Title: Imminent Dawn
Series: EMPATHY, Book One
Author: R.R. Campbell
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: January 28, 2019
Heat Level: 1 - No Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 120400
Genre: Science Fiction, LGBT, science fiction, technothriller, action/suspense, thriller, brain-computer interface, medical
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Synopsis
Art-school dropout Chandra would do
anything to apologize for her role in her wife’s coma—including enroll in the
first round of human trials for an internet-access brain implant.
At first, the secretive research
compound is paradise, the perfect place to distract Chandra from her grief. But
as she soon learns, the facility is more prison than resort, with its doctors,
support staff, and her fellow patients all bent on hatching plots of their own,
no matter how invested they might seem in helping her communicate with her
wife.
Making matters worse, a dark wave of
uncertainty crashes down on the compound, forcing Chandra to become an unlikely
but pivotal player in conspiracies stretching from the highest levels of the
North American Union government to the lowest dredges of its shadowy hacking
collectives.
To save herself and her wife, Chandra
and her newfound friends from the study will have to overcome the scheming of a
ruthless tech magnate, the naïveté of an advancement-hungry administrative
assistant, and the relentless pursuits of an investigative journalist, all of
whom are determined to outpace the others in their own quests to resurrect lost
love, cover their tracks, and uncover the truth.
A twistedly delightful clockwork of
intrigue and suspense, Imminent Dawn is an electrifying sci-fi debut from
author r. r. campbell.
Excerpt
Imminent Dawn
R.R. Campbell © 2019
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
CHANDRA
Chandra didn’t kill her wife, but she
may as well have.
Now, as Chandra herself struggled
against the darkness, against the paralysis that gripped her, she accepted no punishment
was more fitting than the one that seemed to have found her on the far side of
her install procedure.
“That’s what I heard,” said a man’s
voice, quiet but tense. “Comas. Seizures. Electrocution. All of that.”
Chandra’s pulse blared in her ears, her
throat. She tried to wiggle a finger, but it remained still.
“No way,” a different man responded. His
voice thick, Chandra imagined him to be much larger than the first man who
spoke. “If there were patients not waking up after the procedure—”
“Do you honestly think Halman would
care?” said the first man. “Think about it. Would Wyatt Halman really put an
end to this study over a couple of schmucks like you and me going brain dead
after our installs?”
Brain dead. Chandra would have shivered
were she able. But she couldn’t be brain dead, no—at least not in any way the
doctors used the term. She could hear, understand. Her wife, for all Chandra
knew, was no longer capable of even that—deaf even to Chandra’s whispers of
apology.
Grief clutched Chandra as she tried to
call out into the void. She managed only a gurgle.
“You hear that?” the larger man said.
Bedsheets rustled against a symphony of beeping medical devices. “She’s coming
to.”
Chandra’s eyes flashed open to a world
of white.
She lurched forward, hands trembling.
Across from her, the two men—patients like her if their lavender-colored scrubs
were any indication—sat propped up on gurneys of their own. To the left, a
doorway opened into a long, vacuous hall, a nurse’s station just visible at the
end of it. To her right, a wall-length window opened to the colors of spring,
to the pinks of blossoming cherry trees, and the brown branches of a twisted
oak.
“Hey,” the larger man said. “What do you
know?”
The terror that had launched Chandra
forward subsided, the weight of the anesthesia claiming her once more. She
settled back against her bed, the pillow now more reprieve than prison.
“Come on,” the first man said. “Leave
her alone. She just woke up. Probably not thinking straight.”
Chandra forced a dry swallow, thankful
she had at least survived the install procedure. With her EMPATHY nanochip now
installed, all she had to do was wait for it to start working. Then Kyra could
get hers, just like the ad promised all immediate family members of study
participants. Only then would Chandra know whether Kyra could hear, could
understand her apology through their direct internet connection. With any luck,
EMPATHY might even bring Kyra completely back to her.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,”
the smaller man said, apparently responding to some bickering Chandra missed.
“The nanochip isn’t working for anyone yet. They’ve been doing these installs
for months, and—”
“Wait,” the large man said. “How could
you even know that?” He took the words from Chandra’s pasty mouth. “The
compound has been on lock-down since the study started, and Wyatt Halman has
been perfecting this technology for years.”
“Look, man,” the smaller of them said.
“Believe me or don’t. That’s up to you. All I’m trying to say is even if the
nurses come in here and tell us our installs were successful, that doesn’t mean
EMPATHY will ever actually work for us.”
Chandra’s fingers coiled inward. If that
were true, she’d given up being at her wife’s bedside every day only to get
nothing but months of hopeless isolation in exchange. And to fail to return
Kyra to something resembling consciousness via EMPATHY… no, Chandra couldn’t
bear to think of what that might mean.
