Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

  Thirty-Six

  Bel walked swiftly along the seventh floor corridor of the University of Penn Hospital. She’d received the news moments after the board meeting and had rushed straight over here.

  Nick was already in the private room, standing at the head of the bed with a look of deep worry. The unconscious patient was Doctor Emanuel. He was linked to an overhead med panel via a host of IV tubes and sensors. His skin was pale, his age lines somehow more pronounced. Even for a ninety-five year-old man, he appeared terrifyingly fragile.

  Nick grimaced as Bel entered and closed the door.

  “What happened?”

  “Acute myocardial infarction,” Nick said.

  “Heart attack.”

  “More severe than his last one. No chance to do any selfmedding at home this time. He suffered damage to the heart muscle from ventricular fibrillation.” Nick swallowed hard, struggled to continue. “There were complications. His legs are paralyzed. And the interrupted blood flow to the brain has caused… neurological deficits.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Stupid son of a bitch,” Nick muttered, a pained look revealing the true nature of his feelings. “He could have lived to a hundred and twenty if he’d taken better care of himself. He should have had a transplant years ago.”

  Stubbornly independent, Bel thought. In that, Doctor Emanuel and Nick were very much alike.

  “What’s the prognosis?” she asked.

  Nick seemed too upset to reply. He gestured to a unisex mech nurse poised in the corner like a sentinel. It activated and recited a report that was ruthlessly clinical.

  “Transplantation with an artificially grown heart is the recognized procedure. Survival rate based on the patient’s age and metabolism is ten percent.”

  “You can’t always go by that,” Bel muttered, knowing it was a lie. She recalled enough of her training to become a doctor to realize that few physicians would even attempt surgical intervention with such low odds.

  “Presuming survival of the transplant procedure, quality of life would be greatly deteriorated and long-term nursing care likely unavoidable. The lower limb paralysis can be partially corrected through minor surgery although exoskeletal braces would be required to restore full locomotion. The neurological deficits are irreversible.

  “Under these circumstances, the patient’s advance care directive is clear. In consideration of the low survival odds, his wishes are to forego all surgery. A DNR order is also in effect.”

  “Do not resuscitate,” Bel whispered.

  Nick turned away from her, in obvious pain. His voice cracked. “He’s going to die.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, surprised at how intensely the news was affecting him. It had been obvious from that dinner at her condo just how close Nick and Doctor Emanuel were. Still, considering that the elder man was Bel’s lifelong hero, she would have thought that she’d have been the one to experience such an intense reaction. She was sad, of course. But Nick seemed nearly overwhelmed by the news.

  “How long does he have?” she asked gently.

  Nick could only shake his head. The nurse responded. “Per the patient’s directive, life support must be withdrawn within twenty-four hours of final diagnosis.”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow morning,” Nick said.

  Bel heard the iron control in his words. He was struggling to hold it together.

  Her thoughts jumped ahead to practical considerations. The passing of E-Tech’s spiritual patriarch would be a major story across the newsphere. She’d have to meet as soon as possible with Rory Connors to coordinate their media response, as well as with other department heads to ensure that Doctor Emanuel’s death was handled with the care and respect accorded to someone of his unique stature.

  She was about to ask Nick if any funeral arrangements had been made when something he’d said moments ago finally registered.

  “You have the authority to… pull the plug?”

  “Yeah. Full power of attorney to carry out his wishes.”

  Doctor Emanuel’s wife of nearly three quarters of a century had died three years ago and their sole offspring, a son, had been lost in one of the Hawaiian seaquakes of the 2060s. He had no siblings. Without any close living relatives, Bel supposed it made sense that Doctor Emanuel had made such arrangements with a close friend.

  Nick dismissed the mech nurse and finally turned to face her. There were tears in his eyes. It was strange seeing him so broken up, considering he was one of the toughest human beings she’d ever met.

  “Would you like me to be here with you in the morning?” she asked gently.

  “No. This is something I’d prefer to do alone.”

  “Of course. Listen, I have to go, I have a full slate of meetings today. But I’ll try to come back this evening.”

  She laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be OK, Nick.”

  “Yeah.”

  She struggled to come up with words that were more supportive. “I’m sure that Doctor Emanuel would be pleased to know he has someone who cares about him so much. You’ve been a good friend.”

  “He’s not my friend. I mean, that’s not how I think of him.”

  The words contained no bitterness, only deep sorrow. Bel shook her head, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not my friend. He’s my son.”

  Thirty-Seven

  For a moment, Bel was too astonished to respond. When she finally found her voice, the only thing she could think to utter was an inane, “I didn’t know.”

  Outside, the bleak shitsnow continued to fall. Nick stared into it. His words were distant, his sadness palpable.

