C.A.T.S.P.A.W. Computer Augmented Timeing System Particle Acceleration Weapon

By Daniel Cashman

Alexi Romanov developed a program to control the strobing of magnets so that an atomic particle could be accelerated to near the speed of light. He calls it CATSPAW and It should have made him rich but instead it caused his wife to be murdered and sent him into hideing.
For fiteen years he stayed underground while the political alliances of the world shifted and war overtook him. Opposing armies clashed over KABUL where he had sought refuge with his new family. His new life is ripped apart when his wife and daughters are killed and in anguish he gives the CATSPAW to the rebels standing against the army of a unified Asia. The utter defeat of the Asian army begins a manhunt that tracks him to India and then to a mining colony in the Asteroid Belt.
Among the Miners of the Asteroid Belt, Alexi begins another new life. This time his invention is put to peaceful uses and becomes a prime tool in building homes and extracting the riches of the Asteroids.
But There is a secret hidden in the Asteroid Belt. A secret so powerful that an entire civilization will fall or rise with it.
This story is a roller coaster of action, adventure and human emotion combined with an eye opening vision of how society may develop when we, humans, take our first steps to colonize our solar system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Cashman
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463717233

Daniel Cashman

The Author is a Viet Nam veteran. Currently residing in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Book preview

C. A. T. S. P. A. W.

*

Computer Augmented Timing System

Particle Acceleration Weapon

By

Daniel J. Cashman

Copyright 2000 Daniel J. Cashman

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

CHAPTER ONE

Sverdlovsk, Russia

Sverdlovsk is a city of the modern world. Situated on the west slope of the Ural Mountains, the city was born during darkest days of the Russian Great Patriotic War. In the ferocious, icy wind blowing off Siberia, factories were built to manufacture the weapons and munitions needed by the Red Army to fight the Nazi invaders. Refugees fleeing Hitler’s terror endured deplorable living and working conditions to meet the demands of Stalin’s military machine. By the end of the war, the cities roots were firmly set and her growth accelerated.

Shaded from the politics of Western Russia, Sverdlovsk remained isolated both socially and politically and while the cold war raged, the city matured as the center for advanced nuclear weapons research and development. But the promise of these programs was never achieved and they served only to drain the Soviet treasury and accelerate the collapse of the Empire. In the decades following that collapse, the industrial strength of the city waned. Crime and poverty drove the civilian residents to flee the city till only roving bands of bandits and cutthroats remained. In the surrounding grasslands and mountains, the herders and farmers avoided the city and told their children it was cursed.

In the third year after the establishment of the first civilian Lunar colony and on the day colonists landed on Mars, the Russian Army surrounded Sverdlovsk and began a systematic round up of every living soul in the city. Over the following month, mass trials, executions and deportations cleared the population. This was followed by a mass importation of workers to gut the city and rebuild it as the foremost experimental research center in Asia. The premier universities across Asia established new research facilities in the reborn city and vied with each other to draw the brightest academic talent. Companies engaged in theoretical and established scientific research drew young, talented and ambitious students from across Asia and around the world and rewarded their acquisition of scientific discovery with financial rewards. By the turn of the century, the majority of the city’s residents were students of the Max Planct University and alumni affiliated with the military sponsors of the University’s basic research projects. Among the associated institutions of the university, the foremost College was the School of Advanced Physics where students vied for academic excellence and the financial rewards cascading from new discoveries.

In this rarefied atmosphere of academic competition, young love blooms eternal. On warm summer nights, young lovers congregate in the coffeehouses and parks. Arm in arm, they stroll the avenues, window shopping the prized consumer goods they will be able to afford when they uncover an unknown fact of scientific viability and profit. Among the students enrolled in the Applied Nanoprocessor Physics curriculum is a young man named Alexi Romanov. Who, while suffering the tribulations of a tyrannical and humorless professor of Advanced Mathematics, was paired with Ivanna Gregorovich on a research project. Ivanna was a fiercely serious student of Laser Physics who was determined to make her fortune in the field of Interplanetary Communications. Their friendship grew quickly and blossomed into love. Like many students attending the university, their families lived far away and had little money to spend on travel, so they set their wedding date with little of the delay or ceremony custom would have deemed appropriate.

