by Thomas Babak
The front Stator assemblies stuck out inside the old engine compartment up front, the driver side in the wardrobe closet, the passenger side under the two burner propane stove and the back one stuck out right into where the mattress would normally lay. Sandy had hauled the mattress out, made an elevated platform out of two by fours and plywood. The van still had a bed. It was just a foot higher off the floor of the van now.
Then there was the bottom or belly Stator.
The first time he had tested the Bubble Field on the van it had been a bad experience for Sandy. He’d tested that first time with an RC remote control to turn the Bubble Field on remotely from a dozen feet away. When he pushed the switch to power up the Bubble on the van that first time, a sudden crack with the sound of an explosion had rocked Sandy back. He landed on his butt, the remote he was using to turn on the Bubble flying out of his hand, his ears ringing. The van had disappeared, for a second and then reappeared as his thumb came off the remote lever, the spring bringing it back to center and turning off the power. He’d looked up to see the van settling down on the platform. Smoke was rising from the tires, metal glowing from where the wheels had been severed.
Getting up off the floor he walked around the van. A severed part of one of the wheels and part of a tire lay on the floor. He picked it up being careful not to touch anywhere where it had been cut by the Bubble. It was warm from the spreading heat but began to cool in his hand already from the chill air in the bay.
He walked around the van several times and then looked underneath. He stepped back and confirmed his suspicions by eyeballing the Stator with where the tires had been severed.
The mistake he had made then was that he’d extended the bottom Stator down so that it would clear the underside of the van but had completely forgotten about the van’s wheels and tires. The Bubble had formed around the van but had cut through the wheels to join with the fields being formed by the other Stators. The same thing had happened to the power cord during his experiments with the Bubble Sphere when he’d first stumbled on and invented Bubble Tech.
He eventually had solved the problem of the belly Stator destroying the wheels. He couldn’t just have the belly Stator sticking down within a fraction of an inch off the ground. It would catch and be torn off when he drove the van on roads. What he ended up doing was making an access panel on floor of the van over the bottom Stator. He then made a steel tube with the belly Stator mounted on the end that could be raised or lowered. Up it would be a foot away from the ground, down it would be almost to the level of the bottom of the tires.
I’m going to trip over that constantly, he thought when he first was trying to figure out how to build it. Break it too. The belly Stator tube sat right in the middle of the floor between the stove, sink, closet and fridge. He built a steel frame around the belly Stator tube that came up to counter height and covered the sides. So now an awkward post sat in the middle of the van but Sandy soon got used to it. He hardly bumped into anymore as he moved around inside the van.
He wired up a motor to the belly Stator tube that could be controlled by his “cockpit” as he repeatedly tried but failed calling the driver seat and his improvised controls and monitors. He even created a software function for it to lower automatically when he turned on the Bubble field. It would lower and when it stopped, fully extended or touching the ground, it would let the software know and the Bubble Field routine would initiate.
There was no good way to hide all the wires inside the van, but Sandy had spent hours running wires from every Stator to every other Stator bundling them together and using zip ties to keep them together, pinned by cable holders glued strategically around the van.
The sprucing up was taking longer than he thought it would.
He wiped down the van, using a tall stepladder so he could reach the roof. He sprayed primer on the covers and surrounding areas trying artistically to feather the paint in after it dripped the first time he tried spraying. The primer was mostly dry. He’d spray paint over the primer with paint that closely matched the van’s original color as soon as the primer was dry.
Grabbing some Windex he cleaned all the windows. The inside of the van was a mess. He took all the Stator and camera covers off and spray painted those an off white, leaving them to dry on the barn floor. A portable shop wet-dry vacuum picked up all the pieces of snipped wire, dust and odds and ends that had accumulated inside on the van floor. Sandy had been surprised at how much crap had accumulated. He’d been so focused on creating the technology and implementing it that he hadn’t cleaned up after himself each day as was his typical habit.
Shutting down the vacuum, he carried back outside the van and glanced over at the TV. It showed a dump truck crashing into several cars and barreling off down a street. The video obviously being shot from a helicopter overhead. Sandy read the text that crawled across the bottom of the screen “… stolen. Police are attempting…” before he quickly put the vacuum down and ran over to the TV. He picked up the remote and unmuted it.
A female voice said “…again, local police and State Troopers are attempting to apprehend a stolen municipal truck that has already damaged multiple cars and injured several people…” The screen replayed footage of the truck smashing into several cars before heading around a street corner where it was lost from view from the helicopter camera crew. “We’re going now live to Chuck Pearson in our Sky 5 Newscopter. Chuck, what is the latest?”
“Valerie… ” came a voice and the muffled background noise from a helicopters rotors:“… the stolen municipal plow truck is now on County 12 heading west near Delano. The Troopers have attempted to stop it several times without success. As you know, these snow plows weigh several tons and with that huge steel plow mounted up front, they will have a challenge stopping and apprehending whoever is driving it.” The TV screen changed back to the female anchor, wearing a serious expression. Before she spoke, Sandy muted the TV again.
