The Rekindled Flame

Chapter 1Mike looked up as his soon to be former head of marketing walked into the office. Tricia smiled breezily at him and seated herself in the chair on the left, the way she always did. Her blouse was undone enough to show the bow at the center of her bra, a red spot in the middle of her white shirt and pale pink skin. Apparently, it was supposed to be enticing, or distracting. Tricia should really do a better job with her research. “Mikey! I’m glad you wanted to talk. I’ve got a plane to catch—I have a meeting with the CEO of BentBox to talk about a technological partnership early tomorrow morning—but I’m super glad we were able to make the schedules work.” She’d painted her lips the same red as the bow on her bra. Her nails, too. Mike could appreciate her attention to detail, misapplied as it was. He let himself stare at her in silence for a long moment, just long enough to make her squirm. She’d get the hint. She was smart like that. Then he spoke. “Actually, Tricia, your travel arrangements were cancelled through our in-house agency this morning. As was your corporate card, your employee ID, and your network login.” He made a show of checking his watch. “Considering the fact that it’s now two o’clock in the afternoon, I have to say I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.” She froze. “What the hell.” It wasn’t a question. Mike wished he could feel some kind of satisfaction at the way her skin lost all color. Instead, he just felt empty. “There’s no technical partnership with BentBox, Tricia.” “There should be. And there will be, by the time I finish this trip.” “Not between LewaCorp and BentBox. Maybe between your actual employer and BentBox. Or did you not read the fine print when you filled out your paperwork?” Tricia’s eyes bulged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Two beads of sweat appeared on her face, one at each temple. It probably itched, what with the amount of makeup she was wearing. “Tricia, it was my leg that got damaged in Afghanistan, not my brain. It works quite well, thank you. I was already suspicious when you showed up with such glowing references from a consulting firm. The project you’ve been feeding to Nova? It’s fake. I let you find it. Considering his lab burned down this afternoon when they tried to recreate it from the data you stole, well, I’m pretty sure he knows now, too.” She pulled her blouse together. “I can explain.” He held up his hand. “Explain to the US Attorney.” She slapped her free hand down on the desk. “You’re actually pressing charges?” Outrage raised her voice by several octaves, or maybe it was fear. “You son of a b***h. After everything I’ve done for LewaCorp—” “Industrial espionage is a federal crime.” Mike kept his voice even and cold. He always did these days. “It could always be worse. I could be Ben Nova. He’d kill you.” She gulped. “Look. You don’t understand.” “And I don’t care.” He picked up his phone and sent one text, one that was already queued up on his phone. Debbie, his head of security, opened the door to admit two federal agents in dark suits. One of them put handcuffs on Tricia’s slim wrists and they escorted her out of the office. Debbie dropped into the other chair, sprawling out like a college student at the library. “How did it go, boss?” Mike shrugged. His leg throbbed, or at least he thought it throbbed. He knew it wasn’t really doing anything at all, but that didn’t change the sensation of pain. Sometimes he was grateful for the little reminders, or he’d forget the leg was there at all. “I won’t pretend she was happy about it, but that’s the farthest thing from my problem. I already promoted Des. I trust him to clean up any messes she might have left behind her.” Debbie smirked. “Kind of makes me wonder why you didn’t just promote him three months ago.” “I wanted to see what she’d do.” He hauled himself to his feet. “I think my schedule’s clear for the rest of the day. I’ll be down in the lab until five.” “Fair enough.” She followed him through the door. The research department took up five floors, all immediately below the executive floor. Mike’s personal lab was directly below his office, minimizing the distance he had to travel. He was proud of the design, and of the fact that no one had cottoned on to the fact that he’d done it to minimize travel and exposure. No one needed to see him if he didn’t want them to. He rubbed his hands together as he limped over toward his workspace. He’d been into this skin graft project before, but the Nova issue had been an unwelcome distraction. He could focus all of his creativity and energy on this project now. Maybe it wasn’t as earth-shattering as some of the space-aged prosthetics he’d designed when he first got going, but this graft technology was going to change at least as many lives. Once he got the technology down right, humanity would be able to save millions of burn patients. And they’d be able to do it with minimal scarring, too. He couldn’t wait. His biggest obstacle right now was speed. In a standard skin graft, a temporary graft would be performed until a permanent graft could be obtained. Sometimes there wasn’t enough of a victim’s own, unburned skin available to use for grafting. It required multiple surgeries, which created significant risk. Mike’s design involved using nanotechnology to induce the skin to knit back together painlessly, without requiring multiple sessions. It had a lot of promise. He’d watched it happen on a volunteer with a small, but deep burn on his leg, a firefighter who was more than happy to try the treatment at least once. The road block, for Mike, lay in healing larger areas, with enough time to avoid infection. He needed to find a way to make the nanobots induce the skin to knit itself together faster, without harm to the patient. He felt he was almost there, just a few hours away from the right