Ability (Omnibus) Read Online Free PDF

face of death,” is what he’d announced to Derry and Garret after he stopped foaming at the mouth and convulsing on the living room carpet.
    The incident had left him shaken though, and he’d finally had the realization that fiddling around with powerful psychotropic drugs made out of highly toxic, sometimes illegal chemicals should be faced with a proper seriousness. Receiver would never be the ultimate high if he was dead and unable to finish what he’d started.
     
    *****
     
    August, 2043
     
    Garret stared at the latest version of the Cryostemic Reaction - Thermal Decay module he had been working on for the last two weeks. He ran his hand through his hair and slapped it down on his desk. The diploma from the University of Texas - Austin stared back at him from the wall behind his desk, mocking him. He’d only passed his final project by tweaking the language modules and then having volunteers go through the induction procedure. Instead of the twenty minute loops he had originally set, he’d been able to get the induction to work in only six minutes. Every six minutes for a couple of hours, his fellow students, and even Professor Long, sat down and learned how to speak either Japanese or Arabic fluently for thirty to sixty seconds at a time. The climax was when he’d revealed ten tablets and had ten of them at a time all learn the same language. Once the six minutes were up, ten very shocked humans would babble for up to a minute in their new language while the next ten were going through an induction. Garret had even joined them for one round, and had once again been stunned at how his brain understood Arabic perfectly, how he had been able to converse with nine other inducted classmates fluently before it started to fade.
    The diploma hadn’t netted him any serious job offers. He was putting in part-time work with a video game developer out of Seattle. They sent him the updated code each night, and he’d spend a few hours fiddling with it, looking for flaws, pointing out errors, trying to extract more performance without bloating it or causing it to bog down the various gaming systems. It was routine, boring work that he could almost do with his eyes closed. The paychecks weren’t spectacular, but they meant he didn’t have to mooch off of Brian too much, something he’d unfortunately had to do a lot in the three years since they had become roommates at UT-Austin.
    His latest obsession centered around trying to replicate Brian’s ability to freeze objects with his mind. It sounded so goddamn stupid when Garret said it to himself. The other two were equally embarrassed whenever they held a brainstorm session before ingesting a new dose and melting their brains, looping induction modules for hours at a time. Manipulating objects with the mind was bullshit, something that only happened in bad science fiction or horror movies. Freezing something just by thinking about it was stuff that belonged in comic books and teenage fantasy novels.
    If Garret and Derry had not been there to witness it, they would have had Brian committed to the loony bin if he’d tried to tell them what he’d done. All three of them might need to be committed to the loony bin after having what Garret was starting to believe was a mutual, mass hallucination concerning the event itself. In three months, the best they’d been able to reproduce was splitting headaches and crazy trips on whatever version of the drug Brian plopped down in front of them.
    He checked the code in his Cryo module again. Proper molecular structures appeared on the screen with strobed measurements, compositions, cycles, and a ton of other detailed information around and on it, while the data track that rolled horizontally along the bottom instructed the inductee with the proper mathematical equations concerning each function, each reaction required to manipulate molecular structures to bleed or gain heat. Basic chemistry and physics shit , he thought, so why was it