Uplift (20 page)

Think of them as snakes with tentacles. They were quite strong
.
Here is an image from the escapee
.

An image appeared of a four-meter long, brown snakelike body coiled partly around the leg of a pretty, humanoid woman. Her back was arced, and tentacles around her arm, and head. Her face was locked in a rictus of pleasure, or pain.

Richard had a hard time catching his breath. He had caught strong emotion besides the image.

Corey. You were the escapee! You were the scientist that escaped. You knew how to build the shield because you stole one of their shuttles. Was that female someone you knew?

Corey was silent, but a wave of grief, and embarrassment washed over me.

She was your mate – wasn’t she…and you couldn’t protect her. I felt his sadness, and longing, and…pain…long buried, and exposed…definitely male.

Yes. (Long pause) We have little time left. How is the progress going on any weapons? I have been working elsewhere. Corvette, and Carole are doing well. We have the beginnings of a communications systems to use from your Earthly research – this quantum entanglement is simply a function of multidimensional linkages. We can exploit that. Corvette has told one of her chief researchers – a brilliant man named Hershel Graham about us. You should probably do the same with Hamilton Withers.

We are about to do another test today. Hamilton said he’d have something to show me. I’ll talk with him afterward.

We do not have much more time.

****

Hamilton was hopping around today it seemed. He came up to me with that boyish grin. He looked about thirty.

“What do you have for me Hamilton?”

“We have a weapon. We can cut through a shield, and any physical matter we encounter even better than with the vibrochette. That’s it right now – but we think we can make it project like a beam. Goes out through our shield, and projects outward in a two-dimensional plane.”

“How far can it project?”

“Come on boss. You’re asking for miracles.”

I lifted my eyebrows questioningly.

“Five hundred meters,” Hamilton answered. “The projector isn’t very big. We’re trying to increase the range, and make it smaller so we could have a kind of personal light saber, or a remote control mine. There are a lot of issues we haven’t resolved with the remote control mine idea – space is so vast. We can’t transmit through it at all if we’re using a strong field. We can use a Delta field that would hide for a specific time, and then come out, and use our blade weapon.”

“Hamilton. Good job. Get everyone working on it under that Echo field. We need to accelerate our timetable.”

“What’s up boss? Competition from the Chinese, or Washington?”

“I need to explain a few things to you. Let’s go to the indoor test range,” I said, and signaled security that I wanted some private time.

Hamilton turned to me. “What’s up? Where are you getting all these ideas? I don’t believe it’s all from you, from Carole, or from the team.”

“I’ve got a confession to make Hamilton. I have an embedded artificial intelligence aiding me. It is not of Earthly origin. What’s more…we’re about to face some threats – some from other governments, and some from outside our system.”

“Outside our solar system?”

“Outside our solar system…really. Like what? When? How? Aliens? Come on…”

I gave Hamilton the abbreviated story, and displayed the one prominent picture of the Horde’s interaction with a besieged race on a slate. Also gave him the step-by-step, the Horde uses when it loots a planet. “Currently we have no defenses,” I said.

Hamilton sat in front of me, quietly, while he thought about what I told him. “You were right to hold off telling me any of this until now. This dimensional fields, and faster than light travel is so far ahead of what we’d been doing that I was really starting to wonder. This answers a lot of questions. Can we trust these hyperdimensional personality cores?”

“Think we have no choice. They are giving us the tools to survive the coming die-off from genetically modified foods.”

“I’ve seen some preliminary research on that – do you think that is going to get worse?”

“According to my source – we will lose about half of Earth’s population – about five billion…mainly the slower ones.”

“What? Five billion. …half the Earth’s population? We’ll lose good ones too – not all from cancers I assume, but from fights over food. Is that why you bought all those seed sharing facilities?” Hamilton asked.

“There will be fighting over scarce resources, and many of us have been eating these foods for decades. The food is fine, but the trace elements have been accumulating. It’s similar to how bacteria developed resistance to antibiotics in cattle feed, and then those antibiotics stopped working for humans. I didn’t know at the time, but those presticides, and toxins have been accumulating in tissues,” He paused to let the idea sink in. “Also…Our first test of faster than light travel succeeded before we were ready the other day…it made our system detectable. We probably need to complete our facilities to manufacture more Echo covered facilities. We can use hydroponics, cover whole existing buildings, but we need to get on it.”

“I’ll spin off another few companies to do that. We need to expand nanite production for our new workers. Boss – I’ll get some of my folks on it. I am losing more, and more of my teams to other projects. Send me more folks who have weapons design insights.”

I was really more worried about interference from the government now – I figured more, and more ringers would be slipped into our ranks. I’d try to recruit more people.

****

Leiman Kattemann had worked at General Dynamics for years, and then changed to work at Raytheon. He had a top secret with sensitive compartmentalized information clearance still – not the highest, but decent. He had been approached to join AcuMint’s spinoff, Rapid Field, and had jumped at the chance. This company was designing fields where work could be completed under the field at thirty times normal time. It really worked, and Leiman had been working a month at a time under the field before he got a week off in normal time. He had also gotten the nanite treatment, which had cleared up an old separated shoulder injury from football.

