Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  “How did you do that?” Luthor asked, hoisting himself up from the ground, “I can’t even keep my feet.”

  “Remember where gravity is pulling you,” she said, as if flipping halfway across the room was the simplest thing in the world. Those two had been playing with 126 for almost a year—albeit without Eli’s goo—she had seen it for less than a week and made them look like they were still potty-training. “Know where down is going to be.”

  “You have a point.” Michael said, seemingly reluctant to admit she could teach them something about their own element. It was a rare effort at humility from him. “We have to be proactive and always think of wherever the 126 is as down. Like this,” he threw a third lump of 126 up which promptly stuck to the ceiling. His body began rising off the floor; Michael struggled to swing his feet above him. He tucked at the last second and managed a kind of roll that left him standing, upside down, at the end of it. He seemed very pleased at himself for not falling again. “I need to think of the ceiling as the floor, and you guys are all upside down.”

  Tanya didn’t want to egg them on, but she couldn’t help it. The stuff was fascinating; particularly when paired with Eli’s adhesive polymer. It was also a safe bet that no one, at any other time in history had ever played with altered gravity before. There was an irresistible appeal to be the first. So—knowing very well the risk she was taking—she asked her question. “If that stuff counteracts Earth’s gravity, why doesn’t it float?”

  Michael smiled. “It doesn’t really counteract earth’s gravity. It has its own miniature gravity field. A gravity dimple, remember? If you are between the fields then you will fall toward the one with the greater relative gravity.”

  Luthor chimed in, evidently happy to have the attention away from his balancing failures. “It’s still affected by Earth’s gravity even though it has its own,” Luthor said, “like the Moon and the Earth. The Earth’s gravity affects the Moon enough to keep it in orbit around us, but if you get close enough to the moon, it will still pull you in. That’s why men can walk on the moon without floating into space toward earth. 126 behaves like a very, very small moon.”

  “It’s also why we can walk around on earth without getting sucked into the sun,” Michael added.

  Tanya thought she was catching on. “So normally it would still fall to the ground, but when it’s stuck to a wall or ceiling it pulls you toward it.”

  “You got it, girl.” Michael said hefting a ball of 126, “this little guy doesn’t weigh very much, so the polymer only has to counteract a couple grams of weight.”

  “Why doesn’t it get pulled off when you are standing on the ceiling? You weigh more than that.”

  “Because the earth pulls on each different object independently,” Luthor said.

  “Don’t you mean that the Earth bends spacetime and each individual object traverses that field independently?” Michael asked.

  “Yes, but I am trying not to confuse her.”

  “The polymer doesn’t have to hold up my weight,” Michael said, “it only has to hold up itself and this little bead of 126.”

  “Even if I am standing in its gravity dimple, the whole bead of 126 still only weighs a gram or two with respect to the earth.” Luthor indicated to the small plastic bearing, where they encased several hundred thousand atoms of element 126.

  “I don’t add any weight to it at all by standing next to it. It still weighs the same.

  “What happens if you pick it up while you’re upside down?” Tanya asked.

  “This happens.” Michael pointed to the wound over his eye. “It dropped me right on my face. When I picked it up, it was no longer being held to the wall so it got pulled back down with me.”

  “I guess that makes sense. That’s why we can hold it and not float away.”

  “Exactly,” Michael said. “You know Luthor, she’s pretty smart. You’re the big boy scientist, and you don’t seem to have figured it out yet.” Tanya smiled. Brownie points for you Michael.

  Luthor made a face, but ignored him.

  The concept of bending space was just weird. She had seen it demonstrated in college. The professor used a suspended bed sheet with a ball sinking down in the middle. Stuff rolling toward the ball was supposed to help them visualize how gravity worked with planets. The sheet bent around the heavy ball and the lighter stuff rolled in toward it. It painted a nice mental picture, but it never really satisfied. Bed sheets were 2D bending in a third dimension. Space was already 3D, so how could it be bent in a fourth dimension? Weird. It was the kind of thing that only made sense in math, not reality. As a result, it didn’t make sense to her. 126 only altered gravity locally, so it was like a mini divot in the vast curve of space caused by Earth. Or something like that. She preferred the complexities of human history over the unfathomable mysteries of physics. She was out of her element here.

  Vika shook her head. “Don’t be such a man. This is how 126 works.” She threw some 126 at the ceiling above Tanya. It stuck there.

  Tanya froze. The sensation she experienced was immediate and unforgettable. She felt like someone had taken 50 kilograms off her shoulders; she realized she was totally weightless. Her feet drifted off the ground and she floated toward the ceiling. Her instincts did not fail her. She rotated around to have her feet facing the ceiling which had instantly become down. As she gravitated up, she felt the weight flow back into her limbs. It was like getting the sensation back after her leg had fallen asleep. It started with her feet and progressed up toward the extremities closer to the floor. She hit the ceiling standing and though she was upside down she still felt strangely normal. It was everyone else who was upside down, not her. Apart from being a little light headed, but that was understandable, she was defying gravity.

  A thrill rushed through her as she realized what she had just done. She looked around seeing everyone upside down. “Okay first, Vika, you’re dead. Second, thank you!”

