Chapter 1

“Hey there, little girlfriend,” Roberta Simmons said to me as she came into the room. She looked at the array of books and papers and the laptop strewn over the dining room table, then at my high school class planner which sat on top of the pile of books. Glancing at the pad where I was making notes, she asked, “Hmm? What’re all those calcs for? You must have some strange homework—I didn’t think they covered partial differentials in high school.”

I looked at her and smiled as I pushed away the pad, laptop, and the pile of papers which sat in front of me.

“Not in my school. This isn’t school work. I think I’ve found a way to maintain persistent Cooper electron pairs in a conductor at room temps at a normal pressure.”

She gasped. “No kidding? Really?”

“Okay, please translate that for a mortal person,” Sally Iverson laughed; she had followed Roberta into the room. “I’m just a lowly engineer-in-training, not a glorified physics nerd like you two.”

“Emma’s talking about room-temperature superconductivity, Sal. They’ve been trying to find any materials to do this for over thirty years now. What did you figure out, Emma?”

I pulled my pad over to show her.

“I was working with the BCS theory here. The problem is how to keep the Cooper pairs associated at higher temps where the increased random molecular motion in the conducting material would unbind them, Robbie,” I began and she nodded. “So far they’ve discovered that hydride materials will work but only at extreme pressures and only up to maybe 13 to 14 degrees C.”

“Hey, that’d work here in Alaska,” Sally joked. “That’s um... 56 or 7 degrees. Summertime temps!”

Roberta shushed her. “Yeah, Emma, I know. That’s like the metallic hydrogen that forms at thousands of atmospheres.”

“Uh huh.” I went on. “So this thought came to me when I was messin’ around with the Josephson effect calcs ‘cause I thought of a way to dope the hydride substrates...”

“Wait. Isn’t that the Schrödinger equation?” Roberta interrupted, pointing.

“Yeah. I was playing around with the eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian operators using the eigenvalues of some elements and noticed a few materials that seemed that they could extend the possibility of superconductivity to higher temps. So I was just searching the literature and don’t find anything that suggests this line of research.”

Sally broke in, “Okay guys, you’ve really lost me. Right about when I walked in.”

“One sec, Sal,” Roberta said, chuckling. “Let me see what our genius here found. Then we’ll try to translate. So, my little genius, what did you find?”

“Stuff it ... I’m no genius,” I muttered. “I just know some maths.”

“Sure, and I’m the queen of England,” Roberta laughed. “Now enlighten us.”

“It’s about how the properties of niobium and xenon seemed like they could stabilize Cooper pairs in a hydride substrate when constrained in something like a carbon nanotube structure,” I pointed out my calculations. “I was calculating the lattice vibrations in the substrate and it looks like this recipe can produce lattice coupling. See, here’re the electron donor atoms and here’s how they’re stabilized.”

“How’d you calculate the Hamiltonians? Do you have it programmed on your laptop?” Roberta pressed.

I blushed. “Erm ... not really; mostly they’re estimates I can do in my head. It’s close enough.”

“Goddamn. I just don’t know about you, kid ... Fourier transforms in your head, damn...” Roberta shook her head. “Okay, Sal, rough translation: from what I see here, if this shit is right, Emma may have found a solution to room-temp superconductivity. My god, Sally, if she can show that this works in practice, it would definitely get her the physics Nobel—at what age? You’re thirteen, right, Emma?”

I shrugged. “Almost. In August.”

“Hell, you’re just scary smart, Emma,” Sally said, as she sat down next to me. “After you come back down to earth, maybe you can use a teeny bit of those smarts to give me a hand? I have this problem my prof gave me and it’s stumping me and Robbie too. Here.”

She slid over her work and I looked it over. Basically she was using an application of Maxwell’s equations.

“So this problem is to determine how the electric and magnetic fields of this transformer thingie here ... erm ... this induction device—act on the surrounding circuit currents?” I asked, pointing.

“Yeah. Essentially that. Except we get answers which can’t be physically real.”

