“That explains the zombie look.”
“Exactly,” Henry stated. “I want to be able to implant a chip without having to perform a lobotomy on the patient.”
“Make a smaller chip.” Danny handed it back. “That should work. One about a quarter of the size of this one and the base has to be plastic.”
“I know, the electronic portion mainly has to be encased in plastic.”
“Yep.”
“So here’s the problem. Can it hold the data if it’s that small?” Henry leaned closer.
“Yeah. I saw one time at a convention, a microchip so small it was nearly the size of pencil point. They said it could hold enough data to store all the social security numbers in the state of California.”
“I need a small chip, Danny, and I need one soon. I can make one this size,” Henry held his chip, “but I’m lost making one smaller. Can you ... do you think you could do it?”
“I can’t have it done tonight.”
“Can you have it done this year?”
“Hell, I can have it done this week. What’s the rush? You guys creating a new SUT?”
“No.” Henry shook his head. “I created a program for optical enhancement. I did this today. I think I have it.”
“Optical enhancement?” Danny stood up straight. “Enhancement enough to correct imperfect vision?”
“Or to make ... to make a bind man see.”
“Whoa.” Danny grabbed back the chip. “Dean.”
“Exactly. When can you start working on it?”
“Leave me your notes and your chip, and I’ll start working on it as soon as I finish with these glasses.”
“Thank you.” Henry closed his eyes in gratitude. “Get back to me as soon as you make any progress.”
“I will.” Danny set the things aside. “Henry? Thanks for coming to me with this.”
“You’re really my only option, Danny.”
“I see.” Danny gave a slight smile. “I hope I can help you out.”
“For Dean’s sake and the sake of the community, let’s hope you can make this work.”
“No, Henry, let’s hope we can make this work.”
Henry gave a slight smile as he moved slowly to the door. “Danny, keep this under wraps, OK, at least until we get this going.”
Danny held up his right hand, still holding the chip. “Your secret is safe with me.”
Just as Henry began to nod he heard another voice call out ‘me too’. Surprised that someone else was there, Henry looked. “Robbie.”
Robbie walked out from behind the amps, a shitty grin on his face. He was glad to know something that he wasn’t supposed to know, but most of all, he was glad to know what it was.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AUGUST 2
Ellen fussed with Brian. He was so hard to control. He wouldn’t just sit there, he’d kick his legs outward wanting so badly to get off Ellen’s lap. “Dean,” she whispered to him, “I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”
“Shh.” He tilted his head into her. “Want me to take the baby?”
“I want you to tell me I can go home.”
“Ellen, please, quiet.”
“No, Dean, you drag my ass out of bed, make me ...”
“El.”
“Not just me, mind you, but all the children, except for little Nick. You know this is something I just don’t do.”
“Ellen.” Dean gritted his teeth and spoke through them, “Quiet.”
“And everyone keeps fuckin ...”
“El,” his voice rose to a louder whisper, “will you knock it off. We’re in church.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, I’m not letting you leave.” Cringing one more time at the thumping of Brian’s struggles, Dean gave up. “Give me Brian.”
“No.”
“Give him to me, El. You can’t control him.”
“I’ll just take him out.”
“No. I bring these kids to church all the time. Give him up.” Dean reached out and lifted Brian. He made a slight grunt as he transferred the rowdy one-year-old from Ellen’s lap to his. “Shh, Brian, be good,” Dean spoke soothingly. “That’s it.” He felt Brian start to settle and brought his lips to the baby’s head to kiss him. Sharp! Dean’s head sprung up immediately at the pain he felt to his lips. It was a sharp, prickling pain. He brought his hands up and felt the baby’s head. Upon doing so, Dean let out a shrill-sounding gasp of shock.
Everyone looked back at him.
“Dean!” Ellen scolded quietly. She slid down in the pew, knowing what had happened. He’d found out what she had been trying to avoid him finding out, the reason, pure and simple, that she withheld Brian from him all the night before and this morning.
“El,” Dean spoke in a grunt, “what the hell happened to his hair!”
<><><><>
It the corner of Frank’s basement, Henry had his things set up. Since his portion of the cryo-lab accidently caught fire, it was secretive and safe at Frank’s. Originally only a corner, a small petition wall he had made blocked his computer equipment from anyone’s view. Set on a long workbench, a simple stool always sat in front of it. Henry’s logbooks were in a neat stack, and never was there much of a mess left around while, or after, Henry worked.
That was less than twenty-four hours ago. Now the partition had been moved outward from the wall to make more working room and to add the second workbench. Henry’s little work-corner of the world in Frank’s basement now extended pretty close to mid basement.
The neat workbench was scattered with papers, wires, tools, cups, plates, and remnants of food. The computer was running, and a cassette player played songs to fill the air along with the conversation. Henry and Danny stood at the longer workbench. Though the basement was well lit, Henry utilized the bendable table spotlights. A single one was arched in, causing a small golden circle over the area he and Danny huddled. Jason sat in a chair against the partition wall, an old metal folding table next to him held his ashtray and coffee. With his legs crossed, he read from notes printed from the computer, ones brought from Dean’s work at the clinic, and notes he added himself. He’d read, drop them, and read some more.
