Escaping the Sun

by Rhett Goreman

  That evening, I found the courage to go through some more of my mother’s belongings. In amongst her items of jewellery, I found a diamond ring. The large solitaire diamond had been imprinted with a quantum cryptographic key. I called Dave over to scan the diamond and use the key code to open up my mother’s personal files held securely somewhere in the Ether.

  The key gained me access to her personal diary, several recipes, other notes and a number of electronic messages.

  Whilst he was at work, my father was almost completely incommunicado, so my mother used to intercept any mail addressed to my father that was sent to our apartment; and she would usually relay any important information on to him.

  Nonetheless, I came across a few messages she had not forwarded on. They were from some kind of extreme group of people who believed mankind should not try to escape any preordained Armageddon. They mistakenly believed my father had designed the proposed fleet of star-ships and several of these notes contained death threats. It seemed the Police might have been correct in their suspicions after all.

  Why my mother had not passed these messages on to my father I have no idea. She might have thought there was no need to worry him, particularly because he worked inside what was probably the most secure government site in the world. She must not have realised these threats might become a credible danger to the whole family. Perhaps she didn’t believe them. Well they had to be taken seriously now.

  I hardly slept that night, going over the accident in my mind, the Police inquisition, and the death threats.

  My father looked like he hadn’t had much sleep either, when he arrived as usual to share breakfast with me the next morning. I showed him the new evidence, thinking it ought to be handed over to the Police, but he had other ideas. He had already formulated a plan with his government minders to safeguard his family in the event of trouble. He was quite distraught to think that carrying out the plan sooner might have saved my mother’s life.

  In encouraging me to study Applied Quantum Mechanics, my father had been less than subtly grooming me to carry on his work, when in fact he couldn’t really talk about it in any detail. It was all smoke and mirrors. Now I had obtained a degree in that subject, he believed I needed to get physically fitter and learn more about the military without actually joining up.

  After the ‘accident’, and uncovering the credible threat from extremists, it appeared that it was my destiny to take up residence within the confines of the military base where my father worked and join the special training Academy there.

  This would kill several birds with one stone. They would provide secure housing for us both and hopefully my father would be able to spend more time with me.

  In many ways, I looked forward to joining the Academy. I would learn more about real life there, and what I was truly capable of. Like all other young men, I had spent far too long in virtual worlds playing on-line war games and building imaginary relationships with avatars and animated characters driven by artificial intelligence.

  It was time to get physically fitter, world-wise, and to kick some butt.

  Chapter 4 – The Academy

  Atlanton was a huge sprawling military base, covering over one hundred square miles of former desert, surrounded by high, sand filled, bastion style, tsunami proof fortifications. The base included what looked like a small town at its centre, a few featureless hills to the west and a rocket launching facility to the east. It was located just a mile or so from the where the waters of the Atlantic ocean had finally halted their merciless advance.

  Behind those reinforced battlements resided our new home and also the Academy building, where I hoped to learn how to survive whatever curved-ball life might throw at me.

  Apart from that, all I knew about Atlanton base was my father worked in a bunker built under one of the hills. ‘Bunker 7,’ I remember him telling me. He always said it was, ‘Lucky 7’.

  My father wound down the window of our hire car. He waved his pass-card at the guard on the gate and showed him my letter of introduction as a new trainee.

  The guard walked slowly around the car, which was full of our most prized possessions (including a rather old and cumbersome 3D printer, that my father and I made use of to fabricate household objects and also to create ornaments reminding us of people, places, and things we admired: whether real or fictional).

  Eventually the guard motioned to me to wind down my window and he put his head in through the opening. I felt quite uncomfortable. His nose was almost touching my own, and I had some difficulty suppressing a smile, but without any further ado he withdrew his head from the window and signalled for the barrier to be raised.

  We had been allocated a small, but fully furnished, ground floor flat, which turned out to be only slightly smaller than our old apartment. There was ample room for both of us, even after unloading everything from the car.

  Aside from being given limited access to the Ether, the only downside was that we had not been allowed to bring Dave with us. We would have to do our own cooking and I was not exactly sure what that entailed. I had packed several ‘Ready Meals’ to get us started.

  By mid-afternoon we had completed all the necessary paperwork and I was keen to make a start at the Academy.

  I was told by the receptionist who processed my application that, despite being built within the confines of a military base, it was not actually a Military Academy. I was not being asked to enrol in the armed forces, just yet. It was really a special training school for the children of the scientists who worked on the base, and it was run by semi-retired military personnel.

  My training would be conducted by a certain Perkems Benshawe, an ex-Sergeant Major who believed his civilian recruits could be made every bit as fit for battle as regular soldiers. He still rubbed shoulders with his former colleagues in the real military training school, over in another part of the base, and often spent his lunch hour with them.

  Guided by a line, drawn by the receptionist on a map of the site, I arrived at the flat roofed, two storey, Academy building just as the bell rang to signify the end of a lunch break.

