Micromanage

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A brilliant Black scientist-stuck in a loop of grief and anger over her educator mother’s agonizing death from a school shooters bullets-years later stumbles across a way to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again.

Dakota Pennington/The Lady in Waiting

A mini dynamo from the time she could crawl, Dakota Pennington’s life revolved around books, learning and getting on her Momma’s last nerve with her addiction to dismantling appliances-pretty much anything with electricity running through it. The real surprise came when-more often than not-she’d put the machine back together again (and it worked). Her mother-Diana Pennington-a widow and high school educator decided the best thing to do was fight fidgeting with fire; she enrolled the rambunctious six-year-old into the city library’s “Coding for Kids” weekend workshops.

By the fall of that same year, little Dakota had written her first program-a game she developed titled “Find the Pony”.

Rocketing through school (at nine years old she’d already skipped three grades) the future was hers to bend to her will.

Then her momma got shot.

Five bullets fired from a gun lifted by a thirteen-year-old boy from his dad’s gun-safe (he and his partner went on to kill seven other students in that school shooting) didn’t end Diana Pennington, but it got damn close. Thirty-five operations in the last twelve agonizingly painful years of her prescription drug fogged life didn’t matter to Diana-she just wanted to be there for her only child. To see her grow up to be a woman.

Dakota did far more than that.

With two Ph.D.’s (Mechanical/Chemical Engineering) and two Baccalaureates’ (Computer ] Science/Applied Mathematics) by the time she was twenty-two, Dakota seemed to know everything about anything-right up to the time Diana died of cardiac arrest (her fifth one) at the age of forty-three. Adrift in her encapsulated world of private grief, Dakota started three tech firms that made hundreds of billions before she sold her stake in all (for a cool twelve billion) to take the reins as the youngest woman (and first Black person) to head up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Under her reign, America returned to the Moon and jumped to Mars. And in the background-in a forty-million-dollar laboratory built to her specifications on her gated sixty-acre estate-she made some discoveries of her own. Fifteen years after her mother’s death-after countless, heart-rending failures-she’d finally succeeded in doing the impossible-capturing lightning in a bottle.

Finally, it’s time to put a fatal hurtin’ on some seriously deserving monsters…

Ernest “Ernie” Glassman

The oft-time decorated Marine (with two tours under his belt in Afghanistan) with as much brains as brawn, Ernest “Ernie” Glassman traded combat boots for books as he sailed through four years of university (Arizona State with dual BA’s in Journalism/Creative Writing) in two and a half years on the GI Bill. Being married for a minute (they’re still friends) produced a way too cute bundle of questions (his daughter Caria) that steals his heart every day. A rising star at an industry leading newspaper (“The Arizona Herald”), Ernie could punch a ticket to anywhere he chooses to go to in the world of news.

Then-with the click of a trigger-he became part of the story.

Caria by his side, a wannabe school shooter’s gun inches from his face, all he could do was shield his little girl before point-blank shots rang out.

Five gun blasts an instant apart-and now covered in the dead boy’s gore-Ernie looks up at a grinning miracle standing an inch taller than five feet dressed in an iridescent, blue catsuit. An improbable happening that-like all impossible things-lasted only long enough for a smile and a few words.

“Keep your chick close.”

Disappearing into thin air (while blowing out all lightbulbs in a two-block radius) Ernie’s savior landed him smack-dab in the middle of the story of the century-and weeks away from the most difficult and life changing decision he’ll ever be forced to make…

Captain (US Army) Butler Daniels

Absentee father, adrenaline junkie and closet racist, Green Beret Captain Frank Butler views anyone that doesn’t look/think like him as a nail he has the God given right to hammer into submission. A government trained killer, Butler’s use his skills to contain, quell and remove with extreme prejudice third world insurgents across dozens of missions worldwide over his fifteen years of service in the US Army.

Unfortunately, Butler’s ideologies poisoned his son’s thinking before his now ex-wife could separate the veteran from him via divorce and the judge granting her sole custody. On his thirteenth birthday, the troubled teen picked up a gun (and a pocket full of ammo) and stormed a minority filled grade school determined to eradicate as many children as possible.

The Lady in Waiting killed the teen at the schoolhouse door as he’d cornered a terrified group of fourth graders.

Distraught and blinded by rage, Butler returned to the States with a new mission; blow up an inner-city school and take the Lady in Waiting with it…

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