Ami had always been a curious girl, even when she was very young. Once, as a child, while out on a camping trip with her father, she had found a small meteorite that was a lot heavier than it should have been; too heavy for her to pick up. After she asked about it, her father told her about how stars live and die, about white dwarfs and neutron stars, and even about that mysterious creature known only as a black hole. Ami declared then and there that she wanted to be an astronomer when she grew up.
As such childhood declarations go, it lasted a whole five months. Long enough to discover just how boring astronomy was most of the time, unless you had the political clout to get time on one of the big telescopes.
For a while after that, she wanted to be a Physicist at Tokyo University. She ended up on a field trip to the University's Physics department, where she wound up making friends with several of the grad students and lab technicians with her intelligent questions. She even showed one of the students her meteorite, and had an X-ray crystallography performed on it, while the two of them started pondering what the image might mean.
Unfortunately, the famous professor whose presence had sparked the field trip turned out to be an officious bureaucrat who complained about the waste of time in letting a ‘child’ near the equipment and threatened to fire one of the technicians she'd been talking to. And so another dream died.
As Ami grew, her dreams tended to get smaller. Each one she threw herself into learning with all the single-mindedness of youth; each eventually got shot down. Mathematics required one to spend their entire life just catching up to the point where they could make a contribution themselves. Chemistry was turning into Physics as people studied the interactions of electron shells. Biology was turning into Chemistry.
Finally, Ami's mother decided to take her in to the hospital to show her what being a doctor was like. Ms. Mizuno taught her daughter about caring for patients, about the various types of specialities, and about the warm feeling of helping other people.
Ironically, the last part of this trip, which showed Ami the big diagnostics equipment such as the MRI scanner, brought Ami back to physics.
Her young mind quickly started considering the possibilities. MRI worked by setting up a powerful magnetic field, perturbing some of the atoms inside it, then measuring the results as the system relaxed again. In theory it could detect the positions of individual atoms, and tell the differences between them by how quickly they ‘relaxed’. Pump the power up a bit more, and you could start affecting the atoms themselves.
Calling up one of the lab technicians she had met before at Tokyo University, she tried to explain what she wanted to do, the words coming so fast that they stumbled over each other. With a combination of pleading, puppy-dog eyes, and appeals to curiousity, she managed to get herself time on the big MRI systems at the University, which were tuned to scan chemical samples rather than being ‘safe’ for people.
She'd long since realized that the ‘white dwarf’ meteorite she had shouldn't be stable; there wasn't enough pressure around it to keep it from flying apart. Obviously something was keeping it stable. If she could replicate that, the possibilities for compressing matter were endless. Drill bits that would make diamond look like putty. Construction materials for undersea habitats or space elevators. Shrinking objects for storage until needed.
Getting it to work the first time was serendipitous. Just the right combination of electromagnetic fields could make the central part of the meteorite act like a lens, as she found out when the rest of the meteorite cracked in half from trying to shrink around the condensed core. Overjoyed, she inverted the phase of the fields to reverse the process... and found the rest of the rock exploding into dust inside the MRI chamber.
The next week was filled with late nights. She'd managed to isolate the frequencies required so she could produce them without needing the big MRI equipment; with the help of one of the electrical engineering techs, she had managed to build something that could fit in her hand, with a long ‘antenna’ sticking off one end. But she continued having the same problem as the first time. She could compress objects without any trouble; bringing them back was another matter. Rocks, sticks, even a living plant in one case; everything tended to explode when it was re-enlarged.
Dejected, Ami slipped back home and into bed.
The next morning, Ami left town with both her parents. While her mother and father were long since separated, they still occasionally got together for a weekend. This time, with the summer break was almost over, her father had booked a weekend going cave exploring on one of the smaller islands. Her father had been in the caves just a couple of weeks before, and felt both his overworked ladies needed some nice physical exercise. The weather was supposed to be good for it, the first good sunny days after some unseasonably cold and rainy weather.
