Chapter 55: Making Friends and Influencing People

“The others” included President Gerston. The whole group from the investiture had gathered in the ambassador’s family dining room for the meal. Gerston was scheduled to go on to Geneva the following day where he was to address the European Parliament, but he elected to stay over to spend more time with this group of people who had so captured his admiration. During dinner, the discussion covered a wide range of topics including the meet-and-greet that Gerston had with the U.K. officials and the unveiling of the new energy-storage units that Emma’s company was producing. She mentioned about the missing device components.

“But this afternoon, I heard about some more irregularities there. There was some apparent pilfering of other components that go into making the core of the energy-storage units. EEC Energy people were alerted by the police who were following up on a mysterious explosion in an isolated, abandoned farm building in the Cambridge vicinity. The police thought it was from gas—LPG—but that was ruled out. An analysis of the debris turned up traces of the polymers that we use in the energy device. One or more people were killed or injured; some traces of human tissues were recovered, but any bodies, if someone had been killed, had been removed. So it seems that someone was stealing materials and trying to build a working device and it blew up on them. But taking a doped polymer sheet set and trying to push energy into it is exactly like taking a bottle of nitroglycerin and shaking it. It’s a very unstable material if handled the wrong way.”

“How do you make it safe, then?” Wixom asked.

“That’s part of Tamara’s engineering design, actually,” Emma said. “The protections against overcharging or even tampering are built right into the core design. She’s the best one to explain how she designed the cells so that they can’t be converted into explosive devices. Tamara?”

“Sure. When the first accumulator exploded and I saw how much power was packed into that tiny device, I realized that I didn’t want my design to have a similar problem to the one that plagued the early lithium-ion batteries. They could explode or catch fire if they weren’t handled or used properly. Actually, they still need care in handling. So I designed the accumulator devices to have a safety circuit. Here’s how that works.

“The integrated circuit which controls the charging and discharging of the device—think of it like a traffic controller—is manufactured in the same clean room where the cores of the cells are being assembled. Then each individual cell is encapsulated in a polymer layer which includes a microprinted conductive screen. Then the whole thing is sealed in an epoxy layer.

“If any part of the screen layer is pierced or damaged in any way, then the energy stored in the cell will be dumped as heat into the charging control circuit and will melt the whole cell into a fused blob. Forced overcharging will do the same thing—it will fuse the cell. Shorting the cell’s terminals triggers a discharge-limiting circuit and locks the output briefly so any connected wires won’t get hot. If someone tries to x-ray the thing to get a picture of the electronics inside, the high-energy photons of the x-ray beam will trigger an overcharge event and cause it to fuse as well. That makes the cells inherently safe, by design, from being used as explosives and they’re safe from being reverse-engineered too. So some bad actor won’t be able to engineer a cell into an explosive; the design even prevents their copying it and passing it off as an official unit.”

“What about heat dissipation?” Denise asked. “Doesn’t the unit generate heat inside when the energy flows?”

“Good question,” Tamara answered. “The heat’s negligible. There’s no chemical reaction involved in producing energy and the components are all superconducting so the energy movement encounters no electrical resistance.”

“I thought of something,” Jeremy said then. “Couldn’t someone just completely discharge the cell and then take it apart? Then there’d be no energy left to melt it.”

“Hey, a budding engineer,” Tamara chuckled. “Another good one. Because of the way the matrix stores energy and replenishes it from the environment, it can’t be drawn down to less than somewhere around 12 to 17 percent of full charge by using its external connections. The residual energy is plenty to fuse the whole cell. But that was a great point.”

“Thanks, Tamara,” Emma said. “Charlie, does that answer your question?”

“It sure does. Thanks, Tamara, that was a pretty impressive explanation and your work is even more impressive,” Wixom remarked.

“Thanks, sir,” she nodded.

Then Sir George spoke. “So it looks like the police are finding out that EEC Energy Solutions has been targeted by spies?”

“Looks that way,” Emma said. “I heard that they’ve got a number of leads they’re working on.”

“Good,” Sir George said.

The discussion turned to other topics and the end of the meal approached. Then, while dessert was being served, Gerston looked around the table, smiling.

“This is an impressive gathering, folks. I’ve attended state dinners with a lot of important people, but this group is far more impressive than any that I’ve been with before. True, I personally have honored five of you for your amazing contributions to the U.S. But the U.K. has conferred ... ah, let’s see, it’s nine knighthoods, right? Sir George has been knighted twice. Dame Isabella. Dame Emma is a Nobel laureate who also received the Field medal and the Charles Stark Draper Prize. Those last two are like Nobels in mathematics and engineering, correct, Dame Emma?”

She nodded, smiling.

“I heard you were recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences, too. Goes along with being elected as a fellow of the Royal Society.”

Emma nodded. “But don’t forget Tamara, sir.”

