Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Brent Brodie: Hard Beginnings
    Brent Brodie: Hard Beginnings
    Brent Brodie: Hard Beginnings
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Brent Brodie: Hard Beginnings

    By Warren Roberts

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In the middle of the North Pacific Gyre, the accelerated impacts of Global Climate Change have expanded the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to epic proportions.

    Brent Brodie was an oil and gas engineer until he suffered catastrophic mental and physical injuries during an oil rig explosion. After years of recovery, he focuses his unique skills to lead the development of a floating, plastic recycling plant that grows into a star-shaped, two-mile-wide, rotating island. Utilizing the gyre’s powerful ocean currents, Plasticity Island generates massive amounts of hydroelectricity, which powers the Recycling, Fabrication, and Desalination Plants.
    In the very near future, as most of the world runs out of fresh drinking water, Plasticity Island’s Water Tanker Drones come under attack from Chinese Pirates and Mexican Drug Cartels. With his back against the wall, Brent and his team go on the offensive to protect their people and freshwater supplies. In a world of Artificial Intelligence, Drones and Humanoid Robots, high-tech and low-tech collide to change the face of our planet forever.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWarren Roberts
    Release dateMar 21, 2020
    ISBN9780463783016
    Brent Brodie: Hard Beginnings
    Author

    Warren Roberts

    Warren Roberts is a fictional character pretending to be a human being portraying a famous author in an alternate universe. His clever disguise as an Industrial Engineer and Technical Writer by day, allows him to prowl the night as an Author, Inventor, and Entrepreneur. His archenemies try to depict him as a quantum physicist, seeking to unravel reality just to sell more books, and they may be right. Can Warren bend time, unentangle particles, and turn up-quarks downward? Buy his books and find out!

    Related to Brent Brodie

    Related ebooks

    Action & Adventure Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Leviathan

      Aug 10, 2022

      After we killed the passengers, we put the bodies in one of the low-pressure, unheated storage compartments. Some people had wanted to have some kind of solemn burial-in-space thing; that was too ghoulish for most of us, though. Mostly the ones we ki

      25 min read

    • Article

      Hot Tub Time Machine

      Feb 3, 2022

      Hot Tub Time Machine
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Hammer Interview Steve-o

      Jul 20, 2023

      Before finding fame with MTV’s OTT stunt show Jackass, Steve-O had already had some wild experiences. He’d lived in five countries, been arrested multiple times, and worked as a clown on a cruise ship. Then, as Jackass evolved from TV hit to worldwid

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Salute To Cottage Dads

      May 11, 2023

      A Salute To Cottage Dads
      4 min read

    • Article

      When The Fever Hits

      Jun 18, 2020

      When The Fever Hits
      12 min read

    • Article

      Just Say Yes

      Jan 1, 2022

      Just Say Yes
      5 min read

    • Article

      “God Is A Bathtub !”

      Jul 15, 2021

      IT must be the full moon. It was all going along quite comfortably for, ooh, about nine seconds. I’d asked what the album will be like, like it tells me to in the manual. And Björk had replied, “all sorts of things”, just like pop stars are supposed

      9 min read

    • Article

      Apocalypse How?

      May 19, 2021

      Apocalypse How?
      1 min read

    • Article

      High Functioning

      Nov 28, 2018

      High Functioning
      9 min read

    • Article

      Auld Lang Syne

      Dec 10, 2020

      Auld Lang Syne
      2 min read

    • Article

      Scotch and Water

      Dec 28, 2021

      Scotch and Water
      2 min read

    • Article

      Always Alert Accident Avert

      Jul 19, 2019

      Always Alert Accident Avert
      8 min read

    • Article

      Letter From The Founder

      Jun 8, 2023

      Letter From The Founder
      3 min read

    • Article

      Our Deliverance

      Mar 28, 2023

      Our Deliverance
      3 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Get Young

      Jan 1, 2019

      Let’s Get Young
      8 min read

    • Article

      Scales of INJUSTICE

      Oct 7, 2020

      “ÔEeek!’ That was the rather piercing scream you’d have heard if you’d been passing our bathroom door the other day. ‘No!’ and ‘OMG!’ were also noises you might have heard. There were other words too, but of the sort that could not be repeated on thi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fish Story

      May 21, 2019

      Fish Story
      13 min read

    • Article

      Paul Heiney

      Aug 25, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • Article

      Paul Heiney

      Aug 25, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • Article

      RICHARD ARNOLD’S Week In Showbiz

      Jul 14, 2020

      Why Emmerdale vicar Katherine Dow Blyton is hot under the collar… How’ve you been, old pal? Despite everything, being back at home in London for so long was quite a novelty. It’s the longest I’ve been home for seven years, which was nice. Your do

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 1, 2020

      I was only eight. Not the driver, but I wasthe one who begged for the cats. Our father,so allergic he stopped breathing sometimes,gave in. So long as I fed them.So long as we kept them in the garage. Outdoor cats we called them. All I wanted was a bo

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Magic Plug

      Jan 2, 2018

      The Magic Plug
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Dangers of Distraction

      Apr 17, 2018

      The Dangers of Distraction
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Brent Brodie

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Brent Brodie - Warren Roberts

      BRENT BRODIE

      Hard Beginnings

      Short Story Prequel to the Plasticity Island Trilogy

      By Warren Roberts

      Brent Brodie – Hard Beginnings

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      Published by Warren Roberts at Smashwords.

