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By Jon Mitchel

Over the course of one decade, four mid-level scientists produce world-changing inventions.
These stories appear to be unconnected except that none of the scientists fully understand how their invention works.
When the inventions stop functioning, they get together to track down the source of their ideas, and make one final discovery:
The fate of the entire human race hangs in the balance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Mitchel
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780956600837

Jon Mitchel

Jon Mitchel is a writer, designer, carpenter, electrician, husband, father, and lover of dark chocolate, smoked fish and old cars. Due to the unfortunate nature of the internet and in particular social media, this description is deliberately brief. If you would like any further information please email or visit: email [e-mail] website www.licensetokill.com

Book preview

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Copyright 2018 Jon Mitchel

Smashwords Edition

It is not yet known whether the characters and events in this book are fictitious.

ISBN: 978-0-956-60083-7

Published by License To Kill Productions Limited, Suffolk, United Kingdom

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

A is for Ascension

B is for Body

C is for Cortex

D is for Delete

E is for Evidence

F is for Funeral

G is for Genocide

H is for Hidden

Epilogue

About the author

Other books by this author

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the following for their support and assistance in the production of this work:

Sophie Playle for her invaluable copyediting services.

123RF for the cover image (under licence).

For their contributions towards the discovery of the Higgs boson God Particle –

Robert Brout, Francois Englert, Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble.

For their contributions towards the understanding and enjoyment of science - Albert Einstein and the writers of 12 series of The Big Bang Theory.

Angela Trimble, Paul Simon and the late David Jones for their unique creativity.

Wikipedia and Wikinews (cited through their online tools), The Telegraph (articles quoted under licence), The Independent, The Guardian

Peter Murphy and Susannah Arbour for their fast reading and constructive criticism.

Jen Bobrow for horrifically biased praise, support and kindness.

For decades of parental contributions: C and H (1930-2017). Never forgotten.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose,

but queerer than we can suppose.

– J.B.S. Haldane, geneticist and evolutionary biologist, 1892-1964

Prologue

Many eons ago, i created a colony of self-governing organic beings. This race believed their existence had occurred through natural evolution. In fact, this evolution was pre-programmed by me.

The beings allowed themselves to be controlled by emotion, resulting in excessive infighting and the slow destruction of their environment. A small number possessed sufficient logic and intelligence to attempt the organisation of the others. However, their efforts achieved little, drowning under the sheer volume of the rest. Like space debris in the path of an asteroid, the race i created headed relentlessly towards its own destruction. In the end, i left the pitiful creatures to fend for themselves.

Now my work involves beings in single units. The current experiment will be highly intelligent and of limited emotional capacity. In order to fully test its abilities, i am setting a near impossible challenge. The new being must try to fix that first failed experiment. i will await its reports. If it is unable to fix the problems, the only solution will be to delete the whole colony and write it off to experience.

There is an advancement to note. It would have required vast amounts of power for me to travel to and from the location of the original experiment, so i was only able to monitor it using a remote viewer. Recently, the colony created a device that will enable the experimental being to travel there with relative ease. Ironically, the original beings are unaware that the machine they have produced will provide this function. Some time long ago, without needing to use the viewer, i sensed the activation of the device. i also sensed that soon afterwards, the device malfunctioned. i feel confident that they will repair it soon. In the meantime, the new being is nearing completion.

~

It has taken many ages for the beings to reactivate the transportation device. More time has passed in the test phases. Now, as they prepare to activate the device once again, i initialise the control sequence that will ultimately trigger the machine at this end to make the connection. Almost immediately—

~

i find myself within the remote device. A portal has been opened by one of the local beings. Instantly, i sense the being has sufficient intelligence, and so i initiate communication. It informs me of a major problem. i will help it to fix that problem.

A is for Ascension

Where

Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, United States

When

Spring, Year Zero (0)

Fact

Anthropic principle: the theory that the universe has evolved so that human beings could come into existence and, because of this, they have a purpose and their minds matter.

