Unstable Prototypes

Unstable Prototypes

Joseph R. Lallo

Smashwords Edition

Cover By Nick Deligaris

http://www.deligaris.com

Copyright ©2012 Joseph R. Lallo

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###

"Alright boys. Ready for the show?"

The man speaking was named Karter. Actually,
his name was much longer and more complicated than that, but since
no one ever used more than the first two syllables, he'd stopped
going any further. He was odd looking, to say the least. His head,
covered mostly with black hair threaded with gray, featured patches
of immaculate, glossy black that would look more appropriate on a
doll than a man. His face was mostly typical of an aging man who
has shown no interest in taking care of himself, but patches
managed to look as smooth and pristine as that of a newborn. As a
whole, the vaguely bizarre features would likely have been enough
to push him into the so-called "uncanny valley" reserved for
androids, bad special effects, and other not-quite-right humanoids,
but one in particular was outright wrong. His right iris, rather
than matching the hazel color of his left, had a mirror finish. A
pair of dark goggles was perched on his forehead, and he was
wearing arctic gear.

Among any other group of people, he would
have stood out like a sore thumb. The three men who joined him,
however, made him look positively mundane by comparison. Each was
dressed for cold weather, sporting the sort of shiny synthetic
outerwear that mountain climbers favor. Equally synthetic headgear,
gloves, and boots were joined by almost comically oversized goggles
blinking here and there with the telltale indicator lights of
electronics. What little flesh was exposed was unfailingly marred
by burns both chemical and thermal, scars, stitches, grafts, and –
where possible – tattoos.

"We are quite ready, Mr. Dee. I am optimistic
that you are able to provide a tool that meets our very specific
requirements," said the man who was unquestionably their
leader.

"Minimal structural and biological impact,
maximal electronic and technological? Not an uncommon request.
Getting things to work on the scale you're looking for would
normally be tricky, but lucky for you a prior party had requested
something similar a few years back. Right, so let's get
started."

The group was standing in the middle of a
seemingly endless field of broken, cratered ground. A gray sky,
scattered with wispy white clouds, offered little in the way of
light and nothing in the way of warmth. A crust of ice covered
everything, crunching underfoot as Karter approached one of a
handful of complex looking bits of equipment in their immediate
area. A base approximately the size of a fifty-five gallon drum and
constructed from shiny metal panels was topped with a trio of
spindly metallic arms, studded with small discs and tracing out the
rough shape of a globe. On the side of the base was a hefty,
Frankenstein-style knife switch, and dangling above it was what
appeared to be a pipe bomb attached by quick release to a flimsy
gantry. He pulled down his goggles and leaned down toward it, but a
message assembled out of at least three female voices crackled
across a speaker somewhere beneath his coat, interrupting him.

"You should inform your guests of the safety
precautions," said the message.

"Oh. Right. You boys might want to look away.
Unless, of course, you want to know what your retinas smell
like."

"Our goggles should provide adequate
protection," the leader assured.

"Heh, you wouldn't believe the number of
blind guys I know who said that."

With a quick flick of the switch, he stepped
quickly away from the contraption and began heading toward a
dilapidated hover-style school bus a few dozen yards away. Behind
him, the contraption was humming, and the discs attached to the
thin arms were glowing brightly.

A few seconds later, the rocky field was
bathed in a light as bright as day, as a swirling mass of
brilliantly shining light coalesced with a whoosh of sound. The
three men turned suddenly away, shielding their eyes. By the time
any of them could make anything out in the churning purple
afterimages that were crowding their vision, they were seeing their
host slip into the bus.

"Let's go, boys," he said impatiently.

The trio stumbled across the uneven ground
and into the bus.

"Quite impressive, Mr. Dee," said the leader
of the men, once the bus had started and was heading quickly away
from the blinding device. "How quickly can you-"

"That's not the device you are after. That's
part of the demo. It's a contained ball of helium and hydrogen
plasma, the output of a small fusion reactor. It is there to
provide us with a reasonable small scale analog of our reaction
medium. That doodad hanging over it is the item of interest, the
reaction trigger. One of these," he said, pulling out a device,
identical to the one hanging over the plasma.

"Indeed? And what of the rest of this?" asked
the spokesmen of the group, indicating the bizarre assortment of
devices that were whipping by outside the windows.

It was a collection of, it would seem,
randomly selected objects. There were remote controlled toys
rolling and hovering about between street lamps, data terminals,
hover cars, and even a small, hovering space vessel.

"Targets. A representative sampling of
consumer electronics and infrastructure. Some on batteries, others
hooked up to generators, and others hooked up to the grid. Right.
Here we are."

They pulled up to what looked to be a
fortified bunker. The plasma ball was a bright dot on the
horizon.

"Get ready, and keep your eyes on the
plasma," Karter said.

A few moments passed, the three visitors
observing the now distant ball of light with eyes just recovering
from its ignition. When nothing seemed to be happening, the leader
turned to address their host.

"What precisely are we-" he began, just in
time to see the door click shut on the bunker.

"Activating," said Karter over a loudspeaker
mounted on the bunker.

