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Chapter 10 - A New Home

“Nadine, I found something to look at. It’s in a foreclosure auction,” Wilson said in a phone call in late March.

“Where?”

“The northernmost part of Little Haiti. Where we wanted. The auction is next week so I’m checking to see if we have a chance.”

The following evening, Wilson had more information about the property.

“This place will work for us. The owner passed away; he had no children. The executor is a half-sister out of state. She tried to sell, got no buyers, so she let the mortgage lapse. The bank couldn’t sell it either.”

“Why not?”

“The property is in a residential zone but had a variance for light industrial many years ago. The owner had a custom furniture shop set up in a pole barn and he lived in a double-wide on the grounds. There’s a rickety shed there too, where he stored the wood.”

“Why do you think they couldn’t sell it?”

“One major problem is the frontage on the road. There’s only fifteen feet of frontage for the driveway which goes 150 feet back, before it opens onto the site. There’s another driveway that goes out the back way; it’s even narrower. The site is completely land-locked and can’t be developed into anything that could make a profit for a buyer and it seems that no one wants to live on a site which used to be, basically, a factory.”

“What condition is it in?”

“It needs lots of work. The double-wide needs a good cleaning and repainting. The wood shed, tear it down. The pole barn is mostly empty, has a few built-in workbenches, but any tools are gone. There’s an a/c unit in it that maybe works. That building can be your ounfò; there’s room for about a hundred chairs. And it looks like we could park fifty or so cars there after the shed is gone.”

“It sounds like this would be a good place. When can I see it?”

“We’ll go Saturday. If we can get it with a low bid, we’ll have the money to fix it up, but I think we might get a mortgage anyway so we don’t use up our entire savings.”

When she saw the site, Nadine thought the place looked appalling, but Wilson assured her that most of what bothered her was cosmetic.

“In fact, since it looks so bad, maybe that will hold off any speculators,” he told her.

