Beyond Responsibility

Chapter 5 Shocking Development

"Get back here, Shocker! You can't escape me, I'll chase you to the ends of the EEAAARTH!" - Christopher Daniel Barnes overacting as Spider-Man.

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Peter stretched out after a fulfilling night's rest. It took him no time to leap out of bed, attach to the ceiling as part of his morning stretch, and walk over to his kitchen to get some breakfast, not even bothering to drop from the ceiling. He felt great, rejuvenated even. Just one night of sleep after two without had done him wonders. He dropped down to land flawlessly in a chair at his kitchen counter and cooked himself up some breakfast.

Feeling refreshed and better than ever, Peter opened up his window and let the sunshine stream through. Unlike last morning, it was a welcome sight. He considered going for a run like yesterday, but he had work to do and had no time to waste.

He plopped himself down at his work desk and began his task of trying to understand Shocker's gauntlet.

Unfortunately, after a bit of tinkering, Peter had to admit that the gauntlet was beyond him. He had to give Shocker some credit, this was pretty advanced for a crook wearing a yellow quilt. But even if he didn't have the time to fully reverse engineer or even fully understand the gauntlet, he could at least try his best to grasp the basic principles. The gauntlet was a convex oval dish that extended from just past the knuckles to halfway down the forearm. The centerpiece of the gauntlet was a large red gemstone of some kind. It didn't take him long to figure out how to hot wire the thing. It resulted in a loud buzzing as one of the components attached to the gemstone by a metal band vibrated.

"Woah, a supersonic vibrator, the frequency of this thing is off the charts, but what's it doing?"

He soon found that turning on the vibrator somehow produced a high frequency oscillating current. It actually gave him quite the shock. Re-attaching the circuit, he found it was supposed to flow back into the vibrator as a primary power source, creating a positive feedback loop.

"Hang on, this thing seems to be its own power source, but how can that work, isn't that super dangerous? It's not some kind of generator, is it? That's ridiculous. And how's it creating a current, especially a high frequency AC current? It's just releasing kinetic energy. A little more exploration and he found the battery which was connected to the vibrator as an auxiliary power source.

"But this capacitor is a DC current. I don't get it, there's no transformer, the circuitry is rudimentary, what's going on here?"

Reluctantly, he turned it on, hoping the feedback loop wouldn't cause the whole thing to explode. It went normally at first, but then the vibrations started to accelerate faster and faster. He noticed the gemstone begin to spark, he could feel the heat coming off it, even glowed a little. He turned it off before it got out of hand.

"Incredible. This thing is capable of reverberating at hypersonic speeds. Must have been on low power mode before." But that still didn't solve the mystery. And how did the gemstone play into all this?

It suddenly clicked. "Could this all be piezoelectric? I get it! It's its own transformer. The capacitor battery is just for an ignition charge. Then this band around the stone must be a constrictor..." a bit of looking and he found a diverging current powering a motor attached to the band. "The reverberator causes a buildup of pressure in the stone. Rapidly compressing and decompressing in tune with the vibrations. The oscillations between the piezoelectric and reverse piezoelectric effects transform that physical back and forth movement into an alternation in the electric current, mimicking AC current. And that high frequency AC current is much better suited to powering the vibrator than the low voltage high amperage DC current, creating a positive feedback loop that further accelerates it to hypersonic levels. And then the leftover energy is used to tighten the band around the stone, squeezing it to increase the stress and create a further build up of elastic potential energy. The oscillating vibrations running through the band give just enough breathing room for the stone to momentarily decompress enough to produce enough of a current to keep the system self-sustaining while conserving most of the energy!" Peter went slack-jawed in amazement at the device. Sure, the resistance from the normal force increased exponentially and wouldn't allow the potential energy stockpile to build up infinitely, but the upper limit was astonishing for such a simple power source.