Fiction (Fantasy) - Office of Realism - Part 2

"Previously in the 'Office of Realism'"

[exciting montage of clips from part 1]

What wonders* lay in store for us in this next instalment?



*the author accepts no responsibilty for lack of wonders in the next instalment.

"There's not much here." I remarked, looking at a collection of impressively old wooden filing cabinets, towering but almost empty bookshelves, and solid oak desks. The tile floor rang under my feet as I stepped forward, and I almost expected a cloud of dust to rise up around me. It didn't, but despite that the room felt old and unused.

"We keep most of our stores elsewhere these days." Jason explained, walking forwards and peering around a cabinet to a desk that hid behind it. Straightening and turning to look round the rest of the room, he added, "It makes for a wonderfully uncluttered office. William?" He raised his voice as he called out. "Can we have the door to the gallery please?"

Silence answered his question, a silence that I felt was somehow accusatory. Another door on the wall to the left of where we had come in popped open, and I saw Jason roll his eyes.

"Thank you William." He gestured to me and led me through the second door.

The new room looked like a gallery. The decor was much the same as the office, but instead of furniture, pictures hung on the walls and pedestals supported unlikely objects.

"You like modern art?" I asked, inspecting a glass case which held a serving spoon. A plaque on the pedestal read: Camdenton, MO. 1989. Contained Baryogenesis.

"The gallery displays some of the problems the Office of Realism has had to deal with over the years. That spoon, for example, was part of an event in 1989 which would have killed everyone in a nine state area around Missouri."

"That spoon?"

"The spoon itself is harmless, but it was part of a salad serving set, and the pair for it is in secure storage in our warehouse."

"Right."

"Still, that's jumping in to the middle of the story. I'll just give you a brief overview here, and then I'll take you out on site where, hopefully, it'll begin to make more sense."

"It would be hard for it to make less sense."

"Have you heard of the earthquake of 1755?"

"No."

"Well, it's one of the most deadliest earthquakes in history. It hit Lisbon on All Saints Day, and sparked off fires, tsunamis, all the chaos associated with large quakes. The earthquake wouldn't have been important, except that the tremors damaged more than just people and buildings. Have you ever heard the term 'Gaia'?"

"Something to do with the spirit of the earth or something, isn't it?"

"It's a theory that the earth is a single organism, dynamic and self-regulatory."

"It's considered quite hippy-ish, isn't it? I always assumed it was a load of bunk."

"Oh, it is." Jason nodded in agreement. "But it's a good place for us to start. Think of Gaia as the spirit of the earth, as you said, but instead of it being a 'spirit' - something ethereal and unobservable - think of it as a store of energy."

"Okay."

"Now, this next bit gets quite heavy, so if you don't follow it first time, don't worry. That energy within the earth isn't used for anything we can easily visualise. The easiest way to describe it would be to say that it steadies the universe. Everything has a certain amount of this energy, and without it the world would be much more unstable. Life would probably never have evolved, the orbits of the planets would be more erratic - it's possible the planets would never even have formed without it. But since it's there, things work like they should, and we can live normally. The man who discovered it named it Hoeffer energy, but the name Normal energy was invented about ninety years ago, and it seems to have stuck."

"What does this have to do with the earthquake in Lisbon?" I asked, frowning as I tried to understand what I was being told.

"The 1755 earthquake damaged something, and it affected the supply of Normal energy to the planet. It's like an electrical storm - a sudden over- or under-abundance of energy supplied to a point in space can cause unusual and unexplainable things to happen. And like an electrical storm, we can't predict where the lightning will strike. We don't even know if the energy source is still damaged, or if the initial damage healed up almost instantly."

"Surely if it had healed up, you wouldn't get any more... lightning strikes." I asked, adopting the simile in lieu of any other name.

"Maybe. But we think the strikes aren't constrained by time. All the events we deal with could have originated in the split second the source was damaged, having spread out through time before grounding themselves and causing problems for us."

