The Infinite when it was Two Digits Old

by Allen Fleishman

  Abu looked at his companions. He left his mask and gun on the table. Walking to the open door, he put his hands behind his head as he descended.

  After a few minutes, they heard Abu’s voice. “They removed Mirasol’s necklace and my mother’s and father’s necklace. They just handed me the contract and money.”

  Charlie Haines voice echoed over the cheap phone. The tone was strident. “Next.”

  Babu left next, followed shortly by Mohammed.

  In Arabic, Charlie said, “Nachaat, you’re next. You gain nothing by being the dog of Fasil Al-Ibsen. You lose, your town loses, Islam loses. Fasil is only interested in his company’s bonuses.”

  Shouting, the last gunmen wailed, “Never infidel. I kill the boy. ALLAH AKBAR.” The man fled from the kitchen to the room David was chained in. David was curled in a ball facing the wall as far to the left of the window as he could get. The button on the back of the shirt was tilted to face Nachaat. The gunman raised his rifle as he heard something bounce behind him. He turned and saw what looked like a soda bottle. It had holes drilled around it. A grenade! He twisted away from the grenade but saw a strange sight. To the right of the window a giant silver bubble had silently appeared. The large perfectly reflecting bubble reflected the exploding flash-bang grenade. The light was the last thing he was able to see. The shock of the sound blast momentarily stunned him. He did not see the bubble wink out of existence as a circular section of the wall and window slid onto the street. His ears were deafened, so he did not hear the wall and window shatter below. Behind the fallen wall, a floating black Fiat was parked sideways. Nachaat couldn’t see the two sharpshooters at the car windows and another two lying on the hood and trunk with guns pointed at him. Nachaat tried to move his gun toward the location he had last seen the American boy. Each marksman fired a full clip of dumdum bullets at point-blank range. Nachaat’s gun never fired a shot.

  ***

  Fasil Al-Ibsen sat at his summer home, listening to the news services. His phone was within quick reach. He had been waiting for word from that fool Nachaat for days. His calls to that stupid Spanish engineer also went unheeded. Something had happened, but he had no idea what. He had an agent drive past the room he had secretly sublet for the kidnappers. Their report about the perfectly round hole in the wall was curiously strange. They drove past that obvious trap.

  Fasil took another sip of his Turkish coffee, hot, strong, thick and sweet. He enjoyed its aroma, one of his few vices. A bodyguard, there were a dozen guarding his mansion, had delivered it moments ago. He put the small cup back on the saucer when he heard the crash. His wife started screaming.

  He was instantly on his feet as he ran upstairs to his bedroom. There was a four meter, perfectly round hole in the ceiling. He could see the night sky. The fallen ceiling now littered his bed and floor. Fasil ran to his wife to comfort her. She was pointing at something, a fallen ball amid a jumble of thick rope. He was trying to comfort her, she was screaming and pointing at it. Looking again he noticed that the ball had hair and the grayish-purple rope was slimy and had odd curves in it. He was reeling, not knowing why, he woodenly went to the ball and rope. His mind identified the rope as intestines. He recognized Nachaat’s face on the bodiless head.

  ***

  Babu sat dejectedly in the back of the large closed truck. He, his family, and the neighbor boy were on the hard benches for the last 17 hours. He didn’t get any real rest. He was sure they were going to take all of them to some secret prison and perhaps torture them all about the kidnapping. He had heard Nachaat’s defiant shout, the explosion, and the machine gun fire. They all had seen the infidels decapitate Nachaat and put his head in a sack made from his shirt. He vomited when they cut off Nachaat’s penis. They said they were going to feed his body and manhood to the pigs and get their wastes to bury the head. They were obscene butchers. Murderers. Defilers. His life, as he knew it, was ended. There were four armed mercenaries seated at the other end, nearest the door. Their automatic guns were held facing them. Babu was half dozing when he felt the truck lurch. There was a crunch of dirt under the wheels. The truck landed. He and his family were instantly awake and huddled closer to one another. They all waited until the rear of the truck clanked and finally opened. The mercenaries never let their eyes move from Babu and his family. Each mercenary griped his automatic rifle closer. In American, one man issued a command and the mercenaries one-by-one left the truck. A solitary man stood at the opening. He gestured for Babu and his family to exit. Blinking in the sudden light, Babu noticed the old fig trees. It took him a moment to recognize that he was on a path within a two-minute walk to his parent’s home. The English speaking man reached into his pocket and took out two envelopes. Hesitantly Babu took and stared at them. In one envelope, Babu saw his name written in Najdi Arabic. Hesitantly he opened it and saw a thick stack of one-hundred American dollar bills. The second envelope had the name of the village headman. Babu and his parents spoke hurriedly to one another and left toward home, frequently looking behind them at the truck.

