Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

“Yeah, yeah,” he waves her off and continues his call with total disregard for the other two hundred people on the plane. With complete disregard for the fact that my flight is cutting it close to race time, as it is.

“Sir!” The flight attendant yells.

I need this plane in the air.

Now.

While waiting to board, Professor Tillman called. It’s the unknown type of silica Concordia is using. It’s not bonding right with the silane or the rubber. He said he sent me an email with the materials broken down, and now, I just need this godforsaken jackass next to me to get off his phone so that we can take off. So I can connect to the wifi and finally solve the riddle.

Because I put my phone into airplane mode, like a civilized person.

Like a good girl.

“Lady, never mind my phone. Go get me some pretzels or something,” the jackass waves his fingers at the flight attendant.

That’s it.

Look away, good girl.

“Get off your goddamn phone!” I bark at him.

He wrinkles his nose at me. The flight attendant smirks.

“Hey,” he protests when I rip it out of his hands, turn it off myself, and hand it to the flight attendant.

“It’s off. Please, can we go now?”

She nods, smirks at the jackass in satisfaction, and continues down the aisle with his confiscated phone in her hand.

“You can’t…”

“Sit there and shut up,” I kick his leg back into his own seating area.

“Crazy bitch,” he mumbles.

Yeah, you have no idea, asshole.

As soon as we hit cruising altitude and are given the all-clear, I drag my laptop out from my carry-on and pay the extortionate wifi fee.

Despite the jackass leering at me the whole time, I spend hours dissecting the raw material composition Professor Tillman sent. I forgo pretzels, free wine, and bathroom breaks. I dismiss the possibility of deep vein thrombosis from sitting in one position for hours on a long-haul flight.

The answer is here, I can feel it. If the wifi speeds weren’t so freaking slow, this would be quicker.

Silica is crazy-expensive. Still, I’m surprised to see the lab report showing that Concordia isn’t using pure silica from sand. They’re using something else, something synthetic. For the price Concordia charges, the tires should be made of gold, diamonds, and unicorn tears.

Googling the only remaining chemical structure in the list of unidentified compounds, I find it.

Corn husks? What the hell.

There’s one company that had been experimenting with sourcing silica from rice husks, but that didn’t work. And corn is different.

“Lady, let me out, I need to piss.”

I think better of it, then I begrudgingly stand to let the jackass out. “Hurry up.” Jerk.

Finally, he sits back down and buckles back in. His legs stay in his own area.

Adding the corn husk silica to the computer-simulated tire model, I start running the program. At first, it seems stable enough.