Slip: Part 2

Perry waited in a small dim office with dark brown wainscoting walls. He sat on the other end of a wooden well organized desk in a chair that did little for his poor posture with a datapad on his lap. The room was decorated with military group photographs on a variety of air fields and launch pads. There was also a picture there of a lovely curly haired woman and a young blond haired boy smiling brightly.  He wondered if that was the general’s family; Helen refused to have children spouting excuses like widening hips and sagging breasts. Perry would have sawed off his right arm if it meant she would change her mind.

            He tapped his fingers against his pant leg, waiting. He had been in there for fifteen minutes already. Typical military meetings; they always made you wait. Perry wondered if it was an intimidation tactic.

            He flinched when the door finally opened and a tall bury man dressed in a dark blue officer’s uniform stepped inside. He took of his hat and placed it on the corner of the desk nodding to Perry, “My apologies, this place is a mad house.” He rounded the desk and took a seat rubbing his eyes. “I understand that you have a proposal you wish for me to see.”

            “Yes, General Law,” Perry said and took the reader off his lap, with the files already displayed on the screen, placing it on the desk. “I was cleaning up the central database and found some interesting files in the archives. They’re about twenty-five years old. If they’re right, I think they may solve the population problem here on Earth.”

            Law’s brow lifted then tightened, folding the lines on his forehead like waves.

            “These calculations may enable us to get to the proposed colonies faster than we ever thought possible, even before the seeder ships get there,” Perry explained. “The original notes were put together by someone named–”

            “Samuel Carter,” Law said.

            Perry paused staring across the desk. “You know the man?”

            “I knew him.” Law nodded.

            “This was brought up before? Twenty-five years ago?”

            “It was,” Law sighed.

            “Well–I mean–what became of it?”

            “It went under testing, and failed.”

            Perry gulped staring down at the folder. “But it seems so precise, the formulas are sound and–”

            “I was the one who buried it all those years ago,” Law remarked. “There was an accident. Carter was supposed to send a probe over, but, for some reason, he decided to go himself instead.”

            “And what happened?”

            Law shrugged palms up to the ceiling. “No one knows. He was sent with a small nullifier and was to send back word, but it never came. Samuel Crater disappeared. We probably won’t ever know what happened to him until the seeder ships get there and finally send back word. We won’t know for hundreds of years, if anyone is still alive by then.”

            “My God,” Perry breathed. “What of his family?”

            “Fortunately he didn’t have much besides work. He was married but they devoiced. The ex didn’t seem to care too much when she was told,” Law answered glancing at the photo on his wall a touch of sadness reflected in his eyes momentarily. “This happened just before I took over for my predecessor, General Hague. I buried the project and sent everyone onto new tasks. There’s no sense in wasting good minds like that.”

            “But–there’s no–no one knows what went wrong?”

            “Not as far as I know.”

            “But to bury this… If we could work out what went wrong, fix the errors maybe, we could make the impossible leap into space and grow.”

            “Don’t think that I don’t know that, but the risks are not something I wish to partake in.” Law said and jabbed his index finger at the notes. “Put these notes away and forget about it.”

            Perry sighed and reached forward to the datapad, switching it off.

*          *          *

            Once Perry returned to his office he reopened the file again; there was no way he was going to let this go. He wouldn’t make the same mistake Carter did; first he would send a probe.

Getting the equipment would be easy. A gravity nullifying field still wasn’t common technology, but it had twenty-five years to mature and constructing a smaller portable version than Crater had used was a simple affair in the lab; he had clearance to bring equipment home for diagnostics, so few eyes would notice him borrowing a few things.

            Helen was still mad at him when he got home, administering the silent treatment. She left as soon as he got in without a word, most likely to go for dinner with her snooty rich friends. All the better, now he could work free of nagging.

            He peered out the window as she got into the car with two of her girlfriends; there were two men in the back seat who smiled brightly as she stepped in. Perry had suspected that she was cheating on him for some time, but he tried not to reveal his suspicions. He was just some boring scientist after all; all she wanted a little excitement.

