Kinetic

Seven months later.

Time: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 10:44 PM

"Mark!" I said, "89,000,000 kilometers."

Melanie nodded. "And how long to the end of the fifth rotation?"

"Another fourteen minutes." We both sat around quietly in our lunar palace, waiting to see if there would be a sixth rotation, and wondering what it would be like.

Over the last few months I've spruced up our "home away from home" quite a bit. Melanie asked me to install a gateway to the outside, mostly from a spirit of altruism. If we were to suddenly die, future generations would perhaps one day discover this site, and they would probably find 25,000 cubic meters of water very useful. So I have two sets of double-airlocks with a small storage area in between. There are now six airtight doors between us and the vacuum of space, and the system is set up mechanically such that for each door, the other five have to be sealed closed before the sixth door can be opened.

I delighted Melanie over the Easter break by presenting her a wireless internet connection for her laptop in the lunar library. She stared at me quizzically and asked me how it was possible. I replied I was duplicating the signals of our home's wireless router in Cambridge up here in the library, and also duplicating the response of the laptop's network card back on Earth.

The present led to an interesting discussion about causality and the speed of light. We did a few experiments. My sense sphere is instantaneous knowledge, another of Einstein's fundamental principles crushed by my abilities. We recently added our cordless phones to the hook-up. Melanie and I have both gotten used to talking with friends and work colleagues from here, when people call our home.

And I tried an idea from an old sci-fi story I once read. I built a 100-meter radius hemisphere, and Melanie and I tried to fly with strap-on wings. No dice! We were still far too heavy. But then I added a touch of force, reducing the apparent gravity to 1% of Earth's surface. It was fabulous! And very good exercise too. But even with the exercise, Melanie and I try not to spend more than 25% of any week up here. We wonder about the effect of the low gravity on our bodies.

And our lives back on Earth? Delightfully normal. We are both social animals, enjoy working with others, going out to dinners and concerts, leading normal lives. Melanie has just completed her third year of med school, one more to go before getting her M.D.

I'm at a standstill with my Earth cleaning project. I can't do much more without attracting attention to my activities. I have idle dreams of terraforming the moon or Mars. Creating a planet from scratch is well beyond my abilities. At my maximum matter creation rate, it would take me over seventy million years to create an Earth. But I could re-create Earth's entire atmosphere in 25,000 days, a lifetime of work but doable. The question is; where to put it?

The moon just doesn't have the gravity to hold a long-term atmosphere. Mars is a possibility I guess. Its gravity is 38% of Earth's, still not great. Any atmosphere I produce there would have a half-life of 50 to 100 million years, assuming I heated the core and spun the iron to produce a protective magnetic field. Is that good enough? Create a world that would last a hundred million years perhaps and then die? Melanie and I have chatted about this quite a bit. Of course, such a change would be visible from Earth. It would drive the scientists here crazy. No, I take that back. It would drive everyone here crazy.

Mars' last closest approach to Earth occurred on December 18, 2007. The next closeout approach occurs in another eight months, on January 29, 2010. The closest approach after that is on March 3, 2012. So February of 2011, that's my target month to add a bit of atmosphere and water to Mars, assuming my sphere of influence reaches that far by then. It's the month Mars will be eclipsed by the sun, so the change itself will be hidden.

Melanie's parents continue to be a real mystery. The five of us will be touring Italy this summer. That should be fun. But the parents also visited us for a few days in April. They saw what close and loving relationships Melanie, Patricia, and I have for each other. It drove Melanie's mom nuts. Her dad seemed okay with it, but her mom was trying all her old ways to get Melanie and Patricia to compete with each other, and it just wasn't working. The parents wound up leaving a day early, and mom didn't even try to hide her frustration.

The parents have kept their promise regarding Melanie's tuition. They've faithfully paid for the first three years, and they said they will pay for the fourth. It's no longer a critical issue for us. My wife and I have over $80k of legal liquid assets now, and we're even talking about starting to pay off Melanie's old $100k undergrad loans. And with my abilities, it would be easy to launder cash into visible assets if I had to. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition # 22: A wise man can hear profit in the wind. I looked at my darling wife and smiled. Life is good.

I gulped. Melanie looked back at me. The time was 10:58 PM. She reached over and held my hand. "Well?"

