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Chapter 13 - Beginning High School

A few days after their capture of Leger, Wilson heard from Evan Masters at the State Department. Masters wanted to relay the FBI’s thanks to the Alexandres for their part in solving a number of open cases and that the FBI as well as the State Department were also highly pleased with the information Wilson had gotten in Leger’s confession.

Masters said, “I’m able to pass along this confidential information to you because you were personally involved and under the protection of the U.S. government.”

“If that’s the case, how did someone come so close as to be able to attack my wife?”

“We’re still looking into what happened there, but apparently it was because of the two U.S. passports Leger had. We were watching for the one that Arthur Benson, their mole, had issued, but Leger used a different one, that one had been stolen from a tourist and had never been properly canceled. We’ve been fixing problems like that during the past week.”

“Okay. Are we still in danger from Vanessa?”

“Right now, that’s still hard to say. Here’s what happened as a result of your capture of Leger and the other things that happened when Vanessa’s other people arrived here. First, the other person she set to Miami, Vincent Sanon, we had his passport flagged but he was incredibly quick when they tried to detain him. Somehow he had gotten a knife and disabled a Border Patrol agent and a TSA guard. When a Miami cop confronted him and he tried to throw the knife, though, he was shot dead.

“There were two of them who arrived on separate flights in New Orleans. Border Patrol got one at passport control and he’s locked up. The other one got through by a slick dodge. They must have heard that we caught the first. We found out the next day that a Haitian consular official bribed an airport worker to watch for the guy at the gate and slip him a Haitian diplomatic passport. The Customs agent was suspicious by the passport and the appearance of the guy, though, and had a TSA agent follow him to the car rental desk and watch while the Haitian embassy in D.C. was contacted. They said that the passport he presented was bogus, so they had a parish sheriff arrest the guy as soon as he drove out of the airport to avoid the possibility of a hostage situation if the guy was armed.

“The last passport was used in New York at JFK. But from the info you got from Leger, we found that guy’s real name and the Haitian government helped us learn his banking info and we got his account frozen, so he has no funds other than what he’s carrying. Oh yes, the Haitian government has frozen Vanessa’s bank accounts and turned off their cell phone and land line accounts. They still have the burner phones though, they’re common in Haiti, and that can’t be helped. The rogue ministers and assistants that Leger fingered were arrested and the FBI arrested a bunch of diplomatic employees of the embassy and consular offices in Miami and New Orleans; Haiti has waived their diplomatic immunity because several of them were accomplices or were otherwise involved in several assassinations.

“The guy in New York no longer has a support network; the consular office there is all loyal to the current government. The chance of his getting money is small because his Haitian sources have been cut off. The FBI knows his last whereabouts from his last attempt to use an ATM card, in Flatbush in Brooklyn, so there’s a manhunt underway there now.

“So for your safety, I’d advise still keeping your head down. Leger’s visit was a one-off, a lucky guess, since Nadine’s was only the third place he visited. Looks like his approach was to be random. Find one, then the next.

“Oh, and about Leger. I don’t know what the hell Nadine did; whatever she told Wilbur Zane from the CIA; she’s still fucking scary. Leger is a whacko now, completely out of his mind. Being chased by demons and complaining of scorpions stinging him. He’s being kept sedated now and I have no idea what they’re gonna do with him. Maybe send him back to Haiti for them to punish. He’s been implicated in some murders there. He sure can’t hurt anyone now.

