Parmenidean Breach

By Jack West, Jr

Nina Blake is a world renowned nanobiologist. When her family is attacked at their California mountain home, her son Reed embarks on a search that reveals secrets with the potential to change life as we know it. If you like work of Michael Crichton and Dan Brown, you will like Parmenidean Breach also. This book is an action-packed technological thriller that might change you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack West, Jr
• Release date: Sep 25, 2010

Jack West, Jr

I have been a journalist, a mountaineering guide, a physics teacher, and most recently, I have spent summers doing research in nanomaterials at Stanford University. I live in the San Francisco Bay area with my wife and two children.

Book preview

Introduction

In 2009 I spent a summer as a fellow at a major US Defense Contractor. It changed my life. I suffered a background check that would have made the vetting process for White House appointees look like an interview for Best Buy. I had a badge and walked through a metal detector every day just to get in. There were silent surveillance technologies that sniffed me for bomb residues and even adrenaline sweat. The security at this place was no joke and I was aware that I was being watched every minute of the day.

The fellowship was an opportunity for the company to add another line to the pamphlet they produced, detailing their community outreach efforts for their public relations image. It seemed that they did not know exactly what to do with me. As a Physics teacher with a B.S. in Physics I knew enough to understand what they were doing in most of their labs, but not enough to do any of the engineering myself.

I was given a company history project for which I was the sole team member. My supervisor was a woman from human resources. I thought that was a clue that whatever I was to be doing, it wasn't going to have much to do with missile defense or communications blocking devices. I was wrong.

To carry out my project I was given the responsibility of accessing the company history to create a time line for each of the various defense product lines that this company had pursued. Some of the technologies had never even made it to a successful proof of concept, while others are currently deployed in combat by the US military and other NATO forces. What I found was fascinating. I learned about defense technology that I would never have even thought existed.

At first, all of the information that came across my eyes was information that anyone with an inquiring mind and some free time can access thanks to the freedom of information act. Then, unbeknownst to me, and my human resources supervisor, I was somehow granted access to company history as well as current project databases that required top-level security clearance.

Had I known that I was reading classified material I would have stopped immediately. Probably as a result of the anomalous nature of my contract, someone in IT had inadvertently granted my user account limitless access to internal documents.

What I saw blew my mind. I thought the iphone was pretty advanced before that summer. There is nothing that we 'civvies' see out here like what they work on in there.

One afternoon, my supervisor visited me at my makeshift cubicle in the maintenance building. She had reviewed my work for the first time since I had arrived. She knew immediately that I had been working with classified material and activated a systemic response according to a well-defined protocol.

I had the unique experience of feeling like I might be dragged into a small windowless cell in a foreign country like the chemical engineer in the movie Rendition. A security guard escorted me to a room that was locked from the outside (though it did have lights and a rather comfortable chair) where I waited for two hours until a government interrogator could arrive. The guy was clearly a professional. He could smell my fear, and within five minutes had figured out that it was the IT guy who had screwed up and I was not a spy.

I was shortly thereafter shuttled to a different room where I was asked to sign a series of non-disclosure agreements that would effectively indemnify my employer against any penalty from the US government.

The person I was before I had seen what I saw in those classified documents and before I had been spirited swiftly and not so gently into a locked room and interrogated by an official of some undisclosed branch of the US defense superstructure, would have signed the agreements to make everybody happy and to show my gratitude for the summer employment I had been granted. But I was no longer that person. I never signed those papers. I had spent three full working days unwittingly reading classified documents about defense technology that made my hair stand on end. Even before I had experienced the mistrust, if only momentary, of those around me I was considering going public with what I had learned. In my mind at the time, what I saw during those three days was all public information anyway, and I simply thought no one on the outside was talking about it. I figured, perhaps no one knew to ask for this information and I had a civic responsibility to share what I had learned.

Well, that plan had to be scuttled. Whether I was granted the access through proper channels or not it was made painfully clear to me that public or private disclosure of the technologies I had discovered in this defense contractor's arsenal would earn me serious jail time. I could not, however, let that experience sit in my stomach for the rest of my life. My recourse has been to write this book.

After consulting with more lawyers than I care to consort with, I have found the best way to share what I learned as purely as I possibly can without endangering my free-walking future. All of the technologies; nanobiological, medical, chemical, laser and otherwise are in some form a carefully touched-up description of technologies that already exist or are imminently approaching operational. Based on development background white papers I saw, I have also incorporated into my story some state strategy objectives that I inferred from my reading.

