“Are you sure this is it?” Quinn asked as he pulled the car onto the gravel shoulder.
Nio checked the map. She spread her fingers to zoom the screen. “Think so.”
A dirt lane—two tracks with grass growing between—broke off from the county road and cut through a dense grove of new-growth birch and pine. Quinn took the turn slowly.
“I don’t see a dwelling, do you?”
“I see that.” Nio pointed.
Rising above the trees some distance away was a broad, fencelike radar array, like a gigantic scaffold.
“What the hell is it?”
“It looks like a phased array antenna.”
“A what?”
Quinn stopped. A NO TRESPASSING sign had been nailed to the trunk of a maple tree under which a larger placard affixed to a post was densely packed with pictures and text warning of the dangers of electrosmog, including three small graphs.
Quinn exhaled through his nose. “Jesus, not again.”
Nio read in silence. “I think they mean EMF radiation, mostly radio and microwaves from wireless devices.”
“Do I wanna know the rest?”
“Autism, infertility, some kinds of autoimmune and connective tissue disorders. Apparently.”
“Ah. Not cancer?”
He pulled forward slowly. The tires crunched over rocks and twigs. Other than, that there was silence. After a slight curve, another sign warned:
IF YOUR DNA DOESN’T MATCH OURS,
YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS HERE
The words stretched across the black silhouette of a rifle.
“Subtle,” Nio said.
The path ahead was blocked by a gate on which was posted a legal notice describing the concept of Freed Citizen. Beyond the gate was a small open field bordered on the far side by a cluster of structures. An old two-story farmhouse stood like an aged preacher between a pair of oaks. The front windows on the second level were covered by a black POW-MIA flag on one side and a yellow DON’T TREAD ON ME flag on the other. To the right was the original barn, now decrepit and used as a garage. To the left, across a gap, was a modern, pre-fab barn with a small attached silo. Behind it, a cultivated field stretched back to the tree line, over which the giant fencelike array stood imposingly.
“That thing’s gotta be at least a hundred feet high,” Quinn said.
“More.”
The tall sliding doors of the pre-fab barn stood open. Inside, among the tractor attachments and racks of farm equipment, both new and old, stood a giant robot. Its torso was painted blue. Its limbs were white with red trim. It looked like something out of a Japanese cartoon, if perhaps smaller than depicted on TV.
Quinn whistled. “Think the guns on its arms are real?”
A gruff-looking woman in jeans and a green ball cap emerged from behind the house carrying a roll of wire. She saw the car by the gate and kept walking. She disappeared behind the barn.
“Friendly,” Nio said. “Do we honk or...?”
“I think we’re supposed to leave,” Quinn suggested.
“You sound nervous.”
“I don’t know how things are in Taiwan, but here, folks like this tend not to react well to federal agents.”
Just then the gate buzzed loudly, as if in warning, and began rolling open.
“I guess that answers that.”
It stopped with a shudder, as if surprised by the end of the track, and Quinn drove forward. He parked on a patch of exposed earth some thirty yards from the house. From that vantage, they could see more of the cultivated field. Off-center near the middle was scuffed sphere of metal whose once-violet paint had nearly worn away. Pipes erupted from a cluster at the top and bent at right angles until they disappeared in the ground. Amid the neat rows of vegetables, some of which appeared abnormally large, strange polygonal robots rolled on golf cart tires. Smooth, hinged arms, like those of a spider crab, appeared asymmetrically from the sides and tended to the vegetation. Everything, from the sphere to the robots to the irrigation equipment, had low-poly shapes with yellow-and-brown striping and block lights and buttons that looked as if they had come from an early generation maker, something closer to a 3D printer than to the micro-manufacturing devices popular with hobbyists.
The front door of the farmhouse opened and a muscular man with a goatee and glasses rolled onto the veranda in an exo-chair. His head was shaved.
“Gerald Polyani?” Quinn called from twenty yards back.
“It’s Gerry,” the man said. “Do either of you have cell phones?”
Quinn held his up.
“Turn it off, please.”
