Small Miracles Page 4
Still, to give credit where it was due, New York tried to control guns. Virginia’s idea of gun control was suggesting you say, “Please,” before they sold you a semiautomatic weapon.
The skinny kid working the counter at the pizza-and-calzone place sauntered over and plopped down their lunches. He mumbled what might have been, “Anything else?” and turned away without waiting for an answer.
Despite herself, Kim managed a grin. “New subject. What’s your take on the new facility?”
“Kind of in the outer boonies, isn’t it?” Brent said. “I mean, even by Utica standards?”
She shrugged. “Not many other businesses nearby”—a self-storage mini-warehouse and a John Deere parts outlet, to be precise—“but it is inside city limits. I gather that when the original mall was proposed Utica annexed the whole area, with visions of sales-tax revenue dancing in its head. So much for the exotic location. What’s your take on the inside?”
“Plenty of growing room.” The calzone occupied Brent’s attention for a while. “I haven’t yet figured out my way around.”
“The trick is to use the Möbius strip.” His forehead furrowed, and she added, “My, someone is slow on the uptake. Methinks you came back too soon.”
“No.” He worked on his calzone some more. “It’s good for me to be out.”
You’re fading on me, Brent, she thought. “And?”
“And it might be good for me to start with half days.” He had driven them to the mall. “I’ll drop you back at work and head home.”
“After you take a nap, maybe we can catch a movie tonight,” she said.
“Can’t.” He slid back his chair and stood. “Other plans.”
“Who is she?” Kim waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “Anyone I know?”
“Alan Watts.”
“Who?”
Brent looked … uneasy. “Captain America.”
She stood. “I didn’t know you were friends.”
He had nothing to add on the walk to the parking lot or the short drive back to Garner Nanotech.
Inside, frantic e-mails from Quality Assurance awaited her. The latest software upgrade for nanobot power-management control was oddly unstable. Next-generation beasties afloat in glucose solution were shutting down at random intervals. It made about as much sense as her starving to death in a Fresh Foods.
Kim led the team that developed the system software for the nanobots. That made the mystery glitch her problem. She didn’t mind. A weird program bug was a lot easier to think about than the Virginia Tech massacre. Setting aside her worry at Brent’s distant and detached behavior, she called a meeting.
* * *
A blind man in a fast car could see Riley’s Olde Irish Pub was a dive. The beam-and-plaster façade looked more Disney alpine than Irish. The asphalt expanse in front had faded nearly to white. The neon sign flickered and buzzed; the “ub” had burned out.
Brent parked but stayed in his car. His hands trembled on the steering wheel. He broke into a sweat and his chest felt tight.
Riley’s was a cop bar. Cops reminded him of Ron Korn. Korn reminded him of Angleton … and hell. It all washed over him again.
He forced himself through the relaxation exercises from therapy. Slow, methodical breathing. Muscle groups relaxed one at a time. Happy thoughts.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, the shrinks called his condition, as though to label a thing made any difference. They could call it whatever they chose, so long as they prescribed sleeping pills and antidepressants. After the pills stopped helping, he had seen no reason to continue therapy.
In …hold the breath … out. In … hold … out. In … hold … out. Gradually, Brent calmed down. He went inside.
The interior, once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, was all dark wood—the planked floor; the massive bar itself and the stools alongside it; booths, tables, and chairs—beneath enough coats of varnish to turn nearly black. Two feeble track lights shone on the wall of glassware behind the bar. The floor made soft sticky sounds with each step he took.
Brent was ignored until Alan Watts hailed him from a back booth and announced that Brent had been on a ride-along at Angleton.
Until the explosion, Angleton had been just another economically depressed burg upstate. Now everyone knew about Angleton. Cops honored their own; several of the Riley regulars had taken time off work to attend Ron Korn’s memorial. Brent shared his few memories of the sergeant and his regrets. Someone thrust a foaming mug into Brent’s hand.
