Quicksilver

by R. J. Anderson

  Listlessly I packed up the few bits of the transceiver I’d assembled so far and shoved the box into a corner. I still needed to get it out of the house before Mom or Dad got curious, but there was no point until I knew where I was going.

  And right now, it looked like I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I was in bed and three-quarters asleep when my phone buzzed. I fumbled for it, thinking sourly that if it was Sebastian he was about to get an eyeful.

  –Just got e-mail from the makerspace. Went to spam so I didn’t see it right away, sorry.

  Well, of course they’d sent the message to Milo. He was the one who looked like a budding engineer. I was just the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in his personal life story, sent to wave her soldering iron around in a semi-competent fashion and awaken Milo to his true calling. The unfairness of it made me grind my teeth, but I reminded myself for the twenty-sixth time that I didn’t want anyone to notice me anyway.

  –So what did they say?

  –Good news. We’re in.

  I collapsed onto the pillows, limp with relief.

  –But we can’t use the space unless there’s a member present. And we’ll need to fill out a couple of forms.

  –Least of my worries. Thanks.

  –No prob. Sweet dreams. See you tomorrow.

  1 0 0 0 1 0

  I smuggled my box of parts out of the basement late that night and stashed it behind the garden shed, wrapped up in a garbage bag in case of rain. It stayed there until dinner on Tuesday, when Milo sneaked into the backyard and took it away. When I got off the bus by the makerspace an hour later, he was standing there with the box under his arm, waiting for me.

  “We’re still going to have to get all the other stuff from your neighbor’s,” I said as we walked. Milo’s next-door neighbor was an elderly widow, and Milo had been mowing her lawn and shoveling her driveway for years. So when he’d told her that he’d ordered a bunch of parts for a school project and didn’t want the couriers to wake up his mother during the day, she’d been happy to sign for everything.

  “Not a problem,” said Milo. “But let’s get this stuff dealt with first.”

  So we went inside and knocked at the makerspace, and when the door opened, it was Front Desk Guy, beaming at us. “Hey!” he said. “Come on through. I told Barry about your project, and he’s pretty amped about helping you out. So between him and Len and me, you should be able to get in any night of the week.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “I really appreciate this.”

  “It’s what we’re here for,” he said cheerfully and led us up the ramp to the clean room. “Hey Barry! They’re here. Wanna help them set up?”

  We turned the corner and there was Barry, aka Radio Guy, short and stocky and goatee-wearing, elbow-deep in a large cardboard box. His eyebrows went up as he saw us, as did mine, and for the same reason.

  “Hi,” I said. “How’s the quadrotor?”

  “Uh, hi,” he replied. He glanced at Milo as though for reassurance, then stepped back from the carton. “You want to do this?”

  He was looking at me, holding out the battered utility knife he’d used to cut the box open. For a moment I was puzzled—until I saw the label on the box’s side. Not to mention the other boxes and packages stacked up at the other end of the table, all of them bearing the same address.

  “Milo, you didn’t!” I exclaimed, and he grinned.

  “My neighbor let me borrow her car,” he said. “I brought it all down here after school. Surprise?”

  I could feel FDG and Barry watching us, waiting for my reaction. I knew what they expected, and I knew better than to hesitate. But even as I threw my arms around Milo, I wished I could have thanked him without having to put on a performance. And when I felt his fingers tighten against my back, the way his breath caught when my lips brushed his cheek, my delight vanished beneath a rumbling landslide of guilt. He deserved better than this charade. I wished I had something better to give him.

  “You’re the best!” I enthused, breaking off the embrace and bouncing over to take the knife from Barry. “Let’s get started.”

  In spite of our rocky start, I had to give Barry credit. It only took him a few minutes of watching me lay out the various parts and components to realize he’d misjudged where the enthusiasm for this project was coming from, and after that he started addressing all his comments to me. Soon Milo drifted off to a nearby table with his laptop and left us to it.

