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Chapter 29 - University

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland: two months later

Tamara was halfway through her first semester. This was nothing like high school; even her attending college classes while in high school didn’t prepare her for the intensity of full-time college life. She was indeed living in one of the freshman dorms, as Jill had told her she would. But she didn’t much care for her roommate.

Beverly—she wanted to be called “Bev”—turned out to be a clueless, stuck-up party girl. She also tried calling Tamara “Tammy” on a number of occasions, but after Tamara had corrected her each time with no apparent success, Bev found that the next time that she said “Tammy,” she felt ill. Bev must have been a slow learner, Tamara thought, because it took a whole week of episodes of her being ill before Bev finally figured it out—don’t say “Tammy.”

Tamara wondered how the girl had been admitted, since she was so clueless about simple things and seemed to care little for her classes. At least Tamara had never seen her studying.

The JHU roommate-matching program needs a CPU transplant, Tamara thought one evening as she was trying to study and Bev was blasting her music. Tamara sighed and wafted a tiny cloud of light pink taste with faint streaks of brown at Bev, who turned pale and rushed to the bathroom.

This was the fourth time I needed to do that, Tamara muttered as she turned the music down. It’s too cold to walk to the library. I’m missing Miami already. They say it snows here, too. Not looking forward to that...

Then she thought of what Emma had told her about Alaska and the Program (not happening) there. She shivered—both at the thought of the cold there and Emma’s attempts to escape the Program’s clutches.

Thinking of Emma, Tamara was getting impatient. Emma had promised her that she’d allow her to begin working with her in the spring semester.

“Tamara, dear, it’s way too much to jump into a regular research load before you’ve even gotten a few courses under your belt whilst living in a uni environment, innit,” she had admonished Tamara after she had complained about being put off. “Believe me, you’ll understand after a few weeks of classes, won’t you.”

Now Tamara did understand. But living with Bev certainly wasn’t helping any. And apart from the occasional nausea treatments, Tamara didn’t want to use her abilities to influence Bev any further.

Well, I can only hope that Bev decides to go out for a sorority or something next semester, Tamara mused. That might keep her busy and away from here more.

Although Emma wouldn’t allow Tamara to begin on a research project of her own yet, Tamara did have weekly meetings with her, and she learned that Emma was involved in a very interesting battery research project. Emma had funded a research center at Cambridge University to develop new battery technologies and was herself currently working on the quantum theory of electrical energy storage in different substrates, especially using semiconductor-infused polymers as the substrate for embedding molecular lattices which could stably store energy.

At their last meeting before final exams, Emma asked her, “Tamara, I spoke to your profs and they all said that you’re doing just fine in your classes; as well, your marks remain excellent as is your participation in class. How do you regard your fitting in at uni socially?”

“Oh, thanks, Emma. I knew my grades were fine. I wasn’t sure about the class participation since I tend to be outspoken. If someone says something that’s not right...”

“Stop, stop,” Emma laughed. “I do swear, you’re just like me. I did the same thing—only stopped when it got me branded by teachers as a troublemaker. Your professors aren’t anything like my teachers were, are they. They say your participation is just fine.”

Tamara nodded. “Oh, good. Since they never said anything to me, I never knew.”

“And socially? You haven’t been holed up in a library cubicle this entire autumn, have you?”

“Um, not really. You know, before coming here, I divided my days between high school, college classes, and the med school MRI lab. So I’m really used to being very busy all the time. So if I tell you the truth, please don’t be mad at me, okay?”

Emma grinned at her. “What are you confessing to? Overworking yourself?”

“I don’t think learning new stuff is overworking. So, this summer, my family went back to Haiti to close out their affairs there, and I had a whole new insight about my sensory abilities. It occurred to me that animals—lots of plants too—can communicate by scent, that is, chemically. We already know about how nerve cells transmit information; from neuron to neuron, it’s chemical too. Neurotransmitters are released at the synapses, from axon to dendrite.