That is precisely what happened at the auction; Wilson’s bid was the only one. They now owned a home site. Through his fellow mechanics at his shop, Wilson found someone who could do the site cleanup and a handyman to do some repairs and remodeling in the double-wide, while Nadine found a housekeeping service for the heavy cleanup needed inside.

~~~~

Tamara had continued with her home schooling while her physical therapy sessions continued. Now that they would have a permanent home, though, the family decided that they would check into schools for her. At eleven years old, she would normally be a sixth grader, but she was far more advanced than any sixth-grade child. They called the school district and found out that to register, the school would need a copy of Tamara’s home-school record and she would need to be tested. The school they chose was Thomas Mann Middle School; it was the closest to their new home.

Sue volunteered to go with Tamara and Nadine to register at the school. When they got there, Tamara and Nadine were stunned to see a number of children at the school who were walking through the halls, totally naked.

Smiling at the look of shock on both of their faces, Sue told them, “Obviously you’re shocked at the nudity here. I’m guessing that this is the first time that you’ve actually noticed any naked kids since you moved to Miami, right?”

They both nodded but Nadine said, “A few times I thought I saw what looked like a naked kid a distance away but assumed it was a very brief bathing suit. But when we lived in southern Hendry County—it’s mostly agricultural—we never saw any naked kids there. What’s this weird thing all about, anyway?”

“Something that the state legislature came up with. In Florida for the past few years, parents can force their children to be naked all of the time.”

“Ahh, so that’s why there are signs at the VA hospital that say ‘Clothing Required at All Times.’ I wondered about that.”

“Right,” Sue said. “At the hospitals—the universities too, they require clothes. But I assumed you knew about that stupid idea to force kids to be naked; it’s called ‘Stripped in Florida.’ I’ll tell you more later, at home.”

“I’ve only been around the apartment and the medical school,” Tamara said. “There aren’t any kids around and I miss seeing kids my age.”

They went into the office and the secretary sent them on to the principal, who greeted them.

“Hello, I’m Grace Lombard, the principal here at Thomas Mann. Who do we have here?” she asked, looking at Tamara.

Nadine answered, “We’re the Alexandres. I’m Nadine and this is Tamara. And our friend here, Susan Gilson, has been Tamara’s home-school teacher since October, when we moved to Miami for her medical treatment.”

“Oh, goodness, Tamara, are you better now?” Lombard asked.

“Yes ma’am, I had a skull fracture. It made my left leg weak, so I was home schooled while I was healing and having therapy.”

“Well spoken, miss. So you are here to register at Thomas Mann?”

“That’s correct,” Nadine answered. “We’re moving to a home several blocks away, when the place is ready. Should be in a week or two.”

Lombard smiled at Tamara. “Do you have your prior school records, Tamara?”

“Yes, ma’am. Sue has them from before I came to Miami and she has a report of my progress when she was teaching me.”

Sue broke in. “I’m a retired teacher, certified in Florida. My license number is on the report.”

“Oh, good. Let me see...” she began reading the paperwork and then sat back.

“Unusual... no, this is unique. I’m not sure what to make of this. Mathematics, currently studying differential calculus. Science, in physics, postgraduate university; the other sciences, grade twelve, at least—perhaps college level. Language arts—that’s English grammar, reading and writing, spelling, comprehension, et cetera—that varies. Your reading and comprehension are grade 12 plus but the other English skills are closer to... um... middle-school-age appropriate. Then I see more eighth-grade-appropriate achievements in literature, history, and civics. Tamara, I’m just guessing here... you like to read?”

Tamara and Nadine laughed. “Yes, Tamara is almost never seen without a book,” Nadine chuckled. “Even when she just began schooling, she was always reading.”

“And you like science, apparently.”

“Yes, ma’am. Right now, I’m working on a redesign for parts of an MRI,” she told Lombard.

At Lombard’s puzzled look, Nadine chuckled again. “That’s correct. It’s a medical magnetic resonance imaging machine. Tamara’s in a study at the U of Miami medical school that’s using one and she has her own ideas for its improvement. They’ve already adopted one of her design changes.”

“Huh. Seems fitting her in here will be a challenge, I can see. We’ll need to do some testing, Tamara, to see what you need to learn at the middle school level.” She flipped some papers. “This is a final exam from a high school physics class that you took and scored a perfect grade.” Another flip. “Math, here’s a high school senior final. 100%. Chemistry, high school junior, same. Same with biology. There’s no point in testing you on science or math.”

She looked up at Tamara. “Tamara, tell me what you think we should do here.”

“Ma’am, I need to be with kids my age a little before going to high school. Can I just go to school here? I want to learn the social studies topics and get practice in writing too. And if the teachers allow it, I could help other kids learn if they have trouble in classes,” Tamara said.

Lombard smiled. “Young lady, what mature and thoughtful suggestions those are. Are you sure you won’t be bored if the class is working on something you’ve already studied?”

“No, ma’am, as long as I have a book with something new to work on.”

They all laughed.

“Mrs Lombard, to change the subject, I need to ask if the naked kids here cause any particular difficulties in classrooms,” Sue asked.

Lombard sighed. “They do, a fair amount. It’s difficult since they are always a distraction, the teachers complain. I’m not in favor, but we have no choice though.”

Sue nodded. “That’s a major reason why I retired. When they started that nonsense in the Tampa Bay area, it was just a local novelty. Suddenly I had to teach with that major distraction added. Class control became really difficult in my high school classes. I had the opportunity to retire, so I did. But it’s grown and become a state program now. I don’t envy you.”

“Thanks, I think. Well, Tamara, shall we schedule your placement exams? When can you come in to take them?”

~~~~

After they left the school office, Nadine asked Sue, “So what’s this nudity nonsense about?”

Sue shook her head ruefully. “I’ve got some errands to run now, so I have to leave you. Why don’t you stop by my place at 3 o’clock and we’ll talk then.”

Later that day, all the Alexandres arrived at Sue’s apartment and she invited them in.

“I actually assumed you knew about that nudity program in Florida; after all, you lived here while Tamara was growing up,” she told them.

“Huh,” Wilson began, “I did hear about it...” Nadine nodded, “...but paid it no attention. I... I thought it was something that was happening up there around Pasco County,” he improvised, recalling what Nadine told him about Sue’s comment to Lombard about her teaching in Tampa. “We’ve been so tied up with personal things that Nadine and I haven’t been much for the news here.”

“Okay,” Sue said, “what’s going on here with it is that the state gave parents the authority to strip their kids; when they do that, the kids have to remain naked for their whole childhood.”

Tamara jerked. “Eeep! That’s weird! And stupid! Um, that explains...” She stopped. “Um, Mom, I just thought of something. I’ll tell you later.”

At the same time, Nadine was shaking her head, saying, “Unbelievable,” and Wilson was just shaking his head.

He asked, “Where did this idiocy start, anyway? Do you know?”

