CHAPTER 2
As soon as the technician pressed the detonation button, the test building fairly vanished. In a violent swarm of wood splinters and steel beams, the building shattered and then collapsed in on itself; debris darting into a pinprick of antimatter at the center of the storm of chaos. Things were ripped and shredded at an atomic level. What was once wood or steel or concrete was now only a jumble of protons, neutrons and electrons, swarming into the black orifice that looked like a giants mouth. Grinding bones to make it's bread.
If Jack Burles had blinked he would've missed the entire display. It only lasted ten milliseconds. Instead he gasped at the destruction the project members had just caused and stepped back. It was unbelievable: the power they could harness. An implosion like that could destroy a city the size of Shanghai and turn the land within a hundred miles of it into radioactive slag. He shook his head and watched the raging black sphere in the middle of the blasting room roar and claw at the walls like a caged beast. They had the power of gods now. Unfortunately, with great power came the need for great caution and Jack seriously doubted any of the generals up in Tactical would even think twice about sending a couple of these into the heart China...
Jack paused as he saw the sphere squirm and twist. He glanced at his computer pad. Something was wrong. The implosion was supposed to be ending by then. A one second reaction time. He frowned.
No such luck.
The tremor shook every cell in his body – even behind eight feet of blasting glass – contorting, spitting and then in a reaction faster than the last, the giant exhaled. Wave after wave of pure, unbridled energy in the form of heat and light and sound crashed against the walls of the blasting room in a last resort to escape, singing the glass window the crew was behind black.
The sphere had exploded.
Jack felt his body lurch backward at the force and tumbled over a desk. Screams and shouts pieced the suddenly warm, humid room as everyone else toppled from their chairs and hit the ground. Gauges popped. Alarms blared. The world seemed to tremble. And then, instantly, the energy vanished and the building calmed. Jack felt the back of his head twitch as his OPI threatened to activate and he calmly retreated inside of himself, breathing deeply and shoving all thoughts of destruction, terror, and fear from his mind. He didn't want to become amnesic for the next twenty minutes. Jack was determined to keep the memory of that synthetic God power with him until he died. Breath in... Breath out...
Slowly, the coiled, tensing muscles inside of his body loosened and the OPI stopped twitching. His mind emptied it's tension and his breathing steadied. There's nothing to be afraid of he thought to himself, repeating therapy statements, There's nothing to worry about. Like a hospital patient on morphine, Jack's heart rate wavered and then stabilized at a steady rhythm. With a final sigh, Jack cracked his eyes open and stood.
Someone swore. “Did you see that?! That was unbelievable! The effing blasting glass barely held it back. Did you see that son of a...” The man stopped and peered out the blackened window. “ Jeez. It's gone. The entire thing!” Jerry Saddler, the director of the project, crawled from underneath the Operations desk grinning like a mad man.
“Wait until China sees a few of these things. The bastards won't know what hit 'em.” He shook his head and turned to survey the dazed but ecstatic test crew. “Gentlemen! We have just renovated and revolutionized modern weaponry. Let's launch one of these ninas down Shanghai's throat. Let's watch them not just burn, but cease to exist! The Manzetti is our ticket, the world's ticket, to freedom from oppression.” He punched the air and the room burst into cheers. Jack didn't join in. All the Manzetti implosive meant was that hundreds of Clones were going to die hauling it into China and hundreds were going to die setting it off. For all the engineers and physicists in the room, it was an easy thing to cheer. To them, if a Clone died in stopping China from achieving world domination, it was a life well spent. It sickened Jack that they could so easily talk the talk and let others walk the walk. But he kept his mouth shut. He always did. Saying something like that would get him fired faster than he could plead the first amendment.
The cheers faded. “Alright,” Jerry said, “ Back to work. I want the vitals turned into me ASAP. We're screwed if even the smallest world sanction is broken. Burles,” Jerry nodded in Jack's direction coldly, “That's you and Terry if he can help. I also need the blast room sterilized and cleaned and checked for any new flaws or faults or leaks, Harper. The rado's going to be pretty intense, so have your crew put those new suits on.” He rubbed his hands and grinned, “I have a feeling we'll be making a few more of these things. The rest of you, go home and celebrate. We've only just begun this project. We're going to working our tails off for the next few months lobbying this baby so take a break and get ready for a long winter. My advice: get drunk while you still can.” The project members laughed softly and Saddler's grin broadened, “This is a day for the history books, men. Dismissed.”