“But there’s also a huge electrical component in information transfer in the nerve cell; those are the signals that the EEG can detect. At the med school lab, working with Dr Beauford—he’s a neurosurgeon but also has a doctorate in neuroscience—I learned about how nerve cells work. The cells have three parts: the dendrite, the soma, and the axon. The synapses are at the distal end of the axon, and glial and Schwann cells insulate the axons—the myelin. The oligodendrocytes are myelin precursors.

“So this information about neurons triggered my affinity for electrical circuits; I’ve seen how the nerve cell works like an electrical circuit component. While I was working in Beauford’s lab, I came across a new study about how nerve cells work. The key seems to be in the dendrites, which appear to work very much like transistors—switches—and perform binary operations with electrical signals. They receive input from the synapses of axons of other neurons and transmit those signals to other nerve cells and so on to the body’s muscles and other body functions, like the endocrine system’s secretory cells.”

Emma grinned at the lecture. “So all this is in favor of...? It’s fascinating, I’m sure.”

Tamara gave her a grin back. “So what I was coming to is my insight. I think that the brain can send signals externally in two ways: electrical and chemical. And my abilities are probably based on both ways. So my current extra-curricular research is on neurological stimulation of the endocrine system and the chemicals produced. I’ve been reading articles in the medical literature on those topics.”

Emma sat back and exhaled. “And here I was convinced that keeping you out of the lab would make you concentrate on your class studies. I was wrong again; you’re truly too much like me, Tamara. So, back to my original question... any social life?”

Tamara grinned. “Well, in the one free hour I have in each week... Seriously. I do socialize. I get together with some of the Clarke scholars quite a bit; Jill and I hit it off so we meet several times a week. I like Terence and we do study sessions together sometimes. I help him with French since I’m a native speaker and we’re both very advanced in math so we’re taking the Fourier Analysis class and have a study group for that. I also like Peter and we have lunch together several times a week too.”

“Which Peter?”

“Oh right. I forgot that there’s a Peter in the junior class. No, Peter Winsberg, my freshman counterpart. The other full Clarke scholar. He’s dual majoring in math and Double E and is pretty cool too. We talk about electrical engineering a lot,” she giggled.

“Ah, so finally something we differ on,” Emma chuckled. “When I was in uni, I didn’t socialize much, and never with boys. Of course, I completed uni and high school at the same time, didn’t I. I didn’t do much in the social department. Now then. It would appear that you can handle working on a project in addition to your classes...”

She stopped as Tamara exclaimed, “Yessss!”

“... so I’m going to be a taskmaster here and first have you work under my direction. When I’m convinced you can be independent, we’ll discuss the projects I know you’re keen to start on. But good research requires good discipline, clear planning, and reasonable goals, doesn’t it. One doesn’t accomplish much if one just ‘tries stuff.’” She made finger quotes. “Agreed?”

“Oh sure,” Tamara was fairly bouncing in her seat. “I suppose, since you’re doing that theoretical battery work, you want me to try to adapt your ideas into physical structures.”

“That’s precisely it. That will give me the opportunity to see how you are able to discipline your scientific curiosity and as well, give me early indications that show if my ideas have merit. Okay, my dear, I need to hustle off to my Intro to Physics class now, so I’ll see you after the holiday. I needn’t tell you to do well on your finals. Have a wonderful winter break and come back ready for some hard work,” Emma grinned as they hugged.

Emma’s introductory physics class was still one of the most popular science courses at Hopkins; the students loved Emma and she loved teaching them.

Late December

Tamara flew home for the holidays. She was happy to be warm again; the cold gray days of the late-fall mid-Atlantic coast were somewhat depressing, so seeing the sun when she left the airport cheered her right up. She was glad to be heading home for the end-of-the-year celebrations. She was even happier when her dad told her that the kidnapping case was “mostly closed.” Those responsible were now behind bars, but the FBI couldn’t give out any more details other than to say that Tamara was no longer a target.

