MIND FIELDS (6 page)

  Paul sat down at the table.  “Now I know why you’re the boss,” he smiled.  It was the best tasting cheesesteak he had ever had.

  “I guess we’ll have to send Dr. Fletcher a thank-you note,” JT joked as he dipped a fry in some ketchup.

  “Oh, she’d
really
appreciate that, coming from you and all.”  Paul hesitated a moment between bites.  “One thing I still don’t get, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, if you weren’t planning on firing me, why was Sean in my office copying files off my computer last night?”

  “Beats me.”

  Paul scratched his head and looked JT right in the eye.  “Well, if you didn’t know he was there, why did you come looking for him?”

  JT took the subtle accusation right in stride.  “Like I said this morning, I thought I saw his car in the lot.  I’m used to seeing your car here at all hours, but Sean …”

  “Yeah, I forgot.”  Paul still wasn’t convinced.

  “Marlene,” JT barked at his computer, “get Sean on the line for me.  Audio only.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  JT picked up another fry.  “Let’s ask him.”

  Sean answered the call quickly.  “What can I do for you, boss?”

  “I’ve got Paul here, Sean.  He says you were copying some files late last night off his computer.  Kind of spooked him seeing you there in the middle of the night, you know?  What was so urgent that you needed to be on Paul’s computer in the middle of the night?”

  “Geez, Paul.  Why didn’t ya just ask me, man?”

  “You blew by me so fast when you left my office, I didn’t have time to think.  You caught me off guard.  It’s usually deserted that time of night.  My heart was racing when I saw the monitor on in my office.”

  “Yeah, I guess it might have looked a little strange.  I was just copying the project files to reload on my computer.  It crashed yesterday – even
I
come in occasionally on the weekends, you know – and I wanted to get it rebooted before I left.  You know how obsessed I get.  I’d have never been able to get any sleep if I didn’t have the computer up and running before I left.  By the time you came in, I was so tired and anxious to get home to bed that I just grabbed the disk and headed for the door as soon as it finished downloading.  Nothing personal, Paul, I just wasn’t up for conversation at two in the morning.”

  JT smiled.  “Did you get booted up OK?”

  “Yup.  Slept like a baby.”

  “Anything else, Paul?” JT asked.

  Paul shook his head no.

  “Thanks, Sean.  Enjoy your lunch.”

  “Right.  See you guys this afternoon.”

  “Disconnect, Marlene.”

  “Disconnected, sir.”

  JT wiped the ketchup from his plate with the last fry.  “I figured it would be something simple.  Sean’s a bit strange sometimes, but he’s a good man.”  He looked down at his empty plate. “God, I love a good meal.”

  Paul took a last swig from his glass of Coke.  “Thanks, JT.”  He stood and started for the door.

  “Paul,” JT said, stopping Paul in his tracks.  “Get on those patent applications right away.  I know it’s boring stuff, but timing is crucial now.  Besides, once you’re done, I’ve got something really exciting for you to get started on.”

  “Go ahead, I’ll bite.  What is it?”

  “Neuronanobionics.”

  Paul lit up.  This is where he had really wanted to go with the project all along.  Using a conglomeration of nanobots, one could theoretically build a replacement organ, a bionic organ, one cell at a time inside the body.  Organ transplantation without surgery, he liked to call it when talking to some of his less technically oriented friends.  Neuronanobionics, or a replacement for a whole section of a spinal cord or brain, would be the ultimate accomplishment.

  “I’ll have those patent applications done within the week.” Paul left and closed the door behind him.  What had started out as one of the worst days of his life had turned into one of the very best.

Chapter five

The headlines of the Baltimore Sun on October 15, 2050, were mostly about baseball.  The Baltimore Orioles had just beaten the Miami Marlins in the seventh game of the World Series.  “Birds feast on Fish,” the headlines read.  Some people still enjoyed holding a newspaper that was actually made of paper, though most just scanned the news on the Net over breakfast or dinner.  Not too many people noticed the small column on page five of the local section about a young man who had veered off Highway I-95 and wrapped his car around a light pole.

