chapter 23
TEAM 2, YEAR: 2016
Time Remaining: 155 Days
Owen led the team in their next endeavour—developing a diffuser to fit over the muzzle of the zeno ray gun to diffuse the rays. It was an easy concept and with his father’s industrial-grade tools, Owen customized a diffuser body to fit the barrel’s unique shape. While the construction itself was easy, less so was finding a material to do the diffusing that would not disintegrate the moment the highly-destructive zeno rays touched it.
Days turned into weeks of experiments with different substances in the diffuser, but with no luck. Owen had tried frosted glass first, but the thick red beam melted the thin piece of glass like a blow torch on butter, despite the strengthening compound they coated it with.
The effects of working fourteen-hour days and weekends had begun to show on Owen. Eighty-hour work weeks agreed with him far better when he was in his twenties. Dark circles had appeared under his eyes, his complexion grew pale and something in his eyes, Riley noticed, had become flat. He never once complained and maintained a positive attitude when even Riley, herself, wanted to start smashing things in frustration. He was generous with his time with no question of compensation; his only concern was the success of Riley and Finn’s endeavour. Riley knew he needed time away from anything resembling work.
“Alright guys, that’s it. We’re done,” announced Riley. She slid off her cushy lab stool.
“What do you mean?” asked Owen, looking down at his watch. “It’s not even noon yet. We can still get another eight hours in.”
“We’ve been at this for ages, and it’s Saturday.” She looked out the window at the small park across the road, packed with people enjoying the sun. “This is the first day in over a week where we’ve had great weather. I think we should take the rest of the day off.”
Owen leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “I could really use a nap.”
Finn abandoned his work without a second thought and made a beeline to his jacket in the kitchen. “Excellent! I’ve been wanting to check out that amusement park by the stadium. I was reading up on it on your Internet and it looks so retro. I bet those rollercoasters don’t get even get a single G! Do you guys want to come? We could make an afternoon of it.”
“Thanks,” said Owen, “but the only G I want to feel is the gravity pulling me into bed.”
Owen pulled into his driveway, pleased with himself for having kept his eyes open the entire trip. As he closed the driver’s door, he savoured the warm sun rays on his face. It felt shameful to sleep through such a glorious Saturday afternoon, but he had barely enough energy to even complete the thought. As he entered the front door, he thought he heard a loud metallic click in the basement. He stood stock still, listening for more sounds. Hearing nothing, he wondered if what he heard had been a figment of his imagination. He had no trust in any of his senses, but thought it was worth a quick investigation.
Owen crept down the carpeted stairs to the basement. He peered around the living area and into Finn’s room. Hearing nothing further and seeing nothing amiss in either room, he walked down the hall toward the garage. He opened the door to the garage and saw his father’s tools and the white Range Rover, but nothing was out of place. He stood silently for a moment and heard nothing. A fresh wave of tiredness fell over him and he lay down on the couch with the intention of investigating any more noises should he hear any, but fell asleep as his head hit the throw pillow.
Riley struggled off the bus with six paper bags of groceries. The grocery store had been too busy for her to use VersaTool to shrink her purchases down to a manageable, pocket-sized load. The nearest bus stop was a five-minute walk from Owen’s home and without the assistance of her VersaTool, the groceries would be impossible to carry without dropping items or losing the bottom of a bag. With the bus out of sight, she pulled her VersaTool from her backpack and shrank the grocery bags to the size of large marbles.
Riley entered the front door of the house and closed it gently behind her. She placed the miniature bags of groceries on the kitchen table, taking care not to knock any of them over. Chasing down a cantaloupe the size of a small bead would be tricky.
Riley wanted to make sure that Owen stayed in good health and good spirits. Not just because he was a valuable asset and they would lose time if he became ill, but because she cared about his well-being. The last thing she wanted was for him to resent their imposition on him, or worse, regret his decision to help. Riley was impressed by Owen’s selflessness and how he always made himself available. He had insisted they stay at his home, worried about their safety in cheap motels.