      Copyright 2016 Warren Roberts All rights reserved. ASIN: B073HKJ7TR

      Contents:

      Hard Beginnings

      After The End

      About the Author

      Bonus:Chapter One of Plasticity Island – The Water Wars

      Hard Beginnings

      Am I going to live, Doc?

      No one lives forever, Mister Brodie, he replies.

      Then, just shoot me. I feel like crap.

      I know, dysentery blows.

      Out both ends, Doc.

      That’s because you have a combination of amoebic and bacillary infections. It’s not uncommon here in India. The amoebicidal drugs will take care of it in another day or two.

      My nurse comes in to change out the saline drip and give me a hard time in broken English. I’ve seen some cute nurses out in the hallway, but I drew the short straw with this one. She reminds me of Grumpy, Frumpy, and Sleazy all rolled into one mean little dwarf.

      You have company, she says.

      There are only two people that know I’m here, other than the Doctors: my best friend, Bijay Korrapati, and my boss, Jack Sturdevant. I sure as hell don’t feel like talking to my new boss, presuming I still have a job.

      Who is it, Nurse?

      She doesn’t even try to answer me, but Bijay walks in, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

      Brodie, old man. I told you not to drink the water, he says with a toothy grin.

      Hey Jay, it’s almost good to see you too.

      Nurse Frumpy gives us both a dirty look and leaves us to talk in hushed tones.

      What’s going on out there? I ask. I’ve heard all kinds of stories.

      It’s hard to tell. The Dalits are rioting for food and water, and the tree-huggers are protesting our new oil rig. Whatever you do, don’t let anyone know who you work for.

      Bijay and I both graduated from USC last year and roomed together in a spacious off-campus house. I majored in petroleum engineering, and Jay convinced me to apply for this project in the South Indian Ocean. He also signed on as a roustabout to save up some cash for one of his many entrepreneurial efforts.

      Check this out, says Bijay as he pulls out his new Holopad.

      The hologram image has poor definition due to the weak interference-medium pump. I haven’t bought into this new technology yet, but I’m sure it won’t take me long.

      More pictures of Navya? I ask.

      No, but you’re going to meet her soon. She lives close by.

      The six-inch Holopad image clears up, and I’m more than a little startled by the ugly creature staring me in the face.

      Holy crap, Jay! That thing gets more disgusting every time you play with it. Jeez!

      Our house in Culver City had four bedrooms, so we each had an extra room to use as a lab. Bijay majored in Robotic Engineering and minored in Micro-Biology, so his experiments were a little scary. As a Petroleum Engineer with a keen interest in chemistry, my lab was more mundane. Never-the-less, we always kept a close eye on each other to make sure there were no bombs in the making.

      This is our last generation of Bac-Bots. I think we should call him Jack.

      Bacteria-based Nano-Robots are illegal in the United States for a good reason. It’s relatively easy to re-engineer the genetic strains and modify their DNA, but it’s almost impossible to ensure that they can be contained. This six-inch hologram of Jack looks like a purple rubber ball with half-inch spikes protruding from everywhere. A dozen long flagella wave gently to propel it like a squid, and hundreds of pili cover the body for grouping and adhesion to its target.

      I thought we agreed to put this project on hold until we came up with the end-game.

      No guts, no glory, he replies. I got to go, man, when do you get out of this dump?

      Tomorrow, noon. Have you been out to the Rig, yet?

      No, they’ve got me working on that Sand Carrier. Must be a thousand tons of sand on that thing. And your hydrogen. Your racks of canisters are all loaded up and waiting for you when you get out.

      I should be focusing on the sand-hydrogenation project, I developed for more efficient oil and gas fracking, but I’m worried about Bijay. We started the Bac-Bot project with a strain of Alcanivorax, which naturally feeds on crude oil and modified it to absorb other petroleum-based products like plastics and rubber. As environmentalists, we both had visions of cleaning up the polluted ocean waters, but ‘Jack’ could turn into ‘Jack the Ass-Ripper’ under the wrong circumstances.

      I awake early and groggy-eyed to find a young Indian nurse standing at my bedside. Her long black hair is covering her name tag, and her bangs fall straight to the heavy-rimmed glasses hiding her eyes. She smiles shyly and leaves the room before I can even say hi.

      My intravenous catheter has been removed, and my clothes have been laid out on the chair. My stomach is growling from hunger pains, but this is the first morning I haven’t felt nauseated in days.

      Looks like you’re ready to go, says Jack Sturdevant, blocking the doorway. It’s about time.

      Hey, Boss. Yeah, sorry about this. I’ll make up for it.

      We blow past the receptionist without bothering to check out and head toward the exit. Jack pulls on his rain slicker, but I don’t have one with me, so I zip up my jacket and brace for the worst. It’s monsoon season here in India, and we barely step out the door before I get drenched.

      At least we won’t have to fight through those idiot protesters, says Jack.

      It occurs to me now, why Bijay named our Bac-Bot, ‘Jack.’ He’s been working with this guy for three days while I’ve been laid up, and his girlfriend is probably one

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1