Vaz 4: Invaders

by Laurence E. Dahners

  There was a long pause during which Lisanne waited for Clarice to continue. When she didn’t, Lisanne finally said, “So that was last month. What’s happened now to bring all this back to mind?”

  “Yesterday was the last day of school, you know?” At Lisanne’s nod, Clarice continued, “She rode the new fly-board Vaz made her to school for the first time. Tell him thanks for that, by the way. She loves that thing! Anyway, she looked really excited when she left in the morning, so I thought she’d be pumped up when she got home too.” Clarice paused, staring sightlessly out the window.

  Lisanne tried to picture how having something that no one else had could influence a teenager’s status in school. She thought usually for the better, unless you were low on the pecking order and some of the cliques above you got jealous. Tentatively, she asked, “I assume it didn’t go well?”

  Clarice shook her head. “She got home, ignored my question about how her day went, stomped up to her room and slammed the door.” Clarice glanced at Lisanne, “I had to remind her to do her chores... I never have to remind her to…” Clarice trailed off for a moment, then resumed, “Then, when she came down the stairs to go do them I tried to ask her again about how school went. She said, ‘it sucked.’ Desperate to find something to cheer her up, I asked her if Eddie liked the fly-board and,” Clarice’s voice broke, “you’d have thought I shot her.”

  “Did she answer?”

  “Told me all Eddie cares about is his girlfriend.” Clarice dabbed at her face again, “Who, apparently is not Reven like I’d always hoped.”

  “Oh,” Lisanne said, unable to come up with anything better. She put her hand on Clarice’s and the two friends sat there silently for a minute or two. Finally, Lisanne said, “It must be agonizing. Has Reven let you give her any advice on makeup or clothes?”

  Clarice barked a distraught little laugh. “Not a chance! Doesn’t want any suggestions from me. Doesn’t want to get suggestions from the makeup counter at Macy’s. Lezant, you know, that new ‘in’ store for young people has makeovers where they give you advice on your hair, makeup and clothing—Reven has absolutely no interest in that either.”

  “Would you… like me to talk to her? In my experience with teenagers, back when I had some, they’ll often listen to other adults when they won’t take advice from their parents.” Lisanne tilted her head, “Or maybe you have some other relatives that could help? Aunts, cousins, something like that?”

  “I… so desperately want her to have some help that I… want to say yes. But, then I worry that if she doesn’t want advice from anyone our age she’ll say something rude.” Clarice shrugged, “Not that she’s ever been rude to someone outside the family before, but I don’t want you to be the first.”

  Lisanne thought for a moment, then said, “If I see a way to bring it up, maybe I will. Unfortunately, I don’t see her very often, so it’s hard to imagine it actually coming to pass.” She put on a smile for her friend, “But, remember, I’ve already served my time with teenagers. I’ve got pretty thick skin.”

  ***

  Reven rode into the skate park at a six-inch HAAT. Her experience riding it to the school a couple of days ago at six feet had told her that a lot of people would stare. At this altitude she thought most of them didn’t even notice her board didn’t have wheels. She leaned back a fraction and her board slowly came to a halt at the periphery of the park. She’d gotten quite good at hovering by now so she didn’t even have to ask the AI to hold the board stationary for her. She looked around the skate park, wondering where Victor was.

  There were quite a few kids, a lot of guys riding their wheelie boards around the park. Many were on traditional skateboards, some on boards like her old one with a single big wheel at each end. A few were riding bikes or skates. A guy she’d never seen before was grabbing air on both sides of the bowl. Her eyebrows rose, he was getting high air.

  Seeing a talented boarder she didn’t know made her realize she hadn’t been to the park for quite a while.

  Then a guy shot past Reven on his wheelie, saying, “Hey girl, if the park’s too scary for you, you probably should’ve stayed at home.”

