Chapter 14

Four months later...

Time: Friday, May 21, 2004 2:37 PM

I sat at a classroom desk, immersed in a three-hour math final. I came up for air after finishing one particularly difficult problem on conformal mapping and glanced at the clock, 2:37 PM. I smiled happily. I had another fifty-three minutes to go, and I thought the three remaining problems were straightforward and would take less than ten minutes each. I'd have a little buffer time to check everything over, but I was certain everything so far was correct. This was my last test on the last day of Final Exams week, and I was acing the test. My status as sophomore at M.I.T. was drawing to a close.

My only problem with the last of the test was focus. My mind wanted to drift to what was coming next. After an incredibly busy spring semester for both of us, Melanie and I were taking our first vacation together, a ten-day backpacking hike deep into the woods of northern Maine. Both of us were anticipating the trip as our honeymoon, and Melanie's eagerness was a joy to my heart.

Melanie is so smart! Not just with academics, though she certainly excels there too. I'm thinking about her request to me, for us to wait before becoming sexually active. Back in early January, we pledged life commitments to each other hours after spending almost of a year drifting apart. We spent the following months rebuilding our love for each other, lots of great movies and dinners together sure, but much more important were the quiet times, showing each other our hopes and weaknesses, learning to depend on each other with unquestioned trust. I'm so glad we waited and rebuilt the love first.

And my housemates are so jealous! They might be the cream of the country's brightest students, but some of the guys seem to have very limited skills and experience in dating. They would give anything to have any girlfriend at all, let alone one as nice as Melanie. It's rather amusing. So many guys in desperate pursuit of females have asked me about my technique for "bagging" Melanie, as if a girlfriend were a big-game animal! I'm so glad I'm not in that mode.

There's been a little progress on the kinetic front, no major changes. From September 1, 2002 11:42 AM to April 28, 2004 6:38 AM, I crossed over another nineteen periods of what used to be my sense-sphere doubling rate. Melanie had the thought that perhaps something new would occur again when I finished that second set of nineteen. It was an interesting idea, and we took the time to be alone together when it happened.

It was not uneventful. I had that strange road-bump feeling as I did in September of 2002, but nothing else changed. My minimum-mass requirement continues to decrease at the same rate and everything else is frozen. As I was taking my math test in May, I was down to 5.6e-31 kg, below the rest mass of a single electron. I can basically lock anything now. Well, I do have just a dim fleeting sense of quantum photon and neutrinos, but they zip through my sphere too fast to be studied.

We did learn one new thing about my kinetics over the spring semester, something Melanie and I both find vaguely disturbing... Depending on the material, I can pull a kilogram of room-temperature matter down to a Bose-Einstein condensate in about thirty seconds. That should be it, no more heat to pull. But kinetic-wise, it still felt as if I were pulling. With my sense now able to observe at the quantum level, I could finally see what was going on. I was "popping" the quanta, my word for it, popping the leptons and bosons into oblivion.

I guess Einstein would be pleased, E = m c squared stands true, even in my insane kinetic world. My ability to pull heat energy into oblivion at a rate of 46.5 kW is also my ability to destroy 44.7 micrograms of matter a day. Or create it... I can heat things up, or create a speck of dust in a day, from Einstein's perspective the equivalent act.

Nothing new has come up with Melanie's parents. Let's see, anything else? Oh yeah. We're both spending about $1,500 a month of the cash. At this rate, it'll last another forty years. Melanie has a joke that after that we'll move to the north shore of the Mediterranean and start spending the Euros. And we bought a fair bit of land in northernmost Maine for a dirt cheap price, a very inaccessible mountainous plateau deep in the Allagash. Inaccessible for other people, that is...

Time: Saturday, May 22, 2004 8:22 PM

Melanie and I reached the base of our property ten minutes after sunset, right on schedule. We were both porting enormous backpacks, 150 kg each, but for us they were as light as feathers. We hadn't seen anyone for hours, and weren't expecting too. It was the height of the green-fly season, and those buggers are murderous. Except, of course, if they hit a repelling force when they get within a few meters... Melanie is such a nature lover. She prefers me to do it that way, rather than use power. It only takes a small fraction of a Joule to blow a bug's brains out. And power requires less concentration too, and is MUCH more satisfying! But what the heck, keep the woman happy...