by Paul Anlee
“Mr. Andrews. You do realize it’s just a social convention to dress up for these things, don’t you? I don’t think anyone actually enjoys wearing formal outfits.”
He pointed to Greg. “Certainly not your partner.”
Kathy redirected the reporter’s gaze to Prime Minister Hudson, who was deep in conversation with China’s newest President. “I don’t think either Ms. Hudson or Mr. Xiu is any more comfortable than Greg. And I’m sure they’ve been to many more of these things than both of us combined. Anyway, I’m just a simple engineer from California, so I’m more used to work clothes, myself.”
“You could have fooled me. You look ravishing in that dress.”
Kathy would have blushed if she hadn’t been so repulsed by the man. She did her best to keep her feelings to herself. It would only make life more difficult if she alienated the press. Besides, in another decade he would meet his own bleak demise—a small but satisfying consolation. She thought of all the irritating types of people she would be leaving behind once the Eater consumed the Earth.
A small, satisfied smile escaped before she buried it beneath her guilt. I shouldn’t think like that.
Andrews misinterpreted the smirk for warmth and, beaming, offered his arm to escort her.
At the bottom of the staircase, she politely thanked him for his assistance. He slipped her a business card on which he’d pre-written his hotel and room number.
Eew, tacky! She wondered how many of those he’d dispense that night. Before the reporter could become an even greater nuisance, Greg arrived. He rescued her with a glass of champagne, sending the annoying Mr. Andrews to find someone more susceptible to his wiles.
Reverend LaMontagne spotted Greg and Kathy standing by the windows looking out over the harbor. “You two are to be congratulated,” he said in his heartiest Texas accent. “This has been a magnificent achievement.”
“As much yours, as ours, Reverend,” Greg replied.
“That shall forever remain our little secret,” LaMontagne answered. The three of them clinked glasses and laughed. It felt good to forget the fear that had been driving them, and just enjoy their successes tonight.
As his country’s Permanent Representative to Project Vesta, Reverend LaMontagne was given the honor of officially introducing the first Vesta colonists.
The colonists would soon be on their way, and it would be impossible to undo the fact that their numbers included a much higher percentage of the Alumita members than one might statistically expect. It was surprising nobody had noticed, or at least not mentioned, that detail.
Not that LaMontagne anticipated much difficulty in getting the team to overlook the anomaly. Certainly, everyone on the list was qualified, and their loyalty to such a strong supporter of the Project as Alum Himself could only be to the colony’s benefit.
“You two make quite the handsome couple,” LaMontagne continued. “Will you be among the first to bless our new colony with children?”
Kathy grimaced. This had been a sore spot between the couple for some years. Greg had pushed to start a family shortly after they got married. I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to bring a child into a world with such a short expiry date—she’d argued. It was the only thing they’d ever seriously argued about.
“Hey, we don’t even know if our application to join Vesta will be accepted,” Greg said and winked.
Kathy regarded her husband suspiciously. “Of course, we’ll be accepted.”
Greg laughed. “You never know.”
LaMontagne joked, “If Vesta won’t have you, then we’ll simply have to build another colony that will.”
Kathy changed the subject. “You’re looking quite dashing this evening, Reverend.”
“Oh, my dear. No flirting. At my age, that might do more harm than good,” he joked. It was a rare occasion when the Reverend attempted such an endearing jest. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood tonight.
One of the organizers came by to let them know they had thirty minutes before they were expected on stage.
“I have a surprise for you,” Greg said out of the blue.
“A surprise?” Kathy and the Reverend asked in chorus.
“Yeah, I was going to show you later, but I can’t wait. Let’s go in here.” He led them to one of the empty side rooms and locked the doors behind them.
“Why so mysterious?” Kathy asked.
It’s not like him to be this way—she thought with a guilty twinge. But I guess we all have our secrets. She pushed aside thoughts of DAR’s true intellect.
“Hard as it may be to believe, I’ve had some spare time over the past decade,” he said. “In that time, I’ve made a discovery or two of my own.”
“You’ve found a way to stop the Eater!” the Reverend tried.
“Sadly, no. I’ll keep trying, though.”
“Don’t keep us guessing! What is it?” Kathy asked.
Greg reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a tablet. “Lady and gentleman, I present the RAF shifter.”
Kathy and the Reverend exchanged confused glances. RAF stood for Reality Assertion Field, but what on Earth was an RAF shifter? “Okay, I give. What is it?”
“The world’s smallest RAF device.” Greg held the tablet in his best imitation of a game show prize presenter. “It’s small because it has only one function: to move things.”
LaMontagne couldn’t help his curiosity. “Does it generate some kind of tractor field?”
“No, not that kind of moving. It…shifts them, is how I like to think of it.”
Kathy frowned. “Shifts how? Ooh, do you mean like a warp drive?” She was only half joking. She tolerated Greg’s love of science fiction stories, but wondered how a real scientist could let his imagination run wild that way.
“Not exactly. You know about the quantum EM and Higgs fields, right?”
“Child’s play, my dear. Move along. We only have twenty minutes.”
