Angus Drekin, Ph.D, looked up as there was a knock on his office door. Taking his reading glasses off, the sixty-one year old professor of physics carefully folded them and put them in the desk drawer even as he called, "Come in!" He reached out and closed the two notebooks he'd been cross-referencing and slid them to the side of the desk where they joined about forty others, along with a precariously tottering stack of textbooks that had nearly buried his laptop.
He smiled as a familiar person, one he hadn't seen in some time, entered the office. "Danny Hebert! Welcome, my boy, welcome! And this must be Taylor." He peered at the young girl who was looking around with great interest, her long curly black hair bringing back memories. "Good lord, she's the spitting image of Annette," he breathed, then flinched a little as he realized what he'd said.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."
Annette's husband, a man he hadn't seen for over a year now, since the woman's untimely death, shook his head with a sad smile. "Don't worry, Angus, it's fine."
He could see from the look in both their eyes, as Danny put his arm around his daughter's shoulders, that it wasn't fine, but said nothing. Getting up with a slight wince as despite his best efforts age was a remorseless bastard, he moved past them and closed the door, then returned to his seat. "I don't think I ever got the chance to say how much I regret your loss, Danny. And Taylor, of course. Annette was… unique. And sadly missed, I can assure you. She brought a light into every room she entered that I will never forget, nor will any of the faculty of the university." His voice was quiet but he meant every word.
"Thank you," Danny murmured, looking at his daughter, who sighed a little and put her own arm around his waist. "We miss her too. More than anything."
Angus motioned to a pair of chairs next to his desk. "Sit, please. How have you two been since… she passed?" he asked delicately.
"Not as well as we'd like if I'm honest," Danny replied after sitting and reflecting on the query for a little while. Taylor sat next to him and looked at the floor. Angus was pretty sure she had a tear in one eye. "It's been very hard in many ways. Waking up and knowing something that should be there isn't… It takes a long time to get used to."
"Trust me, my boy, you never get used to it," Angus said with a knowing look. "You grow accustomed to dealing with the feelings in the end, but they never leave you. I speak from experience, of course. Marcella left me twenty two years ago now and there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of her." He shrugged a little with a tiny regretful smile of his own. "But life goes on. My Marcella wouldn't have wanted me to dwell overmuch on it to the point of obsession, and I'm certain Annette wouldn't want either of you to do the same." He raised a finger. "That does not in the slightest mean that you shouldn't remember the good times. They get you through the bad ones, trust me on that."
"Yeah." Danny put his hand on his daughter's and gently squeezed it. "I'm coming to realize that. But it's been hard."
"As these things always are." Angus smiled. "The important thing is to remember you still have the living and you can't change the past, so all you can do is live your life as your loved ones would have wanted you to, to honor their memory. They will never leave you."
Taylor leaned on her father, who smiled down at her. "Oddly enough that helps. Thank you. And it has been getting better these last few months or so."
"A pleasure." Angus felt quite satisfied by the look on their faces. "Now, what brings you to the office of an elderly physicist on such a nice evening?" He glanced at the window, outside which a pleasant August day was finishing as the sun lowered towards the horizon, the golden light streaming across the bay towards the Atlantic and casting long shadows of the few ships moving around it, along with those from the taller buildings near the shore. From the position of his office on the second floor he had a good view of a large chunk of the city down the hill on which Brockton Bay University sat. One of the perks of tenure and seniority. "While I'm always happy for a social call, I can't help but feel this is something slightly more than that."
Danny hesitated, glanced at Taylor, then seemed to come to a decision. "We wanted your advice on something a little… strange."
"My advice?" Angus was somewhat taken aback. "I'm always happy to help, Danny, but the only advice I'm really qualified to give other than minor help on matters of loss is in the field of physics. Which I like to think I do know quite a lot about, I'll admit, but it's somewhat esoteric..." He smiled a little, then felt puzzled as Danny looked at Taylor rather than laughing at his small joke.
"It's physics advice we need," Danny said when he looked back. Taylor was hugging a backpack that she'd had with her when they came in.
"A school project or something?" he guessed.
Taylor giggled under her breath, while her father looked fondly although with mild exasperation at her. "Weirdly, that's not quite as wrong as you'd expect, but it's not quite right either," the man muttered. "I suppose you'd better show him, Taylor."
The girl nodded, then opened her backpack and removed… a thing.
Angus looked at it curiously. It was a small machine about the size of a grapefruit, clearly made with fairly basic machining skills, although neatly and precisely done even so. He could see some tiny circuit boards inside the approximately dodecahedral outer structure, which seemed to be constructed of either aluminum or possibly titanium from the color.
