Sparks of Chaos (20 page)

The easiest and most direct path was to simply eliminate them and yes eliminate did mean death. Armstrong viewed that as a sloppy and lazy way to achieve his goal, not to mention it was morally wrong and went against the Three Principles that he guarded. So he had found another alternative. It was riskier, would take longer but ultimately would be more successful. He had plans for their island, big plans and one way or another they were going to leave.

The plan had already been put into place. He needed to make their home so unpleasant and uninhabitable that they would have no choice but to leave. He had begun by sending the Taskers to introduce a plague of snakes and a swarm of biting insects that would make everyone ill. He had them contaminate the water supply to make it foul tasting with a terrible odor. The animals they brought to Prettybone were genetically altered to be restricted to the island and to self-destruct when the goal was achieved. It wouldn’t be helpful to have them on the island once the natives were evicted.

There were other ways to deliver the animals without the Taskers but it had the added advantage of scaring the natives into believing the island was haunted or filled with demons. Any human would be frightened to see a faceless blue Tasker in the dark. The populace of Prettybone was by nature superstitious and even more inclined to believe their ancestors or some such things were angry and punishing them.

They started slow and gradually increased the amount of pests to torment the population. Armstrong ensured that the illnesses were thoroughly unpleasant but not life threatening. He turned up the heat until it got to the breaking point which was when he struck. He had not shared any of this with Rex yet. When the appropriate time came he would present all of this to him.

On his own and without Rex’s knowledge he had formed a corporation to use for this purpose. He had used Rex’s authorization to establish a subsidiary in one of the Stubbard Industries companies and found a way to fund it himself. Prettybone had very little of value in natural resources, except for one thing. The island had been home for hundreds of years to many species of sea birds. Where there are birds, you will find plenty of bird poop or as it is known by its more technical name, guano.

Guano consists of ammonium oxalate, urate, phosphates, as well as some earth salts
 and a high concentration of nitrates. It is quite a valuable product as fertilizer as it doesn’t smell as much as manure from farm animals and was higher quality than 
bat and seal guano. He was able to use the Taskers to gather some and by increasing its volume he was able to sell it and raise several million dollars. He found it somewhat ironic that he was able to use the island itself to fund its own takeover. Like a corporate raider he had used the island’s own assets to take it over.

Armstrong used electronic means to contact the Ravitura government about the use of Prettybone Island. He offered a generous one time lump payment and yearly rental fees provided the island was uninhabited. The government was already looking at a significant cost to relocate the islanders anyways, so this offer seemed to be a true gift from heaven. They already viewed the island as a liability. The payments would go a long, long way to improving the lives of all their people.

He was able to negotiate complete autonomy from Ravitura, giving the company the freedom to do whatever they chose unimpeded by any restrictions. It was to be completely off limits to anyone from Ravitura without permission. When the time came, he fully intended to enforce that with armed security if needed. Once they relocated the island’s natives he finalized the deal and transferred them the balance of the money. He had paid them more than the island was worth but he could afford to be magnanimous because it was worth much, much more to him and once they saw what he planned to do with it, to have paid less would have caused unnecessary problems.

He had quietly begun the work preparing the island for its new purpose.  The changes would be unobtrusive at first and more noticeable later. He needed to terraform it more towards his needs but he couldn’t do it openly. An underground excavation had secretly begun and would be used to house and hide the things they didn’t want or need the outside world to ever see. A small underwater sub-sea cable tunnel was in process of being built, which would serve to extend the Snake subway system from Surga to Prettybone. It would be faster and safer than traveling by boat and essential to ensure the success of his plans. Nothing would stop him from having it ready to complete his plans.

Chapter 34

Talking on the telephone in Surga to someone in the outside world was quite difficult. The time differential made holding a conversation perplexing.  With the outside world moving twenty five times slower, you had a long wait between words and sentences. Rex built a buffering system that made the conversation at least seem more natural. Because of its awkwardness Rex discouraged phone and video conversations. The only people he spoke to were his brother and father. He left the day to day running of his corporation to his brother, though he closely monitored its results and required him to run major decisions by him for approval.

He was somewhat surprised that his brother Edward was insisting to speak with him via video if possible. Since it was a rare request, he acquiesced. He had developed a program that used a life like avatar of his old body as Wayne Stubbard. It would certainly not do for his brother to see him as he was now in his persona of Rex King. One advantage was that he could leisurely think of his responses to his brother.

Edward came onto the video precisely on time, looking dapper and distinguished as always. “Wayne, it is nice to see you again, we don’t get to talk nearly enough. I am sorry to disturb you from your research and work but I would not have asked to speak with you if I wasn’t concerned.”

“Nice to see you too Edward, what is the problem?”

“I need to inform you of some problems we have received with the passport that we had issued to you for Michael Wagner. The German officials have asked to question him in regards to a missing persons and possible homicide case. We used our contacts in the defense department to obtain those as you requested and if there is a problem it is possible it could be traced back to us.”

Luckily he had plenty of time to reflect and calm his emotions before answering. He certainly was angry again; they did not need any more complications from this fiasco. “Here is what I want you to do about that. Under no circumstances are you to provide any information on this matter to anyone. Make sure that you use whatever pressure or resources you need to stop this issue dead in its tracks. We have many, many friends in the government that owe us. Lean on them, we rarely ask for anything.”

“Of course Wayne, I’ll take care of it, you can count on me.”

“I know I can and let me know immediately if there are any other complications on this.” They chatted for a few more minutes and he said he would keep in touch.

