We cover 2000 miles in about 2 months. Along the way, Doc and I talk about nonlethal weapons. Nonlethal weapons practice certainly constitutes a lot of what I’ve been doing. My sound walls and my saserface both constitute weaponized sound. However, there are a lot more options. Resonant frequencies are a biggie. We don’t have any glass, so we can’t do glass-shattering frequency tests, but we have a bit of wire. Taut wires are pretty easy to get to vibrate at a resonant frequency, but other objects are a bit harder to manage. Miguel lets me borrow a six foot long spear. He even takes the pokey bits off so I can study it better, and not stab myself.

With testing, metal seems pretty easy to make resonant. It’s very stiff and P. says it’s got a crystalline structure. Long, uniform bars of the type that Miguel can make are extra nice, because they will resonate at a specific frequency, rather than some jumble of frequencies like many objects will. It takes some work, but in only a couple days, I’m doing a pretty good job of capturing the sounds made by striking the metal rod on the ground and then duplicating the sound to make resonance happen. It's ten times harder to do when I can't capture the sound of the strike first. It's as bad as the difference between trying to mix paints to make a color you're looking at, compared to mixing to make a color someone is describing to you.

Resonant frequency with people is even harder. Apparently, there’s this mythical thing called the brown note. Folks have been claiming since the 1980s or before that you could set up vibrations at the resonant frequency of the anus, and make someone’s pants a bit browner. Piyu says that theory doesn’t actually work, but that the experiments that created the urban myth did discover that you can create nausea, shortness of breath, headaches and such via loud enough infrasonics. With volumes up near 150 decibels and above, and frequencies in the low infrasonic below 5 hertz, folks get uncomfortable pretty quickly.

Again, this isn’t helping me enough. I have trouble getting sound waves above about 135 db, though I can work with the low hertz frequencies. It might work if I had better volume, and it might work if I had a half hour to point it at someone, but mostly, I’m not betting on this as a near-term solution.

On the other hand, apparently, building an 18.98 hertz wave matches up with the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. Some historical sightings of ghosts can definitively be blamed on resonating eyeballs. Also, we have pretty good experiments, refined in the 2040s, that concluded that a combination of resonant frequencies of about seventeen and fourteen Hertz leads to emotions of uneasiness and fear. Movie theaters started to use those kinds of infrasonics as early as the late 1970s, but the experiments didn’t figure out the combination until seventy years later. I think I can manage both the ghost and the fear, but it’ll take a while.

Going back to the metal rod, we start vibrating the bar, and then hitting things with it. It looks like it makes a difference. There seems to be some positive impact to building up the resonant frequency for an object and then hitting things with it. Our methods for measuring are pretty weak, but between doc and me, we think that hitting with a properly vibrating bar is doing maybe five percent more damage than hitting with a non-vibrating rod. Seems like I have some things to work on, at least.

The little professor also finally gets Steve and Miguel to work together to create some magnets. Mike sets up some wire in a coil, wrapped around a iron rod, and Steve supplies the juice. We’re not perfectly sure what the magnets are good for, but we were able to make some.

Across the months, I’ve learned a little bit of aikido from Priya too, but it’s pretty darn hard to go with someone else’s motion when they’re moving so slowly. We laugh about me considering the study of Tai Chi. It’s already slow enough that maybe if it were sped up to superhuman speeds, it would be dangerous. On the other hand, my sticks are dangerous enough at speed, so maybe not.

One day, around two months into our journey, we come over a hill and see something I’ve not seen before in this dimension: real human on human violence. One guy is bleeding from his arm, and everyone is ready to fight, but there’s no violence currently going. I get everyone to drop down behind the hill, and then I build a sound bubble to hide our noises, and a sound funnel to listen in on what’s going on.

“Give up. You’re outnumbered eight to three, and underpowered.”

“You’ve got a reputation, Rocco.”

“What do folks say about me?”

“You kill, torture, and enslave people.”

“So did the government.”

“They protected people.”

“So do I. Look, I don’t even know your name. Can we do this like civilized people.”

“Tyler.”

“Tyler. You already know me. I’m Rocco. I’m the mayor of these lands. As the rightful government in the area, we have taxes. You come in, you pay taxes. And you, my friend, are on my land.”

“I don’t have a yellow to give you, Rocco. We’ve had a hard year, barely surviving.”

“That’s why we have our payment plan. I know you can rest and recover thaums. We’ll offer you hospitality while you rest so you can pay.”

“And if we say no?”

“That’s why there’s eight of us. If you say no, then we’ll have to recover whatever thaums we can from your corpses.”

“We can’t afford to sit here. Any other choices?”

“If you can provide services, then we may be able to come to some sort of agreement. These fine gentlemen I have with me have all decided to help with hunting criminals, for instance. When they help me apprehend the miscreants, they get paid. Of course, they have friends back in town too, who vouch for their good behavior.”

“My friends won’t be hurt?”

“Anyone who comes with us has only to pay their debt, and they’re free to go. Or else they’re free to stay under our protection, if they’re able to pay or serve.”

“Fine. You win. How long will it take to pay off the tax?”

“It would normally be thirty days of meditation and giving us your thaums, but you hurt Johnny’s arm in our little disagreement, and that will take some recovery. That adds fifteen days. And you have to show us your skills.”

Inside the sound bubble, Priya asks, “How do we save them?”

Miguel answers, “We can’t. There’s four of us, and eight of them. We don’t know what their skills are. We have to go.”

Priyu says, “Do we just leave them to their fate?”

Steve replies, “We have to right now. We can maybe come back, but we can’t do anything right now.”

Piyu tries again, “Snake. Tell me there’s something we can do.”

I look at my shoes. “I think Rocco is lying. He’s going to keep the people longer. Maybe it’s slavery. But it’s better than death, and we aren’t going to be able to save them now. Steve’s right. We have to get out of here first.”

Priyanka looks disappointed. “Okay. Then let’s get out of here. Better we’re not captured too.”

We scram hard for three hours before stopping at all.