Date: 2018-11-26T18:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the fifteenth book in a series of near future Hard-SciFi Thrillers. Their heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation that makes her a genius as well as providing astonishing athletic abilities. Her genius has let her revolutionize our world with a number of inventions, including instantaneous communications as well as trans-dimensional portals that are delivering fuel, water, and food all around the worldIn “Terraform,” AJ—Ell’s soon to be brother-in-law—gently takes her to task for not being bold enough to undertake the terraforming of Mars. They begin the first steps to initiate that m
Publisher: Independently published

Terraform

An Ell Donsaii story #15

Laurence E Dahners

Copyright 2018

Laurence E Dahners

Kindle Edition

ASIN: B07K7XSDZP

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only

Author’s Note

This book is the fifteenth in the series, the “Ell Donsaii stories.”

Though this book can “stand alone” it’ll be much easier to understand if read as part of the series including

“Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)”

“Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2)”

“Lieutenant (an Ell Donsaii story #3)”

“Rocket (an Ell Donsaii story #4)”

“Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5)”

“Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6)”

“Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7)”

“Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8)”

“Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9)”

“Wanted (an Ell Donsaii story #10)”

“Rescue (an Ell Donsaii story #11)”

“Impact (an Ell Donsaii story #12)”

“DNA (an Ell Donsaii story #13)” and

“Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14)”

I’ve minimized the repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the earlier books in order to provide a better reading experience for those of you who are reading the series.

Other Books and Series
by Laurence E Dahners

Series

The Hyllis Family series

The Vaz series

The Bonesetter series

The Blindspot series

The Proton Field series

Single books (not in series)

The Transmuter’s Daughter

Six Bits

Shy Kids Can Make Friends Too

For the most up to date information go to

Laurence E Dahners website

Or the Amazon Author page

Table of Contents

Preprologue

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Author’s Afterword

Acknowledgments

Preprologue

Ell’s father, Allan Donsaii, was an unusually gifted quarterback. Startlingly strong, and a phenomenally accurate passer, during his college career he finished two full seasons without any interceptions and two games with 100 percent completions. Unfortunately, he wasn’t big enough to be drafted by the pros.

Extraordinarily quick, Ell’s mother, Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and rarely played a game without a steal.

Allan and Kristen dated more and more seriously through college, marrying at the end of their senior year. Their friends teased them that they’d only married in order to start their own sports dynasty.

Their daughter Ell got Kristen’s quickness, magnified by Allan’s surprising strength and highly accurate coordination.

She also has a new mutation that affects the myelin sheaths of her nerves. This mutation produces nerve transmission speeds nearly double those of normal neurons. With faster nerve impulse transmission, she has far quicker reflexes. Yet her new type of myelin sheath is also thinner, allowing more axons, and therefore more neurons, to be packed into the same sized skull. These two factors result in a brain with more neurons, though it isn’t larger, and a faster processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller, faster CPU architecture.

Most importantly, under the influence of adrenalin in a fight or flight situation, her nerves transmit even more rapidly than their normally remarkable speed.

Much more rapidly…

Prologue

The day was hot, though every day was hot. Worse since the start of the drought. Cabo took a little sip of water and wished he could go back to school. Cabo loved learning, but just the fact he could sit in the shade at school made it wonderful.

However, the drought had made things hard for his family.

Cabo’d been worrying about water for months. Since the drought worsened recently, he’d been worrying a lot more. The land in their area of northern Somalia—near Ethiopia—was arid and covered with low trees, patchy grass and thorny bushes. Water shortages were common. The grass’d turn brown and the brush would wither to some extent. Some of the sheep and goats would get sick and a few would die.

But always, the rains came back. The streams ran and the land greened.

It was just a matter of keeping your sheep and goats alive until Mother Nature provided again. Since the start of the drought, Cabo’d had to herd the goats farther and farther for less and less water. For a while after the streams dried up, he’d been able to dig holes at low spots in the streambeds. Water would seep into the holes. He thought it might work even now, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t dig deep enough.

Cabo was watching his goats when the stranger arrived, wearing bright red and blue clothing and riding a strange kind of bicycle. The bicycle had big, man-high, spidery wheels that Cabo could see rode over the bumpy land more smoothly than one with ordinary, smaller wheels would. The man wasn’t mounted up over the wheels like a normal bicyclist, but down between them so that he was still about the same distance from the ground as a normal rider.

The stranger waved and spoke quietly in some foreign language. A louder translation came from the region of his chest, where he must be carrying some kind of AI that spoke for him. In Somali it said, “Hello. Is the drought causing trouble for your animals?”

Cabo nodded slowly, thinking that—even to an idiot—the answer to that question must be obvious. Looking the man over, he thought, This man’s the kind of idiot who probably won’t live much longer. Like many Westerners, the man was wearing a broad-brimmed hat to shade his face. The rest of him was almost completely covered with brightly colored synthetic fabric. It was easy to see he didn’t have any water or food with him. He’s going to die of exhaustion, overheating and dehydration. Cabo blinked when he realized that the oversized bicycle had no pedals and must, therefore, be some kind of motorcycle—even though no motor was visible.

And, the man wasn’t sweating. In fact, he looked… comfortable. He looked more comfortable than Cabo, something very unusual for a Westerner, even a dark skinned fellow like this one.

The man smiled and got off the motorcycle, stepping closer, “I’ve come to bring you help for your animals.” He reached into a pocket of his brightly colored jacket and pulled out a grey object a little larger than a fist.

“We can’t afford it,” Cabo said abruptly.

“That’s okay, you don’t have to pay unless you want to keep using it next month.” The man held the object up and pointed to a green button, “Press here to set it up.” The man pressed the button. With a hissing sound, the grey object began to expand and unfold. It rapidly enlarged, beginning to take on a shape like an elongated trough.

Interrupting Cabo’s wide-eyed stare, the man said, “Press the red button to close it back down.” The man pressed the red button and the device immediately began to shrink. “But for now,” the man said, pressing the green button again and restarting the expansion, “let’s have it finish setting up. I only wanted you to understand how to make it small again when you’re ready to leave.”

In a few more minutes, the device had formed a long trough; an arms-length wide, a half-knee-deep, and as long as three men were tall. It was gray, ribbed and seemed slightly translucent. The end the man was holding onto stood higher than the rest of the trough. Apparently, the whole thing was as light as tissue paper—not surprising considering that the whole thing had blown up out of something no larger than a big man’s fist. The far end of it was lifting off the ground in the hot breeze. “It looks like a water trough,” Cabo said, “but we have no water to put in it.”

“Ah, there’s the crux of it, isn’t it?” the man said. “Now, we’ll try asking for water. You can do that part. Just say, ‘Turn the water on.’”

Cabo studied the man, sure this was some kind of elaborate prank.

The man said, “Go ahead. Say, ‘Turn the water on.’”

Cabo shrugged, “Turn the water on.”

Water immediately began spurting out of an opening at the high end of the trough. It splashed into the bottom of the trough. Cabo’s goats immediately lifted their heads at the sound and smell of water. In moments, they were moving toward the trough.

Cabo stared, then trying to restrain his excitement, he said, “Is that done with one of D5R’s ports?”

The man nodded. “They’re sending them to places having droughts—just now Somalia. I was lucky enough to be chosen to deliver them here in the northern high lands. My father came from this area so I wanted to be part of the deliveries.”

The goats were shouldering in around the trough, heads down in the bottom of it after the water. Cabo sobered and shook his head, “It seems wonderful, but my family can’t afford it.”

“Ah,” the man said, “but they can’t afford to have their goats die either, right?”

Cabo was still shaking his head, “But we don’t have any money now. We won’t have any until we sell some goats.”

The man shrugged, “D5R’d give this to you for free, except they’ve learned that things they give away hold little value to the people who get them. Free gifts aren’t cared for and, when they’re lost or destroyed, the recipients think they should get another for free as well.” The man lifted his chin to point at the trough, “And something like this? If it’s free, people waste the water. They let the trough overflow into the desert.”

Cabo wanted to keep the man talking, at least until the goats had their fill. I’d just as well barter. He lifted his own chin, “How much do you want?”

The man smiled, “Nothing now. But, next month, if you want more water, then you’ll have to pay for what you used this month.” He shrugged, “That’s to keep you from wasting water this month.”

“How much?” Cabo asked, dreading the answer.

“A penny for 50 liters.”

Like many other poor countries, Somalia used the US dollar for its currency, but Cabo decided he’d better be sure he understood. “A penny? One-hundredth of a US dollar?”

The man nodded solemnly.

“So, a dollar’d buy us 5,000 liters?”

The man’s eyes widened a little, but he nodded again.

Waving at the trough, Cabo said, “How many liters does that hold?”

“Five-hundred liters.”

“So, I could fill the trough ten times for a dollar?” he asked, thinking about the hundred-dollars he could sell a goat for. The hundred dollars each dead goat cost them. And, I won’t have to completely fill it for 120 goats. They drank four to six liters per day, so a full trough would be enough to last all day, but it’d be easier to let them drink a little, then move the trough to a new grazing area. He could move it several times a day.

The man’s eyes widened again, “Yes.” He smiled, “You’ve been to school.”

Cabo nodded bitterly, “Yes, but not since the drought. My father’s searching for work in the city, so I have to tend the goats.”

The man grinned, “You seem very bright. Would you like to go to school while you’re tending the goats?”

“Sure, but,” Cabo grinned slyly, “half the fun of going to school’s being in the shade where it’s cool.”

The man said, “You drive a hard bargain. Here, I’ll give you a jacket like mine.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a light blue jacket made of some synthetic.

Cabo took it, then, holding it, looked the man in the eye. “You’re giving this to me?” he asked. He thought, It may be useless, but at least I could sell it.

The man smiled again, “I can see you thinking that you don’t want it, but that you could probably sell it.” He lifted his chin again, “First, try it on.”

A little unwillingly—because wearing it would lower its value—Cabo slowly unfolded the jacket and carefully slipped into it.

The man said, “Now, tell the jacket to cool you.”

Despite the heat, a little shiver went over Cabo. He’d heard of new western garments that could actively deliver hot or cool air through ports. Remembering that the man hadn’t been sweating, he looked at him again. The man still looked completely comfortable. Tentatively, Cabo said, “Cool me.”

A moment later, he felt cool air. Blessedly cool air, slowly sifting over the parts of him that were covered by the jacket. It’d feel even better if I had on a T-shirt instead of this traditional macawis. Dreading the answer, he said, “How much does it cost to have it cool me?”

“Nothing. Ell Donsaii…” The man tilted his head curiously, “Do you know who Ell Donsaii is?”

Cabo nodded impatiently.

“She told us that if we find bright young people like yourself, we should give you an HUD so you can go to school through the Khan Academy.” The man winked, “And she said it’s okay to offer a little bribe, like a cooling jacket.”

“An HUD?” Cabo breathed. As wonderful as the cool air was, he felt much more excited about the possibility he might get an HUD.

The man nodded. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about the Khan Academy. It has lessons you can study over the Internet. If you follow a course of study, and take the tests after each lesson, and do well, it’ll provide you a diploma.”

“What kind of diploma?”

“A well-respected diploma. They award diplomas for a large number of courses of study. From primary and secondary school diplomas on up to college degrees in various disciplines.”

Cabo found himself wanting to sit down. That kind of schooling was something he’d dreamed of his entire life. Suddenly he noticed the goats were drifting away from the trough, having had their fill of the water. With alarm he realized the water was still splashing into the trough at the high end. “Trough, turn off the water!” he said urgently, not wanting to waste any of it since it cost money. The water shut off. “Um, how’re we supposed to pay you for the water at the end of the month?” he asked.

The man shrugged, “You can do it with your phone, like any other purchase. But once you have your HUD, you can do it through that as well.”

Cautiously, Cabo asked, “How do I get an HUD?”

The man reached into the same pocket on his coat and pulled out a bundle. Popping off a restraint, he shook out a headband and held it out to Cabo.

Staring at the man’s jacket, Cabo asked, “How big is that pocket?”

“Oh,” the man said with a little laugh, “it has two ports woven into it. When I tell my AI I need something, it has Amazon or some other supplier push it through the port into the pocket.”

Wide-eyed, Cabo pulled on the headband. The man helped him adjust it so that the little screens were over his eyes. They immediately began acting like sunglasses, which was nice in its own right. The man showed Cabo how to place the tiny earpieces into his ear canals. He said, “Just talk. Your HUD can answer almost any question you can ask. If you tell it you want to study at the Khan Academy, it’ll guide you through the steps for doing that.” The man turned and started getting on his motorcycle, “When the water trough stops working, your HUD can help you make a payment so you can get more.” He glanced up at the screens of his own HUD, and cheerfully said, “I need to go find the next herder.”

“Wait!” Cabo said in a panic. “Is it okay if my little sister uses the HUD so she can study at the Khan Academy too?”

The man lifted an eyebrow, “Is a good student too?

Cabo nodded enthusiastically, “She’s a lot smarter than I am.”

The man reached in his pocket and held out another bundle. He frowned, “You’ll find these don’t work for playing games…”

“That’s okay.”

“They also only work for their first owner.” The man shrugged, “That’s to keep them from getting stolen or sold. The first owner can share it with others, but must use it him or herself at least once a day.” The man turned to go.

“Wait. Please don’t go yet.” When the man turned back, Cabo was examining the trough. He shook his head, “This’ll never hold up out here in the desert. Thorns, sharp stones, goat’s horns; something’s going to poke a hole in it.” He looked at, “It’s going to be flat in no time. Is there a way to patch it?”

The man waved dismissively, “It’s made of graphene. You wouldn’t be able to poke a hole in it if you tried.”

“Wait, do you want to know where to find the next herder?”

The wheels on the man’s motorcycle silently started turning as he pointed into the air. “I’ve got a drone up there.” He pointed to the west, “The drone’s camera says the next herd’s that way.”

The man rode away while Cabo gaped after him.

He’d heard of graphene and drones but never seen any.

Now, Cabo did sit. He began to contemplate all these changes in his world.

When his thoughts stopped swirling, he realized he was thirsty. He got up and went over to the trough, dipping his hand in, but then jerking it back. “The water's cold!” he mumbled in fright. He’d occasionally shared a cold drink with his father when they’d gone into the city, but he’d never had cold water. Staring at it, he wondered to himself, “Why’s it cold?”

The voice of the AI speaking in his ear startled him. It said, “That water was ported here from meltwater on Greenland. They take it from water that’s about to run into the sea anyway. You won’t always get your water from there though. Sometimes you’ll be getting water from desalination plants and that water won’t be cold. You can actually request warm water if you prefer. Or you can ask for cold if that’s what you want. Usually, either one can be provided.”

Cabo cautiously cupped his hand and dipped it back in the water. Pulling his hand out, he slurped at the cold water. Wow! That’s good!

***

Later, Jillian thought it odd that the whole thing about Donsaii’s kid started in a coffee shop.

~~~

She looked up as someone hurried in the door. It was Barton.

Jillian thought that, in person, Barton didn’t quite match the image he put forth online. There he seemed neat, styled, well-groomed and entirely… together. In person his hair—obviously intended to be perfectly disheveled—looked a little out of balance. His gut wasn’t sucked in and, overall, he seemed not-quite-put-together after all. “Andy?” she asked.

His eyes found her, and he smiled enthusiastically. Nodding, he said, “Andrew, please. You’re Jillian Pardo?”

They’d met through their AIs. Now they were sitting down to have coffee and see what they thought of each other in person. He ordered a sweetened cappuccino while Jillian had a plain espresso. Later, she thought the cappuccino should’ve been a tipoff that they weren’t really suited for one another. That and his pissy attitude about being called Andy. Nonetheless, they engaged in pleasant chitchat. He was a detective. With a shrug and an offhand comment about doing well on tests, he managed to let her know that he was young for his position.

“I’m an investigative journalist,” Jillian replied to his query. “I guess we both make our living asking other people questions, huh?”

He nodded, “But the people you question usually want to answer your questions, don’t they?”

She narrowed her eyes, “No. I don’t do fluff. You’re not listening to the ‘investigative’ part of my job title. I ask the tough questions that people don’t want to answer, or I’m not doing my job.” She leaned back, “Besides, I’ll bet a lot of the people you talk to, for instance, witnesses, are happy enough to give you answers, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” he gave a little laugh, “it’s the accused that’re the problem.” He shook his head, “If only we had some way to tell when they’re actually telling the truth.”

Jillian gave him a wink, “Better hope they don’t actually invent a reliable lie detector. Seems like you wouldn’t have much of a job if all you had to do was just ask every possible perp whether they did it or not.”

~~~

It was after the coffee was finished that Jillian asked the question that changed her life. “So, what’s the biggest case you’ve ever worked on?”

“Andrew” was watching a cute waitress walk by. Apparently without thinking, he said, “When Donsaii’s son got kidnapped.”

His eyes widened, as if in dismay over what he’d just said. “Just kidding,” he said quickly.

But he looked flustered.

Despite a significant uptick in her heartbeat, Jillian schooled her face to stillness. She waited, hoping he’d fill the stretching silence. After a moment, he did, though not helpfully. “Not a very funny joke, huh?”

Jillian waited a little longer. Though Barton fidgeted, he didn’t say anything else. Finally, Jillian spoke herself, keeping her tone even and quiet, “I didn’t think Donsaii had a child.”

“She doesn’t!” Barton said, quickly and emphatically. “That was just a slip of the tongue. An imaginary case I dream about sometimes.”

Jillian waited again, but Barton didn’t fall for it. She said, “How old is the boy?”

Barton threw his hands up in frustration, but pinched his lips together and said nothing.

“I will find out, you know?”

Then he blew it completely. With an exasperated look, he said, “It’s a secret!”

She regarded him coolly, “No shit?”

“Come on. We’re talking about Ell Donsaii. Let that woman keep her secret for God’s sake.”

“Rich people aren’t entitled to secrets.”

“Sure,” he said, “not bad secrets.” He shook his head, “Keeping her child a secret’s not an evil thing to do.”

“Why’s the kid a secret then?”

“So people won’t try to kidnap him,” Barton said, as if he thought it was obvious in view of the fact he’d found out about it because of the boy’s kidnapping.

“Which happened anyway.” She shrugged, “Plenty of rich people have kids they don’t keep secret.”

“Yeah,” Barton said, “but the famous ones try to keep their kids out of the public eye and away from the paparazzi.”

“But they don’t deny their existence.”

Looking stiffly angry, Barton stood up, “I guess we won’t be seeing any more of each other.”

Jillian leaned back in her chair and picked up her espresso, “That doesn’t break my heart.”

Stiffly, Barton strode out. Jillian thought he’d have banged the coffee shop door if it wasn’t on a hydraulic damper. “Bye, Andy…” she said sarcastically. In her mind she was already working out how to find Donsaii’s kid.

***

Lindy Thompson looked up from the remains of her lunch and eyed Mark Wilson, “No rest for the wicked my good doctor. Time to receive our mice.”

A twinkle in his eye, Mark sighed and stood up. “And here I thought I went to medical school so I could take care of people. Instead, I find myself working on rodents.”

“Aw, don’t worry. Mice’re way cuter than people. You’re gonna love em’.” She did a back flip out of her chair. That wasn’t terribly difficult on Mars, but it took skill to land it without stumbling.

~~~

They went to the section of tunnel they called the “transporter room” because it had a large number of ports that connected back to D5R or NASA. They’d received and assembled the cages for the mice yesterday. Today D5R was porting them the actual animals. The mice would arrive, having been under a gas anesthetic delivered into their little chambers back on Earth. The anesthetic was the new one that’d been used to send Phil Zabrisk to Earth and back. Ordinary inhalational anesthetics diminished the seizures, postictal lethargy and diminished mental acuity associated with passing through a port, but this new one was far more effective. With the previous anesthetics, it’d been important to keep the subject anesthetized for a while after they passed through the port. In fact, they’d kept Phil under for days. However, after numerous animal trials using this new gas, it’d been decided that it was okay to discontinue the anesthetic as soon as the mice passed through.

The mice’d be breathing out the anesthetic in their system after they arrived. Because the animals were small, it wouldn’t amount to a lot of anesthetic per mouse. However, since they were taking delivery of hundreds of mice, Mark set up a port over the middle of the table that vented out to Mars. This’d suck up a lot of the anesthetic breathed out by the mice, hopefully keeping it from affecting Mark and Lindy. Turning on the port, he said, “I’m ready.”

Lindy nodded and spoke to her AI. A minute later a long tube, containing 25 mice in little individual chambers shot out of the port up near the ceiling, down a pair of rails and out onto the table.

It felt like the speed they sent the tube through the port was reckless. This despite the fact that Mark knew that the longer an animal spent transiting the port, the more severe port-transit symptoms tended to be. The people back on Earth had a set of steeply inclined rails the tube accelerated down. It was flying by the time it came through the port.

The chambers had been changed over to oxygen and flushed out as soon as they came through. Lindy and Mark carefully watched the mice to make sure they were all breathing. Mark opened a port to flush more oxygen through the chamber of a mouse that seemed to have suppressed respirations, then popped open the chamber and stimulated the little fellow with a finger. In a minute or two all of them were starting to wriggle. He and Lindy began popping open the chambers and lifting the mice out into the heated cage they had waiting.

When all of the mice were up and walking around, Lindy signaled D5R and they delivered another tube of twenty-five mice.

The whole thing went pretty well. In fact, he thought, getting 200 of the mice into a vacuum-proof carrier so they could take them up to their cages in the domes was significantly more difficult than getting them from Earth.

The mice consisted of 400 genetically identical clones—except that half were male and half were female. Half of them had then been subjected to some kind of genetic modification that was supposed to make them radiation resistant. Stepping out onto the surface in his Mars suit, Mark shook his head, But, they claim this gene modification was performed when the mice were eight weeks old. It’s hard to imagine a post-embryonic modification making a significant difference. Even if a gene changed the cells it affected and actually made them radiation resistant, you’d only be able to get the gene into a small percentage of the cells. The rest of the cells, the ones the gene didn’t penetrate, they’d still get cancer.

And that cancer’d still kill you…

Mark wondered whether the reason he was so pessimistic came from the impression he got every time he stepped out on the surface of Mars. Even though he knew it couldn’t be true, he had the feeling that he could sense the radiation sleeting through him.

They set up a double colony of 100 of the mice—fifty radiation-resistant and fifty without the gene—in the dome that had a meter of water shielding it from radiation. Another colony of 100 mice went into the dome that wasn’t radiation shielded and a third colony stayed in the tunnels beneath the surface of Mars. One more colony had stayed home on Earth. In theory, only the colony in the dome without radiation shielding would have trouble, but there was some concern that even the ones in the tunnels and in the shielded dome might have unexpected problems. There were concerns about the effects of Mars’ low gravity on subsequent generations. So, they intended to follow the mice through several lifespans.

Trying to keep a positive outlook, Mark said to himself, If this gene mod does work, maybe it’ll be something they can give me to keep me from feeling crazy every time I step out on the surface. Or, even if the modification doesn’t help, maybe we’ll find out that the radiation here doesn’t cause as many problems as we think it might.

***

Carley woke in a panic. It took a few seconds for her to realize she’d been awakened by a loud thump outside her bedroom. It reminded her all too much of the way she’d often wakened as a child—when dad came home drunk.

She rolled over and looked off the edge of her bed to see whether the sound woke up her brother Eli.

Eli’s sleeping mat was empty.

Gritting her teeth against the sinking feeling in her stomach, Carley got up and went to the door. Steeling herself, she opened the door and stepped out into the main room. She shared a two-bedroom apartment with another grad student. Other than the two bedrooms and a shared bathroom, the apartment only had one other large room. That room had the kitchen at one end and a living area on the other end. There was a dining table in between.

In the dim light, she saw someone sprawled on the floor of the living area. A chubby someone. “Eli?” she whispered.

He didn’t respond. She turned on the light and quietly walked over to him, not wanting to wake her roommate. Her roommate wasn’t happy about having Carley’s brother live with them, even though Carley promised it’d be brief.

Leaning down, she confirmed that the sprawled person was, in fact, her brother. She shook his shoulder and urgently whispered, “Eli!”

“Huh?” he said blearily, rolling enough to gaze up at her. He smiled, “Carleey.”

His breath stank of booze, appallingly reminding Carley of their alcoholic father.

The father who’d killed their mother in a drunken rage—thus orphaning Carley and Eli.

“Get up!” Carley hissed, tugging at his arm.

Eli rose to his hands and knees. He started to get up the rest of the way, then, apparently speaking from experience, said, “Better crawl.” He followed her to her room in that fashion.

Just before they went into the room, Carley’s roommate cracked open her door and gave them a disgusted look.

~~~

Carley lay awake the rest of the night, alternately horrified that her brother appeared to be a drunk like her father, then thinking that at least he didn’t seem violent like their dad.

Yet.

It was good she couldn’t sleep. That way she was awake and could guide him to the bathroom when he threw up.

***

White House, Washington DC— In apparently unscripted remarks, President Stockton again expressed her hope that the group behind the Gordito website would come forward to be recognized. She mused that, before she leaves office next January, she’d like to award the nation’s highest honors to the group that stopped the modified smallpox virus. She appeared flustered when a reporter asked her whether there was any evidence that Gordito was actually based in the United States. Stockton admitted she didn’t know for a fact that Gordito was based in the US, but that some kind of award could still be arranged, even if Gordito turned out to be from another country. She said, “Those people saved billions of lives and should be recognized, no matter where they’re from…”

***

Vanessa’s AI told her she had a call from Zage Kinrais. “Put him through,” she said, dreading the expected discussion of the status of his paper.

“Hi Vanessa,” Zage said. Without any further pleasantries, he said, “Sorry to bug you, but I’ve been wondering about our paper on the weight-loss peptide. With everything that’s been happening in the last few months, I’ve just gotten around to realizing it’s been quite a while. I don’t know how long it usually takes to get a paper into shape for publication, but hasn’t it been kind of a long time?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “it’s a long time. Especially since Dr. Turner only made a couple of minor changes to the manuscript you gave me.” She sighed, “The holdup’s because the peptide presumably has some economic value. Dr. Turner felt it should be submitted to the university’s technology office for evaluation. I’m sorry, I should’ve told you about it before now.”

“Oh,” Zage said thoughtfully. “I can understand submitting it to the technology office, but why would that keep it from being turned into the Journal?”

“Um, you can’t get a patent on a technology after it’s been published. So, since the peptide might be commercially valuable, any patents have to be applied for before we submit it.”

“Really?” he said dubiously.

“Uh-huh.”

“So, has the technology office submitted a patent application yet?”

“The last I heard they were using nondisclosure agreements to show it to a number of pharmaceutical companies. They don’t want to spend their own money getting a patent. They’d rather sell the rights to a big corporation and let the company pay for the patent with its money.”

“Are patents really that expensive?”

“They’re pretty expensive,” Vanessa said slowly. “I don’t know exactly how much they cost, but I think even patents on simple mechanical devices tend to run in the $15-30,000 range. I’ve heard patents on biological molecules can be a lot more expensive but I don’t know how much more. Also, we may have trouble because it can be difficult to get a patent on naturally occurring molecules or gene sequences. As I understand it, the argument’s that if I patented something like insulin, that’d be unfair since the patent would let me, in theory, charge you for having insulin in your bloodstream regulating your sugar levels.”

“Oh…” Zage said, the pause sounding like he was deep in thought. “But, since the peptide isn’t naturally occurring that doesn’t affect us, right?”

“It isn’t?” Vanessa said, startled. “I thought you cited some obscure paper as the source of the peptide’s sequence.”

“Um, no. It’s an amino acid sequence I thought would bind at the receptor responsible for flipping off Trim28 expression. The obscure paper’s about how a peptide from HA-36 flips Trim28 off.”

“HA-36’s the obesity virus, right?”

“Uh-huh. It’d be more accurate to say it’s associated with obesity. It’s actually a cold virus.”

“But you got the sequence for the peptide from HA-36’s molecule that normally flips that Trim28 receptor, right?”

“Not really. Flipping off that receptor’d be bad since reducing expression of Trim28 makes you obese. So, I came up with a different peptide. One I thought would be a high-affinity ligand that’d block that receptor.”

“You ‘came up with’ a peptide?”

“Um…”

“How do you come up with a de novo peptide that’ll bind a receptor without activating it? I thought you found it in the literature somewhere?”

“No.” Zage sighed. “It’s not in the literature. But, knowing the sequence that normally binds that receptor and activates it…” he trailed off as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say next.

Feeling dubious, Vanessa said, “So, you know a sequence that binds the receptor and activates it. How does that get you to a sequence that binds the receptor but doesn’t activate it?”

Zage brightened, “Well, I had a little help.”

“From whom?” Vanessa asked with a sinking feeling. Whoever actually came up with the peptide’s sequence would have a strong claim to it.

“You’ve heard of the Gordito website? The one that—”

“Yes, I’ve heard of Gordito and its vaccines,” Vanessa said, venting a little frustration. “I’m not some kind of clueless idiot.”

“Yeah, but the main thing Gordito does is work out the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their sequences. The fact that they could use it to come up with antigens for vaccination was initially kind of a sidebar until they realized how important it could be in the crisis.”

Vanessa snorted, “Pretty important sidebar if you ask me. But you can’t tell me that you asked Gordito for help with this. The website wasn’t even open back then.”

“No, but Gordito had a precursor site open back then. One that was just focused on protein structure. They hadn’t gotten into vaccines. I asked it for help working out the structure of a peptide that’d bind to part of the receptor site, thus blocking the HA-36 ligand from attaching without activating the receptor itself.”

“So,” Vanessa said slowly, “what you’re telling me… is that whoever runs Gordito probably has a claim to the peptide we’re trying to patent. In fact, they may own the whole thing.”

“No,” Zage said emphatically. “No, I told them the peptide works great and asked them if they wanted credit. They said they didn’t. They’re set up as a kind of scientific charity, you know?”

“They’re not a charity. They charge money for working out the 3-D structure of molecules.”

“They only charge to keep from getting inundated with submissions requesting the structure of every known sequence…” Zage paused. When Vanessa seemed doubtful, he offered proof of the contention. “If you’ll look at the website, you’ll see they donate all the money from the charges to Doctors Without Borders.”

Vanessa was surprised to hear that and decided she’d look it up. Nonetheless, she said “Charity or not, they could still have a claim on the peptide. Besides, they might change their mind about wanting credit or ownership. The University’s not going to be happy about this.”

“Could you submit a query to Gordito? You could confirm they’re the ones who actually designed the peptide and ask them if Gordito wants co-authorship or intends to make a claim on future revenues.”

“Future revenues,” Vanessa thought, it’s so hard to believe this’s coming from a five-year-old. “Okay, I’ll check with the Gordito site before I tell Dr. Turner and the technology office. The tech office is probably going to want some kind of legal documentation too.”

“Um, don’t forget that Gordito… That the Gordito group wants to remain anonymous. It could be a problem getting a signature or anything like that.”

Chapter One

NOAA, Silver Springs, Maryland— Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration verified their data confirms a significant and sustained reduction in atmospheric CO2. Victoria Gaudet, the Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere says it’s too early to determine whether this reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide’s responsible for the lower average temperatures recorded in the past two years. “However,” she said, “evidence does indicate that the lower CO2 levels are due to reductions in the burning of fossil fuels. This reduction can readily be attributed, at least in part, to a marked shift in power generation from fossil fuels toward heat differential engines powered by ETR’s parabolic mirrors near the sun…”

***

Jillian sat back and stared at the timeline she’d been reconstructing. When she’d gotten home from her coffee with the detective she’d realized there was a large flaw in Barton’s claim that Ell Donsaii had a child.

Donsaii’d never been pregnant.

It was impossible to imagine that someone as much in the public eye as Donsaii could’ve been pregnant and had a baby without it being all over the news. Donsaii’d been news story number one since she’d burst onto the scene by stopping Olympic terrorists at age seventeen. A quick search of “Donsaii” and “pregnant” had turned up some tabloid journalism but nothing reputable.

So, for a few days, Jillian had tried to ignore what Barton had said as ludicrous. But the niggling question of why Barton would’ve said it kept bothering her. It wasn’t as if he’d been trying to impress her. In fact, he seemed genuinely appalled to have said it. He certainly didn’t act like he wanted her to publicize his claim.

Now, she’d spent hours constructing this timeline. It was confronting her with what now seemed obvious in retrospect.

Over a period from three and a half years ago, to six and a half years ago, President Stockton had made Ell Donsaii a persona non grata.  As a result, Donsaii’d hidden somewhere.

Somewhere completely out of the public view.

It’d been as if she’d moved to Antarctica. If she’d been pregnant and had a baby during that period, no one in the media would’ve known about it. Donsaii’d have had to have people caring for her, delivering the baby and helping her hide. Those people would’ve known about it, but perhaps they constituted a small enough group that they might’ve been able to keep it a secret?

***

Ell and Mark Amundsen walked out onto the main floor at D5R. Now that he’d taken over as CEO, Amundsen had been making rounds with her whenever she toured the facilities. She usually toured the facilities at D5R’s original research building more than once a day. She liked to get out and around, to see and be seen, and, most importantly, to learn what her people were doing. Amundsen thought the way her visits kept a finger on the company’s pulse, as well as her frequent suggestions on various projects made major contributions to D5R’s success. Mark rarely had much to contribute, but he felt that going around with her was improving his understanding of D5R’s multiple missions.

Ell didn’t care much about the business aspects of her company. After all, that’s what she’d hired Amundsen for. Her own interests lay almost entirely with the research end of things. Since the research was almost entirely carried out at the D5R facility, that’s where she focused her attention. She occasionally also visited the production facilities of the various subsidiaries. She almost always took Mark with her when she visited them.

Their first trip away from D5R itself had been to the highly secured Portal Technology facilities. First to the industrial center where ports were manufactured. They also visited the extensive tunnel system that Portal Tech had melted underground. The tunnels were where PT’s ports were linked, powered, and monitored. The underground locations made them much less susceptible to attack, invasion, or natural disaster. Because ports were now vital for many critical processes around the world, systems had been set up to allow critical ports—where failure’d be disastrous—to be operated in a redundant fashion. For instance, air supplies, electrical power, fueling ports, and even power driveshafts were set up in a fashion that would allow a second port to quickly take over if one failed. Such “spare” ports were supported by widely separated underground facilities in case of terrorist attack or natural disaster.

They’d visited Allosci where Mark got to meet Gary and Viveka Pace, the inventors of so many of the carbon allotrope manufacturing processes. They’d even—to Amundsen’s great delight—taken one of the space planes up to the orbital habitat where graphene was made.

Ostensibly, they’d been there to inspect the new, extra-large habitat created by joining four of the hundred-foot modules together lengthwise. Dr. Pace hoped to begin manufacturing graphene in 110-meter-wide sheets. So far, they’d been having a lot of problems with defects in the big sheets. During their visit, Ell had a number of ideas they could try for preventing the defects.

Despite knowing Ell for years, Mark had felt surprised to hear her proposing possible solutions to the man who was widely acknowledged to be the world’s expert on graphene manufacture. But then he’d reflected that Donsaii’s genius seemed to have few limits. Certainly, Pace had seemed grateful for her ideas.

Although Mark had really enjoyed actually going up into space to see graphene manufacture, he’d also been there to see the habitats that were overseen by ET Resources. The visit to ETR’s facilities down on Earth had let him see the “waldo farm” where thousands of waldo drivers rode their controllers. Those controllers were used to run waldoes on Mars, the Moon, various asteroid mining enterprises, and even some that were exploring the depths of the ocean.

During their tour, they’d visited the facility where exploration rockets were manufactured. He turned to Ell and asked, “Which are the ones that go to other solar systems?”

She’d shaken her head and said, “Let’s talk about that later.”

When they were alone later, Amundsen learned that the interstellar rockets were manufactured at D5R’s research facility, only there, and only right before they were launched. She told him, “That whole process’s so secret that I’m the only one who understands all the parts that’re necessary. Emma and Roger help me with some parts of it, but even they don’t know how all of it works.”

“You don’t think your CEO should know what’s going on with that?” he asked in surprise.

She’d shrugged. “Sorry, no,” she’d surprised him by saying. “You don’t have a need to know and that tech’s… exceedingly dangerous.” He understood that, like most technologies, ports made new weapons possible. The interstellar ports must make some additional weapons feasible, he thought. Her attempts to keep that tech secret are laudable but probably doomed to failure.

He thought he should at least know what kinds of weapons they were talking about. But Ell didn’t.

Ell took Amundsen along on at least one of those daily trips around the facilities. Since the fourth and smallest subsidiary of D5R, Quantum Biomed, was still located in the D5R research building, Amundsen actually saw it much more frequently than the bigger subsidiaries.

When their rounds got down to the Quantum Biomed area, Ell seemed surprised to see AJ Richards sitting with Roger and Emma. Ell said, “Hey AJ, what’re you doing down here with the geeks?”

AJ was widely recognized to be a rising star down at ETR’s research facility, but Amundsen also wondered why he’d be down in the biomedical section.

“Um,” AJ began, seeming a little flustered. He glanced at Roger who simply looked expectantly back at him. “I’ve been talking to Dr. Emmerit here—”

Roger interrupted with a snort and looked appealingly at Ell, “Can you get him to call me Roger? I haven’t had any luck.”

AJ drew a long breath and continued, “I’ve been talking to Roger about Mars terraforming.”

Ell looked at Roger, “I didn’t know you’d taken an interest in terraforming?”

Roger said, “He’s just being polite. He thinks that since I came up with the original deep space heat and cold sources to power electrical generation, he’s got to talk his ideas over with me.”

Ell turned her gaze on AJ. “So, what’s your idea?”

“Well,” AJ stood up, apparently tired of craning his neck to look up at Ell. He looked nervous, “I’ve been told that one of your concerns about using ports to transfer CO2 from Venus, water from Europa and nitrogen from Titan has to do with the amount of power it takes to run big ports?”

Ell nodded, “Yeah, by calculation, about 600-megawatts for a port ten-meters in diameter. We’ve never made one that big, so we don’t know for sure, but if the calculation’s correct, you could power 600,000 homes for that. That’s a good-sized city.”

AJ winced, “But, we do know how to generate that kind of power.”

Ell said, “Yes, but if we wanted to raise Mars’ air pressure to about seventy-five percent of Earth’s—about the pressure you’d see at 8000 feet of altitude—we’d need to move 312 times 1016 kilograms of CO2, water and nitrogen. Even at the flow rates we could expect before pressures started to equalize, that’d take over 600,000 years if we used a ten-meter port. Sixty-years if we built ten-thousand ten-meter ports and the power generation capacity to run them.”

“I’ve run the numbers,” AJ said. He glanced over Ell’s shoulder where Carter DeWitt was walking up. “and I came up with something close to what you’re getting. I don’t pretend to have the entire answer, I just wanted to be sure we were considering the fact that the CO2 coming from Venus would be at a temperature of 465 degrees Celsius or 870 degrees Fahrenheit. If you mixed it with the water coming from Europa, the heat from the CO2 would generate steam without having to build any more near solar parabolic heaters or deep space heat sinks.”

Ell’s eyes widened a little, “Oh, that’s a great idea.”

Carter said, “Sorry I’m late. I’m only here to support the contention that AJ’s a lot smarter than he looks.”

However, Ell’s eyes had narrowed on AJ. “If we mix Venusian CO2 with Europan water, we’re going to have some problems with the sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus, aren’t we? It’s supposed to be 150 parts per million, right?”

Carter nodded, “Those were the figures obtained from the upper atmosphere. But sulfur dioxide’s an important component of upper cloud layers. As you might imagine, we’ve got a lot better data on the Venusian atmosphere now. We’ve been using ground-level ports to fill the domes on Mars and the SO2 concentration down at ground level’s closer to fifteen parts per million.”

Ell looked fascinated, “That’s still toxic though, right?”

“Yeah, but one of the ways to get the sulfur dioxide out of air is to mix it with water where it forms a weak acid. The water coming from Europa has an excess of calcium and it’s mildly basic. This means the calcium and the sulfur should precipitate out as calcium sulfite, AKA limestone.”

“Whoa, that’s awesome. Good thinking!” Ell said with a big grin. “Have we solved all the problems then? Is it time to start building some ten-meter ports?”

AJ’s eyes dropped and he reached up to rub the back of his neck, “Well, no. We’d be generating the steam on Mars and we don’t have any steam turbines there.”

Ell barked a laugh, “And that’s a huge problem, right? Don’t big power turbines weigh hundreds of tons?

AJ nodded, “Yes, it’s a huge problem, but I was thinking that…” he trailed off.

Ell tipped her head, “What?” she said, in a gently chiding tone.

“Isn’t it time we started scaling up? Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out how big we can actually build ports? It seems to me there’d be a lot of use for… for industrially-sized ports.” He paused, as if for comment, but everyone seemed to be digesting this idea, so he continued, “To the best of my knowledge, the biggest port we’ve built so far’s been less than a meter in diameter. It seems to me that we should be making some two-meter, five-meter, and eventually, ten-meter diameter ports. If for no other reason, then just to work out the kinks. We ought to at least find out whether it’s possible to build them that big and what their power consumption actually is. If we had a ten-meter diameter port, then we’d actually be able to move things like big steam turbines to Mars… and elsewhere.”

AJ trailed off uncertainly, then abruptly gained resolve, “I just think we should be thinking bigger!”

There was a moment of silence. Amundsen felt a little bit appalled by the fact that AJ sounded like he was scolding Ell. But Ell stepped forward and threw her arms around him. Holding him tightly despite his flabbergasted look, she said over his shoulder, “You’re damned right we should! Thank you. Thank you for pointing out how small minded I’ve been.” She stepped back, holding him by the shoulders and looking him in the eye, “You ready to take this project on? Be its champion and driving force? Get Portal Tech to build you bigger ports so you can try them out? Find a company to build you turbines you can send to Mars in pieces small enough to fit through a thirty-three-foot hole?”

It took Amundsen a moment to realize that the “thirty-three-foot hole” Ell spoke of was a ten-meter port. He hadn’t ever translated ten-meters into dimensions he was familiar with. Now he felt stunned to realize that ten-meters was so big.

AJ looked stunned. His voice came out a little bit wavery, but he said, “If I’ve got your permission, hell yes!”

“You’ve got it. Go get ‘em.” She glanced at Carter DeWitt and her eyes twinkled, “You’ll also need to find a waldo driver who’s good enough to remotely assemble your turbine.”

Eliciting a grin from Ell, Carter knocked his heels together and said, “Right here ma’am.”

“Um, how much can I spend?” AJ asked tentatively.

“Tell me when you’re about to go over ten million.” She lowered an eyebrow and, using an ominous tone, said, “Don’t forget, there’re bean counters under every rock, watching every move you make.”

