Lifter: Proton Field #2 Read online

  In the center of the bottom were the two field projectors that held the hydrogen, aligned so that their foci would hold their hydrogen inside a chamber just above them. That chamber had tubes running from it to carry the hydrogen to the flattened rectangles of the fuel cells on either side. Vinn recognized a pretty high-powered AI controller chip just above that. At the top was a thick, gimbal-mounted disc. Randy pointed to the bottom of it and said, “I used one of the short-fat field projectors and mounted this weight on the bottom of it. So, it pretty much stays facing straight up. However, the position of the weight’s controlled by a couple of small servos. They tilt the disc by moving the weight around under the disc, thus aiming the field focus forward and back, or to either side.”

  “Why the high-end AI?” Myr asked, obviously having noticed it like Vinn had.

  “If you don’t want to fly it yourself, you can just ask the AI to take you somewhere. It’ll do it using GPS guidance. If you want, you can even ask it to fly you there backwards so you don’t have wind in your eyes. It’ll also process the data from the radar buttons to avoid collisions and tightly control altitude as you come in for a landing to keep you from coming down too hard.” He shrugged and gave them a shy look, “Even if you’re flying it manually for fun, it should keep you from crashing, but I wouldn’t trust it too much until it’s had more testing.”

  “More testing?!” Myr asked with narrowed, though twinkling eyes. “You’re not going to tell me you’ve already been flying around in it, are you?”

  Randy put his hands up defensively, “Oh, no ma’am. All I’ve done is put it on a plastic dummy and throw the dummy around an empty room in the basement to be sure the radar system works.” He tilted his head, “Though, I don’t think you should be riding around on it, at least until it’s had some test flight carrying someone less important… like me.”

  Myr laughed, “Oh, no you don’t! You’re not going to start ‘ma’am-ing’ me, are you?!”

  “Ma’am, when you kick your dog, you’ve got to expect it to lower its head and lick your hand, you know?”

  Myr laughed again, “Ohhh, you really fight dirty! All right, if you’ve got your heart set on it, I’ll step back and let you have the first ride. You are the one that built it.”

  “No ma’am. Just pulling your chain ma’am,” Randy said with lowered eyes, though his grin gave him away. “You go right ahead, ma’am.”

  Myr snorted and started shrugging into the backpack, “You missed your chance, man. How do I control the tilt?”

  Randy handed her a metal helmet, “Safety first, besides it keeps your hair from lifting up and making you look silly.”

  Once Myr had the helmet on, Randy lifted a cable dangling from the back of the pack and stretched it down her arm, attaching it with a Velcro wrist cuff. Bending her wrist a little let her grab a controller sticking out of the wrist cuff and thereby positioned just beneath her hand. Her fingers could easily move a stubby joystick. “Tilting the joystick tilts the controller,” he said. “Lifting the controller increases the power, thus lifting you into the air. Pushing down on the controller decreases the power so you lose altitude. You can also tell your AI to set the altitude at a certain distance above ground, then have it follow the terrain or simply maintain that altitude, barring obstacles. And, of course, you can just tell your AI where you want to go.”

  Having completely strapped in, Myr lifted the controller. When nothing happened, she said, “It’s not working.”

  “You have to tell your AI to activate the hand controller. You wouldn’t want to bump it on the counter and accidentally lift off while you were in Starbucks ordering a coffee.”

  Myr grinned at him, “No, I wouldn’t, would I?” She spoke to her AI. A second later, when she gently lifted the controller, hinging it upward relative to the wrist cuff, she gently floated up into the air. Speaking to her AI, she set her altitude so her feet were about eighteen inches off the ground and told it to use terrain following. She’d slowly started drifting forward. She turned to Randy, “I’m not touching the controller, but I’m drifting ahead. Does it need to be calibrated?”

