Chapter 1

"Are you sure you girls are going to be all right? Your dad and I never left you alone for a whole week before..."

Jill and her twin sister Jamie looked up at their mom. They both knew that the worried look of their mom wasn't serious, that their parents were already packed, and would be heading to the airport in less than an hour. "Relax, mom, we'll be fine," said Jamie. "All seven of us are legal adults now, high school graduates, and we're all heading off to college on our own in a few months anyway. We'll be responsible, and we've promised not to let anyone else in the house while you're gone, not even our boyfriends, and we won't touch the liquor. You have our word on all of this."

"I know I do, dear ones, and I know how firmly you stand by what you promise. Well, we'll call often, and be sure to ask the neighbors for help if you have a problem you can't handle."

"You bet," said Jill. "But relax, mom. Remember, we have Frodo for protection!" (This was a family joke, Frodo was a three-year old, 70 lb brown standard poodle who welcomed everyone who walked in through the front door, and seemed quite hopeless as a watchdog). "Seriously, though, think of all the parents of the other kids. None of them is worrying about this at all."

"You're probably right, my astute one."

It was a fine summer morning in late June, just past graduation, and Jill and Jamie were thrilled to be spending the upcoming week camping out in their own home with five other members of their high school soccer team. The upcoming summer would be a bittersweet time for the young women, for they had forged strong bonds of friendship over many years, and they would soon be going their separate ways as they moved out into their adult lives. Jill, Jamie, Amy, Emily, and Katie had known each other since preschool, and they were inseparable. In their early childhood around the neighborhood, they became known as "the golden nickel", because they all had blond hair and almost always played as a group. In fifth grade, Sarah moved into the school district, a girl with dark brown hair, but otherwise so compatible in kindness and humor that she was quickly absorbed into the group, officially becoming the sixth member of the golden nickel in spite of her hair. It was much later, at the start of their sophomore year in high school, when the girls first met Laura.

Laura was a girl of Polish descent who grew up Bosnia and became a war orphan during the ethnic cleansing campaigns. She came to live with her grandmother's sister in the U.S., a distant relative she did not know, on a late August day when she was 15 years old. A description of her formal schooling, or lack of formal schooling to be more precise, made the school placement team first consider starting her as a freshman, rather than a sophomore, especially since she arrived speaking only broken English. But her great aunt insisted the girl seemed super bright, and they started her as a sophomore for a trial period.

Within a month, the placement team members were talking about their original concerns with wry amusement. Laura went from broken English to fluent English in less than three weeks. Her depth of understanding in mathematics and the physical sciences was so far above high school level that at first the science teachers kept spending their time trying to develop a program that would challenge her. They finally realized she was a true math and physics genius, with abilities far beyond those of her teachers. They talked with her great Aunt (whom Laura just called Aunt Irene), if Laura should move off to college early, but Irene thought the high school and the friends Laura was making were part of a needed healing from the war trauma. So during Laura's first sophomore semester, the school created special classes called "Advisory Math" and "Advisory Physics" for her, after-school sessions where Laura would describe her study efforts, and the teachers would try to suggest directions she might consider exploring. Her math studies were everywhere, her physics focused on getting to the cutting edge of quantum understanding.

On her other subjects, Laura joined the regular classes, and enjoyed moving at the high school pace though English studies, social sciences, and various electives. She also had a very athletic build, and joined the soccer team within a week of starting school. It was on the playing field where she first met the golden nickel.

The parents of the golden nickel wondered how Laura would be accepted by the group. Her endurance, power, and especially her ball handling skill on the field were of a caliber above high-school level, and the parents wondered if their girls would feel outclassed and resentful. In many ways, Laura's personality also was quite different. The members of the golden nickel had grown up nurtured and well loved, and their desires tended toward fun and adventure and enjoying life, and they were a little casual about rules and keeping promises. Laura was driven by her values and by a great passion to understand the physical world around her. She was intensely honest, incredibly focused on fulfilling any promise she made. Her personal motto in life was "carpe diem", seize the day. How would such different perspectives blend?

The blending turned out superb. For all their differences, the girls shared a base metal of kind hearts and a love of life, and the blending of Laura with the golden nickel produced an alloy superior to anything that had existed before. The rest of the team picked up much of Laura's standards for moral character, and ability to focus on goals. Laura learned to laugh again, and this time with an American sense of humor. The time she spent in movies and malls and on the soccer field with her close friends helped heal her from her ordeal in Bosnia. By Christmas of her sophomore year, she was already the seventh and final official member of the golden nickel.