Carter slapped his speechless friend on the back, “Stop looking like someone just dumped a load of bricks on you. I told you she’s a sweetheart.”

~~~

Once everyone had finished congratulating AJ, he and Carter started back down to the ETR research area. Ell sat down across from Roger and Emma. She patted a chair for Amundsen while asking her friends, “What’s new with you two?”

Roger replied with a query of his own, “How much more difficult are curved ports? Like you make for the ocular contacts?”

“Not difficult at all. Any port can be curved. It just takes a few changes in the electronics.” She shrugged, “And those changes in the electronics are pretty minor. Have you thought of other uses for them?”

“How about if we sprayed a ring of buckyballs onto the surface of a graphene balloon so we had a port we could deflate and inflate?”

Ell stared at him wide-eyed for a moment, then briefly got the unfocused look Roger’d seen her get when she was doing math in her head. She spun to look after AJ and Carter, but they were gone. She waved a hand after them and said, “I’ll talk to them later.” Turning back to Roger, she said, “That’s a genius idea. It should only take a percent or two more power than a flat port but it’ll have twice the surface area.” She tilted her head quizzically, “If you had to ask me if the ports were more difficult to build…” she trailed off thoughtfully, “how’d you know they’d have all that extra surface area for almost the same power?”

“Um, I didn’t…”

Roger trailed off as he realized she had that unfocused look again. She’d obviously stopped listening to him again. “We might even…” She looked at Roger excitedly, “We might even be able to power hemispherical ports on both sides of an inflated graphene sphere using the same ring of buckyballs and only a tiny bit more power. Essentially, we’d have four times the surface area for only a little bit more power. Using a ten-meter graphene sphere we could send through four times as much atmosphere for the same 600-megawatts.” She looked unfocused again, “Well, maybe 605-megawatts. Or,” she brightened, “you could send the same amount of atmosphere through a five-meter sphere for 151-megawatts.” She gave him an admiring look, “Roger, that was a great idea!”

Emma snorted, “I hate to sour your admiration for my admittedly wonderful husband, but I’m pretty sure he had no idea it’d make transferring atmosphere easier,” she turned to look dubiously at him, “did you?”

Roger laughed, “Not a clue. I was asking in hopes we could inject tiny graphene balloons through a needle, then blow them back up once they were inside the body.”

Ell frowned, “Why would you want to do that?”

“Well, you know we’ve been implanting ports in diabetics to monitor their blood sugar and administer insulin. When the ports go bad, or stop functioning because scar tissue builds up around them, we’ve been having to leave them in place.” He paused to make a little grimace, “They’re small, but it kinda feels like we’re littering, you know? Polluting the human body actually.” Getting nods from Ell and Amundsen, he continued, “And, they’re not as small as I’d like. We do put them in through a needle, but it’s a pretty big needle, so inserting them hurts. I was trying to think of a way to make the port smaller when it goes in, yet still big enough to pass the sensor once it’s inside the body. It made me think that if only we could blow it up…”

Ell said, “Maybe if… If we had a port around the circumference of the balloon, we could open it hemispherically and apply suction—through the port—to the side of the balloon that’s outside the body. Then, when we deflate the balloon, we suck all the electronics inside the balloon through to our side as the balloon softens…” She trailed off thoughtfully for a moment, then continued, “As the balloon collapses, the port gets smaller, and, the far wall of the balloon pulls through the port too.” She looked up at her audience, excitement in her eyes, “If the shrinkage of the balloon doesn’t break the portal too soon, maybe we could pull enough through that there wouldn’t be much of the port left inside the body?” She looked thoughtful and said, “Maybe no more than a strip of balloon and a few buckyballs? I’m not at all sure what’ll happen to the port when it’s getting smaller while the balloon it’s mounted on’s shrinking. We’ve got to try this so we can find out!”

***

When Alice entered the lab, she saw Carley sitting at her bench, head in her hands. Alice sat down next to Carley and put a hand on her shoulder, “What’s got you down, girl?”

Carley didn’t lift her head. Speaking quietly, she said, “Eli. The brother I searched high and low for over so many years, is a drunk…” After a moment, she muttered, “An ugly drunk.”

Hesitantly, Alice said, “A lot of young guys drink too much when they first come of age. But they get over—”

“Our dad was a drunk too,” Carley interrupted morosely. “He killed our mother in a booze-fueled rage.”

“Oh God…” Alice began to respond, but trailed off when she didn’t know what more to say. After a bit, she ventured, “Then, your mom, who I met…”

“Adoptive mom. She’s great, but she’s not my real mom. And I’m worried that my brother’s going to turn out like my dad. Horrible.”

“Have you… have you talked to him about his drinking? Asked him if he’d like some help? Whether he wants to quit?”

Carley shrugged, “Yeah. I’ve talked to him a bunch of times now. He says he can quit any time. Or that he’s just had his last drink. Or that he’s nothing like our dad. Then he has all kinds of excuses when he falls off the wagon. ‘Some guy talked him into having just one beer,’ then pushed him to drink more.” She snorted softly, “You’d think these guys held a bottle to his head and threatened to shoot him with it.”

“Is it causing him trouble at work?”

“Yeah. He got fired. Apparently it’s not the first time.”

“Oh my God! Is he just sitting around at your place with nothing to do? That’s terrible for alcoholics.”

Carley nodded, “Claims no one’ll hire him.” She looked up into Alice’s eyes, “Because they’re assholes, of course.”

“Does he… does he have a criminal record?” Alice asked worriedly.

“Not yet,” Carley said resignedly. “Once he gets that, then for sure no one’s going to hire him.”

Alice scooted closer and put her arms around Carley, holding her because she didn’t know what else to do.

~~~

His short stature hiding him behind his lab bench, Zage wondered whether he’d done Carley a favor when he’d helped her find her brother.

He’d already finished what he’d had to do in the lab that day, but didn’t want to get up and walk out because then Carley’d know he’d heard what she said to Alice. He didn’t feel guilty about listening; he’d been kind of trapped in the lab when they started talking about Carley’s problems. Their not realizing he was there was something that happened pretty often since he was too short for them to see behind his bench. But now that it’d happened, he didn’t want to embarrass Carley by making it obvious he’d been there and heard what she’d said. He seated himself on the low stool he used to reach higher shelves and whispered to Osprey, his AI. “Find me literature about the genetic basis of alcoholism.”

Zage fell into one of his fugue states as he and Osprey went through a large number of papers on the genetics of alcohol abuse. He rose out of the fugue once when Osprey forwarded a query from Randy, the leader of his security detail for the day. Randy wanted to know how much longer Zage would be in the lab.

Zage said he didn’t know, but he hoped it’d be less than thirty minutes.

He went back to reviewing the literature.

~~

Zage looked up, then rose out of the little world he’d been in.

Carley was standing there looking curiously at him. He realized she’d said “Hi Zage.”

He slowly stood up, “Hi Carley.”

“I guess I haven’t been paying attention. Your diet’s really been working, hasn’t it?”

Zage nodded, wincing internally at the dishonesty of doing so.

Carley tilted her head curiously, “Why’ve you been whispering?”

“Um…” Zage decided not to try to make up an excuse. “I didn’t think you knew I was here when you started telling Alice about Eli’s problems. I didn’t want you to be embarrassed that I’d heard what you were talking about.” He shrugged, “So I decided to just sit here and research some literature… I thought I was whispering softly enough that you wouldn’t hear me.”

“I’ve got weirdly good hearing.” She chewed her lip, “I guess not good enough to notice that you were in here before I started spilling my guts to Alice.”

“Spilling your guts?”

“It’s just a saying. Means telling somebody everything. Maybe telling them too much in this case. I don’t know why I unloaded on Alice with all that stuff, there’s nothing she can do to help.”

“Sorry about your brother. I… I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any siblings,” he said wistfully. “I wish I did. I guess I haven’t thought too much about how a little brother or sister might not be all that wonderful.”

Carley sighed, “Eli was wonderful. Not so much anymore though. I’m really worried he’s going to turn out like my dad.” She tilted her head curiously, “What’re you doing here so late?”

“Waiting for you to stop spilling your guts and take off so I could leave without embarrassing you.”

Carley snorted softly, “That’s polite.” Then she frowned, “No, wait, you said you were searching the literature.”

“Um… I was looking up what’s known about the genetics of alcoholism.”

Carley’s eyes widened, “I thought it was multifactorial? I have to admit I haven’t looked it up… but, I should’ve.”

Zage shrugged, “There’re a lot of genes that’re associated, some weakly, some strongly. Of course, none of them can make you an alcoholic if you never start drinking in the first place. But some can give you a strong predisposition to continue to drink once you have that first taste.” He looked intently at her, “I’m guessing you don’t know whether Eli has any of those genes?”

She shook her head, staring at Zage. “No,” she almost whispered. “I don’t know if I have them either.”

“Have you been worried?”

She nodded, “I’ve never had a drink… for fear… you know?”

Zage nodded, “You ought to at least check yourself out then, don’t you think?”

She nodded, looking thoughtful.

Zage said, “I’d better be going.”

Carley hadn’t moved when he closed the door to the lab on his way out.

***

UCB, Berkeley, California— Today, a group of University of California Berkeley students organized a large protest decrying the NASA-ETR Mars program. Although the Mars program is being carried out under the auspices of NASA, the students point out that it’s almost entirely funded and completely dependent on the technical resources of ETR. During the event’s culmination, they burned Ell Donsaii in effigy for her role as CEO of ETR’s parent company D5R. When it was pointed out that she was no longer CEO, they responded that she had been in charge when the program was initiated. Aimee Dunbar, spokesperson for the protest, said, “We object in the strongest terms to the destruction of Mars’ pristine environment. Beginning in the 1970s a world that remained untouched for billions of years has been trashed with discarded scientific instruments. Now it’s saddled with astronauts who carry burdens of terrestrial bacteria and are growing terrestrial plants. We insist that the planet be evacuated and steps be taken to sterilize the current site where NASA’s astronauts have been carrying out their investigations. It’s obvious these investigations are simple preludes to the full-scale plundering of Mars’ resources, similar to what’s already been done to our home planet…”

***

Jim rolled his eyes in frustration when Mandy told him that Beth wasn’t going to make it to the Funteims’ game. However, he perked up when she said, “But, I’ve got a substitute.”

“Has to be a female,” he reminded Mandy. In their co-rec softball league at least four of the ten players on the field had to be female.

Mandy nodded, “She is.”

“Has to be a Portal Tech employee too. No outside ringers.”

“Yeah,” Mandy said with a grin, “I got her by sending out a query on the company intranet.”

Already wincing at what he expected the answer to be, Jim said, “Has she ever played softball before?”

Mandy nodded, eyes glittering as if amused, “High school.”

Jim’s spirits began to rise. A lot of the women in co-rec had barely played. Someone who’d actually been on a high school team would probably be a step up, even if she hadn’t played a game since she graduated. He waved toward the umpire, telling Mandy to go sign the woman up on the Funteims’ roster. If she’s any good, he thought, maybe I can talk her into joining the team. It sure would be great if we weren’t always scrambling for players at the last minute. And, settling for people who don’t even own gloves.

~~~

Jim led the Funteims in throwing the ball around, wishing as always that they had a way to practice real fielding and hitting right before a game. He looked around, “Mandy, where’s your player?”

“She said she couldn’t get here until right before game time. Might even be a few minutes late.”

Oh geez, Jim thought. “We’re fielding first. We need every player we can get right at the start.”

“She’s pretty reliable,” Mandy said soothingly.

Reliable or not, she wasn’t there when the team had to trot out onto the field. With only nine players, Jim opted for four infielders and three outfielders for now. They left a team jersey on the end of their bench and he had Mandy message the woman to put it on and head out to right field as soon she arrived.

Jim was pitching and had thrown one ball when he saw a woman trot up to their bench, grab the jersey and lope out to right field pulling it on. He began to feel hope when he noticed she had her own baseball cap and glove. She runs like she’s got some coordination too. He asked his AI to connect him to the umpire, “I assume you see our tenth player’s gotten here? She’s going out to right field, okay?”

“Yeah,” the umpire said, an odd tone in his voice.

Jim glanced at the ump and saw him staring out at their new right fielder. Jim looked back over his shoulder to make sure their new player was in position. For a moment he wondered what the ump’s deal was. Then he shrugged and threw the next pitch.

The big lead-off batter for the other team belted the ball. Of course, he hit it down the right-field line where the new girl was their coverage. Thinking, I should’ve told the fielders to back up when I saw the guy was so huge, Jim turned to watch, hoping it drifted foul. If it didn’t, it was going to be way over the new girl’s head. The other guys would get at least a triple.

When Jim got eyes on the girl, she was hauling ass, back and to the right. She’ll never make it, he thought, but at least she’s really putting in the effort.

The big guy was charging down the first base line, like he thought he had a home run. Jim was gratified to see that the next outfielder was hustling to where she’d be able to relay the incoming throw. Jim checked his infield to make sure they looked ready too.

His eyes went back out to the ball. Holy crap! The girl’s actually gonna get there.

She can run, he thought, but can she catch?

Yes, she can! Jim thought as the girl snagged the ball out of the air. She made it look as if what she’d just done was easy.

The big guy was so surprised to see the ball caught he stumbled on the base path. Then he looked around as if he thought someone might tell him the girl’d broken some kind of rule. After a moment he turned and started trotting back to his bench.

Jim looked at his new fielder. She was throwing the ball in. Irritated, he thought, too good to be true, as she threw the ball wide of the relay fielder.

In fact, it wasn’t going to be near any of the infielders either…

It’s coming to me! Jim thought, startled. A moment later Jim moved his glove a couple of inches and it smacked hard into the pocket! My god, he thought, what an arm! He peered into right field where the girl was trotting back to position, is that Donsaii?

~~~

Yes, it is, Jim thought as the Funteims had beer and pizza at their usual place. Donsaii’d gotten them the win by hitting a home run each time she was at bat. Those drove in five more runs.

One time the opposing pitcher’d tried to walk her by throwing high pitches.

Donsaii’d just stretched up and blasted the third over-lofted pitch despite the fact that it would’ve been a ball.

Hit the hell out of it too, Jim thought, remembering how it’d sailed the fence and out into traffic.

At some point in the evening, Donsaii sat down across from Jim. “How do you pronounce ‘Funteims’?” she’d asked.

“Either way. Fun-times or Fun-teams,” he’d told her.

She’d split out a huge crooked smile. “I love it,” she’d said, eyes twinkling.

Even though everyone there worked for Donsaii, they all truly enjoyed the time they spent with her that evening. The girl might be an incredible athlete, but she was humble and self-deprecating and funny and… and she bought everyone’s beer and pizza.

Jim shook his head morosely. But there’s no way I’m gonna be able to talk her into joining the Funteims for good, he thought.

***

Carley woke to a pounding on their front door. With a sigh, she rolled out of bed. When she opened her bedroom door, she found her new roommate, Diane, already peering out of hers. Feeling ashamed, Carley said, “It’s probably Eli. Sorry.”

Unsmilingly, Diane said, “This can’t go on.”

“I know,” Carley said as she walked across the main room to the outside door. I know, but I don’t know what to do about it. Leaning up against the door, she said, “Eli?”

“Yeah, the goddamned house AI won’t let me in!”

“You’re drunk.”

“I am not! I only had a couple of beers.”

“You promised me you wouldn’t drink at all. No beers.”

“I was talking to a guy about a job. I offered him a beer to… To show him I was a good guy. I had to have one myself to be sociable.”

“You shouldn’t be looking for the kind of jobs where buying the boss a beer gets you in.”

After a moment of silence, Eli said, “You gonna let me in, or not?”

“Not. We’ve talked about this.”

The loud bang of Eli slamming his fist on the door startled her into jumping back. He said, “Why you gotta be such a bitch?”

Furious, Carley said, “Why you gotta be such a drunk?” When a couple of minutes had passed without any response from Eli, she sagged against the door and whispered, “Why you gotta be so much like our dad?”

After another minute of silence, she went back to bed. She had a hard time getting to sleep, worrying about what Eli was going to do for a place to stay. He certainly didn’t have money for a hotel. Her last conscious thought was, What if he breaks in…?

***

Zage called down the stairs, “Mom, I can’t find my shorts.”

“We just got you all new clothes. Wear some of the new pants.”

“It’s the middle of summer!” he said indignantly. “I got some out and they’re not just long, they’re heavy.”

“Try them on,” Ell said patiently. “If it gets too hot, ask Osprey to cool you down. They’re heavy because they’ve got thermal control built into them.”

“I’d rather wear shorts,” Zage grumbled to himself, though secretly he felt excited to try out port-conditioned pants. He already had a jacket with heating and cooling built into it, but having conditioning in his regular clothes would make it available anytime.

Shortly he was calling down the stairs again. “You got rid of all my short-sleeved shirts too?”

“Same deal,” his mother replied.

“Aren’t I going to look weird, going around in August wearing long sleeves and long pants? You’re always saying how you want me to blend in.”

“Yeah, but that’s so people won’t know who you are and try to hurt you. These clothes are made with really tough fiber so they can protect you if somebody does try to hurt you. It’s a different tactic.” After a moment’s pause, she said, “Put some on and come down to breakfast. I’m tired of yelling up the stairs at you.”

He had Osprey send her a message, “OK.” He knew that bugged her.

By the time he got downstairs, Zage’d already had his clothes cool him down and then heat him back up. Osprey said he could thermostatically control the temperature of the clothing to keep Zage comfortable. When Zage went outside into the heat, Osprey would preemptively add extra cooling. Zage had wondered why the collar of the shirt seemed thicker than the rest, but when he asked for its strongest cooling, the collar started blowing cool air up his neck and around his head. Zage thought that’d be really nice outside on a hot day. Walking into the kitchen, he said, “These’re really amazing, but I still think I’m going to look like some kind of an ultra dweeb, going around in long sleeves.”

His mother shrugged, “Tell the people you care about that your mom got you some experimental conditioned clothes through her job out at D5R. They’ll think it’s cool. Don’t worry what the rest of the world thinks.”

Zage thought about it for a minute, then decided she was right. He didn’t care what the rest of the world thought. “Why do they have all these extra buttons? Is that some kind of style thing? None of them seem to hold anything together.”

“Sensors,” his mother said, putting a spoonful of cereal in her mouth.

Seems like they could’ve used thermistors small enough you wouldn’t even know they were there, Zage thought.

***

In the morning, while Carley was brushing her teeth, her new roommate Diane leaned into the bathroom and said, “Your brother’s asleep in front of our door.” The tone of disgust in Diane’s voice wasn’t subtle.

Carley closed her eyes in frustration, then bent down to rinse the toothpaste out of her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she said. I’m having to say that a lot, she thought. “I’ll get him to move.”

When she opened the door, Eli was still lying in front of it, his head on a cushion from one of the apartment complex’s pool recliners. The soft gut hanging out from under his T-shirt reminded her unhappily of her father. She gusted a sigh, “Eli, you can’t sleep in front of our door. My roommate can’t get in and out.”

He sat up with a wince. Rubbing at an eye, he said, “Can I come in now? I’m sorry about last night.”

“Sorry enough to stop drinking?”

“Definitely. I’ve had my last drink.”

Thinking, I doubt it, Carley stepped away from the door and resignedly said, “Come on in.”

As soon as Eli stood up, Diane brushed past him on her way out the door.

Looking after her, Eli said, “What’s got her undies in a twist?”

“You woke her up last night, pounding on the door.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“Not get drunk. Come home at a reasonable hour. Barring those two, politely ask the house AI if you could talk to me. If that didn’t work, rap gently on my window.” Carley sighed again, “Essentially, not act like an asshole.”

Eli dropped into a chair, “Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking very well.”

“No… You never think very well when you’ve been drinking.”

“Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“You’ve said that over and over. I want you to seek treatment—”

“I can’t afford treatment,” Eli interrupted.

“Go to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“Those prissy bastards aren’t—”

This time Carley interrupted him, “Those prissy bastards are your only hope. You contact them today and I’ll go to a meeting with you this evening.” She paused. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “Or, get the hell out of my life.”

Eli raised his hands in surrender, “Okay. Okay, I’ll figure it out.”

~~~

Eli toasted them some pop tarts while she finished getting ready. After they ate, he got up and went into the bathroom. She picked up the dishes, thinking, It was nice of him to make breakfast, even if it was only pop tarts. But it’d have been even better if he’d put his own dishes in the dishwasher.

Then she noticed his lip print on the glass. She stared at it for a moment, then put the glass in a baggie and dropped it in her purse. Could he actually have one of the genes for alcoholism? she wondered.

Chapter Two

AJ’d been out to D5R’s private Caribbean island before, but it’d always just been a way station on a trip up to one of ETR’s habitats for a project.

This was his first time on the island for something resembling leisure time, though he wasn’t sure being there for his wedding to Morgan really qualified as leisure. Morgan hadn’t completely turned into a bridezilla, but she still had a lot of expectations AJ’d had a hard time keeping ahead of.

Right now he had a couple of hours of his own, so he’d decided to go down and try a swim. He had a mask and a ported “snorkel”—which wasn’t actually an old style snorkel, though everyone still called them that. Everyone had told him about the beauty visible under the Caribbean water and he wanted to see it for himself. He told his AI to activate the port in the snorkel and popped it into his mouth, biting down on the little flanges. Since he was getting air through the port, not a tube, the snorkel was completely inside his mouth with his lips closed over it. As he’d been told to expect, it immediately began blowing some air into his mouth. He felt his ears pop a little. It generated about a quarter PSI above ambient. It’d keep up that slight excess pressure until he reached a depth of four and a half meters, or 15 feet. If he tried to go deeper than that, the air pressure wouldn’t go up any further and he wouldn’t be able to suck air in against the water pressure on his chest. He’d been surprised to realize that old style snorkel tubes were limited to a length of about twelve inches because people’s lungs weren’t strong enough to pull in air against the water pressure deeper than that. So this snorkel would increase the pressure enough to let him go down to fifteen feet, but not any farther. It was a safety limit to keep novices from going deep enough to endanger themselves.

They made “scuba snorkels” that fed you a different mix of gases and ran higher pressures, thus letting people go down to greater depths. However, you needed special training before you were allowed to use one.

AJ walked into the water and waded in the direction he’d been told he’d find the best coral and fish. He didn’t wade far before it was deep enough to start swimming. Because he’d have to actively swim downward if he wanted to go deeper—in order to compensate for his body’s tendency to float—he stayed near the surface and swam further out, looking for something he’d like to swim down and look at.

Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed something large moving off to one side. He momentarily panicked at the thought it might be a shark. However, when he turned he saw it was a girl in a sky blue bikini, swimming deeper than he was. Presumably she had her own port snorkel. What a body, he thought, admiring her languid strokes.

AJ tore his eyes away, I’m getting married. I shouldn’t be ogling pretty girls in bikinis today.

He turned his eyes elsewhere and swam deeper, aiming for a cluster of brightly colored fish. They didn’t seem disturbed by his presence, but he stopped about ten-feet away anyway. After watching them for a while, he continued moving over the reef, looking at the coral and admiring the fish.

He didn’t swim long before he started to worry that Morgan might be wondering where he was. He turned back for shore. As the water got shallow, he turned for one last look back over his shoulder and saw the girl in the bikini not far behind him. As he started wading out of the surf, he resolutely avoided turning back for a look at her.

But then he heard a familiar voice call out behind him, “AJ, how’d you like those fish?”

He turned and saw it was Ell, done up as Raquel. Trying not to gawk, he looked away, “Hey, Raquel. They’re amazing. Do you ever get bored with them?”

“No, but I don’t get out in the water as often as I’d like.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you have a minute? Or do you need to get back to wedding central?”

His immediate reaction was that he always had time for Ell, however, he played it safe. “Just a minute,” he said, then queried his AI to make sure none of the people planning the wedding were looking for him. Turning his eyes back to Ell, he said, “Looks like I’m free and clear for a moment, what’s up?”

They’d reached the patio in front of the big house. She pulled up a chair in the shade, asking the staff person who came over for a virgin piña colada. AJ’d been thinking about a beer but decided he should have a virgin margarita himself. When in Rome with the boss, do as the boss does, he thought to himself. When he’d settled next to her, she gave him an intense look and said, “I wanted to tell you what a terrific job I think you’re doing for D5R.” She grinned at him, “I wouldn’t want you to think I was just saying that ‘cause you’re my brother-in-law, so I thought I’d better tell you today, not tomorrow. I really think you’re a star.”

“Thanks,” AJ said, feeling overwhelmed.

“I really wanted to tell you how much I appreciated you bumping me out of my rut about terraforming Mars too.”

AJ winced, “I’ve realized there’s another problem. And it’s huge…”

“What’s that?”

“Um, we’ve forgotten about the speed limitation on materials passing through the ports. We’ve been basing our calculations on how fast a gas’ll flow through a ten-meter opening, but we’ve overlooked the fact that movement through ports is limited to twenty-two meters per second. At twenty-two meters per second, it wouldn’t take thousands of years for a ten-meter port to move an atmosphere to Mars, it’d take millions of years.”

Ell lowered an eyebrow as if she were about to chastise him, but then broke out in one of her crooked grins. “Good thinking. However, when I looked into the math a little further, it turned out that the twenty-two MPS limit only applies close to the rim of a port. So, it doesn’t affect big ports like we’d be using very much.” When AJ looked startled and a little doubtful, she said, “Back when it first became an issue it was due to concerns about terrorists shooting guns through small ports, and then also because it limited rates of fuel delivery to rockets—again through small ports. When you’re talking about a port a few centimeters in diameter it’s a big problem, but even in a four-centimeter port you’ve already got higher flow rates near the center. In a port that’s a meter in diameter it only effects flow near the edge, which decreases the flow in a meter port about 6%. As port size goes up, the effect goes down. For a five-meter port flow rates are down 1.2% and for a ten-meter port they’d only be down 0.6%.”

AJ got a stunned look on his face, quickly followed by a frown as he tried to work out the implications.

Ell took pity on him and said, “Obviously, that makes it a lot better than you’d been thinking, but I found an error in my previous calculations. It’d actually take 1.12 million, rather than the 650,000 thousand years I originally thought it’d take to transfer enough material to get Mars’s atmosphere up to Earth density through a single ten-meter port.” She shrugged, “That means 84,000 years to get to the Armstrong limit where you could live on Mars with just oxygen supplementation. Or, 843,000 thousand years to get to the same air pressure as we have at 8,000 feet altitude here on Earth.”

“Wow,” AJ said, looking dismayed, “that means that even if we build 10,000 ten-meter ports, it’d still take 84 years to get to shirtsleeve pressures?”

Ell shrugged, “Yeah. I’ve also thought of another bit of good news you might not’ve considered. When that CO2 arrives on Mars at 1350 psi, the pressure alone’ll be enough to turn a turbine, even before you mix it with water and create your steam.” Ell shrugged, “So, you’ll get more power from that. Maybe you’ll even be able to help run the turbines that bring nitrogen from Titan?”

AJ grimaced, “I haven’t got very good numbers on how much power we’ll be able to generate yet. Probably won’t have great numbers until we’ve got a turbine on Mars that’s running on Venusian CO2 and Europan water.”

Ell grinned at him, “Well, we may never build 10,000 ports, but we should build a few and see what happens.”

AJ produced a huge smile. “Yeah! Thanks! It’s going to take a whole lot of building and refining before we get decent efficiency. We’d just as well get started.” Then he frowned, “But, aren’t you… are you worried about the protests? You know, at Berkeley, about us plundering Mars?”

She shrugged, “Sure… I’m sorry they’re upset, and I can see their viewpoint. A little, anyway. But, weighing their concerns against the need for humanity to be more than a single planet species…” She looked at him again, “You’ve got to realize that there’re always people protesting something. You might not be aware that people protested when we first started shipping radioactive waste to Juno. They had the same kind of complaints. You know, that we were ‘contaminating a pristine asteroid.’ But, cross-correlation showed a lot of them had previously been active complaining about radioactive waste. So, first they complained about the problem; then they complained about the solution. I’m pretty sure those kinds of people would’ve complained about any solution we could have come up with.”

Ell shook her head, “When ports were new, we had a lot of protests about the economic disruptions they caused. Now, most people have adjusted to the fact that their world’s been markedly improved by ports, but there’re some people who’re still mad about them. They don’t offer their own solutions, just complain about ours.”

She gave a little shudder, then grinned, “But, let’s talk about fun stuff instead. Has Roger gotten up with you about his idea for graphene balloons?”

Puzzled, AJ shook his head, “Graphene balloons?”

Ell lifted an eyebrow, “Graphene balloons with ports sprayed onto their surface?”

“No. Um, why?”

“A ten-meter diameter graphene balloon with a port around its circumference could be evacuated down to be smaller than your fist. In fact, the biggest limitation on how small you could make such a port would be the little ports inside it that inflate it and connect it up to power. So, you could send ports like that to Mars through little ports.” She shrugged, “Admittedly, if we’re talking about building ten-meter ports, we shouldn’t be too worried about sending them to Mars through little ports, but still, it’s an appealing trick.”

“Wait. If you open a port on the circumference of a balloon, it’s going to cut through the balloon and destroy it.”

Ell shook her head, “No, that’s the really cool part. We’ll open hemispherical ports on both sides of the circumference of the graphene balloon. They’ll be curved just like the ones in your contacts. The two of them together will have four times the surface area of a flat circular port. My calculations suggest that they’ll only use a little bit more power, though we haven’t tested that yet. But, if I’m right, you’ll be able to send the same amount of CO2 through a five-meter sphere as a ten-meter disk—for just a little more than 150-megawatts.”

AJ’s eyes widened, “Oh! That’d really make a difference.” He frowned, “But the port generates a lot of waste heat. If you build a port on the surface of a thin membrane like that, isn’t the membrane going to melt, or burn-up, or something like that?”

“Well, that could be a problem. We’re going to need some empirical testing. But, you do remember that carbon—the element graphene’s made of—has the highest melting point of any element? Graphene’s melting point’s about 1300 degrees higher than tungsten, which has the second highest melting point. Graphene also has by far the best heat conductivity, about five times better than silver, silver being the best heat conductor among the metals. And graphene has the best electrical conductivity too, by a long shot. So, graphene’s kind of the ideal material for a high-powered port like you want to make.”

“That sounds pretty awesome. When can we try it out?”

“I’ve already ordered some one-meter graphene balloons from Allosci. We’ll need to get the Portal Tech people to spray ports around their circumference. Then you can do some testing.”

AJ said slowly, “I’ve kind of been worried about this heating issue. What if we can’t find a way to beat it? We won’t be able to build really big ports if we can’t.”

Ell shrugged, “We could just build lots of small ports. They’ll move the same amount of gas or water for the same amount of power. But I really like your idea that we need industrial size ports to move big machines from one place to another. So, we need to work hard to figure that out.” Ell’s eyes glazed over and she held up a halting finger to pause their conversation. Then she blinked and looked at AJ enthusiastically. “The ports don’t have to be sprayed onto the surface of a spherical balloon. We could put them on the inner surface of a graphene balloon that’s shaped like a hula hoop. Then, the first stop for some of the nitrogen you’re importing from Titan could be a trip around the inside of the hula hoop. Since the nitrogen’s temperature will be minus 180 degrees centigrade, that should help keep the graphene of the port cool. The pressure on Titan’s about one and a half times Earth’s, or about 240 times the pressure on Mars so that should rigidly inflate the hula hoop. You’ll just need to work out how fast you can exhaust the nitrogen onto Mars without letting the hula hoop go soft.”

AJ grinned, “Sounds great! What’re we going to do, just let these balloons bounce around the surface of Mars blowing out gas?”

Ell snorted, “I’m picturing a big balloon exhausting hot Venusian CO2 through a turbine that extracts the power of its arrival velocity, then it goes into a big tank full of water from Europa. The resultant steam drives the turbines that generate more power for the ports. Somehow I think all those turbines will be enough of an anchor.”

“Ah, yes, but we’ll need a lot more ports delivering nitrogen from Titan than we need bringing CO2 and water.”

“True…” Ell said thoughtfully, “I guess you’d better anchor the nitrogen ports so they don’t bounce around. I imagine people walking around on the surface of Mars won’t take kindly to getting bumped into by a sixteen… or a thirty-three foot spherical port that’s blowing out huge quantities of ultra-cold nitrogen.” She looked thoughtful, “I don’t know if you’ve tried to run the numbers on whether the heat contained in the Venusian CO2 will be enough to generate your steam, but my gut feeling’s that it won’t be quite as hot as you’d like. I read that the ideal temperature for the steam that drives turbines is pretty close to the 465 degrees Celsius you’ll be getting from Venus. Since the Europan water’s cold, you’re going to get steam that’s not up at the temperature you want. Maybe you can get turbines that’re designed to run on lower temperature steam, but if not, you’ll need more heat than that. Also, Mars’s cold enough without delivering nitrogen at minus 180 C.” She twisted her lips, “So I think you’re going to need to use solar parabolic mirrors to boost the heat of your steam and warm up your nitrogen.”

AJ gave her a sheepish grin, “I didn’t want to bring up any of the issues with my beautiful plan until… until I’d solved them. But I was broken hearted when I thought the twenty-two meter-per-second flow rate was going stop us ‘cause I couldn’t imagine there was a solution for that one.”

Ell gently punched his shoulder, “Brother-in-law or not, I don’t want you hiding problems from me. I’d rather get ahead of them from the start than have them bite our buns later.”

Feeling chagrined, AJ said, “Sorry ma’am. It won’t happen again.”

Ell gave him one of her crooked grins, “That’s the right response when you screw up. Except for the ‘ma’am,’ I don’t like being ma’amed.”

“Yes ma’am,” AJ said with a little grin of his own.

Giving him a mock glare, Ell said, “You’d better be glad you’re about to become my relative. And, that it’s considered bad form to tear employees limb from limb the day before their weddings.”

“Yes ma’am…”

Ell’s eyes flashed. She drew breath for a retort, but AJ was saved by a small voice from behind them. “Mom, Mr. Richards?”

They turned and found Zage behind them, wrapped up in a towel. He said, “I’m sorry to interrupt. You said to tell you when I was ready to go swimming? I could come back later?”

Ell rolled her eyes at AJ, “Other five-year-olds’d be really excited to go swimming. I’m practically having to drag this kid down to the water because he,” she made air quotes “‘doesn’t want to take time away from his projects.’” She stood and took her son’s hand, saying to AJ, “I wouldn’t want to waste any more of Zage’s precious time on idle chitchat, so we’ll have to head down to the water.”

Projects? AJ wondered. He said, “You’ll have fun down there. The fish’re amazing.”

Zage nodded seriously, “I really do want to see the fish, but Mom says she has to teach me to swim first.” He frowned, “It doesn’t seem like it can be all that hard. Is it?”

AJ laughed, “I thought it was pretty tough when I learned to swim at your age.” He winked, “But maybe you’ll learn swimming as fast as you learned to ski. You think?”

Zage turned to look out at the water. Taking the question seriously, he answered, “Maybe?”

As Zage and his mother made their way across the patio to the beach, AJ’s eyes followed them. Well, mostly Zage’s mother. Thus he noticed when the kid dropped his towel. The boy’s not fat anymore! AJ thought back to when he’d been sitting next to Zage at their New Year’s breakfast. AJ and Zage had talked about dieting because the were both on the heavy side. I thought there was something different about the kid’s face, but I’d never have realized that it’d changed because he’d lost so much weight. He looks ripped for a kid!

AJ wondered whether it was healthy for a five-year-old to be on the kind of strict diet that could’ve done what he was seeing. Then he looked down at the remnants of the spare tire he hadn’t been able to get rid of for his wedding. I wonder what kind of diet he’s been on.

~~~

Ell was also staring at her son. All his pudgy fat’s gone! She’d known he was losing weight because his face and neck had started looking thinner, but now she saw he’d lost so much she could see muscular definition. She thought that if all his weight loss had come from a diet, his muscles would’ve looked wasted, but he looked healthily muscular. Is this okay in a kid his age? she wondered. She also wondered how it could’ve happened without her noticing it. She abruptly recognized, Because he’s been bathing and dressing himself for a year or two now. I haven’t seen him like this for ages.

Thinking positive strokes were in order, she said, “Hey kid, looks like that diet’s really been paying off.”

Zage looked down at himself, “Um, yeah.” He looked out at the water, “Should I put in this port snorkel now?”

Ell snorted, “No, just leave it there on your towel. First, I need to be sure you know how to swim without any aids. Don’t want you drowning just because you fall in a puddle.”

“Okay,” he said, dropping the snorkel on the towel and starting toward the water.

~~~

When they came back out of the water fifteen-minutes later, Ell thought, the kid swims like a fish! He’d seen a couple of fish at a distance while Ell was showing him how to swim. Now he was running enthusiastically up to get his goggles and snorkel so he could go further and deeper to see them better.

He grabbed Ell’s goggles and snorkel while he was there and came running back to her. Now he looks like kids’re supposed to, she thought wistfully.

But I’d be crazy to regret the way he is…

***

NOAA, Silver Springs, Maryland— The group COTwo held a protest in front of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today. This was not a protest about high levels of CO2, as one would’ve expected in the past. Instead, the group feels we are lowering the CO2 levels so rapidly it’s disrupting the environment through precipitous change. Randal Simmons, the group’s representative, says, “Our ecology’s accommodated to the high levels of CO2 in our atmosphere, as well as the resultant global warming. The abrupt drop in CO2 levels brought on by the rapid shift from fossil fuels to solar ports is resulting in a much too rapid reversal of these changes. Our adapted ecosystem’s suffering as a result…” The group argues for a restriction of ETR’s solar power system licenses in order to allow a more gradual shift of CO2 concentrations back toward pre-industrial levels.

A small counter-protest group pointed out that the protesters mostly came from northern states whose climates have been somewhat improved by global warming…

Marcus Turner saw Vanessa in the lab. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Um, yeah. It’s about Zage’s peptide.”

“Is there a problem?” Turner asked. In view of the revenues that might be generated by a peptide that helped people lose weight, he certainly hoped not.

“He got help from Gordito when he was designing the peptide.”

“Crap! Really?!”

Vanessa nodded. “He says it’s not a problem and points out that Gordito functions as a kind of scientific charity. I didn’t know this, but, even though they charge money for analyzing protein and peptide structures, it’s just a disincentive to keep people from submitting ridiculous numbers of sequences. He told me they actually donate the money to Doctors Without Borders. I’ve checked and it’s true.”

Turner shook his head slowly, “I had no idea… Nonetheless… Wait a minute, did Gordito even exist back when Zage started working with that peptide? I thought… I thought Gordito just burst onto the scene last winter?”

“Yeah,” Vanessa said, not looking happy about it. “I asked Zage about that and he claims he got his peptide from a precursor site to Gordito that was run by the same people. I contacted Gordito through its website—which is the only way you can contact them—and they confirmed Zage’s story. Both that he contacted them at a precursor website, and that they don’t charge for any of their services. They claim to be completely funded by an anonymous donor.”

“But… They might still claim rights to that peptide.”

“No, they say they don’t and won’t. Zage pointed out that they didn’t claim rights to any of the peptide antigens they generated for smallpox vaccinations either. Their email reply to me included a lot of legalese by which they granted all rights to the peptide to us.”

“To us? You, me, and Zage?”

“You, me, Zage, and the University,” she shrugged, “…to be divided up according to pre-existing agreements.”

“Oh,” Turner said, while wondering exactly what pre-existing agreements might hold sway and how they’d actually divide up the ownership. “Did you tell the tech development office about this yet?”

“No, I wanted you to know about it first. Didn’t want you getting blindsided if they came back at you with a question.”

“Okay, thanks. I guess you should go ahead and let them know.” Turner went into his office but didn’t get any work done. He just sat there thinking. At least the little genius didn’t come up with that peptide all by himself, he thought, feeling better about the way the child outshone everyone. But who the hell is Gordito and how do they do what they do? Then he had an idea, Maybe I could get Gordito’s help with a peptide for one of our projects. He started racking his brain for some problem they’d been working on that could benefit from a peptide consultation.

After pondering for a while, he laughed to himself, Wouldn’t you know it. I’ve found a beautiful hammer, but there aren’t any nails…

***

Rick stepped into the lab. Seeing Alice and Carley, he turned and stepped over to the bench that sometimes hid Zage. He peered over, but Zage wasn’t back there. Turning back to Alice and Carley, he said, “Hey, did you guys get invitations to Zage’s birthday party?”

They both nodded, Alice seeming amused and Carley looking concerned.

“Um, how’re you going to handle it?” Rick asked.

“I said I’d be there,” Carley replied emphatically, as if she were thinking, “of course.”

Alice looked measuringly over at Carley, then said, “I haven’t decided yet.” She turned her eyes back to Rick, “What’re you thinking?”

Rick stared at them, surprised by their attitudes. “I’m thinking it’s absolutely freaking bizarre that I’ve been invited to a five-year-old’s birthday party!”

“He’s not your usual five-year-old,” Carley said a little hotly. “Besides, he’s turning six.”

“Five, six, it’s all the same,” Rick said. “I think it’s weird to be expected to socialize with a child, even if he is a prodigy.”

“But not to work or do research with him?” Carley said, rolling her eyes. “He’s way different from any other kid that age. Think about his life. He has nothing in common with kids his age. He’s got far more in common with people our age.” She gave Rick a glare, “Or perhaps, with people who’re as mature as we’re supposed to be.”

Alice laughed. “I’m coming at this from a completely different angle than either of you. Like Rick, I have a feeling that going to a birthday party for a kid his age could be weird, but I think hanging out with Zage doesn’t feel like being around a child at all. Sad for him, perhaps?” She looked back and forth from Rick to Carley, “But the biggest thing is, I’ll bet his dad’s going to be there. It’s not every day I get to chit-chat with a Nobel prize winner. I’ve just decided I’m going to go.”

Rick stared at Alice for a moment, then said, “I’d forgotten about that. I guess I’m in. What kind of gift are you getting the little guy? An action figure?”

For a moment it looked like Carley was going to explode. Then it passed and they all tried to think of reasonable gifts.

***

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina— Last week, Extra Terrestrial Resources (ETR) announced the landing of a survey and mining base on the large metallic asteroid known as Psyche 16. Weighing in at twenty-seven quadrillion metric tons, Psyche’s the tenth largest asteroid and by far the largest metallic asteroid. A storm of protest has arisen over this presumed claim. People objecting include a number of individuals who have claimed Psyche 16 as their own by filing documents with their governments or making claims on various websites. Several nation-states have objected based on their own claims to Psyche as a national territory. Few courts will uphold such claims—based on the long-held doctrine that claiming territory requires physical touch. However, many individuals or entities are using the same doctrine to object that ETR cannot claim the asteroid because no humans have landed there, only an industrial mining complex manned by waldoes.

For its part, ETR points out that twenty-seven quadrillion metric tons is more than anyone can possibly use and says that they do not claim the asteroid, they only intend to mine a small portion of it. An ETR representative said, “Psyche 16’s mostly iron with some nickel. Last year almost 2 billion tons of steel were produced here on Earth. At that rate of consumption, Psyche 16 would supply the world’s iron needs for over 13 million years (even ignoring the fact that steel’s the most recycled material). No one needs to worry that ETR’s going to ‘use up’ Psyche.”

A Montana man, Jason Stackhouse, says he’s ready to “go to war” if his internet claim on Psyche’s not honored…

***

Carley followed Eli toward the AA meeting, wondering what it was going to be like. He’d told her that they were going to an “open” meeting, which was the kind she’d be welcome at. AA also had closed meetings for alcoholics only. Eli was walking a few steps in front of her. She’d tried to catch up, but he’d kept ahead. She said, “You’ve been to AA meetings before?”

He didn’t turn back toward her, which she felt was a little strange. He spoke over his shoulder, “Yeah. They’re not really right for somebody like me.” He shrugged, “More for hard-core drunks who can’t stop drinking without somebody to lean on.”

“Eli,” she said quietly but forcefully, “you keep saying you can stop drinking. But you don’t. I don’t think you can stop—”

“I can!” Eli threw back over his shoulder again, though he immediately turned back to the front. “I’ve done it a million times! I’ve told you this over and over.”

“So then, are we wasting our time? From what I’ve read, AA’s for people who realize they’re alcoholic and want help.”

“Yeah, it’s a waste of our time,” he said vehemently, again without turning. “I’ve told you that, but you keep insisting—”

“Eli!” Carley interrupted. “Stop! Talk to me. I’m only insisting that you stop drinking. I don’t want to waste the people’s time at AA if you’re not committed to stopping your drinking.”

Eli stopped but didn’t turn to face Carley. She could see his shoulders were tense. He said, “I’m committed. I’ve already stopped drinking. I don’t need any help from these assholes.”

Suddenly suspicious, Carley slowly walked around to stand in front of him. He turned his head to look out into the street. “Eli, look at me.”

He turned his head just far enough toward her so his eyes could look at her.

“You haven’t stopped drinking. You’re drunk right now, aren’t you?”

“I’m not drunk,” he said in a surly tone. “I only had a beer so I’d be able to tolerate the kind of pompous jerks that come to these meetings.”

Carley smelled the beer on his breath. Several beers she thought. She studied his face for a moment, then said, “Find yourself some other place to live then. I love you, but not when you’re drinking. It reminds me too much of—”

“I’m not like Dad,” Eli interrupted angrily.

“Yet.” Carley studied her brother’s face for a moment as he looked everywhere but at her. She said, “There’re some genes associated with alcoholism. If it turned out that you had one and something could be done about it, would you be interested?”

Apparently looking across the street, Eli swallowed. He shrugged, “Sure. Whatever.”

Carley stepped around him and started back down the street the other way. She said, “I’ll check you for those genes and get back to you if you have any of them. Meanwhile, don’t come back to my place.” She jerked a thumb back over her shoulder, “I’d suggest you go on into that AA meeting, but it’s up to you.”

As she strode away, she felt the hot tears running down her cheeks. I’ve deserted my little brother, she thought. Then, fiercely, I can’t help him if he doesn’t want help.

No one could, she told herself. But then why do I feel like such a horrible person?

***

“AJ,” a familiar voice said behind him.

AJ turned around and saw Ell walking into the ETR research area. “Yes, ma’am?” He asked.

Ell lowered an eyebrow, “What’d I tell you about calling me ma’am?”

“You said not to do it, ma’am,” he said, unable to restrain a grin.

With an exasperated sigh, she slowly said, “No one else around here calls me ma’am.”

“That’s because they’re intimidated… ma’am.”

She crossed her arms and tapped her foot for a few seconds, then said, “In another moment, I’m just going to take my new inflatable port and leave.”

His eyes widened as they saw she held a wad of grey material. “Sorry mm… Sorry Ell. Please don’t leave!” he said, staring at her hand. “Is that it?” he asked excitedly.

“Yep,” she said with a grin. She mumbled to her AI and it quickly began inflating. In a few seconds, she was holding a thick grey hula hoop, a meter in diameter. She pointed to a wide stripe covering the inner surface of the ring, “These’re the buckyballs that’re supposed to form the port. You ready to see if it’ll work?”

“Yeah!” he said enthusiastically. Then he drew back a moment, “Um, you aren’t going to power it up right here, are you?”

“Sure,” she said, leaning it against a worktable and stepping back. The other end of the port’s over at Allosci, not on Venus. No toxic Venusian atmosphere’s going to come pouring out or anything.”

“Still,” he said, stepping back with wide eyes, “isn’t it going to be drawing two to three-megawatts?! I’d rather not be next to it—in case it blows a circuit.”

She grinned at him, “It’s good to see that you have some of the sense God gave a mule. Let’s take it to the testing room.” She picked it up and walked away. AJ hurried to catch up.