  Babu had never learned English, so he couldn’t understand Murray when he said, “Stupid, stupid teenager. I would have lied.”

  ***

  David and Phyllis visited the newly opened C H Electricity European Union branch office in Brussels Belgium. David and Phyllis recently hired the managers, salespeople and engineers primarily from the solar and wind energy community. The four guards and two dogs who accompanied them were discreet. So were the six guards who guarded the outside of the office. Staff training had been completed three weeks before, and sales were beyond the limited staff’s ability. They already purchased office space in London, Berlin, Oslo, and Rome.

  The board of directors of C. H. Industries (David, Martin, and Phyllis) hired presidents for C H Electricity and C H Motors. On the other hand, David’s business card now read, David Klein, First Assistant to Phyllis Marks, Department of Special Projects and Head of Domestic Jewelry Security.

  ***

  Although he was in Switzerland at the time, David directed his senses into a warehouse in Muncie Indiana. No humans were inside, only two crickets and a single field mouse. The warehouse housed his arsenal and ‘eyes’. On one side was production for special ‘dumb’ diamond computers and memories. He directed one hundred fifty of his new ‘eyes’ to focus on them. These computers were 0.000003 inch in size. Fortunately his ‘eyes’ had the sensitivity to appreciate them. Their memory was very limited, only five terabytes, but enough for his needs. Even after the operating system and encryption subroutines, each still contained enough ‘smarts’ to follow simple instructions and direct antigravity reflectors.

  Willing his ‘eyes’ to travel down the ‘flying brick’ production line he saw where an induction rechargeable battery was added to one of these computers, which in turn was encased in a jolt resistant shell of foam rubber surrounded by a plastic shell. Then he saw a lead football-shape with a hole bored out. Machines were placing the computer/battery into the hole and filling the lead in. This lead was encased in an inch thick steel covering, which was finally encased in a stealth blanket. The blanket had optical sensors and a covering of colored led lights. Each side of the brick was capable of taking on the images from the other side, rendering it effectively invisible. They were silent, invisible missiles with a terminal velocity of up to two hundred sixteen miles per hour. David had plans to add a force field. He knew that when an oscillating force field was added, a half-dozen bricks could remove one side of an aircraft carrier in three minutes. David sighed, ‘if only I had time to figure out how to recharge them fast enough. Maybe one day.’

  On the other side of the warehouse, he saw three foot tall robots making six inch robots. Further down the line the six inch robots constructed one inch robots. The tentacles were tapered into fibers barely perceptible by a person with a magnifying glass. His ‘eyes’ had no pro
blem seeing the tips. Toward the far end of the warehouse was a clean room where he knew that the great-grandfathers of the one inch robots were constructing his new gnat/bee visual arrays, swarms of antigrav motes of dust containing microscopic lenses and computers. The bottom of the room was covered with tiny pyramidal ‘sacks’ each housing a single production cell, like a honey comb. More layers would be produced in the coming months. Each ‘eye’ was powered by a ring of constantly rotating magnets. He knew normal people couldn’t see individual members of the swarm, except as a mist in a bright light. A swarm could produce images of such clarity that even he couldn’t appreciate it, until he magnified the images a million fold. Their simple computers were trained to hide on the floors, walls, ceilings, furniture, or even the bodies of humans. Elementary avoidance routines were installed. The current swarm numbered over one thousand ‘eyes’. By next month that number would triple. Two hundred were currently overseas.

