Vaz 4: Invaders

by Laurence E. Dahners

  Without looking away from the screen, he said, “Would it be a problem if the front and back were a little wider than the main part of the board?” As he said that the two ends developed circular areas that looked a little wider than the deck. Since her board was about seven inches wide and she thought his discs were about 10 inches around, she had the impression that he’d applied 10 inch discs to either end of her board. “Or,” he continued, “would you prefer that it had a bigger bulge right here in the middle?” As he said that, a new board appeared right below the first one. This time, Reven had the impression that it was a seven inch wide board with a 12 inch disc in the center of it.

  Reven stared at the two boards he’d diagrammed, then said, “I think the one with a bulge at each end looks cooler than the one with the big bulge in the middle. But whichever one works the best…” As she ran down, Reven realized she really did prefer the cool looking one and hoped that it would work okay. As she watched the lower one with a single big bulge vanished. I guess he thinks the one I like will work fine, she thought.

  “Would it be okay if there was a thick spot in the board? Like this?” A new diagram appeared below the first one. Again it had wider discs at both ends, then as Reven watched, one of the discs tripled in thickness. “Or,” Mr. Gettnor said, “if both ends were a little thicker?” A third board appeared, this time both of the wider areas were about twice as thick as the central portion of the board.

  “Um, I think I like the third one with the two ends both a little bit thicker. Why do they need to be thicker?”

  He still didn’t look around at her. “They don’t have to be, but if we use the thin design, it’ll have to run on batteries. The thicker version has room for a little fusor and for some acceleration-deceleration discs and side thrusters.” As he spoke the top two designs disappeared and the version with two double thickness discs at each end moved into the center of the screen.

  “Fusor?” Reven said, sure she must’ve misunderstood him.

  “Hydrogen-boron fusion plant for power. So you don’t have to recharge the batteries all the time.”

  Reven blinked, “I know they’re making them small enough for cars now, but not small enough to go in a board like this… are they?”

  “They make them. They just don’t sell them yet.”

  “What do you mean by acceleration-deceleration discs? And, side thrusters?”

  He’d been looking down at her wheeled board. Now he glanced back up at the diagram on the screen and spoke to his AI for a few seconds. The board he’d diagrammed became semi-transparent and she could see various components within it. She saw green discs in the 10 inch circles at each end and there were a couple of smaller discs of about six inches each in the middle of the board. In blue, there were some knobs on top of the green discs at each end with blue tubes running the length of the board. Reven knew enough about fusor design to think that the knobs were probably where the fusion occurred and the long tubes were the coils that collected energy from the alpha particles the fusors generated. A row of smaller, vertically oriented green discs rimmed the periphery of the big discs at each end. He pointed at the ones pointing more front to back, saying, “These discs can accelerate or decelerate the board so you don’t have to do all of it by tilting, and,” he pointed at the discs oriented more side to side, “these discs can push the whole board from side to side to steady it under you if you start to fall off. They can also push to the right in front and to the left in the back to help you turn.”

  Reven’s eyes narrowed, “I want to be able to fly it by tilting my feet.”

  Mr. Gettnor didn’t say anything for a minute, then said, “You still could. Think of it as a safety parameter. If you fly beyond the envelope, these would let the AI catch you.” Still without turning around, he said, “Could you wear boots that were attached to the board? Or shoes that clipped onto it?”

  “I’d rather not. Why would you want to do that?”

  “Maybe not you, but for other people. Being attached to the board would improve your safety quite a bit. If you fell off, but were still attached to the board, the thrusters could reverse and still hold you up. You’d just be hanging underneath it.” He tilted his head curiously, “Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, the safety harness would protect you, but redundant safety measures are always good.”

  Reven’s mind was whirling. She was just about to ask him what a safety harness was, when the door to the basement opened and Ms. Gettnor stepped inside carrying a tray.

  ***

  Lisanne had just gotten back to the house with some groceries when her AI chimed. “You have a call from Clarice Davis.”

  She said, “I’ll take it… Hi Clarice, what’s up?”

