Stepping Stones (Founding of the Federation Short Stories Book 1)

by Chris Hechtl

  “Using gene therapy to repair long-term damage is just one of the tools in our tool kit. That means we can screen out for radiation damage in some of our personnel.”

  “Radiation damage?” a reporter pounced.

  “I can't give you what I don't have. I'm sorry. Some of it is actually from sun exposure. You know that the sun is a source of radiation too. Our personnel are out in it for long stretches of time, and well, they forget to bring the sun block I'm afraid. Which means they can get skin cancers or radiation damage to other parts of the body. You can fill in the rest of the blanks there. Next question.”

  Ursilla flipped the video feed off. It looked like the cover story was holding. That was good news, she thought, rubbing her growing tummy.

  The End

  Prosthesis

  2069

  Most historians when they look back at Jack Lagroose's legendary career tend to overlook any of the time he spent prior to his rise into space. To be fair, their monographs are usually written for educational purposes, not an in-depth analysis of the man and how he came to be. A few like Doctor Myers rightly pointed out the why. Mister Lagroose, like a lot of space enthusiasts, had been born during the time of the initial Mars buildup and had been a toddler following the first landing. Many families watched with pride as mankind stepped forth onto a new world. Like those from the Apollo era he became … space mad. Thrilled with the idea of exploring space, of pushing mankind's boundaries ever onward and outward.

  Even before he could walk, it was realized that he was an exceptional and brilliant young man, able to speak and walk before he was a year old, able to read, do math, and to his parent's relief, fully potty trained before he was eighteen months old.

  They knew they had something with the young man, so both parents did everything they could to nurture and encourage his mental growth during the critical first three years of his life. He learned Spanish and French with his tutor, but his mother insisted on adding Latin to the list.

  The young man had an eidetic memory and a gift for engineering. To his father's amusement and chagrin, his son took apart his tablet near his third birthday, a month after they had given it to him and enrolled him in preschool. He'd held onto his temper and instructed the boy to put it back together. The young man had simply nodded and done so. When he was finished, he powered it back up, and his father watched the software boot normally. After that he had a bit less fear of his son's technical skills … though he did sit him down and firmly instruct him not to take apart any of the appliances or electronics in the house again.

  Jack hadn't settled in well with the preschool curriculum; when his parents explored the reason why, they realized he was being held back and therefore bored. So his mother found alternative home schooling and advanced classes for the young man to take.

  To sate the young man's fascination with anything engineering related, his father started picking up old pieces of electronics from yard sales and other places and gifted them to his son as presents when he finished weekly school goals. Jack learned to take them apart and put them together on his own while also attending home school.

  His family were amazed by his progress. He was a loving boy and enjoyed the attention of others, but he swelled with pride when his father and his canine partner came into the room. By the age of four, Jack had graduated to repairing the things his father brought home and had even learned how to make minor improvements. His small hands were constantly nicked up, but he didn't seem to mind. His mother tended to fret about his lack of interest in playing, but he adored his mental challenges, becoming a loner child.

  Ursilla Lagroose was a geneticist and quite proud of her own work. She quietly tried to steer her son into the medical field but his fascination with mechanical and electronic things thwarted her efforts. She frequently accused her husband of bribing his son for his own guilty feelings at being absent for long periods of time while on duty. Her husband didn't deny it; he just gave her a shrug and moved on.

  Just before Jack's fifth birthday, his father was chagrined to find his son had ordered his own 3-D printer and had needed his help to sign for the delivery. The young man, called “Pipsqueak” by the family took the box nearly his own size into his room on his own and dived right into setting the device up.

  All the while Jack was learning and building, he kept his eye on the sky. His uncle bought him his first telescope and showed him how to tap into the net stream to watch the progress on Mars and for various other projects. Jack's studies began to slip as he got more into watching the space program until he realized a lot of the drama in the program came spontaneously; it wasn't something you could wait for and easily anticipate.

  When the program unveiled the vaults, he was blown away. He made his own mock-up models in virtual reality before the 3-D printed small copies. He bent anyone's and everyone's ear about the project, but his mother held firm that he wasn't allowed to dig the back yard up to make his own.

  When Jack turned seven, his father was killed in the line of duty with his canine partner. The family was devastated by the loss. Ursilla was fearful that Jack would become depressed, or worse would decide to follow in his father's footsteps. Instead Jack read the letter from his father and with a great level of maturity that surprised her told her he was following his own path.

  Jack and Ursilla received money from the death benefits. Ursilla split the amount in half and used her half of the money to pay off the mortgage. The rest was put away for Jack's eventual entry into college.

  Jack applied himself diligently, even more so than ever before. He flew through the early stages of his education, skipping grades at an almost unheard-of rate. He continued to be a loner and tinker, but his uncle Ed insisted on taking on the paternal role from time to time and drag the boy off on fishing and camping expeditions with his family.

