Anti-Hero Blues by Christopher Lee Rippee ~ Excerpt & Giveaway Sept 2nd – 30th

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the ANTI-HERO BLUES by Christopher Lee Rippee Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

About The Book:

Title: ANTI-HERO BLUES

Author: Christopher Lee Rippee

Pub. Date: August 16, 2024

Publisher: Balance of Seven

Formats:  Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook

Pages: 400

Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/ANTI-HERO-BLUES

How do you save a world that believes you’re the villain?

In Union City, where superpowered vigilantes are celebrated as saviors, rebellious grad-student Brandon Carter sees them as anything but. Haunted by the death of his father at the hands of a masked “hero,” Brandon’s defiance might have landed him in a jail cell if not for his gift for physics.

At twenty-three, Brandon is on the precipice of success. Using his  research, his team is just one test away from a world-changing scientific breakthrough-a test that nearly ends in catastrophe due to an “error” in the code.

With the project set for termination, Brandon throws caution to the wind,/  sneaking back into the lab to rerun the test in secret. But when a mysterious, powerful assassin attacks him and sabotages the experiment, a devastating explosion levels the lab.

Against all odds, Brandon survives, transformed in mind and body. With his life on the line and no idea who to trust, he sets out to uncover the truth behind the attack, gain control of his strange, new powers, and protect those he loves-even if it means saving a world that would label him a supervillain.

Excerpt:

ONE

Failed Experiment

You want to know about the explosion and the pillar of fire in the sky at the Resistance Day celebration? What happened to Vincent Vaydan? Sure, we’ll get there, but we need to start at the beginning.

It all went off the rails the day we turned MICSy on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Union City University and the Vaydan Institute for Experimental Physics, welcome!” Claire’s South London accent colored her greeting as she smiled at the research review committee.  She was really turning on the charm, which made sense given that the committee could pull the plug on our project with an email.

That worried me, but not as much as the possibility  of blowing us all up in the next few minutes. My heart  pounded against my rib cage as I raced through the pre-ignition checklist for the twentieth time, trying to focus. With my hands shaking and a tangled snarl of anxiety, excitement, and dread roiling in my stomach, I glanced at the clock.

9:57 a.m.

Three minutes until the moment of truth.

On the dubious bright side, if the test went badly, I wouldn’t have a lot of time for regrets.

“We have what will undoubtedly be an exciting morning in store!”

Dr. Claire Wright was the head of our research team, my mentor, and basically a member of my family.  She was in her fifties, having spent her life climbing to the top of her field. Despite her professional stature, Claire was only five foot five in two-inch heels, and slim. Short, iron-gray hair framed a face that seemed cheery despite her aura of cool professionalism. As usual, she wore an elegantly conservative blazer and matching skirt.

For our test run, she’d gone with navy blue. A few members of the research oversight committee were clumped by the door. Most were watching remotely. We’d expected a better turnout, but I suspected the de sire to be present for a scientific breakthrough was outweighed by an aversion to the possibility of sudden energetic events—explosions, for the nonscientific. Two representatives from the physics department chatted with the Vaydan Industries contingent, a suit in his late twenties named Ashcroft and a tall woman I hadn’t met, while Dr. Clifford from the Department of Energy, a grumpy-looking bureaucrat in a tweed jacket older than I was, glowered at everyone from behind an impressive mustache.

The lab used to be a bomb shelter, so it wasn’t exactly spacious. Despite taking every safety precaution imaginable, the chance of us causing a massive explosion in a couple of minutes was slightly greater than zero, so it was good we were wrapped in concrete and steel a dozen feet underground. Unfortunately, it also meant the lab was a cramped maze of fabrication machines, workstations, and bundles of wiring taped to the floor. Most of the equipment was impressive, but none of it compared to the machine in the middle of the room. Claire turned to me and the rest of the team standing awkwardly in front of the machine that dominated the lab. “These individuals represent some of the brightest young minds in our field, and they deserve the real accolades. Despite my title, all I did was approve purchase orders.” Claire’s smile turned mischievous. “Rarely in a scientist’s career does one have the opportunity to take so much credit for doing so little.”

The observers chuckled.

She gestured to Harvey, who nodded curtly before looking away.

“Dr. Zhang comes to us from the University of Toronto and specializes in the computational modeling of energetic systems.”

