47
“Research”… how fitting a word: re-search.
When the Cascade occurred, the forepeople had mere hours to act and ensure the continuity of civilization. “The brightest minds of the era in a Safe Shelter”, “The hope for the Future”, they called it. The idea was to use large underground shelters to protect mainly scientists, teachers and experts in all fields of human endeavor, to have the highest chances of restarting the civilization once the Cascade fades. It worked. Sort of.
The shelters were ready — they always had been, since the times of the Cool War between The States and The Union. What wasn’t ready were the people. Nobody thought the Cascade would last for so long. Mark and his peers weren’t the children of the forepeople; they were the children of the children of children of children… And while the shelters had been built to last and provide protection and sustenance for many generations of occupants, they were severely lacking in the way of preservation of knowledge. Public electricity became unavailable in generation 4, when the Regulation System switched to conservation mode to keep the life support running. Two generations lived in the dim illumination of emergency lights, struggling to keep alive the mere skills of reading, writing and counting. During the seventh generation, the blast doors finally opened, and let the people out into the post-Cascade world.
We were like children, first walking under the sun, thought Mark. We knew so little about the world around us. When the main way of preserving knowledge is telling stories, and the main use of books is to keep the fire burning when there are no more wood panels to rip off the walls, information is bound to be lost or distorted. And that’s why everyone, literally everyone, became a re-searcher once the surface opened again. If you remembered something — anything — you had to document it. From food processing to avionics, from Boolean algebra to crop rotation. If you didn’t remember, you could always help others remember, and others could help you. You could scour the archives for information about chemistry or nuclear science, or even for information on how to access and decode those parts of the archives that were stored using forgotten data formats. Everything had to be re-searched, invented anew.
And it was a race against time. The last people to have regularly been reading books, or to have accessed all computer terminals without limits, were reaching their eighties or nineties. The last memories of the fourth generation were dying out in the mists of senility and oblivion, and they had to be captured.
Mark was proud to have been selected as the head of the Section of Quanta, Nucleonics and Chemistry. Led by his mother’s rhyme about a brave Neutrino and the Bohr model in the land of Periodic Oscillations, he alone rediscovered most of particle physics, and helped his team build the first cyclotron. With the assistance of a few fourth-generation ones that were still capable of more-or-less normal conversation, they even uncovered parts of the Mendeleev’s table of elements. The rest was the work of the cyclotron: starting fission/fusion reactions was simpler than it seemed, and soon the table was complete. Nitrogen to fill light bulbs invented by DEaM. Aluminum for the backing of the highest-quality mirrors. Silicon for SALD and their autonumeric machines. Copper, with the highest thermal conductivity of all metals, for heavy-duty heat sinks. Argon and krypton for fluorescent lamps. The list could go on and on. But still, Mark had the nagging feeling something was eluding him.
He couldn’t put his finger on it. All the field equations were correct, as far as he could tell. For every known element (with the exception of unstable Thoroides, where it made little difference), molar mass and electronegativity were known to four decimal places or more. But they still struggled with some reactions the archives were describing as “basic” or “rudimentary”. Photography, for instance, never moved beyond cyanotype — even though Torven Hopkins, even on his deathbed, could swear his mother used to show him old photographs that looked different. Photographs which didn’t show the usual blue-and-white scheme, but a much clearer, sharper black-and-white pictures full of detail. And they still haven’t found a proper material for control rods in reactors for sustainable fission. Speaking of which… the fission/fusion in the cyclotron never really worked exactly as they should. Mark was trying really hard to keep this a secret within the walls of SQNC, and so far, he had been successful. Nobody wanted to publicly admit that most of the times, their results were predictable, but for every eight or nine successful experiments, there was one that went contrary to all predictions. Something was fundamentally wrong with chemistry and nucleonics, and the list of people who could solve it was getting shorter with every death of a fourth-gen.
There had to be some explanation. Something simple. Mark finished his coffee and stared blankly at the tapestry hanging on the wall. Woven three years after the invention of loom, it was showing his life’s work: the Mendeleev-Taggart’s periodic table of elements. And somewhere in there, there was a solution. Mark couldn’t see it through the heavy clouds of rejected hypotheses, wrong turns and false assumptions, but he was hopeful. Because as they say, every cloud has a cobalt lining.
