Itty Bitty Bigger World: Strike Commit

It was a short trip - twelve minutes or so - but it felt like forever.

The capsule opened at UC Stanford and we were met by a small welcoming committee -- the Dean of Medicine and the Director of Safety, I found out later.

Guided by my smartware, I walked right past them with my battlesuited escorts tromping behind. Apparently they were miffed.

This I did not care a damn for. I had a friend to check on, and an urgent question for a doctor. Also, I did not yet dislike them enough to be tempted to cough on them.

The contrast between the Public Health Service hobbyist-doctor - who was at least competent - and the UC Stanford physician could not have been greater. Instead of a horde of bots, he had a smartweave lab coat and implanted biofilters. Instead of a distracted look as he multitasked between his ware and the real world, he had all his attention on me. And instead of feeling that he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, he knew that he was part of a profession and that literally millions of his peers were at his back, day and night.

"Mr. Anderson, I'm Doctor Perez. With your permission, I'd like to examine you. I've reviewed the Fed decontam procedures..."

"I consent," I said briskly. No accident that my escorts were in battlesuits - avoids another vector for cross contamination. I did promise I would stop being a vector.

Now Dr. Perez looked distracted. And well he should .. because my ware flashed enough warnings to write a small legal manual.

I overrode them all and granted full access.

Twenty seconds later, Dr. Perez looked back at me.

"You are clear."

"Doctor, how is it that I infected at least two people, yet remained unaffected?"

The question that had been bugging me for hours now. Also, I wanted a second opinion. I suppose a good analogy of the difference, back in the days of automobiles, would be having your car looked at by a Jiffy Lube tech with a flashlight, or having your car looked at by a Detroit automotive engineer with a fully equipped shop.

"You were poisoned. You are not poisoned now. The dose was administered in your iced tea, in Quincy Towers. The payload was encapsulated, and your stomach acids had not yet finished digesting when you were stunned. Post stun nausea resulted in vomitus. Exposure to air triggered the payload. You just happened to not get a good sniff off your own clothing. The CHP trooper decontaminated the back of the vehicle, guaranteeing a solid exposure because he had no reason to assume a biowar contaminant. The CHP Captain - Tsien - recalls discreetly taking a sniff, she was checking to see if you had in fact drunk alcohol that morning."

Talk about attention to details. Well, that's how one becomes a CHP Captain.

"May I see her?"

"She rather insists. This way."

Eight steps later, the slidewalk deposited us at an unlabeled airlock door. I gestured for the Federal battlesuits to remain outside.

"I've lifted quarantine. She is also clear."

Amy Tsien was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows. Several tubes connected her to industrial pallets of machinery behind her, themselves tended by specialized bots. While the area in her immediate reach was equipped for comfort, and the area in front of the bed discreetly decorated -- with an actual window to an actual air shaft, an arcane bit of building code law that had never been repealed -- behind her bore more resemblance to a factory than a hospital of the prior century.

"Alan, so glad to see you!" she exclaimed. "Please do call me Amy. Apparently I was touch and go. Doctor, would you give Alan a quick technical summary? I think it will be relevant."

Doctor Perez coughed. "She collapsed in her office and ware indicated a probable neurological emergency. Her heart stopped twice during transfer to an ambulance. The paramedic initiated quarantine protocol quickly enough to save himself and protect the building from full evacuation. Transport dialysis flushed most of the pathogen and protected her brain from significant damage. During transport, we used her direct neural implants to induce coma. We received a warning that cryonics was contraindicated, which had been our initial approach, so we induced hypothermia instead. It took three complete blood replacements in the ER before we figured out that an infection reservoir remained in the spinal cord. We applied ANLS and considered spinal cord transplantation, but were able to isolate the infected node with medical lasing, destabilize with radiation knife and remove at the nanopresence level. Very complex work. I doubt that most global hospitals would be capable, although of course we have developed and shared a complete treatment protocol."

Crap. That meant that treating an infected person would take a team of dozens of physicians with state of the art equipment and nanopresence rigs. A patient-provider ratio of 1:50 is not a good formula for stopping a plague.

I also strongly suspected that Doctor Perez had simplified things for the two paramedics, whom doctors think of as cute but dim witted. Or merely the latter.

"Can biosuites protect?" I asked.