The high school years rolled by, and graduation was only a month away. Jill and her boyfriend Steve were alone, sitting together talking in Steve's house on a quiet Saturday afternoon in May. Steve's parents were very rich, and off on one of their many vacations. Jill and Steve were very committed to each other, and had together picked Carnegie Mellon as a university that would support both their career choices, Jill in physics and Steve in drama. Jill was talking to Steve about Laura, and how she felt that Laura's reputation as the class genius might have prevented her from ever having a meaningful dating relationship. Jill was stunned when Steve quietly told her that he and Laura once had a date together.

"What!? You and Laura, when?" asked Jill.

"A year ago last May, just a few days before you and I started going together."

"Just last spring!? Was it fun for her?"

"No, not really," Steve said quietly, struggling to find the words to describe what he meant.

"NO? Were you intimidated by her mind, or wasn't she cute enough for you?" Jill suddenly froze and thought to herself, "Jill, what the hell are you doing? This is no way to talk to Steve."

Jill tried to sort out her rush of conflicting emotion. Steve, on the other hand, loved Jill dearly, took no notice of her sharp language, and just tried to give Jill straight answers to her questions. "Oh, Laura certainly is cute enough. Take your classic 5'6" perfect female form, stretch out the waist 4 inches until she's 5'10", add an extra layer of athletic muscle over everything, and you've got Laura. Her warm smile, and the way her smile lights up her eyes gives her a beautiful face. Oh, and those taut, upturned breasts... hey, stop that, pumpkin! It was you who asked the question. And I never petted them, or even saw them. Really. She always wears such pretty dresses; a guy can't but help notice her front... She wears absolutely no makeup or jewelry though. That does take a little getting used to."

"You never told me," Jill said softly.

"I should have told you sooner than this," Steve agreed. "Her intellect is awesome; I think I was a little put off by it at the time. I remember when Laura took Mrs. Li's Intro to the Chinese Language class as an elective her junior year here. Laura was speaking Chinese fluently before the end of the semester. After that, Mrs. Li just started handing her the Chinese poetry that Laura now loves so much... I think I first remember seeing Laura in the middle of our sophomore year. She was having a very animated discussion with Mr. Gnepp, the math teacher who was running her "Advisory Math" class that term. He had given her a book on optimization techniques he thought she would find interesting. She was back in the next day, claiming the book was making a big error in Chapter 2. Not a typo, an error in thought."

"This problem is much better approached with calculus of variations," Laura was saying. "Just set up the function's equivalent of a brachistochrone properly, and you'll see the book's error instantly!"

"Mr. Gnepp was having a hard time following her", Steve continued. "I heard they fixed the error in the next edition, gave Laura a nice citation in it too. Pumpkin, what's a brachistochrone?"

"No idea, of course. You think we've covered stuff like that, even in my honors math class? Stop teasing me, you fiend."

"We met by chance at the end of school, on a very hot day at the end of last May. Laura was bubbling over with excitement; she had just learned her first paper for Physical Review Letters had been accepted. She handed me a copy. The title was "The Reality Creation Process, New Mathematical Constructs for a Self-Organizing, Incomputable Interface Layer between an Undetermined, Entangled Quantum State and an Immutable Past." She was so excited. She started telling me the paper was the first part of something monumental..."

"It's just the beginning, Steve, but I'm on my way!" said Laura. "Read the books of Roger Penrose, he's written some good pioneering work on this. I only have the dimmest of views how this will evolve. It'll probably take me years just to build the mathematical tools I'll need to approach the physics. It will take several more years of theoretical work to lay down the physical principles. But then, experimental physics in the science of consciousness! True exploration, honoring the great scientific culture of test and learn. What is the physical basis for free will to exist? I think I can discover it. It will be my life's work, my life's great thank-you present to God..."

Jill was surprised to notice that Steve was starting to struggle as he continued to tell his story. "... Laura's Aunt Irene was spending an overnight at Angel Memorial with some medical issue. Laura was heading to the bus stop right after school when I met her. You know how bad the connections are from there to the hospital. I offered her a ride in my car, and to bring her back later to her apartment... She was very grateful... We got back to her apartment about 7 pm, so late Laura offered to cook me some dinner... She's a great cook, by the way... Her apartment seemed so small; Laura and her Aunt are really squeezed for space... And such worn-out furniture, very clean though... After dinner, we started talking. Laura was very pretty, walking around in her bare feet and with her hair unbound, wearing a thin cotton bright blue dress... I... , I started lusting after her body..."

"You what?!" whispered Jill.