“Yeah, I do.” Sue told him. “It actually began in Orange County, but it all happened around the same time in Orange and Hillsborough counties, spreading into the Pasco County area. You know those big theme parks in Orlando?”

“Sure,” Wilson said while Nadine and Tamara looked on blankly.

“So someone in their PR, you know, public relations, or maybe marketing department, got the idea to boost sales by offering a big discount to families who brought their kids there and kept them naked. I heard that the original idea came from the reaction to a large nudist group that rented one of the parks after it closed—they do that to get more money out of the park. The park’s staff saw the naked kids having a fantastic time and thought it was cute. So the PR people thought that they’d try it with mainstream guests. It was a totally weird idea, but they got a bump in attendance, so next, they offered a larger discount if the families could show, with photos, that the kids were naked in public areas for at least three days before they visited their parks.

“I think that it was around the same time that the nudist resorts in Pasco and the surrounding areas got together and got the area counties to allow kids to be naked in public. You know, the Pasco area has the largest concentration of nudist resorts in the country.”

Wilson nodded and the others followed his lead.

“The nudist resorts began encouraging the parents of kids to keep them naked outside of the resorts; they got marketing studies which suggested that they could increase their traffic—get more resort customers—if they did that. In about a year, everyone’s revenues were up, mainly from visitors from out of state. Why this happened is a puzzle, but some newspaper columnists conjectured that it might have been a backlash to a backlash. In all the states north of Florida—that’s the whole rest of the country except Hawaii, there was a developing public backlash against the Naked in School program that’s been going on in a lot of states—oh, you haven’t heard of that either? I see blank looks.”

“I read something in the paper a few weeks ago that mentioned naked kids going to high schools,” Nadine said. “The article said it was a federal program and some schools were starting it. It sounded stupid so I stopped reading it. So that’s a real thing too?”

“Unfortunately it is but it’s not in Florida. So as I mentioned, in reaction to the parts of the Naked in School Program that require public nudity outside school, like requiring kids to go into public places while naked, conservative law-makers were making many public dress codes to become stricter. Then the more ‘liberal,’ I’d guess you’d say, parents who rebelled against those stricter dress codes wound up bringing their kids here where they could visit nudist resorts and have their kids ‘express their body freedom,’ as the promotions were saying. So tourism in Florida got a big boost.”

“So obviously it didn’t stay just in that local three or four county area,” Nadine ventured.

“No. But as I mentioned in Lombard’s office, I retired because I couldn’t stand the classroom management problems that a bunch of naked kids in the classroom caused. You know, puberty, teens, nudity... take a guess.”

Just then, the door opened and Sue’s husband came in.

“Hi, Sue... ah, hi there too, Nadine, Wilson, Tamara. What’s up, guys?” John asked.

Sue answered, “Hi, dear. You’re home early.”

“Yup. It was light today and Justine said she’d cover.”

“The Alexandres only just found out about the Stripped in Florida—the SiF Act—today,” Sue told him. “I’m telling them some more about it.”

John sighed and dropped into a chair. “Idiots in the capitol. I’m surprised you didn’t know about it.”

Nadine briefly explained about their meeting with the school principal and the family’s past fabricated history.

“Lombard didn’t seem happy about it at her school either,” Nadine said. “Why do you think it spread from the Tampa Bay area?”

John chuckled. “Money, of course. Bad things always seem to happen when a shortage of money’s involved. Some state officials in Tallahassee, or ‘Tall Hassle,’ as some fantasy author from maybe forty years ago called it when writing about Xanth, which was a fictional metaphor for Florida, took notice of the increased tourist traffic, and the urban legend about it claims that they read some on-line fiction stories about a ‘Stripped in Florida’ program. Since the state is chronically short of money, they looked into using those stories as a template to put together a Florida program like that for real, here in Florida. The problem was that many of the features of the program—the things that made it work in those fiction stories—were total fantasy; the plots were pure fantasy fiction. Not even science because the science in them was impossible. The biggest problem the officials faced was how to monitor and enforce the mandatory nudity that the Florida law was based on.”

“Mandatory? But we saw only a few naked kids,” Nadine countered.

John sighed. “Let me go over the stuff as I understand what happened, beginning from when those dim bulbs in Tall Hassle got started down their rabbit hole. In the fiction stories, that program had two parts, one involving tourists and the other, state citizens. Tourists could have their kids stripped naked for a fee while they were here, just by buying a license to do it. When they purchased it, the kid would have to be naked while they were in the state. On the other hand, state citizens would pay for a license too, but the law mandated that their child had to remain totally naked till the child reached 21 years old.”

