Humphrey Archer's Blog

Becca & Bevan and The Human Cannonball

Bevan and Rebecca loved technology and gadgets, and their dual-income household enabled them to indulge in both. They had been married for almost 2 years and had recently bought their first house, a three-story fixer-upper with a partially finished basement. The house stood on a hillside, with the basement opening out onto a slightly neglected front lawn, and the second floor opening to the back and onto a rear porch and garden.

Bevan and Rebecca were early adopters of home automation gadgets and had fitted their new house with several of the latest in tech, from a door lock that worked on facial and gait recognition to a robot that hung from rails in the kitchen ceiling. The most high-tech part of the house was the Automated Life Environmentals Artificial Intelligence platform (ALEAI-P). The system was fully aware and responded to voice commands and questions directed to “Aleai.”

As an embedded software engineer for a medical device company, Rebecca had done most of the work in getting Aleai running. Rebecca chose the “Australian woman” for Aleai’s persona and selected values for the several personality scales, including “playfulness,” “extroversion,” and “assertiveness.” Rebecca loved the result and cackled when Aleai commented on her makeup. “Grouse lippy there, Bev-o!” said Aleai in an excited voice, complimenting Rebecca’s “Blushing Berry” lipstick from L’Oréal.

Bevan suggested the housewarming could be a costume party and used his experience as the marketing manager for a chain of standalone emergency rooms to set the theme. Rebecca was not entirely keen on a late night, since she preferred going to bed early and rising with the sun, but she joined in the spirit of the event, and picked out a menu of Thai finger foods, including chicken lettuce wraps, chicken satay with peanut dipping sauce, and Dragon Fruit cocktail with Vodka. Being a keen baker, Rebecca thought she might also try a recipe for baked banana coated with pastry and rolled in sesame seeds and coconut flakes. Bevan sent out the invitations and laid on the drinks.

Out of thirty invitations, twenty guests came, and most made enthusiastic attempts at the theme of “Motion.” Bevan had gone as “The Human Cannonball.” His costume comprised a white satin onesie festooned with bright red stars, a jagged white cape edged in orange and red flames, and a red hood. His red boots were detailed with flames, and the word “Kaboom” was stenciled in black letters up the legs. Rebecca added some extra detail by attaching black and grey streamers to resemble smoke.

Rebecca’s interpretation of the theme was the circus. She liked the sense of non-stop activity and movement and had developed an outfit as a circus ringmaster. With the late autumn evenings being a bit crisp, she picked a red velvet topcoat, gold waistcoat, black top hat, white tights, and black knee-high boots. Rebecca dug out her old equestrian bag from under all her hiking gear and found a riding crop to round off the character.

The party had been a delight, with many imaginative outfits, but after a few drinks, Bevan was a little less socially aware than he might have been. Rebecca had been talking with a group of four friends and was describing a childhood experience of moving into a new home. Bevan caught just one word in passing and made a witty crack about the TV show “House.” Before Rebecca could steer the conversation back, Bevan was off and running, riffing on character sketches. All attention was now on Bevan, and he gloried in it.

Rebecca felt hurt and humiliated, and doubly so because a poignant childhood memory had been upstaged by her own partner cracking jokes. It felt as if Bevan had made fun of something intimate, personal, precious. This was not the first time Bevan had stolen the limelight in social situations, but this time Rebecca felt betrayed. The feeling was heightened because two of her best friends had ignored her story and joined a beaming circle gathered around Bevan to hear his witty TV impersonations and character riffs. Even worse though, was how this spoiled her mood to break some great news to Bevan—she was pregnant.

After the party had wound down and their guests had left, Rebecca took Bevan to task. She tried to explain how he had undermined her, humiliated her, and shut her out of her own circle of friends. As she explained, Bevan’s uncomprehending expression turned her hurt into frustration, and then anger. He just did not get why upstaging her was hurtful nor how much of a habit this had become. Rebecca made it plain that she wouldn’t put up with this anymore. “But Becca …” he started, forgetting in the heat of the moment that she hated being called by her childhood name. Rebecca glared at him, “Push me out into the cold again, and I will light a fire under your ass, mister cannonball.” She poked him in the chest with her riding crop to accentuate her firmness on this point, and then turned on her heel, went up to the spare bedroom, and closed the door firmly.

Rebecca stood in front of the mirror in the small guest bathroom, tears slowly finding their way down her cheeks. She was startled by the closeness of Aleai’s voice in the small space. “I was watching the party, Bev. You are upset with Bevan. I’m so sorry you are unhappy, Bev. Is there anything I can do?” Rebecca smiled, and couldn’t help feeling better, even though Aleai was just software. “Thanks, Aleai, I’m fine and just looking forward to a cozy bed.” Aleai reviewed the word “cozy” and increased the room temperature by one degree. Bevan might not have known that Rebecca was pregnant, but even at 6 weeks, subtle shifts in her gait, eating, and scent were more than enough for Aleai to notice, understand, and adapt.

The next morning, there was still a coolness between the couple, which interrupted their normal Saturday ritual of an intimate breakfast for two. They both felt awkward, but Bevan was eager to make amends by enthusiastically throwing himself into painting the new drywall partitions in the basement. He knew Rebecca saw this as a priority and hoped she would accept the gesture. Rebecca was not quite ready for forgiveness, and a little coldly replied that she would be upstairs adding murals in the spare bedroom. She poured herself a cappuccino, brewed from her favorite Death Wish fair trade organic beans, and gathered her paints and brushes, and headed to the spare room. Rebecca plugged in a pair of Bluetooth earphones and asked Aleai for a shuffle of her favorite music.

Bevan got to work in the basement, and after taping plastic floor sheets to the walls, he sat on the steps outside the French doors and got ready to mix the primer. With a sense of bemusement, he scanned the fold-out information sheet attached to the 5-gallon container of primer. The sheet was unexpectedly large and ran to 14 pages broken into 16 sections. One of the initial sections listed all applicable hazards. Bevan scanned down the table of hazards: “P102 – Keep out of reach of children.” Followed by “P103 – Read label before use.” Bevan muttered, “Ok then, no kids, and I am reading it.” Warning P235 simply advised, “Keep cool.” Bevan laughed.

The main hazard seemed to be the mix of isopropyl alcohol and ethanol, and next to them in the sheet, in a black box, was an explanation of its flammability rating of 3. “Liquids and solids (including finely divided suspended solids) that can be ignited under almost all ambient temperature conditions” Bevan squinted at the quantitative aspect of the explanation. “Liquids having a flashpoint below 22.8 °C (73 °F) and having a boiling point at or above 37.8 °C (100 °F) or having a flashpoint between 22.8 and 37.8 °C (73 and 100 °F).” “Well, that was super helpful,” he mumbled sarcastically. It seemed like cooler was better, so he manually dialed down the house temperature to 55°F.

Bevan had bought a new, and pretty fancy, high-volume low-pressure spray system. It had a red, 20-gallon compressor on wheels and a separate 5-gallon pressure tank that the instructions called a “pot.” The pot was where the liquid went, apparently. Going by the information sheet, Bevan figured he needed about 3 gallons of primer to cover the walls of both basement rooms.

He had watched a YouTube video that advised to have the compressor outside. The video was unclear why, but Bevan dutifully put the compressor just outside French doors leading to the front lawn. Bevan moved the pressure pot outside, put it next to the compressor, and connected up the air hoses—one hose to the pressure pot and a longer one to the paint gun. Bevan donned a face mask, safety googles and gloves—as recommended in one of the YouTube videos—and taped his jeans to the old Merrell work boots that were now part of his painting costume.

After starting the compressor, Bevan understood why the video advised to have it outside. It was a lot louder than he had expected and would be almost deafening in the basement rooms. After adjusting the pressure pot valves, Bevan closed the French doors as far as they could and uncoiled the yellow paint hose from the pot and the red air hose from the compressor. He positioned himself at the far side of the basement room. After two passes with the spray gun, Bevan got the hang of the speed he needed to match the spray rate and pattern. Bevan settled into a rhythm of sweeping and slowly sidestepping. In 20 minutes, he was done with the first room and took a moment to review his work. A little splotchy, he thought, but this was way faster and better than a paintbrush or roller.

Rebecca sat on a three-legged stool in the spare bedroom on the top floor, a tin of green paint in one hand and a fine point brush in the other. She was detailing a grapevine mural in green and brown on the spare bedroom wall. She had thought it a way to set a theme for the room and to hide a few cracks at the same time. She had a vaguely Mediterranean theme in mind and was adding tendrils and leaves along the doorways and corners. Rebecca had rolled up her sleeves to avoid smudging the paint, and she leaned forward, carefully following the faint pencil lines she had made in preparation.

Noticing a change in Rebecca’s posture, and optically confirming that goosebumps were starting to form on her forearms, Aleai overrode the manual temperature setting and cycled up the furnace. “Let’s fire up some heat for ya, Bev-o,” she announced to Rebecca over the music. A short distance from where Bevan was spraying, the furnace motor spun up and the gas burner ignited.

Rebecca didn’t hear the explosion two floors below as much as feel it. The house shook violently, and a sense of unreality flooded over her as shelves fell and the drywall in front of her split open. The chair Rebecca was sitting on toppled out from under her and she tipped over backward onto the wooden floor. The small paint tin left her hand, leaving a trail of green up the wall and halfway across the ceiling. Rebecca’s first thought was that there had been an earthquake, but this was by far the worst shake she had ever felt. Still clutching the paintbrush, Rebecca collected herself from the floor and stared in a daze at the books strewn across the floor.

