Our preparations were going smoothly. Gina and I
were keeping everything to ourselves and no one at work or online had noticed that anything was off. If we could keep
things like this (no big deal at all) then we'd be able to get out of here, scott-free. The only thing I had to do
was to tell my family.
"You haven't said much about your family," said Gina suddenly.
I poke my head up inquisitively from my work in the trunk - I had been installing one of
the Turbonique micro-turbo thrusters. The passenger-side camera, one of the two remote-aim capable models that I bought
and 'waved for Gina, swiveled to around to look at me from it's mount on the dashboard.
"What, that?" I asked.
"Your family," said Gina, exasperation coloring her tone. "I know you have some."
I sighed - I was doing that a lot lately.
"Yeah, I do have a family. A pretty big one by todays standards."
"How many?" she asked.
"My mom, dad, one sister and five brothers."
"Shiest! That's huge! Where I came from, people were lucky enough to have just one or two! Where are they,
anyways? Why aren't you with them?"
"London. And I'm not with them because
I'm the black sheep of the family."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, my mom and I get along wonderfully - my biological father divorced her shortly
after I was born, and then it was just her and I for about four years. She moved into her grandfather's place that
was next door to her parent's house, and her parents would watch me whenever she went to work." I smiled
ruefully. "That was the one part of the setup that I wasn't happy about back then."
Gina's laugh filled the air. "I get it,
you're a Momma's Boy!" I grinned and went to sit in the driver's seat.
It was time for a break anyways.
"Yeah, Mom and I have always been close. And
that became a sticking point between us and my step-dad. We were just on such a different level and he couldn't
understand that."
"How could he be so jealous?"
"Dunno. I think it might have been better if
I was a girl, but not much. I was a brat back then anyways. A real
terror."
"Oh, you couldn't have been that bad," said Gina, grinning.
I raised an eyebrow at her. "Back in
kindergarten, I usually didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, and it would sometimes escalate to the point of me hiding under the teacher's
desk and biting her ankles."
Gina looked at me in shock from the computer screen... then fell over laughing
hysterically. After a few minutes of loud laughter interspersed with bits of barely intelligible German, Gina slowly
sat up.
"Mein Gott, Benjamin. You were right about
being and improvement over that Baka Shinji."
"Yeah, but then I'm pretty sure that the poor guy was loosing it
anyways."
Gina suddenly looked sullen.
"Yeah. I think we all were."
"Don't worry about it, Gina.
That's... well, whatever it is, you don't have to let it bother you.
There's nothing you can do to change anything except to accept it and move on. I think you got a lot going for
you."
"Why's that?"
"Well, you're out of that situation, you have a flying car for a body, you can
manipulate computers with ease, and you got me for a friend."
Gina gave me a wry smile, then laid on the sarcasm.
"Yeah. You for a friend. That's just what I need." And so
I blew a raspberry at her. "Mein Gott, you're so immature."
I shrugged. "Better that than mature and
grumpy all the time."
"Hmph. I prefer being grumpy over being
happy-go-lucky. But anyhow... what about your family? I don't think
you've told them about what you're doing."
"Nope. Haven't."
"Why not?"
"It's better this way. Don't worry,
I'll tell them soon enough. Thing is that my folks need to see that I am truly committed to something before
they'll accept it.
Gina nodded at that, then her eyes widened as she realized something. "You're going to drive over there!"
"Ex-zactly!" I said with a smile.
"But how are you going to be able to do that in an unregistered
vehicle? Unless... You're going to have me hack into the DOT's
mainframe, aren't you?"
My smile became a flat-out grin.
"You're a very clever girl, you know?"
"What about the papers for the car?" she said.
"Easy. I got a portable printer soaking in
handwavium right now."
"I guess that'll do it then. Got any
other bright ideas?"
"Nothing bright. Just thoughts."
"Such as?"
"Such as what the hell we're gonna do when we get out there."
"Glad you're thinking about that. Got
anything?"
"Thanks. Courier work comes to
mind."
"You mean running messages?"