Nadine started to interrupt but John said, “Let me finish. You were going to ask how they could enforce that?” Nadine nodded. “That’s where moving the fictional story to reality breaks down. In the story, kids who were stripped had an electronic chip implanted behind an ear. Whenever a ‘chipped kid,’” he made finger quotes, “passed a sensor, it would read the chip, a camera would determine if the kid was naked, and if not, an alarm would sound and police would respond and enforce the law. Now tell me how this could work here in real life.”

“In Miami? Non-emergency? Maybe hours? Likely never?” laughed Wilson. “Like the cops have nothing to do other than chase after naked kids—um, should-be-naked kids, that is.”

John nodded. “So true. A second science-fiction-like part of the stories was the so-called nudity detector camera. There’s no technology which can reliably discriminate between a clothed and unclothed person, and what if the chipped person is in a group? How can the camera tell who in the group has a chip, let alone if that person is clothed or not? Sure, you could have people watching screens. But according to those stories, cameras were at every public building, school, shop, and multiple ones were on every street. How many people would be needed to cover that many cameras? Even then, the detectors are omnidirectional, so picking one chipped kid out of a group is impossible.

“Then the stories had some stupid frills too, one where the kids—boys, that is—were given pills or injections of something like Viagra which made them have permanent erections. Now apparently the state did look into that too. Why, I can’t fathom. Whatever. But that can’t happen. There’s no drug that can cause a permanent erection—or even one that lasts for much longer than about an hour. Back in 1983, a urologist at a medical conference injected his penis with papaverine, a vasodilator, to demonstrate that a drug could cause an erection. It did, but it’s not all that effective. Then Viagra and similar drugs were developed about fifteen years later and they cause an erection but only if there’s active sexual stimulation and even then, their resulting erections last for maybe a half hour, not much more, ever. No drug will case an involuntary erection, other than drugs like alprostadil, prostaglandin E-1, which has to be mixed from a powder and then immediately injected directly into the side of the penis. An erection produced by the recommended dose of alprostadil lasts up to about an hour, max.

“And no one will ever develop such a permanent-erection drug, either. Erections lasting longer than four hours are actually dangerous for the health of the penis and are considered to be a medical emergency, when they are caused by lack of blood flow. The medical condition’s called ‘ischemic priapism.’ With a forced erection—like too much drugs injected directly, or even when using a constricting penile ring, it produces a tourniquet-like effect on the penis. Blood can’t leave the organ—that’s what keeps it erect, but blood can’t enter either, and blood-starved tissues quickly become deprived of oxygen, so they begin dying after just a few hours. That’s the danger of a tourniquet—if no new blood gets to feed the tissues, gangrene may begin to occur in as little as four to six hours. If priapism isn’t treated quickly, the man will never be able to get an erection again, or even may lose the organ.”

Everyone had a look of horror at hearing that.

“So any story that talks about creating an hours-long erection is complete nonsense.” he finished.

Sue took over the discussion. “Another element of the stories was how long a chipped child was to be naked. In the stories, it was until they were 21 years old. Legal adulthood occurs at 18, after which a child may completely overrule a parent’s decision. That’s a federal standard and states can’t change it. And consider this: even if this is Florida, it still can get cold here. The stories allowed covering with a cape or poncho or something like that if the temps got below 65. First, if you’re not acclimatized to cooler temps, spending an hour naked at 65 degrees can be really uncomfortable, especially if you have a small body like a child. I’ve seen kids shivering at temps below 70 in school with the a/c on. And in Tampa, we had some winters where the temps got down to near freezing.”

“So how did the state change the fiction story—what do stripped kids here need to do now?” Nadine asked.

“Here’s a flyer; I picked it up in Mrs Lombard’s school office,” Sue said, pulling it from her handbag. “You can look it over, but to summarize, first, tourists can enroll their kids. It costs $75 now; they recently increased the fee. There’s no enforcement done and the parents are responsible for the kid. After all, they paid, so why involve the authorities in keeping the kid naked? Florida got its cash. For state residents, it’s $150 now. When I was teaching in Tampa, most of the parents who enrolled their kids did it because the kids were supposedly, I quote, ‘too modest,’ or did it as a punishment for something or other. As a teacher, I saw that a lot of kids were horrified when their parents enrolled them, but a much smaller number didn’t seem to mind—at least at first. Then the constant nudity began to get old and most kids wanted their clothes back, but they legally couldn’t get dressed. In Florida now, it’s actually illegal for a kid with a chip to be clothed in public, and it’s also illegal for one without a chip one to be naked, but effective enforcement of either of those provisions is difficult, if not impossible. Hey, we all know that there are plenty of laws where their enforcement is impossible. But if a kid violates the law and gets caught, the parents get a hefty fine.

