Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) (7 page)

They went out to dinner and after they’d placed their orders Shan began talking to Malcolm, his father. Fay turned to Ell, wondering what to talk about, “So, Raquel, where did you grow up?”

“Down at the coast, Emerald Isle.”

“That’s near Morehead City where Ell Donsaii grew up right?”

Ell nodded.

“Did you know her?”

“
Some. She’s younger than I am. But I’m working at D5R where she works, so I see her nowadays.”

“
Did you know that Shan met Donsaii?”

Working to keep her straight face
, Ell nodded, “Yes, word is that she was very impressed.” She raised an eyebrow, “Shan made quite a breakthrough in the understanding of the whole dark matter and dark energy problem you know and Donsaii is publishing a paper with him on it.”

“So
I understand, though Shan plays it down. I really don’t understand anything about this multidimensional physics. I liked math in school but I haven’t done anything with it for a long time. However, I like to think that Shan got his math gene from me.”

The men had turned the
ir attention back to the ladies. Shan’s dad raised an eyebrow and put a hand to his chest, “Yes, and he inherited his good looks from me.”

Ell smiled at Shan, “Well you did a good job with the looks. All my girlfriends are
sooo jealous of me.” She turned back to his parents, “Though I did worry that that Donsaii girl would steal him away from me.” She glanced back at Shan and winked.

Malcolm said, “That’s right Shan. I’d forgotten. What
was it like to meet Ms. Donsaii? Is she ‘stuck up’?”

Shan grinned and winked at Ell, “Well,
you know it would just be rude to talk about her very much in front of my new girlfriend? But I can definitely say, ‘Not stuck up.’ In fact if you took her to dinner, you’d find her just as pleasant as Raquel here, not snobbish at all.”

Fay
turned to Ell, “Tell me how you met Shan?”

“Well, I’m embarrassed to admit,
but it was at a bar. I saw this handsome guy out there clogging on the dance floor. I couldn’t help myself. I just had to get out there and dance like
that
.”

Fay pointed a finger at Shan, “See! I told you you’d appreciate those dance lessons one day.”

“Yes Momma.” Slyly he said, “Maybe if I’d stuck with the lessons I could have impressed Donsaii with my dancing instead of my mind.”

His own mother snorted and said, “Fat chance on that one…”

***

Farshid spoke into his link, “T
he spawn of Satan killed Reza!”

“They found you?”

“No! Well, I don’t think so. But, somehow they made our end of the port explode! They waited until we were walking into the room and then blew it up, throwing Reza across the room. It broke his neck.”

There was a hiss from the other end of the link. “How did they do this?”

“I don’t know! Abbas thinks they may have sent our propane back to us and then ignited it somehow.”

After a long pause, the man on the other end of the link said, “You and Abbas will link up
with another warrior against the Great Satan. A man named Basir in Washington D.C. Together you will work to understand these ports better. I suspect you will need to capture one of the workers at the manufacturing plant and milk him of information. Then,
before
you make another attempt to attack the Americans, you will contact me to teach me what you have learned.”

***

Ryan Keller arrived at D5R’s facility wondering if he might actually see Ell Donsaii walking around. Or more likely Shan’s girl Raquel. Both of them worked here. Well Raquel worked in D5R proper and he guessed that Donsaii probably spent more time in one of the other areas, but maybe she’d be in Quantum Research today.

To his surprise, the receptionist was the girl that he’d met the night that Shan met Raquel at Vic’s dance club.
Just as she said, “Hi Ryan,” he realized with horror that he couldn’t remember her name. She said brightly, “I didn’t think that the next time I’d see you would be here at work.”

Gratefully recognizing that she had on a nametag Ryan said, “Hey Bridget, we should go out dancing again sometime.  Did you know that Raquel and my roommate Shan have really hit it off?

“Yeah,” she grinned, “I’ve heard.”

“I’m supposed to be meeting with a Dr. Kenner. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“No problem,” she said, getting up, “I’ll take you there.”

As they walked Ryan
felt nervous about his meeting and wondered if Bridget would have any influence on whether Quantum Research would support his research or not. Maybe even give him a job someday? “Would you be interested in going dancing again sometime?”

She grinned shyly up at him, “Sure, when?”

Thinking that he’d just been asking whether she was interested, he felt like she’d put him on the spot. “Uh, how about this Thursday night? I think they have bluegrass bands on a lot of Thursdays.”

She tilted her head, “OK, but I do like other things besides bluegrass you know.”

“Really?.”SheReally? He tried to look flabbergasted, “Well you’ll have to tell me about them then. See you there at nine?”

“OK,” she waved at a pretty young woman sitting at a big workbench, “This is Dr. Kenner. Emma, this is Ryan Keller, your 11
o’clock.”

Kenner stood up and extended her hand, “You aren’t already dating our staff are you?” she grinned.

Embarrassed about how it must have looked, Ryan shook her hand and said, “Um, sorry, Bridget and I met once before. My roommate is going out pretty steady with her friend Raquel.”

