Quantum Shift Read online

  Quantum Shift

  Phase Shift 1

  Kyle Johnson

  Copyright © 2020 Kyle Johnson

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Keri, whose strength and patience amazes me daily.

  Quantum Shift

  Phase Shift: Book One

  Kyle Johnson

  Chapter 1

  The Shift

  “Now, let’s move to ukemi!” Troias’ “teaching voice” easily filled the dojo, overwhelming the mutters from the students as they moved into position to practice falling safely. Troias’ gaze snapped to the pair of students murmuring under their breath, silencing them instantly.

  “McCarty, Gonzalez,” the instructor spoke with deceptive mildness, moving to stand in front of the teenage boys. “You think just because you’ve gained a new kyu, you don’t need to practice falling anymore?”

  McCarty, the taller of the two and the usual ringleader, glanced quickly at the short, dark-haired Gonzalez and back to the sensei. Troias stood taller than either of the teens by several inches and was at least fifty pounds heavier, and the blond McCarty obviously needed a moment to gather his courage before speaking.

  “Sensei Drakos,” the boy said hesitantly, not meeting his teacher’s gaze. “I – We just don’t understand why we have to work on ukemi every week. I mean, we know how to fall already…”

  The boy’s words cut off as Troias grabbed the lapel of the student’s gi, nudged him backward slightly, then swept the boy’s right foot out with his own left foot. He held the gi tightly as McCarty fell, slowing him down so that the boy wouldn’t get hurt when, as Troias had expected, he reached his left hand down to catch himself and slow his fall. Gonzalez winced visibly as McCarty struck the mat and straightened into his attention stance, but Troias was having none of that.

  “So, tell me, Gonzalez,” he demanded calmly from the co-agitator. “Did McCarty perform his ushiro ukemi correctly?”

  “No, Sensei,” Gonzalez said heavily.

  “And what did he do wrong?”

  “He reached for the floor, Sensei,” Gonzalez answered.

  “And why, McCarty,” Troias continued, glancing down at the prone student, “is that the wrong thing to do?”

  “Because I could break my wrist, Sensei,” the blonde replied in a defeated tone.

  Troias helped the young man back to his feet with a half-smile. “Precisely. Now, let’s begin with ushiro ukemi, since McCarty needs so much work on them.” He glanced at the brown belt student standing off to the side. “Senpai, please count them out for me.”

  The older student nodded and turned to the class. “Ushiro ukemi, on my count! Ichi!” As one, the assembled students tucked their chins, bent their knees, and rolled back onto their backs, slapping the tatami mat with both hands as they did before rolling back to their feet. The senpai continued the count, and Troias moved through the class, offering correction and encouragement. When the class was finished falling backward and sideways, Troias had them partner up for shoulder roll drills.

  At the end of the class, Troias had the students lined up in seiza position, sitting on their knees with their hands resting on their thighs. “McCarty brought up a good question today,” he told them. “Why do we keep practicing our falls, when you’ve been doing them for six months, now?” A young woman raised her hand, and Troias nodded at her.

  “So we don’t forget them, Sensei,” the woman said brightly, and Troias smiled.

  “Not precisely,” he corrected gently. “Everyone, clap your hands one time.” The students glanced at him, puzzled, but each clapped their hands, completely out of sync with the others. “Good. Now tell, me McCarty, did you have to think about how to do that?”

  The blonde teen looked confused but shook his head. “Uh, no, Sensei,” he replied. “I just…did it.”

  “Exactly,” Troias agreed with a grin. “You just did it. When you clap your hands, you don’t think about how to do it. You don’t aim your hands and concentrate. You just do it, with muscle memory and instinct.

  “We drill these techniques over and over so that they become just as much as part of you as clapping your hands or throwing a ball. If you’re in combat and you have to think about what to do, you’ve probably lost. There’s no time for that. You have to stop thinking and just be; allow your mind and body to do what you’ve trained them to do. When you fall – and you will fall, trust me – your body should relax into it naturally.”

  He glanced up over the student’s heads, at the rows of trophies and medals lining the display case. “It’s said that it takes ten-thousand hours to become a master at something,” he told them. “If you practice an hour a day, that’s almost thirty years. When you think of it that way, six months isn’t very much, is it?”

  It was a slightly chastened group of students who bowed out of the dojo that night, but Troias took it in stride. He knew that some of them wanted to become experts right away and were disappointed learning that it took years to earn a black belt in any serious martial art, much less when learning three at once; those usually dropped out after a year, figuring they’d learned enough to get by. He was okay with that; the ones who stayed more than made up for the dilettantes who left every couple of months.

  “They’re a pretty good group, aren’t they, Sensei?” his senpai asked, helping him pack up the grappling dummies and striking targets.

  “I’ll tell you in six more months,” Troias snorted. “They’ve got decent potential, though. A few of them are too impatient, but I think most will last the year, at least.”

  “At least until the twentieth time they hear your, ‘Judo is earth and water’ speech, Sensei,” the student chuckled. “That’s usually when they start heading out the door.”

