Free Off The Grid by Dan Kolbet Page A

campuses not only in architecture, but also activity. He’d been awakened more than once by amorous co-workers who didn’t know or didn’t care that everyone in the building could hear their late night exploits.
    He had twice been invited back to a woman’s room, but he politely declined each time, thinking of Rachel. He was still in a committed relationship. He wasn’t yet so desperate for information that he’d break that trust to get it.
    ***
    MassEnergy’s security was understandably tight. No items that would hold data were allowed in or out of the campus. Biometric body scans were completed on entry and exit. Which meant even if he found something that he wanted to get to Lunsford, he could only memorize what he saw and attempt to draw or write it from memory. His work consisted of common mathematical equations and physics principals – nothing groundbreaking about that.
    Luke had yet to wear one of the dozen data watches that Lunsford had given him. The devices were supposed to copy data from a hard drive to the watch, but MassEnergy had worked around that too. The hard drives that ran the computers in the pods weren’t local. The machines were all in a server storage room somewhere on campus. The wires that connected the monitors and touch screens dropped through the subfloor and into the abyss, so even if he had the watch, he had nothing to copy from.
    Lunsford had seemed to know what he was doing, but his methods were archaic. Luke had a hard time believing the watch could go undetected during the entry and exit scans, assuming he found a location to turn the device on and copy a drive. For that reason, he kept the watches in a shoebox in the closet.
    Once a week Luke would type up his findings for Lunsford – although he found no real value in the information he was sharing. He’d leave the window shades on the North side of his apartment open for a day, the signal Lunsford had told him to make. Then he’d enclose an encrypted thumb drive in a plastic bag and drop it in the trashcan by the Mainfair Park playground at 10:30 p.m. the next night. If Lunsford or even the city garbage man was collecting the drives, he had no idea, but each week the can was empty.
    It seemed as though his covert work was heading the same direction – right into the trashcan.

 
     
    Chapter 11
     
     
    Luke had yet to nail down any specifics on MassEnergy’s stub and tower plans. There weren’t any large campus buildings that could house a tower that big, but he supposed anything the company created could be built and assembled elsewhere. There were two buildings on campus that he wasn’t allowed to enter – one of them being the Dev Floor where research was conducted. But a large space wasn’t necessarily a requirement to test wireless capacity. At some point tests would have to be conducted in the open air.
    The physical structure of the StuTech towers wasn’t really that complicated, they just had to withstand weather and time. But the receiver coils and transmitters affixed on top of them was where StuTech made its money. They were proprietary and still somewhat of a mystery as to how they worked.
    Since electricity was discovered and harnessed for practical use centuries ago, copper was the primary conductor that got it from one place to the other. Copper is relatively cheap, easy to manipulate into shapes and is a great conductor. It was still at the core of power lines and transformers strung across the world, many of which fed StuTech’s towers.
    For decades scientists used copper and other metals in their attempts to wirelessly move electricity from one thing to the next. These experiments were somewhat successful at short distances, but failed when pushed farther and farther. In-home wireless use was even becoming common for mobile devices and medical implants, such as heart pacemakers. These low-energy, practical uses were the catalyst for wireless research, as they could be sold on the market quickly and