Chapter 10

Time: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 7:07 AM

I stayed in bed a few minutes after my alarm went off, just stretching and thinking. Today's the day! I went over and hopped on the scale before I got dressed, 167 lb. Okay... I pushed up as hard as I could. The scale looked like it went to zero. Yes! I'm still on track! According to my calculations, I should be able to push with 738 Newtons now. Just another hour to go, and I will have crossed the Rubicon. I pushed again and walked around the room playfully, enjoying the soft feel of my feet brushing lightly against the carpet with 1 lb of weight. This was so cool!

This close to my "ground zero", I could already tell what being able to fly would feel like. It would not be like being a weightless balloon. I still have my full mass and inertia. Instead, I imagined my body as a 3-D car, and I would soon be able to "drive" it wherever I wanted my body to go, even straight up. So incredibly cool!

I wanted this so badly, I started to fret a bit over the last few days, thinking that if fate dealt me a joker and stopped the growth of my power just below flying abilities... well, how much could I diet? But now it seemed all those worries were just idle thoughts. I was so close!

Everything else is also progressing on schedule. My sphere of influence is over 46 meters, and my power output is 8.91 kW. I had just tested it before getting up. I had pushed the thermostat on our 200-liter water heater to off last night, and then spent twenty minutes heating it by 13C this morning before switching the dial back on. Hot morning showers for everybody, on the house! Courtesy of...

Courtesy of what? Not of whom, of what? It was a deep problem, and one I had no idea how to explore. All this energy! Where was it coming from?! Did energy have to come from anywhere? I used to think so. All the people who write physics books think so, that energy can be transformed, but total energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

... nor destroyed... That's my latest trick, to jiggle electrons and lattices not just to add heat but to jiggle out of phase with existing jiggles and cool down. It would take more concentration, but if I wanted to, I could now pull heat out of the water heater just as fast as I pumped it in. Pull it out to... to oblivion. There was something deeply disturbing about feeling the heat had to go somewhere, yet observing that it just disappeared.

I've got an interesting job this summer, helping to build homes. I was hired as temporary labor by a non-union outfit. That fact disturbed my dad a bit, but finding a summer job around here with just a high-school diploma is tough, and in the end my dad agreed.

My foreman now thinks of me as absolute gold. I started the summer helping the framers. But for the last couple of weeks my new job is lugging 80-lb bags of shingles up ladders to the roofers. The crew knows I'll be leaving for M.I.T. the end of next week, and they're all telling me how they'll cry when I go.

My job also raised another interesting moral issue for me. What if somebody slipped off the roof and was heading to his death or at least a horrible injury? I figured I shouldn't try to decide about this at the moment of crisis, but think the issue through beforehand.

It didn't take long. The answer was blindingly obvious. There is no way I could ever live with myself if I idly watched someone die. And I'd still have a bit of cover. Nothing would tie the "miracle" to me particularly. Still, I'm so glad I haven't had to do it...

Time: Sunday, September 1, 2002 11:40 AM

I was sitting alone in my MIT dorm, looking over my textbook for the phys/calc course I'd soon be taking. I thought I'd do fine. I sighed and stared out the window at Boston on the other side of the river...

I arrived a week ago, and was very lucky with the dorm lottery, getting a double facing the river. The freshman orientation week has been so interesting! And in a few days the classes would start for real. I couldn't wait. I felt as if I belonged here, as if I always belonged here. I felt surrounded by incredibly bright people, even my roommate Ray, a little immature but so incredibly bright... The campus seemed both magical and like a second home, and I loved it.

Melanie is similarly thrilled about Harvard. We went to dinner in Boston and the theater last night, saw a live performance of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Fabulous stuff! Boston is a Mecca. You just don't get this quality of theater about Reading!

We came back to Cambridge on the Redline. There's no way I'd want to keep a car around here, especially as a student. And with all the public transportation, I didn't need one. So I sold my car when...

I looked back from the window and around my dorm room. "What the hell?! What was that?!" It was as if I were driving a car and hit an unexpected pothole. I got up and walked around the room, feeling queasy but not knowing why. Suddenly, I had a shock of a premonition. I confirmed it within an hour. At 11:42 AM that morning, my kinetic powers seemed to have reached their limits.

Time: Sunday, 2:35 AM, December 1, 2002

It was an absolutely miserable night out, fog mixing with cold drizzle, a wonderful time to stay inside and sleep in warm, comfortable beds. And I was expecting my roommate to be away on Thanksgiving vacation for another sixteen hours. This was exactly the opportunity I'd been waiting for...

I was hovering fifty meters above the roof of a building, dressed in a jet black outfit and surrounded by fog. I was in the seediest part of Cambridge and believe me, Cambridge at its worst is pretty bad. Sixty meters below me and still nine meters within my sphere of influence was my target, a vault-room off the basement of a major druggie distribution node. I had sensed it by accident over a month ago. I was on a bus and it entered my sphere. I saw some very tough looking dudes enter a building and I probed, mostly just from idle curiosity, but what I saw shocked and disgusted me.

Why was I doing this now? Well, to be honest, I must admit the money is a part of it. I enjoy living off an extra supply of cash. But I don't think it's just the money. It's my abilities. I remember my words to Professor Hanson. It seems like so long ago. I said that ability is not intent. But lately I've been thinking that's not quite true...