wireframe animation, sprinkled liberally with numeric labels and equations. It seeming to show two spheres stuffed into the ends of a short rubber hose, which was threaded through the centre of a spinning donut. Glowing pinpricks were appearing in the upper region, alighting on the top sphere and streaming along the surface of the tube to the lower sphere, where they dissipated. Meanwhile the surface of the donut rippled and shifted in almost hypnotic patterns.
'This is our current best guess at the actual structure of the portal. We've been given free access to the NSF supercomputing grid, which helps a lot. The coders are still catching up with the theory though and the theory itself still lacks experimental confirmation.'
Dr Kuroneko paused. The military types didn't seem to be nearly as concerned about the lack of rigour as the audience at a typical physics conference. He shrugged and continued.
'This is just a projection of course. The real thing is seven dimensional. The energy, or whatever is the equivalent of energy flows down from higher dimensions to lower ones. By the way, there’s no sign of it stopping with us, so there could be as many dimensions 'below' us as there are 'above'. The key to the portals is this constriction in the flow; it's formed of some kind of exotic matter, brought into existence by specific patterns of microwaves. We still don't have an empirical model of how that works…'
The audience were frowning now. The doctor's tone became defensive.
'…after this branch of science is so new it hasn’t even got a name yet. What we can do is model the behaviour of the portal once it's open. Once we could do that, your idea was one of the first things we tried.'
The doctor touched a button on the remote and the lower sphere exploded into fragments. With nowhere to go, the glowing particles built up in the centre of the donut. Within seconds, they burst through into the lower area again, as if a temporary dam had been washed away. The particles sprayed wildly for a few more seconds before stabilizing into a new lower sphere.
'That was at x10 speed. Hitting this end of the portal can buy us only minutes at best.' Dr Kuroneko paused to cast his eyes over the impressive collection of military brass. They weren't so different from freshmen, he thought, both spent most of their time playing video games these days. That had been a problem in itself. Politicians, civilians, had seen modern military command systems and noted their similarity to computer games. They’d somehow jumped to the conclusion that the similarity meant that wars could be made bloodless, a stupid concept now disproven by 400,000 dead baldricks in the Iraqi desert. He shook his head, refocusing on the task at hand.
'I know what you're thinking, what happens if we disrupt the far end? Well, watch this.' He pressed the remote again and this time the top sphere shattered. Deprived of energy, the lower sphere faded away, but the glowing particles didn't stop coming. Instead more and more started to appear and this time they were drawn straight to the central torus instead of passing through to the lower region. The spinning donut started to twist and oscillate more and more wildly as it was bombarded with energy, then suddenly the screen went dark.
Kuroneko swore. The simulation had been thrown together in a 36-hour coding session so bugs were to be expected, but it had worked fine in the dry run. Naturally. He reset and tried again. Again the torus was bombarded with energy, looking as if it would fly apart… but then it suddenly swelled to twice it's original diameter. The particles could now make it through, and both spheres reappeared, much larger than before.
'As you can see, unlike our own efforts to date the strange matter envelope in the demon version is self- stabilising. Simply pouring energy in will only result in it reforming around a higher harmonic.' Some of the military types still weren't getting it. He sighed and rephrased it into baby-talk for them. 'So no General, you can't nuke it. We'll have to think of something else.
There was a long pause. The brass shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Dr Kuroneko pre-empted their next question.
'We have come up with one possibility. The inner structure of the portal is in a complex dynamic balance. If we can hit that torus with a blast of directed electro-magnetic energy, on precisely the right frequencies, it's very likely that we can overwhelm that balance and disrupt the exotic matter. It will dissipate and remove the constriction in the flow, thus closing the gate, Permanently unless somebody opens a new gate in the same place. Unfortunately the only a few systems in the world that can generate that kind of pulse, and all of them are huge pieces of apparatus built into research institutions.'
That was that. There was nothing to do but get back to work on the simulation. If they could understand the resonance better, perhaps a series of smaller pulses, spread out over time…
'Actually Dr Kuroneko you may be in luck.' The man speaking seemed to be a civilian, with a curiously flat voice. He reached inside a case and removed
several copies of a file, which he passed out. Dr Kuroneko blinked. They were stamped 'TOP SECRET' and 'CANUKUS EYES ONLY'.
'When I received your initial report I did a little digging. I remembered hearing about a crazy idea that a group of Brits at Aldermaston came up with in the mid 80s. NATO was desperate for a way to stop a Soviet tank army steamrolling Germany without resorting to nukes. A lot of left-field ideas were studied and this was one of them.'
He flipped the file open to a page showing a full-page schematic.
'As you can see, the device is conceptually simple. Two inner coils nested inside an outer one. Capacitors energise the inner coils and an explosive forces them apart. Tremendous current is generated in the outer coils and channeled into the Klystron array in the nose. Power output spikes in the terawatt range in the milliseconds before the device is destroyed. They called it Project Starglider. Don’t ask me why.'
General Schatten spoke up. 'Don't we have something similar? They don't show me all the air force toys but I've heard the rumors about e-bombs used in early strikes on Iraq.'
'Nothing on the scale or precision of this device, General. It was designed to burn through EMP hardening and leave an entire division without communications or radar. It projects a precisely controlled spectrum in a relatively narrow burst. Only two problems; the working parts have to be kept filled with liquid helium and the damn thing weighs nearly 20 tons.'
'Ah, so rather like the very first hydrogen bomb?' Dr Kuroneko was used to theory, not hardware, and he was struggling for a frame of reference. 'It explodes but is almost completely immobile?'
“It’s a device, not a bomb, and it initiates, not explodes.” The targeteer spoke idly. “But you’re right, it was a clumsy device, even for a B-36. We built five of them in early ’54 designated the TX-16.”
“I never knew that.” Kuroneko was amazed, he’d always assumed the Ivy Mike device was a useless technological dead end.
“So don’t worry about size and bulk, if we need it we can move it. The Brits were planning to dump it out the back of a C-130, though that idea was marginal at best.” The targeteer’s voice was still idle and steeped with professional disinterest.
There was a long silence as the attendees paged through the file. Eventually General Moseley's impatience got the better of him. “So, did it work?'
'They built two quarter-scale prototypes. The first one was a non-superconducting test article. It was only fired at low power and according to the file, it's still in storage at the AWE. The second one was a full prototype. Results from the sole test were mixed. Power output was disappointing, but the amplitude profile did suggest that ten of the twelve emitter tubes shattered prematurely.'
Dr Kuroneko had been frantically scanning the project history. 'Ah, of course, the fact that the… device… is destroyed when used would make finding out what happened rather difficult. Hmm. It looks like the engineers were convinced they could lick the problem, but the project was defunded in 1993… I presume because of the end of the Cold War?'
“That’s not why it was cancelled Doctor.” The idle voice was getting on Kuroneko’s nerves. “EMP is a grotesquely over-rated weapon. It’s literary achievements far outweigh its practical applications. There are much simpler ways of taking down a command system.'
There was another long silence, before Secretary Warner decided that he had all the information he needed. The details were clearly best left to the specialists. It was time to ask the key question. “Can you make it work for us?'
All eyes turned to Dr Kuroneko, who had gone back to devouring the file. For a moment, he was oblivious to the discussion surrounding him, but then he sensed the silence and looked up.
'Ah, well, it looks like..,' This is insane, he thought, I'll need a whole new set of simulations to even start…
