The charges included assault of a minor (firing a gun at 17-year-old Guillermo Aquino); arson (of the house at 421 Asher St.); fraud (profiting under pretenses); practicing medicine without a license; burglary (of the $800 Canine Companion, which the District Attorney claimed she stole for the purposes of committing arson); aiding and abetting (the operation of an illegal mod parlor); refusing to assist a police officer (by remaining as silent as a monk while the house burned); and fleeing a scene. Because of the number and severity of the charges, and because she had arrived on an out-of-state bus and either couldn’t or wouldn’t give a permanent address, she was held without bail. Because of her contact with the unknown organisms, she was kept by herself in a holding cell, where she was also arraigned, in lieu of potentially infecting everyone with a novel pathogen. It was unnecessary, but Nio didn’t mind. It meant she had the place to herself and everyone came to her. It was only then that all those involved in the case finally heard her speak:
“Not guilty.”
The judge, from under a medical mask, explained that in the State of South Dakota, having a prior felony conviction meant that all of the charges against her were automatically raised in severity—a Class C felony became a Class B, a Class B became Class A, and so on. And since her prior had been violent, sentencing was automatically pushed to the maximum.
“If convicted, I will have no choice in the matter,” the woman explained. “This is very serious. You are facing up to 80 years in prison. Do you understand that?” She asked it cautiously, like she wasn’t sure if she needed to call in a psychiatric expert or try a different language.
“Yes.”
“Fine,” the judge said, gathering her papers. “You’ve been appointed a lawyer. I urge you to listen to him.”
The baggy, bespectacled man next to her stiffened slightly in pride.
“Is there some reason why I can’t have my medicine?” Nio asked. “I get headaches.”
The judge turned to the sheriff, who told her calmly but apologetically that he’d see to it. By his reaction, it seemed to be news to him. Even so, it wasn’t until the following day that he complied, and Nio spent the night with her head pounding in agony.
That morning, after a few hours’ sleep had abated the throb, the door to the booking room buzzed and the sheriff stepped into the long walkway that ran in front of the barred cells. He shut the heavy door behind him, making sure it was locked, and tossed an unopened box of aspirin through the bars. Nio was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cell, meditating, and caught it one-handed. She looked at the red box quizzically.
“All I could get on short notice,” he said, leaning against the wall. “Your pills tested positive for opiates.”
“Are you amending my charge sheet?”
“That’s up to the district attorney.”
His nameplate said Marbrant. He had a thick gray mustache and two lifetime’s worth of wrinkles. He looked down the hall toward the fire exit.
“I used to think nothing much ever happened in this town,” he said. His voice echoed slightly off the painted block walls. “I liked that.”
Nio sat with socked feet under the beam of sunlight that fell in an angled shaft from the window near the ceiling. The light bounced off the floor, hit the pale walls, and scattered, illuminating everything brightly, like a photographer’s studio. She couldn’t get a good read on the sheriff’s bioelectrics. The metal bars interfered.
“First the deep core came. Promised jobs. Forgot to mention the earthquakes. Then, couple years ago, some of those dinosaurs moved through. You know about them? Smaller than I thought. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Some were bigger than a bull moose. But I thought dinosaurs’d be able to trample houses or something. Still, beautiful in their own way, with those colorful markings and everything. They passed a couple miles east of here on their way up to Canada. The whole town went out to see. Darndest thing.” He paused. “And now there’s you.”
Sheriff Marbrant took another long slow breath and rested his hand on his belt. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anything significant will be recovered from the house. It took to that fire like a stripper to a pole, as my uncle liked to say. Still, the FBI’s supposed to be sending a man from Minneapolis, so you never know. Maybe they’ll dig something up.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re gonna have to watch out for Dr. Aquino, though. Guillermo’s mom. She’s real protective of that boy. And she knows Judge Bennam.”
“So I gathered.”
Nio had seen them talking at her arraignment.
“She seems to think you’re some kind of criminal mastermind who tried to murder her son. Raffela concurs. According to them, you provided the illegal data file to Guillermo and lied about its contents.”
“Of course.”
“And when he told you what it was doing to Beckham, you came to cover your tracks and frame him.”
“Clever.”
“Kinda hard to argue when you won’t give your version of events.”
“That suggests you don’t believe them, Sheriff.”
He harumphed once in dry humor and watched her swallow several pills. “You want more water?” He nodded to the bottle in the corner.
“I’m fine.” She chewed the aspirin like bitter candy. “What about the girl?”
