PARALLEL
CONNECTION
A Science Fiction / Fantasy Novel
by John Jonas
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Parallel Connection
Copyright John Jonas 2014
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CHAPTER 1
James H. Wilkins always loved to go fishing with his dad at the lake. They didn’t always catch anything worth grilling with a little lemon juice but it was the experience that the 12 year old cherished most. Dad in his folding chair and little Jimmy sitting on the ice chest, both holding their fishing poles at the end of the dock. The battery powered radio’s volume was set on low, tuned to the Aggie-Longhorn football game and Dad’s Fightin’ Aggies were down a field goal. Jim was staring at his bobber, WILLING it to jerk down into the water when the loud beeping startled him out of his sleep.
Shutting off the alarm clock with memories of his father and Lake Buchanan fading away, Jim Wilkins kissed his still sleeping wife, forced his 6’4” frame out of bed and prepared to start another day. He would much rather be back in Burnet, Texas with his mom and dad but life and adulthood brought him to Phoenix. That, and the Department of Energy.
After earning his Masters in physics at Texas A&M, Jim got a job with the Dept. of Energy in July of 2049 at the Nuclear Materials Storage Facility here in Arizona. At the age of 26 and fresh out of college, he was one member of the ten engineer team chosen to design and build the new storage facility for enriched uranium. This turn of events worked out perfectly because his wife, whom he met in College Station, had family here in Mesa. Sylvia had been recruited to Texas A&M to play women’s basketball but after a knee injury she focused on earning her degree in teaching. Being 6’2”, she was an intimidating presence to her third graders but they all respected and liked her. Even though Jim was tall and had an athletic build, he never liked to play sports. He was more interested in his academic studies and when he strolled into the library on campus she immediately noticed him, especially his strikingly white hair. She thought it was premature gray but it had a blond tint to it under the fluorescent lights. He walked in with 3 or 4 books in his arms and sat down at a table with six chairs by himself. Sylvia waited a few minutes and wandered over, sat down at the opposite end and opened a book as if preparing to study. Over the next thirty minutes she had glanced at him and kept trying to think of an excuse to start a conversation when Jim asked her if she had a handheld computer he could borrow. When she looked at him, everything else and everyone else in the library disappeared because those mesmerizing green eyes. His white hair, green eyes and square jaw were irresistible and a year later they were married and living in Phoenix.
The uranium storage center, located outside the small town of Florence, southeast of Phoenix, was completed 10 years ago. It was built in response to numerous security breaches at the old Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee. Even though there has been a flawless safety record of using uranium in automobile power plants, hundreds of environmental protestors showed up at Oak Ridge every year causing trouble. When a group of them were found trespassing and trying to break into one of the buildings, the higher-ups in the D of E decided to move it to a more secure location. The new facility is located in the center of 500 acres of desert 300 feet underground. Any unauthorized trespassers have to cross a half mile of unobstructed view desert where they will stand out and be noticed by one of 30 cameras. Entry into the compound is only accomplished by multifactor authentication, which consists of having an RFID card and a retina scan. Parking is outside the main perimeter and the employee must enter through a security building where the RFID’s are read and the retina scans are performed. They are then transported to the facility by a once every half hour shuttle. The facility only has about 50 employees so everyone knows each other and their families. The only automobiles allowed on the grounds are the trucks that carry the containers in and out, along with the armed guards. Strict security procedures and meticulously kept logs are kept to account for every gram of uranium that is processed here. Enriched uranium used to be used in nuclear weapons but is not needed any longer thanks to the new space-based lasers that are more powerful than any bomb created.
Uranium is now used to power cars. The enriched stuff is processed to a more depleted level but still volatile enough to generate enough energy to power an automobile engine. A tiny reactor is used to break down water into its two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. These gases are then pumped into the engine where it is combined (burned), which then pushes the pistons down and produces enough horsepower to move the car. All the driver has to do is fill the tank with water and the only by-product is either steam or small water droplets coming out the exhaust pipe, depending on the temperature and humidity of the air. The automobile grade uranium can’t be used to make bombs but the enriched uranium, stored at this facility, is.
