[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (34 page)

So despite her reluctance, it was with genuine excitement that she prepared the machine. An excitement that was clearly visible on her face when she announced that they were ready a little over two hours later. She came to stand in front of the president and smiled. The rest of the five-person team was there by now, busying themselves with the various measuring and tracking devices that they had set up around the big machine in the room’s center like orbiting satellites around a robotic sun.

She stood there smiling for a moment, she might as well enjoy it, and then turned to an extremely clean-looking man standing in a stereotypical white jacket to her right and asked him to open the sphere. The technician bowed, turned on his heels, and walked over to join three other similarly dressed men standing around the large machine behind her.

Standing between the CEO and the machine, Madeline faced her lone audience member and cleared her throat a little before saying, “Allow me to welcome you formally, Mr. Matsuoka, and thank you for your patience. You have been most gracious.

“Now that we are ready to begin I will talk you through the process you are about to see. Please feel free to stop me if you have any questions and I will answer them to the best of my ability. But for now I will explain what the technicians are doing and then we will begin.

“First the technicians will introduce several raw materials to the machine. These are the basic building blocks of a typical microchip. Notably among them we have this solid piece of material.” With that she produced what appeared to be a small blackish-green coin from her pocket, holding it up between her finger and thumb. It was a tiny piece of silicon half the size of a penny.

“Matsuoka-san, please note that I am holding this silicon in my bare hands without wearing gloves. I am sure I do not need to tell you that doing this just before using a piece of silicon to make a chip using current chip manufacturing methods would most certainly introduce all kinds of foreign impurities to the microchip being built. Leading inevitably to disastrous results for the chip’s efficacy. Because of this fact, Matsuoka Industries and all of her competitors observe strict precautions both before and during the manufacturing process.
Expensive
precautions.”

The CEO looked stern as Madeline emphasized that last statement. Behind her, the technicians activated a control on the ugly machine and a seam around the equator of the golden sphere twisted and unlocked. Two of the techs then heaved the top half of the big dome open on the large steel hinge it was mounted on. As the meter-wide sphere cleft neatly in half along its equator, a perfectly polished hollow interior was revealed. Smooth gold shining brightly: the most expensive globe in the world.

Turning, Madeline walked over to the open orb and simply tossed the tiny piece of silicon into it with practiced nonchalance, raising Matsuoka’s eyebrows at her indifference to the rigorous cleanliness and precision that was typically the hallmark of all microchip manufacture. For even a single speck of dust in the inner workings of a microchip would render it useless.

“My colleague here has the other key ingredients of a basic integrated circuit or microchip: planarized copper and our substrate.” She pointed to two more pieces of material, one coppery, the other a tarnished green, that were clasped between tweezers in the hands of one of the white-coated technicians. She nodded to the man, smiling a little, and he placed them in the big sphere. When they had first tried this it had seemed so strange. Like adding a few grains of salt to a meter-wide paella dish, one grain at a time, or pouring a jug of water into an empty swimming pool. She looked down into the lower hemisphere of the open machine where the three pieces lay in its golden apex. How little we knew. She smiled and then glanced at Mr. Matsuoka.

Oh, my stern-looking Japanese friend, you look so doubtful. You have no idea what you are about to witness. In about five minutes your mind is going to be thoroughly blown.

She came back to stand in front of the president and smiled as she heard the three techs carefully closing the sphere again, the big machine sealing with a dull thud. Matsuoka was starting to look anxious, glancing every now and then at Ito Hanso standing at his shoulder. He wasn’t sure whether he should really believe what he was witnessing. It had seemed plausible in theory, and the ladies had been more than adamant. But now, as he sat facing this monstrous machine with its gaping, hollow core, he found himself worrying if he had fallen pray to biggest prank in history.