“How could I ever? She was awarded a Draper Prize too. And together with her friend, Mr Winsberg, both are Clarke Scholars. That’s being chosen as two of the top high school graduates in the country, The entire Alexandre family are national heros; Major Alexandre is a Medal of Honor recipient and all three were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

Nadine put up her hand. “Mr President? I think you’re embarrassing everyone here now. Me too. Look at Denise, Kevin, and Dame Amelia and Sir Jeremy—their faces are glowing red.”

“Oh my, you’re absolutely right. But there’s so much incredible talent in this one room that I want to remember this time together. I made a deal with Miss Tamara, too. That deal will involve the Columbia Institute of Economics and its mission and it’ll be a real challenge for me to satisfy Miss Tamara, right?”

He looked at her, smiling.

“You bet,” she shot right back at him.

He went on, “So I’d like to find a way to use all of your talents and abilities, everyone, to help the Institute when we kick off the projects that the academic council of the Institute is planning. Some of you are on board with us already. But watch out; I know where all of you live, and I might just call on you in the future!”

Everyone laughed and soon began to leave the table. Kevin went over to Tamara as they were leaving the room.

“It’s still early—can we talk?” he asked. “Let’s go back to the sitting room. I want to talk about our schools.”

When they got settled, Kevin opened the discussion. “Gerston said you and Peter were Clarke Scholars, so that means you guys are in Maryland, right? Hopkins?”

Tamara answered, “Yep. Peter and I just graduated from Hopkins but we’re staying for grad school there. I know that Amelia and Jeremy are ... it’s not high school ... you’re going into year 12?” They both nodded. “What about you and Denise?” she asked.

Denise answered, “I’m getting a master’s degree from the London School of Liberal Arts and Education and this summer I need to take one more ed course and finish writing my thesis. Then it’s back to the States and Kevin and I need to finish up at Avery University. We’re ‘super-seniors’ because we took an extra year earning masters’ degrees—but we haven’t even gotten our bachelors’ degrees yet,” she laughed. “So we’ll graduate next spring and I want to go to med school. Kevin has similar plans.”

“But not in medicine,” Kevin clarified. “I want a doctoral program in political science and international relations.”

“So you guys were here to go to school and wound up getting knighted,” Peter said, thoughtfully. “And it was because you showed them that Avery Program? With Amelia and Jeremy too?”

Jeremy laughed. “I guess you didn’t hear her say this, but the PM accused Kevin and Denise of exporting the colonists’ rebellion back to the U.K. Actually Denise single-handedly unraveled two years of the government’s curriculum planning in ed schools and then both of them got a government agency disbanded when they stopped the U.K.’s Naked in School Program in its tracks. They were knighted because Denise and Kevin showed how much money the Brits were losing by keeping the Program going and how much the Avery Program would save the government.”

“And Amelia and Jeremy were important co-conspirators,” Denise chuckled. “The government ministers never knew what hit them when those two nailed them to the wall with how they were violating the law and kids’ civil and human rights too. Then we showed them a video about how the Avery Program worked and they grabbed onto that like a lifeline.”

“You go to Avery University and know about the Avery Program, so...” Peter started.

“They helped invent it!” Amelia interjected. “With their friends at Avery. And then they taught it at my school to a bunch of uni students and also to Jeremy and me. Our school has the country’s pilot program for teaching it.”

“Wow,” Peter nodded. “My cousins—they live in Delaware—told me that their school was looking into the Avery Program this past year and will be starting it up there this fall.”

“Really?” Denise said. “Then they would be one of the few outside of the Atlanta area to do that. Do you know their school’s name? I’ll make sure that they get the most recent curriculum stuff from how we developed it here.”

Peter gave her the information and she entered it into her mobile phone.

“So you guys were the ones who got the Program—the naked one—stopped in the U.S. too,” Peter commented.

“It was a team effort,” Kevin told him. “A number of people played major roles. A lot of very talented people.”

“Emma told me that when she was in high school, they tried to run the Program there,” Tamara told them. “That was when it was first beginning, maybe twelve years ago.”

“Really? Was she in it?” Denise asked.

Tamara laughed, “Nope, she and her friends shut it down before the school could even get it started. But get this—they were in Fairbanks in Alaska! How about that for idiocy?”

Everyone reacted to that news with surprise.

“That’s just about the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Jeremy summed it up for all of them. “Naked, in the winter, in Alaska. What were they thinking?”

Tamara laughed. “You do know that you shouldn’t use the word ‘thinking’ when you’re talking about officials running the Program, do you?”

Jeremy grinned. “Absolutely.”

“Hey, let’s talk about what’s happening next week,” Kevin said. “Next Friday is when Emma’s invited us to the roll-out of Tamara’s energy device. I’m helping my Aunt Janet—she’s the CEO of the Coris Foundation—get settled; they’re moving into a house in Beckenham and the Foundation is finishing its headquarters move from Jakarta. I’ll be helping with that. Denise is taking her ed course but she has Fridays open.”

