Connection 1.03

The experiment went like this: I made one portal facing down, with its other end directly below facing up. A trap; anything between the two would fall forever, at least in theory. I took a pebble and dropped it between the two. It fell through the bottom and out the top, through the bottom, out the top, and so on.

Then I ran away and watched from a safe distance.

The equation for calculating the kinetic energy of a moving object goes like this: Energy in joules is equal to 1/2 times the object's mass in kilograms times its velocity in metres per second squared. It was easy to understand: Consider a 2 kilogram object. It energy in joules is equal to 1/2 times 2 kg times velocity squared, which can be simplified to just velocity squared joules. If the object is going 1 m/s, that's 1^1 or 1 joule; at 10 m/s, 10^2 or 100 joules; at 100 m/s, 100^2 or 10,000 joules.

And how does the object accelerate? The basics are pretty simple: An object falling in Earth's gravity accelerates at 9.8 metres per second per second; put another way, every second it goes 9.8 m/s faster. After one second, 9.8 m/s; after two, 19.6, after ten, 98 m/s. That's complicated by wind resistance, which being a fifteen-year-old I frankly didn't understand. What I did understand is that different objects are resisted by the wind to different degrees, and that wind resistance increases as an object goes faster and eventually cancels out the acceleration altogether, preventing objects from exceeding a certain falling speed depending on its mass and size (called its 'terminal velocity'). For instance, a raindrop would never fall faster than 9 m/s, while a golf ball is limited to 32 m/s.

This was further complicated by the fact that in my portal trap, the air was falling just as fast as the pebble. I had no idea what would happen, which was why I decided to observe my experiment from very, very far away.

One minute forty seconds later according to my stopwatch, there was a sound like a thunderclap. The portal winked out. The pebble escaped and smashed into the ground hard enough to kick up some sand.

The sound made me suspect that the pebble had broken the sound barrier and created a sonic boom. That was unexpected, because the air in the portal trap should have been falling as well, and if the pebble and air were travelling at the same speed there shouldn't have been a sonic boom. In that case, either the fast-moving winds had disrupted the portal or the pebble had tumbled out of the middle and hit an edge, and the sonic boom came after the portal broke when the super-accelerated pebble and air hit the still air outside the trap.

On the other hand, the falling air particles would still be resisted by the non-falling air outside the portal trap, so there was definitely some resistance. Maybe there was a gradual transition from slower-moving particles at the outer edge of the portal trap to faster-moving particles in the centre near the portal, and the sonic boom was caused by the pebble exceeding the speed of sound relative to the air particles around it – say the air around was going 300 m/s and the pebble was going 700 m/s. The speed of sound is 343 m/s; the pebble fell for 100 seconds, so it would have a speed of 980 m/s minus whatever resistance reached it. It sounded plausible to my high-school educated ass, but I was just guessing.

What I really wanted was to make something go as fast as parahumanly possible and throw it at an Endbringer, then do it again ten thousand times in quick succession. Theoretically I was playing with powerful forces that lent themselves to being weaponized. In order to make my dream come true, my next step was to keep the portal open longer so the object inside could be accelerated for longer. I had a few ideas (what if the portals were in a vacuum? What if I blocked the portals from closing?) but before doing anything resource-intensive I wanted to narrow down what exactly was going wrong.

I knew the sonic boom and the portal being disrupted happened at the same time. I had two hypotheses: Either the sonic boom disrupted the portal, meaning that I had to stop the object inside from breaking the sound barrier relative to the air around it, or the forces involved had disrupted the portal and the sonic boom happened when the pebble hit still air. Either the boom caused the disruption or the disruption caused the boom.

Clearly I needed to do more experiments.

Next I made a cube out of portals. Each face of the cube led to the face on the opposite side. From outside the cube, I could stick my hand through any face and have it come out the other side without interacting with the contents of the cube. The inside faces likewise led to their inside opposites; top to bottom, left to right, front to back. The edges touched, so there was no interaction between the inside and outside. In theory that meant no wind resistance at all. Anything inside would definitely not cause a sonic boom, no matter how fast it went.

My experiments took three hours, and when they were done I was very happy with the results. I couldn't spend all night on it, though. My to-do list had accumulated a lot of entries. After planning, scheming, a break, more planning, and a brief shopping trip, I found myself on a Pacific island with a stolen video camera.

