MIND FIELDS (8 page)

As usual, Rocky didn’t drink much that night.  Even when off duty, one drink was his limit.  He liked his job too much to risk losing his license over something as stupid as a drunk-driving bust.  It would be a long drive back to Washington that night, and after the first coffee, Rocky took it straight, without the whiskey.

The evening passed quickly.  Belle’s Place had worked its magic once again, and by midnight, a week’s worth of stress had melted away.  He called Belle over.

“Leavin’ already, hon?”

“Fraid so, Belle.  It’s been a long day.”  He didn’t like to say too much about himself around here, not even to Belle.  Not too many of the guys did, for obvious reasons.  Belle even figured that name, Rocky, had to be made up, but she didn’t mind a bit.  Rocky was always a gentleman and always paid in cash.

“Don’t be a stranger now, Rocky.”  She winked as she handed him his coat. 

He gave her a kiss on the cheek and headed out the door, bracing himself against the cold night air.  The icy wind slapped against his face, and he tucked his chin down as he walked toward the car.  He didn’t notice the three men who scrambled for their coats and exited Belle’s just after him.

The last thing that he could remember when he awakened in the ER was that he had been sitting in Belle’s Place, enjoying the show.

“Christ! This guy’s got White House clearance.  Look at his ID card.”

Rocky awakened in a bit of a fog.  He saw two men in white coats standing over him.  One of them was holding his wallet and showing it to the other. 

He tried to sit up and grab it.  “Ahh,” he yelped as he plunked back down to the gurney grabbing his head.  He felt the warm, sticky blood oozing from the left side of his skull, and looked at his hand in disbelief as he pulled it away, covered in red.

“Whoa there, big fella.  Hold still.”  The two men in the white coats reached down and restrained his arms.  “Just lay still, we’re gonna get you some help.”

Rocky wasn’t quite sure what they were saying, but he didn’t like being held down. He struggled to pull free, but his usually powerful arms were like Jello at his side.  “Let … me … go!” he shouted, as he tried once more to break free.

“Five milligrams of Valium IV push, stat!” was the last thing he heard.

Chapter eight

  Russell Stetson, the senator from Maryland, had served for the past nine years on the Senate Subcommittee on Nanotechnology.  The committee had been formed shortly after he won the election for his first term.  It had been placed under the direction of a senior senator from Connecticut, Stanton Cole.  Cole was one of the Senate’s old-timers.  Having served in the Senate for eighteen years as a levelheaded moderate, he had the respect of the leaders of both parties.  When nanotechnology rose to the forefront of clinical medicine, the committee had been organized to deal with the inevitable ethical issues that would concern the public.  Nanotechnology would enable physicians to alter the human body in ways never known before.  Not since the arguments involving cloning had a new technology raised so much controversy.  At what point would a body full of nanobots cease to be human?  Would a body that had most of its organs replaced or augmented by miniature internal machines become a machine at some point? 

  In order to allay the public’s fears, the legislators decided to have a congressional committee rule on these issues rather than leaving them to the discretion of entrepreneurs who stood to benefit from the exploitation of nanotechnology.  The Senate Subcommittee on Nanotechnology was formed as a branch of the Senate Health Care Committee, and the job of chairing the committee went to the very well respected and very uncontroversial Senator Cole.

  Russell Stetson had spent his first year in the Senate getting a feel for the political battlefield that was Washington, but he was determined to make his mark as quickly as possible.  He lobbied hard to get onto the new committee, realizing that it would enable him to deal with some of the most controversial issues of his day.  He spent hours boning up on nanotechnology, including wining and dining one of its foremost proponents, JT Anderson.  By his fourth year on the committee, he was the vice-chair, with more power over decisions regarding the authorization of human research than anyone in the country, save for the venerable Stanton Cole.