"Sure. Someone's gotta deliver
packages. It's not like anyone's invented some way to do matter teleportation, even with handwavium."
"Seems... Kinda boring."
"Yeah, but I thought of something to do for recreation that should be
fun."
"What's that?"
"How about racing?"
"Racing? In space? How?"
"In the asteroid belt. There, top speed
doesn't really matter. It's how well you maneuver and accelerate."
"But don't you think it's dangerous?"
"A bit. I'm working on it."
"How?"
"Armored survival suit."
"And me?"
I grinned. "Case hardening."
By case hardening I meant a handwavium-hardened external case for the computer
itself. Gina made what passed for approving sounds.
I was living the handwavium lifestyle here. The
car and computers were handwaviumized. I had found one of those nifty Coleman coolers that had a small
refrigerator/heater built into it. With handwavium, it became a proper refrigerator chest and a microwave oven. Weird. Weirdness
aside, though it was pretty damn convenient, depite having to remove everything else I didn't want cooked, like the milk.
I just had to be careful about how long I left stuff in there to cook as it had no timer - it would run as long as the lid was closed.
There was only one final hurdle, and that was hygiene.
I knew that the most I could hope for was to clean myself off with something like baby-wipes (I did not dare want to handwaviumized something I used
directly on my body). While that may work for my skin, it didn't do much for my clothes.
While I was working on this problem I happened to handwaviumize one of my smaller
steamer trunks - one that happened to have wheels on one end to make it easier to carry. In an outrageous quirk, it
grew a whole bunch of legs and I found that anything I put in there for more than an hour or so came out clean, pressed, and smelling faintly of lilacs.
I simply wondered how the hell it knew about Terry Pratchet.
Gina only shook her head in disbelief and told me to stow it in the back seat next to
the food box. At least I wasn't worried about it trying to eat anyone, given handwavium's thing about
non-violence.
Gina didn't have too much trouble hacking into the PenDOT servers and got everything
setup for me, and the handwaviumized portable printer didn't have any trouble spitting out the appropriate forged stickers and paperwork… though my new
driver's license depicted me wearing an outrageously cheesy moustache.
Gina couldn't stop laughing for about five minutes, and even then she was making
snarkish remarks about me with a moustache for weeks afterwards.
Once all the stickers had been applied, I made sure that everything else was in
order. I called all the utility and service companies to discontinue service, made sure I had all the food we could
carry (which was all of it - that little refrigerator chest kept on 'swallowing' the food, which would reappear as we needed it), and made sure that we
had a full tank of… beer.
Yeah, it was just like Mr. Fusion from Back to
the Future. The active yeast and stuff in beer was the perfect fuel for the fusion turbine. I just hoped the damn thing wouldn't start driving drunkenly (I would later discover that this only happened when we were
dangerously low on beer and that, of course, it ran best on German beer). I had to go out and purchase a beer-pump for
the kegs I'd have to buy in order to fill it up. I just hoped that a full tank would last a while.
The day to leave came after all the preparations had been laid down and we left Emmaus,
but not without a backwards glance from me. Emmaus was one of the few places I liked from spending time in Pennsylvania
if only because it had that nice small-town feel.
Gina made sure I didn't get lost along the way to New York City. There, we paused momentarily to pay our respects at the September 11th Memorial site.
Along the way, Gina and I talked about how messed up the world was. She briefly accused me of running
away. I reacted by asking her what I could do about the matter, and stating that I wasn't running away at
all. I just wanted to pursue a child-hood dream.
The argument petered out about the time we reached a suitable pier.
It was dark and we were alone there on an unused pier.
The Atlantic Ocean lay before us. It was quiet for a long moment.
"So, are you ready?" asked Gina.
"Yeah. How about you?"
"All set. You do realize, though, that
someone's bound to see us take off from here."
"Yeah, but I'll take that chance."
"Okay then, let's do it."
And with that, I shifted from Drive to Fly.
There was no turning back now.
Perhaps leaving from New York was a mistake.
