Chapter 17: All the King's Men

Later that evening...

Time: Tuesday, August 26, 2053 9:24 PM

Megan came home to some warm hugs by her husband and sleepy daughter. Kelsey had already bathed and brushed her teeth and gotten her nighttime story from her father. After a quick tuck of her daughter into bed, Megan headed off to her own shower.

It was just after 10 PM before she finally settled down with Alvaro on the living room couch. The evening was beautifully clear and cooling rapidly from the day's high of 23C, and the familiar sight of Funchal University was very pleasing. Megan sat at the opposite end of the couch from Alvaro, and then turned and lifted her legs and plopped her bare feet into Alvaro's lap. She was rewarded by a heavenly foot massage a moment later.

"You look happy..." Megan commented as she smiled and her husband.

"Well, I should be happy. Somehow I've convinced the most beautiful woman in the world to let me pet her bare feet... And let's see, what are these beautiful feet connected to?" Alvaro's hands began to caress her legs up her calves under her bathrobe.

Megan shivered. "Hey! That tickles!" They both laughed for a moment, and then Megan added, "I don't think it's just me you're happy about."

"No?"

"No. I know you Alvaro. You look like a cat who just managed to swallow a very tasty canary. Did something exciting happen at work?"

Alvaro paused for a moment and then nodded. "You first. How was your day?"

"Wonderful! I tracked Hannibal into a tiny settlement where Tangier will someday be. Uh, at least in our old timeline. Their boats got there a few minutes before 6 PM, just as the sun was setting."

"Hmm?" Alvaro was puzzled for a moment, thinking that sunset today was at 6:38 PM. But then he remembered Tangier was more than ten degrees east of Funchal. "Ah..." he sighed, "my saucy wench. What sexy feet you have..."

"Hmm... Just keep up what you're doing. We goddesses know how to reward such loyal affection."

"Indeed?" Alvaro grinned. "Such as?"

"Ha! We goddesses also don't reveal all our intentions. It makes us more mysterious that way. I promise, you won't be disappointed."

"Okay! Sounds like a plan... So, I take it Hannibal is all right?"

"Yep. There was no excitement at Tangier either. Hannibal runs a tight crew. I don't think they told anybody yet about us."

"Well sure, that's smart. It might take them two months to reach Sidon. This world might not have invented much yet, but they have the concept of pirate very well established. And the man is packing a heck of a lot of gold."

"Oh yes, I agree. Hannibal is smart enough to hide everything until he reaches home. Anyway, my job as ambassador and Coke controller is complete, at least for a while. I'm scheduled for some final debriefings tomorrow, and then I'm off active duty until the end of September."

"Hey, that's great. Want to head to Porto Santo?"

"Absolutely! We can have five weeks there, catch the last part of summer at the beach! Cool sand, warm ocean, September is the best!"

Alvaro smiled. "Kelsey will be thrilled. Want me to set up the transportation? Thursday be okay?"

"Thursday will be fine. But Discovery should be back at Funchal tomorrow, and I think will be making a run to Porto Santo the day after. We can probably hitch a ride. I'll handle it."

"Great..." More caresses on her feet.

Megan smiled and stretched her legs. "So, husband with the I-ate-the-canary smile, what's up?"

Alvaro nodded and grinned. "Big breakthrough at the labs this past week. We've been spending the last few months analyzing some data from four years ago."

"Oh yeah?"

"May 7, 2049 to be exact."

Megan shivered. "The day Princeton burst our bubbles."

"Yes. Our new analysis seems to be conclusive. It wasn't the intersection of Princeton's bubble with ours that caused the temporal rupture. It was their damn kilowatt lasers. They were using four orders of magnitude too much power."

Megan cocked her head. "So?"

"The data imply, perhaps I should use the word suggest, that it would be safe to let our low-power resonance spheres intersect with each other. There was never any firm theoretical reason not to. It was just an unknown danger. And now we think the empirical evidence shows it'll be safe."

Megan was quiet for a moment as the implications sank in. "Wow. This is huge. It'll change everything."

