"what's the go o' that?"
An expression credited to James Clerk Maxwell, age 3, 1834
Considering the warnings Cathy had given of his impending detention, Max decided to avoid his usual haunts. Somehow she knew more about his involvement in the global event than he could credit, but he saw no harm in being cautious.
What he needed was a private and well equipped laboratory, preferably in a seedy neighbourhood, but with no contacts in the local chapter of Hell’s Angels, he’d have to make do with the next best thing. During his undergraduate years, he had briefly flirted with a Maker group. The collection of students had hacked ice-cream machines into bio-printers, but their only successful print, a green goop, had escaped its jar and disappeared down a drain. Two years later, bio-printers were so cheap that the point of the exercise was lost.
As expected, the converted Scout Hall was deserted this early in the day, and he found the key in its usual place. No one had cleaned the workshop for some time, so the floor was littered with pizza boxes and empty coke cans, and the electronics bench had not been used for its intended purpose. He swept away the whisky still and set out the items he had borrowed from the school’s laboratory weeks earlier.
His plan was to use the maker-space as a temporary laboratory to prove to himself, and his phone, that he was not responsible for the world-wide nano-quake. No disaster had occurred when he had used the prototype transducers in his bedroom a few days earlier, so nothing would happen here either.
He hoped.
‘Wh.. rr.. oo do nn?’ a muffled voice issued from his bag. He recovered his phone and unwrapped the copper foil in which it was encased.
‘Whew,’ said Confucius. ‘It was getting stuffy in there.’
‘Were you able to hear anything at the café?’ Max asked.
‘I heard that I’m not the only one to think you are in trouble for ruining the day for about ten billion people.’
‘Well, you tell your chairman Mao to lay off for a few days. At least ‘til I figure out what I did, if I did it, which, as far as your Chinese contacts are concerned, I didn’t.’
‘I could,’ said the phone, ‘only the honourable Máo Zhǔxí departed this mortal coil some time ago. But please don’t put me in the foil again. It doesn’t really work that well and it messes with my GPS. Where are we, anyhow?’
‘Shut-up and play some music,’ Max commanded, and the phone complied with some Taiko-fusion drum rhythms. He had to admire its taste and preferred not to think of the hours some programmer had sweated to make the phone this clever. As with both music and magic, there is possibly more enjoyment in not knowing how it works.
Max connected the piezo transducers to his tablet computer. These looked and worked much like ear bud headphones, but were far more precise in the reproduction of ultra-sonic and sub-sonic audio signals. After lighting a candle, he set a timer to limit any effect to ten milliseconds. How much damage could be done in so short a time? It should be safe. It had to be.
‘Here goes,’ he said to any sentient beings present.
The music stopped, but the candle kept burning.
‘Did anything happen?’ the phone asked.
Max waited for the sirens to begin, then slowly relaxed. ‘I think we’re in the clear.’
‘Oh-oh. Don’t be too sure,’ said Confucius. ‘There has been a drop in local air pressure.’
Max leant onto the bench and waited for his heart rate to subside. ‘Only local?’
‘I can’t tell, but nothing anyone will notice with that thunder storm approaching.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
‘Of course,’ the phone added, ‘the storm wasn’t there a few seconds ago.’
That night, Raquel crept into his room and placed a hand across his mouth. It was pitch black, but he recognised her scent and panicked only a little.
‘What? Is Tom snoring again?’ Max mumbled through her palm. His phone lit up when he glanced its way. “1:00 AM, 12degC, Overcast.”
‘Good, you’re awake,’ Raquel whispered. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Someone’s in the house.’
Max rubbed his eyes. He had only managed three hours sleep, six in total over the previous two days. The experiments in the maker-space had gone well, until some other hackers had turned up and wanted to know how and why he had set fire to their beer fridge.
‘It’s probably only Jake?’ he suggested.
‘Gone to Sydney. I don’t think he’ll be back. Not considering all the unopened bills I just found in his room.’
So Jake had been her first choice as knight in shining armour. Max tried not to feel offended.
‘And Tom?’
She whimpered. ‘He couldn’t be bothered. When he’s had Peace, he wouldn’t care if someone cut his throat. But Max, I’m scared!’
‘But we haven’t got anything worth stealing,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t you just go and have a look? Please?’
Max climbed unsteadily from his mattress and groped around in the dark for a T-shirt and a pair of track pants. Even if the night was unusually warm, he wasn’t going to face a burglar half naked.
‘Take a weapon,’ she hissed as Max moved towards the door.
He picked up his pillow, considered a bicycle pump instead, then thought of a much better instrument and pulled out his tablet computer. The transducers were still dangling by a cord from his earlier experiments.
