Chapter 59

Nikki's turn:

I'm looking at the letter. It's a real, 'hold in your hand' letter. The contents are not a surprise. It's the culmination of a cycle of phone calls, a teleconference, and a flurry of emails.

The gist of it is that the coaxial power conductor configuration that Cindy and I proposed and tested has gained some attention.

"As you know, your work parallels actual weapons system development. The work you have presented in relation to high energy conductor configuration is being incorporated into our present large-scale project. Accordingly, all documentation and data regarding this configuration is considered to be classified under appropriate DOD regulation and Federal law."

"Personnel working on the large-scale project will be contacting you to make arrangements of joint efforts."

Cindy giggled. "We've been drafted."

"It almost appears that way," I said. "We lose any possibility of commercializing our design."

"Not necessarily," Cindy said. "We need to pass this idea on to my step-dad. He'll know which attorney we need to line up on our side."

"What commercial use do you have in mind?" Dan 1.0 asked.

"Well, since you asked," I said, "Cindy and I were talking with Terri about her squirrel gun, and she was asking about our project, and she asked what would happen if we released that energy pulse into some gas. Would it cause fusion?"

"No," my Dan said.

His tone was different, though, so I asked, "Is that 'no', as in it wouldn't cause fusion?"

"No," he said, "it's 'no' as in you three don't get to go into the fusion reactor business. It's just not that easy."

"2 plus 2 equals 4. What else COULD it be?" Cindy said.

"No," my Dan repeated.

"Don't ... Aren't you just dying to see what happens? I mean we can get a little vial of tritium pretty easily."

"Okay," Dan said. "Let me try this one more time: Holy shit, NO!"

"Why not?" Cindy asked.

"Well, if you really DO get a fusion reaction, where's the energy going? How much is there going to be?"

I giggled. "Doctor E's gonna faint when we ask 'er if we can try it."

"Look," my Dan said, "the only thing that would make this discussion more surreal is if Terri was doing the drawings for it."

Cindy's Dan though... "Guys, you really need to look hard at this. The amount of energy released if you achieve fusion ... I mean, we're getting a new building, but I'd kind of like this one to still be standing when we get ready to move."

"Yeah," my Dan reinforced. "That whole fusion thing is about getting huge amounts of energy out of tiny amounts of hydrogen. You guys better run some numbers."

"Yeah," Dan 2.0 added. "This one might be outside the scope of things we build in the back room."

"Okay," I said, glancing at Cindy. "But it does sound interesting."

"Bears investigation," Cindy giggled. "Might put Terri on it."

"Don't threaten us," Dan 2.0 said, laughing.

The truth is, we had a lot of irons in the fire. The purely academic pressure changed when they passed out the degrees to Cindy and me, but now, honestly, we're working, really working, on the masters' theses. I know that we've had the discussions of credentialing and education and knowledge, and what the three of them mean. Jason's a great example of a guy who has the knowledge but lacks the credentialing. Some of his clients are stupid ill-informed to think there's a real difference between his BSET (Bachelor of Science in Engineering Technology) and BSEE (Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering) in his ability to perform his job.

I know there's not. Dan (both of 'em, actually) say that the dumbest move is to think Jason DOESN'T know what he's doing, 100%, or better. But we're in the academic arena for right now and it just makes sense to us to play around inside the boundaries and get those master's degrees.

The arena requires that we actually attend some classes, but it's funny because the same professors pushing those classes are the ones who signed off on the bachelor's degrees and who tell us, basically, to give them an excuse to sign off on master's degrees. Still, material is there and appearances must be maintained. It's a happy thing, for the most part, though. We're known, for one thing. The other thing is that by the time you start talking about master's candidates in an engineering program, the less dedicated or capable are pretty well filtered out.

That said, there is a detectable undercurrent of jealousy from time to time. I mean, a couple of the other candidates weren't on quite the footing with the department hierarchy as Cindy and I. It doesn't help that Doctor Embert drags one or the other out of class from time to time, or that we get past some of the tests by working on them IN CLASS a week ahead of schedule or that Doctor Stebbins or Mizz Aneeta see us and call us by first names.

On the other hand, though, we don't treat our abilities as guarded secrets. We both offer help where it's asked, and our 'Greenhouse' is a common 'coming and going' thing for a couple of the master's bunch and a sizable number of the undergrads.

