Puzzle Master
T.J. McKenna
Puzzle Master
T.J. McKenna
Puzzle Master
Copyright 2016 T.J. McKenna
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
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Author’s Note for the eBook Edition
I hope you won’t pre-judge the contents of this or any eBook by the price you pay for it. I’ve been given many books for free (including copies of the Bible) and I’ve found value in their pages regardless of whether money changed hands. I give you this eBook for free with my blessings, here’s why.
Every Easter a house on the road between my house and my kids’ school would do a beautiful but simple statement of their faith. They’d erect a heavy wooden cross and drape it with a purple cloth in the days leading up to Easter. On Easter morning the purple would be gone and the cross would be draped in white. I came to love seeing it there each spring. So much so in fact that over time as I drove by I’d find my eyes drifting to that spot year round hoping to see it. I’d go so far as to say eventually I could see the cross with my heart even when it wasn’t there for my eyes.
Every now and then I’d see the owners of the house in their yard and I’d consider stopping to introduce myself and tell them how moving I found their cross to be. I never stopped. I was always too busy or felt like it just wasn’t “the right time”. Then they suddenly moved away and I’d squandered my chance to meet them. They took the time to touch everyone who drove past and I’d done nothing to touch their lives in return.
At about the time they moved away my wife was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer. Thoughts about opportunities to touch each other’s lives again came to the forefront as friends and neighbors sent flowers and food. The road won’t be easy but she’s going to be fine, I’m sure of it. Imagining my neighbor’s Easter cross as I drive by each day helps me to be sure of it.
If giving away this eBook is my best chance to plant a cross for someone to see with their heart as much as their eyes, then I don’t want to squander it. I don’t know that I’ll ever have what it takes to be a “Best-Selling” author. Instead, I hope anyone who reads these words will help me to become a “Best-Giving” author by spreading the word.
You’ll soon see that the main characters are just eighteen years old. I’d particularly like to see free copies of Puzzle Master in the hands of teens and young adults so at the end you’ll find a second “Author’s note” where I request you do something for me to spread the word among our youth and help me give away as many free eBooks as possible.
Finally, I recognize that not everyone is interested in eBooks. I personally still love the feel of a book in my hands and turning a page rather than tapping. Unfortunately I can’t give the paper version away for free but I have made it available via major online print on demand retailers for the lowest price possible. I will make a small profit per print book so if I make enough I can do a traditional print run and offer the book at a better price later.
Dedication
For Kristen on our Silver Anniversary. You once asked the question “What kind of man would you have our daughter marry?” I’d be lying if I said I want her to marry someone just like me but there is one trait of mine I’d like him to have. I’d like her to marry the man who will wake up every morning honestly believing he married the most beautiful woman in the world.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Sneak Peek at Puzzle Master: Master of None
Prologue
Sheridan, Illinois 2190 A.D.
God loves a good puzzle. He spent six days creating puzzles for mankind to solve and on the seventh day smiled as we set to work on them. His grand design even included keeping some of His puzzles always just beyond our grasp to insure we’d never stop reaching higher. I’ve never thought of His unsolvable puzzles as a means to frustrate humanity. I’d rather believe that as long as we keep searching for the solutions to His puzzles, we’ll also be searching to know Him.
I love puzzles too. My parents say I solved my first puzzle before I could walk and squealed and clapped with delight before smashing it just so I could solve it again. From that day puzzles became my joy and wonder. I don’t even know how I do it, I just see things most people can’t see and know how things will fit together. Just as God planned, He provided me with a supply of increasingly harder puzzles to solve so I’d never stop reaching. He had good reason. He wasn’t training me to solve man’s puzzles. He was training me to solve one of His own creation.
I was just six years old in 2190 A.D. but I remember the day when the first pieces of God’s puzzle were fit together. Mom was in the kitchen humming the same tune she hummed every morning so I hummed it along with her. I’d learned it at school and both Mom and my teacher would smile when I hummed it, even if I couldn’t carry a tune.
Dad came down the stairs with a small bag, indicating he was going to be away overnight. Whenever he was going to be away he took an extra-long time saying goodbye so on that morning he sat and talked to me while I completed a difficult three-dimensional holographic jigsaw puzzle.
“Cephas, why do you like puzzles so much?” dad asked while I manipulated the hovering shapes of light with finger motions.
“Puzzles are like secrets only the puzzle maker knows,” I answered without looking up. “It’s fun to know secrets, especially when people don’t know that you know their secrets.”
