Blake's Tweak (more)

The watering hole was dark and quiet. It was Monday night and the place was empty other than the owner Jim and a few regulars. Blake and I sat at the corner of the bar and two whiskeys appeared in front of us, and a beer for me. Jim rested his elbow against the dark wood, leaning toward me...

"What's up with Blake?"

"He just window paned some acid."

Jim looked at Blake for a moment. Blake shuddered and began whimpering. Jim smiled and looked back at me...

"You guys looking for food? We're about to close the grill."

"Not tonight, thanks."

He resumed drying glasses. I wanted to get down to business. I wanted to figure this out. I looked at Blake as he pounded his empty low ball on the bar.

"Blake, our sun..."

"My sun..."

"Fine. Your sun. Whatever. What's the plan?"

"We milk it."

He held his hands out and moved them up and down in a milking motion.

"How?"

Blake sat up straight and took a deep breath...

"Gabriel, my friend, we shall milk this cow dry, and I will tell you how: we will write theories, dozens of theories, all misguided in subtle ways. We will conduct experiments that seem to yield promising results, but actually steer the whole field completely off-course. All the while, 'progress' will be made. Heh! Enough 'progress' for endless public funding. Endless! We will...we will...yip yip yip yip..."

It was some sort of seizure. His head was sort of turning uncontrollably as he attempted to restrain himself. Both his hands grasped the edge of the bar for stability. He leaned toward me and I caught him by the strap of his overalls on his way to the floor. He positioned himself, shook his head, then picked up my glass of whiskey, drowned it, and slammed it down on the bar.

"Jim, another round...please," he shouted, his words trailing off. Blake was right. We needed bulletproof subterfuge. If our sun went public there would be utter disaster. I had already begun pondering bogus research projects.

"Yes, that sounds good. What are their chances of finding the tweak? That would ruin everything."

"They never will. The government can't afford top scientists. Anyone with real brains is in some commercial lab designing DNA for Monsanto's crop of cheep, liver-shredding, synthetic food-like substances. Besides, our guidance will nudge them away from the tweak. The critical clues are already buried, we'll just bury them deeper. You know, distraction, diversion, sensationalism. The experiments can be plenty compelling. Their work could still yield a reactor. It would run. All of the fundamentals would be there. It's just that in the end the reactor will always take more power than it gives. Without my tweak there will never be a net gain, never, just an endless sucking of time and power and energy forever and ever and ever sucking forever and ever and ever....yip yip yip yip."

He started convulsing violently again and I wrapped my arms around him. He was lit. Jim walked over and placed his hands on the bar.

"Gabe, Blake is disturbing the neighbors. Is he going to be OK?"

"Ye-es, ye-es, he-e's fi-ine, he's fi-ine. Pi-itch-er of wa-wa-ter please."

Jim dunked the pitcher into the trough of ice and began filling it from the faucet, swirling it around. When it was about full he smiled broadly.

"Yip yip yip yip yip yip..."

SPLASH

Blake got it square in the face, cubes bounced everywhere across the wood floor. There was some clapping from the other side of the bar.

Blake shook his head, throwing water in all directions like a wet dog.

"Thanks Jim."

He took another deep breath.

"Alright, Gabe, here's the plan. We are going to steer the lab rats and bean counters through decade-long dead ends. We are going to budget for technology that never needs to exist. It needs to be hyper-complicated and all completely useless. These projects will be huge. Huge and worthless. Well, worthless except for the fact our jobs will be locked down permanently. We will have our pensions. We will ride this golden cow to our deaths, and that is all there is to it."

"Very well. Good, good."

I took a deep breath and sipped a taste of sweet beer. A chill went up my spine as I thought about the possibilities, the power, the insanity. What were we going to do with it? How far could our imaginations go with this thing? It was time to broach the subject...

I leaned in close and whispered. "What do you want to do with it?"

Blake turned. His eyes were wide and his expression was suddenly serious.

"Pardon me?"

"You know, when we turn the reactor on, what will we be doing with it?"

"No Gabe, that's all there is to it. We have no need for another sun. One is quite enough. Yip."

I set down my beer and gave him a look of disbelief. He couldn't be serious. No one could resist driving the fastest car in the universe with a limitless expanse of open road. He continued...

