The Storm Fishers and Other Stories

by Everitt Foster

rolled around the edge of the circular core room. In the center lay the reactor core. A golden glow pulsed from behind titanium shields in three second increments. Between each pulse, steam and heat rose from the center stacks and vaporized before reaching the walkways. Interns wearing gray heat insulated work suits, looking similar to the padded and braced in place under armor used in gravityball; stared at their tablets, paced the walkway, carried tools aimlessly or some combination of all of the above (sometimes at the same time).

  Footsteps clank and clang echoing through the corridors and growing as Quark rushed down the stairs towards the control room. “Is Brine here?”

  “Hey! What’s new in the room with the view?” Brine smiled and waved over his friend.

  “Let me ask you for a favor.”

  “What’s the what? Got a new idea for a shindig?”

  “Not exactly. Well it’ll be cause for celebration enough I figure. Listen. I came up with an idea that’ll get me into the core.”

  “Assignments have been handed out. They don’t let people move you know. The balance is picked so we have enough of everything and no one gets left out once they reach the real world.”

  “I know but listen, they can just replace me on the next round of assignments with an extra business-type, accounting-whatever,” he was frustrated his excitement had not been returned. “But listen okay. I have an idea for how we can obtain energy via the CMB. I know they harness it for the shield on the delivery deck. I think we can ‘harvest’ it like they ‘fish’ for storm energy.”

  Andromeda walked up behind Quark and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned hoping to see Dr. Ibrahimzade. “Oh. Heya. Were you listening?” he smiled at her but could not help scanning the background like a radio telescope searching for a sign of hope.

  “I’ll listen, what’s your plan?” she said moving next to Brine. Quark looked in Brine’s smiling eyes as she handed the physics intern his lunch and sat in his chair opening her brown bag and retrieving a sandwich.

  “She brought you lunch?”

  “I made it for him this morning, for the past three actually,” she said.

  “Oh.” Quark looked for a chair himself. His mind caught unaware, his thoughts could not reach back to his weeks working with Poly at every free moment. He forgot about the CMB, the Cold Spot physics he had crammed into his brain and hastily analyzed with hope to change his life’s trajectory.

  “Oh,” he said again trying to summon his thoughts.

  “Take your time. It can’t be easy,” said Brine. As they ate more and more of the core team entered the control room. Quark watched as the interns laughed and told stories of their labs “…what’s the story in Fermiville?…” “…how was that possible without dismissing the very low entropy detected…” each snip he caught brought a tear closer to falling. He felt the hope he had clung to fade a little more with each laugh and bite. He thought about the dinner Volt and Maria left him each night.

  “Uh okay here it is,” one by one the crowd stopped chatting and listened like he had imagined students in labs listened to lectures on sunny afternoons at Faraday, while he labored in the tedious computer lab. Quark first explained how engineers were harnessing background radiation bombarding the ship to power the ship’s docking shell. This the core students knew. He fumbled over a few words and like a novice polemicist inadvertently creating a non-sequiter, jumped to his idea.

  “What if, I mean, I think we could create a kind of matrix on the exterior of alternating magnets that would generate an electromagnetic pulse as the ship passed through the background radiation, which as you know contains a small charged particles. We could harness the pulse and send it directly to the core obviating the need for external energy cells.”

  The young scientists were silent, save Nugget’s crunching on a wafer. Andromeda sighed and looked left and right seeing the blank faces and hollow eyes of her contemporaries. Brine nodded slowly and said, “You’ve put a lot of thought into your theory. Are you sure you were ready to present it?”

  “What do you mean? It’s sound. Poly and I both agreed.”

  A young man with a long neck and messy rat brown hair spoke up, in a cracking deep voice said, “Friend you’ve invented something marvelous.”

  “Really?” he smiled looking past Brine and Andromeda.

  “Yea you’ve invented a whole new category of stupid. No a phylum, a kingdom of idiocy.” With each insult the interns laughed and one by one broke into groups ignoring Quark and by extension Brine and Andromeda.

  Brine turned to Nugget, “You want to help out? Help us out I mean.”

  “I like my reputation just the way it is. No thanks.”