Riley retrieved her VersaTool and aimed the blue beam at the bags. Just as she pressed and slid the button, she sneezed. Instead of selecting the groceries, she missed. The table doubled in size, knocking four wooden chairs backward onto the stone floor with a deafening crack that echoed throughout the silent house. Cringing and hoping she had not disturbed Owen, she returned the table back to its original size. She tiptoed to the overturned chairs and righted them as silently as possible. She made a mental note to apologize to Finn for being so hard on him when he blew up her office; apparently it was an easier mistake to make than she had realized. Positive the beam encompassed the bags only, she decompressed the bags to their regular size and began putting the food away. She carried the last few items to the basement to leave in the cold storage. At the bottom of the stairs, she realized Owen was sleeping on the couch. She crept past him and put the supplies into the storage area. As she passed, he stirred and rolled over to face the back of the couch. She pulled the blanket off the back of the sofa and laid it over him.
Finn arrived and found Riley in the kitchen preparing dinner.
“He’s flaked out downstairs,” explained Riley, reading her protégé’s mind. “I figured I’d let him sleep until dinner’s ready.”
Finn reflected on Owen’s unwaveringly amiable temperament and durability. “The guy’s a machine, eh? I couldn’t work like that.”
“Oh, trust me, I know,” said Riley, one eyebrow arched. She joked, but in truth, Finn was one of the best subs she had ever worked with. He played hard, but he worked even harder. Even though he had only been in Black Ops a few years, Riley knew she could trust him with her life.
“Who’s your date?” asked Riley, looking at the oversized, stuffed Tyrannosaurus Rex under his reddened arm.
Finn’s face and arms were pink from the spending the afternoon in the sun. He explained to Riley in great detail, a crazy game he played where he had to shoot an antique gun that used air and something that sounded like “bee-bees” to hit different targets. He had done it just for fun and when he was finished, the stunned carnie handed him the biggest T-Rex hanging in the booth.
“You guys should have woken me up,” said Owen, pouring glasses of wine. “I could have done all this.”
As Riley, Owen and Finn sat down to dinner on the rooftop patio, the sun faded into a pink pool in the west. The patio lights cast a soft white glow over the deck.
“Owen, you’re insane. You’re putting in more hours in a week than two people would. We can do a few things around here.”
The steaks were charred with Finn at the helm of the barbecue, but it had been his first time with a manual grill. Owen arrived on the rooftop patio to find Finn dictating his grilling instructions to the barbecue. When the cooking appliance failed to acknowledge his command, he leaned over and this time, spoke the commands louder and directly into the temperature gauge. Chuckling, Owen handed Finn a fork and explained that his eyes were the cooking gauge. Finn was thrilled by the low-tech nature of the grill but after becoming distracted in the kitchen while getting the potato salad, he returned to find the barbecue billowing smoke.
When dinner was over, Owen brought up coffee. Watching Owen fill the three mugs reminded Riley of something and she dashed downstairs only to return moments later with a small plastic container.
“I found somet
hing for you today, Finn.” Riley tossed Finn the container as she returned to her seat. Finn caught it and read the label. A grin lit up his face. “Wow! Where did you find this?”
Riley shrugged casually, but the sparkle in her eye gave away that she too was excited. “At the grocery store!”
Owen passed Riley and Finn mugs of coffee, surprised that honey could be so fascinating.
“And it was just in the store? On a shelf, like with ketchup?” Finn pulled off the lid and spooned some of the golden delight into his coffee.
Riley nodded. “There was tons of it! Isn’t that crazy?”
“Have neither of you had honey before?” asked Owen.
Riley shook her head as she took a spoon off the coffee tray and sampled a small scoop. “Wow. That’s way sweeter than the synthetic stuff.”
“Honey bees have been extinct since sometime in the fifties,” said Finn. He sunk the spoon deep into the honey then jammed it into his mouth.
“So how do all the crops get pollinated?” asked Owen.
