Halon-Seven

by Xander Weaver

  Cyrus ran a hand through his short stubble of hair and yawned. “About twenty-four hours after I tried to boot the laptop, Walter Meade showed up at my door for the first time. He introduced himself and we talked for some time. He had a security detail with him. But even that was interesting. He didn’t know me at that point, but he left his three-man detail out in the hall. Normally in situations like that, a member of the security team will enter a residence to sweep it prior to the VIP entering. But Meade told his guys it wasn’t necessary. He left them in the hall and we sat down and talked for hours. It was all very strange because it was so comfortable and informal. We just sort of hit it off.”

  Cyrus scratched at the stubble on his chin. She knew he was pondering something. He either didn’t know how to bring it up or he wasn’t sure how to say whatever it was.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked.

  His eyes met hers, and he smiled. “I’ve been thinking about the current security concerns. Meade obviously thought I could be useful in a situation like this. But I don’t understand how he knew there’d be a situation like this. How could he have anticipated attacks on the team? I’m missing a piece of the puzzle.”

  First she smiled. Then she laughed outright—she couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry,” she said self-consciously. “While I suspect Walter knew very well what you were capable of, his abduction not withstanding, his desire to have you involved with Meridian had nothing to do with your field experience.”

  She could read the confusion in his eyes. “Walter never spoke about the platforms? About the technology?”

  That made Cyrus chuckle. “We talked about a lot of things. But always in the abstract. Always. Never specific details. He would stop by without so much as a phone call. We’d kick around whatever problem was on his mind, and then he would go.”

  “But you never asked what he was working on? You never wondered where his ideas were coming from?”

  Cyrus shook his head. “This might be hard for you to understand…” He paused while he searched for the right words. “I’m used to dealing with people with secrets. When I was with the Coalition, I was trained to keep those secrets. As an investigative reporter, I need to do the opposite. I need to know what questions to ask—know where to look when something seems off. When it came to Walter, I just knew what questions not to ask.

  “There’s a problem that’s somewhat unique to people in my former line of work. The job requires people who are very good at reading between the lines…at seeing what other people don’t see. The trouble starts when those people retire. That sense that was once so important suddenly becomes a slippery slope, and it can do a lot of damage. You start to see things in the people you deal with in day-to-day life. You notice when they’re lying or when they’re telling a partial truth. It’s fine when you’re on the job or in the field. Then it can save your life. But when you see those things in your personal life, it can make normal friendships tough and relationships impossible.

  “The reason being that people—friends—constantly tell half-truths. Often to spare another’s feelings. They do it for any number of reasons, really. But when you pick up on all those tells, and it’s second nature to dissect their motivation for what they just did or what they just said, it can be terribly destructive.”

  “You make it sound like a mental condition.”

  Cyrus responded with a slow knowing nod. “Some field operatives get wound pretty tightly. It’s a hazard of the job. They have to be tuned in to everyone and everything around them, 24/7. When they leave the field, many have trouble adjusting to normal life. It can manifest as any number mental of conditions. Some guys become paranoid. Some just burn out. Far too many end up eating their own bullet. It’s common—it happens to more of us than not. It’s one of the reasons I left that life. I choose to take people at face value. That’s how normal people live. They don’t dissect the actions of everyone around them, always watching for anomalies.

  “The point being, I just took every conversation with Meade as the talk that it was. Always interesting, always thought provoking. That voice in the back of my mind that speaks up when something is off or out of place? I locked it away. I used the conversations with Meade to help me hone that discipline.”

  Reese gave some thought to all Cyrus had said. Certainly being a human lie detector was harmful to relationships great and small. No one should be one hundred percent honest with the people around them. It defied the natural order. There were times when it was necessary to omit information, however trivial, to spare the feelings of another. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it might be for someone trained so thoroughly in detecting these tells that they saw deception everywhere they turned. She could see it eventually becoming detrimental.

  “Those ideas that Walter brought to you?” she started. “They were key issues relating to Meridian. Many of them were roadblocks we, the team, hit. When that happened, Walter would visit you and discuss the problem. He would return the next day, more often than not, with a great new idea or a different approach that would lead to a workaround or an outright breakthrough. A number of the innovations currently employed on the platforms were yours!”

  Cyrus laughed. “I think Meade was exaggerating my contributions. I don’t know anything about teleportation. I’ve read a little about quantum physics, even quantum entanglement, but I’m no physicist. I don’t even know enough to be dangerous.”

  Reese finished her wine and poured them each another glass. “Then you’re going to love this,” she said with a coy smile.

