by John Carrick
Wendell helped himself to a handful of the blue goo from the ten-gallon tub next to his leg. He applied it to the mangled joint.
Near the beginning of the previous school year, almost a year to the day, he'd been trapped in the pool's hydraulic cover; the mechanical joint had mutilated his knee.
Wendell had spent the bulk of the school year in bed, taking all his classes in virtual. He'd had four surgeries, and the last set of pins had just come out last week. The doctors talked about replacing the joint all together, but Wendell’s mother had objected.
Wendell Meyer and Andrew Fox had been close friends that year. After the accident, Andrew dedicated all his spare time, and a significant amount of his family fortune, in creating and developing the goo.
"It itches," Wendell said, as his skin devoured the blue-tinted mixture. "Ouch!”
The knee swelled under the blue coating.
"ARGHHHH!" Wendell cried.
He lay back on the table, face knotted into a scream he didn't dare utter at full volume, for fear of bringing a teacher.
The boys watched as the knee repaired itself. A thick sweat popped out on Wendell's face. The joint began to make strange cracking and rending sounds. Wendell gulped air in tortured gasps.
A few seconds later the knee began to shrink, the blue tint staining the skin and bubbling from his pores. Within two minutes, Wendell's knee was back to its natural size, albeit a bit skinnier than the other, coated in a thick blue wrapping. The goo had become a kind of splint, a rubber bandage, holding the bones, tendons and ligaments in place.
Wendell swung his leg. "It works." He gestured for Jim Croswell to pass over his crutches. Jim reached out and picked them up but didn't hand them over.
"Fine." Wendell smiled and hopped down from the table. He stood on his own two feet for the first time since the accident. Smiling, he lifted and flexed the shattered knee. He walked a few steps, staring at the blue wrapped knee, and burst running from the room, screaming wildly.
Jim carried the crutches to the corner of the room and leaned them up against the wall.
"Who else wants to try?" Andrew asked.
At first the kids were skeptical.
Andrew opened a drawer full of dissection tools. "Step right up," he said and removed a tray of scalpels from the drawer.
"It can heal anything?" Stephen asked.
"It's healed everything I've tried so far," Andrew answered.
"Ha! What have you tried?" Joe Stanwood asked.
Andrew smiled. He held up his left hand and rolled up the sleeve of his school button-down. His arm was covered with the telltale blue rubber bandages.
Most of the kids looked nervous, staying well away from the surgical blades.
"I'll go first then," Andrew said, reaching out for a knife. He brought it down across the back of his left arm, opening a long gash between his wrist and elbow, spilling blood onto the counter top.
Andrew clenched his teeth and applied a smooth coating of the blue goo. He held out his arm for the others to watch. Almost as if it were reversing the damage done by the blade, the goo sealed the gash. As it worked itself out of the cut, it formed a new blue coating and a few seconds later, Andrew's arm was good as new.
Wendell returned to the lab at full speed, catching himself in the doorframe. "Thanks, Andrew! You're the best! They said I was never gonna walk again!" Wendell ran off again at full speed, his footsteps and jubilant cries trailing down the hallway.
Andrew smiled, thrilled with Wendell's recovery.
"How's it work," Croswell asked.
"Supercharged poly-synthetic nano-stemcells. Once exposed to living tissue, it works backwards to regenerate any damaged or missing cells. Seems to work pretty good, so far," Andrew said.
Andrew Fox and Jim Croswell had been friends since early childhood. Their fathers often worked together on various government projects, Andrew and Jimmy saw each other a lot growing up. They had always been great friends.
Both Croswell and Fox were considered top among their peers, and neither of them took any crap from Stanwood, who bullied everyone else. Croswell was far more athletic than Fox, so the mantle of leadership fell to him.
"What else did you try?" Stanwood asked, nodding to Fox’s arm.
Joe Stanwood, in his own weird way, had never fit in with anyone. Most of the boys were scared shitless of him.