I can help here, Sandy thought as he watched the view change back to the helicopters vantage point. Sandy dropped the remote onto the TV and ran back to van. Getting in, he powered up all the systems. This would take a couple minutes so he jumped out and unlocked the barn door and raised it up. He ran over and unplugged the extension cord from the side of the van and then hastily got back in. The laptops were still booting up.
Everything in the van ran off of battery power. All the systems were controlled by a couple laptops he’d installed. They were ruggedized laptops called Toughbook’s that law enforcement and the military used extensively. The ones he found was light years ahead of his old laptop he’d bought off of Craigslist that he used for school and to initially develop the control software for Bubble Tech. Sandy couldn’t believe how cheap the used ones were being sold for and bought three of them.
He used two laptops in the van because he didn’t want to be a thousand feet in the air and have a laptop lock up or get a Blue Screen of Death, leaving him plummeting to the ground. After researching solutions he came up with a redundant solution using them. He came up with redundancies for everything else he could within the van to keep himself alive and well.
He mounted the two Toughbook’s inside the van and installed software that made one the Master and the other the Replica after networking them together. There was a communication heartbeat between the two and if the Master went down or locked up for some reason, the Replica would take over in microseconds and alert Sandy. The flight stick and thruster handle was plugged into a switch that would work with either Toughbook. Both laptops were exact duplicates of each other and either could be used to fly or drive the Bubble Van.
He installed a bank of 12 car batteries in the old engine compartment up front and used a generator that was hooked to the rear wheels to recharge them. He also had a charger that he could plug in to do the same. Sensors would let him know via his laptop and a dial on his dash the power status of the batteries at all times. He added a separate battery to power the Bubble Drive and another for the
Lifter drive that were separate from other batteries. These were set up isolated from the laptops and operated by mechanical switches. They were also his backups if everything else stopped working. His failsafe. Especially if he was several thousand feet in the air and things went wrong. They had similar types of sensors and dials installed to let him know the status of each.
The laptops were still booting up. I have to fix that somehow he thought to himself as he waited. Almost all of the power up time was waiting for the Operating Systems of the laptops to boot up.
Firmware instead of software? he thought. All the hacks, user interfaces and software he’d used to create the controls for the Bubble Van had been from open source Linux packages. He could compile on that and create firmware for some dedicated hardware. If he did that, the Bubble Van would be able to go within seconds. That, or I could leave the laptops on all the time, shaking his head at the thought of overheating and components frying. It would be nice to turn it on and go, he thought as everything finally came up and on. One day Sandy thought wistfully. He never seemed to have enough time.
The main monitor showed no alerts or error messages so Sandy clicked the flight stick clutch to Bubble Mode and activated the Bubble Field. From behind him he heard the brief whir of the electric motor as it deployed the belly Stator tube downward, the small electric motor humming the only noise in the van. It only took a second to deploy or retract the belly Stator. It clicked into place and then there was a muted pop, pale disappearing blue light, a slight lift upwards that he saw but didn’t feel and an increased silence as the Bubble field formed.
Everything was working normally. Sandy eased the thruster control forward gently and with minuscule movement, his hand hovering around the flight stick. The van began to slide forward slowly towards the barn door.
Once outside in the yard, Sandy pulled back on the Thruster gently until it was centered again. The van was stopped and hovering, invisibly, in the Yard. He reached with his thumb and clicked another button and pushed the thruster forward. The van rose straight up into the air.
The flight stick and controller were actually used for flight simulator games. Sandy had been surprised when he’d first received them in the mail. They were pretty well built and durable. He figured serious flight simulator enthusiasts would expect that. That they wanted all the realism they could get. So maybe it wasn’t so much of a surprise after all.
All of the buttons on the flight stick and thruster handle were programmable and Sandy had already used quite a few of them to tie them to various flight, lift and drive functions he had created in the controller software. You could also change the color of light that would glow from each when activated. He had made the light for Bubble Flight blue, Lifters were green and Driving was yellow. There would never be confusion, hopefully, about which mode he was in and what would happen if he pressed a button or control.
Once Sandy was several hundred feet in the air, he pressed another button and pushed the flight stick forward. The van tilted forward in place. Cars, or van in this case, were designed for a good view out through the windshield. They weren’t designed for a good view downwards. He stopped the forward tilt at what he thought was the best angle. It gave him a view of the horizon as well as the ground. He glanced over at the camera monitors. The left and right monitors showed a tilted horizon. The rear and top monitors showed blue sky. The belly camera showed an eagle eye view of part of the Yard and the farmland beyond and behind him.
Delano was south and east of here. I’ll just head south until I hit County 12 and follow it until I see the stolen truck, he thought.
The van was already facing south so Sandy disengaged the vertical flight button and pushed the thruster forward. The Bubble Van sped south quickly even though Sandy had barely pushed the thruster forwards. Soon he came to County 12 and turned left and dove downward closer to the ground so that he was barely over the tree tops and powerline poles as he followed the road eastwards. He’d have to watch for the news helicopter too. He could see them but they couldn’t see him. Mr. Bullock was right about what could happen.
It had taken weeks of practice and trial an error to learn to fly by what he could see combined with glances at the GPS. The hardest part had been recognizing terrain features and roads from the air versus the ground. Once he’d gotten the hang of it, it seemed much easier now flying over rather than driving on the ground.
