Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  Because without that coincidence, the family with a screaming girl who had blood flowing freely from a perfect circle around her upper arm would’ve missed Tonya.

  The girl wiggled at exactly the wrong time. “I don’t want this!” she cried out with a rage much more mature than her seven-year-old voice should be able to convey. “I hate this!”

  Growing new limbs was a twenty-first century miracle, but it was a miracle full of pain.

  “Conroy,” Tonya said to the orderly, “you have to hold her still.” The repair stitches had already torn once. If the wound went down into the nanofiber layer, they could lose the whole arm.

  He leaned across the girl with all his weight. Her scream hoarsened into a small oof.

  Great. She had to re-stitch the join before the poor kid smothered.

  Nursing school had given her the basics; the specialization courses she’d taken afterward had taught her maybe eighty percent of what she needed to do this job well. The rest was, as her instructors loved to say, practice, practice, practice.

  Tonya was about as practiced as it got, but she’d never tried stitching up a wound on an arm that was half the size she was used to. Speed and precision. Tonya taught doctors how to do this. The stitches needed to hold, but this little girl would want to wear a sleeveless dress someday. Tonya did not want to be responsible for her looking like Sally from A Nightmare Before Christmas.

  Five more.

  Conroy was pressing down too hard. Without looking up she said, “Don’t break her ribs!”

  Four more.

  Sweat dripped off the orderly’s nose and onto her glove. “I can’t hold her like this much longer.”

  She finished two stitches between breaths. “You don’t have to.” Tonya pulled the last stich through. “Done!” The orderly jumped back and held his hands up like cops had drawn guns on him.

  Tonya reactivated the anesthetic harness while the little girl, Sarah, sobbed and caught her breath. It’d been turned off so it wouldn’t interfere with the neural scanners. The poor girl instantly transformed from a wounded animal into a helpless little kid.

  “It’s okay,” Tonya said, brushing the hair out of Sarah’s eyes. “We’re done now. We’re finished.”

  “I couldn’t breathe!”

  “I know, but it was only for a second. Now you’ll get your arm back, good as new.” She waved a finger at the girl and pulled out her nurse voice, the one that everyone paid attention to. “No more twisting up swing sets and spinning in them from now on, promise?” This far into the twenty-first century and swings still used chains that could twist up, or tangle around an arm.

  The resiliency of kids always amazed her. Sarah was in a lose a limb crisis not sixty seconds ago, and now she was distracted by Tonya’s comment. “It was Billy’s fault. He tricked me into getting on that swing.”

  She was a little monster, but in this moment, she was Tonya’s little monster. “I know. You stay away from him now.”

  Right on cue, the attending doctor rushed in. “What’s going on? Who did that? I didn’t authorize that!”

  Tonya peeled a glove off and pulled him aside. This baby doc was more useful than most. His mom had been a nurse; he knew the drill. “She got tangled up in a swing. I only had to put a few new stitches in.”

  He went pale, almost matching the white wall behind him. “That’s not a few stitches. I came as soon as the alarm hit my phone.” He held the pendant up off his neck and whispered, “I hadn’t taken it off!”

  He’d eventually learn to trust his nurses. They all did, otherwise they wouldn’t survive. At least he wasn’t telling her how to do her job. “She’ll be fine.” Tonya moved him out of the way to keep the parents from running him over. “Sign the orders. I’ve got this.”

  And that’s what it took to distract her from this afternoon’s disaster. If Tonya wasn’t arms-deep in some sort of crisis, then the enormity of what almost happened to Kim crashed in on her.

  She had to stop writing patient notes and just hang on until the wave of what if running through her mind had passed. They’d been so careful. She knew what Mike was like. Mike knew what Mike was like. He was always leaping off on one tangent or the other. Tonya was his backstop and his consultant. It’d been her proofs that convinced them both everything would be safe.

  She could still hear the sound of those alarms as it all went wrong around Kim. The urge to stop it all, to not press the buttons, to not take those steps, was overpowering. She wanted to undo it, make sure it didn’t go wrong.

  The pointer she used to make notes at the nurse’s station gave way with a screechy snap in her hand.

  The deep Russian accent of the head nurse rolled over her. “That is it, Miss Tonya,” she said. “You are going home now.”

  Tonya learned some Russian swear words from Kim, but she was too tired to use one now. She turned in her chair and looked up at her sometimes boss. The shock of short red hair, a shade that didn’t exist in nature, always made her smile.

  Then she remembered how the lab was bathed in red warning lights.

  “I am not kidding, Tonya. You are exhausted. Your shift was up an hour ago. Go home.”

  There was no way she’d sleep, but there was also no way to negotiate with Ivanovna when she got that look in her eye. Tonya clocked out and got in her car. She couldn’t stop thinking of it, of looking at her best friend and being so helpless. It forced her head down on the steering wheel. She needed to relax. She took a deep breath and started a rosary.

  Chapter 6

  Mike

  Kim nudged him awake with one of her touch-sticks. “Hey.”