  “Um,” Clarice said, sounding uncomfortable to Lisanne. “Did you know that Reven’s over there… um… talking to your husband?”

  A flood of thoughts rushed over Lisanne, but she immediately realized that Clarice probably felt uncomfortable having her pretty teenaged daughter hanging out with an older man Clarice had never met, even if the man’s wife was a good friend of hers. For her part, Lisanne found it hard to countenance the possibility that her solitary, asocial husband had even met a teenage girl, much less started a conversation with her. Her mind raced as she tried to think of a way to comfort Clarice’s concerns. Clarice had to be wondering why she’d never met Vaz and the fact that Lisanne had told her several times that Vaz was “different” probably wasn’t very settling. However, it was probably too late for Lisanne to start telling Clarice that Vaz had a hard time dealing with people but was basically a good person. She settled for saying, “Wow! Vaz is usually way too shy to talk to strangers! Do you know how they actually met?”

  “No. Reven said they were going to work on her board. You know, she has one of those electric skateboard kind of things with big wheels at each end that the kids ride nowadays. Reven goes everywhere on hers.”

  “Um, well, Vaz really does like to tinker and he has a big…” Lisanne suddenly felt uncomfortable calling it a lab, “workshop… Why don’t I take them some milk and cookies and see what they’re doing?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you don’t need to do that… although I imagine they’d love to have a treat.”

  Lisanne could tell her friend was worried and actually really did want her to check up on them. Knowing Vaz as Lisanne did, it was almost impossible to conceive of any improprieties between him and a young girl but… in any case she was sure that simply saying nothing could be happening would not be sufficient reassurance for Clarice. And, there is the possibility that a pretty young girl might try her charms on the astonishingly wealthy neighbor. For Clarice she produced a laugh innocent of those thoughts, “Well, I’m really curious. The milk and cookies are the best excuse I can come up with for going over to see what the heck they’ve got going on.”

  “Okay… thanks,” Clarice said, unconsciously giving away the concern she’d been trying to hide.

  “I’ll call you in a bit to tell you what they’re trying to do.”

  Lisanne finished putting away the last of her groceries, then put some of the chocolate chip cookies Vaz liked on a tray with a couple of glasses of milk. Asking the AI to open the back door, she headed for the barn.

  Inside the barn, Lisanne looked around but saw no one. He must’ve taken her down to his lab, she thought with some surprise. Most of the tools you might use to repair something mechanical like a skateboard were in the barn. The stuff Lisanne thought of as “scientific” was in the basement lab. Surely whatever might have gone wrong with Reven’s board wouldn’t be something that Vaz would need scientific equipment to repair, would it?

  The AI couldn’t open interior doors like the one down to the basement, so Lisanne had to balance her tray carefully and turn the knob. She had to repeat that process at the door at the bottom of the stair. Although the doors at the top and the bottom of the stairs were somewhat irritating, they were also somewhat reassuring to Lisanne as they always reminded her
of how Vaz had used the doors at the top and bottom of the stairs in their old house to protect her family when they’d been attacked years ago.

  When she stepped inside, she found Vaz and Reven staring at her from the area of the basement lab that Vaz called the design station. Huge screens surrounded the area, letting Vaz display multiple cross-sections and exploded views of his CADs (Computer Aided Designs) all at the same time. Lisanne saw Reven’s board sitting on the floor, so they obviously weren’t trying to repair it.

  Reven’s pale blue eyes stared at Lisanne somewhat apprehensively. No doubt the girl could have been quite attractive if she put effort into it, but her short black hair was a mess, probably from riding the board in question. Reven wore a baggy old T-shirt and old, loose jeans relieving any lingering questions in Lisanne’s mind that the girl might be playing the seductive Lolita. Lisanne would have proclaimed herself confident that Vaz was too obtuse to respond to a temptress… except for the niggling fear that no one could truly know how weak a man might be. The very idea of Vaz playing the seducer, however, seemed ludicrous.

