A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  Prakant’s phone led him to a row of apparently unused rooms in the base of the main tower. According to the map of Wilson’s locations, he’d recently been spending quite a bit of time in a room at one end of a hall and was currently located in a room on the next floor.

  Curious, before trying to confront him, Prakant decided to see what was in the room where Wilson had been hanging out. When he opened the door, the first thing he noticed was a faint acrid smell. There was a table holding a small stazer that’d been dismantled.

  At first, Prakant thought the stazer had malfunctioned, a fried circuit accounting for the odor, and that Wilson had been trying to repair it. Then he remembered that stazers weren’t repairable. In fact, there was a warning tag attached to one of the bolts that held their covers on. It said, “No user serviceable parts. Opening the stazer will irretrievably damage it.”

  He stepped closer and recognized that the Stade case he’d thought was the small stazer was empty. There was a smaller Stade case next to it and a—smaller yet—steel case next to that. The interior of the steel case was burnt and charred. A few electrical components were recognizable, but the rest had been immolated.

  I guess opening one will “damage it,” Prakant thought, gingerly reaching in and touching the burnt circuit board. Pretty warm, but not hot. I guess we know what Wilson Delbet was doing down here.

  He looked at the tracking map on his phone. Delbet had only started coming down here a couple of days ago. His eyes widened in surprise, Delbet was doing this stuff during the day, when he should’ve been at work! Why not at night when no one would’ve been looking for him?! Why would he do it on the day of the Big hookup? Just because he didn’t have an assigned job?

  Prakant snorted, The man’s so lazy he doesn’t even make a good crook!

  Heading to the other room, where tracking said Delbet’s laptop was still located, Prakant wondered what he’d find. An abandoned laptop? Delbet taking a nap?

  Prakant tried the door. It was locked. He told his phone to record audio, then had it send his master password to the lock.

  He slowly pushed the door open.

  From inside the room, Delbet’s distinctive voice said “Hey! This room’s in use. Keep the hell out!”

  Prakant kept pushing the door open, then leaned in and looked. “What’cha doin’ Wilson?” he asked, seeing for himself that the man had settled in with a couple of the pastries from the Big hookup celebration, a coffee, and his laptop. Wilson was closing the laptop, but not before Prakant saw the word “thermite” on its screen. Ah, Prakant thought. That’s what happened to the inside of that stazer.

  Looking like a fish on land, Delbet was soundlessly opening and closing his mouth.

  Prakant spoke to his phone, “Call security to this location.”

  “Wait, Mr. Prakant!” Delbet said, “I’ve been looking for a lost stazer. Did you find it?”

  Prakant looked around the room, “It’s not in here, is it? Was the task so exhausting that you had to stop and fortify yourself with coffee and pastries?”

  “Um, no, I, ah, had an idea I thought I should research and was using my laptop…”

  Delbet had stopped talking at the look on Prakant’s face. Prakant said, “While searching for a lost Stazer, you decided to stop and research thermite?”

  “Actually,” Delbet said nervously, “I found it a bit ago and it looked like it’d been on fire. I’ve been trying to figure out why it burned.”

  Prakant’s phone spoke in his earbud. “Security’s on the line and would like to speak to you.”

  “I’ll take it… Yes? Security?”

  “Hello, Mr. Prakant. You wanted us. Is it urgent? Mr. Seba called from Staze West to tell us that someone was opening a stazer. We’ve been trying to find it.”

  The stazer must’ve sent out a signal before it burned, Prakant thought. He said, “I’m calling about the same issue. I know where the stazer is and I’m with the person who tried to open it. If you could send a team?”

  As security responded affirmatively, Delbet was saying, “I didn’t try to open it! I found it that way!”

  Giving Delbet a disappointed look, Prakant shook his head. “Wilson, the tracking software on your laptop says you were in the room where the stazer’s located quite a bit over the past few days. What do you want to bet that the stazer itself uploaded a record of your attempts to bypass its security? Give it up man. You’re toast with this company and you’re probably going to spend some time in prison.” He shook his head, “Should’ve put in the effort instead of looking for the easy way out.”

  Delbet slumped.

  Which was nice. Prakant had been a little worried the man might attack him despite the fact the jig was obviously up.

  Chapter Six

  Admiral Halser looked up when JAG Wang entered his office. “So, what do we have to do to invoke this Invention Secrecy Act?”

  Wang looked reluctant for a moment, then took a breath and said, “It doesn’t apply. They haven’t patented the stazers.”

  “What?!” Halser exclaimed. “Come on! If they haven’t patented them, then any fool could take one apart and reverse engineer them!”

  “Yeah,” Wang said, a puzzled look on his face. “It would seem so, wouldn’t it? They did make a patent application, but then they abandoned it. By applying some pressure on the basis that we wanted to invoke the secrecy act, I got to talk to the examiner. He says the application doesn’t have enough information to actually build the device like submissions are supposed to. When it first came in, he says he told them their application didn’t represent the required ‘full disclosure’ of methods. Though they said they’d submit a revised application, they never did. When queried about it, they said they were just planning to keep the methods secret instead of protecting them with a patent. Shortly after that they formally abandoned it.”