Andy and Jim seemed able to tolerate him. It seemed to the other kids that perhaps Fox and Croswell were unaware of how creepy Joe actually was. It was in his mannerisms, the slow way he talked and used his hands. He was, in a word, malevolent.
Andrew removed his shirt. His body was covered with blue rubber strips and sections. There was almost no open skin for more than a few inches.
"Holy shit," Croswell said.
"I feel one hundred percent fine. It activates the RNA to work overtime, fixing whatever's out of whack.”
Stanwood looked into Andrew's eyes, taunting him. "You don't seem fine.”
Andrew began to unbuckle his pants, but several objections and declarations of trust stopped him.
"And it gets absorbed through the skin like that?" Stanwood asked.
"You saw it.”
"So, is it better for cuts or broken fingers?" Stanwood inquired.
"I think, either or," Andrew replied.
"Could it grow back a whole arm, or a leg?" Joe asked.
"I don't know, but I bet it can reattach them.”
"No way," Stanwood answered. "Brain injuries? How do you get it in there?”
"Shit, maybe it can fix you, Joe," Croswell said.
Several of the other kids laughed.
"Fox is gonna be a millionaire. I bet it'll fix anything," Stephen volunteered.
"It fixed Wendell's leg." Tom Becket said. "He's happy as shit.”
Andrew realized he didn't have to answer Stanwood's objections. The other boys were making his arguments for him. They had witnessed the power of the goo.
Joe Stanwood raised his hands, smiling.
The guys grew quiet.
"Can you re-attach someone’s head?" Stanwood asked.
"I don't know, but I'd love to try." Fox answered.
The boys heard the challenge and responded with an "Oooo.”
"Don’t cut anyone’s head off, seriously," Stanwood replied.
"I think maybe you could re-grow a finger or something, but it would be expensive," Andrew said. "I don’t think I could do it with this. We’d need a thicker composition. It would take longer.”
"How much did this cost to make all this?" Croswell asked.
"Close to seventeen million," Andrew said in a low voice.
"Holy shit!" Becket said. "What?”
"I said close to," Andrew countered. "I think you get Holy Shit at twenty.”
"How close?" Joe asked.
"If you figure in all the test batches, a little over, maybe.”
"But current medical science can already reattach limbs for a lot less," Stanwood pointed out. "And we have lots of ways to accelerate the healing process, so this is kind of redundant. It's too expensive for the common people. All you did was waste a bunch of money."
An hour later, after more than seventy healed scrapes, cuts, abrasions, lacerations, fractures, burns and contusions, they had exhausted their creativity and courage. They had a reached a place where the pain endured outweighed the novelty of having the tissue magically repaired.
Andrew took notes while the boys played. He took a sample of blood from each volunteer, usually from whatever instrument of violence used to create the tissue damage, never allowing any blade to be used twice. He bagged the tools of destruction and logged each into his notebook, along with the damage done and how long it took the goo to repair the wound.
With one boy, Jesse Parker, total repair took an agonizing forty seven seconds, but Jesse's wound had been rather severe. They had attacked his leg with an electric hedge clipper. Then they applied the goo and stopped the femoral artery from dumpi
ng Jesse's entire blood supply on the laboratory floor. The boys laughed and joked as they replaced chunks of meat from his thigh.
A minute later, Jesse's leg was good as new, minus the damage to his school pants.
Croswell had wanted to see how hard the other boys could punch him. He asked each of them to give it all they had. He dared them to out do each other in a single strike. After taking a haymaker from everyone in the room, Tom got creative and broke a glass beaker over Jim's head, his face looked like hamburger. The boys stuck a straw in his mouth and coated his entire face in goo. Andrew estimated it cost almost a hundred thousand dollars to wrap Jim's face, but they had plenty left.
Bored, they began to discuss grievous, mortal wounds. Andrew tried to dissuade them.
Gabriel joked about cutting Sandoval’s throat, who happened to not be present. He challenged Andrew to save him before he died.
Andrew countered that he'd never liked Enrique and wouldn't be inclined help him. no matter what. That would leave Gabe on the hook for murder.
