Kinetic

"What?!" Professor Hanson whipped around and stared, partially at me but mostly at the open lock in my hands. He tore his eyes away to glance at the clock, fourteen minutes. He looked back at me and whispered in awe, "How did you do that?"

I shrugged. "It's a gift..." Which was the truth, and besides, what else could I say?

"That lock was made by guy named Stephan," Hanson said at last, "A grad student of mine. He got his Masters six years ago and went to work for Masterlock. That's a specialty lock. It would cost over $300 apiece to make if Masterlock ever went into production with it. But it's not sold commercially as a padlock. There's no market for such high precision in a padlock."

"Yeah," I commented. "It would be just too easy to bring a plasma torch and slice through the shank."

Hanson nodded. "Exactly... Stephan made a few of these on a whim, as demos for the sales channel..."

"It's the most beautiful lock I've ever seen," I nodded in agreement. And then, a touch of pure bravado. "Very sophisticated... but vulnerable, if you know its weakness."

Hanson blinked and frowned. "Stephan thought it would be unpickable..."

Dang! Had I gone too far?! "Yeah, well... It was a challenge..."

"Yeah... Eric, I just realized sometime. The other kids applying here, if they were curious about how their lock worked, they would just look at combination locks on the web and study diagrams. But not you. You reached for a screwdriver and another lock..."

Professor Hanson took a deep breath. "Eric, what do you want out of life? This isn't a trade school. You'll be firmly in the camp of management if you graduate from here. Is that what you want? You told me about the Union background of your family..."

"If I graduate from here?!" I thought silently. "Whoa!" I tried to collect myself as I realized Professor Hanson was asking me a very thoughtful question. "Oh, there won't be any problem there. The family ties win out. At worst I'll be their spy in an enemy's territory, unless I do something heartless."

He nodded. "At what do you think?"

"About labor versus management? That they need each other, that labor needs the capital market, and capital needs the labor market. The competition is fine! It's a pity though the competition can't be more symbiotic, more win-win..."

Hanson nodded. "Damn Eric! I'll ask you straight. Think you can cut the physics and calculus here? The other kids will be coming in better prepared."

It suddenly occurred to me that I never mentioned all the home schooling I was doing. Professor Hanson's eyes really lit up and he smiled and relaxed when I started to describe my studies.

"What text did you pick?"

"The Feynman lecture series."

"Really?!"

"Oh, I'm hooked on it. Back in my physics class at Exeter, we're still talking torque. It's so boring! Formulas out of nowhere and no explanation of where they're coming from! How can anyone learn physics like that?! You just can't see the true nature of what's happening without the calculus. But on my own, I've just covered Feynman's lecture on the principle of least action. Beautiful stuff! He has such incredibly different ways of looking at things..."

We wound up chatting mechanics for over an hour. It was one of the most enjoyable conversations of my life. Well, except for Melanie of course. I drove home that night in very high spirits.

Chapter 5.

One month later...

Time: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 3:40 PM Eastern Standard Time

I felt my heart leap when I came home from school a few days before my 18'th birthday. Melanie had sent me another letter! I raced upstairs to my bedroom and sat down at my desk to look at it. It had the same strange business with the return address as before. After staring at it for a moment, I opened it and saw that Melanie had sent me a handmade birthday card.

The first drawing had a simple stick figure standing at the apex of a simple triangular mountain, with the title, "Today I am a man!"

The second drawing had the stick figure in a sitting and thinking pose, the head-circle leaning on the line-hand, with the title, "Now, where is my woman?" Underneath the mountain far below was a tiny second figure, lying down and gazing up at the huge figure sitting on the mountain top above it. I smiled and began reading Melanie's short letter.

* Hi Eric, and Happy Birthday!

I hope you'll forgive me for waiting so long to write. So much has been happening here. I should first tell you I am in good health, and have been accepted at Harvard! (Remember I applied for early decision?) Their package came just a few days after I mailed you my December letter.

I had to pay a price of course, but all the immediate uncertainty about college is behind me. I negotiated with my parents, under an end-of-January Harvard deadline for completing all the acceptance forms and mailing in an initial deposit for the tuition. Some serious bucks! That's what convinces me all this is real. My dad and I walked everything to the post office over a month ago. I watched my future hopes go into the mailbox and breathed a huge sigh of relief. The application package even issued me a Student ID, 579040. That makes it seem real too.