“This device disconnects matter from those quantum fields for a short period of time. During that time, an object is no longer of this universe and is not constrained by its laws of motion.”
Kathy tried to think through the implications. “Wouldn’t you just disappear? You might reappear somewhere, but likely not where you started. Nor where you intended.”
“Exactly!” said a proud Greg. “Unless, that is, you could find some kind of anchor. Now, for your bonus question. What effect seems to instantaneously exchange information between particles, no matter where those particles are located in the universe?”
“Well, quantum entanglement, for one. Einstein’s old ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Everyone knows that. Interesting effect but not really useful for anything.”
“Oh, sure,” laughed Greg, “everyone knows that. Okay, so we really haven’t found a way to use quantum entanglement for anything important…until now.”
“What are you talking about?” Kathy was getting impatient. Greg’s mystifying disclosure was going nowhere, and it was taking a long time to get there.
“If I may,” interrupted the Reverend. “Are you suggesting you can disconnect an object from the natural laws that limit its rate of motion?”
Greg nodded excitedly.
“And you can use entangled particles to help that object find its way back to some specific place in the universe?”
“Yes!” Greg’s eyes sparkled. He held up the tablet. “And this device is all it takes!”
He fiddled with some buttons on the screen, and disappeared.
“Hello,” he called from the other end of the long conference room.
Kathy was astonished, which was a considerable feat in itself. She’d seen a lot of “miracles” since working with Darian. The problems they solved every day on Project Vesta were astonishing. But she hadn’t imagined Greg’s surprise discovery.
In no more than a blink, Greg reappeared beside them.
Questions rolled through her mind. Some were obvious in retrospect. She and Greg
had been spending a lot of time in their own separate worlds. She was on the road most days, and he was tied to the labs. Clearly, he’d made this discovery while she was away and had tested it on his own.
The thought of it irked her. He was flashing in and out of existence without her, without telling her. She held off giving him a piece of her mind, and considered the timing of the disclosure. He’d saved the big reveal for today so it must be relevant to Vesta.
“Greg, what’s the range of this thing?”
“Bingo,” he exclaimed, “The sixty-four million dollar question! The answer is…infinity. We can go anywhere, instantly. Well, anywhere with the right entangled pair of particles.” He smiled broadly in maddening glee.
The Reverend sat down. He rested his chin on his hand and thought furiously. How can the Church get control of this technology? How can we use it to our advantage? It’s far too valuable to be left in the hands of the Project management or national governments.
The obvious solution would be to just take it…but how? I’ll have to get Trillian on that project right away. I hope Greg keeps electronic or physical notes outside his own brain. I’m not sure even a genius of Trillian’s level could hack his dendy lattice.
Aloud LaMontagne said, “Greg, this is wonderful news. It means the transportation bottleneck to Vesta has been removed.”
“What do you mean?” cried Kathy. “This opens up the stars! If we can travel anywhere, we can explore the entire galaxy.”
“Not that I didn’t already think of that,” replied Greg. “But there are two problems. First, we don’t have enough time to find and terraform a suitable planet orbiting another star, so we’re stuck with what we have for now.
“Second, in order to navigate a return to this universe, you need an entangled pair of particles. Over a range of a few hundred meters, it’s easy to find paired virtual electrons from a static charge. But over interstellar distances? Unfortunately, not that easy. We’re limited to the speed of light in a fairly conventional way until we can ship some entangled particles to a new star.”
Kathy looked crestfallen.
“Hey! There’s still a lot of good news in this,” Greg said. “We can move people off Earth a lot faster than before. We’ll be able to save as many people as Vesta can hold. Maybe thirty or forty million instead of the ten million we’d planned.”
“Still, we’re limited to what Vesta can hold,” Kathy replied.
“Perhaps I have something that could help with that,” said LaMontagne. “I’ve also been busy in the experimentation department.”
“When did you develop an interest in science?” Greg asked.
“I am offended, young man,” the Reverend responded, feigning hurt. “I’ll have you know the dendy lattice has opened my mind to a whole universe of possibilities. In the final analysis, even God saw fit to back up his decrees with threats of punishment. Taking a chapter from the Good Book, so to speak, I’ve been working on a new weapon.”
“Of course,” Greg said. He meant it ironically. Both he and Kathy knew that LaMontagne’s interests ran more to the applications of power and persuasion than to the strictly theological. It was not enough to merely speak of the promised Kingdom of God, one should do everything in one’s powers to hasten the arrival of that Kingdom on Earth.
LaMontagne took Greg’s utterance at face value. “In light of what you’ve shown us, I think this particular weapon might prove useful beyond its original intent. Let me demonstrate.”
He sent a request to share an inSense video with their lattices.
They accepted. Fifteen years of working together had convinced them the Reverend had no designs on their brainpower other than to put them to work on the Project. Anyway, their security was up to fending off any unwanted attempts to hijack their conceptas.
