Balance of Power Shifted

by Karl, Victor

  Jeremy and Ty were already on the mat practicing takedowns, submission holds, and it looked like Jen and Don were going to alternate with bags and practice kicks. I know that Donny really wanted to improve is kicking game to augment his punching prowess and Jen was just the person to teach him. This left Miguel who looked like he was just finishing up on a heavy bag. With one final kick and punch combination, he turned around and saw that I was waiting for him. Miguel was about my height but outweighed my by 20 pounds with a good complement of muscle. We knew each other’s style and had the classic speed versus power matches. I wanted to wrestle him and practice takedowns since he was a bigger person and he knew he wanted to wrestle me, since his ground game was where he needed the most work. It did not hurt that I had taken second in the state wrestling finals back in high school.

  It is difficult to practice take downs since the guy you are sparring with knows it is coming and can defend it easily so what we do is try and defend at half speed. We each did that for five minutes and it is amazing how much energy is expended trying to leverage position. The big difference in MMA versus high school wrestling is the body slams. If your body does not hit the mat at the same time as your opponent in high school, you can get points taken away or disqualified. In MMA, you can slam the other fighter so hard you can knock him or her out. We then moved in the half guard position and tried to get to full guard or into side guard and back and forth. This is where Miguel needed some work. He did not seem to know how to use his legs from the bottom to block my moves and did not know how to leverage them when he had a superior position. I showed him a few pointers and he did much better, but his legs were not as flexible as mine were and could not get everything.

  By that time, everyone had a good sweat going and it looked like Jen and Don were going to take it from practice to sparring and were the first pair to get up. From a pure power and size perspective the men had too much of an advantage over women when sparring. It was an unwritten rule that women can go at it full speed, while the men pulled back on everything and did not take the fight to the ground. Jeremy was the referee or what we called the safety person to help make sure no one really got hurt and had all the required gear on. With a “let’s rumble” from Jeremy ripping off part of Buffer’s shtick, Don and Jen started circling each other.

  Jen and Don both traded many kicks with Jen nailing Don about 2 to 1, which was impressive for Jen since Donny was almost as quick as she was. Suddenly Donny faked a flying knee and dipped down for a take down. This caught Jenny by surprise and Don easily picked her up and dumped her on her back. I yelled to Jen that she was fighting like a girl and to get back up. Don did not follow his advantage and signaled for Jen to get back up. Jen came in for a Muay Thai clinch, but Don was by far the much stronger person out there and easily separated himself from Jen and at the same time delivered a solid but only half speed elbow to the side of Jen’s headgear rocking her and making her step back. Don quickly closed and landed a couple of three quarter speed punch combinations and finished up with a front leg kick. Jen countered with a vicious kick to Don’s right thigh, followed that up with a three-punch combination, and immediately backed out. At this point Jeremy stepped in and said “time” which ended the match. We only sparred one three minute round per match and time was up. Don and Jen huffing and puffing a little gave each other a quick hug and sat down for a well-deserved rest.

  Jeremy and I were up next with Ty ref'ing. I always enjoyed sparring with Jeremy, since I thought he was my best competition and something about getting a few good licks in on your boss made it more interesting. Where Donny pulled back a little with Jen, there were no pulling anything on our strikes. We had a great battle where he enjoyed being a slightly better boxer, which I countered with better kicking. Jeremy and I both had great take down defense, but when we did go to the ground I had the better ground game, which ended up giving me the edge at the end of the fight. I was able take him down right before the three minutes were up and slipped in a couple of partially blocked head strikes before time ended. Ty and Miguel took to the ring and had a sloppy but entertaining match. Neither of them dominated over the other and each got some solid power shots in.

  With first round of matches over, Jen game up to me and gave me a playful smack to the back of my head. “Fights like a girl” she said to me. “Why don’t we take it out to the mat and I’ll show you how a girl fights,” she boasted with a mischievous smile. “You’re on little girl,” I responded. We had to wait for Ty and Jeremy finish up a match, which was entertaining, but easily won by Jeremy who finished with two consecutive hard rights. Slipping into the ring, Jen and I danced around for a couple of seconds to loosen up again while we waited for Jeremy to be our referee. Once he climbed in, Jen did not even wait for a signal and went on the attack. Before I knew it, she had landed two sidekicks and a straight right. Then the smack talk started. “Let’s go little boy” she said as threw another right side kick and automatically reversed it with a spinning punch to the side of my head. I have to tell you, I really felt the impact of these strikes. Instinct kicked in for me and I immediately went in for a double leg takedown, which she was not expecting and dumped her on her back. I then stepped back and motioned for to get back up which she quickly did. She then tried to go in for the kill with a high kick to my head, which I was able to block while at the same time grabbing her leg and landing a few half-speed punches to her upper torso and face. I swept the one leg still on the ground and she was now underneath me. I let her stand up again, since I had a huge weight advantage on her.

