Mad Science Institute

by Sechin Tower

  I was now in a big, circular room at the very bottom of the deep shaft of the Doomsday Machine ride. The place was crammed full of electrical supplies, and when I say “electrical supplies,” I don’t mean computers or Blu-ray players. The stuff in that room included industrial-grade electromagnets, poly-phase induction motors, transformer cores, coolant casings, heavy-duty fuse boxes, and miles upon miles of coiled copper wire in every gauge. There was enough equipment in that make-shift warehouse to create a power plant and wire up a small city. All of it was shrink-wrapped or packed into crates, stacked from floor to ceiling, and jammed in so tight I had to empty my lungs to squeeze through some parts to get deeper into the room. Rusty had an even harder time getting around because he can’t turn sideways like a person, so he had to climb over a stack of electrical cable spools and meet me on the far side.

  I perused the boxes and crates, trying to find any clue as to why the Professor or the Blitzkriegers would want to stockpile items to make a power grid. Along the way, I found some rifles, bullets, and a small crate that contained something I had seen back at Topsy: earthquake grenades. Unlike all the other devices in the warehouse, the earthquake grenades had been partially disassembled and looked if someone had deactivated them and removed the few grams of teslanium contained in their power source.

  None of the gizmos gave me a clue as to what was going on, until I reached the middle of the circular room, right next to the ride shaft’s maintenance access hatch. I just about fell on my face when I saw the six-foot high steel kettle-bell. It was an antimatter reactor of precisely the same size as the one in the sub-basement of Topsy. Except for the improved cadmium-encased depleted uranium shielding, this reactor was an exact replica.

  I rushed over to the control panel and found that the reactor was not yet operational. An open hatch on the side revealed why: the power core had not been completed. To be specific, it lacked only the components that needed to be constructed from teslanium. After working for the last two days to install a much smaller reactor into Rusty, I was pretty familiar with these pieces and I knew that all it needed were a few solid plates and some tightly-wound wire, but all of it had to be made from that mysterious superconductor. I figured it would only take about twelve more pounds of teslanium to complete these pieces, but there isn’t much of that stuff to go around—all the gizmos in the secret lab at Topsy didn’t have ten pounds of the stuff between them, including what I had installed into Rusty. That explained why someone had stripped the power-cores out of the earthquake grenades, but even that combined with the few spools of specially made cable stacked next to the reactor would add up to no more than two or three pounds. A little bit of that strange, pale metal goes a long way in most devices. Only the Topsy reactor had the quantity required, which must be why the Professor had sent his Blitzkriegers and the chupacabra after our reactor core.

  The big question, then, was why they needed such a powerful generator. The one in Topsy had been built as an experiment and it had the capacity to generate more power in sixty seconds than all of Bugswallow used in a year. If the Professor just wanted to run the roller coasters in this amusement park, he could have done it with much, much less. He had to be after something bigger, something that would justify the attempt to break into Topsy and go to all this trouble.

  There was a computer control terminal attached to the reactor, so I wiggled the mouse to wake it from sleep mode. I almost laughed out loud when I found that it wasn’t even password protected. It took me 30 seconds to call up the reactor operation software that rewarded me with a diagnostic display that told me everything I needed to know. The antimatter reactor down here was linked up to the Doomsday Machine ride so that the whole thing would serve as a broadcasting tower. I had been right about the dome-shaped cap at the top of the ride: it was a transmitter, but it wasn’t designed to send out radio signals. It would send out a full-spectrum EMP powerful enough to disrupt the stratosphere and alter the electromagnetic grid of the Earth itself.

  I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep myself from yelping in astonishment. Now I knew why the Doomsday Machine ride had looked strangely familiar to me: it was based on Nikola Tesla’s designs for the Wardenclyffe tower. It had been Tesla’s failed dream to provide the entire world with wireless energy through his tower. Now, more than a hundred years later, the Professor was using the same basic design not to empower our machines but to destroy them.

