CHAPTER 137: Security

It was April Fools Day of the year 2002. This day was singularly inappropriate for Professor Evans-Verres plan. Nevertheless, this was the day it was first made ready. The plan was one part brillaint and three parts insane. He was going to hand the powers of the world a weapon so strong it would break society to keep Voldermort at bay, in the hope it would never be used.

The device was not simple. Rather this was, as we should term it, towards a third infinity. Not towards the infinitely large of cosmology, nor towards the infinitely small of the particles being discovered in the colliders, but the infinite complexity of life. Let us be fair, none of these are true infinities, but the scales start looking like each other after awhile.

He had taken the measles virus and preturbed it so that the existing vaccinations would not cover it, then prepared a new protean sequence that would inject a copy of its genetic material into the cell nucleus yet not the host DNA. This was tricky business as he need it to work but not kill the host cell. He had done this line first in the hope that someone else would do some of the other hard parts first so he could stand on the shoulder of a giant, and he was correct. For not one month ago, somebody had published the piece he lacked. He strung together a new set of eukaryotic activators and prepared a splice uing the newly published CRISPR/Cas9 technique. This was truly brilliant. The sequence contained within itself another copy of CRISPR/Cas9 and anybody who happened to inherit one copy would pass it to all of that person's descendents. This would become known as gene drive, but was just not heard of in those days. The gene drive payload was the Atlantean marker he had discovered so many years ago.

He had just finished packing the vials. One vial would be sent to each power with a letter written in Latin. This was no accident, as the Latin would mask the author and he had no intention of these being traced; and he hoped the mark of a letter in Latin would still be understood as of one scientist to another even though it was no longer customarily used as such. The letter read something along these lines "I give to you a weapon. On the day that you see darkness and power spreading across the globe against you, this is the last resort. Use it on your own people that they may make it through the night. I fear this night shall be longer and darker than any that has yet befallen man. Yet here is wisdom, for this is powerful medicine and it will of itself break your society yet not lead it to utter ruin. Yet pray that this night never come to pass."

Each vial was packed in dry ice and teaming with his modified measles. If any power looked and saw that it was measles yet not measles as they knew it, and sequenced it they might guess. The principles of engineering would be easy to read, and if they manufactured the Atlantean proteans who knows what would happen. Even he hadn't dared try that.

"Honey, it is done. The packages will be picked up in tomorrow's mail. But there is a little bit left." He handed her a stopped eyedropper. "Now see that I have listened to you and I truly love you. This is dangerous, but it's what you wanted. There is no centaur. There is only your heart. This is as the potion your sister gave you so very long ago, and I am sorry I did not believe you sooner.

"Look into your heart and decide which world you want to belong to, for touch one particle from that potion and there is no going back. So great is my love for you that I give you a treacherous gift. I cannot choose for you. Love must be a choice."

Her face screwed up. "You speak like we're going to part. After all this I have been through."

"No Honey we will not part. Whatever you choose, I will follow. My work for the fate of the world is done. Now I am free to love you as you deserve to be loved."

"Caaaaw!"

Alastor Moody understood the dream of man. For he saw in the end the hope of overcoming Voldermort was not in beating him but in the end wrapped up in the dream of man. Reaching outward, spreading across the galaxies, never again to be tied down to one vulnerable planet.

Lord Voldermort was down again, and they had plenty of time. There was nothing to prepare, for who knew what form he would take and by what means he would strike and how long he would study them from the shadows. There was only the training, always the training. New aurors had to be made ready all the time.

But for the moment, Alastor Moody was tending to the dream of man.

He had in his hands a Request for Proposal for some high-grade capacitors. His newfound education had just barely been enough to understand the proposal before him. These were normal-looking supercapacitors except for a couple of numbers including being vacuum-rated (which he now knew wasn't that hard to do) and an unusual breakdown voltage. But that breakdown voltage: an exponent of 17 in an electrical apparatus is not normal, and he recognized the significance immediately. There was only one place in all the world he could take this RFP if Jet Propulsion Labratory would have any chance of getting it filled.

So he prepared a cover letter and took up the RFP and went to Gringotts, Statute of Secrecy be darned. Goblins could be made to understand, and for the right incentive could overlook the technicalities of Wizard Law. The richness of JPL contracts was known to him, and, he hoped, to Griphook. Thus he found himself in a little room sitting across from the head goblin with the guards and their ornate earpieces and eyepieces providing the security he actually needed.

"We understand that Wizard Law and Goblin Law aren't quite the same thing, and we've had our differences about that. And muggle law is something else entirely, yet here it is all on paper in more words than we care for in a hundred contracts. It is important to understand when JPL writes purchase, they really mean it. There is no recovery of their purchases again. These things will be expended, and when the service life of the deep space probe these things will be part of is reached, it will be crashed into Jupiter and so ended.

"It wouldn't be fair for me to tell you what other prices are for other components, nor quite fair to tell you the scale of this thing, but I can tell you that if you asked the weight of fifty thousand galleons in lump gold for these small things, it would be approved without them even considering if the price is reasonable. On the other hand, I don't know if you actually can make these things. Submitting a proposal that you can't deliver is a bad idea. Yet they do want these things, and anybody in this market should know, deliver well and there's more to come."

And of course Griphook's greed got the best of him, despite having to agree to using Alastor Moody as an intermediary. Not that he charged much.

NASA was indeed moving slow. The first test of the Alcubarre drive would be on board the Juno space probe. They lacked the power generation required to use it anywhere near its full potential, but they had figured something out. The warp drive and the Oberth effect had a strange interplay and they could get more acceleration out of their Hydrazine engines by using one at the same time. At low power level, they hoped they could get ten percent more efficiency at their gravitational slingshots. But in this mission they planned for failure. The Juno space probe had enough fuel onboard to carry out its primary mission anyway, thus on arrival at Jupiter they hoped to stay on science station a lot longer. But if it worked reliably the next deep space probe and the next would use them.

NASA was playing the long game. Years down the line, they hoped to pull off what had never been done and send a deep space probe to another star. This would require use of the Alcubarre drive and a nuclear reactor to power it. Getting approval to launch a nuclear reactor was hard in this era. They would use the dream of man to sell it. This would be no fraud, for this was always the plan. Mankind would reach for the stars if given even a shadow of a chance of doing so.

High above the earth, beyond the moon's orbit, there was a satellite that man did not place there. It was waiting for a signal it saw thrice before. The sign that man was ready to set sail for the stars and find he was not alone. But would the watchers be ready?