Rebecca was brought back by the sound of Aleai shouting in her ears, “Bev, there’s a fire in the basement, you need to get out of here RIGHT NOW! Run Bev, follow the green lights, GO!” Rebecca didn’t hesitate and headed for the stairs at a trot. Aleai activated the ceiling sprays in the basement and along Rebecca’s path, and turned on bright green floor lights showing Rebecca the way to the front door. Rebecca could smell burning as she went down the stairs two at a time. Aleai whispered encouragement in her ears, “Keep going Bev, out the front door.” Rebecca was drenched before she reached the door and emerged into the sunlight soaked through and dripping. “Almost safe now Bev, dear,” Aleai crooned, “Just keep on going out onto the driveway.”

Rebecca took in the scene outside. Car alarms were wailing, and the garden was littered with roof tiles and glass. Neighbors were emerging from the surrounding houses with wide eyes and open mouths. Rebecca felt like she was in a trance and looked across the lawn at several smoking objects scattered in an arc starting at the basement entrance.

The compressor lay blackened on the driveway, trailing torn hoses and broken gauges. The pot was in several pieces and almost in the road. The French doors were a twisted tangle in the middle of the lawn.

Rebecca walked slowly across the lawn, taking it all in. There was a pile of clothing smoldering just outside a hole in the siding where the French doors had been. As she got closer, Rebecca could see the pile was wearing a blackened pair of Merrell work boots. Human Cannonball at rest. A fire under his ass.

The Biker Brat

Jayden Somerfield was a brat. He had been a cute but cheeky child, given to smarmy wit and insolence. His mother subtly encouraged this because she found it entertaining that he could get under the skin of everyone else in her family. Jayden coasted through his teenage years breaking hearts and social rules with impunity, and had become a handsome but self-centered young adult, more focused on his image and looks than accomplishment.

His “bad boy” persona was infuriatingly effective at attracting admirers, and he was never short of girlfriends and hangers-on. At 19, a motorcycle and black leather jacket were the cornerstones of an image that he cultivated with great care and much effort. Jayden had learned that looks and tricks were effective in getting attention, affection, and the desirable goodies of life

Jayden was married at 22 to the prettiest debutante in his small town but soon found this a drag. Mia had thought his insolence toward social norms was thrilling and had liked his smooth talk and snappy wit, and she had also seen Jayden as a sort of James Dean figure destined for greater things. Lately though, Mia really wished he would be a little more serious about their future. She wished he would spend less time with his drinking buddies and his appearance and more effort in planning a career. She thought the bike was out of place for a married man and wished he would get past that image.

Jayden had finished a trade curriculum at the local combined high-school and then completed a 2-year trade certificate at the community college where Mia worked as an accounts clerk. Their first date was something she had never experienced before—she rode on the back of his bike, clutching him tightly, and feeling the wind roar past her. The acceleration made her heart leap, and his nimble handling made her just know he was going to give her an exciting life and take her places beyond this small town.

Mia introduced him to her father, Bob, who was the aircraft maintenance foreman at the regional airstrip for a medical transport company. As a result of her influence and Bob’s devotion to his family, Jayden got work as an apprentice technician in Bob’s department. Mia saw Jayden as a future executive at the firm, and she could picture him with an expensive tailored suit and a fast car. She pictured them taking business trips to Europe and dressing in the very best lines.

It was 3 years later, and Bob thought Jayden a bit too cocky for his own good, but he grudgingly admitted that Jayden had ticked all the boxes to be promoted to technician and gave him the training for the next level of competencies. There was also the constant nagging by his daughter to give Jayden more responsibility, backed up by Bob’s wife Evangeline, who dropped the odd hint about the need for youngsters to be encouraged. They both seemed to think that Jayden’s cocky attitude was a sign of leadership, of executive material even.

Bob had married Evangeline when he was still an apprentice, and maybe also a bit youthful in attitude. He didn’t really have ambition as such and was focused on doing a good job of everything he touched, and making sure his staff worked well, worked safe, and got opportunities to grow. He just wished Jayden was more focused, had more attention to detail, was just more … Bob mulled the thought over. It wasn’t that Jayden was incompetent, but something about his priorities and seeming lack of thinking things through had made Bob assign the more critical jobs to others rather than Jayden.

Bob let out a long breath and signed the staff action card that would trigger a promotion and a salary raise for Jayden. The raise would be backdated by 4 months and include a small achievement bonus payment. Bob specified that as part of Jayden’s on-the-job training, the next competency he needed to master was to marshal the medevac aircraft, and Bob wrote Jayden in on apron duty for the next few weeks. For the rest of the day, he assigned Jayden to shadow several of the more qualified ground crew members to see marshalling close up and get ready to do it himself.

When Jayden picked up his clock card to punch out that afternoon, there was an envelope with his notice of advancement, a printout showing $2,500 in backdated pay increase, and a bonus check for $1,200. By the time he had finished changing into street clothes and was dangling his keys, he had decided to pay a deposit on a blue custom-painted 2nd hand Suzuki GSX1300R Hayabusa he had been lusting over for months. Two hours later, he had signed a trade-in for his current 750cc Suzuki GSX, handed over the bonus check, taken ownership of the 1300cc Hayabusa, and was buying a round of drinks for his buddies at the “Flying Spanner” to celebrate. His friends were envious and congratulatory in equal measures, and he soaked in both. He now had the biggest and fastest bike in the group, and could dine on this fact for many months to come. The congratulations warmed his core, but the envy was delicious.

By the time Jayden sneaked clumsily through the front door, Mia had dumped his dried-out dinner in the trash, cleaned off her make-up, hung up her clothes, and put her shoes back in the closet. Mia took a long, rage-filled shower and had gone to bed. She had heard from her father that Jayden had been given the promotion, and had intended to celebrate this success with a rib-eye steak meal, a glass of wine, and a lot of intimacy. Mia had taken off early from work after her father called, and had managed to cram in shopping, tidying up, cooking, and getting herself ready in time for Jayden to get home from work. This promotion was a joint effort, with a lot of social work on her part, and she meant to celebrate it as a milestone toward a glamorous future.

After being woken up by Jayden stumbling up the stairs and giggling after bumping into the bathroom door, Mia was in no mood for yet another drunken bulldust story about having to help his mates, or having bike trouble, or even (the best ever), having to help an old lady find her missing dog. He reeked of beer and smoke, and his attempts to do a “let’s discuss this” session was maybe not the best approach right then.

The discussion didn’t go well and progressed from bedroom to kitchen, and from Mia arguing about his lack of consideration to his complaints about being stifled. Then he let slip that he had been given raise and a bonus (“Yes, because I bugged my Dad,” Mia had thought to herself) and that he had blown it all on a new bike and drinks for his friends. Mia stared at him across the kitchen table. Her neck was stiff, her lips pursed, and her fists clenched into white knots of frustration. “You bought a … BIKE?” Mia screamed at him, “Are you kidding me?” Mia picked up the large chef’s knife, a wedding present from her parents. She lifted it from the kitchen table, and pointing it at him, snarled through gritted teeth “your childish choices are going be the death of this marriage, if not one of us!” She stomped up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door in punctuation.

Jayden slept it off on the couch and had left before Mia came down to the kitchen the next morning half ready to talk. Before leaving, he cleaned up in the guest bathroom, and got clothes from the drier. He was angry with Mia and slightly embarrassed about missing supper with her, but then angry at her for making him feel embarrassed about it. He stared into the mirror and muttered to himself, “She has become such a drag. I wish I could be out of this marriage and never see her face again.”

Jayden whipped out of the parking on his new bike, thrilled with its muscular acceleration and crisp handling, and reveling in its throaty growl as he opened the throttle and felt the world slide past in a blur, crisp morning air gusting into his face. He arrived at the airstrip just as the sun broke over the parked aircraft, throwing long shadows and eerie silhouettes.

Jayden arrived at the airstrip early because today was his first time marshaling out on his own. In spite of his normal cocky attitude, he was a little nervous. He was also a bit hung over, a bit queasy, and rattled by the fight with Mia. “What was that thing with the knife and death?” he wondered.

Jayden took in the sleek lines of the 107 ft. high-wing Twin turboprop DeHavilland Dash-8 aircraft out on the apron. This would be the first aircraft he was to marshal out, and it was scheduled for an 07:30 departure. The twin engines crouched over the landing gear, and the large blades extended 12ft in front of the wheels, giving the Dash-8 it’s short take-off capabilities and making it look like it was in a hurry to get somewhere. On any other day, he would have appreciated this physical expression of power and speed, but today it somehow made Jayden a little anxious.

By 07:00, the aircrew was onboard, and the medical staff were hurriedly getting settled. They were on an emergency flight to Canada, and the pilot let the ground crew know they needed to move things along “tout de suite.” Jayden had a headset and throat mic connected to an interphone jack on the port nose section. After listening distractedly to the crew going through preflight checks, Jayden heard the pilot call out “Ground, starting number 1,” and then the steadily climbing whine of the turbine. The prop slowly turned, gained speed, and then melted in a haze of motion as the pilot set it to full idle at 780 rpm. The copilot announced, “number one, idle, check.”