  “Early in the project, we were trying to encase the entire contents of the transport platform in a magnetic field. The next step was to entangle every atom within that field with the atoms encased in a duplicate field, located on the paired platform. Prior to our experiments, quantum teleportation had been successful but only on a single photon at a time. Our approach intended to entangle the entire contents of both platforms, resulting in a quantum bridge between the two devices. The bridge would last only a fraction of a second, long enough for the contents of the platforms to instantly swap positions. But while this approach was theoretically possible, it required astronomical levels of energy to entangle any matter of consequential mass.”

  She made penetrating eye contact with Cyrus again. “The energy requirements were entirely prohibitive. Each platform would require its own dedicated high output nuclear reactor. Essentially, it was the same problem Pellagrin faced in 1908 with his test platform. The difference being, we didn’t have Fire Star.”

  Cyrus whistled and sat back in his chair. He ran his hands through his hair again. His eyes drifted into the distance as he considered the ramifications.

  “The goal of this project is,” she said in a very serious tone, “and always has been, to create a network of teleportation platforms putting every location on the planet within easy reach. Professor Meade’s soul intent for this project is—was,” she corrected herself, “to create an extensive network of inexpensive teleportation platforms that would be safe to operate, and available to everyone in the world. He wanted to revolutionize travel, solve a significant portion of our pollution problems, and unite our people in a way never before imagined.

  “The platforms will have the power to do all of that. But if each device requires its own nuclear reactor, that’s simply never going to happen. They must be inexpensive to produce as well as operate. And safe! Nuclear-powered platforms are neither cheap nor safe. We need to produce millions of them, or none at all. If they’re ubiquitous, then everyone on the planet has equal opportunity. Imagine the entire world using safe, instantaneous travel.

  “Walter believed it was absolutely critical that the platforms be available to everyone to use free of charge. He wouldn’t allow them to be a tool strictly for the affluent and powerful.”

  Cyrus leaned forward. He understood. “So the power requirements are a problem?”

  “No,” she said with a smile. “Power requirements were the pr
oblem. But you and Walter solved it!”

  —————

  Cyrus sat back in this chair and rubbed his eyes. Exhaustion was setting in, but they were finally getting to the meat of the matter. Understanding the project would be the key to understanding the threat they faced. He waited for Reese to continue.

  “Two things made a difference when it came to the platform power requirements. The first part of the solution was your idea.” She had a smile that made Cyrus suspect that she wanted him to guess what his contribution might have been. He had no idea, and he lacked the energy to speculate.

  She nodded in understanding and continued. “Your suggestion did away with magnetic field as a means of controlling the mass entanglement onboard the platform.” She let the statement hang in the air for a moment.

  “Lasers?” he said with a nod of understanding.

  “Your idea was so simple and practical that it bordered on genius! Rather than entangle the entire contents of the platform, we would generate a laser containment field around the contents of the platform. The concept went right back to the original work of Einstein and Rosen in the 1930s! And it was poetic since the very first groundbreaking work in quantum teleportation was done with photons. After all, what is a laser if not an array of photons?”

  She laughed and rolled her eyes. “It seems a little funny, explaining your idea to you.”

  He had to admit it was amusing, but necessary. “Please, keep going. Keep in mind that when I discussed these things with Walter, we were speaking in the abstract. I was never aware of the project. I knew nothing about Meridian. So while you might credit me a solution, you’re being generous. All I ever did was brainstorm on matters I didn’t fully understand.”

  She laughed. “Rather than entangle the entire contents of the platform at a sub-atomic level, the platform’s perimeter is wrapped in a laser field. Then photons that compose the field are entangled, and when the right signal is passed to the particles, the quantum bridge is engaged. The contents of the two platforms are instantly swapped!”

  “Right!” Cyrus slapped a hand on the table and grinned. He now remembered the full extent of the conversation. “It would be like placing the contents of the platform in a box made of entangled photons. Rather than entangling every single atom on the platform, you just entangle the surface of a three dimensional box. Whatever’s inside the box just goes along for the ride. So you’re saying the power needed to entangle the perimeter field was less than that needed for the entire contents of the platform?”

  Her jaw dropped at the thought. “By several orders of magnitude! I don’t recall the exact equation off hand, but the power requirement was a tiny fraction of the original implementation.”

  Cyrus absently scratched the rough stubble of his jaw again. Damn, that is something. “So a nuclear reactor is no longer required?”

  She waggled her hand. Kind of yes, kind of no. “That got us part of the way there. But the breakthrough solved a lot of safety concerns. Prior to that modification, the platforms channeled so much energy that there was no way to adequately prevent overload or safeguard against tampering. More simply put, there was just so much juice running through the hardware that any sort of malfunction could cause the device to go critical. The resulting damage could range anywhere from a massive EM discharge, to an explosion that could destroy a city block. No… Until we were able to limit the power requirements using your suggestion, the platform had no chance of leaving the research and development stage.”