As Jim was stepping out of the shower he heard his phone ring. The wristphone was sitting on his dresser so he let it go to voicemail so he could dry off. After slipping into his jeans he put on his wristphone and grabbed the rest of his clothes and went into the kitchen so he could finish getting dressed without waking that beautiful brunette in the bedroom. He put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, put some bacon in the microwave, grabbed a cup of coffee and finished getting dressed while his breakfast prepared itself. Sitting down at the kitchen table with his bacon on toast Jim said “call voicemail” and listened to his secretary asking him to call the office in what sounded like an urgent tone.
He said “call office” and in 2 seconds he could hear his secretary’s voice coming out of his wrist, “Engineering and Logistics, Jim Wilkins’ office. May I help you?”
“Linda, this is Jim. What’s up?”
“Oh, good morning Mr. Wilkins. I’m sorry to bother you but Mr. Sorenson from security wanted me to get hold of you and ask that you get here as soon as possible. He’s really upset and you know how he gets when he’s excited, he starts repeating himself and running around and … “
Jim interrupted “I know how he hyperventilates Linda. Any idea why this time?”
“He is saying something about a cylinder missing.” Linda said.
All Jim could say was “Impossible!” but he was already scrambling for his keys and yelling that he was on his way. After jumping into his old Ford pickup and almost forgetting to open the garage door, Jim had the car speeding down highway 60 toward Florence Junction with nothing but questions running through his mind. How? How is a cylinder missing from one of the most secure places on Earth? Is this just an accounting error? Jeez I hope it’s that, somebody miscounted or maybe a computer glitch. If there really is a cylinder missing, the Department is going to come down HARD on the whole group and EVERYBODY is going to get an anal exam. Just as he thought about this, he reached the gate where the guard read his parking sticker with the RFID scanner and he was able to pull his old beat up Ford into his assigned slot. As he got out of the truck he could see that the Security building, where everyone entering must pass, was not normal. Body armored security guards were stationed on either side of the main doors and approximately every 100 feet along the fence facing the road. He could see the cameras, usually stationary, rotating ever so often and Jim could almost feel them staring at him as he walked towards the door.
As he entered the building he saw some new people manning the checkpoint that he did not recognize. The guard holding his RFID badge, making sure it was unaltered, was a big and well built mountain of a man only a few inches shorter than him. The usual procedure of just holding your badge under the RFID reader and then placing your face in the retina scanner was not being done today. The guard removed his badge, examined it, compared the picture to his face then let him pass to the scanne
r. After checking his eyeballs, the second guard pressed a button and Jim walked through to the platform to wait for the shuttle. Only this time there was no shuttle but there was a van with an armed guard holding the door for him, so Jim took a seat and accepted the ride to the main building. It was just him and the driver and as the van made its way down the two lane road, Jim stared out the window at the featureless desert landscape and tried to visualize what happened.
The cylinders that the uranium is stored in are eighteen inches long and six inches in diameter. Each cylinder holds about three pounds of uranium and are lead lined, which explains why each one weighs about 25 pounds. They are stored in an automated vault that is 300 feet underground and has a biometrically controlled access system. A biometric identity authentication system is based on the characteristics of a person, such as face, voice, fingerprint, retina pattern, hand geometry or signature. The retina scan station in the security building uses biometrics but the main vault has a voice recognition system that controls access to it, and in this case access is restricted to just three people. Only the Security Chief Rick Sorenson, the Facility Administrator Melinda Powell and Chief Engineer Jim Wilkins are allowed in the vault. The cylinders are transferred by automated robotic arms and are moved through tubes that extend up through the ceiling. Each cylinder has an eight digit serial number and an attached RFID tag, which allows the computers to know its exact location at all times. There is also an embedded GPS locator in all of them but this device only gets activated when it travels past the perimeter of the main building. Anytime a cylinder is moved in or out of the vault, there is a computerized record of the serial number with a timestamp.
After going through the second security checkpoint, Jim was met at the elevator by Rick Sorenson.
