Coming of Edge 3: On the shoulders of science

Professor Dr. Wout de Vries reclined at his desk in his small office. He held his extra-large cup of filtered coffee, resting it on his bulging belly and let his gaze wander over the simple pieces of furniture in front of him.

Except for his computer it was nearly empty. It was tidy.

He grunted. Nobody had ever called him structured and sorted regarding his office duties and his room still looked overstuffed on books and trinkets. If those books had calories his room would be the foie gras of the university. And still it was nothing in comparison to the days when his academic career kicked off. He vividly remembered how it was before. It was nearly impossible to access his little fridge or the coffee machine without making more of a mess.

There was a reason his peers had called him Dr. Malcolm back then.

Technology had sorted it for him – The exhaustive essays and endless forms for funding applications, the countless exams and research papers of his students. He did like print on paper but in a work context it did not make much sense to stay analogue when machines did most of the heavy lifting.

Now he had time, in abundance. He wondered how he would survive the boredom of the remaining years until retirement. He felt desperate thinking about the years after retirement.

There was a knock on the door. He checked his watch. It was exactly 10 o’clock, as expected. He could see a shadow on the other side of the frosted glass in his door.
“Come in!” he answered and stood up.

“Elise!” he beamed at the woman who opened and entered the door. He waved her in. The woman smiled at him, slightly tilting her head down in a light sway. “Wout,” she paused, “it’s so nice that you are having me over.”

He affectionately placed a hand on the upper arm of his former student who easily matched his height.
“You want a coffee? Water?” He pulled up two chairs for them to sit together.
“Water’s fine, thanks.” She turned to the bookshelves, reading their titles.
He went to a little fridge for a bottle and then for his own mug, offered her the beverage and took one of the seats.

“Now, I was surprised you called. How long has it been? 20-something years?” He realized how much his student had changed and somehow not at all. Her slightly angular glasses looked modern and expensive, but not stylish. Her mid-length hair and make-up were precise and adequate, but lacked any specific personal expression. Her suit looked expensive. She was still inspecting the books.

“Yes, in that ballpark. It’s been interesting.” She smiled and looked around his room. “What happened here? It is so… empty.” He instantly recognized her little, polite laugh, emphasized by a slight waggle of her head.

“Ahh, even an old white man like myself cannot run from the future and it has arrived without question. The stuff computers do nowadays is just fiction for me.” He paused. “I heard you are working for the government now, I saw this report lately mentioning you in charge of building the new EU Ministry of Health?”

“Well, I have been working government ever since.” She smiled. “Bureaucracy and institutions don’t like career changers much. So, was working my way up.” She pointed her index finger to the ceiling and he nodded. It seemed fitting. She was not his best student, not even close, but she was good with people and she had managed to get grades that exceeded his expectations by far. A hint of memory crept up, something itching the wrong way but he could not place it.

“Oh, Bukowski and Roth. Did not expect those here so openly but I suppose it’s fine considering your expertise is biology.” She smirked at him in a way that made him wonder if this meeting was a good idea.

She continued. “Anyway, last year was crazy hard to navigate. I was lucky to show up on their shortlist when they decided to reorganize Brussels. But my weeks are hell right now. The world won’t stop turning.” She waved the statement off with her hand and finally sat on the chair in front of him.

“I am here on official business and my schedule’s pretty tight – I hope it’s okay if I cut straight to it.” She had always liked her deliberate pauses.
“We need you.” She managed to underscore this by intently looking into his eyes. He felt flattered and at the same times had the unnerving notion of his escape routes closing.

“Okay. What for?” He was sure caution was creeping into his voice by now. “I hope this time it’s not related to the B in WMD.”

She put the bottle on the floor and lifted her briefcase to her lap. She pulled out a notebook and turned the convertible screen so both could look at it.
“Are you following the news? There was this terrorist attack in Germany a few weeks back. Part of a building in the center of Hanover gone in an instant.”
She showed him some screenshots of media coverage. Then actual photos of the scene.

“Ah, that one. Yeah, hard to miss,” he answered. “What a tragedy, about 8 killed, some 30 injured. Do you remember Tuva? She teaches as well now. Anyway, she told me the net’s full of conspiracy theories. What about it?”

Her voice was laced with a tinge of sharpness. “I know your field is molecular biology but do you think a common bomb could cause damage like that?”

“Uhm… damage like what?” He realized her question was rhetoric. “Sorry, I did not dive into it. I honestly have no details about the incident. So, it was no common bomb?” His tone hinted more at affirmation than a real question. In a surprised afterthought he added, “The truthers do have a point?”