  “What kind of antenna are you using?” Barry asked, following me as I carried my circuit board to the soldering station. “Dish or Yagi?”

  Playing slightly dumb was a lot harder than playing completely dumb. I wasn’t used to working in front of people who understood what I was doing, and I had to remind myself to act uncertain. “I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “Well, I know a guy who used to work at the cable company, and now he sells surplus electronics,” he said. “He’s got a couple dishes sitting around, if you need one.”

  According to Sebastian, I didn’t have to worry about finding an antenna. But I didn’t have to fake my interest either, because Barry had just given me an idea. “Do you think he might have a vector network analyzer?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” said Barry, looking surprised. “Maybe. I’ll give him a call.”

  He wandered off to the lounge, while I laid out the remaining packages of capacitors and chips I needed to complete the microcontroller circuit I’d started at home. Most of the components had been simple to solder, but these last twenty-two were all surface-mounted, and some were so tiny that a single careless breath could send them flying in all directions. I swung the lighted magnifying glass over the board, picked up my tweezers, and went to work.

  I’d been soldering for what seemed like only a few minutes, absorbed in the pleasure of concentration, when I became aware of fragmented whispers coming from behind me.

  “… should see how fast … barely used the magnifier…”

  “… no way can anybody solder that many SMDs in ten minutes…”

  “… look closer—oh man, she just picked up that SOIC.”

  I had too. The tiny square was at the end of my tweezers. Which meant Barry wasn’t telling the others about some instructional video he’d watched online, as I’d vaguely supposed.

  He was talking about me.

  My tweezers shook, and the chip dropped onto the board a full centimeter out of place. My greatest worry until now had been that Barry would notice the modifications I’d made to my transceiver or ask me why it needed so much power. I never imagined I’d get busted for something as simple and basic as my soldering technique.

  But I couldn’t let that stop me. I had to keep working as long as I still had the chance. So I willed my hand steady and nudged the wayward chip back into position. I’d applied a thin line of flux and was drag-soldering the pins into place when Barry leaned over my shoulder. “D’you mind … uh, I mean, when you’re done with that chip, could we take a look at your PCB?”

  My instincts told me to play innocent. “Oh, sure!” I said, with an internal wince at how perky I sounded. “Hang on, I’m almost finished … okay, there.”

  I put down my soldering iron and slid out of the chair. Barry and the other two members crowded forward to inspect the circuit board, sweeping the magnifier across its surface. The tallest one frowned, and I held my breath—but then he leaned back and let out a sigh.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured. “Not a bridge in sight, and look at the size of that tip she’s using.” He turned his quizzical brown eyes on me. “Where’d you learn to drag solder like that, at your age?”

  “She’s homeschooled,” Milo spoke up before I could answer and strolled over to join us. “Hey, baby,” he said, in an exaggerated drawl that even a stranger couldn’t have mistaken for anything but a joke. “Are these guys bothering you?” He pretended to crack his knuckles.

  Barry and the others flicked me wary glances, and I laughed,
as much with nerves as relief. “Oh no,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  The three men relaxed, and the stocky one gave a sly smile. “Mohan here was just about to ask you to marry him and bear him many beautiful geeky children,” he said, elbowing the tall one in the side. “But since you’re taken—”

  “Excuse me, Jake,” said the other with dignity, “You’re forgetting I’m taken.”

  “Oh, right. Guess it’s just me then.” Jake flashed me a grin. “Seriously, nice work. I’ll have to get you to give me a lesson sometime.” Then he strolled off back to his own project, and after a slight hesitation, Mohan followed him.

  “So,” Barry said, when the others had gone, “let me tell you what I found out about your VNA. Surplus Steve doesn’t have one, but he knows a guy who does and is willing to do you a loaner if you give him fifty bucks deposit. Sound okay?”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Where can I pick it up?”

