by David Drake
"Wrong? More wrong than my mother being beaten to death by that animal I had to have for a father?"
"I can't say what would be more wrong. I don't think it works like that. What I can say is that your mother was the one who had to make the choice. She had to leave. She had to make that choice, not you."
"You think she deserved this?" he said. His hands were in fists and he looked like he might hit me.
"No," Louise said quietly, so quietly I don't think Jim heard her.
"No," I agreed. "She didn't deserve it." I stood and faced him. "I'm not saying that at all, and I don't for a second believe she deserved this. I'm just saying that she had to make the choice to leave, and nobody—not you, not anybody—could make that choice for her."
"Well if I had, she'd still be alive," Jim said.
"It's not your fault, Jim," I said.
He stared at me for a bit, but I don't think he was seeing me. Finally, he said, "You mind if I crash here tonight?"
"No problem. You want the bed or the sofa?"
He looked at Louise like he was seeing her for the first time. "Hi, Louise," he said. "Sorry about showing up like this. You guys keep the bed. I'll just sit here for a while."
We went into the bedroom. When I came out a few minutes later to get a glass of water, Jim was curled in a ball on the sofa, fast asleep. I threw a sheet over him and went back to the bed and Louise.
We talked until almost four a.m. that night, Jim's tragedy making us both feel the need to stay awake, to stretch the day, to cling to another as if we needed proof we were still alive. We talked about our life after college, and I told Louise about the men who had visited me in my latest political science class, about the offers they made of a chance to really make a difference, to channel all my frustrations and energy into working to change the system. I told her the job would mean training in Virginia for a year or two, then moving around the world for a while. She didn't want to leave the area and intended to get her Ph.D. in math at UNC and teach or do research if she could find a job. We agreed to worry about all this later and fell asleep curled tightly together.
When we awoke in the late morning, Jim was gone. Louise asked me again about what I had planned, and though I tried to say nothing was set, she knew what I was going to do, and so did I. I had always wanted to be somebody special, to do something special, something that would matter, and this seemed to be the best shot I'd get. I thought of Jim's mother and desperately did not want to be someone who had never made the choice to make the changes his life needed. I had no idea what I was really getting into, but at that age, who does?
By the time we graduated, Louise had slowly taken all of her stuff out of my apartment, and though we were still dating only each other, you could almost see the space between us. Jim and I talked a couple of times a week for the first couple of weeks after the funeral, but then the calls faded away. A week after graduation, Louise and I said good-bye, I called Jim to let him know I was moving, and I headed for Langley.
* * *
Greg and I rode without talking until we were almost through South Carolina, and then I decided to try again. "What was Jim doing for you guys?" I asked.
"That is not relevant," Greg said.
"Yes, it is. You've told me it involved nanotech, so I know what sort of gear we're looking for, but I don't know how we'll spot these materials you want back."
"I am to locate them."
"Are you sure you'll be able to do that?" I said. "Do you know what form they'll be in? Whether Jim might have copied them? How he might have stored them? Whether he'll be in a public place when we find him?"
Greg was silent for several minutes before answering. "I find myself in an awkward situation. You are right that I may not succeed in that part of my mission without sharing the information you have requested, but I am also not to discuss it. Some of my more . . . aggressive colleagues have gone beyond the rules others of us advised them to follow, and now we must remove all traces of those transgressions. James Peterson's work is such evidence."
"What form will the evidence be in?"
"I do not know. Small, sealed containers are likely, of course; that is the form in which we gave him the original nano-machines."
Greg paused again for long enough that I assumed he was done and switched on some music.
Halfway through a song, he turned off the music and resumed talking. "It is also possible that the machines will be in one or more human subjects," he said.
I was glad traffic was light and I had the cruise control on, because I swerved slightly as I whipped my head to the side to look at him. "He's putting your nano-machines in people?"
"Not exactly. His job involved the adaptation of our machines to humans in this environment. So, what he would put in humans would more precisely be his own machines, built from our initial prototypes."
I forced my voice to be calm. Nothing about this sounded good, but I wasn't going to get anything from Greg by appearing too anxious. "What do these nano-machines do?"
"That is not relevant."
"Maybe not. What certainly is relevant is why you needed Jim, because if I know that I may be able to guide our search better." I didn't need that info, because merely knowing the type of equipment and where Jim was headed was a good enough start, but I was hoping Greg wouldn't realize that. "Was it because you couldn't make the machines work in humans without his help?"
"No. We have our own supply of humans in other locations. The machines definitely work in humans."
