Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 9===

Heivia had said the World’s End remained in one piece and had not broken apart after the hit from the giant bow that used the elevator as its string. It was still going to fall to the surface and wreak havoc on the planet.

And yet…

And yet…

“No.”

Quenser grimaced and rejected that idea.

He continued with a smile on his sweaty face.

“I wasn’t trying to use it as a bow.”

Louisiana Honeysuckle had said the carbon nanotube wires, which remained safe despite constant exposure to the thermosphere, could snap from the elevator car’s friction once the safety devices had been removed. Even the ordinary phenomena seen in everyday life could cause massive damage if the quantities were high enough.

And as Quenser had just proven, the elevator wire could be used like a bow or slingshot. Push on it and it did not continue that way; it had a restoring force that brought it back to its original position.

In other words…

“It’s a heating element,” whispered Quenser. “The carbon nanotubes don’t conduct electricity as well as metal, which means they have resistance. So what if we sent enough electricity down that wire while gathering it on a single point? That would be more powerful than a nuclear weapon.”

The others were left speechless.

Things at this scale had that effect on people. Ordinary phenomena could achieve unbelievable results. Just like black holes were nothing more than ordinary gravity, yet they swallowed up even light and distorted both time and space.

“But how are you going to prepare and gather that much electricity?” Louisiana smiled. “Your work with the military must have told you how strong the fiber structure of that wire is. You just proved for us all that your plastic explosives are not enough to damage it.”

“This had to be the biggest obstacle you faced when building Mother Lady, so you should know better than any of us just how few places you can construct a space elevator.” Quenser spoke a direct challenge to the genius scientist smiling with the cracked desert of the Turkana District behind her. “1. It must be near the equator. 2. Building a ground base provides greater stability than trying to build it out at sea. Dealing with the shaking of the wires can be handled from the space station. 3. It must be somewhere without any typhoons or hurricanes despite the unstable weather so common on the equator. Because special though their structure might be, carbon nanotubes are still made of carbon and are thus weak to thunderclouds…in other words, to powerful static electricity.”

Electricity.

But he did not need to rely on a strange rain dance to summon some thunderclouds.

Electricity was created by the contact potential difference when two different types of matter came into contact and separated. One could be the wire and the other could be iron sand or even water. And shaking the wire more than it was ever designed for would increase the number of contacts.

“In other words,” said Quenser Barbotage with the voice of someone who desired an unchanged tomorrow and refused to let that cruel hammer strike the surface. “It’s the same as an electric eel. The basic idea might be a small thing, but that long wire increases the scale considerably!!”

All sound vanished.

The light was also blown away.

The distortion gathered at a point of slight damage at the 15km mark along the 100,000km wire and the carbon nanotube belt flashed. Heivia’s bullets and Louisiana’s fingers had shaken the wire up in space, but this was different. By calculating things out down here, they could create more energy than it could handle.

The instant the carbon nanotube wire snapped, a strange light appeared from the damage to the wire. But instead of electricity, that was the heat produced within the wire. So the light lasted more than an instant. The pure white shine did not vanish and instead grew endlessly as it tore through the wire capable of surviving in the thermosphere.

They should have been sufficiently far away, but Quenser nearly fell from the top of the spear. In fact, he could not remain on his feet and was crushed to the floor.

“Gahhh, ah!?”

He heard a disconcerting straining sound from within his body, but he still moved his head to check on the blue sky.

He saw a fireball there.

But it was not alone. An artificial downpour trailed by orange light fell from above. It was a terrifying image, but the light was not the pure white of welding he had seen before. The Object had clearly broken apart, lost its falling speed, and cooled.

“A meteor shower, huh?” said Louisiana as she looked up into the oddly clear sky.

They did not all hit at once. Tens of thousands of pieces continually poured down to the surface.

