Chapter 40 – Declan

 

I’d had it. First getting yanked out of Plasma like a kid past curfew, with Stacia still in some funk, and then sent to Susskins while Mack got to hang out and play video games in my quarters. Actually, I could have handled all that, but Susskins was the most insulting, egotistical son of bitch I’d ever met.

 

He belittled my intelligence, my schooling, and my future with every failure to achieve quantum stability. Give me a break. Baldy had been at it for years; me, almost half an hour. Yet when I didn’t instantly give him perfection, he started calling me a moron, an idiot, a cretin. He drew me pictures so I could visualize what he wanted but I was so mad, I couldn’t concentrate. Then he said something about my mom. That she must have been the product of incest.

 

Now he was stuck to the ceiling, plastered in a spread eagle position directly over the massive black cube of the D-Wave cryogenic cooling unit—which was chilling at some ridiculous degree below zero. Frost had formed on his lab coat in the short time I’d had him up there, hanging a couple or inches from the cold metal.

 

“Declan, put him down. Dr. Susskins didn’t mean what he said about your mother,” Chet said.

 

“That’s right, Declan. I was kidding. Just my way of motivating my staff,” Susskins said, his breath fogging in the super-chilled air. He didn’t look quite so condescending now.

 

Etch his flesh like he wanted that metal etched, Sorrow suggested, showing me just how to do it. A spell to magically tattoo glyphs into flesh.

 

It would be easy, now that my many-great grandmother’s grimoire had shown me. I could literally tattoo him with electrons, burning any symbol I wanted into his skin.

 

Hi I’m an asshole! emblazoned across his forehead. Perfect.

 

“Declan, why is Dr. Susskins on the ceiling?” Stacia suddenly asked from behind me. Turning to her, I gave Chet a glare as I did, guessing that he’d called in help. He shrugged.

 

She had changed into yoga pants and a stretchy blue workout shirt. I wasn’t going to let her distract me from my anger. After studying my expression, she turned and looked up.

 

“Nevermind. Susskins, what did you do or say that put you up there?” she asked.

 

When the doctor didn’t answer right away, Chet answered for him. “He may have said something about Declan’s mom.”

 

“Oh no. Tell me you didn’t?” she asked.

 

“He said my mom was a product of incest,” I said.

 

She sucked in a sharp breath, staring at me for a moment. “I take it all back. Declan, why is Dr. Susskins still alive?” she asked in exactly the same tone she’d used when she’d first walked in.

 

“Now see here,” Susskins said, frost on his eyebrows building from his breath.

 

“No Doc, you see here. Declan’s mom was the product of generations of Irish witches selecting the very best partners they could find. She was, by all accounts, the most powerful witch to come out of a nation that has consistently produced strong witches. So for you to tell the son of that witch that she was in any way of poor breeding is so monumentally stupid that it makes me wonder how you stay alive when that massive cranium isn’t in the lab. What could possibly possess you to say such a thing?” she asked.

 

“I was trying to motivate the boy,” he said.

 

“Before you undertake a motivation program, you should first decide what behavior you are actually looking for. Getting yourself murdered by an angry warlock is sort of Darwinian, don’t you think? Removing your own genes from the pool by insulting his? No wonder this program goes nowhere.”

 

“In reviewing my technique, I have to admit to perhaps not thinking it through first. It’s just he has so much raw ability. We should be able to do this,” he said, eyelashes now clumping together with white.

 

I realized, somewhere in the middle of his speech, that with Sorrow’s mental tutorial, it would be almost as easy to accomplish it on the single atom thickness of tin that he called Stantene. Not that I could actually see the metal that was attached to a substrate, but I could feel it with my Earth senses.

 

With a wave, I removed Susskins from his spot on the ceiling tiles, sliding him across the ceiling to just above an open spot on the floor and then removing my telekinetic hold on him. He hit the floor with a satisfying thump.

 

“Shit, Declan! Dude, you can’t just throw people around like that,” Chet said, looking seriously freaked out.

