Little Deadly Things (32 page)

Jim commented on the morbid curiosity that drove him to watch the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Marta spoke of her interest in seeing the river cleaned. Eva offered no motive for watching her competitor’s success.

Dana’s schooling brought him to the conference room. The remediation project provided lessons in chemistry, political science, history, biology, and social science. His gaze alternated between the vid projections, his own heads-up display and sidelong glances at Eva. At one point, he subvocalized a command to his datasleeve and sent a databurst to Eva’s sleeve. She looked over at the boy with a wistful gaze and mouthed, “Later.” Dana frowned and turned back to the news coverage of the plant’s opening.

The winter morning was unusually warm in Rockford, and the sun shone as bright as the town’s hopes for a clean river and economic prosperity. Rings of chairs perched on a temporary stage. The front row was reserved for plant and town officials. Dr. Reinhart mingled with them. He shook hands, slapped backs, and doled out humble thanks and earnest congratulations in equal measure. The Rockford High School marching band entertained the assembled guests from just beyond the stage. Their costumes shimmered, first in blue, then gold—Rockford’s colors—and sunlight glinted off their instruments and the decorations on their costumes like the tips of a crackling fire.

The officials and honored guests, the townspeople of Rockford, and viewers around the world all focused on the ZVI containment building, with its inverted funnel-shaped dome that came to be an icon for the project. CleanAct’s building had passed inspection after inspection. Experts considered earthquakes, lightning strikes, fires, terrorist attacks, and tsunamis, never mind that the munitions plant was nearly two hundred miles inland.

Their conclusion? The building was safe. This pronouncement was all the more laudable because CleanAct was ready three weeks ahead of schedule, as Dr. Reinhart had boasted it would be. In an age of complex projects with near-zero tolerance for error, most manufacturers were hard-pressed to meet a deadline, let alone beat one. But Dr. Reinhart had made this a point of pride. He’d show those eggheads in Boston a thing or two. “Here in Texas,” he’d said repeatedly, “we don’t always have fifty-dollar words for workin’ hard. It may not be the easy way, but it’s the Texas way.”

The final safety check had been three weeks earlier. Quality engineers flooded the containment chamber with pressurized helium. Had any of the helium escaped, it would have been detected and the project halted until the integrity of the chamber could be guaranteed. Once CleanAct demonstrated the safety of the chamber, all of the helium used for the test was evacuated through a vent high up on the building and rose safely into the atmosphere. Only enough to surround the ZVI remained.

The moment came to bring the plant online. Wielding an oversized pair of ceremonial scissors, the plant manager cut a foot-wide blue-and-gold ribbon, and then Rockford’s mayor threw a ceremonial switch. The plant had actually been brought online hours earlier, again thanks to CleanAct’s deadline-beating push to complete the project. All that remained was for the containment building to release ZVI into a production vault where thousands of microscopic jets would spray fine mists of ZVI into a collection tank through which the Rockford Munitions Plant’s effluvia now passed.

The process was completely automated. CleanAct’s proprietary process assembled the analysis of incoming waste, the moment-by-moment configuration of the ZVI spray heads, the analysis of the output, and the scooping up of the heavy, ZVI-bonded pollutants.

There were backups to the process, and backups to the backups. A redundant operating system ensured that none of the operating instructions became corrupted. If quality control sensors noted any irregularity in the operating commands, the plant would switch to the backup operating system and the cleanup would carry on without a hiccup. It was foolproof, CleanAct said, and the plant officials dutifully agreed.

Inside the containment chamber and unseen to the crowd, the backup operating system was monitoring the containment chamber, as expected. But it was not synchronized to the three-weeks-ahead-of-schedule timeline that CleanAct had as the centerpiece of its winning bid. The backup operating system believed that the containment chamber hull integrity test was to be conducted today. This set of instructions should have been deleted after the successful test three weeks earlier. Was it carelessness that allowed the code to remain? In its rush to beat the clock, did CleanAct miss a crucial step? Or was it an act of sabotage?

Whatever the reason, the backup software overrode the primary instructions for the operations protocols. The redundant instructions ordered external sensors to test for escaped helium as it had been programmed to do. Noting no leaks, the backup operating system concluded that the pressure test was successful.

The next step in the testing process was to purge inert helium. But the chamber now contained ZVI, not helium, and tons of the volatile particles poured out of the purge vent. The heavy iron cascaded down the rear of the round containment dome and into the oxygen-rich air that sustained the lives of the observers. The ZVI was little different from grain dust or flour in its explosive potential. In fact, given the size of the nanoclusters, it was more hazardous by several orders of magnitude.

One spark, source unknown, triggered the blast that incinerated the officials and the guests on stage, rattled windows for eleven miles, and prompted seismologists to report an earthquake at the small Virginia town.

The blast was magnificent, as explosions go. Had the guests been able to describe the last moment of their lives, they would first have noted a powerful shockwave and compared it to being tackled by a steroid-soaked team of football players. Their hands would have tried to clap at the sides of their heads when, a few milliseconds into the event, their eardrums flexed and ruptured. An overpowering flood of nausea would have swept them as their internal organs began to liquefy. Given the ability to continue their observations, they would have noted a strange fog appear and disappear as the air’s moisture precipitated and then vaporized in the emerging fireball.

The observers’ reports would have terminated as the air flashed to over four thousand degrees. Then the firestorm incinerated the plant and any evidence of the cause of the conflagration.

