Crow - The Awakening (17 page)

As he sobbed, he heard a whisper that was so quiet he almost missed it. "It's alright. I'm here. We're part of each other, forever."

"Asherah?" Steven stood up and looked around quickly. No one was there, however, and his quick movement dislodged a clump of snow that landed on his head and shoulders. He shook it off and put his hand on his chest where she had pressed her hand, remembering her words. He could still almost feel her hand. But she wasn't real. The real meadow is covered with a blanket of snow, not lush plants and flowers and the sun is obscured behind clouds, not shining warmly on his back. He felt so lost.

His sessions with James helped though. Steven was starting to feel he had another confidant as James worked him through the pain of separation. Excepting a few secrets he had to keep close to his chest, there was little he couldn't share with his therapist. James had even helped with his nightmares, teaching him to confront his fears in his dreams rather than run. He hasn't had any serious nightmares in a while, but a few minor ones taught him the wisdom of that suggestion. But he still had trouble giving up Asherah. It was like he was addicted to her and breaking that addiction was proving extremely difficult and painful. He grabbed his shirt and pressed his fist against his chest. He could still feel her there and it was driving him crazy.

Dejected, he walked out of the meadow and climbed his tree to resume his search for his parents. Even though it was logical, he still had trouble comprehending just how his obsession with finding his parents could have had anything to do with creating such an elaborate fantasy, especially one that was so convincing. He shook his head and climbed into the tree house to check on the progress of the search. Sighing, he sat down and pulled up the videos of his parents on his own laptop. He had a starting point now and was focusing on every detail he could find in the videos. There were hours of videos, mostly uneventful as his parents and godparents seemed to obsess with one or another of the many pieces of scientific equipment in the laboratory. He remembered the chip Jonah had shown him, and imagined that chip in one of those experiments being tested for whatever it was they were testing for.

He focused his search there, taking note of anyone and anything they interacted with. It didn't take long to get a list of all the employees of that company and he gave each one of them their own search algorithm as he searched for any little clue he could find that could have anything to do with the disappearance of his parents. Someone didn't like what they were working on back then. Steven was convinced it was someone they worked with, or connected to them at that company somehow.

While the search continued nonstop, he opened the very last video he had of his parents. In this one, for a moment, his mother had looked straight at the camera. She was no longer pregnant then. Steven was a baby hanging out somewhere while she worked. He froze the frame as she appeared to lock eyes with his. She was beautiful, with long, wavy dark hair very similar to his own, and even after giving birth so recently she was amazingly slender. Her eyes were large and he could see worry in them. Was she afraid of something? Did she know she was in danger? So many questions filled Steven's thoughts as he stared at the image. Questions he hoped would be answered soon. "Don't worry, Mom. I'll find you and Dad. I promise." He touched the screen with his hand, more determined than ever. He remembered Asherah's confidence in him and smiled sadly. How could he fail if even his fantasy was confident in his success?

"Okay, try again." Steven looked up from his latest engineering project over to Dmitri, who had proven invaluable in helping with his college challenge. This will surely garner him another perfect score, if he can just get it to work. Dimitri reconnected the power supply and Steven winced as his project sparked. Steven flipped a switch as a breaker popped.

"This power supply isn't enough for what you are doing here. I told you trying to put the vacuum pump on the same circuit was asking for trouble," Dmitri grumbled as he disconnected the power supply. He frowned as he popped in another fuse and reset the breaker. "You should have gone the fusion route I suggested."

"Everyone is doing fusion! And what am I going to do with it? Watch it glow?" Steven fussed with his contraption. "Though I do know how to make fusion energy positive."

"What?" Dmitri had only been kidding. There were already at least a couple of fusion entries to the fair, but none of them did more than what Steven said - glow. Producing more power than it consumed has been the Holy Grail of fusion research for decades and a seventeen year old kid is flippantly saying he's solved it?

Steven looked up. "It's actually pretty simple. But I don't want to go that route for the fair." He returned his attention to the microscope and opened a panel to the electronics of his quantum microscope. "I need better cryogenics in here." He thumped the Stirling cryocooler. It was still humming away and was extremely cold, but it was not cold enough. "I need better insulation. Aerogel perhaps?" That high tech silica foam was nearly as light as air and a spectacular insulator.

"Let's see, I have some around here somewhere." Dmitri put his hands in his pockets and shuffled the papers on the counter, pretending to search.

Steven grinned and closed the panel back. "Very funny, Dmitri. I'll find something that'll work better than what we have. Between that and fixing the power supply I think we'll have a winner here." He looked at a chart. "You know, better insulation would lower the power requirements."

"Not enough, Steven. You need to add another power module." Dmitri put his hands on his hips. "You've set the bar pretty high with this thing." He looked at the contraption they were struggling with and considered it way overkill for the project. "We could have gone with one of the simpler electron tunneling designs, you know."

"Well, yes, we could have. But that would have been too easy." Steven had seen many do-it-yourself designs out there for simple scanning electron microscopes using cheap piezo elements and low power and experimented with a few of them already. They weren't nearly as sophisticated as professional versions, but still neat to play with. He had one up in the tree house that worked pretty well and was very revealing of the sample he scanned. But he wanted to kick up the resolution and usefulness significantly and radically boost the amount of precision needed to control the scanning stylus to quantum levels. "It took me half an hour to assemble that power module. I could probably scrounge the leftover parts and put together another one here in a few minutes."

Dmitri grunted as Steven started pulling capacitors and power transistors out of their junk box. He plugged the soldering iron in for Steven and found another breadboard for him. "You're just lucky I never throw this junk away."

"Yes, Dmitri. I really appreciate your junk. I need a rectifier. Oops, never mind." Steven spotted one and started pulling it off the board it was attached to.