After a few seconds I replied, "Everything's still here. I haven't lost anything."

Melanie nodded and rested her head on my shoulders. Within a minute I knew how the sixth rotation was starting. "My gosh Melanie, I'm in full growth mode again."

She blinked. "Everything?"

I retested just to be sure. "Yeah, everything."

Melanie was silent for a while, just holding me. And then she kissed me. "You okay with this?"

I sighed. "It's not as if I have a choice. And it's not as if I'm becoming an over inflated balloon. I don't have to use the power if I don't want to."

"Oh, I know." Melanie hugged me. "Still, I know your heart Eric. I think you were hoping things would slow down for a while. I think you were feeling you had enough of this."

I tried to make a joke. "Yeah... Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #97 seems to be in play here. Enough is never enough."

Melanie smiled, and then gave me a very affectionate and playful kiss. "Perhaps the same is true for love. Come! Let's go to bed and find out!"

Chapter 33

One and a half years later.

Time: Friday, December 31, 2010 11:33 PM Eastern Standard Time

Melanie and I and the rest of the house decided to sack out early and not wait up for New Years. I was lying with my wife in my parents' house in Exeter PA. Patricia and her boyfriend Jim are sleeping downstairs. The house became quiet a half hour ago.

So much has happened this year. Melanie got her M.D. degree, and is spending a fifth year at Harvard doing genetic research. She's also applied to a three-year residency program at Boston Children's Hospital. We submitted all the paperwork in October. Melanie is very hopeful, and I'm sure the Harvard staff has written glowing references for her. I think it's in the bag.

This year has been a real transition with Melanie's parents. Our trip last year to Italy was very frustrating for Melanie's mom. But this summer we all went to Hawaii, and Patricia brought along Jim, an assistant professor at Boston University. Melanie's parents, and her mom in particular, are finally resigned about the issue of Patricia dominating Melanie. At least I think they are.

Finance wise we have no worries. Melanie has a full post-doc research grant for this year, and she'll get over $60k per annum as a resident starting in June. And her parents made us and interesting offer last fall. They offered to pay off 10% of our student debt if we paid off the rest. Melanie and I had been discussing paying it down anyway, and given our healthy cash flows, we decided to accept the present.

So now we have about $10k in blue money, $20k in gray money (our nickname for my IRA and 401k accounts), $1.3 M in U.S. cash, and our only debt is the $233k remaining on our mortgage. Even ignoring the platinum and euros, we're in fine shape.

And my kinetic abilities! This sixth rotation has been very interesting. The first period was full growth, then seventeen periods of growth only on my sense-sphere radius, and now I'm back to full growth. The last period of the sixth rotation started eleven days ago, and will end on January 21, 2011, at 5:54 PM.

Currently my sense-sphere is over three light-years in radius and I can lock photons as low as 158 Hertz. My maximum force is at 9.3e25 Newtons and power output 1.08e28 Watts, 120 mega-tons of matter per second. At the end of my sixth rotation, I think I'm going to terra-form Mars.

By that time I should be able to produce 791 mega-tons per second. At that rate, it will take me about fifty-six days to build up a Martian atmosphere to an Earthlike standard pressure. Mar's atmosphere will be a lot thicker than Earth's. It has to be. With a surface gravity of 38% of Earth's and its smaller radius, there has to be about 2.7 times as much air above to exert the same pressure. But the thicker atmosphere will serve a very useful purpose. I plan to push the CO2 concentrations above 400 ppm, providing a thick thermal blanket to trap the heat.

I'll be spending the rest of March and April creating Martian water. I'll be able to produce 79% of a cubic kilometer of water every second, more if my power limit keeps growing. That's a minimum of two million cubic kilometers by the end of April, enough to create some shallow seas. I also plan to liquefy the iron core and spin it. I'll need a magnetic field to protect the atmosphere from being stripped by the solar wind.

Melanie was dozing by my side, breathing easily and more than half asleep. We got here to Exeter yesterday evening, after spending Christmas in Sterling Illinois at a big family reunion hosted by Melanie's parents. Her parents can be so nosey sometimes, and in the strangest ways. They asked about our itinerary several times during our stay, and had even called here late this evening to be sure we had arrived okay. I kept thinking, wasn't yesterday the day to do that?

