by Mike Smith
*****
The notebook crashed onto the table with a jarring impact and Alex had to keep a tight grip on his glass, to stop the contents spilling across the desk. With papers spread everywhere, this would have been of significant detriment to the Professor and his work. Not that Alex thought that the man particularly cared, as the Professor stumbled to his feet, pacing backwards and forwards, cursing in frustration.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he grumbled, waving his hands about wildly. With his wrinkled face, piercing grey eyes and long, shoulder length silver hair, he was the epitome of the mad professor.
Having spent an inordinate amount of time with the man over the last few months, Alex was more than used to his mercurial moods. Taking the remains of his half-eaten sandwich between his lips to free both of his hands, he spun the notebook around flipping it to the last page, running his eyes over the jumbled numbers and letters.
They were complete gibberish. As if a five-year old had gone mad, writing upside down, right to left, bottom to top. The way the Professor was ranting and raving, most people would have had the man carted off to the nearest asylum for the insane. Still Alex wasn’t most people, having spent the past few months closely observing the man, he had eventually deciphered his personal cypher. It really was quite ingenious. It only took him a few minutes to spot the mistake and, spinning the book back around to face the Professor, Alex took the remnants of the sandwich from his mouth and with his remaining free hand stabbed at the spot in the book.
“There!” Alex declared loudly, to be overheard by the Professor. “You raised it to the fourth power, not the fifth,” he declared confidently, interrupting the Professor mid-flow.
“What?” the man barked, looking at Alex in surprise. “What do you know about multi-dimensional superstring theory?”
“I read it in a book once,” Alex shrugged nonchalantly.
“A book?” Henry Alcubierre snorted in disdain. “And just where did you find such a book?”
“You’d be amazed at what you can find in dusty rooms, while having a clear-out.”
“And who may I ask wrote such a book?” Henry sniffed. “I’ve yet to find one that wasn’t just science-fiction, or a complete fantasy.”
“You did,” Alex replied unperturbed. “Or at least your great, great, grand-father, Miguel.”
“Preposterous,” Henry dismissed the possibility out of hand. “Miguel only ever produced three copies, one remains in High-Lord Hadley’s personal library, closely guarded, the other is in my possession, and the final one is—”
“—in my library.”
“Even if what you say is true, it’s impossible for you to understand it, it’s written—”
“—in English. Yes, I know.”
“And you read English? A language that ceased to exist over four hundred years ago?” Henry snorted.
“Yes.”
“Dare I ask how you managed this miraculous feat?”
“Another book,” Alex replied. “Parlez-vous français?” At the confused look from Henry, Alex sighed. “It’s French. According to the book that I learnt it from, it was the pre-eminent spoken language on Earth at the end of the Twenty First Century. It seems it was spoken by all the intellectuals of the time.” Alex shrugged, eyeing the remains of his half-eaten sandwich hungrily as he’d missed breakfast that morning.
“Anyway, it’s totally preposterous,” Henry shook his head in disdain. “There is no way you could understand this problem and…” his voice trailed off, eyes widening in disbelief as he ran his eyes over the calculation that Alex had pointed out. Looking up from the book he focused on the man sitting unconcernedly across the table, who had already resumed eating. “Who are you?” he demanded incredulously.
“Me? Just a soldier, or more specifically an ex-soldier,” Alex said, having finished off his sandwich. “Although as High-Lord Lee Hyun-Woo is paying me to guard you and this facility, I suppose technically that makes me a mercenary,” he added distastefully.
“No,” Henry disagreed, pointing his finger at Corporal Frank Banks, who was currently inhabiting another reality, literally, as he was caught up in a virtual reality simulation. From the way he was grinding his hips, grunting, it was obviously not Final Fantasy XXXII. “That is a mercenary,” Henry exclaimed in disgust. “So that makes me wonder who you are?”
“Me? I’m a nobody.”
“In that case where are you from?”
“Nowhere.”
“Everybody comes from somewhere. Where were you born?”
“Deneb,” came the resigned reply, “near enough.”
“Parents, family?”
“Deceased, or at least my mother is—she was a prostitute. My father?” Alex looked up thoughtfully for a moment, “Could’ve been anybody. There were certainly enough men passing through when I grew up, and yes, before you kindly suggest it, that makes me a bastard.”
“In that case,” Henry Alcubierre replied, with a curious glint in his eye, “How is it that I recognise you?”
*****
“Where did he recognise you from?” I asked, totally engrossed in the unfolding story.
“He never could remember,” father sighed. “Although he swore to me, until the day that he died, that I reminded him of somebody.”
“How long did you spend with the Professor?”
“Several months,” he replied. “My squad and I were hired to guard him and protect the facility where he worked. It was a high-tech, secret, research laboratory, so there was very little security but the High-Lord wanted the Professor closely guarded and insisted on daily progress reports.”
“Why? What was the Professor working on?” I asked, wide-eyed with curiosity.
My father was silent for a long time, as if weighing up just how much to tell me, before whispering quietly to me, almost as if he was afraid that the surrounding trees had ears. “A weapon.”
I blinked, hardly expecting that answer. “A weapon?” I echoed incredulously.
