Visions of the Future (68 page)

“I’ll keep it to myself,” I said. “By the way, she was a lot more animated when I mentioned that you wanted me to talk to Carl about his work—”

“Was she now?” Jake laughed again. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“There’s something I don’t understand yet,” I said, changing the topic. “They call it big science for a reason. The sort of ground-breaking research you’re talking about is done by large teams, not a single scientist.”

“Carl’s the head of a small engineering team,” said Jake. “What is often called a skunkworks. I’ve been keeping them separate from everyone else. I’m pretty sure that whatever they’ve found is a result of engineering work, rather than experimentation of the type you’re used to. I think Katherine’s reaction is due to a desire to learn what they’re up to.”

“Have you heard from him?” I asked.

“No,” Jake said. “And I really need him back on the job.”

“Any messages?” I asked. I threw my coat over the back of a chair, and my hat onto the table. The house pulled up a list on the nearest wall. I’d set my incoming calls to go directly to the message box while I was away.

There were two requests from editors, an invite from some journalist friends to meet up for dinner, and one from the local police division to tell me that they didn’t have an active investigation, that as far as they could tell Carl wasn’t missing anyhow, and that if I came up with any information to the contrary to please get in touch with them. I hadn’t called them, so I assumed that either Jake or Katherine must have told them about my involvement. I left another message for Carl, splashed some water on my face, and then headed out to the restaurant.

There was a small journalistic huddle around a table in a far corner. The place was crowded, dark and noisy. There was more beer than food on the table. I had almost reached the table when the restaurant patched a call through to me. “Priority call from Katherine Fitzgerald. Do you wish to take it?” The restaurant must have had an extraordinarily good environmental sound system. The audio appeared to be positioned right next to my head, and perfectly compensated for the background noise.

“I’ll take it,” I said, waving distractedly at my colleagues.

“I’m sorry if I’m interrupting something,” Katherine said. Perhaps some of the background noise was coming through on her end, despite the restaurant’s best efforts. “I have an idea where Carl and his team could be.”

I chuckled. “Is this going to cost me?”

“Hey,” she said. “I think the whole thing is a wild goose chase, but I want to know what my budget line item is paying for. Nobody talks to me.” I wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating or not.

“Why don’t you try talking to them directly?” I asked.

“Carl is pretty stubborn,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll talk to anyone until he’s ready. Whatever ready even means in this case.” She sounded peeved.

“That’s pretty much the same thing that Jake said,” I said.

“We have an old warehouse,” she said. “We used to use it for light manufacturing early on, but we outgrew it years ago. We’ve been trying to sell it. I think they may have moved in there in the meantime. I’ll send you the address, just in case.”

“I’ll head over there after I eat,” I said. “Do you mind sending him another message to let him know I’m heading over?”

“It’s a pretty run-down area,” she said. “Make sure you get the car to wait for you, otherwise you may have trouble getting a ride back if there’s nobody there.”

Katherine hadn’t been kidding about the neighborhood. There was a burned-out hulk of a building across from the warehouse, and the parking lot was overgrown with weeds. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone around, because it didn’t look like there were external windows. I instructed the car to wait for me, and went to find an entrance.

After knocking on the front door with no answer, I got back in the car and drove around the back to the loading bay. The bay door was open, surprisingly, and two people were standing on the dock. They were backlit by the light from the warehouse, so I could only see their silhouettes.

“You the journalist?” one of the figures said.

“Who’s asking?” I replied. I shielded my eyes and tried to make out their features with little success.

“I guess that’s a yes,” he said. “Katherine called about an hour ago to say you were on your way down here. I don’t know how she knew to call here. I guess you’d better come on in.”

“Are you Carl?” I asked. I climbed the stairs up onto the dock, and got a better look at who I was talking to. One of the two men was young, tall, exceedingly thin, and just about to fall over from exhaustion. The other was older than me, but certainly not old enough to match Katherine’s “poor old dear”.

“That’s me,” the older one said.

“I was expecting some sort of éminence grise, from what Katherine’s description,” I said.

He chuckled. “She has a way with words.”

“Pretty much everyone said you probably wouldn’t talk to me either,” I said.

“That’s pretty much the point of having a secret skunkworks team,” Carl said. He looked at his companion, and then back at me. “Jake said you studied physics before becoming a journalist.”

“You spoke to him?” I asked.

“I called him after Katherine called us,” he said. “Jake said he trusts you to keep a lid on the story until it’s okay to release.”

“I don’t know what the story is though,” I said.

Carl turned and walked back into the warehouse, waving with his hand for me to follow. The younger man closed the loading bay door after us.

I had been anticipating a dusty, cavernous space, but instead the room inside of the loading area was small, and looked more like an office. They must have sectioned the room off from the rest of the building, and cleaned it up.

Several young people were seated at various desks, and were clearly focused on their work, as my entrance appeared to be barely noticed.

“My team,” said Carl. “We’ve been working around the clock for the past few weeks. I’ve been sleeping here, when I can even find a moment.” He gestured at a pile of inflatable mattresses in the corner of the room.