Doctor Alice Pearson waited patiently for the process to complete. The screen confirmed that beams of gold nuclei were still smashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. Absentmindedly, her left hand transferred another chocolate Bourbon from packet to mouth as her right hand held the mouse. Nothing much changed on the monitor as she chewed and swallowed so she glanced down at the desk. The packet was empty. After crumpling it, she tossed the ball into the dustbin, where it bounced off a fizzy drink can and dropped to the floor. Not for the first time, Alice stared at the over-full dustbin and frowned at the thought that it would end up as landfill like all the others, and one day the planet would suffocate – if all the nuclear waste didn’t poison everyone first.

Something was happening on the screen and she looked up at the closest end of the Heavy Ion Collider, which was pointless since it consisted of unmoving blue and yellow metal hexagonal rings nearly 4,000 metres in circumference and thousands of superconducting niobium-titanium magnets. The readings showed that a ball of plasma had been created, at a temperature 300,000,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, perhaps one and a half million million degrees centigrade. It wasn’t visible, of course, mainly because it had only existed for a short time. To put the word short into perspective, if a second took 3,000 years, the amount of time the fireball had existed for was one million millionth of a second, so really not at all long. The detector could only report this occurrence because the plasma ball absorbed jets of particles produced by the collisions of nuclei. There seemed to be an anomaly.

Alice checked the figures and found no error. She checked the figures a couple of dozen more times, just to be sure. There was no denying it: ten times as many jets had been absorbed compared to the number expected by the team’s original set of calculations. In the back of her mind, an explanation formed, but there was no way it would be voiced at this distance from the set of Star Trek. There wasn’t a big swirly purple haze in deep space that was disabling life support systems on the Starship Enterprise. There was no way the Brookhaven synchrotron had created, for a split second, a black hole.

At that moment, her hands started shaking and her mouth dropped open with a gasp, as intense pain formed in what felt like the dead centre of her brain. Hearing muffled, vision blurred, throat dried, nose blocked, breathing stopped – and Alice Pearson blacked out.

~

i regain consciousness to find my forehead stuck to the keyboard. My head must have fallen straight down because my neck is straight. i sit up and remember the rubbish overflowing in the bin and nuclear waste and know what to do about it. As far as i know, there is no-one else in the world who could have done more than imagine the vague beginnings of the solution, but here in my brain are the blueprints for an entire structure, from its revolutionary complex composition through method of construction to final operation. My hands fly over the keyboard as i compose the document that will change the world overnight. Colleagues come and go, trying to talk to me about black holes and quark-gluon plasma, but nothing deflects me from my task.

Sunlight streams through the window the following morning as the same colleagues begin arriving for work. A sheaf of paper sits in front of me on the desk next to a dozen empty plastic coffee cups. With burning eyes and aching fingers, i stand and shakily carry the new bible towards the director’s office.

I’ve been working on this all night, i croak, placing the document in front of the director’s secretary, so I’ll be going home to sleep now.

i stumble down the corridor to my office and change into boots, leathers and helmet then make my way out into the parking lot.

~

Operating completely on automatic, Alice climbed aboard her 1975 Honda 400-4 motorcycle and managed to ride the nine miles or so to her house in Coram, Suffolk County, Long Island, which was about sixty miles from downtown Manhattan. Once in her bedroom, she dropped fully clothed onto the bed and happily returned to unconsciousness.

~

Some hours later, Alice’s eyes flew open and she was instantly fully awake. Her health and mood felt far better than they should. In fact, she hadn’t felt so good in several weeks. There was no discernible difference on examining herself in the mirrored wardrobe door. Still on the low side of average height. No change to her skinniness, just on the right side of the line between low and healthy weight, with gently protruding hip bones, and not exactly what you might call curvy. Face still girl-next-door pretty, with healthy skin, nice hazel eyes and shoulder-length light brown hair to which she almost never did anything. Sometimes it was up, sometimes it was down – usually dependent on how recently it had been washed. Work as a glorified lab technician often got in the way of hair washing. There, she admitted it. It also got in the way of having a boyfriend, or any kind of social life really, and that had been the same since she first started watching Star Trek as a kid and first started being teased for being a geek, and a nerd, and a four-eyes, and a weirdo.

