Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (6 page)

“Oh. Great! Where?”

“Stanford.”

My stomach clenched and I nearly jumped away.

Joe was at Stanford.

Well, at least I wouldn’t need a new jump site.

*   *   *

My cell phone
doesn’t
.

What I mean is, we completely killed its cellular radio when we rooted it. It can’t connect to any cell towers. This is deliberate.

It
will
connect to WiFi hotspots, though, but every time it does, it uses a different Media Access Control address for the wireless Ethernet adaptor. My phone stores a block of four thousand MAC addresses harvested from obsolete and decommissioned equipment, and ranging from phones to computers to tablets to routers. Last time I checked, I’d used about half the list. The program is set to cycle through them again when it reaches the end, but I suspect I will break or lose the phone by then.

I also did the regular security things, like using encrypted browsing and changing accounts regularly, but mostly I depended on looking like a different machine every time I connected to the net from wildly varying WiFi hotspots.

When Joe first left for college, we used e-mail, instant messaging, voice over IP, and computer videoconferencing to talk during the week, and we saw each other on the weekends, usually with me taking him someplace.

When I found him in bed, with
her
, I’d screamed and jumped away, ending up sobbing in the reading nook under my bed.

I hadn’t done
that
in a while.

An hour later, I connected to my e-mail account and found three e-mails.

The short version is that one of Joe’s study partners had been dumped by her boyfriend. Beers and a shoulder to cry on had turned comforting into something more. It was the only time and he was so sorry and could I ever forgive him?

I sent a one-word message,
No
, and deleted the e-mail, instant messaging, and telephony accounts that we’d used. If he sent any other e-mails, they bounced.

Okay,
when
he sent them. I
know
he sent others. I read some of them off of his computer, while he was in class.

Stalker
much?

Stalker.

I watched Joe for the better part of a month, several times a day, usually through binoculars. I looked through his stuff when I knew he and his roommate had class. I even thought about putting a remote camera on his shelf, hidden in a book.

Yeah, I know.
Mega
creepy.

I didn’t put a camera in his bookshelf. I stopped visiting his room, though at first it was only because his roommate skipped class one day and nearly caught me.

Then I just felt embarrassed.

If some guy was entering
my
bedroom when I wasn’t there, how chill would
I
be with it? It took me another week to apply the same logic to my following him around campus.

Either go to him and make up, or leave him alone.

And I was too afraid to go to him.

I stopped jumping to campus.

Exactly two weeks later, Dr. Cory Matoska tells me he’s got a post at Stanford.

Perfect.

I connected to a coffeehouse WiFi hotspot in the Mission District of San Francisco and used an Internet telephony program to call Cory’s cell phone a few hours after his scheduled arrival on the Stanford campus.

“How was your trip?”

“Uh, Cent? The number shows up as blocked.”

“Using Skype. Don’t have a dedicated number. You still have my e-mail, right?” I’d set up an account just for him and he’d sent me his new office and lab info as soon as he received it from Stanford.

“Oh, yeah—it’s on my laptop. The trip was okay. Did the drive in three days. But I took your advice and had the movers do the packing. Talk about stress relief.”

“How’s your lab?”

“Great! Thanks for having the stuff delivered. Though there was some weird mix-up there. They’ve lost all record of receiving the shipment. No one even knows who unlocked the lab for the movers. They’re
really
embarrassed about it.”

Oops
. Maybe I should’ve waited to deliver it until after Cory had received the keys.

“It’s all there, right? Nothing broken, nothing missing?”

“Seems to be. Flexed the suit. Worked fine.”

“Flexed? You bent it?”

“Oh, no. I just charged the EAP fibers and relaxed it.”

“EAP?”

“Electroactive polymers. I thought you’d read my papers. That you knew how the suit worked.” He sounded annoyed.

“Ah. I know it contracts when the power is off. That’s the reason it doesn’t have to be customized, right? We chose you because you were the first to achieve thirty kilopascals over a nonuniform surface without having to customize it for different people.”

His voice sounded calmer when he said, “That’s right. It’s really quite dramatic. I could show you when you’re in the Bay area.”

