Ability (Omnibus) Read Online Free PDF Page A

two boxes of vacuum-sealed gray powder that they’d press into pills before delivering somewhere else. He had no idea what happened to any of the substances he produced once they left the property, and he didn’t want to know.
    As he watched the taillights of the two Ivans leaving with their bounty, he calculated how much the next batch of Crash would eat into his Lyborsol supply. The Ivans had brought him two kilos of it, of which he would have just over four hundred grams left when he made the next batch. Brian calculated how much of that he would need to create four different variants of Receiver, twelve doses for each variant. He became slightly distracted when he thought of his roommate and his…Derry wasn’t his girlfriend. She wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend , or as she liked to call it, property .
    Garret was going mad at his failure to reproduce the same kind of ability that Brian had demonstrated by accident. He’d tweaked a few of the induction modules what seemed like a hundred different ways. He was the most hardcore when it came to downing the pills that Brian brought home to begin the next leg of their experiment. It finally came to a head one night when Garret had almost come to blows with Brian after being told there would be no Receiver to test out for another two weeks. He’d erupted in fury at hearing the cook house had nearly burned down. Garret was so obsessed that he refused to believe it, even after being forced to acknowledge the odor of burning plastic that accompanied Brian’s two very singed eyebrows. He then raged at his best friend for almost an hour, spewing accusations at him until Derry had stepped between them and threatened to punch Garret in the mouth.
    Derry, on the other hand, seemed to be in a state of bliss. Her natural guitar playing skill had become almost as good as her flashed skill. She never wanted to experiment beyond the guitar module and the Physics - Gravity module that Garret had included in his original six prototypes. Brian had asked her about the gravity thing, and she told him that if he’d frozen a few things after being flashed with Fluid Dynamics - Heat Transfer , then she hoped to be able to move objects with her mind if she should ever chance to even briefly gain the ability through their experiments. When Garret had laughed and told her to go back to her dead, boring British authors from her Lit studies, she promptly told him the first thing she would move was a lamp to the side of his skull.
    Brian was still a bit blown away by his impressive display from that night. Just like the missing detail that kept his Receiver drug from being complete , there had been something gnawing at the back of his mind ever since he’d frozen the objects. He had been so astonished the first time that he couldn’t remember how he’d done it. When Garret and Derry had set up random objects on the counters in the tiny kitchen, he figured out how to do it again with a glass of water. It felt natural, but there was some kind of…something…in his mind that instinctively knew how to manipulate atoms at the molecular level. By the time the ability had worn off, he’d been no closer to grasping the concept of what he was doing. It had felt instinctive each time, whether freezing water, dinner plates, or metal rulers. The inability to understand how to manipulate that instinct consistently had left him feeling as if he’d been trapped in a paradox.
    Brian grabbed one of the sealed bags of Lyborsol and headed back into the kitchen to weigh out what he needed for a Receiver cook. This would be Receiver v11 to v14. Each batch would have one or two minor details altered. He’d been tinkering with the formula for months, and each new revision of the drug brought out sometimes subtle, sometimes heavy new reactions during a trip. Batch v9 had almost killed him when he’d ended up producing a mild cyanide reaction instead of the hallucinatory effect he had theorized.
    “I laugh in the