Several boys laughed, and no one did anything excessively stupid.
Andrew suggested it was time to lock the goo up.
Croswell peeled the rubber from his eyes. "I want to try something bigger.”
"Something bigger like what?" Andrew asked.
"I want you to cut my arm off," Jim said.
"You're fucking crazy," Stanwood said.
"No I'm not," he replied to Joe.
Croswell looked over to Andrew. "I want you to cut my arm off.”
"Stay here." Andrew left the room. Half a dozen boys trailed after him.
Croswell, Stanwood and several others remained behind.
"Seriously Joe, you should try it, it really works." Croswell said.
"Fuck that," Stanwood said. "You don't know what the side effects are. Maybe someday you wake up and who knows. This shit might kill you a month from now.”
"Yeah, well, Fox will die first."
Andrew walked to the locked glass trophy case, in the grand entrance hall of the academy. He picked up a nearby chair and used it to knock the glass out. The surrounding boys watched as he reached into the case and removed the long samurai sword, the katana, from the daisho: a set of two swords.
The set had been awarded to the Rivendell Kendo Team from the Yagyu Sword School of Japan. Andrew's great grandfather had competed in the tournament that had claimed the glorious victory. Now, the young man had pilfered his ancestor's trophy case for an afternoon of raucous and juvenile amusement.
Andrew argued the points and counterpoints in his mind. What he was doing was contributing to science. He needed volunteers and to get them, he needed an extraordinary claim, an outrageous claim, a bit of theatre.
He had broken the glass in a calculated gesture.
He needed to put an end to the experiment while they still had a ton of goo. He needed to get caught, so the discovery could be exposed, with a number of witnesses.
On the way back to the lab, the boys joked about what they could do with such magical power. Several confirmed beatings they intended to dole out and then supply the recipient with a bit of blue goo to heal them right up. The lists of rivals were long, and the actions to be taken against them were intricate, cunning and cruel.
Once Andrew and the others returned with the sword, the boys who'd waited behind fell silent. Andrew Fox looked Jim Croswell in the eyes. He held the sword up, prepared to take it out of the sheath.
Jim stepped close to the tub and held his left arm out over it.
Andrew stepped back, and the other boys cleared back a few steps, room enough for him to draw and swing the sword.
Andrew gestured to Stephen and Jesse, standing opposite Croswell. "Grab his arm," Fox said.
The boys looked from Andrew to James, who nodded. They reached out to his hand.
"When I hit it, you have to take it right down into the goo. Then right back up to his arm," Andrew instructed.
"Goo? We should call it glue," Stephen said.
"Shouldn't we put some on his arm too?" Jesse asked.
"Yeah. Becket," Andrew pointed, "stand here, next to the tub. When I slash through the arm, Stephen and Jes are going to be holding it. Wait for the sword to pass through, and then put your hands in the tub. As they bring the forearm to the tub, I want you to take a hand full of goo up to Jimmy's stump. Got it?”
Several kids laughed, but Tom nodded.
Andrew drew the sword from its sheath.
"I wonder if he'll scream," someone in the back said.
Andrew looked James in the eye and without waiting for a count of three or a ready, set, go, Fox slashed through Croswell's bicep and humerus. The sword severed the boy's arm with little more resistance that if it were slicing through smoke. Andrew held the sword low and still after the cut.
James didn't scream. He didn't gasp. He didn't make a sound.
Tom reached into the tub.
Stephen and Jesse brought Jim's forearm and elbow down into the tub, passing Tom, on his way up to Jim's open stump. As Tom applied the goo, an excited pulse of blood sprayed into the room.
Jes and Stephen dunked the detached stump and reattached it to Jimmy's remaining upper arm. The room was quiet, except for the sound of blue and red drops hitting the floor.
The goo caused the skin to swell and knit together where it had separated. Blood and blue syrup bubbled from the bicep. As the excess ran off, the remainder of the goo grew darker, harder, rubbery and thick.
