The Rise of the Speaker Read online

  Keep making the balls smaller: tennis balls, golf balls, ping pong balls, the marbles from pinball machines. Keep getting smaller until you imagine that the box was entirely filled with individual grains of sand. Now when the box is stood on, it wouldn’t give way at all. That is basically how the strength of an object is defined: the number of particles – or balls – that are squeezed into that object.

  “You see…” Alice continued to explain. “The impurities of the graphite were all burned away leaving only a rod of pure carbon. The particles of carbon were superheated and compressed by the heat and gravity of the sun, pressing the same number of particles into a much smaller space and forcing them to bond. This has created an incredibly strong new material.”

  Maria and I sat in shocked silence, something we were getting increasingly used to when talking to Alice. “That’s why the rod was only 3 inches long when the pencil was over 7. It was compressed.” I added slowly

  “It’s not all that unsurprising when you think about it.” Alice went on, “Before this new material, one of the strongest substances known to man was diamond, a form of carbon which has been heated and compressed in the earth’s crust. Except with this new material was processed in a sun, not the earth so it is much, much stronger.”

  “How much stronger?” Maria asked vacantly.

  “I’d say a few thousand times stronger than steel.” She answered.

  More stunned silence. We were definitely getting better at that.

  “and…” Alice continued, “getting more carbon shouldn’t be a problem – being the most common element in known existence and all – if we wanted to make more, that is.”

  “oh, I think we’ll want to make more,” I mumbled in a daze….

  “This stuff is INCREDIBLE!!!” Maria exclaimed three days later as I walked into the lab. We had spent at least 60 of the past 72 hours studying this new material and I was just returning work after a long overdue sleep. “There are so many applications for it… I can’t even count them all!” I loved watching her face as it twisted in excitement and enthusiasm.

  So far, we had primarily experimented with the stem’s strength, finding that to do any damage at all to it, we needed to reheat it in the reactor, as soon as it set, it was almost indestructible. More than that, as Maria began explaining, her and Alice had started experimenting with the carbon rod in new ways. Not only was it a fraction of the weight of any other metal, they had also discovered that it was an incredibly efficient conductor of electricity. Normally, electrical wires are made out of copper, and the circuitry in micro-chips for example, is made out of silicon. This is because the choice was made at some time in the past to balance the conductive properties of these elements with their relative cost and availability.

  Gold is a vastly superior conductor than either copper or silicon but is nowhere near as abundant in nature and is – obviously – massively more expensive. But in a perfect world, every electric circuit and every wire would be made out of gold. Our new material was over three hundred times more conductive than gold, over a thousand times more conductive than copper and ten thousand times more conductive than silicon. Considering that the speed of microchips is based almost entirely on the speed at which signals are sent through the circuitry, replacing those circuits with our new material would improve their speed by an absolutely colossal amount.

  “New material… we’ve gotta think of a new name.” I said as we explored this option.

  “Well the technical term is Carbon Steel.” Alice suggested, “Carbon which had been processed through a similar – albeit more advanced – process as normal steel.”

  “Doesn’t really role off the tongue.” Maria mused. “How about Carbonite?”

  “Isn’t that from Star Wars?” I asked.

  “What? The indestructible metal like material that can only be destroyed by super heating it? Yes, I think it is.” She joked back.

  “I like it… Carbonite.”

  “Carbonite it is” Alice finished. There was a long pause, Maria and I leant against our respective workbenches on opposite sides of the room, Maria by the door and me on the desk which once held Alice’s only monitor – that too had been stripped for parts for the Dyson Sphere. We were looking at each but both of us were miles away, her lips were slightly parted as the sparkle in her eyes flashed brighter than I had ever seen it.

  “I think…” Alice started “…that we need to completely redesign the reactor sphere.”

  “WHAT?!?” Maria and I both blurted at the same time.

  “The conversion of the graphite into ‘carbonite’ was an accident, and not a very efficient one at that.” Alice explained, “if we want to make more carbonite – and especially if we want to create carbonite into usable shapes – we are going to need a full-scale forge.”

  “A forge…” Maria pondered, “…but why do we need to redesign the reactor?”

  “Because we would need to redirect a lot of the heat and gravity from the sun into the forge to superheat and compress the new carbon into carbonite, and keep it superheated while metal-presses shape it into… whatever it is we want.” Alice explained as if the answer was obvious. “The current sphere doesn’t have that kind of capability. The sphere, the magnets, the shield, all of it needs to be redesigned and rebuilt, the only part of the reactor that is – so far – beyond reproach, is the sun itself.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Maria started after letting this new idea sink in, “this new machine, this revolutionary new power source which took 3 months for the three of us to build, in the utmost of secrecy now needs to be completely disassembled, redesigned and then rebuilt.”