I looked over her work. Then I spotted it.

“A-hah ... I see. Look here. See this section where you did some partial differential calcs? You set the limits wrong when you did the double integral here. See, try it this way.” I showed her the correction.

“Oh damn,” Roberta groaned. “She got it in a minute of looking it over and we’ve been at it for an hour, not to mention your time before that, Sal. Emma, how the hell do you do that? My prof jokes that you should be teaching physics, not taking classes in it. I don’t think he was joking.”

I stared at her and shook my head. “No ... I need the classes to learn about this stuff in an organized way. I guess I can see how the maths are supposed to work; that’s a gift I have, but I need to learn how it all fits together. My thoughts are awfully disorganized. Like today. I thought of superconductivity when I was coming home from school ‘cause it was so bloody cold out—we never got this cold in England and it’s supposed to be spring, too! The thought popped into my head about how nice it would be to have an electric hand and body warmer right now but efficiently powering them is a problem and that led to thinking about storing energy and that led to electrons in high-energy states and then to ... oh well, you know.”

The girls thanked me and after a few more joking comments about how smart I was, left me to mull over and refine my calculations. I wondered if there was a way to make an apparatus to test this idea. Well, I suppose I can spend a few days trying to see how these calcs can be turned into something practical. I suppose I can ask my prof when I see him.

My thoughts turned to how I got to be so smart—and wound up in Alaska, of all places.

I’ve always been a loner, even when Mum was alive. It comes with being a bright kid, I guess. You learn to become invisible; that way the other kids don’t tease or make fun of you for being smarter than them. I learnt that the hard way—don’t correct the teacher when she’s wrong. Do that too many times and you get a rep—amongst the kids as a showoff and amongst the teachers as a troublemaker. Fortunately a few teachers noticed how advanced I was in school and that led to my mum having me jumped in grades several times. Damn, I still miss Mum.

Me? I’m Emma Elizabeth Clarke. Yes, I’m named after the Queen. That was Grandma’s idea; she loved the Queen. I’m 12 now, 13 in August, and a hybrid of a high school kid and a college coed. Some coed I am—12 years old, 145 centimeters tall ... oops, this is the U.S.—that’s only four feet nine inches tall (I know that some Brits use feet and inches for height, but I learnt to say it in metric in school. That’s how I think too. In metric.)—and I’m almost flat as a board. Mum said her boobs didn’t come in till she was 15 or so. I’m hoping that’ll happen for me too. Or could I hope for sooner? I have chestnut hair and green eyes. I hate team sports but like running and swimming and do both as much as I can.

That’s me. Oh, and I’m a maths prodigy, apparently. Maths comes easily—differential calculus, multivariable calculus, set and group theory, topology, tensor maths, number theory, whatever. I understand it all, like it’s there in my head all ready to use as I need it. If you can express it with numbers, then I can understand it completely. But I’m not socially inept, like a lot of other savants (I guess you could use that term for me). I’m not on the autism spectrum, like Asperger’s, ‘cause I can do just fine socially. But I don’t socialize much; I guess it’s ‘cause my mind is always running full tilt analyzing everything I see, so personal friendships with other kids my age are sort of difficult to maintain.

My thoughts turned to my childhood and recent past. What a bloody whirlwind it’s been! I guess my early childhood wasn’t entirely “normal,” whatever that means. I didn’t grow up in a father-mother kind of family. My family was just Mum, Grandma, Grandma’s devoted friend who had been her personal assistant before she retired, a live-in au pair for me, and me. Grandma was quite well off; with her husband, who died when I was a toddler, she owned a multinational corporation (actually she was the majority shareholder, owning 63 percent of the shares). She had been the chief financial officer before she retired and was a U.S. citizen. Oh, right, so was Mum. Mum was born in the U.S. and she and my grandparents lived there till Mum was one or two years old. When Mum was born, my grandparents got a U.S. passport and a citizenship affidavit for her—I have those papers in my bank’s safe deposit box. I kept them because I think I may have a claim to U.S. citizenship, but I’ve never thought about pursuing that idea. Maybe in the future, if I need to...

