by Scott Cramer
“Doctor,” he croaked.
A female doctor approached and looked down at him with kind, caring eyes. Her nametag said: Dr. Honey. “What can I do for you?” Her voice was as sweet as her name.
Ashminov labored to form each word. “Need to disable chip.” He chomped his tongue and tasted blood. Fearing that he had created an even more significant mess for himself, he waited for her reaction.
Dr. Honey held his hand. The magic of human touch served as a balm for his pain and suffering. “It's normal to have strange thoughts when you get a new nanochip,” she said. “It takes time for your brain to adjust to the hardware. Try to rest.”
“Toilet.”
A trace of frivolity touched her eyes. “That's unnecessary. You have a catheter.”
Ashminov peeked under the sheet. A thin flexible tube, emerging from his groin, extended to a urine bag hanging off the side of the bed. Distraught, he let his head sink into the pillow.
“Do you like to cook?” Dr. Honey asked.
“No.” With compromised lungs, even brief snippets of communication came at a steep price.
Dr. Honey lifted a plastic bag of his belongings, hanging from a hook on the side of the bed. The bag contained the clothing he had been wearing at the time of the field implant and the garlic press he had purchased for Signora Villanova.
“Friend,” he wheezed.
“That’s nice,” Dr. Honey said with a smile. She moved to another patient.
In an act born of desperation, Ashminov tugged on the catheter tube, causing an ache in his groin. He pulled harder, but it was held in place by some kind of anchor. A burning sensation commingled with the aching as he removed the tube millimeter by millimeter.
The anchor refused to budge. Burying his face in the pillow to muffle his scream, he yanked the tube hard. The cry robbed him of air and, half-asphyxiated, he took several labored breaths to recover. When he lifted the covers, the catheter was out, and he was still in one piece. “Doctor Honey!”
She returned to his bedside.
Ashminov flipped the sheet back. “Toilet?”
Her eyes widened. “I’ve never seen that happen before. I’ll fix it for you.”
As Dr. Honey was reinserting the catheter, he flopped his head to one side, making eye contact with Roscoe.
Roscoe winked.
DESIGN: PHASE 02
When Raissa entered the safe house, the couch was empty, save for Ashminov’s satchel.
“Ashminov?”
Alarmed, she walked to the bedroom. Ashminov wasn’t in bed. She checked the bathroom, even pulling back the shower curtain. Curiously, a bottle of bleach sat on the bathroom floor, next to the open door of the cabinet beneath the sink.
Do I need to find him? In one sense, she no longer needed Ashminov. She couldn’t imagine him helping her kill Petrov, and he was a liability. If paladins interrogated him, he’d sing like a canary.
Deciding it was necessary to find him, Raissa explored the contents of his satchel. It held a portable 3D printer, trans, mindport, and messenger. Nobody went far without their messenger. Moving to the window to see if he had stepped out for air, Raissa looked down on Beacon Street. It was quiet.
She rode the elevator to the first floor, stepped outside, and sat on the steps to keep watch. It was 11:00 p.m.
At 11:15, she walked around the block, glancing at stoops, in doorways, and down alleys, and then returned to the safe house where she collapsed on the couch.
Her thoughts turned to her encounter with Caleb Saunders. Interestingly, it wasn’t how her years of training had paid off, or the rocky relationship he seemed to have with his sister, or even how it had felt to come face-to-face with the enemy. Caleb has a cute nose.
Goldstein had warned her about the risk of emotional involvement with her target; he had given her a strategy to fix the problem if it occurred. “Ask yourself this: what’s more important, your grandfather's suffering or your desires?”
She had a better strategy. Never set eyes on Caleb Saunders again.
* * *
“Raeeeesa. Raesaaa. Raisa.” Variations of her name rolled off Caleb’s tongue.
On the taxi ride to NanoArtisans, he couldn’t remember how she had pronounced it. Was there a long ‘e’? Or a short ‘a’? He slumped back in the seat. What does it matter? I’ll never see her again.
The concert had ended ten minutes ago; Zoe had taken a separate taxi home. He had told her he had to go straight to his lab because he had some critical research, which was the truth.