"Hey there world," I said into the camera's glassy eye, "Tesseract here." (Tesseract was my intended superhero name. It was important to name oneself before anyone else got the chance to.)

I watched the recording to see if I sounded as stupid as I thought I did. I didn't just sound stupid, I looked stupid, too. I had switched out my domino mask for a ski mask because I was skeptical that a mask that covered less than a quarter of my face would do much to hide my identity in a closeup. Now I just looked like a bank robber.

It was fifteen minutes to six (New Hampshire time) on the morning of Monday, February 7, which gave me an hour and a half before I had to go home and get ready for school. It would be best if I could finish the video and figure out how to upload it to the Internet before then.

I started again. This time I pointed the camera at my chest. "My name is Tesseract, the world's newest superhero." No, that was dumb. I probably wasn't even the world's newest superhero at this point.

I had underestimated how much time the video-making portion of my new, fleshed-out plan to kill Blitzkrieg would take. The more time I wasted here, the longer it would take me to get to the killing part. But if I looked like an idiot, the whole thing would be a wash.

A cool wind blew across the beach, flipping the pages of my open notebook. On a whim, I picked it up and wrote out 'My name is Tesseract' on a blank page.

That was better. No voice, no face, no body, no costume, nothing to trace, and no way to embarrass myself. I just wanted to get it over with, anyway. I wrote out some more bare-bones cards, going through my plan for the video in my head, then started the camera again and faced it towards a palm tree.

I held my notebook in front of the camera to show the first page, only letting my hand enter the frame. 'Blitzkrieg can go two hundred km/h.' I flipped the page. 'I can go faster.'

I had four portals ready to go for the purposes of showing off. They went to places with good views of world-famous landmarks: Big Ben, the Sphinx, Mt. Fuji, and the Statue of Liberty. I walked through them one by one, panning the camera across the scenery. When I was done, I held up the last page. 'To the Minutemen, the Guild, the Brockton Bay Brigade, or any other superhero team planning to fight Blitzkrieg: Contact me if you want to team up.' I ended the recording.

Close enough for government work.

This was the clumsiest, least cool way to get involved with a big superhero team, which was why it had not been part of my original plan. Videos like mine were common-ish, but I'd never heard of any cape successfully using it as a platform to jump into the big leagues. I wasn't sure how anyone ever did get to the big leagues, actually, but it wasn't by making lame videos on the Internet. Probably they did it by building a reputation based on solid superhero work, which I emphatically did not have time for. Blitzkrieg was forcing me to accelerate my plans.

The Minutemen and the Guild, led by Armsmaster and Narwhal respectively, were the two biggest North American cape teams (in terms of impact if not numbers) and the only two that operated coast-to-coast. Neither one of them had a street address or phone number, for different reasons. The Minutemen were embroiled in a decade-long war with organized crime across the Eastern Seaboard. It was a local legend that Marquis would pay ten million dollars for Armsmaster's head, even though Armsmaster hadn't come back to Brockton Bay in years. Some people said that was why he'd left in the first place. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Guild was officially outlawed by the Canadian government. They'd reintroduced the death penalty just for capes, so execution was emphatically on the table for any active member of the Guild caught by a country with an extradition treaty with Canada – the United States, for example.

Those were the Endbringer-fighting dream teams. Of the four that had ever been killed, the Guild was responsible for one and the Minutemen another. I really hoped they turned up for this one.

I'd included the shout out to the Brockton Bay Brigade because they were the only big Brockton Bay team and because they reliably responded to nearby Endbringers. I was sure they'd turn out for a fight on their home turf.

Blitzkrieg was forcing me to rush a lot of things I'd have preferred to take my time with. My original plan had been to work my way up slowly and systematically, but my original plan didn't figure on a near and present danger. It wasn't out of the question for me to fight the Endbringers single-handed, especially after the qualified success of my little experiment, but it was probably a bad idea. I had never fought anyone in my life, let alone a nigh-invincible killing machine.

I wasn't going to just let it be, though. That was the next stage of my plan, just as soon as it showed itself. My spiderweb of portals wasn't picking anything up, so I could only assume it was still underwater.

The libraries in Brockton Bay wouldn't open until eight, so I went to one in Manchester instead. After just shy of an hour of fiddling, I made accounts on Youtube and a few of the bigger parahuman-focused message boards and uploaded my video. After that, I changed out of my costume and was back in my room at five minutes to seven.

