Mark Alpert is the author of Final Theory, The Omega Theory, Extinction, and, most recently The Furies, as well as the young adult novel The Six. He is a contributing editor at Scientific American and his work has appeared in Fortune magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Playboy. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and their two children.
The Orion Plan: A Thriller by Mark Alpert
A homeless man sleeps fitfully in a park in New York City. He’s startled awake when an object crushes the box that affords him only a modicum of protection for the elements. He clambers out of the box and gapes at a:
black sphere at a center of a pit, half-buried in the mud. It looked like a bowling ball but slightly bigger, about a foot across. Its top half shone in the moonlight ... it was as black as coal and yet its surface gleamed as if it were polished ... it seemed to be glowing.
Joe’s a broken man ... an alcoholic, divorced and separated from his family and now forced from his latest home, however transient it may have been.
Several members of a local Latino gang, led by Emilio, hear the crash and descend on the same location where Joe’s rotting around the object that crashed from the heavens.
Several hours later, an old woman drops off groceries ... Read More