A blind man in a fast car could see Riley’s Olde Irish Pub was a dive. Very quickly, Brent came to love the place.
sunday, may 15, 2016
In the north-side Chicago neighborhood where Brent grew up and that his parents still called home, house sites were twenty-six feet wide. You might not quite be able to lean out your window and touch the bungalow next door. Shake hands with the next-door neighbor at his window? No problem.
Brent grew up feeling nature-deprived.
College might have been better. The University of Illinois had its main campus in Champaign-Urbana, smack in the center of the state. The prairie stretched all around—but the greenery was mostly corn and soy. Never mind that Chicago was called the Windy City. For a hundred miles in every direction, nothing around Chambana stood taller than a cornstalk and the wind never stopped. In the winter, there weren’t even cornstalks.
Cornfields everywhere—the undergraduate library was entirely underground, lest it cast a shadow on a historic experimental cornfield—was not college’s only disappointment, nor the most consequential. General engineering had seemed the ideal curriculum for someone curious about how everything worked. What the department deemed a “comprehensive, interdisciplinary program emphasizing real-world problem solving through a unique orientation toward partnerships with industry” turned out not to prepare him to take the lead anywhere so much as to under-qualify him to do much of anything.
He should have gone on for a graduate degree in something more substantive, but grad school would have meant waiting another two years for a real salary. The wait did not seem like an option, not after hooking up with Nicole Tanner their senior year. General Electric in Schenectady offered him a job, as the least significant of cogs in the most ponderous of mechanisms. He accepted and married Nicole. She was as hot as a firecracker. As smart as a whip.
And, it turned out, as prickly as a porcupine, impossible to live with. They were a short-lived fiasco: like the Hindenburg disaster, only noisier. A year later, they were divorced. She moved home to Chicago.
Staying put was the path of least resistance, even as one dull assignment too many vanquished the fascination Brent once had with technology. A few years after that, he was reorged out of a job.
Living near the Adirondacks and Catskills had made the rest bearable. He joined a hiking club. He learned to backpack and ski. He found a new job at Garner Nanotech, still near the mountains. General knowledge was more than sufficient for sales support, a case of less being more. He trained for two years to walk the Appalachian Trail, all 2,160 miles of it, from Maine to Georgia.
And now climbing two flights of stairs to his apartment left him wheezing.
* * *
Kim twisted and stretched. She adjusted her sweatband. She jogged in place a bit. She nodded at the couple coming off the little park’s fitness trail. Dew sparkled on the grass. Two little girls in pigtails, clearly sisters, shrieked on the nearby teeter-totter. All in all, a lazy Sunday morning, although her notion of a lazy Sunday morning favored Starbucks and The New York Times.
Brent finally emerged from the lobby of his apartment building. He crossed the street into the park and strode up to her, already winded. “Sorry I’m late.” He began a stretching routine, scrawny in T-shirt and shorts.
Kim had yet to get straight answers from Brent about how much weight he had dropped and whether he had managed to regain any of it. Still, he was clearly on the mend; he almost seemed only his own age agai
n. Something—the beard, maybe, or the rough time he had had—gave him a pensive look. His face was long and thin, thinner still since the accident. And those are beautiful brown eyes. He’s a good-looking guy, she thought. More, he’s a good guy.
Her matchmaking impulse stirred. Who suitable did she know?
“I just got here myself,” Kim lied. She was here to encourage him. The lame little fitness trail was her speed, not his—at least until Angleton. Now, she wondered, would he make it around the twenty-station circuit even once?
He finished a set of joint rotations. “Let’s do this thing.” They set off down the path, bark chunks crunching beneath their feet, at little more than a brisk walk. She jogged in place just to stay limber while he worked out at the exercise stations. Pull-ups. Sit-ups. Stretches. Balance exercises. By station ten he was huffing like a steam engine.
“Your left leg is bleeding,” she suddenly noticed.
“Huh.” He stopped and took a look. “Just a scrape. I wonder how that happened.”
