"Hmm."
Taylor looked at her phone with one eyebrow up a little, then past it to where Vicky Dallon was floating about ten centimeters off the floor, arguing with her boyfriend yet again. It was a fairly good-natured argument but it was still an argument, something the pair seemed to engage in far more than seemed sensible.
She'd seen it happen at least four times in the last week, since the start of her time in Arcadia. Which she was quite enjoying. Her father had been right, it was nice to meet other people her own age, even if many of them seemed to be a little slow on the uptake at times. Most of them were still friendly and she liked them.
Already she'd made several friends, she felt. Vicky, definitely, was one of those, as the girl was impossible not to like even though she had something of a reputation too. She was remarkably outgoing, generally seemed pretty honest and enthusiastic, and was a mine of information on Parahumans, which explained why she was studying the subject. Her sister, too, was interesting. Very sarcastic and generally far quieter than Vicky, which admittedly was the case for most people, but definitely very intelligent. They shared a love of reading which had, when it had come up, seemed to make the brunette Dallon sister open up quite a bit.
Taylor rather suspected that Amy wasn't entirely happy with life, and lacked friends. She was prepared to help with both cases.
Vicky's boyfriend Dean was a slightly odd guy. He'd been introduced to Taylor a couple of days ago, when they'd made up yet again, and had shaken her hand readily enough but had also given her a somewhat strange look for reasons she wasn't entirely certain about. Aside from that he seemed nice enough, and was certainly very polite. His friends Dennis and Carlos were amusing, Dennis particularly, although he sometimes tried too hard. According to Vicky he had a reputation of his own, and was rather more familiar with detention than ideal…
She hadn't yet been introduced to Chris, the other guy who hung around with the first three on a regular basis, but she'd seen him around.
Glancing at her phone again, she tapped the screen a couple of times, saving the readings for later analysis, then put it away as the bell rang.
Another positive of attending Arcadia had been all the data she was getting on Parahumans, of course.
It somewhat amused her that she'd ended up almost instantly meeting most of the ones who went to the same school. At the insistence of one of the more obvious members of that group.
She wondered if Vicky knew that Dean and his friends were the Wards? Presumably yes, as it wasn't difficult to work out even if you didn't have a subspace quantum interference detector handy. They weren't exactly being as sneaky about it as they probably thought they were. Considering the number of people Taylor had met who were as sneaky as they thought they were, she'd had quite a lot of practice working this sort of thing out, but even without that she was a little surprised that no one else seemed to know. Or perhaps they did, and were merely discreet about it? Who knew? She was aware that Parahumans were pretty picky about who they let know their real identities to, for very good reasons from what she'd learned when she studied the situation, and she could hardly begrudge them the same sort of thing that the government was going to great lengths to arrange in her own case.
And she had no intention at all of mentioning to anyone else what she was working out, unless it became completely necessary. People deserved their privacy.
But she was gathering some really intriguing data here. Data that she needed close proximity to fully acquire and analyze. Data that pointed towards some fascinating possibilities.
She liked data like that. Mind you, she liked data in general. Learning things was fun.
As the teacher came in everyone settled down, although he had to look hard at Vicky to make her stop floating around and land. The blonde girl smiled at him, the man sighed very faintly, then everyone got their textbooks out and opened them.
"All right," he said after he'd checked everyone was present and nothing was amiss. "Who can tell me what mitochondrial DNA is?"
Half a dozen people's hands shot up, Taylor's among them. She was finding biology rather interesting, and had some intriguing ideas percolating in the back of her head already.
She made a mental note to ask Amy some questions at some point, as it seemed likely that the girl might well shed light on a few things she was wondering about.
"Taylor? You in here?"
"Over here, Dad," Taylor called as she looked around from where she was half-way up a tall row of steel shelving that was entirely covered in boxes, most of them dusty and obviously untouched for years. The rolling ladder she was using was tall enough to reach all the way to the ceiling, but moving it around the larger stuff on the floor had been something of a pain in the ass. She'd ended up having to enlist the aid of a couple of the dock workers to help, which they'd done efficiently and without any issues. Now she was leaning over one of the boxes which she'd opened, rummaging around inside the random items filling it to the brim.
"What on earth are you doing up there?" he asked when he'd negotiated his way through the rows of shelving. This store room was so full of stuff it was reminiscent of the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, she thought with a smile. He stopped at the bottom of the ladder and looked up at her with interest.