“Lastly, Vanessa’s still around and probably remains a threat. A lot of her power base here was taken out and most of her Haitian resources are tied up, but she still has supporters. We think that many of those in government have been flushed out, but there could always be sleeper moles. So remain cautious, my friend, and thanks for your excellent, but unexpected, service to your fellow citizens, both U.S. and Haitian. You do more honor to your military awards than the U.S. can acknowledge.”

~~~~

It took more than a week for the fallout of Leger’s unwanted visit to end. The FBI was visiting the Alexandres almost daily—Wilson at his shop and Nadine at home, because she didn’t want the repeated interruptions to affect her job with the patients. Most were elderly veterans and she came to really care for them; in some ways they reminded her of Wilson because many were true warriors at heart, were strongly opinionated, but had romantic souls.

They learned that Vanessa’s missing thug, the one who had gone to ground in New York City, had been arrested when he tried to hold up a convenience store using a knife as a weapon. The clerk had a pistol and used it, hitting the man in the shoulder when he tried to leap over the counter. Many of Wilson’s or Nadine’s sessions with the FBI were to see if either had seen any of the identified suspects while the couple was living in Haiti. Wilson thought he recalled several from service work he had done for some of the wealthier Carrefour residents.

But most of those next two weeks were spent with Tamara, whose experience had both terrified and exhausted her. She was having nightmares almost every night and during the day, she was jumpy and irritable. Wilson realized that he recognized the symptoms.

“That’s classic PTSD,” he remarked to Nadine after five days of observing Tamara.

Nadine had heard of it but was unsure of exactly what it was.

“It stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the military in the mid-twentieth century, its name then was ‘shell-shock’ or ‘combat fatigue.’ You don’t have to be in combat to get it, though. Sexual abuse or assault, living through a disaster or accident—those all can result in PTSD. It’s caused by being exposed to repeated bad experiences or to a single major shock, like any experience that threatens your life or someone else’s—and that’s exactly what happened here.”

“She acted so mature and collected, though,” Nadine objected.

“That sometimes is part of it. When I was in rehab for my leg, there were lots of soldiers and Marines with severe PTSD. During the event that might have been the precipitating one for them, they told me that when everything seemed to get out of control; they’d get angry at feeling vulnerable, so they acted to try to restore some control. Lots of times that results in incredible heroism but it can come at a terrible psychological price. The body remembers the feelings of fear you had, and given a trigger—sometimes no apparent trigger at all—the body reacts with feelings of panic or severe anxiety. PTSD. Tamara acted collected and mature because that’s her nature—to stay in control, but her body was screaming ‘fear,’ ‘danger,’ while she was trying force her control over the situation. That’s heroism in my book.”

“How can we help her, then?”

“The biggie is just getting her to talk about it. Reliving her memories about how she was feeling and what she was thinking about while she was dealing with the situation here would help her process that the bad stuff is behind her. Talking helps her mind show her body that she’s in no danger now, because it’s the response of the body to a perhaps random thought that can cause the panic response. We’ll talk to her, or you should. You’re more sensitive and have counseling experience. Just get her to tell you what happened from her point of view and ask if that part is still scary or bothersome and explore with her why she feels that way. She might have a lot of ‘what ifs’ or ‘I should haves’ and working through those ideas is a huge part of the healing.”

“Wilson, are you hiding something from me? Are you actually a psychologist in disguise?”

He snorted. “Nah, just a badass Marine who got wounded and washed out of his dream career. I’ve been down the PTSD route. Got it real bad after my last mission and then I learned I was done in the Corps. And had an amazing doc who worked with me to slay the demons that were killing me inside. I know all—well, maybe not all—of the horrors that the mind can create when it starts to tell you about all the mistakes you made. I learned that those were not mistakes, they were the best possible decisions at the time. Learning that saved my sanity.”

It took several weeks of gentle but painful discussions with Tamara about her recollections of that morning, but soon Tamara was almost back to her normal, cheerful self. It was good timing because the graduation assembly was at the end of the week and the summer vacation would begin the next day.

Tamara had already decided that she wanted to study introductory French and Spanish at the local community college that summer, and she had an offer from Dr Beauford to work at the medical school on the MRIs in the imaging unit. She had a project of her own design, building tunable sub-coils to be installed in the machine’s external coils to enhance the scanning resolution in small areas of the body part being imaged. Because of her age and the possibility of any radiation exposure involved, she wouldn’t be allowed to work on the CT or PET scanners, and she couldn’t be paid, but the university gave her independent research credits in electrical engineering and physics. She’d have to write two papers and take two exams to complete the courses.

There was another topic that her parents wanted to discuss with Tamara but put it off because of the stress of the incident with Leger. They wanted to know about her mental and emotional state of mind regarding her “pushing” ability. They were also concerned that she might use her abilities in ways that society would disapprove. And how strong was she now—how close did she need to be to affect another person?

Little Haiti, Miami, Florida: six weeks later

One evening in mid-summer, Tamara was excitedly describing how one of her mini-coil installations had improved the imaging resolution in tests that day.

