Apocalypse

45

Joaquin Abell stood at the control panel and watched ten armed guards led by Olaf Jorgenson escorting Governor MacKenzie, Harry Reed, Robert Murtaugh, Congressman Goldberg and property tycoon Benjamin Tyler into the hub. Dennis Aubrey stood behind the control panel and as far away from Joaquin as he could.

Aubrey had heard that Olaf had returned barely half an hour before, Joaquin meeting the giant aboard the yacht before travelling down to the facility aboard the Isaac as his guests followed aboard the Intrepid. On his arrival, Joaquin had handed Aubrey a camera identical to those in the black-hole chamber and ordered it to be locked away until further notice.

The five men were looking about them with uncomfortable expressions, set somewhere between curiosity and disgust. Men of power, Aubrey guessed, were not used to being kept in the dark and disliked being told what to do and when to do it. Effectively brought here against their wishes, and without their bodyguards and other familiar security measures, they probably felt precisely as Joaquin wanted them to feel: exposed and alone.

Joaquin spread his hands in a gesture of welcome.

‘Gentlemen, thank you for coming.’

Robert Murtaugh scowled up at him.

‘We’re only here because you’ve forced our hands, so don’t presume to believe that we’re willing visitors.’

Governor MacKenzie nodded in agreement.

‘I’ve had to put a major meeting on hold for this, Joaquin. It had better be worth it. You said we were meeting on your yacht. Why the hell are we down here? What is this place?’

The Texan, Harry Reed, pointed to the huge metallic sphere dominating the center of the hub.

‘What in the name of darnation is that goddamn thing?’

Congressman Goldberg scanned the large plasma screens lining the walls of the hub, their coalesced news feeds taunting them with hundreds of voices.

‘Why all the news channels?’

‘All will be revealed,’ Joaquin said as he stepped down off the control platform. ‘For now, suffice to say that this hub is the center of my organization, the beating heart of what will, in time, become the most powerful company on earth.’

Robert Murtaugh coughed out a bitter laugh and shook his head, his jowls swinging beneath his chin.

‘My ass, Joaquin. Your jumped-up little outfit isn’t worth a tenth of what my broadcasting network turns over.’

‘Not right now,’ Joaquin agreed, refusing to be baited. ‘But tomorrow…’

‘Something else you’ve seen in your damned visions?’ Governor MacKenzie uttered.

Joaquin smiled and extended one hand toward the metallic sphere nearby.

‘You will observe, gentlemen, that the sphere in the center of the hub has windows, and that those windows look out toward the television screens around the walls of the hub.’ The men glanced up at the various news-feeds. ‘We see those feeds in the present, but from within the metal sphere, those newsfeeds are greatly accelerated by time dilation, allowing me to see tomorrow’s news today.’

Robert Murtaugh glanced at the contraption. ‘Caused by what, exactly?’

Joaquin did not reply, and Dennis Aubrey took his cue.

‘A black hole,’ he explained, his own voice sounding small in his own ears, ‘large enough to cause sufficient time dilation to allow IRIS to see into the future, small enough to remain under our control.’

Robert Murtaugh spat his response.

‘That’s impossible,’ he uttered. ‘I studied physics at college. Black holes form from collapsed stars of tremendous mass. You can’t possibly have achieved such energies. It would take a particle accelerator the size of our solar system to generate enough pressure to produce a black hole. Human technology doesn’t even come close to what would be required to…’

‘I haven’t captured a star,’ Joaquin replied.

‘You’re no scientist,’ Reed sneered at Joaquin in his Texan drawl, ‘so how could you have…?’

‘I have people,’ Joaquin cut him off. ‘People who know how to achieve the impossible.’ He gestured to the chamber before them. ‘Do you even know what a black hole is?’

When none of the gathered men responded and Murtaugh simply scowled, Joaquin looked across at Aubrey and raised an eyebrow. The scientist took a breath.

‘Black holes are formed when giant stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and begin to collapse under their own gravity,’ he explained, finding solace from his fears in the knowledge accumulated from a life’s work. ‘Stars ordinarily are a balancing act, with the force of gravity that formed the star in the first place trying to crush it ever further inward, balanced by the energy from nuclear fusion in the star’s core blazing outward. But when the fuel is exhausted, the nuclear fusion ends. With the core of the star no longer burning, there is no force to prevent the star from being crushed by its own weight. Eventually, the core of the star collapses into itself with immense force, blasting the outer layers of the star away in what’s called a supernova. The super-dense core usually remains as a smoldering remnant, but if the parent star was massive enough the core is crushed with such gravitational force that nothing can stop the collapse of its entire mass into an infinitely small space. A singularity is formed, the heart of a black hole. It is a place without dimension, yet of incredible mass, where time literally comes to a stop.’

