2CHAPTER TWO: Forces and Habits
Erik Wasserstrom's class was one of my favorites, when I was a young student in District Thirteen. Erik was of the opinion that mathematics should be taught, within the context in which it had been discovered or applied. Nobody counted for the sake of counting. Primitive man discovered how to count, to express an idea. The size of an animal herd. The time it would take to reach the next watering hole. The difficulty of lifting an object.
So we never attended a math class of Dr Wasserstrom's, without also getting a history lesson, about how a sort of problem was first conceived, and why the folks who discovered a particular mathematical trick, found it useful. Everybody learned something from his classes.
The three geeks who were Boggs, Portia, and myself, had more fun with those classes than most folks understood. I was going through a rough period at the time. I grew up in District Nine, a farm kid. My uncle and my dad got the idea one winter, to jump the fence, stow away on an empty coal train, and escape to District Thirteen. I was the only survivor. Peacekeepers slaughtered the rest of us. The last words my mother spoke to me, were "Don't look back, Mike". I heard the pistol shot. And I kept on walking. A week later, starved, freezing, nauseous from drinking bad water, pissed off that the Peacekeepers had made me an orphan, feet blistered bloody and holes in my boots, I stumbled into four grey-uniformed soldiers on roving patrol in Thirteen and got taken in. There was some care given me, at the Infirmary, for the blisters and the nausea. And two days later, at age 12, I was put to work in one of our underground farms, and sent to school.
Thirteen was principally a bomb shelter that could shoot back.
Most of what we did, was done underground. For most of our history, we were mainly about survival. We had a command economy. Most adults were soldiers. All the young adults were soldiers. We worked. We studied. And we waited for the opportunity to overthrow the regime of Panem's President-for-life, Coriolanus Snow.
Life was not easy in Thirteen.
What we did not endure in Thirteen, was the full tyranny of the Snow regime.
Snow's Capitol lorded over the districts, taking whatever it wanted, leaving barely enough to survive. And to get enough food actually to survive, district people had to sign up for treasure, called by its Latin name, tesserae. Every child between the ages of twelve and eighteen, could sign up multiple times. For every gift of soybean oil and cereal treasure that a family got, their children's names were entered into the Reaping Bowl an additional time. Every summer, between spring planting and the summer hay and grain harvests, a public Reaping was held. Two children, a boy and a girl, would be picked from among the names in the bowl, and sent into an arena to battle each other to the death. Out of twelve Districts, entered twelve boys and twelve girls. One of the 24 was allowed to survive, and would be crowned Victor. The Victors got special privileges but few of them aged well. Many committed suicide within a few years. Most others stayed mentally ill and survived as best they could. They had to lead the next year's two children to their fight to the death, and that is not a good thing to do. Enough years of doing it would exhaust anybody.
Families who didn't want tesserae, found that their children were entered in the Reaping anyway. Some said that the air we breathe, was a gift from the Capitol, and counted as tesserae. Others said the air was free, but the water we drink, or the food we eat, or our safety from monstrous creatures called Muttations or Mutts, was a gift of the Capitol for which we owed them our lives.
Still others stayed out of the discussion, and said it was dangerous to discuss Capitol policy. Peacekeepers were known to flog people with leather whips for anything they said in public, that sounded critical of the Capitol. Occasionally someone was tortured with electric shocks and dumped by their home, blue and shaking, for their children to see. Some folks were simply shot in the head with a pistol. A handful were jailed and put on trial before a Tribunal. The Tribunals usually sentenced people to die by hanging, or else, to be rendered voiceless by a surgical procedure and put to work as slaves. Lingua mali, pars pessima servi went the wisdom...the tongue is the very worst part of a bad slave. Hence, those set to work at slavery, were first made avocal, or voiceless.
The poor bastard whose identity I took, "733A", was an Avox from my home district. I wasn't briefed on his history. I did not know his name, and he could never speak it again. Since he could not speak, no one was about to ask him any personal details. "Erik Wasserstrom" was, of course, many years dead. I had just gotten promoted to Captain, when he expired of a brain hemorrhage while teaching a calculus class. Portia's new husband, Lieutenant Talbot, was a musician and a bit of an actor, for a hobby, and he could get Portia and Boggs and even Erik Wasserstrom laughing, with his realistic impressions of Erik Wasserstrom. So Lt Levias Talbot had once shown his act when President Coin had the chance to watch, and immediately after Erik's funeral, Coin proposed that Talbot go under cover, as Wasserstrom, and infiltrate the Capitol as a District Thirteen defector.
