Class Fives: Origins

by Jon H. Thompson

  Dan gave him a crooked smile.

  “You’re done when White and Jones tell you you’re done. Remember, you’re a terrorist.”

  “Christ,” John spit. “I’m never gonna get out of this, am I?”

  Dan stared at him a moment, then turned to Roger.

  “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  Roger drew in a thoughtful breath and slowly released it.

  “I don’t know,” he replied distractedly. “I’m not like him,” he inclined his head toward John. “I can’t just go back to normal. I don’t have a normal. Normal for me is trying not to break everything I touch. That’s never going to change. Not for me. I’m stuck with this.”

  He fell silent, his expression indicating his thoughts were dancing far away, groping toward something just out of reach.

  “At least, if I could do something with it. Use it in some way…”

  He paused a moment.

  “Then maybe I’d feel like it had some kind of purpose to it. Like there was some kind of point.”

  “So, what?” John said, “You want to go around fixing things? Saving people? Being the big hero?”

  Roger turned to him.

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Yeah, I got a better idea,” John shot back, “Tell those suits, those White and Jones guys to just leave you alone. You did what they wanted. You took their tests. So that’s it. Game over.”

  Roger seemed to slump slightly in his seat.

  “Besides,” John went on, “What could they do about it? If you told them to just leave you alone, what the Hell could they do to you?”

  Roger shook his head.

  “Who knows?” he responded quietly.

  “I’ll tell you,” John snapped back. “Not a goddamn thing. They couldn’t lock you up. Even if they tried, you could just punch a hole in the wall and walk right out. They can’t shoot you. So what could they do?”

  It was Dan who responded.

  “They could take away whatever he’s already got,” he said grimly.

  Roger’s eyes flicked up to fix on him, suddenly wary.

  “They could,” Dan continued, “Harass him. Audit his taxes, go after his property, whatever money he’s got. They could follow him around, put a twenty-four hour a day stake out on him. They could harass the shit out of him.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Roger said firmly. “They wouldn’t dare.”

  “Probably not,” Dan replied. “They’re not stupid. And they sure wouldn’t want to piss you off. My God, if that happened, you could be their worst nightmare. Somebody they literally couldn’t stop, couldn’t even slow down.”

  Roger considered this, his expression slowly darkening. Dan fixed on him intently.

  “You’d scare the living shit out of them,” he said. “You probably already do. If you ever decided to go after them….”

  This drew another blanket of silence over the table, as all three men contemplated the thought.

  “They’re not going to leave me alone, are they?” Roger said finally.

  “Probably not,” Dan replied. “You’re like a nuclear bomb. Even if you never plan to use it, you still keep an eye on it, just in case.”

  “Hey,” John shot, “What am I, chopped liver?”

  Dan allowed himself a wry grin.

  “No, not at all. But your… talent is different. It’s manageable, at least by them.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” John snapped back.

  “It means that if they want to control you, all they have to do is get you locked up somewhere and keep you there for longer than ten minutes. Then you’d be stuck. You could jump, but you’d just wind up in the same place.”

  “Oh,” John muttered, “So I’m no problem, is that what you’re saying? They don’t have to worry about me. I’m no big deal, then. Well, that’s nice to know.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Dan cut in. “You’re different. Your ability is different. It’s more specialized. Hell, it’s the kind of thing that would make you some kind of super spy or something. But it wouldn’t make them feel like you could turn it against them. You wouldn’t scare them all that much.”

  John seemed to consider this a long moment, then nodded.

  “Okay, I get that.”

  Dan regarded the two men and leaned back in the booth.

  “You know, when I was a kid I was so into superhero comics. And you just dream about, some day, maybe you’ll bump into one. And they’d be right there, in front of you. And maybe you'd get to talk to them. How incredible that is.”

  He looked from John to Roger and back.

  “It’s different. When it really happens.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Roger said quietly.

  “Oh no,” Dan said quickly. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disappointed. Not in the least. It’s just… more than I ever thought it could be, that’s all.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, before Dan added, “And besides, you aren’t wearing any tights.”

  The laughter of the trio floated through the quiet café.

  11

  Acceleration

  The instant he had heard the name, Crawford’s inner sense of alarm started screaming. He’d made the analyst repeat everything, jotting notes furiously, and by the time he hung up he was already examining the pieces of information and searching for the framework on which to hang an operational plan.

  The Karillan Foundation. Of course. He’d overlooked that reference, buried and disregarded it because Alexander Karillan was dead. He’d forgotten about the man’s memory. He’d instructed the analyst to find out whatever information existed about the organization, then turned his attention to the immediately actionable parts.

  Joseph Franklin had done a job for the Karillan Foundation. Joseph Franklin had shipped something to Eastern Europe and then gotten gunned down as he was leaving the airport.

