FLAMEOUT TRAJECTORY

by “Thomas Daulton”

A Winnerverse^TM Story

“Just this once.”

He wished he could burn those words out of his brain so that he couldn’t ever assemble them into a sentence again. It was always a lie. There had been innumerable 'once’s before today and he knew full well there would be more in the future.

But the lie was too powerful. Those three words were the glue that bound together a half-dozen disparate excuses which could never have swayed him by themselves; together they formed a monolithic wall that he couldn’t surmount. When the excuse-bricks fell apart later, as they always did, ‘Just This Once’ would ooze out from the wreckage and mortar together a new barrier of rationalizations -- tomorrow, or the next day... certainly on Thursday before his big meeting. He knew that already.

Myke rolled back his collar and applied the dermal patch over his jugular vein.

A rough smile crept across his rectangular face. At least this was easier than his old college days, when he had to shoot the stuff intravenously. Right before a dissertation, already nervous, his shaking hands would miss the vein in the crook of his arm, or the needle would roll right off of it, once, twice. During final exams his arms became a cratered mess, and he always wondered when his teachers would finally notice the blood spots and bandages underneath the long-sleeve dress shirts he wore to cover them up.

But obviously a lot of thought and research had gone into the delivery of illegal brain-enhancing drugs in the years since 2012, when Myke Dorgan had graduated Berkeley with a PhD in astrophysics, and outstanding honors. These days the dermal patch was almost invisible against his pasty white skin, and he only had to wear it for a few minutes anyway. Myke had at least fifteen minutes before the department briefing, as if those things ever started on time. So he leaned back in his chair, ran his fingers through his longish bronze hair, and kneaded his temples, savoring the initial rush as his thought-processes sped up and his nerves sang with energy. He wouldn’t get caught.

Without the drug, he still had the accumulated learning from years of grad school plus an MBA. He knew the formulas, he knew the theories. But without the drug, the facts in his head were locked down, inaccessible. The knowledge didn’t flow, it wouldn’t take the initiative to apply itself to problems. His work without the drug was always a matter of plodding down obvious dead ends, too much time spent on too little innovation, never failing to get a reprimand from his superiors.

If something like that happened during today’s briefing... if he allowed some trivial question to consume the brief time allotted for his department’s report... then the boss would assign two of his hyena-like junior managers to ‘assist’ him with his big presentation on Thursday. He’d seen this happen to others. Within a week those two smiling, well-coiffed twenty-somethings would be making all the decisions on the Chiron project, and a week

later Myke’s paycheck from Gravitic Op would read “Senior Consultant” instead of “Department Head,” with a corresponding loss in pay. Even though Myke was barely thirty-two. It would make his résumé look like he had been put out to pasture.

But if he could just get through this week... just this once... then he’d never need the chemical assistance again. He just wasn’t sure if it was the drug or the lie which left that bitter taste in his mouth.

Suddenly he realized he was five minutes late to the department briefing. Funny, he never dozed off when applying the drug; usually quite the opposite. He stood up from his chair and had to grip the corner of his desk to avoid falling. Headrush. His mouth quickly became as dry as rice paper. That wasn’t new, but the “lost time” was. The pleasurable aspects of his high had been dropping off, one by one, for months. Switching sources hadn’t helped; this was some weird chemical tolerance effect. At least he could still count on the mental edge when he needed it, like this meeting today. Each new side effect became just another factor in his calculations, the threshold where his need surmounted his self-loathing and spit out a ‘just-this-once’.

Myke loped half-drunkenly towards the conference room, hoping he wouldn’t bump into anything on the way there. “You look pale as a sheet,” his secretary observed. “Lemme grab you a coffee before you go into the briefing.”

“No thanks, Trish,” Myke replied. “I never touch the stuff.”

Uh-oh, Myke realized, the boss is in a mood today. There was no box of donuts, no pack of StimuSodas on the conference room table. When the boss felt that things were not going satisfactorily and people needed to concentrate more, he withheld these little humanistic touches. Which Myke found odd, since in his opinion, sugar and caffeine were just the ticket at such moments. No prob, I have my own little boost this morning.

“Very well, now we can get going,” Mr. Deckurt rumbled, from the end of the conference table. His coffee mug, dwarfing his disproportionately small chubby hands, smelled like it contained about a quintuple cappuccino, making his next declaration redundant. “I’m on a tight schedule today. So let’s postpone the administrative announcements until I leave. Myke, let’s begin with your report on the Chiron project.” The other department heads leaned back in their chairs; most lit cigarettes to relax. It was obvious who was in the hotseat today.

But with Substance E on his side, paranoia was nothing more than a spice to whet his appetite. He could handle this.

“The Chiron Probe,” Myke explained as he stood up, “might best be described as a fascinating enigma at this point.” He opened his handheld PDA and pointed its transmitter at the room’s display screen. A planetary orbital schematic appeared.

“For some reason, the guys at Shallobeertun want to swing this space probe through four full slingshot orbits of the Earth, in order to build up momentum for its journey.”