  If this broadcasting tower went into operation, it would induce overwhelming currents in anything with wires or circuits. That meant it would burn appliances, destroy internet and telephone communications, and obliterate power grids the world over. Not even military-grade shielding would protect from this attack, because the grounding wires and faraday cages that are used to harden equipment against EMPs are all designed to channel the unwanted energy into the earth. Given enough time, this tower could send destructive energy up through the very ground, causing all those surge protectors and grounding strips to totally backfire. Governments would fall, armies would be paralyzed, and the world would be plunged back into a pre-industrial dark age. Most households aren’t prepared to go without power for more than a few days, if that. The Doomsday Machine would destroy the world’s electrical infrastructure so thoroughly that it would be many months or more likely years before service could be restored.

  Tesla had once said that with the right frequency he could split the earth. It looked like the Professor was about to test that claim. I couldn’t see why he would want to, but he was obviously serious about carrying this thing through.

  Suddenly, the whole room felt like it was spinning and I had to grip the control panel to keep myself from falling over. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the screen on the computer flickered and went black. Then it came up with a video conference window. There was a dark silhouette against a white wall. His face was blacked out by some kind of software that made him look like a living shadow, but from the way he moved his arms to lean forward I could tell it was a real person.

  “Hello, Sophia,” the Professor’s voice came through the computer speakers.

  I stepped back and bumped into a stack of crates. My snooping around inside the computer’s files had probably tripped an invisible alarm, which was how he knew where I was and what I’d been doing. It felt like all the warmth in my body had drained down through my legs and out into the floor as I realized there was a little web cam on top of the screen, which meant he was watching me right now.

  “I know everything,” I blurted out, trying to sound braver than I felt. “Except, why are you doing this? If you hate electronic stuff so much, why don’t you just go live on a desert island and leave the rest of us alone?”

  He laughed at me. “Look around you, Sophia. You’re surrounded by the answer.”

  I blinked and stared around me at the crates stacked up inside the makeshift warehouse, but I knew they were only the same kind of electrical components that would be destroyed when the Doomsday Machine did its thing. Then it hit me: they hadn’t stockpiled all the supplies for making an electrical grid just to watch it break. After they destroyed the world’s electronics, they would be the only ones with the ability to rebuild.

  I whirled back to the computer station and quickly confirmed my deduction. According to the readout, there was a smaller transmitter in this room that would broadcast a counter-frequency to protect the equipment in here from damage. It wasn’t powerful, but it didn’t have to be: it just had to work like the electromagnetic version of noise-cancelling headphones. According to the files, there were also several other warehouses with similar equipment stashed across North America and even more in South America. With all that, he had the seeds to start a small nation. The guns, bombs, and earthquake grenades I had found must have been so that his followers could defend these warehouses if needed. Evidently, the Professor had a lot more people working for him than just the Blitzkriegers.

  “Ah, now you have it,” the Professor said. �
��I’m not going to be known as the man who destroyed the world, I’m going to be hailed as its great savior. And when I rebuild, I’ll have a planet-wide monopoly on electricity. Governments will pay whatever I want—unless I decide to replace those governments and become emperor of the Earth. I haven’t decided about that part yet. But the important thing is this: in every sense of the word, I will be the only one with the power.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “You can’t possibly know if it’s going to work right. I mean, this level of electromagnetism had never been tested. There could be environmental damage of biblical proportions. Brains and nervous systems operate with electrical transmission, too—you might end up killing every living thing on the planet!”

  The Professor’s silhouette shrugged. “I think you’re overreacting just a little bit, don’t you?”

  “No way. I’m not letting you do this. I’m going to the cops.” Triumphantly, I whipped my Hello Kitty USB drive out of the back pocket of my jeans and brandished it in front of the webcam. Then I jammed it home into the computer and started copying the contents of the hard drive.

  “Sophia,” the Professor’s voice was patronizing. “You are such a clever girl. Are you sure you won’t come to work for me?”