My story and all of the characters in it are, of course, fiction. Sometimes fiction allows the storyteller to approach the truth askance. Finally, my attorneys would like you to know that the above letter is fiction also.

Thanks for choosing to read Parmenidean Breach.

Chapter One

Galveston, Texas. Early a.m.

Like tumbling logs in the surf after a storm, two bodies spilled onto the Galveston beach. In midsummer, coastal Texas temperatures are regularly in the nineties. This late-night corpse beach-party would turn into a scavenger's Thanksgiving by mid-morning. Anyone within a quarter mile would know the storm had brought death, but most would assume it to be a school of unfortunate fish or perhaps another poisoned sea turtle.

The last human corpse to wash ashore near Galveston was a transient whose dental records were difficult enough to find that the local police, after initiating the requisite state and national missing person networks, abandoned the case altogether. The body was held at the local morgue for two weeks, photographed extensively for any post cremation identification that might happen, and then cremated. No one shed a tear over the slightly obese, shaggy, gray-haired fifty-something with rotten teeth.

At first a pair of bodies bobbed in together, tangled in one another's clothing. Both of them wore industrial weight rain slickers. One of them wore a harness with carabiners. Their faces in death made it difficult to age them precisely, but they were both men no younger than twenty, no older than forty-five. And they appeared to be of the same multi-racial origin. Rigor mortis was beginning to set-in, but had not yet fully gripped their slowly necrosing muscles. This would date their time of death at somewhere between three and twelve hours prior to their beach landing. The faces of both men were slightly bruised, indicating that the storm had smashed their bodies against one another in the violent surf or perhaps there had been an altercation before their hearts stopped beating.

Twenty-two minutes passed before another body washed ashore. And then, like at the finish line of a marathon, seven more bodies tumbled in all within three minutes of one another. The original two were greeted by number five on the shore, huddling together in the shallow water as if in a rugby scrum. The rest lay scattered over a three hundred yard range along the beach away from town. All of them wore yellow slickers. All of them were men, or at least they had facial hair. All of them had one hell of a day, twenty-four hours prior. And all but one of them had a microchip fused to his third vertebra down from the top in the cervical spine that repeated a signal to a triad of United States Defense Department Satellites.

Chapter Two

Cerro Torre, Patagonia

Reed Blake wedged his knee into a five-inch wide crack in the face of the granite spire known as Cerro Torre. His forearms burned with lactic acid. The calf of his left leg was no longer responding to the commands his brain sent to it. And his thirst prevented him from swallowing to suspend the feeling that his throat was about to close from the cracked, swollen dryness brought on by altitude and dehydrated exhaustion.

This is fun? He asked himself.

At forty nine degrees, nineteen minutes south latitude and 10,000 feet altitude Reed had solo climbed his way to within two hundred vertical feet of one of the world's most challenging mixed rock and ice routes. And he had done most of it without a rope. This despite the nearly three thousand foot drop that appeared between his legs to the valley floor below. The quadriceps in his leg began to quiver, loosening what little purchase he had. He shook his dangling arm below him and behind his back in an attempt to fill his muscles with enough oxygen to lift his ice axe one more time.

Now be a good girl and come back to the party. He said to his own arm.

His other hand, ungloved, crimped a small facial feature of the rock. He breathed deeply, arched his back and looked as far up the vertical face as he could see. It appeared that he had another fifty feet of climbing to go to reach the top, but he knew this was his leopard brain talking. He was deceiving himself into thinking he was almost there. Despite his exhaustion, his rational mind carried out a simultaneous analysis that counted the hours he had been climbing, considered the pace at which he had climbed, and performed a more accurate calculation of the distance between him and the top of the spire.

Then he retreated to the leopard brain assessment. I am almost there. Just another fifty feet. I can surely do that. It was his ability to allow the leopard and the scientist to coexist that made him one of the world’s most successful big wall climbers.

If we make a bit of haste we can make it back for tea and crumpets. He spoke to himself now with a fake English accent.

The rational mind cautioned him that time was of the essence. Most accidents happen in hasty retreat. But risky haste at this moment made sense in the integral calculus of mountaineering. He lifted the axe to snag a horizontal feature above his head, but as he did this his leg violently ejected from the crack into which he had placed it. His other foot, strapped with a crampon, chipped loose from its icy perch with a ping. His entire body swung out and left as if it were a barn door. Only his bare hand remained clutching this granite behemoth.