At the moment, Talbot was cursing the slick mountain road on which we were driving, and I was doing my best not to laugh out loud, at what sounded like his impression of Col Boggs' favorite curses. We finally got below the snow line and the pavement became wet instead of icy. He pulled off the road and handed me a snow brush. I climbed out, getting into character as the servant, and dutifully wiped every last flake of snow off the car. To all appearances, we had stayed in the city and had been out in the rain.
We turned off the mountain road onto an oddly lit street, that curved around the mountainside. The homes were luxurious and the street lined with evergreens, pines or perhaps aspen. We pulled up in a driveway that faced a three-car garage. The house had walls of rounded stones set into concrete, and seemed colorful, even in the dark.
I exited the car, trotted to open the driver's door and helped Talbot out, then went ahead of him to sound the doorbell.
The door opened and a gaunt woman with alert eyes answered.
"Doctor Wasserstrom, good evening!"
I held open the door and avoided eye contact. Talbot entered, wiping his shoes on the doormat, and I followed him in silently.
"Wiress, so good of you to join us for the evening."
"I'll get Beetee. He seems preoccupied with something. Do sit down, please."
Suddenly began the sounds of Beetee and Talbot having a talk about music. Apparently Beetee had recorded a previous evening's visit between Wasserstrom, Wiress, and himself. And, predictably, his house was bugged.
Beetee Latier followed Wiress into the living room, and motioned for us to follow him into a small study. The walls were covered in thin gold foil of some sort. Apparently the study was a Faraday cage, in which any electromagnetic signals would be trapped. There was a square table in the middle, with a Holo on it. A rack of equipment on the wall blinked with diode lights. Beetee pressed a switch, one of the diodes glowed yellow, and he sang out, "May the odds be ever in our favor.". He pointed at Wiress. She echoed him, word for word. He pointed at Talbot, who sang out likewise. Then at me.
"May the odds be ever in our favor", I said. And I enjoyed the privilege of speaking, again.
Beetee flipped another switch and the yellow light turned green.
"An echo inverter. You can speak freely while it's lit green, because any sound you make, it plays the inverse of the sound, to the bugging equipment outside. The bug hears only the recording, because our voices add to our inverted voices, and cancel themselves out. Would anyone like a beer?"
I grinned broadly. "Mike Fuser, Colonel, commanding Special Defense Lab", and offered my hand. Beetee and Wiress shook my hand firmly. "And yes, I will have a beer."
We were on our second beer each, when Dr Beetee Latier got around to the real reason that he had joined the Rebels.
"Ever hear of Nikola Tesla?"
"Invented the polyphase electric motor, didn't he?", I said.
"Old news. But what he failed at, was a scheme to capture energy from thunderstorms. He failed because he lacked a suitable material."
Wiress had a twinkle in her eyes, almost like she was feeling sexy.
Talbot and I looked at each other, and he looked as baffled, as I felt.
"He wanted what, some kind of big windmill that follows thunderstorms around?", guessed Talbot.
Wiress giggled and her eyes looked impish.
"Of course, that would recover a little energy, but not nearly what Tesla had in mind. Guys, picture a cloud droplet.", said Beetee.
"Of water?", I asked.
Wiress gave me an approving nod.
"Yes, water. About half a billion molecules of water per drop. Actually 555.6 million molecules of water is the right sized drop. That's precisely 0.2854439 femtoliters, which is pretty damned small, of course."
Wiress giggled again.
"A new curse for the kids in basic training. 'May you swallow a femtoliter of water at a time' ", said Talbot. Wiress and I smiled. Beetee gave Talbot an annoyed look.
