Flip

by Christopher J Fox

  ***

  Like a traffic webcam, Observer 113 watched, and through him, Qian and The Project saw the quantum world. Observer 113 had no idea what he was looking at; in fact, he had no idea that he had no idea, as his conscious ability to comprehend, to be aware of the information his senses were feeding him, was gone. He didn’t even know his name was Charlie anymore.

  The overpowering beauty of his perceptions had no meaning; the profoundness of the subtle, complex interconnections of all life and events was lost on him. Thus, he had no reaction when the tightly packed group of lights that had been placed in the center of his view slipped behind a rolling mound and disappeared.

  17 Volunteer 119

  T he sweltering day after their high school graduation in June 1989, Ray Stevens and his buddy Tom Shelley were picked up in a police gang sweep in East St. Louis, Illinois. True, they were in the gang, but joining was what they had to do to survive. Their real goal, ever since they were boyhood friends, was to finish high school and get out of what the FBI’s Unified Crime Report called the most dangerous city in the country.

  It was a testament to the strength of that promise that they did graduate, and it was miraculous that they did so without ever having committed a violent crime. The judge, a former naval officer with a reputation for being unsparing with gang members, recognized these accomplishments and uncharacteristically offered them the option of enlistment in the military now or the certainty of the penitentiary when they reached their third strike. Ray and Tom saw their way out and took it.

  They ended up in the Naval Construction Battalion, or Seabees, and considered themselves lucky. The judge had kept the matter in juvenile court, where their records would be sealed upon their eighteenth birthdays and their promised enlistment. By the end of that summer, they shipped out to the Naval Construction training center in Port Hueneme (pronounced “why-nee-mee”), California. They were out of East St. Louis, and with the construction skills they’d get, they saw union jobs for themselves with steady paychecks after they finished their tour. Life was looking up.

  Tom died in a helicopter crash early in their deployment to the Persian Gulf. His death, which seemed as cruel and meaningless as any death they had witnessed in East St Louis, broke Ray’s spirit. Defeated, he finished his deployment driving a bulldozer, sweating, drinking, and getting high.

  The Seabees’ motto, “We Build, We Fight,” turned out to be true for Ray. He lost his right arm and the hearing in his right ear during a mortar attack on a special forces camp his unit was building. On some level, the loss made sense to Ray; he told the doctors that he and his body were now right with each other. The injuries were his ticket home, and eight months later, he was released from the VA hospital with an honorable discharge, a Purple Heart, a few bucks, and a diagnosis of PTSD.

  Ray went back to the St. Louis, Missouri, area and found a foreman at a road-paving company who was sympathetic to his situation. The foreman, who was also a vet, hired Ray to do quality assurance reviews on a nice long contract the company held with the Missouri State Department of Roads.

  The consistency of work and the location allowed Ray to settle down, during which time he met Rosie. She was from a small farming town outside of Jefferson City, and for a year or so they made a go of it. When Rosie told him she was expecting, his hope for the future blossomed along with the new life she was carrying.

  Renewed, Ray took the news of the end of the state road contract with calm confidence and directed his energy into looking for steady work. Like migrant farm workers, he and Rosie moved from place to place, following seasonal paving and home construction jobs. Eventually the work dried up and the stress of constantly moving and little money made Ray’s PTSD worse, driving him back to the bottle and drugs.

  His erratic behavior and withdrawal became too much for Rosie. She took their beautiful daughter, Jenny, and went back to her hometown. In the letter she left for Ray, she said it would be better if he never came around her or Jenny again, and she would tell Jenny her daddy had died in a construction accident.

  Ray took to drifting and joined the ranks of other homeless vets, living on the street and picking up the odd job where he could. Over the years, he made his way west across the country, moving until he came to Seattle and couldn’t go any farther. He found some peace in the long months of rain and gray, which were so different than the blazing heat and dryness of the Gulf, and in that peace, he started to heal. It was a good city for him; there were many other vets he could relate to. He still had to move around, though. Sometimes he stayed in the Nickelsville homeless camps, sometimes under the Alaska Way Viaduct or in The Jungle. After being assaulted once in Pioneer Square, he avoided that place from then on.

  In the cool of November, as the relentless winter rains were starting, a college kid from Seattle University, just up the hill from Ray’s tent on Cherry Street under the I-5 overpass, came to talk to him. He said his name was Derrick, and he was a volunteer for PUSHH, the Puget Sound Homeless Haven. PUSHH was offering thirty-day vouchers for motels and meals, new clothing, plus access to a full medical clinic at a place called The Project, down in Pacific County, in the hills by the coast. With appointments backed up for months at the VA, Ray took the offer and the bus with about eighteen others to a small but sophisticated private clinic about two hours south of Seattle.

  The doctors and nurses were great there. He got better medicine for his arthritis and pain, all his dental work done, and a new hearing aid. He also talked to a therapist who specialized in PTSD. She referred Ray for some brain scans and psychological tests there at the clinic. Based on his results, they asked Ray to come back for more therapy and neuropsychological exercises on the computer, which he was happy to do. This went on through the holidays, and after years on the street, Ray became accustomed to sleeping safely in a warm bed again.