  Lisanne looked at the screens. She saw something that looked like a board… she narrowed her eyes… it didn’t have wheels, but it had suspicious disc-like bulges at each end. She wanted to say, “You’re not thinking you’re going to build her a board that flies, are you?!” but restrained herself. Instead, she set down the tray and said cheerfully, “I brought you guys some milk and cookies.”

  Vaz looked very pleased. He loved chocolate chip cookies with milk and, with his limited social skills, would never stop to wonder why Lisanne would just happen to bring him milk and cookies on a day when he was in his basement lab with a pretty young girl. Lisanne realized that she felt relieved to find them working on designing a flying board—at the same time that she found herself horrified to think that Vaz might make something as dangerous as a board that flew for a young girl.

  Vaz had a cookie halfway to his mouth, when he suddenly stopped, carefully looked Lisanne in the eye as she’d taught him, and said, “Thank you.” His eyes dropped back down to the cookie and he took a bite, picking up his glass of milk with the other hand.

  Reven said politely, “Thank you Ms. Gettnor. I feel embarrassed that you’re bringing me cookies at the same time your husband’s helping me with my board idea. Is there anything I can do to pay you back?”

  Lisanne felt a little bit relieved to learn that it was Reven’s idea rather than Vaz’s. “Go on, take a cookie.” She lifted an eyebrow, “If you want to pay me back, you’ll tell me what you guys are building.”

  Reven picked up her cookie and bit into it, her eyes widening as she stared at the remaining portion. Covering her mouth, she said over a mouth full of cookie, “These are really good! Are they homemade?”

  “Yeah,” Lisanne said, patting Vaz and then leaving her hand there because she liked feeling his surprisingly muscular shoulder. “Vaz really loves these, so I keep baking them.” She waited a moment for one of them to tell her what they were doing, but when neither of them said anything, she finally looked at the screens and said, “You guys aren’t trying to make a skateboard that flies are you?”

  Reven got a worried look, obviously recognizing from Lisanne’s question that Lisanne would not approve. However, Vaz was oblivious. He said, “Yes. We’re calling it a fly-board.” His eyes dropped to Reven’s feet and Lisanne realized that, if he’d ever known Reven’s name, he’d already forgotten it. He said, “She says that she and a friend of hers thought of putting thruster discs under one of their boards several years ago, they just haven’t been able to buy any thrusters.”

  “Vaz,” Lisanne said, trying to sound patient rather than exasperated, “don’t you think a flying skateboard would be a little dangerous?!”

  “Uh-huh,” he nodded, “so I’ll need to put a lot of safety algorithms in the software. It’d have radar so it could avoid objects even if the rider didn’t notice them. I’m trying to talk her into boots or clips that would attach her feet to the board so that she couldn’t fall off if it made a sudden avoidance maneuver.” He stared sightlessly at the floor, “Still, she should wear a safety harness. He tilted his head questioningly and mused, “Maybe a harness by itself would be safer than being tied to the board…”

  Lisanne said, “Vaz, I don’t think you should be building some kind of flying board for Reven without her parents’ permission!”

  Vaz blinked a couple of times, “That’s probably true.” He looked in Reven’s direction and manage to bring his eyes almost up to her face. “Do you have your parents’ permission?”

  “Not yet,” Reven said, “but,” she continued emphatically, “I will.”

  “Oh,” Vaz said, sounding relieved. “Is it okay if I go ahead and build a board like we designed it then?” He turned to Lisanne, carefully bringing his eyes all the way up to look at hers, “She won’t fly it until she has her parents’ permission,” his eyes turned back toward Reven’s feet, “will you?”

  Lisanne looked at Reven who was staring at Vaz, obviously puzzled by his behavior. Behavior that Lisanne had lived with for so long that she didn’t really find it all that weird anymore.

  Reven shrugged and said, “No.”

  Lisanne could tell the girl didn’t really think any fly-boards were ever going to get built.

  Reven bent over and picked up her wheeled board, “I’d better get up there and find Bessie before it gets dark.” She turned toward the door to the stairs.