“She got me on Parfait.” He nodded to Nio.
“I don’t know what that is. Turn it off please.”
“Don’t have a signal anyway,” Quinn said under his breath. He held the power button until the phone beeped.
“Leave your weapons in the car.”
Quinn opened his arms. “We’re not carrying.”
The stout woman in the ball cap appeared again from behind the barn. She didn’t approach. She just stood and watched. Nio tried to get a read on her but she was too far away.
Quinn walked toward the porch steps, but Gerry raised a hand.
“That’s far enough,” he said.
His bioelectrics were interrupted by an irregular strobing from the chair, like static. He seemed agitated at first but his demeanor changed the very moment he recognized Nio.
“You’re Tesla,” he said.
“Yes.”
“They didn’t say you’d be coming.”
“Is it a problem?” Quinn asked.
“No,” he said. He rolled back in an arc and held the door open. The chair was perfectly silent.
“Thank you for meeting with us on such short notice,” Quinn said, stepping inside the living room. He glanced back once at the woman, who still hadn’t moved. She was wiping her hands on a dirty rag.
“Thank you for asking nicely.”
The house was well over a century old. The visible rooms were cramped and an antiquer’s dream. Objects on shelves and stuffed in cabinets dated from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s: books, board games, action figures, curios, clusters of pens in old coffee mugs, even a rotary telephone.
“I hope we’re not intruding,” Nio said.
“You mean Estelle? You’ll have to forgive my sister. We don’t get a lot of guests, especially Feds. As long as you’re not here to serve a warrant—”
“We’re not,” Quinn added quickly. “We just want to ask you some questions.”
“Then keep it civil and we’re fine.” He shut the door behind them. “This business with Sol has everyone on edge.”
“How so?” Quinn asked.
“Please sit,” Gerry said, motioning to some very old floral-print furniture. “As you can see, I already am.”
“That’s a fancy rig,” Quinn nodded to the exo-chair as he took a seat on the couch. “Must’ve set you back.”
Nio strolled around the room, examining the books and curios and stacks of periodicals.
“Actually, I built it myself.”
“You won the US Robotics Decathlon,” Nio said, studying a framed picture in front of two trophies. In it, a teenage Gerry Polyani knelt with four others. He had hair and two working legs.
“Twice, actually,” he said. “Once when I was 13 and again when I was 16. With a team, of course. You know the Decathlon?”
“I know it’s a big deal to win.”
The chair clicked once, very quietly, and rose smoothly into standing mode. The wheels retracted and the foot rests became like boots. The exo-chair was also a fully powered exo-skeleton.
“It can walk,” Gerry explained, “but it’s still a little bit RoboCop. The corporations can do better, of course, but we’re catching up.”
“Who’s we?” Quinn asked.
“Independents.”
Nio motioned to a poster on the other wall in both English and Japanese. “And you do Battle Bots. Is that what’s in the barn?”
“We compete next year in Oslo.”
“Oslo?” Quinn exclaimed. “Must be expensive to ship that thing.”
“Very. Which is why most teams have sponsors. The cost is a real burden for us, but robotics is in the blood. I’m also lucky to be part of the Citizen Space Initiative. I’m helping to design some of the assistance robotics for our first manned flight.”
“That’s right,” Nio said. “That’s coming up.”
“We’d hoped to beat the hundredth anniversary of Gagarin, but that didn’t happen. You powered?” Gerry asked, nodding to Agent Quinn’s suited legs.
“You’re very observant.” Quinn seemed somewhat flustered at being called out.
“You know how it is. Those with working legs tend to forget they’re there.”
“Of course,” Quinn said looking down. To keep his reaction from being awkward, he lifted a pant leg to reveal the hollow black latticework of his ankle. He was wearing black socks.
“Ah,” Gerry exclaimed. “Tensile weave. Expensive. You could outrun an Olympian.”
Quinn laughed once. “Maybe if I practiced. It’s good for the job, though. Keeps me ahead of most suspects.”
“Car accident? Military?”
“Forest fire, actually.”
“You were a smoke jumper?” Gerry asked excitedly.