He held his right hand in the air, not wanting to add any impurities to it. Raissa’s sweet, spicy scent was evaporating and the sooner he stuck his hand in an analyzer, the better his odds were of identifying her perfume.
The taxi dropped him off at Gate 5D.
“Can’t sleep, Dr. Saunders?” the paladin guard on duty asked.
He looked into the scanner. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
It flashed green, and the paladin waved him onto the campus. Caleb entered the security tunnel, awakening the blister guns. On the other side, he climbed on a scooter. “Grace Hopper.”
Five minutes later, Caleb stepped into the spectrometer lab on the fifteenth floor of the Grace Hopper Building and inserted his right hand into the body-part portal. When a spatial model appeared on the screen, he used the laser guides to mark the area to survey: wrist to fingertips, including the thumb. “Spectrometer, analyze.”
“Analysis complete,” the spectrometer reported, several seconds later.
“Send the results to my messenger.”
Caleb opened the Analyzer app on his messenger. There were thousands of compounds clinging to his epithelial cells, from sunscreen to the residue of an apricot meal tab he had popped into his mouth a week ago.
“Analyzer, eliminate trace compounds older than four hours.”
“Reduction complete,” Analyzer reported.
“Analyzer, identify perfume components.”
“Dioctyl sebacate.”
“Analyzer, what is dioctyl sebacate?”
“Dioctyl sebacate is an organic compound that is the diester of sebacic acid and 2-ethyl hexanol. It is an oily, colorless liquid used in plastic explosives and other applications.”
“Analyzer, what other applications use dioctyl sebacate?
“Brake fluid,” came the reply.
That brought a smile. Raissa didn’t seem the type, but maybe she took part in the hobby of fixing antique, gasoline-powered vehicles and driving them inside a smogatorium. “Analyzer, update your database. Brake fluid is not a perfume component. Continue analysis.”
“Sandalwood perfume,” Analyzer reported.
Caleb brought his hand to his nose. Raissa’s perfume had faded, but not the memory of her soft touch. He ordered a bottle of the sandalwood perfume, which would serve as a reminder of his encounter with the girl with the captivating green eyes.
DESIGN: PHASE 03
Ashminov executed a hard, swift tug on the catheter tube and then checked under the covers. The new one was out and his anatomy intact. He surveyed the ward. Roscoe's brief sign of brain activity had been fleeting, and Dr. Honey was consulting a chart.
To sharpen his focus, Ashminov thumped his chest to pound more molecules of oxygen from his compromised lungs into his bloodstream. “Dr. Honey?” She approached him, and he pulled back the sheet again. “Need toilet.”
After her brows shot up in disbelief, she called over a colleague, a male doctor with muscled arms, and said, “It’s fallen out twice. Can you believe it?”
“Let's apply a polycuff to his penis,” her colleague suggested.
Ashminov thrashed his head from side to side. The male doctor pressed down to hold him still. Ashminov found Dr. Honey’s eyes with his own and made a final, silent plea.
“I’ll let him use the bathroom,” she said.
The male doctor nodded and left, and Dr. Honey spun a dial on the wall above the bed, which released the polys. She h
elped Ashminov remove the bands from his ankles and wrists. “Thank you,” Ashminov whispered when she helped him sit up. He thanked her again as they limped to the bathroom with her arm around his waist. Dr. Honey’s touch was a lullaby that took him back in time. If the Captain and Colonel had offered a caring touch in his youth, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have ended up here.
“Sit or stand?” Dr. Honey asked when they reached the bathroom door.
“I can manage.”
Dr. Honey scrunched her brow in concern for his safety. She didn’t want him to hurt himself.
If she only knew. “Please.”
Dr. Honey gave a reluctant nod. “Pull the cord if you need help.”
Once Ashminov was alone, he opened the door a crack and peered out. Staff members floated from patient to patient. He thumped his chest again to prep for his dash to freedom, but every time he was ready to race to the ward doors, a doctor or nurse blocked the escape route. He had better act soon because Dr. Honey wouldn't let him remain unattended forever. When he spotted Roscoe grinning at him from his bed, he closed the door.
