Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  Someone proved to be Brent, revealed as the door swung farther open. “I thought I heard you, Charles. I’ve been looking for you. See me when you have a minute? I’ll be in my office.”

  Tyra set down her folder. “Brent, come in. I’d like to run something by you. We’re at a bit of an impasse here.” With Brent casually leaning against the door, again closed, Tyra summarized.

  Too casually. It was all so very theatrical. Hot flashes, door opened, Charles’s booming voice, Brent “happening” by looking for Charles, Tyra inviting Brent inside, and Brent’s nonchalance.

  Kim imagined dominoes—arranged through the VR specs—falling. All to augment the boss’s prerogatives with a tiebreaking vote?

  This “discussion” had become a farce.

  “Damn it,” Kim exploded. Everyone stared at her. “Brent, this isn’t theoretical. This is about you. What bots may have done to you. Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

  “I refu—”

  Kim cut him off. “Spare me that ‘refuse to worry’ nonsense. Afraid to worry, maybe, because you’re sure there’s no way to know. Well, maybe there is. Aaron, tell Brent your thought about PET scans.”

  “Positron emission tomography,” Aaron said. “Long story short, it uses a radioactive glucose substitute as a tracer. With a ton of computation the radioactive decays reveal where sugar uptake is most concentrated. We’d be imaging the brain, looking for unusual patterns of neural activity. Brain PET scans are used, for example, to diagnose some dementias.”

  To Kim’s surprise Brent said nothing for almost a minute. When he did speak, it was to ask a question. “Radioactive glucose. How radioactive are we talking?”

  Charles coughed. “Fairly significant. The total radiation exposure from a PET scan is more than a year’s exposure from natural sources. Each instance of radioisotope decay emits a positron: the antimatter version of an electron. When a positron hits a normal electron, they annihilate each other, sending two photons in opposite directions. That’s what the technique detects: photons of a specific energy, emitted at the same time, traveling in opposite directions. Each of these photons carries over half a million electron volts.”

  “Photons,” Brent repeated. “How benign sounding. Half a million electron volts, though … you’re talking about gamma rays.”

  Aaron nodded. “That said, it’s a pretty standard test.”

  “A pretty standard test,” Charles said, “involving a rather fancy process. Fluorodeoxyglucose—FDG is the ‘glucose analogue’ Aaron mentioned—contains a fluorine isotope with a half-life a bit less than two hours. The fluorine isotope is produced in a cyclotron, then reacted to produce the FDG. It’s then injected intravenously. Everything is typically done in one medical facility, before too much of the tracer can decay. And yes, FDG crosses the blood-brain barrier.”

  “Hmm.” Brent tipped his head, pondering. Miracle of miracles, he removed his VR specs to meet Kim’s gaze. “This is a bit overwhelming. Can you and I go somewhere for coffee? I could sure use a friendly second opinion.”

  * * *

  Hours, cups of coffee, and finally a dinner later, Brent had not committed himself. Maybe he’d undergo a scan. Maybe he wouldn’t. They went their separate ways for the evening.

  Brushing her teeth, staring into the bathroom mirror, her mind chewing on the events of the day, Kim froze. Why had Brent sat through a tutorial on PET scans? Specs on, he could have looked it up in an instant. He looked up everything that way. Why hadn’t he this time?

  That touch of humanity wasn’t the day’s only oddity. There was also the theatricality of Brent’s appearance in Tyra’s office. The debate about notifying the FDA had not been settled against Kim. It had not been settled at all—and she had been the one to change the subject.

  It made Kim ill to see that Brent had manipulated her.

  thursday morning, january 12, 2017

  Tires slipping, Kim fishtailed up the steep and treacherous driveway toward Garner Nanotech. Two pickups, their plow blades noisily scraping, their rooftop flashers flashing, were clearing the overnight snowfall from the main lot. Ghosts of blizzards past lurked between the aisles and all around the periphery of the lot, in dirty mounds taller than her car. Each time she crossed an aisle was an adventure. She turned toward an empty side lot, with the usual moment of panic when the car went into a skid. In Virginia you didn’t learn to drive in snow.

