Brendan Calhoun, PhD, General, and old hand in the ways of science, stared with extreme concentration at the document he was holding as he flipped through it. As he was now easily able to recognize, the style of the author was clear, concise, accurate, and neat.
And, of course, yet again took the rule book on a number of scientific disciplines, looked dismissively at it, and threw it out while muttering about doing it properly.
Then did it properly.
He finally leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. Taylor, the Prime Asset, was so far past 'brilliant' that an entirely different terminology was required. He'd known that, or thought he'd known that, from about ten minutes after meeting her, but this latest piece of her work drove that home like nothing he'd ever encountered. The girl had already single-handedly advanced the understanding of gravitics and associated fields by decades. She'd basically invented the science of gravitics, for that matter. Then advanced it by decades. The knock on effects just since that point had produced a larger upheaval in physics, chemistry, mathematics, electronics, and half a dozen other specialties than the entire Manhattan project had managed in its entirety.
And she kept doing it.
Every damn time he talked to Angus, it was to learn that the impossible young woman had again rewritten everything they thought they knew about pretty much everything. She didn't seem to know when to, or possibly how to, stop. Of course, that was why she was the Prime Asset, a Person of Interest to the US government that was literally the single most important person in the entire country. He wasn't sure she even realized that, in fact he was fairly sure she didn't, because she was aside from being a genuine comic-book level super-genius a very nice, friendly and down to earth girl who was basically just having fun working out how the universe functioned. And documenting it thoroughly so lesser minds could also understand it.
He very much liked Taylor, and for that matter her father, and even without her value to the country, and the world too, would have been happy to know both of them.
It somewhat amused him that she was so valuable a person, so unique a mind, that if it came down to the President himself or her, orders were that she was the one who was saved. Orders from the President himself, which was somewhat odd at best. Understandable, as the man was by no means stupid, but unusual too.
Now she'd apparently decided that inventing practical antigravity and a cheap room temperature superconductor wasn't exciting enough and had moved onto successfully reverse engineering Tinker tech. Not only the anomalous engineering itself, but the theory behind it. It was like she'd seen a TV for the first time and rather than just copying the functioning unit, derived all the principles upon which it worked and extrapolated from that to image compression, digital transmission standards, and game shows.
From what he could understand of the thick document, she was well on her way towards a genuine theory of how Tinker tech in general worked. This particular one explained the principles behind the 'optical diversion field generator' in detail, enough detail that a talented engineer could duplicate her results in the same manner that had occurred with her gravitational reference frame regenerators. And more than that, a really talented engineer could take that understanding and undoubtedly work out other related areas of research. It was far more than just a design document for one specific implementation of the basic idea, it was an entire field of study that would keep a whole series of university departments running for years. Or be something you could spin off a number of very successful and profitable companies on the back of.
Just like gravitics, superconductors, and anything else she came up with. He was completely certain she was nowhere near finished with this sort of thing.
In the long run her work was going to be the source of a massive rebuilding of society in almost every manner one could imagine, he thought. Already the US defense industry was feeling the ramifications almost everywhere, even if the ultimate source of the extraordinary new technology wasn't yet known beyond a very small number of extremely highly vetted people. DARPA was busily dusting off hundreds of former projects that had been investigated since the fifties and shelved because of something or other that simply was beyond the knowledge of the day, and looking into which ones were now feasible. A surprising number appeared to be worth following up on. Just the superconductor alone had put a good two dozen ideas back into the running as practically doable, and that was certainly only the start.
Their allies undoubtedly had other similar archives which would be amenable to reinvestigation now, and in due time this would definitely happen. The Canadians at least would be read into the program within a year or two, and others would follow. At the moment the impetus was of course on making sure that the Prime Asset was sufficiently protected once knowledge of her work became more widespread. Half the security apparatus of the US was devoted to that end, and many agencies that were so secret hardly anyone even in the government knew about them were having a lot of fun and considerable success in dealing with all manner of problems they'd wanted to handle for decades.