            He gulped back his pride and went down to the basement where he had a small makeshift lab. There he tossed the folder on his work bench, flicked on the lamp and pulled up a stool. He poured over the notes for several hours trying to determine what the problem was but came up empty handed. He tore himself away from the math and began setting up the null-field and designed a small probe to send to Grindious–C.

            He worked until daylight and opted to call in sick at the lab; his team was self-sufficient enough to operate without him for a day. He went upstairs for a coffee and noted that his wife’s heels weren’t at the front door; she hadn’t come home.

            He conducted a quick test of the null field and managed to launch an empty mug across the room accidently making it appear in mid air where it fell shattering on the floor. He stood over the mug and frowned. He thought for a moment that he had sent his favorite mug adorned with little grey alien faces but this one was adorned with flowers; one of Helen’s, he would have to make up a story to explain its disappearance.

            Perry went into the lab in the afternoon, zipped to the eyes with sugar laced coffee, and pretended to work on the mainframe while ducking out to collect components for his probe. He needed sampling tools, a camera and a simple AI core for running basic procedures. The equipment wasn’t bulky and he managed to stow it away in a small duffle bag. His tired red eyes helped people believe that he was fighting an illness and avoided much contact for the remainder of the day. By nightfall, most of his staff had left for the day making it easy for him to slip out with his borrowed gear.

            Helen had come home, the shoes she had worn the night before were in the front hall. Perry still wasn’t sure if she was in; she tended not to wear the same shoes more than once a month, but as he ventured into the kitchen she stood there smiling over her shoulder greeting him happily and began telling him about all these things she had seen in the shops that day. The conversation was very one-sided, in fact, Perry wasn’t sure if he got to say anything at all. He slid the duffle bag under the bar hoping that she wouldn’t notice it and sat down nodding periodically.

            She talked for about an hour about how she was doing and what she had been up to in the past day with elated energy. She must have been with one of those men last night to be in such a joyous mood; she seemed to even forget about their quarrel at the restaurant the other night. She finally retired into the den with a glass of cognac where she fell asleep from exited exhaustion. Perry slid a blanket over her wishing he was worthy enough to earn her affection then slid down to the basement to continue working.

             He assembled the probe by three AM and thought about going to bed briefly but realized he couldn’t bear the wait. He ate a few chocolate covered coffee beans and set up the experiment. He tested the probe, making sure everything was working, especially the null-field; without that, it wouldn’t be able to send back a data capsule.

            With everything in place Perry took a moment for several deep breaths and hesitated before the switch. He reached out and flipped on the null-field completely obliterating the probe’s mass, removing the superglue of the universe and opening the door to all things possible. The probe vanished.

            Perry sat at his desk wiping sweat from his brow. He glanced at the clock; ten minutes had passed. The probe should almost be done conducting its tests; it would need another fifteen minutes to prepare the data capsule.

            Half an hour ticked by and still Perry waited. The sun began seeping light through the small basement window.

He heard the door at the top of the stairs open. Helen yelled form above, “Have you been up all night again?”

            Perry almost jumped out of his skin. “Uh…N-no! I just got up. I just needed to get something down here for work, yeah…” he replied. He heard the faint hiss of cussing above as the door thumped shut.

            He lingered in the basement until she left to go pass judgment on someone’s living room decorations then kicked his stool to the ground. Where was the probe? It had been gone for four hours now. He rechecked the calculations but found nothing wrong. He spent an hour pacing the floor until the phone rang.

            Perry went upstairs and picked up the phone. “What?”

            “Sorry Doctor, we were just wondering if you were coming in today. Are you still feeling under the weather?”

            It was the lab. Perry blinked and stuttered, “Um…Yeah, uh…Sorry, it was a bad night. Yeah, I think I’m going to need the morning. I’ll try to come in this afternoon.”

            “Okay. General Law was looking for you, but I’ll tell him you’re home sick.”

            “Thanks.” Perry hung up. The General was not going to accept that he was home with a bug. Knowing military personnel, he was probably going to get a house call. If he was going to do something, he needed to do it quickly.