  “Marta got pregnant. That’s why we got hitched in the first place. Still, I was crazy in love with her even though in a lot of ways we were less than compatible. We stayed together for so many years for Weldon’s sake. When we finally split up, Marta married that divinity professor. They took his last name, Emanuel.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  “I tried. That first night we were together.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Who am I kidding? I could have told you, should have told you. My only excuse was that it wasn’t something I was proud of. Abandoning my own child. Not exactly the kind of admission to launch a new relationship with. And later… well, I didn’t want to ruin a good thing.”

  “Oh, Nick. You wouldn’t have ruined anything.”

  His tears returned. He forced control, wiped them away with a sleeve.

  “When things went bad for me back then, when I couldn’t deal with the world and thought about ending it all, I figured – no, I rationalized – that a boy nearing his tenth birthday was old enough to handle his father dying or running off into the future. I told myself that he’d be fine, that he wouldn’t be hurt by my actions.” He shook his head. “I was wrong.”

  “But when you woke up, the first thing you did was try to reconnect with him. That says something.”

  “Yeah, it says I was an asshole for abandoning him in the first place.”

  “Maybe. But the two of you ultimately reconciled.”

  “It wasn’t easy. Even after seventy-six years he was still plenty pissed off at what I’d done.”

  Bel recalled Doctor Emanuel’s words from the dinner about their early attempts at getting together. A rocky start. But we worked at it, helped it grow into a most worthwhile relationship.

  “You ended up with something good. In the end that’s all that matters.”

  “I suppose.”

  She wanted to hug him. But she sensed that affection wasn’t something he wanted right now.

  He stiffened, swallowed back his grief. “None of what I just told you can be made public. The doc and I decided from the beginning that we’d always keep this part of our lives under wraps.”

  “Of course. It goes no further than this room.”

  Nick moved closer to the bed, gripped one of his dying son’s frail hands. Bel slipped out the door without another
word.

  Thirty-Eight

  Bel returned to her condo late in the evening following the earthly half of Doctor Emanuel’s funeral. It had been a long day, climaxing with a service for the great man attended by thousands at the Imperius Convention Center. The toasts and the speeches were heartfelt but they’d seemed to go on forever. It was almost two am. Bel wanted nothing more than to take her ToFo meds, slip into pajamas and have the autosheets nestle her into oblivion.

  Nick hadn’t attended the service. He’d said his own goodbyes on that morning last week when he’d terminated his son’s life support. He’d been content to watch the eulogies online from the sanctity of his apartment.

  The other half of Doctor Emanuel’s funeral would happen tomorrow. His corpse would be launched into space on an E-Tech shuttle flight departing for the Colonies. The great man wouldn’t be going that far, however. His final wishes called for orbital vaporization. His body would be ejected from the cargo bay as soon as the shuttle reached low-Earth orbit. As the craft ignited its main engines for its final thrust toward the cylinders, his remains would be incinerated by the burning exhausts.

  Nick had wanted to be alone for the evening, which was just as well. The funeral had attracted far more global media than usual and put excessive attention on Bel, with endless demands for interviews and comments. She couldn’t take the chance of being followed to Nick’s apartment or him being spotted coming here. It was best that their affair take a break for a few days until the frenzy relented.

  She headed for the bathroom, her mind still on the funeral and what would come next. Although she didn’t like to think of it in such terms, Doctor Emanuel’s death would be a PR boon to E-Tech. Just as Director Witherstone’s assassination had served to increase support for the organization, the passing of such an iconic figure would also contribute to keeping E-Tech’s message front and center.

  But what she really couldn’t stop dwelling on were the ironies of the entire situation. Over the years, Bel had read numerous biographies of Doctor Emanuel. All had pinpointed the events that had led him, in his middle years, to begin writing and speaking about the long-term negative impacts of unrestricted science and technology, a famed series of articles and speeches that had inspired E-Tech’s creation.

  Doctor Emanuel had revealed that his inspiration for such views had come at least partly from the struggles he’d gone through after his biological father sank into depression and left them a week before his tenth birthday. The father, a figure lost to history, had been described by Doctor Emanuel only fleetingly, and then only as “a little man.” The phrase was believed to reference the son’s anger at the father. As far as Bel knew, no one had ever taken it for a literal depiction.

  In his college years, Weldon Emanuel had composed a series of memorable articles criticizing the excesses of technology. An early target had been the explosion of com devices blanketing the early twenty-first century, which he believed served to distance people from one another, substituting a kind of faux interaction for genuine human closeness.

  Later, under the tutelage of his stepfather, the divinity professor, his views had expanded into more subtle critiques of sci-tech, including several papers where he’d attacked the notion of people using technology to evade personal responsibility – a clear reaction to Nick electing to become a corpsicle, which Weldon subsequently had learned about while secretly researching his father’s fate. One midcentury speech in particular echoed in Bel’s mind. In it, he’d railed against the growing number of people opting to escape the troubles of the world by going into stasis.

  The future is a precious gift, an opportunity to overcome the limitations of our pasts and presents. It is not a recreational drug, a thing to be consumed in order to evade the responsibilities or problems affecting us in the here and now.

