Balance of Power Shifted

by Karl, Victor

  I sat down next to Bill and patiently let my mind process the information for a minute, which was the same as my partner was doing. Bill was the first to speak up and echoed what I was thinking by saying, “It appears that light is the stimulus for these organisms and in some way or fashion they are synchronized to one another, how else would they pulse in unison. The more light they receive the more green color is observed. Based on what we know from depriving it of light while in the ship’s locker and my bag it becomes browner in color without light. The greener the color, the greater the electrical charge as witnessed when both of us got shocked.” “Sounds like what I was thinking and I would add that the organism seems to be hardy and resilient.

  I think our next step is to see if we can reproduce more of the specimen because if we screw this up and it dies, who knows if we will ever be able to get access to it again.” “I actually have a couple of scenarios in mind that I want to try tomorrow,” Bill said. “Using small amounts of the specimen liquid I want to dilute it by up to fifty percent with sea water and see what happens. I also want to perform the same test, but add just plain filtered tap water to see if it is dependent on salt water. I will need to monitor by using the microscope to see if we can determine what the effects of the tests are.” “Why don’t we set it up tonight,” I asked. I don’t have enough seawater left to accomplish what I want. Why don’t you run down to the beach first thing in the morning and bring back a gallon in a clean container,” Bill said. It seemed to be more of an order than a request I thought to myself, and grinned thinking how this whole situation has brought out a side of Bill I had never seen. “How come I can’t just go down to the bay for the sample,” I said. “Too many contaminants that may muck up our test and the results” was Professor Bill’s haughty response.

  “Hey Billy boy, let’s head upstairs and play a little Call of Duty. I feel need to shoot something and it might as well be you.” “You are on Boy Scout” was his quick reply as he jumped up from his chair with some bravado. We headed up to my gaming area which can support four different people playing on their own system at the same time. With a quick detour for a couple of beers, we sat down in the specially designed gaming chairs. We sat in chairs opposite of each other, separated by our own 50-inch LED video screens. We communicated with each other and a slew of other players around the globe over high-quality headsets for the next two hours. I must say I had the most kills, but I had to give Bill some credit for getting a few.

  The sun was just coming up the next morning as I dressed in my workout clothes. Heading downstairs barefooted, I stepped onto my workout mats and stretched out for 10 minutes. For the next 10 minutes, I used the same wrestling warm up drills I used to do back in high school with a number of simulated single leg takedowns, shoulder rolls and body sprawls. When that was completed, I put on a pair light gloves used in MMA and shadowed boxed for another 10 minutes. Once I was nice and loose, I started punching the heavy bag while continuing to move my feet back and forth around the bag. Alternating combinations and jabs as well as few power punches, I worked up a nice sweat. Once my arms got tired and heavy from the lactic acid buildup, I moved over to the kickboxing dummies and practiced side and front leg kicks with both legs. I always enjoyed the loud thwwack sounds that resonated with these kicks. In real bouts, I always used them to take the steam out of my opponents as I set them up for a knockout or submission. I then moved into straight kicks and ended with a flurry of roundhouse head kicks using both legs as fast as I could change direction. Taking off the gloves, I finished with 15 minutes on the treadmill running barefoot as fast as the track would turn. Feeling nice and relaxed after my workout I headed upstairs for a quick shower and a trip to the beach.

  Bill was still sleeping as I headed out to the beach in the pickup. I decided to head South on Highway 5 and drive to Imperial Beach. I had not been there in a while but thought it was a beautiful location. My favorite spot was near a well-known pier and tourist spot. While driving the 45 to 60 minutes to the beach, my thoughts led me to Bill, and how glad I was that he had decided to hang out in California with me. In truth, I was a bit homesick and had not been back east for a while. New Jersey and the east coast was still where I considered home to be. I started to get a little melancholy about my situation and my thoughts soon turned to Fiona. I felt bad that I had become one of those friends that thought posting a few things on Facebook kept me classified as a friend. In reality, I had isolated myself out here since I felt that life had cheated me and left me without one of the best support organizations a person could have in this world, which was family. By the time I got to Imperial Beach, I had decided that Facebook was not going to cut it anymore and I wanted to reconnect with all my friends in a more personal way starting with Fiona.

