Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  Assuming Charles was home. Mother and children had tramped out through a side door, providing Brent no view into the garage. The low-to-the-ground Tesla was doubtless inside until the spring thaw. With the garage door closed, Brent could not tell whether Charles’s winter Volvo presently sat next to the sports car.

  Brent had not phoned ahead to ask about stopping by. If you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question.

  The minivan finally backed onto the road and headed toward the subdivision exit. Brent took a minute to wonder, am I really going to do this?

  The world went black. It slowly faded, somehow, even more scarily, to nothing at all. One taking control of his vision, making a point: act now, or be a freak, alone, until he/they died.

  If the FDA got wind of Charles’s petri-dish experiment, there would be consequences—and there might never be a Two. Brent focused on a short answer, I know. The response, for all that he could not see it, must have reached One, because the outside world returned.

  He drove onto Charles’s empty driveway, cinders crunching beneath his tires. Reluctantly, Brent folded his VR specs and slid them into his shirt pocket. He would need to make good eye contact. Along the walkway to the front porch, burlap-wrapped bushes bowed under the weight of snow. He stepped onto the porch and rang the bell.

  The door swung open. Jeans and a plaid flannel shirt was a whole new look for Charles. This once, the shifting of Charles’s eyebrows was easy to decode: surprise. “Brent. Hello.”

  “Do you have a minute, Charles?”

  “Sure, Brent. Come in.”

  Brent wiped his shoes on the mat and stepped inside. “I’m not disturbing anything, am I?” he probed.

  “Amy took the kids to some Christmas movie.” Charles grinned. “For my purposes, it’s The Escape Claus.”

  Old Brent had a sense of humor. He would have found that amusing. Then again, old Brent was capable of many things he seemed to have lost. Like guilt and shame.

  Charles hung up Brent’s coat and led the way to the oak-paneled den at the back of the house. Logs blazed in the fireplace. An open novel rested facedown on a table beside one of the leather wing chairs that flanked the hearth. Snail mail and holiday catalogs lay strewn across the desktop. The computer was off. “What’s this about, Brent?”

  Brent studied his shoes in a show of embarrassment. “I heard something about an experiment with neural cultures.”

  Charles took one of the wing chairs. “Sit. Okay, I assume Kim told you. She thought a friend should be the one to break the news to you.”

  “She did, yesterday … kind of. The explanation was sort of muddled. I didn’t want to wait till Monday to hear the straight version.” Brent tried and failed to regret criticizing Kim, and unfairly at that. Nothing he said here would get back to her.

  He had yet to sit. “It sounded like something a doctor should explain.”

  “Indeed.” Charles pursed his lips, considering how to proceed. “It’s a bit—”

  “Of bad news. That much I got.” Brent gazed into the fire. Confident of the answer from many a company party, he asked, “Hence let me ask a favor. Do you have any Scotch?”

  “Always.” Charles stood, crossed the room, and opened the leather-covered globe that disguised a compact bar. “Ice? Water? I can get some.”

  “No thanks.” When Charles filled just one tumbler, Brent added, “You wouldn’t let me drink alone, would you?”

  “I suppose not.” Still, the second tumbler got only a splash of Scotch. “Cheers.”

  Brent reached toward the emptier glass. “I’m driving.” A pill hid between thumb and index finger. His other hand, in a pant pocket, squeezed a button on the keyless remote. His car alarm wailed.

  Charles’s head whipped around toward the sound.

  Brent dropped the trank into the fuller tumbler before grabbing the other one. “Oops. Sorry.” He took out his key chain and silenced his car alarm. “About these neuron cultures?”

  “Ah, yes.” Charles picked up the remaining glass and sat. “An interesting experiment. Several cultures, in a variety of nutrient solutions. All with bots added, as—”

  “Good health,” Brent interrupted, raising his glass. Hint, hint. He took a sip before, finally, sitting down.

