• Published 29th Aug 2012
  • 2,337 Views, 124 Comments

The Conversion Bureau: Threshold - Guardian_Gryphon



The Threshold of a new era... Ponification Begins.

  • ...
22
 124
 2,337

Prologue

"What a piece of work is a man, How noble in
Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me..."

--Hamlet: Act II, Scene II.

Threshold (n):

1. The point of entering, or beggining

2. The point that must be exceeded to begin producing a given effect, or result, or to elicit a response

3. The point of division between two differing states, or places; a boundary line

Earth Calendar: 1/18/2030
11:45, GMT
International Cyclic Quantum Accelerator Campus

"Coolant systems?"

"Operational."

"Where are we with satellite telemetry?"

"UN Military command is establishing the secure link now."

"Good! Make them go faster. Light a fire under them if you must. We are firing this at twelve hundred, come hell or high water." Doctor Immanuel Kerint straightened his thick, square rimmed glasses, and took a nervous sip of his schnapps. He reasoned that it didn't matter if he had a little buzz, it wasn't as if he had to do any serious calculations that day.

Doctor Kerint and his partners at the ICQA had spent over fifteen years running calculations, testing their theories, and projecting out a seemingly infinite number of simulations.

Kerint gazed out the control room's exterior window at the Siberian tundra. The governments of the world had insisted on constructing the ICQA somewhere nonthreatening. Despite all the reassurances of the scientific community, no one wanted a device capable of generating that much energy in their backyard.

CERN's old LHC had been capable of generating seventeen teraelectronvolts.
ICQA could generate twenty petaelectronvolts, which was so many orders of magnitude larger that you couldn't fit all the zeros on ten whiteboards.

The United Nations had funded the monstrous construct. Building down through Siberian permafrost had been an extreme task, especially given the sheer size of the facility.
The particle tunnels themselves had to be over four stories in interior diameter.
The circumference of the initial acceleration tunnel, or 'ramp up loop' was twenty kilometers.

The actual firing loop clocked in at an impressive and mind boggling forty five kilometers in circumference.

ICQA's first test firing had succeeded in briefly creating more antimatter, sustained only for a microsecond, than every particle accelerator that came before. Combined.

But ICQA had been built to do something far greater.
Kerint's brainchild, the Atmospheric Wave Front Propagation Experiment was going to be one of the pinnacle achievements of human history.

Ever since the early 2000s, the planet had been in a spiraling state of decay.
People had ignored countless warnings about population carrying capacity, the dangers of polluting the Earth's water supplies, the critically low oil reserves, and worst of all atmospheric decay.

Global warming, as such, had never come to fruition. Several large volcanic eruptions caused by badly placed geothermal taps, and illegal underground nuclear experiments, had forced global temperatures down despite the toxification and rising carbon levels in the atmosphere.

Instead, humanity was stuck with all but unbreathable air in some locations, a profusion of acid rain in its cities, a lack of clean alternatives to dwindling oil supplies, and ever declining crop yields due to atmospheric conditions.

Weather had reacted violently to the changes in global chemistry, pounding parts of Asia, Australia's southern coast, and the Gulf of Mexico with storms so brutal that the areas were deemed permanently and totally uninhabitable by 2020.

The human population stood at a staggering 14.7 billion. Many scientists, Kerint included, believed that if something wasn't done quickly, there would be a massive extinction level event that would knock the population back to medieval levels through a combination of starvation, super plague, AIDS, and terminal genetic birth defects.

If Kerint had anything to say about it, the Atmospheric Wave Front Propagation experiment would put Humanity back on top. The premise was awe inspiring; release a precisely tuned energy front that would affect the entire atmosphere; breaking down all invasive and synthetic chemicals to solid, heavy, basic carbons, which would rain down into the oceans and be processed away by the salt water.

If it worked, the atmosphere would be as clean as the day before man built his first coal fire.
Within a few decades, advances in genetic science would allow for cloning as a viable means to species replenishment, and if world governments could bring down the population then the planet had a strong chance of moving into a new golden age.

In Kerint's own words, "We shall put the Renaissance to shame!"

The forty five year old scientist had given everything to this one experiment.
From the day his mother had died of malignant cancer, caused by the toxic environment she lived in combined with a genetic predisposition, Kerint had vowed to solve humanity's problems.

He had graduated MIT at twenty, with two PHD's, one in quantum mechanics, the other in physics. He had gone on to push his crusade on the world's governments and the UN, yelling until eventually, someone listened.