  Early in the New Year, during one of his therapy visits to the clinic, they told him they were so impressed with his progress that they wanted him to stay on there and take a position as a resident counselor. Because Ray didn’t have a degree, however, they said he couldn’t be paid, but they would give him his own room at the clinic and continue to meet all his needs. What clinched it for Ray was when he realized he would be helping people like himself. He would have purpose in his life again.

  He skimmed the acceptance paperwork they gave him and was pleasantly surprised to find an additional benefit: a ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy the clinic paid for as long as he stayed on, and he could name whomever he wanted as the beneficiary. He signed his name right below the beneficiary’s name, Jennifer Lynn Stevens in Sage Bend, Missouri, and left the life of a homeless vet forever.

  The Project took a new picture of him for his volunteer ID badge. Ray smiled as he looked at it. Next to his photo, the caption read: “Ray Lee Stevens, resident counselor, volunteer 119.”

  ***

  Three days later, in the benefits department of a shell company twenty-one levels removed from The Project, a brand-new benefits associate got a file on Ray Lee Stevens in his inbox. He didn’t know the sender had mistakenly chosen “Benefits: West Coast” instead of “Benefits: West Coast Special” from the automatically populated names in the “To:” line of the email. Wanting to make a good impression, he filled out form FRD-395 to open a ten-thousand-dollar five-year term life insurance policy with the North Plains Life Insurance Company in Minneapolis.

  18 The Production Floor

  F eeling drained at what should have been the end of a long day, Jerome Gilden faced a very long night. The security measures that controlled access to the most sensitive section of The Project were taking longer than he thought they should, adding to his irritation. Chafing at the perceived delay, he waited in a sealed cubicle and closed his eyes, thinking through his next steps.

  Oversee the disposal. Then call Michelson.

  After a loud thunk announced the release of the magnetic locks on the inner doors, he pushed his way through to the op
erations area of the Predictive Sciences Section—or the production floor, as he called it—annoyed he even had to be there.

  Gilden didn’t like involving himself directly. Michelson or Qian usually were the ones to handle this, but Qian was occupied with a more distasteful task, and Michelson wasn’t here.

  Well, when you’re the boss, you’re the boss.

  The technicians had screwed up the disposal of an observer before, leaving evidence that could have been traced back to The Project. Fortunately, the mistake had been caught by the redheaded man, who was now the head of field operations. So now each disposal had to be supervised by a member of the senior leadership team.

  With a hiss of pneumatic cylinders, the last set of double doors swung open. The production floor was brightly lit and cool, and though it resembled a hospital floor, it lacked the antiseptic aromas one would expect. Instead there was only a trace of the thin, sharp smell of off-gassing new computer cases.

  Conversations died on the lips of the thirteen staff members in the room at the sight of Gilden. His visits to the production floor were rare, to say the least. He ignored their “What the hell is he doing here?” reactions. In Gilden’s mind they all were as disposable as the observers and just as leveraged.

  He strode through the ring of four nurses’ stations around the centrally placed control dais. A nurse and two technicians worked at each station, remotely monitoring and maintaining the observers’ operational conditions. Once an observer was operational, no one was allowed into the sealed production suites that lined four of the outer walls of the pentagon-shaped room. The data from each of the stations was consolidated and fed to the shift production manager, who was at the dais. Gilden went to talk to her; she waited for him to speak first.

  “Show me the failure,” he said, indicating she should bring up the video from the dying observer’s room on the main screen, which occupied most of the fifth wall.

  She knew to give him only what he asked for when he asked for it. “On the screen, sir.”

  In the center of the screen was a large featureless white pod, the size of the outer shell of an Egyptian sarcophagus, with multiple sets of cables and tubes connecting it to the outside world. A large steel pipe exited from the lowest point of the pod, and a series of smaller video windows lined the perimeter of the main screen, showing the dwindling vitals of the occupant. Ignoring the EKG, pulse ox, temperature, and respiration rate, Gilden focused on the EEG, which was almost completely disorganized; some of the lines had already gone flat.

  He scowled at the data before him. He was no doctor, but it didn’t look good. “How much longer?”

  “Five, maybe ten minutes,” she said.

  Why did this have to happen now? And why wasn’t it predicted? A printer can tell you when a new toner cartridge is needed; we should be able to do the same with the observers.

  “Show me the activity monitor.”

  In the silence of the room, her mouse clicks were nearly deafening. The camera view of the production suite was replaced with a semitransparent 2-D view of a 3-D model of a human brain. Overlaid on the image were coordinate lines with labels at specific points. Waves of colorful activity washed through the projection, running over the outer surface of the brain, called the cortex, while flashes of light echoed around the interior of the structure. The cortical waves slowed, then stopped.

  “There’s no longer any organized activity,” she said, narrating the swift decay into death. “Observer 113 is insentient.” After another moment, the flashes of light, which represented activity along the major tracts of nerve bundles that connect various areas of the brain, ceased as well, leaving only the scattered random sparks of individual neurons that continued until the last of their chemical energy was spent.

  For the record, she said, “Brain death, 02:10 a.m..”

