Adhara's Sonder

Chapter 18: Particle Supply

Adhara was waiting for them when they returned home, and as his friends unloaded the graphene and lead into the broad Pipeworks tunnel beneath the house, Cyrus solicited her and Olive's help inventing his new power source.

"I'm going to reverse-engineer your nuclear strong-force actuators," Cyrus told Adhara. "If my hypothesis is correct, I can use them to rearrange matter on an atomic level."

"That is ambitious," Adhara replied. "Will you let us examine them?"

To Cyrus and Olive's surprise, Adhara responded to his request by removing her little finger and placing it in his hand.

"Well then," Cyrus remarked as they stared at the finger in his hand. "That will do."

He and Olive took Adhara's finger to Cyrus' workroom, where Olive occupied a small workspace for her tools alongside him. They studied and analyzed the finger for many hours, deriving bits and pieces of fascinating qualities, but came to the eventuality that they would not be able to unify the design without observing it in use.

"We've gotten all the lead and graphene laid out like you asked," said Aliyah from the doorway. "And, if you're interested, they've declared a city-wide state of emergency. No one's supposed to go outside."

"Oh, Aliyah—" said Cyrus. "Could you ask Adhara to come here, please?"

"Do you need something?" asked Adhara, taking Aliyah's place in the doorway a few minutes later.

"Yes, well...." Cyrus extricated himself from the tangle of wires they had attached to her detached finger. "We've al- most figured it out, I think—but we need to take a few readings from how the electricity flows through the actuator as it's being used. Would you let us...?" he trailed off, but Adhara merely smiled and held out her arm. As Olive and Cyrus watched, the rosy, porcelain segments of her shell shifted away from her elbow, exposing silver printed circuits, tubes, and polished copper apparatuses clustered around the obsidian synovial joint.

"Incredible," Olive breathed. "It's just like she said. She's modeled after the human body—her arm is just like a mechanical equivalent of the anatomical model in Dr. Kersey's classroom."

"Is it really that similar?" Cyrus regarded the joint from another angle. "It's been a while since I've had an anatomy class."

"I'm telling you, man, it's a perfect replica."

"That's good to keep in mind," he noted as he gave Adhara a weight to hold. "Now, with a little resistance...." He prodded around inside the joint with a multi-meter as she pumped her forearm up and down.

After ascertaining that aside from electricity, the strong-force actuators also manipulated neutrino flow, Cyrus and Olive made steady progress reverse-engineering them. By the evening, as the others generously kept them well fed and supplied, they had produced a working prototype and integrated it into Cyrus' gauntlets, ballasted by a new backpack. Finally, the only remaining task was to feed the calculations into the gauntlets' supercomputer, and after they finished rendering, he led Adhara into the basement.

"What's with the backpack?" asked Maria as he set up his workspace. "I thought you didn't need one anymore since you're not using the diamond."

"Well, I don't, not for a power source." He slipped the sleek white pack off his shoulders to give her a better look. He grabbed a handle set into a circular black panel, and after he turned it a long cylinder sprang out. "This tank," he pointed, "has hydrogen cations, which are basically just protons. This tank has a neutron generator," it bore a radioactive symbol sticker, "and this here is just a ballast from the gauntlets for electricity—electrons. It's just raw materials for transmutation." He pushed the cylinder back into the pack and locked the panel again. "It used to be a power supply; now it's a particle supply! Plus, I still need somewhere to put the supercomputer." He patted the base of the backpack, presumably where the supercomputer lived.