by Jim Wurst
“First of all, I am compelled to remind you that this briefing is being conducted under section ten of the Official Secrets Act. You may receive this security briefing, but we prohibit you from making copies or notes from this and you may not discuss this with anyone lacking the proper security status. We will take this monitor with us when we leave.”
“Understood.”
“We now believe the Chinese Device is a prototype for a large machine. To the left of the schematic, you will see it is incomplete. Based on the analysis of the complete parts of the schematic, we believe the missing section is the power source.”
“What about the big question I don’t have to be an expert to ask: is it a weapon?”
“We place it at a 75% probability that it has a military function.”
“Nice parsing of words. I said ‘weapon,’ you said, ‘military function’.”
“It could have a military function but not specifically a weapon.”
“You’re backtracking from the government’s original position.”
“The government does not have an official position. I am relaying to you the best information the United States security services can provide. How anyone interprets that information is beyond my responsibilities.”
Sean thought this was an appropriate moment to join the conversation. “A popular rumor is that it is a concentrated particle beam, something that could shoot down our missiles and aircraft.”
“Rumors, exactly. That is a workable hypothesis, but it is one of many….”
“And this appendage, could that be anything but a cannon?”
“Yes, it could be a telescope, but that’s highly unlikely given what else we know about the Device. It could be a sensor.”
“Which could have a military, commercial or scientific explanation.”
“Exactly.”
Cranston took back the reins. “I’m the last person to give the Chinese the benefit of a doubt and I understand you would be derelict in your duties if you did not consider the possibility of a grave threat to the United States, but how much attention did we give to the idea that it has a benign, reasonable purpose?”
“Yes, of course. While the schematic could be open to various interpretations, we also factor in the Chinese behavior which contradicts innocent scientific or commercial activities.”
“And when exactly have the Chinese been innocent of anything? They’re secretive about everything, commercial secrets can be as vital as military ones.”
“I understand you have to make political calculations, but again that’s not my brief.”
There is an awkward silence. Cranston and Sean continued to look at the schematic. The general continued to say nothing, and Rogers continued to stand.
Finally, Cranston broke the stalemate. “That’s it?”
“We have fulfilled our obligations under the law. The monitor, please.”
Cranston gave it to Claussen, who turned in off and place it back in his attaché. After exchanging formal handshakes, Sean escorted them to the door. Cranston sat at his desk, contemplating the ceiling.
As the visitors made their way out of the Senate office building, General Claussen turned to the still silent Rogers. “Well? What do you think?”
Rogers thought about what he didn’t want to say and then said, “He was more formal than usual, but your rank could account for that. No unusual ticks or movements.”
“What did he mean about being the last person to give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt?”
“His mother was on the Orion.”
“Really? But he has a Chinese assistant and Chinese running mate.”
“Chinese-American,” Rogers corrected in the most subservient manner possible, “He focuses intently on the individual. It’s an important element in his profile.”
Meanwhile, in Cranston’s office, the senator was sitting while Sean turned on the computers. He then pushed away from the desk, giving Sean access to the desk drawers. Sean opened the center draw and took out a nearly transparent tablet.
“Did it work?”
Smiling, he looked up to his boss. “Yes, sir.” He handed the tablet to Cranston and went over to a side door. Opening it, he escorted Lilly and Worth into the room. Worth was in his forties, walking like Claussen but wearing civilian clothes. As the saying went, “Once a Marine…”
Cranston rose. “Lilly, thank you. Everyone, have a seat.” They did as Sean projected the contents of the tablet onto the larger screen. It was the schematic for the Chinese Device.
“How was the briefing?” Lilly asked.
“In a word, lies,” Sean responded.
It was Worth’s turn. “What odds do they give that it’s a weapon?”
“’75% probability that it has a military function.’”
“Their words?”
“Yep.”
Lilly and Worth, her 360, studied the image intently for several minutes. Cranston and Sean could barely restrain their impatience.
“Why didn’t their scan pick it up the copying?” Lilly asked Sean.
“Extremely low-level frequency. Less than a watch gives off. The download only works a short distance and must do it slowly. That’s why the monitor had to stay on the desk as long as possible. Also, very fortunate we have a wood desk. If we had switched it, Rogers would have noticed.”
“Do you believe the scale is accurate?” Lilly asked.
“Yes. Which means what we are looking at is about 70 meters long.”
“On what do they base the premise that the missing section represents one third of the size?”
“We don’t know.”
“So, they could be guessing,” said Worth.
“Or throwing us a curve ball. But that one-third number is out there.”
The technical parsing was important, Cranston knew, but he needed the big picture, so he finally spoke. “How important is that?”
“There is no apparent power source. So, the assumption is that the missing piece is the power source. If only one third is missing meaning 30 meters, or so then that’s enough for a tradition power source plus some auxiliary machinery. If there is more missing…”
“… Say, that what we are seeing is really only half of the Device…” Worth added.
