How are ya'll doing? Hopefully everyone is safe during this quarantine, and everyday means that we are one day closer to the end of this pandemic. Have faith!
Anyway let's get on with the story:
Chapter 4:
"Hiccup?"
Emptiness. His mind was blank and the only thing he could see was an abyss of darkness.
"Hiccup, wake up."
After a few seconds of mental turmoil, Hiccup felt two hands gently shaking his shoulder. How much he wished it would be Astrid's! During the three weeks of Astrid living with him, he woke up almost every day with her soft voice whispering beside his ears and her lips pecking his forehead. Her kiss acted even better than his alarm clock.
But those hands were too big, Hiccup only knew one person who would have the same effect on waking him up beside Astrid.
"What time is it Fishlegs?" Hiccup yawned and stretched against the lab table that he fell asleep on. His lab computer was still on, and graphs comparing different kinds of radios remained on the screen. The curtains weren't drawn, but there were no natural lights, so the windows that were large enough to count as glass walls looked like someone painted that part of the wall in black.
"Almost ten, pm," Fishlegs replied as he walked away from Hiccup and resumed cleaning the wires and screwdrivers on the counter. The familiar clanging sound of metal pieces bumping each other brought Hiccup's senses back to reality. "You slept for about six hours, and I guess you probably won't leave that table if I didn't wake you. Gobber came and helped me with some part, but his hands are too fat to do delicate things like rewiring a computer circuit."
"As if you don't have hands the size of other's heads," Hiccup replied half-heartedly as he rubbed the elbow that he rested his head on.
When he hopped off the chair, his vision landed on his phone beside his elbow. The screen was still turned on, and a picture of Astrid's face was smiling at him. He did remember scrolling through his photo album - which was filled with pictures of Astrid - before he fell asleep.
"Does Newton's third law only work with physical forces?" Hiccup blurted as an idea flashed across his mind.
"Of course! For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It only works with motion," Fishlegs chuckled as he placed the different sized screwdrivers in their designated places in a toolbox. "What? You think it works in psychology? If you love one person and the love motion will hit her and bounce back to you?"
"No," Hiccup scratched his head. "What if it works with temperature?"
"Like what? You think you heat something and the heat will just… react on to you?" Fishlegs laughed, and then he paused when he realized what Hiccup might be talking about. "Look, Hiccup, even if Newton's third law works with temperature, you can't bring Astrid back in that way."
"Why not?"
"Ok, let's just assume that Newton's third law works with temperature and assume that temperature has mass and force, and I said assume. Bose-Einstein Condensate is about one Kelvin, or less, and when it hit Astrid and froze her, why did it not cause a reaction and freeze you?" Fishlegs looked at Hiccup's eyes as he questioned.
"Because the temperature was trapped in her body, and it reacted in her body instead of outside," Hiccup explained urgently. "If I hit her with room temperature then it might thaw her."
"Then her molecular structure will collapse! Even if what you said made sense, molecular speed in Bose-Einstein Condensate is too slow to make it stable, and the slightest touch will turn the entire thing into ash. You should know that."
"I can slow down the molecules first, and use the Laser to increase how much energy the molecules produce."
"But it doesn't change the fact that you are hitting a non-modified object with a temperature of less than two Kelvin." Fishlegs's voice was somewhere between explaining and pleading. "You should be lucky that at least she has a structured body instead of ash."
"Don't talk about her as if she is just someone's lab mouse," Hiccup hissed, and Fishlegs could see a fire burning behind his emerald eyes.
"I'm sorry," Fishlegs said after half a minute of silence. "But you can't change anything. Modern technology doesn't allow it. Maybe this will come true in the future, but you are not living in the future. You are living in the present."