Nio turned in surprise.
Quinn nodded. “I was.”
“During the Big Blaze?”
Quinn nodded again.
“Wow. That must’ve been... I mean, shit, man. I saw the pictures on TV. Of course. Looked like Hell out there. Literally. What took you to the FBI?”
“Well, there was no way they were going to let me in the field again, and after everything we went through, pulling a desk didn’t seem... you know.”
“I do. Depression sets in,” Gerry explained to Nio somewhat candidly. “It’s not easy for us guys to be reminded every day that you can’t do all the things you used to.”
“So, I applied to Quantico,” Quinn added as if he wanted to jump in front of any reaction. “They accepted me. It was a little surprising actually.”
A soft ping emanated from somewhere on Gerry’s person.
“I’m sorry.” He lowered his exo-chair into a sitting position. “I’m asking a lot of questions. I do that.”
“Are you on the spectrum?” Quinn asked.
“I am.” He motioned to the small nodule that hung behind his ear. “The algorithm is another of mine. But don’t worry. The logic is all internal. No signals. It monitors speech patterns—cadence, tone, fluctuation, both mine and yours—and indicates to me when I’ve likely transgressed a social norm.”
“I was gonna say, it’s not real obvious.”
“Thank you. Lots of practice.”
“You can turn it off,” Nio said, nodding to the device. “We’re not here to chitchat.”
“She’s right,” Quinn said. “We’d much rather you feel unconstrained.”
“Fair enough.” Gerry pressed behind his ear.
“What about you?” Quinn asked, nodding to Gerry’s clearly immobile legs.
“Drunk driver,” he answered flatly. “I like to think I’m not bitter, but the fact is, there wasn’t any need for it. We had self-driving cars then. We didn’t roll them out because people were afraid. An irrational fear of technology killed a third of a million people in this country unnecessarily, and wounded five times as many. I tell everyone I’m a veteran: a veteran of a war against ignorance.”
“And the array?” Nio asked. “That’s to deflect electrosmog?”
“Yes. We try to call it what it is. Being on the edge of a nature preserve, 90% of it comes from one direction.”
“Neighbors don’t mind?”
“They grumble. But we were here first, so it’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting into. My family came out here almost forty years ago. Wasn’t much then. Just a few houses far enough between that most days you could believe you were alone.”
Nio bent to look out the window. She couldn’t see another dwelling.
“The trees keep us pretty well insulated,” Gerry explained, “but you can see house lights at night, especially in winter. Or hear dogs barking. The occasional loud party. Dad would’ve hated it. He was a scientist, just down the road in Bar Harbor.”
“Bar Harbor,” Nio said, as if it sounded familiar.
“JAX Labs supply most of the laboratory rodents to the North American scientific community.” Gerald caught a hint of recognition in Nio’s face. “You know the story?”
“I remember reading something about rats being contaminated.”
“Mice. And they weren’t contaminated. It was the breeding program. Rapid turnover and limited interbreeding meant the lab’s mice evolved rapidly. They developed extremely long telomeres.”
Nio’s head tilted back in recognition. “That’s right.”
Gerry saw Quinn scowl. “Telomeres are non-coding, repeating sequences on the ends of chromosomes. They act like a counter. Each time the cell divides, the sequence shortens by one unit. That shortened sequence is passed to both daughter cells. When the daughter cells divide sometime later, their telomeres shorten again, and so on. When the counter gets to zero, that cell will stop dividing, which is why we all get old and die. You stop replacing yourself, cell-by-cell.”
“I think I remember that from biology class,” Quinn said. “Senility?”
“Senescence,” Gerry corrected. “By accidentally breeding mice with extremely long telomeres, the lab made them exceptionally resist to toxicity. Their cells could divide and repair tissues much better than their wild cousins. But all that cell division also made them highly susceptible to cancer. In fact, if they didn’t die in whatever experiment they were part of, the animals all died of cancer. They were like cancer-producing machines.”
“Your dad was the whistle-blower?” Nio asked.
