Mr Nikolai was my employer for over a decade.
He lived in a nothing town, in a nowhere place, on the edge of the Arizona desert. A tumbleweed and dust storms town, where people came to disappear, to fade into an unremarkable world. There was a veneer of normalcy there, banality was baked into the landscape. The ceaseless heat forced people indoors, neighbours were strangers, hiding from each other as much as the torturous sun. It was a place to hide. Perfect for mavericks with dangerous ideas.
I dedicated my days to his housekeeping. He lived in a small, simple two-bedroom house, in a suburban sprawl. Uniformly tended front lawns, maintained by sprinklers. Surrounded by flat, dusty desert. The far horizon broken only by the distant mesas.
The only part of the house in regular use was the large basement. I had the over ground house to myself as I cooked, cleaned, and maintained a facade of an average household.
He dedicated his days to his vision. I took care of his life, the house, his food, his bills, and taxes. He would have ceased to function without my assistance, he was solely dedicated to his work. His all- consuming level of focus was unable to spare any time for the business of staying alive.
I never understood the science behind his work. Some mornings, when I was cleaning his house and he had not yet been to bed, in a frenetic excitement, he would ramble to me about quantum mechanics, gravitational fields and zero-point energy. I was clueless to what any of that meant, but I understood he was working on an abundant, clean source of energy. “Electricity from the void” he would call it.
He explained this would be a major paradigm shift, the potential for a self-sufficient energy source for every town. Clean affordable transport. No more fossil fuel barons. No more oil wars. No more climate breakdown.
I thought about the new, just world such an invention would bring. A world without drilling for toxic oil, burning coal or splitting atoms to heat water. No more digging up dead dinosaurs, choking the planet and lungs for energy.
***
He kept his Zero Point Energy system a secret from all but me because he wanted to patent it.
I urged him to share his work with the world, to allow his technology to be recreated. Let the people seize their own destiny. I was worried there were powerful people, with vested interests in fossil fuels, who could quash it.
However, Mr Nikolai had other plans. He wanted to make his fortune, so he applied for the patent.
***
A month after the application, a man, claiming to be a patent assessor, came to the house. He arrived in the evening, weary, clearly at the end of what had been a long day. His demeanour suggested he was not taking this appointment seriously.
When he left, his demeanour had dramatically changed.
***
The next day, at precisely 9am, a man and a woman turned up, both dressed in immaculate, pressed grey suits, with not so much as a hair out of place.
They were downstairs with Mr Nikolai until late that night.
The following day two gentlemen, with matching buzz cuts, and severe expressions, dressed in desert-coloured military fatigues, started visiting the house. I thought it was odd, they had no insignia, no rank, no flag, and no troop I.D; but my employer seemed obligated to receive them in his workshop all the same.
They would turn up once a week for the next 4 months.
***
One unusually cloudy afternoon, he flew into the kitchen as I was cooking meals for his freezer. He buzzed with excitement, hair greasy and tangled, his eyes wide. He clearly had not slept for a while.
“I’ve done it Carolyn, fully wireless, fully scalable.” This is it,” he said, grasping me by the hands.
He asked me to drive to the seven eleven and get a bottle of ‘something bubbly.’ We drank it out of mugs, in the garden, watching the sun disappear below the distant mesa, lighting up the sky like fire. The fire before the darkness came.
***
He had told no one else about his final breakthrough, so was surprised to find he had visitors the next morning.
I had arrived at work that day to find them in the kitchen, the immaculate man and woman, wearing the same grey suits.
He had managed to make coffee for the guests, but the cups sat untouched on the table, next to a file of papers. The air was tense, and the conversation cut off when I entered.
I excused myself to tend to the garden.
They left an hour later in their chauffeured black SUV, roaring up the street. I found my employer staring out the kitchen window, digging his fingers into the counter-top, the nerve below his right temple twitching.
I quietly tidied away the abandoned coffees waiting for him to leave.
Instead, he sat down and crumpled into himself, elbows on the table and head in his hands. A shattered man.
“You know what they want me to sign?” He sat up, “You should see this – but I’d be breaking the law showing it to you” he said, waving a handful of papers.
“Best you don’t show me then,” I replied.
