by Toby Weston
The situation had deteriorated rapidly. Keith was in the water again. He couldn’t count the bobbing heads in the dark, but he could hear a lot of screams for help. Suddenly, he was aware of something large in the water with him. Flashes of frenzied shark death presented themselves for his inner eye’s perusal. He recoiled, jarred away from merely imaginary horrors when a vicious 60cm knife—which seemed fouled with gore—thrust up through the waves a metre or so away.
“Take off his fucking spike, it’s got stuck!” screeched a voice through the buds of his Spex. Keith got the impression it had been shouting at him for a while.
The blade, which had hinged forward to provide a handy stabbing tool, had become wound with pirate clothing and jammed. Keith found that he had to peel off the entire neoprene mask to get rid of the gruesome weapon. He jerked back to avoid its blade as it sank safely away.
The water was warm and, once the girls realised it was a dolphin with good intentions, rather than a ravenous shark, that was circling them, things calmed down. Joseph and twelve girls were in the little inflatable, while Keith, Stella, and the rest held onto ropes with exhausted arms. Nobody seemed to be missing. Tinkerbell had helped the less proficient swimmers to the Zodiac and was now nuzzling at Stella’s side. The coastguard was on the way.
It looked like they had done it. Media streams had already started picking up their public feeds.
Chapter 10 – All Inclusive
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. The First Law of Thermodynamics is unambiguous.
Electrical potential created in the spinning coils of a coal-fuelled power station is a withdrawal of chemical energy originally deposited by sunlight millions of years ago: an auditable chain of transmutation, from solar photons, to plant carbohydrates, to mineralised coal, then to heat, angular momentum and, finally, into the electrical potential used to power your fridge.
A nuclear power station does the same thing by liquidating a longer-term investment. This ancient energy, required to build the massive nuclei of radioactive elements, was laid down by supernovae firing hundreds of millions of years before our planet was even formed.
The universe is rife with energy. Generation is not the problem: solar, wind, tide, thermal, nuclear. There are, however, few means to store it as conveniently as in fossil fuels.
It takes 250 calories—one megajoule—to accelerate a car to 100mph. This is about the same amount of chemical energy as stored in one shot glass of petrol. The energy is liberated by burning the fuel in air, and the waste products blown back into the same gaseous waste bin for someone else to worry about. To generate the same energy, an electric car needs 1kg of charged batteries and a lot of other expensive and complicated components.
Nuclear fuel can hold millions of times as much energy in the same volume. A hypothetical nuclear-powered auto would only burn a grain of salt’s worth of fuel to drive around all day. In practice, however, nuclear engines tend to be dangerous and dirty. Even if they could be miniaturised, nobody wants a billion little autonomous nuclear reactors creeping through their cities or buzzing through their skies.
It seems that some technologies just don’t want to die. Despite the awareness of the indignities that fossil fuels foist on the environment, after two hundred years of looking for alternatives, they are still the energy storage medium of choice for far too many scenarios.
Professor Dominic Griffin clamped the sample and closed the leaded glass hatch. He screwed the butterfly nuts to seal the chamber and tested the vacuum. Then he withdrew to the bench, where he began powering up the accelerator.
The tiny Hafnium target, a purple and blue marble, was magnified in one window of a blackboard-sized panel. The professor would shortly begin the proton bombardment, pumping in energy from the hulking cyclotron in the next room.
The ball of protons and neutrons that make up an atom’s nucleus, deforms and wobbles, like a fat lady’s bum when struck by the slap of an incoming high-energy proton. Hafnium was unique in that if spanked just right; its nucleus would flip into a new shape—imagine clenched buttocks—and could hold this metastable nuclear configuration for years. Eventually, and randomly, it would relax back to its original, unclenched, form, releasing a blast of gamma energy in the process.
The breakthrough that Griffin and his grad students had made, and now were tweaking, was to coax the primed Hafnium to release its stored energy on demand. Although thousands of times less energetic than a true nuclear reaction, it could be used as a fuel source with thousands of times the energy density of the best chemical alternatives.
It would change the world.
***
Except it wouldn’t. Not if Niato’s small, but highly-trained, team of hackers and critters had anything to do with it.
He felt sorry for the guy. The camera angle, from cockroach height above the floor, was hardly optimal, but he could clearly sense the excitement in the man’s body language.
The research was highly restricted, and nobody had tried yet to reproduce the experiments. One day, undoubtedly, they would and then they would find that the papers contained nothing but a gibberish of ludicrous parameters and flawed theoretical work.
