The Day Gravity Became Irrelevant

by Ralph Rotten

  “All it takes is for one thing to go wrong and it all falls apart.” She countered his logic. “The penalty is death; we have seen that already.”

  “Then by all means, let’s do nothing wrong.” Raising one eyebrow, Jamie’s tone told her that he would not be swayed from the task.

  “Leveling out at three hundred and fifty-five thousand feet.” Returning to her tasks, Alexis let him know their progress.

  “Increase speed to forty-five hundred and twenty nautical miles per hour.” Allowing a foolish smile to flow across his face, it pleased him greatly to know that his humble creation could rival such a capable craft as the X-15. To think that he was treading where such legends as Knight and Walker had gone made the historian in Jamie want to squeal with excitement.

  “At that speed we should reach Washington, DC, in just over a half hour.” Her tone pleasant this time, Alexis preferred to keep her processors busy at a time like this.

  “Well?” Jefferson Phelps showed obvious irritation as he stood with a cell phone in one hand and a golf club in the other. It was a perfect day to play, and his group included a country music star, two Fortune-100 CEOs, and a top- NASCAR driver. But instead of being able to focus on important things like sinking a little white ball in a hole, the President had to spend his time dealing with matters of state.

  “We have the technology. He gave us a link to a website and there it was, hiding in plain sight.” Marco glossed over the small details like how the URL had been scrawled on his unconscious forehead with a laundry marker.

  “On a website?” Phelps seemed unsure. “Are you sure this isn’t the technology to build penis enlargers or discount Viagra?”

  “I have three scientists poring over it and they say that it seems genuine so far.” Pleased to have good news for the President, Marco had no desire to tell his boss the next part. “But James Sparks Junior did manage to escape. He seems to have had outside assistance; they blew a hole in the ceiling and snatched the money out with a crane or something.”

  The agent’s sudden data dump caused the President to pause for a second. It stunned his sensibilities to think that a team of commandos may have broken into a secure black site and kidnapped his scientist.

  “Was this the Chinese?” Leaping to conclusions, Phelps was ready to start pressing buttons.

  “No, sir, this seemed to have been a plan engineered by Sparks himself. He made damned sure to take all of the money with him when he left.” Still afraid to breathe, Marco awaited the President’s wrath.

  “So while he was under your supervision, and I told you not to let that sumbitch out of your sight, he managed to escape all by himself? Or just him and that smart-ass girl that’s helping him? Right out of a high security prison, guarded by a thousand men?” His voice carried as he berated the agent at the other end of the line. The other golfers fell silent as they milled around some distance away.

  “I don’t think they have that many people working here…” Marco trailed off, unable to think of a way to deflect the other charges.

  Phelps could feel his ire rise almost to its boiling point as his national security chief rolled up in a golf cart. Not a part of their foursome, he was clearly here because of something work related. Moving quickly towards the President, he was talking on a cell phone as he drew near.

  “Sir, we have placed our domestic forces on high alert due to an object travelling in a ballistic arc over the United States.” It occurred to the retired general that he would need to elaborate if Phelps were to understand any of what he had just said. Despite the President’s claims to being a member of Mensa, the national security chief had never found his boss to be especially bright.

  “Ballistic? Someone fired a nuke?” Jumping to a simple conclusion, Jefferson Phelps slammed the golf cart with his 5-iron.

  “We do not believe it is a missile. The vehicle was on a registered flight plan when it deviated by climbing to three hundred and fifty thousand feet. The flight plan indicated that it is going to Washington, DC. ETA about a half hour.” Always the dour looking type, the NSC Chief let that soak in before continuing. “The flight originated in the region adjacent to a classified prison break.”

  “Still holding a phone to his head, the gears in Phelps’ head spun slowly before they finally lined up. A ballistic vehicle, headed to Washington, from the same neighborhood that Jamie Sparks had escaped from? Slowly but surely the President began to piece it together.

  “Hey, yo, Jeff.” From the flag on the ninth hole, Cletus Benjamin called out in a twang. A true man of the people, Cletus had worked his way up from lowly pit mechanic to top NASCAR driver with millions in revenue. Holding up a golf club, he beckoned the leader. “It’s your putt, man.”

  “Oh, oh yeah.” Flashing a Presidential smile at his celebrity golfers, Jefferson Phelps simply handed the cell phone to his national security advisor. “Here, you two talk. I’m going to putt.”

  “It’s good for a man to have priorities…” The Chief grumbled dryly as he clamped a phone to each side of his head.

  “Say again?” Marco asked, unsure of what he had just heard.

  Studying the massive tides of information that washed across the internet, Alexis had come to see some truths about the world of her makers. So much more was visible to her now. It was amazing how much you could understand when you tripled your processor power.

  Really it was a net increase of 390%, achieved by co-opting additional processing power wherever she could find it. There were other powerful computers out there, and many of them were running well under capacity. Bleeding off excess resources from mainframes all over the world, she was able to break up her work into smaller modules, each analyzed and processed by her surrogate applications. With so much of the work being farmed out, she was able to focus her core resources on the mission at hand. Her directions from Jamie were extensive and detailed, requiring her full attention.