“I had used the Larmor equation—which gives the frequency at which the hydrogen nucleus will absorb energy—to do the calcs for my mini-coil orientation. The equation shows that the frequency of precession of the nuclear magnetic moment is directly proportional to the product of the B0 field—the magnetic field strength—and the gyromagnetic ratio, and the design result, when we tested it, matched the theory! Dr Beauford was so happy. He wants me to write it up—he gave me the format to use—because it can be patented and I’d be the sole inventor!”

Wilson was trying to slow her down. “Um, sweetie, you realize that neither Mom nor I have any inkling about what any of that means? Except that you can get a patent, I suppose. That fact we can celebrate with you. So I assume your work is going well?”

“It’s great. And I’m enjoying working on the other electronics too. Tomorrow Tim’s gonna show me an EEG that’s being surplused. He said several channels are getting funky and it’s five years old and they don’t want to fix it anymore. He said I could quote, ‘work my magic on it.’ That’ll give me the chance to learn about the tiny electrical signals the brain produces. Oh, and I’m still messing around with that cell phone jammer that I ‘liberated.’”

“You’re not going to use it to jam phones, right?” Nadine asked.

“‘Course not. That’s illegal—not that I haven’t... anyway. I’m dissecting the circuit design. Getting ideas about radio wave transmission, is all. It sends an RF signal, like a lot of the things I’m working on, and I like to see how devices that do that work. I set up a little Faraday cage to block its emissions when I test it.”

Mom and Dad looked at each other and shrugged.

“Sweetie, to change the topic, how have you been feeling during the last week?” Nadine asked. “No more nightmares, right?”

“No, Manman, and I’m much better since we talked and you helped me work through the bad thoughts I was having.”

“What about your... special abilities? You aren’t getting tempted to ‘push’ people to get them to do what you want, are you?” Nadine pressed.

“Oh, no. Um, I can’t just do that whenever I want, you know. To do that, I need help from... um... this is difficult. I’m not sure how it works. If I have an urgent need, like when those people at the school were questioning me that time, or what happened with that monster, somehow I can get the ability to ‘push.’ That’s only when stuff like that happens, when I need it. I guess... I’m sure Emily helps me. Yeah, she must ‘cause I can’t do the big stuff all by myself. I get the help I need then.”

Nadine looked at her. “Emily? Your doll sits on your pillow all the time now. How...?”

Nadine stopped when Tamara pulled the amulet on its chain out from under her top.

“She’s with me always, Manman. I’m sure this pendant links me to Granmanman’s spirit, but I felt that calling this pendant ‘Tamara’ too would be confusing.”

“So you can touch the spirit world through that. Amazing,” Nadine whispered.

“Not like that, Manman. It’s different; I can’t go to the spirits. Through this... it’s a gateway? Portal? ...the lwa seem to come into my mind. Like you told me back when I was... eight? Yeah. That the lwa give us praise, scolding, and guidance. That’s what I feel; help comes when I need it. I know that Papa Legba is the Speaker of the lwa, but Ayizan, my protector, is his wife, and a Speaker too. She speaks to me. And when I need help, Ayizan brings the lwa who can best help me.”

“Tamara, in my studies, I have heard of only one such person with your abilities. When I was little, maybe older... your age possibly, Manman told me of a legend of our people, Manman’s very-greats-manman ancestor, who communed with all of the lwa. You may well have her spirit in your soul,” Nadine said.

“What about your ‘making myself little’ ability?” Wilson asked.

“Now that I’m older—bigger—that’s not as easy... I’m sure I can’t actually be invisible. That’s probably impossible,” Tamara answered. “I rarely do that anymore, too. When I did it last time, it was when Mr Evil was sneaking up to the house. I was ‘pushing’ an... aura... yeah. It was, ‘you don’t notice me; I belong here’; kinda like that. This is sooo hard to explain,” she sighed.

“How close do you have to be to ‘push’ to someone?” Nadine asked.

“That depends. To do uh... compulsion? No, that’s too strong. I can’t force anyone. I do something like a suggestion backed by an emotion. So if they don’t want to have the emotion, like fear, the suggestion keeps the fear away. And people make their own fears—my ‘pushing’ lets them connect the fear to the suggestion. How close? To do that, I really need to look in a person’s eyes, so that’s pretty close. To project auras like confusion, I can be a little farther away but the farther away I am, the more taxing it is.”

Nadine gave her the ‘serious mother’ look. “Your abilities are unique and remarkable, but scary too. I don’t have to tell you that if someone learns about what you can do; your life, ours too, could be in danger. So please, darling, make sure you never take advantage of someone using them. And if you do need to use your abilities, please be discreet.”

Tamara nodded and hugged her mother, then her father.

August

The summer passed quickly. Tamara completed her French and Spanish classes at the community college and continued with the medical school’s study and her electronics work on the MRI and the other side projects she had begun. And just for her entertainment, she kept her “camera” zapper close by in her backpack, using it randomly on shop sensors and all of the school buildings in her area, getting close enough to the schools’ doors to use it on the RFID scanners there. She also used it near the few naked kids she encountered. She felt that if a kid really wanted to be naked, then the state had no business “branding” them like cattle, by injecting them with an electronic tag, just to allow them to “express their body freedom.”

Also during the summer, Tamara had a growth spurt; she shot up in height as the hormones of puberty began flooding her body, and although she was about two years younger than the typical ninth grader, she was as tall now as the typical high school freshman girl and wouldn’t stand out as being so much younger than her classmates.

