AMPED (16 page)

Most of the untold millions tuning in already knew of her discovery, of course, at least the punch line, but this was the first formal announcement. Panicked speculation and rumors had gone viral almost as quickly as had the discovery.

Eugene Tobias stood at the microphone until the audience chatter gradually ceased. When the room was silent, he began. “As many of you are now aware, at 10:23 Pacific Standard Time last night, a graduate student at the University of Arizona named Madison Russo made a discovery that has shaken the foundation of science, cosmology, and religion. Indisputable evidence of not just extraterrestrial life, but of
intelligent
extraterrestrial life. This discovery has now been repeatedly confirmed.” A thirty foot image of Tobias also appeared on a screen behind him, so those in the back could detect his every facial expression.

“I will now ask Miss Russo to make a brief, prepared statement. She will be followed by Dr. Timothy Benari, an expert in something called
zero point energy
. He will make a prepared statement as well. Then we will introduce our full panel and open up the floor for questions.” He gestured to Madison. “The microphone is all yours.”

Madison approached the lectern in flats and a dark suit, consisting of a pencil skirt and matching jacket. She hated formal wear and found the outfit restricting and uncomfortable. But if there was ever a time to dress formally, headlining a press conference in front of most of America was probably it. She adjusted the microphone and cleared her throat.

“Hello,” she croaked, and to her own ears her voice sounded tiny and meek. “As Dr. Tobias said,” she continued, managing to increase her volume despite the trouble she was having taking in oxygen, “my name is Madison Russo. Before I describe my findings, I thought it was important to give a quick—and I hope painless—review of Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

She half expected to hear a unanimous groan from the crowd of reporters. She hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, so didn’t entirely trust her judgment, but while everyone had heard of relativity, she guessed that few non-scientists fully understood its implications. Or how profoundly it had turned mankind’s intuitive sense of how the universe worked upside down.

She smiled nervously. “Naturally, this will be a huge oversimplification. But relativity is critical to understanding the discovery that Dr. Tobias spoke of.

 
“So here is a three minute course. Suppose I threw a ball twenty miles per hour at a boy racing away from me on a bike, also going twenty miles per hour. How fast would the ball gain on him? The answer is, it wouldn’t. Relative to the boy, the ball would be going at zero miles per hour. If he was racing
toward
me at twenty miles per hour, the ball I threw would be closing the gap at
forty
miles per hour.”

Madison looked out over the audience to see how the reporters were reacting, but they might as well have been made of stone. “So relative velocities are just a matter of addition and subtraction,” she continued. “Pretty simple, and true for every object ever measured.” She paused. “But then light came along. It travels at an incomprehensible speed of
670 million miles an hour
. And as impossible as it seems, it doesn’t obey this simple rule. The speed of light measured by an observer is exactly the same, no matter how fast he or she is moving toward it or away from it. If you were traveling at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, and chasing a beam of light, it would still be moving away from you
at the full speed of light
.”

She turned a page of notes and continued. “This would be like being in car going fifty-nine, chasing a car going sixty, and the car you’re chasing is still gaining on you at
sixty miles an hour.
Just as fast as it would if you were
standing still
. Seems impossible, and defies common sense. Newtonian physics couldn’t explain it. Fortunately, Albert Einstein developed a physics that could.”

Madison paused for just a moment and looked out at the sea of reporters. They still could have been made of wood for all the interest they were showing.
Oh my God
, she thought.
I’m boring an entire nation to death
. Her throat tightened, and breathing became even more difficult. But there was no turning back now.

“Einstein devised a theory and set of mathematics to account for light’s strange behavior,” she continued, forcing the words out. “According to him, speed changes
everything
. As objects get faster, to an unmoving observer, they shrink in length and increase in mass. At just a hair away from light speed, an object’s length would be very near zero. And its mass would approach
infinity
. And time would slow down for it as well. If you traveled very near the speed of light for just a few minutes—at least for you—a million years could have passed for your sister on Earth.”

