First Chapter

DIMENSIONS
By Richard Bellamy

C Copyright by Richard Bellamy - 2013
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Chapter One: I Don’t Know Where I Am

Sometimes I don’t know where I am.

When I tried crossing Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, and almost got hit by a passing gardener’s truck, a blast of diesel fumes placed me in Errachidia, Morocco, where Ford lorries belch clouds of exhaust into the hot air. I felt like I was on my way back from visiting a Relief Outpost in the Sahara, one of the twenty-five humanitarian aid stations my billionaire father had established and funded all over the world. It often happened that way. A smell, a sound, a taste in the air made me feel like I was in another country. It was a strange side effect of traveling so much. A recent arrival in another country was always a tenuous thing for me. At any time, forces might conspire to snatch my mind away and send me thousands of miles overseas to another land.

It was like that for me that sunny Saturday in June when I found myself back in the States after nearly a year visiting locations all over the world. What had brought me back was the death of my father.

The funeral had done little to orient me. It had established another kind of limbo, the otherworldliness of an unwanted occasion that makes your head ring with adrenaline. You go through the motions of your life settled into the security of routine, but then a significant tragedy comes along to alter that routine, and the normal flow is interrupted. You are sucked into the moment of whatever exigency inevitably arises in your life, yet there is little awareness of your surroundings. The people around you demand your attention. Custom and ritual require your focus. The event could be taking place anywhere.

“Your father did so much for so many, Paul.”

“Thank you.”

Yes, my father was a HUMANITARIAN. A hard act to follow. He had given billions to research a cure for the cancer that had killed my mother when I was five; a London socialite, she had used her beauty to ensnare my father and his fortune only to fall in love with him and help establish his clinics and aid stations all over the world. I had a lot to live up to. Would I become a HUMANITARIAN?

“Your father was a model to us all.”

“Thank you.”

All the internships I had done in Relief Outposts all over the world had been in response to my father’s HUMANITARIAN model, unlike my brother who had emulated my father’s model as a successful moneymaker.

“Your father was a genius.”

“Thank you.”

I had a sneaking suspicion I wasn’t genius material.

“What will you and your brother do with all those . . . ?“

“Uh, billions? I know. I don’t know.”

Robert Verne, my father, had been the founder and CEO of Verne Technologies. His perfecting of a voice-activated operating system as well as his innovative advancements in thought-activated operating systems had earned him world acclaim and the billions of dollars that occupied the minds of many of the people attending his funeral.

Billions of those dollars had been spent to establish a number of clinics and shelters in troubled, disadvantaged parts of the world. During the past year, I had visited a number of those Relief Outposts, as they were called, all over the world. After two years in an American high school, I had been world schooled in Outposts for two years, completing my high school education online, and firsthand, at these aid stations. I was eighteen, had just earned my high school diploma, and I was bound for U.C., Berkeley, in the fall.

My father had prescribed a small, private service in a non-sectarian chapel in Santa Monica, but his admirers had breached that exclusivity and turned the private affair into a public one that took up every inch of space in the quaint chapel and in the monastery-like gardens. Here were his distant relatives, his friends, his colleagues, his buyers, his worshippers, his envious critics, but a notable absence from that assemblage had been his older son, John, my brother.

But after offering their terse condolences, everyone who talked to me commented on one of three burning topics (my father’s advances in technology; my father’s humanitarian contributions; or my father’s money) and made no reference to John and his absence.

Everyone except the man in the gray suit.

I first saw him lurking by the modest refreshment table: fruit, cheese, various breads, iced tea, lemonade, and he sent a shiver down my spine. He was tall and thin, but he stood erect in a military sort of way. He had dark eyes set in deep sockets. His sunken cheeks made him look famished for something to fuel a deep hunger.

Later, I got another shiver when I turned and there he was, blocking my way.

“My condolences,” he said curtly, looking around nervously as though he thought he was being watched.

“Thank you.”

Here we go again, I thought.

I expected him to comment on one of the three standard topics.

Was that all that my father meant to them? He had been a passionate outdoorsman and champion of Sierra Nevada preservation movements. He had a collection of rare books that reflected a very different side of him. He had been writing a novel. He had been a devoted father when he had the time.

The gray-suited man’s abrupt question took me by surprise.

“Where’s John?”