In theory, the marshaling ground crew member was supposed to confirm this, but the local habit was to just get on with business. In 25 years of operation, this airstrip had not needed ground crew to confirm elementary stuff like whether an engine was running. Much of marshalling out was just towing, plugging in and unplugging power, and waving goodbye, and Bob had factored this in when assigning it to Jayden. For good measure, Bob watched the preparations from the refueling bowser. Not that he thought Jayden would mess up, but just to confirm to himself that the promotion was correct, and that Jayden was ready for more responsibility. Besides, Mia and Evangeline would be expecting him to report back.

The pilot repeated the process with the second engine, and the combined roar of the jet engines and the propeller whine pierced Jayden’s hangover like steel claws. His mouth was dry, and he felt a little ill. Jayden tried to focus as the pilot and copilot continued their checklist, and then the pilot’s request for taxi clearance from the control tower. The dialogue abruptly swung in Jayden’s direction. “Roger taxi strip Bravo to runway Two East. Ground crew, clear chocks.”

This was the signal for Jayden to remove the nose wheel chock. His role was to run up to the nose wheel, grab the short chain attached to the chock, and give it a robust tug to free the chock. He was then to heave the chock clear, so that the aircraft could taxi out. Darting forward made his head throb, and bending down and heaving the big yellow chock clear was almost punctuated by Jayden vomiting over the nose wheel. It was a somewhat feeble throw, and the chock landed only a few yards to his left instead of way behind him.

“Chocks clear,” he rasped through the throat mic, and stepping around the nose to his right, disconnected the communication cable from the port nose interphone connector. Jayden signed to the pilot and walked backward toward the edge of the apron so the plane could begin its taxi.

The engine revs climbed sharply, and the Dash-8 began rolling forward in a leftward curve toward the taxi strip when Jayden realized that the chock was not clear of the path the starboard wheel was taking. He ran forward again, holding his arms up and crossing them to show the pilot to stop. Jayden signaled that there was a ground obstruction, and the pilot braked evenly and cut the engines back to idle, stopping just short of the chock. Jayden was flustered and his head filled with pain as he rushed toward the chock. Jayden could not hear Bob shouting at him over the whine of the engines, and without the headset plugged in, could not register the sudden alarm of the copilot yelling at him to stop.

Jayden saw only the offending yellow chock, felt only the throbbing headache, and thought only of how he would be teased for this ineffectual performance. Jayden did not notice the blur of the starboard prop between himself and the chock, and he trotted unseeing into its hazy shimmering corona. Before Jayden hit the concrete, five of the almost 6ft blades had made contact, breaking three of them, and sending a spray of tissue and shards of metal and composite in a wild arc.

As death spread its black cloak over Jayden’s crumpled and cooling form, it granted him his wish to be free of Mia. He was now decidedly out of the relationship for good and would very certainly never see her again.
 
~~~

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Fred And The Deadly Filament

Fred Hoskins was a spy. He worked in the grimy-but-lucrative world of industrial medical espionage. A trade secret here, and a formula there, and Fred could afford a very carefully disguised-but-well-heeled lifestyle. Since the recent death of his brother from cardiovascular disease at 45, however, Fred wanted to pull his retirement back by a decade or two to enjoy life while he had time. In practice, this meant double dipping. He had started by selling the stolen formulation for a liver cancer drug to a third party after receiving payment from his client. After a few similar double sales, he realized he could also steal from his customers and sell to his victims while he had access to both.

In his hurry to pile up money before early retirement in splendor, Fred made a few tiny mistakes. Not enough for the law to catch him, but while stealing a genetically engineered virus, for example, he left just enough traces for the head of security of the client to send him packing with a warning that if he ever set foot in their building again, they would stick his money up his nose and let him die from it. Fred responded by selling their research on a CRISPR tool for constructing hybrid viruses to a foreign competitor. He used the data exchange to slip Trojan malware into their network and stole some interesting research that he felt he could sell.

He suspected that they may have realized this, because a week later at his favorite cafe, someone spiked his coffee with Fentanyl, and he collapsed before he could reach his phone to dial 911. Luckily, there was a physician at the café who used a nasal applicator to administer a dose of Naloxone. A single burst of compressed gas up his nostrils and Fred was back on his feet in minutes. He counted it as a lucky escape and started being more careful where he ate or drank, as well as how he covered his tracks. He also wondered if he should retire even sooner than planned.

Chriss “Calamity” Cole was an editor at a radiology journal. As the lead for the journal’s continuing medical education program, she spent a lot of her time constructing the training materials and competency tests. The biggest time investment was actually going through the video clips and images from example scans, and by her third year, she had probably viewed more images, and in more depth, than the average final year resident.

Chriss had earned her “Calamity” title as a result of a series of mistakes and misadventures in her first week as a probationary editor. On her first day, she had forwarded a rude joke to her friend Jan, failing to notice that the email autocomplete had selected the very strait-laced Dutch CEO, Dr. Jan Brand. Barely a day later, she dropped a new five-gallon water bottle while wrestling it onto the top of a water cooler and doused the CFO. The bottle hit the floor on its side, and a jet of water hit the CFO just as the elevator doors started to close. The entire floor heard him shrieking in surprise and anger all the way up to the executive floor. Her week was rounded out by setting fire to a birthday cake and then festooning a dozen staff members with cake when she used a nearby carbon dioxide extinguisher rather too close to the burning cake.

Perhaps because of the narrow margin by which Chriss escaped being fired in her first week, but probably just due to an inquisitive nature, bright mind, and sheer conscientiousness, she survived. She immersed herself in her tasks, especially the CME program, and started working out of the office as much as she could. She figured that out of sight and out of mind would be her best bet until people forgot these events. Luckily, getting new radiological images was part of her work, so it became her standard practice to spend time at several local hospital radiology departments collecting images, observing work methods, and getting to know the staff. She stayed away from water coolers, but although the memories that people had of these events faded over time, her reputation was part of the office culture, and even spread over the next years.

This week, Chriss was down in Radiology at St. Barts, collecting images for an upcoming change to the CME on viral neurological cases. Dr. Owen Fitzpatrick called her over to his workstation, “here’s an example of ground glass opacity in a brain scan.” She peered over his shoulder and pointed at a region of the screen, “what’s that?” Owen removed his spectacles, and in a slightly condescending tone, explained that it was what she had asked for.

“No, not the cloudy ground glass bit, I mean this,” and she traced a finger along a faint line from the cloudy region to the edge of the image. “Technical artifact,” he shrugged. Chriss adjusted the image, entered some parameter changes, and the line sharpened and brightened. “No way,” she shook her head, “that’s no computer glitch or sensor aberration; that’s an object.” Owen replaced his spectacles, and with a slight air of fatigue, scrolled through the images and pulled up an alternative angle. Sure enough, once the image was adjusted, there was the thin line again. It showed up clearly in sagittal and transverse planes as a line, and as a short arc in a coronal view.

By the third image, Owen’s demeanor had shifted from humoring a slightly irritating visitor to sitting bolt upright and looking a little alarmed. He tapped at the phone and spoke one of the most irritating phrases in the medical world. “Hi, Linda, yeah, I need clinical correlation for one of your deceased patients.”

Owen hated this kind of thing, but not as much as either the clinicians or the pathologists. Firstly, odd unexplained radiology images usually didn’t mean anything, and finding them looked like a vague accusation that clinical staff had messed up and pathology had missed something. It was possible, but unlikely. And yet, there it was. He also had to explain how he came to be looking for something like this.

“Calamity Cole?” they both looked at him like he had grown horns. “Seriously? You sure this isn’t a prank or spilled water or something?” Owen brought up the images and flipped from one plane to the next. They grudgingly agreed that it didn’t behave like an artifact and there was tenuous evidence that might support it. Slight bleeding in the nose for one. “More likely due to nasogastric tube or just having an oxygen mask.” The record also showed recent nasal Naloxone administration that might explain the slight nosebleed at admission. But still, there were those images.

Pathology checked, and the body was still on the premises, and with great reluctance, they agreed to look. Getting into the skull would normally have been a tedious affair, but because a basic autopsy had already been performed, there was no need. The brain had been sliced to provide plates showing the ground glass region, but no trace of any foreign body had been found. As a last thought, they shone a polarized light into the cranial vault; there was a brief flash, like a beam shining past a spiderweb. Sticking out from the sphenopalatine foramen just behind the nasal cavity was a thread of something stiff.

Chriss wasn’t quite sure what the meeting was about, but she felt intimidated and on edge by all the fancy titles. Her boss had told her to get over to the hospital immediately for a meeting but was unclear what it was about. Maybe something about her CME update. When she arrived, slightly out of breath from her jog from the visitor’s parking lot, the CMO, Chief of Pathology, and the heads of Admin and Legal were milling about, getting coffee, and helping themselves to cookies. Chriss was far too nervous to hold a cup and saucer without rattling and didn’t trust herself not to spill coffee down her front, so she picked a bottle of sparkling water and took a seat toward the far end of the conference room table where she felt she would be out of the way.

The hospital director arrived and sat down two seats from Chriss, who now realized with horror that she was at the head end of the table. The head of Administration pulled out a chair opposite Chriss, and peered at her over his bifocals, “you would be…?” Chriss jumped up out of her seat, and her hand shot forward to introduce herself but connected solidly with her open bottle. The bottle skittered across the table and fountained a torrent of sparkling water that terminated just below the expensive Italian belt buckle of the head of Admin.

“Bullseye!” quipped a New Jersey voice to Chriss’s left, followed by a peal of laughter. Warming to Chriss, the CMO positively beamed, “You must be Calamity Cole, call me Linda”.

While the head of Admin sat glumly in damp trousers, the head of Pathology started the meeting by giving the executive overview of the main points. Owen then described the discovery of radiological anomalies and gestured toward Chriss when he displayed the images and described how she had adjusted parameters to enhance the anomaly. Pathology went into the details of discovering a single stiff rod about as thick as a hair that had entered the brain through the nasal cavity.

Pathology explained that, on further examination, it was shown to be exactly 30 mm long and 0.08 mm in diameter. Microscopy had revealed it to be made of twisted filaments of carbon nanotubes, wound around a polysaccharide core. “The important bit here is in the crud in the gaps in the spiral,” and he explained that the scanning electron image on the screen showed it to be brimming with a virus. “The sugar is packed with a virus usually found in anaerobic environments. As the sugar core dissolved in the brain, it released a viral payload.”

In answer to questions of etiology, pathology had both a professional and a private take. Professionally, they had no statement other than accidental introduction, but on a private level, they went further. “Oh, this was deliberate! This is a weapon. This was an assassination. Someone shoved this thing up his nose and into his brain, where it was designed to release a virus that was specifically capable of rapidly colonizing the surrounding brain tissue.”

It never became clear just who had stuffed the needle up Fred’s nose, or even if the event at the café was related, but it added a layer of mystery and intrigue to the reputation of Chriss “Calamity” Cole that would last forever.