"I needed some more C63020 nickel aluminum bronze bar for machining a part from, and we're out of it in the Gravtec stock," she explained, holding up a thirty centimeter piece of three centimeter diameter somewhat greenish-gold metal. "Dan said he thought there was some left over from making bearing bushes a few years back, but he couldn't remember exactly which box it was in." She waved at the shelving next to her. "Aside from it being somewhere in this section. So I thought I'd poke around and see if I could find it."
"Clearly you succeeded," he said with a smile.
"Yeah. Found about fifty kilos of it, that's more than enough. We've got more on order but it won't be here for a couple of days because that alloy is a little unusual, and I wanted to make this thing today." She shrugged with a grin. "Worth wasting an hour or so looking for, especially when it wasn't a waste." Putting the bar down on the steps with a clunk, next to three more just like it, she turned back to the box.
"So why are you still here?" he asked, ascending the steps until he could look into the box himself, as she pulled out a lump of oily machinery and tried to work out what it was.
"Got curious about all this stuff," she mumbled, turning the thing over in her hand, then deciding it was some sort of diesel injection pump by the looks of it. She put it to one side as not worth bothering with and delved deeper.
He chuckled, putting his hand on her back affectionately. "I always said you should be a customs inspector, the way you basically inventory everything you get your hands on," he said with a grin. She glanced at him and smiled, before returning to what she was doing. It was more or less true, ever since she'd been a little kid she'd tended to poke around in cupboards and storage areas and make mental lists of what was there. Her mother had more than once, having misplaced something, simply asked her where it was and she'd been able to think for a moment then tell her.
"Alternator from a truck," she muttered, putting the next item down. "Broken milling cutter, pity, it's a nice one, stainless steel bolt, um… barrel from a machine gun, I think?" She held up the metal tube questioningly. He took it from her and peered at it.
"AK-47 barrel, probably from one of the guns the ABB is always losing around the Docks," he said after a moment, handing it back. "They're very slapdash with their weapons. We've broken up a lot of them for parts over the years, or just to make sure they don't get used again."
"Huh. OK." The barrel went next to the box as she kept digging. "Ooh! Some tubes… couple of thyratrons, nice ones, that's an old radar klystron, and some brand new heliax connectors! Cool. I'm having those." She put her loot next to the bronze bars with a satisfied smile.
Her father chuckled again. "You have more resources available to you than God himself but you're looking through piles of scrap?"
She giggled. "Well, yeah, but some of this old stuff is neat, and why waste it?" Moving a couple of ancient and rusty gear wheels the size of her hand to the side, she kept looking. "And you never know if you'll find something really int..."
Taylor paused, then stuck her hand right down to the bottom of the box, grabbing something that had caught her eye as she moved her head a little and the light from behind her glinted off it. After a moment's tugging, and a bit of help from her father holding the box in place, she yanked whatever it was into the open from under all the other stuff.
"...eresting," she finished slowly, examining her find with great care. "What the hell is this thing?"
Turning it over, she peered at the widget closely. "This isn't commercial stuff," she added thoughtfully. "It's hand made."
The device was a lump of electronics with some custom made mechanical parts sticking out one end, the entire thing about the size of a hard drive. It showed signs of having suffered from an uncontrolled thermal release, or as a non-engineer called it, a fire. There were scorch marks up one side, although when she experimentally rubbed them with her thumb, it became apparent that the damage was superficial and external, not from the thing itself having burned out. A bundle of wiring sticking out the side had been crudely cut, probably with a hacksaw, and one of the mounting lugs was snapped off too.
Overall on first appearance it looked similar to a vehicle ECU, but she could see that while the casing had probably come from such a thing, and the wiring was using the standard color codes car manufacturers used, all of this had been repurposed for another use. It reminded her of her own first prototypes although she was fairly sure hers were neater. The holes that had been drilled in the box weren't lined up very well, for example, which was just sloppy.
"Let's have a look," her father said, sitting on the next step down. She handed it to him, then went back to poking around in the box to see if there was anything else like that in there.
"Hmm. I think this might just be a bit of one of Squealer's horrible mashups," he finally said, just as she pulled out another vaguely similar device that was in a similar state, although from a quick inspection probably did something different. She froze, then slowly turned her head.
"That's real Tinker tech?" she asked in amazement.
"I think so, yes. About… maybe three years back? Just after Squealer turned up and the Merchants were starting to become a problem rather than just a nuisance, they went up against the ABB for some reason I never worked out. Got the crap kicked out of them. Squealer and Skidmark barely escaped with their lives and about ten of the ordinary Merchants didn't manage that. Several ABB died too, and there were close to fifty casualties among the bystanders, the cops, and the PRT when they finally turned up." He shrugged with a sigh. "Usual thing, I'm afraid. Anyway, they had two of those bizarre vehicles she makes, really ugly stuff that shouldn't work in the first place but somehow does. One of them was blown up by the ABB with a rocket launcher, the other one was what they escaped in, but Lung set it on fire on the way out. They dumped it in the bay about ten minutes later, just past Pat's bar."
