Prologue
“The Bright Sparks just aren’t the same without Pam,” one of the bloggers’ floating holographic heads said, her round-cheeked face contorted with intensity.
“No! They’ll be better! You’ll see!” insisted a young man with long eyes and a waterfall of shining black hair. The others burst out in protest. Their voices echoed over the silent, twilit Iowa farm fields surrounding Barbara Winton.
The tall, brown-haired girl put the online chatter mostly out of her mind and focused intently on the problem at hand. With silent finger commands, Barbara motioned her personal data engine, PDE, to adjust its position and to alter the lighting a bit. The hand-sized supercomputer tilted and hovered closer under the hood of the harvester, casting the white cone of light across the grease-covered, grimy circuit box. Barbara removed the last screw in the faded, zinc-plated sheet-metal cover. She could feel the rush of air from the four silent fan jets on the ultralight PDE as it moved about.
“I don’t agree,” another one of the other bloggers, an adolescent male with short, knotted, crimson-dyed dreadlocks, insisted. The holograms from the Web site cast dancing hues of colored light that mixed with the flashlight function of the hovering PDE. “I don’t think Pam ever fit in anyway, and besides, Dr. Bright will be putting Dion in charge, just wait. You’ll see.”
Barbara frowned, squinting down into the mass of electronic components. The smell of burned capacitor made her eyes water. The teenager dashed away the tears with the back of her hand and wiped them on the front of her denim coverall.
“Fido, I can’t see the alternator diode bridge. Project that schematic for me again. And do a cross-correlation between the image and the schematic pictures and see if you can pinpoint it.” Barbara was perplexed. She wasn’t sure if it was the lighting, the grime, or if she was just lost in the circuit, but for whatever reason she wasn’t finding the components she was looking for.
“Yes, Barbara,” the PDE replied. “Please give me a moment to cross-reference images and to extrapolate position angles.” On the air above the miniature spotlight, diagrams of circuits flashed one after another, rotating and spinning in search of the correct orientation.
“Right.” Sweat trickled into her eyes. Barbara rose and wiped it off her forehead with the back of her hand, and, she guessed, smeared grime on her forehead. The late afternoon Iowa sun had heated the trademarked tractor-green painted metal on the enormous satellite-guided harvester like a cake pan in an oven and, at the moment, she was the cake. Even though the Sun had set an hour earlier, the heat continued to radiate from the vehicle. Barbara suspected it was over forty degrees Celsius under the hood of the beast, but was afraid to ask Fido to find out for sure. She really didn’t want to know.
“Here it is, Barbara,” the hovering supercomputer said, shining a laser-pointer beam into the depths of the tractor’s circuitry. A tiny red dot danced on the component she was looking for.
“So, the diode bridge is here in this corner of the box on this board, and the high-current lead goes this way. . . .” She traced the cable with the tip of the screwdriver in her right hand while her two-generation-old PDE did its best to track the motion and keep it lit. She really was asking a lot of poor old ancient Fido. “Right about here is where the voltage regulator should be. Yeah, gotcha.” She tapped the cover of the regulator with the metal end of the screwdriver, making a hollow tapping sound as she did.
“I don’t think Dion is the man for the job. I think the job needs a woman,” a tattooed female blogger put in. “I like Jan. She’s the one who can do it. The way she rewired that computer-controlled electromagnet was nothing short of genius.”
“How about two leaders?” asked another woman, dark-skinned in a high-necked white cotton blouse. “Jan and Gary are the Nerd-Twins. They work together so well. I admire their teamwork.”
“You think two heads are better than one? I think that’ll be a disaster! Gary can’t make decisions.”
“Fido, I need you to go ahead and handshake with the diagnostic computer on this combine and start up the engine,” Barbara said, pointing. “Monitor the phase interval. If this regulator is out we should get a lot of ripple on top of, oh, thirteen point seven volts right here at the input to the drive motor.”