"Your own supply?" This time my voice rose slightly before I got it under control. "What does that mean?"
"That is not relevant."
I took a slow, deep breath before continuing. For the first time in my life, I seriously wondered if the alien abduction stories were true. "Okay. But what did you need Jim to do if you knew the machines would work in people? I mean, once you knew they worked, you were done, right?"
"No," Greg said. "We knew they worked in humans in other locations. They would not work correctly in this location, on your planet. Conditions here were interfering with the machines, stopping them from functioning properly. We do not know exactly what those conditions are, so we could not at any reasonable cost duplicate them elsewhere. Guild rules do not allow us to set up our own laboratory here. As we explained, the guild would also not allow us to openly pursue the product line this more aggressive faction led us to create. Hence our need for James Peterson."
The realization hit me hard enough that I had to stay quiet or risk giving it away, so I made myself drive in silence for another half hour before I said, "One more question. How far along was Jim in his research when he escaped?"
"I do not know."
"Was he yet using human subjects? If so, it would help me find him to know that he needed a place that could hold additional people."
"No," Greg said, "he had not yet progressed to that point. However, the day before he escaped he told us that he would need to obtain subjects soon."
"What if he has tested the nano-machines in people, or if he's testing them in people when we find him?"
"Then we must retrieve those people as well as any other containers of the machines."
Crap. Now I had to find Jim or risk either him hurting more people, the aliens taking those people away, or both. I nudged the cruise control a few miles per hour higher and forced myself to focus again on the road.
* * *
For a little over two years after I left the company, I traveled and worked odd jobs when I found them or they found me. As the specter of turning thirty became more real, I decided it was time to settle in one place, even if only to have a base of operations for a while. The Chapel Hill area was the logical choice. My mother had died in my second year at Langley, so there was nothing to take me back to St. Pete. I'd kept up with Jim and Louise via the Web, and I knew they were both working at UNC, Jim as a nanotechnology staff researcher and Louise as a math post-doc. Though part of me wasn't sure seeing Loui
se again was the best idea, another part was eager to see her. More importantly, she and Jim were the closest thing to family that I had. R.C. and I had just started working together, and where we were based didn't really affect the kind of work we did, so he agreed to move to North Carolina as well.
We spent the first year there setting up our gym and doing a couple of small jobs for old clients so we could have a bit of a nest egg, and I wondered when I'd get around to calling Jim and Louise. I meant to do it many times, but I kept finding excuses to put it off. Finally, I called. They both seemed happy to hear from me, so I proposed that the three of us get together.
At my suggestion, we met on neutral ground at a neutral time, for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a shopping center in the middle of Research Triangle Park. I got there first and grabbed a booth in the back with a clear view of the front door. They came in only a few minutes apart, Jim first, then Louise. Jim looked like he still played some ball but wasn't hitting the gym much, thinner than he had been during college but still carrying more muscle than when we first met. Louise was remarkably unchanged, perhaps a bit heavier but with the additional weight only filling out her figure and making her look even better than she had. We were all pretty awkward at first, but when I got them talking about their work, the conversation flowed easily.
"The use of nanotech in medicine is in its infancy," Jim said. "Drugs can take you only so far. Cloned parts are okay if the host body can handle the shock of the transplant surgery and if you can afford the cloning. Only nanotech can go right in and actually rebuild organs that aren't working well, destroy bad cells, and basically make you a literally new person."
"I didn't think the FDA had cleared any nanotech testing on humans yet," Louise said.
"It hasn't," Jim said. "The stupid government would rather make us twiddle our thumbs with animals than give us access to a decent group of subjects. It's not like it would be hard to find subjects, and everyone knows we won't be able to make real progress until we do. Yet the government won't even lift a finger to help. Do you have any idea how many prisoners would jump at the chance to risk one of our tests in exchange for an early release?"
Louise looked furious. "What if the tests go wrong? And even if the tests were to work out, what about the prisoners' rights? Wouldn't that kind of offer amount to coercion?"
"Sure," Jim said, "the tests could go badly. Some of the prisoners might die; I acknowledge that risk. It's not like we're talking about the cream of the crop of humanity here, Louise." He took a sip of his drink. "As for it being coercion, maybe, in some cases, it would be. In most cases, though, I think the prisoners would truly volunteer happily. More importantly, though, so what if it is coercion? For Christ's sake, they're prisoners; it's not like they didn't earn whatever happens to them."