~~~

Ell took the inflated graphene ring into the building’s chemical reaction safety room. She and Manuel Garcia, one of the machinists, clamped it into a fixture she’d obviously had Manuel build just for this. They all exited the room and took up station outside the thick viewing window. “Ready?” she asked.

Manuel and AJ both nodded and Ell spoke to her high-powered AI. A moment later, right through the wall, AJ heard the kind of rising hum that came from big ports when they powered up. The center of the ring flashed; then smoke started pouring out into the testing room. “Damn!” he said in frustration.

Ell glanced at him in some surprise, then said, “Oh. It’s the smoke, right? I had the people over at Allosci pressurize the room and turn on some smoke generators. That way we’d be able to tell if it was working.”

“Oh,” AJ said, feeling relieved. Then he remembered that when the port first snapped on, it’d looked flat. He couldn’t see the surface now because of the smoke pouring out of it. “Um, it looked like the port was planar, rather than hemispherical?”

“Yep. Let’s try making it hemispherical.” Ell mumbled to her AI.

AJ still couldn’t see the surface of the port, but instead of the smoke pouring out as if it were shooting out the end of a large pipe, it suddenly looked like it was puffing out in every direction.

Ell said, “That seems to be working. Let’s see if we can open up hemispherical ports on both sides.” She spoke to Allan again.

A few seconds later and the room seemed to be filling with smoke. AJ could hardly see anything, but for an instant before it got too smoky, he thought he’d seen a large ball pouring smoke in every direction.

“Awesome,” Ell said, studying numbers only she could see on her HUD. She turned excitedly to AJ and put her hand up for a high five, “We’ve got a one-meter, bi-hemispherical port with a flow rate four times what it had when it was a single-surface, planar-port.”

“What about the graphene tube? Is it heating?” AJ asked concernedly.

Ell’s eyes darted up to the side to look at numbers displayed on her contacts’ HUD, “It warmed up some. We’re easily controlling the heating by running cold nitrogen from Titan through it.” She looked at him, “But, it might be a problem for a bigger ring, running a lot more power. I’ll send you the numbers we’re getting from this test run and you can do some engineering on them.”

“That’d be great,” AJ said, his mind already trying to think how he might try to correlate what these numbers would mean in a larger ring. “I’ll run the numbers, but we’ll still need empiric testing.” He looked at her hopefully, “Can we order a two-meter ring?”

Ell’d obviously turned off the port. The smoke was clearing out of the test room and the ring was becoming more visible. She looked at him and said, “Why don’t you run a few numbers? Try to decide whether we need to increase the diameter of the tube of the hula hoop to let us run more nitrogen through it or not.” She grinned, “Not that I necessarily expect you to predict it correctly. I just don’t want to have those Allosci wimps complaining that we had them make something that was guaranteed to fail.”

“Okay, okay,” AJ said. Shaking his head, he said in a low tone as if he didn’t want her to hear, “Hard to believe the way you mollycoddle your employees.”

“Hey,” Ell said, giving him a gentle poke, “I’m mollycoddling you too, you know?”

“Yes ma’am,” AJ said with a big smile. I appreciate it too!”

Ell rolled her eyes…

Chapter Three

After a long day spent transferring mice, Mark poured them tea, then sat down and looked Lindy in the eye.

It’d been sixteen weeks now since Mark and Lindy imported 300 six-week-old mice to Mars and put them in their special colony cages. Two groups of 50 stayed in the Martian tunnels, two groups went in the water shielded dome up on the surface, and two went in the unshielded dome. Quantum Biomed and NASA had kept two more groups back on Earth. One of each of the pairs of groups consisted of mice that had supposedly been genetically modified to resist radiation. After five weeks, when the mice were eleven weeks old—ten weeks being a generation for mice—there should’ve been about 300 mice in each group since mice typically had litters of 4 to 6 pups each. At that eleven-week time-point, they’d transferred all but fifty mice from each group back to Earth for examination. Again today—after a second 11-week generation period—all but fifty mice from each group had been sent back to Earth. The transfers were partly to keep the colony size in control, and partly to give the scientists back on Earth specimens to evaluate.

Mark said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“If you’re thinking that the supposed genetic modification for radiation resistance works pretty damn well; then yes, we’re thinking the same thing.”

“Of course, we don’t have any of the DNA analysis, or the results of any of the rest of the evaluations they’re planning, but—”

Lindy interrupted, “But, both times there were between 286 and 313 healthy looking mice in each of groups one through five. At five weeks there were only 202 mice in Group Six, from in the unshielded dome. At sixteen weeks there were only 147 mice in Group Six. Group Six hasn’t been reproducing well and there were quite a few dead mice in that cage. And I swear every mouse in Group Six looked feeble. Some of the live ones had obvious mutations. Some had tumors. They look… old, for lack of a better word.”

“Yeah,” Mark said with a sigh. “Though until they break the code, we can’t be sure which group is which—”

“Come on!” Lindy interrupted, “Group Six has to be the control mice for the unshielded dome. Group Five, their friends in that dome, looked fine. The Fives have to be the ones with the supposed radiation protection gene mod. If the gene mod made mice sick, they would’ve known about it back on Earth. Also, remember that none of the groups that weren’t subjected to a lot of radiation looked sick. The gene mod can’t be making Group Six sick; therefore, it has to be what’s keeping Group Five healthy.”

Mark nodded acquiescence.

Lindy shook her head, “Since I’m a control version human, now that I’ve seen what’s happening to Group Six, I plan to cut down the amount of time I spend out there on the surface… Cut it to the bare minimum I can achieve.”

Mark didn’t say anything, just stared into space.

She frowned, “Are you thinking there’s some other explanation?”

He blinked, then focused back on her, “No, no. I’m thinking I want that genetic modification for myself.”

Lindy rolled her eyes, “You can bet that’s not gonna happen. Not without years of testing and endless legal wrangling. I’m going to tell the rest of the team about this though. I think, in view of what’s happening to those mice, they should have the right to decide for themselves how much time they want to spend on the surface.”

Mark shrugged and got up, “You may be right about all the years of testing and legal crap, but I’m gonna volunteer to be the guinea pig anyway.”

Lindy grinned up at him, “Volunteering to come to Mars wasn’t enough crazy volunteering for you?”

He grinned back, “You don’t think one crazy volunteering can cancel out the bad effects of the other one? Like two wrongs making a right?”

“In your dreams, baby, in your dreams…”

He smiled, “You know, I think Group Four in the shielded dome and Group One in the tunnel both look a little healthier than their sister groups. I’ll bet they have the gene mod too.”

Lindy frowned, “A gene mod that repairs radiation damage can’t make you healthier if you’re not being irradiated, can it?”

Mark shrugged the shoulder that wasn’t holding a teacup, “I heard one of the Quantum Biomed guys call it an ‘error correction mod,’ instead of a radiation protection mod. Cumulative DNA errors from all kinds of sources are a big part of what makes us old.” He grinned, “Once I join the experimental group, I’m gonna start getting younger…”

“In your dreams, baby, in your dreams…” Lindy said again.

***

Jillian had spent hours hunting the Internet for signs of Ell Donsaii’s child without success.

Sometimes, when the web fails you, you just have to go take a look for yourself, she thought, turning into the driveway at Donsaii’s little farm. She felt surprised. She’d been expecting massive walls and an automated gate, but there was only a paved driveway. The pavement looked new, leading her to wonder whether it’d actually been a dirt driveway recently.

She drove her car right up to the farmhouse and parked. That was easier than I expected, she thought, though I’ll bet things’re going to get harder. As she walked up to the porch, she turned to survey the area. No swing sets or other playground equipment, she thought. Though I suppose the boy could have ponies in that little barn over there.

Climbing the steps onto the porch, she crossed it and knocked on the door. “Hello, house AI?”

“Yes, this is the house AI. How may I help you?”

“Is Ms. Donsaii home?”

“No, may I get your name so I can tell her who stopped by?”

“Jane Doe.”

The AI said, “Your face matches the image for the byline of a reporter named Jillian Pardo. Are you claiming to be someone else?”

“Why’d you ask me who I was if you already knew?”

“It’s considered the polite thing to do.”

Polite? Damned insufferable AI’s. Jillian leaned back and peered in the windows, thinking that the house AI was pretty powerful if it could correlate her to images on the net that quickly. She didn’t see any toys on the floors inside. Or, anything else that suggested a child lived in the house.

Once again, she wondered whether Barton had been pulling her chain. But why would he do it? she wondered. Could he have taken an immediate disliking to me and just wanted to send me on a wild goose chase?

She wanted to walk around the house peering in all the windows, but that might be a bit much with an AI that was this sharp. She got back in her car and drove back out to park on the road where she’d be able to see the people in any cars that entered the driveway. Am I just wasting my time? she wondered.

~~~

At 5:17, an old, blue Ford Focus turned into the driveway. Housekeeper, Jillian thought at first, based on the age of the vehicle.

But then she recognized Donsaii in the vehicle.

And no one else.

Certainly no child.

What’s she doing in that piece of junk? Jillian wondered

She stayed there in front of Donsaii’s place until it got dark. Since it was summer, the sun didn’t go down until 8:30. That gave Jillian plenty of time to get hungry and irritable.

And to wonder just what the hell she was doing there.

~~~

Jillian watched the house two more evenings. Both nights she saw Donsaii’s Focus come home with Donsaii in it. No one left the house. No one brought in a child.

And the only evidence Jillian had for Donsaii’s possible child was an offhand remark by a detective she didn’t like. A remark he’d almost certainly deny. Her recognition that there was a time period when Donsaii could’ve had a child only said it was possible. It didn’t constitute evidence that Donsaii actually did have a kid.

A scoop of the rest of the journalistic world—to tell them that Ell Donsaii had a child they didn’t know about—that’d indeed be a triumph for Jillian Pardo. But, other than Barton’s rescinded remark, what else did she have? And, if she stayed out here stalking Donsaii for weeks or months, unsuccessfully trying to find some evidence to support a story that surely should’ve broken a long time ago if it were true… Hell, I need stories that’ll pay the bills now. I can’t afford to spend months out here stalking Donsaii in hopes of breaking a career worthy scoop.

She decided, I’ve got to give up on this.

***

Steve got off the high-speed tunnel scooter he’d taken from beneath his own house to the entrance under the house south of her farm where Ell actually lived. His AI’d already obtained permission for him to enter, so he opened the door and stepped into Ell’s changing room—the spot where she normally changed her disguise from Ell Donsaii to Raquel Kinrais and back. The door on the other side of the changing room let Steve into Ell’s huge basement lab. As Steve started to walk through, he saw Zage standing on a rolling kick stool beside one of the lab’s large computerized instruments. Zage was looking at him, so Steve started his direction. “Hey Zage, whatcha doing?” he asked cheerfully.

Zage watched Steve approach as if he were wondering how to respond. He said, “I’m trying to modify a phage.”

“A what?”

“Phage. It’s a virus that attacks bacteria.”

Steve blinked, not knowing what to make of this. “Why would you want to modify a virus that attacks bacteria? Or, for that matter, even care about a virus that attacks bacteria?”

“They kill bacteria and bacteria kill us. It’s the old, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Phages have been used in Russia and a few other parts of the world to treat human infection since the nineteen forties. Now that a lot of bacteria are gaining resistance to antibiotics, phage therapy’s making a comeback.”

Steve stared at Zage, not quite sure what to make of this. He knew Zage was interested in biology and presumably microbiology too, but modifying a virus? Can that actually be done? he wondered. Trying to make light of it, but also a little concerned, Steve said, “What if you modify one of these viruses so it attacks us?”

Zage blinked as if he was surprised by the idea. “The kind of virus that attacks bacteria’s really different from the viruses that attack us.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I suppose you could modify one so that it’d attack us, but it’d be really hard to do…” He paused a moment, then shook his head, “It certainly wouldn’t happen by accident.”

Bemused, Steve said, “If these viruses already attack bacteria, why do you need to modify them?”

“Two reasons,” Zage said blandly. “First, each phage only attacks very specific bacteria, so there’s no such thing as a ‘broad-spectrum’ phage that’ll kill a lot of different bacteria. In fact, they’re so specific that they might only attack certain strains of a particular bacteria. For instance, it might kill one strain of E. coli but do nothing to another.” He looked up into the air with an unfocused gaze for a moment, then said musingly, “That could actually be good if you wanted to kill a toxin producing E. coli, but not kill all the rest of the E. coli that’re living peacefully in your intestine.”

He blinked back onto Steve, “Second, if we give the phages through an IV like we deliver antibiotics, they’re recognized as foreign and elicit a response from the patient’s immune system. Then the patient starts fighting his own treatment.”

“How… how’re you thinking you’ll be able to solve those problems?”

“A phage attaches itself to a specific site on the surface of the bacterium. Those sites can vary from bacterium to bacterium, depending on the species and strain. I’m trying to figure out how to help them attach to sites that lots of bacteria have in common.”

“And,” Steve said tentatively, “that’d make it more of a ‘broad-spectrum’ phage, right?”

Zage nodded.

“The other problem was giving them IV?”

“Yeah. I’m hoping to modify the outer coat of the phage so it doesn’t have any antigens recognized by humans as foreign.” Zage winced, “That means, so our immune system can’t recognize them as foreign and attack them. They’d need to have common human proteins on their outer surface so our immune system would think they’re part of us.”

Steve nodded sagely, as if he hadn’t needed that last sentence of explanation. “That sounds really cool. This’s what you’re learning over at Dr. Barnes’ lab?”

Zage nodded again.

“So this’s like homework?”

“Um, I guess.”

“Well, I’m here to talk to your mom,” Steve said, turning for the stairs up into the actual basement of the house, “so I’d better get to it. I’ll see you later.”

~~~

When Steve reached the top of the stairs, Ell was there to meet him. She lifted an eyebrow inquisitively, “Took you a long time to get through the basement.”

“Um, yeah. I stopped to talk to Zage.” He gave Ell an inquisitive look, “He says he’s working on some homework to do with phages?”

Ell shrugged, “It’s not really a homework assignment, just his own project.”

“He’s talking about changing phages so they can attack more bacteria, and… and so they won’t be attacked by our immune system?”

Ell nodded slowly.

“Should he be messing with that kind of stuff? It sounds kind of dangerous.”

Ell just looked at him thoughtfully. For long enough that Steve started to fidget. Am I sticking my nose into stuff I shouldn’t? Or didn’t she know what Zage’s doing and so she’s trying to think what to say?

Finally, Ell slowly said, “I think as leader of the security team, you have ‘a need to know.’ But I’d really rather it didn’t go any farther than you if it doesn’t have to.”

Steve blinked, “What’s that?”

“You remember that package you had Linda deliver to the CDC a couple months ago? Back during the smallpox crisis?”

Steve grinned, “In a brown paper bag. Yeah, seemed kind of crazy. What was the deal there?”

“That brown paper bag contained 40 million doses of vaccine for the modified smallpox virus.”

Startled, Steve said, “40 million? That bag couldn’t have weighed more than a pound or two.”

“Freeze-dried, a dose of the vaccine weighs micrograms. Because of wastage they almost certainly didn’t get 40 million doses out of that bag of powder, but they should’ve gotten close.”

“Wait. The news reported that Gordito supplied 40 million doses of vaccine. Is Gordito taking credit for…?” Steve paused as he tried to fit the parts of this puzzle together.

“Steve, Zage is Gordito.”

Steve stared at her for a moment, then quietly said, “Holy shit…!”

“Yeah,” Ell said with a gusting sigh. “I’m still trying to come to grips with it myself. But, you, me, Zage and Shan’re the only four people who know about it. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Wow, it’s really sad that the world can’t know…” Steve said slowly. He stopped at the flashing look in Ell’s eyes, “…though of course, they can’t.”

“That’s right,” Ell said grimly. “Now, I think you came over here about another issue?”

“Um, yeah. Yesterday the farmhouse had a visit from a journalist, Jillian Pardo. According to her website, she fancies herself an investigative journalist. She’s young and what she’s published hasn’t been all that penetrating. Nonetheless, she came up to the house and talked briefly to the house AI, giving it a false name.” Steve gave Ell a questioning look, “The AI’d already recognized her?”

“Yeah, the house AI’s linked to Allan. He helped with that.”

Steve was no longer astonished by what the supercomputer running Ell’s personal AI could do. He said, “I thought that was likely. Do you already know everything you need to know about the incident?”

She shrugged, “I know she looked in the windows. Then she parked out on the road and watched me drive in. What I don’t know is what she thinks she’s investigating. Any ideas?”

Steve shook his head. “If you’d been home and she’d actually asked you some questions we might have a better idea.”

“I thought reporters weren’t supposed to come onto private property like that?”

“Yeah, paparazzi are supposed to stay out at the road to take their pictures. Reporters can come onto private property to ask questions but must leave if they’re asked to do so. Misrepresenting oneself to gain access leaves you liable for trespass. However, even though she lied about her name, it wasn’t like she was pretending to be a gardener to do some undercover spying. I think she just didn’t want us to know who she was.” He shrugged, “We were prepared to run her off, but she didn’t really break any laws, and you know my philosophy.”

“Yeah, ‘be so boring they forget about me.’ I suppose trying to arrest her’d be a news story in its own right.”

Steve nodded.

“Are you thinking that if she manages to buttonhole me, I should answer some questions?”

“Yes, but for God’s sake, be boring.”

***

His car having dropped him off, Rick walked up to the Kinrais home with mixed feelings. He worried Zage might’ve invited a bunch of other six-year-olds, a prospect for random rambunctiousness that Rick dreaded. He didn’t like kids, though he hoped his attitude would change if he ever had kids of his own.

He’d heard men often changed their outlook about children once they’d started interacting with their own.

Zage was different from the obnoxious children that normally set Rick’s teeth on edge. But if Zage had a bunch of normal six-year-olds at his party, Rick thought they’d probably drive him crazy.

Rick also worried about the gift he’d brought. He’d hated receiving clothes when he was a kid, but bringing Zage a toy had seemed ridiculously inappropriate. He’d decided to get the boy a jacket, but then couldn’t find any in an appropriate size that seemed to be suitably mature. It seemed like every one he’d found was decorated with characters from current children’s movies. When he’d finally found a plain black one he’d felt like it was probably too boring.

So, Rick felt uncomfortable on three counts; obnoxious children, inadequate gifts, and nerves about meeting Dr. Kinrais.

~~~

Kinrais himself opened the door. His shaggy dark-blonde hair, T-shirt and jeans were seriously at odds with Rick’s picture of a Nobel prize winner. Kinrais shepherded Rick back into a big room deeper in the house. The house didn’t seem to be anything special, but the big room was outfitted with a surprising number of high-quality screens. Alice and Carley were already there, talking enthusiastically with Zage. Zage’s mother came out of the kitchen, shook Rick’s hand and asked him what he’d like to drink.

Rick glanced over at Carley and Alice, wondering whether it’d be okay to ask for a beer. With some relief, he saw Alice had a wine glass in her hand. From the corner of his eye, Rick saw Kinrais himself swigging a beer. He turned back to Ms. Kinrais and said, “A beer’d be great.”

The woman headed back into the kitchen, so Rick started toward Kinrais in hopes of striking up a conversation with an actual Nobel Prize winner. He hadn’t quite reached Kinrais when his eyes were drawn to a brilliant blue painting on a white canvas. An elongated vertical rectangle, it looked like someone had spilled blue paint across the canvas.

Rick loved art. Distractedly, he moved closer to the stunning work.

It looks like someone’s still pouring paint onto the canvas, he thought, realizing there was what appeared to be a spout of paint flowing down out of the air and onto the canvas. The glossy, vivid-blue paint appeared to be picking up little reflections. Rick leaned closer. The actual reflections were enhanced with tiny dots and lines of brilliant white paint. It seems so simple. Yet it’s so elegantly done, looking effortless despite the fact that close inspection shows a great deal of effort went into it.

He looked down at the lower corner for a signature and saw “Leoni Mattioli.” My God, this can’t be an original, can it? It’d have to be worth $50-100k! Rick turned and saw Kinrais studying him with an interested expression. He turned back to the painting, thinking it had to be a print. Then his eyes went back to the little spout of paint supposedly pouring onto the canvas. You can’t do that with a print, can you?

He turned back to Kinrais, “Is this an original Mattioli?!”

Kinrais grinned, “I wish. Just a good forgery, I’m afraid.”

Rick turned back to look enviously at the painting. “Whoever forged that has real talent. He or she should start doing their own stuff!”

Kinrais smiled, “He does.”

Rick turned back to Kinrais and put his hand out to shake again. “I’m sure you hear it all the time, but I’d like to be able to say I congratulated you on your Nobel Prize wins. When Zage invited me over, the first thing I did was read through those papers. They represent some astonishing insights.”

Kinrais gave him a curious look, “Those’re mostly math and physics with a bit of chemistry thrown in. I wouldn’t expect a geneticist to find them interesting.”

Rick shrugged, “I try to keep up, at least a little, on all of science. I’m a big believer in the idea that a broad perspective lets you see things other people miss.” He laughed, “But I can’t pretend I really understand the math in either of those papers.”

Kinrais produced a wry look, “I can’t pretend to understand the gene analysis and modification stuff you guys do either.”

Rick looked over at Zage, still deep in conversation with Alice and Carley. Still speaking to Kinrais, he said, “Speaking of genes, your son certainly seems to have inherited some of yours. It’s amazing what he can do at his age.”

His eyes on Zage, Kinrais slowly shook his head, “Yeah, he’s pretty much astonished us at every turn. Doesn’t seem likely he inherited it from me. He’s way ahead of where I was at his age.”

Rick looked over at Ms. Kinrais. “I understand your wife works out at D5R?”

“Well, it’d be more accurate to say she works for them. Seems like she’s not actually at the D5R facility very often. She’s always going somewhere different. Up to the space habitats, out to D5R’s island in the Bahamas, over to portal tech, or Allosci, or ETR. She’s kind of Donsaii’s gofer.”

“Well, she’s got to be pretty sharp to do that kind of stuff,” Rick said, trying to be politic, though it didn’t sound like a job that required all that much intellect. He glanced around again, “Are any kids his age coming to this party?”

“No…” Kinrais said wistfully, “Zage isn’t attending grade school. That’d seem kind of pointless. So, he doesn’t have any friends his age from school. We tried to talk him into inviting some of the kids from his martial arts class.” Kinrais laughed, “He says the kids in martial arts are too immature. He thought they’d irritate you guys and he says you guys are his real friends. Besides, he said, as host, he’d have to spend time with them, time he’d rather spend with you and the other grad students.” Kinrais got a pensive look, “Sometimes I think he’s missing his childhood.”

“Yeah,” Rick said gently, “I worry about the same thing. Zage seems so serious.” He shrugged. “But it’s hard to imagine him doing the usual childhood stuff.”

~~~

After a while, Zage opened his gifts. Rick thought he was pretending when he said he was thrilled with the black jacket Rick brought. Alice brought him chocolate. Rick thought that was an inappropriate gift for a kid who’d just done some serious dieting and lost a bunch of weight. However, from appearances, Zage liked the chocolates a lot better than the jacket. Carley gave the kid what looked like an oddly shaped piece of plastic. When Zage unwrapped it, his eyes widened and he looked up excitedly, “Is this for me to throw with Tanner?”

Carley nodded, “It bounces funny. Dogs’re supposed to love chasing them.”

I’m pretty sure I spent at least twice as much as either Alice or Carley, Rick thought in amused frustration, but I think I’m getting half the credit.

~~~

Eventually they had cake and ice cream. The cake was surprisingly good, much better than the typical grocery-store sheet cake Rick was used to eating at birthdays. Finding himself next to Ms. Kinrais, Rick took the cake as an opportunity to initiate a conversation. “This cake’s awesome. Did you bake it yourself?”

“No, sorry,” she said, looking discomfited. She wiped at a crumb in the corner of her mouth, “I’m afraid I’m a terrible cook. We had to splurge at Raffstetters.”

Raffstetters was a high-end restaurant famous for its baked goods, and for how expensive they were. Rick said, “I didn’t know they baked custom cakes.”

Now she looked really embarrassed. “They don’t. I had to really wheedle and beg. I promised them a huge tip to get it to happen.” She leaned closer, “Don’t tell Zage or Shan, they’ll think I went way overboard.”

~~~

In the car on his way home, Rick had his AI bring up a catalog of Mattioli’s works. It didn’t take him long to find the blue painting, though the images didn’t do its simple beauty justice. Hard to imagine that the original could be any better than that forgery, he thought. In fact, I wonder if it’s even as good?

***

Carley looked up as Zage entered the lab. “You were right,” she said.

Zage stopped and blinked at her, “About what?”

“My brother. He’s got a β-Klotho gene anomaly.”

There was a pause, then Zage appeared to decide she was waiting for him to say something. He said, “β-Klotho’s a co-receptor for FGF-21.” He waited a beat, then, when she didn’t say anything, apparently decided she expected him to continue. “FGF-21 inhibits both alcohol and sweets consumption in animals. A deficiency in its receptor could be why he’s overweight as well as alcoholic. Which β-Klotho anomaly does he have?”

“β-Klotho-c.” Exasperatedly, she asked, “How do you even know about β-Klotho?”

Zage tilted his head curiously at her, “Remember? I looked up the genetics of alcohol dependence back when I first heard you talking about Eli’s problem?”

Carley snorted, “Oh, I do remember. But if I’d looked up alcohol genetics way back then I would’ve forgotten most of it by now.”

Ignoring her protestation, Zage said, “β-Klotho-c isn’t such a bad deficiency to have. It makes him less sensitive to FGF-21, but he should still respond to higher levels.” Again, he waited a beat. When she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Do you have the anomaly too?

Carley shook her head.

“So, then you’re not likely to become addicted to alcohol. It should be safe for you to try a few drinks if you want.”

Slowly, Carley said, “I think I’d rather not. What if…”

“What if… what?” Zage prompted.

“What if I’ve got some other predisposition? A gene no one’s found yet?”

“Seems unlikely,” Zage said with a shrug. “But then, I’ve never understood why anyone’d want to consume something that impairs their mental faculties. From what I understand, the alcohol itself doesn’t taste good. That’s why most people mix it with other things—to cloak its flavor.”

Carley couldn’t keep herself from laughing at this hyper-rational assessment of people’s motivations for drinking. She shook her head, “Unfortunately, there’s no way for me to modify Eli’s β-Klotho gene.”

Zage didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he shrugged, “That would be a pretty large undertaking. At present we don’t have very good methodology for inserting the corrected gene into most or all of his cells. It’s especially problematic in that you’d need to insert the gene across the blood-brain barrier into his CNS where it’s assumed that β-Klotho and FGF-21 have their effects on the desire for alcohol. And, if something went wrong, it’d be really hard to undo.”

“Yeah,” Carley sighed. “When I ran his genome, I was hoping to find something simple to fix.” She shrugged, “Which was a real pie-in-the-sky hope, since most things aren’t easy to correct. But, thanks for the suggestion anyway. If I had found something easy to treat, I’d have been eternally grateful.” She started to turn away, thinking Zage’d be wanting to get on to his own project.

She paused when she realized Zage hadn’t moved. He said, “Why not just give him FGF-21?”

Carley thought for a moment, then shook her head, “It’s a protein, so it’d have to be given by injection. Even if he was willing to inject himself regularly, chronic elevation of FGF-21 can cause problems with the liver.”

“Essentially, his levels act like they’re chronically low because he doesn’t have a good receptor. Also, it’s normally induced by drinking and those elevated levels suppress further drinking. What you’d like to do is give him a little bit of FGF-21 all the time and increase the level if he drinks.”

Carley drew back hesitantly, “It’d be hard enough to get him to give himself a daily injection. There’s no way I’d be able to get him to inject himself multiple times a day and then a bigger dose if he drank something.”

“Ah,” Zage said as if he’d just grasped her objection. “But he could use one of those new injection ports diabetics are using. They give insulin on a steady basis and increase it when they detect elevated levels of blood glucose.”

“How would I get one of those?” Carley said doubtfully. “It’s not like I can just write a prescription for an insulin port, you know?”

Zage shrugged, “D5R makes them for animal studies. I might be able to get you one.”

Carley mumbled to her AI. Looking up at her HUD, her eyes widened, “And, FGF-21’s expensive! I guess I don’t know how much I’d actually need, but I doubt I’d be able to afford it.”

“It wouldn’t take much,” Zage said, then shrugged again and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the lab’s equipment. “And we’ve got a cell-free peptide synthesis setup here in the lab…”

Carley drew back, shaking her head in dismay, “You’re essentially talking about doing an experiment… an unauthorized experiment on my brother.”

Zage gave a tiny nod, “Or… you could just let him keep drinking. Whichever’s worse.” He sighed, “I wouldn’t want to actually urge you to do it; I’m just mentioning the possibility. Personally, I think Eli’s the one who should decide.” Turning toward his desk in the lab, he said, “I’ve got to check my results.”

Carley sat, looking after the boy as he walked away. Talking to Zage, it feels like he’s the adult and I’m the kid! He’d looked unhappy and she felt bad she’d sounded critical of his suggestions. Also, he’s been a little standoffish lately. She liked him a lot and didn’t want to lose his friendship. After a while she got up and walked around the end of the lab bench. Zage was examining multi-well plates, “Whatcha doin’?”

He looked up warily, “Dr. Barnes had me synthesize some of the Alzheimer associated proteins Gordito predicted might misfold. I’m checking to see if any of them have clumped.”

“Oh, you mean… that if one of the proteins misfolded, the others might crystallize around it, misfolding to match?”

“That’s the idea. We’re calling it ‘crystallization’ even though that’s not an accurate term for what happens with these proteins.”

“Are they ‘crystallizing’?”

He nodded, still not looking up at her. “I think they’re forming clumps. Really slowly. Maybe some more than others. But it’s slow going. I’ve had to use high concentrations and low temperatures so they’re more likely to crystallize.” He sighed, “Obviously, if it was easy to get them to crystallize, Alzheimer’s wouldn’t be a slowly progressive disease that takes decades to wreak its effects.”

“Oh,” Carley said, thinking about what to say. Finally, she ventured, “Are you mad at me?”

He turned slowly to look at her. “Um… No.”

“‘Cause lately you don’t talk to me much…”

“Um…”

“It’s okay if you’re mad, but… I’d like it if you told me what I did so I could try to make it right. I’d like us to be friends.”

Zage made a little grimace. “The problem is… that…” He took a deep breath, then spoke in a rush. “I’ve got a crush on you.”

Carley stared, “You what?”

“I have a crush on you.” His voice trembled as if he were trying to speak normally despite gusts of strong emotion. “I’ve read up on it. It isn’t uncommon for kids a little older than I am to get crushes. The crushes aren’t usually on someone as much older as you are though. Usually, the crush is on someone mysterious because the child doesn’t know them well and attributes a lot of wonderful but unrealistic qualities to the object of his… affection.” He looked down, as if embarrassed, “Actors and musicians. Even though I’ve read a lot about it, and though I rationally understand what’s going on, I can’t seem to make it go away.” He shrugged sorrowfully, “Sorry.”

Carley pulled over a chair and thumped down onto it. “Wow.”

Zage nodded. “I’m doing my best to act like usual, but I’m having some trouble. I should get over this pretty soon I think. I hope you can still be my friend till then?”

Not having any idea what to do, Carley leaned forward and gave him a hug.

He helplessly patted her on the back a couple of times, then said hoarsely, “I really love it when you give me hugs, but… but it usually makes my feelings about you a lot worse for a while afterward… Maybe if you didn’t?”

Thinking of pedophiles, Carley let go like a hot potato. “Oh! Sorry! I didn’t mean to…”

“Don’t worry,” Zage said, looking embarrassed. “It’s not your fault. I just get all these weird feelings and… It’s probably because I don’t have any friends my own age, you know?”

“I guess… I guess life must be difficult for you, huh?

Zage shook his head, “My life’s awesome. This is about the only problem I’ve got and probably most people wouldn’t even think having a crush was a problem.”

“That’s a great attitude,” Carley said with a gentle laugh.

“I hope you can put up with me acting weird until I get over this?”

“Sure. And I’ll stop hugging you. Sorry about that.”

He looked wistful, “I’ll miss it.”

Carley tilted her head, “Don’t try to be too sensible about emotional issues, they don’t respond to logic.” She hesitated, “And if you ever feel yourself needing a hug… I’ll be here.”

“Okay,” he said, then brightened, “and if you ever need help with…” his face froze for a moment, then he finished, “with, with anything, just let me know.”

Back at her desk Carley couldn’t help but think that he’d meant, “help with school, research, understanding what you’re working on in the lab, your brother…” And I’ll bet he could help me with any of those things.

***

When his AI pinged him, Presidential Science Advisor John Simon glanced up at his HUD. A message said, “Ell Donsaii would like to set up a meeting with you, the President, and NASA director James Epaulding.”

“Urgent?” he asked.

“No,” it displayed.

“Find some coinciding open spots in their schedules and mine, then get back to me.”

“Okay.”

Chapter Four

Jillian couldn’t sleep. Finally, she sat up in her bed and spoke to her AI. It turned on the big screen on the wall of her bedroom. “Bring up a satellite map of Ell Donsaii’s farm,” she told it.

She studied the image. “Highlight the borders of her property.” A moment later, her AI dropped a thin red line around the property. “Zoom in and take me slowly around the border at high resolution. Higher resolution. That’s good.” The imaging started to move unhurriedly along the red line. It started at the north side entrance she’d driven in through when she’d visited, then slowly moved all the way around the border.

She leaned back into her pillow. No other roads in and out. If a kid lives there… Could he walk in? She spoke to her AI again, “Zoom out a little and show me the school bus routes that stop at nearby houses.”

What looked like every road in the vicinity was immediately marked in yellow. She sighed. Could he be walking in and out from the little neighborhood on the west side? she wondered. “Zoom in on the west border. Not so far in, back out a little. That’s good.” She didn’t see anything that looked like a path, but to be sure, she had her AI zoom in on a couple of areas she thought might be paths. I don’t think so, she decided. But if I really want to know, I’ll have to go out there and walk around the border of her property in person.

Jillian relaxed back into her pillows and told the AI to dim the lights. Am I that obsessed?

Just before she fell asleep, she decided she should interview Donsaii instead.

***

The house AI said, “Eli Bolin’s at the door.”

A jolt of apprehension shot through Carley. It seems an age ago that I felt so overjoyed to have found him, she thought. Getting up, she told the AI, “I’ll come to the door.”

The AI’s door screen showed Eli with a young woman beside him. He’s met a girl? Carley thought with some enthusiasm. Maybe someone who’ll help him get straight? Give him something to live for? Rather than talking to Eli through the door like she’d planned, Carley opened it, though not wide. “Eli! Who’s this?”

“This’s Marnie,” Eli said with a wave at the girl. “We met at AA. She’s helping me stay on the wagon, right Marnie?”

In person, the girl looked somewhat unkempt, something Carley hadn’t been able to see on the small door-screen. She didn’t speak, only nodded, eyes downcast.

“Hi Marnie,” Carley said uneasily. “How long’ve you been sober?”

“Ten days,” Eli answered for her. “She’s doin’ real good,” he glanced over at the girl, “right Marnie?”

Marnie nodded again, still without speaking.

Carley noticed the girl had a folded piece of cardboard in one hand and wondered what it was for. Her thoughts whirled. She didn’t want to seem unfriendly to a girl who might help Eli get back on his wheels, but she couldn’t help wondering whether the girl might have her own problems, perhaps ones just as bad as Eli’s. She felt a natural urge to invite them in, but Carley’s roommate Diane was home. Diane would be royally pissed if she found Eli in the apartment. Making a decision, Carley stepped forward and pulled the door shut behind her. “How about if I take you guys to dinner at Wendy’s?”

“That’d be great, right Marnie?”

Wendy’s was just a few blocks away, so they headed to the sidewalk. Carley, uncomfortable with the fact that Marnie hadn’t said a word yet, turned to her, “Did you grow up around here?”

“Nope, she grew up in South Cackalacky, right Marnie?”

Carley wanted to snap at Eli. Tell him to let the girl answer her own questions. Instead, she just posed another, “Whereabouts?”

There was a pause. When Eli didn’t answer—apparently because he didn’t know—Marnie murmured, “Greenville.”

Then they were in Wendy’s, placing orders. Eli irritated Carley by saying, “I missed lunch,” and ordering himself a triple hamburger and large fries. He didn’t ask if she minded, he just placed the order as if entitled. Marnie asked for a regular hamburger and small fries, but Eli up-sized those as well, once again without asking Carley. He told Marnie, “If you can’t finish it, I’ll eat the rest of it later.”

Once they were seated, Marnie kept her eyes downcast and carefully unwrapped her hamburger. She appeared to savor her first bite. After a couple of bites of her own burger, Carley tried to resuscitate the conversation, “Have you been able to keep Eli on the wagon, Marnie?”

Eli turned to stare at Marnie.

Marnie’s shoulders began to rise in a shrug; then she twitched away from Carley’s brother.

He pinched her! Carley thought with horror, leaning to look under the table.

Eli’s hand rested on the bench beside Marnie’s legs.

Her bruised legs. The piece of cardboard had unfolded on the bench beside her. “Homeless, please…” was all Carley could read, but she imagined it probably asked for help.

Carley rose to her feet, indignantly horrified. “You’re abusing her! Just like Dad did Mom!”

Eli rose too. He said, “Relax Carley.” However, he didn’t look relaxed. His breath was boozy and he looked like someone full of anger and having a hard time holding it in. Carley was suddenly reminded that, nowadays, her little brother was bigger than she was.

Suddenly frightened, Carley turned to leave. She felt a stab of guilt though, leaving Marnie behind. She cast a look back over her shoulder at the girl.

Marnie was wolfing down her hamburger as if afraid she wouldn’t get to finish it.

Eli’s hand closed just above Carley’s wrist. He said firmly, as if he were the reasonable one, “Sit down and finish your food, Carley. We wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”

Carley tried to jerk her wrist away, but it didn’t come free. When she did, his grip tightened until her bones felt like they’d break.

Involuntarily, her knees started to bend.

He used her wrist like a handle to lever her into the booth.

He sat down beside her so she couldn’t get out.

Letting go of her wrist, he calmly reached out and pulled over his triple-decker burger. “In answer to your question,” Eli said, “Marnie’s doing a great job of keeping me on the wagon. As I’ve told you, I don’t have a drinking problem. When I don’t want to drink, Marnie’s right there by my side. When I do want to drink, she’s there then too, even if I drink too much. She cares about me, unlike my sister.”

Carley sat, staring at the partially eaten hamburger she no longer had any appetite for. She’d always told herself that no man would ever be able to abuse her. She’d thought she was too smart for that. Now, just a few brief moments of crushing force on the bones of her arm had convinced her otherwise.

~~~

On the way home, Eli caught her wrist again. He asked, “Could you spare twenty bucks so I can help out Marnie?”

Carley thought about saying no, but couldn’t do it while he had her wrist.

***

NASA Director James Epaulding looked up as the President came in with his Science Advisor John Simon… And Ell Donsaii!” Suddenly this meeting’s a lot more interesting! he thought. I wonder what this’s all about?

It soon became evident that Simon and the President were uncertain as well. Simon turned to Donsaii and said, “You have the floor.”

“Well,” she said, “you may or may not be aware of the fact that I’ve thought terraforming and colonizing other planets were extremely iffy propositions…”

“Oh, come on,” President Stockton interrupted with a broad smile, “I thought you were Supergirl. That there wasn’t anything you couldn’t do?”

“Oh how I wish that were true,” Donsaii smiled. “There’re plenty of things I can’t do. However, to me, the issues with colonization and terraforming aren’t that we can’t do them. The problem was that they seemed remotely possible but mostly pointless.”

Stockton tilted her head curiously, “Seems to me you’re already well on your way. You and NASA have people living on Mars. You’ve built a tunnel system and some domes there. You’ve even brought in some atmosphere from other planets. It seems like you’re doing it, whether it’s pointless or not.”

Ell shrugged, “All that’s true. But it doesn’t seem to me that living in tunnels is really living. Living in domes on the surface isn’t much better. Even if the spacesuits weren’t so clumsy, going out in them gets you a substantial dose of radiation, so you really shouldn’t do it often. And, generating an atmosphere in a dome’s a tiny problem as compared to generating an atmosphere on an entire planet, i.e. terraforming it.”

“Is radiation really that big a problem?” Stockton asked.

Ell glanced at Epaulding and Simon as she nodded, “Yeah, it’s a big problem. We have one dome on Mars that isn’t shielded under a meter of water. You really wouldn’t want to live in that one. The radiation dose you’d get in four years would raise your cancer risk about 5%. You wouldn’t want to keep living there because your cancer risk just keeps climbing. We’ve had a variety of vegetation growing in that dome and it seems to be doing fairly well, but plants are known to be radiation tolerant. After all, though it’s little known, soybeans and flax did quite well around Chernobyl. Unfortunately, we’ve recently installed a colony of mice in that dome, and its mortality’s significantly increased. Also, subsequent generations have had quite a few mutations.”

Simon said, “What about the plan for sleeping in the tunnels during the day and then coming out on the surface at night? My understanding’s that Mars blocks a lot of the solar radiation when it’s between you and the sun.”

“That’s true,” Epaulding said, “but the radiation at night’s still higher than you’d like.” He gave a small shrug, “And, there’s also the problem that we’re evolved to be active during the day and sleep at night. Changing to a nocturnal schedule isn’t healthy either.”

Stockton said, “Okay, I’ll grant you that radiation’s a problem we haven’t solved yet. But you said there was some kind of problem with generating atmosphere too? I thought you were already doing that.”

“We are generating atmosphere. We’ve worked out a lot of the bugs with it already. The problem is the actual scale of generating a planetary atmosphere. Even for a small planet like Mars, making a livable atmosphere would take millions of years at the rate we’re going.”

