The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  The waiter brought their orders. They said grace and dug in, quietly savoring the food as they chewed. Pratt was the first to break the silence. “How has the team been dealing with the failure of the experiment? What has it been, about a month?”

  “Yes. It was just before Christmas break.” Larry realized he was speaking with a mouthful of food; he finished chewing and swallowed before continuing. “We didn’t get much of a vacation, though. Darian had us all working overtime to figure out what went wrong.” He grinned mischievously, though Pratt couldn’t imagine why. Working overtime through the Christmas holidays didn’t sound like fun at all.

  “Perhaps the theory is incorrect,” Pratt suggested.

  “Well, that would serve them right.” Larry studied his plate, planning his next bite as carefully as his next words. “They were all so sure of themselves. They never thought to question whether the whole RAF theory was moral or right, even when I pointed out their hubris. I told them God would not take lightly to messing with His creation like that. They gave me absolutely no credit; they treated me like a foolish child.”

  “You could have been one of them. You chose not to take the dendy virus pill.”

  Larry looked up, a flash of anger crossing his face. “Who could pervert their own brains that way? They’re more machine than human. I don’t trust them. I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of them.”

  “Well, their lattices don’t seem to have helped them out this time.”

  “Ha! They put such trust in their so-called super intelligence. It seems they’re not all that smart in the end.”

  “Well, their intellectual prowess may exceed ours, but I do wonder what they’ve given up to achieve that.” Pratt stared wistfully at the little wavelets lapping against the hulls of the boats.

  “Kathy and Greg would say they’ve given up nothing. They’re lovers now, you know.”

  “Oh? Does Darian know?”

  “Yeah. It’s just another factor to consider when he assigns work.”

  Pratt sensed that it was more than simple jealousy behind Larry’s tone. “And how does that affect you?” he asked gently.

  “They can do whatever they want,” Larry replied. “It makes no difference to me. Greg changed the day he took that pill. You know, we used to be best friends, ever since the first day of grad school. We were in the same field, but we never competed with each other. We were colleagues, good colleagues. We worked together on most of our papers. In fact, our supervisor actually called us into her office one day to warn us to be careful to distinguish between each other’s contributions.”

  Dr. Pratt worked on his burger while Larry talked. “I’m sorry you lost your friend. That must be difficult on you, to see him every day.”

  “If Reverend LaMontagne hadn’t asked me to keep an eye on the group, I think I would have left when Darian got back from the hospital.”

  “Right, the shooting. That was shocking, wasn’t it? How is Darian doing? Is he recovering well?”

  “He still favors his left shoulder. It seems to be healing okay but I’m sure it still hurts. It hasn’t slowed him down, though. I’m not sure anything slows him down.”

  “What are they doing to resolve the problem?”

  Larry took a few quick bites of his own sandwich, downing it with a sip of water. “All the usual. Taking everything apart: the theory, the hardware, the software. Testing everything. Checking their assumptions. Seeing if there’s indication of any activity whatsoever. It’s difficult because the RAF generator is binary. It either works or it doesn’t. But even if the device is working, if there is no evidence of new or changed physical laws, it looks like it’s not doing anything. There’s no intermediate result.”

  “And have they found anything wrong?”

  Again, Larry grinned mischievously. “Not yet.”

  Pratt was relieved. “Well, if the theory is wrong, and the device doesn’t work, that will come as welcome news to the Reverend, won’t it?”

  “Oh, the theory is correct. The device works perfectly.”

  Pratt choked a little, as sweet, hot coffee found its way down his windpipe. “Excuse me?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with either the theory or the RAF generator. I’ve used it a number of times.”

  “But I thought you said the tests did not work.”

  “Their tests didn’t work.” Larry lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “I installed a slight modification to the controller BIOS. Unless I’m signed on as the operator, the RAF interrupts are routed into a side routine that adds a degree of randomness to the generated field. That randomness overwhelms the generated standing-wave resonances so they collapse without effect. None of them even thought to question the BIOS program. It’s the standard externally-supplied software-on-a-chip so they just assume everything is fine with it.”

  “You’ve actually used the device?”

  “Yes, I have. It doesn’t do very much yet; it just alters a few physical constants.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the first test altered the speed of light, exactly like Darian predicted. I’ve managed to alter the physical laws within a tiny microverse so light travels at about four times its regular velocity.”

  “That is remarkable,” said an excited Dr. Pratt. “We must inform the Reverend.”

  “Soon. First, I have few more tests to run. Tonight, I’m going to try altering permitted electron orbitals in molecular bonds. Just to see if I can affect a bit of chemistry.”

  “Isn’t that getting into dangerous territory?”

  Larry’s short, loud laugh drew attention from the other patrons. He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “It’s not like I’m changing the nuclear force. It won’t set off an explosion or anything. I’m not insane like they are. Be grateful that God saw fit to place me where I would be first to operate this thing. In the wrong hands, say, Darian’s hands, it could be extremely dangerous.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt.”