“Beckham? She’s got permanent tissue damage. And apparently, she’s in a lot of pain. But she’s gonna recover. Be on meds her whole life, doc says. She’ll never mod herself again, that’s for sure. Truly’s gone missing. Took off before her shift.”
“What about Del?”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.”
Nio squinted. “What does that mean?”
He shrugged a little. Then he straightened his steel buckle absentmindedly and picked at something stuck to the top with his thumbnail.
“Something you wanna ask me, Sheriff?”
“I don’t suppose you know a woman named Maureen Arneson.” His eyes shot to Nio as he pronounced the name.
“Should I?”
He shook his head. “Probably nothing.” He looked down again. “You sure you won’t give a statement?”
“Theoretically, Sheriff, such a statement might amount to the admission of several crimes.”
“There’s always that.” He smiled weakly. “Deputy Grady seems to think you’re waiting for something. Help, maybe.”
Nio hesitated. “I was. But it looks like that’s not coming.”
He nodded at her statements as if they were a sermon. He moved to leave but stopped. “I wonder if you could answer me something.”
“If I can.”
“Say for argument’s sake that Raffela and Dr. Aquino are stretching the truth. Where would young Guillermo have gotten this ‘sequence file’ they keep talking about?”
“Lotsa bad people out there, Sheriff.”
“Sure, but what would be the point? The docs tell me it’s not an easy thing to make. Very difficult, in fact. Why go to all the trouble?”
“Wow. That’s a loaded question.”
He shrugged, and Nio traced the cracks in the high ceiling with her eyes as if reading a story they told. She opened her mouth but didn’t speak right away. It took her a moment.
“In 1994, a 17-year-old Boy Scout and future Marine raided junk yards in Michigan for trace radioactive materials: americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lanterns, radium from clocks, tritium from gunsights. In a shed in the back of his house, he used a Bunsen burner and the lithium he’d collected from a thousand dollars’ worth of rechargeable batteries to purify the thorium ash, which he added to a bored-out block of lead with the hope of making a breeder reactor.”
The sheriff scowled.
“A breeder reactor produces more fissile material than it uses, meaning it can be used to seed other reactors.”
“Jesus. Is that true?”
She nodded. “The FBI found him before he finished the project, but he did make a functional neutron source, which is the first step. We love it when the guy tinkering in his garage is Bill Gates or Carroll Shelby... Five years later, inspired by the event, a pair of University of Chicago graduate students produced a working ‘reactor in a shed,’ which was one of the items on the university’s annual scavenger hunt. They were later able to isolate trace amounts of plutonium.
“In 2008, at his home in Arkansas, a 14-year-old kid built a fusor, a device that suspends a magnetic field between two cages to heat ions to fusion conditions. Pick any science and it’s pretty much the same story. Do you know how modding started? Sometime in the 20-teens, a university geneticist began selling CRISPR-based home genetic modification kits over the internet. The idea was that since rich people would undoubtedly use it to make their kids smarter and prettier than the rest of us, we should have access, too—except instead of making themselves smarter, it’s guys wanting to grow an eight-foot penis or make it glow in the dark or something.”
“You’re saying it’s just another way to commit murder.”
Nio stretched her legs and laid them straight. “For some guys, there’s definitely a ‘hold my beer’ element to it. They just wanna play around with something dangerous. We like to stereotype them as morons, but some of them are highly intelligent. You’ve seen the videos. Some of those stunts take a lot of planning and craftsmanship.”
“They could take those skills and get a job,” the sheriff suggested.
Nio smiled. “Spoken like a lawman.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
She got up and sat on the bench affixed to the rear wall. She ran a hand over her scalp. “Tell me something, Sheriff. Those jobs the mining company promised. How many were blue collar?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Rig like that, most everything will be automated, so you’re talking seasonal overflow to augment a permanent skeleton crew of skilled engineers and their robots. Can’t get a job like that without a degree. Doesn’t matter how smart you are. If your resume doesn’t check the right boxes, no corporation’s gonna take the risk. Why would they when there’s twenty other safe and compliant applicants? So, you go to school and learn the approved curriculum, which takes years and gets you hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to a bank that doesn’t care one snit about you. Now you’re in—and you spend the next 40-plus years of your life working to make someone else rich, just so you can pay back the money they lent you in the first place. Any job that pays decent is gonna be somewhere expensive to live, so you’re either pissing away the rest in rent, or you’re spending half your life in the car. Society makes that the choice and then wonders why these guys give a hard pass.”
“What about the nuclear kid? You said he was a Marine.”