Tamara recalled the Christmases when she was a child in Haiti—the greetings of “jwaye Nwèl” and “joyeux Noël,” “happy Christmas” in Kreyòl and French, which rang out everywhere on the local streets during the weeks before the holiday. She recalled how, as a child on Christmas Eve, she would clean her shoes, fill them with straw, and place them under the scraggly pine-tree branch that they called a Christmas “tree” next to the nativity scene there, in the hopes that Tonton Nwèl, “Uncle Noel”—Santa, would take the straw out and bless her by filling her shoes with gifts.

Some of those customs changed somewhat in her family when they came to America. There was still a tree—far more robust than the pine branches they could get in Haiti. The happy Christmas greetings still abounded everywhere in Little Haiti, but the commercialization of the holiday led to the giving of more substantial gifts than a little candy or a small doll left in or next to her shoes. Or in Tamara’s case, a book.

Now that she was at home, she looked forward to her family’s traditional service in the ounfò, which was followed by the Christmas “baths,” a spiritual cleansing of her body of all of the bad experiences she had experienced during the past year. Wearing loose-fitting white garments, the vodouisants silently poured the cleansing waters of her mom’s family recipe over themselves to wash away any evil traces that might remain on them. After this was done, they would silently make a brief visit to a crossroads—a nearby street corner—carrying a symbolic offering together with the unused bath preparation materials, and leave those remains behind. Then they would return home, taking a different route—by not retracing their steps, the evil wouldn’t follow them home.

There was also a very late dinner on Christmas eve, which began after the religious observances. Called “réveillon,” from the French réveil, meaning “awakening,” since in Haiti (and in the diaspora too), the meal frequently lasts until dawn; in Tamara’s family it usually consisted of fried chicken with rice and beans and didn’t last all night.

Christmas day was a day of rest and the Alexandres typically had an open house for friends and congregation members to visit. Tamara always loved this season and was happy to be home to enjoy it.

Two days after Christmas, Tamara checked her student account on the Johns Hopkins website to see if her grades had been posted yet. They had been, and she was happy to see that she had preserved her “A”s in all her classes. That meant that Emma was sure to let her begin working in the lab for the spring semester.

Tamara decided to see if Beauford was at work, but when she called his office, she learned that he was on a two-week vacation with his family, so she’d have to put off seeing him until at least spring break, since she had to return to school right after New Year’s Day. Even though the spring semester didn’t begin until the last week of January, Tamara was scheduled to return for the school’s “Intersession,” a three-week period when the university offered specialized classes or allowed students to do research projects for credit. Emma had told her to register for two credits of research during Intersession.

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore: two months later: March

March was a sloppy month in the mid-Atlantic states, Tamara decided. At least this year it was. After two days of intermittent snow, the weather turned to freezing rain and the snow on the streets and walks turned into slush—a new experience for Tamara—as was her first experience with snow in late January, when her spring semester had begun. That’s when she learned that her favorite roommate, Bev, was not returning to school. It seemed that majoring in parties wasn’t a very good idea for maintaining one’s grades. By March, Tamara was still lacking a roommate, which was just fine with her. A number of fellow students in her dorm wing also found themselves without a roommate; that’s more kids who didn’t take school seriously, Tamara figured.

She was having a wonderful time in school this spring. Her classes were very interesting and the profs were decent. Best yet, Emma had set her up in her lab in the Physics-Astronomy Building. So far, Emma had her working with the materials that Emma had brought from her lab at the APL which they had used during the Intersession period: polymer sheets of varying thickness doped with Emma’s superconducting formula. The thinnest of these sheets, ones only a hundred micrometers thick, were used to make superconducting wires by rolling them into tight cylinders and heat-annealing them to set the inclusions’ lattice structure.

Emma’s current experiment, which Tamara was performing, was to cut the polymer sheets into small squares of a few centimeters’ size and stack them, alternating with thin wedges of silicon semiconductor material, like a sandwich, and then tightly compressing the resulting stack of polymer squares. Some of Emma’s calculations showed that this configuration had energy-storage possibilities. They nicknamed this setup a “pancake.”