  “Oh, I can do that for you.” Barry waved my surprise aside. “I’m off work right now—wrecked my back doing long-haul trucking for sixteen years and can’t start retraining until June. So it’s no big deal to run an errand or two.” He paused, his gaze sliding back to the circuit board at my elbow. “I’ve never seen a layout quite like that before. Who did the design?”

  My pulse quickened, but I didn’t let myself falter. “Oh,” I said, “just a guy I know.”

  “Huh.” He blinked and scratched the side of his nose. “Well, I’d like to meet that guy.” He gave me a last, unreadable look and wandered back to his table.

  “Everything okay?” asked Milo, when he was gone. “They weren’t criticizing you or anything, were they?”

  “No,” I said, feeling the tension in my stomach beginning to unwind. “They were just looking.”

  And it was true, because nobody interrupted me for the rest of the evening. By nine o’clock I’d finished the microcontroller, made a good start on the oscillator, and was feeling good about my progress. At this rate, I might have the transceiver ready by the end of the week.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said to Barry, with a nod to Front Desk Guy—whose name, I’d finally found out, was Shawn. “So it’s okay for me to leave my stuff here?”

  “Sure thing,” said Shawn. “But we’ve got a bunch of homeschoolers building robots in the morning, so if there’s anything you’re worried about, you might want to stash it in one of the lockers. And tomorrow night we’ve got the crafters coming in, so it might be a little crowded…”

  “I just got called into work for tomorrow,” said Milo, making a face at his phone. “Can Niki get in with one of you guys?”

  “Uh,” said Shawn. “Well, I’m teaching a night course—”

  “I’ll keep an eye on her,” said Barry. “Is seven o’clock okay?”

  Under other circumstances I might have hesitated before accepting that offer. But even if Barry turned out to be a creeper, he’d have to be pretty stupid to harass me in a room full of women armed with sharp objects. And besides, he was clearly a lot more interested in my transceiver than he was in me.

  “That would be great,” I said.

  1 0 0 0 1 1

  Barry brought in the VNA the following night as promised, and it didn’t take us long to convert the makerspace’s old oscilloscope into a spectrum analyzer, so I finally had all the equipment I needed. And by the time I went home that night, I was starting to feel hopeful that I’d be allowed to finish the transceiver without interference.

  Thursday went even better. Mohan watched me at the drill press, and Len helped me laser-cut the enclosure. When he saw me working on the bandpass filters, Jake hailed me as “Goddess of Solder” and pretended to worship me, and later that night a girl named Mandy told me she was a third-year engineering student and joked that we geek girls should stick together. But none of them questioned what I was doing at all.

  Unfortunately, the transceiver still wasn’t finished, so I had to beg off my usual Friday night shift at Value Foods. But I’d asked Kayleigh to cover for me, so I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble. At least not until halfway through the evening, when Barry pulled out a chair and sat down next to me.

  “You know,” he said seriously, “this transceiver you’re building is pretty hard-core, if all your dad wants is to bounce a radio signal off the moon. Not that moon bounces aren’t a challenge, but…”

  “You don’t think it’s going to work?” I asked, making an effort to sound anxious. Not that I wasn’t concerned about getting it wrong, but so far everything I’d built had performed exactly as it should. I was more worried about whether Sebastian had given me the right specifications in the first place.

  “I, uh, wouldn’t say that,” Barry replied with a sideways glance at the 3-D printer, where Len was working. “You seem to have a really good handle on what you’re doing. I’m just not sure I understand what you’re doing.”

  “Well,” I said slowly as my brain scrambled for a plausible answer, “I kind of wanted something more versatile…”

  My phone rang, sparing me the rest of the sentence. “Excuse me,” I said to Barry and hurried off to the lounge. “Hello?”

  “It’s me.” Milo sounded tense. I could hear rumbling in the background and the slow beep of a truck backing up for a late delivery. “You know that ex-cop you said was looking for you? Becker?”

  Cold crept up my spine. “Deckard. What about him?”