"I can't give up on her, Fishlegs." Hiccup's voice turned into a gentle sob. The fire behind his eyes extinguished and was replaced by ice. His once bright pupils looked as if an invisible fog swallowed them. He turned toward the window, and through the window, he could see the dark figure of the Appalachian Mountains stretching endlessly far out into the unknown, like the skeleton of a dead giant sleeping under the night sky. "I promised her we would go and start a new life somewhere else after I finished Project Bifrost. Maybe by a beach, so we could do whatever we did when we were kids."
"Then hold on to that promise. Go somewhere after you had enough of engineering, find a good place, and settle down. Astrid would be happy if she sees you not forget your promise. But you can't bring a dead person back to life. You are not Skuld, you don't decide other's fate."
"She is not dead!" Hiccup screamed.
"Modern technology doesn't allow body freezing to work like those in movies. You are an engineer and you know that! We don't have the technology to preserve the human brain against that extreme temperature. Minus two hundred and seventy-three degrees Celsius! Human brain tissues will be dead in less than a second, and even if the brain somehow mystically survives, it will still malfunction and eventually die after because the blood is frozen, and without blood, a brain dies as well," Fishlegs still talked in a considerably calm way back to his old friend. "Brain death means death, Hiccup."
Hiccup didn't reply. He felt someone slapped across his face, hard. A single drop of tear formed at the edge of his left eye and rolled down his cheek. It shined under their lab's cold white light like crystal glimmering in the sun's halo. Right now people tended not to talk to him about Astrid, and even when Fishlegs tried to talk some sense into him he just refused to listen.
Hiccup's head lowered. His legs were shaking as if they could support the weight of this body and would collapse at any time.
It broke Fishlegs's heart to see his best friend suffer while he couldn't do anything but tell him the truth. Hiccup dug his fingers into his hair, scraping his scalp with his nails. He sobbed. Tears dropped down from his face and splashed into million pieces as they touched the floor.
Two floors above them, in Sam's office, he and Gobber looked at the security camera footage in silence. Hiccup was sitting soullessly on the ground, leaning against the glass wall of their lab while Fishlegs stood quietly beside him.
Sam and Gobber eavesdropped their two best engineers' entire conversation. That wasn't the only thing the security cameras in Asgard could do. The heartbeat and pulse of subjects in the camera view were also shown in the corner. The cameras also had infrared mode, in case some rooms got accidentally overheated.
"I almost felt sorry for him," Sam said as he shook his head, not removing his vision from the camera footage.
"If Hiccup stops trying to save Astrid then we have to give me a promotion for convincing him," Gobber joked, leaning his heavy body on Sam's Red Oak table.
"Too bad for DARPA that our littlun' don't need blood flow to move," Sam sighed as he opened another screen, showing a graph of a human body with countless red dots circling inside the brain, like bees flying around a beehive. "I almost felt sorry for DARPA as well."
"But that's the part that I don't really understand, and I know I'm not so good with biology..." Gobber pointed at the screen. "Usually biological robots, or whatever you call those things, are powered by bioelectricity, but now the body is frozen there is no bioelectricity to power the robots."
"Frozen doesn't mean the molecules stop. They just move slower and create less energy. I just need them to produce more energy when they move slower. Does that ring a bell?"
"The Laser!" Gobber yelped. "That's why you told me to let Hiccup use the Laser! It charges the molecules and lets them produce more energy, and when it hits her the charged molecules charge Astrid as well!"
"Exactly," Sam replied with an evil smile.
"But how do you know she would be the target? We are not advanced enough to actually read her mind. We are just predicting."
"A traitor always fails to hide. Her friends were so used to her actions that even when she does something weird they would categorize it as normal, but an outsider can see what's going on because," Sam paused and pointed at his head. "His thoughts and perspective aren't numbed."
"I do have to admit you don't use engineering to beat engineers, Master Timothy," Gobber commented, mimicking the tone of a servant from a Medieval castle.
"Don't call me that. This is the twenty-first century." Sam waved as he focused his attention back to the screen and typed in a few lines of code into the command box on the right side of the screen. "Let's try and connect them with her optic nerves and see what's around her."
