Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  “I’m so sorry.” Reality came crashing in, washing away the post-vacation glow. Five minutes: that had to be a record. “Is Charles back?” she asked.

  “Not yet. And yes, by the way, to a ride home tonight. I’m about to run out for a little while, but I expect to be back no later than three. Holler when you’re ready.”

  “Will do,” Kim said. But first she was going to find out what Aaron had learned.

  * * *

  Aaron, it turned out, had learned a lot during Kim’s time away.

  She had found him with Crystal Nordling in the main Bio lab. Kim saw only one change from her previous visit. The skeleton had traded its Santa cap for ski goggles and poles.

  “Trust me,” Aaron said, “we’ve made progress. We have some video that’s instructive. Each movie shows a neural tissue culture growing in time-lapse photography. Crystal?”

  Crystal, seated at a lab PC, moused open a file. “The scopes captured images every few minutes. Here’s a representative sample.” On the main lab display a random smear of neurons appeared. “That’s a brand-new culture. Now watch two weeks condensed into two minutes.”

  It wasn’t pretty like the time-lapse view of a flower opening, but Kim was rapt. Almost from the start axons and dendrites groped toward particular spots. A digital counter clicked up in a corner of the window; as the count increased, more and more synapses formed. After a week synapses lay scattered throughout, but clustering was apparent. At two weeks, the crowding of axons and dendrites around a few spots in the sample was undeniable.

  “Here’s another example,” Crystal said. This video also showed synapses forming, the concentration points arrayed in a pentagon. “And a third.” Now the synapses converged around vertices of a hexagon.

  “You set bots at those locations,” Kim guessed. “Then there’s no question bots stimulate synapse formation?”

  “Not for me,” Aaron said. “We have more examples, each forming a different pattern—letters, numbers, geometrics—always matching the initial placement of nanobots.”

  Crystal merely nodded.

  “And it’s not only the appearance of synapses …?” Kim ground to a halt. She didn’t know what, exactly, she was trying to ask.

  “That’s an excellent question.” Aaron opened a supply cabinet, removing a stoppered flask and a pipette. “Allow me to rephrase it. Do nanobots affect only the growth patterns of neurons, or also the behavior of neurons? Crystal and I had wondered about that, too. To find out, we look to see whether synaptic activity reflects the presence of the bots.” He raised the flask, gently swirling its contents. “That’s what this is for.”

  This turned out to be a voltage-sensitive fluorescent dye. The firing of a neuron released ions into the synaptic cleft, creating a temporary voltage difference between axon and dendrite. The more active the synapse, the more ions were released—and the brighter the fluorescence.

  Aaron emptied a pipette of dye into a petri dish, then gently rocked the dish back and forth until the dye dispersed. As he positioned the dish on the viewing platform of an optical microscope, Crystal dimmed the ceiling lights. A hint of green leaked out of the scope into the room. Then Aaron projected the image, a mass of green-tinged cells and synapses.

  Emerald light blazed from six spots, from every corner of a hexagon.

  * * *

  The deli was unassuming, not quite fast food but order-at-the-counter casual. During the midday rush, maybe two hours each workday, the place did a booming business. The rest of the week you could set off a bomb here and hurt no one. Brent had suggested the eatery for its location between Utica and Clinton, convenient for both Megan and him.

  Queuing up for the counter, they eyeballed the menu board and discussed their lunch options. Brent chose a gyro platter and Megan went with a salad. They chatted about their recent holidays: he, his fictitious ski outing and injury, omitting the imaginary ski bunnies; she, her trip home to Illinois. Sunlight, some direct, more glinting off the snow cover, poured blindingly through the south-facing window wall. There were neither shades nor blinds to be closed.

  Their orders finally taken and filled, he and Megan carried their trays to an open table. They hung their coats over the backs of chairs, Brent taking the seat that faced the wall of glass. Skirt and sweater was a whole different look for her from short shorts and T-shirt.

  He said, “So, here we are.”

  “Here we are,” Megan agreed. There was a trace of a question mark at the end.

  “You’re wondering why I called.”

