Chapter 1: The Reality Show Starts Now

Rob Young was surprised by the question at first, more so than he had been during the bulk of his thesis defense, but he smiled as he considered it. He liked questions that made him think.

"No sir, if you look at the data on field retention and feedback effects, the results show clearly that the tuned fields are sympathetically reinforcing. The math supports it here and here."

Rob used his 'pointer' to interface with the holo-projector image, splitting the display to show several pages of equations from his work.

"In addition, proper tuning will cause a dynamic increase in field stability that makes the increases sustainable across all the field parameters with almost no additional power required."

"What are the practical limitations you expect, aside from the theoretical ones you mention?" Came another voice in the darkened room.

"Well, the quantum tunneling gets us around the light speed problems, but adds its own problems with the refractive index issues causing some measurable differences between real-time and RGL sensor output. Also an increase in interference from quantum hashing begins to override the signal output as the distance increases. This is a common problem all researchers in this field are having to endure. We all agree that the math doesn't support the concept of distance being a problem, and yet it exists. My best guess without having had the chance to build and test it yet is ... a light minute, more or less?"

The room was silent for a moment before the last voice came again.

"Thank you Mr. Young, we will have a determination for you by this time tomorrow."

The lights came back up and Rob pulled the datapak out of the media console interface and reattached it to the lanyard that hung around his neck. It was only a copy, but he still felt protective of it. It represented two years of his life, after all.

As he was escorted back to the elevators by the aide who had brought him to the interview room, Rob couldn't resist asking.

"How do you think I did?"

"You lost me almost immediately. Pretty much the last thing that you said that I understood was 'Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen'. Based on what I know of the reviewers though, I'd say they liked what you had to say, but thats a very subjective impression."

"I'll settle for the subjective if its all I can get, thanks." Rob said as the elevator doors closed between them.

There was no one in the villa when Rob got there. He was sharing it with two other IME candidates, none in his field, but all just as scientifically bent as he was. No matter. This was Hawaii and the beach was calling. The dreaded suit was off, the board shorts were on. A pair of sunglasses, a tube of sunscreen and his wallet in a waterproof pouch finished the switch from candidate to tourist and Rob was off.

#
Ike Dunham left his interview feeling bruised. Not only had the questions made him think, but some of them actually required him to rethink several of his conclusions. He'd changed one of them on the fly but adamantly stuck to his guns on the second one.

The very same nano-crystalline composites that were being used as ultra-fast computer memory could be modified and used in constructing the processors and other components of the nanoscale computers he proposed and he was confident that his conclusions and his math were accurate.

One of the reviewers had attacked the math, saying it wasn't his own work and that his proposal was derivative.

"Well yes the math is derivative!" Had been his answer. "I'm not a mathematician, I'm an engineer and computer scientist. "The nano-crystallization and circuitry formation processes are all derivative too." He had continued. "That's exactly the point I made to defend my doctoral dissertation. This is not new math or science, it is new engineering."

"Thank you Mr. Dunham." Had come the voice finally.

The young man who walked him to the elevator just smiled and shook his hand when they got there, calling out a "Good Luck!" as the doors closed. 'A warm beach and a cold beer were definitely next on the agenda.' Ike thought to himself.

#
Wendy Fellowes steamed and stewed silently as she floated in the pool. Her interviewers had refused to take her at her word, insisting she step them through the proofs. Demanding she go into details involving the metallurgy and the simulations that showed the bonding site specifications and the resulting field integrity test results.

"Of course this is all simulator work!" She had fumed back at one of the questioners. "Nobody else on the planet but the IME and Obsidian Research is willing to even talk about building this stuff, so all I can do is run simulations."

In the end it had been all about the projected conversion efficiency ratios and the reduced waste heat outputs and the simplified manufacturing process.

"You have been asking for a Universal Power Convertor and here it is." She had said at the end. "Is it perfect? Hardly, but it is as good as we'll get until we start building them and have something real to continue our research on."

"Thank you Miss Fellowes." Was all she got from the darkened room. That and a smile and wink from the cute guy who had escorted her in and out of the meeting.

"Eight out of Twenty four." Arne said. "That's better than I had expected."

"What surprised me was just how much original work was being brought to the table." Dave McKesson added. "We've got at least three or four workable ideas here that will bump Earth's technology right up to the Taluatan levels as soon as they can be produced."