[??]-WHY WASTE THREE MILLION DOLLARS OF TAXPAYER CONTRACTS WHEN FOUR MILLION WILL DO, a rather snide text message splashed across everyone’s PDAs. The sender was encrypted but Myke suspected it was Sean, one of the boss’ hotshot assistant managers. Electronic heckling during a presentation had been a fixture ever since Myke’s college days, but some comments didn’t deserve a response. Nevertheless, Myke didn’t want to look like he was losing control of the meeting.

Myke hit the preprogrammed F2 key on his PDA. [MYKE D.]-I’M SORRY, I DON’T HAVE THAT INFORMATION, and then he quickly thumb-typed, “...SEAN, WHY DON’T YOU ASK SHALLOBEERTUN INSTEAD.” A few of the meeting participants suppressed snickers at the quickness of Myke’s riposte.

“This makes our job a bit more difficult than usual,” Myke continued verbally. “Our contract is to plot an orbital scheme that will steer Chiron clear of a collision with any of the space-junk up there. But every time it passes through the orbital junk layer, the gravity of the Chiron probe itself will attract and perturb the orbits of nearby objects. There’s so much junk up there, those disturbed objects will then affect other orbital items, both abandoned and operational, and thus change the parameters of Chiron’s next course. By the time we get to the fourth orbit, we’re solving a fourth-order multimodal equation in the model. Don’t worry, though, my program can handle the math.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Unfortunately the client seems disinclined to provide us the crucial specifications of the probe. Therefore, at present, it is completely impossible for us to fulfill our contract.”

[??]-SOUNDS LIKE SOMEBODY IS UPSET ABOUT THE DONUTS THIS MORNING... that probably came from Jake, the other one of Deckurt’s hyenas.

[MYKE D.]-IF ONE OF YOU HOTSHOTS IS SHARP ENOUGH TO HACK INTO SHALLOBEERTUN’S DATABASE AND GET ME THE EXACT PROBE SPECS, I’LL BUY YOU A FREAKIN’ DONUT STORE!

“Why can’t we solve it?” blustered Deckurt, his rosy face darkening. “You have the overall specs and density profile for the probe.” The boss flicked a button on his own PDA and Myke’s orbital schematic was replaced on the big screen by a diagram of the probe and its booster rocket.

Myke suppressed a growl as Shallobeertun’s distinctive theme song played loudly and the corporate logo in the corner began to expand across the screen. The boss had linked to the original schematic file straight from Shallobeertun, which was chock-full of electronic advertisement viruses. Myke hastily downloaded the anti-spam subroutine from his own project archives, which attacked Shallobeertun’s virus before it could use Gravitic Op’s own server to send itself out to all of Gravitic Op’s other clients. The happy Shallobeertun employees waving from the conference room screen instantly vanished. Deckurt was scrawling notes and ignored the whole thing.

“The information they’ve given us so far is only aggregate, for the whole package. This is a heavy probe. If it’s a large mass concentrated in a couple of small modules, it will affect microgravity differently than if the mass is uniformly distributed.”

“But you can come up with a generic solution, can’t you? Even if you have to refine it later.” Sean, the second assistant manager, seemed best at putting a condescending spin on statements made in ignorance. “We have to show them some progress on Thursday.”

[MYKE D.]-EVEN IF IT MEANS WE THROW OUT ALL THE WORK AND START OVER ON FRIDAY MORNING...

“They can’t expect progress unless they give us what I’m asking for,” Myke countered, simultaneous as he typed. “There are a hundred different generic solutions to the less specific problem, but only one of them is going to work in real life. Shallobeertun knows their own probe specs by now, they’re competent enough that they won’t be fooled by a wild-guess solution at this point. I honestly don’t know why they’re being so evasive about the specs.”

[??]-CAN/DO, THAT’S THE SPIRIT, MYKE! Now Jake and Sean were double-teaming him. [??]-SAY THAT TO THEIR FACES AND THEY’LL ANNUL OUR CONTRACT.

[MYKE D.]-WELL THE CLIENT ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE ELSE, NOBODY HAS ANY ORBITAL WRECKAGE MODELS THAT CAN HOLD A CANDLE TO MINE.

He never could have survived this two-pronged attack without the brain-enhancer drug, he decided. But such aggressive commentary was by no means unusual around here. Jake and Sean struck him as the handsome, team-lettermen type who had probably spent their college years on steroids. Between Substance E, nicotine, and ludicrously strong coffee (which Deckurt had probably spiked with some kind of amaretto booze), steroids were about the only thing missing from the conference room.

“The deadline is too close. We have to work on the generic-solution angle,” Deckurt muttered softly.

Mike drew a sharp breath. “Even if there are a hundred of them.”

“You’ll have your data. Just get those potential solutions ready. The final report better not be late. Our company is not going to be the bottleneck on a project for a client as important as Shallobeertun.” The boss closed his PDA and stood up. “I have to hop onto a conference call. Jake, Sean, mail me a summary of what I miss.”

