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Chapter 172 – Off WeeksAlex did the lunchtime conference call just like the last time, with her and Ray eating out in the parking lot in her car. She wasn’t quite done with her lunch when it was time to call in, but she called in anyway so she wouldn’t be the one Jack teased. “Terawatt here.”
Jack answered, “We have Team One and Action Girl and Acid Burn and Sergeant Harriman here, Finn back in the Congo, Team Four in Khajuraho, and Team Two in Roswell. We’re still waiting on —”
“The Pep Boys are here. Are we late?”
Oh, gosh, they’d decided to call themselves that! Maybe they were ‘owning the insult’. Or maybe they just thought it was really funny and they liked it.
“Dr. Lee and Dr. Ledbetter here in Roswell.”
Jack cheerfully asked, “Is Roswell on some special timezone that’s five minutes later than everyone else?”
Willow cut in, “Stop it, or I’ll tell everyone how to dial in the moment the conference call gets instantiated.”
Jack intoned, “Very well, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.”
Willow just answered, “Damn straight, flyboy.”
Someone laughed really hard and had to move away from their phone.
Jack just went on like nothing was happening. “Major Lorne, you can go first.”
“Yes, sir,” said a guy. Alex was sure she’d heard him on the conference call when she’d been in Jack’s office and holding four liters of Diet Coke. But she hadn’t ever met him. Well, she was pretty sure she’d never met him. He went on, “Working with intelligence officers of the Indian Army, Team Four uncovered three underground bunkers that all had India bloc maps and charts. We were only able to recover paper intel, because the computers were wiped clean.”
“Not really of the surprising,” Willow tossed in.
No kidding. Alex figured that P$ychon4ut probably arranged to wipe everything electronic before he took off.
The guy went on, “It’s pretty clear from the maps we found that the eight Agni-VI MIRVs were targeted at Moscow, New York City, Beijing, and London, as well as the major cities of four other nuclear nations, in an attempt to start a global thermonuclear war. Thanks to Terawatt and Colonel Finn, that didn’t happen. Also, the rocket ship they launched is a long-term transport ship with cryogenic chambers for the passengers. The papers we found indicate it would go into High Earth Orbit and remain there for long enough for the planet to recover from a nuclear holocaust, at which point they would presumably land and take over.”
Jack asked, “And are they in HEO?”
Captainmal answered, “No sir. Everybody and their cousin was tracking everything that launched from India, just in case it had a nuclear payload. NASA reported that the ship is heading off into deep space. Unless they have more fuel than the NASA experts think, they have very little chance of ever finding a way to slingshot their way back. But NASA will continue to monitor them as long as they can. NASA and the ESA detected several seconds of rocket burn about nine hundred miles up, so they think someone on the ship figured out the problem well after liftoff and made a small adjustment. It’s estimated that under their new course, their ship could try a slingshot as they pass Jupiter in 6.4 years, but NASA figures their most reliable route would require that plus another slingshot past Neptune to get back to Earth and still be able to land safely with the amount of fuel they’re probably carrying. And if they mess up any of their orbital mechanics, they’ll end up drifting off into interstellar space. So even if they get everything right, they’ll need either 13.2 years or 29.5 years to return, and we can easily be waiting for them.”
Willow added, “And even if they were in HEO, we could pick ’em off with Terawatt and Major Carter’s maser. So they’re gonna be in for a surprise when they get back here.”
Jack checked, “Do we have any theories about what went wrong?”
Jackryanrules replied, “Well, sir, given who was doing their heavyweight programming, I’d have to guess P$ychon4ut or another mole tampered with their shipboard computers.”
Willow added, “That’s my guess. Probably Wacky Maggie getting rid of her competitors by letting them shoot themselves into space.”
Jack said, “Okay, that seems like a reasonable working assumption. Now we need to ask ourselves whether one of the eight primary missile targets is the HQ for the Empire’s primary bloc, or if Khan knew that Maggie’s base has anti-missile systems that are too good to penetrate with an Agni-VI.”
Riley said, “At a minimum sir, we should alert the relevant countries and let them search those cities from top to bottom just in case.”
