Wired (part one)

Infinite Beat was back at his home office desk, rolling a fat Cuban cigar between his thumb and index finger, checking it for defects. He carefully considered the texture, the grain, and ran the length of it under his nose for a good whiff. Quality. Maybe even perfection. These days, they weren’t hard to come by; many things changed after the war. But this was a pre-war cigar, one he had stashed away for years. Beat had been saving it for a special occasion, and that occasion was today.

There was a gentle knock at his door. He was expecting company. Rising to cross the threshold, he sat a glass of bourbon next to the ashtray as he proceeded to the door. He paused momentarily as he looked up at the orthodox cross above the door frame. It’s time, he muttered under his breath, as he unlocked and opened the door. There, standing barely over 5 feet tall, was a frail-looking, bent man with coke bottle glasses, a pocket watch, a wide smile, and a beat-up leather briefcase in his left hand. He silently shuffled through the doorway and into Beat’s cottage. “Sit anywhere you’d like, old friend. I’ll follow you,” Beat said, as the old man picked out a comfortable-looking spot near the fireplace, which was already lit. Light from the flames danced across the wall as Beat cast a shadow, sitting between the fireplace and the octogenarian. “I’m glad you could make it. I don’t imagine you get out much these days,” began Beat, “it’s good to see you.” The man smiled, cleared his throat briefly, and spoke up. “It’s no trouble. They all thought I’d be dead by now, or died years ago, like a forgotten celebrity that goes into seclusion. But you know… somehow, I keep on going. Maybe through spite, maybe unfinished business. No man chooses to leave the stage before his scene ends, and my scene continues. Nobody, including myself, expected me to outlive 3 wives.”

Beat eyed the old man intently before taking another sip of the bourbon and setting it down quietly. “Listen to me, pontificating like any other old fool. You asked me to come discuss a problem, not wax poetic about one’s twilight years,” the old man said, before clearing his throat again. It was clear that he wasn’t long for this world, but some fire burned behind his eyes, borne from the spark of genius. Beat was face to face with the man that was believed to have cracked the code that unlocked biogenic power sources. He may also have found a way to integrate nanomachines with living tissue, feeding on fractions of energy from cellular mitochondria. All this invention, this discovery, and yet, he refused to use any of it himself.

Beat leaned back a little and crossed his legs as he began his unavoidably long question. “The problem. Yes. It is more of a working theory at this point, and my understanding is that, at one point in your life, you had worked with very similar concepts. However, rumor had it, you stopped short of the goal and never created the prototype. Nobody knew why, and you have always been avoidant on the topic, refusing to elaborate further after destroying your documentation on the subject. Volumes. You were the foremost expert on…” when Beat was suddenly interrupted by Jakob.
 
“Optical camouflage. Yes. I did study it, mostly on a blackboard. Lots of equations, scribblings trying to mimic the secrets of nature. But I did stop short. Not for the reasons most would expect”, Jakob replied before removing his glasses to clean the lenses with a carefully folded handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He continued. “You see, our history on this planet has been spent essentially reverse engineering what nature has already done well. Nuclear energy, not much different than our own sun. Centuries are filled with these things, millions of man-hours poured into some of them. Each time, man was convinced that there was a problem to solve, and the solutions were waiting to be discovered, created, implemented. War. Farming. Industry. Always a means to an end. Although, occasionally, man has been so eager to solve the problem, he didn’t stop to think if he should.”
Beat had another sip of bourbon before his reply. “Da, the contradiction of science. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Countless examples, truly. Bioweapons, advanced warfare, terrifying weaponry that could poison humanity for millennia. Tonight, we are discussing evasion. What man hid in the shadows that could roam freely in the light? It wouldn’t be necessary. To what ends, for what purpose…in those answers, the concerns lie. Was this an issue during your research, Jakob?”