Ball Lightning

The colonel who had led us in motioned for us to follow him, and we went from the conference room to the door of an adjacent room. It was ajar, and a large number of temporary cables were running through it. The colonel gestured for us to remain in place.

“There’s little time, so I’ll give you only a brief rundown of the situation. At nine o’clock this morning, eight armed terrorists took over the power plant’s nuclear reactor. They entered by hijacking a bus taking elementary school students on a plant tour, and in the course of occupying the reactor, they killed six plant security guards. Now they have thirty-five hostages: twenty-seven students and teachers from the bus, and eight plant engineers and operating personnel.”

“Where are they from?” Lin Yun asked.

“The terrorists? The Garden of Eden.”

I knew about that international terrorist organization. Even an utterly benign idea could be dangerous if taken to an extreme, and the Garden of Eden was a classic example. It had originated as a group of technological escapists who had established an experimental micro-society on an island in the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to break free from modern technology and return to nature. Like many similar organizations throughout the world, it was closed off in the beginning, a community with no aggressive tendencies at all. But as time passed in seclusion, the mentality of these isolationists turned radical, and their flight from technology turned into a hatred of it, their removal from science into an opposition to it. Some extreme diehards left the island they called the Garden of Eden and, with a mission to obliterate all of the world’s modern technology and bring it back to nature, began engaging in terrorist activities. Unlike other stripes of terrorists, the Garden of Eden attacked targets that were bewildering to the public: they blew up the European Synchrotron, burned down the two largest genetics labs in North America, destroyed a large neutrino detection tank deep within a mine in Canada, and even assassinated three Nobel Physics laureates. The group found repeated success at research facilities where scientists were minimally defended, but this was its first attack on a nuclear reactor.

“What measures have you taken?” Lin Yun asked.

“None. We’ve set up an observational perimeter at a distance, but we haven’t dared approach. They’ve put explosives on the reactor and can blow them up at any time.”

“As far as I’m aware, these large nuclear reactors have a very thick and sturdy shell. Several meters of reinforced cement. How much explosive material could they have brought in?”

“Not much. They only took in a small vial of red pills.”

The colonel’s words sent a chill through Lin Yun and me. Garden of Eden may have hated technology, but they would use any means necessary to achieve their goals. It was, in fact, the world’s most technologically sophisticated terrorist organization, and a significant number of its members were top-flight scientists. The red pills were their own creation, enriched uranium, clad in some nanomaterial. Under sufficient impact force, fission detonation was possible without the need to achieve supercritical mass by other means of compression. Their typical method was to weld the muzzle of a large-bore gun shut, place several red pills inside it, and chamber a flattened-down bullet. When the gun was fired, the bullet would strike the red pills, triggering a nuclear explosion. When the Garden of Eden used this gadget to successfully break the world’s largest synchrotron, which was several kilometers underground, into three segments, it threw the world into terror overnight.

Before the colonel led us into the room, he gave us a warning: “Be careful what you say in there. We have set up bidirectional communication.”

After entering, we saw several military and police officers staring at a large screen displaying a surprising scene. For a moment I thought there must be some mistake, for we were watching a teacher leading a class for a group of students. Behind her was a wide control panel with lots of display screens and flashing instruments, probably one of the reactor’s control rooms. It was the teacher who caught my attention. She was in her thirties, plainly dressed, with a gaunt face that made the delicate glasses dangling from a gold chain around her neck look particularly large. A keen intelligence showed in her eyes. Her voice was soft and gentle, and it soothed some of my fear and anxiety to listen to it. My heart immediately filled with respect for the teacher, who had taken her students to visit a nuclear plant and maintained composure in the face of danger, and now was soothing them with a laudable sense of duty.