  Senator Stetson had his own agenda for nanotechnology.  In it, he saw the potential for the ultimate political power: control of the human mind.  His idea was to develop nanobots that could be placed into a human brain and used to control the thoughts and actions of their host.  He knew better than to propose this idea to Senator Cole; a man like Cole would never have the vision to take such a bold step in the name of God and Country.  Instead, he enlisted an NSA operative by the name of James O’Grady, who he knew would appreciate the advantages of mind-controlling nanobots.  With the support of the NSA, Stetson could insure the security that would be needed to covertly bring his ideas to fruition. 

All the security in the world would be useless, of course, without the capability to develop the mind-controlling nanobots.  It was imperative to find a scientist who not only had the skills to develop the nanobots, but who also could be persuaded that Stetson’s ideas were the right ones.  This would not be an easy task; scientists are, by nature, an altruistic group.  Stetson searched long and hard for the right man to do the research needed to accomplish his goal.  He needed someone equally ambitious as he was brilliant, someone with the wealth to sponsor the research without making the government’s support obvious, and someone who could be trusted, or at least intimidated, into absolute secrecy.  By the spring of 2042,
he had made his choice.  JT Anderson was already one of the wealthiest men in the country.  His brilliance was incontrovertible, and his willingness to stretch the boundaries of integrity were well known; no one really believed that he had just happened to make the critical breakthroughs in nanotechnology immediately after leaving Hopkins.  Even though the courts exonerated him, no one really believed that he hadn’t stolen the work that rightfully belonged to Hopkins.  They just gave him credit for being a particularly brilliant thief. 

  Anderson was the perfect choice, and when Russell Stetson approached him with the idea of using his expertise in nanotechnology for a very patriotic and even more lucrative cause, he was not hard to persuade.  He proved to be very adroit at his task, and within a few years, had developed a synthetic bionic implant the size of a pea that could be surgically inserted into the human brain and could be used to introduce thoughts and actions into its host.  It was constructed of thousands of nanobots, which together made up a small machine capable of generating electrical impulses that could be read by the surrounding neurons.  By meticulously studying brain wave patterns, he was able to develop a digital language with which he could program his bionic implant.  The digital signal would then be converted into electrical impulses that the brain would interpret as original thought.  When implanted in the right frontal lobe, the device was capable of making its host perform whatever action the bionic implant was programmed to suggest.

  The first obvious flaw in the work was that cutting the someone’s head open to insert the bionic implant was not the ideal way to covertly gain control of the subject.  Cutting a person’s head open would definitely arouse suspicion.  Anderson had toyed with the idea of injecting nanobots programmed to assemble themselves into the bionic implant once inside the body, but he had no idea how to insure that it would assemble itself at the proper location in the right frontal lobe.

  The second obvious flaw was that his inorganic nanobots would create a foreign body in the host, one that could cause seizure-inducing irritation, and would be detectable by standard X-ray techniques.  Again, this was not ideal for a covert operation.

  Anderson had struggled with these issues until he heard Dr. Sandra Fletcher speak at the Hopkins Symposium introducing organic nanobots.  The organic bots would solve the problem of host rejection and detection, and the programming skills of someone like her or Paul Hingston would give him a fighting chance of getting injectable bots to migrate to the right frontal lobe where they could be effective.

  Work had been progressing well since Paul joined BNI, but it was never quite fast enough for Senator Stetson.  JT felt a pang of anxiety when he saw Senator Stetson’s name penciled into his schedule unexpectedly that morning.  It wasn’t unusual for members of the congressional nanotech committee to meet periodically with leaders in the field of nanotechnology, so an occasional meeting with Stetson in the name of senatorial enlightenment would not arouse suspicion, but JT knew what the meeting was really about.  It was always about the same thing.

  Senator Stetson arrived at BNI right on time, as usual, and JT greeted him in the outer office.

  “Good morning, JT.”

  “Good morning, Senator.  Right on time, as usual.”  JT extended his right hand to greet the senator, and guided him into his office.  The door closed behind them.

