A small forest of wide silver columns ran the entire length of the new hallway, obscuring his view of the far end. Pointing down from the ceiling was an inverted pyramid—a perfect match to fit into the door protrusion below. He suddenly understood. The entire ceiling was designed to move up and down to prevent entry. The columns must be massive hydraulic pistons, and their pumps were no doubt the cause of that god-awful noise. The number of pistons employed meant that the moveable ceiling had to weigh hundreds, if not thousands, of tons. Anyone unfortunate enough to be inside when it returned to its locked position would be squashed into goo. It was the most massive security feature he had ever seen. It would take days, if not weeks, of drilling and high explosives to defeat.
"This is… wow."
“Proceed.” The Amazon waved him into the hallway with her pistol.
Sebastian hastened his step, devoutly hoping the hydraulic system possessed safeguards to prevent his worst claustrophobic nightmare from coming true. After winding his way through the pistons to the end of the hall, he faced a circular hatch similar to those on the submarine.
“Turn the wheel and pull. It’s unlocked,” the woman said.
“With all the rigmarole I’ve just been through, you leave this one unlocked?”
“We have other security measures that render locking this door unnecessary.”
“Measures like…?”
She cocked the pistol with her thumb.
“Fair enough.” Sebastian turned to the door and opened it.
Beyond the hatch was a dark chamber of unknown size or depth.
“Okay, where’s the light switch?”
“There’s a flashlight on the floor to the left of the door, just inside,” the woman said.
Sebastian arched a carefully groomed eyebrow at her.
With a feminine shrug of her shoulders, she volunteered, “We ran out of funding, and security weighed more heavily than convenience.”
“Uh-huh.” Against his better judgment, Sebastian stepped into the darkness and felt around on the floor. His fingers found the flashlight. “Got it. Hope you could afford batteries.” He fumbled for the ON switch.
“Rotate the end counter-clockwise,” the woman said from the door.
“Yeah, yeah.” The flashlight came on. Its beam revealed a low, dome-shaped ceiling spanning a circular room. A pedestal stood in the center, on top of which a pristine white cloth covered a rounded object.
Sebastian had to crouch as he approached the pedestal. Only when he was next to the artifact was the ceiling high enough for him to stand at his full height. Holding his breath, he carefully lifted the cloth.
A blue-hued sphere, heavily scarred and pitted, sat atop the pedestal. It measured approximately sixteen inches in diameter and its center glowed faintly. Sebastian slowly went to his knees as if in reverence. He absentmindedly dropped the cloth and hovered a hand over the sphere. It radiated heat.
“Is it radioactive?” he asked, drawing away in concern.
“No. It stays at a constant fifty degrees centigrade. The means by which it generates heat or light is unknown.”
“But you had to have run tests?” He leaned toward it until he could feel warmth on his face.
“X-rays, spectrographs, MRIs, chemical makeup—you name it, we tested it. Without all of the surface damage, it would be a perfect sphere of diamond, with a few trace minerals. We didn’t wish to cut it open—yet—for fear of damaging it… or us.”
“Is it carbonado?” Sebastian asked.
“Similar, but not like any carbonado we’ve ever seen. The most disturbing test result came from the analysis of the light it emits. While it’s too fast to be detected by the human eye, there is a pattern to it, not unlike a timer.”
“Timer? Like a countdown?” Sebastian felt a seed of fear take root in the pit of his stomach.
“Possibly. It’s more like a simple count based on fractions of the speed of light. If the scientists and mathematicians are correct, their extrapolations from the count suggest the artifact is well over one billion years old.”
Sebastian had trouble wrapping his brain around a timespan of one billion years. The implications… This artifact had the potential to shatter the foundations of religions, cultures… of the very foundations of the human race. Here was an artificial energy source that predated most life on earth—and it certainly wasn’t created by a bacterium and protozoa in some lichen’s garage.
“Where was this found?” he asked, never taking his eyes from the wonder before him.
“The moon.”
“What?” he half shouted as he snapped his gaze from the sphere to the woman. “This was discovered during the moon landings? That long ago?”
“No. It was found last month.”
Sebastian blinked, dumbfounded. “Since when…”
“As you know, you aren’t privy to all the covert operations going on.” The woman lifted an elegant leg to rest a sandaled foot on the bottom of the raised hatch opening. Silhouetted as she was, Sebastian couldn’t help but conclude that she could rule the fashion world as a model—if she traded her attitude for a pair of high heels. “There’s one more thing you should see. Shine your light into the sphere from the side.”
Tearing his gaze from her leg, Sebastian did as he was told. Hazy shadows appeared inside the sphere. With the tip of his nose almost touching the artifact, he identified the shadows as three-dimensional symbols. Glyphs?
He twisted back to the woman. “This could be a lang—”
The woman’s gun fired. For the second time that day, someone had pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. He staggered back, ears ringing, blinded and stunned. A sticky wet warmth flowed from the center of his chest. As his knees buckled, he was stung by a cold anger. Before consciousness abandoned him, he attempted to vent that anger in one last word of defiance.