She made a pained expression. Apparently, conspiracy theorists were a touchy subject.
“The analysts had some explosion experts look at it. No debris. No inward or outward force.” She pointed at the screen. “Then they asked nuclear physicists, Enander, Curreri - I think you know the guys. Do you see those things here, or this?” She showed some more detailed photos.

He squinted his eyes, lifting his chin to focus through the lower part of his glasses. “Looks molten to me.” His fingers played with his beard.

“Yes, this is molten steel. This slag here? Liquefied stone.” She nodded. Or bobbed her head, hard to tell.

“So, scorching hot then.” he mused. “Still, this is quite a big sphere of nothing and it hardly matches the amount of molten material.” De Vries propped his elbow on the arm rest of his chair to support his head, thinking.
“It would mean lower temperatures at the fringes, but extreme ones in the center. Concrete and steel disintegrating… hm.”

He reclined again. “Nuclear? But that would be pretty tough to cover up. What did the two Nobel candidates have to say about it?”

“You’re right, they assumed temperatures could be in the range of the sun’s core.” Her mouth pressed into a line.
“Both Curreri and Enander stated that it looked like small-scale nuclear fusion first, due to the temps, but it did not add up. No ‘ionizing nuclear radiation’ and the damage was far too contained, controlled.” Another pause. “This should have been blocks, not a few rooms of that building.”
She leaned back and finally unscrewed the bottle and drank some water. He found his mug empty. When did that happen? He stood up to get more.

“Okay, no fusion then – there’s a surprise. It’s a nice research topic but hardly anything where I can be of any service. Why do you need me?” He found this interesting on a hobbyist level, but for his level of decade-long expertise this seemed completely irrelevant. “This is physics.”

He fetched milk from the refrigerator.

“This is physically impossible,” she countered sharply. The way she was looking at him made him realize he was condescending and she was not done yet. She would not have come if the answer was simple. She had not in the last twenty years.

He felt like a tool. Even more because he just had poured coffee beside his mug very confidently.

“Investigators were completely blind on this one. The government decided to cover it up, hence the terrorist framing. Wait.” Her voice barely dipped into the shrill and pressured but she recovered. She searched for something on her laptop. She continued much more controlled, “So, this place was a medical practice before a relevant part of it got whisked out of existence, right?”

He fetched a cleaning rag and took care of the spilled coffee.
“Did you just use past tense? They were blind?” The professor looked at her incredulously.

Elise authenticated herself to open a file, placing her wrist on the integrated sensor.

“Sometimes they deliberately upload patient data directly into the cloud, saves money, more efficient. It’s illegal, so it’s hidden. But we could acquire the recorded feed.” De Vries could not help feeling extremely excited, his spark of curiosity had become a bonfire. He sat down on the edge of his chair, taking a mouthful from his mug.

The clip had a clear image and crisp sound and showed almost the whole room, including the door. It started with the doctor notifying an unremarkable blonde boy about the recording procedure. The examination itself seemed boring enough, except maybe for the fact that the body of the poor boy showed a reaction to the doctor. The professor inhaled sharply. “Man, that’s a shitty moment to have a boner.”

He barely registered Elise’s frown upon his remark, when a man entered the room in the video, apparently father of the boy. A short argument broke out between him and the doctor. Distortion and noise suddenly built up in the clip’s picture, a bright white light grew more and more intense and then the clip was over.

“What the fuck was that?” He stared at the screen.

“Look,” said his former student and set the timer back and paused the video. Then she slowly moved it.

De Vries said nothing. She played it again, slower this time, then stopped it again at a still. It looked like the boy’s skin was boiling.

“The boy?” he asked with grave voice, mouth agape.

“Yes, that’s why we need a biologist. A good one.” she answered in a solemn voice. She switched to a photograph. “This is what the first responders found.” It showed a naked child, soot-covered in the crater’s core.

“This footage has to be fake.” There was a tickle at the back of his head, it made him feel uneasy. “It’s literally impossible.”

“The boy’s alive.”

The old man leaned back into his chair and looked to the ceiling. He knew he wanted this. It was a once in a lifetime mystery for a scientist to solve. It also was incredibly dangerous. What protection could possibly be sufficient to survive this?

He sighed.

“You’ll get the funding you need. I’ve already talked to the dean, the Karolinska would very much appreciate your support on this,” she said with a bob of her head.

He finally understood. He did not talk to the people-savvy Elise of the past; he was talking to a proxy of the government. The last time he agreed to helping them during the war, it nearly had unraveled him. Back then he had thought he could save hundreds of thousands of lives. He had accomplished the opposite.

She was way better at this game than he was. He wanted her out of the room.

“We found two more.”

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