Returning to their computers, the technicians activated the machine. After a moment’s anticipatory silence, a bass hum could be felt around the room as the big machine came to life. More than one of the technicians looked from side-to-side, a little concerned, as this was still only the fifth time they had powered up the miraculous machine. Matsuoka did his best to remain impassive and Madeline smiled. She had done this several more times than the rest of the team, wanting to test the more elaborate applications of the machine when the others were at home or asleep. It took longer to set the machine up without assistance, but it could be done. She had done wonderful things with the beast. It was going to change the world, in more ways than one.

“Now,” said Madeline suddenly, making several of them jump, “we cannot see anything inside the sphere as there is absolutely no light inside that block. But the devices attached to its outside, by the very virtue of the way they control what occurs inside, can show us what is happening to the objects inside as well. This information is shown to the machine’s operators in a graphic representation which allows us to operate the machine, and for your edification we are going to show you the same view which they enjoy.”

On a large LCD screen to one side of the big machine an image came to life. It was in full color, but something about the scene it displayed looked awry: though the image appeared to have texture, the coloring appeared to be two dimensional, like an old photo that has been retouched, or an image from an atomic microscope. The latter comparison was, perhaps, the most apropos, as the images were a magnified view of the three objects that had been had introduced to the sphere. But not seen using light. Instead they were being viewed using vibrations varying from the audio down to the gamma. These were sonar images.

Looking at the screen it appeared as though the objects were hovering in midair inside the sphere and this was, actually, exactly what was happening. They were being held there by the focused resonance being pumped into the sphere by the devices that radiated from its exterior, and as the tech adjusted the fields, they were able to flip the three objects over and move them around relative to each other.

As Matsuoka stared in silence at this parlor trick, Ito Hanso saw the childlike fascination creeping into the man’s expression and a reflected smile spread to his own lips. He had been right to send for the president of the firm.

Madeline rolled her eyes at this sycophantism and carried on with her explanation. “OK,” she said suddenly, making them jump once more, “for this next part of the demonstration, I would like to ask if you have a Matsuoka Industries cell phone, Mr. Matsuoka?” Shinobu Matsuoka looked at her confusedly and then nodded.

She then held out her hand and he stared at it a moment before realizing that she meant for him to give it to her. Disconcerted but keen to see where this all was going, he dipped his hand into his jacket pocket and withdrew a high-end but nonetheless fairly standard smartphone. Standard excepting that it was a platinum-plated version made especially for him. Madeline glanced at the extravagance a moment, then smiled and turned it over, glancing at the model number on the back.

“Domo Arigato.” She bowed to the man. “With your permission I will return this at the end of the demonstration.” She smiled. She was not used to being a showman, but it was easy to run a circus when you had an act like this.

“The image you see on the screen is, as I said, a representation of what is happening to the objects inside the sphere. Using super-low frequency waves, resonated and focused within the sphere, we have perfected a way to hold these objects in place at the very center of the sphere. The method does not work outside of a confined area like the ceramic and gold sphere you see here, and the area must be tightly sealed for the sonics to be accurate and effective. But once you have that sphere sealed … well, let’s just say you can do wonderful things.” She smiled again, almost laughing with joy at it all.

“First, can you see the discolorations highlighted on the magnified objects? Those are impurities on their surfaces, left by my fingers and by the manufacturing process. The machine knows this because, while the low-frequency waves are holding the materials in place, another set of far more precise waves are probing them, from microwave all the way down through the gamma range. You see, all materials have a specific sonic signature, a way they vibrate under pressure that tells the machine what the contents of the sphere are made up of. Tells it right down to the molecular level.

“As I mentioned earlier, the impurities on the outside of these objects normally present a significant problem for Matsuoka Industries and other chip manufacturers, forcing you to maintain a stringently clean environment for chip production.

“Because the sphere can detect the sonic signature of any material, it can identify which materials are part of the specifications of a given chip design, and which are not. This, in itself, would be of no value, of course. Unless you can also do something about them. But detection is not the only application of this resonance technology.”

