The Skeptic- Sample Chapter One

The Skeptic is my first finished novel. I loved the book so much I essentially wrote it twice: the first draft being so bad that I rewrote probably eighty percent of the book. I’m currently in the process of finding a publisher, which might be harder than writing the damned well-loved and cherished thing to begin with.

If you like what you see, I’m always open to beta readers, just e-mail me at bryaneikwood@gmail.com. (Or if you’re in the industry and want to see more, I guess that would be fine too.)

Chapter 1: In Which Our Protagonist Suffers The Melancholy of a Job Well Done

“I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch then. Have fun with the guys… I can’t, got a dinner date…No, with dad… That’s sick, Leslie. Get out of my office… Love you too. Bye.”

In a new office, halfway up a sparkling skyscraper, halfway down the middle of one of the busiest streets in Memphis, Tennessee, sat Maggie Montaigne, relaxed in her new “leather” chair, no animals killed, at least not within this geological era, and watched her friend leave, the frosted door sliding shut behind her. Maggie missed hearing a good knock on the door, in the movies they knocked on the door, an act of intention, not this always-on, passive sensing of your presence, your facial expressions, your movement patterns, in the movies they smoked cigars and drank whisky after a job well completed, health be damned, and they knocked on doors. Maggie had a bottle of Highland scotch in the bottom drawer, twenty-one real years too, sealed in the case she was caught by HR, she could say it was a gift. It was enough to know it was there.

A woman is known by the company she keeps, and we will have plenty of time to talk about Maggie. Leslie, however, is walking out of the door, and out of this scene, so we should address her before she leaves.

Here is one description of Leslie Parker. It is unfair of an author to reduce a full life to a few sentences no matter how carefully I choose my words, but we have to get on with the story, so this will have to do for now. Leslie Parker, or Dr. Parker to the students that visited her assigned lab bench deep in the basement, or to the flight terminal desk in Concourse B when she is trying to get a free seat upgrade, or to her parents’s friends when they introduce her, or to that cute man or woman in the bar who she wants to hook up with,  Dr. Parker was a woman who was nearsighted, accounting for the frameless glasses, and by frameless I truly mean no frames, just two circles of glass hovering in front of two frost blue eyes, and the contacts that she wore every day to make her eyes frost blue. Leslie Parker was the woman who wore two types of optical correction to get the perfect look, Leslie was the woman who was Maggie’s best friend in college, Leslie was the woman who left MIT to finish her Ph.D dissertation back in the Mississippi Delta because Dr. King promised her a lab within five years, and Dr. King gets what he wants, and Leslie was the woman that was the most upset Maggie was missing the celebratory drinking party tonight. Oh, she said she wasn’t, but Maggie knew the truth, as Leslie’s hair dye changed from its normal blue-green to the bright red, an unconscious signal that normally precedes a tongue lashing.

Leslie has left and Maggie remains, the smile fading from her face, not into a scowl or a frown, but into a neutral pensive countenance, a boring phrase for a boring facial expression. Maggie, in her new office, with a new job title so boring she cannot remember the exact words. Regional manager, or regional director, or was it divisional manager, she wasn’t vice president yet, she would have remembered that. Here’s a word that stuck out and wasn’t boring, cognophysical, a monstrous word, a word she would have opposed had she not been, well, had she not been her. An ugly word, a word with Latinesque faux-authority; no one in the Athena Group uses the colloquial “belief” when they can use “cognophysical”.

If Maggie bothered to step out of her door, the frosted glass sliding open obsequiously, she could have read the plaque to the right; “Margaret Montaigne, Regional Director of Reliable Cognophysical Engineering.”

Maggie gazed at the picture frame on her desk, a permanent live feed (why can’t they just say ‘video’, Maggie thought) of the Magnificent 23 presented to her by some important photographer that she knew the name of four hours ago. She had an uncomfortable flight since then, so she forgave herself. How have they not fixed airplanes yet to be comfortable? Live from Baltimore, it was sunny there, the event programmers must have dedicated some holo time to Believe, sorry, “cognophysically manipulate” the weather into being pleasant for the whole day. Where Maggie sat, fresh from a midday plane back to home, the skyline of Memphis muted grey, the new Pyramid, everything so new, reflecting white, the Mississippi lazy, the sky overcast, this view behind Maggie went unnoticed as she mused in her new office in the second to top floor of the Athena Building in the middle of the revitalized downtown, home branch of a diverse portfolio including Athena Communications, MindX Pharmaceuticals, Athena Finance, and Maggie’s own Athena Engineering Solutions, all subsidiaries of Athena International, the world’s first and greatest congnocorp, another monstrous word, but in this case fitting of the subject.