~~~~

Another item that they needed to finalize during the summer was Tamara’s high school. She had three choices—four, if she was to consider a private school.

“Dad, where did you go to high school?” she asked when they were making their plans.

“Even though Maman was a trained manbo,” Wilson told her, “she was a pious Catholic and co-existed very happily with both traditions. She sent me to Catholic schools—which back then in Miami, were really excellent schools. I’m not sure how they are now. I know the public school quality seems way better here now. I don’t think you’d be happy at a Catholic high school, though. They tend to be pretty rigid; everyone is expected to conform.”

“Yeah. That’s not me,” Tamara giggled. “I’m not that interested in that magnet school, iTech. It kinda has a vocational school feeling to it.”

“And I’m not keen on Tamara having to cross the highway,” Nadine commented. “Which eliminates Northwestern. I know a lot of your Thomas Mann friends are headed there. Would you be okay with Edison?”

“So, that school has lots of poor kids. I guess it’s heavily Haitian. The classes seem small and the student surveys say they mostly like the teachers. You know I like to help kids—so going there, I can get to help the disadvantaged ones. Like I used to do back in Haiti, remember? The girls would sit in the ounfò with me and I’d help them.”

Nadine nodded. “Those were happy, carefree times, thinking back.”

“Okay, it’s Edison then,” Wilson declared. “Right? Let’s fill out the forms.”

~~~~

In late summer, the Alexandres received a letter from Miami Edison High School welcoming Tamara as a new student. The letter went on to say that, because of her unusual schooling record, the school wanted her to take a series of placement exams so their guidance counselors would know which classes they should schedule her to take. Tamara spent two days taking the placement tests and the following day after her work shift, Nadine found a voice mail message from the school on her phone, inviting the family to visit the school to talk to the counselor about the test results. When they arrived at the high school office, the principal came out to meet them first.

“Hello, you are the Alexandres? I’m Dr Patricia Barello, the school principal. It’s a pleasure to meet you all. We’ve heard good things about you, Tamara, from Horace Mann, your middle school, especially how you really have advanced in grades. I understand that you told the principal there that you didn’t want to jump ahead any more grades because you wanted to be able to make friends with teens closer to your age—I think that was a very wise and mature choice. When you talk to Mrs Moore, your counselor, she’ll have some suggestions for you about your free time—with your placement scores, you’ll have a lot of free time—while you’re attending Edison.”

They thanked her and then went to Mrs Moore’s office. After their greetings and some discussion about Tamara’s educational history, Moore went over Tamara’s exam results.

“We can accept Tamara’s physics and math scores from her home-schooling record and her middle-school placement evaluation, but we need to find the best fit for the other classes she’s going to take here. And Tamara, you’ve told us in your registration materials that you’ve decided that you want the whole high school experience.”

“Yes, ma’am. All through my childhood, I had limited contact with kids around my age and I want to experience a more ‘normal’ time as a teen.”

“That’s an excellent attitude, my dear. Now, your placement exams showed your strong English skills in reading, spelling, comprehension, and knowledge of a wide range of literature. Your testing results in grammar and writing are not as advanced, they showed that you’re at the level for an incoming ninth-grade student, but that’s still an excellent result since it places you at two years above your age-appropriate grade level. Your results in history and civics were at a ninth-grade-appropriate level too, so we’re placing you in the freshman English and introductory history classes.

“In math and science, you’re advanced well beyond high school, so the school period times for those classes are free since you don’t need them. To fill those periods, we have a choice of electives here.” She passed them a paper. “Please pick an elective—decide before the week’s end and let me know. And Principal Barello wanted you to consider working as an office aide during some of your open time. She likes to pick incoming students with good past school records and grades so that the job won’t interfere with their high school classes.”

“What would Tamara need to do?” Nadine asked.