Taylor hadn't wanted to leave Brockton Bay, saying it was her home, and while in some ways that had presented a problem, in other ways it had been a benefit. Far enough away from the corridors of power to avoid certain parties, but close enough to a number of specific places to make it fairly easy to move people and equipment around if required. Right on the water, which was again a positive from the point of view of getting access by sea, but a negative in some ways for the same reason. And it was a city that was more than used to the peculiar which meant that with care a lot of the things that were likely to happen could be spun as just something that happened in a Parahuman hotbed like Brockton Bay, once the actual Parahuman problems had been otherwise dealt with.
That was a work in progress, but the latest reports showed it to be something that was quite successful so far. And it had produced a number of unexpected dividends, some of which had been useful bargaining chips for local politics, some resulting in valuable skills being acquired, and so on.
All in all, while the location wasn't one he himself would have naturally picked for the next big leap in research, it had turned out to be oddly effective to date.
And BBU, with Angus Drekin involved, had also proven to be a highly valuable source of extremely intelligent people eager to work on beyond-cutting-edge physics and engineering. They seemed able to keep their mouths shut, were very good at their jobs, and had no trouble working with a fifteen year old girl who was smarter than all of them together. The DWU as well had shown their worth immediately being a ready made and highly motivated workforce who were remarkably loyal and very discreet.
Neither he nor anyone else in the know had expected things to work so well but everyone was very glad it had.
Picking up the next document he leafed through it, not going into a deep read as the very first page said that it was preliminary and still subject to change as Taylor worked on the theory. There were three more documents of a similar nature sitting on his desk, covering other Tinker widgets she'd found in the DWU storerooms. Apparently the dock workers had a habit of collecting pretty much everything that people left lying around and filing it away for a rainy day. He wondered just how much stuff they really had. The place was pretty large after all, and had been around for a very long time…
It might be worth investigating at some point, just to settle his own curiosity.
Quickly scanning the other three binders, he finally stacked them neatly on the desk along with the first two, then sat and stared at them for a while, thinking. It was clear to him that Taylor was heading towards explaining Tinker Tech to a level that literally no one else had ever managed, and he wouldn't have been at all surprised if she ended up cracking the entire phenomenon wide open and turning it into engineering rather than near-magic.
Picking up the device next to the reports, he turned it over in his hand, studying it with near-awe. A practical invisibility generator, battery powered, reliable, and duplicatable, the size of a pack of cards. The girl had actually apologized that it wasn't yet suitable for an entire vehicle larger than a motorcycle, saying that it was far more efficient than the rather amateur implementation she'd investigated (her words exactly) but not quite as powerful as she'd concentrated on making it work properly. Making it cover a larger area was easy, she'd said, and her document suggested various modifications to the hardware designs to achieve that, but she wasn't going to waste her time building them herself as she had other projects.
Brendan smiled to himself as he recalled her exasperation with Squealer's designs. The girl took the whole Tinker thing somewhat personally, feeling it wasn't keeping up to her own standards. This was undoubtedly true but not something anyone but her would actually care about. Simply making it work at all would be seen as miracle enough for the vast majority of people.
He put the example device on top of the whole pile and leaned back in his chair, picking up the half-empty and nearly cold mug of coffee at his elbow and finishing it in a couple of gulps, before putting the empty mug down and reaching for his secure phone. He had yet more calls to make, advice to request, and people in high places to worry and excite in equal quantity.
These latest developments would push the Prime Asset's value even higher, require a number of alterations to the existing situation and protocols, and probably cause quite a few individuals both joy and concern. It would also require yet another specialist team to be set up to investigate the practical ramifications of Taylor's latest ideas and how to integrate them into the various projects being developed at a frightening pace right now. He could think of at least four separate areas where just the cloaking device would be welcomed with open arms and cries of glee.