While I was certain that air radars wouldn't detect us as long as we stayed low, surface radar was another matter altogether. It wasn't too long until Gina, who'd tapped into the military radio frequencies to listen in, warned me that we had
F/A-18's inbound. Figuring that there was nothing else for it, I lit-off the Turbonique Microturbos and let them
shoot us out across international waters. There, at least, they didn't have much of a leg to stand on since the UN
still hadn't figured out what to do about Handwavium - Australia was still causing headaches there. However, there
was no doubt that the US had gone straight on over to their friends across the pond and were demanding our capture.
"Well, what now, boss?" asked Gina as we zipped along leisurely over the
Atlantic.
"I guess we could just try calling my folks, then."
"Radio?" asked Gina.
"Yeah, even though my folks aren't radio hams themselves, there's bound to
be someone over there that could get in touch with them for us."
"I think I can handle that."
Long story short, we managed to find a ham radio operator in the UK who was only too
pleased to contact my family for me… in exchange for a can of handwavium. I promised him that I'd drop by Australia
and ship it from there. My parents were happy to hear from my, but they wish it could have been under better
circumstances. They weren't all that happy about the situation, but they understood that I was doing something that
I wanted to do all my life and were proud nonetheless and made me promise to send them pictures regularly.
Once the connection was broken, we began a long flight to Australia to fulfill the
promise to the radio operator. Aside from dodging the occasional non-pro-wave country, it was an uneventful trip.
It was pretty interesting, though, getting clearance to enter Australian airspace as a
wave-refugee. Apparently this was happening often enough that they directed us to one of their smaller airfields
they'd set aside for this sort of thing.
I did Melbourne for a few days and sent the ham radio operator in the UK his Handwavium
as promised, and in an approved shipping container no less! Of course, I repackaged it so it looked quite ordinary to
the postal workers in the UK so they wouldn't know the difference. The container was just to ensure there
weren't any accidents along the way.
After that, we got reprovisioned, refueled, and then filed flight plans file for lift off. Since there really
weren't any settlements out there yet, we were just doing whatever we wanted to do.
We were of the Frontiersmen of the New Age.
We were happy.
And the rest is another story for later.
were keeping everything to ourselves and no one at work or online had noticed that anything was off. If we could keep
things like this (no big deal at all) then we'd be able to get out of here, scott-free. The only thing I had to do
was to tell my family.
"You haven't said much about your family," said Gina suddenly.
I poke my head up inquisitively from my work in the trunk - I had been installing one of
the Turbonique micro-turbo thrusters. The passenger-side camera, one of the two remote-aim capable models that I bought
and 'waved for Gina, swiveled to around to look at me from it's mount on the dashboard.
"What, that?" I asked.
"Your family," said Gina, exasperation coloring her tone. "I know you have some."
I sighed - I was doing that a lot lately.
"Yeah, I do have a family. A pretty big one by todays standards."
"How many?" she asked.
"My mom, dad, one sister and five brothers."
"Shiest! That's huge! Where I came from, people were lucky enough to have just one or two! Where are they,
anyways? Why aren't you with them?"
"London. And I'm not with them because
I'm the black sheep of the family."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, my mom and I get along wonderfully - my biological father divorced her shortly
after I was born, and then it was just her and I for about four years. She moved into her grandfather's place that
was next door to her parent's house, and her parents would watch me whenever she went to work." I smiled
ruefully. "That was the one part of the setup that I wasn't happy about back then."
Gina's laugh filled the air. "I get it,
you're a Momma's Boy!" I grinned and went to sit in the driver's seat.
It was time for a break anyways.
"Yeah, Mom and I have always been close. And
that became a sticking point between us and my step-dad. We were just on such a different level and he couldn't
understand that."
"How could he be so jealous?"
"Dunno. I think it might have been better if
I was a girl, but not much. I was a brat back then anyways. A real
terror."
"Oh, you couldn't have been that bad," said Gina, grinning.
I raised an eyebrow at her. "Back in
kindergarten, I usually didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, and it would sometimes escalate to the point of me hiding under the teacher's
desk and biting her ankles."
