COSMOS magazine

Friday, July 18

Bruce Edward Blick strolled under the shade of an arbour from which hung fragrant clusters of purple Wisteria blooms. Although this room was more than sixty feet underground, it was a garden filled with sunlight delivered by a vertical series of mirrors that continuously shifted their alignment to track the hot Mexican sun throughout the day. A muted image of the true sky as seen from the surface was projected onto the ceiling of the underground chamber, thirty feet above Blick's head. Birds, insects, and microbes native to fifteen separate regions of the world shared the underground paradise, pollinating flowers, recycling organic materials and creating beauty for the few humans who were allowed access.

Blick leaned forward to breathe the fragrance of a Madame Hardy rose, sat on a stone bench where the day's email had been downloading to his laptop as he walked. He sighed. It seemed harder each day to keep his mind focused. I'm getting old, he thought. I can almost feel my brain cells dying, a hundred here, a thousand there.

Lately he had been grooming a new protégé to take Gebhardt's place, allowing the younger man to make many of the top level decisions, but he always kept one task strictly for himself: strategic preventative maintenance. Each day he spent at least two hours reviewing national and world news digests prepared by his regular staff, and closely reading weekly reports from his special staff, a world-wide network of people from corporate CEOs to unemployed labourers. Most of them did not know each other, and none knew that their specialized insights were being channelled to Bruce Blick.

Scrolling through his correspondence he read:

To:
johansen@yahoo.com

From:
henry engelke

Subject:
antique amish quilts

i found some of the kind of papers you wanted me to look for in the trash. let me know where i should take them. i assume the price is still $10 each.

Blick thought for a moment, selected a name from his mailing list and typed:

To:
Rodney Baker

From:
Webgambler

Subject:
Retire in 5 Years!

Rodney, call the number I sent you for H.E. I will wire money to your account. Send papers to address in Ithaca.

He read the next five emails quickly and deleted them without response. The sixth one read:

To:
Eric Johansen

From:
Beryl Clarke

Subject:
Fried Milk Recipes

Dear Eric,

I heard you seek Paul Gibson, formerly postdoc in the pharmacy department at UT, Austin, TX. I believe he living in Guadalajara, Jalisco under assumed name Ben Peters. He lives with beautiful young woman claiming to be his wife, Joyce, not same as lawyer in your document images. There is older boy living with them, Ricky, but he does not match the description provided. Dr. Peters met with two visiting scientists from MTJ labs in San Antonio, TX, at Universidad. They were Dr. Roberta Treadwell and Dr. Drew Chang. That is only thing of significance I have observed this week.

Regards, Beryl

Without missing a beat, Blick began typing:

To:
guardian

From:
Monkeyman

Subject:
bad teeth

Please provide all possible details, including photos and fingerprints if possible. Extreme urgency!

Blick's replies went to a server in Saltillo, Mexico, which forwarded them to a second server in Dar Es Salaam. From there they would go, in encrypted form, to their final recipients. The encryption program Blick used was flagrantly illegal, but if by some remote chance the encryption were discovered, Blick would suffer at most a slap on the wrist in the form of a fine. He had learned early in life that he was not subject to the same rules as ordinary mortals.

Friday, July 18

Alex sought out "Dr. Ben Peters" at his lab bench. They had found a school class for "Ricky" to slot into, and it was driving him nuts although his Spanish was improving fast. He was far too advanced for his own age group, but Jill insisted that he needed the socialization of his peers. After classes, he was allowed to roam the library, drinking in a universe of knowledge and art. These days, though, he spent half his free time hanging about the electrical engineering labs, borrowing test equipment, tinkering with castoffs. He toted a bag of these toys over his shoulder, aware that Paul and his Mom could have no real understanding of what he was doing.

"Hi, tyke! How's it going?"

He started to speak, and the words caught in his throat like phlegm. "Wayne's still alive," he said, unbroken voice husky.

"I'm sure he is," Paul said, gaze still fixed on the screen of his atomic force microscope. He tweaked an atom closer to its target. "Got it! Sorry, you were saying?"

"I thought he was dead."

"Just a nightmare, Alex." Reaching down from his stool, Paul ruffled the boy's hair fondly. Alex pulled away.

"No, it's more than that, Paul. You don't — Well, the point is, he isn't dead. I think the auxosomes saved him."

He saw Paul start to roll his eyes then block the unconscious reaction. Pointless trying to explain.

"The thing is, he needs the final regulator dose real bad. We've gotta get it to him."

Paul shrugged, face sad. "I'd like to help him out, but we don't know where he is. I mean, son, he's in another country, hundreds of miles away, probably hiding out from the cops."

"That's not the problem," Alex said tersely. "I can find him. But I can't make the protein." He reached into his backpack, drew the transporter out.

"You can find— Oh. Oh, my. The things you used on the chopper. I thought— I don't know, I thought I'd hallucinated that."

A glowing sphere hung in the air between them, spinning, it seemed, on two axes at once.

Paul was smarter these days, Alex noticed. He didn't need any explanation. Just the facts.

"That will reach him?"

