Chapter 39

“Good work out there. I’ll finish organising a lab and we can get started when the award ceremony begins.”

Having sent the message, Jeff caught a ride out to the airport and from there walked to the hanger of a company that handled the supplies for the area. While the bulk of the supplies were shipped in on boats, and a lot of the plants were grown in greenhouses, a lot of the perishables and fresh imports came in on the bulky planes. With the number of trips in and out that the company made, they were the best bet of smuggling in the things he needed.

His collaborators in bringing down the Kaya company had workers on those planes and had spent the week assembling a laboratory out the back of one of the hangers. The lab was a sterile plastic box with a smaller plastic chamber that served as a decontamination room. Inside was a small table plugged into several computers, each displaying the controls to a range of different probes, scans and sensors. The back of the chamber even had a tank of laboratory grade formless particles. Unlike the ones he normally worked with, laboratory grade particles were completely blank, even devoid of the basic function that let them be easily formed. The difference was mostly around usability. The general use type, when exposed to air, would retain the same general shape that their container was, only expanding lightly as the wind moved them about.

The laboratory type would instead spread out instantly, clumping together on sources of electricity or magnetism. That included human bodies. If there was a breach of the containment, any humans in the room would be covered from head to toe in the formless particles that would then compress into the body, trying to reach the nerves and causing millions of micro cuts to the skin and organs. They would die in an instant, unaware that they even died. To prevent that kind of outcome, the four corner and centre of the roof all had light-like fixtures that would attract the formless particles if there was a breach. Alternatively, a shield could be used, though the lab didn’t have one.

When Jeff entered the makeshift lab, he had expected to see some of the smugglers there. When he found he was alone, he tried calling them. Not getting an immediate response wasn’t unusual. Whenever he tried to contact them, it would often lead nowhere until they contacted him. It wasn’t that surprising, most places called them terrorists after all. If they were that easy to contact then they would have been found out and arrested long ago.

With no one around to help, he spent a few more hour prepping the lab and verifying the tools. When he finished a dry run of the experiments they were going to perform, he returned to his room to rest, sleeping sporadically as the excitement kept him up and his fatigue brought him down.

The next morning, he ran the stall at the convention until the clock said it was midday. With the award ceremony set to start at any moment, he walked out into the dark snow to catch a ride to Sam’s workshop. As the award ceremony was only for the pilots who came in first and second, and not their mechanist, Diana was running the stall while he and Sam ran the analysis. Her fame as the winner’s mechanist would likely drive sales even more than just the victory did.

Once Sam and Jeff arrived at the lab and got through the decontamination process, Sam opened up her container to reveal the cube. Placing it on the table, the first thing they had to do was confirm the rumour. Jeff drew some of the formless particles into a vacuum syringe, one with a microscope in the plunger that broadcasted to a nearby monitor. Without any kind of programming, they particles bounced around in a wild jostle, without any kind of pattern or consistency. As the syringe was placed in contact with the cube, that suddenly changed. The particles formed into a single sheet and layer the syringe neatly, turning the syringe a solid black colour.

That was enough verification for Jeff, but the rest of the testing was still necessary. He pulled out a radiation detector and found the exact reading he had been expecting. The cube was exactly what he thought, a deactivated rig core.

If the rumour was to be believed, then when Homi Kaya brought back her discovery of the formless particle, the military, which was the most significant funder of the expedition, sought to take the discovery and weaponize it. Homi and her team had originally thought that the formless particles were a rare by-product of the shield generator and that was the avenue that the military’s researchers focused on and the story that was made public when Homi’s medical research later paid off.

After several attempts at recreating the circumstances of the discovery, the Lanternfish and its crew stop going out into public and then a few years later Homi makes succeeds in making the first formless particle generator. There had been some attempts at weaponizing the formless particles, but they were to easily defended against and more conventional poisons and chemical weapons were far cheaper to make. As the computerised control progressed in secret, and the particles went from novelty to industrial part, to medical breakthrough, Erin Kaya came of age and she, having studied her mother’s project and worked in military research, changed the world with the invention of the rig core.

Only, if the rumours were to be believed, Erin and Homi were not inventors; they were discoverers. The core and particle generators weren’t made but were instead naturally occurring.

