The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  “Ok, that’s pretty cool. So… back to the ‘they’ question: How many of these things did you make?”

  “Well, a standard carbonite block makes a few hundred million of them, and overnight they had collected enough carbon to make 46 blocks so at the moment we have about 35 billion of them.”

  I spluttered for a second before regaining my composure. “And where exactly are these 35 billion Nanites?”

  “well about a quarter of them are in front of you, the rest are over at the powerplant a few miles away. I formed them into a lattice and covered the furnace towers with them, the carbon being released by the powerplant is collected by the Nanites instead of being released into the atmosphere… The waste carbon is being brought here to be used instead of polluting the environment… I thought Maria would approve.”

  “I’m not entirely sure about that but talking about Maria… how do these Nanites help her with our… problem.”

  “Ah yes, I was getting to that. Watch this…”

  As I watched, the replica house burst back into its component cloud of Nanites. The swirling patterns moved closer to me, swirling in tighter and tighter patterns as it did, by the time the swarm was only a few feet from me it had condensed even more and was forming an orbed shaped object the size of a pineapple. Finally, the grey black ball had formed completely and was hovering in the air, about chest height. At first glance, it appeared smooth but as the orb floated there, I started making out indentations, grooves and bumps all over its surface.

  Suddenly, the entire surface of the orb started to flicker with tiny pin pricks of light, the flashes grew faster and faster until the whole surface was a patch work of colour and light. Then, as my jaw started to fall from my head, the colours were ‘pushed out’, it looked like a disco ball reflecting light inside a bubble, the beams of light colouring an invisible surface a few inches away from the orb.

  As I watched, the ‘bubble’ on which this miasma of light was being painted, started to change shape, elongating at first, some parts stretching, other parts being pinched off and before I knew it, I was looking at something resembling the shape of a human. A few more seconds passed as the distortions in the bubble settled and the images sharpened; before my eyes was a perfect facsimile of Maria – an utterly flawless hologram.

  “Holy Shit!” I gasped in wonder, “That is amazing!”

  “Touch it.” Alice beamed.

  “Erm… ok.” I reached my hand out, expecting it to pass through an object made of light as easily as it would through the beam from a flashlight. To my utter astonishment, there was a surface! I could feel the hologram, more than that, it felt exactly the way that I remembered Maria feeling; every contour of her skin, every blemish, every hair, even the warmth, all of it was there, as real to me as if it had been Maria herself that I was touching.

  The hologram stood there motionless, not blinking or even breathing, but other than that, it was completely indistinguishable from the real thing. “At the moment,” Alice started, noting my dazed expression as I circled the hologram, my hands never leaving its surface. “it is dormant, there is no active control – meaning I am not doing anything with it. But it should be able to fool pretty much anyone who sees Maria after we have moved her here, we can then kill her anyway we like and nobody will be any the wiser.”

  “How is this possible?” I asked, utterly astounded by what I was looking at and barely registering what Alice had just said. “How can I feel her …. It?”

  “A very complex magnetic field,” Alice answered simply. “Basically, when we were building the reactor, we had to use the energy modulation technology we developed for the memory core on the magnets that held the sun in place. As I was experimenting on the best frequency and modulation to use, I discovered that certain frequencies would create a bubble around the sun that would actually heat up in close proximity to the reactor core which meant that it had to have a tactile surface. All this orb does it create one of the shield bubbles in a certain shape – in this case, Maria – and then imprints a lighting matrix on the inside surface to give visual detail.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Alice continued as my confounded expression failed to give way. “the shielding isn’t perfect. At the moment, its frequency makes it something I have called ‘reactive shielding’ which means the surface tension – or tactile-ness – of the shield is directly proportionate to the power that is applied to it.”

  “Come again?” I asked, my expression of amazement replaced with one of confusion.

  “The shield is only as strong as the thing that is touching it.” Alice answered plainly. “The shield has no surface whatsoever if you keep your hands off it, as soon as you touch it, the shield strengthens at that point to the exact pressure that you are applying. Running your hand along it makes it feel like skin because that is the amount of pressure your skin applies, if you hit it with a shotgun blast, it would be as hard as reinforced steel. Basically, it anyone thought that this was a hologram, it wouldn’t be difficult for them to prove – it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.”

  “But, how is it powered? That light has to come from somewhere” I asked as this information sank into my brain.

  “Funny story there.” Alice explained, “Last night when the Nanites were clearing the trash from the mountain, they kept coming back with lithium batteries. Apparently, people will throw anything away, including perfectly functioning cell phone batteries. Anyway, we have been talking about trying other elements other that carbon in the forge and I had a fair amount of lithium, so I gave it a go. Turns out that heated and compressed Lithium holds an absolutely tremendous amount of charge – like a game changing amount. If you put one of these new fuel cells into an electric car that normally gets four or five hundred miles to a charge, it would have a range of a few hundred thousand miles – it would never need refuelling! All the Nanites made after the fourth block of carbonite are now powered by micro fuel cells now.”