  “Anyway, I just want to see if I can change the requirement for how many electrons fulfill the outer orbitals in the atoms that form a water molecule. Make HO-water instead of H2O. It should be interesting but, otherwise, generally inconsequential. I would not presume to tinker with things I don’t understand. Unlike some people, I can make moral choices.”

  “I suppose I’ll need to leave it to your judgment.”

  “I’d invite you to come have a look, but I think you’d find it boring.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. There wouldn’t really be much to see, would there?”

  “Just some measurements on a computer display. A whole lot of nothing to the average layperson.”

  “Hmm. In that case, I’ll take your word for it that the device actually works.”

  “Oh, it works. But only for me.”

  “How long before the rest of the team figures this out?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. They’re all so smart and so noble that none of them have figured out I might be hiding something from them. I’ll be able to run the RAF generator for months before anyone clues in.”

  “Promise me, if you get any sense they realize that they’ve been duped, you’ll let us know?”

  “Sure thing. Then you can get me out of here and move me somewhere out of their reach, somewhere inside the New Confederacy. I’ll expect a very nice position. Maybe at the University of Houston.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged once we have the device in our control. Until then, please be careful.”

  “I’m always careful, Dr. Pratt.” Larry reached over and scooped up some ketchup with Pratt’s last fry, and popped it into his mouth.

  25

  Greg waved his hands slowly and evenly, back and forth, back and forth, in rhythm with his breathing and purposeful sideway steps. This was the second last pass of Move Hands Like Clouds; they had about eleven minutes remaining in the routine.

  He’d only begun practicing Tai Chi a month ago but already preferred
the discipline over the various styles of yoga he’d studied as a child. Maybe that was because he’d never met anyone like Kathy in his yoga classes.

  And now, this! This was great. Together with six other students from their school, he and Kathy were giving a public demonstration of the Yang-style 85 form in the South Corridor Courtyard of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.

  They faced the corridor because, as the ancient saying went, “To face the south is to become a king.” A quietly appreciative audience gathered in the open courtyard in front of them and along the other three sides of the jade green pool behind them.

  Greg’s lattice had enabled him to memorize the complex martial art routine almost instantly. Sadly, his muscles had yet to become accustomed to the deceptively rigorous movements, let alone the brutally slow place of this traditional Yang form. As they approached the twenty-minute mark, he could feel his heart beating rapidly and his legs shaking from fatigue. The form was surprisingly challenging, both mentally and physically. Just a bit longer. It gets easier once we get past the last Needle at the Bottom of the Seabed.

  Over the past few months, Greg discovered he loved everything Chinese. He loved the food, the music, the architecture, the martial arts, the language and, most of all, Kathy Liang. They were happy to learn that Darian also had an appreciation of the ancient culture. When he and Kathy requested the Saturday morning off to take part in a Tai Chi demonstration at the Sun Yat-Sen gardens, Darian not only gave them permission but came along to watch.

  Truth be told, Greg and Kathy welcomed a little respite from the stress of the past five weeks. They were trying their best to be a normal couple, to nurture the love that was growing between them, but it wasn’t easy. They managed to steal away for a dinner date, a walk in the misty rain, or an occasional movie, but Darian granted time away from work begrudgingly, and only when exhaustion or tedium hampered productivity. By the time they got home, they barely had enough energy left to cook, eat, and crash, painfully aware that next morning’s alarm would come too early for their liking.

  In the meantime, the dendy lattices growing inside their heads pushed relentlessly forward, displacing and replacing biological neurons.

  Ever since the shooting, which Darian now referred to as, “The Event,” he had altered the lattice development program to make its host—that is, each of them—less reliant on the body’s natural biology.

  For now, the combination of retreating biology and aggressive semiconductor growth made all three of them more prone to total mental shutdown than they had been in prior weeks. Darian promised that would change after the system adapted. Once it did, their bodies and minds would no longer need the restorative cycles of sleep. They would be able to work as much as they wanted, provided they took care of their physical requirements.

  Greg wasn’t quite sure he liked the sound of that. I guess I’m not ready to be primarily machine-driven quite yet.

  Darian’s dendy program upgrade, having been implemented before the others’ as a precautionary measure, was further along in its progress. He didn’t need internal system checks to measure the improvements, he could tell by the dwindling hours he was able to work without rest.

  The man was obsessed with solving the enigma of the RAF generator dysfunction. Like so many compulsively dedicated scientists before him, other aspects of his life were starting to suffer, notably, his hygiene, his health, and his patience. He spent his days in electronic communication with Greg in a shared virtual, computational space he had constructed on his desktop computer.

  There, the two of them reworked the RAF equations from as many different starting principles as they could imagine. They compared the computed predictions with every cosmological, subatomic, and quantum experiment of the past century.

  As a result of their investigations, they proposed a host of new experiments, many of which they sent out to groups around the world. At least twenty new, ground-breaking tests would be underway over the next few months at research institutes in China, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Brazil, Pacifica, and the United States of North America.

