Chapter 3

Dinner was a quiet affair. It was one of my mother's unbreakable rules; we were relatively free to keep our own hours – within reason – so long as neither our chores nor our grades suffered but we absolutely HAD to eat dinner with the family. Special dispensations were made for tournaments, sports and the like – football for me, forensics (think speech and debate) for Andwynn, and the University Insterscholastic League (UIL) for Nevaeh (well, as I think about it forensics falls at least partially under UIL as well but High Schoolers are quick to put space between what's done in High School and the Middle/Grade school tournaments) – but if we were at the house or over friend's houses we had to be home to eat dinner with the family. Dad was an investment banker and I was pretty sure he'd have ate in his office if he had a choice but Mom's word – at least on this matter – was law.

I ate on automatic. My head was too filled with all of the possibilities of my new-found ability. There were potential pitfalls as well. Things like how long could I stay in a particular speed zone; was there a limit to how much personal time I could spend at another speed? When I was in a different speed zone, was I affecting how long I'd live – meaning, if I stayed sped up long enough would I die subjectively of old age even though not much objective time had passed? Worse, how would I know without actually doing it? There was no way of testing this; at least, none that I could think of. Maybe with a full lab I could, I don't know, look at how my body reacted but ... I didn't have access to a full lab and even worse, I wouldn't know how to run one if I did.

I even thought, briefly, of leaving this alone. There were so many questions and so many potential dangers. I knew I wouldn't be able to stop, though. Not now. I mean, this was the coolest thing to ever happen to me. It was all I could do not to speed up now so I could finish dinner faster. Only the thought of freaking out my Mom and Dad stopped me.

That was another thing. Should I tell Mom and Dad? How would I even begin that conversation? "Mom, Dad, I've just found out that I can speed myself up into a higher speed zone. Don't worry, everything's fine but you might not see too much of me."

Yeah. That was going to happen. I weighed telling them with the pitfall of them potentially figuring it out later and it was a no brainer. There was always the chance they'd never figure it out and if they eventually did, well, I'd have more time this way to come up with a good story.

After dinner, I went to my room for 'homework'. I didn't have any; at least none assigned by school. Although I was taking mostly pre-AP classes this year, I had already done my homework. It was one of the few things I pushed upon myself; since football could be so time consuming, I made sure that I did my homework the day it was assigned. Of course, now I'd be able to do it even faster...

Instead, I looked up some statistics about human vision. It turns out that anything going faster than 36 degrees per second in the human field of vision is blurry if it was seen at all. So, I needed to be moving faster than that if I wanted to be unseen.

Once in my room, the door shut, I walked into the bathroom and sped up until my watch was showing me 120 seconds to every second on the wall clock. I figured that was fast enough though it certainly wasn't as 'loose' as I'd been earlier. I didn't want to overdo it right then, however.

Things were just barely moving outside. I could see the barest movement of a flying bird's wings; it was almost, but not quite, stationary. Cars in my neighborhood, travelling at 30mph didn't appear to be moving at all but I could see some movement in the cars on the freeway down a half mile from my home. To amuse myself, I did the calculations in my head. I seem to remember reading somewhere that people walked at about 3mph and ran at about twice that. So, I just needed to convert that, something I was pretty good at thanks to my 5^th grade math teacher, Mr. Zuwicki. (3 miles/1 hour)(1 hour/60 minutes)(1 minutes/60 seconds)(1609.344 meters/1 mile) equals about 1.3 meters/second and some change. Since I was 'sped up' to 120 seconds for every 1 in objective time, I was travelling (walking) at about 156 meters/sec. Running would be about twice that or 312 meters/sec – just shy of the speed of sound (343 meters/sec). Using the same conversions, a car travelling 30mph in our subdivision would be traveling just over 13.4m/s and a car on the freeway would be just under 27m/s.

It was at that moment that I nearly stumbled. I remembered back to when I was 'tightening up' back after school. I remembered hearing those strange series of explosions; I hadn't paid attention to them then because I was so overwhelmed by what I had just done. Now, though, I knew what they were. Sonic booms. I had been travelling at many times the speed of sound. Many times.

I wondered just how fast I had been going before but I wasn't sure I wanted to know. I also wondered how fast I could potentially go but I wasn't sure I was ready for that answer either. All I was sure of was that I'd 'loosened' the place in my head earlier but I hadn't loosened it as much as it could go ... and I was afraid of what would happen if I loosened it too much. As it was, I seemed to be breaking some laws of relativity as the faster I went the more energy I should consume – and I had been walking for quite some time and I wasn't feeling even slightly tired.

I started running, wanting to push things to the limit – but after a few miles I realized I wasn't even getting tired. I pushed myself harder and felt the slightest bit of resistance but it went away as I pushed. I was running flat out, sweating only slightly, but I wasn't getting tired. At all. There was something about accelerating myself – increasing my subjective speed – that was doing strange things to my anatomy, increasing my stamina to an incredible level while also accelerating my body's ability to heal.