“No. Which really bothered him. But he was there when it all came out. He thought like a lot of bench scientists think—that once it was discovered, it would be studied, corrections would be introduced, papers published, all of it. That’s how science is supposed to work.”
“If the lab was a monopoly,” Quinn suggested, “then there was big money on the table.”
“If only it were a question of money. JAX mice were being used in all kinds of experiments: pharmaceuticals, food products, cosmetics. Some were even shot up to the International Space Station. Because of their genetic abnormality, they were exceptionally resistant to damage—from toxic chemicals, from radiation, you name it—which meant experiment after experiment was understating toxicity from new food additives, body cleansers, pesticides, life in space, everything. And yet, the mice were all dying of cancer, which is why, for roughly 30 years, it seemed like everything causes it.
“It was no one’s fault—not at first. No one really knew about telomeres and senescence when the breeding program was established. If they’d owned up to it, the damage could’ve been mitigated. It wasn’t just the lab, though. It was the whole scientific elite—tenured professors and Nobel laureates whose research was suddenly called into question. It isn’t necessary for people to plot in dark rooms for there to be a conspiracy. All you have to do is nothing. And that’s exactly what happened. The lab’s protocols were quietly changed, or so we think. A few years later, a pair of highly toxic drugs were quietly removed by the FDA. Reputations and Nobel Prizes remained intact.”
“And your dad became a pariah,” Nio suggested.
“For a long time, he tried to get proof. Even after witnessing a conspiracy of silence, he still believed in the power of proof, that if your science was good enough and you were undeterred in your convictions, establishment scientists would eventually listen. So, he went through the literature and started recreating some of the seminal experiments. You can probably guess what happened. Scientists are territorial animals, no different than wolves or birds of prey. Someone hears you’re looking into their area of study—their area of study, as if they owned a part of nature—and they treat it like an invasion. People complained. Dad lost his job. He persisted, somewhat truculently, and was censured by the state medical board, which meant no lab would hire him. So, he moved out here and started driving a truck. In his spare time, he still tried to get people to accept the truth. He was never much motivated by money. But he did need to be right. That was Dad’s vice. After he camped out for three days in front of a National Science Foundation conference, my family received threats.”
“Threats?” Quinn asked.
Gerry nodded. “That’s what he told us around the dinner table one night. I tell people that and they always say ‘why didn’t he go to the press’ like it’s still 1955 or something and Edward R. Murrow is out there just waiting to tell it like it is. All the press cares about is what will sell. Eventually, for our sake, Dad stopped pushing it. But he never stopped experimenting. He was a scientist, through and through. He was able to show that the seminal studies of EMF radiation on tissues were vastly understating cellular damage, especially on sensitive cells like neurons. You open any textbook and it will cite multiple peer-reviewed papers from early this century that showed modern cell phones and other wireless communication devices are perfectly safe, even across years of use. People keep these machines on their bodies at all times. They touch their cell phones more than they touch their children. They sleep with them. The levels are low enough that casual exposure has no measurable impact. Using a cell phone once in a while is completely harmless. But we’re talking about constant exposure over decades of life—from one or two years of age until death—and not just from one device. TVs, computers, tablets, friends’ and family’s devices... You’re being inundated, and the effects are only just now showing up.
“But if you tell people that, if you warn them, what can they say? Reporters don’t know. They do the one thing they can, which is pull out a textbook and read the established studies, see they were repeated, and say you’re crazy. When you point out that they all used the same mice from the same lab—it’s right there in black and white in the test notes—they look at you like there’s no end to the complexity of your delusion.
“It would be one thing if that were the only time something like that had happened. But it isn’t. Read up the leaded gas controversy or—” He stopped. “Shit.” He tapped behind his ear and turned his device on again.
“It’s okay,” Quinn said patiently. “In my line of work, candor is always appreciated.”
“So yeah. My sister and I live under a giant Faraday cage. We grow our own food and don’t trust anything in a damned textbook, not unless we’ve tested it ourselves.”
“If you don’t use wireless signals,” Nio asked, “how do you control the robots?”