Harvey was pale and thin, with a mop of stylishly unkempt black hair. Dressed in a tight, black button down and fitted jeans, Harvey looked more like a model than a mathematician. He’d seemed like an asshole when we first met, but he just wasn’t great with people. I wouldn’t have called us friends, but we weren’t far from it.

He didn’t smile as the observation group shifted their collective gaze to him. He made most stoics seem emotionally unhinged.

“Next is Dr. Itzel Rodriguez,” Claire continued. “Dr. Rodriguez is a mechanical engineer from the University of Mexico, by way of MIT. She specializes in exotic matter containment and applied xenotechnology.” Itzel was short, with an olive complexion and a mane of wavy brown hair, streaked with blue, that surrounded a face with round cheeks. She was in one of her many science-pun T-shirts, battered jeans, and Chuck Taylors. Her shirt of the day had a smiling proton telling an electron to be positive.

Itzel’s endless enthusiasm almost made up for her tendency to sing when she was excited. Nothing helped complex engineering problems like lab karaoke. Still, I’d put money on her winning a Nobel Prize.

Vibrating with excitement, Itzel beamed when Claire said her name. “It’s great to meet everyone,” she said, with a hint of a Mexican accent.

Claire pointed to our third team member. “Many of  you already know Dr. Nathan Chambers.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

Barely.

Nate was blandly handsome, with sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and the muscle tone of someone who worked out for looks. Straightening his salmon polo, he smiled with the casually smug air of a guy used to being showered with praise. I guess it came with being the child of a billionaire.

Nate was the son and heir apparent of tech mogul Jeremiah Chambers. His PhD was just part of preparing for his legacy.

As much as I disliked the rich, though, Nate’s money wasn’t why I couldn’t stand him.

The guy was just awful.

He ignored Harvey and treated Itzel like a waitress, but he reserved his real contempt for me. I was the only one in the lab without a PhD, but that didn’t bother him as much as the fact I’d grown up poor.

The first time we met, Nate had asked Claire if she’d given all her strays research projects. I’d asked him if he was planning to be buried in his father’s shadow or just live his whole life in it.

It went downhill from there.

As much as I hated the guy, though, Nate was good at computational physics. It was why Claire had brought him in on the project, even if his presence was a needle in the heart of my chill.

“And of course, I want to introduce Brandon Car ter.” Claire gestured to me, her smile expanding with pride. “Brandon came to my attention years ago, thanks to his high-school physics teacher.”

Someone snickered. Maybe they’d been born with an advanced degree.

“While research is a team effort, Brandon’s equations—his revolutionary way of visualizing and modeling gravitational waves in tandem with highly energetic systems—are this project’s foundation. The first time I read the paper that launched all this,”—Claire gestured around the lab— “a paper Brandon wrote as a second – year under grad, I might add—I thought it was rubbish, mostly because I didn’t think what he was suggesting was possible.” Claire chuckled. “When Brandon explained his work to me, I realized I was holding something extraordinary.”

The observers looked at me. Some seemed impressed; others, dubious or dismissive. 

I managed not to glare.

Whatever they saw, I doubted physicist was the first word that came to mind. Musician, maybe, if they were being generous. Armed robber if they weren’t.

I was twenty-three and nearly six foot four, with a wiry build and the colorless complexion of my Irish roots. My hair was dark, a product of the Korean side of my dad’s family, chopped short and shaved on the sides.  I wasn’t what people called handsome. Striking, maybe, with deep-set hazel eyes under a heavy brow, a large nose, prominent cheekbones, and a strong chin.

My uniform—a hoodie, band shirt, jeans, and a pair of boots, all black—didn’t exactly scream scientist. Neither did the tattoos that peeked out from beneath my sleeves and spread across my hands.

If asked, almost anyone who knew me growing up would’ve said the only way I’d end up in a physics lab was by robbing it. Before fifteen, I would have agreed. The trajectory of my life hadn’t been aimed anywhere good.

Why?

Because a superhero killed my dad when I was eight. If it hadn’t been for that high-school science teacher sending a paper I’d written to Claire, I probably would’ve ended up in a jail cell instead of a lab.

Claire smiled again. “Collectively, this team has accomplished something monumental: the first step in bridging the gulf between our world and the infinite other worlds beyond.”