“Bissh!”
Fear slipped in to dine in darkness as he collapsed to the ground.
***
A man in a well-tailored suit stepped through the hatch. “Well done,” he said.
“Can I shoot him again?” she asked, removing her earplugs.
He chuckled. “I’m afraid not.”
“Please?”
“Not, now. The situation is far too advanced to be fixing problems one at a time. Besides, I get the next shot here.”
“I hope he doesn’t disappoint you,” she replied. She bent to rescue the cloth from the trickle of blood inching away from Sebastian.
“Individuals with his qualifications never do.”
CHAPTER 6
Summer 2040
Jessica labored at her desk in disciplined concentration, analyzing data from the military’s latest experiment on subatomic particles. A prototype circular particle accelerator lay hidden in what the public believed to be a nuclear test crater deep in a Nevada desert. To all satellites, foreign and domestic, its details were no different than any other poisonous radiation pit scarring Nevada’s barren soil. But while nearby craters had originated from underground nuclear detonations, scientists had conjured the accelerator crater with conventional explosives. And to Jessica, this crater offered a means of pursuing a lifelong dream she had mortgaged her body and soul to achieve.
Jessica believed that life’s rewards were directly related to the effort invested in their pursuit. As simple and naïve as that might have been, she also fiercely believed in her own abilities.
Jessica had suffered through the necessary evil of high school, enduring indifferent teachers and watered-down classes. But before she made it to college, the economy tanked—and college scholarships evaporated. Young people were needed in the work force, not in school. And it wasn’t just colleges that were downsizing; public school districts changed minimum proficiency policies in order to accelerate graduation. Once a student demonstrated minimum competency, they were summarily graduated. There just wasn’t money available to keep everyone in school.
Most teens were ecstatic to graduate
early, but not Jessica. She kept her grades less than stellar in order to stay in school, thereby retaining access to library facilities, computers, and textbooks. She knew that dedicated self-study provided her the best chance of college admittance. She was determined to get a college education.
Unfortunately, the cost of attendance had risen beyond the means of all but the very rich—or those desperate enough to gamble with their financial future. To encourage applications—and thereby revenue—colleges removed the government middleman from the equation and began offering high-interest loans themselves, to anyone who could pass their entry level placement tests. Fees for these placement tests soon surpassed tuition as their main moneymaker.
Jessica earned the money for her tests by working odd jobs after school. Her parents offered no support, feeling it was a waste of money. They said her life would be better served by getting a real job. Her mother managed the trailer park they lived in, and her father walked two miles, each way, every week, to collect his disability check and a case of beer.
Jessica passed her tests with ease and opted for the fifty-year payment plan. Requirements also mandated that she submit to temporary chemical sterilization—the college’s way of providing additional motivation for its students to pay them back. If she kept current with her remittance, she could have her sterilization reversed after ten years. Jessica fully intended to pay back every penny much sooner. The alternative was a lifetime of lonely poverty and garnished wages.
But during her first three years of college, she discovered a horrible fact. Acidic practices were corroding higher learning from within. Instructors doled out material like the carnival game in which one shoots streams of water into a clown’s mouth until the balloon above its head pops. In the new education game, everyone won when their brain was full, no matter the amount it took to fill it, or the quality of the filling. Knowledge took a back seat to blind attendance—and the occasional nod of compliance.
Yet the moment Jessica penned her signature to that student loan, she had committed herself. She had no other choice but to make the most of it. So once again, she immersed herself in the rigors of self-study. A handful of professors gained her attention and admiration. She took every class they taught regardless of whether she needed them for her physics degree.
When the time came to enroll for fall classes in her fourth year, the college mandated that all students take committee-selected classes dealing with the social and cultural appreciation of third world countries. The powers that be wanted to force their students to be sympathetic to the growing problems of dying cultures, thus sending forth a new generation of minds to alleviate the tensions threatening to destroy civilization. Jessica had other goals. Lining the pockets of professors teaching moral fluff was not among them.
So she proposed a different course of study, one revolving around her thesis that an infinitely large universe presupposes an infinitely small one—and that there were yet to be discovered subatomic particles that could be key to solving the world’s energy problems. It was a groundbreaking concept; her research had revealed that only one other person had ever made mention of the idea. That mention was made in a journal dated before the Second World War ended, credited to a man by the utterly generic name of J. Smith. She found no other mention of the man in post-war academic writings or the science community at large. As impossible as it seemed, this man ahead of his time had existed only long enough to publish a few lines of text.
But Jessica encountered an unrelenting force preventing her from moving forward with her research: a corrosive indifference to new knowledge.
“Cold fusion?” said the dean of physics. “Don’t waste your mind. You’re a bright girl, Jessica. Why don’t you develop a new insulation for multifamily dwellings? That’s what will be needed when we run out of fossil fuels in two hundred years.”
