chapter 18
TEAM 2, YEAR: 2016
Time Remaining: 180 Days
Although Finn had eaten a late lunch only hours before, he grabbed a Coke, a sandwich and a muffin from the kitchen before joining Owen and Riley in the boardroom. With Owen now present after working his day job, the newly-minted trio could get down to business and determine what method would neutralize Elevanium the quickest.
Finn sat down at the mahogany table and laid his spread of food before him. Riley handed Owen a thick coil-bound book and sat down beside him. Her own copy looked well-read with little pieces of coloured paper bookmarking various pages. Finn’s copy wore a collage of coffee and food stains on the cover. Owen read the title, Elevanium Neutralization Hypotheses and Speculative Assumptions. He flipped through the pages and saw endless text, charts, illustrations, images and flow charts. He had university textbooks thinner than this and with less information.
“This book is the compilation of the research we gathered while prepping for this op. All of these methods were either suggested by the two researchers we collaborated with during the prep for this mission, or, were methods used in neutralizing other materials that we thought might be useful here in some way.”
“Ugh. I hate reading on paper,” said Finn, heaving the thick document theatrically while swallowing a mouthful of banana muffin. “It makes my eyes feel like they’re swimming in mud. I wish we could just B-load the damn thing. I mean, who wants to physically read all of this? It’ll take forever.”
“Suck it up princess,” said Riley, smiling as she flipped to the first page.
Owen looked confused as he so often did when Finn or Riley made reference to something from the future to which he was oblivious. “B-load?”
“Brainloading,” explained Finn. “Some books you can upload right into your brain and save yourself the tiresome and tedious hassle of having to physically read it. The problem is that programming a document for B-loading is pretty time-consuming, so it’s really only feasible to do it to books that are going to sell lots of copies, so mostly mainstream stuff.”
Riley opened her book and flipped to a page that was bookmarked. “I’ve highlighted some methods that I think might be good. For example, on page 142, there is something about a gel that could possibly absorb the energy, plus it would need to be sped up considerably. On page 275, there is something about microbes, and on 332, there’s something about an electric shock. That one might be good. It seems like it might be fast. We need the process to be damn near instantaneous. At the longest, less than half a second.”
“Personally, I like this one,” said Finn, “on page 327.”
Riley flipped to the page. “Of course you do Finn. Anything that involves guns wins with you.”
“Neutralization via Zeno Rays,” read Owen. “Sounds complicated. And I’m not really sure what a zeno ray is.”
“Zeno rays are a highly-concentrated, highly-damaging energy-based ammunition. From a zeno ray gun,” explained Finn.
“And did you even bring a zeno ray gun?” asked Owen.
“Of course,” said Riley. “We brought supplies for all of these solutions unless it was something we knew we could get here. Some of the things we brought are unstable to a degree, so we left them in their protective boxes.” She motioned to the dorm room where the packing crates were stored.
The core left from the apple Owen had eaten had long since turned brown. There were enough coffee mugs, empty water bottles and soda cans on the boardroom table to give the impression that seven people had shared the room. Owen yawned. Finn’s dishevelled hair stood at all angles from holding his head over the book as he read. His eyes were red and bloodshot from continually rubbing them. Riley looked as composed as she had the moment she sat down hours earlier.
Owen felt at a major disadvantage. Riley and Finn had the advantage of having conversed with real professionals about all of these methods. This being the first time he had seen any of these solutions, Owen scanned the book as quickly as possible, trying to familiarize himself with all of the suggested methods before reading them again in greater detail.
The group read in silence, flipping through page after page. Every so often they would break into a discussion and talk through a process that seemed to have merit, but the conversation inevitably ended with Owen explaining why it would not be successful based on his knowledge of Elevanium or the pitfalls of the solution itself.
Owen rubbed his eyes. “Most of these won’t work and the ones that have potential could take days or months to be effective. Elevanium is just too dense for most of these,” said Owen. He flipped through the rest of the book and shook his head. “And the rest involve equipment I’ve only now just had a crash course in. I just don’t know enough about them to give you an accurate assessment.”
Finn put his feet on the boardroom table, reclined his chair as far back as it would go and tossed his book on the table. “Well, this is depressing. We’ve nearly gone through the entire book and none of these solutions are even close to being viable.”
