Flir s Late Night

He hadn t been able to sleep. He was so worried about not getting up in time to push the code up that he stayed up all night. That hadn t been hard, since Jordan sure wasn t going to sleep that night. Flir wasn t sure he d ever seen Jordan sleep through a single night, actually. Watching Jordan even fall asleep was strange . Hyperkinetic to the end, Jordan would fall asleep mid- sentence . Less than an hour later, she d wake back up and finish her sentences.

Hey, why don t we go put the car back together outside, Jordan suggested.

Sure, Flir answered , thinking that he could use some fun that didn t involve sitting at a computer for a change.

It was very meticulous work, slowed down by the fact that they did it alone instead of in a large group as normal. It had been fun, though, and had eaten the time up wonderfully. In the parlance of MIT, they had enjoyed their all-night tool, As a final step, they had replaced the front license place with a fake that read IHTFP, a kind of official slogan of the all-night tool.

Standing back and looking at the car, he noticed that Jordan had replaced the tires on the Prius with wider ones whose contact patches must have been twice the size of the stock tires. They jutted out slightly from the side of the car, but not enough to look odd. Hop in, Jordan called out. As Flir got in and looked around the cabin , he realized that the sunroof had not been the only internal modification. She d also replaced the side-mounted automatic shift with a 6-speed shifter, which he assumed must be linked to a manual transmission. Finally, the dashboard seemed to have two more motor readouts.

So that hadn t been sleep deprivation-induced d j   vu, Flir thought, as he remembered Jordan carrying the same small electric motor to the car three times. That gave the car one gas engine and three motors.

How fast is this thing now, Jordan? Flir asked with some serious concern. He d seen some of her experiments in propulsion go a little overboard before.

Not too fast, 220 horsepower probably, she responded, anticipating his worry, But it s light, so that makes it even faster. Now help me with the roof, she asked. With that, she reached up to an internal handle on the left side of the roof that Flir had noticed as they had assembled the car, but had chalked up to an extra bracing handle to balance Jordan s erratic driving style. He found an identical handle on his side of the roof and together they pushed the hardtop roof onto the back hatchback-trunk of the car.

You made it a hard top convertible ? Flir asked.

Yeah, I did. But it goes faster when the top s on and the sunroof is closed, because I replaced the back windshield with a solar panel too, she told him.

And because convertibles lose body stiffness, right? Flir checked.

Yes, yes, of course. Now let s go for a ride! she exclaimed, and threw the car into gear.

They drove the hybrid hot rod around the surrounding town for an hour, before finally returning to the dorm to get ready for the next day.