  “You can tell your AI to maintain position. It’ll do it using GPS outside, or with radar if you’re in a building. You can also tell the AI to calibrate the controller, but when I was testing it in the lab, it always eventually starts drifting some direction. I figured it would be better to bias it for a slow drift forward since going backward might run you into things.”

  “Okay, here goes,” Myr said, touching the joystick and starting to move forward a little faster. She glanced at the others and said, “You guys are gonna run along beside me in case I mess up, right?”

  They started walking, then trotting after her, but in another minute she was going so fast they couldn’t possibly keep up. She banked a few turns, rose up to six feet for a little bit then came back, slowing to a quite creditable stop just in front of them. Dropping to the ground, she said, “This’s freaking awesome!” She threw her arms around Randy for a hard hug that had him grinning.

  Vinn went out for his ride, coming back to say mysteriously to Randy, “I’m thinking they should move your ‘line item’ all the way up to ground-level!”

  Randy went out for a ride, startling Vinn by taking a completely plain-vanilla tour of the green whereas Vinn had been expecting him to be somewhat reckless. While Randy was riding, Vinn found himself standing next to Ellen. He said, “Ellen, I haven’t had a chance to talk to you very much. How’re you holding up?” He felt a little bit amazed at himself. In the past, he’d never have thought to talk to someone who was distraught.

  Ellen said, “Sometimes okay.” She rocked a hand, “Sometimes not so good.” She didn’t say anything for a second, then said, “But I do better here at work where I have something else to think about. At home I can spend entire days obsessing and moping.”

  “Just let me know if there’s something I can do,” Vinn said, thinking that talking to her about it hadn’t been nearly as painful as he would’ve expected a year ago.

  “I might be taking you up on that,” Ellen said enigmatically.

  Ellen took a ride as well, surprising everyone by rising up to what looked like a couple hundred feet. By then a few employees who’d been out on the grounds had gathered around to watch. They begged rides as well. Myr consented after Randy gave her AI an override code to keep people from going over three feet into the air.

  Warning them about the carnival ride sensation of having the fluid swirled in your semicircular canal didn’t keep a couple of them from throwing up when it happened to them. Vinn felt a little surprised that the four of them who’d taken the first flights had been lucky enough not to be that strongly affected. Even the people who barfed felt pretty sure they’d be able to get used to it—after all, flight was probably going to be worth the misery of developing tolerance.

  As the gaggle of people arrived back in the lobby of the building, they ran into Arlan Miller coming out. “What’s this I hear about you guys out testing a personal flyer…” he said with a stormy look on his face, then grinned, “without me?!”

  They all went back out to the green so more people could take rides.

  Arlan was so excited after his ride that he told them to start building thirty more. “I know… you guys are going to redesign it and build a better one for production. But wait to do that until after a bunch of people have given you feedback from riding prototypes.” He lifted an eyebrow, “And, after we’re done having fun with them, we’ll sell these prototypes at a ridiculous markup. People will have to pay to get collectors’ items!”

  ******

  Ardis’s AI said, “You have a call from Ellen Mitchell.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “She’s the brother of Mark MacGregor, one of the six hostages in the Philippines.”

  “Oh, yeah. Go ahead and connect her… Hi Ms. Mitchell. What can I do for you?”

  “Is it okay if we start a video connection?” she aske
d.

  “Sure,” he responded, and a second later an image of her popped up on the screen in front of him. Hoping to deflect any long-winded questioning about the ransom situation, he said, “If you’re hoping that there’s something new on the negotiations, the negotiator hasn’t even been in contact since we last spoke.”

  “Yeah,” Ellen sighed, “no, I didn’t really have my hopes up for something like that. It’s just that… Um, we have some new technology here where I work and I’ve been wondering whether it might be useful for your possible rescue plans.”

  Ardis shrugged, “Because of what I do, I’ve been involved in evaluating a lot of the new technologies. I’m pretty up to date on everything in the pipeline, but, of course, I’m always happy to listen.” He wasn’t really interested in wasting his time on whatever she thought they had, but he couldn’t afford to alienate the families of the other hostages.

