The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles)

by Dane, Max

  “No, not exactly. It kind of sprung up during my investigation.”

  “Well, it’s true that birth rates have been in decline. And I know that some of our resources have been diverted over the last few years to studying infertility issues. But this isn’t exactly news Ryan; a gradual slowdown in the numbers has been happening for over two decades now. Some are linking it to our extended life spans. The medical advances of the last quarter century have allowed people to live healthier and longer, but I’m sure they are still having babies, Ryan.”

  “So falling birth rates is a phenomenon that has been occurring over the last twenty years?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s true.”

  Jeff walked over to his ‘In-box’, and looked through his departmental mail, “It’s funny you are asking about this. I just received a paper for review that suggests the numbers of viable embryos will fall by large stepping stone leaps over the next two generations. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, just the summary. Frankly, I thought it was another grad student trying to make a big splash.”

  Relaxing a little, Ryan said, “Jeff, if there was a problem it would be known publicly wouldn’t it? I mean, I watch the news all the time, and I’ve never seen a story about declining birthrates.”

  “Well, I see the lab assignments and I know that many more IntelliHealth scientists are looking at fertility very recently. Maybe it’s because this is relatively new information. What made you even ask about it?” said Jeff.

  “I found some information indicating that IntelliHealth was treating 2.3 million patients with vaccinations for Rn186. It caught my attention because I also saw a report saying that 2.3 million was the city census. I was interested, so I did a little digging and started comparing annual census numbers. And now I’m here bothering you.”

  Ryan was smiling his best ‘I’m really not crazy’ smile.

  “Are you saying there is some sort of correlation to the vaccinations for Rn186?” said Jeff.

  “No, not really. It was just odd to me that IntelliHealth would have complete records for inoculating everyone in the city. I thought that most people would be getting their shots from other places like their local doctors or job sites. Why would IntelliHealth have records on everyone?” said Ryan.

  “Hmm, interesting. I don’t know. But back to the birthrate question, if there was some sort of problem, I think there are too many people working on it for it to be hidden for very long.”

  “Well thanks Jeff, you’ve made me feel a little better.”

  “Anytime Ryan. If you like, I can call you if I find out anything new.”

  “Thanks that would be great. Take it easy.”

  Ryan went back to his office feeling a little better. Maybe he had simply touched on an issue that was already being addressed, and if he hadn’t heard anything in the news, maybe it just wasn’t newsworthy. Jeff worked with the scientists in the labs; it was good to know that he wasn’t concerned. Still though, he couldn’t help wondering if Jeff really knew the full story himself.

  Back in the lab, Jeff went to the file cabinet where he kept the most recent papers he’d received. He opened it up and pulled out a paper titled, ‘Infertility, the Price for Perfection?’

  He sat down to read the first section.

  As Ryan was suggesting, had he like everyone else, missed this? Could there be something huge happening all around them, to which he’d been oblivious? He decided to discuss it with Bender at the next opportunity.

  In the meantime, he decided to write to one of his best friends who was a practicing obstetrician in India. He sent an electronic mail that said only, ‘Dearest Amala - how many babies have you delivered lately?’

  Jim sat in his cubicle staring at his screens.

  He had been looking for any signs that the system needed a fresh update, and found an odd entry in the hospital security log. It was a single line of code that shouldn’t be there.

  #starEtrySIDnet12B34b61 ‘let Sc3356BBB 9’

  It was odd to see it here, because he had deleted it yesterday.

  Strings like this weren’t really all that unusual.

  As systems ran, they would collect code debris from unexpected interactions between systems. They never deleted their directories, so these entries were never purged. They built up over time. In the old days, if enough accumulated, they could hamper response times. This wasn’t as true today, but it was still a good practice to clean them out when you found them.

  Jim had worked on powerful systems like this before. For several years he’d worked for the International Space Program. He was part of the team that upgraded the space station so that it shared a strong safe network with the tiny lunar colony, Haven 1.

  He remembered how excited he’d been to come here. Working on the system that Steve Ranks built was awesome at first, but the truth was there wasn’t much to do. Occasionally, a project would come up that was interesting for a while. Inevitably he would end up here again, looking at screens of virtual flotsam and jetsam for hours.

  The truth was that this system didn’t really need him.

  So here he sat, staring at the code bit he had found, wondering if meant anything.

  When he had first started looking through the Hospital logs yesterday, he found this line with a few others that were nonsensical, and cleaned them out. Checking his work again today, he found that this one was back.

  He called to his team-leader, David.