"For every 555.6 million water molecules, on average, there are two molecules that get a little weird. The hydrogen atom falls off of one and attaches to the other. The electronic shell around each oxygen atom must be balanced, and the balance is achieved by forming a positive ion, H3O+, and a negative ion, OH-. Get the droplet cold enough to freeze, and a funny thing happens. The neutral water molecules squeeze out the two charged ones, because at quantum distances, there is more energy released by all 555.6 million molecules bonding together into ice, than it takes to pull the two charges apart. So the ice crystal looks like a needle, with opposite charges at the pointy ends. A few hundred such needles of ice, will attach themselves in a network, plus and minus ends attached to one another, and when they weigh enough to overcome atmospheric lift, they sink into denser air. The water vapor in the air, if it's supercooled, will attach itself to the surface of the net of ice needles and the whole network will thicken to become a snowflake, like the ones falling on top of the mountain this evening. Damned few snowflakes ever are completely alike, because of that random assortment that creates their outline."
Beetee paused a moment. My gaze flipped to Talbot's face. He seemed amused. I wondered if it was my random stunt with the parachute this evening, that came to mind.
Beetee went on. "Now suppose that there's a collision between snowflakes that shatters a few ice needles. Now we see a charge imbalance. The unbalanced charge migrates away, in response to any local electric field. For some, that field is the Aurora, caused by ions in the solar wind that are jetting out of sunspots into space. The aurora causes negative charge to migrate up. The water molecules evaporate off, the supercold ion loses some weight, and drifts to the edge of the atmosphere and collects in four permanent layers of ion clouds. The positive charges, meanwhile, fall to the ground in snowflakes that melt into raindrops. The sea, and most ground water, acquires a positive charge, and the upper air ion clouds have a net-negative charge. What closes the circuit, of course, is the Aurora. Charge transfers within the plasma of the aurora, usually onto smoke or dirt, settles back to the sea, and the charge is neutralized."
Wiress looked at Talbot, who looked like he had missed a step. "The dirt comes from volcanic eruptions and meteors that burn up in the atmosphere".
Talbot nodded Wiress his thanks.
"Tesla learned of an inventor named Lee DeForest, who built a vacuum triode that could be used to amplify signals, and figured out that the four ion layers of atmosphere, and the sea, are the two outer elements of a planet-sized triode. The charge-forming mechanism in thunderstorms, constantly charges the outer elements up, they discharge near the Aurora, and all he needed to do, was pump energy into the Aurora to get it resonating, for this mechanism to launch a planet-circling electromagnetic wave, fed with the energy of every thunderstorm on the planet. All that anyone would need to do, is put up an antenna that's big enough, tap into that wave, and get energy out of storms, everywhere on the planet."
I had not heard of that idea. "So what happened?".
"History."
Wiress saw Beetee's pained look and jumped in. "Tesla underestimated, first off, the amount of meteor dust in space. There was another American in the mix, a German immigrant named Karl Steinmetz, who helped with Tesla's polyphase motor at General Electric. Steinmetz wasn't much of an actor. Tesla was. There was a fellow named John Muir, in California, who got a group of nature-lovers together called The Sierra Club. Muir and his club opposed building a dam, that was to supply water to a city called San Francisco, and generate electric power. General Electric had agreed to build the generators. Muir was worried that too many dams would eliminate all the world's noisy waterfalls, and folks who were embarrassed to be heard making noises while mating, would have nowhere private that they could go, to get laid. Which got Muir a following. Wealthy educated people in Muir's day, never admitted to mating at all. They reasoned that being in love with one person, would make others jealous of their love, and get them angry and feeling left out. So nobody spoke about the things that were actually important to them, and instead, found other silly things to care about."
"Like the Capitol's Hunger Games?", I said. "They don't let District people express any feelings of envy, because it's a good way to get whipped, electrocuted, shot, hanged, or Avoxed. And the Capitol wastes so much stuff, no one there has time to feel left out."
"Very good, Mike!". Wiress was grinning broadly. "It made for social instability, because to put on the appearance of never mating, the wealthy had damned few children and the poor, who could least afford their care and teaching, had many. This dumbed down their entire society and excluded most people from acquiring knowledge. To be smart was to be asexual. To be sexy, one had to appear stupid. Warfare became a social necessity, because in a society that valued stupidity, every few decades, enough ignorance would accumulate, to where most young people thought a war was a good idea. Enough would get killed, to where folks who wanted to try peace, eventually ended the wars. But as long as it was fashionable to hate people for their pleasures, the peace makers would blame war on too much pleasure, not on too little. And the war makers were happy with that, because in combat zones, pleasure is harder to find than anywhere else. Kids who are accustomed to going without, make obedient soldiers.