            He rushed back down to his work room and tapped at the desk thinking. He looked at the null-field. He needed another one, a portable one. He rummaged through his duffle bag for the spare he had taken from the lab and began modifying it so that it would fit in his pocket.

            As he worked, he wondered if this was what Carter had endured. Maybe he had sent a probe as well, met the same results, got fed up and went though himself…

            Perry completed the small handheld null-field and began programming coordinates. He paused blinking into space considering special relativity. If he instantaneously appeared at Grindious–C, he would be effectively be traveling back in perceived time. The light that fell to Earth from the Grindious system was hundreds of years old, its present-day status wouldn’t be known for three centuries. What if Grindious–C didn’t exist anymore? He would be appearing on either a dead world or in a vacuum.

            He shook his head. Such a thought was preposterous; the star was young and stable, it wouldn’t experience novae for billions of years. Something else was fudging the experiment, but what? What dangers lay three hundred light-years away?

            His hands were shaking. Perry was terrified. But then something happened that scared him more; there was a knock at the front door.

            Perry knew who that was; Law was here to check on him. Once he figured out what Perry had been doing in the basement behind the government and the military’s back, he was going to be brought up on charges, lose his job, probably be thrown in prison, and Helen would go off and find someone else with money, one of those goons she had been with the night before no doubt.

            Ruminating of a million possible catastrophes, his little trip didn’t seem as frightening. He activated the null-field and shut his eyes.

Refering sites?

That's really weird...One of the sites referring to my blog is stop-a-cheater.com?... And I thought the cosmettics site and the Russian sites were weird...

Slip: Part 1, or an exerpt (not sure yet).

**Hello! I wrote this story about three years ago but have been editing it and correcting some of the facts. Hope you enjoy it! Thank you for reading.**

            Colonel Law took his place at a long blue table within a presentation room at the Developmental Aerospace Research Think-Thank. A few other men sat along the table’s length waiting patiently for the demonstration to begin, one of which was General Hague, an elderly officer, to whom Law was being groomed to replace.

            A tall, thin blond man was hunched over the controls of a magna-screen embedded in the opposing wall. He made a few quick adjustments then stretched and looked over his stern brass audience. He adjusted his suit collar and stepped in the center of the room, hands behind his back. “Gentleman, as some of you may know, my name is Samuel Carter. I run and oversee experiments involving space propulsion here at DART,” the man began with a calm steadfast visage. “We have made some interesting discoveries in the past year that may revolutionize space flight.” He turned and gestured to the magna-screen which adjusted its magnetic lines to collect the metal shavings between its films, forming pictures and characters; an old photograph of a man in his early sixties with brown parted hair materialized.

            “This is Roger Penrose who studied physics a century ago. He studied gravity in conjunction with quantum mechanics where most physicists ignored gravity at such a small scale,” Carter explained. “We have been looking into his ideas concerning small atomic particles, gravity and the potential forms that these particles have. Now,” he paused, sweeping his electric blue eyes over his audience, “Penrose believed that we all have infinite potential duplicates exist and that gravity is what keeps all those potential states from being in multiple places at the same time.

            “Lately, we have been developing ways of creating and nullifying gravitons on a small scale for use on our seeder ships to reduce mass and prevent muscle atrophy in zero-g. Our experiments involving neutralization of all gravitons on a specific object have been astounding.”

            Carter turned and nodded at the screen which shifted to show a clip of a small automated probe. It sat motionless for a few moments until the table, air and wall behind it began to bend as though some unseen hand was tugging at the fabric of space like putty. The probe was suddenly at the other end of the table.

            “What you have just seen is a shift, a slip, of this probe from one place to another. We have used cameras with the highest FPS we have and slowed the recording to a rate where we can view the passage of light, and the slip still appears instantaneous.” He turned back to his audience many of whom wore frowns and stroked their chins; military types were often not up to speed on their physics, something Law did his best to try to verse himself, moderately at least.

            Carter summarized, “We have discovered a means of faster-than-light travel. In fact, speed is not even a factor, we have discovered instantaneous travel.”

