Science and Strangeness: The Scientist's Circle

Chapter 1

"Alright, guys, I get that we're a new company, but damn, you HAVE to stop wasting the company budget on robots that don't do essential functions. I'm looking SQUARELY at you, Brandon."

"I don't see what the problem is, Jason." 

"You built a robot that helps you put away other robots." 

"Hey, you got us government funding for crazy action science, and you don't want robots?"

"Only to a certain point. Robots to maintain other robots are not helpful."

The Conference room was painted bright blue, with large overhead lights to illuminate the large space. All tier one AstroCorp personnel were present, the heads of the various depatments.

Jason Tanner was the founder of the company, and the head of the Biology division. A world class Forensic scientist, he was at the forefront of investigative technique development. His general science knowledge was unparaleled. He was in his early thirties, tall, and well muscled from his years as an action scientist. He was messing with his long brown hair, tucking it behind his ears every so often. 

Brandon Zion, the head of engineering, was a brilliant roboticist and traditional engineer, capable of building almost anything given time and resources. Though he could be difficult to work with, he was generally observant of the assignment requirements. He was noticably shorter than Jason, and he almost always had a  frown line. More often than not, he could be seen building another robot. 

 Anna Reeves was busy tapping away on her keyboard, looking up every so often to acknowledge the stupidity of wasting the company budget. She was only 21, but she was at the top of the computor science field. She was hard at work earning back the budget, with an antivirus software guarunteed to stop even the most worthy of bugs. She was messing with her glasses as she typed, and she was one to occasionally listen to her music. No one knew what kind she liked.

Daniel O'Neill was absent-mindedly playing with a small puzzle, not listening in the slightest. He was arrogant and overconfident. Unfortunately, he had the skills to back it up. He was currently heading up a team with some of Brandon and Anna's teams, working on a quantum decomputer. He was 29, and he was not only a world class Physicist, but also a world class shot, surpassing the rest of the team.

Rebecca Ramirez was the head of Chemistry, and she was the world's foremost expert on exotic elemental bonding. Her research was essential in discovering Astronium. She had been with the team longer than any of the others, save Jason. Her own chemistry prowess extended beyond the confines of a lab or particle accelerator, however. There's not a situation that can't be action chemistried out of. Her photographic memory was as valuable in almost as many scenarios. She was prone to a few anxiety attacks from time to time. Stress got to her easily.

A few months ago, the team had learned of an area within New York City with hidden laboratories under the surface. They had quickly snapped it up as the budget had been much larger, and they had Government support. Now that they had firmly established their base of operations, they had begun working on their own projects, and persuing some of the finds that had been left in the labs. Namely, some of what looked to be lost volumes of Alexander von Humboldt. Jason was thouroghly studying those.

Not only that, but it seemed to belong to none other than Nikola Tesla himself. He had left a few books there himself, including many of his notes. Some were scientific notes, and Daniel was attempting to wrap his head around those. After several hours of study, he had concluded that Tesla was far beyond his time. Daniel had even discovered plans for a very portable, very aimable Tesla Coil. He had Brandon working on that.

Some of the notes, however, were in an indecypherable code. They looked like a map of some sort, though Daniel couldn't make sense of it.

"And with the weekly chastisement, the weekly departmental meeting has concluded. Thank you for flying Air Science. We hope you've enjoyed the flight" said Jason.

"Hey, Jase?" asked Rebecca. "I got an idea. Could you meet me in my lab in 10?"

"We can't talk here?"

"I'd rather show you what I've got than just tell."

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Rebecca heard a Knock on the door. "It's Jason."

"Coming!"

Rebecca hadn't had much time to prepare, and she hoped she had gotten it all down perfectly, for the sake of the project. This could be bigger than Brandon's 'Tesla Ray.'

"Hello, Dr. Tanner. Please, come in."

"Is this a formal test, Dr. Ramirez?"

"No, but I formally introduce to you," She ripped a large white sheet off of the machine she had been working on. Cliche, but effective. "The Ramirez Reactor!"

The large chrome machine looked like a metal box about seven feet tall. The center had a thick layer of leaded glass sheilding. Inside the porthole like window, there was a light blue glowing cube, about 10 cubic inches in volume, securely fixed in place by rubber coated metal arms.there was some kind of electric charge being sent through it every one second. 

"It's a pint sized nuclear reactor?" asked Jason.

"Not exactly. The core there is Astronium. I was able to synthesize enough of it to finally create the reactor. when we discovered Astronium, we found that it was extremely suceptible to electron flow changes."

Jason recalled the report on the recent discovery of Astronium. Much of the success of AstroCorp was thanks to Rebecca's discovery.

"Yeah, I remember."

"The Tesla Ray was already adapted into a large, three foot coil format as a proof of concept. All I needed to do was adapt it into the Reactor. Some of the engineers helped with that. But essentially, this Astronium is recharging the coil. It's creating an infinite power loop! It's a battery that never runs out!"

"Wait, really? Rebecca, there isn't a number big enough for all the money we can make off this!" said Jason, awestruck.

"That's not even the best part! With a bit of fine tuning, this thing could be reduced or increased in size to power anything from a space station to a cell phone. In fact, I already have some ideas about what we could use it for ourselves. There's only one problem. Astronium is expensive to synthesize, and we could be looking at a big profit margin if we could shave the cost of that a bit."

"And it currently costs $200 to synthesize a macromolecule, right?"

"Yes. I have an idea of how to drop it to $50. But that might be as low as we can go.´´

´´Work up a solution, and then report back to me when it´s done. This is big. Brilliant job. That´s why you´re a department head.´´

Rebecca glowed with pride. She had done it. This might be Nobel material. After her last prize for the discovery of Astronium, she didn´t need another one. Sure, she would accept it, but it wouldn´t be as big a deal to her. Not anymore. She had already acheived that dream.

Jason was elated. Not only was his company going to make billions off the Ramirez Reactors, but Rebecca was probably going to get another Nobel. He had been there during the last acceptance. She looked so happy. He was right there with her doing some of the research himself. He'd been given a Nobel himself earlier that year, in Biology. Though he was surprised at that, he was not going to refuse that offer.

Jason informed the rest of the team. They all reveled in the joy of another successful invention.