“Good morning, Rick. What the heck happened?”
The Security Chief, with his ever present coffee cup in his hand said “I’m not sure Jim, all we know is last night the logs showed we had 75 cylinders in the vault and this morning about 6 A.M., one of my assistants reported that there were 72. There is no record of any transfer and the computer doesn’t show anything but 3 cylinders vanishing into thin air. What time that was is anybody’s guess because last night’s log was time stamped at 11:30 P.M. and there is no record of any activity until the log check this morning. The only reason it was noticed is because the same man checked the logs last night and remembered the number.”
“What about the cameras? Anything on video?”
The elevator came to a stop and they both stepped out as Rick said “I was just about to go to the surveillance room, care to join me?”
“Absolutely, got any coffee in there?”
“Of course. Help yourself.”
Jim and Rick walked into a room that had subdued lighting to allow for the operators to easily watch the 3 large monitors mounted on the wall. These were directly in front of a massive console where there were three uniformed security guards seated. Each guard had what looked like an airplane cockpit console in front of him with more buttons and switches than Jim could count. As he was pouring his coffee he could hear the Security Chief tell one of his guys “Let’s take a look at the last 12 hours of the topside feed”. The three monitors on the wall switched to a view of the deserted landscape that surrounded the main building. He could see the perimeter fence in the distance. The guard touched a button and the video feed seemed to flicker a little as if it had changed speed. He saw the clock display on the lower right go from 6:30 P.M. to 7:30 P.M. and it continued to count up the hours as the light went from daylight to dusk to dark. When the counter reached 6 A.M. and the light had returned, nothing had happened on the video out of the ordinary.
“Well, it looks like nobody came in through the fence and I’ve got a team going through the personnel entry logs with a fine toothed comb. Switch to the vault feed and let’s see what we get.”
The video feed for the vault came up and Jim could see that the quality of the video was not as good as the rest of the camera feeds, it seemed a little grainy. He remembered that inside the vault, even though the uranium is sealed in lead lined cylinders, a small amount of radiation leaks out. This presents a problem for the internal CCD’s in the cameras. The result is a grainy video that is not as high a quality as the rest of them. What was on the screen now was a view of inside the vault with the usual time indication in the lower right corner. Jim could see the rack that he designed to hold the cylinders and still allow the robotic arms to grasp them. These racks were mounted on the far wall, which was about 30 feet across and 6 feet high. In the center of the room was the computer that controlled the arms and on the floor in front of the racks was a small set of what looked like railroad tracks that the robot traversed on. It moved left and right as needed and at the moment was in its storage position, which was far to the left side of the room.
Rick said “Speed it up” and the guard touched a button and the time at the lower right started counting up. Nothing unusual happened at first but at about the 1:00 A.M. mark, something appeared in front of the racks for just a flash and disappeared.
“Slow it down and replay at half second intervals starting at the 1:00 A.M. mark!” yelled Rick.
The screen in the center showed the vault and the clock on the right now included seconds in the display with decimal points. The guard advanced the feed by half second intervals and at first, nothing but vault showed. Then at the 1:14:35.2 mark, Jim could see on the screen what appeared to be a tall figure in front of the racks that only stayed there for a blink of an eye.
“Back it up and replay!” yelled Rick.
After using the controls to rewind and replay the video 3 or 4 times, it looked like a tall man had suddenly appeared in the vault in front of the racks at the 1:14:35.2 mark and then vanished when the clock reached 1:14:38.0. The intruder was wearing a dark jumpsuit of some sort with a wide metallic belt around his waist. He also had to stoop down a little which would indicate he was taller than 6 feet. Just before he vanished, he touched a spot on his belt and then disappeared, along with three cylinders, after being visible for only 2.8 seconds.
CHAPTER 2
as•ter•oid
noun: asteroid; plural noun: asteroids
A small rocky body orbiting the sun. Large numbers of these, ranging in size from nearly 600 miles across to dust particles, are found (as the asteroid belt ) esp. between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, though some have more eccentric orbits, and a few pass close to the Earth or enter the atmosphere as meteors.