A guttural scream put Ashminov's neck hairs on end. He peeked out again. Roscoe was flailing his arms and thrashing his head, an endeavor made fruitless by his polys, but one that caused a commotion, and soon every staff member was at his bedside. Roscoe is creating a diversion!
Ashminov crept out of the bathroom, staggering as fast as his oxygen-starved body allowed, and passed through the double doors into a corridor. A man wheeling a cart emerged from the intersecting hallway to his right. Ashminov turned left.
About ten meters away, he pushed open a door marked “EXIT” and entered a stairwell. He stumbled to the railing and froze in fear. The shaft stretched at least ten stories to the bottom, and each story had two flights of stairs. His new chip quashed his fear, and he started down, every step consuming his limited oxygen supply. At the edge of unconsciousness, he reached the bottom floor and limped to a door.
Grasping the handle for support, he peered through a rectangle of glass. The lobby was bustling with staff, visitors, and patients coming and going.
Ashminov, shoeless and wearing a flimsy gown, started for the front door, expecting staff to question him, but none did. The door opened, and he trudged to the curb where he raised a finger to flag a taxi. As one pulled up, he glanced back, relieved that nobody was on his heels. Air supply depleted but confidence surging, he slid into the back seat.
“Taxi…” he began, but he couldn’t recall the address of the safe house, or even the street it was on. “Taxi, drive.”
“What is your destination?” the taxi asked.
“Drive.”
“Destination, please.”
He rolled his eyes in despair. “Tour of Boston.”
DESIGN: PHASE 04
Worn out from the potent cocktail of grief, shock, and excitement he’d consumed over the past twenty-four hours, Caleb stepped outside the Grace Hopper Building. He couldn’t stop thinking about Raissa. The time was 3:00 a.m.; if he returned home, he’d never be able to sleep.
He marched to his office to identify her chip ID. What would he do with it? Nothing. Zoe was right. He suffered terminal shyness. Sitting at his mindport, he pulled up the evening’s performance at Symphony Hall and reviewed the seating chart. When he clicked on Raissa’s seat, there was no record of her purchasing the ticket. Did she pay with cash?
Before exiting the database, he checked his and Zoe’s seats, curious whether Jack had purchased the tickets before or after poisoning Julian. But Jack, too, had apparently paid with cash because there was no record of his transaction.
Next, he accessed the Boston network of video cameras. Facial recognition software would provide the answer. Locating the interior camera at Symphony Hall, he played the archived footage at high speed starting from 7 p.m. Raissa arrived at 7:30. He liked that she was punctual. He also enjoyed the feeling of his heart fluttering in his chest. She strolled down the aisle and took her seat, then craned her neck left and right, but she never looked toward the camera. The application required a clean, unobstructed view to report an ID.
At the 7:55 p.m. mark, Caleb saw himself and Zoe appear and engage in a spat over seat selections. He chuckled. For once, he was glad that his bossy sister had lived up to her reputation and made him sit next to Raissa.
Caleb sighed in frustration when it became clear the half-shots of Raissa's face would not suffice. Hoping for better results from their encounter outside Symphony Hall, he tried accessing the exterior camera, but it was down for maintenance.
He recalled her hobby and accessed the membership database of the Jerusalem Smogatorium Club. But only one person named Raissa drove gas-powered vehicles within a thousand kilometers of Jerusalem, and that Raissa was not his.
* * *
Raissa shot up on the couch, awakened by a frightening dream. Gripping her joule, she scanned the dark room. “Ashminov?”
3:05 in the morning.
Her heart thudded in the silence. Rubbing her eyes, she stood up and stretched. In her dream, Petrov had been inside her brain, like sludge in a river. She shook her head, then made a quick search of the safe house. Ashminov was still AWOL.
Looking out the window, she saw a couple approaching on the sidewalk. Wearing expressions of joy, they were holding hands. They must be in love. Fixing her eyes on their faces, she waited until they passed. ‘Joy’ did not accurately describe their expressions. Electric? High wattage? Glowing? Even in the dark, Raissa marveled at the brightness of their eyes. They must be very much in love.
