Echoes of the Mind's Eye: 13 Speculative Fiction Short Stories

It so happens that terrorists pay attention to science, despite the mad rantings of so many of them against it. Science, after all, brought us TNT, the A-bomb, the H-bomb, weaponized anthrax, and lots of other cool goodies that are wonderful additions to the terrorists’ toolkits. As it happens, one particularly well-funded, well connected group in the Middle East thinks it a grand idea to blow Israel off the face of the earth before that even better funded, and better connected state has the chance to do the same to them or to their proxy states. They have acquired a gaggle of disaffected, under-employed Russian physicists and funded them generously to produce “outside-the-box” ideas for a doomsday device on the cheap. They did not have 17-mile supercolliders to play with, and Jihadist physicists are a rare breed. But not to worry, they had something better: money, lots of it, and the ability to entice scientists who view themselves above pedantic, bourgeois notions of ethics and for whom science is the only religion.

Undaunted by any notions of right and wrong and guided by the simple principle that “if it can be done, it must be done,” these brilliant men and women soon developed a working experiment that presented an elegant solution that their benefactors immediately approved.

Their plan was exquisitely simple and required very little by way of resources beyond two suitcase nukes that can easily be obtained either from Russia (cheap, old-world loose nukes listed simply as “missing” from the former Soviet inventory), or spanking new, state-of-the-art but untried ones from the secret Pakistani stash. They opted for the Russian suitcase nukes, in part because they did not want a trusted ally compromised in the event that their experiment did not attain the desired ends.

The two suitcase nukes have been mounted at precise distances from one another in the cargo hold of a modified old Boeing 747 passenger plane from a terrorist-friendly country, and are equipped with the best military-grade timers available, obtained from a close U.S. ally in the region. The simultaneous detonation of these nuclear devices will force the collision of countless billions of subatomic particles accelerated at nearly light speed through the old-fashioned process of nuclear fission to strike one another, thereby creating large numbers of miniature black holes like an endless row of poor-man’s supercolliders working in unison. Granted, the effect will be somewhat messy and difficult to quantify, but these are matters of little consequence to scientists interested in practical results rather than peer-reviewed publications or Nobel prizes in physics.