As his hands worked with Danny’s, Henry lifted his eyes slightly when he heard Jason yawn. “I’m still waiting for an answer, Jason.”
“I’m still working on one for you, Henry,” Jason said back.
Henry shook his head slightly, eyes peering through the magnifying glass he shared with Danny. “This looks good, Danny.”
Danny adjusted his glasses and maneuvered a wire. “I think we should have a successful test after this adjustment.”
“Let’s hope. We’ve been at it how long now?”
“Too long,” Danny said. “Do you think I can sleep soon, Henry? I have this bed Beginnings gave me in this nice little house, and I haven’t been in it yet.”
“I thought you wanted to work on this with me.”
“I do... hold that still ... but I thought when I brought the chip design over to you, you’d at least wait.”
“Wait until when ... no you’re missing the connection, right ... there, you got it.” Henry watched Danny work.
“My eyes are losing their focus, Henry.”
“Try harder. If you didn’t want to work on it right away, you shouldn’t have brought over the design two hours after I talked to you.”
“You seemed restless. I thought you wanted to have it.”
“I was restless, and I did. Thank you.”
“Yeah, who would have thought that making this tiny chip would have been the easiest of details,” Danny stated. “Of course, I don’t think that William guy from Plastics was pleased with us when we woke him up at four thirty in the ... shit.” Danny pulled his hand out from the magnifying glass, bent his fingers a few times and returned them to the wires they worked on. “My hands are cramping.”
“Almost there. Damn it, it’s not staying connected.” Henry grunted.
“We’ll get it. As soon as we do and we encase this bad boy in its plastic shield, it should never lose connection again.”
“Good. William did well on that, didn’t he?” Henry asked Danny.
“Superb job, but you, Henry, you shaped it.” Danny looked up at him. “Just about ... hand me the chip portion. Any chance I can get some more coffee?”
“Sure.” Using tweezers, Henry removed the chip from a case. “Don’t touch it with your fingers, remember.” Henry turned his head back to Jason. “Jason, can you get Danny some coffee?”
“When?” Jason asked.
“Now.”
“No.” Jason flipped page. “Ten more minutes.”
Shrugging and unable to move his hands, Henry returned to looking under the magnifying glass. “Once we get this thing together, what are the odds that the sterilization process will affect it?”
“The chip? Not much. I read some of that program. All of these chips are sterilized before implantation. My biggest concern lies in the receptor you made me put in it.”
“All of them have a receptor, Danny. They have to or how else are we gonna program it once it’s implanted.”
Danny’s hands stopped working. “You’re serious about that. I thought you were kidding.”
“No, not at all. I guess I wouldn’t have believed it myself, had I not read it. For the longest time, I was hooking up the microchips to the circuit board to reprogram them, and well, it can be done that way. I have this problem, though I do real well at reading manuals and such, I hate to.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“No one, I guess. But all the ‘read me’ files on the program, I merely skimmed through.”
“I’m the same way.” Danny took a second to rub his eyes. “So what happened? You saw it by accident?”
“Yep. Boy, was I surprised. So as soon as we replant Harold, the SUT we grabbed last year, I’ll bring him down here and reprogram him.”
“Or bring the program to him.”
“How’s that?” Henry asked.
“Laptop.”
“We don’t have any.”
“You have a city a half hour from here. I’m positive if we made a run out there we could find one. Between you and me, we’ll get it fixed up. Are you going to run it through the internal speaker system?”
“Yes,” Henry answered. “Nearest I can figure is that the speaker, a single earphone, will run the data sequence thought the ear. It works the same way as hooking it up to the circuit board, only it’s done audibly instead of directly. You know, unscrambling the current program then running the new one.”
“Without harming the base program needed to make the chip function?” Danny questioned.
“From my tests, no, it won’t harm it.”
“Interesting and ... cover please.”
Henry moved his hands about, bringing the cover to the chip, allowing Danny to secure it. “Looks good ... again.”
“It will work this time. I’m almost positive. If not, we’ll start over again. But we rest first. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Henry, answer me this. Can the base program that makes the chip function be transmitted audibly too?”
“We’re not doing it that way, Danny. We install the base program, implant the chip in Dean, and then install the optical enhancement.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you, can the base program be audibly installed?”
“Yes ... it’s not secure on the left.”
“I’m getting there.” Danny made an adjustment.
“Why are you asking?”
“I have an idea. Let me run it past you.”
“Shoot.”
“OK, what makes a SUT, a SUT?”
“The microchip.”
“Not exactly, it goes a little further than that. Think about it.”
Henry took a moment to contemplate. “The lobotomy?”
“That and what else? What is the most important thing that makes it function the way it does, merely kill because ...”
“Because it’s programmed to kill.” Henry nodded. “So, where are you going with this?”
“How are you planning to make this Harold SUT normal?”
