Mars- The Red Planet Awakens Read online

  MARS:

  The Red Planet Awakens

  Paul Reaver

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Paul Reaver

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover Design by Allison Baird

  Also by Paul Reaver:

  Quantum Evolution: The Metamorphosis Begins

  This book is dedicated to my daughter Allison, whose love, intelligence, and artistic talent never cease to amaze and inspire me.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1Chapter 23

  Chapter 2Chapter 24

  Chapter 3Chapter 25

  Chapter 4Chapter 26

  Chapter 5Chapter 27

  Chapter 6Chapter 28

  Chapter 7Chapter 29

  Chapter 8Chapter 30

  Chapter 9Chapter 31

  Chapter 10Chapter 32

  Chapter 11Chapter 33

  Chapter 12Chapter 34

  Chapter 13Chapter 35

  Chapter 14Chapter 36

  Chapter 15Chapter 37

  Chapter 16Chapter 38

  Chapter 17Chapter 39

  Chapter 18Chapter 40

  Chapter 19Chapter 41

  Chapter 20Chapter 42

  Chapter 21Chapter 43

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 1

  It was a beautiful sunny July day in the Middle Of Nowhere, Arkansas. John Harkness braced his head against the headrest of the nondescript dark green sedan he was driving and goosed the accelerator pedal just a little to feel the power from the acceleration of its unique form of locomotion. He wasn't disappointed. The speedometer jumped 30 miles per hour in less than a second, and the two-lane blacktop sped by noticeably faster. Smiling to himself, he decelerated a bit and drove on.

  After a mile or so, he abruptly slowed and made a right turn from the highway onto a small side road in an area so rural that it looked as though it should be a passage on which only farm tractors would travel. A “Dead End” sign marked the entrance to the road, which was lined on both sides by trees that were ancient and large; their branches intertwined and formed a canopy above and across the area below. This effectively created a natural barrier to aerial surveillance. After about 100 yards the road turned 90 degrees to the left. Beyond that turn, directly ahead about 150 feet away, there was a blocking cross-fence with red warning signs that indicated the end of the road. Behind the fence, there was a solid wall of trees in a forest. The fence was only for show since, in conjunction with the barrier of branches above, there was a very elaborate and sophisticated surveillance protection system for the entire area should someone ignore the fence and become curious. They would have failed if they tried to go further at any rate, because the fence-and-tree barrier was a solid hologram; striking it would be like hitting a brick wall. No regular or technically sophisticated traveler would be able to make it past this point, and especially not past the fence. Regardless of whether someone wanted to make it this far, they would not be able to do so as an always-alert area patrol team would quickly surround them. The hologram was merely an extra layer of protection for what lay beyond. However, for John, whose car emitted the proper electronic signal, the hologram de-solidified and became just a projected image through which he could easily drive, and so he did. The hologram solidified behind him after he passed it.

  John thought about the fact that the entire area for 50 square miles was highly and continuously protected by very elaborate electronic shielding; it might have been possible to circumvent some electronic surveillance, but it would be virtually impossible to circumvent surveillance of the degree to which this area was protected. When it came to guarding its secrets, what the government wanted, the government got; and it was more or less regardless of the complexity and cost.

  As he discarded this cerebral review and changed mental gears, he returned to the present in his mind. Now that the hologram was behind him, he pressed a control button for the ultra-sophisticated heads-up panel that appeared in front of him so that he could see if any warning lights appeared on the display. None did. The fact was, any appropriate warning lights would have appeared automatically even before he drove through the hologram due to the many sensors in the area and their synchronization with the car. Still, John was careful and a realist and left no electronic stone unturned.

  He slowed down as he approached a small, barn-like structure. He stopped and waited for the brief seconds that it took for the holographic door in the side of the building to change from being solid to a solid-looking projection that was the opening to permit his access. Once this transformation was complete, a light turned green on the dash (as it had when he drove “through” the fence), and he drove in and waited again for the brief seconds as the door became solid again. When the building was secure, John felt the movement of the elevator his car now rested upon beginning the descent that would ultimately lower him to the rough equivalent of 10 stories underground.

  The vertical ride did not take long. Once the elevator had stopped, and the light on the wall in front of him flashed green to indicate the elevator had come to rest, John drove off the lift, parked, and exited the car.

