Writers of the Future Volume 31 Read online

  In addition, we have classic tales from L. Ron Hubbard, Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta and Larry Niven.

  Each year thousands of authors send stories from around the globe, at no cost for entry. I then judge these stories blind, not knowing who the authors are.

  My goal is to find great new writers who are worthy of recognition. Many of our winners have gone on to gain fame as writers, winning awards and becoming international bestsellers, and as you read the biographies for the writers here, you’ll find that many of these authors are already selling short stories and getting novel contracts, while our illustrators are on their way to their own illustrious careers in books, comics, and film.

  Just as our writing contest has grown, the Illustrators of the Future Contest has also blossomed. It too has taken on an international flavor, and our winners have come from all over the world. The works that they’re producing are so gorgeous, that once again we’re presenting them in full color so that you can appreciate the magnitude of their talent.

  Along with our stories and illustrations, we have insightful articles by author L. Ron Hubbard, author Orson Scott Card and artist Bob Eggleton.

  So I invite you to join our writers and illustrators in some grand adventures. We’ll supply the book. You can supply a comfortable chair, a quiet place to relax, and perhaps a cup of hot cocoa.…

  Switch

  written by

  Steve Pantazis

  illustrated by

  Daniel Tyka

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Steve Pantazis knew he wanted to be a writer after purchasing The Hobbit with his allowance money when he was eight. A lover of all things Tolkien, he emulated the author in a number of stories throughout his young adult years. He got the opportunity to pay homage to his hero by penning a spoof on a rejection letter to the author, published in the Writer’s Digest November–December 2013 issue.

  When he is not dabbling with words, Steve runs a small software firm, set in sunny, warm San Diego. He enjoys exploring the great outdoors, and using his culinary skills to create feasts for his better half, who has affectionately named him “Love Chef.”

  Steve has written four novels, the latest set in the same universe as his short story, “Switch.” He believes this is a stepping stone toward getting his sci-fi novel, Godnet, published. He hopes to someday entertain the masses with his love of the craft.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Born in 1983 in Warsaw, Poland, Daniel Tyka was raised with the smell of oil paints, as his father was a painter. It was a difficult time, when Poland was ruled by communists; Tyka didn’t have fancy toys or computers. To fill his time, he could either go outside to play with other kids or draw.

  In high school, Daniel loved art, but instead of art school, he followed a path into the financial industry where he lost nine years trying to fit into the financial corporate life.

  Then, eight years ago, inspired by a website called “CGSociety,” he began watching free tutorials on the net and studying by himself.

  With a little push from his friends, Daniel decided to quit his job and spend all his time drawing. He began spending sixteen hours per day working on his laptop. After a year he began getting his first jobs, which enabled him to slowly make a living. From then on, art has been a wild ride until now.

  The decision to take art seriously was the best decision in Daniel’s life. With all of the resources on the net, he didn’t think that art school was necessary anymore.

  Today, he is living his dream. It’s a great honor to be in this Contest, and he considers himself a winner already.

  Switch

  The teenager is sprawled by pump number five, multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, the word “deceased” hovering over his body through the projection in my retinal overlay. We’re in the middle of a crime scene at a gas station in Jackson Heights, Queens just after sunset, where the decedent expired during a shootout with police. One officer was hit in the face, pronounced dead on site, the other two in the neck by return fire, now at a nearby hospital. I pray they make it.

  The June humidity makes me want to tear off my clothes. Instead, I let my blazer bunch up around the elbows as I squat by the body. We have the station taped off and the street blocked on either end with a couple of cruisers.

  Lieutenant Briggs is on his way, and at some point we’ll talk to the media. There’s a crowd of hungry spectators beyond the barricade, along with several news vans. I’m not going anywhere for the next few hours.

  My partner, Detective Ed Mullins, holds up an evidence bag. He’s sweating worse than me. “Three casings, nine mil.”

  “Where are the rest?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What, he got lucky or something?”