A week before spring break, Tamara stopped off at Emma’s office.

“Emma,” she said as she knocked, “I’ve been getting only a tiny response with the latest pancake version. I looked at your math and don’t see why these designs aren’t working. We should get something. What if we try amplifying the electron flow? Maybe this thing needs a kick-start, like with using SETs? That’ll move the electrons since they’ll flow with no voltage applied.”

“Hmm. It shouldn’t need that, but why not try,” Emma mused. “Well, you’re the electronic circuit nerd. Try a setup like that and see if the pancake responds.”

Back in the lab, Tamara assembled a small charging circuit using a single SET with its superconducting gate connected to a small power source, a 10 ampere-hour, 12 volt sealed lead-acid battery. She wired the SET’s sink, the device’s output, to the latest pancake device—then had an idea. Recalling how capacitors are made, instead of using her latest square pancake, she took a very thin sheet of the superconducting film she was using to make the pancakes, covered it with an equally thin sheet of dielectric material, and rolled them up into a tight 50 x 8 millimeter cylinder, slipped it into a heat-shrink tube, and then shrunk it with a heat gun.

She connected the resulting tubular device to the output of the SET circuit and tested that configuration and was delighted to see that her design could indeed store energy and the measured values closely matched Emma’s calculations. How much energy it stored, and whether the device could produce any, would have to wait until tomorrow, since it was late now, she suddenly realized. She pulled the connecting wires off the battery and coiled up the tubular circuit assembly’s connecting wires, putting the little cylinder and its wires into a plastic shoe box. Then she slipped the battery into its case, put it away, shut down the test equipment, stowing that away, and put the rest of the items she had used back into their proper drawers.

When she checked Emma’s office on her way out, her door was locked; she was gone for the day.

Oh well, I’ll talk to her tomorrow, Tamara thought.

Early the next morning, Tamara’s phone rang. It was a worried Emma.

“Tamara, are you okay? I got a call that my lab was damaged last night.”

Tamara shook her head to clear it.

“Oh, wow. No, I’m fine. What happened? When I finished working on the pancake yesterday and closed up, I put everything away. Everything was okay then.”

“I’m heading in now. The message was that there was some kind of explosion.”

“Jeez. Explosion? What could cause that?” Tamara wondered aloud. “I’ll go there and meet you. What time will you get here?”

“In twenty minutes. I’ll see you then. Be careful.”

It was just past 6:30 a.m. Tamara got dressed. It was a short walk to the Physics Building, which was surrounded by fire equipment. She walked up to a firefighter who was helping another put on a respirator and air tank.

“What happened in the lab?” she asked.

“One sec, kid,” the man said. “Oh... You know it was a lab?”

“Yes. Got a call from my prof; she said it was in her lab.”

The guy turned and called, “Hey, Lieutenant! Gal here says she knows something!”

Then the one with the respirator hustled back into the building.

The lieutenant jogged over.

“Miss, what was in that lab?” he asked.

“Physics stuff,” she answered. “Electronics, test equipment, wires, batteries...”

“Hold it. What kind of batteries?”

“A few small sealed lead-acid ones, up to ten amp-hours...”

“Were they connected to anything?”

“No. All put away. I used one yesterday and put it back in its storage box when I finished. What happened in there?”

Emma came running up.

“One sec,” Tamara said, pointing to Emma. “She’s the prof in charge. Dr Clarke.”

The lieutenant turned to her. “Doctor, do you know how an explosion happened in that lab?”

“I’m totally mystified, so no,” she answered. “Tamara, explain what you were doing before you left yesterday. You were working so intently I didn’t want to disturb you when I left for the day.”

Tamara explained how she had cleaned up when she finished, and then said, “Oh! Right, using the SET did work, Emma. I did the readings and got the expected results. I, um, changed the accumulator configuration a little, too.”

“Well, that’s good news, but details’ll need to wait, won’t it. What’s damaged?” she asked the lieutenant.