Richie Kincade noticed.  He crumpled the paper as he folded it up to show his wife.  “Will you look at this.  Says the fella just turned right into the light post at seventy mph.  Three witnesses saw it.  The car was moving along fine, no sign of guidance system malfunction or nothin’.  No alcohol in his blood and no drugs, but the safety system was off; the damned microchip was missing when they found the car.  He must have been driving a de-chipped car, got depressed about something and just decided to steer it right off the road with a death wish.  God, the kid must have been a Marlins fan.”  He started to chuckle a bit, but caught himself.  “Sorry.  Guess that’s kind of sick, huh?”

“Kind of, Richie.  So what’s new?”  Lara Kincade had long ago accepted what it was like to be the wife of a police detective assigned to the Motor Vehicle Tech-Tampering Unit. People only messed with automobile safety systems for two reasons:  to steal a car or to remove the microchip that prevented the car from speeding or veering off a road.  Mostly, it was kids who liked to de-chip the cars for joy rides, rides that ended in disaster too many times.  The MVTT Unit cops saw some pretty gruesome things; there wasn’t much worse than the sight of the mangled corpse of a teenager who was out joyriding.  Lara Kincade was used to her husband’s sick humor; she knew it was how he dealt with the awful things that he saw.  Different detectives had different ways, but each of them had to have something, some way of keeping themselves sane, of distancing themselves from their work when they came home.  This was Richie Kincade’s way.

Richard Kincade grew up in Baltimore.  All he ever wanted out of life was to be a member of the Baltimore Police Force.  He went right into the Police Academy after high school, and worked his way up to detective.  He’d been working the MVTT Unit for twelve years now, and in Baltimore an MVTT detective sees a lot in twelve years.  He could often get a glimpse of his new assignments by reading the morning paper; he had a pretty good idea by now how the chief’s mind worked.

“This one’s got Richie Kincade written all over it, honey.  Hartner likes to stick me with these dumbed-down car kills.  It’s not that easy to dumb-down a car.  Detroit hardwires the safety microchip relays in, so you’ve got to be a bit of a computer geek as well as a mechanic to shut it down without disabling the car.  If they didn’t do it that way, everybody’d be shutting their safeties off; it’s a bitch getting out of a parking lot when your car won’t let you get within ten feet of the next closest crawler.”

“Sounds interesting, hon,” Mrs. Kincade muttered sweetly as she poured him another cup of coffee. 

He knew that she really wasn’t listening to the words he was saying.  She had little interest in homicide and less interest in cars and microchips.  He appreciated that she listened enough to at least feign interest.  She may not have loved his work, but she surely did love him and he knew it.

“Thanks,” he said as she poured, “but I’d better get going.”

He stood up and went to the hall closet to grab his trench coat.  “Bye, sweetie.”  He gave the missus a kiss on the cheek.  She smiled and watched him hurry down the white marble steps in front of his Highlandtown row home.

It was a short drive to the police station on Howard Street where Richie worked.  Within twenty minutes, he was at his desk, reviewing the file the chief had handed him as he arrived.

The young man who had died in the I-95 weekend accident was one Lester Hanes of Columbia, Maryland.  He was a computer sciences engineer who had grown up in Baltimore and graduated from the University of Maryland four years after he got out of high school.  He had worked for a while as a programmer at a banking firm in the city, and then switched to a biotech company just outside of Columbia.  He was single and had no family apart from his mother who still lived in Baltimore. 

“Definitely not a Marlins fan,” Kincade muttered as he looked over the report.

“What’s that, Richie?”

“Uh, nothin’, Chief.  The kid looks pretty non-descript.  This one shouldn’t take too long.  I’ll bet the geek just shut down the safety system to impress a girl.”

   Detective Kincade went back to his desk to dig up whatever he could on Lester Hanes from the Baltimore Police Department Intranet.  He planned to spend as little time as possible with the vehicle itself, or what was left of the body.  It could be pretty gruesome work, and after looking at the paperwork, he was sure that he could have this all but wrapped up before consulting with the coroner’s office or the body shop that had sequestered the wreck.

The investigation was about as routine as any Kincade had been assigned to in recent years. The guys at the body shop had already sifted through the wreck that had been Hanes’ car and, as expected, the safety computer had been jury-rigged with a bootlegged microchip, the kind that any computer geek could buy on the Net and install himself.  With his background in computers, Hanes could have done it without breaking a sweat.