"Time travelling lightning?"

"Or maybe not." Jason shrugged. "I think the strikes, or the transmissions as we call them, can ground themselves in the past or the future, but not that far into the past or future. Otherwise there'd be billions of years of history through which we should be able to identify the effects of the transmissions. But I'm getting into too much detail." He grinned apologetically. "For now, all you need to know is that these transmissions cause problem hotspots all over the world, and the Office of Realism deals with them."

I nodded, although I wasn't sure I understood, or believed, a word he had just said.

"Am I dreaming?"

"No."

"Am I crazy?"

"I don't think so."

"Are you crazy?"

"That depends on who you ask." Jason sighed. "I realise it's unbelievable. That's why this Office exists, so that people don't need to worry about it. But we need staff, and Personnel tell us you're a good candidate."

"And how do they know?"

"I'm not sure. I never got it straight myself, when I was hired."

"How long have you worked here?"

"Twelve years. I was a bit younger than you when my boss brought me here and told me what I'm telling you. He showed me that spoon," Jason pointed back to the spoon I had admired earlier. "And told me he had been responsible for detecting the baryogenesis in time and getting a team out there to contain it."

"What does baryogenesis mean?"

"Basically, parts of the atoms that make up the salad fork that went with the spoon had begun to turn from matter into antimatter. It was contained baryogenesis because the of the way the reaction happened. Normally, I'm sure you're aware, if matter and antimatter are combined, there is an explosion - this reaction produced a sort of jacket around the antimatter as it formed, isolating it from the matter in the rest of the fork. It was only a temporary protection, so we had to act quickly to get it in containment."

"I didn't think that was possible." I replied, looking at the spoon in a whole new light.

"Before the 1755 earthquake, it wouldn't have been."

"How did you contain it?"

"It's in a heavy duty container being exposed to a specific type of radiation which stops the protective jacket from forming around the antimatter. That way, when a particle of antimatter is produced, it immediately reacts with a particle of matter, and produces a small explosion, which is much more containable than a large explosion. In fact, I think the research and design department are using the energy emitted to heat their water."

I shook my head.

"I can't decide if all this is believable or completely absurd."

"It's all completely absurd." Jason replied seriously. "But it's still real, and we have to deal with it."

"So where do you come in to all this?"

"The Office of Realism basically polices the transmission events and removes them from people's memories. My department ensures that there are no loose threads for a determined mind to unravel. That picture on the wall behind you is a good example."

I turned, and saw an aerial photo of a vast desert scene, punctuated only by a large, circular crater.

"Is that an impact crater?"

"It's the Hickman crater in Australia."

"I've heard of that." I said, surprising myself. "That's the one that was discovered a couple of years ago by a guy looking at satellite photos online."

"That's the one. Discovered in 2007, thought to be between ten and one hundred thousand years old."

"So what happened?"

"In 2006, a transmission caused the gravity in a very localised area to increase dramatically."

"Really?"

"We had enough prior warning to set up protection for the plant and animal life in the area, and once the event had passed we were able to replace them and leave no one the wiser."

"So you fixed gravity?"

"It fixed itself. We just had to worry about the continuity."

"So what was the problem?"

"The crater didn't exist before the event."

I blinked.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, wondering if I'd heard him wrong.

"It didn't exist. Before April 2006 the land there was perfectly flat. The gravitational forces were strong enough to compress the bedrock to form the crater. All we had to do was sort out the edges a bit, make it look more presentable as an impact crater, and fix the records."

"Fix the records?"

"There had been a landscape survey a number of years before, so the records there had to be altered. We doctored all satellite images of the area, and kept an eye on Arthur Hickman and other researchers in case they stumbled on anything we might have missed."

"That's incredible."

"It was a pretty simple job, actually." Jason said. Wistfully, he added, "I wish all of them could be like that. Come on, I've kept you inside long enough. Let's go see what the field team is up to."