Page 11 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Black Pinhole Nanofurnace

planetarily preservative, value in turning his ideas into something of
greater benefit to mankind. He had also figured out that the
company, driven by the shift from Cold War to “war on terror,” was
already intending to hammer his sword into a lower-altitude precision
weapon, mounted in drone aircraft and aimed at terrestrial targets
determined by global positioning coordinates transmitted by shadowy
security agencies.
Badly in need of their chief technologist to carry Bull’s-eye
forward into its repurposed implementation, the directors of the
corporation gave him several hearings, hoping at first to blunt his
enthusiasm with mock sympathy and empty promises. The strategy
backfired: first it inspired him to develop his ideas with company
resources for several months, then soured him utterly when he finally
understood the duplicity. For their part, his employers did at least
respect his intelligence by sending his proposals out for third-party
analysis by a panel of academic experts. They found the physics
underlying his new theory to be either invalid or beyond validation.
Delenda was forced, in the face of Aitkens’ intransigence and the
directors’ determination to protect their federal contract, to terminate
him. In short order, the government revoked his security clearance
and he joined the ranks of the unemployed.
That was eight years prior to my assignment. Aitkens’ great gift to
humanity went on the back burner while he tried other schemes to
make enough money to return to his pet project. He was already
exhibiting signs of instability, if not lapses in judgment: it was as if his
ego had allowed him to place the laws of nature in a position
subordinate to his desires. Thus the ill-destined home flash freezer.
Microwaves had made it big, he reasoned, by indiscriminately
bombarding water molecules at the frequency exciting them into
higher energy states and thereby raising their temperature. This was a
commercial application of radar, also a shotgun approach to hitting a
target of unknown distance and location in order to elicit a reflection.
A decade or two later another type of radiation generator was
invented: the laser. It did something different with energy emission.
Here the particle aspect of mass-energy was involved rather than the
wave. Beams of photons could be fired in a coherent focused beam
of constant wavelength, or color; controlled by an oscillator, that
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