"What on earth is that?" he asked, tilting his head slightly to get a better look. "And where did you get it?"
"I made it," Taylor said with a somewhat pleased expression as she also studied the thing.
He looked at her, feeling he knew where this might be going. "Is that… the work of a Tinker, then?" he asked carefully, knowing that Parahumans tended towards the secretive, for good reasons in most cases. It was rather impressive that they trusted him if that was in fact what was going on.
"Tinker tech?" Taylor shook her head with a small grin. "Nah. It's real technology, not some magic machine no one can understand."
"Hmm." He studied her now. She had the air of a young person who was rather pleased she knew something you didn't. In the end he smiled. "All right. What does this real technology do? I assume it does in fact do… something… oh my lord."
As he'd been speaking she held the little widget out in front of her, pressed a switch on top of it, and let go.
It emitted a very faint hum and a few tally lights blinked on inside it, then the thing placidly stayed exactly where she'd put it, hanging in mid air like that was a reasonable course of action.
He stared at the thing for a good thirty seconds, wordless, until he raised his eyes to meet hers. Which were alight with amusement.
"That..." He cleared his throat. "Is quite impressive, my dear."
"It's neat, right?" she chirped happily. "Look." Reaching out she poked it with a finger, causing it to slide sideways without effort, then stood up and pushed down on it, nearly lifting herself off the floor as it utterly refused to sink any lower. "It's currently fixed to the reference plane of the center of mass of the Earth, so it stays at a constant distance from it, but it's free to move orthagonally. Cool, isn't it?"
Somewhat lost for words, he nodded, then absently retrieved his reading glasses, unfolded them without taking his eyes off the machine floating two feet off the floor in the middle of his office, put them on, and leaned closer. Experimentally he reached out and very cautiously pushed the thing sideways, finding it moved freely without any resistance at all. Putting his hand on top, he pressed down, and felt complete rigidity as if he'd tried pushing it through the floor.
After a moment he put his hand under it and tried lifting only to find the same thing happened.
Sitting back in his chair he pulled his glasses off and tapped his chin with the left arm while studying the device. "Anti gravity?" he finally asked a little weakly.
"Yeah. It's a gravitational reference frame regenerator." She smiled at her machine with a look of someone who felt quite satisfied with their work. "It can do other things, like provide thrust, but it needs reprogramming to do it efficiently and safely and I'm still working on that. At the moment it pretty much just holds things up."
"How?" he asked. "Because I've seen Tinker antigravity machines before and they all have limitations, the prime one being that even the Tinker who invents them can't give a coherent explanation of how they work, and of course they invariably have a limited lifespan for some reason."
She pulled a binder, the sort of thing you'd find in school, out of her backpack and handed it to him.
Curiously he opened it, then smiled at the first page.
"Taylor's Gravitational Reference Frame Machine. Mark One Issue Two," he read out loud. Raising his eyes, he asked, "What happened to the Issue One?"
She rubbed her cheek with a slightly worried glance at Danny, who sighed heavily. "Like I said it needs work on the thrust programming," she mumbled, sounding embarrassed.
"Which is why we had to patch a hole in the living room ceiling," Danny said with a fond look at her. "And the guest room ceiling. And the roof."
Angus started chuckling.
"It sure doesn't lack power," Danny added. "She says, 'Watch this, Dad!' and pokes a switch. Next thing you know there's a hole we can see daylight through, plaster falling from the ceiling, no machine, and Taylor's looking about as red as she is now." He grinned at his blushing daughter. "Damn thing's probably on the moon by now."
"It'll be out of the solar system, actually, Dad," the girl said with a somewhat amused smile. "I accidentally got it set for two g of acceleration and it would do that until it ran out of power, which would take..." She looked thoughtful. "About two days." Taylor shrugged. "So I made a new one and disabled that part just in case. I need to work out what went wrong."
Angus looked from one to the other, amazed at how matter-of-factly they were taking it, then returned his attention to the binder in his hands. Turning the page, he was faced with a nicely done summary of the contents, printed from a computer, and from an instant impression as good as if not better than many of the papers his students produced. Quite likely Annette Hebert's legacy, he thought. She'd always told him that her daughter was rather more literate than many her age and very intelligent. He suspected she'd rather understated things.
He read the description of the contents, then turned the page again. A quick scan of the equations that met his eyes turned into a much slower and more careful examination, which went on for some time as he kept flipping pages. Occasionally he went back and checked a previous one, then returned to the documentation.
When he finally reached the part where theory gave way to practical engineering notes, along with remarkably carefully drawn schematics and mechanical sketches, he sat back in his chair with a feeling like someone had just given him a much stronger drink than he'd asked for. Angus realized with a start that it was dark out, his chair was now turned towards his desk where the binder rested, and next to it was a calculator and one of his own notebooks which had hastily scribbled math filling several pages.