In retrospect, with the sudden temperature shifts, the cave-in probably should not have been unexpected.
Ami's father let out a long breath as he leaned back against the mass of rock that had previously been the entrance to the cave. He looked down at the splint that his ex-wife had made on his leg. “The good news is, there are lots of other little holes in these caves, so we're not going to run out of air any time soon.”
“And the bad news?” her mother replied. “I take it that there's more than just your leg.”
“We may need the air. This whole pile is still somewhat precarious in spots; digging it out is going to be difficult. And none of the other holes are large enough for a person to get through.” He patted up the wreck that previously had been the radio on his hip. “And, of course, the only radio we had with enough power to get back to the tour company was the one that got damaged when the rocks fell in. So they're not going to be looking for us until we fail to radio in tonight.”
“We need to get you out of here before then. You've lost enough blood that waiting here until it gets freezing cold at night is not an option.”
“I do know first aid, dear, I'm as aware of my chances as you are.”
“Mother? Father?” Ami asked. “Do you mind if I go looking for one of the other entrances?”
“Go ahead, dear,” her father replied. “Keep the radio close, check the map to make sure you know where you're going, and call us if anything happens.”
Ami nodded, and vanished down the tunnel before her mother could start arguing too forcefully against her actions.
Her father had been right; there were several holes that birds and other animals used to get in and out of the caves, but none large enough for a person to climb through. At least, not a normal-sized person. But there was one that was close...
She set all the exploration equipment down on a nearby rock, then pulled out the transmitter the engineers had built for her. She wrote a quick note for her parents, hoped they would understand what she had to do, then pulled up her shirt and wrapped the antenna of the transmitter around her stomach. She wanted to make sure the device was in contact with her, so she wouldn't have only her shirt shrinking and strangling her.
A press of the trigger later, and Ami was only twenty centimeters tall, with her clothes falling down through the air around her blushing body. I should have realized the field wouldn't extend too far outward.
Shaking her head, she jumped for the hole in the rock that now seemed high above her, and bounced off the ceiling. Okay, she thought, My proportional strength is a lot greater. Thankfully, so is my proportional toughness, or that would have hurt.
Finally getting the amount of force required right, Ami jumped into the hole and started to clear it out. A few punches in the right places broke the rock to where she could remove it without too much trouble. Several sections of rock near the edge fell inward, clearing the path out even more. After a few minutes of this, she paced off the distance, fairly sure that this should be enough space to get father out even with his leg in a splint.
Ami jumped back in, one foot landing in a small puddle that had been just underneath the opening. Her foot slid in the muck of what to her seemed like a wading pool, sending her face first into the water. There was a shock as the water got into the power supply for her shrinking belt, and a snap as her body expanded outward, pushing the air in front of it.
Blinking her eyes, Ami took a moment to realize that yes, she was intact. She hadn't exploded like any of the other things she'd tried to shrink. It took a moment longer for her to realize that she was still naked and lying rather uncomfortably on the floor of the cave. With another blush, she quickly got herself dressed.
She then grabbed the radio and ran back to where her parents were sitting. “I found an opening! It's big enough to fit through.”
Her mother looked at her father. “I thought you said there weren't any.”
Shrugging, her father said, “Well, if there was a cave-in here, there could have been one elsewhere as well. Let's go take a look.” Leaning on his ex-wife, he followed Ami down to the opening she'd recently widened.
As her mother got up top to help lift her father out, Ami considered what might have caused the re-enlargement to work this time. Perhaps some minerals dissolved in the water, she thought as she scooped some of the water up into a bottle for later tests.
Setsuna groaned as she rubbed her forehead, watching the family outing. She already knew what Ami would find, that it wasn't the water, it was her own body and life force that kept herself bound together. That she was one of the few people, perhaps the only person, who could use the device safely. A discovery which would lead her to start using her new abilities both for the advancement of science and for helping others.
At least some things didn't change.
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(Posted Wed, 11 Aug 2004 07:13)
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