Smirking a little to himself at the thought of the likely look on the face of one specific military person, he started dialing the first of a fairly long list of numbers.
It was going to be yet another long evening, but despite that he found he was enjoying his current work far more than previous arrangements.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Connecting her first sensor-laden phone to her main computer, Taylor downloaded the latest data she'd collected at school and around the city into the steadily growing collection of related information, then unplugged the device again. She pulled the keyboard in front of her and started up her analysis program, which chewed on the download for a while, running trillions of calculations on it and correlating the most recent readings with the rest of the information she'd derived up to this point.
While it ran, she tabbed to the other program that was constantly monitoring Parahuman subspace anomalies around the city, at lower resolution that her phone sensors managed but over a much wider area. It showed that a number of new targets had entered the collection area, while a few had left. Most of these were congregated around the PRT building and the Rig which probably meant they were heroes visiting the city. She checked the logs and nodded to herself, then added some more annotations to her database.
The target that had been located under the commercial district on a regular basis appeared to have vanished a week or two ago, and no sign of it had been seen since on her sensor grid. She idly wondered who it was and why they'd been lurking down there. It had been easy to work out it was an underground location, which was sort of cool, if somewhat odd. As far as she'd been able to find out nothing in that area had a basement deep enough to match her readings, which implied some sort of secret base. Whether that belonged to a hero or villain she had no idea, either choice being possible. Perhaps one day she'd find out, but for now it wasn't really important.
A group of four other targets that had been in the bad part of the Docks had also disappeared, her logs showing them to have moved around the city quite a lot for a while then exiting to the east and not returning. Again, she didn't know who it was, aside from clearly being an organized group, but beyond that she was in the dark. It didn't really matter, for the most part she wasn't interested in the identity of the targets, merely the data she could gather on their existence.
There was something very odd about Parahumans in general, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it. And the more she learned the odder the whole thing was, but the more fascinating. How all this linked into subspace and quantum variations she wasn't yet sure. On the other hand, the fact that it did left a number of paths of inquiry open to her, and fitted neatly with her own interests and skills. Being able to track the end result of Parahuman abilities had helped immensely in finding Tinker Tech to examine, for instance, and the portals that had briefly appeared well off shore a while back were also extremely intriguing and clearly related to the same sort of thing.
She wasn't sure who was behind them, but she had a growing understanding of how such a thing could be done…
And she was also coming to the conclusion, when working out the theory behind it, that yet again the Parahuman method to do what it was doing was doing it wrong. Or at least, very inefficiently. The math seemed to suggest that a cleaner solution to the problem was possible but she was still thinking about the whole thing and wasn't quite at the stage of being able to test her hypothesis. Soon, though. The hardware should be fairly straightforward, once she worked out a few minor residual issues and finished the equations needed.
So many projects, so little time, she thought with a smile to herself. But that was one of the things that was so much fun, of course.
Noting the presence of a pair of familiar target signatures in another area in the docks, not too far from the DWU area, she zoomed in on her map and stared at the display. Some adjustments to the processing algorithms revealed what she'd suspected, traces of the minute quantum hiss that Tinker Tech emitted, although the resolution at this distance wasn't sufficient with her current long range sensors to get a good read on the source or sources. Making some notes on improvements that would fix that issue, she put the pen down again and returned to the display. Correlating the results with those of the Rig, which she was using as a control since she was certain it was stuffed full of Tinker hardware, she nodded thoughtfully to herself.
"Not quite as large a reading, but close," she muttered, propping her chin on her hands and staring at the screen. "Gotta be Leet. Probably target one, there, I'd think, so that logically makes target two Über. Huh. I wonder if those last devices I found were his stuff? I'll need a really good sensor to be sure from here..." The girl picked up her pen and notebook and spent a while thinking hard, slowly jotting down a new design for a very directional and sensitive quantum interference detector specifically capable of filtering out background noise and selectively distinguishing the type of interference pattern at long range. That task took her another forty minutes, long enough for her analysis program to finish munching its way through about two terabytes of data and ping for her attention.