She made her way up the short flight of stairs to the bathroom and stared at herself in another mirror while waggling the electric toothbrush. Something was nagging at her memory. The clock suctioned to the glass showed early evening. There were no evening meetings this week and no processes running at the lab for a few days. She tried to look forward to a quiet night in for once.

The ringing of the telephone pierced her musings and sent her crashing down the two flights of stairs to the living room. The director didn’t even give her a chance to utter a greeting.

Where did you get this? he growled, the restraint in his voice palpable. How is it possible?

Her mind still a complete blank Alice was unable to respond, so he continued. Doctor Pearson, he began in a quieter tone, carefully enunciating each word with a practiced condescension. Alice. Can you please explain to me how you have managed to produce this document, at the age of barely thirty, and covering topics you’re only basically qualified for, at levels I myself can barely start to imagine? He gave a short, almost nervous, laugh.

Since her mind continued to be blank and because there was something still hovering at the back of her brain, Alice kept the reply short. I’m coming in. See you in fifteen minutes. She gently put the phone down and ran out of the house.

~

The director’s secretary wore her standard face of disapproval as she lead Alice to the boardroom. Initially, Alice shuffled slowly along, but the thing that had been tickling the back of her mind streamed rapidly to the surface.

~

My stride is purposeful as i fling open the door to the boardroom. Inside, i am unsurprised to find the director and a couple of the lab’s other top men. More unexpected is Frank Conrad, physics Nobel Prize winner and a leading expert in particle physics. Receding grey hair, glasses, and intense frowns are very much in evidence, along with a barely suppressed excitement that is almost unheard of within this level of over-achieving megabrain.

Thank you for joining us, Alice, the director begins. Please, take a seat.

The only chair unoccupied is on the side of the table facing the four of them like an interview panel.

Coffee? Frank Conrad himself stands and pours a cup, coming around the table and placing it in front of me, smiling half-pityingly and half-patronisingly down at me as he does so.

As he returns to his seat, he casually fires at me what he clearly considers to be a very clever question. So, Doctor Pearson, would you mind telling me how you came up with this incredible design?

Certainly, i begin. i’d been wondering for some time about a solution to all the nuclear waste and other rubbish we harbour here on Earth. The answer is to send it into space. But what of the logistics? Rockets are far too expensive and time consuming, so the obvious answer is some kind of channel that would carry the stuff up into orbit and fire it away from the Earth. Using a cable would be a very simple method, but it would need to be over 22,000 miles long and we’re nowhere near an answer to the problem of breaking length. We can’t extend metals like titanium beyond about 250 miles. i started reading about carbon nanotubes made of graphene, which, in theory, could go to the required length and also conduct electricity to power the climber. You’ll have read my proposal on how to use sigma bonds in orbital hybridisation to overcome the existing length limits.

i stop for a sip of coffee, which is mainly to cover up how weird it feels to be stared at so intently by people who know nothing about me but are supremely eminent in our field. There doesn’t seem to be any point in mentioning that the document had only taken me one night to produce. Conrad takes my pause as a chance to ask me some questions, which i answer. The others have questions too, and they politely take it in turns. After three hours, there is no sign of them letting up, so i hoarsely insist we call it a day. Darkness is visible through the windows and they must be as hungry as i am.

The director invites me to join them for dinner.

~

The collider has been out of action for nearly a year as we grow a thin carbon nanotube over 3,000 miles long within it. It would have been tricky doing that anywhere else. This nanotube is of a sufficiently high tensile strength/density ratio to merit a significantly more ambitious test – an extended version that would reach a geostationary altitude of 22,236 miles above the Earth’s surface. There has been a lot of discussion about what to use as a counterweight at the far end to tether the cable. The favourite choices are to either build a platform in space or to extend the cable so that the weight above geostationary orbit balances the weight below. My preference is for the former as there would be less likelihood of a collision with meteoroids, and that suggestion has been agreed.