And my price for all this? I had to split my personality. This is Melanie #1 who is writing this letter. This is the first time she's been allowed to come out during the daytime in over two months. I'm in Study Hall again, writing you this letter on a cold Friday Illinois morning. I'm sure you'll get this in time for your birthday, probably a few days early.

Eric, I won't reach majority for another five weeks. Please continue not to contact me. I'm still standing on very thin ice, still under very intense supervision.

My parent's price for Harvard? That I become the daughter they've always dreamed of having. That's Melanie #2. Mom threw out all my old clothes in order to please Melanie #2, and got her/me an entirely new wardrobe. I think I'm the only senior at Sterling High going around in clothes that look straight out of Junior High, but... I decided Harvard was worth it.

Remember me in Junior High? All the bright colors? You should see me now, in my canary yellow skirt and argyle knee socks! I even have my hair in pigtails again, just as mom had me do when I was in seventh grade. I even spend time (lots of time!) painting my nails. (You probably wouldn't recognize my toes!)

I've been avoiding my old friends. I think the really important ones have some understanding of the true nature of what's going on and forgive me. At least I hope so. I also have a bunch of new, parent-approved friends, from some the richest families in the Sterling area. Mom's throwing me a birthday party with them when I turn eighteen, my first birthday party ever! Melanie #2 is very excited about that.

Oh Eric, do you forgive me for surrendering? I know and admire your courage. I know you wouldn't have degraded yourself like this, no matter what. But when the decision was before me, I took the easy way out, the one with no yelling and a nice warm bed and meals and a great college and lots of shopping trips with my mom.

My parents love me Eric! They love Melanie #2! I finally know what it feels like to have parents who love me. Poor Patricia! I never understood what a pit of dependency my parents have dug for her, and how deeply she is trapped in the quicksand at the bottom. I used to envy Patty, but I feel so differently now. I pity her.

Eric, I couldn't pull this off as an act. I had to live the part. My true personality had to disappear, truly disappear, at least during the daytime. Melanie #1 comes out only late at night, and she has learned how to cry without making a sound.

Amusing, in a sad sort of way. My parents accused you of brainwashing me, but it is they who are the true practitioners of mind control.

I dream of you Eric, almost every night. I meet you in my dreams, and you hold me and give me strength. Thank you Eric. Thank you for waiting, thank you for holding me in my dreams, thank you for giving me strength, thank you for loving me. I sign myself The True Melanie *

I put down Melanie's letter and shivered, my mind overwhelmed with emotions. I leaned back in my desk chair and close my eyes, trying to calm myself.

After a minute or so I started to scan the desk in front of me as a diversion. There was a loose paper clip on the desk, very near the back edge, and just within the limit of my sense-sphere. The sphere had been growing slowly but exponentially for months, doubling in radius every 31 days and 20 hours, as close as I could measure. It had a current radius of 118 cm. I was expecting it to reach four feet by my birthday.

With my eyes still closed, I dived into the detail of the paper clip, tracing the three simple loops back and forth with my mind. And then my anger at Melanie's parents erupted out of me, and I hissed and PUSHED and... The paper clip disappeared!

"Huh?!" I thought as I opened my eyes. I looked at my desk, no paper clip! "What the hell," I thought. "I can make things disappear too?!"

After a moment I got down on my hands and knees and looked around under the desk. On the rug next to the wall in the back was a paper clip. I was relieved to think it had to be the same one. I picked it up and then sat back in my chair, just thinking for a while.

Had I bumped the desk and knocked the clip off the top? Somehow I didn't think so. I put the clip on the middle of the desk and tried to remember exactly what I was doing when it disappeared. It felt like a new way of sensing...

I finally went back to my anger. I stared at the paper clip and imagined it was owned by Melanie's parents and I PUSHED it and... It moved! Not very fast, but it moved, all by itself!

I was in a whole new ballgame! Passively sensing within my sphere was a huge and wondrous ability, but having the ability to make changes with my mind... Wow! That was a whole new level of pure blow-off-the-socks magic! I started to practice my new skill. Once I learned the trick, it was very easy to do. I moved the paper-clip back and forth and then in slow lazy circles and spirals around the desktop, becoming more and more excited.