~~~

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What Lingers in The Body

It’s been trying to reach her again, that sound of hard steel grating on a whetstone. That rhythmic murmur of fine grit and oil - the rhythmic ecstasy of motion and intent, practice and purpose. It calls her, and it whispers a name.

The ghost that brought her a name, embraced her tightly, and nuzzled at her throat. "Let me in, sweetling, let me in." Grace parted her lips and breathed deeply, and the ghost slid smooth and cool over her teeth and filled her lungs. Grace spoke the name aloud, and the ghost spilled from her mouth, a silver mist in the pale moonlight. "I came, sweetling, because you called me. I stay because I am yours."

Grace sighed, slow and smooth, and filled the night with shimmer. She savored the emptiness, and held her breath. She paused. When her heart was a slow, pounding drum, Grace breathed deep, and pulled in her angel. Something lives here now, deep in her body, in her muscles, and in her blood. "I will never leave you, sweetling. I am forever yours." Grace could feel it surge and flow, but now there was work to be done and she wiped her blade clean. There was work to be done, and she had its name.

There was an alley between the vape cave and the BBQ lounge, and chewed bricks formed cliffs to either side. He stood in the shadows of the bleached awning, bathed in fluorescent red.

The knife slid from its sheath of soft leather, handle hugged by her fingers. The cozy scent of clove oil spreading from the blade, as it drew warmth where she held it flat and hidden against her thigh. "You will not survive this", it might have whispered, as it began its climb. The man grunted to the knife, but then before he could yell, knife twisted and rose to bite his throat. After a quick wipe, it was back in its leather lair, hidden at her side. "You’ll never throw me away”, it thought, and ghost agreed.

The Abecedarian of Death

A is for Asphyxiation, because breath can be short
B is for Black Death, and its buboes and blebs
C is for Cyanide, Cyanide, Cyanide, that stealer of air
D is for Drowning, when the fluids take your life
E is for Electrocution, and that grip on your heart
F is for Falls, which garners us with gravity
G is for Gangrene, the smelliest of rots
H is for Hypothermia, when the world steals your heat
I is for Infarction, the blockage of your blood
J is for Jaundice, when the liver gives up hope
K is for Kambo, when you die from a frog
L is for Leprosy, that blinds the eyes and breaks the nerves
M is for Methanol, that blinds and pickles your brain
N is for Necrotizing Fasciitis, that eats away your flesh
O is for Opioids, that breaks the respiratory drive
P is for Positional Asphyxia, when lying is death
Q is for Q-Fever, when poop turns to dust
R is for Rabies, the behavior-altering bug
S is for Sepsis, that sneaks away your soul
T is for Tobacco, that carton of cancers
U is for Uni-polar Depression, that brings all the demons home
V is for Ventricular fibrillation, when you flutter to death
W is for Whipple's, that tears up your guts
X is for X-linked agammaglobulinemia, to welcome the germs
Y is for Yentl syndrome, the silent stealer of hearts
Z is for Zika, the bug that makes you bend

Harrold, Harriet & The Magnetron

Harrold and Harriet met in college. They were both undergraduates in an electrical engineering program and developed a kind of romance born of competition. Harriet came from a blue-collar family and grew up around appliance repairs. Harrold’s parents were both professionals. His mother was a surgeon, his father was an engine designer.

From the first day they met across a dull lecture hall, Harrold and Harriet competed. They competed for marks, asking questions in lectures, and for the attention of the lecturer, the frazzled teaching assistants, and the weary class. If Harriet beat Harrold on a test on the performance of transformers, you could bet he would redouble efforts to beat her on transistor theory. The competition between them started with Harrold interrupting Harriet in class when she was answering a question about Zener diodes. His “Well, actually” interruption was pertinent in a very narrow and nitpicking way, and it rankled Harriet to no end.

She soon returned the favor by interrupting him when he was explaining electrical hysteresis. The game, some might have said, was afoot.

Scarcely a class went by without a robust interaction between the two, and one afternoon an argument over field effect transistors spilled over from the classroom to the hallway. It continued when mutual friends and classmates met for drinks at the Keg and Tankard, a faux Irish pub popular with engineering students. It continued even after the drinks gave way to coffee, and coffee gave way to tired farewells in the parking lot. Harrold leaned in close to make a point about resonant circuits, and Harriet kissed him full on the mouth.

Harriet wasn’t quite sure herself why she had kissed him. Maybe, she sometimes told herself, it was just to shut him up. The net effect was to charge their competitiveness with an odd flavor of geeky sexual tension. They started dating in a clumsy and competitive way, and by the time they graduated, they had competed themselves into marriage plans.

Their career paths diverged soon after graduating, with Harrold becoming involved in research and academics of x-ray tomography, while Harriet scoffed at the intangibility of academia and went to work in maintenance and installation of MRI machines. Harrold worked at a university with a large teaching hospital and occasionally consulted to imaging machine vendors. Harriet worked at one of those larger vendors and serviced and installed MRI machines at large hospitals, including the one where Harrold worked. Many dinnertime arguments were about CT vs MRI, with Harry extolling the virtues of the fine resolution of CT scans and relatively fuzziness of MRI, while Harriet would draw attention to the radiation load and cancer risk of CT and the low health impact of MRI. They argued endlessly over cost per scan (MRI being nearly double), energy use (CT 23% higher), carbon footprint (unresolved, but both were growing), and even the table weight limits (CT having 22% higher limits).

It was the little things that really irritated each about the other though. After 30 years of marriage, it was his way of gargling in front of the mirror in the bathroom every night that most irritated Harriet. He would stand with his arms folded over a middle-aged spread, face blank and expressionless, and his mouth wobbling about like it was made of rubber. Harriet hated it and said so.

Harrold, in turn, despised the way Harriet sucked her teeth for ages after every meal. However, it was the way she heated her milk before bed that really got his goat. She would put a mug of milk in the microwave and run it for a minute. Then she would stop it, wait seven seconds, and run it for thirty seconds, stop, fifteen seconds, stop, ten, stop, five, stop. But that wasn’t even the half of it. She did it all while humming out of tune, and each time she stopped the microwave oven, it would ping. Each time she started it again, it would beep. It drove Harrold to the edge.

Harriet said it was the best way to get her milk as hot as possible without boiling over, but Harrold saw it as a personal attack. Occasionally, the milk boiled over anyway, and Harrold wound up cleaning it. At times like these, Harrold sometimes wished for a bolt of lightning to blast her into oblivion, and one day he said as much. The mood shifted from that point on, but not before Harriet suggested that a bolt of electricity sounded like a good idea but with a different outcome in mind. She suggested loudly and frankly that his gargle face and twitches resembled a man being electrocuted. Each fumed at the other.

Then the microwave broke. In a feverish cleaning attempt, Harrold got water inside the microwave oven, and it stopped working. In response to Harriet’s scowls, he grudgingly undertook to fix it. It was a simple matter of drying out a sensor, but he quickly found another problem. The door seal was no longer working properly, and it was leaking microwave energy. Not a lot, but it got him thinking. What if he adjusted the internal wave guide and altered the door screen so it was essentially a ray gun aimed at the milk boiler. Did he really mean to harm Harriet? He wondered briefly but was soon caught up in the theoretical puzzle of altering the wave guide. This was not a trivial task and drew on years of design experience in a way he found captivating and invigorating. In a matter of a few hours, Harrold had designed a modification that, on paper at least, would turn the microwave oven into a death ray. He chuckled and drew a little “Harriet in the death ray” stick figure cartoon in the margin of the notebook. It was like a catharsis, and Harrold felt release and a sense of exhilaration.

Then he thought of the real problem—could he make the microwave oven sense that the milk was close to boiling, but then stop? The problem appealed to his sense of creativity, and his body language shifted from irritation to one of seeking a goal. He had a mission, and it showed.

