The Elementalist Book 1: Quest
Jack is cooking up something new, or maybe it’s something old, but trouble is not far behind.
Quest snippet –
Late at night in a university science lab, a young man was lost in thought, staring at his latest experiment as it flared into blue flame and faded out. Jack didn’t know where these experiments would lead him. He didn’t even know if they were anything more than a sick obsession, meaningless to anyone but him.
What he knew was this. His parents’ death had not been an accident. They must have been onto something, and he intended to prove it.
“Come on, Jack,” he muttered. “Keep your eyes open. You’ve got this. The octahedron formula, that’s next. Check the predictions.”
Test tubes and Bunsen burners surrounded the young man on all sides, along with computer screens showing spreadsheets covered by long lists of data that would have meant nothing to anyone but him. As he ran his eyes over the lists of data, he went on talking to himself in the same quiet voice.
It sounded like he was practicing for a classroom lecture he would someday give. Or it would have sounded like that if anyone was listening to him.
“So, his elemental transformations violate the conservation of matter. But do they, really? It’s true that the volumes of the polyhedra don’t add up properly, but do they even need to? Plato isn’t talking about matter in the first place, is he?”
Most people without extensive experience in chemistry would probably have thought of the place as a mad scientist’s laboratory. It had the same look of elaborate chaos about it. Most people who did understand chemistry would have furrowed their eyebrows if they had seen what the young man was working on. It would not have looked like a sensible or useful set of experiments to them.
That was because it wasn’t based on any chemistry familiar to modern science. Jack had never known much about the work his parents did, but he had always suspected it was a classified research program.
When he’d looked through his father’s notebooks after his parents died, he had discovered his father’s lifelong interest in the work of Plato. He couldn’t say why, but he was deeply convinced his parents had been onto something. Some advanced technology with the potential to revolutionize the world. As far as he was concerned, it must be the reason for their mysterious deaths.
Mad science, indeed.
One thing didn’t fit the mad scientist image, other than the absence of a hunchbacked assistant. Though he was completely absorbed in what he was doing, no one at this stage in his life would ever have mistaken the young man for an absent-minded professor. For one thing, he was too young to fit the stereotype at only twenty-one years old. Jack Williams wasn’t even a grad student yet. Only a college senior.
He didn’t look like a particularly nerdy example of a college senior. He did wear glasses, but his five-o’clock shadow and somewhat muscular physique made him look more like a frat boy than someone who would normally be staring at a chemistry experiment in his own dedicated laboratory.
The one detail that fit the image of a mad scientist was the intensity of his eyes as he pondered the results of the chemical reaction he had tested.
“This… This doesn’t fit. It doesn’t match the predictions for the octahedron set at all.”
Jack was exploring a theory well outside the scientific mainstream, and he was determined to prove the truth of his theory even if it destroyed his chances for a respectable scientific career. His eyes burned with a fire even brighter than the flame that had flared and died in front of him. He was close to discovering what his parents had been working on, and he knew it. But he wasn’t there yet.
Jack had been working to understand a series of chemical interactions, but not for the purpose of the interactions themselves. Those were already thoroughly understood and not the sort of thing anyone would stay up late night after night to work on. Instead, Jack was trying to understand how these particular interactions related to the Platonic elements and the Platonic solids of which they were said to be composed.
This was an eccentric area of study, to say the least. The Platonic elements of earth, air, fire, water, and ether were no longer acknowledged as elements by modern science and had not been acknowledged as elements for centuries now. Any chemistry professor would have laughed Jack out of the room for even suggesting modern chemistry had something new to learn from Plato. Well, any chemistry professor but one.
Jack was a student, but he had something only a handful of professors had. The fire of true genius. As he poured one test tube into another and observed the reaction between the chemicals, he thought back to a conversation with his mentor, Dr. Marcus Thompson, one of the only chemists who had ever been willing to hear him out.
“I have a theory,” he’d told Marcus, sitting across from his mentor in his private study while the two of them split a bottle of wine. “I know it’s crazy, but give me a chance here.”
