Empyrean Rises

by Spencer Pierson

  He called up a few files showing the systems he had targeted, including the long-range scans. They weren’t very detailed, but it didn’t need to be to show basic mineral contents of each system. He’d worked hard to find systems that were not only rich but reasonably far apart so that even if they were discovered in one system, the others could stay safely hidden.

  It was the perfect scheme, and it would give his family a chance to buy property on the actual home world. Right now they had a few, tiny offices on one of the outer orbital habitats but that would all change once the massive profits began to roll in. He tapped his claw on the screen, pulling up the file of the system he planned to oversee personally.

  Smiling in a way not unlike a human, he leaned forward and tapped on some specific numbers that showcased some very attractive readings. There were several extremely rare and therefore valuable elements appearing on the trace element scan. There was no way to tell where the elements might appear n the system. Not yet, at least, but once they arrived, they would be able to narrow down the locations and proceed to strip the system of everything of value.

  For a brief moment, he glanced at the small foot-notes concerning the third planet in the system. Apparently, intelligent life had been discovered, but at the time of the scan, it showed them having no footprint in space. Unless the elements he was after were on their planet, they would probably never even know he was there stealing their riches.

  Chapter 8

  Time: August 23, 2027

  Location: Empyrean Island, Pacific Ocean

  Piper grunted, turning the wrench until a note began pinging softly. “Got it!” she said before sliding out from under the small suspended platform that hung in her grandmother’s laboratory. She got up and moved behind the barrier where her grandmother stood, facing the transparent panel that let them see into the large, round room.

  The platform was connected to a centrifugal force engine which would spin at variable speeds. Piper was down to help her grandmother work on the initial prototype of one of her latest inventions. To date, it was performing fairly poorly, but Piper still thought it was awfully cool.

  Colleen pushed the button, smiling at Piper’s excited grin. They both watched the readings as the large centrifuge warmed up. The top speed it attained was a paltry twenty miles per hour. However, what was of most interest was the holographic computer screen floating above the console. It showed the center of the platform was unaffected by the inertia.

  They knew that if the centrifuge moved any faster, the difference would begin to register, but as of right now, Earth had its first, stable inertial dampener. Right now, it was beyond primitive and took an exhaustive amount of energy to power, but they had the basic physics down. Now it was just a matter of time to refine it.

  “I cannot wait until we have phasers!” Piper crowed, jumping up and down in excitement. “To boldly go where no super-awesome scientist has gone before!”

  Colleen chuckled, crossing her arms as she watched Piper bounce around in excitement. “I think we’re a bit far away from phasers, Piper, but we are closer to getting up to orbit. It’s related to the anti-gravity field, and I think I’ll be able to combine the two, in time.”

  “You are amazing, Grandma!” Piper said. “Do you think it’s safe to take a ride on the platform? I want to see what it feels like.”

  Colleen glanced at the contraption in the center of the room before pulling up a few readings on her computer. “I think we’ll do a few tests first, or really, more than a few. The last thing I want to be responsible for is all of your hair falling out or something dreadful like that. Trust me; these things aren’t anything to play around with. At least, not yet. Now, the rest of what I’m going to be doing today will be terribly boring. Isn’t Alex arriving today?”

  Piper pursed her lips, the image of her bald head flashing through her mind for a moment, making her reconsider. Besides, Alex was due in today, and she wanted to be the first one to tell him the good news. Alex was determined to get not only into orbit but out to the asteroid field as fast as he could. Seafloor mining would only go so far, and he wanted to be as independent of Earth-based infrastructure as quickly as possible.

  “Yes, he is coming in today, but those two United States representatives are coming in with him. I bet he’ll be involved with those agents for most of it. I don’t think it would be a good idea to talk to him about anything interesting with them in earshot.”

  “Hmm. No, I would suppose not. Still, it might not be a bad idea for them to see you. They’ll be less likely to think of this as some Bond-esque island of evil if they see someone’s sister walking about. I think the younger agent is close to your age.”

  Piper mulled it over. She’d read the files. Actually, Piper was the one that had managed to collect both agent’s files from a not-well-enough-guarded server. Of the two, Agent Leann Bates was probably close to Piper’s official age of twenty-seven, though she carried herself as someone younger. Still, there was a twinkle in the woman’s eyes that said she might not be a complete drone.

  The older man, Agent John Malcolm, was a bit more difficult to parse. He had at one time worked for military intelligence as a high-level analyst but had left under some unusual circumstances. Whatever the reason had been, someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide it. Piper probably could have found the reason, but she had run the risk of being discovered and had deemed it not worth the trouble. Still, after he’d moved to the state department, he had apparently been kept on unimportant desk jobs where he’d performed adequately but never allowed to work any sort of situation his skills warranted.

  “I think I’ll go see if Nabhitha is available to go with me. She’ll think it’s fun and she’s pretty good at spotting bullshit,” Piper said. “Tad? Can you tell me where Nabs is working today?”

  Tad whirred over. “Yes, miss. She’s working in the exotic materials lab on sub-level four at Sahara Sands.”