  To that end, she had already ordered most of her drones to self-immolate. Each unit represented a link that took resources to operate. It was better to destroy the units before they were found and analyzed, especially since each included a microscopic gravitational disaffinity system. No, it was better to erase their trail. Hence she had ordered each drone to retreat to a spot where they would not be discovered and self destruct.

  Monitoring the government information services, Alexis kept a vigilant eye out for any mention of their endeavor. She had been amused by one intelligence dispatch that mentioned a female accomplice, possibly a sister or groupie.

  “Groupie? Seriously?” She could understand being mistook for a little sister, but to be referred to in such pedestrian terms insulted her cubed processor. It occurred to her that with her current level of access to the intelligence systems, she could have some fun with the analyst who had penned that memo.

  “Security?” Alexis mimicked the HR director’s voice. “I need you to take a cardboard box to cubicle three-twenty-one. Escort Mister Hastings off of the premises, please.”

  Gleefully watching the security officers flank the shocked analyst, she took additional steps to ensure that the termination would be only temporary.

  “I got your groupie.” Alexis would have smiled if she actually had a mouth. It pleased her to be able to interact with the world to this degree. With almost everything accessible via the net, she could reach every corner of the globe.

  “More hackers?” Her voice held a note of irritation as she noticed a serious spike in attempts to breach the American intelligence networks. Able to watch internet traffic as if it were a river, she could easily spot the lurkers and hackers. Their packet sniffing devices were constantly sampling the encrypted data that emerged from these hubs. It was here that she first focused her attentions.

  For Alexis, capturing a sniffer bot was no more difficult than placing a glass over a cockroach. Once she had it contained, her next step was to dissect it, examine its code and determine who it was sending its data to.

  Next st
ep; begin examining the site where the bots had all been sending their data. Most were dark-web repositories protected by massive cipher codes. Although she easily had the power to crack the encryption on those documents, Alex saw no reason to do so. She cared not for the data; her target was the people who used that data.

  It never took very long. Alexis would camp out at one of these dead-drop data repositories, and eventually someone would check on it. Had this been the world wide web she might have expected a few accidental visitors before the actual custodian showed up. But this was dark-web, the place on the internet where nothing was registered. To find a black-vault like this one you had to know it was there in the first place. Hence, anyone who showed at one of these data-drops was likely the hacker’s handler.

  Tracing the custodian’s traffic took her to the next level. Usually the data went to a regional workshop where analysts would examine the packet files and query results, looking for a way to access the system. Once, in the case of Saudi Arabia, the first hop after the black vault was the Ministry of Security’s network. Alex had been surprised that they would have left their main network so close to the dark web that way. For purposes of deniability, most countries had at least two hops between their dead-drops and their national espionage database. The Russians had layers and layers of virtual machinery between their bots and the Kremlin. It was for this reason that Alex had to sacrifice an entire floor of processing power to cracking the Russian networks. While she doubted that they would be any harder to infiltrate than the other hackers she had interdicted, it was getting to them that seemed to be the biggest task. Deciding that it was simply too messy to try to get through the armada of defensive measures the former Soviets had in place, she settled for bugging the data repositories. As soon as they accessed the data, they would be infected with her virus.

  “Just like Cracker-Jack; a secret surprise in every box.” Laughing aloud, she imagined their expressions when they tried to access the stolen data, only to find themselves under digital attack. By the time they realized they were infected, she would already have the keys to the Kremlin.

  “I have backtracked seven of the hackers to their main data archives. I am close on another four.” She announced her progress over the speakers in Jamie’s helmet. “You are ten minutes out from Washington, DC.”

  “Thank you, Alexis.” Professor James was eminently pleased with his progress today. Already he had bested two of his aviation heroes, would there be a third? Snug in a spacesuit and travelling at over 4,000 knots an hour, he was practically giddy.

  “They have been looking at your work for nearly an hour now; do you think they have realized what’s missing?” Her voice on the edge of a giggle, it pleased her to know that the people who had kidnapped them were about to get quite a surprise.

  Sensing her mirth, Professor Jamie gave one of his stretched smiles. “I do wish I could be there to see the look on their faces, but alas, duty calls.”

  “Well, is this technology plausible?” Marco stood hands on hips. With the faded remains of a website address still scrawled on his forehead, it was clear that he had gone to great lengths to remove Jamie’s hand writing.

  With the three project scientists all gathered in the main conference room, Agent Asanté had been feeling the pressure from the top for confirmation of the package. Regardless of what they had found, he needed some kind of an update to take to the President.

  “We’ve been over this documentation,” The lead scientist begin, her excitement over the material made her sound almost breathless. “And we find it beyond fascination. Yes, right now it looks totally viable, but we’re still having trouble figuring out where in the schematics that this new form of energy comes into the equation. The device requires a form of fuel that they refer to as Blue Plasma to operate, but we have yet to determine where that enters the process.”

  So it works, right?” Being obtuse, Marco really only cared about one thing.

