Punishment

by Guerin Zand

  “I’ve never listened to you before when you tried to warn me off and I am not going to start now. My answer is yes. I’m not going to let you get away now, not after all the work I’ve put into getting you to ask me. I’m sorry, but you asked, and I said yes. Your mine now.” She just broke out into tears and hugged the air out of my lungs.

  Roger and the team knew about Anna for a while. They had done background checks on her without involving me so I wouldn’t have to look like a chump. Roger had called me and told me about this and we had a bit of an argument. I told him it was up to me to decide if she could be trusted. I was the only one who really had the power to decide what I told her. At the moment Anna was so happy I figured I would put off the whole “I’m an alien mutant” discussion until I found the right time.

  Anna didn’t have any family. She was an only child. Her parents had died in a car accident shortly after she graduated from high school. She never talked much about her parent’s death and I never pushed the subject. She thought she had an uncle somewhere from her father’s side, but she had never met him. We decided to get married in a small private ceremony with a few of our friends as witnesses.

  Before our wedding, I told her the whole alien story and gave her a copy of my first book as a primer. She didn’t have a lot of questions and I’m not really sure she believed any of it. I offered to bring her up to a spaceship, or introduce her to a few aliens, if that would help. She said it wasn’t necessary. I asked if she would have a problem with me not aging or with the fact that I was getting close to 60. She said that if I didn’t age then she wouldn’t have to find younger lovers as we grew older. As far as my being that old, well then, she could have an older lover as well.

  Chapter 13

  Diane

  Anna didn’t speak English when we first got married so I extended my stay in Tokyo for another six months. If she had turned me down I would have moved back to the States, and that was the original plan, but I could work from anywhere. I didn’t want to drag Anna off to a foreign land right off, so extending my stay made sense. She could start English classes and hopefully, in six months, she would be fluent enough that the transition wouldn’t be too difficult. I didn’t bother to tell her at the time we also had a home in Chile and she might want to learn Spanish as well. I’d save that for later, after she had gotten past the English lessons. The company bought the house where I was staying in Tokyo and I planned on us moving back and forth whenever we felt like it.

  Working with the Japanese actually did open up more opportunities to bring some of our work into the open. Japan and the USA had made a public announcement stating that they were forming an international team to work on commercial fusion energy production and that the headquarters would be based in Tokyo. Of course, NFT was a prime contractor on the effort. The team had set a goal to have a viable commercial reactor up and running before the end of 2030. Both countries had pledged to provide whatever resources were needed to make this happen. Having stated the goal date they had put their national pride on the line. Both countries were promoting this venture and likened it to America’s promise to land a man on the moon. No, we weren’t going to have little fusion reactors for spaceships anytime soon, but this would be a giant step in that direction.

  By this time, NFT was gaining a reputation as a leader in bringing emerging technologies to the public. One of our early patents on manufacturing processes for advanced carbon nanotube materials had made us famous. Companies were using this technology to make composites used in everything from household appliances to spacecraft. These new processes not only allowed manufacturers to create stronger composite materials but made them less expensive than traditional materials. Several other patents we had registered were just as revolutionary but not as commonly used.

  One thing we overlooked initially was the press scrutiny NFT would face. The technology media didn’t like some upstart company coming in and rolling over the good old boys of Silicon Valley. Most of the tech media existed to promote Silicon Valley and that just happened to be where most of these publications were based. The fact that we had no interest in any presence in that area really pissed them off. No sane person would do business in California if they didn’t have to, and we didn’t have to.

  To fix this PR problem, Roger was moved to a new position that was rather loosely defined to make it look innocuous, Chief Technology Exchange Officer. In fact, he was in charge of everything relating to NFT interactions with any national governments and that covered almost everything. We brought onboard an overpriced CEO from a top Silly Valley company to pretty much be a puppet CEO. We paid him a lot to basically shut up and do what he was told by the PR department which was ultimately under Roger. Since a lot of what we did was classified at the highest levels, he was told any breach in the NDA he signed would also fall under the National Security Act. One wrong word and he’d be locked up in a very dark place and never heard of again. Being the corporate whore he was, he had no problem with that considering the obscene amount he was being paid. He signed the NDA and accepted the job without having a clue of what he would be asked to do, thus the term whore, which we constantly used to refer to our CEO.

  Since the announcement of the Japanese American Fusion Initiative, JAFI, and NFT’s involvement, the NFT started to be actively recruited to open offices in other foreign countries. This was happening faster than we thought. Roger, I, and the rest of the team had to decide how best to handle this. This was what we wanted but we weren’t prepared to grow that fast. We thought the best way to bring in more nations was for JAFI to expand and let the governments worry about this. This made sense to us since NFT couldn’t control governments, but an international body could set rules for their members and have an enforcement mechanism as well. It also meant that in the future, NFT could deal primarily with this body directly and not the individual governments.