"What I find intriguing, is the unspoken communications potential that some aspects of that RGL sensor technology could provide." Chester Magill said. "If we can get improvements in the quantum hashing and the refractive index issues, enough improvement to get up to 4 or five light minutes, we've got near instantaneous communications within the inner solar system. Improve that out to light hours instead of light minutes and we've got system-wide interplanetary communications with no more delay problems than we currently have with the global cellular network."

"Lets allow ourselves to be happy little techno-geeks another time." Dave McKesson said. "We've got our eight candidates, lets get them in the fold, let them enjoy the weekend at the resort and then put them to work, shall we?"

When Rob's cell phone rang he was on a bar stool in the Hang Ten Bar and Grill sipping on a cold beer. It was a message asking him to please return to the Ali'i Suite. Two stools down from him, he saw another cell phone flip shut. He sized the guy up and decided to gamble.

"Rob Young." Rob said holding out his hand. "Ali'i Suite?" He asked.

"Ike Dunham." Came the reply as the two men s hook hands. "Guess the sword is falling quickly."

"Apparently so." Rob answered.

"Shall we?" Ike said, waving his arm towards the path leading back to the hotel.

"Lead on Damocles!"

The two rode up in the elevator together and found five others already in the reception foyer waiting. They sat down and got busy waiting for something to happen. They hadn't been waiting long, only about five minutes, when the elevator door opened again and a young woman in a bikini and a beach towel came rushing out.

"Umm. Hi. I guess I'm not late?" She asked. Nice voice Rob thought, kinda smooth and smoky at the same time. A part of Rob that hadn't had much chance to express itself began blipping a signal on his consciousness. No not that! Well, not just that. 'She has a great ass', Rob thought. That part of him did threaten to respond.

They got the whole story later of course, that laying in the pool sipping on a piña colada, she had not heard her cell phone, and rushed straight to the meeting on the assumption she was late once she had checked her messages.

The group was shown into the conference room again. The numbers were reversed this time. There were eight of them, five men and three women, and only one interviewer, the aide who had escorted them to and from the elevator.

"Welcome back." He said to us all once we were seated. "My name is Trevor Parkin. I am acting liason to the IME from Obsidian Research. I will be working with all of you to some degree or another over the next eighteen months. Welcome to the IME."

The room immediately burst into what Rob's dad used to call 'Glorious Noise'. He looked around the room and there were seven beaming faces that he assumed were mirrors of his own happy expression.

"Congratulations Ike!" Rob said, shaking the hand of the only person there he knew by name. "You too Bikini Woman."

"Wendy." She said with a blush. That led to a round of introductions. Trevor resumed control of things once they were out of the way.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now 4:30 on a fine Friday afternoon. In an hour and a half, there will be a dinner held in a private dining room where you will all get to meet and mingle with your department heads. After that dinner, you have the rest of the weekend here at the resort as guests of Obsidian. Monday morning we will all be packing up and heading to the Shipyard on Nauru."

More Glorious Noise! Once again Trevor got their attention when things quieted down.

"With the other sixteen candidates going home today we will be doing some re-arranging of the accomodations. We can keep two of the ocean villas we are currently using if we can collapse ourselves down into them. Who here was in the three bedroom villa?"

Rob raised his hand, and was the only one who did.

"We'd like to move the three ladies into your villa Rob, if you don't mind, and we'll put four men in the four bedroom villa. Who here doesn't mind being moved into a room in the hotel?"

Rob raised his hand again. Other hands followed.

"Rob, looks like you beat the others." Trevor said. "Thank you all for generously offering to give up your villa room. I don't guess you need me to find the elevator anymore, do you? I'll see you all at dinner. Rob, if you'll stay a moment I'll get you squared away with your new room."

"See you at dinner." Ike and Wendy said almost simultaneously as they all disappeared out the door.

"Rob, I'll do the old routine here. I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you want first?"

'Oh great!' Rob thought.

"You might as well get the bad news out of the way first." He said with a sigh.

"Okay. You will not be meeting your department head at dinner tonight. You ARE the department head. We will be asking you to head the team designing and building the sensor array for the Pai Lung. We want you to base the entire array on your new system and augment that with whatever else you feel will be needed."

'Good-God-Freaking-Damn! What were these people thinking!' Rob thought.

"ah - okay, if you all feel I'm the man for the job, I'll give it my best. The good news better be pretty good though, after this!"

That got him a laugh from Trevor at least.

"Relax, we have a lot of confidence in you, and you will have a lot of support! The good news is that the room in the hotel you're moving into is this one."

"I'm moving into the Presidential Suite?"