“Can we make it a million times faster?” Stockton asked.

Ell snorted, despite all the trials and tribulations Stockton had put her through, she found she liked the woman’s blunt and direct style. “We’re hoping we can make it a lot faster, yes.” She laughed, “Not a million times faster, but we’re thinking of shooting for thousands of times faster.”

Stockton snorted, “And I suppose you’re here with your hand out, expecting the government to finance it?”

“Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that, but I wouldn’t object if the government was the one to fund it. However, I was more worried about the people who’ve been protesting our,” she glanced at Epaulding, “contamination of Mars’ pristine environment. That’s a political problem, not something that really falls in our area of expertise.”

“Surely you wouldn’t worry about that?” Stockton said in a mildly sarcastic tone. “It didn’t seem to bother you when the political system tried to get you to hand over the keys to the stars.”

Ell stared at the President long enough that Epaulding and Simon began to fidget, then she said calmly, “Back then, I was being asked to hand over technology so dangerous I feared the human race wouldn’t survive its release. Handing that over’s not something anyone can make me do. Now, on the other hand, I’m trying to give the human race another place to live. That goal’s in conflict with the protesters who feel that Mars holds more value as a pristinely dead planet.” She tilted her head curiously and said, “I’m just trying to figure out which way the wind’s going to blow on this. We don’t want to invest huge quantities of financial and engineering capital into initiating the terraforming of Mars if the government’s going to decide we shouldn’t do it. Whereas no one can make me—the individual—turn over the technology that lets us get to the stars, it’d be easy to disrupt the terraforming project.”

Stockton appeared to be thinking. Simon broke in with another question, “You started by saying there were two big problems. It sounds like you think it’d actually be possible to undertake the terraforming, it’s just that it’d be an enormous engineering project?”

Ell nodded, “I suspect it’d be the largest engineering project in our history.”

Stockton quirked a lip, “If it’s our biggest engineering problem, I doubt anyone else’s done a bigger one.”

“Ah, you mean ‘ours’ as in the United States. I was thinking ‘ours’ as in the human race.”

“Well, it’d certainly be the biggest we know of. The Teecees aren’t capable of any big engineering projects.”

Stockton obviously hadn’t considered the possibility that Ell might not have told her about other extraterrestrial engineering projects. Instead of getting into an issue irrelevant to the current discussion, Ell said, “Anyway, we’re interested in trying to determine which way the political winds are going to blow, so we’ll know whether or not to begin a huge project that might get shut down.”

Stockton shrugged, “Since my second term’s nearly up, maybe you should be talking to Governor Grassley.”

Ell nodded, “We’ve already talked to the governor as well as his opponent in the presidential race. We also have an appointment at the UN.”

Stockton pursed her lips, “It’s all well and good to talk to various leaders, but if I were you I’d do some polling. Find out how the people feel. Even if Grassley thinks we should terraform, he probably wouldn’t fight for it if the majority of the citizens were against it. On the other hand, if as I suspect, 90% of the population’s in favor of terraforming, leadership will fall into line.”

Elle looked a little surprised, then said, “Thanks. That’s a great idea.”

Simon suddenly interjected, “But isn’t it rather pointless to undertake terraforming Mars if you’re still going to have the radiation problem?”

“Well, that’s actually the compelling reason we’re having this meeting, even though President Stockton’s, I apologize, a lame-duck. I’m mostly here because I’ve been urged to keep the president informed of possible disruptive technologies.”

Epaulding frowned. “You think you have something that could shield Mars from radiation?” he said doubtfully.

“No… We think we have a way to modify humans so they can live on Mars despite the radiation.”

“Some kind of suit?”

“A biological modification.”

Simon broke in with a disbelieving look, “D5R does physics, not biology.”

Ell shrugged, “Mostly true, but not completely. We formed Quantum Biomed a few years back. It specifically takes on biological problems.”

“Yeah.” Simon looked like he wanted to roll his eyes, “Headed by Roger Emmerit and Emily Kenner, two physicists. They’re brilliant, but…”

“We’ve also got associations with a number of clinicians. And with Dr. Regina Barnes at Duke. She’s a geneticist and, with her doing most of the heavy lifting, we’ve come up with a way to modify cells to make them much more radiation resistant.” Ell lifted an eyebrow, “It also, as one might expect, seems to make them significantly more resistant to cancer.”

Looking dubious, Simon said, “For that to be effective, you’d have to modify every cell in the body. Unless you’re talking about a medication they can take, any genetic modification wouldn’t help us. It’d only do the next generation any good.” He shrugged, “I suppose, if it’s going to take us centuries, or even decades, to terraform Mars, by the time the terraforming’s done we’d have people ready to live there.”

Softly, Ell said, “It’s a DNA modification. And we can get it into every cell in your body…”

***

Dr. Barnes stepped into the lab for her meeting with her students, including Zage. As she sat down, she glanced around at them and said, “I assume you guys heard the news about our friend Gordito?”

Zage was unaware of any news himself. He saw the others shaking their heads so decided—whatever it was—it must’ve just happened. He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Did someone manage to track the website somehow? Am I about to be outed? Then he had a worse thought, Maybe someone’s had a fatal reaction to the vaccine or antibody?

Barnes said, “Nobel Peace Prize.”

Zage wondered why she was changing topics without finishing up on Gordito.

“Although,” Barnes gave a little laugh, “apparently when they tried to make their usual call to the recipient, they couldn’t get through.”

Zage felt a prickling in his scalp as he realized what’d actually happened.

“Really?” Alice asked, “Why not?”

“Gordito does have a phone number, but apparently it always goes directly to voicemail. People occasionally get calls back from some kind of synthetic robo-voice. But only if Gordito thinks the call’s important.” Barnes shook her head in amusement, “The people that run that place are really secretive.” She shrugged, “Secretive or not, I think their role in stopping modified smallpox certainly deserves some kind of major award. The Peace Prize seems to fit the bill admirably.”

Barnes turned to Carley and said, “So, how’s your…” Barnes eyes narrowed and focused on Carley’s left wrist. Carley quickly covered it with her right hand, but it was too late to deflect Reggie, “What happened to your wrist?”

“Um, I bruised it…” Carley said uncertainly.

“I’ve seen bruises like that before,” Reggie said slowly. “Four in a row. Like fingers. Whose?”

For a moment Carley didn’t say anything, looking embarrassed. She grimaced, “My brother’s.”

Reggie’s eyebrows shot up. “The brother you looked for so long and hard?!”

Carley nodded, definitely looking embarrassed now. And dejected. She looked down at her shoes.

“Did you file a report?”

Carley shook her head miserably.

“You’re just going to let him get away with doing that to you?!”

Carley looked up into the blazing eyes of the professor they all respected. Zage thought she wanted to say, You don’t know what it’s like, but she didn’t. Instead, she swallowed and said, “No… I just haven’t figured out what to do about it yet.” Firming her expression, she said, “But I will.”

Barnes studied her for a moment, then said, “Let’s go ahead and talk about your research. When we’re done with this meeting, you and I can talk about your brother, just the two of us.”

~~~

When the lab meeting was finished, Dr. Barnes got up and crooked a finger at Carley, “Let’s go to my office and talk.” She turned and left the lab as if it were a foregone conclusion that Carley’d follow.

Carley did. But she felt a little irritated.

Once they were in Barnes’ office, the professor leaned back in her chair and said, “Tell me what’s been happening.”

At first, Carley was reluctant. She felt as if she’d been ordered to divulge personal details of her life. Nonetheless, she started telling the story and soon found it spilling out. Her father’s drinking and abuse of her mother, Carley, and Eli. The murders. Being put in foster care, then adopted.

Trying and failing to have Eli adopted with her.

Searching for Eli through college and grad school.

Her elation when she found him.

Her disappointment when she realized he was an alcoholic like his father.

Carley hesitated briefly, then confessed to Dr. Barnes that she’d used the lab’s resources to sequence Eli’s DNA and find that he had a β-Klotho genetic anomaly, type c. “So, I kind of feel like it’s a problem he doesn’t have control of. As if hating him for being alcoholic would be like hating him for being short, or blue-eyed, or something like that.”

Dr. Barnes sat calmly through this chronicle, listening intently. When Carley wound down, Barnes exhaled long and hard, then said, “Once you get the whole story it’s never as simple as you think it’s going to be. I came back here thinking I should tell you to seek police protection and force him out of your life.”

Carley said, “Yeah, telling me to do something drastic…” She looked down, then back up, “I already did drastic when I killed my dad. I’ve felt guilty ever since. Sometimes I tell myself he deserved it. Or, that I was just trying to protect my mother—however unsuccessfully. But, now that I realize he almost certainly had the β-Klotho anomaly too… I have to think he was another victim.”

Barnes tilted her head curiously, “Are there any ongoing trials, trying to treat β-Klotho-c?”

Carley shook her head dejectedly, “No. It’s a rare anomaly so it’d be an ‘orphan disease.’ Too few patients in the world for any pharmaceutical company to try to push a therapy through the FDA.” She shrugged, “It seems like it could be treated with FGF-21 since the anomaly just makes the patient less sensitive. I briefly thought that, since FGF-21 had been thought to be helpful for diabetes, some company must’ve gotten it approved for that.” She gave Barnes a questioning look, “You know that a doctor can prescribe an approved medication for ‘off-label’ use in a different disease?”

Barnes nodded.

“So, I hoped I could get someone to prescribe it to Eli for his alcoholism.” She shook her head, “But it turns out FGF never got approved for diabetes, so it isn’t actually a prescribable drug.” Carley found her attention focused on her professor, wondering whether Dr. Barnes might suggest using their CFPS setup to make some FGF-21 in the lab the way Zage had. If Barnes thought it was okay, maybe Carley’d have the courage to do it.

Barnes looked musingly out the window for a moment, then said, “I’ll bet companies like Sigma sell FGF-21, but in tiny quantities for really high prices, right?”

“Yeah,” Carley said. “It’d be way beyond what I could afford.” She paused for a moment, then asked, “If it wasn’t so expensive I couldn’t afford it, do you think it’d be okay to give it to him?”

Still looking out the window, Barnes slowly lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a law against it. Considering all the natural remedies and other pseudo-medications people take, it’d seem there must not be any legal issue. My impression’s that you can take whatever you want. In other words, that the law doesn’t come into it unless you’re trying to sell your useless drug to other people.” She paused, “Maybe not even then since so many companies sell ridiculous herbal preparations. On the other hand, most of those remedies are taken orally or rubbed into the skin, not injected.” She glanced at Carley, “I’m not up on FGF-21. It is a protein that’d have to be injected, right?”

Carley nodded.

“So, maybe there’s some rule against injectables that doesn’t apply to all those nonsensical naturopathic remedies? I don’t know.” Barnes gave Carley a hard look, “But I do know you’ve got to avoid being alone with your brother. Just because he’s your sibling, or you feel you owe it to him, or something, doesn’t mean you’ve got to let him hurt you. You owe that to yourself.”

Carley’s eyes dropped, “I can stay away from him. No problem. That doesn’t make him stay away from me.”

“Yeah,” Barnes sighed. “And that’s a big problem.” She gave Carley an intense look, “You need a way to protect yourself.”

“Are you… Are you suggesting I buy a gun?!”

Barnes looked out her window again, “No… Though I might, were I in your situation. But, I was thinking of something nonlethal like a Taser.”

“Tasers kill people sometimes.”

“So does hitting them. Or shoving them off you. Everything kills some people sometimes, even riding around in a car. Well, that’s rare nowadays with AIs doing the driving, but it used to be common.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You could get some self-defense training too.”

“I’m not great at athletic stuff.”

Barnes gave her a look, “Being clumsy and clueless is a lot worse than just being clumsy.”

~~~

When Carley got back to the lab, Alice and Rick were gone. At first, she thought that was good because she didn’t have them asking about her wrist. Then she felt lonely. She walked over closer to the bench that usually hid Zage. When she peeked over it, she found him looking directly at her. “Hi, Zage.”

“Hi,” he replied, unblinkingly.

Now Carley felt uncomfortable for coming over to see if he was there without any reason for doing so. “Um… How’re your Alzheimer’s crystallizations coming along?”

He gave a nod, “I’ve had a breakthrough and now the ones that’re more highly associated with Alzheimer’s are crystallizing more rapidly than the others. But, knowing that doesn’t solve the problem of how we might treat those people.”

“Oh,” Carley said, stopping to think. It felt good to think about something besides her own problems for a moment. “I guess we could carry out gene evaluations prior to conception, then eliminate or change out genes that result in bad folding. But the problem is that it doesn’t do anything for the people who’re already born, and it especially doesn’t do anything for those who already have Alzheimer’s, right?”

Zage nodded. “Knowing the gene associations would let us predict dementia, both likelihood, and probable severity. But I don’t know if I’d want to know that I had a disease like that if there wasn’t any treatment.” He shrugged, “Some people might.”

“Yeah,” Carley sighed, “that’d just be depressing.”

Zage hopped down off his chair and started around the end of the bench toward her. She suddenly felt uncertain. She shouldn’t hug him, but she didn’t know why else he might be coming around the bench. It would leave them with no physical objects separating them. But, when he approached, he held out his hand as if he wanted to give her something. She reached out and he dropped a small black cylinder into her palm, “What is it?”

“Pepper-spray.” He gave her a hard look, “In case you need it… You know, if Eli attacks you again.”

“Oh,” Carley said, staring at the little cylinder. At first, she thought she shouldn’t use it. Then she remembered how someone had used pepper spray to save her from Matt when he’d gotten overly amorous at her party. “Um, how do you use it?”

Zage showed her how to release the safety, point, and spray. “For practice, you should spray something with it a couple of times when there’s nobody around. You don’t want your first time spraying it to be when you’re already under assault.”

When she looked over at the trash can, thinking she’d try spraying a little bit into it, he put a hand on her wrist and said, “Outside. With the wind blowing. You don’t want to be trapped in a room with it.”

“Okay. But how many sprays does this have in it? If I use it for practice, will I need to get another one to use for real?”

“Um,” Zage said, “It’s port connected. It won’t run out.”

“Really? It doesn’t seem like anyone should need that much.”

He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “My mom’s worried about me. Being a little kid out in the big, bad world and all.”

Carley tried to hand the second one back to him, “Then I shouldn’t take it. Your mom’ll be mad.”

Now he looked even more self-conscious, “I’ve got another one. My mom bought a bunch.”

“Still,” Carley said, continuing to hold it out, “you should keep this one today. Give me another one tomorrow.” She grinned, “She wouldn’t want you traveling home unarmed.”

He didn’t reach out for it. Instead, he laughed, “Believe it or not, I’ve got another one here.”

Carley frowned unbelievingly, “Really?”

“Yeah,” Zage turned and trotted around the bench to his area.

She stretched up to see where he kept it. This let her hyper-acute hearing make out his mumble to his AI. He said, “Another one.” Then a moment later, “Everything’s fine.”

Without reaching into his backpack or onto his desk, he just turned and came back around the bench toward her, holding up another pepper spray device. “See what I mean? My mother’s really paranoid.”

Carley nodded. However, she wasn’t at all sure what it meant. Obviously, his AI was instantly delivering a pepper spray device to him through a port. She looked down at the pepper-spray device in her hand, This’s a weapon. What kind of mother’d have an AI holding two of them for her five-year-old child?! Aloud, she said, “Thanks.”

There was a knock on the doorframe and a large man leaned into the room. His eyes thoroughly scanned the room, then he looked Carley and Zage up and down. Casually. Perhaps too casually, he said, “Is this Dr. Barnes lab?”

“Uh-huh,” Zage said, to Carley’s surprise, sounding irritated.

“Is everything okay here? Somebody thought they heard a call for help.”

“Yep, everything’s fine here.” Now Zage sounded overly bright.

“Okay,” the guy said, “I’ll check some of the other rooms.” He pulled back out of the doorway and disappeared.

Zage turned back to Carley. “Um,” he said hesitantly, “my mom also has me taking some self-defense courses. “If you like, I could teach you a few things I’ve learned?”

Carley was still looking after the big man, thinking he didn’t look like the usual people you saw on campus. More like a soldier or something. And, he’d been checking to make sure everyone was okay, like a security guard or something. But he didn’t have on any kind of uniform or badge.

Unable to decide what might be going on with the man, she turned back to Zage and studied him for a moment until she remembered what he’d been talking about. She said, “I’m not much of an athlete. I probably couldn’t learn judo or anything like that.” She tilted her head, “Besides, I’m a lot bigger than you. We probably shouldn’t be trying to throw each other around, right?”

Zage shrugged, “Don’t forget, Eli’s bigger than you are.”

Carley pulled a face, “Yeah, his relative size is hard to forget after the other day.”

“If you want, we could just talk about effective places to hit an assailant?”

“Assailant,” Carley thought, finding it hard to think of her brother in those terms. Then she thought that “an assailant” was exactly what Eli’d been. “For instance?” she asked.

“Well, I assume that you know hitting a man in the testicles—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Carley said. “Everybody knows that one.”

“And your knee’s usually best positioned to do that, right?”

Carley nodded, not having thought about it before, but deciding it seemed obvious.

“You know where the solar plexus is?”

Carley nodded, pointing at her upper abdomen.

“It takes a really hard punch or kick to the solar plexus to have much effect, but if you carry it off, it works really well. If somebody’s grabbed you from behind but you’re off center a little bit, your elbow can usually punch back into the solar plexus. Strike as hard as you can though. A weak punch won’t do much.” He gave her a funny look, “I’d suggest you practice striking back with your elbow before you actually have to do it. At least punch back into your mattress when you’re lying on your back. Hard!”

Thoughtfully, Carley nodded again. She felt surprised to have a little kid instructing her in self-defense. But, she reflected, she was almost always feeling astonished by what this kid could do.

Zage talked about stomping insteps on people who grabbed her from behind. “And then there’s the head,” he said, telling her that even fairly light blows to the nose or Adam’s apple could be disabling. “Gouging eyes can be pretty effective when someone’s grabbed you. Hitting the chin shouldn’t be the objective like a lot of people think. What you’re trying to do is accelerate the skull in any direction. Sudden acceleration’s what produces the concussion. By all means, strike the chin if you have to, but hitting his teeth will hurt your hand. Hitting the forehead or the side of the skull works just fine for knocking your assailant out.” He looked at her arms, “It takes a really hard blow to drop somebody though. You might not have the upper body strength for that. But,” he brightened, “if you get a chance to send a knee to the head…”

Carley laughed. “I guess I’d need to ask them to bend over… ‘Sir, if you’d just put your head right here,’” she said, holding her hands out to indicate a spot she’d be able to easily strike with a knee.

Zage laughed with her, “You could talk them into it, couldn’t you?” He tilted his head and got a serious look, “But maybe, if you were grappling or something, you might find yourself in a position where knee to the head would be your best weapon.” He snorted, “Though I agree, probably not.”

~~~

On her way home, Carley mulled over what she’d learned. A surprising amount, she decided. Especially considering she’d learned it from a little kid. She glanced behind her and saw no one was nearby. She darted her hand into her pocket, pulling out her new pepper-spray and releasing the safety with her little finger like she’d practiced. She shot the telephone pole she was walking past.

At first, she was pleased that she’d hit the spot she was aiming for. Then she seriously regretted walking past the pole and into a faint mist of downwind spray that had deflected off of it. Holy crap! That stuff’s awful!

***

Zage said, “Osprey, let me listen to Gordito’s message about the Nobel Prize.”

***

Zage had been in the basement lab working on his phage project since he got home and hadn’t seen his parents.

Ell called him up for dinner. As he walked into the kitchen, his dad was saying, “…my son won’t have any reason to idolize me anymore.”

Ell sighed, “Yeah, it’ll be hard to get any respect from a six-year-old kid who’s already won the same kind of prizes we have.”

Zage looked uncertainly back and forth between his parents. Detecting sly smiles, he said, “Are you guys giving me grief about the Nobel?”

Shan guffawed.

Ell was grinning at her husband, “How messed up are we that we’re hassling our son for secretly winning a Nobel Prize?” She turned to Zage and dropped to one knee, gathering him into a hug. “We’re incredibly proud of you Zage.”

Zage hugged her back. When she let go, he went over to hug his dad. “You guys’ll always have my respect. You got your prizes for doing science.”

Ell tilted her head and gave him a curious look, “You’re getting yours for saving millions… probably billions of people. That’s a pretty big deal. Besides, it took a lot of science to do it.”

Zage shrugged, “I might’ve helped the CDC get there a little faster, but Dr. Kelso was going to solve the problem anyway.”

Shan said, “Getting there ‘a little faster’ during the epidemic’s period of exponential spread probably made a difference of millions or billions of people’s lives.”

Zage grinned at his dad, “Okay, you’re the mathematician…”

Shan rolled his eyes, “Are you giving me grief about my profession?”

Zage grinned again as he got up onto his chair, “Maybe a little.” He looked down at his plate, “Oh! Hamburgers! My favorite.”

Ell snorted, “We thought it was the least we could do.”

“Can we have ice cream with chocolate syrup for dessert?” Zage asked, taking an enthusiastic bite of his plain hamburger.

Shan laughed, “Your mom thought you might make that request. We thought maybe we’d take you out to Ben and Jerry’s?”

“Awesome,” Zage mumbled around a mouthful.

Hesitantly, Ell asked, “Are you wanting to go to Oslo and collect your prize?”

Zage gave her a surprised look. Once he swallowed, he said, “I thought you’d be against me getting that kind of publicity? That’s the whole reason for ‘Gordito,’ right?”

“Well, we do think publicity like that’d make your life a lot more difficult. But, if you want to go accept it, and are willing to accept the problems that kind of publicity might cause, we’ll figure out how to help you do it.”

Zage shrugged, “I’m fine without it. I don’t really think I deserve it anyway. Unless you think it’s rude of me not to go accept it?” He tilted his head curiously, “I’m not sure what to do about it though. They’ve called the Gordito site a couple more times and seem a little freaked out that no one’s responding to their announcement.”

“You haven’t even had Gordito call them back using his synthetic voice?” Shan asked.

“No, I wasn’t sure what to say.”

Shan gave a little laugh and looked at Ell, “It’s hard to remember that our little science genius isn’t necessarily a social interaction genius, isn’t it?”

Ell nodded thoughtfully. Looking at Zage, she said, “You said you thought Dr. Kelso deserved it more than you. Do you really feel that way?”

Zage shrugged, “Sure. I couldn’t have done that stuff without her. And, all I really did was help her be a little faster at what she was doing anyway.”

“Well, you remember how I’ve told you that sharing credit around with other people gets you a lot of good will?”

Zage nodded.

“You could have Gordito call the committee and tell them you’d like Dr. Kelso to accept the award on your behalf. Since you don’t need the money from the award, you could tell them to give the money to her.”

“Oh!” Zage said excitedly. “That’s a great idea. Or,” he got a thoughtful look, “maybe some of the money could go to the CDC’s research on obesity viruses?”

Shan nodded, “The money in half of a Nobel prize probably won’t make a big difference to that kind of research. But, having someone as prominent as Gordito bring attention to it might actually get that kind of research more funding in the future.”

~~~

As they drove to Ben and Jerry’s, Zage said, “Osprey, connect me to Dr. Kelso at the CDC. Use Gordito’s synthetic voice.”

A few moments later, Laqua Kelso’s voice came on the line. She sounded a little excited. “Gordito! Congratulations on your Nobel prize.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m hoping you’ll do me a little favor…”

Chapter Five

Getting off D5R’s Gulfstream, Ell walked across the tarmac with a small gaggle of ETR employees. As she neared the gate to the parking area, she saw someone standing beside it. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized Jillian Pardo. The lady’s persistent, Ell thought with a mixture of irritation and admiration. Mentally, she queued up her “no comment” response for whatever questions Pardo might pose.

But, as Ell stepped through the gate, Pardo asked a question she hadn’t even considered. “Dr. Donsaii, is it true you have a 3 to 6-year-old son?”

Stunned by the question, Ell stopped and faced the woman. She hoped she kept the shock from registering on her face as she tried to form a surprised but incredulous expression instead. “Whatever gave you that idea?!”

“A credible source revealed he’d been kidnapped.”

Probably that damned FBI agent, Calder, Ell thought as she calmed herself so she’d stay out of the zone. She’d never liked Calder, though she’d hoped that giving the agent the win on rolling up the Chinese kidnapping ring would’ve left Calder on her side. Trying to look even more startled, she responded to Pardo’s statement with a series of her own questions, “Really? Kidnapped? Just now? Or a while ago?”

“A while ago,” Pardo said. “How long did they have him?”

Ell widened her eyes, “Have who?”

“Your son,” Pardo said, sounding irritated.

“My goodness,” Ell laughed, “you’re the one telling this astonishing story. Perhaps you’d better check your notes?” She turned and continued toward her car, still trying to calm herself.

~~~

Jillian ground her teeth as she watched Donsaii walk away, looking amused. Well, that went just great. Another couple of days wasted.

***

Oslo, Norway— There have been a few days of confusion because, initially, no one responded to the announcement of Gordito’s Nobel Peace Prize. Today, we’re told that the famously secretive Gordito finally returned the committee’s call, from an untraceable number using a synthetic voice. Apparently, the only two methods by which Gordito communicates are synthetic voice phone calls or responses posted on its website.

In the call, Gordito informed the committee that Dr. Laqua Kelso of the CDC had agreed to accept the award on Gordito’s behalf. Apparently, Gordito says that Dr. Kelso and the CDC were the ones most responsible for resolving the epidemic and that they deserve most of the credit. It’s Gordito’s wish that the CDC split the monetary award between Dr. Kelso and the support of research into the obesity viruses.

For those of you unaware, there are a number of viruses that are associated with obesity. Though there is disagreement as to whether they are actually the cause of epidemic obesity, apparently Gordito believes that the question deserves more attention than…

***

Will Davidson ushered the representatives from Bayer into the conference room. Though Bayer was quite excited about the weight loss peptide, they’d wanted to have an actual face to face meeting with the research team who’d discovered it before proceeding farther. Will felt a little bit worried because he himself had only met Marcus Turner and Vanessa Jenkins so far. Actually, he’d only met Jenkins once.

Turner seemed to understand the importance of appearances, having worn a sports jacket to a meeting with Will in the past. And, Jenkins had been dressed nicely the one time Davidson had met her. Nonetheless, Will couldn’t help worrying. He’d occasionally had a scientist dress casually for a meeting with industry. Some of them seemed to believe that the only things that mattered were their results. They didn’t seem to recognize that a professional appearance could instill subliminal confidence in those results.

Nonetheless, this Zage Kinrais was the most junior member of the research team. Surely, he’d dress well, or at least as well as his professor.

Although they weren’t actually late yet, Will turned back to the door, saying, “Please, take your seats. I’ll just check to make sure Dr. Turner and his team can find the conference room.” In truth, Will had suddenly had a deep-seated premonition Kinrais would be slovenly. If so, he wanted to turn him away from the meeting. Surely, we don’t actually need the most junior member of the team at the meeting, he thought.

However, before he got to the door it opened and Dr. Turner stepped in. Turner was followed by Vanessa Jenkins and… Oh my God! She brought her child?! To a meeting with representatives of a major pharmaceutical company?!

Will glanced toward the door, thinking, Carol’s going to be really pissed if I ask her to babysit this kid, but better Carol is pissed than the kid pitch a tantrum in the middle of a multimillion-dollar meeting. “Um,” he said, wondering where Kinrais was and reaching for the child’s hand, “let me—”

“Hi Mr. Davidson,” the kid said cheerfully, “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten to meet you before. I’m Zage Kinrais.” He took Will’s hand and shook it.

“Um, hello…” Will said, not knowing what further he might say. “Um, just a moment,” he said letting go of the kid's hand and turning to the professor. “Um, Dr. Turner?” he said, almost inaudibly, “A word, please?”

Turner stepped closer and, speaking just as quietly, cut immediately to the crux, “I assume you’re worried about the boy’s age. I think you’ll find he handles himself quite well. He really is an important member of our team.”

“Um, but I didn’t warn…” Will gave a weak wave toward the Bayer representatives.

Turner gave him a little grin, “Probably just as well you didn’t. They might not’ve come.” Turner turned and introduced himself to the Bayer people. He introduced the child as a “prodigy and a co-investigator,” raising their eyebrows just as high as Will’s wanted to ascend.

Will did his best to pretend he’d known about it all along.

~~~

To Will’s great relief, the child sat quietly, saying virtually nothing and causing few if any problems. He didn’t even get fidgety while Jenkins made a relatively long presentation regarding their study of the effects the peptide had on obesity in rats.

The meeting hadn’t gone terribly far beyond Jenkins presentation before it got to the issue Will had been worried about. Mr. Schmidt, the leader of the Bayer delegation, said, “As you might imagine, we’re somewhat concerned about the fact that the sequence for the peptide was actually developed by Gordito, whoever Gordito might be. We’ve reviewed your documentation of the claim that Gordito’s relinquished any claim it might have to the peptide. It appears sound, but we remain concerned about Gordito’s nebulous legal status. After all, no one even seems to know whether Gordito’s an individual, a group of some kind, or some other entity. We don’t even know what country Gordito resides in or what effect that national residency might have on any agreements.”

Will turned to look at Dr. Turner, wondering how he’d respond. To his dismay, he saw that both Turner and Jenkins were looking at the child.

The boy turned to Mr. Schmidt and said, “I don’t think it’s a problem. You could, if you wanted, contact Gordito yourself in order to confirm that it’s relinquished its claim. In addition, if you’re worried about the legal ramifications, you should be aware that there’s a recent legal precedent. Vickers v. Centers for Disease Control determined that—using much the same language you’ll find in our documentation—Gordito had, in fact legally relinquished its claim to the antibody against the modified smallpox virus.”

“Oh,” Schmidt said, shooting a glance at one of his juniors, presumably a lawyer. “Joseph, can you pull up that case and tell us whether you believe it applies?”

The lawyer nodded, looking embarrassed that he hadn’t known about the precedent. He quickly began murmuring to his AI.

“Meanwhile,” Schmidt said, “I think it’d be good if we all contacted Gordito together and confirmed that Gordito’s relinquished said rights to you.”

Now, Will found himself worrying that Gordito would simply say it’d relinquished the rights. Perhaps, those rights were now freely available to anyone and not actually the property of the University either.

To Will’s dismay, the boy had gone out to the bathroom by the time that Gordito replied to Schmidt’s call. Since the kid seemed to know more about Gordito’s relationship to the intellectual property than Turner, Will feared his absence might be problematic. He also worried about Gordito’s reputation for answering in its own good time. However, in what was obviously a synthesized voice, Gordito responded clearly and unambiguously that it had relinquished its rights to Turner, Jenkins, and Kinrais, as governed by any agreements that they might have with the University.

At that point, Schmidt’s legal advisor reported that the legal precedent appeared solid. Apparently satisfied with that, Schmidt said, “Moving on. Though your presentation on the effects of the peptide on rat obesity was quite impressive, we were hoping for a little more detail on how the peptide works, as well as whether it’s likely to work in other animals, and, of course, humans.”

The kid had just come back in the room and Will had the distinct impression that Turner and Jenkins were relieved to have him there. Certainly, they looked hopefully at him. Before Will’s sinking feeling got too deep, however, the boy commandeered the big screen in the room and began pulling up diagram after diagram. Although Will didn’t know much about proteins, he’d certainly seen some of those same types of diagrams in the news about Gordito and the protein work it’d done. Kinrais calmly and clearly explained the diagrams, showing what he called “receptor sites” and showing the Bayer people that the rat receptor for the peptide was quite similar to the human and porcine receptors. “In fact,” he said, “though it’s likely the rat peptide would work in humans, Gordito also provided this slightly modified peptide that should attach to the human receptor site with higher affinity.”