  Lisanne glanced at Vaz. He’d already turned back to his screens and begun talking to his AI. Lisanne turned and went after Reven, “Let me walk you out.” As they made their way up the stairs and out through the barn, Lisanne managed to get the story of how Reven had followed one of Vaz’s surveillance discs to the barn and knocked several times until Vaz finally came to the door. Apparently Reven had gotten close enough to the perimeter Vaz had established that his AI had sent a disc out to check and see who she was. It would have let him know and he would have watched Reven on the video imaging from the disc. He’d have been able to track her on radar and infrared as well. He probably wouldn’t have known she was knocking on the barn door upstairs if he hadn’t been watching her on his video surveillance system.

  As Reven rode away on her board to look for her cow, Lisanne wondered how to explain all of this to Clarice.

  ***

  Clarice was on tenterhooks by the time Lisanne called. At first she’d been reassured when Lisanne had said she would go see what was going on between Reven and her husband. Then Clarice had started worrying because, despite being very good friends with Lisanne, she’d still never met Lisanne’s husband. Several things Lisanne had said in the past made her think that Lisanne’s husband was a little bit of an oddball.

  If even Lisanne, who’d married him, thought he was weird he had to be really different. Clarice started wondering whether she should trust Lisanne, who lived with this apparently bizarre man, to see to Reven’s safety. When more time had passed than Clarice had expected, her imagination started to go out of control. She imagined Lisanne surprising her husband in the act of doing something terrible to Reven. In her mind's eye, this unknown man then attacked his wife to keep her from protecting Clarice’s daughter.

  Clarice was standing at her backdoor, wanting to go over to the Gettnors’, but telling herself that she must be worried about nothing when her AI said, “You have a call from Lisanne Gettnor.”

  “I’ll take it! Lisanne!” She tried to calm herself, thinking that she must sound slightly hysterical. “What are they… working on?”

  Lisanne said, “I’ve got some bad news.”

  This caused Clarice’s heart to leap into her throat. Clarice threw open her back door and started running down the stairs.

  Lisanne continued, “Apparently Reven would like to have her skateboard, or whatever you call it, mounted on some thrusters so that she can fly it through the air.”

  Clarice stopped, her mind jangling with a lack of co
mprehension. “She wants… what?!”

  “She wants it mounted on some thruster discs, you know, so that her board can lift up into the air and she can fly instead of skating or wheeling or whatever the kids call it.”

  Clarice bent over and rested a hand on her knee, enormously relieved that no mayhem had occurred to her daughter, but still completely unable to wrap her mind around what Lisanne had just said. “Thruster discs? What’s a thruster disc?” she asked weakly.

  “Oh… I thought you knew. Our daughter Tiona’s the one that invented the thruster discs? You know the things that flew that saucer out to rescue the astronauts. Apparently Reven wants Vaz to put some of those discs underneath a skateboard for her.”

  Clarice backed up a few steps and sat down heavily on her stairs. “Your daughter… Sorry, I had no idea. I guess I should have, Gettnor’s probably not that common a name. Is that where all your money came from then?”

  “Um, no. Vaz… has some other inventions, but he’s not getting any money from the thrust discs. Well, he is, but he donates it to charity.” Lisanne paused, perhaps waiting for Clarice to say something, but Clarice was having too much trouble just coming to grips with what she’d been told. After a few more moments, Lisanne said, “Anyway, Reven promised she’d talk to you about her flying skateboard idea. Maybe you could come over tomorrow morning for coffee and you and I could talk about it too. It sounds crazy and if I were you I’d be thinking, ‘There’s no way my daughter’s getting on something like that,’ but Vaz really is pretty good at building safety into things like this.”

  “Um, okay, what time?”

  “9 o’clock?”

  “See you then,” Clarice said, then disconnected, hoping she hadn’t seemed rude. However, she’d had so much trouble concentrating on the conversation in view of the way her emotions had just been whipsawed that she didn’t think she could bear to say another word.