She glanced up at the other monitor, then wrote the last few words in her notebook, before typing a few sentences into her Parahuman detector database. When she'd finished updating it, she closed that program and switched back to the first one. Studying the resulting data with great interest, she nodded slowly to herself.
"Fascinating," she murmured under her breath, barely audible over the faint background track from the alien tutor channel playing quietly in the basement lab. Every now and then she almost subconsciously recognized a few words, glancing at the speaker with a small smile when this happened before returning her attention to the screen.
Eventually she rolled the chair sideways and picked up the latest bit of hardware she'd been fiddling with, a specialized variant of the subspace detector that was an outgrowth of her Tinker Tech tracker. She'd noticed a few odd readings on the phone she'd put that device into when she'd taken it to school and had spent some time puzzling over this, finally working out that it was picking up something somewhat more subtle than the background noise of anomalous technology interfering with normal subspace. The signal was barely at the detectable threshold, being both very faint and, for want of a better term, on a different frequency. This was not at all accurate for most purposes, but she still hadn't settled on the right terminology to describe subspace properly.
The important thing right now was that she knew what she meant. She'd work out how to tell other people as and when she actually did tell other people about the whole thing, which was still a problem in her mind. Taylor was all too well aware that much of her work could have some pretty severe implications to both Parahumans and everyone else, many of these being potentially very unpleasant. It was something that worried her, as she didn't want to hurt anyone, and felt that Parahumans had as much right to privacy as everyone else. Friends of hers would be affected, after all, and even leaving that aside, there were a hell of a lot of possible problems that her research could spark off.
It was a tricky problem. So she was in no real hurry to tell anyone else at the moment. Not until she could work out a solution, or there was a good reason to tell them. Ideally both.
Dismissing this line of thought yet again, she connected the new detector unit to various pieces of test gear and her computer, then very carefully checked her work, before powering it up. Once she'd tested all the voltages were good, nothing was getting excessively hot, all the current draws were correct, and none of the magic smoke was escaping, she started testing it bit by bit. Eventually she was happy that the basic system was functional.
Moving back to the computer she opened the development editor and spent a while going over her code. Spotting a couple of tiny errors she fixed them, then began writing a new processing section based on the results of her latest analysis run. After over two hours, and a few aborted compilations, she finally had something she was happy with and uploaded it to the sensor unit. When it finished flashing the new program she reset it, then fired up the front end program on the computer.
Taylor studied the results the device was producing and frowned. "Weird," she mumbled, moving sideways to the sensor package and bending over it, remembering this time to put her safety goggles on just in case. She stared at it closely, before adjusting a couple of faintly glowing coil-like structures wrapped with half a dozen oddly shaped windings in different metals. Her ceramic screwdriver distorted in a somewhat visually disturbing manner as she gently inserted it down the core of one of the components due to the multidimensional nature of the field it was producing, something she thought was rather neat. Tweaking it she looked up at the bank of power supplies, checking the readings on them, before tweaking it a tiny bit more then nodding in satisfaction. Moving to the second one she adjusted that as well, watching the readings on one analog meter jump, then settle back at a steady position.
She found analog meters were sometimes invaluable for this sort of thing, since they gave an instant visual feedback a digital reading didn't, and were easier to quickly read.
Both components were now glowing a little more brightly. "That's better," she said to herself, pleased. "Really good resonance lock now. OK, let's see what that does..."
Back at the computer, she reset the sensor unit again, then watched the program output for a while with a furrowed brow. Eventually she looked across at the thing on the bench and studied it for a few seconds. "That is… very intriguing," she commented softly to the aliens, still talking to themselves at the threshold of hearing. "Not quite a portal, but really similar in some ways. And really small too." She reached out and carefully pivoted the device ninety degrees while watching the readings, then tilted it up and down by the same amount. "And really close as well."
