Seeds of Change Read online

  The phone finally stopped ringing. Smoke was creeping under the door, sending gray fingers up to the ceiling. Grover’s midsection no longer felt like it had gone nova, but he was stuck here. His only hope was that the fire department arrived before the fire did.

  No sirens yet.

  A thought made him sit upright, which in turn brought an unpleasant rush to his head. She’d been here looking for his dummy prototype. She hadn’t known he’d taken the defective samples home.

  “I’m going to live,” Grover told the fire.

  He dropped to all fours again and crawled to the closet. It was full of supplies, winter clothes, the sort of crap that a bedroom-turned-office accumulated. He’d tossed his sweaters back in there after dropping out of the Cleveland trip. Underneath them was four yards of strangely slick black cloth, so dark it looked like a hole in the shadows of the closet. Eighteen inches wide, twelve feet long. Enough to wrap himself like a mummy and walk out through the fire.

  So long as he got the gradiation right. It would do him no good for the nanostructures to pipe all the heat of the fire inward to his skin.

  Power still seemed to be working, even with the fire. Grover tugged his lamp off the desk, switched on the bulb, and set the cloth against it to see which side got hot and which side stayed cool.

  * * * *

  “YOU CAN’T HOLD me,” Grover said. “And I’m going public as soon as I find a reporter.” Or a phone, at least, he amended.

  Special Agent Angela Looks Twice stared him down. “I’m not going to let you walk out that door.” The compact woman from the FBI was currently in the grip of fury. Grover was perfectly willing to believe she could take him apart, joint by joint if required.

  They were crowded together in the manager’s office of the Denny’s two blocks away from his condo complex. The complex had gone four alarms last he heard. He and the agent were crammed into a tiny room arranged for the convenience of one person. The manager clearly spent a lot of time trying to motivate low-wage workers through old fashioned intimidation, at least judging by the posters on the wall warning of all the different ways a job could be lost.

  “Everyone connected with Quantum Thermal Systems is missing or dead.” She stabbed a finger at him. “Your colleague in Cleveland. Brody. At least four innocent bystanders that we know of. Everyone. Except you.”

  “Right.” Grover felt a laugh welling up inside him. He swallowed it hard. “You’re never going to suck this thing down the memory hole now. Hell, I must have spoken to four or five dozen groups in past six months. A lot of investors heard the pitch. Now you’re going to have victim’s families asking questions.”

  “You’d be amazed what gets sucked down the memory hole.” Looks Twice had a grim smile on her face. “You walked out of a 1100 degree fire with normal skin and core temps. The defense applications of this thing alone are worth a total blackout.”

  “Not to mention the firefighting applications,” Grover said sarcastically. “I don’t care what the hell you do with it. It just can’t stay secret. That’s what all the killing, all the fires are about. Covering it up. Making it go away. Just another failed startup. Except most startups don’t end in a series of murders and kidnappings.”

  Looks Twice rubbed her temples, then gave him a long, slow look. “Ever hear of Heaven’s Gate? Cults make great cover for this kind of operation. Everybody spends a minute feeling sorry for the dead whack jobs, then moves on.”

  “Got a lot better at it since Karen Silkwood, huh?” Grover stood up. “Arrest me, or let me go.”

  Her fists clenched. “I can hold you as a material witness.”

  Grover grabbed the doorknob. When had he ever fought back like this? Maybe since people died tonight. “Or you can help me . . . ”

  “Don’t open the door, Mr. Ruggles. There are a number of pissed off cops out there who will stop you. They might even check with me, after you’re finished resisting arrest.“

  “So, arrest me now or let me go.”

  “And you’ll walk out and find a reporter? I can promise you, anyone with the resources to coordinate this many assaults and arsons in one evening will have no trouble finishing the job with respect to you. Any interview you go to will be the last thing you ever do.”

  “Then help me stay alive long enough to go public,” Grover said with a growl. He wondered where all this courage was coming from, and how soon it would evaporate. “Go so public it won’t matter. Fuck the NDAs. There’s no one left to sue me for violating them.”