"Yes. To maximize our power extraction ability, all resonance chambers would be brought up to the 326 ms limit. Each chamber would be capable of generating a force of 16.5 mega-Newtons, and the only constraint is that all chambers combined will have to stay below a global limit of extracting 144 GW. We can even put three resonance chambers on Discovery and lift it right out of the water. Who needs a dry dock when your ships can lift themselves out of the water?" He laughed. "A great alternative to building canals too! If we're right, they might never be needed in this timeline."

Megan frowned. "Three resonance chambers on the same ship? Won't they compete with each other?"

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Well, if the first chamber is focusing all the dark force to its location, how can the other chambers work?"

Alvaro frowned. "You use up energy. You don't use up force. You don't have the right way of looking at this."

"So what is the right way?"

"Well, imagine two parachutists. The presence of one below the other doesn't block the Earth's pull on the top guy. Think of the dark pressure as a fire hydrant with three hoses connected to it. As long as the hoses aren't drawing any water, the pressure in each is the same, whether the other hoses are connected or not."

"Oh, I see. And it's the drawing of the water with one hose that reduces the pressure head available for the others."

"Exactly. And with the resonance spheres approaching one hundred thousand kilometers, the available power is enormous. We could draw 144 GW and still be at the 1% level of the background fluctuations."

"Is all this a certainty?"

For the first time, Alvaro looked a bit sheepish. "Well, almost, not exactly. We still need to do some proof-of-principle experiments."

"Hey, how dangerous will this be?"

Alvaro gave her a playful smile. "Hey back! This is Alvaro the Great talking, remember?"

His playfulness was contagious. Megan rolled her eyes. "Oh, I see. I'm a goddess, so you must be Alvaro the Phoenician god of physics, huh?"

"Well, maybe I was being too modest. How about Alvaro the Greatest for a title?"

Megan reached behind her and playfully chucked an extra sofa pillow at his head.

Alvaro grinned as he almost but not quite managed to dodge the soft blow. "We'll be asking Congress for permission to run a remote experiment on the moon, sub-nanosecond spheres a few centimeters in radius. We should have the package built in a month or two, turn off all the other generators and have Topcat make its first voyage to the moon, maybe pick up a few rock samples too."

"Hmmm, think Congress will give their approval?"

"The potential reward is so great, yes, I think so. There's already some high-level talk of stopping the dry dock construction at the shipyard, turning the area into a second ship building bay. The first trading ship we build might not have propellers. They wouldn't be needed. We could even put Golem-sized dark generators into bluebirds. Their capabilities would be enormous." His warm hands continued to massage her feet.

Megan gave a deep sigh and closed her eyes, relaxing completely. "Shift the paradigm..." she muttered.

As Alvaro gently caressed her feet, he made a vow to himself never to tell Megan the result of one additional calculation he had made. His research team finally understood why their dark energy generators got cold while in use. The dark energy resonance caused a backflow, a backscatter of positive energy flowing backward in time.

The effect was similar to an electron exchanging energy with a position. In half the photonic interactions, the electron would speed up before the positron would slow down, the virtual photon exchanging the energy being absorbed before it was emitted. The duration of existence of the virtual photon would be less than zero, which in singularly mechanics was the axiom definition of moving backwards in time.

Madeira's dark generators could produce gigantic amounts of power and force, but the underlying dark resonance was quite gentle, and the cooling effect of the photonic backscatter could be ignored. Not so with the Princeton resonance that tore spacetime. Alvaro did a private calculation concerning the destruction of Golem's bubble, and was horrified to find that the backscatter would cascade exponentially at the Princeton end of the temporal dipole. All matter within a ninety kilometer radius of the Princeton lab was almost certainly brought down to within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero.

Except for the torsional pulses adding rotational energy to the Princeton bubble, the matter would have collapsed into a Bose Einstein condensate. That would have left a vacuous spherical pit ninety kilometers in radius at the Princeton site, with a small puddle of degenerate matter lying at the bottom, a puddle pulled into a small sphere by its own gravity. Alvaro thought that might have been a planet killer.

Even without the collapse to degenerate matter, his wife's actions had certainly resulted in the deaths of millions and probably hundreds of millions, both from the instant flash freezing inside the Princeton bubble and the resulting planetary shock wave once the bubble was popped. The surrounding atmosphere would rush in to fill the vacuum left by the solidified air.

