As my consciousness hovered in the centrifuge’s positively charged core, an image appeared on the wall of spinning rollers like a 360-degree movie screen. The projection showed a man who looked to be in his mid-forties, his hair silver-gray and long, pulled back into a tight ponytail. He was dressed in an expensive, charcoal-black Italian suit with a matching shirt and tie. He was seated in the back of a limousine next to an attractive brown-eyed blonde in her mid-thirties. The two of them were holding hands.

As I watched, the silver-haired man’s eyes rolled up and he slumped over. The woman grabbed him and shook him and called out his name, but her words were distorted, rippling with echoes. Before I could comprehend what she was shouting, a tsunami of negatively charged electrons swept through my being and carried my consciousness outward through the portal’s spinning inner ring. That’s when I realized the man in the limousine was me.

Part Two
Endings…

25

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

—Albert Einstein

“Zachary! Zach, honey, wake up. Driver, pull over!”

I opened my eyes, my brain buzzing with electricity, my body weighed down by a sudden sensation of gravity.

“Zach, are you all right?”

I turned and stared at my research assistant and lover, and the buzzing stopped.

“Susan?”

“Thank God. I thought you were having a stroke.” Susan McWhite, Ming Liao’s former assistant, turned to the dangerous-looking fellow in a buzz-cut and dark suit leaning inside my open window. “Jim, tell the driver we need to skip the hearing and get Dr. Wallace to a hospital.”

I turned to my head of security. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just tired from the flight. How soon until we arrive?”

Jim Clancy checked the GPS on his watch. “Twenty-eight minutes. You sure you’re okay, boss? You look kinda pale.”

“I’m fine.”

The armed bodyguard waited until I closed the window before signaling to our motorcade over his radio. Then he climbed back into the front passenger seat, and we continued our journey through the District of Columbia.

The Subcommittee on Energy and Power falls under the auspices of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, its congressional members exercising control over the broadest jurisdiction of any congressional committee on Capitol Hill. These powers include overseeing national energy policy, energy conservation and information, energy regulation and utilization, regulation of nuclear facilities and waste, the Clean Air Act, and all related Homeland Security issues.

Democrats sat behind a stretch of elevated wood-paneled tables at the front of the assembly room. Chairing this morning’s event was Congresswoman Cassandra Boyd of Texas’s twelfth district.