Wiress looked at us. Seeing our rapt attention, she continued. "Steinmetz had no idea what to do about John Muir. Tesla invited Muir to lunch and had a chat. And then another. After a few lunches, Muir realized that the main reason that his club's beloved wilderness was too crowded, was that cities weren't any fun to live in. They stunk all the time, from rotting horse manure and coal smoke. Poor people sat indoors behind window screens and suffered from the heat and the smell. Or went outdoors to cool off, and suffered from the flies and mosquitoes. And the smell. And the occasional epidemic spread by the flies and mosquitoes. Rich people vacated the cities for the seashore or the mountains to stay cool. It became so common, the Americans invented a word for it. Any recreational travel was called a Vacation, because in hot weather, most people wanted to vacate the stinky cities."
Wiress looked at Talbot and at me. Seeing no questions, she went on. "If city life was more comfortable, fewer people would vacate the cities for the wilderness, and the wilderness would remain wild. What if electric railcars transported people around the cities, and there weren't so many horses crapping in them? What if electric power cooked their food, so houses stayed cooler and didn't stink like coal smoke? Trading a few waterfalls near cities, for eliminating the stench, made sense. But what really sold Muir on the San Francisco dam, was Tesla's thunderstorm power idea. Building enough dams to power the Aurora Resonance system, meant that in the foreseeable future, people would get all the energy they needed, just by putting up an antenna, without building any more dams."
I asked what came to mind. "So Tesla built up a following. How smart were they?"
Wiress broke out laughing, and tried to say, "Not very", but it came out sounding like 'mott berry', which got the four of us laughing.
I took a swig of my beer. Good stuff. Smooth taste, a bit like bread. Just a hint of bitter herbs, probably hop plants like those we grew in Thirteen, that we grind with hemp seed to make a treatment for belly cramps.
"The following was quite enthusiastic, but Tesla and Steinmetz could not deliver results quickly enough, and started taking dumb risks. From watching auroras, Tesla concluded that auroras resonate at 24 Hertz. Every second, there are 24 vibrations. But the aurora does not synchronize the vibrations. They vortex. Each vortex looks a bit like a screw, and spins. What Tesla needed was a way to get the screws to slow down and speed up, to release that energy in a planet-circling wave. He guessed that putting a ball on the end of an antenna would launch a new kind of electromagnetic wave that moved faster than light. Einstein guessed it would not work. Tesla, believing it would work, wanted to use it to force every vortex in the aurora to move with a rhythm, and he set up a demonstration. At a place called Pike's Peak, Tesla set up a hydroelectric generating plant to power an electric railway and a gold refining plant. He built a laboratory there. And he used some of the energy to launch a 24-Hertz signal with his ball antenna. The results weren't pretty."
"What happened? ", asked Talbot.
Wiress giggled. "Damage."
"What sort of damage?", I asked.
"The expensive kind.", said Beetee. " Generators in 140 neighboring towns got caught in Tesla's wave and became overloaded by a short circuit in the aurora. They melted. The towns that paid for them, sued Tesla for damages. General Electric forbid Steinmetz from doing business with Tesla, because they were competing to sell generators to replace those that melted, and did not want anyone to charge them with destroying 140 generators on purpose and selling replacements for profit. All of which interfered with anyone learning what had actually happened. Tesla got depressed after that, and his health failed. He died broke and confused."
"What does this have to do with materials?", I asked.
"Everything." Beetee exchanged grins with Wiress, before going on. "The main flaw in Tesla's planning, was that he assumed the atmosphere to be a better resistor of current, than it actually is. On average, Earth's atmosphere offers about 300 ohms of resistance. Free space has an impedance of 277 ohms. Inside an auroral vortex, considerably less. Tesla's experiment on Pike's Peak probably created a local vortex with about a one to maybe five ohm impedance to any signal at 24 hertz. The effect on all the nearby towns with generators, is that when the wave hit, the air between their wires stopped insulating and started conducting current. Instead of draining energy from faraway thunderstorms, he drew it out of all those nearby generators. The generators became overloaded, heated up, and the copper melted."