"The secret to this particular biopathogen is encapsulation. It hijacks a white blood cell to use as protective camouflage against both the body's natural defenses and the enhanced defenses of a biosuite. Checking for this is a relatively simple update, but there are simply too many potential Trojan Horses without continuous monitoring of every cell normally found in blood or the GI tract. An updated biosuite should protect, and updates are already going out. But ordinary biosuites sound the alarm only after successful infection."

"What about building defenses?" Amy asked.

"Arcology air filtration systems will prevent spread. This is a poison with biopathogen behaviors rather than an infectious agent. It may have a contagious mode in other deployments, but the biopathogen samples from the attack, from Quincy Towers and from the Fedhobbyists ..."

I was impressed at how Doctor Perez made the coined phrase a single filthy word.

"... showed no signs of such capability. Once it's loose in a human body, it's _nasty_. But it shows little interest in leaving that body. Fortunately, because that drunkard's walk your friend did could have killed San San." He turned to me. "I take it you did not know you had been exposed?"

"No, Doctor."

"I will not belabor the point that if you did not indulge in an addictive borderline legal substance, you would not have been exposed via that method. However, you will want to be careful of any source of food or drink or controlled substances or _illegal painkiller tablets_ in the future."

Amy and I shared a glance. One of _them_.

She owed her life to Dr. Perez. So I would be scrupulously polite.

"Yes, Doctor. When will Amy be cleared to go home?"

"We have a mandatory twenty four hour monitoring protocol for high risk events. So about twenty-three hours from now. Excuse me."

He walked away briskly.

My ware - which has the ability to monitor other people's ware behaviors - advised me that Doctor Perez had been paged, and was therefore being rude from necessity rather than just intention.

This left me alone with Amy. Her eyes flickered to my backpack.

"Kitten?"

"In Federal quarantine."

"Gun?"

"Same - but I've got two Marines in battlesuits outside your door. San San reserve police officers. Long story."

"The hospital is afraid I'll tire myself keeping track of current events. They might be right. Are you sure you have time to be here?"

"Best place to be. Spreads out a couple of the risks."

You can take the Captain off the battlefield, but you can't take the battlefield out of the Captain. "UC Stanford is also a tough nut to crack. More so with a pair of battlesuits at hand."

I could sense faint jealousy. Police agencies were strictly regulated. Then again, even a SWAT team had little use for a battlesuit. Armed exoskeletons, yes, but even a single battlesuit was a truly formidable force. A pair of them versus any 20th century military would result in a victory for the former.

"I suppose I'll have to give them back sooner or later."

An awkward silence fell. We just sat there for a while, perhaps ten minutes.

Finally, she spoke.

"I saw your broadcast. Well done."

"Thank you, Captain."

"The name's Amy. Thank _you_, Captain. And I didn't vote for your promotion."

I felt vaguely hurt.

"I abstained. Conflict of interest."

I sat down heavily in a convenient visitor's chair and met her eyes. She smiled.

"It would be awfully awkward to recommend you for a leadership position and _then_ ask you out on a date, you see."

I blinked about six times. Sometimes I'm awfully dense.

"The logistics are going to be interesting. 'Table for two, floor for 200 psi [14.1kg/cm^2].'"

"We'll figure something out. Come sit next to me."

"On the bed?"

She gestured to the tubes. So I sat on the side of the bed and she matter of factly wrapped a arm around me and squeezed. Hard.

My eyes watered but I showed no discomfort.

"Thank you."

"For accidentally poisoning you?"

"For taking this madman down."

"Huh?"

A visual and audio lit in a corner of the room.

"Mormon Protectorate Police with the assistance of Jefferson Community Militia and Idaho Security Incorporated, have successfully interdicted and secured a biopathogen production facility in Utah. No persons have been injured and seventeen persons on site have been detained under the Cairo Protocol for suspected involvement in biowar. UN observers have been requested to supervise the dismantling of the site. The Henchman Prize Commission will be meeting to verify the reward for the informant, who called immediately after the one billion credit prize was announced..."

The video showed one of the briefest and most efficient forcible entry operations I'd ever heard of. A brief burst from an orbital laser followed by hypersonic aircraft delivering a supersonic precision strike of exoskeleton armored troopers through the hole just carved. If I recalled correctly, the entry team would be Mormon, the aircraft from ISI and the orbital laser courtesy of the Jeffersonians. Quick work for a joint operation.

"We won," I said to the air of the room, which probably did not think I was stupid.

I turned in time for Amy to deliver a supersonic precision strike of her own.

I kissed her back as skillfully as I knew how. I may be stupid, but I'm not an idiot.