Fusion Laboratories
A private research company on the Rock, chasing the energy of the stars. On paper, it studies clean power. Underneath, it keeps something it cannot explain.
- Founded
- 1968
- People
- About 140, including 32 scientists
- Field
- Fusion energy and plasma physics
- Site
- Labs above ground, three levels below
What they study
Fusion Laboratories was set up in 1968 to chase the same promise as every fusion lab of its day: the power of the sun, made safely on Earth. Its physicists build magnetic bottles for gas hotter than the core of the sun, test metals that have to survive that heat, and run a small doughnut-shaped reactor that everyone in the building calls the Ring. The annual report talks about clean power for a small territory. Most of that is true.
What they keep
In 1979 a sealed lead case arrived from a research programme in Paris that had shut down without warning. Inside is Specimen 7, a dark sliver no longer than a finger. No two instruments agree on what it weighs. It stays warm on cold nights, and the staff who have worked near it say the lights flicker when the case is opened. Fusion has never published a word about it.
Where it is kept
Below the public labs, the site runs down into old wartime tunnels cut deep into the limestone. The paperwork says Specimen 7 is stored on Level 3, the lowest floor, in a lead-lined vault that needs two keys and two people to open. Officially, Level 3 holds archive boxes. Nobody below a senior grade has been past its door.
Two of its physicists