Did humanity survive the event? The tremendous thunderous power of a simple lightning strike is due to the atmospheric discharge of around one giga-joule of energy. How much more destructive the Princeton event must have been, with outside air rushing in over a vacuous terrain greater than the area of New Jersey. According to Alvaro's calculations, it was hell's own version of a thunder clap, releasing the energy equivalent of half a million Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs or twenty billion lightning strikes. The atmospheric shock wave would be unimaginable.

The destruction would be extremely widespread. With a nuclear bomb, much of the energy gets released as heat and radiation which stays concentrated at the local blast point. Not so with the cold release of the Princeton bubble. All the potential energy stored in Earth's atmosphere pushing against the bubble was mechanical energy, ready to transform into an exploding shock wave of momentum as the air imploded inward. As the vacuous wave propagated over the deep ocean, it would raise the sea water almost ten meters in height. Countries bordering the Atlantic would be hit twice, first by the atmospheric shock wave, and then hours later by shattering tsunamis.

And a large portion of the New Jersey shore was within sixty kilometers of the Princeton labs. A broad wedge of the Atlantic thirty kilometers wide and all the ground below had been super cooled to very near absolute zero. How long would it take for the wedge and the land to thaw? Years? Decades?

Alvaro sighed as he petted Megan's feet. There was no reason to ever burden his wife with such guilt.

After a while he gave a playful tug on one of her big toes. "Come! It's time for the goddess to deliver her divine reward."

Megan's eyes blinked open. "Oh, it's never a good idea to rush a goddess Alvaro!" But she got up anyway, and smiling with her husband they headed off for bed.

Two years later...

Time: Friday, May 7, 2055 1:48 AM UMT (Universal Madeiran Time) (circa 1101 BC)

Sunrise was just breaking on the horizon as Ensign Megan Lopes stepped out of a hatchway and onto a portside deck of the M.N.S. Urushalim Express. Megan had a short while to relax and she stretched her arms wide, idly estimating the sun's azimuth at twenty degrees north of due east. Her merchant marine ship was sailing due east at 36 knots and was currently forty kilometers due west of Sidon, on time for their arrival at 2:20 AM UMT. "Six years," Megan thought to herself. "Today is the six-year anniversary of our new timeline." She took a moment to reflect on the slow pace of Madeira's efforts to change the world.

The world and especially the Mediterranean area were now under a high degree of surveillance. Close to a thousand compact observation / communications platforms were in operation, not in orbit but hovering at stationary positions typically sixty kilometers above the Earth's surface. The sensor array had given Madeira detailed knowledge not only of the sizes and technical levels of the world's populations, but also of the social norms. The magnitude and pervasiveness of the brutality had been a shock to many.

The citizens of Madeira thought they understood now why the human species never had the population explosion that it experienced in the twentieth century. The lack of technology to support dense populations was only a small part of the answer. The primary driver that kept the population in check was the continual warfare. In this era, war was the social norm worldwide and seemed to have a fractal-like quality to it, occurring at all levels of magnification. Empire against empire, city against city, tiny hamlet against tiny hamlet, ethnic and religious groups against alien groups, war was everywhere.

Madeira's models showed a huge churn in the world's population, women typically living a third of their adult lives in pregnancy, starting around fifteen years of age. The prodigious flow of new children would overcome the ravages of the wars, slowly edging the population upwards until a natural disaster such as a flood or famine or plague would cause the population to collapse. And then the great cyclic process would begin again. And the wars never ceased, even during calamities.

By the end of 2054, Madeira's population had grown to more than 127,000, including over 12,000 at their new settlements in the Azores. And their supply of elements was now almost limitless. A single finely-tuned matter conversion chamber could make almost a cubic meter per hour of any element they wished, from hydrogen to bismuth, elements 1 to 83, and often with as little as 10 MW of dark power. The only exceptions below bismuth were technetium and promethium, elements with 43 and 61 protons which had no stable isotopes.

