Rescue (an Ell Donsaii story #11)

by Laurence Dahners

  Chapter One

  Washington D.C.—Despite the recent brouhaha over President Stockton’s penchant for playing golf and the taxpayer costs for golf outings by her and her cronies, her approval ratings continue to climb. There is no doubt that this is mostly due to the recently improved employment figures. The Republicans claim that she is unfairly taking credit for the economic boom resulting from the new PGR and portal technologies. The thriving economy has boosted employment and raised revenues which the Stockton administration is spending on popular public works.

  Though Stockton has toned down her anti Donsaii rhetoric, she refuses to have Donsaii removed from the FBI’s Most Wanted list. This despite the public ridicule of the “Ementhal Committee” in the wake of journalistic investigations of the committee members. Dr. Ementhal himself has been subjected to scathing criticism following a blue ribbon panel’s scientific examination of Ementhal’s work. After those inquiries, the Blaustein bill barely survived an attempt to rescind it sponsored by the North Carolina delegation and few expect it will survive very long after the midterm elections.

  Despite public opinion in favor of Donsaii, Stockton claims that even if Donsaii could no longer be accused of breaking the law as constituted by the Blaustein bill, Donsaii remains a danger to the nation and the world because of her solo control of several extremely dangerous technologies…

  Shan sat in the living room of the farmhouse staring at his son. Lying in his lap, head on Shan’s knees, Zage stared placidly back at his father. He blinked occasionally, but otherwise seemed perfectly happy.

  Everyone told Shan and Ell that they were extraordinarily lucky because Zage cried so little. Even back when he cried at night for a feeding, it fell regularly at about two AM when Ell was awake anyway. Day or night, when he did cry, he didn’t wail until someone came, he cried for about ten seconds then stopped. If no one came he would cry again a minute or two later.

  Amy had told them tales of when Janey had been a colicky baby, crying inconsolably for hours on end. Just like with other babies, the sound of a crying Zage was one of the world’s most disturbing sounds, but Shan realized that they were extraordinarily lucky that he did it so infrequently.

  Shan tried tickling Zage. Zage squirmed away from Shan’s finger but didn’t laugh or giggle. After a bit Shan sat his son up on the couch beside him and opened Mathematica on the big screen in the living room.

  Amy climbed the steps to the farmhouse and let herself in the kitchen door. She put away a few groceries, then headed into the big room. Shan had Zage beside him on the couch while he intently studied the big screen where some kind of graphic display was shifting back and forth in response to quiet commands. Zage sat beside him, also staring at the screen, apparently interested in the flickering changes of the multicolored display.

  Amy shook her head. Zage had to be the most placid baby she’d ever encountered—or heard of for that matter.

  Amy studied Shan for a moment. He’d washed off the bronzers he’d originally worn as Daniel Reyes and bleached his new crew cut a much paler blond than that of his natural hair. When he left the house he inflated his cheek prostheses and looked much different than he did as Shan. He looked like a Reyes from Spain, instead of from Mexico.

  Shan’s focus on his math program was so intense that he hadn’t noticed her enter the room. Amy worried that he didn’t pay enough attention to his son while working on his research. The way he concentrated she didn’t think he could keep the child safe. Of course, the way Zage just sat, watching the world around him, it didn’t ever seem like he was about to get himself into trouble.

  Amy walked across the room and picked Zage up. The little guy transferred his gaze from the screen to her face, searching her face interestedly for a minute with his eyes, then rolling his head back and to the side to focus on the screen again. Amy looked down at Shan, tempted to just head downstairs with Zage, but she’d done that before and when Shan came up out of his fugue state, he’d panicked to find Zage gone. “Daniel,” she said quietly. When he didn’t respond, she reached out and nudged him with a toe. She felt tempted to call him Shan instead, but they’d agreed to go by their pseudonyms at all times so as not to confuse Zage—as well as to keep the habit ingrained for when they were out in the world.