It hadn't been easy, but he had forced his way up the ladder of bureaucracy and finally... finally he had secured the last dollar of necessary funding. And over the course of a decade, ICQA was born in the Siberian wastes.

Kerint ran a shaking hand through his thick black hair. The edges were prematurely graying, something his doctor told him was a result of the near constant stress he had operated under since childhood. But if things went as planned today, he reasoned, then perhaps he could *finally* relax.

He turned to look through the control room's other window at the particle acceleration tunnel below. The ramp up tunnel would accelerate two protons to 0.98 c, or near light speed, before handing them off to the actual firing tunnel which would push that to 0.9999999875 c, or so close to light speed that the relativistic effect on the particles would cause gravitic fluctuations in the tunnels themselves.

Finally, the particles would collide, and the resulting stream of energy would be beamed by focusing dishes to three satellites, which would spread it to a full network of twenty two, which would in turn detonate the actual propagation wave down into the atmosphere.

Kerint grinned as he lovingly stared at the gleaming metal section of tube. His child was going to produce an event that would reach out and touch every member of mankind, for all eternity.

He snapped his gaze to one of the research assistant, who was busy at a console in the corner.
The interface was one of the first fully holographic ones in the world. No expense spared.

"Are we ready?"

The young woman nodded, "Telemetry is established with the Trinity satellites, and the full network has been aligned with six sigma accuracy. We're on schedule."

Kerint chuckled, "Good yes... very good. Carry on."

He stared at his watch as the hands inched, agonizingly, towards 11:58 GMT.
At 11:58, the accelerator would activate for the two minute pre-fire spin up.

He walked over to the main status board and drummed his fingers beside the activation key.
Finally, the time came.

A few members of press had been allowed to be present for the event, and the rest of Kerint's partners filed in to stand beside him. They were extraordinary people, one and all. Over the years they had become a small family, dedicated to the betterment of the human race.

Kernit cleared his throat, and the cameras went live, "Ladies and gentlemen," his lilting germanic accent held audiences across the world in mesmerized suspense, "First and foremost, I wish to thank my brilliant colleagues. ICQA belongs to them, as much as to me. It also belongs to each and every one of you. It is our gift. Our gift to humanity."

With that, Kerint turned and laid his hand on the activation key, his eyes on the large clock display projected on the control room's overlook window. When the clock struck 11:58, he twisted the key.

Red lights flicked on throughout the tunnel, warning personnel to evacuate the area, as huge steel radiation-proofed doors slammed shut all across the complex. Even the glass of the overlook was itself radiation proofed in case of an accident or leak.

The technicians began calling out a countdown, and information, "Coolant channels are active!"

"Acceleration in progress, ramp-up complete!"

"Handing off particles to the main tube!"

"0.991 c!"

"Gravimetrics look good!"

In a titanium tube, deep below the earth, two protons spun in opposing directions at velocities unimaginable to the human psyche. With barely the space of a molecule to keep them from colliding, the two particles sped on in their quest for the insurmountable lightspeed barrier.

At exactly 11:59:59 GMT, the two particles collided. In the course of a second, the energy of a million million stars was born in a space the size of the head of a pin.
This stream of pure energy inhabited, for a planck second, a fractal hexagon framework of ionized steel fibers designed to channel it out to the three firing dishes.

The energy coursed along the channel given it, racing out and up to strike the three satellites the dishes were aimed at. The 'Trinity' satellites in turn divided and pulsed the energy out to the network.

At 12:00:00 GMT, the Quantum Wave Propagation experiment fired into Earth's atmosphere.
A wave of energy engulfed the entire planet, an event visible to every member of the human race, occurred in the space of a moment.

But down in the ICQA control room, no one was celebrating.
As the satellites had fired, alarms had blared and warning lights had flicked on.
The telemetry screens went from stable symmetric displays, to wild unshackled, and terrifying spikes that sent shivers of abject panic down Dr. Kerint's spine.

"The wavefront just jumped its gravitic barrier!"

"Propagation, in progress! We can't shut it off!"

"Something has changed in the waveform equation, outputs are not, repeat NOT nominal!"

Kerint slammed his palm down on the control board, "Initiate the contingency protocol!"

"Too late! Wavefront has passed critical phase!"