She looked around the room, an expression of bemusement on her face. Then she got up and picked the entire sensor up off the workbench, making sure not to dislodge any of the cables connected to it, and spent a few minutes turning it in every direction possible while logging the results. When she finished she put it back and sat down again, going back over the logged data.
Eventually she tilted her chair back and peered at the ceiling. "Huh. I didn't expect that," she said under her breath, thinking very hard. "I wonder..."
By the time she went to bed, she'd opened a new project and got about half way through sketching out a design for yet another specialized sensor. She was going to have to get some very close range readings of as many different Parahumans as she could with the new device to work out what was going on.
The subspace interference she'd detected coming from Parahumans seemed to have another layer to it she'd not initially noticed, one that was definitely related to portals but different in a number of interesting ways.
One of those ways raising the intriguing question of whether Parahumans really did have tiny little almost-portals inside their heads. And if they did, where did the other end go?
Taylor was definitely going to figure that one out.
And even more interestingly, she was going to figure out why there was a similar but subtly different phenomenon apparently somewhere in the house itself…
If something was watching her, she was damn well going to find out what it was and watch it right back. Whether it liked it or not.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"The Prime Asset can duplicate Tinker Technology?"
Secretary Robinson's voice was flat.
"Not quite that simple, sir. She can understand Tinker Technology."
The woman speaking, Doctor Gabrielle Hudson, a physicist, mathematician, and engineer with four different doctorates acquired over her sixty years of life, and more than fifty patents to her name, shook her head in wonder. "At least the specific examples that were acquired from local sources. The investigation of them was unparalleled in its detail and comprehension of the underlying principles. The Prime Asset appears to be able to derive the theory behind what the specific implementation is doing, or as it was put, trying to do and not quite managing that correctly, then generalizing this to a functional explanation understandable by anyone sufficiently versed in the relevant fields. I will note that despite nearly thirty years of effort across the world, no one else has ever managed to do what the Prime Asset has managed apparently as a side project mostly due to curiosity."
"Unbelievable." He stared at her, then at the report in front of him, a summary of the much more comprehensive data that General Calhoun had acquired from a recent visit to Gravtec, along with the results of a lot of careful verification work done by DARPA scientists. "And this is like the gravitic work, something that genuinely can be mass produced?"
"Yes. The basic principles are surprisingly straightforward in most respects once you manage to get to grips with a far more comprehensive superset of physics than described by the Standard Model and any other current understandings of how the universe actually works. Most of which are rapidly becoming apparent as being severely lacking in numerous areas. Just the gravitational theory the Prime Asset produced opened up a vast number of paths to a true understandings of physics, and clearly this has helped with the Tinker conundrum. Much of the documentation handed to DARPA relies on the previous work in many places, and without such understanding it's now obvious that discovering how such anomalous technology functions was never going to be possible, at least without a century or so of very difficult effort."
"I see." He rubbed his chin as he looked at the documentation, flipping through it again slowly while everyone else waited patiently. "And this isn't simply reverse engineering specific devices? It's a true understanding of the underlying operational theory?"
"Definitely, yes, Mr Secretary." Doctor Hudson indicated the report in front of him with the end of her pen. "We have thoroughly investigated the initial reports, and DARPA engineers and scientists have not only successfully duplicated the work involved in the original proof of concept hardware, but generalized it to a whole class of related implementations. Several of which were mentioned by the Prime Asset as possible if someone wanted to work on it. One application is an inversion of the cloaking device, which instead of bending electromagnetic radiation around a zone of space, instead reflects it directly back to where it came from. A perfect mirror, in other words, one that can in theory cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum."
He looked at her in amazement.
"There are quite a number of practical applications for just that," she added with a small smile. "A telescope mirror, a radiation shield, a solar power generator, perfect heat insulation, and quite a few more our people immediately thought of. Invisibility, while useful, is merely the tip of the iceberg."
