For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

November 17, 2031

It was almost three months before Tammy saw much of Eddie again. At first she thought he was just avoiding her, embarrassed about their conversation. But after a few weeks she realized it wasn’t just her, and it wasn’t just Eddie. His entire staff had become almost clandestine in their movements. Occasionally she would catch a glimpse of one of their distinctive white and blue DARPA lab coats leaving a conference room. More often she spotted them standing wearily by the coffee machine at the end of the hall. But no matter how casually she would wander in their direction they would trudge away, dark circled eyes peering over a hot paper cup of coffee. She never made it close enough to engage before they would swipe their badge at a red door and disappear.

Although she had never been there since she lacked clearance, she knew that the red doors led to the labs on the bottom floor. That was where they kept the more dangerous technologies or biological agents they worked with. So she had resigned herself to the fact that they were working on something important and tried to keep busy with her own duties.

In the meantime, Jessica continued to show remarkable improvement. She attacked her physical therapy with a fervor Tammy wished she could get out of all of her patients. There were currently four other trauma victims in her ward, but right now she only expected two to live. Lieutenant Rogers in bay seven had lost both of his arms and an eye in an IED explosion near Kabul two weeks ago. His internal injuries had compounded things somewhat, but the third degree burns over seventy percent of his body were what worried her. The trauma alone from an injury like that usually claimed its victim in the first forty-eight hours. They had done everything they could for him but if something didn’t change soon she expected she would lose him.

Two doors down from Rogers, Sergeant Clark in bay five had a critical brain injury that wasn’t responding to the hormonal treatment that had restored Tammy’s health. The team had done everything possible for the poor man, even tripling the dosages. But despite their best efforts and a brilliant surgery by Sallinger he remained in a persistent coma. His most recent tests had revealed very little brain activity and she knew that if something didn’t change in the next few days Sallinger would pull the plug. Those were the worst for her. All of her medical training told her they were already gone and that disconnecting their life support was just letting their body catch up. But she could never get over the fact that there was a human being there in the bed whose heart was beating; who had a mother, and a father, and possibly children who loved them. But after someone in scrubs flipped a switch and recited textbook condolences to the family that person stopped being all of that and became nothing more than memories and heartache.

Captain Daverson in bay four was recovering nicely from multiple crush injuries and thanks to treatment at RAMBUS they expected him to make a full recovery. She was hoping the same for her only other civilian patient, a contractor named Danielle Carter who had been blown off of a radio tower in Baghdad by an insurgent mortar. The treatments she had undergone were more radical, but showed even more promise than Eddie’s first method, causing a lot of excitement amongst the staff. They knew that every success they had was a major victory. They only got a few patients every year because only very those with very unique clearances could be brought in. There were exceptions of course, but generally speaking this meant they only got a dozen or so chances to try things each year. Each successful use of an experimental treatment became important because it brought them one step closer to field deployment. That could mean saving thousands of lives. That potential to save soldiers from what would have been fatal or crippling injuries kept them well funded and protected from public scrutiny. It was the only comfort she could find when one was lost in her ward. So she clung to it as justification for some of the things they did.

But thankfully, Jessica had been different. It had only required a double strength round of Eddie’s original treatment formula to bring her to a point where standard treatment could take over. If she could complete her PT regimen over the next two weeks, they would most likely transfer her back to UC Hospital for the remainder of her inpatient care. Tammy was torn about this, feeling glad for the girl and her family, but also knowing she’d miss her. In the last four months the girl’s spunk, courage and adorable attitude had endeared her to everyone. One would think that recent events would have made the staff wary of her, but the opposite seemed to be true. Everyone greeted her a bit more cheerfully now and their expressions of affection felt far more genuine than before. They had also lost a lot of that “going through the motions” attitude and seemed to be caring about their jobs again. She guessed that the Director’s briefing may have motivated them through their sense of duty, but the girl had reminded them of their moral obligation. That tended to prompt a lot of good hard looks in the mirror in a way no pep talk ever could. In addition, her return to her normal sunny disposition and gritted determination had made it clear that she held no ill will.

The effect the first day had been an immediate and almost grateful relaxation across the base. Even Sallinger seemed close to normal after he spent time in her room. It was so odd that Tammy overheard one of the nurses joking about actually seeing him smile. Tammy had joined in later to assure them it wasn’t true because the world hadn’t ended - a full blown smile from that man had to be one of the seven signs of the apocalypse.

Then one morning, after Jessica had spent an hour in the wave pool, Tammy was wheeling the girl back to her room when her comm sounded. So flipping the switch on its side she sent the comm audio to her earbud. “Senior staff to C-Seven. Charge Nurse Bowlin to transport patient Saylor to C-Seven. Blue Zone Three Security to notify, transport, and escort family of patient Saylor to C-Seven. All STAT.”