Joaquin nodded.

‘Absolutely correct,’ he agreed, as he strolled off the platform and surveyed the control room. ‘However, in the event that formed our universe, the Big Bang, there were such pressures and densities that much smaller, micro black holes were formed in their billions. More are produced daily by cosmic rays from the sun that collide at almost the speed of light with particles in our earth’s atmosphere, creating micro black holes that pass through the earth at close to light-speed. All of these tiny black holes possess little more mass than a grapefruit and pass through the earth almost unnoticed.’

Benjamin Tyler frowned. ‘Almost?’

Joaquin turned and lithely leapt up to the control panel.

‘Time-slips,’ he said grandly. ‘They produce tiny slips in time, their gravity distorting the flow of time around an observer just enough to cause them to experience events that some people refer to, rather naively, as supernatural.’

‘Such as?’ Governor MacKenzie asked.

‘Déjà vu,’ Joaquin replied. ‘The feeling that you’ve been somewhere before. The reason for that is because you have been there before, moments before you actually arrived. The micro black hole causes a tiny loop in time, too small to detect with the senses but enough that the human subconscious remembers what’s about to happen after one of these micro black holes flash through your brain.’

‘That’s pure speculation,’ Murtaugh argued, leaning on a thin white cane. ‘You have no evidence to support it.’

‘What about ghosts?’ Joaquin suggested. ‘Albert Einstein himself stated that time can flip and loop over on itself, and it takes little imagination to picture the past replaying itself before the eyes of those in the present. It wouldn’t take much for a small swarm of micro black holes passing through the earth to generate such a loop in time, the shadowy past temporarily revived.’ Joaquin shrugged. ‘But I digress — I take it that you can see the basic structure of the device, now that you know its purpose. It contains an object of tremendous power. Dennis, if you will?’

Aubrey gestured to the giant tokamak chamber and the huge magnetic-field generators.

‘A magnetic field is generated around the central sphere to attract and capture passing micro black holes as they travel through the earth,’ he said. ‘Black holes can carry a charge depending on the particles they consume from matter around them. If any black holes captured are given a negative charge by firing electrons at them from a cathode-ray tube, they become entrapped within the negatively charged surface of the chamber’s interior and forced into suspension in the center. They are repelled by the surrounding plates and thus combine.’

Joaquin clapped his hands in delight as he addressed the guests.

‘The chamber contains a pure vacuum which stops the black hole from consuming any particles and getting bigger,’ he explained. ‘We couldn’t create the pure vacuum on our own, of course: what particles remained within the chamber were consumed by the first micro black holes that we caught.’

‘But how did you know where the micro black holes would be?’ Murtaugh asked. ‘It should have taken millions of years to have accumulated so many, even if solar cosmic rays were producing them in our atmosphere.’

Joaquin smiled, expanding his arms to encompass the entire underwater complex.

‘Our planet has a number of what are known as magnetic anomalies,’ he explained. ‘They are regions where compasses fail, radio devices are cut off and all manner of atmospheric phenomena prevail. The two best known are the Devil’s Triangle off the coast of Japan, a place so dangerous that it is actually a controlled area which is avoided by aircraft and vessels. The other, here in the Florida Straits, is the Bermuda Triangle.’

Aubrey took over, the eyes of the guests fixed upon him.

‘The anomalies are caused by the micro black holes passing through the earth’s magnetic field, which directs them toward these points on the earth’s surface. This is why so many anomalies seem compacted into a small geographic area. It’s why the facility was built here; Isaac Abell was trying to capture neutrinos, but instead the facility has been capturing black holes.’

Joaquin must have learned from reading countless popular science books that black holes coalesced when they came into contact, creating larger black holes and in doing so, greater time dilation. Out in deep space, Aubrey knew that truly gargantuan black holes dance in terminally declining orbits as they spiral in toward each other, causing tremendous warps in time and space so violent that they form temporal ripples that spread across the entire universe. The largest yet found possessed the mass of twenty billion suns. By contrast, Joaquin’s black hole was a tiny speck, but a speck that nonetheless could produce truly dramatic results.

‘How do you translate that into the ability to see into the future?’ Congressman Goldberg demanded.

Joaquin looked up at the plasma screens surrounding them on the walls of the dome.

‘That, gentlemen, is down to both the ubiquity of global news channels and something that you may have heard of before, a legend of science fiction, if you will, that was once considered the stuff of fantasy and yet is now known to be real. It is the barrier between existence and oblivion, and is called the event horizon.’