“And I’m helping my daddy and new mum too,” Amelia said. “Their house is gorgeous; it’s in a park, and Kevin and Denise bought it for them as a wedding gift ... thanks again, my bro and sis; love ya. Jeremy said he’d help us too.”

“But we’ll drive up to Cambridge Thursday afternoon and stay at Emma’s. She invited us to stay overnight at her estate there,” Kevin finished.

“Glad that you can come,” Tamara said. “My folks need to return home when Dad’s meetings are done, probably on Tuesday. Peter’s spending a few days working with his collaborator at Imperial College while I meet with Emma’s engineers to look over the prototype specs and performance. The prototype unit has a provision for one kind of wireless energy transmission, RF beams, and I’ve been working on systems to minimize power losses during energy beam transmission. My goal is to do away with high-voltage electrical transmission lines. The prototype will be used to test transmission methods.”

“I guess we’re a bunch of high achievers,” Denise chuckled. “But Tamara’s outclassed us all...”

“No way!” Tamara objected. “I haven’t destroyed parts of the governments of two world powers, you know.”

“Yeah, yet,” Peter snarked. “You guys, don’t give her any ideas, ‘cause when she gets going on one, the destruction in her wake is like where a tornado passed. She’s already shaken up the departmental structure at Hopkins—her ideas have sparked so many cross-disciplinary programs there that the administration has all but given up trying to write program descriptions. Most of the medical, science, and engineering faculty are trying to get joint appointments in other departments just to get a piece of the action. How many collaborators do you have on your neuroscience project now, Tamara? Thirty-four?”

She giggled. “Nuh uh, it’s at fifty-seven now. From sixteen departments, schools, and programs. Just before we left, I got calls from professors in economics, sociology, and philosophy. They have ideas to use the neuroscience findings which my collaborator’s group has been publishing in their respective fields, so that number may increase.”

Peter turned to the others. “See what she’s done? Case closed.”

“Sorry, honey,” Tamara rebutted, “Look at Denise; she did a number on the curricula of all the ed schools in the country. And sounds like the four of them did what my dad told me to do about ending threats when they stopped the Program here. He’s a Marine and they make sure that the threat is gone when they’ve finished their mission. They say, ‘Walk softly, leave no sign that you passed. But if someone interferes with your passage, then end the threat. And never look back.’”

“Ohmygod, Tamara,” Denise cried as she ran over to hug her. “You’re another Marine brat—where’s my head at; I didn’t make the connection. Sure, your dad’s a Marine, duh, saw the uniform. When we’re all back in the States, I gotta hook you up with Cindy Denison. She and her brother Roger, their dad’s a Marine too, had us use Marine strategy to destroy the Naked in School Program back in the States. She’ll absolutely love your ‘no-holds-barred’ philosophy.”

“Well, Denise, Cindy must have taught you well, ‘cause that’s exactly what you did with your little education rebellion here,” Tamara replied. “In my case, that motto describes how I live my life—I had to because of the threats my family faced in leaving Haiti. I just apply it to my work as well—an unanswered question, an unsolved equation, missing data, these are all threats. I leave none behind when I work. And, of course, the threats of evil people too; those I neutralize,” she finished in a tone of voice and an icy glare that gave everyone in the room a sudden chill.

“Shit, Tamara, that was scary,” Kevin remarked. “I felt the emotion behind that last comment.”

Denise shuddered. “Oooh, that was awful—suddenly your spirit became inky black, Tamara—what the hell did you do?”

“Jeez, sorry,” Tamara apologized. “I forgot I’m with a bunch of sensitives here. Part of my psyche is tied up in an attachment to the lwa called Ayizan Velekete. She’s my patron and the protector of the young, poor, weak, and disadvantaged people in the world. I committed to her when I was young that I would never do evil nor abide evil people. This is the source of my abilities, I believe, and how I was able to stop the Program back in my high school. The Program was a serious evil inflicted on the children and had to be stopped.”

“Oh, that’s perfect!” Amelia exclaimed. “That was exactly what Jeremy and I were saying in his blogs and how we got the public’s support behind us, the press too, and that pressured the government to listen to us.”

“You know, Tamara, I’m getting a hint of an idea here,” Kevin mused. “Modesty aside, we’ve got a bunch of wizards here. You’re the tech wizard; Jeremy’s a legal wizard; Amelia’s a humanitarian one; I don’t know Peter well yet but I sense that he’s both a tech wizard and an empathic dynamo; Denise is a psych wizard; and I’m an organizer. We’ve all bonded over the last week, I believe. Perhaps when we’ve all finished our education, we could get together and see what we could accomplish. Can we all think about that?”