A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  Kaem interrupted, “I agree. But that doesn’t matter. The thing is that we’ve already had thousands of stazer requests from hospitals, mostly from here in the U.S. but also from elsewhere. We’ve been telling them we can’t sell them stazers until the FDA approves it. Not even to hospitals outside the States who claim their country will allow them to use non-FDA approved devices—”

  “Wait,” Arya broke in, “this is a good thing, right? We could use the money…” she stopped at the look on Kaem’s face. “What?”

  He winced, “Right now, only one person can make stazers. And he sure as hell can’t make thousands of them by himself.” He scowled, “Unless he does it full time.”

  Noticing that Kaem didn’t say that he was the person who could do it, Arya chose her words carefully. “Can’t other people do most of it so that person can just do the critical elements?”

  “Yeah,” Kaem sighed, “X and I have worked out a way to have almost all of the assembly carried out elsewhere in an automated factory. The proprietary chips would be built by a different supplier, then inserted robotically at the factory that puts everything else together. Then all that’d have to be done here would be firmware installation on the chips, the making of a couple of minor adjustments to the electronics to make it functional, then closing the stazer up inside of our Stade cases.” His shoulders slumped. “That’s still a lot when you’re talking about making tens of thousands of them.” Kaem groaned, “I should’ve started working this problem a long time ago.”

  Gunnar said, “Is there anyone you’d trust with the secret? Someone you’d let do the critical assembly steps? Ordinary employees could deliver the parts, then pack the finished stazers up and ship them out.”

  Kaem stared at Gunnar for a moment. “You,” he said. “I’d trust you to do it.”

  Gunnar drew back, hands up, “No freaking way! I’ve got a job I like. I don’t want to take that on. Too boring and too… easy to screw up. In case you haven’t noticed, I tend to make mistakes on dreary repetitive tasks.”

  “There’d be a simple quality control test at the end of assembly that would make sure we didn’t ship out any mistakes.”

  Gunnar snorted, “Did you miss what I said about me not liking mind-numbing projects? And about me having a job I liked?” He lifted a chin at Kaem, “You know, you could do it if you just gave up the interesting job you’ve got at present.”

  Arya said, “What about your mom?”

  Kaem had been focused on Gunnar, now he looked astonished.

  Arya realized Kaem thought she was proposing that Gunnar’s mother could do the assembly. She thought he was thinking Gunnar’s mother must be far too old to assemble stazers.

  Rather than letting Kaem have time to embarrass himself by making it obvious he didn’t remember Gunnar’s mother had already passed, Arya quickly said, “I talked to Sophia at Staze’s spring picnic, Kaem. She told me she’s glad to have her job, but that it’s boring and doesn’t pay very well. I’ll bet she’d jump at this.”

  Wide-eyed, Kaem said, “She doesn’t know the deal with X either!”

  “So,” Arya shrugged, “bring her in on it.”

  “And you got the impression she’d be happy jumping from one boring job to another?”

  “It’d pay a lot more. And what she’d be doing would matter. She complained that she didn’t feel her current job was fulfilling.”

  Looking uncomfortable, Kaem said, “I’m… ashamed to admit I don’t know what she does at… Hell, I don’t even know the name of the law firm where she works.”

  “I got the impression she answers phones, makes appointments, and maintains their electronic filing system. Not what she’d like to be doing.”

  Looking pinched, Kaem said, “I thought it might be something like that, but was afraid to ask her.”

  “So? I assume you think you can trust your own mother?”

  “With my life. Though I’d hate to make her keep a secret from my dad.”

  Arya arched an eyebrow, “You wouldn’t trust your own father?”

  Kaem shrugged, “The fewer people that know…” He looked at Arya, “I thought we couldn’t hire any more relatives?”

  “Oh no, we definitely shouldn’t. But she could have her own business that does electronic work, we wouldn’t call it ‘stazer assembly,’ on a contract from Staze. I can help her set it up.”