"What General Electric and their competition guessed from the experiment, is that it was unsafe to make generators that ran at frequencies near 24 hertz, because an auroral vortex could happen from natural causes, anywhere, and melt the generators. So they moved away from it. Deutsche Bundesbahn ran their electric trains on 18 hertz. English Electric picked 50 hertz. General Electric ran their new equipment on 60 hertz. The higher frequency enabled more energy to pass through the same equipment, so a lot of capacity was added to the world's power grids in the early 20th century, while protecting against another auroral vortex striking. But what nobody did, at the time, was figure out what was happening inside an auroral vortex."
"Did you?", I asked.
"Almost. Actually, nobody can fully know what's happening there, because it's a quantum phenomenon. The parts that are predictable, only appear, after the unpredictable parts have happened already. But we can make some guesses about the predictable parts and wait for them to appear. Or we can force them to appear."
Talbot looked sharply at me. Wiress was snickering. "I'm lost. How do we force quantum phenomena to appear?"
"Okay, Mike, try this idea. How do you remember to wake up in the morning?"
"I just do."
"Another way to describe it, is that you make a habit of waking up. Which means that your past is affecting your future."
"So where's the connection?"
"There was a Canadian scientist named Geordie Rose who asked that same question, early in the 21st century. He had the idea to treat a math problem as a physics experiment. Cooling a system of current loops while varying a voltage applied to them, collapsed them to their lowest energy state. Rose called that 'quantum annealing'. The result was easier to get by experiment, than by running calculations. Basically, Rose simply allowed the phenomena to appear, measured them, and got his questions answered.
"The flaw in Tesla's analysis of the aurora, is that the quantum phenomena were already present, even though he ignored them. He inadvertently set a part of the atmosphere to minimum energy state. And what we need, is a reliable way to predict that minimum energy state. Geordie Rose's quantum annealing computer was almost good enough to crack the problem. He used superconducting current loops. So, to get there, I plan to make a hyperconductor that works at room temperature. And then repeat the Rose experiments in enough detail, to get a usable solution to Tesla's problem."
Wiress was grinning with anticipation. Talbot looked overwhelmed. I opened my big mouth and spit out the first question on my mind.
"What in hell is a hyperconductor?"
"Mike, what keeps electrons from collapsing into the atom's nucleus?", asked Beetee.
"Quantum mechanics?"
"Yes. What about them?"
"I have no idea."
"Precisely."
Beetee Latier paused for a sip of his beer.
"Just as people sleep by habit, electrons, by habit, do not crash into their nuclei."
"Why?"
"To know that, would require us to observe what electrons do. We can only measure huge swarms of electrons, not single ones, so we can't know. That's what Heisenberg wrote in the 1930's, and not a lot got done about the problem. Until Wiress got bored silly during the Seventy-first Hunger Games after both our Tributes got killed in the Bloodbath, and asked me a really challenging question."
Wiress blushed. Beetee motioned to her, and took a drink of his beer as she picked up the story.
"I conceived it this way. If I accelerated an atom closely to the speed of light, and the atom had a nuclear spin, like Carbon-13 does, one side of the nucleus would get to the speed of light, first. Whichever protons were spinning in the direction of travel, their speed would reach c, before the whole atom did. And if Einstein were correct, part of an atom's mass would become energy, while the other parts flew apart.
"So if Einstein were correct, there should be a quantum wall, just below c, beyond which a carbon-13 atom would not accelerate, without first losing it's nuclear spin and with that, it's magnetic resonance. Basically the atom would give up its spin energy and lose mass, as we sped it up with more kinetic energy. And the problem I saw with that, is that matter and energy would simply vanish as we added more. So it didn't make a lot of sense to me, that by adding more energy to an atom with a spinning nucleus, we would cause it's existing spin energy to disappear.
"That led me to consider that maybe a part of Einstein's theory was backwards. Instead of a quantum wall, there might be a quantum catapult of sorts, with the spin energy adding to the energy of forward motion, not subtracting from it.
"So what I suggested is that we build a big particle accelerator and launch carbon-13 atoms at close to c. Either they break up and release energy. Or they get catapulted and they turn into energy. And then Beetee had a wonderful idea. He decided that we should make Carbon-13 and try it."