  As he got out, he did so with a sense of pride for his team’s ability to take an everyday Ford sedan and turn it into something that, even now, would be quite an item for science fiction fans. To make the car pass for a “real” Ford sedan, it had to sound like a real Ford sedan, since he drove it back and forth to work upon occasion, one of those occasions being yesterday (driving home) and today (driving to work). Before he could drive it from this government facility where it went from the drawing board to reality, it had to sound like it had a real V-6 engine under the hood. One of his engineers had come up with the solution one day on his lunch hour, one of the many achievements that made him glad to be a part of the team of which he was in charge. That engineer had dreamt up a way to artificially produce the V-6 sound as the car accelerated and decelerated (including the sound of the non-existent automatic transmission changing gears), created the hardware, and installed it. He did all this in a single afternoon. Once he had overcome that little (little?) obstacle, John could drive the car back and forth to work. He knew he was taking somewhat of a risk by doing this, because if anyone outside his team were to raise the hood, their eyebrows would have raised even higher. What nestled under the hood looked nothing like anything Detroit (or any other automobile-producing factory location) had ever approximated. But he was convinced (and he had also persuaded the powers-that-be) that the only accurate way to prove the car’s roadworthiness was to use it as a “real” car and drive it on a fairly regular basis. This didn’t mean that he drove it every day, just that he drove it often enough to make sure he had covered most of the environmental situations that a standard car would experience. He also drove it after any updates had been made to the vehicle (and there were constant improvements) to ensure everything worked as expected. Currently, and as usual, it worked like a charm.

  He traversed the short walk from the car and walked into a circular room no more than four feet in diameter. The annular wall of the open side of the room rotated to close it around him. He placed his hand on a palm scanner, gazed into an optical scanner, and was faintly aware of the scanning device above his head that he knew would be there. Within seconds, the sca
nner above verified his identity via his handprint, the retinal scan, his heartbeat’s electrical patterns, and his brain waves. An intruder theoretically might be able to mimic two, or possibly three, of the scanner readings. But this latest technology allowing for the brain wave scan was currently impossible to duplicate. This was especially true since the potential entrant had to concentrate on some type of a mental password, such as an image. However, although the technology to mimic retinas for retinal scans already existed, the potential processes for doing so still required some creative techniques. One way would be to render the retinal owner in question unconscious and steal the scans that way, or even a gruesome alternative best left to the imagination. But it would only be a matter of time before the ability to purloin brain scans became a reality. The saying goes that government secrets are the most fleeting of all. By the time brain scans could be stolen, the world of science as regards security would have moved on to the “next big thing” anyway.

  Had the scans failed, the circular room would have become a trap that would hold the occupant until security arrived. Since the scans were successful, the opposite side of the room now opened, revealing a featureless corridor apparently constructed entirely of faintly glowing opaque glass. As he stepped out of the circular room and into the hallway, the door behind him disappeared, replaced by a featureless wall that was identical to the rest of the corridor.

  After a few yards, the corridor turned to the right, revealing an alcove, also to the right. John stepped into the alcove, and a repeat performance of the scanning scenario at the corridor entrance took place. This time, a door slid open to reveal John's office. The walls currently had the same opaque glass appearance of the corridor, but they could be customized to display any picture, feature, or view, including live views from almost anywhere in the world. When a live scene was presented, it appeared that one was looking through wall-sized windows into an unfolding scene or panorama instead of just seeing a picture on the wall – because the view was real as well as being in real-time, as it was transmitted by a video camera at the location of choice. John chose to display an underwater view of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia on the opposite wall from his desk, with fish and other marine creatures swimming and moving in live action as he watched. He found this view to be simultaneously pleasing, relaxing, and conducive to constructive thinking. Although all four walls plus the floor and the ceiling could exhibit the view, giving the ultimate 3-D visual impression, John chose to limit the display to the wall in front of him. Some views could be distracting, and for some, a little unnerving.

  As John sat down, his gaze fell to a picture of his wife on the desk. He was momentarily overcome by a deep feeling of loss. About six months ago, she had died in a bizarre accident that he was not only involved in (although peripherally) but that he still blamed himself for; the fact that he did not deserve the blame did not make him feel any less responsible or mitigate the sense of loss. He closed his eyes and recalled the day of the accident. Angela was going to the store and wanted to take John's "company car" (an older, less sophisticated version of the model he was now driving). She was fully aware of John's job and his role as leader of his organization, as she shared the same level of secret clearance in another ultra-secret covert government organization. John's superiors allowed him to share his work with his wife, and vice versa, one of only a very few instances in the organizations where such interaction took place with a husband and wife. If he didn’t know better, he would have assumed that their situation was unique.

  John had permission to drive the test car for his commute (and more to the point, to drive it like a standard car), and it was highly yet unobtrusively protected whenever he drove it away from the facility. He returned to his earlier thoughts when he was driving to work this morning. Since his "company car" was a prototype that his organization was continually working on, with improvements made on almost a daily basis. He drove it to and from work fairly often so that he could judge whether it remained viable as daily transportation, especially after one of his team had made a significant change to it (and once the change had been thoroughly tested by whichever lab made the change). Thus, it ended up at his home at night and even sometimes on the weekends. Therefore, when Angela asked to take the "company car" on an errand, she knew she was taking a top-secret prototype to the grocery store (or wherever she was going). But this day-to-day type of driving was precisely what John wanted to have done to affirm the car's functionality; that it could replace the ordinary internal combustion propelled vehicles that everyone else in “normal” society currently drove. All trips made in the car, including John’s use of the car for his commute to work, were required to be approved ahead of time by the upper-echelon management that oversaw John’s group, and coincidentally, provided his projects with funding.

