The Weapon

Professor Westfield was adamant that his techology should only be used for peace, but it wasn't to be.

It seems ridiculous now but, at the time, everyone wanted to know what had happened to Professor Richard Westfield. Back when Europe was peaceful, it seemed an important question.

I studied under Westfield at Cambridge. He used to organise these picnics by the river in Grantchester, where a motley assortment of invitees would debate the scientific issues of the day, and everything else. The people he invited to these picnics were often comically mismatched. I remember once he invited a priest and one of those evangelical atheists that were quite common back then, especially in Cambridge. At one point they got out a Bible and started arguing over passages in Leviticus.

I remember saying to him at one of these events, after the other picnickers had particulary got on my nerves, “Don’t you sometimes think we should be working on something bigger? Something more important?”

He was the kind of mentor you could talk to like that. I knew he wouldn’t take it amiss.

“What could be bigger or more important than energy storage?” he said. “What’s the real limiting factor behind electric cars, electric planes, even humanoid robots? Progress in all those areas is drastically constrained by our ability to store energy. Imagine how much simpler the national grid would be if we had effortless energy storage. Why, simple lack of storage is the main reason wind turbines are such a disaster.”

Westfield wasn’t a fan of wind turbines, no pun intended.

“That’s all well and good,” I replied, “but we’ve just spent two years trying to stop lithium growing dendrites.”

“You know what your problem is, Smithy?” he said, laughing.

“No, do tell me what my problem is, Professor.”

“Your problem is you think in years. The things we’re doing, well, they take decades. If you want to do them right, I mean. It might feel for a year or two as though you’re not doing much, but then you’ll look back at the past ten years and realise you’ve done a lot. When you get to my age, you’ll understand.”

He sipped Pimms from a plastic glass, looking at me over the top of his spectacles with amused eyes. In my memory there’s a piece of sliced cucumber wedged onto the edge of the glass, but that can’t possibly have been real.

What I wouldn’t give to go back to those innocent times, even for an hour. We were isolated from all the world’s problems in a way that now seems almost obscene. Of course it couldn’t last.

No-one was more surprised than me when he abruptly announced his retirement. People like him usually go on till they die. He wasn’t even sixty.

He went quiet for a bit, as people do when they retire, but he didn’t vanish. He used to pop up being interviewed on video channels and podcasts. Then, he began to publish books. Really strange books, on philosophy and science. He was going way outside of his field of expertise. Now I think it was all carefully calculated, all of it. It was the unfolding of a plan that he expected to take the best part of a decade to fully unfurl, and he reckoned that still left him with enough time.

HIs books were weird but they were wildly popular. He seemed to have a knack of hitting nerves. I’m sure he had worked the whole business out years in advance. Probably when we had that conversation by the river, he was already planning it.

He published five astonishing books, and just when he had become the most famous popular science author on the planet and no-one could get enough of him, that’s when he disappeared.

He didn’t disappear in a literal sense. Doubtless the tax authorities still knew where he was, and one or two of his most trusted confidants, but for the rest of the world he dropped out of sight completely.

Several years went by, and then, very unexpectedly, I received a call from him.

“What are you working on now, Smithy?” he said, after some initial pleasantries had been exchanged.

“Oh I’ve moved on to bigger and greater things.” I said. “I’m trying to stop outgassing in acetate batteries.”

He laughed, and carried on laughing for almost an entire minute.

“It’s funny but it’s not that funny.” I complained.

“I’d like you to come and see me. Spend a few days here. Are you married? Girlfriend?”

“Divorced.”

“Oh. Well that makes things all the easier.”

That struck me as an odd thing to say, but I suppose he was thinking that I might have committments that would make it hard to go off somewhere for a few days at short notice.

“Where do you live these days?” I asked.

“Scotland.” he said. “The nearest town’s Fort William. Drop whatever you’re doing and come up here.”

“Seriously?”

“Never been more serious.” he said.

I had to hire a car to reach him, since I didn’t own one at the time. Driving was very common back then, although we’d reached a point where any long journey was sure to incur multiple fines for accidentally driving or parking in the wrong place at the wrong time, to say nothing of the many tolls, but there was no other way to get there.

He was living in a little cottage on the side of a sweeping escarpment covered in heather. I had to walk the last couple of hundred yards to his house. There were little bilberry plants in amongst the heather, chewed short by goats, and stones covered in feathery lichens. When I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, I could hear not even a single motor vehicle and I could see no other human habitation. I could hear nothing apart from the wind, the beating of my own heart, and the calls of curlews.

I wrongly assumed at first that he’d chosen the place out of a desire to be alone with the beauty of nature.