            The men at the table shifted in their seats, many wide-eyed. Law blinked and his hard face compounded the stress lines across his forehead as he considered the possibilities.

            “How is this possible?” Carter continued. “What we have done is remove the restraints on time and space. By doing so, we can access the potential state of anything from a person to a seeder ship. We can unlock that potential, bring it into reality and leap across the stars. Imagine the looks on the crews of the seeder ships already sent to Grindious-C when they arrive finding the planet already colonized and awaiting their arrival. We can spread across the cosmos with no restrictions on speed!”

            Carter smiled watching the generals and admirals muttering to one another of possible applications.

            General Hague spoke up, “How close is this experiment to implementation?”

            “With your approval, we can send a probe to Grindious-C. If successful, I see no reason to begin sending men,” Carter answered.

            There was a barrage of questions: How much funding would be needed, then manpower, materials and equipment? Then Law raised his gritty yet monotone voice, “What happened to the first probe in that video?”

            Carter blinked not quite expecting the question. He calculated something in his mind and answered, “In order to maintain balance in the universe, if something is added, something must be taken away, just like an electron temporarily borrowing energy, or virtual particles blipping in and out of existence. As the potential probe is brought into existence, it must be replaced with the original.”

            “What happens to the original?”

            “The potential and the original are fundamentally the exact same thing, just in a different position. The probe is potentially at Gridious-C, we just make that potential reality, by doing so, we make the reality of the probe here on Earth only a potential.”

            Other questions interrupted Laws’ further inquires. He sat and watched as Carter received all the support he would need to make human colonies in space a reality.

*          *          *

            Perry’s head jerked to the side and his cheek sizzled with heat as the palm of his partner, Helen cracked through the air.

            “Ouch!”

            She blurted a barrage of angry opinions in his face so quickly, he barely realized what she was saying. He managed to catch that he was too engrossed in silly ideas, didn’t stay in reality and talked too much attention to his projects at the labs, although, in a less polite manner. She stormed out of the restaurant pulling up her coat and holding her chin high as she departed.

            Perry was glad that she hadn’t decided to throw food at him, like last time. He sighed and nodded apologies to other patrons sitting around him.

            He knew how this would play out, he would go home apologize, get a second ear-full, sleep on the couch and be forced into an entire weekend of shopping for useless knick-knacks at expensive designer stores. And he knew full well who was going to pay for everything.

            He looked down at his meal and decided to finish before paying the check. No point in wasting good food, not with all the starving people on Earth.

            He hated how Helen flaunted their money; her obsession with interior design was so wasteful. The money could easily go to the starving masses living right here in the city, but she had to keep up with her rich friends. Perry wondered why he was with her, but knew he feared being alone.

            He finished up his meal, stayed for another drink, trying to build up the nerve to go home, and finally paid the bill. He walked out into the street trying not to catch the eyes of a beggar sitting huddled on top of a sewage vent, warmed by the rising heat from the decaying refuse below.

            Earth’s population had swelled in the last hundred years; unemployment was atrocious, famine among the lower class was common place and there was little hope for the future. The underclass of humanity’s only hope was to be boarded onto seeder ships and seek out a new world. The project had been popular last century, but the populace had become bored with the idea, plus those vessels wouldn’t reach their destination for another two hundred years; anyone who ventured would be put into deep freeze until arrival and awake on a new world, all the while knowing that everything and everyone they cherished on Earth would be long since dead and gone. Perry knew that the time scale involved was why no one wanted to go anymore; better to die with loved ones than leave without hope of ever seeing them again.

            Perry rounded the corner of the restaurant to where his car had been parked and remembered that Helen had taken the keys. He was in for a long walk home.

            On his way, Perry let his mind wonder to his work at the DART facilities north of the city where he typically did work on hibernation systems for seeder ships. The idea was to make them habitable for the long journeys so people didn’t have to sleep for hundreds of years, but the idea was controversial since several life spans would pass between lift off and arrival. But lately, he had been peeking through the archives and found some compelling notes, now twenty-five years old, detailing the experiments of a Doctor Carter. That was what had angered Helen in the restaurant; Perry had been rambling nervously about a meeting with a top military executive concerning the implications of those notes.