  “Never,” I hissed. “You’re a scuzz and a creeper and… and… everything else that’s bad. You’re worse than chewing-gum on my shoe.” I was really talking my way into trouble now, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  The blackened image of the Professor cut me off by waving a shadowy hand.

  “I’m disappointed,” he sighed. “But it’s probably just as well. I’ve alerted the Blitzkriegers to your presence. Whatever’s left after they finish with you probably won’t be much use to me.”

  Behind me, on the far side of the crates and cases, a thunderous banging sounded against the door.

  Chapter 33 ~ Dean

  “This is big,” Victor muttered, running his hand distractedly through his short blond hair. “This is unbelievably big. If this thing really dates back to the Triassic, it may lead us to revise everything we know about human history.”

  “Calm down and don’t get your panties in a knot,” Angela said. “I’ve almost got the program running. Then we’ll see what we see.”

  They had moved from the laboratory into the computer center, where they had filmed the image that the egg was projecting. As they did, the spinning blue hologram of the 200 million year old Earth made Dean’s skin crawl. He couldn’t imagine who had made it or what was going on in the early days of the dinosaurs that was important enough to get mapped. Whatever it was, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it.

  Angela hammered away at the keys as her monitor displayed a digitized representation of the hologram of Pangea, complete with the red pinpoints that indicated the important locations. Under her command, the software broke Pangaea into sections and re-arranged them in the form of the contemporary continents they had become. These images were then superimposed on satellite photos of the modern world and adjusted to account for new mountain ranges, rivers, and other geological features. The final result was an up-to-date map that preserved the locations of the glowing red pinpoints and cross-referenced them with GPS coordinates.

  “If this thing is really a pre-historic treasure map,” Dean said, leaning over Angela’s shoulder. “What does it lead to? Dinosaur bones or something?”

  “I doubt it,” Angela said. “That wouldn’t have been valuable back when there were actual dinosaurs.”

  “They’re spread all over the place,” Victor said. “They don’t seem to line up with any major city or particular landmark… hey, wait. Move over—I want to see something.”

  Angela moved out of the way and Victor wheeled his chair into her spot. He clicked the mouse and dragged the image down to show the northern regions of the United States. He zoomed in until Minnesota filled the screen. A bright red dot pulsed in the lower corner.

  “You recognize this spot?” Victor asked, tapping the red dot. “It’s smack-dab on Bugswallow City. We are standing on top of that dot right now.”

  “It’s here?” Dean asked. “What are the odds of that?”

  “It can’t be coincidence,” Victor said. “There’s a link that could explain it: Nikola Tesla. Think about it. He invented wireless power and he had possession of this egg. He would have seen the same image that we saw the first day he brought that little rock into his lab. We always assumed that he chose Bugswallow as the site for his school to keep it far away from industrial spies, but there were plenty of other backwater places he could have located the Institute. Maybe he located it here because he was looking for something.”

  Dean glanced over at Angela. She had her arms folded in front of her and her lips pursed, as though she were angry about something.

  Victor spun around in his chair to look at the two of them. “I think he did more than just look, too,” he went on. “I think he found it. The cavern two hundred feet below us—what we’re using as the reactor room—is impossibly deep and impossibly ancient. It could have been built by the same people—if they were people—who built that egg. I bet all these dots lead to other deep caverns just like the one below us.”

  “Hang on there,” Angela put out her hands. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

  “We can test the theory,” Victor said. “If I’m right, then these other pinpoints will lead us to other caverns. At the very least, we may get to see what the Professor was after. The first members of the Institute found teslanium down in the cavern below us. That discovery led to the invention of the antimatter reactor. I wonder what we’ll find in all these other caves.”

  Angela leaned in towards the computer screen and moved the image around.

  “It looks like the next nearest one is up north of the twin cities, near the Canadian border,” she said. “It’s going to be a boring, and probably fruitless trip. Tell you what: you boys hold the fort here while I go check it out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “No way,” Dean said. “Nobody’s going without me.”