Will couldn’t tell the difference between the two peptides, but Schmidt’s scientific expert looked appropriately impressed. With some unease, Will noticed that Turner and Jenkins looked similarly impressed. It’s as if this whole thing’s the kid’s project, not theirs!

~~~

When all was said and done, they left the room with an agreement in principle for the University to do pig model testing of the peptide on Bayer’s dime. They also had an agreement in principle for Bayer to fund the patents and develop the peptide as a human drug.

Assuming it was successful in the pigs.

***

When Carley walked into her apartment complex, she saw Eli sitting by her door in one of the chairs from the pool. She pulled out her pepper-spray and positioned her little finger on the safety. “Hello Eli,” she said warily.

“Hi Sis,” he said, looking remorseful.

Wondering if he was just putting on a show for her, Carley stopped some distance from his chair. “Where’s Marnie?”

Eli shook his head dejectedly. “She left me. Not that I can blame her. I treated her like shit.” His eyes left Carley’s and wandered around the apartment complex, “I’m such an asshole. I didn’t deserve her.” He looked back at Carley, “I don’t deserve you. I’m really sorry about how I treated you the other night.”

“Yeah,” Carley said, holding up her left wrist. “You left some bruises.”

Eli closed his eyes, “I’m so sorry.” He opened them and looked directly into Carley’s eyes, “I want you to know I’ve had my last drink, for sure this time.”

Carley wondered whether she should tell him about his β-Klotho anomaly. No, it’ll just give him an excuse for his drinking, she thought. Then, But it is an excuse for his drinking. Deciding she’d rather he didn’t know, she said, “That’s good. I hope you can stick to it this time.”

“I will,” he said emphatically, getting up. He glanced away, then back, “I don’t suppose you could spare a few bucks for dinner?”

Though it tore at her heart, Carley shook her head. “I’m afraid you’d spend it on booze.”

“You’re right, it won’t do me any harm to go hungry for a bit. Maybe when I’ve been sober for a while you’ll come to trust me again.”

Carley nodded, “I’d like to help you out if you can stay on the wagon. Where’re you staying?”

“At the homeless shelter.”

“I thought they wouldn’t let you stay there if you’d been drinking.”

“They won’t. If they even think I’ve been drinking, I have to sleep on the street.” He gave her a wry grin, “I’ve got my own little culvert. But, it’ll be good to get straight. I don’t want to have to sleep in that damned hole this winter. Hell, even now I can’t stay in a culvert when it rains.” He gave her an emphatic little nod, “So, I’m getting my shit together. No more drinking.”

“I’m glad,” Carley said. But after Eli’s oft-repeated Jekyll or Hyde changes, she didn’t actually have much hope.

***

Ell walked into a conference room at D5R. Roger, Emma, Rob Braun, Ben Stavos, and Mark Amundsen were already there. AJ stood up by a big screen, looking nervous. She glanced at the screen and saw two grey colored rings, each looking like they had a black band around their inner circumference. They were clamped to a wall that’d been marked in one-foot increments. The smaller ring was about 6 ½ feet tall. So, that has to be a two-meter ring, Ell thought. The big one reached above the sixteen-foot mark, so it had to be a five-meter ring.

Ell grinned at AJ, “So, we’re going to see if these actually work?”

AJ nodded, glancing back over his shoulder at the screen. “I didn’t think we should watch the test in person because we’re going to be running ten-million watts through the little one, then 62-million watts through the big one.”

Ell snorted, “Sounds a lot more impressive than ten-megawatts and sixty-two-megawatts, doesn’t it?”

AJ shrugged, “I think we should use the most impressive sounding numbers that’re accurate. We need to remind ourselves that we’re running a dangerous amount of power.”

“Granted.” She lifted an eyebrow, “But I’m looking forward to hearing how you’re going to describe the 680 to 812-megawatts it’s going to take to open a ten-meter port all the way to Mars.”

This broke a little laugh out of AJ, but then he firmed his expression, “Are you ready to see whether these things work?”

Everyone nodded.

Evidently, audio was being imported from the site also—because a basso profundo note signaled the power coming on. The sound rapidly rose to become inaudible. Smoke, which seemed less than in their previous test with the one-meter port, started pouring from one side of the two-meter ring.

AJ pointed up to the numbers in the upper right corner of the screen, “This’s the temperature in the tube. My calculations said we needed a tube with this diameter to be able to run enough cold nitrogen through it to keep it from overheating. It looks like the temperature’s doing fine, so maybe we could’ve used a smaller tube.” He looked over at the rest of them, “On the other hand, I’d rather have a tube that’s too big and stays too cool then make the tolerances tight.”

Ell glanced at the others. They all looked entranced.

AJ ran the port through its paces, making it hemispherical, then bi-hemispherical and waiting till the numbers stabilized. Once the port seemed to be running in a stable fashion, he turned to the others and said, “I think that’s enough of a test at this level. The next step on my plan’s to run enough power through it to open a port all the way to Mars, even though the two ends of the port aren’t separated by that much distance. This’s just to see if the system, as built, will handle the power. Any objections?”

When no one objected, AJ gave some commands to his AI. Nothing seemed to happen to the sphere that was pouring out smoke on the screen, but Ell saw the numbers in the upper right-hand corner spinning up. AJ pointed out the increasing numbers to everyone in case they’d missed it. They all watched for a couple of minutes until the numbers stabilized. AJ said, “It looks like we’re within tolerances. In fact, we’re surprisingly close to what my calculations predicted.” He turned and gave them a sheepish grin, “Whenever that happens, I worry somebody fudged the numbers.”

Rob Braun laughed, “Me too.”

AJ asked, “Anyone want to try something else? Or should we move on to the five-meter ring?”

No one had any suggestions, so AJ mumbled to his AI. Ell saw the numbers in the upper right-hand corner of the screen start spinning downward. “Um,” she said, puzzled, “you’re dialing it down rather than just turning it off?”

“Uh-huh,” AJ said, “I just thought we should see what the power level is when the port fails to maintain its connection. You know, check empirically to be sure that the power it takes to maintain the port agrees with our calculated needs.”

“Sure,” Ell said, thinking, That’s a waste of time. The calculated power’s always been correct in the past.”

With a loud buzzing snap and a bright flash like an arc going out, the smoking two-meter sphere disappeared.

Ell’s eyes turned to the five-meter ring, but then went back to AJ when he said, “Huh?”

He was staring at the numbers in the upper right corner of the screen, so Ell’s eyes went there, but she wasn’t sure which of the many numbers in the corner he was looking at.

AJ turned slowly to look at Ell. “The port didn’t fail until the power got down below seven-megawatts,” he said, sounding pleasantly surprised.

Ell felt a tingle in her scalp, Could it be my calculations show how much power it takes to establish the port, but that the power required to maintain the opening is less, especially as ports get bigger? After all, little ports didn’t require much power, so decreased demand would hardly be noticed. They hadn’t really done any testing of maintenance power requirements as ports got bigger. If the effect didn’t become substantial until ports got big they might not’ve noticed.

Excitedly, Ell said, “If that’s correct and holds up with even bigger ports, it’s a really important finding AJ! You need to go back and see whether that one-meter port runs on less power than it takes to open it too. In fact, we need the Portal Tech people to test ongoing demand in half-meter and quarter-meter ports too.” Her eyes went to the five-meter ring, “For now, fire that big boy up and let’s see what its ongoing power requirement is.”

Roger turned excitedly to her, “If power requirements keep going down as size goes up, we may want to use twenty-meter ports for terraforming. Or even bigger!”

“Yeah,” Ell said dubiously, “if we can make them work at those sizes. I’m worried about whether we can get them to work at five-meters or ten-meters.”

“Oh, pooh,” Roger said with a dismissive wave. “You’re such a pessimist!”

Ell grinned and turned back to AJ, “You ready to fire up the five-meter?”

AJ nodded and spoke to his AI. A moment later the port opened with a bass note they could feel. The note started to rise. Ell glanced around, surprised that the little conference room was fitted with woofers capable of reproducing such a low note with that much power. She missed seeing the five-meter hoop start emitting smoke, then disappear in an arcing flash. She looked at AJ, “Why’d you shut it off?”

“I didn’t,” he said, looking chagrined. He pointed at the screen where the smoke was clearing to reveal the remnants of the graphene ring hanging in tatters. Ell saw him mumble to his AI and a moment later a graph popped up on the big screen. It showed a line that geometrically increased. The Y-axis was labeled “Temperature.” AJ said, “Your crap engineer must’ve made a mistake in his calculations for keeping the ring cool. Even graphene can’t stand up to that kind of heat.”

Ell felt nonplussed for a moment, then laughed. “I suppose you’re referring to that dumb-ass AJ Richards guy?”

AJ nodded, looking embarrassed.

Ell got up and strode around the table to give him a hug. Pushing him back to arm’s length, she said, “You should’ve been with us when we tried to get ports to work in the first place. Back then, ‘failure’ was our middle name.”

AJ produced a shy grin, “Glad to help you reminisce…”

“Reload, AJ,” she said. “The fact that you thought to test the assumption that maintenance power remained the same in these big ports is worth a lot more than one blown out five-meter ring.”

He snorted, “The people who made these things over at Allosci and Portal Tech might not feel the same way.”

Ell laughed, “If they give you too much grief, let me know. I can give you ammunition for your argument by telling you some stories about some of their colossal screw-ups.”

***

Jillian was awake in the middle of the night again. Dammit! she thought. She considered turning over one more time. Instead, she sat up and stuffed a couple of pillows behind her back. Speaking to her AI, she said, “Play back the interview with Donsaii.”

Jillian watched it through. Then again. After the third time through, she took out a pillow and sagged back to stare at the ceiling. Donsaii never denied having a kid! She just replied to my questions with questions of her own!

An hour later, Jillian finally dozed off, still wondering how she could parlay Donsaii’s lack of a denial into a story.

In the morning she woke, thinking, You can’t.

***

Lifting her fork to her mouth, Ell paused looking at her son, “What’s new with you?”

Zage said, “A German company’s buying the rights to the weight loss peptide. They’re going to pay to patent it so the University doesn’t have to.”

Shan looked curious, “What company?”

Zage shrugged, “It’s called Bayer. Have you heard of it?”

Shan snorted, “Oh yeah, Bayer’s a huge pharmaceutical company. I think it got its start making aspirin way back in the 1800s.” He gave Zage an appraising look, “I guess at least someone thinks your peptide’s going to be important.”

Zage looked at his mother, “They’d like the University to do some large animal testing, probably in pigs. Do you think we could get some of those injection ports from Quantum Biotech? It’d really simplify the testing because we wouldn’t have to be injecting the animals all the time.”

Ell studied him for a moment, then slowly said, “Sure. But Bayer’s a big company. I’d imagine they could afford to buy some ports.”

Zage looked blandly back at his mother, “But what if they decide to save some money by having us do the injections?”

“Then, you charge them dearly for the man-hours required to do the injections.”

He looked unhappy, “I’d really like to do it with ports. I don’t want the animals having to get injected all the time when we could be doing it with ports. It’d seem kind of mean.”

Ell leaned forward to place her elbow on the table and rest her chin in her hand. Intently focused on her son, she said, “I’m pretty sure that if their alternative is to pay for man-hours to do the injections, they’ll be happy to buy some injection ports. In fact, I’ll bet if you just put injection ports in your protocol, they’ll pay for them without asking any questions.”

“Okay,” Zage said, brightening, “could you help me get some samples and pricing so that I can put them in the protocol?”

“Samples, huh?”

“Um, yeah. So we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

Ell just sat studying her son. After a minute, Shan asked, “Is there a problem with that?”

“Maybe,” Ell said slowly. She turned and looked questioningly at Shan, “Have you seen your son without his shirt on recently?”

Shan turned a curious gaze on Zage. After a moment, he said, “I guess not. Is something wrong?”

Ell turned back to her son. “Maybe,” she said slowly. “Zage, can you take off your shirt for your dad?”

Zage gave an odd little wince, but stood and slowly pulled off his shirt. Oddly, before he pulled off the shirt, he first tugged up the waistband of his pants

Shan stared. He’d known Zage wasn’t as chubby as he’d been in the past. But the boy he was looking at now wasn’t fat at all. He didn’t look underfed or scrawny, but he had very little extra padding. “Wow kid, your diet’s really been working!”

Ell said, “Can you pull down your waistband a little bit?”

Looking unhappy, Zage did so—fractionally.

Ell sighed, “A little farther please.”

Shan gave Ell a questioning look but then turned back to look at his son. There was a faint blue mark on his lower abdomen. Feeling alarmed, Shan said, “Is that an old bruise?”

Zage looked unhappy but didn’t say anything.

More upset, Shan said, “Did somebody hurt you?!”

A pinched look on his face, Zage still didn’t answer. Quietly, Ell said, “It’s an injection bruise, right?” She sounded disappointed.

Zage gave a tiny nod.

A light went on for Shan, “You’ve been injecting yourself with your weight-loss peptide?”

Zage nodded again. He put on a fake smile, “It’s been working great.”

Gravely, Ell said, “You promised me you wouldn’t experiment on yourself with that stuff!”

Drawing his head back and giving her an indignant look, Zage said, “I did not! You didn’t even ask me to promise. You said, I should test it in tissue culture and in rats first. I did both. The peptide worked great without any problems.”

Closing her eyes and sadly shaking her head, Ell said, “We’ve got ourselves a barracks lawyer.”

“Really mom!” Zage said exasperatedly, “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ve been on the peptide for over six months and I feel fine.”

Ell sighed, “There could still be something wrong. Toxicity that’s just not severe enough for you to feel it yet. But, still, a problem that, with enough time will make you sick, perhaps irreversibly. We need to take you in and get you tested.”

“Tested for what? We don’t even know what we’d be looking for. The peptide doesn’t do anything except prevent down-regulation of Trim28. Essentially, it makes me more normal, not less.”

“It isn’t supposed to do anything except prevent down-regulation of Trim28. What we’re worried about’s some kind of unanticipated side effect. Maybe, though unintended, it accidentally happens to bind some other receptor. Before Bayer tries your peptide in people they’re going to want to consider possible side effects. If you’re going to do further research with them, you should start figuring out what kind of side-effects they normally look for in these kinds of studies and which problems might be specific to your particular peptide. Since it needs to be done anyway, why don’t you research it? Then we’ll get you tested for whatever you come up with.”

Zage rolled his eyes, “Okay,” he said, an unhappy look on his face.

“And I want you to stop those injections.”

Crossing his arms and looking obstinate, Zage said, “I read that when the first port-enabled space-plane went up to the ISS, you were in it. Against the advice of the astronauts who were flying it. In fact, a lot of people thought it was too dangerous and that you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Ell’s eyes widened momentarily, then she grinned, “So you think that, because I did some dangerous things when I was young, that justifies you doing the same?”

With a nod, Zage said, “That was definitely unsafe. A lot of people thought so. This peptide’s been thoroughly evaluated in tissue culture and in an animal study. It’s not nearly as risky.”

“We’d flown the spaceplane up to LEO several times under remote control. We also knew it was going to work safely.”

Zage shrugged, “So, then you admit it’s the same thing essentially.”

Ell laughed, “Okay, let’s compromise. You can keep taking it for one month. Meanwhile, you carefully and thoroughly research what kind of side effects or toxicity such a peptide might have. Cross-binding and whatever else you can think of.” She gave him a wink, “Get that Gordito site to tell you whether your peptide has a similar morphology to any other bioactive peptides. Review the literature on the toxicity of other peptide pharmaceuticals. You give me an honest appraisal and we’ll get you thoroughly tested. If you haven’t gotten it done in a month, or you find any indication it might be toxic, you stop taking it. Okay?”

Zage nodded, “Okay.” He shrugged, “You’re right, we really ought to do all that stuff anyway.”

Ell snorted, “Well, I guess we almost see eye to eye.”

***

As Carley walked into her apartment complex she heard the faint sound of a shoe lifting. Something other people would’ve heard, but she recognized as the sound a soft rubber sneaker made after it’d been standing in one place. Standing long enough that it pulled free with a slight ripping noise when it came up.

The sound came from up ahead, just around the corner of the building. A corner she walked by every day on her way home.

She knew it was Eli. She’d heard that little ripping sound from his shoes before. If he was hiding around the corner she walked by every day, rather than standing or sitting by her apartment like he usually did…

That probably wasn’t good.

Carley turned and walked slowly back away from the corner. Though, to her, the sounds of her footsteps were plainly evident, she felt fairly sure people without her oddly acute sense of hearing wouldn’t hear them. Hopefully, that included her brother.

She exited her apartment complex through the gate she usually entered and walked around to the other side, coming in through a gate much closer to her own apartment. From this gate, as soon as she arrived in the common area around the pool, she could see Eli leaning against the corner of the building.

Right where she’d heard him.

He didn’t notice her until she’d almost reached her apartment. The house AI opened the door and she was stepping inside before he called her name.

Inside, she turned back to face the door. “AI, keep the door screen on, showing the exterior.”

Eli arrived at the door looking pissed. And, a little unsteady. “Carley!” he said again.

“Hi Eli,” she said, not trying to hide the disappointment in her voice. “Looks like you’ve been drinking again.”

“I am not!” There was a brief pause, then he continued, “I did have a beer, but one’s not enough to do anything. Just a little taste for the flavor.”

“Looks like more than one beer to me. You’re staggering a little. The other night—”

“I’m not staggering!” he interrupted. “After one beer? Don’t be ridiculous!”

Patiently, she said, “The other night you told me you were done drinking.”

“I am done drinking,” he said indignantly. “I just have a little taste now and then. Something to wet my whistle.”

“Well, I don’t want to be around you when you’ve had anything to drink. ‘Wetting your whistle.’ ‘Little tastes.’ Nothing.”

“You’re such a bitch,” he said, shoulders hunched and a look of fury on his face. He took a deep breath, calmed, relaxed his shoulders, and said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I was just hoping to hang out with my sister a little while. It’s a little frustrating to walk all the way over here and not even get to see you.”

Carley found herself wanting to forgive him, then remembered how he’d been hiding around the corner. Probably wanting to grab her wrist before she knew he was there. Then, like when he’d gotten her by the wrist after the blowup about Marnie, he’d want to borrow some cash and wouldn’t let go until she’d sent it to his AI. “Well,” Carley said slowly, “all I can say is you shouldn’t waste your time walking over here to see me when you’ve had anything to drink.”

“Oh, come on, Carley. Cut a guy a break!”

Wondering whether or not to say anything, Carley said, “I tested your DNA. You know, like we talked about? You do have a genetic abnormality that’s associated with alcoholism.”

“There you go again,” Eli said in a surly tone. “Always accusing me of being an alcoholic. Telling me I’m just as bad as dad. If I got a little support, instead—”

Carley interrupted him. “It might be that we could give you something that’d help you stop drinking. It’d have to be by injection. And, it’d be an experiment. No one knows whether it’d actually work. But, that’s the support I could give you. If you want, I could try and make some of this stuff—” she stopped talking when Eli turned and walked away.

As he walked, he threw her the finger. “Sit on that and rotate. Bitch.”

Carley’s heart felt like it was breaking. She restrained herself from throwing open the door to offer Eli ten bucks for dinner. He’d just buy booze, she reminded herself.

***

As they made rounds at D5R, Mark Amundsen got the impression Ell was anxious to get down to the Quantum Biomed research area. When they got there, Ell pulled something out of her back pocket and sat down across from Roger, Emma, and some of the other members of the biomed research team. Mark saw there were a couple of awestruck interns gaping over Emma and Roger’s shoulders.

Ell grinned at Roger and placed a folded piece of paper on the table between them. “You’re gonna love this,” she said, starting to unfold the paper.

Roger and Emma leaned forward. Mark thought they were expecting a rough drawing of some kind. Instead, what they saw were tweezers and six little dots. At first, it looked like they were just dots of ink on the paper. Dots that happened to be where one of the creases were. But then, as Ell moved the paper, the dots skittered around on the surface.

Emma looked up and said, “You’re bringing us a few big grains of sand?”

Ell said, “Guess again.”

“Are they my deflated ports?!” Roger asked excitedly.

Ell nodded, then spoke to her AI, “Allan, inflate number one.”

With a barely audible pop, one of the tiny grains suddenly expanded to become a ring about the size of a small sequin. Mark saw some of the other people there glancing at one another curiously, obviously not sure what they were looking at.

Roger was mumbling to his AI and leaning in closer to the paper. When Ell started to reach for it, he said, “Wait, wait. I’m having my AI magnify the image so I can tell what I’m looking at.”

Emma said, “Throw it up on the big screen so we can all see it.”

A moment later, they all turned to stare up at one of the big screens on the wall. A grey ring sat next to a crumpled little ball. Ell said, “Roger, give us a live look at them so we can watch this next part.”

Roger lowered his head back down and focused on the ring. They could tell the static image had been replaced by video because it shifted slightly as Roger’s eyes moved.

Also, the image disappeared occasionally when Roger blinked.

Ell spoke to Allan, “Energize port.” Smoke started coming out through the ring, evidently from a port that had suddenly formed inside it. Ell said, “The smoke’s just so you can tell the port’s open and something’s coming through it.” She paused briefly, then continued in an admiring tone, “Just like the medication from a medical port would.”

Amundsen had just glanced at Ell so he saw her grin just before she said, “Now for the cool part. Allan, turn off the port.” The smoke dissipated, leaving the ring lying there. Ell said, “Reverse the port and apply suction.”

This time the screen showed that a featureless black surface had appeared inside the ring. Ell said, “So, now Roger’s showing you the port in the ring. It looks black because the other side of it’s in the dark inside the box that was filled with the smoke earlier.” She spoke to her AI and a second image popped up on another video screen. It showed a spot of light at its center. She said, “That second screen’s showing the other side of the port from the viewpoint of a camera inside the box.” She spoke to her AI again, asking Allan to light the inside of the box. The screen lit, showing that the spot of light they’d been seeing was actually a small hole with a black ring around the edge of it—the other side of the port from inside the box. The spot of light had been light coming into the box from the room they were in at D5R.

Ell said, “Now we’re going to apply suction to the box.”

Roger, with his head still down by the little port, said, “I can hear a hissing sound. I assume that’s the air being sucked into it?”

“Must be.”

The video screen blanked momentarily as Roger blinked. He said musingly, “So, we’ll have to work out how much suction we can apply without causing tissue damage.”

Ell said, “Uh-huh. See the little piece gel membrane that’s lying on the paper?”

The video image darted around as Roger looked for it. He said, “Oh, yeah. It’s bigger than I expected, just nearly transparent.”

Ell said, “Use those tweezers to move the deflated ports aside, then lay the gel over the top of the active port.”

He used the back of the tweezers to move the deflated ports, then used the tips to pick up the gel and laid it on top of the active port. Amundsen found the motion of the image from Roger’s contact while he was moving stuff around… disconcerting.

Ell laughed, “Now, those of you who aren’t too seasick, watch the image from inside the box. I’m going to increase the magnification, then apply a little more suction.” She spoke to her AI and they zoomed in on the other side of the port. When the suction was applied, the gel bulged through the port toward them. “Now,” she said, “we’re going to slowly decrease the pressure that’s inflating the ring the port’s mounted on.”

As they watched the gel bulged in a little more, and some grey ring material seemed to come into the box with it. Ell said, “This’s the really cool part. The gel, standing in for tissue in the body, has pushed the membrane of the ring in through the port. Now the gel’s what’s actually holding the softened ring stretched open wide enough that it doesn’t lose continuity with the other side of the port.” Ell studied the image a moment longer, then said, “I think most of the ring’s membrane’s been pushed through the port, so we’ll shut off the port…” She spoke to Allan.

On the wall screen displaying Roger’s view the gel membrane jumped up. When it settled, it had a hole in it that looked a little bigger than the ring had been.

On the other wall screen, a chunk of material—the gel and the membrane of the ring—had flown across the inside of the chamber. This left the closed port looking like it was just a black ring drawn on a metal surface.

Ell said, “Roger turn over the gel and let’s see what’s left on our side of the port—the body side of your eventual medical port.”

Amundsen looked away during all the video motion that occurred as Roger used the forceps to lift the membrane, look under it for fragments, and turn it over so they could see if anything had stuck to the other side. Sounding pleased, Roger said, “It looks clean!”

Ell said, “I’m betting there’re at least a few buckyballs left behind, but it’s a lot less ‘littering of the body’ than having an entire port still in there.” She gave him an admiring shake of her head, “Inflatable ports! That was a great idea you had there, Roger-my-man. I’m assuming you’ve already heard the inflatable ones are working great for the big Mars ports?”

Roger nodded, though he still seemed so focused on the tiny ports that Amundsen wasn’t sure he’d really understood what Ell said. He said, almost to himself, “These’re gonna be awesome.”

Chapter Six

Jillian was sitting on her porch, drinking a beer and watching the sun go down. Donsaii’s life must be pretty shitty, she thought, feeling a little guilty. Having people like me always after your secrets so they can tell the world about them. You’d hardly want to leave your house for—

Jillian interrupted her own train of thought, Donsaii lives in a small town. She has to leave the house for something besides work, at least sometimes, doesn’t she? Have I ever seen a report of her going anywhere besides work… or to accept awards… or talk to presidents?

Jillian had her AI start a number of queries.

~~~

She leaned back and stared into the darkness, realizing she’d missed the sunset. But realized that Donsaii’s life had to be much worse than she’d been thinking in the past. In years gone by Donsaii’d been seen around town and at concerts by bands she’d liked. But no one saw her doing anything interesting anymore.

Donsaii went to work at the D5R facility. She came home from it. Jillian had found reports of her at other facilities under the D5R umbrella. Portal Tech, ETR, even up at the space habitats.

But, Donsaii never did any of the mundane things in life. She never went to the store. Jillian supposed she had her groceries delivered. She never got her hair done, though perhaps someone came to the house for that as well. She never went out to a restaurant. Or went to the movies. Or visited friends…

Just thinking about it made Jillian depressed.

Donsaii’s life was completely bounded by her workplace, her farm and the road in between? That had to be so awful…

Wait a minute. If she has a son, how’s he going and coming from school?

This’s ridiculous, Jillian thought. No teachers are going to the house. Unless she’s got the kid in some ultra-secret boarding school where even she never sees him, he can’t possibly exist, can he? Even if he does, do I have the right to make her imprisoned life even worse?

Minutes passed.

School, Jillian thought, worrying at a glimmer of an idea.

***

Carley’s AI said, “Eli’s calling.”

Reluctantly, Carley said, “Put him on… Hey, Eli, what’s going on?”

Somehow, even over a simple audio connection, Carley could tell he was sober again. “I’m calling to apologize. When I dropped by your apartment the other day, I acted like a dick… make that a whole barrel of dick. I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the way you always act when you’ve been drinking.”

“Yeah… I know… Sorry…”

When a few moments passed without Eli saying anything more, Carley ventured, “Do you remember me saying you have a gene for alcoholism?”

“Yeah,” Eli said with a hopeless sigh. “Does that mean that I don’t actually have any chance of staying sober?”

When he hasn’t had anything to drink, Carley thought, I feel like I’ve got my brother back. If only that brother’d stay. “Um, no one knows the answer to that question. There’s been a little bit of research on which gene defects make people alcoholic, but the one you’ve got’s kind of rare. There aren’t enough people with your problem for anyone to do a study and see if they can still succeed with AA or other treatment programs.”

“Oh,” Eli said, sounding like he didn’t know how to take that news.

Hesitantly, Carley asked, “Do you remember me telling you that it’s possible your problem could be controlled with an injection?”

“Um, yeah. Vaguely… I, uh, I was kind of pissed off at that point. I don’t think I was really listening.”

Though he hadn’t asked, Carley found herself wanting to tell him about the idea. “Your gene makes you less sensitive to FGF-21. It’s a protein that acts kind of like a hormone. It decreases people’s desire to drink and eat sugars. Especially because, whenever you drink alcohol, your liver secretes more of it. That makes it less likely that you’ll have a second or third drink.” She paused, then admitted, “At least that’s how we think it works based on results in mice and rats.”

“So, what’re you saying?” Eli said. “My liver doesn’t make enough of it?”

“No, your liver probably makes plenty. It’s just that you don’t respond to it as well as normal people do. But, it’s possible that if we gave you extra FGF-21, you’d get the same effects that normal people do from smaller doses. Then you might be less of a drinker.”

“But, injections? Why can’t I just take a pill?”

“It’s a protein. If you take it as a pill, you’ll just digest it.”

“So, just coat it with something so it’ll go through my stomach.”

Carley blinked in surprise at the idea. I guess it’s a little much to expect he’d understand this stuff. “Wouldn’t help,” she said. “Getting it past your stomach isn’t what’s needed. If it gets past the stomach, it’d just get digested in your intestines. Or not absorbed. I’m not exactly sure, but protein medications have to be injected.”

“I don’t know if I could hack an injection every day.”

“Diabetics used to do it all the time. Multiple injections a day. Now most of them use ports to give themselves their insulin, but some of them are still giving themselves injections.”

“Yeah, but diabetes is a life-threatening disease.”

“Alcohol is destroying your life, Eli,” Carley said, sadly.

“So, get me one of those diabetic injection ports.”

“Eli, I can’t do that… Um, I have a friend who says he might be able to get one, but it wouldn’t be like an approved one through a doctor or anything. You need to realize this protein’s not an approved medicine. No doctor’s going to help you get it. You’ve got to at least try it by injection. Then, if you thought it made a big difference, maybe my friend could get you an injection port. I don’t know if he can really do it, but he said he’d try.”

“This guy’s some kind of boyfriend?” Eli asked. “You know, that he’d do something shifty for you?”

Taken aback by the idea, Carley immediately thought of Zage’s crush on her. “Definitely not! He’s just a… really good friend. One who’d go out on a limb, not just for me, but for you too.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, go ahead and tell your boyfriend I’m ready to be your guinea pig.”

“No!” Carley said indignantly. “Not a guinea pig! Someone we’re trying to help. Someone we care about. Someone who hasn’t responded to the usual treatments.”

Disdainfully Eli said, “You called it ‘experimental’ the other night. I remember that much. If it’s experimental, that makes me a guinea pig.”

I did, Carley thought, with sudden horror. After a long silence to think about it, she said, “You’re right. I did call it an experiment. I was thinking of it like when a doctor gives you a medication to see if it helps you, not like when a scientist gives a bunch of patients a medication versus a placebo to see whether the medication really works. But, if you don’t want to try an ‘experiment,’ neither do I.” Unhappy and a little angry, she told her AI to disconnect the call. The whole thing made her uncomfortable. Miserable, she put her head down on her desk and wondered whether she’d be able to get her focus back on her research.

A moment later, she heard Zage’s little shoes coming around the end of the bench he worked behind. He approached the back of her chair. She both did, and didn’t, want to talk to him. Maybe if I keep my head down on the desk, he’ll take a hint.

No, he won’t, she thought when Zage said, “Carley?”

Carley slowly sat up and turned to look at Zage, surprised to realize her eyes were dry. Then, her AI said, “Eli’s calling you back.”

She put a palm up toward Zage, asking him to wait, and turned away. She said, “I’ll take the call…” Trying not to sound exasperated, “Yes Eli?”

“Sorry, Carley. I guess I can be a jerk even when I’m sober. I’ll be happy to try your experimental medication…” He snorted, “And, I’ll refrain from referring to myself as a guinea pig. I really do appreciate what you’re trying to do for me.”

Stiffly, Carley said, “You’ll have to give the injections to yourself. You’ll be doing the experiment, not me. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Eli said, sounding like a military guy who’d just come to attention.

“Okay,” Carley sighed, “I’ll see if I can make you some FGF-21.” Her thoughts already started tumbling over all the potential problems. Not least of which would be using the lab’s equipment and supplies to do something ethically questionable. She knew she’d want to tell Dr. Barnes what she was doing. She hated being dishonest. Using supplies, equipment, and even her own time without permission would make her feel guilty. But, if she asked for approval, maybe Barnes’d tell her she couldn’t do it.

Perhaps, even if Barnes secretly wanted her to do it, she wouldn’t want to know about it?

Eli sounded puzzled, “Can’t you just buy some?”

“Yeah, but it’s expensive. And, not approved for human use.”

“It wouldn’t be approved if you made it either, would it?”

“Nope. But, it’d be off the books.”

“It’s got to be more expensive to make it yourself, doesn’t it? I mean, a big company that makes it all the time would have industrial equipment and some kind of production line, right?”

“Yeah, that’d be cheaper. But, not if you don’t count the man-hours… or, in this case, the woman hours that went into it. All we’d have to actually pay for would be the ingredients.”

“Oh, well then, I, I’d really appreciate it. And somehow I’ll just have to get up the gumption to give myself the injections.”

Carley snorted, “They’ll be tiny needles. Don’t get too worried.”

Eli disconnected. Carley turned back around to Zage. Zage had apparently left when she was taking Eli’s call because he was just returning. Probably wanted to give me my privacy, she thought. “That was Eli,” she said. “He says he’s willing to try your idea about FGF-21 injections.”

Zage gave her a puppy-dog look, full of longing. Now that she knew what they meant, she found them a little frightening, though also endearing. He said, “I got the gist from hearing your side of the conversation.”

Carley’s eyes drifted over to the cell-free protein synthesis equipment. “I think I’m going to have to try to ask Dr. Barnes permission,” she said. Her eyes went back to Zage, “I don’t have your courage.”

Zage looked perplexed, “What courage?”

“You remember. The way you just started making Gordito’s vaccine, without asking permission. It was the right thing to do and you just did it.”

Zage shrugged, “So? You could just decide that making FGF-21 for your brother’s the right thing to do.”

“No…” Carley said pensively. “It’s not at all clear it’s the right thing to do. It’s just a WAG that it might be the right thing to do.”

“WAG?”

“Wild ass guess,” Carley said, then embarrassed, put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

Zage gave her a grin, “I’ve heard a lot worse. Besides, it wasn’t clear that making Gordito’s vaccine was the right thing to do back then. Remember, at one point there were people who thought Gordito might be the terrorist.”

Carley stared at him for a moment, then gave a little shrug, “You may be right. But the potential downside of not making the vaccine was pretty huge.”

“Maybe,” Zage said. He held out a small paper bag. “This may be a solution to part of your dilemma.”

Carley took the bag, hoping it wasn’t some strange or over-the-top offering that came from Zage’s crush. Pulling open the top, she looked inside and saw a small plastic bag of powder. Frowning, she looked up at Zage, “What’s this?”

“FGF-21.”

Carley’s eyes widened as she looked back in the bag. “My God! There must be grams of it there.” She considered the fact that there were only about 500 nanograms of FGF-21 in the entire blood volume of a normal person. “At nanograms per injection this has to represent hundreds of thousands of doses?”

“Yeah,” Zage said, shrugging as if it wasn’t a big deal. “A friend of mine heard about your brother’s issue and made some up for you.”

Carley searched his face, “A friend, huh?”

Zage nodded blandly.

“A certain someone didn’t fire up the CFPS over there and make it himself, did he?”

Zage glanced at the CFPS. He turned back to Carley and shook his head.

“Who did make it?”

“He doesn’t want me to tell you. You know, since it’s not approved?”

“How do you even know someone who could make a protein like this?”

Zage shrugged, “I know you. And Dr. Barnes, Rick, and Alice.”

“Are you saying one of them made it?”

“Nope, not them. Really, it wasn’t made here in the lab.”

Carley peered back into the bag, “How do we know it’s any good?”

“You should assay it. Make sure it’s okay. And, obviously, you’ll need to sterilize it.”

“I’ll do that,” Carley said thoughtfully, still looking in the bag. “What’s in the little box?

“Um, I brought you some syringes too. They’re little ones like they use to inject small doses in mice and rats.”

She gave Zage a puzzled look, “Will that be enough?”

He shrugged, “You said it yourself. You’re going to be injecting nanogram quantities. So, yeah. These syringes’ll hold a lot more than you need. You’ll need to dilute it into a moderate volume just so you can tell how much you’re injecting. If it wasn’t for that, you could use even smaller syringes.” Carley’d pulled them out and was looking at them. Zage indicated the syringes with his chin, “They have really tiny needles. From what you were saying when he called, that’s important too.”

Carley frowned, “Where’d you get the syringes?”

“You can order them online. Syringes aren’t controlled like drugs are. I think that’s because they don’t want addicts sharing needles. They try to make it easy to get them.”

Carley looked at him. She slowly said, “I’m not sure you should be spending your money on my brother’s problem.”

Zage looked uncomfortable, “I, um, I have them on hand. I have to give myself injections.”

Surprised, Carley said, “Are you diabetic?”

“No. I’m, uh, injecting a different peptide.”

Concerned, Carley asked, “What’s it for?”

“I’m not supposed to say. Sorry. But it does mean I know how to inject myself. I could teach Eli how to inject himself… If you want…”

***

This time Ell met with AJ, Rob Braun, and Ben Stavos in the ET Resources research area. AJ was shifting around, as if he was pretty excited. She grinned at him, “From the look on your face you got that five-meter port to work. Am I right?”

AJ nodded enthusiastically. “Our data and slo-mo video showed the first one overheated and blew out near the port that vented the cold nitrogen back out of the ring. It just wasn’t cold by the time it finished its circuit around the ring. To solve it we installed entry and exit ports at multiple locations around the circumference. That way the cold nitrogen’s coming in and only traveling part way around the ring before it exits. That seems to keep the hotspots by the exit ports from getting hot. I’m feeling fairly confident that with some design optimization we’ll be able to go up to even bigger rings. In fact, we’ve already built a functioning ten-meter ring.”

Ell led the others in a small round of applause, then leaned back and lowered an eyebrow, “You know you’re frustrating me by keeping me waiting to hear about the power requirements, don’t you? Was that lower-than-calculated demand last time real? Or not?”

AJ’s smile got even bigger, “Like you suggested, we went back and tested the one-meter port and smaller ones on down to 20-cm. The effect gets smaller as the port gets smaller, but even in the 20-cm ports, you can see a few percent decrease from calculated demand. In a one-meter port it’s down 21% and in a two-meter port it’s a 30% reduction.” He lifted an eyebrow, “Our ten-meter port only needs 122-megawatts. That’s only 49% of what we’d expect with our old-style calculations.”

Ell gave him a high five, “If that’s true, then a ten-meter port to Mars at its average distance from Venus would only draw 378-megawatts, quite a bit less than we’d expected. The average distances to Europa and Titan for water and nitrogen would take about 438-megawatts.” She grinned, “And, remember, if we’re using bi-hemispherical ports, they’d be delivering four times as much carbon dioxide.” She turned to look at Rob and Ben, “I hope you guys know just how important AJ’s getting to be to D5R as a whole. If he hadn’t pushed me out of my rut on the difficulty of terraforming Mars, we wouldn’t have learned any of this stuff!”

AJ gave a humble shrug, “I just got lucky. We’d have built some bigger ports eventually. At some point, someone would’ve noticed.”

In an amused tone, Ben said, “Yeah, newlywed boy’s running us plum out of attaboys down at ETR. Next thing you know; we’re gonna have to give him a raise.”

AJ looked embarrassed and deflected the conversation away from himself. “If my calculations are right, a 100-meter port’d draw about 23% of the calculated need and a 500-meter port’d draw 11%. That 100-meter baby’d draw one quarter the power to deliver four times as much volume… sixteen times the efficiency.”

Ell turned wide eyes on Rob and Ben. “You can’t say he doesn’t have ambition!”

AJ put up his hands in surrender, “I give. I give. I just want to point out that 159 bi-hemispherical hundred-meter ports could give Mars a breathable atmosphere in twenty years.” His stunned audience of three said nothing, so he filled in with, “Well, and, of course, there’d need to be a lot of photosynthesis going on to convert the CO2 and water into oxygen…”

After a few moments of silence, Ell said, “If your numbers are right, those 159 enormous ports are going to be drawing 2.81 tera-watts…”

AJ shrugged, “Earth’s using 25 tera-watts at present. It’s not impossible. And if you build 500-meter ports you could do it for half that.”

El laughed delightedly. Eyes twinkling merrily, she said, “I’m hoping you have a funding solution too? At 10 dollars per megawatt-hour, the power alone’s going to cost $674,400 a day. Over 20 years, that’s nearly $5 trillion!”

AJ shook his head, looking mulish. “That’s not an engineering problem. But I’d point out that ETR’s solar ports have dropped the price of power below ten dollars per megawatt hour and it’s still going down. Besides, we’d be making our own power.”

All three of them laughed at this one. Rob turned to Ell and Ben, “I’d say he’s pretty committed to this project… As long as he doesn’t have to pay for it.” He turned back to AJ, “Don’t forget, before we can make our own power, we have to buy turbines and generators. It’s the capital investment that makes solar power cost money, the energy’s actually free.”

AJ brightened. “I forgot to tell you I found a 35-megawatt steam turbine,” he said enthusiastically. “All its components’ll fit through our new five-meter port and they can be assembled on Mars by waldoes.”

Ell said, “So, by your new numbers, that’d be enough power to run a two-meter port from Venus, Europa or Titan to Mars.”

“Or,” AJ said enthusiastically, “we could run 4 one-meter ports, two on Titan, one on Europa, and one on Venus. Kind of a test run to check that all our guesstimated numbers are in fact reasonable.”

Ell’s eyes twinkled, “I’ll bet that 35-megawatt steam turbine’s going to put you over your $10-million budget, right?”

“Um, yeah,” AJ said, looking chagrined, “the turbine’s $150 million.” He gave her a hopeful glance.

Ell smiled, “I’ll talk to Amundsen, but I’d imagine you’ll get your money.” She shook her head, “We’ve got to keep you happy so you’ll keep coming up with all these… ideas.”

***

Jillian had her car pull in and parallel park down the street from the Montessori school’s entrance. A quick glance out the back window showed there was a clear line of sight to the drop-off circle where the kids’d be getting out of their cars. She worked with her AI to aim and focus the telephoto sitting on the back deck of the car. With a little effort, she got it lined up so it covered the entire area where the kids might be getting out of vehicles. She positioned her screen so she’d notice when the kids started to arrive.

Ready, she picked up her coffee.

At least this plan leaves me the rest of the day to do some honest reporting. Something about doing it left a bad taste in her mouth though. This was the fourth school she’d watched. She was only doing the hoity-toity private schools in the area since she figured Donsaii wouldn’t send her kid to a public school. But, there were enough high-end schools in the area for her little project to take weeks unless she struck it rich right away.

Once the kids started arriving, she’d focus her attention on the screen, marking any of them she thought might resemble Donsaii in any way for intense close-up review of the recording. So far, she hadn’t seen a child she thought might be Donsaii’s.

At first, she’d been hoping to be able to look for Donsaii herself in the car, but it seemed like most of the kids were just dropped off by their car’s AI. Jillian figured that probably a parent came with the kids for a while at the beginning of the school year, but by now the kids had had a couple of months to get used to just getting dropped off by their car.

Blackly, she thought, Hanging around schools is one place where there’s an advantage to being a woman. Less likely someone’s going to decide I’m a pedophile and call the cops…

***

Carley spoke to her AI, “Call Eli.” Jekyll or Hyde? she asked herself as she wondered whether she’d reach the nice, sober brother, or the drunken jerk.

Eli answered, “Hey Carley.”

Even though it’d only been two words, Carley thought he sounded sober. “Hey, brother. You straight?”

“Yeah.” Then, uncharacteristically, he confessed, “But I really want a drink. So, you’d probably better stay away from me tonight.”

“Oh,” Carley said, thinking. “Would you… You want to try an injection? It’d just be a small test dose, but if it affected how much you wanted to drink, that’d be good news.”

Sounding irritable, Eli said, “I thought you had to make the stuff. Sounded to me like that was going to take weeks.”

“Turns out a friend already had some. All I had to do was test it to make sure it was pure, then sterilize it.”

“Okay, I’ll be over to your place in about twenty minutes.”

“No hurry, it’ll take me longer than that to get there.”

Carley’s AI said, “Eli had already disconnected.”

Crap, Carley thought. She didn’t want to arrive at her apartment with an irritable Eli already there. “Send him a message that I won’t be there for 25 to 30 minutes.”

She got busy mixing up a test dose and drawing it into the syringe.

Zage came out from behind his bench and said, “Shall I come with you? So I could show Eli how to do the injection?”

Carley didn’t think that was a good idea. She tried to talk him out of it, but he was persistent and persuasive.

~~~

As Carley entered the apartment complex, she slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out her little canister of pepper-spray, holding it hidden in her palm.

She walked wide around the corner that Eli’d been hiding behind the other time.

However, this time he was sitting beside her door in one of the pool chairs. Eli looked fidgety. Another guy sat beside him. “Hey Eli,” Carley said, slowing and keeping to a cheerful tone, “who’s this?”

Eli nodded at the guy. “Buddy of mine. Name of Ray.”

Ray was a big guy with a scraggly beard. He got up, smiling in an odd fashion. Carley had the impression he was trying to keep his lips covering some missing front teeth. He waved in Carley’s direction, saying, “Wow, I had no idea your sister was so pretty.” He glanced at Eli, “You been holding out on me, Brother.”

Carley stopped. Lowering herself to one knee beside Zage, she whispered, “I don’t like this. You need to get out of here.”

Zage held concerned eyes on Ray and Eli. “Let’s both get out of here.”

Carley looked up to see that Ray and Eli were ambling her direction. Eli was speaking quietly and urgently to Ray, but Ray just kept his eyes on her. When Eli ran down, Ray said, “Come on, Brother. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your friends. Introduce me to your sister.”

“I already did,” Eli said in a surly manner.

Zage tugged on Carley’s hand, pulling her away from the two men, but she thought about how long it’d take her car to get back to the apartment complex entrance. She decided walking away from them wouldn’t help. She’d rather be there at the apartment complex where someone might respond if she started screaming. She flipped the safety off her pepper spray.

Ray looked at Zage and said, “Who’s the little man?” He shifted his gaze to Carley, “Your son?”

Eli responded, “He’s some kind of child genius. Works in her lab.”

Ray leaned down and reached out a hand for Zage to shake. Zage did, but Ray immediately said, “Hey little man. A limp handshake like that won’t get you anywhere in this old world. You need to give my hand a real squeeze.”

They shook again, this time Ray seemed satisfied. He stood back up and gathered Carley in a hug, not bothered by the fact that she seemed unwilling and held her arms folded up between her chest and his. “It’s good to meet my brother’s sister,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

Carley thought he smelled bad. She really wanted to get away from both of them. Putting on a bright tone, she said, “So, Eli, you ready to try one of the injections?”

“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t really sound like he wanted to.

Zage said, “I came along because I have to give myself these kinds of injections all the time. I can give myself one to show you how it’s done, then you can do your own.”

Eli snickered, “What, are you an alcoholic too?”

“No, it’s just that I have to have daily injections. It’s a different medication.”

Eli said, “Are your shots what makes you a genius?” He elbowed Ray, still speaking to Zage, “Maybe I should get some of those too.”

“No, it’s for a different problem,” Zage said, a small syringe now visible in his hand. He pulled up his shirt, saying, “It’s pretty easy—”

“Not out here!” Ray said, stepping closer so the bulk of his body would block sightlines.

“No one’s watching,” Zage said, mildly indignant.

“You don’t know what they’re doing, little man. They could just be sitting in their apartments, staring out at you with nothing better to do than call the cops.”

Zage shook his head, looking even more annoyed, “This isn’t an illegal drug.”

“Trust me, little man, you don’t want the police taking you down to the station to cool your heels while they try to figure out what the stuff actually is, do you?”

Carley was feeling more and more disturbed. She agreed they shouldn’t be doing an injection out here, but she did not want to take Eli into her apartment, much less Ray. Of course, Eli chose that moment to say, “Let’s go to your apartment, Carley. You can show me how to do it in there.” He started walking that way.

Carley really didn’t want to take Eli into the apartment if her roommate was home. She spoke to her AI, “Check with the house AI to see if Diane’s home.” She started walking slowly after Eli.

Her AI said, “Yes, Diane’s home. Do you want me to connect you?”

“No,” she said. Eli was almost to her apartment, so she hurried after him. “Eli, Diane’s home. We can’t go in there.”

Ray said, “Diane’s your bitchy roommate, right? It’ll be okay. I’ll charm her. It’s something I’m good at.”

Carley managed not to roll her eyes. “I don’t think that’ll work.” She turned to Eli, “We’re going to have to do this some other day.” Uncomfortably, she noticed a couple of other men had entered the central commons of the apartment complex. The two men seemed to be converging on them.

“Oh, come on, Carley,” Eli said from where he stood at the apartment door. He sounded irritated, “After we came all the way over here? We can just step inside, the kid’ll give me my shot and I’ll be on my way. Even Diane should be cool with that.”

Reluctantly, Carley said, “Let me just see. Maybe she’s in her room and we can do it without her even knowing.” She stepped up close to the door, asked her AI to unlock it, then pushed it open a little bit.

Diane sat at the little table, staring at her. Carley started to pull the door shut, but Ray shoved it open. “Diane, right?” he called across the room as he shouldered his way inside. “I’m Ray, one of Eli’s buddies.”

Carley pulled on his sleeve saying, “Ray! Do not go in there…”

Carley paused when Zage twisted past her and appeared in front of Ray, holding up his hand like a policeman halting someone. Zage said, “You heard her. Stop! Go back outside and wait for us.” For a little boy, he had a surprisingly commanding voice.

Ray bent forward, saying jovially, “Don’t worry little man, I’m just gonna talk to her.”

Diane had risen to her feet, looking white-faced, furious, and frightened. She was edging toward the door to her room.

Ray said, “Hey Diane, relax. I’ve heard a lot about you and…” He moved toward her. She shrieked and scurried toward her room.

Carley only had time to think, Oh shit! when Ray just fell down.

Later, when she had time to watch the record from her AI’s cameras, she saw Zage—moving surprisingly fast—punch him in the crotch. When he reflexively bent forward, Zage reached up, pulled his head down further, then kneed him in the temple.

Hard!

Diane had vanished into her room, slamming the door behind her.

Eli plaintively said, “Ray?”

Carley, not sure what’d happened, looked for Zage. The boy was bending over Ray, peeling back his eyelid. “Zage?” she asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded upset. “Um, I’m kinda worried about Ray?”

Till that point, Carley had just been thinking that Ray’d stumbled. Now she realized he wasn’t getting up. She stepped closer. The eye Zage had exposed was twitching. Did he have a seizure? Carley wondered. It didn’t seem unlikely in a guy who lived on the street with Eli.

Carley went down on one knee, picked up Ray’s wrist, and felt for a pulse. Or, tried to. She realized that the fact she’d seen a lot of people checking pulses on TV shows didn’t mean she actually knew where to feel for one.

Zage said, “I’ve already checked his pulse. It’s eighty-two, which’s fine. Also, we can see he’s breathing regularly. I counted that at twelve breaths a minute. Also normal. I think he’s just concussed…” Apparently deciding that might’ve been too obtuse, he elaborated, “Knocked-out.”

Since Carley hadn’t seen Zage’s knee-to-the-temple strike, she hadn’t been considering the possibility of a concussion. Maybe he hit his head when he fell? But, then there’d still be the question of why he fell? “Eli,” she asked, “do you know if Ray’s epileptic?”

Ray chose that moment to moan and roll onto his back.

Watching from about 6 feet away, Eli said uncomfortably, “I don’t think so.”

“What happened?” Ray asked, then produced another long moan.

“I don’t know,” Carley said. “You fell down and were unconscious for a little bit. Are you epileptic?”

“No!” Ray said in an offended tone, as if he’d been accused of something loathsome.

“I think he’s going to be okay,” Zage said thoughtfully. He looked over at Eli, “Do you want me to show you how to do an injection while we’re waiting?”

“Okay…” Eli said, without enthusiasm.

~~~

Carley sat cross-legged beside Ray as he gradually became more alert. She noticed he did have a missing front tooth. The one next to it was grey. Nonetheless, she thought he could be fairly handsome—with some dental repair, a haircut, and a shower. But those things wouldn’t fix his assholian attitude, she thought, wondering whether he was an alcoholic like her brother. Or, maybe he’s got problems with other drugs?

Behind her, she could hear Zage explaining the injection to Eli. Some more quiet words and he apparently injected himself. The boy came over and got the syringe Carley’d prepared for Eli, then returned with it to her brother.

Eli apparently injected himself without any of the whining or foot-dragging Carley’d expected. Maybe because he didn’t want to seem like a wimp in front of Zage.

Ray started trying to get up. Carley said, “Wait a minute. How’re you feeling?”

“Fine. Just a little dizzy. Help me up.”

“Maybe we should call an ambulance?”

“No. I hate hospitals.” He glanced at her, “If you call one, I’ll just refuse treatment.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try just getting you up on the couch.” She stood and held out her hand.

Ray took her hand. Leaning heavily on it, he climbed to his knees, then heaved himself onto the couch.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Better. Can you sit here with me?”

“Okay,” Carley stepped over and got one of the dining chairs. She pulled it over near the couch and sat down.

“No, I meant, can you sit here next to me,” Ray said patting the couch beside him. “The touch of another human can be healing.”

Carley shook her head, “You’re not getting that from me.” She turned her head, “Eli, do you want to come sit here next to your ‘Brother’?”

“No,” Eli replied in a surly fashion. “That’d be weird.”

Carley wondered whether this was evidence that her brother was homophobic, or whether he didn’t actually like Ray either.

Ray gave her another of his covered-tooth smiles and said, “What’d I do to make you mad?”

Carley gave him a stony look, “Hugged me when I didn’t want you to. Entered my home without permission. Frightened my roommate, who’s already mad at me. Generally ignored my requests about how you should behave.”

He lifted his eyebrows, “Wow, that’s quite a list.”

“Now, I’m going to ask you to leave my apartment. Do you think you can do that without acting like a jerk?”

Lifting his hands out to the sides, palms up, he said, “Come on. I was just unconscious. You oughta cut me a little slack.”

“If you think your condition’s serious, I’ll be happy to call you an ambulance.”

Ray’s face turned ugly. Planting his hands, he pushed himself to his feet. “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” he said in a sour tone. He made his way over to the door, saying, “You ready to go Eli?”

Eli got up and moved to the door as well.