I knocked at the door and soon we were drinking whisky from little crystal glasses in his living room. I didn’t notice there was anything wrong with him, he hid it well.

“I’m working on a project.” he said. “That’s really the reason I asked you to come up here.”

I looked around the living room. A small herd of Highland cattle were visible through the window, grazing on the side of the hill, with horns and long reddish hair.

“Really?” I said. “Theoretical, I presume?”

“Oh, no.” he said. “Practical. Very practical, although certainly a lot of theory happens to be involved.”

“Intriguing. Tell me more.”

“Better if I show you.” he said. “Come and see my laboratory.”

By that point I did have a slight sense that something was a little off about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. He wasn’t looking me directly in the eye, and at times he seemed to stare blankly at the wall. It did cross my mind that perhaps he had lost the plot completely and intended to smash my brains in and pile me up with a collection of assorted other corpses that he perhaps kept in this laboratory of his, but I had known Westfield as a reliable colleague and kind mentor for almost a decade before his retreat from active research, so I tried to dismiss that unsettling idea.

He produced a massive old iron key and used it to unlock an ancient-looking wooden door in a recessed area of his kitchen.

Behind the door, was a lift. That is to say, what Americans call an elevator. I looked up and down. Using a lift to get to the second floor seemed excessive. Westfield was getting on a bit but he was sprightly.

“After you.” he said, as the doors slid open.

The lift went not up, but down, and quite a long way. When the doors opened, they opened on an underground laboratory the size of a small aircraft hangar.

“Bloody hell.” I said.

“This is where I do my research.” he said.

“How much did this cost you?”

“About eight million. It would have been a lot more if I hadn’t called in some favours. I was able to leverage an existing cave system. The house above, I brought here stone by stone from ten miles away.”

“I had no idea writing popular science books was so lucrative.”

“Oh, it isn’t.” he said. “Not unless you’re the world’s best-selling popular science writer in fifteen different languages. I considered other more obvious ways of obtaining the money I needed to build this, but psychology and linguistics happen to be hobbies of mine, and I knew I could write bestsellers. A lot nicer than dealing with some dreary corporation.”

“And what is the object of your research?”

I recognised a great deal of the apparatus in the room. He had all the usual stuff; oscilloscopes, industrial mixers, sputtering machines, benches filled with bits of electronics, computers of course, a couple of electron microscopes, and numerous electrolytic tanks ranging from tiny little things to things to the size of a large fish tank.

He went over to a bench and slid his hand over it, picking up a thing that looked like an old-fashioned USB drive.

“There’s enough energy stored in this to power a small city for three days.”

I shook my head.

“Not possible.” I said. “There’s no way you can structure matter to store that much energy. I mean, that’d have to be maybe four terajoules. That’s like a kiloton in TNT terms. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was only fifteen kilotons.”

“You’re right.” he said. “There’s no way to store that much energy using conventional matter.”

“But even if you could completely convert mass to energy, that USB would still weigh three kilograms or something.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Smithy.” he said. “Your calculation is way off. As a matter of fact, this USB weighs a total of twenty grams, and only a hundredth of a gram is due to its energy content.”

“You’re telling me there’s enough energy in that thing to level a village?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Don’t worry, it’s quite stable, for the moment. The problem is if I don’t immerse it in liquid nitrogen every few days, all that energy will turn gradually into heat over a period of about two years, and that would be a huge problem. A sustained power drain could even cause it to detonate, but I monitor that closely and there’s no real danger of it.”

“I’m speechless.” I said.

“Naturally.”

“I have some questions.”

“Ask away.”

“How does it work?”

“It stores energy as a kind of subatomic condensate. The details are rather involved. If you agree to work with me, I’ll have to explain it to you over a few days.”

“Work with you?” I said.

“That’s what I want to propose.” he said.

“Where did you even get that much energy?”

He pointed further down towards the end of the laboratory.

“There’s a thorium salt reactor down that way. That’s one of the things I need your help with, actually. Horrendously unstable little thing. I wish I didn’t need it.”

“But why are you doing this out here? Any number of places would love to fund this research.”

“Yes, and the military would love to get their hands on it too. Did you know, Smithy, that every patent application filed gets run past the military before it’s even considered? A fellow who works in the patent office told me that. My invention must only be used for peace. Oh, I know eventually they’ll weaponise it, but I intend to distribute this technology freely to every country in the world before anyone manages to turn it into a weapon. Anyway, I can see you’re in a state of shock. Let’s go back upstairs. You’ll need some time to absorb this whole business.”

He wasn’t wrong. My mind was reeling. A thousand different questions were vying with each other for supremacy in my brain.

Westfield made a kind of satisfied sound as he sat back down in his comfortable chair in the living room.