“To try to get the appearance of some semblance of enforcement, the state put up sensors; you can see them at all store entrances, in schools, and also in places where kids like to hang out. The sensors have rudimentary camera systems that can detect clothing but only when it’s somewhat loose. If a camera detects a clothed chipped kid, an alarm is sounded. But as you pointed out, Wilson, the cops don’t have time to chase chipped kids. John, explain about the chips.”

John began speaking again. “So, the chips themselves are the third science-fictiony part of the SiF Act. Everything in the program depends on them. In the fiction stories, the chips were described as being very tiny and self-implanting once they contacted the skin. The chip was in a band-aid and once the band-aid was applied, the chip implanted itself under the skin within a few seconds. In the stories, the site on the body used to put the chip was behind an ear, and a parent could slap the thing onto the kid and bingo, they were ‘Stripped’ with a capital ‘s.’ Well, that’s impossible on two counts. First, there’s no artificial solid material known which can burrow itself into the skin like that, let alone do it in a few seconds. Second, the readable range of a chip that tiny wouldn’t make it detectible further than a few millimeters above the skin’s surface. The laws of physics prevent that, despite the best intentions of Florida’s own laws.”

Sue broke in. “One of the biggest problems the state had with rolling out the program was, in fact, the chip itself. You know I was an electrical engineer before becoming a teacher. The company I worked for manufactures integrated circuits and I heard that they had gotten an RFP, a request for proposal, from the state—it’s sort of a pre-bid process. Other companies got the RFP too. It asked them to propose an RFID tag that could be quickly and easily be implanted under the skin and have at least a 30-foot read range. I’m sure they weren’t happy when they got nothing like they expected. No self-implanting chip, no 30-foot read range, and no easy implanting method. In fact, to implant a chip, it has to be done under medical supervision by a licensed practitioner. John can tell you about that.”

He nodded. “What they got—what Florida uses now for the SiF program—is an RFID chip which is the size of a half-inch long wooden matchstick. The chip needs a special needle and injector to insert it under the skin, just like birth-control implants are inserted. And because they are inserted into the body, the chips were determined to be a medical device and the chip and its insertion device had to be approved by, and is regulated by, the FDA. The length of a birth-control implant is over an inch but the Florida chip can’t be longer than a half inch because it’s going into a child. It needs to go into a site with a reasonable skin thickness, so behind the ear is out. Birth-control implants go into the inside of the upper arm, so that’s the site that was chosen.

“Finally, the insertion procedure isn’t like body jewelry piercing or tattooing, so only licensed medical personnel can do it—and a lot refuse to do it. In my practice, I refused to do the implants, too. The chip has to go an exact depth under the skin so it can’t get loose in the dermis and migrate deeper into the body. That’s known to have happened with birth-control implants. Refusal to do an objectionable medical procedure is a federal right and the state can’t overrule it. Docs at our company clinics—some docs, that is—do the procedure. I won’t.”

“So you’re saying that no one can force us to make Tamara naked?” Wilson asked.

“According to Florida law, only the parents can choose,” Sue replied.

“And you’re not gonna make me?” Tamara asked.

Both parents said “No!” emphatically and she heaved a sigh of relief.

Nadine asked, “Can’t the parent just get the thing taken out if they change their mind?”

John shrugged. “Theoretically yes, but the state made doing that illegal and a doctor could lose their license if they did that procedure. That’s what I heard. I suppose if you went to another state, a doc there might do it but maybe they’d follow the Florida rules for Florida residents. So, yes, it can be removed if you can find someone to do it. It’s not trivial; it’s a minor surgical procedure. Actually, those chips really must be taken out eventually, once the kid ages out.”

“I was wondering about how radio waves work with those chips.” Tamara asked Sue. “They don’t have a power source?”

“Some RFID chips do. The bigger chips can have a battery. The SiF chips don’t; they’re powered by the radio waves that activate them.”

Tamara got a thoughtful look.