She waved at the device behind us. “Our machine uses alien matter to shape a gravitational distortion and generate a microscopic breach in the membrane separating our reality from others, allowing us to receive electromagnetic radiation from a nearby multiversal strand. To put it another way, we’ll be capturing radio signals from parallel Earths.”

The size of a cargo van, our machine might have looked like a haphazard tangle of wires, cables, and components grafted at random to a metal frame, but every module, field generator, and dedicated processor had been custom built for this experiment. Collectively, it represented three years of my life and more than $9 million of funding.

The machine’s official name was the Multiversal Intermembrane Communication System. We called her  MICSy.

MICSy wasn’t pretty, but she didn’t need to be. At her heart, straining against a xibrantium containment bottle, was a piece of voidrium the size of a fingertip, capable of generating enough gravity to punch a hole through the fabric of space-time.

Assuming the test didn’t kill us all in the next few minutes.

“That’s right. Some of you traveled two thousand miles to watch us turn on the world’s most expensive radio,” Claire said, eliciting more chuckles. “But if we’re successful, the technology will pave the way for full matter transference.”

The multiverse wasn’t a theory. It was a fact made hard to ignore by the occasional monster attacks and invaders from alternate timelines. Masks had been known to travel to other multiversal threads, or parallel worlds, and tread on strange and “undreamed shores,” to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare. They did it in ways not easily replicated, however: Magical portals. Falling through black holes.

If successful, we’d take a step toward making the trip easier.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, shall we make history?” Claire turned to the team and raised an eyebrow. I looked at the clock, my stomach churning.

It was 10:01 a.m.

Breaking apart, we headed to our workstations. Har vey and I were on one side of the room, monitoring the control system and the voidrium to ensure the exotic material’s energy output remained within the containment fields’ tolerances. On the other side, Itzel monitored MICSy’s power system, while Nate watched CPU usage on the control-software servers to make sure they didn’t crash.

I glanced at the team. They seemed as nervous as I felt, even Nate, who had the least to lose, outside his life. Taking a breath, I pulled up the ignition sequence. “Everyone ready?”

Harvey nodded.

“Make it so!” Itzel chirped.

“Get on with it, Carter,” Nate groused.

“Here we go.” I took another deep breath and clicked the initialize button.

The refrigerator-sized xenotech power block began to vibrate, and MICSy hummed as she generated a series of overlapping containment fields. The smell of ozone filled the air, but the diagnostics showed everything as nominal.

“Containment fields on, control system running,” I breathed. “How are we looking on your end, Itzel?” “Stable. MICSy’s purring like a kitten.”

“Opening the containment bottle and bringing the voidrium online.” Hoping I wasn’t about to kill us all, I started the activation sequence.

The power block’s hum deepened as the xibrantium  bottle at MICSy’s heart opened. The voidrium inside glimmered with violet light as energy flowed through it. A stillness filled the room. This was the real test. If it went well, we’d change the world. If it went poorly . . .  well, we might still change the world, at least on local topographic maps.

“Uh, Brandon, you should look at this,” Harvey murmured, a ripple of tension in his tone.

“What?” I asked, hoping my voice wouldn’t carry to the observers. Harvey’s calm demeanor was a joke in the lab, which meant the worry in his tone amounted to hysterics for anyone else.

“We’re getting some instability in the voidrium modulation field.”

A chill ran through me. Shit.

Voidrium was highly unstable. Investigators had discovered it among the wreckage of the Rakkari ships that assaulted Earth nearly three decades ago. The Rakkari  had used it for faster-than-light travel, but research so far had produced no results other than fatal accidents. Our project was one of a handful authorized to work with the exotic matter, and only for a brief window of time.

Sliding out of my seat, I made my way to Harvey as quickly as I could without running, weaving around equipment and through wires. Harvey slid to the side as I stepped in front of his terminal. The screen was covered in graphs and other monitoring tools that would have been incomprehensible to most people, but we had designed the system. I saw what he meant instantly.

An alert message flashed in the field control system. Uh-oh.

Voidrium’s energy production rate was unstable. Previous attempts to harness it had failed due to unpredictable power spikes, almost as if the voidrium were fighting to break free. To compensate, Harvey and I had created an algorithm to predict energy fluctuations and modulate the overlapping containment fields in real time. Without it, we couldn’t have put enough power into the  voidrium to penetrate the membrane separating our reality from other multiversal strands without it exploding. Some of the best computational physicists at the university—and by extension, the world—had reviewed our algorithm. We’d run thousands of simulations, using data models constructed from other experiments. It should have been working.

