Dale Brown - Puppet Master

He’d only taken a single sip when his cell phone began to buzz. It was in his pocket, set to vibrate — which in itself was weird, because he had no way of feeling it.

Everything was different in this world.

It was a Boston number. He didn’t recognize it, but decided to answer anyway. Maybe it was a doctor — or the hospital calling to tell him there had been a mistake; he wasn’t supposed to go home.

“Hello? Johnny?”

“Who is this?”

“Chelsea Goodman. I stopped by to see you. They told me you were released.”

“I was. I am.”

“Oh. That’s great.”

Johnny felt as if he should say something, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

“You should come to the office,” said Chelsea. “Everyone would love to meet you.”

“I’d like that,” said Johnny. “When?”

“Whenever you want.”

“How about now?”

“Well, it’s Saturday, but… sure. A lot of people are here. Including the boss.”

“Maybe I’ll be there in a while, then,” he said. “What’s the address?”

The outside of the Smart Metal building was very nineteenth century. Brick interrupted by steel cross beams, large windows that caught the sun and reflected the nearby harbor, a shiny metal roof with thick standing seams and snow guards.

Inside, Smart Metal was the future, and beyond.

While the shell of the old factory building had been restored, the interior had been gutted and completely rebuilt. It was now a building within a building, sleeker than anything Johnny had ever seen. The entrance lobby rose five stories above street level. Thick panels covered with granite rose to the ceiling; steel and glass walkways ran the length of the interior. Behind the panels on the first four floors were labs; there were offices on the fifth. Thick glass pipes ran across the top of each hallway, a ceiling of conduit, optic fiber, and HVAC trunks.

For all its high-tech look, cooling the building was a major problem, Chelsea told Johnny as she led him through; though the most powerful computers were confined to the basement “processing farm,” there were workstations and even mainframes scattered throughout.

“It got so bad last year Mr. Massina assigned me to write an algorithm that would take into account how much the computers were being used,” she said, pausing at the elevator on the first floor. “Since then it’s been better. Everyone sets their lab at a different temperature, though, which drives the maintenance people batty.”

The elevator arrived. Like everything else in the place, it was cutting edge, both in appearance and in function. There were no buttons anywhere on the exotic wood paneling; you spoke the floor where you were going. There was a security benefit to that — the elevator would not take you to a floor if you weren’t authorized to go there, explained Chelsea.

“Can’t you just take the stairs?” asked Johnny.

“Doors won’t open, except in an emergency. If you weren’t with me, you couldn’t get out of the visitors’ area on the first floor. That’s why you don’t need a pass.”

“You’re my pass.”

“That’s right.”

“I better not let you out of my sight.”

Chelsea led him out into another hallway, this one on the fourth floor. So far, they had seen labs where mechanical birds flew through mazes and an electric piano was hooked up to a computer that was composing its own music — melodic but somewhat boring.

“This is the biomechanical lab,” said Chelsea. “This where your next heart will be grown.”

“Grown?”

Chelsea smiled, then waved him through the door.

Full-spectrum fluorescents bathed the interior of the building with light so intense that Johnny had to shut his eyes so they could adjust. When he blinked them open, he found himself standing at the edge of a long row of what looked like oversized aquarium tanks, the sort a fish farm might use when breeding small fish. The interior of the room was very humid, and the place had a sweet smell unlike the rest of the building.

“Nutrient baths,” said Chelsea, stepping over to one of the large tanks. “Think of them as large, artificial wombs.”

Johnny followed her. The tank, a good three meters long and another meter wide, looked empty, except for a pair of marbles nestled in what looked like rubber material at the bottom.

They weren’t marbles.

“Eyes,” said Chelsea. “They’re grown from pig cells. The difficult thing is the interface.”

“Human eyes?” asked Johnny.

“They will be. Eventually. We have a lot of work to do.”

She continued down the tanks. Two lab technicians were working at the far end, running a series of tests on handheld instruments whose wires snaked into one of the tanks. Chelsea waved at them but didn’t interrupt. She led Johnny around the tanks to a bench where a set of large flat screens, each roughly eighty inches diagonally, were lined up in front of keyboards. Screen savers played on the screens, creating multi-stringed parabolas that morphed from red to green to blue and back. They looked like webs made by spiders tripping on LSD.

Chelsea tapped one of the keyboards. The screen behind it blanked. She bent over and began typing rapidly.

That girl has a beautiful shape, Johnny thought. He’d noticed it before, but something about the way she leaned forward now made lust erupt in him.

It scared him a little. He wasn’t sure he could act on that impulse anymore. It was the one area he hadn’t talked about with the doctors — an oversight born of shyness and fear.

But she was beautiful.

“This is what your mechanical heart looks like,” said Chelsea as a three-dimensional image rotated on the screen. “And this is what the next generation will look like.”

The device on the left side of the screen looked like a pair of inverted and intertwined trumpet mouthpieces made of white plastic. The bottom openings were fitted with corded plastic tubes; the tops looked not unlike the fittings on home plumbing. Between these two carbon and fiber constructs was a plastic-covered collection of circuitry, artificial nerves that not only governed the pump but were also grafted to Johnny’s nervous system and a set of leads that could be used to test and monitor the unit externally.

His was handmade, fitted, and programmed specifically to his needs. All of them were, adapted from a basic but flexible blueprint.

On the right side of the screen was something that looked exactly like a “real” heart except for the wires and the nubbed fitting on the bottom.

“How long before that’s ready?” Johnny asked.

“Mmmmm… Hard to say. The growing techniques are still in their infancy.”

“Is this what you do?”

“No. My field is AI — artificial intelligence. I work primarily with the robots. But I do a little of everything. That’s what I love about working here.”

“I want to work here,” Johnny told her. He felt he was gushing almost — he was intrigued and excited by everything he saw, and it was hard to hold his emotions in check. “I want to be part of this. How do I join?”

“As scientist?”

“As — security or something like that. Are you still working on the ATM case?”

“Well…”

“You are,” said Johnny. “I can help on that.”

“We’re working on it, but not with the Bureau. Not officially,” she told him. “Your boss didn’t want us involved.”

“Well, I can work with you on that. I can be involved. You’re not an investigator, but I am. Who do I talk to?” Johnny asked. “Mr. Massina?”

“I don’t know that there are openings.”

“He told me if I wanted anything, to see him. Is he in?”