  “Well, the science and the math are certainly plausible; we just haven’t found where in the plans they create this new form of energy. But it must work because we’ve all seen it work, right?” Her eyes still wide, the little scientist pushed her glasses back up her nose.

  “So do we have what we need?” Never one for discussion, Marco tried to drill down to the basics.

  Although she felt she had expressed herself clearly the first two times, the lead scientist thought of another way to phrase what she had just told him…twice.

  “We believe that the plans are genuine, however--” She found herself cut off as Marco held up a hand so he could dial his phone with the other.

  “Sir, according to the squints the plans are genuine. We have what we need.” Feeling confident in his delivery, the agent listened for a reply.

  “Squints…” the agent thought how to explain it. “Y’know how scientists get all squinty-eyed when they’re studying something; squints.” Marco explained to the voice at the other end of the line. A moment passed before he was rewarded with a hearty laugh.

  “Yes, sir, squints would be geeks.” For a fleeting moment the federal agent felt as if he were talking to his great-uncle Morty. The cantankerous old man had been a fixture in his childhood life. With Uncle Morty you never knew if you were going to get congratulations or the cane. He had been a fuddering old man in the years before his death, but still capable of delivering a good punch or slap over an unintended sleight.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll send over the data…no? Yes sir.” Marco had barely responded to the order when the line went dead.

  “He says that two men will come get the data from us.” Still surprised to have received the order, Marco imparted the directive to the scientists.

  “But we haven’t finished our analysis yet.” Squinting in anger, the lead scientist was already irritated at the Cro-Magnon agent for having misrepresented their initial findings. They had scarcely had a chance to examine the extensive documentation, let alone determine the source of the energy used to power the device.

  “You said it looked good, didn’t you?” Turning the argument on them, Marco immediately held up a finger as he answered another call on his cell phone.

  “Marco Asanté?” The guttural voice asked.

  “Yes, how can I help you?”

  “Turn around.” Gruff, the voice directed him.

  Pivoting, Marco realized there were two men there in the doorway of the conference room. The short, barrel-chested man on the left wore a blue Armani suit. Beside him was a taller man in a gray suit, puffing on a Cuban cigar.

  “We’re here for the data.” The Drummond Heckler grumbled as he hung up his cell phone, dropping it into a jacket pocket.

  “And the scientists, too.” Pausing from his cigar, Robert Heckler looked over the three academics. “We’ll take them, too.”

  Humpty-Dumpty

  Pablo DeJesus had risen to the rank of Colonel in a little over twenty years. While he did not fly a jet or fight on the front lines, his position was every bit as important. An air force was only as good as its weapons, and it took men like Colonel Pablo Dejesus to bring those tools from conceptual drawings to war-shots slung beneath the wing of an Eagle or Falcon.

  Charged with overseeing the special weapons division, DeJesus was primarily responsible for devices that technically did not exist. Under his purview was all manner of ultra-classified weapons in development and production. But there was also a third category of weapon that Pablo oversaw; banned weapons.

  The last category was a special group of tools. These were weapons so evil that they had to be banned by international treaty…but still they must be possessed, even if in secret. While it was hard to imagine a scenario where they might actually need some of the weapons in Pablo’s arsenal, it seemed prudent to be prepared for any possibility, no matter how statistically improbable.

  Standing on the edge of the dock, the Colonel watched as a pallet of sealed containers were trucked about by a small forklift.

  “Take it ea
sy, those things are ten million apiece.” Gesturing with a sharp finger, Pablo reminded the airman driving the forklift which of them was the Colonel.

  “Yes, sir.” Airman Wilson had no intention of getting into an argument with some full-bird colonel. Like an ant, the wiry little man from Nebraska knew his place; he got blamed for enough stuff in this place already.

  Glancing down at the digital tag on each of the containers, the Colonel compared them to the numbers on the printout in his hand. Verifying each missile down to the serial number was common practice that rarely required anyone as senior as a full colonel to complete it. But these were not ordinary AMRAAMs or Sidewinders, these were ASAT-165’s. With only a few dozen in the entire US inventory, each and every one of them was checked and double-checked before being released for loading.

  The genesis of the ASAT harkened back to the cold war days when one of the opening moves for either side would be to delete their enemy’s satellites. Blind them and gain a leg up. For a while this technology was the holy grail of future warfare, at least until someone tried it.

  In 1985 the United States government decided to test its new ASM-135 anti-satellite missiles to destroy an old, decommissioned satellite by the name of P78-1. The test had proceeded normally; F15’s streaked to sixty thousand feet, fired their payload straight up, solid-state rocket engines ignited on cue, and the ASM-135 successfully destroyed that pesky P78-1. It was a rousing success, until they realized that there was now an expanding cloud of sharp metal fragments orbiting the planet at seventeen-thousand kilometers an hour. Right away the world saw that the cost of destroying a single satellite could mean destruction for dozens of unintended targets. Worse yet, these clouds of shrapnel could even pose a significant danger to the International Space Station and manned flights. It was for this reason that international treaties had been signed, essentially banning anti-satellite missiles and a host of other space weapons.