Emery Miller, Sergeant Mike Imfeld, Nancy Kiley, and Jagen Cater, may they rest in peace. Kiley’s staff survived because the threat posed by region-wide rioting ended when their desal filters came back on line. Kidney patients regained their bearings and backed away from renal failure. Diabetics found their insulin levels returning to normal.
My parents were dead; Colleen Lowell was dead; the Eva Rozen I knew was dead and so was her doppelganger. I was alone.
33
DEAD MAN’S SWITCH
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
MARCH 4-7, 2045
Twenty-one point eight seconds after Eva Rozen plunged to her death from her Boston brownstone, an electronic Presence awoke. It had been programmed to lie dormant unless a signal from Eva’s datasleeve ended. It was a dead man’s switch, triggered by Eva’s death.
The Presence, a sub-routine within Eva’s home datapillar, reached out with electronic senses. It noted human biological signatures in the Rozen mansion. Immediately, it returned to dormancy. The detection cycle went unnoticed, lasting a mere two milliseconds. The Presence repeated its cycle of animation, search, and dormancy until there were no indications of any complex organic life forms in the dwelling, some three days later.
Finding itself alone for the four seconds required to carry out preprogrammed instructions, the Presence sent hundreds of data-burst signals. Most of these went to financial institutions around the world. Three found human targets and sent pulses to their datasleeves.
One found the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, slipped through her sleeve’s security and pinged an urgent message. The second reached a newly-appointed Special Prosecutor. He was in a press conference and would not see the message for seven minutes, during which time all hell would break loose in the governor’s office.
The last signal activated software that had been downloaded days earlier, when Eva Rozen pushed gently, one final time, on Dana Ecco’s forearm. Dana’s sleeve accepted this last inbound transmission without notifying the preoccupied scion of the Cruz-Ecco family.
34
SPECIAL PROSECUTOR
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
MARCH 7, 2045
Suffolk County District Attorney Sean Doyle, elected to the first of the public offices he coveted, had progressed in the years since Jim Ecco’s trial for assault and subsequent conviction for disorderly conduct. Doyle rose steadily through the legal system and he won the DA’s office by a comfortable margin two years earlier. Now the legal and political powers that controlled the Commonwealth of Massachusetts believed that the best choice for a Special Prosecutor in the matter of the Great Washout was Sean Doyle.
Granted, there was the small matter of determining exactly whom to prosecute, but Sean Doyle would be the People’s Champion once again.
Doyle kept his trademark navy pinstriped suit, changing only the material to a lustrous nano-silk befitting his enhanced station in life. His red and blue striped club tie still formed itself into a perfect Windsor knot which never loosened or came askew. He no longer needed enhancements: the gray hairs that salted his blond curls fit perfectly with his image of energetic maturity. He strode with purpose into the State House and walked to a podium to greet the media. The event was important enough that the reporters attended it in person, rather than in virtuality.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brief statement. First, let me thank all of the emergency personnel who helped avert an even greater catastrophe than we might have suffered. My staff is working with governments around the world to ensure that water and medical supplies will not be interrupted again. We restored service to NMech customers just hours ago. Now it is time for an accounting and I can assure the public that we are doing everything in our power to bring those responsible for this vicious act of terrorism to justice.”
“Three persons of interest were killed during what is being called the Great Washout. We believe that they may have had knowledge of how this catastrophe was committed. We have pledged every resource to learning exactly what happened so that we can prevent another attack. The combined resources of the City of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States government have been placed at my disposal to ferret out the truth and take appropriate action.”
“I will not take questions today. Again, let me thank the emergency responders who prevented a much worse tragedy, and the valiant efforts of those, who, under my direction, stopped the Great Washout. We have begun to restore normalcy to the world.”
35
GRAY GOO
FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO
The family home was now mine although keeping it would prove to be a challenge. My parents’ estate, including the house and their NMech stock had been held in a trust. Their wealth was to transfer to me upon their deaths. On paper, I was one of the richest people in the world.
A battle over my inheritance had already begun. Sean Doyle, Governor Azevedo, the mayor of Boston, Congress, and an army of attorneys were seeking to pry it all away. I was too young, immature, too vulnerable to inherit property. A custodian should hold and manage my wealth until I was twenty-one.
Never mind that my education in wealth-management was more thorough than the self-appointed guardians’ knowledge. They wanted my parents’ estate and would find a way to wrest it from me. Just being in control, even for a few years, would be lucrative. And the possibility of carving up the estate for their own purposes made the prospect of a bruising fight worthwhile.
Eva’s share of the company was in dispute. The City of Boston lay claim to it as did the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and several agencies of the United States government. Sean Doyle assigned himself the ambitious task of trying to find a legal precedent by which he could appoint himself executor of Eva’s estate. Then there were the lawsuits. It would take years to probate her holdings and to settle with the millions who suffered at her hand—a legal limbo that would prove frustrating to all except to the attorneys who poured their best billable efforts into tangling and untangling Eva’s affairs.
The ersatz beneficiaries did not fail to consider that the portion of Eva’s holdings and my parents’ estate included large blocks of NMech stock. If the company failed, the value of the estates would be slashed. They had a vested interest both in keeping NMech alive and in appropriating it.
I focused on my parents’ legacy, not the estate, on their memory, not their money. I used my ghosting skills to have their bodies released from custody then slipped electronically into the pillar of a funeral home and had their remains picked up and delivered to our home. Our home? My home. Now they lay interred near the tree-lined edge of a pond where the Muddy River trailed one last streak of wildness within a great city.