Ray said quietly, though it was loud enough that everyone in the room would be sure to hear, “It ain’t just her roommate that’s a bitch, you know?”

~~~

As soon as the door closed behind them, Carley told the house AI to lock it. Shoulders slumping, she said, “Let me just tell Diane I got them out of here. Then I’ll have my car pick us up so I can take you home.”

“Um, don’t worry,” Zage said, “My AI’s already called a car for me.”

Carley studied him a moment, thinking how unlikely it was that a six-year-old—make that a barely-six-year-old—would’ve thought to call for a car. Considering all the other crazy stuff he can do, this’s minor, she decided. “Well, let me talk to Diane, then I’ll walk you out to the entrance to meet your car.”

Carley went to Diane’s door and tapped it lightly. “Diane, I’m really sorry. They’re gone now. Gone and hopefully won’t ever come back.”

Diane didn’t say anything, so Carley stood there at her door wondering what to do. A moment later, the door opened a crack and Diane’s eye peered out. She briefly surveyed the room, then pulled the door open the rest of the way. Flatly, she said, “I’m going to be looking for another place to live.”

Carley sighed, “I can’t say I blame you. I hope you know that I really don’t want any of these things to happen.” She looked away from Diane, unable to face those accusing eyes. “But, Eli’s my brother. He’s got his problems, but… I feel I owe him something, you know?”

Diane said, “Yeah. Well, I don’t owe him anything, do I? And, whatever you owed him, I think you’ve paid your debt.” She walked back out to the little dinette, took her glass off the table and went back into her room. She pointedly shut the door.

Carley turned to look at Zage. He was watching her, concern in his eyes. She asked, “Do you know if your car’s here yet?”

His eyes twitched in a way she’d learned meant he was checking the HUD in his contacts. “It’ll be here in two minutes.”

“Okay,” Carley said to Zage. She spoke to her AI, “Can you access the apartment complex cameras through the house AI? Tell me whether Eli and Ray have left the complex or not?”

“They’re gone.” her AI said, “In case it matters, you should know that two other men are standing out by the pool.”

“Really?” Carley said, then felt silly for saying something like that to an AI.

Her AI produced an inflectionless, “Yes.”

“Let me see.”

An image popped up on her HUD. Carley saw two men standing out by the near end of the pool. She thought they were the ones who’d walked into the complex’s common area when she’d been trying to keep Eli and Ray out of her apartment. “What’ve they been doing?”

In answer, her AI rewound the video to the point when the men had entered the complex, one from each side. Then it fast forwarded. She, Zage, Eli, and Ray had met and were moving toward Carley’s apartment door, gesticulating as they argued. The two men entered, then seemed to focus on the four of them. For a moment, Carley thought the two men seemed to be hurrying toward them, but then Ray pushed into the apartment, everyone else followed, and the door closed behind them.

The two men slowed. They stared at the closed apartment door for a moment or two, then turned back toward the pool. They met at the near end of the fence around the pool and leaned up against it next to one another. They’d been standing there ever since, as if they were carrying on a conversation

At first, Carley felt like it was nice that a couple of strangers had been concerned about the argument between herself and Ray. Then she started to wonder what they’d been doing there in the first place. She was pretty sure she’d never seen them in the complex before.

And, why they were still there…?

She turned to Zage, “Eli and Ray’re gone, but there’s a couple of other guys hanging out there by the pool. People I’ve never seen before. I’d rather wait until they were gone, unless… Are you supposed to be home by a certain time?”

A flash of what looked like frustration crossed Zage’s face, but then he said, “No. No worries. I’m not in any rush.” He turned and walked over to the window, looking out. With her hearing, Carley could hear him mumbling quietly to his AI, though she didn’t think most people would’ve known he was doing it.

Motion attracted her eye back up to her HUD. The two men had abruptly turned and started walking out of the apartment complex, leaving in different directions. It’s as if they were spies, she thought, just come here for a brief conversation with one another. Now they’re taking off. She wondered whether she should be worried about it, but decided any spying they might be doing probably didn’t apply to her. Or Zage. Maybe they’re undercover cops following Eli and Ray around? she wondered, thinking that Ray seemed like the kind of person who might be in trouble with the law. She decided that wasn’t her problem either, but still worried about whether Ray could be the kind of crook who might drag Eli into his problems.

Carley turned to Zage, “They’re gone from the inner part of the complex now, but let’s give it a couple more minutes before we go.”

Zage nodded. “I’m sorry everything went so rough here today.”

“Yeah,” Carley said with a sigh. “I’m a lot sorrier than you are. I should never have brought a kid your age into a situation like this.” She looked over to where Ray’d fallen down. “I was afraid Ray was going to cause a lot of trouble until he had his… seizure, or whatever it was. I wasn’t watching when he fell, but you were over there closer to him. Do you have any idea what happened?”

“Um, yeah.” Zage said, looking embarrassed, “When Diane shrieked, I thought she could tell he was about to do something really bad, so I…” Zage stopped talking as if he didn’t know what more to say.

Puzzled, Carley said, “So you…?”

“I don’t even know Diane. I’m not sure why I thought she’d understand what he was about to do better than I did. But… I guess, ‘cause she’s an adult…”

“Because she’s an adult… what?”

“I trusted her intuition. I, um… I punched him in the testicles.”

Carley drew back in astonishment, “You did?!”

“Yeah.” He sighed, “I should’ve stopped then. But in self-defense class they teach us to follow through. So when he bent over, I kneed him in the head.”

Carley gawped at the boy, not knowing what to say. Not really knowing whether to believe him. Finally, she slowly asked, “How long have you been taking self-defense courses?”

“Just this year. But I’m a pretty good athlete.”

“You are? Do kids your age even do sports?”

He nodded solemnly, “I do martial arts.”

Carley stared at him for a minute, trying to come to grips with the idea that this small boy was the reason a large man had been rendered unconscious. She shrugged and looked toward the window, “Well, those guys’ve been gone for a bit. Shall I walk you out to your car?”

Big-eyed, Zage said, “Yes please.”

As she walked Zage past the pool, Carley had to suppress a hysterical giggle, Do I really need to walk out the kid who took down a big guy like Ray? She shook her head and turned to the boy, “Thanks for coming along and showing Eli how to give himself an injection. Did that go okay? I wasn’t watching that either.”

“Yeah, he did fine.” The boy paused, then said, “If we were giving him a test dose, shouldn’t we have kept an eye on him for a while afterward?”

Carley sighed, “Yeah. You’re right. But I couldn’t stand having Ray in the apartment a single moment longer. I hope rushing them off doesn’t turn out to be something I regret.” She looked over at Zage, “Thanks for stopping Ray. If he’d hurt Diane, I’d have a lot worse problems than her wanting to move out.”

Zage looked chastened, “I still think it was the right thing to do. But… I also think I overdid it.”

A small pickup truck, old but looking well-maintained, was waiting at the complex gate. Zage got in and it drove away with him. When Carley turned back toward her apartment, a movement caught her eye. She thought it’d been a man pulling back behind the corner of one of the buildings. Could there really be spies here? she wondered. What in the world would they be spying on?

Chapter Seven

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina— Extra Terrestrial Resources (ETR) announced that their surveys of the large metallic asteroid known as Psyche 16 have found an area particularly rich in platinum series metals. David Stephenson, ETR’s spokesman, said, “I wouldn’t want you to think that we’re talking pure platinum or anything like that. But a few of the samples have been as much as 4% platinum group metals which is pretty rich.”

ETR’s begun sending small quantities of this material back for processing in the same refineries it’s been using to purify the metals from asteroid 2019 UB40.

While he was waiting for ETR’s legal weasel, Allison Branson, to pick up his call, Jason poured another two fingers of whiskey in his coffee mug.

He heard a click, then a frustrated sounding Branson said, “Yes, Mr. Stackhouse?”

“I saw it in the news. You assholes are starting to mine my asteroid.”

She sighed, “I assume you’re speaking of Psyche 16?”

“Haven’t I called you enough times that even a retard like you should be able to remember Psyche 16’s the one that belongs to me?!”

“You’ve called enough times for me to remember that Psyche 16’s the one you think belongs to you,” Branson said exasperatedly.

“Then,” Jason said angrily, “you’ve probably heard from me enough times to remember that you’re supposed to negotiate me a percentage before you take any ore off my asteroid!”

“Mr. Stackhouse…” Branson said, back to speaking patiently, “like I’ve told you, you can’t claim to own an asteroid based on the fact that you filled out a claim on a website. There’re literally thousands of people who think they have claims on asteroids. ETR’s not the company that’s disrespecting or taking advantage of you. The people who took advantage of you are the ones that charged you fees to fill out claims on bogus websites. Such claims have no legal—”

“I made my claim fair and square. I own that asteroid. You people better respect my claim or you’re gonna be sorry!” Jason told his AI to cut the connection.

“Are you threaten—?” the woman said before the disconnection cut her off.

Incandescently angry, Jason threw his now empty coffee mug across the room. It shattered against the old brick fireplace.

His wife looked up as if she might say something. When she saw his face a frightened look crossed her features. Saying nothing, she quietly got up and left the room.

I’m gonna hurt those bastards so they’ll never forget it, he thought.

His wife came back in and silently began sweeping up the remains of his mug. Normally he’d have pointed out how she was doing a shitty job of it, but he was too focused on ETR-D5R and the revenge he was going to take.

It’ll take some planning. Jason wished his old sarge was there. Sarge was way better at planning than Jason.

***

Phil’s AI said, “You have a call from Ell Donsaii.”

“Put her on,” Phil said with a frisson of excitement. “Hey, Ell, you must be really bored if you’re calling me.”

Ell’s image popped up on the video screen across from him. She said, “Yeah, but I thought I ought to check in and see how your hip and head’re doing?” Her eyes went to the spot next to Phil and she gave a little wave, “Hi Carol.”

“Hi Dr. Donsaii,” Carol said with her own little wave.

“Oh my goodness,” Ell said, “can’t you call me Ell?”

Phil saw Carol catch her lip between her teeth for a moment. He knew his wife felt conflicted. Grateful to Ell for getting them on the Mars mission and rescuing Phil when he broke his hip, yet with an undercurrent of jealousy because she was Phil’s good friend. Make that Phil’s beautiful best friend, he thought.

Carol gave a nod, “Hi Ell. I wanted to thank you once again for taking a chance on sending the lunkhead here back and forth to Earth.” She waved at Phil. “His hip seems to be functioning almost normally… well, at least it seems almost normal in Mars gravity. We need to get him back to Earth and find out how it does there. Also, I wanted to let you know that, despite two trips through that port, he really doesn’t seem to be any dumber than he was originally.”

Ignoring his wife’s insult, Phil said, “They’ve just finished putting me through a huge battery of IQ tests. They say they’re confident the trip from Earth back to Mars didn’t make me any dumber. They’re pretty sure the first trip from Mars to Earth didn’t affect my smarts either.”

Ell grinned, “That’s great to know. When your IQ’s starting in the single digits, knocking off a couple of points really makes a difference.” She glanced around the limits of what she could apparently see, then gave them a curious look, “How’s the shielded dome working out? I thought you guys were going to live in it?”

Phil lifted an eyebrow, “You’re thinking this still looks like the same tunnel we used to live in?”

Ell nodded.

“You’re right.” He sighed, “We actually have lived up on the surface a little. NASA sent us the stuff to build a little house in the shielded dome and we’ve kind of camped out in it some nights.” He shrugged, “The problem’s that, even in that huge dome, you still feel like you’re inside. It’s true that some sunlight comes in, but you really can’t see out very well. Looking through a meter of water plus the graphene membranes on each side kind of blurs everything. And,” he said sounding disappointed, “once you get over the excitement of looking down into the Valles, the rest of Mars’ scenery’s pretty boring. Just reddish-brown rocks everywhere you look.”

“Boring’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. We’d heard that you were kind of feeling like there wasn’t all that much of a challenging nature to do now that exploration’s kind of paled?”

Both Phil and Carol nodded.

“So our terraforming team said they asked you guys for some help setting up their new five-meter port. It’s not a lot of work, just choosing a location and spiking it into place. We’re talking about sending you guys a—”

“I know all about it,” Phil interrupted. “It’s a trial toward powering some big ports that might actually terraform Mars. We’re excited about it all right, but we’re kind of putting on a little revolt at present.”

“Revolt?”

“Yeah, I suppose you know about the mice they sent up here to live in shielded versus unshielded locations?”

It was Ell’s turn to nod. She looked uncomfortable.

“You’re aware they were testing some new radiation resistance gene? And how a lot of the mice that were exposed in the unshielded dome got cancer and their pups had mutations?”

“Yeah, we’re all excited about how well the experimental group did,” Ell said. She tilted her head and continued, “But I’ll bet you guys’re concerned about how the unshielded control group did, since you’re similarly unshielded when you’re out on the surface?”

Phil turned to Carol and gave her a little nudge, “See, you can tell she hasn’t been back and forth to Mars via port. She was smart enough to figure that out all by herself.” He turned back to Ell, “So, the bottom line is, we don’t want to go out on the surface any more than we absolutely have to. We certainly don’t want to be out there setting up a five-meter port, when it’s a job that could be done perfectly well by waldoes.”

Ell said, “I see your point. Are you wanting to come back to Earth? You still have the lander, and the transfer vehicle’s orbiting over you.”

“No. We aren’t excited about spending forty-days cooped up in that little transfer vehicle either.”

Ell said, “I’m hoping you’ll remember I once said I didn’t see any reason to send humans to Mars when almost anything they could do could be done by waldo. You were one of the people who argued that humans needed to be there.”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “But, if the technology’s available, those humans should be living on the surface of Mars while protected by the gene doohickey somebody gave those mice. And, they should get to port back to Earth every few months for a vacation and a little exposure to Earth-normal gravity. We don’t want to waste away if we don’t have to.”

Ell rolled her eyes, “And, I suppose you want to be the guinea pig again?”

Phil shook his head. “All of us want to be the guinea pigs. This last trip back to Mars was easy-peasy for me. I breathed some of that anesthetic and I woke up here on Mars an hour or so later. A few hours after that I felt fine. The only real drawback was taking all these damned tests to prove I’m fine.”

“But Phil, we don’t know—”

“What we do know,” Phil interrupted, “is that coming and going by rocket’s definitely dangerous.”

Ell sighed, “Granted.”

“And,” he grinned, “that the transit takes forty days of our lives we’ll never get back.”

Ell slowly shook her head in dismay, “Both porting humans and the gene for radiation resistance are untried. They may have all kinds of risks that we don’t even understand.”

“We know,” Phil said patiently. “But if we ever want them to be ‘tried’ technologies then someone’s got to actually try them. We’ll sign all the releases you want…”

***

Zage looked up when Ell appeared in his doorway. She said, “We got your lab results back.”

“And?”

“They were normal.” She shrugged, “Well, there were a couple that were just outside the normal range, but your doctor pointed out that since the,” she made little air quotes with her fingers, “‘normal range’ is set so it includes 95% of results from the general population, that 5% of lab values are typically flagged as abnormal. Since the ones that were flagged in you were barely out of the normal range, they’re almost certainly normal.”

Zage gave her a big grin, “Shall we celebrate with some ice cream?”

His mother snorted, but said, “Sure. I’ll bet your dad’d like to have some with us.”

As they headed down the stairs Ell said, “I think we should repeat your lab tests every six months for a while.”

“Okay,” Zage said resignedly.

***

Carley rolled down the window of her car. “Eli?” she asked.

“Yeah,” her brother responded without getting up off the street-side bench. He sounded a little belligerent.

Her shoulders sagged, “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

“I’ve had a couple of drinks. Not enough to make me drunk.”

Carley’s initial impulse was to leave, but then she decided she could at least get a little bit of information. “Did the test dose of the FGF-21 cause any problems?”

“Nah.” Eli said dismissively, “But it didn’t do any good either.”

“It wasn’t supposed to do any good. It was just a small dose to see if you had any reaction to it. You didn’t have any itching or other reactions? You’re feeling okay?”

“I’m feeling hungry. Got a solution for that?”

“I’ll buy you dinner,” Carley said, feeling resigned, but trying to keep her voice chipper. She started getting out of her car. “We can talk about whether you want to try bigger doses of FGF-21. The doses I hope’ll actually make a difference.”

As the car pulled away to go find a place to park, Carley wondered what she was doing. He admitted having a couple of drinks! That probably means four or five. If he’s drunk, he’ll probably start acting like a real jerk. She’d promised herself that she wasn’t going to hang around him when he’d been drinking, but she desperately wanted to help him stop and he wasn’t sober very often. She checked her pocket for her pepper spray and said, “You want to go to McDonald’s?”

“Why not try the new brewpub?”

“Because you’d start trying to talk me into buying you a beer, not just a burger. Besides, I don’t have enough money to take you to expensive hamburger places like that.”

“All right,” he said, channeling a lot of disappointment into the words. “Take me to McDonald’s.”

It was a couple of blocks. A nice walk on a pleasant afternoon. Eli wasn’t staggering, suggesting that he might not have had all that much to drink. Or, that he was getting really booze tolerant. They walked a block in silence, then Carley said, “Do you think you’re ready to try the bigger dose of FGF-21?”

“Whatever you say. You’re buying dinner.”

Carley sighed, “Eli, I think that shots will help you stop drinking. But if you don’t have any interest in quitting… I mean, after all, you’ve got to give yourself the shots for it to have any chance of working.”

“Yeah, yeah. I, want, to, stop, drinking,” he said, spitting out the words with metronomic regularity. “I admit I can’t do it by myself. Give me the stuff and I’ll give myself the shots.”

When they got to the McDonald’s, Carley gave him one of the loaded syringes and he took it into the bathroom. He came back out a minute later and joined her in the line to place their order. “Did it go okay?”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said without enthusiasm.

~~~

After they’d eaten, she had her car pick them up and she dropped him off near the shelter where he usually hung out. Handing him five more loaded syringes, she said, “Remember, since you tend to drink at night, I think they’ll work best if you give yourself your shot in the afternoon.”

“Yes Mom,” he said sarcastically.

As she drove away, she wondered whether there was any chance he’d give himself his shots.

And, she felt bad leaving her brother on the streets.

***

Jillian was parked near the front of the seventh expensive private school she’d observed. So far, she’d only seen two kids she thought might be related to Donsaii, but when she’d followed up, their parents had been so unlike Donsaii it’d been almost laughable. Unfortunately, she still had a number of schools to visit and this project was really getting to her. It was true it didn’t cut into the rest of her workday very much, but it cut into her sleep. And it cut into her morning relaxation, a part of the day she’d always enjoyed.

While she waited for the first kids to arrive, she wondered whether there was any way to sort the schools somehow, perhaps for those that dealt with gifted kids—on the assumption that Donsaii’s kid was either actually gifted or that his mother thought he was gifted. Starting with those schools might pay off—if Donsaii herself was actually gifted, not just lucky; and if she’d passed her genes on to her kid; and if she was sending the kid to a school for smarty-pants kids.

A lot of ifs.

Nonetheless, Jillian ran a search on “schools for gifted children within sixty-miles” and skimmed down the results. Number nine on the list wasn’t about a school. And it was a story with a headline that screamed clickbait, “Five-year-old skips grade school and high school to start college at Duke University.”

But when Jillian read the article, it was completely serious. And, most interesting of all, the kid’s mother worked at D5R. How could it be that I didn’t know about this? she wondered, though rationally she knew no one could read all the news—not even someone like her who took a real interest in it. Jillian looked to see where the story’d been published and saw it came out in the Duke Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper. Ah, a story of local interest, published in a place where it’d be unlikely to get picked up by other outlets. Even better, the story said the child’s father was Shannon Kinrais, the UNC mathematician who’d won two Nobel prizes with Donsaii last December! The mother, Raquel Kinrais, was the parent who worked out at D5R. Could Donsaii be paying this Raquel Kinrais to raise her kid for her? That seemed kind of weird, but Donsaii was far from normal.

Jillian looked at the screen for her camera and saw kids being dropped off and cars pulling away. I’ve missed some, she thought with frustration, thinking about how she’d have to go back over the recording with care. With sudden relief, she thought, But, it doesn’t matter. Unless this Zage Kinrais kid turns out to be some kind of dead end, I’m done watching snot-nosed kids getting dropped off at expensive schools.

She told her AI to shut down the camera and take her to her morning assignment.

***

In the morning when Eli came out, Carley was waiting outside the shelter. She’d been surprised to learn that homeless people weren’t allowed to stay in the shelter during the day. Rolling down her window, she said, “Eli? How’re you doing?”

“Fine,” he said.

He looked better than usual, but it took her a moment to realize why. “You got a haircut!”

“Yeah, a guy comes by once a month and gives us free haircuts. I usually skip it, but mine’s been getting pretty shaggy.”

“It looks good,” she said. It looked like he’d washed his clothes as well. She decided not to mention that. Steeling her nerve, she asked the big question instead, “Any problem with the shots? Did they make a difference?”

“Nah, I don’t think they do anything. In fact, I can’t even tell I’m taking them.” He shrugged, “But it doesn’t matter. I’ve quit drinking anyway.”

Feeling terribly disappointed, Carley said, “So you didn’t even take them?”

“No, I took ‘em, every last one. The last one was yesterday afternoon. But, since they haven’t really been doing anything, I don’t want to keep takin’ ‘em. It’s not like the injections hurt a whole lot, but if they aren’t working, there’s no reason to stick myself at all, right?”

Her unhappiness must’ve shown on her face, because he said, “I know you’re disappointed, but the important thing’s that I stopped drinking, right?”

Carley gave a weak nod.

Eli said, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a line on a possible job .” He turned and strode away.

Carley started to ask him if he needed a ride, but then her eyes widened. He’s been taking the shots and he hasn’t been drinking! They might’ve been working and he just thinks he stopped drinking on his own! She started to call after him, but he’d gone around the corner. She thought about chasing him down in her car, but decided she shouldn’t. Let him find out for himself whether he can stay off alcohol without the injections.

She didn’t want to leave her brother without the medication she thought had made such a difference, But I don’t think he’ll believe it if he doesn’t prove it to himself.

She told her car to take her to the lab at Duke.

***

Roger looked up. “Dr. Van Horst?” he asked, rising to his feet.

The woman Bridget was guiding over nodded, then looked around as if bemused.

Roger grinned, “Expecting something different?”

She smiled and nodded, “More exotic and high-techy.”

Roger winked, “We keep all that stuff hidden away.” He glanced around himself. “I admit it isn’t impressive looking, just a big table with benches, but this’s where a lot of our ideas have been hammered into shape over the years, so we’re sticking to it.”

Dr. Van Horst grinned back, “It seems to be working pretty well then, so I wouldn’t mess with it if I were you.”

“I’m Roger Emmerit,” he said, then waved at his wife, “and this’s Emma Kenner. You’ve got an idea for us?”

Van Horst nodded, “I’m a trauma orthopedic surgeon. In that role, most of what I do’s treat broken bones. I’ve had this idea that we might be able to use ports to let us do some of our surgeries through smaller incisions.”

“Really?” Roger said, feeling a little surprised.

Van Horst waved at the wall, “Can I throw up some video on your screen there?” When no one demurred, she spoke briefly to her AI and the screen flashed to life. She resumed, “If you were to break your femur, or thighbone, in the mid-thigh, this’s how we’d treat you.” She pointed to the screen where an incision was being made up at the hip. After some cutting and spreading apart of the tissues, a hole was drilled into the bone and a wire passed into it. X-ray images then showed the wire being pushed down through the hollow interior of the bone to the knee. Quite a bit of jiggling and twisting was required to get it across the break in the mid-part of the bone. “Now,” she said as the screen quickly stepped through the next parts of the procedure, “we pass these flexible reamer drills over the wire and run them down the inside of the bone to drill it out a little bigger. With that done, we hammer this titanium tube, called a nail, down over the wire. The nail holds the bone straight until it heals.” The presentation concluded with a series of x-rays of the bone as if healed. “Healing takes months, but the great thing’s that the rod’s strong enough for the patient to walk on it as soon as they feel up to it. That’s long before the bone’s actually healed.”

Roger tore his eyes away from the video images of what had appeared to be a fairly brutal surgery. “I hope the patient’s asleep for that?”

Van Horst laughed, “Yes. I imagine you think the surgery looks kind of rough?”

“Kind of,” Roger said with a little laugh. “What part of it are you thinking could be done through ports?”

“Well,” Van Horst pointed to the biggest of the incisions up near the hip where everything had been inserted, “you see how this incision the rod’s put in through is several inches long?” She glanced over and got nods from Roger and Emma, before continuing, “The rod that goes in through the incision’s only about ½ an inch in diameter. Some surgeons are pretty good at putting the rod in through an incision that’s less than an inch long, but most use something bigger. The incision doesn’t just go through skin either. It’s going through muscle on its way down to the bone.

“My thought’s that we could make a ½ inch incision and slide a piece of metal with a ½ inch port in through it. We’d use x-ray to position the port in the right place at the end of the bone. Then we could put all the wires, reamers, and the nail in through that port. Not only would the skin incision be smaller, but the reamers etcetera wouldn’t go through so much of the muscle, doing damage as they did so”

“Um,” Emma said with a frown, “since you wouldn’t be able to see where you’ve got the port positioned, what’s going to keep it in the right location?”

“Oh,” Van Horst said, sounding a little surprised. “We’d put a little port right next to the half-inch one and we’d drive a small pin into the bone through it. The pin would nail it in place to keep the port from moving around.”

Roger winced and gave a little shiver. “Okaaay,” he said drawing out the word. “I’m not sure why, but sticking a pin into the bone gave me even more heebie-jeebies than drilling a big hole down the interior of it.” He shook out his hands, “Nonetheless, it all sounds plausible.”

Emma sat up suddenly and grabbed Roger by the arm, “Hey! Instead of making a half-inch incision, what if you made a much smaller incision and put in one of your inflatable ports on the end of a wire?”

Roger turned and gave her a wide-eyed stare.

“Inflatable port?” Van Horst asked.

“Oh yeah,” Roger said, turning enthusiastically back to the surgeon. He spoke to his AI and a moment later the big wall screen started showing videos of the new inflatable ports blowing up from tiny lumps into bigger rings. “We haven’t made any that’re the size you’re talking about yet. We’ve been focusing on little tiny ones for diseases like diabetes where injecting medications or inserting sensors would be a big help.

“Well,” he shrugged and waved at the screen which was showing some of the Mars ports, “and huge ones like you’re seeing there. They let us put big ports through tiny ones. The idea’s that once we get a small rocket to another planet, we can upsize ports and use the big ones to port big things to that location.”

He turned back to Van Horst, “But there’s no reason we couldn’t make inflatable rings with ports on them that were ½ an inch in diameter. Would that be helpful?”

Van Horst looked thunderstruck, “That’d be…” her eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment, “that’d be astonishingly helpful. Not just for the surgery I showed you a moment ago, but… for all kinds of surgeries that’re done with ‘scopes.’ Arthroscopes, laparoscopes and other endoscopes. I mean those surgeries as they’re done now were huge advances because they let us do surgeries through small incisions, but if we could put a substantial port on the end of something the size of a big needle… Needles don’t leave scars at all.”

Emma frowned, “They don’t?”

“Well, there’s probably some kind of scar, but they’re so small they’re not visible. You’ve probably had a lot of injections in your life, but I doubt you can find any of the scars.”

“So,” Roger said slowly, “you’re saying that it’d be a big advantage to be able to put a needle into the abdomen or a knee or shoulder. Then you’d blow up a port and use that to introduce the actual laparoscope or arthroscope?”

Van Horst nodded, “In the abdomen, you could put in several more needles with extra ports that allowed you to put in additional instruments, rather than making more incisions every time you needed another instrument for a complex procedure. In the knee, you could slide a curved and springy wire in from the front of the knee, passing it around the bones and into the back of the knee before you inflated the port.”

Roger blinked, “Why not just put a needle into the back of the knee?”

Van Horst shrugged, “There’re a lot of nerves and blood vessels back there. Not a good place to be sticking needles. It’d be a lot safer to put them in the front of the knee, then slide them through the joint, maneuvering them to the right location using a camera you’d already put in.”

“Oh,” Roger said. “Can’t you already do everything you need to do in the knee? Is something like this really needed?”

“Admittedly, the incisions and the scars from arthroscopic surgery are already small. But there’re parts of the back of the knee where it’s difficult to see and work using our current techniques. It’s also tricky and dangerous getting instruments into some of those back corners. It’d be a lot safer to slip the ports in on curved wires then pass the instruments in through those ports. There are places that are hard to reach in every joint.”

Roger sat digesting this information for a moment; then he said, “Is there a reason you drill and drive the nail in through the muscle at the end of the bone?”

Van Horst tilted her head curiously, “What do you mean?”

“What if, instead of putting the port into the muscle above the end of the bone, holding it with a pin, then drilling the hole into the bone and down the length of the bone… What if you drilled a pin into the bone from the side, rather than out in the muscle up above the end of the bone. Then you inflate your ring-port inside the bone and do all that reaming and wire passing and nail driving completely within the bone?”

Van Horst’s eyes widened. “That’d be awesome,” she breathed.

“Wait a minute!” Emma broke in. She turned to Roger, “What if the nail was made out of inflatable graphene?”

Roger turned slowly to Van Horst, “Do you know what she means?”

Van Horst looked dubious. “I assume you’re talking about a tubular structure made out of graphene, then inflated like a long skinny party balloon. For instance, perhaps a half-inch diameter tube like the nails we insert?” She shook her head, “I just don’t think it’d be strong enough.”

“Graphene’s tensile strength’s over a hundred times greater than steel’s. If you inflated it to a high-pressure, it could be incredibly strong.”

Van Horst grimaced, “And if that balloon broke, releasing all that pressure?”

Roger shook his head, “When you rupture a stretchy, air-filled balloon, it lets out a lot of compressed air. But something that’s not stretchy, that’s filled with something incompressible like saline’s a different matter. It wouldn’t spray its contents around like you’re thinking.” He musingly looked up at the screen where she’d shown her presentation—even though her presentation had come down when the videos of the inflatable ring-ports went up. “I’m thinking that you’d first slide in a wire like you did at the beginning of your procedure. But you wouldn’t drill, or ream, or put in a nail. Instead, you’d inflate narrow diameter graphene tubes that were running down along the outer surface of the wire. You’d keep inflating them until one of them developed high-pressure readings before it was supposed to be full, thus telling you that you’d filled the inside diameter of the bone—then you could stop without inflating any more of them so the bone wouldn’t rupture from the internal pressure.” He shrugged, “They’d act like a bunch of extremely stiff straws inside the bone. Since they’d be attached to one another along their length, the more of them you inflated, the stiffer the nail would get. For a large person, presumably needing a bigger stronger nail, you’d have filled a lot more straws and provided that big strong nail.”

Van Horst shook her head, “In the interest of saving time, I didn’t show the part of the procedure where we drill holes and insert screws through both ends of the nail to lock it securely to the bone. We wouldn’t be able to do that through your graphene straws.”

Emma shrugged, “You could put graphene balloons on the four sides of each end of the nail. Once you had the nail positioned the way you wanted it, you could inflate the balloons to get a tight friction fit between the inflated graphene nail and the inside of the bone. The balloons could even be shaped so they pushed little spikes into the bone from the inside.”

Van Horst gave Emma an admiring look, “Ooh, that’d be really cool. One of the hardest parts of the operation’s drilling the holes through the bone so that they line up with the holes that’re in the nail.”

Roger said, “With Quantum Biomed’s other devices, I worry about leaving junk inside the body. Littering the body, so to speak. Do you take these nails out once the bone’s healed?”

Van Horst shrugged, “Sometimes. They usually don’t cause much trouble inside you, so if there aren’t any problems it seems a little bit crazy to go through surgery to take them out. On the other hand, after they’ve been in there for a decade or more they can sometimes be almost impossible to get out. That can be a serious problem if they really do need to be removed for some reason.”

Roger said, “I’m picturing a nail that has a built-in ring-port at one end or the other. When you want to take it out, you deflate all the graphene straws, then inflate that ring-port. Then you just reach in through the port and pull out the nail.”

Van Horst shook her head, “I came in here with what I thought was a good idea. You guys’ve turned it into an incredible idea. Of course, all kinds of things could go wrong when we’re trying to put it into practice but I’d sure like to be involved in trying it out.”

Emma and Roger looked at one another. Emma said, “We’d have to get Ell Donsaii to talk to D5R’s investors, but they’ll often fund feasibility studies. Would you be interested?”

Van Horst’s eyes widened, “You bet I’d be interested…” She’d obviously stopped talking so she could think for a moment. Her eyes focused again, “Here’s another idea for inflatable ports. A patient swallows one of those cameras that move through the intestinal tract taking pictures. One of the problems with those is that if the gut didn’t really get purged and cleaned out the night before, sometimes you can’t see some areas very well. Inflate a side port, put in a little tube and squirt-wash that area. Voilà, you can see. And, if you see a lesion that needs to be biopsied or a polyp that needs to be removed, you can just reach in through the inflated port to do it.” She looked at Emma and Roger to make sure they were following, “They can already do biopsies and remove little polyps through a tiny port on a full-length endoscope like a colonoscope, but they can only take tiny pieces. The current swallowable cameras have ports on them that they can take biopsies with, but they’re also very small and it’s hard to position the camera correctly since it’s just floating along. With a few inflatable ports, you could slide in some little legs to reposition the camera. Then you’d inflate a bigger port and use it to take substantial biopsies. You could even remove pretty big polyps.” She shook her head, “I’d predict that people will be doing some fairly complex surgeries through that kind of device in a few years.”

Roger said, “Would there be any way to use inflatable ports to do surgery inside blood vessels or in the heart?”

Van Horst shook her head, “It sounds like a good idea, but you can’t see through blood to do your work. The procedures that’re currently done inside of blood vessels are guided by x-ray.” She shrugged, “I’m just a bone doctor, so I haven’t given some of these non-orthopedic procedures much thought. Maybe someone who specializes in that area could think of a way—”

“What if…” Emma interrupted, her head tilted to one side in concentration. “What if you slid in a thin wire like you slide through the marrow canal for the bone surgery… Using x-ray guidance, they slide the wire right past the area of the blood vessel that has the lesion you’re wanting to work on. Then you inflate a port inside the vessel on the near side and another one on the far side of the lesion and connect them so the blood arriving on one side’s ported to the other side—thus completely bypassing the area you’re wanting to work in. You use two more inflated ports to wash the blood out of that area so you can see, then reach in to do whatever it is you need to do…”

“Oh, oh!” Van Horst said excitedly. “You could put those kinds of ports in the bloodstream before and after the heart so you could fill its chambers with saline and work on the valves from inside the heart.”

Roger blinked and slowly said, “If you’re taking the heart out of the circuit, you’d have to have a pump between the ‘before port’ and the ‘after port.’ You’d have to have it to keep the blood moving through the rest of the body.”

Van Horst nodded, “You’d still have to use a heart-lung machine and you’d also have to stop the heart to let you work, but it’d still be simpler and have a lot fewer incisions than open heart surgery.” She shrugged, “Once again, you’d have to talk to real experts in those fields to know whether it’s worth it.”

~~~

After Van Horst left, Roger turned to Emma and said, “I wonder if we’ve missed a bunch more uses for medium sized inflatable ports?”

Emma was staring dazedly into the distance. “Undoubtedly…” was all she said.

Chapter Eight

Jason Stackhouse leaned back against the headrest and sighed. Two days! Two days I’ve been sitting here on my ass, watching people drive in and out of ETR an’ I ain’t seen that Branson woman yet! He hadn’t seen anyone else he recognized either.

Stackhouse had thought it was going to be simple. Park here by the gate until he saw Branson go in. Follow her home to find out where she lived. Set up near her house early the next morning with his AR-15.

When she comes out… bang.

That’d teach them to mess with his claim.

He closed his eyes to imagine the looks on their faces.

He woke up to the tapping of a flashlight on the window of his car.

Despite the fact that he hated cops, he lowered the window and smiled. “Can I help you, Officer?”

“Mr. Stackhouse,” the cop said. Jason’s heart did a little flip-flop at the fact that the cop already knew his name. The cop continued, “I need you to get out of the car.”

Without moving his head, Jason moved his eyes around. There was a cop standing right behind the one talking to him. There were a couple of rent-a-cops standing at the front of the car. Jason had seen the rent-a-cop guys behind the ETR fence. They wore grey uniforms with ETR insignias. Now Jason noticed they were carrying guns. He hadn’t thought that was legal for rent-a-cops. Surprisingly for his image of security guards, they looked like they were in shape. Outnumbered four to one, he thought, better do as I’m told. “Okay,” he said, triggering the door latch.

Humiliatingly, they braced him against the car and patted him down. Then they showed him a warrant and searched his car.

Fortunately they didn’t find anything. Thank God, he’d left the AR-15 back in his motel room.

Despite not finding anything, they took him downtown and talked at him for three or four hours. He demanded his right to a lawyer. They kept saying he wasn’t under arrest or accused of anything so he didn’t need a lawyer.

Yet.

Nonetheless, they kept asking him about the threats he’d made to that stupid lawyer-weasel Branson.

Which he now realized were probably recorded as a matter of course by her AI.

“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” he began, the first time it came up.

“Then what’re you doing here?”

From then on he just clammed up. They talked at him and they talked at him, but he didn’t figure it did them no good.

In the end, apparently because he’d committed no crime, they let him go while telling him he’d better go on back home. They repeatedly warned him that they’d be keeping an eye out for him.

When they let him go, he got in his car and drove away.

All the way to Richmond Virginia—since they’d had a cop follow him when he left.

~~~

Jason rented a car at the Richmond airport. It wouldn’t have a license plate they’d recognize, so he headed back toward the Triangle. This time he stopped and got a motel in Creedmoor so he’d be outside the Triangle area.

He’d decided that Branson was now too tough a target since they’d be watching her like a hawk. But he’d had a great idea. He’d step up his game and take out Donsaii herself. After all, she was in charge of all the claim jumpers.

Doing her would really show the bastards.

***

With some trepidation, Carley spoke to her AI, “Contact Eli.”

After a substantial wait, her AI said, “Eli isn’t answer—” there was a brief pause, then AI said, “Excuse me, he’s answering now.

Eli’s voice slurred, “Heey Carleey. Whaasup?”

Drunk out of his mind! Carley thought sadly. Trying not to let her dismay show in her voice, she spoke evenly, “I just thought I’d call and see what happened with that job interview you had.”

“Reejected! My life’s like a pile of dog poo. If you want to pick me up, you have to put a plastic bag over your hand before you do it.” He paused to laugh hysterically at his own joke.

“I’ll call you tomorrow morning when you’re sober,” Carley said, trying not to snap.

“Ohh, nooo! Not in the morning! I’ll be hung over and all cranky. Try me in the afternoon.”

***

The next afternoon Jason found Donsaii’s little farm.

At work, she parked in the depths of a big parking lot, protected by a fence and a bunch more of those high-end rent-a-cops. At her farm, there were enough trees he couldn’t sight in on the house from the road. After some thought, he’d decided he’d just have to wait by the road a few blocks from her farm. He’d pick her up sometime when she left to go somewhere besides work.

He’d thought about just driving onto the property and shooting the place up, Donsaii included. But just as he was getting ready to do it, he got a glimpse of a couple of security type guys walking around in the trees.

Those guys looked really capable.

I’ll just have to be patient, he thought.

He didn’t like it, but he could do it. After all, on his hunting trips he sat in blinds for days at a time.

***

Approaching the admin assistant for the genetics section, Jillian said, “I’m looking for Zage Kinrais? Can you tell me where I’d find him?”

The lady looked up and waved vaguely down the hall behind Jillian, “Probably down in Dr. Barnes lab.”

“Oh. Not in class?”

“Maybe?” she said. “It’s not my job to keep track of the students’ class schedules.”

Thinking, I’m sure this lazy drone’s AI has access, Jillian kept her tone pleasant, “Um, which lab belongs to Dr. Barnes?”

“It’s down the hall on the right. I don’t know the number, but Dr. Barnes’ name is on the door.”

~~~

The lab door was open, so Jillian knocked on the door frame, “Hello? Is this Dr. Barnes’ lab?”

Jillian knew she was in the right place when a child’s head popped up from behind one of the lab benches. He said, “This’s Dr. Barnes lab, but she isn’t here right now.”

Saying, “Hello,” Jillian walked closer. She thought maybe the kid looked a little like Donsaii, but she wouldn’t have thought it was a sure thing. He definitely looked like his father, Shannon Kinrais. He had blonde hair, though it was lighter than his dad’s dark dirty blonde. None of the reddish tint Donsaii was famous for. Raquel Kinrais had dark brunette hair, but Jillian knew kids’ hair was often lighter than it turned out to be when they were adults. The boy’s eyes weren’t green either, they were pale gray. Jillian had access to plenty of pictures of the kid’s dad from the Nobel prize ceremony and the dad’s eyes looked like they were a dark shade of blue. There weren’t that many close-up pictures of Raquel Kinrais available on the Internet, but her eyes looked brown in the ones Jillian had found. Jillian supposed that the kid’s gray eyes could be a result of the father’s blue eyes and Raquel Kinrais’ brown eyes. She didn’t know what’d happen combining the dad’s blue and Donsaii’s famous green eyes. She realized she should speak, not just stare at the child. With no other adults there, she decided to just hit him straight on. “Are you Ell Donsaii’s son?”

The boy’s eyes widened in surprise, but he answered without hesitation, “That’d be really cool.” He shrugged, “But, I’m Zage Kinrais.”

“I know. Shannon Kinrais and Ell Donsaii’s son, right?”

“Shannon and Raquel Kinrais’ son.”

I suppose, even if he is Ell Donsaii’s son, he might not know it, Jillian thought, wondering if there were any other reasonable questions she could ask a five-year-old and still expect an answer. I guess if he’s going to college, he should be able to answer pretty sophisticated queries. But I should still be able to trip him up with a good question. “You and your parents live just south of Ell Donsaii’s farm?”

The boy nodded enthusiastically, “Yeah, I walked over to her house one day, hoping I could meet her. She wasn’t home though. A nice lady that works for her offered me milk and cookies, but said I shouldn’t pester Dr. Donsaii.” He shrugged and gave Jillian a shrewd look, “‘Cause she’s famous, people bug her all the time, you know? It’s pretty sad.”

“I suppose so. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nope. So far I’m an only child. I do hope I’ll have a sibling someday though.”

Jillian snorted, “Most kids spend all their time fighting with their siblings.”

“I know, but I’m more mature than a lot of kids. I don’t think it’d be a problem.”

This kid’s definitely weird, Jillian thought, staring at him again. “You have any aunts or uncles?”

“I have a couple of aunts on my dad’s side.” He shrugged, “But my mom was an only child.”

Hmm, Ell Donsaii’s an only child, Jillian thought. She couldn’t think of any more questions to ask a kid this age. After a moment, she said, “Well, if Dr. Barnes isn’t here, I guess I’ll come back later. Bye.” She turned and left.

~~~

As soon as she was out the door, Zage whispered to Osprey, “Do you know who that was?”

“Jillian Pardo. She’s a reporter.”

“Can you tell my mom about her visit?”

“Allan’s already told her. She thinks you handled yourself well…”

***

At dinner that night, Ell turned to Zage, “I thought you did great when Pardo was questioning you.”

Shan frowned, “Someone questioned Zage?”

Ell nodded, “Yeah. Jillian Pardo, she’s a journalist. She fancies herself an investigative reporter, though she hasn’t really had any big-time successes. She publishes stories, but she hasn’t yet turned over a big rock and found any truly ugly things.” Ell sighed, “However, now she seems to have set her sights on us.”

Shan said, “Do we know what she thinks she’s going to dig up?”

“Yeah,” Ell said unhappily. “She stopped me at the airport a while back. Asked me if my son had been kidnapped.”

Shan looked up with alarm, “How’d she find out about that?!”

Ell shrugged, “No idea. Because I didn’t like her, I suspect Agent Calder from the FBI, but that’s pretty weak reasoning. Worse than the fact that Pardo seems to know about the kidnapping is the fact that she asked me about it when I was done up as Ell, implying she knew Ell had a son. Today, she asked Zage if he was Ell Donsaii’s son.”

“Oh, crap,” Shan said. He turned to look at his son, saying, “What’d you tell her?”

Zage shrugged, “That I was Shannon and Raquel Kinrais’ son.”

Ell said, “Zage said it like there wasn’t any doubt. Didn’t hesitate at all. I thought he did great.”

“It wasn’t hard,” Zage said, “I was telling the truth.”

Ell stared at him for a moment, then laughed, “That’s true. You never said you weren’t Ell Donsaii’s son, you only said you were Raquel Kinrais’ son. And, Raquel Kinrais does have her own legal identity.”

Shan spoke to Zage, “Do you think she believed you?”

“I think…” Zage said slowly, “that she’s got a hypothesis that I’m Ell Donsaii’s son and she’s fishing for evidence to support it. I didn’t get the impression that she really believed she’d proved her thesis yet.”

Shan laughed, “Spoken like a science geek.”

Ell turned to Shan, “Our son also told this reporter he was hoping to have a sibling someday.”

Shan turned to Zage with a grin, “I’m hoping you’ll have a sibling someday too.”

Ell leaned back in her chair and casually said, “He’s going to. Someday. Some day about seven months from—” she paused when Shan leaped to his feet, sending his chair over backward.

Wide-eyed, Shan said, “You’re two months along? How come I don’t know about this?”