"You are, and for the next two days we expect you to share your good fortune with your team mates." He said, handing Rob the key card. "The other department heads and the rest of the support staff will be heading off to Nauru tonight after dinner. From then until Monday morning the eight of you will be on your own. Don't worry about your bags by the way. They'll be packed and brought up for you."

That was said as he walked out the door. What a parting shot!

"What do you think?" Dave asked.

"He's as close to awakened as anyone I've ever seen who hasn't been exposed to the Light." Jeni said.

"He'll be fine, but we're going to want to give him lots of reassurance as he goes." Grace said. "He's going to need a father figure or confessor type that he can go to when he has doubts."

"Do we push him over the threshold, or wait for him to fall through on his own?" Ginny asked.

"Let him fall. We should let him have time to form a normal bond with the rest of the crew as one of them before things get complicated." Ian said.

Kieran was the one who finally said it out loud.

"The trick will be in keeping things sane when someone finally notices that his work can be used to communicate over distances at faster than light speeds."

The colors of the IME were officially red, black and blue, representing Mars, space and Earth. Rob decided if he was going to dinner tonight as a department head he'd better not show up in his cheap-ass college interview suit. He called his concierge, Drew.

Yes, the Ali'i Suite had its own concierge.

"Yes Mr. Young?" Drew said when he answered the line, before Rob even heard it ring on his end.

"I have an important dinner in less than an hour and a half. I'm hoping you can help me find something stylish but not too extreme to wear, and I thought a hair cut would probably be a good idea as well."

"Of course sir. Your barber will be there shortly and I will have your valet bring by a selection of outfits to try, if you'll trust me to make the selection?"

"Of course." Rob answered.

"Very well sir. Will there be anything else?"

"I was thinking of inviting everyone back here after dinner for a champagne toast and then perhaps hitting the Hang Ten for drinks and dancing. Do you see any problems with those ideas?"

"None sir." Drew said with a sniff, as if the idea that I might have a wish that he could not fulfill was an insult. "I shall arrange everything. Would you like me to select the champagne for you?"

"Please! I will confess to being an unsophisticated rube if you promise not to laugh to much. Your assistance is a life saver!"

"You do yourself an injustice sir. You at least had the good sense to consult me immediately."

There was a buzz at the door. They ended their conversation and Rob went to open the door, finding a large Hawaiian man in a traditional barber's outfit. Two women were with him, both wearing the hotel's staff uniforms.

Rob received a luxurious and decadent shampoo and cut as well as a shave and pedicure. Halfway through this process a distinguished looking older man came in with two bellboys in tow and it was quickly decided that Rob would be wearing a black silk shirt and white linen slacks with a black leather belt and a fancy dress wristwatch with a watchband that matched the belt. He was given black socks and a pair of black Italian leather shoes to finish things off.

More wait staff arrived as Rob was leaving, carrying a couple cases of champagne. They were led by Drew himself, who gave Rob an intentionally dramatic once over.

"You dress up pretty well for an unsophisticated rube!"

"The generosity of the Obsidian people aside Drew, I cannot say how much this means to me. Thank you."

"Thank you sir. Enjoy your evening." Drew answered with a smile.

At dinner Rob was seated next to a man in his mid-thirties who introduced himself as Doctor Constantine Fylakas. In addition to the seven people He'd met earlier at the suite there were twelve others. They were all enjoying a captain's platter of seafood appetizers and margaritas when Trevor Parkin got their attention.

"Folks, I want to introduce the department and group heads and get them seated with the people they'll be working with. I'd like to start with the man who'll be leading the Hull build out, Doctor Alexei Baranov."

There was a nice bit of applause as a man who hardly seemed older than the rest of them stood up.

"I'd like to ask Pradnesh Ravandur, Brian Conroy and Oscar Menendez to join me please." Alexei called.

Next Trevor called up a woman named Natalie Simmons.

"Good evening everyone. I am actually a stand in for the person who will be the head of the Fusion power team, Doctor Chen Hsu. He has obligations as head of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing that prevented him from being here this weekend. On his behalf I would like to call up Wendy Fellowes, Peter London and David Trainor."

Next up was Yuri Stepanovich, head of the Gravity Drive team.

"Welcome everyone. If the following people would join me? Saalih Jaffre, Michael Westbrook and Coretta Ramirez."

"Next we will have the head of the Electronics, Communications and Data systems department, and a founding member of Obsidian Research, Doctor Constanine Fylakas. Con?"

The man Rob had been sitting next to smiled and stood up.

