But I Did It Anyway - A Short Story by M. K. Dreysen

For this week's free story, readers, let us introduce ourselves to Doctor Rick Belkin, engineer and scientist. Dr. Belkin works in many fields, dreaming of tomorrow and creating it from crude matter.

He's had a few difficulties, has Dr. Belkin. It seems that Rick's work has brought him to the attention of Authority. And with attention, of course, comes paranoia.

Whose paranoia? Well, readers, follow along and, please, decide for yourself...

But I Did It Anyway - a short story by M. K. Dreysen

[The following is an audio recording of a talk presented by Dr. Rick Belkin, on the subject of industry-academic career transitions.]

Thank you, Professor Geary, I appreciate the invitation. It's been a fun couple of days, I've enjoyed my visit a great deal.

Let me state for the record: I shouldn't have done it.

I knew better. Dig into those areas that the powers that be watch over and you're asking for trouble. Spend too much time reading up on arsenic, nightshade, and you'll end up explaining things to a judge. Dig into the security measures of a military base nobody's ever heard of in the middle of South Dakota, and a whole crew of blue suits are going to show up at your door, looking for answers.

I know how it works, I'm not entirely disconnected from the world. Sure, tensor manipulation takes up most of my time, and I've had many pleasant conversations with machines. But I still listen to the radio, watch the news.

The radio plays the Astros games, and the local weather teams are a lot more relevant, and accurate in my estimation. So that's where you go for the information that matters. I pick up the rest of it by osmosis, I guess. You learn to read between the lines. Like getting the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Not for the headlines, but for what happens on page B6, where the little tides government and corporate tell how things will go. What they'll be doing over the next few years. Trends, whispers.

How ever-present the automated data-catchers have become. I knew these things were there.

And I went looking anyway.

Specifically, I've been curious about metals and fields. The alloys that can stand up to the high temperatures and pressures of various nuclear processes. And the electromagnetic fields, their strengths and geometries, that pair up with the alloys. These aren't your garden variety stainless steels, my friends. And even the best alloys need the magnetic fields for aid and support. Or for extending the reactions to places pressure, heat, and force of personality can never go.

Right, and you there in the back, you're shaking your head. There's gotta be more to it than that, right? Hey, every month there's some professor at MIT, or Cal Berkeley, or deep in darkest Canada, teaching basic nuclear physics. A few hundred kids off to Google every night, desperately hoping that someone somewhere has already done their homework for them. In all that noise of term papers and problem sets, just what in the world makes me think that my noodling on reactor geometries and the estimated lifetime of various metal alloys under constant neutron bombardment would stick out? Enough to matter?

There are a couple things. First, that I've been on the government's list for a couple decades. Not that list. Nope, about twenty years ago, I went to renew my passport. My husband and I were headed to Baja. One of these random "Five days, four nights" for cheap things you get for signing up with a hotel loyalty program, and we actually had the money.

It's Mexico, but we can't just hop across the border anymore, everyone has their panties in a twist, so if you're off to yank back a shot of tequila or twelve, explore the cenote, or just go put your toes in the sand and watch the Pacific roll in, you're screwed my friend. You've got to troop off to the post office, get your picture took, send in paperwork and a nice check and get the little blue folder that says "I'm all official, my government has given me permission to fly, look aren't we so proud of ourselves for all this?"

How far we've come, right? Except I can't go.

That's what the State Department told me. And not because I'm a threat to anybody. Nope, the letter, the one I've got right here, because after the third or fourth time I decided I'd go ahead and keep the damned thing, a trophy of the obstinacy of government at its finest. These letters tell me I'm "Identified as scientific, engineering, or technical personnel essential to the security and safety of the United States Homeland. As such, your risk factor while traveling abroad has been deemed high, or elevated, such that, in the broader best interests of the Homeland, the State Department must deny your passport application."

I'm too important to somebody, in other words. Who?

Wish I knew, brother. I wish I knew.

You're shaking your head, too. Freedom, liberty, right? Never heard of such a thing? Then sister, I suggest you expand your technical skills. Get out ahead of the pack a little. I've had to explain this to my employers, half a dozen times now. "Hey, we're exploring expansion into Toronto..."

"Can't go, find somebody else."

That conference in Vienna. The institutional get together in Beijing, and asking about that one got me one of my sterner letters from the State Department. That one mentioned the possibility that "CFR 6008.113.084 prohibits certain types of scientific and technical communications with any foreign national, in any capacity. Violations of this regulation will result in loss of contracts, employment, security clearance, and further penalties at the discretion of the department in question."

"Can't go, find somebody else. Oh, and stop asking, otherwise we're going to lose our DOD and DOE contracts." I had to add that little phrase to my book of words. I should have quit banging my head against the wall.

Which would have been the end of it. Fine, says I, fine, I'll be a good little researcher and I'll do my job, I'll run my projects and I'll make sure they're done as well as human ingenuity can do.