Finn, with the spoon of honey still in his mouth, mimed something that Owen thought may have been a bird flying into a window. Riley looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure how it works exactly. I was never big into biotech in school but from what I understand, there are millions and millions of little marble-sized drone bee-bots that fly around and pollinate everything, but that’s it. No honey.”
“Really?” said Owen, fascinated.
“There is a small amount of honey left-over from before the extinction, but it’s rare and definitely not something the average person can get. You’d have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for it,” said Riley.
Finn had managed to remove the spoon. “Well, honestly, it seems inconceivable that millions of little insects flew around from plant to plant, pollinating everything and then crops magically grew. Now that sounds like science fiction.”
After dinner, the team discussed their string of less-than-stellar results and attacked their problem from a different angle. Did they need to use a combination of materials? Perhaps they needed to blend and fuse different substances or create something from scratch? Perhaps a liquid?
“Hey, what if…” Owen looked off into the night in thought. He frowned.
“What if, what?” asked Finn.
“No. It couldn’t be that simple,” he said absently.
Riley sat up in her chair. “What are you thinking?”
“You said you were able to successfully neutralize Elevanium before you came, right?”
“Well, yes. But the method was too slow for what we need,” said Riley.
“Right, but what did the Elevanium look like after it was neutralized? Did it change in any way?”
Riley thought back. “No, not really. It just kind of stopped glowing. That’s about it.”
“Did anything else about it change?”
“No. Why do you ask?” asked Riley. She set her wine glass down on the table and sat up straight.
“What if we diffused the zeno rays with a piece of Elevanium?”
Riley crossed her arms and looked up at the sky, running the idea through her mind. “I don’t know. The stuff is only slightly transparent. Don’t you think the rays would lose a lot of their effectiveness?”
“If we tried different thicknesses it stands to reason that you could control how much of the beam passed through it by how thick the piece was. You brought tools that will cut it, right?”
Riley and Finn exchanged excited glances.
“I think we should go to the lab and try it,” suggested Owen.
Riley smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
At the lab, Riley walked directly into the dorm room and returned with yet another device Owen had never seen before. It reminded him of a deli scale.
“What is that thing?” asked Owen.
“It’s an Elevanium Fragmenter.” Riley placed a glowing rectangular brick of Elevanium on the surface of the cutting machine. After Riley tapped her commands into the holographic screen projected above the device, the slab of Elevanium rose off the surface and settled itself several inches in the air. A small bead of green light sliced down the front of the brick like a knife, and a wafer-thin slice of Elevanium separated from the block. The green light reappeared on the slice, and like a laser cookie-cutter, cut a perfect circle then bisected it down the centre. The laser disappeared and the circle slid out leaving a hole the size of a quarter. The various pieces of Elevanium settled on the base. Riley grabbed one of the semi-circles and tossed it to Owen. He held it up and noticed the light was quite visible through the thin slice, like looking through thick, frosted glass.
Owen placed the small piece of Elevanium into the tip of the diffuser then slid the diffuser onto the barrel of the gun. Finn set the gun and its tripod in the tank. The zeno ray gun had been shrunk to less than a quarter of its size to make testing more manageable. Riley hung a new paper target on the side of the tank. If the diffuser worked, the paper would disintegrate instantly. If it failed and the zeno rays burned through the Elevanium in the diffuser, the thick red beam would ignite the centre of the paper.
“Ready?” asked Riley. She held the remote control for the gun in her hand, her thumb ready on the trigger button. The two men nodded and she hit the button. Instead of the thick beam they had grown accustomed to seeing, a pink haze appeared. The target disappeared instantly and tiny bits of black ash settled to the floor of the tank.
Any residual tiredness that Owen felt had disintegrated along with the paper. The team jumped up and yelled with excitement. Caught up in the excitement and not realizing until after he had done it, Owen turned and pulled Riley into a big hug and kissed her on the cheek. She looked stunned and blushed a little. He let go of her awkwardly and gave Finn a high five.