I am thrilled to be hosting a spot
on the ANTI-HERO BLUES by Christopher Lee Rippee Blog Tour hosted
by Rockstar Book Tours.
Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
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Author: Christopher Lee Rippee
Pub. Date: August 16, 2024
Publisher: Balance of Seven
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 400
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/ANTI-HERO-BLUES
How do you
save a world that believes you're the villain?
In Union
City, where superpowered vigilantes are celebrated as saviors, rebellious
grad-student Brandon Carter sees them as anything but. Haunted by the death of
his father at the hands of a masked "hero," Brandon's defiance might
have landed him in a jail cell if not for his gift for physics.
At
twenty-three, Brandon is on the precipice of success. Using his research, his
team is just one test away from a world-changing scientific breakthrough-a test
that nearly ends in catastrophe due to an "error" in the code.
With the
project set for termination, Brandon throws caution to the wind, sneaking back
into the lab to rerun the test in secret. But when a mysterious, powerful
assassin attacks him and sabotages the experiment, a devastating explosion
levels the lab.
Against all
odds, Brandon survives, transformed in mind and body. With his life on the line
and no idea who to trust, he sets out to uncover the truth behind the attack,
gain control of his strange, new powers, and protect those he loves-even if it
means saving a world that would label him a supervillain.
ONE
Failed Experiment
You want to know about the
explosion and the pillar of fire in the sky at the Resistance Day
celebration? What happened to Vincent Vaydan? Sure, we’ll get there,
but we need to start at the beginning.
It all went off the rails
the day we turned MICSy on.
“Ladies and gentlemen, on
behalf of Union City University and the Vaydan Institute for Experimental
Physics, welcome!” Claire’s South London accent colored her greeting as
she smiled at the research review committee. She was really turning on
the charm, which made sense given that the committee could pull the plug
on our project with an email.
That worried me, but not as
much as the possibility of blowing us all up in the next few minutes. My
heart pounded against my rib cage as I raced through the pre-ignition
checklist for the twentieth time, trying to focus. With my hands shaking and a
tangled snarl of anxiety, excitement, and dread roiling in my stomach,
I glanced at the clock.
9:57 a.m.
Three minutes until the
moment of truth.
On the dubious bright side,
if the test went badly, I wouldn’t have a lot of time for regrets.
“We have what will
undoubtedly be an exciting morning in store!”
Dr. Claire Wright was the
head of our research team, my mentor, and basically a member of my
family. She was in her fifties, having spent her life climbing to
the top of her field. Despite her professional stature, Claire was
only five foot five in two-inch heels, and slim. Short, iron-gray hair
framed a face that seemed cheery despite her aura of cool
professionalism. As usual, she wore an elegantly conservative blazer and
matching skirt.
For our test run, she’d gone
with navy blue. A few members of the research oversight committee were
clumped by the door. Most were watching remotely. We’d expected a better
turnout, but I suspected the de sire to be present for a scientific breakthrough
was outweighed by an aversion to the possibility of sudden energetic
events—explosions, for the nonscientific. Two representatives from the physics
department chatted with the Vaydan Industries contingent, a suit in
his late twenties named Ashcroft and a tall woman I hadn’t met, while Dr.
Clifford from the Department of Energy, a grumpy-looking bureaucrat in a
tweed jacket older than I was, glowered at everyone from behind an
impressive mustache.
The lab used to be a bomb
shelter, so it wasn’t exactly spacious. Despite taking every safety
precaution imaginable, the chance of us causing a massive explosion in a
couple of minutes was slightly greater than zero, so it was good we were
wrapped in concrete and steel a dozen feet underground. Unfortunately, it
also meant the lab was a cramped maze of fabrication machines,
workstations, and bundles of wiring taped to the floor. Most of the equipment
was impressive, but none of it compared to the machine in the middle of
the room. Claire turned to me and the rest of the team standing awkwardly
in front of the machine that dominated the lab. “These individuals
represent some of the brightest young minds in our field, and they
deserve the real accolades. Despite my title, all I did was approve
purchase orders.” Claire’s smile turned mischievous. “Rarely in a
scientist’s career does one have the opportunity to take so much credit
for doing so little.”
The observers
chuckled.
She gestured to Harvey, who
nodded curtly before looking away.
“Dr. Zhang comes to us from
the University of Toronto and specializes in the computational
modeling of energetic systems.”
Harvey was pale and thin,
with a mop of stylishly unkempt black hair. Dressed in a tight, black
button down and fitted jeans, Harvey looked more like a model than a
mathematician. He’d seemed like an asshole when we first met, but he just
wasn’t great with people. I wouldn’t have called us friends, but we
weren’t far from it.