The servers and instruments in the lab had been so thoroughly compromised that, since the start of the project, every formula and calculation had been corrupted. Systematic errors had been introduced at every stage in the research, from the initial fundamental literature review to the custom simulation of nuclear decay. As a final twist of the knife, the research papers had been peppered with subtle math typos and silly schoolboy errors to make the scientists look like amateurs.
The hack’s finesse was that, despite the garbling of information, the experiments worked. Real science had been done. Malicious perversion of parameters and equations in the research were symmetrically unscrambled by the equally hacked experimental equipment. The only people who knew the real values and formulae were Niato and his cohort of Nebulous hackers.
Griffin would be ridiculed. If enough shit could be thrown at him, the whole field might be mothballed for decades.
It was a horrible thing to do to a perfectly good scientist. Had Niato thought for a second that the technology might truly eliminate fossil fuels, or genuinely improve life, he wouldn’t have got involved. Unfortunately, Hafnium nuclei, once packed full of energy, could be forced to release this payload in a single nasty burst. A blast, a thousand times more powerful than the best plastique, would be destructive enough on its own. But, considerably more destabilising to a world that already had enough ways to re-format the biosphere, was the reaction’s potential to trigger direct nuclear fusion without having to mess around with critical mass quantities of fissile material.
Nuclear warheads as small as cigars were not a cosy prospect.
“When is the presentation?”
“Three weeks.”
Niato nodded and watched Griffin fiddling with the settings. “Poor chap, he has no idea what is about to hit him.”
“As it should be.”
“And we are going in tomorrow?”
“No, Sir, Sunday.”
“Okay, yes, I remember. The BBQ. Less chance that somebody will be working at the weekend.”
“Exactly.”
“Right, then proceed. You have my final approval.”
“Yes, Sir!”
The Commander snapped a salute and turned to go. Niato looked at the screen again. Then, as he heard the click of the opening door, he called the officer back.
“Wait. Last-minute change. The man from the rescue of the girls… you know who I mean?”
“Yes, Sir,” said the Commander, turning back from the door.
“I want him brought into the mission.”
“What?!” the man blurted, then recovered something of his composure and continued. “Your Highness, we’ve been planning this operation for nearly two years. It is simply impossible to add another team member at this stage!”
“Commander, the universe works in
mysterious ways. I have a feeling he is meant to be part of this.”
The King could be frustrating to a rational military mind. Too much time meditating with monks or munching mushrooms, the enlisted men joked. The officers, fiercely loyal to their king, wouldn’t tolerate such subversive mutterings amongst the men; in private, however, they would also grumble light-heartedly about their ruler’s penchant for esoteric mumbo jumbo.
“Sir, there are a lot of specialist skills that cannot be trained in an afternoon…”
“Did you watch the feeds? Have you read his backstory? And as for special skills, I trained him myself, back when you were still shooting civilians on the Kashmir border.”
The Commander winced as if struck. Like many in the Atlantean navy, his previous military history had been a journey of guilt and shame, marbled with veins of heroism and distinguished service. He had joined the Hind army as little more than a boy, nearly twenty years ago, full of hope and a naive belief in his people. What he had seen and been made to do in the years that followed had worn his soul down to a nub. The King had recruited him and many others, head-hunted them from the world’s armies and police forces, spoken of the necessity and rightfulness of the warrior’s way. Given them a just cause.
“Sorry, Your Highness. I will see what can be done.”
The airport’s boards were looping re-runs: cavorting dolphin antics, Keith waving to a group of girls as they climbed the steps, all dressed in white, bedecked with garish garlands. A sanitised upbeat outro to the media show now spinning down.
Keith turned away from a screen attached to a supporting pillar and looked out of a physical window instead. A plane was climbing into the orange evening.
Aboard the flight back to Manila, the girls would enjoy hero status in First Class, filmed and live-streamed, sipping their sparkling wine and eating caviar. Disembarking, they would head to immigration, while the reporters headed for connecting flights. Within twenty-four hours, the news would have moved on, and most of the rescued victims would be back in their old grubby lives, many in the same brothels they had been kidnapped from.
Keith stood next to Joseph. Both wore newly gifted khaki shorts and shirts, props from the networks. When the last shots were in the bag, tiny camera drones had dropped and folded themselves snuggly into the carry cases of young, scruffy tech interns. A couple of the immaculately dressed, severe yet beautiful anchors came over to shake hands and say goodbye. The adrenalin-fuelled whirlwind was over. The circus was packing up and moving on.
Joseph felt it, too. He shrugged and stuck out his arm to Keith. “Walk good, bro.”
Keith took the wiry, calloused hand and shook it firmly. “Stay safe. We should do it again some time!”
Joseph looked at him sceptically, and then the ageing Rasta turned away into the crowd. Keith watched the red, black, and green knitted hat as it cut a line through the purple, orange, and turquoise tourist throng.