  After a brief pause Shan blinked and looked up. He looked a little like a man surfacing from a dive. “Hey Amy.”

  “I’m Amelia, Daniel,” Amy said patiently.

  “Oh… yeah, sorry, when I’ve been concentrating I… I make mistakes when I come out of it.”

  “I know Daniel, but are you sure you should be doing that when you’re watching Zage?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Your math.”

  Looking puzzled, Shan said, “Why not?”

  “What if Zage got into something while you were thinking?”

  Shan frowned, “How would he get into something? He doesn’t go anywhere.”

  Amy sighed, “One of these days he’s going to. When that happens, you’re gonna be caught off guard.” Amy turned to go down the stairs and see if Ell needed anything.

  Amy crossed the basement proper, a room filled with the kind of junk typical for many cellar’s owners. People who didn’t get rid of the rubbish and refuse of their life. It made perfect camouflage. Lifting a hidden latch underneath a shelf she pushed back a section of wall and headed down the tunnel to Ell’s lab.

  Not for the first time, Amy wondered how Ell had had the tunnels and her lab bored out of the solid rock down under the layer of soil on the farm. Amy hadn’t disbursed any funds to a miner like she had when Ell had had the tunnels dug at her farm in Chapel Hill. She’d asked Ell about it once but Ell had deflected the conversation elsewhere. Steve thought Ell must have used the same technology that she’d used to break Steve and the guys out of prison, but he had no idea how Ell had done that either.

  Amy had her AI ping Ell’s to tell her she was coming in, then opened the door and stepped into the lab. She blinked, a new extension of the lab stretched out from the far wall. The main room had been getting a little crowded with esoteric equipment that Ell had had delivered to a warehouse in Chapel Hill. Randy and Barrett would drive up to the warehouse in the middle of the night, lifting the heavy items onto Randy’s heavy duty truck with a winch on a graphend frame. The same frame lifted the equipment out of the truck once it had arrived back in the barn at the farm. Then they’d move the truck and the winch would lower the heavy gear down a shaft into an extension of the tunnels which ran beneath the barn.

  Still, it looked like Ell had doubled the size of her lab without Amy seeing a single soul arrive to do any of the work, much less any heavy equipment. Ell crouched along one wall of the new area, gluing outlets to the wall. “I hope you’re going to get a qualified electrician in here to hook up those outlets?”

  Ell grinned at her, “Ports Amelia, ports. They’re already hooked up through ports. I’m just putting them where I want them.”

  Amy gave an embarrassed little snort, “Duh, of course.” She frowned, “Why don’t those machines come already hooked up to power through ports?”

  Ell jerked her head, “That one over there does. I suspect more and more of them will in the future. Actually, it has a plug too, the plug’s just hooked up to it by port. You can plug it in in your room if you have a high power outlet there, but you can also just plug it in at your breaker board or down at the power company if you want. It uses a lot of power so I suspect most people plug them in at the power company rather than rewiring their building’s breaker box.” Ell got up and walked over to take Zage, snuggling her face down against his head. “I still love the way this little guy smells… at least when his diaper isn’t full.”

  She leaned him back and Zage smiled up at his mother. Ell’s skin was dark, though in an effort to make her skin color more compatible with Zage’s she had lightened her color from the original shade she had used as Elsa Gardon. Not only was her skin lighter than it had origin
ally been, but she’d started growing out and coloring her hair brunette instead of wearing wigs. She hardly ever appeared as Ell anymore so it was easier that way. Besides, Zage would soon be pulling wigs off and they didn’t want him confused about his mother’s hair color.

  Zage dropped his head back and looked around the lab as if fascinated by all the machines. Amy said, “You need me to do anything Elsa?”

  Ell handed Zage back to her, “Just keep an eye on this guy. Thanks though.”

  Amy gazed fondly down on Zage, still flopped back and looking around the room, then looked up at Ell. “Hey, when you see the pediatrician this afternoon?”

  “Mmm hmm,” Ell said, studying the new area of the lab.

