Legacy of a Mad Scientist (15 page)

Fox entered the alcove at the back of the hall and
found Croswell and Stanwood waiting for him. Stanwood’s shadow,
Deputy Director Von Kalt, was nowhere to be seen.

"Was the mole hunt necessary?" Fox asked.

"It would seem so," Stanwood said. "Considering."

“Considering what?” Fox asked.

“In the past two hours there were over a hundred
treasonable acts committed. Thirty suspects are already in custody,
and another twenty have been terminated. I suspect that, by the end
of business, over fifty people will be charged. A resounding
success.”

“A mole hunt with a hundred suspects means the
problem is systemic. It can’t be rooted out in a single pass. It’s
a corrupt culture, not a cure,” Fox said.

Stanwood rolled his eyes, but Croswell laughed.

“Is everyone here?” Fox asked.

“The Varashavya convoy never showed,” Croswell
answered. “But everyone else did, and it looks like they all
brought their donations too.”

“Are we going to do this, or what?” Stanwood
asked.

“Yeah, let’s get it over with,” Fox said.

Fox, Stanwood and Croswell entered the main hall,
walked to the center dais and took their seats at the table.

Congressman Harris stood and addressed the room,
"Gentlemen," he said. "As I look around today, I see some of the
most influential men of the world. Senators Clarke, Grey and
Miller, Citizens Morgan, Roth and Anderson. And I dare not leave
out the youngest personage present." Harris grinned. "Citizen
Pierce, you must be hardly out of your teens."

Pierce was obscured behind four mammoth crates of
cash.

"He certainly seems interested, doesn't he, Dr. Fox?"
Harris said.

Fox had heard about the young Pierce, he had an
explosive temper and a penchant for gunfights. He had no doubt the
cases were props for some idiotic outburst, unless Harris goaded
him into one early.

Harris addressed Pierce directly, "You know, the
installments are just a show of good faith. It goes straight to the
treasury department, to offset operating costs. Fox doesn't see a
dime. We're all interested in success of this project." Harris
spoke to Pierce, but Fox suspected the words were meant for
him.

Before Pierce could rise to Harris’s challenge,
Senator Clarke cut him off. "Let’s get to it. We all know why we're
here." He nodded to Fox, gesturing for him to get started.

“Yes, Senator.” Fox stood with exaggerated slowness.
He slipped his chair into place and came around from behind the
table. "I don't know if you read the report. It wasn't sabotage. It
was the interface. The human variable is too unstable. It's
over."

"Okay, but unstable how?" Senator Clarke asked.

"Initially, it discriminated based on intellect. The
smart ones survived, and acquired more power than they knew what to
do with."

"Ha! We could call it life," Harris joked.

A few delegates laughed.

"We could," Fox said. "In the end, they all
died."

"What was the initial ratio?" Senator Clarke
asked.

"Ratio?" Fox replied.

"Success to failure, one to one, two to one?" the
senator inquired.

"One to one, but that's irrelevant. Today, it is one
to forty thousand."

Clarke conferred with Senator Miller and Congressman
Harris, who held and pointed to sections in the summary of Fox’s
report. After a moment, they returned their attention to Fox.

"What's interfacing?" Congressman Harris asked,
reading from the table of contents.

"What?" Fox asked, surprised. He realized the
Senators were fully aware of the project; they were going to make
him lay it out for them.

"You said interfacing?" Harris asked. "You called
this the Mental Computer Interface? Is that correct?"

Dr. Fox scanned the crowd. They weren't scientists;
they had no idea what he was talking about. Harris, Clarke and
Miller knew everything, but no one else did. They hadn't read the
report; after all, this was the briefing.

Jack and Geoff escaped Ashley's line of sight while
she'd been distracted by the kite boards. She ran off after them,
frustrated to have let them get away. She had no problem chasing
after them; she kind of enjoyed the responsibility. Except when
Geoff got into something before she could stop him, then she
resented the authority and the responsibility.

From around the bend, and down a shallow slope, she
heard Jack barking. Geoff and Jack had disturbed a group of older
boys doing tricks on their hoverboards in a shallow forest
bowl.

