Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

I’d also like to apologize in advance for the bending of physical laws in the following chapter. I suppose in my defense, I’ve been watching some lectures from the Royal Institute lately, and maybe it’s gotten me thinking a bit more – sideways?

To Return Home

2.3

John and I were in The Heavens Rose and I was trying to think, which was something I always did better in my kitchen. He had offered to help me, but was instead sitting on a stool placed in a corner where he could see me. It wasn't that I didn't want his help, but that we’d found that I would process things better while cooking, rather than explaining what needed done..

John wasn't just sitting watching me, though. He was explaining how he was hoping we could use the solid photons Vic and Trent had discovered.

“Really, Rose. I'm not sure you understand the gravity of the situation,” he said with a smirk on his face.”

I stopped what I was doing, and put my hands on my hips, glaring at him. “Would you care to enlighten me?” I knew there was something more to what he was saying... Probably one of his horrendous puns. I decided I'd figure it out soon enough, so I didn't push it.

He turned serious, and I knew he was going to tell me something with relatively little humor in it. “Do you remember what you read about the engines?”

I gave him a strange look and pointed to my necklace which was sitting on a small shelf by the kitchen door.

“Okay, Hon. Did you understand it?”

I glared and asked, “What do you think? Physics has never been my strong suit. I understand chemistry, so I understood the old reaction engines. But these? Hardly.”

He nodded and proceeded to explain, but in a way that I could grasp the simpler concepts.

The power for the ship came from the engines, but in a rather unusual way. The old stations converted to ships, N21 and N22, utilized reaction engines, although very powerful ones. When the new colonization ships were built, however, it was realized that there was no way to provide enough fuel for reaction engines to speed up and slow down more than twice.

Neo22 was built when people were desperate to make strides that had never been made before. There was no way for people to live on Earth, so changes had to be made. One of the areas that had made huge progress was the understanding of gravity. Of course, even before N21 was built, there was enough understanding to give any satellite, or ship, artificial gravity.

But the new strides allowed much finer control than had previously been possible. When coupled with the ability to produce a gravitational field through a relatively small amount of power, it allowed the use of gravity to produce safety measures in different areas of the ship with the low amounts of energy available.

Another remarkable discovery that became an integral part of the engine was dark matter. Not dark matter itself. We'd known about that for hundreds of years, but how to harness it, or more exactly, harness our ship to it. By increasing the gravity of dark matter pulling on the side of the ship in the direction we wanted to go, we were able to make the dark matter pull our ship. That alone wouldn't make it move very quickly, but by reversing the polarity of the gravity behind the ship, we would be both pushed and pulled in the direction we wanted to go, turning two slow methods of propulsion into one fast enough to be usable.

From there, the uses expanded even more. Gravity generation became the backbone of so many functions on board the ship. They weren’t just our engines, or letting us walk on the floors, we had a containment field of sorts, we had anti-gravity tractors.

“The thing is, Hon, whenever we expand something one way, we lose something in another. We can make a gravity field extremely powerful, but when we do, we have to focus it tighter.”

I shook my head. Maybe I was missing something. “What do you mean by focusing a field?”

“Okay. We have two types of fields that we use with gravity, depending on how we want to use it.”

I decided to take a break for a moment, so I sat down facing John.

He continued. “The first type of field is what I described for our propulsion. We sort of turn the ship into a ‘gravity magnet’ with a ‘north and south pole’. Normally, gravity doesn’t work that way, but somehow, physicists have made it work. But doing this, narrows its effect, which in our case is fine. We want to only project normal gravity in front of us, and anti-gravity behind us.”

I nodded. So far, so good.

“But we need it amplified considerably. That’s where the dark matter comes in. To amplify it to the extreme we need, we have to focus it so much that it only affects things in a very small space.”

I nodded. “I’m not sure I understand, but continue, and maybe I’ll make the connection when you’ve given me a bit more information.”

“Well, what do we do if we’re nowhere near a planetary body, or a star? What do we grab onto to move?”

I wondered if his question was rhetorical, but he seemed to want me to answer. “Dark matter?” I asked hesitantly. I mean, it seemed like a logical answer, and apparently, it was correct.

“Right. Dark matter is pretty much everywhere. There’s almost six times as much dark matter as there is regular matter in the universe. So even though we might not be able to lock onto something that’s visible, we can do it to the invisible. We can’t accelerate as fast by using dark matter, but we can still slowly speed up.” He paused for a moment. “I remember the idea of propelling a ship with solar winds, which seems like a great idea, but it would take so long to accelerate that it would take millions of years to accelerate. Granted, you could eventually be going nearly the speed of light, because the photons that make up the winds travel that fast. I suppose if we were in intergalactic space, it would take awhile to do any maneuvering, even with dark matter, but it would be possible to do it, where with solar winds, it would be almost impossible.”