  For some reason Vika seemed to think Tanya threatening her life was hilarious. Tanya tried to laugh with her, but her head still felt very wrong, like it was being pulled in the wrong direction. She took small steps away from the 126 just like she had seen Michael do. In seconds she was back on the floor, head feeling normal. Tanya massaged her temples.

  “Your head hurt too?” Michael asked.

  Tanya nodded.

  “I finally figured out why we’ve been getting headaches since trying this. The outside edge of the 126’s influence is weaker, so the farther you are away the less it pulls on you. Your head was probably being pulled more by the earth than by this thing. While you were standing there, you were actually being yanked in opposite directions,” he said as he jumped up to retrieve the 126.

  It made sense to Tanya, and somehow helped, knowing she wasn’t crazy. It was also a little unnerving to think about being pulled by two opposite gravitational fields at once.

  The speakers crackled, a voice boomed in French, “Your attention please. We are requesting everyone move to their respective sleeping quarters for a mandatory CPI inspection. You have 15 minutes to be in your dormitories or rooms.”

  The message then began to repeat in other languages. The English translation would come soon.

  Tanya looked at Vika, she was the only other one who had understood the message.

  “They know we’re here.”

  Chapter 9:

  Aurora, Illinois, United States of the West

  Qwiz flopped into his computer chair, and flipped open his laptop—while still very capable, it barely held a candle to the power of his old rig. The jerks had blown it up while it sat in Luthor’s apartment. Qwiz missed the venerable Norquist, but was thankful to have a powerful laptop in reserve.

  Today was his day to receive emails from his father. His father had been an ambassador for the Chinese before the conflicts leading up to World War III. He’d been called home as tensions escalated. He was forced to leave his wife and only child. China wouldn’t accept them because they were
American citizens. Qwiz had managed to keep in touch with his father all that time through heavily-censored, weekly emails. The Chinese Block didn’t allow communications from their officials to the West any more frequently than that.

  Qwiz clacked another password, unlocking his email. He never saved any passwords; it seemed to defeated the purpose. Sure enough, there was a new message from his father in his inbox. In the post-war years since communication lines were reopened, he had never missed a week. Qwiz depressed his index finger on his 12,000 DPI laser mouse, opening the message. A bitter laugh forced its way out of his mouth as he saw the extent of the unapologetic censorship. Unnatural spaces perforated the entirety of the message making it a challenge, as usual, to read.

  He had learned over the years about the multiple layers of censorship that were involved with even casual communication with China. When his father sent a message it was first screened by whatever agency he now worked for—in years of reading messages, the specific level of government and father’s current role was still a mystery. After his agency approved the message, it was screened again by the Chinese censorship bureau. Then the message was sent from behind the Great Firewall of China, through a network of communication satellites and entered the USW intelligence bureau pipeline. There it underwent yet more scrutiny until, after being read by untold American censors, it ended up in his mailbox.

  Qwiz began his ritual of reading any message from his father. First, he ran the message through the browser’s grammar check. Small green underlines popped up everywhere, marking additional spaces where words had been deleted. The governments never seemed to bother rewriting the message, they simply deleted any perceived national security threats leaving a single extra space to mark their ingress. Unfortunately, he never had any idea how many words had been deleted, it could have been entire paragraphs or a single word. All he was able to see were those annoying green lines. After the grammar check he then skimmed the message inserting underscores to emphasize where words had been removed. Then began the tedious job of trying to decipher what his father had been trying to say to him. His current message was worse than most:

  Dear Quency,

  I am ______ today. I hope this email finds ______ health. Remember how I told you about the ________? The ______ was very impressed with my work on ________ and has decided to_______. At the end________ will result in a net____for me. I doubt that _______ will reach you____ uncensored ________ try. This _________ 40th anniversary for _________ and ________. I miss______.

  I am delighted _______ Chinese ________ conference. I earnestly ________ better relations between _________ future. Perhaps that means ________. I look forward to that day.

  Thank you for always replying. I know __________ difficult. _______. proud of you. _________.

  Blessings _______ .

  Courage_________,

  Your father,

  ____________

  Qwiz let his breath out again in another bitter laugh. They even sensor the name of my own father. What could someone possibly gain through knowing a name? It was clear from the slash and burn editing process used by the censors that they didn’t care if any actual content managed to squeeze through so long as no unintended messages did. Qwiz had wondered often during his disjointed conversations with his father if their respective countries had a censorship quota when reading emails. They probably didn’t care which words they removed so long as they removed a certain number of words per page. That way they could destroy any secret code imbedded in the message.

  His eyes lingered on the last lines of the message: “proud of you.” Bill had said the same thing to him during their escape. He sincerely hoped his father knew how hard he worked to be worthy of those words.

  Thanks to the zealous censorship he probably had no idea about the sort of man Qwiz had truly become. He always tried to live by his Father’s motto, which he always used as his salutation. Today it had been censored, it should have read, “Courage isn’t defined by what you do, but by what you are willing to lose.” Father had always tried to instill the importance of living with honor and the use of strength and honor to accomplish good deeds. He had been successful in that task. At least Qwiz earnestly hoped he had been.

