Kinetic

...nor destroyed... That's my latest trick, to jiggle electrons and lattices not just to add heat but to jiggle out of phase with existing jiggles and cool down. It would take more concentration, but if I wanted to, I could now pull heat out of the water heater just as fast as I pumped it in. Pull it out to... to oblivion. There was something deeply disturbing about feeling the heat had to go somewhere, yet observing that it just disappeared.

I've got an interesting job this summer, helping to build homes. I was hired as temporary labor by a non-union outfit. That fact disturbed my dad a bit, but finding a summer job around here with just a high-school diploma is tough, and in the end my dad agreed.

My foreman now thinks of me as absolute gold. I started the summer helping the framers. But for the last couple of weeks my new job is lugging 80-lb bags of shingles up ladders to the roofers. The crew knows I'll be leaving for M.I.T. the end of next week, and they're all telling me how they'll cry when I go.

My job also raised another interesting moral issue for me. What if somebody slipped off the roof and was heading to his death or at least a horrible injury? I figured I shouldn't try to decide about this at the moment of crisis, but think the issue through beforehand.

It didn't take long. The answer was blindingly obvious. There is no way I could ever live with myself if I idly watched someone die. And I'd still have a bit of cover. Nothing would tie the "miracle" to me particularly. Still, I'm so glad I haven't had to do it...

Time: Sunday, September 1, 2002 11:40 AM

I was sitting alone in my MIT dorm, looking over my textbook for the phys/calc course I'd soon be taking. I thought I'd do fine. I sighed and stared out the window at Boston on the other side of the river...

I arrived a week ago, and was very lucky with the dorm lottery, getting a double facing the river. The freshman orientation week has been so interesting! And in a few days the classes would start for real. I couldn't wait. I felt as if I belonged here, as if I always belonged here. I felt surrounded by incredibly bright people, even my roommate Ray, a little immature but so incredibly bright... The campus seemed both magical and like a second home, and I loved it.

Melanie is similarly thrilled about Harvard. We went to dinner in Boston and the theater last night, saw a live performance of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Fabulous stuff! Boston is a Mecca. You just don't get this quality of theater about Reading!

We came back to Cambridge on the Redline. There's no way I'd want to keep a car around here, especially as a student. And with all the public transportation, I didn't need one. So I sold my car when...

I looked back from the window and around my dorm room. "What the hell?! What was that?!" It was as if I were driving a car and hit an unexpected pothole. I got up and walked around the room, feeling queasy but not knowing why. Suddenly, I had a shock of a premonition. I confirmed it within an hour. At 11:42 AM that morning, my kinetic powers seemed to have reached their limits.

Time: Sunday, 2:35 AM, December 1, 2002

It was an absolutely miserable night out, fog mixing with cold drizzle, a wonderful time to stay inside and sleep in warm, comfortable beds. And I was expecting my roommate to be away on Thanksgiving vacation for another sixteen hours. This was exactly the opportunity I'd been waiting for...

I was hovering fifty meters above the roof of a building, dressed in a jet black outfit and surrounded by fog. I was in the seediest part of Cambridge and believe me, Cambridge at its worst is pretty bad. Sixty meters below me and still nine meters within my sphere of influence was my target, a vault-room off the basement of a major druggie distribution node. I had sensed it by accident over a month ago. I was on a bus and it entered my sphere. I saw some very tough looking dudes enter a building and I probed, mostly just from idle curiosity, but what I saw shocked and disgusted me.

Why was I doing this now? Well, to be honest, I must admit the money is a part of it. I enjoy living off an extra supply of cash. But I don't think it's just the money. It's my abilities. I remember my words to Professor Hanson. It seems like so long ago. I said that ability is not intent. But lately I've been thinking that's not quite true...

My abilities hit a brick wall exactly three months ago. They've held steady but no further progress. Lately I've been brooding about them, wondering if they might start to decrease someday or even (horrors!) suddenly evaporate. How would I feel for the rest of my life, knowing that I had an opportunity to do something truly amazing, and had never seized the moment?

I remember a quote from Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream."

