Chapter 23

Time: Sunday afternoon, August 6, 2006

Melanie and I got back home from church about a half hour before noon. We both started working, Melanie on her Biotherapeutics project while I crunched and wrote some code for my research grant. After a couple of hours, my wife up to me from behind my desk and nibbled on my ear.

"Lunch?" she whispered, and then licked my ear.

"Sure... Just give me a minute to finish up..." Melanie headed off to the kitchen. "Want to watch a movie?" I called out as I shut down my laptop.

"How about just some music?" she called back, the sounds of sandwich making in the background.

I got up and searched around our collection, looking for something we both liked. I finally picked some ethnic music for Scottish lute and mandora.

After lunch and doing a few dishes we stretched out in the living room, relaxing from the day. We had both gone out for an early morning run. Melanie laps me on the track; she flies like the wind when she kicks up her heels. I could keep up with a bit of force, but with other runners around why take the risk of blatantly displaying impossible physics?

With gentle strumming melodies in the background, I cuddled with Melanie on the couch. She smiled and nestled into the side of my body and sighed. Her eyes were idly looking at our small end table by the couch. With a thoughtful look on her face, she reached over and ran a fingertip across the top and then examined her finger. It was spotless.

"Amazing how clean this place stays," she commented. "I've gotten so used to it, the slight amount of dust on the yacht caught my attention, but it's really here that... Oh my gosh! Eric! Is this you?!"

"Uh, yeah... I wasn't trying to hide anything. I guess I just never got around to telling you. I sense and lock all the dust on a daily basis."

"Oh... Where does it go?"

"Into a plastic bag, and then into the trash... It only takes a few seconds..."

"Oh... Oh wow... Hey! Eric! Couldn't you wash the dishes that way too?"

"Oh yeah, I suppose..."

"So why are we still doing them by hand?"

"Well, I do force them clean when I'm alone... I clean the air in the house too."

"You do?" Melanie looked at me thoughtfully. "How far down do you lock?"

"Well, except for the plants, I go down to the molecules. I just cleaned before lunch. This condo is far cleaner now than the best surgery room... I even pulled the CO2 in the air here down to zero."

"What?! How do you do that?"

"I pick off the carbon-12 atoms from the CO2 molecules; force the carbon atom in one direction and the oxygen molecule in the other. I leave the O2 molecules in the air, and about sixty grams of pure carbon dust goes out with the trash."

Melanie stared at me. "What?! So much? From a trace gas? You're kidding!"

"No, not at all. Do the math. We have 1148 square feet of interior space, ceilings over 9 feet high. I find the indoor concentration of CO2 is usually about 560 ppm, and then you have the mass ratio of the carbon-12 atom to the two oxygen-16 atoms. The end result is about sixty grams of carbon in the condo, locked up in the air's CO2."

"And you can pull it out. Wow Eric! You could be humanity's answer to global warming!"

"Well, at full throttle, I suppose I could put a dent in the problem. But only within my sense sphere, and the effect would drive Cambridge scientists crazy. Why would the CO2 in the city be so much lower than the rest of the planet?"

"Yeah..." Melanie turned thoughtful for a moment, and then started to look troubled. "Oh Eric! How can you focus on so many molecules at the same time?!"

I shrugged. "Want to know a secret? It's easy. It's like a bifurcating zoom... Difficult to describe how it feels... easy though..."

"But down to single molecules?! Doesn't that... What about the uncertainty principle?"

"Oh yeah, major-league violations all over the place. I am a one-man wrecking crew, as far as quantum principles are concerned."

"Eric, pulling the CO2 out of the air, you never mentioned doing this..." Melanie smiled kindly and took a guess. "Don't like to boast?"

"Yeah, well... I can, you can't... It's not exactly boasting, but... well, something that separates us..."

"Ah..." She leaned over and kissed me. "Sweetie, you're very considerate, but really, this is so fascinating. Tell me about these things."

"Okay! Actually, there are a few things I need to tell you anyway. Want to see what I'm working on now?"

"Sure!"

I looked around the condo. The one room without windows was the kitchen area. "Come with me to the stove. I'll show you something."

A few seconds later I was standing in front of the stove at the end of the galley kitchen. Melanie was standing at the kitchen entrance watching me. "Okay. What's up?"

"I'm just about to do something with the light in this room. It'll look a little weird. Don't be shocked."

Melanie raised her eyebrows. "Well, forewarned is forearmed. Go ahead. AHH!" She couldn't help a small cry as I demonstrated my new trick. "Eric, what am I looking at?!"

"What do you see?"

"This looks so bizarre, like a double negative! I see an orange you, like you're lit up in an orange light. And I also see a bluish stove right through you!" She moved her head from side to side. "I'm maintaining binocular perspective! I really am seeing a blue stove right through a reddish you! Eric! What am I looking at?"

I nodded and shut down my experiment. "Remember Thursday night, when I mentioned I hit a pothole?"

Melanie's eyes lit up. "My gosh, now I do!... Oh gee... Eric, come back to the couch with me?"

We were soon sitting on the couch. Melanie was all cuddles and affection. "Sweet Eric. You were so gentle with me Thursday night. I was being a bitch to you, and you had something change with your kinetics... I can only imagine how stressful that must be... And you ignored your problem and stayed caring for mine..." She kissed me. "So what happened when you hit the pothole?"

"Everything started growing again at their characteristic rates. Force, Energy, sense- sphere radius, everything... I did the calculation. It was right at the start of the seventh period within this fourth rotation."

Melanie nodded. "You're growing again, huh?"

"Yep. Sense-sphere radius is now 1170 meters, compared to 1103 on Thursday, I can create 4.5 grams of matter an hour compared to 3.5, maximum force is 4.77 giga- Newtons compared to 3.77, and my minimum mass for a lock right now is 2.48 eV. It used to be 2.99 eV. My new wavelength limit for locking a photon is 500 nanometers. That's right at the boundary between bluish and greenish light."

"Oh my gosh! The stove!"

"Yes! It's the strangest feeling, sensing the photonic promises. Between the photon- electron interactions, the photons are nowhere at all, they have no spatial locations. But I can lock the promises, force them not to be fulfilled. The net effect is making anything totally transparent to any wavelength I can lock."

Melanie's eyes lit up. "So if your minimum limit keeps decreasing, you'll be able to make yourself invisible?!"

"Well, not just me. Anything within my sense-sphere. It takes very little power. Of course, I'd still be visible to an infrared camera, unless the limit keeps decreasing. Maybe I'll be able to nullify those promises too... Melanie?"

"Uh huh?"

"There's something more I should tell you about last week, about Thursday night, and my last conversation with Patricia at the airport..."

Melanie listened quietly while I talked. Afterwards she rested her head on my shoulders. "Such a gift Eric," she sighed. "Your forgiveness... I think I suppressed the memory of how brutal I was, dry jerking you like that... Why didn't you stop me?"

"Oh, it wasn't that painful..."

"You sure? Show me now?" Melanie got up smiling and led me into our bedroom. She undressed me and laid me on the bed. She asked me to spread my legs with her hands on my inner thighs. I lay there and relaxed, feeling her gentle fingers examine my penis and sac. It was the easy familiarity of resting with a trusted mate. My penis stayed completely soft. The time passed quietly.