Chapter one hundred and twenty one

Agent Smith was as polite as usual as he led as through the military encampment. He explained to us that this was being seen as a global catastrophe and that was why a lot of powers around the world sent teams to help even though weird stuff was popping up everywhere.

"Since the CERN super collider incident, the world has been experiencing a sudden influx of an alien energy that we have never seen before. This energy is easy enough to sense because it affects other types of energy but other than the fact that it can affect other types of energy, scientists are unable to tell us anything else about it. The reason we are here is because this energy has a strange effect on fissionable material. Reactors around the world have found that the abundance of neutrons in their main cores was increasing exponentially for no reason at all. Luckily crisis was averted when a French nuclear physicist named Jean Pierre discovered that a good Faraday cage could stop the cores from going critical and exploding."

I felt a chill go down my spine when I heard that, "You mean that all the nuclear reactors on earth nearly exploded?"

He smiled easily as if he was talking about the weather and not something incalculably horrible nearly happening, "Not only nuclear reactors, all of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons nearly exploded as well. The ones in North Korea actually did explode, Pyongyang thought that we were lying to them about the whole thing so they failed to take appropriate actions before their reactors went critical. Anyhow let's get back to the main topic, you can guess that the Ukraine government was worried about Chernobyl after what happened to the rest of the world. Naturally, they sent a team of scientists and engineers to construct a crude Faraday cage around the exposed reactor 4. Unfortunately, the team vanished at the outskirts of the city and they were never heard from again. The Ukrainian government sent troops,choppers, planes and drones. Same result. The moment they get a certain distance from Chernobyl, all communications cease and they disappear. It has become a complete black zone."

"It does sound pretty bad but why would this be considered a global emergency? I would think that other world powers had problems of their own and they would ignore something of this magnitude until they get their own shit together."

"You're right, if it was only this much the world would have let the Ukrainian government deal with it but the black zone is expanding and it is expanding at an exponential rate. A lot of our assets in space have been compromised but one of our older model cold war era satellites was able to pick up the radiation signature in the area. It is a perfect circle with reactor four at its center and the circle is expanding. According to our scientists, there isn't any way for this to happen naturally even if the effects of the alien energy were factored in. The boundaries between the hot and safe zones are too clean cut. They theorize that something is controlling it. They also say that there isn't enough fissionable material to cause the amount of radioactivity that we have been seeing and as time goes by the circle of radioactivity surrounding Chernobyl has only been getting more radioactive. Right now the radiation signature shows that there is enough fissionable material in reactor 4 to wipe out the entire planet three times over if it detonates."

I couldn't help but gulp when I heard that.

Now I knew why it was a global emergency.