Ashley rounded the corner, and slid down to where
Geoff was being lectured. He looked scared, and Jack barked wildly.
Above the racket, Ash heard a familiar voice.

When the older boys saw her, they forgot about Geoff.
At their center was Evan Dunkirk.

Ashley stopped a little distance away.

Jack ran over to her. Ash knelt to pet him.

She was old enough to understand the differences
between men and women, and knew that physical beauty could cause
strange reactions in people, especially boys. She was aware she
possessed this characteristic by the way people behaved around her.
Young men had a tendency to stare, and adults would speak more
politely or be more reserved around her. It allowed Ashley to be
more reserved in general.

"You ought to keep that thing on a leash," Evan
snapped at her.

Ashley had also noticed that not all the attention
she received was positive. "Why's that?" she asked, calmly.

"Cause dogs in the park have to have a leash. Those
are the rules, and you know it." Evan popped his hoverboard against
the ground. It hummed as the charge built up.

"Those same rules say hoverboards need a leash," she
said.

Evan took his foot off the board, and it shot toward
Ashley. She didn't move. It missed her, but only by a tiny bit.

"See, where's your leash?" she asked.

Jack pursued the board across the forest floor.

"What's your problem, Fox?" Evan asked.

"You," Ashley replied.

"No, I'm the solution.”

Evan's friends gasped, chuckled and giggled at
her.

"Oh, that's a threat?" Ashley asked.

"Yeah, what are you going to do about it?" he
taunted.

Ashley smiled, "I guess I'll let you live, this
time."

Evan’s friends burst into laughter.

"Yeah, I'm scared.”

In the distance, Jack wrestled with the board, which
continued to slip away from him.

"If that animal slobbers on my board, you're going to
have a real problem," Evan growled.

"Jack," Ashley called the beagle.

Jack trotted over and sat next to her.

Evan's board continued to drift away, sliding
downhill.

"Come on, Geoff. Let's go somewhere else," Ashley
said.

"Yeah, come on, Jack," Geoffrey echoed.

"You're not going anywhere, until someone goes and
gets my board."

Ash looked at the board. It had drifted a good way
down the canyon. In the distance, she saw two other kids, playing
at being soldiers, creeping closer to the confrontation. She looked
back to Evan.

"Go get it, yourself," Ash replied, with all the
condescension she could muster.

Evan's friends snickered and laughed. He glared over
his shoulder at one of the laughing kids and snapped, "Jason, you
think it's so funny, you go get it."

"Why me?" Jason replied.

"Cause you still have a board. Unless you want me to
knock you off of it."

Evan took a couple of steps toward Jason, who
retreated by sliding away. "I'd rather hit a fat kid than a girl!"
Evan roared.

Jason turned and angled down the hill.

Ash saw Doug and Jamie, moving along the tree line, a
few feet behind the bigger kids. Doug signaled two kids she hadn't
seen yet. She spotted them, hiding near a dense thicket of
brush.

Jason gained speed as he approached the board. He
scooped it up from a crouched position and made a wide turn back
uphill. He bounced his board a few times, charging it to gain some
elevation, and coasted back toward the group of kids.

Suddenly, something big and heavy came flying toward
his head. He wiped out, both boards flying away from him and
sliding downhill.

"What the hell?" Jason yelled, already angry. "Who
threw that?"

Jack growled and began barking again. Ash slid the
choke chain around his neck.

"That's right, leash your bitch, bitch," Evan said.
He stepped forward, his arm raised overhead, close enough to swing
at her.

Ash remembered how he'd punked Bobby. She didn't
flinch.

The canyon went silent. Even the birds made no
sound.

"I see some new faces, so let me start over," Fox
said. "Gentlemen, you are here to check on an investment, correct?
That investment was the Micronix or Mental Computer Interface. It
was marketed to your agencies as a major leap in
telecommunications."

Fox jumped into the pitch. "A single device that
could translate and transmit any intercepted data stream, directly
to the user's mind. A signal into your head." He'd given this pitch
a thousand times.