For a moment Reed considered letting go. It wasn't the pain that racked every fiber of every muscle in his body. And it wasn't the seemingly insurmountable odds that were stacked against his safe return. No, this scenario was commonplace for Reed. He considered letting go because he had no fear, and he had never had any fear. His third, more whimsical mind thought it might be interesting to see if falling three-thousand vertical feet, occasionally smashing against the vertical face at 120 miles per hour on his way to a grisly death would stir feelings of fear in his heart.

He let himself dangle a moment, and looked down between his legs. He could see his tent at the bottom of the face; an orange handkerchief nattily tied around the white snow collar of this varicose veined, gray neck he was holding with the numbed fingers of one hand. And then his leopard mind regained control. He thought of his parents. They loved him. They loved him so much that they suffered his pioneering adventures despite the worry it caused them. He believed he would die some day from climbing, and so did they. But he could not knowingly cause them that grief by simply, capriciously letting go.

No, mom and dad would not be proud of their boy if he were an inch thick and ten yards in diameter.

These few moments of treacherous repose had refilled his muscles with oxygen. With the grunt of a martial artist, Reed swung his cramponned foot back to its purchase, placed his ice axe on a lower horizontal feature, and repositioned his knee into the crack it had just been in. Before he attempted to make any further progress he looked out at the horizon.

Oh, those boys don't look like they will play nicely at all.

A bank of rising lenticular clouds was hungrily moving up into the valley below him with an appetite for death. This meant snow, and it would happen soon. Without a tent or any overnight gear at all, the best scenario for Reed, if he did not get down fast, would be a torturous play of three acts.

In the first act, unable to climb any further as the freezing precipitation closed all of his escape routes, he would anchor himself to the rock and shiver for about an hour. In the second act, all of his limbs would go numb and the shivering would stop; he would feel a momentary calm, quelled by the approaching sirens. In the third act, an internal fire that would make him think that all those tabloid stories about spontaneous internal combustion were true would consume him as all of the nerves in his extremities began to freeze.

It would be in this third act when Reed would strip off his clothes as if they were spiders biting his entire body, and if he did not jump off the cliff face from the burning pain, his heart would shortly be unable to pump the cold, viscous blood to his brain and his parents worst fear would come true.

Chapter Three

Galveston, Texas. Early a.m.

As the surf continued to calm down and the tide began to recede, one last guest decided to crash the corpse party. This one, also male, was older than the others. Flecks of gray in his hair indicated as much. The coroner's report on this man, however, would not indicate death by drowning. That is, if the body were ever to be seen by the coroner.

This man's head more closely resembled a castanet than a head. A perfectly cleft wedge of exactly three eighths of an inch was missing from the middle. The two hemispheres cleaved in half. Besides the mutilation that distinguished him from his peers, absent from this man was the microchip that was the fashion amongst his colleagues.

Chapter Four

Caribbean Sea. One day prior.

Red lights flashed from all high points, but no sirens rang. Gale force winds pelted rain into everyone on the deck. Dozens of men scurried about the decks of this giant offshore oil rig, securing compressors, tying down garbage cans, locking doors.

Tower two had lost one of it's four anchors and it appeared as if the pounding of the swell would tear loose a second anchor any minute. Earlier, the engineers assured Sam Belgich that the rig was designed to remain secure with only three of four anchors tethered to any tower. Now, thirty-foot swells had made them change their minds.

What is going to happen if tower two cuts loose? Sam asked the group of three engineers that sat in front of him.

One of the men spoke, We can't say for certain. Our three-tower anchor system was designed to withstand fifteen and twenty foot swells, which are unheard of in this area. Under those conditions it can hold if any single anchor line of any of the towers were to disengage. The additional force created by thirty-foot swells is not simply fifty percent greater. The increase in water mass is exponential because of the shape of the waves, and the torque is nearly twofold because of the increased height of the impact.

I don't want an analysis! I want a goddamned answer.

A second engineer looked at the first, and then to Sam, Sir the entire operation will collapse.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Sam was shouting. He took his hands off the table he had been leaning on, laced the fingers of his hands behind his head in his gray-flecked, dirty blonde hair, and walked around the room circling the engineers.