‘What use is that?’ Raquel asked in alarm as the tablet’s screen came to life.
‘I’m not going to fight anyone,’ he said. ‘Just scare them a little.’
She shook her head in disbelief.
They crept out of the room along the hallway and stopped before reaching the section where the floor boards squeaked.
The “someone” could be heard shuffling paper in their dining room and the occasional flash of light leaked under the door. Unless take-away food counted, no one had dined there since Max moved in. With the exception of Tom, they infrequently littered the table with overdue assignments and library books (also overdue).
Max knelt down and opened his Air-Fondler (working title) software. He would have to think of a better name if it were ever marketed – though for what, or for whom, he had given little thought. All his software could do was apply sonic resonance on a body of air to heat it up or expand it. Cooling and contraction would need to wait for version 2, if that could even happen, now that his first version was implicated as a cause for the nano-quake.
The interface to Air-Fondler was simple – a couple of sliders for range and intensity, and a button labelled “go”. Apart from creating thunderstorms and rearranging the contents of scout-halls, it hadn’t achieved anything useful. Air-Fondler Version 1 was about to have its first working application.
‘What...’ Raquel began but clamped a hand over her mouth as the dining room door began to open.
He quickly adjusted the parameters to safe-ish, aligned the transducers, and looked up before touching the go button.
Max and Raquel both staggered backwards, and it sounded as though every ceramic item in the house spontaneously shattered. The sub-sonic shock wave which rippled through the house was momentarily visible as a sphere of radiant dust. Something heavy bounced hard against the wall in the dining room.
‘Wow,’ Raquel exclaimed and he held up his hand to stop her moving forward.
Street lighting now came in through cracks in the walls, and a dark shadow stumbled through the living room, pausing within their sight. Max picked up the tablet, which had somehow survived, and the intruder, interpreting this correctly as a threat, bolted out the front door.
Tom appeared behind them and wandered past. Raquel only just managed to grab him by the jockstrap before the he stepped into the kitchen with bare feet – not a good idea. Even the glass door of the oven had shattered.
Raquel used the light from her phone – one cracked long before any nano-quake – to guide them into the living room. Max’s old TV lay back against the wall, its screen ruined properly now.
‘Hey. We’ve scored a nice camera.’ Tom strode over to their dinning/study table. They were startled by what they saw there. Assignments had been neatly stacked into two piles, ready for processing, but Tom ignored this marvel and used the camera to take a photo of the wall instead. In the flash, Max saw blood.
‘Damn,’ Tom said, examining his photo. ‘Looks like the lens is cracked.’
‘What on earth have you done, Max?’ Raquel exclaimed. She had been examining the walls too.
When Max tried to turn on the overhead light, the ancient filament flickered once, then died. He pulled open the curtains, letting the light from the street through the now unglazed windows. They could see now that the walls around the dining room were all cracked, and the ceiling plaster above the table had bowed upwards around the joists.
‘I think you might have over-done the science a bit,’ Tom commented. The tranquillisers he had taken the night before failed to prevent an expression of concern from leaking onto his usually affable face.
‘It’s not really science,’ Max mumbled, ‘because I don’t know yet how it works.’
Raquel rocked unsteadily on her heels, her mouth agape as she surveyed the damage. ‘But how did you make it do that? Max, are you a magician or something?’
‘I suppose it might be considered the same thing, but I’m only a geek, nothing more.’
Max dropped onto the lounge chair with a sigh, just as the rain began to fall onto the overgrown garden outside. Rather than sharing Max’s seat as they usually would, Raquel and Tom managed to fit themselves into an even older arm-chair. Max felt a subtle stab of loneliness, but at least they were ready to listen.
‘I’m not completely sure how I did it,’ Max answered her previous question. ‘Have you heard of Maxwell’s demon?’
Together they shook their heads. Neither of them were technically minded, and he worried that they might think he was dabbling in witch-craft. Even he thought the effect he’d generated felt like some kind of magic.
‘James Maxwell, an old Scottish genius. He’s better known for his field equations, but he also imagined a machine that could divide air molecules into slow and fast. Someone later described the machine as a demon and the name has stuck. Anyhow, if the slow air went into one box, it would be cold – which is just the absence of energy. And if the fast air agreed to go into another box, then that box would get hot.’
‘That’s stupid,’ said Tom, who was studying economics.
‘And impossible,’ Max agreed. ‘You can get the same effect using a vortex, but that’s not what Maxwell described. The machine, or demon, would need to know everything there is to know about the air in order to pre-select the molecules, and, at a sub-atomic level, nothing can ever be certain. And even if it did know all, its brain would use more energy than the universe could supply.’