“There’s a wide range of little jobs like scanning and copying sets of papers for the office and for teachers. There’s running errands and carrying messages. Answering phones when the office staff is busy or on break. Things like that. Most office aides use the time to study when they have nothing to do. You think you’d be interested in that, Tamara?”

“I think so. I’ll let you know when I tell you the elective I want.”

Tamara was thinking, If I work in the office, maybe I’ll be able to find out how to contact the SiF kids here. They must have some kind of exemption from the school’s dress code like they did at Thomas Mann, so there may be a list of them. I’ll think about this a little more; maybe I’ll get to know more teachers—and they’ll get to know me too. That can’t hurt.

During the next several days, she discussed the electives options with her parents. After deciding, she notified her counselor of her choice and her agreement to be an office aide, at least for the first term. She’d see about continuing after she knew more about the work involved.

Little Haiti, Miami, Florida: first week of high school

During her first school week, Tamara had to take off for several hours for an appointment at the medical school for her quarterly MRI follow-up exam. The MRI test wasn’t really needed anymore; however, Dr Beauford was interested in keeping track of Tamara’s brain activity patterns as she went through the changes of puberty, to see if her unusually high activity continued.

He had told the Alexandres when he had proposed continuing his study, “Her brain activity continues to be at the highest level reported in the literature, and that includes both children and adults. I saw activity increases continuing as she approached menarche and now that she’s well into puberty, that increase in activity shows no sign of stopping—it’s actually getting greater. So I need to caution you: I don’t know what the effect that exogenous hormones would be on her body, so I will strongly recommend that Tamara not be given birth-control hormones.

“I saw an article published in a recent issue of the journal, Frontiers of Psychology. It was titled ‘The Effects of Hormonal Contraceptives on the Brain: A Systematic Review of Neuroimaging Studies.’ It was a well-done study, memorable. The authors reported that... I’ll try to quote them, ‘Contraceptive substances can alter both structure and function of the brain. We identified structural and functional changes in areas involved in cognitive and affective processing, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus.’ Unquote. You’ll recall from our first meetings that these are the precise areas in Tamara’s brain that show such greatly increased activity. Their studies had a reasonable number of subjects but included just one single adolescent. But we already know that the brain undergoes major changes and structural reorganization during the adolescent years. So we have absolutely no idea about what effect hormones will have on Tamara with her unusually elevated brain activity and we’d prefer not to take any chances.”

~~~~

When Tamara returned to school from her appointment, she noticed that the RFID tag scanner unit at the entrance door had been taken apart and a man was disconnecting the wires leading to its antenna loop. She stopped and looked at the parts on the cart.

“Interested in that stuff, miss?” the man inquired.

“A little. What’s happening with this?” she asked innocently. Tamara knew that this was the third time that this unit was being replaced since she had zapped the previous two units installed there.

“Taking this damned thing out,” he answered. “If you ask me, this whole stripping idea was... well, forget it. We can’t keep these miserable sensor things working. Why they want to keep trying to replace ‘em is beyond me.”

“What happened to it?” Tamara asked, wondering just what her zapper did to the units to make them fail.

“I’m not sure,” the man replied. “I’m just a repair tech for the district. I think the whole antenna circuit is fried. There are a lot of bad scanners in the schools in this part of Miami and the district is getting tired of paying to replace them.”

“What happens with the broken ones?”

“I’ve been taking them back to the shop; they’re just sitting in a pile there. The school district bought ‘em—the state makes the schools buy their own. I can’t send them back to the state supply place since they won’t accept returns. Just toss ‘em, I guess. Got over a dozen bad ones now.”

Tamara thought, Go for it! Then, “Hey, I like to tinker with gadgets. I know someone at the med school electronics shop and he gave me an old broken EEG to work on. If you’re just gonna toss this thing, could I have it to mess around with?”

The man shrugged. “Sure, why not. The whole tag reader section is toast.”

“Thanks,” Tamara said as she stuffed the circuit board back into its case, wound its wires up, and shoved it into her backpack as she thought, Ooo, I can’t wait to get this on the bench.