  The first nation included was Great Britain and this created the new organization, the International Organization for Emerging Technologies, or IOET. Sorry about the acronyms but you can’t do government work without them. When I worked for McDonnell Douglas the company actually published a book of accepted acronyms and abbreviations to help with technical writing. This book was a few thousand pages and made a Thesaurus look small.

  NFT decided to open an office in Ireland as part of the addition of Great Britain to the IOET. I was asked to do the same job I had performed in Tokyo but this time in Dublin. The work in Dublin was not scheduled to start until after my year in Tokyo was over, but I declined. Anna was talking about children and she knew I had concerns about this. I wasn’t happy about outliving my wife and I was even less happy at the thought of outliving my children. We were planning to move back to Florida for a while. With Anna’s desire to start a family I needed to take a break so we could sort out our future together. We really had been playing it one day at a time and that wasn’t fair to Anna.

  As NFT expanded, I was going to have to spend more and more time working and it simply wasn’t realistic. I needed an assistant. They would take charge of these issues and I would concentrate on the technology. That’s what I wanted to happen anyways, but the truth was my job was becoming more political. As the team grew, the need for a liaison between the Collective and them had become more of a full-time job. My replacement would at some point need to take over the technology transfers as well. I enjoyed the part where I would consult the R&D teams when they would run into a roadblock. I would give them suggestions, often knowingly pointing them to other dead ends that would eventually lead them to the correct answer. I was like the professor and they were my students. I didn’t do the work for them, I just helped push them to find the right answers on their own.

  Diane Slater was the current wunderkind in the theoretical physics world. A lot was hype but that didn’t mean she wasn’t at the top of her field. She was also really hot, which explained a lot of the hype. She had long blonde hair, blue eyes, and legs that went on forever. She dressed
like a lesbrarian. That’s what I called women who looked part lesbian and part librarian. She always had her hair up in a bun so tight I was sure it had to affect the blood circulation in her face. She also wore these silly granny glasses that just drove me crazy, or I mean they would have if I wasn’t already married. She had this ice princess persona that made you think she liked men about as much as she liked a good hemorrhoid. Again, I used to find that kind of thing really hot before I got married.

  Diane was also the hottest property out there and she had offers coming out her wazoo. She figured she had the world by its balls, but she hadn’t met me yet. She also had one major weakness, she was a UFO fanatic. If she had balls, then I had the vice to put them in, and she was about to squeal. I brought her to the Florida office and she came at me with her “You don’t have a chance with me loser!” attitude. I just smiled when I shook her hand. She had been working with the NSA in the past. She had the security clearance already, so I simply asked her to sign an NDA before I would even speak to her.

  “I have no intention of signing anything. You want me to work here, and frankly, I’m not impressed. What’s in it for me?” The fucking nerve of this woman, she was perfect for the job. I was trying not to laugh too hard as I watched our HR head, Cathy Benz, try to get her to sign the NDA.

  “Do you find me amusing, Mr. Zand?” Oh, she was an iceberg. This was probably going to be the most fun I’ve had interviewing a candidate ever.

  “Well, yes. I found this little exchange between you and Cathy extremely amusing. Frankly, I haven’t seen anybody with an attitude like yours since I looked in the mirror this morning.”

  “Very funny.” The scowl on her face was just making me enjoy this more and more.

  “You think your hot shit, maybe because that is what everyone else tells you, but to me your just another arrogant physicist with their head firmly entrenched in their own ass. One that I’m going to have to put in her place. You don’t know jack shit babe.” Ok, I couldn’t resist adding the “babe” part. She would need to get used to a little sexual harassment if she was going to work with me. I tossed a copy of one of her recent papers, one she was extremely proud of, on the table in front of her. I had marked it up and pointed out several issues with her assumptions and logic, making her original paper about as valuable as toilet paper. “When you’re done reviewing that,” I pointed to the paper. “You can ask Cathy to call me after you sign the NDA, and perhaps if you say please, I’ll talk to you.”

  She started to fume, and I simply left the room. Roger was in the next room watching all of this. I walked in and he just shook his head. “Still the charmer I see.”

  “She’s perfect for the job, Roger, but I’m not going to take her shit. I’m going to have fun with this one. She’s already accepted the job, she’s just too dumb to know it. You should probably get the cleanup crew ready because she’s going to lose bladder control when she sees what’s in our Black Lab.”

  “If she signs the NDA.”

  “She will, Roger. It may just take a little time for her to deal with the little lesson I tossed at her.”

  Roger and I sat back in the room drinking coffee, and eating donuts, while watching Diane’s expression change as she realized, what she had so proudly thought of as one of her most brilliant piece of work, was being shot down in flames right in front of her. She was crushed and you could tell. She was also pissed as all get out. She spent several hours reviewing the paper, going back and forth, back and forth. Cathy brought us all lunch and still, she just kept reading the paper over and over until finally, she put down the paper.

  She grabbed the NDA, signed it and handed it to Cathy. Cathy simply filed it in her briefcase and sat back. The two of them stared at each other for the longest time. Diane let out a long sigh and finally spoke. “May I please speak with Mr. Zand?”