Some caution settled in. I would have to be very, very careful. My thoughts are my own. Nobody could ever really see me using my sense-sphere, really be sure of its existence. But this?! Pushing things around?! These were physical changes, not just thoughts. This was visible! I had to be very careful...

I tried to lift the paper-clip up in the air. No dice. I sat thinking for a moment. Time to do a few experiments!

I got out a protractor and measured the angle the clip would start to slide down a tilted plane. With a little trig, that gave me the coefficient of static friction for sliding against a horizontal surface. I then went back to my box of clips to see if I could determine the weight of one clip.

After a little time weighing small piles of clip on my postage scale, I had a few numbers about my new ability. I think one clip weighs 0.43 grams, so it should take 0.0042 Newtons of force to lift it against gravity and based on the protractor experiment 0.0003 Newtons to slide it along the desktop.

I stopped and considered. It was hard to quantity, but I thought I was right at my limit for sliding it, right at one hundred percent of my maximum push. I stretched out the clip into a straight wire and got out my ruler and a wire cutter. I clipped off seven percent of the wire and put in on the desk. Then I tried to push it up.

Nothing happened for a moment, and then very slowly the little piece of wire began drifting off the desktop. I smiled and released the snippet from my push. It fell back immediately. I reached for my cutter and cut the small segment in half. Then I tried again with only 3.5% of the original paper clip.

It worked! It fell upward immediately. I did some timing, and found at maximum push I could get it to fall upward at the same rate it would normally fall. I was exerting a force of two-g on the little sliver of wire. My force of 0.0003 Newtons was causing a net acceleration of one-gravity upward.

I sat back and shuddered. Should I throw all my physics books away? I had just violated the conservation principles of both energy and linear momentum. Energy... That's right. It takes power to do this. My current limit on force seemed to be 0.0003 Newtons. I didn't have the right setup to measure that more accurately. Was there also a limit on how much power I could generate? I started thinking about ways to measure...

I pulled out my stopwatch from my desk, the one I used to time Melanie with when I helped her train for track. Pushing aside the emotions for her for now, I set up a little track of my own, a little imaginary 230 cm vertical track from the floor to the ceiling of my room. If I put my head half-way in between, I could accelerate the tiny wire for the whole trip, having it shoot passed near my nose.

I started writing down a few equations. The kinetic energy as a function of time would be E(t) = .5 m v(t) v(t), where v(t) = a t, so my power into kinetic energy would be dE/dt = m a v(t) and my power into potential energy dP/dt = g m v(t).

I timed the flight of my tiny wire. It went from floor to ceiling in seven tenths of a second, consistent with a constant upward acceleration of one-g. My power into kinetic and potential energy at the end of the flight was the same, about one milli-Watt each. Unfortunately my stopwatch only measured down to tenths of seconds, not very accurate for what I was trying to do...

I stood there thinking about the results. Two milli-Watts? Not much power... But that was only a minimum estimate. I still had no idea of a maximum. How to test... I was so preoccupied I didn't hear dad come home and pause outside my bedroom.

"Hi Eric!"

I jumped. "Oh! Ah... Uh, hi dad!" My dad stared at me, wondering why I was so nervous. He glanced at the stopwatch in my hand. I smiled sheepishly. "Just thinking about a physics experiment... Sorry... Didn't hear you come in..." He gave me a brief nod and kept on going. "Phew!" I thought. "I'll have to be more careful!"

After dinner I showed dad Melanie's latest letter. My dad had grunted and shook his head during Melanie's first letter, but this one he read in silence and was absolutely motionless. When he looked up at me at the end, there was a tear in his eye.

He shook his head. "Talk about a pact with the devil... She made a deal with a pair of 'em... We guessed wrong... about Romeo and Juliet... Melanie and I both guessed wrong..."

"Huh?"

"This is more Faust than Shakespeare. Eric, think! Her parents don't really hate you particularly. They would hate anybody that would allow Melanie to be independent of them."

I shrugged. "Well, they're sending her to Harvard. That's Melanie's path to independence."