  Jack chafed under the demand, but when his uncle began to tell him stories of his childhood with his father, he relented in order to listen and learn. But he didn't relax his studies. He took some community college courses during his first year in junior high and even more in high school. He graduated high school at the age of thirteen with an associate's degree and all the basic college courses covered. He also had a dozen of the top universities offering him full-time scholarships to go to their school. By sixteen he had three master’s degrees in engineering, business, and space. The money from his father remained untouched, accruing interest steadily.

  His mother was disappointed that he hadn't been interested in following in her footsteps with medicine but was secretly relieved that the family bug to serve and protect hadn't bitten him either. But his interest in space was just as bad in many ways. She knew it was dangerous and whatever she said he would make up his own mind … if he hadn't already. Her son was flexible, but … she took the time to look at the world around her, then called a few friends in the space industry. She had surreptiously helped the Irons family with their genetics problems … would that come up with her son? She didn't know, wouldn't know without modeling it, but the company's super computers were heavily scheduled now.

  Her talks with Mario and Luigi eased some of her fears but brought on others. But she knew she had to allow Jack to follow his heart.

  Jack had set out on his own to follow his dream, gathering plans and studying his options as he rammed his way through college. He'd ended up with a series of goals, the first had been his initial desire to go to Mars. But the idea was daunting; even with his intelligence and skills, there was no way he could get on any of the lists.

  By the time he would have his majority, he calculated that the public program would have dried up despite funding from the Helium-3 mine. He knew he didn't have enough money to afford a ticket but had plans to remedy that. But that all changed when he got a tearful call from his mother.

  {D}==+===@E

  Jack followed the net stream from his aunt and cousins when he heard the news; getting into their social media sites was a snap.

  His
uncle Ed Lagroose had been hit by a car while out on his motorcycle driving home late one evening. A drunk driver had not only struck him but ran over him with his black pickup and dragged his body for over two kilometers before he'd made a swerve around another motorist, and Ed's battered body had been set free. He'd laid there on the dark road for under two minutes, slowly bleeding out and overlooked by other motorists until a horrified nurse and her paramedic wife on their way to work had seen him and stopped to render aid.

  At first they had thought he was dead, but he had groaned enough for them to realize he was still alive and that had spurred them into leaping into action. Despite his shattered helmet and leather riding outfit, his skin had been abraded by the pavement. What remained of the leather jacket and pants had wrapped around his limbs to act as tourniquets, slowing the bleeding and potentially saving his life.

  He was in a medically-induced coma for a month. His injuries were severe. He had lost his right arm at the elbow. His left arm had been crushed and the fingers on that hand had been mutilated so badly they had been amputated. His worst injuries, however, were the loss of both of his legs along with his head and spinal damage.

  His left eye and ear had been lost. His face had been virtually pulped. He'd swallowed several of his own teeth as well as blood and vomit. They had damaged his trachea and caused pneumonia for several weeks.

  His fractured skull had led to a subdermal hematoma forcing the doctors to cut out a chunk of his skull to allow his brain to swell without causing more permanent injury. The skull piece had been inserted in his abdomen until they could reimplant it.

  His spine had been broken in several places. His lengthy coma had cost heavily. His medical insurance paid for his medical care, but they balked at prosthetics when he woke and began the lengthy road to recovery and rehabilitation. His family's savings had been sucked dry by the high cost of his deductible, premiums, and putting the family up in a motel near the hospital where he had been transported to.

  The family watched helplessly as the once large man, so full of life, was reduced to an invalid. Turned into a monster everyone feared and loathed looking at. They all wrung their hands, unsure what to do, filled with shame. He watched their posts and tried to console his mother.

  “They are just … just giving up. I'm scared, Jack. He could do the same. Give up the will to live,” Ursilla whispered softly. “He's so weak now, and he knows what has happened to him. The surgeons have done what they can, but they can't do more.”

  “The hell they can't,” Jack snarled. His fingers flashed as he booked a flight to Seattle. “I'm coming.”

  “Jack …”

  “Mom, it's done. I'll be there in a day or so. Is my room still available?” Jack asked.

  “Of course,” she replied, ever so softly. “Thank you, son.”

  “I haven't done anything, Mom. At least not yet,” Jack said as he used a search bot he'd wrote the script for to start gathering files he would need to read on the flight. “I'll email you the flight info,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  “He's in San Francisco?”

  “Yes.”

  “I'll need to borrow the truck to visit.” He felt a pang. Mom hadn't had the patience to teach him to drive. Uncle Ed had done it last year.

  “It's okay. Fine. I haven't driven it in a while, so …”

  “I'll get her running again, Mom. No sweat,” he said with a fond smile. “Gotta run,” he said gruffly.

  “I'll see you when you get here. Dinner is at six,” His mother informed him.

  “Yes, Mom,” he said, fighting the urge to roll his eyes.

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too.” He heard a click and then put the phone aside. He had work to do. Important work.

  {D}==+===@E

  Furious, Jack stepped in when he realized no one else was willing to do so. They were already giving up, looking into assisted care facilities and moaning about the cost. That was bullshit; he had no intention of seeing his uncle's mind trapped in a broken body.