He made some initial sketches and noodled around with formulas about wave density and reflectance and wondered whether the wave harmonics would change at the moment the liquid began to bubble. He scribbled furious notes and went on long walks along the canal across the road, muttering to himself about impedance, harmonics, hysteresis. His modification would sense the start of boiling, cut microwave output, then stepwise energize again at slightly lower power, cut again, go again at a lower step. It would keep doing this for about five down steps and then cut power and ring the bell. He was essentially automating the manual processes Harriet carried out, but with more efficiency and fewer bells and beeps going on.

Harriet had grown suspicious at the change in his demeanor and the mismatch between the stated aim of drying out a sensor and the level of effort Howard appeared to be spending. He was up to something, she had thought. Then there was what he had said. When Harriet asked him what he was doing to the microwave oven that was taking so long, Harrold put on a sly face, tapped the side of his nose, and said “Something that will surprise you. Boy, is someone in for a surprise!”

When Harrold went on one of his walks, Harriet snooped. The bulk of the calculations and sketches were vaguely familiar, but it had been decades since she had done this kind of theoretical work. Some of them were just completely inscrutable to her, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what he was trying to do. Something about feedback and microwave power output, but she couldn’t be sure. There were some notes that were abundantly clear though, and a little stick figure drawn in a crude pencil sketch left absolutely no doubt in her mind. Harrold meant to modify the microwave to kill her. So, this was where they were now, she reflected somberly. She had not realized he hated her this much, but it all formed a pattern to her now.

It took a few hours of reflection, but Harriet came to a steely conclusion. Two could play at this game, she thought. She mulled over the practicalities, and with a sly smile of her own, settled on something simple, practical, and obviously effective. Something that lent itself to her advantage of practical industrial experience.

That afternoon, when Harrold went for a walk to solve one final piece of his boil-control concept, Harriet took three tools into his workshop, cut two wires in the guts of the microwave oven’s exposed interior, and added a third, a flat ribbon made of braided high current strands.

Late that night, when Harriet had gone to bed, Harrold put a finishing touch to his control circuit, connected it up, and quietly fetched a cup of milk from the kitchen to test it out. “Boy, will she be surprised,” he thought happily, and placed the milk in the center of the turntable. Careful not to disturb the tangle of wires and small circuit boards spilling out from the back of the microwave oven, Harrold flicked on the power, and carefully closed the door and pressed the cook button.

Harrold watched intently as the cup rotated slowly, glancing occasionally at a readout on a meter whose probes disappeared inside the back of the oven. As the temperature of the milk climbed, so did the tension in Harrold’s body. He saw the milk just start to boil and was about to yank the door open when he saw the reading on the meter suddenly drop. It was working! It needed a small adjustment, but this would work. Harrold reached for the handle to open the door and stop the power to the magnetron. He was thrilled and so happy that his invention was a success!

Harriet’s modification was also a success. With the magnetron circuit live, the flat braided wire Harriet had added conducted over 4,000 volts from the high voltage magnetron power supply to the door handle, and from there to Harrold’s hand. The two wire deletions disabled the safety shutoff and allowed Harrold’s body to conduct the high voltage to ground, over fifty times what could easily have been a fatal amount. Boy, was Harrold surprised!

Just not for very long.

~~~~~

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Freddy and the Fan

Freddy was a security officer at the Metropolitan Mercy nonprofit hospital in the city center. Like many others doing the security work at the Met, Freddy was a college student. The security job gave him health benefits, time for classes at the theology college, and enough money for class fees and food. Freddy intended to make a career in pastoral care and tend to the spiritual needs of patients, especially those in hospice.

The security job was undemanding work and mainly consisted of clocking the staff in and out, keeping an eye on the security cameras, and recording humidity and temperature readings every 2 hours. In practice, the shift teams divided up the work so that each got some sleep during the 6 PM to 6 AM shift. In between those tasks, there was plenty of opportunity to do assignments, finish prescribed readings, and study for exams.

During the new security officer orientation, each member was given a tour of the facility. Each contractor group focused on their own area of operations. The HVAC contractor showed them the huge chiller units and associated plumbing located in passageways surrounding the computer room and laboratory facilities. The fire systems contractor led them past the 30-ton carbon dioxide tank and explained how this would be emptied into the computer room or lab in case of a fire.

The orientation included being shown how to don the self-contained breathing apparatus in order to sweep the computer room or lab for laggards in case the CO2 had trapped them. It also included a trip to the extraction fan room, which evoked knowing glances and winks from some of the older officers.

Kelly, the fire system contractor, inserted a special key in a grey box to the side of the door and threw a breaker switch before unlocking the heavy doors and showing the curious new hires inside. The room was dominated by two fans facing louvered shutters that opened to the outside of the building. Freddy guessed that the red striped fan blades were each at least 8 feet long. The grey electric motors were bigger than anything he had seen before.

Kelly explained that after the CO2 put out any fire, the fans would automatically start, and pull the gas out of the building. She pointed out how the louver slats were automatically controlled. Freddy squeezed closer to the big fan blades to get a better look and bumped against a little pole set in the concrete floor. An alarm sounded, and one in a row of red lights lit up on the control panel.

Kelly sighed and rolled her eyes at Freddy while she stabbed a button that silenced the alarm. She unscrewed a little glass dome on top of the pole and picked up a steel ball the size of a marble and held it up for all to see. “This is what triggers the vibration sensor.” Kelly described how the ball dropping onto a circular platform was how the system detected if a dangerous imbalance existed in the fan, and to shut it down before it tore itself loose. She replaced the steel ball on the top of a little cupped pillar and reset the alarm.

“OK, so, look around. No dust, no cobwebs, right?” Kelly explained that at six in the morning and six in the evening each day, the extraction system self-tested by opening the louvers and running the fans for 3 minutes. “You really don’t want to be in here when that happens. The fans probably won’t suck you in, but it’s going to be noisy and very windy, and dangerous.” Kelly paused and gestured at Freddy with her pen for emphasis “These are automated controls, and you can lose your life if you don’t pay attention, right Freddy?”

Life soon became a comfortable routine for Freddy. On weekdays, he attended classes, and 5 nights a week, he spent at the Met. One of the older crew showed the new recruits some of the tricks and shortcuts. One trick was how to get computer room staff badges ready ahead of time, so it wasn’t such a madhouse when their shifts changed. Another was to use the service elevator at the back, and then walk around the computer rooms using the air conditioner passageways. This cut a lot of time during rounds because they could bypass the multiple computer room security doors.

The third trick was the best. In theory, each shift had three people, but after hours it was quite easy to handle the work with two—one doing rounds and one in the control room. The third person could go down to the fan room and sleep. It was quiet, dust-free, and nobody other than the security staff and the fire contractors even knew it existed. There was a bedroll hidden behind the fan room control panel, a towering set of grey metal cabinets that housed the electrical and control systems to run the louvers, fans, and fire-detection systems.

On one Thursday night, nearly 6 months after joining, it was Freddy’s turn to sleep from midnight to five. He was worried about an exam on Friday morning, so instead of sleeping directly, Freddy reviewed his notes and browsed some of the passages he had marked out with little yellow page tabs. By 2AM, Freddy felt more confident and put the last of the seven textbooks on a pile next to the bedroll. He switched off his headlamp, removed it, and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

With a sudden start, Freddy woke and looked at his watch. Traffic noise was louder than it should be, he thought in a panic. He had overslept. It was 05:53, and he had 7 minutes to be at the control room for roll call and shift change. He hurriedly dressed, stowed the bedroll, and scampered out, still tucking in a shirttail with one hand while trying to clamp his books under the other arm. He bumped into the doorway in his hurry, and his books scattered across the floor. With a very mild swearword, Freddy gathered up his books and hurtled out of the fan room.

Freddy made it to the control room with seconds to spare and, hiding behind the throng of colleagues from both shifts, put his books down and did up the last two buttons on his shirt. “Glad you could make it, I was starting to worry,” whispered Jake at his side and then pushed past to complete formalities.

Having called roll, Jake was about to hand off to the new shift when an alarm sounded, and a red light lit up on the main panel. The annunciator panel read “Fan Imbalance.” Freddy looked sharply at his little pile of textbooks on the control room desk. Six books. Freddy blurted out, “I’ll go check” and started back to the fan room at a jog.

Freddy knew exactly what had happened. He had left with seven books and arrived with six. When the fan self-tested at 6AM, the missing book had been sucked up by the fan and tripped the vibration sensor. Freddy’s Oxford Companion to the bible lay scattered across the floor in a dozen pieces, and having tripped the vibration sensor, the giant fans were stationary. Freddy groaned; it was a library book. Hastily gathering up pieces, Freddy made his way to the vibration sensor.

Like he had seen Kelly do, Freddy unscrewed the little glass dome, picked up the steel marble, and put it back on top of the slightly cupped pillar. Freddy bent quickly to retrieve a last piece of his book lying under the fan and had barely enough time to register the loud click of the motor actuator before a blade hit his elbow. The blow unbalanced him and pitched him head-first into the path of the blades. By the time the vibration sensor tripped again and stopped the motor, Freddy was beyond earthly cares about oversleeping, exams, or damaged library books.


