Near Future 1: Awakening (27 page)

Miranda laughed and said, "Not today, thank you." Then she gave him a crooked smile and said, "But if my ideas are right on our project, it could someday solve the world's future power needs!"
 

It was Zeke's turn to laugh. "Let's get it to work without blowing up", he said, "and not until tomorrow." He then had to get out of the way as Emily was rather impatiently waiting for him to finish.

Grabbing Miranda's arm, Emily pulled her off toward their dorm room, leaving the bags for Zeke who once again gathered them without a complaint. "Are you alright?" Emily asked with a concerned look on her face. When they reached their room, Emily told her, "Tell me everything, now!".

Knowing that it was time to come clean with her best friend and her sort of boyfriend, as soon as Zeke came in with the bags and closed the door, Miranda swore them both to secrecy, telling them everything. When she related what happened the previous day, she wound up crying on Emily's shoulder part of the time, confessing, "I was pretty much scared to death the whole time, but I didn't have time to do anything but act. Now I get weak in the knees every time I think about what could have happened. Especially with my headaches. I was terrified that I would trigger one and be caught unable to function. But I kept running the music through my head and tried to calm my head down whenever we had a break in the action."

Zeke had pretty much listened in amazement. He had known that Miranda was a good shot from talking to his friend on the shooting team and after watching her shoot out the lasers. He also knew that she had kicked the soccer team's butts when they attacked her, but he had absolutely no idea that she was able to do all the things she could do. And of course, she had told no one about the headaches. He mostly listened and let the girls deal with their emotions, but he perked up when Miranda mentioned the President and the highest military honor. "The Medal of Honor", he whispered and stood, giving Miranda a brisk salute. "Better get used to those," he said, refusing to respond further when she gave him a questioning look. He knew that if it was indeed the Medal of Honor, every officer, no matter the seniority, would be required to salute her when she was wearing the medal.
 

He thought about what that meant.
She doesn't know that, but she will find out later. And she will hate it because she tries to play everything down. That's one of the things I love about her.
Instead of voicing any of this, he said, "I am going to get pizza. I expect you two will need some energy food soon to feed all those emotions you have stirred up." He brushed a fake tear from his eye.

The girls continued talking, and they did have another mutual cry while he was away to get the pizza. Miranda suspected he had deliberately left them alone for a while, so that she could get it all out of her system, and build a little more of the strong emotional tie she had with Emily. She also realized, when Zeke returned with the pizza, she really had developed quite an appetite. Zeke grabbed a couple of slices, gave them both a hug and retired to his room, agreeing to meet Miranda the next morning. The girls soon turned in for the night, both emotionally wrung out.

#

Zeke, on the other hand, had his own emotions to deal with. When news of the coup had first come across on VR, he had been terrified for Miranda. When they had broadcast the video, and he realized that Miranda wasn't with the others, he had been greatly relieved. He had felt slightly ashamed, with Caitlyn and the others in such obvious danger. Then they had gotten the news that everyone was out safely, and he had been thrilled. But even though he had known that Miranda had special abilities, he had not suspected that she was so capable. After hearing her story, he felt amazement and a little nervousness, wondering what she saw in him. Intellectually he knew she didn't care about any of that kind of stuff, but emotionally he didn't know that. He had no idea how he could tell her any of that. He finally decided that the only solution was to continue spending time with her, and let it work itself out. With that, he was able to get some sleep.

When Zeke knocked lightly on the door the next morning at the agreed time, Miranda met him with two cups of coffee in her hand. "Emily is still asleep," she said quietly. "Let's go down to the common room so we can talk about our plan for the day. Here, I made you coffee."

"That's awesome. I could use a good cup right now." Zeke's response was equally quiet. The coffee Miranda offered smelled great.

Taking the cup from her, Zeke followed her down the hall. Taking a seat beside her, he told her, "All of the parts are in. We should be able to make good progress today, with no classes. If you don't mind, walk me through the changes once more. I think I have updated most of the control code already, but I need to run through it with you first."

"I do need to tell you one thing about the changes I made," Zeke went on. "I have made the code more modular and set up the central processing module to be more of the system manager, with the semi-AI code we discussed earlier. We tell the central processor what to do, and it tells the rest of the system what it wants it to do. That allows us to more easily make changes by only having to submit it to the controller."

Miranda understood immediately the ramifications. "That's awesome. I suspect we will have to tweak things even if we do get it to work, but that will make it much easier. I also want you to put us a big stop button that you can hit on the controller in case something serious goes wrong like last time." She went on to explain the details of the changes. Dropping their coffee cups off in the room, they headed to the lab.

With no interruptions for class, Miranda and Zeke were able to spend almost the entire day at the lab. Since most of the design was very similar to what they had done before, they managed to complete the changes to the design by midday. That meant that they spent a good part of the afternoon checking everything, determined not to have another meltdown. Finally, there was nothing else to check, so they were ready for the next test. With a little flourish, Miranda hit the start button, and they anxiously awaited the results. But, taking both of them completely by surprise, nothing happened. Or more precisely, nothing was produced on the output terminals. What went wrong? She knew that many of the intermediate test points had the readings she expected to see. What could possibly have happened? Finally, she shut it down, telling Zeke, "I guess we should just leave for now. I need to think about it for a while."

As they walked back to the dorm, Zeke told her, "Give it some time. I know you will figure it out. Just let that big brain of yours crunch on it for a while. I'm sure it will give us a complex answer that you will have to simplify for my poor brain."

Miranda tried to smile at Zeke's attempt at humor, but just couldn't laugh at the moment. She had been so sure this was going to work. So instead, she only nodded and went into her room to think about it.