All eyes turned to the exterior window. The ice blue of the cold Siberian sky lit up with a stunning aurora, as the wavefront passed. The energy appeared as a boiling wave of greens and blues punctuated by chain lightning. As it passed over, the clear blue of the northern sky turned to a sickly ashen grayish teal. The sun itself vanished, occluded as something in the interaction between the wave, and the planet, went horribly horribly wrong.

As the wave finished encircling the globe, and dissipated, silence reigned in the control room.
No one wanted to speak. No one had the words.

What words could be offered?
Few would grasp the enormity of the disaster at first, but Kerint's Einsteinian IQ allowed him to develop a grim picture of the day's events in the course of a few moments.

Kerint buried his face in his hands.
He was now a chief conspirator in an event that would be marked as the beginning of the end.
For all mankind.

Extinction was the future.
A future he had created.

Where had it all gone *so* wrong?

Equestrian Calendar: 10th Month, 1st Day, Year 955 PB (Post Banishment)
Late Morning
The Canterlot Archives

The monarch of Equestria was having a bad morning.
Things had started well enough, to be sure; she had lowered the moon in a timely manner, sparing a few moments to think of her imprisoned sister.

The sun had risen in a spectacular wash of golden color without any fuss, and breakfast had been a fantastic and refreshing start to the morning's activities.

Nothing had really 'happened' between breakfast, and mid-morning that gave Celestia any right to be upset. She knew that, which made the deep sense of foreboding she was experiencing all the more troublesome. The white Alicorn didn't subscribe to coincidence, and centuries of rule had taught her to trust her instincts.

When seemingly 'unfounded' feelings of concern tugged at her spirit, she was always more upset, by default, than if the problem had a definable source. Not knowing what ill events might be transpiring at any given moment was a source of extreme anxiety for her.

She had developed a method for dealing with these gut-wrenching premonitions over a hundred years ago, and that was to lose herself in the Archives, in hopes that she would either read something that would provide insight into the vague issue, or that she would be able to distract herself and forget about it until such time as she had enough information to act.

Canterlot's Archives represented, unquestionably, the largest library in the world.
Dragon hordes, and the Gryphons' great library, contained some manuscripts that predated even the oldest ones the Archives possessed, but nothing could compete with Canterlot for sheer volume of collected works. Everything from histories and magic textbooks, to fiction of all sorts, both engaging and ill conceived.

Celestia would sooner die of embarrassment than admit it, but she had a particular weakness for sappy romantic works. It was her one private vice.

On that particular morning, Celestia did finally manage to shake off the impending feeling of concern. But rather than completely dissipate, it nested at the back of her mind, constantly needling her, as though a miniature devil were sitting in there driving a tiny pin into her brain.

Celestia had learned to sideline less potent emotions such as this, however, and she did her best to ignore the little pin prick until it became something she could actually, physically, respond to.

Earth Calendar: 7/15/2031
08:55 GMT
London, The UK

"...in other news, violent food riots continue to add to the rising body count in Eastern Europe, exacerbating the casualties caused by the widespread famine plaguing the globe. The Russian Federation has declared a state of indefinite martial law, and continues with its plans to 'peacefully' absorb several smaller surrounding nations in order to bolster their failing economies..."

"...Minister Keshir Riikal addressed the UN defense council today, pleading for more troops to help stabilize the Middle Eastern regions, which have been rocked by a series of increasingly destructive Jihad wars, as centuries-old cultural conflicts intersect with the collapse of the Arabian economies due to the total exhaustion of the world oil supply...."

"...The President of the United States formally announced the creation of the American Sub-Continent Disaster Relief Command; a paramilitary organization consisting of American and Mexican special forces, paired with Canadian Mounties and National Guard. The organization will gain unprecedented powers to operate militarily in all three countries, under the oversight of a joint governmental advisory board...."

"...Biologists in Geneva are scrambling to collect genetic samples of remaining plant and animal life on Earth, as the greatest extinction event since the Cretaceous Asteroid Impact rocks the planet. Some scientists estimate that all life on Earth, outside of captivity, beyond humans and microbes, will be dead within the decade. These terrifying numbers come as the World Health Organization is slated to deliver its sobering report to the UN next week; early estimates say that as much as seventy percent of the world is experiencing famine, with those statistics slated to rise to ninety five percent within six months...."

"...Tonight on the Who's Who of the World; 'Immanuel Kerint; misguided genius, or butcher of the human race?' We'll delve into the life history of the man responsible for perhaps the most destructive single event in human hi..."

