Chapter 88

It took Net Thirty hours. During that time, I would have gone nuts, but Bud asked me if I was serious about wishing I could see in the warehouse.

"Serious? Of course I'm serious, but your systems aren't capable of penetrating walls."

"No, they're not," he agreed. "But that doesn't mean we couldn't build something here. In fact, the quickest solution would be to sacrifice your old suit for the purpose."

"What do you mean? Sacrifice it how?"

"With the Tk power source, a modified video field like the suit hood uses to allow you to see even when the hood is covering your face, and some adapted exoskeletal bits and pieces, we could build a small, self-contained unit that we could insert into the warehouse. It would move on its own, the AI would guide it. It would record audio and video, but could just as well transmit using our undetectable communications system to send it to Net as a live feed. We could even override the AI if we saw something interesting we wanted to investigate."

"Well what are we waiting for then?" I asked. "Lets get moving!"

So that's how I spent my Monday morning, except for a thirty minute session on the phone with Mike Guilford, where we hashed out the Charles and Deanna James Memorial Scholarship fund, the Fiberdyne Industries Science and Technology Scholarship fund and the James Military Veterans scholarship fund.

Mike Guilford promised me he would take care of finding qualified and caring people to administer the scholarships, subject to my input on membership, and on future decisions regarding disbursement of funds. There were laws to be followed of course. The money involved was a large sum, but I wouldn't miss it. That was another mental hurdle I was slowly overcoming.

The finishing touches would take months. What we'd begun today was barely begun, to be honest, and I wold certainly have a few dotted lines to sign on before anything was real, but it felt good to have things begun, and in time to help Mitch if he needed it.

When we were done building our new toy, it was almost dinner time. I'd come upstairs at lunch time and devoured a cold pasta salad and some fresh apple slices, then disappeared into the basement again.

The finished product looked like a cross between a spider and a caterpillar. It had the long, sinuous body of a caterpillar, with the long, skeletal legs of a spider. It had twelve legs, in six pairs. There were two video and audio sources, one at each end. Both video feeds could handle visible light. One could also handle infrared light and the other could also handle UV light.

The unit was about the size of a large banana, and the legs were each as long as the body.

I was rather proud of the feet. The feet were special. Taking a cue from the invention of Velcro, thought to stud the bottom of the feet similarly, but Bud suggested instead that we emulate the gecko. I studded the feet of 'Bug' as I began calling it, with millions of microscopic hairs only a few molecules thick. The feet of a gecko utilized structures called 'Setae', which relied on something called Van der Waals force for their ability to stick to even smooth, slick surfaces. The nanoscale nature of my threaded feet gave them a hundred times more sticking power than the best a gecko could do, and on top of that, with the AI's help, the effect was slightly tunable, allowing for the maximum adhesion possible for any given material.

"That is one amazing little critter," I said when we were done and watching Bug scurry around on the walls of the cavern. "We need to get it into that building tonight."

"As soon as it gets dark," Bud agreed.

Dinner was steak and potatoes with a green salad. I ate leisurely and talked with Mrs. Trinh about her new email account and how she was getting along with it. Don Murville's name came up as well, and it was interesting to see her drop her eyes while she spoke of him.

Something else to file away, and definitely too soon to tease her about.

Sunset was around 8:30 that night. Full darkness took a while longer than that. I sat in the house and watched some shows that Mrs. Trinh liked on the SyFy channel. I thought it was called the Sci Fi channel, but apparently they'd changed it. Both shows were a nice mix of action and humor, and I enjoyed them. I was chuckling when I finally headed for the basement at ten. I could have used some of that stuff they had in the warehouse.

I took a big breath when I donned my new suit. This time I was putting a suit on to actually use it. This was my first public act as a super hero. Granted, it had better not be any more public than I intended it to be, as in totally unnoticed by the public, but you know what I mean. This was my first time 'being' a super hero.

I lifted up out of the secret exit, grateful as well that it was only a few days until the new moon. There was not a lot of light in the sky, and with the normal atmospheric haze, I wasn't too worried about occluding any stars for people on the ground.

Harley lifted us up to fifteen hundred feet, following the flight path the suit's AI was displaying in the HUD. It was about 12 miles, as the Tk Suit flies, from the hilltop above the secret exit to the airspace above our destination. Harley began accelerating immediately, slowly building our speed, then reducing it as we grew close. With a peak of two hundred miles an hour, it took only a couple minutes to get to there. When we came to a stop, We stared at the overlay of the building below us for a moment.

"Match that up to our daylight view," I told Bud, and he and the AI did their thing and zap, the scenery around us switched to what looked like broad daylight. Really we were just seeing the daylight version laid atop the current one, but it was so seamless, it was impressive.

"Highlight the target," I thought. Bud relayed that to the AI and a small section of wall began to glow.

This was our one uncertainty. Net had found the building's schematics in the Santa Rosa City Building Department's computer files. Awful nice of them to computerize all this information for us. Those plans showed that this section of wall was isolated from the rest of the building, but had access to the rest of the structure.