Theo Xeta sat in his chair, pensively watching the burgundy moonlight swirling in his glass. The door creaked open, and his arm twitched, breaking the moonlight into a thousand ripples.

  “Sorry, Mr. Xeta, I did not mean to scare you.”

  Theo glanced back. It was Miles, a jolly Fraxian man in his sixties. Theo breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a few days since the assassination attempt, but he was taking longer than usual to recover.

  On paper, Miles served as Theo Xeta’s housekeeper, though the decades in the Stormrunner Corps and law enforcement had given him a more diverse skill set.

  “Miles! I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I feel the same, Mr. Xeta, especially after what happened…” Miles glanced around, then lowered his voice. “It was damn lucky you let me get off early that night.”

  “Yeah, you certainly dodged a bullet.”

  “Very funny. But I’ve been thinking, did you see it coming ahead of time?”

  “You think too highly of me,” Theo feigned a laugh, patting his housekeeper on the shoulder. “You’re just a lucky bastard.”

  Seeing that, Miles helped himself to some wine. However, his face turned serious again.

  “Next time, Mr. Xeta, I’ll make sure I stay.”

  “Don’t, Miles. You still have a family to go back to.”

  Miles sighed and sipped on his drink.

  “Regarding the man in your custody — the assassin with the skull mask — I have transferred him away.”

  “Good, and the other two Valerian assassins?”

  “The police are dealing with them. The dead one got cremated. The paralyzed one was arrested, but they went easy on him because he was an ex-Stormrunner. Though I reckon some powerful people were pulling strings.”

  “Just as expected. How about the fourth assassin? The Fraxian woman?”

  “I couldn’t find a thing on her. The other assassins knew nothing. I even interrogated their fixer, all he could give me was a fake Valerian name.”

  “How about the cryo grenade she threw at me? Any prints?”

  “She was wearing gloves. Luckily, one got torn off, and I managed to recover half a fingerprint and a small blood sample. However, it did not match any donor records in the XetaGen database.”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  “You know, we could try to send the records to the police —”

  “No. Not the authorities. Not for her.”

  A loud buzzer interrupted the conversation.

  Theo Xeta glanced at his clock. It was time. The visitors had arrived.

  Vik Layden, the director of the Valerian Unification Committee, entered the room, followed by two scientists — a Fraxian woman and a Valerian man.

  At their sight, Miles brought in a few more glasses of wine, alongside a thick dossier. Then he left the room.

  “How have you been? I heard about the burglary. That was truly terrible,” said Vik Layden, putting up a show in front of the two scientists.

  Theo Xeta felt ambivalent about Vik’s role in all of this. On one hand, her warnings had saved his life. On the other hand, VUC started this fiasco in the first place.

  “I’ll recover,” said Theo, playing along. “Thank you for all that you’ve done, and the VUC too. I’ll be sure to repay them for their kindness.”

  “Of course,” Vik continued without missing a beat. “Please use this safe house for as long as you’d like. And those burglars, what happened to them?”

  “Those three scumbags? I have taken care of them.” Theo Xeta glanced around at the other faces and quickly added, “By turning them in to the police, of course.”

  There was an intentionally loud yawn, and the Valerian scientist spoke. “Will you guys please cut the chitchat and explain why we’re here.”

  Theo turned to the two scientists. He specifically requested their presence at this meeting.

  The Valerian man could no longer conceal his boredom and distaste for the bureaucracy. The Fraxian woman showed little on her face, but no doubt her thoughts had already wandered off.

  Theo sighed. They were not people of politics or business. Both of them were the brightest minds in the scientific community, regularly featured in science magazines and conference posters, sometimes even on evening radio shows. Their work formed the bedrock of modern Valeria.

  “Vik, this is Dr. Lucius Stratos, director of the Storm Analytics Institute,” said Theo, gesturing to the Valerian. Then, he turned to the Fraxian. “And this is Dr. Ada Flux, tenured professor at the University of New Orion.”

  “Vik Layden,” said Vik curtly, quickly shaking their hands.

  “As you all know, the Northern Stabilizer in Thiab had been destroyed,” Vik continued. “After that, three level 7 storms appeared in neighboring cities. The entire Northern Quadrant is now exposed.”

  “I’ve heard,” Dr. Stratos said, blinking his intelligent blue eyes a few times. “I heard that a storm had hit the Exam facility as well.”

  “Yes. A level 5 storm. Right in the heart of the Capital.”

  Silence. The Capital, deep in the interior, had been the safe haven from storms. Not a single storm had breached the Capital in the last decade. Indeed, not even a gust could appear in the capital skies without presidential permission.

  And now, a level 5 storm?

  Although the storm was eliminated quickly, the signification was clear. The Capital was no longer immune to the malice of nature.

  “Now that the Northern Stabilizer is gone, the atmosphere in the Northern Quadrant is rapidly deteriorating,” said Vik. “If it is not repaired within the next month, meteorological conditions will spiral past control. Dozens of storms could erupt.”

  “That would be countless lives,” Theo muttered.