The blast was loud. A mid-twentieth century battleship’s 16-inch guns generated 215 decibels and the sound wave flattened nearby seas. The Saturn V rocket that carried its human payload to the moon generated a decibel reading of 220—five times louder than the battleship on the logarithmic decibel scale. The rocket’s sound was loud enough to melt concrete. The Rockford blast was estimated at 230 decibels—ten times louder than Saturn V.

The fireball consumed most of the iron nanodots. There were no structures within the blast radius and once the shockwave passed, the event appeared over. Military personnel from the munitions plant were deployed and they fanned out, tending to the wounded and dazed survivors, pulling bodies from the containment building’s rubble.

Those who had been watching the video feed were stunned. Schoolchildren wailed. Financiers winced, seeing an investment opportunity literally go up in smoke. Representatives of other toxic sites cradled their heads in their hands and wondered what they would do next.

A different scene unfolded in the boardroom at NMech. The Cruz-Ecco family stared in horror. Eva Rozen was building models of iron atoms with children’s construction toys. She’d create one, and then take it apart and build it again. Eva glanced at the video feed, blank since the explosion, and grunted, “I told them it was dangerous. Maybe they’ll listen to me now.”

Marta stared at her, a puzzled look on her face. “You don’t seem very surprised by the explosion,” she said in a casual tone, almost nonchalant.

“Nope. Bad science leads to bad results. I warned the bid committee, but they were already in Reinhart’s back pocket. Serves them right.” Now she was building carbon atoms. Her hands moved faster than a blackjack dealer at a high-stakes table.

“Do you really mean that?” asked Marta. “The explosion serves them right? Being incinerated is justice?” Her tone stayed gentle, casual and interested.

Eva grinned and ignored the question. She looked at the empty video feed and said, “Well, I guess we’re back in business. I don’t see any obstacles left. We’re a year or so behind where I thought we’d be, but that business is going to be ours.”

Marta said, “Eva, I’m a little concerned. You’re not surprised. You talk like this tragedy serves some kind of higher purpose. Ever since you decided we should go into remediation, you’ve acted like winning this bid was a life-or-death matter for NMech. I have to ask, did you have anything to do with this disaster?” Her voice was restrained but her gaze was direct.

“Don’t be an idiot. I told them it was a stupid idea. Are you suggesting that this explosion was anything but Reinhart’s folly?”

Jim interrupted. “Wait. Something’s happening at Rockford. Look.”

The video feed resumed as new vidbots came online. People staggered drunkenly, their skin turning cyanotic. Those who had been untouched by the fireball had counted their blessings too quickly. They had breathed a sigh of relief—and inhaled ZVI. Most of the particles had oxidized on contact with air and posed no health risk. Just enough ZVI, however, stayed reactive and entered the onlookers’ respiratory systems. The nanodots bonded with the oxygen in the bloodstreams of those rushing to the site of the blast. The iron rusted; the townspeople asphyxiated.

Eva looked at the video feed and shook her head. “Bad science,” was all she said.

___________________________________________

DIAMONDS AND DUST

FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO

N
othing is more compelling than a disaster that’s viewed from a comfortable armchair or a barstool, or from miles away in a sixth-floor boardroom. The explosion held the public’s attention as securely as an inchworm on hot tar. It was news, entertainment, and a cautionary tale. A cloud of dragonflies—video cameras the size of an insect—caught the explosion’s aftermath. Datastream providers quickly packaged a four-minute story arc that began with Dr. Reinhart’s polished remarks, highlighted the fireball, and concluded with the grisly asphyxiation of the thirty or so observers who rushed forward after the explosion and inhaled active ZVI particles.

While emergency crews mobilized and rushed to Rockford, my mother slumped in a smartchair, her head in her arms, resting on the polished cherry wood conference table. Dust motes caught my eye as they twinkled in the sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The pattern in the drapes was still, as if in respect for the tragedy 700 miles south.

My mother pushed herself up from her chair and embraced me.

My father stared at Eva’s retreating form.

She stopped in the doorway, turned and gave a shrug. She ignored my mother and grinned at my father. “Time to dust off our proposal,” she said.

“What did you do, Eva?” my mother asked. Her voice was sad.

“What did I do? I warned them that this could happen. That’s what I did. I built a better plan than CleanAct, that’s what I did.”

“I mean the explosion. Did NMech have anything to do with that?”

Eva’s voice took on a flat, affectless quality, the studied neutrality of anger. “Marta, you asked me that three times and I’ll answer you just once more: I had nothing to do with it. I warned them this could happen. You’re upset. Okay—it’s upsetting. But you accuse me? Better take a mood block before you say anything you’ll regret.”

“Eva, there’s going to be inquiries, people will look at NMech—”

“Disregard that. NMech is clean. And Marta? We’ve been friends for a long time. We might still be friends—I don’t know, since you contrive to keep Dana away from me. My only advise to you is this: don’t push me.” She stalked out of the boardroom.

My mother looked at me involuntarily. Her face told me all I needed to know about Eva’s accusation. But now wasn’t the time to discuss my mother’s interference with my relationship with Eva. Besides, I’d figured it out months ago.

I decided to investigate. Maybe I could show that Eva was innocent. Maybe we could act like friends again. I scanned Eva’s datapillars. There was no trace of a databurst transmission that might have triggered the explosion. But NMech was one of the largest companies in the world, and I couldn’t scan every pillar Eva might have used. Besides, I just didn’t want to believe that she’d have murdered dozens of innocent people just to get Reinhart or the bid committee. On the other hand, she’d been acting strangely in the days leading up to the bid submission, and her behavior had never returned to what is normal for her. I wondered, would she have sabotaged CleanAct’s plant?