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  “Nope!” She grinned, “Once I had the shapes I wanted, with little tails that went down on to my teeth and that fit perfectly into the shapes of my gums—that took molding them out of silicone first, then I casted them in Styrofoam—then I had Gary coat them with graphene. They have tiny ports in them and the ports are glued to my teeth in the right location.”

  Shan’s eyes widened as he began to understand.

  “Then I used acetone to dissolve the Styrofoam out of the little graphene bags, rinsing them a couple of times to get it all out.” She grinned, “So, when I apply a vacuum to the port the graphene bags disappear down to tiny bumps that I can barely feel on my teeth. Hook them up to pressurized air and voila, I have instant cheek prostheses.” She pulled her cheek out with one finger, “And, the graphene has a thin layer of tooth and gum color over it so you can’t really see the prosthesis when it’s inflated.”

  Shan shook his head in awe, “That’s amazing,” he breathed.

  “Wait! There’s more!” Ell said, unconsciously imitating a cheesy commercial. “I put a piercing on the septum of my nose.” She grimaced, “That was no fun, let me tell you. But the stud has little graphene donuts on it, so,” she spoke to Allan and her nostrils suddenly became wider. Ell raised an eyebrow at Shan’s look of startlement, then gave Allan another command. Abruptly her ears leaned out away from her head.

  Shan snorted a laugh at her new big eared, wide nosed look.

  “Little graphene balloons behind my ears,” she grinned, “and under my heels, she said, slowly rising to become about an inch taller. “And,” she winked, “being a man, you should like this one.” Over a few seconds, her chest enlarged. “Bra balloons.” Ell snorted at the way Shan stared wide eyed at her chest. “I think I look ridiculous with boobs this big, but I can tell from your glazed look that you actually think these monsters look good.”

  Shan blinked, and he waved his hands in surrender, “No, no, I loved you just the way you were!” he gasped out.

  Ell rolled her eyes, “Men! You probably won’t like this one.” She stood up and her loose pants gradually got tighter as she inflated balloons inside of them. “I inflate the bra and underpants with water so they’re softer and more flesh like. Even my wigs have bladders in them that can change the shape of my head. It’s a good thing my head is on the smaller size so that I can make it wider or longer without looking like a big headed alien freak.”

  Shan, whose eyes had been getting wider and wider, started laughing uncontrollably. As he wound down, he gasped, “That’s amazing!”

  “I have to go into a bathroom to change my hair and skin color, but once in a private location, I have lots of wigs that I can pop through, though I have to use a bigger port than my umbilical one.” She shrugged, “Changing my skin color takes a while so almost all my new identities use this same mildly darker color I use for ‘Raquel.’”

  They talked a while longer, deciding that they should set Shan up with a couple of identities, facial prostheses and an umbilical port to deliver items to him if he were to need to flee. Shan said, “You ready to head on back?”

  “Sure, but let me show you how to ‘get out of Dodge.’” Shan looked at her curiously and Ell said, “Talk to Allan. Tell him to send the hoverbike to your location and lower the lifting harness.”

  Shan did as she’d requested then looked around for the hoverbike.

  “No, if you want to see it, you have to look really high. It’s up at about 12,000 feet. At that height it’s really hard to see. It only covers about 0.05 degrees in its long dimension and the gray under color matches the sky. Also at that distance the wind noise from the fans isn’t audible.”

  “Jeez, at that height, isn’t two miles of even graphene cable going to fill the lifting drum?”

  “It’s thousand pound test and a quarter millimeter diameter. Two miles of it wrapped on a four inch drum has a cross sectional area of less than a square inch.”

  “Isn’t it going to have a hard time getting the harness to my location from so far up?”

  “Yeah, it’s a little difficult. Even with GPS in the harness so Allan knows where it is relative to you, moving the hoverbike way up there takes forever to move the harness’s location down here. So I got Manuel to make up a harness attachment point with air jets on it that let Allan push it one direction or another. Moving things in space is something that AIs are really good at.”