The group took a break to let what they read sink in. Finn showed Owen his B-loading device. At first glance, it looked like a pair of earphones—two white ear buds attached to a thin, metal headband. Owen was surprised when Finn set the ear buds on his temples and not in his ears. After offering Owen a selection of popular fiction titles, Owen selected Finn’s recommended choice, Tales from the Trench, a highly-acclaimed, book-turned-movie about a human colony living in a pod-like city on the ocean floor. Finn started the device and watched Owen with interest. Owen, expecting his brain to be bombarded with an explosion of words and flashing imagery, felt and saw nothing.
“How long does it take?
“An instant,” said Finn, removing the device from Owen’s head.
“I don’t think it worked. I didn’t feel anything.”
Finn smiled. “What did you think of chapter twenty-three?”
“Amazing! How could a person live with such conflicting loyalties? I mean, what choice did Lennox have? The squid was…” A smile grew on Owen’s face and he appeared trance-like while his memory recalled all of what it had just taken in.
“The trick is knowing how to find what you’ve just B-loaded. The information gets placed in your brain, but then you need to recall it.”
Owen took the device from him and inspected it with awe. “What other books do you have?”
After taking in six books, Owen and Finn joined Riley at her CI. The screen showed mostly white except for some notes and illustrations on it. She stared at the screen, a perplexed look on her face.
“A digital whiteboard?” asked Owen, looking at the screen and seeing sketches and notes.
Riley looked at him sideways. “How did you know this program was called Whiteboard?”
“I didn’t. It just looks like a whiteboard.”
“I could never figure out where the program designers got the name from. Scratchpad, okay. Thought Canvas or Idea Sketch, maybe. What is a whiteboard?” asked Riley. “I mean, I get that it’s white…”
Owen chuckled as he disappeared into one of the offices. He returned pushing an executive-sized whiteboard on wheels. He set it beside Riley’s CI screen and took one of the dry-erase markers from the ledge at the bottom of the board. He drew a picture of a cube then swiped his index finger across the illustration to leave a swath of clean white in its wake, to demonstrate the dry-erase quality. He recapped the marker, hitting the lid closed with the heel of his hand.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” breathed Riley. Finn dove for a marker.
Owen enjoyed these few moments when the tables were turned and Riley and Finn were the ones in the dark about the simplest things that had apparently become obsolete somewhere between the year 2016 and 2097. “Surely you’ve heard of a whiteboard before? Chalkboard?”
Their heads shook.
“I mean, we had handwriting tablets when I was little, but that’s about it,” said Riley.
Owen chuckled as he watched Finn draw on the board, inspecting his work as carefully as a surgeon would review his stitches, then erase it.
“It’s a little more low-tech than I thought you’d be used to,” said Owen.
“Oh, it is,” agreed Finn. He removed the cap from the red dry erase marker and smelled it. “It’s super low-tech, but it’s so neat and I’ve never seen anything like it, well, in real life anyway.”
While no conclusion was drawn on a particular method, the team agreed that the first day of research into the neutralization of the Elevanium got off to a good start. They celebrated this with a late night barbecue on Owen’s rooftop patio. The conversation over dinner was lively considering the hour. Finn’s fascination with the past was rivalled only by Owen’s curiosity about the future, and much of dinner was spent cross-referencing different aspects of daily living to see how they differed in 2016 and 2097.
After dinner, they relaxed in reclining deck chairs with wine in hand and stared up at the stars. Owen drifted in and out of the conversation and wondered how many evenings he had been spent doing exactly this with his father over the years. He noticed he had been dwelling less on the death of his father since the arrival of Riley and Finn, and for this he was grateful. He knew that if his father could see how little living his son had done in the last six months, he would have been very disappointed. But Owen’s heart had lost all interest in hiking, kayaking or any of the things he previously loved to do. His telescope had accumulated a thick layer of dust. The distractions that Riley and Finn brought were so different from the usual, monotonous routine he had designed to keep his mind occupied every waking minute—work, sleep, work, friends and more work. At night, his mind would become flooded by the waves of mourning he dammed up during the day, but that had changed since the arrival of Riley and Finn. They brought a level of distraction so unique that it encompassed him entirely.
Riley looked over at Owen, who had fallen quiet and saw his thoughts were elsewhere. She knew he would bear a considerable amount of strain between the time spent at his real job and the time spent working with them in the evenings and on weekends. She had personally experienced and seen in her co-workers, how damaging an unbalanced work-to-life ratio can be. It could destroy relationships, cause excessive mental strain and physical illness, making neither work nor life very enjoyable.
