“Turning on the power supply,” Jack said. “Starting at twenty percent of calculated maximum.”
“Alright,” I replied. I noted the meter readouts. “Output readings look stable. Turn up the supply voltage.”
“Right. Increasing power to forty percent.” He paused. “No change to the output. Still stable.”
“Bring it up to fifty percent.”
Another pause. “Still mostly stable, observing minor oscillations at the emitter.”
“Keep bringing it up.”
“Sixty percent… Sixty-five… Seventy—Voltage spiking in the primary inductor.”
“Back to sixty-five and hold,” I said quickly.
“Holding… Inductive spikes dissipated. Back to only minor oscillations again.”
“Keep going. Eighty.”
He hesitated. “You sure? It doesn’t look like it's working right. We could cause a burnout if we go much higher.”
“I’m aware. However, we’re limited on time here and need to confirm that this works. So, unless you have a better idea, we keep going.”
“Fine. Eighty percent… Oscillation amplitude is decreasing.”
“See? We’re good, take it to full power.”
He sighed. “Supply voltage to one hundred percent.” Several moments passed. Then in a surprised tone, “Oscillations gone. The emitter signal is completely stable.”
Silence.
“What the shit?” I announced.
“It's stable.”
“Yeah, I got that. Just one teeny little thing. It's supposed to be oscillating. It’s an oscillator, it’s not supposed to be stable.”
“Well it’s at max power. And drawing more current than planned. A lot more, actually… Say, do you smell smoke?”
CRACK!
“Fuck! Shit! Tits! Ass! Unplug the damn thing!” I scrambled, pulling at wires. “Kill the power!”
I found the wires leading to the supply and yanked them free. With the offending cables disconnected, and nothing else looking at risk of imminently exploding, I looked down at the small circuit board sitting on the lab table in front of the two of us. A few wisps of acrid smoke rose upward from it.
Well, that could have gone better.
I did a quick survey of the rest of the lab room. A few of the other groups were quietly watching us, the rest too preoccupied with their own work to care about what was happening at our bench. I glanced at the lab TA. He was looking up from his laptop and staring at our little scene. He removed one of his earbuds and spoke, “Garrett, Jack, you two having some issues?”
“We all good,” I said with a grin, coughing at the rising fumes. I fanned at them with a hand to hasten their dispersion. “Just a minor hardware glitch.”
“Mhmm...” He replaced the earbud and his gaze went back down to his laptop. Then muttered under his breath, “So long as it doesn’t set off any alarms this time...”
Jack rotated slowly in his seat to face me. “So…” he said. “That didn’t work.”
“How very perceptive of you,” I replied, not even glancing in his direction and instead pulled the slightly-smoldering circuit closer for inspection. “Maybe you should have gone into criminal justice instead of engineering. You’d’ve been a great detective, I’m sure of it.” It didn’t take long to locate the guilty component, which I plucked from the board and held up for him to see. “Yep, that’d do it. The e-cap was in backwards.”
“Hey, you assembled the circuit, not me.”
“Ahh, but whose job is it to notice when I do stupid shit that might explode?” I tossed the useless part over my shoulder. “Anyway. I’d say that was a successful test. Might have to get a new breadboard though, this one looks a little well-done.” A quick look at my watch told me it was 6:50 pm. Only ten minutes until the end of electronics lab. “...which can totally wait until next time. The report isn’t due until the week after break, right? Right. Awesome. Just put it down as ‘mostly functional’ in the notebook and we’re done here.”
I stood up and stretched, then got to work unplugging the cables and probes from our test circuit. The laptop and other tools got neatly packed away into my backpack, with everything else just piled on top. A quick shake of the bag and everything was stowed, neatly or otherwise. I waited for Jack to finish writing down the last few details in his notebook.
“Okay, done. Let's get out of here,” Jack said, closing his book and grabbing his backpack.