This was highly unusual and Tammy couldn’t help but feel a small knot of tension in her stomach as she switched routes to head to the second elevator bank. “Hey, where are we going? Aren’t we going back to my room?“, Jessica asked. “Sorry hun”, Tammy replied, “They just asked us to go to a meeting upstairs. I’m sure it’s nothing.” The girl was quiet for a moment and Tammy could tell she was thinking by the tilt of her little blonde head. “Am I going home?“, she asked, craning her head around to look up at Tammy. “I don’t know sweetie”, she replied. “I’m not sure why they asked us to come.” Jessica reached out to push the elevator “up” call button with her good hand, and then asked, “If I go home will you come visit me?”

Tammy knelt down to get eye to eye with her before replying “Well pixie dust. You know there are a lot of people here who need me too, and new people come in all the time. But I promise that when you get new legs I’ll be there to see you walk out of the hospital.” The look the girl rewarded her with as they rolled into the elevator would have given sunshine a serious run for its money, so she returned the beaming smile and punched the floor number.

Thirty seconds later they cruised around their last corner and Tammy carefully backed them into the room, using her elbow to depress the door handle. When they turned around, both were surprised to see Eddie’s team seated on one side of a long table, the senior staff on the other, and Director Barnes standing at the head. “Please, come in. Sit” he intoned carefully, gesturing to the three empty chairs at the near end of the table. Sensing an almost ominous vibe in the room, Tammy nodded carefully and wheeled Jessica to the center spot. Locking her wheelchair brakes she then moved one chair to the corner and sat in another. Looking at her curiously the Director queried, “Is Jessica’s aunt or uncle not going to be attending?” Softly Jessica answered his question for Tammy, “No Mr. Barnes. They’ll both be here, but Uncle Jacob doesn’t sit.” A quick glance down the table by the director at the many heads nodding in agreement confirmed the statement and so he sat. Several minutes ticked by uncomfortably before the door opened again and security escorted Janelle and Jacob in. Janelle read the room pretty quickly and went over to politely sit in the remaining chair, while Jacob merely stepped to Jessica’s side and put his hand on her shoulder.

After pausing a moment for effect Director Barnes cleared his throat and began, “It’s my understanding that you may be leaving us soon Jessica. Is that correct?” Jessica merely nodded in reply. “Well then”, he continued, “We are very glad to see your recovery has gone so well and we look forward to seeing you go home with your family. But before you go we’d like to know if you’d be interested in staying a little longer for an experimental treatment Dr Mothers feels may interest you.” Turning, the Director nodded and Eddie stood.

Tammy noticed two things immediately; one was that she’d never seen Eddie look so tired, and the other was that he was wearing clean and pressed clothing for the first time since she’d met him. A quick glance down his side of the table showed similar stories of exhaustion written on the faces of his technicians. They all looked like they had been through some sort of herculean marathon. The typically tubby Dr Ginney looked like he had actually lost some weight and the almost microscopically small Dr Liao somehow looked even smaller.

Eddie picked up his slate and set it on the glass tabletop, causing a blue grid to light up within it. The lights dimmed and a second later the grid rose up into the air and coalesced down to a floating 3D image. It was what looked like a hamster suspended in a tiny cotton hammock over a shoebox sized tank of blue gel. As the resolution of the image improved it became obvious the rodent had no hind legs and was also missing the tiny paw from its right front leg. The stumps of the severed limbs were dangling into the gel.

“This is Hammy six weeks ago”, Eddie began. Then he touched the video slider on the tabletop and slid it forward. “This is Hammy today”. The new video showed a happy and very complete looking Hammy burning calories furiously on a running wheel. “Complete recovery took eighteen hours and forty-seven minutes. All limbs were completely accurate and functional according to every test we ran. He was running on his wheel at twenty hours and twelve minutes after treatment.” The last comment drew a gasp from Janelle and she quickly covered her mouth with her hand.

Eddie touched the table and this time a small long tailed monkey with identical injuries was shown in a similar hammock over a larger tank of gel. “This is Eduardo, a two-and-a-half-year-old South American spider monkey.In spider monkey years that makes him the same age as Jessica. We sedated him five weeks ago before amputating his lower limbs, right hand, and left thumb in a manner very consistent with Jessica’s injuries. We left him sedated so he was never aware of what happened. In just under eight days....” Then he slid the video forward to a marker near the end. The scene changed to show the monkey playing normally in a small pen. Everyone not on Eddie’s team gasped. The formerly missing limbs were back and only faintly raised scars showed where they joined in at the amputation points. They looked completely normal aside from a strange blue and grey marbled appearance. You could even see fur starting to grow back.