The four of us will be heading back to Boston on Sunday. Melanie and I wanted to be here with my dad over New Years. It's the tenth anniversary of my mom's death, and we wanted to be here with dad and my step-mom for that.

I sensed a tickle in my mind from our Harvard Square condo. I keep a permanent low- level lock on the place. In a couple of seconds I brought up a full scan, and what I saw astonished me.

A man I didn't know had the keys to both locks on our entrance door, and had just let himself in. He was carrying two large suitcases. I probed the suitcases and was surprised to find them full. He was carrying stuff inside my condo?! This didn't seem like a typical burglary. I decided just to observe and see what happened.

He went right to work, opening the suitcases and dispersing the contents around the condo. It looked like magazines and video tapes and disks. He put a few magazines in all the rooms, but the mother lode went into our bedroom. What the hell was this? The only things left in the suitcases were a clock radio and a large plastic bottle of, of what? I sensed inside and realized the bottle was filled with nail polish remover. The man went back for the radio and bottle after he was finished disbursing the magazines. I watched in silence.

The party sounds from outside drifted in through the closed windows. It was shortly after midnight, and there were several groups of people in the halls outside leaving various parties. This one extra man had aroused no one's suspicions. The holiday was a perfect time for a break-in.

He set some of the house newspapers on one of my wooden end-tables, and then dribbled a splash of the nail polish remover on the papers and wetted the label on the plastic bottle with the fluid too. Then he plugged in the radio and set everything right next to each other on the table on top of the newspapers. He spent of few moments setting the time, and then he went back across the room and silently closed his suitcases. I realized he was about leave. What the hell was he doing?

I probed into the radio. One of the wires was frayed and shorting, dumping its heat into the plastic insulation of the wire above it . I realized it would take some time, maybe as much as a half hour, but when the main power wire above lost its insulation, the clock radio would have a major arcing short. And it was sitting on newspapers sprinkled with nail polish removal. Hell! Why did this man want to burn our condo?!

I took a closer scan at the magazines and videos, and gasped as the recognition hit me. They were full of child pornography, spread all over my home. In a burst of insight, I saw the intent. The fire on the end-table was sure to set off the sprinkler system. The danger to the lives of the other people in the complex was actually quite low. But the fire department was sure to be breaking down the door shortly after the fire occurred. They'd find what would look like an accidental fire, in a vacant condo filled with child pornography.

Melanie! My gosh, my gosh! My dear wife! The monstrous intent shocked me into action. Melanie's vocation and lifelong desire to be a pediatrician were about to be ruined. The stain of being associated with child pornography would lose her the license to practice medicine, probably even without a criminal conviction. Her dream and all her years of work to become a pediatrician were about to be destroyed.

No fucking way! I locked and pushed, sending all the smut into oblivion. Then I did the same for the clock radio and bottle of nail polish remover. My anger was boiling out of me.

The man picked up his suitcases and was about to walk out the door. I think if he just would have left, I would have let him go. But he took one last look at the end-table across the room, and he could no longer see the red display of the clock in the darkness. Frowning, he put down his suitcases and walked across the room.

As he walked I took a close scan of him. My eyes went wide. Jason! I couldn't believe it, it was C.J., looking a bit older after nine years of life. He froze as he realized the end- table was bare, and then he started to look around the condo, becoming frantic as he discovered that all the pornography was gone. He must have thought he was losing his mind.

My heart felt leaden, and then it turned to stone. In a burst of revenge, Jason followed the pornography into oblivion, followed a second later by his suitcases. My condo was now back to its original condition.

But I was not back to my original condition. I was filled with righteous anger. I cloaked and pushed and was hovering above Melanie's parents' house in Illinois within seconds. They were having a private New Year's Eve party, the house filled with over two dozen guests, but the parents were currently alone together in the kitchen. Perfect! I descended and uncloaked behind them near the door leading to the outside deck.

"You!" I hissed.

Melanie's dad was just starting to pick up a party tray loaded with munchies and carry it out to the guests. Both parents jumped at the sound of my voice, Benjamin dropping the tray in surprise. They turned and stared at me with absolute shock. Their eyes went wide with astonishment. As far as they knew, they had both spoken to me less than two hours ago in Exeter PA.