  Kincade studied Hanes’ file.  He was single, worked hard, didn’t date much.  All in all, a pretty straight shooter from what Kincade could tell.  Hanes didn’t really seem like the kind of guy who would de-chip his car, but hey, young guys have been known to do some pretty crazy things to impress a girl.  It didn’t sit quite right with Richie, but after a predictably routine investigation, he was ready to let it go.  He had phoned Hanes’ employer, his family, his coworkers and what few friends he could find.  This was a boring guy from what Kincade could tell.  He wasn’t into anything that anyone would want to kill him for, so why look for trouble.  Just mark it up to testosterone stupidity.

  He filed the report, and was home in time for dinner.

Chapter six

  Columbia, Maryland, was still, in many ways, a model city.  Originally developed in a large rural area between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the 1960’s as a developer’s vision of what an ideal suburban American city should be like, it grew to unforeseen proportions as the Baltimore-Washington corridor filled with two-worker households in the late twentieth century.  In spite of the rapid growth, the city maintained a bit of its mystique and remained a popular place to live.  Its most famous resident was a technology entrepreneur named JT Anderson.

  Anderson had grown up in Columbia.  Even as a boy he was always a little different.  While most of the boys in his class spent their free time playing ball, JT would rush home from school, grab a Coke and head down to his basement.  His parents gave him a rather generous allowance along with the unfettered use of the basement, where neither of them often ventured.  It was JT’s private wonderland, stocked with parts from computers that most people were glad to get rid of as they became obsolete.  But to JT, these computers weren’t junk, they were a virtually bottomless well of spare parts.  It was in this strange place and with these junked circuit boards that he constructed Homer. 

  Homer wasn’t the first robot ever built, but he was one of the first with a crude form of artificial intelligence.  Homer was good enough to win first place at the Maryland Science Fair, but more importantly, it was the fact that Homer was built for about thirty-five million dollars less than the AI robots that Sony, IBM and a dozen other companies had been developing at the same time that caught the eye of the industrial elite.  JT went to Harvard on a full scholarship.  It was during his time at Harvard that he learned about nanotechnology, and it became his fascination.

  As much as he loved Boston, JT ached to return to Maryland, and Johns Hopkins was only too glad to oblige him.  Hopkins had a lab that was involved in some of the early work on nanotechnology, and it wasn’t hard for them to attract JT to their campus as a grad student.  By the time he graduated, he was the world’s leading researcher on nanotechnology.  He stayed on as project director for a couple of years, but when he saw the light at the end of the tunnel – the breakthrough that would make nanobots commercially successful – he abruptly left Hopkins to found the Baltimore Nanotechnology Institute.  His critical discovery, one that led to success in the fabrication of silicon-based nanobots, came just weeks after he had left Hopkins.  In fact, it came so quickly that it raised suspicions the discoveries had actually been made while he was employed by Hopkins, and therefore the nanobot technology was rightfully the intellectual and fiscal property of the university.  For a brief period, a prominent law firm even tried to file charges against BNI to regain ownership of the nanobot fabrication process, but if JT did steal the work from his lab at Hopkins, he had covered his tracks well.  Charges were dropped, clearing the way for BNI to retain sole ownership of the nanotechnology patents. Within two years, nanobots were a mainstay of vascular medicine, and BNI was on its way to becoming one of the wealthiest corporations in America.

  As BNI grew, JT Anderson moved the company from its original location in northwest Baltimore to Columbia.  He was finally back home, and in many ways Columbia was literally his town now.  The seventy-three acre campus nestled into the outskirts of the town housed the corporate offices, research headquarters and fabrication plant for BNI.  He was the largest employer in Columbia, and many of the corporate executives, including JT himself, lived in the suburbs of Columbia.

  Paul Hingston was a little different from most of the gang at BNI.  He was glad to be a part of the corporate culture, “one of the boys,” as JT liked to say, even though he actually employed more women than men, but Paul couldn’t give up the city life, especially not without Sandi by his side.  He bought a penthouse in the heart of downtown Baltimore by the harbor, the ultimate bachelor pad, at least in his mind.  He didn’t find it hard to spend his newfound money.