Wilson looked at Nadine and she nodded. “I think we’ll leave you two engineers to discuss some theory,” he chuckled. “I know to run when Tamara gets that look in her eyes.”

When they left, Sue asked, “Okay, how detailed should I be?”

Tamara shrugged. “You can leave out the calcs and stuff. When I know the correct terms, I can work out the number details.”

“Spoken like an engineer,” Sue laughed.

She began. “Let me explain a little about RFID tags. That’s the abbreviation for ‘radio frequency ID’ tags. They’re put on lots of consumer products for tracking and anti-theft devices and on credit cards, passports, key cards, and ID cards too. They’re manufactured by printing the circuit onto a substrate like plastic, kind of like integrated circuits are made, and the chip’s circuitry must have an antenna to work because it’s powered by radio waves...”

Tamara interrupted, “I’ve seen something like that in the MRI detector circuitry I’m studying. They use Schottky diodes to rectify the incoming RF signals and to regulate the transmitted signal.”

“Correct. Now passive tags, like the ones they use in the SiF program, don’t require their own power source to work. Their power comes from an RFID reader or interrogator which uses radio waves which activate the transponder, that’s the circuit in the RFID tag. If those radio waves are at the frequency that the RFID chip’s antenna is tuned to, an electrical current is created in the chip’s circuitry, powering the chip. When the chip is powered, its circuitry sends a signal back through its antenna to the interrogator where it’s translated into the data contained in the RFID chip.

“Now here’s where the problem enters. The range in which an RFID can be read is based, in large part, on its antenna size. Other factors are its operating frequency, activating power, antenna orientation, and interference in the surrounding area or from other nearby RFID tags. The most efficient RFID for best range versus cost is a UHF chip; the SiF chips are UHF and operate around 928 megahertz. You saw in the SiF flyer from the school that those chips are about the length of a short matchstick but a little flatter around. Because of their small size, their antennas can’t be very big; also the antenna needs to be wrapped around inside the chip several times. Now, for the frequency that the SiF chip uses, the ideal antenna length would be about six-and-a-half inches long to obtain its theoretical full range—and that range is about 115 feet under ideal conditions. Ideal conditions would require that the antenna be exposed on a flat surface with the surface fully facing the power source. Now, for the most efficient antenna design, the so-called ‘tip-loaded’ configuration, where the antenna length is folded back and forth on the surface, the SiF chip would need to be printed on a flat surface, about one inch long and a half-inch wide, and placed on the skin’s surface. Instead, the chip’s half as long; its half-inch width is rolled into a 3/32-inch diameter cylinder; and it’s buried under the skin where the arm and body effectively shields much of any RF wave transmission. That reduces the theoretical range immensely.

“To give you an idea of the resulting range limitation, a one inch by one-quarter inch UHF tag, like they use for anti-theft devices, is activated by an antenna about 2 feet by 4 feet in size and the receiver only needs to see a reflected signal—no data need be sent. Those work ten, maybe fifteen feet away. But the actual range of a matchstick-sized RFID implanted in an upper arm activated by a 24-inch antenna would be only about six inches or so.

“But enter superconducting circuits. Used in the SiF chip, the new technology has greatly improved its RFID range, out to about three feet, but superconductivity hasn’t abolished the laws of physics—like the inverse-square law. I’m sure you know that law.”

“Yeah, and its application to propagation of radio signals. The power received at a given distance from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between source and receiver. The Friis transmission formula is used to calculate the effective power received,” Tamara said. “But an inch-long RFID antenna isn’t a point source, which means that the inverse-square law is only a best-case situation. It’s more like an inverse-cube law, isn’t it?”

Sue went on. “That’s exactly right. Also, making the circuit out of superconducting components greatly increases the chip’s efficiency in how it uses the power it receives, but physics laws can’t be violated, so the inverse-square or inverse-cube law still applies. Another efficiency decrease occurs since the antenna’s not flat. Rolling the antenna up the way it needs to be done to fit in a chip, reduces its power efficiency by 60 percent for each 90-degree turn. And you can’t overcome this range limitation by simply increasing the power of the interrogator unit either. In the U.S., by federal regulation, the transmitted power allowance for UHF devices is four watts. So the SiF chip can be read from perhaps four feet away, max, under totally ideal conditions.”

“Okay, then, I guess enforcing it is kinda hit-or-miss,” Tamara concluded.