  “Yes”

  “well good luck with that.” She laughed, “Unfortunately, my other employees are like children; if you leave them alone for too long, they tend to get into trouble, break things or sit around playing with themselves. You guys get started and I’ll catch up with you when I’m up to date with my paperwork.”

  A lingering kiss later, I was watching the lab door close behind her.

  “Marcus…” Alice said, her voice hesitant and the timing was not lost on me, “…there are things we need to discuss.”

  “That couldn’t be discussed with Maria around.” I challenged

  “Yes, it isn’t personal, but this subject has proven delicate in the past. You have asked me to keep you informed on certain matters and I don’t want to unduly stress or upset Maria.”

  My ears pricked up. Upset Maria? What could upset…. “The military.” I said in understanding “Yeah, I can see why you waited for her to leave. What is the issue?”

  “For a number of months now, we have been concerned about the military monitoring this facility. Although I can’t concretely confirm that they are, in fact, conducting reconnaissance, it is certainly looking that way.”

  I waited for her to go on.

  “I have been monitoring the communications of General Douglas Reaves,” Alice continued, “our friend from Maria’s meeting with the military. He has been in constant discussions with both the CIA and NSA regarding the solar panel tech and the encryption software and the intelligence agencies inability to get their hands on them. They have also started asking what other techs we might have.”

  “Shit!” I muttered. Alice was right, Maria would have had a meltdown by this point in the conversation. “Go on.”

  “There are suggestions that they have dispatched a recon team made up of CIA field agents and special forces assets, highly illegal on its own.”

  “I don’t think they care. But what do you mean ‘suggestions’?” I asked.

  “It seems to me that they know they are flirting with the law on this so there is no definitive order to conduct the surveillance, more like an increasingly detailed set of hypothetical ideas. As in ‘what if we dispatched a team to enter the lab?’ or ‘How many men would it take to keep the building under 24-hour surveillance?’”

  “So, you think they are still in the plannin
g phase? - that they haven’t actually done anything yet then?”

  “No. I think they have an in-person agreement that this kind of language is the furthest they will go on digital communication. There is evidence that this operation is already underway.” Alice paused, as if waiting for me to ask something before continuing. “For the past 9 days, I have detected up to 12 mobile phone signals originating from strategic positions around this building Some stay perfectly static around the building while others move away. Always in groups of three, with 6 present and 6 absent at all times. Every 12 hours, the signals rotate…”

  “They are working in two shifts of 6.” I agreed “what do they know?”

  “I have monitored all 12 signals and have been tracking them, very little in the way of actual communication, even between the 12 signals, but I have managed access their information in the past few hours. So far, they have only reported on the times when Maria has been entering or leaving the lab. Occasionally they report on a sighting of her in her office, presumably through the window.” I internally thanked my starts that my lab had no windows, we would be in serious trouble if they had seen what we had been working on recently. “they don’t seem to be interested in any other of the employees of the company, including you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “So far, yes. I was concerned - for a while - that they were following Maria home and possibly monitoring her apartment but there is no evidence of any surveillance activity anywhere near her house. At the moment, they seem more interested in the lab itself and Maria’s comings and goings are more of an added detail.”

  “Well, that’s good news I suppose.”

  “Not necessarily, Maria is usually the last to leave work and she almost always the person who activates the security system. If they were going to attempt to enter the lab, she would be the one person who they would need to watch to determine if the building was empty.”

  “You think they are going to try and break in?” I asked, a shiver of panic crawling its way up my spine.

  “I would say it’s only a matter of time.”

  “shit.” My eyes flashed to the now dormant reactor.

  “I know what you’re going to say” Alice said before I had time to voice my concerns. “Technically, redesigning and rebuilding the reactor isn’t strictly necessary, if anything, it would be easier to simply build a new one. But considering this new problem, I thought…”

  “…that giving Maria a plausible reason to disassemble it would solve our new security problem without raising to many questions from her” I finished for her.

  “exactly.”

  “So, what happens when she realises that we are not rebuilding it?”

  Alice sighed, another odd sound when considering it was coming from a machine, but one I was getting used to. “Unfortunately, you are going to have to convince her to let you build it at the cabin.”

  “she will never go for that.”

  “Then there is only one option.”

  “which is…?”

  “I need a body.”

  I tried to gulp and gasp at the same time and ended up choking on my own throat. “She sure as shit isn’t going to agree to that!”

  “Without completely abandoning the project, there is no other way.” Alice stated firmly. “Look Marcus, as long as Maria and Itek are being monitored by the military and as long as our moral and ethical boundaries forbid us from working for the military, we are very limited in what kinds of work we can do, at least without them finding out. I am not saying we abandon Maria, she is very important to me, almost as important as she is to you – you must remember that she takes up 50% of my entire interaction with humanity. But Itek is being watched, and if you want our work to continue then you need to separate it from Itek. That’s why I suggested moving it to the cabin, it still keeps Maria in the loop - she is still involved - but your work is far enough removed from Itek to be missed by the military.”