  Looking through the classroom door was like stepping back in time. The chairs and tables looked like they’d been brought out of mothballs left over from the Second World War, let alone the Third.

  There was a big kerfuffle, at the back of the class, because some unfortunate guy had had his backpack thrown around the room from student to student until it had hit a Venetian blind.

  Still stood in the doorway, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. The hand belonged to Perkems, my teacher. I recognised him from the description given to me by the receptionist. His particularly fierce crew cut was apparently intended to minimise any signs of his greying hair.

  Perkems ushered me into the room. Every slat of the blind had come off its strings and they were falling like autumn leaves to the floor as we entered. The class fell silent as he announced that Gerland and Tombor would have to stay behind and repair the blind after class.

  I swiftly found a spare desk and sat down. Glancing around the room, there was just one face I recognised. It was Ellie Kesinko from my university course. I must have looked surprised to see her. She suddenly turned pale and seemed positively shocked to see me.

  Gerland definitely had the appearance of a trouble maker. He had a short back and sides, with a crown of rebellious spiky golden hair. He wore an angry expression. He was angry at being caught by Perkems. I didn’t get a good look at Tombor; he was sat at a desk behind me.

  I put the holdall, I was carrying, on the floor by the side of my desk. Then I noticed Perkems waiting for me to settle down. Whilst he was waiting, he used his tongue to revolve his old fashioned false teeth around in his mouth. His eyes had glazed over and he was gazing into the middle distance, probably at the wrecked blind, apparently unaware of the passage of time.

  The class didn’t seem to mind waiting in silence for me to settle either. I later discovered that previous lectures had talked about the
principles of flight, and this had started a craze enjoyed by almost all the students. They appeared to be busy making little paper aeroplanes, under their desks, just out of sight.

  The dentures made one last revolution and then Perkems addressed the class, ‘Now you are all ready, allow me to introduce Mr Goreman. I would normally ask the new boy to tell us something about himself but more pertinent to this course is what his father does. So Goreman, come to the front of the class and enlighten us please.’

  Standing at the front of the class was almost as nerve racking as collecting my diploma on Graduation Day, but the panic gradually subsided as I started talking.

  I was proud to explain that my father, Aleq Goreman, had received a major prize for inventing the Biological Quantum Computer - a new technology still in its infancy. In addition, whilst he was prospecting for precious metals, to be mined from asteroids out beyond the orbit of Mars, he became the first person to track down any significant quantity of a very special crystalline material known as Astracite.

  Sounding quite an authority on the subject, I went on, ‘There was some speculation that the asteroid, where the crystals were found, may have wandered across inter-stellar space from another solar system, or possibly from another galaxy.’

  ‘Anyway, it was also discovered that by infusing tiny amounts of the crystals into a specially developed bio-fabric material, a massively distributed computer network could be built.’

  I quickly thought up an example, ‘For instance, it has been shown that patches of the fabric, spread around the world, can colour co-ordinate themselves! How cool is that?’

  Everything I had said up to that point had been met by blank expressions. Nevertheless, I pressed on.

  ‘This means my father’s inventions and discoveries have the potential to change everything. Smart materials can become a lot smarter, and the Ether cloud can be extended everywhere mankind can travel to - however far that might be.’

  Perhaps I was getting a little carried away in the moment, but I had the full attention of my audience now and I wanted to leave them with a lasting impression.

  ‘The key point here is that irrespective of how small the fragments of crystal are, what you do to one fragment has a minute but measurable effect on all the other fragments. The fragments are said to be entangled. The strange thing about entangled communications is that distance is no object.’

  The class had fallen completely silent. You could have heard a pin drop.

  ‘Will that do?’ I asked and then just as quickly realised everyone must have thought I was a complete nerd.

  Trying not to let on that he didn’t really follow what I had been talking about, Perkems looked around for another victim, one who might possibly be able to trump me, to bring me down a peg. ‘Yes, that will do nicely,’ he said. ‘Quite an impressive speech for your first day. Sit down now. Let’s give someone else a chance. Kesinko...’

  Ellie stood up by her desk. After a slight pause for thought, she started talking. ‘Leading on from what Mr Goreman was saying, asteroids from across the solar system are being brought closer to Earth where they are being mined for their pure metals and crystals. Well, my father is the inventor of the Dark Matter Engine used for harvesting those asteroids and bringing them into Earth orbit. He says spaceships built using his Dark Matter technology will enable us to reach for the stars and also to move millions of people to another planet in the event of any major natural disaster, such as the one that killed the dinosaurs. To date, only one starship has been completed and that is to be named after him. But over the next hundred or so years, thousands of larger lifeboat spaceships will be built.’

  Ellie kissed the tip of her thumb in thought and then continued, ‘I should point out that Dark Matter is not consumed in the engine. Spaceships will be powered by conventional nuclear fusion reactors. Dark Matter is merely sucked in at the front and blown out of the back in a similar way that water is used by a jet ski to provide the thrust.’