  Shan had been looking pretty much straight up. He said, “There it is.”

  Ell looked up and sure enough could see the harness dropping rapidly down the last couple of hundred feet. Little puffs of air were deflecting it towards them from where it had been coming down about a hundred feet away. As it swung down Shan snagged it out of the air with a stretched arm. Ell said, “Just in case you need to put it on in a hurry someday, let me show you how.” She showed him how to step into the leg straps and buckle the straps around his thorax. “You want to have him take you up?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, tell him how high you want to go. I’d suggest keeping it to about twenty feet so you aren’t visible from down at the lodge. Then give him directions as to which way you want to go.”

  A minute later Shan was swinging through the air just above the treetops. By the time Ell climbed down from the tower he was on the ground about fifty yards down the trail. “Hey Raquel? How much longer are you gonna be?”

  “Not as long as you hope smart ass!” Ell said as threateningly as she could as she grinned and trotted down the trail after him.

  ***

  Pasadena, California—Dr. Leo Jans of JPL announced today that the unicellular life on the planet circling Alpha Centauri A is DNA based and contains chlorophyll. JPL, in association with D5R, has landed a probe on the planet and determined that the gravity is about three quarters that of Earth, nonetheless, the atmosphere is dense at 1.8 times terrestrial. Further they found that the atmosphere is 67% nitrogen, 31% oxygen, and 1.3% carbon dioxide. It would appear that if we could get there, humans could actually live on the planet although the toxicity of long term exposure to high partial pressures of oxygen would certainly be a concern. “On the other hand,” says Jans, the bland landscape, frequent asteroid bombardment and wide fluctuations in temperature would be undesirable as well. Hopefully, if we do ever find a way to travel to the stars, we’ll find a more hospitable location than either Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti.”

  Roger looked around the table of their weekly D5R meeting. He still felt pretty weird leading the group. Especially since Fred and several of the other people there were quite a bit older than he was. Just as he was about to clear his throat and try to bring them to order, Ell’s voice came in his ear, “Hey Rog’, I’ll be listening in ‘real time’ this meeting. I might feed you some suggestions to give to the group if that’s OK?”

  Quietly he said, “Sure, but why don’t you just join us remotely with an AV connection?”

  “I’d like to, but I don’t really want to put some of them on the spot, trying to decide whether they should be dealing with me when Stockton’s declared me a criminal.” She paused, “Maybe I shouldn’t be putting you in the middle of the same situation?”

  “Stockton’s an idiot. Count on me to help anyway I can. I’m happy to put your suggestions out there; I just didn’t want to steal your thunder.” He cleared his throat and said, “Hey folks, shall we get this little meeting underway?”

  The group turned to look at him.

  “Let’s start with ET resources. What’s happening with your group?”

  Rob Braun looked up with a smile. “Things are good. The asteroid mine hit a thousand tons last week and we’re sending out more waldoes to increase output. That’s about eleven million dollars of metal per week. Minus expenses and we’re still making about five million.

  “Speaking of asteroids, France has asked us if we can help it dispose of radioactive waste from its old nuclear energy program.” He shrugged, “Well, actually, waste from other programs,
like medical radiation etcetera too. Our current plan is to send waldoes into their current storage areas and dump the waste into a crusher. Once it’s small enough to put through a reasonable sized port we’ll just drop it into Neptune’s upper atmosphere.”

  Ell had started speaking in Roger’s ear and so he held up a hand, “Dropping them into a gas giant would make them pretty much irretrievable. I’m thinking we should consider that someday there might be some reason or technology for which we might need those radioactives. How about if we set them down on an asteroid somewhere, or inside of one maybe?”

  “Good thought. We’ll have to find an asteroid that we’re pretty sure is otherwise useless but has enough gravity to keep them from floating away.”

  “Or,” Brian said, “You could inflate a metallic asteroid.” The group turned to look curiously at him and he continued, “You heat it with some of your parabolic mirror ports from down near the sun. Once it’s molten, you sink some high temperature ports into the middle of it and blow it up with gas to make it hollow.”