He continued,
“A matter of protecting ‘national security interests’ they say. Coercing me to sign this,” he said. Gesturing to the papers, now on the table, “How did they even know I finished the prototype?”
“I have no…”
He continued, cutting me off, “They want me to sell to the military. You know what that would mean? My invention, in their hands?”
“Then don’t sell it to them,” I replied.
“They’ve blocked my patent; I can’t sell it to anyone else. It’s a good deal, a lot of money, but it comes with a secrecy order.”
“A secrecy order? What’s the big secret?” I asked.
“I can’t reproduce my own technology or tell anyone about it. You and I will be the only ones who ever knew what happened here in this basement.”
“What?”
“My guess is they want to use it or bury it. I want to change the future of humanity, not rewrite the next chapter of war.”
“Well, I guess you have two choices; sell it to them, and never speak of your life’s work again. Or share it with the world,” I said.
“I’ve slaved away too long to just give my secrets away,” he said.
I did not answer.
***
That evening the phrase; ‘national security interests,’ troubled me. Unable to place where I had heard it before, I turned it over in my mind. It made me think of war.
***
The next day the harassment and phone calls began.
I was certain I was being followed. Several times I noticed the persistent presence of a black SUV behind me on the freeway, following me into the suburbs. They were not subtle. It was a campaign of intimidation.
Mr Nikolai’s accounts and credit cards would be frozen, the phoneline disconnected, and my phone signal was often blocked when I was in the house.
Large black helicopters would rumble overhead, throughout the day and night. The house would vibrate with the bass of the large engines, the throbbing punctuated by the spin of the rotors.
He would joke it was lucky he had no family to be threatened; but the visitors had seen me here, they knew I worked for him. I worried that would make me vulnerable too.
***
This nightmare continued for a month.
I implored him to go public. He would be safe in plain sight, surely, they could not do anything to him with the world watching.
He was torn with indecision. Wracked with paranoia, he never left the house. I was his only confidant.
He came up from the basement one afternoon, as I was preparing to leave for the day. He looked tired. Lines carving canyons of worry across his forehead.
“Petr?”
“Carolyn, I think you are right, I need to go public,” he said.
I stopped him talking with a finger to my lips. I suspected the house was bugged. Our eyes locked. He placed a small blue USB drive in my hand. I squeezed his shoulder and left.
***
I arrived at work the next day. The house was locked up. My keys did not work. The windows were boarded. I ripped the police tape off the front door and hammered with my fists. I ran round the outside of the house, pounding on the boards nailed over the windows.
My heartbeat booming in my ears, sweat sticking my shirt to my back, the panic stuck in my throat. I could not speak. I could not catch my breath. I bent double, hands on my knees, clawing for air.
A police cruiser came around the corner. Eyeing me suspiciously he crawled to the kerb in front of the house as I knelt, despondent, in the yard.
“Ma-am. What do you think you are doing?” he asked picking up the police tape I had thrown aside.
He must have been at least 6”2, staring down at me, he made me feel small and foolish. Like a low creature scrubbing around in the dirt.
Wiping the tears and snot from my face, “What happened here?” I asked him, “Where is Petr, where is he? Is he okay?”
“There was a fire ma-am.”
***
Apparently, the fire had gutted the house so the police officer could not let me inside. However, there was no outward sign of any fire. No soot marks scorching the brickwork.
“No one was known to be in the house ma-am” he said.
“So where is the man that lives here?” I asked him.
Ignoring my question he said, “You need to move along now. You need to go home. “
“I can’t, not until I know where Petr is?”
“Yes, you can, and you will, if you know what’s good for you.”
As he escorted me to my car, I noticed he had no Arizona Police logo or badge on his shirt.
***
I contacted the local fire department for more information, they had no record of attending a fire at the address. Nobody could tell me anything helpful at the police department either. There was no record of him at any hospital in Arizona.
The officer I dealt with really wanted to help me find Petr, but his efforts were frustrated, his investigation thwarted by redacted files and national security orders. I believe he was personally threatened because he abruptly stopped returning my calls.
No undertakers, no mortuary, or graveyard held his body or had any record of it. He had disappeared, and worse, there was no record of him having ever existed.
The only worldly evidence he had ever walked this earth is a small blue USB drive still taped to the underside of my dressing table.
[Image Credit : Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash]
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