  “We’ve got these new flyers,” Ellen said hesitantly, “they’re pretty amazing and…”

  “Yeah,” Ardis said dismissively, “pretty much any civilian technology’s not going to be up to what we need. For what we’d hope to do, we’d need something that’ll fly higher than most commercial drones, stay up for a long time, be nearly silent so it won’t warn the kidnappers, and be radar stealthy so it won’t show up on the Philippines’ defense networks.”

  She just stared at him for a second as if she was thinking, then said, “Maybe I could just show you some video.”

  Ardis was saying, “It would probably be better if you just sent me the technical…” when an image popped up on the screen of a woman putting on a lightweight backpack. It looked like the view from someone’s personal AI. Great, he thought derisively, some tiny little drone small enough to fit in your backpack. Like we haven’t all seen something like that before! Then all of his attention suddenly focused razor-sharp as, on the video, the woman with the backpack floated gently up into the air.

  He suddenly suspected that the woman with the backpack was Ellen Mitchell. He’d just been seeing Ellen Mitchell’s image on the screen, but because of changes in distance and lighting, he wasn’t 100 percent sure it was the same woman. While looking hard for cables or ropes that might be pulling her upward, he also focused his attention on the audio so that he could listen for whatever was lifting her. She seemed to be outdoors on a little grassy park in front of a moderately large industrial building. There were a few people nearby and others seemed to be walking toward them. As the video followed her, she floated off across the park at a sedate pace, then, to his astonishment, rapidly rose up into the air to what Ardis thought must be two or three hundred feet. As the image tilted up to follow her, she floated almost directly above the camera. At that angle he could see that no craft was above her to suspend her from cables unless someone had gone to great lengths to scrub it out of the video. Or maybe it was so high in the air it couldn’t be seen? He focused his attention back on the audio. He couldn’t hear anything but the voices of the people talking nearby, one of whom was sounding alarmed, saying, “Ellen! Get back down here, dammit! You can’t be going up that high with unproven technology—we need to do more testing first!”

  The woman slowly floated back down to the ground and landed in front of the camera. Speaking to the person who’d been filming she said, “Can you get your AI to send me a copy of the video?” then the screen went blank. A fraction of a second later the screen filled with Ellen Mitchell’s image, as before sitting in a desk chair. She seemed to be studying Ardis curiously.

  Stunned, Ardis said, “What the hell was that?”

  Mitchell shrugged, “New technology. As you could hear on the video, it’s completely silent. It can go high enough that you’d need oxygen and it can stay up for hours at a time. I’m not sure about radar though. Do people show up on radar?”

  “Um… Some, depending on the radar band.” He sagged back in his chair and blinked a couple of times. “Geez…!”

  “We call them flyers. Do you think you’d be able to use them?”

  Ardis shook his head to clear it. After a second he said, “Probably. I have to… I have to think about how we could use them. Can I fly out and get a look at one? Take a test ride?”

  She nodded, “I’m pretty sure they’d let me have one. Or more than one. I’ll steal them if I have to. When will you be here?”

  “Where do you live?”

  ******

  Vinn looked up at a knock on his door, “Hi Shelley, come on in.”

  Shelley Williams was the interactions coach that Arlan Miller kept on retainer. At first Arlan himself had spent quite a bit of his own time working to improve Vinn’s social skills. Eventually though, he’d said, “I’ve knocked the really jagged edges off your personality. Now we need Shelley to spend some time getting your surface down to something more like a cheese grater.”

  Vinn had laughed at the analogy, saying, “Then are you going to bring in someone else to put on a polish?”

  Arlan had shaken his head, “I think the best we can hope for is something like rough sandpaper.”

  Vinn really liked Shelley, which he thought was only to be expected of someone who coached social skills. However, he was determined to do better than Arlan had expected. As Shelley sat down, he said, “How’ve you been doing?” and settled his mind to really pay attention to the answer.