Jack answered, “Good point, Finn. We’ll have Top Banana do that through the President.”
Willow chipped in. “And I think we need to put together maps of everywhere on Earth that wouldn’t get flattened by a global nuclear war, because I’m pretty sure P$ychon4ut wouldn’t get on a ship he was sending off into deep space, and he wouldn’t want to stay on Earth in a spot he thought was about to get turned into radioactive glass.”
Jack told her, “Ooh, a fun new project for you and the Pep Boys.”
Willow just told him, “Behave. Besides, there are probably a hundred maps like that all over the DHS and the DOD and the DOE and the CIA and the NSC. All we have to do is ask Big Cheese —”
“Princess Celestia.”
“— to get us a couple for reference. And if you don’t stop it, I am so telling him you’re still calling him Princess Celestia. He has grandchildren. He’ll know.”
“Okey-dokey, Sparkle.” Then Jack just went right on, like he wasn’t acting like an eight-year-old. Again. “All right, good work, Team Four. Top Banana has conferred with his equivalents over there, and they say you were as awesome as usual, but you can get back to your regular posting in the morning.”
That was when Alex remembered that it was like 12:30 at night over in India. Jack should totally have made her get up at six in the morning for an earlier call.
Jack checked, “And Doctor Lee, do you have any results for us?”
“Yes, general,” Bill Lee stated. “We were able to get blood samples from Carlson and Lupo as soon as they got back. Lupo brought a sample from Finn, and Valentine helpfully had three samples of her blood taken by a CDC phlebotomist and Fedex’ed to us.”
Dr. Ledbetter followed up. “We administered minute doses of GC-161 while watching the process under a scanning electron microscope. It was fairly conclusive and quite dramatic. We tried over a hundred normal human blood samples first. In most of the control samples, the blood shows no visible changes. In about three percent of our control samples, the blood shows the silvery color change while preserving the microscopic characteristics of human blood. In all of the Orphan blood samples, we get the silvery color change, but the red blood cells disintegrate on contact. This would be instantly lethal. We need to make sure that our people are not exposed to GC-161.”
Bill Lee continued, “So we have a fast test to determine whether someone is really an Orphan. The IOC would be interested in this.”
Jack cut in, “As would every government agency and politician in the world. And we know that some Orphans are responsible, hard-working goodguys who don’t deserve all this grief.” He paused for a second. “What? Oh, all right. Someone is insisting that I clarify that these are goodguys and also goodgals.”
“Good people,” Willow insisted.
“Goodpeeps.” Jack kept going. “They’re heroes in my book. And I’m using that as a non-gendered noun, so stop it. But I figure Ledbetter and Lee and Marshall can put their heads together with the Macks and come up with some sort of protective chemical, given what George Mack’s already invented. What I’m more concerned about is what the Empire is doing with Danielle Atron. Or rather, what is she doing for them, if they already know that GC-161 is instantly lethal to their Orphans? Surely they’re not keeping her around just to maybe give superpowers to the rest of their people.”
Alex pointed out, “I doubt that Maggie Walsh would be interested in superpowers of her own, unless they would help her in the lab. She’s pretty … focused. But Danielle Atron’s a really good biochemist. She could be working on a variant of GC-161 that would work on Orphans without killing them. It still might have a lot of weird side effects.”
Jack asked, “You mean like maybe turning you into a flaming blob who has no fire-resistance?”
Alex suggested, “Or an electrokinetic who can’t stop shocking everything around him, or even himself. Or a telekinetic with no control, so everything around him floats away from him. Or a cryokinetic who can’t turn it off. Or a telepath who can’t stop hearing everything that everyone within a hundred yards is thinking. Or —”
Jack interrupted her. “Well, I’m glad someone’s thinking about side effects and consequences.”
Alex told him, “I’m just glad Azure Crush managed to get enough self-control that she doesn’t crush everything and everyone she touches. She does have a boyfriend now, you know.”
Jack snarked, “I bet they don’t let her play beach volleyball with the rest of the centerfolds.”
