by Kim J Cowie
at the end of the line, right? I expect the problem will get worse if they play around with making the equipment run many functions at once, or if they try running their virtual computers in n-space."
At Christmas, they heard that the world's major superpower was claiming to have an impregnable anti-missile defence. Terrorist activity in several friendly countries was crippled as accurate intelligence led the police to guns and explosives caches. An inconvenient dictator of a Third World country died suddenly of a brain lesion.
Time hung heavily on their hands, for none of the military families on the base would socialise with them. They bickered with each other and watched the satellite news a lot.
Often Derek sat staring into space, his mind back in the spartan fluorescent tube lit laboratory. McCall had realised that the telekinesis machine, driven by computer instructions, could itself use its high- speed operations in a small space to represent 0's and 1's and so simulate computer-like logic functions, and that these in turn could run the control software, but at much higher speeds. It was a kind of 'virtual machine' an idea quite familiar to computer engineers. Or, in other words, the tekekinetic unit could itself be a very high-speed computer.
Prof. Boothby realised that if it could do that, it might be able to do it in the n-space through which it sent things, as well as in normal space. This opened up the bewildering notion of a computer- controlled telekinesis machine with no visible hardware.
The development he found hard to understand was the reduction in power input; it was linked with the solution of the rocks-from- Australia problem, an energy balance scheme to stop objects arriving with excess kinetic energy.
Derek took to spending a lot of time at the Base's transport pool, working on small mechanical devices or fixing their two ageing cars. Sally drew more into herself, spending hours every day meditating into her crystals. Patterns appeared in the long grass, and some nights there were patches of strange luminescence in the sky. She collected flowers and counted species of insect that lived in the long grass. Despite everything, they started a family. She claimed to have predicted the sex of each child before the birth. First was a solemn alert-eyed girl, who followed Sally everywhere, then a boy.
Five years later everybody knew that power concurrent telekinesis systems existed. It had been a good five years for world peace, a good five years for wealthy oil and mineral prospecting corporations and a terrible five years for resistance, criminal and terrorist groups who found their supplies seized, their members killed or arrested and their hostages rescued or simply vanishing. Business confidence sagged as rumours abounded of the telekinesis systems' ability to spy and probe into anywhere, logging on as virtual terminals to isolated computer equipment, snooping inside locked filing cabinets, and copying prototypes from guarded laboratories.
In 2018 Derek and Sally were at last let out of detention.The same day the news came through, Sally moved out to a rented trailer in the town, with her two small children. The next day, their clapboard house at the base fell down. She gave no signs of having been surprised by either event. She and Derek didn't live together any more.
The number of TK systems in existence was increasing, all being in the hands of governments or large corporations and trading companies. There was little even governments could do against the owners of TK systems when illegal software was available to convert from commercial to full military use.
Derek sometimes came to the trailer hoping to be asked to stay. It was never long before he turned the conversation round to one of his obsessional subjects."There's no work in this town," he complained. "There's a rumour that the airbase may be closing."
"Could be because so many nuclear weapons are being scrapped," she said.
He shook his head. "Probably not the tactical weapons. Anyway, if you think thermonuclear nuclear war would be bad, I can tell you that a war fought with telekinesis weapons could be worse."
"How could anything be worse than nuclear war?"
He shook his head. "I'd give a lot to know what the maximum range of the new telekinesis units is. They had several thousand miles five years ago. Now it might be 93 million. If it is, God help us all."
"Why? What possible use is the extra range?"
"It's the distance to the Sun. If they can extract matter from the core of the Sun, even a pin head sized piece of it brought back to the Earth's surface will emit enough X-rays to sterilise a city. Anyway, a military telekinesis unit might be able to make, deliver and detonate an atom bomb by itself. They could also be used for weather control and cause most countries a lot of trouble."
She was staring at one of her bookshelves, and only half-listening.
"You've certainly got a lot of books in here," he said. "You never used to read so much." He was pointing to her collection of occult and paranormal books.
Sally shrugged. She still believed in most of these things, but the topics hardly seemed important any more compared with the powers of the telekinesis machines. And she had learned far more about science in the past five years than ever before.
During the next ten years the demands of the worlds' populations for free goods grew ever more insistent. Governments responded with telekinesis- assisted repression. It was rumoured that in some countries even uttering anti-Government slogans could lead to instant death.
On July 6 2028 a pinstar attack was carried out against most of the cities of the United States and Europe. Derek, who fortified by several shots of Jim Beam was giving a lecture to an anti-telekinesis lobby group, perished when a blast of X-rays sluiced through his body just before the heat flash caused the building to be engulfed in fire.
In minutes hundreds of millions of people died and the economic activities of these countries were totally disrupted, though many physical structures remained fairly intact. A rogue cubing program chewed its way across France, reducing everything in its path to 3cm. randomised cubes, while a war-damaged heater program slowly turned part of Dorset into a white-hot puddle.
At the same time, several poor and overpopulated countries were attacked; leaving them poorer but no longer quite so over-populated. Nobody ever found out who had done it, and naturally no telekinesis unit input log retained a record of it, but the recipients of their economic migrant problem came under suspicion.Sally and her children were unhurt. By this time she had a house, and aided by her British accent made an income by selling crystals and telling fortunes. These were mystical times.
A few weeks later, a telekinesis unit created a fault line under the main Japanese island of Honshu, and then inserted pinstar material from the Sun's core into the crack. With a tremor, Honshu lifted by a centimetre and began to slip eastwards, slowly and then with increasing speed till it fell into the six-mile deep Japanese Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. Half of Japan, including Tokyo and most of the major cities, had disappeared, leaving a new shallow sea. The resulting hundred-metre high tsunami caused terrible devastation all around the Pacific, and washed away computer factories in California.
Most of the telekinesis units were destroyed in the war, and soon others were deactivated. The latest had so much of their structure in subspace or in virtual computers that they no longer needed the physical incarnation.
Fifty years later, Sally's granddaughter struggled to memorise the words of power that would make the Gods answer her commands, and make her a sorceress. Without these words she would be poor and hungry and helpless; with them - a sorceress could make fire, or fetch useful things from afar, or coin gold, or turn enemies into piles of steaming meat cubes.
[END]
If you liked this story, please check out my other stories:
Epic fantasy novel “The Plain Girl’s Earrings” by Kim J Cowie on Amazon.
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