It was only a couple minutes before he saw flashing lights up ahead. He wouldn’t hear anything. The Bubble field cancelled all noise from outside. Sometimes it was creepy in the van when the only sound you could hear was the sound of your own breathing. Got to put a sound system in here to play some music, Sandy thought absently despite the growing excitement about what he was about to do. He’d been worried for a couple of minutes that he wouldn’t be able to find the truck or that it would all be over before he got there.
The news helicopter flying several hundred feet behind where the truck was driving down the highway. There were a half dozen police and Trooper cars trailing behind the lights all flashing. Sandy hadn’t noticed the Trooper car that he had already flown over that was well in the lead to make sure other traffic was out of the way.
Sandy looped the van around and came back over the highway passing the police cars and easing the thruster handle back to match speed with the speeding dump truck. A quick glance over at the GPS and navigation monitor showed that he was flying around 67 miles per hour. He hovered over and just behind speeding truck. Now what? He thought. Sandy didn’t have a plan or really any thought about what he’d do next.
Maybe nudge it off the road? He finally thought. The excitement of everything along with a little fear about what he was doing made his maneuvers a little jumpy but soon he had the Bubble Van down alongside the truck. Sandy glanced at the camera monitors occasionally but mostly judged his position by looking out the passenger window. He also looked ahead. There had been no oncoming traffic for a while but he still had to follow the road as it meandered through the countryside. They were out on open country road, no other buildings or traffic. Sandy decided it would be a good spot to try something.
He barely eased the stick over but the reaction was immediate as the truck was pushed off the road. He hadn’t felt anything from inside the van, but the results were catastrophic for truck.
The truck travelled over the narrow shoulder, down the short embankment hitting its front right wheel which twisted back from the impact. The truck rolled over onto its side, gouging the dead grass covered earth and sliding for a couple dozen feet. It looked like it wanted to flip over but settled back onto its side with a final crash.
Sandy let out a loud whoop of triumph and circled the van around and brought it to a stop about a hundred feet back and a hundred feet up from the crash site. He tilted the van even further forward to get a better view, the seat belt he wore pulling at him.
The helicopter came into view briefly as it circled around. The police, Trooper vehicles, and an ambulance all rolled to a stop near the truck. They rushed out and over the truck. Only a couple of the officers had their guns drawn but they soon put them away. They all moved to the front of the truck, so Sandy reached out and grasped the thruster and flight stick and maneuvered the Bubble Van around so he could have a better view.
By the time he moved the van around the officers had already either removed the windshield of the truck or knocked out the remains of it and were calling out and waving to the ambulance. An EMT team rushed over with a gurney and they spent the next few minutes carefully removing the driver and strapping him in.
Sandy stayed and watched until they drove the truck driver, a man, away. The lights flashing and the sirens of the ambulance unheard by him in the silence of the van.
I’ve done something good. Heroic, Sandy thought to himself as he flew back to the Yard barn. He was pumped up with excitement and smiling the whole way back.
Once he had the van sitting back on the platform, powered down and the
extension cord plugged back in, Sandy watched the TV while standing there in front of it. There was no news of what had happened. He switched several channels and caught the tail end of one channel about “the chase being over.” It all seemed so anti-climactic now. Shouldn’t there be more he thought.
He’d been so excited and happy about what he had accomplished. The Bubble Tech could be used for good things. Even the slight disappointment that there wasn’t more on TV about it couldn’t lessen all of his excitement and enthusiasm. He’d already powered down the van so he’d go into Yard office to use the computer there to check online for news of stolen truck and details of what had happened.
With a smile on his face, Sandy locked up everything and headed to the bay. Once inside he walked upstairs to the Day Room. Mr. Bullock wasn’t around and Sandy was soon online using the office computer tucked under the front counter. The old tube screen monitor, mouse and keyboard sitting on the scarred counter top.
Within minutes, the excitement and pride he’d felt earlier had been replaced by nausea and guilt.
Larry Jacobson, the truck driver, was a city worker who had just found out his wife and child had been killed in a car accident. His only thoughts, apparently, were of getting home. In his distraught emotional state, he’d taken the truck from where he worked and was heading home to his wife and son. He just couldn’t accept that they were dead. Whoever had given him the news of his family’s death had apparently done a very bad job of it. There had actually been no injuries as previously reported, just some damaged parked cars. He had been two miles from his house when Sandy had run him off the road. Larry now had a broken back, a dead wife and a dead son. No charges were being pressed and sources were confident, considering the circumstances, that there would be any.
Sandy sat there frozen in thought. He’d wanted so badly to do something heroic he’d gone off half-cocked and didn’t consider the consequences. I hurt him, Sandy thought. I hurt him trying to be the hero and prove that Bubble Tech is a good thing. The articles he’d read said that Mr. Jacobson should eventually make a full recovery. Physically at least. If I had waited another few minutes he would have probably pulled into his driveway and that would have been the end of it, he thought. There was nothing Sandy could do for him right now but he resolved that if he did make something out of Bubble Tech he’d make sure that he’d make it right somehow for Mr. Jacobson.