Amped: A Kid Sensation Companion Novel (4 page)

Babies come from somewhere.

That was my leadoff (if unoriginal) thought the next morning as I began earnestly looking into my own background. Esper was still asleep when I got up, so – following a quick breakfast of cereal and milk – I had hurried back to my bedroom, anxious to get started.

My room was fair-sized in my own opinion – about one hundred and fifty square feet in size. In addition to a standard bedroom set (consisting of a bed, dresser-and-mirror, and a nightstand), it also contained a bookcase roughly six feet in height and a student desk, on which sat my laptop and a printer.

Upon entering, I closed the door and went to my modest walk-in closet; reaching up, I pulled a small black lockbox from the shelf above the clothes rack. Tossing the lockbox onto my bed, I grabbed my keyring from the top of my dresser, where I’d tossed it the night before when getting ready for bed. A moment later, the lockbox was open.

Inside were a few of the typical things you might expect to find, including a small wad of cash with a rubber band around it, a few pieces of jewelry, some savings bonds I’d received years earlier as a birthday gift, and various important documents.

There was also a small, gift-wrapped box – my Christmas present from Jim. As I had mentioned to his mother, we had exchanged presents before he left, but decided not to open them until he got back. (It was our goofy, adolescent way of trying to add some sort of impetus to his return, I suppose.) I picked it up for a second and held it, thinking for a moment about my boyfriend and trying to envision what he must be going through light-years from home.

After a moment, I put Jim’s gift back and pulled out what I was really after: the documents. Setting aside various items such as my passport and instruments related to my trust fund, I found myself holding a small sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip. As hard as it was to imagine, this handful of documents represented my entire life: birth certificate, state records, court orders concerning guardianship – everything I’d been able to find out about myself over the years. It admittedly wasn’t a lot (and I’d had a hard enough time pulling this much together), but it was essentially all I had. I got to work.

I immediately set the birth certificate aside. It was a work of pure fiction: fake name, fake date of birth, fake place of birth… Basically, no one knew anything about me when I was found, so they had made everything up. It wasn’t a record that could be relied on in even the flimsiest sense. It only existed because it was essentially the gateway to getting other mandatory documents (a passport, for example).

I then began slowly and methodically poring over the remaining paperwork, something I had done countless times before. In truth, I knew almost every word on every page verbatim, but I hoped – as I did each time I reviewed this stuff – that something new would leap out at me. Unfortunately, nothing did initially, and I was starting to get discouraged and lose my enthusiasm when I came across something on my initial medical report.

After I was found, I’d been taken to the closest emergency room, where doctors had checked me out and performed a battery of tests to make sure I was okay. According to the medical report, I had no broken bones, and was generally in good condition except my levels of Vitamin A seemed excessively high. (There was also a handwritten note about nurses complaining of static shock when they touched me and malfunctions of some of the equipment monitoring my status, but none of that affected the overall diagnosis.)

On a recent visit to my current physician, the doctor had suggested that I start taking a vitamin supplement. Not that anything was wrong, but simply as a precautionary measure.

“Teens have high nutritional requirements,” she’d said. “They probably need vitamin supplements even more than adults.”

She hadn’t made a specific recommendation for which supplement to take, but she had warned me to keep an eye out for the amount of Vitamin A in anything that I eventually decided to consume. In short, Vitamin A – in large doses – could be toxic.

Looking over that initial medical report, I noted the treating physician’s indication that the excessive Vitamin A in my infant body was unlikely to have come from ingestion. Combining that with what I’d learned from my own doctor, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the culprit was probably a vitamin supplement. (Prenatal vitamins, to be exact.) It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to go on. I walked over to the desk, grabbed my laptop, stalked back to the bed with it, and went to work.

