Shatterglass (Book One)

San Francisco, 1956

The city streets were busy. There was the incessant sound of people walking and talking. The sound of cars, honking and passing down the street, and clumsy drivers, shouting at each other. The police on patrol were trying their best to maintain the traffic flow. Someone’s gramophone was playing jazzy blues. Saxophones and trumpets were skilfully riffing all over the octaves, accompanying a talented female voice.

Amid another busy, chaotic morning, a woman walked amongst the countless people that flooded the streets. She was in a light blue shirt, stuffed into her long, dark blue skirt that reached just below her knees and whipped around her legs with every step she made. The sound of her black, short heels hitting the white pavement was drowned by everything else around her.

Her brown hair was tucked in perfect waves. Her lips were painted red, and her blue eyes stared behind the circular lenses of her glasses. A brown leather bag hung by her shoulder and her brown coat was shielding her from the cold, morning breeze.

She was heading towards that white, Greek-style building standing tall at the end of the road. She was supposed to reach the Burgess Laboratories by exactly 8:00 AM, and now it was 7:08 AM. She needed approximately five more minutes and thirty-seven seconds to get there. She had her reasons for being so early. Today’s experiments were going to take more than the usual work time.

It was typical for a young Burgess to be hard at work.

She reached her location ridiculously earlier than she was supposed to. Nathalie swiped a card at that strange, peculiar device outside the entrance. It had been so odd for strangers passing outside to see a door without a lock. A door that unlocked with a single swipe of a ‘magical’ card. Nathalie slipped the card back into her brown leather bag and walked in.

Nathalie found her lab coat hanging by the very same coat stand that she had left it on yesterday. She greeted her cousins, uncles, aunts, and whoever else she happened to meet on her way to the lab. This was a family business. Only a Burgess could work in the Burgess Pharmaceutical Company.

It wasn’t until seventy-five years ago that it became a business. Grandfather Gustave said a stranger convinced him that the family needed to start sharing their knowledge and findings with the rest of the world. That strange man said that if they worked for other people, it would result in something terrible.

The Burgess Family was graced with greater intelligence than that of modern humans, but no one knew how or why. Only the head and the elders of the family knew. Grandfather Gustave said that the next head of the family was going to hear the story from him on his deathbed.

The Burgess Family did not concern themselves with anything that didn’t have to do with science. They conducted research on all scientific fields, including the biological sciences, mathematics, physics, engineering, and chemistry. Only a few members of the family focused on the arts. The majority of them considered the arts to be useless.

The government funded their research and in return, the family provided the country with the most advanced medicine. Their technology, their tools, their labs, their equipment – the world wasn’t yet ready for any of that. They kept their advanced technology hidden. All they offered was breakthrough medicine, and even most of that was still kept hidden.

Grandfather Gustave had only set one rule: to allow humanity to evolve at its own pace. If humanity had access to Burgess technology during the war, the damage on both the people and the planet would have been inconceivable – or that was Gustave’s most famous example when he had to explain why they had to keep their technology hidden.

Nathalie was about to complete ten hours of work. The afternoon arrived almost too fast, and the light outside was orange. Still, the lights were bright in the lab, all day, every day.

Nathalie lifted her attention off her lab book as she noticed the old man rolling his wheelchair into the lab. With barely any white hair left on his head, a smile spread on his lips as he looked around a lab full of the youngest scientists of the family. Nathalie joined the rest of her cousins that gathered around him.

“I have a new project for a Burgess to work on,” Gustave announced.

“Field?” Uther asked. He was one of Nathalie’s cousins — a slim, tall young man with black hair and glasses. Blue eyes and glasses were the distinguishable traits of all Burgesses. It wasn’t the typical blue colour. It was darker and characteristic of the Burgess Family. The eyes of a Burgess would glow like lightning when they’d make a groundbreaking scientific discovery. They all wore glasses and had poor eyesight.

It was partly because of all the studying.

“Physics. Time-travel. Space,” Gustave responded, and everybody groaned.