  Piper smiled. Sahara Sands was only one building over from where her grandmother had been working, and it wouldn’t take her long to get there. “Can you please send her a text asking if she’s available? I should be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Yes, miss,” Tad said, as Piper gave Colleen a hug and then a kiss on her cheek. Then she was off to the elevator that led to the surface. Piper wasn’t a teenager, but she moved like one and had an almost indomitable energy supply. Colleen was almost certain she could give a toddler a run for their money.

  The older woman smiled, watching her granddaughter go with a wistful look on her face, though as time passed, that envy was slowly beginning to fade. Somehow, she was growing younger, not older. She was exercising again, and despite her advanced numerical age, her joints and muscles did not suffer from the usual aches and strains she should expect. There were some, but as time passed, they diminished more and more. It was a gift that she wasn’t sure she could trust.

  For some reason, she had been spared from death, and she could only put it down to having a job to do. She gave a sigh, then turned back to the computer console once Piper was safely outside of the centrifuge chamber. There were indeed many tests yet to perform, and they wouldn’t conduct themselves. Smiling, she began to set up the next run. It would involve stacking several blocks of varied weights in the middle of the platform and seeing how the field would perform while holding something within it.

  It was an exciting time to be alive.

  Chapter 9

  Time: August 23, 2027

  Location: Empyrean Island, Pacific Ocean

  Nabhitha Mahajan could never have imagined she’d be working on cutting-edge technology in a field of study she loved out on some tropical island called Empyrean. Every day when she was done, she literally got to go sit on the beach and drink a margarita. On top of that, she was paid well. Very well.

  She loved her parents, but she had grown sick and tired of them nagging her to come back to India and marry a nice lawyer or something like that. She’d finally
flashed her bank accounts to them, shutting them up after a particularly difficult skype call.

  “Rudra Gupta can go jump off a very tall building,” Nabhitha muttered to herself as she stared intently at the holographic screen and bit her tongue. She was so close to getting the woven strand carbon tubes into long scale production. Not that long scale was perhaps the right word to use when it came to nanotech, but it had been unbelievably challenging to build long, continuous sheets or columns of carbon tubing at anything approaching an affordable rate.

  That is until she’d met Colleen Drake.

  Three years ago, she had just gotten out of her fifteenth job interview trying to get into any kind of lab that could remotely claim to be working on cutting-edge technologies. However, no one was willing to take a chance on a too-pretty Indian girl still working on her exotic materials doctoral thesis. She’d left the building where the interview had taken place, still angry at the dismissive attitude of the all-male panel when all of a sudden a gray-haired Caucasian woman was walking next to her and smiling.

  For a moment, Nabhitha had thought the old woman was just lost, and she worked hard at ignoring her until it was apparent she wasn’t going away. Finally, she stopped, crossly asking the woman what she wanted.

  That was when Colleen had spoken. “I understand you might like a chance to change the world, Miss Mahajan.”

  She had, and a few short months later after she’d defended her thesis, she’d begun working for Empyrean, and with Colleen Drake directly on her farm in Oregon. Now, she was out on an island that they’d built in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in a lab complex that she wouldn’t call cutting edge so much as beyond amazing. There were tools and equipment she’d never even dreamt of, and it had catapulted her theories into near-reality.

  If she could just get the right frequency on some of these emitters, it might just be a reality. Typing in the next sequence, she turned to her floating DPA whom she’d named Byangoma. “Okay, Byangoma, initiate another production run. Let’s see if we can get this working.”

  A moment later, the floating assistant clicked and then spoke. “The production run has been initiated, miss. It should be complete in approximately three point four hours. Would you like me to alert you ten minutes prior to completion?”

  “Yes, please,” Nabhitha said, turning just in time to see her best friend wave at her through the door to her lab. Piper grinned and then pointed down, indicating for Nabhitha to buzz her in.

  Nabhitha smiled and then quickly let her friend enter. She loved Piper and her enthusiasm. It was an excellent counterpoint to her own personality which was more reserved, and as a result, she’d found herself taking more chances in having fun. From the look on her friend’s face, this looked to be another opportunity to get into mischief.

  “Hey Nabs!” Piper said, bouncing in with Tad buzzing along behind her. The two DPAs circled around each other in some strange form of greeting, though Nabhitha didn’t understand why. She’d asked Piper about the strange behavior, and her friend had said it was just them sharing recent information. “I have an adventure for us to go on!”

  “An adventure?” Nabhitha said, raising an eyebrow. “This isn’t going to get us in trouble, is it? The last time you bought an adventure to my door, we almost got blown off of the cooling tower.”

  “Pfft, the key word there is almost,” Piper said, waving her hand dismissively. “Besides, that was the best spot to view the meteor shower on an island with almost no light pollution. You have to admit; you can see a whole lot more stars than from the mainland.”

  Nabhitha didn’t answer, pursing her lips instead but she had to admit, it had been a magical night. The only better place would be up in orbit, and at the rate, they were developing technologies, it might not be that much longer before she got to see it. Still, she couldn’t stay mad at her friend. “Fine. Almost. Now, what is this new adventure your dragging me into?”