Madison could tell from the body language of the room that interest in the subject matter was growing.

“Pretty mind-blowing stuff. And it seems totally crazy. But Einstein’s predictions have now been proven over and over again. Particles that decay at one rate when they’re slow, take far longer to decay when traveling near the speed of light. Precisely as the equations of relativity predict. Even GPS satellites are corrected for relativistic effects using Einstein’s equations. The reason these effects seem so ridiculous to our intuition is that they only take place at insane speeds, far faster than anything on earth can travel.

“Einstein also provided a new take on gravity. He realized spacetime is like a trampoline, which is dented by any object with mass. Put a bowling ball in the center of a trampoline and it causes an indentation, so that anything else you put on it wants to roll downhill toward the ball. This is gravity. When a mass indents spacetime it sends out gravitational waves at the speed of light. Until very recently, these were all but impossible to detect. But a new theory has arisen which has allowed for super sensitive detection of these waves.

“My research gives me access to such a detector. I designed software to sift through billions of pages of gravitational wave data from endless masses, big and small. From asteroids to planets to suns. My software crunches this data and alerts me if it detects anything unusual.” She paused for effect. “And last night it did. It detected a mass the size of our moon in interstellar space, in the plane of the ecliptic, hurtling towards us from the direction of galactic center. Dr. Tobias has provided the exact coordinates in your information package.”

She paused and took a sip of water from a glass on the lectern. “Now a moon sized mass by itself isn’t all that interesting.
But the mass of this object was falling precipitously as it went
. First it was the mass of the moon. Then this moving object was only half as massive. Then only a fifth. Then a tenth. And so on.

“This made no sense at first. But then I remembered relativity. Remember that an object’s mass increases as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light. If an object were traveling very near the speed of light, and then began to decelerate, one would observe exactly what I had observed.

“But objects in interstellar space don’t travel anywhere
near
the speed of light. So I was sure I was mistaken. But when I drove this data through Einstein’s equations, it fit
perfectly
. Crosschecking its apparent mass at different time points and at different locations gives a precisely consistent picture mathematically. I’ll spare you the math, but the picture that emerged from the equations is as follows: a spherical object that, when not moving, would be roughly the size and weight of a small car, was traveling at greater than 99.99999 % of light speed. It then began braking smoothly. At its initial speed its apparent mass was huge, but as its speed fell its mass decreased dramatically.

“As most of you now know, further gravitational readings and further math indicate that this object is headed directly toward Earth. As of an hour ago, it was travelling just over a million miles per hour, and it is still slowing. If it continues to decelerate smoothly, it will intersect our planet in exactly twenty-two days time.”

19

John Kolke waited patiently for his commander to return to his office, one of several the colonel maintained at military bases across the country.

Colonel Morris Jacobson entered and took the chair at his desk, facing his second in command, and he didn’t look good.

Kolke was confused by his demeanor. “You did tell Rosenblatt about his daughter, right?” he asked.

Jake sighed. “Yeah, I told him.”

“Then why do you look so miserable?”

“It didn’t go the way I thought it would. I might have made things worse.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“Part of him is desperate to believe me. But part of him thinks this is some kind of cruel mind fuck. That I’m giving him hope, just so I can snatch it away later to destroy him even more. So he’s afraid to believe me, just in case it isn’t true. If he believed me, and then it turned out I was lying, it would be like losing his daughter twice.”

“I see what you’re saying,” said Kolke.

Jake checked his watch. He had about twenty minutes before he called Miller a second time. His people had gotten nowhere tracing the call or finding Miller’s IP address, as expected.

“So what did you think of Kira Miller?” asked Jake. Kolke had listened in on his call, but Jake had wanted to delay any postgame discussion until after he had spoken with Rosenblatt.