“Sweet,” I replied while grabbing my own bag. I threw it over my shoulder as we made our way to the door. The T.A. simply grunted as we passed.
“You know,” Jack said as we walked down the hall, “we probably could have been finished completely today if it hadn’t blown up.”
“Meh.” I waved a hand in his general direction. “We’re basically done anyways. Pretty sure we got the design right. Like ninety-five percent sure. The implementation just got screwed up a teeny little bit.”
“And whose fault was that?”
“Totally not mine. Nope. Not at all.”
“Uh huh...”
“Whatever. Doesn’t matter. And do you know why?” I asked, pushing through the double-doors of the building and into the cool air outside. “Because we. Are. Free!” I punctuated the last word by throwing my arms up into the air. “At long last, spring break begins!”
We stepped down onto the slightly-wet sidewalk. Partially embedded in a snowbank next to the door was a bicycle rack which was currently home to a singular bicycle. If it could even be called a bicycle in its current state. Most of the paint was missing from the frame, the chain was rusted, and more than a few parts were wrapped in duct-tape. Any reasonable person would have thrown it in a dump rather than bring it anywhere near a road. I walked over to it and began to unlock it from the rack.
Jack shook his head. “I can’t believe you actually ride that scrap heap. Especially at this time of the year,” he said, zipping up his jacket.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, brow furrowed. “It’s spring.”
“Yeah, a Griffonstone spring. Except you know far better than I do that ‘spring’ in Griffonstone doesn’t mean shit ‘cept for a slightly reduced chance of getting wrecked with a random blizzard out of nowhere.” He suspiciously eyed the skies, despite there not being a cloud in sight.
“Oh, it's not that bad,” I replied with a wave of my hand and pulled my bike out of the rack.
“Yeah… no. Just because y’all northern nutcases decide not to wear your coats the moment it goes above freezing doesn’t make it spring. No matter what the calendar says.” He shivered and pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders. “Nuh-uh, you can keep your weird-ass weather. I’ll spend my break laying on a proper beach getting drunk like a normal person, thank you kindly.”
“Sounds like an exciting agenda.”
“Ha, more so than your plan of ‘sit at computer and fuck off for two weeks’.”
“Hey now, fucking off can yield all sorts of interesting results.”
“Yeah right. Twenty bucks says the most exciting thing that happens to you is a blizzard knocking out the power and interrupting your Netflix binge.”
“I ain’t taking that bet. That's practically a given and you know it.” I threw a leg over my bike and sat on the mostly-intact seat. “See you back at the room?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I’ve got all my shit in the car already. It's a bit of a drive back down to my parents’ place, and I should get going.” After a moment of consideration, he said, “Sure you don’t want to come with? Still got plenty of room in the car. For you and a computer.”
“Nah, you have fun. Enjoy your sand and sunburns. I’m fine chilling here.”
“Literally.”
“Pfft, wuss.” Then I added, “Drive safe, dude.”
He practically snorted at that. “Ha! Says the guy who refuses to wear a helmet, and yet insists on riding as fast as humanly possible, on a bike held together with tape, while there’s still snow on the ground.”1 He turned and walked towards the parking lot, then shouted over his shoulder, “Try not to kill yourself this time!”
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1The tape was there for rust prevention and served no structural purpose. I wasn’t that reckless.
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“No promises,” I said with a chuckle. “Have fun!”
“Oh, I will! I’ll be sure to send pictures! Lots of them! Especially any with chicks in ‘em! See you in a couple weeks!” he yelled back with a wave. He rounded the corner of the building and then was out of sight.
I stood there for a few moments, one foot on the bike’s raised pedal, a hand holding the brake, simply taking in the evening. The streetlights were on, illuminating the sidewalk and roads with an orange glow. Just about everyone had gone home by now, with the exception of the few stragglers like myself who had the misfortune of late-running classes. Looking about, I didn’t see a single other person, and the roads were clear of cars. The university was virtually abandoned for the coming break.