  Taken together, Doctor Emanuel’s writings and speeches made a strong case that E-Tech’s creation had been inspired by the simple fact that a father had deserted his son at an impactful age.

  Bel sighed, too tired to dig any deeper into the myriad of ironies. Changing into pajamas, she made her way to the bedroom and ordered the covers to part. Just as the autosheets folded around her and she closed her eyes, her drudge pinged an alert.

  She groaned and opened her eyes. The serving mech stood frozen beside her bureau, its default position. It raised its right hand and finger-flashed a holo message.

  A VISITOR IS AT THE FRONT DOOR.

  “At this hour?” she muttered.

  YES.

  She’d left word with the lobby mech that she wasn’t to be disturbed other than for an emergency. But if that were the case, the drudge’s pings would have been more urgent.

  Climbing from bed, she donned a robe and made her way to the main room. The hall camera turned on automatically as she approached the entrance, revealing the visitor’s identity on the doorscreen.

  It was Gillian.

  Bel was too shocked for a moment to do anything other than stare at his image. Garbed in a maroon jacket and black pants, he leaned casually against the wall across from her door, staring straight into the lens of the hidden camera.

  She overcame her surprise, tabbed the intercom.

  “What do you want?”

  “I need to speak with you. It’s important.”

  “How’d you get past the lobby mechs?”

  “I was persuasive.”

  It sounded like something Nick would say. She was tempted to call him, see if he knew why Gillian was here. But she decided against it. He was either sleeping or grieving. She could handle this on her own.

  “I don’t feel comfortable letting you in.”

  “Understood. Would you feel more comfortable coming out? One of the cafes on the third floor is still open. We could meet there.”

  No way did she want to be seen in public with him, even in a place that would have few patrons this time of night.

  “We can speak through the door.”

  “Not an option.”

  “Then tell me what this is about?”

  “I need to confirm a theory.”

  “What theory?”

  “It will be simpler if you just let me in.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to sniff your face.”

  Oh sure, no problem. I always let weirdo face-sniffers into my home at two am.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” she snapped.

  “On the surface, yes. But if you don’t allow me to do this, I guarantee you’ll regret it.”

  Her heart raced. Alarm bells went off in her head. The panic button on her wrist fob could summon her bodyguards stationed out front. But by the time they got up here…

  “Is that some sort of threat?” she asked.

  “Let me rephrase. Confirming my theory will provide you with vital information critical to making informed decisions about your immediate future.”

  She had to admit, he had her curious. But she continued to hesitate.

  “Take a moment to think about it,” he said. “But consider this. If I was here to do you harm, do you really believe a door could stop me?”

  It was a valid point. Tightening her robe, she opened up and let him in.

  Thirty-Nine

  Bel backed up as he entered, not allowing Gillian out of her sight. She halted only when her butt bumped up against the dining table. Too late, she realized that her robe was maroon, the color he’d wanted to see her wearing.

  He closed to within two meters. She raised a hand, held it there as a stop sign.

  “That’s far enough. You need to tell me what this is about.”

  “As Nick mentioned when we first met, I have the ability to bind odorant molecules to olfactory receptors at a level far beyond that of the average human.”

  “Uh huh, you have a great sense of smell. So?”

  “On our two previous encounters, I detected within you a strange molecular signature, one that I wasn’t familiar with. I did some olfactory r
esearch and narrowed down the possibilities. Earlier this evening, I believe I nailed down the signature’s ID. But I need to make certain before presenting you with the information. If you’d allow me to come closer, I can quickly confirm my hunch.”

  “And you just want to sniff at me. This isn’t some attempt to do… other things.”

  “It’s exactly what I say it is.”

  “Just so you know, I’m not even mildly attracted to you.”

  “I can’t say the same. I find you… mysterious and intriguing. I suppose part of the reason is because your aroma bears certain similarities with that of my dead wife.”

  He paused and seemed to gaze off into the distance, as if puzzled or in a trance. Bel found herself growing more nervous by the second. She was relieved when he finally returned his attention to her.

  “Rest assured I have no desire for any sort of emotional or sexual relationship with you. The nature of my attraction is something different, something harder to fathom. In any event, none of that has any connection with why I’m here.”

  Good to know.

  “So, may I sniff you?”

  I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

  She lowered her hand. “All right, let’s get this weirdness over with.”

  “Thank you.”

  He eased closer, brought his nose to within centimeters of her forehead. She felt the gentle warmth of his exhalation blowing down across her cheeks. His nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply.

  “Relax your body and breathe normally,” he instructed. “I need to sample your respiration.”

  She hadn’t even realized she’d been tensing her muscles and holding her breath. She forced herself to go slack and released the air from her lungs.

  He sniffed some more. Finally, he backed away. She folded her arms across her chest, feeling that she’d been violated somehow.

  “So, what’s the verdict?” she demanded.

  “I’ve confirmed my suspicion. You’re under the influence of an exceptionally powerful version of pheromone induction tranqs.”