Chase was becoming a big problem that he was getting tired of dealing with. He wasn’t sure how he was going to deal with this yet but his patience was running out. It did point out that there was a real problem with his plan on recruiting world class scientists. If he was having this many problems with the first one he tried to recruit, how could he realistically hope to ever achieve his goal?

He had been spending a lot of time with Birgit lately since she had arrived and she was making a lot of sense to him. She was a delight to be around and he was only now aware of how lonely he had been with no one to talk to during all those years. It was fun showing her the wonderful sights that Surga had to offer and she was so happy with her new home.

He had begun talking to her about what his plans were and she was very impressed. They both noticed that there were some serious flaws as well, such as the difficulties in getting the recruits here, the fact that the world would notice that many famous scientists had gone missing and their advancing age. He realized these were very serious flaws to be overcome and had been working on solutions to these problems. With all that he had accomplished in building Surga, the Taskers, biobots and the BLI, you would think that these would be minor problems easy to overcome. His scientific training and background had taught him though that each puzzle had its own challenges to solve.

Long distance runners have often said that when their stamina ends while racing in a marathon, they ‘hit the wall’. Rex had felt much the same way about scientific discovery. Time and again, when working on research for a project, every time his mind felt like it had literally hit a wall. Each individual project required a different type of solution to the wall. One might need you to chip away at it, another to run hard and blast right through it, while another required you to find a door.

He had explained it that way to Birgit in reference to the problem with the advanced elderly age of many if not the vast majority of the famous scientists he wanted to recruit to Surga. It was a very difficult problem he faced with rejuvenating aging brains without altering or damaging the very thing that made them valuable to him in the first place. You could fix memory storage but not recreate something that was already lost, as in the case of Professor Hauptmann. Tampering also ran the risk of changing the subject’s personality. How was he going to get past this wall and it was only one of several.

He was stunned, when he remembered what Birgit had said to him. Using the same metaphor, she said, “What if you’re running in the wrong direction and trying to get through the wrong wall?” Was it possible, that she was completely right? Maybe the reason he was having such a hard time finding the right answers was that he was asking the wrong questions. That was why he was going to visit her in hopes that a fresh perspective might just point him in the right direction.

Like the bright light and lonesome whistle of an oncoming freight train, he felt a breakthrough coming on. It had always been thus with him. He felt the exact same way when he made his first big success on altering the size of atoms. He liked to remember it as an unexpected stroke of luck but it wasn’t like that at all. He and Steven had been working on it together for over eighteen months and were getting closer all the time. Steven Zehn, he had forced himself to try and erase him from his memories. Steven had for a long time been his best friend and trusted research partner, then he became a rival, then a mortal enemy and finally nothing.  It was shortly after Steven’s ‘disappearance’ that it all clicked into place and everything began.

Sometimes he missed him, wait that was not true he didn’t miss him, even after all these years he still hated him with a laser hot intensity. What he missed was that little spark of chaos that came from bouncing ideas off another mind. Now he had Birgit, while she didn’t have any scientific training or background that wasn’t what he was really looking for. It was even better that she didn’t, she wasn’t burdened by the same preconceptions and the limitations they imposed. Birgit wasn’t just a pretty face, she was bright, there were many types of brilliance and they didn’t all need to have a Nobel Prize to prove it. She would be the icy cold blast of a brain freeze from a milkshake consumed too quickly. She would jolt his mind in a new direction.

Chapter 35

Franz was upset, they had made great strides in the case but the results had been worse than ever before. Someone had been actively hindering their investigation. Clearly they were on the right track or else the threats would not have started in earnest. Sadly, they would not listen to reason, he was bound and determined to find the clues and push this case forward regardless of where it went and whom it might hurt.

He had spoken several times to Birgit’s father, Professor Freund and it had been a delicate balancing act. There was a limit to the amount of information that he could share on an active case such as this. The good news was they had not found a body so they were not formally looking at a homicide. They didn’t have a suspect but they did have a lead. The bad news was that there was plenty of bad news. They didn’t have a body but they had found a significant amount of blood. The blood on the hooded sweatshirt was a positive match for the same samples found in the office, where they believe a crime took place. They had a name and a picture for their lead but had yet been able to find him.

Professor Freund had put them in touch with several of Birgit’s friends. While a few of them had spoken to Birgit about her new friend Michael, none of them had ever met or seen the boy. They all said that Birgit was very happy and excited to have met her new boyfriend and none had any knowledge of them fighting or any reason to believe he wanted to harm her.

Finding the bloody sweatshirt was a stroke of luck and helped them to more completely tie Michael Wagner to the crime. Found inside the bag was a store receipt that had been saturated with blood. The forensic crime lab had been able to make out the name of a nearby convenience shop. Mattius had gone to the shop personally to question the employees and show them a picture of Michael Wagner. An elderly woman who worked in the store on the date found on the receipt thought she might have recognized Michael’s picture but she couldn’t be sure. The picture was not very clear, her eyesight wasn’t very good anymore and it had been a few days ago, making it difficult to remember every person who came into the shop.

A firm identification would have conclusively tied Michael to the scene of where the bloody sweatshirt was found and implicated him in the crime. All they had now was a picture of him wearing the hooded sweatshirt as he entered the building. They had what they felt was a good case for questioning him further, though it was all based upon circumstantial evidence.

They had taken what details they had to the American authorities to get additional information and a warrant or access to Michael Wagner.  Uncharacteristically they had gotten no co-operation at all; in fact they had met a fierce resistance. That in and of itself was enough to raise his suspicions even more. It made Franz feel that there was definitely something to hide.