Alex winced a little, because she could imagine how that could go horribly wrong if Az just got slightly carried away.
* * *
The rest of Thursday and all of Friday went just like schooldays were supposed to go. Kelly was really grouchy because posters kept popping up all over the school no matter how many she tore down. Alex noticed that a lot of people in the Science Club and the Computer Club were just way too smug about the whole thing.
On Thursday evening, Willow and Jack called to ask if she’d had any more thoughts on Atron and GC-161. But Jack would not stop doing ‘War Games’ jokes about the ‘global thermonuclear war’ thing. Even if he did a pretty good imitation when he said ‘do you want to play a game?’ He didn’t stop until Willow told him, “Knock it off, or I’m gonna smack you right on your WHOPR.” She didn’t know what Jack did then, but it was silent, and it made Willow laugh out loud.
Then, on Friday, most of the cafeteria was fussing about the meat in the tacos, instead of important world news. Donna’s BF was doing really well in track and Heyward was doing really well with the shotput and the javelin, so the cheerios were cheering at all the track meets in addition to the baseball games, and Donna had the junior varsity cheer squad cheering at a bunch of the other meets. People in the off-sports were saying this was the best year ever when it came to getting cheerleaders out cheering for them. And everybody in the whole chem class was ready with a pencil when Mr. Hooper announced he was giving a pop quiz.
And Ray took her out Friday night. He took her to dinner and a movie, even if she had to eat a couple of plates of food before he picked her up so she could eat a normal amount at the restaurant. And she had a baggie with a pound of M&Ms hidden in her purse, so the large drink and large popcorn and large bag of Twizzlers she bought at the cinema would appear to hold her through the whole movie. And she really had to turn off her brain to watch the movie, because otherwise she couldn’t watch superhero movies anymore. And then she’d ruin the movie for Ray, too.
Okay, it was just hard to watch The Human Torch enjoying the heck out of his powers and not feel really bad for Victor Cready.
But then, on Saturday, when she brought up the subject, her dad told her, “I’ve already been trying to get permission to do the ‘Atron repetition’ process on Mister Cready, but the prison authorities think I’m crazy for wanting to give a supervillain better control over his powers, and they made it pretty clear to us that one of his conditions for parole would be that we don’t help him with his powers.”
Alex frowned. “That’s not fair. I need to call Jack and see what he can do.”
Her dad smiled. “See? Great minds think alike. That’s just what I did. Jack thinks he can swing something once Mister Cready is paroled and working at the plant as a security officer.”
She gave him a big hug and said, “You’re the best dad in the world, and I totally don’t tell you that enough.”
He hugged her back. “And Jack wants my group at the plant having a big web conference with Annie and her fangirl professor —”
“Dad!”
“— and your friends down in Roswell about GC-161 and what Danielle’s up to. Given that Annie and I still haven’t worked out what Danielle developed as a GC-161 accelerant, I don’t know how productive that’s going to be. But it’ll be a two or three hour conference Monday while you’re in school.”
Alex told him, “Well, if you need Terawatt for anything, even just background intel, you text me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And be nice to Annie’s professor. I felt bad. She was totally embarrassed about it.”
He smiled. “Don’t you have that happening to you all the time?”
She opened her mouth to say no, but then she thought about it, and she admitted, “Umm, pretty much.” Because now she knew even other superheroines were wearing Terawatt t-shirts, and that was really kind of embarrassing. She really hoped Hanna didn’t have a Terawatt t-shirt that she wore all over the place.
Okay, she just really hoped Hanna didn’t have a Terawatt t-shirt she wore on ops. That would be totally embarrassing for Alex. Hanna probably wouldn’t be embarrassed at all.
* * *
The next week, the big news was that a hostage situation in Fresno was resolved when the police negotiator told the robbers that Terawatt was on her way, and the guys just surrendered on the spot. The news people were going on and on about Terawatt flying all over middle California to fight crime, but Alex knew the police had totally bluffed that guy. She was so not happy about it.
And Willow Skyped her in a matter of minutes after the news broadcast. “How did you get the police request and I didn’t see it?”