Dr. Thompson had shrugged, an action which caused his magnificent white beard to splay out on his chest like an avalanche on a ski slope. He reached up and pushed his glasses back up his nose, then sipped Shiraz from his ridiculously large and overfull wine glass. “I like crazy ideas, personally. They make science more interesting, and on top of that, we often learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. Tell me all about this idea of yours.”
“Well…” Jack paused and drank from his much more reasonable glass. When they split a bottle of wine, Dr. Thompson insisted on drinking two-thirds of the bottle himself. “Buckle yourself in because this one is wild. I’ve been developing some ideas based on a Platonic understanding of the elements.”
Dr. Thompson blinked at him several times. “Excuse me, my tolerance is usually much higher than this, but tonight I seem to be a bit of a lightweight. I’m afraid I’m already a little tipsy. You didn’t say the Platonic elements, did you?”
Jack nodded. “I did.”
“You’re trying to replace the Elemental Table with the elements used by medieval alchemists?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Because, Jack…” Here Dr. Thompson paused for another sip of wine, staining his white mustache dark red. “You must understand. Plato did not define the word element in the same way as a modern chemist. It’s not really an equivalent concept.”
“Yes, I’m aware. That’s kind of the point, really. I don’t think the Platonic elements can be applied as a direct or concrete correlation with the Elemental Table but rather as an understanding of the nature of interactions. It’s arguably a little meta, but…”
Dr. Thompson raised an eyebrow. Jack had his interest. “So, you’re trying to use the Platonic elements as a schema for understanding the interactions between what we now know as the elements?”
Jack nodded enthusiastically. Dr. Thompson was getting it. “Yes! To be more specific, I have a theory that the angles present in the Platonic solids, which Plato saw as building blocks of the elements, could ultimately be a sort of codified formation of chemical bonds.”
“Hmm. You’re right, my boy. That’s quite insane. Still, I have to admit, you’ve got an intriguing concept there. I’ll tell you what. I have a lab I don’t use on campus. My own lab at home is much easier for me to get to. How about I give you the keys, at least for a while, so you have a space to conduct experiments? It won’t last forever, as I’m not really supposed to be doing this. But we’ll get you started, anyway. Just try not to burn the place down, all right?”
For the past nine months, Dr. Thompson’s lab on campus had been totally dedicated to Jack’s experiments in Platonic chemistry, with some assistance from Dr. Thompson with complex equations when things got difficult.
He didn’t have long, though. Dr. Thompson had tenure, which made it possible for him to get away with a lot, but he was increasingly nervous that someone might find out he was lending an undergrad his on-campus laboratory for unsanctioned experiments based on occult theories about the nature of reality. He had already made it clear to Jack that this arrangement could not go on much longer.
“Bart, the latest reaction seems…inconsistent. It doesn’t match my predictions for the angles in an octahedron.”
Jack was speaking to Black Bart, an AI he had created himself and loaded onto his phone. Bart communicated with him using a synthesized voice through his earbuds, which usually couldn’t be seen by most people because of his wavy and slightly long hair.
“Well, maybe that’s because your predictions are simply wrong. Nonsense. Wishful thinking and fantasy. Have you thought of that?”
Jack had intentionally programmed Black Bart to be sarcastic and humorously confrontational. Although he had to admit it was irritating him right now.
Then again, he could hardly blame Black Bart for being snarky. He had programmed the AI like that partly because he found it entertaining and partly because he had thought he could use a personal gadfly. Black Bart had always been skeptical about Jack’s theories, but he was never outright dismissive or discouraging.
“No, the whole theory is not wrong,” Jack replied with a shake of his head, stepping carefully on the slick tiles at the far end of the table so he didn’t slip and bang his head on the corner of the shelf. “It’s something about the octahedron ruleset. I need to adjust my predictions to reflect.”
A loud noise somewhere in the building startled Jack from his concentration. It sounded like someone had dropped something extraordinarily heavy or possibly slammed hard into a metal door.
“Bart, did you hear that?”