“Starting the engine, Barbara. Please be mindful of moving parts and sparks.”
“Safety first,” she said. She pulled her hands free of the engine and rested them on her hips to make certain they were out of the way. Her knack for understanding power systems included a healthy respect for what high amperage could do to human flesh.
Barbara waited until she heard the whir of the electric drive kick in and watched the graphs of voltage and current from systems throughout the tractor engine on yet another holoprojection from Fido. Just as she had expected, a curve suddenly went sporadic and oscillated randomly about a dotted line, marking the optimum level at thirteen point seven volts. She nodded. That regulator was shot. That was really bad luck.
“Barbara,” Fido said, in his conversational tone, “there is a temperature sensor warning on the high voltage tripler rectifier for the right front drive motor.”
“What?” Barbara swiped at the projection in front of her to access the menu. She frantically pulled up the diagnostics for the gears and drives. On the third screen, she spotted a vibrational mode that shouldn’t have been there. That could fry the whole system! “Shut it down, Fido! Shut it down!”
“I’m attempting to override the power system, but there seems to be a malfunction in the interface,” Fido replied, still maddeningly casual. “The oscillating current is causing the motor to vibrate due to the back electromotive force being induced.”
“I get that. We have to shut it off! Dad will have a cow if we blow this motor!” Barbara pawed through the canvas tool bag next to her with one hand, searching for anything that would do the trick. She needed to cut the power to the drive before it could go out of control and burn out the windings, but she didn’t have any insulated wire cutters that could cut through the centimeter-thick cable. Besides, fifty amps running through the wire would likely weld whatever tool she attempted to cut the wire with right to the tractor, just adding to the problem. An axe would work, but she would have to run back to the barn to get one.
The engine began whining, rising to a frequency that hurt her ears. She cast around, looking for any shutoff or switch she could close.
“Fido, this thing is about to burn out if we don’t stop it. Shut it down!”
The PDE sounded infuriatingly calm. “I’m sorry, Barbara, but something is wrong and I cannot. You will have to do it manually.”
“I know! I know!” Barbara thought quickly. She should call Dad for help. No. It was nearly dinnertime, so he was back at the house already. He couldn’t make it out to her in time. What would Dad do in this situation? The bright spark of an idea flashed into the edges of her mind. The idea was risky, but it could work. I got this, she thought. “Fido, do you still have throttle controls?”
“Yes, I do.”
She waved her arm. “Kick it in! Full throttle on the front right side, now!”
“Barbara, that will cause an overload on the power circuit.”
“Do it! That’s what I’m hoping for.”
“Very well. Activating full throttle.”
Barbara swiped up the voltage and amperage graph in an adjacent window and crossed her fingers. She watched the thermal data with all her nerves tuned to high. The voltage continued to swing wildly, and the current rose like a rocket ascending to the Moon. The vibrational modes in the motor continued to worsen and the horrendous noise could have shattered glass.
“The motor will burn out before much longer, Barbara,” Fido warned. “Should I begin deceleration?”
“Full throttle! Don’t stop!” Barbara stared at the readings, hoping she knew what she was doing.
“. . . Jan knows what she’s doing and is a good engineer. But I think the Sparks are in a rut. That particle accelerator experiment they did was a disaster,” a deep, thickly accented voice said. Barbara twitched at the word “disaster.”
“That’s not true! Neil posted some data on the membership boards this morning that was amazing!”
“I can’t afford the membership area,” someone replied, sourly.
“Me, either,” Barbara muttered to herself, staring at the rising graph. “Me, either.”
“Well, there was apparently some feedback in one of the superconductor magnets that caused the aim of the proton beam to be off. Wasn’t their fault.”
“They should have planned for that kind of contingency!” the deep voice insisted. The debate raged on. Barbara did her best to ignore the background chatter, but it was difficult. Dr. Bright’s Bright Sparks had it great, and they were doing great things, and on the Moon, of all places! Barb had been one of their biggest fans all her life.