“What?”

“Is he back?”

“I don’t know. Back from where?”

I had called John’s cell phone multiple times but hadn’t even gotten voicemail.

“You don’t know?”

“Who are you?”

“A client. I need to talk to John.”

“Well, he’s not here.”

“I talked to Deckard. He’s back. John’s not back?”

“Back from where? Is John in Tokyo?” I said.

“No.”

His voice quivered.

“Well, I don’t know where he is,” I said.

“I need to talk to him,” he said, like an addict expressing a need for a drug.

“About what?”

The man in the gray suit struggled over his diction.

“About going.”

This was absurd.

“About going where? What are you talking about?”

“The excursions.”

“What excursions?”

The man in the gray suit fixed his shifting eyes on me.

“You don’t know . . . about the excursions?”

“What excursions?”

The man’s eyes shifted and I followed them toward another man approaching us. It was my father’s lawyer, his pudgy hand holding two slices of bread clamped on a thick slab of Brie.

When I looked back, the man in the gray suit was hurrying down a walkway, disappearing around a corner of the chapel.

After my father’s lawyer launched into an endless string of concerns about managing my historic inheritance, all voiced around a mouthful of bread and cheese, I felt more disconnected from present time and space than ever. I had to get out of there. My mind was still back in Africa on the edge of the desert where I had accompanied the delivery of supplies to the Relief Outpost and it hadn’t caught up with my body.

Now, crossing Wilshire, I realized what I was wearing was certainly more appropriate for the desert than Beverly Hills. I had arrived at LAX at the last minute and had decided not to change my clothes for what had been planned as a small, exclusive gathering. The frayed brown cuffs of my hiking zip-offs rested on the tops of my hiking boots, and I knew that in my faded green canvas shirt, my gray assault pack slung over one shoulder, I looked ready for a backpacking trip, completely out of place in Beverly Hills, and the disorientation of looking up at a chrome and glass tower, when I had been looking over the Sahara Desert the day before, made my head spin despite the familiarity of this dazzling structure.

The building held the offices of Verne Media Tech with the top floor taken up by John’s penthouse apartment.

I pushed through the revolving doors, crossed a massive foyer in which an imitation mountain stream splashed over granite boulders through a faux redwood grove. My mind on the utilitarian features of the Relief Outposts my father had set up in countries all over the world, I felt like I had landed on an alien planet.

The new Relief Outpost set up in Cambodia could fit into half the space taken up by this vast lobby where the echoing conversations of VMT representatives and their clients went on despite the death of Robert Verne.

I was relieved to see the familiar face of the guard at the security desk.

“Graham!”

A handsome, muscular young Aussie in his twenties. Had come to the States to make it big in Hollywood. Sometimes worked as an extra playing one of the many gun-toting goons in action movies. Got a speaking line once in a while. “Drop it!” Dreamed of becoming an action-movie star, but he was still a security guard at VMT.

“Nice to see you, Paul.”

“Good to see you, too, Graham.”

“I’m sorry about your father. A tragic loss.”

“Thanks. Any movie opportunities?”

“Perhaps a sci-fi movie. A cross between The Time Machine and another dystopian novel by H. G. Wells I’ve never heard of.”

“Hey, good luck!”

“Thanks! What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for John.”

“Sorry, Paul. John isn’t here.”

“Where’s he gone?”

“He didn’t leave me an itinerary, which is kind of strange.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Weeks.”

“Can I go up to the penthouse? Maybe he left me a note or something.”

“You got your key?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, go on up. I’ll unlock the elevator.”

I walked past the central elevators and went down a narrow hallway to the private elevator that Graham had opened with the push of a button. I got in, selected the penthouse, and shot to the top floor.
When I let myself into John’s apartment, all echoes of the Moroccan desert vanished from my mind. I could be nowhere else but in this fantasy of glass, steel, and granite.

I also knew I would not find a note.

John’s apartment was no more John’s home than any of his other properties in the L.A. area, and the bareness of the place indicated what little time he spent there. Entranceway, kitchen, bar, living room – everything looked new and sterile.

When I stepped up to the bar, the highly polished black surface reflected my unshaven face. On the edge of the bar lay John’s keys to his Jaguar, a credit card, and three white metal discs: strange tokens or coins I couldn’t identify.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, through the top of a plate glass coffee table, I saw something move.