"I know, Jill, I know. I'm so ashamed now of the way I acted. I was an absolute jerk. I kept pawing at her body and trying to undress her. Worse than a jerk, brutish, way below even my usual standards of bad conduct back then. I... , I came very close to force mounting her. Any other girl I know would have been crying rape and calling 911. I was that bad."

"Laura was firm but gentle with me. She kept saying, "Steve, we can't be this intimate. We don't know each other. You don't know me; you don't know who I am. You don't know what I am. Steve, we can't be this intimate." "

"Finally I semi-yelled at her, "Well, just who are you, anyway?" Laura paused, and then started telling me about her life in Bosnia..."

Jill could not believe what Steve was telling her, that he could have acted the way he described. She decided to pass it by for the moment and move on to her second astonishment. "Laura told you something about her life in Bosnia?" Jill whispered. "She's never even told anyone in the golden nickel about that, except in the most general terms. We all respect her right to privacy, of course..."

"Laura told me everything about her life in Bosnia. At the end, I promised not to tell anyone else... But I think I can tell you," said Steve, with a dawn of comprehension in his eyes.

"No, Steve. I'm dying to know, but don't break your promise."

"No, that's not what I mean. A few weeks ago, Laura came up to me between classes and said, "Steve, I think you and Jill are so close now that I consider you two as having begun your marriage dance. Between such dancers, there should be no secrets." I didn't understand exactly what she meant then, but I've just realized she was giving me permission to tell you about her. Tell no one else, though, not even Jamie. I think Laura wants this to be sealed inside what she calls our marriage dance..."

"Laura was born in Bosnia to a pair of poor farmers who loved her dearly. She lived close to a village of great ethnic diversity, and even as a young 2-year old she was amazing her neighbors with her language ability. All she seemed to need was to listen to people talk for a few hours in their native language, and then she would begin to chat back and imitate it. Making lots of errors, of course, but rarely the same mistake twice if you took the time to correct her. By the time she was eight, she was fluent in a whole basketful of the languages of Eastern Europe: Bosnian, Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and Albanian. She also had some limited abilities in Western European languages. It was her pride to make much needed money for her parents as an interpreter between neighbors as needed, and she was well loved and accepted by her community, as was her twin brother Edward, who was often by her side."

"Laura had a twin brother?" asked Jill, and she felt a deep cold shudder rock her body to the bone. Jill loved her twin sister Jamie so dearly that her loss would be unbearable, and Jill began to dread how this story would unfold.

"Edward was Laura's closest friend and great pride. He was like a deer, super graceful, kind and very protective of Laura. Laura said he was a phenomenal soccer player, able to make turns in direction so quickly, it seemed impossible. Laura spent many, many hours of her childhood playing one-on-one soccer with him. She spent much time practicing ball control, not to beat him, but to try to be a worthy opponent for him. Formal schooling was easy for Laura, but no one was pushing her very hard to study, and she spent her time playing with Edward, loving and caring for her two younger sisters Katja and Natalie, and chatting with the neighbors with all their interesting languages."

"Almost all her memory of the first ten years of her life is of loving times. But the clouds of war were gathering. People began to move out, the society began to polarize, all the love and acceptance and the different languages began to disappear. Then the war started. Laura called it a multi-year meat-grinder of insane hatred and stupid nationalism. Formal schooling disappeared for Laura. Across the last part of her childhood, from 10 years to 15 years of age, Laura and her younger sisters spent most of their time with a close friend of their family, a retired university physics professor. He was no blood relation, but Laura and her sisters loved him dearly, and they all called him grandfather. He lived in the nearby village, and Laura's parents thought it was safer for the girls there, rather than on the more exposed farm."

"Grandfather spent much time being Laura's private tutor. He was amazed and delighted in how fast Laura could pick up math and physics concepts when he challenged her to do so, and he soon realized she had the ability to start reading college level textbooks on her own. Grandfather turned Laura loose upon his own library, filled with the textbooks from his teaching career. Laura spent a great part of her last five years in Bosnia in that library, lost in the beauty of the math and physics, trying to ignore the war that was just outside her window."

"But the war did not ignore her. In the early spring, just a few days before Laura and Edward would have had their fifteenth birthdays; there was a raid on her family's farm by ethnic cleansers. Laura's mother was raped and killed outright, and her father and brother just disappeared. Usually in cases like this, the people just disappear forever, but in this case, the cleansers were very sloppy in hiding their disposal site, and Laura was able to help identify the bodies of both her brother and father within a week of the raid. Life all around Laura and her sisters was filled with fear, with her younger sisters Katja, now age 9, and Natalie age 7 trying to act braver than they felt."