  “A projected death toll of three million to be precise,” Vik said. “And if a high-level storm cluster builds up in the Capital, we will not get away as easily as this time. It will be catastrophic…”

  “Can’t we use the bunkers?” asked Dr. Stratos. “Get everyone into the storm bunkers like those frontier towns.”

  “You answered your own question,” Vik said, her impatience showing slightly. “The Capital is not some frontier town. There are two million people. Even if we dig up the entire earth, we aren’t gonna have enough space. They will die fighting each other before the storm kills them.”

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “How about we evacuate everyone from the Capital to a safer city?”

  “No. The Capital is the heart of Valeria. It must stand. Besides, what city can handle a sudden influx of two million people? You’re looking at famine and riots.”

  “Okay, okay. So what is the VUC’s plan then?”

  “The Stabilizer and the Stormrunner Corps are the plan.”

  Dr. Stratos and Dr. Flux looked at each other, taking in the gravity of the situation.

  “That is why,” Vik continued. “Theo referred you two as co-leaders for the Stabilizer repair project.”

  The two scientists exchanged another look.

  “That is correct,” said Theo, taking a few pages out of his dossier. “The Stabilizer is built on three pillars of foundational science. The three of us are the best experts in their respective field.”

  “Experts, huh?” scoffed Dr. Flux. “Quite the expert of borrowing someone else’s work.”

  Ignoring Dr. Flux, Theo proceeded to organize the documents. “The first pillar is storm modeling. Dr. Stratos is the creator of The Stratos Equations, the best storm model we have as of today. This summarizes his research.”

  Vik Layden grabbed a copy of the files and quickly scanned through them. Dr. Flux followed suit. Although experts in their own fields, no scientist would dare claim mastery across other disciplines.

  The Stratos equations were far more complex than their name suggested. Pages of mathematical models broke down storm behavior in terms of kinematics, thermodynamics, humidity, and pressure. Most importantly, the Stratos equations modeled atmospheric changes as a partially observable Vokram decision process, meaning that future states depended solely on present states. Using present data gathered by the Stabilizer, the Stratos Equations could forecast how the weather patterns would morph and evolve.

  “Hold up,” Vik Layden frowned at a line of bolded text. “It says the Stratos Equations can only achieve 90% accuracy. Why aren’t we using the Storm Equations instead? The field data from Stormrunners shows a 99% accuracy rate.”

  “The Storm Equations focus solely on kinematics and heat, which is effective only for small-area storm control,” explained Dr. Stratos. “Imagine the sandstorm as a beast. The Stormrunners are like hunters, shooting thermal and cryo spears like arrows to kill the rogue beast. We reserve this only as a last resort.

  “However, when the beast hasn’t gone rogue yet, you don’t want to pick a fight right away. A Stabilizer is a gentle tamer, only nudging a little where necessary. This gentle method requires information on humidity and pressure. Instead of blasting thermal bombs, we can just blow a bit of air here and dry a few clouds there.”

  “Also, the Storm Equations are only a discriminative model,” Theo Xeta interjected. “While the Stratos Equations are generative.”

  Vik’s face looked blank.

  “It means that the Stratos Equations could envision the full scope of a storm,” Dr. Stratos explained patiently. If he hadn’t been serving such a pivotal role, he could have made an excellent college professor. “The Storm Equations, as a discriminative model, rely on prior information. The Stormrunners supply the model with air flow and temperature data, and the Storm Equations compute the weak points of the storm.

  “On the other hand, the Stratos Equations can generate plausible weather patterns directly. No observation needed. We are forecasting and understanding different storm patterns before they even happen.”

  “And most importantly,” Theo Xeta added. “Unlike the Storms Equations, every single line in the Stratos Equations was mathematically derived and proven.”

  Vik sat in silence, flipping intermittently through the pages. After a full minute, she asked, “If the Stratos Equations could do so much more, why aren’t the Stormrunners adopting this model?”

  “Time complexity,” said Dr. Stratos. “Stratos Equation takes much more time to compute. That’s why we need all the logic infrastructure, plus the dozens of peripheral computation centers.”

  At the mention of the computation centers, Theo shuddered a little. The Republic had always offered alternative jobs for students who failed the Stormrunning Exam, and back in his younger days, Theo had also been assigned to a computation center in the Northern quadrant. There, alongside two hundred other Valerians and Fraxians, he travailed through twelve-hour shifts armed with only pen and paper. Each day was packed with non-stop equation-solving and function optimization. It was, in essence, a mathematic sweatshop.

  This was the cost of safety.

  Thankfully, Vik’s words pulled him back to the present. “I see. Let’s proceed to the second pillar of the Stabilizer.”

  “The second pillar is Dr. Flux’s works, thermal biomechanics.” Seeing Dr. Flux huff, Theo added, “Which is a major inspiration to my work.”

  “Cut to the chase, what is it?”

  “Thermal biomechanics is all about the back-and-forth conversion between thermal energy and mechanical energy,” Dr. Flux said, her orange eyes faintly glowing. “Evidently, there is no better candidate for this than Fraxian cells.”

  Theo proceeded to hand out the files. Once again, they scanned through the information in silence.