  “I need an update, JT.  I’ve introduced a bill that will appropriate five-hundred million dollars over the next decade for nanotech research, and I’ve been building a fragile coalition.  It’ll crumble like a house of cards if I don’t have some solid sign of success for the project.   Cole is dead set against the idea.  He doesn’t want to give that much money or that much latitude to any independent enterprise.  That old coot is gonna play by the book on this one.  Even the mention of using nanobots for any covert operations will blow the deal.  We have to convince him that it’s in the public interest to give that grant to BNI or it’ll never fly.  He’s a tough nut to crack, but if you can give me something tangible, I think my friends at the agency can put enough pressure on the rest of the committee members that we may be able to swing the vote.”

  Anderson sat quietly behind his desk.  He liked having the NSA on his side, but it was also somewhat unnerving knowing that he was under their thumb.  He did not want to screw this one up.  It had become much more than the money now. 

  “Let me show you where were at, Russ.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Chapter nine

  December 1, 2050

  Harborview Hospital sat on the waterfront in downtown Baltimore, not far from Federal Hill.  The resurgence of the downtown waterfront area in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was the model for the redevelopment of inner city areas all over the United States.  The rundown industrial and storage facilities had been replaced with modern financial and business towers, and the yuppies that staffed those businesses moved into the city in droves.  Broken down row-homes were supplanted by luxury condominiums, and the growing numbers of prosperous residents were accommodated by new fashion boutiques, upscale malls and a plethora of exclusive restaurants, always filled with young urban professionals who were too busy and too tired to prepare a meal at the end of a long work day.  Unfortunately, accidents happen even in the finest neighborhoods, and even the most privileged amongst us fall ill.  Harborview Hospital was the Rolls Royce of hospitals, built to fill that niche. 

  Harborview was the kind of hospital that not only provided good care, but it did so in an environment that would do justice to a five star hotel.  Rooms appointed with designer furniture and marble bathrooms had small balconies that looked out over the Baltimore skyline, where those patients who were able could sit and enjoy a gourmet meal with their loved ones.  It was not the hospital of choice for those who were found unconscious on the streets in the gentlemen’s club district, but the ID card in Rocky Stankowski’s wallet made it clear that he was not the normal bucolic drunk who stumbled into the wrong alley in downtown Baltimore.  The officers who found him contacted their chief as soon as they saw the card that identified him as a White House employee.  The chief contacted the mayor, who placed a few calls that eventually wound up at the ear of the White House Chief of Staff, Harold Bradley, at Camp David.

  When the President of the United States calls and says to give a patient top priority, hospital administrators do not stop to ask who is paying the bill, at least not right away.  Rocky was admitted to a private suite on the neurosurgery floor of Harborview Hospital.  An MRI showed the results of blunt trauma to the right side of the head — a skull fracture and a severe right frontal lobe contusion.

Mr. Bradley knew that Rocky had no family, and made it a point to be by his side within hours.  A few calls were made, and he learned that the only real hope for a complete recovery from the injury was a new experimental treatment called two-phase neuronanobot therapy, or TPNT.  He conferred with the Surgeon General, and signed the papers the next morning.

Rocky Stankowski was not the first patient treated with the TPNT for a brain injury under the Hopkins protocol, but he was the most prominent thus far.  Fortunately for Rocky, as well as for the nanobot researchers, he made a complete recovery, like each of the twenty-three patients treated before him, within fifteen days.  On the sixteenth day, he was back home.

Rocky was itching to get back to work, but protocol demanded that the patient not be allowed to operate a motor vehicle for at least six months.  He was monitored regularly for any sign of seizures, and underwent a thorough battery of neurological and psychological tests during that period of time.  The results were astonishing, with no trace of injury detectable on any of the tests within three months’ time.  Anatomically, the signs of injury could be seen: the scar on the scalp, the subtle defect in the shape of the skull where it had been bashed in, and minor abnormalities discernable on the MRI.  From a practical standpoint, however, Rocky was as good as new.   His doctors promised him that if no complications occurred, he would be back to work in six months. Rocky didn’t like being idle; he would hold them to their word.