My father just nodded.
“And where is this weapon now?” I prompted him.
My father looked at me in surprise, as if he couldn’t comprehend the question. “Well, I have it, of course. Why do you think I’ve spent the past thirty years here, hiding on the very edge of the Imperium?”
“You have the weapon, designed and built by Professor Henry Alcubierre?” I knew I was starting to sound like a broken record, stuck on repeat, but in all honesty, I just didn’t know what else to say.
My father nodded again, but I couldn’t see any laughter in his eyes, nor his lips upturned in a smile. If this was some sort of joke, he gave no outwardly visible sign.
“Let me see it then,” I insisted and, after a moment’s hesitation, my father turned about-face, heading back the way that we had just come. Literally. As we then spent the next twenty minutes retracing our steps until, once again, I found myself standing in front of the ship, the Céleste.
“It's inside the ship?” I asked confused.
“No, that is the weapon,” he insisted, motioning towards the ship.
I glanced at it once again, but it remained unchanged, sitting in the middle of the cavern, still, silent and about as threatening as a mouse. Seriously, I had seen bottle openers that had appeared more menacing.
“Watch carefully,” my father broke the embarrassing silence, activating the remote that he had been carrying with him since he had discovered me earlier. With a few deft taps on the device, he nodded his head.
I looked round, expecting some sort of massive death ray to suddenly appear, but nothing happened and for a moment I wondered if it hadn’t worked. It took me a few moments to register what had happened, as it was not immediately obvious.
The ship—had vanished!
“It’s a cloaking device,” I breathed in sudden understanding. For I had heard differing rumours of such devices over the years, but had never come close to one. I looked carefully at where the ship had been parked, loo
king for shadows, trailing edges, reflecting light, anything to indicate that a ship was hidden there, but I couldn’t see a thing. The ship had completely vanished. I would swear that we were the only occupants of the room. “Very impressive,” I conceded. “What does it use? Metamaterials? Optical camouflage or Retro-Reflective projection?”
“No, nothing like that,” my father snorted dismissively. Reaching down to the floor and picking up a small rock, obviously left over from when the cave had been hollowed out, and tossed it to me. “Throw it at the ship,” he insisted, gesturing to the centre of the cavern where the ship remained hidden.
Shrugging my shoulders, not completely understanding the reason behind the request, but complying nonetheless, I threw the rock in the direction of the ship. It was a good throw, striking the ship squarely amidships—or it should have.
Instead it passed cleanly through.
I could only stare, speechless, observing the rock strike the far wall, on the other side of the room. Only then did it hit me. There was no other entrance, or exit, to the cavern apart from the small corridor that we had just entered by.
So how had the ship got here, and just where had it gone?
I would find out the next day when my father explained just what Professor Henry Alcubierre had invented, but that explanation had to wait, as I had already fainted dead away.
I, of course, blamed it on my lack of sleep the night before.
*****
“A fusion reactor? That’s impossible,” I vehemently disagreed.
“You use that term so confidently,” my father sighed. “Who are you to say what is possible and what is not?”
“I’ve seen a fusion reactor. It’s hard to miss, what with it being a few hundred feet tall and all.”
My father and I had been having this same argument for the last few hours, ever since he had first explained to me how the ship worked. While he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t know all the details, he had worked closely with the Professor for several months. The basic principal was similar to the Alcubierre FTL drive. The Celeste was fitted with one, but instead of being surrounded by a negative-energy field, it moved into one of the other thirteen dimensions of super-string theory. This was identical to our own, but where time flowed at a different pace, moving the ship slightly out of phase, that infinitesimal tick between the second hand of a clock. From the perspective of a person observing the ship from this reality—it simply vanished.
“The shielding alone to contain the reaction would be hundreds of feet thick, and that doesn’t even include the cooling systems required for the superconductors to maintain the integrity of the magnetic containment shell.”
“So what you’re saying is that you cannot build a self-contained fusion reactor, less than a hundred feet in diameter, correct?” my father asked.
“Absolutely.”
“I see,” my father smirked. In the blink of an eye he smoothly drew the fusion pistol, which I hadn’t even noticed him carrying, the beam surging forward and striking a tree, several metres distant, dead centre.
“Then I guess that’s also impossible, as it’s powered by an even smaller, micro-fusion reactor,” my father grinned.
Leaving me standing in the middle of our lawn, mouth agape, staring at the perfectly round hole, over an inch in diameter, cut cleanly all the way through the ancient tree trunk.
*****
“So who is she?” I prompted my father one evening, a few days later. I had requested permission to look around the Celeste, which my father had agreed to, in that maddeningly dismissive way of his, pointing out that the ship belonged to me now, just as much as him. The indifferent attitude, a father agreeing for his child to go ahead and play with his newest toy, had put me in a foul mood for most of the day. The fact that I made little progress trying to glean the inner workings of the ship, even after twelve hours tinkering away, had hardly helped matters. Looking back on that day, I wonder perhaps if that was why I pushed him just as far as I did.
“Nobody to concern yourself with,” my father said, ignoring me completely and continuing to scribble into his journal.