  He leaned over her desk, being as persuasive as he knew how. Do it for Brody, he thought. For Wei Ming. For all of them.

  “I didn’t invent this stuff, but I can explain it well enough that people with the right training will know what to do to recreate it. If thirty or forty universities and corporate labs nationwide are working on it, there’s not much point in killing to keep the secret. I’ll make the memory hole so damned big that even Karl Rove couldn’t disappear this thing. Hell, once the Chinese or the Russians start working on the knock-offs, the QTS tech will be worldwide. And it will change the world.”

  Looks Twice snorted with a rueful amusement. “You don’t think small, do you?”

  “Almost all the time,” he admitted. “I’m a small kind of guy. Just not this time. I walked through fire, remember? Think about what else that stuff will do.”

  The last remnants of anger seemed to leave Special Agent Looks Twice in a heaving rush. She pulled a business card from her jacket pocket. “You’re free to go, Mr. Ruggles. Call me if you think of anything. I suggest you don’t leave town without talking to the District Attorney.”

  Grover was surprised. He’d always figured FBI agents for world class hard asses when it came to law and order. That was pretty much the job description, after all. He gathered up the oversized plastic bag into which someone had stuffed the strips of thermal superconductor. The plastic was bubbled and stretched from residual heat.

  “Mr. Ruggles,” Looks Twice said tentatively as he pulled open the door.

  Grover turned around, a state wage-and-hour poster looming large in his peripheral vision. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “My mother and my baby brother died when our trailer burned. A lot of years ago. I find a . . . special pleasure in investigating arsons.” She took another deep, ragged breath. “If they’d been able to walk through fire . . . ”

  “Sometimes it is all about saving the world,” he said.

  * * * *

  GROVER WAS ON local television the next morning. The reporter loaned him her cell phone as he left the studio, and promised to give out the number to everyone she could think of who might be interested.

  Within an hour, driving a rented Focus hybrid along a random set of roads through the Willamette Valley, he took calls from reporters from the San Jose Mercury News, the New York Times and Agence France-Presse. He couldn’t do anything about the cell phone being traced except to keep moving.

  Around noon he stopped at the public library in Silverton, then went by the local post office to mail samples of the thermal superconducting cloth to every major university he could think of. First class, no tracking, paid for in cash. That was as anonymous as he could think to make the process of getting the stuff out into the world.

  After mailing off the samples, he drove east into the Cascades. One of the Mercury News reporters called back with home number of a science fiction author who was also an “A” list blogger and a feature writer for Wired. Grover called and told his story. The writer immediately grasped the implications of the idea, in both states — gradiated and balanced. “Waste heat alone,” he said. “You’re on the way to providing a manageable approach to global warming, and closing a huge portion of the loop on power generation. Those are two of the biggest stumbling blocks on the Kardashev scale.”

  “It’s still lossy,” Grover said, guessing at what the other man was talking about. “We can’t escape the Laws of Thermodynamics.”

  “Right, but you’r
e going from maybe thirty percent thermal efficiency on internal combustion to, what, ninety-five percent? Or more. You just keep reusing it.” The writer sounded thrilled. “It’s the future by degrees. This has applications everywhere. Did you know that they put air conditioners in equipment shacks in North Slope Alaska? Forty below outside, and a compressor running inside the insulation to manage the heat rise. This stuff . . .”

  The conversation spun off into space exploration, medicine, environmental remediation, the potential for home-based power generation from waste heat, before the mountains ate the cell phone signal. Grover laughed at the waste heat idea, thinking back on his manure pile analogy.

  * * * *

  THE SILKWOOD SQUAD caught up with him just on the eastern side of Santiam Pass. Grover was surprised to have gotten even that far.

  A helicopter with no markings, not even a tail number, was parked on the highway. He could see a large yellow dump truck at a curve half a mile downhill. They were roadblocking any potential witnesses.

