The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  “Gonzalez?”

  “No, sir,” the adjutant looked down at some papers in his hand. “she was in a staff meeting elsewhere in the building. It looks like it was the head of her research department.” Reaves eyes shot open, he obviously understood the relevance of this man, “A Marcus… something, surname not confirmed yet.”

  “What happened?”

  “Dr Gonzalez had called a staff meeting, apparently she was concerned about security breaches and cooperate espionage…”

  “as she should be…” the general smirked.

  “this Marcus character was in his lab, provisional forensics by local law enforcement indicates he was working on a new form of high-powered batteries. They think he inadvertently overloaded one them, it exploded, causing a chain reaction which in turn detonated the other batteries. Our recon teams reported that it was a pretty significant explosion and by all accounts, this researcher was standing right in the middle of it… there wasn’t much of him – or his lab – left.

  The general sighed and sat back into his chair, one hand coming up to massage the bridge of his nose. “Would this head of research be – by any chance – the man who created the solar panels and the encryption software.?”

  “Given his job title, sir, that would be a reasonable assumption. But the simple truth is we don’t know.”

  “Well then, wouldn’t it be a good idea if you found out!?!”

  “We have tried, sir. But the patent is registered to the company and not to any one individual. We have never been totally sure if even Dr Gonzalez is even part of the development team. As CEO we always assumed that she was either involved with the R&D aspects of the company, and if she wasn’t, she would certainly know who was.”

  “Fine!” the general huffed, “I want a full work up on this man, I want to know everything there is to know, his parents, siblings, wife, mistress, boyfriends, I want to know what that asshole had for breakfast the day he died, I want our men in there, conceal them in the local forensic team, I want every inch of that lab scoured for anything we can use to get us this technology while it is still an active crime scene. I want every phone call, every email, every fucking postcard from that god damned company intercepted! If we can make out that he was working on something he shouldn’t have been, that might be enough for a FISA warrant to get all the data we need.”

  The adjutant snapped to attention, he obviously knew when he was being given an order “Yes, sir.” He said with a salute, turned and left the office.

  Alice and I watched the security feed from our new home in the mountain cabin. The NSA didn’t even trust their own agents - let alone the military – after the whole Edward Snowden / Wikileaks incident and had secretly installed cameras in every room in Fort Meade, including General Reaves’. It had taken Alice only a few seconds to find and hack into that system, displaying the feed on a new 65inch plasma screen that I had hung above the fireplace.

  Alice had – once again – amazed both Maria and I with the elaborate and brilliant charade to fake my death. It would only be a few months or so until the next phase – Maria’s apparent suicide through grief – would take place.

  “They can possibly fall for that!” I had exclaimed when Alice had laid out the details as I disassembled the last pieces of the reactor. Maria had nodded in agreement. “They will pick up on doctored surveillance footage in a heat beat.” I added, “not to mention, how the hell are we going to get body parts with my DNA strewn around the place without – you know – cutting them off me?”

  Alice sighed again, I’m sure to her, this was like trying to teach the alphabet to a monkey. “We don’t need body parts with your DNA, we simply hack into the coroner’s database and add in a new report. That’s the only information the military will have access to because by the time they get their own men inserted into the investigation – which they almost certainly will try to do – the crime scene will be cleared of all human remains so the forensic investigators can determine the cause of the explosion.”

  “Right, so my limbs are all safe?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “What about the security feed? They will see that has been tampered with.” Maria asked from her chair. The cynicism obvious in her face had started to fade as the plan was laid out for her. She had started the conversation with her arms crossed, convinced that there was no other way to get this done other than to end our relationship and for me to go into hiding. She had hated the idea but had come to terms with – even if in only her own mind – its inevitability.

  “it wouldn’t have been.” Alice replied; the pride evident in her voice.

  “Wait, I thought we established that my limbs were safe. Standing in an actual explosion doesn’t seem the best way to do that.”

  “A tampered video is basically when you overlay two pieces of footage. So, in our case, one piece would be you standing in your lab, the other would be the lab being engulfed in an explosion.” Alice explained, “But my way, the entire video would be – essentially – CGI, only an extremely detailed and lifelike version of it. All I would need is the real footage of the explosion as a guide, and the last few frames as a reference point and I could recreate the whole thing as a computer-generated graphic.”

  “and they’d buy that…”

  “Yes, without a doubt. The overlaps in the videos and the digital alterations needed for them to detect the forgery simply wouldn’t be there, even if they could read my digital language – which they can’t.”

  “and what about my death?” Maria asked, clearly convinced by Alice’s explanation.

  “That comes later,” Alice replied. “Marcus would need to build the reactor and the forge by himself as quickly as possible, even working on it during every waking moment, I estimate it will take more than six months for him to complete, maybe as long as a year if things don’t go well. But as soon as he does, and carbonite production starts properly, I have designed two pieces of tech – both of which can only work with carbonite – that can help us pull that off.”