“No, not really, Jack. I’m an AI, aren’t I? I can’t hear anything. On the other hand, you did program me to register sounds so I could respond to your conversation. If you’re asking me whether my listening devices picked up an unusual sound of some kind…well, yeah. They did.”
“Remind me to turn your snark level down from a nine to a five when I have a moment. It was probably some clumsy students who managed to drop something. No, wait. That doesn’t make sense, does it? Bart, what time is it?”
“Depends on your perspective.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s either very, very late or very, very early. Depending.”
Jack sighed. “Depending on what, Bart?”
“Whether you’ve already gone to bed or not.”
“I have not, as you know perfectly well. If it isn’t a student… Bart, I think maybe someone is breaking in.”
“I can’t fault your logic there. That’s not really a job for a chemistry major, though.”
“I wasn’t always a chemistry major.” Jack stood. “In fact, I like my chances pretty well in a fight with your average burglar.”
“Pride goeth before a fall, Jack. Best leave it to the proper authorities.”
Jack wasn’t really listening to Black Bart, though. He was too busy pacing around the room, thinking out loud about what might be going on here.
“You know, this wouldn’t be the first time some desperate vagrant or drifter has come in here looking for a place to get out of the cold. Or addicts looking for something to pawn, we get those too. Or even dumb kids looking to cause trouble.”
It might seem odd for a twenty-one-year-old man to be talking about “dumb kids,” especially given those kids would most likely be his peers. Still, Jack was something of an old soul, and he generally considered most of his peers to be immature. He wasn’t wrong.
As for possible candidates for a break-in, most of them were people who saw the recessed basement doors of the underground lab area as an opportunity. A place they could break in without anyone seeing them, whether that meant people walking around the campus or campus security cruising along the streets that crisscrossed the university.
While Jack was deciding whether to intervene in person, he started taking steps to reduce the risk to his work. “Bart, call 911 for me. Let them know there’s a possible break-in at this address.”
Having made sure the police would soon be on the way, Jack quickly went around the laboratory, shutting off all the lights, as well as any equipment that might draw attention to his lab.
He wasn’t especially worried about his personal safety. For one thing, he was physically fit, as well as young enough to have some youthful confidence. Not only that, but he had spent a solid portion of his teen years in some kind of martial arts training. Sometimes a boxing or Wing Chun gym or a karate dojo, other times a Brazilian jiu-jitsu club.
At the same time, a lot of stuff in his lab was delicate or expensive, and in some cases, the chemicals were actually combustible. If he was forced to defend himself here, it could set his work back by months even if he won. If they somehow managed to set things on fire, it could be even worse, shutting down the whole lab for repairs for an extended period of time.
It was better not to get involved directly, or so he tried to tell himself. Having shut off everything that could attract attention, he stood in the dark at the door of his lab, watching furtively through the small window.
Jack looked around and scanned the corridor with his eyes, looking for any sign that there really was a break-in. He caught a glimpse of a shadow moving in the lab across from his. Based on the sounds he was hearing, they seemed to be ransacking it.
Jack knew the woman whose laboratory this was. She had been working hard to keep a grant for her project, which involved developing something capable of safely dissolving plastics. If she ever produced a product that could be manufactured at scale, it would obviously have multiple ecological applications.
Jack sometimes chatted with her by the vending machines or in the coffee room. He considered her cute. He also happened to know she was keeping her grant by a thread. All these things were factors in his sudden decision to help her.
He opened the door as slowly and quietly as he could and eased it shut behind him as silently as possible. Then he turned the handle to the door of her laboratory, hoping to sneak up on the burglars. He heard their voices right away, although he couldn’t see them clearly because it was simply too dark.
There seemed to be only two of them. He felt confident he could take on two burglars successfully if he took them by surprise.
He was easing his way past a table in the dark when he heard their voices.
Can’t a guy just do some unsanctioned chemistry in peace? On June 13th find out if this is a normal break in, or if someone is onto him and his secret recipe. Until then head over to Amazon and pre-order The Elementalist Book 1: Quest.