“… Then it could be an extremely large power source, or a traditional power source plus one or more other major features.”
“Meaning we are flaying, around even more than we know,” Sean said.
“Exactly.”
“Alright, enough,” said the boss, “Let’s focus on what we can see. So that, what? Appendage? A cannon?”
Worth answered. “Without knowing the thickness of the tube, it’s hard to tell. If it’s a cannon, it would have to be thick enough to withstand the pressure and heat of the projectile.”
“A particle beam?” Sean suggested.
“Possibly, then thickness would be less of a concern.”
Lilly interrupted the dialogue with a simple firmness that disguised the impact of what she was saying. “That appendage is not a cannon nor beam. It’s not designed to be a weapon.”
Everyone looked at her, startled and impressed. Cranston’s low opinion of her did not extend to the belief that she babbled nonsense. “That’s the first unequivocal sentence I’ve heard all day. Why do you say that?”
Pointing to a blockish section near the base, she asked Worth, “Doesn’t it make sense that this is a variant converter?”
“Yes.”
“Converters are a universal size. So, extrapolate the size of the device from the converter. The cylinder is 40 meters long and one meter in diameter.”
“No projectile of any military value is going to be that wide.”
“And it’s too wide for a particle beam.”
“The Pentagon has to
know that,” Sean interjected.
Cranston was displaying the twitch the others had learned to avoid. “Of course, they know. Ailes is feeding us a steaming pile of it. Hayden bases his campaign on the best intelligence, and we get this dog-and-pony show. What’s the bottom line?”
Worth was confident. “70 percent probability that it’s not a weapon.”
Lilly added, “70 percent probability that it’s not a weapon.”
“Bastards,” the presidential candidate said.
“We have to be careful here,” said Sean, “We’re not supposed to analyze the schematic so thoroughly.”
“So, we have to base our strategy on a truth we’re not supposed to know.”
“And that we know is treason,” said his aide as he deleted the schematic from the screen.
CHAPTER 20
Marbury Point was dead during the day, but alive at night with the dying. The point was a part of Washington’s maritime and industrial history, the jut of land on the east bank of the Potomac, downriver from the District. For decades, it had been an isolated storage site for the oils, metals, and chemicals that drove industrialization but poisoned everything around them. Finally abandoned, it just sat there, weighed down by its faded past and the toxic and heavy metals that had settled into the soil. First Washington real estate sky-rocketed, then it started disappearing, so anything that was more or less dry was desirable. That included the toxic Marbury Point. First it was the artsy types, no children and no food but magically the lead and mercury in the water and soil evaporated then they built housing. That boom lasted only a few years before the tidal surges started pounding the buildings and storage tanks. By 2052, the new rot had set in. The kids who didn’t care took over the hulks of the massive tanks for parties and concerts. Ear-splitting tonal music, drugs, some acts that looked like sex, and the occasional self-flagellation and bloodletting kept them fueled until the daylight bored them to bed.
Washington was proof that climate change has a sense of humor. Rising sea levels reclaimed the land the city had taken away. In the 1880s, massive reclamation projects took from the river what became the western end of the Mall, the Tidal Basin the name should have been a warning and the East and West Potomac Parks. Now all of that except the Mall was once again part of the riverbed. Further away from monumental Washington, the swamp was the least of the worries. The land was too low and there was too much of it to protect. Floodgates where the Potomac met the Chesapeake Bay slowed the water down, but it was not enough. The airport named after a president who failed had to be moved inland. The Marines had to retreat from Quantico. The fancy marinas drowned.
The denizens of the Point were young enough to know only this world, but old enough to know what their world could have been. The younger generation always rebels, usually with reason, against the elder generation, but no generation had more obvious reasons to heap contempt upon their elders.
Statisticians sliced and diced the generations. The Greatest Generation that fought through the Great Depression of the 20th century and World War II was followed by the Baby Boomers that great demographic bulge that defined the rest of the 20th century and a huge chunk of the 21st. They just would not let go. Then the names got boring: Generation X, Generation Y, as if they could not bother to come up with complete words. But then someone rebranded Gen Y the Millennials, for those born in the last two decades of the old millennium. As kids they could see what was happening, but there was nothing they could do about it. It was like watching a rockslide and wondering, in desperation, if they could stand together and hold back the exact right rock to stop it.
The next generation was the one that really got screwed. They grew as sea levels and global temperatures rose. Born after 1997, it was hard to find an appropriate name. After Generations X and Y, Z was logical, except there was an uncomfortable finality to that. But Z stuck, helped by the nickname “Zoomers.” The next generation could have been called the shit-out-of-luck generation. Alpha and Omega fought it out. Some took a page from F. Scott Fitzgerald: Generation Lost. The name matched the new realities: birth rates were as low as they had been at the worst of the Depression and World War II; prenatal and infant mortality rose at a heart-breaking rate as the most vulnerable could not adapt to new threats of diseases; insects and the lack of food and water where they had once been sufficient. In a decade, international efforts that succeeded at the beginning of the century in reducing infant mortality and poverty and improving access to medical care and clean water disappeared with the ice caps, shriveled like the crops when the monsoon failed to arrive. The Dead Babies Generation was too morbid even for those days, so the Lost Generation won the day.