  The beach was beautiful this time of morning. The gulls were noisy as ever as they fought over scraps of food among the flotsam and except for a couple of joggers and a dog walker; I had the beach to myself. Taking off my sneakers leaving me barefoot since I did not wear any socks, I walked down to the pier with the smooth sand cool on my feet and toes. Wading out to where the water was about a foot deep, I submerged the plastic gallon container that previously held spring water. As the water gurgled and whirl pooled around the opening, I watched the dog walker throw a tennis ball about 25 yards out in the water with some kind of sling shot contraption. The Black Labrador took off like a shot and bounded through the morning rippling of waves until his paws no longer touched bottom. With quick dog paddle strokes and his snout sticking out of the water, the dog closed in on the small green fluorescent ball and snatched it in full stride. Immediately the dog reversed course back to his owner. By now the jug was full so I capped it and started to walk back to the beach. By the time I was a few yards onto the beach, the dog’s owner was already launching the ball back into the waves to the obvious joy of the dog. With a silent acknowledgement to myself, I knew that somewhere in the future that a Labrador would be panting beside me.

  Driving back home, I stopped for gas at a local station and convenience mart, car wash and whatever else they did there. I pulled up to pumps and with an emphatic, “you’re shittin me” saw that the price of gas had gone up 12 cents since my last fill up. I recalled some headline a few days ago about some middle-eastern mucky muck had farted to loudly and the US analysts interpreting this as a sign that there would be fuel shortages hence driving the cost of a barrel of oil upwards. It seemed quite regular now that every weather event, military sabre rattling or OPEC announcement caused dramatic fluctuations in the price of oil, resulting into amplified increases at the pumps.

  Manipulation of Joe Citizen happens on many levels on a daily basis. This includes financial traders, oil companies and even the government as they look to squeeze the consumer. How else do you explain immediate price increase at the pumps or for heating oil when the price of a barrel of oil rises, while the downward movement at the pumps significantly lags behind the reduction in price of a barrel of oil? There are also those multi-billion dollar profits posted by the oil companies that correspond to when there were higher prices at the pumps. With a look of disgust at the $3.94 and of course the 9/10 of a cents sign, I decided to grab a couple of those breakfast taquitoes from inside and my daily energy drink from AMP.

  Returning home I was surprised that Bill had gotten the water sample tested and was already back at the workbench intently browsing Internet pages. I threw a couple of extra breakfast tacquitos onto the bench and asked how it was going. “Interesting, interesting,” he repeated. “Well, are going to fill me in I said?” Tenting his hands together and holding them just below his nose he started to fill me in on the details. First, he said, they ran the test in less than an hour on an outrageous machine called a ‘Total Organic Carbon Analyzer’ used specifically with brine based water samples. I told the tech what I wanted to test for and when he asked me for details of the where the water sample came from, I told him that I wanted it to be blind test. It only took ab
out 20-minutes for it to run which was faster than I expected. Grabbing the two sheets of paper off the desk, he handed them to me and told me they were the results. I quickly glanced at them but immediately new I was out of my league. The organized results came under categories such as; total salinity, dissolved gases and elements. “What do this mean I asked?” “Well, Bill said, based on my research, the water sample is pretty much as expected based on the location and depth of the sample, which held no surprises there. There are two key references in the report critical to our research. The first confirmed the presence of organic material of unknown source, and the second identified a trace element that was anomalous in high amounts.”