It’s good I didn’t look up or I may have picked up on my father’s concern. James Paulson was a man keeping a secret from the world, including me. Born to a powerful Atheist family, he’d somehow fallen in love with both a Christian woman and her savior Jesus Christ. Being just six years old, my parents had decided it was too risky to teach me about Jesus until I learned how to hide my thoughts and opinions from prying eyes.
At six years old all I knew about Christians was what I’d learned in school, they were people who believed in some force they called “God” and their ideas were banned by the government sometime after the Final Holy War in 2036. My teachers also told me there used to be many other religions but they were all gone by about the year 2150.
Of course there was also the playground education on the subject. At recess we’d play “C&C” which was short for “Christians and Cult H
unters”. One lucky kid chosen at random would be the government “cult hunter” and would hunt the rest who were the “Christians”. When the cult hunter caught you he could “re-educate” you and make you a fellow cult hunter or he could just kill you outright and you’d sit out until the next game started. It usually depended on how good you were at begging for his “help”.
To me the game was a puzzle where my classmates represented predictable pieces that I could move around as I pleased, so I was usually the last one to get caught. I once tried to change the rules so the last Christian caught would become the cult hunter in the next game but my teacher overheard my proposal and wouldn’t allow it. As part of her scolding I was assured it was illogical that the Christian who was best at evading the cult hunters should ever be perceived as a “winner”.
“If you know all the puzzle maker’s secrets, maybe you should be a puzzle maker when you grow up,” dad said after a pause.
“But then somebody else would learn my puzzle secrets,” I replied, acting more like a six year old again. “Solving them is more fun anyway.”
“Is the last piece your favorite piece to put in?”
“I don’t know why everyone thinks that. The first piece is just as important to the solution as the last one. What difference does the order make?”
I stopped working and considered the last piece, which was hovering in front of me.
“Dad? Have you ever thought that maybe we’re all pieces in somebody else’s puzzle?”
The question had set him back onto his heels though I didn’t know why. Was this a dangerous theological thought I’d somehow picked up on from my parents? Or was it just another passing notion of a six year old, soon to be forgotten?
“I don’t know Cephas. Why do you ask?”
I flicked my finger to slide the last piece into place.
“Because if we are, that’s a puzzle I want to solve.”
***
In the hills above Gore, Virginia
As dad and I were having our conversation about puzzles, underneath a dilapidated old house over a thousand kilometers away identical twin old men worked alongside much younger backs, burrowing out working and living spaces where the faithful could hide from prying government eyes. With the average lifespan nearing one-hundred years the twins refused to consider themselves old but they both knew they’d be sore the next morning. Such was the life of a Christian, hiding in the shadows and being called “cultists” or “fish heads”. To them this labor was considered worth the pain.
Any other excavation project in the world, big or small, would simply use digging robots. You’d program them to clear a certain space and they’d excavate it to the millimeter. The problem is the drones would uplink to a global positioning system and the government would know instantly and update its maps accordingly. For secrecy, manual labor was the only option available.
Three escape tunnels had been completed but when the fourth was started it’d run into a preexisting chamber which had been built by coal miners more than a century earlier. The coal itself had been much deeper but the area was riddled with old air shafts that would mean death to anyone who fell into one. When the discovery was made they’d explored just the first twenty or thirty meters then erected a makeshift door and set up monitors for natural gas. Once the monitors confirmed the air was safe, the old twins took it upon themselves to keep everyone else out of harm’s way while they checked the area for danger.
“We good to go baby brother?” Austin asked his brother Brill, who was about twenty minutes younger than himself.
“Sure thing old man,” came Brill’s customary response.
Austin shined his light back and forth, paying special attention to the floor as he searched for danger. As his beam hit the far corner of the space it swept across something shiny.
“Where’d that come from?”
“Looks like an old canary cage or something,” Brill replied. “I guess the old timers were worried about gas too.”
“I can see what it looks like. I’m saying it wasn’t there when we first broke though.”
“You’re eyes are getting weak old man. Look at the floor. Everywhere we’ve been you can see our footprints in the dust. There isn’t a footprint anywhere near it.”
Austin carefully crossed the floor for a closer look.
“It’s not much of a canary cage, it has no bottom.”
He frowned as his light revealed a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string sitting under the cage. There was writing on it which he could easily read because it wasn’t covered with the same layer of dust as everything else in the area.
“What is it?” Brill asked.
“Is the new guy James still planning on spending the night and helping with the power connection? The one with the government job and the little boy named Cephas?”