Instead, the algorithm was failing to predict nearly a third of the energy spikes, pushing the field generators to the limit of their tolerances. Unless we could get the spikes under control, the generators would burn out. If we lost one, failure would cascade through the rest, which would be very, very bad.

Our theoretical modeling predicted that an explosion probably wouldn’t generate an ever-expanding singularity that would engulf the solar system, but it would destroy the lab, along with a significant portion of the building, not to mention kill everyone inside.

No pressure, I thought, breaking into a cold sweat. I racked my brain, ignoring the voice telling me to shut MICSy off. If I hit the emergency shutoff, I could check the field generators and debug the algorithm. I could blame a faulty power relay and use the incident to demonstrate our rigorous safety protocols. But our research review was at the end of the month, and there was no guarantee the Department of Energy would let us keep the voidrium long enough for a second test run. This needed to work.

Suddenly, the solution hit me. My fingers flew across the keyboard as I threw commands into different windows.

“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” Claire asked from behind me, her normally unflappable cool unable to keep the tension from her voice.

“It looks like the algorithm isn’t modulating the fields properly,” Harvey whispered. “It’s failing to prevent roughly thirty percent of the energy fluctuations.”

“Shut it down,” Claire ordered. “Immediately.” Harvey reached for the emergency shutoff.

I grabbed his wrist. “Don’t.” We locked eyes. His were wide with fear. “I’ve got this.”

We looked to Claire.

“We’re still within tolerances,” I said. “I need sixty  seconds.”

Claire’s eyes narrowed, and she glanced at the committee. “One minute. If the power fluctuations aren’t under control in one minute, shut it down.”

I was typing before she’d finished speaking. Our energy growth model wasn’t the issue. It had to be a software bug. The night before, Nate had “fixed” a syntax error I’d supposedly overlooked. I was guessing whatever he’d done had broken something. I initialized the previous version of the control software on a backup server. MICSy sent data to both primary and secondary control systems as a failsafe. I could compare the readings on the secondary server to the primary and, if there were no errors in the earlier version, switch to it. The two control systems ran concurrently, so there shouldn’t be any interruptions. If I was right, the switch would stabilize the process.

The program was system intensive, so it took time to synchronize. Each second felt like an hour as the diagnostics flashed alarms.

I tried not to think about the consequences of being wrong as MICSy’s smooth purr shifted into a rumbling  growl, drawing concerned murmurs from our observers. “Apologies, gentlemen!” Claire flashed them a practiced smile. “It wouldn’t be science without a little excitement.”

Nearly there. Five seconds until the backup came online.

The lights flickered.

Four seconds. My pulse pounded in my ears. Three.

The grumbling increased. Harsh, violet light radiated from the containment bottle. The field generators’ output levels began to redline.

Two.

The acrid stench of overheating electronics filled the room. Electricity crackled, and a blue flash, followed by a spray of sparks, erupted from MICSy. It was only the secondary power relay burning out. We were still good.

One.

A field generator blew, sparks erupting from the side of the machine, but the other generators still worked. The fix was going to work. I was sure of it.

The prior version of the control system finished initializing. Immediately, I could see I was right. The energy curve began to smooth out. I switched control systems, and the levels started to stabilize.

“I’ve got it—”

Claire hit the emergency override. MICSy sputtered and went silent as the diagnostic panel flatlined. The stench of smoldering electronics intensified, and a haze filled the room.

People coughed behind me.

Shit.

About Christopher Lee Rippee:

Christopher Lee Rippee won a young authors contest in third grade, which was the day he officially decided to become a writer. He prepared by reading comics, playing too much Dungeons & Dragons, and devouring every sci -fi and fantasy novel he could get his hands on.

Along the way, thanks to some great people and a lifelong love of punk rock, Chris found his way to social work and currently works at a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit.

He’s also a certified mental-health first-aid trainer, has worked as a neurodiversity consultant for several Pittsburgh-based tech startups, and has contributed to several tabletop RPG products. When not writing, Chris reads, plays games, and spends time with his lovely wife, Nicole, and their adorable rescue dog, Belle.

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