Time delayed fields were great for when I was traveling and I could also see them as being incredibly useful for scaring the crap out of people without me having to be anywhere near the scene of the crime, but what I really needed to work on was field detection.

Field detection had two aspects to it. Could I use my field to detect the baby’s field, if he had one? If not, could I place a tracker on the baby and use that to detect the baby? Oh, I also had to see if I could detect the baby in multiple layers or sublayers of reality. Crap! If the baby disappeared, would I have to search each of the three layers and each of the three sublayers? That could take too long. I needed to find a way to do it instantaneously.

The idea of a tracker was very appealing to me, primarily because I was having trouble figuring out how to detect a field. For a tracking device, I needed something that wouldn’t set off metal detectors and that wouldn’t require a battery source. Recharging trackers would be too much of a hassle. Besides, I didn’t need to use electronics to send out a signal for me to triangulate. My pulse scan could find anything I wanted it to, if I was in range. The problem was finding something unique enough that I wouldn’t get hundreds of hits when I sent out a pulse.

The other challenge was in how the tracker would be worn on the body. It’s great to have a tracking device, but if it’s not always on the person, then it’s useless. I needed it to be out of the way, unobtrusive. It couldn’t interfere with daily life. Something that wouldn’t normally be taken off or discarded if you were being kidnapped. Clothing can be changed too easily. Phones can be taken away. Maybe an anklet? I liked that idea. A piece of jewelry might be taken off of a kidnap victim, but it wouldn’t be thrown away. It would be pocketed and that would be just as good for my purposes.

Deciding on an anklet to hold the tracker solved the problem of finding a unique tracker. The anklet I was envisioning consisted of a chain that would hold a small jewel on it. I was already practiced at finding jewels and all I needed was to find a rare one so that the pulse would find only one match to in its search. Did I have anything that was that unique? I shifted to L2 in my room and searched the stacks of jewels that I had on hand. Searching for anything with gold, silver, or diamonds would be a waste of time. I’d get thousand of hits. What about other gemstones? I pulled out a few and tied them to a pulse scan. Every gemstone I tried got dozens of hits within a ten-mile radius. I had to find something else, something with a unique signature, a gemstone that no one else had or even could have.

Looking through my bags of jewels, I soon realized that my only solution was to create something completely new. The same way that I combined fields to create new frequencies, I could merge gemstones to create unique tracking devices. I took out the bags of small diamonds that I liberated from the safe at Serpentine and spread out the diamonds. The cut diamonds weren’t uniform in shape or size, but they were similar enough and perfect for my purposes. Next to the diamonds, I placed a ruby that I’d found during one of my trips with Mark’s family. The ruby was considerably larger, yet still less than half the size of one of the ones that I’d sold at auction to get the foundation set up. Using my field I sent a small piece of the ruby to L1. Using tweezers, I picked up that piece and brought it to occupy the same space as one of the diamonds, before releasing the field around it. The result was diamond with a section inside that was a combination of diamond and ruby molecules. A Rumond? No. A Diamuby!

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I tied that section of the diamond to a pulse scan and couldn’t find a single thing that matched it. So far my idea was working. The next part involved making a second one and repeating the scan. If the scan picked up the other diamuby, I was in business. A few moments later, I was the proud owner of a unique tracking device! I experimented for a little while longer, until I not only had a functional tracker, but an incredibly beautiful one. Merging in tiny amounts of ruby into various points all over the inside of the diamond created an eye-catching sparkle effect that was unreal. I had no doubt that besides a tracking device, I now had a new revenue stream to exploit in exclusive gemstones.

Setting aside the diamuby pair, one to integrate into an anklet and the other as the tracker, I returned all the gemstones to their places and shifted back to reality. The process of making the diamuby gave me another idea. While it was unlikely that a kidnapper would throw away a rare gemstone, it was possible that it wouldn’t be recognized as one. It that case, it was unlikely that he’d want to hold onto ‘costume’ jewelry. Why take the chance? The same way that I’d merged the two gems, I could insert the diamuby inside a person. Perhaps inside one of their bones. Simply remove a bit from the bone and use my surgical techniques to insert the diamuby into the space I created. The pulse would detect the tracker inside the body just as well as it would outside the body. The person being tracked would never even know they had it in them, unless they took x-rays of that bone. That didn’t seem to be very likely.

With the baby’s bones still growing, the anklet idea was the better choice for now. I was planning on giving it to the baby once it was born and explaining to mom and dad how it worked. Maybe I’d ask them if they wanted trackers as well, in either anklet or bone form.

I felt like I’d accomplished a lot towards my goal, but I wasn’t quite done yet. I still had to figure out a way to quickly scan in all seven layers and sublayers of reality. I could scan them each, one at a time. It would be effective, but inefficient. Thinking of my R1 backpack, I tired to come up with a way to have the diamuby exist in all the layers and sublayers. That way, I’d find it no matter what layer I scanned.

I pictured a set of nested diamubies, like those Russian nesting dolls, each in a different layer and connected to an outer diamuby shell using my connecting fields. While I believed that I had the skill to pull of such an intricate design, I rejected the idea when I realized that the fields wouldn’t hold once I was too far away from the tracker, thereby defeating the entire point of it.

Instead of concentrating on the tracker, I tried to think of a way to have the pulse scan in all the layers at once. No, not at once, but in sequence. What if I could send out a longer pulse; one that shifted from layer to layer, or sublayer? It would be similar to singing a note and then varying the pitch up and down. My current pulse-scan was a fast powerful burst. This multi-scan would take more time and more finesse to accomplish.

I got to working on the multi-scan right away, taking my pulse burst and adding another layer to it. This was the hardest part and once I finally managed it, adding the rest was easier. Like every aspect of learning how to use my field abilities, this new technique tired me out quickly. I’d found a new ‘field-control’ muscle that I’d never used before and it needed to be built up.

In the following weeks after this new discovery, I managed to build up that muscle considerably and send out the multi-pulse out further and faster. It would never have the mind-boggling range of the pulse-scan, but it still went pretty damned far when compared to the mine-scanning that I did. I also learned how to differentiate between the layers and sublayers of the scan so that I’d instantly recognize in which layer the diamuby was in. I did this by making a bunch more of the diamubies and scattering them throughout the layers.