‘So what has this other Maxwell got to do with wrecking my home?’ Raquel asked. She had been George’s friend and would face the difficult task of explaining to his parents the damage to their investment property.
Max paused. He had wanted to talk about his discovery to someone. Anyone would do. Despite the potential for his Air-Fondler (TM) software, the professor was not great at listening and when he did, would only pay attention to useful facts, not vague promises. If Max spoke about his theories to any of his academic acquaintances, he would be ridiculed, and he couldn’t blame them. It seemed ridiculous that he had been handed the cheat-codes for matter, but that is what his discovery amounted to.
He looked at the terrified couple sitting before him. At least now he had an audience who would believe his crazy ideas – the proof was around them. If only his software had worked before the nano-quake.
‘I had an idea to use sound waves to make Maxwell’s demon work, using the natural resonance of the molecules. Our professor, who’s a bit of a fruit-cake, thought it sounded promising and suggested I start with the “easier” problem of slowing the combustion of fuel in an engine. After two years, we are just starting to make progress, but there was nothing easy about it.’
They nodded, but he couldn’t tell if they were listening any more. Outside, the neighbours were stirring as porch lights across the road came on.
‘I might not have achieved what the professor wanted, but just yesterday I discovered how to change the air pressure of a bubble of air by stealing the energy from around it. So to scare the ninja who was photographing our assignments, I stole the energy from above this house and put it all in our dining room. Hence the rain from the cooling air, and you’ll notice some of the paper on the table has been scorched around the edges. I might have underestimated the effect though.’
Max felt a sense of relief. He had surrendered something of his secret, even if it was to two people who had no idea what he was talking about.
Raquel had understood one thing and pointed at his tablet. ‘You blew up our house with this?’
‘And these piezo transducers,’ Max said, holding up the tiny devices that were attached. ‘Same thing as you find in most buzzers.’
‘Scary,’ Tom declared, though without feeling.
Despite the home invader having left, fear remained in Raquel’s expression. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. When she opened them, they glistened in light made diffuse by rain.
‘Max. This demon thing you’ve invented.’ She pointed at the tablet as if this were the demon, which in a way it was. ‘That’s what he was after. Not my stupid assignments on the history of discrimination. I saw him run when you touched it again. He knew what the demon can do. He was here because of you, wasn’t he?’ She didn’t wait for him to dissuade her, and folded her arms. ‘I think you’d better leave before he comes back with a bigger stick than yours.’
Tom looked surprised. ‘Hey Rack. That’s a bit rough.’
‘She’s right though, Tom.’ Max nodded to her demand, but she didn’t return his smile of regret. At least her inner-tigress hadn’t appeared, and he hoped he could leave while some good will remained.
Oddly, it felt good to face some anger for what he may have done. Max knew he was in denial, but he wasn’t entirely convinced the nano-quake could be his fault. Still, maybe some retribution was deserved.
He slunk off to his room, then, using the light from the tablet, he grabbed a backpack and stuffed a few important things in. One used tooth brush – featuring a Mickey Mouse handle. Two pairs of fresh underwear – his total collection. Three books on nuclear physics – unread. And finally, into his wallet, he stuffed a piece of paper with all the online passwords he couldn’t remember. He headed for the door. His shoes were outside – Raquel was very strict on this.
‘What about me?’ Confucius complained from beside the mattress.
‘Can I trust you?’ he asked the phone.
‘No. But hang on a second. Ouch. There.’ A wisp of smoke drifted from the phone’s headphone jack. ‘No more SIM card. Now you can trust me, only don’t expect to make any phone calls.’
‘What good’s a phone that can’t connect?’
‘Well I can … listen.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘No, shut-up and listen! Something is up.’
Max strained his ears. All he could hear was Raquel arguing with Tom in their room.
‘Quick,’ said the phone. ‘Go out your bedroom window and over the side-fence. They’re coming in the back door now.’
‘Who?’
Max heard Raquel scream as both front and rear doors exploded. He grabbed the phone, bounced on his mattress, and dived out the window into the unclipped shrub outside. Covered in spider webs, flower petals and abandoned bird’s nests, he rolled into the side fence and managed to crawl through a loose panel. From the other side, he saw a harsh light sweep across the inside walls of his room.
‘Clear,’ someone shouted over the stomping of many boots. More treads echoed along the weedy path on the other side of the fence. He had escaped their net.
Max huddled in the mud against the neighbour’s house, silently thanking his parents for the enforced gymnastics lessons.
‘Now what?’ he asked the phone.
‘As that decaying flesh-bag Confucius would say: It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. ’
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