Time Remaining: 177 Days
For the fourth evening in a row, Riley, Finn and Owen revisited the coil-bound book of proposed neutralization methods. They had seated themselves at the back of the lab to enjoy the setting sun, which by now had long since set. Finn was reclined back in his cushy lab stool with his arms folded behind his head with his feet up. He stared blankly at the ceiling in concentration. Owen conceptualized an idea on the actual whiteboard—the same idea he dismissed hours ago, but he revisited for lack of anything better. Riley stared out the window as if hypnotized by the city’s lights. They were no further ahead in finding a usable solution than they had been on their first day. Owen had eliminated nearly eighty-five percent of the suggested methods, and the ones remaining involved equipment or processes too complex for any of them to learn within their timeframe. For four nights, Owen’s mind had been hammered as Riley and Finn gave him a crash course on technologies, processes and equipment that had come into existence somewhere between 2016 and 2097. With a better understanding of the proposed equipment or methods, Owen could determine whether the solution was viable. An empty wine bottle, wine glasses and several empty energy drink cans stood in a neat cluster in the centre of the lab table.
Owen erased his drawing out of frustration and set the marker back on the ledge. He returned to his seat, ran his hands through his hair and flipped his book open again. As he did when he became stumped, he started by eliminating what he knew would absolutely not work. He apologized to Riley for what he was about to do and begun tearing the pages from the book that contained suggestions he knew were no use. When he had finished, the book had lost over three-quarters of its content.
“Feel better?” asked Riley, looking at the pile of torn pages lying on the table.
“Actually, that was quite cathartic.” He smiled guiltily. “All that remains now are solutions that we haven’t been able to eliminate, either because we don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about, or we can’t find a way to speed them up. Let’s go through it again and investigate each unknown a little further.”
This pass over the book went more quickly than any of them had anticipated. Of the areas in which the group had no practical knowledge, delving deeper into the unknown areas yielded only more confusion and wild speculation.
Owen closed his book, leaned back in his chair and stared at the pearly white lights of the city. “I think the most viable method is the zeno ray solution,” said Owen after a long moment. He grabbed his book again and flipped to the page he had marked with an orange sticky note. “I mean, I’m only basing this on what you’ve told me about zeno ray guns, but they sound powerful enough to do the job, in theory.”
Finn slid his feet off the desk and sat up straight as he shook his head. “My gut says no. Your description of Elevanium’s density makes me think it won’t work fast enough, mostly because the beam is too direct. I think that the gun itself is probably powerful enough. It would take too long for the effects of the narrow beam to penetrate the entire mass. It would be like trying to cook a turkey with a single heat source on one side, instead of one that is all-encompassing.”
“But what if the beam could be split into multiple beams…” Owen trailed off, wondering if the answer lay in mirrors or a prism. He stared out the window at the colourful gardens near the building’s entrance, lit up by elegant lights. Puffs of mist appeared as the sprinklers came on. The garden lights took on a ghostly quality as the misty spray of the sprinklers diffused the light. Diffused, thought Owen. “Yes. Zeno ray guns. I have an idea.”
“What is it?” Riley yawned and closed her book, ready to call it a day.
Owen slid off his chair and woke the CI out of Unobtrusive Mode. The sleeping screen had shrunk to its start-up size, and, after being awakened, it quickly returned to the size it had been set to at last use. He cleared the whiteboard on the screen. An unshapely mass appeared with the word “Elevanium” written inside. Beside it, an illustration of a fully automatic machine gun appeared with a miniature satellite dish on the top of the barrel.
Finn squinted at the illustrations Owen had drawn with his mind. “What is that?” he asked, pointing to the object beside the Elevanium drawing.
“It’s a zeno ray gun,” said Owen.
Riley stifled her laugh, but Finn outright howled. “It’s clear you’ve never seen one of these before,” said Finn.
“What if,” an object appeared at the end of the barrel of Owen’s illustrated weapon like a silencer, “we diffused the beam?” Owen drew a green, puffy cloud coming out of the gun’s barrel.
Finn studied the screen for a moment and then shook his head. “This is a great idea, but it won’t work.”
“What? Why?” asked Owen. “I think it’s the only way to spread the beam over a wider area.”
“I agree, but we’ll lose a lot of the gun’s efficiency that way.”
“We did bring three of them, plus a ton of cartridges,” said Riley.
Finn looked sceptical. “Even still, I don’t know if it would have enough of an impact.”
“Well,” said Riley, already heading toward the supplies in the dorm room, “we won’t know unless we try.”
Time Remaining: 176 Days
The team began their day by setting up the equipment to test Owen’s ray gun theory. Finn emerged from the dorm room carrying a black crate with something perched atop it that looked to Owen like a fish tank. Finn set his load down on the nearest lab station. From inside the crate, he retrieved two of three matching, elongated metal cases and handed one to Owen. Owen opened his and saw something shiny, held securely in place by pro
tective foam.