  ***

  Fasil was bent on planning for the destruction of Charlie Haines. The only problem was no one could locate him.

  He went to speak to each of Nachaat’s men. When he visited Abu, the man was gracious in inviting him into his house. His mother made some mint tea and Abu told him of Nachaat’s desecration by the infidel and the words of that infidel, Charlie Haines, the American who didn’t lie. Reclining on some pillows he told Fasil that he was now a respected member of his village. He was eager to tell him of all the details of the kidnapping, but that was the end of his involvement. He went into detail on the dismemberment of Nachaat’s body, including the removal of his manhood. He also went over, in detail, the great things that Charlie Haines did as promised. Three members of the village were currently being trained as teachers. The American did not lie. The headman was trying to find seven more.

  On exiting the modest home, Fasil noticed that gunmen were on the roofs surrounding his own bodyguards. Fasil left.

  A similar fate had befallen Mohammed. Mohammed was even less willing to talk to Fasil.

  Babu was only able to talk to him in the presence of two of his brothers, an uncle, and father. They completely believed that their entire male line would be eliminated by the American and wouldn’t talk further. Fasil noticed as he left that all the males of the village stood at the side of the road watching him leave. Most carried heavy guns. No women or children were in sight.

  On returning home, Fasil had received a flat envelope containing a DVD, the return address on the envelope was CompuHead Industries. He put the DVD into his computer. A picture show started. It contained very clear images of his trip to Abu, Mohammed, and Babu, hundreds of pictures, including pictures of Fasil within his limousine. It also had a picture of an indistinct man throwing a tan lump of flesh to a set of large hogs. More upsetting were pictures of him eating with his wife, his nude wife putting on her dressing gown, his eldest son looking down at his grandchild, his daughter talking to her son, a picture of Fasil sitting on the toilet, and a picture of hogs eating from a trough. The only writing were the words: ‘I feel that violence is the last possible resort for reasonable men.’

  YEAR 19.2 UNCLE DAVID’S PICK-UP AND DELIVERY

  David was now nineteen and was in Oslo Norway with Phyllis when he picked up the news. The first he heard was that a young boy was being kept locked in his room, with electrodes implanted in his brain for some scientific experiment. The boy was comatose and 3 years old. Two hours later Martin transmitted to David and Phyllis.

  Martin: David, Phyllis did you hear the news that’s breaking about that little boy with the electrodes?

  Phyllis: Barely Dr. Klein, it all seems so jumbled. We know only little more than the news media. The parents are Janet and Sidney Ryan, who work in a very small biotech firm in Cambridge, a place called Lepto-Molecular Pharmaceuticals. The company is a startup with about a dozen scientists; the Ryans are two of the most senior. The baby’s name is Joshua. According to the birth certificate, he’s actually four years old. Oh, here’s something, the baby has LPH deficiency. It’s a very rare deteriorating auto-immune condition, where neurons break down in childhood. The interconnections actually dissolve. Few of the LPH children reach their twenties. Those that do are frequently in a vegetative state. It is a very rare genetic condition. There is no cure. But then again, with about one LPH patient in twenty million the drug companies wouldn’t bother with them.

  Martin: Actually Phyl, some do. The FDA makes it relatively easy to get drugs approved for these rare diseases. They have special rules for orphan drugs. I heard of one drug that only had eight patients to prove that it worked. It helped that a senator’s son had the disease. However, you’re right about LPH. Currently there is no cure or useful treatment.

  David: Dad, did you notice their purchases about four years ago. They bought carbon nanotubes and a collagen matrix.

  Martin: Hmmm, that’s what I used on you.

  David: Dad, should Phyllis and I come home?

  Martin: I don’t think so yet. But we’ll watch this play out a bit.

  ***

  Reporter: I have here Dr. Janet Ryan, the mother of four-year-old Joshua. She’s in the center of this latest controversy. When did you first hear of your son’s condition?