  Troias barked a laugh. “Judo is the water flowing on the earth,” he corrected. “The earth is the foundation that supports you, the water is the yielding flow that lets you control your opponents. Come on, if you’re going to be telling these stories one day, you’ll need to get them right, Oscar!”

  Oscar looked at his instructor in mock astonishment. “You think I can’t quote that story verbatim?” he asked. “Or the one about the maiden and the bandit? Or…”

  “Okay, you know my stories,” Troias agreed. “You just have to make sure that Liz tells them right while I’m on vacation.” The big man grabbed the heavy duffel bags and lifted them easily, almost unnoticeably favoring his left knee as he walked. The old injury barely bothered him anymore, and he’d put the incident that caused it more or less behind him – although he refused to call it an accident, still, so he guessed it wasn’t totally behind him.

  “I still don’t get why you always drive all the way to the UP each year,” Oscar shook his head, carrying a single bag and following his teacher. “Isn’t there camping closer to Chicago?”

  Troias grunted and carefully stacked the bags in the equipment room, even though there was plenty of space in the old warehouse for everything. Good habits were habit-forming, after all, and so were bad ones. “McKeever Cabin is way out in the middle of nowhere,” he replied. “Edison Park just gets too much for me, sometimes. I need the peace and quiet to reboot a little.”

  Oscar shook his head in disbelief. “Yeah, but no electricity?” h
e persisted. “No running water? No cell phone service? What do you even do up there?”

  “Fish,” Troias said simply. “Hike. There’s swimming, canoeing, bow-hunting; heck, I’ll spend hours just enjoying the silence some days. It’s great for practicing meditation. Plus, I can train all I want, and I don’t have to worry about anyone bothering me.”

  Oscar shrugged; his teacher’s obsession with training and meditation were both well known in martial arts circles. “Well, it’ll be weird not having you here for the week,” he said, apparently surrendering. “Liz can be a little…hardcore sometimes.”

  “It’s just a week,” Troias reminded him gently. “She’s a good sensei; she just pushes you brown belts harder because she knows you can handle it.”

  Liz was the school’s resident karate instructor, and she was a good one. She was great with the younger students, and she knew how to motivate the older ones to keep them from being lazy. Like Troias, she might have been an Olympic medalist or World Champion if she hadn’t gotten injured, and he knew he was lucky to have her. Unlike him, she hadn’t had more than a decade to get used to the idea of being unable to compete, so she sometimes pushed her students a bit harder in the hopes of experiencing a championship vicariously through one.

  He changed out of his gi back into his street clothes, taking a clean pair from the travel bag he had with him, his mind a million miles away as he did. He was truly looking forward to his trip up north; the cabin was something of a sanctuary for him, one he went to twice per year. He was totally cut off from the world, there, except for the occasional hunter, hiker, or fisherman he ran into, and those usually stayed well away from him.

  Glancing at himself in the dojo’s mirror, he could see why. He stood three inches over six feet, and his training regimen left him solidly muscled, if not as defined as he was back when he was competing. He kept his black, curly hair in a buzz cut – it was just easier to maintain that way, plus it made it easier to ignore that, at 42 years old, he was dealing with a slowly receding hairline – and his odd, grey eyes were piercing and tended to make people uncomfortable if he wasn’t smiling.

  After locking the school up for the night, he bid Oscar farewell and tossed the bag into the passenger seat of his Expedition with a contented sigh. Troias was a night owl; he preferred to sleep until mid-morning and stay up all night when he could. Mornings were over-rated in his opinion; they were bright, loud, and filled with people demanding things of you. Troias didn’t really like people, but people seemed drawn to him for some reason. It was weird: they were either totally intimidated by him, or they were fascinated with him and intruded on any moments of solitude he might want to get. At least, at night, most people were in bed and left him alone.

  Plus, night-time was the best time for gaming. He’d gotten hooked on video games during his convalescence, years ago, and despite the fact that in gamer years, he was an old man, he still managed to slap around most of the Gen-Z crowd in PvP duels with no problem. He tended to prefer MMORPG games or first-person shooters, but he was fine with 4X and city-building games, too. About the only kind he refused to play were fighting games; his days of competing in martial arts were behind him, and the games didn’t offer remotely the same experience as being inside a ring.

  The drive to the UP would probably take him a bit over 6 hours; Troias rarely went over the speed limit and was content to drive up the Edens, what locals called the north part of I-94, in the second-to-rightmost lane, coasting along a mile or two under the speed limit. People zipped past him, all in a hurry to get somewhere, but he figured that he’d get where he was going eventually. There was no real need to rush there.

  A person in a rush is what had led to his injury, in fact. He had always believed that a solid foundation would lead to victory: all you had to do was wait for your opponent to make a mistake, while being patient enough to avoid making one of your own. The idiot that had taken out his knee in an illegal leg scissors hadn’t felt the same way; he’d been in a hurry to win the fight, and when he couldn’t do it in the first few minutes, he’d gotten stupid and taken dumb risks. Speed kills, he reminded himself as another car buzzed past him. It had certainly killed his career, after all.