  Fuming, she leaned hard on her forward foot to take off after him. The fly-board didn’t have the immediate acceleration that the electric motors gave her wheelie board, but in the past several weeks of intense practice since Dr. Gettnor had last updated the software she’d learned some tricks. One of the most surprising to her was that the board would try to hold her up, almost no matter how far forward she leaned. It did this by increasing the thrust to its main lift discs, trying to maintain enough of a vertical vector to hold her up. The main lifters totaled 280 pounds of thrust and since she only weighed 110 pounds that resulted in a big forward vector when she tipped the board up past forty-five degrees. The small forward thruster discs in the board also tried to push it back under her. This meant that the farther forward she leaned, the more she accelerated. It wasn’t endless, if the board didn’t manage to force itself back underneath her, eventually the big lift disc in the safety harness would pull her back upright so she didn’t go too fast or fall over forward.

  So, her old wheelie board had been able to accelerate faster for the first few feet, but after 15 to 20 feet the fly-board would be going faster and still accelerating.

  As she’d expected, it took her 25 to 30 feet to blow past the dude who’d disrespected her. She passed him on the right, then slalomed sharply to the left in front of him. “Say hi to your mom,” she said as she arced toward the bowl. The guy she’d seen before shot up out of the right side of the bowl, flipped and dropped back down into it. She felt pretty sure she couldn’t go down into the bowl lengthwise at a HAAT of six inches without taking a significant chance of running into him. Tugging up on her joyball, Reven set her HAAT to six feet. This caused her to rise sharply just before she got to the bowl, then drop down as she crossed its edge. The fly-board’s AI, in an effort to smooth out bumps in the terrain underneath her, gave her a gradual drop rather than the sharp drop that the actual bowl had. When she got to the other end of the bowl, it lifted her gradually back up to be six feet off the ground there too.

  Realizing that no one was going to be too excited about the gradual rise and fall of the board as it crossed obstacles on the ground beneath it, Reven began slaloming hard from side to side, leaning close to horizontal in each direction. She looped around and shot back toward the bowl. The guy who’d been riding the bowl had landed on the edge with his board under his arm. He turned to watch her go by. She gave him a wave, shouted, “You’re an awesome rider,” and dipped through the bowl at six feet once again. At the other end of it she started making hard circles, then did a few figure eights. She pushed down on her joyball to drop herself to six inches as she shot toward the hedges. As she approached them, the AI lifted her just enough to cross them with the six inches to spare. She banked hard to run along the hedge, flexing her knees as the board lifted her over some big topiary bumps the landscapers had cut into the hedge.

  As she flew off the end of the hedge, she lifted her joyball to keep her at six feet, about where the hedge had had her. She curved around toward the middle of the park and saw Victor standing, open mouthed, wheelie board under his arm. She turned his way, gave him a little wave and gently pushed down on her joyball to take her back down to six inches. She slowed, then did a skater’s stop right in front of the gaping Victor. “I couldn’t see you when I first got here. Have you been here for a while?” She pretended she was oblivious to all the people who’d stopped to stare, but it was hard not to notice the silence in the skate park with grinding wheels of all the boards silenced as their riders gawped.

  Victor said, “No, sorry. My dad jumped my ass for not taking out the garbage and I had to suck up a lecture before I could come.”

  The guy who’d been riding the bowl started slowly clapping.

  More people joined in the clapping and without looking Reven could feel everyone in the park start
moving her way. Since most of them were rolling on some kind of wheels, it broke the silence, but they were moving slowly so it still sounded different than usual.

  “Oh man! I so eat my words! I should never have been heapin’ scorn when I rode past you on my way into the park!”

  Reven looked, it was the kid who’d said she should have stayed at home. She lifted an eyebrow at him, “Now, you’re probably thinking you’d like to ride my board, huh?” Unobtrusively, she slowly lifted her joyball, floating up to six feet. As she got a little higher, she gently rocked her feet, causing the board to wave back and forth under her.

  He laughed, “I’m guessing I don’t have a chance.”

  Reven slowly shook her head, though she was smiling.

  The talented guy who’d been riding the bowl leaned down to look up at the fly-board from underneath. Handsome, he was older, maybe fifteen, or even sixteen. He said, “It has the new thrust discs in it, huh? What a great freaking idea!”

