Antenna Syndrome

by Alan Annand

  Darcia was a pharmacist who worked in the neighborhood. She’d lost her husband to cancer a few years before the Brooklyn Blast. I’d seen her with the occasional guy but none for long. Aside from living down the hall from each other, we sometimes crossed paths in Dewitt Clinton Park, where we both went for the occasional walk, indulging in the illusion that we were getting some fresh air with our exercise, even though we both wore eMasks. She was a few years younger than me, a blonde with a nice figure and a ready smile. But I’d never asked her out. I suspected we were probably more alike than we knew, perhaps too afraid to risk falling in love again for real.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Just crawling home from happy hour.”

  “Seriously?” She kneeled beside me, and the view of her legs was replaced by the equally-pleasant close-up of her face.

  “Sorry I banged your door. I had a blackout.”

  “Well, you can’t just lie here in the hall.”

  “I don’t think I can get up.”

  She took my wrists in her hands and dragged me into her apartment, kicking the door shut behind her. She propped me up against a loveseat in her living room.

  “Romantic,” I said. “Role reversal on the caveman routine.”

  “Don’t throw up on my carpet,” she commanded and went into another room. She returned a moment later with a gauze-covered phial that she broke under my nose. “Inhale.”

  I did as I was told. I felt the black lava pushed to the periphery of my vision. My brain lit up and my limbs began to tingle all over. I got myself off the floor and sat on the loveseat. “What was that?”

  “Never mind. Let’s just say my job has perks.” She sat beside me on the loveseat.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “It’s all right. Stay a while until I know you’re okay. You want something to drink? Water? Juice? Soda?”

  “Thanks. I could handle a glass of juice.”

  She went to the kitchen. I looked around her living room. Nice carpet, leather furniture, some original art on the walls, a teak coffee table. She returned with a glass of OJ and sat in the chair opposite. I took a sip and nodded my appreciation.

  “You have a lot of blackouts?”

  “One or two a month.” I recited the spectrum of medical opinion.

  “Make miso a regular part of your diet,” she said. “Studies have shown it’s effective in treating radiation sickness.”

  “Japanese soy paste, right?”

  “Buy it organic in any health food store. One spoonful in a cup of hot water. It’s salty but you get used to it.”

  “You can get used to anything if you have no choice.”

  She smiled. “There you go.”

  “Yes, here I go.” I drained my glass and set it on the coffee table. “Thanks for the first aid. Sorry to disturb you.”

  She took a business card from a cabinet and wrote a number on the back. “Call me if you need me.” She insisted on walking me down the hall to my apartment, and waited until I’d unlocked the door. “Goodnight,” she said.

  “Don’t I get a kiss?” I joked.

  She shook her head and smiled. “Not on the first date.”

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter 24

  In the morning I awoke with a thudding headache and leather mouth, for which I swallowed two aspirin and a quart of water. Last night after my fainting attack I’d gone straight to bed without watching the news. Now, as my coffee brewed, I sat at the kitchen counter and browsed the news sites. A reporter from Al-Jazeera, whose growing reputation for objective news coverage now made Fox look like a bunch of right-wing hacks, had it covered:

  “The MediaTech Center on Pier 26 was the scene of a shooting yesterday afternoon at the unveiling of EDGAR, the autonomous garbage robot that enters trial operations this week. During the demonstration, a man with an automatic weapon emerged from the audience, firing upon the robot and event coordinators. A Voromix Industries technician, Sergei Kolkovitch, died on the scene of multiple gunshot wounds.

  “The identity and motive of the gunman remain unknown. A Voromix security officer intervened with the shooter but, in their ensuing struggle, the gunman was swallowed by EDGAR. The MediaTech Center remains a crime scene this morning, as a forensic team sifts through EDGAR’s processing tract in hopes of retrieving the gunman’s ID.

  “Investigators are still puzzling over the gunman’s final words before he started shooting: ‘This is a crude ploy to steal jobs from New York’s Strongest.’ Unofficial sources speculate this was a gesture of protest from Department of Sanitation employees whose jobs are threatened by garbage robots. The public relations officer for Local 831 of the Teamsters’ Union denies this allegation.

  “Meanwhile, human rights activists are using the incident to demand a moratorium on autonomous robot production, citing grounds of instability and danger to the public. But Dr. Globik, the Director of Operations, strongly refuted this proposition.”

  The scene changed to an interior shot of Dr. Globik in an office. “EDGAR underwent field trials for over a year, using animals of all sizes and volunteer human subjects in a wide variety of conditions including noise, airborne pollution and limited visibility. These trials, whose results are available for media scrutiny, have not incurred a single accidental death to an animal or human.

  “The only reason EDGAR harmed the attacker was because the gunman had shot out its sensor array, thus preventing EDGAR from discerning human features. When the gunman stumbled against its front bumper, this activated EDGAR’s collector arms, pulling the gunman into its feeder port. It’s unfortunate but, if you live by the sword, you may die by it as well.”

  Back to the Al-Jazeera reporter. “Despite this setback in public relations, Voromix Industries will proceed as scheduled with EDGAR field trials this week. On the Nasdaq, Voromix was off a point in light trading end of day, but up two points this morning on strong volume.”

