by David Archer
“I don’t care to discuss it at all,” Pat said. “I just want to know that you got the right stuff to do the job. My doctor said I should come down and take a look at your operating room, can we do that?”
Iverson’s eyebrows went up. “Well, yes,” he said. “I believe there might be a procedure going on there before long, but I can definitely take you down and let you see it. Come this way.”
He got up and led them down a hallway, and a couple minutes later, they arrived at the surgical center. There were three operating rooms, and Pat insisted on looking into each of them. The first two were empty, so he was able to walk inside and look around for a moment, but Iverson told him the third was being prepped for an upcoming procedure, so all they could do was look in through the windows.
“I guess that’ll be good enough” Pat said, being as grumpy as he could manage. “Doesn’t look too bad so far, let’s take a look at this one.”
Iversen led them to the door, which had a pair of windows that allowed those inside and outside to see whether anyone was about to come through. Sam and Pat leaned up and put their faces to the glass, and Sam felt a rush of excitement when he spotted Li Chang inside, sitting on a stool.
And then Chang spotted Sam, and he smiled.
38
Sam pushed the door open and stepped inside, and the medical staff spun around and stared at him in shock. A nurse tried to block his path, but Sam pushed her out of the way. He took out his ID and held it up, turning it so that everyone in the room could see it.
“My name is Sam Prichard, and I’m with the Department of Homeland Security. Li Chang, you are under arrest.”
Chang continued to smile at him. “Sam,” he said. “Did you really think I’d let it be this easy? You can have Chang now, but his usefulness to me is far from over. Meanwhile, Dr. Hu and I will proceed with my plans, exactly as I laid them out.”
Sam looked into Chang’s eyes for just a moment, and then he remembered what Walter had said about the other kind of chip.
“Well, hello, Joel. I see you’ve got Mr. Chang all wired up the way you want him. I’m guessing you can see and hear me through his eyes and ears?”
“I can’t actually see you clearly, but well enough to be sure that it’s you. As for the rest of the people around you, they know absolutely nothing about what’s going on. As far as they are concerned, Chang is simply a representative of the trust that purchased their facility, and he’s there to observe. It was my little way of planning a surprise for you.”
“And Chang? How much does he know?”
“This little twit? He only knows what I tell him to know. He doesn’t have a gen-4 chip, that was just a smokescreen to keep you busy while I made certain other arrangements. He’s got…”
“I already know,” Sam said. “I don’t know what you call it, but Walter found out there was another kind of chip that can actually control a brain, so that you can take over someone else’s body. The only part that confuses me is that we thought it required the gen-5 chip to make it work.”
“Oh, not at all,” Chang said. “It’s called a slave chip, and it basically turns its human host into an avatar, like a robot. Most of the time, I’ve kept him running off a computer program that makes him seem almost normal, though a few people might have thought he was acting a little odd. We’ve done some amazing work with AI, but it’s all still based on situational response at this point. The program encompasses millions of possible situations he might run into and provides him with a response to them, but there’s always the chance of running into something we didn’t program for. You should have seen what happened when he was riding the bus and some strange little boy crawled up in his lap. The computer was only programmed for pets or people he knew, so it thought the kid was a puppy. Everybody laughed when Chang started petting him and telling him he was a good dog.”
“So what’s going to happen when we deactivate that chip? Is he going to know what you’ve done to him?”
“Well, no, as a matter of fact. I’m not a hundred percent certain, but I suspect he’ll wake up thinking it’s a Tuesday, about four months ago. I’ve had him running on autopilot since then, when I wasn’t driving myself.”
“Joel, give this up,” Sam said. “The doctor isn’t going to cooperate with you, she knows too much about what you are really doing. You can’t possibly get away with it, and I should let you know that the government has authorized us to shoot you on sight.”
“Which is precisely why I’m not going to let you get anywhere near me. Sam, Sam, I tried very hard to convince you of just how wonderful this technology really could be. I actually like you, Sam, and I would have liked to have had you working with me. Imagine what you and I could accomplish together, would you?”
“Would never happen,” Sam said. “I guess I’m just not wired the way you are.”
“Yes, I figured that out. As for Doctor Hu, I’m afraid you’re wrong about her. She’s actually planning to cooperate completely, though I will confess that I gave her some incentive. She chose helping me as the lesser of the two evils, and I plan to keep her very close and very safe. You need to forget her, Sam. She’s already out of your reach, and so am I.”
“You might be surprised,” Sam said. “I’ve got a pretty long reach, especially when I’m angry.”
“Oh, I know,” Chang said. “I told you, I followed your blog. Now, admittedly, I only started after I found out you were going to be working on the investigation, but you have accomplished the impossible on so many occasions that I felt it necessary to insert myself, to make sure you didn’t figure it out in time to stop me. It worked pretty well, I thought. I loved the way you fell for my awestruck act when we went for a ride in your car. Sure, it’s a pretty cool Mustang, but I could have a hundred of them if I wanted. When you can have anything you want, there aren’t a lot of things that you really get excited about.”
“I’m coming for you, Joel. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far this goes, I’m coming for you.”
