World Gone Mad (Book 1): Mad World

  Mad World

  Michael Evans

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  Chapter 1

  When Ryder Shaw glanced at the television, he knew he messed up—big time.

  Normally, he was never one to worry.

  He always figured that even if things were going bad, somehow they would find a way to work out just fine. He had acquired what some would call delusional optimism after a slew of failed leukemia treatments on his twin brother finally led to a breakthrough that cured him.

  The doctors weren’t sure how the cancer cells that had metastasized to multiple areas of his seven-year-old body magically disappeared when a new, untested cancer drug flooded his system.

  Ryder had always figured it was God.

  And it was safe to assume that God would always be on his side.

  But this time was different.

  Ryder knew the moment he heard the voice of the young, attractive news reporter that she was talking about him. Last night, a man supposedly coordinated a security breach of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s new headquarters in Washington D.C., leading to an ultra-powerful technology to escape into the hands of terrorists.

  The terrorists used the technology to put the United States military at a standstill as they bombed the White House and Pentagon to smithereens.

  Everyone in the breakroom stared at the television screen in shock as the reporter continued. One woman even spit the food in her mouth back onto her plate while one of the senior members of the agency dropped his smoldering coffee onto his chest.

  This exact event had been the worst fear of everyone in the agency and something that they actively ran tests to try and prevent.

  But they never planned for this.

  An insider breaching the internal security systems and compromising United States National Security—even global security—in order to hand the most powerful technology known to mankind over to a terrorist group.

  Ryder was that insider.

  “They have no idea what is coming for them,” Zachary stated as he brushed a hand through his thick, gray beard. Ryder served with him in the Final War against China a little over a decade ago. Although he was in the Air Force and Ryder served as a Marine, they both always shared in the pain that came from witnessing hundreds of thousands of their brothers die in that war.

  For Ryder, that pain became really personal when his brother was captured by the Chinese in the battle of Beijing and later killed in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  The pain from that day still hadn’t left him, and imagining something worse than returning home without his twin brother by his side was nearly impossible.

  That was until the shit hit the fan.

  And Zachary, Ryder, and every other person in the breakroom located at the heart of the secret DARPA research facility knew how bad this was. With the Chimera Cube in their hands, there was virtually no way to stop the terrorists.

  The technology was created through a series of government research experiments in the 1980s, spearheaded by the single greatest genius to live since Einstein. His name was Isaac Savery, and his mission was to harness the power of quantum physics to create a technology that could embody all the glory that the Atomic Precise Manufacturing Revolution sought to bring. At first, the United States government supported him and his ambitious endeavors because they desired to gain yet another leg up on the Russians in the Cold War. But after they realized the immense power of the technology, even the top military generals decided that it would be better off destroyed.

  The only problem was that Isaac Savery couldn’t bear to watch his life’s work be turned to ash in a matter of seconds, so he saved all the patents and gave them to his trusted mentees. A few decades later, those trusted mentees finished reconstructing the technology and were ready to release it into the world.

  The first time the Chimera Cube collided with the public, it almost destroyed humanity for good.

  Luckily, it was saved just in time, but not before hundreds of millions of lives were ruined. In the wake of that disaster, with the United States government firmly in control of the technology, they decided to hide it away and save it for a time of desperation such as a global famine or alien invasion.

  After over a decade more of it being locked away, it had been Ryder’s job along with a number of other DARPA scientists to research into its full range of capabilities and develop plans about how it could potentially be implemented into society in the future.

  Ryder’s discoveries had been nothing short of spectacular.

  The Chimera Cube was capable of manipulating subatomic particles, thus allowing for the formation of materials at an atomically precise scale. In practice, the cube was meant to be a nanofabrication machine, a cube-shaped factory about the size of a large watermelon that was capable of producing self-replicating nanorobots. And these nanorobots represent a technology so advanced that it was indistinguishable from magic.

  They could monitor the bloodstreams of humans, eliminate tumors before they arose, and constantly repair cellular damage to keep one from ever aging or growing sick. The same nanorobots were also capable of self-replicating in perpetuity, along with trillions upon trillions of the tiny microscopic devices to manipulate individual atoms and build complex molecules at the blink of an eye. With this process scaled up, the Chimera Cube at just the touch of a button was able to create more wealth from oxygen molecules alone than had ever been created in human history.

  Overnight, the cube could solve the problems of wealth inequality, render humans free from sickness, and give unlimited food, water, and other goods to nearly every person on the planet.

  For years, Ryder had fought to release the technology in hopes that it could save the hundreds of millions of people who suffered each day from feeling needles pain. He was tired of hearing the sorry excuses from his boss, Hunter, that it would destroy the world if released. He was even more exhausted of the laborious lectures he frequently received from members of the Senate. They believed that if the general public had knowledge of such a device existing, that the social order would collapse and the desire of people to work and to even be law-abiding citizens would fade away instantaneously.