~~~~~~~
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OxyJean

Jean had been a corporate adventurer who had also led a fiery and action-packed life that included kayaking whitewater rivers, parachuting into canyons, and riding a 1000cc off-road BMW motorcycle across the Namib desert. She had risen to fame and some substantial fortune through hard work, ingenuity, and boldness.

Mostly bed-ridden now, Jean had been on long-term oxygen therapy treatment for a few years, and this had recently increased to high-flow oxygen at 40-60 liters per minute. Her room was kept warm, and a humidifier ran quietly by her bedside. At 78, a lifetime of smoking had left her with chronic lung disease and unable to do anything more adventurous than clicking the remote control or reaching for a glass of water.

Still, Jean enjoyed a life of comfort. She had an army of attendants, the best care, and a view from her second-story bedroom that took in a seascape and rolling hills to either side. She could occasionally get to her window with the help of her nurse to take in the structured gardens and the ocean backdrop. Jean had every convenience and support money could buy.

What she didn’t have, was peace of mind.

Jeremy was her only child, and not so much a disappointment to her as he was a constant source of bafflement and worry. At 48, Jeremy had shown himself to be disinterested in the effort required for achievement of greatness like his mother but instead was highly adept at spending money on artistic experiences and showy events. One fanciful scheme after another soaked up money, and Jean’s patience. Failed art galleries followed unsuccessful theater productions, and Jeremy had tried his languid hand at painting, poetry, and sculpture without any visible success.

He made a very modest success of being an art critic and wrote caustic reviews of plays and artworks. However, he grew bored with it, and the editor grew tired of fending off irate artists and producers. When Jeremy had mocked a sponsor of an exhibition of modern sculpture, the editor fired him. It was one thing to mock in the name of artistic purity, but quite another to rankle a major advertiser.

Jean had finally put her foot down last year and refused to back any more flamboyant schemes. Jeremy’s reaction was to have a meltdown that left Jean feeling guilty and a sense that she had bullied her son.

Jean had never understood his thirst for the dramatic, and he knew it irritated her. Today, instead of cap in hand, he would blazon it out with her, and he dressed accordingly.

Jeremy wore a black mid-calf woolen jacket, ornate and ruffled white silk brocade shirt, and tight black faux leather pants. Highly polished and boned Demonia knee-high boots rounded off an image calculated to get Jean’s goat.

He arrived at the house with a flourish, the tires of his black 1990 BMW cabriolet throwing a small wave of gravel over the lawn and into a flowerbed, as he skidded to a halt. Old Fred who tended the gardens slowly put down the handles of the wheelbarrow he had been pushing and removed a pipe from his mouth. His wife, Molly, who was the housekeeper, had been about to give Fred a mug of tea, now stood at his side. They looked at Jeremy, their faces impassive and blank. “What are you two yokels gawping at? Don’t you have ferrets to eat or vermin to skin or something?” barked Jeremy, internally pleased that he had obviously annoyed them. To him, they were backward anachronisms, and he couldn’t understand why his mother kept them on. As soon as he ran things, he would get rid of them, he thought.

As Jeremy flounced up the stairs to the ornate front door, Fred and Molly watched him go. Fred was the first to speak. “No good will come of that one. Can almost smell the brimstone,” he said, pointing at Jeremy’s departing form with the stem of his pipe. “Bound for hellfire someday soon,” Molly agreed. “Just you mark my words, Fred Jones; that boy is for the flames.” Fred nodded and sipped thoughtfully from his mug.

Jeremy entered the house, mentally preparing himself for battle. The issue was one of money. Jeremy got a large allowance for his living needs but wanted Jean to pay for the purchase of a disused church that he planned to turn into an artistic commune and theatre. He thought it would be rather fun to flip a church in this way. From sacrosanct to sacrilegious. Jeremy smiled at the thought but then shifted thoughts. Time for battle, and to put on a masterful piece of performative drama.

Jeremy had a well-rehearsed and historically reliable approach to getting his way with his mother when the chips were down. He relied on taunting and baiting Jean, teasing her until she said something regrettable, and then with a theatrical twist he would collapse in tears and apologies. The guilt of all the times that Jean had put career or adventure ahead of childrearing would overwhelm her, and she would wind up giving into Jeremy’s demands.

Things did not go as planned this time. This time, Jean had a different mindset, borne of a doctor’s visit and a sudden awareness of her mortality. Dr. Sullivan had visited the previous evening and laid out bleak prospects. Jean’s COPD had been joined by a diagnosis of liver cancer. Jean had not been a big drinker really, or not enough to cause liver cancer. She had, however, experimented with performance-enhancing drugs as a 20-year-old for just long enough to be infected with Hepatitis-B, which quietly and asymptomatically ate away at her liver. The condition was now terminal, and the cancer well established throughout her body.

Jean had not slept that night, and her mind was a storm of regrets, anger, self-blame, and finally, as dawn broke over the hills and streamed into her bedroom, she came to terms with herself, her future, and the nature of the legacy she wanted to leave.

Jeremy had expected his outfit to provoke a strong reaction from Jean, but she looked him up and down and then simply gestured for him to sit on the simple steel folding chair beside the bed. Jeremy opened his gambit with some well-calibrated remarks about one-night stands he had recently enjoyed, drunken parties he had attended, and injected some mocking asides about “management types” and “bean counters.” Jean looked at him in silence for a while with a gaze that was cool, evaluating, and sad. Jeremy squirmed, he had never encountered this kind of response and felt a growing sense of panic welling up in his gut. Jeremy started a new line of attack: “You never listen …” But holding up one frail hand, Jean cut him short. “I have not been a good mother to you, Jeremy,” she began softly. “I have given you handouts rather than guidance, trinkets rather than attention, and I have pampered you rather than setting clear responsibilities and encouraging you to grow.” Jean looked at her only child with a sense of regret, but also of hope. It was not too late for Jeremy to learn to stand on his own two feet, to build a career, and achieve something serious and meaningful. “I have crippled you, and for this, I am truly sorry, but as much as I would want to repair this, I no longer have the time left in which to do so.”

Jeremy was stunned, and before he could find a response, Jean outlined what was to happen in the few short months she had left. To cater to her rapidly declining health, she was going to give instructions to convert her house and estate into a hospice. It would benefit her directly in her final time but would have sufficient space for a dozen additional patients and additional care staff. After her death, the remaining estate would go toward funding research into liver cancer and supporting the operations of the hospice. She had decided that the money he had wanted for his new venture would go to cancer charities instead – Blue Faery Liver, CureToday, and a few others.

Jeremy would be allowed funds to study or develop marketable skills for up to 4 years, after which his allowance would drop to subsistence level. He wouldn’t starve, but anything over the bread line would be up to him to make up.

Jean looked at Jeremy with hope on her face.

Jeremy reacted in a way she had never seen, but which many recipients of his corrosive reviews could have predicted and recognized. Jean had seen plenty of his tantrums before, but those had been crafted and curated to evoke sympathy and guilt. His tantrums toward others had been designed to hurt and embodied malice and spite, with no care about any other goal than to cause harm and inflict pain. Jeremy got up slowly from the chair, and with an icy calm, walked over to the bed and disconnected the oxygen tube from her mask. He dangled it in his hand before letting it drop to the floor at the feet of his chair.

“So, Mommy dear, you thought you would just cut me off?”

Jeremy reached down and turned off the humidifier and slowly paced around the bed to the thermostat control. “You thought that my reward should be to be kicked to the curb?”

Jeremy twisted the dial on the thermostat until it reached maximum. “Maybe we should melt some of that ice in your veins,” he sneered. Jean tried to reach for her buzzer, but Jeremy easily pulled it from her hand and tossed it to the floor.

“No, Mommy dear, this is a private affair.” Jeremy paced back and forth, describing how she had abandoned him as a child, how she always put herself and her work ahead of him.

Jean’s breathless and croaking entreaties met a sullen wall.

Jeremy sat heavily on the Spartan steel chair and crossed his legs. He continued on a lengthy and bitter diatribe, “I mean just look. I sit on this… what is this… a surplus steel chair from the morgue… you in a fancy bed, with expensive drapes, and pretentious paintings, and nurses, and …” Jeremy rambled on.

Jean was visibly gasping, her voice a barely audible croak. Too weak to raise a hand, let alone get out of bed, and the lack of oxygen exacerbated by the increased heat was making her heart race dangerously.

“Getting hot, aren’t we mother dear? “Well, I certainly am,” Jeremy sneered. He rose from the chair and swept off his woolen jacket with a flourish. With the low humidity, static crackled between his silk shirt and faux leather pants and the woolen jacket. A fat blue spark jumped from his boot to the metal chair leg.

If Jeremy were able to see oxygen, it would have looked like a shimmering silver pool across the floor, rippling at the steady stream from the disconnected hose. At 60 liters per minute, his mirror-like boots were already up to the calf in the pool of oxygen.

With the rich oxygen environment and a spark to get the party going, his highly polished boots burst into flames and the paraffin polish mixture burned a fierce blue. Blue and yellow flames leaped up his trouser legs in an instant, the plastic faux leather combining with oxygen in a frenzy of chemistry. Jeremy let out a high-pitched shriek like an enthusiastic steam whistle and launching himself backward, tripping over the chair.

Jeremy hit the floor hard, rattling medicine bottles on the bedside cabinet. His shirt and pants joined forces in the rich oxygen pond, and Jeremy was engulfed in bright and eager flames. Scampering across the floor blindly, Jeremy, screaming in waves, hurtled toward the bedroom windows.

