Elk Ridge, MD - 3 January 2028
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Assassination
Jacqueline Stein’s every waking action for the past three and a half months had been leading up to this moment. Maybe it went even further back than that. In any case, from the safety of the shed in her backyard, she was about to assassinate the president of the United States of America. With a complicated piece of homebrew technology, some carefully quintuple-checked mathematics, a car battery, and a dash of hope - she would succeed, and hopefully spark the revolution her country so desperately needed.
As she was setting up the machine she had spent the last days and weeks creating, Jacqueline thought back over the steps that had brought her to this point. It all started in 2025. That was the year the nodes had appeared, but even before that, the president had removed term limits via executive order, and the supreme court appointed by him upheld the decision. Congress had had its powers steadily reduced over the previous four years, so there was effectively nothing to stop the blatant authoritarian power grab. The government put together a multi-department task force when the nodes appeared in order to conduct research on the nodes, and in September 2025 the task force published “The Node Report” containing their findings and setting forth the official system for classifying the nodes into different types. Based on this report, government agencies, private corporations, and even individual hobbyists took to developing technology making use of the nodes.
Jacqueline had started experimenting with the node in her shed even before the Report was published, trying to get it to respond to various stimuli like flashlights and batteries and random objects from around the shed. When the Report was published and she had access to the declassified research of Drs. Arnold Drof and Elizabeth Schrieb, among others, Jacqueline dived deeper into her experimentation. She managed to hook herself up to 5G data networks for free through the node, gaining untraceable access to the internet. In early 2026, however, a government mandate was released requiring everyone to report the location of any known nodes so that they could be connected to a national array.
Jacqueline’s parents had mobility difficulties, so they did not get out back to the shed very much, instead sending her if they ever needed anything, so they were unaware of the floating yellow pyramid of light that she had been tinkering with for months. They were under the impression she was working with the old riding mower that was in there. Whether her parents would if they knew about it or not, Jacqueline certainly wasn’t going to report the node to the obviously corrupt government. When men in suits eventually came to their door asking about the node energy readings they were getting from their property, she made up some excuse about there being a high density of nodes at her high school (which there were) and trace energy must have built up in her body. They scanned her and her excuse seemed to check out, and they clearly weren’t at a pay or education grade to question why the same thing wouldn’t have happened with every student at her school.
Safe to continue her tinkering, Jacqueline had begun to look into what more could be done with the nodes. She tried reaching out to Dr. Arnold Drof, the head researcher on the Node Task Force, but he didn’t return any of her emails, and after the third or fourth attempt, she started getting “unable to deliver message” notifications. She took to hobbyist forums, but much of the activity there had died down since the national arrayment, as tinkering with arrayed nodes was nigh impossible and far more dangerous. She did find out from one such forum however that Dr. Elizabeth Schrieb had left the Node Task Force in disgrace and had supposedly been open to sharing information when contacted. Jacqueline looked for more concrete evidence of these claims, and a few articles turned up mentioning Dr. Schrieb’s departure from the task force after she wrote some sort of journal about the nodes giving her visions, and she was deemed too unstable to continue on the project. Given the nature of the current government regime, Jacqueline was inclined to believe there was something more to the story, and after finding a forum post from a user “RAMIEL77” with an email address supposedly belonging to Dr. Schrieb, she reached out.
Dr. Schrieb had responded and was glad to elaborate on the nature of her departure from the task force, after ensuring that they both were on secure connections. Certifying the security of the connection was actually somewhat of a process, as Jacqueline explained her untraceable internet connection and Dr. Schrieb called it “easily detected child’s play” before sending an encrypted document. In a separate email from a different address, she sent the password for the file, which had instructions for setting up a node-to-node data transfer system. Finally, in a third email she sent the node ping address for Jacqueline to connect to so they could communicate completely off-grid, and then they finally got down to business. Jacqueline had actually printed out Dr. Schrieb’s first substantial communication and hung it above her computer station in the shed because it had resonated with her so strongly. As she connected jumper cables from an old car battery to bolts on the side of her device, she read over that message again.
> “Jacqueline-
>
> We are truly living in an authoritarian state. I’m sure you no longer have any doubt of that, but there are many who do. I’m also sure there were many people in Germany in the thirties that didn’t think things were really all that bad.
>
> I left the Node Task Force of my own volition. I had my initial doubts after learning that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security were both intending to weaponize the nodes, even as we barely knew anything about them yet, but at that point I stayed on because I knew the work I was doing would enrich the lives of people around the world. Once I learned about their project codenamed “Solomon” I knew I had to leave.
>
> This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
>
> Using my research, the DoD and DHS were developing the very surveillance system you and I are now avoiding. Not only that but they were prototyping the domestic weaponization of that same system, might I reiterate with my research.
