Novel Title: Run
Time Setting: 2020
Genre: Thriller
Minimum Word Goal: 120,000
Timespan: April–May
Locations: Alexandria, Virginia; Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; other points between Alexandria and Seattle.
Main Characters: Corbin Eastwood, DaNiel Sparling
Background Information:
Corbin was born a few weeks premature when his mother went into shock at the news of his father’s death while he was fighting as a member of the US Army in Afghanistan.
Traumatised by her husband’s death, Corbin’s mother immediately accepted the offer from her mother to move from where she’d been living with her husband in California to her parents’ home in Virginia.
Because Corbin was a son who bore a strong resemblance to his father even as an infant, his mother found it hard to have anything to do with him, and left his care in the hands of his grandparents, who took it on willingly.
As a result of their efforts he had a fairly normal childhood, including taking up — and becoming fairly good at — baseball in the summers, while being academically average.
His mother had formed a dependency on the pain medication she was given after having experienced a minor tear while giving birth to Corbin and when doctors cut off her prescription refills she started stealing money from her job — aided by the fact that she was a cashier — to buy it off the street, and thus has developed such a laundry list of aliases Corbin’s hard-pressed to remember what her actual name is.
When he was twelve years old his grandfather died of age; the loss was hard for Corbin, leading to him quitting baseball because he couldn’t stop crying when he looked up to the seat where his grandfather had always sat and cheered him on from.
Three years later his grandmother also died, and because they were both cremated Corbin keeps their remains — among other things precious to him — hidden in his bedroom so they’re safe from his mother, who was also hit hard by the death of her parents and became destructive in her grief.
Because of his mother’s drug dependency Corbin’s three uncles had come to have little to do with Corbin and his grandparents, as they disagreed with how Corbin’s mother was being treated by his grandparents.
When his grandparents died Corbin’s uncles merely came to the house, claimed what they wanted, and left, never to be seen again.
Thus, for the past two years Corbin has been fending for himself, becoming an adept pickpocket and hacker of debit and credit cards, as well as a decent shoplifter; the speed he developed through baseball helping him to evade law enforcement when he runs the risk of being caught.
Although he makes enough by stealing wallets and hacking into the bank accounts of the victims to drain the accounts dry, Corbin dropped out of school so as to have more time in which to pick pockets, and thus actually has almost a small fortune, but no idea what he would want to spend it on.
In fact, even though he has a small fortune he continues to pick pockets and steal as much money as he can, not content that the money he has will ever be enough.
Born the youngest of three children to a real estate agent and a luxury car dealer receptionist, DaNiel has been well provided for throughout the course of his life, including being given a good education.
From a young age he took an interest in technology, and was soon taking apart household appliances to see how they worked, and sometimes even to snitch parts to make his own little devices.
Seeing futuristic technologies in Science Fiction movies prompted DaNiel to ask his dad why he hadn’t seen them in real life, and was informed by his father that many of the technologies depicted didn’t actually exist, but were made to seem real by animation, camera tricks, and other sleights.
DaNiel was disappointed by this news, but was encouraged by his dad to see if he couldn’t make some of them real, and since then DaNiel has endeavoured to do so, winning prizes at science fairs and other things for his real-life working replicas of well-known film technology.
The one technology he’s been most interested in creating is teleportation, and he’s been working on it for years at the Test House, an abandoned house in a rough neighbourhood that he decided would be a suitable location for him to work in secrecy, as well as to do tests to see if he could teleport things through walls or over decent distances.
He started small, making devices capable of teleporting pennies and marbles, then getting bigger; his first living test was a trapped rat, which survived a couple trips through the device as he tested different distances.
During his last year of high school DaNiel started building his largest teleportation device yet, capable — he hopes — of transporting a full-grown adult, which he meant to continue working on even as he went to college on a tech-related scholarship.
However, not long after he graduated, while heading home from the Test House, where he’d just completed one half of his large teleportation device, he was accosted, beaten, and arrested by a policeman for murder.
Although he had no connection with the victim, and DNA and several other usually-weighty evidences pointed to his innocence, he was convicted of the crime to life in prison, which he believes occurred purely because of his skin colour, and the fact that he was unwilling to provide an alibi, not wanting to reveal his teleportation technology to the world just yet.
Since his conviction his parents have been desperately appealing to higher and higher courts for the other evidences to be considered over his skin colour and lack of alibi and his sentence to be overturned in favour of convicting the real criminal, while DaNiel himself has been snitching parts from his cell and elsewhere in the prison to assemble the other half of his teleportation device in a bid to either get out of prison or die trying, and at the moment he is getting close to completing the platform, which he’s deliberately making so that it will self-destruct as soon as it sends him to freedom.
Pronunciation:
DaNiel: dahneel
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