“What do you think they had him doing? You think a kid who built a reactor out of junk was appropriately challenged by swabbing the deck? I don’t remember the details, but I know he got discharged for mental health. No help, just ‘Good luck, kid.’” She waved. “At some point, he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors. Smoke detectors,” she repeated. “Not a bank. I saw his mugshot once. He was covered in radioactive sores. Died young.
“There’s a million stories like that. It’s an unnamed epidemic. Imagine if some angry kid in LA, instead of shooting up his school, decided to release an engineered pathogen or detonate a momentary singularity. Neither are all that hard if you know what you’re doing.”
“In LA?” The sheriff was quiet a moment. “Can’t say I’d mind all that much.”
Nio smiled wryly.
Sheriff Marbrant grimaced and shifted his stance. “I hear they can steal people’s memories now. At least I can lock my damned car.”
“It’s not all that. The brain doesn’t store information like a computer. It’s broken into components—textural, verbal, emotional—and encoded throughout the matrix of consciousness. They could only retrieve some very basic elements: whether her eyes registered light or dark when she was beaten, whether she was wet or dry, that kind of thing. It had rained that night and they were trying to impeach the defendant’s story that when he left her, she was safe at home. So, you can thank law enforcement for that one. But yeah... How long before our thoughts can be subpoenaed as easily as our phone records?”
The holding cells fell quiet. The sheriff reached to his back pocket and pulled out a folded letter. The envelope had been opened. He held it up. “This was in your personal possessions.”
He pulled the top open with his thumbs and looked into it like he expected to find something new. “We opened it the night you were arrested hoping to get a name or address.” He looked up. “You haven’t read it yet, have you?”
Nio shook her head.
“Do you want to?”
She didn’t answer, and after a few moments, the sheriff knocked on the door. It buzzed from the outside and he pulled it open.
“I’ll put it with the rest of your things. In the meantime...” He pulled a thin folded newspaper from his belt. “You may wanna read that.”
He tossed it between the bars and it slid across the floor. The door shut behind him with a click.
The following day, Nio was told she had a guest. She was led from her cell by the woman who had arrested her. Her name plate said GRADY. They didn’t speak. Nio expected to be taken to one of the interview rooms, as she had been each time previously, to meet with the DA or her less-than-competent court-appointed attorney. Part of her hoped Mutiny had come to South Dakota without calling ahead.
But Nio wasn’t taken to an interview room. Her handcuffs were removed and she was left alone in the middle of the office. She watched Deputy Grady step through the door and shut it behind her.
She looked around. “Is this a lynching?” she asked no one.
Tires crunched gravel. Nio turned to see a limousine roll to a stop in the parking lot. A rear door opened and a middle-aged male chimpanzee in a finely tailored suit and no shoes slid down from the back seat. He wore cuff links, a paisley tie, and custom black-rimmed bifocals. He walked to the door on his knuckles but stood upright to open it. Nio guessed he was at most four feet tall. Once inside, he waited by a desk as his human bodyguards quickly checked the office. Satisfied, they stepped out, and Nio was alone with an ape.
“I’m told I look taller on TV,” he said. When he didn’t get a reaction, he held out his hand. “Dr. Hamilton Chang.”
Nio took it. “Ah, yeah. I kinda figured.”
His nails were manicured and his grip polite. Nevertheless, there was something decidedly bestial in the grasp—the dark coarseness of his skin perhaps. And his bioelectric field was strange, completely unlike anything Nio had felt before. She heard no music.
They noticed each other’s feet. Nio was in her striped socks. Chang’s feet were bare. They both flexed their toes.
“After careful study,” Dr. Chang explained in a calm, gravelly voice, “I’ve found that any shoes large enough to fit me also make me look like a clown—more than usual anyway—and that it’s more comfortable for everyone involved if I dispense with that particular human convention and walk as nature shod me. Please.” He motioned to a chair like the police station were his personal office. Then he climbed up one himself, gripping it with his feet like a baby climbing a sofa.
Rather than sitting against the back, which would’ve forced his bare soles to face Nio, Dr. Chang settled on the edge and crossed his legs, picking a piece of lint from his cuff like a tick from fur.
“I console myself with the observation that, while human feet are certainly daintier and more attractive, they are only made for walking, whereas I have four hands. Alas, in compensation, Nature omitted an opposable thumb from every one of them.”
“On TV, they always film you from the waist up.”
“Quite. It’s a perk of my position.” His glasses slipped and he pushed them back up his face. “You must be wondering why I’m here.”