  He grabbed his coat and was already heading towards the elevator. He didn’t know what he would find when he got there, but whatever it was, it would give him leverage over the man who had killed McKenzie.

  “Fine,” Angela said with exasperation. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Okay, you boys load up the drilling equipment while I take care of a few loose ends here. Meet you upstairs in five.”

  Dean and Victor worked together to move the heavy equipment out of the lab. As soon as the elevator doors closed behind them, Angela rose from her seat in front of the computer and moved over to the chupacabra. The creature was huddled at the back of the cage, still as a statue, watching her with its red eyes.

  She grabbed the key off its wall hook, undid the padlock, and swung the cage door wide open.

  “Go back to the Professor,” Angela said to the creature. “You know the way out of here. Go back to the fun park and I’ll meet you there later.”

  Chapter 34 ~ Soap

  It was a heavy-duty, reinforced door, but with the way the Blitzkriegers were pounding on it, it wouldn’t be long before they got through.

  The circular storage/reactor room was thirty feet underground with only one entrance and no good places to hide, but it did have one other possible exit: the ventilation shaft that ran up to the center of the Doomsday Machine. With luck, I could climb up through there and be out in the open air before the Blitzkriegers figured out where I had gone. Before I left, though, there was something I had to do.

  In three minutes, I rewired the reactor’s power output to split an undetectably small amount of current through a spool of superconducting cable. Then I fixed the earthquake grenades I had found earlier to various points on the wire and mounted the whole kit onto Rusty’s back. This took me another sixty seconds, and the bikers had the door almost off its hinges by then. I could hear their angry shouts and rude calls to me through the widening gap around the d
oorframe.

  “Rusty,” I said, even though it’s stupid to talk to a robot that isn’t rigged for full language analysis. “Rusty, you’ve got something important to do. You’ve got to go save the world.”

  Flipping open his back panel, I performed a temporary override on his tracking protocol so he wouldn’t home in on my bracelet until he was done with his next task. I entered a destination point two hundred twenty feet straight up, and instructed him to string the cable up through the tower and rig up the earthquake grenades along the way. I’d designed Rusty to move through different types of terrain and perform simple mechanical tasks, so he was already geared to pull this off and all I had to do was add in the particulars. Spreading those earthquake grenades would mean that if the Professor ever got the teslanium he needed to get his reactor working then it would run power up the cable to the grenades and shake the whole structure to pieces. I thought it was a pretty good plan, although there was no way to be sure the grenades would destroy the tower before the tower destroyed the world.

  I finished entering the instructions, closed Rusty’s control panel, pushed him into the shaft’s access hatch, and powered him back up. For a moment, he just stood there looking at me with his big eyes. Then his system finished compiling data, and he nodded his head and snapped his pincers. It felt like he was saying goodbye, so I kissed him on what would have been his nose. He snapped his pincers again, pivoted in place, and scuttled up the ladder and through the shaft, leaving a trail of wire behind him.

  Following Rusty, I ducked through the hatch and closed it behind me just as the door clattered to the floor and the room filled with angry voices and the stomping of a dozen heavy motorcycle boots.

  The shaft was at least forty feet high and stretched all the way up to the top of the building above. I could see daylight out there, but it was partly blocked out by big steel struts and metal bars protruding from the concrete walls. These were the steel bars that would send the electromagnetic waves into the Earth, but right now all they were doing was transforming my climb into an obstacle course. Rusty had no problem with it, and I could see him getting farther and farther ahead of me as he nimbly moved through the maze of criss-crossing steel. I, on the other hand, was slow and I scraped my knuckles and knees something fierce as I went. I had thought it would be an easy climb, but it was basically a series of pull-ups from one steel bar to the next, and my arms got stiff and shaky almost right away. About fifteen feet up the shaft, I made the mistake of looking down at the sharp angles and solid steel posts below me. If I fell, I would bounce my way down like the ball in a Japanese pachinko game.