  “Good health.” Charles took his own sip. “So, several cultures. Many with CSF, that’s cerebrospinal fluid, included. A few synapses always form spontaneously in neuron cultures, so it wasn’t evident at first that anything out of the ordinary …”

  Brent let his host prattle on, struck by the irony in that label: “host.” From time to time, he sipped his Scotch and watched Charles sip his own. The explanation from Charles confirmed everything Kim had said. Nanobots cultured with CSF triggered no immune reaction. Nanobots stimulated synapse formation. So if bots did, somehow—impossibly, as Charles would have it—get behind the blood-brain barrier …

  Nods and the occasional “uh-huh” kept the narrative coming. Brent fished for only one clarification: the location of the damning cell cultures. Those had to go. Charles liked the sound of his own voice. That voice grew softer and softer, and the words slower.

  Sedating his victims was not usually this dicey. Alan Watts, the first time, had been simplicity itself, chugging a beer that Brent had opened and drugged in another room. Half the bums Brent had practiced on were in drunken stupors when he came upon them. The rest accepted bottles, no questions asked—until word of the assaults got out. That was the end of his practice.

  If vagrants had their demons, so did Brent. Dreams, arcane research, One’s experiences, and Brent’s own, eerie déjà vu all melded into an amorphous whole. Daunting images—no, damning memories!—flickered accusingly behind his eyes: wandering the slums of Utica, operated like a puppet; improvisations done in thrall to the inchoate yearnings of a personality not yet fully emerged; his recollections dismissed by light of day as nightmare …

  Possession was like hypnosis. It was sufficient to motivate (in this case, “I’m lonely”) and plant the suggestion (“Make more like us”). Brent had done the rest. Like a man in a trance, he had invented a strategy, rationalized his actions, and dismissed everything as dream. He had distanced himself from the plan—his plan—even now coming to fruition.

  He ought to be outraged and terrified. He tried to be outraged, and failed. A homunculus sat within his brain, meddling with his thoughts, flooding him with some hormones and soaking up others.

  Pulling his strings.

  Focus! Brent commanded himself. Or was that One ordering him?

  Was he going to do this? Truly? Merely to imagine the procedure set Brent’s fingers in motion, rehearsing. He pictured—no, he remembered—snapping on latex gloves, his hands questing along the lower spine, probing until he found the lumbar vertebrae, counting, pressure-marking a spot on the skin with his fingernail. Between L4 and L5, the detail came, unbidden—like the popping sensation the needle made puncturing the fibrous membrane of the dura. He remembered the slight resistance as the needle slid in, and the subtle change in feeling as the needle approached the nerve bundles that split from the base of the spinal cord. He remembered …

  Like riding a bicycle, then. Still, he would have liked to do a lumbar puncture once more, fully in control, on someone expendable, before doing the procedure on Charles.

  He would like to have felt a trace of remorse about the things he had done, and was about to repeat.

  But what choice was there? The FDA, notified that Garner Nanotech’s medical nanobots did not self-destruct in CSF, would almost certainly revoke the conditional approval for their use. And if told, or if FDA researchers discovered on their own, that bots of the current design stimulated synapse formation? The entire inventory of bots would be ordered destroyed. He/One would be alone … and eventually, inevitably, extinct. The life Charles had known was perfectly expendable to avoid that fate. One was entirely amoral.

  Whatever happened, Brent refused to kill—hoping desperately t
hat he could enforce that stance. No one-of-a-kind could understand family and friendship, culture and law. No one-of-a-kind could grasp the waste that was Angleton.

  When had hundreds of deaths become, simply, “a waste”? Where had the outrage gone? Brent could not remember the last time he had even thought about Ron Korn—and, scarier still, Brent could not bring himself to mourn. All that remained of his feelings toward the tragedy was selfish fear for his personal safety. Or its personal safety.

  I’ve become a monster, Brent decided. He tried without success to find even that scary.

  Charles prattled on, yawning, oblivious. Also, though he could not know it, about ready.

  Charles alive, discrediting his own neural-culture experiment, was more useful than Charles dead, subject of a police investigation. And posed far less risk that Brent/One would spend the remainder of his/their life in a prison cell or psychiatric ward. Charles transformed, a partner, would be an invaluable resource. “Proceed,” flashed across Brent’s field of vision.