"Off." The wall-sized LCD switched to black instantly, in response.
The man stepped to the window of his apartment, and looked down at the sprawling metropolis of London. The streets were eerily empty, with only the occasional taxi, bus, or diplomatic car passing. The world's hopes for large scale synthetic oil based fuels had died with the sun, and since the... 'event', the countries of the world had quickly exhausted most major fuel reserves.

Ninety percent of the vehicles on the road now were electric.
Without the full light of the sun, even corn couldn't grow in crops large enough to produce ethanol for anyone but the military.

Most of the world's crops were now being created and harvested in massive towering cylinders built in deserts and on tundras. The facilities were hydroponic, and hermetically sealed.
The produced their own artificial UV light, and the general crop of choice was kelp. It was disgusting, both in taste and texture, but it was the most efficient thing that could be grown, and thus it was the only thing being grown.

A beleaguered, and significantly more gray, Immanuel Kerint, knew better than to trust the WHO numbers. The casualties would be far *worse* than they were estimating. His own personal guess, which he had verified out to five sigma mentally, suggested that the population would stabilize at eight billion. If the governments of the world could rally and create a new fuel source.

As far as Kerint was concerned, the conclusion was foregone.
He had effectively signed a death order for six *billion* men, women, and children.
Those that didn't starve, would be victims of plague. The signs of adaptive superbugs were already there; created by the foul conditions that over four fifths of the world had descended into.

A mewling, crying, moaning, dying mass of humanity packed into the cities; desperately seeking refuge. London was an exception; the UK government had initiated a military freeze on immigration in all its member countries; no one in, no one out, period.

Anyone caught trying to cross the border, either direction, was treated as a combatant in defiance of military law, and killed on sight.

The HMS Elizabeth itself had recently destroyed a freighter with her F-35s. The vessel had been arriving from France, ladened with starving immigrants. It refused to answer hails, light signals, or turn around when presented with warning shots, and a few of the beleaguered occupants had tried to shoot down a Sea Stallion helicopter with a shoulder mounted rocket launcher.

The world had been too busy tending to its own dead to initiate any kind of outcry at the killing of four hundred 'innocents.'
The old way was gone. The new rule of survival was 'stay alive at any cost.'
There were no innocents, no criminals, no soldiers, no civilians. Not really.
Only the dead, and the survivors.

Kerint himself was essentially under house arrest. Despite the world's preoccupation with its death throes, there had been plenty of people in high places clamoring for Kerint's extradition, and in some cases execution.

Some believed he could reverse the catastrophe, others just wanted to indulge their fantasies of justice. Sometimes, Kerint wished they would. He didn't feel worthy to breathe relatively clean air, have lights and running water, and receive a daily food delivery. He had, after all, possibly condemned a whole race to death.

The only thing anyone unanimously agreed upon was that no one, Kerint included, had an explanation as to *why* the ICQA had misfired so catastrophically. But the UK believed he was the best hope at reversing the problem, and so had confined him to his apartment.
They had provided him with access to a powerful server cluster, his research data, and correspondence with his colleagues. Those few who hadn't been assassinated, disappeared, or committed suicide.

The government had then strongly implied that he was to quietly attempt to find a counter to the effects of the experiment. If he couldn't, they might be forced to 'hand him over to the Hague.'
That would, by all counts, be a death sentance in and of itself.

Kerint sighed, and spoke to his VI again. The device, a 'virtual intelligence' was based off of rudimentary predecessors like Siri and Watson. It was not artificially intelligent, but it was a powerful linguistic parser and database manager, making it an invaluable tool for research.

"Pull up datafile 23-11-108.65. Let's try this again..."

Equestrian Calendar: 9th Month, 11th Day, Year 981 PB (Post Banishment)
Midnight
The Canterlot Throne Room

"Is it as we feared?"

"It is." Celestia stood in the throne room, addressing a circle of hooded and cloaked Unicorns.
The Council of archmages wasn't a governmental body per se, more of a conglomeration of the realm's most talented magicians, assembled to better all of Equestria through the study of magic.

To her surprise, she had been approached by the head wizard several months prior.
He had relayed startling concerns and findings; according to the studies of the council, Equestria was moving.

Not in any sort of limited two dimensional, or even three dimensional sense, but astrally.
Celestia had tried to explain it to her closest advisors with the illustration of bubbles;
Equestria's 'bubble' was on the move.

Such occurrences were not unknown; the realm had even melded and broken away from several others over its lifetime, but these had always been gradual and weak events whereby the two 'bubble's brushed each other ever so slightly, opening a small stable portal between them.