And I'll take my vacations in Yosemite and Yellowstone, Grand Canyon National Park and the Appalachian Trail. I'll not so much salute the flag as I'll pretend it stands for something, somebody not me, but hey they'll get what they asked for. Won't they?

I wonder, if I quit, whether I'd ever get that back? Or, on my death bed, will some half-wit show up with a paper from the State Department, demanding that I not cross that oldest boundary because I don't have permission to shuffle off to Buffalo, my work in ye olden times is still classified and a matter of national security and blah blah blah, no you can't die you're not getting off the hook that easy.

You detect a little bitterness, don't you? That's because the letters started showing up whenever I touched boundaries in the literature. Cooling water circulation, which is about the most generic thing in the world for any plant larger than a child's chemistry set. Getting rid of excess heat, or pumping it back in again, may be the most fundamental thing in chemical engineering.

But if I go and ask about the corrosive resistance of this new pipe material I heard about, at the conference in Seattle last year, which at least I get to go to those, right guys? Anyway, this engineering team from RHIC shows up with a tweak on an old favorite, and I go to these conferences for just this kind of thing, you never really know when you'll hear of somebody in a slightly different field doing something that can be stolen, I mean of course adapted, for your own work.

The Brookhaven crew had convinced a foundry to experiment with trace amounts of boron and yttrium, and they'd come up with a malleability increase along a dimension I needed. Maybe, because who the hell knows with this stuff, but I had a pilot project underway that this new shiny would slot right into.

So I did my homework, I built up my library on the base alloy they'd started with, all of the known applications, and then I emailed the RHIC team to pick their brains. And find out the contact info for the foundry.

The letter from the State Department showed up before the quote from the foundry did.

I just hope that whoever, whatever team State has put together enjoys what they do. It sure as hell looks like it from my end.

That particular letter pissed me off. First, I sat down with my boss and the company lawyer. "Keeley, Mike, you guys are going to have to fire me. I'm no use to you. If this keeps up, they're going to make it so I'm twenty years out of date for the rest of my career."

They both treated me like I'd had five too many espressos. "Rick," Mike said, "You're not a liability here. Everything goes through our outside P.E., right?"

Which I'd argued with. What's the point of me having the license if they're not going to use it? Except that they want the audit trail. And someone outside the company taking a little bite of the potential liability. These are the breaks when fifty percent of your work flows through the halls of Congress, eventually.

Keeley was even less worried. "Hire a lackey, Rick. Some kid fresh out of school, you hand out these little research projects, they come back all neat and tidy, with one inch margins and doublespacing, and you're golden. Honey, don't sweat it. You're worth enough to me and the company to make this work."

I don't like being patted on my little head and sent off to my room.

Well, ok. Actually, when you get down to it, I love being able to go off to my room and work on my stuff and not have the headaches. And let's face it, this was a headache that cut a lot of paperwork out of my life. I couldn't sign off on anything, not officially. So there was that.

Do you realize how frustrating it can be, to not be able to ask Google to look up a paper for you? I've only been doing that for going on forty years, counting school. It's like a limb missing. Hell, at this point I'm terrified of asking for weather projections. Some nimrod might think I'm moving on to working on weather control. Which, I do have some ideas in that area. If you're really interested, the nonlinear dynamics group in Pennsylvania, what's her name, Kalruska, at Temple?

Right, let's get back to the story. If I get off on tangents like that, we'll be here all day, and Professor Molina looks like he's ready for lunch, right Carl?

After my failed effort to retire, the first thing I did was to get on a plane to Brookhaven. If this was a spy story, I'd tell you about all the work I did to cover my tracks.

I'm afraid I'm no good at intrigue. I made my ticket reservations the same way I always do, car rentals, the hotel, one website at a time. Long Island's great, I go through MacArthur and there are plenty of hotels. Expensive, but these days even Long Island's cheap compared to San Francisco or Seattle.

I got off the plane just fine, got a car because I was thinking of doing a little sightseeing, it was July after all. Called my contact at RHIC to let him know I'd made it ok. I won't mention his name, but you won't have to search hard to figure it out.

The State Department certainly didn't. "Rick, who on earth did you manage to piss off in the White House?"

"Oh, lord, let me guess."

"We're not allowed to bring you onsite. Your badge request was circular filed."

Which was kind of them. Lost is a lot better than the other options. "And?"

"And, there are a handful of people wandering my building this morning who don't have any business being here. Except that their badges let them in anyway. From what I can tell, if they wanted to, they could walk right into the collider."

"Don't give me ideas. What about dinner, then? You up to a little steak?"

"Italian. There's this great place in Stony Brook, you'll love it."