  He blinked twice as his threads unfurled in realmspace. Everything ached; he’d fallen asleep at his desk in their little lab. Kim was dressed, with her arm in a sling. They’d hoped it would get better overnight. Apparently it hadn’t.

  “How are you this morning?” he asked.

  “Better in some ways,” she lifted the sling, wincing, “no change in others. It’s not any worse at least.”

  He sat up and suppressed a groan. Human bodies were great as long as you moved them around once in a while. He must’ve put his head down right after Tonya left and poof. The threads of his real self weren’t in any better condition. He’d gone through his own ordeal bringing her back, but his arm wasn’t in a sling, and he hadn’t spent half an hour leaning over a toilet.

  He would never forget those sounds for as long as he lived. And it was his fault.

  “Do we need to go to urgent care?” he asked. They’d tried to get her to go to the ER last night, but she refused. Kim wanted to see if she could sleep it off while he and Tonya worked on the problem.

  “No.” She put her hand up at his protest. “Not yet anyway. I want to give it twenty-four hours before going to a doctor. I’ll make an appointment with mine. He already knows about me.”

  Mike stood and moved close. Nowadays he could be within millimeters of her without risking an actual touch. He was afraid she would flinch or move away, but she didn’t.

  It was still his fault.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.” He loved her, and they came close to losing her over a stupid experiment.

  “I know. It’s okay. Nobody made me do it.” She looked up at him and a bit of steel came in behind the warmth of her gaze. “But we’re not doing anything else until you figure out what went wrong and can explain it to me in a way that I understand. No more hiding behind math is hard. If I need a math degree, you’ll teach me.”

  This wasn’t how it usually went. Last night he and Tonya thought they’d be thrown out of the house. Kim was upset by visions, a realmspace bleed through that happened when he maxed out the trans-D amplifier’s power, but there was no anger at them. If anything, she’d been a bit introspective.

  “Absolutely,” he replied. “I can’t promise how soon we’ll have the answers, but I’m not letting you anywhere near that thing until we have them.”

  “Good.
I’m still going to open the store today. I’ll let Basil manage the customers when he gets in. He needs to practice his English.”

  “I’ll go with you. I only need to take a shower.”

  She closed her eyes as she shook her head. “No, that’s okay.” His agony must’ve been obvious because when she looked back at him, she smiled a little, and her eyes teared up. “It’s not you, Mike. You’re fine. We’re fine. It was an accident, that’s all. I just need some time to myself.”

  “Then rest, stay here. I’ll be quiet. How much can you do with your arm in a sling?”

  She stepped back, but the affection was clear in her voice. “You sound like my mother. I’ll use the waldo rig if I have to.” For extremely fine or precise work Kim had a set of robotic hands she could control with a realm connection. “I’ve got some forensic stuff I’ve been putting off, too. Some shady accountant in Roanoke stuffed his real financial records into a Mark Seven digiVault. The cops know he’s dirty, but they need the info to prove it. The permission paperwork I need landed in my message queue two days ago. They’ve already pinged me about it.”

  “You’re sure?” The thought of her going anywhere like she was twisted him up inside.

  “You wouldn’t be any good to me anyway. All you’d think about was this.” She waved her good hand at her sling. “To me, this is nothing. Ignoring my customers is what would piss me off. Do some work on the problem, and if you find anything let me know.”

  She ran a length of red ribbon she’d been hiding in her good hand across his neck. It set his heart racing. “Hopefully,” she said, “my arm won’t interfere with anything we want to do later.”

  They said their goodbyes, and she was off.

  Tonya had set her do not disturb flag. She was probably in bed, so he called his sister.

  “I was just about to call you,” she said.

  She had some sort of news. If he let her go first, it would be ages before he got to talk. “Kim got hurt.”

  “What?”

  Telling her about it let him look at it with new eyes, at least until he got to the part where it all went wrong. A feedback loop went out of control, and he lost her in the noise. Mike’s threads encompassed all of realmspace. Losing her should not have happened. He’d split his perception into thousands, then millions of places trying to find her.

  “Going that far that fast must’ve hurt like hell,” Helen said. They could both be in more than one place at a time, but it usually took preparation. The more they needed to split, the longer it took to get ready. Mike had done it all at once. He’d torn himself apart and thrown the pieces far and wide.

  “It may take weeks for me to repair the damage.”

  “You’re too big. You need to practice more. You’re flabby.”

  The realmspace Helen inhabited encompassed a single country, whereas Mike’s spanned the rest of the world. It made her incredibly nimble when it came to splitting and braiding her threads. “Point taken. If it hadn’t been for Tonya, I might’ve lost her.”

  Tonya was the one who thought of altering the phase of the spline reticulator. It gave them a coordinate set that had to be wrong, but when he tried it, he was able to throw threads out to find her. But he couldn’t free her. He used the stabilizer channel and turned it up well past what the reticulator had been designed for. Then it all went sideways.

  Helen asked, “What do you think went wrong?”

  “One theory is bad, the other is worse. It could be Kim.”

  Helen nodded, now fully engaged. “But it could also be realmspace. Your devices may have found a fundamental bug.”