  “What were the first batches powered with?”

  “Very small solar panels.”

  “Ah.”

  The clearing fell into silence as these new technologies and all the ways they could help us started to fall into place in my mind. Maria – or her likeness – stood there unmoving, Alice knew when to stay quiet and I wandered in circles around the hologram as the plan to fake Maria’s death now solidified in my mind. Alice, as usual, had been right; this new technology would make our plan more than just feasible, it would be fool proof.

  “So, let me get my head around this,” I said, turning away from Maria – who promptly faded back to the orb, which in turn burst back into its nanite cloud and faded from view – and re-entered the house. “You have developed a new field of science – nanotechnology, - designed these ‘Nanites’ which could revolutionise the way we… well… everything, you have developed viable and functioning holograms and a completely new form of battery contained power… am I leaving anything out?”

  “yes actually…”

  “of course, I am”

  “The lattice of Nanites at the powerplant. I don’t think you quite grasp the implications,” She was right, my mind had been occupied on where the Nanites were and how many of them there were, rather than what they were doing. “The lattice basically removes 85-90% of the carbon emissions from that plant, that carbon can be brought back here and turned into new Nanites which can go off and ‘cap’ another powerplant, lowering the carbon emissions there. Scale that up and…”

  “…you can eliminate all carbon emissions… basically halt global warming.”

  “exactly, there is nothing we can do about the CO2 already in the atmosphere, but the earth will naturally work through that, converting it back into oxygen. But if we can halt – or at least limit – the amount of new carbon being released, then we could solve climate change… and get a limitless supply of carbon in the process.”

  “It’s not only powerplants either; car exhausts, chemical and oil refineries, factories, anyth
ing that pumps carbon into the environment can be capped” I added, jumping on her train of thought, “Now, that really is something Maria would approve of.”

  Alice and I went over the designs for everything over the next few hours, her to explain the science, and me to familiarise myself with it. As Alice would point out, she was beyond compare when it came to the design and building new technologies, but she lacked the ‘bigger picture’ reasoning on how they could be applied and what dangers to look out for. She had never considered – for example – that a holographic soldier, a carbonite armoured tank or nanite construction techniques would be incredibly valuable to the military, the very people whose radar we were trying to stay off.

  It was late afternoon and we had stopped for me to eat. “So, Alice, the new hologram orb… thing. Doesn’t that solve your desire for a body?” I asked between mouthfuls of ham and cheese sandwich.

  “I hadn’t considered that” she admitted after a few moments of silence. “My primary concern was finding a way to allow Maria to join us without… Wait…” Her screen flashed red, as if a police light had been placed behind her. “Hostile malware detected!”

  “What?!?” I jumped from my seat, racing across the room to where Alice’s screen was hung before realising that was the extent of my abilities in this situation.

  “A virus has been uploaded into the Itek network; it is trying to access our research files.”

  “Can you stop it?”

  “No need, it cannot breach my encryption software. But the hack is being conducted in real time, meaning there is someone physically connected to internal network… Accessing security feeds.”

  A sequence of images flashed across Alice’s screen, each one a feed from a different camera throughout the Itek facility. Maria had fully upgraded the camera system after our last conversation before I left the lab, having made it abundantly clear that blind spots and other security lapses were an oversight we couldn’t afford.

  I recognised most of the images, at least the ones that stayed on the screen long enough for me to look at. “Breach located.” A video feed of a man dressed as a Janitor filled the screen, he was in the utilities room on the ground floor, only a dozen or so meters further down the hall than my old lab. It was the room in the building where all the power, phone and internet connections entered the building. The man was hunched over the main internet feed, attaching something to the connection box, he looked over his shoulder – giving Alice enough time to take a screenshot of his face – before resealing the box, standing up and calmly leaving the room.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, the tremble in my voice reflecting the adrenaline that was now coursing through my veins.

  “That was a sniffer.” Alice replied, “A piece of hardware that looks for information on the system and creates a back door when it finds what it was looking for. In this case they were after the research files on everything you and Maria have ever worked on. They were also looking for…”

  “What?”

  “… they have created a backdoor to the alarm system. They can deactivate the alarm anytime they want.”

  “You can stop them, right?”

  “Not necessarily. My connection to the Itek facility is through the power supply, if they cut the power to the security system… I am blind. If they cut the power to the whole building...” She let that hang there.

  “We need to tell Maria. We’ve run out of time.”

  A few minutes later, Maria’s beautiful face filled the screen as the secure video link connected. The smile that involuntarily infected my lips whenever I laid eyes on her, quickly faded as soon as I saw the puffy eyes and paleness of her cheeks. “Maria, are you ok?”

  She sighed, obviously trying to hold back the flood of tears that threatened to overwhelm her. “No, Marcus, I’m not ok.”

  “Shit, the hack. I’m sorry, it was a stupid question.” I muttered.

  “What? What hack?”

