Chapter 86

Lunch was grilled chicken panini sandwiches and sliced peaches and pears. I drank a large iced tea with it and watched Mrs. Trinh grin as I devoured it.

"That was delicious," I said when it was gone.

"How could you tell," she teased. "It wasn't in your mouth long enough for your taste buds to react!"

"Guess I worked up an appetite."

"You are exercising too much down there," she cautioned again. I was beginning to worry that she wouldn't keep buying the idea that I was just down there exercising.

"It's not that I'm exercising non-stop," I ventured. I was going to say more but decided it was probably not wise to belabor the point.

I'd switched loads in the washing machine before coming back upstairs, and the first load was dry by the time lunch was over. I made something of a production of carrying the folded sheets and pillow cases up to the upstairs linen closet, trying to reinforce the concept that there were legitimate things getting done in the basement. With the last load in the dryer, it was back to the cavern.

The new suit went on the same way the old one had, but it seemed odd once I was standing there in it.

"The false shapes need some encouragement," Bud told me. "The first thing we need to do is get the suit's power cells full." With Bud back in my head it was easy to know where and how, not that this was unfamiliar. The amount of power it took to fill the suit completely was surprising though.

"That's a lot more power than last time," I said when I was done.

"The suit has a lot more reserves now," Bud commented. "Plus it now has more active systems that require power. The first one is the new shape."

"I want to see" I said, and built myself a mirror. Creating an almost optically perfect mirror was an easy trick when you can get the appropriate layers of thicknesses telekinetically.

There have been a lot of methods tried over the centuries to create sheets of glass. Float glass, for example, is created by 'floating' molten glass on a bed of molten metal like tin. The technique produces a thin, even layer of glass, but was a tricky process that many tried, but few achieved. Commercial success for the method eluded glass makers until the 1960's.

I could achieve even better results than that, perfectly flat glass anytime I wanted, as long as I had the correct ingredients to hand, and the process of depositing aluminum and other materials on the back of the glass were a piece of cake for me. The coolest part was that when I was done, the mirror just dissolved back into its component molecules until the next time I needed them. Oh, and it was cool of course that the mirror would float in midair while I used it. Telekinesis is cool.

Bud guided me to an internal switch that I could activate telekinetically. I flipped it, and suddenly I looked like a comic book super hero. I had the wide shoulders, tapering waist and bulging muscles of a cartoon character. At the same time, the whole thing looked somehow alien. Maybe it was cartoon proportions translated to real life, or maybe it was something else, but in the suit, I did not quite look human. The smooth, almost featureless not-quite-a-face where the face should be added to the effect as well.

"All right, now for the real show," Bud said as we stood there staring at my image in the mirror. "Activate the exoskeleton."

"Okay," I said, and followed words with action.

"Oh wow!" Harley and I echoed together. Powered up, the exoskeleton brought a myriad of spiderweb-thin fine lines into view, glowing with a deep blue light. Think of the suits they wore in the old movie Tron, or the newer sequel, only smaller and finer. It did look sort of like a tracing of circuitry, in a way.

"the harness points on this suit are built in and mirror the larger of the exoskeletal lines you can see," Bud told us. "Everything should work the same as the old suit, but it would be a good idea to go get a good workout in it tonight."

Harley and I agreed.

"What should we do with the old suit?" I asked, looking at the crumpled heap on the table were we'd dropped it when we went to put the new one on.

"We can keep it as a reserve, of course," Bud said. "But we might want to consider something else. We could cut the arms and legs back, eliminating the feet, gloves and the hood, and cut back around the neck and collar as well. That way you could wear it under your normal clothes."

"Would we want to do that?" I asked.

"It would allow you to access Net from almost anywhere," Bud explained. "And of course you'd have access to the exoskeleton's strength in an emergency."

"Hmm..." I thought about it for a long time. There was certainly something to be said for having access to Net and the exoskeleton, but even as thin as the material was, I thought it was too bulky to go unnoticed under normal street clothes.

"How about we incorporate it into my riding leathers?" I asked. "That would mean converting it to a two piece system, if its even possible, but it would never be noticed there, and could be explained away as my trying to boost the riding outfit's protective features."

"Hmm..." This time it was Bud's turn to think. "That might be workable. We could even work the HUD into your helmet. Let us think about that for a while and see what we can come up with."

"Sure," I laughed. "You guys are the brains of the outfit, after all."

I did do a little playing around in the cavern, seeing how it felt to move about, let Harley lift us into the air and move us around. I practiced engaging and disengaging the exoskeleton. Everything felt normal. The new suit didn't feel any bulkier than the old one, and I felt just as nimble.