by Jose Moreno
CHAPTER III***
Racing, Barón was approaching the famous Old Jazz Corner at 6:24 pm. He slowed down right before he set foot on the corner. When he set foot at the corner,—it was a small recreational plaza with an area of 300 square yards—he walked quickly into the plaza, looking around a little, and trying to analyze the complex social ambience at the crowded place: The place was full of rambunctious children and energetic teen-agers, doing different whimsical activities, and playing with the mechanical metal devices that were there to amuse them. Then, he spotted Martin and two other students, all wearing colorful and lighted TRSs. They seemed to be whispering, muttering, passing cryptic notes to one another, and occasionally performing light shows with the lights on their TRSs, a common practice among south Truxes teen-agers. Barón thought that they were not talking about anything related to the things that the daring pamphlet indicated; instead, they looked as if they were goofing around like average teen-agers on his block. Barón’s impression of Martin’s group was that they were not serious about the information that was printed on the pamphlet. In order to test his superficial judgment, Barón walked towards the group. As soon as Martin noticed that he was approaching them, he ran towards him displaying a big smile. Martin shook Barón’s hand, gave him a hug, and whispered in Barón’s ear, “We are pretending that this meeting is not taking place. We do not want to be caught up by the ODFs”. While Martin and Barón were walking towards the other two students, Barón realized that his judgment about the group was wrong, observing how they disguised what they were communicating. They were doing an excellent job pretending to be wasting their time. Thus, Barón thought that the best way to communicate with the group was to play their own game and try to imitate whatever they were doing. When he was at the site where the teen-agers were, he sat down on the concrete benches like the other ones. As soon as Barón sat down, he received a notepad and a note from a teen-ager; the note said, “Welcome”. The teen-ager then stood up and began to turn all the lights on his TRS in order to do a lightshow. While the teen-ager was distracting people around with the light show, Barón took a paper from the note pad and wrote a question.
The teen-ager doing the light show sat down after a few seconds. Barón gave him the question that he had written: “How can we assault functiomatons?”
He passed the note to the other teen-agers. Meanwhile, unexpectedly, the teen-ager that had done the light show initiated a conversation about the food that he had eaten for lunch—a comment that was out of context, but Barón understood to mean that it was part of the “game” they were playing in order to maintain the secrecy of the meeting. When all of them had read the note, they all began writing their responses on sheets of paper. When Barón noticed they were responding his question, he stood up to do a lightshow in order to disguise the social context just like the other teen-ager had done. Barón was thinking, while doing the light show, that it was a ridiculous way to communicate; however, he also thought it was the best way to communicate with other potential vandals.
Once Barón was done with his show, he sat down. All of them handed out their responses to Barón’s daring question:
Martin wrote, “We are thinking about dropping a functio-virus.”
“Let’s sabotage something,” was written by another teen.
The other teen wrote, “Do you have any ideas?”
Barón stood up excited by their responses and said out loud, breaking the rules of the game, “I have an idea that is going to work.”At first, they felt that Barón had done something wrong by breaking the rules of their “silent game”. However, immediately afterwards, In Barón’s facial expression, they noticed the seriousness of the message that Barón had communicated verbally. They all nodded and smiled, implying their acceptance of whatever aggression Barón had in mind.
Barón kept playing the secret communication game; the goal was to communicate something non-verbally to create a distraction so that the ODF and VRS nearby were not able to capture the essence of the communication—It was not a good idea to carry out the meetings in anyone’s home given that often parents recorded what the teen-agers were doing in their rooms. The chances of getting caught by any security officers from Truxes were slim given that it was impossible to pay attention to every conversation and action that had been carried out at that corner. Furthermore, even if the security office had been suspicious for any reason about the purpose for their meeting, the group of teen-agers had thought that by passing non-electronic notes and disguising the context for the message, it would be difficult to decode what they were communicating because there would not be electronic records of their conversation, city ODFs and VRSs would not be sufficient to incriminate them, and they could destroy easily the papers they had used to communicate.
In this way, by passing paper notes, Barón was able to propose the creation of an outlandish device that was not known by the military community: He suggested that he could build a high intensity electromagnetic wave pulse generator that could disable a functiomaton—the idea was to cause the quantum systems in the functiomaton to be “disturbed” by radiation [15]. Because he volunteered during the weekends in a hospital fixing medical equipment, he had privileged access to discarded device parts that could be used to create a high power output in the form of low frequency electromagnetic waves that could interrupt any functiomaton—Given that functiomatons in the year 2054 consisted of components about the size of atoms, he also thought that a small thermal disturbance delivered directly to the components could interrupt their operations [16]. Barón mentioned also that it was not going to be difficult to cause the desired effect because functiomatons were not heavily shielded against external low frequency, high intensity radiation given that it was not known at that time about vandalism that could be done on functiomatons by means of high intensity electromagnetic energy. Baron reasoned that his original method was better than dropping a harmless virus that could be removed easily.
It was understandable that he made the other group members afraid of his project when they read in the notes given out by Barón that only nuclear energy could power the device; in other words, the dangerous aspect about the generation of high intensity electromagnetic pulses, the way Barón had suggested, was that it was going to require high levels energy per second. Ordinary electric current source in the year 2054 did not provide the required energy. In order to produce the required power, Barón suggested that he could to steal five milligrams of uranium from the hospital’s research lab; it was an amount so small that the hospital safety office was not going to notice missing.
However, Barón unexpectedly discouraged two of the members from participating, and encouraged only Martin to carry out Barón’s eccentric proposal. Both of the thwarted teen-agers showed on their faces their reluctance to participate and responded formally with a note that said, “Isn’t that dangerous?”
Baron did not have time to respond: coincidentally, while their meeting was coming to an end, the security patrol cars were passing by asking, by means of megaphones, all minors everywhere to go inside their homes because the allowed hours were almost over. It was 7:17 pm. The group of potential vandals realized that it was time to run towards their houses to make sure they would be inside exactly at 7:30 pm to prevent getting a court citation for violating the criminal code. In this way, they simply stood up, waved their hands to say goodbye, and began to sprint.
