“After the wars, everyone went along with whatever Transport proposed. Everyone, that is, but the refuseniks: mainly the miners and the people who lived out in the countryside. Just like when everyone but the Amish went along with the implanted chips and the Transport IDs, the refuseniks refused to accept the outlawing of private transportation.”
“We don’t have time for a political discussion,” Dawn cut in. “We’re being hunted down, we have a dead friend lying on the back table in that office up there, and I doubt Jed cares about our problems. I suspect he just wants to get away from all of this craziness and into the safety of the Amish Zone.”
“Yeah. Safety,” Pook said drily.
“How are you going to run the printers?” Dawn asked. The last thing she needed was her cousin trying to radicalize an Amish dissenter. She was calmer now, and a few faint tracks on her face were the only reminder that she’d had an emotional episode over the death of Donavan.
Jerry Rios stood silently now, watching Pook with a curious look on his face. Jed could tell that Jerry couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.
“I have an okcillium power generator,” Pook said. “That’s how I can run ten of these machines at once without Transport detecting anything. “It’ll run for a couple hundred hours on just a few grams of okcillium.”
“Ok—freakin’—cillium!” Jerry said with a grin. “I knew it!”
“You did, did you?” Pook said.
“What is okcillium?” Jed asked before he could think better of it. His curiosity was piqued by the strangeness of the machines and what Pook might do with them.
“Okcillium?” Pook said. “Okcillium is the future, and it’s the past. Okcillium is power and freedom, and it can also be control and tyranny. Okcillium is why there’s a war going on out there, and I reckon it’s why you’re here too Jed, but we don’t have time for that right now. Dawn is anxious and she wants us to get to work.”
As if to emphasize the point, another explosion shook the building above their heads, and dust and dirt shook free from the rafters of the basement as the building creaked and moaned in protest.
Seemingly unconcerned, Pook went to work. He plugged the male end of the cord assembly into a female receptacle, and then walked over and pulled a bunch of flimsy cardboard boxes full of clothing from a pile. The cartons had lost most of their structural integrity and as he moved them they spilled some of their contents on the ground. After Pook had moved a few of the cartons, Jed could see a small machine that had been hidden among the antique treasures.
Pook cleared the area around the machine, and then pushed two buttons simultaneously on the face of the stainless metal cage that housed the okcillium generator. A slight hum and an almost imperceptible vibration indicated to Pook that the machine was running, and Jed noticed that the ten gray machines over near the north wall all came to life, beeping and humming in coordinated response.
“It runs almost totally silently and doesn’t emit any fumes or off-gases,” Pook said of the generator. “It doesn’t produce a tremendous amount of heat either. That’s one of the reasons okcillium is so valuable… and so illegal. It is quite nearly undetectable.”
Jerry Rios pointed at the generator and winked at Jed. “Private power generation is like private transport, Jed. Forbidden.”
Jed nodded his head. He wasn’t sure what to think about that information, but it was scary—and, if he had to admit it, somewhat thrilling—to be standing there while Pook defiantly broke the law.
“Once upon a time,” Pook said, “the powers that be just kept a lid on new inventions. They killed or financially ruined inventors, bought up patents, and spun conspiracy theories that kept people wondering whether cheap and clean home power was even possible. Mainstream electricity and grid power were kept so artificially inexpensive that most people didn’t even really care if home power generation was a possibility. Thomas Edison once said something along the lines of, ‘We intend to make electricity so inexpensive that only the rich will be able to afford candles.’ And they did it, too. The problem with that is that it made everyone addicted to, and dependent upon, cheaply provided and ubiquitous grid power. Sure, the government didn’t much care if you went solar, bought fossil-fuel generators, or put up wind generators, because those off-grid resources were finite, unsustainable, and would always require more input from the outside world. But when okcillium was discovered, all bets were off. It was outlawed pretty soon after it was discovered.”
“What reason was given for outlawing it?” Jed asked.
“They just categorized it with other fissionable materials, even though okcillium is nothing like radioactive, nuclear substances.”
“Okay,” Dawn said firmly, making it obvious that she was exasperated with all of the talk. “It’s not necessary that Jed get a complete briefing about all of the problems in this world. He isn’t a part of this world. We need to get a move on, like immediately.”
“Gotcha, cousin,” Pook said with a smile.
Jerry, Dawn, and Jed could only watch as Pook went to work. The first thing he did was produce a black pistol from a drawer. He showed the pistol to everyone before placing it flat on a metal rolling cart that had a bright white tabletop. Jed had never seen a real gun, and had only heard of them through gossip and maybe in a few sermons back at home. Pook removed some sort of cartridge from the grip of the pistol and placed the cartridge on the table as well.
While Pook went and grabbed a few other boxes, Jerry picked up the weapon and examined it.
“Glock 21,” he said. “Fires .45 ACP ammunition and is very deadly, especially at close range. This one is highly illegal. No tracking chip. No location-based disarming module. No serial numbers. No ID activation or remote jamming.”
“You know your weapons,” Pook said as he placed the boxes he’d retrieved near the machines. He walked back over to the gun and took it from Jerry’s hand. “That’s not very common back where you come from.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said, putting his hands into his pockets. “My dad was an enthusiast.”
“You have some kind of military background?” Pook asked.
“Nah. I was way too young for the wars. I’m only twenty, but my father fought. He was in Kansas City before it was destroyed, and he was there when New Orleans fell. He used to take me out to the country to an old cabin where he’d hidden some weapons from the time before the banks collapsed and the wars broke out. I learned a lot about guns from my father.”
“Interesting,” Pook replied.
Pook placed the gun back down on the table, disassembled it into its several parts, and then propped up the pieces on tiny, clear blocks that elevated the gun from the table. He did the same with the black cartridge. “This will allow us to get a full 3D image of the items,” he said as he worked.
“The units we’re going to make will be one hundred percent polymer resin and ceramic, even the striker pin and spring, and they’ll be undetectable by metal detector—even though almost no one really uses metal detectors anymore.”
Pook opened up a cabinet and pulled out a large handheld device that, when plugged in, emitted a glowing red light. The luminous wand was connected to another device that Jed rightly identified as some kind of computer. He knew about computers from the studies he’d done to prepare himself for his trip, and he’d seen Dawn operate one back at check-in when he’d first arrived at Columbia.
“Back where you’re from, guns were not only illegal, but they were manufactured so that they wouldn’t fire unless they were in the hand of a certified Transport Officer. They were also disabled electronically whenever they were in or near any government facility.” Pook began slowly moving the handheld device over and around the gun parts and the disassembled cartridge, and an image of the items began to appear on the computer screen.