Madeira's population might be stable and even growing a bit, but the rest of world was heading in the opposite direction, continuing to decline in numbers below the low range of Madeira's earlier estimates. The Satan Bug had been extremely efficient in eliminating the senior leadership, and the current generation of young warlords ruling the world was both aggressive and destructive. Outside of Madeira, the world's population was estimated to have dipped below thirty-one million, in spite of the almost complete lack of elderly people.

It was impossible to measure the impact of Madeira's presence in this new timeline, but Megan didn't think Madeira's existence had been a net benefit to the Phoenicians, at least not yet. The tiny nation was being squeezed by its neighbors even before the temporal rupture, and the possibility of Phoenicia acquiring new allies with godlike abilities was seen as a grave threat by the surrounding tribes. The Israelites were advancing on their settlements in the Canaanite highlands and the Philistines were actively contesting land along the Canaanite coast. Tyre had become the southernmost city that was still firmly in Phoenician hands.

And on the home front at Funchal, there was growing opposition in the legislature regarding Madeira's ambitious plan to abolish slavery in the Mediterranean area. Very little progress had been made with their attempts at trading so far. King Ethbaal had repeatedly tried to cheat on his end of the agreements. Madeira had offered him very good prices for slave-free commodities, nothing as insanely generous as they had with Hannibal, but still very attractive offers. And he had blown one deal after another.

The king just couldn't seem to understand that no slave labor meant no slave labor, along all parts of the production process. For the last three months, the Urushalim Express had declined almost all the trade goods being offered by the Phoenicians with the exception of Hannibal's farms, and this current trip would be no different. Megan sighed. King Ethbaal just wouldn't learn.

The Phoenicians were risking all the dangers associating with gods and had reaped very little reward. On one occasion Madeira had to decline even Hannibal's trade goods, though the problem was caused by a Hannibal overseer, one of his former slaves. Megan was somewhat appalled by how Hannibal's cousin Devarim handled the matter. It was an example of the world's current code of justice, swift and brutal.

"Well," thought Megan, "at least we'll be buying Hannibal's good today. King Ethbaal will get his tax. That should take some of the sting out of rejecting the king's own goods." Megan took one least deep breath of the clean morning air, and headed back to the bridge.

At the port of Sidon...

Hannibal stood by the docks, the warming sun at his back as he watched the western horizon. The gods' ship was due in port a half hour after sunrise, and they were never late or early. Hannibal estimated he had about a quarter hour before they would dock, and he was expecting to see the command tower of the Urushalim Express any moment now.

Urushalim Express! The city to the south had been named after the Phoenician god Shalim, god of the setting sun and the peace of the cool of the evening. What a joke! Why the Madeirans named their merchant ship after that infernal city, Hannibal would never understand. In his opinion, the place should be burned and turned into a garbage dump. So many wars, the death, the misery, everybody was always fighting for the infernal place. The Jebusites, the Philistines, even the Phoenicians at one time, they all wanted the city. And now the Hittites were in control, though the Israelites seemed determined to capture it someday.

It was a moderately difficult place to defend. There were nice deep ravines on three sides, but the northern direction was a constant headache to the city defenders no matter how many walls they built, and as a man who loved being at sea, Hannibal could never understand why anyone would want to waste their life defending a piece of dirt. Total madness...

Hannibal squinted. Yes, there, the faintest glimmer, right on the horizon. The gods were on time once again. He sighed and looked around him, twitching nervously. The king had two full platoons of his elite personal guard right here in the harbor area, 120 heavily armed men, the king's best archers. They were double what had been agreed to with the Madeirans. Plus a full battalion of army regulars was nearby in the city, pulled away from the southern border with the Philistines. The force represented a fifth of both the elite guard and the citizen army. It was far more security than was needed and the show of force made Hannibal feel very uneasy.

So many times Hannibal had pleaded with the king in private to be completely honest with the new gods and their divine powers. Assume they could see and hear everything, absolutely everything, Hannibal had urged. The bartering deals the gods were offering made slave labor completely unnecessary.

It was all in vain. The young king was greedy and just could not comprehend an economic effort that was not supported by slave labor. Hannibal finally concluded the Madeirans would probably have an easier time trading with the Egyptians or even the barbaric Greeks. He would never voice such traitorous opinions, of course.