  “Oh…” Kaem said, looking like the idea had his mental wheels spinning. She thought he liked the idea.

  As usual for Bonnie’s, their lunch sucked. How does this place stay in business? Arya wondered as she walked back.

  ***

  It was a beautiful summer day as Sophia walked to the park, but she was too worried to notice. When Kaem called and asked if he could eat lunch with her in the park down the street from her job, she’d tried to invite him to dinner instead. He’d balked at that, saying he wanted to talk to her alone.

  She couldn’t imagine what he wanted to talk about that he didn’t want Emmanuel to hear. Was Emmanuel about to lose his job at Staze and Kaem wanted to prepare her for it? Was Staze going broke so that both Kaem and Emmanuel would be out of work?! Was it something about Emmanuel’s health? Or Kaem’s health? It couldn’t be a problem with school, Kaem had graduated several months ago now.

  Thinking that whatever this problem was, she couldn’t afford to endanger the job she had, she told her phone to remind her in plenty of time to get back to her office. Looking up, she saw Kaem waving to her from a picnic table in the shade of some trees. She hurried that way.

  Arriving, Sophia saw he had a lunch basket from one of the catering companies in town. Having ordered one such basket for a lawyer at her firm, she knew it was expensive. Kaem! She thought, upset, This is hardly the time to be splurging!

  Kaem started unpacking the basket when he saw her. Now he looked up. “Chicken salad or BLT?” he asked cheerfully.

  She liked both but chose the chicken salad because she knew Kaem loved bacon. Looking at her son, she said, “What’s this all about?”

  “What? I can’t ask my mother to lunch without getting the third degree?”

  “No,” she said. “Not when you so pointedly didn’t want your father to come along. Now, what’s wrong?”

  He frowned, “Before I can talk to you about it, I’ve got to swear you to secrecy.”

  “Secrecy?! About what?” She narrowed her eyes, “Are you wanting me to keep this secret from Emmanuel?! We don’t keep secrets.”

  Kaem grinned at her, “So, you’re saying that Dad knew about the money you kept in the oatmeal can all those years?”

  Sophia tried to keep a straight face, but a grin broke through anyway, “Busted. But we don’t keep secrets about things that matter.”

  “Like money?”

  She snorted, “Dammit! You, my son, can be quite annoying.”

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t a family secret. It’s for Staze.”

  Sophia blinked, “Why would I need to keep a secret for Staze?”

  Kaem gave her a frustrated look, as if he hadn’t expected all the pushback. Speaking slowly as if he was struggling to keep his patience, he said, “Because, they want to offer you a job.”

  Suspiciously, she said, “I already have a job.”

  Calmly, Kaem said, “This one would pay a minimum of a hundred and fifty thousand a year.”

  Rocked back on the bench, Sophia nearly dropped her chicken salad. “To do what?!” Trying to make a joke, “Assassinate people?”

  Eyes steady on her, her son said, “Now we’ve gotten to the limits of what I can tell you without your promise to keep it all secret.”

  “Is it illegal?”

  He shook his head. “It might, however, be dangerous. Hard to say. You could decide not to do it because of the risks, but you’d have to keep it a secret nonetheless.”

  “You’d have me take a job that’s dangerous?”

  His face stilled, “No.” He shook his head, “Sorry, let’s just finish a
pleasant lunch and forget this whole thing.” He smiled, “How’s your week been going?”

  Sophia froze. My son just offered me a job that pays three times as much as I’ve ever earned! Am I going to refuse to even learn about it?! “Sorry,” she said, “I’ve been looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll keep this secret, whatever it is.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, “No. You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t have even considered offering you a job that might be dangerous.”

  Sophia rolled her eyes. “Every job’s dangerous to some extent. An angry client of our law firm could come in and shoot the place up. Don’t make me beg, Kaem. I want to know what you’re talking about. Even if I decide the job is too dangerous, I’ll still keep the secret.”