Alex confessed, “I had no idea about it. The police just lied to those guys, and it worked. But what if it didn’t work?”
Willow scowled. “I need to talk to Jack about sending out some kind of warning telling police departments not to do that. If one of those crooks had been a psychopath, they might have ended up with a building full of dead bodies. And if some policeman tries it on some really desperate guy, like maybe a divorced dad breaking into his ex’s house, the guy might just shoot everyone and kill himself. This could totally be of the bad!”
So Alex had one more awful thing to worry about. Even if her mom and dad said it couldn’t possibly be her fault, she was still feeling guilty about it.
* * *
Meanwhile, at school, things were even worse. The next morning, a pretty hand-painted banner appeared in the gym. In big red script letters it said, “VOTE FOR KELLY” but underneath that in smaller black block letters it read, “because you are a braindead tool who values looks over everything that really matters.” Until the principal and a couple of gym teachers got it down, everyone was going in to look at it and take pictures and stuff.
After chem class, Alex gave Wade her best Jo Lupo glare. “Did you guys do that banner, too? Because that was just mean.”
“Umm … Too? Wha … uhh … what do you mean?” Boy, Wade was a way worse liar than she figured.
She snapped, “It was the Computer Club and the Science Club, and you’re big in both of them.”
“Umm … who told?”
She frowned. “No one told. I figured it out with my own two eyes and a few brain cells. I’m pretty surprised the principal hasn’t pegged you.”
His shoulders sank. “I … umm … told ’em you’d figure it out. You’re … umm … way smarter than people think.” He looked up into her eyes. “But … umm … we didn’t do the banner!”
Tony Amanzetti, who was also in the Science Club and was one of the student office assistants, slipped over and added, “Yeah! And anyway, I got a good look at the banner when the principal hauled it in to the office. Really careful painting on top, real sloppy work with spray paint and letter forms on the bottom. Only people I know with stuff like that are the skaterboys. Greg Vaculik keeps stuff like that in his car trunk so he can screw with people who piss him off. I’m pretty sure he’s not the only one.”
Ooh. Grinder Vaculik could totally have done it before school, as soon as he spotted the banner, which would therefore have to be Kelly’s work. Scowling, she said, “Well, you have your people stop it, because this is getting really nasty.”
Tony insisted, “She started it! No one asked her to be a total bitch to all of us, and she totally dissed Helen for no reason!”
She asked in her best mom-tones, “And if Kelly jumped off a bridge would you jump off, too?”
Tony smirked. “No, but we might jump up and down and cheer.”
Louis was already over to see what was up. He told Tony, “No, you’re supposed to put a lot of stupid in your voice and say, ‘Uhh, not again.’ ”
That had Tony and Wade laughing, so it totally ruined the pressure she was putting on them.
On her way out of the building after her last class, she saw Amanda and D blocking the door into one of the girls’ bathrooms. There was only one reason Alex could think of for that. Kelly needed some privacy, and she needed it bad.
Alex cut over and stopped in front of them. “Is Kelly okay?”
“What do you care?” snapped Amanda.
“Do you care?” D asked softly.
“Sure I care! Maybe she’s not my friend, but I’m her friend. Didn’t she ever tell you about summer camp and the bear?”
“Maybe?”
D said, “Well, she sorta told us something, but there’s no way you were the totally scared one and she was the totally brave one. Everyone saw you when Azure Crush attacked the school. You were the person who got everybody organized and out the other side and made sure people were safe, and then you just went right out and took video of the fight!”
Amanda admitted, “We know there was something with you and Kelly, and we know Kelly told you some private stuff because she was scared, but … well … sometimes you have to take what she says with a grain of salt.”
Alex firmly said, “I’m gonna go in and see if I can help. If you get in trouble later, tell her I had a bunch of the basketball players with me and you couldn’t stop me.”
“Okay?”
Alex just walked right between them and pulled the door open. Kelly was standing at the sink and leaning over it and crying, while Natalie poured water from the next sink onto her hair.
Alex asked, “What happened? Can I help?”