Bridget waved and headed back out front. Kenner smiled and said, “Please sit down.
Let’s hear about your nerve interface devices.”

Nonplussed to be sitting out in the middle of a big room rather than an office, Ryan sat across from her at the big workbench. She had on jeans and t-shirt and he felt over dressed in his sport coat and tie. It wasn’t a job interview after all
; he just hoped it might lead to a job if he could get them interested. He sat and said, “Thanks Dr. Kenner.”

She said, “Just call me Emma. We aren’t very formal here.”
A tall slender guy with wild black hair walked up. She indicated him, “This is Roger Emmerit. He’s been doing most of our biological interface work.”

Ryan stood and shook Roger’s hand, “Hi, Dr. Emmerit.”

“Like Emma said, we aren’t very formal. Call me Roger and show us what you’ve got.”

“Uh, OK Emma
, Roger.” He pulled out an envelope, opened it and slid out a wire with a large jack on one end and a clear tube full of fuzz on the other. “This is one of the nerve ‘neurotrodes’ I’ve been working on.”

Emma
picked it up and studied the fuzzy end. “‘Neurotrode’ because it connects to a nerve like an electrode, I assume. So, how’s it work?”

“Well, what looks like fuzz
inside the tube is actually thousands of tiny micro tubules with a cocktail of growth factors, mostly nerve growth factors, coating their insides. The base of each tubule is hooked up to a nanowire electrode.

“
We cut the nerve and put it into the tube. The growth factors induce the axons that sprout out of the end of the cut nerve to grow down into the tubes where they can activate or be activated by the nanowire electrodes. Thus we can pick up outgoing motor signals and input sensory signals. So far I’ve been able to activate reflex arcs in rats.”

Roger said, “Reflex arc
s?”

“Yeah,
” Ryan nodded, “like when a doctor thumps on your knee?”

They nodded.

“So what happens in that case is the thump stretches the tendon and little stretch sensors in the tendon send a signal to the spinal cord telling it that the tendon has been stretched. Then the spinal cord, without consulting the brain, sends a signal back out to the muscle to contract. Your body has this arc so that if you stumble and the knee is bent sudd. is bendenly, stretching the tendon, the muscle will be told to tighten, trying to prevent you from falling before your brain even knows about it. The good thing about the arc from our viewpoint is that we can send a signal up a sensory fiber and get back a signal on a motor fiber telling us that our equipment is working without needing to have an intelligent subject to tell us what they’re feeling.”

Roger and Emma glanced at one another, “How many fibers are we talking about here?”

Ryan shrugged, “It depends on the type of nerve and its diameter of course, but tens of thousands at least.”

Emma tilted her head, “Normally, we count on being able to jack and unjack wires that pass through ports so that if we have to close the port we can unjack the wire first and re-jack it after we open the port back up.”

Ryan nodded.

“But you have to have that big jack to be able to
accurately connect tens of thousands of wires, right?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve been working on ways to make the jack smaller. But it’s pretty hard to get good connections with jacks
this tiny.”

“Alternatively you could pass the small
er nano wire bundle through a port that you plan to keep open at all times. A small port requires only a few watts of power so you could keep it open indefinitely without any problems, the only problem being if something interrupts the port you have to re-operate on your subject to hook it back up.”

Ryan shrugged, “That plan
would keep you from having to have a large jack inside the patient so it’s probably worth the risk of having to re-implant.”

They discussed the issues a while longer
, eventually deciding to have Ryan make some “ported” neurotrodes of a size that would fit a human nerve and agreeing that Quantum Research would pay for some implantations in an animal model larger than a rat to work out problems that might crop up in a human sized nerve.

On the way out Ryan stopped by Bridget’s desk, “Hey, I was wondering where Raquel’s office is. I was hoping to say hi.”

Bridget raised an eyebrow, “Didn’t you just ask me out for Thursday night?”

“Uh, yeah.”

She frowned at him, “We haven’t even been on our first date and you’re already asking me for help meeting another woman?” She raised an eyebrow, “This doesn’t bode well.”

“Uh sorry, that did sound bad. I just wanted to say ‘
Hi’ since we’re friends and she goes out with my roommate.”

Sh
e grinned, “Just giving you grief. Raquel’s not here today. She hardly ever works in this facility. She’s more of a troubleshooter, handling problems here and there.

“Oh, OK. See you Thursday still?”

She raised an eyebrow again, “You’d
better
be there.”

oult size=***

“Our ‘allies’ say that they cannot get us access to military grade technology. In fact, they
claim
that ‘military grade’ port technology doesn’t exist.”

“What’s the difference between a
‘military grade’ port and an ordinary port?” Menahim asked.

“Hah!” he snorted. “Obviously, being able to fire weapons through a port would allow you to carry only a port to battle. Then you could have an assistant back at a depot fire any number of
different weapons through that port at enemies you had identified. Anything from a rifle, to a small cannon, flame thrower or grenade launcher. However, two of our people sustained injuries just trying to fire a bullet through a port. Not only didn’t the bullet go through, but the port exploded producing shrapnel and injuring our scientists.