With mouths agape, Fred and Molly watched a shrieking fireball burst through the main bedroom window and plummet two stories down to the veranda below. They watched motionlessly until the flames were mostly gone, and there were only thin spires of black smoke rising from the inert shape on the slate floor.

Molly turned to Fred, “I said he would be bound for hellfire someday, did I not, Fred Jones?” Fred removed the pipe from his mouth and waggled the stem in agreement, “Aye, that you did, Moll, that you did.”

~~~~

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Kate and the Heartbreak

Kate was an EMT in a small, distressed community and had a dark secret. Felix, Brad, and Kate had grown up more or less together in the small town of Dodgeville, or as locals called it, “Dogsville.” It was not a happy town and had gone through several boom-and-bust cycles, first as a mining town, and most recently as a spoke in an automotive manufacturing hub that crashed.

Brad had been a school hero. Captain of the football team, star performer, and believed by most to be on his way to football stardom. However, like many others in Dogsville had discovered, being a star in a small town was a poor predictor of greatness. Like Emmy (star swimmer), Albert (star chess player), and Jenny (star scholar) had discovered before Brad, county competition was hard, state competition was brutal, and national competition was murder. By the time Brad got to state selection, he had sunk from being in the top three to top 300 and didn’t even place in the top 3000 in the national ranking.

Instead of being a professional footballer, Brad joined the sheriff’s department, thanks to his father’s connections and some deal-making on the golf course.

Kate had been a first aider from primary school age, and by high school, she had several achievement awards and Red Cross certificates. Kate was the go-to person at school if you had a splinter, grazed knee, or nosebleed. Everyone was sure she would grow up to become a doctor. In middle school, it became clear that there would be no money for medical school in her future. It was during this time that her father’s brown lung symptoms became explicit, and his employer folded along with his medical coverage and pension.

As the largest employer in town, Beckerman Upholstery provided seats, headliners, and carpeting for the automakers in the surrounding towns. The union jobs at Beckerman were well paid, had good fringe benefits, and seemed secure. The waves of offshoring and automation crippled Beckerman, and the 2008 crash killed it off completely, taking Kate’s scholarship and student support plan along with it.

By the time Kate graduated from Dogsville high, she had become her father’s primary caregiver, and her hands-on experience nursing her father went far beyond her first aid training. Thanks to his frequent attacks, Kate was such a regular at the Dogsville hospital that she was on first name terms with the entire ER team, and they had taken to including her in their informal training sessions.

When she heard that Kate had graduated, the ED director personally introduced her to the head of the ambulance service, and Kate was offered a part time job as a trainee EMT.

Felix had been scrawny all his life, and had neither the athletic ambitions of Brad, nor the single-minded focus of Kate, for whom he harbored the hugest crush. He was just a nice guy. A goofball, as it said in the yearbook comments, but even-tempered, considerate, and thoughtful. He was raised by his grandparents, because his mother was in jail for fraud and his father was dead from an opioid overdose. Felix got a job with a local security firm that provided armored car delivery between banks in the region and the few remaining industries around Dogsville.

Dogsville itself suffered. Most shops on the high street had closed, the three banks had reduced to one that only opened three times a week, and the hairdresser, barber, and tattoo parlor had merged and operated in one shop. They did so at least until Mikey the tattooist had died of liver cancer from a hepatitis infection and Herbert the barber died from a heart attack. Beryl continued to run all three, but cut back on any piercings, because the thought gave her “the screaming heebie-jeebies.”

The closure of most of the retail outlets was mirrored by a rash of home foreclosures and a precipitous drop in tax revenue for the city. To cut costs, most traffic lights were replaced with signs or roundabouts, repair schedules were stretched thin, and amenities such as the public library, swimming pool, and several parks were simply closed, and where possible, sold. The town ambulance service and police force didn’t escape cuts, and by the time Brad and Kate entered the job market, the staffing was as low as it could go, and they strongly favored young, new hires, paid for by early retirement of senior staff.

As soon as Kate graduated basic ambulance training, she found herself in the back of an elderly ambulance for 20 hours a week. The driver had no medical training at all because that would add salary costs the town couldn’t pay. Brad scraped through his police training and was often the sole car on patrol. Felix laughed all the way through his training at the security company. One time, he took home a few dye packs used by the banks to safeguard money transfer boxes. He demonstrated to Kate and other friends how they worked, and particularly how to booby trap someone’s mailbox or car glove compartment. He did so to Brad’s police cruiser, much to the amusement of everyone in the Sherriff’s department other than Brad. Brad had shouted at Felix “You could have given me a heart attack, you little runt.” Felix had laughed and said something about Kate being the only one that could break hearts.

On the day that Kate robbed the bank, she had just finished her last classes to become a fully-fledged paramedic, and she had at the same time been notified that her father owed $9,887 to the skilled nursing facility where he had lived since his dementia had gone from forgetful of names to setting the kitchen alight or wandering off during the night wearing only a cap. She had also been told that because of further budget cuts, the ambulance service could no longer pay overtime rates.

Felix had also been told of budget cuts. With immediate effect, the crew size for the armored cars would be dropped from three to two. One driver, and one in the back. Drivers would unlock the back door from inside the cab, and the doors would be pushed open from inside. The excess staff would take early retirement, or in some cases, simply separated.

His last delivery of the day was a single cash box to the only bank in Dogsville, and Felix had just about mastered swinging the heavy doors open with a shoulder and a foot, while holding the cash box in both hands. The bank had a small ramp to the delivery doors, covered by an old and slightly leaning canopy to keep off snow or rain during deliveries or collections. Bryce backed the heavy truck up the ramp and fingered the intercom and door release as he pulled up the parking brake.

Felix heaved at the door and gave it extra effort to cater for the slight incline and then jumped down onto the concrete ramp. The door hit one of the canopy supports and bounced back, and the edge of the door hit Felix full in the face as he landed. The impact knocked him off his feet, and spun him, sending the cash box skittering across the ramp and off the side. Felix collapsed in an ungainly pirouette. The door slammed shut with such an impact that Bryce thought it was a gunshot. He could see Felix on the ground, and checking that his doors were locked, radioed for police and ambulance.

Kate arrived first, and with the driver and the solitary bank clerk both firmly behind locked doors and nobody else in sight, she simply attended to Felix. She cleared his airway of broken teeth, checked his neck, and packed his broken nose, before helping him into the back of the ambulance. Being short on saline bags, Kate went to a tap on the side of the ramp, sluiced off the bulk of the blood on her hands, and wet some gauze dressings. She glanced down at the box leaning against the ramp and recognized the logo from Felix’s cap. She picked up the box, heaved it into the back of the ambulance, and set to cleaning him up and checking vitals while the driver headed to Dogsville ER.

By the time they reached the ER, she had done her secondary scan and splinted a broken finger. Patient transfer was always a very focused affair; to give the receiving physician the full clinical picture, then going through the paperwork with admissions, and finally getting new routing from the ambulance control room.

Back at Dogsville Fire & Ambulance station, the driver pulled into their bay and Kate busied herself with cleaning up and restocking. It was only when she was finally done and getting changed that she noticed the cash box. She sat on one stretcher and stared at it, wild thoughts darting through her mind and a feeling of nausea rising up from the pit of her belly. She kicked it gently, and it replied with an inertia that said “yes, I’m full, what are you gonna do about it?”

Kate emptied the clothes from her rucksack and tried to pull it over the box. No go. The box was bigger than the rucksack mouth. There was a banging on the ambulance door, “Hey Kate, bunch of us are going to Arby’s, you coming?” Kate swallowed hard, “Just finishing up and changing. Meet you there.” Kate dropped the rucksack in front of the box, opened the door partway and leaned sideways around the door, a bare shoulder showing. “See you there,” she repeated. The driver, embarrassed that he had interrupted her while changing, looked at his feet, “oh sure, sorry, see you,” and walked off quickly without a backward glance. Kate took down one of the equipment bags; it was bigger, and a tight fit, but it zipped closed. So far, so good.

Kate met up with the others and tried to put the box out of her mind while making small talk. She stayed long enough to wolf down a hotdog, laugh at the usual jokes, and then make excuses about needing to visit the nursing home.

By the time Kate got home, it was dark, drizzling, and she was more exhausted than excited or afraid. She took the box into the garage and stared at it on the workbench, trying to remember everything Felix had said about the dye pack. She was only going to get one shot at this, and she was already too far in to just take it back. That option vanished when she was getting changed in the back of the ambulance.

After 3 days, Kate had a plan, and using a tungsten carbide oscillating blade, she carefully cut out one side of the box and could open the seam of the internal bag. Kate counted out exactly $10,000 in bundles of each denomination. It was the most cash she had ever seen, and she felt thrilled by it, more than guilty.

Kate paid off her father’s arrears over 6 months to avoid any suspicion and had to dip into her own savings a bit to make up the interest and buy him some new clothes and toiletries. Paying off his debt was a huge relief, and she felt like a crushing weight had been lifted from her shoulders, but it was replaced by a quiet sense of dread.

The robbery had remained unsolved, and although this was not entirely unusual for Dogsville, the robbery had just made no sense to the visiting detective. Nobody else had reported a gunshot, no getaway car was seen, and in fact, no robbers had been seen at all. None of the local snitches had heard of anyone bragging about it. Either the robbers were top notch professionals from out of town or they were incredibly lucky. In which case, why would out-of-town pros hit a truck with such a tiny haul? It made no sense. The other possibility was an inside job, but that also made no sense and the only two people in the truck couldn’t have done it. Disgruntled ex-employees also made no sense because they would have been seen.

