Kulkarni stood in wonder as he contemplated this. “We should do Newtonian motion experiments.”
Grady dragged a bucket of golf balls from a nearby lab table. “Already have . . .”
Moments later, Kulkarni was shouting joyfully as he hurled golf balls through the center of the test rig. The balls curved as they interacted with the gravity well of the apparatus, then arced off to ricochet against the lab walls.
Kulkarni shouted, “Did you see that?” He pointed. “Like an asteroid slingshotting past Earth’s gravitational field.”
Marrano was still wringing out his jacket. “Jesus Christ, I smell like a damned hobo.” He gestured to the humming apparatus. “And would you please kill that power? No wonder your burn rate is insane.”
Kulkarni glared at him. “Do you have any idea how important this discovery might be?”
“All I know is an investment has to make economic sense. Mr. Grady, have you filed patent applications yet?”
Grady exchanged looks with Kulkarni. He shrugged. “No. But look, there’ll be time for patents. And anyway, we shouldn’t patent the discovery itself.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because it’s a fundamental insight into the nature of the universe. That would be like patenting electromagnetism. We need to share this information. There’s no telling how many innovations might spring from it. And it’s those innovations we can patent.”
“So basically you’re telling me we invested millions of dollars so you guys could win the Nobel Prize? You’d better get a lawyer, Mr. Grady.”
Kulkarni stared at the spinning golf balls and smiled. He looked amazed as he gazed up at the massive assembly. “Your discovery could change everything, Mr. Grady. It could change literally everything.”
Grady shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about that, Professor, given the energy requirements for the effect. But it certainly opens up some interesting possibilities.”
“Is there a landline where I can make a call?”
“Sure.” He pointed to the back wall. “The offices are through the door there.”
“Thanks.”
Marrano looked up. “Who you calling, Professor?”
Kulkarni spoke without turning. “The fund’s technical advisers in New York, Mr. Marrano. I don’t expect you’re capable of describing what we saw here today.”
“Tell them we’ve got the situation under control.”
Suddenly a billiard ball bounced across the floor and narrowly missed Marrano’s head.
“Heads up!”
• • •
Sameer Kulkarni moved through the unimpressive lab offices. What décor there was had faded from decades of exposure to fluorescent lights. Still, he examined the rooms with something approaching reverence.
This is where it happened.
Low-rent space with unused filing cabinets pushed into a corner. Racks of cheap computers busy processing something. All so . . . ordinary.
He noticed another origami geodesic dome on a nearby filing cabinet. He stopped to examine its precise, intricate structure.
Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him.
And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it—and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.
No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed. Kulkarni’s organization had much luck along those lines in the Third World—eccentric geniuses reinventing infrastructure with small technological improvements: water filters, solar, optics. The trick, as always, was separating the wheat from the chaff. Finding the usefully crazy people among the seriously crazy ones. And that was something Kulkarni’s organization did better than Silicon Valley ever could.
The track record of Valley venture capitalists showed the pattern. A new, sexy tech idea would come along, and then every dollar would be chasing the same thing. Staffers from the original firm would be poached to launch rival firms—until the market became glutted with variations of the same craze. Valuations would skyrocket, and finally, the bubble would burst—the market plummeting. Then a fallow season. Then the cycle began all over again.
And for what? The development of the railroad blew away the Internet when it came to disruptive innovation. Interchangeable parts? Likewise. No, mainstream tech innovation was no threat to the status quo.
Kulkarni’s organization didn’t follow that model at all. It was one reason their investments were seldom near the tech hubs. They wanted the geniuses they identified to remain uninfluenced. It resulted in lots of failures, but then truly useful knowledge was often pried from the cold dead fingers of failure. It made those once-in-a-generation breakthroughs all the more valuable. The breakthroughs that would one day change the course of the human species.
On a day like today, for example.
Kulkarni slowed as he noticed whiteboards in the conference room. They were slathered with complex mathematical equations. He stood in the doorway as he studied the notations, nodding as he followed their logic—but then was lost. Grady had gone somewhere Kulkarni could not follow.
“Very clever, Mr. Grady.” Kulkarni realized Grady’s insights would never have occurred to him. Not in a million years. And neither had it occurred to other great minds of the age—biological or synthetic. Grady’s innovation was one of the rare “virgin births”—never conceived of before.
Kulkarni sat on the edge of the conference table near a desk phone. He just stared at the whiteboards and contemplated how differently Grady must see the universe from most people. And how beautiful that must be.
He sighed. It pained him to do this. It really did. But it was necessary. Deep down he knew it was. But doubt came with the job. After a moment Kulkarni clasped his hands together and spoke to the empty room as if in prayer. “Varuna, I need you now.”
A calm, disembodied female voice answered inside his head. “Yes, Tirthayatri. How may I assist you?”