Pulling his glasses off he blinked then looked around, to see Danny sitting with his legs crossed and stretched out, half asleep and holding a paper cup of coffee in his hand, while Taylor was apparently deeply engrossed in reading one of his textbooks.
He tilted his head to read the title. 'Quantum Chromodynamics,' by Greiner, Schramm, and Stein, the second edition. Examining her face, he saw she was carefully reading a page about halfway through with a small frown, the tip of her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth.
Amused and somewhat amazed, he shook his head and looked at her machine, which was still blithely ignoring gravity without any effort whatsoever. It was an incredible piece of technology.
Angus looked back at the binder and his notes. 'She's right too. It's technology, not tinker tech.'
That was the utterly bewildering thing. What he'd just spent… he checked… three hours reading through was a fully fledged explanation of precisely how that damned machine was doing what it did, the theory behind a field of gravitational control that rewrote half the stuff he'd learned over his career, and extended Special Relativity among several other things in quite unexpected directions.
Which was completely mad. How had a girl who was around fourteen edging on fifteen possibly come up with something like this without Parahuman abilities? On the other hand, how could a Tinker, or even Thinker, manage to explain in a way that was entirely understandable to current science, even if it showed that a lot of that current science was either wrong or seriously limited, a working theory of antigravity?
It was totally unprecedented as far as he knew. No one had ever managed to do anything with understanding Tinker inventions beyond the smallest, tiniest insight into trivial aspects of them. But this… This was going to change everything.
He flipped through the rest of the binder, glancing at the reams of notes on precisely how to duplicate the little device, using technology that was nothing more complex that you'd find in the university mechanical and electronic engineering building. Any decent grad student with a knack for both could make one, although it would be a complex task even so.
Shaking his head, he almost reverently closed the binder, then rested his hand on it, feeling that something fundamental had changed somehow.
"Incredible," he breathed.
Danny twitched and opened his eyes, before lifting the coffee cup to his lips and draining it. Taylor closed the book she was reading, a little reluctantly, and put it back on the shelf behind the chair, before turning to watch him.
"My apologies, I didn't realize how invested in this extraordinary document I became," he said to his visitors.
"Don't worry, I half expected that," Danny smiled. Taylor giggled a little.
Angus snorted, then looked at the machine, reaching out to poke it. It slid away from his finger and resumed hanging without a flicker of motion. "I have no words to say how impressed I am. This is likely the single most remarkable thing I've ever encountered in my life." Raising his eyes, he asked the girl, "How did you do it?"
"I like technology and stuff like that, and I like learning," she replied. "And I got some interesting ideas a while ago. I learned a lot, all sorts of cool stuff, and this was one of the things I came up with." She frowned at the machine, then reached out to turn it off, catching it with her other hand. Tossing it up and down, she added, "I think I can improve it but I'm happy for a first attempt. Well… second." Taylor looked slightly guiltily at her father who rolled his eyes but smiled. "Sorry, Dad."
"We fixed the damage, no one was hurt, and you learned an important lesson about testing antigravity machines indoors," he chuckled.
"Such lessons are undoubtedly important," Angus commented in a slightly lightheaded way. He looked at the machine she was holding, then asked, "May I?"
"Sure, Professor," she replied, smiling, and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hands under the desk lamp, inspecting it closely. The work was not as polished as a trained machinist would produce, tooling marks showing where it had been formed with methods that were effective but those of a gifted amateur rather than a professional. Even so it was very carefully and accurately manufactured, far past the level he'd have expected from someone that young.
The internal circuitry was also handmade, he could see, some of it made with point to point wiring using extremely fine wire, some of it parts of commercial printed circuit boards that had been carefully modified and trimmed to suit the new purpose. Overall it was clearly a prototype, but it was a very good prototype. And, of course, it worked.
He even knew how it worked. More or less, although it would take a lot of study to derive all the ramifications of her notes. Years, probably.
With a momentary thought that every physicist on the planet was going to both praise and curse the name of Taylor Hebert at the same time for what she'd just done to the field, he handed it back. "What do you intend to do now?" he asked, watching her put it into her backpack. He gave her the binder too, which also went in. "And why did you come to me?"
"Annette trusted you and liked you a lot," Danny explained. "Taylor insisted this thing was entirely explainable by normal science, although she also keeps saying that normal science gets quite a lot of things wrong."
"Incomplete, dad," she protested. "I said it was incomplete. There's all sorts of cool things no one is thinking about, like how superconductors really work..."