Finn looked over Owen’s shoulder. “That is a zeno ray gun.”
“Kinda small, isn’t it?” asked Owen.
“Well, yeah. At the moment.” Finn set the two cases in the centre of the empty lab space and with his VersaTool, he decompressed the two boxes until their length rivalled Owen’s height. The gun—that moments ago would have been too small to fit a child’s hand—now looked so heavy and unwieldy that Owen doubted he would be able to hold one up with a single hand for any length of time. Owen was impressed by Finn’s strength as he hoisted one of the mirror-finished guns up in front of him with little effort. Taking it from him, Owen was surprised to find the weapon weighed barely more than a bottle of wine. He turned the gun over in his hands, taking care not to let the long barrel hit the ground. Although it vaguely resembled a gun, it was unlike anything he had ever imagined or seen in a movie. The majority of the gun’s five-foot length was in the long and narrow, semi-circular barrel, round at the top and flat on the bottom. The semi-circle gradually increased in size as it neared the rear of the gun’s body, though Owen was unsure where the barrel ended and the rest of the gun began. The unique hand grip was the gun’s most unusual feature. It looked less like a hand grip and more a metal tube, like something to be worn instead of held.
Finn pulled the second gun from its case and caressed it adoringly like a new father would his baby. He slid his hand into the flared, tubular handle. Owen did the same. Inside, his hand found a grip that matched his expectation of what the grip of a typical gun would feel like, having never held a handgun before. Without warning, the flared edges of the gun’s handle clamped firmly around his hand, wrist and partially up his forearm. Owen jumped back in shock. He would have believed that the gun would have fired out rabbits before what he had just experienced. The handle had formed a flexible metal sleeve around his hand and forearm. It felt considerably snug but in no way painful. As he flexed his wrist, the shiny metal stretched like a bizarre fabric.
“Oh yeah. Sorry, I forgot to warn you about that,” said Finn, chuckling at Owen’s reaction. “That’s the blast brace. The gun’s got an anti-kickback counterbalance that eliminates most of the kick, but it still kicks and the brace helps.”
Finn gave a detailed tutorial on the gun, explaining its intricacies to Owen on whom most of the minute details were lost.
Owen noticed something important was missing. “There’s no trigger. How do you shoot?”
“Two ways. It’s just like using a CI. You tell it what you want to shoot and when, so it’s pretty accurate when you’re in a combat situation and your target’s moving. If you’re looking for a bigger blast, like if you need to blow something up that’s really big and you need multiple guns, you’d want to use the remote control. You can also modify the software on the guns by connecting to it with your CI, say if you need to repair it, recalibrate it or update its software.”
Owen thought it was bizarre that a gun would have software in it. “And where do the cartridges go?”
With his hand still secured around the hand grip inside the gun’s metal sleeve, Finn held the gun up to reveal the underside. Part way up the metal sleeve where the base of the hand grip met the sleeve, Finn pointed out a small access panel. He pressed down on the panel and with a mechanical click, the gun’s clip slid out. Similar in dimensions to a C-sized battery, a red cartridge with the word “ZENO” printed across it, fit neatly into the clip. Finn used the heel of his hand to expertly push the clip back into the gun’s handle and it clicked back into place.
“You know a lot about these,” said Owen. He looked over the weapon he held with new appreciation.
“Not really. Not these anyway. Some of our service guns, yes. But these aren’t commonly used. They’re incredibly destructive. Think of these like one of those over the shoulder rocket launchers we saw on the news the other night. Times ten.”
“So if they’re extremely destructive, how come the Elevanium doesn’t get blown to bits by the zeno rays?” asked Owen.
Finn shrugged. “When they were doing exploratory research on it back in the fifties, they found it was resistant to a lot of things that would be considered destructive. Explosives, yes, extreme heat, no. It has some characteristics that have been found by accident. Like the Elevanium poisoning. We don’t really know exactly what about it is so toxic, but we’ve found that standard radioactive protection protocols seem to contain it.”
Riley set a box down on the lab table beside the men and leaned on it. “Finn is an artillery expert.”
Finn chuckled. “I’m nowhere near an expert. I know a bit about some of the more common guns.”
“Wow, Finn, I’ve never known you to be humble,” teased Riley. “Finn spent two years in Artillery before switching to my unit.”