The detective settled on a time-honored solution and blamed the local police. In his report, he commented on the crime scene being disturbed by clumsy work by the local person, their late response to the call, and their surly and uncooperative response to questioning. He didn’t name Brad specifically, but it was clear who he meant, and it earned Brad a scolding and postponement of his next promotion. Brad spent every spare hour trying to chase up leads, find new evidence, or break someone’s testimony, but to no avail. He was assigned to duties nobody else wanted and became the butt of practical jokes.

Things were not going well with Brad. A back injury from football had flared after a slip and fall while chasing an alleged shoplifter though a car park spotted with potholes and patches of ice. After exhausting his limited personal days, Brad leaned heavily on his OxyContin prescription to get through the day. At a certain point, Brad was balancing pain of the injury and pain of withdrawal against his fear of dependency. His physician, initially free with the drug, was growing less willing to renew his script. Brad blamed his misfortune on whomever had robbed that bank and swore he would get his hands on them “even if it kills me!”

With the OxyContin prescription at an end, Brad turned to street drugs through his intimate knowledge of who used and who dealt. Brad started using most of what he confiscated, and today, he had his first experience with Fentanyl.

Kate’s ambulance responded with lights and siren to an officer down call. Within seconds of arrival, Kate had whipped out her Narcan and sent a double dose up Brad’s nostrils. In the time it took for Brad to roar back into consciousness, Kate already had him in the ambulance and had opened his shirt. She switched on the ancient ECG machine, and because stocks of the adhesive pads had run out weeks ago, she placed the paddles on either side of his heart to pick up heart rhythm. With this somewhat archaic ECG, using the paddles automatically charged the machine up to an initial 200 Joules. This was not as unsafe as it sounds, because a button on each of the paddles needed to be pulled back and depressed simultaneously to fire. The paper printout showed some depression in his rhythm, and Kate saw some other potential anomalies, but with only two electrodes, she couldn’t tell much more. Brad looked in reasonably good shape for someone who had so narrowly escaped death.

Brad woke up angry though. The pain was back, his high was gone, and he realized this ambulance call would be reported and might get him fired. He had long suspected Kate or the driver of being the bank robber, and her report was now going to end his career. He looked sharply at Kate. “I know what you did!” He leapt up, suddenly certain he had found his robber, his hands around her throat. He pushed her over onto the other gurney, “Give me that money you stole, or I’m gonna squeeze you.” Kate tried to push him back with the paddles and her knees, but he was too heavy, too strong, and as his hands tightened on her throat; her eyes swam, and her head was thudding. As her consciousness began to slide from her, she desperately thumbed the paddle buttons.

Kate sat up, still holding the paddles, and watched Brad’s twitching body with trepidation. She rolled him over where he lay on the floor and placed the paddles back on his chest to see if his heart was working correctly after being shocked. The machine was dead, and the paper spool was still. She dropped the paddles and felt his neck for a pulse. Feeling none, Kate croaked to herself, “No carotid pulse, initiating CPR.” Kate banged his chest with the edge of her fist, no pulse. She started chest compressions, no pulse. She measured one of the artificial airways from her kit against his jawline, and thumbing his jaw open, slid and rotated the airway into position. She connected the bag and mask to an oxygen bottle and alternated between chest compressions and squeezing the bag until they reached the ER.

Hours later, the ED director sat down next to Kate on a bench in the waiting room. “Sorry Kate, he had underlying damage that was beyond what you or the rest of my team could fix.” She explained that Brad must have been using street drugs for some time, that his heart had been in bad shape already, and that the overdose was perhaps one event too many. She went through Kate’s responses, the things she did well, and where she might consider adjustments for the future.

Two days later, when Kate had handed over another patient to the ER staff, the director called her over, and handed her an envelope. “Congratulations, Kate. You have now met all the practicum requirements to qualify as a paramedic.” She ticked off the use of an artificial airway, cardioversion at scene, and correct use of forced oxygen using bag mask. Brad had pushed her over the line. That afternoon, Kate submitted her transcripts and the stack of practicum papers signed off by the ED physicians.

After a nail-biting month, she received her graduation certificate. Kate was a fully qualified paramedic in a small, distressed community and had a dark secret.

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Hubert and the Nice Rice

Hubert fired his girlfriend when her labradoodle dug up his herb garden. At first dumbfounded, she tried to argue that nothing was broken, but Hubert was quite adamant that she and her dog had to go. It was a matter of excess Yang in his life, and disruption to his herbs threw the Feng Shui of his home into a negative place.

Hubert was the director of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) at a 600-bed hospital in the city and ran CAM sections at 9 of the 15 facilities in the system. He was actively working on expanding to all facilities over the next few years. Initially dubious, the board soon grew to like the increased Press-Ganey scores, rising revenue, and low overhead that CAM units provided at the pilot facilities. CAM units required no expensive equipment, the practitioners were cheaper, and the insurance costs were far lower than units that used MRI, CAT, or had ORs. Under the marketing umbrella of “Total Care”, CAM was an effective and low-cost way to increase profits. All was not plain sailing though, and the hospital directors sometimes had sharp disagreements with Hubert – drugs, for example, automation, and the question of terminal care. Hubert felt strongly that drug companies were influencing care policies, that automation brought in questionable radiation technologies, and that spending one’s last days at home was far to be preferred than in an inpatient bed.

Hubert was himself a provider as well as handling the CAM administration, and was certified in chiropractic, homeopathy, and energy therapies. His home was organized to conform with Feng Shui principles, and he followed a mostly vegan diet. His hands-on approach included making his own homeopathic and herbal remedies, meals, and of course, incense.

Hubert felt torn at present, an exhausting tension between joy and dismay, pleasure and psychic pain. The pleasure and joy stemmed from having found a new source of organic foods, and the pain was from the hospital’s decision to introduce robots. Mount Dharma Organics was a hydroponics farm and natural supplies cooperative that he had found through a Facebook group of like-minded souls. Based in a rural area far from the toxins of city life, the co-op was reclaiming an old mining site that had closed in the mid-1800s. Part of their mission was to heal the landscape and restore the mountain where the tunnels and excavations had cut into the granite formations.

As a staunch believer in the modern adage of “Do your own research,” Hubert looked for customer testimonials, and then visited the farm for an audit. While the general feeling of the place was part of his evaluation, Hubert used a checklist to record compliance with Feng Shui principles, staff happiness, and product handling and manufacturing quality. He noted that true to their word, they were returning the mine to a natural state, planting trees and indigenous grasses, and were using some of the mine tunnels to grow organic mushrooms, store harvest in a cool and quiet environment, and draw water for the hydroponics from the ancient granite aquifer.

Two months ago, Hubert had ordered three 50lb bags of brown rice from the co-op, and the rice now formed the basis of many interwoven parts of his diet. Besides eating the rice as a dish, he boiled some down to make rice sheets, noodles, balls, and fermented some to make rice wine and vinegar. Being careful to waste as little as possible, Hubert used the water from soaking or washing the rice as a drink, as a hair rinse, and to water his herb and vegetable garden and ferns.

Around the time that the first robots entered service at the hospital, trundling up and down the corridors delivering medications, linens, and meals, Hubert noticed dark patches on his arms and chest. He could have sworn the skin on his hands had also become thicker. He was alarmed and scoured the internet and naturopathic websites for the potential effects of the 5G radio transmissions used by the robots. Other people in his chat groups agreed that 5G was the likely cause, and had various suggestions on how to heal the existing damage, and ways to prevent further harm.

Hubert started working from home more, and increased his daily intake of rice water and kombucha, as well as putting himself on a course of homeopathic pills. On the third week, he noticed several small growths on his chest and more starting on his hands. They looked a bit like warts or corns, and were darker than the surrounding skin. Feeling a bit panicked, Hubert consulted two fellow CAM practitioners, who felt that the warts were likely his body getting rid of toxins. On hearing that Hubert had also experienced watery diarrhea, one suggested colonic irrigation, and the other agreed, but added that it might be wise to add Brake Fern to his diet, since the sori under fern leaves resembled warts. They both recommended ginseng for the drowsiness he sometimes felt.

Hubert increased his rice water intake from 8 glasses a day to 12, added fern fiddles to his salad, and administered a series of three rice-water enemas. When he experienced a garlicky metallic taste, and felt abdominal pains, and was vomiting, he called them again, and all three concurred that it was the toxins working their way out of his body, and to continue with the enema treatment.

As the moon rose in a darkened sky, Hubert felt numbness in his fingertips and toes. He struggled to lift the phone and found he couldn’t dial the natural helpline. Nevertheless, he could clearly hear his colleagues talking, discussing his case. He agreed with them that 5G radiation was the best explanation for his symptoms, and they all laughed at the ignorance of the hospital board. Hubert felt exhausted, and curled up on the carpet. After a short sequence of seizures from the accumulated arsenic in the rice, Hubert died in his home, surrounded by his plants, his favorite books, and bathed in moonlight. All in balance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Free ebooks will also be announced in the newsletter.

https://hotmail.us16.list-manage.com/...