"Huh." Taylor nodded, absorbing the information. She hadn't known about that particular event but then she'd only been about twelve or so at the time.
"The PRT salvaged a couple of things from it, like the obvious weapons, but they left most of it in the water," he continued. "It was getting in the way of the wharf down there, so some of the guys ended up taking our crane barge over and fishing it out, then cut it up for scrap. PRT didn't seem interested, the Merchants weren't going to come and ask for it back, so we ended up with the whole thing. No use to anyone, it was a mess, half burned and mostly soaked in salt water." He held up the module in his hand. "I vaguely recall that the back part of the thing wasn't too badly damaged and we pulled out some bits and pieces like this that someone must have thought were worth keeping. No idea why, Tinker Tech has a very short shelf life after all, and can't be fixed. And we don't even know what it does anyway."
"Cool." Examining the unit she had in her own hand, Taylor pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket and shone it into one of the connector holes in the side. She could see the innards were somewhat sooty but looked mostly intact. And… wrong. "Very cool. More data," she mumbled, tilting it around for a moment or two.
"Sorry, I missed that," he said quizzically.
"I said it was interesting, Dad," she replied more loudly, turning the light off and putting it back in her pocket, then smiling at him. "I think I want to have a look at these things. I'm curious, I've never seen a real Tinker device before."
"Try not to kill us all," he said after a moment's reflection, handing her the other one. She stacked both of them next to her bronze rods, grinned at him, then went back to poking through the box of interesting crap.
"I would never do that, Dad," she giggled.
"The roof would beg to differ," he commented with a grin, making her look over her shoulder at him and roll her eyes a little. Standing, he descended the stairs. "Lock up when you're done. I need to go talk to Angus, so I'll see you later."
"Later, Dad!" she called, waving without looking. She heard footsteps fade into the distance as she kept investigating what else might be in there.
When she finally stopped, three boxes later, covered in dust and oil, but with a wide smile, she had two more chunks of currently unidentifiable hardware clearly made by the same person, another even larger klystron, and a whole pile of semi-rigid copper RF interlinks with SMA connectors on the end, which she thought might come in handy at some point. Putting all the stuff she'd removed and discarded back where it came from took half an hour, and it was another ten minutes work to find an empty box for her haul. By the time she left the storeroom and locked it behind her, nodding to the security man posing as a dockworker and believing she didn't know who and what he was, she was very contented with the results of her work.
And she was very intrigued to find out what sort of machine a Tinker actually produced.
Angus walked over to where Taylor was working at her computer, the young girl entirely surrounded by large monitors filled with windows showing multiple graphs, streaming columns of numbers, and at least half a dozen command terminals. She was rapidly typing into one of the latter, then inspecting the resulting output with concentration. As he watched, she nodded to herself, muttering under her breath as he'd noticed she tended to do when working, made a few cryptic notes on one of her pads at her elbow, then turned to one of the other monitors. "What are you working on?" he asked curiously, making her look up at him then quickly smile. "That doesn't look like the gravity generator hardware."
He peered at the complex schematic that was on one of the monitors with interest.
"Nope, it's something else," she said, going back to the screens and clicking a few controls, before leaning back and stretching. On the other side of the room one of the big color printers whirred into life, slowly extruding a huge sheet of paper covered in diagrams, while next to it a smaller one began spitting out pages of more normal paper. He could see even from here that they were dense with mathematical equations. "We're going to need a chemical engineer and a materials scientist."
She got up and went over to the printer as he followed, wondering what she'd done this time. Picking up the sheaf of paperwork that had already printed, she flipped through it, extracted half a dozen sheets, and handed them to him. "To make this," she added as he accepted them and started reading.
After about three pages, he raised his eyes and met her amused gaze with incredulity. "A room temperature superconductor?"
"Yep. Should work, I think. As far as I can work out it's not that hard to make, but I'm still working on theoretical chemistry so we need someone who knows their stuff."
"Good lord." He went back to the papers, scanning them carefully. Chemistry wasn't his field but at this level it was as much physics anyway, and he understood that. The equations for electron Cooper pair formation were obvious, although she seemed to have extended a lot of the quantum theory surrounding valence bond resonance in an unexpected direction. He recognized some aspects of her revised theory of gravitics involved in the math, which was intriguing.