“Really? Then I guess you got your passport all in order? You didn’t really think I was limited to this country, did you? The way I’ve got everything set up, I can handle everything from anywhere in the world. You can look as hard as you want, but you’ll never find me. I will literally be in the last possible place you would ever suspect.”
Chang blinked suddenly and seemed like he was about to fall over for a second, but then he righted himself. He looked around the room for a few seconds, and his eyes grew wide. They got even wider when he saw Sam, and Pat standing just behind him with a Colt .45 pointed into his face.
“Hey,” he said, his voice suddenly sounding different. “Um, would somebody like to tell me what’s going on? Where am I, anyway?”
Sam stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Mr. Chang? My name is Sam Prichard, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me.”
Surprisingly, no one in the room had spoken or interrupted during the entire conversation before that moment, but now they all seemed to want to speak at once. Sam tried to make them stop, but finally he shouted for them all to shut up, and they did.
“I realize what you’ve just seen seems pretty strange,” he said, “but this is a matter of national security. All of you are going to answer some questions, but unless we learn something different from what I know right now, you are probably not in any trouble.” He turned to Pat. “Go tell Merrick to bring everyone in, it’s time we let the locals handle this part.”
Pat nodded and walked out of the room, tucking his gun into his waistband. A couple minutes later, Merrick and the local officers met Sam in the lobby, with Chang. Sam explained what was happening, and Merrick agreed to take over the general questioning of the clinic’s staff.
Darren, Jade, Rob, and Albertson went to fetch cars, and Chang was placed in the back seat of Sam’s. Pat and Becky rode with Darren, while Jade took shotgun beside Sam and Summer sat in the back seat with Chang.
“Lo
ok,” Chang said as they drove away, “this is really freaking me out, okay? I mean, the last I remember was last night, I guess, when I was getting ready for bed. Where am I, and how in the world did I get here? And why don’t I remember it?”
“Mr. Chang,” Sam said, “I’m afraid you have been used by someone who was out to cause a lot of trouble, and wanted you to take the fall for it. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail at the moment, but we will explain everything when we get back to CerebroLink. I just need you to be patient until then, okay?”
Chang looked frightened and frustrated, but he sat back in the seat and looked out the window. Sam took out his phone and called ahead, letting Doctor Prentiss know that they were coming.
Being a little more careful about the speed limit, it took them slightly less than an hour to get back to the CerebroLink headquarters. Sam, Jade, and Summer walked Chang into the building, and he was taken directly upstairs to the brain lab. Doctor Prentiss and Doctor Rice were there, along with a couple of engineers named Wilson and Ballard.
“Here’s what I want to know,” Sam said. “First, is there any possible way to use the chip in Mr. Chang’s head to track where Joel might be?”
Wilson and Ballard looked at each other, and both of them shook their heads. “I’m afraid not,” Wilson said. “If we had access to its relay server, then it’s possible we could track the IP address of the server that relays for Joel’s chip, but it’s gone. Without that, we have no way to access that information.”
“Okay, I kind of get that. What about tracking the things Joel has made Chang do? If we could figure out what he’s been up to with Chang, it could lead to clues that will take us to him.”
Ballard made a grimace. “There might be some limited possibility of that,” he said, “but not through our department. I read a study that was done on human memory, and it seems that everything you do, even when you can’t remember it consciously, is recorded in the brain. Now, from what I understand, that would take the services of a psychiatrist and a hypnotist. It’s basically the same thing they do with people who have unexplainable gaps in their memories, like people who think they were abducted by a UFO. A hypnotist and a psychiatrist working together can usually unravel what happened during those times.”
“Alright,” Sam said, nodding. “We’ll look into that. Next question: is there any way to completely deactivate the chip he’s got now? From what I saw, Joel can tap right into his brain and pick up everything that’s going on around him. We need to be able to shut that off, both to protect Mr. Chang and to keep Joel from using him to learn more about what we know or don’t know.”
“Oh, that’s pretty easy,” Ballard said. “We actually made a little hat for that very purpose. What it does is generate a small electromagnetic pulse that shorts out the antenna built into the chip. The chip is inside a bio-neutral gel pack that keeps it from causing any scarring on the brain, and it’s more than sufficient to insulate the brain from the tiny amount of heat that would be generated.” He looked at Chang, who was looking terrified. “That means it can’t possibly hurt you,” he said. “You might feel a little bit of tingling in your frontal lobe, but that’s actually a false sensation. There aren’t any nerves in that part of the brain that are capable of feeling anything, so it’s just the brain reacting to the sudden disconnection from the chip.”
Sam turned and looked at Chang. “It’s got to be your choice,” he said. “However, you were asking me a bit ago about how you got out of your home and to that clinic. Mr. Chang, do you know what day it is?”
Chang’s eyes were darting all around the room, looking at everyone but always returning to Sam. “Umm—Tuesday?”
“I’m afraid not,” Sam said. “It’s actually Thursday afternoon.” He told him the date, and Chang’s eyes grew even wider than he would have thought possible.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, that’s not…”
Ballard gave him a sad smile. “Li, he’s telling you the truth. I’ve actually thought you were acting kind of odd the last few months, but I just thought maybe you were having some rough times or something. But, yeah, man, you’ve apparently been running off the BCI561120 for a while, now.”