  I stood there with what was probably a confused or stupid look and Bill said, “Let me explain a little better. In regards to the trace element in question, it is Arsenic, which is usually present in seawater but at a diluted amount of .0026 parts per million, however this test came back at .143 parts per million which is considered significantly higher. I have to admit that determining what this organism is stumps me. The closet organism I can associate it with is Phytoplankton, however there many key differences. I believe, just like with Phytoplankton, that this organism does need sunlight to survive, however it is not ultra-sensitive to not having it for long periods or can survive on minimal amounts. The reason I say this is that the specimen has alternated between mostly brown to mostly a green color and based on my observations this directly correlated with access to sunlight. The other key point I wanted to make, was that the specimen came up from deep water where sunlight is almost non-existent. This organism must have evolved itself to adapt to low light situations and slow its metabolism down to reflect the amount of available sunlight. It is apparent that the amount of light and not just sunlight correlates to the strength of the electrical charge that it can generate. That is the only real correlation. Another big difference is Phytoplankton needs to be near the surface water while our organism does not. We should probably start considering what to name our find since I am getting tired of referring to it as ‘The Specimen’.’ “Hey professor,” as I was finally able to get a word in edgewise, “all said and done, you found it, you get to name it.” With a big grin on his face, Bill responded by saying “I think I can handle that” and added, “You know naming something that will be this famous is not as easy as you would think.”

  For the next hour, we identified the testing we needed to achieve and who was going to perform them. Bill kept two of the sample jars to perform experiments. He needed to determine how the specimen reacted to dilution with seawater and to try to figure out if the organism reproduces. Assigned with the other two jars, my job was to try to determine the electrical characteristics of the specimen such as voltage and amperage output per sample size, effects of sunlight and research ways in which the specimen was creating electricity in the first place. Under Professor Bill’s advice, we spent the rest of the evening detailing test plans.

  To say the next few days were a blur would be an understatement. We virtually did not talk to each other and lived on food remnants in the fridge and a few fast food deliveries. I detailed every step of every experiment in the computer log. The excitement in realizing that the results of the testing were consistent and predictable was overwhelming. In my limited electrical engineer brain, I associated these results with the knowledge that anything that was consistent and predictable was much easier to harness and control. The hardest part was determining how current flows and the presence of positive and negative polarities. I stumbled upon how our organism achieves this purely from a lucky guess. My initial attempts to determine polarity were futile. Using the voltmeter probes, I could never get a steady reading. After half a day, I decided to remove the tip from the negative probe and trimmed the wire to leave the copper showing only if you looked directly at the wire end. No copper strands extended past the sheathing. Running the wire down the inside of the container holding the specimen, I had placed the wire at the very bottom of the solution. Using the positive probe I touched the just the surface of the liquid. The meter display immediately displayed some numbers, which stayed consistent. I taped the positive probe to the jar to free up my hands and adjusted the meter scale. The 8 ounces of fluid was generating a steady 2.2 volts with amperage reading 8 and wattage equaling 17.6. The other sample showed almost identical results. Halving the liquid resulted in the same voltage, but it cut the amperage in half. This was shaping up to be very consistent to how batteries work.

  Another test I ran, that I named for a lack of a real technical term, was the ‘shake test’. Theorizing that in some manner, the specimen organized itself top to bottom as positive and negative I wondered what would happen if the liquid became stirred or agitated. I have to admit I thought it would disrupt the steady state voltage and current that I had been observing so I was surprised that there was just a slight fluctuation in voltage and amperage, which steadied it almost instantaneously upon cessation of the agitation. The last test I performed, which was late Friday afternoon, was to change the shape of the container to see if the characteristics were the same for fluid being one inch high and spread out horizontally rather than four inches high and spread vertically as in the original container. Once again, I was surprised to see that the characteristics remained the same. This implied to me that the organisms have some organization capability so that they worked in unison to a master plan or common state.

  To get Bill’s attention, I called over, “Hey Geek boy,” since once again had his eye pressed into the viewer of the Microscope. With a silent chuckle to myself, I made a mental note to apply some pencil or other black color to his microscope eyepiece to see if I could catch him with an age-old gag where Bill would walk around with a black circle around his eye. “What are you smirking about” he replied and then asked, “What’s up?” “I don’t know about you, but all work and no play makes Rico a dull boy. How about we go out tonight and eat and have a few cold ones.” “What do you have in mind Bill asked?” “How about some authentic Mexican food…from Mexico, I added. Let’s finish up here, head to Tijuana for some food, drink, and check up on the senoritas. “I’m with you,” Bill chimed in with no hesitation. I just have to finish my notes for the day.”