"Don't make too much mess. DARPA is not stupid. You added pseudocode to make them believe the codes are scrambled, but they have the government on their side," Gobber reminded him as he walked toward the door.
"The government is playing word games with people who are actually doing the work instead of giving them the necessary budget to fight national enemies." Sam shrugged. "Your cursing problem seems to be solved. Haven't heard a 'fuck' in three days. Is the sun rising from the west?"
"What do you mean the sun rising from the fucking west?" Gobber cried before he exited the office in a rush, and almost bumped into the person outside.
"Oh I'm so sorry, Helga," Gobber apologized after seeing the woman in front of him.
"Seems like you still haven't solved your cursing problem. I wonder how exactly you won Sam's favor and became the Main Engineer," Helga said, crossing her arms before her chest.
"Very funny," Gobber deadpanned, rubbing his while stubbles. "But if my math is correct, then when I was dealing with thermonuclear weapons you weren't even born yet, or you were trying to squeeze through your mother's… birth canal."
"Excellent math skills," Helga said, rolling her eyes. "Get out of my way."
"Fine, fine," Gobber laughed as he moved his huge body away from the door to Sam's office. "You are seeing Sam?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Reporting something to him."
"You could've done it through the radio! We are the most advanced technology company and our employees need to personally send information to her boss?" Gobber paused. "Or you have other intentions."
Helga raised her eyebrow.
"I always wonder why Sam made his office sound-proof," Gobber grinned.
"That's because he needs complete privacy when talking with clients," Helga sighed as she realized where their conversation was going. "And I'm not his mistress, too old for me."
Gobber laughed as he walked away, throwing loud greetings to engineers in the corridor as if he was drunk. Helga pushed open the door of Sam's office while watching Gobber's figure disappearing into his own lab. Her mouth curved up into a weird smile.
"So, what do you have for me?" Sam asked while shutting down his laptop.
"No one is aware of what's going on, not even that Hiccup. Gobber thinks he knows everything but he doesn't," Helga reported, standing a yard before Sam's table.
"It feels weird to not tell Gobber the whole part of my plan. We've been through too much together for either of us to hide things from each other. I guess he knows I'm hiding something." Sam rubbed his forehead in frustration. "But we need him to finish Lighthouse Program, and I don't want other ideas to distract him. Any other news?"
"Still no sign of DARPA's research station. It's either they don't use more electricity than a normal household, or they hid really well."
"It has to be the second one. Labs always use a lot of power. Out electricity fee is tingling to four digits, per week," Sam said, looking at the large Appalachian Mountains outside his window.
"Should we go after the electricity company?"
"No, we wait. They'll show themselves eventually. They have to," Sam concluded confidently.
"Why are you so sure about that?"
"Because I just gave them a hint about who we are and what we want. I'm just not so sure whether they are smart enough to get it." Sam smiled, still looking at the forest that seemed to stretch on to the end of the world. "Cancel the infinite loop for our central computer's firewall and set up a new one that's easy for them to break. They'll go after that, and save their digital fingerprints… or whatever you call those things… just save the evidence that they hacked into a private company's computer illegally."
"What if they do it legally?"
"Legally? They would never get the authentication to do it."
"What do we do after?"
"Make sure our engineers get the job done, and after that, we use Astrid to bring DARPA down."
"Yes, sir," Helga said before she headed toward the door.
"Wait."
Helga stopped.
"There is something else I want you to do," Sam spoke with a slight sense of dishonor in his tone. "This will sound really inhumane and brutal and selfish. Even I feel ashamed to order you to do that, so you can choose to not obey this order."
"It's my job to obey your orders," Helga reminded him.
"Okay then…" Sam turned and faced Helga, looking her in the eyes. "I want you to find all documents, research, essays, anything, about cryonics, and then either destroy those documents or find a way to stop the research."
"Why?" The word jumped out of her mouth without her thinking about it. "If I may ask."
