The Ragnarö Protocol

Zeb is a world class engineer living a life normally reserved for the super wealthy: traveling to exotic locations and bedding beautiful women. All on someone else's dime.

Then comes The Plague. Fifty million dead worldwide and no end in sight. After more than a year stuck alone in his house, he gets a cryptic offer: solve an impossible problem first and get a million bucks. But the strange missive is just the beginning. His mysterious new employer has loftier plans which will take Zeb around the world, and beyond, in a sexy science fiction adventure.

The Ragnarök Protocol is a tale of erotic science fiction about an engineer who, with the help of his beautiful companions, attempts the impossible in an effort to avert the end of the world. If you're a fan of the science fiction and spy movies of the sixties and seventies, but always wished they didn't fade to black when things got sexy, then this novel is for you.

Author's Note: This is a full novel (~98k words) which I'll attempt to break up into easily consumable sections. All characters are over eighteen. Enjoy!

*****

Chapter 4

I reluctantly opened my eyes to start another day in the hellscape that was my life. I picked up my phone and saw that it was only 5:39 am but I got up anyway. I had not slept for more than four consecutive hours in more than a month. I knew the isolation was getting to me. I rolled out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen to make some coffee, catching my reflection as I passed the bathroom and shaking my head at the stranger looking back at me. It had been more than a year since I had had a haircut or trimmed my beard. For some reason at the beginning of this catastrophe I had declared, to no one in particular, that I would not trim my beard again until I could get a haircut. As I sit down at my computer, I see a notification on my news feed titled,

Day 400

. Who could have guessed that things would have gone on so long?

The scientists called it SARS-CoV-7, but in the beginning, everyone was searching for something to call it which did not sound like the virus which caused the pandemic of 2020. While they were searching for a name it became clear that this virus was orders of magnitude worse than the virus which infected one percent of the world's population a decade ago. This virus was just as infectious as its predecessor which killed almost five million people, but it was much more deadly. The terrible difference this time was, rather than a four percent mortality rate this new virus was closer to twenty five percent. I think it was that terrifying lethality as much as anything which quickly led basically everyone to just call it The Plague.

The people of the world seemed to collectively feel as though they were more prepared this time. We had learned our lesson. Gone were the megalomaniacal, ultra-right-wing fascists who had nearly succeeded in allowing the last virus to turn into a world killer. Now the nations of Earth were seemingly much more rational with a mind towards shared prosperity. When this new virus showed up seemingly everywhere at once, the entire industrialized world was immediately ordered to stay at home. Those in the medical and service industries were given all the protective equipment they could ask for and everyone returned to the isolation model which had been forced upon us once before. We all hunkered down and waited for the vaccine which we hoped our more enlightened and compassionate governments would be able to deliver in the span of months. No one thought it would take so long.

The most depressing part is, if nearly every news source is to be believed, no one is even close to developing a vaccine, or even an effective treatment. So, things just continue, day after hellish day, with no end in sight.

I had not seen another person's face in the flesh in more than a year. Like everyone else, I have a decontamination drop-box installed in my front door. When groceries or packages get dropped off, they get flashed with UV light for thirty seconds to kill anything living on the surface. I took the extra step of turning my foyer into what amounts to a clean room. I sealed off all the openings, save one. I then installed a rudimentary airlock in the final opening, really just two doors with enough space between for me to stand. Whenever I pass through the airlock, I always wear a sealed cowling which encloses my head and, at roughly a half cubic meter, is large enough to hold about ten minutes of air. In the beginning I had a dedicated outfit I wore while in the clean room, but I eventually concluded it was easier to just go in there naked and hose myself down with disinfectant after I was done and before I entered the main house. I had a two-sided refrigerator and two two-sided air-tight cupboards which were built into the wall of the clean room. My rule was: do not open the fridge until it has been closed in the clean room for six hours, and do not open a cupboard until it has been closed in the clean room for three days. Perhaps this all sounds like overkill, but my parents had thought they were being careful, and they passed away before The Plague hit the 200-day mark.

I would occasionally video chat with some friends from school, or my sister. I even chatted with Eva, who was locked down outside Tokyo, every month or so. I knew it was important to keep whatever contact I could with the outside world, but each call is a reminder that I would not see these people in person for the foreseeable future, and perhaps never again.

With no one to spend time with, at least in person, I spent a lot of time working. Amazingly, my skills were still in high demand, I even hired my sister to work as an agent of sorts for me after she got laid off.

*****

Late in the day on what was apparently Day 400 of The Plague, I got a Slack message from my sister asking me to call when I was free. I was still in the middle of a task, but I had hit a wall and was spinning my wheels. Grateful for an interruption, for once, I opened my video conferencing app and clicked her icon. She appeared on the screen moments later.

I said, "What's up Z?" My parents, bog rest their souls, had a thing for Z names and had hung Zoe on my sister after dubbing me Zebadiah We had called each other 'Z' since we were children.

She said, "What was fast. Everything ok?"

"Yeah, I just realized I needed a break. How are Sophie and the kids?"

