The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  “Difficult to say” Alice replied, “He definitely has the resources and backing to be a serious threat, he has access to Special Op assets, financial backing and a willingness to use them, but so far, Blake has done a good job of keeping him in check. I will have to keep an eye on the situation.”

  My mind, randomly, jumped back to a conversation on the day of Alice’s ‘birth’. “Out of curiosity, Alice,” I asked, “How many functions are you processing right now? Including this new monitoring of Reaves”

  “26” she answered matter-of-factly.

  “and what is your current efficiency level?” Maria eyed me amusingly, knowing where I was going with this.

  “0.022%”

  “Of course, it is.” I muttered in faux exasperation. “Ok, back to work. What’s our next big project going to be then?” I clapped my hands together, looking between Maria and Alice for inspiration. There was little more that could be done about the military at this juncture and sitting around, waiting to see if they would do anything held little appeal for me. I would move on in the same way I always had: throwing myself into a new project.

  “World peace?” Maria suggested.

  “Saving the Whales?” Alice interjected.

  “Space exploration.”

  “Space elevator.”

  “Repairing the Ozone.”

  “Perpetual energy”

  “Human teleportation”

  “Human cloning

  “Lightsabres.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to develop military tech, Maria.”

  “Fuck the military, I wanna watch it make toast.” Maria laughed.

  “What about….”

  “Wait,” I interrupted, “Go back.”

  “Lightsabres?” Maria asked, looking amused.

  “No…” I said slowly, a thought forming in my mind. “…Perpetual energy.”

  Chapter 8

  The power of the sun

  3 Months later, the finishing touches were being applied to the prototype. I’m not going to bore you with the scientific details, primarily because they are still classified. But, as it turns out, contrary to tv shows and common opinion, there is no such thing as a perpetual energy source, not even the sun. The closest that we could get at that point was a power source that produced vastly more energy than the amount of energy that is needed to make it work.

  We had toyed with the idea of somehow creating anti-matter, CERN in Switzerland had been doing that for years, albeit at massive expense and with miniscule amounts of antimatter actually made. That put this idea of a matter/antimatter reactor to bed. A nuclear fusion reactor took up more space than we had access to and the idea of an artificial micro-black hole was a little too doomsday for either Maria or I to stomach.

  What we settled on was a combination of nuclear fusion – smashing two electrons into each other at almost the speed of light – and nuclear fission, ripping those atoms apart – basically contained mini nuclear explosions. The idea was incredibly complex, even by my standards; hydrogen particles would be spun at fantastic speeds by a bank of incredibly powerful electromagnets arranged in a sphere. Then, every few seconds, the magnets would emit a massive pulse that would slam all the particles into the centre of the sphere, each time two of the particles collided – and there were hundreds of millions of them so that would be a lot of collisions – the hydrogen molecules would fuse into helium emitting a massive amount of energy for the size of the reaction as the unneeded protons and electrons dissipated.

  The CERN particle accelerator operated on the same principle, but they shot a single electron one way around their ring, and another particle in the opposite, speeding them up to almost the speed to light, they would smash into each other creating a colossal amount of energy. We had adapted that idea; the energy output would be much lower for each explosion due to our particles being much slower, but there would be a lot more of them, and the collisions would happen much more often.

  Eventually, the magnetic pulses would accelerate, creating more and more explosions until the entire thing became supercharged, when that happened, the helium atoms would split in a microscopic nuclear explosion and form – of all things – a miniature sun.

  Now, as I said, not even the sun is a limitless source of power. Our closest star has an absolutely mind-boggling amount of hydrogen and helium in its mass to draw from, but eventually it will run out, the magnetic fields holding the sun together would collapse and the star will explode in a massive supernova that will incinerate and then obliterate most planets in the solar system.

  That’s a comforting thought!

  Luckily, this won’t happen for another couple of billion years, but the point is, without ‘topping up’ the amount of fuel – in our case, hydrogen – the whole system would stall; and the best source of hydrogen? Good old-fashioned water. More classified tech electrically charged the water until it split into hydrogen and oxygen, the latter being dispersed into the atmosphere and the former being fed back into the powerplant. The world’s most advanced reactor was fuelled by a tap.

  The artificial sun – once ignited – would be a little bit larger than a standard basketball. Around that was built a Dyson Sphere, a metal and metallic ball which totally contained the sun, the inside surfaces were covered with miniaturised versions of my solar panel with the capacitors stripped out, and the outside surface was a criss-crossed grid of thousands of copper wires. The sun would not only produce a huge amount of heat and light – both of which would be absorbed by the solar panels - but also a massive gravitational and magnetic field – all of which would be contained by the Dyson Sphere and the huge bank of magnets - but each time that electromagnetic field intersected the wires before being repelled by our magnets, even more power would be produced. It was a staggeringly efficient and powerful design.

  The whole thing was a level of science and engineering that was pushing the limits of what even I was capable of fathoming. The numbers involved and the complexity of the math meant that only Alice was capable of dealing with intricacies of the reaction. Numbers like ‘millions’, ‘billions’ or even ‘trillions’ had long become obsolete and she had started talking in ‘ten to the power…’ this and ‘order of magnitude…’ that. In the end, Maria and I had simply told her to stop showing off and to just give us the answers we needed to build the damned thing.