James smiled. He took a deep breath and wiggled the fingers of his left hand. Jesse and Stephen felt the arm come alive under their grasp. It grabbed and shook them. It had taken less than thirty seconds.
Croswell pulled the limb away and flexed it. Excess goo and plasma burst from the seam, the scar, where the limb had been severed. James punched his palm then turned and slammed his hand through a wood paneled cabinet, laughing.
Withdrawing the fist, James saw he'd damaged it anew. He laughed as he lathered the splintered fingers with, "Dr. Fox's Super-Blue Healing Goo."
During that first week of eighth grade, all the boys involved in the incident with the goo found themselves assembled in a large conference room, seated with their parents and their parent's lawyers.
Professor Cotton recited his discovery of the scene in the laboratory. The adults got the whole story, from Andrew's inspiration by Wendell's accident, to Jim's courageous determination in the name of scientific progress.
The patent filed in Andrew's name resulted in a massive windfall. In the final settlement, all the kids who'd participated in the blue goo experiment received a king's ransom. Joe Stanwood, who hadn't participated, got nothing.
Centaur Cyber Tanks
December 31st, 2299 – Eight-and-half years earlier
Another night on the office couch. It was just after six when Fox awoke.
Being the dead of winter and the last day of the year, the sun still had not yet lit the horizon. Fox had a couple of hours before the Generals arrived. Fox knew the project waiting outside his office, the ten thousand cyber-tanks, would win the war.
It was footsteps that awakened him. Someone was coming. Dr. Fox sat up in the darkness and rubbed his face. Visitors' plural, there were at least two of them. Fox switched on the light.
A moment later came the knock at his door. "Yes, come in."
Chief Operator Chris Matthews and Special Agent Tasha Vangen entered.
The Doctor smiled. "So, this is it. The big day.”
Matthews nodded, "We're all ready, Sir.”
Third Gate Citizen, Chris Matthews was one of those gung-ho patriots that rarely looked before he leaped. Fox didn't trust him to think for himself, but if you gave him an order, he'd die before giving up. You couldn't have everything in a project manager, and Matthews was better than most. He was honest and loyal, and those were qualities valuable beyond measure.
"We've got thirty-six units spooled up and another twenty-four taking on fluids and ammunition," Ma
tthews reported.
Special Agent Vangen looked troubled. Tasha was special for several reasons, the least of which being her status as in international dignitary on loan from Sweden. By default, the clear-headed young woman often found herself elected to go up against the party line Matthews.
She was the most socially well-adjusted scientist Dr. Fox had met in years; she was sharp as a neutron laser, cool under pressure, and a pleasure to work with.
Being from such a socially progressive country, Dr. Fox suspected it was the tradition of community that allowed the young researcher to share her discoveries and triumphs with the team. Most of the other members, Citizens of the Republic, were fiercely competitive.
Tasha was also dating his Andrew’s younger brother, Geoffrey. They were secretly engaged and waiting for the project to be officially over before they said anything.
From the look on Tasha’s face, it was clear something had gone sideways. Fox knew, at this late stage of the game, that’s just the way it went sometimes.
Major General Cruthers and his staff had arrived at the nearby observation station a day earlier. Ten miles north of the border, they reviewed intelligence data, watching in fast forward as the enemy flooded into Tijuana over the past month.
Over two million strong, the Christian Socialists intended take San Diego with the force of sheer numbers alone. The tension in the room was palpable. The intelligence officers were panicked, but not about the enemies’ numbers. They couldn't identify any weapons. The enemy had arrived empty handed.
The socialists always marched with artillery. There was no other way they could cross the border en-mass without some method of detonating the mines. The presence of cannon had always been the justification for the republic’s overwhelming response.
It would be difficult for the talking heads in Washington to explain the dropping of bulk munitions on a group of civilians. The officers continued to scramble, but all they could find were light arms: handguns and rifles. The People’s Army of Christ the Redeemer hadn’t brought a single cannon. Usually they had an overwhelming amount of artillery, but today, they had none.