"It's a type two superconductor, and the vortex glass phase temperature should be around eight hundred and sixty kelvin," she explained, gathering up the rest of the printout as the printer spun down into silence, then tapping the stack into a neat pile. "Which is far better than any of the existing ones like the cuprate-perovskites. And it won't suffer from some of the major downsides to that sort of stuff either, it should be a ductile material about the hardness of aluminum, not a brittle ceramic, for example. And I think it'll be quite cheap to make."
He shook his head in wonder, handing her the paperwork, which she put back into the pile, before running the entire thing through the binding machine. She gave him the still-warm document. "Probably a couple more patents in there, right?" she grinned.
Angus sighed a little, putting his free hand on her shoulder and saying, "You, my dear girl, are an unending source of delight, but keeping up with you is… difficult."
Taylor laughed, smiling at him with amusement, then moved to the bigger printer as he flipped through the main document, which was a full description of the theory behind the material she'd apparently invented wholesale, along with a suggested high level process for making it. The details were left to someone with knowledge of this sort of chemical engineering, which he agreed would take an expert. Fortunately he knew several, all of whom would happily mortgage their families for a chance to work on something like this.
"You did mention superconductors that first time, but I'd forgotten about it," he commented as he looked over her shoulder as she held up the large printout, which was a full schematic of a very complex piece of electronics. "I assume you need it for this, whatever it is?"
"Yes. It's a hand-held MRI scanner," she replied, holding the sheet very close to her face and checking one of the details, then nodding. He stared at her.
"A hand-held MRI?" he echoed, feeling the familiar sensation of not quite knowing how they'd arrived where they were without any intervening steps.
"Yep. It's much higher resolution than the normal type, if I did it right, and will do both normal MRI and fMRI too. We should be able to adapt some commercial tomography software to work with it which will save time writing it all from scratch." She rolled the diagram up and turned to him, holding it in one hand and tapping it on the other. "I can probably make it smaller with the second generation but I wanted to make a prototype and test it before that. I've designed the main electronics, all I need now is the superconductor so I can wind the main field coils. By the time we have that I'll have the PCBs made and built, and some basic test software worked out."
"You do realize that this little project of yours is enough to spin off an entirely separate company on the back of, I hope?" he asked with a shake of his head. She shrugged a little with a smile.
"I guess. But there's nothing stopping Gravtec branching out, right? We can make gravitational frame regenerators and MRI scanners too. And all the other things I'm thinking about..."
"Well, we'll certainly not run out of things to do in the short term," he finally said, accompanying her back to her desk.
"Yeah. I wanted to get the easy stuff out of the way before I start working on the really cool things," she giggled, making him sigh again. Mostly because he was certain she actually meant it.
"Completely changing the subject, how is school treating you?" he asked, sitting on the edge of her desk.
"It's fun," she replied after thinking it over for a moment. "I've met some interesting people, made a few friends so far, found some other things to learn about… I like it. It's sure better than junior high was. That was so boring!"
He snorted with laughter. "Considering that you probably knew more about mathematics, physics, and several other fields than your teachers, I'm not entirely surprised you'd feel that way."
The girl nodded with a sigh. "They kept wanting me to go over the same stuff, and told me to stop reading ahead. Which is ridiculous. The books were so simple it was silly, and there were quite a few errors in them too! But they got annoyed when I corrected them and shouted at me." She folded her arms and glowered at the keyboard. "They should be using correct textbooks, not ones that make basic errors."
Angus looked fondly at her. He could just imagine a twelve year old version of her carefully fixing the errors in a physics text with a pen, then getting upset when the teacher complained.
"Well, at least that part of your life is in the past," he said calmly. "You have the rest of it in front of you, and you seem to be making the most of it."
She brightened up as she dismissed previous indignities. "Yep. And it's a lot of fun. Dad's enjoying it too."
"I think we all are." As he was about to say something else, his phone rang, so he pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it. "Ah. Brendan. I'd better take this."
"OK. See you later," she replied, smiling.
"I'll find a suitable group to work on this as well," he said, holding up the document. "I have several people in mind already."
"Great." She waved as he walked off and by the time he was at his office she was deeply involved in yet another project. Closing the door, he sat down behind his own desk and tapped the answer icon.
"Hello, Brendan. Say, is DARPA interested in a room temperature superconductor that will cost about as much to make as stainless steel?"
He listened to the response with a broad grin.
When the other man finally shut up, he said, "Indeed. Our friend has certainly exceeded expectations yet again. I'm almost dreading to see what happens next."
