“Well, I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know that I’m not going to fire any of you, or have you arrested. Not that I ever could have,” she said with a smirk. “Dirac was an awful tragedy, but in the big picture it was mostly a financial one. Rebuilding the station while everyone is pushing for more defense spending is going to be a tough pill to swallow.”
“There’s one other item I want to bring up,” Drennan said. “Disincentive. We spoke once about quietly letting other world leaders know about the replicator, and that we were behind all this so we could destroy it. Can’t have anyone else inventing one.”
“Let’s let the dust settle a bit more,” the president said. “I know rumors about the device are leaking, but it’s too soon to talk about our own involvement. Our people who were working on it are all sworn to silence, and we’ll warn others soon enough.”
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories
Berkeley, California
3:00 pm, 11 February 2066
Mike Trevino was among the last few to arrive, having flown from Princeton on short notice. As they entered the conference room they walked through an examination chamber which scanned them for electronic devices down to molecular levels. Inside, another former coworker from Molecular Dynamics finished a sweep of the room with a handheld scanner. As Mike took a seat among the three dozen colleagues, Will Groves walked to the podium at the front of the room.
“OK, that’s the list. Thank you all for coming. Everyone, welcome to the first reunion of the Project Njord team.” Groves smiled, but there were no happy faces returning it.
“I asked you all here to tell you three things. The first thing helps explain the security precautions, and you already know about it. Like most other Dirac projects they were involved in, the Department of Science and Technology shut down Project Njord pending a rebuild of the station. What concerns me is learning that the few people at S&T who know about the project also know that we no longer need a collider to finish it. We’re well past the experimentation phase, yet they still don’t want us to rebuild. Therefore I think there’s some political pressure trying to keep us from finishing it.”
“We always figured there would be,” someone in the audience said. “But we do need a collider if we’re starting over from scratch. And a new Sleipnir. All of the details, all our work was lost with the station.”
Groves smiled and reached into a pocket. He produced a data stick and held it up. “Here’s the second thing. Besides all of us, this is what remains of Project Njord. I ran to the lab and back minutes before we evacuated, just to grab this. It has all the construction specs and programming data for the replicator on it, and every detail is up to date from where we left it. We can rebuild the machine as it was and complete the final stages of our work.”
Gasps arose from the audience and people excitedly muttered to each before someone started clapping. In seconds every team member was on their feet, clapping and cheering for Groves.
The cheering continued until Mike Trevino held his hand up. “Hang on, hang on a sec! That’s fantastic news, but we’re still years away. The project is on hold until a new Dirac can be built.”
“Oh, Dirac will be rebuilt,” Groves said. “If humans ever want to colonize beyond our solar system, a new one has to be built. As far as this project is concerned, though, it doesn’t need to be. Since we no longer need a collider, we can recreate the prototype and complete our progress right here on Earth. Here at Berkeley Lab, in fact. All we need is some funding and a few months of secrecy.”
“Do we have either?”
Groves put on a broad grin. “That’s the third thing. We have both. After Dirac, I put in a request for a federal research grant to study quantum tunneling. S&T expedited the process and approved it this week. The administration here has the space and power requirements reserved for us in Building Sixty-Eight. I know we’ve all spread out to different labs and universities ever since Dirac, but I brought you here to tell you that you’re all welcome back to Njord if you want to return.”
Most of the gathering looked elated at the notion, but Trevino had another comment. “Will, taking taxpayer money for one job and using it for another is something of a crime, don’t you think? How would we explain ourselves?”
“I’ll hire a few people to work on the quantum tunneling research, just to keep the auditors from noticing the rest before we’re ready. But once we are, the benefits to our work will be so dramatic, so profound, we won’t have to explain anything. The public will laud us for what we’re giving the world.” Heads around the room nodded to each other and to Groves in agreement.
“Team, we undertook this project to change mankind. It was far more than a scientific challenge for us, it was an ideological vision. On Dirac, we committed ourselves to it. Tell me… are we still committed?”
The crowd cheered again.
Acknowledgements
It is said that no novelist writes a publishable first draft. I now know that’s certainly true for rookie novelists, and even more so for someone who never considered writing a fiction book prior to opening a blank Word document on a whim. That’s how this got started, by the way: I was bored one day, so I started writing just to see what I would produce. After more than a decade of procrastination, enthusiasm, mistakes, new ideas and despair, I finally had something that I could call complete.
Then came the editing process, and I realized I was halfway there.
There were plenty of people who helped generate ideas for this book and helped push it towards completion. I can’t thank them all, but here are some that stand out the most.
Many thanks to Michio Kaku, George Friedman, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis and others, for presenting an abundance of ideas both large and small. I emulated, altered, cannibalized or subjectively interpreted many of their concepts about the future of our world, and even the ideas I ignored or rejected still provided me with framework for what might exist later this century. George Friedman’s book The Next 100 Years, for example, gave me the idea behind the geostationary command stations (called “battlestars” in his book) like CS-Kenya.
Thanks to my coworkers at ONI and everyone in the intelligence community for the dedication and professionalism they show at work every day. Special appreciation for Richard, Jenna, Nate, Brian and others for putting up with my mentioning from time to time that I was writing a book at home. Never once did you guys roll your eyes, as far as I know.
I gave the debatable honor of beta-reading this novel to a few volunteers among my friends and family. Mom and Dad, my brother Dan, Rachel Boykins, Tricia Smith, Jack Waters, Keith Clark, Paul Ford, Matt Ford and Greg Gerling – thank you all for your feedback and for bravely enduring a typo-ridden first draft that I had yet to line-edit. I’ll get things right next time. Maybe.
A dubious thank you goes to various national leaders of late, most notably President Erdogan of Turkey, for providing “inspiration” in terms of what international politics might look like decades from now. At the risk of spoon-feeing my readers, I’d like to emphasize that while there are a number of themes running through this book, it is not anti-Islamic. It is, though, anti-authoritarian. Turkey has spent decades heading down the road to fascism, and today shows few signs of turning around anytime soon. As I wrote this book, I’d consider nations like that (and others, including my own) and wonder what would happen if politics didn’t swing pendulum-like as they normally do, but got stuck heading in one direction? That’s what sometimes happens. This book is partly an attempt to explore some consequences of authoritarianism.
To my kids Emily, Skyler and Jack… I joked in the dedication that without you this book might have been finished years earlier, but the truth is that you provided the best inspiration possible: a desire to always look towards the future. I doubt I would have even started writing this story if not for you.
Most thanks of all to my wife Heather, who always encouraged my writing even before I had shown her a word – and when I final
ly did, became my most thorough and helpful editor. This book could not have been written without her support. Moreover, after I had produced and rejected four other working titles, she’s the one who skimmed through the Defense Department dictionary one evening and suggested Critical Asset. A gold star for you, honey.
And a final thanks to you, dear reader, for bothering to pick up this book. Having family and friends read a debut novel is thrilling, but having perfect strangers read and (hopefully) enjoy it is a different but equal sort of excitement. Despite all the hours and occasional anguish that went into producing this book, I’m happy to say I’m working on my second one. I promise it won’t take another decade.
Ian Tonnessen
21 May 2021
About The Author
Ian Tonnessen
Ian Tonnessen is an intelligence analyst specializing in military technology developments at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington D.C. A former naval officer and a lifelong science fiction geek, Critical Asset is his debut novel. He lives in suburban Maryland with his wife and children.
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