"You!" I hissed again. "He had our fucking keys! He even had our fucking keys!"

"I don't know what you mean! How did you get in here?!" Melanie's mom hissed right back at me. Her dad though went a beet-red, as if he'd just been caught with his hand in a strictly forbidden cookie jar. Melanie's mom was giving me a look of pure hatred. After all these years, all the masks were finally gone.

I kept glaring at them, returning the anger. "The keys! Jason had our keys! Remember that day when Melanie couldn't find her keys in Paris? What'd you creeps do? Make copies?! You pieces of absolute filth! How long have you been planning this?"

Benjamin tried to bluster. "What?! Jason who?! We don't know what you're talking about! We don't know any Jason! What... What keys?!" He started to shake uncontrollably.

"Benjamin, shut up! Let me handle this! Listen Eric, I don't know how or why you deceived us about being in Exeter, but how dare you slander us! You are to leave this house at once, or I'm calling the police!"

I shook my head at them, my deep disgust starting to mix with pity. "Your daughter Melanie, my wife! Rita, how could you?! My gosh, how can you both?! She offers you her love! How can you hate her so much?! What kind of people are you?!"

Dad took affront and he tried to put on a look of indignation. "How dare you insult us, accuse us like that! Listen to me Eric! I'm telling you we don't know what you're talking about! Isn't that right Rita?"

"Benjamin! I told you to shut the fuck up!"

I looked at both of them grinding my teeth. It was becoming hard for me even to see these people as human anymore. "Melanie! She's such a beautiful person, filled with such love and goodness! How is it possible for you not to see this?! How can you possibly hate her?!"

Melanie's mom's eyes went pure feral. Her face was a twisted mass of hatred, and she started pointing to the exit behind me and inhaling to launch a scream. I made a snap decision, and she followed Jason into oblivion.

Her husband had been standing by her side, but his eyes were locked on me. I met his gaze with infinite sadness. He seemed more confused than anything, more frightened than angry. He tried to lie his way out of his shame. He began to shout, "Key?! What key?! We have no idea what keys you're talking about! We have no knowledge whatsoever..."

And then he paused and blinked in puzzlement that his wife was being quiet for so long. He turned his head, and his jaw dropped in utter bewilderment as he realized his wife was no longer in the room.

"Huh?" he whispered.

"Benjamin, what are you shouting about?" called a voice from the living room. A couple of the guests began approaching the kitchen door. I sensed the clock behind me. It was 11:20 PM local time. I had traveled back to 2010. In a burst of summary judgment, I cloaked and then cancelled the quantum reality of Benjamin's existence just before the kitchen door opened.

It was Benjamin's sister, Melanie's aunt, plus some other man I didn't recognize. They were looking for the hosts of the party, and were very surprised not to find them in the kitchen.

"Benjamin!" called the aunt. "Come out, come out! I know I heard you talking! Where are you hiding? What was that about a key?"

I floated to the ceiling. The man walked over to the back door, turned on the floodlights and looked at the deck. "No footprints. Hell, this door is dead-bolted from the inside!"

The aunt nodded and looked at the only other exit from the kitchen. "They've must have gone down the basement."

She walked over and opened the basement door. She gave a small gasp as she realized all the lights in the basement were out. The basement stairs descended to utter blackness.

She began to call out, "Benjamin! Rita! What's going on? We know you're down there!"

There was no reason for me to hang around. I zipped back to my bed in Exeter while I kept a watch on the Sterling house. Within ten minutes, all the guests started a search for the parents. At first they were confused. The weather outside was terrible, a sloppy snow, and all the cars were still in the driveway. The deck outside the kitchen and the front door had no footprints leading out.

The aunt told the guests about hearing Benjamin shouting something about a missing key just before she entered the kitchen. Several others agreed they heard him shouting. Others said they were sure they saw him and his wife enter the kitchen just a few minutes earlier.

The group decided the parents were playing a game, trying to remain hidden until the New Year. There was a second exit from the basement, to Rita's private study on the other side of the house. From there, the parents could have used a small staircase and gone unnoticed to the second or third floors of the house. By now, they could be anywhere in the house.