  “Alex is coming in today, and he’s bringing some spooks from the U.S. in with him to give them a tour over several days. The younger agent is supposed to be around our age, and I figured that would give us an excuse to kidnap her and keep her mind off of spying. Unless she’s a total stick-in-the-mud, I bet she’d love to go out on some of our souped-up jet skis.”

  “Spooks? What’s a spook?” Nabhitha asked. “Isn’t that a ghost or something?”

  “Yes, but not in this case. I mean they’re spies,” Piper said. “There are only two of them, but grandma figured we might serve as a good distraction.”

  Nabhitha frowned, uncertain if this was really such a good idea. “Um. Why would we want to put ourselves anywhere close to spies?”

  Piper once again waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry; this isn’t going to be them showing up with guns and knives. They just want to get a peek at what we’re doing here to make sure we’re not sacrificing people to the old gods. Alex says he has a plan.”

  “Okay, well, I don’t have anything to do for a few hours,” Nabhitha said, glancing through the window at the automated machinery running in the room beyond. “I just started a production cycle. Hopefully, it will work this time. I almost got it on the last run, but the sequence lengths had too many fractures. This time…” she trailed off, crossing her fingers.

  Piper grinned, leaning over and looking at the screen where Nabhitha had just entered her latest information. Her friend was currently working with a double plasma laser configuration which stopped the webbing behavior of the carbon, enabling it to retain its tubular form as well as weaving the tubes together. If it worked, it would create a super-strong, flexible material they desperately needed to work in space or deep under the ocean.

  As she saw the numbers, she felt an odd recognition occur deep in the back of her mind, letting her know that her friend was on the right track. She didn’t know why since exotic materials were not anything she’d ever studied, but it was what it was. She expected Nabhitha was going to be jubilant in a few hours but wasn’t going to say anything. That would just raise too many questions that she didn’t have answers for.

  “Let’s go. It will take us a bit to get to the airport, and by then they should have landed.”

  Nabhitha agreed, letting the door swing shut behind them as they left.

  Chapter 10

  Time: August 23, 2027

  Location: On Approach to Empyrean Island, Pacific Ocean

  Leann frowned as she flicked the button which changed the viewpoint of the screen in front of her. Instead of windows, the plane apparently used cameras on the fuselage and then piped them to the curved view screen that was attached to her seat by a floating arm. It also served as a computer and entertainment console at need, but as they were on approach, Leann wanted to see the island Empyrean as they landed.

  “This can’t be right,” Leann said, turning to John who was reading a magazine next to her. He had always been old school with his entertainment and had only grunted when the stewardess showed them how to access the computers.

  “What do you mean,” John said, looking up and over his glasses.

  Leann pointed at the screen. “I mean, this island is green with mature palms and trees. Are we on the right island? I saw the greenery from the satellite images but just thought it was grasses and such.”

  Alex looked up from his own chair, smiling at Leann’s question. He had expected the question since, without Helen’s innovations in plant growth, the island would not have been green for many years. “Yes, we are landing on the correct island.”

  “Did you ship in plant life for an entire thirty mile island?” John asked after having turned on his own view screen and found the forward facing camera. “That seems like a waste of money, doesn’t it?”

  “No, we didn’t ship in plant life, at least not in its current form,” Alex said. “Some of our research and development has been oriented to improving and increasing crop yields. Below, you see some of the results.”

  Leann and John both exchanged looks
before the dark woman quirked an eyebrow at Alex. While John had kept mostly to himself, she and Alex had enjoyed a lively conversation during the flight. She had been intensely curious about the creation of the luxury islands in Dubai and subsequent raising of their current destination. Alex had taken pains to answer most of Leann’s questions, at least those relating to past projects.

  “Improving crop yields? You mean like genetically modified organisms? What’s the end game for those technologies? Maybe that’s why you’re way out here, so you can play a little god without anyone looking over your shoulder?” John asked, leaning forward. He had been involved in the intelligence community for most of his career, but he’d grown up on a farm just outside of Pullman Washington. As such, he kept a nose to the ground through friends and family that had let him stay abreast of the business. He very well knew of the current debates that surrounded GMOs. He himself didn’t see anything wrong with the technology but understood why most people might be a bit leery, at least those that didn’t bother to educate themselves.

  “With most of the plants on the island, we didn’t modify them at all. We only took seeds and samples from comparable biomes and planted them. What you’re seeing is a direct effect of growth accelerating technologies, alone.” Alex said, giving them a look before pulling out a thin briefcase from a cabinet next to him. Out of it, he pulled what looked like a drone and activated it, letting it float gently into the air with a soft hum. “We don’t use these on the mainland or in public, but you’re going to see some of these active on the island. Think of them as a cross between a computer and phone that follows you around. It’s a bit smarter than that, but for all intents and purposes, that’s what it is.”

  Leann gave out a small humph of interest, but overall it didn’t really excite her. She was just surprised that someone hadn’t come up with the idea before. Maybe it could be too easily stolen by someone running past. A second later, her eyes widened in amazement as a hologram appeared in front of her.