  Rob frowned, “I didn’t think any of your ports would tolerate temperatures that high?”

  “They won’t,” Brian winked, “Unless you put them in a tungsten frame that’s cooled with one of your deep space cooling ports.”

  Rob smacked his own forehead, “Damn! Good idea. Though maybe it would be easier to just put the stuff down on Pluto somewhere.” He spoke to his AI to make a note, then said, “Our new power generation projects are going well. So far we’ve been using existing plants and supplying the heat to create steam as a substitute for the coal or gas they had been using, but we’re starting to build some plants from scratch. We had hoped to kill two birds with one stone by putting generators in the deserts. Then we’d port them seawater, which we’d heat into steam, run the generator and when the steam cooled we’d have fresh water for the desert. Problem is that saltwater steam is too corrosive and would ruin the turbines so we’re thinking we’d just as well go back to having one plant for desalination and another for power that uses fresh water for its steam.”

  Roger blinked, then put up a finger, feeling weird to pretend to have thought of things that Ell had fed him. “Uh, Gary,” he turned to focus on Gary Pace, “Would you be able to coat the turbines and their bearings with diamond to prevent wear and corrosion?”

  Gary blinked, “Hah! I’d been planning all sorts of cooler things than that for diamond coatings. But, yeah, that sounds important. I assume these things are huge and we’d have to scale up, but the patents are applied for so we can just license to the companies making the turbines.”

  Several people in the room turned to look at each other, Fred said, “I thought you were making graphene? When did you start making diamond?”

  Gary grinned, “Allotropes R Us! We’ve only done small sized lab experiments so far, but I’m positive we can scale them up. It’s just a matter of convincing the companies it’s worth the investment.” He looked around, “As long as I have the floor, we’re getting a lot of demand for graphene and are currently planning to buy even more space in the habitats for production. Eventually, I expect we’ll be using an entire habitat and then more than one. So we’ll be providing more and more business for the ET Resource group.”

  The group looked back at Rob who said, “Another development is that ILX is getting into the space business, so we’ll have some real competition soon. They’re focusing less on space launch and have started building a habitat and buying some waldoes.”

  Vivian said, “Should we be limiting their ability to purchase ports and… ‘put the brakes’ on them so to speak?”

  Rob shrugged, “Sure, we’d like that, but Ell told me she thinks it’s important to get other people out there in space exploring and harvesting some resources. Space is too big for just ETR to be developing it.” He laughed, “If they start kicking our ass, we might want you to slow them down, but really, if they beat us with the head start we’ve got, we ought to just take our beating, then go lie down in the corner with our tail between our legs.”

  Vivian and Fred then described the enormous numbers of ports now being produced by Portal Tech as well as the sizes of the new port controller warehouses they were building to support the ports. Roger hadn’t considered that, since they were essentially leasing the ports and supplying power and control to all of them that they would have enormous “port server” facilities. Though they didn’t discuss financials in any details at these meetings—the meetings being focused on the science and the progress of implementation—Roger wondered just how much money Portal Tech must be making.

  ***

  New York—A new phenomenon in women’s style has sprung up around the country. Women everywhere, especially young women have started asking for the “Donsaii cut and color.” This is apparently in response to a virally disseminated posting by Sylvie Hatchell, self-proclaimed number one fan of Ell Donsaii. As Hatchell intended, this has resulted in thousands of reports from people claiming to have seen Donsaii, now number one on the FBI’s “most wanted” list. So if you’ve been wondering why you are seeing so many young women with short strawberry blond hair, now you know…

  As Shan and Ell drove back down I-40 toward Chapel Hill, Ell asked, “How are you liking being on the faculty at UNC?”

