Professors Derek Martin and Mick Samuels stood in front of the bank of LED screens staring in disbelief at the satellite images and real-time video that was being relayed to them from the Skybird satellite and the G-IV Gulfstream high-altitude plane that was flying directly above the storm center.
As the images on the wall screens showed, there were now no longer four separate hurricanes: only minutes before two of them had collided together, and now as they watched, the third of the hurricanes - Hurricane Josephine - was beginning to collide and merge with the new, single mega-storm just formed by the collision of Isaias and Hanna.
Ten minutes ago they had been able to see four clearly defined 'eyes', one at the center of each hurricane: then as Isaias and Hanna had collided, they had merged together and coalesced until the dark blue centers in the middle of each had warped together, forming one single hurricane eye.
Surprisingly the eye of the combined Hanna-and-Isaias hurricane was smaller than the individual eyes had been in each of the separate hurricanes. At the same time, they had observed a visible increase in the speed of rotation of the new hurricane, and it had changed course towards Josephine, veering slightly away from Hurricane Kyle.
Incredibly, almost as if it could sense what had just happened, Hurricane Kyle had also altered its course, veering further to the north west and now on a new collision course with the other hurricanes.
At this moment, the titles that Derek and Mick shared - 'Professor'- held very little meaning to either of them. For all their education and training, the basic fact was that neither man understood what was happening...this was something that had previously never been observed or described in any text-book and could not be predicted.
In theory, what was happening today was impossible.
At its most basic, a hurricane was an extremely intense rotating weather system that began to form over tropical oceanic regions, and then developed and intensified until sustained wind-speeds reached over 74 mph. The strength and power of all hurricanes varied according to a number of factors, but there was a general acceptance that their destructive capability could be categorized on a scale of '1' to '5' , depending upon the hurricane's wind speed.
Hurricane Hanna was a Category 4 hurricane. It had formed before the others, spun up north and then, incredulously, started to veer back down south. According to the text book definition, just before it collided with Isaias, Hanna had a sustained wind speed of between 130-156 mph. Isaias, on the other hand was a Category 5 hurricane... exhibiting wind speeds of well over 157 mph. Isaias had formed a thousand miles away from Hanna, had also moved north, grown in strength, and then started to veer south towards Central America, colliding with Hanna en route.
Hurricanes Josephine and Kyle were younger than Hanna and Isaias, but had already grown to Category 3, which meant that internal wind speeds had reached over 111-129 mph.
The satellite images that Derek and Mick were studying showed the typical storm spirals of clouds spinning outwards in an anticlockwise direction.
As Hanna and Isaias had collided, the size of the new superstorm had initially grown, covering a much larger geographic area, but then it had rapidly shrunk in size.
It was hard to imagine what was actually happening inside the storm. The instruments before them that lined their laboratory, told them facts and figures, and the satellite images showed them what the storms 'looked' like...but this was on a massive scale... What was actually, really, truly happening inside these storms?
Staring at the images of the storms taken from 550 miles above the Earth's surface, Derek felt like a little child, totally inadequate and useless. The scientific equipment in this room at the Bush Center for Geo-Electromagnetic Studies represented the state-of the-art knowledge of mankind. It was the most advanced equipment anywhere on the planet, connected and communicating with aircraft, submarines, satellites, and spacecraft that represented the pinnacle of human advancement and achievement...and yet, basically, in spite of all their clever machines...they hadn't really got a clue what was going on out there in the ocean today.
They had ideas ...theories ...suggestions ...guesses,yes, but really nothing more.
The conditions that led to four separate hurricanes being established and then sustained at the same time in the Atlantic Ocean were not clearly understood by contemporary science.
On a more positive note, Derek knew that in the years to come, the events that were happening now would be studied, dissected and modeled ad infinitum until the existing models that predicted weather patterns and hurricane formations could be successfully updated and refined, making today's events predictable and fully comprehensible. But that was the future... for now they could only watch, record everything and try to understand it all later.
As Isaias and Hanna collided with Josephine from the north, Kyle pushed into and merged with Josephine from the east.
Mick lifted his hand and wrapped an arm around Derek's shoulder. This was the moment that Professor Derek Martin had been waiting and watching for, for most of his adult life.
In Switzerland, atomic physicists had spent billions of dollars building a research center to watch and observe what happened when atoms collided together. At the completely other end of the scale, the reason why the Bush Center for Geo-Electromagnetic Studies had been built was almost purely to observe the next few moments: what would happen to the electrodynamic energy of the storms when they collided? Eight years before, Derek had predicted that under conditions similar to those being witnessed now, they should observe the creation of unstable singularity in space that he had called a 'Hunraken Vortex'.