  “and they are…” Maria asked excitedly as Alice failed to fill in the obvious blanks.

  “Nanotechnology and holograms.”

  I fell into my chair, Maria – lucky enough to already be sat in one - simply gawked.

  “What?” Alice asked, “I only gave up on human teleportation the day before yesterday.”

  “Holograms?” Penny asked with enthusiasm as she looked up from her screen. “We don’t have holograms in Atlantia, do we?”

  ‘Do I dare tell her?’ I thought to myself, ‘No, I can’t, that is one truth too far.’

  I looked over my desk at the young writer, her blonde hair pulled back into a flowing braid that fell to the nape of her neck, a few strands of hair hanging freely onto her face. She was still sat in the comfortable leather sofa in the middle of the room where she had been sat for the past few hours. I had been dividing my attention between her and the spectacular sunset that was dominating the skyline behind me. The oranges and purples of earlier had given way to a deep crimson, as if the sky itself was ablaze with the fire of the sun.

  The light in the city below was starting to drop and streetlights, windows and the odd car head light could now be clearly seen from our position on the highest point in the city. The tower was by no means the tallest structure in the country, not by a long way. There were apartment buildings 30 or 40 stories higher than this building in Lincoln city alone, quite a few of them in fact. But the tallest building in Atlantia was ‘the spire’ in Blue Lagoon – the tourism orientated city on the coast to the south. The massive 210 story building was the second tallest in the world, beaten only by Pinnacle tower in Hong Kong, both dwarfing the previous holder of that record – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. That building had held the record for almost 40 years before, first ‘the Spire’, and then ‘the pinnacle’ opened a few years apart. The spire was a huge hotel overlooking the beautiful blue lagoon bay, it was one of the most exclusive destinations in the world.<
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  My mind was pulled back to my present location as Penny repeated her question.

  “No,” I lied, “there are no holograms still in use in Atlantia, although the military still use them occasionally. We had a few active in the very early days, before the Nation was actually founded but, compared to the Spartans and the Artisans, in terms of energy requirements, they were deemed to be to inefficient. Plus, there was always something – unsettling – about the possibility that you could be talking to one and not even know it.”

  Penny nodded acceptingly. I had to wonder if she – or anyone else for that matter – ever suspected that they were talking to a hologram at this very moment. Alice was the only one who knew the truth, Alice was almost always the only one who knew the whole story – primarily because she was the only one who had survived the whole story with me.

  Chapter 11

  smoke and mirrors

  It took 7 months and 3 days to finish the new reactor / forge system. The design was genius; carbon – or more accurately anything containing even trace amounts of carbon – was placed in one end. A mechanical vice, similar to one found on a garbage truck squeeze the mass down the size of Alice’s memory core and then fed that into the reactor. All unneeded elements were burned down or filtered out – plastic, for example, was a hydrocarbon, the hydrogen was fed into the sun if it was needed or fused with the oxygen that came from the water inlet to make more water if the sun had enough fuel – the carbon which was left was held in place as the gravity and heat from the sun compressed it into carbonite.

  The carbonite never melted completely in the way that iron or steel does, there was never any glowing red sludge that was poured into moulds. Instead, the carbonite was a slighter smaller mass of something resembling melting candle wax, solid enough to hold a form, but pliable enough to manipulate into new shapes. After that, the ‘blob’ was squeezed and moulded by variously sized presses until it was the right size and shape for whatever we needed, before exiting the other side of the forge. Despite being white hot at the point it left the machine, it dropped to almost room temperature within a few minutes due to its incredible thermal conductive properties. We’d made a few mundane objects as a test of the system, to see if it needed adjusting in any areas.

  One of the first problems we had come across was that you either needed to produce a totally intact item, or make sure that the holes for screws, and so on, were already present – once the carbonite set, no drill in the world could make a new screw hole if you needed to attach it to something. To account for these kinds of intricacies, Alice had been put in charge; Every single item had to be 3d designed before the carbonite was processed and that took a level of calculation and tedium that were beyond my tolerance threshold.

  Throughout it all, Maria and I kept in touch. With daily video calls on Alice’s encrypted system, she watched every step along the road to our eventual reunification. She – of course – was amazed with the applications of this technology, but she was even more thrilled with the idea that soon, her military worries would be over, and we would be together once again. The sting of losing her company in the process – or at least direct control of her company – had lessened dramatically over the months as the pressures of management and dealing with the increasingly demanding military took its toll.

  General Blake had been true to his word – at least on his end, the downside of that was that Maria was receiving a few calls a week about where and how our encryption technology was being used. In almost every one of those conversations was a subtle hint at allowing the tech to be used for other purposes or allowing other agencies to use it or developing a new technology to fill one of the military’s other needs. Plus, there was the constant stress that came with knowing you were being watched. After all of that, losing direct control of the company had lost its bite.