"They're as well as they can be, considering. Thanks for all your help setting up a clean room for us. I know it cost a fortune that I'll likely never be able to repay but it makes us feel so much safer."

I said, "Anything for my favorite sisters and nephews."

She smiled and said, "So, I got a very strange call a few moments ago. It was from an unidentified number, like not a number I didn't know but the screen just said PRIVATE. But I've got shit-else to do so I picked it up. A sultry sounding woman, think Jessica Rabbit, said, 'Are you the agent for Zebadiah Anson?' I said I was, and she said, 'I have a project that I believe he is uniquely suited for.' I told her I was listening, and she said, 'This project pays one million dollars upon delivery, but it is an unlimited bid. I'm calling all the top engineers-slash-computer-scientists in the world today. Whoever delivers a working product first gets the money. Second place gets nothing.' I told her to send me the info and I'd run it by you, but I didn't make any promises."

I said, "Why not? In this Hell of Being Cut To Pieces I can never count on our next payday. Send me the info and I'll see what we're dealing with."

*****

A few moments later an email arrived from my sister. It contained a one-page PDF which spelled out the terms my sister had outlined. The project in question was a computer-controlled environmental system that was not working as intended, not unlike the project I did in Vegas. The header on the document said, Sinnsyk Industries. I should have known that nutty billionaire would think up a scheme like this to get work done.

In a way it could be brilliant, if the project was complicated enough, he would likely spend that much anyway on time and materials if he bid it out traditionally to one of the big firms. This way, he got a solution the quickest and avoided paying for any overhead since everyone who failed to win the prize ended up wasting their time.

I closed out what I had been working on, sending the PM a quick message saying I would be taking a few personal days before downloading the project file from the Sinnsyk file repository. Something felt like it was missing, then I realized that I had not signed an NDA or gone through the laborious process of setting up secure access. Whatever Sinnsyk needed done was evidently complicated enough that they were more worried about a quick solution than intellectual theft.

As I scanned through the project files and internalized the scope of the project, I realized the combination of The Plague and the unlimited nature of the project was the perfect scenario for me to lose myself in my work. I made another cup of coffee and got to work.

Twenty-four hours later I pushed back from my desk and stumbled towards my bed. I had heavily leveraged the work I did for the Vegas project, but I still could not make the simulations perform up to spec. And I was not even close. I understood now why Sinnsyk was using this unconventional strategy to find a solution. I fell into bed, hopeful that some sleep would help me focus but I found I could not fall asleep despite my exhaustion. I finally pulled out my e-reader and started reading a bit of classic science fiction before I finally drifted off to sleep.

*****

When I woke up, I glanced at my phone and saw I had been asleep for ten hours. I could not remember the last time I slept for so long. I thought that perhaps I should work for twenty-four hours straight more often, or maybe it was the pulpy novel about a group of kids and their Scoutmaster building a ship to fly to the Moon that did it.

As I had that thought, inspiration struck me. Maybe that crazy asshole was designing a system to work in that space habitat he was always talking about building on the Moon. That could explain why the system refused to behave as it should. I made some more coffee and grabbed a banana before sitting down to work.

By the time the sun came up the next morning I knew my hunch had been right. If I changed all the assumptions inherent in the control software to a closed system using the gravitational constant on the Moon, the behavior in the simulation started making sense. But even though the system no longer burned itself out constantly when running the simulation, I was still getting failures.

I realized as I stared unmoving at my screen for the tenth consecutive minute that I was starving. I had only had a banana to eat in the last 36 hours. I got up from my desk and made myself a gourmet meal of a half dozen eggs scrambled together with a half a pound of crisped bacon chopped fine, sautéed green onions and potatoes. I topped it all off with a handful of shredded cheese.

After I was pleasantly stuffed, I sat back down at my desk and blew out a long breath before once again being struck by inspiration. Maybe the problem was the system was being used for another purpose than the one I was assuming. Even once I figured out it was on the Moon; I had still been assuming that the system would be used to heat and cool a closed environment based on the phases of the sun. Those pulpy science fiction books were full of descriptions of how the Moon's surface oscillated by hundreds of degrees based on whether it was in sunlight or shade. But if this system was being used more than a few meters underground then it would probably be similar to a cave here on Earth. So, I asked myself, why would you need an environmental system which could handle a million cubic meters of air a day if you did not need to heat or cool the air?

Obviously, in hindsight the answer is ridiculously straightforward, but it took me another day of staring helplessly at my screen before I figured it out. They were using a commercial environmental control system, built for heating and cooling, to work in tandem with the system which scrubs the CO

2

and replenishes the O

2

. It would stand to reason that a system built to move mass quantities of air should be able to handle the job they had in mind, but I suspected the problem was about the control interface. A typically environmental system is built to respond to departures from preset fault tolerances. If it gets too hot, or too cold, the system takes action to correct the unacceptable condition. The system continues taking the same action until the unacceptable condition no longer exists.

The thing many people do not understand about modern environmental systems is that they typically only spend about 10% of their total effort on the interior of the building. Most buildings lose the vast majority of their heating or cooling through the windows or doors, so modern systems focus their energy there. But if you ran an O

2

replenishment system the same way, people in certain parts of the structure would pass out from hypoxia while those in other parts would be drunk with hyperoxia.