She returned to the couch, still shivering from her dream. The chill of Petrov lurking inside her mind would take a while to dissipate.
Unable to sleep, she accessed her messenger to identify probable locations where she might find Ashminov once the sun was up.
She tried putting herself inside his head. I am a brilliant Bulgarian technologist who lives in Rome. I watch wolf documentaries and know about black-legged ticks. I am undernourished and admit to sleeping little. Raissa thinks I have a problem with drugs, but I don’t. Where, after she punched me in the jaw, might I go?
* * *
“Old Ironsides,” the taxi announced as it pulled into the parking area for the frigate which had served in the War of 1812. The ship’s three masts stood against a starry night sky. From the back seat, Ashminov noted the time on the dash: 3:10 a.m. He craned his neck to scan his surroundings, hoping to spot the safe house.
Even though he teetered on the abyss of unconsciousness, he was sure that the safe house was not near docks or large industrial warehouses. He pounded his chest to lubricate his voice box with oxygen. “Taxi, next destination.”
Over the next thirty minutes, he visited other popular tourist destinations: Bunker Hill Monument, Alewife Wolf Hollow, Faneuil Hall, Fenway Park, a statue of Civil War General Joseph Hooker on horseback, Symphony Hall, and the Granary Burial Ground.
When they pulled up to Old Ironsides again, he crumpled in dejection. He was going in circles. Then, the faint ember of an idea glowed in his mind. “Taxi, take me to Boston Public Garden.” Twenty hours earlier, he had walked to the duck pond straight from the safe house. Retracing his steps ought to work.
They rolled to a stop at 3:20 a.m. “Taxi, wait here.” Ashminov exited the back seat and limped toward the scene of the crime, the bench where the paladins had embedded a chip in his brain. The bricks were cold and wet on his bare feet.
He sat on the bench, aware that paladins would be quick to investigate a man on a park bench wearing a hospital gown, especially if one remembered him from yesterday. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure a mental map to the safe house.
It wouldn't come.
So, accepting that such a map would never materialize, he struggled to his feet and relying on muscle memory, stumbled past the taxi and down a boulevard. He glanced up at the street sign: Boylston Street. The name didn't ring a bell. Boylston was quiet although several pedestrians over
took him. With their nanochips stimulating the neurons responsible for politeness, nobody gawked at his garb or condition. In a chipped world, everyone belonged.
His feet padded and scuffed their way over brick, over the pavement, over cobblestones. The changing textures signaled movement, but not necessarily progress.
He saw things in grayscale, and his legs grew heavier. The ground whispered to him like a soft gray pillow. Stop, curl up like a cat, rest for a spell.
The sight of kitchen gadgets in a storefront gave him a jolt. This feels right. At the next intersection, he stopped and lifted his eyes to the sky, recalling his fanciful wish to fly among the stars. Cautiously optimistic that he was nearing his destination, he turned right on Gloucester. The street sign at the next intersection said “Beacon,” and his optimism surged. The safe house is on Beacon Street!
He turned onto Beacon, and two-and-a-half blocks later, after what seemed like a painful, exhausting marathon, stopped at a three-story brick building with flower boxes beneath the windows. The sweet scent of flowering trees nearby served as a double confirmation the wayward explorer had arrived home.
When he looked to his left, a spike of dread cleaved him in half. The next building was also brick, three stories tall, and had flower boxes beneath the windows. The two structures were identical. He faced twin Matterhorns. Which one?
Banking on sheer luck, he opted for the house on the right and started the slow, agonizing climb up the steps. Wheezing and dizzy, he reached the top and crawled to the door where he probed with an outstretched hand, missing the handle twice until he got a grip on it. He pulled himself up, opened the door, and stumbled inside.
After dragging himself into the elevator, he croaked, “Top floor,” and slumped against the door.
When the elevator delivered him to the third floor, he half-fell through the opening door and used his elbows to pull himself along the floor to the safe house door. His cry was at once desperate and faint. “Raissa!”
