Saxon Andrew: Love conquers all

“Thank God the teacher doesn’t know the truth,” his mother thought. Then she thought about how to explain to the teacher what happened. “Thomas, you also need to let them catch you in tag, maybe not every time but a lot of the time, and no more sneaking to the front of the line. I am going to write a note to your teacher apologizing for your leaving the playground, but tell her that you did not hear her say you couldn’t, that you were writing the next day’s homework assignment when she explained the rules. I know this isn’t the truth, but I don’t want this incident to hurt your future. Telling her the truth about your gift would cause you a lot of serious problems. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Also tell her when no other students are around, because they will say you didn’t leave the playground. Thomas, you must learn to fit in and not do anything that would cause anyone to think you’re different or could or would break any rules. Make everyone think that you’re normal and want to do what everyone tells you to do.”

That night when his father got home, Tag’s mother sat down with him and explained what she had discovered that day. He refused to believe it at first until after playing hide-and-seek with Tag for thirty minutes. He was mystified by how his son could do it, but he was even stronger than Tag’s mother in warning him to never do anything that would reveal this gift he possessed. He even told Tag that he would be taken from them if he did, and that he might be made to disappear and never be seen again. If Tag was concerned before, his father had him totally frightened.

That night Tag lay in bed thinking about all that his mother and father had said. He had never seen them show this much fear over anything he had ever done; he loved his mother and father and trusted them more than anyone. So he vowed to himself that he would not use his gift. He would hide what he could do; after all, he thought, he keeps his promises. Still, even if he didn’t use his gift, he could still see the shadows to hide in or whenever someone was looking at him. He decided that he just wouldn’t look to avoid being seen so the shadows wouldn’t appear. They only appeared today when he was looking for a place to hide. He closed his eyes and sensed his mother staring across her bedroom at the wall that separated their rooms. He could sense her fear. He also knew when a Directorate patrol car passed in front of his house and the driver looked around to see if anything needed looking into. Just before he fell asleep he discovered something else about himself. He could sense one of his classmates who lived at least two miles away from him; her name was Leila, and she was looking at his picture in their school yearbook. “Now that’s something new,” he thought. “Maybe this gift hasn’t been completely opened yet.” He had to admit he always enjoyed opening gifts. This was one he would just have to hide. Then he fell asleep.

T ag was seventeen years old and he liked riding the city floaters to school. Most human transportation used floaters. The floater was aptly named because it actually floated on a cushion of air. Since the invention of the small-sized power cell, vehicles used the power cells to power turbines that spun and lifted the vehicles on propellers. Just like ancient helicopters, the vehicles could lift amazing weight. The city floater Tag was currently riding looked like one of the ancient busses that were used in mass transit, but instead of using streets to travel, the floater just rose and entered a traffic lane hundreds of feet off the ground and flew from stop to stop. The ten-mile trip to school gave him the chance to look out over the city and see some of the millions of people and the homes they lived in. Some of the homes were beautiful to gaze on, and Central City had many examples of them. Central City was the largest city on the North American continent, covering an area that included part of what used to be northern Oklahoma all the way to what used to be South Dakota. The ancient cities on the east and west coasts, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Atlanta, had been destroyed during the third world war with the Chinese and were radioactive for more than three hundred years, making it unsafe to live anywhere near the old sites until two hundred years ago. Now that the radioactivity had dissipated they were growing, but only the central part of the continent, now known as Central City, was safe to live in after that war. It had been damaged during the other wars but managed to survive. Over time it had become the planet’s center of government and had the largest population of any city.

From a distance, the central spires in the middle of the city with the rising sun reflecting off their crystal windows looked like giant diamond triangles growing out of the Earth. Tag was fascinated by the various shapes and colors, and he never tired of studying how the view was constantly changing. His gift gave him an inborn sense of shapes and how they fit together, or, in some cases, didn’t. The huge number of floaters flying over the city at different levels looked like long, moving dotted lines that surrounded the buildings like ants moving around their colony. The city soared thousands of feet into the sky and extended as far as the eye could see. He found that gazing at the city touched him in the deepest part of his soul with an emotion that felt almost religious. The clear blue sky and white clouds gave a beautiful background for the city, and today was spectacular.

The tops of the tallest buildings were covered with low white clouds. Of course, the tallest buildings were 4,500 feet tall, and the clouds didn’t have to be low to cover them. It amazed Tag that some of these buildings extended more than three thousand feet underground. He found it interesting that the height difference from their tops to their lowest levels allowed most of these older buildings to use geothermic energy for their power due to the temperature difference between their tops and bottoms. Of course the Coronado solar panels could have powered these buildings by themselves. Eighty-four years earlier, Joe Coronado had invented a solar panel the size of a floor mat that would generate ten times the electricity of an old solar panel that covered one square mile. That really wasn’t the best thing about his invention, though. Its storage capacity was enormous. One hour of sunshine would power that five-thousand-foot-tall building for a day. This invention allowed humans to have clean, nonpolluting, and unlimited energy. It also powered the millions of floaters used to travel around the planet. Humankind soon found that the solar panels could be used in any application that required power.

It also made a great weapon when it was charged with a fusion reactor instead of the sun. The panels could absorb seemingly unlimited amounts of energy as long as the solar panel discharged its stored energy before reaching its limit. That, however, was a recent discovery that was accidentally made by miners on the moons of Mars. One of them had come up with the idea of charging three power cells to their limit and then releasing all that power into a quick blast of energy focused into a tight beam aimed at a hardened rock wall that had broken six of their drill bits. When they did this, it made an eight-foot circle one hundred feet deep in less than one one-hundredth of a second. The Coronado power cell, as it came to be known after that, made mining for metals easier and increased tenfold the raw material available to build an advanced civilization. It not only made it easier to get to these materials but it also made all the bracing that was done on the walls of a mine obsolete. A circle is nature’s strongest shape because it distributes the forces equally around its surface, so all that the miners had to provide was a surface to walk on. It also made mining asteroids and moons more economical because the walls were airtight from the intense heat, making them extremely hard and smooth as glass. Human expansion into the solar system and planets inside the twenty-light-year limit became an explosion. Every business was looking for a moon or large asteroid to mine for raw materials. Earth became a center of high technology.