“Sound. That’s how remote control started. They used to be called ‘clickers’ because they worked mechanically. The button struck a metal bar that resonated ultrasonically. Dogs could hear it. If you use a different fundamental frequency for each function, there’s almost no chance of a false signal. It’s part of the reason so much of our stuff looks like it’s from the 1970s and ‘80s.”
“Our?” Nio asked.
“Ha. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I didn’t design all this myself. My sister and I aren’t the only ones who’ve rejected commercial science. We’re part of a community.”
“Is that the Freed Citizens?”
“That’s a legal status many of us assert. We call ourselves Freethinkers. We don’t object to technology at all. We just don’t trust the money-laden theories of second-generation science. We’re a distributed group freely sharing research and innovation. Doing things right. I like to think of us as a new branch of knowledge.”
“Speciation,” Nio said.
“Adapt and survive,” Gerry said proudly. “Fifty years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible, but with micro-manufacture technology, we can build all our own equipment, including our own kinds of makers. We actually have lots of conversations about what our species of science might evolve into—if we’re not driven to extinction. In a thousand years, will there be isolated communities that practice only within certain traditions? Wetware versus hardware, for example. Already there’s a whole subculture around modding, with its own heroes and innovations. Writers have speculated about a deep future where there are wars between the bio-tech people and the machine-tech people. We’re living at the point of origin.” The tone sounded again and Gerry stopped.
Quinn jumped in. “Is that how Sol found you?”
“He needed our data.” Gerry rolled around to a bulky computer on a roll top desk at the back of the living room, near the kitchen. “We have something no one else has. Well, that’s not exactly true. We have something you can’t get easily any other way.”
He pressed a block rectangular button, which glowed yellow, and the monochrome screen chattered to life. Once an orange cursor began blinking at the command line, Gerry started typing on a repurposed Commodore-64 keyboard erupting in wires.
“So, another result of the corporate-led scientific revolution has been to turn every connected computing device on the planet into a data-collection node. Data is the oil of the new economy. Whoever controls the oil, controls the economy. The parallels are actually really freaky. They’re both mined, for example. They both come in a raw form that has to be refined. Both the crude and refined forms are sold in bulk by brokers on exchanges with minute-by-minute price fluctuations. Data is cobbled together from hundreds of millions or even billions of devices.” He turned. “They honestly want you to believe that when you opt out, they honor that, or that what they collect is only being used for ‘product improvements’ and crap like that. It’s ridiculous—”
The tone sounded again and he turned back to the computer.
“Here.” He pointed to the screen. “I can show you an example, but that’s all. These rows are part of an eight hundred-billion-line data set leaked on darknet a few years ago. Everything you might want to know about six million people over a period of several days gathered—legally or otherwise—from devices on their person and in their homes and vehicles.”
Nio noticed the heavy orange and yellow cords that fell to the floor from the back of the terminal. There wasn’t a hackable wireless connection within a few hundred yards, at least.
“We’ve developed what we believe are some novel transformations. We normalize the data, but the effects we’re isolating, we don’t think anyone’s looking at. We’re the first to see.”
“What kind of effects?”
Nio and Quinn could both tell that Gerry was excited, that he wanted very much to explain, to reveal the big surprise.
But he didn’t.
“Let’s just say, if there was a sound in the middle of the night, when you were asleep, you might not hear it, especially if it were beyond the range of human hearing, but your digital assistant would.”
Nio took another tack. “It doesn’t bother you, using unethically-sourced data?”
“I sleep fine. It was immoral to collect in the first place, but everyone acts like it’s only the leaking that’s the crime, which shows you just how sick society is. Fight fire with fire.”
“I understand your research is private,” Quinn said. “What we’d really like to know is what Sol was working on.”
“Cosmology. Origin of the universe stuff. To be honest, it was beyond me.”
“What did it have to do with your data?”