"You're not done yet?" Dmitri looked at his watch.

"Oh, shut up." Steven grinned as he started assembling his power supply. "Let's see you do it faster."

Dmitri raised an eyebrow. He was good and had done his share of breadboarding, but he had never seen anything like what Steven did. Steven seemed to have all the schematics in his head. Either that or he created it on the fly as he went. It was like he could instinctively envision the path of the electrons and what needed to happen with every step to achieve the desired results. Dmitri still needed to pull out the plans for things even as simple as the switching power supply that Steven was putting together.

"Just about done. I just need to finish the control circuitry." Steven snipped leads to diodes and resisters and picked an integrated circuit from the pile and started soldering again.

Dmitri frowned. "Steven, do you have any idea just how important a power positive fusion reactor would be to the world?" If he were to believe that Steven actually did have a solution, he was a little appalled that Steven would just keep it to himself and not even follow through on that idea.

"Meh. We already have the biggest positive nuclear fusion reactor that's completely maintenance free and passes overhead every day of the year and we can't seem to exploit that to any significant degree. What makes you think any piece of junk we build will change anything?" He looked over at Dmitri. "It'll get tucked away and buried with patents and greed and people will still have to pay out their noses for power even though abundant free power is practically shining down on them every day." Steven finished tying the new power module into his circuit and closed the cover back up.

Dmitri opened his mouth to reply, but stopped. Steven had a point.

Steven leaned against the microscope and tried to think of anything he may have missed. The microscope was a humble desktop model not much larger than a coffee maker. It was currently sealed and under extreme vacuum. Steven was eager to turn it on and start scanning the sample he had placed in it, but he wanted to be sure he didn't miss anything. By all means it should be working already and he was disappointed at the setbacks. Aerogel may be hard to acquire but he could explore other insulating options to make it easier to bring temperatures down to superconducting levels. He looked at the chart but didn't see anything he overlooked.

He sighed. "Okay, let's dial it back then and work on the cooling problem later. I just want to see it work." Steven reset the breakers on the control panel and looked at the computer monitor to check the sample he was going to scan. A regular microscope helped him fine tune the position of the sample before activating the scanning head. The sample was a computer chip he had abraded down to the substrate similar to the chip his godfather had shown him, and used nitric acid to further etch it to its base so he could get a clean look at it.

His motivation, as always, was his never ending search for his parents. Steven hoped to recreate their discoveries and now had a perfect excuse to do so surreptitiously under the guise of a project for college. In this case the project was for a technology fair in Seattle that he would actually get credit for. He grinned at his ingenious little agenda. It would go on his portfolio and help further his search for his parents at the same time.

Steven checked the homemade multistage vacuum pump to make sure it was still maintaining a nearly perfect vacuum in the microscope and then got ready to reactivate the equipment to try and get a good scan. The concept was simple - several pairs of scanning tips passed a single electron back and forth as the pairs moved past the sample being measured and the sample's effect on the electron is used to create the image. Steven had added a second modified electron microscope tip to follow the imaging pass to remove a layer of atoms from the sample before the next imaging pass. This would allow him to generate a three dimensional image of the sample, allowing him to view the inner structure atom by atom. It also provided a less resolved image that could be added to the higher resolution image to give it more information for the final render.

Dmitri dialed back the power to the last setting they used when the microscope was working while Steven reset the emitter needle and abrading tool. The biggest challenge was stylus control, and Steven wondered if he would have to redesign that altogether. He was able to create multiresolution technology that allowed him to capture many more samples per stylus move, which in turn cranked up resolving power significantly. But things were still a bit buggy, especially since his stylus design used multiple tips to further increase coverage and speed up scans. He had gotten a rough image of the surface of the chip already from the regular scanning electron part of his microscope, but needed to refine the stylus movements better for the quantum microscope part and controlling power was a major stumbling block. Having access to advanced schematics from some of the servers he had cracked into certainly helped give him ideas, but he still had to ultimately design the system off the cuff. He was even able to make some significant improvements on those designs based on other designs he had perused plus his own ideas. But applying those improvements had proven a challenge.

"Now let's see what we can... see." Steven activated the microscope and waited for it to calibrate on the sample and begin scanning. He stared at the output on his laptop, watching the image begin to resolve. The output was little more than tiny energy spikes, but they could then be translated to pixel values to generate the image. Dmitri looked over his shoulder, munching on a muffin his wife had brought them. The process took a very long time for the tiny section of the sample they were scanning atom by atom. "Look!" Steven pointed excitedly. They had abraded the chip with extremely fine precision producing an extremely smooth and reflective surface, but when magnified the pattern of deep ruts in the image was obviously apparent. As the image slowly resolved a few pixels at a time, the surface under magnification began to look like huge valleys where each tiny piece of superfine abrasive dust had gouged the surface of the chip. "That is so cool!" he exclaimed, fist bumping his mentor. "How many seventeen year olds have made one of these?" He grinned, gushing with pride.

"Your head is swelling. I can see it." Dmitri put his hand on Steven's head, mussing his unruly locks of wavy black hair. Steven shook his head and grinned. He was extremely proud of his accomplishment, even though he knew he had a bit more refining yet to do. He had fabricated the whole thing, machining the steel components in his godfather's shop and assembling everything in a corner of Dmitri's computer shop. The result of that hard work was slowly starting to display on the computer screen.

"When you got it, you got it." Steven looked at the image. "Now I just need to increase the magnification. Which means I need better stylus control. Which means I need better insulation for the superconductor." He looked at Dmitri but his thoughts wandered elsewhere. He really wanted to see what his parents had found and knew that this would represent the next major step in his search for them. He habitually grabbed his mug of tea then remembered that he was out. He would have to visit his therapist for a refill.