Blood ran down the shin, staining his sock and sneaker. She said, “Hardly a scrape, but maybe that’s good. The blood should wash out any dirt. Let’s get you upstairs and clean it out.”
Brent stripped off his T-shirt, blotted the wound, and knotted the shirt tightly in place. If he noticed her sharp, sympathetic intake of breath, he did not comment. He wasn’t being stoic about the new injury, but entirely indifferent.
He caught her staring at the scars on his torso. “After months of PT, I guess I’m desensitized to pain. And should you wonder: yes, my tetanus shot is current. Let’s do another few stations.”
“I’m sensitive enough for the both of us.” Squeamish enough, anyway. Merely having blood drawn for a physical made her woozy. “Unless you enjoy splashing through puddles of vomit, we’re done.”
They walked toward his apartment, not taking time to properly stretch. She would be stiff later. “How’s the leg?” she kept asking.
“About the same as ten yards ago,” he grumbled.
Back in his apartment, Kim insisted on cleaning and bandaging his wound. She did not trust him to do it himself. To distract herself, although the wound indeed was a fairly superficial scrape, she began chattering. Work was the first thing to come to mind. “They giving you time to get settled back in at the office?”
“Time?” Brent snorted. “All the time in the world. You must know the company is touting me as”—dramatic air quotes—“‘the survivor of Angleton.’ Quick segue to a sales pitch for the products that made it possible. My old photo, me looking all hale and hearty, is a better promo than me. My current feeble self isn’t the image anyone wants.”
Kim looked up. “Frank said that?” Frank Yoder was the head of Sales Engineering, and Brent’s boss.
“In so many words? No. Only Frank has given me nothing to do and declined every offer I’ve made to go on a sales call. Lest I exhibit any initiative, it turns out I no longer have a travel budget.”
She taped a gauze square over the disinfected scrape. “What does he expect you to do?”
“Ease into things.” Another snort. “Maybe Frank hopes I’ll get bored and leave.”
Brent was in his recliner, so she moved to the sofa to face him. She tried to ignore the red oozing through the bandage. “And will you?”
“Hell, no. Dan Garner could have put me on disability. Instead, he kept me on full salary the whole time I was away. That was damn decent of him, and I’m not about to repay his loyalty by jumping ship. I choose to consider Frank’s benign neglect as paying me to look for a new opportunity within the company. I’m cramming for interviews before I even ask for one.” Brent stood abruptly. “I need something cold to drink. What can I get you?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
He returned from the kitchen with two bottles of water, and handed one to her. “Fluids after exercising, Kim.”
They sat and drank for a little while. He cleared his throat. “Speaking of my studies, I have a question for you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Self-destruct in the body of the nanobots. Do you believe it’s foolproof? The bots are mostly carbon nanotubes. From the web surfing I’ve done, the immune system generally ignores carbon nanotubes.” He frowned, retrieving a phrase from memory. “Immunoprivileged, it’s called.”
She sat up. “You have been studying. What happened to the guy who was content to know only what the technology could do?”
Brent chugged a third of his water. “His prototype suit shot him full of alpha-test medical nanobots, and the little buggers helped keep him alive.”
“And that wasn’t enough?”
“It’s certainly a good thing, only I realized I had no idea beyond ‘trust me’ why the nanites would ever leave. And immunoprivileged or not, no one knows much about the long-term medical effects of most nanoparticles. Except that you probably don’t want to breathe them, which, thankfully, I didn’t.” He got up and looked out the window into the park. “Or so my recent readings say,” he added, sounding apologetic.
Apologetic because she who programmed nanobots for a living had ducked his question? She said, wistfully, “I wish I had the time to learn more about how things worked. Enjoy the luxury while you can.”
* * *
Brent permitted his eyes to fall shut. He tipped back his recliner. Dozing in the chair was not quite as pathetic as returning to bed after a half lap around the park’s couch-potato exercise circuit. But Kim had gone—and she had let herself out, with a, “No, no, don’t bother to get up”—so whom, exactly, was he kidding?