The only apartment they could afford on their student’s stipend and part time income was a flat on the third floor of a renovated walk up. Although it had been reconditioned to include indoor plumbing, electric and data service, the design did not include an elevator. Their kitchen, bath and living room were furnished with love and a few pieces of second hand furniture purchased at the local flea market. Discarded concrete blocks and planking made a substantial bookcase and a table that had been salvaged, refinished and reinforced served as their dining table and study surface. Their bedroom ensemble was little more than a mattress on a platform but the love they shared there transformed it into a suite at the most lavish dacha on the Black Sea.

The Center of their home was the computer. It was a blocky configuration of salvaged and bartered components Alexi had configured to meet the massive computations needed in his visions of nanoprocessor applications and sat on the floor under the table. Approximately the size of two concrete blocks, it sat silently waiting for a keystroke that would begin a new task of processing and storing data. On the tabletop sat twin keyboards, mice and monitors that allowed the couple to work simultaneously on their studies and projects. On the walls surrounding the table were shelves holding stacks of memory bubbles, all neatly labeled, and stacks of hand written notes that seem to lie in random piles. The walls were decorated with a single large digital photo frame that changed every few seconds to show a different picture of themselves, their families and friends.

They made a handsome couple and being friendly by nature, they easily melded into the tight knit neighborhood of their building. Whenever they met a neighbor, both made it a point to wave, smile and pass a pleasantry. They knew all the children playing in the dim hallways and talked often of how their lives would be brightened with the advent of their own children. But the time was not right for them and so they decided they would wait till Ivanna graduated and was steadily employed before beginning their own family.

Alexi’s job brought him home each day in the early evening. Invariably, on his arrival, he met old Ivan Pegorsky, the Block Watcher, and before inserting his key into the lock, he would greet the old man and comment on the weather or some other small inconsequential matter. Today, as he opened the door and stepped inside, Ivanna turned from the stove where she was frying noodles and smiled to him. Hi, honey, he called, placing his briefcase on the floor and letting it lean against the wall. He loosened his tie and walked up behind her, as she busied herself with the evening meal, wrapped his arms around her slender waist and buried his face in her hair breathing deep and nibbling her ear.

How did it go today, he whispered?

Lousy, she said. You weren't there and giggled as his lips touched the back of her neck. How about you?

Lousy. You weren't there.

The young lovers held each other, savoring the warm emotions running through their bodies as the noodles popped and sizzled in the pan. Alexi breathed deeply and let the smell of Ivanna’s skin awaken the memory of their first meeting. It had been almost a year now since he had finished the requirements for his Masters in Computer Technology but rather than find a job with one of the companies in the nearby area, he decided to stay on with the University as a Project Assistant, so he could be with Ivanna till she finisher her education.

The project he was working on involved the engineering of low gravity manufactured materials into micro-gates for a new generation of nano scale computer chips. The gates, it was hoped, would have applications that would allow for an exponential increase in the processing speed of the next generation of super fast computers. Although the project had been plodding along at a slow but seemingly, productive pace, the sponsors were getting nervous and wanted positive results. Without any ready applications, the military aspect of the research contract had already been withdrawn and it was becoming clear to the research team that their industrial funding would not continue much longer.

Alexi realized that staying on at the University was not a practical plan for a career but with Ivanna in her final year and the college willing to keep him on for the foreseeable future it was a reasonable option till a better offer arrived. The wages were just good enough to keep him satisfied and diligently working at the number crunching but the work was not demanding enough to command his undivided concentration.

Alexi considered the project work to be fascinating but for hours at a time he had little to do except wait as the computer relentlessly mulled over strings of data and calculated the next equation. During these lulls, his mind would wander to a proposition that had taken root and grown in his mind. The seed was Einstein's classic statement, E=MC2. Stated simply, when matter is accelerated to the speed of light, squared, it changes into pure energy. Theoretically, an increase in the speed a particle travels, even if only to a small percent of the speed of light, would release dynamic amounts of energy. The cold war atomic bombs were the simple proof of this proposition demonstrating that a huge amount of energy could be released from a small amount of mass. Einstein proposed that if a particle could be accelerated to approximately 3.456 billion miles per second, its life span would increase to infinity as would its mass and then transmute into an infinite amount of pure energy.