I'd have bought, but the wall between government and business is a little more sacred than the headline news would have you believe. The RHIC crew aren't regulators, which you can't even buy that crowd a cup of coffee, or a cheesesteak, but the RHIC crew still have to work with outside contractors. So they just brightline it: no outside money, period. Good call, I'd do the same if the seats were reversed.

And I did enjoy the clams and linguine. This was the kind of place where remembering that they were on the island mattered to them.

"Just don't ask about the ownership," my contact told me. He'd come in alone, which told me a lot.

Italian, Long Island. "It's not all that bad..."

"Friend of mine, a professor at CUNY, lived next to one of the 'connected', Gerry said he was terrified to mow his lawn. Afraid the guy would get pissed off because of the noise."

Ok, so it was that bad. "Listen, about the..."

"Nope," my guy said. "Not here. We're just colleagues, catching up. I've got a grad student you might be interested in."

"Let me see if I remember, the one who gave that poster in Seattle? Illana, um, Illana Merchant, right?"

"That's the one."

We talked about her poster, that she was interested in an industrial postdoc. No details on the first regard, more on the second. Small talk in this realm, and I see a few of the professors nodding and whispering because I'm giving away their secrets. No matter.

The real conversation came a couple hours later. "Great place to eat, but there are federal microphones set up in every corner. I figure that the reason we haven't seen any of our friends with the all-access passes is because they're busy calling their buddies at the FBI for the audio of dinner."

"Geez, remind me again why you ever took this job?"

"At least I'm not on the no passport list."

Which, of course he had a point. "Why the hell not? You're hip deep in these things and they let you travel? I'm an accidental tourist here, and they're treating me like I'm Typhoid Mary." And maybe that was the point.

My contact is known, trusted. I'm the kind of wildcard somebody didn't see on the board. They didn't hire me, and sure I was working for someone's DOD buddies, but I'd crossed the streams.

"Sounds like you've stepped out of your lane, Rick. At least, that's the way it was put to me. You're known to some, for a different field, so they know you're capable of doing some remarkable things. But you're also known for not being able to keep your mouth shut."

"I'm wounded. I've never published anything to do with the secure side of the fence."

He had the grace to laugh. "And someone like me can read between the lines and guess what inspired the idea. A computer doesn't even have to guess, Rick, you know that."

Yeah, textual analysis, network analysis of citations. I'd built a map for any who followed me, but wasn't that supposed to be the point of science? "And you think it's because they didn't hire me when I graduated? They missed out, and now they're kicking my ass because of it?"

"That's the long and the short of it. If you'd taken that Los Alamos gig, they'd probably have you tagged as family. As it is..."

As it was, I'd taken an offer at UBC, because Professor Welanya's group there worked on something far more interesting to me, at the time at least. And if there had been hints of politics, or 'developing contacts', or any other kind of nonsense like that, I'd have run from them even harder. If I'd even noticed, to be honest. I tuned those lessons from my graduate school out, somewhere around the time I'd started skipping seminars.

Yeah, there are reasons I'm not a proper academic.

But that's why I'm here, really. To give you some idea of what might await you, if you're looking beyond the walls of academia. Try not to let what happens next scare you. There are worlds yet to discover, and plenty of opportunities to wander there.

Just pay a little more attention to the signs and roadmarkers than I did.

Ok, so I came back from Brookhaven with a few more ideas, precious little concrete information, and most of all...

Most of all the knowledge that the State Department had gone from letters to boots on the ground. Where would they show up next? And when, because once you're on a list, the feds are worse than a pit bull. They don't let go.

Let's back up a little. I'm fairly certain that, if you don't already know about fusion geometries, or at least that there are projects big and small playing with them, then you will be busily searching your phones for the publicly available information. It's not exactly hard to find. I won't push anything from inside the fence, because I'm sure you can guess that the secret world has ideas they haven't yet seen fit to discard to the public.

I mean of course, "Publish for the good of humanity and the broad advancement of scientific knowledge."

My part in this stuff really is quite small. Designs come along regularly. Every one of you could, if pushed properly, come up with an interesting idea.

Most of them won't be original. But that's not the point. My part in the proceedings comes at the "But how do we build it?" stage. I'm the one who has to put together the "Pencil to megawatts" path. Design, design again, cost estimates, siting, power requirements, contractors. It goes on for a while.

I do have a tiny part in the deciding. But please don't email me your ideas. There are two or three layers of committees that sift through the ideas. I sit in those meetings, and let me be the first to tell you, that's an agonizing process. There are far more ideas than we can ever build, you see, and picking the next one is as bad or worse than picking your favorite child.

Sure there's politics, we're human. It's not as bad as you think, though.

You nod your head. Now you see why I need to know about alloys, and geometry, and fields. I have to spot the holes in the plan, if I'm doing my job. You put a few billion into a project and you'd better hope someone realizes, early, that, for example, ordinary stainless might work great for a standard pressure vessel, but add a few hundred neutrons per second and now we need something a little more exotic.