This was the northern Caribbean. The seas never got this rough. Not even during hurricanes. This wasn't supposed to happen. Then again, neither was the Tsunami that hit the Pacific, nor were there supposed to be record-breaking numbers of hurricanes on the eastern seaboard in each of the last seven successive years. The global air temperature had increased only slightly, alarming the red-legged frog screaming environmentalists, but very few others.

What only a select few scientists really understood was that most of the increased heat on the planet was going into the ocean, hidden in the stubborn water. For the same reason it takes ten times longer to heat the coffee in the cup than it does the cup itself, the temperature of the oceans had almost imperceptibly changed. But this small change in temperature of more than three hundred trillion gallons of water was a heck of a lot of heat. Maybe enough heat to change the rules of weather.

Sam got on the phone. Mister Ansel, we need to talk. May I come up to deck one and meet with you in your quarters.

Yes, please do. The executive responded.

Sam returned his attention to the engineers who had not spoken a word to each other. I am going upstairs to discuss our retreat options with Mister Ansel. I would greatly appreciate it if you would hatch some plan to keep tower two rooted to the sea floor. If I come back with bad news, there is nothing I wont be willing to try.

As Sam exited the room all seven men simultaneously retrieved laptops from aluminum briefcases at their sides. In silence, they logged into a wireless network and began to hatch a plan.

Sam zipped his rain jacket, put the hood up over his head, and velcroed the jacket's flap over the zipper. He stepped outside to enter the stair well that would take him up to Helmut Ansel, director of this deep sea, tar-sand, oil extraction operation, but paused to watch tower two before he climbed.

The wind made a deafening roar in his ears and forced him to steady himself against the railing.

From the stable repose of tower one, Sam watched the sway of tower two. With every oncoming wave the top of the tower, nearly three hundred feet off the surface of the ocean, swayed back and forth about ten feet. Pipes groaned, and girders sang.

For the top of a tall skyscraper to sway a bit is normal. Flexibility is built into the thousand foot frames of tall buildings that allows them to sway as much as three to five feet at the top. Built somewhat like a skyscraper, the towers of this offshore rig were small in comparison. This gave them similar flexibility, but less overall sway than tall buildings. A ten-foot sway over time would overstress the sea floor anchors that tethered this giant to the earth. Adrift without anchors, the top-heavy rig would surely capsize.

Sam started up the stairs again, but paused. He stepped back into the atrium leading to the meeting room where the engineers were working and reached under his slicker to retrieve his common phone. All of the engineers were permitted short-range microwave phones that used a repeater on the rig to communicate out to the world. They had all been briefed that all communications would be recorded and any hints to anyone about their whereabouts or the technology employed on the rig would result in a cancellation of contract. He pressed number one and send. The phone speed dialed to his wife.

Janice's instinct let her know that it was Sam calling, Why didn't you call earlier? I have knots in my stomach thinking that you might be in the Gulf and what could be happening to you in that storm. Why can't you tell me where you are so I can at least put my finger on the map and say a prayer for you?

Are the girls asleep yet? He asked her, avoiding the question.

Kayla is asleep, but Trina knows that I’m worried and so she is too. She asked me if you were coming home because of the storm. I didn't know what to tell her. She paused. Sam, I don't even know if you are near this country.

What did you tell her? Sam asked.

I told her that you might surprise us. She paused again, but Sam didn’t say anything. Was I right? She finally asked him.

It was at this moment that Sam's twenty years of running offshore oil rig operations subconsciously informed him that he had a very slim chance of making it home from this assignment. Tears welled in his eyes, not in self-pity, nor in fear, but with empathy for his wife and daughters. If he failed to return, life would be hard for them. Janice had given up her job as a medical assistant to spend more time with Kayla and Trina since Sam was away so often. This was, of course, a black hole. Without Janice's income, Sam felt obligated to fill-in by working more frequent and longer jobs in less and less desirable places.

She had stood by him despite all of the time he spent marooned on steel giraffes five miles from the coast; working amidst the drunks and misanthropes. She had weathered four moves, and countless assignments that kept him away for as much as three months at a time. He had promised her this would be the last overnighter; wagering his promise on the payoff he believed he would get from Ansel's company.

Extech was employing some cutting edge technology that Ansel cryptically promised would change the direction of oil exploration. All of the bits, drills, extraction systems, filtration systems, and even the rig's anchoring system were new and had recently been patented. Ansel’s promise had proven true. Sam had seen things on this job that he had only seen in futuristic thrillers on cable.