"Hiccup is way smarter than we thought. He will find a way to save that girl. We can't give him the slightest chance to get in our way."
"But I thought you needed that girl to at least be able to move for Lighthouse Program to work," Helga replied." But your plan is brutal."
"People think a person can only do harm when he or she can move on their own, but that girl won't need to move on her own." Sam's teeth gritted and his tone became deep, like the ghosts from the underworld calling for living souls. "We only need her temperature, that's her most important value, and Lighthouse Program will take care of the rest."
Hiccup stayed up all night that day. Even though he knew what Fishlegs said was reasonable, if he was a reasonable engineer he wouldn't become this successful and wouldn't figure out Project Bifrost.
He stayed up all night, going through Muspelheim's central computer, finding anything he could about cryonic and other related technologies. He knew next to nothing about that subject. He wasn't an all-round engineer like Gobber, but after Sam decided to digitize all files in Niflheim and stored them in the central computer so that all engineers of Muspelheim would use, a lot of work that used to be as difficult as going to Mars became something similar to killing an ant.
But none of the files were about thawing a frozen human body. Most of those files were written a decade ago or some even centuries ago. They might contribute to other researches, but the technology these days could only freeze a human, not unfreeze a human.
He sighed and slapped down the screen of his laptop after the horizon became bright under the morning sunlight. No important gains that night.
Hiccup rubbed his sore eyes and leaned back into his couch and stretched. He still remembered during some nights of that three weeks, Astrid would sleep on the couch when he had to stay up all night to finish Project Bifrost so that she could be with him. Each time he fell asleep on the blueprints and graphs, he would be woken up in the morning by a trail of kisses on his neck.
Now those lips were frozen solid and locked in a tank somewhere else in this world. He didn't know where, but after he hacked into the surveillance cameras of Charleston Air Force Base - where he last saw her - she wasn't there.
He didn't even know what to do even if he found out a way to thaw Astrid and keep her alive after. He didn't even know where she was. He thought about hiring a private investigator - the salary of Muspelheim's most precious engineer was pretty high - but he didn't know how to describe the job to him. He couldn't just say 'oh I just need you to find a blond girl who is frozen solid by a super-advanced weaponry and now is stored in a cylinder and was last seen in a military base'. That investigator would think he was crazy.
An idea flashed across Hiccup's mind, like a lightning striking the Earth and releasing tremendous power in a short moment.
Fishlegs said Newton's third law doesn't work with temperature. Hiccup knew that as well. But that was thinking reasonably.
What if the whole action wasn't over yet? What if for "every action there is an equal and opposite reaction", the "action" part wasn't over yet? What if the Bose-Einstein Condensate was still cooling down her body and it wasn't the time for the reaction to take place?
They all knew Bose-Einstein Condensate was weak because of the slow molecular speed, but after the Laser charged it, Hiccup knew the energy BEC could produce was increased, but he had no idea about how much energy the Laser added on. BEC might still be releasing energy in Astrid's body, and the reason why her molecular structure didn't collapse was that reaction couldn't take place because the action wasn't finished yet.
Even the intern for a laboratory would know Hiccup's idea was similar to those in sci-fi movies… no, in fantasy books, but Hiccup forbade his mind to think that way.
Tiredness disappeared in instinct and his forest green eyes lit up with hope. He didn't know whether his hypothesis was true or whether it would help him thaw Astrid even if it was true, but his intelligent mind caught a scent of possibility in that big mess of science.
He couldn't do that on his own. He needed more people to help him and more equipment, but he knew where to find them.
"Legs, I think I found a way," Hiccup said to his phone after Fishlegs picked up the call on the other end.
He ended the call before Fishlegs could reply and threw his phone onto the couch so he wouldn't be distracted by it later.
After pouring himself a cup of coffee, the sound of his fingers danced on the keyboard filled the room again.
To be continued.
I'll see yawl later! Stay healthy!