  Mullins shoves a stick of chewing gum in his mouth. “That’s what I’m saying. I checked the mag on his Glock. You can count the bullets yourself, if you want.”

  I peer at the teenager with fresh eyes while Mullins chomps his gum. The suspect is a good-looking kid, Puerto Rican with an athletic build, ocean wave-style trendy haircut and gelled sideburns. He’s wearing a plain, bloodied white T-shirt and expensive jeans and sneakers. Doesn’t fit the profile of a sharpshooter.

  “How many shells from our side?”

  “Eleven.” Mullins pops a bubble. “Our ME says this one took four to the chest. He must have been on something, ’cause he didn’t drop until after our guys went down.”

  I didn’t take the kid for a user, but then again, you can’t assume anything these days. We ID’d him as Kurt Rodriguez, seventeen, address from the nice part of Forest Hills. His head is cocked to the left. I part the hair above his ear, exposing the port of his temporal lobe implant. There’s a designer enamel grommet clamped on, Chinese characters around the ivory-colored rim. Kids love to mod their TLI ports with all kinds of stuff. This is pretty conservative considering what I’ve seen.

  Twelve feet away is a splotch of blood soaked into the grime from where Officer Nolan Yee bled out, numbered markers left in place of his body. Part of me wants to plant the heel of my shoe over Rodriguez’s skull and cave it in.

  Yee and my younger brother Tommy graduated from the academy together. I remember Yee and his girlfriend coming over to the house at our big Super Bowl party where we shared beers while barbecuing out in the cold. Yee was a smart kid, with aspirations of making detective. His girlfriend was pretty, and I could tell he was crazy about her, from the way he kept his hand on the small of her back to the goofy I’m-in-love smile tattooed on his face. Such a freaking shame. He wasn’t a close friend of Tommy’s, but they were rookies together, paying their dues on patrol. I can’t imagine how Tommy will take the news, but it pisses me off just thinking about it. Rodriguez won’t even get a chance to stand trial for what he’s done. Son of a bitch!

  The stench of gasoline is heavy. Mullins steps closer, blocking the bright gas station canopy lighting with his two-hundred-twenty-pound frame, belt swooping below his enlarged gut as if holding back a storm. He points at the body. “I’m still picking up a TLI broadcast.”

  “Me too. Should have quit with brain death, but something must still be firing.”

  Every few seconds, I get a discovery ping from Rodriguez’s temporal lobe implant, which flashes red in my overlay. Usually, you set your TLI on discovery mode if you want another device to find you over the Mindnet. Some neural activity must have triggered the response, but I’m no doctor, so I don’t bother dissecting it.

  Our blood spatter analyst corroborates the stories from a couple of eye witnesses that gave their take on what went down at the gas station, including the attendant: Rodriguez had walked over to Yee, who was buying a bottle of water at the kiosk, and shot him point blank in the face, without provocation.

  According to Dispatch, two officers in a squad car heard the gunshot from down the block and zipped over in their cr
uiser. They engaged the suspect and squeezed off a number of shots before Rodriguez fired back, just twice, taking down each officer from about fifty feet away after being critically wounded. The crazy part is that the suspect made no attempt to run or hide.

  Mullins shares my sentiment. “He just stood there and picked them off. I’m telling you, he was on something.”

  I search the kid’s pockets, turning them inside out. House keys, cash card, mini flashlight, and a packet of breath-freshening strips.

  Mullins squats next to me. “Nada, huh?”

  I want to agree, but I pop open the plastic dispenser and hold it up to my nose. It smells of cinnamon and cloves and something else I can’t quite place, but I’m positive what we’re dealing with without needing to wait for results from a lab. I lick my lips, imagining how it would taste, dissolving the wafer-thin strip until only the exotic oils remain on my tongue.

  Mullins calls my name, but I don’t respond until he says it a second time. “Parker!”

  I snap the dispenser closed. “Yeah, just thinking.”

  “Well, think out loud.”