  Now, they weren’t all just evil people.

  Ryder knew they had a point.

  Ryder knew better than anyone that if released into the wrong hands, the Chimera Cube could become a device of endless war and destruction. It could be used to wipe out the human race with ease.

  That was why he never released it out into the world himself. Over the years, he had worked hard to become a senior member of the DARPA research facility, and one of very few people who had enough power and knowledge to take the cube into his own hands.

  But he never trusted himself.

  How could he?

  Dealing with such a technology could result in the blood of billions on his hands if he didn’t do it correctly. And with his daughter and wife clueless as to what he did on a daily basis, coming home and telling them that he was going to change the world overnight would not be a good way to introduce them to his secret second life.

  Well, he believed all of that until he got desperate.

  And he made a mistake—a deadly one.

  Now the world would have to face the consequences, and if Ryder didn’t move quickly, there was a good chance that they would become lethal for him and everyone else in the facility real fast.

  “The Chimera Cube is gone.” Hunter stormed into the breakroom, his glasses falling off his face. He was a young man compa
red to most of the scientists who worked in the facility, but due to his stunning intellect, he had skyrocketed through the ranks.

  Since the day that Ryder arrived at this particular facility, Hunter had been the head researcher. He was the kind of guy that was so popular around there that even his shit would not stink if it sat in the middle of the old, rotting wooden tables at the center of the small breakroom. Even his wife, Natalie, had immense power in the facility with her job, serving to coordinate the operations of DARPA with the Pentagon and other divisions of the government.

  The few times that Ryder had seen Hunter angry had always ended terribly for the person on the receiving end.

  And all it would take was Hunter glancing at the security cameras for a second to realize that the person who deserved all the heat of his fury was standing right in front of him.

  “This is some sick joke, right?” Natalie called out as she emerged from her small office. Like the rest of the rooms in the facility, there were no windows in her office. The cheap cement walls were painted in beautiful splashes of red and blue by the army of high-tech robots stored in the depths of the facility. However, the attempts by Hunter and Natalie to spruce this place up had little effect.

  Due to the lack of government funding, most of the infrastructure in the facility was falling apart. Although it would be as simple as commanding the Chimera Cube to create them some resources to fix all their funding problems, Hunter would never allow that to happen.

  He rarely let anyone touch the cube except for himself. Most days he stayed in his laboratory late into the night, studying the effects of the Chimera Cube on animals, matter, and even his own body.

  He had always said that if that technology got into the hands of the public, it would spell doom for humanity.

  One glance at the television screen would seem to prove him right.

  “The freaking signal is lost!” someone burst out as a round of static radiated throughout the room. Everyone’s voice started speaking up at once as all the competing theories about what was happening collided in the airwaves.

  Some thought Hunter was the culprit of the leak. Others were convinced it was Oscar, one of the quiet senior researchers known for his habit of asking annoying and often intrusive questions. So far, no one had pinned the blame on Ryder, but all it would take was someone noticing the color draining from his face and his wrists shaking to know that he was guilty.

  “My cellphone stopped working!” Oscar stood and shouted. Ryder put his hands over his ears, a migraine threatening to split his consciousness in half with the overwhelming stress of the moment combined with all the commotion.

  These people needed to stop yelling. How many years did it take for them to realize that with just over a dozen of them, it didn’t take a megaphone for the sound to travel?

  “Mine too,” another one shouted, their voice dissipating into the chorus of paranoid chatter.

  “It must be an EMP. Those freaking terrorists could have easily exploded hundreds of nuclear warheads in the atmosphere all around the world,” Zachary said as he glanced around at each person in the breakroom. “The cube would make that just as easy as pressing a button.”

  “What is an EMP?” Allie questioned with a bite of her sandwich still in her mouth. Allie worked in human resources and was the liaison to Congress for the small, yet powerful branch of DARPA. Out of the roughly dozen people who worked full time in the laboratory, she was the one with the least amount of knowledge about what the Chimera Cube was capable of.

  From her expression, you would think that there was nothing more than a terrible winter storm on the horizon or a powerful hurricane. She had no idea that the entire world just changed in a single instant.

  And it might never be the same again.

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” Hunter stated, his deep voice slicing through the panicked movements of all the DARPA researchers. “It is essentially a powerful wave of electromagnetic energy that can destroy all nearby electronics and cripple the communications and power grid. EMP bursts can occur both naturally, mainly from solar flares, and artificially, typically produced by nuclear bombs or smaller, more localized e-bombs. Odds are that if this event is truly connected to the Chimera Cube’s disappearance, then whoever has the technology is using it for something bigger—likely a global takeover of power. And with only a few dozen nuclear bombs exploding at high altitudes above strategic sections of the continental United States, it is more than possible to wipe out the power of hundreds of millions within their blast radius.”