He didn’t smile as the
observation group shifted their collective gaze to him. He made most
stoics seem emotionally unhinged.
“Next is Dr. Itzel
Rodriguez,” Claire continued. “Dr. Rodriguez is a mechanical engineer from the
University of Mexico, by way of MIT. She specializes in exotic matter
containment and applied xenotechnology.” Itzel was short, with an olive
complexion and a mane of wavy brown hair, streaked with blue, that
surrounded a face with round cheeks. She was in one of her many
science-pun T-shirts, battered jeans, and Chuck Taylors. Her shirt of the day
had a smiling proton telling an electron to be positive.
Itzel’s endless enthusiasm
almost made up for her tendency to sing when she was excited. Nothing
helped complex engineering problems like lab karaoke. Still, I’d
put money on her winning a Nobel Prize.
Vibrating with excitement,
Itzel beamed when Claire said her name. “It’s great to meet everyone,”
she said, with a hint of a Mexican accent.
Claire pointed to our third
team member. “Many of you already know Dr. Nathan Chambers.”
I resisted the urge to roll
my eyes.
Barely.
Nate was blandly handsome,
with sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and the muscle tone of someone who
worked out for looks. Straightening his salmon polo, he smiled with
the casually smug air of a guy used to being showered with praise. I
guess it came with being the child of a billionaire.
Nate was the son and heir
apparent of tech mogul Jeremiah Chambers. His PhD was just part of
preparing for his legacy.
As much as I disliked the
rich, though, Nate’s money wasn’t why I couldn’t stand him.
The guy was just
awful.
He ignored Harvey and
treated Itzel like a waitress, but he reserved his real contempt for me.
I was the only one in the lab without a PhD, but that didn’t bother
him as much as the fact I’d grown up poor.
The first time we met, Nate
had asked Claire if she’d given all her strays research projects. I’d
asked him if he was planning to be buried in his father’s shadow or
just live his whole life in it.
It went downhill from
there.
As much as I hated the guy,
though, Nate was good at computational physics. It was why Claire had
brought him in on the project, even if his presence was a needle in
the heart of my chill.
“And of course, I want to
introduce Brandon Car ter.” Claire gestured to me, her smile expanding
with pride. “Brandon came to my attention years ago, thanks to his
high-school physics teacher.”
Someone snickered. Maybe
they’d been born with an advanced degree.
“While research is a team
effort, Brandon’s equations—his revolutionary way of visualizing and
modeling gravitational waves in tandem with highly energetic systems—are
this project’s foundation. The first time I read the paper that launched
all this,”—Claire gestured around the lab—“a paper Brandon wrote as a
second-year under grad, I might add—I thought it was rubbish, mostly because I
didn’t think what he was suggesting was possible.” Claire chuckled. “When
Brandon explained his work to me, I realized I was holding something
extraordinary.”
The observers looked at me.
Some seemed impressed; others, dubious or dismissive.
I managed not to
glare.
Whatever they saw, I doubted
physicist was the first word that came to mind. Musician, maybe, if they
were being generous. Armed robber if they weren’t.
I was twenty-three and
nearly six foot four, with a wiry build and the colorless complexion of
my Irish roots. My hair was dark, a product of the Korean side of
my dad’s family, chopped short and shaved on the sides. I wasn’t what
people called handsome. Striking, maybe, with deep-set hazel eyes under a
heavy brow, a large nose, prominent cheekbones, and a strong chin.
My uniform—a hoodie, band
shirt, jeans, and a pair of boots, all black—didn’t exactly scream
scientist. Neither did the tattoos that peeked out from beneath my
sleeves and spread across my hands.
If asked, almost anyone who
knew me growing up would’ve said the only way I’d end up in a physics lab
was by robbing it. Before fifteen, I would have agreed. The
trajectory of my life hadn’t been aimed anywhere good.
Why?
Because a superhero killed
my dad when I was eight. If it hadn’t been for that high-school science
teacher sending a paper I’d written to Claire, I probably would’ve
ended up in a jail cell instead of a lab.
Claire smiled again.
“Collectively, this team has accomplished something monumental: the first
step in bridging the gulf between our world and the infinite other
worlds beyond.”
She waved at the device
behind us. “Our machine uses alien matter to shape a gravitational
distortion and generate a microscopic breach in the membrane separating
our reality from others, allowing us to receive electromagnetic radiation from a
nearby multiversal strand. To put it another way, we’ll be capturing
radio signals from parallel Earths.”
The size of a cargo van, our
machine might have looked like a haphazard tangle of wires, cables,
and components grafted at random to a metal frame, but every module,
field generator, and dedicated processor had been custom built for this
experiment. Collectively, it represented three years of my life and more
than $9 million of funding.