  Well I must have pissed her off, because she came at me with a flurry of kicks and punches. She grabbed me behind the back of my head and was doing some Muay Thai knees on my mid-section. I ducked down out of her grip and as I was moving away, Jen decided to throw a kick at my midsection, but since my head was down, she connected with my nose instead which snapped my neck up. Tears came to my eyes and I stepped back, caught her next kick and dumped her to the ground to buy time to help clear the tears from my eyes and hope the sharp pain would decrease. When she stood back up, she just stopped and looked at me with a concerned look. “Mike”, she said, “I am so sorry.” I realized at that point that my nose was streaming blood onto my shirt and the mat. Jeremy threw me a towel which I applied to my face and cleared most of the blood away.

  I stepped out of the ring and walked over to the laundry sink, which had a mirror over it. Dampening the towel, I tilted my head back and wiped away the rest of the blood. Jenny gently pulled the towel away to inspect and gingerly felt the cartilage in my nose and said, “I don’t think it’s broken.” The blood had already stopped flowing, but the nose was throbbing slightly. Jen was still fussing around me, and I said “Jen, chill…I’m fine. Nice kick by the way. I’ll be fine.” Looking back over to the mats everyone else were hiding grins. I realized to myself, that I was going to hear about this for a very long time. They had already mopped up the blood off the mat and Don and Miguel were spiritedly exchanging strikes. Grabbing a beer from the cooler, I figured I would just sit back and relax.

  The rest of the evening was good friendly hanging out. I was the only one with any lasting mementos of the evening. Every time I turned around Jenny had a cold beer ready for me and asked me if I needed anything. If I had known this was the way to get special attention from her, I would have let her kick my butt sooner. Soon people were saying goodbye and only Jenny and Emily remained. Jenny unabashedly told us that she needed to stay tonight and observe me to make sure I did not have a concussion. Everyone got a kick out of this and I started to get inkling that this could be an interesting night. Jenny had driven and it looked like Emily was fine with hanging out all night. Jenny looked at me and asked if I could show her where my shower was, with that I brought her to my room and showed her the bathroom and shower. Nice she said and immediately started to remove he workout clothes. “Are you going to join me little boy she intoned?” Without hesitation, I stripped off my clothes in r
ecord time, and followed her gorgeous, very shapely and tight rear into the shower. We embraced and traced each other’s bods with our hands for a long time with deep kissing. With pent up anticipation, we dried off and headed for the bedroom.

  We made very energetic love a couple of times which we needed since I was coming off a dry spell and had a lot of making up to do. Instead of drifting off to sleep, we ended up talking about our personal lives. She confided in me that she had caught her long-time boyfriend cheating on her while on a business trip so they had broken up a couple of months ago and she had been lonely. Her boyfriend Craig, had been trying to reconcile with her, and had been distraught about screwing things up with her. Jenny had not come here tonight with the intention of sleeping with me, but in an impulsive moment decided that she wanted to do so. Her reasoning was she could then accept her X back if she had been with someone else and had decided if it was to be anyone; it was to be with me. I guess I felt somewhat honored, but also a little bit used. We went at it once more before drifting off to sleep; I guess she wanted to get her money’s worth before heading back to Craig.

  We showered separately in the morning and when we walked out of the bedroom, it looked like Bill had slept on the couch. Emily was just walking out of Bill’s room with her hair still wet from a shower. She walked over to Bill, gave him a kiss on his head, and told him thanks for giving up his room last night. My pleasure he replied. Bill and I walked the girls downstairs but since Bill was still in his boxers, I walked the girls to Jen’s car. With a last kiss, Jen whispered in my ear “thanks Rico you do not know how much last night helped me.” Always here to serve I said, and meant it. They got into their car and headed out.

  Chapter 10: Solving the Riddle

  When I came back into the house, I heard Bill calling me to come over to the lab. “Rico, get over here; I think we have big problems.” Hearing that, I rushed over to Bill where he was standing by the open specimen cabinet. It took me a second to realize what the problem was, and with an accompanying thud in my gut, I saw that half of the specimens were a brown color and not the green hue we wanted to see. “Shit, it looks like the entire sample base that I had diluted greater than 50% were dying out” Bill wailed. “Calm down Bill, we can figure this out. Did you expect that everything would just fall into place for us? Why don’t you compare the samples under the microscope and see what you can see. In the meantime I am heading to church and I will be back soon.”

  As I was walking to church, I was considering these new developments. I did not want to show Bill that I was as concerned as he was since it would have only made matters worse. In truth, I was very concerned since the ability to reproduce the organism was essential to a commercial success. Based on our initial work we realized that the composition of seawater was pretty much the same around the world, so why did diluting the original solution have an impact, I questioned to myself. Why would the organism replicate itself initially, and then decide it did not like the environment and start to die off? I got to church with one minute to spare as the four altar servers started down the aisle towards the altar. My thoughts drifted back and forth between the mass and our replication issue, but my ears picked up when the priest got into his homily. His main message was about helping those who had less than ourselves here in our parish, our country and around the world. His talk was relevant to current tensions in our country that had been sparked by political grandstanding around the term the media loved to refer to as “class warfare.” The reality of the situation was that the current administration was all about building a base of citizens that were dependent on the government hoping they would become votes on Election Day. They were handing out entitlements for half the population with little to no real understanding of how they would be paid for or how our economy would react to the costs a couple of years down the line. Father’s words seemed to hit the right middle ground. We helped others because it is the right thing to do and simply that.