The feed of the Magnificent 23 glittered before her: no amount of manpower, ingenuity, steel, glass, or concrete prior to Belief could begin to build what the Athena corporation had designed, thin tendrils, over a dozen, connected at the base, each sliced into hundreds of rooms, weaving amongst themselves, changing hourly to provide an infinite number of views. At night, it looked like a giant fiber optic toy, colors constantly changing, shapes suddenly shifting. Maggie watched from almost a thousand miles away as the building changed: towers broke their linkages, reformed them briefly with nearby neighbors, moved fractionally, broke links again, and continuing in this way, slowly shifted into a flower. The bottom levels were lit in greens, the top floors formed blue and purple petals that draped downward. In the middle of the building, three strands stood tall basked in yellow and orange. In the background, the perpetual fireworks that illuminate most major cities these days matched the hues.

Reliable was the word that hurt the most.

“Creative solutions” could have been worked into her job title. Corporate rejected the phrase “fail-safe”. Too negative. Then they rejected “safety”. Safety is not one person’s job, they said. She earned the “creative”, sitting in the early planning meetings and contributing more than just doom and gloom predictions, or supply chain complexities. The entire exterior lighting system was her idea, the architects were surprised a mid-level safety officer had such a passion for colors and lights.  Of course, the lights, being Maggie’s idea, had a practical side, the building would continue to light up (and, of course, remain standing) in the case of a doubt storm.

Did people really see her as reliable? Ol’ reliable Maggie.

This is a true story from many years ago: In Greenland, a polar bear roamed the fjords outside a village. In that time, well in all the time humanity has roamed the planet, killing something big and scary is a good way for young men to prove themselves. And so as it goes, a young man, a happy man, took his rifle and his friends, and with the joy of youth, killed the polar bear. The town celebrated into the night, and the young man, the happy man, was the envy of his peers, the desire of at least some women and statistically speaking, probably some men.

By the morning, he shot himself. He died, in the snow. He was twenty-two.

The hidden scotch sung a silent song in Maggie’s desk. She swore long ago never to drink at work. This was not going to be the day she started.

The story goes on into a lesson about contagion, that’s why Maggie knew of it, the copycat suicide that followed just days later and the community’s desperate attempts to prevent the spread of mental depression in the midst of an economic depression, the spread of loneliness in one of the most isolated populations. The analogy towards doubt storms obvious to even the most junior member of the conference where she first heard this story, paid for by Athena Engineering Solutions, ‘Please learn from this tragedy to better our bottom line’. Today, Maggie turned her mind to the originating act, the success that begat calamity. Did she shoot her polar bear this morning?

Reliable, the word Maggie so despised when applied to her, was in fact a quality she respected in objects. The desk, a gift from her father, beautifully carved from a single young sequoia, its curves reminiscent of well worn driftwood, drawers with cut crystal fronts, a special compartment for the antique fountain pens she collected since childhood. A much more technological looking workstation, state-of-the-art, yet prone to the occasional programming error, knobs and buttons and flashing panels surrounding a gridded circular area that usually held one model skyscraper or another but today stood empty, hovering several meters away from her chair. On the wall by the door, as though placed to greet visitors while staying out of the way of the serious work, was a shelf of magical toys, gifts for previous jobs well done and all that, colorful balls that bounced themselves, a prism that diffracts sound waves into rainbows, a tetrahedron that morphed into all the other platonic solids, a cube, an octahedron, a dodecahedron, a icosahedron, and finally into a sculpture of the company logo, the god Zeus, sitting, and out of the top of his head, a smaller feminine figure emerges triumphant. The plaque reads: ATHENA ENGINEERING.