“I’m local now,” I said. “Are you in your office?”

“No. Unpacking. I scored a temporary faculty apartment in Stanford West. A petroleum-engineering professor is off doing an extended sabbatical in Abu Dhabi, research and teaching. Perfect timing. But I could bicycle to the lab in ten minutes.”

“Is that convenient?”

“Well, if you give me half an hour.”

“Yeah, could do that.”

“Do you need directions?”

I’d been there already but I said, “The Durand Building right? Material sciences. Aeronautics and astronautics?”

“Yes.”

“See you there, then.”

*   *   *

I jumped directly to Cory’s lab because, other than Joe’s dorm room over in Stern Hall, it was the jump site freshest in my memory for Stanford. The lights were off and the door was closed, but unlike his previous lab, it wasn’t tucked away in the corner of the basement. High northern windows lit the room and the adjoining office, which made both rooms much less claustrophobic than his previous digs, though they were about the same size. He’d already organized things, and the boxes I’d stacked here four days before were gone.

I let myself out the locked door into the hall and waited, sitting on a bench. I could hear people walking through the halls in other parts of the building but this little stretch was quiet. I could see down the hall and through another window. In the far distance was Hoover Tower and I remembered time spent with Joe on the observation deck when it was open
and
when it was closed.

I had to look away to keep from crying.

Cory came up the hall, still wearing his bicycle helmet. Velcro straps bound his khaki slacks at the ankles. He nodded at me. “You must’ve been close. When you said you’re local, does that mean you live here in Palo Alto?”

“No, but I’ve been out here a lot.” The absolute truth.

“Well, if you can afford to fund me, you can afford the travel, I guess.”

As he unlocked the door I said, “Travel is the smallest budget line item we have.”

He uncinched the straps from his pants cuffs and put them in his helmet, tucking it into an empty spot on an otherwise full bookshelf. He ran his fingers across the spines of several books as he moved to the connecting door to the lab. “It was weird. Didn’t feel right with these in the boxes.”

I followed him.

The stand and suit were at the end of the room, their cables leading to the bench. This time the USB connections rising out of the headless neck were connected to a laptop computer and the heavier cable below the suit’s helmet flange was connected to the power supply, as it was when I first saw it.

“So, electroactive polymers,” said Cory. He handed me a piece of what looked like dark gray insulated wire, about six inches long. “This one is an ionic EAP. Pull it tight.”

I held it between my thumbs and forefingers and pulled it straight. It wasn’t at all stretchy.

Cory took a pair of leads from a smaller power supply on the bench and clipped each one to the ends of the gray piece where they stuck out past my fingers. “Hold it tight,” he said, and flipped a switch on the power supply.

The gray piece suddenly thickened and was three inches shorter, drawing my hands together despite my best efforts to pull it back to its original length.

“Huh!” I said. “Muscular!”

“Yeah. In fact, that’s one of the biggest applications under development. Artificial muscles for prosthetic limbs and actuators for small robots and drones.” He turned it off and it relaxed, allowing me to stretch it back out to its previous length. “The molecules fold under current, pulling in on themselves. Now try this one.”

He handed me a different length of what looked like a fuzzy cord, also six inches and, while I held it, he shifted the alligator clips from the gray rubbery piece to this one. “Give that a tug.”

When I pulled hard on this piece it stretched out. I managed to pull it out to about eight inches but it retracted to six inches as soon as I relaxed. “This one has some elasticity. Is that what the suit is made of? It’s pulling pretty hard now. I hate to think what it would do when you put the pressure on.”

He smiled. “Keep some tension on it.”

I did and he threw the switch.

It didn’t bunch up or pull together. It
relaxed
. I was now holding a piece of thinner smooth cord nearly fifteen inches long.

“The ECP core of this one relaxes its molecular structure under current and folds back up when we remove current. We could’ve gone the other way, but we decided pretty quick that you wanted a power failure to enable, not disable, the suit.”

For a moment I pictured my arm, the place where I’d had the frostbite, suddenly and unexpectedly exposed to vacuum. “That would be … bad.”

