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Previous: Prologue

Flicker – Phone Tag

    Flicker was eating lunch when her phone rang.
    She was sitting at a table in a small sandwich shop near her apartment.  She ate here more often than she did at home because the food was good, no one here looked at her funny anymore, and cooking, while theoretically a fairly trivial bit of chemistry and thermodynamics, was, as Doc often said, surprisingly tricky to get right.
    She was being very good, she thought, spending the tedious, necessary milliseconds and seconds alone here in the slow world, the messy chemical, biological, and synchronous social world, the world of growth and learning, its rhythms dictated by the endless cycles of the sun.  At least the french fries were tasty.
    The phone hadn’t finished its short chirp of a ringtone before Flicker answered.  It was her friend Stella, with a little symbol that indicated an international call.  Stella should be on her way back from a conference in Italy where she had presented a paper, and her previous week had been consumed by preparations.  Flicker was always vaguely horrified at the elaborate rituals most people endured to travel long distances.  She didn’t know how they stood it.
    Flicker knew the last day of the conference had been… unusually stressful, but wasn’t sure yet whether she wanted to tell Stella that.  People could get upset when then found out someone was checking up on them, even to try to protect them.
    “Stella?”
    “Hello, Flicker.” she said.  Her voice sounded worn out.  “Would you believe my connecting flight got delayed?  Nasty weather they didn’t want to fly through.  Looks like I’m stuck here until tomorrow morning.  The airline provided a hotel, but I’m too wired to sleep, so I’m out getting something to eat, and I thought I’d call you and share my tale of woe.”
    Flicker could hear crowd and traffic noises in the background, along with the faint regular variations in sound that indicated Stella was walking.
    “Stella, I’m sorry, that must really suck.  You sound pretty wiped.  Where are you, anyway?”
    “Oh, I’m – whuaah!”
    Flicker was in fast mode before anyone else would have fully registered what was coming from the phone.  There were a few sounds that Flicker had trained herself to recognize the start of very quickly, and one of them was an approaching vehicle horn.  Put together with a cry of alarm, that meant her friend was in immediate danger.  Stella needed help, fast.  Which normally wasn’t a problem for Flicker – she could get to anywhere on the planet in under a second if she had to.
    Except…
    Stella was in another country.  And Flicker didn’t know which one.
    T = 0
    In under a millisecond, Flicker was out of her chair, and had changed into her costume from her pack.  It was form fitting and navy blue with the functional silver tracery of the degaussing and plasma guide net.  Most importantly at the moment, the hood and visor contained a high speed interface and communications suite.  She switched it to active from standby, and had it take over the call.  Her normal cell wasn’t going to be able to cope with the speed needed, so she slid it into a shielded pocket without turning it off.  Its electronics would eventually stop spinning from the sudden changes in inertia and position.
    The cell network wasn’t going to be able to cope either, and that was more of a problem, because this phone call was Stella’s lifeline.  If she didn’t dawdle, though, she would be to Stella before the network realized anything was up.  Flicker sent an alert to HISC, the High Interaction Speed Computer, at Doc’s headquarters, that she would be visiting it in a few milliseconds and needed some important data ready.
    Flicker looked over at the door to the shop.  It was closed, nobody was going in or out.  Flicker had ambivalent feelings about doors.  Sure, they were nice and convenient for most people, and for her if she was moving slowly (hah!) or they happened to be open.  Unfortunately, they were usually closed when she needed to get to the other side in a hurry.  She couldn’t extend her inertial damping field far enough from her body to cover a whole door, and even if she could that would just mean the hinges would break instead.
