Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  Inside the looming building, the snaking line was held in check with retractable barriers that sharply reminded Luthor of draft day at the beginning of the war. The waiting passengers were entertained with signs giving security instructions in different languages. “Remove any gloves or hand coverings.” And “Remove shoes and coats.” Luthor tried to read the signs in Spanish first to see if he could still read any. It didn’t go well. His foreign language skills were an anemic husk of what they had been during the war. All around him people took off gloves and stuffed light coats into their bags.

  Soldiers clad in strange-looking, bulbous body-armor prowled the periphery of the lines, a sober reminder to take the directions seriously. Tanya stared. “What are they wearing?” she asked. “They look ridiculous.”

  “Its cutting-edge body armor called gelvar,” replied Michael Laramy, Fermilab’s cyclotron intern. In gratitude for his long hours working in the lab in the previous months, Luthor had decided to pay his way to the IEC. He sincerely hoped that decision hadn’t been a mistake.

  “Why does it look like that? It’s so round.” Tanya asked.

  Michael smiled. His bright teeth contrasted with his black skin in a way that most women found irresistible. “Gelvar is made of a special type of ballistics gel. It has the same resistance as several meters of water, but crammed into a vest only a few centimeters thick. When bullets hit it, the impact diffuses laterally around the surface of the gel.”

  “Like ripples on the water.” Tanya summarized. Though not a scientist, she was anything but stupid. She was a History Professor at the community college in Aurora, Illinois and was fluent in French and Spanish.

  “Exactly. It makes them almost impervious to conventional bullets.”

  Luthor would have given the rest of his seven toes to have had a Gelvar vest in Antarctica, better yet, one for everyone he knew. But they hadn’t been invented until the last year of the war, and the United States of the West wouldn’t have been willing to fork over 200,000 credits for a soldier’s safety. Luthor had learned their priorities the hard way. He shuddered and shook his head, trying to clear it of the terrible memories trying to claw their way out of the cage he had made for them.

  “All of it feels a little over the top for a security checkpoint, if you ask me,” Tanya said. “It’s not like we can fake these stupid ID’s anyway, they’re implanted.” She gestured toward an angry white scar on the back of her right hand. She, like nearly everyone else this side of China, had an implanted Computerized Personal Identification chip on the back of her right hand. All the signs were abbreviated CPI for short.

  They continued to shuffle forward. Ahead, in front of the x-ray scanner, a zealous security agent was meticulously ensuring everyone scanned their CPI chip properly. His drab, green carbon enforcement pants were tucked into high, black military-style boots. Every buckle gleamed as if he personally shined it every morning. He had the lopsided look of a man who spent every free moment in the gym but had very little idea of how to actually work out. He intensely scrutinized each person to an almost comical degree. Luthor fought back a laugh, but he couldn’t help but be impressed by the diligence with which he worked at what was undoubtedly, a menial job. Of course, it was also probably his fault that this line was taking so long. If he weren’t trying to win the Bronze Star, they would have been through an hour ago, and he wouldn’t have disproved General Relativity.

  Luthor noticed most of the heads in the crowd turning toward some sort of commotion coming from the front of the line. Luthor wished he were as tall as Michael, he would have been able to see more easily. The CPI agent had taken a timid Asian man out of the line quite a bit more forcefully than was strictly necessary. Another, far more portly security guard stood next to him with an open suitcase on a utility table. Their raised voices were audible over the startled queue.

  “Customs found a hidden liner in your suitcases, Mr. Akobe,” said the diligent guard in fluent English.

  The other one sneered, “If that’s your real name.”

  “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Its nice work, very professional. Most people wouldn’t have noticed anything,” the guard stuck out his chest as if trying to blind him with his buckles. “But I discovered a distortion of the X-ray and decided to investigate.”

  The Asian man’s eyes darted about, as if he were looking for an exit.

  “Do you know what I found? At least twenty-five hundred grams of powdered coal in each liner. Making sense yet?”

