III
Having finished rewiring another phone and checked that the connection worked, Tomi nervously set another device on the pile of near-identical devices at the side of the table.
When he'd put forward the idea of using the light on a phone and the possibility of illuminating in the ultraviolet spectrum, he'd somehow entertained the thought that he'd do it all in the peace of the central room, where he could be alone and control the whole process of managing the shelter.
He couldn't even have hoped that he'd be assigned a group of people to work with on this project.
Though those people weren't illiterate in the parts of IT and electronics, their very presence incredibly irritated Tomi, who because of that disturbance could barely concentrate on the work in front of him.
He recalled the runner who'd unpleasantly surprised him with the news that a group of people was looking for him.
A group of people specifically looking for Tomi couldn't bode well.
And it didn't. It turned out that this bunch of nerds had been assigned to him by the council's decision for education and training, for the purpose of forming a guild of electricians, and that he had then been unanimously elected leader.
And all that happened without his knowledge, because someone had cleverly said that if Tomi knew of his nomination, he'd flatly refuse it and make every effort to avoid any connection with them.
Someone who knew Tomi — and that list wasn't very long.
And they were completely right. Tomi agreed to lead the guild only after the council's written threat to revoke his access to the central room in the shelter and forbid his access to the main computer.
To be left without access to the central computer — that he couldn't allow himself.
So he just silently accepted the role, took over the office in the machine room, and ordered the people to start collecting mobile devices.
Interestingly, many of the shelter's residents didn't want to part with the useless devices.
The screens would never light up again, the keyboard wouldn't come up, and everyone knew it, but they clung convulsively to some miserable hope that one day those phones would turn on and they could return to their former life.
He didn't care; the only thing that mattered to him was that he had devices in front of him and could get on with the fairly simple rewiring of a few tiny wires on each of the devices.
The thing with phones was that, although the microchips in the devices were irreversibly fried, the other components worked.
The camera could be turned on if isolated from the device, the light definitely worked if hooked up to another power source and separated from the camera.
A heap of valuable electronics remained in the phones that could serve other purposes.
You just had to deal with it. And it all required time.
Tomi first took out the batteries, then the memory cards and the device's chip.
He literally broke the cameras out of their housings and rewired the miniature motherboards.
The miniature floodlight that gave light was strong enough to provide very bright illumination and, if it had a suitable power source, could shine continuously for years.
The thing was that those lights, unlike the rest of the device, were built of high-quality materials and their wear was fairly low, so Tomi gave the lighting a few years of operation before it would begin to fail.
And what after that? That wasn't his concern; he'd deal with it when it came to that.
For now the biggest part of the job was to get working the devices that would provide light on the farms, and, by a simple connection to one laptop, to convince the floodlights to shine in ultraviolet light.
A little maneuvering of frequencies and you could decide the strength, band, and range of the light thus reproduced.
It all required time. Somewhere deep inside he was grateful for the help he'd been assigned.
That very precise work couldn't be done by just anyone, and changing the devices' frequency was equally technically demanding. Had he done it alone, it would have taken weeks, if not months. And the lighting had to be delivered within days, or so Nika demanded, at least.
She'd decided that the initial farm beds would have lighting from phones, while the lighting obtained by painting normal bulbs would be used for the normal growth of plants. When she saw the ranges and various strengths of the mobile devices' lighting,
Nika wished she had it across the whole farm with zones of different lighting, but that was impossible because of the very fixed number of devices.
So it was changed so that the mobile lighting would be used on young plants and at the end, to obtain the sweetness and quality of the harvested product.
So he was told he had to prepare 1,200 devices in just a few days, and so he and his crew got to work.
It took a few hours until he explained what and how it should be done, and he spent some more time writing a program on the laptop with which he changed the lighting frequencies.
The work went very smoothly. There were no stoppages or interruptions.
And the little pile of already-calibrated devices grew steadily.
After a couple of hours, looking at the remains of the phones, the fried chips, and the piles of functional electronics that couldn't work without microchips, he began to ponder how to use it.
The motherboards were calibrated to conduct electronic impulses through the device in the shortest instant.
The cameras were completely functional and could still take high-resolution pictures.
The pictures could be saved to memory cards for storage.
The speakers and microphones were still completely functional, they just needed power.
The batteries were mostly completely functional.
All that was missing was the something that made phones smart devices.
The chip, that tiny, square little piece bathed in gold for better conductivity, governed all of it and sent the impulses that made the phone smart.
And then an idea occurred to him. What if he made smart phones dumb?
What if, by a simple connection and modification, he made devices that would send and receive signals on the principle of a radio?
If he paired two or more devices to the same transmit and receive frequency, he could create a communication link that was currently insufficient, because they were limited by the quantity of old radios from the armory.
It could work! His mind ran wild with various ideas.
He could make simple cameras, simple receivers for image and sound.
They could have their own television or music radio again!
The possibilities were limited only by the amount of data stored on his laptops, but even that could be used.
He looked at the memory cards from the dismantled devices.
All the cards were full of data, music, films, pictures.
All of it could be downloaded and stored and later reproduced.
The work really required a lot of time, but the project could fill the time he'd definitely have after finishing the current job with the lighting.
Tomi rose from the chair. He couldn't sit still because of the sheer ideas in his head.
And he knew he had to calm down, otherwise he'd get another episode of mania, and he didn't want that.
Followed by the gazes of the people working in the office, he left the office, climbed the ladder, and headed toward the laboratory.
His nerves were twitching, he was sweating a little, and he knew an attack lay ahead.
He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and opened the laboratory door.
A young man who was obviously in charge of turning people away from the laboratory headed toward him, but Tomi completely ignored him as his gaze searched the room.
And then he spotted her. Nika was engrossed in a conversation with two people by some machine.
She spoke loudly and gestured like someone teaching.
And she was incredibly charming doing it.
Her black hair fluttered when she brushed aside with a hand the unruly strands that fell on her forehead.
Her even nose and the gentle curve of her chin on a slender neck with a small ear that mostly served to tame her unruly hair sent shivers down his back.
Tomi felt himself calming. He settled into the nearest chair and secretly went on watching Nika, who, obviously having finished the lesson, carelessly crossed her delicate arms over her chest and watched with satisfaction as the two people turned on the machine and typed some commands on a small
screen on the side.
Then, satisfied with what she saw, she broke away and moved a little further toward a microscope, where she then began changing samples and observing the results, sometimes writing something in a small notebook set beside the microscope.
Everything she did was completely elegant, considered, yet executed gracefully.
Tomi could watch her like that for hours — no, what hours, for days!
And she'd never bore him. Nika straightened, looked around the laboratory unaware of his gaze, stretched, and massaged a stiff shoulder, then returned to her work.
She had gorgeous curves. Tomi had no doubt she had the so-called curves of the perfect woman.
Which to him made her above his league. And he assumed that quite reasonably.
Such a perfect woman needs a perfect man, not a scrawny, bowlegged, and half-blind young man like he was.
He knew she too would, like many before her, end up with such a young man.
And at the same time he knew that for the first time he wouldn't be jealous.
He sincerely wished that such a pure girl would end up in a great love.
With someone who would glorify her like a queen.
Who would love her with only a fraction of his feelings.
Because he knew he was irrevocably in love with Nika.
Not with that passionate love that dies down after a while, but with the kind of love felt only once in a lifetime.
The kind of love that makes the mere presence near the loved one fill your whole being.
The love that makes you happy as a small child when the object of your fixation smiles at you, and ready to forgive everything.
The love that makes you happy when you see that the loved one is safe and happy.