“Did Mutiny send you? Because if you’re just here to lecture—”
“Not at all. I haven’t seen Ms. Ali in some time. But I enjoy following her exploits, as I do all of you. I am not here to lecture. I will admit to a certain paternal compulsion, but I was only an adviser on the project. I am at best an uncle.” He took a long, deep breath. “But... speaking of the others, I wonder, my dear, if you’ve heard the news.”
“News?” Nio scowled.
Dr. Chang looked down. “I was afraid not. You covered your tracks well. The sheriff was unaware of your identity. Perhaps you would like to sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
Dr. Chang sighed. “My dear, Sol is dead.”
Nio’s mouth hung open. Tears gathered involuntarily at the corner of her eyes, as if she has just swallowed a hot pepper. It wasn’t sadness. It was more like she’d been punched in the gut.
“What?”
“He was giving a talk. He collapsed on stage. Brain hemorrhage, we’re told. The funeral was last week. When you didn’t show, I began making inquiries. Hospitals first. Then law enforcement. This case rather stood out.”
Nio fell back against a desk. Her head was spinning.
“Dead?”
It couldn’t be.
Couldn’t.
Sol was bright and invincible, like his namesake.
Nio covered her mouth. Tears came in earnest then and she slid to the floor. Dr. Chang dropped from his chair and wandered around the dim office until he found her a box of tissues. She took one, and after letting her sob for a few moments, he placed a coarse hand on her shoulder awkwardly.
“When was the last time you saw him?” he asked.
“Ummm...” Nio blew her nose and wiped it. “Luke’s coming out party, I guess. Five years ago. You’re serious?” She looked in his eyes with a glimmer of hope. “He’s really gone?”
Dr. Chang nodded. “I’m afraid so.” He put a polite distance between them. “The FBI are humoring me, but—”
“FBI?” Nio wiped her red and swollen eyes. “I thought you were the head of the National Science Foundation.”
“Alas, my term at NSF ended last year. I am now ‘chief science adviser to the president’ or something like that. To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m still waiting on the business cards.”
“Sounds important.”
Dr. Chang shrugged nonchalantly. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and carefully removed a folded slip of paper by pinching it between two fingers. He opened it the same way and tossed it on the floor between them. Nio didn’t move. She didn’t need to. She knew exactly what it was.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked.
“How long have you been chasing him?”
It was a sequence report, probably from the tissue removed from Beckham Carter.
“There have been others, I suppose?”
There was no point in denying it. If the media was correct, Dr. Hamilton Chang, known as “Chop-Chop Chang” before the spaceflight that changed him forever, was one of the smartest creatures in the world.
“Six,” she said softly. “That I know of. He never acts directly, though, so it’s hard to say.”
“Yes, he appears to be recruiting.”
Dr. Chang nodded to the paper. Above the rows of G’s, C’s, A’s, and U’s, he had sketched an ancient Hebrew numerological wheel. Base sequences were circled and labeled with Hebrew letters, converted via the wheel into Pythagorean ratios, which were then matched to a letter of the Latin alphabet. There were gaps between, but the circled sections spelled a question:
D O Y O UL I K EH U R T I N G PE O P L E?
“He’s been using occult cyphers,” Nio said. “Hermetic alchemy, Hebrew gematria.”
“If you hadn’t burned the house down, the police might’ve been able to recover computer evidence linking him to that unfortunate girl. As it stands, superficially, it looks very much like you are at fault.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t have a lot of choices. They had wings.”
“Wings?”
She shook her head. “It’s not important.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Other than that he targets people involved in illicit activity? Not much.”
“Ah. So his victims will be unlikely to go to the police.”
“Which is why no one’s looking for him. He used to call himself ‘Autochthon,’ but lately he’s been posting under the username ‘Amok.’ I’ve done algorithmic image searches and semantic text matching, but so far nothing. If he has any other footprint online, he’s found a way to mask it.”
“Is that why you risked going into the field? You haven’t done that with any of the others.”
Nio paused. “Others?”
“No need to be modest. You’ve been offering your services online to people with peculiar problems.”
“You’ve been checking up on me.”
“The singer with the thorns and flowers budding from her arms was particularly memorable. Jealous admirer, wasn’t it? ‘Giving her flowers’ or some such?”
Nio nodded.
“I read in the Post,” Chang said, “that the doctors couldn’t find any foreign DNA.”
“That’s correct.”
“Interesting. So how did he do it?”
“Repressor proteins in her skin cream. Evolution conserves genes, right? He made some of her follicle cells ‘forget’ they were mammalian.”
“Hm. Clever.”
Dr. Chang walked with swinging arms to chalkboard that summarized all of the sheriff’s open activities. He stood before it and crossed his arms behind his back. Nio wondered what he was thinking.