  “Please sir, it’s not what you think—”

  “Here’s what I think: We banned coal for a reason. I won’t let you piss on our most important laws and dump carbon into the atmosphere because you think you’re better than everyone else.” He crossed his arms over his perfectly tucked-in shirt.

  Luthor suddenly appreciated Soldier Boy’s attention to detail. He felt his temper flare at the diminutive Asian. Damned Chinese. In Luthor’s opinion, no punishment was too severe for the bastards who started World War III. Fighting the Chinese block in that war had been unequivocally the worst four years of his life. While he didn’t hate every Asian, he found zero pity in his heart for a coal-smuggling polluter who happened to be one.

  The small man looked around frantically. “I was just trying to keep my family warm this winter. My daughter died of hypothermia last year. Please, sir—”

  “You are going to have to come with us, Mr. Akobe. It’s a minimum 15 years in prison for burning coal in European Union. You can add another 10 if we found out you were planning to sell it here.” The man pulled the set of handcuffs hanging from his belt.

  Without warning, the Asian man kicked up violently, hitting the security guard in the groin. After the unmistakable sound of squishing man-parts, the guard’s eyes rolled back and he collapsed. His handcuffs clattered away on the finished concrete floor. A leather-soled shoe stomped on his groin again. Hands proved to be a futile defense for the crushing blow, and he let out an anguished moan and curled into a fetal position. Spectators crowded the edges of the barrier to get a better view of the commotion.

  “You don’t know what it’s like!” the Asian cried as he sprinted off around the line. Despite the demise of all future children, the crumpled guard managed to rip out his comm, he shouted angrily—if higher pitched than usual—into the device in French.

  The real soldiers began converging on the fleeing Asian. One took out his rifle and fired a burst of rounds off into the air. Luthor shivered. It was an MX-5 assault rifle; the sound of its discharge had too many bad memories that went with it. The crowd flattened to the ground in fear, clearing the way to the fugitive. The soldiers leaped easily over temporary barriers in their pursuit; the bulk of their gelvar didn’t seem to inhibit their movement.

  “Stop!” one yelled.

  The Asian didn’t comply.

  “Stop, or we will shoot!”

  Luthor heard the solitary crack of a gunshot. It silenced the crowd as fully as if someone had hit the mute button. The soldiers stopped running. Some began waving instructions, telling everyone that all was clear. Luthor got to his knees immediately, instinctively looking for his rifle. It wasn’t there. Through a small break in the line, he glimpsed a body sprawled in the gaping cargo entrance. A moment later soldiers surrounded the figure and Luthor lost sight of the dead Asian.

  The crowd recovered from the traumatic scene remarkably quickly. They had survived much worse during war. No one had escaped unscathed from the economic collapse and chaos in those years.

  “Did they just shoot him?” Tanya asked.

  Luthor nodded soberly.

  “If you ask me, he deserved it.” Michael shook his head, “trying to smuggle coal into the country.”

  “Seems like there should have been another way,” Tanya said. “What if he really was trying to keep his family warm?”

  “No,” Luthor said. “He had four bags. That’s 10 kilos of coal. The bastard was smuggling it in to
sell it, probably hoping to pay for his passage on the seabus.”

  “He sounded pretty sincere.”

  “Nah, Luthor’s right,” Michael said. “Definitely a smuggler. But I bet they only checked so closely because he was Asian.”

  Luthor could’ve asked anyone in that building and they would have lost loved ones due to Chinese bombing raids, knew someone who froze to death in Antarctica, or more likely—they themselves had been on the brink of starvation during the war. Their prejudice against Asians had been earned.

  “How much is coal worth anyway?” Tanya asked. “It must be valuable if he’d risk going through customs.”

  “It’s still cheaper than gasoline, which explains why people will buy it,” Michael said. “I heard the going rate is 2 kilos for the same price as one liter of gas, at least in the West.”

  “I couldn’t afford five liters of gas if I saved for 2 months!”