Stopping the video Eddie brought up a timeline of images showing the monkey’s arm transitioning from the marbled appearance to a healthy pink. “Notice how the appearance returns to normal after another four days. As far as we can tell, Eduardo is unaware anything happened aside from being shaved. He’s never shown any signs of discomfort and all of his vitals have remained normal.”

“So, the way we see it - Jessica is the perfect candidate for this and with permission I’d like to see if I can give her back her missing limbs.”

Once the lights came back up there was silence for a long time before Janelle spoke. “Look. I understand that this is exciting for all of you and you’ve got a miracle monkey or something. But this is our little girl here and she’s gone to hell and come back in the last year. I don’t think it’s right to ask her to be your first guinea pig. Maybe after you’ve been doing this a few years and we know that monkey’s legs didn’t fall off six months later. But right now it just seems irresponsible and rushed, especially for a child.” With that she sat back and crossed her arms, leaving Tammy and most of the other people in the room to look over at Jacob. He simply glanced at Janelle and then fixed them with a steady cold blue-eyed gaze. It didn’t take a mind reader to see that his agreement with her was clear.

“Ma’am”, Eddie replied, and Tammy was stunned to even hear him say the word. She’d never heard him use a formal title for anyone, even Sallinger. He simply referred to the man as ‘Doc’ in person and ‘The Big Doc’ when he wasn’t around. “I gave that a lot of thought and the more I did the more I felt the same way. You’re right that Jessica shouldn’t ever be a guinea pig, especially not for something this important.”

Eddie stood and walked over to their end of the table. As he came out from behind the last chair Tammy was stunned again to see nothing but his bare legs sticking out from under his lab coat. He had white paper hospital slippers on that they issued for patients. Pulling over the unused desk chair he put his right leg up on it as he unbuttoned his lab coat. Tammy was relieved to see grey scrubs underneath rolled up above his knees. But looking closer she saw a wide, flat scar running around his right knee and the faint remnants of bluish grey marbling around the same leg’s ankles and toes. Gasping in shock she cried out, “Eddie, what did you do?!?!” But Eddie didn’t answer her, and instead he just smiled as he held up his right hand and pulled down the sleeve, revealing an identical scar encircling his wrist. “I made the decision when we saw Eduardo playing in his crib just a couple of hours after the sedation wore off. So I went and requested approval from Director Barnes right away.”

“If by request he means not-so-subtly implying that he’ll go public with certain information we recently learned… then well yes, he... requested” Barnes intoned sarcastically. With a short glance at Barnes Eddie made slow, careful eye contact with Janelle and then with Jacob in turn. Something about that bothered Tammy and it took her a moment to realize that she’d never been able to do that with Jacob, or seen anyone else besides Director Barnes try. But Eddie seemed unfazed and so went on. “I couldn’t bring myself to propose using this technology on another person, much less our little Jessica here before I knew for sure it was safe. So I volunteered to be the first human trial. Dr Sallinger simulated the hand and one leg amputation, but insisted we stop there in case anything went wrong. But... as you can see, it didn’t.” With that he put his foot back down and bounced up and down a little while waggling the fingers on his right hand.

Turning back to his team he nodded and Dr Liao used her slate to flick a series of photos to each person within the glass table. Once she was finished Eddie reached over and spread the images on the stack before Janelle. All of the other stacks mirrored his movement to show them a timeline with Eddie in a cotton hammock over the blue gel. In the first photo there was nothing, but by the fourth an outline of faint limbs could be seen forming. As the images progressed so did the limbs and by the last image Eddie was whole again. “It took me twelve days, and I was awake for about four hours a day so that I could relate the experience.” Tammy was unable to control herself and blurted out, “what did it feel like?” Eddie paused for a moment and when he replied it was a bit strained, “Maddening to be honest. It sort of burned and itched at the same time. I recommend remaining under sedation for Jessica.”

Janelle continued to sit with her arms crossed, but it was obvious that Eddie’s unbelievable display of self-sacrifice had seriously affected her. Looking up, Tammy could see that Jacob’s brow had furrowed slightly and his head was tilted just a bit. In the same way that those very small changes in his face during the Director’s brief had lent him an almost terrifying aspect, these minor adjustments conveyed to him a look of intensely deep contemplation. Then he did something that she would never have expected... he spoke. Not only did he speak but he did so in a manner that caused even Eddie to turn and regard him with awe and respect.