  Knowing Ell would hear her even though she seemed to be preoccupied with something else, Amy continued, “I’m a little worried about how Zage…” she trailed off, uncertain how to say it.

  “How Zage…?” Ell prompted.

  “Um, how he just doesn’t do much.”

  Ell looked back at Amy. Focusing all her attention on her, she tilted her head, “Really? What should he be doing at six months? That he isn’t doing, I mean.”

  “He should be starting to sit himself up, kinda moving around and… I don’t know, not just placidly sitting like he does, staring at vids. He hardly even cries! And, he’s kinda chunky, you know?” She shrugged, “I’m not really an expert, but I think my kids were a lot more active at that age. It’s probably not anything to worry about, but I wanted to suggest that you talk to a professional who actually does know whether to worry or not.”

  Ell looked at Zage a moment, “OK, I’ll ask.”

  ***

  Gary glanced at Viveka out of the corner of his eye. As opposed to most people up in the space habitats who tended to orient themselves generally in the same direction, Viveka seemed completely comfortable tilted off at whatever random direction she happened to be in. At meetings where something was presented on a screen, she did tend to turn herself upright to the screen in order to make it easier to read, but right now she and Gary were simply examining the small graphene beads they were making for Ell and she was tilted off at 120° to Gary.

  They had only coated a few beads so far as a test run. As Ell and Viveka had surmised, charging the walls of the coating chamber the same as the beads themselves made them float out into the center of the chamber in microgravity conditions. They stayed separate from one another as well. This had made them relatively easy to coat with graphene without the beads sticking together.

  The beads themselves were only a little bit bigger than BBs and the ports in them were tiny. Nonetheless, they had successfully dissolved the Styrofoam out of them using acetone and now they could inflate and deflate them at will. Deflated, the beads seemed more like bits of sand. Inflated they made perfect little spheres, even more perfect than the original Styrofoam because of the tendency for the air pressure to stretch them round.

  Viveka rolled a couple of beads back and forth in her fingers, then looked at Gary, “What does Dr. Donsaii want these for anyway?”

  Gary shrugged, “I have no idea. I guess they would make good ball bearings, but I have no idea what use anyone would have for inflatable ball bearings. What do you think they might be for?”

  “I don’t know… And I find it pretty frustrating that I can’t figure it out. If Dr. Donsaii wants them for something, they probably represent some kind of genius level innovation. One of the reasons I came here was to try to learn from her, and I really want to understand each stroke of genius as I come across it.”

  “Yeah,” Gary sighed, “the problem is, I think she’s so much smarter than the rest of us that we have no hope of emulating her.”

  “Well, let me start making the rest of the beads for her. Maybe it’ll come to us before we deliver the beads back to her.”

  ***

  Ryan turned to Cindy Stauvich, Dr. Ulrich’s lab tech. She had the second of the two rats that had neurotrodes on their left optic nerves in a chamber with an inhalational anesthetic. “I’m ready, how’s she doing?”

  “Ready for me to apply the blindfold,” she said lifting the rat out of the chamber and securing a hood over its face. She put the front end of the rat just inside a tube barely big enough for it.

  Sure enough, as soon as the rat woke up a little, it squirmed deeper into the tube, feeling safe in the confined space. The little infrared camera in the tube showed the rat’s head, busily sniffing the air.

  “OK, she’s ready,” Cindy said.

  Ryan tapped a momentary switch that should send an impulse down the optic nerve axons. Far from a picture which would take extensive work to determine which axon correlated to which pixels from a camera, the rat should perceive this impulse as a bright flash. They knew from earlier tests that rats hiding in the dark little tube had a startle reaction to a flash of light inside the tube. Presumably they thought their little hiding place was being breached.

  The rat didn’t react to Ryan’s tap.

  He tried it again, then several more times without any reaction from the rat. Closing his own eyes he sighed disgustedly. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Yup,” Cindy said.