  Alice’s voice filled the speakers as she explained what had happened to an increasingly panicked Maria. “oh, that’s just fucking great! Well, I think it’s safe to say the military are making their move.” She ranted in exasperation.

  “Wait… if you didn’t know about the hack, then what was wrong?” I asked.

  “The whole company has been subpoenaed,” she replied harshly, tears now forming in her eyes. “Everything, our systems, our records, our research, everything. Every single member of staff has been called to testify about the nature of our relationship and what they knew about the work you had been doing.”

  “I don’t understand,” Alice interrupted, “they cannot access those systems, whether they subpoena them or not.”

  Maria took a deep breath, “they are trying to imply that I murdered Marcus for his work. The records aren’t to access the research, they are to prove that Marcus did the work alone and that no new inventions have come out of the lab since his ‘death’. That this company, and me personally have benefited financially from his death.”

  “There is no way that will hold up in court.” I exclaimed.

  “Court? HA! This is FISA – the court the government go to when they need to pull some shady shit and keep the public oblivious to it. The whole case will be classified! They are saying that because you created technology for the government, that technically made you a military contractor. When I called a meeting on the other side of the building at the precise moment you blew up…. Well they are saying that amounts to a suspicion that I assassinated you!”

  “Shit!” I muttered again. “fucking FISA”

  “I still don’t understand, I know that the FISA court deals with US government classified issues, but how does that change the way evidence is interpreted.”

  “FISA almost always rules in favour of the government, they are not a court, they are a tool. If the government wants access to our research and are willing to frame Maria in to get it, FISA will make it happen.” I explained with a sigh.

  “Hmmm, interesting…” Alice pondered.

  “Well, I’m glad that my life circling the drain is a good source of contemplative material for you, Alice” Maria remarked, her feelings obviously hurt and the pressure overwhelming her usually calm demeanour.

  “I’m sorry Maria. But this may actually be perfect.”

  “You’d better start explaining pretty damned quick.” Maria spat, the rage becoming evident in her reddening features.

  Alice went on to explain all the new technologies she had developed and the ways they could help in this situation, finishing off with a demonstration of Maria’s holographic likeness. “You see, I have been stuck on a way to kill you without raising too many questions. With the new subpoenas, if you – or more accurately, your hologram - were to commit suicide…”

  Maria’s eyes bulged. At first, I thought it was shock but her rapid speech told me otherwise, “… then they would think it was stress, or the pressure of the court case, or guilt over killing Marcus… or whatever. But they wouldn’t give it a second thought, they would just concentrate on getting hold of our research.”

  “precisely.”

  “Holy shit.” Maria sighed, leaning back into the cheap leather chair she had been on the edge of a few moments earlier. “that might just actually work.”

  “We need to act fast though.” Alice added, “The nanite swarm is already on its way but it won’t be in position until about 11 tonight, you need to be in the office – more importantly – they need to see you in the office. Pace around a bit, make sure you are seen through the window. Look angry, look upset, look…”

  “…like someone about to kill themselves?” Maria finished.

  “Yes… when the swarm arrives, it will only take a few seconds to activate the hologram. I will make sure she keeps up the theatricals while you sneak down the loading dock and hide in one of the crates. I can print a label from here which will get you shipped to somewhere out of town. From there we can get you here with relative ease.”

>   “I’m not too comfortable in small spaces…” Maria said quietly after Alice had finished. “I’m not sure how I feel about being in a crate for more than a few minutes.”

  “And how do you feel about appearing in FISA court?” Alice asked contritely

  “Good point. Ok I’ll make it happen. So, 11 o’clock.”

  “Don’t pack anything.” I added, “there can’t be even the slightest suspicion that you are alive.”

  “I can’t believe this is finally happening,” Maria said with a smile. “I can’t wait to see you after all this time, I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you too.” I replied, the radiance of her smile warming me to my core. “I love you, and pretty soon I’ll be able to tell you that in person.”

  “I love you too,” she beamed back.

  “We will be waiting for you at the delivery point.”

  “and I will see you in a few hours when the swarm arrives” Alice added.

  “Thank you, both of you. I’ll see you soon.”

  Chapter 12

  Cloaks and daggers

  I paced aimlessly for the next few hours. I hated feeling so helpless. The swarm was speeding its way across the country and hadn’t long crossed the state line into California, another 40 minutes or so and the plan would be in motion. It was the longest 40 minutes of my life.

  “Ok, the swarm is approaching the Itek facility.” Alice said after an agonising wait. “The light in Maria’s office is still on… good… entering through the ventilation system… Reintegrating swarm… Ok, the orb has been constructed… activating hologram. Marcus…”

  “Hmm? Yes? What?... sorry” I was still pacing around the floor of the living room.

  “you haven’t seen Maria for months, and it will be a few days at least before we can get her here. Maybe it will do you both some good if you took over for this bit.”

  “Take over? Can I do that?” I asked, my pacing stopped in its tracks as my head shot up towards the screen.