Perfect.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the chill air, then slowly released it. I repeated the process a few more times.
My foot came down on the pedal. Hard. Hard enough that the front tire briefly lifted off the ground from the sudden acceleration. When it returned to the pavement, I yanked on the handlebars and turned sharply onto the road.
I didn’t immediately go in the direction of my dorm building. No, instead I took the road towards the center of campus, dodging potholes along the way.
Located at the heart of the university was the mall; a long open field lined with trees. At one end was the campus library, at the other sat a statue of the Griffonstone University mascot.2 During the warmer months the fields would be filled with people playing frisbee or chilling under a tree, or whatever other summer-ey things people usually did. Currently, however, the fields were covered in a layer of snow and ice that wouldn’t be entirely melted for another month or so.
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2A griffon, made of stone. Zero points for creativity.
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My target was the walkways encircling it. I turned left off the main road and onto the closest of the paths running its length. Pushing the bike’s decrepit pedals to their limits, I accelerated to a speed that was definitely faster than necessary and probably faster than was strictly safe, given the conditions.
The extra exertion served its purpose. The wind whipped past and each lungful of air bringing with it the night’s chill. The coolness spread through my body, pushing away sluggishness from a long day of sleep-inducing lectures.
At the end of the mall, I turned, crossing in front of the library before riding back down the path opposite the one I’d just traversed. A few laps around the place would do wonders to burn off the accumulated restlessness from classes.
The preceding week had been filled with extra work as professors inevitably all crammed in assignments and exams before we all left for break and all the hard-fought learning could leak from our brains. Multiple exams, labs, reports and whatever else they could think of had filled my schedule to the brim and resulted in a week-long gauntlet of continuous stress that had only just concluded.
To say that I was looking forward to the break would be a little bit of an understatement.
Jack’s plan for the break was to head south to the nearest beach, get drunk, and then do… something. I don’t think he planned farther than that. Still, that’s totally fine for him but didn’t rate all that high on my list of preferred vacation plans. I wasn’t a huge fan of the heat, or the sun, or sand, or excessive consumption of alcohol… or really anything about it. So, best friend or not, I felt no overwhelming desire to join him on his trip.
No, I planned to spend the next two weeks holed up in our dorm with my computer, a crate of caffeinated beverages, and a backlog of things I’d wanted to do but hadn’t had time to because of school. Or maybe I’ll just binge-watch three hundred hours of Netflix. Who knows? Only time will tell.
Speaking of time, my stomach took this opportunity to remind me that I hadn’t eaten since noon. My legs were also in agreement; I’d done enough laps around the place, it was about time to wrap it up and head home.
I was approaching the end of the mall opposite the library, with the statue coming up on my right. One last pass around it followed by a quick turn to the left would set me back onto the main road and on the way home.
At least that was the theory.
In practice, when I looped around behind the statue and started to pull out of the turn, the bicycle’s front tire lost traction. Maybe there was a patch of ice hidden in the statue’s shadow, or maybe I was just going too fast for the turn. I don’t know. Either way, the result was the same. Instead of nicely following the path, I now found myself careening off the plowed sidewalk and towards the statue.
“Fuucking shiiiit!” I announced with all the eloquence the situation mandated.
I fought with the handlebars for control as I left the pavement and entered the snow. I did my best to remain upright, but it wasn’t enough. The brakes were unsurprisingly ineffective on the icy terrain, and without the ability to change my direction, the front tire ran right into the snowbank at the base of the statue.
The bike, weighing significantly less than me and impacting the rather incompressible snow, came to an abrupt stop. I, however, continued forward with relatively little opposition.
That isn’t to say there was no opposition. The handlebars made a commendable effort, slamming into my gut and knocking the air from my lungs. But it wasn’t enough to stop me from tumbling forward off the bike. Pain ripped through my skull as my head hit stone and my vision filled with a rather impressive spectrum of colors before going black entirely.