“Implant him with the chip and run a new program, which I have about three new ones I created. How they’ll work, I don’t know.”
“So in order to make a SUT less deadly, you change the program, right?”
“Right.” Henry kept thinking how basic this was, so he wondered why Danny was recanting it.
“Now, you mentioned a few hours ago that Frank would love to get these things in here and reprogram them for us.”
“Yes, which is easy to do once we get them. Boy, I’ll tell you, Danny, we were going by the misleading information that we had. We thought we would have to remove the chip and reprogram it. I am so grateful Robbie found the program or I’d still be looking at number sequences.”
“So how do we get the SUTs to reprogram?”
“That’s the tricky part. They’re tough to get. Knock them out, wound them, I suppose.”
“Or disable them?” Danny asked, lifting his head.
“That’s usually what happens when you wound them, Danny,” Henry stated, thinking perhaps he should let Danny get some sleep.
“I’m not talking physically, Henry. I’m talking ... mentally.” Danny raised his eyebrows. “If you can create an optical enhancement program, you can create a de-scrambling program. A program that when played audibly can take out not only the program they use to function but the base program as well.”
Henry knew exactly what Danny meant. “Causing them to drop or stop, then all we’d have to do is redo the program.”
“Exactly. Think about how many we can eliminate that way?”
“Any in their army that has a microchip but ... problem.” Henry stood upright when he saw Danny had finished. “Anything that will cause the descrambling will have to be played audibly and loudly. And if it’s that loud, we take a chance of it screwing up any data we have elsewhere here in Beginnings. That is, if the SUTs are close.”
“What about in the field?” Carefully Danny lifted the microchip and carried it to the board.
“It would work, but what kind of equipment would our men have to carry in order to transmit the signal loud enough?” Henry raised his eyebrows.
“You’re killing me, Henry.”
“I’m being realistic. It’s a good idea, a really good idea. It would really help if we disabled them then captured them. It definitely would be easier on our men we send out.”
“What if we armed our men with something on an individual basis?” Danny began hooking up the chip for the test.
“Like a pocket tape player?”
“Possibly. Is there anything else? I mean, what else could descramble that program if not all the data in the chip.”
Henry shrugged in thought. “Demagnification.”
“A blast.”
“A vibration.”
“A shock ...”
At that same instant, both of them looked at each other with the same thought, and they spoke it at the same time. “A stun gun.”
“Good idea, but—” Henry quickly shook his head. “Outer body contact will not do it.”
“But inner ear will.”
A bright smile hit Henry. “It would have to be strong and direct.”
“Easy enough,” Danny spoke like it was a piece of cake, “a matter of taking one thing from another to create it.”
“It could cause the inner ear to rupture.”
“So they’re deaf in one ear, big deal.”
Henry chuckled. “I like this idea. We can arm our men with a new line of defense out there. They’d have to use the sneak-attack approach.”
“Only for a second, then the SUT is down.”
Henry nodded. “Robbie Slagel would die for that opportunity.”
“We should give it to him.”
“You mean make a prototyp
e?” Henry asked.
“Oh sure, we can do that. In fact, if this test is successful, I don’t see why we can’t start on that later.”
“But you have this tracking system to work on.”
Danny fluttered his lips. “This thing will be easy. We need a shell and insides. Hell. I’ll bet you guys have all we need right here in Beginnings.”
“I know we do.”
“It won’t take long. Between you and me, we’ll have it done and in Robbie’s hands quickly. I can work on more than one thing at a time, except walking and chewing gum. I never grasped that.”
“We should run the program test on this.” Henry took a step back then brought the magnifying glass closer to the chip that lay on the circuit board. “Good job, Danny.”
“Yeah, we did well.”
Jason’s single word, along with the cup of coffee he set down in front of Danny, brought their attention from that chip. “Amazing.”
Henry looked at him. “What is?”
“You two.” Jason shook his head. “It’s also a scary thought. If you two actually set your minds to working together, think about what your two minds could build for this community. The Wright Brothers could very easily look like Abbott and Costello. And ... I’m leaving now.” He moved to the steps, papers in hand. “I wish I had sunglasses, because I know my eyes will hurt when I leave this basement.”
“Wait,” Henry called out to him. “My answer.”
“Oh.” Jason looked back. “Yes, I can do it. I’ve been reviewing Dean’s notes. Seems the laser program does all the work for you. I, as a doctor, only need to guide it. If we play our cards right, the risk should be minimal to Dean and his healing should barely be noticed. I just have to work on the program for the surgery. You know, pinpointing exactly where to go in, and doing it with very little exposure of the brain.”
With a clench of his fist, Henry smiled excitedly. “Thank you, Jason. Will I see you tonight?”
Jason grumbled a ‘yes’ and walked up the stairs.
“Work on that ...” Henry shut up when he heard the door above him shut, “... program.” Henry shrugged. “Ready to run our test, Danny?”
“I’m ready to sleep, Henry. Can we just sleep?”
The Big Ten: The First Ten Books of the Beginnings Series Page 314