  I hold up the blue plastic case. It’s half the size of my thumb. “Homegrown.”

  “You sure?”

  “Smell.” He does, but his face clouds over, like he’s trying to wrestle with the fact it’s not something you buy at a 7-Eleven. He wrinkles his nose. “What kind of product, you think?”

  “Switch.”

  He nods slowly, getting it. “Told you he was on something. They usually come in pasty dots, printed on paper ribbon, or in clear tabs. Haven’t seen this form before.”

  But I have.

  Sublingual delivery is by far the best way to get it into your bloodstream. Dots, tabs, strips—doesn’t matter. Stick one under your tongue and say goodbye to foggy thoughts. It’s big with the underage crowd because they love to surf the Mindnet in long marathon sessions. Rat race junkies enjoy the extra boost when they have to pull eighty-hour workweeks. Athletes have been accused of taking it, but there is no mandatory testing yet in the sports community. Same with military and law enforcement.

  The best way to describe the experience is to imagine a massive caffeine high. You get that awesome rush, that laser focus, that burst of euphoria, like who cares if it’s Monday morning at the office with a ton of shit to do. Nothing matters at the moment because your brain has turned off all your concerns, all the pain, all the problems of the day—everything. What you’re left with is your subconscious mind taking over; and you just go with it. Switch does that. It gives you a mental edge over those around you. You think better, you work better, you fight better. You are better.

  Unfortunately for the enthusiast, it’s illegal, and you don’t just get a misdemeanor for possession these days.

  “Well, it explains a few things.” Mullins waves a hand over the scene. “But it doesn’t explain why he snapped and went on a killing spree.”

  Mullins is wrong, but I don’t say it. He’s never had a taste, so his only experience is what he learned during morning briefings, and on the Net. This is cutting-edge, psychotropic-grade product, and the scientific community is just starting to discover its true potential. In my mind, this stuff is a game changer.

  I hold the dispenser between gloved fingers with newfound respect, almost reverence. So small, yet a powerhouse of mind manipulation. I place it in an evidence bag and resign it over to Mullins. “See if your guy can get us an expedite on this. I want to know how much is in our susp’s system.”

  Mullins holds the bag up to the light. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I come to my feet, and the blood returns to my cramped legs. We need to finish processing the crime scene. “All right, chief, let’s get a move on.”

  It’s almost midnight by the time I crawl into bed. I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep. We made a statement to the press, buttoned up the scene, and tried to interview the murder suspect’s mother, who was in pieces over her son’s death. Then I had to spend almost thirty minutes on a call with Tommy, trying to calm him down. The whole evening was a mess.

  My wife Suzie’s eyes flutter open when I turn on the lamp. She looks over at the clock radio on her nightstand and frowns. “So late. Everything okay?”

  “It’s just work. I’ll tell you about it in the morning, sweetie. Go to sleep.”

  She yawns. “Caitlyn asked about you. I wished you would have called.”

  “I know.” Our four-year-old loves to hear my voice at least once before she goes to bed, even if I’m on the job. It’s not like me to miss the opportunity. If I had even the briefest moment alone …

  I give my wife a cursory kiss on the cheek and let her roll onto her stomach, covers pulled up to her neck. She tells me in her drowsy voice that she loves me.

  “I love you too, babe.”

  Thirty seconds later, she’s asleep. I watch the soft rise and fall of her back and the dark-brown tumble of hair lying across her shoulder blades. I’ve been married twelve years, and I still see the same twenty-one-year-old, that fragile girl who defied her parents to marry a cop.

  Caitlyn is the spitting-image of her mother. She’s incredibly smart and uses the Net better than anyone I know. She was born into the Mindnet generation. I was sixteen when it became commercially available, touted as the “Internet for the mind,” and twenty-nine when I got my temporal lobe implant. I used to the think the Internet was the end-all-be-all, as a kid. Then the Mindnet came along, and all of a sudden, we were using wearable prosthetics that could connect our brains to banks, retailers and social networks. TLIs followed, replacing cell phone calls, e-mails and texts with thought-enabled communications. My parents would laugh, recalling a time when a networked computer was a marvel. Now it’s the brain, and little Caitlyn will think of the Mindnet as I did of its predecessor, and how she never knew a time before it existed.