  On the flight out, he came up with ideas of his own, ideas that hadn't been tried. He found links to some things that were in the public arena and sent them to his computers at home as well as the machine he'd left in college.

  He copied a few things to his aunt and cousins as well as to his mother. His aunt Prue didn't respond. His mother, however, did. She sent him an email telling him not to distress Prue anymore and to talk to her since she was the doctor of the family. He sketched out his plan as he set his search bot to download the blueprints to his 3-D printer.

  She was supportive but unsure his more advanced plans would work. She did her best to help her brother-in-law, however; she'd borrowed some of the company's lab resources to grow grafts for the doctors to use in the reconstructive surgery and spoke with Doctor Arub, his doctor, on a daily basis to keep a close eye on his progress. Ed's progress had slowed as reality had set in to his mind. She just hoped her son's project wouldn't get his hopes up only to be dashed when reality set in.

  She picked up a silent Jack at the airport terminal. He had his duffle over his shoulder. He stopped to wrap his free arm around her for a hug, then they picked up his check-in luggage and left.

  The drive was quiet. She kept glancing at him, but he was busy on his tablet. Finally at a stoplight, she glanced over to see what he had been looking at. The efficiency of lithium batteries … she shook her head.

  “There are four big problems with prosthetics; two are from an engineering perspective. The others are medical, tissue rejection, and tied to that, infection. There is also encapsulation, but that's a part of rejection so we won't get into that,” Jack said, not looking up as his fingers flicked the scroll down.

  His mother glanced at him and then back to the road. The computer could handle most of the driving but one could never be too careful, especially with heavy rain about to hit any moment. She looked at the sky with a frown, then back to the road. Finally her eyes cut to her son once more.

  “The two engineering problems are power and weight. Some would argue about range of motion and composition, but I think after a couple of millennia we've got those under control.”

  “Weight is a big factor. I remember them telling us about that. Some stuff is cosmetic though. I mean, I used the lab to grow him a new ear and skin but …,” Ursilla frowned.

  “Cosmetic. And some tissue can be grown or harvested from other places on the body and used to rebuild damaged areas. But …,” Jack frowned and then looked up. “He lost both knees, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry, just checking,” Jack murmured, going back to his research. She glanced over to see a leg spinning in a window. Parts were there; with a flick of his finger, Jack pulled the diagram apart into an exploded 3-D diagram, then added another part. He scowled when he put the model back together, and it flashed red in several spaces.

  “That's another problem, miniaturization. Getting everything to fit,” he grumbled. “But, where there is a will, there is a way,” he said softly.

  He was on autopilot when they got to the house. He carried his things in, eyes still glued to the tablet. His mother shook her head as he went to his room to work. She turned and went to the kitchen to make dinner.

  {D}==+===@E

  The consensus was that Ed's life was over. His daughter Phoebe kept harping on the web about how her father should be allowed the dignity to die in peace. Jack saw the post and snarled. No. Where there was life there was hope he typed angrily, then went back to work.

  After a moment his computer pinged a response. Phoebe's answer was short and brutal. “What life?”

  Jack was determined to prove her wrong, to prove them wrong—those who thought he should just crawl in a corner and die or live out the rest of his existence away from the pretty people. As the storm lashed overhead, he did his own additional research. He ran a range of motion studies and printed parts to test.

  He worked through
the night and into the following day, barely stopping to eat or go to the bathroom. His mother was worried, but she had to go to work so she didn't see how he toiled during the day.

  Over several days he eliminated some paths and plans and came up with a synthesis of ideas. Some were untried; some had been overlooked. Some had been considered, but there were health issues to deal with. Many were quite radical. What he proposed was rebuilding his uncle's limbs with permanent prosthetics, something that had been done but limited to just a stud or strut embedded in a limb or bone for prosthetics to be attached to.

  The eye was the hardest problem, so he set that aside for last. He realized he was performing triage, working on the critical systems. No, that wasn't right. To others the project wasn't a project; it was an overwhelming horror. But he took his parent's sage advice. If something looked too hard, too hard to grasp, too hard to accomplish, break it down into smaller and smaller bits and then beat them, one at a time. Eventually you'll get to where you want to be.

  As his mother said, the ear was easy, she'd done that. The same for the teeth; a good dentist could fix him up there. Aunt Prue finally relented to send him Ed's medical files. He scanned them again.

  “Time heals all wounds. I wish that it didn't leave scars though,” he said softly.

  The nursing staff were having him run through some basic exercises, but he was limited on what he could do of course since he was strapped into a spinal brace and halo. At least he wouldn't be a full paraplegic like some had assumed he would be.

  More and more talk on the web spoke of how he didn't want to be a burden on the family. He saw it and wrote a script to filter it out. He needed to focus. Knock the problems down one by one.

  Surgery had repaired his skull once the brain swelling had stopped. Plastic surgery, largely thanks to his mother's contributions, had repaired enough of his face to make it functional again. He didn't look like the elephant man anymore.