  But finally, after months of tireless work, the finishing touches were being applied, tests were being run and we were almost prepared to initiate the reaction.

  “Ok, I give up.” Maria shouted in exasperation, “where the fuck is my pencil?”

  “There are more pencils over there” I said, nodding one of the workbenches behind here.

  “No,” she answered, now on her hands and knees peering beneath the support structure that held the whole contraption up, “I need this pencil, it’s my lucky pencil.”

  I looked at her with an amused expression, the probes of my voltmeter hanging loosely from where I was running my tests. “you have a lucky pencil?”

  “oh, shut up!” She shot back with a smile.

  “No, no, I’m sorry” I jested back, matching her smile “I’m just curious, what’s so lucky about it?”

  “I don’t know,” she huffed, now looking underneath one of the desks, “It’s just lucky ok? All the good things in my life recently have happened with that pencil.”

  “Oh really?” I smirked

  “Yes, really.” she poked her tongue out as she stood and stated moving papers and diagrams around the desk, looking under each, “I had it when I signed for this company, I was using it in our interview…” She turned to face me, “…I was carrying it when we had our first kiss, and it…erm… has spent some time on my bedside unit.” She winked.

  “Well in that case…” I laughed. “Alice?”

  “I was waiting for that,” the friendly feminine voice crackled through the speakers. A short pause later, “Yes, you had it in your breast pocket when you arrived,
but I can’t pinpoint where you put it down, the camera feeds in this lab – and the rest of the building, for that matter – don’t have the resolution to pick up that kind of detail.”

  “Well, I guess that’s our next task once this is finished then.” I joked.

  Maria huffed, “fine, but if you find it, I want it back!” her face pretending to pout.

  “I’ll even tie a bow on it for you.”

  “ever the romantic.”

  “In case anyone is interested….” Alice interrupted, “I think we are ready.”.

  “excellent.” I smiled back at Maria, our new favourite pastime being to annoy Alice with mundane displays of affection, Alice had called it very inefficient – which made us do it more. “remind me where the on switch is.”

  “ha ha.” Alice quipped, “Ok… initiating the reaction.”

  The reactor was so complex and so potentially dangerous that we didn’t trust this to any microchips or computer systems, the entire reactor was completely controlled by Alice. A few days after starting this experiment, all those months ago, she had informed us that her new core was now online and she had transferred her engrams to the cabin, her old core had been disassembled – many of the components being recycled to create the Dyson sphere – the rest had been destroyed. Despite her being thousands of miles away, it didn’t seem any different than when her core was in the next room, if anything, her personality and creativity had only grown as her consciousness had started to grow to fill the new available space. If we somehow built her a body, it would be almost impossible to tell her apart from a normal human being.

  My thoughts were yanked back to the present by a series of small dull thuds emanating from inside the sphere. Alice’s large plasma now displayed a camera feed from inside the sphere and showed an increasing number of tiny white flashing specs – pinpricks of light in the darkness of the sphere - appearing every few seconds before disappearing just as fast. The thuds – and the specs of light – became faster and more pronounced. One flash barely having time to dissipate before another microscopic explosion took its place. In less than a minute, the centre of the sphere had taken on the appearance of TV static with millions of flashes lighting up the screen, the dull thuds had morphed into a steady rumble.

  “Ok,” Alice announced to the nervous silence in the room, “here we go.”

  The rumble got louder, the vibrations now being clearly felt through the floor and into my feet. Suddenly, a sound reminiscent of a jet fighter flying at low altitude reverberated around the room and the screen was lit up by a blinding flash of light. The viewing port on the northern hemisphere of the sphere emitted a dazzling beam of light and – just as suddenly as it had started – the sound vanished leaving only the slight vibrations in the floor. Alice’s screen showing – if I hadn’t known better – a close up picture of the surface of the sun. It was – in a word - beautiful.

  Maria and I watched in awed silence for a few minutes, our hands joined, as we looked upon our newest creation. Maria’s beaming smile intensifying as the realisation of our new reality dawned on her.

  “Output measurements coming in…” Alice said, “…on track with predicted levels.”

  A small black rectangular box appeared in the bottom right hand side of the screen, the output quickly shot up: Watts, kilowatts, gigawatts… the measurements kept going up. By the time it levelled off – between the solar, thermal and electromagnetic energy – the power output was high enough to power a large city.

  “Foreign object detected!” Alice suddenly announced; the concern evident even in her computerised voice. “initiating emergency shut down!”

  “Wha…” my question was cut short by a clunking and banging sound as something was thrown at incredible speeds around the inside of the sphere. I never heard the louder bang as, whatever it was, punched through the sphere. I did, however, feel the searing pain as, whatever it was, penetrated my right shoulder, exited the other side and threw me into the air. I also didn’t hear the dull thud as, whatever it was, imbedded itself into the wall behind me. I landed in a crumble heap on the floor, sliding into the legs of a desk.