When Derek had first conceived of the Hunraken Vortex he was a Ph.D. student studying atmospheric physics at the University of Delaware. When he had presented his final thesis to the professors in his department for his Ph.D. examination, he had initially been met by silence. At first this led him to believe that he had just failed his Ph.D. and that the past five years of his life had been wasted. But then, after several minutes of silence, three out of the five professors in attendance had stood and given him a standing ovation. The other two professors had remained seated, and had given the impression that they did not agree with Derek's findings. Derek had been asked to leave the room, and await the decision of the panel, forced to endure three hours of waiting whilst the professors debated his work and his thesis and decided whether or not to award him his doctorate degree.
When the professors had finally emerged from the room in Sharp Lab where the presentation had taken place, they had surrounded him, congratulated him, and commented excitedly upon the quality and scope of the work. They had then all retired to the Blue Hen Club, drank lots of beer and spent the rest of the day and evening debating and arguing excitedly whether or not a Hunraken Vortex was possible and could ever be created naturally or manufactured by large-scale experimentation.
Since that day physicists and mathematicians the world over had continued to debate and theorize over the possibility that the Hunraken Vortex could ever exist.
If it could, the implications were truly mind-blowing.
When Mick Samuels had first heard about the Hunraken Vortex, he had been attending a guest lecture by Professor Martin at MIT. Having just graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard, and specializing in both Electrodynamics and Quantum Mechanics, he had been fascinated by what he had heard, and had later studied everything that Professor Martin had written. A conversation had then developed between the two over email, and when funding for the Bush Center had been granted, Mick had been Professor Martin's first hire.
Together they had built the laboratory, hired other scientists, and launched a new field of research into the effect that ultra-high electromagnetic fields would induce in solid state, gaseous and liquid matter.
In essence, in much the same way the Atomic Bomb became the visible, tangible proof that matter could exist either as mass or as energy, the bomb being the catalyst that converted the matter back into energy, the Hunraken Vortex,
if ever observed, would be the tangible proof that a much wider study of quantum electrodynamics also had a physical effect on the real world that people could observe and experience.
During 2011 and 2012, the Higg's Boson was much sought after in Cern to prove the existence of one universal force in Physics, yet scientists always struggled to explain in simple terms what the Higg's Boson was or why it was important. The same became true of the Hunraken Vortex: for a while it became the lovechild of the media. Everyone talked about it and wrote about it, but no one could ever explain in simple terms just what it was.
The reason for this was simple: any explanation of the Hunraken Vortex, by necessity, would be complex. Essentially, it required an understanding of quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, and meteorology.
At its simplest level Derek Martin had hypothesized that when the magnitude of an electrodynamic field increased beyond a specific level, known as the Hunraken Amplitude, the structure of the electrodynamic field that held together the sub-atomic particles that make up matter, would begin to deteriorate, or effectively 'shatter'. At this transition point any physical matter would either transform to an unstructured plasma of energy and matter which would be formed at that point in time and space into a form of 'cosmic goo', or, the matter would essentially 'flip' from one point in the space time continuum to another point in time or space where the 'electrodynamic pressure' was lower.
In other words, when the electromagnetic field got too great, matter in the center of the field could theoretically be squeezed from one point in space and time to another, making it jump from Point A to Point B: the Hunraken Vortex.
Derek had first hypothesized the existence of the Hunraken Vortex in an attempt to resolve an anomaly he found in the work of a professor he had previously studied under at Delaware: its existence had effectively popped out of the mathematics as he fought to find an answer to another problem.
It had taken Derek a while to understand the full implications of what he had discovered.
There were now many scientists who were interested in his work, and funding to continue and expand the field of research he was developing was surprisingly simple to come by.
In particular there were two main sources of the funding. The first was NASA. The second was the American Military.
The latter being very interested indeed.
As Derek and Mick watched the screens, Mick noticed that Derek was shaking.
"Nervous?"
"You betcha."
"So am I."
Nothing more was said. In the years leading to this point in time, countless hours had been spent in discussing exactly what might be seen if the formation of a Hunraken Vortex was ever observed.
Basically, after all the debate, still no one knew what to expect.
The vortex was an electromagnetic effect: according to the calculations they had run on the supercomputer, the electromagnetic field necessary to create the conditions under which it might manifest itself, if indeed such a phenomena was possible, was beyond the capability of being generated by any existing machine on earth that Derek yet knew of.
A hurricane, on the other hand, was made by Nature. And Nature was infinitely more powerful than man.