Everyone erupted from their seats and began talking and swearing about the implosive simultaneously. Jack had to agree. This really was a day for the history books. Kind of like the Manhattan project in the 1940's when they developed the atomic bomb. It would change the world forever. He shook his head and headed over to the Operations terminal. He was right in the focal point of history-in-the-making. It just didn't seem real. In a few hours, a vid and summary of the Manzetti project prototype would be sitting on the president's desk. Maybe at that point in time it would become a reality, not just some fireworks display seen behind a window. At that point in time, the bottle would go around the table and the engineers of the project would be given medals and recognition. But Jack, as a Clone, would invariably be left out.
He frowned to himself, plugged his pad jack into the terminal and began uploading the implosion vitals onto his computer. Jerry Saddler was at the door, shrugging an overcoat on.
“5 o'clock , Burles. I need that summary by 5 o'clock , got it?”
“Yeah, Jerry, I got it. It'll be there.” Jerry grunted and walked out the door. Jack sighed and turned back to the terminal. He was used to Clone Bias by now. In fact, he'd been used to it as a kid. He had been cursed early on by some bureaucratic entity that had decided to put him into a military school that mixed Clones and Originals. Where Clones were the outcasts and the weaklings and the scapegoats. Jack could've sworn he came home to his foster family every other day with a swollen eye or a bruised self-esteem. He supposed that was just how it was. What Jack knew as a reality was not some nuclear weapon but that kindness was empty and equality was just a word. When the world claimed it was free and fair, Jack cracked up. What a load of hypocrites. Take a look at the Clones! He wanted to shout, The Blacks of the modern world! Humanity was so twisted and convoluted. All those men and women before them had lived in vain. They had given birth to liars and narrow minded hate mongers.
He shook his head again, more in pity than anything else and watched the completion bar on the screen reach 50%. It was a large file. 550 GB that held videos, audio, radiation levels, temperature, basic chemical reactions, pressure, size and energy output of the first Manzetti Implosive. The first step in the defeat of China. Jack smiled to himself. China deserved anything and everything they got; even if it meant a Manzetti in each of their cities and the death of millions of Chinese people to get it through their leader's thick skull that the other countries of earth couldn't be won or lost in war. It just wasn't worth it to sit and watch China literally consume the world. Besides, eventually the Caesars and Hitlers and Napoleons of the world had to die. History required it.
China had made it's first attempt to conquer Asia 60 years after the Maverick plague ended and Thomas Babilon's perfection of the Cloning process. Even reading about the plague in school had given Jack chills. The Maverick Plague was an oral virus which targeted cells in the digestive tract and ate away at the stomach lining and bladder over a one or two week period. Literally, stomach acid would break through gut and eat away at your organs and blood vessels before you died of starvation. It wasn't a pleasant way to die. Needless to say, it wiped out nearly half of the worlds population, sending civilization into chaos. Before the plague, though, a man named Thomas Babilon had developed a cheap, realistic cloning process that could have been used to create a second society for Military work and Organ transplants. In order to jumpstart the world's population, what was left of the world powers united and began using Babilon's technique to make duplicate embryos of every newborn and healthy adult to create the Clones. Slowly, steadily, both Original and Clone began repopulating the world and reinstating the Old Civilization. People had time to create and discover again. Cities grew. Cultures flourished. Economy skyrocketed and, strangely, for the first time since World War II there was some semblance of peace and unity on the earth. By 2085, sixty years after the Maverick Plague, there was a Clone population of something like 700 million, comprised of three Pastless generations. Jack was twenty by that time and the practice of OPI insertions and Clone bias had long since taken hold. Still... there was growth and harmony on the earth. Something like the U.N of the pre-plague times had been conceived and over 130 nations united under the People of The World's standard. Unfortunately, like it always did, chaos struck once again.
As it turned out, during the sixty years after the plague the Chinese had been constructing a Clone army behind the world's back and in 2085 declared war on all of it's Asian brothers. Needless to say, Asia as a whole was caught off guard and the quick, bloody carnage of the Chinese-Asian war came to a definite end in 2087. In fact, only half of the countries they conquered – India, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan, among others – fell to the ravaging of nuclear bombs and machine guns. The other half fell because of their material reliance on China and the fact that China embargoed virtually all exports with other countries. They starved. Their economies fell. There were countless civil wars over food shares and conveniences. In reality, it was like a modern siege. China merely picked up the pieces after the other countries tore each other apart. They were brutal and efficient and quick. Some of the greatest military minds of the world had been offered prestigious citizenship in the Chinese government in turn for their services during the war. It was all too apparent that most of them had accepted the offer. Nearly all of Asia had fallen into their hands before the other world powers – America, England, France, Canada, and Italy came to the rescue and pushed China out of the Asian countries. It had been known as the third world war.