  Minnie stood in front of the helicopter, wrapped in an oversized windbreaker. Somehow she didn’t seem so beautiful to him any more. There were three men with her. They were bulky, in gray suits and dark glasses. It was a scene straight out of Central Casting. Grover found the sheer lack of imagination offensive.

  He pulled the car over and got out. “It’s a rental,” he shouted, feeling light-headed. Minnie’s fire had finally caught up to him. “Probably don’t need to blow it up.”

  Minnie nodded. “We tracked you by the car company’s GPS.”

  “The secret is blown.” Grover took a couple of steps toward Minnie. “It’s all over the world now. Not the sales hokum we’ve been passing this whole time. The real thing, as much as I had of it. Including samples.” His knees quivered. “You can shoot me now, like you did Brody and Wei Ming, but it doesn’t matter any more.”

  “Hmm.” She flicked her hand and the big men came for Grover.

  “I saved the world,” he shouted just before the first blow landed hard enough to crack his jaw.

  Minnie’s voice was distinct over the grinding thump of brass knuckles and tape-wrapped pipes. “And you pissed away a hell of a lot of money doing it.”

  * * * *

  THE BIGGEST SURPRISE was that they let him live. A long haul trucker had found Grover by the side of the road, and called in the EMTs, who’d evacuated him by helicopter. Now he sat in a Salem hospital, aching at every joint. His right eye had a detached retina and his left was full of blood.

  Something moved in the doorway. Grover squinted, mumbling, “Who’s there?”

  “Special Agent Looks Twice,” said the blur.

  “Oh, hey.” At least, that’s what Grover tried to say.

  “Don’t talk. I just thought I’d tell you there’s no air traffic control record on a helicopter near the Santiam Pass. No one saw anything coming and going. So far as the Jefferson County sheriff’s department is concerned, you drove up there alone and tried to commit suicide.”

  “Beat myself to death?”

  “I believe the press was told you’d thrown yourself off the top of a road cut and sustained injuries striking the cliff on the way down.” She stood close enough to the bed that he could see her.

  Grover fought to make the next words clear. “And the thermal cloth?”

  “Front page news, pretty much everywhere.” He thought she might have smiled. “You won.”

  “Heat is the engine of the world.” He knew that wouldn’t make sense to her, not through his shattered mouth.

  “Right. I’ve got to go.” Looks Twice stroked his arm briefly. “Hey, firewalker. They ever let you out of here, give me a call sometime.”

  Grover lay back, imagining what the future might be like.

  * * *

  Afterword

  I’ve been fascinated by thermal superconductivity for years. Waste heat management is one of the key issues facing a civilization progressing along the Kardashev scale, so thermal superconductivity would be as profound a breakthrough as the control of fire, or possibly electricity. I’ve used thermal superconductivity as a minor world-building element in various stories, but never addressed the concept in detail before this story. Seeds of Change looked like the perfect opportunity to tackle the topic directly, given that such a concept would be just about the most profound revolution ever seen in technology. Think about how much of the design of any electronic device is concerned with waste heat management. Likewise internal combustion engines. Or the heat transfer issues in climate control within residences and commercial buildings. The list is endless.

  It was challenging getting the science in the story right, even in this case, where the science is “rubber science” because rubber science still has to make sense. If I knew how thermal superconductivity could work, I’d be a billionaire instantly. But I have to sound like I know how to make thermal superconductivity work. That means getting it right with all the ordinary science which is packed around the rubber, and it means getting the rubber to sound legit. Mostly I had to get the thermal and energy science stuff right. I have a friend who’s a power systems engineer who helped with that, and there was a very involved discussion on my LiveJournal about the thermal characteristics of manure. That concerned one line in the story, but a lot of the rest of what I needed flowed out of that conversation as well.

