The Geneva Factor Read online

  Luke pulled up the picture he had been looking at on the workstation. “Is this him?”

  “Yes, that’s Milton Dyne.”

  “Look closely, look at the nose and the ears and the eyes. Either that is Milton Dyne or it’s his dad.”

  The med assistant broke in, “Dr. Walker we’ve finished the field scan. Our DNA analysis confirms, this IS Milton Dyne!”

  “Check it again. There must be something interfering with the scans.”

  “We did. Twice. It’s him.”

  All four of them—the three medical personal and Agent Morris—stared down at the body, questions racing through their minds.

  “Dr. Monroe, I need to know if there’s a danger to the rest of the base here and I need to know now. Could something in this lab have caused this?”

  “Truthfully, I have no idea what could have done this. I do know that there is no biological research going on anywhere on the base. I’m going to have to get the body back to the Medcenter to see if I can find out more.”

  This wasn’t a murder. Doctor Dyne had aged more than 30 years in matter of a week.

  Chapter 4

  As much as he hated to admit it, Corradi was right. Security footage of the SciLab gave him a suspect. Except it didn’t explain anything about what had caused the scientist to age so rapidly. According to the timecode on the footage a mining technician had entered the SciLab at the same time Luke had been walking down to Central Core for his meeting with Director Corradi. There was no audio but it was clear that the man was arguing with a young Dyne, pleading with him. After a few moments, Dr. Dyne pointed emphatically at the door and turned back to his workstation. The man rushed across the room, arms outstretched as Dyne executed some kind of program…the picture jumped…and the man was standing over Dyne’s aged body. A look of horror on his face, the man stood frozen, staring down at the body. He backed slowly away, looking around the room, turned, and fled.

  A search of the identity database quickly gave Luke a name to go with the face. James Hooper, maintenance tech 3rd. Arrived on base two weeks prior. No record to speak of, in fact this Hooper fellow was a bit of a ghost electronically speaking. How did a guy like that end up on the moon apparently killing a scientist?

  Regardless, Luke had his man and when he brought him in, he might just have some answers. He found himself outside Hooper’s assigned flat in one of the habitat corridors. Once again, the adrenaline coursed through his entire body. Truth be told, it always did that when he went into an unknown situation. Was this Hooper fellow dangerous? Did he have some sort of unknown weapon?

  Luke’s palm sweated against the grip of his stunner. It had been decades since real guns had been necessary for this kind of work, but breaching a suspect’s residence was still basically the same. In hindsight, it might have been smart to swallow his pride and ask for some backup from Blankenship. Too late now, he was committed.

  “Let’s see what’s behind door number one.”

  Accessing the door controls from his wristlink, he placed it in silence mode and entered the override code. The door swished open and he charged through. “Tranquility Base Security, remain where you are and put your hands up!”

  Sitting, head hanging, Hooper had an open bottle of beer in his hand. He regarded the Agent for a moment, took a big chug of the beer and set it down. “Thank God you found me first...you’ve got to help me get off this base!”

  Not the reaction Luke was expecting.

  “James Hooper, you’re under arrest for the murder of Milton Dyne.”

  Hooper raised his arms, wrists together. “Anything, just get me out of here.”

  Chapter 5

  Luke’s office were centrally located between the habitat corridors and the entertainment sector of the base. It wasn’t much, but it was his home away from home. In fact, he spent more time in his office then he did in his actual quarters. He’d sleep there, but the only place for a bed was in the holding cells. He’d never live it down if he accidentally locked himself in.

  Hooper was in one of the rooms that Luke normally used as a drunk tank. It was still early in the day so he didn’t need it for anything else quite yet and there wasn’t a separate room for interrogations anyways. Luke had a few questions he wanted answered. “Mr. Hooper, you understand that you don’t have to answer my questions until you have a lawyer present?”

  “You need to get me off of this base! I can’t tell you anything that’s going to help you.”

  “You realize what they’re going to do to you, don’t you? We don’t execute murderers anymore. They’re going to freeze your ass and stick you in a satellite. Except, it’s not like suspended animation or anything so quaint. You’ll be aware the whole time. Before I came off-world, word on the street was that the guys being released were completely crazy, but completely harmless too. Cheap, efficient, and a damn good deterrent.”

  “I didn’t murder anyone, much less Milton Dyne. Milton was a friend, a colleague. I was trying to help him…but he wouldn’t listen. You can threaten all you want, but I’m never going to live to see the inside of a court, much less one of those satellites. Unless you get me off the moon and back to earth, they are going to kill me.”

  “Who’s they? Maybe we can help each other out here. You have to give me something here.”

  Hooper took a long moment, apparently weighing his options. A moment later the decision was made.

  “Either you really don’t know what’s going on here or you’re a part of it. Either way, you can’t help me.”

  Every interrogation Luke had ever done came down to this moment. Rveryone claimed they were done talking, wanted a lawyer, or wanted something in writing before they said another word. Most of the time that meant they were at the breaking point and the application of the right pressure in the right way would cause the floodgates to open. In very rare cases, it was the exact opposite. Sometimes they actually meant it and no amount of coercion, short of actual torture, would convince them to open the book.

