The drawing for this page and the next page is an excuse for me to do a big two page spread of Richardson Bay, the Marin and Tiburon peninsulas, and the Golden Gate bridge. The ‘action’ is just Kay and Tam walking back to Schoonmaker marina to get his dingy, and that didn’t feel like action at all. My initial write-up of this book had Kay meeting up with Alex and Rachael, characters from the old comic, but I found that I didn’t have room to re-introduce them and get all the information that I felt I had to get into this intro. That left a little extra space right here, and I wanted to go ahead and draw a big scene.

We will almost certainly run into Alex and Rachael again.

Oh, and for those who may not know, an ‘Order of magnitude’ means to be ten times as large, or one-tenth as large, while ‘Two orders of magnitude” means one hundred times as large, or one one-hundredth. So when Tam is tell Kay that she may be one or two orders of magnitude faster, she is really saying she could be about ten to a hundred times faster, and that is a pretty big range.

And yes, I can also hear that guy in the back saying, “Years for backup hardware and two weeks for a fusion reactor?”. Well, yeah. The fuser design is actually uncomplicated, while the quantum processors that Tam uses are much more complicated (an order of magnitude at least! maybe two! See you learned something!), and would take longer to create. A key point is that some people build fusers at home, but nobody builds modern day integrated circuits at home.

A fuser is actually a fusion reactor that you can make at home. High school students have done it. Unfortunately it requires that you put in a lot more power then you get out, because most of the hydrogen that you heat up is wasted. It’s actually a really slick device, the ‘heat’ in this instance is just the hydrogen ion moving really fast as its accelerated in an electric field. The fusion is then kinetically contained, which is a fancy way of saying that the particles hit each-other.  My theory here is that if Tam creates the ions in quantum coupled pairs then even though she can’t be exactly certain where they are exactly, she can manipulate them so that they reach the same point at the same time with enough energy that they would probably fuse. Making quantum couple pairs of hydrogen ions would actually be fairly easy, as they tend to bond in pairs. Anyway, that’s my story and I am sticking with it, for now. There are some elements I will add later.

He is actually shopping for  a lot more than just magnets. However most of the shopping list consisted of materials that Tam could cannibalize for their constituent components, and I balked at the idea of illustrating that in depth. It would have led to a long digression of exactly what all that material was for, and I wanted to keep this first book fairly tight.

If you want to find out more about the fuser, Wikipedia is most certainly going to be your friend.