Connected Infection

29. Paradigm Shift - Chapter 18.2

Anna crept back from the wall. She couldn't expect to be rescued any time soon. It was up to her to stop them from launching the missile, whatever its target was. Sure, she could barricade herself in; jam the loosened cubicle panels between the door and the other wall, hide out, drink the fresh water from the taps, but as the last remaining GASP employee, the lone good guy, it wasn't an option. She was the heroine. She had a job to do.

Somehow she had to sabotage the missile. All the pieces were falling into place: Who was she? A physicist. Where? In the Exotic Matter building. She obviously had to build a bomb. Either destroy the missile before it launched, or disable the magnetic field on the reactor so the holes could escape their containment, evaporating down to the stable Planck mass before dropping harmlessly out of the way.

The game was on. Fight some zombies, save the world. No problem.

Anna ducked under the spray from the sink and went back to the door. She opened it and crept out, keeping low, working out what she would need. Broken glass grated beneath her her feet as she passed the torn and bloodied bodies of her assailants and made her way down the stairs to the security door at the bottom.

The scanner was flashing a red warning light - the power in the building was down and the locking mechanism was powered by battery only. Anna swiped her ID through it. That didn't work, so she punched in her emergency access code instead and crept out into the corridors beyond. The buildings above ground were for offices, administration, security, payroll and so on, as well as facilities for the staff. Beneath ground was where all the labs were, in a vast complex that joined every part of the Project. That was where she could find the tools and samples she needed.

Avoiding the lifts, Anna took to the stairwell, which was lit only by emergency lighting. She made her way downward, creeping along; peering over the railings to ensure nobody was beneath her in the gloom. She jumped the last few stairs of every flight, landing in a crouch, ready for action, listening to the echoes. Before she opened the door to leave the stairwell she pressed her back to the wall, listening for any sounds of the enemy.

There came none. Anna crept into a dimly-lit corridor. The carpet muffled the sound of her passing, and she peered through open doorways, into labs and offices, meeting rooms and rest areas. Inside, computers were still on, having restarted when the explosion disrupted the power and now running on the emergency juice, but there was no sign of their users.

Every so often Anna would freeze, trying to catch the faint sound of a footfall behind her, or spin around suddenly to see if anyone ducked back into a doorway. But there was never anything to see, or to hear. After a while she gave up, accepting that she truly was alone.

When she arrived at the Exotic Matter central storage area, she found the heavy security doors already wide open.

'Hello-o?' she said as she peered inside, and then clamped her hand over her mouth.

Antimatter containment canisters were strewn all over the floor beyond, along with pieces of what looked like scrap metal and engineering tools. She crept in and frowned at the mess.

'This is not a good sign,' she said, picking up one of the canisters, looking towards the enormous open blast doors of the AM storage chamber, supposedly one of the most impenetrable parts of the facility. She walked over and glanced in. Row upon row of green lights blinked back at her. The pods were empty. All the antimatter was gone.

GASP was allowed to store only a very limited amount of the AM its singularity experiments produced; one hundred milligrams in total. This was split up into thousands of tiny positron or anti-nucleon swarms, each housed inside a retractable Penning canister designed to keep the AM away from normal matter. Each of these was in turn kept within a larger, heavily blast-shielded, Penning pod, with emergency venting systems in case both of the traps' power simultaneously failed, or, in the event of a security crisis, the antimatter had to be allowed to annihilate to prevent it from falling into hostile hands.

The Project's security precautions hadn't helped here, though. Not with every member of their staff going evil. Anna did a quick calculation. The stored amount of antimatter, allowed to act correctly with normal matter, was enough for a four-point-three kiloton bomb. 'Nasty,' she concluded, and kicked one of the empty canisters across the floor.

But the situation was worse. Much tinier quantities of AM could be used to trigger thermonuclear explosions in fusion bombs made of other, easier to come by, materials. One hundred milligrams could devastate a hell of a lot of the planet.

'And they didn't even leave the tiniest bit for me,' she complained to the empty room. 'That's so unfair.'

She'd been meaning to use one of the smaller samples for her own bomb. Now she'd have to improvise doubly. She picked up another of the empty canisters. It looked like it had been scavenged for parts, perhaps for elements of the Penning trap itself. What did the Infected want with antimatter? They already had Kali, and she had the potential for a lot more than four kilotons if handled right.

Anna looked around at the inscriptions on the other storage areas for inspiration; some other way of sabotaging the missile. And then it came to her. Fire with fire. She would get one of the other micro black holes out of storage, feed it up to its Planck mass and set it to go off as a bomb. The first particle to be emitted would spawn a fireball with the energy of about sixty kilos of TNT, destroying the missile.

Cool.

Anna began to gather the equipment she needed, talking to herself as she sorted through the tools the Infected had left after taking the antimatter, and then went to get one of the singularities out of storage.

As a Project Coordinator, she was one of the few people in the Project who knew the codes that allowed access to the artificial singularities. More pieces were falling into place: Of course she was supposed to use another MBH - she was a Project Coordinator, and the zombies had taken the antimatter. It was so obvious now.

There came a faint rumble and the emergency lighting flickered. Anna paused, her hands full of equipment, as another distant explosion sounded close on the wake of the first.

The cavalry? Finally on its way? Maybe. But whatever the explosions heralded, she knew that jury-rigging a singularity bomb, as stupid, crazy and illegal as it sounded, was what she had to do.

She grabbed everything she needed and ran back out, along the corridors to the stairwell, where she panted her way back up to the topside levels of the EM building. She made her way towards the decimated fore and peered out at the desert from behind the cover of the debris. More sounds of artillery-fire reached her, and as she watched she saw tiny mushrooms of smoke blooming up in the desert, and further flashes of light in the sky beyond. Overhead, she heard the faint whine of the motors for the Zephyr experiment dish. Why were the zombies adjusting that, she wondered? Then she shrugged. It wasn't her concern. Her reinforcements had arrived; she would let them fight the war outside. She had work of her own to do.

Anna set her equipment down on a table in a small room, out of sight of the desert. With the exception of the security guards, nobody at GASP had any weapons. The Mongolian army, or whoever it was, would overwhelm them easily, but she knew they wouldn't arrive in time. She had to build the bomb and destroy the missile and save the day herself, otherwise there would be no point in being there at all.

She looked at the parts spread out on the table before her, and sighed. Why couldn't she have left a ready-made bomb lying around somewhere? She should really have thought of that earlier - then she could have gone straight to the Kali chamber to plant it and battle some zombies without all the hard technical work first. She pouted for a brief moment, then set to work.