I set up Gary and Mia’s teams in the industrial building at Hannah’s Home, next to Sifu Zhang’s Kung Fu, and I put Shauna in charge of making sure that they that they all got settled in ok. The two teams of three quickly grew to ten employees, as key team members were lured back to their old jobs, and within a few short weeks, the two teams merged into one. For my part, I cut back on my studies a little, ending my days at three, so that I could help the new company, VR Health Systems, get off the ground.
If it weren’t for Jenny taking a keen interest in the new venture, I’d have been forced to put my medical training on hold completely. I had no idea how much work it would be to integrate two companies and to ride herd over them. Jenny took on the task of operations manager without being asked and organized things so that I got a daily update report when I came in and had a list of all the decisions that the team required in order to move the project towards my vision for it.
This side project was putting a serious dent in my legitimate personal funds, but I had enough to last me out the year. That would be enough time for some of my other projects to bear fruit and refill my cash reserves. While my farm and my mining land wouldn’t give me much of a return for many years, my mining consultation business, as well as my planned “Natural Healing” consultation business, should more than handle the costs of running VR Health Systems.
Throughout the remaining weeks of summer, my schedule was packed from morning until…morning. I started off my days following rounds at the hospital and then joining my ‘peers’ in whatever rotation I was currently learning about. Afternoons, until three, were spent observing surgeries in the ORs and listening in on the pre- and post-surgical analyses. Mostly, I was following the general surgeons around, but I sometimes ventured into the orthopaedic, thoracic, or colorectal department surgeries. My repertoire of surgeries was growing fast and my field allowed me to recall every bit of those procedures. In addition, as I came to realize that my new VR project was going to need to recreate these surgeries from the standpoint of each member of the surgical team, I started scanning all of the participants. This put a serious strain on my abilities and pushed my concentration to the limit. Although, like any other muscle, continued use improved those abilities and it became easier as the weeks went by.
Leaving the hospital at three, I would head out to Hannah’s Home for about two hours to work with the people at VR Health Systems and then another hour with Shauna going over foundation business. Home, dinner and a late Kung Fu class were my next activities, followed by home, shower, and school for some cadaver practice. Most nights I was sleeping by one or one-thirty and I’d start the whole process again at six in the morning.
With a schedule like that, it was no wonder that I looked forward to the weekend. Weekends were my only chance to sleep-in a little and to spend a bit of time with my parents and friends. Even Mark was relegated to the weekends and he made sure that his trips for McKenzie resources left his weekends free.
On the last weekend before Eva and James left for university in Chapel Hill, I had plans to spend almost the entire two days with them. The festivities were to begin with lunch at Big Julie’s Pizzeria.
A few sentences from mom at breakfast put an end to those plans.
“Josh, there’s a call out for volunteers to help search for a mother and daughter that went missing at South Mountain State Park. They’ve been gone since yesterday afternoon. It’s only an hour away. Do you think we could go help them search the area?”
Mom had been reading the news on my iPad. She would have preferred to get a ‘real’ newspaper, only they’d all either gone out of business or online in the decade plus that she’d been away. At her words, dad turned to me and raised his left eyebrow in question.
“Why are you looking at me?”
“I was just thinking that your field might be perfectly suited for searching that state park.”
“How could Abby’s field do that?” Mom hadn’t ever seen my detailed maps of Jake’s mines and didn’t know how far out I could scan. Dad filled her in and she told us to be ready to leave in fifteen minutes.
“Dad, there could be hundreds of families out there on those mountains.”
“You’ll just have to look for groups of two, with one of the two being very small. Given that they’ve been missing since yesterday, I’d guess that one of them, or both, are injured or they’re in an area that they can’t get out of.”
“Hmmm. In that case, I’ll need a bit more time to get ready. I’ll meet you and mom at the car.”
Since my impromptu examination of Matt, I’d been building up my own doctor’s kit. Initially, it was an emergency medical kit, resembling what many people kept in their cars, and it quickly evolved into several backpacks, as I considered all of the things that I might need. I had one backpack organized with all the drugs and medications that I might need, including some EpiPen’s and a glucose meter. Howie was able to find me a good deal on the drugs as they were all within six months of their expiry date. As this bag spent almost all of it’s time in L2, the expiry dates were meaningless for my purposes. Having the bag in L2 also let me store several useful medications that would normally need to be kept refrigerated.
A second backpack was set up as a trauma bag. It contained sterile dressing, splints, and oxygen tank, a few tourniquets, chest decompression kit, trauma scissors, open chest seals, heavy duty all-purpose tape, airway stabilization equipment and a manual suction device. Whereas a first aid kit was used for small scrapes and cuts, this bag was used to keep a person alive until you could get them to the hospital. This bag, I’d purchased full stocked and merely tweaked it a bit for my personal preferences. For instance, from my experience at the embassy party, I make sure to include several needle decompression syringes.