  Ryan felt a flash of irritation, but he’d come to realize that Cindy considered the research to be merely a job. She had little emotional investment in whether the experiment worked or not. Well, probably she realizes that if none of the experiments work, Ulrich will lose his grants and she’ll lose her job, but she’s not invested in any particular experiment and certainly not invested in mine. Out loud he said, “Well, the failure points I see are first, that it could be that the impulse generator isn’t working, or second, that the port connection to the neurotrode has failed, or third, that the neurotrode didn’t connect to the axons.”

  “Or that optic nerve axons don’t respond to your neurotrode impulses,” Cindy ventured.

  Ryan shrugged, acknowledging the possibility, “OK. First let me make sure the impulse generator is generating an impulse.” Ryan disconnected the generator from the jack to the fibers that entered the port to the rat’s neurotrode and hooked it up to a diagnostic display. The display showed an impulse all right. Next they tested the port by sending an impulse to the neurotrode that it had been designed to return for testing purposes. It returned the signal intact indicating that the port functioned OK.

  “OK,” he said dejectedly, “I guess we need to harvest the neurotrodes and submit them for histology to see if the nerve’s axons actually grew into the microtubules.”

  ***

  Gary attempted a gentlemanly little bow and wave, suggesting that Viveka should precede him into the tube leading down to one of the living modules. Unfortunately he wasn’t holding onto anything when he did it. Being weightless, both the bow and the small circular wave he tried to make with his hand threw him out of position. Embarrassed, he felt certain he had not given the sophisticated impression he had been going for. Nonetheless, Viveka, who had very rapidly become surprisingly adept at maneuvering in weightlessness, smiled and slipped into the tube without making any comment on the way he was tilting out of position.

  She grabbed one of the rings on a long belt which went up one side of the tube and down the other. It began moving her down the tube. After she had gone down the tube a ways, the centrifugal force generated by the swinging of the living module around its pivot point began to gently pull her mass down the tube. As this happened the weight of her body made it swing downwards in the tube to hang below the hand that gripped the ring. Her long glossy braid of hair swung down to hang along her back as she pivoted. She put a foot in a ring a little farther down and began holding herself up by bearing most of her weight on her foot.

  Gary watched her do all this very gracefully and felt glad that it took enough of her concentration that she didn’t look upwards to see him fumbling a little as he got himself situated on the passing line of rings. Looking down at her he saw a woman riding the up line of rings which were ascending the op
posite side of the tube from where he and Viveka were riding down.

  They got heavier and heavier as they traveled down the 250 meter tube to arrive at the living module. The top floor of this living module had been made into a restaurant where Gary had made reservations. Typical of habitat décor almost everything in the restaurant looked like it had been assembled from long slender pieces which could be easily passed through ports. Nonetheless, it all seemed to be of high quality, giving the impression of an expensive restaurant.

  When the menus arrived Gary was gratified to see Viveka’s dark eyes widen as she took in the prices. He had known the prices would be high, but then he was startled himself when he saw just how high. He had to remind himself that graphene had been very good to him. No matter how high these prices were, he could easily afford them.

  Viveka looked up at him and said, “Dr. Pace, this restaurant is far too expensive!”

  He grinned at her. “Are you ever going to start calling me Gary?”

  She wrinkled her upturned little nose impishly, “Gary, these prices border on the ridiculous.”

  He winked at her and waved a hand airily. “No cost is too high when I’m buying dinner for my best employee.”

  Viveka looked startled, then wary, “Um…”

  Suddenly worried that he might have offended her, or that she might feel he was coming on to her, Gary quickly said, “Sorry if I’ve upset you. Actually, prices are high everywhere up here at the habitat. Besides, graphene is making us a lot of money. We can afford to buy you a nice dinner.” He didn’t mention the fact that prices at this particular restaurant were known to be higher than any of the others. He’d become enamored of his young, pretty employee with her dark silky skin, pert nose, and flashing smile. He thought of this as a date, but suddenly realized that she may have been thinking of it as simply two coworkers going out for dinner. “I’ll be putting it on the company tab.”