Two intelligence types approached him. They said they were CIA agents. They paid him to ‘keep tabs’ on what was happening, and anything he heard at Rapid Field. Leiman knew Rapid Field was ramping up production for more field generating equipment, and when he asked – was told it was for Whole Seeds, an organic food production series of small producers. He knew some of their equipment would go to AcuMint for weapons production, but couldn’t get on that team yet. His ‘handlers’ suggested he try harder – that it was in the national interest. He didn’t realize that they were Chinese nationals who had grown up in the US, and been recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security when visiting the mainland to ‘see their heritage.’ Leiman had been paid surprisingly little for the Echo dimension field plans. He thought he should have gotten more reward, but knew that the fields would be set up all over the country in a few weeks.

****

Center for Disease Control Director Madhur Rao, MD, MPH, was scowling as he read the latest research findings predicting almost ¾ of a billion dead due to cancer within five years. How could we have let this happen? He thought. Also, this firm, AcuMint, has tremendous growth outside the other existing large corporations. Now they’ve formed Fast Fields, and are promising organic foods with no pesticides. That’s good news. The ScriptFarming was boosting food production by 5% by suggesting future environmental conditions, and the crops that would yield the best. Too bad the company that has that data sells it, and only uses it where genetically modified seeds are sold.

This report is dynamite. It will kill the stocks of many of the agro companies. Conclusive proof that genetically modified foods had allowed pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides to build up in the body, causing a wide range of cancers. This wasn’t going to be suppressed – I will not let this one get suppressed like the preliminary two studies. I need to do it fast though. WikiLeaks – that’s the only way, but how do I do that? He took the sole copy of the paper, and put it in his safe – went to Starbucks down the street, and connected his tablet to their free broadband. He uploaded the document while waiting for his triple mocha. He stepped out of the store, and was getting in his car when he was gunned down.

The Indian operative who had been contracted for this job said this man would release a report in another 24 hours that would hurt Indian food production. They didn’t say he would have already released it. He disassembled the weapon, and destroyed the gloves using a jar of tetrahydrofuran to destroy the prints on the inside of the fingers.

****

Richard. The director of the CDC was just murdered. I suspect for publishing a report on the cancer epidemic that is occurring due to genetically modified foods. He evidently posted it on WikiLeaks, but it has already been removed everywhere it keeps popping up. The US, Russia, UK, EU, Chinese, and Indian governments have been trying to suppress it.

Corey. What do you think we should do? I suppose you have a copy, and have read it?

Of course I have it. My prediction is it would cause a cessation of permitted production of GM foods. GM foods would be illegally labeled organic, and illegally sold as if no pesticides were used. I know designs to make inexpensive detectors we could sell at 10% above cost to consumers. I would have to get the report all over the Net though. There will be riots, job layoffs, and deaths if I release it.

…and millions more cancers if you don’t. Do we take the deaths now, or later? Let’s go with now. Begin the production of the sensors. The sooner the better… Get that report distributed everywhere. Look at whoever opposes the report acting like it is
unconfirmed
, and eliminate them through disease, or nanites, or poison, or vehicular accidents. Monitor who contacts them, and kill them too. We will lose a lot of media people, politicians, CEOs, and marketing directors, but they should go. Trace back emails to where they originated. Kill anyone supporting that stuff. It was way past time to be compassionate.

I started brainstorming questions to ask Corey …do you have any technology that can destroy the chemicals in the soil? Could we use nanites sprayed over fields that would biodegrade rapidly into something inert, or even helpful to the soil?

We may, but anything we do would be looked at with suspicion after the Genetically Modified food duplicity for decades. We could try to get some government funding to study the issue, and spend more than they give us. Then we could release the report, and possibly save a few million with suggested solutions. We have to get them to approach us however. I think I can make that happen. The report is being sent to every blog site on the planet, and is translated into every language that has web access. I added photos from other confidential files showing the types of cancers – names, and faces withheld of course, but location of the hospitals, and dates. It will cause a lot of suspicion, but your computer systems are still crude by our standards, and I’m good.

Thanks Corey. Does Carole know?

Yes she does, and thinks you are a bloodthirsty bastard, but she had even more violent ideas than you.

****

Hershel called me all excited, to show me what his teams had come up with.

“It’s really good. I think we can do something with this. We just weren’t looking at it the right way. We’ve got essentially three types of fields that we can manipulate. We’ve got our defensive shield that can allow some energy, and matter through – though it delays it a bit. That shield can be strengthened so it reflects everything – it becomes the perfect mirror. We can set it so we reflect all energy, and matter – it goes back to the sender from whatever angle they shoot at us.”

“Okay. I see that…what about the others?”

“Well, we have the Delta Field that redirects all energy, and matter. We don’t know where it goes, but we don’t absorb it, and matter just disappears. We’ve sent probes against with powerful transmitters, but they haven’t come out within,” he stopped, and looked at his watch. “…Anywhere within 24 light hours of Earth, if the objects ever reenter normal space. We think it would be good to hide autonomous weapons that could attack.”

“And the third field,” I asked.

“You already know about that. We have a way to strengthen one area on a sphere, and it will travel really fast in the opposite direction. We can also manipulate its shape. We can project a thin two-dimensional plane about 1,500 meters. It projects out through our standard shield no matter how strong we make that field. It cuts through any matter. We’ve been able to make a personally sized one, but you will be disappointed. The field comes out about a meter, but you can’t see it. It’s hard to control.”

Turn on your terahertz vision Richard,
thought Corey.