My dad frowned. "Yeah... Hell! That doesn't fit the pattern at all! I wonder..." He was silent for a long time. "Eric?"

"Yeah?"

"We never really talked about this, about Melanie. But from her letters... I don't mean to pry, but... How serious are you two about each other?"

I was my turn to be silent for a while. "We love each other. I think of her as my girlfriend, and she thinks of me as her boyfriend. We haven't made any life commitments. We both feel we're not mature enough for that. And we haven't gotten physical with each other, we really haven't. We both want to be more gentle with each other first. Melanie calls it emotional intimacy. We want to develop that first... I guess that's where we are dad..."

My dad nodded and gave me a kind smile. "Sounds like I should expect Melanie to be my daughter-in-law someday..."

"Well... It's still uncertain of course... But yeah... Melanie and I have been dreaming about that since Junior High..."

Our conversation ended soon after. Dad went back to his project of re-grouting the floor tiles in the kitchen, and I went upstairs to finish an English paper that was due the next day. We both sacked out a little after 10 PM.

Chapter 6.

Time: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 7:40 AM Eastern Standard Time

I was riding in the school bus, sitting by myself, feeling a bit tired. I didn't get much sleep the previous night, thinking about Melanie. I had a paper clip in my hand, and I began idly playing with it, stretching it out into a straight wire...

I did a spot check on my sense-sphere, 1.196 meters. I've gotten very good at self- testing; I don't need a ruler anymore. Then I went back to trying to push the paper clip down into my finger, and then up. Could I feel the difference? Maybe... Well, maybe not...

I tried combining my two abilities, my ability to zoom in for detail and my ability to PUSH... Things felt weird for a while, weird... then really weird... and then...

I could see it! No, not see it, feel it, sense it. The paper clip wasn't just simple metal. It was made of a very rigid frame holding a light but very stiff fluid. I suddenly realized that that stiff fluid-like substance must be the free electron population in the metal. I couldn't focus on individual electrons, not even close, probably by twenty orders of magnitude, but I could feel the population. My sense for detail was now allowing me to feel the electron population as a distinct fluid, very light, much lighter than the atomic frame...

Could I PUSH it? Just the fluid? I tried. It was totally impossible. It suddenly occurred to me the fluid had nowhere to go. I bent the straight wire into a circle and tried again. It worked! As I stared at the wire I could feel the effort, sense the electron fluid spinning round and round. Fascinating...

"Eric my man! You on drugs or something?"

I looked up. "Oh, hi Bob! No, just wool gathering. Ready for the math test today?" I spent the remainder of the trip chatting with a friend.

I had a free period that morning. Our history teacher was out sick and the sub hadn't shown up either. The class was asked to go study in the library. I ran ahead and managed to get one of the computer spots. Something dad had said last night about Harvard not fitting the pattern was bugging me. I wanted to look something up. I spent part of my time looking up contact information for Harvard's Registrar Office, and another chuck of time thinking about pushing electrons in wires. About fifteen minutes before the period ended, I slipped out of the library and headed over to the deserted physics lab.

I was in luck. The door was unlocked. There was a nice multi-meter on a lab bench there, locked down so nobody could walk off with it but still usable. I grabbed a 4.7 k- ohm resister and a short piece of medium-gauge copper wire. I connected the wire to both ends of the resister, and then clipped the multi-meter probes to both connection points. I turned the meter to read DC voltage. It showed 0.000 volts. Well, that made sense...

I looked at the clock, 11:20 AM. I probed my sense-sphere. 1.2 meters exactly, as far as I could tell. And then I locked the electrons in the copper wire and I PUSHED, as hard as I could. I could sense them flowing. I glanced over at the multi-meter. It was registering 1.004 volts. I smiled and let go of the electron-fluid and the meter dropped to zero. I put everything back and went to my next class.

I did a short calculation. Power equals voltage squared divided by resistance, so my current maximum power output was 2.15 mW. So... I must have been barely able to do my acceleration experiment last night...

Rather than eat lunch I went outside the school building and got out my cell phone. It was time to verify something. I called up the Harvard Bursar Office.

At first they didn't want to talk with me, even after I gave them Melanie's student ID and social security number. But then I said I wanted to pay for Melanie's tuition deposit, and the guy went to get his supervisor.