  Oh, to be back on the beach in Cancún! It had been less than a week, but already it seemed a lifetime ago.

  She parked in an already-plowed area near the back of the building, on the factory side. Two seconds leaning into the wind, the sleet pelting her face, her teeth chattering, and she reversed course to go behind the building. The loading dock was closer than any of the regular entrances.

  Wind whooshed under Kim’s coat as she scurried up the loading dock’s salted-and-sanded stairs. A freight truck was backed up to the dock to unload. The security guard, bundled against the cold, held open the door for Kim. He wore mirrored glasses that might have been sunglasses and might have been VR specs.

  She pointed at the tarp-covered, vaguely torpedo-shaped things that sat on two-wheeled trailers just beside the dock. “I’m curious. What are those?”

  “Snowmobiles, ma’am. No matter how much snow there is or how foul the weather, in an emergency we can pick up from a pharmacy or get someone to a hospital.”

  Emergency preparedness, huh? More likely, an excuse for the company to buy toys. Once you owned snowmobiles “for emergencies,” you had to keep them in running condition—and right behind the factory a switchgrass field beckoned. Beyond the biofuel farm, a state park stretched for miles. Friends in Accounting had told Kim it had become a challenge to justify taking all the money VCs wanted to invest here. The waste wasn’t Kim’s problem, though. She hurried inside.

  “Have a good day, ma’am,” the guard called after her.

  Kim cut across the factory toward the R & D wing, leaving a sloppy trail of boot prints, shivering for reasons unrelated to the cold. It wasn’t just Charles and Tyra: more than a dozen people at Garner had adopted the VR specs. Many were in Security, and it was hard to see how hands-free Internet access benefited their work performance.

  Circling one of the automatic carts creeping along the factory floor, Kim changed course. Aaron was another early bird and she needed a sympathetic ear. She found two sniffling colleagues waiting ahead of her. She went to her office and left Aaron a voice mail: “Got a minute? I need to talk.”

  It was well after eleven when Aaron returned her call. “Sorry, Kim. It’s just been one of those days. High flu season and an icy sidewalk mishap. If you’re still looking for an ear, come on over.” Pause. “I keep a jar of them.”

  “Be right over. Shall we talk over lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  Kim locked the most recent iteration of her department’s new budget in a desk drawer and grabbed her coat. In the time it took her to walk to the infirmary, Aaron was again behind closed doors. High flu season? She waited in the hall, loath to touch the waiting-room chairs.

  The door from the tiny treatment room opened, and a woman came out with an Ace bandage wound around her wrist. Following the patient out, Aaron noticed where Kim stood waiting. He grinned broadly. “It’s hard to catch a sprain.”

  She remained in the hall while he retrieved his coat. “Aaron, would you mind driving? I’m parked way out back.”

  “No problem.” They headed for the main entrance. “So, you need to talk? I hate to ask.”

  A bug-eyed guard sat behind the reception desk; Kim said nothing until they were tromping across the lot, snow and cinders crunching beneath their feet. “And I hate to say it aloud.” But why else had she sought out Aaron? “You know my fear, that Brent has been infested with nanobots. This is going to sound nuts”—she laughed without humor—“okay, more nuts, but I can’t get the idea out of my head. More and more people are changing like Brent did. I have to wonder, Aaro
n. Are they all, somehow, also infested with bots?”

  “They? All?”

  Kim grimaced. “Yeah, I know how that sounds. Charles and Tyra, certainly. Mercedes Ramirez. The Security folks—what’s with so many of them going around in VR specs? And Felipe Lopez, I noticed just yesterday.”

  “Who’s Mercedes Ramirez?” Aaron asked.

  “One of the sysadmins on-call to back up the help desk. Latina with attitude. You’d recognize her.”

  Every male in the company recognized Merry. Kim understood the guy-talk technical term to be “built like a brick shithouse.” The men, with great affectation, referred to her as Mercy, or Have-Mercy, imagining themselves clever and their “wit” a secret. To the frustration of the single guys across the company, Merry was happily married. She was too funny and down-to-earth for the women not to like.