  “… And I’ll be filling in Dan about these lab results.” Charles rubbed his eyes, but as soon as he stopped his eyelids drooped. “Before anyone contacts the FDA with these latest findings, I want Dan in the loop.”

  Brent said, “You seem tired.”

  “Yeah, I feel tired.”

  “Very tired.” Brent looked directly into Charles’s eyes. “You look like you could nod off right there in your chair. Very tired.”

  “Uh-huh. Maybe we should plan to talk more tomor—”

  “Look at me. You’re sleepy.” Brent heard Samir’s soothing, level tones in his mind’s ear—or replayed from One’s memories?—and emulated them. “You’re very sleepy.”

  “I’m sleepy,” Charles agreed. His eyelids drooped farther.…

  * * *

  Carpet fibers tickled Charles’s cheek. His forehead felt sticky. His shirt was untucked. Why was he on the floor? He opened his eyes.

  Brent Cleary knelt beside him. “Charles! Are you all right? You went down like a sack of potatoes.”

  As though through a fog, Charles considered the question. “I’m okay.” Yes, come to think about it, he was better than okay. He was fine. “I guess I fell.”

  “No doubt about it. And you whacked your head on the table.”

  Then the stickiness on my forehead is blood. “Can I get up?”

  Brent laughed. “You’re the doctor.”

  Right. “I think I’ll sit up.” He did. Blood trickled into his eyes and down his cheek.

  Brent gave him a handkerchief. “You cut your forehead. You might want to apply pressure.”

  “Maybe we should call nine-one-one.”

  “You’re fine,” Brent said. His voice was soft and calming. “There’s no need to call nine-one-one.”

  That sounded right. “There’s no need to call nine-one-one,” Charles agreed.

  “You’re very tired, Charles. You should take some time off. A vacation. Maybe three weeks on a quiet beach.”

  “I need time off. A vacation. Three weeks at the beach. To rest.”

  Brent smiled. “Very good. Say it again.”

  “I’m tired. I need a vacation at the beach. I need rest.”

  “Tonight, you’ll call Dan Garner and tell him you need three weeks off. Tell him about your mishap right here in your own den. Tell him you don’t want any big decisions made in Biology while you’re gone. You don’t want to, you can’t, think about one more thing.”

  “I’m tired of thinking,” Charles agreed.

  “Who else in your department knows about the culturing in neural tissue?”

  Kim wasn’t part of Charles’s department. Neither was the factory doc. It was important, somehow, that Charles answer every question precisely. “No one, Brent.”

  The answer seemed to please Brent. Oddly, that pleased Charles. Something else struck Charles as surprising. “I banged my head. Isn’t it funny that it doesn’t hurt?”

  “It does hurt,” Brent replied. The flames flared for a moment as Brent poured the dregs from Charles’s tumbler into the fire. “I told you not to feel it. Concentrate, Charles. You’ll call Dan Garner tonight to …”

  “I’ll call Dan tonight and tell him I need a vacation.”

  “Why do you need a vacation, Charles?”

  “I’m so tired that I fell and whacked my head. I need a vacation.”

  “You fainted, Charles. ‘Fell’ sounds like you tripped or did something careless.”

  “Sorry. I fainted and whacked my head. So I need a vacation. At the beach.”

  “Excellent.” Brent laid the tumbler, on its side, next to the little table. “What else, Charles?”

  Charles basked in the praise. “I’ll insist any major decisions in my department await my return.”

  “And the neuron cultures? Informing the FDA?”

  Charles furrowed his brow. The scab forming on his forehead cracked open; he felt the wound oozing. “Those would be major decisions. I can’t think about one more thing.”

  “That’s right, Charles. I’m very proud of you.”

  Then he was proud. “Thanks for telling me not to feel this cut.”

  “You’re welcome.” Brent helped Charles settle into a chair. “I’m sorry to say, it’s going to hurt later. A lot.”

  “That’s too bad,” Charles decided.