  Bill thought to himself that getting out was good for the brain and he had never been across the border so was hyped about the trek. The week, and especially today, had been very productive. The specimen once again proved very adaptable. In every test case, the organism was able to reproduce and reach a certain saturation point. In the last test he ran, he diluted a four-ounce sample of the specimen with four ounces of seawater for a 50% dilution. At last look the organism was heading to the saturation level expected when viewed under the Microscope. Part of the observation was not very scientific at all and relied on viewing a sample on the slide and estimating that it had fully reproduced itself. After the initial dilution, I could see spaces around the organisms, which progressively got denser as time went on, where it was expected to reach a steady state. Upon higher magnification, it seemed that the organism just split itself into two. One thing I know, Bill thought to himself, was that the specimen did not like fresh water. The testing of one ounce of specimen to one once of fresh filtered water resulted in the water turning brown after only an hour and the organisms appeared to have dramatically died off in an additional hour. The chemical composition of seawater had a direct correlation to the health of the organism.

  Before logging off the laptop, Bill checked to see when the server backup routine kicked in. Little data was stored on the local workstations and was all stored in a server in a utility closet on the other side of the lab. The way that Rico set this up, the server not only had a storage area network behind it with about 10 terabytes of storage, but it also replicated to an online storage cloud where all the data was encrypted and stored. Replication ran continuous, but he also had a local disk-to-disk backup as a tertiary copy, which based on the schedule was set to run at two o’clock in
the morning. If there was one thing Rico knew, it was how to build an impressive computing environment. I did not hurt to have the bucks to do it. Rico was not private about his finances and openly told Bill he pretty much did everything on his salary, which was in the $150,000 range, and except for buying this building, had not touched his inheritance and insurance money. Friends and family are everything, Bill mused to himself, and friends like Mike were rare. As long as I have known him, he has had a philosophy of what is mine is yours and more than once has helped his friends at a moment’s notice.

  Hearing a rumbling sound behind him, Bill turned to find Rico pushing a large rolling trash barrel. If we want to be professional lab rats he quipped, we will need to keep the lab up to standards. Both started throwing a week’s worth of pizza boxes, Thai food containers, and junk food wrappers and of every kind water, soda and energy drink container into the trash. Whew, I guess I tuned out the smell,” Rico said as he twitched his nose at the same time, but when you put all this garbage together it’s not pleasant.” Rico rolled the can out though the side door for trash pickup tomorrow and when he came back in he said we are rolling in 30-minutes.

  The drive to Tijuana was a relatively short one considering that there was some evening rush hour traffic and a minimal wait at the border crossing. On the way there, Bill and I compared notes about our testing and by the end of our updates both of us were as pumped up as could be. Bill looked at me, and said “Rico, do you know what this means?” Without waiting for my reply, he went on in almost a whisper saying, “It means we have something here that is stable, can be replicated, can be controlled and can be harnessed to replace any electrical source to power homes, businesses, cars, boats and many others. I do not want to use the phrase ‘game changer,’ but this could change the way the world runs. Shit, this is not a game changer; this is a freakin ‘world changer’. Just think about it. Based on your testing we could build a system similar to solar panels, but would not need anywhere near the floor space to power an electric car or even an entire home. Bill needed a moment to catch his breath, which gave me an opening to add a few caveats. I started by saying, “I agree with what you are saying and I am really pumped about what I’ve seen, but we need to stay grounded and take one step at a time. We do not know how stable this stuff will be over time, hell we do not even know what this stuff actually is. I think more people need to be engaged to fill in some of the questions. I also think we should incorporate ourselves and think about building a company around this and most important of all, keep this as secret as possible.”