  Victor chimed in, “Reven’s the one who thought of it! She got the Gettnors to make it for her.”

  The guy turned to Victor, “Gettnors as in GSI?” When Victor nodded the guy looked up at Reven with eyes that made her feel warm and fuzzy. “You’re Reven?”

  Reven nodded, slowly lowering her board back down to six inches. Somehow it felt wrong to be looking down at a handsome guy who was that good on a board.

  The guy put out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Blake.” After Reven shook his hand, he looked down at her board and said, “Any chance you’ll let me try to ride it?”

  Reven gave a little shrug. “Maybe? I promised Victor the first ride,” she said jerking a thumb in Victor’s direction.

  Blake grinned and said, “Well, let’s get Victor up on it then.”

  Feeling a little overwhelmed by the attention, Reven said, “Okay.” She stepped off the board, causing it to settle to the ground, then popped the release on her safety harness, stepped out of it and held it out to Victor.

  Victor looked askance at the harness. “I don’t need that thing.”

  “You do if you want to ride the fly-board. Dr. Gettnor programmed the board so it won’t lift off if the rider isn’t wearing the safety harness.”

  Victor frowned at it, “How… How can these straps make you any safer? They’re not attached to anything.”

  Reven thumped the big disc in the back plate, “This is a twelve inch thruster.” She pointed out the little radar buttons mounted on the harness, “If these tell the AI that you’re falling or about to run into something, the big disc in the harness is going to pull you up short. It’s double stacked, so it can generate 300 pounds of thrust, 600 in an emergency. You might still be able to hit something, but it’s going to slow you down a lot.” She waved around, “You can imagine that if I fell off while I was doing some of the things I just did on this board, I’d’ve gotten hurt pretty bad.”

  Victor’s eyes had widened during this recitation. Now he held out his hand for the harness and said, “I guess you had me with the, ‘board won’t lift if the rider isn’t wearing the harness.’ Don’t know why I asked the other, but I guess it does make me feel safer.”

  Blake said, “What do you mean, ‘double stacked,’?”

  “One right on top of the other,” Reven said. “Each one generates 150 pounds of thrust.”

  Reven talked Victor through putting the harness on since she didn’t feel comfortable actually helping him. As he was tightening the straps he’d had to loosen to get his bigger frame into it, she glanced around and saw all the kids from the park intently watching each move.

  Victor tugged on the harness, evidently deciding he’d like it snug in view of what it could do to protect him. He turned to Reven and said, “Okay, what’s next?”

  She shrugged, “Next you get on. Oops, wait a minute.” She took a few minutes to explain the joyball at his right hip. How it could let him adjust his HAAT from six inches to six feet by tugging it up or down. How, when you let go of it, the AI would maintain your HAAT at whatever height you were when you released it. “If you’re falling to the left or right, you can pull or push on the joyball to get a little right or left push from the small side thrusters in the harness. Though it’s not much, it can help you stay upright if you’re just a little off. Pushing the joyball hard forward or backward gets you a push or pull from the big disc back over your shoulders. In theory you could use that thrust to push your board along, but I’ve mostly been tilting the board instead since I ride with my feet and body turned.”

  Victor stepped his left foot onto the board. Reven was shouting, “Wait!” when he picked up his right foot before he’d really balanced himself over the board. When all of his weight fell on the board, it lifted to six inches and, since Victor was still off-center to its left, it shot frictionlessly away to its right. Victor easily landed back onto his trailing foot, but Reven, not having seen this happen before, thought the frictionless board was going to shoot off and bang into the ankles of the crowd.

  Instead, as soon as Victor’s weight was off of it, it tilted up sharply to stop its motion, then flattened to lower itself gradually and perfectly straight back down to the ground. Reven would have sworn it didn’t travel another six inches after Victor came off of it. Though she’d fallen off of it herself, she’d always been too busy with the fall to watch the board stop itself. She tilted her head curiously, Can any AI control a board like that? Or is Dr. Gettnor an amazing programmer as well?