Gina looked at me in shock from the computer screen... then fell over laughing
hysterically. After a few minutes of loud laughter interspersed with bits of barely intelligible German, Gina slowly
sat up.
"Mein Gott, Benjamin. You were right about
being and improvement over that Baka Shinji."
"Yeah, but then I'm pretty sure that the poor guy was loosing it
anyways."
Gina suddenly looked sullen.
"Yeah. I think we all were."
"Don't worry about it, Gina.
That's... well, whatever it is, you don't have to let it bother you.
There's nothing you can do to change anything except to accept it and move on. I think you got a lot going for
you."
"Why's that?"
"Well, you're out of that situation, you have a flying car for a body, you can
manipulate computers with ease, and you got me for a friend."
Gina gave me a wry smile, then laid on the sarcasm.
"Yeah. You for a friend. That's just what I need." And so
I blew a raspberry at her. "Mein Gott, you're so immature."
I shrugged. "Better that than mature and
grumpy all the time."
"Hmph. I prefer being grumpy over being
happy-go-lucky. But anyhow... what about your family? I don't think
you've told them about what you're doing."
"Nope. Haven't."
"Why not?"
"It's better this way. Don't worry,
I'll tell them soon enough. Thing is that my folks need to see that I am truly committed to something before
they'll accept it.
Gina nodded at that, then her eyes widened as she realized something. "You're going to drive over there!"
"Ex-zactly!" I said with a smile.
"But how are you going to be able to do that in an unregistered
vehicle? Unless... You're going to have me hack into the DOT's
mainframe, aren't you?"
My smile became a flat-out grin.
"You're a very clever girl, you know?"
"What about the papers for the car?" she said.
"Easy. I got a portable printer soaking in
handwavium right now."
"I guess that'll do it then. Got any
other bright ideas?"
"Nothing bright. Just thoughts."
"Such as?"
"Such as what the hell we're gonna do when we get out there."
"Glad you're thinking about that. Got
anything?"
"Thanks. Courier work comes to
mind."
"You mean running messages?"
"Sure. Someone's gotta deliver
packages. It's not like anyone's invented some way to do matter teleportation, even with handwavium."
"Seems... Kinda boring."
"Yeah, but I thought of something to do for recreation that should be
fun."
"What's that?"
"How about racing?"
"Racing? In space? How?"
"In the asteroid belt. There, top speed
doesn't really matter. It's how well you maneuver and accelerate."
"But don't you think it's dangerous?"
"A bit. I'm working on it."
"How?"
"Armored survival suit."
"And me?"
I grinned. "Case hardening."
By case hardening I meant a handwavium-hardened external case for the computer
itself. Gina made what passed for approving sounds.
I was living the handwavium lifestyle here. The
car and computers were handwaviumized. I had found one of those nifty Coleman coolers that had a small
refrigerator/heater built into it. With handwavium, it became a proper refrigerator chest and a microwave oven. Weird. Weirdness
aside, though it was pretty damn convenient, depite having to remove everything else I didn't want cooked, like the milk.
I just had to be careful about how long I left stuff in there to cook as it had no timer - it would run as long as the lid was closed.
There was only one final hurdle, and that was hygiene.
I knew that the most I could hope for was to clean myself off with something like baby-wipes (I did not dare want to handwaviumized something I used
directly on my body). While that may work for my skin, it didn't do much for my clothes.
While I was working on this problem I happened to handwaviumize one of my smaller
steamer trunks - one that happened to have wheels on one end to make it easier to carry. In an outrageous quirk, it
grew a whole bunch of legs and I found that anything I put in there for more than an hour or so came out clean, pressed, and smelling faintly of lilacs.
I simply wondered how the hell it knew about Terry Pratchet.
Gina only shook her head in disbelief and told me to stow it in the back seat next to
the food box. At least I wasn't worried about it trying to eat anyone, given handwavium's thing about
non-violence.
Gina didn't have too much trouble hacking into the PenDOT servers and got everything
setup for me, and the handwaviumized portable printer didn't have any trouble spitting out the appropriate forged stickers and paperwork… though my new
driver's license depicted me wearing an outrageously cheesy moustache.