“I didn’t go in because of toxic fumes,” he replied. “No fire, no smoke. Just some nasty-smelling fumes. They eventually set off a smoke detector, but the explosion was maybe about an hour before that, apparently. Right in the middle of that big thunderstorm we were having then, I’m guessing. Part of a lab bench was wrecked. I sent a guy with a respirator in to check... ah, here he comes.”

“Hey, Lieutenant,” the firefighter said as he took off the respirator. “The blast took out the top of a bench and damaged the cabinets around it. The ventilation’s sucked out almost all the fumes but I did get an air sample. No traces of any metallic projectiles or container fragments like you’d see with a bomb—if a bomb exploded, you’d expect to see fragments of its container leave impact marks on nearby surfaces. Nada. But I did find a bunch of wires and a shredded plastic-like material in the mess.”

“Which bench was it?” Emma asked.

“Middle. Near the end with the fume hood,” was the answer.

“That’s where I was working,” Tamara said, in shock.

Emma looked at her. “You said you put the equipment and battery away. What did you leave out?”

“The experiment box—the plastic shoebox with the accumulator I was working on, and the SET circuit. I coiled up the wires and put that stuff in the shoebox... Oh! Oh my. You said there was a thunderstorm last night?” she asked the lieutenant.

“Yeah, a big one. Came very close.”

“Shit... sorry. I might have an idea what it was, then.” She looked at Emma. “Sorry...”

Emma put her hand on Tamara’s arm.

“No, don’t be. You thought of something important.”

“Yeah. But I broke a rule. ‘Don’t change more than one experimental parameter.’ I changed two; ‘cause I had a sudden thought.”

The lieutenant was looking very confused.

“Miss, if you can explain it in plain English...” he began.

“Okay,” Tamara said. “I think what happened is that the accumulator must have blown up...”

“Just what is this accumulator?” the lieutenant interrupted.

“Sheets of polymer that contain a superconducting recipe, designed to hold, and hopefully, generate electricity,” Tamara told him.

She turned to Emma.

“I’m guessing that when I put it away, the SET circuit must have kept the accumulator circuit alive. Then the wire coil would act like a huge antenna, letting the accumulator keep charging; it must have sucked up all the free electrons in the area that the storm was producing. For the size of the sheets I used, the energy threshold limit would be... um, let me think... something like a megajoule. There must have been a big impurity I accidently introduced somehow in rolling up the accumulator; that caused a local breakdown in the dielectric and a short happened, releasing all that energy.”

“Bloody hell,” Emma breathed, “That’s almost 300 watt-hours. In such a tiny package?”

Tamara nodded. Emma hugged her.

“I’m gobsmacked,” Emma continued. “You have any idea what this means?”

“It’s the Energy Bunny on steroids?” Tamara giggled. “Yeah. It’s big. All based on your calcs, too,” said Tamara.

“And your design intuitions, dear,” said Emma.

“Um,” said the lieutenant.

“We need to get back with the leftenant,” Emma told her. “We’ll talk later.”

The lieutenant blinked. “Leften...? Ah, you’re a Brit. So that was an experiment gone wrong?”

“Actually the opposite. The device did precisely what it was designed to do. But electrical storms weren’t considered in finalizing the design. This was a case of too much power with nowhere to go, innit. Is it safe to go in there now?”

A small crowd had gathered outside the building; Emma saw that her chairman, Dr Montern, had arrived, so she got his attention and then quickly told him to keep the crowd away from her lab but everything was under control. Knowing Emma, he knew not to ask further questions just now.

The lieutenant led them into the building, dodging around the fire crew who were carrying their equipment out of the building and rolling their hoses back up. With a sad expression, Emma looked at the lab door, which the fire crew had broken to get into the room.

“Sorry for the damage, but...” the lieutenant began.

“Your blokes had to get in. I know. It can be fixed. Tamara, show the gentleman what you think happened.”