“So what is the big mystery about?” I asked.

“Come,” he said, leading me to a flat metal table, in the middle of a cluster of equipment and instrumentation.

There was a small, flat metal disk floating several inches above the table. Carl whacked the disk with his hand, and it swung violently to-and-fro for a few seconds before reaching equilibrium once more.

“Electromagnets?” I asked. “Neat trick, but I’ve seen this one before.”

“Nope,” he said. “Why don’t you put your hand over the table and see what happens?”

I tentatively waved my hand over the table, and immediately noticed a small but not insignificant upward pressure. “What the—,” I said. “How did you get an electromagnetic field to interact with my hand?”

“This isn’t magnetic”, Carl said. “This is something completely else.”

“I thought your team was doing engineering, not cutting-edge physics,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes we are. I think you went up to see the noodle forest with Jake, right?”

I nodded affirmatively.

“Did you notice the bright coloration?” Carl asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Jake said the colors were specifically tuned to frequencies from the sun.”

“Right. We use special materials to capture as many photons as possible, at the wavelengths that make it through the Earth’s atmosphere.”

“Okay,” I said, “But what does that have to do with this floating disk?”

Carl looked at me slightly apologetically. “Sorry, it’s going to take one or two more digressions to explain what you’re seeing. You see,” he said, continuing, “humanity has become quite good at manipulating electrons over the past two hundred years. As a result, we can do all sorts of neat tricks with the electromagnetic force—”

“Like memristors?” I asked. Memristors, theorized about long ago, but only discovered practically in the last two decades, make so much of modern computer technology possible. The immensely powerful smart environment that we take for granted is entirely dependent on them, from the pattern matching that allows our driverless cars to function, to the seamless movement of my personal communication preferences as I move from place to place.

“Yes,” Carl said. “Like memristors. The thing is though, we have almost no ability to manipulate the other forces of the universe. Like the strong nuclear force, for example. The only way we know of to do anything with it is to blow things up.”

“Nuclear reactions,” I added.

“Right,” he said, “But it’s blunt force. We hit atoms with a metaphorical hammer and break them apart, or we apply immense heat and pressure and we fuse them together again. The same thing goes with the weak nuclear force, and—” he paused here for maximum effect, “with gravity.”

“Are you telling me you have some sort of anti-gravity device here? That’s simply not possible,” I said. There’s never been any solid evidence for a force that opposes gravity.

“Not precisely,” he said. “Remember we were talking about metamaterials for capturing photons and electrons?” A metamaterial is a blanket term for any substance that has been engineered to have properties not normally found in nature. The water repelling glass of a car’s windshield and the self-repairing fabric in clothes are both examples.

I nodded.

“They’re tuned to operate at the same physical scale and energy levels as the particles that they’re intended to catch. Mostly we’re talking about wavelengths less than a millimeter, or alternatively terahertz frequency—”

“I’m a little rusty on this stuff,” I said, interrupting him. “I know what the terms mean, but I can’t picture it.”

“It’s okay,” Carl said. “Just imagine that we keep reducing the size over and over, that we make materials that operate at many orders of magnitude smaller scales. You know what the Planck length, is?”

I vaguely recalled. “Isn’t that pretty much the smallest measurable length in the universe?”

“Yes, according to quantum mechanics. It turns out that the particles that control the nuclear forces—”

“Like the Higgs boson?” I asked. The evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson had been discovered while I was studying physics at college. I remembered the excitement among the faculty.

“Right, and other sorts of elementary particles, including the graviton,” he said. “Theoretical graviton, I should say,” he added. Despite the best efforts of physicists, actual physical proof of the existence of gravitons remained elusive.

“And so,” he said, “If humanity wishes to learn to master those forces like we have mastered the electron, we must learn to act on that minute scale.”

“Hence your anti-gravity device?” I asked.

“It isn’t anti-gravity,” he said. “It’s like a lens for gravitons. It produces an interference pattern, which has the rather odd side effect of focusing the Earth’s gravity a few inches above its surface.”

He must have misread my look of awe for confusion, because he added, “Remember this is only a technique. The specific result isn’t important, and the practical applications remain to be seen. All we’ve done is demonstrate that it is possible to have some level of control over gravitons, and possibly some of the other elementary particles that cause the other forces.”

I said nothing for a few seconds as the implications of what he’d said sunk in. “Oh man,” I said, eventually. “This is a big, big deal.” I realized that I sounded like an idiot, and shut my mouth.

“Big claim, big proof required,” said Carl. “Can you imagine if I published and it turned out we’re wrong, or there was a better alternative explanation for our results, or that others couldn’t duplicate our results?”

“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t even been born when the cold fusion scandal had rocked the physics community, but I’d read about it. There had been similar scandals within the medical community over cloning.

“It would completely discredit me, my team, and my sponsor,” said Carl. “Add in a corporate power struggle—,” he twirled his finger in the air, as if to say that he cared little for such things, but was forced to deal with them anyway.

“Somehow, I think you’ll do just fine,” I said, looking around for a chair to sit down on. “I think you’ll do just fine.”