    Fortunately, the shop still had cardboard up over the hole she had left in one of the glass walls last time she had to leave in a hurry.  Flicker had already paid for the replacement too, so she just zipped over to the counter and dropped off one of her ‘Hi!  I’m Flicker and I had to leave in a hurry!  Sorry for any disruption!’ stickers in front of the cashier.  Then she skimmed along the wall, poking along at only about 50,000 meters per second (m/s), making sure they was no one right on the other side of the cardboard patch.  She slowed to 10,000 m/s to go through the cardboard, leaving a hole like a cartoon character with the edges matching the extent of her damping field.  The damping and the low speed meant the pieces of cardboard acquired relatively little kinetic energy, and weren’t a threat, or even very noisy, and she turned into the street outside and accelerated.
    T = 3 milliseconds
     The most common question Flicker got asked was ‘How fast are you?’ or the equivalent ‘What’s your top speed?’.  It was a pain to answer, because the questioner didn’t usually understand special relativity.  She usually just shrugged and gave her standard answer of ‘80% of the speed of light’ rather than the truthful one of ‘Very close to the speed of light, but I don’t know exactly how close, and I did a scary amount of damage to the Moon last time I tried to find out.’
    During a Q&A session someone had once asked Flicker how fast she could go from 0 to 60.  That had struck her as a much more interesting question, and required a bit of unit conversion.  Her answer of ‘Too fast to see’ made people laugh, but they stopped when she explained that in the 30 picoseconds it would take, light would only travel about a third of an inch, and it was dangerous to stand that close to her if she was accelerating that fast, so it was literally too fast to see.
    The sandwich shop was in a suburb of Minneapolis.  Flicker zigzagged through the streets at 500,000 m/s or 500 kilometers per second (km/s), speeding up to 1000 km/s on less crowded sections.  At that speed she could still turn on a dime, and safely dodge around pedestrians in a crowded street.  They would feel and hear nothing more than a sudden gust of wind.  It was only a few kilometers to the highway she wanted, and then she could speed up again.
    T = 6 milliseconds
    Doc’s HQ was about 80 kilometers away by the highway.  Flicker liked highways.  They had long sightlines, they changed direction and elevation only gradually, and best of all, pedestrians tended to stay off of them.  The people that were on the highway were either inside protective metal boxes, or at worst had a couple of gyros to keep them stable.  She accelerated to 5000 km/s, increasing to 15,000 km/s or 0.05 c on clear straight sections.  This was fast enough that shock waves from her wake were starting to be a problem despite her damping, except there was a trick she could and did use that reduced them at the cost of leaving a trail of plasma instead.
    The vehicles she passed saw and heard something that seemed very similar to a nearby lighting strike – a sudden flash of light and boom, followed by a diminishing grumble of sound.  They were also buffeted by the shock of her passage, but she was careful to slow and pass by them as far away as possible, so it was no worse than being passed by a semi going the other way.  The two walkers she encountered got a nasty scare and ringing ears, but neither were hurt.  Then it was around the turn and up the short access road to Doc’s.
    T = 13 milliseconds
    The entrance Flicker used looked unremarkable, more like a tunnel with a drive through ATM than anything else, the entrance protected by a very minor forcefield to keep snow and animals out.  But it had been built just for her, and contained her external access to the HISC.  She started slowing down a little over a hundred meters away and four microseconds later was at rest in front of interface panel.
    The HISC frantically shoved data through her high bandwidth com to answer her previous requests.  The first answer popped up on her display, the location of the cell phone tower that Stella’s phone was currently using.  London, England, not far from Heathrow airport.  Great.  Well, London might be sprawling and congested, but at least it was near the sea.  She twiddled her fingers over the high speed magnetic keyboard, refining the overlay for the second request.
    The High Speed Pathing algorithm, which Doc jokingly called ‘Driving directions for Flicker’ was at heart quite simple.  It was just a set of satellite verified maps from wherever Flicker was to wherever she wanted to go, showing elevation changes and all obstacles.  The trick was that the satellite updates were recent, as in less than a second old, so everything that might contain a human could be treated as near constant velocity.  Which meant, after correcting for how soon Flicker would be near, effectively stationary.
