The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) (21 page)

Drifting, he began to wonder if someone
could be swapping treatments on purpose. What could cause someone to try to
harm patients across the IntelliHealth network of hospitals? It didn’t make
sense. The whole mission of working for the betterment of mankind seemed to
permeate every aspect of their work. Who would want to randomly harm the
patients?

No it didn’t make sense, but it did
open his mind to a new way of thinking.

He wondered if they would find anything
if they compared the documented cases across all the affected Facilities.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were some sort of trend, invisible at just
one facility but apparent over several? Maybe the reason no one has been able
to understand what’s happening to the patients, is because they’ve only been
looking at their own cases.

Maybe it would turn out to be a matter
of scale.

Then there was the news from Jeff.

The whole idea of man becoming extinct
was too big to take in right now. If he let himself think too much about it, he
would begin to think about the future Alex would have. The rest would be too
sad to contemplate. He chose to believe that this idea was a gross
exaggeration, and that the men upstairs would get it straight soon enough.
Depression was not the answer right now.

As he let himself continue to drift, he
wondered about the impact on the city. How long would it be kept secret, and
what would happen when the news finally broke? He imagined wide-spread anger
and unrest would ensue. In the movies, people tended to really freak out at the
end of the world.
That was a troubling thought.

Maybe he should start stocking up on
some supplies. He needed to remember to take a look around the house tonight
when he got home. If he was clever, he could do it without Jean catching on.
The last thing he wanted to do was scare her.

He needed to test the tablet that
Theresa had given him, from home. He might need to use it if he was not able to
get to work. It might be smart to be prepared.

Or, he could be a pathologically,
paranoid administrator.

Either way, he was thirsty.

He got up and went to get some more
coffee.
 

In his cubicle, on the other side of
the floor, Jim was nursing a pretty good hangover.

It wasn’t the first time for him, but
it never got any better.

He popped some more headache pills, and
followed them with more coffee.

Last night had been surreal. Drunk and
angry, followed by a ‘visit’ from a girl he knew.

He woke up sleeping on the balcony, not
remembering how he got there. Inside the girl was gone, and he found a note
taped to his big view screen.

All it said was ‘Asshole!’ in great big
red, lipstick letters.
’What was that about?’ he wondered.

He looked through the cracks of his
eyes at his screen.

The code was there, but the girl was
gone.
He snickered.

David heard him laughing, “What’s going on over there?”
“Hey Dave, just comparing programming to women.”

“Programs are logical.”

“Amen, my brother.”

Jim took a moment to look again at the
code fragment.

There it was. Defying all logic.

As usual the time stamp indicated that
it was still appearing exactly one minute into the window between his searches.
Not feeling really focused, he decided to play a trick and opened six windows,
each 10 minutes long, occurring over the course of the next day and night. It
didn’t really make any sense, but he wasn’t very focused at the moment. He
would take another look at it tomorrow when he felt better.

He looked at his schedule for the rest
of the day. He had a checklist of points pertaining to the installation of Thor
and Loki. Their installation had been re-scheduled, and now they would be
arriving on Friday, and today was Wednesday. He needed to meet with the network
guys, the facilities department, and touch base with Zimmerman to make sure
everything was still on target.

He also needed to start writing and
preparing to organize the operating systems for each of them. Really there
wasn’t much to write from scratch. Mainly, he was going to integrate
IntelliHealth login routines with user and administrator account services, and
then add the whole chunk to the main operating systems at startup. There were
also network protocols to incorporate, but he had those listed and ready to
add.

‘It shouldn’t be a problem,’ he
thought.

Of course, those were famous last words
he had uttered many times before. There was almost always a problem. It would
be something the Zimmerman group forgot to mention, like maybe there was a
coordinating master control unit, or maybe an additional personal, storage
device built back in 2000 that he was supposed to integrate as well.

From early in his career at
IntelliHealth, Jim remembered a grisly old man, Dr.
‘I’m-short-on-funding
’
wanting him to build a supercomputer from a cluster of older model machines.

It was a ridiculous request.

‘Sure, like that would even work’, he
remembered thinking.

Of course, in the end he had done it.

Oh he had balked at first, but he
actually made it work.
It was an excellent opportunity to author a script for a self-organizing,
series of computers. They worked in unison to run calculations at breathtaking
speeds. It had worked, but it was still not as efficient as the new
super-computers. The cluster of old machines had weaknesses like over-heating,
if it ran for too long.
But the code was beautiful, worthy of a thesis or two. It wouldn’t last for
very long before overheating, but while it ran it was comparable to any modern
supercomputer.

When he was finished, he got approval
to order a single high-end, multi-tasker machine and replaced the whole mess.
The researcher was pleased twice over.

Jim kept the ‘super’ computer-cluster
as a trophy, and named it Gamera, the flying turtle that fought Godzilla. It
reminded him that a clever script could do a lot of good.
And besides, even though it was clunky, he thought it might come in useful some
day.