  Being more into the theory of yelling and press-ups for himself, Perkems eyes were starting to glaze over again. He revolved his teeth once more. ‘Well that was equally eloquent. Thank you Miss Kesinko. What about you Tombor?’

  Tombor was the bully victim whose bag had broken the blind. When Ellie sat down and Tombor stood up to speak, I had the feeling I had seen his face somewhere before.

  He winked at me nervously, and then the penny fully dropped. I was amazed that it had taken me so long to be sure it really was him, but surprise, surprise, Tombor turned out to be my old Ruffian friend Curly. I was delighted. His long locks of ginger hair had gone. They had been replaced by a very short crew cut similar to Perkems. This was probably a good thing. He was already being given rather too much unwanted attention by certain class members.

  Curly swallowed hard and began this speech, ‘My mother is both an actress and an inventor,’ he explained. By that, I assumed he meant his new mother. Like me, he was clearly trying to put his humble roots behind him, at least for the time being.

  He continued, ‘She is actually credited with the discovery of the Astracite stuff that Mr Goreman told us about previously. She had been given a leading role in a holographic movie, being recorded on location in Antarctica, when one of the worst blizzards since records began pinned down the entire cast and crew. Although they had plenty of supplies, she was starting to go stir crazy being cooped up in her far-from-luxurious tent for several weeks - its canvas being constantly battered by the wind.

  Regarding her time in captivity as an opportunity to think; to be creative; she was looking around her tent, at the heaps of wire and equipment abandoned by the film crew, when her eyes fell upon a tiny purple meteorite she had picked up a few days before the storm struck. Apparently, the rock was just lying there on top of a crisp white blanket of new fallen snow.

  So just for amusement, she built a crystal radio set: incorporating the little purple rock at its heart. For some strange reason, the radio waves it produced could travel right through the Earth, and she found herself having a conversation with an elderly gentleman thousands of miles away. He didn’t even have a radio himself. He said he could hear my mother’s voice rattling in his teeth. It turned out that her radio buddy was in fact an Eskimo. He had a false tooth fashioned from a similar meteorite that had been passed down to him, within his family, for generations. A fanciful legend, recounted each time the purple stone was handed on from father to son, claimed that it was a “gift from the gods.”’

  Curly took a deep breath and proudly expounded, ‘Well, soon after returning home, my mother developed a more robust radio system, using tiny shards of crystal taken from the original meteorite. Her system solved the age old problem of how to communicate with submarines at depth in the ocean. Several years ago the Government agreed to have the radios fitted into the conning tower of all submarines, and I believe they are still in service today.’

  ‘She never did gain much recognition for being the first person to discover Astracite, but her radio system is greatly valued by the military. It’s a funny thing, but whilst everything else in the world is becoming more and more miniaturised, including submarines, my mother has won many accolades specifically for making the knob on the front of her device much bigger.’

  Then Gerland piped up and asked the question on everyone’s lips, ‘Why did making a knob bigger win her so much praise?’

  Tombor explained, ‘Because it turns out the sub-mariners find it more than useful, and in just the right position, to stand on when they climb out of the submarine!’

  At that, Curly was showered with little paper aeroplanes and Gerland laughed uncontrollably for nearly a minute.

  The afternoon went by quite quickly for me. I was fascinated to hear the background of my fellow students. They all had someone in their families who had made a major contribution to the latest military technology. These would be the technologies I felt sure that the regular soldiers, sailors and airmen would be training on somewhere else on
this base.

  Our special Academy was certainly a poor relation in that respect. Our training was clearly going to be based on more general character and team building exercises. I imagined that ‘flying in formation’ might for us mean running around a football field with our arms outstretched.

  When the bell rang, to mark the end of the day, almost everyone followed Perkems out of the room. As instructed, each student took a timetable, on their way out, as they passed his desk at the front of the class.

  Gerland was nowhere to be seen, so I stayed behind with Curly to help him repair the blind.

  We shook hands and pulled together in a hug, patting each other on the back. Curly said he would be very grateful if I would use his proper name, Thomas, or Tom from now on.

  So I asked Tom what he thought about Gerland and he gave a particularly well observed answer.

  ‘Gerland is just about as opposite to me as anyone can get. He behaves like a five year old most of the time. He’s a liar and a bully but he is rarely caught by Perkems actually intimidating anyone himself. You see, he gets his mates to do most of his dirty work for him. I suppose that’s the mark of a strong leader. I’ve also noticed if Gerland is actually caught doing something then he always seems to get off lightly. I’m sure that’s because Perkems can see a lot of Gerland in himself and so he treats him like the son he never had.’

  ‘Wow,’ I exclaimed, ‘You certainly paint a picture.’

  Tom smiled.

  ‘It’s all stuff you need to know,’ he said.

  He then went on to tell me never to make the obvious joke about Gerland being a big girl, unless I particularly wanted a nose bleed.

  Wearing a slight frown, Tom concluded, ‘He probably picks on me because he secretly wishes he could have had my name.’

  I nodded, ‘Now you mention it, Tombor does sound more manly. You might well be right.’