“Yeah, I thought Artillery would be crazy cool. I loved to blow stuff up when I was a kid so it seemed like a natural fit, but it was so unbelievably boring.” He rolled his eyes. “Lots of technical stuff, numbers and programming and stuff. It was horrible.”
“But you were so good at it,” said Riley.
“Yeah, but I didn’t get to blow a single thing up, except on the range when we were testing repaired equipment. Ugh. So boring. But after being there a while, I started watching to see what unit sent in the most equipment for repairs and maintenance, and I thought that’s where I need to be, so I applied. Riley’s division has given me the biggest bang for my buck, quite literally.”
“Either way, he’s a whiz with guns and a good asset to have in the field.”
“I know a bit,” he said in earnest, “but trust me, there are a gazillion types of guns. Lots are similar, and lots look similar but are very different. The programming of say, a zeno ray gun, is far more complicated that the standard plasmaqueous guns we’re issued.”
Owen mimicked Finn and ran his finger across a sensor beneath the barrel at the gun’s base. The blast brace released his hand and the gun handle returned to its original state. Owen extracted his hand from within the gun’s unique grip and like Finn, set the gun back inside its case. Owen’s attention shifted to the fish tank while Finn set up a tripod.
“That’s our testing tank,” said Finn, seeing Owen peer into the empty tank.
Owen leaned closer and looked inside. It reminded him of an expensive fish tank but with a glass lid. Looking closer, he saw a small door on the side large enough to accommodate a hamster. “A bit small, isn’t it? Wait, you’re going to make this bigger too, right?” He took his VersaTool out of his pocket.
Finn shook his head. “Nah, this’ll be big enough.”
Owen knocked on the side of the tank. It looked like glass but sounded different. “This isn’t glass, is it?”
“Kind of. It’s three layers of polyplastiglass. Sandwiched between the layers is a transparent film that acts as a shield for things like chemical reactions, radiation, laser blasts and, conveniently, Elevanium poisoning.”
Riley emerged from the dorm room carrying two large yellow crates; the muscles in her arms clearly defined from their weight. Owen noticed that even though Riley had the VersaTool to make jobs easier like carrying the two boxes she struggled with, she rarely used it. Owen jogged across the lab, heaved the surprisingly heavy crate off her load and followed her to the collection of matching containers she had already stacked against the far wall. He was just about to unclasp the lid of the heavy-duty crate he carried for her when she spun it around so he could see the label. Owen jumped backward like he had received an electric shock. The words “ELEVANIUM” were stamped across the front with a symbol he had never seen before but intuitively knew to be toxic; a triangular circle with hooked spikes and an E in the centre.
Riley watched Owen’s eyes grow with shock. “Don’t worry. Even if you’d gotten it open for a second, the worst you’d’ve experienced for that length of exposure is flu-like symptoms for a day or so. You’re fine, and these boxes are shielded. You could sit on this all day long and nothing will
happen. We do need to get you suited up though.”
“You guys remembered radiation suits I hope?” Owen knew he could get some from work if he had to, but it would be a real stretch for him to come up with an excuse for why he needed three.
Riley disappeared into the dorm room again and Owen expected her to return with three Chihuahua-sized radiation suits needing to be decompressed to their full size. Instead, she carried yet another metal case, and she set it down on the lab table beside Owen and Finn. She folded back the lid of the clamshell case to reveal three substantial syringes—the size of syringe Owen associated with equine medicine. Riley removed one of the pre-filled syringes, as well as a fresh needle tip, and began screwing the two together. Owen’s stomach sunk at the sight.
“We don’t need protective suits because we’re shielded from the Elevanium poisoning internally.” She held the needle pointy side up, flicked the syringe a few times, then squeezed the plunger gently until a drop of the silver, metallic liquid oozed from the business end of the oversized needle. “This will shield your body from the Elevanium poisoning.”
Owen looked at them sceptically and subconsciously took several steps backward. “And you guys have had this? What are the side effects?”
“Don’t worry, mate, it doesn’t hurt as much as it looks,” cheered Finn, slapping Owen on the back so hard he stumbled forward in Riley’s direction.
Riley smiled to reassure him. “Yes, we’ve both had this shot. Everybody on Operation TimeShift got this shot. And there are some side effects but nothing major. You’ll probably feel a little nauseous right after the shot and you could experience some fever symptoms in the first twenty-four hours, but that’s about it.”
“I’m feeling both of those symptoms already,” said Owen, forcing a casual laugh as he rolled up his sleeve.
“Sorry, sweetie,” said Riley, “this ain’t a shot in the arm.”