solution, if he could just get enough time to focus. Before he knew it, Debbie was in his lab. “It’s time for your physical therapy appointment, Boss.” He bowed his head. Just a few more hours… He got up and used the private elevator to head for the residential floors. Not many people knew LewaCorp Center had residential space, and Mike intended to keep it that way. He had a small domestic staff, as well as apartments for the occasional visiting CEO or member of Debbie’s family who might be passing through. Debbie had a place here, and of course Mike had his own. He retreated to his penthouse now, and exchanged his suit for board shorts. Then he headed down to the swimming pool. The pool hadn’t been his idea. He’d inherited it, along with everything else. He wasn’t going to turn it down, though—especially not when it gave him his only chance to move through the world without pain. His therapist preferred to put him through his paces here in the pool simply because it was easier for him to move here, but Mike would stay here all day if it weren’t for work. He made a mental note to design a computer that was compatible with the water. Once the therapist was done, he went through his evening workout, two hours of laps during which the noise in his head was forced to silence itself. Swimming was great like that. He had to focus on breathing, on the rhythm of his strokes. Everything else had to wait until he was done. By the time he was finished with his workout, his shoulders burned with exertion. That was fine, though. He could live with that. He made his way back up to his penthouse and settled in to review messages and information before bed. His contact with the FBI had messaged him to say Tricia was safely in federal custody. His contracts with the Army and the Justice Department were up for renewal; he sent a message to his internal audit team to review how his products were being used before anything was signed. It was good to be the boss sometimes. The Personal Protective Equipment Division had come up with some fun new body armor they wanted to start trials with. He gave the go-ahead to start experimenting without live humans; once they were on more solid ground they’d go farther. The Pharmaceutical Division had come up with a potential cheap and easy to manage HIV treatment that would be easy to distribute in less developed areas. Mike almost managed to crack a smile when he saw how much progress had been made there. He sent a note to the project manager, reminding her to include the need for discretion in her distribution plans; not every country on their list was hostile to same-s*x attraction, but he wanted to make sure folks who were could get what they needed, or else every effort was useless. Same with s*x workers. He knew HIV wasn’t exclusive to those two groups, but stigma was still a problem, and probably would be for most of his lifetime. Bob, his Vice President of Public Relations, had sent him an article that soured his mood from the good news out of Pharmaceuticals. The article, Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: A Moral Examination of Modern Biotechnology, had been penned by the current televangelist du jour, a horse’s ass of a man by the name of Gerald Carson. No one had ever managed to figure out where exactly the good Rev. Carson had been ordained, but apparently Mike was the only one concerned about that. He scanned through the article. Just as he’d suspected, Carson focused on LewaCorp’s efforts in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology fields in his exhortation to “submit to God’s will.” Apparently, he hadn’t managed to climb out of the eighties, and still felt HIV was a reasonable punishment for s****l activity he hadn’t personally approved. Burns were a message from the Almighty about vanity. Memory crept up on him, the way it did when he was alone and didn’t have a project to focus on. He could remember a sweltering July day in a humid town somewhere in Connecticut, where he and his siblings had been sent to wait out their mother’s latest stint in rehab or jail. He might have been eleven or twelve. Grandma hadn’t wanted to let them outside, on the grounds that she was embarrassed by what her daughter had become, so they were all crammed into her the stuffy little living room of her stuffy little Cape house, watching the only thing she’d let them see on TV. The preacher’s voice droned on and on, nattering about sin and the need to be saved. Whenever Mike tried to tune out and focus on his book, Grandma would tear the book out of his hand and swat him with it. You listen to Reverend Carson, Michael. You need his help most of all. All Mike could do was sit there and count the days until he could go back to New York and see his best friend (and crush, but he couldn’t admit that in Grandma’s house), Jimmy, again. He shook his head to clear it. Jimmy was long gone, in the belly of the beast itself. He was Carson’s son-in-law now, moving up in the world from their Queens youth. At least Mike had learned most religious folks weren’t like Carson. He’d had good experiences with the chaplains in the Army, after getting out of Afghanistan. Hell, he’d had good experiences with the village imam in Afghanistan too. He could say with confidence, as he penned his response to his unwitting childhood nemesis, that Carson didn’t have a leg to stand on with his arguments. At least not theologically speaking. He sent his response to Bob for editing and a sanity check, and then stared at his blank screen. He should do something productive. He was a grown man, a successful CEO who’d taken his inherited millions and turned them into billions. He wasn’t the kind of guy to sit around and whine about the past. As the silence of the penthouse deepened around him, he could only hear Jimmy’s voice in the back of his head. We’ll be together forever, Mike. Won’t we?