  “I don’t understand. How do they think they’re going to keep the tech secret?”

  Wang shrugged, “Maybe they’re not going to let anyone else get their hands on a stazer. Could it be the company’s going to do all the stazing itself?”

  “So, you’re thinking that if we wanted a Stade ship’s hull, someone from the company would come down and build it for us?”

  “Um,” Wang said, “you know they’re building rockets for Space-Gen don’t you?”

  “Rocket engines, yeah.”

  “No, apparently they’re building the entire rocket. This poses another problem for the Invention Secrecy Act, in the sense that Stade’s already out in the wild and it’d be extremely difficult to make it secret. Also, if you tried to take it away from the world, you’d have a lot of very pissed off people coming down on you.”

  Halser frowned. “I get that some people might be pissed about taking Stade away from the rocketry folks, but I don’t think the average citizen gives a damn about the space program.”

  Wang said, “Stazers do a lot of things they will care about. Just the fact they can put people in stasis until their cancer can be cured is going to get the public involved.”

  “So…” Halser said slowly, “maybe the government will have to make rocket engines and staze the people who need it medically.”

  “I think you’d be in for an uphill battle, there’re too many other things people are going to want. But, back to Space-Gen. I talked to a Space Force JAG who says that Space-Gen has to build something like a mold for whatever parts they want made out of Stade, for instance, the rocket engines. Then someone from Staze shows up and,” Wang made finger quotes, “‘casts’ the Stade in the mold. Maybe the Navy could do something similar. Build a mold for a hull and then just have them come and cast it in Stade.”

  Halser narrowed his eyes, “How much do they charge?”

  “I’m not sure,” Wang said. “The guy thought they charged four million to cast an engine. Since a Stade engine can be used over and over indefinitely, it’s a pretty good deal as compared to normal engines that cost two million and have to be refu
rbished regularly and replaced after a while.”

  “So, you’re trying to say that the million dollars they want to charge for a hundred-meter Stade blimp is a good deal?”

  “Blimp?” the JAG asked, looking puzzled.

  “Yeah,” Halser said, “apparently they have a mold for a ten by hundred-meter Stade blimp and said they could cast one for us as a surrogate submarine we could use for testing.”

  “A blimp… submarine?”

  “We wouldn’t use it as a submarine,” Halser said with irritation, “but we could submerge it well below crush depths to make sure we could build a submarine out of Stade.”

  “From what I understand,” Wang said slowly, “there’s no doubt that it’d be far stronger than an ordinary submarine.”

  “Yeah,” Halser sighed. “But we have to test these ideas. And they won’t build us a test model for free in hopes of getting future business. The damned military procurement system could take forever to approve the purchase of a test model.”

  “It’ll take forever to approve building a boat too, right? Maybe you could just ask permission to build the next submarine out of Stade?”

  Halser stared into space for a few seconds, then waved his thoughts off and turned back to Wang. “If the secrecy act only works on patented devices, did you look into other options to restrict them from selling this tech? Or at least to keep them from selling weapons to other countries?”

  Looking surprised, Wang said, “I’m pretty sure that’d take an act of Congress.”

  Maybe Bill Jain could ask his pet senator, Halser thought, thinking of the vice admiral he reported to.

  He dismissed the JAG and turned back to signing paperwork.

  ***

  AP Washington DC—The FDA has responded to the storm of controversy that has erupted around the university hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, “stazing” technology has been used to save critical patients for many months. Physicians are reportedly astonished by the differences it has made in their ability to save lives.

  A number of brief reports and small case series have come out that seem to make the benefits of stazing patients in critical situations incontrovertible. In reaction to such reports, hospitals all across the country have begun clamoring for access to the devices, however, the FDA has been reluctant to approve their use without the usual animal data and controlled trials.

  The physicians using the device at UVA say that they’re using it without FDA approval on the basis that not using it to save people’s lives would be unethical. Dr. Horton, the leader of the stazing program said, “You only need to see stasis save one person to be convinced. I am reminded of the introduction of anesthesia in the 1800s. Without a doubt, anesthesia was much more dangerous than stasis, yet it provided so great and so obvious a benefit to persons undergoing surgery that it was taken up with great rapidity across America and soon after that in Europe and the rest of the world. We agree that a controlled trial of patients treated with and without stasis would, in fact, be the correct scientific strategy, but we contend that it would be unethical to withhold such an obviously beneficial treatment from half of our patients for the sake of science when many of the control group would then needlessly die.”

  Bowing to pressure from medical practitioners across the country, the FDA sent a team of observers to UVA over the past several weeks. They reviewed data from an unpublished retrospective study that compared the outcomes of critical patients at UVA where stasis was used, to patients at UVA with similar presentations before stasis was available. They also compared UVA’s current outcomes to results in similar patients at another major university medical center that does not have access to stazer technology.