  “If something happened to—”

  “Kaem! Please! Let me decide.”

  He sighed. “It has to do with building stazers.” He went on to describe how Mr. X had been making their stazers but that they were about to need thousands of them. X didn’t want to do all those builds so they needed a subcontractor to build them. Someone they absolutely trusted not to sell information to competitors. Someone who’d keep it all secret, including the fact that X himself wasn’t building them. Though at first, this sounded like an insurmountable job, Kaem explained that the stazers would arrive having been almost completely assembled elsewhere. All she’d have to do was electronically load firmware and make a minor modification to the circuit board. Then insert a thermite plate beneath the circuit board, test the stazer to be sure it was functional, close the steel case, put the stazer in a Stade case, and send home a few bolts.

  “How long do you think that would take per stazer?”

  “Less than five minutes.”

  “So,” Sophia said contemplatively, “that’d be—”

  “Ninety-six in an eight-hour day,” Kaem said, obviously too impatient to wait for her to figure it out herself. “Four hundred and eighty per week and twenty-four thousand a year. Plenty of them for Staze’s needs at present.”

  She frowned, “Why’s this dangerous? Overuse injuries from doing the same thing so many times a day?”

  He cocked his head, looking surprised. “I wouldn’t think so,” he said thoughtfully. “We’d help you set up industrial robots that would move the stazer into place for you to plug in the firmware cable. While the firmware was installing, you’d cut a wire on the circuit board and slide in the thermit plate. Once the firmware was installed, you’d plug the output cables into a quality assurance tester. Once it passed, a second robot would put the lid on the inner steel case and bolt it closed. Then the robots would put the steel case into a Stade case and bolt that closed.”

  “Wait, what about getting them out of the boxes they’re delivered in, then boxing them back up to be sent out afterward?”

  Kaem waved that away. “That can be done by other people, nothing secret about those parts of it.”

  “But, aren’t those other people going to see what I’m doing?”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t be in the same room as you,” Kaem said as if shocked by the very idea. “They’d be in a neighboring building, feeding the incomplete stazers onto a belt that takes them through a long narrow Stade tunnel to you. A tunnel that’d be small enough to keep them from seeing or entering or even knowing where you were. They’d send the incomplete stazers off and get finished ones back and hopefully believe it was all done by automation.”

  Why isn’t it being done with automation?”

  “We might get there someday but right now there’s a couple of things a robot would have trouble with. Besides, we don’t want someone hacking into the software for the automation and then somehow figuring out how it all works.”

  She leaned back pensively, “So, then, why is this dangerous?”

  “Because a lot of people, some of them bad people, would like to know how to build their own stazers. If they figured out you knew how it’s done, they might try to force you to give up the secrets.”

  “But… I wouldn’t know how to do it, would I?”

  He shrugged, “Not really. They might still hurt you because they thought you knew. All this secrecy I was insisting on is partly intended to keep anyone from knowing what you’re actually doing. But there is some danger, so you definitely shouldn’t do it.”

  “So, I’d be in a separate building, working as a subcontractor for Staze and no one would know what I was doing?”

  Kaem nodded. “We’d need to come up with a cover story about how you were building something out of Stade and we’d have automation that did build something for you to deliver. That’d be what you’d tell Dad and Bana you were doing. And anyone else that asks. So, people would think they knew what you were doing and wouldn’t ask questions.”

  She thought about that a moment. “Okay. The people in the building that’re unboxing and re-boxing wouldn’t know where the stazers were being finished or who was doing it?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Would they let me have input on how it was all done? By that I mean, could I insist it be done in a manner I thought was safe?”

  “Yeah. You understand I don’t think you should do this, don’t you?”

  She gave him a sly grin, “But now I want to. It’s a challenge and one that pays well.”

  “No matter how careful we are there’ll still be some risk. And, even if it’s interesting while you’re setting it up, it’s going to get boring and lonely after a bit.”