The video opened on a desert scene. The ground was covered in rock, brush, and dry grasses. “This is the Chisos Basin of Big Bend National Park in Texas,” LaMontagne said. The video panned the area revealing low, rocky mountains, buttes, and mesas. It stopped on a clear crystalline rod mounted on a tripod, its barrel pointed at the side of a nearby mesa.
“I’ve embedded a cylindrical RAF generator in this device,” LaMontagne continued. “It produces a rather enormous amount of energy when activated. Keep an eye on that mesa, about a kilometer away.
An intense, pulsating, conical violet beam leaped from the end of the device. By the time it struck the rocky side of the mesa, it was ten meters across. The part of the slope it struck was instantly vaporized, sending gushes of incandescent steam outward and upward. As it pushed through the rocks, the beam self-adjusted so that the vaporized area didn’t grow much wider. In less than a minute, it drilled through the mesa, leaving a ten-meter tunnel.
“As you can surmise, this new weapon I’ve been working on could be used as a tool to accelerate the process of building colony tunnels in other asteroids. We could expand our efforts and save many millions more.”
Greg silently fumed. Yes, the utility of this new “tool” as he’d called it was undeniable. But it was still primarily a weapon being sold as a tool.
I’m not happy to see RAF technology being used to develop weapons but, realistically, what else could I expect? I value the Reverend’s support of Project Vesta. Can I trust his motives?
Kathy broke the silence. “So does this mean we can immediately expand Project Vesta to include Ceres and Pallas? They’d be the next two most obvious target colonies.”
Neither man responded, and she interpreted their hesitation as uncertainty about her proposal. “Oh, come on! This means we can save almost a hundred million people. Not to mention tens of millions more minds that we can instantiate inside Cybrids. It’s perfect!”
“In theory, I would agree,” Greg offered reluctantly.
“Fantastic!” Kathy clasped her hands together and spun around, ecstatic.
Greg quickly added, “But let’s not publicly announce any of these new developments until we’ve discussed them with the PM. People can have a hard time adjusting to new technologies, especially when they’re as radical as these. I mean this is big, maybe even bigger than limitless energy or Cybrids.”
Kathy and the Reverend agreed. Private discussions before public disclosure.
Regardless, she was elated. She wasn’t going to let her joy be diminished by Greg’s caution.
More colony space and better transportation!
Today was a good day.
25
“Heavenly Yeshua, bless this Church and these, your people, for thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. Amen.”
John Trillian smiled discreetly as he muttered his own, “Amen” from backstage. His laptop was open on the small table in front of him. Today was a big day at Yeshua’s True Guard Church of the Prophet Alum in Austin.
“Be seated, my friends.” Reverend Alan LaMontagne stood at center stage, looking over his adoring flock. Thousands settled into their cushioned chairs in the nave, mezzanine, and balconies.
Television cameras representing various networks relayed his image around the world: aged, wise, and serene but still showing a glint of fire and brimstone in the eyes.
A team of assistants stood attentively in the wings, and a two-hundred member choir, resplendent in their rich purple and gold robes, formed a regal backdrop behind him.
The Reverend walked around to the side of his podium, leaving a steadying hand on its solid oak edge, and nodded to the recently elected President Heath situated prominently in his private box seat.
“My friends,” he began. His amplified voice filled the spacious structure and reverberated to the farthest reaches of the globe. “I have some great news for you today.”
He paused for dramatic effect and savored the sight of his beloved congregation—his greatest achievement—and the magnificent building they occupied.
Unlike many Pentecostal churches that eschewed science and technology, Yeshua’s True Guard Church had taken a strong p
ro-technology stance over the past eighteen years. The Glory Hall of the Diamond Cathedral reflected that stance. It inspired glowing admiration—if not outright worship—on its own account.
Modeled loosely on the spectacular old Crystal Cathedral of California, it was an engineering masterpiece three times larger than its predecessor. Its outer walls were made of insanely expensive diamond-coated borosilicate glass, chosen for its striking beauty and significantly greater strength over the “ordinary” glass of the older building. The walls required only the thinnest of metal support struts, more for convenience than structural strength.
The Diamond Cathedral glittered where its predecessor had merely gleamed, and shone where the other had only sparkled.
A weighty forty-meter cross and Savior rising up from the back of the stage bestowed gravity and solemnity to proceedings. The artist had placed a subtly stern expression on the face of the Savior, which was echoed by the spearmen protecting the base of the cross from curious tourists.
The spearmen were the most literal representation of Yeshua’s True Guard. The spears were adorned with their Savior’s flag, the Christian cross centered atop a brilliant sun with a pair of swords overlaid along the diagonal. The same flag was proudly displayed around the Hall, adding to the military feel.
When questioned about the militaristic touches in the cathedral, the Reverend once proudly explained that it was intentional: it was a tribute to the embattled founding of the Church and of the country. He openly rejected the whole “lion lying with the lamb” stance held by other churches, calling it, “dangerously irresponsible, blind pacifism.”
Sensing the optimum level of eager anticipation had been achieved in his congregation, LaMontagne resumed.
“I am an old man in a young Church,” he confided and held up his free hand to quell the anticipated protests from his choir, assistants, and followers.