Kelly tried not to cry as she complained, “Come by to gloat?”
“Of course not!” Alex snapped. “I just figured you needed some help is all!”
Kelly managed not to burst into tears again, but it was pretty obvious she had been crying and she was desperate not to let everyone know. But between her and Natalie, the whole story — or at least Kelly’s version of it — came out. She had told two of the emo girls she didn’t have enough lollipops for everyone — although Alex figured Kelly had been a lot less nice about it than that — and Kristi had pulled a bottle of her black hair dye out of her backpack and let Kelly have it right in the face. There was black in the front of Kelly’s hair, and there was black on her blouse and her skirt, and there was still a little black on her face where she’d obviously been scrubbing pretty hard.
Alex muttered, “That is so not okay.” Then she pulled out her tPhone and started typing.
Kelly hissed, “Don’t you dare take a picture!”
Alex hissed back, “I would never!”
Natalie patted Kelly on the shoulder. “She probably wouldn’t.”
Kelly sobbed slightly. She still said, “Saint Alex, huh?”
Alex explained, “I’m just looking up how to get stains out. That top’s cotton, right?”
“The skirt, too.”
Alex looked at her screen. “Okay, we need to get you home ASAP. Soak that stuff in two quarts warm water with a teaspoon of dishwashing detergent and two tablespoons of ammonia for half an hour, then rinse, then tamp with rubbing alcohol until all the stain’s out, then flush with water and launder. And while someone’s doing that, you need to get over to your hairdresser and get your hair treated to get that stuff out.”
Natalie muttered, “I didn’t get that down.”
Alex told her, “I just got it off the internet. You can look it up when you get Kelly home.” She glanced at her watch. “Okay, last period’s going now. You can get her out to her car with no one watching. If you hurry, you can probably get the stains out before they set.”
Kelly whimpered, “I just wanted people to vote for me, but I couldn’t afford enough of those lollipops for the whole school because I needed these really gorgeous heels I saw at the mall, and now everyone hates me. And why are you being so nice to me?”
Alex sighed. “Kelly, there are way more important things out there than being prom queen. Or homecoming queen. Or any of this stuff. I photograph stuff, so I know. I’ve seen a real superheroine fighting real supervillains. I had Danielle Atron kidnap me and try to kill me and my whole family just so my dad couldn’t stop her from releasing that GC-161 junk.” Okay, that was a sort-of-fib. “I had Azure Crush come here to kidnap me and turn me over to Danielle Atron so she could torture me because she thought maybe I had figured out Terawatt’s secret identity, and I was so dumb I still thought it was probably Libby.” Okay, that was another part-fib. “There’s really, really bad stuff out there now, and the only thing we can do about it is to try and take care of each other, and help other people. So I’m helping you.”
Kelly stared into the sink. “It would totally be easier to be mad at you if you could just be bitchy at me. You know. Tell me I deserved it, or like that.”
Alex didn’t know what to say to that. She tried, “The last person I really confronted around here ended up going to jail and turning into a supervillain, so maybe that wasn’t a good idea. There are lots of people who do stuff they shouldn’t, and maybe a lot of them are doing it because they think someone did stuff to them first. The only way we can stop that kind of cycle is if someone has the courage to say ‘I’m not gonna retaliate so this can finally stop.’ But that’s really hard to do. You pretty much have to be a saint. I’m still pretty bad at it.”
Kelly sort of laughed and sort of sobbed.
Natalie asked, “And you really wanted to skip the homecoming queen jazz?” Alex nodded. “You were really gonna help Kelly run against Libby?” Alex nodded again. “And you really didn’t want Louis and Marsha to run that campaign for you?” Alex nodded one more time. “Who did you vote for?”
Alex admitted, “Well, Nicole, because she’s my friend and I knew it would make her happy. And Terri and Elissa … because Kelly said mean things about them. See? I’m still pretty bad at the not retaliating thing.”
Kelly was trying to dry herself off with some paper towels. “You really didn’t even vote for yourself?”
Alex told her the truth. “Right. And I told Ray not to vote for me either, but he totally ignored me. He voted for me and Nicole and I think Shauna.”