The basement area was deserted, and that suited my plans perfectly. All the guys with the guns, and there were a number of them, were asleep on the floors above. My planned extraction point was a small basement window, painted over with a dark green paint and less than one foot by one foot square, heavily grated and locked from the inside. I didn't expect it to be any problem at all.

I sensed and *pushed* the dial around on the vault-room with ease. Once I had the massive door open, I starting floating my target merchandise out of the vault, leaving the guns and all the horrible poison behind. I stopped myself from giggling half way through. It looked so stupidly amusing! A long line of money-packs wrapped in cellophane, floating through the air one after another. It reminded me of a Disney cartoon. Where was Mickey with his wand?

And those ingots! Gold? I decided to go for them too.

I soon had a huge pile of very expensive merchandise lying on the floor below the small window. I quietly swung the vault door and spun the dial, only starting to pour in the heat after I was sure the vault was sealed. I am not an arsonist and I didn't want to injure anyone, not even the drug dealers.

My current power limit is just shy of 46.5 kW, enough to raise the air temperature of the ten cubic meters of air in the vault room by about 6.5F every second. It doesn't require any power at all to hover, and a very minor amount to float the merchandise to the window. I started pushing the pins inside the locks securing the window grate. I pulled open the locks as quietly as I could and floated them to the floor. And then I just hovered silently and cooked the vault.

Five minutes later the hottest air in the center of the vault reached 2000F. The air nearest the walls was a bit cooler due to the outward heat conduction, but I had succeeded in carbonizing all the poison. I took a moment to pour some power directly into the disks of the vault lock, sensing them glow red and soften and then start to drip and bend and fuse together, ruining the opening mechanism for the massive steel shanks securing the vault door.

I went back to cooking the vault air as I started to swing the heavy window grate off its anchors. I didn't know if I could do this quietly or not, and I was prepared just let it crash to the floor and smash the merchandise through the window if I had to. But that proved unnecessary. I really wasn't expecting to do this whole job silently, but I suddenly realized I had my chance. I opened the small window, and one by one my packages slipped through it and up and into the two black duffle bags I had with me.

"What the hell," I thought. "Why not? A nice touch!" As I floated the last of the goodies up to me, I also took the time to close the window. I then moved the grate up from the floor. I waited until I had all the goodies zipped up in my bags before I tried to attach the grate back to its anchors.

It was no problem at all. I *pushed* the locks and snapped them back into position. The soft clicks of the snaps were probably the loudest sounds I made. I didn't realize it would be this easy.

I hovered for another few seconds and considered. Another eight minutes had gone by, and the core air temperature of the vault was approaching 4000F. What the hell was I doing hanging around?! I shut down my power flow and zipped to my touchdown point at a very isolated spot on campus. It took a little longer than I was expecting, the extra weight of the ingots slowed me down. I was back in my dorm room by 3:40 AM, less than a half hour later.

I was tired, but I knew I'd never sleep until I knew what I had reeled in. With my door locked and the window shades pulled, I sat on the floor and gloated over my haul.

It was huge. I was ecstatic for a while, but then nervous as I realized I had stolen more money than I could possibly ever spend. The bulk of it was in U.S. currency, but there was also a surprising amount of the new euro money, including two prize packages of 1,000 500-euro notes each.

Unlike my Fourth of July heist, most of my U.S. bills were in $100's, though the numerous stacks of $20's were still huge and must have been over a hundred thousand dollars. I suddenly realized I wasn't all that interested in counting it. I did a volume estimate by bill type. About $1,500,000 in U.S. and about the same value in euros, though the euros were a much smaller pile. And the ingots... I finally realized they were platinum, 108 ingots of pure 500-gram platinum, stamped with the mark of the Bank of Belarus...

Hell... This isn't walking-around money... What the hell did I do? I put a few thousand dollars in my desk, and hauled out my empty foot-locker from the back of my closet, and just dumped everything else in there. With the locker back in the closet, I undressed and sacked out.

And my moral justification for all this? It goes something like this: My society spends a lot of money trying to put these guys out of business. I didn't just rob them. I think I destroyed tens of millions of dollars of poison too, effectively doing what my society pays to have done anyway. I'm not a saint, but I think the bottom line question is: Is my society better or worse off because of what I had done? I think the answer is obvious.

