Fear and Aggression

Fear and
Aggression

Dane Bagley

Published by Dane Bagley at
Smashwords

Copyright © 2012 by Dane
Bagley

All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system,
without the prior written permission from the author. For
information send request to [email protected]

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http://www.perfectoptical.net/FearAndAggression.html

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All of the characters and
events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance or similarity
to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-301-20545-5
(Smashwords eBook)

ISBN 978-0-615-64122-5
(eBook)

ISBN 978-1-478-23960-4
(paperback)

Edited By Kayti
Mayfield

[email protected]

Cover Design by Ronnell
Porter

http://www.wix.com/ronnelldporter/design

Author Photo by Kim
Greenfield

http://agreenfieldphotography.com

For Karen,

my sweetheart, best friend,
and eternal companion

Oh, how
beautiful
, she thought to herself, as they
rounded the bend and looked out over the lake with the sunset
reflecting off of the water. Jenna’s husband, Chip, was be-bopping
to the oldies music that had been playing on the satellite radio
for the past couple of hours. She glanced at him and he gave her a
quick glance and a smile.

That glance brought back
her train of thought.
Why was that? Oh,
that’s right, it’s his silly beard,
she
thought to herself. He hadn’t sported a beard since they were
dating over twenty-five years ago. He really couldn’t grow a beard,
with his light blond hair, but he decided to give it a whirl again
anyway.

Jenna had been thinking
about her name, and how much she hated it. She still hated it after
all of these years; and seeing his attempt at a beard brought it to
the forefront of her thoughts.
Jenna
Jenners, it just sounds sick—it’s a sick name. Why did the man I
love have to have that horrible last name of
Jenners
, she thought. She really didn’t
hate the name Jenners—it was the combination that she hated.
Jenna Jenners, that just sounds
awful
.

Chip had thought of plenty of ways to fix
the problem. He was happy with her keeping her maiden name,
Rickson. But Jenna was a traditionalist; she didn’t even want a
hyphenated last name, nor did she think that it would help. Chip
loved her sandy blond hair, and had called her, ‘Sandy,’ just for
fun. “Since you are changing your last name to Jenners, anyway, why
don’t you just change your first name to Sandy?” he suggested. She
liked the name Sandy—she even liked him calling her Sandy—but she
was Jenna. She had always been Jenna, and always would be Jenna.
There was no way around it: she was going to be Jenna Jenners. It
made her cry at the time. Now, she could smile about it, but she
still hated—really hated—her name.

The setting sun brought a
brilliance of color to both the sky and the lake. She felt happy
inside.
If the worst thing about Chip is
his last name, then I’m a pretty lucky woman.
She really did love him, and that was the only thing about
him that she really didn’t like. Sandy Jenners was no longer her
pet name. Sandy was actually her nineteen-year-old daughter, with
long, sandy blond hair, just like hers.
That worked out perfectly
, she
thought. Her younger, fifteen-year-old daughter had a lighter shade
of blond, more like Chip’s hair.

The girls were both
sitting in the back seat, with Sandy sitting directly behind her
mother; Megan was sitting behind Chip, who was driving. The girls
had not said a word in hours.
They must
both be playing on their phones,
she
thought. Her daughters never had much to say or do with each other.
They could be together in the same room—or car—for hours and have
no interaction. It had always been that way. She couldn’t think of
a time when they had fought with each other. They didn’t act angry
or frustrated; they just never had much to do with each
other.
It’s funny, I love them both so
much,
she thought,
why don’t they get along better?
It
really had always been this way, ever since they were little
children.

Jenna turned around to look at her
daughters. Megan looked up with a classic fifteen-year-old, ‘what?’
expression. She had headphones on, and didn’t look like she wanted
to remove them. Reluctantly she pressed pause and looked back at
her mother.

“
Check out the sunset;
it’s gorgeous!” said Jenna. Megan looked up briefly, nodded
quickly, and then dropped her eyes back to her phone. “Tell Sandy,”
said her mother. Jenna didn’t want to have to lean over to get
Sandy’s attention.

Megan reached over and gave Sandy a gentle
slap with the back of her hand on Sandy’s thigh. Sandy turned her
head and gave Megan a dirty look. Megan bobbed her head towards her
mother with a similar expression, as if to say, “I don’t want to
talk with you, Mom made me do it.”

Once Sandy began to look out her passenger
side window towards the lake and the setting sun, she lost interest
in her phone. The beauty captivated her, and she just looked out
and gazed—something was clearly on her mind.

Such beautiful, wonderful
girls, who couldn’t care less about each other,
Jenna thought as she turned back around to admire the view
herself. They were riding alongside the lake now. It was just a few
feet away from Jenna on the passenger’s side. With her boys it was
entirely different. Even though they were fourteen years apart in
age, they had been inseparable since her youngest was born. They
both absolutely adored each other, and would be happy to spend all
of their time together. That is why they were not with them right
now. They were home hanging out together,—
probably having the time of their lives,
she thought pleasantly.
I think I’ll
text them and let them know when we’ll be home
.