            He wished Helen would understand the potential here. If he could reopen experimentation, it could solve many of Earth’s problems.

Fist Full of Philosophy Update: Human Relations

Hi everyone. Just relaying a new post on my other blog, Fist Full of Philosophy. Check it out! Thanks!

http://fistfullofphilosophy.blogspot.ca/2012/03/human-relations.html

Berserker Exerpt

***time to start posting again. here's a exerpt from a either a short story or the first chapter of a book. The title, or chapter title is Berserker. Enjoy!***

            Kay followed Gram into a small circular room with a domed ceiling composed of long overlapping panels. Gram stopped at the center of the room scratching his nose; he appeared to be waiting for something. While they stood in the small round chamber, Kay attempted to come to terms with his predicament. Here he was on a spaceship orbiting the Earth; any normal person in his position would be having a brain aneurism, yet he felt awe-inspired, this sure beat going home alone to watch television and eat leftover pizza.  

Nothing seemed to be happening, so Kay cleared his throat and asked, “Aren’t we going back to Earth? Where’s the ship? A Tear Drop, you said...” He felt eager to see this space vessel.

Gram flicked something off his fingers. “Oh, we’re already in it. Curdle will have the absorption shields up in a moment.”

            “But the room is empty, no controls or anything, how are you going to pilot it down to the surface?”

            Gram grinned; Kay didn’t like the devious intent that gleamed off the boy’s teeth.

            Curdle’s voice clicked into the room from an unseen speaker system. “Everything is ready. Prepare yourselves.”

            “Prepare for what?” Kay snorted disapprovingly.

            “Have you ever been in free-fall?” Gram smirked. 

            Kay attempted to respond to the question, but had his attention torn away as a golden yellow light swam across the room seeping through the air like liquid. He felt a slight tingle on his skin as it washed over him and quickly became aware that it was immobilizing his movements. Kay found himself stuck in an awkward pose half facing Gram with his eyes held open and his mouth partially ajar. He couldn’t breathe; the yellow glow was holding his chest in place, yet there was no sense of asphyxiation; the energy field appeared to be providing his body with oxygen.

            There was movement. In his peripheral vision Kay saw the floor slide away under his feet revealing the empty void below. The domed ceiling began to cascade back leaving Kay and Gram suspended only by the yellow bubble, all alone. Kay attempted to say something, yell, scream, anything, but even his vocal cords were unable to vibrate, he could do nothing but watch as they began to drop from Gram’s ship and roll down Earth’s gravity well.

            At first the trip wasn’t too bad, there was only an awkward dizzying sensation instigated by the Earth’s surface speeding by each time the energy ball rotated. Then they hit the outer layers of the atmosphere. The impact began quietly, like a slight flutter, but quickly upgraded to airplane turbulence, then to being hit in the face with a waterfall before, finally, Kay felt as if he were riding atop a compressed oxygen cylinder with its valve broken clean off like a bucking bronco through an unending series of brick walls, but unlike straddling a mad horse, he didn’t have the option of letting go.

            As if the tooth shattering vibrations weren’t enough, Kay had no choice but to watch as an inferno of fiery red flames erupted around the energy field as it scrapped through the sea of air molecules. He attempted to whimper in vain fully believing that he was about to be barbecued.

            Thankfully, the trip through the upper atmosphere ended and the raging glow faded leaving the bubble fully intact. Kay was able to relax for a few moments as they passed through the clouds, but quickly realized that the worst part of the trip was rapidly approaching at an acceleration rate of 9.8 meters per second. Had Kay’s brain been capable of coherent description, he would have depicted the impact as what being shot in the stomach by a cannon firing a black hole would have been like.

            The yellow sphere dissipated but Kay barely noticed. He lay in a small crater left by the Tear Drop face down on top of an impressively flat heap of pizza boxes while his limbs seized with a terror they had never before known.