  “MARCUS!!!” Maria shrieked, her voice a mix of panic and concern as she rushed over to me, her hands immediately reaching for the patch of blood that, curiously, didn’t seem to be growing as you’d expect.

  I braced myself for the second onslaught of pain as my brain registered the damage to my body, but nothing came. “Are you ok?” Maria blurted, her hand roaming to the back of my shoulder, quickly locating the exit wound, “sorry, stupid question.”

  “Actually no,” I said slowly, “It doesn’t hurt. I think I’m ok.”

  “Of course, you’re not ok,” She blurted out, “you’ve just been impaled by something, it has to be shock.”

  “not necessarily,” Alice interjected, having finished the shut-down procedure, “whatever hit him would have been super-heated. It probably cauterised the wound as soon as it made it, it would also have seared the nerve endings, hence the lack of pain. Its best to get him to a hospital to make sure there are no broken bones though.”

  Despite my objections, Maria had insisted – pulling rank in the end – and forced me to go to the hospital. The trip to the emergency was pretty straight forward although explaining the cause of the wound had posed some problems, the doctor had told us that if the wound was a little bigger, he would have assumed I’d been shot. Luckily Alice, as always, had been right and the injury was little more than a flesh wound missing all bones and important soft tissues. “So, where are we?” I asked a few hours later as we stepped back into the lab. My arm in a sling for precaution and a gauze patch on each side of my shoulder covering the wound itself.

  “Well, the good news…” she answered, “…is that we have found Maria’s pencil.”

  “Come again?” Maria spluttered.

  “Your pencil… it’s now buried about 2 inches into that wall.”

  “her pencil?” I asked trying to understand what Alice was getting at, looking for – and eventually finding – a thin sliver of grey extending from its bedding in the concrete. “A wood and graphite instrument so brittle it can be snapped by two fingers with very little effort and turned to dust with a shoe… survived being bounced around the inside of the sphere, next to the surface of a sun, punctured a composite metal ceramic shield which can survive said sun, went completely through my shoulder and buried itself 2 inches into a reinforced concrete wall…. Without disintegrating?”

  “yes.”

  “Care to explain that?”

  “I will need a sample to confirm, but, if my hypothesise is correct… something very unexpected and quite revolutionary has happened.”

  “Wait.” Maria interjected, “how do you know it was my pencil?”

  Alice’s screen flickered away from her face and back to a picture of the inside of the sphere, it took me a few seconds to realise that I was watching a recording – albeit it one played in extreme slow motion. A few seconds into the video, a red circle highlighted the pencil laying on the floor of the sphere as the sun burst into existence.

  “shit,” Maria Muttered, “I must’ve dropped it when I was checking the shielding.”

  “When the sun ignited,” Alice explained, “the wood around the graphite core was incinerated in a fraction of a second, leaving only the graphite core.” The circle started moving, the graphite core being lifted up by the gravity of the new sun. “Once that reached the outer part of sun, it was caught in the magnetic field of the sun and accelerated around the sun at immense speed until…”

  “Wait…” Maria interrupted. “… how is that possible, graphite isn’t magnetic.”

  “That’s why I need to run tests.” Alice answered, “but eventually, the graphite stem built enough velocity to break orbit and the strength to punch through the shield.”

  “…without disintegrating…” I added

  “again… tests.” Alice replied with the mainframe’s equivalent of a sig
n. “Dig out a sample. If I’m correct, that may be harder than it sounds.”

  Of course, she was right, and she wasn’t kidding. We needed a claw hammer and a lever just to get the thing to wiggle. It took both Maria and I and all the strength we could muster to pry it from the concrete.

  Once the stem was loose, Alice told us to mount it into the Mass Spectrometer – a huge piece of machinery that incinerates a sample of whatever you put into it and tell you its exact chemical make-up. The cradle on which you mounted the sample was only about an inch square, the stem was too big.

  “Son of a bitch!” I exclaimed, trying in vain to snap a piece of the graphite, something that should have been extremely easy. When I finally gave up, I picked up the claw hammer, smashing it as hard as I could onto the stem… nothing.

  “Alright, fuck this!” I muttered to myself as I pulled out a power saw. I mounted the graphite stem into a vice, turned on the saw and pressed the razor-sharp blade into the exposed part of the stem. After a few seconds of ear-splitting screeching and with the tool getting noticeably hotter, I pulled the saw away, the blade was stripped! Instead of jagged and even spaced teeth, the blade was as smooth as polished steel. The graphite stem didn’t so much as have a scratch on it.

  “Ok. I’m confused…” I finally conceded.

  “Put it under the electron microscope.” Alice instructed. Her slim smiling face lighting up the screen as her theory was slowly being proved.

  She was quiet for a few moments before her small smile spread and grew into a beaming grin. “You are going to love this….”

  Chapter 9

  The need for secrecy.

  Ok boys and girls, particle physics 101: imagine you had an empty shoe box and you stood on it, the whole thing would collapse right? Now imagine that, instead of being empty, it had a football in it, when you stood on it, only the parts not supported by the ball would collapse. Now this time, instead of it being a football, imagine it was baseballs – enough of them needed to fill the whole shoebox. Now more of the box is supported by the balls and less of it collapses when you stood on it.