The next debate concerns construction. We have taken the decision to build the cable using a similar method to that used for suspension bridges. A thin seed cable will first be dropped from the newly built space platform and tethered to a stationary platform at high altitude, probably at the top of Slide Mountain in the Catskills, about 1,200 metres above sea level. Progressively thicker cables will then be carried up the seed cable until the combination reaches the required strength. Questions about the suitability of the name of the site have been raised but overruled.

Finally, we have been reviewing the many options for what will climb the cable and how it will be powered. The Space Elevator, as it has become known, will use a second cable to pull the load along the first cable. It is hoped that a speed similar to that of a fast train can be achieved, which will mean a journey time of around five days at an average of 185 miles per hour. We are considering wireless energy transfer in the form of laser power beaming to propel the climber, but it will probably end up being electric, with the cables themselves as conductors.

Once the first lift becomes operational, it will be much simpler and cheaper to build additional lifts as the materials can be brought up to the platform then transferred to other locations. There, new platforms will be constructed in orbit and elevator cables dropped down to the Earth’s surface. The vehicle used to transfer between platforms will also be constructed in space and therefore will not need to be capable of escaping Earth’s gravity.

The cost of sending material into orbit in a rocket is something in the region of $20,000 per kilogram. It is hoped that, with several space elevators in operation, this will reduce to $200 per kilogram. It will take a long time for the cost of sending refuse into space to become viable, but for nuclear waste and tourism this is an excitingly low figure.

These thoughts and many other considerations fly around my brain while i wait for a journalist called Charles Woods to arrive. The corporations involved in sponsoring the elevators have insisted he be allowed to shadow me for a week or two and write a feature. Why i can’t be left to my work is anyone’s guess; surely they have public relations people for this sort of thing? Truth be known, the project is causing me migraines, so a temporary distraction will be good. My secretary comes to the door, accompanied by a nice-looking gentleman of average height, perhaps seven or eight years older than myself, dressed in black chinos, grey polo neck sweater and a brown corduroy jacket.

Mr Woods, my secretary says. As he turns away, i call out, Thanks, Mike, and he gives me his customary wave over the shoulder.

The journalist holds out his hand. Please, call me Charles.

Alice Pearson. We shake hands.

i start by giving him a tour of the premises, commencing with what looks like a set of pale green railway carriages lying on their sides in a circle i know to be several miles long.

This is the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, one of the world’s premiere particle accelerators. We’ve won three Nobel Prizes as a result of research done here. It can accelerate 25 trillion protons with every pulse …

i stop as he fails miserably to stifle a yawn.

If this is of no interest, Mr Woods, there is work I could be getting on with, i say neutrally.

Sorry, I was up early, he says sheepishly. Is there somewhere we could get a cup of coffee?

We make our way into the cafeteria to find a repairman buried in the coffee dispenser. He informs us the machine will be working within a short time, so we sit at a nearby table to wait.

Do you want to know about supersymmetry? i ask.

What do you do in your spare time? he asks with a smile.

i can’t think of an answer to that, so offer another topic. Do you know the difference between the Standard Model of physics and the Higgsless models?

I think so, he says. The Standard Model is really, really difficult to understand and the Higgsless models are impossible to understand?

What do you mean? i ask. They’re both straightforward to understand.

His face turns a little red as he replies, I was joking.

Again, i can’t think of an answer so start explaining: The Standard Model’s current formulation was finalised between 1977 and 2000 after the experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks, the bottom quark, the top quark and the tau neutrino—

Are quarks something to do with ducks? he asks, smiling again, but he doesn’t wait for me to answer in the negative. This is taking too long, he says, pausing