“You know you’re getting old when you can’t sit down without sighing.” he said.

“You want my help to figure out how to make your energy storage thing stable.” I said.

“That’s exactly it. You’ve got it. And I think you’re the perfect man for the job, even if your working knowledge of relativity is a little rusty.”

“It seems like you’ve managed pretty well by yourself. I bet you’ve got another ten or twenty years left in you. Why do you need me?”

“There’s something else.” he said. “You see, Smithy, I made some mistakes when I set the thorium reactor up. I was exposed to a lot of radiation. Too much. For the most part I seem to have escaped largely unscathed, but for one small problem.”

“And that is?”

“I’m going blind.”

I stared at him in shock, for the second time that day. Suddenly I could see it. His habit of looking slightly past me, his tendency to stare at the wall; his eyesight was failing.

“I’m so sorry to hear.” I said.

“Spare me the pity. You can kill a person with pity, do you know that? Don’t worry, I don’t need to be looked after. I can operate the reactor with my eyes closed, literally, and before you get to the reactor there’s an enormous hydroponics lab where I grow most of my food. Potatoes, fish, rice, salads of all kinds, all monitored and regulated via artificial intelligence. All I have to do is pick it. I only send out for a few things I happen to like and can’t grow, like coffee and milk, and I do that online.

“What I can’t do, is the research. That device I showed you in the lab—I can barely see it now. I need you to help me complete the research.”

I didn’t have to think a whole lot.

“I’ll do it.” I said.

He positively beamed.

“Good man.” he said.

For a year we worked on the technology methodically and patiently. We worked hard, and we could both very well understand that the goal of stable storage of nearly unlimited quantities of energy was within our grasp, and that drove us to work long hours without complaint.

We never argued or became frustrated with each other. Not once. We were completely focused on our goal, and the things that we had to do to reach it were, for the most part, fairly clear. If ever there was any question as to the best course of action, I was perfectly happy to defer to the Professor. I knew, by then, that I was working with one of the greatest minds that had ever existed.

His eyesight continued to deteriorate and on the few occasions when I could persuade him to consult doctors, they only informed him there was nothing they could do. His retinas were steadily deteriorating, and the ends of the optic nerves. Whatever the radiation had done to him, it was beyond the power of medical science to fix it.

Of course you know what happened next. Not to us, but to the rest of the world.

The first summer after I’d arrived at Westfield’s lab, didn’t arrive. Something changed internally deep within the sun, and crops all over the world failed.

So much has been said about it that there’s no point me dwelling on it. It affected me far less than most people. Failing eyesight combined with a dislike of supermarkets had driven Professor Westfield to construct an underground hydroponic farm capable of feeding us perfectly adequately. Sometimes I almost wonder if he hadn’t seen the failure of the sun coming, but that surely would have required a stretch of intellect beyond the reach of human ability. The only people who saw it coming were cranks who predicted it by chance.

The optimists said the next year would be better, but it was the pessimists who got it right. The following year was even worse. In Britain, our government, a corrupt bunch of parasites who hated the average person like poison, introduced rationing, which was the first and last sensible thing they did.

A lot of people became awfully thin, yet still no-one was actually starving to death. Britain leveraged all her remaining power and all her tricks to ensure food imports kept coming, even from countries that were themselves starving.

The fourth year was the killer. There just wasn’t enough food. People began to die.

Westfield and I had to scrabble a bit in the first two years to get the hydroponic system fully up to speed. It had to be made to support us completely, and I spent a lot of time working on that instead of working on energy storage, under Westfield’s direction. By the fourth year, when everyone else was starving, we had a small surplus.

I wanted to distribute the surplus among the nearest locals, but Westfield was absolutely dead set against it.

“If you attract the wrong attention, our work here will be finished.” he said. “The best thing we can do for humanity is to complete the work. We’re almost there.”

They say trouble comes in threes. Four years after the sun dimmed, the war began.

I know people have strong opinions about how the war started, even though it has now come to be seen as a senseless mistake. Let me tell you, the history books are largely just yesterday’s news, and who believes the news? The fact is that Britain started it. Not the British people, but our corrupt and degenerate leaders. They began the bombing campaign against Serbia, and an elaborate web of international treaties gradually brought every other major power into the war.

I would have been conscripted, but no-one knew where I was. Westfield had been very insistent on me not divulging his location to anyone.

Throughout the whole of Britain, people who were already starving found themselves press-ganged into going off to fight.

It was at this point that we began to have serious problems with raiders, as they were called.

