by Josh Karnes
Chapter 6
Tampa, Florida
“Hey! Someone shut off that alarm!” Lucas “Poppy” Jackson yelled across the manufacturing floor as he marched towards the source of the noise. Poppy was a short, stout, lovable black man in his fifties, who was regarded like a father by many of the young folks working on his factory floor, thus his nickname.
“What’s the hold up?” Poppy asked the line operator.
“Looks like the saw got caught on something, tripped the safety override and the alarm went off. I was just going to check it out,” Mike said as he donned his hard hat to go take a look at the stuck manufacturing line.
Florida Scientific Supply was a custom manufacturer for all kinds of specialized products needed for the more advanced scientific community. Thermion was one of their biggest customers. FSS made all kinds of stuff for Thermion, including producing the raw material of exotic materials they needed to run their supercollider down in Puerto Rico, plus just about anything else special they needed. Sometimes they’d need some wire with special plating or made of a special superconducting alloy, or some unusual controllers to operate a servo but not actually embedded into the servo. They usually were just given the specs and they found a way to make whatever the thing was, without really asking a lot of questions about what it was for or what it did.
Mike and Poppy were standing, staring at a sixteen inch automated chop saw that was at the front end of a manufacturing line they had to make these weird little carbon cubes that Thermion ordered by the dozen. This was a small line, and you feed it a piece of wood on one end, it chops it down to the size that will fit in the oven, and then it is burned at the correct temperature and oxygen content to yield elemental carbon a large, dense chunk, which were then laser cut into these little perfect shiny black 1 cm x 1 cm cubes.
Mike said, “Well, the saw is stuck alright.” He pulled the release pin from the arm of the saw so he could manually pull it free of the log. Once the cut was clear of the saw, he shined his LED pen light into the cut. “There’s something stuck in the log. Maybe a nail or a piece of barbed wire or something? These were from some pretty old trees.
“Alright, then. Is the saw blade ok?” Poppy asked impatiently.
“Yeah, looks ok.”
“Okay. Get another log on there and reset the safety lockout, get the line going.”
“Will do, Poppy,” Mike said. And he did just that, yanked the flawed log off, stuck another one on and fired up the line again. Once it was rolling again, Mike took a closer look at the log that stopped the saw. He couldn’t see the foreign object in the log through the cut, which was only about three fourths of the way through the log. He hauled it over to the workbench and pulled out a crowbar. With a three-pound sledgehammer, Mike pounded the crowbar into the cut and eventually the log split in two, revealing the object stuck in the log.
“What the hell?” Mike breathed to no one in particular. “Hey, Poppy!” he shouted at his supervisor who had returned to the other side of the floor. “You have to come see this!”
Poppy rolled his eyes and walked back over by the wood line. “What is it, Mike?”
“Look at this. That’s what the saw got caught on.”
“That looks like… that was in the log?”
“Yeah. It’s too hard for the saw to cut it so it got caught and stalled.”
“But how in the hell did it get in there?”
“Man, I don’t have any idea. But it was there. It doesn’t make any sense, at all.”
“No, it doesn’t. I’m going to have to take this up to Phil. Good job, Mike. Listen, don’t tell anyone else about this until we can get to the bottom of it, okay?”
“Yeah, sure, Poppy. I don’t even know what I’d say. If I told anyone they’d think I was nuts.”
Poppy picked up the log and walked straight to Phil McLain’s office.
They had found one of the missing cubes.