“OK, a micronite biological reconstruction session hosted in an Omni-material gel. It’s probably something dominated by materials well suited to synthetic flesh, and driven by a customized quantum CPU. Not all that impressive considering the resources you have. The only question is; how did you solve the progressive mutation issue? Artificially reproducing the DNA in each synthetic cell means trillions of trillions of iterations. Eventually one of the micronites makes an error in the genetic code. Then that gets reproduced and somewhere along the line another error is made. Eventually you get a mutation that it defeats dendrite aging, and then it starts replicating out of control.”

Again, Eddie stared at the man in frank disbelief for several seconds before looking over at the staff, Janelle, and a wide eyed Jessica he explained. “So Tammy had some leftover shrapnel in her from what happened to her over at Corsica. Her body saw those pieces of metal as foreign invaders and after a few years pushed them out through her skin. Now Jessica has four pins in her right arm, but her body doesn’t reject them because they’re titanium. Titanium is non bio interactive. In other words, her body can’t reject them because it can’t even tell they’re in there. Synthetic flesh is the same thing and a cancer made from it is unstoppable. Everyone who’s ever tried this never even made it past the hamster.”

“This isn’t making me feel better.” Jessica said quietly from her chair.

Jacob followed on her comment with a nod to Eddie, “OK Eddie. So tell us how you fixed it. Did you embed a ‘seek and destroy’ policy against mutation?”

“No you can’t have the same micronites running around patrolling the system like little Nazis, keeping everyone in line and exterminating anything that so much as twitches wrong. It’s not sustainable in the long run because it takes too much energy and all it does is eliminate only the mutations it can handle. When you do that sooner or later the one mutation you can’t handle shows up - and then it’s game over”.

“OK, so again, what’s your solution?“, asked Jacob.

“Well that’s just it. I didn’t solve it. I deleted it”, Eddie replied.

Jacob just gave Eddie a puzzled look.

“I’ve been tinkering with this idea for months, going around and around the problem for trying to figure out how to fix it. But no matter what I did I always wound up back at the same place. Every solution just made it more complicated, more likely to fail. I was ready to give up and I took a walk outside. I went by the residential building and I saw you out there with the hood up on that old car.”

Jacob nodded.

“Yeah well, that car got me thinking because it didn’t have any electronics in it, but there it was still driving around while my eight-year-old Toyota is ready for the scrapyard. Why? Well, it lasted because they couldn’t fall back on computers or secondary systems back in the nineteen sixties. It had to work right the first time, and every time after that. So they went about designing those things in a way I think maybe we’ve forgotten. They had to think it completely through and the engineering had to be perfect so - no wiggle room.”

“I started thinking that maybe that was the problem I was having. Maybe I had to stop trying to add stuff in to fix it and instead just take out the problem. So… what if we didn’t use any DNA? What if I left out all the self-correcting biological and just went mechanical and electronic? Synthetic tissues don’t need DNA if they have a tissue map to follow and in Jessica’s case there already is one.”

Tammy gasped, “Her leg! You… you kept it?”

“We did even better!“, Eddie grinned. “On a hunch I had it flash-frozen. So we thawed it back out and did a fifty pass progressive HDMRI on it. We basically scanned it into the computer at such a high resolution we can see individual cells. All we have to do is use the quantum AI to tell the micronites to forget DNA and just make a perfect mirror copy of her existing leg, minus the damage and inflammation of course, and... Voila! Perfect leg and then just use a mirrored version for her right. Same for the hand, but we’ll have to get creative on the thumb.” By this point Eddie had become extremely animated and was pacing back and forth, waving his arms and stopping just long enough to pull up different images to illustrate whatever point he was making before going back to his rant.

“But that’s just the first half. Then the QAI accesses the facility’s medical data store and uses it to connect the nerves, arteries, veins, and everything else directly into her body. It should take about three weeks and I expect the micronites to hybridize around a third of her thighs and arms. But once it’s over I think she’ll be back to playing hopscotch in no time.” Since the room had fallen silent as he finished, Eddie looked around awkwardly for a moment, then cleared his throat and sat.

Jacob shifted again, somehow using that subtle movement to draw everyone’s strict attention. “I’m more than a little familiar with higher end mathematics. So would you mind if I looked over some of your numbers while we think this over?” It sounded like a question, but everyone in the room knew it wasn’t.

Eddie paused for a moment looking thoughtful, and then shrugged. “It never hurts to have an outside critic audit your math”, and looked over at the director. Barnes sighed, and Tammy saw a flash of the strange expression that had been on his face at the briefing. Then he responded carefully, “With some restrictions Mr. Saylor. You can look at the underlying theoretical math, but I can’t let you have access to restricted systems. I’m sure Eddie can supply you with a secured slate.”