Nits and Nano

Nits and Nano

 

   Chapter 12

 

  

Cassie’s next couples of days were busy. The security breach happening right before the holidays had been a lucky stroke. The student body was busy getting ready to head home and the excitement of missing instructors and professors could be overlooked.

 

The former security chief was removed and he was informed that DHS would insure that he would never again work in any form of security. Three prospective new chiefs were brought in for interviews. Cassie was part of the interview process and she found she could use her deep scanning abilities to determine when they lied.

 

Then she used a form of binary search to narrow the lie down to the truth.

 

“Sir, looking over your application and resume I am sure that you lied to us. Now, some lies are harmless; others are not as harmless, as I’m sure you know. So let’s determine which are which. I’m going to ask a few questions. Failure to answer will be a ‘no’ so there will be no unanswered questions.

 

“Have you ever committed a felony even if nobody else knew of it?”

“No I have not.”

“Was it a violent felony?”

“I have not committed a felony!”

“Was money involved?”

He just sat there with his mouth closed.

“Was it sexual in nature?”

“Was a member of your family involved?”

“My opinion is that we turn this applicant down, he is most likely a sexual predator. He would use his position to force female employees into sexual liaisons.”

 

“Who do you think you are? I have never committed a felony!”

 

Cassie stood up and leaned toward the man, “I am Special Deputy US Marshal Howard! When you leave here, I will institute a deep background search of you and any sexual crimes around you.” She had, without thought, thrown back the left side of her jacket where her badge and credentials hung along with her pistol.

 

He stared at her left hip, turning pale as he did so. Then he turned and rushed out of the office.

 

Cassie sat back down. Her face focused on the door that had just slammed shut.  One of the assistants to the DHS agent in charged was talking on a phone in the corner. He hung up and bent to whisper to his boss.

 

“There have been three sexual assaults and murders of female employees that worked with him. We have notified the FBI of our suspicions. But how did you do that?”

 

“You ever see that TV show ‘Lie to me’?” 

“Well by telling him that saying nothing was saying ‘No’ he was forced to try to answer, but I could tell when he thought he was telling a lie.”

 

“By continuing to ask questions, I narrowed down his lies. He knew he had committed a felony. It was violent, but did not involve money. It did involve sex, but was not on a member of his family which is the most common sexual violence.”

 

“The background report showed he had never had a complaint filed on him; nor been part of an investigation in relation to a crime.  I am betting that a deep background with these suspicions will show that other females have been assaulted and murdered at other jobs where he has worked.  He has to move along though or suspicion would finally narrow to him. ”

 

“Marshal, this one interview with you present, would pay for your inclusion if we had to hire you to participate.”

 

Days later none of the applicants had been found acceptable, though none was as spectacularly denied as that first one. However, serious questions rose on the suitability of any of them.

 

“Marshal Howard, could you take over the position of security chief here?”  The DHS AIC asked her.

 

“No Sir, I have a full load about to hit me. Within a year and a half I will earn my BS and have half my MS done. I’ve got a proposal for you, though: Contract with CHH Security and Protection to handle the security here on site. The President of the company is a Special Deputy US Marshal; the Chairman of the Board is also. The company does close scrutiny of all its employees with spot checks of background routinely.”

 

“See if that would be feasible?”

 

He sat there thinking, and then he looked at her as his eyes widened. “That’s you! You are the Chairman of the Board.  So we would basically be contracting with you!”

 

Cassie smiled at him. “But not with me personally! We use a military ranking system; Clint Wilson is DOA, Director of Administration, and is President of the company and a Special Deputy US Marshal. He is the effective commander. I’m in charge of SOC, Special Operation Command, as well as the Chairman of the Board. He does not give commands to me, and I make suggestions to him.”

 

 

“I would not have supervisory oversight of whoever he puts in charge. That person would be in charge of the site.  Since I will be working the lab as a scientist and not a security person, we need a ‘Chinese wall’ here so I am not in a conflict of interest.  I certainly can report anything I see to Clint for follow up by the Security team.”

 

 

“Let me kick this up the ladder to my boss. It’s for sure that with you doing observation it would be a lot harder to pull what was going on here again. We busted three separate industrial espionage and two foreign espionage operations in this one sweep.”

