The Disparate One

Prologue

Piercing through the darkness was the most annoying sound ever to start someone's day. It awakened the man tucked under the sheets, groaning and cursing at the blinking red light in the dark room. His hand slid across, hitting the button on his alarm clock, the button that brought back favorable silence.

5:00 am.

Oxford, the man who always struggled to wake up early, rubbed his face while his mind recalled the tasks given last night before passing out. Staring at the clock, he couldn't count how many times he was ready before the alarm, because he hadn't done it before.

The sheets slid off from him when he sat up with his back arched, he smacked his dry lips as he reached out for his phone from the darkness, next to the nightstand where his alarm clock was. The smartphone in his palm glowed brightly, blinding the man. It was followed by the morning light flooding in as the blinds rolled up, revealing the city of New York waking up from its slumber.

He glanced back at the clock.

Shit.

5:20 am.

Jumping from his bed, he hurried into the bathroom and took a shower, and shaved his beard. He got out in a robe and transferred to his walk-in closet where he put on his typical black suit.

Once he got the black tie tightened, he left his penthouse and called his chauffeur who was already on idle at the front of the building.

The vehicle drove off and smoothly headed to the Grand Central Station, beating the morning rush hour.

Oxford was putting on his custom-made wristwatch when the driver spoke to him about his morning. It had become their routine.

Everything in Oxford's life had become a routine.

Ever since he was young, he started working for someone who worked in a facility buried deep underground, beneath the ocean floor.

The facility, told by his predecessor, stored a lot of secrets that could change the entire human civilization, possibly ending it. It had countless advanced technologies years ahead of any made on the surface. But it didn't stop there, together with those revolutionaries, they also stored sacred and priceless relics from the past. Everything every historian was searching for could be found in that very facility.

His predecessor even told Oxford that they made their own nickname, The Keepers.

But to Oxford, he sometimes viewed themselves as the "men in black", since they wore black suits and worked in a secret organization. So secret that not a single person nor any government from the surface knew about them

Sometimes when a company introduced a "revolutionary" product to the world, The Keepers would just chuckle underground saying things like: "You call that revolutionary?"

Of course, to keep mankind intact, they had no choice but to keep everything in secret. It was their utmost priority. However, they could sell their inventions to other companies or influencers only should they be approached by The Keepers first.

Arriving at the station, instead of doing what other passengers would do, Oxford, after walking down the marble staircase, made a sharp turn to the left where he found a metal door next to a janitor who was sleeping on his job.

He truly wasn't. He was just pretending. In fact, he was one of the facility's first lines of defense.

He calmly swung the door inward and let it close by itself as he walked through the narrow hall.

At the end of the hall was an elevator, the facility's second line of defense.

Stepping inside the confined space, he slid out his key card and inserted it into the scanner on the side where buttons would be.