The Killswitch; Return of the True Heir

The Discovery

Shaky pale hands grabbed a small container on the drawer and popped it open and took two pills and put it into his mouth before taking water.

Cassiel let out a shaky breath as he wiped the beads of sweat on his forehead. He had overworked himself these past few days because of the contract he couldn't let anything go wrong. He had fainted in the office before Darcy had threatened him to take the day off. That's why he was at home.

He sat down on the chair and opened his laptop and went into a site. His fingers dancing across the keyboard then he took a pause and took his glass case and wore his glasses, the silver frame glinting from the reflection of his laptop screen. Then he resumed typing, windows bloomed across the screen each replacing the last before it could be fully read. Then streams of green characters raced down the terminal, punctuated by the status bar that filled and disappeared almost instantly. Then a warning flashed across the screen.

Authentication required. He smiled briefly before working magic with his fingers and then a progress indicator appeared on the screen, showing verifying and bypassing.

Access level updated

He tapped on a key and in the next second the warning vanished. ACCESS GRANTED flashed across his glasses and then strings of words appeared on the screen. He continued typing away. Then he checked his time.

" Oh shoot, it's 11." He shut the encrypted window with a single. The dark interface went with it alongside the endless streams of notifications, coded messages and pending authorisation. Finally the room was silent and the clicking of keyboards could no longer be heard. He leaned back on his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose, his glasses going up a bit. His mind was now somewhere else. He opened another folder on his computer. It wasn't business related, it was a long list of documents bearing the same name.

PROJECT ORION.

Iteration 031.

Iteration 110.

Iteration 077.

Iteration 111.

Iteration 099.

Iteration 122.

Iteration 116.

Iteration 222.

His cursor lingered over the last file before he clicked on it. The document filled the screen. It was pages after pages of densely packed equations with matrices stretching across the pages . And integrals interned with differential equations, entire sections had been crossed out in red, and were replaced with handwritten notes that had been scanned back into the document. Some pages contained a single equation, while others were crowded with symbols that left barely an inch of white space.

Near the top of the top page just beneath the title a sentence was typed in bold italic.

Objective: Determine whether a stable non linear quantum information lattice can preserve coherence beyond current computational limits without exponential energy loss.

Beneath the writeup was an equation he had spent a very long period of time trying to reconcile.

A thick red line stretched through the expression. One could infer that it meant that was probably wrong.

His eyes drifted lower, there were pages filled with eigenvalue decompositions, tensor transformations and probability distributions and complex matrices. Somewhere around page forty three the document read: assumption fails under recursive lattice collapse. He left it there and reached beneath the desk and pulled out a storage box, it looked weathered with age. The cardboard edges were a bit soft. Inside lay hundreds of loose sheets of paper every single one of them were bathed in equations, Some were folded in half while others had coffee stains on it. He spread them across the desk until there was barely any enough room for his laptop.

One sheet contained nothing but matrices and another was filled with vector field diagrams. Several pages had circles connected by arrows each leading to a different assumption but it all seemed to lead to some sort of confusion or bottleneck progress.

He picked up one sheet scanning through it and picked up another one and repeated the same process with several other sheets. His movement became faster like he was about to discover something. Then finally he stopped.

" Finally...finally if I can just..."

He stared into the old paper that it felt like he could borough a hole through the paper, he stared at a particular sentence that was almost impossible to see.

"....Of course." He whispered, sounding like he had finally found the missing piece. He picked up a fresh sheet of paper and instead of continuing from his previous calculations he drew one big horizontal line across it and then another one.

Then he began writing in a not so clean order. Underlining some things and branching some and using arrows to connect some to another as he wrote, putting some expression in a bracket or a box and lines that stretched across the sheet.

He was writing increasingly fast, he seemed to have unlocked a puzzle and was getting answers after answers.

Minutes turned into an hour and the lights in his room began to flicker as rain tapped softly against his windows.

Cassiel didn't notice that. He was staring intently at everything he had written. Everything was making much more sense now, he had struggled with finding a way forward with this and finally he had made a breakthrough.

He leaned back on his chair and took in a deep breath, taking off his glasses and putting it back into his case.

His phone rang and he picked it up.

" Yes ?"

" Sir, have you gotten the document from the chairman?" The person the line said.

" No, I'll get it now and send it to you in a few." The line went dead.

He stood up and made his way to his father's study leaving the door slightly ajar. The study was quite simple, there was a chair and a desk with a laptop on it and a few books and on one side there was an entire lineup of different wines and alcohol. With a drawer close to the desk and by the other side of the study was a bunch of books carefully arranged in a shelf, his father had never gone there that belonged to Lady Fran the woman of the house. That was her exclusive library.

He checked the deal for the document he came to take, not finding it anywhere, then he went to the drawer and checked there.

" Finally found it." He said. He stood up and put his phone into his pocket and crosschecked the document.

His eyes went to the book shelf, he strode to it and ran his hands through the books and then he randomly pulled out and opened it, going through the pages and then something fell out of the book.

" What the fu." He bent down and picked it up and a bracelet fell out of it, a look of familiarity brushed through his face.

" How?How can this be here?" This was his bracelet, he had lost it during his days in the orphanage, he had lost it when the orphanage had been robbed. He opened the envelope from which the bracelet fell from. His hands shook and a look of disbelief on his face. There were about five photos and documents.

" Fuck." He hissed his breath and brought out his phone and took snaps of everything he saw.

" Cassiel!!!" Sariah's voice rang through the house.

" Shit." He cussed under his breath. Then he quickly put it back inside the envelope and inside the book and into the shelf and quickly left the study and headed straight into his room and opened his laptop with his equations greeting him.

" Cassiel!!" She shrieked, opening his door wildly.