    Flicker mapped out her time optimized route, and the only real question was whether to go around Scotland to the north and approach London from the east, or swing south past Ireland, make landfall near Bristol and try to go up the M4 motorway.  The second route was shorter, but Flicker looked at the congestion on M4 and decided it would be slower.  She waited one more precious millisecond for the final changes to be uploaded to her visor and she was off.
    T = 19 milliseconds
    Flicker couldn’t fly, she needed to be near mass for momentum transfer and entropy dumping, but that didn’t mean she had to stay right next to the surface when moving.  The tradeoff was less maneuverability the higher she traveled.  Now that she had a verified clear path, she could travel higher up, at five meters or so, to avoid obstacles and damaging roads, and could swing wide to avoid pedestrians.  She was quickly back up to 15,000 km/s, and now was able to chance as high as 30,000 km/s or ten percent of lightspeed, where no humans were near.
    The biggest frustration Flicker had when trying to move really fast was the air.  It kept getting in the way, and moving it out of the way inevitably added energy.  Her ability to damp inertia near her body let air flow around her much faster than normal, but there was limits to how well that worked, and she was now starting to push them.
    At 0.1 c, Flicker appeared like a horizontal lightning bolt, or a meteor brought to earth, unaccountably moving a thousand times as fast without causing any additional damage.  She was now leaving a substantial shockwave, enough to knock over cars and break windows, as well as a kilometers long tail of plasma, enough to melt the snow and flash some of it to steam.  Roads became less useful, as she had to swing wide or slow down for all vehicles.  She traveled this way for about two hundred fifty kilometers, mostly north, before jumping in a glowing arc to meet the surface of Lake Superior just outside Duluth.
    T = 31 milliseconds
    Out on the surface of the lake, the nearest humans well identified and far away, Flicker accelerated again up to 0.2 c.  Now her shockwave was lethal for anything near and above the water surface, and the plasma would have set anything flammable alight, but she was over water, so there was nothing.  No trees, no roads, no houses, no vehicles, nothing man made except for a few boats she could avoid by kilometers.  She considered going faster but decided to wait, because it was less than than six hundred kilometers before she hit land again in Ontario.
    T = 41 milliseconds
    Back to 0.1 c or so on land, and Flicker chafed with impatience as she went north, but there were still occasional roads and power lines to cross, as well as a lot of trees.  She was on good terms with the Canadians, and wanted to stay that way.  She planned and thought of her route ahead as she approached water again, the southernmost part of James Bay.
    T = 60 milliseconds
    Finally, water ahead – salt water.  Hudson Bay in winter had very little traffic, even the parts not covered by ice.  There was a choice here.  She had a clear path, free of people and at least 20 km wide for most of it, and over 6000 km to go over salt water.  At 0.2 c that would take 100 milliseconds, at 0.4 c it would take 50 milliseconds.  If the vehicle approaching Stella was traveling at 20 meters per second, that was a meter every 50 milliseconds.  Flicker didn’t know how many meters Stella had left before it hit her, but it wasn’t many.
    At the speed she was thinking now, Flicker was very far from her emotions, which relied on slow chemistry.  But she could remember them just fine, and evaluate based on them.  She remembered the years she had known Stella, how they had become best friends, her dry humor, her odd moments of vulnerability, her weary voice over the phone, with the hint of relief at being able to talk.  But it didn’t really matter.  Flicker had made this choice already.
    She set her plasma net to full regenerative shielding, and shut down most of her electronics.  She adjusted the polarization on her visor and extended her damping field as far ahead of her eyes as she could in a wedge.  Some people were going to be mad, and some fish and birds were going to die.  Oh well.  Stella wasn’t going to die today, not if Flicker could help it.  Flicker leveled out five meters above the surface of James Bay and started accelerating flat out, at ten billion G’s.  It was time to go fast.
    T = 63 milliseconds
    There is type of device used by military engineers called a line charge.  It is a long series of small explosive charges in a line or tube, that are set off all at once to clear a path through minefield in a hurry.  By the time Flicker emerged from the mouth of James Bay, traveling north at 240,000 km/sec, 0.8 c or eighty percent of the speed of light, the path behind her looked like someone had set off a line charge made out of nukes.
