Nanowhere | Page 9

been purged from the
culture by Ernest Straff. He had killed the medical profession. If not
directly, it had all been done in his name.
Straff was the reason people hated hospitals. It was his fault that at the
sight of any doctor, people ran for their lives, or shrank in fear with
murmurs of, "Don't make eye contact."

When manufactured viruses swept through cities, and riots broke out,
Straff's advanced medical agency stepped aside and let it happen. When
Americans thought of Dr. Ernest Straff, they thought of bodies stacked
next to dumpsters in alleyways, EKG alarms blaring from crowded
hospital rooms, technicians draining corpses into blood-type bags and
selling them off to high-bidders. They couldn't shut their eyes against
the palsied hands of an intoxicated surgeon demanding clamps, rails
and the bone saw, they couldn't turn away from floodlit operating
rooms that smelled like sewers, damp with death.
Ernest Straff didn't bother looking around at the cluster of buildings
that made up the Rost Institute. He knew where he was. Why the hood
then? Why the silence? He glowered at the nearest jumptrooper.
"You think I'd misplace upstate New York?"
The trooper ignored him, although the man was so geared up it was
difficult to tell.
Two thousand four hundred and seventeen seconds since two hundred
pounds of trooper landed on him, grinding his face into the dining room
rug and shattering his favorite coffee mug.
Straff stopped when he recognized the man coming at him, but the
trooper behind him shoved him a few steps further.
Dr. Richard Greenleigh met him outside Building Blue, a twelve-story
block of pitted concrete with rows of identical window slits and blue
front doors. There was an eight-meter deep crater where Building
Orange once stood. That was Straff's doing as well.
Straff met Greenleigh's dark deep-set eyes and stayed there, glaring for
a few seconds, until Greenleigh opened his mouth into a wide smile of
perfect white teeth and aimed them at him like a weapons array.
Greenleigh was a pale rickety man in a faithful black suit, meticulously
unwrinkled and clean, perfectly barbered and manicured. Like a leaky
septic tank beneath soft green meadow folds, an unhealthy cleanliness

seeped from his pores and gave off a weird sweet smell, a corrupt
bundling of a pharmaceutical researcher and an undertaker.
"Caught up with you at last, Dr. Straff," said Greenleigh, pleasant,
dignified and slow, a tone that made it clear that there was no reason to
be angry. He waved off the jumptroopers.
"How?" Straff's voice was raspy and defensive.
"Fairly easily, I'm afraid. Some sort of watchdog process monitors sat
image data for manipulation," said Greenleigh in an
I-expected-a-little-bit-more-from-you tone. "It happens. High level
covering up, that sort of thing. When the process flagged a half
kilometer sized patch of forest in coastal New Hampshire, no one
thought much of it. When it flagged it after a second pass, with the
same manip signature, that's when they got excited. When this piece of
forest identically matched a like sized piece 1.2 klicks away, it aroused
my attention. The idiots in data security have spent the last seventy-two
hours trying to figure out how someone manip'd the same data twice,
right under their noses. While I understood the anomaly at once. The
data hadn't changed. The forest had. And there's only one man on earth
with the power to control nature on this scale and to that level of detail.
I knew I had you."
Straff dropped his eyes to the sidewalk, his breathing quickening.
"Come on, Ernest. It'll be like old times. I have one of your old
acquaintances over in Red. Time for a reunion, I think. I let her out of
her cage, and had her fixed up for you."
Straff's head snapped up. "Who?"
"The moment I knew my team had you, I sent for June Trimony."
"Trimony?" Straff whispered, a little confused. He had to remind
himself that he was no longer on Greenleigh's side. Trimony had
always been an enemy, hacking into Rost systems, the leader of her
own intel-gathering org, with her own agents in the field feeding her

data. "I thought she died in the overthrow."
"You're not the only one with secrets, Ernest." Greenleigh smiled.
"Let's go inside and talk." The chairman of Rost Institute indicated the
building behind him with a precise sweep of his hand. "I used to call
you Ernest. Do you mind?" He paused for an answer, and then
shrugged. "Or would you prefer one of the names the public has pinned
to you?"
Ernest Straff forgot to count. His lungs betrayed him. He coughed and
tried to catch his breath, stuttering numbers in the thousands. Dr.
Greenleigh's thin, gentle laugh hit him and followed him to his knees.