A buzzer on his display brought him
back into focus, reminding him of his schedule. He had a meeting with
facilities regarding the installation. He didn’t understand how the cooling
unit was going to be controlled. He was still confused because it seemed to run
without any linkup to the supercomputers. Basically they seemed to be like
giant air-conditioners pointed directly at the biogel-silicon, processors. He
thought there ought to be some sort of routine running on the main computers to
let you know if they were over-heating, but maybe this was simply another way
of streamlining what the computers were doing. Like on a muscle car, when a
mechanic would tune every separate piece of the engine to get the most
efficient use of energy.
Trying to squeeze out every drop of performance.

So probably the big coolers were
separate from them to free-up CPU cycles.

But he needed to know for sure.

David was right about what he said a
couple of days ago, they were going to be fun to play with.

Upstairs in the lab, Jeff was just
finishing putting the equipment request together for a new scanner.

Dr. Bender wanted to begin analyzing
sperm samples from the IntelliHealth patient population. Dr. Bender was meeting
today with someone named Dorothy Allan to discuss mandatory sperm tests on all
IntelliHealth patients, well the males ones anyway.

Jeff wondered how that would fly.

They will need a lot of magazines.

Or videos.

He was chuckling to himself when two of
his researchers came into his office.

They looked upset.

He looked at them, held up a hand and
said, “Hold on a second.”

He called in a grad student, “Susan, after lunch will you please take this
requisition and submit it to the admin office?”

“Sure Dr. Sarin, will do.”

He turned back to the two
downtrodden-looking investigators.

“Okay, how can I help you?” he said.

“Jeff, Dr. Bender seems to have
re-prioritized our projects.”
“Yes, I believe there is quite a lot of that going on right now,” he said.

“But the work I was doing on RNA
reversion might be important to looking backwards. It might help in
understanding how we got here.”

“Yes, and my work on replacing organs
via cloned replicates might provide solutions for going forward.”

He understood why they did not want to
change. Each of them had spent more than five or six years working in their
area of interest. He felt sorry for them, but this was no time to get
sentimental. The areas of research were being divvied up, at the top. At this
level, they needed to work on the subjects assigned to them. It was a
re-organization of research spanning thousands of researchers just like them.

“Look, you need to talk this over with
Dr. Bender. If he does not agree, come back and I will help you save your work
as best as possible,” he said, “so that you can return to it when this is
over.”

Looking glum, they said thanks, and
went off to talk with Bender. They obviously didn’t hold out much hope of
changing his mind.
Neither did he.
After all, there were scientists all over the world right now dropping their
careers to work on the ‘fertility crisis’. But these were rapidly changing
times, and you never knew.

Thinking he should go ahead and take
steps to help them store their work, he called Susan back to his office.
“Susan, please add two small-sized, cryo-preservation tanks and get Chris to
help you prep them for use; and thanks, Sue.”

He went back to his desk and started
going over the experiments Dr. Bender wanted to run tomorrow.

Ryan was still documenting his files
when his supervisor Ben came knocking at his door.
“Hi, Ben, please come in. What can I do for you?”

“Ryan, I was headed to the cafeteria
for some lunch. Why don’t you come with me? I know it’s a little early, but I
didn’t eat breakfast, and this way we can beat the crowd,” said Ben.

Ryan had brought his lunch, but what
the heck; he thought it was probably a good idea to go with Ben. And maybe he
would learn something new.

“Sure.”

He got up and followed Ben to the
elevator, where they descended to the 18
^th
floor. Ryan remembered
Theresa saying something about cafeterias and recreation on the 18
^th
floor. Honestly, he just hadn’t made it that far yet.
 

The doors opened up and he saw a huge
open area with restaurants, a cafeteria, gym equipment, and sitting areas for
reading or watching the vids. It looked like there was a drycleaners on one
side, and maybe a salon too. The distance across the floor was amazing, as if
the entire floor was one giant open area. There were lots of plants around the
floor; so many that it almost felt like a park. There were some pretty big ones
right in the middle that blocked his view so that he couldn’t see the opposite
side at all.

“Wow, Ben this is pretty cool,” he said
looking around amazed.

”Oh, you haven’t been here yet,” said Ben,
“We really need to work on our tours. Well, this is available to all employees,
and you may come here at any time that does not conflict with your work.”

Ben started in, with Ryan walking next
to him.

Pointing to the left Ben said, “There
you can find almost any type of food you’re after. Also, if you are
entertaining, there is a steakhouse and sushi restaurant available. Both places
have very appropriate atmospheres for that sort of thing. Just past them, we
have a cafeteria which is my favorite.”

Pointing to the right, Ben continued,
“Over that way, is a day-care for those that have kids that young, and a
cleaner for your clothes. Also there’s a place back there to get your hair cut,
but they always want to style it too, and I don’t like that. I go in for the
cut, not a shampoo.”