The machine’s official name
was the Multiversal Intermembrane Communication System. We called
her MICSy.
MICSy wasn’t pretty, but she
didn’t need to be. At her heart, straining against a xibrantium
containment bottle, was a piece of voidrium the size of a
fingertip, capable of generating enough gravity to punch a hole
through the fabric of space-time.
Assuming the test didn’t
kill us all in the next few minutes.
“That’s right. Some of you
traveled two thousand miles to watch us turn on the world’s most
expensive radio,” Claire said, eliciting more chuckles. “But if
we’re successful, the technology will pave the way for full matter
transference.”
The multiverse wasn’t a
theory. It was a fact made hard to ignore by the occasional monster
attacks and invaders from alternate timelines. Masks had been known to
travel to other multiversal threads, or parallel worlds, and tread on strange
and “undreamed shores,” to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare. They did it
in ways not easily replicated, however: Magical portals. Falling
through black holes.
If successful, we’d take a
step toward making the trip easier.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen,
shall we make history?” Claire turned to the team and raised an eyebrow. I
looked at the clock, my stomach churning.
It was 10:01 a.m.
Breaking apart, we headed to
our workstations. Har vey and I were on one side of the room, monitoring
the control system and the voidrium to ensure the exotic material’s
energy output remained within the containment fields’ tolerances. On the other
side, Itzel monitored MICSy’s power system, while Nate watched CPU usage
on the control-software servers to make sure they didn’t crash.
I glanced at the team. They
seemed as nervous as I felt, even Nate, who had the least to lose,
outside his life. Taking a breath, I pulled up the ignition sequence.
“Everyone ready?”
Harvey nodded.
“Make it so!” Itzel
chirped.
“Get on with it, Carter,”
Nate groused.
“Here we go.” I took another
deep breath and clicked the initialize button.
The refrigerator-sized
xenotech power block began to vibrate, and MICSy hummed as she generated
a series of overlapping containment fields. The smell of ozone
filled the air, but the diagnostics showed everything as nominal.
“Containment fields on,
control system running,” I breathed. “How are we looking on your end,
Itzel?” “Stable. MICSy’s purring like a kitten.”
“Opening the containment
bottle and bringing the voidrium online.” Hoping I wasn’t about to kill us
all, I started the activation sequence.
The power block’s hum
deepened as the xibrantium bottle at MICSy’s heart opened. The voidrium
inside glimmered with violet light as energy flowed through it. A
stillness filled the room. This was the real test. If it went well, we’d
change the world. If it went poorly . . . well, we might still change the
world, at least on local topographic maps.
“Uh, Brandon, you should
look at this,” Harvey murmured, a ripple of tension in his tone.
“What?” I asked, hoping my
voice wouldn’t carry to the observers. Harvey’s calm demeanor was a joke
in the lab, which meant the worry in his tone amounted to hysterics
for anyone else.
“We’re getting some
instability in the voidrium modulation field.”
A chill ran through me.
Shit.
Voidrium was highly
unstable. Investigators had discovered it among the wreckage of the Rakkari
ships that assaulted Earth nearly three decades ago. The Rakkari
had used it for faster-than-light travel, but research so far had
produced no results other than fatal accidents. Our project was one of a
handful authorized to work with the exotic matter, and only for a brief
window of time.
Sliding out of my seat, I
made my way to Harvey as quickly as I could without running, weaving
around equipment and through wires. Harvey slid to the side as I
stepped in front of his terminal. The screen was covered in graphs and
other monitoring tools that would have been incomprehensible to most
people, but we had designed the system. I saw what he meant instantly.
An alert message flashed in
the field control system. Uh-oh.
Voidrium’s energy production
rate was unstable. Previous attempts to harness it had failed due to
unpredictable power spikes, almost as if the voidrium were fighting to
break free. To compensate, Harvey and I had created an algorithm to
predict energy fluctuations and modulate the overlapping containment
fields in real time. Without it, we couldn’t have put enough power into
the voidrium to penetrate the membrane separating our reality from other
multiversal strands without it exploding. Some of the best computational
physicists at the university—and by extension, the world—had reviewed our
algorithm. We’d run thousands of simulations, using data models
constructed from other experiments. It should have been working.
Instead, the algorithm was
failing to predict nearly a third of the energy spikes, pushing the field
generators to the limit of their tolerances. Unless we could get
the spikes under control, the generators would burn out. If we lost
one, failure would cascade through the rest, which would be very, very
bad.
Our theoretical modeling
predicted that an explosion probably wouldn’t generate an ever-expanding
singularity that would engulf the solar system, but it would destroy the lab,
along with a significant portion of the building, not to mention kill everyone
inside.