  #

  Obscured by an empty two liter bottle of soda, Qwiz noticed the clock on his monitor read 1:30 am. His computer science degree and extensive video game collection had conditioned him for this sort of marathon. But he wasn’t frantically troubleshooting code or head-shotting aliens. Now that he was back safely in his mother’s apartment, he pursued a different task: research. It had consumed every spare moment of his time since the incident, and every spare thought.

  It haunted him that he’d been forced to flee like a coward as he watched SUVs run over innocent poor people. Heroes didn’t do that. Heroes stopped the bad guys before they killed people. I guess I’m not a hero, Qwiz thought bitterly. He hoped to redeem himself by finding out who was responsible. Inevitably, Luthor knew more about what was going on and Qwiz needed to catch up in order to help him.

  Despite Qwiz’s failure to be a hero, his sidekick had never faltered. Stone sat with him in his cramped room and they had read and reread every document, periodical, and commentary they could find on Luthor’s supposed terrorism in Geneva. It was clearer than ever that the whole thing had been fabricated.

  The rampant inconsistencies they’d uncovered would never have occurred in a true terrorist plot. Most of the papers claimed Luthor’s team was affiliated with 2180, but a major paper from Italy claimed that Luthor was with Chinese agents trying to kill important allied scientists. That particular irregularity had been fixed hours after it had been posted, but Qwiz had been lucky enough to catch it before it had been retconned. Others disagreed on the number of members of his team. In some Luthor was a lone wolf, others said he had as many as four collaborators. In fact, the only elements of the story devoid of discrepancies were Luthor Tenrel’s name and his intent to set off a bomb at the International Energy Conference as an act of environmental terrorism.

  None of that helped him figure out who was masterminding—or bankrolling—the propaganda against Luthor. Their initial guess had been a multinational green energy corporation. They seemed to have the most to lose if Luthor managed to publicize their research on element 126. All of their current infrastructures and products would be made completely obsolete overnight. Wind generators, effective but expensive, and the ubiquitous photovoltaic cells would be a thing of the past. With 126 there would truly be no need for alternative energy.

  Why make an alternative to unlimited, perfectly clean, and free?

  The only problem with his hypothesis was that there was not one shred of evidence substantiating it. Qwiz had checked out SOLmax photovoltaics, the massive company located in Phoenix that kept the city from sinking into the desert. He had hacked into the intranets of Thanex Energy and Lidius and unearthed nothing. It was infuriating, but Qwiz felt he had no choice but to move on and search for something else, or somewhere else.

  The problem had been finding entities powerful enough to make people disappear, fund personal armies to blow up apartments, and have the influence to counterfeit international news. Bill supplied a constant stream of new conspiracy theories to track down. The old man lay on the floor with his tablet braced against his knees like a teenager messaging a crush. It was almost two in the morning, but he needed some new leads and the old man hardly ever slept. He said he hated dreaming. Qwiz himself loved dreams, he got to have grand adventures every night.

  “Stop trolling the forums, Stone. We still have more work to do.”

  “Did you finally crack into Thanex? They’re one of the largest green companies in the world.”

  “I finished it an hour ago. I haven’t found anything that could explain how Luthor’s been framed so completely.”

  “The media sure is smoking something good. Or else they have an imagination bigger than my—”

  “I’m sure it’s a big imagination
, Stone,” Qwiz finished hurriedly. Bill laughed. He had heard enough such comparisons to infer where it had been going.

  “I guess it’s time for plan B then, huh?”

  Qwiz was not excited about Plan B. Plan B was trying to hack into the EU network to see if they were behind it. “It is going to be a challenge without my desktop.”

  “You’re a goddamned genius, Quency. You can do it.”

  Bill didn’t understand. Hacking was a not a secret magic button that only IT professionals could press. It involved decryption programs and algorithms, luck, and an intimate knowledge of the systems and subsystems he was trying to bust into. Much of that would be much more difficult—if not impossible—without the massive processing power of Norquist.

  “I might be able to do it, but I am worried.”

  “About what?”

  “About somebody in the censorship department getting suspicious of our browsing history. I’ve been spoofing our IP addresses and running some other counter-measure programs, but you can’t truly hide anything. If someone really wanted to find out what we’re doing they could. Hacking into federal-anything is a criminal act. And I’m not sure if I could even do it.”

  Bill scratched his beard thoughtfully. He was a much smarter man than he liked to let on, hiding it with his Stone persona. Apart from his rampant conspiracy theories, Qwiz appreciated his insights.

  “So you think hacking in to the EU is too dangerous,” Bill said. “But is there a way that you can get access legally? I mean, without hacking?”

  Qwiz thought for a moment. “Well, yes actually. It’s a lot harder than breaking in, but if I could get my hands on a user-name and password of a sufficiently high-ranking official, I could have access to the whole network—or at least most of it.”

  “Let’s get on it then,” Bill said, “what can I do?”

  “Start searching the feeds for EU officials who have current scandals, they would be most vulnerable. We’ll get a list together and start searching.”