S Hunter - Longevity

Any researcher with the skills, supplies, and minimal equipment, and a scary minimum of understanding could perform illegal resets and enhancements for a pittance to try to support their research, hoping for some major discovery. The more enterprising researchers even found support from wealthy patrons. Investors, of a sort. Chris understood the unlicensed resets. People got desperate. But he’d never understand those who submitted and even paid for the unlicensed enhancements or volunteered for the research trials. None of them, he supposed, had ever seen or spoken to one of the pitiful victims of a badly fumbled black market molebiol procedure.

Andrews was shaking his head vigorously. “No, I would never… it was all just my own research. These cultures… There’s nothing dangerous. I swear.”

“Do you have someone specific you want to go to for the reversal?” Chris asked.

“No. It doesn’t matter,” Andrews said. “What’s going to happen to my dog? What’ll you do with Louie?”

Back to the dog. Louie. For a criminal mastermind the doctor was a bit too sanguine about both the jail time and the enhancement reversal, but then perhaps Andrews had more confidence than Chris did in the ability of his fellow molebiologist practitioners to poke and prod his neural circuits safely back to their innate level – hopefully by cautiously reversing the process described in Andrew’s notes. Good reason not to get too clever with encryption. In the reversed cases Chris had been able to follow-up on there was seldom any noticeable diminished capacity, but significant memory loss was common. Which brought them back to the dog.

“You don’t have a family member or a friend or co-worker he can stay with?

A year is a long time in a dog’s life; perhaps more so if the dog is especially intelligent,” he added, not unkindly.

Andrews was shaking his head again and his jaw had taken on a stubborn cast, although his eyes portrayed nothing but anxiety.

“Look, I know LLE has a reputation for being heartless,” Chris said, “but I’m not trying to get you to implicate someone else. We need to find a place to take the dog.”

“My wife and son died two years ago in a car accident. There’s no one else. You won’t let him be destroyed? You can’t. That’s just not right. We can’t have come to that yet. Louie’s just a good, smart dog,” Andrews said again.

The dog was standing there, looking Chris straight in the eye with that non-sentimental trust that seemed to be their unique gift. His tail was waving slowly as though caught in a breeze.

“Take him, please. He’s smart about people and he obviously trusts you. Please. I don’t care about the rest of what happens to me. I knew the consequences. Just take care of Louie. He’s a good dog.”

At the final mention of his name, Louie leaned forward and placed his head on his owner’s knee, pushing Andrews one step closer to the precipice of a complete break-down. Suddenly, Chris had had enough of this case. A hermit, yes, but a benign, idealistic hermit who had probably been doing research on something geared to save mankind from itself and whose only concern now was for his dog. On an uncharacteristic impulse, and with a premonition that he was unsealing a whole can of heartache, Chris opened his mouth and let the words out.

“All right. I’ll see to Louie. Don’t worry about him.”

After that, Andrews pulled himself together and stumbled around his tiny efficiency, eagerly bestowing Louie’s bed and bowls and leash, and pulling a huge half-empty bag of kibble out of a closet.

“He gets two scoops twice a day. And one of the dental treats after each meal.”

Which is how, when they finally all got down to the curb, while Chris stood there with his arms full of dog accessories and Louie on a leash bedside him, as the uniforms assisted Andrews and dumped an evidence pack full of memotabs with molebiol notes into their car, for the first time in Chris’ almost 80 years as a cop the last words from the prisoner just before the door slid closed were a sincere “Thank you.” Andrew’s eyes met Chris’ and then, lingeringly, Louie’s. The car locked onto the glassene strip and silently merged into traffic.

Last night, arriving at his own small efficiency with Louie and all of the dog supplies in hand, Chris looked at the place with fresh, slightly bemused eyes. It was a disturbing experience. His efficiency was not much bigger than Andrews’ and was similarly piled with notes, although most of them were concentrated on the large table that dominated the room and served Chris as a desk. Only the corner of the table closest to the kitchenette was clear so he could use it for dining when he occasionally sat down to eat. Otherwise, anything beyond the minimal necessities were remnants of Karen’s occupancy: her antique books and a few little things that had meant something to her. It had been a long time since he’d had any visitors. He took a moment to calculate. It had been several decades since he’d had any visitors.

Louie had spent the first few minutes scouting the place and then gone over to an open space near the door, yawned loudly with kind of a tenor sigh, and sprawled on the rug with his head on his forepaws. He stared at Chris for another two minutes before falling asleep.

Now, are you going on instinct alone or have you figured out something that’s still eluding me? Look around you. Do I look like someone who should have a dog? Chris remembered thinking, and he’d gone back to his notes at the working end of the table. As he acquired new information he frequently reviewed the contents in his files with the hope that some juxtaposition of the data would yield an insight or a pattern.

The particular case file he had been shuffling last night had been an intermittent preoccupation for over 3 years, not from any special concern for the victim, whose death had been ruled accidental, but because Chris was convinced there was something more going on, something that was a matter for LLE. So far he couldn’t even find evidence that the death wasn’t accidental, other than his unshakable conviction that the victim’s father, one John Bedford, was a total slopswad. As sometimes happened, he had finally fallen asleep with his head on the table resting on a memotab.

This morning Louie was back at the door.

“There’s housebroken and there’s housebroken. Which one are you?”

At Chris’ question Louie pawed at the two deadbolts, only one of which yielded to the pressure, and then put his paw flat on the palm plate.

“Ah. That kind,” Chris said slowly, impressed in spite of himself. “Just a little problem with sensor incompatibility. And tough luck, missing that opposable thumb.”

A brisk, productive walk, a quick breakfast, and Louie was back at the door, sitting and waiting. Chris, whose morning rituals were a little more numerous and time-consuming, found himself the focus of a lot of patient observation as he caught up. He studied Louie’s expression. There was expectancy there; he wasn’t imagining it.

So much of his work dealt with bringing the hammer down on relatively harmless people like Andrews. Now he’d complicated his uncomplicated life by bringing this very bright dog into his home and he couldn’t fool himself by thinking that throwing Louie a few chew toys before he went off to work for twelve hours or more was going to cut it. Andrews had probably taken Louie everywhere and discussed molebiol research with him.

“Louie, I’ve got to go to work.”

The expectancy didn’t falter, and Louie’s ears swiveled forward with the word “work.”

Chris sighed. He was already talking to the dog. “Look, all I can do is kick it out there and see how far it goes.”