>
> Before I could whistleblow about any of this, my superiors saw fit to leak my personal speculations outside the realm of my concrete research, in a successful effort to take away my credibility. Let me clear: I did write the so-called “Ramiel Journal,” but it is not reflective of my understanding of concrete scientific processes, nor of my careful separation of my personal life and beliefs and my dutiful conduction of professional work.
>
> In any case, with no way to sway the public opinion, I am very glad to be able to work with you, and I hope that together we might undo the damage my research has unwittingly caused.
>
> To be perfectly frank, the concise and important answer to your question, “what are the nodes truly capable of?” is this: Everything, anything, and most importantly, destruction. I have reason to believe the government will carry out acts of domestic terror utilizing the nodes in order to manufacture a world war. With revolutionary movements on the rise abroad, they see an opportunity to rile up our country with nationalism and “restore order” to foreign countries.
>
> You want to know what more you can do with the node in your shed? You can stop that from happening. You can kill, Jacqueline Stein.
>
> Are you willing to do it?
>
> —Elizabeth”
Jacqueline remembered the shock she felt when she first read those final lines. She was only seventeen at the time, (in the months since then she had had her birthday, barely pausing her work to acknowledge it) and had certainly daydreamed of killing a few public figures, but she had never really considered that she might one day be asked to do it. What shocked her more than Dr. Schrieb’s email however, was how readily and quickly she had replied back, “I’m willing.” After that, the time seemed to fly by as she learned the nature of her Gadreel-class node and worked with Dr. Schrieb to develop the machine around it that now engulfed nearly half of the interior of her shed. It wasn’t until they were several months into working together that Jacqueline paused to ask herself why Dr. Schrieb had been so ready to share her secrets with her, and considering the amicable relationship they had established by then, she decided to ask. Jacqueline had generally thought of Elizabeth as a woman of hard facts and reason, so the answer she received surprised her a little:
> “It just felt right. I will admit, sometimes things with the nodes just… feel a certain way. That’s how it was when I got your first email. Of course, I also ran an extensive background check on you, and I did occasionally lurk on the hobbyist pages when they first started up, so at least as a concept of a person, you weren’t a complete stranger to me by the time I decided to really get into all this with you.”
Over the course of their working together since then, Jacqueline came to realize there was a certain spirituality to some of the things Dr. Schrieb did, or the way she said certain things, but it was always counterbalanced with her trained academic sensibility. Whatever the proportions of vague spirituality to science, the work continued at nearly unbelievable pace for weeks and months. As their labors were finally coming to fruition though, time felt slowed. With the machine powered and the data cables connected between it and her computer, the homebrew photon cannon primed, and the node encapsulated within a solar shield, all that was left to do was to turn on the live stream of the president’s speech and wait for the right moment.
Together, Jacqueline and Dr. Schrieb had carefully calculated the exact geographical coordinates, including the height above sea level, of a particular point in space above the president’s desk in the Oval Office. There would only be one chance to activate the machine, as most of its components would be destroyed in use, so they needed to take a sure shot. After watching countless hours of press conferences and presidential speeches, they concluded that the most reliable position to calibrate the machine to would be sixteen and a half inches above the president’s desk, five and three quarter inches in from the front lip, where the president would regularly rest his head on his clasped hands while talking in televised speeches.
Jacqueline had the stream muted, as listening to the president made her sick, but she was watching more intently than she had watched anything in her life. Less than three minutes into the broadcast, he leaned forward and his head was in position. Jacqueline unmuted the stream and pressed the enter key on her keyboard to activate the weapon. The attack was instantaneous, but even with 5G speed there would be a two second delay before she saw the result on the stream. She heard the president say the word “beautiful” and in an awful and awesome way, it truly was. As the machine filling the room around her ruptured at its seams, letting the yellow light of the Gadreel node envelop the shed freely again, so too the president’s head ruptured at its seams, his bright red blood spraying out over the desk and even splattering the camera before the stream was cut.
Jacqueline Stein had just microwaved the brain of the president of the United States of America, at the touch of a button, from thirty miles away.
She sat in shock for a long while as the fried husk of the machine started a handful of small electrical fires. Jacqueline had been so caught up in the science and engineering and ideals of the work she and Elizabeth had been doing for so long that she never really stopped to consider the weight and personal implications of things. She was fairly confident from near the beginning that she would never be caught since the action had been completely untraceable and the machine destroyed itself in the process, but it hadn’t really clicked for her that that did not mean she wasn’t a murderer. She had carried out a completely justified killing of a horrible dictator who had allowed millions to die needlessly under his authority, but it was still a killing. At this point it then hit her that she would probably have to kill again if this successfully sparked the revolution she had hoped for. On that note, she decided she would need to step outside her head for a minute and take things one moment at a time before she got lost in retroactive introspection and the whole shed burned down. As she finally stood and got the fire extinguisher from the corner, she saw a node communication from Dr. Schrieb pop up on her second monitor.
Halfheartedly aiming the extinguisher in the general direction of the various small blue flames around the shed, she looked at the message. No subject line, and only two words in the body:
> “Thank you.”