She had watched Dr. Keegan Bright’s show ever since it began, when she was a little girl. The Bright Sparks, young people ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two, had lived and worked with him for years. She knew all of their names, when they joined the program, when they left it, and where many of them had gone since. They were brilliant and had all kinds of fun scientific and engineering resources at their fingertips.
The most exciting moment had come a handful of years before, when Dr. Bright had left Earth for the new international moon base named Armstrong City, and taken the most current crop of Bright Sparks with him. There had been a couple of new additions and subtractions from the team since then, like Pam. Along with all their other Earth-bound fans, Barbara had followed all of the Sparks’ exploits on social media, as they settled in on a literally strange new world, adapting to their environment and adapting the environment to suit themselves, all with the latest scientific technology, their wit and ingenuity. The first videos of them bouncing around in lunar gravity as they put together their first project had nearly made her explode out of envy. How she wished she could be one of them! She could work on particle accelerators, or anything else for that matter, rather than broken down, decades-old tractors that were about to blow drive motors at every turn.
But, she thought with a sigh, somebody has to take care of old tractors. Farming wasn’t just pushing dirt around. It was one of the most important jobs there was, and over the decades had fallen into fewer and fewer hands as farm sizes increased and people dropped out of the backbreaking work it took to keep an agribusiness going. She always reminded herself that every job was important. People had to eat. That was what her dad and her grandpa had taught her and her brothers since they were old enough to listen. One day she’d get to the Moon and visit the Sparks’ laboratory classroom. One day.
The screeching sound in the motor rose to a point that was so unbearable that Barbara clapped her hands over her ears. It drowned out the bloggers’ heated debate in the background. Just as she covered her ears, something mechanical let out a loud click. Barbara jumped back in case something was about to blow. Instead, the electric current graph dropped instantly to zero. The shrill scream spun down to a whining moan. As Barbara held her breath, it dropped to a low hum. Suddenly, the system stopped altogether. She closed her eyes and sent up a silent plea.
Please be all right, please be all right, please be all right!
Barbara took in a deep breath and opened her eyes, hoping that she hadn’t just destroyed a seventeen-thousand-dollar tractor drive motor that her family most certainly couldn’t afford to replace. They couldn’t afford the thirty-nine dollars a month for the private membership area on the Bright Sparks website, and they most certainly couldn’t afford to lose a harvester right at the end of growing season.
“How bad is it, Fido?” she asked the floating rectangle.
Fido displayed a circuit diagram with all the gates in the positions they were supposed to be.
“The diagnostic system says that there was a power overload on the right front drive motor and the safety circuit breakers have been tripped.”
“Yes!” Barbara cheered, waving her arms in the air. She wished her PDE could high-five her. Her idea had worked! By driving the failing regulator at full power, she had shorted through the diodes that had been causing too much current flow until the safety circuit breakers triggered, cutting off the power before the engine could burn out.
She traced the diagram on Fido’s projection until she found a mechanical breaker that looked as though it had burned out. That was no big deal. The breaker and diodes only cost about fifty bucks. Barbara smiled. “Okay, Fido, data-dump all this to the mainframe in the house so I can show Dad.”
“Yes, Barbara,” Fido said. The PDE paused for a moment. “Your dad is calling.”
“Really?” Barbara asked, with wide eyes. “Amazing timing. Put him through.”
Her father’s image appeared over Fido’s screen. Like her, he was tall and rangy, but his light brown hair was going a bit thin on top. His eyes crinkled as he smiled at her.
“Hey, big girl. What’s going on with Harvester Seven?”
“Were you spying on me or have you developed psychic abilities you haven’t told Mom and me about?” Barbara said with a laugh. Lange Winton’s eyebrows went up.
“Uh, no. Just curious about our predicament. Why?”