  And also damned competent. Among Kim’s many post-vacation catch-up tasks, she had reviewed system logs for her department’s wireless LAN. The most recent round of bug patches on the WiFi/WiMax routers had been backed out company-wide after Merry traced sporadic PC crashes to the latest router update. The patches were apparently buggier than the code they “fixed.” It happened. When Kim checked the manufacturer’s website, the complaint remained under investigation. Recalling the Brownian-bit-bumps episode, Kim sympathized: transient problems were always tough to isolate.

  They reached Aaron’s sport-ute. As Kim got settled, Aaron said, “‘Infested’? That was another interesting word choice. You think there could be some kind of environmental problem here at the company? One that manifests itself in the wearing of VR glasses? That’s a pretty wild hypothesis.”

  “I know!” Kim squirmed in her seat. “If only Brent would agree to more tests.”

  “Which, obviously, you’ve discussed unsuccessfully with him.” Aaron put the car into second gear and headed cautiously toward the exit “Where to?”

  She named a burger place across town, hoping to finish this conversation on the way. In the car. Privately. Worried all the while that she felt so paranoid.

  Aaron tapped on the steering wheel as he drove. “Technically, Kim, I shouldn’t even tell you this, but I’ve also spoken one-on-one to Brent about getting tested. I’ll give you good odds he gave you the same answer. He’s not about to have a PET scan. If I were he, I don’t know that I would, either. I’m no radiation-phobe, but who wants an unnecessary exposure?”

  “And?”

  Aaron sighed. “I have the same worry as you. Charles and Tyra have changed. The thing is, Charles has been away for weeks. That hardly fits with a problem in the factory.”

  “So now what?”

  Aaron changed lanes cautiously to get past a spinout. A police cruiser was already on the scene. “Now I pull Brent’s files from the insurance company and see if there’s a shred of data that tells us anything.”

  “You can do that?” Kim’s hopes rose.

  Aaron took one look at the skating-rink-like parking lot of the burger joint, shook his head, and continued past the entrance. He pulled over into a spot far down the block along the curb. “Can I? Sure—only not legally. Medical privacy laws are freaking strict. It’s a good way to get the company sued and me fired, and maybe lose my license. If anyone finds out.”

  And just as quickly, her hopes were dashed. “Aaron! I can’t ask you to risk that.”

  “You didn’t ask. I offered. We need to know if we have a plague on our hands.”

  Kim leaned across the vehicle and gave Aaron a peck on the cheek. “I promise you this. No one will ever find it out from me.”

  thursday evening, january 12, 2017

  At lunch with Aaron, Kim had worried that she was becoming paranoid. By midafternoon she’d been afraid that she wasn’t. By then she had revisited Crystal’s neuron-and-nanobot lab results, scanning for progress the nerd way: using software to compare the newest and previous snapshots. Old and new versions were supposed to differ—but not through retroactive changes made to prior data!

  The changes were slight but unmistakable. Examined carefully, the altered imagery showed neurons reaching toward the amorphous blobs of adhesive that affixed the bots, not to the bots themselves. A second deletion of data would have been too blatant, so someone had laid the groundwork to discredit the rerun experiment in a new way.

  So far, Kim had shared her discovery only with Aaron. She was not about to reveal to anyone else that she had unaltered and unauthorized versions of the earlier results. Whom else did she trust? Whom else could she trust?

  This situation could not possibly end well. The only benefit of the doubt she could give was that the bot longevity in CSF had come as a surprise. Either way, a cover-up existed at senior levels across the company. And no way could she keep that knowledge to herself.

  At best, whistle-blowing would decimate the R & D ranks, ignite a scandal, unleash the FDA, and abort the imminent Army field trial. At worst, the rot went all the way to the top, to Dan Garner himself, and the company would die that much faster. One way or another, the days of Garner Nanotech seemed numbered.

  Should she call Dan directly? The question had been torturing Kim for hours. Tyra had made her expectations clear. At this point, getting fired was the least of Kim’s concerns, but she dare not be let go until she had gathered enough information. Incontrovertible information. If Dan was innocent, he’d understand.