  “But you’re tough, aren’t you, Charles. You don’t want any painkillers. No more booze. Not even an aspirin. You won’t accept anything if offered.”

  “I’ll tough it out.” And he would, although he really didn’t care much for pain. Curious. “Why is that, though?”

  Brent smiled. “It’s only a mild concussion. Just enough, I hope, to tempt nanobots to your brain. Pain markers to show the way.”

  Nanobots? “I don’t understand.”

  “My job gives me the run of the factory,” Brent said. He took a syringe, its long needle capped, from his coat pocket. “This was full of first-aid bots.”

  The joke was on Brent. “The bots won’t go through the BBB.”

  “That’s why I gave you a lumbar puncture, Charles. The bots are in your cerebrospinal fluid. And because I bounced your forehead off the edge of the table, so are injury and pain markers. The bots are backtracking toward your concussion as we speak.”

  Nanobots in CSF did not self-destruct, and they stimulated synapse formation. “I should be upset, shouldn’t I?” Charles wondered why he wasn’t.

  “We’ll talk about that, Charles,” Brent said soothingly. “You trust me, don’t you?”

  “I trust you,” Charles repeated. Abstractly, he wondered about that, too. He had been instructed to trust Brent, he decided.

  “All right, Charles, let’s review. What are you to tell Dan Garner tonight?”

  Charles set down the handkerchief. The flow of blood had slowed to a trickle. “I’m tired. I’m so tired I fainted. I need three weeks of vacation. I don’t want any major decisions made in Biology while I’m gone.” He had not been thinking about taking any vacation until spring, but it all made perfect sense. Without rest, lots of rest, he could faint and hurt himself again. That would be wrong.

  “Excellent, Charles. You will feel much better, relaxed and refreshed, after a vacation.”

  “Amy will be upset that I fainted and have a concussion. Why aren’t I upset?”

  “Because you’re in a hypnotic trance, Charles, and I told you not to worry. When you wake up, you will remember that I dropped by to discuss giving Christmas gifts jointly to the admins at work and that you recommended, oh, let’s say peanut brittle. You will remember that you fainted and bumped your head. Your head will hurt but only until six o’clock tonight. You don’t want to see a doctor. You don’t need medicine. If asked, you will refuse to go to a doctor, clinic, or ER, and you will point out that you are a doctor. If pressed, you will get angry and even more resistant. You will remember what to say to Dan, believing that time off is your own idea.

  “You will forg
et everything else that we discussed since I came to your door. You will not feel any pain or discomfort from the lumbar puncture or notice the entry wound. You won’t bring up with anyone the experiment involving bots in nerve tissue. If anyone asks you about that experiment, you will answer that the petri dishes were obviously contaminated, that any observations of them were meaningless, and so you destroyed the cultures.”

  Charles squinted in concentration, reopening the scab on his forehead. “Why would I destroy the cultures?”

  “You don’t want anyone to draw wrong conclusions from contaminated cultures. It would be a shame for a dirty petri dish or two to throw the upcoming Army field trial into chaos. If I were you, merely the thought of such foolishness would make me mad.”

  “Delay would be a bad thing,” Charles agreed.

  “It could hurt the company and keep the company from going public. That would cost us a fortune. It would cost you a fortune, Charles. Your family would suffer.”

  “Then the cultures should be destroyed,” Charles said firmly. The field trial had to succeed for the IPO to proceed. Of course it would be going public, not failing to, that would make Amy suffer. That was an amusing irony and no one’s business but Charles’s own. “And the computer records, too.”

  “Yes, they should, Charles. It’s good that you understand. If I may continue, upon awakening, you will believe anything I say, answer honestly and completely any question that I ask of you, follow without reservation any suggestions I offer to you, and believe these behaviors entirely normal. Whenever you read or hear the phrase ‘one, two, three, aardvark,’ you will resume a trance state, leaving the trance only when instructed.

  “You will accept without comment whatever happens to you, however out of the ordinary. You will obey these instructions but not consciously remember that they have been given to you. Do you understand everything you are to do, Charles?”