Over the decades, the slogans of the young changed, like the seven stages of grief, except they were nowhere close to acceptance. It appeared it took everything to get to anger and bargaining, so depression was as far as anyone could get. “Working through” was a joke.
First it was the armor of irony:
YOU DROWNED SANTA CLAUS
DID YOU ENJOY YOUR HUMMERS?
I MISS FISH
Then the anger and the threats:
WATER IS NOT FOR PROFIT
WHEN DID YOU KNOW MONEY WASN’T ENOUGH?
DO YOU THINK MARS WILL SAVE YOU?
YOU DRANK OUR FUTURE - WAIT UNTIL YOU ARE OLD
YOU WILL NEVER EAT STEAK AGAIN
As the decades progressed, revenge took over:
NO FOOD NO MERCY
THE MOON IS NOT FAR ENOUGH
BEG AND WE MAY NOT KILL YOU
BEG AND WE MAY NOT EAT YOU
The most popular was the simplest. Two words. They were everywhere, physical and virtual graffiti, songs and movies, hacks on phones and computers, chants at public events, clothing, even on their bodies. It was a popular tattoo. Some even had it inked – scarred – into their foreheads so anyone looking at them would see it. Turning away was impossible:
YOU KNEW
This world was awash in drugs. So many anxious people needed so many drugs. The drugs from nature, marijuana, and cocaine lost their influence as the vanishing arable land got used for food, no matter how inefficient. Even tobacco had to surrender to the need for soybeans and corn. Only heroin from the poppies of central Asia continued production. Its only agricultural competition was cotton, and that needed more water than existed. Addiction, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so a boom industry grew in creating drugs in the lab. And the subsequent business of making as many of them legal as possible. There were designer drugs for the elites and the absolute scraps for the poor that completely rotted one vital organ or more. Reversing the trend of the 20th century, generations in the 21st saw a steady decline in median age. In the countries most devastated by climate change, the main causes of death remained hunger, disease and war. In the richer countries still somewhat protected from the worst, generational depression, low birth rates, increased birth defects and suicide took a steady toll.
That night at Point was especially riotous. A new batch of a favorite drug, Troynoy Iks, Triple X in Russian, or Iks had arrived. The rumor was that it was a modified formula. Demand was high and no one knew if it was really Russian, but the name had just the right shading of mystery and misery to incite the target audience. There was the usual amount of vomiting and concussions. But then a 23-year-old had a stroke. And then another.
The police arrived and unlike the old days of speakeasies when patrons would flee, this crowd was too far gone or bored to run. Rounding them up was like collecting dead kittens. One veteran collared a clearly underage girl who was snarling at her fingernails. As usual, she had lost her identity card.
“Name,” the cop started the routine.
“Slasher.”
“Real name.”
“Vik.”
“Last name.”
“Cranston.”
CHAPTER 21
An an
gel donor was financing Mr. Lopez’s work. If it were up to the university, his research would have shut down years ago. While the research was useful, Lopez was not. Corporations made enormous endowments to ensure research stuck to the approved avenues of chemical and genetically modified solutions. Only a few universities mostly in California and Georgia had agricultural departments dedicated to finding organic solutions to the impact of climate change on crops. In addition, while most non-chemical research centered on breeding new varieties, Mr. Lopez was moving the opposite direction. He wasn’t the only one working on reverse genetics, trying to breed out centuries of “impurities” and resurrect the original corn, but he was the most vocal about it. At the University of New Mexico, Lopez was alone. He was not the most popular member of the faculty.
Whenever someone knocked on his door, it was always a student. Eager, inquisitive, they had to know the answer. So, when the opened door revealed the Dean, Mr. Lopez was thoroughly surprised.
“Carlos, doing well?” the Dean asked.
The Dean was never casual, so Mr. Lopez’ answer wasn’t either. “Yes, why?”
“We’ve known each other for a long time, so I feel I really should warn you about things that are being said about you.”
“’Being said.’ How conveniently passive. What is ‘being said’? And I suppose I shouldn’t ask by whom?”
“You’re using your position in this university to criticize the president’s immigration policies.”
“No, I am using my position in this university to teach about corn.”
“You didn’t say that the president would forbid the eating of Mexican corn? We’re supposed to pretend ‘corn’ doesn’t mean… something else?”
“That doesn’t sound like a joke to you?”
“And what about you talking about Aztlan? Was that a joke, too?”