  Shelley said, “Pretty good, though I’m worried about my son. He’s having trouble making friends in school.”

  The first thing that crossed Vinn’s mind was that it must be a bitch to be a social skills coach whose son couldn’t make friends. He realized that in the past he’d have had a hard time repressing a smart-assed comment about the irony of it. He also wouldn’t have given much of a damn about someone else’s child’s problems. Especially since he didn’t like kids. Now he thought that one of the things he didn’t like about children was the way that most of them were so focused on their own problems. Like me! he realized. He forced himself to think about how Shelley must feel about the struggles of someone she loved. He said, “That sounds pretty rough. How are you dealing with it?”

  She gave him a chagrined look, “Trying to restrain myself from coming on strong with the life skills lessons.”

  Vinn frowned, “You don’t think that’s what he needs?”

  “Maybe, but I think it’d be better coming from someone other than his mother.”

  “Oh,” Vinn thought, suppressing a panicked notion that she might be hoping he’d volunteer to be her son’s coach. That’s ridiculous on the face of it, he realized, the last thing he needs is to get advice from a social flounder like me! He cast about a moment for something to say, then essayed, “Do you have someone you can ask to give him some advice?”

  “I know lots of people who could give him great advice. I just don’t want to take him to one of my professional friends for a sit-down about it. I’m worried he’d feel like I think there’s something seriously wrong with him.”

  “Ah, I can see how that could be a problem. It’d be easier if he asked you for help, but I’ll bet he hasn’t, right?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about trying to write a children’s book that disguises lessons on how to make friends within a story. It’d be too late for my son though, and I’m afraid I’d have a hard time keeping it from being too pedantic.”

  “Aren’t there books out there like that already?”

  She shrugged, “Most children’s books have some kind of hidden lesson.” She grinned, “Actually in a lot of them the lesson isn’t very subtle at all. But, I haven’t found one I thought really taught this one very well. They tend to focus on why you shouldn’t be a bully and how bad it is to be one and how sad it is to be bullied. They seldom try to give the victims of bullying any tools to help them gain social acceptance so they won’t get bullied in the first place.” She gave him a smile, “But, let’s get back to you. I must say I’m quite impressed with how you handled talking to me about this personal issue
.”

  Vinn felt his own eyes widen a little, “You made all that up?!”

  “No,” she lifted a shoulder, “play acting a conversation can be helpful, but I think dealing with a real one’s a lot better. I am worried about my son, and it did soothe my soul that you cared enough to be interested in how he was doing.”

  But I was just pretending to be interested, Vinn thought. Then he realized he had actually empathized with Shelley’s son. This left him wondering whether, in the past, he’d ignored his own empathy; or whether pretending to be interested had actually caused him to become more emotionally involved in the boy’s problem. Vinn didn’t get to think about this anymore though because Shelley asked, “How’ve you been getting along with folks yourself?”

  “I, um, feel like I’m doing quite a bit better. It feels like I’m able to kid around with the other guys here at work and that they’re genuinely laughing and smiling with me… That their responses aren’t forced, I guess I mean to say.” He shrugged, “I might not be the best person to judge though, considering how bad I am about understanding other people’s feelings.”

  “I think you’re doing a lot better.”

  Vinn shrugged, “But you wouldn’t really have any way to know, would you?”

  She grinned, “I have quite a few sources. Probably a lot more than you might expect.”

  This left Vinn wondering whether she went around asking people how they felt about him, or whether she was counseling so many people that she’d have heard about his interactions with them during her sessions with others.

  He hadn’t voiced that question before Shelley asked, “How are you getting along with women?”

  Vinn felt himself staring at her. Is she supposed to be asking me about that? he wondered. He said, “Are you asking…” He ran down, unable to get up the gumption to say “Are you asking about my love life?” Then he suddenly thought, I could really use some advice on how to… how to talk to Myr…