  The room felt warm under Quark’s collar. His heart thudded in an unpredictable rhythm like an olephont pacing the artificial earth floor at the Faraday Station Animal Park.

  “Maybe you could help me a little-” Quark said looking through his friends, past the interns, out the window at the core, “-maybe we could work on this-um-you want to-raisonberry home-maybe.”

  “You should go.”

  The room spun a little and Quark sat down. Andromeda put her arm around him, “You’ll be missed at your station. But you can stay here for a little while,” she scanned the room, a few coworkers rolled their eyes at her kindness, most ignored her like a ghost, “I wouldn’t want to. But that’s just me.”

  A quiet background sound filled the bedroom like a lullaby. Poly smiled at her maker singing gently along with the tune. Quark sat on the ground beside his bed. He hadn’t cleaned his room in weeks and his distraction both showed and smelled. There was a new message blinking in the corner of Poly’s screen. It read, “Get in touch, all our love.” He thought perhaps they would go away. Perhaps they would think his work was so important that he was as distracted as Hugh Everett driving his car. Important men had better things to do than answer their mom’s email. Brine probably skipped out. Maybe even Andromeda. Maybe Nugget. And did anyone else break from their work for fear of falling behind by even an hour? Of course not. Those legal scholars outside, laughing and playing with the cat (what was its name? Who cares?)

  When ‘The Black Bird’ rolled past a comet the light broke through his window causing a flare the color of wheat to reflect off his telescope and bisect the room. The line looked to him like the boundary imposed upon him by the men and machines of Faraday. The councilor said math could take him anywhere.

  And a knock on his antique wooden door woke him from the haze of self-pity.

  “You in there?” said Brine. “I know you are. Your roomies told me you are. Come on out. They’re about to feed that cat. It looks like a rabbit with the nose twitching!”

  Quark took his time answering. “Poly turn it down please. And open the door. It’s Brine.”

  Brine bounced in the room looking around smiling, “Yea this is what I thought it would look like.”

  “Clear something off and have a seat. If you want.”

  “So what’s up? You okay?” Brine wiped the food-stained pile of t-shirts from the star blue microfiber seat in the corner. “No one said anything after you left. Andromeda even said she kind of liked your initiative even if you don’t have the background for the hard sciences. Nugget said he dug the balls you have. I said, ‘Yea they’re as enlarged as your old man’s prostate.’ He said, ‘how do you know that?’ It was a good day.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I had hoped you would.”

  “Listen. You know I’ll fight for your right to test your hypothesis. Sure as Hell is a malfunctioning multiverse with no entropy, I think everyone deserves a shot at their dreams. So whaddaya say we ask Ali what he thinks?”

  “What do we say? I’ve got this half-ass’d hypothesis and I want to waste some of your resources testing it?”

  “Nope. We say, ‘Wouldn’t the world be a better place if there was some wise old prince to tell da Vinci to pick a topic and stick to it?’ Quark is an accountant. Who’s to say he can’t be more th
an what the algorithm made him?”

  “It is a good idea. Though maybe it could use some work.”

  “Maybe. How many years did you spend working out Poly’s odd ticks? Remember when she would cuss out anyone who came in the old room like a guard dog barking?”

  They shared a laugh. “Do you think Ali is in his office? I’m too excited to eat, sleep or play with the cat.”

  “You’ll never know if you don’t try.”

  Brine waited until Quark got his shoes on. They dashed through the kitchen on the way to the door. “You guys going out? If you want to hang we’ll be around this evening doing a marathon of ‘The World beyond the World.’” Maria shouted. Volt joined in, “Nice meeting you Brine!”

  The core team had wound down the day’s research operations, they had cleared the cooling system and flushed the energy cells with water to prevent overheating and thus a melt-through. The observation deck held two shadowy figures reclining as if falling asleep. Brine led Quark through the corridor banged on the wall of the observation deck and shouted, “Wake up or screw up,” and turned to his friend, “hey! Come to help us out?” he said to Andromeda passing through a crossing hallway.

  She looked up from her papers and waved, “What are you two misfits up too at this hour?”

  “Going to get permission for an experiment.”

  “Oh you going to get an assistant?” She bit her lower lip and lightly punched