Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  Call it a minute and fifteen seconds.

  An image, horrific, took shape in Brent’s mind: explosion, building collapse, another slaughter of innocents. It was memory and omen both. For an instant he froze.

  Not again!

  He shook off the paralysis and ran to a forklift.

  * * *

  Kim and Harry were halfway to R & D when Aaron fell in alongside her. She read fear and determination in his eyes.

  He shouted, “The second floor is about to come crashing down!”

  Which explained R & D: that part of the facility had no second floor. Aaron squeezed between Kim and Harry, and together they hurried Alan’s chair the rest of the way to an R & D conference room. She was gasping for breath by the time they arrived. Eight people had crowded in ahead of them.

  “Will we be … safe here?” Kim asked.

  “Safer,” Aaron said. “Be right back.”

  “But—”

  Aaron left before she could finish her objection, returning almost as quickly. “Be ready to run again,” he bellowed.

  Kim thought Aaron looked terribly sad. And where was Brent?

  * * *

  At its top speed of fifteen miles per hour, the forklift lurched across the factory floor. It struck the double doors off center, ripping one side from its hinges. Brent swore and overcorrected, impaling a wall with one of the fork tines. He backed up and tried again, veering from side to side, gouging walls as he went.

  The motor was electric and quiet; he bellowed over its drone, “Be ready to run. Be ready to run. You won’t have much time.”

  Aaron peeked out of a cross aisle, his eyes wide with understanding and horror. He ducked back as the forklift bore down on him—and didn’t argue.

  Thirty seconds, best guess, and then the roof came down. “Ready, people!”

  Brent careened through a wall-mangling turn. A fire exit loomed ahead. A red LED stared balefully from the bomb rigged to the door. Closer … closer …

  Brent took his hands from the steering wheel to seal the final gaps in the nanosuit—as futile as the precaution seemed. Flick/blink, he set his visor to near opacity, until he could hardly sense the door straight ahead. At the top of his lungs, he screamed, “Get ready!”

  He had a final moment to remember his failure at Angleton, and the evil he had done since, and to wonder about closure. The exit was about twenty feet ahead.

  Brent dove over the seat back, behind the forklift. He just had time to think, I’m sorry—

  Then blinding glare and deafening sound and an invisible fist sent him into oblivion.

  * * *

  Blam!

  The conference room shook. Kim’s ears rang and she couldn’t hear what Aaron was shouting. Maybe no one could: he was shoving people out the door. Harry pushed Alan, still taped into his chair. Aaron grabbed Kim’s arm and they followed.

  The emergency exit at the end of the hall had ceased to exist, replaced by a gaping hole half-choked with debris. Coughing from the smoke and dust, people slogged through fallen chunks of wall and ceiling. They ducked under the dangling, sparking wires and squeezed past a mangled forklift—where had that come from?—tipped onto its side. They scrambled over the detritus where the door had been, out of the building. Two men on the outside helped Harry lift out Alan and chair.

  Aaron yelled—although Kim still couldn’t hear anything—and pointed behind her, away from the outside and safety. Two arms and two legs, covered in dust, deathly still, peeked from a hole caved into the wallboard. One sleeve bore a familiar keypad: a nanosuit. Brent! Did they dare move him? Did they dare not?

  Brent had been right on top of this explosion. Could he even still be alive?

  Aaron took hold of an arm. Hurry, he mouthed.

  Kim punched in the test code to make Brent’s nanosuit rigid—a full-body cast—and grabbed his other arm. They heaved, and something in the wall shifted ominously. They heaved again, and something in her back tore. A final yank, Kim screaming in pain, and they had Brent out of the shattered wall.

  Then they were stumbling through snow, and Aaron was still tugging. She just barely heard, “Keep moving!” After a few steps her feet skidded out from under her and they tumbled into a heap. In the distance, toward town, red and blue lights flashed: squad cars, fire engines, and ambulances racing toward them.

  With a roar like the end of the world, the building behind them started to collapse.

  EPILOGUE

  sunday, may 21, 2017

  Good food (or so Kim had been promised). Good friends. She wanted to be relaxed, tried to be relaxed, and she failed dismally. Utica stirred up too many memories.