Tamara looked around at what was left of her bench. She was amazed at the power that her tiny accumulator had unleashed. She looked at the door of the cabinet over the bench to the right of the damaged benchtop; it was slightly bent but it opened. Fortunately that cabinet was out of the blast’s main path since the superconductor polymer sheets were stored in there. She carefully took out a sheet; they were somewhat fragile.

“This is what was inside the accumulator,” she began. “I rolled it up with a dielectric—a semiconductor sheet—into a tube, like you make a jellyroll. The wires from the anode and cathode points stuck out the ends. The wires were attached to a tiny circuit with a transistor device; that circuit worked like a switching amplifier. I used all superconducting components. Then I tested it and confirmed that the accumulator’s electrical characteristics matched Dr Clarke’s calcs. Finally, before I left the lab, I disconnected it from the battery, coiled up its power leads, and put it into one of those plastic shoeboxes...” she pointed to a small stack of them on another bench, “and set it on the bench there.

“I had no idea that those power leads could act like an antenna, though, but in retrospect, the circuit I made to charge the accumulator closely resembles the circuits that power RFID chips. I have lots of experience with those,” she chuckled softly. “What must have happened, since there’s no trace left of the accumulator I built, is that the energy—the electrons carrying the atmospheric charges present in thunderstorms, were collected by the wire leads, which worked like an antenna, and the circuit sent the power it collected into the accumulator. What happens if you try to put more air into a balloon than it can hold?”

The lieutenant nodded. “It goes bang. But how do the electrons get into the antenna?”

“Think of how TVs worked before cable—or how your car radio works. The antennas pick up very tiny signals from the air. Then a circuit attached to the antenna boosts, or amplifies, the signal so it can be turned into sound or pictures. My circuit worked like that. It appears that it’s a very efficient circuit to be able to store so much power so quickly, though.”

“Okay, that all makes sense. No need to get the fire investigators out for this case. I’m calling it an unusual instance of overloaded equipment not resulting from misuse or improper installation. Does that sound okay?”

Tamara and Emma looked at each other and nodded.

Emma reached out to shake the lieutenant’s hand.

“A good way to word it. And thank you for being patient with our explanation. We had to work our own way through what happened, as well.”

As he said goodbye and left, Montern came in and looked around.

“Emma, you’re a solid-state specialist, not a high-energy one. Making big explosions isn’t in your job description,” he joked. “What the devil happened here, anyway? This much damage took a huge amount of energy.”

Emma nodded. “Tamara figured it to be about a million joules, actually.”

“Like a lighting strike?”

“Not that much. About a tenth of the energy of the smallest ones,” Tamara demurred. “I think when the stored charge broke down the dielectric’s resistance. the accumulator probably discharged in about 10 milliseconds. That released maybe 100 megawatts of power. That must be the ultimate storage capacity of that particular design.”

Montern looked at her in shock.

Emma chuckled. “Chet, I told you that we should grab her when she applied here, didn’t I. Tamara’s going to revolutionize power storage. Forget batteries... no, don’t do that. I think batteries will be her next achievement, the way she comes up with ideas. Oh, Tamara... we Brits can use the words ‘battery’ or ‘accumulator’ interchangeably.”

Meanwhile a crowd was beginning to gather at the door, so Montern walked over to the door, briefly explained that the electrical storm had caused the damage (Not a lie, Tamara thought), no one was hurt, and they should move along. Then he called the facility maintenance office to tell them that the door needed replacement. The frame was undamaged. They promised that the repair would get done within a few hours; the door was a standard size and was in their stock. They sent someone over to clean up the damage and close the opening temporarily.

Then Emma took Tamara to her office where they sat together on the couch.

“Two design mods, you said you made,” Emma grinned at her. “Do tell—I think I already know the answer.”

“Yeah. I mentioned part of what I had done. Building the SET array to control the accumulator’s charging was the first thing, but then I visualized a far more efficient configuration...”

Emma laughed, “Einstein. Quote, ‘A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way.’ Unquote. Right?”

Tamara blushed. “It was so obvious...”

“Well, of course it was. A paraphrase from the great master of physics: ‘... intuition works because it’s helped by one’s sense of the underlying physical order.’ Einstein said something like that too.”