  On the bright side though, the circumstances of my death had been accepted fairly easily. General Reaves and his ridiculously badly disguised agents had – obviously – found nothing in the wreckage of the lab – the old desktop computer had conveniently been sat right next to the batteries when they exploded and had been obliterated, that was the only thing they bothered to look for – and their clumsy attempts to find information about me had only given them data that Alice had wanted them to find, nothing even close to resembling the truth.

  The explosion, which had been very real and much more destructive than I thought – although well within Alice’s calculated parameters – had caused a fair amount of damage to the Itek building. My lab had been completely destroyed, the force of the explosion had blown out the wall into the hallway and continued though the main exterior wall on the other side of it. Our military observers had watched a huge fireball erupt from the side of the building, easily convinced that I – having apparently been stood in the middle of it – would have been killed instantly.

  The investigation had lasted a little over a week, the repairs had taken a few weeks more, there had been a memorial service, Maria had played the part of grieving girlfriend to perfection and life at the company had gone back to normal. It all seemed so long ago.

  I awoke one morning, rose from the double bed in one of the rooms - a bed which had always seemed oddly empty despite never having actually shared it with anyone – and entered the living room, the main work area of the house. That bed was the one that Maria and I had planned to spend many, many years together in.

  “Good morning Marcus.” Alice said cheerful as I entered. The beautiful morning mists that I had come to love, were being penetrated by brilliant rays of light as they were burned away by the morning sun.

  “Hey Alice. How are things on this fine morning,” I responded as I poured myself a cup of stale coffee from the night before, grimacing as the first taste touched my tongue.

  “Maybe you should take a look at the forge to find out.” Her smug smile was something that had become increasing endearing about Alice, like the knowledge of a job well done – which meant that she had not only surpassed expectations, but blown them out of the water.

  I strolled from the kitchen area to where the outlet of the forge was located, “Ah, how nice. You’ve made me a petri dish.”

  “And what’s in the petri dish.”

  “there’s nothing in the petri dish.”

  “Are you sure?” the playfulness in her tone a little too grating for this time of day, at least until I had finished my coffee.

  “I’m very sure there is nothing in the petri dish.” I was about to turn away when something moved. I leant in closer, examining the bottom of the clear circular container. Eventually I found what I was looking for, it was a dot. A tiny black spec in the centre of the dish.

  “Ok, I was wrong. You have made me a full stop; my grammar will be eternally grateful.”

  “Maybe you need a magnifying glass.” Her pride filled voice danced out of the speakers.

  I looked around the room, quickly finding the needed implement and retuning to the forge, aiming the lens at the petri dish and adjusting it until the dot came into focus.

  “Alice…” I said cautiously, the implications of what I was looking at slowly dawning on me, “What exactly am I looking at?”

  “That…” pause for effect, “…is a nanite.”

  What I was looking at was barely visible to the naked eye. It was so small that some obscure word containing Latin would be needed to measure it. It looked like a tiny piece of Lego, with six legs, insect wings and antennas – or something resembling antennas – sticking out from the front and back.

  “Ok Alice, we talked – briefly – about nanotechnology before we faked my death, but I think I am going to need details.”

  “Good, I was hoping you’d ask that.” Alice beamed like an excited teenager. “What it basically is, is a tiny, carbonite infused microchip that controls the legs and wings which manipulate the nanite’s movements. Each one is capable of semi-autonomous actions depending on the task they are assigned…”

&n
bsp; “You said ‘they’...”

  “yes, they operate as a swarm, on their own they are pretty useless. So far, I have tasked them with collecting more carbon for the forge, they have been finding …”

  “But there is only one… you’re still saying ‘they’…”

  “Shut up and let me finish. Anyway, they have been clearing the mountain of garbage and litter, each one lands on a piece of trash, a laser – that’s what the antenna looking things are – cuts a piece out of the trash small enough for the nanite to carry and then it brings it back here to the forge. They have actually cleaned up a 40 miles radius of the mountain so far.”

  “Cool. Now… ‘they’?

  “I’m getting to that. Now, let’s go outside.” I stepped out into the early morning sun, most of the mists had been burned away by now and the air was fresh and crisp. “watch this.”

  There were a few moments of silence, gradually a faint buzzing sound faded into my senses, getting louder by the second. The buzz suddenly erupted into a loud whoosh as something resembling a cloud flooded into the clearing in front of me, the cloud became denser, forming into a shape – a shape that started looking familiar – suddenly the noise stopped and I was staring at something my brain was refusing to accept.

  “That…” Alice’s voice floated from speakers attached to the outside of the house, “…is a fully functional reactor forge.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “The six legs on the nanite can be used to connect the swarm together into a shape. And because they are so small, and because the bond between them is so strong – being carbonite – they function as a solid material. They can make almost anything if there are enough of them.”

  The forge exploded into a cloud of Nanites, the shapes swirling and morphing until they reformed into a Toyota SUV. “That car is fully drivable, once you added fuel.” The swarm exploded again, another myriad of shapes and patterns before reforming once again, this time into a perfect replica – albeit a smaller one – of the house I was standing in front of.