  I watched for a few minutes while she choked on the “Please”. I got up and Roger followed me into the interview room.

  Diane looked up at me as I entered the room. There was a look of resentment on her face that was priceless. She fought to get the words out. “Who marked up that paper?”

  “I did.”

  “Why have I never heard of you before?”

  “If you’d bothered to read the NDA you just signed, you’d realize you still have never heard of me.”

  “Seriously?”

  I flashed her one of my boyish grins and shrugged my shoulders.

  “If you’re that smart, why do you need me?”

  “Who said I was that smart? I just happen to know a lot more than you. Being smart, and having knowledge isn’t the same thing. When your resume first came to me I pretty much just tossed it aside. I don’t like so-called science celebrities. Roger here… By the way, this is Roger Smith. He’ll be your boss.”

  “I haven’t accepted the job yet!”

  “Please. Do you want to continue to play games or should I continue?”

  She signaled for me to continue.

  “As I was saying, Roger handed me your resume when we decided I needed an assistant. He said your attitude might make you a good fit for someone who would be working with me directly. I’m not sure why he said that.” I gave her my puzzled look. “Anyways, I read your papers and the way you stomped on that moron Hawking made me laugh. I agreed with Roger, you might be the right person.”

  “You’re not a Hawking fan?”

  “Dear God, no. The man couldn’t be more wrong about the universe. You’re a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide so you’ll appreciate this comparison. The million monkeys with typewriters are more likely to uncover the mysteries of the universe than that poser.”

  That got a small laugh out of her.

  “I chose you because you might actually have some promise.”

  “But you tore me a new one in the analysis of my paper?”

  “You must have been too crushed to actually read the main comment at the end.”

  Diane grabbed the paper at flipped to the end. Using my big red pen I had written at the end of her paper. “If you stop trying to fit the universe into your way of thinking, and start changing your thinking to the way the universe actually works, you’ll find it’s not that complicated.”

  “I think you can do that. Your peers hate you because you ignore their work when it doesn’t fit your thinking, well that and you’re better looking and get more press. You need to start ignoring a lot more of what you’ve been taught as well. If you can do that you might be surprised what you discover. Come with me.”

  We left Roger and Cathy in the interview room and we headed down the hall to the elevator. Katie was waiting for us there and I introduced the two. The elevator opened and we got in. We started to descend and Diane asked, “You never pressed any buttons. How does the elevator know where we’re going?”

  I smiled and in my best Mexican accent, which is pretty awful, I said, “We don’t need no stinking buttons!”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “He’s just showing off. Don’t give him the satisfaction of being impressed.”

  “Katie can’t stand it when I actually have fun at work. To answer your question though, I simply thunk it!”

  “You have some form of device that determines where you were looking?”

  “Your thinking is so limited. Perhaps I was wrong about you?” The elevator was continuing down. The Black Lab was 50 stories below the parking garage so the trip took a bit of time.

  “An actual interface implanted in your head?”

  “Pretty much, but since that is what the aliens said I tend not to believe it is actually that. I think…”

  “Aliens?”

  “Getting a little moist, are we?”

  “GUERIN!”

  “Oh, come on, Katie. If she’s going to work with me she’s going to have to learn to deal with my sense of humor.”

  “As I was saying, I think the aliens like to dumb down their explanations of some of the tech so we can understand it in familiar terms. I’ve fo
und their explanations are usually not really that accurate. They like us to figure this shit out on our own.”

  “Aliens?”

  “You’re repeating yourself now, Diane.”

  The doors opened and we exited the elevator into a long hallway. Off the hallway were several doorways to private labs. We turned to the right and I stopped at the first door, turned the handle and entered. Diane noticed the door pad and gave me a questioning look.

  “Yep. I just thunk it again.”

  There were two of the more promising members of our physics team in the room and the alien battery was sitting on the table.

  “Brian, Derrick, I’d like to introduce Diane Slater. Diane this is Brian Swetz and Derrick Hymes.” They all shook hands. They were all quite familiar with each other from their published works and forums they had attended in the past. I was kind of hoping for one of those scenes out of a comedy where they each introduced themselves and said, “Doctor,” “Doctor,” “Doctor,” “Doctor,” but obviously, these nerds needed to work on their personalities.

  “Diane is going to be working with you…”

  “You still haven’t made me an offer and I haven’t accepted so…”

  “Diane. When I’m done with you today you’ll say yes, even if I only offer you minimum wage, so let’s move past your little ‘I’m not impressed’ act, please?”

  Derrick looked at her and said, “He’s right.” He picked up the battery and handed it to her. “According to Guerin, it’s an alien ‘smart’ battery, or that’s the simple description. It detects the circuitry it’s connected to and can determine the proper output required. It can charge your iPad or power this entire facility, and that’s not even pushing it. We’ve measured the maximum output to be close to a full terawatt.”

  “Ok, now you’re just having some fun with the new guy, right?”