  Walking back to my place, I saw the Exxon sign across the street displaying a $4.13 cents for regular gas on their sign. I just shook my head and wondered how others could afford to pay this price. In just the last couple of days, it had gone up another five cents. The media played it up as speculators driving up the price of a barrel of oil which had a lot of truth to it, but what they weren’t reporting was that our administration had a piss poor energy plan and were consciously blocking attempts to leverage US resources in manipulative way to drive faster development of renewable power sources. In my opinion, this was great in theory, but poor in execution. It would make us more reliant on foreign oil and take money out of a low growth economy.

  As I was lamenting the state of our country’s leadership, out of nowhere a nugget of information popped into my mind…Arsenic. Arsenic was the only oddball reading from the water we took from the original sample. What if this was a need of the specimen and how did it get in the water? Alternatively, maybe it was a byproduct of the organism as it reproduced. I would have to see what Bill thought about it.

  No way, Bill was thinking to himself. We have come too far to have everything crash to a halt now. The deteriorated samples showed what he had feared. The organisms were no longer pulsing and amperage had dropped to almost nothing. On the bright, side the core sample did not seem to have any change. Adding a little solution from the original sample only resulted in the organisms slowly dying out. Bill thought to himself that he really needed to perform another water analysis with the sample from the diluted solution to see if there was anything going on that the eye could not discern. Feeling frustrated, he looked up when Rico came back and saw that his friend did not look defeated or concerned, but appeared intent and focused. “What’s going on with you?” Bill asked.

  Rico walked right over to the bench and started by saying to Bill, “consider this; the first water analysis showed an anomaly which was…,” Rico was waiting for Bill to chime in. It took about 20 seconds, but Bill eventually remembered about the Arsenic. “Arsenic” he yelled out like he was on a game show, and in the spirit of a game show, Rico said and the final question of the round is,” How did the arsenic get into the water?” To this question, Bill didn’t have an answer, so Rico said, “ding…ding…ding, times up. What if,” he said, “the plant you originally brought up was the nutrient source for the organism?”

  Bill sat quietly processing this information, without a word went over to the specimen cabinet, and removed the small sample that had broken off from the main body sent to Professor Greyson. Removing the piece of plant and placing it on a glass dish Bill sliced off a small piece and placed it into a small beaker. He then ground it up into small pieces and poured about a one-ounce sample from the deteriorated specimen into the new beaker. Bill announced, “Now we wait”, as he smiled in anticipation. “If you got this right Rico, I will do your laundry for the next few months.” “You are on Grasshopper,” I said with a slight bow.

  We both went upstairs to get something to eat since we couldn’t do much down here for the moment. We took out some frozen pizza and threw it in the oven. By the time the pizza was done and we had voraciously chowed it down, it was time to see how our test went. I followed Bill down the stairs and over to the test beaker. He held it up to the light and with a little tremor in his voice said, “It looks noticeably greener.” He next placed some on a slide to view under the microscope, fired up the PC screen and in about two minutes had an image on the screen that had us both jumping up and down like school girls. The organism was pulsing again!

  Over the next couple of days, we tried numerous experiments. Water analysis tests confirmed that arsenic levels dropped off to almost nil. We acquired Arsenic from a supply house and after carefully calculating the ratio to meet the original sample levels we were able to restore all samples to a viable level. We also figured out that the replication of the organism depleted the Arsenic levels, but once the organism reached maximum saturation, no additional deletion occurred. Our lab technician remained busy while we
documented each step. We spent $2200 dollars in four days on testing water samples, which was well worth it to prove out our hypothesis.

  Thursday came around and I told William, which is what his mother called him, that we were having an evening board meeting up on the roof to discuss the state of the state regarding our future. “Bill,” I said “bring your appetite because I am grilling.” For the rest of the day we sorted through a variety of deliveries and inventoried what we had. They only thing that had not been received was the heat sealer machine. A quick check of the order status and tracking number showed that it would be here by 10 o’clock the next morning.

  We worked together during the week to create very detailed diagrams of our first “Power Mat.” Not much had changed from our initial rough drawing. The most intricate part of or documentation was the wiring schematic. We had decided to double the wiring for each 8-ounce bag of fluid to compensate for the movement of liquid such as hanging a mat vertical or even envisioning it as part of the hood of a car and the car at different degrees of angle based on normal driving. We figured out that gravity played a role causing the negatively charged organisms to be at the lowest portion of the fluid. Each wire bundle was tie wrapped together and connected to a central panel. For durability purposes, we decided to solder each connection into a common bus instead of using circuit boards with pressure clamps similar to what stereo speakers typically use. We also created a rudimentary “Power Panel,” that took the direct current or DC voltage and converted to a 120 volts using alternating current or AC. One of the AC outlets ran to an uninterruptable power source or UPS to protect gear sensitive to power fluctuations or spikes. We also ran the DC power directly to a DC panel that allowed the selection of different DC voltages.