And I'm not even that hard on the dealers. They have a second chance. Perhaps they'll see what a crappy business they're in. It's their choice.

Chapter 11.

Thirteen months later...

Time: Thursday, January 1, 2004 12:03 PM

My morning flight from Philadelphia into Logan Airport got in on time and I took public transportation back to campus. I was carrying two suitcases, and the new laptop I was lugging was quite heavy too. But I'm an expert now in taking weight off things that I'm carrying. I was maintaining a very normal looking gait, and the stroll back to my dorm room was easy and uneventful...

So much has happened in the last year. It's been a whirlwind of activity and change. But the most important fact is that Melanie and I are drifting apart.

We still love each other, there have been no fights, but our affection for each other seems to have evolved into more of a friendship kind of love. And I'm the cause of it.

Brooding... Professor Hanson once asked me what I wanted out of life. I had no idea at the time what a profound question that was. I loved my role of being Melanie's knight in shining armor, but I struggled a lot with what I wanted our adult relationship to be, especially since I seem incapable of trusting her.

Looking back, I think my one chance to treat her as an equal occurred shortly after I rescued her from Sterling. If I had to do it all over again, I would have told her about my kinetic abilities right then, got it over with. But I was so uncertain, so worried that she would think of me as non-human. And once I started the trend of not telling her, I became embarrassed about how I wasn't trusting her, which made it even more difficult to talk. How do you tell someone you love that you don't trust them?

We still take time to see each other, even give each other goodbye pecks when we part. In fact, we have a "date" this Saturday night. The Rover *Spirit* is scheduled for touchdown on the Martian surface a half hour before midnight. M.I.T. has a direct feed from JPL coming into Kresge auditorium, and Melanie and I will watch and hope together.

As for Melanie herself, I couldn't be more proud of her. She's secured her own package of scholarships and loans that will see her through to graduation; she is excelling in her classes and also one of Harvard's top athletes, she's... well, she's launched! She's a beautiful, accomplished young woman.

And as for my kinetic abilities, rock solid for sixteen months now. I'm beginning to think of them as permanent. There's also one aspect of them that did not stop evolving...

I sat idly at my desk, staring across the river. I haven't tested in several days. Time to practice! I picked a random micro-dot of air, and then started to zoom down. Within a second, I sensed my intended target, a single H2 hydrogen molecule. I could sense the quantum roughness of its existence, sense the rough dipole nature. I could sense it, but not lock it, not *push* it, not by itself. My limit for minimum mass for a lock was about 9.6e-27 kg, and my elusive target was three times smaller. After all this time, still another sixteen days to go...

And as for my version of the Great Train Robbery? I still have it. I try to spend cash whenever possible, something Melanie finds a bit odd but I've given up trying to hide from her. I've done a bit of snooping, very discretely. My target that night turned out to be the Russian Mafia, and they are a powerful enemy.

They know nothing of me, but they know they were attacked. They never found a trace of their platinum in the incinerated vault. I rode the bus route by their site for a while, just to scan them. It took them over two weeks to open the mess up...

Oh Melanie, my heart still dreams of you...

Time: January 4, 2004 1:15 AM

"Want to come in? I could make some tea. It'll warm you up!"

I looked at Melanie and smiled. "Sure! That's sounds great! Err... I don't want to disturb Betsy though..."

Melanie gave me a thin smile as she unlocked her dorm door. "Oh, Betsy won't be back till Monday. Come on in!"

I soon had a large mug of steaming English Breakfast in my hands. Melanie and I sipped our tea and chatted for a while about the success of the Spirit landing, and how our classes were going. Melanie is one of the top students of her class. I'm also doing fine, but not quite at that level.

It had been pretty exciting, cheering the signal of a successful landing at Kresge, but shortly after midnight we both decided we were too sleepy to stay up for the videos. I walked her back to Harvard.

Melanie took a long sip of her tea and changed topics. "So, how's your dad doing?"

"Just great. He sends you his love. And he's got a girlfriend!"

"Really?! Wow, that's great! Did you meet her?"

"Oh yeah, a few times... She's very nice..."

Melanie nodded, and then looked thoughtful. "Do you think it's serious?"