A body shifted under a red satin sheet. The body rose, the sheet slid down, and a young woman wearing a black camisole, one strap hanging off her right shoulder, sat up, placed her back against the spotless white couch and brushed tangled strands of honey-blonde hair from her face.
The woman looked across the room. Her head swayed groggily. She saw me.

“Paul,” she said, recognizing me, “Paul Verne.”

I stepped into the living room and sat on the edge of a massive white ottoman.

“You look familiar but . . . “

“Trinity. There was a party. Last summer. You were there briefly. And I’ve seen your picture . . . in John’s bedroom.”

I vaguely remembered Trinity, one of a long line of companions John selected out of many willing females and later cast off upon a whim or, upon a similar whim, picked up to be reused.
Like a patient coming out of deep anesthesia, Trinity pushed herself onto the couch and pulled up the sheet to cover her legs. An iPhone slid out of the sheet, and she picked it up and placed it on the coffee table on a small pile of clutter: an iPad; a wad of new one hundred dollar bills; a credit card; an open gold pill box filled with cocaine; car keys; a glass still holding an inch of liquor; and a tumbler of water next to a scatter of white pills.

Trinity smiled at me as she took a sip of water. Her skimpy camisole revealed youthful breasts as she leaned over to set down the glass.

“Back from saving the world? Wondering what you would have done with your choice? I guess the money you stand to inherit from your father sort of negates the choice, but you never know. Your father’s money might be held up by litigation for years.”

Trinity knew about THE CHOICE.

I suppose the whole world knew about THE CHOICE.

Robert Verne had had two sons. John was six years older than me, his mother the daughter of a wealthy L.A. hotelier; her bitter divorce from my father would most likely lead to the litigation Trinity predicted.

Growing up, John and I had always been told that when we turned twenty-one, we would be presented with a unique choice: take a billion dollars with the stipulation that every last penny of it be used to start a business or humanitarian organization within a year’s time, or take five hundred million and spend it on whatever you wanted.

John took the billion and bought up a tech firm, expanded it, turned it into Verne Media Tech, developed innovative filmmaking technology and virtual reality gaming technology, and made billions more.

Meanwhile, I wondered what choice I would make. Would I take the billion and expand the Outposts? I could add schools and housing for the homeless. Or, feeling I had given so much already, I could take the five hundred million for myself and buy a chunk of Montana.

“Can anything save this world?” I said.

Then Trinity seemed to remember. She rubbed her eyes. She looked like she was still under the influence of a drug.

“You came back because of your father.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Your father was a great man. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“I guess your brother didn’t make it to the funeral.”

“That’s right.”

“Your brother didn’t get along with your father.”

“My father loved John very much.”

“Well, John didn’t love him back. In fact, John doesn’t love anybody.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He loves all this,” said Trinity, sweeping a pale, bony hand over her collection of stuff.

“Where is he?”

“I haven’t seen him in weeks. Three weekends ago, he had a big party here for some new clients. A couple of Americans, two Germans, an Arab, and some playboy from South America. All big spenders. He took them on a pleasure junket to Paris or the Riviera, or maybe took them on one of the extreme trips he was organizing. Told me I could stay here. Haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

“He hasn’t been at work for a month?”

As she listened to the question, Trinity slipped the strap of her camisole partway up her slender shoulder. She was an attractive young woman, but drugs and alcohol and life with John Verne had taken their toll and her face had succumbed to a puffiness subtly lined with wrinkles.

“Not that I know of. He and three others from work had been disappearing off and on since Christmas. First it was just the four of them, staying away for a week at a time. Then they organized some sort of an exclusive excursion that people could pay into. Extreme Excursions, they called them. Some suicidal outdoor thing or something like that. I asked him where he went, but he always answered in vague terms, said it was dangerous, never invited me to come along. Beyond a small circle, it was all hush-hush. It’s probably illegal.”

“Who are the others?”

“Adrian Ash . . . “

A first class son of a bitch. As John’s right-hand man, Adrian always got his way. He fired techies right and left. But he had an irresistible charisma that made you hate him out of jealousy or follow him irresistibly. He loved pleasure-seeking women, fast cars, and extreme sports, and he didn’t care about anybody else, but people followed him and looked up to him just the same. Not tall but dark-featured, handsome, lean and hard of body. At parties, I had always steered clear of Adrian, and after a token greeting, Adrian never showed the slightest interest in me.