  And then we were on to other stories, some of which were far too disturbing to watch on an empty stomach. This city was chuck full of nuts, and every full moon they all came out of the woodwork to compete for the media’s limited attention span.

  I poured a cup of coffee and sat on the balcony, debating my next move. I needed a reason to approach Dr. Globik but, after seeing his security detail in action, a frontal assault was obviously not the way to go. I needed some sort of backdoor angle...

  I put on my iFocals and took a closer look at Dr. Globik’s online data. I didn’t know what I was looking for, just hoping for something to point me in the right direction. To hope for a clue implied a crime had been committed, of which I had no proof. What I sought was a bit more vague – more along the lines of an omen...

  After an hour’s worth of trolling the entire contents of the Avatar Clinic website, scanning the abstracts of the many articles he’d written, retracing his academic and work history all the way back to Europe in the nineties, I finally found something...

  Between his three-year stint at the Mayo Clinic and his opening the Avatar Clinic, there was a one-year period during which he’d apparently held a research post at New York University. Except it looked like he hadn’t been there a full year, only nine months... It struck me as odd, and I wondered if his contract had been cut short.

  I called a former client who worked in NYU’s HR department. Cheryl had been the victim of identity theft a few years ago but I’d succeeded, where the police had not, in tracking down the people who’d skimmed her ID and credit card info via a fake site selling Italian shoes at deep discounts. Long story short, Cheryl cleared her credit rating and successfully sued the scammers. Her indebtedness to me had been sitting there like a gift waiting to be unwrapped at my leisure.

  “Cheryl, honey, have I got a deal for you! Five pairs of Gravati in size six just fell off a loading dock on Fifth Avenue. Yours for seven hundred bucks and I’ll deliver by lunchtime.”

  She must have seen my name on her call d
isplay. “Mr. Savage, you’re mean. You know I love Gravati. You are joking, aren’t you?”

  “It’s been a dull week. I just needed to torture someone.”

  She was pleased to hear from me and, after a quick exchange of mundane news, I asked her for Dr. Globik’s employment history at NYU. In this age of moral ambiguity, she had no problem pulling up his file and giving me the gist of it.

  “We hired him in August 2019 on a one-year contract to research the feasibility of radio-controlled insects. He was given his own lab with a staff of three doctoral candidates. As part of the contract, he was required to teach a graduate course in Entomological Neurology. But shortly after the completion of the academic year, his contract was terminated in June 2020.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “There’s a copy of the Dean’s letter in his file. It’s pretty vague, says Dr. Globik contravened basic principles of professional conduct the university held sacrosanct. They paid out his full contract but asked him to vacate his office immediately.”

  “Anyone take over his contract?”

  “Dr. Yamazaki.”

  “One of yours, or an outsider?”

  “Ours. He runs the Marine Biology lab, but he’s a specialist in crustaceans, so maybe there’s some sort of connection with insects. I mean, crabs and lobsters are sort of like giant insects of the sea, aren’t they?”

  “Please. I used to like going to Red Lobster.”

  “I owed you one.”

  “Now we’re square. Got a number for Yamazaki?”

  She gave it to me and I called Yamazaki right away. I was transparent with him, more or less, said I was doing a background check on Dr. Globik, and wanted to meet him face to face to discuss what he knew. He seemed eager to assist and said his schedule was free all morning. I said I’d be there within the hour.

  Chapter 25

  I drove downtown to NYU and the Silverman Building. In the Biology Department, I asked the department secretary where to find Dr. Yamazaki. She directed me to Fish Lab #1 in the basement.

  When I entered, a man was feeding some fish. He wore a white lab coat over brown slacks and crepe-soled white shoes. A bald spot the size of a child’s hand shone copper-toned at the back of his head. The fish were a dull green color but there was nothing dull about their movements. They lunged from one side of the tank to the other, as fast as a boxer’s hands, to snatch the morsels of meat as soon as they hit the water. Piranha.

  “Dr. Yamazaki?”

  He turned with a frown. His eyes were black beads within puffy lids. Yamazaki was tall, maybe six-foot-two, and bulky. If he were as athletic as he was academic, he might have made the sumo wrestling team.

  “Close the door, please. The draft is bad for the tropical fish.”

  “My name’s Keith Savage. We spoke on the phone earlier this morning.” I gave him my card. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about Dr. Globik.”

  Yamazaki squinted at my card and stuck it in the breast pocket of his lab coat. He dipped his hand into a plastic bag and tossed a few more pieces of chopped liver to the piranha. “Why?”

  Generally I like to tell the truth. But in this case, my telling him I was trying to find a paraplegic runaway who might seek treatment at the Avatar Clinic would raise more questions than I could answer. So I said, “I’m making discreet inquiries on behalf of an employer.”

  “Globik is seeking employment? You know he runs a clinic in Tribeca that specializes in prosthetic implants?”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

  “Who’s the employer?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, except that it’s a government agency which exercises great due diligence in matters of personnel.”

  “DARPA?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell, remember?”

