The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

could sit there and chant words at it to turn the turbine. But the goal, his goal since coming to this place was to make it run itself. Free electricity.

But there was no way without a person sitting there chanting.

And he could not replicate a person's chanting with any of the recording equipment he had tried so far.

When it came to the new power, there needed to be a person, something with will on the other end.

He stood from the table, having reached his limit and unable to work on the problem anymore. Maybe it would be best for him to wait. Wait until there were Acolytes more well versed in physics than he was.

The gaunt face and dark eyes of Carmen Carruthers came to his mind. Though he could not say that it actually was her, his memory of facial features was about as good as his engineering skills. She was the reason he had been able to construct the bunker he sat in, and had discovered it completely by accident. The same way he had blown out the wall of his cursed apartment, Carmen had somehow taken the incendiary procedure that released heat energy from an object and, through a strange quirk of speech had managed to release pure light energy.

If he had managed to convince Sandy to send her away as he had wanted, the cavern would not be possible.

Wondering exactly what other mutations were possible was nearly overwhelming and caused such profound terror in him that his mind refused to fully process the thought. The alternative was to do nothing, to squirrel away whatever power he could and make sure it never saw the light of day. And he had seen the results of that in fire that had consumed the house.

And Carmen and the others were gone now.

All they could do was make sure everything was sanitized, prepared for the masses. And so there were the levels of training and the weeding out. He had to admit, the anything is possible tagline did seem to be a bit of a bait and switch when the reality behind it was a multi-tiered vetting process.

Maybe he was just looking at it through tired eyes.

He called for coffee and the vessel materialized next to him. Even making the liquid from nothing was fast becoming a chore. He thought back to what they had done with Sandy, altering the mitochondrial membranes in a person had been difficult, but the results had been promising. Maybe he could alter the dopamine receptors in his own brain to fire more readily. Clayton James had eluded to something similar...

He paused. Yes, he needed others. He needed help. He looked around the mostly barren chamber deep within the earth in a place he did not know, or even really speak the language. There was one lifeline to his own sanity, and she was rarely around anymore, she was off trying to bring in more people.

But the vetting process was too slow and too stringent. But it was necessary.

The wheels of his mind spun out and he inhaled deeply, reminding himself to stay on the path he had chosen. Stay on target. Stick to the plan and everyone will understand eventually. He exhaled in a shudder.

Then you'll have... others.

The anything is possible tagline didn't line up well with patience.

Come on, McAllister.

He turned his attention back to the problem at hand. It was easier than trying to figure out other people anyway.

Maybe there was a way he could alter the metal specific parts of the generator the way they had altered certain atoms in the molecules of Sandy's membranes. He tapped his fingers, pulling out a few of the textbooks that littered the room. If he could set up some kind of differential in the metal it might be able to create an electric current. But to do it himself, without the help of others like with Sandy, he would need a simple metal. One with as few electrons as possible. Hydrogen would be ideal, but there was no way to make a pure metal, the same with helium. Lithium was too reactive to not oxide in air, which left beryllium.

He pawed through some of the books on his shelf and grumbled.

He had left most of his chemistry manuals upstairs.

Serge Novak rubbed his stubbled chops and emerged from the hazy realm of sleep for what seemed like the fifth time of the night. He exhaled quietly to avoid waking his wife.

Time was that he wouldn't worry about whether the woman next to him was awake or not, but time also was when he could sleep through the entire night. As his father had said, on the rare occasions he was home and not spending the night with one of his mistresses: Upon entering middle age a man realized there were things he wanted to build to outlive him when he died.

And with that want came sleepless nights.

While growing up he had envied the men living in the high towers and the penthouses. They rolled up on the curb in huge, shining sedans, beautiful women on their arms and large men hanging on behind them like the Sultans and Czars of old. But even as he had fought and killed his way up the ladder, he had never conceded how much work it actually was. There were too many judges to pay off and witnesses to threaten. And then there were the goddamn politicians who, while on the right side of the quintessential lead/silver bargain, were weighing a little too heavily on the scale.

While he admitted that the role of an oligarch (even a minor one) sometimes required a little blood being shed, he did not enjoy it, mostly because of the work involved in covering it up. It involved even higher people poking their noses around, determined to impose limits,