Recognizing that the life of a subatomic particle is measured in nanoseconds, he reasoned that he only had to accelerate a particle to a small part of the speed of light to sufficiently extend the particles life span and correspondingly increase its mass. His calculations indicated that a speed of only one tenth the speed of light, about 18.6 thousand miles per second, would be sufficient to increase the mass of a subatomic particle to that of a freight train and cover a distance of .32 kilometer before deteriorating! The calculations whirled in his mind, to travel one kilometer; a particle would have to exist for 1/186,000 of a second. At twice the speed of light the particle need only exist for a 1/93,000 of a second. The numbers were staggering, mind-boggling, and constituted an unattainable eternity in the nanosecond realm of sub-atomic particles.

But Alexi had witnessed the results of the physics that yielded the atomic bomb and a new era of science based on high-energy particles. Daily, in laboratories buried deep under the University grounds, researchers proved and reproved the theory in huge tunnels lined with strobing rings of super magnets. The Accelerators isolated individual atoms and then dragged them along a racetrack, stripping off the outer shell and accelerating the naked nucleus till it approached a large fraction of the speed of light. At the point of least acceptable control, just as the operators are about to lose control of the nucleus, the particle is directed into a heavy element target. The impact results in the demolition of the nucleus and release of the exotic subatomic particles constituting it. The shattered remnants of the nucleus are then mapped, measured, and evaluated for further study. On a clear day, the booming of particles striking the target can be heard across the campus like the drumming of distant thunder.

Alexi's education in the advanced equations of nanocircuit physics filled his day dreams and sleep with symbols describing the mathematics involved in microgate manipulation. The readily available straight line gate board haunted him. Often, he would wake from a deep sleep with theorems dancing through his dreams and desperately scribble till the dream faded and he fell back asleep. He continually toyed with the equations, trying to figure a way to turn micro magnets on an off in a perfectly smooth consecutive order that would drag a particle along the gate board and accelerate it to a small part of the speed of light like the huge power hungry accelerators buried under the university.

Slowly, his equations grew in both complexity and volume and the solution nagged at the back of his brain until it finally manifested itself as an equation directing a micro processor to time the flow of signals to the magnetic gates in accordance with the natural pulse of a hydrogen nucleus. Shortly afterward he loaded the new mathematics into the University super computer and downloaded the results to a magnetic bubble.

-*-

Alexi arrived home early and began cooking the evening’s meal. His mind was alive with anticipation and when Ivanna arrived he could barely contain himself, greeting her with a short kiss, a hug and excited chatter. During their meal, he bubbled and rambled describing the results he obtained from three hours of processing time. He held up a bubble pack and whispered, I think I have the solution here.

Like a child with a new toy he could hardly finish his meal and Ivanna finally had to tell him to go and try the new program. As she cleared away the remnants of the meal, he loaded the calculations and programming into their computer and wired a six-inch-long gate board to the drive. Expectantly, he keyed the final command and stood back while the progress bar counted down to the initiation. The first experiment was deceptive in its result. A puff of smoke, ionized air, only a few centimeters long issued from the gate board and in the twinkling of an eye, dissipated. Alexi stood unmoving, unsure if he should shout out in anger or joy. Then a smile grew on his face as Ivanna came to the table and touched his hand.

Was that it, she asked?

"I think so. Let’s try to get a visible result.

Alexi held a piece of paper in front of the gate board and initiated the program. A puff of ionized air appeared again and then a flicker of flame grew and consumed the paper. A wood block placed in front of the port was knocked across the room and their frying pan let out a resounding note and showed a visible dent. The result was reproducible and consistent!

That night, they reveled in the glow of his success and made love madly into the early hours and fell into an exhausted sleep till the morning sun summoned them back to the rigors of daily life.

Over the next months, Alexi was unable to make further progress. The project had to be shelved while the demands of his job intervened and he was forced to devote his time almost exclusively to the problems set to him by the University. But the taste of success never left him and in every spare minute his mind found, he returned to the problem of opening and closing micro gates with nanosecond precision timing.

-*-

The New Year's party in the Nanoprocessor Studies lab was joyless; it was a swan song. The funding for the Micro-gate project had been terminated and the staff was now facing the prospect of finding new positions in other research departments or leaving the University altogether. Even though the announcement had been expected, the project staff was stunned and the party broke up early. Glumly, Alexi returned home that night and sat numbly