Sipping again, I grinned and said, “Could be lots of fun. And it would definitely be good for the American people.”
Apparently disapproving, Thompson asked, “So you’re determined to go through with it?”
I noted that Elgin masked her feelings very well as I said, “I never said that, Thompson. Hell, I wouldn’t say that in front of two federal agents. I was just speculating a bit.”
Elgin stood up and gathered her stuff as she said, “This discussion is over, Agent Thompson. They’ll do whatever they decide to do and we’ll just have to be ready.”
Thompson’s startled expression turned even sterner as he looked at me and said, “We will be ready. Count on it.”
With a little salute, I said, “Roger that. In the British sense.”
“The what?”
Elgin gave me a tight, tiny smile and said, “I’ll tell you in the car, Agent Thompson. Let’s go.”
Chapter Eleven
We escorted them to the door. When Tanya headed back to the kitchen area, I noted she exhibited none of the loose, flowing warmth of our earlier teddy-enhanced encounter. She fairly marched to the fridge, snatched out another pack of juice, and seemed to have trouble inserting the straw.
I sent screens to scan the apartment inside and out and found two new bugs; one outside and one inside. I had a use for the one under the table.
Frustrated, Tanya threw the pack in the sink, leaned on the table, and raged, “Goddammit! Why the hell can’t I just take my mother to a clinic without all this other horseshit?!”
She was trembling hard as I rinsed the bag and the straw, then forced the sharp end through the plastic seal. When I set the bag on the table and said, “Here’s your juice thingie, ma’am,” she seemed surprised to see it, then she picked it up with a curt thanks and sipped hard.
Pointing under the table, I said, “Don’t sweat it. I can take the rap for it.”
Before she knelt to peek under the table, she asked, “Oh, really?! And how would that make me look?!”
Tanya knelt, saw the bug, and reached for it. I stopped her hand and said, “You’ll look like the woman who’s mounting my defense and raising my bail money, of course.” Glancing at her as if doubtful, I asked, “You would do that for me, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t let me rot in prison, would you?”
Standing up, Tanya rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, be serious, dammit.”
“Yes’m, serious it is. They’ve managed to keep Joyce’s new legs and other Robodoc healings more or less under wraps, but I doubt they’d be able to keep Marie quiet. Some of them doubt that, too, guaranteed. So what if we become the first big case? We won’t be alone on the stand. If the feds didn’t bring the other healings up, our lawyers would subpoena them. We’d all be sold to the public as heroes for fighting political corruption and bad laws.”
“Sold to the public? We would be heroes, damn it. Nobody’d have to sell the idea.”
“Well, true, but not really the point, ma’am. Like I said, it’s an election year. Remember the calliopes I mentioned?”
“Yes. Sort of. Something about hunting for them. I thought you were just being a smartass with her.”
“Well, yes and no. Ever see a calliope? Ever hear one?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“You’d know if you had. Used to be — back when there were showboats on rivers — they’d play big steam calliopes to announce their arrivals. You could hear the boats coming for miles around. Same with the old-time circuses. There’d be a steam calliope on a tractor or trailer. Big, gaudy, maybe pulled by an elephant, and loud like you wouldn’t believe. Gather ‘round, y’all, the circus is here. By now Elgin’s reported her results and shared her recording of our conversation. Most people in those intel chains will have to look up the word ‘calliope’ and they’ll either freak out or laugh.”
“Wait. They’re just cops of some kind, right? Why would they be the ones to freak out or laugh?”
“They know about Steph’s law firm, so they know what’ll happen if we’re busted and prosecuted. There’d be a long, drawn-out cage fight in a courtroom. Except for a few in-house Homeland guys, the US intelligence community isn’t at all fond of our current administration. They can’t trust it. They also know a hard shake could knock lots of parasites and rotten fruit out of the governmental tree.”
Looking very skeptical, Tanya said, “The bank bailouts were a hard shake. Trillions spent in two years was a hard shake. But except for a lot of bitching and complaining, nothing else happened. It’s just bad business as usual. Why the hell would this be any different?”
“It’s personal, Tanya. Big money’s an abstract concept to most people. They’ve never had major amounts of money. They can’t really envision a billion, much less a trillion. But everybody’s been sick or injured. Everyone knows a car accident is all it takes to wipe you out financially. A badly healed injury can keep you from working. Having a tooth pulled — not major surgery; just yanking one with a shot of Novocain and a pair of pliers — can cost you fifteen or twenty bucks a minute. Major surgery costs big bunches more per minute. A lot of people haven’t seen a doctor or a dentist in decades. Some of them live in real pain. Some are suffering and dying from diseases that could have been prevented or treated early on, but who can spare big bucks to check out every sour stomach or cough?”
Sipping my coffee, I said, “Current Robodocs are so far away most people couldn’t get to them anyway, so laws about not visiting them are pretty much meaningless to Joe Average. Never had ‘em, can’t get ‘em, forget about it. But what if the Amarans had put one within walking distance in every town in America? Who’d be stupid enough to barf up a law saying they were off limits? What would happen if they tried? And this isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing; both parties have had power since the Amarans arrived and the laws have remained in place the whole time.”