  To me, the theme of Seeds of Change is about what it would take to fundamentally shift the world. Most of the change we experience is incremental—a better search engine algorithm, a new flavor of Ben & Jerry’s. Even the larger changes—hybrid cars, for example—are mostly larger increments. Truly socially disruptive changes are quite rare: I’m thinking on the order of fire, agriculture, structured legal codes, open water navigation, gunpowder, engines, electricity. This lead me to ask: “What would move the world so profoundly again?” I can think of a few things: the arrival of an extraterrestrial species on Earth, functional immortality, micropower generation (which is implied in my story), thermal superconductivity. Of those, alien landings and immortality didn’t meet the “feel” of the theme. So I went with thermal superconductivity, which has fascinated me for years. I wish someone would invent this darned stuff. It would be mighty cool.

  DRINKING PROBLEM

  K.D. Wentworth

  JOE SETTLED INTO his accustomed seat before the Brass Tack’s polished black granite bar. It had been a tough day, full of stupid meetings. But, hey, lots of days were tough. Nothing new there. The jukebox was grinding out something unmelodic and off to one side, a frizzy-headed woman regarded the beer bottle in the middle of her table with dread as though it was about to explode. Outside, the July sun was blazing, even at 5:30 a force with which to be reckoned.

  “Cold one?” Tom Whitebear, the barkeep asked. He was tall, black-haired, and laconic with the presence of a deep dark well, absorbing his patrons’ words and giving back blessed silence.

  Joe nodded, liking that he didn’t even have to ask. His tongue was already full of holes from biting it all day long. If Salinger emailed him one more time demanding reports that weren’t even due yet, by God, he would take a stapler to the idiot’s balding head.

  Tom slid a bottle with a strange blue and gold label in front of him and stared at it morosely.

  “I drink Miller,” Joe said, too weary to raise his voice.

  “This is Miller,” Tom said, sliding a slip of paper across the gleaming blackness. “The packaging’s just different. They call it a ‘Smart Bottle.’ Even comes with its own instructions.”

  “Instructions for a freaking bottle of beer?” Joe blinked.

  Tom seized a cloth and buffed the bar as though it was smeared—which it wasn’t. “You been in Tibet or something? Press has been screaming about this for weeks. It’s the law, went into effect today. Brew’s only available in these fancy ‘Smart’ bottles now. Supposed to save the environment. Big Brother watching out for us and all that.”

  “I don’t get it.” Joe flicked
the back of his finger against the cold glass, making it ring. The label featured a man holding up a bottle and smiling broadly.

  “Whole damn country, no, make that the whole damned world, is going to hell.” Tom peeled off a tab below the label that ran all around the bottle and pushed it gingerly toward him with his fingertips. “Joe Browder, meet your Smart Bottle,” he said in an oddly formal way, as though he were introducing Joe to a potential partner at a stupid speed-dating party.

  Joe noticed belatedly that the barkeep was pulling off latex gloves. “What the hell?”

  “Hope the two of you will be very happy,” Tom muttered and slouched off to wait on a man at the far end of the bar.

  Joe picked the bottle up, finding the label’s texture oddly rough. His hand tingled and he set the bottle aside to examine his palm. The skin was slightly reddened as though he’d scraped it against something.

  “Greetings!” a hollow little voice said. “I am your Symesco A2300 Smart Bottle equipped with DNA recognition software and a high environmental consciousness quotient. I will be handling all your future beer consumption needs.”

  Joe pushed back off the stool, his heart thumping. “Did that thing just talk?”

  “Drink me, Joe,” the bottle said, “while I’m nice and frosty. Delay will not improve the esthetics of the experience.”

  Hairs crawled on the back of his neck. “Like hell I will!”

  “Might as well,” Tom said as he came back. “Once you touch the sensor, infernal thing is imprinted on you. It’s yours—permanently.”

  Fuming, Joe threw a five on the bar and stood.

  “Actually, it costs twenty-five bucks.” Tom pushed it toward him. “One-time deposit. And you take it with you so I can refill it the next time you come in.”

  Joe pulled a twenty out of his billfold and added it to the five, glaring at the offending bottle with its ridiculous blue and gold label. “Not in this lifetime, buddy!” He turned to go.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Tom said to his back. “Damn thing has a proximity sensor.”