Jack had fought in it for three years on the Indian front before his spine was shattered after a clip of bullets had been drilled into his back by Chinese Clones. It was only by a miracle that he survived. Stem cell research had come a long way since the turn of the century and had saved Jack from being a quadriplegic until he was eighty or so. He was forever indebted to the surgeons and geneticists that both brought him to life and saved his life within 21 years. That didn't mean though, that he had to be grateful. He would've preferred it if they had just let him die on the operating table: no Clone was ever grateful they were alive, not really. But they gave him a new spinal cord anyway and sent him back to the United States to work for DARPA in the Department of Defense. An agency for developing new military technology; things like big guns and fast jets.
China was finally reproached and defeated in 2091 and to the returning soldiers it was phenomenal, the damage that had been caused. Books were written. Movies were made. In fact, only a few Asian governments were able to gain their footing. The rest laid right where they were and sank quietly back into anarchy and civil war. There really wasn't much else to do. China had delivered a devastating blow.
For the next five years, Asia struggled and the rest of the world went on with life. No one expected China to try her hand at world domination again. It would be stupid. Apparently though, China's intelligence was misjudged. In 2096, the Russians, the Koreans, and the Chinese became official allies and ravaged Asia once again. It was over in months. All they had to do was clean up after the last war. The Chinese-Russian-Korean axis called their spoils: 'The First Republic of Asia', embargoed all trade with the world powers and withdrew from the People of The World. As a finishing touch to their geopolitical masterpiece, they declared a vendetta on the world. And here Jack was in 2097, in the middle of the first Atomic bombs all over again, plotting the downfall of the “First Republic of Asia”. All they were missing was Einstein. Still, with any luck, the war would be over within a year. The Manzetti Project was years ahead of schedule. The terminal blinked once as the completion bar reached 100% , Jack unplugged his computer, and began winding his way around tables and desks towards the door. He glanced out the blast windows and inadvertently saw the implosion replay in his mind. He shivered. By the time they got the Manzetti into China the people and the land would be indecipherable gray mounds of ash. Somehow, strangely, he felt sorry for them.
Shaking his head, Jack tucked his computer back under his arm and kept walking. And now it was his job to sign their death warrants. The millions of them. He felt like a butcher wearing a blood spattered apron, wielding nuclear meat hooks...
****
“Tell me everything,” Terry Skopka said as they both slid into a pair of chairs in the coffee room. “ I want to know every detail. I want to hear about every splinter. You know, that implosion must've been something like 5.0 on the Richter scale. Every window in this freaking building rattled when it went off.” He smirked and poured a cup of coffee for himself. “Anyway. What're we sending to China?”
Jack grinned to himself as he watched his friend and colleague smile, close his eyes, and lean back in his chair. Terry Skopka had been the only Clone - or person for that matter - to study with Manzetti while he was conceiving his theory. He knew the Manzetti implosive inside and out, forwards and backwards. Every single formula, every single detail was run past Terry before it was implemented in the implosive. In truth, Terry was the behind-the-scenes nucleus of the entire project. However, that little fact wasn't often publicized. No surprise there. Still... Jack knew it gave Terry a sense of intrinsic pride to know that he was the mastermind of this top secret, unbelievably influential government project. He had raged for days when they told him he wouldn't be able to watch the first testing because of “lack of status”. The only reason Jack was allowed to watch was because he was the vitals man. He was a number cruncher. But the genius, the nucleus, hadn't able to watch his creation in action because of how he was born. It was disgusting.
Sighing inwardly, Jack logged onto his computer. “How about I show it to you instead? I give you...” Jack double clicked on the vid file and turned the computer to Terry, “Baby Death. China's newest enemy.”
The video wasn't as tremendous as the real thing. You weren't literally knocked off of your feet or temporarily blinded. But it made Terry happy as it unfolded on the screen. His eyes widened as the antimatter exploded and the energy meter at the bottom of the screen spiked. Suddenly, without warning, he inhaled sharply and pressed the pause button. Breathing heavily, Terry leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair. “Wow. We weren't expecting that kind of energy output. It was only supposed to be a side effect.” He glanced at Jack's computer again, the explosion painted on the screen in mid-destruction. “You know, something like this could punch a hole through our ozone in a second.”