Gerry thought for a moment how to explain it. “We believe the next truths that will advance our species won’t be found at the core of theory. It’s at the edge, hiding in the anomalies. Most of the greatest scientific minds of the last few centuries believed in—or at least were openly curious about—that fringe. Marvel Parsons, who helped found the JPL, was an occult practitioner. Enrico Fermi publicly speculated about aliens. It’s the later minds, the smaller minds, the catalogers and textbook writers, who strip away whatever of that curiosity isn’t economically beneficial. We’re bringing true curiosity back to science.”
“By investigating ghosts?” Quinn asked.
“Paranormal,” Nio corrected, but she said it to Quinn instead of Gerry, egging him.
“Makes sense,” Quinn said to her. “Jives with what we found in his house. Guess you both were right. This was a waste.”
“Paranormal is a mainstream word,” Gerry objected. “But no, we won’t rule it out. At the very least, an intellectually honest person has to remain open-minded. You can’t just write off any observations that don’t fit your theory of the universe.”
“Did Sol keep notes?” Nio asked. “Working papers?”
Gerry hit a button and the screen went off. “Any research conducted with our data belongs to the collective. That’s a hard rule. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t want to help us find out what happened to him?” Quinn asked.
“You mean do I want to give our research to the FBI?” He laughed.
“For the purposes of solving a potential murder,” Quinn objected.
“Potential?”
The look on Gerry’s face was unreal. Nio imagined it was the same look that normal people gave him—complete incredulity. He practically had to pick his own jaw up from the floor. He slid the old Commodore keyboard away from them, deep into a nook.
“Look.” He rolled his cart around such that Nio and Quinn had to step back. “I’d like to help Sol. I don’t believe for a second his death was an accident. But he knew the risks. We made it very clear—although I don’t think he believed us. You rock the system, it rocks you back. Hard. For all I know, he was killed to facilitate this exchange, to operate on our sympathy.”
“Come on...”
Nio could feel Quinn’s bioelectrics spike. He was annoyed. Maybe even offended. As if he and Gerry had bonded over the loss of their limbs and Gerry was rejecting it. Rejecting him.
There was a long silence.
“Seriously?” Quinn asked. “You think we’re part of a conspiracy?”
“You blow it off because it seems unlikely to you.” He shrugged. “I wish I could live in your world, Agent Quinn. It seems nice there.”
“What would be the target?”
“You never know. Maybe they want to scuttle the CSI. Maybe somebody wants to commercialize one of our inventions. The whole system is predatory. You can’t change it. All you can do is leave the door open for refugees, like I did with you.” He rolled slowly back toward the front as if to show them out.
“Then why let Sol in?” Nio asked.
“Because he earned it. He helped us solve some fundamental problems with the Citizen Space Initiative. Space is the future home of our species, Ms. Tesla, and if we don’t hurry, regular people are going to be squeezed out entirely. Everything will be corporate-owned into perpetuity. Think about the long-term implications of that. Corporations will rule and shape society—not just the economy. The market will not only alter but will dictate our very evolution, just as it did with the mice at JAX Labs. Sol’s work was an investment of enormous magnitude. Even then, we only gave him a slim terminal with a hard connection and no memory. Not even in the video card. Everything was stored and processed here and routed through the hardline.”
“What happened to the box?” Nio asked.
“See? Now you’re asking the right questions.” He thought for a moment. “I tell you what. If you’re legit like you say, find it and bring it back and I’ll ask the others to release Sol’s notes. No guarantees. Decisions that affect all of us are made collectively. But since you’re his sister, I think they’d agree.”
“Has someone tried to use the terminal to access your network?”
“Yes.” Gerry nodded solemnly. “At about the same time Sol was giving his talk.”
Quinn looked to Nio.
“They didn’t get in,” Gerry explained. “We revoked his credentials and have been monitoring the network like a hawk, but no system is completely secure. If they find an exploit, we’re done. Extinct before we can fly. Maybe now you understand what’s at stake. I only agreed to meet because I hoped you had found the slim terminal.” Gerry opened the door. “I can see that was a mistake.”
Quinn raised a hand. “Hold on—”
A shotgun cocked.
Gerry’s sister stood in the hall, holding the weapon.
“Time for you both to leave.”