  I shut off the lamp, but I still can’t sleep. I’m smelling cinnamon and cloves and …

  Cardamom! That’s the spice I couldn’t think of !

  I connect to the Net through my TLI and quickly pull up a wiki on Switch. It appears in my retinal overlay as a semi-transparent page against the room’s darkened background. There’s a complete on-screen breakdown of the history of Switch. It started as an accidental offshoot of a popular antidepressant, found to increase memory retention and response time in rodents. The pharmaceutical name is Duoxatane, but it was never approved for human trials. Still, somebody came up with the brilliant idea to package it into digestible form and put it on the street. The Cardamom masks the bitter taste of the active ingredient.

  Thoroughly awake, I log into the precinct portal and pull up the case file for today’s homicide. A thumbnail of each page is tiled across the bottom of my overlay. I select the first one and start at the beginning. Some of the information on the expired suspect has been updated, but it will be at least tomorrow when the lab work comes back. I remember Alicia Rodriguez crying her eyes out, wondering how her son could have shot anyone. There were similar reactions from the father and younger sister, who swore Kurt Rodriguez, track and field star of Forest Hills High School, was incapable of perpetrating the murder of one police officer, let alone three. Wait until they find out how much Switch was in his system.

  I get out of bed and peek in on Caitlyn. She’s asleep, thumb in her mouth, with the covers bunched around her feet, same long, dark hair as her mother. She’s got my wide-swept ears though. I feel bad about missing our nite-nite chat. I pull her blanket over her shoulders and tell her how much Daddy loves her. She snoozes on. I wish I could sleep like that.

  I go down to the basement, my man cave. I’ll never get the smell of cigars out of the carpet, but it’s comforting to me, and this is where I do my best thinking. There’s a workbench by the water heater, with an old, rusted vise mounted on the side, and a bunch of small tools I use for my hobby work. I rest my palm on the
vise for a moment. It was my father’s. He was a tool-and-die worker, and spent most of his career at a ball bearing manufacturing plant in Philly. He always wanted me to find an honest job, and stick to it; and all I wanted to do was make my old man proud.

  I take a deep breath and ease open the plastic organizer that holds the assortment of nails, screws, washers and bolts. There’s a box of matches underneath a dozen ten-penny nails. It doesn’t have any matches in it. I turn on the bench light and open the box. Like precious bars of gold bullion, the wafer-thin strips glint in the light. I’m greeted by a fresh burst of apple and hint of cardamom. There are only three strips left, and a slight panic settles in. I usually do a strip before breakfast, but on a night like tonight, especially when my conscience is weighed down, I’m tempted to do a second. That would leave me a day to restock. Suzie doesn’t know about my secret habit. I could never tell her.

  A pang of guilt floods my innards. I imagine what my father would have thought of my stealthy enterprise. What would I say to him—that I started because of the long hours at work; that it helped me cope with the Nolan Yees of the world; that I kept going to deaden my nerves any time I came upon a teenage tragedy like Rodriguez’s? My father wouldn’t buy any of it.

  I reach over and give the vise a good pat. Thank goodness the old man’s not around to witness this. He had that sixth sense, the kind that kicked in anytime I did something wrong, no matter how good I thought I was at hiding it. Tommy, on the other hand, seemed to get away with everything.

  I dislodge a paper-thin sheet from the matchbox. It adheres to the moisture on my fingertip. I hold the see-through amber film up to the light, marveling at how such a thing could have driven Rodriguez to murder. I can understand the elevated aggression with higher and more prolonged doses, but the same could be said of alcohol. Was the Switch enough to make a star athlete snap?

  I have a lot of questions percolating through my head. At the top of the list is finding out what drove Rodriguez to murder.