We experienced two minor break-ins while we were asleep. I assume they were looking for food. The third time it happened, Westfield was in the kitchen making a kind of coffee substitute from dandelion roots (actual coffee was no longer available), and when he ran towards the pair of them, shouting, they pushed him over and fled. He somehow broke his thumb in the fall. We scanned it with an ultrasound machine that we used in our work and put it in a cast.

“Professor,” I said to him the day after, “we need to take measures to protect ourselves. There’s only going to be more of them. Word must have got around that there are people living here and they’re not starving.”

“What are you suggesting?” he asked me.

“Remember that phenomenon we observed last year; when a brief megawatt pulse is discharged through a superconducting coil, it can create a kind of discharge that flies out of the coil. It could be used as a weapon.”

Although he couldn’t see me, he turned his face towards me with a look of indignant anger on it.

“Absolutely not! Smithy, don’t you understand that the whole point of us developing this technology in secret is to prevent people weaponising it? Now you’re suggesting we turn it into a weapon?”

“It’s practically already a weapon, by its very nature. I’m only suggesting we use it to defend ourselves. Otherwise what will happen to us? What will happen to you? Those people out there, they’re desperate and growing more desperate all the time. I’ve heard gunshots in the valley. Weapons are everywhere now. It’s only a matter of time before they come for us with guns.”

“I won’t hear of it.” he said petulantly. “And I’d thank you not to mention the idea again. Next time these people break in, we’ll offer them food and they’ll leave peacefully.”

“You can’t do that! How does it make sense to hold off distributing food to local farmers, yet give food to raiders? If you give them food they’ll tell other people, and soon we’ll have a whole mob coming for our supplies.”

I could see my words had affected him, but he only repeated what he’d already said: “I won’t have it turned into a weapon.”

What would you have done? Perhaps you think us selfish. We had food and we weren’t planning to share it. That much is true. But without the food we would have had to stop our work on a technology that could have helped alleviate the food crisis, and prevent future crises. More than that, we could not have continued to secrete ourselves away from the world and I certainly would have been drafted to fight a war that I was absolutely against.

I quietly set out to do the only thing that could protect the Professor’s work. I began to work in secret on a weapon.

I stand by what I told Westfield. Our technology was already almost a weapon. It could potentially discharge terawatts of energy in a fraction of a second. That much energy is powerfully destructive. It could easily have formed the basis of a terrifying explosive device. I set to work on something a lot less ambitious. When the professor was sleeping, I gradually built a kind of rifle with adjustable output. I wanted something that I could use to fire warning shots, capable of causing only mild injury, but that could produce a lethal discharge if absolutely necessary.

I don’t know if Westfield suspected anything, but if so, he had no way of verifying his suspicions. There were parts of the lab that he never even tried to feel his way around, for fear of putting his hand on a live wire or a hotplate.

Meanwhile, things were going from bad to worse in the outside world.

People had been horribly weakened by the famine, and large numbers of conscripts were pressed together in filthy barracks, and that’s probably a big factor in why the plague emerged.

They say it came out of a lab somewhere to the east. Scientists have always overestimated their ability to contain viral pathogens. A bunch of fools somewhere were trying to develop a vaccine against a kind of hypothetical haemorrhagic fever and they modified some kind of marmoset disease to infect human tissue. It escaped, and it spread like wildfire.

All over Europe, and soon the world, people began to collapse, often without warning, blood spewing from their mouths.

The disease caused bloody diarrhoea and vomiting, blood often leaking from the eyes, ears and nose in the final stages.

I encountered one of the victims once when I was stretching my legs, walking on the hills surrounding us. The first thing I saw was a dead dog in a pool of blood. I gave it a wide berth. I was making my way back home, more than a little scared, when I rounded a rock and came face to face with a woman half-covered in blood, even her eyes a red bloody mess.

“Help me.” she groaned, but what could I do? As I backed rapidly away she fell on her face, where she remained.

Back in the cottage I daresay I behaved in a way that was more than a little unhinged. The experience had given me quite a shock.

“There must be something we can do.” I said. “We could research the disease. We’ve got a whole laboratory at our disposal.”

“It’s not a biolab and we have no training or experience in that kind of thing.” said the Professor. “The best thing we can do is finish what we’re doing. I tried a small admixture of beryllium this morning; I’ve obtained promising results.”

He was completely blind by then, and not in the best of health. He was starting to wheeze when he spoke. A good doctor probably could have fixed him, but there were no good doctors left.

I knew he was right. I felt embarrassed almost immediately for even having raised the idea of researching the virus. What did we know about viruses? Nothing.

I began to take my improvised weapon with me whenever I went outside. I used it to hunt rabbits and found it extremely effective. I’ve always loathed the whole idea of hunting but after three years on a restricted and monotonous diet, I was quite willing to bump off a few rabbits. The weapon projected a blue glowing orb that shot out of it with incredible speed. Even at very low energy the orb stopped the heart of any living thing that it touched.

