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The London Incident
by Jennifer R. Povey
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The following is an excerpt from The London Incident. The chamber crackled with energy. She studied it for a moment, only then checking the gauges and indicators around her. She believed in this, but there was still that niggling fear. Finally, she spoke to Sam, the facility's artificial intelligence. "Sam, your opinion on our status?" "I have a green light, Clarissa," Sam said in his rich, deep voice. It had probably come from a starving actor. "Green light, roger." She tapped her ear. "We have green light in control." Everyone who could be evacuated from the building had been, in fact, they had emptied the area to the maximum predicted blast radius. "Green light. Area clear." This was her experiment. She refused to let anyone else take the risk. If anything went wrong, she would die quickly. She probably would know nothing about it. Thus, she kept her emotions solidly locked down, not letting them interfere with her work. Clarissa pressed the button. The powerful laser rotated into its final position. Then it fired into the turmoil of energies. Fire formed in the center of the chamber, first red, then white, growing in brilliance. Automatically, shades descended through the middle of the shield, protecting her eyes from the light now being produced. There was still an after-image on her retinas. "Sam, status." It was up to the AI to watch now, although she had her eyes on the instrumentation. Everything fell within expected ranges, then the energy generation spiked upwards. "We have fusion," came Sam's unemotional voice. "Energy generation is at 100%. One twenty. One thirty. One fifty. Two hundred." "Woohoo!" Clarissa made up for the computer's lack of passion with plenty of her own. "Two fifty. Fusion is stable." Clarissa screamed triumph that quite possibly matched that of the first human being to control fire. Then one of the gauges suddenly shifted. "Sam, tell me that wasn't a spike in the gamma band." "It was." She had not moved far from the laser controls. It took her less than a second to turn it off. Her breathing became ragged, her skin pale, but she forced her reactions down. "Reaction is self-sustaining." "Full dampening," Clarissa said, dropping off the top of the emotional roller coaster so hard her stomach lurched. She moved to flick the manual switches just in case. "The dampening is not working." Clarissa used a word for which her mother would have washed her mouth out with soap. "Maximum containment." Her hands twitched, her heart beginning to race. She was finding it hard to breathe, hard to think. "It is contained. However, nuclear collapse has continued past the fusion point. The containment field energy is weakening." Sam said this as if delivering the weather report. "How long until containment failure?" Clarissa's voice became rock hard and ice cold. "Three days, four hours, fifteen minutes and thirty-six seconds is the best estimate." Oh yes, this was bad news. Instead of adding to the arsenal of Earth's energy sources, she had quite probably killed the planet. Excerpt from The London Incident © Copyright 2009, Jennifer R. Povey
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© Copyright 2010, Zefram Media LLC |
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