The Demonstration

Sometime around 2030 an individual living in the United States of America, a large and powerful nation of Earth at that time, began working on a little-studied form of fusion power. Following the work of Dr. Robert Goddard, an early space and nuclear power pioneer. This individual, who's name is lost to history, achieved breakthrough success in 2040. By 2045 this person, recorded in surviving records only as "Father", was ready to demonstrate a practical, commercial, portable fusion power system. The system was portable in the sense that it was small enough to move without disassembly. Weighing in at a minimum of 20 tons it was not, in any sense, easy to move, but it could be used to power a large freighter or military vessel, or scaled up to power a city. The demonstration took place on a small barrier island about five kilometers off shore near the small city of Brownsville, Texas. Something went terribly wrong at this demonstration, and for years there was speculation that the demonstration was sabotaged. The practical result was the death of both mother and father of seven young adult sisters, as well as over one hundred of the most elite among the world's wealthy and powerful.

Less than thirty days later, on June 14th, 2045, the Pleiades Corporation was formed.

From the very start there was rampant speculation that the demonstration was somehow sabotaged. The system demonstrated was a modified Inertial Electrostatic Confinement technology, using terahertz wave induction heating and a largely aneutronic modified lithium cycle chemistry. This type of system is inherently very safe, and the unit was contained within a well shielded protective enclosure. In a failure scenario the system should have cooled to relatively safe temperatures nearly instantly, and emitted almost no measurable neutron or ionizing radiation. Instead the containment somehow failed in a tightly localized point after the device accelerated out of control to over one hundred times design power. The failure emitted a tightly focused plume of supersonic plasma at a temperature close to seven hundred keV (or about seven billion degrees kelvin) that stretched over one thousand meters. This failure happened to direct the plasma in the worst possible direction, directly toward the hydrogen fuel storage cylinders, and the shock cones formed in the plasma caused a minor nuclear detonation with a yield of nearly ten kilotons TNT. The nature of the event and structural elements of the test facility limited radioactive impacts to a radius of less than one kilometer, but there was no possibility that any individual then present could survive the blast, which leveled a number of poorly constructed beach-side structures on shore, fifteen kilometers away, and sent a three meter tsunami wave into the Brownsville harbor, destroying a large number of boats and ships.

The Sisters were not present for their Father's demonstration, a fact often used by conspiracy theorists to suggest the Sisters themselves may have been partly responsible. In fact all seven Sisters were employed in positions that forbade their presence that day, but this did not slow the speculation. The Sisters were notified quickly, of course, and were, surprisingly, able to marshal the family assets to establish the Pleiades Corporation shortly thereafter. The Pleiades Corporation produced a working production model of the device, capable of five hundred megawatts nominal output, within another three months, and demonstrated it successfully late in the year. Within a year after that, supported by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of orders, the corporation demonstrated the first practical fusion rocket propulsion system, with a thrust of one hundred twenty giganewtons, the engine, which weighed only thirty five tons, was capable of lifting over two thousand tons of payload to earth orbit, and could operate for over twenty hours continuous maximum thrust with only one hundred tons of fuel. The era of rapid and unlimited solar exploration was begun, and the fortunes of the Pleiades Corporation secured.