Page 13 of Just My Luck

His house manager would complain, but screw that guy. His only job was ordering everyone else around. He didn’t know what it felt like to work bent over until your lower back screamed for relief.

After about an hour in the shower, he wandered out to the living room and stood for a moment gazing out the window at the ocean. Since Kona was on the west side of the Big Island, the next landfall would be Maui, then the rest of the string of islands and then…Japan or the Philippines, perhaps. Past Japan would be South Korea. Here in Kona, he was a couple thousand miles closer to his father than when he was home in California.

Hi Dad, he thought sarcastically as he waved out the window. Bet you miss me, don’t you? Bet you’re wondering why I’ve dropped out of sight and gone no contact with everyone. Yeah right. You probably haven’t even noticed.

On impulse, he raised his middle finger and flashed it at the ocean, as if his angry gesture might carry all the way across the Pacific. Then he laughed out loud at himself. “Idiot.”

Zara’s schtick about triggers and denial flashed back to his mind, and he found himself chuckling out loud. If she could see him now, flipping the bird at a man an entire ocean away, she’d be “I told you so”-ing all over the place.

He sat on the couch and logged onto his laptop. Before he’d come back to Hawaii, his IT supervisor had set it up so his identity was masked behind a top-tier VPN. For some time, he’d been searching for Rory Baker, his former pilot, who had been present when the crystal disappeared. Rory had gone completely off the grid, and Lincoln couldn’t blame him for that. Better than anyone, Rory knew how powerful the CHUM technology could be.

Lincoln could still hear the accusations Rory had leveled at him. You’re going to keep this technology for the zero point zero zero percent while the rest of our bills keep going up? Win win lose?

Rory just didn’t understand how the world worked. One person couldn’t change it, not even a billionaire. Why couldn’t he get that?

His computer pinged. He’d set up a very complicated alert that would tell him if anyone posted about his missing tech.

He clicked on the alert and a shiver went through his body. The post was on a subreddit page devoted to alternative energy. It showed a meme of a two-inch tall bluish crystal object against a starry background.

This will change the world, the text on the meme read. Want to know more? Check the comments.

He had to wade through a hellscape of comments before finding the website. The comments said things like, Vaguepost much?…The world’s a steaming dumpster fire of toxic waste, what’s the point? …That’s alien tech from Planet 18973, I saw it when I got abducted.

Finally, there was a website link. FreeEnergyForAll dot com.

Another tremor shuddered through his body. If his investors saw this shit, they’d throw a fit. It wouldn’t benefit Higher Ground to produce something that provided free energy. The opposite, in fact. It would make his company the enemy of every utility, oil company, generator manufacturer, even solar panel company in the world. No one wanted free energy.

Except the general population, of course.

He clicked on the site and scanned the text.

The promise and potential of harmonic magnifiers. Imagine a device so powerful it can amplify the nearest electric current to a hundred or even a thousandfold. That’s the power of this small crystalline object. If properly controlled, it could allow the smallest light bulb to provide enough energy to run an entire house, or even a city block, and perhaps even a town.

It sounds impossible, and yet, for weeks, rumors have been flying that such a thing exists. This photo was taken from a recent sighting, but it disappeared shortly afterwards.

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to track down this world-transforming object before the billionaires lock it up forever.

This technology should not be gate-kept by people who don’t have our best interests at heart.

This mission is hazardous.

The most powerful elites in the world don’t want you to find it. They don’t want us to be free from energy costs. Too many people make too much money off our backs. That’s the way things have always been. But ask yourself, do they have to be that way? What could humanity accomplish without the restrictions of costly energy production?

Lincoln stared at his laptop screen and swore out loud. This was his worst nightmare. The CHUM could be dangerous in the wrong hands. This was why he had to find the damn thing before this got out of control. He didn’t need to be fending off internet conspiracy theorists while he did so.

Had Rory posted this? Or maybe it was someone on Tanaka’s team, trying to flush out whoever currently had possession of the CHUM crystal?

He fired off an email to his IT team to find out where the meme had originated.

But face it—this was his fault, full stop. He’d had possession of the only surviving sample of the CHUM and he’d let it get away. Okay, it had taken two plane crashes and a coma to make that happen. Nonetheless, he had no one to blame but himself.

The sick taste of failure soured his stomach. At this rate, he was going to end up with nothing. He’d put all his eggs in this one basket. In the settlement with his sister Maureen, he’d stepped down from every part of Kerr Enterprises other than Higher Ground LLC. Everyone in his world had been mystified by that choice. Why, out of all the companies in the Kerr portfolio, had he chosen the one no one had heard of? The one that seemed to be little more than a research lab that hadn’t produced anything yet?

He got to his feet and paced around the room.

Maybe he should take Zara’s advice and not jump to the worst conclusion. Obviously the CHUM was still out there, or there wouldn’t be any push to locate it. That was something. If Rory had posted this, he might know something by now. Lincoln should be able to locate Rory; he wouldn’t be far from Mathilda. Lincoln had seen the way those two looked at each other.

He also had an alert set up for Mathilda Wheeler. She was the last known person to have had contact with the CHUM. Checking the most recent report from his investigators, he saw that she’d landed at the Hilo airport two days earlier. Now that she was moving around freely, out of the hospital and away from her family, he wanted to talk to her.