"Good lord." Robinson looked down at the report again, shook his head, and closed the folder. "Yet again I am stunned."
"That does seem to be a common result of the Prime Asset becoming interested in something, sir," Hudson chuckled.
"So it would appear," he agreed. Turning to one of the other people, he asked, "Does this impact on our situation vis a vis the PRT?"
The Attorney General, Quentin Miles, looked thoughtful. He had a short quiet conversation with one of his associates, then looked back at Robinson. "We don't believe so, no. The PRT can make a case that Parahumans are their responsibility, although as you are aware this is not entirely correct in all possible cases, and they do tend to assume that the results of Parahuman powers fall under their remit. However, there is a significant amount of legal precedent showing that it's entirely feasible for Tinker Tech, for example, to be transferred perfectly legally via several methods to private or company ownership. Admittedly the NEPEA-5 laws make it hard for any Parahuman to profit from their powers, which was clearly the entire reason for passing them, something I personally feel was not well thought out, but the stated intent of such laws were to prevent Parahuman abilities conferring an unfair commercial advantage."
He looked around at the others, all of whom were listening carefully.
"Of course, if the Parahuman in question provides a service or product that can't be conventionally arranged, there's a good case to be made that NEPEA laws don't apply. Past cases have gone either way, but in the case of Tinker Tech it's been generally considered that assuming no laws were broken in the process, and that the technology is performing a function that can't be otherwise reasonably done in other ways, it's entirely legal to sell or give it to someone else. Of course, there are other issues at play, with dangerous technology, weapons, self-replicating organisms or machines, that sort of thing, but there are plenty of cases where this has been done. The PRT often kicks back about it, they really don't like not having total control of such things, but the courts certainly don't always go their way. In fact in recent years they've lost more such cases than they've won, and precedent tends to show this is likely to continue."
Miles shrugged slightly. "Several tech companies have taken advantage of such loopholes to acquire Tinker Tech for study in an attempt to reverse engineer them, almost invariably without success, the Federal government reserves the right to do much the same as well although in recent years this has been quite rare since it so seldom produced results, and there are even a number of successful niche businesses that deal in custom Tinker products for various clients. Toybox is the most obvious one but there are several more that are less well known. The limited lifespan of Tinker hardware tends to be significantly more of an issue than the legality of acquiring it."
He looked down at the notebook he'd been scribbling in during the meeting. "Abandoned Tinker devices also sometimes turn up, especially in places like Brockton Bay, and while the PRT will usually either confiscate them or pay a bounty on them if turned in, they also tend to ignore quite a lot of the less important devices. At one point they obsessively collected every single item they could find, but in the last ten or twelve years this seems to have become low priority. Possibly due to lack of resources, but you'd have to ask them to find out for sure. A large amount of this sort of material ends up on online auction sites and again there's precedent to show that, under many circumstances, it's entirely legal. Laws of salvage among other things."
Secretary Robinson nodded slowly as he finished speaking. "So essentially you believe that the PRT do not have a monopoly on Tinker Technology, even if they would like to?"
"That is what precedent and legal opinions show, sir, yes," the other man agreed. "Additionally, I will point out that from what Doctor Hudson has explained, the result of the Prime Asset's work, even it if was inspired by Tinker work, is not Tinker work. By definition. It's entirely reproducible and understandable by a person of sufficient knowledge in the relevant fields, which makes it mundane technology and entirely out of the PRT's legal remit no matter how they might attempt to argue the case. It's provably not the result of Parahuman powers. This has been shown before in the very limited number of cases where some technological breakthrough resulted from the study of previous Tinker devices, the archetypal case being of course Solwind Industries vs Parahuman Response Team, 1997. The PRT took that all the way to the Supreme Court and ultimately lost, on the basis that the innovation in question was explicable by normal science and therefore not Parahuman in nature regardless of the provenance of the original inspiration of the new solar cell design the company invented."