Tanya seemed thoughtful for a time, then asked, “What do you think she meant by ‘specific steps’ to prevent us?”
“Standard stuff. Extra people. Monitors and alarms. Hold that thought. Speaking of monitors, my field turned up two new bugs. One’s outside and one’s under the table.”
Sending a field to kill the outside bug, I reached under the table and retrieved the tiny gadget. Showing it to Tanya as I put it in the sink, I said, “Goodbye, bugs,” and used a field tendril to fry it. It swelled and popped open and I tossed it in the trash.
Eyeing me as I returned to the table, Tanya sipped her juice and asked, “How much of what you just said was real?”
“All of it. Let’s look at that nursing home.”
I put up a four-foot screen showing the nursing home’s main entrance, then had my semi-James Garner simulation walk toward it from the street. Splitting the screen, I showed the security command center, a console of several monitors with a guy watching the displays.
As the Garner-sim strode into view, the guy went on alert and pressed a button. Two security guards met a guy in a suit and headed for the front entrance. I had the Garner-sim stoop as if to pick something up and head back to the street. The security crew stayed up front and watchful for a time, then broke up and went back to whatever they’d been doing.
“Now we’ll try it in stealth mode.”
The Garner-sim vanished, then became an outline on our screen. As it again approached the entrance, a light came on and four pinpoint lasers began sweeping the area. The guy in the command room again went on alert and closely studied the screens.
On general principles I reshaped the Garner-sim into a squirrel and sent it around some foliage. Invisible or not, one of the lasers found it and stayed locked on it. I let the sim become visible and wander in the open, then steered it back toward the sidewalk and past a hedge.
“Well,” I said, “That was informative.”
Glancing away from the screen, Tanya asked, “It was?”
“Yup. Stealth mode didn’t work quite as well as I expected. One of
the lasers managed to stay with it.”
Her gaze returned to the screen. “Oh. That’s not good, is it? How did it do that?”
“Something noticed a variance in the beam when it shunted around the sim. Stealth mode alone wouldn’t get us through the parking lot. Ever see one of those clips of a small animal running loose in a mall? With everybody avoiding or chasing it? I think a couple squirrels being chased by a dog would overwhelm that system.”
Tanya shot me a big grin. I said, “Someone would arrive and the doors would open. We’d launch the critters and follow them inside.”
“Before we do that, shouldn’t we find out if there are similar sensors inside?”
“Done dunnit, ma’am. I sent probes through the building.”
“Probes? What are they exactly?”
Sending a probe through the building’s roof in stealth mode, I pointed at the moving outline on the screen and said, “That’s a probe. They can be used to look for stuff or take samples and like that.”
I flew the probe high and low throughout the building without triggering the monitoring systems. It traveled along the floors and ceilings at differing speeds, then through walls, and finally out through one of the windows.
That’s when the monitor alarm went off. I had the probe’s view look for radio waves, then run through the full spectrum of light. It found two bingoes only a few slight shades apart in the infrared range. Multiple sensors.
On our screen, an elongated dome appeared to encompass the building. Well, not quite. A long, narrow strip of the center of the flat roof was left unguarded. Deliberately, maybe? I checked monitoring hardware and ranges and found they could have been placed to cover the dead zone.
Incompetence, then? Miscalculation? An old adage says never to ascribe to hostility to that which can be attributed to stupidity, but even old adages have coverage limits.
Standard investigative probes are nearly intangible, unlike sims and people in stealth fields. Describing my thoughts to Tanya, I sent a foot-diameter probe into the building, then had it solidify an opaque shell within its stealth field. As it flew through the corridor at shoulder height, an alarm sounded.
I let the probe vanish. “Yup. Got ‘em inside, too. Different settings for different targeting.”
“But there’s no laser. How did they know it was there?”
“Good question, ma’am. We might need a whole damned herd of squirrels for this trick.”
She chuckled, but her gaze remained serious as she studied the screen. After a moment of staring at the scene and letting my mind wander a bit, I changed tactics.
“Maybe this is the wrong approach. You’ve visited Marie. So has Jessica. They’d probably even let me visit her. The problem with this plan is only getting her out, not getting us in.”
When I sipped coffee and said no more, Tanya prompted with, “So? What are you thinking?”
“Can’t treat her on US soil. Can’t easily get her out of there to visit a clinic. Getting caught and tried might eventually get the laws repealed, but that could take years. But what if we could get a small piece of Marie, take it to a clinic and have it treated, and then get that piece back into her?”
Sitting straight with an ‘are you serious?’ look, Tanya asked, “How would you get a piece of her?”
“As painlessly as possible. I think a spot of living tissue from anywhere on or in her would be enough.”
“How big a spot?”
Holding up a thumb and forefinger almost touching each other, I said, “Not very. A sliver would do.”
“How would you keep it alive?”
“Stasis and artificial life support.” I shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter if it didn’t survive, I think. The treatment within it could escape into her body once we put it back in her. Maybe it could even be a timed-release thing.”