I secretly made some experiments on none-living things too. I was able to blast out rock from a cliff over a mile away on a slightly higher setting. The power of the thing frightened me, and I added various catches and levers to ensure it couldn’t be accidentally turned up to a higher energy level. I added other safeguards too, like a fingerprint reader.

I told Westfield I’d caught the rabbits in a rudimentary trap. I think he believed me.

The news from the outside world was horrible, although I didn’t fully comprehend the full horror of it till years later. As the fourth year without a summer came to an end, perhaps a tenth of the population was seriously ill, spewing bloody vomit into buckets and toilets, corpses lying unclaimed for days in the streets because no-one wanted to go near them and there was no-one to collect them.

In November, when the hills around the Professor’s house were already covered with snow, Zaryatskaya launched a full-scale invasion of Britain, and the country fell under a brutal occupation. Britain had caused a great deal of suffering to the Zaryatskayan people, and our occupiers saw only a mass of enemy faces when they looked at us.

Now I wasn’t only worried about raiders, but also soldiers. The only good thing about the situation was that the invading Zaryatskayan army killed most of our leaders; the idiots who had got us into the war in the first place.

Not long after the invasion, our food supply began to appear mysteriously depleted, and finally Westfield confessed to me that he had begun almost regularly giving food to several different sets of people who had broken in at night.

“There’s always more and more of them.” he said. “Perhaps you were right. I don’t know where this is going to end. If only we could finish our work.”

His illness was progressing and it was affecting his mind. His lungs were deteriorating, and I suspected he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He wasn’t thinking straight. What could we have done with our work if we had finished it? Handed it over to the occupying forces?

Call me a traitor if you like but I had every sympathy for the invaders. We had struck the first blow, not they. Our politicians, who should never had been allowed to run so much as a bakery, had almost single-handedly caused the war, and responsibility for the plague therefore lay at their door too, since the disease probably wouldn’t have proven so deadly without wartime conditions.

Even so, in a war there are sides, and I knew which side I was on. British people were being slaughtered in their thousands and I wasn’t about to help make the lives of the occupiers any easier.

I didn’t want to tell Westfield about the weapon. I could see that he was dying, and I if I waited long enough I’d be able to decide what I ought to do with his work without his unrealistic moral scruples getting in the way.

I set up ultrasound and infrared detectors to alert me if anyone came near the cottage at night and I took to sleeping with the weapon by my bed.

Unfortunately none of that helped. I woke up suddenly one night to the sound of my motion sensor alarms going off and I went downstairs carrying the weapon to find three men had already got hold of Westfield. All three men had guns. I guessed they had been conscripted to fight in the war, then probably stashed in a prisoner-of-war camp for a bit by the victorious invaders, before being released. The country was awash with guns, and with men who knew how to use them.

“Drop your weapon or we’ll blow the old man’s brains out.” said one of the men.

I didn’t like the look of him. He was obviously their leader, and his eyes were oddly bloodshot.

I threw down the weapon, and one of them other men picked it up.

“What the hell’s this?” he said, and he tried to fire it at the window. I thanked my lucky stars that I’d added the fingerprint sensor. “Piece of crap.” he said, and he threw it down in disgust.

“What do you want?” I asked them.

“Food.” said the leader.

I tried to pretend we didn’t have any but it didn’t wash and they soon found the hydroponics lab. They filled sacks with food that would have lasted us maybe a couple of months, eked out with an occasional rabbit.

Once they’d got their stash they made to leave, to my immense relief, although I knew we hadn’t seen the last of them.

The leader turned to me as one of his followers opened the door, and said, “We’ll be back.”

Then he swayed slightly, and abruptly vomited. The bloody vomit gushed out of him with projectile force, splattering my face.

“Run!” shouted one of the other men, and he and his friend made off with all possible haste.

The leader looked at me and smiled a slow, sardonic smile, as if to say, “Well, the game’s up now.” and then he collapsed at my feet.

Westfield’s face was bruised and he was wheezing horribly, but he found the strength to rise to his feet, steadying himself against the wall.

“To the lab!” he said. “Quickly.”

I followed him in a daze. I was somewhat in shock. The infected blood was all over me.

In the lab he filled a bottle with some kind of disinfectant and began spraying it on me, or at least in my general direction. I stepped into the cloud of mist.

“There’s a chance you’ll be all right if you haven’t got any in your eyes.” he said.

“It definitely did go in my eyes.” I replied.

The following day we sat in the kitchen while Westfield plied me with helpful suggestions for avoiding infection. He had ideas about concocting a sort of antibiotic, although the disease being viral, antibiotics couldn’t do more than prevent secondary infections.

