Rock the Baby - Episode 9

New episodes of Rock the Baby are posted each week. Read from the beginning here.

Break Away

I had to sit down. It’s been four days since the world as we knew it ended. Electronic devices don’t work any more. We have no power. We are running out of water and food. And now I meet a woman who tells me that she caused this with something that she has in a small steel case sitting five feet away from me.

I asked her what it is because I was too afraid to ask her what I really wanted know, was it safe to be sitting this close to it? She sat down across from me and rested her hands on the case. She said they call it “cold fire” and she was part of a team that had been working on it for several years. I looked at her and wondered again how much trouble I was getting myself into. Her eyes glowed like a summer sky.

She went on to explain that cold fire was a combustion process that produces light but not heat. They had recently developed a catalyst/enzyme chip that not only sparked the combustion but then reacted with the light to reclaim and recycle nearly all of the materials consumed. Put one of the chips in a sealed glass container and you have a light bulb that lasts almost indefinitely and never needs electricity. Totally self-contained.

But four days ago one of the prototypes had broken in the lab. There was a sudden and violent reaction when the cold fire met the air in the lab. An unexpected side effect was an enormous electromagnetic pulse. That’s what knocked out all the electronics. She was able to re-confine the materials, still burning, to the steel case that now sat on the table between us.

Since the EMP was unexpected she couldn’t estimate how far its effects extended. Already it was well beyond anything she would have guessed. Her hope was that the lab at BokonoCorp headquarters was still functional so she could use their equipment to extinguish the cold fire she was carrying.

And then her eyes — those incredibly deep blue beautiful eyes — started to well up with tears. She told me that she hadn’t told me the worst part yet. No way did I want to ask her, but I couldn’t sit there like an idiot [any more than I already had] so I did. The worst part, she explained, is that what was supposed to be the ultimate in low-cost illumination now looked more like a small, inexpensive, devastating weapon.

Un-freakin’-believable.

I stood up and spun out my yo-yo. I didn’t realize until that moment how I much use it now to clear my head.

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Please come back next week for Episode 10.

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