Jack frowned as Terry leaned forward and began pounding at the computer furiously. Jerry Saddler wasn't going to be a happy man. After all breaking international environmental sanctions never did sit well with anyone. And if Terry was right, the entire Manzetti project could be abandoned. Jack was confident that the world had learned it's lesson with Global warming and melting ice caps. If the Manzetti meant an ozone like swiss cheese, it didn't matter how many wars it would stop: the bomb would still be terminated without a second thought. Terry shook his head. “I can't believe the blasting room held in the explosion. What element did they use again? Lithium?” He frowned and shrugged. “Anyway. Okay... got it. Take a look at this.” He turned the computer so that he and Jack could both watch it. “ I took the vitals on the implosion and plugged them into a simulation program. This is a simulation of what could happen if we detonated a good sized Manzetti in, say, Beijing. Cross your fingers.”
Terry tapped the play button and the implosion occurred all over again. But this time the black, gaping hole inhaled computerized buildings and people and then spat them out in a bright hemisphere of pure energy. Jack swore under his breath as the computer followed the explosion and tracked the atmosphere at the same time. The simulation ended nearly as soon as it began and Terry hooked his finger around his coffee mug. Jack glanced at the atmosphere statistics. He breathed a sigh of relief. Minimal erosion to the ozone. Minimal tearing. There was some, but it wasn't enough to make the president think twice about detonating one. “Close,” he breathed. Terry frowned, “Yeah, but about 600 miles of China's been reduced to slag and that's unforgivable. We're not trying to murder people...,” Terry paused and smirked, “Well, yes, we are. But rather, we're trying to make a point. Turning an eighth of China into radioactive mush is kind of extreme. But, hey,” He powered down the computer and smiled at Jack, “I'm just a Clone.” Jack rolled his eyes and couldn't help snorting, “When has China ever been reasonable to us, or anyone for that matter? We're just giving them what they deserve. So a couple thousand get skin cancer. What's it to us?”
Terry shrugged and sipped his coffee in silence, brooding.
Jack was just glad he didn't have to report any bad news to Saddler. Knowing the DARPA director, Jack would probably have been fired. He suddenly turned to Terry, frowning. “How does it work, anyway? The Manzetti. No one's been able to create an implosion like this before. What made Manzetti's theory work?” A smile tugged at the edges of Terry's mouth and he slid the computer pad across the table back to Jack.
“Do you know what an isotope is?” Jack paused and racked his brain. Despite being at the top of his class in military school, he had been torn out of his junior year to fight in the third world war. Almost all of the Clones in his class did. They had gone to war and died and killed and suffered so that the originals in high school or college could have a future. They had been the patriots and heroes while the originals sat back and watched the war a thousand miles way on a screen; feeling sorry for those dead and mangled bodies strewn over Asian land, but living life just as if the war Jack fought in was just another foreign tussle. The originals were given an education and first rate jobs while eighteen year old veterans were given a gun and three cold meals a day in India. The dice of society were severely weighted.
“Well?”
“Remind me, Terry. It's been a long time since chemistry class.”
“Alright. An isotope is an atom of an element that has a different number of neutrons in it's nucleus than a normal atom. Usually, an isotope is radioactive. They're what scientists a couple decades ago used to carbon date. A nucleus of an atom, though, can't have a lower number of neutrons than protons. Got it?” Jack nodded. Terry grinned eagerly, “At least, that's what everybody thought. Manzetti's theory deals with a hypothetical atom that has many more protons than neutrons. Just the opposite of an isotope. Impossible, remember. Manzetti supposed that if the nucleus had substantially more protons than neutrons it would have an extremely positive charge. Also remember, the electrons around an atom's nucleus has a negative charge. Therefore, the electrons would have an attraction to the proton-drunk nucleus they orbited. Manzetti went even further, hypothesizing that if the electrons and the nucleus came in contact the mass of the combined particles would force the electron-nucleus to collapse.”
Terry sipped his coffee, eyes twinkling, “Now if you know anything about black holes and cosmology, you'll know that when a star gets too old and heavy it begins to collapse on itself, just like Manzetti's hypothetical atom. Over time, the star will collapse to a point of infinite density and infinite spacetime, but that's getting into some heavy physics. In layman's terms, the star will become a black hole. And it sucks in everything from planets to light. So, with this knowledge, Manzetti guessed a collapsing atom would act the same way and make a kind of miniature atomic black hole. Manzetti called his theory, 'The Proton Isotope Phenomenon'.”