“Okay, stop embarrassing me. I thought of how cylindrical formations facilitate electron storage, you know how that has to do with electromagnetic theory, electrical field formation, magnetic flux, battery design... well, I thought forming the accumulator into a cylinder of interleaving layers of dielectric and superconducting films—just like the way capacitors are constructed—would improve its efficiency.”

“Oh, it certainly did.”

“But I can’t understand how it could accumulate such a tremendous potential. The amount of energy charge—in electron volts—is far greater than the atoms in the lattice structure should possibly allow.”

“That’s why physics is so fascinating. When experimentalists, like you, come across something different, then we theoreticians need to come up with new physics to explain it. Look at what happened a few years back when particle physicists got a really accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson. That’s the elementary particle which carries the weak force; it’s responsible for nuclear processes—what happens in the fusion reactions in the stars. So, a large group of particle physicists—they only hang out in large groups because their equipment is so huge and expensive—made a really accurate calculation of the W boson mass based on 4.2 million events over 26 years of measurements. Their calculated mass is within 0.01 percent error of the true value. However, it turned out that the mass they calculated differs from the value predicted by the Standard Model by a huge seven standard deviations. It’s very unlikely that their result is an error since so many checks and balances were involved in the work. That means either that there are more fundamental particles to discover or new physics must be developed to account for this disparity. I heartily agree with what the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said, ‘The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.’

“So, let’s see your notebook; I want to look at the results of your measurements.”

Mid-April

When Tamara went home for the week’s spring break, she had a lot of things to discuss with Beauford and also with Tim. Much like Tamara, Tim had an innate feel for electronics too and Tamara wanted his impression of what she had discovered.

She also wanted Beauford’s advice about her ideas about how the body’s limbic system could mediate body secretory cells to produce signaling chemicals which were part of the pheromone class or even possibly a new class of biochemicals.

Tamara didn’t expect that both of their reactions would be one of surprise. Tim thought that the ways she thought of using superconducting materials in circuits were extremely creative, but he did give her some good pointers that he had learned from experience.

Beauford was quite familiar with the work being done on chemical signaling; he even pointed out to her an MIT article where researchers had deduced that the length of the dendrites in human brain nerve cells contributed to what they called ‘distributed processing,’ because the longer dendrite length in human brain cells, as compared to smaller mammals, allowed each cell to be able to handle several binary operations independent of each other. Those researchers conjectured that the evolution of the longer dendrites was the major contribution to the development of human intelligence.

Beauford also gave her an update on the two school district guys whom she had “sentenced” to permanent nudity.

“You might be interested in the case of the two men who had an adverse reaction to clothes—you wanted to hear about that when it occurred,” he mentioned.

“Sure,” Tamara agreed. “Was there any change?”

“Their physicians convinced them to get psychological help. I heard about it—mainly because the cases are being written up for a journal paper. Cognitive behavioral therapy—CBT—was tried, and appears to be having a positive effect. Whatever happened to those two, it must have been a really strong emotional shock.”

Tamara answered, “I guess. I still remember them on the stage complaining about the heat, then stripping. So weird.”

That information led Tamara to consider what she had done to people over the past few years with her ability. Two, perhaps three, officials who had left their jobs because of her “suggestion”; a man had been driven insane from his own evil thoughts turned inward; several teachers had been embarrassed by involuntarily stripping (but that one was okay since they wanted to do that to the kids); a man had died of a congenital heart problem triggered by the stress she had helped cause; the case of those two school district officials (another pre-emptive move to protect kids); the kidnappers who were afflicted with panic attacks; and the prom jerks (they deserved what they got) ... but not Vanessa—that didn’t use her special ability. And quite a few staff members and teachers at her high school, who had followed her “suggestions” unknowingly.

Does my doing what I did to those people make me feel bad? Tamara wondered. I need to think about that much more.

When Tamara returned to school after her spring break, her mind was filled with those questions, plus a lot of new ideas.

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