As I sipped again, Tanya canted her head and seemed thoughtful, then said, “They take blood samples twice a week. Mondays and Thursdays. But they chased us out of the room while they did that.”
“Good thinking, but how would we get blood back into her? They’d watch our every move in there.”
Making another screen, I had it display US laws regarding Amaran medical treatments of US citizens. The documents involved listed over eleven hundred printable display pages. I searched with the phrase ‘treat US citizen‘ and found only a few exact matches. Plural variants turned up several more, all of which ended with ‘on US soil‘ or similar words.
Letting the vast pile of legal crap disappear, I said, “Let’s ask a pro,” and had the screen contact the Guyana Robodoc clinic. When a woman answered, I asked to speak to Milla.
Tanya asked, “Who’s Miller?”
“Not Miller. Milla. First name, not last. Maybe her only name, in fact.”
“Okay. Who’s Milla?”
“The Robodoc in Guyana. She’s a sentient AI.”
“You… you know her?! Really?”
“I took Joyce down there, remember?”
Milla took control of the link at her end and a woman who looked somewhat like Charlize Theron asked, “Yes, Ed? How may I help you?”
“Wow! Excellent choice for a persona, ma’am! The lady on my left is Tanya, who will be helping me with something. I know you’re kind of busy down there, but I need to know whether you can do something. If I bring you a spot of live tissue, can you treat it as if it were a complete person?”
Her right eyebrow arched slightly and a moment of silence ensued, then she said, “Such a ‘spot of tissue’ would not legally qualify as a US citizen. Outside certain proscribed regions of this planet, I can treat any living thing I encounter for any manner of healing required. For obvious reasons, I would prefer not to know more than necessary about why you’d be in possession of someone else’s tissue.”
“You’re as gorgeous as you are brilliant, milady. The patient has brain and skeletal damage and can’t be moved. I’ll edit some records and send them to you if you need them.”
With a small smile, she replied, “Not necessary. I can install restorative DNA nanobots in your sample. If you can get them into the patient, they’ll reconstruct damaged regions. Would that be sufficient for your purposes?”
“Absolutely sufficient, Milla. By God, I wish I could promote you or something, Ms. Miracleworker.”
She laughed, “Also not necessary. I have enough responsibilities. Will there be anything else?”
“Not until I bring you the sample, ma’am. Thank you for your time. And for looking like that and everything else.”
“You’re welcome. Goodbye for now, Ed. Goodbye to you as well, Tanya.” With that, she dropped the link.
I sipped coffee and said, “Now, about that sample. Where could we nip a little live stuff off Marie? Maybe some tissue from one of the damaged spots?”
Tanya shook her head. “No. Those… nanobots… will fix everything anyway, right? We’ll take some good tissue, just to be sure.”
“Sure of what? Damaged or not, it’ll have her DNA.”
Her gaze narrowed and she said firmly, “I don’t care, damn it. We’ll take a healthy sample.”
“Give it some thought, then. Maybe we could go with hair follicles. Should be easy to get some and it wouldn’t cause much pain. We could…”
Tanya looked at me as if I was nuts. “Hair follicles?!”
“Do you know of any other follicles on people?”
“Do you know how small those are?”
“Nanobots are smaller and we’d only need a few. The bots’ll replicate themselves as necessary to do the job.”
Sitting back, Tanya seemed to consider matters, then said, “Okay. If we can’t think of something better.”
“Thank you so much for your kind indulgence, milady. Let’s not wait for Monday. Let’s visit her tomorrow afternoon. We can practice with boards in the morning.”
Giving me an odd look, Tanya asked, “Practice for what? If we’re just going to walk in, get some hair, and walk out, why do we need to
practice?”
“Because we have an audience. Remember what I said about magic needing an audience? We have to look as if we’re preparing to do something dramatic, so the practice will have to seem equally dramatic. After watching us buzz around the woods all morning like fighter jocks, what’ll they think when we land by the front doors to visit her in the afternoon?”
Rolling her eyes, Tanya exclaimed, “How the hell should I know what they’ll think?! They’ll probably think we’re going to try to bust her out.”
I just looked at her and grinned. She muttered flatly, “Oh, hell. They will, won’t they?”
“Yeah, seems likely. They aren’t really a trusting bunch.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?”
“Sure. Think about it. They’ll watch us practice, then see us swoop in and hop off our boards out front. They’ll be on high alert while we’re there, then they’ll go on a whole ‘nother kind of alert when we leave. In short, they’ll stay geared up to try to capture us in the act of snatching your mom and we’ll be on our way to Guyana and back with a wad of hair.”
Tanya sighed, “And when we get back, they’ll arrest us.”
“I really hadn’t planned on that happening.”
She replied drolly, “I’m not surprised to hear that.”
“Well, ‘scuse me for asking, but if we don’t try to spring Marie, how would they bust us? On what grounds?”
With quite a bit of attitude, she snapped, “At that point, they’d find something! Or make something up, just to…”
Holding up a hand to stop her, I said, “Spare us more of the same. They’ll need a viable case to make a decent political fuss. You just have some pre-mission jitters.”
3rd World Products, Book 16 Page 12
