Chapter 1
755 Words
1
The plan: break into Butterfly Star Research. Steal the data, research and processes for their incomplete, suppressed sickle-cell cure. Make everything as public and explicit as a fading starlet’s professionally-shot s*x tape. Miller Time.
I’d rather get a Blue Moon, but “blue moon time” means something totally different. You get a doctorate in astrophysics before your twenty-third birthday, they teach you these things.
I still had to learn about betrayal and lies on my own, though.
Say “Billie Carrie Salton” in the right places, usually rancid bars on the wrong side of town or even more rancid corporate boardrooms, and people dive under the table and bawl for momma. Say it in the wrong places, and they’ll either say “Can we afford her?” or “How do you know Beaks?” (BCS, get it?) The FBI has my picture on their wall, right next to my description. Six foot one (too tall), one-sixty pounds. Sharp nose that has nothing to do with my nickname. Size eleven feet. Blonde, redhead, brunette, or sometimes spumoni. There’s one agent with a real hard-on for my head, and another with a bigger hard-on for all the rest of me.
Fun times.
So fine, I’m a killer. Get in my way, this Detroit-born girl will put you down hard.
But I’ve never murdered a hostage or bystander who didn’t make a move first. You get cute, I’ll give you a third eye before the eyes you came with can blink. Behave yourself, stay quiet in that back room till the cops find their map and their flashlight, you’ll get home safe. Probably get on TV and a few days off work and the sympathy vote. I even let this one kid’s poodle live, and I really wanted to punt that little monster out the great big hole we burned in that thirty-third floor window.
I’ve never robbed anyone of anything that wasn’t stolen.
Too bad the whole country’s been stolen.
Along with the rest of the world.
Which takes me back to Butterfly Star.
Sickle cell anemia’s really horrible. You hurt. Sometimes you fall over in agony, no warning, just pow and you’re down. Your body can’t fight off infections so well. You’ll probably die in agony before you’re fifty. It killed a high school friend of mine before he even got his driver’s license. Add in the fact that it’s hereditary and found mostly in blacks and folks from the Middle East. You’ve got these people at the bottom, who’re supposed to work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, except for the little detail that every so often they keel over screaming in pain and get fired.
Butterfly took federal funds to research sickle cell.
A lot of federal funds.
My sources tell me that their researchers learned some interesting things, and even made progress on a cure. It’s not perfect—nothing ever is—but in the sickle cell puzzle it’s a couple corners and enough connected middle pieces that you can make out the horse’s ass.
When you get a degree in a science, like astrophysics or genetic diseases, they tell you the scientific method has four steps. Observation. Hypothesis. Test. Conclusions.
But culturally, science has a fifth step.
Publish.
It’s not science if you don’t tell people what you learn. If you don’t let others build on your work. Otherwise, you’re just playing solitaire with Petri dishes.
Butterfly didn’t solve the whole thing, so they didn’t manufacture a cure.
But the data—ah, the data’s valuable. Not now, sure, but one day, when someone else puts most of the puzzle together, they’ll whip out the corner pieces and their horse’s ass and shout “We cured sickle cell! We win!” Never mind that some bright young thing in a podunk med school right now, tonight, might look at the Butterfly data and jump the whole thing forward ten years.
Save thousands of lives, and years of agony.
If they’d done this on their own dime, fine. Don’t get me wrong, they’d still be jackasses, but I couldn’t really say they didn’t have the right to do it. You buy the cards, play all the solitaire you want. They’d done their research with federal funds, though. Our taxes paid for that knowledge.
All right, fine. Your taxes.
Still.
That knowledge belongs to everyone.
Normally I’d call some people I know and put a raid together. There’s no profit in this, though—it’s a straight smash-and-grab-and-upload. I’ve got a few special people who owe me big, but calling in those favors on a gig like this would be slicing watermelon with a cement truck. And after last week’s Newcastle debacle, my budget was the change in the back seat of my rusty grungy black Econoliner van and the gear I’d accumulated in the last four years.
Fortunately, it’s some pretty awesome gear.
So that’s why I’m hugging the outside of the forty-first floor of the glass-walled Embassy Building, letting the wind whistle through my hollow head.
- Writer