"I see," Robinson replied after he'd mulled that over for a few seconds. "Excellent. So there is still no reason for the Chief Director to become involved."
Miles smiled thinly. "I suspect she would strenuously argue otherwise, but legally she would find it very, very hard to make her case. With the national security restrictions covering the entire situation being what they are, I would say it was impossible, to be honest. There is no legal rationalization I or anyone else can come up with that wouldn't be dismissed out of hand with years if not decades of precedent to back that judgment up."
The Secretary thought this over again. Eventually he looked at one of the other people present. "I believe it would be a sensible idea to organize through suitable channels to acquire more Tinker Technology and see that it is passed on to the Prime Asset through DARPA. Discreetly, of course, no sense making the PRT get any more interested than they already are, but if this is what happens from the limited amount of samples locally sourced, it would be interesting to see what would happen with a larger quantity."
The dark haired man he was talking to, who was not known by name to any of the ones present other than the Secretary himself, nodded and made some notes. "That can be arranged," he said in a quiet voice. "We have a number of potential sources for such things. It may cost."
Robinson waved a hand. "Money is irrelevant."
"Possibly other requirements will be needed."
"That can be arranged. Whatever it takes. As usual, this is the highest priority other than the safety of the Prime Asset and related personnel. Orders directly from the President."
"Understood, sir." The man nodded again as he finished writing and slipped the notebook into his inside pocket. "And if any PRT operatives do become involved?"
"Dissuade them. Refer them to me if required. Ideally, though, keep things under their radar. It'll make life a lot easier for everyone."
The agency man merely smiled a little.
Looking around the table, Robinson seemed satisfied. "Thank you, everyone. Good work. We'll meet again in two weeks unless something critical comes up. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to meet with the Joint Chiefs and brief them on the somewhat startling results our friend has yet again pulled out of a hat."
He stood up and picked up the folder, slipping it into his briefcase, while everyone else also rose and left. When he exited the room he headed deeper into the Pentagon, thinking hard about what would come next.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Putting a forkful of spaghetti into her mouth, Taylor slowly ate it, while fiddling with her phone with her free hand. She discreetly nudged it to point at the table that the Wards sat at, all four boys current discussing baseball with some of their friends, while Vicky Dallon listened idly as she ate. The blonde girl looked mildly bored but not enough to push for a subject change.
Tapping the screen a couple of times, she ran another scan, looking at the small complex graph that quickly built up in various colors and mentally decomposing the result to its component values. Yet again, the results were fascinating, and backed up some of the conclusions she'd arrived at over the last couple of weeks.
She was getting closer to working out what the next step should be, and it looked like she was going to learn some really cool data when she built the equipment she'd need to take that step.
Eating another mouthful, she picked the phone up as Amy sat opposite her, the other girl smiling at her. She smiled back, watching as her friend put her own tray down and grabbed a can of soda then popped the top. "That math test was a bastard," Amy commented, looking somewhat annoyed.
"It wasn't that bad," Taylor replied, toying with the phone then glancing at the screen before putting it in her pocket.
"Yeah, you would say that. You're weird with math." Amy grinned at her. Taylor laughed a little, shrugging.
"I like it."
"Weird, I say." Amy sighed, then picked up her fork. "I'll stick to biology. That I can handle."
"You're good at Spanish too," Taylor commented.
"You're picking that up much too fast as well," Amy grumbled good-naturedly. "I've been learning it for four years and I'm not as good as you are after a few months!"
"Gift for languages, maybe?" Taylor suggested, smiling as she took a drink of her apple juice. "Linguistics is pretty neat."
"It's unfair," the other girl sighed. "You got the height and the brains. I'm just left with godlike power and snarkiness."
They exchanged a glance then burst out laughing, before discussing a movie both wanted to see. Taylor put her investigations to one side, as there was friendship to be done.
And that was nearly as important as Science.