  He pushed the somber thoughts out of his head and turned on the radio to an oldies station, wincing as he realized that the music of his childhood was considered ‘oldies’ now. He lost himself in the music, enjoying the radio while he could. Once he got past Green Bay, stations would be less frequent, until eventually there’d only be a handful of choices once he was in the UP.

  The hours slid by mindlessly as he drove, stopping only to gas up and grab some coffee. That was a talent of his: while most people found meditation boring and difficult, Troias had no problem putting his thoughts aside and just being in the moment. It made a 6-hour drive in the darkness much more bearable, although he was yawning and blinking tiredly by the time he turned onto Forest Road 2613 and drove slowly toward the cabin. It was late enough that he didn’t expect to see a ton of wildlife, but the forests were often far more active at night than they were during the day, and he didn’t want to hit anything. He was fine killing a deer with a bow while hunting; somehow, running one down with a car didn’t seem very sporting.

  The road stopped a quarter of a mile or so from the cabin, and Troias gratefully threw the Expedition into park and leaned back in the seat, his eyes heavy. He forcibly roused himself, grabbing his overnight duffel and stepping out into the crisp, October night. The cool air revived him instantly, chill enough to bite at his skin but not enough to be freezing, yet. He tossed on a light jacket, locked the car, and trekked the dirt path that led to the cabin, using his flashlight to light his way. It was a decent hike, and he had a cart in the truck to carry all of his supplies, since the cabin basically came with nothing but firewood for the wood-burning stove. At least it wasn’t snowing; in the winter, you had to park a mile away and ski or snowshoe in, dragging everything in a pull-behind sled, since snowmobiles were prohibited. In December and January, the snowfall here was measured in feet rather than the inches that Chicago usually got, and while Troias liked seclusion, that was a bit much even for him.

  He located the key and opened the door, frightening a pair of mice that had taken up residence beneath the cold stove. Hanging his flashlight overheard, he spent a few minutes getting a fire lit in the stove and loosely making the bottom bunk on one of the bunk beds; the cabin wasn’t cleaned between visits, so he would need to check the mattress in the morning, but for the moment a clean sheet and comforter were good enough for him to strip to his skivvies and collapse into bed.

  He bolted awake sometime later, a strange buzzing sound filling the cabin and jolting him from sleep. At first, he thought the sound was some sort of large insect that had managed to infiltrate the small room, but after a few moments he realized that the noise was coming from outside. Probably some idiot camper who brought a generator, he muttered, rubbing his eyes and laying down, trying to fall back to asleep. If you need electricity, maybe this just isn’t the place for you…

  His thoughts were scattered as suddenly, a voice burst into the cabin, accompanied by a flashing wall of text that filled his vision. He clapped his hands to his ears, but the sound seemed to be coming from inside his head. The voice had a strange, game-show-announcer quality to it, and he was surprised that he didn’t hear some sort of brassy fanfare as it spoke, narrating the words that appeared in his vision:

  PHASE SHIFT INCOMING!

  Your local sector has been selected to undergo

  a Quantum Phase Shift in order to increase its

  habitability. Any humans who survive this process

  will receive more information on these changes.

  Expected Survival Rate: 1 – 5%

  Phase Shift begins in 3…2…1...Commence Phase Shift

  No sooner had the voiced and text spoken than a flash of strange light swept through the cabin, the radiance seeming to spread from every part of the room
at once, the color of it something he couldn’t quite describe or even remember. A moment later, agony erupted throughout Troias’ body. It felt like every cell in his body was on fire; his blood seemed to boil in his veins, and his heart pumped torment throughout his dying organs. As he reflexively curled into the fetal position on the bed, he felt liquid running down his cheeks and lips and knew that his eyes and nose were bleeding freely. His heart felt ragged in his chest, and as darkness began creeping into the edges of his vision, part of him welcomed it as a release from the pain.

  Troias knew that part of himself, though, and he savagely put it down. That was the part that had wanted to give up after his injury, the part that wanted him to take a blue-collar job and give up on training forever. It would have been easy – not many people recovered well from the unhappy triad of torn ACL, MCL, and meniscus – but Troias had never been one for the easy route. He’d forced himself to rehab, suffered through years of painful therapy, and recovered most of his strength and endurance. His knee would never be strong enough for competition, but many people with that severe of an injury limped badly for the rest of their lives. Most people told him he’d been lucky, but he knew the truth: he had made his own luck.

  He hadn’t given up then, and he wasn’t about to, now. He forced himself to take a deep, shuddering breath, then another, focusing on the slow, rhythmic movement. Breathe, he repeated mentally, turning his thoughts away from the pain. Breathe. Despite what others had insisted should happen, he’d never been able to use meditation to reduce pain, but he could force himself to ignore the agony. Breathe. Each breath was a victory, a sign that he lived, another moment stolen from the darkness that was still pressing on him.

  Breathe. Was it his imagination, or was that darkness receding from his vision? He refused to consider it; it didn’t matter. All that mattered was this moment, not the future. Breathe. Pain raged in his body, ravaging him from the inside out, but all his focus was on the slow rise and fall of his chest. Breathe.