They were all members of the Biosciences Division. Physics and mathematics were not their forte.

“I know, I know,” Gustave chuckled. “I would have normally asked for either the Physics or Space Divisions, but they are busy enough with the government’s Moon Landing Mission and that only leaves me with the bio-scientists of the family.”

Nathalie had heard that the members of the family aiding the government in the space race were tirelessly working day and night, trying to design a functional rocket that would safely take a man to the moon and back. She was glad she wasn’t in any way involved with physics or mathematics, or even programming.

Nathalie had been working on an entirely new project of her own. She had been trying to find a way to either induce or accelerate the process of tissue regeneration.

She hadn’t made much progress, but she had barely started it.

“I’m not good at physics.”

“Me neither.”

“Requires math.”

“Beats me.”

Nathalie rolled her eyes. She was on the same page. She wasn’t confident with those subjects either, but she was open to learning more at least.

“I suppose, my project on tissue regeneration can wait,” Nathalie tugged off her gloves and approached the old man. “I’ll do it.”

“Very well. Follow me,” Gustave pressed a button on the arm of his wheelchair and twisted himself around before heading out of the lab.

Nathalie was perfectly aware of her cousins, staring at her, probably gossiping about how naïve she was to not be scared of maths and physics. She rolled her eyes and eyed them over her shoulder.

“I’m a little less stupid than you guys are,” Nathalie smirked.

“Ha! Calling a Burgess stupid.”

“What kind of blasphemy is this!”

“At least, we’re being honest with ourselves!” Jocasta grumbled – another cousin of Nathalie’s.

Nathalie frowned but chose to ignore them and she followed her grandfather out of the room and away from those idiots. She sighed and rubbed her forehead, finally out of their sight and into the reception where they usually welcomed guests and patients that visited their facility. The clinic was held by the older members of the family, whilst the research centre was for the younger ones.

“So, what is it that you want me to-” Nathalie tried to ask but then she looked up and eyed a stranger.

He must have been the guest that Grandfather Gustave had brought to help her work on the new project, but there was something about that man’s characteristics that she recognised. Blonde hair and bright violet eyes – what a rare colour. She knew of only one family in the world that had a heritable combination of both those traits. Her eyes widened.

It can’t be.

“Is that… a Garner?!” Nathalie almost panicked as she turned to her grandfather and crouched behind him. “Why the hell would you bring a Garner here?! He’s going to kill us all!”

The Garner Family was the greatest mistake that the Burgesses had ever created.

It was centuries ago when a previous head of the family ordered the creation of a personal guard — powerful individuals with supernatural strength and implanted knowledge of martial arts. The Burgesses created the perfect soldiers. They planted obedience in their genetic code to control them like puppets. No Burgess could fight. They were not warriors, but they still had to protect their knowledge and their findings from the rest of the world.

Thus, the Burgesses created the Garner Family by means of human experimentation. They were genetically engineered to obey all individuals with Burgess blood running in their veins.

It took time to realise the immorality of it.

It wasn’t a challenge for the Burgesses of the past to create creatures with desired traits. The technology of the Burgess Family had always been advanced.

When the Garners found out that they were being used and exploited, they figured out a rather reckless way to go against their nature and break free from the influence of the Burgess Family. They were now free, and they utilised their skills for other purposes.

The man chuckled. She was adorable as she cowered behind a literally ninety-five-year-old man. He tried to approach them, but she tensed up even more.

“I apologise for frightening you,” he lifted his arms in surrender “but I am not hostile.”

Nathalie certainly did not believe him. She had every right to. Their two families had forever hated each other. It would be a pleasure for a Garner to kill a Burgess.

Nathalie looked down at her grandfather.

“What were you thinking bringing a Garner here?!”

“Now, now,” Gustave spoke. He was still so ridiculously calm. “Listen to me, little one. He is indeed a Garner-”

“I know! He shouldn’t be here!”