I saw the fight brewing and though I was on Louise's side I didn't want to sit through it. "Louise, what is your research in?" I asked.
She glared at Jim but took the opportunity to change the subject. "I'm investigating possible uses of a type of math known as negative probabilities—it's primarily German, never really caught on here—in algorithms to mimic human vision. I'm working with a couple of people in the computer science department and a cognitive scientist in the psych department, and we think we're onto some pretty exciting stuff. Take our work, add it to some of the recent advances in direct neural feeds, and we might really be able to feed visual pattern data even to people without optic nerves so they could effectively see."
Jim shook his head. "Why use your giant machines to feed that data down some wire into a dead nerve, when with just a little slack from the government we could learn what it would take to make nano-machines that could rebuild all the missing parts, from the nerve on out? The ability to make that kind of repair doesn't have to be far off, you know."
Jim and Louise went back and forth for a while, until Louise said, "We've been talking about our work, Matt. What have you been up to? Are you still working with the same people?"
I looked her in the eyes as I spoke, hoping to see . . . I don't know what, maybe some sign that my having left would be important to her, or that she'd be interested in trying again. "No. I left a couple of years ago. A friend of mine and I opened a gym together, and we do odd jobs to make a little extra money." I didn't see whatever it was I was seeking, but I couldn't tell if that was because it wasn't there or because I looked away too quickly, embarrassed at lying to them but not willing to tell the truth, not there, not yet.
"That sounds like fun," she said.
Despite her words, Louise's body language convinced me she felt I was a total failure. Or maybe it was all inside me, maybe I just felt like a total failure simply because I wouldn't tell her everything I did. I couldn't tell the difference, couldn't separate the words she said from the way I expected her to feel about them.
The lunch ran out of steam quickly after that. Jim asked if he could come by and shoot some hoops and grab a workout some time, and I said sure and gave him my number. Louise said she'd keep in touch, and I knew she wouldn't.
When I got back to the gym I worked the squat rack until my legs were shaking and I felt the old rush of cleansing anger as all the mess-ups and dumb choices of the past seven years washed away in the purifying red haze. I did set after set until I couldn't do any more and I felt like I was going to throw up, and then I just sat on the floor, wishing things were different but not having a clue how to make the wishes come true. I'd made the choices I'd made, and I could go only forward, not back. Looking forward, I couldn't see how or even why Louise and I could be together again, but still I missed her and wondered over and over what my life might have been if I had stayed.
* * *
Way past midnight, I pulled the BMW into the parking lot of a motel near the ocean outside Savannah. It was very late, and the city was buttoned down for the night. At first I was too wired to sleep, so I walked to the beach and sat on the sand. Greg insisted on following, so I made him wrap a towel around his head and a bedspread from one of the two motel beds around his body. It was late enough and dark enough that I figured no one was likely to spot him, and anyone who did would just see a very tall, very thin man wrapped in a blanket against the slightly chilly evening.
I called R.C. and asked him to reach out to some of our police friends and see if there were any recent increases in missing-person reports in St. Pete or Tampa. As usual, he had nothing to say. I knew I'd hear from him when he had any information he felt we needed to discuss.
For a few minutes I tried to figure out just what was going on, what Jim was doing for the aliens, but after a while I finally accepted the simple fact that in the end the answer did not matter because it would not change what I had to do, that the details of whatever was going on would not stop me or change my mission. The sooner I found Jim, the sooner all of it ended. Time and again I've found myself in situations where I was desperate to understand the why of it all, the reasons for everything that was going on, and every single time I ended up having to act without all the knowledge I wanted. You learned what you could, but in the end, whether you understood everything or not, you did what you should.
I gave myself over to the sound of the waves. Growing up on the Gulf side of Florida, I had always found waves to be a special prize, a treat nature brought only when a storm disturbed the normal flatness of the Gulf of Mexico. That this treat was almost always available in the Atlantic was something I had never learned to take for granted, and waves never failed to calm and center me. When I realized my chin had hit my chest for the second time, I clung to the drowsiness and the calm and headed back to the motel, Greg in tow.
We slept well but still got a reasonably early start. We rolled into St. Pete late in the afternoon of a beautiful, cloud-free day. I was itchy for activity, an animal corralled in too tight a space for too long. We stayed on the freeway until we hit the middle of town, then I exited and parked in a lot near Haslam's, one of the city's few surviving private bookstor
es. I called R.C. to see what he had found. This time, after I identified myself, he spoke.
"The old Woodlawn community center."
"Are you sure?"