“Oh, come on,” I cried out loud. “It’s not as if you don’t know about all my conquests.”
“You’re not still sore about Elizabeth refusing to kiss you in tenth grade are you?” he looked up at me with a raised eyebrow, “as you really need to get over that.”
Grinding my teeth together in frustration, wondering if he would ever forget that incident, I snapped back irritably. “It’s just that you know everything about me and I know so little about you. It’s only by accident that I found out that you knew Professor Alcubierre and that you’ve got his damn spaceship secreted in our basement!”
My father cast me a stern glance at the use of my profanity, but obviously decided to let it slip, just this once, as he must have observed something in my expression. Instead he turned back to his journal, which only incensed me further.
“An ex-girlfriend?” I needled him, but while his pen slowed momentarily, he deliberately went back to ignoring me.
“A spurned lover, perhaps?” I continued to goad him, failing to notice his body tensing, the grip on his pen increasing until his fingers were almost white from the strain.
“Your mistress then,” I smirked. “What did she do, toss you over for somebody else?” I paused for a moment, before adding nastily. “Her husband, perhaps?”
While I was hoping to get some sort of reaction out of him, it wasn’t the one I expected. For before I could blink he was suddenly standing in front of me, his forearm pressing painfully into my throat, cutting off my airway. I immediately started to choke, unable to draw oxygen into my lungs. I tried pushing back against him, but I could find no purchase, as I found myself slammed against a bookshelf, my feet dangling some inches from the ground.
It was the expression on his face that so took me aback; it was like nothing I’d ever seen before, devoid of any emotion, lifeless and empty. His eyes, normally a warm brown had darkened until they appeared almost pitch black. Suddenly all those stories from my childhood about this man, a killer, came rushing back. This time I well believed them, for the man standing in front of me was a total stranger—and seemed more than capable of murder.
“Don't ever mention her like that again,” he whispered chillingly. “You don’t have the right. You know nothing about her, or what she was like. Of anybody, she is the least deserving of your scorn. Call me whatever you like, I probably deserve it and far worse, but you never disrespect her like that again.” With that my father dropped me to the floor turning his back on me.
But I always had to have the last word, it was my greatest failing, and before I’d even consciously thought about it, the words were already tumbling from my lips. “How can I mention her? I don’t even know the whore’s name—” I never even saw his fist, it seemingly came out of nowhere, but I certainly felt it. My jaw exploded in pain and already unsteady on my feet, I stumbled back into the bookshelf and it was only this that stopped me collapsing to the floor.
“If it was anybody else—” my father shook his head furiously. “I would have killed them for that.”
With those words still ringing in my head, he left, leaving me bruised, shaken and wondering what the hell had just happened.
Who was this woman?
*****
The brief, and very one-sided argument with my father, simply left me even more determined to find out what I wanted to know. When he had left his study he had purposefully taken the remote with him, perhaps guessing at what I might have attempted. In his fury, however, he had forgotten the simple fact that it was a remote to something else, completely superfluous if you happened to have physical access to that device, which I did, my father having granted me full access to the ship, a few days earlier.
So still nursing my wounded jaw, and pride, I stepped through the hidden door of his study, taking me only a few minutes to arrive at the Celeste. This time my first action was t
o cancel any remote monitoring, so my father had no idea what I was doing. Then I sat down in the cockpit, activating the main computer. It only took me a few seconds to find her pictures again. This time when I came to the end of the file, I was prompted to search for others, but dismissed the warning. Instead I instructed the computer to use the pictures for a far-reaching search, far beyond just this System, to search out across the complete corporate extranet. I naïvely dismissed any and all warnings about the cost; who cared? My father could foot the bill. It would be suitable recompense for my wounded pride.
I also dismissed any and all warnings that the other corporations could monitor such activity. Who cared about some woman that my father was still obsessing over, thirty years later?
It was just another step along a path that was eventually to have fatal consequences.
The network connection ran over a Faster-Than-Light link, but even then it was horrendously slow and I sat there for ages, literally on the edge of the pilot’s seat, as the results slowly started to trickle back. My biggest fear was that the search result would come back negative, that she was some insignificant, unrecognisable person, lost amongst the billions of others, special only to my father. That was obviously not the case, as the results started to flood in and I soon had a name to go with the picture—Lady Jessica Hadley, eldest daughter of High-Lord Hadley. My eyebrows disappeared into my forehead at this startling discovery. As this was no distant relation to some minor Lord or Lady. With no other family, except for a younger sister, she would have inherited most, if not all, of her father’s domain. I could barely get my head around the mind-boggling concept of my father ever inheriting such wealth and power.
The responsibility however, wouldn’t be a problem, I thought snidely.
Curious to discover the present whereabouts of Lady Hadley, I expanded my search, only to discover my second big shock of the day—she was dead; having died almost thirty years ago. The dates suddenly clicked in my head, no wonder my father looked at her picture so wistfully; he hadn’t left her, or her him, instead she had died! A fist suddenly clamped around my heart and squeezed, remembering the words that I had spoken to my father, barely an hour before. I felt the worst kind of scoundrel and realised that I owed him a sincere apology.