  She lost that train of thought as she started talking to Victor about how to get on it and stabilize himself. Although she hadn’t had much trouble the first time she got on it, Victor struggled and finally had to hold on to one of the guardrails while he was getting the hang of it. Eventually, Victor started off in a wobbly fashion to a smattering of applause. After a few loops around, he pulled up next to Blake and said, “Your turn.”

  Reven had been thinking that Victor just wasn’t very coordinated, but even Blake, who’d fully proved his coordination with the way he rode his skateboard in the bowl, struggled quite a bit. He also had to start out holding onto a handrail. When he moved off around the skate park, he did a little better than Victor, though that may have just been because he wasn’t as timid. He went a little faster and went down a gradual slope. Something about the speed seem to smooth out his actions, at least until he wiped out. It was interesting for Reven to watch from outside the harness as its big disc jerked up and back to slow Blake once he’d come off the board. Since he was only six inches up when he came off the board, his knee, buttock and palm did touch down, but softly. Essentially, the harness turned what had looked like an impending eggbeater into a falling feather.

  As a bunch of the other boarders started begging for a ride, Reven picked another one. When Blake handed him the harness, Reven said, “Actually it’ll be a little safer if you start riding it at six feet. Then the harness has more time to catch you if you fall off.”

  The guy stopped with the harness part way on, “It may be safer, but I can tell you I won’t feel safe starting six feet in the air. I promise to go slow if you’ll let me ride it down low to begin with. Once I’ve got the hang of it, I can try going up there.”

  Reven shrugged acquiescence. All in all, she let about twenty people ride the board, all of them struggling more than she’d expected that they would. The last one to ride was the guy who’d dissed her coming into the skate park. She made him get down on both knees and beg forgiveness before she let him ride.

  As she buckled the harness back on herself in preparation for heading home, Blake said, “Hey, ride it hard around the park again before you take off. Show us what it can do now that we’ve got some idea what it’s like to be on it.” He grinned and winked, “That way we’ll have something to look forward to someday when we get our own fly-boards.”

  Reven scorched the park and felt great riding away to their enthusiastic applause.

  Still, it felt pretty empty not having Eddie there.

&nb
sp; ***

  Tiona’s car descended to land in front of Nolan’s house. North Carolina, home of GSI, had voted in a fairly liberal set of rules for flying cars, soon to be superseded by the new federal regulations. She eyed Nolan’s house a little uncomfortably. She thought it was pretty ostentatious for someone in his twenties, though, Lord knows, he had plenty of money.

  As she walked up to his front door, she worried he wouldn’t be home at 11 o’clock in the morning. This alternated with her sense of unease that he would be home—because he had nothing else to do. She felt guilty that she hadn’t seen him in weeks, but a little miffed that he hadn’t contacted her. Shouldn’t a boyfriend call his girl sometimes? She worried that he was rudderless, but wasn’t sure why he needed a rudder when his boat was floating so high.

  Conflicted in many senses, she arrived at the front door where the AI said, “Hello Ms. Gettnor, please come in.” The door swung open and she walked in, looking around and hoping to see Nolan.

  What she saw was a beautiful young blond girl sitting at Nolan’s breakfast bar eating a mango. As Tiona’s heart sank the girl hopped down off the barstool and came toward her. She had an immense and brilliant smile on her face. “Ms. Gettnor!” She put out her hand, “I’m Carolyn West. I’ve wanted to meet you for… like forever!”

  Tiona shook Carolyn’s hand uncertainly, “I, uh, is, um, Nolan here?”

  Carolyn grinned and wrinkled her nose, then whispered as if giving away a secret, “Yeah, but he had way too much to drink last night so he’s still in bed with a hangover.” Carolyn glanced back towards Nolan’s bedroom, then said with an enthusiastic smile, “I’m sure he’d muster himself for you, though. He’s been complaining about how he hasn’t seen you for, like, weeks! You want me to wake him up? Or,” Carolyn said as if she just had a brilliant idea, “you could wake him up yourself.” She tilted her head, “Though I usually take him a couple of Tylenol, then don’t try to talk to him until they’ve had a half an hour to work.”