“He is probably the only Garner who is of no threat to us,” Gustave explained. “You see, this very same man came to me, seventy-five years ago and asked me to start the company, and he hasn’t aged one bit, so there’s only one explanation-”

“Yeah, you’ve lost your mind,” Nathalie knew that even though he was past ninety years old, Grandfather Gustave was the sanest Burgess of them all, but “about time, really. You’re almost a hundred years old, old man, you should’ve developed dementia a long time ago- Ow!”

She glared at her grandfather as he elbowed her hard on her stomach. Gustave started laughing at the look of irritation on her face.

“Respect your elderly, little one,” Gustave scolded her before he turned his attention back to the man who was trying his best to keep himself from laughing. “It turns out, that in every generation, a Garner is born capable of travelling through space and time. It’s a side effect of the genes we used to create them,” Gustave explained. “This young man has some interesting theories on time and space travel. Not to mention that he’s the living proof of Timothy Burgess’s theory on Parallel Universes.”

Many Burgesses had come up with countless unexplainable theories about space and time that no one could confirm. Not even the Burgesses possessed the technology to investigate such vague and impossible hypotheses.

“You want me to… run tests on him and figure out… time and… space travel?” Nathalie was already beginning to doubt herself.

“Yes. You two will work together. He’s been kind enough to offer us his cooperation,” Grandpa Gustave was already rolling his wheelchair towards the exit of the building. “We might as well finally uncover those mysteries,” he said and before Nathalie knew it, she was left alone with that man.

She sighed, once again regretting choosing to work on this. Her cousins were right. She had been naïve to even think that she could lead such a project. She would most definitely have to revise her knowledge of physics and mathematics.

Looks like I won’t be sleeping tonight either.

“Tedric Garner,” he lent a hand forward for a shake.

Nathalie looked down at his hand and then back up at him.

“Dr Nathalie Burgess, PhD on Neurodevelopmental and Cerebrovascular Diseases. Follow me.”

She didn’t shake his hand, she just turned around and started searching for an unoccupied lab to put him in and start working.

Tedric shrugged and followed her.

He guessed the rumours were true. The Burgesses were a proud family. Their entire lives were dedicated to their degrees and their research. There was nothing else they cared about. He knew she was a Burgess by the way she introduced herself. First Name, Last Name and PhD specialisation, and that was enough to describe her entire life. It was typical of a Burgess to introduce themselves like that.

She had already taken out her lab book. It was wrapped in dark blue leather and her name was carved on the cover with silver letters along with the number ‘38’. Tedric had heard that the Burgesses always carried their notebooks around where they recorded everything they had discovered so far throughout their lives. She had thirty-seven more of these somewhere.

What a brilliant woman.

Tedric found that he was left far behind her with a stupid smile on his face as he watched her walk away. He snapped out of it, and he rushed to her side. She was scribbling things down whilst walking. He peeked at what she was writing but he couldn’t understand a thing. Her handwriting was impossible. He should expect nothing less.

“So… Cerebro… vascular diseases,” Tedric sincerely hoped he had spelt that correctly. “Interesting.” God knows what that was.

“You’re not finding it interesting. You just don’t know what it is.”

She didn’t even spare him a glance. He suddenly felt like a total idiot. It almost felt that merely being in her presence was something to be grateful for. Everything he had heard about the Burgess Family was true.

They were so… overwhelming. Many other Burgesses were roaming all around the building, searching for their designated areas. Not even one of them turned to look at him to register his presence. It almost felt like they didn’t even notice him being there. He was a man with very clear characteristics of being a Garner – a member of the family that was their sworn enemy - yet none of them panicked as Nathalie had done just a moment ago.

“Of course, I have no idea what that is.”

Nathalie pulled out what looked like a card. She swiped it over a device by the door. Tedric had never before seen anything like that. The door opened and she let him in.

“Uh… ladies first,” Tedric chuckled, and Nathalie shrugged.

“What a gentleman,” she said sarcastically.

He smirked “I try.”