  There was something in the eyes when the decision was made. This was one of the latter. Whatever secrets Hooper had, he was determined to keep, or too afraid to say. Luke could keep trying all day and all night, asking questions, probing, threatening, making up lies and promises, but there would be no more information. This wasn’t a computer system. There was no program Luke could run, no back door to hack. Computers were easy. People were not.

  Luke walked out, not saying another word and leaving the lights on in the cell. He still had one or two tricks up his sleeve and maybe a little bit of psychological intimidation would crack Hooper’s jaws open again. It wasn’t likely, but it was all he had.

  Chapter 6

  He left the office, heading down to the entertainment zone. He had solved a real case, caught a murderer, and gotten out of that damned performance audit. Not bad for a day’s work. Except something just didn’t feel right. He still didn’t know how Hooper had killed Dr. Dyne and caused him to age 30 years in the blink of an eye.

  Normally, he avoided the entertainment zone when he could. People went there to relax, but often had a hard time doing so with the head of base security sitting next to them. Tonight was going to be an exception and everyone else would just have to deal with it.

  His favorite spot…well the only spot he could find a quiet corner to think…was modeled after an old earth Irish pub. He had no idea what Guinness tasted like one hundred years before but it was exactly what he needed tonight.

  How had Hooper managed to age the doctor? According to the report from Medlab, Dyne had died from old age, just as it appeared. “No abnormal biological factors present.” So who was Hooper afraid of?

  “Focus, Morris, focus.”

  His beer arrived and he took a long draught. He was pretty sure that in whatever old Earth pub this place was modeled after, they didn’t order on a touchpad and the beer wasn’t delivered in a sealed plastic pouch via closed pneumatic delivery system. He needed a bartender. Bartenders were supposed to listen to you. That’s who people went to when they needed to talk something out.

  Back to the basics. Number one issue was always motive. There were two threads to pull on. One was the amorphous “they,” the other was whatever Doctor Dyne had been working on. Pulling on those two threads should lead him back to why Dyne had died. Ok, that was a start. It didn’t give him much to go on, but it gave him something. He was going to need to crack into the base system and he couldn’t do that from his tablink, that would create too much of an electronic footprint.

  Means. How did you cause someone to age 30 years in an instant? He had no idea and Dr. Monroe couldn’t give him any answers. For now, means was a dead end, leaving opportunity as the last leg. SciLab4 was a secure area of the base. Following the company’s institutional paranoia, access was granted to a select number of people. There should be a nice audit trail in the system telling him who granted that access. Sure, they will have tried to hide their tracks. They didn’t really understand who they were dealing with though. There was no way for them to know how Luke really got into solving cybercrime. Their loss.

  There it was. He had two threads to go on and both of them would require him to tap into the base systems. That he could do. Not tonight though, it had been a long day and trying to hack in at this time would only call attention to what he was doing. He took one last pull on the beer, set it down, and walked out towards his quarters.

  Chapter 7

  For the first time since arriving at Tranquility Base, Morris got up before his alarm. No one had ever accused him of being a morning person. Jules had always joked that you didn’t approach Luke in the morning without a large cup of coffee. Even then you did it quietly.

  Today, Luke had a case to solve and a computer system to
crack. This was why he was on the moon. He hadn’t had this feeling since the day he got the call to pack his bags. There was a reason he was here, there always had been, the boredom of the past 12 months notwithstanding. Time to go talk to his number one lead, James Hooper. Grabbing that cup of coffee on his way out the door, Luke practically skipped down the corridor.

  Palming open the door, he strode into the main office area and stopped dead in his tracks. “Blankenship? What are you doing here?” The Director’s Chief of Staff had not once come down to this part of the base.

  “Luke, I just want to say first how pleased the Director is that you were able to find who killed the doctor so quickly. She asked me to personally come down here and make sure you knew that.”

  “That’s nice, but you really didn’t have to come all the way down here. I’m just doing my job. In fact, I really need to keep doing it. I’ve got a few questions to ask Mr. Hooper in there.”

  “You’ve already gotten everything we need. The Director and I viewed the footage of the event and it’s all pretty cut and dried.”

  Cut and dried? That footage hadn’t answered anything. “Look, I hear what you’re saying. But this is about overall base security now. I need to be sure of a few things before I can close this out and I need to know how he killed Dyne. So, like I said, I’m going to head in and continue questioning my witness.”

  “You misunderstand. This case is closed by order of the Director. James Hooper is leaving on a shuttle as we speak. He’ll be transported directly to the penal satellite ring for sentencing.” Blankenship’s face hardened, “You did a good job on this. Now let the system take care of the rest.”

  Luke’s mind reeled at what he was hearing. There wasn’t a transport scheduled for another 24 hours and somehow his murder suspect was being whisked away on an unscheduled shuttle. Could Corradi be involved somehow? Did she know how Dyne had died? All of Luke’s good feelings melted away. Hand shaking, he set the coffee down to keep from spilling it and betraying to the Chief of Staff how upset he was.