“I just finished with Seven. Fido just dumped the data to the house. It’s going to need some parts ordered before we can fix it, unless we can scavenge them from something we’re not using right now. I also think it needs a firmware update because Fido couldn’t shut it down remotely when we needed to. That’s some kind of fault.”
“Hmm,” Dad said, with a shrug. “That’s timing for you. Harvester goes out just before the harvest. The repair money will have to come from somewhere. Oh, well, we’ll figure it out. Good job, sweetheart.”
Barbara smiled. “Is that all you needed?”
“As a matter of fact, no. We just got a delivery for you at the house. It needs a thumbprint and signature before the man will leave it.”
“What is it? I haven’t ordered anything.”
Dad beckoned to her with a grin. “Well, you won’t know until you open it. Get up here so this young man can go on his way. Besides, between school work and that tractor, you’ve put in over a ten-hour day already. Mom says to call it a night.”
Barbara blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes.
“On my way.”
Barbara reached up, grabbed Fido out of the air, and slid him onto the magnetic band on the left shoulder of her coveralls. She hoisted her tool bag onto the other shoulder and swung it into the bed of the beat-up old pickup truck, then closed the tailgate. The old green and white truck with patches of primer on the hood and various other places didn’t look like much, but it was hers. It gave her the freedom to drive anywhere on the farm she wanted, and even into town every now and then. Even though she’d gotten her license two months before, she had been driving that truck around the farm since she was fourteen. The truck, once an abandoned wreck stashed behind the barn, had been her first big fix-it project, probably inspired, she realized with a smile, by the Bright Sparks making their first Moon buggy. It had taken her years of work and buying or cobbling together spare parts to get it running. One day she might even consider painting it, but she kind of liked the patched quilt look.
The truck’s batteries showed full once she started it up, and the drive kicked in silently. The old farm vehicle had been out in the sun all day while she worked on the harvester, so it was fully charged. Pleased, she calculated that the diesel engine backup probably wouldn’t have to kick in until the middle of the week unless she had to haul some big loads or pull something out of a rut.
Harvester Seven had been on the front side field about three kilometers from the house. The drive home took just a couple minutes up the baked dry dirt road, past the transmitter repeaters on stalks that talked to the field equipment from the central mainframe. Barbara lowered all the windows and let her hair blow in the wind as she listened to the bloggers continue their argument about the Bright Sparks and Dr. Bright. She thought of a comment or so, but didn’t bother to ask Fido to post it for her this time. The passion the bloggers put into their posts made them feel as though they were involved. Most of them also participated in the science and engineering competitions that Dr. Bright posted every week, accumulating points on the Sparks Meter. Barbara answered every quiz and entered her ideas for new projects that the Moon-based students could undertake. She thought she’d posted some really good ideas, and gotten praise for them from her fellow bloggers. It was the closest she was ever going to come to being part of the program. In a year, when she applied for college, her high rating on the Sparks Meter should add to her appeal as a potential student in the STEM Fields, maybe even get her a scholarship.
When she rolled into the long drive, her headlights lit up the rear of the delivery truck that was in her parking place. She parked in the knotted grass close to the ancient tire swing instead. Her father came out on the porch and waved her up.
“Barb, you look like you’ve been wrestling a greased pig,” Dad said with a laugh. He hugged her and handed her a yellow shop cloth from his back pocket as she walked up the porch steps into the light. He didn’t look much better, with his thinning hair slicked down with sweat, his coveralls daubed with rust and dirt, and a black smear on the side of his face where he must have dabbed it absentmindedly with axle grease. Barbara guessed he’d been working in the shop behind the house on one of the million other broken-down pieces of equipment. She felt a rush of cool air hit her in the face as she opened the door. The familiar squeak as the damper pulled it closed behind her and the orange-and-white cat zooming in and nuzzling up to her leg reassured her that she was home.
“That’s my good kitty, Tabitha.” Barbara scratched the cat behind the ear and rubbed under its chin. The cat purred her satisfaction.
