Amber’s face fell. ‘My home is gone.’
Lopez stepped forward. ‘Did you have family there?’
Amber nodded. ‘My folks, they’re gone too.’
‘Towns don’t disappear without a reason, nor do family,’ Ethan said. ‘And this is not the first time it’s happened.’
‘What do you mean?’ Amber asked.
‘The DIA has evidence of towns disappearing in remote parts of the world such as Africa and Siberia, and it’s happening more frequently than you might imagine,’ Lopez explained. ‘This is the first time it’s happened on US soil as far as we are aware. If you want to find out what happened to your parents, then we’re going to need an idea of why it was that this town would be made to disappear instead of any other in the United States. Was there anything at all unusual going on in Clearwater before the population disappeared?’
Amber sighed softly and nodded.
‘Four weeks ago, the entire town was cut off from the National Grid.’
Ethan raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m surprised it was connected in the first place, it’s so remote.’
‘A lot of the properties used oil burners,’ Amber agreed, ‘but we also had mains electricity.’
‘So what, the population left after the power was shut off?’ Lopez suggested.
Amber shook her head.
‘No, the town was disconnected from the National Grid but the power wasn’t shut off. That’s what I’m assuming is behind this. Clearwater was generating its own power and no longer needed to be a part of the National Grid at all. None of us were using oil or gas or coal anymore.’
‘I don’t see a wind tower,’ Ethan said as he looked around.
‘That’s because there wasn’t one,’ Amber insisted. ‘That’s kind of the point. We didn’t need any energy at all because we were getting it all for free.’
VI
‘Say that again?’
Amber sat down on the lawn of what had once been her home, the rifle resting against her shoulder and pointed at the sky as she spoke.
‘My father was an inventor who worked for the government for almost thirty years,’ she explained. ‘He worked on numerous projects involving nuclear fusion at the National Ignition Facility in California. I don’t fully understand exactly what it was that he did except that it involved novel ways of producing energy.’
Ethan nodded as he recognized the name of the famous facility in Chicago.
‘They're the guys that are trying to produce nuclear fusion on earth right?’
Amber nodded. ‘My father explained it in the sense that they were trying to create a small sun on earth. They have these chambers that are able to contain immense pressures and temperatures just like those found in the sun. If they are able to do so, then the energy produced is far more than the actual energy required to start the process in the first place: dad calls it the “ultimate free lunch”, getting more out than you put in.’
‘I didn’t think that was possible,’ Lopez asked, ‘something to do with the law of conservation of energy?’
Amber looked at Lopez with renewed respect.
‘Dad mentioned that from time to time, that it’s impossible to get more energy out of something than you put in. However, nuclear fusion is the same way that a nuclear bomb works except of course that in a bomb the energy is not contained but allowed to radiate outwards as a blast. He said once that this process is the conversion of matter into pure energy, E equals MC squared and all that techy stuff. That’s why nuclear bombs are so powerful, they convert everything back into raw energy.’
Ethan recalled from a previous investigation for the DIA of just how much power nuclear fusion was able to create. A scientist who had worked at similar laboratories once explained to him that if he was to take the button from his shirt and convert it into pure energy, it would explode with enough force to level an entire city block. Even the largest nuclear fusion bombs that had ever been detonated contained only a fist — sized chunk of matter, usually plutonium, and yet they were capable of levelling cities and laying waste to entire regions.
‘So what happened? Did this ignition facility finally manage what your father was working on?’
‘Not in his time working there,’ Amber said. ‘My father was at the forefront of the pioneering technology being developed to create true nuclear fusion on earth as a power source, but the new scientists coming through from the universities were overtaking him in the understanding of what was happening. My father thought it wiser to relinquish his position to allow them to continue the work while he pursued other avenues.’
‘Other avenues?’ Ethan echoed.
‘My father had become disillusioned with the idea of creating nuclear fusion on earth, chiefly because he thought it was an expensive and inefficient way of generating such vast amounts of energy.’
‘Inefficient?’ Lopez asked. ‘I don’t know much about nuclear fusion, but I did understand it to be very powerful and without any exhaust gases that pollute the atmosphere.’
‘That’s very true,’ Amber agreed. ‘And despite what the green movement says, nuclear fusion is in fact very safe. It’s the opposite of nuclear fission, which is the process of splitting an atom. In that process, if the cooling of the reactor is not maintained then the process can run away with itself. That’s what happened at Chernobyl in 1986. Nuclear fusion, however, is very safe because it’s the process of forcing the atoms together under high pressure. If the process should fail for some reason, perhaps the reactor chamber being breached, the first thing that happens is that pressure is lost and the process immediately ceases.’
‘So what was the problem then?’ Ethan asked.
‘My father was of the opinion that it was possible to produce nuclear fusion without requiring the intense pressures and temperatures of a nuclear fusion reactor. He had done sufficient research, or so he kept saying to anyone who would listen, that he believed it possible to build a reactor that was not the size of a small town but that you could fit in a boiler room at home.’
Ethan glanced at Lopez. ‘Something like that would be worth silencing an entire town for.’
‘If it existed,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Did your father managed to build something like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Amber admitted. ‘After he retired from the National Ignition Facility, dad spent countless months in his workshop labouring on something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about and was really shady about revealing to anyone what he was doing in there. I didn’t really understand why until now.’
‘Understand what? And was it your father’s invention that was powering the town after it separated from the National Grid?’
Amber rubbed her temples with one hand as she replied.
‘According to dad, many people in the past have claimed to have invented devices that produce energy for free. Most of them are charlatans, snake oil salesman who have ripped off people for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and then disappeared. However, he said that a few people have created devices that have then suddenly disappeared, all trace of their existence vanishing and in one case their house actually being reduced to nothing but foundations literally overnight. News reports would then appear on the Internet claiming them to have been charlatans that had fled the country with others people’s money, or likewise slanderous comments made denigrating their reputation.’
‘Sounds like conspiracy theories to me,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Any time somebody claims to have invented something spectacular and is then challenged to produce evidence to support their claims, they mysteriously find themselves unable to do so or simply disappear.’