  Maybe he should just let it go. He didn’t come here to fight the system. He didn’t even know if the system was what he was fighting. When it came down to it, he didn’t really know anything. He had suspicion and a few threads and that was all. He could ride out his contract, go home and leave all this behind him. Sure, it sucked for Dr. Dyne and his family. They might never know what really happened to him. The story would be that some maintenance tech went space crazy and killed him for no good reason. Neat and clean.

  Deep down, Luke would always know better. All that energy was seeping from his pores. For the briefest of moments, he had a sense of purpose again. He was going to bring a criminal conspiracy to justice! How could he have thought it was going to be so easy?

  “By the way,” Blankenship interrupted his revelry just as the pity-party was really starting to roll. “We’ve already identified a replacement for Dr. Dyne. Director Corradi tells me that you know her? Dr. Julia Walker?” He got up and moved toward the door to leave as Luke sat there, stunned. “Good thing you already caught Hooper, I’d hate for something to happen to a friend of yours. She’ll be here in five days.” The door shut behind him, leaving Luke to deal with this last revelation.

  Jules was coming here. When she threw him out her last words had been that he needed to get grounded, to find himself and grow up. He showed her! He was so grounded he landed on the moon.

  Wait.

  Jules was coming here AND she was taking Dr. Dyne’s position. She was his replacement. That made zero sense. Her area of expertise was supersymmetric quantum gravity, and it was purely theoretical. After they tapped into the Higgs field at CERN, an amendment to the Geneva Convention had gone into effect banning further experimental research. There was no profit in exploring the implications of something that couldn’t be made practical. He had been together for two years with her and in that time she had shared the basics of the field with him.

  The search for the Higgs Boson was supposed to answer the question of why mass exists. Physicists believed that at the very beginnings of the universe the fundamental forces of nature (electroweak, strong, and gravity) were all unified parts of a single whole ultimately explained within a supersymmetric model. It was the interaction of standard model quarks with the Higgs field, mediated by the Higgs Boson that caused symmetry breakdown.

  Scientists at CERN believed that if they could recreate the right conditions, primarily by accelerating protons to velocities near the speed of light, they could simulate the very beginning of the universe and demonstrate the existence of the Higgs Boson. Nay-sayers claimed that there was a danger that the interaction would create a black hole that would suck in the entire planet.

  The truth was potentially much, much worse.

  May 21, 2035 was first light on the Advanced Supersymmetric Collider (ASC), replacing the badly outdated Large Hadron Collider. For an instant, the ASC achieved a proton-proton event with a center-of-mass energy greater than anything they had seen before. In the years that followed it was theorized that at that energy level the Higgs field actually collapsed in on itself, reducing the proton masses involved in the collision to zero and relativistically accelerating them to the speed of light, punching a hole in the fabric of space-time.

  In the end, we got lucky. The resulting energy release only destroyed Geneva and most of the surrounding countryside. Simulations demonstrated that had the field collapse remained stable for a nanosecond longer, the energy release would have been large enough to decimate the planet.

  Jules was coming here. If she was his replacement then Dr. Dyne must have been studying the theoretical implications of what had become known as the Geneva Effect. A few times, after a couple of bottles of red wine, Jules had opened up about what fascinated her so much in a field that was essentially taboo. The implications of the energy collapse were mind-blowing. All the old science fiction stories came to life. Wormholes, time-travel, exploring the universe, instantaneous travel between planets and galaxies. Jules said it was all possible. She always said that the most tangible, and practical implication was the creation of stable wormholes, allowing transport between planets.

  Could the company be trying to make it really work? A monopoly on interplanetary travel? Did Julia know what she was getting into? If he knew her at all, she was caught up in the possibilities of the research and the wonder of what could be.

  Five days. That was how long he had and then Jules would walk right into the middle of a storm. That sense of purpose? It was back.

  Chapter 8

  Three excruciating days. Morris waited three long, excruciating days before resuming his investigation. Not nearly long enough to completely allay any suspicions, but it was all he had. In those three days he had seen Blankenship more than he had in the entire month prior. Turning a corner, stopping by the base exchange, grabbing a beer at the pub. Wherever he went, it seemed like Blankenship was there. Maybe he was just being paranoid. It could have been a coincidence, but he doubted that.

  In that time there was just one quick conversation via comlink with Director Corradi. She called to commend him for his swift handling of the “Dyne matter,” as she called it. No mention of the audit. No mention of the fact that they still didn’t really know what had killed him.

  Leaving his office, Luke made his way to the east hoteling center. To anyone watching, his convoluted path would look like a normal security patrol. There shouldn’t be anything to indicate the hoteling suite was the destination he had in mind. Arriving 20 minutes later, he found the suite to be about seventy five percent full. Technicians and scientists throughout the facility used these hubs to access the base’s computer systems for non-priority work. Families used them to communicate back and forth with Earth and supplement the systems in their quarters. The centers bustled with the coming and going of just about everyone on the base at all hours. It was perfect.