  “Pull the plug.” It was ridiculous that he had to say that; this should’ve been automated years ago.

  “Removing operational support,” she replied. They used to call it life support, but the term “operational support” was more palatable.

  The pulse and blood oxygenation monitor—pulse ox—plummeted, as expected, with mechanical respiration cut off. The EKG slowed, became erratic, and then stopped.

  “Open it up. Pull the marker,” Gilden ordered with a sigh of exasperation.

  Time for a new toner cartridge.

  The magnetic locks to production suite one released, allowing the outer door of the airlock to swing open. A technician from station one went into the airlock. Another few keystrokes and the door sealed behind him. A security glass window allowed Gilden to see jets of high-pressure air from the ceiling bathe the man while powerful fans under the floor pulled the air down and out. The man donned a white clean-room suit and sat on a bench to wait out the next part of the disposal procedure.

  After the shift manager typed a few commands on her keyboard, the end of the pod pulled away, revealing two feet.

  “It’s the left one this time, sir,” she said.

  “Go.”

  Her mouse clicked again, and the faint hum of an electric motor vibrated through the walls, followed by the ripping and snapping of the observer’s left foot as it was disarticulated at the ankle, a notoriously weak joint. A surgical cut would have been neater, but a necessary part of the deception involved forceful trauma associated with the removal of the foot. The foot was dropped into a thick plastic bag with an airtight seal before the inner door of the clean-room airlock opened and the technician went in to retrieve it.

  In the next week or two, there would be another story on the Internet of a human foot in a running shoe washed up on a beach somewhere, only this one would be identifiable. The knot in Gilden’s stomach released a little bit now that the gruesome part was over.

  “Okay, retrieval complete. Close it up. Soak it and flush it,” he said.

  “Closing it up, sir.”

  The pod had been sealed again, and fluid rushed into it. The liquid contained genetically modified versions of the naturally occurring bacteria in the human gut that break down all animal tissue after death. These hungry little microbes were further nourished and made hyperactive by the nutrients and chemicals in which they floated.

  Gilden smirked. People think dissolving a body is hard, but after death, the body dissolves itself.

  Depending on the environmental conditions, this could take anywhere from weeks to years. Postmortem, the chemical processes of life no longer inhibit the activity of the anaerobic (not needing oxygen) bacteria in the gut and uninhibited they start to break down the surrounding tissue; this is called putrefaction. It stank like hell, and Gilden was grateful for the sealed pod and airlock.

  It’s a beautiful thing actually, thought Gilden. Nature was taking care of the problem for him; they just had to speed it up a little.

  Their genetically modified version of the bugs would accomplish the decomposition in about an hour, leaving only the skeleton. From there it literally was a child’s science fair project to remove the calcium carbonate from the bone, leaving it rubbery.

  A basic garbage disposal took care of the last step. That left the biomedical waste and electronics to be burned in the facility’s small incinerator, for which they were fully licensed.

  The shift manager worked on her computer, closing out Observer 113’s file. Once she finished, she sent the file to the PSS senior leadership team. Gilden sat down in a computer workstation chair and crossed his arms, waiting for her to finish. He still had one task to perform.

  “I’m all done, sir. The file is ready for you.”

  “Fine. Thank you. Go get a cup of coffee.” Gilden rolled his chair to her workstation as she exited the dais. He stared at the camera and waited for the facial recognition to identify him and unlock the last section of the file for editing. Before coming down here, he had looked up Observer 113’s recruitment records to see the general area of the country he had come from; turned out it was from along the Gulf Coast.

>   In an innocuous field labeled “plant,” he typed in the value “Florida.” He authorized the operation with his PIN and certified the disposal. Observer 113’s left foot would be placed in a beat-up running shoe and dropped in the waters off Florida in a few weeks. The tides would eventually wash it up onto a beach, where it would be found and collected. In the meantime, someone who looked very much like Observer 113 and who had his ID would have a minor jaywalking encounter with some local Florida law enforcement or go into a social services office for a food voucher. It wouldn’t be enough to book him, which entailed fingerprinting, but it would be just enough to establish his presence there. He would be released back to the streets and then disappear.

  Later, local law enforcement would come into possession of the foot, and if they bothered with forensics testing and managed to identify the owner of the appendage, their own records would show he had been alive and in the area recently.

  The evidence would support the death of the individual; the disarticulated foot could be from a boat accident, or a feeding shark. Scavenging crabs would further mutilate it. Since he was homeless, there was a greater than 99 percent chance that the investigation would stop with the notification of the next of kin, if they could be found.

  Neat and clean. No trail leads back to The Project. Now to Michelson.

  She picked up after one ring.

  Well, she’s not asleep.

  “Hi, Bev. How are things on your end?” he opened, letting a little of his irritation come across.

  “We’re doing well here. What’s wrong, Jerome?” She was surprised he was up; he rarely slept less than eight to nine hours on the nights they spent together.

  “You’re needed back here now.” Even over a secure line, which this most certainly was, Michelson wouldn’t ask for more details. She knew what this meant; there were few activities at The Project that required her personal attention.