  “Hey Dave, I’m sending you a screen 122, can you take look at something for just a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He and David often had conversations over the partition wall, and so without getting up Jim sent an invitation to Dave to see the screen he was looking at on his own monitor. David paused what he was working on, and opened the invitation from Jim.

  “Ok, what am I looking at?”

  Jim sighed, “Well, it’s not a new video game. It’s part of the security log from the Hospital, from last night.”

  “Okay, what’s wrong with it?” David said.

  “See that bit in line 1006, the #starEtrySID… thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea what that is?” he asked.

  “No, why? Who cares? It’s garbage code, a fragment of a bit string, just delete it.”

  “Yeah, that’s the funny part. I deleted it yesterday and it’s back.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well delete it again; maybe you made a mistake yesterday.”

  ‘Flathead,” he thought. He wanted to say, ‘I don’t make those kinds of mistakes,’ but thought better of it.

  In his best happy-voice, Jim said, “Okay, thanks.”

  He deleted the line and wondered why he’d come here.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he thought, ‘it was for the excitement.’

  After the weekend, Ryan started his Monday morning with another look at the Rn186 treatment to see if the number count had changed again. Sure enough, it went up by a few more.

  They were getting around.

  He had told Jean to wait to take Alex to the doctor. Right now there was no pressure to take the inoculation, and there were no cases reported of Rn186. He wanted to slow down and see what was going on around IntelliHealth before getting any more shots.

  He got a call from Theresa asking if he had time to visit with Mr. James. He said sure, and headed to Ben’s office. When he arrived Ben waved him in, as he wrapped up a phone call and said goodbye.

  “Ok Ryan, I’ve thought about it, and I will approve your request to talk with some of the other facilities. However, I want you to do a few very important things. First, start with the facility in London. That’s Jack Spree’s place and he and I are friends. He would call me before going off to the higher-ups. Second, never refer to this as a departmental request. You are interested in an anomaly here, and want to talk with some folks around other facilities on your own initiative.”

  Standing up and walking around the desk, he continued, “It is not my inte
ntion to throw you to the wolves if things get hot, but I do not want to escalate this to a departmental level request. There are protocols that they will have to follow if we do, and there will be a lot of subsequent attention. Do you understand?”

  Trying to restrain his enthusiasm, Ryan said, “Yes Ben, I believe I do.”

  “Third, do not raise concerns that are not present. By that I mean do not exaggerate, or embellish anything to make it sound worse that it is, even accidentally. Choose your words very carefully when you talk with these people.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “And Ryan, if you do find anything over there, I want to know about it before anyone else.”

  “I understand, Ben.”

  Ryan, on his way back to his office, was eager to get started, and just a little surprised. Judging from Ben’s previous reaction, Ryan had doubts that he would get the necessary approval to proceed. Ben must suspect something, or maybe the pressure for answers was increasing from above. Now he realized he had a new problem, who-in-the-hell was he going to call in London?

  “Janis, you understand how expensive this machine is, yes?”

  Through wet eyes, and a lot of sniffing, she said, “Yes, sir.”

  Jeff put on his lab coat and stared at the broken centrifuge.

  The grad student next to him was in tears.

  She had been running experiments, and had forgotten to re-balance the machine. It happened all the time with students. Truth was, it might happen to the senior investigators too, but they relied on SID to perform these actions. However, it was the job of the lab director to sufficiently drive home the point that they could not tolerate sloppy practices. He had inherited the responsibility with his last promotion, and had to admit it was more fun to be on this side of the conversation.

  “You understand that your sloppy actions could have seriously hurt another person in our lab?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This was a total myth, perpetuated by lab directors going back to the beginning. However the picture of a broken bucket sending fragments bursting through the centrifuge case and spraying shrapnel around the room was a powerful one.

  “You understand that everyone’s work will be slowed down until we can get a new one here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This was also a myth. There were countless centrifuges around the building. But again, it was part of the age-old speech given by lab administrators everywhere.

  “As penance, you will arrive early every morning for two weeks, and clean the lab benches, yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And with that, she was off.

  It was over and the only thing left was to send in a requisition for a new one.

  He didn’t notice that his supervisor Dr. Bender had stepped up, and was waiting quietly behind him.

  “You know Dr. Sarin,” he said with a grin, “I seem to remember giving you that exact same speech, and almost in this exact same spot.”

  Startled, Jeff turned around to see Dr. Bender smiling at him.

  “Ah yes, and I recall you made me clean your lab benches for a month.”

  “It’s possible; I don’t really remember that part.”

  They both laughed as they walked towards Jeff’s office.

  Bender walked in, and sat down, “Jeff, I got your message, and so here I am.”

  Jeff shut his door, and sat down too.