  Crawford reset his phone, and dialed the unlisted number, which was answered on the first hint of a ring.

  “Operations,” the clipped voice responded.

  “Crawford,” he said back, “I need eyes on the ground in Arizona, Tucson. I want a full forensic team on the address I have. And I need it right now. We’ll be very late in getting to the scene so they have to look carefully. I’ll be there do give a video briefing in about twenty minutes. Set up a video briefing with New Mexico. I’ll give them the details then.”

  “Copy,” the voice on the other end responded and the line went dead.

  At last, he told himself, a lead. Maybe a slim one, but something.

  He now had another stepping stone toward Dr. Walter Montgomery. Whether it would bear the weight of his examination or just sink uselessly, he couldn’t know yet. But it was something.

  He stopped at the corner of the wide, busy thoroughfare and waited for the light to change. Glancing over, he could see the Washington Memorial jutting into the sky.

  He still couldn’t believe what resources the government that rested behind that granite pillar had at its disposal. The systems and secret networks that watched and listened to absolutely everything. That read every email, that recorded every video image, that listened like a nosy neighbor to every phone call. And still it might not be enough to save the world.

  The light changed and he stepped across Pennsylvania Avenue toward the garage where his car was parked. In twenty minutes, he would have to begin briefing a strike team out of the secret base in New Mexico that was one of his current resources. They would have to get to Franklin’s business as quickly as they could. Presumably, if he was assassinated at the airport, then perhaps the local authorities would have little reason to do an extensive search of his offices. That would be good. His forensic team was the best. They not only were trained to sniff out normal crime scene evidence, down to the smallest hair or droplet of blood, they were also trained to see things that were out of place, that didn’t belong. If Franklin had retained a single scrap of paper regar
ding whatever it was he had built for the Karillan Foundation, his team would find it. With luck there might be a phone number, or something else Crawford could use to extend the chain he was clawing his way up toward Montgomery.

  The problem, he knew, was the limitation of people. Systems could now converse at the speed of light, trading bytes of data in milliseconds and remembering it flawlessly. But they couldn’t put it together. All you could ask of them would be to listen for specific sounds, specific words, or cross-reference and filter lines of text. But you couldn’t ask them to use their intuition. Because they simply didn’t have any. For that you needed people. Human imaginations to just try something stupid and crazy, something a machine could never do. A human being could stumble upon something he didn’t even recognize, other than the fact that the hair at the back of his neck just stood up. But a machine never stumbled. On anything. They just locked up.

  So he had to have his teams check not only Franklin’s place of work, but his residence, his vehicle, all of it. And even then it may turn up nothing.

  But now he had the Karillan Foundation to reach for. What exactly is it, where did it come from, who owns it and how do I find them, were just a few of the cascading questions that roared through his thoughts.

  If only, he considered, we had more time. The facilities would be fully operational. The pieces to deal with things like this would already be in place. Now he was playing catch-up, improvising his head off. That had to change. There had to be some kind of system already in place when this kind of thing started popping its head up. Because it only gives you one shot, and if you blow it, everything may go down the toilet.

  That was the problem going way back, he told himself. Back to that horrible day when the Towers fell. They didn’t have a system or a plan because they couldn’t conceive of ever needing one. Nobody would ever consider resurrecting the Kamikaze, because it was insane. Yet someone did. With disastrous results.

  And the threats looming today, he reassured himself, were popping up fully formed, like Hydras, from the severed neck of science, spewing its poison across the world. Because science had no head. It was a thing, a machine of discovery that lumbered constantly forward, unstoppable but with no one in control. And somebody had to try and figure out what to do whenever it started to go wrong. Like it was now. Like it had thirty-five years ago. And for now, that someone was him.

  He took one more sharp glance over his shoulder at the tall, gleaming white finger pointed at the open blue sky, and allowed himself a smile.

  It had to be protected. It had to be saved. There had to be good guys.

  He allowed one tiny fleeting glimmer of a thought, something about hoping the thing he was building would never get into the wrong hands, then brushed it away and stepped through the wide, gaping door of the parking garage and was swallowed by the shadow.

  Dr. Stephan Svag stood before the thick, shielded window, staring into the containment chamber. Sitting on the plinth in the center of the gray, barren room was the container. It didn’t look like much, merely a foot-long glass cylinder about the circumference of a small trash can with silver caps on either end. But it was, he considered, the thing that would win him a Nobel Prize. And without it, his current researches wouldn’t have been possible.

  It was nothing less than a lensing device for directing the force of magnetic fields.

  He still smiled whenever he considered what had inspired him to think along those lines.