If my parents ever discovered that I was never in my room at night, I didn't know what excuse I would make.

I went straight to the shower. My Sahara trip had kicked up more dust than I had expected and my hair was caked with it. I shampooed twice to destroy the evidence, dressed for school, and joined my parents for breakfast.

Mom was at the table making notes on a new bus schedule. The routes changed too often as it was, and I could only imagine what the destruction of dozens of roads had done for that. Dad was making scrambled eggs and toast. He set them out on the table with coffee for Mom and himself and orange juice for me.

The radio was playing classic rock. Dad turned it down when he sat down. "We're having a Union meeting today. Our usual place is underwater now so I volunteered the house."

"I won't be home until late," Mom said without looking up. "The government doesn't think we have enough artillery shells."

"They're probably right," I said darkly. "Do guns even hurt Endbringers?"

"No," said Mom. At the same time, Dad said "Maybe."

"They might," Dad said. "I don't see what a superhero's fist can do that a fifty kilo explosive shell fired out of a cannon can't."

"Fists don't work either," said Mom.

"Then why do people keep punching them? And why does the government spend so many of our tax dollars making weapons?"

"Stupidity and morale, respectively," said Mom.

"I might be out late, too," I said.

Mom looked up for the first time. "Where?" she asked, at the same time as Dad asked "Why?"

"With a friend. Maybe. I don't know what her plans are right now." Blitzkrieg still hadn't surfaced. I couldn't imagine what it was up to.

"I don't know, Taylor," said Mom. "If that thing comes back..."

"I'll be way far away from the water," I said. "Miles away, on high ground."

Dad chimed in. "These are the rules: You're going to call me if you aren't coming straight home from school, and you're going to be home by six."

Six? What was I, made of spun glass? On the other hand, given the ongoing natural disaster a curfew wasn't unreasonable. "Fine."

It struck me that there had never been an Endbringer quite like this before. It came, it went, it came back, it went somewhere else. The entire eastern seaboard was uncertain about whether or not to sound the alarm. I had more information than most people and even I didn't have a clue what it was up to, other than Armsmaster's road theory. It hadn't even killed all that many people.

School was as boring and devoid of educational content as usual. I tuned it all out; history, math, everything. My attention was on my spiderweb of portals. Just as lunch ended, my diligence paid off when I detected Blitzkrieg's characteristic sideways rain. I followed it to its centre and was rewarded with metaphorical front-row seats to Blitzkrieg emerging from the water fifty kilometres off the coast. It took off like a shot towards land, aiming somewhere between Brockton Bay and Boston.

I didn't head to my next class. This was phase 2 of my new-and-improved plan. It was true that it would be unwise to risk life and limb in any death-defying escapades, but I didn't need to. My power had a global range. The least I could do was test Blitzkrieg's defences while I waited for the world's greatest heroes to get back to me.

I slipped off somewhere I wouldn't be seen and took a portal to my previously-established command centre on a desolate Pacific island. I had prepared the site in advance with standing portals to several locations of interest, including sixteen presently-empty Pacific islands very, very, very far away from both me and each other. These would be my arsenals.

I went to the islands one by one and loaded sixty-four portal cubes with ten-kilogram rocks. I had to be careful to drop them straight down, because if they drifted too much while falling they would hit the portal boundaries and pop prematurely. If that happened, depending on how long it had been in there the resulting explosion could pop other cubes and cause a chain reaction that cost me three other cubes. That was why the arsenals were so far away from each other and my command centre; I didn't want to be near the things.

The whole process took eight minutes. I wanted to make more, but my cubes lasted ten minutes at most before the forces inside popped them. If I waited any longer I would start losing the oldest ones. Sixty-four was the most I could reliably do in my experiments.

As aforementioned, Blitzkrieg could move 200 km/h and had emerged 50 kilometres off the coast, which meant it would take 15 minutes to reach. I had spent 8 minutes arming up, so I had 7 minutes left to shoot without risking collateral damage. More than enough.