  “At least you get paid,” Michael said.

  Luthor interjected, “It’s part of your education, besides you scored a free trip to Europe out of the deal.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t enjoy it, I have to hang out with you two.”

  Tanya gave him a disparaging look, but he grinned, apparently achieving the result he wanted. “I guess you’ll just have to settle for the honeys at the convention. I’ve heard pocket protectors are the new thong.”

  Michael was known to be a womanizer. Luthor had been forced to endure months of daily drama stemming from his dozens of trysts and subsequent breakups. He did not relish the thought of Michael finding European women to seduce instead of helping him change the world with the miracle of Element 126.

  A paramedic arrived on the scene and knelt next to the broken agent. Going through a checklist affixed to a clipboard, she checked his vitals. She helped him as he limped away to some unseen office to, no doubt, begin a long bureaucratic report on the situation.

  The replacement carbon enforcement agents were more like guards ought to be: fat, balding, and preoccupied. They looked as though they knew something had gone wrong, but were still struggling to produce the additional requisite effort.

  A few minutes later, Luthor slung his bag containing his computer and notepads onto a long conveyer belt that led to the X-ray machine. He had spread his supply of element 126 out throughout his bags, which muted the gravity difference significantly. To the untrained senses, being next to his bag would only make one feel off somehow, as the inner ear complained of being pulled in a subtly different direction. At worst it would be searched. In that case, all they would find were little plastic BBs, nothing to be suspicious of. They wouldn’t know that each plastic sphere had several hundred thousand atoms of 126 contained inside.

  Element 126 was Chemistry perfected. His isotope had 126 Protons 184 Neutrons making a flawlessly balanced element of supreme power. The fully closed proton, neutron, and electron shells stabilized the roiling atomic forces coursing through the enormous nucleus giving it an indeterminately long half-life. It fulfilled the predictions of a stable, super-heavy element existing in an “Island of Stability” originally hypothesized by Glen Seaborg 80 years ago. But 126 exceeded his most optimistic hopes. Seaborg had hoped for an element with a half-life measured in minutes. 126 was stable, or at least appeared to be. It was also the rarest substance on earth, with Luthor personally possessing all of it—minus a few stray atoms here and there in labs around the planet. He had been the only one to stumble upon a method of efficiently synthesizing the uncooperative element, which had allowed him to discover its gravitational properties.

  He hated letting it out of his sight, but there was no way around it without explaining what he was doing. The dead Asian in the cargo bay reminded him what could happen if one messed around with customs. He took a deep breath, feeling his heart begin to race. Nothing to be worried about here Luthor, you will be fine. No one is going to find anything. He forced himself to grab a durable plastic bin off the stack and put his shoes and belt inside. Once the bin lay on the conveyor, he stepped up to the security guard.

  “Right hand,” the guard said. His predecessor had just been nut-stomped, but he already looked to be losing his focus. Luthor couldn’t really blame him. His sole job was to make sure that no one subverted the most impervious security ever devised: the Computerized Personal Identification system. Luthor admired the simplicity of the solution CPI offered to the complicated problem of monitoring and curbing the carbon dioxide output of the earth. Nearly everyone outside of the Chinese block now had a CPI biochip, implanted in their right hand. It contained their ID, other personal information, and recorded their activity. Using the subject’s own blood flow to generate electricity, it transmitted a short-range, unique, highly-encrypted signal that was impossible to fake. It also was impossible to steal, because as soon as a person’s blood stopped flowing, the chip would immediately—and permanently— shut down. It could not be cut out or taken from a person in working order.

  Luthor pulled back his sleeve slightly to fully expose his hand. He lowered it under a scanner that reminded him of an antique video camera with an opaque lens. Feeling a bit like produce at the supermarket, he waited for a mechanical beep. The hyper-efficient computer methodically crunched through his record; upon deciding he met the standard required by the EU, it beeped. It was a single, pleasant sounding computer tone. The good beep.

