“Hey, there, hippie-dude, what’ja got there?”
He looked up to see the truckers; the question came from a slim little man with protruding ears, a mop of black curly hair sticking out from around his strap cap, giant sideburns, and big brown eyes, who resembled a leprechaun going to a costume party as a trucker.
Jason gave Leprechaun the warm grin that had gotten him through a lot of college classes when he hadn’t done the reading. “Well, it’s pretty dumb, and I don’t really know how to explain it,” he temporized. Then his eye fell on the deer whistle on the hood of the nearest cab. Hah! “I was just going to go inside and ask you whether you wanted one of these,” he said, holding two eggs out so they could see. “Don’t touch them, they’ll give your fingers the itch the way fiberglass will. My stupid dad thinks he’s an inventor, and he’s created this wind-resistance cutter. Supposedly you put it on your hood and it sends, like, radio waves forward that harmonize the sound vibrations in the wind stream and make the air flow real smooth over the car, which reduces wind resistance so much, supposedly, you get some extra miles to the gallon. I think. I gotta admit, I don’t understand Dad three-quarters of the time even when he’s not talking about physics.”
He caressed one of the little eggs with a gloved finger and let himself sound as if he were trying to hide his pride. There’s the ticket. Good old Dad. Genius inventor. I’m his amiable dimwit hippie son. Got it. “It’s solar-powered, so it has to be somewhere the sun gets to, but that way it doesn’t draw any power from the rest of the vehicle. Dad says it’s an idea from Nikola Tesla, who was this scientist dude that, like, studied air and electricity. So he sent me out to give away a bunch of them ’cause he can’t get the big companies interested. The one on the hood of my truck doesn’t do much for my gas mileage, though.”
“On the hood of your truck?” another guy, a square-built older type, asked.
Jason looked at the hood, and said, “Dammit. Third one that’s fallen off. I told Dad they wouldn’t stay on with Liquid Nails.”
Leprechaun-trucker snorted. “D’you think your dad’s really a genius with no common sense? Or is he just a guy who’s got so little common sense he don’t realize he ain’t a genius?”
Jason let himself grin broadly. “Well, we lived on his patent money most of the time I was growing up, but the company that paid him didn’t make any of his gadgets; it was some oil company that said ‘the market wasn’t right yet’ for energy-saving gadgets.”
“Damn,” the big beefy older trucker said. “Of course they said that; why would an oil company want anyone to save energy?”
“Yeah, I guess. So the patents ran out, the money dried up, and we had to move out to the boondocks to find a place cheap enough for Dad to keep working on his gadgets. Nowadays, the little bit he makes just lets him buy more parts for the next gadget. Doesn’t sound like a lot of common sense, does it?”
Leprechaun said, “No, it don’t sound like common sense, but I been following Tesla stuff for twenty years on the web, and your dad might just be a genius. Even if he don’t know that Liquid Nails won’t stick a piece of slick glass to a rusty old truck hood.”
“Well,” Jason said, “I’m supposed to offer one to anyone with a vehicle, and Dad said the bigger the vehicle, the more fuel it would save. They’re solar-powered, they work anywhere on the front of the vehicle where the sun gets in enough to charge it. Maybe we could put one on your grille? I’d hate to screw up the paint job on your hood.”
Leprechaun-trucker was beaming. “Let’s give it a try. If it don’t work, it weighs what, a couple ounces? And you can’t beat free for a price. I’ll even spring for some of that Superstick High-Temp they sell inside; that keeps trim on a truck, oughta keep one of these on the grille.”
After he’d equipped all four trucks with an egg on each grille, Jason also gave an egg carton with six more in it for his new Tesla-freak buddy Leprechaun to give to other truckers. “Handle them with gloves only,” he said. “You can trust me that you don’t want to know how much you’re gonna itch—or how much it will spread to anything you touch with your hands—if you don’t. And remember, whether it works or not, we’d sure appreciate a note at three w’s dot tesla hyphen waveflow, dot org, about whatever you observe.”
“Will do,” the short trucker said, pulling out a ballpoint pen to write it on his hand. Jason spelled it out carefully; there was no such site as far as he knew, but well before Leprechaun might try it, there’d be no web.
To keep it convincing, Jason was visibly at work, scraping at the rust on the hood of the F-150 to better attach a black egg, as the truckers pulled out. The moment the last truck vanished over the rise, he tossed the egg up onto the flat roof of the little diner, figuring there’d be plenty of sun, and with things like the air-conditioning, satellite antenna, and gadgets inside, there ought to be enough stray electromagnetic fields around as well.
Then he sloshed Liquid-Plumr over the place on the hood where the black egg had briefly rested. The truck had to make another 250 miles, even a POS this old had an electronic distributor and fuel injection, and with so much ground to cover, Jason couldn’t afford excessive irony.
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. JUST AFTER 1:00 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.
Edwards, the liaison from FBI, looked around the DoF’s main meeting room, as if seeking support from his dozen other law-enforcement, security, and military colleagues, folded his arms, and asked, “And you didn’t have crypto resources to find out about this sooner?”
Arnie looked as embarrassed as Heather felt. She said, “The only thing we could get was assistance from the Amateur Crypto Section at NSA.”
Susan Adler from NSA nodded. “It’s as much our neglect as yours. OFTA asked for more help all the time, and Dr. Plekhanov several times told us that you needed it badly.”
Edwards, a tall, thin, bald man with a crooked nose, who tended to look like Popeye on a bad day, said, “Well, that’s probably enough recrimination right there. Just another case of you can’t watch everything. But… thousands of people doing minor sabotage?”
Arnie nodded. “Maybe not minor. The tech analysts from Dr. Browder’s office gave us a preliminary opinion that what we’re looking at is at least weaponized nanoreplicators, which the Daybreakers call nanospawn, and a mix of genetically modified organisms they call biotes. Coordinated release not just across the country but around the world.”
“We’ve had to run on borrowed resources,” Heather said. “I’ve had a request in for two full years for a cryptologist, longer than that for more science and engineering staff—”
Edwards made a sour face. “I said this is no time for recriminations. Now, when they weaponize a nanoreplicator, what do they make it do? I thought in the most sophisticated labs they’ve got, right now, they’re barely making nanotech do anything.”
Jim Browder rubbed his porcine jowls, shoving so much flesh up toward his ears it looked as if he were about to peel his face off like a bag. “Non-replicating nanotech works just fine in industry, everywhere, these days, and has since the late twenty-teens. Replicating nanotech is a stunt that hobbyists do. It’s not hard to make nanos that make copies of themselves, and it’s not hard to make nanos that do something useful, but so far it’s hard to get them to do both because for any useful, creative purpose, they’d have to communicate and work with each other, and that’s very hard. But if all you want a nanobot to do is make nitric acid whenever it senses that it’s near an electric circuit—that’s what our weapons guys were looking at. They thought it was too unreliable, it would attack our own gear, and you’d never get rid of it once you released it. But if all electric machines are the enemy, forever, I guess that’s an advantage.”