“I am at incubator sixty-three.”
“I see you.”
“What is the status of this facility?”
“Simulations of incubator sixty-three experimental designs are inconclusive.”
“And if those designs were validated?”
“Successful implementation of incubator sixty-three designs would result in a tier-one branch event.”
Kulkarni took another deep breath. “A tier-one.”
“Correct.”
“I see.” He paused for a moment. “What is the ETA for a harvester team at my location?”
“Harvester assets are already standing by.”
Kulkarni was taken aback. “Then you were expecting this?”
“If validated, the disruption risk is high. What are your findings, Tirthayatri?”
He steeled his resolve. “I can confirm that a tier-one branch event has occurred at incubator sixty-three. Incident imagery and supporting measurements submitted at eleven, three-nine, GMT.”
“Stand by for confirmation.” A brief pause. “Submitted materials confirm that a tier-one incident has occurred.”
“Have there been any communication leaks from this location in the past seventy-two hours?”
“Checking.” A pause. “There have been forty-seven emails and eight voice messages intercepted—along with fourteen submissions to social media. All were contained or rerouted to the Decoy Net, with simulated responses from recipients.”
“Has word of thi
s discovery escaped this facility?”
“No data concerning the tier-one event has escaped incubator sixty-three’s IP enclosure.”
Then it was still his to decide. “Recommended course of action?”
The response was nearly instantaneous. “Intellectual containment. Deploy harvester assets.”
Kulkarni nodded to himself. “I concur. Initiate containment. Record the time.”
“Time noted. Harvester assets inbound. Nonoperations personnel, please clear the area . . .”
CHAPTER 2
The Winnowers
Jon Grady watched a collection of billiard balls revolving around one another in wild orbits within the gravity modification field. It looked like a tiny solar system, except that the orbits slowly eroded in the drag of air. He laughed as the young lab techs, Raharjo Perkasa and Michael Lum, tossed more billiard balls into the gravity well created by the towering apparatus in the center of Grady’s lab.
Leaning on his cane, Bertrand Alcot stood next to Grady. “Well, it looks like the universe is as crazy as you are, Jon.”
“That’s a frightening thought.”
“Agreed. And yet you succeeded.”
“You mean we succeeded. You know I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Alcot waved this aside. “I spent years trying to convince you why your ideas would never work.” He gazed at the orbiting spheres. “And I was wrong. As I was wrong about most things in my life.”
Grady turned with concern. “What you did was challenge me, Bert. Force me to refine my theory. To change it. And change it again. And then change it again.” He laughed as he gripped Alcot’s shoulder. “There’s no way I could have done this without you. Don’t you realize that?”
Alcot pondered this. After a few moments of silently observing the orbiting billiard balls he said, “The truth is I had nothing else to do. My own work has come to nothing. Greta and I . . . all our lives we looked forward to my retirement. Now with her gone . . .”
“You’re definitely needed. I need you.”
Alcot seemed to be grappling with complex emotions. Eventually he looked up. “Your parents will be very proud of you.”
“And I’m sure your children will be proud of you. You should reach out to them.”
“I barely know them.” Alcot squeezed the handle of his cane. “Listen to me. You have to promise me something, Jon.”
“Okay. What?”
“Don’t do what I did.”
“I love my work, too, Bert. There’s nothing wrong with that.” He gestured to the gravity mirror. “That’s why we succeeded.”
“You need to love more than work. You need to have people who care about you—otherwise what’s the point?” He stared without seeing. “That girl of yours—what’s her name?”
“Well . . . Libby.”
“What happened to her?”
“She met someone at yoga class. She’s already pregnant. They’re happy.”
Alcot nodded to himself.
Grady took another glance at the wondrous gravity mirror on display before them. “This is not the conversation I thought we’d be having right now, Bert. This is a historic discovery. We should enjoy it.”
Alcot turned to face Grady. “Life waits for no one.”
“Is this not life?”
“Just promise me you’ll live outside your head as well as you live inside it.” Alcot gripped his shoulder hard. “Promise me.”
Grady could tell his mentor was serious. He finally looked Alcot in the eye and nodded. “I promise, Bert. Now would you shut up and start thinking about your Nobel acceptance speech, please?”
Alcot grimaced and then gave Grady a slap on the back. “This ridiculous hair. You know, the first time I met you, I told Greta that a dirty hippie was stalking me.”
Grady laughed. “Hey, hair is nature’s calendar.”
Just then Grady noticed forms moving out of the shadows at the back of the darkened lab. He straightened up. “Who the hell is this?”
Alcot turned as well. Perkasa and Lum looked up from their miniature solar system. Close by, the visiting investment advisers, Albert Marrano and Sloan Johnson, stopped trying to dry their suit jackets over a space heater and with curious looks came to join Grady and his team.
