robert claridge

MOMENTUM is a fast paced race toward the brink. Set in the near future, with all the current conflicts, power blocs, industrialists, countries openly or underhandedly at each other’s throats over all the usual histories, plans and insults.

Into this general mess, Dave accidentally invents a way to produce null-momentum. Truly, it’s a fantastic technology, paradigm shattering, a world-changing tool.

Sadly, it’s also a staggeringly devastating and apparently unstoppable weapon.

Worse than a nuclear bomb, and frighteningly easy to build: any competent electrical tinkerer could manage it. Consider any terrorist or suicide bomber with nuclear capability in the palm of their hand, a disgruntled high school student with a real ‘equalizer’ to solve their angst, or perhaps worse, a nation with an unstoppable weapon, staring at their ancient aggressors over the border.

Dave dare not release the invention without properly understanding it, and hopefully finding a way to make it more useful than dangerous. In its crude form, all that will happen is one bloc or other will attack their favorite enemy, before the enemy gets them!

But wishful thinking won’t put the genie back in the bottle. It will surely only be a matter of time until someone else flukes the discovery, and what if they are already one of the disgruntled minority? So Dave must go underground, hiding, work out the kinks, and yet stay in the public eye enough that a ground swell of viral interest will make sure when the details are there, they just can’t be swept under the “national security” blanket.

Hunted by scientists, police, military, industrial, and less savory groups, Dave desperately tries to iron out the kinks, and work out a way to release it that won't blow the final lid off the powder keg. He struggles with the details, his personal life in shreds, trying to survive life off-grid. The very best (and worst) are hunting him, and even with unexpected assistance, he is barely one step ahead of the hunters.

All by itself, the world lurches ever closer to insanity.

Then the hunters kidnap his daughters, and things get serious.