  Still, it was great to see Aaron and Sladja. A few minutes at the bar waiting for their table to be ready and Nick already had the Sanderses charmed. Aaron liked almost everyone, but to keep a big grin on Sladja’s face took talent.

  The restaurant was jammed, which perhaps excused the postage-stamp tables. If postage stamps were ever round. The ambience was all brass and glass and art-deco tile, and very noisy. They sat boy-girl, boy-girl.

  “What kind of appetizer shall we get?” Sladja asked the moment they got menus. “We need to put some meat on your bones, Kim.”

  Yeah, right, Kim thought, letting it pass.

  Aaron leaned close and plucked a quarter from behind Kim’s ear. “A token of our esteem. Dinner is on us, you two. Don’t be shy.”

  “You don’t need—” Nick began.

  “But we want to,” Aaron said firmly. “Next time, don’t elope.”

  Only Kim had learned the hard way—not ten minutes from here, where Garner Nanotech once stood—that life was too short not to elope. She frowned. “I drove by, Aaron.”

  “The old office?” Aaron guessed.

  There, too, but not her point. “CNYPC.” The Central New York Psychiatric Center, a few miles away in Marcy.

  That was Aaron’s cue to look unhappy. “It’s a job, Kim, and this isn’t a region with a lot of them.”

  Kim caught Nick’s eye. He started reviewing appetizer choices with Sladja. He could talk for ten minutes on the merits of various Buffalo wing sauces.

  Kim scooted her chair a bit closer to Aaron. “I want to see Brent. You can get me in.”

  Aaron looked her straight in the eye. “Kim, we’re not talking about a nightclub. It’s a maximum-security psychiatric prison. Unless and until the warden says otherwise, the rule is families only.”

  She shook her head. “Brent’s family can’t get in, either. For psychiatric reasons, they’ve been told. That it would be too dangerous to visit their son, their brother. I don’t buy it.”

  “I’m only an internist, Kim. I can’t overrule the shrinks. You have to keep hoping.”

  That put a damper on the evening. Kim hid behind her menu, thinking furiously of a change of subject—or a change in approach—when someone sidled up to the table.

  “You are her.” The man was short, pear-shaped, and tan, with an excess of teeth. He looked closely at Aaron. “And you’re one of them, too. Garner Nanotech survivors.”

  “I just have that kind of face,” Kim mumbled. All she needed was a celebrity stalker. She’d never wanted to be a celebrity—especially not about that day—and she had never been given the choice. The news vans had followed the first responders up the hill to the blazing ruins. She had long ago stopped counting the clips on YouTube, jerky vids shot on countless cells, of her trying to explain things, of her naming the VR-spec fanatics before they scattered too far and wide. To the police, the FBI, Homeland Security …

  “No, I’m sure you’re her,” the stranger persisted.

  Nick pushed back his chair and stood. He huddled with the stranger and within seconds had the intruder nodding sympathetically. Someday, she’d understand how Nick did that.

  “I’ll leave you folks to your meal. Sorry for interrupting.”

  “So how’s your new job?” Aaron asked, too brightly.

  Back-office software for a b
ank. It took no imagination. It would never change the world. It was in Albany. “It’s exactly what I need right now.”

  The waiter came by to take their orders. After he left, the conversation stayed on safe topics for a while.

  But Kim couldn’t leave things alone. She took a skinny paperback volume of sports trivia out of her handbag. “Aaron, can you give this to him?”

  Aaron looked away. “What the inmates get is very controlled.”

  “Because last season’s baseball stats might be coded instructions for the prison break?” She held out the book until Aaron took it. “Just tell me you’ll try.”

  “Okay.”

  Their appetizers came. Nick carried the conversational ball while Kim picked at her food. A trial would at least have offered a kind of closure. It would have been a way, perhaps, to get past this. Would there ever be a trial? CNYPC housed the criminally insane. It was the only institution in the state where people could be committed against their will.

  Were Brent and the others insane? Well, hearing voices in your head wasn’t usually taken as a sign of mental health. The snag was, maybe Brent and the others did.

