The School of Hard Knocks by Oliver Strong

Author:Oliver Strong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scifi, scifiadventure, scifi humour, scifi dystopia, scifi adult
Publisher: Oliver Strong

Peters cleared the cockpit of men’s magazines, empty beer cans, cigarette ends and all trash in between. Rick considered whether it was Annyah or did all neggs look so smug after they’d won an argument? Nevertheless, she was getting what she wanted. Sonnet would be cleaned before they set off on another adventure. Once complete Annyah inspected Sonnet, she took a good look around the toilet bowl much to Graham’s ire. On deciding it was adequate they departed for the scorpion’s heart. Sonnet’s reactor fired up burning rings of plasma inside its magnetic field before ramming them into one another. The fusion reaction created was hundreds of millions of degrees hotter than the innards of the sun.

Back in the 20th century they were named Tokamak reactors, Russian for Toroidal Chamber with Magnetic Coils. Scientists at the Kurchatov institute put together the first Tokamak. They did so with powerful magnetic fields and an ingenious design. A cigar shaped metal object packed with powerful magnetic emitters maintained an unbreakable field while plasma encompassed the cigar in the shape of two separate halos. The halos were rammed into one another then pulled apart causing a fusion reaction. Today, centuries later, its principles remain the same, major changes being super alloys used in construction and a new method for creating plasma.

In the past it took great power to heat hydrogen-boron gas to high enough temperatures before it was useful. Sure, the return was way beyond any cost but Sonnet is a small space craft about the size of a world war two U-boat. She didn’t have the means to heat plasma whilst maintaining a magnetic field … that is until urilliuim was discovered.

Urillium, discovered by accident on Io, is a solid form of exotic matter, that is matter with negative mass. When the rover identified a sample scientists believed its instruments had failed. An inert brown lump which resembled a giant dog turd with negative mass.

Usually it’d have a mass of say 1kg but instead it read as -1kg, the Einstein’s scratched their heads. They tested it again, same result, they tested a lump of volcanic rock nearby, results demonstrated a positive mass. It took weeks to work out what’d happened but finally they got there, the world had just done a back flip. After much wrangling backers gave the green light and the rover dispatched a sample, a year later it arrived.

That brown stuff did have weight. Like negative pressure pulling sap up inside a plant, negative mass pulled mass toward it, unaffected by gravity in the way normal mass would be. The sample was refined of impurities to form what resembled a dry yellow clay. It was named urillium after the probe that’d discovered it on the Jovian moon. A corporation looking for ore deposits had made the scientific breakthrough of the century.

Urillium Corp had long since gone out of business but the strange yellow substance remained. A mere oddity on the periodic table, an interesting note for children in science class until the day scientists used it to fire up a Tokamak.

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