  “He’s here in the store. Right now.”

  PART THREE: Hunting

  (The undesirable oscillation that occurs when a feedback control system is unable to reduce the error rate to zero)

  1 0 0 1 0 0

  My legs felt shaky, and I gripped the corner of the bookshelf for support. I’d known Deckard might come to town looking for Sebastian, but I’d never dreamed his search would lead him so quickly to me.

  “Niki?” asked Milo, faint and tinny. “You there?”

  “How—” I cleared my throat. “How do you know it’s Deckard?”

  “Because he showed me your picture and asked me if I recognized you,” said Milo. “Said you were a missing girl who’d been seen in the area, and there’d be a reward if I helped him find you.”

  I leaned harder on the bookcase and closed my eyes. Milo went on, “I told him you worked at the Tim Horton’s on the corner. I thought if I could get him to leave, I could run around and tell Jon and the others he was a stalker. But when I came up to the front, he was by the manager’s office, looking at the staff board.”

  Which had my picture on it, of course. With my name underneath, in large friendly letters. I groped along the sofa and sat down.

  “I tried to sneak back to the stockroom, but he saw me,” Milo said. “Then he called me over and showed me another picture. A still from a security video, with the two of us together. From the night you stopped the bus.”

  My throat felt like someone had soldered it shut. “Go on.”

  “So I played the stalker card myself,” he said. “I said you’d told me you were hiding from a creepy ex-boyfriend and that I shouldn’t talk about you to anybody but the police. That seemed to work, because he backed off and let me go. But he’s still in the store. He’s talking to Jon right now.”

  And not only did Jon Van Beek know exactly where I lived, he had my cell number. Friendly, trusting, farm-raised Jon, who would probably never guess this clean-cut, soft-spoken man would do me any harm. Especially if Deckard pulled out that medical emergency story he’d used on Alison, because Jon would love a chance to be my hero.

  In short, I was doomed.

  “So what are we going to do?” Milo asked, and his voice seemed to be coming from a billion miles away. I stared at the word clock on the wall, which said IT IS FIVE AFTER EIGHT, and tried to think.

  I couldn’t go back to Value Foods, not now that Deckard knew I worked there. So there went my job. I couldn’t be seen with Milo, because Deckard would be watching him. So there went my best friend, quasi boyfriend, an
d partner in crime. I couldn’t even go home, because now that Deckard had my name, it wouldn’t take him long to hunt down my address. Nothing in my life was secure anymore, and nowhere was safe. The only thing to do was run.

  But I couldn’t do that, either. Not before I’d finished this transceiver. Because what was the use of hiding from Deckard and Dr. Gervais, if Mathis got to me first?

  “I don’t know,” I said to Milo. “I don’t know what to do.”

  For five seconds Milo didn’t answer. Then he said in a decisive voice, “Stay where you are. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  1 0 0 1 0 1

  By the time my phone rang again, I’d pulled myself together. I even had the beginnings of a plan. “Okay,” I told Milo, “so once Deckard leaves—”

  “Wait,” said Milo. “Let me go first. I just got off the phone with your dad.”

  “You what? He’s not even home tonight. How’d you get his cell number?”

  “Emergency contact,” Milo said. “It was in your file. Anyway, I told him a guy you used to know came into the store looking for you, and you were scared, so you hid out in the back with me. And now you’re afraid to leave in case he follows you home.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. It wasn’t a bad story—it had the advantage of being simple and mostly true. It would also throw my parents into a panic, but I couldn’t see any alternative. It’d be worse if Deckard showed up at the door and caught them unprepared.

  “But I told him not to worry,” said Milo, “because I’ve asked my grandparents to pick you up and take you to their house instead. You can even stay overnight with them, if you need to.”

  “You mean your mother’s parents? Your mother, who’s not supposed to know anything about—”

  “Never mind that,” he said. “I’ll explain later. How soon can you get to the 7-Eleven on Caledonia?”