This system would necessitate CO

2

and O

2

sensors in every space, but the control software would also have to be rebuilt to remove all the intelligence which intentionally imbalanced the airflow. Now that I knew what to do, I got to work.

*****

Over the following twelve days I averaged five hours of sleep per day and spent the rest working. And it was the happiest I had been in a year. While I worked, the only time I thought about The Plague was when I had to process a delivery which happened every day or so. The rest of the time I spent writing an environmental control system from scratch.

It only took me a few days to scrap the idea of rewriting the existing system. There were just too many inherent assumptions in the code. It also was not built to work with the increased variables needed in a colony in space. This new system needed to keep all the spaces at the correct temperature, as well as maintain a high enough oxygen level to keep everyone alive while keeping the level low enough to minimize the fire hazard. As part of the design, I would include the specs for a sensors needed to provide all the necessary information to the master control system but this was extra credit and not part of the simulation I had to pass to earn the prize.

Once I settled on the idea of writing the software from scratch the process became very straightforward for my engineer's mind. I could visualize the entirety of the project, I just needed to write it all down in the language of computers.

At the end of the sixteenth day after Zoe had called to tell me about the contest, I ran the simulation again with the new control system I had written. The first time I ran the simulation it had errored out immediately. The last time I had ran it, before I decided to rewrite the software from scratch, it had errored out after twenty minutes. This time it ran for almost three hours before a single word appeared on my screen. It said, 'WINNER'

Chapter 5

I heard the chime from my front door, which confused me since no deliveries were scheduled for today. I opened an app on my laptop which showed me live video of the front door and my jaw nearly hit the floor. Standing outside my door was a clearly buxom, fit woman but I was unable to draw any further conclusions. She was wearing a skintight red suit which covered her entire body except below her knees, which were encased in deep blue boots, and her head, which was encased in a helmet of the same blue color. The helmet seemed roughly the size of a motorcycle helmet, but it was shaped differently: like it was not meant to protect from blunt force. She was standing with a hand on her hip, her body language broadcasting her impatience. As I stared at the image on my screen, she pressed the door chime again. I clicked the speaker button on my surveillance app and said, "Yes?"

She said, "I'm with Sinnsyk Industries. I'm here to arrange for your reward. Can I come in?"

My trained response kicked in before my conscious brain even registered what she had said. I responded, "Of course not."

She put her other hand on her hip and said, "Why not? We're talking about a pretty substantial prize here."

I said, "I don't mean to be rude, but there's kind of a Plague going on right now. That door in front of you hasn't opened in more than a year and I have no intention of exposing myself to the virus now."

She said, "Oh that. Well perhaps we can come to some kind of arrangement, but I'd rather not do this through your front door. Write this down." She held a card up to the camera with a phone number printed on it before continuing, "Text me your video conferencing link and password so I can talk from the comfort of my vehicle," and she walked away.

I created a one-time conference room and texted the info to the number she provided before starting the conference. She joined a few moments later.

She started by saying, "Mr. Anson, I assume?"

I nodded.

She continued, "You don't look much like the picture we had on file."

I said, "It's been a while since I've been to see my stylist. Can't you guys just wire me the money?"

"It's not really that simple. I wish I could explain this face-to-face. I hate these video conferences, so impersonal."

"What exactly is it you want from me?"

She said, "I've been instructed to present a rather lucrative offer. But I have no intention of doing this over the phone, or even video conference. This would really be easier if I could come inside. I've been authorized to offer you a ten-million-dollar guarantee against exposing you to the Plague."

"What are you

talking

about?"

She said, "We knew you would be reluctant to break your isolation after so long. So, we've established a ten-million-dollar term life insurance policy, for the next ninety days. I assure you we have been quite cautious with respect to this virus, and I personally guarantee that you won't get it from me. But this is our way of putting our money where our mouth is."

"I can't spend the money if I'm dead. Why should I believe you? I don't even know your name or anything about you."

She said, "My name is Hadley Kristiansen. I'm director of special projects for Sinnsyk Industries. As to the rest, I think that's up to you. The million for solving the challenge is yours regardless. But I've been authorized to offer you significantly more than money, although there will be plenty of that. You have two choices here, Mr. Anson. Option one, you take the million and spend the rest of your days wondering what you missed out on. Option two, you let me in and find out just how much Sinnsyk is prepared to offer you. You take a chance either way, I leave it to you."

I was genuinely tempted by her proposition. Not just because of the money, or whatever else she was going to offer, but also because it had been more than a year since I had seen another person in three dimensions. I also knew my desire to do something, anything, to break out of the same-shit-different-day hellscape that was my life was definitely influencing my thinking. In the end, I said, "If you make it twenty-five million, and six months, then I'll take the red pill."

She said, "Deal. I'll email you the policy information. And we can deposit the one-million-dollar reward for the contest before I come inside if you like."

I said, "That can wait until I hear what else you have to say. Give me a few minutes to get things ready. It's 9:21 now, why don't we say 9:30?"