Gina couldn't stop laughing for about five minutes, and even then she was making
snarkish remarks about me with a moustache for weeks afterwards.
Once all the stickers had been applied, I made sure that everything else was in
order. I called all the utility and service companies to discontinue service, made sure I had all the food we could
carry (which was all of it - that little refrigerator chest kept on 'swallowing' the food, which would reappear as we needed it), and made sure that we
had a full tank of… beer.
Yeah, it was just like Mr. Fusion from Back to
the Future. The active yeast and stuff in beer was the perfect fuel for the fusion turbine. I just hoped the damn thing wouldn't start driving drunkenly (I would later discover that this only happened when we were
dangerously low on beer and that, of course, it ran best on German beer). I had to go out and purchase a beer-pump for
the kegs I'd have to buy in order to fill it up. I just hoped that a full tank would last a while.
The day to leave came after all the preparations had been laid down and we left Emmaus,
but not without a backwards glance from me. Emmaus was one of the few places I liked from spending time in Pennsylvania
if only because it had that nice small-town feel.
Gina made sure I didn't get lost along the way to New York City. There, we paused momentarily to pay our respects at the September 11th Memorial site.
Along the way, Gina and I talked about how messed up the world was. She briefly accused me of running
away. I reacted by asking her what I could do about the matter, and stating that I wasn't running away at
all. I just wanted to pursue a child-hood dream.
The argument petered out about the time we reached a suitable pier.
It was dark and we were alone there on an unused pier.
The Atlantic Ocean lay before us. It was quiet for a long moment.
"So, are you ready?" asked Gina.
"Yeah. How about you?"
"All set. You do realize, though, that
someone's bound to see us take off from here."
"Yeah, but I'll take that chance."
"Okay then, let's do it."
And with that, I shifted from Drive to Fly.
There was no turning back now.
Perhaps leaving from New York was a mistake.
While I was certain that air radars wouldn't detect us as long as we stayed low, surface radar was another matter altogether. It wasn't too long until Gina, who'd tapped into the military radio frequencies to listen in, warned me that we had
F/A-18's inbound. Figuring that there was nothing else for it, I lit-off the Turbonique Microturbos and let them
shoot us out across international waters. There, at least, they didn't have much of a leg to stand on since the UN
still hadn't figured out what to do about Handwavium - Australia was still causing headaches there. However, there
was no doubt that the US had gone straight on over to their friends across the pond and were demanding our capture.
"Well, what now, boss?" asked Gina as we zipped along leisurely over the
Atlantic.
"I guess we could just try calling my folks, then."
"Radio?" asked Gina.
"Yeah, even though my folks aren't radio hams themselves, there's bound to
be someone over there that could get in touch with them for us."
"I think I can handle that."
Long story short, we managed to find a ham radio operator in the UK who was only too
pleased to contact my family for me… in exchange for a can of handwavium. I promised him that I'd drop by Australia
and ship it from there. My parents were happy to hear from my, but they wish it could have been under better
circumstances. They weren't all that happy about the situation, but they understood that I was doing something that
I wanted to do all my life and were proud nonetheless and made me promise to send them pictures regularly.
Once the connection was broken, we began a long flight to Australia to fulfill the
promise to the radio operator. Aside from dodging the occasional non-pro-wave country, it was an uneventful trip.
It was pretty interesting, though, getting clearance to enter Australian airspace as a
wave-refugee. Apparently this was happening often enough that they directed us to one of their smaller airfields
they'd set aside for this sort of thing.
I did Melbourne for a few days and sent the ham radio operator in the UK his Handwavium
as promised, and in an approved shipping container no less! Of course, I repackaged it so it looked quite ordinary to
the postal workers in the UK so they wouldn't know the difference. The container was just to ensure there
weren't any accidents along the way.
After that, we got reprovisioned, refueled, and then filed flight plans file for lift off. Since there really
weren't any settlements out there yet, we were just doing whatever we wanted to do.
We were of the Frontiersmen of the New Age.
We were happy.
And the rest is another story for later.