Small Miracles Read online

  “But I didn’t destroy the cultures. Did I?”

  “Ask me to do that for you, Charles.”

  “Will you destroy the cultures for me, Brent?”

  “I will. So, by delegation, you have destroyed the cultures.” Brent paused until Charles nodded. “What’s your password, Charles, so I can erase those records?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell anyone my password. Am I?”

  “You can trust me,” Brent said soothingly. “You asked me to destroy that information, remember?”

  “Right. Okay, my password is tobonan2001. That’s ‘nanobot’ spelled backward.”

  “Is that for your personal files only, or for group access to all files in the Bio labs?”

  “The latter.”

  “Very good, Charles. Now forget about delegating the task and sharing your password. Remember only that you destroyed the cultures and the records. Do you understand these instructions?”

  “I understand.”

  “Now, tuck in your shirt. Lie down on the floor, just as you were a few minutes ago.”

  Charles complied.

  “I will count backward from three, Charles. At zero, you will wake up. Three, two, one … zero.”

  * * *

  “Easy, big guy!” Brent said. He was shaking, and for good reason. If this didn’t work, he/they were screwed. “Are you okay?”

  “Why am I on the floor? My head hurts.” Charles looked around, confused. He sat up. “I think I fainted and hit my head.”

  “You said something about poking the fire,” Brent lied. “You stood up from your chair and just keeled over. I think you clipped your head on that end table on the way down.”

  A tumbler, on its side, lay on the rug. The rug was dry. Brent watched Charles work it through.

  “Too much Scotch, perhaps.”

  Clearly, Charles had forgotten things as instructed—like being assaulted and shot up with nanobots. Telling him everything had been a calculated risk. Planting the info in Charles’s memories was the best way to give an emergent personality access to its own origins.

  But had Charles retained everything that he was supposed to remember? “I think you’ve been working too hard.”

  “I need a vacation. I should call Dan about taking some time off. Three weeks at the beach sounds about right.”

  So far, so good. “Your forehead is bleeding a bit. Should we go to the ER?”

  Charles felt his forehead. He flinched as his hand brushed the wound, then dispassionately noted the smear of blood on his fingertips. He carefully got to his feet and went to study his reflection in the dark computer display on the desk. “I’ll clean up the cut and put on a Band-Aid. I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Who’s the doctor here?” Charles snapped.

  Excellent. “Then I’ll leave you to it.” Brent took the VR glasses from his shirt pocket, eager to reconnect with the world. “Charles. You should get yourself specs like these. Spend some time in VirtuaLife while you’re on the beach. I’ll e-mail you an invitation to my private ‘island’ there.”

  Charles frowned. “I don’t do VR games.”

  Even hypnotized, a person couldn’t be made to do something against his will. A blanket command to obey such as Brent had given had suggestive value; it would not make someone act completely against his nature. But the things that one might wish for? Those could be changed.

  “Charles, you misunderstand me. Of course you don’t want to play VR games. You can catch up with your reading—fun, relaxing reading—much faster with the specs. You won’t even have to hold a book. Doesn’t that sound nice? You want to relax, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” Charles agreed, dubiously.

  “Besides, VirtuaLife isn’t a game. Of course you’re too mature for games. My VirtuaLife programs will help you master the specs. Specs and my program will help you relax.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Brent had a few more “suggestions” to make. He delivered them as succinctly as he could, increasingly anxious. He wanted to be gone before Amy Walczak returned home. Confusion from the guy who fainted, the guy with a bump on his forehead, would raise few questions. Brent, if he was still in the house, had no excuse for answering vaguely.

  Finally Brent was out of the house, into his car, and back on the road. He could scarcely believe what he had just done. His hands shook on the steering wheel. He resisted the urge to floor it. To flee. It was as though—

  As though he was drenched in adrenaline. Fight-or-flight reflex. One’s doing, of course. He was One’s puppet, as much as Charles was his.

  Brent turned the car into a strip mall and parked. He took slow, deep breaths, picturing his island in his mind’s eye. The adrenaline surge began burning off. Or was One tweaking the level of another hormone?