She gave him a crooked smile, “I was waiting to make sure everything was okay. And then, for the right time to tell you. This seemed like an auspicious—” Ell let out a little oof as Zage tackled her from the side, giving her as big a hug as his little arms could deliver. A moment later, Shan knelt by her chair to join the hug.

~~~

Once they’d all settled down and started back on their dinner, Ell said, “You realize this means I’m going to have to go into hiding this winter so people won’t see me pregnant.”

Zage said, “Will you still have to hide if Ms. Pardo’s already broken the news that you have a child?”

Ell glanced at Shan, “If she breaks the news… I don’t know what we’ll do. I suppose the world’ll know who Shan and Zage Kinrais are in relation to Ell Donsaii. The Raquel Kinrais identity will be useless. Either Ell could move into this house, or Shan and Zage could move into the farmhouse where security would be easier…” Her eyes shifted back and forth between her husband and her son, “But, I don’t think you guys would like living your lives in the Donsaii spotlight. I can tell you it isn’t very much fun.”

Zage frowned, “But, if Ms. Pardo tells everybody about us, what choice will we have?”

“Well, um,” Ell glanced at Shan, “we have lots of other identities already made up. The most obvious, and probably the easiest, would be for us to go back to being Elsa Gardon and Daniel Reyes, who live down near Pittsboro. You’d go back to being Zage Reyes-Gardon,” she turned her eyes to Zage, “which you probably don’t remember.”

Zage shook his head. “I remember the house in Pittsboro a little bit. But I don’t remember that my last name was different. I probably didn’t get called by my last name much at that age, did I?”

“No,” Ell said. “Of course, you were supposed to be too young to remember anything.”

Zage shrugged as if that was unimportant. “Zage’s a rare name though. Aren’t you worried that it might catch people’s interest in view of Ms. Pardo’s story?”

Shan grinned, “You might have to go by one of your nicknames.”

“Nicknames?” Zage asked with a frown. “What nicknames?”

“You know, ‘Munchkin’, or ‘Knucklehead,’ or…” he ran down at Ell’s glare, “or, maybe Z-man.”

“Or, just Zee,” Ell said dryly. “But, let’s not do too much planning for something that might not happen.”

When Shan and Zage didn’t say anything, Ell said, “Tomorrow’s Saturday. I think we should go to the mall.”

Shan said, “Sounds like fun.”

Zage drew his head back in horror, “The shopping mall?” At his mother’s nod, he asked, “What can we get at the mall that we can’t just order online?”

Ell said, “You need new clothes. You’ve gone from short and wide, to tall and skinny. The clothes I got you this summer hang on you like bags and your pants’re too short.”

“So? We can order more clothes.”

“I’d want to buy some where we can try them on you. We’ll just be using them as patterns to get some more of your special clothes made up for you. Clothes like the ones from this summer I was dumb enough to have made based on your old clothes that already didn’t fit.”

Zage acted incredulous, “Just order several different sizes and return the ones that don’t fit.”

Ell raised an eyebrow, “And, you need to get out and see what the world’s like. It’ll be fun. We’ll take you for junk food.” She poked him in the stomach, “I think you’re getting a little too skinny.”

Zage frowned, “I’ve already started eating more. Maybe I should cut back on the peptide…?”

***

Zage gaped at the crowds as they walked through the mall. He did enjoy looking at the people when his parents took him places like this. It seemed like at least half of them were obese, which made him wonder once again about what was going to happen with UNC’s sale of the peptide. The people’s styles ranged from those who dressed to blend in, to those who dressed as flamboyantly as possible. Brick and mortar stores had seemed to be dying out but they were making a comeback. The stores didn’t sell all that much. Mostly they displayed wares that people preferred to see, feel, hear, or try before they bought. Clothing, jewelry, furniture, art, display screens, audio speakers, personal assistant AIs, and vehicles. They only exhibited goods from manufacturers that paid them an “advertising cut.” Your AI identified you when you entered the store, then if within a month you bought a product that’d been displayed there; the manufacturer paid the store a cut. Willingly, since sales were much better for products that had such displays.

Although most people didn’t actually purchase goods while they were there at the mall—preferring to have them delivered to their home—there were some people carrying bags in order to get a “no delivery” discount on small items.

Zage, his mother and his dad had all tried on clothes. His mom had ordered several of the ones she liked on him. The mall also featured a lot of personal services like hairstyling, makeup advice, manicures, pedicures, exercise facilities and trainers, massages, docs-in-a-box, fitted medical supplies, and restaurants. The Kinrais stopped at a number of restaurants where Zage’s mom and dad studied the menus. Zage, however, was hoping to eat at the food court. What he liked was simple bland food like pizza, hamburgers, French fries, and ice cream.

When his mom and dad stopped to look at another menu, Zage looked up at them and, trying not to sound whiny, said, “Can we eat at the food court, please? It’ll be faster. Besides, you know I don’t like the strange kinds of food they have in fancy places like this.”

His dad ruffled his hair and said, “There’s no way we’re wasting fine food like this on an unsophisticated barbarian like you. We’re just trying to figure out a good place to come back and have a nice dinner some other night.”

“Aw,” Zage said, grinning up at him sweetly, “a romantic evening.” Then he frowned, “Wait a minute, you guys don’t need to be romantic. Mom’s already pregnant.”

Shan gently smacked the back of his head, “You’ve watched far too many of those biology videos for you to be saying something like that. Are you trying to get on your dad’s bad side?”

“No,” Zage said, giving him a smirk. “I’m shooting for just annoying enough that you won’t change your mind and decide to take me to one of these restaurants.”

~~~

At the food court, Zage spent quite a bit of time wandering around, looking at all the choices, but then settled on a burger and fries anyway. His mother bought it for him and one for herself, though her burger had lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and dressing where his was plain with catsup. He followed her as she threaded her way through all the tables in the court, wondering where she’d choose to sit. There weren’t any tables that backed up to walls the way she liked. The tables just kind of ended where the mall started. She picked a table near the edge where the mall proper started. It was near a support column which Zage guessed was almost as good as a wall.

They were sitting, waiting for Shan to arrive. He’d gotten Mexican food from a different vendor. Zage had just said, “When will we know if it’s a boy or girl?” when his mother’s head snapped to her left. He looked the same direction, realizing she’d reacted to a muted clanking that’d come from that direction.

A young man had set a heavy-duty canvas bag down on his table. Zage thought the bag must have some metal objects in it to make the clanking noise. The man unzipped it and reached both hands inside the bag.

Ell’s eyes dropped to their table. She moved their tray and grabbed her Coke with her arm in an odd, position. Zage frowned, thinking, It’s got to be hard to hold her Coke that way. Her hand was upside down, with the thumb closest to the table. She’d turned and focused her gaze back on the man. Zage had never seen her look worried before, but that’s how he’d have characterized her expression at the moment.

Zage turned to look at the man. He was pulling his hands out of the bag.

Guns! Zage thought when he saw pistol grips in the man’s fists. Zage’s world slowed.

Ell lunged left out of her chair, moving so quickly she seemed to blur. Her right hand flashed forward, throwing her Coke at the man.

Ell’s violent leap up from the table knocked their tray flying. Zage saw their hamburgers and French fries tumbling to the floor…

She was hurtling toward the gunman.

The guns had come clear of his bag and started to rise. He’d just shouted, “Adios mutha—” when the Coke smashed into the side of his head.

Zage’s time sense had slowed enough that he had time to realize her odd grip on the Coke had been so she’d be ready to spiral the Coke cup at the guy like it was a football, flying lid first.

When the Coke hit the man, it looked like it’d exploded.

The brown fluid sprayed outward like a firework going off.

The guy’s head jolted away.

Zage was out of his chair, running after his mother.

Ell leaped into the air, flipping to pass over the man upside down.

As she passed above, she grabbed his guns, jerking them up toward the ceiling and ripping them out of his hands. The gun in his right hand fired, the bullet flying high over the crowd.

He collapsed to the floor, out cold from the impact of the Coke on his temple.

Zage’s mother completed the rotation of her flip, landed on the other side of the guy, and, astonishingly, stopped in a single step.

She set the guns on the floor during the crouch of her landing.

Starting casually back toward the man as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, Ell grabbed Zage when he almost crashed into her.

She set him back upright and pointed over him, out toward the rest of the tables. “Stop your dad and take him to sit far away from here,” she whispered. “He can buy you another burger and fries.” She turned to the gunman.

As Zage walked away, he heard his mother mumbling to her AI, telling the security team not to get involved.

He realized Ell hadn’t pointed randomly out toward the tables like he’d thought. His dad was rushing across the food court toward them from exactly the direction she’d pointed.

Zage headed to intercept him.

A glimpse back over his shoulder showed his mother kneeling over the gunman. Her face tilted upward as she began to speak to a stunned-looking mall security guard. She pointed to the guns lying by the guard’s feet and he bent to pick them up. At a word from her, he stopped and put on gloves.

Shan was focused on the commotion and not looking at him so Zage shouted, “Dad!” When Shan’s eyes turned to fix on him, Zage put up hands to halt him.

Shan stopped, dropping to one knee beside Zage. “What happened?!” he asked quietly.

“Shooter,” Zage said. “Mom stopped him.”

“Oh my God!” Shan said raising his head to look towards Ell. He started to stand.

Using the grip he’d taken on Shan’s shirt, Zage tugged him back down, “Mom wants us to sit far away. I think she’s trying to keep us out of the news.”

“Oh…” Shan said, taking one more look towards Ell, then turning to look back the other way. He sighed, “Let’s go sit far away then. You can tell me all about whatever happened.”

As they walked, Zage glanced back toward his mother. A huge crowd had gathered around the incident so she wasn’t visible any longer. Shan found an empty table and sat down, then looked at Zage. “Your lunch’s still over there?”

Zage nodded, “It went on the floor during all the excitement.” He grinned at his dad, “Mom said you’d buy me another burger and fries.”

Shan slumped his shoulders and gave Zage a mournful look, “You’re so wasteful of your food.” He got up resignedly, “Come on, I’ll get you another. Plain, with catchup?”

Zage nodded, saying in a serious tone, “Sorry. It won’t happen again.” After a moment, he followed up with, “And fries.”

Shan laughed, “You’re serious about being off your diet, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh. Ice cream next!”

~~~

While Shan was ordering, Zage watched the crowd. Policemen arrived, then a couple of EMTs with a stretcher. They disappeared into the crowd so Zage couldn’t see what they were doing. He wished he could go over close enough to see how they loaded the guy onto the stretcher. More police arrived and started downloading people’s AI’s, getting the audio-video record of what’d happened.

Shan got Zage’s food. As they picked a table and sat down, he said, “I wonder if I should’ve gotten some food for your mom. Did hers go on the floor too?”

Zage nodded. “I’d wait. Wouldn’t want it getting soggy.”

“What’d she have?”

“A burger with the works, French fries, and a Coke.”

“Okay, spill. What exactly happened?”

Zage described the events, realizing it was taking several minutes to describe something that’d happened in the space of a few seconds.

Shan turned a look over toward the crowd Ell was hidden amongst. “Sounds like your mom alright.”

Wonderingly, Zage said, “It’s like she knew exactly what to do.”

“Yup. But, then, it’s not her first rodeo,” Shan said offhandedly.

“What’s that mean?”

“You know, that she’s handled a lot of crises in the past. Including other terrorists.”

Zage had to finish chewing, but as soon as he swallowed, he said, “She has?!”

Shan turned wondering eyes on his son, “Yeah. In her first Olympics, right?” Seeing the confused look in Zage’s eyes, he said, “You didn’t know about that?”

“I knew she was in the Olympics twice. The first time she won four gold medals,” Zage continued almost indignantly. “Nobody told me about terrorists.”

“I guess I kind of assumed you’d probably read up on your mom. Checked out her Wikipedia page or something. Sorry. Let me tell you about how she took out seven terrorists to rescue a bunch of her teammates on the US Olympic team.”

Zage listened with growing astonishment as Shan told the story. When it drew to a close, he said, “So she shot those guys?”

Shan nodded.

“Where’d she even learn to use a gun?”

Shan shrugged, “She was in the Air Force, you know. Everyone in the military gets weapons training.”

Zage’s eyes widened, “She was in the military? How long?”

“Um, she was at the Air Force Academy for two years… Then she was on active duty for a while longer, I’m not exactly sure how long. She was involved in some secret stuff during the Taiwan crisis—”

“What was the Taiwan crisis?”

“The PRC, that’s mainland China, set out to invade Taiwan, but something happened. They called back their fleet and pretended it was just a training exercise.”

“And Mom was involved in that?”

“Yeah, it was something secret though. She’s never told me exactly what she did, but things other people have said makes it seem like whatever she did was of some importance.”

“Is that the crisis you were talking about earlier?”

Shan nodded, “One of them.”

Zage frowned, “There were others?”

“Well, yeah. I know you know about how President Stockton was after her for a long time. There were lots of little crises involved in avoiding arrest back then.” Shan looked Zage in the eyes, “Did you know her invention of ports came just in time to send little rockets up and save the astronauts in the International Space Station? D5R was able to provide air, water, and food after the space station’s normal rocket resupply system failed.” When Zage shook his head, Shan said, “You should read about that one. Then there was comet Hearth-Daster—”

“Was that the comet that nearly hit the Earth?”

Shan nodded.

Zage frowned again, “Was part of it going to hit one of the habitats or something?”

Shan snorted, “Yeah. The Earth. That habitat. D5R didn’t have any habitats up in space back then.”

“But I thought the comet didn’t hit us.”

“Yeah, but only because your mom helped NASA hit some of the big fragments with nuclear weapons and D5R pounded the little fragments to smithereens with kinetic impactors.” Shaking his head, Shan leaned closer to his son, “Probably every living person on this planet owes their life to her, that’s why so many people love her. Why she gets so much respect. It’s just unbelievable to me that some people still take pot shots at her.”

Wide-eyed, Zage said, “I thought she got so much respect because she’s so good at science. She really saved everyone too?”

Shan nodded slowly, glancing over to where the crowd around the incident was starting to disperse. “She did indeed…” Zage saw tears welling in his dad’s eyes before Shan used a napkin to wipe them away. Shan’s voice sounded rough as he said, “Maybe I’d better order our savior a burger with the works. It doesn’t look like she’ll be much longer.”

“Okay,” Zage said, staring at his mom across the room. “Osprey,” he whispered. “Bring up the Wikipedia page on Ell Donsaii.” When he’d gotten several pages into it, he thought, I should’ve read this a long time ago! It seems insane that I knew all about her science accomplishments, but that I only read about her sports stuff recently. And then only because she mentioned she was good at sports when she was talking to me about my own reaction times. How could I not know about all these crises my mother’s dealt with?!

Zage had stopped reading to ponder how his mother could still be so humble when Steve walked up and sat down across the table from him. Steve said, “You okay?”

Zage nodded, “Do you already know what happened?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve seen the video records from Allan and Osprey. I’m worried she moved so fast someone’ll figure out she’s Ell.”

“Do you know about the reporter who asked me if I was Ell Donsaii’s son?”

“Yeah,” Steve shook his head. “If she sees that video, it really seems like the cat’ll be out of the bag.”

“Mom and Dad were talking about how they might have to go back to some old identities they had in the past? She’d be Elsa Gardon and he’d be Daniel Reyes.” Zage frowned at Steve, “Did you know about those identities?”

“Yeah, I started working for your mom quite a while before that.”

“Um, Steve?” Zage said. At Steve’s nod, he continued, “It kind of seems like I’ve known about my mom’s science stuff forever, but I didn’t know she was good at sports until February or so.”

Steve snorted, “Good at sports?”

Zage shrugged, “Really good.”

“Un-freaking-believably good is more like it.”

“Okay.”

Steve tilted his head in a surprised fashion, “Really? You had no idea?”

Zage nodded slowly, looking across the food court toward his mother, “Yeah, I’m not interested in sports.” He looked back at Steve “My dad says… he says that Mom’s dealt with people like this guy with the guns before. That’s why she knew what to do.”

Steve shrugged, “She knew what to do the very first time she got in that kind of situation.”

“You mean, with the terrorists at the Olympics?”

“Yeah, though I wasn’t working with her way back then. But, also when she was kidnapped—”

“Mom’s been kidnapped too?! Not just me and Amy?”

Steve nodded slowly, looking a little dyspeptic. Zage thought maybe Steve wasn’t sure he was supposed to have told Zage about that.

“Do you know about what she did with comet Hearth-Daster?”

“You mean, how she saved our planet? I think everybody knows about that,” Steve said, his voice sounding rough like Shan’s had.

“I… I didn’t know about any of this stuff… I mean, I’ve always thought she was amazing because she developed PGR technology and ports and D5R and… and she had Nobel Prizes even before the two last December. Well, two back then if you count the Peace Prize. But I didn’t know she was an athlete, or that she’d been kidnapped, or dealt with terrorists, or…” Zage shook his head, “It just seems like I didn’t know much about my own mother.” Shan arrived back at the table and sat down with a tray holding Ell’s burger, fries, and Coke. Zage looked up at his dad, then continued, “I think she should’ve told me about this stuff. Dad’d say it’d be bragging to tell me, and that bragging’s an ugly thing to do, but…”

Shan said, “And now that you’re hearing about it from someone else, not her; aren’t you even more amazed and proud?”

Steve leaned across the table and put a hand on Zage’s forearm. “Your mom decided that I needed to know that you’re Gordito. Have you considered that you might’ve saved as many lives as your mom did when she stopped that comet?”

Zage frowned and tilted his head, “I just helped a little. Dr. Kelso and the others at CDC would’ve figured it out pretty soon anyway.”

Quietly, Steve said, “Even Kelso says millions of more people would’ve died without your help. Probably billions. But I’ll guarantee your dad’s right. Finding out about it from someone else made me think a lot more of you than if you’d been going around bragging about it.”

Steve suddenly stood up, “It looks like they’re about to let your mom go. I’m going to get out of here so they don’t have any reason to associate her with me.” He turned and ambled away as if he were going to do some shopping.

A few minutes later, Ell sat down with them. She lifted an eyebrow and gave them one of her crooked grins, “Is that burger for me?”

Shan nodded. As Ell unwrapped her burger, Shan asked worriedly, “Who was that guy? Do we know yet?”

Ell slowly shook her head. “I got a glimpse of his ID when the cops checked it. Name’s Joe Rodgers. Allan says he’s got a chronically disgruntled presence on the net, but that there’s nothing there to tell us why he decided to shoot people in the mall.”

“Crazies can be anywhere I guess…” Shan said, shaking his head. Then to Ell, “What do you think? Is your little performance going to be all over the news?”

Ell shrugged as she chewed. When she’d swallowed, she said, “I don’t know. There was a reporter lady that showed up and interviewed some people. But, it happened so fast that hardly anyone got time to turn and look. The only ones who saw it were the ones who were incidentally facing the right direction. I heard people in the crowd asking each other what’d happened and saw them checking their AI’s recordings to see if they’d caught any video of it. I heard a lot of them saying their AI cameras didn’t have us in frame. But it’s a certainty that at least a few got part of it. Of course, I didn’t get to watch their videos so I don’t know exactly what they got.”

“The reporter didn’t interview you?”

“Yeah,” Ell shrugged, “I told her I hardly remembered it myself. Said I was freaked out and full of adrenalin and just attacked him without thinking.”

“What about Allan’s recording?”

After another pause for Ell to chew a mouthful, she said, “I told the reporter I didn’t want to share it. I gave a copy to the cops of course, but I got Allan to interpolate some frames so I won’t look like I was moving so fast. Of course, if someone on the force gets too inquisitive and cross-correlates my frames to someone else’s, that could be a problem.”

Zage said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have done that gymnastic leap over the guy? It seems like that’s the thing that might make people think of Ell Donsaii.”

Ell looked thoughtful. She said, “His guns were pointing into the crowd and I wanted to aim them safely up over those people. If I’d run behind him, I’d have had a hard time reaching them. I didn’t want to run in front of the guns. I couldn’t go underneath, because his table was in the way.” She shook her head, “I think the only way to do it was by going over him.” She gave Zage a serious look, “When you’re trying to save people’s lives, you can’t be worrying about whether doing it might blow a secret or cause other problems… problems that’re minor in comparison.” She looked out across the big room, “To tell the truth, I’m astonished our little secret hasn’t been blown before now. It just seems like way too many people know about my double life for it to have stayed a secret this long.” Ell pursed her lips, “Actually, it’s pretty amazing no one’s decided to sell us out to the press before now. But I think if our Ms. Pardo sees a copy of that video, she’ll sell us out before her next heartbeat.”

Chapter Nine

Carley hadn’t been able to reach Eli for several days—which had her worried. When she got out of the lab at the end of the day her AI said it had managed a hand-shake with Eli’s and told her he was in Raleigh, not Durham. She didn’t want to ride all the way over there, then have him refuse to talk to her, so she asked her AI to connect them. A moment later, he said, “Yeah?” in a gravelly, grumpy voice. Hungover again, she thought.

“Hey, brother. What’re you doing in Raleigh?”

He began a harangue that started with, “Those assholes in the Durham shelter…” and went on and on. The gist was that he’d gotten incredibly drunk, then tried to get back into the Durham shelter. Since that was verboten, they’d denied him. He’d taken revenge by declaring that he was moving to Raleigh—as if they’d be hurt by the loss of his patronage at their homeless shelter.

He spent a good deal of the harangue bitterly complaining about the fact that the Raleigh shelter had much the same set of rules that the Durham one did.

When he wound down, Carley said, “You want me to come get you?”

“Yeah, you can take me down to Wilmington. I’ve been thinking about checking out the beaches.”

“I’ll come get you, but not to take you even farther away.”

There was a moment of silence, then he said, “Chapel Hill?”

She didn’t want to have to drive to Chapel Hill either, but it was closer than Raleigh. She was afraid he’d make his own way down to Wilmington. “Okay. It’ll take thirty, maybe forty-minutes to get there.” She gave instructions to her car and leaned back to read some papers she’d been meaning to get to.

~~~

When her car pulled up beside Eli, he got in without a word. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Headache.”

“Hangover, you mean.” Carley had her AI order a couple of Tylenol and a bottle of Pedialyte from Amazon, getting them delivered to the port in her car.

Eli took them from her without thanks, popping the Tylenol and swigging the Pedialyte. Carley went back to reading her papers.

When they reached the outskirts of Chapel Hill, she turned to him again, “So, have you thought any more about how the injections actually were working?”

He’d reclined the car seat and shut his eyes. He didn’t lift his head off the headrest, just said, “No.” He said it in a tone that implied he didn’t really want to think about it, or talk about it either.

“I know you feel like the shots didn’t do anything, but I want you to consider the fact that you didn’t drink while you were on them. Then, the day they ran out you got blotto drunk.”

“I got blotto drunk because some asshole gave my job to someone else.”

“Yeah,” Carley said with a sigh. “It’s never your fault, is it?”

“Just let me out here,” Eli said angrily. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Sorry. I know, not getting the job must’ve been tough…” She paused, not sure what else to say, but letting the car continue on its way.

Eli didn’t say anything either. Carley suspected he’d be happier if he was closer to the Chapel Hill shelter before he actually got out. After a while, he said, “Really. Those shots didn’t do anything. I couldn’t feel any difference. I think you’re wasting your time on… whatever the stuff is.”

“It’s a protein,” Carley said, unable to keep herself from beginning to explain, though she did manage not to continue expounding on something he so obviously didn’t care about. “There’s no reason to expect the shot would make you feel any different. They’re only intended to diminish your desire to keep drinking. They’re not supposed to replace the euphoria of drinking with a different kind of high.”

“So, I suppose you want me to keep injecting myself,” Eli said in a flat, bored manner.

She nodded, “And I think you should keep applying for jobs too. Don’t go off the handle because you didn’t get the first one you applied for. With your history…” Carley trailed off before she said something that’d piss him off.

Before she could think of something else to say in order to recover from the verbal path she’d been heading down, Eli said, “Yeah. With my history, I’m going to have to apply for a lot of shit jobs before I get one. Then, I’m going to have to do well there before I can get a better one. I’ve got to dig myself out of the hole I’ve thrown myself into… I’ve heard it all.” He held out his hand.

Carley looked at his palm suspiciously, “I’ll buy you dinner, but I’m not giving you any money.”

“Give me your damned medication. Protein. Whatever. I’ll shoot it up. I still don’t think it’s going to work, but I’ll do my part.”

Elated that he was willing, but depressed about his attitude, Carley handed over a packet with two-weeks’ worth of loaded syringes.

She bought him dinner before she dropped him off.

Then she drove home, emotions sloshing, sometimes optimistic, more often cynical.

***

Sunday night at 10 o’clock!

In disgust, Stackhouse pulled onto the road and started his long drive back to the motel in Creedmoor. Four days! He’d waited from mid-afternoon until midnight Thursday and Friday, all day until midnight on Saturday and now all day until 10 PM on Sunday!

Donsaii never freaking leaves her farm!

She probably got her mail through a port at the post office. Lord knows what she ate. She didn’t go to the store and no one delivered.

I’ll give it another week, he thought. But I’d better start thinking about other targets.

***

Jillian sighed, despairing over how much of her job followed the dictum, “Hurry up and wait.” Currently, she was sitting in a courtroom, watching the attorneys’ backs as they whispered to the judge at her bench. Worse, a moment later, the judge called a recess. Everyone else got up and started shuffling out of the courtroom. Jillian wanted to leave too, but she couldn’t afford to lose the seat she’d come early to get. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a granola bar. Taking a bite, she leaned back in her seat, looked up at her HUD and asked her AI to run a new search on Raquel Kinrais. The woman had a vanishingly small presence on the web, but Jillian’d decided she should look deeper into the low relevance search matches in hopes of finding something.

However, when the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) opened, before Jillian had a chance to scroll down to the lower relevance results, her eye caught on the top link. She realized it had its high relevance listing because it’d only happened a day or so ago. Opening the link, she read that Kinrais had stopped a shooter at the local mall’s food court. Jillian’s surprise grew as she read about the incident. Kinrais had been seated just a few tables away from the shooter when he pulled out a couple of pistols and pointed them out into the crowded court. According to witness reports, Kinrais had thrown a Coke at him, then launched herself across the intervening distance, tackling the man so hard she’d flown over him. She’d managed to get the man’s guns away from him, though he’d gotten off one shot that went wildly up over the crowd.

Kinrais had been incredibly humble afterward, saying she’d just happened to be in the right place at the right time. She claimed anyone else would’ve done the same thing in that situation. This, despite the fact that a lot of people who were seated even closer to the gunman hadn’t even realized what was happening until it was over. Kinrais and the reporter had both attributed her action to the type of superhuman feats mothers had been known to perform in the past—lifting cars off children and the like. The reporter even had a vid clip of Kinrais’ trembling hands—attributed to adrenalin. The news outlet had managed to purchase AV records from some of the bystanders, but said none of them had captured more than a fragment of what had happened.

Jillian ran the single scrap of video they’d attached to the story. Holy shit! she thought. She watched the video over and over, slowing its speed to a veritable frame by frame before she thought she understood what she was seeing.

At the beginning of the clip the gunman was at the edge of the video frame, his right arm actually off the edge. The visible left arm pulled a gun out of the bag, then raised it to point out into the food court.

Suddenly the guy’s head tilted violently toward center-frame, an explosion of brown material bursting out around it—presumably the Coke Kinrais had supposedly thrown at him.

Only a few frames later Kinrais herself hurtled over him—Jillian wouldn’t have characterized it as “tackling” since an upside-down Kinrais went completely over the man’s head, flipping end for end. She ripped the guns up out of the man’s hands as she went by.

Kinrais landed perfectly, halted in a single step, placed the guns on the floor during the crouch of her landing, and started back the other way, casual as you might please.

As if out for a stroll on the beach.

At that point, the video jolted. This seemed to be because the guy whose AI made the recording had finally reacted to the gunshot. The weapon that fired the shot must have been the one off the edge of the frame because Jillian couldn’t see it fire. Jillian certainly didn’t see any kick or fire from the left gun she could see in-frame. Despite significant camera motion artifact as the guy making the video was ducking, Jillian thought she saw Kinrais catching a kid who barreled into her.

Then all the video showed was the floor, as the man who’d provided it cowered under a table.

Jillian leaned back in her seat digesting what she’d just seen. That was freaking amazing. I wouldn’t have thought anyone… anyone in the entire world could’ve disarmed a shooter like that. Jillian sat bolt upright, But, by God, Donsaii could have!

But that was supposed to be Kinrais! Did Donsaii dress herself up like Kinrais to go to the mall incognito?

Jillian went through the video frame by frame again, trying to get a clean look at the woman to see if she actually could be Donsaii dressed as Kinrais. The few frames not distorted by motion all came as the woman walked back to the shooter, but the angle was from the side and slightly behind, not a good facial image.

As Jillian looked at those frames again, she realized the woman didn’t look at all shaken. She may be claiming adrenalin let her perform superhuman feats, but she looked calm! Calm as only Donsaii could be.

Anyone else would’ve been freaked.

I hope Simpkins can work some of his magic to clean up this video, Jillian thought. She started searching for the reporter that’d done the story, hoping the woman had collected more video clips than she’d published. Ones that might be able to be assembled with this one to produce a more complete picture of what’d happened. Hopefully, the reporter at least had the names of other people who had clips.

***

Ell was walking back to her office when Sheila appeared in the hallway. “Hey Bosslady, I’ve got some news.”

Ell broke into an excited grin, “What is it?”

Sheila drew back, “You seem to think it’s good news?”

“Of course.”

Sheila narrowed her eyes, “What makes you so certain?”

“Because,” Ell laughed, “whenever you have bad news for me, you send one of your minions.”

Sheila frowned and looked introspective, “Really?”

“Every time.” Ell tilted her head, “Go ahead, try to tell me it’s actually bad news.”

“It is,” Sheila said in a serious tone. “It’s about those polls you asked me to get done.”

With a relieved sigh, Ell said, “People think we should terraform Mars?”

With a stern look, Sheila said, “I said, it’s bad news.”

Ell laughed again, “It is not. You’re just trying to sell your little lie. What’re the actual numbers?”

Exasperatedly, Sheila said, “In the US, 83% in favor. Worldwide, it’s more like 91%. Despite what the protesters out at UC Berkeley think, most people really do want us to live on another planet.”

“Wow!” Ell said thoughtfully. “That’s way better than I expected.” She looked back up at Sheila and grinned, “Thanks for the great news…” She wrinkled her nose and leaned a little closer. Speaking quietly, she said, “And if you really want to pull off your little charades,” she winked, “You’re going to need some acting classes.”

Ell turned and headed on down the hall to her office with a bounce in her step—leaving Sheila with a frustrated look on her face.

***

Jillian stepped into Simpkins dim little workspace. High-resolution screens were the main feature of the room and seemed to be everywhere. Handing the video guru one of the disgusting vanilla cappuccinos he liked, she said, “Tell me you were able to work a miracle with those clips.”

He grunted, “If you want art, you gotta give me something more than mud and sticks to work with.” Nonetheless, he mumbled to his AI and a video started running on the biggest screen. The first clip was one that displayed Kinrais from a completely different angle than the original video Jillian had watched. This one showed her from a left-posterior angle, sitting at a table in the food court. There was a kid across the table from her who could be seen in a frontal view. Simpkins had stabilized the motion of the image well enough that Jillian recognized the Kinrais kid she’d met at Barnes’ lab. So, what’s that mean? Jillian wondered, feeling confused. If this’s Donsaii’s kid… what’s he doing with Raquel Kinrais, and, how did she… Well, but aren’t I thinking this’s Donsaii dressed up as Kinrais?

Her train of thought stopped as Kinrais turned her head to the left and could be seen in profile.

It wasn’t Donsaii’s profile.

The nose wasn’t a slight ski-slope. It had a hump instead. Then Donsaii leaped to the left and vanished off the side of the screen. Jillian’s initial impulse was to pause the video and go back through it frame by frame, but she could do that after Simpkins gave her a copy.

So she kept her eyes on the screen. Now the action was seen from another angle. This time, when Kinrais turned to her left she was facing toward the camera. Her cheeks were a little chipmunky. Her skin and hair were quite a bit darker; eye color was hard to tell on the video.

But, she did not look like Donsaii. The dark hair and skin color could be faked, but the shape of the face definitely wasn’t right.

The Kinrais kid looked more like Donsaii than Kinrais did…

~~~

At home later, having watched the vid over and over, Jillian sat back and sighed.

The kid who’d barreled into Kinrais after the shooter’d been disarmed proved to be the Kinrais boy.

The gun that’d fired had indeed been the one in the shooter’s right hand.

The only video showing Kinrais springing up from the table to take three bounding strides before she leaped over the guy was of terrible quality, but nonetheless, it showed Kinrais performing an amazing, Donsaii-like, physical feat.

After the guy was disarmed, Kinrais didn’t look at all shaken up. You would’ve thought she carried out such astonishing physical exploits every day.

Jillian just couldn’t put it all together. The incontrovertible facts were that the kid at the mall had been Zage Kinrais, boy genius, going to grad school at age 5, and, that the woman, Raquel Kinrais, moved like Jillian would’ve thought only Ell Donsaii could, but did not look like Ell.

Well, her body was similar to Donsaii’s, but not her face.

Jillian wondered if Kinrais could be some kind of relative of Donsaii’s, with the same phenomenal physical abilities, just without the notoriety.

Or, could this really be Kinrais and her kid; but Kinrais had really had one of those phenomenal, adrenalin-fueled physical experiences that were supposed to happen to ordinary people on occasion? A stress reaction that let her be as good as Donsaii, but only for a moment?

Or could Kinrais be Donsaii in an extensive disguise? Seems like it’d require a lot. A nasal prosthesis, cotton stuffed in her cheeks, a wig, dark skin makeup…

Damn… That has to be it! That’s why no one ever sees her anywhere except at work!

But, how do I prove it?

***

In the morning, Jillian found herself going over the material she’d accumulated once again.

She had a few public pictures of Zage Kinrais. There were a few she’d picked from the video of the incident at the mall. There was the published picture of him from the article about him attending Duke at such a young age. She’d recently found one of him with his father at the Nobel Prize ceremony.

She didn’t want to use her own images from when she’d found the kid at the Duke laboratory. She had a feeling that people wouldn’t take kindly to a reporter who tracked down a child to get a story.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the kid looked like his dad. Her own pictures taken at the lab were the ones where he looked the most like Donsaii but even then she didn’t think anyone would remark on it if they weren’t considering the possibility to begin with. And, even though those images might seem suggestive, they certainly weren’t proof he was Donsaii’s kid.

The kid was undeniably a prodigy, but the fact that he was a prodigy didn’t prove he was Donsaii’s child. In fact, though she’d graduated high school several years early, Donsaii hadn’t started attending grad school after skipping elementary school, high school, and college like the boy had. So, actually, it seemed he was a lot more of a prodigy than she was. Besides, genius like Donsaii’s wasn’t usually inherited. The children of geniuses were usually smart, but they weren’t often off the charts like their parent.

Jillian also had the video from the mall in which Raquel Kinrais physically performed in a fashion that Jillian thought only Ell Donsaii could. That didn’t prove that Kinrais was Donsaii though. It was true that their body morphologies were similar, but they walked differently. Their faces were so different that Jillian found herself having to propose that Donsaii applied the kind of Hollywood transformation that took hours in the makeup chair. The fact that she’d have to carry out such a transformation on a daily basis made it seem ridiculous.

Nonetheless, Jillian was convinced Raquel Kinrais and Ell Donsaii were the same person. But I can’t prove it, she thought with immense frustration.

After thinking about it for another hour, she decided to draft a story in which she outlined what she’d found and posed the question, “Is this Ell’s child?” She wouldn’t claim to have proved it. She’d just suggest the possibility. Maybe she could even couch it as a story about Zage Kinrais, a child of undeniable genius whose mother had astonishing physical capabilities like Donsaii… “Or could she actually be Donsaii?”

She started working on the story.

***

Carter DeWitt settled into place on his waldo controller, then told his AI to connect him to the oversized construction waldo on Mars. A view of Mars snapped into place in front of his eyes. It’d been a few days since he’d been on site there, so the first thing he did was look around the flat and featureless plain.

It was still flat and featureless. They were located on the opposite side of Mars from the Valles Marineris—where Ell’s friend Phil and the other Martian scientists were living. The Mars waldo team had set up another kilometer diameter graphene dome, this one unshielded, since only waldoes were expected to work in it. The graphene contributed to the featureless appearance by diffusing the light coming through the dome. Well, and the graphene also kind of hid the pebbles on the surface of Mars inside the dome.

They’d poured a concrete ramp four-meters—thirteen-feet—wide in the middle of the dome.

At present, a couple of construction waldoes were setting up one of the new five-meter inflatable ring-ports at the top end of the ramp. They were positioning it so, when the ring opened, the surface of the ramp on the side back on Earth would line up with this one.

Carter walked his waldo over and looked things over. He took the time to measure the critical distance from the ramp down to the ring. Looking up at the other two waldoes, he said, “You guys ready?”

They nodded.

Carter stepped back and spoke briefly to his AI. A few seconds later, the port opened with an actinic flash. There was a puff of air suggesting they hadn’t managed to pump the Earthside chamber down far enough to completely match the pressure in the Mars dome.

Cognizant of the fact that they were burning 100-megawatts, or $1,000 per hour, just to keep the port open, Carter felt some urgency. He reminded himself that a thousand dollars an hour really wasn’t much to spend on keeping a 16 ½ foot portal to Earth open, but wasting money had always grated on him.

A waldo on the Earth side pushed a steel plate over on its hinge. Once it fell, it nicely bridged from the concrete ramp on the Earth side to the ramp on the Mars side. Carter stepped his waldo up onto the Mars side ramp and looked at the fit of the plate. “It looks good,” he said. He lifted the plate and flipped it back to Earthside, then had his AI shut down the port. Speaking to the waldo team back on Earthside, he said, “Go ahead and position the first parts of the turbine on the ramp.”

Carter shut down his Mars waldo and shifted his point of view to one of the waldoes working in the big evacuated chamber back on Earth.

~~~

It didn’t take the waldo team on Earth long to position their first load on the ramp. It was a large wheeled cart full of tools and some of the smaller generator components. Carter switched back to the Mars waldo, checked in with his team, then opened the port again. One of the Earth waldoes flipped down the steel plate while three more gave the big cart a shove to help it start moving. It rolled down the Earthside ramp, shot across the plate and through the port. From there it ran on down the Mars ramp.

To Carter’s surprise, the big cart rolled across without any problems. He’d felt sure something would go wrong with this first major transfer of a large mass across interplanetary distances. The port would have suddenly required less power as it absorbed the kinetic energy of the cart which had been traveling at 30 kps in Earth’s orbit, but was now only traveling at 24 kps in Mars’ orbit (plus or minus as much as 0.7 kps depending on the time of day and therefore the relative rotational speed of the surfaces of Mars and Earth). It seemed to him that—despite the reassurances of the power engineer who’d designed the supply—the power surges inherent to such transfers had to blow something out someday and that the bigger the surges were, the more problematic they’d become.

Though he breathed a sigh of relief when this one went without problems, he knew that the fact the first transfer had gone fine wouldn’t keep him from worrying that the port might shut down with one of the expensive turbine components halfway across, destroying millions of dollars of expensive equipment in a microsecond.

Carter flipped up the plate that bridged the gap, had his AI close the port and told the guys on Earth to set up another load. Then he turned to help four big Mars construction waldoes keep the cart rolling all the way over to the spot in the dome where they’d poured a concrete slab for their first atmosphere plant.

By the time they’d walked the waldoes back over to the port, the guys on the Earth side had the next cart of equipment ready to roll. Carter opened the port, the components rolled through, and he and the guys moved that cart over to the worksite too.

The last load across was one of the truly huge waldoes that did many of the things construction cranes had done in the past. It’d be able to reposition the massive steam turbine components so they could be connected to one another. The merely large waldoes would help guide them into place. Man-sized waldoes would do the welding.

The big boiler tank where hot CO2 from Venus would meet water from Europa and generate steam was too large to go through the portal. The stack of plates they’d ported for it’d have to be welded together there on Mars.

There was a box beside the huge waldo that Carter didn’t recognize. He spoke to the people back on Earth, “What’s in the box that came through with the crane waldo?”

“That’s AJ’s new twenty-meter inflatable ring-port.”

Carter snorted, “Twenty-meters!” He shook his head, “AJ’s skipping right past a ten-meter port and going directly to a twenty-meter?”

“He says he needs to know whether he can open a portal over sixty-feet in diameter. That’d be big enough to send across parts for a two-terawatt generator.”

“Holy crap!” Carter said almost under his breath. “Can’t accuse the guy of thinking small, can you?”

He looked around the worksite, then turned to the other waldoes. “Let’s get started. This bad boy isn’t going to build itself.”

Chapter Ten

Raleigh, North Carolina— Self-styled investigative reporter Jillian Pardo published a speculative piece in which she postulates that Ell Donsaii may be living her private life in disguise. Pardo proposes the idea that Donsaii doesn’t actually live on the farm that’s listed as her residence. Rather, she lives in a house just south of the farm—a house whose lot borders that of her publicly known residence.

Even more stunning, if Pardo’s correct, is that Donsaii has an alter ego, Raquel Kinrais née Blandon. It’s a matter of record that Raquel Blandon married Shannon Kinrais, Donsaii’s co-author and co-Nobel prize winner. Shannon and Raquel Kinrais are also known to have a six-year-old son, Zage Kinrais. Zage himself was in the news when he began participating in graduate level genetics courses and research at Duke University last winter. This essentially means he skipped elementary, middle, and high school, as well as college.

As to the question of how Donsaii hid her pregnancy, Pardo points out that the pregnancy would’ve occurred during the time Donsaii was out of the public eye anyway—hiding to avoid President Stockton’s arrest orders.

Pardo readily admits that hard evidence supporting her contention is limited. However, she’s put up a video of Raquel Kinrais disarming a shooter in a mall—with an unbelievably gymnastic leap that sends her flipping over the shooter’s head while she reaches down and pulls the pistols out of the man’s hands. Virtually anyone who’s reviewed the video acknowledges that it represents the kind of unbelievable athletic feat that only Ell Donsaii can perform. The video, however, is a heavily edited composite of clips from many different individuals AI’s and we await an analysis performed on the original clips.

The ramifications of this claim, if true, are mind-boggling. Although Pardo readily admits she has not proven her thesis, so far no one has been able to disprove it either. Attempts to contact Donsaii or her representatives in order to obtain confirmation or denial of the claims have been unsuccessful…

Although Jason Stackhouse was not one to closely follow the news, even he saw the story about Donsaii’s alter ego.

He immediately decamped from his parking spot near Donsaii’s farm. He drove around to the Kinrais’ house, but, by the time he arrived, reporters were already driving up and beginning to set up on the street out front. He drove past and parked several blocks down the street to sit and think.

His initial conclusion was that it’d be much too difficult to carry out his attack with a zoo of gawkers out in front of the house. He’d decided that he’d just have to wait until the frenzy died down. Then, he realized Donsaii’d probably disappear that night or the next day. Along with any chance for Jason to take his sweet revenge—something he was becoming more and more enamored of.

He briefly pondered trying to choose another target at D5R, but by now he had his heart set on Donsaii. Or the kid or husband. Taking them out would be even better because Donsaii’d suffer more.

Could he do it and get away?

It’d certainly be difficult, but Jason knew crowds had difficulty pinpointing the source of gunshots. Besides, the Kinrais home and its neighbors were on huge lots so he could sneak onto one and then through its woods to the Kinrais property. Once the deed was done, he could exfiltrate through a different lot.

And if he didn’t escape? That’d be okay. He thought he’d kinda like being infamous. Besides, if they didn’t catch him, those bastards at ETR might never even know it was his revenge that’d been taken.

He emptied his backpack and climbed into the back of his vehicle. Flipping over a seat he pulled the parts of his AR-15 out of the cushion and put them in the bottom of his backpack. He stuffed his jacket, food, and water back in on top of the weapon and got out of the car…

***

Alice had finished updating Dr. Barnes on the progress she’d made on her projects. Barnes turned to Zage and said, “My recollection is that you were working on whether proteins fabricated by Alzheimer associated genes will sometimes fold incorrectly, then clump, right?”

Zage nodded.

“So, how’s it coming on your project? Was Gordito right about the folding and clumping?”

As if it were no big deal, Zage said, “I finally got good data on that back at the end of September.” He mumbled to his AI and a chart popped up on the big screen in the lab. The boy quickly walked them through diagrams of one of the proteins he’d fabricated, images of it clumping, and graphs of the speed at which the protein tended to clump under different conditions.

