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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
The Pretender: The Administration
by Dash Nolan
Five Votes Down
by Dash Nolan
Five Votes Down
As the room fell silent, Jarod interlaced his fingers behind his head and leaned back. Closing his eyes, he breathed deep. Even in his new office, the air was heavy in a combination of sweat and old papers, like a library in the middle of a gym. Jarod's head lolled back as his breathing slowed, and the scents were gone. The sounds of organized chaos from outside his door faded away. Jarod opened his mouth, tasted the stale air. His fingertips were cold, pressing against an unyielding surface.
He opened his eyes, and his vision was filled with a bright light. Turning left and right, the light seemed to bounce off a shield around him. While it was painful to look at, the light couldn't harm him here. His back was sore, apparently cramping from having been curled for so long. His upper thighs pressed against his chest, and he realized that he was inside a sphere. The enclosure was a simple design: a plastic ball suspended from a steel pillar above. But he had been here countless times before, and the safety it granted allowed him to leave his body unprotected. Don't worry, he said to his adolescent form inside the bubble, I'll be back in a minute.
Suddenly he was an architect, his hand running a wide pencil furiously back-and-forth on a wide sheet of paper. The design was already on the paper in a pleasant glowing blue, his hand was only tracing out the image in his mind. It wasn't terribly complicated, Jarod thought. It would widen from the base to a level several stories up, then slowly focus to a point over the course of tens of floors. Cut like a gem, the sides wouldn't be simple four-sided panels, but instead triangular surfaces alternating up-and-down.
He stepped back to admire the design, allowing a tiny smirk to slip into his expression. At nearly one-hundred-and-ten stories, with a base of about two hundred square feet, the tower was a triumph. It was an unspoken memorial to defiance. "You will not bring this down," it shouted. In his pause, he felt as a drop of sweat rushed down his brow and into his right eye. Blinking and rubbing, his vision blurred away. As it returned, he refocused on a bright white light focusing down at him. He was back in his bubble. Turning right, Jarod watched as four men in long, white coats scurried around a wide table with pens.
Shifting, Jarod pressed against the plastic of his little shield and squinted at the sheet on the table. It took a second to recognize, but that was his beauty on the paper. The men in the coats had, a few slips aside, faithfully drawn out his tower.
"Is there anything else you would do to the design?"
Jarod recognized the voice. It was a middle-aged man, a thick French accent woven throughout his English prose. Despite the purposeful and demanding question, the voice comforted Jarod. Between the voice and the plastic bubble, he thought a nuclear bomb would simply turn in the other direction before attempting to pierce this perfect shield.
"No. But this would be one of the biggest construction projects America has worked on since the Empire State Building. It doesn't make sense to put this on the edge of a new city, it would never work."
"Don't worry about that. Your beautiful building is complete."
"But it needs to go somewhere, and what you said about the land doesn't make sense. Considering the resources needed and its probable uses, it only makes sense to put this in the middle of a major city. Tampa, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago all would want it, but they don't really have the money."
"Jarod," the French-American said, now more pressing. "There are people whose job it is to work this out. Don't bother yourself with it, your job is done."
"But Sydney, I can figure it out now." Jarod heard himself say. His lips were moving, the sounds were coming, but somehow he wasn't in control of the sounds. "The only place that would need a building like this, something that meets everything you asked for, is New York."
"You can stop there," said the man.
"But there's already several buildings doing what this does. The Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, several corporate buildings. Why would New York need another building like this?"
The man sighed, and Jarod could have sworn he caught a small laugh from him. "Cities have to be prepared. Fires, earthquakes, what-not. Jarod, you just gave a city a future that, in times of tragedy, it can be proud of. Someday you'll see what you've done, and you will be as proud as I am."
The light grew brighter and brighter. The shield around him was fading away, and suddenly Jarod was falling. Wind rushed past, lifting his arms and legs away in a free-fall. Air rushed into his lungs, and his eyes opened again. His arms out, Jarod's hands slapped against a solid surface.
He was back in his office, around six-foot-tall and wearing the same style suit he laughed about Sydney wearing day-after-day as a child. He was still a pretender, and there were still people out there using his mind to plan out the killing of President Bartlet.
"Someday you'll see what you've done, and you will be as proud as I am," the voice echoed in his head.
"We made so much, Sydney," Jarod said, his voice full of quiet anger. "How could you let me do this? He's a good man, a good leader. I can't believe you would let me put together something that he couldn't get out of. There has to be a way out of it."
Gripping the desk before him, Jarod could feel his fingers shaking.
"Bartlet won't die because of us, Sydney."
Chapter End Notes:
This is the first chapter from the new material. Curious to hear if there's any progress.