"Gabe, let me tell you a story. Years ago there was a highly talented engineer hired to code some software. Let's call him Bob. It was extremely complex code used to estimate pressures in subterranean aquifers or something. At the time, there was only one company in the world that needed the software Bob made, and Bob was the only guy that could make it. Version 1.0 of the software included a "bug" that caused 1000 extra cycles under the hood. It caused a delay for users. Compiling the results took several minutes because of this, and it was annoying in the field. But, the software worked, and it was used effectively for months. Some time later, Bob's boss asked him: "hey, can you make this things go any faster?" Bob said it was difficult, but possible, and that it would take six months, and he needed a bonus up front, and he wanted to work remotely. Bob's boss had a lot of clients pressuring him to make the software faster, so he agreed. Bob took the extra cash and went on a six month vacation to the Bahamas. Six months later, on the morning the project was due, he sat down in his office, changed the number "1000" to "750" and compiled version 2.0. It was a huge success. He got a raise. He became the employee of the month. A week later, his boss asked him: 'say, do you think you can make it even faster?' Bob was thoughtful, but decided it just may be possible and it would take approximately 10 months. It has now been 10 years and Bob is still on vacation. What do you think Bob would be doing right now if he hadn't introduced those 1000 extra cycles right away?"

"I don't know, Blake, what?" I was annoyed.

"Bob would be poor, overworked, and living at home. He might be unemployed. I can just hear his boss' farewell meeting: 'well, Bob, your software is perfect. Your fired.' Without Bob's creativity up front, he would have suffered unnecessarily. He would have sold himself into a form of slavery. Gabe, an intellectual monopoly is a powerful thing. If you plan to use our reactor for plain fun or for some ridiculous moral crusade, think again. That machine is our 1000 cycles, and it doesn't matter whether we are hiding it from our boss or from civilization at large. It will not, cannot, be used unless our lives depend upon it. Yip yip."

"Blake, when I voted to fuck the public good, I wasn't suggesting we derail the course of science just to let the thing rust. I was just saying that we are better prepared to use this technology than elected charlatans and incompetents, and that handing it over to them would be irresponsible. Letting this thing go to waste is not only irresponsible on our part, it's criminal."

"Underperforming is always legal, Gabe, sometimes compulsory, and in our case, it is necessary. You know very well we can't turn it on. Who helps us run it? How do we keep it quiet? The Feds have agents everywhere. We are public employees. If we get caught we'll get thrown into Federal prison for treason and the barbarians in Washington and their corporate overlords will have free reign over the power of the sun. Drink up, Gabe, and live your life. The alternative is suici,i, i, yip yip. Suicide."

"So, you're saying our sun is best used as an tool we can use to support a lazy and indulgent life."

"Laziness and indulgence is not my motive, just a happy side-effect. My motive is survival, and the greater good. The public pays us to protect them from themselves. Look at our economy! We already suffer from massive unemployment. If we turned this thing on we could supply all power needs for the continents of North and South America. Millions in the electricity biz would be fired. Chaos, riots, mayhem. All the skills of these folks would be entirely useless. Dangerous. Very dangerous."

Blake looked at me with one eyebrow slightly raised. Sometimes he took me for an idiot. That bothered me.

"Blake, stop wasting time. I am no Republocrat and you are no actor. No one with a shred of common sense has bought that incredulous argument since Bastiat's Broken Window."

"Well done, Gabe, now we're getting somewhere. But you are not entirely right. In fact, no one with common sense has ever bought that argument, before or after Bastiat. Yet, the proportion of individuals somehow lacking common sense in this particular aspect has increased to the majority. Therefore, when in our position, it behooves us to pay lip service to it if we are ever brought to trial for our behavior."

"What are you saying, Blake?"

"I'm covering my bases. If and when it is exposed that we developed a viable fusion reactor with public funds, and we are on a trial by jury for keeping it secret, just say we withheld the information for the public good. Say we saved millions of jobs and prevented riots and mayhem. We'll get off scot-free. That's what I'm saying."

"Forget it. That's a damn lie anyway, Blake."

"No it isn't. There would be riots. There would be mayhem."

"Yes, but we know better."

"They don't know know that. How could they? This is America. This is democracy. As for political ideology, we are all judged at the lowest common denominator, and expected to be blithering idiots regarding anything but fusion science. Ain't it beautiful?"

"We are not using this thing for milk, Blake."

Blake finished my beer.

"We'll live like kings, my friend. No one will miss fusion power anyway."

I was angry. Either Blake was right or the drugs had gone to his head. But, Blake was usually right when he wasn't joking around, even with the drugs. My former exuberance was waning. But, if all this was true, there was some comfort that we would not be the only ones. If Blake was right, there were certainly others hiding breakthrough discoveries for self-preservation–maybe even fusion power, but God knows what else. Would I be able to find them? Had they been looking for me already? The world was getting weirder.