Jessica stormed out of his office, too disgusted to argue. She met with her two trusted professors. One taught advanced physics, the other philosophy. Both sympathized with her situation but were powerless to do anything. They did point out, however, that she had learned all she could in the educational system, despite the best efforts of the educational system itself—and that there was a different institution that might even pay her to continue learning: the United States government.
Two months and six civil service tests later, Jessica sat at a desk in a brightly lit windowless room, the pancakes she’d eaten for breakfast skipping around like flat stones over the acid pond in her stomach. A closed question booklet with a blank answer sheet tucked neatly inside loomed on the scarred laminate surface of her desk. She had applied for a civilian physicist position within the military, and a noisy clock now ticked away the seconds as she prepared herself to delve into her seventh entry-level exam.
She wasn’t superstitious, but she devoutly hoped number seven would be her last.
Her six prior attempts had taken place in convention centers and auditoriums alongside hundreds to thousands of other applicants. She had enjoyed a degree of cozy anonymity in the company of so many strangers. But now she was the solitary person in a space not much larger than a closet, the walls reflecting and amplifying her anxiety. As did the sound of that stupid clock! At least there wasn’t an anti-cheat spy camera watching her, just a spindly black spider, high up in a corner, starving in its empty web.
With a deep cleansing breath, she opened her booklet and began.
The early questions challenged her undergraduate limits. If not for her self-imposed study regimen, she would have been at a loss for how to unravel the trickier problems. It took over an hour to complete the first page alone.
Upon turning to the second page, she found that someone had circled all the answers from that page forward, making only a halfhearted effort to erase their marks. She didn’t think much of it: the instructions allowed for writing in the test materials, and she couldn’t be held accountable for these markings. Besides, she wasn’t going to trust the answers of the preceding test-taker. But as it turned out, the next two pages proved ridiculously easy, and she discovered that her answers matched up perfectly with the poorly erased circles.
She scanned the rest of the booklet. Ten pages remained, and much to her chagrin, they were filled with technically advanced questions that would require tedious calculations. The ticking clock gave her less than two hours to complete the exam—not remotely enough time.
She leaned back to contemplate a moral dilemma. She could complete the test using someone else’s answers; or she could turn in the compromised test booklet for a clean one, muddle through as much of the test as she could, and almost certainly lose another job opportunity.
It was an easy decision. She wanted her achievements to be on her own merits. A clean conscience would allow her to sleep well at night, regardless of the bleak future awaiting her if she failed.
She stood quickly and knocked at the closed door.
“Finished already?” the proctor asked, peering in.
“No, ma’am. Someone marked the answers to all of the questions after the first page. I thought it would be best if I turned this in for a new test booklet.”
The proctor took the booklet and flipped through the pages. “Well, aren’t you the honest one?” She left to retrieve a replacement booklet, discarded the first page, and handed the rest to Jessica. “Finish the test with this. The questions are different, but the knowledge required for them is the same. I’ll take the answers you have so far. Unfortunately, I can’t give you any extra time to complete the test.”
Jessica nodded and returned to her desk. She managed to finish another four pages before time expired. She left the building with low expectations for the job.
So it was to her great surprise when, two days later, she received a phone call requesting she come in for an interview the next day. Two men and a woman—who looked more accustomed to wearing military uniforms than the crisp civilian suits they had on—interrogated her on background details for less than ten minutes
before dismissing her. When she asked what she had scored on the test, they merely replied that she had passed and should wait in the lobby while they deliberated. Jessica fidgeted on the edge of a couch cushion, pondering how palms could sweat so much. She made a mental note to never eat such a large breakfast before testing or interviews.
An hour later, a secretary ushered her into a completely different room to complete the interview. An Army colonel in full dress uniform stood alone behind a cheap folding table.
“Sit,” the colonel commanded. After Jessica settled herself into an uncomfortable chair, the colonel seated himself and asked, “Why do you want to work for the United States military?”
The fact that she heard the same question at the beginning of every other civil service interview did nothing to alleviate her anxiety at having to respond to it again. With hands folded calmly in her lap, she took a breath, straightened her back, and answered, “I’ve reached a point in my education where I believe practical application of what I have learned will be more beneficial than remaining in my degree program. I know the military has abundant facilities and resources to engage in scientific research. It’s public knowledge that the military has been attempting to develop alternative energy solutions. Given the opportunity, I would like to continue my thesis work and help you achieve that goal.”
The colonel took no notes, nor communicated anything through his facial expression or body language. She may as well have been trying to convince a frowning statue to smile. As if someone flipped a switch, he recited his next question. “The current global climate hints that we may be on the brink of another world war. While we can’t give you any specifics, your performance on our entrance exam showed that you may be proficient in areas that will allow you to participate in other projects. How would you feel about that?”
The Prometheus Effect Page 3