  Clarity returned.

  Maybe—probably—Charles would go away for a few weeks. Maybe Kim would wait for Charles to return rather than bring up the neural-culture experiment with anyone else, or Dan Garner would heed Charles’s request to defer big decisions in his department. Maybe no one else in Biology had independently thought to experiment with bots in a neuron culture, and was about to tell all to her colleagues.

  Maybe bots in sufficient numbers would take root while Charles was on the beach. Of that, at least, Brent had high hopes. Charles had but one serious injury, the concussion, to draw all his bots’ attention, and those bots had been injected straight into the central-nervous-system side of the BBB. The good doctor could easily end up with many more bots integrated into his brain than comprised One. (Not even One knew how bots had passed the BBB into Brent’s brain. That had happened long before it first awakened.)

  And maybe, with post-hypnotic encouragement and exercises through VR specs, Charles’s alter ego would emerge in weeks—not the many months One had required.

  That was a lot of maybes. But if everything worked out? Then I/we will have dodged a bullet. In a corner of Brent’s vision a face appeared. It was his own face as glimpsed in a mirror—when, he could not guess. He seemed to smile at himself.

  The face of a monster.

  Brent drove up the road to the nearest grocery and bought a six-pack, then turned toward Garner Nanotech and the incriminating neural cultures. He did not know who had security duty this dreary Sunday afternoon, but it hardly mattered. All the guards were his friends. Whoever he found would not reject a bit of camaraderie and a beer.

  Together, as Brent drove, as One took notes, they prioritized a list of people to be … evolved.

  monday, december 12, 2016

  Kim’s Monday morning began with a QA emergency, which proved to be only a too-literal reading of a software test plan. Those who can program, do. Those who can’t become testers, and make programmers miserable. It was almost noon before she got a chance to sit behind her desk.

  Charles had neither called nor e-mailed.

  She strode to Aaron’s wing of the building, miffed. “Not today,” she snapped, passing the main lobby, as Captain America launched into his bit. Ten feet past him, she stopped abruptly. “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your head?”

  He touched his forehead near a mean-looking bruise. “Lovely, isn’t it? I had the Sunday afternoon shift to myself. I must’ve caught my toe on an edge of carpet on rounds, and clipped my head on a desk going down.”

  “Ouch. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just embarrassed … ma’am.”

  She blushed. “I apologize for growling at you. I shouldn’t take out my bad day on you.” After two steps she stopped again. “If you didn’t know, there’s now an on-site infirmary. I’m sure the doctor would be happy to look at it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  In other words, a polite “no.” Well, polite was more than she had managed. She nodded and went on her way.

  Aaron’s waiting room was empty, but she heard indistinct voices from the infirmary. Berating herself for not bringing
her laptop, she settled into a chair, hands in her lap. “Sick people go to the doctor. Don’t touch the magazines,” she said to herself. It was high flu season, and those were Dad’s words of wisdom. He would be proud.

  The infirmary door opened with a squeak. “You tell me how that goes, dear,” Aaron said to the patient. Kim did not recognize the woman and guessed she was another of the new hires on the factory side of the house. Aaron noticed Kim. “I know that scowl. Come on in.”

  Kim followed him into his office. “I haven’t heard a thing from Charles. I’m hoping he’s merely snubbing me because of my amateur status. What have you heard?”

  “He hasn’t called.” Aaron bent over his desk. “No e-mail, either.”

  Kim dialed Charles’s extension on speakerphone. Voice mail picked up on the fifth ring. As she reached to hang up, it registered that she wasn’t hearing the usual greeting.

  “… On January third. For anything time sensitive, contact Dr. Crystal Nordling at extension three-two-nine; otherwise, leave a message. Thank you.”

  “What the hell?” Kim said. “Am I losing it, or did Charles tell us last Friday he’d talk to Brent this morning?”

  “Not unless I’m losing it, too.” Aaron tapped out a short e-mail to Charles. It got an immediate automated vacation response. “Do you know Nordling?”