“Uh huh.” I love the man, but he can get so distracted when he’s talking about sciencey things. “It sounds interesting, and it obviously works as we’re moving pretty fast. How does this help us now?”

He looked sad. I guess he was wanting to continue his explanations. It wasn’t often that I let him wow me with tech talk. I guess I needed to do it more often. I have to say, I was having fun listening as well. “I’m sorry for cutting you off, John. Please continue.”

He smiled a bit, and as he continued speaking, he seemed to gain his good mood again, and was soon speaking with as much feeling as before. “We get our electricity in much the same way. Our generators are in a vacuum, and we use a gravity generator pulling an armature around a stator to produce power. It uses only a little electricity to produce a lot more.”

I couldn’t help myself. “But that sounds like a perpetual motion machine!”

His smile got bigger. “It’s not. We convert gravity to electricity. We’re also using gravity already existing, and amplifying it. When we use the gravity this way, we lose the effect on other items, by amplifying it. It sort of narrows the beam. Sort of like how we can increase the voltage of electricity by sacrificing amperage.”

My head was spinning. I wasn’t sure how this was possible, but obviously, it was. We had plenty of power.

“The thing is, I think we can use this, as along with some of the other tech we have, and the solid light, to permanently disarm Amos.”

I stared at him. “How?” I asked in a small voice.

“What if we could target every bot in his body, and crush it with gravity?”

I couldn’t even fathom that idea. Could it be done? “Can you target through his body without hurting him?”

The look he gave was almost apologetic. “Rose. It hardly matters if we hurt him or not. The only reason I want to target each nanobot is so none of them are left. I don’t think it would be prudent to leave any of them alive.” He let that sink in a bit, then explained a bit more. “I say that it hardly matters that it will kill him eventually, regardless of whether we attacked him directly or just the bots. It would be a terrible death as well. Someone dying, ravaged by disease and old age. We haven’t seen that for years.”

“He wouldn’t have any immune system.” I tried to ignore the fact that we were talking about killing someone in cold blood. Removing what we knew would be his defense against a slow and painful death. I pushed that thought from my mind. I knew it had to be, and there was no way out for him. He had brought it on himself.

-=#=-

At our next meeting of the five, we discussed John’s plan. He went into much greater detail than he had for me directly. That was fine, as I wasn’t of a very technical mind, unless it had to do with a mixing bowl or a musical staff.

We were in Daddy’s home, and John had the floor, so to speak. We were seated around a table that had materialized in his office, rather than his desk. It was an oval table, and Daddy was at one end, while Paula and I sat opposite Marc and John.

It wasn’t a real table, but made with a hologram and force fields. Soon, the system would be replaced by a solid light hologram. It would take much less power then, and seem much more real, but the current ‘table’ worked for now.

John had a tablet on the table in front of him, and as he touched a control, a hologram appeared above the table. It showed the two halves of the ship pinwheeling along side by side in the void. I thought of the explanation John had given me of the engines and wondered how we compensated for the spin of the ship. Oh well, obviously we did.

“What I propose we do is slowly bring the ships as close together as we can, then bridge them using a solid light bridge. I think if we can tap into the projectors inside, we should be able to make a construct that can carry a gravity generator to Amos.”

“What would the gravity generator do?” Paula asked, clearly intrigued.

“I propose we map where every nanobot in his body is, and focus the generator on them at high power. Then we crush them. Literally.”

“We could do the same thing from here,” Marc said.

“Too risky. I don’t want to target the wrong person.”

“Why use the… Oh. Never mind,” Daddy suddenly said.

“Why use what?” John asked.

“I was wondering why we don’t use a force field sled to get it to him, but with the solid light, you can make it pretty well undetectable.”

John nodded. “Right. We can sneak it in. With the gravity generator completely encased inside a solid light box, it’s invisible if we cloak it in the same way as one of our cloaking suits. And using the already present hologram generators, we can avoid contact with any person. The chance of them noticing the power drain would be negligible.”

“Who will we have to inform of our plans?”

“Well, Vic and Trent, obviously. The Docs. Marc and I can handle the mechanics of it.”

“I can make a virus for their computers that will build the control system for the sled and grav generator,” Marc said.

“How can we map the bots?” Paula asked.

“That’s where we’ll need the docs. I got the idea from when we looked inside Rose’s brain. We could see the bots that were transmitting her memories to and from her crystals.”

We sat digesting the information for a while. Finally, Daddy said, “All in favor?”

The other four raised their hands, so it hardly mattered if I did, but I slowly raised mine as well. I felt sick to my stomach, although I knew that my feelings were based on reading his fake memories.

“Let's do it, then.” Daddy said.

I noticed that I didn’t have any duties in that plan, so I turned to John, “What will you need me to do?”

“Figure out how to help those people. They’ll be without a leader.”

I must have gone several shades of white as my head seemed to spin. “Okay, John.”

Please don't forget to leave kudos and comment!
Thanks!
Rosemary