“But I—I can’t believe that. I mean, I know what happened to me, guys, I got Joel and Dr. Aaron to give me a chip, but it was supposed to be...”
“Yes, well,” said Prentiss, “apparently it wasn’t. It seems they pulled a switch on you. BCI561120, as you might remember since you created it, is the slave chip. While you thought your friends were helping you steal gen-4, they were setting you up to become Joel’s newest avatar.”
Chang swallowed hard and looked around at all of them again. “What—yes, I know what it is. It means he could use me like a puppet.” Tears began to stream down his face. “What—what have I done? What did he make me do?”
Sam took pity on him. “I don’t think you actually did much of anything,” he said. “However, he set you up as the fall guy for his own criminal actions. He was running the Cho Weh Wo triad through you, though he never let anyone actually see your face or identify you. I’m no expert on the law, and there may not even be one when it comes to this kind of stuff, but I seriously doubt you are personally going to be held culpable for anything that happened while he was in control of you.”
Chang sobbed and looked into his eyes. “But what kind of things? What things did he order using my voice, my face?”
“Many things,” Sam said. “There will be plenty of time for you to learn more about that, but right now we need to make sure he can’t use you to spy on us, or make you do anything else. Will you give us consent to turn off that chip forever?”
Chang looked into his eyes for another moment, then nodded his head.
*
“This is unacceptable,” Daphne said. “It is not possible for me to perform such delicate surgery under these conditions.”
“Oh, relax, Doctor,” Joel said. “We’ll be ready in just a little bit. Haven’t you always wanted to travel, anyway?”
“I came to you from Hong Kong,” she said. “I do as much traveling as I care to. I do not, however, perform surgery while doing so.”
It had been almost 2 hours since they had arrived in San Jose, and Daphne had been startled when she saw the “clinic” that Joel had referred to. It was incredible, she would admit, but not something she had ever expected to see, much less work in.
One of the side ventures of Patterson Surgical Partners was the development of mobile operating rooms for use in third world countries. They had worked with a major motor home manufacturer for the last four years, building mobile surgical centers for use by missionaries, philanthropic organizations, and other groups that might need complex medical services far from a conventional hospital.
Built on the chassis of a commercial passenger bus, it was capable of being driven on any road, even in the worst possible terrain. Electrically operated suspension allowed it to raise its entire body up to three feet, so that its wheels could climb over obstacles and maneuver through relatively deep water. Completely self-contained with its own generators, water and sanitation system, and everything a surgeon could possibly need while performing an operation, it was a marvel of modern medical technology.
It was even more impressive when it was ready to be put into use, however. From the driver’s compartment back, the entire body could expand outward on both sides, creating a stable structure that was thirty-six feet long and slightly more than thirty feet wide. Sliding, movable walls allowed the interior to be configured quickly to suit whatever purpose it was most needed to fulfill, and all of it was controlled by a single computer. One person could choose the layout desired and tell the unit to configure itself, and it would be ready in less than an hour.
Rather than going directly to PSP, Joel had directed his driver to take them to a warehouse on the south end of San Jose. His own unit was waiting there, already set up and prepared for the surgery to begin. He had even borrowed a few of Pa
tterson’s medical staff, telling them only that they were needed as support for an important experimental procedure.
“Isn’t it impressive?” Joel asked Daphne, pointing to the massive vehicle. She looked at it for a moment without saying anything, then glanced around at the other contents of the warehouse. There were a few vehicles, ranging from something the size of a delivery truck down to tiny cars that she first mistook for toys. Several of them were so small that even her tiny frame could not fit inside. She couldn't understand their purpose, but merely shook her head.
Just beside the big vehicle there were three odd-looking devices. Each of them was about four feet tall, and shaped like an inverted ice cream cone on wheels. On top of each of them was a small machine gun with a large magazine sticking out the side. Attached to each gun was something that looked like a video camera, and all three of them seemed to be watching as they approached.
“These are part of my security system,” Joel had said as they passed. “Just in case you get any silly ideas while I’m under anesthesia, you should know that they are programmed to shoot anyone who comes out of that unit before I give them the command code to deactivate them. We can go in, but we can’t come out. Everyone inside knows that, so it won’t do you any good to try to run after you put me under.”
Daphne had followed Joel into the unit, and begun examining the equipment. While it was certainly incredible, she did everything she could to convince him that it was not suitable for the operation, and that she could not work under such conditions.
Her arguments fell on deaf ears.
“This unit was specially designed for our purposes,” he said. “It will be available to us whenever we need it. It will always be completely stationary when it’s in use, of course, just like it is now, and I’ll always provide you with the best possible staff.” He was sitting on a chair directly in front of her, and leaned forward for emphasis. “Doctor, it’s time to quit stalling. Remember that those children are counting on you, and that their only hope for survival is for you to ensure that the surgery is successful and I come through it in good health. Everything is ready; it’s time to begin.”