When he crossed from drowsy free association into dream was unclear.
Nanobots were on his mind and in his reverie: long, skinny cages constructed from carbon nanotubes. Each nanotube was a mesh of hexagons, like a roll of chicken wire—only the vertices of each hexagon were single carbon atoms. Most tubes were a mere nanometer, a billionth of a meter, across. Many thousand such tubes would fit comfortably across the width of a human hair.
His dream self had the perspective of a single bot, smaller than the nearby living cells his subconscious used to judge scale. The tiny nanotubes had been woven into a much larger, generally cylindrical construction whose shape and flexing motion suggested an animated Chinese finger trap. He seemed to share the nanobot’s central cavity with more complex structures: organic cargo molecules, nanologic, nanomotors. Through gaps in the braid he watched arrays of yet more nanotubes, anchored at only one end, beating in rhythmic waves to propel the nanobot.
His mind’s eye panned out. Nanobots crept and swam everywhere, amid a bedlam of larger, jostling forms. Reddish disks, pinched in the center. Whitish spheres, their surfaces alive with questing knobs. Smaller, amorphous, blob-and-tentacle shapes that defied any geometric characterization.
Red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.
Something jostled him. Something else shoved him from another direction. White cells gathered, surrounded him, engulfed him. “His” flagella ceased to beat, pinned to the woven-nanotube latticework. The hunters grasped and squeezed. He sensed motion as the swarm carried him away—
Brent woke with a shriek, his mouth dry, his heart pounding. He looked around in confusion until the out-of-body illusion passed. Trembling, he went into the kitchen for some iced tea, chiding himself for a suggestible fool.
At least this nightmare had an obvious source.
Charles Walczak had, a bit condescendingly, given Brent a demo two days before: ‘To put your mind at ease already, damn it.” His hands busy at the microscope controls, Charles scanned across a blood sample, seeking one of the nanobots.
The digital microscope more closely resembled a PC tower than the fragile instrument Brent remembered from high-school biology. The scope was as much computer as optical device, and it streamed images wirelessly to the lab’s local area network. A red/green/blue LED triplet bathed the slide in cool white light.
There was no glass-and-chrome-tube eyepiece to peer
into. The magnified corpuscles were huge on a big flat-screen display. A faint grid, digitally superimposed, showed scale. The largest of the blood cells were but fifteen microns across.
Brent twitched as a pale sphere, its surface a writhing mass, swam into the image. At this magnification it was larger than his fist. “Ugly beastie. A white blood cell?”
Charles tittered. “White blood cell? When did you last study biology, the third grade? It’s called a leukocyte.”
The choice of synonym changed what? Brent said nothing.
There! A dark rod undulated among the disks and spheres of the blood cells. In length the nanobot compared to the diameter of a typical red cell. The rod was too slender to reveal the finer points of its construction. At the limit of vision, he sensed spots scattered over the braid.
The optical scope’s limited resolution didn’t matter. Brent had seen detailed design drawings and artists’ conceptions. Most amazing of all, he had seen a close-up still image of a medical nanobot, captured, atom by atom, using an atomic force microscope. The AFM image wowed everyone; Dan Garner gave framed poster-sized copies to prospective investors.
The bots’ scarcely visible spots were changing color. “How long?” Brent asked.
“How long if they weren’t made to self-destruct? Roughly forever. But since I’m not stupid … every bot carries dabs of the antigen for chicken pox.”
With a final tweak, Charles centered the nanobot in the display. Never one to forego lecturing, he spun on his stool to face Brent. “Practically every adult in this country has had chicken pox or been vaccinated against it. Either way, their immune system is sensitized to the antigen. You’ll recall that we did a blood test for antibodies before implanting your biosensor chip.
“In a day, give or take, a protein in the blood dissolves the film we put over the antigen. The exposed antigens then stimulate the production of antibodies. See the dots changing color? That’s the coating going away. For this demo I put a dollop of enzyme into the blood drop. It speeds things up. Ergo, any minute now …”