Samantha restored, therestored.com
The next morning was as bright and as splendid as the morning Naomi woke up all better, or the morning Akiko did at the hospital, only now it was fourfold. Scout snuck into Samantha’s room at break of dawn, waking her up, guiding her by the hand out of bed, helping her take her first steps in three years, telling her joyfully how much better her legs looked, touching them as they moved. Samantha was overjoyed at her total recovery and lifted Scout high with her arms, then clasping her tightly, saying: “You and I are going to travel the whole world together. I promise you that.”
Scout smiled the biggest smile a ten-year-old girl possibly could. They hurried downstairs, hand in hand.
Next, it was Jason’s turn, woken up by Mary and Jane about a half an hour later in the guest bedroom next to theirs. He wasn’t so completely repaired as Samantha, yet he was able to rise and stand on his own, somewhat shaky, and walk down the stairs with Mary and Jane on each side, ready to steady him if he slipped.
By the time I came down they were all in the kitchen, Jaime and Eileen, Naomi from the cottage, chatting away merrily, drinking coffee, comparing their improvements from the night before. Even the good doctor was there, eager to see the progress his two patients had made, and he was, once again, amazed at what he saw.
Samantha had once been an athlete of Olympic stature, a gymnast, and was now so chipper as to demonstrate pirouettes and handstands on our kitchen floor which Scout was so cute as to try to mimic, imperfectly, Samantha catching her before she fell. All of us clapped at the scene.
We had a large breakfast again. Eileen was profuse in descriptions of how much healthier she felt and how young she looked. Jaime said the same thing; that this wafer was a wonder drug, a panacea.
“So today we get down to the nitty-gritty” I broke in, “what to do next. Mr. Tanaki and Akiko should be with us within the hour. When they get here, we have to figure out our next steps as everything that’s happened here has world-shattering implications.”
Eileen spoke out: “Roland, even though I run the lab I don’t have all the answers to all the questions, especially the technical ones. It’s Saturday, the lab is still closed, thank god, and Frank is our go-to man. He knows all the details of our supply of chips, their status in programming, everything. We have to get him here for any intelligent decisions. Jaime, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, for sure. Once I hand him the blanks, I have no idea at what stage of programming they’re in.”
“But Jaime” I interrupted, “it’s the blanks we’re interested in. Do you have more of them in your hands?”
“No, I gave them my latest batch of twenty about three weeks ago. My whole process of sorting and tagging and arranging the nanochips on wafers takes six weeks so we have another group of twenty halfway through development, except moving our lab and the break put a pause to that. We do need Frank here.”
Eileen made the call. He was out shopping and would come by soon.
When Mr. Tanaki arrived with his daughter and then Frank, we moved into the living room and resumed our talk, after filling Frank in. He was amazed at our history and a little bit disconcerted to realize that everything he’d been doing in programming the chips, all that hard work for over a year, was only making them worse, unfit for human consumption. In fact, he’d been ruining them. He had the perfect wafer in his hand on day one, before he even started to tamper with it.
Our first question was for him. Did he have any of those virginal wafers left, those still unsullied by his programmers?
“I should have a few, perhaps even a dozen, five from the latest batch and other remainders from older series. When a new series of more powerful chips come out the unprogrammed wafers from the last are set aside. Now he blushed deeply, rose from his seat, came over and whispered to Eileen, within my enhanced hearing: “These chips aren’t even locked in our vault. Only the programmed ones are. They’re in my desk.”
“I might have even more,” he said out loud, resuming his seat, “I hardly paid any attention to them. I always thought of them as blank bullets, empty canisters. I know I have some old ones from the animal trials, the twenty thousand model. I remember the one we programmed for Claire. There were a bunch of those chips in the vial. We didn’t even have a count on them. What a fool I am, what a fool I’ve been all along.”
“No not a fool, just a scientist at work. Think of Edison and the light bulb. But now you know their extreme worth.” I said bluntly. “And we need to decide what to do with them, as a group, the discoverers so to speak and who to tell or who to give them to, with only one goal guiding our decisions, the greatest benefit for the human race.”
Everyone nodded and murmured in agreement.
“But they’re not really ours to distribute. The contracts we all signed make every wafer we design the property of our sponsor.”
“That would be the case” I began, “if you invented some little improvement on a device or some new gadget. But the scope of this discovery goes way beyond any patent or contract. You don’t put the fate of the human race into one man’s hands because of a legal punctilio.”
“Sometimes you have to break the rules. Imagine yourself standing on a crowded street, a mother trips and her stroller with her baby in it rolls out into a busy intersection. You don’t hesitate to rush out and pull it to safety because the sign says: ‘don’t walk’.
“Our case is similar. This is a crisis. What we have can be used for tremendous good or tremendous evil. And you can’t hand over, as a moral being, such a universal benefit, such a lifesaver, into one man’s power. You would make him god if you did and would be condemning everyone else on this planet to his demands and commands. That degree of imbalance is not going to happen. I’m sure you can see my point.”
“I might have kept this secret all to myself. I could have easily disappeared with Jaime’s wafers, collected a small team of scientists to replicate them, keeping all of you in the dark, and sold only to aging billionaires making myself in a very quick time the richest and most powerful man on earth. But I didn’t.”
“I gave the next wafer away freely to the first person I met in need of one, this little girl. It was the right thing to do. That’s the benchmark I insist we live up to today. So what do we do next?”
Eileen spoke again. “There’s no way we can keep our team in the dark, at least for long.”