“You shouldn’t be near me.” I said. “I should quarantine myself.”

“We both know I’m not long for the world.” he replied. “It doesn’t much matter to me whether I go out with pneumonia or plague.”

I stared at him sadly. I had come to feel a degree of affection for Westfield that I’d never really felt when I was a student of his. I’d always liked him, certainly, but now I felt almost as though I was faced with the prospect of losing a father.

“Listen,” I said, “I want to confess something.”

“You built a weapon.” he said.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I know how you feel about it.”

He lay a hand on my arm.

“You did what you thought best.” he said. “We won’t speak of it.”

“It wasn’t even any use.”

“You know what your problem is, Smithy?”

“What’s my problem, Professor?”

“You’re always thinking about counterattack. Not enough about defence. Has it occurred to you that our technology could be used to generate an EM pulse strong enough to rip guns out of people’s hands and deflect bullets?”

The idea startled me. He was right; I saw it immediately. A correctly-modulated pulse could form a powerful defensive shield.

“Do I have your approval to build one?”

“You have my full consent, and I think you’d better to it quickly.” he said.

It took me only two days to put together something that, in tests, seemed to do the trick. I spent another few days adding sensors and computer technology to it, to try to make it ramp up the shield automatically in response to detected threats. It took a lot of time out of my schedule, but without proper defence, we’d be force to go and find food before finishing our work, if we even survived the next raid.

The finished device wasn’t much bigger than a salad bowl, and could be worn strapped to the back.

All the time I was expecting symptoms of plague to appear, but they never did. About ten percent of people seem to be completely immune to it, and Westfield suggested I might be one of them.

I made the alarms louder and began sleeping downstairs. I was so tired all the time that it took a lot to wake me up.

The next raid occurred a couple of weeks later, and it was a big one.

The alarms went off in the middle of the day, and I rushed upstairs out of the lab to find an entire line of men marching down towards us from the hill, trudging through the snow. They looked serious, and hungry.

I fired a warning shot. Instead of running, they hit the ground and began firing on us, smashing windows. A couple of bullets broke clean through the door and embedded themselves in the kitchen wall.

I had never been shot at before, and the experience had an odd effect on me. It made me very, very angry. I activated the shield and opened the door, carrying the weapon.

I could see they were firing at me, but even on the lowest setting, the shield deflected all of their bullets, which whizzed harmlessly away all around me.

Then I levelled the weapon at them, and let them have it. A few seconds later, where there had been men, there were now only bits of smoking earth, blown clean from under the snow. It was as if they had disintegrated.

My conscience didn’t trouble me too much. I was quite sure they would have killed us and taken every last morsel of food they could have found. I had seen the looks in their eyes through my binoculars, and the expressions on their faces.

Plus, the weapon had rendered the whole business of killing detached and remote. One moment they were there, the next they were in small bits all over the field, being picked off by crows. It was hard to really connect with what I had just done.

And all that, with the weapon on an extremely low setting. I had turned the power dial up only two notches from the setting that was supposed to stun, and the dial had fifty notches on a logarithmic scale. The power of it awed me, and I could say all of the same things for the shield.

When I went back down to the lab, Westfield said, “Another false alarm?”

His hearing was deteriorating too by then.

“Minor situation, but I dealt with it.” I replied.

“Is it stormy out there? I thought I heard thunder.”

“No. Maybe some bombing in the distance.”

All of this happened the day before the Derby massacre. The details of that terrible event are still being written into the history books.

The occupying army had built an enormous grey concrete building in Derby, very roughly in the middle of England, which was supposed to serve as a new parliament. It was a truly monstrous building.

At the opening ceremony they’d held for it, at which their leader Xerophanes himself was supposed to give a speech, a crowd of rioters armed with guns had tried to break through the security, and the occupiers had gunned them down without mercy. Perhaps three thousand people died that day. After the riot had been quelled, they went around the town executing anyone they suspected of involvement.

Westfield was extremely rattled by it and took to bed, which I’d never known him to do previously, when there was work to be done.

I carried on working in the lab alone.

The following morning there was no sign of Westfield. I found him in his room, deathly pale, his breathing laboured.

When I went to him, he grasped my wrist in his bony fingers with surprising strength.

“Those poor people, Smithy.” he said. There were tears in his eyes. “Several people I know were gunned down. It’s horrible. And they say the reprisals are continuing.”

“Try to relax.” I said. “You’re in no state to be worrying about it.”

“I need you to do something.” he rasped.

He looked so weak, I was afraid speaking would drain his last reserves of energy, especially since he seemed so worked up.

“Tell me.” I said.