"Thanks, Wiress, but actually we got lucky", said Beetee. "I built a magnetic device called a Calutron, and separated some carbon into the two isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13. I made a thin layer of graphene on smooth glass, out of pure carbon-13. And if I did that inside the Calutron, with the magnet at full power, I got a lot of conductivity in the graphene sheet. If I turned the magnet off, I got ordinary graphene. Then Wiress came up with a plan."
Beetee smiled at Wiress with appreciation, and took a long drink of his beer.
"My plan is to repeat Beetee's process on a larger scale.", she said. "The hyperconductive graphene is formed by a magnetic field that causes the carbon nuclei to spin in step with each other. If the field is strong enough, the atoms align their spins first, as plasma, then stay aligned as they bond into graphene. So we can use the hyperconductive graphene to make stronger magnets for separating the carbon isotopes and for putting down layers of hyperconductor on objects."
"So a little bit of hyperconductor builds a machine that makes more of it?", I blurted.
"Exactly. One idea we saw, is that we can speed up the process of making a hyperconductor, if we found a richer source of carbon-13. District 5 has an old nuclear reactor that used graphite bricks as a neutron moderator. The unit is about ninety years old. Those graphite bricks have absorbed neutrons and some carbon-13 was created in them. If we convince the Capitol to give us those bricks as raw material, we can work a lot faster at creating hyperconductive products."
I had an idea. "In District 13 we have four graphite reactors that are even older. Two are already shut down. We could make this stuff ourselves, if you are ready to move in with us."
"The Capitol knows about our work. If we vanish, they will try to copy it. It would be safer if the Capitol used up their carbon-13 supply to make an object, that we could capture and take to District Thirteen, then use ourselves. That way, Thirteen has the advantage.", said Beetee.
"So that's why we're giving this away to a Gamemaker?"
"Yes. And not all of it. Wiress and I will persuade the new Head Gamemaker that we can build a lightning machine, in time for the Quarter Quell. To get the hyperconductive wire for the lightning machine, we'll have to make it. We'll need a carbon-13 source. The Head Gamemaker sells the idea to Snow. District 3 builds it. And we raid the 75th Hunger Games and take the wire."
"Why would they let you do that?", asked Talbot.
"Because they are proud and very vain. They want the districts to worship them like gods. Who is Zeus, without a lightning bolt?"
Beetee should have been an intelligence analyst, I thought. Then said as much. "Okay, your guess is that the Capitol will be so enthralled with owning a machine that makes lightning, that they won't look beyond the Quarter Quell and ask, 'Why do Beetee and Wiress want to build this machine?'".
"It's a calculated risk. Remember Dr Guillotine?"
"I heard the name once."
"Guillotine built a machine for the king of France, about five hundred years ago, that chopped people's heads off. A guy named Robespierre overthrew the king, and wanted to know if Guillotine's machine worked. So Robespierre arrested Dr Guillotine, and tested the machine on him. Guillotine's head came off with ease. And Robespierre went on to use it on the king and a lot of other folks he didn't like. My guess is, if I don't convince the Capitol that I'm building the lightning machine out of my undying appreciation for Coriolanus Snow, they will try to kill me and not worry about my intentions for the machine. In which case, I shall appreciate a hoverplane flight to Thirteen."
"That's a risk you both are willing to take?", I asked.
"Yes."
"Do we know if the lightning machine works?"
"Yes. It works. In my lab I have several chunks of broken glass that are covered in graphene hyper conductor. Some more pieces will break, when we're testing the generator tomorrow. My plan, you see, is that there must be a considerable amount of hyperconductor made, to provide enough spare parts to keep the lightning machine running for the whole Quarter Quell. They stockpile it. We raid the Arena and capture it. Meanwhile, we make more in Thirteen."
"We make more?", I asked.
"Yes. You, as my temporary Avox, are going to clean up and pack all of that cracked glass tomorrow and haul it out of my lab, right under Seneca Crane's nose. And after you take out my trash, you're going to load it in an empty coal car. The train hauls it to District Twelve where it gets dumped down a mine shaft for disposal, along with our other hazardous waste, and the nuclear waste from District Five. Meanwhile, you're going to be met by a hovercraft and lifted away, with all that material I trashed, take it back to Thirteen, and build something with it. The train crew won't know it is missing. Nor that you guys were ever aboard."
It sounded like a good plan.