"The idea was; no more monitors, no more keyboards,
no more invasive data ports, plugs, or memory sticks. Nothing but a
hand-held signal amplifier."

Fox reached into his pocket and pulled out the
Micronix. He stood it on the table next to him. It was part of the
pitch, the bell ringer.

Damn! Damn, damn.
Fox told everyone that they
had all been destroyed in the accident. Now he'd gone and shown it
to them
. What the hell, Doctor?

The room was silent.

Fox relaxed, he had his answer to the next
question.

"I thought you said they'd all been destroyed?"
Harris asked.

"This is the original prototype," he said. "A
marketing placebo."

He jumped ahead, call to action. "We've got flying
chariots and cities in the clouds, right? This should have worked.
After all, what are we, if not liquid-core computers?"

Fox paused for dramatic effect, but the presentation
had derailed when the Epsilon facility was reduced to a layer of
dust on the desert floor.

Simply to fill the silence, Fox continued, "We
naturally transmit electrical signals to the brain. We hoped to
communicate, digitally, without any physical invasion. The brain is
just a network of neurons, transmitting electrical signals. It
should have worked just as easily as we transform signals from the
retina or the eardrum. Just communicate with the frontal lobes,
without inserting any wiring in the mind itself. Getting wired and
plugged has its own problems, the idea was to eliminate all of
that."

Fox picked up the prototype. "The plan was to go
wireless, no fiber optics, no wires in the brain. That was the
idea, anyhow. We just couldn't make it work. Initially half the
subjects couldn't even link with it. You need a certain amount of
intellectual capacity just to use it at all. If the subject wasn't
smart enough, it, um, just sort of fried their brains."

The delegates remained quiet.

"Some people could receive, but not transmit, some
got nosebleeds, some went comatose and there was, well…. More
significant damage."

"Significant how?" Senator Clarke asked.

"Permanently significant," Dr. Fox replied.

"Explain, please."

Fox took a deep breath. "One guy blew his brains out.
I don't mean suicide, not with a gun or anything. His mind, his
brain: it overheated, exploded all over the room. We kept them
isolated during their first experience, just in case. We set the
interface on a table, just like this, only we had an air lock. We
told them the risks. We gave them the information, and let them
make their own decision."

Fox looked at the floor, feeling ashamed.

"In that very first instant of contact, the moment
your hand touches the item.... Some people claimed that time slowed
down, or stopped all together. Those were the ones still capable of
communication. The others…" Dr. Fox shook his head.

Senator Cheryl Warrington spoke up from the back row.
"And you continued the trials? Through all of this?" The revulsion
in her voice was tangible. Formerly a medical doctor, Cheryl was
the only female delegate present. This was her first encounter with
the project.

Fox noted the frustration and anger in her voice. He
sympathized with her but suspected she was out of her league. Fox
knew the hubris she'd discovered here was as poisonous as any
disease she'd ever tackled as the nation's surgeon general. Now
serving her first term as a state senator, Fox suspected it had
been a long four years. She didn't look as if she could do two
more.

Secrets can be like a cancer in your brain, rotting
your soul. Watching the senator, Fox realized her internal pressure
cooker had finished preheating. He smiled, after all, it was
classified, and she couldn't talk to anyone else. She may as well
take her frustration out on those responsible. Unfortunately,
'those responsible'
applied mostly to Fox himself.

"You killed how many people with this little fiasco?"
Senator Warrington asked.

Dr. Fox seemed confused. "I'm sorry, you want what,
numbers?"

"I want to know how many people died because of this
project."

Fox didn't answer.

"How many?!" the senator shouted.

Fox knew he shouldn't jerk her around, briefs are
supposed to be brief. "Forty seven thousand, five hundred and
one."

She smiled. "Don't jerk me around, Doctor."

"Senator, Doctor Warrington, I wouldn't dream of
giving you false facts. You asked me how many people died because
of this project, that number is forty seven thousand, five hundred
and one. I have a photographic memory, I just copy and paste."

"Cute."