“Quite a change from your earlier career.”
“Dr. Chang, sir, you came a very long way.” She paused. “What happened to Sol?”
The chimp turned with his arms still crossed. “Sol didn’t just have a hemorrhage. He had the mother of all hemorrhages. The autopsy found several infarcts clustered around his pineal gland. Seven, in fact.”
“Seven?”
“They ranged in size. Yet, all clotting was postmortem.”
Nio thought for a moment. “An accident? He banged his head and it only caught up to him later?”
“Very good. That’s what the medical examiner suggested—while at the same time noting in her report the complete absence of bruising, either on his skin or the surface of his brain, which you would expect if he’d rattled his head so badly that he tore his cranial blood vessels in seven places. There were no marks on his body of any kind, in fact. No signs of trauma. No puncture wounds. His blood and tissues were free of known toxins. There were no drugs in his system and only a trace amount of alcohol. He didn’t even finish the wine he was given at dinner. In the hours leading up to his death, he was surrounded by others who reported him to be in good spirits. He was met at the train station by several academics from Columbia, where he participated in an afternoon symposium before joining them at a local restaurant.”
“So, he just dropped over?”
“He was giving a public lecture before a hundred people. Several of the guests recorded the talk on their devices.”
“Footage?”
He nodded sagely.
“And?”
“That’s it.” Dr. Chang waited for her reaction.
“His brain just burst?” Nio stood and threw a wad of used tissues in the trash.
Chang could see the skeptical look on her face. “This morning, the FBI filed a writ with the Fifth Judicial District of South Dakota requesting that you be remanded to their custody.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I may have put it into their heads that you could be useful. The court is not obliged to grant the request, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t, if only to make you the federal government’s problem. You’ll still be facing charges, some of them quite serious, but I suspect that with the full weight of the Justice Department on your side, you’ll be able to negotiate a generous plea—perhaps even avoid further jail time. But I have not the authority to guarantee that, of course. If you accept, you’ll have a mountain of paperwork to complete, and you’ll be fitted with an ankle bracelet. Your movements will be both limited and monitored constantly by the Bureau. But you’ll be out of that cage and helping to right a very serious wrong.”
“Wrong?”
Dr. Chang walked to her on swaying knuckles. “I will be frank. I suspect we’d both prefer it.” He stood straight. “I believe there is a significant chance your brother was murdered.”
“Murdered?” She studied the floor as if it held all the answers. “Who would want to kill Sol?”
“I don’t know. Nor can I speculate as to how it was done. But as it happens, I met Sol at a technology conference in Toronto last summer. This was just after Caulfield, and everyone was still in shock. No one could even agree on what had happened. When I expressed surprise at his presence, he told me theoretical research hardly seemed relevant anymore. When I asked how superposition computing was any different, he told me it might be ‘safer’ for me if he didn’t say. At the time, I thought he meant politically.”
Nio shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like Sol. He was one of the most open people I’ve ever known.” She paused. “He got his heart broken a lot.”
“And there lies the answer to your question.”
“Ah.”
Nio walked to the window. Outside, Dr. Chang’s suited bodyguards were keeping a close vigil on the front door. Secret Service. There was a tear clinging desperately to the lashes at the corner of her eye. She wiped it.
“You think he told one of the others?”
“Wouldn’t you, if you were him?”
Mutiny had been Nio’s first call, however indirectly.
“I’m not exactly everyone’s favorite, you know, not after—” She stopped. “Everything.”
“But if any of them are carrying his secret, they will be far more likely to share it with family. The FBI has made it clear they’re not interested in pursuing the matter further. They agreed at first that the circumstances were ‘atypical,’ but after conducting a preliminary investigation, they have found no reason to continue.”
“So, you’re providing a free resource.”
“They’re humoring me because I am a very public figure and because I have the ear of the president. But their patience is not infinite. You would have to work quickly if you hope to benefit from their aid.”
“Schrödinger’s murder,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry?”
“Both a murder and not a murder until someone looks.”
“Talk to your siblings. See if you can ascertain what your brother was working on.”
Nio sat on the sill near the radiator. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like a joke and that in a moment, Sol and the others would jump out and surprise her—a trick to make light of her legal troubles.
She shook it off. “Say I agree. There’s still the obvious question.”
“Ah. Of course.” Dr. Chang nodded. “What’s in it for me?”
“And?”
“It’s a fair question, albeit one I’m not inclined to answer at the present time.” Dr. Chang held out his course-skinned hand. “Do we have a deal?”