  The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. However, energy could change between states. Among these, mechanical energy was the driving force of all atmospheric motion, and thermal energy was the crux of meteorological stabilization. The Stabilizer ran on a gigantic reservoir of both.

  “Why do we need this… thermal biomechanics?” asked Vik Layden. “Why can’t we just use steam engines and burn natural gas?”

  “The key to stabilization lies not only in supplying mechanical and thermal energy, but also in balancing their ratio. To diffuse a risky weather pattern, we need to be incredibly exact. There is no other machine as exact and as efficient as Fraxian cells.”

  “But these figures on energy throughput, why are they so high? That’s 20 gigajoules. If I’m not wrong, these are equivalent to 5 tons of TNT.”

  “You’re right. Most stabilizing countermeasures consume only minimal energy. But if a storm grows out of control, we will have enough thermal energy to destroy it by brute force.”

  “By brute force?”

  “Yes, by blasting an area with so much heat or cryo that it wipes out any temperature differential the storm feeds on. It’s like hunting a beast by burning down the forest.”

  “Has this approach ever been used?”

  “Occasionally, but only in high atmosphere or uninhabited areas.”

  “I see,” Vik said, contemplating. “Are Fraxian cells always capable of turning into a bomb? This could be a matter of national security…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dr. Flux said. “All these Fraxian cells are chemically doped and exposed to a very controlled set of biochemical signals. You don’t get that in everyday life.”

  Vik dwelled on these facts for a little longer, though, to be fair, these research had always been openly published.

  After a long while, she turned to Theo Xeta. “I assume you are the third pillar.”

  “Yes, the last pillar is ThermoTech. It is more of an applied science, but still science nonetheless,” said Theo, shooting a look at Dr. Flux as he handed out his own papers.

  “The Stratos Equations lets us model the storms,” he continued. “Thermal biomechanics gives us a reservoir of energy. However, we still need an infrastructure to hold everything together. We need sensors, transmitters, and regulation modules. All these — the central nervous system of the Stabilizer — is achieved through ThermoTech.”

  The information of ThermoTech was a little more comprehensible to everyone. After all, it had such widespread adoption.

  The crux of Thermotech was stability and precision. In terms of stability, bioengineering allowed Fraxian cells to bind seamlessly to mechanical systems. The cells were modified to halt all but one function, whether it be heat detection, heat containment, or heat transmission. Using thermal biomechanics principles, these Fraxian cells could interact with the mechanical forces all around them. With amplification devices, these cells could power gigantic machines.

  The real marvel of ThermoTech was not just in automobiles and assembly lines; it was in its extraordinary precision. The modified Fraxian cells could detect and maintain temperature at a fraction of a percent of a degree. With such precision, a continuous stream of thermal energy could carry varying amplitudes and frequencies, allowing information to be encoded inside. Once information could be embedded, anything could be possible, whether it be radios, thermographs, or even those displays worn by Stormrunners that could form any images in a split second.

  Vik Layden took her time with the ThermoTech files, navigating slowly through the diagrams and figures. Despite all the years of their collaboration, Vik never bothered learning the exact details behind Theo’s work.

  “This all sounds great, but I have one question,” Vik Layden said. “Where do you get all these Fraxian cells?”

  “We have donation programs throughout the nation. All donations are voluntary and financially compensated.”

  “And how many Fraxian cells will we need for the Stabilizer?”

  “For something that big, trillions at least, could be quadrillions.”

  “How many Fraxians would you need to harvest it from?”

  “By regular XetaGen standards, at least 800,000.”

  Vik paused for a moment as she worked out the numbers in her head.

  “That is too slow, we can’t afford to find 800,000 donors. Can you do it more efficiently?”

  “Theoretically,” said Theo as he pulled out his own reports. “This is not backed by enough experimental data, but we can do up to double the amount of harvest.”

  “So 400,000 donors, this is the best you can do?”

  “Yes, and there is no guarantee that there are no long-term health implications —”

  “We don’t have time to care about health implications!” Vik raised her voice. “If the stabilizer doesn’t go back up within a month, dozens of storms would be hitting the Northern Quadrant at once. Millions could die. Millions!”

  She took a deep breath and calmed herself, reverting to the nonchalant voice. “The VUC can give anything for this. Financial compensation, housing, and even citizenship. What is the very best you can do?”

  Theo grabbed a pen and began scribbling next to his charts and graphs. After a while, he spoke, “The best is 4x regular yield. This is just enough to leave a heartbeat in whatever poor soul.”

  “What is the absolute maximum yield you can harvest from a body? Absolute. Maximum.”

  “I just told you, it is —” Theo Xeta stopped short mid-sentence. He just understood what she meant. His body became still, and his eyes darkened. “No, no. You must be kidding me, Vik. I will not allow this.”

  “The situation is very urgent —”

  “I said no!” Theo Xeta slammed his fist on the table. Seeing the bewilderment and confusion in the scientists’ eyes, he got even more furious.

  “Why don’t you just spell it out, Vik? Tell them. You want to harvest these poor Fraxians to the point of killing them.”