Preview: New Chapter One

          It was around six o’clock in the evening when Mendel found himself looking out the window of his office, watching the sun go down from behind his desk instead of from the living room in his home. His faint reflection glared back at him from the shiny surface, showing his medium length jet-black hair, prominent nose, and square cheek bones. His office was not lavish, but was well appointed with all of the things a very good physicist would need. So, all he really had in his office was a desk, his chair, sofa, and a cabinet about five feet wide and eight feet tall with a myriad of electronic gadgetry neatly organized inside. His gaze returned to his office walls which were, of course, covered in dry-erase board which themselves were covered with a lacework of equations, molecular diagrams, and multi-colored fingerprints and smudges where markings had been erased unsuccessfully. 

          Mendel turned his gaze back to marking on the wall he had been previously examining, and when he couldn’t regain concentration momentarily, he turned his neck to the right to look out his window again. He knew the sunset he was looking at was not real, but was a computer generated recreation of what was actually happening four thousand feet above his head on the surface. He hated the feeling of being locked deep underground in his own personal mausoleum that his agency called an office. He understood the need for security, as his interstellar travel research would be highly prized by any government or private organization looking to find a way to move between colonized planets faster than the three years that was the current norm between neighboring planets. He once again tried to turn his mind back to his work, this time by turning his head back towards the holo-display on the desk. After a few moments, when something didn’t seem to make sense, he noticed that there was a portion of the hologram missing. Mendel reached out in front of him and cleared the notepad from the corner of the projection area allowing the image to refresh and fully display. Ah. Now that’s better.