Nanowhere | Page 4

NANOWHERE

#

1
Joe and Al

DR. ERNEST STRAFF wasn't surprised when the jumptroopers
tackled him in his dining room, stuffed his head in a bag, zip-tied his
wrists and ankles, dragged him into a clearing in the forest next to his
house, and cabled him up into a hovering gunship. He just thought or
hoped or wished he had had more time.

In seven hundred and sixteen seconds (Straff was counting) his captors
had him over the New Hampshire line, crossing western Mass at a
shallow angle that would take him into upstate New York. He knew
their direction because he heard a voice through the backroar of the
engines, deep with round tones and a slight Minnesota lilt, curiously
pointing out the Mass Pike to one of his squadmates. I-90 ran east-west
across Massachusetts, dipped south a bit in the middle before it headed
into Boston. The ex-Minnesotan was on Straff's left, so they must be
just north of the Pike, heading west. Nothing but cold Atlantic east. If
the pilot kept a fairly straight heading they'd cross into New York south
of the capital toward the Catskill's.
Straff caught all of this in the space of a few seconds. As soon as the
trooper started speaking, he stopped, having seen another of his team
give him a finger drawn across the throat.
This left another few hundred seconds for Dr. Straff to blindly think
over his fate. The black fabric bag rubbed his nose and ears. The
gunship's engines threw off a steady high-throttled chainsaw whine
with an accompanying fuselage-vibrating rumble, and his ears hurt
trying to listen for distinguishable sounds out of the dense storm of
noise.

#

The noetic surgeon stepped back from his scope, rubbing the arched
pink grooves in the skin around his eyes. "Nicely healed, sir. She's
ready to go."
Dr. Greenleigh looked up from the whitepaper his tech staff had
worked up for the procedure. He pocketed his reading glasses. "Enough
in place to get into her memory flow?"
"Yes, sir."

The mechs embedded in June Trimony's brain were next-gen neural
retiforms, far more intrusive and real-driving than gCognitivs,
SoulYoke stabs or the deeper versions of these developed in the
military's labs.
"How long before her body rejects them?"
The surgeon's lips curled in to hide his mouth behind a stiff doughy line.
His lips popped out after a pause. "I'd guess a month."
The Chairman of the Rost Institute tilted his head a little, not quite
smiling, not much of a guesser. "That long?"
"Guessing, but keeping it cautious, sir. There are physiologicals to
consider, but I'll stand by a month," he said, nodding.
"And after rejection?"
"They won't come out easy. Probably kill her."
Greenleigh straightened, pausing half a second over the question of
how much sympathy he needed to show, and nodded at his surgeon
without showing anything that looked sympathetic. "Very well. Keep
her on nutrition. I need her healthy."
"Yes, Dr. Greenleigh."
The chairman studied the surgeon a moment, and then showed all of his
teeth in a broad grin. "Well done, Mitch. I'm off to pick up an old
friend at the landing. Let me know when Miss Trimony wakes."

#

Kaffia Lang jumped the curb at 30 k's, ground the handrail against the
earth's gravity in a sideways scoot, and dropped three feet into a
concrete plain at the edge of the North Hampton skate park.

She swung her backpack around, charcoal black against smooth brown
skin and a flare of tight neon green clothing. She lowered it to the
ground as she rolled up to another skater, Alexander Shoaler, a tall red
head her own age, fifteen.
Plywood ramps and half pipes ringed the central concrete basin like
bygone-era shipyard scraps. The park was clean, walled with sixty-foot
pines, and set back twenty meters off Atlantic Avenue, prime real estate
that the owner had been obliged to give up in some cloudy property tax
exchange deal with the New Hampshire town.
A single lane dirt track ran alongside the laser-leveled concrete pad,
weed-choked and pot-holed. It headed into the forest, lost in
overgrowth thirty meters beyond the padlocked gate.
The forest was haunted. Everyone knew that, but the tax deal
apparently included a do-not-bother-the-skaters clause, and so as long
as you stayed this side of the gate you weren't likely to run into any of
the rumored specters, alleged oversized arachnids, poisonous fog or any
of the other blood-drinking, mind-emptying, acidic-saliva-spitting
denizens of the wood.
Kaffia didn't notice the haunted forest. She smiled at Alex because she
felt their world blaze into existence and expand around them, widening
to encompass the real world, but with special properties like the ability
to tune out the real world while they were