 

Cassie thought that there would be no decision made until after the New Year, so she prepared to wait. This did not mean she sat back relaxing until she heard back. It meant that she concentrated on her studies. Her Graduate Tutor was now on her payroll as a temporary hire. She found him a room at her main house and saw to it that he made it to his classes. But approximately eight hours a day he lectured her.

 

In her one nanotechnology class she saw a shortcut for binding elements closer together. The instructor ignored her suggestion.  

 

Cassie took a couple of hours in the Research Building to run her math past the computer and it checked out. The next day, in her weekly meeting with the Dean of the Physics department, she showed him her printouts and what she had suggested to her instructor.

 

Over the next week her paper was published in the Nanotechnology Under-Review magazine. The Dean’s name was below hers. That did not bother her as the magazine would have never considered publishing it with just her name on the paper. The College applied for a patent. The college legal agreement with its researchers was 50% to the college and the other 50% divided equally with all the participants in the research. This did not bother Cassie at all; she was here to learn.

 

Knowing how much she was missing being with her family over the holiday, Cassie took care that as many of her people as possible were given leave over the holidays. That turned out to not be as many as she had first thought. The majority of those working for CHH were without families.

 

Cassie suggested to Clint that maybe a Christmas festival be held on the estate. For the next three weeks the estate got very quiet with no construction. She had no school except that she would go into the Research Building two or three times a week to keep up her oversight of the remaining security onsite. This security was temporarily in place from DHS.

 

Then the accident happened.

 

_________________________

 

 

Cassie slowly regained consciousness. Her head ached, as did her whole body. She automatically reached out to scan and she screamed. She felt compressed, as if the world had fallen on top of her. She blanked out.

 

In the distance she heard a voice, “Cassie, oh Cassie sweetheart. I am here baby. I am here.”

 

Well of course she was. Her mother was always there for her! Cassie felt her hand being squeezed tightly and squeezed back.

“She’s waking up!” she heard he mother scream.

“Sarah dear, don’t get excited.” Her dad said.

“She squeezed my hand, George!”

“Good! I have been scared. She has been unconscious for days. The Doctors said they can find nothing wrong, but a heck of lot they know!”

 

“Yeah, George our girl is unique.”

“I can hear you.” Cassie mumbled.

“Oh My God! Did you hear her George?”

“I heard her!”

Cassie felt kisses being pressed on both sides of her face. The pain had subsided. There were just a few aches. The headache was almost gone. She slowly opened her “eyes”. There were her Mother and Dad. She sighed in relief. She remembered the pain that had hit her when she had first tried to scan. She remembered how she had overdone it and lost most of the ability until she had learned to push just so far, and then relax before trying more.

 

Cassie extended her scan further and further but slowly. She gripped her mother’s hand tightly. “Cassie! Please dear, not so hard.” She heard as if from far away. She was in the Hospital near the college, but she had reached all the way to the college with her normal 360 degree scan. That was over 3 miles! Normally she could only scan this way to a distance of half a mile.

 

She then began narrowing her scan down and reaching in the direction of the estate which was nearly 15 miles from the campus. ‘Oh My God!’ she thought, as her scan ‘saw’ the whole estate and then began to pick out details. Clint and June were hugging. ‘Wait! When had June arrived here?’

 

“When did June get here? I thought that she was not coming until around April?”

 

“June? Who is June? Cassie?” her mother asked.

“Egh, she was my assistant up in Idaho, she is Clint’s girl friend.”

 

“I have not met her Cassie, so I don’t know when got here. Is she outside?”

“No, she is at the Estate.” She smiled, “She and Clint are kissing.”

 

Cassie heard the steady beeping from the medical machines that were all connected to her. Neither her mother nor her father said a thing. Cassie did what had become a routine habit the last month or so; she scanned herself.

 

The muscles of her body were all recovering from bruising. Some of her organs had taken a beating as well. In fact her body appeared like she imagined one would look like after a real hard beating. “What had happened to her?” she wondered. What about her sensitivity? Had it changed? She reached for the pendant that she wore, feeling for the boundary between the gold and silver that it was made from.

 

Her scan slid right along the boundary and went deeper then she had ever gone. It was empty. There was nothing there except for a few strange things that came and went with no apparent movement. Then she ‘saw’ it: a massive object. Then it hit her, this was an atom of gold! She looked closer and it grew as her scan got narrower. She saw the neutrons and protons that made up the nucleus of the atom and the empty space between them.