Feeling a smooth crack along the surface of the cube, Jeff gently stroked it, causing the cube to split into two roughly even halves. The inner side of one half was as smooth as the outer faces, but the other seemed like a maze of tiny paths, like the negative imprint of an old-style circuit board. The carved, for or just giving the impression of being carved, side seemed to pulse and move fractionally and the sensor that was monitoring the cube for microscopic movements showed a stream of formless particles coming from several microscopic holes in the pattern. The particles were drawn vertically to the power supply in the ceiling, but still caused Sam and Jeff to take steps backwards. While that was interesting to watch, there was a far more significant thing happening, one that caused more alarm across the networked computers.

Some of the particles from the lowest hole, the hole furthest from the power, weren’t getting distracted by it and were making their way over to the other half. Once there, the particles disintegrated, sending some electricity into the half-cube and some gamma radiation into the room, with a tiny spark of light each time.

While Sam and Jeff took some radiation mitigation medicine and studied the data, some of the particles that were clustered on the roof suddenly disengaged from it and retuned to the patterned half, returning inside the hole that the monitoring software said it had emerged from. That struck Jeff as a bee like behaviour, the energy from the safety system was pollen being returned to the hive. Looking over the data, at the moment that the particles started returning with their spoils, the smooth half had sent out a harmonic pulse, exacting within the signal range that rigs operated with.

A structural scan of the smooth side seemed to give no results, but a scan of the patterned one was like something out of the textbooks they had studied in the early stages of their degree. Aside from the part that would normally hold the controlling computer, the patterned half was almost identical to a commercial formless particle generator, only at a much smaller scale. The location that normally housed the computer was very strange. The scan showed that the substance in it was a colony of viral particles, virions, that were clustered together like a moss. The virion moss seemed to be sending simple signals, like a simple brain structure.

Studying it closer, Sam and Jeff were able to actually see the process by which the formless particles were assembled and it wasn’t at all like they had always been told. They had learnt that it involved a colony of assembly nanites, instead it was a colony of virions covering other virion clusters in a metallic coat. The whole thing acted like the living body of a creature that was made from rock and metal.

If the formless particles were alive, or as alive as a virus could be considered, then the smooth half would be the controller for the colony, the actual brain of the structure. It sent out pulses and controlled the formless particles, getting them to disintegrate against it. The cube was a metallic lifeform capable of naturally occurring nuclear fission.

With the technology of the time, Homi wouldn’t have been able to work out the controlling side, though she had apparently worked out the structure and recorded the pattern enough to make it a viable technology. Erin however, did find a way to harness the smooth side, even if she couldn’t replicate it. Be encasing the smooth side along with whatever else she needed, she was able to make the cube into a rig control core. While the earlier versions only had limited control over the particles, as the generations past and the complexity of the signals they were able to send increased. In the latest update, they even worked out how to cause the particles to trigger their disintegration without direct contact with the core and without causing the entire core to explode, as with the anti-tampering failsafe.

When Sam and Jeff were done with the experiments and they put the cube back together and froze it, thus putting it to sleep, they recorded one final pulse. Jeff had a suspicion about what it was, and fed it to the lab’s contained formless particles. Sure enough, when they received the signal, they floated harmlessly to the ground, inert. It was the shut down signal, something that mechanist everywhere had long dreamed of having. Every time someone tries to do rig maintenance, it was like fixing a power tool while it was still active. At any moment they might make a mistake and trigger the anti-tampering explosion. However, with the shutdown signal, even the anti-tampering could be put to sleep, allowing the machine to be fixed without any issue.

Pulling out his phone to check the time, Jeff started to get a little concerned. It had been three quarters of a day and no one had gotten back to him. He also looked through the file distribution site they used. Both of the drivers that had picked up Sam were supposed to upload a copy of the recording, yet he couldn’t find anything. With the number of files on the site, he might have just been looking for the wrong keywords, but if that was the case then there had been some serious miscommunication. Searching through the local news, he found that there had been a sudden movement in the ice, an several vehicles had been caught up in it. One large sized car and three bikes.

Without hesitation, he grabbed the hard drive which had all of their data and yelled out to Sam.

“Something's wrong; we need to go.”