  “Barely. She’s a biophysicist, one of the few theoreticians on Charles’s staff. Her research looks far downstream at cellular repair machines.” Crystal was a quiet woman, very pale, with a fondness for too-dark colors that left her looking vaguely vampirish. Kim started for the door. “Let’s see what Crystal knows about Charles.”

  R & D was all the way around the factory. Thinking, Rules be damned, Kim again took a shortcut across the factory floor. Busy being furious at Charles’s disappearing act, she scarcely glanced at the production line on which trial units of a production-model nanosuit slowly advanced. Whistling “Silver Bells” off-key, a worker emerged from a storeroom rolling a mannequin on a two-wheeled hand truck. For final fitting of a nanosuit, Kim guessed. Nearby, two industrial engineers were carefully uncrating nanotube weaving gear recently acquired—as Brent had recommended—from a would-be space-elevator company. Someone from Security stood nearby, ready to apply a property-management sticker (very visible) and an antitheft RFID (hidden) to the pricey machine.

  Aaron’s head turned as she led him briskly past the glass wall of the nanobot assembly area. Truly, there was nothing to see. The magic happened inside the sealed chemical vats, orchestrated by electronically activated catalyst patches arrayed on the inner wall of the reaction vessels. The finished bots? Those, with proper gear, you could see. The random dance of self-assembly, as Brownian motion nudged nanoscale components together until their alignment was perfect and they clicked? That could only be imagined.

  “Another time,” Kim told Aaron. It would be a through-the-window explanation, of course. Bot production was the most proprietary and valuable of company secrets. Access was tightly limited, enforced by retinal scanner. She wasn’t on the list.

  They exited the factory directly into the Biology Department. Crystal Nordling was eating lunch at her desk, looking frazzled. What Crystal knew about Charles’s absence was next to nothing. “I wish I did know, since he dumped everything on me. He sent an e-mail to the team putting me in charge while he’s away. He left me a voice mail last night, saying he was beat and headed for the Caribbean, and just to hold the fort until he gets back. Apparently I’m—” She stopped abruptly.

  Kim had no difficulty filling in the blank: not trusted to make any big decisions. She played the sympathy card. “Charles wasn’t very considerate, Crystal.”

  Crystal exhaled sharply through her nose but declined the bait. “So, what brings you two?”

  “We’re here about an ongoing experiment,” Kim said. “Nanobots in neural culture.”

  Crystal shook her head. “That’s a new one to me. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “That’s okay; we do. I’ll keep tabs on it myself,” Aaron said. Crystal looked grateful for the help. Kim wished she were half as smooth. “I’ll get back to you about that later.”

  Not much later, as it turned out. They were back in Crystal’s office in five minutes. Crystal had no idea where the cultures might have gone.

  * * *

  A double-time march across the sprawling building, this time to executive row.

  Tyra Kurtz, Kim and Charles’s boss-in-common, knew no more than Crystal. Tyra was even more hacked off. “Three weeks’ leave, without notice. Not so much as a phone call from the airport. I only found out this morning, from Felipe.” That was Felipe Lopez, the chief operating officer, Tyra’s own boss (and, as it happened, also Aaron’s). Before Kim could think of a polite way to proceed, Tyra added, “Felipe is furious. Charles went straight to Dan Garner. Called Dan on his vacation, if you can believe the gall. Dan authorized the time off and told Felipe not to bother Charles while he’s away.”

  “That’s unusual,” Aaron said mildly.

  Tyra stiffened in her chair. “I don’t see how it affects you, Doctor, unless you need help dispensing aspirin and Band-Aids.”

  “Charles and I had a little experiment going. It turns out bots stimulate synapse formation in neural cultures. That’s a concern because bots in CSF aren’t destroyed like bots in plasma.”

  “Crap.” Tyra was a biochemist by training and didn’t need the implications spelled out. She gestured toward her desktop display. “The FDA will go nuts. Show me.”