“I have a friend in the resistance. I need you to get plans for the weapon and the shield to him. And take him any prototypes you’ve built.”

That choked me up. Here was a man who had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure his work was used primarily for peaceful ends, asking me to deploy it as a weapon of war.

“Professor …” I began, struggling to contain my emotions.

His other hand grappled for a piece of paper on his bedside table. He found it and stuffed it into my hand.

“The details are all here.” he said. “Take my car. Go as soon as you can.”

“It’s not stable, Professor.” I said gently, wondering if he was getting confused. “The energy storage technology isn’t stable. We’re almost there, but —”

“It’ll last long enough to win the war.” he said.

He seemed to collapse into the bed, wheezing.

“I see it now.” he said, almost in a whisper. “What I couldn’t see before. Without freedom, without peace, nothing we’ve done matters. Find them, Smithy. Find the resistance.”

His eyes closed and I left him to go and pack a few things. Mainly, I needed the weapon, the shield, and some plans I’d sketched out, although I couldn’t visualise how any underground movement could possibly make use of the plans without the occupiers finding out about it. I wondered if we could turn our laboratory into a manufacturing facility, but it hardly seemed plausible that we could manage to arm more than a handful of people.

When I was ready to leave, I went back to tell Westfield, and I found him completely still, and cold to the touch. He had passed away, peacefully I think, in his bed.

I didn’t have time to bury him, so instead I placed his lifeless body in one of our big freezers. There was no alternative.

Then I took my things outside to Westfield’s car.

My heart sank even further, looking at it. I doubt there was another car that old anywhere in a hundred-mile radius. It was a little convertible Fiat, with tyres that were almost bald and little spots of corrosion speckling its sides. It ran on diesel.

I strapped the shield device onto the boot and set it to adjust itself automatically in response to detected threats. Then I began to drive.

The Fiat had an old-style manual transmission and the gears sounded awful. There must have been something wrong with the gearbox. The brakes were also incredibly soft. Clearly none of Westfield’s expertise had gone into maintaining his car.

Why a man like him didn’t have an electric car, I’ll never know and have often wondered.

According to Westfield’s instructions I was supposed to somehow get to Dundee, where his contact was based. There were a thousand checkpoints between here and there, and the chances of any of them letting me pass seemed remote. I encountered the first one just outside Fort William.

It was manned by Zaryatskayan soldiers, who shouted “Halt!” as I approached. Instead of stopping, I sped up, relying on the shield to protect me by smashing the barrier out of the way. I figured the AI I’d built into it would treat the barrier the same as an incoming missile.

The soldiers opened fire on me, all their bullets going wide of course. The barrier crumpled like a piece of paper tissue and flew spectacularly into the air like a weird metal kite.

One of the soldiers threw a grenade at me, which bounced back and blew up some of their vehicles.

I suppose I got angry. Is that an excuse? I don’t know. All of those men had mothers. They were sons and fathers. Our own leaders, in my mind, were responsible for the war in the first place. At the same time, they were an occupying army, so I let them have it. I was well past the checkpoint when I opened fire.

Balls of blue-violet flame flew from the weapon, turning into fiery streaks of light as they got further away. They landed on the checkpoint and the whole thing was blown into tiny pieces in a shower of white sparks.

When I saw the next checkpoint I opened fire before arriving at it, with the same results, except that the little Fiat struggled to get through the mud that the weapon had thrown up. I almost had to get out and push.

I’d made it as far as Pitlochry when I changed my mind. By then I was regularly shooting down helicopters and occasional fighter jets—the auto-aiming function of the weapon working superbly—and it became clear to me that it would be entirely impossible to meet with anyone in Dundee, or anywhere else.

I changed course and headed for Derby.

It was fortunate that the car was a convertible because I had to shoot things with one hand and drive with the other.

I got onto the M6 near Carlisle. I was afraid of traffic jams but fortunately the roads were almost entirely empty. They tried destroying the roads ahead of me and several times I had to drive around craters, but I made fairly good progress nonetheless.

I think it was somewhere around Preston that I had to stop off at a service station. My arm was shaking from holding the weapon up all the time, I was covered in dust and filth, and the Fiat was almost out of fuel.

There was no-one in the service station apart from some Zaryatskayan soldiers so I blasted them to pieces and then drove the Fiat in through the smashed window.

That was pretty stupid because I ended up with a flat tyre. I had to replace it with the spare from the boot.

Amazingly, I found a working coffee machine, although there was no milk. The Zaryatskayans evidently spared no expense for their soldiers. I also found some bread.

I managed to siphon some disel out of the remains of a Zaryatskayan military truck, and I was on my way again.