"Well..." I thought for a moment and then smiled. "Yeah, maybe... It's pretty obvious they love each other. And they're both... well, yeah, it's probably serious."

"Wow Eric... And how do you feel? Will it be like getting a new mom?"

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes and thought. "No," I said after a while, "More like getting a mother-in-law maybe, I don't know. Maybe if I were still a minor living at home, it'd be different..."

I heard the squeak of Melanie's chair, she was getting up. I sighed. I thought Melanie was signaling it was time for me to leave. But then I felt her chair bump into mine, and she sat back down.

"You look tired, Eric, and it's a cold night. You really didn't have to walk me back."

"Ah..." I sighed. "I really enjoyed being with you again. We saw so little of each other last semester."

Melanie sighed too. "Yes, I know. Life has gotten so incredibly busy for both of us..."

"Still seeing Richard?"

"Ah, Eric! Don't tease me! It was only one date! And no, we're just friends..."

I nodded my head. I still had my eyes closed. I was relaxed and very sleepy and profoundly at peace, more so than I had been in a very long time. I felt Melanie's hand come and touch mine. I turned my hand palm up in invitation and we were soon holding hands. I sighed in contentment. We hadn't held hands in many months...

"Eric..." Melanie whispered.

"Hmmm?"

"You look beat, and it's cold outside, and it'll take you forever to walk back to MIT. You want to sleep here tonight? In the chair, I mean."

"Hmmm?"

A long time seemed to flow by, both of us just sitting and holding hands. I felt so sleepy, and so, so relaxed. All the uncertainties of the future and kinetic abilities drifted away. The moment seemed filled with a sense of belonging, that I had found a true place to be...

"So Eric, how do you feel..." Melanie paused. She had meant to add, "about staying here tonight", but she was starting to wonder if I were already asleep.

Her question drifted down to my soul, below all my sleeping defenses and my shame of not trusting her. "I feel... I feel like home..." I muttered.

"Huh?!" Melanie stared at me. She's so smart! ...and empathic. She realized what had happened, that she had gotten an answer from the core of my thoughts. "Eric... Eric..."

I opened my eyes and looked at her sleepily. Being alone with her, I felt so tired, and it felt so right to be with her... So late in the night, and I was in a profound state of peace.

"Eric, you mean me, don't you? Am I home to you?"

I nodded and smiled at her peacefully. I tried to focus... I was so sleepy. I tried to focus, and saw tears in her eyes.

"Come on," Melanie said, pulling me out of my chair. "Lie down. Let me take off your shoes..."

Time: Sunday morning, 7:14 AM, January 4, 2004

Melanie's dorm room faces due east, and the first rays of the rising sun caught and sparkled on the frost outside her window. I blinked my eyes awake at the light. It took me a moment to remember where I was. Melanie! I was lying down with her. She was sleeping by my side, the both of us squeezed together on her dorm bed.

I was barefoot, but otherwise still dressed in my clothes from last night. No, wait... Melanie had taken off my belt too. I turned slowly and looked at her. She was dressed in pajamas, and stirred but did not awake. I could feel a bare foot rubbing against mine under the covers.

I gazed at her in silence. This was only the second time we had ever lain down with each other. My heart ached as I watched her sleep, knowing how shy she was about sex, knowing that that this was the second time she had trusted me with her body by falling asleep with me. I couldn't bear the thought of not trusting her in return. The pain of not trusting her was finally overcoming my shame of not trusting her.

I bent slightly and kissed her. She wiggled and sighed in contentment, and then I felt her body stiffen and she opened her eyes and looked at me. "This isn't a dream, is it?" she asked, and then smiled at me calmly.

I shook my head. "It feels as magical as one, though..."

Melanie cocked an eyebrow at me and then turned to lie on her side, propping her head on one hand and resting her other on my chest. "Eric..."

"Yeah?"

"Last night, I remember... what you said. I know you meant it then. But what about now?"

I nodded. "I do. I mean it now too. Melanie?"

"Yeah?"

"I've been so incredibly stupid..."

"You mean about not trusting me?"

"You know, huh?"

Melanie rolled her eyes at me. But I know her too well. It was a playful gesture. "Duh! Yah think?! Want to talk about it?"

"Yes."