“Do you read many online news articles? They say 100,000 meteors poured down on the Eastern European city of Pultusk in 1868 and on the Eastern European city of Mocs in 1882. And 14,000 meteors fell on North America’s Arizona in 1912. Yet humanity was not destroyed. That is because those were not individual meteors that broke through the thermosphere; they were the many fragments of a single meteor that broke up in the atmosphere. And that distributed the force.”

There was a precedent.

If the great mass broke up in midair, it would not bring about an ice age. Humanity could live on for now. It also helped that this was the middle of the desert and not a major city center.

The snapped wire fluttered in the air like a ribbon.

They had won.

Or so Quenser thought until a singsong voice reached his ear. A certain girl leaned against the railing and slowly removed the gasmask covering her face.

The genius was thinly smiling with the orange rain falling behind her.

“That settles it then. Human goodwill has snuffed out this world’s final hope.”

“…?”

''What is she talking about?'' wondered Quenser while still down on the floor.

She did not have some secret card left up her sleeve. She was not still hiding something.

“You mean…you weren’t trying to create a uniform global environment?”

“When did I ever say I was?”

The enigmatic genius girl tossed her mask aside.

Having accepted this result, she looked somehow sad as she continued her song.

“Objects weigh 200,000 tons. And there isn’t just the one. This world is crawling with them. Those extraordinary monsters are performing MMA-style footwork and firing low-stability plasma cannons, railguns, and other weapons capable of punching through other nuke-resistant Objects. All while forcibly suppressing all of the direct recoil, secondary heat, and shockwaves.”

He did not understand what she meant at first.

Or was a part of him refusing to understand it?

Louisiana gave him a pitying look while he lay on the ground at her feet.

“Did you really think that would have no effect on the planet’s ground and crust? When even those obsolete nuclear tests would cause artificial earthquakes? The planet’s axis has long since begun to shift. At this rate, humanity will be destroyed by a series of cataclysmic events. Or the climate itself will change to the point that we can no longer produce enough food. This will bring about the age of winter you so feared.”

She had insisted she was saving the world.

She had said she would protect the people of the Turkana District as they worked to preserve their simple way of life and she had said the rest of humanity was just a bonus prize.

Quenser finally saw what it was that genius scientist had seen.

“So I intended to hold a concert with that 100,000km string instrument to retune the planet’s axis.”

She sang.

The song of doom continued without end.

“And once that failed, I tried to drop the Object along a rough calculation I hoped would slam the planet back onto its proper axis. …Of course, using the Object’s fall was an adlib meant to recover from an unexpected defeat, so it only had about a 20% chance of working. Ha ha. My actual plan had failed from the moment I could no longer play that instrument.”

“Wait…” Quenser clenched his teeth and forced out the words. “You said a giant meteor could not actually wipe out the dinosaurs, didn’t you? Did you think you could protect that village even as you dropped the Object on the Turkana District? Did you use that spiraling path around the elevator so you could have the elevator itself act as a shield for the village???”

She smiled.

But this smile was different. It was like she had been freed from a long, long period of isolation only to realize it was too late.

“But even that possibility is gone now.”

The Mother Lady space elevator’s wire had snapped. The others running parallel to it would not have escaped unharmed, so it was uncertain if they could survive her concert. And her last ditch effort using her own Object had also literally fallen apart. Even if she did try to repair the elevator that had fallen under the Legitimacy Kingdom’s control, would the hardheaded officials really comprehend the threat? And even if she could repair it as quickly as possible, would the earth survive long enough?

“My struggles end here. The world’s final chance at salvation has been fully snuffed out. But it means a lot that I managed to share the threat with you. Because you carry a different sort of talent from my own.”

“…”

“You may be able to destroy this world’s fundamental flaw.”

She must have carefully calculated it all out.

And that must have led her to the conclusion that she had to sacrifice her own Federation of Elevator Industries for her goal or she would run out of time.

Yet it had ended in failure.

The genius scientist spread her arms as if to receive the blessing of the ruinous rain pouring down from the sky.

“Hello, god of destruction. Show me how you will smash this godforsaken problem to smithereens.”

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