Alex got Kelly and her posse out of the bathroom and off to the parking lot with hardly anyone noticing that Kelly was hiding in the middle of her gang instead of just being in the middle of the posse like usual. Then she went all over the school and took down every anti-Kelly poster she could find, just because she figured it was the easiest way to stop the battle. She was pretty sure Kelly’s posse wasn’t going to have anything up tomorrow.
* * *
And the next day, there was just sort of a big silence, like everyone was holding their breath waiting to see what would happen next. Alex checked on Kelly, who looked good as new, even if you could tell someone had touched up her hair since yesterday if you knew what to look for. Then she checked with Wade and his friends that they weren’t going to do anything else. Then she checked with Grinder and the other sk8erbois that they were done, too, since the principal was looking for who might have defaced Kelly’s banner even if she didn’t have school permission to put it up in the first place. Then she checked with the goths and the emos that they weren’t going to do anything, even if they were all waiting for Kristi to get hauled to the principal’s office and get a detention or maybe even a suspension. Then she talked with Helen about keeping the computer and science guys under control, because most of the nerdier guys would do pretty much anything Helen or Tanya asked them to, and Helen said she would keep an eye out.
Nothing happened all day. Which meant Kelly didn’t go to the principal and turn Kristi in for throwing hair dye on her, even though she had plenty of witnesses. And it meant a bunch of people who were still mad at Kelly didn’t do anything else.
Alex waited the whole week, but nothing else happened on the ‘vote for/against Kelly’ front. The only big thing that happened was that on Friday, the Pulitzer Prize Committee announced their winners at eight in the morning East Coast time. By the time she got up and got Shar going, she had congratulation texts and emails and calls and everything else. Jack and Willow called even though they knew she already knew it was coming, and Hanna emailed her, and Cindy and Grover texted her, and Graham sent her an email that he had called Riley to tell him, too. And then Jo Lupo texted her about the time she was going to drive Shar to school.
And KPVC and the Paradise Valley Gazette called to say they wanted to run stories, and people in Los Angeles and San Francisco and San Diego called to ask if she would give them short interviews over the phone. She said yes to Ed Oliver and Chuck Winston, because they had been nice to her back at Comic Con when they totally didn’t have to, and they didn’t try to get anything out of it last summer. They had just been nice to her because she was another member of the press and she was a newbie.
So all her spare time that Friday was spent talking to other reporters about winning the Pulitzer while still in high school, and how she had tried to track Terawatt via police calls for months and months before getting one lucky break, and running into a super-battle to get pictures, which in retrospect was a really dangerous thing to do. And she had to go over to KPVC for an interview with Maria McClellan that they showed at six and eleven. Her mom picked up Shar so Alex had time for all the interviews, and her dad said they would take her out to a celebratory dinner Saturday night instead.
It was pretty exhausting, which was saying something considering that not that long ago she had spent maybe seven solid hours flying around Khajuraho fighting supervillains and rescuing citizens.
And KPVC and the Paradise Valley Gazette were going to pay for her to go to the Pulitzer luncheon in May! Maria McClellan said that meant first class tickets both ways and a nice hotel room close to Columbia University and meals and cab fares and everything. Plus she could take one of her parents and the TV station would pay for them, too, because Paradise Valley had never had a Pulitzer Prize winner before, not even when the Danielle Atron disaster story broke, because the big-name San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York reporters had walked off with the big stories and the biggest interviews and the Pulitzers for that year. Maria was still sort of cheesed off that the really important people in that whole mess, like Danielle and Lars and Vince, had all insisted on getting interviewed by really ‘important’ journalists instead of locals.
The only good part was that Principal Wilson didn’t call a school assembly to talk about it and make Alex get up on the stage with him. That would have been totally embarrassing.
* * *
Alex spent the rest of April and the first half of May doing all the stuff she needed to do for high school stuff. Getting her final papers and assignments turned in. Getting ready for four AP exams. Getting all her stuff in for official graduation, because there were five different forms you had to get turned in and she only had three of the forms turned in already. Getting her cap and gown for the graduation ceremony.