A dozen intruders moved into the light—men dressed in reflective crocus-yellow jumpsuits emblazoned with Jersey Central Power & Light logos. But along with hard hats they wore black gas masks and carried work lights and tools. They silently and efficiently fanned out through the room, deploying equipment, acting as if the research team weren’t there.
A glance toward the fire exit showed a dozen more coming in from that direction.
“What’s going on here, guys? Hey, guys! If it’s about the power consumption, that’s normal. We have permits for all this.”
Marrano, Johnson, and the others turned to Grady with confused looks on their faces.
“You don’t need the gas masks.” Grady pointed up at an alarm panel and a row of green lights. “There are no chemical leaks.”
Grady noticed one of the workmen had a large, older video camera on his shoulder; the red light indicated it was recording. A bright light suddenly illuminated him.
“Hey! Turn that off! What are you filming us for? You have no right to film in here. This is a private facility. How did you get in here, anyway?”
A man emerged from among the intruders. Unlike the others he wore simple work clothes—flannels and jeans with work boots. He was tall and handsome, with blue eyes and dirty-blond hair and a Donegal-style beard running along his broad jaw. He was athletically built with a charismatic, compelling look—like some rustic fashion model. And he had a vaguely familiar appearance. Grady felt certain he’d seen him somewhere before.
Grady eyed the man warily. “Are you the foreman for these idiots? What’s going on?”
The man stood before the camera, gazing into its lens. Then he turned and raised an accusatory finger at Grady as he spoke in a booming voice. “His judgment be upon you, Jon Grady!”
“Judgment? What the hell are you talking about?”
“In Proverbs it is written that the wise winnow out the wicked.”
“Who’s wicked?”
“Your research robs us of our humanity—creating a hell of this earth. We have come to return mankind to our natural state. To bring us back into harmony with God’s creation!”
Grady felt a sinking feeling as the intruders surrounded them. “You guys aren’t with the power company.”
“There is but one power.”
Marrano shouted, “All right, that’s it! You guys are trespassing. I’m calling the police.” He raised his smartphone and started tapping.
The gas-masked men around him leveled pistol-like weapons that resembled black plastic toys.
“Whoa, whoa!” Marrano held up his hands, still clutching the phone. “What is this? Wait a second.”
Several Taser darts struck Marrano. The clicking shocks that followed could barely be heard against the larger electric hum of the nearby capacitor bank. Marrano fell and twitched on the ground as they continued to shock him.
He screamed, “Stop! Please stop!”
Johnson held up his hands. “For chrissakes! What do you people want?”
Several Taser darts struck Johnson as well. He went down screaming, disappearing from view as men in power company jumpsuits and gas masks surrounded him, looking down without pity as the investment bankers pleaded for mercy. The shocks continued.
Grady shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” He turned to the blond man. “If you’re so against technology, why are you using it?”
The man intoned for the camera lens while keeping his finger pointed at Grady. “His winnowing fork is in hand to clear the threshing floor. But He will burn up the chaff with unquench
able fire!”
Several darts hit Grady, too. A teeth-gnashing jolt coursed through him as all his muscles contracted. Before he knew it, he was on the ground. Screaming in pain. Between shocks he pleaded, “Not Bert! Bert’s got a pacemaker!”
Another shock. Then the leader’s face loomed over Grady. He carefully stepped over a Taser wire and came in close. “Your research is an affront to God. Your inquiry into His works an abomination. Humanity must live in humble gratitude. Just as we came into His world.”
Grady craned his neck up, straining to speak. “There are security cameras . . . covering . . . this place.”
The man looked up without fear. “Let them see my face so that they know the Lord’s Winnower, Richard Louis Cotton, has claimed you.”
A further shock coursed painfully through Grady’s body. As his consciousness ebbed, he was dimly aware of voices coming in over a nearby radio.
“Commencing evolution two.”
“Copy that, Harvester Nine inbound . . .”
• • •
Grady regained his senses sometime later, only to find himself held in place with ropes. Glancing around, he could see that he was lashed to the tangled piping of the gravity mirror tower by impressively complex knots. Whoever had tied them had literally lashed down his individual fingers. There was no longer any electrical hum from the capacitor banks. The intruders must have powered everything down. Strange that antitech militants would even know how to do that.
Grady then noticed Alcot tied next to him, head slumped to the side. The old man’s face was covered in sweat, eyes closed. Marrano was tied up on Grady’s other side, with the ropes leading off in both directions. The whole team appeared to be lashed to the perimeter of the gravity tower. Grady struggled to squeeze his wrists through the bonds, but his efforts only tightened them.
That familiar voice: “You should pray for redemption.”
Grady noticed several gas-masked men nearby silently attaching wire leads to fifty-five-gallon chemical barrels arrayed across the floor, linked by wires. They looked like enormous batteries. “What are you doing? What are those?”