Zage paused and looked around at their little group. “But, it turns out that the folding and crystallization process really only proceeds in the presence of certain viral proteins. That’s why I didn’t make much progress for a long time—because the folding and crystallization occurs glacially in the absence of viral particles. Having read about the infectious hypothesis for Alzheimer’s, on a whim I added some viral shell proteins. All the results I just showed you happened only in the presence of proteins from a Herpes simplex virus, specifically HSV-1.” He mumbled to his AI and new images popped up on the screen, “Here are graphs showing how crystallization proceeds without the herpes shell proteins.” It was immediately obvious that without the proteins the crystallization proceeded at a snail’s pace—if at all. “I got similar crystallization results with different amyloid forming proteins using two other herpes viruses, HHV-6 and HHV-7.”

He blinked at them a couple of times, as if wondering whether they understood. When there were no questions, he said, “So my current hypothesis is that the formation of amyloid is an immunological response to brain infections. The amyloid folds and crystallizes around the infectious particles, thus neutralizing them—somewhat like an antibody. It’s still not clear to me whether the damage to the central nervous system comes from the virus, from the inflammatory reaction to the virus, from the amyloid reaction to the virus, or from an inflammatory reaction to the clumped amyloid. However, it does seem like it might be advantageous to remove the amyloid with a non-inflammatory process since, at the point that it’s formed clumps, it’s already destroyed the virus.”

When he stopped, Alice thought Dr. Barnes eyes looked a little glazed. After a moment Barnes cleared her throat and said, “How do you know the amyloid destroyed the virus?”

“Um, I used to work in Dr. Turner’s microbiology lab over at UNC. Dr. Edith Schaefer does virology research in the lab next to his and I’d met some of her grad students. Through them I contacted her about ‘a protein’ that I thought might destroy HSV-1, though I didn’t tell her what it was since I didn’t have your permission. She had one of her grad students put the protein in with live viral particles. They couldn’t culture herpes out afterward, even after the amyloid was dissolved away.”

“Wow,” Dr. Barnes said dreamily, then sat in silence for a while, evidently digesting what she’d just been presented. Finally, she said, “That’s some very impressive work. I guess I should talk to Dr. Schaefer. Do you think you can write up your part of a paper that our lab and Schaefer’s could publish together? or do you need some help?”

“Um, I drafted a paper back when I got the data. It’s got almost all of Schaefer’s methods and data already in it for her to just edit and approve. Shall I forward it to you?”

“Um, sure,” Barnes said, still looking stunned. “Sorry I missed our last meeting. We could’ve tried to figure out something else for you to work on. Have you started on anything else on your own?”

The boy looked a little uncertain. Alice wondered whether he was embarrassed to say he hadn’t really been doing anything else since he’d finished all the work he’d just presented. Although, what he’s already done was plenty! she thought. I don’t think anyone would blame him if he took a vacation after that.

Zage said, “I hope it’s okay, but I worked with Gordito to come up with some short, glycosylated peptides that bind across the sites that deform in the Alzheimer associated proteins.”

Barnes gave a little shake of her head as if she were trying to clear it. “Come again? You’re proposing peptides that bind on either side of the segment of the protein that folds incorrectly?”

Zage nodded, a serious look on his face. He mumbled to his AI and another diagram popped up on the screen. This time they were showing a long protein chain. Then showing that protein chain folding differently, then showing a short peptide attaching itself where the protein folded abnormally. He said, “With the peptide attached, it can’t fold incorrectly anymore.” After a moment in which it looked like he wasn’t sure whether he should continue, he said, “And if it’s already folded, it unfolds.”

“Wait,” Barnes said, “are you saying you put this peptide in with some of the Alzheimer proteins and it kept them from folding and clumping?”

Zage nodded, “And, if you put the peptides in a well that’s already clumped, the protein un-clumps and goes back into solution. That’s how Dr. Schaefer’s grad student got the viral particles back out of the amyloid clumps so he could culture to see if they remained active.”

Oh. My. God! Alice thought.

Evidently, Barnes was thinking something along the same lines because she just stared at Zage for a few moments. “So,” she said slowly, “you’re thinking this peptide’ll dissolve already established amyloid clumps?”

Zage nodded again.

“You’re thinking it’s a treatment?” Barnes asked. Alice thought she was posing the question rhetorically.

“Well, I really think that the treatment should be to stop the herpes viruses before they cause problems in the first place. And, maybe it’ll turn out that it’s the herpes infection that causes Alzheimer’s and the amyloid’s unimportant. But if the amyloid is contributing, it’d be nice to be able to get rid of it,” Zage said diffidently.

There was another pause, then Rick asked, “You said the peptide’s glycosylated? Why’s that?”

“Glycosylation lets it cross the blood-brain barrier,” Zage said as if he wasn’t proposing a huge idea.

Barnes blinked a couple of times, then slowly said, “And… what’re you thinking the next steps should be?”

“Um,” Zage spoke to his AI again and the screen popped up a picture of a mouse. “I was thinking that I could apply for an animal research protocol using these transgenic mice that’ve been developed to express Alzheimer genes. They get amyloid plaques in their brains and develop some Alzheimer-like symptoms, presumably without herpes infections. This suggests that the amyloid actually is part of the problem. It seems they likely represent a good model in which we could administer the appropriate peptide to see if we could prevent formation of plaques… or maybe even treat the disease. That’d provide pretty good evidence that stopping formation of the amyloid or getting rid of it is likely to be an important part of the treatment in humans.”

Gobsmacked, they were all still staring at Zage when a knock came at the door. The person opened the door without waiting for permission. The admin for the genetics labs peeked in. Her eyes found Zage first, then went to Barnes, “Dr. Barnes, there’re a bunch of reporters out in my office. Um, they’re wanting to talk to Zage.” The lady’s eyes flicked somewhat apologetically to Zage, then back to Barnes.

Barnes frowned, then said with some irritation, “About what?”

“Um…” The woman stepped into the room and leaned down next to Barnes’ ear. She whispered, but Alice could easily hear it and she suspected the others probably could understand it as well. She said, “A reporter’s just published an article claiming ‘Raquel Kinrais’ is actually Ell Donsaii’s alter ego.” Her eyes shifted to Zage, then back, “And that Zage is Ell Donsaii’s son.”

Everyone in the room was staring at Zage. He looked distinctly unhappy.

Alice thought, Ell Donsaii’s kid…? No wonder he’s so damned smart!

~~~

Rick thought, I essentially ignored Ell Donsaii at the kid’s birthday party?!

~~~

Zage stood up. Saying, “I’d better go,” he started for the door.

He was mostly out the door before Barnes managed to say, “Zage! Wait!”

To her surprise, Carley was right behind Zage.

Zage turned and trotted the opposite direction from the administrative offices. As she ran after him, Carley told her car to meet her out back. Then she called, “Zage, let me give you a ride home.” She glanced down the hallway behind her and saw a group of people, presumably the reporters, hustling after her. She shouted angrily at them, “Leave him alone! He’s just a boy!”

Zage slipped into the stairwell. Carley slammed in after him. To her surprise, she was losing ground on him. She started running down the stairs, determined to catch up but frightened about what’d happen if she made a misstep. “Zage! Wait!”

He called back over his shoulder, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a ride.”

“But it’s not scheduled to be here for a while. I’ve called my car.”

“If you want to help, slow down those reporters.”

Carley looked back. The reporters were pretty far behind them. She reached the bottom of the stairwell just behind him. He was slowed down by the heavy door and she helped him bang it open. Outside, Carley looked around desperately for her car.

It rounded the corner. “The blue car’s mine,” she gasped, a little breathless from the run down the stairs. She started that way.

Zage looked both ways, then ran toward her car with her.

As they were leaping in, an SUV sped around the corner. Damned reporters are everywhere, Carley thought. She told the car’s AI to head back out the other way, then glanced at Zage. “Where should I take you?” She looked at the SUV as it went past. It looked like it had three people in it.

“My house,” he said, “where we had the birthday party.”

When she looked back at Zage, she thought he’d just waved at the guys in the SUV. Is he taunting them? she wondered.

Then it suddenly all came together. Ell Donsaii’s son! She remembered the men who’d been wandering around her apartment complex when Eli and Ray were there. She remembered the big man who’d come into their lab to ask if everything was okay when Zage had been giving her the little canisters of pepper spray. As CEO/CTO of D5R, Donsaii probably got paid enough to hire protection. Or maybe D5R hired it for her? “Are those guys your guards?” she asked hesitantly.

Zage grimaced, “‘Security detail,’” he looked at her, “that’s what we call ‘em. They’re really nice people.”

Carley looked out the back window and saw the SUV making a U-turn to follow them. “Do they think you’re in danger?”

He snorted, “They always think I’m in danger. But I’m not. I just didn’t want to talk to a bunch of reporters. At least not until I’ve talked to my mom and figured out how she wants to handle this.”

“Your mom… Ell Donsaii?”

He laughed, “I hardly ever see her as Ell. She’s always Raquel when I’m around.”

“Oh,” Carley said, trying to come to grips. After a few moments, she said, “I guess your life must be pretty… weird, huh?”

Zage shrugged, “I guess. It’s the only one I’ve ever had, so I really wouldn’t know.”

Carley didn’t know what to say to that, so they rode in silence for a bit. Finally, she said, “So why… does your mother live as someone else? In disguise, and all that.”

Zage jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Reporters. You saw what happened back there. That was within an hour of Pardo’s story coming out. I haven’t had to live with it, but of course, my mother has—as Ell Donsaii. I’m sure some people’d like being famous 24/7, but she says she likes being able to live an ordinary life like she can as Raquel.” Again they rode in silence for a while, then Zage continued, “Besides, there’re also the people who’ve tried to kidnap her… and me.”

Horrified, Carley said, “Someone tried to kidnap you?!”

“Succeeded actually,” he said darkly. “I was lucky to escape.”

“My God! What happened?”

“I probably shouldn’t talk about it.” He turned to her and grinned, “I thought you reported some pretty cool progress on your research this morning.”

So says the boy who might’ve just come up with a cure for Alzheimer’s, Carley thought, realizing he’d intentionally tried to distract her, but deciding to go along with it. “Thanks. I’ve been pretty excited about it myself.”

“I was thinking,” Zage said, then reeled off three excellent suggestions for confirmatory experiments and possible extensions of her work.

Feeling a little dazed, she sank back into her seat to ponder them. It’s sure a good thing my AI recorded that for me…

~~~

When they got to Zage’s house, there were reporters all along the road out front. Zage asked Carley to have her car pull down the driveway and around by the back of the house, not park in the front where she’d parked before.

The reporters eased aside to let them onto the driveway, but then crowded the windows of the car taking pictures. Many of them shouted questions. Zage gave Carley a forced smile while ignoring them.

When they pulled into the little parking area near the back of the house, Zage turned to her again to say, “I really appreciate your driving me home.” He waved back over his shoulder toward the SUV behind them, “I feel bad because the guys could’ve brought me, but the fact you were willing to do it means the world to me.” He opened the door and got out.

~~~

Jason saw a little kid getting out of the car. It’s Donsaii’s boy! he thought exultantly.

Rising from under the dense bushes he’d been hiding in, he stepped forward and leveled his AR-15.

~~~

It was Mary’s day to monitor feeds for Donsaii’s various security teams. This included signals intelligence from Allan, Ell’s astonishing AI. Allan also watched the video feed from the AI cameras of the people they were protecting, from the AI cameras of the security team, from any nearby security cameras, and from drones which continuously flew invisibly high above their charges. He flagged questionably dangerous events with astonishing accuracy whereas ordinary AI’s missed the obvious and ran false alarms all the time.

Mary’d just run her eyes over all the screens when the alarm went off. She looked back up to see a red circle flashing on the video from Zage’s overwatch drone.

Someone’s coming out of the bushes! she thought as she shouted “Zage-team, threat! 40 feet northeast!”

To her own equipment, she said, “Zoom in.”

The picture rapidly zoomed in and was suddenly repeated on a much larger screen above the rest of them. “Shooter!” she screamed as she saw the barrel of a gun out in front of the man in her top-down view.

A bloom of smoke appeared at the end of the barrel.

~~~

Barrett was looking back over his shoulder, checking the damned reporters lining the street for possible threats when Allan’s alarm went off and Mary’s call came in.

His head spun to the front.

He opened the door and leaped out of the slow-moving vehicle.

He saw Vince jumping out the other door as he shouted at the driver, gratified to see she’d flipped the switch to put the car in manual, “Run over the bastard!”

Barrett was running and the vehicle was accelerating when his gut clenched at the unmistakable sound of an AR-15 firing.

~~~

Carley’s car had just started to back up when she heard a loud banging. Her first thought was that the car ran into something—an event which would be bizarre while it was under AI control.

When the banging repeated, over and over, she spun around trying to figure out where it was coming from.

She saw a man with a rifle striding forward and firing it towards where Carley’d last seen Zage.

Heart in her throat, she looked for Zage.

He lay on the ground.

His little body shivered at the impact of another bullet.

She threw open the door of her car, wondering what she could do but determined to do something.

The SUV roared by, ripping the door off her car. A moment later the vehicle ran over the shooter.

On weak knees, Carley got out and stumbled toward Zage.

Two men ran past her and dropped to their knees beside the boy.

Arriving moments later, she knelt beside them, crying, “Zage!”

But, with all the shots the man had fired, she knew her young friend was dead.

Seeing bullet holes in his shirt, she reached out and put her hand on his chest. His hard, rigid chest…

The man next to her moved and she could see Zage’s grey face…

No, she blinked, some kind of grey material covered his face. To some extent she could see through it. Zage’s head and eyes were moving. He looked alarmed but not dead.

What?! she thought.

Suddenly his chest softened under her hand. Or, actually, she realized, his shirt softened beneath her hand. Now she was actually touching him. “What the…?” was all she managed to say.

The man next to her was pulling the grey stuff down from around his head. “Zage!” he said, sounding horrified, “You okay?”

Zage nodded, “What happened? My clothes got so stiff I fell over. While I was falling it felt like somebody was slapping me.” He tilted his head to look down at the grey material, “And this stuff just shot up around my head. What the heck Barrett?”

The man said, “Your mom didn’t want you worrying. But all those new clothes she got you this summer have inflatable graphene armor in them.”

“Why’d it inflate?” Zage got an angry look, “And then slap me? It hurt!”

“I’m so sorry Zage. We missed a guy in the bushes. He was shooting at you.”

Zage’s eyes widened, “Oh!” He looked remorseful, “Sorry I yelled. I guess it’s a good thing it inflated.”

Carley stared, thinking graphene was too flexible to serve as armor. Then wondering whether—if it was in a cellular structure and inflated to a high enough pressure—it could actually get rigid enough to stop bullets.

Barrett said, “You’ve got every right to yell.” He tilted his head, “I need to pat you down to be sure you aren’t seriously hurt somewhere and just don’t know it. That happens sometimes.”

Zage nodded and Barrett started patting him all over, asking if it hurt. Carley saw the other man was taking Zage’s pulse but still looking all around for threats.

She looked around herself. The reporters out at the street had taken cover behind their vehicles.

A woman with military bearing trotted up carrying a rifle, though Carley somehow knew it wasn’t hers. She looked tight but nonetheless spoke calmly, “Shooter didn’t make it.”

Barrett nodded. Carley thought he seemed pleased, but he almost completely hid the emotion.

Zage told Barrett nothing seemed any more tender than it would’ve been if someone had slapped him. He got a curious look on his face, “How’d the armor know to inflate before the guy even fired his gun?”

Barrett shook his head unbelievingly, “I don’t know.” Then in a low tone he probably didn’t mean Carley to hear, he said, “Probably that freaky AI of your mother’s.”

Zage got a focused look that suggested his AI was talking to him. Then he turned curious eyes on Barrett and waved down at his shirt, “Did you know all these decorative buttons are actually cameras and radar emitters?”

Barrett snorted, “No, but I should’ve guessed. Did your AI see the guy and inflate the armor?”

Zage gave a wondering nod, “Apparently so.”

Carley frowned. She didn’t think AI’s were capable of such a thing. Hers sure as hell wasn’t.

~~~

They all went in the house, where Zage declared that some ice cream was in order. He got it out of the freezer and started dishing up bowls for everyone who’d take one. At first it was just Zage, Carley, and the three security guys. The way she felt, Carley didn’t think she could eat any ice cream. Within minutes more and more security guys started showing up, astonishingly, most of them came up the stairs inside the house, as if they were coming from the basement.

So did Ell Donsaii, running up the stairs to drop to her knees and hug her son.

Shan Kinrais did drive up and come in the back door. They’ve got to have some kind of tunnel entrance, Carley realized, picturing an entrance down the street somewhere. A place where people can come in without being seen, she thought.

Thinking about the tunnel, she looked around at all the security people. Having this much security has got to be really expensive. I know Donsaii’s a big muckety-muck out at D5R, but her salary can’t be big enough to pay all these people can it? Oh, and own the farm next door where she’s supposed to live? And have some kind of exotic AI? And pay Zage’s tuition at Duke?!

After a while, Carley decided D5R had to be paying the security people for her. Probably they pay for the high-end AI too.

Soon there were so many people there that Carley felt like an eleventh wheel. She wanted to apologize to Zage’s parents for bringing him home instead of letting him ride with his security, but they seemed swamped with everything going on. She looked outside and saw cops everywhere, some parked right behind her car. She asked her AI to check with the car and see if it’d be able to back out, but her AI said the car couldn’t go on the road missing a door.

Suddenly tears welled in her eyes. She’d done okay until then, but thoughts of what’d nearly happened to Zage crashed over her.

And what his life would be like now that the world knew who he was.

And wondering how she was going to get her car fixed.

How would she even get home?

She shook her head in frustration. At least the last one was fairly simple. She had her AI start arranging a rental car. Though I don’t know how I’m going to afford it…

She startled when a hand settled on her shoulder. When she turned Ell Donsaii was holding out a Kleenex. “Sorry you got caught up in our mess,” Donsaii said, eyes filled with sympathy. “We truly appreciate your giving Zage a ride home today. The fact that you were getting out of your car while that guy was still shooting tells us the kind of person you are.” She gave Carley an intense hug. When she leaned back to look at Carley again, she said, “I know your car’s ruined. We’ve got a car coming for you, but if you need to go now, one of the security guys could take you?”

“No, no,” Carley said wiping her eyes. She blew her nose, then said, “Thanks.” Then, saying what she’d been worrying about, “I keep thinking that if I’d just let Zage ride home with his security team, none of this would’ve happened.”

“Maybe,” Donsaii said, then shrugged, “on the other hand, maybe our security guys would’ve gotten shot up too…” She gave Carley a serious look, “Don’t do the ‘what if’ thing. It never helps.” She reached behind her and picked up a bowl. “Ice cream?” she asked.

Carley laughed, unable to turn this woman down. “Yes, please. Sounds like just the thing to get me out of my funk.”

~~~

The police interviewed Carley and downloaded the records from her AI.

Shan Kinrais stopped by to express his thanks that Carley’d given Zage a ride.

Barrett talked to her for a while, saying how much he appreciated everything she’d done. He seemed a little choked up about it. She told him it was nothing, while simultaneously wondering what, if anything, she’d actually done that was actually helpful.

Finally, the police started to leave. Carley asked her AI to connect her with someone that could tow her car in for repairs. However, as she was talking to a towing company, Barrett stepped around from behind her and waved his hand in a halting motion. “Don’t worry about your old car. We’ve got a tow truck here already.”

Carley quirked him a smile, “Are you insulting my somewhat ancient vehicle?”

“Oh…” he said, looking surprised, then pointing out the window, “no, just differentiating it from your new car. Didn’t Ell tell you? She bought you a newer model… You know, for all you did for Zage.”

“Oh!” Carley said, looking where he pointed and seeing what looked like a brand new model of her vehicle. “But… but I really didn’t do anything…” How could even Ell Donsaii possibly afford a new car on top of all this other money she’s spending?! Carley wondered, thinking about how Donsaii famously drove an old Ford Focus.

“You were Zage’s friend when he needed one,” the big man said, surprising her by wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. Because of who he is, he doesn’t have many. He talks about you a lot, and today we got to see why he cares so much about you.”

Trying not to blubber herself, Carley looked around the room. Donsaii was hugging one of the other security guys. Zage was asking one of them if she was sure she didn’t want some ice cream. Shan Kinrais was coming out of the kitchen with a tray full of snacks. It’s like they’re one big family, she thought with surprise.

I’ve got to go tell them thank you, but that I can’t possibly accept a car. And, of course, I should say goodbye to Zage before I go…

***

Zage came down to breakfast hoping the shooting wasn’t going to mess up his life. His mother was pouring herself cereal like she almost always did. His dad said, “Hey Z-man, I’m making waffles with pecans in ‘em. Want some?”

“You bet!” Zage said, hoping this apparent normalcy meant that his parents had decided they could just keep living their lives the way they had been.

No such luck.

When Zage ventured that he was excited about what he had going on in the lab that day his mother stared at him for a moment, then set down her spoon. “Sorry kiddo. I figured you wouldn’t want your life to change, but even if we try to keep it like it is, people would change it for you. Paparazzi hanging around all the time. Everyone treating you differently. If you want to have anything like a normal life, you’re going to have to live at least part of it in disguise.”

“But…! I’ve got to keep taking my classes and going to the lab!” he said, alarmed. Then embarrassed because his voice had trembled.

His mother and dad looked at one another briefly, then his dad said, “We thought you’d say that. We talked to Steve last night about how we might be able to make that happen.”

“How?” Zage asked, wiping at an eye and wondering why he couldn’t control his emotions.

“Steve thought maybe the security team could take you to the lab in a delivery van. You’d get into it in the garage at one of the team members houses, over near your mom’s farm. They’d unload you at the loading dock back behind the building Dr. Barnes lab’s in. If there were people watching the dock, they could even put you in a crate and wheel you into the building on a dolly like an actual delivery.” His dad shrugged, “Some of the younger guys on the security team could wander the halls of the building, looking like students.”

Zage thought the whole plan sounded creepy, but decided that now wasn’t the time to object. He could negotiate for something less intrusive after things had cooled down. “So, I can go to the lab today?” he asked hopefully.

His mother laughed, “No. Today we’re moving to the Pittsboro house. Then we’re going to take a little vacation out of the country while all the excitement dies down around here. We’ll come back after they get tired of turning over every rock looking for us.”

“But… But I’ve got to read the results of my last experiment!”

“Could Carley do that for you?”

“I can call her?” he asked hopefully.

His mother nodded. “I think we can trust her. Ask her not to tell anybody what’s going on.”

“I need to talk to Dr. Barnes too. I’m hoping to get permission to apply for an animal protocol so I can start some new experiments.”

Ell pursed her lips, then said, “Okay, but let me talk to her first. There’s some stuff I need to talk to her about anyway.”

“About me?” Zage asked, worried that she was going to run interference for him.

“No. Not everything’s about you. You do remember D5R’s got a project going with her, right?”

“Oh, okay.”

~~~

Zage learned his parents were planning to “sell” the Kinrais house to Steve and his new wife. That’d save them having to seal the basement off before selling the house to someone else. It’d also give Steve easy access to the tunnel system.

The Kinrais family would live their public life out of the Donsaii farmhouse, both parents going to and coming from work at that building.

They’d live their private life out of the house in Pittsboro.

They were going to take their vacation in Greece…

Epilogue

Walking up the stairs to the lab, Carley felt depressed. The day after the shooting, Zage had called to say he couldn’t come to the lab for a while. He’d asked her to collect results from some of his Alzheimer’s work.

She’d been happy to do it.

Then he’d vanished…

It’d been a couple of weeks since he’d been in the lab. Getting worried, she’d driven past his house. It looked like a ghost house. There was a for sale sign out front and absolutely no evidence anyone lived there anymore.

She tried to call him several times. After the third try, she’d gotten a text-only message that said, “I’m fine. Laying low. Don’t worry.” It seemed unnecessarily brief and she pondered the possibility that a kidnapper or some other nefarious person might be responding in Zage’s place.

It’s been too long. I should contact the police, she thought as she stepped into the lab.

Zage’s head popped up from behind his bench. “Hi Carley,” he said.

Carley’s heart did a flip-flop, “Zage!” She tossed down her bag and tried to keep from running as she went around the end of his lab bench. She was just about to drop to a knee and give him a hug when she remembered she shouldn’t.

She stopped unhappily, really wanting to throw her arms around him. Maybe I’ve got a crush on him? she thought. “Hi back at you,” she said, feeling inane. “We’ve really missed you.”

“Thanks,” he said, then grinned. “My parents decided it’d be a good time to go on vacation, though dad taught his classes remotely since you’re not supposed to leave in the middle of a semester.” He paused a moment, then in a heartfelt tone said, “I really appreciate your collecting the data for my study.”

“No problem. But what about your mom? Doesn’t she have a lot of stuff she has to do out at D5R?”

He gave a dismissive wave and made a raspberry, “She claims she’s superfluous. Says they get along just fine without her. Points out they’ve had a lot of practice doing business without any help from her back when she was hiding from President Stockton.” He grinned up at her from beneath a lowered brow, “I think she might be a little bit more important than that, but that’s what she says.”

Carley laughed. After talking a few more minutes, she headed back over to her lab bench.

~~~

Carley’s AI said, “You’ve got a call from your brother.”

“I’ll take it,” she said, dreading the possibility he was in trouble or might ask her for money. “Eli?” she asked.

“Yep,” he answered.

He sounds sober! she thought excitedly. He rarely needed help when he called sober. “Is everything okay?”

“Uh-huh, but I’m about to run out of your magic juice.”

“The FGF-21?”

“If you say so. The shots that keep me from wanting to drink… I’m not so good at remembering strings of letters and numbers.”

“So, it’s been working?”

“I guess. I still can’t tell it’s doing anything, but I haven’t had a drink since the last time I saw you. It’s not like I don’t think a beer’d be nice, it’s just that I don’t think about beer very often.” Carley was just about to speak, when he said, “In fact, I had an argument with myself this morning. One side saying the shots didn’t do anything—I’d actually quit on my own. The other side was saying that, now I’ve got this job, I can’t risk losing it by seeing what happens if I go off your juice.”

Carley felt like she was floating. “Thank God! Yes, yes, I’ll bring you some more. I forgot today was the day you’d need more—shoulda told my AI to remind me.” She realized she was blathering and paused a moment. Then she said, “It’ll take me a couple of hours, can you hold out that long?”

“Absolutely,” Eli said with a confidence in his voice she hadn’t heard before. He’d sounded confident—but actually more arrogant—back when he’d claimed over and over that he could quit drinking on his own. This was a quiet confidence. Something she thought she could believe in. He said, “I’ll be at work by then. Maybe you could drop it by my job?”

“Of course,” she said, heart skipping a beat, “where’re you working?!”

She thought she heard a grin in his voice, “McDonald’s. Flipping burgers.” Then, with quiet confidence, “I won’t be there long. I just need to build up a work history.”

~~~

When Carley broke the connection, she saw Zage standing at the end of his lab bench. He took a few steps toward her, “Did that conversation mean Eli’s got a job?” he asked hopefully.

She nodded, wiping at suddenly overflowing eyes. “Just at McDonald’s for now, but he’s been sober for two weeks!” She walked over to Zage, bending down to give the boy a hug. At the last moment, she realized what she was about to do and pulled back. Voice breaking, she said, “Sorry.”

Zage’s eyes were bright as well. He said, “I think news as good as that occasions a hug.” He blinked, “I’ll just have to control myself.”

Dropping to one knee, Carley squeezed him hard, “Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely into his ear. “Thank you so much… And it’s so good to have you back!”

He reached his small arms around her and hugged her back, but pulled his head back minutely, “I didn’t do anything!”

“Right,” she said, letting go and leaning back to look him in the eye. “You only suggested DNA testing, then proposed that his β-Klotho-c anomaly would respond to higher levels of FGF-21. Oh, and got me the FGF-21 from some mysterious benefactor. Only those three things.”

“But you would’ve figured all that stuff out yourself,” Zage said with a dismissive wave.

“You really think so?” Carley asked, doubting it, but feeling an unreasonable flush of pride that Zage thought she could’ve done it.

“Absolutely.”

Another flush of pride washed over her to hear him say it.

Then she thought, But he’s just a boy!

***

United Nations, New York, New York— In a nonbinding resolution, the UN today affirmed that “The terraforming of Mars would be of benefit to all mankind…” This is apparently in response to a query from D5R regarding the desirability of what would be a phenomenally expensive undertaking requiring decades if not centuries. Though protests were staged earlier this year against the presence of just a few human beings on the planet, it’s becoming evident from a number of polls that the vast majority of people believe Mars holds little value in its present state. In fact, a website set up to promote the terraforming of Mars already has hundreds of thousands of volunteer settlers and millions of dollars in donations.

Although this follows on the heels of a similar resolution by the United States Congress, it must be noted that neither of the bodies have set aside money to accomplish such terraforming. It seems likely that the initial wave of enthusiasm will diminish significantly once supporters comprehend the full cost of the endeavor…

Lindy drifted up into consciousness feeling heavy. I’m back on Earth, came a distant thought.

A nurse smiled down at her. “Welcome home,” he said. “You’re doing fine. Feel up to seeing your mom?”

She nodded.

He gave her a sip of water, then stepped out of the little room she was in. I guess this interplanetary porting’s on its way to being routine, she thought, remembering the big team of anesthesiologists and other specialists that had welcomed Phil Zabrisk back to Earth during the first human porting. They’d also kept him under anesthesia in the ICU afterward. Now she just had a single nurse, though Lindy’d still been ported to a hospital in case something went wrong.

Lindy’s mom came in and gave her a hug. She leaned back and said, “Not that I’m complaining about having my daughter home already, but I thought your doctor friend Mark was desperate to be first.”

Lindy gave a little laugh. “He was. However, since they’re actually inducing a brief anesthetic for the porting, they pointed out that they needed someone medical on Mars to do the inducing. Now that I’m back on Earth, they’ll send another NASA trained doc to Mars. She’ll put Mark to sleep for his trip back.”

Her mother lifted an eyebrow, “And how’re you and Mark getting along?”

Lindy widened her eyes to give her mother an appalled look, “What’re you trying to ask?!”

Her mother snorted, “It’s just that every conversation I have with you seems to reference Mark…”

“Well,” Lindy couldn’t keep herself from grinning, “we do get along awfully well,” then, seeing the expression on her mother’s face, she lowered an eyebrow, “but you need to get your mind out of the gutter.”

Her mother grinned, “I guess I’d better move on to another topic then. Are you going back to Mars? Or are you back here for good?”

“I’m not going back for a couple of months. They want me to re-acclimate to Earth’s gravity. Also, I can’t go until I’ve had the new treatment and they’ve tested me out the wazoo to be sure I’m okay.”

“‘You’re okay’? What’s that mean? What kind of treatment?”

Lindy rolled her eyes, “Forget I said anything. It’s supposed to be a secret. I should never have said anything thing to you…” Darkly, she muttered, “Damned drugs!”

Her mother gave her a hard look, then said, “Tell me. I assume you’d like to do it before I raise a ruckus?”

Producing a long-suffering sigh, Lindy said, “It’s a new treatment for radiation damage. You should be glad—considering all the worrying you do about my cumulative radiation dose.”

Closing her eyes, Lindy’s mother said in a resigned tone, “An experimental treatment?”

Lindy gave a minute one-shoulder shrug, “It worked awesome in mice.”

“Why do you have to be the test subject?”

“Somebody’s got to. Who better than me? I’m someone who wants to live in Mars’ high radiation environment.”

***

Eli arrived at Carley’s apartment, feeling as nervous as if it were a date. Asking the house AI to announce him, he swept his fingers through his hair.

Carley opened the door, studied him for a moment then smiled. “You’re still sober, right?”

“I am. I really am,” he said, feeling amazed himself.

She pulled the door open wide. “Come on in.”

They moved inside and sat down at her little dinette. She leaned back and gave him a hard look, “Have you had anything to drink since you’ve been taking the shots?”

He shrugged, “I’m not going to lie about something this important. I have had a beer.” Seeing the distressed look on her face, he held up his palms, “Calm down. One beer. I don’t have a hunger to drink like I used to, but I thought I should find out what’d happen if I had a drink. So, I bought one beer and took it home on a Friday night. If something bad happened, I wanted the whole weekend to try to straighten myself out.”

“And you drank it?” Carley asked still looking unhappy.

Eli gave a slow nod.

“And what happened?”

Eli shrugged, “Not much. I watched TV.”

Relief blossomed on Carley’s face, “You didn’t go out and drink any more?”

Eli shook his head, “Nope. I think I could’ve had another one, say if I’d been out with some friends or something. But I didn’t constantly think about another beer like I used to. Believe it or not, I actually didn’t want to go to the trouble of going out to get another one.”

Carley stepped forward and gave him a big excited hug. When she let go, she said, “This stuff could save your life, you know?”

Eli gave a solemn nod.

“But you’ve got to have it every day. I think it’s as important to you as insulin is to a diabetic.”

“Yeah, I find myself worrying about missing a dose. All it’d take to put my life back in the shitter would be for me to go on another bender.”

“My friend Zage…”

Eli blinked, “The little boy?”

Carley nodded and smiled, “Yeah, that one. He’s the one who says he can get you an injection port. It’s one that D5R makes for veterinary studies,” she gave him a glance, “but it should work in you since you’re part monkey. With it, you could be getting your FGF-21 steadily instead of a big once-a-day dose. You could even ask your AI for a little bigger dose if you did have a beer and wanted to make sure you weren’t going to crave another one.”

“And,” he said slowly, “how does the AI get the FGF?”

“I’ll give you a bunch of vials with the protein already in them as a dry powder. You’ll have to squirt a little saline into a vial to reconstitute the protein before you use it. Then you’d put it in a pump your AI’d control. You’ll need to let me know whenever you’re running low.”

“I hate to ask this, but what if something happens to you?”

“Ask Zage, he’d get you some more.”

“The little boy would get me more of this fancy protein?” Eli asked dubiously.

Carley pursed her lips, “He got me the stuff you’ve been taking. He says he got it from a friend, but… I think he probably made it himself.”

“Okaaay…” Eli said, deciding that if something happened to Carley he’d pretty much be screwed.

Carley cocked her head at him. “You look like you’ve lost some weight.”

Eli nodded. “I used to really like sweets. Not as much as alcohol, but still, I tended to eat them if I had a choice. Not so much anymore.”

Carley nodded, “FGF-21’s supposed to suppress the desire for sugar too.” She shrugged, “Though alcohol has its own calories so giving up drinking might have helped with the weight loss too. But, I think you look healthier in more ways than one.”

Eli nodded, “I feel healthier.

“You’re still living in the shelter?” Carley asked.

“Yeah. I’ve been looking around, but, even after the promotion, my salary doesn’t go far. I’ve either got to find a roommate or get another promotion, ‘cause I don’t think I’d better job-jump yet.”

“Um, Diane finally moved out. I need a roommate.”

Prickles ran over his scalp. “You mean…?”

She nodded.

“We’d be a family again,” he slowly said, feeling a sense of awe.

“Yeah. Don’t get too excited. You’d need to do your share of the cooking, cleaning, laundry…”

Eli couldn’t remember being so happy in years.

***

The family was getting together for Thanksgiving at the undercover houses Ell owned at Lake Royale. Ell, Shan, and Zage walked through one of the underground tunnels Ell had cut, crossing undetected from their house to Kristen’s. When they came up the stairs, the first person they ran into was Ell’s grandmother. On seeing Ell, she squeaked with joy and gathered her into a big hug.

Shan and Zage carried the side dishes into the kitchen while Gram and Ell chattered excitedly. Ell thought, It’s a sign we’re not seeing enough of each other that it’s such a big deal when it happens.

A few minutes later, Zage came in and sat down beside Ell. Gram smiled and said, “And who’s this handsome young man?”

Zage got up, stepped around Ell and gave her a hug, “I’m your great-grandson Zage, Gram. I just turned six a couple of months ago.”

For a moment, Ell felt embarrassed that, rather than recognizing it as a figure of speech, her son had taken Gram’s question so literally. But then Ell saw a flash of puzzlement flit over Gram’s face as she hugged Zage.

It felt like her heart stopped.

However, as they kept talking and laughing about old times, Ell convinced herself that she’d been imagining things. Gram seemed to remember every detail of their lives and nodded joyfully at their recent exploits.

~~~

Thanksgiving dinner was a huge amount of fun and Ell reflected on how lucky they were that they didn’t have a drunk uncle or other obnoxious relative in the family. Even Lane, Shan’s somewhat immature sister, seemed to have settled down and become easier to get along with.

~~~

At the end of the evening, as they walked through the tunnel back to their own house, Zage gave Ell a look of concern and asked, “Do we know which type of dementia Gram has?”

Feeling ice water run down her spine, especially in view of her earlier fear, Ell nonetheless exclaimed, “She’s not demented!”

He blinked up at her, “Well, okay, no. She’s only in the early stages.”

“What makes you even say that?!” Ell asked, feeling a little desperate… because she thought she knew.

Zage’s expression turned sad, “Her short-term memory’s fading. She didn’t know who I was when she first—”

“That was just a figure of speech!” Ell interrupted anxiously. “Older people often say things like that to kids. You… you just haven’t been exposed to it I guess.”

Zage shrugged, “She couldn’t remember my name later either. I mean, she covered pretty well for it, calling me ‘kid’ and ‘little guy,’ but you could tell she didn’t remember.”

Ell shook her head, “Your own dad calls you ‘Munchkin” and things like that all the—”

Shan touched Ell’s arm and gently interrupted, “She had a hard time figuring out who I was too.”

Ell stared wide-eyed at her husband for a moment, then shook her head. “No. She and I talked for a long time and she made sense. She was a lot of fun too.”

“Didn’t she pretty much limit her conversation to old times?” Zage asked softly.

Feeling almost betrayed, Ell said, “No! We talked about you…” She trailed off as she realized that she’d told Gram about Zage while Gram just nodded enthusiastically.

Sadly, Zage said, “We’ll see tomorrow. I’m afraid she’s not going to remember much of what you told her about me. I hope I’m wrong.”

Heart sinking, Ell turned around and started walking back to the other house. “I’ve got to talk to my mom. I’ll… I’ll see you guys in a bit… Or, in the morning.”

~~~

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ell asked.

Kristen shrugged. “She thinks she can still hide it fairly well so she wants to keep it a secret.”

“But what if there’s a treatment that I…”

Kristen put a hand on Ell’s knee. “There isn’t. I’ve done every search known to man.”

“But we can afford to—”

“Honey, money can’t buy miracles. And a miracle’s what you need for Alzheimer’s.”

Ell blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m going to have Allan do a search. And ask some of the medical people Roger works with. Maybe they know of ongoing research…”

Kristen patted Ell’s knee. “Go ahead… But it’ll be a joyless search. You can’t fix everything Ell. You’ve done your fair share of fixing things in this old world, but this one’s way out of your field.”

~~~

As she entered the tunnel back to her own house Ell spoke to Allan. “Do a deep search for new treatments or new research on Alzheimer’s.”

“I’ve been searching since you started talking to your mother about it,” Allan responded.

“What’ve you found so far?”

“There’re many approved treatment regimens and some approved medications—”

Ell interrupted, “Why does everyone say it’s untreatable then?!”

“Likely that’s because the therapies and medications are at best palliative or somewhat slow the progress of the disease. They aren’t the cure that most laypersons think of when they say ‘treatment.’”

Feeling like she was sinking, Ell said, “Okay, what about research then? Any breakthroughs or promising trials? Or even something in the lab that might work but hasn’t been animal tested yet? Anything I could throw money at?”

“No breakthroughs. There’re two highly anticipated trials ongoing, but, at best, they’re hoped to provide marginal improvements in palliation. There’s one published lab study suggesting that an experimental compound may block inflammatory responses to amyloid in the brain’s glial cells. This is on the theory that the inflammatory response to amyloid may be more responsible for the brain’s deterioration than the amyloid itself.”

“Can you tell if they need funding?” Ell asked eagerly.

“Like almost any researchers, they have applied for grants which haven’t been funded—”

“Contact them. Put info about the researchers and their project up on my HUD while I’m waiting.”

Ell had gotten back to their house and sprawled on an overstuffed couch. She learned quite a bit about the researchers and skimmed abstracts of their work. Though it didn’t sound like as much of a breakthrough as she’d been hoping for, it did sound more promising than what she’d been hearing about other projects.

Allan came back on. “There’s no response at the publicly available numbers. This’s likely because no one’s present in the facilities at ten PM on Thanksgiving evening. Or, that if they are, they aren’t taking calls. I’ve left e-mails. Would you like me to do a deep search for private numbers?”

Ell sighed, “Yes. But don’t call them tonight. Remind me to try to call them late tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” Allan said. Then, to Ell’s surprise, he continued as if he’d been interrupted earlier—which she realized he had. “I don’t have access to most unpublished laboratory studies, but through my connection to Osprey I’m aware of Zage’s work on the folding of Alzheimer’s proteins. Would you like me to tell you what he’s been doing?”

Ell said yes, at first astonished that her son had been doing anything with Alzheimer’s, then remembering that protein folding was one of his major interests. She didn’t imagine the folding of such proteins had any effect on the disease, but it’d be the kind of thing Zage’d be interested in.

A draft of a paper popped up on her HUD. Allan said, “This is an excellent summary of what he’s been doing. There’s a lot more material if you want to look it over too.”

“No. This’ll be plenty.”

Then she read the introduction and learned how important protein folding was thought to be in Alzheimer’s.

She settled in to read the paper in detail, searching terms she didn’t understand and reading other papers that had been referenced.

~~~

Stunned, Ell sat staring into nowhere, asking herself how a mother could not know her son was doing something like this.

After a bit she thought, I guess I’ve got a place to throw money.

But am I ever going to stop being astonished by what that kid can do…?

The End

Hope you liked the book!

To find other books by the author try Laury.Dahners.com.

Or his Amazon Author page

Author’s Afterword

This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I’ve always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question (and also has some real science in it). Not everything in the story has to be scientifically plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the stories tries to ask such questions.

“Terraform,” asks what it would actually take to terraform even a small planet like Mars. Not just how it might be done, but what the magnitude of the job would be. It’s truly daunting to consider just how freaking huge the job would be, even if you had a massive breakthrough technology such as Ell’s ports with which to make it happen. If you were trying to move an atmosphere from one planet to another using chemical rockets it’d be utterly impossible (because you’d have to burn so much fuel to move so little mass). If you were to break down Mars’ (extremely thin) carbon dioxide atmosphere to release the oxygen, you wouldn’t have nearly enough. They’ve found water on Mars (which we’d need in its natural state as water) but, barring some kind of massive underground reservoirs, there certainly isn’t enough water there for us to break it down into an oxygen atmosphere either. Perhaps all the oxides that give Mars its reddish color could be broken down to get oxygen, but the scale of such an undertaking is mind-boggling, to say nothing of the pollution problems that would be created by a greater-than-industrial scale breakdown of such oxides.

And then there’s the radiation problem on Mars. Personally, the only viable solution I can see for this would be to make the settlers radiation resistant. If we’re going to live underground once we get there, I’d rather live underground here on Earth. The fact that we’re entering an era in which we’ll have an almost unbelievable ability to modify our genetic code makes the creation of radiation resistance seem a plausible solution to this otherwise intractable problem.

Alcoholism’s a devastating disease that almost certainly has multiple causes, and that ruins the lives of many more people than just those who’re afflicted. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a good treatment? There actually are some genes that are associated with the conditions (β-Klotho really is one of them) and they may be correctable.

There actually is significant evidence for a herpesvirus association with Alzheimer’s disease (in that people with herpes infections are more likely to get Alzheimer’s and, postmortem, Alzheimer brains are often positive for several species of the virus).

I expect that someday we’ll be as amazed to think back on how we used to just live with such diseases as we are today when we think back on the days when you could only make phone calls from dial-up landlines, and had to look things up in books.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Mike Alsobrook, Clay Boyd, Allen Dietz, Philip Lawrence, and Abiola Streete, each of whom significantly improved this story.