Madeline turned to face the screen and said, in the most professional voice she could muster, “OK, gentlemen, remove the impurities, please.”

On the screen, Matsuoka saw each object in turn begin to shed its coating of what Madeline had described as impurities. The discolorations simply flew away from the materials.

Shinobu Matsuoka was stunned. That was incredible.

You are impressed with that, thought Madeline. Ha! He thinks it is a cleaning device. Oh, if only I could get away with just that. But Matsuoka had been promised more, and Ito would tell the powerful man if she held anything back. Well, he would tell the president about the things he knew, anyway; she still had some very important secrets they could not possibly have guessed at yet.

“Now, if I may return your focus to the phone you so kindly lent to me,” said Madeline, holding up the ostentatious but innocent flip-phone, “I see that this is one of your MVC-416Ns, slightly modified, of course. The flagship phone of the company, for its flagship chief officer.” She smiled at the president who merely nodded curtly. Turning and stepping over to one of the computers, she said, “If you will excuse me a moment, this is one of the steps in the process that I am afraid my colleagues do not yet fully understand.” She sat down at the machine, focusing on the computer screen. As her hands moved quickly over the mouse and keyboard, she carried on explaining what she was doing, speaking offhandedly the way parents do to nagging children, and teenagers do to nagging parents.

“What I am doing now, Matsuoka-san, what I am doing now is calling up the schematic for the main processor in the MVC-416N.

“We have loaded into the computer controlling the machine the designs of all of Matsuoka Industries’ standard processor chips so that we can use them as test subjects.” She typed and clicked furiously, taking the schematic and inputting it into the machine’s control screen, assigning material types and build parameters.

After about five minutes studious dragging and clicking, she announced that she had the schematic locked in. The room became excited once more. Standing, she checked the screen one final time and then straightened, bringing her focus back to the man for whom her little circus was performing. “If you are ready, Matsuoka-san, we will initiate the design into the system and begin.”

He remained still a moment, a slight quiver of his lip betraying his well-masked anticipation. But after a moment he managed a nod, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible. With that the technicians inputted the routine Madeline had created, instructing the machine to begin imposing the chip’s design on the materials in the sphere. Suddenly the noise from the machine became markedly louder, shaking the room on a fundamental level. But as the noise grew, and the rest of the room began to sensibly shake, all of its occupants were transfixed by what was happening in the big screen. The three objects in the sphere seemed to freeze in midair, and then appeared to go soft, almost to liquefy. Their sides became viscous, vibrating infinitesimally like a cup of coffee resting on the bonnet of an idling car.

Matsuoka stared at the screen, trying to make out if he was seeing it correctly. After another moment the machine was satisfied that the substances in its grasp were at the correct malleability and it began. Without ceremony, the now gelatinous objects started to morph, tiny strands starting to lift from their surfaces like a wool sweater coming unraveled. Imagine a bucket of viscous liquid into which a complex wire structure has been submerged. Now imagine that wire being slowly exuded from the liquid and you have an image of what appeared to be happening on the screen.

It looked some complex construct was being pulled slowly out of each of the three objects, coated in viscidity like melted chocolate. But it wasn’t something being pulled from the materials at all. The machine was shaking the very bonds that held the substances together, freeing them like an earthquake settling a desert, making their constituent molecules shake freely from each other. Violating and undermining their solidity.

Once the material bonds were deconstructed, the machine then used the same gamma tendrils to bend and twist the now malleable objects to its own end. The big machine was imposing its will on them via the focused force of the resonance being drummed into the dome. It was beyond imagining. In fact, the very concept was at the fringes of humanity’s scientific understanding, and if it seemed incredible to the people in the room, that was a reasonable reaction. For unbeknownst to anyone but Madeline and her fellow conspirators, the magic they were witnessing on the screen was not of human origin. It was a gift from above. A gift of knowledge given so that we might build the tools of our salvation.