She pulled the deposit box’s door open. The faint glow from the safe room’s overhead light showed her little of what was inside. Maddy pushed her hand into the darkness and almost immediately felt the side of a wooden box. She found a small handle and pulled it out. It was quite heavy, and as she hefted it out of the locker towards an inspection bench in the middle of the room, the young man called out.
‘Let me give you a hand with that, madam.’
‘I’m fine… I’m fine,’ she grunted.
‘Strong as an ox, so she is,’ Liam assured him. ‘She’ll be all right.’ He resumed chatting to Leighton, something about steam ships, from what she could hear.
She studied the box. It certainly looked like a jewellery box, about the size of a small travel trunk, made of dark wood with silver buckles and ornate swirls along each side. She turned the box so that the upright lid would hide what was inside from any prying eyes, and then slowly, carefully opened it.
‘Another box,’ she whispered. But this one was smooth, featureless, metal and cold to the touch.
Refrigerated. There had to be some kind of small power unit or battery inside.
Her gloved fingers found a catch on the side and gently slid it back. Something inside the box clicked and the lid slowly raised with a barely audible hiss. A shallow fog of nitrogen wafted out of the box revealing a row of eight glass tubes, each six inches long and a couple of inches wide. She eased one of the glass tubes out of its holder and, still shielded by the lid of the jewellery box, inspected it closely. Through the glass she could see the murky pink growth solution and the faint pale outline of a curled-up human foetus.
‘Hello there, little baby Bobs!’ she cooed softly, waggling her fingers down at the frozen embryo. ‘Auntie Maddy’s here.’
The conversation in the corner was getting quite animated. Clearly Leighton had a passion for new-fangled things like steam ships and automobiles. And Liam was playing along nicely.
Well done, Liam.
She placed the glass tube back and closed the lid of the refrigerated case, lifting it out of the jewellery box and into her bag. She was about to close the lid of the jewellery box when she spotted a scrap of paper at the bottom. What she saw on it made her heart lurch.
Her name.
A note for me?
She reached in and picked it up. Just a folded scrap of paper, a few words scrawled hurriedly on it.
Maddy, look out for ‘Pandora’, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.
‘How’re you doin’, my dear sister?’ called out Liam.
‘I’m good,’ she replied, grabbing the scrap of paper, balling it up and tucking it into one of her gloves. She closed the box and lifted it back into the locker, much lighter now. She closed the door. ‘I’m all done here, Mr Leighton!’
‘Ah, splendid!’ He came over with his jangling keys and locked the deposit box for her.
‘Everything all right?’
She glanced at Liam making a silly face at her over Leighton’s shoulder.
‘Yes… yes, just fine, thank you.’
A minute later they were exiting the bank on to Minna Street once more, Liam holding the bag for her.
‘Nice enough chap,’ he said.
She turned to look at him. ‘A dozen hours from now he’ll be dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes, dead. That’s why the instructions said to ask for him specifically.’ She’d figured that out on the way back up the stairs. Because if anything happened, if the young man had caught a glimpse of anything inside the box, or heard either of them say anything suspicious… well, he’d hardly have time to do anything with that knowledge, would he? The agency once again cleverly covering its tracks.
‘Jaayyzz. That seems not right to me,’ uttered Liam. ‘Not to warn him somehow.’
Maddy didn’t like it either. ‘It’s how it is, Liam. It’s how it is.’
As they walked up Minna Street towards the main thoroughfare, Liam attempted to lift the mood. ‘You got our little babies?’
She nodded. ‘All in there. Baby Popsicles.’
‘Baby what?’
CHAPTER 7
2015, Texas
Edward Chan and the rest of the touring party sat in the visitors’ reception room, munching on doughnuts and breakfast bagels and slurping orange juice from cartons as their tour guide, Mr Kelly, gave them an introductory presentation.
‘The Texas Advanced Energy Research Institute… or TERI, as we call it for short, was established three years ago in 2012 when President Obama was re-elected. As you youngsters have been taught in school, the world is entering a new, tough and very challenging time. The world’s population is nearly eight billion, carbon emissions have gone off the chart, the world’s traditional energy sources — oil and gas — are rapidly running out. We need to change the way we live or… well, I’m sure you’ve seen enough doom and gloom forecasts on the news.’
He paused. The reception room was silent except for the shuffling of one or two feet and the slurping of orange juice through straws.
‘So, as you no doubt know, the institute was set up as part of the president’s advanced energy research programme. And over the last three years we’ve used the billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money set aside by this initiative to develop the wonderful facility you’re visiting today.
‘We have some of the finest quantum physicists and mathematicians working here, and most of our research work has been to do with a thing called zero-point energy. I’m sure some of you must have heard that term in the news.’
Edward looked around at the other kids. A few heads were nodding uncertainly. One of them — a boy a couple of years older than him, short and chubby with curly ginger hair parted at the side and brutally combed so that his hair kinked in waves to one side, reminding Edward of a Mr Whippy ice cream — raised a hand.
‘Yes, er…?’ said Mr Kelly, raising his eyebrows.
‘Franklyn.’
‘Go ahead, Franklyn.’
‘My dad says zero-point energy is just a bunch of wishful thinking. It’s like getting something for nothing. And that’s impossible in physics, nothing’s free.’
Kelly laughed. ‘Well, Franklyn, that’s a good point, but you see that’s exactly what it is. It is a free lunch. And the idea that there’s such a thing as a free lunch isn’t a new one either. Remember Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. Well, he argued that even in a complete vacuum there’s a great deal left there. It isn’t just empty space, there’s energy too, endless energy waiting to be tapped. Even the ancient Greeks suspected that we walk through an endless soup of energy. They called it “ether”. But the trick, kids… the trick has always been being able to isolate it, to measure it. Since it exists everywhere, it’s homogenous, isotropic… That’s to say it’s uniformly the same everywhere and in every direction.’
The students stared at him in confused silence.
‘Trying to measure zero-point energy is a bit like trying to weigh a glass of water under the ocean. You know? It’s the same inside the cup as it is outside… and therefore since there’s no measurable difference between what’s in and outside the cup, the logical statement to make would be the “cup has nothing in it”. Which would of course be wrong. So, we have a similar issue with measuring zero-point energy. Only by creating a proper vacuum — and I don’t mean just sucking the air out of a space, I mean a proper space-time vacuum, a tiny one — can we observe what it is that remains.’ He smiled his polished public relations smile. ‘The energy itself.
‘And that’s what we have here at the TERI labs, a device that can create a proper space-time gap. A genuinely empty space.’
Another hand went up.