Keith was alone. Free and aimless for the first time since limited options had nudged him into the army, four and a half years before. The reporters had all gone; the girls were safe. Joseph would be outside in the sun by now, halfway through a crumpled joint. Staring out of the window and pondering his options, Keith decided ‘free’ probably did not fully describe his situation.
He was AWOL. The media had described his daring one-man escape from the military hospital, where he had been recovering from post-traumatic stress, aggravated by traumatic loss of a foot. He was a fugitive. Equal measures of hero and household name, but also persona non grata across much of the world. While the blaze of public adoration still warmed his skin he would be protected, but the media was already turning away its gaze, and His Majesty’s government was much less fickle. They would not be forgetting his infraction any time soon, or giving up their option to use his body as a tool for dealing violence—Keith the biological bludgeon.
He had no intention of returning to the army. Even the thought brought back the sweats and a rising panic.
He stood near the windows looking out. The Manila flight was long gone. Another plane must have been delayed, because all around him Nipponese travellers were arriving and sitting down on the polished concrete. He began to feel uncomfortable, as if he was intruding on a private party. He moved off. Walking without goal or destination.
Inevitably, he ended up in a bar. Ironically, an English-themed place, called the Big Ben. At the next table, a lady recognised him, and Keith heard her pointing him out to her friend. She had probably been learning yoga or limbo dancing or something for the past week and was now heading home to work the year’s fifty-one remaining weeks, dreaming the whole time of her next exotic soiree. Keith sipped on his Bloody Mary, savouring the vodka fumes that lifted off its surface.
“Hi,” the woman said nervously. “You’re the man from the TV who rescued those poor girls, aren’t you?”
Keith wasn’t sure how to react to these approaches. Once or twice, he had swung too far to the sarcastic end of the spectrum, prompting unexpectedly severe responses. Apparently, people were entitled to his time, now that he shone from their screens. In the other direction, when he had been too earnest and open, getting rid of his clingy new ‘friends’ had taken effort. So he went with a neutral:
“Hi, yes, I am.”
“That’s so brave!”
“Thanks, but I was just doing my job,” he lied.
“So, a big hero’s welcome waiting and lots of pretty ladies making a fuss over you back home, I guess?”
Publicly, GOV.UK was commending him on his bravery, spamming hints they had been behind the operation, while avoiding all mention of his breakout. Their SpinBot Sages had done such a good job, it was difficult for Keith to watch the news reports and backstory features without feeling a patriotic swell.
In private communications, the tone was different, threatening him with everything from prison to publicity tours as an UK MOD recruitment tool. He was sure that, if he went home, he would get a very public hero’s welcome, followed by a very private debriefing. If they could not convince him to turn shill, this would be quickly followed by rendition and indefinite detention.
“Maybe,” he replied to his new fan, playing these future scenarios over in his mind.
“Well, you should. You deserve it!”
“Thanks,” Keith smiled and turned back to his drink, hoping to end the conversation on a high point.
The lady and her friend continued to glance at him from time to time as they whispered to each other. He drained his drink. During the consumption of a second, he rolled around the idea of ‘reaching out’ to his old employer. He was sure that, in light of recent changes to his status, BHJ would be willing to overlook some of the past silliness and make a place in their organisation for an ex-soldier and war hero. Ben might be pissed off, but that was actually a point in the idea’s favour. Keith fished out the fancy Spex the boys had given him and started composing a message to George, Ben’s father.
He was slightly drunk by now and his brainwaves were obviously a little confused because, although he was focusing on subvocalising a polite professional job application, some form of technologically enhanced Tourette’s kept interspersing foul and sexually explicit slurs throughout the text. By the fourth drink, the ladies were long gone, having made their goodbyes, and posed for their selfies. Keith’s application letter had turned into a rambling confused rant. Expending his last reserves of sobriety and good judgement, he deleted it and disgustedly stuck the Spex back in his rucksack.
Keith was painfully aware how fleeting his current fame was likely to be. He also knew that, however ephemeral this celebrity, drunk, alone in an airport lounge, surrounded by hundreds of citizen snaparazzi, he would have to stay sharp or be cast as another celebrity meltdown and next minute’s snack-able mass titillation. He pulled down his baseball cap, but left off his shades. It was a tightrope walk: he didn’t want to be recognised—snapped and live-streamed, stumbling over a pram or coming out of the lady’s
toilet—but equally, he didn’t want to look too suspicious and get shot or bundled into a room to be fondled intimately by men with rubber gloves. He dug around for the Spex again and slid them over his eyes as an additional barrier against the world. A message was waiting.
*** A Hero’s welcome ***
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