I had lost my clear view of Blitzkrieg shortly after it emerged. The amount of water in the air around it made a total barrier to my clairvoyance. That was one obstacle I would need to deal with. Blitzkrieg was moving in a straight line, so I prepared the field in front of it. I wanted to do everything I was going to before it reached land, which didn't give me a lot of space or time. I made ten extra-large portals, each leading to a matching one in the upper atmosphere. The intense pressure difference caused the cubes to suck in air like vacuum cleaners.

That was all I had time for before Blitzkrieg reached my prepared area, but it was enough. The portals sucked a portion of the rain out of the air and spilled it out into the upper atmosphere, clearing it enough for me to get a sense of Blitzkrieg's location.

I selected the oldest cube in my arsenal and opened a portal below it pointing directly at Blitzkrieg's head. Then I dismissed the cube, releasing rock trapped inside.

I had done the math in advance. A ten-kilogram rock falling without wind resistance for eight minutes gained a speed of 9.8 m/s/s * 480 s = 4,704 m/s. Its energy, therefore, was 1/2 * 10 * 4,704^2 or 110,638,080 joules, better expressed as 1.1 * 10^8, or roughly ten times the kinetic energy of a tank shell (albeit without the explosion). On top of this was the energy of the air in the box, which weighed about a kilogram, was travelling just as fast as the rock, and added the energy of an extra tank shell.

The rock hit Blitzkrieg between the eyes. It flipped head over tentacles – now that it was out of the water I could see that it had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of an octopus. Before it landed I emptied the next three oldest boxes into its chest, emptying one of my arsenals and pile-driving it back into the water.

Blitzkrieg surfaced a dozen meters away. It didn't immediately start moving again. It cocked its head to the side like it was listening for something.

I decided to wait for Blitzkrieg to move again. As long as it wasn't getting closer to land, time was on my side. It took me less time to shoot than it did to reload, so if I spent my shots as quickly as I could each shot would be less powerful than the last. Better to play slow and steady and wait for them to finish – I decided the word I'd use for that was 'cooking.' My most recent boxes were only a minute old, which (if my calculations were correct) made them one sixty-fourth as powerful as the eight-minute boxes because of the power-of-two figure in my equation.

Blitzkrieg cocked its head the other way, then back. With one hand it plucked a hailstone out of the air. Water collected on it and froze until the hailstone was the size of a softball. With pure hydrokinesis, it flung the hailstone -

My range was one kilometre, so there needed to be a straight line less than a kilometre long between me and anything I wanted to sense. I had one open portal near Blitzkrieg. It was six inches across and put us five hundred metres apart. The hailstone's trajectory would take it through the portal with barely enough space, out, arcing just so to hit me in the head.

I closed the portal and only then realized that I wasn't close enough to sense it and had track it down again. When I found it it was racing for its original destination.

The instant I made a portal close enough to sense Blitzkrieg it threw another hailstone at me through it. This time I opened a new one before closing the first. Again, instantly, without even a glance, it threw a hailstone at me.

I opened a third portal and then four more under my four next-oldest cubes. Two of my shots hit Blitzkrieg from the left side and knocked it over sideways into the water. The other two missed.

Rather than let Blitzkrieg get up, I emptied all fifty-four of my remaining cubes into it one after another. By the end I wasn't sure if I was just hitting empty water, but this test needed to end. My plan did not include being shot at at this juncture.

When I was done I closed my portals and sat down on the beach to process.

If I went back to school I would be just barely in time for my first class after lunch. If I re-engaged...

I couldn't sense Blitzkrieg directly because it was a living thing, and I hadn't looked directly at it since the first shot. I didn't know how much I had hurt it, if at all.

Re-engage? Later. My potshots were apparently enough to get its attention, but my main takeaway from that was that Blitzkrieg could sense me through a six-inch portal five hundred metres away. Just great; the Endbringers had invisible powers too. None of my reading had even hinted at that. I'd thought they were just dumb brutes.

If I was going to re-engage, I was damn well going to get all my ducks in a row first. The most powerful thing I could cook up in twenty-four hours was not my A-game. I needed to be shooting actual tank shells with explosive payloads, or tungsten rods. I needed to do the acceleration in a vacuum to remove the speed limit so I could cook my shots for days instead of minutes. Heck, I was sure Armsmaster would have better ideas than me; as soon as I got in touch with him we could combine our powers to do ten times as much damage as either of us ever could alone.

None of that was possible if I died. I went back to school. Let Blitzkrieg smash roads for now, I'd be back.