Mum was a doctor—my dad too, they met in their medical training, but when I was still a baby, he was killed by an IED in Afghanistan where he was doing a tour as a field surgeon. Then when I was about eight, Mum was sent to Ghana in Africa where she got one of those awful viruses—Marburg, Lassa, or Ebola, don’t remember which one, and they couldn’t get her home in time to get proper treatment. Grandma became my guardian then. By that time, I had been advanced to Year 7—that’s secondary school, making me three or four years younger than my classmates. So I quickly learnt how to be invisible to avoid being bullied or getting on the wrong side of any other unpleasantness. My jumping another school year resulted in my beginning Year 10 when I was just ten years old.

Just after my eleventh birthday, Grandma’s increasing dementia put her in a nursing home and her friend joined her there, too frail to live independently herself. And then six months later, Grandma suffered a stroke and passed away. So once again I needed a new legal guardian. The executor of Mum’s and Grandma’s estates—he’s our family solicitor—located my only remaining relative, Dad’s younger brother, my uncle Scott Clarke. I didn’t remember him; I had never met him as he hadn’t visited our family after Dad was gone. That probably was because he works as geologist for an international energy company and worked overseas; now he works out of Fairbanks, Alaska. Uncle Scott agreed to become my guardian, I think mainly because of the £50,000 annual stipend that the trust would pay him. No, that’s harsh. He did feel that becoming my guardian was his family duty and we did like each other when we met. Anyway, he’s an okay sort of bloke, I guess. He’s a bachelor and when I met him, I could see why. Maybe that’s why he spends so much time in the field; it keeps his contact with people at a minimum and he’s fine with that.

Since Uncle Scott traveled a lot, he kept just a small apartment for when he wasn’t in the field. He told me that the apartment was too small for the two of us, not to mention the problem of my supervision when he was in the field. He came up with an interesting solution to the problem; he’d buy a house, one large enough to have renters, kind of like a boarding house, and get a live-in housekeeper to watch over me and the renters whilst he was in the field. The renters would be drawn from students at the local uni and they could provide “companionship” for me. Scott knew of a possible person for the job, a Mrs Ann Flannery, whom he had known fairly well through his company contacts, so he asked her if she was interested. She asked to meet me before she accepted; we found that we liked each other, so she agreed to take the position.

Uncle Scott found a suitable house near the uni—it’s University of Alaska Fairbanks, or UAF, in College, Alaska, actually, just outside the Fairbanks city limits—and he agreed with Mrs F that they’d only rent to graduate students. Mrs F had a daughter, Joyce, who was four years older than me and was currently a pupil at the high school I’d be attending. Uncle Scott arranged with his local attorney, a Mr Alan Jameson, to give Mrs Flannery a power of attorney for any permissions or care I might need when he couldn’t be reached. He and the attorney set me up with a spending account to allow me to draw money from my trust stipend. The trust I inherited contained all my mum’s and Grandma’s assets and it would pay me “HEMS”—health, education, maintenance, and support—each month until I was 18 years old or starting uni; then the payment amounts would be assessed to see if any changes were needed to support me when I went to uni. I’d get full control of the trust when I turned 25.

After I had moved to Fairbanks, coming to the U.S. on an L-2 visa—it was last summer when I had just turned age 12—it took the school almost a month to get my status sorted. From my U.K. records, it looked like I should get sophomore status here; sophomore year in the States is roughly similar to year 11 back in the U.K.—except in Scotland. They’re different in Scotland. Really.

During my first few weeks here last summer, I began to settle in. With some input from me, Uncle Scott and Mrs F found three graduate students to live with us; Roberta Simmons, who was a first-year PhD student in physics (she wanted to specialize in solid-state physics); Sally Iverson, who had a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a computer science minor and was going for an engineering doctorate; and Jennifer Rich, a third-year PhD candidate in geology. She was someone my uncle knew at UAF as he was an adjunct professor there, and like my uncle, spent time in the field, so I didn’t see her much.

