching any
surface more than was absolutely necessary.
By 7:30 a.m., he was at his desk at
work, half an hour early, just as he had done every workday going back several
years to when he had slid seamlessly out of college into his job doing risk analysis
at an insurance company.
There, Daniel was completely in his
element. The cogs of his mind wound through the numerical data related to all
the ways things could go horribly wrong and indexed them appropriately. It was
work that was, for Daniel, both rewarding and life affirming.
“Hey, Dan,” said his neighbor, as he
poked his head over the cubicle wall.
Daniel looked up from the report he was
reading on space debris.
“You won the office pool.” He reached
over the wall to hand Daniel a small wad of bills. “The new intern lasted
exactly four months. I don’t know how you do it.”
“I noticed he had specialized in game
theory rather than economics…” started Daniel in a quiet baritone. But his
coworker had already walked on. Daniel turned back to the report he was
reading, relieved he wouldn’t have to carry on a conversation.
Daniel was making up a spreadsheet to
display the relative risk of being hit by space debris as they fell out of
orbit when he was interrupted by the department manager.
“Mr. Wyn,” said a lady carrying a thin
file folder, “We’ve been given a high-priority case from upstairs.” She handed
him the folder.
He opened it to find a single sheet with
a heading and several bullets.
“We need you to document the risks of
electric cars.” She summarized for him.
He looked up from the folder, brow
furrowed in confusion.
“The risk wouldn’t be any different from
standard gas-powered cars,” he said. “You could actually remove all the risk factors
associated with combustible fuels.” It was something an intern could do…if they
still had one.
She stared at him for a beat, then
looked around to see if there was anyone within range. She leaned in and
lowered her voice to a conspiratorial murmur.
“One of the directors on the board also
sits on the board of Texas Petroleum,” she explained. “He wants the company to
charge higher premiums for electric cars, so we have to make them seem
dangerous to justify it.”
Daniel gave a nod of understanding, and
she left. Shrugging off the feeling that he was prostituting himself, he looked
up information on electric cars and electrocutions.
Two hours later, the scariest thing he
could find about electric cars was that they were going to cost him his job. He
was pouring over a report on the toxicity of lithium batteries when one of the
cogs of his consciousness gave an unsettling vibration. He looked up from his
monitor and focused on the sensation; the intuitive feeling that something
disruptive had just entered his orderly existence. He peeked over the edge of
his cubicle to find the source of his discomfort. A shock of white hair, just
barely clearing the other cubicles, made its way over to him.
He sat back down and leaned close to his
monitor, not reading the words on the screen but staring very deliberately.
“Tryin’ to look busy isn’t gonna fool
me.” The voice was feminine but with rough edges from being used for a
lifetime. “Even if I thought you were busy, it wouldn’t stop me.”
He stared resolutely at his screen,
unblinking, holding his breath.
“Ignorin’ me won’t work either,” the
voice continued. At the same time, a massive handbag was plopped down on his
keyboard.
All his strategies thwarted, he finally
looked up to see the woman with coiffed white hair. Wrinkles on her face spoke
of a lifetime of grinning mischievously. Two dark eyes that had seen a lot of
hardship and sorrow, mostly of her own making, looked him over.
“Hello, Mildred,” said Daniel in his low
voice, which now had a hint of a smile.
“Hey, Danny Boy,” she said. “What are
you doin’?”
“Researching the dangers of—”
“I was just at the mailroom.” She cut
him off. “The guy says they don’t mail things any more. What’s the deal with
that?”
“They farmed mailing service out to a
third party,” said Daniel, reaching into one of his drawers and pulling out a
business card. He gave it a cursory look and handed it to her. “We started a
business account with a specialty courier service to save money.”
“Trans-Commute,” she said, reading the
card. “So, I have to walk all the way to their office downtown. Why is it every
time they save money I do more work? And get paid less?”
Daniel shrugged, hoping not to get too
involved in the subject. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Mildred, but meeting her
was always a bit jarring, even for an adventurous person.
Mildred was a resident investigator for
the company. She had a long successful career tracking down information, stolen
property, and people in hiding. Her continued employment was guaranteed by her
high success rate and the mysterious disappearance of the HR manager who
insisted that eighty-seven was well passed mandatory retirement age.
“Well, thanks for this,” she said,
holding up the card before she slipped it in her handbag. “Now, take me to
lunch.”
“It’s only eleven thirty,” he said,
following her anyway as she made her way to the elevators. “Lunch is scheduled
for twelve.”
“That’s a whole thirty minutes away,”
she said. “At my age, you can’t be sure if you have that much time.”
“If you don’t have that much time, does
it matter if you’re full?” asked Daniel.
“Yes,” she quipped, “it does.”
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Meet the Author
Archie Hellshire is an author with aspirations of being able to write. He was born in the Caribbean where he developed a love of nature, the metric system, and high temperatures. In school, lacking any athletic or social ability, he became a very bookish person, indulging in the works of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling, and Charles Dodgson. Despite being well read, he struggled with dyslexia and would forever remain horrible at spelling. The advent of Spell Checker reignited his dreams of becoming an author.Archie grew up in a family and culture that was not tolerant of homosexuals, and he spent his entire young life in the closet, retreating into his books and a rich fantasy life. In the theater of his mind, the romances he read could be edited to be male couples. He dreamed of one day writing his own stories and living his own happy ending. Find the author on Twitter.
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