  “One that could hurt people, or worse.” Billions of people used realmspace every day. Mike was smart but not so smart that he’d be the only one to ever discover this. If there was a bug, he had to find a patch before someone used what he discovered to hurt not just one person, but thousands, maybe millions.

  “The simplest answer,” Helen said, “will inevitably have the most complex solution. I’ll bet it’s a combination of both.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.” The bug that let realmspace hurt people, maybe even kill them, could be electronic or neurologic. Mike hoped it was all on realmspace. He wasn’t sure it was possible to patch a human. Their operating system hadn’t been designed, it had evolved. Billions of years of undocumented patches without any source control at all. Advanced physics and mathematics had taken him years to master. He’d have to become an expert on gene tailoring too. The realization made his head hurt.

  It was too much to worry about right now. “You said you were about to call me?”

  She blinked at the change of subject but seemed to understand why he’d done it. “I’m afraid I have even more bad news for you. Remember I asked about the Yellowstone Project?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to look into that for you.”

  She shook her head. “Events have overtaken any research you could’ve done. We’ve been closely following its progress. Closely.” A file full of blueprints landed in his message queue.

  “Where did you get these?”

  The gentle shrug was telling. “China is a clever country, Mike.”

  His sister wasn’t only a hybrid human-AI like him; she was also the de facto president of China. She had access to considerable realspace assets. Things like tanks, airplanes, missiles.

  Spies.

  “Helen?”

  “I’m not going to apologize, Mike. We need all the help we can get.”

  “By stealing stuff?”

  “It’s not stealing. It’s acquisition by other means. If your country didn’t have such ridiculous export restrictions, we would be happy to purchase the plans.”

  Right. “Last time I checked, those restrictions were for weapons, not power plants.”

  “And if the woman in charge of it had accepted any of our offers, we would’ve bought them. How we got the plans doesn’t matter. What they build does. We don’t think it’s a power plant.”

  When she took a deep breath, Mike knew the news was bad.

  “We think it’s a bomb.”

  He couldn’t have heard her right. “A bomb? How can it be a bomb?”

  “We haven’t figured that part out yet. It was a project my father started. He had a team build a one-tenth-scale model of the final design. When we turned it on yesterday, it blew the top of a mountain off. It was hundreds of miles away. The scientists tell me it has to do with gravitic resonance.”

  The Yellowstone Project’s gravitics were on the razor-thin margin of the leading edge. The Nevon valves that captured and boosted the gravitons were the largest ever built. Related, but on a different scale, to the ones that controlled the HgRI scanners Mike, and then Helen, used to bridge their realmspace selves into realspace bodies.

  “How do you know your guys didn’t make a mistake?”

  “That’s why we built the scale model. I’m glad we did it in Xinjiang Province. There aren’t any people out there. We didn’t even hurt any goats.”

  He needed to get her back on track. “How big was it again? The scale model?”

  “One-tenth. That’s what has us concerned. If the real one does blow up, we don’t know what the impact will be. Some of our models show a logarithmic progression.”

  The real one wouldn’t be ten times more powerful. It would be thousands of times more powerful.

  “Why didn’t it affect anything closer?”

  Her eyes flashed. “We think it has to do with crustal composition. The explosion revealed a monster copper deposit, larger than anything in recorded history. We have to be careful with that news, otherwise we’ll derail the futures market.”

  “Why haven’t you said anything publicly?”

  “About a plant that exploded in China built using stolen plans? Nobody would believe us. And that’s the other thing, Mike. The plans we have? They don’t match the ones your regulators are using. The differences are hard to spot, but they’re real.”

  Tha
t turned his stomach. “It’s not accidental. Someone’s trying to hide what’s going on. Do you have any good news?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. If it is a bomb, it’s a fussy one. It took a massive electromagnetic pulse to kick ours off, and most of our models imply that could be logarithmic, too. The people in charge will need a nuke to set off their bomb, and we’re all very good at keeping track of those.”

  “But if they’ve hidden it for this long…”

  “Right. Fortunately we didn’t find any evidence of radiation when we…toured their site recently, so we’ve got that going for us. They don’t have a bomb yet. But disaster could be a truck delivery away.”

  “Lovely.”

  Chapter 7

  Kim

  The FBI van hadn’t returned or been replaced. Either that or they’d gotten clever. Kim didn’t have the energy to figure it out. She hadn’t slept well, and now it seemed every move set her arm on fire. At least she needed to dive deep into the realms for today’s work. It should give her some relief, but if it didn’t she’d go home and let Mike fuss over her.

  Her shop made her feel a little better. It always did. The building had started life as a farmhouse in the mid-eighteenth century. Since then it’d been an inn, an apartment building, even a pub in the early twentieth. Researching the deeds had been fascinating and a bit humbling. It would be around long after she was gone. Kim hoped she’d do it justice. The first step would be to freshen up the paint on the outside soon. It had gotten a little ragged.

  When Kim keyed in the last number to shut the alarm system down, a light turned on behind her. Mike sometimes played with motion-controlled lighting, but she was certain she turned it all off last night.

  “Good morning, Kimberly. Please don’t be frightened. I’m here to talk.”