  “After seven months?” Megan picked up her fork. “I thought we hit it off, but when you didn’t call I decided it was just me. Look, Kim threw us together that day. You didn’t owe me a call then, and you don’t owe me an explanation now. But sure, I’m curious.”

  If only this were about his libido reawakening, or even about discussing da Bulls and da Bears with another Chicago ex-pat. Brent’s need was far more elemental—to restore some normalcy to his life. His qualms loomed as large. He had invited Megan to lunch because lunch wouldn’t take interminably long if things went badly.

  He said, “Kim merely thinks she knows everything I do. Soon after you and I met, a relationship I thought was something else flared up.” That was even truth of a sort, but a truth Megan could not possibly understand. Without a second consciousness in their head, who could?

  “Makes sense.” Megan smiled. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Then I’ll assume the fork you’re holding won’t be coming at me. Go ahead and eat.” Brent started on his own food.

  She told funny stories about library-impaired Hamilton College students. He mentioned an offbeat band whose music he had discovered. (Kim had discovered it, and passed it along. Brent/One did not waste time on such frivolous searches.) They talked about last summer’s big movies, only one of which he had seen.

  After a while, Brent put on his VR specs. “The glare is brutal.”

  That was another partial truth. The mirrored specs did double duty as sunglasses, but being offline so long had left him jumpy. Putting them on was soothing.

  Why kid himself? A ready-made excuse for wearing the specs—that was why he had opted for lunch and this particular deli. He had planned for failure.

  Getting to know Megan. Crippling the homeless men. Hospitalizing and discarding Ethan. Brent struggled to feel anything about any of them. All were but fading shadows of a world lost to him.

  But what of the new world?

  With a flick/blink, Brent confirmed that Morgan and Brittany were online in VirtuaLife, orienting the latest recruits. Progress? Brent IMed.

  Quick studies, Morgan answered. The attached file, blinked open, revealed a long list of training results.

  Brent tried to imagine how it would have been to transform over a couple weeks, not many months. With hypnotic suggestions to ease his concerns and guide him along the path. To know that he was evolving, not crazy. To be planned and guided, not just … happen.

  Flick/blink: another virtual window opened. Through Schultz’s eyes, Brent peeked in on Charles on his virtual beach. Charles was Brent’s personal pupil and the most advanced of all; Two had fully emerged more than a week earlier. Charles remained on his Caribbean retreat even as three weeks stretched past four, baffling the island doctors (and stymieing Dan Garner, increasingly impatient) with nonspecific, nondiagnosable symptoms.

  Crystal Nordling was a brilliant thinker—just how capable, Brent was only very recently able to perceive. As an experimentalist, she left much to be desired. As a delegator, she was hopeless. It had been expedient to let her create chaos within the Biology Department. Later, it would take that much longer for anyone to understand what had been removed. As for later …

  Flick/blink: he added Alan, stuck in the Garner Nanotech main lobby, checking IDs. The mundane task did not keep Alan/Three from annotating the imagery Three had stored from his/their latest patrol through the factory.

  The moment would come so
on for the Emergents to act. Alan/Three’s assignment was to create an optimal sequence for selectively looting the plant and its inventory. Despite corridors stacked with equipment being staged into the factory, despite ongoing maintenance and upgrades and repositioning of the production lines, despite overflowing storerooms repeatedly unloaded and repacked to get at parts and materials, despite the daily bounty of crates and pallets and chemical vats that came across the loading docks …

  It was a factory-sized 3-D jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces kept moving about, and not even the set of pieces remained constant. Captain America could never have conceptualized the problem, let alone worked it. Alan/Three was someone quite different.

  2 hours, Brent reminded Alan. When the day came, that was the longest they dared risk taking.

  More text and imagery flickered in a corner of Brent’s online vision. That was One, communing with its cohorts at a rate to which Brent could still only aspire. A rate that no old-style human could imagine.

  Almost as an afterthought, Brent directed Charles to return. For as long as Dan Garner remained overseas, safe from transformation, the boss’s impatience mattered. At work tomorrow.

  “… Game this Saturday afternoon,” Megan was saying. “Hardly of Blackhawks caliber, but I enjoy watching them. Are you interested?”