  During the development of the very first atomic bomb it was determined that two particularly unstable elements were most suitable for attempting a sustained fission chain reaction: uranium, a substance found in nature but in tiny quantities, and plutonium, an element that could be manufactured. Uranium came in two varieties, U-238 and the slightly heavier and much rarer U-235. The bomb development teams quickly realized that the more-plentiful U-238 wasn’t as suitable for detonation as U-235. But after months of frantic effort, they only managed to isolate enough U-235 for a single bomb. However, by bombarding the U-238 with extra neurons, they could produce suitable quantities of a new element, P-239, Plutonium.

  But whereas U-235 could achieve a critical chain reaction quite easily, requiring only the impact of two significant masses of it at high speed, Plutonium needed to be compressed many times to trigger a fission reaction.

  That was where lensing came in. An explosive shockwave, such as from ordinary plastic explosives, could provide the force required to squeeze the plutonium to critical mass, but explosions were naturally very messy, the force flying off in all directions, their energy dissipating undirected.

  By surrounding the plutonium with many small explosions, all detonated at the exact same moment, an internal shockwave of force directed inwards would provide equal, sudden compression from every angle, trapping and multiplying the impact, squeezing the plutonium on all sides evenly, all at once. This was called implosion.

  What Svag had managed to accomplish was to provide the same sort of continuous implosion, not of explosive concussion, but of a magnetic field. It was the perfect way to capture and trap stray subatomic particles traveling at high speed. And it had allowed him to grow his currently unnamed element to an incredible size. In fact, within another week, if he stood where he was right now, looking through the thick window and across the twenty feet to the plinth, and squinted his eyes just right, at the very center of the cylindrical glass tube he would just be able to make out the tiniest flicker of something incandescent. It would become visible to the naked eye. A single nucleus of a single atom.

  Without the container, his efforts would have been like trying to build a house of cards in the middle of a hurricane. Without his container the billions of protons and neutrons, all currently being forced together in the center of the magnetic field, would fly apart with tremendous force, most likely obliterating the lab, the control room and perhaps the entire facility.

  Svag smiled.

  That was why the container was, almost naturally, completely invulnerable. Because the magnetic field didn’t just push inwards. It pushed outwards as well, throwing a protective cordon around itself that was able to withstand penetration by almost anything. Bullets would ricochet off it, as would all forms of shrapnel. Heat would flow around it. Radiation would skid along its surface and be deflected. Almost nothing on earth could penetrate it, as far as he could determine, except for his particle gun, and then only because he had it tuned to a specific frequency. And only he knew what that was. He hadn’t even written it down, and had erased all the equations of his own design that had allowed him to determine it in the first place. Now the single number was recorded only within his own head, where it was safe.

  He really did have to come up with some kind of name for the thing, he mused, and for the new element he had managed to create as well. He had toyed with the name Svagium679, but he knew that wasn’t even accurate, as with each passing hour more protons and neutrons were being spit into the container, and some were being trapped and slammed against the ever-growing clump at its center. It probably could no longer even be assigned an atomic weight, he considered. A new unit of measure might have to be devised. Why not a “Svag Weight”?

  He chuckled quietly to himself and glanced down at the monitors. The particle gun was functioning normally, lazily shooting out its steady stream of bits, the container field was humming away nicely. All was right with the world.

  He tapped a key on the panel and a fresh window popped up on one of the small screens.

  Svag’s smile widened.

  4.7 it read.

  Wait until I tell W, he thought. He will be so pleased.

  Roger and John moved down the sidewalk, turning into the parking lot even as John was digging his keys out of his pocket. It had been a long, wearing day for both of them. A second full round of tests at the same medical facility, all of them equally ineffective when applied to Roger, all of them equally exhausting for John.

  But at least they had managed to conv
ince White and Jones to allow them to arrange for their own transportation. The two government men had hesitated momentarily, but were intelligent enough to know if either John or Roger resisted their efforts to be controlled, there was very little that could be done about it. They had finally given a grudging consent after extracting pledges of confidentiality from the two.

  “You know,” John said casually as they crossed the parking lot, “You really haven’t lived until you’ve had a camera shoved up your ass. You really have got to let them do that at least once.”

  “Hey,” Roger said, smirking, “They had their shot. It’s not my fault they couldn’t make it work.”

  “You were clenching,” John said.

  “Big time,” Roger responded firmly.

  They were both parked in the far corner of the sprawling, open lot. Around them the buildings of the numerous businesses that lined the long boulevard sat like squat lumps, except for the rising new structure under construction to the south of the lot. It was already three times as tall as the other buildings in the area, on its way to an impressive height, especially for this section of town, and it cast a deep shadow across the lot.

  John approached his car just as Roger began to veer off toward his own, parked a few rows away.

  “Well,” John called, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Hey, did they tell you how long we’re gonna be doing this? These tests?”

  Roger shook his head, half turned to John as he walked.