About an hour later, I hit pay dirt. I hadn’t known exactly what I was looking for, so I had simply started out looking up prenatal vitamins with excess Vitamin A on the Internet. In the course of my research, I had found out a lot more than I wanted to about pregnancy, human gestation, and childbirth (strongly reinforcing the notion that I didn’t want to have kids any time soon). Ultimately, however, I had come across an article about a massive recall of prenatal vitamins manufactured by a company called Gross Metaphysical Pharma (better known as simply “Gross Meta”). The reason for the recall was an excessive amount of Vitamin A in the vitamins, and the recall had been announced just a few months before I would have been born.

Bingo!

I mean, it wasn’t an absolute certainty by any means, but it seemed highly likely that my biological mother had taken Gross Meta prenatal vitamins while I was in the womb. The question now was how to use that info to find out more about who I was.

Gross Meta, however, wasn’t making my job any easier. The company had distributed their tainted wares not just across the country, but around the globe. Still, I felt comfortable excluding their international reach from the scope of my investigative efforts. More to the point, it was going to be almost impossible to run down every lead, so I was going to have to make some plausible assumptions (such as presupposing that I was born within the nation’s borders).

The recall announcement from Gross Meta also contained a list of all the pharmacies that had sold the contaminated supplements. From what I could discern, none of the drugstores on the list had operated in the area where I’d been found – a small town of about twenty thousand people called Aberdeen, located about thirty miles outside the city limits. In fact, it had been the Aberdeen Hospital that my initial medical report had come from. However, bearing in mind that the hospital had no record of my birth (and no one in the town seemed to know anything about me), it was pretty clear that my parents – my birth mother, anyway – hadn’t been from there. Maybe she had just been passing through; maybe she had been visiting a friend. Regardless, bearing in mind all the relevant facts, I felt it was highly probable that she had gotten her prenatal vitamins (and possibly prenatal care as well) right here in the city, which led to the presumption that she might also have been
from
the city.

I looked at my watch, noting that I had been researching for about two-and-a-half hours. I smiled, mentally giving myself a pat on the back; I had accomplished more this particular morning than I had in probably the past five years combined. That said, there was still a fair amount of guesswork involved in reaching my current conclusions. It wouldn’t hurt to get a second opinion. Plus, I had probably reached the limit with respect to my own online investigative skills. I needed someone with an innate talent for this sort of stuff.

I put my laptop aside and called Li.

Esper had just rolled out of bed when I left about an hour later to go meet Li (who, needless to say, had agreed to help me). I told her where I was going and got a mental hug and a telepathic as I headed out the door.

Our rendezvous point was Li’s quarters at Alpha League HQ. Li hadn’t originally been a member of our teen affiliate, but his current body had been constructed at HQ over the course of several months (after his original one had been destroyed during the incident at the Academy), and after so much time around us, it seemed only fitting to make him part of our team. Therefore, like all the other Alpha League teens, he had his own place at headquarters.

When I reached Li’s room, I rapped sharply on the door and heard a crisp “Enter” a moment later. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

All of the teen quarters were fairly uniform, so I essentially knew what Li’s room would look like on the interior: there was a living room with a sofa and loveseat combo, as well as a flat-screen television on the wall; a kitchenette with a small breakfast area; and a door that led to the bedroom. Li was sitting at the breakfast table when I entered, typing on a laptop.

“Well?” I said, dispensing with any formalities as I walked over and took a seat across from him. “What do you think?”

During our phone conversation, I had conveyed to him my assumptions, and then emailed to him the little paperwork I had after we hung up. I was really anxious now to get his take on things.

“First of all,” Li began, closing the laptop, “let me say that the scant paperwork you provided was sorely inadequate in light of what you are trying to accomplish. Although you are to be commended for what you have been able to assemble over the years, the documents are so severely limited in nature and scope that little worthwhile information can be gleaned from them.”

My breath caught in my throat, and I felt an avalanche of frustration and despair starting to rumble within me. I had felt with so much certainty that I was finally on the path to learning something about myself, and now it seemed like the rug was being snatched out from under me. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to come to grips with the fact that reality had pistol-whipped me – and not for the first time.