Before anyone could voice concerns about why
he had seen fit to hide within the shelter and leave them outside,
the tiny form of the pipe bomb released, dropping into the plasma.
A moment passed, and then a massive lance of light burst out of the
top of the plasma ball, curling into the sky like a silk ribbon
drawn into a tornado. As quickly as it came, it was gone, but the
effect it left in its wake was undeniable. Instantly, each of the
devices and vehicles filling the field between the bunker and the
test site failed simultaneously. Hovering devices dropped to the
ground. Some of the less potent gadgets fizzled with pops of
electricity, and there was even a scattered spray of sparks from
some. Even as far away as they were, the PA speaker made crackling
hiss of failure and the hover bus momentarily shuddered.

The door to the bunker clicked open again,
and Karter walked out.

"That was a directional emission, pointing
straight up. What you witnessed happening to all of this crap in
the field was just the collateral damage, so try to picture what it
would have done if it was actually aimed at them."

"Unmistakably impressive," remarked the
spokesman. He withdrew a credit card sized piece of electronics
from his pocket. It flickered a few times, but finally activated,
displaying a mildly scrambled welcome screen. "The effect was very
brief, however. My slidepad is already coming back online."

"That's because the fusion reactor was taken
out by the blast. Toss something like that into a reactor that can
take the hit, or is self-sustaining, and that pulse becomes a
continuous broadcast. And it scales linearly with the size of the
reaction medium, so you can imagine what it would be like when you
try it on the real deal."

"With any luck, I won't have to imagine it.
How long would this broadcast last?"

"We've only ever deployed one of these in the
field once. I think it lasted for three months. But that wasn't
anywhere near optimized. It was a rush job. I figure we could get
that up to a year pretty easily. And firing these things is all
you'll have to do. Automated targeting makes them home in on their
targets, automated defenses makes them impossible to disarm, and
twilight drives keep them from being tracked by normal
sensors."

"Excellent. You'll be coming with me, then.
I'll need you to prepare a production facility so that we can
maintain a ready supply," he said, tapping some commands into his
freshly rebooted pad.

"Nope. We do the production here. If you want
reproduction rights, we are talking about a much larger fee.
So-"

"Multiple unauthorized device deployments
detected in and around the facility," the automated voice
announced. "Electromagnetic pulse dev-"

The signal suddenly cut off in a burst of
digital distortion. Karter's hand was already on the grip of a
firearm at his belt, but a hypodermic injector was pressed to his
neck and he collapsed to the ground.

"Lock coordinates and activate, radius six
meters, centered on transmitting position," ordered the leader into
his slidepad as his men gathered up the unconscious inventor and
clustered around.

A few moments later there was a flash. When
the dust cleared, the men, as well as a hemispherical bowl of rock
and soil beneath where they had stood, were gone.

Lex had certainly enjoyed more than his share
of excitement in the past. His short but stellar career in the
world of hoversled racing, one would imagine, would have been the
high point so far. Failing that, it would certainly be a reasonable
assumption that his ruinous fall from grace at the hands of a race
he'd fixed against his will would have added plenty of undue
excitement to his life. In truth, though, it all paled in
comparison to the events of earlier that year when he had, through
dumb luck and desperation as much as skill, managed to foil a plot
that could have taken the lives of nearly half a million people,
not to mention the star systems they called home. That little
adventure was something he thought of as the 'Bypass Gemini
Incident.' It had involved directly opposing VectorCorp, the
largest corporation in the galaxy, and had required the aid of a
man who could only be called a mad scientist. Yes, there had been a
number of exciting days in his life.

This was not one of them.

Currently he was cleaning up his tiny
apartment. The place was little more than a combination living
room/bedroom dominated by a flatscreen that took up nearly one
entire wall and a futon that occupied most of what space was left.
A door at the opposite side led to a room that would have been
called a closet if not for the fact that it had a sink, a
refrigerator, and a microwave. It adjoined a room that was
similarly a bathroom in name only, with a toilet and shower wedged
tightly enough to make successfully closing the door behind you a
veritable contortionist act. Generally he allowed trash and grime
to accumulate until it made it difficult to navigate the space
safely, but today he was sanitizing it in preparation for a rare
visit from his girlfriend.

Her name was Michella Modane, and by virtue
of their jobs, the pair had been having something of a long
distance relationship despite the fact they lived less than twenty
minutes apart. She was an investigative reporter, and thanks to her
coverage of the very same near-catastrophe that had made such an
impression on Lex's life, she'd managed to become one of the more
respected and sought after figures of local news. In the past,
"local news" might not have been an impressive achievement, but
these days the term local tended to cover multiple planets, so she
was rather proud of how far she had come. Most of her information
regarding that first big story had come from Lex himself, but
everything since had been due to her own significant skills. In the
eight months since that big break, she had gone on to unearth
scandals and plots ranging from disgraced government officials to
corrupt corporate executives. If you had secrets, you did NOT want
to get a visit from Michella Modane.

One might then assume that this meant that
Lex had no secrets. After all, he was anticipating her arrival so
eagerly he was willing to clean out the crevices of his futon,
which was at this point a veritable archeological expedition. As a
matter of fact, Lex did have secrets, a point which had caused no
small amount of friction between them. The first was the specific
name and location of the man who had provided him the equipment
that had made his heroic deeds possible. Considering the fact that
he'd bested the security of VectorCorp, a company more powerful
than most individual governments, and had done so despite a
complete lack of anything resembling training, her curiosity was
entirely understandable. So far he'd been able to avoid telling her
by making it clear that his unnamed benefactor would be in terrible
danger if he was revealed, and more so, would not be terribly
pleased with Lex for revealing him. It had been enough to convince
her, and by happy coincidence it happened to be true.