No pressure, I thought,
breaking into a cold sweat. I racked my brain, ignoring the voice telling me
to shut MICSy off. If I hit the emergency shutoff, I could check
the field generators and debug the algorithm. I could blame a faulty power
relay and use the incident to demonstrate our rigorous safety protocols.
But our research review was at the end of the month, and there was no
guarantee the Department of Energy would let us keep the voidrium long
enough for a second test run. This needed to work.
Suddenly, the solution hit
me. My fingers flew across the keyboard as I threw commands into
different windows.
“Is there a problem,
gentlemen?” Claire asked from behind me, her normally unflappable cool
unable to keep the tension from her voice.
“It looks like the algorithm
isn’t modulating the fields properly,” Harvey whispered. “It’s failing to
prevent roughly thirty percent of the energy fluctuations.”
“Shut it down,” Claire
ordered. “Immediately.” Harvey reached for the emergency shutoff.
I grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t.” We locked eyes. His were wide with fear. “I’ve got this.”
We looked to Claire.
“We’re still within
tolerances,” I said. “I need sixty seconds.”
Claire’s eyes narrowed, and
she glanced at the committee. “One minute. If the power fluctuations
aren’t under control in one minute, shut it down.”
I was typing before she’d
finished speaking. Our energy growth model wasn’t the issue. It had to be
a software bug. The night before, Nate had “fixed” a syntax error I’d
supposedly overlooked. I was guessing whatever he’d done had broken
something. I initialized the previous version of the control software on a
backup server. MICSy sent data to both primary and secondary control systems as
a failsafe. I could compare the readings on the secondary server to
the primary and, if there were no errors in the earlier version,
switch to it. The two control systems ran concurrently, so there
shouldn’t be any interruptions. If I was right, the switch would
stabilize the process.
The program was system
intensive, so it took time to synchronize. Each second felt like an hour
as the diagnostics flashed alarms.
I tried not to think about
the consequences of being wrong as MICSy’s smooth purr shifted into a
rumbling growl, drawing concerned murmurs from our observers. “Apologies,
gentlemen!” Claire flashed them a practiced smile. “It wouldn’t be science
without a little excitement.”
Nearly there. Five seconds
until the backup came online.
The lights flickered.
Four seconds. My pulse
pounded in my ears. Three.
The grumbling increased.
Harsh, violet light radiated from the containment bottle. The field
generators’ output levels began to redline.
Two.
The acrid stench of
overheating electronics filled the room. Electricity crackled, and a blue
flash, followed by a spray of sparks, erupted from MICSy. It was only
the secondary power relay burning out. We were still good.
One.
A field generator blew,
sparks erupting from the side of the machine, but the other generators
still worked. The fix was going to work. I was sure of it.
The prior version of the
control system finished initializing. Immediately, I could see I was right. The
energy curve began to smooth out. I switched control systems, and
the levels started to stabilize.
“I’ve got it—”
Claire hit the emergency
override. MICSy sputtered and went silent as the diagnostic panel
flatlined. The stench of smoldering electronics intensified, and a haze filled
the room.
People coughed behind
me.
Shit.
About Christopher Lee Rippee:
Christopher Lee Rippee won a young authors contest in third grade, which was the day he officially decided to become a writer. He prepared by reading comics, playing too much Dungeons & Dragons, and devouring every sci -fi and fantasy novel he could get his hands on.
Along the
way, thanks to some great people and a lifelong love of punk rock, Chris found
his way to social work and currently works at a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit.
He's also a certified mental-health first-aid trainer, has worked as a
neurodiversity consultant for several Pittsburgh-based tech startups, and has
contributed to several tabletop RPG products. When not writing, Chris reads,
plays games, and spends time with his lovely wife, Nicole, and their adorable
rescue dog, Belle.
Website | Threads | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon
Giveaway Details:
1 winner
will receive a $10 Amazon Gift Card, International.
Ends October 5th, midnight EST.
a Rafflecopter giveawayTour Schedule:
Week One:
|
9/2/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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9/3/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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9/4/2024 |
Excerpt |
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9/5/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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|
9/6/2024 |
Excerpt |
Week Two:
|
9/9/2024 |
IG Post/TikTok Post |
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9/10/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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9/11/2024 |
Excerpt |
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9/12/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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9/13/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
Week Three:
|
9/16/2024 |
Review |
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9/17/2024 |
IG Review |
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9/18/2024 |
IG Review |
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9/19/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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9/20/2024 |
IG Review/TikTok Post |
Week Four:
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9/23/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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9/24/2024 |
IG Review/TikTok Post |
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9/25/2024 |
IG Review/LFL Drop Pic/TikTok Post |
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9/26/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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9/27/2024 |
Review |
Week Five:
|
9/30/2024 |
IG Review |
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