“Still,” Li went on, “the material was not totally devoid of useful information. In short, after reviewing the data and conducting my own research, I ultimately reached the same conclusions as you.”

My eyes snapped open, and for a moment I just stared at him. “What?”

“I said that my end-analysis concurs and supports your assumptions. Basically, your biological mother probably received prenatal care here in the city.”

I jumped up, squealing in joy for a moment, and then gave Li a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He accepted them stiffly and with a bit of an unsure smile – probably not used to being the recipient of human affection.

Still giddy, I sat back down and excitedly asked, “So now what?”

“So now we try to narrow the search for your mother.”

“Great! So where do we start – the recall list? Can we use that to figure out who she is?”

Li shook his head solemnly. “That would be a daunting task. Even if we focused only on the city, the recall list identifies scores of pharmacies that filled prescriptions written by hundreds of doctors for thousands of patients. It would be difficult to determine where to begin.”

I sighed in frustration. “So it’s almost as hopeless as not knowing anything.”

“Only with respect to the utility of the recall list. Fortunately, we have another starting point.”

I frowned. “What do you mean? I didn’t think we had anything else to go on.”

“We have your initial medical record.”

“I know. That’s what led us to the Gross Meta recall.”

“But it contains more than just the diagnosis about excessive Vitamin A. There is also the statement regarding your effect on hospital equipment.”

“Yeah, so? That was presumably just my power over electricity. As I understand it, I was exhibiting that ability from the moment they found me, although obviously no one knew that when the Aberdeen Hospital was looking me over.”

“Understood. But I would posit that if you were displaying that power during infancy, it is possible that it also manifested while you were in the womb. Thus, if you were subjected to an ultrasound while your mother was receiving prenatal care…”

“Then my power might have affected it!” I blurted out excitedly.

“Exactly.”

“So we need to try to find out which hospitals had equipment issues back then. Specifically, problems with fetal monitoring equipment.” As I spoke, the magnitude of the problem dawned on me. There were quite a number of hospitals in a city the size of ours that offered services to expecting mothers – not to mention clinics and the like. Moreover, we were talking about
possible
equipment malfunctions that took place almost twenty years ago. I groaned in frustration.

“You obviously recognize the difficulties inherent in the problem,” Li said, interpreting my mood. “Moreover, the health care facilities do not make our research any easier. Their document retention policies are horribly inadequate, and their equipment maintenance records – when they exist – are incomplete and unreliable.”

“So what do we do?” I asked, glancing at Li. He smiled at me in a knowing way. “Wait. You already have a solution, don’t you?”

Still smiling, Li gave me a short nod. “Approximately sixty-five percent of the hospitals in this city are nonprofit. Simply playing those odds, there is a sixty-five percent chance that your birth mother sought care during her pregnancy at one of those facilities. Being nonprofit, those hospitals would have had to comply with financial disclosure laws in order to maintain their tax-exempt status.”

“So,” I said, trying to sum up Li’s last few statements, “although their other records may have basically been junk, there’s an expectation that the financial statements of nonprofit hospitals would have been pristine.”

“True.”

“And I take it that there’s something in the financial statements that helps us?”

Li nodded. “One of the nonprofit hospitals, Sisters of Mercy, has financials showing, a little over seventeen years ago, the temporary rental of an ultrasound and a fetal Doppler at roughly the same time.”

I leaned back in my chair, contemplating what that meant. “So you’re thinking that my mother went to get an ultrasound perhaps, and my power screwed it up in some way. After that, they brought in a fetal heart monitor, and I somehow destroyed that as well so they had to go buy new equipment.”

“Actually, since the financial records indicate the
rental
of new equipment, what is most likely is that you simply caused the ultrasound machine and the fetal monitor to malfunction in some way. My assumption is that they sent both for diagnostic checks or repair, hence the rentals.”