Does the metal need to be inert, non-magnetic? Or maybe you want the vessel to participate, bound the field, and let the jacket nullify the boundary. All of these things and more, we work through. The big difference here, between your current job and this end of things, is the difference between specialization and generalization. Step through my door, friends, and think of how you'd entangle everything you've ever heard your neighbor work on together with everything you've ever worked on.

Even the group down the hall? The ones whose seminars you've learned to ignore because they're working on what you think is the most boring thing in the universe?

My friends, that group might someday be your salvation, and you'll find yourself diving into their work with enthusiasm. If you can stay awake long enough.

What caught me up, this last time, and brought the visitors that I see hanging around the back of the room, was when I started looking for a certain set of solutions to Einstein's field equations. You know the type, the odd little ducks, the ones that your physics professors all admitted, when pressed, exist, but none of them willing to admit might be physically realizable. Like the Godel solution, which admits time travel, or faster-than-light travel if that fits your mental picture more comfortably.

I'm not here to run down the rabbit hole. My interest wasn't, isn't, whether these solution types are physically realizable, or hint that there just might be means to construct them. Energy-dense systems suggest many things; if you come to this field, you'll find yourself digging out the pencil and paper, running to the chalkboard, examining your wildest dreams.

Pinch points and co-rotating fields. Projective solutions and what happens when the center of thrust and the Boson densities... See. I can see your imaginations firing up, now. It happens when you realize...

There's the work you're doing. The real thing, in materials available and hours of labor and gigawatts of power, in and out.

And then there are the possibilities inherent to the game. The always present 'What if?' And, the 'Could we just try it?' Keep those solutions, the ones that Einstein and others say "Can be ruled out due to..." a thousand different aesthetic choices. Keep them in mind, daydreams. Go to the drawing board with them, when everyone else has stepped out of the room for a trip to the little researcher's room. Ask yourself "How would I build in a closed time-like loop, here?"

Maybe a change of material? Trace amounts of a different metal, or non-metal, something with a larger cross-section, or smaller. Topological fields, perhaps, that shape the boundary locally, or globally, differently than the other way around.

Can you punch a hole through space in your backyard? I've not yet done it. Maybe you will, if you all remember to play a little. When nobody's looking.

Which, as you've guessed from my adventures, is getting harder to do.

Yuri Grenn Faldo is a dear friend, we worked across the hall from each other many, many years ago. Yuri has a passion for integral equations that has survived through the generations of computers, of wandering grant targets, of the "I don't want to learn that" and "That's a waste of time in the new era" brigades. Yuri gives me hope; I note down my little bits of work, the solutions I come up with when I'm playing with the dog or digging up my orchids.

Yuri throws his to the world, and dares the world to ignore them. I went to him with an idea of the Godel solutions. Not, again, for the hope of building a warp drive.

No, I'm of course quite orthodox in my thinking when it comes to relativity. Absolutely, he said with his hand over his smile, there will be no violations of Professor Einstein's iron clad rules in this lab. Cough, cough. No, I was interested in Godel's geometry, because I had this idea that the closed, time-like loops could be approximated in certain material and energy conditions, as a local particle flux.

I was asking questions on neutrons and needed an itch scratched, that's all.

Yuri it was that made the connection. "Where are you collecting your neutrons then, Rick?", he asked me. "You have some need for them, I presume?" he suggested.

I might, I avowed. Perhaps, I hinted. But, "Yuri," I wanted to know, "Does it work? Have I made a mistake somewhere in the algebra?"

Would my little theorem in partial differential equations be realizable in a particle density world? Rather than a world where you're using naught but chalk to draw pretty pictures? Or have I been chasing moonbeams?

If you pay attention to Arxiv, you may have stumbled across Yuri's paper on the subject. He's gone far farther, formalizing my noodling, than I would have ever guessed.

Oh, look at the time. And the ladies and gentleman at the back of the hall who await the end of my talk. I apologize, Professor Molina, I'm afraid that I won't be going to lunch with you after all. Enjoy the linguine for me, won't you?

Before I leave in their company, let me just remind you. Most of you will likely remain academics. Enjoy this, the search for truth and beauty. And give some thought to the possibility that someone like me might just someday need to build a device that realizes your imagination's most fevered dreams.

And for those of you who walk my path, two things. First, don't forget to keep a bag of tricks for yourself, those little questions you've been wondering at since your first physics courses. Worst case, they're things to play with while you're waiting out a construction schedule.

And second, of course, is to give a little thought to who might be watching over your shoulder.

Ok, ok, I'm done, just please let me...

[Audio ends here. Contrary to the media reports, Dr. Belkin is being held in voluntary confinement for reasons of his health. This recording and all transcripts generated from it are considered CONFIDENTIAL, property of the U.S. Government, and subject to all restrictions associated with this classification.]