  The autopsy on Charles had conclusively shown bots inside his brain. Not much else, apparently: reading between the lines of the news reports, Charles’s head had been crushed like an eggshell. At that memory, she lost any interest in dinner.

  Logically she should be happy Aaron was at CNYPC, a friendly face for Brent. She knew it wasn’t fair to punish one friend for her worries about another.

  But life was hardly fair, was it?

  “I don’t get it,” Kim burst out. “How did Dan Garner and his backers end up with get-out-of-jail-free cards? Why the hell can’t Brent’s family, can’t any of the victims’ families, sue for negligence?”

  “How do you expect me to answer that?” Aaron answered, looking down at his plate. “Label something a national-security matter and the government can do as it pleases. You know that.”

  Nick nudged Kim under the table—twice, firmly, to show it was no mistake. As in: you need to stop; you’re being unfair; you’re pushing too hard.

  And so she dropped the subject, made small talk, ate her dinner. She even, to Sladja’s certain satisfaction, ordered and forced down a dessert.

  For all the pleasure the meal had provided, Kim might as well have eaten sawdust.

  monday, may 22, 2017

  The redbrick towers could have been an apartment complex anywhere. The sweep of well-trimmed grass could have been a park anywhere. Those same towers all alone, so completely isolated, conveyed a much darker image.

  Or maybe, Aaron thought, the darkness came of knowing that the clear-cut expanse around CNYPC was thickly strewn with heat and motion sensors.

  “Thank you, sir.” The gatehouse guard handed back Aaron’s CNYPC photo ID, and the steel-plate barrier in front of the car began pivoting down. “Have a nice day, sir.”

  Not bloody likely. Aaron hated lying to anyone. Lying to Kim, after all they had been through together—that gnawed at him. He had tossed and turned all last night, brooding.

  The barrier plate hit the driveway pavement with a thump and he put the car into gear. “You, too, Theo,” Aaron told the guard. He cleared the gate area and the massive steel plate rose in his rearview mirror.

  After parking, Aaron showed his badge at the checkpoint at the main entrance. Inside, he went through a second checkpoint equipped with a mantrap booth. Here the CNYPC badge counted for nothing. Access to the inner unit relied on a retinal scanner and a subcutaneous RFID chip. In theory, the DNA-tagged biosensor on the RFID chip rendered it inert outside his body—for his protection. He could imagine ways around that, all on the grisly side, so surely the inmates had, too. They were so much smarter than he.

  Some choice he had had: accept a job here as a civilian contractor or end up here anyway. His discharge was still fresh. The Army could recall him and post him anywhere. Either way, secrets didn’t come more classified than the inner sanctum at this facility. Revealing what went on here, even to Sladja or Kim, would get Aaron sent far away, for a very long time. Ah, homeland “security.”

  Not to mince words, he was a prison doctor in an unacknowledged, maximum-security federal prison, whose cover story was being a unit of a state maximum-security psychiatric prison. A mystery wrapped within a riddle inside a snake pit. Maybe the inmates were insane, among their other problems, but Aaron knew he wasn’t qualified to judge.

  In fewer words, he’d been screwed.

  The absence of choices didn’t make Aaron feel any better about himself. Last night he’d given Kim false hope that “the warden” might eventually allow her, or at least Brent’s family, to visit. He’d lied about trying to deliver the gift book. Nothing from an unofficial source went to these prisoners. He’d dissembled about Dan Garner and his investors’ situation. The government very badly wanted exclusive rights to the defunct company’s technology and the recovered bot-assembly vessels. A national-security exemption from civil suits, immunity from criminal charges, and total silence had been the quid pro quo.

  Just damage control, Aaron had been assured. Don’t worry about it.

  There was much about which he wasn’t supposed to worry. Okay, so all suspected Emergent were accounted for. Who was to say Homeland Security’s suspicions were imaginative enough, or that anyone could trust anything any of the Emergent said? And then there were the no-nonsense assurances Aaron had been given that all the bot inventory was accounted for. Those only triggered his bullshit detector. Garner Nanotech had been far too thoroughly destroyed to ever know with certainty what had or hadn’t been taken.

