FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2045
One year later, Eva Rozen, Marta Cruz, Jim Ecco and Dana Ecco gathered in an NMech conference room and watched scores of Rockford’s residents join the munitions plant officials and the CleanAct’s executives gather for the remediation plant opening. The launch of a dump site seldom generated much public excitement, but CleanAct’s public relations department had had a year to feed the public’s imagination. A video stream broadcast the event and fed the dreams of delegates of other toxic sites who watched in anticipation. Schoolteachers used the occasion to illustrate the principles of environmental responsibility and scientific achievement. Financiers calculated whether remediation would be the Next Big Thing. Even the viewers at NMech were mesmerized by the scope of the celebration.
Jim commented on the morbid curiosity that drove him to watch the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Marta spoke of her interest in seeing the river cleaned. Eva offered no motive for watching her competitor’s success.
Dana’s schooling brought him to the conference room. The remediation project provided lessons in chemistry, political science, history, biology, and social science. His gaze alternated between the vid projections, his own heads-up display and sidelong glances at Eva. At one point, he subvocalized a command to his datasleeve and sent a databurst to Eva’s sleeve. She looked over at the boy with a wistful gaze and mouthed, “Later.” Dana frowned and turned back to the news coverage of the plant’s opening.
The winter morning was unusually warm in Rockford, and the sun shone as bright as the town’s hopes for a clean river and economic prosperity. Rings of chairs perched on a temporary stage. The front row was reserved for plant and town officials. Dr. Reinhart mingled with them. He shook hands, slapped backs, and doled out humble thanks and earnest congratulations in equal measure. The Rockford High School marching band entertained the assembled guests from just beyond the stage. Their costumes shimmered, first in blue, then gold—Rockford’s colors—and sunlight glinted off their instruments and the decorations on their costumes like the tips of a crackling fire.
The officials and honored guests, the townspeople of Rockford, and viewers around the world all focused on the ZVI containment building, with its inverted funnel-shaped dome that came to be an icon for the project. CleanAct’s building had passed inspection after inspection. Experts considered earthquakes, lightning strikes, fires, terrorist attacks, and tsunamis, never mind that the munitions plant was nearly two hundred miles inland.
Their conclusion? The building was safe. This pronouncement was all the more laudable because CleanAct was ready three weeks ahead of schedule, as Dr. Reinhart had boasted it would be. In an age of complex projects with near-zero tolerance for error, most manufacturers were hard-pressed to meet a deadline, let alone beat one. But Dr. Reinhart had made this a point of pride. He’d show those eggheads in Boston a thing or two. “Here in Texas,” he’d said repeatedly, “we don’t always have fifty-dollar words for workin’ hard. It may not be the easy way, but it’s the Texas way.”
The final safety check had been three weeks earlier. Quality engineers flooded the containment chamber with pressurized helium. Had any of the helium escaped, it would have been detected and the project halted until the integrity of the chamber could be guaranteed. Once CleanAct demonstrated the safety of the chamber, all of the helium used for the test was evacuated through a vent high up on the building and rose safely into the atmosphere. Only enough to surround the ZVI remained.
The moment came to bring the plant online. Wielding an oversized pair of ceremonial scissors, the plant manager cut a foot-wide blue-and-gold ribbon, and then Rockford’s mayor threw a ceremonial switch. The plant had actually been brought online hours earlier, again thanks to CleanAct’s deadline-beating push to complete the project. All that remained was for the containment building to release ZVI into a production vault where thousands of microscopic jets would spray fine mists of ZVI into a collection tank through which the Rockford Munitions Plant’s effluvia now passed.
The process was completely automated. CleanAct’s proprietary process assembled the analysis of incoming waste, the moment-by-moment configuration of the ZVI spray heads, the analysis of the output, and the scooping up of the heavy, ZVI-bonded pollutants.
There were backups to the process, and backups to the backups. A redundant operating system ensured that none of the operating instructions became corrupted. If quality control sensors noted any irregularity in the operating commands, the plant would switch to the backup operating system and the cleanup would carry on without a hiccup. It was foolproof, CleanAct said, and the plant officials dutifully agreed.
Inside the containment chamber and unseen to the crowd, the backup operating system was monitoring the containment chamber, as expected. But it was not synchronized to the three-weeks-ahead-of-schedule timeline that CleanAct had as the centerpiece of its winning bid. The backup operating system believed that the containment chamber hull integrity test was to be conducted today. This set of instructions should have been deleted after the successful test three weeks earlier. Was it carelessness that allowed the code to remain? In its rush to beat the clock, did CleanAct miss a crucial step? Or was it an act of sabotage?
Whatever the reason, the backup software overrode the primary instructions for the operations protocols. The redundant instructions ordered external sensors to test for escaped helium as it had been programmed to do. Noting no leaks, the backup operating system concluded that the pressure test was successful.
The next step in the testing process was to purge inert helium. But the chamber now contained ZVI, not helium, and tons of the volatile particles poured out of the purge vent. The heavy iron cascaded down the rear of the round containment dome and into the oxygen-rich air that sustained the lives of the observers. The ZVI was little different from grain dust or flour in its explosive potential. In fact, given the size of the nanoclusters, it was more hazardous by several orders of magnitude.
One spark, source unknown, triggered the blast that incinerated the officials and the guests on stage, rattled windows for eleven miles, and prompted seismologists to report an earthquake at the small Virginia town.
The blast was magnificent, as explosions go. Had the guests been able to describe the last moment of their lives, they would first have noted a powerful shockwave and compared it to being tackled by a steroid-soaked team of football players. Their hands would have tried to clap at the sides of their heads when, a few milliseconds into the event, their eardrums flexed and ruptured. An overpowering flood of nausea would have swept them as their internal organs began to liquefy. Given the ability to continue their observations, they would have noted a strange fog appear and disappear as the air’s moisture precipitated and then vaporized in the emerging fireball.
The observers’ reports would have terminated as the air flashed to over four thousand degrees. Then the firestorm incinerated the plant and any evidence of the cause of the conflagration.
The blast was loud. A mid-twentieth century battleship’s 16-inch guns generated 215 decibels and the sound wave flattened nearby seas. The Saturn V rocket that carried its human payload to the moon generated a decibel reading of 220—five times louder than the battleship on the logarithmic decibel scale. The rocket’s sound was loud enough to melt concrete. The Rockford blast was estimated at 230 decibels—ten times louder than Saturn V.
The fireball consumed most of the iron nanodots. There were no structures within the blast radius and once the shockwave passed, the event appeared over. Military personnel from the munitions plant were deployed and they fanned out, tending to the wounded and dazed survivors, pulling bodies from the containment building’s rubble.