My final backpack more closely resembled the traditional doctor’s bag and included a stethoscope, percussion hammer, otoscope, ophthalmoscope, cotton, alcohol, throat swabs, sterile gloves, sutures, scalpels, sutures, needles, scissors, syringes, a thermometer, a flashlight and equipment to measure blood pressure. To be on the safe side, I added several surgical instruments that I thought might be useful to have.
I dressed quickly, grabbed the three medical bags and overlapped them on my back. The drug bag stayed in L2, the trauma bag went to L1, and the doctor’s bag was shifted to R1. It still amazed me how I could be carrying all those bags simultaneously and not feel their weight at all. I was pretty sure that some physical laws were being broken in the process.
On the way, dad asked me if I had ever used my field to search for anything.
“Sure. I searched for ores in Jake’s mines.”
“Not quite, Abby. In the mines, you scanned everything. That’s not the same as searching for something specific.”
“It kind of is. How can you search for something specific without seeing everything else while you’re looking?”
“If you know the shape of something, then your eyes can pick it out of a pile of other things, without your brain actually paying attention to every item in the pile. Your scans seems to read the entire pile and list of what’s in it and where. I would assume that scanning that way give you a complete picture, while also filling up your brain with incredible amounts of information that you don’t need. I would think that if you were able to use the field to only look for what you need to find, then you’d be able to scan much further as well, since you wouldn’t be overwhelmed by all the extra detail. Instead of thousands of data points, you’d only get a few.”
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Dad had a good point. I remembered trying to go past my three-mile limit and how my brain couldn’t seem to hold everything clearly after that. If he was right, then I needed to find a way to only scan for what I was searching for. In this case, it was a mother and daughter. I didn’t know their shapes, but maybe I could search for all humans and narrow it down from there, as dad had suggested earlier. Now I just had to figure out how to scan for humans.
“Got any suggestions on how to scan for something specific?”
“Picture an object that you’re very familiar with and keep it in mind while you scan. Try it while we drive. Perhaps the wheel on the car?”
I gave it a try. I pictures the circular shape of the tire, the color of the tire, and the metal rim interior of the tire and I kept the image firmly in my head while I shaped a small ten foot by ten-foot field and passed it through the moving car.
“You’re low on oil and windshield washer fluid. Also, next time you bring the car in, have them top up the brake fluid and check why the rear passenger-side tire is getting slightly more wear on the inside part of the tire. Mom, the lip balm that you were looking for is under your seat, closer to the door, six inches back from your right foot. There’s also a combined seventy-cents in various positions under your seat dad.”
Mom was giving me a strange look, a little amazed and a little bit worried about my mental health. Dad just chuckled and said, “Good to know. Now tell me what you did. How did you scan the car?”
I explained about the field and how I passed it over the car. He asked a few more questions and got quiet for awhile, deep in thought. I’d seen him like this sometimes, as he tried to figure out how to create difficult pieces for one of his artworks.
“Are you able to pass the scan through the car faster? Perhaps then the field won’t have enough time to register everything.”
“At the mines, I sent the field through miles of rock in a few seconds. That’s faster than the speed of sound. Scanning the car took less than a second. I don’t see how I can get it to go faster, unless I had it going at light speed and that’s several orders of magnitude faster still. I’m pretty sure that my brain wasn’t designed to handle that.”
“Don’t electrical impulses in the brain travel at the speed of light?” Mom asked.
“No. Sound travels at around one mile per five seconds. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. The fastest neurons in the brain go about a hundred and twenty miles per second.” Those neurology books sure were coming in handy.
“That means your brain is able to handle faster speeds. If it’s not a speed issue, perhaps you need to look at how you’re sending out your field.”
Now it was my turn to get quiet and thoughtful. What other ways could I send out a field? Shape the field and send it out. I’d always done that. Except…except I hadn’t started out that way. The first time I’d send out the field had been unintentional, when I’d been sparring with Uncle Magnum. No, Paul. I needed to get out of the habit of calling him that. The joke was old and it was time to retire it. I was eighteen, not twelve anymore. Anyways, that first time, I hadn’t shaped the field beforehand. I’d just instinctively sent it out. My lack of power had limited it to staying just a few feet from my body. If I did the same thing today, the field would probably burst out much, much farther.
Thoughts started clicking together in my head. Burst. Impulse. Pulse. Where had I heard about pulse bursts? Eva! She’d been telling me about laser hair removal and how the handpiece they used sent out laser pulses to damage the hair follicles. Could I send out the field in a pulse burst away from my body? I wouldn’t shape it or keep it going, just send it out away from my body in all directions.