    At the tip of a narrow arrow of shockwave and plasma that stretched all the way back to shore behind her, Flicker glowed like a star.  Turning everything within 30 meters to plasma, leaving behind a continuous windbreak of mushroom cloud trees, she sped north, devouring two hundred and forty kilometers of distance along her path every millisecond.  For a long distance from the human free safety zone on either side of her path, anyone looking the right direction saw the entire horizon erupt in fire at once, while any radio communications were blanketed in static.  The few who witnessed the line of plasma as it slowly grew skyward in her wake could be forgiven for thinking they were seeing the end of the world.
    As she passed the Belcher Islands, Cape Smith and Mansel Island, before turning east in a graceful curve into the Hudson Strait, monitor satellites began screaming that nuclear weapons were going off.  The radiation profile wasn’t right, but the thermal output sure was, and what else could possibly do that?  Long seconds after Flicker was gone, the humans alerted by the robotic vigilance were left to wonder why anyone would want to nuke Hudson Bay.
    In the Labrador Sea just southeast of Greenland, a Russian icebreaker just nine kilometers from the nearest part of Flicker’s path was crewed by the closest people to the whole line of fire.  Several of the crew watching it panicked, before the swearing officers drove them to prepare for heavy waves, and the captain turned the helm away, to catch them on the stern.  One old geophysicist, who had heard a few wild stories from his more conventional physics colleagues, realized what he was seeing and laughed.  He told the rest of the crew, all who would listen, to prepare, certainly, but not to worry, that they were lucky even.  Because that was Flicker, nothing else was that fast, and Flicker wouldn’t kill them.  Most thought he was crazy, so he made bets.  He didn’t pay for a drink for months after that, but the losers didn’t mind too much – they were glad he was right, after all.
    After rounding the southern tip of Greenland in another smooth curve, Flicker aimed nearly due east, and tore across the rest of the North Atlantic in a straight line, still leaving a trail of heavy waves and rising plasma clouds over the open ocean as the sun plummeted towards the horizon behind her.  She curved south between the Shetland and Orkney Islands into the North Sea, where, approaching the narrowing gap between England and the Netherlands, Flicker was finally forced to slow down.  She had covered just over six thousand kilometers, fifteen percent of the circumference of the earth if it had been in a straight line, in twenty five milliseconds.  She had left a path behind her that looked, from orbit, like a god had started a globe spinning, then slashed across it with a narrow pen of fire.  But it was a merciful god, and careful.  Not a single person was hurt.
    T = 88 milliseconds
    Flicker dropped her velocity to 0.4 c for the rest of the North Sea with its more crowded traffic, then to 0.2 c for the Thames Estuary, entropy dumping hard all the way to cool down, and finally 0.1 c for the Thames itself, dropping to 0.05c or 15,000 km/sec when she had to pass close by boats.  She stayed on the river as long as possible, putting up with the meandering path because the lack of pedestrians let her maintain a higher speed, before finally jumping to land near Brentford.  She also turned off plasma regeneration and turned her electronics back on.
    T = 94 milliseconds
    Flicker slowed down again to 2000 km/sec for the last few kilometers to the area covered by the target cell phone tower, then 1000 km/sec as she started her search pattern, and slowed almost to a stop briefly at intersections, to look around and give her com a microsecond or two to try to pick up Stella’s phone signal by direct line of sight.  She weaved in and out down the streets, dodging cars, trucks, buses, taxis, SUVs, a few scooters, and pedestrians crossing at every other intersection.  She had just passed two cars and rounded a bus to stop at the next intersection when her signal alert flashed.
    T = 116 milliseconds
    Flicker looked forward, then left and right, but didn’t see Stella.  Was she mostly behind something?  Finally Flicker checked back the way she had just come and saw her, angled backward, right in front of the bus Flicker had just passed.  She moved over, leaving a bare swirl of air behind her at 500 km/sec, then stopped with her mind still going full speed, to study the tableau.