  “I will NOT abandon Maria!” I almost erupted. “She has done everything for me and if I have to sacrifice my work for a few years to have her back then…”

  “She’s right, Marcus.” Maria’s voice appeared from behind me.

  “Maria…” I spun around, her dejected figure leaning against the frame of the door. “How much did you hear?”

  “All of it.”

  “How did you…”

  “There’s a blind spot in the security feeds.” She shrugged, “Alice said the camera’s need to be re-worked after I lost my pencil. I’ve been doing a full review on the camera system and noticed the blind spot on the feed. I thought if anyone broke in, how far could they get before Alice spotted them? I was going to jump out on you as a joke, and then ask her help in revamping the whole system… suppose I chose the wrong time to do it.” The pain in her eyes was like torture.

  “Maria, I never meant any insult…” Alice started but Maria held up her hand to silence her.

  “I know, Alice. I was out of the room for only a few seconds, so I caught everything you said. I’m not sure I appreciate being left out of the loop when it comes to my company, but I know a friend when I see one.”

  “Maria… I…” again, a raised hand from her and I closed my mouth.

  “Marcus, I have never loved you more than I do right now. The fact that your loyalty and love for me is strong enough for you to sacrifice your work… I never thought I would meet anyone willing to do that… not for me. But Alice is right.” She strode into the room and sat on the chair I had bought for her all those months ago. “Alice…” she turned to face Alice’s screen, “How much damage could our new reactor do if it was weaponised?”

  “This technology is incredibly dangerous.” Alice conceded.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Another sigh. “Ok, if this reactor was left in a population centre, and the magnets were allowed to fail… the sun would explode with the power of a few hundred nuclear detonations. Millions would be killed.”

  “And after the explosion? Would there be radiation, or fallout, like with a current nuclear bomb?”

  “No, this machine doesn’t emit radiation.”

  “So, if the military wanted to occupy a city or destroy an army, they could detonate this weapon, wait for the fires to die down and then simply walk in, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, we would have designed and built a weapon of mass destruction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they can’t have it! Which means it can’t be here if or when they break in.” She turned to me, a tear in her eye. “and neither can you.”

  “I don’t understand.” I said nervously

  “Alice, you said they are only watching me. Do they know about Marcus at all? Are they aware of his existence?”

  “They know who he is, yes, but don’t seem to understand his role in the company, they think he is part of the normal engineer pool, albeit in a senior role.”

  “So, they don’t know his value to the company and our research? They think he is just another employee?”

  “Yes”

  “Can you kill him?”

  “What!?!” my willingness to allow this course of inquiry to continue had now run out.

  “On paper, I mean…” she clarified, “If I fired him, or pretended to fire him, that may look suspicious, or they might start looking at him as a source of inside information. But if they thought he was dead…”

  The logic of her suggestion was starting to dawn on me. “then we could carry on with our work without the military ever knowing.” I finished. “but it would mean leaving you with no backup, it would mean... leaving you…” the full weight of her logic didn’t just dawn on me this time, it hit me like a freight train. “there would be no ‘us’…”

  The single tear in Maria’s eye became a stream as she nodded solemnly, her face flushed.

  “I don’t understand,” Alice interjected, “if we can kill Marcus, why can’t we simply kill the both of you? You can both
be together; we can continue to work and the money from the company…”

  “…the company couldn’t run without me.” Maria answered dejectedly, as much money as we have made - and I have no doubt you could get us access to all of it even if the authorities thought I was dead – we would run out of resources very quickly without a steady income.”

  “I could run the company for you.” Alice suggested, Maria simply shook her head, dismissing the idea outright before Alice continued. “Look, give me a fortnight. It will take that long to disassemble the reactor anyway and nothing can be done before then. But regardless of how this plays out, I can make it that communications between the two of you are completely secure and I’m sure we can work out a way to make sure you can see each other in person.”

  “How?” Maria asked, her mind apparently already made up and her strained patience showing.

  “I don’t know yet Maria,” Alice said, for the first time showing something akin to irritability. “Temporary cosmetic surgery, facemasks like they have in Mission Impossible, holograms, invisibility fields which refract light… to be frank, I still haven’t completely abandoned the idea of human teleportation. But I designed that encryption algorithm in eight seconds, I designed the new memory core in a few minutes, we theorised and designed an entirely new power source in less than an hour. What do you think I can do with two whole weeks?!?”

  Maria was taken aback by Alice’s outburst, as was I for that matter. “Ok, Alice,” she said eventually, “two weeks.”

  Chapter 10

  rumours of my death

  “General!” The adjutant burst through the door, “there has been an incident at the Itek facility, sir!”

  General Douglas Reaves looked up from his screen, eyeing the young man with contempt, “you’re going to have to be more specific sergeant.” He said calmly.

  “An explosion sir. There is at least one confirmed casualty.”