 

She saw the 79 electrons.  They were there, then gone as they shifted orbits; there was no actual movement. One moment they were in one orbit then they were in another! It was the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle in action.

 

She felt a sharp pain in her face and pulled her awareness back. “Cassie! Come back here!” Her mother was almost screaming in her ear.

 

“Mom! What are you doing? That hurt!”

“Cassie you just seemed to fade away! It scared me!” Her mother was crying!

 

“I’m sorry mom. But my sight has changed; its range has increased tremendously and my sensitivity has increased by orders of magnitude. What happened to me?”

 

“There was an accident at the Research Building you were in. The DHS thinks somebody may have put a bomb in place, maybe one of the disgruntle ex-employees or one of the applicants that got turned down. They have been as anxious as we were for you to wake up. They are hoping that you can shed some light on the problem.”

 

“Well, first, it was not a bomb. I remember that I scanned the whole building before entering it. I would have spotted a bomb. I had no feeling of unease, like I usually get when someone is about to do something against me. So it was not an overt act. I was doing a walk through.”

 

“I go to each floor, walking into each office to check if everything is on schedule and to ask if anything unusual is going on. A lot of the lab workers don’t like it. They think I am being nosey as they don’t know what my real position there is.”

 

“I had just entered the nano-biological lab where they are working with using biological material to work on the nano level; retroviruses and such. I had a feeling that they had been hiding something from me over this last month.”

 

“Grace! She was with me! What happened to her?”

“She’s okay Cassie! She hardly got hurt; she had your back and the thing that happened came from in front of you. We, your Dad and me, did not know where you were when this happened. They have not told us.”

 

“Grace has been kicking herself. She keeps saying that she was your shield and that she should have taken it, whatever it was.”

 

“Wait…” Cassie did another scan of her body; this time she used her new sensitivity. There deep within her very cell structure was what appeared to be a virus. It was everywhere. The virus had crossed the brain barrier and every neuron had the virus inside of it. Her body was saturated with the virus. She could not find a single cell of her body that did not have the virus inside it. She looked closer, even the bone cells!

 

When she really took notice, she saw that her teeth were repairing themselves. Where she had had fillings, the fillings were being pushed out of the previous cavity and the teeth were filling in the old cavity with new dental growth.

 

A closer examination of the DNA helix within her cells showed that they were now undamaged. The DNA in the cells are under tremendous stress, with the need to split with every cell duplication. Solar radiation, cosmic radiation and normal background radiation could all cause mutation of the cells.

 

Now hers were completely undamaged. Every cell in her body was healthy. This was not normal. Just walking out in sunlight would normally damage thousands and thousands of skin cells.

 

Cassie reached out to the Research Building and scanned it thoroughly. The Nano-biological lab was completely destroyed.

The center of the destruction appeared as if a thousand gallons of hydrochloric acid had been dumped on it. But then as you got further from that center it began to appear as if a bomb had exploded and not just dissolved.  It reminded her of what the science fiction writers had portrayed as what an attack of nano dissolver would do; except where an explosion seemed to have happened.

Then she had it. The nano-bots dissolvers had released a lot of energy when they had taken apart the molecules at the center. The sudden release of energy was like an explosion!

That was why the DHS thought a bomb might have gone off.  Her scan found no nanobots roaming the building. Cassie thought for a minute. She hoped that all the documentation had been destroyed. If what had happened to her was as powerful as she feared, it would be too dangerous to the human race for this technology to be released at this time.

 

That virus was repairing her body completely; she expected that it would soon lead to her vision being repaired if it was not a psychological condition.

 

“Mom, get me out of here before the doctors learn too much about me. Where are my things, credentials and my guns, my comm units?”

 

“Your people took them.”

“Get Clint dad, tell him I have to get out of here now. If he objects, just say ‘Security’ that should get him moving.”

“Tell Schultz to get me fully dressed as soon as possible.”

Cassie lay there observing her Dad in action. As soon as he finished with her people he started on the Hospital.

 

Five minutes after he started making phone calls, SSgt Schultz, Cpl. Perkins and Sgt Townsend entered her room.