  “Never mind, I can put two and three together. What do you want to know about Globik?”

  “His contract with NYU was terminated in 2020. Do you know why?”

  Yamazaki chewed his tongue for a moment. “Let’s say, he exceeded the boundaries of his research mandate.”

  “Which was...?”

  “To create an electronic interface that would allow an operator to control the movements of insects.”

  “Any bugs in particular?”

  “Cockroaches were his initial subjects.”

  “Was he successful?”

  “Yes. He published a paper on it.”

  “Can you describe his work in language I could understand?”

  “Sure. I’m not an entomologist, so I can’t get too technical anyway. Globik attached a miniaturized radio receiver to the head of a cockroach, thus allowing a remote operator to control its movements.”

  “That’s it?”

  Yamazaki looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Yes, that’s it. All it required was the brain mapping of a cockroach, an intimate understanding of insect neurology, and a three-hour session of micro-surgery to attach the implant.”

  “I guess Dr. Globik was good at his work.”

  “The man was a genius. He hadn’t been on staff six months before everyone in the faculty was referring to him as the Einstein of entomology.”

  “Did you work with him?”

  “No.”

  “Then why were you assigned to take over his project when he left?”

  “I wasn’t assigned to continue his research. I was assigned to destroy everything he’d done here.” Yamazaki shook his head. “Sorry, that’s not strictly true. I was assigned only to destroy the experimental aspects of his research that went too far beyond the scope of his original contract.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Yamazaki nodded toward a camera in a corner near the door. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He led me down a corridor and into some sort of utility room full of water pumps, dehumidifiers and heat exchangers. It was warm and humid, with dozens of pumps thrumming away and a huge fan sucking noisily like some little kid with a straw at the bottom of his milkshake.

  Yamazaki took a pack of cigarettes from his lab coat and offered me one. Eagle Clouds again. We lit up and blew some smoke overhead. The fan yanked it away in a hasty swirl.

  “Best place in the building to sneak a puff,” he winked at me.

  “What did you destroy?”

  “His hornet colony. His insect-mammalian hybrids. All of his research files pertaining to hybrid cloning.”

  “Whoa. Hornets?”

  “After he’d achieved remote control of cockroaches, he set his sights on Asian giant hornets. It was a quantum leap in remote motor control.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s one thing to control a stable six-legged creature on a two-dimensional plane, quite another to control the in-flight stability of a four-winged insect in three dimensions. But he failed to establish adequate environmental controls...”

  “What happened?”

  “Individually, he’d attached radio implants to almost a dozen hornets. Der Schwarm, he called them. Unfortunately, they escaped from their enclosure one day and attacked a whole class of graduate students. Several were stung multiple times. One student died of anaphylactic shock and the family sued the university.”

  “You mentioned something about hybrids...?”

  “The university didn’t even know about these until I started shutting down his research. Would you believe, he’d used university funds to rent an off-site facility just to keep it a secret? We’d never have known about it if I hadn’t found reference to it in his files.”

  “Why were you made responsible for shutting down his research?”

  “Primarily, because I wasn’t an entomologist and therefore wouldn’t be tempted to over-value and protect the research he’d done. Secondly, I hated his guts, and was glad to play a part in his removal. The man’s a genius, but a mad scientist.”

  “Why did you hate him?”

  “He had no sense of boundaries and was arrogant beyond compare. He had no tenure but he lorded it over
us as if he were the president of the university. Plus which, there was something personal between us that I’d rather not go into.”

  “What sort of hybrids?”

  “He was experimenting with grafts. Leading edge stuff that required three PhDs just to understand all the neurology, physiology and micro-surgery required. He’d transplanted compound insect eyes onto sparrows. Tarantula legs onto mice. He had plans for so much more which he’d sketched in his research notes. As a scientist I was in awe of his brilliance, but as a human, I was disgusted with how he proposed to bastardize God’s creatures. I was happy to incinerate it all.”

  “What sort of plans?”

  “As an entomologist, he was naturally fascinated with insects. But as a trail-blazing neurosurgeon of organ and prosthetic transplants, some of his ideas were practically science fiction.”

  “Such as...?”

  “He wanted to make insects much larger than normal. Although it’s a complex undertaking, it comes down to three steps. The first was to map the insect’s entire structure through an MRI scan, thus creating a blueprint of the species. The second step involved the deconstruction of hundreds of samples of that same insect to create a cell bank.”

  “By deconstruction, you mean...?”

  “Shredding them, and separating the results into a palette of cells – brain, optic, muscle, cartilage, exoskeleton cells. In the third step, he’d create a new insect, perhaps ten times larger, by using the MRI scan as a template and a 3-D printer to build it in layers, drawing the necessary cells for each component from the palettes he’d filled in step two.”

  “Did you ever see such an insect?”

  “No...”

  “You sound uncertain.”

  “I never saw anything like that, but when we dismantled his off-site lab, there were empty cages and enclosures with signs of excrement, which led me to believe perhaps something had existed, however briefly. It’d be no surprise, in the early phases of such an undertaking, that many, if not most, of his creations would have died. Globik might be clever, but he wasn’t God.”