  “That’s the problem,” Kim said. “The test cultures disappeared over the weekend. Like Charles.” And unless Charles was playing hide-and-seek, so had the computer records of the experiment. Kim kept to herself that she had tried hacking into the lab files. She doubted Tyra would appreciate that particular exercise of initiative.

  “Dan’s orders notwithstanding, I tried Charles’s cell phone. I got an out-of-service-area recording.” Tyra pinched the bridge of her nose. “From what I remember about culturing neurons, I’m guessing two or three weeks to duplicate the experiment.”

  “About right,” Aaron said. “Meanwhile, we should be contacting the FDA.”

  “And the Army,” Kim added. “The customer should get this kind of news directly from Garner Nanotech, not through the FDA.”

  “You don’t have the cultures. Or any hard data, I’m thinking, or you would have led with that.” Tyra released her nose and began massaging her temples. “Even with a convincing experiment, the responsible next step would have been to replicate the results. You can’t seriously expect us to contact the FDA or our primary customer now.”

  Aaron said, “Either organization might want to get involved in rerunning the—”

  Tyra cut him off. “You have no evidence. Uh-uh. No way, people. Talk with Crystal about redoing this experiment.”

  “But Tyra,” Kim began.

  “You heard me. This stays in-house for now. Even with data, if the new results are what you expect, it won’t be me placing the calls. Screwing up the Army’s big field trial is beyond my pay grade.”

  And screwing up people’s lives? Kim almost burst out. She had one last idea to try, and Tyra would be no more supportive of that.

  Forgiveness was easier to come by than permission. “Thanks for hearing us out, Tyra.”

  * * *

  One glance at Kim’s face as they left Tyra’s office and Aaron said, “Come on. Let’s go out for coffee. Or for lunch, if you haven’t eaten yet.”

  Kim was content to let Aaron drive. Crystal was out of her depth. Tyra was stalling, hoping the issue would go away. If it didn’t, Tyra clearly planned to make it someone else’s problem. Felipe never made waves. And then there’s me, Kim thought. What earthly use am I?

  They must have crossed the river while she was lost in thought. Ah, the river, the not-so-mighty Mohawk. Whenever her parents visited, Dad was incapable of crossing it without intoning, in his best movie-trailer voice-over m
anner, “Guns Along the Mohawk.” It mattered not that the guns along the river nowadays were Saturday night specials. Or that the movie of which Dad was so fond, because as a little boy he had watched it on TV with his grandfather, was Drums Along the Mohawk. She and Mom despaired that Dad would ever get that right.

  As though she didn’t have anything more important to ponder than Dad’s foibles.

  Paying attention again, Kim saw they were winding through a neighborhood of modest bungalows with clapboard siding. Many of the little houses sported brightly painted wooden butterflies, a bit of Utica kitsch she hoped never caught on anywhere else. A dusting of snow made the butterflies even more ludicrous. “This seems off the beaten path.”

  Aaron laughed. “Hardly. It’s the path I beat every day to and from work. When I’m frustrated, I like to cook. Or anyway, to create chaos in the kitchen.”

  The working-class neighborhood came as a surprise. Aaron was ex-Army, recently back from duty at a military hospital in Germany. Army docs surely earned less than their civilian counterparts, but they were still officers, and Aaron had to be pulling down a decent salary at Garner Nanotech. So why here?

  He parked on a short driveway—there was no garage—and led Kim into what she guessed was a two-bedroom home. The living room smelled of potpourri and scented candles. On the hallway walls hung long rows of somber paintings, the people all formally posed, many with their heads circled in light. Orthodox icons, Kim decided, and the pieces came together. Utica had a large Serbian community. “Is your wife Serbian?”

  “Bosnian Serb, yes. Sladja’s family, all of them, got out in the midnineties. She feels at home in this neighborhood. Her folks live just down the street, and some cousins are a couple blocks away.” His expression had gotten uncharacteristically serious. “After two tours in Germany, I owed her that.”

  Aaron didn’t take long to make a mess in the cramped kitchen. Kim sat at the small table while he heated soup and fussed over grilled-cheese sandwiches. His wife worked and the kids were at school; Aaron and Kim had the house to themselves.