  So, whom could she trust? Only Aaron, and that answer broke Kim’s heart. Just a week ago, she would have said—no matter the changes in him—Brent. Which brought her back to tonight’s caper …

  Aaron sat at the battered desk of his home office, flipping through inches of hardcopy as a little ink-jet printer squeaked and wheezed and struggled to output yet more. The ancient home computer, its cooling fans whining, labored nearly as hard to format the data stream for printing. Many caps on the keyboard were illegible from wear (his QW—TY keyboard, Aaron called it), and there was an actual floppy drive. Only the thumbprint scanner provided a touch of modernity. A rat’s nest of cables, another anachronism, tied everything together. In the background, under Sladja’s watchful eye, children squealed gleefully in their evening bath.

  Kim occupied the armchair alongside Aaron’s desk. She tried to glean something, anything, from his expression. His lack of expression. If the insurer’s files were yielding any insights, Aaron kept that news to himself.

  Except for the protests of overtaxed computer gear, the only sound in the room was the vigorous thumping of Bruce’s tail against the carpeted floor. At least someone here was happy to see her again. Sladja’s scowl was firmly back in place—whether because Kim’s reappearance was too soon, too unheralded, or on too mysterious an errand remained anyone’s guess.

  Only learning how Aaron accessed the insurance-company records offered a glimmer of hope. Doctors routinely caught up with paperwork at home, he had told her, and insurance companies had had to come to terms with that. When he described how he logged on, Kim recognized the setup as typical for a virtual private network.

  The VPN gave authorized medical personnel the same access—from anywhere—as the insurer’s own on-site employees. That being so, she wasn’t surprised by the robust authentication process. Insurers were subject to the same draconian penalties as doctors when patient privacy was breached, despite the lack of control over doctors’ computers connecting in over the net. Doubtless many doctors were less than rigorous about applying security patches to Windows.

  Aaron’s keys lay in a heap beside the keyboard, the digital readout on the key fob slowly blinking. Every doctor allowed onto the insurer’s network was issued such a key fob. A pseudo-random-number generator resided inside, its individualized parameters known only by a synchronized bit of code behind a firewall on the insurance company’s security server. Log-on to the VPN involved keying in the digital readout (the eight-digit number on display changed every ten seconds) and the fob holder’s thumbprint. After the user was authenticated, every scrap of data transmi
tted in either direction was encrypted using a private key uniquely assigned to that session.

  It was all very standard, very secure—and if anyone ever questioned why Brent’s medical records had been downloaded this evening, it pointed very unambiguously to Aaron. There could be no plausible deniability.

  Kim told herself no one need ever know. That was her contribution, in fact. Aaron had had such confidence in the privacy safeguards that he had not thought through the implications of printing the voluminous file: Data had to be decrypted for the printer. Had he accessed these insurance records at work, a packet sniffer on the company network could have captured whatever Aaron routed to a company printer.

  Am I being paranoid? Kim wondered again. Uh-uh. Not after Charles erased the first iteration of the neural-culture experiment. Not knowing that someone at Garner had tampered with the second try. It wasn’t much of a stretch that someone might be monitoring the computers of anyone interested in those neural cultures.

  Aaron’s chair squeaked as he finally turned her way. A thick sheaf of printout sat on his desk, in the disarray that bespoke a hasty perusal. “Kim, you don’t want to know how badly injured Brent was. I have no doubt that the bots saved his life. The Army should want this technology deployed. After what I’ve seen in military hospitals, I want to see it in the field.”

  “I know that. But what else did the bots do to Brent?”

  Aaron hesitated. Bruce whined, as though he felt the tension. Perhaps he did.

  Kim leaned over to comfort the dog, which whimpered once and then quieted down. “Aaron, come on. You found something in the files. You have a theory, at least. What is it?”

  “A suspicion more than a theory.” He picked up the papers and began tapping them into a neater stack. “Most likely I’m grasping at straws.”

  “Tell me, Aaron.” Please!

  “Well … that day in Angleton, Brent took a very serious blow to the head. To judge from the bruising pattern, the hood of the nanosuit did what it was meant to: it went rigid to distribute the blow. Still, he was seriously concussed—”