"Thank you Trevor. Everyone please call me Con. My position as head of this department is something of an honorary thing. We will have no trouble filling in the ranks of people capable of building these systems. Still, we will push the envelope in a few places and it promises to be an exciting time. I will announce those joining my department, but if you will merely stand for the moment, rather than joining me here? Ike Dunham, Nicole Short and Mickey Brooks"

Ike stood with a big grin as did the other two.

"Thank you." Con said. "My next duty is introduce you to the head of the Sensor Array team. I will be working with this team also in an advisory capacity, as well as liaison to the electronics team. Ladies and Gentlemen, Doctor Robert Young.

'That definitely generated some Glorious Noise!' Rob thought as he stood next to Dr. Fylakas, who handed him a slip of paper. There were three names on the list. He looked up and saw that everyone was waiting for him to speak.

"Thank you Doctor Fylakas. As you can all imagine, I am still adjusting to the idea that I am being expected to head a department, when as all of you were, I was merely hoping to win a place on the team." There was another brief bout of cheering at that before Rob spoke again. "This slip of paper lists the names of the three of you who will be joining me on my team. Alexandra Nascimento, Frederick Wassermann, and Tyrese Glover."

In the end, they were divided into 5 development groups with a total of eight departments. Power and Propulsion were a group of two, Hull and Ship Systems were also a group of two, Sensor Arrays and Electronics were a group of two, Shielding was a group of one and Health and Safety was a group of one, even if it sounded like it was two.

Dinner seem divided into two groups as well, those willing to try sushi and those who were not. Rob was definitely in the 'not' camp, figuring he was going to wind up there, but not tonight. Not with champagne and the possibility of dancing later. He had a delicious piece of fresh grilled Hawaiian Snapper with a green salad and fresh pineapple and ice cream for dessert. As dinner wound down and he saw more and more people scraping the bottoms of their dessert plates and bowls, he stood and did the traditional spoon on water glass attention-getter.

"Folks, I know the Department heads, myself excluded, will be headed out tonight, but I'd like to invite everyone back to my room for a champagne toast. We are also expected at the Hang Ten later for drinks and dancing."

Rob found dancing with Alexandra Nascimento exhausting and exhilarating, and watching her dance was almost pornographic. He don't know if it was a Brazilian thing or an Alexandra thing, but she was not self conscious in the least about her body, and she really seemed to consider body contact and sexual stimulation as a natural part of dancing.

Dancing with Wendy Fellowes and Jocelin Walsh was exactly the opposite and yet even more stimulating somehow. Perhaps it was because it seemed to be one of those two who found him every time the music slowed down.

The first step in building the Pai Lung was was to build her keels. Although this ship, Earth's first true ship of space, did not need a keel in the same sense that a sea-going vessel did, there were several reasons for these. A cross-section of each keel was going to resemble a slice of Okra. She would have a central access chamber. Surrounding the access chamber there would be five smaller chambers, two for data, two for power and one for the environmental control conduit, piping in clean air and piping out carbon dioxide and other waste gases and unwanted airborne contaminants.

Symmetrical construction outward from the keels would make the artificial gravity more stable and less subject to variations and 'seams' in the field overlaps. Any seams would be found where the fields for the two keels overlapped, which was actually outside the hull itself. It would also allow for increased efficiencies in the modular methods planned for the laying in of the individual sections, making it possible to build the individual sections separately and just 'lock them in' when the time came.

The hull was going to come out looking something like an elongated clamshell, and each half of the clam was going to have its own keel. Picture the Atlantic Jack Knife Clam, or Razor Clam as it is sometimes called. Ensis Directus, not the one from the Pacific. It looks like a folded straight razor, and that is more or less what the Pai Lung was going to look like as well. Without the slight curve though, she would be straight.

The shipyard proper was ringed by classrooms, labs and shops. For a lot of them, they were prototyping as they went. Rob spent the first two weeks in a classroom with his crew and the three Electronics guys, Ike, Nicole and Mickey. Nicole and 'Alex' as Alexandra insisted she be called seemed to just rub each other the wrong way, so they had to do things with a little more structure than Rob might have normally used. He was beginning to believe that Alexandra simply saw every other woman as a competitor and couldn't or wouldn't put that perception aside.

The biggest problem Rob had was getting everyone in the room to the point where they could wrap their heads around the quantum physics the RGL required. The R in RGL stood for remote, and it was the key piece of the puzzle as far as making his gravitic lens idea work as a sensor system. He rolled out the basic explanation in their first session together.