Smile fading, Terry leaned forward and set down his mug, “And that's where I came into the picture. Manzetti's theory looked well and good on paper but how was he supposed to get a proton isotope? So he put together a small crew, got a particle accelerator and started testing. After a couple years we concluded that an atom in a vacuum under certain electrical circumstances will join with several extra protons. We tested this with Lithium, a small stable element. And just so you know, the larger the element in a Manzetti implosive the bigger the bang. Anyway, It worked. But Manzetti published in only a small, obscure scientific journal for sentimental reasons before dying of cancer. And the project kind of died with him. Until now.”
Terry sat back in his chair and glanced out the window at the far end of the coffee room. Thick, angry drifts of fog were creeping through the streets of Arlington; consuming dumpsters and parked cars. “So that's the secret behind the Manzetti Implosive.” Terry finished, looking at Jack, “No one was expecting that much energy output. But at least it didn't kill our ozone." Jack nodded absently. Suddenly, the destructive power of the Gods could be reduced to a few words from a Clone's mouth. A few unifying equations and scientific laws. Miracles nowadays were defined by neutrons and electrons rather by bishops and faith... Jack stretched and glanced at his watch. Three o'clock. He had only two hours to finish the summary.
“Well, gotta go, Terry. My job depends on a summary of that bomb on the President's desk by tonight.” But Terry gripped Jack's shoulder as he rose and lowered him back into his seat.
“I meant to ask you something. Have you heard the news?”
“What news?”
Terry took a deep breath and Jack frowned. What was wrong? His friend looked him in the eye and paused.
“Secretary Aston's dead. Murdered actually, by some effing Hyte. It happened last night. There's no chance now that the OPI bill can be passed. We... are... officially... screwed.”
Jack went pale and his OPI began twitching violently; itching at his skull. He clenched his teeth and kicked a chair, watched it skitter across the ground, and buried his head in his hands. Phillip Aston had practically been the savior of the Pastless people. Not only had he been effective and results-oriented but he truly meant what he said and was sincere about making the world a better place. And now he was dead. No one could take his place and, frankly, no one would want to. Helping the underdog was dangerous stuff. The big dogs wanted to play alone by any means necessary. Jack swore and rubbed his temples as he tried to retreat into himself and stop the blasted OPI from twitching. It nagged at the back of his brain and made him feel hot and tired and sick. He felt like killing someone.... As soon as his last thought burned it's way through his synapses, Jack's OPI went berserk. His mind felt literally on fire as amnesiac chemicals threatened to leak out onto his neurons and wipe out his short term memory. Not Aston, not now...
Grudgingly, sweating, he shoved all other thoughts from his head, began to count backwards and took several deep breaths. The world hadn't ended; not yet anyway. He was still alive. He was happy, complacent, calm. There was nothing to hate and nothing to fear. Inwardly, Jack laughed at his ironic prescribed positive therapy statements. Lies, lies, lies. But at least they worked. His brain would still accept them. Steadily, the twitching became less intense and Jack's facial muscles loosened.
“You okay, jack?” Terry asked quietly. The OPI impulses had been reduced to a dull pounding. He shook his head. “Yeah. I'll be fine... It's not as if we can do anything about it. Thanks for telling me though, Terry. I'll be fine...”
Terry nodded and gathered up his attache, “Good luck on your summary. See you tomorrow.”
And he walked from the coffee room, leaving a disgruntled, irritated Jack Burles to finish a page of history in his wake.
NOTE: To me this ending seems a little forced and/or underdone. Give me some specific critiques about it. Tell me what you think of Jack; he's my main character. Does he have a personality yet? Or is he just a blank face on a blank canvas??? The proton isotope thing is something I thought up myself. Does it seem realistic? Do you get the "world history" part after the Manzetti explosion? Is my dialogue forced??? Thanks for reading...
-Kylan
Information overload!!!! I know you've read the full version of Les Mis. So, you should know what I mean. The politics were so detailed and extensive that it was both impressive and mind boggling at the same time. Which isn't exactly bad. But I want you to think back to when you read Les Mis, what you were thinking during the long political sections. Sometimes it's okay, but other times it makes the reader drift off, and start thinking about other things.
I'll get back to the rest, maybe later tonight, or tomorrow.
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