Her mother, still in the tailored suit she wore that day to her law office, came up to give her a peck on the cheek. Anji Winton was small and curvaceous, with long dark hair and eyes she inherited from her Ojibwa mother. Barbara had inherited her looks from her father, but her determined streak and her brains, or so her father insisted, from her mother.
“Sweetheart, there’s a plate for you on the table once you’ve signed for your package,” Mom said. She clicked her tongue in disapproval at Barbara’s appearance. “Oh, what a mess you are! You’ve got grease all over your face and hands. You better wash up. And don’t sit on my good couch with those grungy coveralls on. Your brothers won’t be home until after practice. But for pity’s sake, sign for this package so this nice man can get on his way! It must be important if they didn’t send it by drone.” She gestured to the delivery man in brown shorts and button-down shirt who hovered nervously by her elbow.
“Yes, Mom,” Barbara said, turning to him. “Hi.”
“Can I get your thumbprint here, ma’am?” He held out a flat touchpad and a stylus.
“Sure,” Barbara replied. He looked anxious and ready to get on his way. She touched the plate’s surface in the little square he indicated. Her fingerprint appeared in black, and a green checkmark etched itself over it. “Like this?”
“Right. And sign here and initial here please.” He handed her the stylus. She scrawled her name in the box, and the screen changed to a colorful graphic with the delivery company’s logo. “Thank you. Here you go.” The delivery man handed her a container the size of a cereal box. “You have a nice evening.”
He rushed out the door and ran down the front steps to his vehicle. Barbara watched him go, feeling bad that she had held him up.
“What is it?” asked her mother, tapping the box.
“Let her open it,” Dad said, but he came to stand at her elbow.
Barbara glanced down at the carton, puzzled. Her name and address were on the front, but no return code was printed in the upper left corner. She tore through the packing tape and turned the box on its edge. A small silver plaque slid out into her hand. It was the same size but half the thickness of Fido. A message tablet!
“What in the world?” she whispered.
“Well, are you gonna play the thing or stare at it?” her father asked.
“Uh, right.” Barbara depressed the on button and the screen cover removed itself as the small device took to the air. Projector lasers at the corners of the device cycled through several colors, then the three-dimensional image of a very familiar smiling man’s face appeared before her, a man with thick blond hair, blue eyes and an infectious grin. Barbara’s heart nearly stopped beating as she recognized him.
“Hello, Barbara Winton. I’m Dr. Keegan Bright. I’d like to congratulate you on being such a well accomplished young lady. Your academic records, standardized test scores, and your performance on the online science and engineering challenges have placed you at the top of a very exciting list.”
“What list?” her father said as he looked at her with raised eyebrows.
“No idea!” Barbara shook her head, baffled. But, no idea or not, Dr. Keegan Bright had sent her, her, a message, and she wanted to hear every word of it.
“Shhh!” Barbara’s mother said.
“What list, you might ask?” Dr. Bright raised an eyebrow and paused, for dramatic effect.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Dr. Bright continued, with a smile. “What was not released as public knowledge is that the online science and engineering challenge that you joined in was actually a worldwide competition. It was intended to find just the right person that I’ve been looking for. And Ms. Winton, you’ve won that competition hands down. There’s only one thing left to do before we can be certain. If you’re willing and able, and your parents are okay with it, I would be very excited if one week from now you could report to the astronaut training facility and Bright Sparks Central Earth in Houston, Texas. There, you’ll spend the next three months training as an astronaut and learning how things work in space. As soon as your training is complete and you’ve met all the requirements, I’d like to offer you a job. I would like for you to join us here at Bright Ideas Laboratory and become the newest member of the Bright Sparks.” He cocked his head playfully to one side. “So, what do you say, Miss Winton, do you want to go to the Moon?”
Barbara gawked at the hologram. All of her hopes and dreams fulfilled with one single question? What did she say? What else could she say?
“Weeeeehooooooh!”