  She took another sip of wine and pursed her lips in thought for a moment. “We got the first prototype platforms online a couple of years ago, before the implementation of the laser field. As I explained, they had massive power requirements, so the two prototype platforms were drawing power directly from nuclear power stations. One on the East Coast, one on the West.”

  “A couple of years ago?” Cyrus was confused. “You didn’t have your first operable prototype until a couple of years ago?” This didn’t match with what he read in the files from the vault.

  She shook her head. These facts clearly troubled her as well. “No,” she said. “Prior to what we read tonight, I had no idea prototype platforms were built before the start of Meridian. We—the team, that is—were led to believe we were breaking entirely new ground.”

  He nodded. “And now we know this project has been in the works, in one form or another, since the start of the twentieth century.”

  “That part still blows my mind! I can’t imagine what sort of work they could’ve been doing with quantum teleportation as far back as the early nineteen hundreds.” She absently rubbed the corner of her eyes at the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “The technology of that era? It would’ve been like cavemen trying to build a jet airliner!”

  Cyrus laughed. He couldn’t argue that point. But according to Professor Meade’s documentation, scientists had been enamored with the prospect of this technology for more than a hundred years. And why not? The technology really would change the world. But what were the motivations of project leaders prior to Professor Meade? Certainly the tech would yield untold strategic value for the military. Even in the private sector, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of uses.

  The number of ways to abuse the technology was also nearly limitless. It was becoming clear why Walter Meade considered the technology as disruptive as it was beneficial. While the advantages were great, so were the potential negative consequences. Flooding the market with the new technology could destroy financial markets virtually overnight. There were unavoidable consequences. Big oil concerns would collapse. Shipping companies would fail. There was potential for global economic disruption that would ultimately lead to the failure of banks, which in turn, would take entire markets along with them.

  With this in mind, Meade had devised what he referred to as a progressive deployment strategy. He intended to put the technology in the hands of international shipping companies first. This would give those companies a chance to revise their business models and transition away from the ocean-going freighters and airliners used for international transport of goods. At the same time, this initial stage of deployment would allow the public to grow slowly comfortable with the idea of teleportation and the technology behind it. Meade anticipated a certain amount of pushback from the less progressive members of society. There would be those who questioned the safety of the technology, no matter how much testing was conducted or how many safety protocols were involved. By allowing shipping companies first access to the platforms, the technology would gain traction and support, as it was slowly rolled out for wider use.

  In turn, the platforms would gradually be expanded into additional markets. They would be made available to governments around the world. This would yield tremendous economic advantages and further support and acceptance of the technology. For that to work, Meade believed it was critical for the technology to be made available to all United Nations members, not just favored nations. This provided everyone equal footing in the global arena and prevented any sort of arms race for technological superiority.

  The next, and most important stage called for the deployment of Meridian technology more widely as a means of public transportation. The slow rollout and deployment was to take years. This would garner public acceptance of the technology, but it would also allow auto manufacturers, airlines, shipping companies, and the like to alter, revise, and update their compromised business models. The ultimate goal was the deployment of the Meridian platforms with a minimum of economic and social disruption.

  From very early on, Walter Meade understood that Meridian was a veritable Pandora’s Box. It could be a boon to the world or it could cause untold harm. With a proper deployment plan, he believed he could bring the life-changing tool to the world, while minimizing negative consequences.

  This was the crux of the problem for Cyrus. Corporations, militaries, nations—many, if not all, would be willing to kill everyone on the team if it allowed them s
olitary access to the technology. The first to possess it would have a decisive advantage over any and all competition. This meant the list of suspects interested in Meridian was virtually endless. Literally anyone could have been behind Meade’s death.

  Reese continued her line of thought without realizing the rabbit hole into which Cyrus’s thinking had descended. “After our first successful test, one amazing unforeseen consequence became shockingly apparent—”

  She had Cyrus’s full attention once again.

  “Once the transport was complete, the platform discharged a staggering amount of power!”

  “How staggering?”

  Her eyes were absolutely glowing as she considered how best to phrase her reply. “The power discharged was 1 to 2 orders of magnitude greater than the power needed to initiate the transport.”

  Cyrus was at a loss for words. All he could do was stare. It was the holy grail of modern science to develop a process of generating power, one that released more energy than was required to initiate the generating reaction. She was saying that such an energy release was a byproduct of the teleportation process? The implications of this were almost as earth-shattering as the teleportation technology itself. But by 1–2 orders of magnitude? That meant the power generated by the teleportation was 10–100 times greater than the power required to initiate transport.

  He opened his mouth to speak but found no words. 10–100 times? He tried again but once again failed. This was truly unexpected.

  “Okay,” he said, finally finding his voice. “What about negative side effects from the teleportation or the excess energy? Radiation? Volatility?”