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    Mind Over Employment
    Mind Over Employment
    Mind Over Employment
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Mind Over Employment

    By Stefon Mears

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A brilliant, geeky, hand-painted water bottle. The only spark of personality and life Thane dares keep in his gray cubical, at his dead end job.

     

    An accident sets that water bottle falling. Falling! Thane's most treasured possession, split-seconds from destruction! Panic overwhelms him.

     

    But the bottle catches in midair. Floats. As though on its own. Why? How?

     

    The answers to those questions will change Thane's life forever.

     

    Mind Over Employment, an exciting novella of psychic powers and secret societies. Fans of Push and Firestarter, don't miss this one! From Stefon Mears, author of the popular Jumpstart Duchy series and the Telepath Trilogy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThousand Faces Publishing
    Release dateFeb 2, 2025
    ISBN9798230976202
    Mind Over Employment
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      Book preview

      Mind Over Employment - Stefon Mears

      1

      It’s funny. The moment it all started is engraved in my brain. Like a splash of color in a black-and-white movie. Because in some ways, my life was black-and-white up until that point. Colorless.

      And I know that, because even trying to tell you when it started — how long I’d been working at IQ — I had to stop and go back through old pay stubs and emails to figure out when I’d started there.

      See, IQ, it’s the company everybody knows for its printers. Hell, even people who use an IQ computer — generally not what you think of as high-end users, let me tell you — need to be reminded that IQ makes anything more than printers.

      In fact, I bet I could run you a list of their dozen or so different types of products, and ten minutes later you’d still be thinking of them as just a printer company.

      Which is fair. Because the only things they make that are worth a damn are their printers. And they’re still not the best printer makers on the market, you know?

      Anyway. Technically, I worked at IQ, but not for IQ. I was a contractor. My actual employer was Zoom Temporary Services. True, this shielded me from all the politicking and infighting — the major activities of management, far as I could tell — but it also made my position kind of lonely. I was the outsider, excluded from most of the casual chats and gossip around the break rooms and such.

      Add to that being good at my job — i.e. not needing much in the way of supervision — and I became part of the background, even to my team.

      I just showed up at eight-thirty every morning. Took my half-hour lunch at eleven-thirty. And left at five. Day in and day out. Had to go to meetings three times a week, but those meetings never affected anything I did. To be honest, I don’t even know why I had to attend them. But they were mandatory. So I went.

      Otherwise, I sat there at my desk. In a cubicle that smelled like slightly cooked dust — from the PC — spiced with hints of industrial carpet cleaner and the tang of someone nearby’s burnt coffee. Handling editing and desktop publishing for documents that might as well have been shades of gray themselves.

      Day after day. The same thing. And it wasn’t much better after work. Didn’t have a girlfriend. I had a few friends, but nobody ever wanted to get together during the week, so best I could do was maybe hang out some on weekends. Maybe play a videogame or two during the week.

      Really, I was twenty-six years old, and my life wasn’t anything to write home about. Not until that day. Not until it happened. Or … I should say not until I made it happen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

      It’s not easy remembering what had gone on that day, up until that golden moment. I know it was a Wednesday, and I know it was afternoon, so let’s just assume I’d recently come back from one droning meeting or another. About the new CEO or some new policy or maybe about when our cubes were moving buildings again, which we did every few months for no reason I could ever determine.

      I know I was editing something. The flat gray plane that constituted my desk was covered in open white three-ring binders, where I’d be inserting printouts of whatever bullshit I was editing once I finished.

      God. Must’ve been … seven or eight of those huge things. Each with spines three inches thick, and half the pages in sheet protectors and half not, according to somebody’s idea of what was the most important data.

      I had so many of those things open on my desk that I didn’t have anywhere for my water bottle.

      My water bottle. The one bit of character in that whole damned cubicle. The one bit I allowed myself. Or maybe that they allowed me. Truth is, I don’t remember which it was.

      But that bottle, it mattered to me. It was a wonderful artistic rendering of Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Done by hand, by an artist who might have been a bigger Star Wars geek than I’d ever been, even as a kid.

      I’d bought it at a convention years ago. I could still remember the smile on her pretty face when she saw me see it. How she was happy to sell it to me, knowing I’d care for it the way she would have herself.

      And I did. Hand-washed it regularly, whole nine.

      But all those damned three-ring binders, which had to be open and ready or my supervisor would bitch at me for not following procedure, they took up my entire desk. So instead of my water bottle being in its customary place, in front of my mouse, I had it on an exposed flap of binder beside my mouse. Best I could do.

      Which left it between my right hand and my phone.

      Not my personal phone, my cell phone. That had to be off when I was at my desk. (And they actually checked.) No, I mean my desk phone. The phone I had to answer on the first ring, or risk getting written up.

      You’ve probably already put the pieces together, but just in case…

      That phone rang.

      My Pavlovian hand shot out to answer.

      My wrist hit my precious water bottle.

      The bottle fell over. Glugged water across some bullshit I didn’t care about.

      My foolish hand was still following its course. Near as I can figure, its orders came from the spinal column, because my brain would’ve made it at least veer toward the water bottle.

      Sheer panicked terror flooded my system. I watched in slow motion as that bottle rolled to the lip of the desk.

      Started to go over, where doubtless it would crash on the concrete floor, which was only barely covered by a token nod of thin, puke green carpeting.

      But that bottle froze in place.

      Mind you, time did not stop. My hand grabbed the phone. All the remaining water in that bottle dumped down onto that carpeting, making it smell strangely like wet dog.

      But the water bottle itself just hung there. Butt end up high, like the mouth was the heavy end of a seesaw with the desk lip as a fulcrum.

      This was impossible. I mean, object in motion and all that. You know. Newton. Physics.

      There was absolutely no way that water bottle should have been hanging there at the lip of my desk.

      Except maybe for the second half of Newton’s first law.

      See, people tend to shortcut that law into something like An object in motion tends to stay in motion. But that’s not the whole story.

      It’s better thought of this way. That an object in motion will stay in motion, and an object at rest will stay at rest unless a force is applied.

      There was absolutely no way that water bottle’s movement should have arrested at that obtuse angle. Not unless a force had been applied.

      Now, I didn’t think most

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