"Range is unlimited, but it might take a little while to track him. It borrows its juice from... well, it's hard putting it into words, and I don't have the right math yet. The space between things."

The adult gazed down at him with an expression of thunder-struck respect. Alex preened a little. It felt good to be taken seriously, especially by someone you admire. Someone you love, actually, like a father.

"Zero point energy," Paul said very quietly.

"Maybe, I don't know what it's called."

"And this gadget gives you some sort of link to Wayne?"

"Not this one." He reached out, plucked the transporter from the air, placed it on the bench. Its glow diminished but was not extinguished. He popped a lid on its cargo compartment. "Something else." He smiled. "I think it uses the midichlorians."

"That's 'mitochondria', Alex. Okay, those are the body's cellular power units. But how—"

"Not mitochondria. Sorry, it was a Star Wars joke." The grown-up stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Never mind. It's the auxosomes, Paul. Their resonant frequency, I think you'd call it."

"But that's... that's... absurdly low-energy. You couldn't possibly sense—"

"Not by myself." Alex shrugged, nudged the transporter back into the air where it glowed like a tiny green moon. "Something I built."

"And it tells you where Wayne is?"

"Where all of you are. Sort of. I mean, Mom's over that way," he pointed left, through the wall, toward the language labs, "and Aunt Carol and Dad are in Austin that way, and Roberta and Drew and Maureen are... well, you know, back in San Antonio."

"Where's Wayne?" Paul was hardly breathing.

"Not sure. San Antonio somewhere, but there's all kinds of noise of cars, and people everywhere, it's all blurry, lots of them are sick. Wayne feels sick all the time in his head. We gotta get the regulator to him, Paul."

"Okay, son." The adult crossed the room, opened a locked cabinet. Glass vials stood racked inside the containment space. "No harm in trying."

Friday, July 18

Wayne was careful to keep his space tidy and to do what he could in the way of community services. A scavenger had scored some photovoltaic panels and deep cycle batteries left over, unsold, from an auction of marine equipment, so Wayne put his electrician skills to work. It kept him close to the library van.

"Okay, Elliot, plug it in!" On the roof of the van, where he had just hung an improvised light fixture made from a car headlight backed by a metal garbage can lid, King Curt whooped. "Woo hoo! It works! Look at that, will ya? It works!" Curt grinned. "You're my man, Elliot!"

"We should increase the albedo of the reflector," Wayne mused. "Let's put out the word for everyone to be on the lookout for some white paint."

Curt climbed to the ground. "This calls for a celebration. Care to join me and a few friends for dinner this evening, Elliot? Maggie brought back some lobster and shrimp from the Turf and Surf dumpster, and a couple of the girls have gone fishing down along a tad from the end of the Riverwalk. We'll have a seafood feast."

"Sure." Wayne cleaned up his tools. "In fact, I saw an interesting recipe for ceviche in one of your cookbooks, and I think we have all the ingredients we need in the garden 'cept for the lime juice. I bet somebody around here will have some limes they can spare."

"That's what you've been reading? Cook books?"

"Cook books, medical books, art books, whatever." He shrugged, a little embarrassed. "It's all interesting, know what I mean?" I'm still changing, Wayne realized. As he made his way to the garden to pick tomatoes for the ceviche, he thought: Half the time I get so wrapped up in what I'm reading I forget about my mission. I have to be careful not to lose sight of the reason I'm here. But he had to wait until his body healed completely and his beard grew out a little more. I can't go anywhere that Blick might track me down, he thought, persuading himself. So it won't hurt to spend some time reading books. Besides, all this reading will be good exercise for my brain, help my planning. He wished the kid was here. Him and his partner.

He'd found in an old neurology text that the individual components of a human brain were almost identical to those of a mouse. The key difference appeared to derive mostly from the comparative number of brain cells and the number of different ways they could be connected with each other. Synapses. That had been Paul Gibson's claim, too. The auxosome treatment caused extra neurons to grow. Or maybe just forced them to build new connections, like him wiring up the lights on the van. He'd read that the brain produces intense electrical activity. Right! Rewiring brains!

It was scary and rather exhilarating, this having the joyful curiosity of youth along with the wisdom of age, like he was, was... interpreting the world with newborn neurons. Like the sweet taste of fresh-grilled catfish caught on his own hook. It came to him that he'd felt this way as a kid, a small fry, when him and his friends went exploring, climbing on the roofs of houses under construction, poking around in Old Man McNutt's junkyard, watching tadpoles grow into frogs a little each day. Tomorrow I'll figure out how to get the final dose of the drug. Need to get on-line and reach out to that Roberta gal. If she's forgiven me yet for nearly killing her boy Drew. He was torn again by unaccustomed emotions: guilt and misery, for his past crimes, elation at what the treatment was doing to him. Back from the dead! He almost laughed aloud with delight at the thought of how those extra baby brain cells were growing, but caught himself. This was serious business. He had no business laughing when Gaia was in danger from that murderous son of a bitch Blick. And those burgeoning baby cells might be about to choke him into sickness and terrifying stupidity.