High school classes ended at 2:30 p.m. so Tamara could get to the medical school, just three miles away, giving her enough time in the electronics shop to do a little work on the reader unit. When she walked in, Tim was working on an infusion pump.

“Hi there. What brings you in—you didn’t say you’d be here today.”

“Nope. Got a new toy. Broken RFID scanner from the school. Guy was taking it out and when I asked nicely, he gave it to me.”

“Uh huh. And you have no idea how it broke, I’m sure.”

“Of course, you’re sure. Actually I want to autopsy it. See what an EMF pulse does to the scanners. So this is an educational investigation.”

Tim snorted. “Right. You keep on believing that.”

Tamara began working on the device and soon found that the section of the circuit containing the comparator IC had been overloaded.

“Hey Tim, this thing’s got a USB port, why? Oh, and this here must be a microprocessor and here’s a RAM chip. This is a data section. Why would a scanner collect data?”

Tim came over and looked too. “Interesting. Let me get the laptop and analyzer.”

They connected the laptop to the USB port and then Tamara connected the scanner’s power leads to a power supply. Up popped a menu on the laptop screen. Tamara looked at the menu.

“There’s a WiFi option? Huh. Let me see...” She selected more options and looked at the laptop screen. “Okay, this thing stores about 100 ... no, exactly 128 tag IDs in memory—maybe the last ones read? And it looks like it sends them to an address... let’s see if the web address is stored in the system... it is. There’s a WiFi setup app here too so maybe it was paired with the high school’s WiFi to use the school’s internet. Tim, can you turn on the laptop’s WiFi and let’s see what it does.”

What the scanner did was to connect to the state’s Stripped in Florida database, and using the scanner’s built-in authentication, allowed the ID which the unit had just read to be transmitted to the state database, if the connected but separate camera module had also signaled that it had detected clothing on that person.

“Hey, I can spoof this,” Tamara said, and pulled out of her backpack one of the SiF chips she had gotten from Dr John. “The ID scanner part is dead but I see a menu option for manually adding a chip ID code.”

She used her phone to get her sample tag’s ID, entered it, and shorted out the “camera detect” input pins on the board.

“Oh look,” she exclaimed, “it’s contacting the database. Oh boy, the whole database is open for reading now. It’s not even encrypted, damn, just a session token. The scanner must have set a session security token on the laptop. Way cool. Let’s see if I can download the whole... yeah, there’s a choice: Excel or csv. ... Big file,” she said after two minutes of downloading.

Tim was back working on the infusion pump, but glanced over at her.

“What you gonna do with that file? It must be really private stuff, you know.” he commented.

“I have an idea for my high school. Most of the kids in the SiF program there hate it. We have sort-of uniforms—clothes like I’m wearing—and then those kids are forced to be naked. That’s terrible for them. I need to help them. This may help me find their names. Oh my...”

“What?” Tim asked.

“Just remembered. My folks found out from talking to my middle school principal last spring that the state gets reports of all sensor detections of clothed but chipped kids. And I used those sample chips to trigger some detectors. Just did this one here. These chips were registered to a kid but were never implanted. Wow, so they try to track down kids if officials can’t grab them on the spot...?”

Tim grunted. “I heard something about that. When they set up the SiF program, the cops in every city insisted that all violation calls would need to go through their non-emergency dispatch, so it looks like the state had to add the tag ID storage and reporting to the system since it would be rare to catch a kid just after a scanner reported him.”

“Ah, so that’s why the scanner works like that. Okay, you got an extra thumb drive I can use?”

Tamara got a USB flash drive from Tim and copied the data file over; then she puttered around a little more with the scanner circuit.

“I’m looking at the RF signal amplifier section of this circuit,” she told Tim, “and I have an idea for my zapper. If I tune it right, I can fry just the scanners’ signal amp sections rather than wiping out the whole IC itself. Then it won’t need as much power to work. The ID tags themselves are much easier to fry. That’ll save on its battery life.”

“Just what the world needs,” Tim muttered. “A more efficient chip killer.”

A bit later, “Hey Tim... borrow your signal analyzer, please? Got a new coil to test here. I think I got the right winding number.”

“Tamara, you could be doing something really productive, you know.”

“Hey, I’m helping kids. How is that not productive?”

Tim had no response to that.

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