And going through the really boring graduation practice time in the basketball gym, which was so not of the fun because everyone had to sit alphabetically so she couldn’t even sit with Ray or Nicole or Robyn or Louis or any of her besties. Okay, she knew the people on either side of her, and she got along with them, but it wasn’t the same. And really, how hard did it have to be to sit in an assigned seat and then walk up in a line to get an empty envelope and then carry it in the same line back to your seat? They even had people whose only job was to stand there and tell your row when it was time to get up and go get in the line, and people whose only job was directing the just-got-the-diploma traffic back into their seats. But apparently they needed to practice that about six or seven times because some people were not quick on the uptake.
The three valedictorians would have to get up and give a little talk, and the six salutatorians would have to do one, too, but she wasn’t in the top nine grade point averages so she wasn’t part of that, even with the school giving extra points for AP exams so Mindy Wang was ending up with a GPA that was like a 5.3 average when a straight A average with no AP courses would only be a 4.0. And the class president and vice-president would have to get up and do a little speech. And everybody was going to have to sit through a boring talk by the principal about how school was great for you and this was the best class since the invention of schools, just like the graduation speech every year. And there were going to be special awards that Vice-principal Erickson would read out and people would just stand up and wave at the parents in the stands and then sit back down. But there were over eight hundred seniors, so just the whole ‘walking up and walking back to your seat’ part would take a Gojira-sized chunk of time.
And she was going to have to work around her trip to New York City for the Pulitzer Prize. That turned out to be a real pain, since she couldn’t travel on Jack’s Cessna or the Blackbird, but Principal Wilson arranged to let her squeeze her AP exams around her travel dates which was really nice of him. And she had to get a really nice prom dress, because Ray was getting a nice tux and he needed to know the color of her dress so he could buy her a pretty corsage.
At least Terawatt didn’t have to spend hours on the web conferences with Alex’s dad and sister and the SRI people. Her dad showed her some of the whiteboard software they were using, and it looked extremely cool. You could write on a ‘whiteboard’ tablet hooked up to your computer and everyone else could see your work on their computer screens, so they could work on stuff, too. And someone whose initials were W.R. had bought the tablets and software for everyone on the calls. Alex’s dad said he wanted to make it a company standard, because it was so awesome. Actually, he had grinned at her and said, “Because it’s so tera.”
But Lieutenant Marshall’s report out of the web conferences was pretty discouraging. They were pretty sure you could fiddle with the GC-161 molecule and come up with something that would probably give Orphans superpowers. And they didn’t have any new GC-161 antidotes, so they needed to work on that, and Alex’s dad still had a ways to go on a drug to protect the SRI Orphans from exposure to GC-161, even if he had some new ideas after talking with Annie and Annie’s major prof. And they had four concepts for GC-161 accelerants, but all of them were probably highly toxic to GC-161 cases. So either Danielle just didn’t worry as much about the toxicity as she ought to, or she was a way better biochemist than they were even working as a group, or she was now immune to lots of stuff so she didn’t care that it might kill other people as long as it worked fine for her. None of those options was encouraging.
Alex personally didn’t think Danielle was a better biochemist than her dad or Annie, but she had to admit she could be biased on the subject.
Seniors wrapped up before the underclassmen, so the last week for the seniors was also the week for the AP exams, and then the prom was Saturday night, and then there was a week of school she didn’t have to go to, then the graduation ceremonies on a Sunday afternoon, and then everyone was done for the summer. The only problem was that she had to take the English and calc AP exams on Monday, then fly to New York City on Tuesday, then go to the Pulitzer Prize luncheon on Wednesday and fly home right afterward, and then have an AP exam on Thursday when she would probably be exhausted, and then take yet another one on Friday.
She was just crossing her fingers that no Terawatt stuff exploded, even though they knew The Evil Empire was up to something in central France, and they had no idea what the remaining America bloc jerkheads were up to, and no one knew whether there were India bloc Orphans sneaking around plotting stuff instead of being popsicles in that cryo-ship.