The crew retrieved their industrial drill bits, and cleaned them with what looked like light sabers from Star Wars. Ansel explained to Sam that they used simple blue light laser technology, but that they were able to terminate the lasers at one meter by suspending a nano-particle reflector with a parabolic magnetic bowl induced by electronics in the handle. The blue saws, as they called them, vaporized the sludge that was caked on the drill bits but left the bit itself intact.

Extech was paying Sam handsomely for his expertise, but more importantly they had promised him a share of the company's profits from this particular venture. In exchange, Sam signed an exclusivity agreement that forbade him from working with any other drilling company ever again. This also bound him to secrecy with regard to the new technologies.

Sam knew the risks of deploying new equipment. He had lost three men in his career in industrial accidents. Oil extraction work involved using big tools with incredible forces and high pressures. In that sense, at least, Sam did not go blindly into this assignment.

One red flag arose early for Sam but his hunger for money quickly knocked it down. When he first entered negotiations with this newcomer, Ansel, he was told that he would have to commit not only to keep secret what he learned about the newly patented equipment aboard the rig, but he would also not be permitted to know where they were going. If the operation were a success he would be tapped as an onshore consultant for future rig installments with Extech. A position, Ansel committed, that would eliminate any future financial worry. Sam signed the contract with a shaking hand.

Extech flew Sam by helicopter out of Tallahassee, Florida. He was placed into a cloaked compartment in the rear of the bird so that he could not see where they were going. When they landed aboard what appeared to be an aircraft carrier he assumed that he had unknowingly taken an assignment with a company that had a defense contract. But he was not allowed to remove the blindfold, so all he saw were the markings on the flight deck where his vision was not occluded. The pilot guided him out of the helicopter and pointed him to a bathroom. As soon as Sam was done, the pilot guided him back to the helicopter and they took off again.

Four hours later they landed on the helicopter pad of tower three of the rig on which he was now standing. That was ten days ago.

In those ten days Sam had seen state of the art tools perform tar-sand extraction at a greater rate than any liquid extraction he had ever witnessed. There was no doubt that this would reinvigorate oil exploration with Extech at the helm. Tar sands had previously been considered too dirty, too difficult, and not worth the effort. Even if you could liberate all of the usable oil from the muck it would take so long and produce so little that you would spend more oil powering the extraction than you could disinter. Extech's tools had proven that to no longer be the case.

Sam swallowed hard, I just wanted to hear your voice. Tell the girls I love them very much.

Sam.

He didn’t respond.

Sam! Janice began to cry.

Loving, devoted, and hard working Sam was. Sentimental, and weepy he was not. She sensed something was wrong.

I will be back at the end of the week. I love you. Goodbye. He had to end the call before he gave in to his emotions and brought Janice all the way down with him. There was a job to be done here, and he was as qualified as those egghead engineers at trouble shooting. He zipped up again, opened the door, and pushed his way out, shoulder first to cut the wind.

Chapter Five

Gulf Coast

Sam was nearly blown off the stairs as he climbed to meet with Helmut Ansel. He knocked on the door and simultaneously walked in as if Helmut were family, which he wasn't. But the current circumstances led Sam to dispatch with formalities. Ansel was the financial support behind this operation, but Sam was the operations manager. Sam had made it clear in his negotiations that when the shit hit the fan, he was in charge, regardless of whose money paid for the steel they were standing on. Ansel agreed to the protocol and wrote into Sam's contract a clause for life and death situations that gave Sam first command.

Helmut, This was the first time Sam had called Ansel by his first name, and it was intentional. We need to alert the coast guard that our rig may be at risk of capsizing.

Immediately after Sam said this it occurred to him that he did not know if they were even within the reach of the U.S. Coast Guard. By Sam's estimation, they could be anywhere from the Louisiana to Venezuela.

Ansel was reclining in a Fellini office chair with his feet on a minimalist, brushed-steel desk reading a magazine.

Did you know that the queen conch was once so abundant in these waters that the local islanders refused to eat it? It was beneath their refined palate I suppose. He said with the arrogant facetiousness of a conquistador. Now, it is a delicacy and may soon go on the endangered species list. Ansel made a note in a small black book he had on his lap as he was talking.

Helmut, tower two has lost an anchor. Your engineers have informed me that if the swells do not abate, this entire..

At that moment both men were unsteadied by movement of the floor they were standing on. A loud groaning of metal, stretched