#

The issue kept bugging Miranda, because she knew she was missing something. Emily and some of her friends had decided to use their time to work together in a study group, so she was alone. She finally sat cross-legged on her bed and tried meditation to see if she could clear her mind.

Suddenly Miranda bolted up straight. She realized that she had been looking at everything with too much simplicity. Zeke's little quip about simplifying the complex was the key. She had assumed that the subspace fabric only had matter and antimatter on the two sides as if she were looking down on a line on a piece of paper. But what if there was a much larger dimension of particle universes. Each would be slightly out of phase to the other and would have to be considered in the shape of her generated field. Each particle universe would exist separately from all the others, separated by the same subspace fabric she had imagined separating matter and antimatter. That would also explain why her previous math had been flawed; it had not completely accounted for the amount of dark matter/dark energy observed. The complexity of it all boggled the mind.

It wasn't that the experiment was not working at all, it was because they were getting a lot of interfering signals and the net result was that with the configuration she had set up, all of the signals wound up canceling out in the generated result. That was why they didn't have any output.

Miranda immediately VR messaged Zeke, asking him if he could meet her at the lab, even though it was getting late. He reluctantly agreed, replying to her VR message with an electronic pizza image, saying,
"You owe me for the pizza the next time"
and then his VR icon took a bite out of the pizza.

Miranda couldn't keep from laughing when she saw it.
"Zeke, you are such a show-off!"
was all she sent back. She finally admitted to herself that she could not keep up with him and his VR skills. Of course, she might have been a little distracted too.

They headed toward the lab, with Miranda still thinking about the design changes. She was so focused on the work to do, she didn't notice a shadowy figure following them at a distance.

When they got to the lab, it took a few minutes to make the changes. Miranda had Zeke apply a filter to the Space Tech wave generator. Instead of a signal with peaks at both ends as she had been using, they wanted as smooth a signal as they could get. They then took their respective positions with Zeke standing in the control room ready to hit the big abort button and Miranda standing in front of the monitoring equipment. Miranda spoke loudly enough for Zeke to hear her, "Be ready to hit the stop button if something goes wrong!"

Miranda reached for the go button and paused one last time, the excitement dancing in her eyes. "Ready?" she asked. Upon hearing Zeke's muffled "Yes!" she tapped the button, gradually ramping up the new input signal from zero. They started to get an output signal! "It's working!" she yelled.

She reached to the controls, pushing the power level up again, but suddenly the output jumped rapidly to a much higher level than what she was expecting to see. She realized it was about to get out of control and tried to pull the levels back down. Zeke saw it too, hitting the big emergency stop button that he was indeed glad they had added this time around.

Zeke stuck his head out the door and asked, "What just happened? It looked like it was out of control so I hit the stop!"

"It's working!", Miranda said breathlessly, "But it's got a log scale to it. I need you to modify the control program to handle that."

"Of course," Zeke said. "We should have known that... Ok, just a few minutes." He moved back into the control room but didn't shut the door completely so that they could hear at least a little. They needed an intercom for that purpose instead of having to yell to understand each other.

Miranda pulled up the VR results from the test and was looking over the full outputs of the test project. Suddenly she heard a noise and turned to see someone come into the lab, shutting and locking the external door. Miranda dropped into a defensive posture, and demanded as he turned toward her, "Who are you and what are you doing in our lab?"

He said, "You can call me the Weasel. I am the guy who knows who you really are." He had a gun in one hand, but he pulled a device out with the other hand, pointed it at her, and said, "But first..." Then he pushed a button on the device. Miranda found herself unable to move anything below her neck as if her limbs were locked into place.

The grisly little man laughed and spat out, "I am the guy who has been working with your father, and this little toy has full control of your nanites. When your father disappeared, the friends that I have been working with were all upset because they had hoped to grab him to force him to tell them his secrets. I even had some plans to try to help them capture him, but he outsmarted all of us. However, I glimpsed some of the early VR video of you, and after your little adventure the other day and your chit-chat with Doctor Ted that my little bug captured, I hacked the hospital lab. From the information in his system there, I easily figured out who you are. Very clever in fact for you to hide in plain sight, and that is a very good disguise you have. None of the others have a clue about you, and that will make you a very valuable asset to me."

Miranda stared at the man in total confusion. "What do you mean? I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about."

The man said, "I know your name isn't Miranda. It is Julie Randolph! You are the daughter of Doctor Samuel Randolph and have the only fully functioning nanites in the world." Moving across the room toward her, he pressed a device to her arm and gave an evil smile when it beeped its results.

"I now know this for sure because I did a quick DNA test with my other little toy here, and it's telling me exactly who you are. And with the help of my friends, we're gonna use you to figure out how to build our own nanites, and put them to work for our purposes. And they are going to pay me well for it!"

Totally frozen with his device and in shock, Miranda could only stare at him. She did manage to at least speak her defiance. "I'll never help you," she told him. She was desperately running the music through her head, trying to break the control of the device he had used on her. She felt her little finger twitch, the best she seemed to be able to do. She redoubled her efforts.

But he said, "I think you will, because you have no choice." He laughed, not a pleasant sound. He stepped toward the experiment and said, "And maybe I should take this little device with me. I'm sure eventually you will tell me what it does. But for now this will be our little secret."

The whole time the man had been talking, Zeke had remained hidden in the control room trying to figure out what to do. Although he couldn't understand their conversation, the gun the man held in his hand was enough to tell him that he was up to no good. But when the man turned toward the experiment, Zeke had an idea. Knowing he had to act quickly, he turned their test project back on, shoving the controls all the way up. Running out the door, he tackled Miranda to the floor just as the system overloaded and exploded.