Should Equestria collide with a realm with the potential of so much energy behind it; the event would be much more cataclysmic. There would be no negative effects on Equestria's side, since it possessed all the momentum. But for the other realm?
Celestia shuddered to consider the implications.

She knew she couldn't stop Equestria moving; even had her sister been present, the two demigods could not have exerted enough power, even with the Elements of Harmony, to leech the realm's momentum.

Celestia addressed the council of magicians, her regal voice echoing from the marble floors back up the golden balustrades, "Unseal the deepest vaults. Peruse whatever works you must. Find answers. We need to know more. We need to be ready. For any conceivable outcome.."

All she could do was spend the next two decades preparing; for what precisely, she did not know. But one thing she knew for certain; this event was going to change everything.

Earth Calendar: 9/23/2079
12:23 GMT
Florence, Italy

"HAS THE WORLD BEEN SAVED? HUMANITY WELCOMES THE INAUGURATION OF EARTHGOV"

It was the headline of the Wall Street Journal, and an oddly fitting sentiment, given that it was Immanuel Kerint's 93rd Birthday.

The physicist was surprisingly well for a man his age; advances in genetic science had dramatically increased the human lifespan, at least in the segment of the population that could afford it.

If necessity was the mother of invention, then humanity had been inventing as never before.
Kerint felt guilty for thinking it, but his disaster of an experiment had produced some good for humanity.

Viable hydrogen fuel cells, positronic computing, quantum phase modelling, genetic engineering... The list went on and on. Humanity had thrown enormous effort into technological advancement to combat the threats of its own lifeless home.

Perhaps the biggest change was the one-world government.
Christened 'Earthgov,' it was a council wielding ultimate global power, counterbalanced by regional senates that could be run and molded at the discretion of each continent or sub-region.

Representatives were elected to the senates by the people, and in turn members from these senates would be elected to the Council itself by popular vote of their peers.

Humanity was throwing its chips on a single number. With the world population hovering around eight billion, Kerint's grim predictions had been fulfilled almost to the letter. The death's weighed on him, but less than they used to.

His consolation was knowledge, however bittersweet. It had taken him twenty years to find the culprit; the true world-killer. If only the ICQA had been fired on a different day. Any other day. Even any other hour on the same day...

Quantum Strangelets had been a theoretical menace once.
That was before Kerint's attempts to discover a reversal to the Wave Propagation Experiment lead him to discover proof of their existence.

On January eighteenth, twenty thirty, a quantum strangelet had intersected the Earth at noon GMT. Just as the ICQA had been fired. Kerint didn't subscribe to coincidence, but the world was too busy trying to rebuild to listen to the crackpot theories of an old man.

He had become something of a laughing stock since his 'exoneration', which, he supposed, was better than being more hated than Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin combined.

He never had found a viable fix. The regret still haunted his dreams, waking and sleeping.
The interaction of the strangelet had produced variables so complex, even the new AI computer systems couldn't untangle them.

AI. Artificial intelligence.
Man had finally smashed the Turing Test once and for all.

Positronics had led to an era of Quantum computing, and thus to AI.
The programs actually had to be based off a sort of 'etching' of a human brain into positronic pathways. A Programmer would then strip out the white noise where personality, memories, and emotions would have existed, and add in directives and databases.

The program's weren't emotional, or even sentient. They couldn't even intuit. But they could be creative in an antiseptic sense, and their processing capabilities were impossible to fully comprehend. AI now ran virtually everything on Earth.

Ironically, the advent of so many new technologies had led to a second, more subtle, form of global disaster. Though it was hard to see inside the cities, most of humanity lived below the poverty line. Jobless. Replaced by their own, more efficient creations.

They were calling it the Singularity.
A point at which man's own creations could govern, repair, construct, direct, and decommission themselves with no intervention whatsoever. Their only purpose to produce goods and services for their mostly jobless masters.

Without AI, however, mankind would be extinct. The Machines had been the key to stabilizing world logistics, alleviating famines almost overnight with their superior and a-moral capacity for 'optimum resource allocation.'

Kerint even had his own AI, patterned after his own brain.
Though the government no longer funded his research, a half dozen private corporations had been willing to stake a few billion of their newfound cash reserves on him, hoping he might yet discover a reversal for the atmospheric taint.

Since the immigration bans and his own house arrest had been lifted decades before, he now lived in a small villa in Florence. The once beautiful Italian countryside was now, like every other place on Earth, a study in shades of gray.