It took a few tries before I got the idea to work, somewhat. My mind kept trying to form a shape. That’s what I was used to. Finally, overcoming the habit, I managed to send out the field without any control or boundary limits. I just threw the field outwards, projecting it away from my body in all directions. It was a weak burst and I could sort of make out the ragged edges of it twenty feet away. It provided significantly less information than my regular scans. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing on not, but it was something new. It had the potential to be what I was looking for, so I kept experimenting. First by adding more power, to see how far I could pulse. I let out a series of pulses in quick succession, each one with more power than the last. There was no strain at all in reaching the one-mile mark and I put that on hold for now. Next, I tried to see if I could send out a pulse in one direction, rather than out in all directions at once. Having already gotten a handle on pulsing, this came easily and I was soon sending out pulses in any direction that I chose. It made sense that sending out a pulse in only one direction took far less power than sending it out in all directions. With the same amount of power as I’d used in sending my pulse one mile in all direction, I could send out a pulse in one direction for six miles. Wow! I hadn’t been close to my power limit when I’d sent out that pulse and I wondered how far I could send one out. However, before I could start experimenting with that, I had to see what I could use the pulse for. Right now, it didn’t seem to do anything.
Despite my earlier attempt to hold the image of a tire in my head, I already knew that simply imagining what I wanted to find wouldn’t work. The field didn’t work that way. It couldn’t read my mind. I had to direct it to do things. Although, when I stopped to think for a minute, I realized that even giving directives to the field required some understanding from the field. It was reading my intent every time I shaped a field or sent it out or changed frequency to reach a layer or sublayer or reality. There had to be a way to communicate my intention for the field to search for an object when I sent out a pulse.
Just for the sake of completeness, I sent out a pulse while imagining the tire in my head. Yup, I was right. Nothing. What else could I try? How do I connect the idea of the tire with the pulse? If the field couldn’t read my imagination, could I pair the pulse with an image or with an object? What if I held one of the tires in a field while I sent out the pulse? Like giving a dog a scent to track.
It worked!! I let out a gleeful “Yes!” and punched the air in triumph. I startled mom and she jerked in her seat. Dad merely said, “Glad to have you back. You’ve been in your own world for half an hour. We should be at the park in fifteen minutes. Please bring us up to date on your efforts.”
I took dad through my thought processes and my trials and errors. I got the biggest reaction out of him when I told him how far I’d pulsed. “Six miles? And you weren’t anywhere near your limit. That’s remarkable.” When I finished my tale, dad got all thoughtful again.
“You’ve gotten closer to what we need, but you’re not quite there yet. If you have a duplicate of what you’re looking for, then you can find other examples of it, as you just did with the tires. All four of the tires were lit up in your pulse. You need to take it a step further and see if you can find things that you don’t have a duplicate of. In the tire experiment, you used one of the tires as an example and it found the others. Since the four tires aren’t exactly the same, with one having more wear than the others, that suggests that the field is able to find things that are very similar to what you’ve presented as an example. However, you didn’t pick up on the spare tire in the trunk. Spare tires are typically thinner than normal tires so that they take up less space in the truck. I’d like you to try creating a field in a shape similar to a tire and seeing if that works as well. If it does, try getting progressively further from that shape until it is just the suggestion of a tire. Maybe even try shaping a simple two-dimensional circle. You need to get a feel for how far from the actual you can get and still find what you’re looking for.”
Damn! I’d completely forgotten about the spare tire. Dad had some very good observations and I set about trying out his suggestions. The field accepted to search for a tire based on the tire shaped field I created and ended up catching the spare tire this time. As I shifted the field to look less and less like a tire and more like a circle, more and more items started being detected in the search. The first one was the steering wheel, but soon the air filters in the engine showed up and then cup holders, air vents, break lights and even engine cylinders.
Thinking ahead to the upcoming search, I changed the fields shape from a flat circle to that of a 3D person and sent out a half mile forward pulse in the direction we were traveling. Thirty-two adults showed up in my search. Shrinking the field in size to that of child, I tried again and found nine-children. Given that the size of the adults varied a good bit, as did the sizes of the children, I got the impression that there was a good amount of leeway in the field’s interpretation of what counted as ‘similar’ to my shaped field. Was I missing the people between those two sizes? Was there a way that I could get everyone in a single pulse? Trying again, I created two person-shaped fields, one adult and one child sized, and send out a pulse. This time, the field only found six people, three sets of two, each set with one adult and one child. That’s exactly what I needed for my search!