A dull throb took hold along where the
surgeons made the incision near her temple. She raised her hand to massage the
area, still unaccustomed to the lack of hair there—or anywhere on her head, for
that matter.
“Don’t touch it,” the large man said.
Chandra lowered her hand. “The nurses said so. That’s what they told us,
anyway.”
Chandra managed to sit. She opened her
mouth to thank him, but before she could respond, a nurse strolled into the
room.
Her periwinkle scrubs matched those of
every other nurse Chandra had seen since arriving on the compound yesterday. The
woman looked hurried, haggard—as if she hadn’t slept in weeks. She leaned over
the armrest on the side of the smaller man’s gurney and spoke in hushed,
inaudible tones.
Even the most casual glance at the man’s
drooping expression told Chandra everything. A failed install.
Without so much as a response from the
patient, the nurse unlocked the brakes on his makeshift bed and wheeled him
from the room.
The hospital equipment whimpered in
three long, digital sighs before the man across the way finally spoke again. “I
guess it’s just me and you now.”
The throbbing in Chandra’s temple
accelerated, the pressure immense as it pressed against her left eye. Her hands
gripped the railings on the side of her gurney as she collapsed back onto her
sheets.
“You okay?” the man said. “Want me to
get some help?”
She pulled in a breath between her
teeth, bracing herself against a pain so fierce she sincerely wondered if
someone was taking an ice cream scoop to her brain.
“All right,” the man said. “I’m calling
a nurse.” A tinny-sounding buzzer hummed as he depressed the HELP button.
A new feeling gripped Chandra. Painless
now, she felt as though she were outside her own body, rising from her own
chest and drifting toward the ceiling.
Her trembling ceased, though her eyes
danced beneath her eyelids. When she opened them, an awareness of the tangle of
bedsheets now twisted around her settled in. She unsnarled herself and brought
herself upright, resting her back against her pillows, her head against the
wall.
A flash of white struck in and out of
her vision. The quivering returned, the hair on the back of her neck rising.
Across the way, her fellow patient had
gone paler than the wall behind him. “Lady, can you talk? What’s going on?
Nurse!”
Chandra, too, meant to plead for help,
to relay all she felt, but the flash crashed into her vision once more—and this
time, it remained. When she dared lower the shield she’d created with her arm,
the softness of the lingering light surprised her. It wasn’t a light at all. It
was a rectangle. No, a perfect square.
It hovered before her, fixed in the
center of her vision, stirring some familiarity, the alluring awe of a
daydream, a memory. And there, in the upper-left-hand corner, a thin vertical
line blinked on, blinked off. Blinked on. Blinked off.
Finally a nurse stumbled into the room,
his cheeks red, his chest heaving.
“Something’s happening,” Chandra
managed. “There’s this white thing floating here, hanging here.”
On the far side of the translucent
sheet, the nurse scampered back into the hall, his voice echoing as he called
for support.
Disbelief consumed Chandra. How to
describe what hovered before her? She drafted a description to remember for
later, but even her best attempt failed to do justice to the moment. She shook
her head to clear her mind and typed a description of the image.
Typed. No, it couldn’t be.
The words crawled across the sheet of
white, the cursor trailing her thoughts as they gathered on the screen. And as
the textscape grew, so did her excitement—as well as her concern. She paused to
calm herself, and the cursor halted in its march from left-to-right.
Her chest grew light, her skin tingling.
It worked. EMPATHY was actually working. She wanted to leap from bed, to tell
anyone, to tell the world, to tell Kyra most of all.
But before she could speak another word,
the screen vanished into a single, impossibly distant point. All the same,
something told her its contents had been saved forever.
Footsteps approached from the hall, the
urgent pitter-patter of a herd of help on the way.
And help was on the way, all right—help
for Chandra, yes, but more importantly, help for Kyra. Once the research team
confirmed EMPATHY had taken for Chandra, they’d have to give Kyra the install
they’d promised.
It would only be a matter of months,
maybe even weeks before Chandra could apologize to her wife, could tell her she
loved her again. They’d be back to squabbling over what to plant where in their
garden, to bristling at bedtime ghost stories—even if Kyra’s coma only allowed
her to do so over EMPATHY.
Then a memory of the rumors returned,
the smaller man’s whispers of seizures and install recipients who themselves
slipped into comas after their procedures. Chandra’s stomach clenched at the
thought.
She supposed the man had also said that
after months of install procedures EMPATHY still hadn’t taken for anyone, and
Chandra had already disproven that rumor. Perhaps she was the exception. At
least she hoped she was.
Her fate and that of her wife depended
on it.
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Meet the Author
Born Ryan Campbell, r. r. campbell is an author, editor, and host of the r. r. campbell writescast. His work has been featured in Five:2:One Magazine’s #thesideshow, Erotic Review, and with National Journal Writing Month. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife, Lacey, and their cats, Hashtag and Rhaegar.Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
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