 

“See, Chet, but he can. He just doesn’t, unless he’s seriously provoked. Calling him names won’t generally do it, but attack someone he cares about, living or dead, and well, there ya go,” Stacia said.

 

Now I suddenly felt bad. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t that guy. The one who used his abilities against those without them just because he could.

 

“This isn’t working out. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I’m not going to sit here and listen to his verbal abuse, Stacia. Chris and Tanya can fire my ass if they want. I didn’t sign up for this,” I said. “In fact, I’ll start packing now. Mack and I can be gone within the hour.”

 

“Whoa, whoa. Nobody said anything about firing anyone, dude. Right Doc?” Chet asked Susskins, who was sitting up and rubbing his hands and blowing on them. Stacia wasn’t saying a word, just watching me.

 

“What? Of course not. I just want you to use what you were born with,” he said, frowning. I actually believed him. The arrogant son of a bitch thought nothing of degrading people, but he also wasn’t holding my temper tantrum against me.

 

“I use my intelligence to its fullest and I have little patience for people who can’t equal it—which is no one, by the way. So I do understand when you use your gifts to their maximum capacity, even if it was against me,” he said.

 

“That wasn’t maximum. Not even close,” I said.

 

“Really? You can throw me on the ceiling but you can’t scribe a simple circuit on a tiny piece of metal?” he said.

 

“I think I can. I didn’t figure it out till Sor… till I got mad,” I said.

 

“Show us,” Stacia said, waving at the little table that held our experimental material.

 

After thinking it through one more time, I looked at the drawing Susskins had made while reaching out to the little block of substrate and its nano-sized piece of tin with my mind. “I think I just did it,” I said.

 

“Nothing happened,” Stacia said.

 

“Nothing visible to the naked eye,” Chet said.

 

Susskins stood up and looked from me to the experimental substrate, then he looked at his computer monitor. Chet moved up next to him and they both studied the readout. The only other people in the room, two technicians, a man and a woman, were still backed up against the wall, watching me like I was a crazed carnival clown.

 

Susskins looked up from the monitor, exchanged a glance with Chet, and then turned to me. “Excellent. Absolutely perfect.”

 

Now I just felt weird. “Yeah, well it’s not so hard.”

 

Stacia smiled at me. “You help them if you want, but if either of them get abusive, walk away. Then tell me and I’ll kick their asses,” she growled the last part.

 

“Threats won’t be necessary. Now that we know what we’re about, we can do a whole lot of more of it,” Susskins said. “Samantha… what are you doing over there? Never mind, just bring up the theoretical architecture diagrams. Calvin, come away from that wall and find out where we can get more Stanene,” Susskins said.

 

“Ah, I can probably make more of it,” I said.

 

“Really? How?” Chet asked.

 

“Well, if we have tin on hand, I can sort of repurpose it, so to speak,” I said.

 

“My boy, you didn’t even know what it was until an hour ago. Now you think you can make it?” Susskins asked, but his tone wasn’t condescending, just curious.

 

“I can feel it,” I said, “and therefore, I can replicate it as long as I have the raw material.”

 

“Could you mold the circuits into it as you synthesis it?” Chet asked.

 

“Could you?” Susskins asked, truly excited.

 

“Probably,” I said.

 

“You heard the boy—no. You heard the man,” Susskins said. “Let’s get him some tin. We have a quantum computer to build.”

 

Stacia leaned in and whispered in my ear. “I mean it. Stop when you want and let me know if Susskins gets nasty. And thank you for my blade breaker,” she said, giving my cheek a kiss. “All right, I’m going to check in with the others. Play nice,” she said, sauntering away.

 

I watched her walk away while Susskins gave orders and the room got rearranged behind me. Then I turned back, meeting Chet’s eyes. He had a funny little smile that I couldn’t decipher, but he just nodded and started to lay out material. Susskins looked up from a monitor, where he was reviewing diagrams of quantum circuits.

 

“Come on, people. Let’s make history,” he said. I shivered a little. Making history wasn’t necessarily hard; making good history was.