Looking at the document in front of him, he slowly turned pages as they talked, mentally building a list of what would be needed for yet another research group.
At this rate they should probably rename Brockton Bay University to the Taylor Hebert Research Institute and be done with it, he mused, smiling a little to himself.
Having finished her homework, Taylor closed the books and looked at the clock. "Half an hour. I can live with that," she said to herself. Stacking everything neatly to the side, she got up, left her bedroom, and went downstairs. Her father was washing the dishes after dinner so she picked up a cloth and started drying the ones in the rack, getting a murmured thanks as she did. Between them they soon had the task finished. Afterwards, he got himself some coffee, tousled her hair on the way past causing her to squawk indignantly, laughed slightly, and went into the living room to watch the news.
Somewhat amused she grabbed a couple of cans of soda out of the fridge then went down into her lab, turning the lights on as she descended the stairs, then walking over to the workbench. Popping the tab on the first can she sipped it as she examined the four chunks of mystery Tinker hardware sitting there.
Eventually she pulled the chair out, sat down, put the open can and the new one to the side, and reached for a screwdriver. She turned on the high resolution camera above the bench, made sure it was pointed at her work area, then began disassembling the first device very slowly and carefully, making notes as she went and dictating her actions too.
Three and a half hours later she was staring at the guts of the devices in bemusement.
"That's just wrong," she finally said in exasperation. "Who the hell designed this junk? It's a miracle it ever worked in the first place!" Shaking her head, she pulled the microscope head into place and slid one of the exposed circuits under the lens. "Right, then. Let's see… OK, that's never going to work for long, it's entirely the wrong power rating. And this BJT is nowhere near the current required to drive that coil properly. Which seems to have been wound in the dark by a drunk one-armed monkey..."
Taylor sighed heavily, pulled one of the large format notebooks closer, picked up a fine pen, and began sketching out the circuit while puzzling over places where the designer seemed to have somewhat ineptly improvised a very inefficient method to do something the hardest way possible. She was wondering the entire time if all Tinkers just made it up as they went along, or whether Squealer was somehow a bit special in that respect.
Late that night, she finally yawned and sat back, rubbing her eyes. The sound of her alien tutors was a comforting background noise over the sound of the fans in the computers. Waving a little smoke away from where she'd unsoldered one of the components to examine how Squealer seemed to have modified it with a tiny add-on circuit connected to three of the pins she picked up the nearest soda can with her other hand, shook it slightly, then sighed as it was empty.
"Well, I can say with confidence that I don't think she actually understood what she was doing," she remarked out loud to the alien soundtrack, which didn't pay any attention. "Because I can see what this is doing and it's really not doing it very well at all. The phase space interactor can't be more than about three percent efficient if that. And this is the crudest version of something that's almost but not quite a tesseract coil I can imagine having the faintest possibility of working in the first place. I'm surprised it didn't melt down the first time it was turned on."
Picking up what was left of the device, which she'd determined after some time was meant to be an optical diversion field generator, or what PHO termed a cloaking device, she shook her head in wonder. "Cool idea, horrible implementation," she added with a sigh, before putting it down again and looking at many pages of notes she'd made as she worked out what it was and how it worked. And the more pages of how it should have worked.
Deciding that designing her own, properly made, version could wait, she got up, dropped all the cans into the recycling bin under the desk, then headed upstairs to bed, flipping the lights off on the way.
It was late and tomorrow was a school day after all.
"Tinkers," she grumbled as she went into her bedroom and closed the door.
"The Prime Asset has done it again, sir."
"Good news, definitely. Is it likely to be as disruptive as the gravity devices?"
"At least. The ramifications are significant in a large number of fields. The railgun project will benefit from it immediately, but there are a huge array of possible areas that will also see massive changes."
"Incredible. And gratifying."
"Quite. I take it that there will be no problems with additional funding?"
"None. Everyone is agreed that this project, and the Prime Asset, are worth anything required."
"That's good to hear. On another note, has there been any more trouble from the expected directions?"
"We've had to intervene more often than I'd like, annoyingly. Certain parties are… less than entirely helpful in this case. It's possible that more pressure will have to be exerted. But that's our problem, you don't need to worry about it at the moment. Just keep doing what you're doing and we'll see how it pans out."
"And if there is… direct interference?"
"Deal with it."
"I look forward to it, Sir."
"I don't, because it's going to be a nightmare to clean up after if it happens, but that's how it goes."
"As you say. I'll report again in three days as usual, unless the situation changes."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