“Correct.”

~~~~

Later, Tamara spoke to Nadine about the thought she had had when they were talking to Sue.

“Momma, when we were in the school and saw the naked kids, it was so weird...”

“I know, sweetie, I thought so too.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. The tastes I felt and colors I heard and... um, I’ll use the ‘aura’ word but you know I’m not ‘seeing’ this stuff, right?”

“Sure. I’ll know what you mean.”

“Okay. Now it was hard ‘cause there were so many kids and difficult to tell whose auras I was getting, but there was lots of fear and anger in the kids there. Also lots of ... dread? Maybe. Anyway, that school wasn’t a very happy place. If the stripped kids have to stay that way for a bunch of years and the others are scared that’ll happen to them too, I can see why everyone was so down at the school.”

Nadine nodded. “That makes sense. But I’m sure the other schools are that way too. Do you want to change your mind and stay with Sue—if she’ll keep teaching you, that is.”

“No, Momma, it’s what I said in the school. I need to be with other kids. I want to have friends and be normal, even though I know stuff.”

Nadine smiled sadly. “So true; you do know ‘stuff.’ I think that you’re right and I agree. Well, let’s see how this school works for you.”

Little Haiti, Miami, Florida: Two weeks later

Two weeks later, the Alexandres moved into their new home. It needed a few more minor fixes but it was the largest space that the family had ever lived in, and Nadine was both thrilled with the space but dismayed by the extra work that all that extra space required to keep clean. The site itself still needed work; the wood shed site and its surrounding area had been covered by asphalt paving and Wilson had laid out parking stripes on it to allow just over fifty parking spaces. The unpaved areas could hold a few more cars if needed, but they were full of ruts and had bare or weedy sections. That fix-up job would need to wait. The pole barn had been touched up, painted, and new lighting fixtures had been installed. They hunted through the local papers and web sites for sales of inexpensive institutional seating and tables.

Tamara was now attending the local school and had been put into social studies classes in the seventh and eighth grade; the seventh grade for basic European-world history and the eighth, U.S. history. Her testing showed she had little background in those areas. She was in an eighth grade English class and was in a combined music and art class. A physical education class rounded out the formal classes in her day. She loved the physical activity of dodge-ball and volleyball, but still was favoring that leg. She decided to do running too; that would help her build the muscle, her therapist had told her. She had some open time and spent that time in the school’s resource room, the modern term for “library,” since it also contained computer stations and audio-visual materials too. During her open time, Tamara hoped that the teachers would send kids to her for coaching.

She couldn’t get used to the kids’ nudity, however. About a tenth of the kids in the school were naked. The ones in her classes didn’t want to talk to her in the classroom; they were uncomfortable with her as a newcomer, and furthermore, she looked so much younger than them. At lunch, at the end of her first week in the school, she waited to go through the serving line until she could see where some of the naked kids sat. Then she got her lunch and went to the one table that she had seen where a few naked kids had sat. They were seventh graders, only a year older than her.

“Um, hi, I’m Tamara. I just started here. Can I sit with you guys?”

Two girls shifted over to make room. Then the six at the table, all girls, introduced themselves. Three were naked.

“I was home schooled till my family moved to Miami,” Tamara began. “I was in an accident and hurt my head so I was in the hospital and had a tutor until last week.”

They asked her about the accident and Tamara told them the family’s prepared history.

“I was really shocked when I heard about this nudity thing,” she went on. “And now I see it. You guys don’t look very happy.”

The three naked girls all shook their heads. “We don’t like to talk about it,” one girl, Sylvia, said. “I hate my stepmother. She did this to me.”

Tamara continued talking with them for a while, gradually learning that most of the parents who had stripped their kids did it out of anger at them or on a whim, thinking that seeing their child naked would be somehow “cute” but eventually came to regret their decision, especially after seeing how depressed or withdrawn their child had become. After all, for a twelve-year-old, that decision would affect the child for another six years at least, the not-clothed-until-age-21 rule being a non-starter.

“So if you could wear clothes again, you would?” Tamara asked.

“In a heartbeat,” Julie, another of the girls, answered and the others echoed her.

“What about your folks?” Tamara continued.

Sylvia said, “My stepmom wouldn’t give a shit, but my dad would allow it. But that law has awful fines if they find a chipped kid wearing clothes and he won’t risk it.”

And that was the key, Tamara learned; the parents were afraid of the penalties they would suffer if they let their children wear clothes again.

Tamara vowed to do something to help them to be able to wear clothes again.

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