No Such Thing as Evil

Chapter 3

Pete Rasmussen, senior research director at TerraStore, waited with the other members of his team in the control room eight hundred meters underground. The security monitors showed the electric cart, essentially an industrial golf cart, departing from the main tunnel junction. It held two riders: the driver wearing a white hard hat and the passenger wearing a green hard hat. The unique green color was reserved for the CEO alone, Rick Anderson. The cart seemed tiny as it glided through the enormous tunnels, like a single blood cell flowing through a vast network of arteries.

Damn! What does he want now?

"Listen," Pete said, turning to the group, "he's on his way. Let's walk through it one more time." Pete nodded to his staff, the several scientists in white lab coats sitting at control stations around the room and the half dozen technicians in protective clothing standing by. They looked like kids on a baseball diamond, waiting for the owner of the house with the broken window to come out.

The appointed scientist straightened in his chair, cleared his throat, and looked around the room. "Well, we've detected neutrino bursts consistently. The average interval has been seventy hours. However, six days ago, we failed to detect a burst at the expected interval. Initially, we were unable to determine the cause. Then we found an error in the detection subroutines—" The scientist reached for a trash can. He leaned over it with a sickening heave, his mouth opening wide, uncontrollably, his face beet red. His eyes bugged out as he shuddered under the convulsive strain. Viscous strings of bile dripped into the basket.

Pete could almost taste the sourness at the back of his own throat. The only sound in the room was the scientist gasping and spitting into the basket. Pete gave him time to recover.

What does Anderson want? What is he going to ask that he hasn't already? Anderson doesn't want excuses. But there were plenty. The laboratory's location was far from ideal: deep under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, built secretly at the same time as its closest neighbor, the infamous Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. The government needed a place to store material of any type—for any reason—without prying eyes. Working under the veil of secrecy made everything difficult.

The laboratory tank, used to harvest the unbihexium, was originally built to store crude oil as a fail-safe for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It could hold 1.5 million cubic meters of oil. But as the US energy industry converted from oil to renewable forms of energy, especially solar, oil lost its strategic significance, and the tank remained empty. As reliance on oil and nuclear fission declined, the government's secret complex became obsolete. The cost of maintaining the facility became a liability. Anderson's firm had agreed to take ownership, ostensibly as a geologically stable vault for the world's data. TerraStore always seemed to be at the right place and the right time.

Unbihexium, atomic number 126, didn't exist on Earth, but serendipity revealed a reaction that yielded a few atoms. Liquid CH2O, commonly known as formaldehyde, catalyzed a reaction between a neutrino buildup lasting only a fraction of a second followed by a perfectly timed discharge of high-energy electrons at the peak of the buildup. The reaction formed trace amounts of unbihexium-310, a stable isotope.

Out of work for two years, Pete didn't hesitate to take the job to modify the tank and build a fully automated process to produce unbihexium. Anderson should be grateful to have me. I'm the only one who could come up with this design. Between the refrigeration system and the extraction filters, I've done everything right.

"But we fixed the computer code. Harvesting of the unbihexium has resumed," the scientist concluded, looking toward Pete.

Pete glanced at the security vid feed. The cart pulled up to the door outside the lab. What the hell does a company that stores data need with unbihexium, anyway? It was a question he didn't have the courage to ask. The display switched to a different camera showing Anderson walking down the access tunnel to the control room.