I thought otherwise. “Why can’t we pretend it’s business as usual with Jaime ramping up the supply of blank chips and Frank slowing down the programming department or setting everyone to work on the old twenty K chips for a time. With a few hundred of these, I think we’d have all the bargaining power we needed to set out on our own agenda and demonstrate to the right people what we have.”
Mr. Tanaki broke in: “I’ll gladly bankroll any other lab you wish to set up and if secrecy is a priority I own a good section of a small island in Polynesia where I have an estate. It’s entirely self-sufficient, with solar panels, a desalination unit and a hydroponic greenhouse, capable of sustaining a population of forty or fifty people, my private getaway. It has a skeleton crew of ten people there now who maintain the facilities and grow food, along with a few dozen locals and their families whose ancestral claim to their homesteads I would never violate. In return, they trade for our vegetables with a constant supply of delicious fish.”
“Well there’s an option” I said. “What I’m most afraid of is some government agency finding out what we’ve got, stepping in, locking you out of your lab and sending this discovery straight to the Pentagon. We’d probably be held in cells indefinitely, outside due process, while megalomaniac generals would be spending sleepless nights plotting new scenarios of world domination, with all the added brainpower and bravado of our secret pill.”
Frank stood up. He’d been staring curiously at Akiko the last minute. “Is this the Chinese girl from the hospital who was cured overnight of terrible burns?”
“How did you know that?” we all chimed.
“My wife Nancy told me. All the nurses are talking about it.”
“Yes” the doctor added. “And a reporter came by yesterday making inquiries. I meant to tell you this. I deleted all the files on your daughter that I could, Friday morning and put her folder in my car. But I’m sure some of the staff might recall your name, Mr. Tanaki. I think our days of secrecy are numbered.”
“This changes everything” I said. “First of all, thanks doc, for your efforts. But we need to act fast, much more quickly than I’d anticipated. It’s probably only a matter of days before the story leaks out and they track you down, Mr. Tanaki. You’re too high profile to hide for long. Where would a man of your importance, a public figure, be invisible, with so many people and cameras everywhere?” I said musingly.
“On a boat in the middle of the ocean.” Scout replied proudly.
“You might be onto something there Scout, good answer.”
“The bottom line, as I see it, is that we cannot let this fall into the hands of any one entity or country, or it will be a weapon. We either disappear with the secret and give ourselves more time, several months maybe, to concoct a plan and get more people into our group or else go public with all the information on how to make it and what it can do so that every developed country can produce their own. I see both courses as dangerous and full of holes. What about you?”
This started a lively debate among us. The world was truly on the brink of war and to announce this revolutionary new development would be destabilizing, to say the least. The safest route, we all agreed, would be to suppress all knowledge of it, like it never happened and hide ourselves until we could collect our wits and somehow introduce it to mankind in a sane way. Eileen and Jaime and Frank could go back to the lab and resume work Monday morning as if nothing had changed. Mr. Tanaki would fly in his private jet with his daughter to Papeete and go by yacht to his island, where he would stay indefinitely, conducting his business interests from there. Our doctor, who might be pestered by journalists, said he was long overdue for a break and could visit his ailing mother in Vermont for a week. He even begged us for a chip or two, which we decided he should have when Frank collected the remaining unprogrammed ones on Monday. The rest of us were such a low profile that we could simply hide out here. A few phone calls would put our loved ones at ease. Everything else we could put on hold.
We were satisfied with this plan, so much so that we entered into another conversation on who might be the best recruits into our group once we had a new supply of chips to hand out, in the next weeks. It all came down to a matter of trust. Important people were best as they had the most influence, the most connections. On the other hand they were the most dangerous to trust. With their powers so amplified they might turn on us. It seemed like a philosophical conundrum.
While we were all musing these complexities Scout broke the silence.
“You should give them to children in school. They can’t start a war, and when they grow up, they’ll make everything better for everyone. You should also give them to really sick people because when they get better, they’ll be so happy they’re well again they’ll only do nice things to others, for a long time.”
Sometimes, I thought to myself; it takes a child to see the obvious, the plain and simple, while we with our scheming adult brains get tangled up in convoluted knots and plots. It would be wonderful to know what was going on in that beautiful mind, so slender in knowledge yet so rich in imagination and fancy. She was growing nearer and dearer to me every hour and my care and fondness for her seemed to have no end.
We decided to part for the day, at least most of us. Frank and Eileen and Jaime wanted to return to their respective homes just for some time alone, to sit and digest all these wild developments. Our doctor told us he had to tie up loose ends at the hospital and prepare for his vacation on Monday. Mary drove Samantha in her van while Jane took Jason to his place to collect their clothes and laptops for a prolonged stay here. Naomi wanted to spend the night with her mother and told us she’d be back tomorrow afternoon with a large supply of food as if we were a castle about to be under siege.
Mr. Tanaki could do anything with a phone call, but he wanted to check on his jet in Hayward and prepare for a flight home in two days. He called his limo driver for a trip there. I told him he might be stopped by reporters at the Clairmont. He told me he would book a room for himself and his daughter at the Fairmont in San Francisco for two nights under an assistant’s name, keeping his suite at the Clairmont as a decoy. No one would trace him there, he promised. We all agreed to meet at my place Sunday evening for one more dinner, one last time, to finalize our plans.
It was amazing to see what a bond had grown between all of us in so short a time, even with the doctor and Frank, who hadn’t eaten the wafers. We all shook hands and hugged each other upon parting in the wide hallway before the front door. We were a band of brothers and sisters to be sure, facing a very uncertain future yet fully confident in ourselves and our abilities. Scout and I were standing hand in hand in the bright sunlight at the open door, waving goodbye to each as they left. After that I turned to her and said, “let’s pay another visit to the library.”