In effect, a hurricane was a machine, a large heat engine that fed on the incredible amount of heat absorbed from the sun by the waters of the tropical oceans, and then later released tremendous amounts of that heat -or energy- into the air. As the air heats up, storms form and grow.
As the storms moved, they carried that energy with them, dissipating it slowly as the storms spun away from the source from where the power had originally been fed into the machine: the waters of the tropical oceans.
Professor Martin had seen the potential of these 'weather machines' to carry vast amounts of 'heat': energy which could, under specific circumstances, be released instantly instead of being dissipated slowly over a large area. He had calculated that should several storms collide together from different directions, the effect would be to focus the electromagnetic energy contained within the storms into a small, confined area of space: an electromagnetic cauldron of intense energy: the 'Hunraken Cauldron'. Under the right conditions, this energy would have nowhere to go, and as the storm systems compressed together, the electromagnetic energy within that focal area would rapidly increase and intensify until it passed over the Hunraken Amplitude, and a Hunraken Vortex was initiated.
Professor Martin's theory predicted the possible creation of either a 'cosmic goo', or a vortex from one point in space and time to another: but if either of these was formed, what would it look like?
And how large would it be? In a hurricane, what volume of space would it occupy? Would it be at all visible, or would it be so small that you could not really see it without a microscope?
There were a lot of unanswered questions, but everyone at the Bush Center for Geo-Electromagnetic Studies knew that each new journey into unchartered territory had to begin with a single step.
The first step was always the hardest.
As the two professors stared at the images on Screen 'A' they saw the eye of the hurricane in the center of Josephine crumple as the newly formed mega-storm made up of Isaias and Hanna smashed into it from the north. Almost simultaneously Hurricane Kyle penetrated the eastern side of Josephine, rapidly moving inwards to where the eye of Josephine had been just moments before.
It was a dark night, and only starlight and moonlight from a crescent moon were reflecting back from the layers of turbulent cloud below, making it difficult to see what was happening in the normal spectral range.
Two of the images on the screens were therefore showing what the satellites above were observing in the infra-red and micro-wave frequency ranges, on Screens 'B' and 'C' respectively. Both of these images were also rather dark, but as the hurricanes collided, the area around the collision between the hurricanes, suddenly started to light up with activity in the infra-red and micro-wave ranges. As the hurricanes merged, the center of the newly created superstorm started to glow.
On Screen 'A', the area around the center of the new superstorm began to shimmer, and tiny pulses of light seemed to glitter across the area at its core.
A moment later a sudden burst of intense visible light appeared on the image projected onto Screen A. For a tiny fraction of a second, a pulse of light as bright as the sun flashed on the screen, making both men watching exclaim involuntarily.
"Wow!" shouted Derek.
"Did you see that?" replied Mick.
But it was not over yet.
As the first pulse of light disappeared from the area around the center of the superstorm, a second pulse of light flashed and formed a ring of light which then spread outwards, decreasing in intensity as it expanded: it reminded Derek of the ripple you saw when you dropped a stone into a bowl of phosphorescent water.
But as fast the ripple of light spread outwards, the storm clouds left behind on the inside of the expanding circle of light seemed to blur for a moment, then disappear altogether.
It only took a moment for the circle of expanding light to wash outwards across the surface of the storm and fade away, but in those few seconds, almost all the storm cloud vanished, leaving behind only patches and wisps of dark cloud that rapidly grew lighter in color and then vanished as well.
Professor Derek Martin and Mick Samuels stared dumbstruck at the screens, both of their jaws gaping wide open.
"Bloody hell!..." Derek eventually said, breaking the silence. "Where did they go? What happened to Hurricane Josephine and Kyle and Isaias and Hanna?"
"They're gone! They've disappeared! EXACTLY like you predicted they would!"
"It's incredible... I was right! My theory was right...! One moment the storms were there...the next moment they weren't! And all the energy...it HAD to go somewhere!"
"Did you see the pulses of light? The radial wave spreading outwards...?"
"I've never seen anything like that bef
ore. No one has...But where did the energy go?"
"Through a Hunraken Vortex! It's the only explanation!"
"Mick... I think you're right. That has to be the answer!"
"Let's watch it again..."
But before Mick could wind back the video streams to the moment just before the collisions took place, the phones began to ring.
Most were people calling to congratulate them, and to join in the excitement of the moment, or to try to be the first television or radio station to get a quote which they could rush onto the airways as they reported that the dangerous storms in the Atlantic no longer posed a threat to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
But then the red phone on Derek's desk rang, the first in a chain of events which would soon threaten the survival of mankind itself.
Derek picked it up.
It was the Flight Operations Center at NOAA.
Stormchaser 3 had gone missing.