  Dr. Anson Torrence, leader of the FDA’s team said, “The differences between outcomes with and without the use of stasis were remarkable. This was true both in the retrospective review and in our own estimation of patients whose treatment we personally witnessed. However, we cannot yet conclude that there are no long-term effects of undergoing stasis. Of course, such retrospective and case-control studies do not meet the gold-standard of randomized and blinded studies. However, we agree that the ethics of carrying out such studies—when one arm of the study is so obviously beneficial—at least in the short run, is problematic. Therefore, we are recommending that the FDA approve medical stasis in critical conditions where there is little doubt that, without stasis, the patient is headed for a grave outcome. We, however, do not believe it should, as yet, be used in situations where the patient can be treated satisfactorily without stasis.”

  When asked for an example of a medical situation or condition where his panel does not believe stasis should be used, Dr. Torrence said, “We do not believe that patients should be put in stasis for the doctor’s convenience, i.e. so that a treating surgeon wouldn’t have to come into the hospital to perform surgery at night. We do believe that, after further data is accumulated, this strategy may be deemed reasonable at some point in the future. After all, there is no doubt that well-rested practitioners perform at a higher level than exhausted ones. However, at present, given the possibility that stasis might have some unrecognized long-term adverse effects, we do not think that patients should be stazed for convenience until long-term animal and human outcome data are available.”

  When such a team makes a recommendation, it is usually followed by the Administration, therefore we asked Staze, the company that builds the stazers, how long it would take to outfit hospitals across the United States and throughout the world with such devices. They replied that they were a small company and that turning out so many stazers would prove extremely challenging. Apparently, they are unwilling to license the construction of stazers to other companies…

  Arya turned, trying to look casually around the room. Her eyes caught on Kaem and Gunnar, heads down over some project. She felt a momentary stab of emotion, somehow longing for the days when it was just the three of them.

  Rose-colored glasses, she told herself. Those days had their own sets of problems.

  She turned back to her desk, wondering how she could get Kaem to come over and talk to her again. To give her a chance to tell him she regretted pushing him away. But you’ve pushed him away for so long, why would he risk a visit? she wondered. He’d just expect you to badger him about something he’s been doing.

  After a while, she realized she’d been staring at her computer but getting nothing done. I’m going to have to make the first move, she thought, but how?

  Someone cleared his throat behind her, “Arya?” Gunnar said.

  Startled, she turned quickly, “Uh-huh?”

  “Um,” he leaned down and braced an arm on her worktable, then spoke quietly. “Kaem’s hoping I can talk you into going out to lunch with us.” He held up a halting hand, apparently worried she was about to bite his head off. “Just to talk over some business issues we don’t want anyone else to hear about. No romantic stuff on his part, he’s told me how upset you are about that.”

  “Oh,” Arya said. Then, worried she was going to get choked up, she limited herself to a one-word answer, “Sure.”

  “Great,” Gunnar said, giving her as big a smile as he ever produced. “Bonnie’s café at one o’clock okay?”

  Arya wanted to say “no.” After all, the food at Bonnie’s was terrible and she had an appointment at one. However, she didn’t trust her voice for the needed explanation. She simply nodded and resolved to reschedule the appointment.

  Before he left, Gunnar said, “I hate all this cloak and dagger, but we think it’d be better if we all walked over separately, okay?”

  ~~~

  Kaem was already sitting in a booth when Arya arrived. Following habit, she headed toward the seat across from him, but, ten-feet away, she realized what she was doing and instead sat next to him.

  Kaem turned to stare at her, a shocked look on his face. “What’s this mean?” he asked as if he dreaded the answer.

  “I’ve… been too hard on you,” Ar
ya said, “sorry.” Inside she was horrified, What happened to the ‘I love you too,’ you steeled yourself for on the walk over here? she asked herself.

  Kaem’s voice wavered, “So, are you not pissed at me? I’m sorry about sending those flowers, it was a bad idea, but I—”

  Arya interrupted him by saying, “Hi Gunnar. You must not’ve been too far behind me.” Then she turned to Kaem, hoping to quickly and quietly say something about how she appreciated the flowers. Unfortunately, she hesitated, trying to come up with the right words, and didn’t get them out before Gunnar was sitting down in the seat across from them.

  He said, “You two are sittin’ together?! I hope you’re over whatever silly-ass problem you’ve been having, it’s b-been…” He stuttered to a stop, eyes jumping back and forth between their faces, “I should just shut up, eh?” A waitress arrived at the table and Gunnar looked up at her with relief.

  Once their orders had been taken, Kaem opened the discussion as if there hadn’t been any unpleasantness. “I’m wanting to talk to the two of you because you’re the only ones who understand the situation with Mr. X.”

  Arya thought, Even after cloak and daggering off to Bonnie’s he isn’t going to come out and say something about how X’s imaginary is he? Thinking she’d have to watch her own tongue in this conversation, she simply nodded.

  Kaem accepted their nods and went on, “I’m sure you’ve seen that the FDA’s probably going to approve the use of stazers in critical situations. But the way they’ve worded it,” he paused, then spoke as if he were reciting the statement verbatim, “‘in conditions where there is little doubt that, without stasis, the patient is headed for a grave outcome,’ I think they’re going to leave it to the treating physician to decide what constitutes a critical situation.

  Gunnar said, “Well that’s who I think should decide—”