Chapter 7


The rain had stopped, and the air felt heavier. The power loss had stranded many barstool bikes, and most gates wouldn't open. Simansky assembled the remaining workers, his voice echoing through a loudspeaker. A truck rolled by, spraying a long cloud behind the trees.
  The main group started toward the office tower, walking five meters apart in single file. They entered a darker section of new-growth woods. The path sunk in the ground, supported by a plastic embankment. Rick could see only three people ahead. A strip of sky was framed by waving branches.
  A scream erased whatever had happened before. Far ahead, Simansky raised his arm, and the gesture passed down the line. The column stopped, looking for a sightline. Later, they would say the scream hadn't sounded that painful. It didn't seem real.
  There was a flash like a missing frame, and a painful bang. A pulse of heat kissed the branches, and then the wind blew the other way. Employees dropped boxes.
  Rick looked over the sidewall without turning his body, and saw Simansky vanish down a narrow trail. He quickly climbed up and followed. The others waited a few seconds before continuing their march.
  A smoke signal hung over the trees. Rick glimpsed a bright blue light, a bad color. A cart train blocked the way, and they doubled back.
  As he ran, icons lit and faded. He controlled them by focusing and blinking. A gas mask appeared. One of his gadgets had smelled ammonia. Rick waved a sampler, and was rewarded with chemical formulas. Cyanides, ionized ozone, saltpeter. The air itself had burned.
  "Hurry," Simansky shouted without looking back.
  The clearing was blocked by a roiling mountain of smoke. Something that looked that solid should make more noise, but they only heard a soft hiss. The smoke rose, and unveiled an oval of burned ground. Coming off the path, the clearing seemed huge. Three cops approached with their weapons drawn, acting indifferent. Rick rechecked his instruments.
  Only a haze remained. The air shimmered as smoke strings curled skyward. The branches had been blown off the trees. At the end of the clearing was the hissing remnant of a large storage container, puffed out like a mushroom, amid scattered debris. A piece of plastic fell with an echo. The trees behind the container had burned, the tip of each bough still glowing. Furious blue flames had painted everything black.
  "Good thing it rained," Rick said.
  "They cut dead wood," Simansky replied as he reholstered his gun.
  There was a newly created rock, indistinguishable from others a billion years older. Rocks were not easily impressed. Rick crunched over the edge of the charred lawn, and leaned forward. That smoking outline was a skeleton, never meant to be seen. A movie composition skull, sootlike with an oily sheen. The bones had been carbonized and calcined, cracks and hollow spaces collapsing under their own weight. Even the ground had changed. Three minutes ago, the core of the shed had been hotter than the sun. It would take hours to cool.
  He kept his mental distance. He'd once seen an accident victim with part of his skin ripped off, intestines spilling out. Rick didn't think the situation had become more serious. It was always serious.
  Belatedly, he put on his Mask filter and ran more tests, sending video. He saw large gaps in the human remains. People were not solid objects, but assemblages of organs. He checked the Net to see if organs had contiguous gene chains. They did.
  He snapped out of it. "It's Yasov," a cop said, trying to contact Yasov's Box, a primitive form of immortality. No one mentioned the smell.
  Simansky did not approach the container, a malformed spider sagging under its own weight. It moaned and glowed inside. He saw concentric rings of chemical reactions.
  "What the fuck did they keep in here?" he asked.
  "This is a diversion," Rick said.
  Simansky got emotional. "Get Haz-Mat!" he ordered the agents in Russian. "I'm ordering a curfew."
  Rick had already pressed his panic button. Soon, more inspectors would arrive with the latest scanners, and cameras in the backs of their heads. He decided not to disturb the commissioner. Rick added "17:55 - walking to office tower" to his public log, and began to walk back.
  The smell lingered as the proximity icons faded. "If something happens to me, get revenge," he told Tina.
  The map was empty, and the path seemed longer. Any piece of evidence should stand out. Pressure squeezed out fear - he saw more and thought less. The regular traffic here included chainsaw robots. This might be his final thought.
  He returned to the sunken pathway and jumped back in. The trench cut off his peripheral vision, leaving a black wall on the horizon. He had a sudden shock when Simansky stared down. The commissioner descended a ladder while a distant humming grew louder. The air trembled, and they stepped back as a swarm of workers raced past on their barstool bikes, eyes fixed ahead. Ten minutes later Simansky stopped a police van, and they rode to the tower through a scenic forest. Ancient pillars supported a dark canopy. They crossed a bright valley, gone in seconds.

  An hour later Tina generated an incident report so Rick could stay in charge. "Your name hasn't come up yet," she said.
  "Donitz will take care of that."
  "Just ignore him."
  They had managed to miss the first hour of a self-sustaining media frenzy. Zondyne's data release and the container explosion were being discussed in strange corners of the Net. Two minutes ago, a mainstream network had offered to pay for information. Less than 1% of mankind knew it had begun, but billions wanted something to happen.
  Rick thought the most important news story of the past half-century had been the absence of Armageddon. Incredibly, he wouldn't realize the full importance of this story for another 36 hours. In an age of software entertainment, his life was actually one of the more boring. His fifty-two adventures had been less intense than any game.
  The deadly container was a sealed crime scene. "It stored zero-point chips," he explained. "They used the Casimir effect from quantum physics."
  There was no such thing as empty space. Even in the smallest gap, short-lived particles were constantly appearing from nowhere, usually in opposite-energy pairs. After separating, the virtual particles drew back together and erased each other, as if they had never existed. The shorter their existence, the more energy they embodied. Space was the result, not the cause; normal matter was a mere impurity.
  Rick had never seen these virtual particles, but he believed the scientists who claimed they could exploit them. The unseen quantum storm was a force mediator, or perhaps it was shared among all possible universes, but not both. Actually, he read, it was both.
  Two parallel plates were brought close together. Fewer particle types could form in the minuscule gap, but many more formed outside the plates, which were pushed together with great force. Unfortunately it took exactly as much energy to pull them apart again. Scientists were looking for a loophole, an unlimited energy source. Perhaps the energy could come from the expansion of space.
  Here was the first deep clue: the Casimir effect was unaccountably biased. Any physical process should work equally well in both directions. The plates only came together because of this universe's ridiculously low entropy.
  The zero-point chips used wire meshes instead of plates to store almost unlimited data in the gap. "Someone cracked the chips' failsafes, which may not even be part of our universe, and ordered them to calculate their own state one second in the future." Perhaps they had succeeded. "The meshes slammed together, and released all their energy as gamma rays."
  "Too much effort to kill one cop," Tina thought.
  "That was probably unintentional."
  "You're not just saying that to feel safe?"
  "No, Simansky agrees Yasov was a Zampolit - Internal Affairs. We don't know what he was doing there. The container's metal-plastic alloy released a lot of heat at once, mushrooming up. The radiation voided the Depot operating license."
  "So it was an attack. Gamma rays are non-persistent, but they stimulate inner electron transitions," Tina read while typing. "What aren't they telling you?"
  "The Depot may be storing various hazardous forms of matter. Normal chemicals are bound together by the outer electrons of atoms. 'Transcarbons' use the more powerful inner electrons. They're stronger than diamond, but will explode if you blink wrong. If any Transcarbons are near here, I don't want to be. Of course isomers are even worse." With a heat index below absolute zero, they could absorb almost any amount of energy, before releasing it all at once.
  "Enough excitement for today," Tina sighed.