“Morris Miles . . .”

Everybody’s friend. He was John’s sociable negotiator who could butter up the driest clients. With his puffy face and stocky build, his big, clumsy hands, he didn’t strike you as a womanizer, but he loved to party, loved to dance, and very attractive women loved him for his charm and his readiness to have a wild time on short notice. I had gotten along with Morris.

“And Julia Wilde.”

Fiercely competitive, mercilessly aggressive, she was John’s litigator. She always won. An avid mountaineer and rock climber, she had broken numerous free-climbing records. She was a blonde-haired preppie queen bee turned rock-hard mountain woman. If she hadn’t been so warm and outgoing once she got what she wanted, if she hadn’t been such a knockout physically, and if I hadn’t lusted after her on numerous occasions, I would have hated her.

“Any idea what they’re up to?”

“No idea. He didn’t take me. Funny thing, whenever I texted him, the text got kicked back, like he discontinued his phone service when he was away.”

I looked out the huge window at the familiar hills that placed me without a doubt in California and once again I jolted out of some foreign zone back into this present place in time. I was far from Africa.

I looked at Trinity. Under the effects of overindulgence, she was very young and sexy and there was an endearing innocence in those blue eyes underscored by dark splotches. I wondered how long John would keep her around. I wondered how long she would survive.

“You have no idea where they went?”

“No idea. Like I said, he didn’t take me. I mean nothing to him.”

I stood. I surveyed the living room that looked in on the kitchen, the bar, and John’s bedroom. I thought I might see a sign, something, anything to tell me where John had gone, but there was nothing but sunlit bare surfaces.

“What means anything to John?” I said.

And with that, I turned and left, and Trinity slumped down on the couch, seeking refuge from the emptiness of her life in the oblivion of drugged sleep.

I took the elevator down.

It sped past the ground floor and opened into the underground parking structure.

“Damn!” I said. Wrong floor.

I pushed the button for the main floor. Nothing happened. The door didn’t close. The elevator didn’t move. The elevator lights went out.

“What the hell?”

I jumped out of the elevator before the doors closed behind me.

I turned and looked around the parking structure. At least the lights were still on. Only a few cars: John’s Jaguar; John’s vintage Mustang; John’s black Hummer: a convenient vehicle if I had to bulldoze my way through a concrete wall.

I headed for the door to the stairway.

I opened the door, and when I turned to mount the steps, I froze in my tracks.

On the landing above stood a dark figure armed: a girl, a young woman, seventeen or eighteen, jet-black hair cut just off her shoulders, eyes behind dark glasses, her slim but solid body clad in black tights, high black boots, and a tight black jacket fastened with a long line of golden buttons. Her right hand, extended, held an odd sort of gun like a cross between an Uzi and Han Solo’s blaster. All in all, she looked like a costumed anime fan lost on her way to Comic-Con.

“Do not move!” she said, her toneless voice running the words together.

“Take it easy,” I said, unslinging my pack and reaching into the outer pocket for my wallet.

I held out a Moroccan leather billfold that contained a few soiled dirhams and a twenty-dollar bill.

“Here! I know what you want! Take it! There’s nothing in it, but you can have it.”

She made no move to take the wallet.

One eye on the gun, I watched her take her left hand and reach into a slipcase in her jacket under her right breast. She took out a smooth black device the size and shape of an iPhone.

“Take it!” I said again, and when she didn’t, I dropped the wallet. It made a loud slap on the cold concrete.

The female goth, anime-fan mugger looked down at the wallet as though she didn’t know what it was and didn’t understand why I had offered to give it to her.

What happened next made my heart stop.

Whether by mental command or an imperceptible pressure of her hand, the black device hummed and projected a small holographic screen covered with icons. From one of the icons rose a 3-D schematic of sixty different colored spheres arranged in the shape of a soccer ball like a science class model of a molecule. One of the spheres grew larger while the others faded away, and from the remaining sphere emanated a stream of dazzling pixels that rose over our heads and began forming a shell that fell around us.

She slipped her gun into a holster on her right thigh, as the pixelated shell enclosed us completely.

“This will hurt,” she said.

And it did.