Chapter 15

Two years later...

Time: Friday, June 2, 2006, 8:12 PM

I look out of my window at Baker House a few minutes before sunset, and I can't help but feel a wave of nostalgia. I have gotten so familiar with my room's view of the river and the majestic Boston skyline. But after four tough and magical years at M.I.T., I am one week away from Commencement and receiving my Bachelors degree. And Melanie and I will marry a day later. My time and identity as single and an M.I.T. undergrad are drawing to a close.

I'm very proud of my senior thesis. I got my inspiration for it watching a NOVA program on the Chinese Rainbow Bridge of the Song Dynasty. My thesis is a really neat combination of fractal geometry and Lagrangian formalism, and it leads to a building technique I call compression/tension weaving. My thesis advisor and reader are ecstatic with my work, and I'll be staying a fifth year at M.I.T. to expand on it and get a Masters degree.

At the end of April Melanie and I closed on a small condominium near Harvard Yard, only 1100 square feet of space but perfect for us. We'll both be moving out of our dorms next week, and shopping for the rest of the furniture, primarily a couch. We are both keenly looking forward to it, living together openly as a married couple. We are so ready for it!

Melanie's dream has come through! The competition was incredibly tough, but she got accepted to Harvard Medical School. She hopes to one day be a pediatrician.

And my kinetic powers are currently locked at constant values, have been for over four months. Have I reached my final plateau, or is this fourth rotation just "the pause that refreshes?" Melanie laughs about this when no one is watching and will hug me and call me her "god in training." It's her intuition that the party isn't over yet.

The third rotation was the same temporal length as the first two, nineteen periods of 31 days, 19 hours and 56 minutes each. It lasted from May 30, 2004 2:30 AM Standard Time to January 24, 2006 9:31 PM Standard Time. Each period within the rotation would have the characteristic expansion of its attribute, a factor of 2 for sense-sphere radius, 16 for force, 18 for energy, and 9 for minimum mass. The order of progression was 9-18-16-2-9-18-16-2-9-18-16-2-9-18-16-2-9-18-16.

Bottom line? My sphere of influence now has a radius of 1102.75 meters. Within it, I can generate 3.77 giga-Newtons of force, 87.7 giga-Watts of power, anywhere I want, with fantastic bifurcation if I choose. And I lock down on a single 2.99 eV photon.

Locking photons is such a bizarre feeling. They don't really exist as a point or a wave. You can see that in the QED math, and it's also true when I probe the quantum reality. At the quanta level, I feel the complex wave function of the photon as a "promise", a tiny promise for interaction flying around the universe, sometimes being fulfilled and sometimes not. It's so strange... and beautiful... And I can create or destroy them, one 3 eV promise at a time. It's a wavelength of visible light, 415 nanometers, about in the middle of the violet range.

My force I never use near its full potential, except perhaps in molecular joining in woodworking. Think of one of those jumbo mega-ton oil tankers. I could lift about 42% of it out of the water, but why in the world would I ever want to do such a thing? The most I've ever used the force at the macroscopic level was at our secret home in the Allagash. The floors of the rooms in the former cave are now smooth polished stone, and horizontal to optical wavelength precision.

At a molecular level though, I can do so much with the force! I am a walking woodworking shop! I perfected my techniques in late winter in the Allagash, working with the local hardwoods (maple, birch, beech, and aspen). I taught myself how to make furniture from raw trees.

During the month of May, I brought in huge amounts of hardwoods and some exotic accent woods into our vacant condo. Breaking the wood along optically precise lines and curves is no problem, but what I really love is my ability to join. I can plane two surfaces with my force to sub-wave optical tolerances, and then use my force to bifurcate and tie multi-trillion knots in the micro fibers between the two surfaces. Result? A joint stronger than the original wood, and absolutely seamless!

I built a magnificent bedroom set in solid cherry with specialty wood inlays. The dining room set and the living room bookshelves and rocking chair are similarly made, base combinations of oak and walnut with oiled inlays of beech and aspen from the Allagash. Melanie was so happy with the results I redid the kitchen cabinets in solid maple and birch woods as a surprise for her.

And then there's my power. I can create 3.52 grams of matter in an hour, of anything I want. I often run at my limit. You should see Melanie's engagement ring. Five half- carat diamonds, I guarantee the five most pure and perfect carbon-lattice diamonds in existence. Five 58-facet, brilliant-cut diamonds, and it took me less than two minutes to think up each one of them.

But it's the rings I'm the most proud of. For both the wedding rings and Melanie's engagement ring, I used my own secret recipe, 3-D woven carbon nano-tubes threading a face-centered hexagonal matrix of gold and iridium, with individual atoms of silver and copper at key nexus locations. Light seems to get trapped in the nano-tubes, and creates a strange quantum resonance that appears as a flicker to the naked eye.

The result is iridescent gold. Its beauty is unique, breathtaking, and Melanie and I being the Trekkies that we are, we call it gold-pressed Latinum. It's incredibly tough material. Rule of Acquisition #102: Nature decays, but Latinum lasts forever. The Ferengi would be so proud of us.

Finance wise, our supply of cash is still huge, but the down-payment on the condo and our projected uncovered costs for first-year med school have tied up our legally available resources. Fortunately I've got a research grant for my grad school year.

I've got a pet dream to be within a kilometer of the power-ball lottery machines when they bounce the balls. It would be so easy to "win" the mega-million jackpot. But Melanie is part of my conscience now, and she asks me simply what is our moral justification to steal from all the people who bought the other tickets? So, we're going the route of mortgages and student loans for now. Ah, Melanie... She's become the better part of who I am.