And here, every Monday through Friday (excepting holidays and the occasional bout of illness), sits Reliable Maggie, a 33 year old adult-in-the-room but preschooler-at-heart, a child with a penchant for breaking the other kids toys and ignoring their crying, a personality that became vitally important after Dubai five years ago, the industry failure that lead to conferences about contagion, “doubt storms”, the empowerment of safety officers who, for PR reasons, weren’t  called “safety”, the promotion of Reliable Maggie. With her pixy cut dark hair and her green hazel eyes and often with a pen in hand from the 1950s that no one even recognized much less uses in such advanced times, tasked with breaking and then fixing the next generation of skyscrapers to deal with the overwhelming population growth. Margaret Beatrix Montaigne, entertaining, eccentric (eccentric being a nice word for downright weird) an engineering prodigy, and apparently “reliable”.

  It could have been worse than reliable. It could have been “Legacy”, the corporate world’s nice way of saying “out of date”. Obsolete.

Now that the human race was limited only by their vision for that which was not yet, those with said vision became the most valuable and sought after. Leslie had it - Maggie often called her the maddest scientist, but only to her face of course - as evidenced by her being scooped up by the Athena labs years before her dissertation was completed, an honor reserved for only the brightest of the bright.

Jon had it in both of his dual roles of journalistic prodigy and boyfriend. Jonathan White had a lot of amazing talents besides writing down what other people do (and being really good at it), imaginative visions which Maggie did not discuss publicly. (Because she saved those conversations with Leslie and some cocktails.) What the world lost, as more and more people left the traditional workforce to participate in work-at-home Belief programs… sorry…“home-based cognophysical manufacturing: all the TV you can watch with work during the commercials”, what was lost were people who worked hard at a specific task and saw many many failures, people with a deep understanding of “brokenness”.

Sometimes eccentricities are an illusion to disguise some very real and serious shortcomings.

She watched the live view of the Magnificent 23 ignoring the city behind her, the city of the Delta Blues appearing through real plate glass windows, a special request for her new office, not view screens of exotic waterfalls in vibrant rain forests, or nude beaches in south France, or canyons, mountains, sunsets, all live and happening right now, no, this window was only glass, for she was the type to find the beauty present in its natural location. But for now, she lost herself in an image a thousand miles away.

Everyone sells apartments based on the view. No one wants to live in a place with a stunning panorama of the town dump (excepting recycling entrepreneurs looking for inspiration or those looking for quality but affordable lodging, of which the latter is much more common). Everyone wants the side with the water and the boats and skyscrapers sailing in the bay: what if the view was pretty some of the time and not some of the time and the price was cut in half? Rotating building tops were old-school, it was quite simple with the new techniques to make rotating floors, and the Magnificent 1 became the top rent-controlled apartments in New York for the upwardly mobile. Copies were placed in cities worldwide, including Memphis, and as people moved in Maggie bought that little place she wanted near the river, because hell if she was going to live in a big skyscraper with all the other people watching and listening.

It would be at least a two months before anyone would be let inside the Magnificent 23, a doubling of the usual wait time. Part of that was due to Maggie’s insistence that the final safety features be installed manually, with real construction workers, and real tools. Part of that was due to the new, untested design. No one wanted a second Dubai.

Contagion. Doubt Storm.

And now Maggie is “Margaret Montaigne, Regional Director of Reliable Cognophysical Engineering”.

She was unusually suited for this job. She had no illusions as to her promotion being anything else but due to her particular personal skill set, or to be accurate, lack thereof. Her engineering skills were superior. Her mathematical ability was greater than or equal to two standard deviations from the mean. Secondary considerations both.

Some people have trust issues. Some people earn them. Some people have trust issues thrust upon them.  Some people are just left behind.

Some people live in their own personal doubt storm.

Maggie unscrewed the top off a Pelikan fountain pen, the one from her father when she graduated, the one with the ink Leslie had special made, ink that changes color with every word. A fitting metaphor for her life. Paper was cheap, but rare in the offices of the Athena Group. Another metaphor? Maybe this is getting stretched too far.

“Taking a week off. Call if you need me. Or even better, write me a note.”

Her dad was having problems again, and she needed to take care of that tonight. Nothing serious, but people tended to overreact with the mental hygiene treatment laws. Jon had started dropping hints, which she pointedly ignored, but she needed to deal with, by first thinking about what he said in the spaces between words. Leslie would want to have girl time. She needed to lose two, no five pounds. A friend from college had an art show, he had been reaching out to her for weeks. She would like to read a book.

She didn’t bother to sign her note. The paper and ink served well enough for identification.

She needed to think about what Maggie wanted.

Maybe two books.

It would be a good week off. She could at least believe that.