  Luthor imagined all his personal information flying away, as it was sent to be stored on the massive servers located in the worldwide Carbon Enforcement Headquarters in the European Union, the organization that was synonymous with CPI. Every time a person scanned their hand, no matter where they were in the world, their information was sent to those databases. Their carbon output, purchases, immigration status, passports, and criminal record were all crosschecked, and their location recorded. Chip-scans were required to buy or sell anything because it was in the creation and use of goods that carbon dioxide was created. They were also used to withdraw or deposit carbon credits and as a universal ID. Luthor’s information had already been updated twice since he woke up.

  As long as this guard made sure that each passenger was, in fact, scanning their own CPI chip, the system did the rest. If it beeped in one way, then you were cleared and on to the metal detector; if it beeped the other way, incarceration. It took no thought, no insight. Just one functioning ear would suffice. Not only that, anyone branded as a fugitive or a terrorist wouldn’t step within a hundred meters of a scanning station. It was suicide. In the fifteen years since he had been implanted, he hadn’t ever heard a single bad beep.

  Hard to imagine not having your brain turn to slush and run out of your nose on a job like that, Luthor thought. But then he preferred the challenge provided in science. Perhaps this job was the perfect match for this guard and his temperament. Either way, he didn’t much care. If this guard lost focus, he would be less likely to notice anything abnormal in his carry-on. Luthor just hoped he still had enough agility to avoid any stagnant puddle of guard-brains.

  “Step forward.”

  Luthor complied and stepped through the standard doorway-like scanners dedicated to finding any hidden items on his body and his luggage. After he’d ensured his 126 wouldn’t be confiscated, he stepped to the side to wait for the others.

  #

  “I get so tired of these damn Marks.” Tanya said, glaring distastefully at the scar on her right hand. “They are such a nuisance.”

  “You mean CPI chips.” Michael said confrontationally. Tanya’s insistence in using the Christian term for the chips bothered Michael to no end. Maybe that was why she kept doing it; as a professor, she thrived on debate and disagreement.

  “I meant Marks.”

  “You can hate them if you want, but you have to admit it really was an elegant solution to enforce the carbon restriction laws,” Michael said. “How else could they monitor everyone’s carbon output when we were still using cash?”

  “Elegant.” Tanya said the word like it tasted ranc
id in her mouth.

  They sat in a large, crowded terminal waiting for the next train to Geneva; it was due any minute. Luckily, Luthor had snagged an elusive bench. He stood, having offered his seat to Tanya. She gently leaned against him and hugged him in thanks. Luthor relished the feeling of her body next to his, it had been too long since they had been this happy.

  Luthor hoped the trip would prove to be a breath of fresh air for their relationship. In the last year since the stumbling upon the gravitational properties of 126, he had become engrossed in his work to the exclusion of everything else—including her. He had spent days on end at Fermilab, sleeping on a couch rather than coming home. He hadn’t been on a proper date with her in months. Of course, her stubborn refusal to move in with him didn’t help. But bringing that up had perennially proved as dangerous as any battlefield, and Luthor had no desire to lose any more body parts now that the war was over. In the end, Luthor knew that she was a far better woman than a deeply broken man like him deserved. He desperately wanted to keep her around as long as she would have him, antiquated Christian notions of relationship propriety or not.

  Tanya knew how important his discovery could be, but she had also informed him, in no uncertain terms, that his current pace was not going to be tolerated much longer.

  Luthor thought he heard the squeal of a breaking train in the distance and began to move to get a better view. He threw his bag over his shoulder. The safest place for element 126 to be was on his person.

  Winding his way through a milling crowd of people, he moved toward the train platform to get a better view. The terminal’s high peaked ceiling seemed to make the space feel much roomier than it actually was. Clearly a relic of an older society, it had been built with concern for form rather than function. The vast volume above them sucked up all the ambient heat from the waiting passengers making the room still remarkably cool despite being so crowded. It would have cost a king’s fortune if the port authority ever had to heat the space.