Danny smiled as Angus stared at her. "You see what I have to deal with," he remarked, making her stick her tongue out at him. "Anyway, I talked it over with some people I trust at the union, and one thing that came up was that as soon as the PRT hears about this, they're going to be all over us saying it's the result of a Parahuman power. You know what they're like."
Angus slowly nodded. Annette herself had spoken about the PRT in less than glowing terms more than once, and he'd lived long enough and seen sufficient evidence to not entirely trust in their good will himself. "I'm afraid I take your point," he replied. "They can be somewhat aggressively enthusiastic about taking over any aspect of life they feel is covered by their remit."
"Tell me about it," Danny grumbled. "But the idea we had was that if we can prove it's not Tinker tech, it's suddenly not their problem. I mean, they won't like it, I'm pretty certain of that, but if it's something that anyone trained in the right field could understand, or even make, well..." He spread his hands with an evil grin. "What can they do? It's perfectly ordinary superscience, not crazy Parahuman powers. We can prove that."
After a few seconds of staring, Angus burst out laughing. "Oh, lord, there are going to be some very peculiar expressions, I suspect."
"Probably." Danny didn't look worried about that. "The question is, are you interested in helping with the patent?"
Angus examined him for a bit. Then he picked up the notebook he'd made his own calculations in and studied it briefly. "You know, I believe I am, as it happens," he replied with a smile. "And I have a distinct feeling that there's a chance the university would be interested in setting up a research program into the new field of gravitational reference frame manipulation."
"How convenient," Danny smirked. "Oddly enough, there's a Union on the docks who have a lot of people who are interested in the practical applications of that field. They might want to collaborate in real world uses." He held out his hand.
Angus, with a sensation that this was going to be interesting, and a broad smile, shook it.
Taylor was grinning to herself. "Cool," she said happily. "I've got so many other ideas."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Standing at her office window, Emily Piggot sipped her coffee, trying to wake up as she stared out across the city and bay far too early on a crisp October morning. It was just cold enough that a mist, due to the damp sea air, had formed as the sun rose and filled the streets below with white, car headlights dimly visible through it. The taller buildings protruded above the ground level cloud, which spread out into the bay for a few hundred yards from shore, gradually dissipating over the warmer water until by the time you got out to the Rig it was only barely obscuring the view.
A number of small trawlers were puttering around on the water, navigation lights still easily visible due to the light level, although the sun was coming up quickly and would soon burn the fog away. She yawned, watching as one group of four boats headed towards the mouth of the bay and the grounded cargo ship blocking most of it, as it had done for nearly two decades, long predating her arrival in this benighted city. They were moving quite rapidly in formation, causing her to wonder where they were going.
After a couple of minutes of watching them, she turned away and sat at her desk, putting the coffee cup down next to the keyboard before prodding the space bar to wake the screen. Reading the list of things to do and meetings to attend she groaned under her breath.
It never ended. There was always something mad going on in this place. Usually something she had to figure out how to fix. It was enough to make her wish she'd stayed in bed some days.
Sighing faintly she opened the first report and started reading. The dense technical jargon that Armsmaster seemed unable to avoid using soon had her wishing the man would take a course on science for the layman, or possibly get Dragon to write it for him. At least she knew how to talk to people who weren't humorless robots…
Giving up on understanding whatever it was he was trying to explain in excruciating detail that probably only mattered to about four people in the world, she tabbed through the document looking for things she could understand, read the summary, shrugged, and signed it. He knew his stuff even if she didn't and he wasn't asking for a budget increase, so for now she'd trust him. If he screwed up, she got to yell at him, so there wasn't really a down side.
Closing that document she went on to one written by Miss Militia, which was far more understandable by a normal person, and read it carefully. Deciding the request was entirely reasonable she authorized that one too.
So things went for an hour or so, until she decided she needed more coffee. It was still far too early to be working this hard and the caffeine was essential. Getting up she walked over to the coffee machine, put her cup under it, selected the right menu option, and set it going. While the thing gurgled happily away to itself she looked out the window again, seeing that the fog was nearly gone, and she could now easily make out the huge old ship at the mouth of the bay several miles away.
She noticed absently that the small fleet of ships that had gone by earlier seemed to be moored right next to it for some reason. Squinting into the rising sun she wondered what they were doing. The coffee machine started the whirring noise that preceded it filling her mug, distracting her as she waited for it to finish then stirred in some sugar.
Sipping it she walked back to her desk, glancing out the window again as she sat.
She was just in time to see the miles-distant and very large ship lift gently out of the water like it was an oddly shaped balloon, turn ninety degrees over about fifteen seconds, and slowly start floating up the bay with the four smaller ships following beneath it.
The director was still gaping even as her phone started ringing.