He nodded. “Mind you, we’re not talking about exploding limbs etcetera. Our skin is tougher than that, but you would get swelling and tissue damage. You know why the target is thirty kilopascals don’t you?”

“One third an atmosphere. Twenty-nine thousand feet above sea level. Mount Everest.”

He looked pleased. “Right. Your skin can handle that easily enough.”

“Yes,” I said, rubbing my wrist through my shirt. “Up to forty-five thousand feet, though that’s pushing it.”

He nodded and flipped open the laptop on the bench. The screen lit up as it came out of sleep mode. A chart of numbers appeared, with labels like
Anterior Torso 4
,
Right Leg 23
, and
Left Foot 16
. Above it were three larger numbers labeled
Max
,
Min
, and
Avg
. They were 31,250, 30,700, and 30,986. “It’s in pascals.” He reached over to the suit and dug his thumb into the chest. Immediately the max went up to 31,540 and the average crept up slightly, too.

“These are measured by strain gauges in the surface of the life-model pressure sensor. When we change out the underlying gel packs for different-sized life models, we get comparable results.”

He reached out and turned a knob on the heavy-duty power supply connected to the suit. The suit
shifted
on the stand, going from a sleek, smooth surface, tightly covering the structure beneath, to suddenly looking like ill-fitting and wrinkled coveralls three sizes too big. Only the neck flange seemed the same as before, though the fabric of the suit now seemed to bunch together where it met the stainless steel.

Cory let me look at the suit for a moment, my mouth open, before he directed my attention to the laptop screen. Across the top of the screen read
Max: 320 Min: 0
and
Avg. 11
. “Those maxes are from the armpit sensors, probably, where it’s resting on the stand.”

I took a fold of the suit between my hands. It felt like midweight canvas, flexible, nowhere near as taut and rough as it had felt before.

“I’m impressed, Doctor Matoska. How does the suit feel on an actual human?”

He cleared his throat. “We’ve only done partials, but it’s okay. Full range of mobility with only a little effort and good vacuum protection.”

“Oh? But not a full suit yet?”

He opened his mouth but then closed it without saying anything. He turned to the suit power supply and slowly turned the knob, reducing the power to the suit gradually. This was just as magical as watching the suit expand. The suit shrank down, like it was alive, until it seemed to merge with the life-model pressure sensor inside. The average pascals climbed to 30,827 with a max of 31,602 and a min of 29,985.

Dr. Matoska said, “I blew through most of my previous grant and wasted over fifty thousand dollars of EAP fibers trying to solve the issue of a reclosable entry.” He looked a bit shamefaced. “I was lucky the first time. It’s a topology issue. All the tensioning fibers have to go from the anode—” He touched the front half of the suit, right below the flange. “—to the cathode.” He tapped the back.

I stepped around the suit. Except for the rigid flange at the neck, it was seamless. No zippers, no buttons, no clamps.

“I tried to incorporate a pressure closure with the fibers looping through anchor islets, we got wildly varying pressure distribution, areas completely out of balance. A human would have gotten dangerous hematomas in some parts, and overpressures in others that would constrict circulation dangerously.

“Next I tried to put the anode around the closure and the cathode at the helmet flange. It threw everything off. I tried a secondary waist flange, splitting the suit into two separate electrical systems. That was closer but we couldn’t get good pressures in the waist region. I tried an oversized helmet flange, big enough for a flexible adult to worm through, but the pressure distribution around the neck and shoulders was way off
and
we couldn’t maintain the neck seal necessary to pressurize the helmet.”

I tried to hide my disappointment. “So what’s the next step?”

“A great deal of computer modeling,” he said. “I’ve met with a multidisciplinary team here. They’ve got some applied mathematicians and guys from material sciences. I’m thinking we go back to the original design but we make the anode and cathode ring disassemble—” He held his hands together, touching at finger tips and thumbs in a circle, then spread them apart. “—instead of being permanently locked into the neck flange as they are now. Then the wearer can put the suit on, then bring the anode and cathode together and latch them to the helmet flange once he pulls it over his head.”