  Ryder gulped at his words. He didn’t need a reminder about the magnitude of destruction that an EMP would cause upon the United States and the entire world. He also didn’t need anyone to tell him to know that the EMP was just the beginning. The war that this cube had sparked would tear apart modern civilization and likely kill billions.

  The one thing he didn’t understand was how any of this was possible.

  It was only twelve hours ago when he broke into this very same facility and gave the Chimera Cube to his cousin, Seth Wade. Out of everyone that Ryder knew, Seth seemed to be the most trusted. He had a high-paying job and had multiple houses around the country, all of which were located in gated communities.

  He was always the man that Ryder could never be. Someone who had great power, immense confidence, and an ability to support his loved ones in ways that Ryder couldn’t.

  He also was a very generous man.

  He offered Ryder ten million dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency in exchange for the Chimera Cube. A man like Hunter would have never been swayed by a bribe of that amount. With a modest apartment in Downtown D.C. and two weeks paid vacation per year, Hunter was happy in the nine-to-five rat race.

  Ryder was not.

  After years of his gambling addiction eating him alive, the monster had grown to a level that was impossible to keep up with. After taking out a second mortgage on the house, his monthly payment was well over five figures, his credit card debt was sky high, and last week he even had to pawn off his wife Amy’s prized possession—an old Chevy Truck with zero computerized parts, built for surviving an EMP.

  He lied to Amy and told her that he had to bring it to the shop to fix a broken carburetor. His hope was that after selling the truck for just over fifteen thousand dollars that he could turn it into a profit of over a million overnight. That plan appeared to just be another bout of delusional optimism, because by the time the professional sports leagues had finished their play for the night, Ryder’s risky bets failed to pay off yet again.

  He was at a dead end this time.

  One that he would either have to get out of by filing for bankruptcy and exposing himself to his wife and daughter as the lying, gambling addict that he was, or one that he could solve overnight by finally taking Seth up on his offer.

  For years he had pestered Ryder about the cube, claiming that one of his Senator friends told him about its existence late one night after drinking too much bourbon. After finally reaching a dead end, Ryder was too scared to confront the pain that he tried to cover up with his addiction for years.

  He figured that ten million dollars would be a nice way to mask it for a while, and an even better way to pay off his gambling debts, send his daughter, Marin, through college, and set aside money for graduate school and her potential wedding one day, and even retire his wife from her job working with therapy dogs at the children’s hospital in Arlington.

  Well, it was a nice idea.

  In practice, it didn’t turn out that way.

  Ryder had hoped that his cousin could bring the cube to the masses and just as the money would change Ryder’s life, he hoped that the wealth that the cube would bring would change the world forever. He had hoped that the cube would be the one singular thing the world needed to propel humanity to new, unbelievable heights.

  He was right in that the cube would change the world forever.

  He had no idea that it would destroy it.

  But when t
he power cut off, and the entire laboratory was blanketed in a thick layer of darkness, Ryder knew that this mistake wouldn’t just cost him everything.

  It would cost the world too.

  And as everyone stood up, the seriousness of the situation sinking in, Ryder knew that he had only one mission.

  He needed to save his family. He needed to ensure that Marin, Amy, and everyone else he cared about survived this disaster and went on to live happy lives in the end.

  But he needed to save the world too.

  The only problem was that doing so might be impossible. However, Ryder knew just where he needed to start.

  “Listen up!” Hunter stood up on one of the tables and stomped his feet onto the wooden top. Suddenly everyone shifted their attention to him. With the static on the television screen dissipating, there was nothing but the heavy breaths to accompany the silence.

  Even in the darkness, the imposing silhouette of Hunter was visible. He was slender, yet extremely muscular, and his blue orb-like eyes glowed in the darkness as if fueled by their own source of electricity.

  “We all have prepared for this day even though we never wanted it to come. The backup generators we have down here will kick on within seconds.” As if on cue, the lights flickered back on and the static returned to the television screen right as the words left his mouth.

  “No one move!” he yelled again, putting a stop to the hurried movements of the researchers as they all attempted to make an escape. Ryder was the only one who wasn’t eager to leave. The shock and guilt weighed him down, causing his mind to put up a mental barrier between himself and the world around him.

  This can’t be real. This must be a dream.

  “The generators have about a week’s worth of fuel. That is more than enough to get us through what will likely be the worst initial burst as everyone goes mad on the streets. It is imperative that we protect the rest of the technologies in here. If someone gets their hands on the proprietary laser rifles or gains control of the legion of combat humanoids stored in this facility, that will only add to the chaos.”