  Though politics had rearranged national alliances over the past few decades, science was as international as it had ever been. Those with the most appropriate expertise were sent proposals for new experiments regardless of their physical locations. Darian insisted that his research benefit all of humanity; borders and political alignments were irrelevant.

  The team knew something was wrong, most likely with the theory. Otherwise, the RAF generator would have worked. They held to the premise expressed by one of Darian’s favorite sayings, “Mother Nature is never wrong.” If that were true, they must have missed some important clue in the petabytes of available experimental data. Once discovered, the overlooked data would explain why the Reality Assertion Field theory could not be correct.

  But the more they probed, the better the theory stood up. Darian’s frustration with his inability to spot which of his initial assumptions was faulty began to wear on all of them.

  There was still a slim possibility that the theory was right, and that something had gone wrong with the implementation of the RAF generator. They’d run a cursory check early on in their testing and almost entirely ruled that out but…still. What else was left?

  One day, Darian asked Kathy and Larry to log every schematic, along with videos and intermediate test results into Darian’s workspace.

  While the others slept, Darian reviewed all of the engineering specs and functional tests of the device. He went over everything. He checked the approach, the implementation, and the operational verifications. He proposed new tests at every step to ensure that every part was functioning to spec. He could find nothing that wasn’t working exactly as designed. It was infuriating.

  Everything in Darian’s world moved at hyper-speed, including the questions around his competency. Within days of the publicized failure of the RAF test, the first grumblings began. “Maybe the university had been too ambitious to hire the wunderkind.” “Maybe Leigh was more of an engineer than a real scientist.” “Maybe the young genius had been fooled by his own brilliance or by his early successes.”

  Normally, fledgling tenure-track professors were granted a full two or three years to prove their academic mettle. Darian’s cockiness had heightened expectations to such a degree that, in the minds of much of the Faculty, the usual honeymoon period did not apply to him.

  It didn’t take long for the grumblings to find the ear of the Department Chair, and Dr. Wong saw no choice but to bring the concerns forward to the Dean of Sciences. Unaccustomed to failure in any intellectual arena, Darian reacted predictably. He was defensive and arrogant.

  “I would be happy for anyone to show me where I’ve gone wrong. However, seeing as no one outside of my team is capable of following the math in any reasonable period of time, I will likely be very old before outside help will be found to be in any way useful.”

  Dr. Wong was a seasoned veteran of departmental politics and knew when to withdraw quietly. He’d watched many star performers burn brightly at the beginning and flame out under the institutional pressures of constant productivity. He didn’t take Darian’s implied criticism personally. But while he let the comment pass, his estimation of the young man’s probable long-term outlook dropped significantly.

  Weeks passed without resolution of the academic or political problems picking away at the Faculty. The grumbling grew louder. Administrators from Dr. Wong to President Sakira urged patience, but the complainers enlisted the aid of those whose original protests over Darian’s research were based on philosophical or religious grounds, rather than scientific or safety concerns.

  Several groups organized rallies against Dr. Leigh’s work. Yesterday’s rally outside the President’s office was sponsored by the local chapter of Yeshua’s True Guard Church.

  “With the birth of His Son so recently celebrated,” declared the Archbishop of Vancouver, “God, Himself, has seen fit to demonstrate Hi
s dominion over the laws of nature. This experiment of Dr. Leigh’s has been, is, and always will be a failure. It is an abomination to our Lord. It is the work of Satan, and it must be stopped.”

  When he bothered to pay them any attention at all, Darian scoffed at the ridiculousness of the protests. “They have no scientific basis whatsoever. They’re just posturing for soundbites on the evening news.”

  He may have been right, but that did little to comfort the Board of Governors attending their first meeting of the New Year. Though academic freedom was purported to be highly valued among that eminent gathering, in the end, it came down to an uncomfortably close vote.

  The decision on whether to censure Dr. Leigh’s work was tabled for the following month.

  * * *

  The Tai Chi demo moved into the final Down Form and Step Forward With Seven Stars. Greg caught his mind drifting. He brought it back to the present, finishing the form with the required mindfulness, and as smoothly as he could muster on his trembling legs. As the music came to a close, the group held the closing position, then straightened and lowered their arms in perfect synchrony. The spectators applauded as the class took three deep breaths in silent meditation and were done. Several from the audience approached the group to congratulate the instructor and students, and to inquire about lessons.

  “That was great,” Darian said, his broad smile echoed by others gathering nearby. “I really should think about taking it up myself.”

  “I’m sure you already have all the moves memorized,” Greg replied. “I saw you following along with us.”

  “Guilty as charged. But you’ll note my movements were microscopic. It’s been so long since I’ve done anything like that, I’m afraid the body would find it hard to follow the brain’s instructions on a larger scale.”

  “It’s a really good break from working. Apart from the exercise, I find it very meditative, very calming, and deceptively challenging.”

  “I’ve always wanted to take up something like that. I like Kung Fu movies but I could never handle that level of intensity. Maybe this would be a happy medium or a good starting point. I’ve read that one should master Tai Chi before beginning Kung Fu.”