Because of my age, I was put in freshman classes during the first week or two of my starting high school while they were still sorting my status and I was bloomin’ bored out of my mind. One class in particular got me really brassed off at the teacher. I had been parked in freshman English while my records were being reviewed, you see. The teacher was a “Mrs Prissy” and everything had to be by her rules. She got on my wick after the very first assignment I had turned in, the standard “How I spent my summer vacation” essay. When I got it back, I found she had given it two marks: one for content and one for style. Both were failing marks.

On “Content,” she indicated that I hadn’t addressed the assigned topic, “How I spent my summer vacation.” On “Style,” she wrote that there were too many spelling errors and improper usages. She had marked all the words I had spelt with the English spelling as wrong, you know, words like colour, specialise, centre—words like that. That’s how I learnt them. She also had marked wrong all the common idiomatic phrases I had used, phrases used in most, if not all, British writing.

I went to her after the class and complained vehemently.

“What’s this about not writing about what I did this summer?” I asked with some heat.

“Miss, um, you’re whom again?”

I pointed to my name which was written on the top of the essay. She didn’t even bother looking at it.

“Emma Clarke.”

“Miss Clarke, I wanted you to write about vacation topics, to see how your writing expressed your emotion and your enjoyment when you did interesting things. You just wrote about,” she looked at the paper, “yes, about packing up a house, visiting offices, moving, and then looking for a house in Fairbanks. That’s not vacation material; I expect you to write about what I assign.”

“You assigned the topic, ‘How I spent my summer vacation.’ What I wrote about is precisely what I did during the summer. My grandmother had recently died; she was my guardian, and my uncle came from the U.S. to help me get her affairs in order, close up my home, and get me ready to move here. This was how I spent my entire summer; there was no quote enjoyment unquote involved. What I wrote was exactly what your topic called for. I wouldn’t have written about what I didn’t do, either.

“And why did you mark all these words wrong?” I pointed at some words; my temper was rising. “Every single one of those words is in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language,” I said, pointing to a copy on the classroom bookshelf. “That’s an English dictionary; this class is an English class. You wrote the class’s name on the board over there. It says ‘Mrs Oliver, Freshman English.’ How can you call those spelling errors? And how do you expect me to write about a topic if you don’t explain your expectations?”

“Miss Clarke, I’m teaching American English. I expect that everyone will learn the proper spelling. And I expect when students write about vacations, they’ll write about interesting things they did.”

I was gobsmacked at her attitude.

“I just can’t believe that you think every kid has a wonderful time when school’s not in session,” I snarled at her. “I can’t accept that explanation. And on the spelling? Please don’t suggest that the English spelling I learnt is not proper. The school doesn’t call this class ‘American English,’ after all. Another thing ... idioms are idioms. They’re words or phrases whose literal meaning doesn’t match their true meaning but are accepted as proper usage. You marked many of my idiomatic usages wrong. They’re common idioms.”

“That’s not how people talk here, miss. That may be common where you used to live but not here. So I marked them as improper usages.”

I was fuming. “So you’re not adjusting the grade?”

“No. I will expect you to learn to write properly.”

This was too much. I went to Mr Smith, the assistant principal, over that tiff. Immediately. His office was right inside the reception door and the secretary didn’t see me come in; I’m short so from her seat she couldn’t see me over the counter so I was able to get to his office without being diverted. I was happy to see that he was in. I tapped on the door frame.

“Erm, Mr Smith? May I have a minute?” I asked quietly.

He looked up.

“Ah, yes; you’re, um, Miss ... Clarke, is it? Come in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

My anger was threatening to boil over. I wouldn’t let it, I wouldn’t let what happened with Mrs Prissy get on my wick and get me all eppy over her being a nit. But it all came out anyway.

“Sir, that dozy cow, Mrs Oliver, gave me a bloody failing mark on my frikkin’ first essay and...” I fumed.

“Calm down, Miss Clarke; sit and let’s discuss it. Let me get your file, okay?”