When I reversed the Fiat out of the service station building I could see they were hitting it heavily with all kinds of missiles, or at least, trying to. There was a perimeter about a mile away where I could see nothing but fire.

The journey from there to Derby was a nightmare. I had to leave the main road and take side roads, because they’d basically blown most of the motorway up. Destruction rained down all around me, but none of it touched me.

I switched on the radio to try to find out what was happening. The only working radio station was saying a massive army of resistance fighters was making its way south from Scotland but the Zaryatskayan army was decimating them and would soon be victorious. Of course there was no resistance army on the move, not at that point. They meant me.

I dread to think how many innocent people they killed in the process of trying to stop my progress south. The thought made me only the more angry. I felt determined to personally destroy every last trace of the Zaryatskayans, although obviously that was quite unrealistic.

Somewhere not far from Derby a curious thing happened. The radio station switched sides. It seemed my efforts had sparked a genuine uprising.

I began to see traces of it in the distance as I drove. There were explosions on the horizon, and their constant attempts to kill me became less than constant.

I stopped withins sight of the vast ugly Zaryatskayan parliament at Derby. For two whole hours I destroyed everything that came near me. I could have taken aim at the parliament itself but the thing is, I had a problem.

The shield, with its enormous energy output, was becoming unstable, and the weapon couldn’t be far behind. I had an idea about what to do with it.

When the attacks died down, I drove to the parliament, picking off any Zaryatskayans I saw. The streets were increasingly full of rioting, shouting mobs, all of them painfully thin and some of them staggering and bloody, clearly infected.

I left the shield attached to the side of the parliament, warning lights flashing all over it, and ran, shouting warnings to anyone in the vicinity.

I was about a mile away and still in one piece when there was a vast explosion behind me, and a mushroom cloud, resembling a tiny nuclear bomb, rose up to the sky. The noise, when it hit me five seconds later, was absolutely deafening, and the shock wave shattered windows.

Not long after that, something hit me in the back, and that’s all I remembered till I woke up with a terrible pain in my side and a Zaryatskayan officer slapping me in the face.

“We have your weapon.” he said. “The shoe is on the other hand now. You will tell us how to make it work.”

“What?” I said, confused by his talk of shoes and hands.

He slapped me again.

“Would you like to get to know my friend Boris?” he asked.

I looked over to Boris, a massively-built bald man with scars on his face. Boris was holding a blood-stained hammer.

“No thanks.” I said.

Boris stepped towards me, laughing in a way that I can only describe as sinister.

I wondered idly whether the weapon would go into a prolonged meltdown or detonate suddenly. I didn’t have to wonder long. There was a huge roaring sound and a man opened the door of the room where they’d tied me up and jabbered something in Zaryatskayan.

They dragged me up some stairs and outside.

There was an vast violet fire raging not very far away, great electric arcs shooting out of it like lightning. The weapon’s remaining energy was discharging in a roaring torrent of flame and electricity.

The officer and Boris seemed stunned, like they couldn’t believe their eyes. Then a series of shots rang out and they dropped to the ground.

A man strode towards me and snipped off my handcuffs with a pair of boltcutters.

“Captain Nichols, resistance.” he said in a thick Scottish accent.

What I didn’t know at the time, but what everyone knows now, is that Xerophanes, the Zaryatskayan dictator, had been giving a speech to the nation in London at the very same time that I had been approaching Derby in the Fiat.

Behind him was a huge screen full of images of Zaryatskayan military prowess and alleged Zaryatskayan achievements. Emboldened by my efforts, the resistance had somehow hacked into the feed and replaced the film with an image of the British flag and a rousing rendition of God Save the King. Xerophanes had stood there shouting his head off for about a minute before a sniper took him out.

The whole world had seen it, and it proved the turning point in the war.

Within three days Britain was free, and a week later the war ended and peace terms were agreed. I drove back to Westfield’s place in the Fiat, accompanied by three of the best physicists I could find.

Westfield’s technology helped us restore decent living conditions in Britain, and later on, in much of the rest of the world.

With the help of the physicists, I was able to finally figure out how to make the technology stable. Now, of course, we take it for granted.

The following spring, the sun brightened and the spring gave way to a glorious summer. As for the plague, it disappeared largely of its own accord once sanity returned to the world.

Many people have asked me what conclusion I draw from my experiences. I have none. Westfield tried hard to ensure his technology would only be used for peaceful means, and its real value ended up being, initially at least, as a weapon.

I’m sometimes tempted to say my conclusion is that if you want peace, you have to fight for it. But I just know that would end up being taken out of its complicated historical context and used to justify more madness, somewhere down the line.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of Westfield’s death. I placed a flower on his grave, in amongst thousands of others.