  “Dr. Bender, I know you don’t like to waste time, so I’m just going to ask, is there something happening to the birth rate?”

  Bender instantly took on a very somber look.

  He hesitated before answering, as if he was weighing what could, or maybe should be said.

  “Jeff, you have been a valuable person on my team. I watched you grow up into the excellent scientist you are today. I won’t lie to you, but I will caution you on what you might say afterwards. I imagine that this is more than educational, this is a personal matter as well, isn’t it?”

  Suddenly Jeff was uncomfortable in his chair, and the room felt warmer than it should. Jeff and his wife were married a year ago, and had been trying to get pregnant, so far without much luck.

  Bender continued, “The truth is birth rates across the world have dropped significantly. And even more so in the last couple of years. In our faculty meetings, this subject is now our greatest concern. Nearly all of the IntelliHealth research is focused on fertility, and the human condition.”

  Jeff was stunned, “What is causing it? How is this not known?”

  “We don’t know the cause. Some are suggesting that it is a natural biological reaction to our longer lifetimes. For example, it is known that longer-lived animals such as elephants, whales and some sea turtles produce less offspring than shorter-lived animals.”

  Bender knew Jeff and his wife had been trying to get pregnant unsuccessfully for quite a while now. He could see the stress building in his friend.

  In a calm voice he continued, “Some believe it is an environmental factor of a kind we simply have not been able to isolate, maybe even something to do with our new particle-smashers.”

  He took a deep breath and continued, “Other more radical views suggest that our tampering with human cell-signaling has turned off something necessary to reproduce. Flipped a switch in our genetic make-up. But I stress that there is no evidence to support this idea.”

  Jeff said, “What do you believe Dr. Bender?”

  “I don’t know, and I won’t pretend to. You asked why this isn’t known. It’s because this has come upon us so quickly. We still don’t have all the numbers. I believe we were fairly quick to react when the first data was collected and submitted. Our work now is not completely different from identifying a sort of plague. Right now our best minds are driving SID with new tests around the clock.”

  “Currently, more than anything else, we need more information, more concrete data. The next round of census numbers will be gathered shortly. We took steps to work with our government officials to access their vaccination numbers. Because of this, we’ll have a more accurate update on the census soon,” he said.

  Bender stood up and leaned towards Jeff, putting his hand on his shoulder. “Jeff above all else, we must remain calm. We simply do not have any facts and there is nothing to gain from these rumors right now. We do not know enough at this time to react in any other way.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Bender, I understand.”

  Bender left Jeff, still sitting at his desk.

  He reached for his in-box again, and pulled out that paper on infertility.

  Jim was still between projects, when he found himself back at the Hospital Security Log looking for the code fragment again. Opening a fresh bottled water, and a bag of chips he scrolled down the entries from last night. And there it was, the little string of characters was back.

  #starEtrySIDnet12B34b61 ‘let Sc3356BBB 9’

  “Well, hello there, my little friend,” he said under his breath.

  This was enough to become an issue for Jim. Random code fragments could appear, but they could not repeat.

  It defied logic. This was something different.

  He decided to catch the program that was generating this entry.

  He could simply write a monitor program and let it run 24 hours a day, but any constant surveillance would be detected by David. The protocol would be for David to request a report with explanations and documentation from Jim. It would also mean a lot of attention and scrutiny on what Jim was doing. It was nothing he couldn’t handle, but why go there if it wasn’t necessary.

  Instead, he believed that with a little clever scripting, he could accomplish the same thing. So he began writing a script that would search for the fragment every second from six o’clock in the evening, through the night and end at six o’clock in the morning. This was a twelve-hour period, which more than covered the usual time frame for when the entry had been appearing. And the next time it happened, his script would trace the entry backwards, and identify the
executable responsible.

  He smiled as he uploaded his ‘monitor’ script to the server.

  ‘I’m coming for you,’ he thought.

  Later that morning, while performing light maintenance on server apps, he received a message from Mr. James. It went to the whole program team asking them to meet with him at two o’clock. He called over the partition wall to David.

  “Hey Dave, did you see that message from Ben just now?”

  “Yeah, I got it too.”

  “Know what it’s about?” he said.

  “Nope. We have about two hours to kill before our system scans are wrapped up. Want to kill some orcs?” said David.

  David had recently bought the latest version of the Dungeon Master series and was always looking to play.

  “Sure, why not. I’m always ready for some mass destruction.”

  Ryan’s challenge was to find his own counterpart at the London facility. Being as he was recently hired, and that there was no such position prior to that point, it made finding his counterpart difficult. He wondered what would be better, talking with an IT person or someone in the hospital administration.