Jenna turned around to borrow Megan’s phone
rather than fiddle in her purse for her own. As she turned around,
she shrieked, “WATCH OUT!” But there was nothing that Chip could
do. A car racing at over seventy miles per hour, along a side road,
slammed into them squarely on the driver’s side, crushing and
killing Chip and Megan instantly. Sandy and Jenna blacked out as
both cars flew over the embankment and into the lake.

Jenna partially regained consciousness as
the vehicles made impact with the water. She was aware of her
husband and daughter’s deaths—it was obvious—but wondered about
Sandy. She wanted to call her name, but could not as she blacked
out again. Both cars sank quickly into the lake. The next time that
Jenna regained consciousness was when she felt the cold water on
her thighs. Again, she thought of Sandy, and again, she blacked
out.

She briefly regained consciousness when she
inhaled cold water, instead of air. She sputtered momentarily, but
could not stay awake. Jenna Jenners had taken her final breath.

Einstein had been wrong. Not that he was far
off; the universe did seem compelled to obey the rules according to
the paradigm of relativity. And according to every experiment that
was ever designed—beyond atomic physics—nature behaved just as
relativity predicted. Space travel, to any great extent, appeared
to be a practical impossibility because of the vast distance
between heavenly bodies. The speed of light was the universal speed
limit, and even if crafts were designed that could approach this
speed in outer space, it would still take eons of time to move
about from heavenly body to heavenly body (though it wouldn't seem
to take so long to the space travelers themselves). Therefore, this
was of no practical use to either governments, or corporations. And
even if it were possible to design such crafts, the amount of
energy required and the costs would be literally astronomical. So,
governments played around with the moon, Mars, Venus, some comets,
and asteroids, but nothing of much use or interest was gained by
it.

It really was nothing more than a
mathematical technicality, something very few people could
comprehend to any degree, whatsoever, and fewer still could see the
beauty in it. With human minds, and everything else in the
universe, designed to experience reality in three dimensions, it is
startling that it was ever discovered. Computers, however, had been
employed to simply analyze logic and math itself; to take
mathematic suppositions and see if anything intriguing would come
up from it. It wasn’t that these machines were capable of free
thought. They were just doing as they were commanded; throwing out
or changing one rule or principal at a time and seeing what would
happen. Very little had come from this and some of the brilliant
yet skeptical minds wondered what could possibly be discovered by
machines designed to work by a system of logic, questioning the
system of logic itself. Nevertheless, the fruitless computations
went on. The next step in the skeptic’s line of reasoning was that
if something new, unusual, or intriguing was discovered in the
calculations, how would the computers be able to assign it as such,
flag it, and bring to the humans in charge an understanding of what
was discovered? If the computers were using the logic they were
designed to use, everything would simply make logical sense to
them.

Contrary to the skeptics’ logically
beautiful line of reasoning, computers, while logical, are not
philosophical, nor do they see beauty in anything; they simply do
as they are told, and that’s just what they did. The mathematics,
of course, was unfathomable to comprehend by nearly everyone. Those
who supposedly did understand the math relied heavily on the
computers. But the bottom line was this: Anything traveling in the
three dimensional universe, i.e. traveling in a straight line, is
limited by not being able to exceed the velocity of light.

However, space was found not to be three
dimensional at all. The fourth dimension had been discovered
mathematically, as incomprehensible as this was. And, if traveling
according to the mathematical paradigm of this fourth dimension,
everything in the universe was exponentially closer together. The
way that it was described to the average budding intellectual on
the street was this: if you were able to look at the three
dimensional universe from the perspective of the fourth dimension,
the three-dimensional world would look like a sine wave with high
peaks and valleys, but with extremely rapid frequency. So high was
the frequency, that it was as though the three-dimensional universe
was tightly folded up. Traveling in the three-dimensional world
would be a-kin to having to climb up a steep mountain, traveling a
much farther distance than the actual height because of the
numerous and lengthy switchbacks. But, when traveling according to
the fourth dimension, it would be like cutting straight across
these switchbacks, and thus decreasing the length of the journey
immensely. Of course, those in the know say that this analogy is
not entirely correct, but for all practical purposes this is how
everyone visualized it.

The actual length from the earth to the
furthest reaches of the known universe was calculated to be
approximately twenty light years, when traveling via this ‘fourth
dimension.’ In theory, this made the entire universe accessible for
space travel within an individual’s life time. Now, going back to
Einstein, all of the great theorists wondered if the laws of
relativity held up when traveling via the fourth dimension, as they
did when traveling exclusively via the third dimension. Initial
results of experiments were encouraging, but there were always
discrepancies. Two camps ensued: those that held that relativity
had failed relative to the fourth dimension, and those that held
that the fourth dimension was incompletely understood, or slightly
miscalculated.