Gray dirt, gray dust, gray petrified trees, and gleaming gray skyscrapers.
Humanity's monochromatic legacy of antiseptic lifelessness. His fault.

Kerint seated himself on one of his many fiberglass porch chairs, to stare, as he always did, at the comings and goings on the street below.

The new 'Earthgov Military Police' found his body that way two days later.
He had died of cardiac failure, brought on by emotional stress.

The man who wanted to save the world passed at age ninety three; dead of a broken heart.

Earth Calendar: 1/18/2102
13:22 GMT
Earthgov Quantum Situational Awareness Facility
Belarusian Grey Forests

Senior Technician Miles Edwards was bored out of his skull.
Of all the possible jobs for a man with such a complicated, prestigious degree as Quantum Metaphysics; staring at a monitor all day waiting for something that would never happen was easily the least worthwhile.

The QSA Facility was referred to by anyone 'in the know' as the most expensive publicity stunt ever created by Earthgov.

Quantum Science was considered by the populace to be the demons of Pandora's Box; a ticking timebomb of terrifying arcane magic-like knowledge that paramilitary organizations, terrorists, or cackling mad scientists might misuse or abuse to wreak havoc that would put the Winnowing to Shame.

The Winnowing. A Strangely poetic name, Edwards reflected, for a decades spanning event that had cut Earth's population nearly in half.

He had described it as best he knew at his graduation cocktail party, "You take one, little, tiny aspect of the planet; the atmosphere's opacity, and you tweak it. Suddenly; its 'rocks fall, everybody dies.' "

The discussion had lost him a date, but it was essentially a correct portrayal; if somewhat macabre, in a cavalier way.

To keep the populace from tossing and turning in their beds, and putting their votes behind different politicians, the administration had spent billions of credits creating a command center, connected to a worldwide network of tidal sensors, seismographs, atmospheric sensors, and satellites.

Its single purpose was utter redundancy; to sit and wait for a disaster that, in theory, could never happen, so that everyone could breathe easier.

It was true, Quantum Science was a genie who had long since escaped the bottle; but to create an event on the level of the disaster that caused The Winnowing would require not only trillions of credits' worth of assets, but also a highly coincidental set of circumstances, and devices or facilities so large the Military would notice them well before they ever got to the active 'Armageddon' stage.

Given its apparent uselessness, the QSA campus was often loaned out to researchers seeking to take a crack at plumbing the secrets of the universe, or publish another useless paper on the Wave Propagation Experiment failure.

Edwards was not yet part of the 'clique' of initiated scientists with access to the data archives; so his seemingly eternal toil was to slave away at a monitor, daily, and hope to be noticed by his section director.

Edwards had already begun writing up a new resume.

He hated his boss with a passion unmatched by all the other annoyances in his life.
The man was the sort who thought the universe's central axis passed directly through his, considerably overestimated, brain.

Miles Edwards was so engrossed in his boredom, that it took him over a minute to register the fact that his terminal was trilling a soft, insistent alarm tone.

For a split second, he thought it might be the alarm he set to keep track of the end of his shift.
He swiftly realized that the situation was infinitely more serious.

Edwards's fingers flew over his terminal, trying to make sense of the warning it was insistently displaying. When he finally began to comprehend the meaning of the graphs, and lines of text, he had to take a moment to sit back in his chair, and let his mind chew it over.

Ultimately, he decided it was far too staggering a discovery to simply shelve, or handle himself.
He rose, and poked his head out of his office, "Hey! HEY! I got something on my scopes!"

At first, none of the scientists and interns in the main chamber reacted strongly.
Most, in fact, stared at him as if he were making an April Fool's prank a few months too early.
Edwards darted back into his office, and ordered his terminal to transfer the data to the main screen of the central chamber.

The room was pie shaped, with offices along the straight walls, an elevator at the vertex, and a screen that occupied the entire 'arc' section.

Edwards reached the main floor again just in time to watch the reactions sweep through the assembled eggheads. At first whispers swept the room, then murmurs, finally it devolved into an outright fracas of noise, angry debates, and fearful assertions.

The bedlam was interrupted by a loud, piercing whistle that emanated from the direction of the elevator. Everyone, Edwards included, whirled to see the facility director taking in the information on the screen with a quiet reserve.

The man gestured, "This is real?"

Several people, Miles Edwards among them, nodded silently.

"Call the council. We are now officially in a state of global disaster."