  “Are these going to be the medical stazers that’ve been in the news?”

  “Um, yeah. For the most part.”

  “Then, it’ll be a worthwhile endeavor. And, every job has its risks. You quoted a minimum salary?”

  He nodded. “More if you produce more than twenty thousand a year. Of course, at times there may not be enough demand for you to even reach that amount.”

  She waved dismissively, “I’m not worried. Demand for stazers is only gonna go up. Will I be allowed to innovate methods to let me increase production?”

  Kaem rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

  “I think it’s gonna be fun,” she said, washing her hands together.

  ***

  “Senator Starn?” When Starn looked up, his assistant said, “Admirals Jain and Halser are here to see you.”

  “Bill!” Starn said, getting up and coming around his desk to shake Jain’s hand. His eyes shifted to the other man, “And you must be Admiral Halser?”

  “Yes sir, Jack Halser,” the man said, putting his hand out to shake. “Pleased to have the opportunity to meet you.”

  After a little more chit-chat, Jain got down to the issue at hand, “I assume you’ve heard of this stuff, ‘Stade,’ that’s coming out of Charlottesville, Virginia?”

  Starn had heard of it because of the way the stasis it was based on was saving lives at the hospital in Charlottesville and because, after dragging their feet, the FDA had finally fast-tracked approval for it. He also knew it was very strong, but now Jain went on to tell him just how astonishing its physical properties were and how the navy wanted ships and submarines built out of it. How Jain was sure the army would like it for tanks and the air force would like it for jets and their engines.

  Jain said the company hadn’t been cooperative with providing the naval shipyard with a reasonable test sample.

  And, most importantly, how the admirals were worried that America’s adversaries might get it before America did, even though it was “made in the USA.”

  Starn frowned, “It may be too late to declare it a secret and restrict it to some kind of black lab. A whole lot of people already know about it and I’ll guarantee there’ll be an uproar if we shut down medical stazing. It’s saving a lot of lives.”

  Jain nodded, “We agree on that. Besides, they abandoned their patent application so the Invention Secrecy Act doesn’t apply.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “We were thinking of nationalization.”

  Starn’s eyes widened. “Nationalization
! That’s normally done by governments that’re trying to prop up their economies.”

  Halser said, “That’s been true in poor countries around the world. But here in America, it has a long history of being done for military reasons during wartime.”

  “Oh,” Starn said thoughtfully, “I think you’re right. During World War II the country nationalized some industries to mobilize them for the war effort, didn’t it?”

  “Not just some industries. A bunch of them.”

  Starn’s brow knit, “But at present, we’re not really at war. Minor skirmishes, I’d call them.”

  Jain said, “In terms of actual shooting, that’s true. But you could say that we’re always in a war to maintain our technological superiority. The advantage that keeps other countries from starting wars with us. If this Stade stuff gets away from us, we could suddenly find our tech’s no longer superior. If our adversaries get ahead, we could abruptly find ourselves with a military that’s distinctly second rate.”

  “Ah,” Starn said, settling thoughtfully back into his chair. “You’re right. We wouldn’t want this to get away from us… But keeping it will take some serious maneuvering. I assume I can call on either of you gentlemen if I need access to military expertise?”

  The admirals nodded. Jain said, “We could bring in experts from other branches of the service if needed. I, ah, was thinking of contacting some and forming an informal working group to consider the implications of Stade to our military as a whole.”

  “Good idea,” Starn said, “but be sure they keep it confidential. Loose lips could sink this ship before it even launches.”

  ***

  Arya arrived at work and couldn’t help glancing around for Kaem. Since he’d graduated, he’d almost always been at work before she was. Apparently, he was usually here before anyone else. But yesterday he hadn’t been in the building at all.

  And she didn’t see him this morning.

  Neither was Prakant. She scanned the room again to be sure she hadn’t missed him amongst all the people already there.