  No amount of legerdemain could make this situation better.

  Aaron got a cup of coffee and hid in his office. There was plenty of paperwork. Many of his patients had arrived fairly banged up. No one had had surgery for a while now, but many continued in physical therapy. A car wreck was a big insult to the body, even with a nanosuit.

  And a bigger insult without a suit.

  Aaron had observed Charles’s autopsy, yet another secret he kept from Kim. Charles had had masses of unusual structure in his head—as squashed as the brain was, some things were unmistakable. Thousands of bots lay scattered throughout. Unusual nerve bundles connected the bots, and more bundles threaded throughout the neocortex in ways no neurologist permitted a look had ever seen.

  None of that proved a second consciousness, but it all suggested one. PET scans—these prisoners had no rights—only reinforced the impression. Many of the unusual connections glowed like fire in the scans. Also very classified, of course.

  Aaron’s masters had no idea what to do with their prisoners. What could you do with supergenius sociopathic terrorist bombers, most of them with police, military, and even counterterrorism expertise? Not put them into any general prison population. Never, ever, allow them to go free. If those were the only choices, Aaron guessed the prisoners would have been guantanamoed, or worse, by now. So someone, somewhere, was seriously considering somehow trying to make use of these brilliant minds.

  The most anxious man in the prison …

  By midmorning, Aaron could no longer stand his office or own company. The one way he knew to cope was to do some good here, whatever the government’s agenda. He passed through another checkpoint, into the viewing area that abutted the prison dayroom. Even after four months here, Aaron thought the inmates looked naked without VR specs.

  An LED array showed the interior cameras and audio bugs all operating properly. More green status lights blinked reassuringly on the knockout-gas canisters. The unit had a single disciplinary measure: at any infraction, by any inmate, flood the entire area with the gas. These prisoners were too dangerous to move among while conscious. The only way Aaron ever treated patients here was if they were allowed out through the mantrap, with an armed escort, in plastic leg restraints and handcuffs the entire time.

  Aaron played a game of chess with Alan Watts, losing in seventeen
moves (and sensing that even to last that long was a gift). He discussed biology with Tyra Kurtz and baseball with Manny Escobar. He feigned indifference to the staccato tabletop finger tapping of Morgan McGrath and Merry Ramirez. Encrypted messages, obviously, only the NSA had yet to break the code. Aaron thought about the thousands of computers wired into the prisoners’ heads, and shuddered.

  RFID sensors and CCTV showed Brent in his cell. Eventually, Aaron called over the PA for Brent to come out.

  Brent took his time appearing, but it was attitude, not injury. He was hardly limping anymore. “Hello, Aaron.”

  “Hi, Brent.” Aaron took a seat, then gestured at a chair across the partition. All the furniture inside was nicked and dented, made of soft wood. “I saw Kim yesterday and she asked about you. I thought you’d want to know.”

  Brent rubbed his chin. “How is she?”

  “Good.” What did one more lie matter? “And I finally met her new husband. Nice guy.”

  “Nick? Yeah, he is. Took his time asking, though.” A hint of a sad smile. “Maybe I can take a bit of credit that Nick finally did ask. The life-is-too-short principle, and all that.”

  “And how are you doing, Brent?”

  His patient chewed that over for a long time. “I could be better.”

  Aaron stood to go. “I know how you feel.”

  * * *

  Brent stayed in his chair for a full 4.72 seconds after Aaron left: fixing details of the encounter in his mind, reviewing every nuance of Aaron’s demeanor and every subtle implication thereof. The paisley pattern to the necktie and the slight asymmetry to the knot. The razor nick on his chin. Every word choice, oral hesitation, shift in posture, and eye blink.

  Kim and Nick married, Brent thought. A paper-thin silver lining.

  You’re welcome, One responded across his vision.

  For all the sarcasm, One’s politeness was real. Its main source of stimulus, with the Internet out of reach, lay in mining Brent’s memories—and the further back One delved, the less it understood. It needed explanation and interpretation from the mind that had experienced that world, the mind that had made those memories.