  Janet Ryan: When I was 4 months pregnant, I had an amniocentesis, and they recognized the genetic disorder.

  Reporter: Did you consider an abortion?

  Janet Ryan: I think any mother, facing the early and horrible death of her son would think of it. But I believe in God and didn’t consider it any further.

  Reporter: Can you tell me about your son’s disease?

  Janet Ryan: Joshua has a very rare genetic disorder, called LPH Deficiency or Morgan’s Disease, LPH stands for a protein which is in not in his blood and brain fluid. The missing protein allows the uncontrolled build up a second autoimmune protein. For little Joshua this protein will slowly dissolve the neuron’s dendrites and axons.

  Reporter: You mean it’s dissolving his brain.

  Janet Ryan: Ahh, you can say that. Yes.

  Reporter: Then Doctor Ryan, what did you do?

  Janet Ryan: We, my husband and I, decided that one step we could take to save my son, at least temporarily, until a cure was found, was to allow a computer to interconnect the cells to one another.

  Reporter: But you didn’t get permission to do this very experimental procedure. Isn’t it normal practice to go to the local medical board at the hospital and explain what you planned to do? Don’t you need initially to back such experimental research up with rats or other laboratory animals?

  Janet Ryan: Yes, but it takes years, decades to do things like that, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars. My son might die. There are no animals with this disease, so you can’t do animal research with LPH Deficiency. My husband and I took this chance. We wanted my son to have some hope to live.

  Reporter: But I take it the remedy failed. Isn’t it true that this illegal operation put your son in an autistic, almost comatose, state for the past four years?

  Janet Ryan: Yes.

  Reporter: Doctor Ryan, did you ever consider removing the baby from the computer?

  Janet Ryan: Yes, about two years ago and again last December, Josh’s tiny heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing. We re-attached him, of course.

  Reporter: This is Cathy Barker, of WUZR news, Somerville Massachusetts.

  ***

  For the next week, pictures frequently appeared in the tabloids with the baby lying in a large crib. The child was tiny for a four year old. A slight swelling was seen in his eyelids and cheeks, giving the baby an artificial oriental appearance. His large eyes were open but he was looking off into the distance. The child’s chest was unusually large and barrel-shaped, the legs and arms were small.

  ***

  Moderator: This is Right-Left, where we discuss and debate matters of interest to the country. Tonight is the case of
Joshua Ryan. We have Monica Sommers, a noted liberal columnist from the Village Voice in New York City and Mark Chadwick representing the conservative point of view, he is the author of ‘We are Right.’ Let us begin:

  Monica: You conservatives must be really of two minds about this issue. Here we have a woman who decided to carry her child and not get an abortion, to let him live with this disease which will eventually kill him. But having spared the child the merciful, quick death, instead of the lingering one, she tries to do something about it.

  Mark: There is no abortion issue here Monica. This was never about abortion. Even you can see that. The issue is simple. Should a parent be allowed to illegally experiment on her own child? Look what happened, the child is worse off now than if they left the baby on its own.

  Monica: You have no way to know if the baby wouldn’t have been comatose anyway. Or do we call you Doctor Chadwick? The mother took a chance to save the life of her only son. Isn’t that what you conservatives preach, saving a life?

  Mark: How do I know the baby would be comatose? I’ll tell you how, by hooking the infant to electrodes and applying current, you fry the mind. She ran electricity straight into the baby’s brain. Do you remember the only other person who did that? It was Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. At least Frankenstein took the moral high ground not to perform such an operation on a new borne baby, his own child. At least Frankenstein experimented with cadavers and the dead brains of murders, not an innocent living newborn boy. Doctor Frankenstein was a saint compared to Doctor Ryan. The only person who was grievously brutalized was the little boy. The child should be forcibly extricated from his horrible, sick parents.

  ***

  David: Dad, I’ll be home tomorrow, Phyl is closing down our apartment. I’ve started my plans. I think timing will be tight. I’m sending you a list of things to get. Can you send someone out for them?