“Forgetting about the rentals, if we know when and where the equipment malfunctioned, we know when and where my biological mother was present. We just need the hospital’s patient list and see who was receiving prenatal care then.”

“On that front, there is good news, bad news, and worse news.”

Well, I’m a big girl and can take adversity. “Give me the bad news,” I said.

“Patient records are confidential. From what I can tell, they reside on some internal hospital system that can only be accessed on-site.”

“Okay, what’s the worse news?”

“The hospital’s document retention policy, which I cited as being horrible, is only five years with respect to most items – including patient logs.”

“Five years?” I repeated, unable to hide my disappointment.

“Yes. The time frame probably relates to the fact that the statute of limitations – that is, the time in which you must sue – is four years for personal injuries. Adopting a five-year policy is likely intended to give the impression that they don’t have anything to hide should a lawsuit arise for something like medical malpractice.”

“But if that’s their policy, anything that we’re interested in would have been destroyed or tossed over ten years ago.”

“Yes, but that brings us to my good news: the hospital actually
was
sued.”

I found his statement confounding. “Huh?”

“The Gross Meta recall gave rise to a tidal wave of litigation, including a massive class action lawsuit on behalf of patients. Gross Meta was sued, of course, along with doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals – including Sisters of Mercy.”

“So how is that good news for us?”

“For documents involved in a lawsuit, the retention policy of the hospital is ten years after the end of the litigation.”

“So when did the legal wrangling end?”

“The class action lawsuit ended with a settlement about twelve years ago. However, many patients opted out of that suit and pursued their claims individually after the class action was resolved. Moreover, the court overseeing the litigation has stated that additional claimants may still sue should they develop some symptom or aftereffect of Vitamin A toxicity later in life.”

“In other words, the litigation may never end, which means that the hospital should still have the records we want.”

Once again I was excited, but also couldn’t help noticing that this conversation with Li was a wild roller coaster ride, with a lot of ups and downs and even a few loops.

“So,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, “now that we’re at the end of the road, where can we find the information we’re after – in the hospital basement?”

In truth, it would have been base
ments
. Sisters of Mercy was actually a large hospital system, with several locations around town. However, it turned out that I wasn’t going to have to go crawling around any musty old understructures.

“Most large organizations store aged documents offsite,” Li said. “In fact, many of them retain record management companies to handle storage for them, and that is what Sisters of Mercy has done. The documents we are looking for are stored with Locke Infinite.”

My eyebrows went up in surprise, as this part of the Li roller coaster was more of a loop-de-loop. Locke Infinite was a well-known and well-regarded storage facility, with a reputation for keeping documents – anything of value, in fact – safe and secure for as long as required by their clients. They had high-tech storage locations all across the country, including one on the southern outskirts of the city.

“So what do we do?” I asked. “Make some sort of formal request for the paperwork we want?”

“You can,” Li stated, “but it is unlikely that your request will be granted. You simply do not have a right to access or custody of the documents.”

“Fine,” I said defiantly. “Then let’s talk about how we can
get
custody of the documents.”

I flipped open his laptop and told Li what I wanted him to do. He seemed reluctant, but an hour later we had the rudimentary outlines of a plan.

“This can work,” I said, after reviewing everything for the umpteenth time.

“There is still the problem of the vault,” Li said, “where the documents we want are stored. If the power is cut, the door is designed to remain locked. If the power stays on, getting past the automated entry system will require that you have a key and the passcode, as well as pass a retinal scan.”

“But you said the vault can be opened from the
inside
without all that.”

“Yes. If you are already inside, the system is designed to let you exit without harassment, as it assumes you gained entry legitimately.”

“If Jim were here he could simply phase through the walls like a ghost,” I said. It was one of the many powers my boyfriend had. And of course, now that I needed him, the idiot was a million light-years away.

“Yes,” Li agreed. “Someone with a phasing ability could easily get inside and let you in. Do you know of anyone else with that talent?”

“Not exactly,” I said, a faint smile crossing my lips.