  He shrugged, “I like it pretty well. I kind of like teaching and the rest of the faculty cut me a lot of slack as the only one that understands your math. The University as a whole has been pretty upbeat since an anonymous donor started donating huge amounts of money five years ago. She started with 105 million but this last year she put up 700 million. Other donors put up two to three hundred million a year so that puts total donations up near a billion. Even though the majority of the money goes to the Physics Department, the rest of the University is getting a significant upgrade. Salaries are up which makes it easier to recruit top faculty. Well known faculty attract top students to the school. They’re upgrading the buildings. UNC was already considered the best public school in the country, now it and NC State are both on their way to being among the best in the world. There’s no doubt they’re the best or soon will be in Physics.” He gave her a serious look, “But if you’re asking if I could give it up to go somewhere with my girl, the answer would be, ‘Sure, in a heartbeat.’”

  Ell leaned over to rest her head on his shoulder. “Good, ‘cause it’s hard to imagine that it’s going to take the FBI all that much longer to figure out who you’re married to.” She looked up at him, “Can I take you to see one of the places we might live as fugitives?”

  Shan raised his eyebrows, “Sure.”

  They left I-40 and headed south a ways. When they pulled off the pavement onto a dirt road out into the trees, Ell said, “This land belongs to one, ‘Stan Kenner,’ wealthy playboy who likes to come out and stay in the woods. Looks a lot like you, but has dark hair and puffy cheeks.” Ell handed Shan a couple of lumps of congealing silicone, “Tuck these between your upper gums and your cheeks.” Once Shan had done that, Ell massaged his cheeks to get the shape she wanted. “Now don’t talk or move your mouth while it sets up.” While they waited, Ell returned to her description. “Your alter ego’s got a rustic little cabin hidden away in these 109 acres of woods and meadows. The land used to be owned by a lumber company but they got in financial trouble and sold this plot because it was pretty far from the rest of their holdings.” Ell continued describing Shan’s alter ego’s life and statistics.

  As they pulled up in front of a tired looking cabin, Ell said, “OK, they should be ready to take out. Let me get a picture of them in situ.” Ell pulled his cheeks back so the cameras on her head band could record the location of his teeth relative to the inserts. “You can take them out now.”

  Shan pulled them out and examined them. “You’re going to make graphene balloons in this shape with ports to attach them to my molars?”

  “Yeah, you’ll hardly notice them when they’re deflated, but you will when they’re pumped up. And,
of course, I’ll have to install an umbilical one ended port for you to get your hair dye and other doodads through.” She smiled ruefully at him, “Getting that put in isn’t any fun.”

  He shrugged, “I’m sure I’ll live.”

  “Well, let’s go inside.”

  The cabin certainly wasn’t upscale, though it had a well-stocked pantry and a closet full of casual clothing. Ell commented, “You could live here for months without having to venture back out in the world if you needed to, though I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  ***

  In the midst of cooking breakfast, the AI for the headband that Donsaii gave to Viveka chimed for attention, then said, “You have a call from a Bridget Spaulding of D5R.”

  For a moment Viveka thought, “Who would call me during breakfast!” and “I don’t know anyone with that name!” Then the “D5R” registered on her brain. “Yes, yes! I’ll take it.”

  A young woman’s voice spoke, “Viveka? Is this Viveka Janu of Delhi India?”

  “Yes?” Viveka said, trying to keep her voice from trembling.

  “Uh, sorry to be getting back to you so late, I know you emailed a while back.”

  “Oh, that’s OK.” Viveka’s heart sank. The apologetic tone in Spaulding’s voice said that they wouldn’t have a job for her. I wonder why they even called me back.

  “Ms. Donsaii left word that we should find a job for you when you graduated. Have you finished your degree yet?”

  Heart pounding and voice breaking, Viveka said, “In three weeks.”

  “Are you OK? You sound… frightened. Should I try to contact the police for you?”

  “No, no, I’m just very happy that Ms. Donsaii remembered me.”

  “Oh, OK. Would you like for us to help you get a visa to come work here in the United States? Or would you prefer that we try to help you get a job with one of our subsidiaries in India?”