“She’s impressive,” replied the major. “Her reputation is well earned. Her charisma comes through, even when you can’t see her. And from her pictures, I can only imagine how much seeing her in person adds to the effect.” He paused. “You can’t possibly believe she’s sincere about this trade, though.”

“No,” agreed Jake. “Not for a second. But we need to figure out what her angle is. She didn’t go through this charade for her health.”

“It has to be a rescue attempt.”

“I agree that’s the most likely explanation. She’ll set up the handoff so she’ll know where we’ll be with her people. Then she’ll attack. Or members of her group will. She’ll count on those pills of hers giving them the advantage, no matter how we protect ourselves.”

“So how do you want to play it?”

Jake didn’t answer for almost a full minute. Kolke waited patiently while the colonel weighed options in his head. “We restrain Desh and Rosenblatt at a location far away from where we acquire Miller. Metal handcuffs, plastic handcuffs, leg irons, the works—we bind and gag them so thoroughly we can walk away without any worry they’ll escape. In an apartment, maybe. Or a hotel room.”

“What about in a self storage facility? In one of those little steel rooms you can rent out?”

“Perfect,” said Jake. “When Miller is safely in our custody, we tell her people where to find Desh and Rosenblatt. This way, ambushing us does them no good. Not if they want their people back.”

“I like it. But she’ll never agree to it.”

“If you’re right, I’ll have at least forced her to show her hand. She’ll still be intent on outsmarting us, so the discussion won’t end there. The ball will be in her court, and you’d better believe she’ll hit it back.” He paused. “But for some reason, I think she’ll agree to just about anything I propose.”

Kolke’s face wrinkled in confusion. “Why?”

“Because she’s a lot smarter than we are. Even without her magic pills. We’re just thinking a move or two deep and congratulating ourselves. She’s playing a different game. I think she already factored this play into her equation.”

“If that’s true, then you should refuse to deal. Period.”

Jake smiled. “Yeah. Probably. But if I do that she’ll have won forever. She already has me second guessing myself, jousting at shadows. But if I believe no matter what I do, she’s a few steps ahead, then I’m paralyzed and may as well pack it in now.”

“So what else do you think she might have up her sleeve?”

Jake rubbed his head. “There is one flaw in my plan. Even if she can’t directly free her friends, she could try to capture me and force me to give up their location.”

Kolke considered. “Not if you don’t know it,” he said.

“Good thought, Major. Very good thought.” Jake paused for several long seconds. “So we can play it like this. You and I separate. You leave Desh and Rosenblatt bound somewhere, but you don’t tell me their location. But now it should be in an apartment. Far more of these than there are storage facilities. If she really does give herself up, you tell her people where to find our two guests. If she kills or captures me and our team while we’re trying to take her into custody, you just re-gather the prisoners and she’s no better off.”

“Not to rain on this parade or anything,” said Kolke wryly, “but under this scenario, she might not get her people back, but you’re still captured or dead. Doesn’t seem like much fun on your end.”

Jake laughed. “Well, I’ll do my best to see that this doesn’t happen. It’s just a worst case. We can have her rent an SUV and give her driving instructions as she goes, so we can’t be ambushed. We’ll find a stretch of low ground between two cliff walls—like a shallow canyon,” he said, his head tilted back as he thought it through and tried to envision the handoff in his mind’s eye. “One she can get to quickly by off-roading. We can have helos overhead making sure she isn’t followed and snipers on both cliffs. Most with live ammo—but a few with tranquilizer rifles, just on the off chance she doesn’t try anything.”

“That seems like . . . adequate . . . protection,” said Kolke, and Jake could tell his second in command was convinced this was overkill. Maybe so, but this woman’s capabilities had him spooked.

Kolke was about to continue when Jake said, “hold that thought,” and picked up the phone on his desk. He described the kind of terrain he was looking for in the Colorado area to the woman who answered, and that he needed the GPS coordinates of such a place communicated to him as soon as possible. He hung up and gestured to the major. “Go on,” he said.