“James Paulson? Yeah, he got here an hour ago. I watched him sign the guest book and everything. Why?”
“I don’t know what it’s all about, but whoever snuck in here left a package with his name on it.”
Chapter One
Colorado Springs, Colorado 2202 A.D.
Avoid eye contact. You know what’ll happen if you look directly into those eyes.
It’s an odd thing to think to yourself while looking into a mirror.
Each day it’s my job to teach classes in Religious History and convince young minds that any form of spiritualism is a delusional road to ruin compared to the truth offered by science. So every day before teaching class I take the advice of my old friend and mentor whose seat I now occupy at the University. He told me to look over the parts of my body and acknowledge I’m nothing more than a complex collection of biochemical reactions. He told me embracing my nature as an evolved being would keep me grounded in reality and free of destructive spiritualism.
He didn’t mention that you’d develop an aversion to mirrors.
I watch my hands as they twist the silk of my tie into a knot.
“Hands are a useful adaptation our early ancestors acquired eons ago to give them a competitive advantage so they could pass on their genes. They’re no different than a plant’s leaves or a fish’s fins,” I say aloud.
It makes perfect scientific sense. Of course hands evolved. Where else could they come from?
I open my mouth and look at my lips and tongue.
“Evolved to give my ancestors the advantage of communication.”
I look over my ears, nose and hair in turn and assign them each a rational place in evolution, followed by a deep sigh when I give up pretending. I could work my way down to my toes but my eyes will still be there in the mirror, waiting for their turn. Waiting to deny every scientific argument with a simple twinkle.
My life makes no sense. It never has. It’s like the twinkle is the only thing that’s a true reflection of me and everything else in the mirror is a distortion.
Like every morning, the need to look into my eyes and ponder their secrets will soon overcome me so I sigh then close my eyes and lean in closer to the mirror. I tell myself again that eyes are just another set of complex cells that evolved to allow me to interact with my environment. I tell myself that the twinkle, the spark of life I’ll see in there is just light reflecting off the edge of the iris. I stand for a while with my eyes closed, hoping to believe it this time.
Opening my eyes is the same each morning. Try as I might, I can’t see a mass of cells that collect light and transmit biochemical information to another blob of cells called the brain. I see beyond the cells staring back at me. I see a…
I stop short before allowing myself to even think the word “Soul”.
Don’t go there, Cephas. Your job is to deny the existence of such nonsense, not explore it.
I break off the staring contest with the mirror.
There’s no place for this sort of thinking in your life. Even if you’re retired you’re still a cult hunter. You’re not just any cult hunter, you’re THE Cult Hu
nter, so control your thoughts.
I drive the conflict from my mind and take another look at myself in the mirror while avoiding my eyes. At eighteen years old I’m younger than the students I teach, though it can be hard to tell anyone’s age due to “enhancements”. The human race long ago tired of seeing any sort of “imperfections” when they looked in the mirror. Virtually all children have enhancement surgeries of one sort or another, many while they’re still babies and some before they’re even born. The awkwardness of puberty typically brings more surgeries followed by many more in later years in an attempt to deny the inevitable signs of aging.
Most people think of their enhancements as a step towards perfection but I’ve never been able to view it that way. To me enhancements make people look like a set of molded plastic dolls that all say the same words and think the same thoughts. It’s always been a point of pride that I don’t have any visible enhancements.
The only thing you like about looking in mirrors is the reminder that you’re not perfect.
I look at the table that sits under the mirror and sigh again as I see the final step in my morning routine, my communications device or “com”. When I place the tiny device into my ear it’ll automatically activate and the daily assault on the senses will begin. Coms don’t understand the pleasure I take in being alone with my thoughts so it’ll batter me with personal messages, news, advertisements, music and countless other types of noise. Once it’s in my ear the simple act of thinking will become like trying to sleep as a faucet drips nearby.
Maybe that’s why people love their coms so much, so they can avoid thinking.
I wouldn’t wear one at all but as a professor I’m contractually obligated to wear my com for four hours per day so I put it in solely to get the clock started. Anyone in the world who cares to look can now see my electronic footprint so my ear hasn’t even warmed it before the first call comes.
“Incoming call Cephas,” the pleasant voice that’s not quite male and not quite female says in my ear. At least it pronounces my name correctly, “See-fuss”. The old voice never got it quite right.
“Really? Who’s looking for me?”
“Riemann Jones from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cult Hunter Corps.”
Not the corps. Not again.