  John's prototype ran on hydrogen. Not only did he never need to stop at a gas station, but the car's fuel system also pulled the hydrogen for its fuel right out of the atmosphere. Though hydrogen makes up only about 0.00005% of the Earth’s atmosphere, one of the earliest breakthroughs by John’s team was devising a method of pulling enough hydrogen out of the atmosphere to power the car and much more. John’s team member Mark was in charge of the car project. Mark had stumbled across this phenomenon while experimenting with something else, and it presented a perfect example of happenstance. Mark was experimenting with both quantum mechanics and nanotechnology to solve the problem of getting enough hydrogen from the atmosphere for fuel. He accidentally ran his then-current experiments with both technologies at the same time, and at a time when he was not prepared to run them. So somehow, in tandem, they solved the hydrogen problem. Luckily, unlike most fortunate scientific “accidents,” Mark was able to recreate the processes.

  The drawback to the early prototype his wife was driving was that it could not pull enough hydrogen straight into the unique engine’s pre-combustion compartment to keep it fully fueled as it ran. So his team had introduced a compromise. They had equipped the car with four separate hydrogen "pumps" to pull hydrogen from the air, and the four together stored the hydrogen in a holding tank so the car could draw upon it as needed. It was literally a gas tank since it held the hydrogen gas. If his team had been just a couple of months farther along, they would have created a single hydrogen pump to supply the hydrogen directly to the engine as needed; because a couple of months later, they installed this enhancement. But at the time of Angela’s accident, they had not reached that point in the car's development. Today's model had an improved single pump that could assimilate as much hydrogen as was needed.

  This was not the case the day that Angela died. She had taken the car and was only a few miles away from home when something catastrophic happened: the hydrogen storage tank developed a leak. Unfortunately, it only took one spark to ignite the hydrogen in the holding tank. The resulting explosion and fireball were enormous. The terrible tragedy had one small positive detail as far as the project was concerned: Angela was on a deserted road with no witnesses anywhere nearby and far from any civilization when the accident happened. The "unobtrusive protection" team for John’s projects swooped in and made short work of the cleanup, though they had to close the road and create a detour for a short while during the process of returning the road to its pre-explosive state. That area of the road required repaving due to the intense heat that the explosion generated. This was not a problem for the "unobtrusive protection" team - their organization had the money and resources to make such things happen as needed. That was their job. Fortunately for the team, they had the connections to clean up the mess and then create a cover-up for the accident. They passed it off as a gasoline tank rupture, which explained the ball of fire but not the strength of the explosion, which was explained away vaguely as many government “accidents” are. In this case, the detour and explanation were made available but did not attract a lot of attention because Angela was in such a remote area.

  John forcibly tore his thoughts away from the
memory. He knew there was no use to dwell on it. He was a changed man. Few could go through what he had gone through and not be changed. Some would change to a darker place, but John was not this sort of person. He still grieved - he had loved his wife dearly - but he knew she would want him to go on with his life and with the projects. So he changed as many people do after a catastrophic personal loss of this nature; he threw himself into his work. This would ultimately be the force behind many of his team's incredible accomplishments, but he never took credit for them. If he provided a positive atmosphere and supportive incentives to his team members, that was all good, but he still felt as though his team deserved all the credit for their accomplishments. It would not be until years later that he would look back and allow himself to see that his positive influence is what, in large part, inspired his team to greatness.

  One part of the process of driving the car back and forth to work was the requirement that he enter notes into the log file for the car regarding its performance. If indicating that the vehicle functioned as expected was important, indicating that there was any anomaly was even more important. John had experienced no defects on this latest voyage with the car, so his log entry did not take very long. Its performance was currently above expectations.

  John’s log entries were currently all verbal, and always done in his office, where security was tightly maintained. However, he and two members of his team were very close to perfecting a device that they could use to record information directly to a computer using brainwaves.

  John mentally switched gears. After thinking about the car, he thought this was an appropriate way to phrase (to himself) the re-focus of his attention; he had made a note to himself to be sure to follow up on the brainwave-reading project and was thinking about it now. He had always found that one of the most significant gaps with information technology was transferring information from person to computer and back. He saw it as a slow and plodding process. The introduction of the mouse to the computer world helped, of course, and there had been other significant improvements, but in his view the process was still unforgivably slow.