  Huh? Brent accessed One’s digital memory to replay the last few seconds. Megan was talking about the college hockey team. While his attention had been elsewhere, One had had him nodding at appropriate moments.

  The faster Brent/One’s mind sped, the harder the niceties of basic social interaction became. He dredged up enough humanity to feel lousy about calling Megan. “Saturday? I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  Even as the ever-softer, ever-more-distant voice that was old Brent chided him for begrudging Megan the merest fraction of his attention, she suddenly remembered an afternoon meeting for which she had to prepare. They parted ways as noncommittally as after their first encounter. He guessed they could agree on one thing: he should not have bothered to call her.

  Old Brent called him a jerk.

  Brent drove to Garner Nanotech, glad that Kim was back in town and in need of a ride home. Deep memories and old relationships seemed to have the most persistence. Harder to rewire, he supposed.

  Whether or not that was the explanation, Kim was his last anchor to normalcy. For how much longer he did not know.…

  * * *

  Information overload, Kim thought. This would have been a lot to process even if she weren’t just returned from two weeks away. “I’ll need time to take it all in. I assume the data is on the G: drive.” G: was for data shared across R & D. “What’s the folder name?”

  Crystal shook her head. “Everything you’ve seen is on the Biology Department server.”

  Which was to say on F:, to which Kim did not have access. “Would you mind giving me read access?”

  “I don’t know.” Crystal dithered for a while. It was evidently a big decision. Chewing her lower lip helped. “It’s supposed to be department internal.”

  “Then put a copy on G: for me,” Kim said, trying not to sigh. Aaron had had to leave for a patient appointment. As the plant doctor, Aaron wasn’t technically in the Biology Department. She wondered if he had access.

  “I don’t know, Kim. This is pretty sensitive information.”

  And I’m a freaking department head, not a seat warmer like you. Kim toyed with the idea of going over Crystal’s head. But did she really want to get into a fight on her first day back? Not while there were other options. Not when there were more substantive matters to debate with Tyra. It had come out, just before Aaron dashed away, that the FDA remained uninformed about this line of research.

  “How about this, Crystal? We’ll encrypt the G: copy. I can set that up for you.”

  More lip chewing. “Okay,” Crystal finally said. She relinquished the workstation from which she was logged into the lab network.

  Ten minutes later, Kim had set up and tested a simple script. It locally copied the neural-culture results folder, encrypted the copy, and moved the encrypted version to the general share drive. The script would run every morning to keep her copy current. When Kim had finished, she thanked Crystal profusely.

  Then, in her office for the first time since before Christmas, Kim wrote a second script. She gave this script an innocuous name, put it into a utilities folder among dozens of innocent programs, and scheduled it to execute every evening. The new script produced a copy of the copy, padded the second copy with meaningless filler, renamed it, and reencrypted it. The final version could not be identified by comparison to the file Crystal knew about.

  The outcome from this experiment would not be lost like the first time.

  monday evening, january 9, 2017

  Muttering instructions to herself and firmly rejecting all offers of help, Sladja Sanders bustled between her cramped kitchen and tiny dining room in a crescendo of pre-dinner activity. Her hair was dark, as were her eyes, complexion, and scowl—and the scowl, judging from her frown lines, was as permanent as the rest. The Sanders children, who had been fed earlier and sent to play in their room, kept appearing to tug for attention at her pant legs and apron; Sladja shooed them away loudly (and, when words did not propel them quickly enough, with a long-handled wooden spoon that aimed for, but never quite connected with, their knuckles). She looked Slavic and spoke with an accent.

  Kim sat with Aaron at the dining-room table, the living room having been declared off-limits. Maybe her puzzlement showed, because Aaron whispered that on the Serbian Orthodox calendar Christmas had fallen just two days earlier. Kim concluded the living room was a wreck and entirely understood.

  Sladja was not at all what Kim had expected, and she wondered why. The scowl, Kim finally decided. It was nearly impossible to reconcile Aaron’s whimsy with such severity. Talk about opposites attracting.