The only thing close a real friction is from another 'smart kid', you know, high IQ, although he didn't get the precocious thing assigned to him, so he's a few years older than me or Cindy. Colin's one of those 'he has issues' types, a bit obnoxious, sometimes inappropriate in his language.

We're not prudes. I know what it's like when a wrench slips and somebody says 'Fuck!' or somebody notices a mistake and says 'Cocksucker', but those are generally in the heat of the moment. It's not like I'm going to get the vapors and faint or something. I regard my fellow student who drops F-bombs in normal conversation as being uncouth or deliberately trying to prove something. I'm glad he's not on the project. I don't know or care what his master's thesis is. I just don't choose to associate with him except as absolutely necessary.

Since Cindy and I share some of the same classes with him, she and I stick together. On occasions when we weren't, he has made some untoward comments, trying to laugh them off as being flippant when he got called on it. He says nothing to us when we're together.

Maybe knowing about my ballpoint pen prowess helps.

Don't get me wrong; he's not a total dick all the time. And yes, Dan assured me that in proper context; 'dick' is a perfectly workable term describing a personality defect. Colin has his moments. He actually is quite brilliant; it's just that it's wrapped in such an obnoxious shell that it's unusable to us.

I honestly try to work with just about anybody. We're all like that in the Community. Cindy and I discussed it. I made the error of saying 'giving back' in that context.

Watched my little redheaded sister jump into her 'determined' mode. "Ain't giving back nothin'! 'Giving back' implies that I was 'given' something in the first place by THIS bunch. All I did was get born and show up here."

"What about your Dan and Mizz Helen and Mister Jim and Mizz Aneeta?" I pushed.

"Good point, but those are people who just do their jobs. My job is to make the universe a better place. If I don't do this, then I'm failing in my mission."

"Your mission is to build a weapons system that will punch holes in people miles away."

She fixed me with those green eyes. "You and me, we KNOW about the phrase 'he needed killin'', don't we?"

"You make my head hurt sometimes," I said.

"Oh, baloney! If you want to call it 'giving back', then go ahead. We do what we do because we CAN, and if your psyche drives you to help somebody with differential equations, then it's your little fight against entropy..." She punched my arm playfully. "And mine."

"Speaking of entropy rolling back, what'd you think of Kara and Bert's duet last night?" Two violinists. They cooperated on the score, transferring between genres, classical, Bluegrass, and back, tossed in a little Celtic for good measure.

"Uh," Cindy said, "There's definitely some harmony happening there." Giggle. "Music ... and..."

We're strapped for office space now at 3Sigma. I like working at the office, even though with the network anything we do on computer is completely transparent, and a click gets me a Skype or a FaceTime with whoever I want to converse with. I just like being in the office, listening to the background of conversations about the business, Mizz Beck or Maddie going on with somebody about purchase orders and billing, the 'back and forth' over one of our power system studies, the bouncing of ideas between people who know what they're doing.

I call it growth that you don't get in a classroom. They didn't spend as much time in class discussing the give and take over what form the protection of 500 kV transmission line should take. I mean, here's all this education about how much current can flow and what the voltage drop will be and how much heat the conductors will see and how fast the wind blowing over them will carry that heat away and how much the conductors will expand and sag. I got that.

I didn't get primary and backup protection, pilot channels, phase comparison blocking, directional comparison unblocking, and a little galaxy of other bright ideas as to how to see if that poor conductor is in a bind moving megawatts of power from one area of the country to another. That's stuff I'm learning.

A random thought. If Cindy sees this, I'm gonna get a lecture about structuring my writing better. It's happened before. And it makes me do MY lecture about William Faulkner and 'stream of consciousness' writing. He was famous for it.

I quoted him:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I still laugh at our knock-down, drag out argument.

"You're saying that you're equivalent to Faulkner?"

"Nope!" I said. I love these arguments where it doesn't matter who wins. "I'm saying that Faulkner himself says I don't have to be the same as him. Or Twain. Or Willum Freakin' Shakespeare hisownself." Giggle. "And how do YOU get by?"

"I don't have to be the same as Mark Twain or Margaret Mitchell. I get to be ME! And where I came from is a lot more culturally connected to Yoknapatawpha County than "WhyaintIwashedintothegulfofmexico, Louisiana will ever be."

By this time we had an audience. Tina started to say something. Susan touched her arm, shaking her head. "No, let 'em go. It's like watching Japanese sci-fi."