“Where have you people been? I am laying here stark naked! Where are my guns?”

“We were down the hall in a waiting room, with the door to your room under our surveillance.” SSgt Schultz told her.

 

Grace handed her the backup holster with its Glock. Cassie ejected the magazine and un-chambered a round.

Clicking the magazine back into the pistol she chambered a round then ejected the magazine and loaded the loose round back into the magazine then reseated the magazine. Now the pistol was loaded and she was ready. A nurse rushed into the room

 

“All of you people have to leave!”

 

Sarah looked at the nurse and said. “Yes we know and we will as soon as you get my daughter unhooked from all these machines. Then we will all be going.”

 

“What! She can’t leave. The doctors have not released her yet.”

“In about 5 minutes we all are leaving. If you do not have her off those machines we will sue this hospital for every dime it has ever made and will make in the future. We might settle for ownership, and then we will bulldoze it to the ground.” George, her father, said.

 

The nurse turned and ran from the room. Minutes later she returned with hospital security guards. “Now, you people will get out of this room!”

 

Cassie looked at Schultz and reached out her hand, ”My Credentials.”

 

Schultz opened her ever present briefcase and took out her credential case and handed it to Cassie.

 

Cassie held them up facing the security guards, “You are interfering in a Federal Investigation and will be charged with Federal Obstruction of Justice, a 5 to 10 years sentence. I suggest you get out of here now. DHS should be somewhere in the building and they are not as nice as I am.”

 

“Nurse, get these things out and off of me. Now!”

 

Nobody moved for a minute. Then a voice from the doorway spoke up.

 

“I am Special Agent in Charge Blake of the Department of Homeland Security, and she is right I am nowhere as nice as she is. Get her out of that bed! Now!”

Everybody looked up as Agent Blake and five of his agents stepped into the room which was getting very crowded.

 

The Nurse began to slowly move to the bed looking around, wide eyed, at all the people in the room. Then she focused on doing what she knew how to do. Soon Cassie was completely unhooked. Throwing the sheet back, she slipped out of the bed and stood completely nude in front of the world.

 

Grace laid the bag she was carrying on the foot of the bed and opened it. From inside she handed Cassie a pair of panties and a bra. Then, piece by piece, with her mother’s help, she dressed in a full dress uniform. Her belt with holsters, Glocks and her credentials was firmly in place. Grace did the final bit, the triple braided gold chain holding the lapels together.

 

“Agent Blake, the accident was caused by the experiment in the nano-biological lab. They had not been telling me the full details on what they were doing. We need to round up every person that worked in that lab. A virus could have escaped. If so, we need to find out what it is supposed to do. I’m almost willing to bet that we will be missing some personnel that took trips out of the country just before or after the accident or have just disappeared.”

 

Agent Blake whirled on one of his agents, “Davis! Get on it.”

 

“Marshal Howard, this place is giving me an ulcer! I have fifteen laboratories under my jurisdiction and this one place is causing me fifteen times the problems of any of them.”

 

“What did your boss say about the security contract?” She asked as they walked out of the hospital.

 

“Oh, you would not know! We have Okayed it. Your man has been negotiating with the College about the security contract.  I think the Chancellor has been holding off to talk to you first.  Also, we found out that the former security chief went around to every department telling them that a lab worker was in fact a Deputy US Marshal. That how come so many violation with CD, papers and video all were leaving the same day. They were trying to make hay before getting burnt.”

“Ouch, I’m lucky I was not ambushed in the Research Building!”

 

“Oh Well thanks on the contract. We need to get that in play as fast as possible. I want my people over that facility like bees on flowers. I am going all futuristic on them. They will not be able to see who my people are. There is not going to be any fraternization between security and workers. The workers should have no interaction with security that is not related to security.”

 

“I am also going to increase the tracking of experiments. That one in the nano-biological lab should never have been done in that building. It should have been in a biohazard facility. I am majoring in Physics. I’m sure not going to be working with fissionable material in the center of a city!”

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

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My thanks to Grumpybear for his editing and proofing help. But the final results are mine and all criticism should be loaded onto my shoulders.

 

© Virgil Lee Fuqua III and ‘vlfouquet.wordpress’, 2008-2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vlfouquet and Virgil Lee Fuqua III with appropriate and specific direction to the original contents