  “Something smells delicious,” Kim called out the next time her hostess appeared. Kim got only a preoccupied nod in response.

  Aaron chuckled. “At this stage of the meal, you’d never guess Sladja is a whiz at entertaining. I’ve come to accept that it’s her obsessing over the details that makes everything turn out so well.”

  A cold, wet nose insinuated itself under a leg of Kim’s slacks. She leaned over and gave Bruce, a yellow Lab, a good head-scratching. He collapsed contentedly at her feet. “That’s a very good boy,” she told the dog. “Thanks for inviting me, Aaron.”

  “My pleasure. We’d have asked you over sooner if you hadn’t gone out of town.” He grinned. “Maybe now Sladja will forgive the burnt grilled cheese on your first visit to her home.”

  The invitation could not have come at a better time, and not only because Kim had had no opportunity to buy groceries. “I am so frustrated, Aaron. What you and Crystal showed me this afternoon seems ironclad. Why hasn’t the FDA been notified yet?”

  “Later,” was all Aaron managed as Sladja bustled back—this time, finally, to stay—bearing a platter heaped with something breaded and rolled.

  Pork, by the smell of it. It was Somebody Steak and Kim had never heard of Prince Somebody, but after one bite she took an instant liking to the man. The meat was indeed pork, wrapped around not-quite cream cheese, breaded and fried, and then garnished with tartar sauce. Sladja smiled at Kim’s attempt to pronounce the name of the dish. An inspired, put-on second try with Kim’s broadest Southern accent got an actual friendly laugh. There were also roasted potatoes, a red-pepper-and-eggplant salad, and a circular loaf of bread fresh from the oven.

  “This is delicious,” Kim said. “Everything is. Sladja, you are a marvel.”

  “You haven’t yet had everything,” Sladja corrected, smiling. “Save room for dessert.”

  The cold, wet nose returned. Aaron braved a stern look to pass scraps to the dog. There was a lull in eating while Sladja—glowering when Kim stood to help—cleared the table.

  “Dessert,” Kim said. It was
a plea for dispensation: she was stuffed. She sat back down.

  “Baklava. You’ll like it. Trust me.”

  If the main course was any guide, she undoubtedly would—assuming she didn’t explode. Kim called out to the kitchen, “Sladja, how old were you when you left Bosnia?”

  “She was twenty-two,” Aaron said. “Bosnia was a mess, and Sarajevo was under siege.”

  The reply was unusually terse for Aaron, and he looked uncharacteristically introspective. Kim wondered why he had answered. She called again to the kitchen, “Do you ever miss home?”

  Sladja appeared from the kitchen, this time with a tray of coffee cups. “This is home,” she said insistently, adding more softly, to herself, “I lost too much there.” She set down the coffee, sloshing it in her haste, and disappeared again into the kitchen. She did not bustle back.

  “I’m so sorry. Should I …?” Kim wrung her linen napkin, at a loss how to complete the sentence. Make her excuses and leave? Apologize? Pretend nothing had happened?

  “You couldn’t have known.” Aaron took a deep breath. “We don’t know in America how lucky we have it. I wised up the hard way, patching up GIs caught in the cross fire between Shiites and Sunnis nursing grudges a millennium old. Sadly, there are places with hatreds too ancient for some people to get past. Kosovo. Lebanon. Eritrea.”

  Sladja returned, dabbing reddened eyes with a corner of her apron. “And Sarajevo.”

  “Aaron, Sladja, you don’t have to explain—”

  “The shooting was awful enough. For a long time, just to leave your house was to risk the snipers. Next it was mortars.” Sladja shook her head, as though to cast out the memories. “Then those”—the next word, something Serbian, spat as much as spoken, required no translation—“discovered car bombs.”

  Aaron went to Sladja, holding her and slowly stroking her hair. “Park a car filled with explosives. Trigger it with a cell phone as your target is passing, or at any time at all if you aren’t so discriminating. That’s ‘warfare’ in our enlightened times. So anyone who imagined himself a potential target began carrying radio jammers, to stop from arming any bombs he might happen to pass. Normal people would have been stymied at that point—