    She was in time.  If her lungs and emotions hadn’t both been frozen, stuck in slow time, Flicker would have breathed a great sigh of released tension.  She hadn’t come all this way just to try to get Stella to the hospital with already inflicted injuries, or worse, ones Flicker couldn’t stop.
    Flicker reconstructed the scene.  Stella must have approached the intersection striding quickly, hunched slightly against the falling sleet, cell phone pressed against her ear, tired, stressed and distracted.  She had looked left to check traffic before stepping off the curb – but that was the wrong way, because this was England.  A bus had been coming from the other direction.  Stella had heard either the bus or it’s horn, but too late, and her foot had slipped when she tried to step back up onto the curb.  She was turning left, away from the bus, starting a martial arts fall, which was good; that meant she was less likely to get hurt by the sudden acceleration Flicker was going to have to use to get her out of the way of the bus in time.
    Flicker looked over at the bus.  The front was about a meter away from Stella, and was not noticeably lower than the back, so the bus hadn’t had time to brake much, if at all.  Flicker moved to the driver’s side and looked through the window at the speedometer.  Just over 50 kilometers per hour – call it 15 meters per second, or about 66 milliseconds from Stella.  Actually, it was little longer if she accelerated directly away from the bus, because that would allow more time – but going sideways would get her out of the way quicker.  Decisions, decisions.
      It would take 23 G’s average acceleration to match velocities with the bus in 66 milliseconds – not pleasant, but survivable.  The tricky part was imparting it.  Flicker couldn’t just catch Stella in her arms and pull her out of the way – her damping aura couldn’t fully cover another person, and being partly in and partly out would be worse than getting hit by the bus.  If Flicker turned her damping off for the catch, it wouldn’t be any better for Stella than hitting another person at close to the speed of the bus.  Flicker could try using her catching tarp, but that worked better when she had more time and space.
    No, it was time for Flicker to use her favorite material for imparting velocity to fragile things – air.  With her damping field pulled back to the edges of her costume, she could scoop and move air with her hands and body.  With effort and the expertise from long practice, she could sculpt temporary curtains, cushions and trampolines.  She could even make a giant air cannon without the cannon – and did, with Stella as the payload.

    Long milliseconds of careful work later, Stella was starting to be pushed up and away from the bus, which was being slowed slightly, but not enough to hurt its passengers.  Flicker took a little more time to smooth out all the rough edges of shock waves she could and equalize pressures a little in the surrounding area where she had scooped the air from.
    T = 150 milliseconds
    Finally everything was ready.  Flicker stood waiting with the tarp in the right spot, and let the world speed back up almost all the way.  She could now hear the echoes of the initial boom and the roar of stabilizing air pressure from all directions, as well as the horn from the still moving bus.  Stella was propelled ahead and to the side of the bus, back up onto the sidewalk, and Flicker caught her, still upright, with the tarp, smoothly sliding backwards to decelerate.

    T = 3 seconds
    As the bus passed by on the street, Flicker felt her own emotions try to catch up with events, and a flood of fear that had started back in the sandwich shop warred with a sense of relief, and a fierce, protective satisfaction.  Flicker’s costume was still crackling and sparking in the twilight as the remaining excess charges dissipated and the last of the plasma dispersed, but the tarp would protect Stella.  In a moment, Flicker would have to check for injuries and deal with the aftermath, but her best friend was alive, and safe, and that was enough for now.

Next: Life Saver

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#storytime #long post #…oh god this is beautiful #oh god I have so many other things to read #and so many non-reading things to do #oh god #(I looked at the blog and apparently this is part of a novel which is part of a series) #this doesn’t really belong in medium-term to-read* but I’ll leave it there for now until I decide how best to place it in long-term storage #*”medium-term to-read”: longer than a week shorter than a year (roughly)