Cheerily ignoring the fact that the boss was adamantly demanding the mathematically impossible, Myke left the meeting room after the briefings wrapped up an hour later. He checked in with a couple of his underling technicians and offered them words of encouragement. He felt pretty sure that his optimism was quite convincing, until after he entered his office and closed the door behind him. Dammit! Stupid, stupid. He’d just spent an hour and a half meeting with all the company bigwigs, and for that whole time he’d been wearing the semitransparent dermal patch on his neck. Obscured by his collar, perhaps. And maybe if he was lucky, it might have been mistaken for a nicotine patch. But anyone who spotted the embossed “E” would know that Myke was using Substance E, the brain enhancer, and not nicotine. He tore off the patch and crumpled it inside a piece of scratch paper before throwing it away. There were smarts, and there were smarts... and then there was common sense. But Substance E only helped you out with smarts.

Myke tried to take stock of all the meeting participants. Surely, out of that number, several people would have silently approved of the E. For all Myke knew, half the company were habitual users. On the other hand, possibly, somebody with a grudge against him might have snapped an image with their PDA. Even now, the Personnel Department might be preparing a termination letter for Myke, citing his violation of company anti-drug policy.

But Myke had no idea who -- if anyone! -- actually disapproved of Substance E strongly enough to make an example out of him. Not in the middle of a big project. Not now. Only later... if he screwed up. He’d just better not screw up.

By the time he stumbled home to his apartment, Arlen was back from her second job at the newspaper and had finished most of the leftover pizza. After coming down off of Substance E, around lunchtime, Myke had simply blundered through the rest of his day, like a scrap of litter blown across a playground, avoiding anything heavy or consequential. He could not remember ever getting a hangover from the brain-enhancing designer drug before. But that was what it felt like. His pulse felt slow and clotty like rancid butter stinging in his veins.

Arlen could tell. She terminated her welcoming kiss as if Myke were a blood relative. “Again? Today? After last week? That stuff is going to kill you, Myke.” Her grey eyes frosted over and her fine eyebrows arched into sharp peaks. When Arlen got angry, she looked like a fox, but not in the good way.

“Nobody’s ever died from Substance E,” Myke faltered. He wished he knew that for sure.

“Yeah, as if. The only doctors who ever gave it clinical trials were hopped up on E themselves.”

Arlen disapproved of Myke’s habit. When he saw her on the drug, their normally lighthearted banter somehow congealed into sour hostility on both sides. But he’d come down four hours ago. How could she tell? Had there been other side effects, before, which she had learned to notice? Myke couldn’t recall any. Substance E was named after a drug in some trippy Philip K. Dick story from almost sixty years ago. Myke had never read the story; his job didn’t leave him time for pleasure reading. But he suspected she had read it and didn’t like something the story said.

“Honey, let’s just talk about it later. Right now I only want a slice of pizza and then bed.”

Her eyebrows de-arched themselves, but her expression looked even worse. Worried. “You really got a bad batch this time, or something. You look like you’re about to fall over.” She helped him to the couch. Not necessary! he protested silently, but he didn’t feel up to arguing.

Arlen left him on the couch since he didn’t seem inclined to move on his own after the pizza and a boring TV movie. Dramatic images refracted through his corneas and lodged themselves, upside-down, upon his retinas... but his brain had already decided that his duty to his girlfriend ended after it reassembled the pictures right-side-up for him. They hadn’t spoken since he lay down. The one part of his mind that he could call his own -- the only part not mired in the molasses of hangover toxins -- somehow knew that he was missing out on something.

But did he trust that objectivity? That was how the craving usually started... the urge, the suspicion, the worry that he ought to be doing more. Could be accomplishing more. If only he could sharpen his thoughts. That usually led straight to the dermal patch.

He flipped open the hidden flap in his wallet without even noticing that he had already sat up and taken it out of his pocket. NO, not yet. It was this project that was distracting him. A few words from Mr. Deckurt and he had suddenly fallen six months behind in his work whereas he’d started this morning in a position of strength, waiting on late information from Shallobeertun. He needed something, something to get back the advantage.

He flipped the TV into Internet mode and slowly dragged the keyboard and mouse from under the coffee table. Stroke by stroke, hunting and pecking, he typed Shallobeertun’s web address. Their homepage didn’t leave any more of an impression on his brain than the chick drama he’d watched earlier. “QUARTERLY STATEMENT WILL THRILL SHAREHOLDERS, CFO PREDICTS.” Myke clicked through to their Technologies division. He tapped a few random links, finding nothing. His fingers felt like water-balloons, barely firm enough to depress keys. Myke sat up from the keyboard again and reached for the wallet he’d just put down on the couch.

“I dunno how you can call it day-trading at two in the morning,” Arlen quipped as she walked towards the bathroom. Myke blinked his eyes a couple of times. Suddenly, somehow, he found himself poring intently over stock market reports on the screen, probably set off by the headline on Shallobeertun’s homepage. And yes, he was day-trading too, on a side window on the screen.

“It’s always daytime somewhere, babe. Singapore markets look good today. Time enough for sleep when we get old and retire!”

The energy and enthusiasm of his reply were a complete one-eighty turnaround from the way she’d seen him last. “You did it again, didn’t you, you bastard! After the way you looked when you came home? Well somebody else is gonna have to feed you and tuck you in when you come down off it this time. I can’t miss work again.”

“Babe, just sign over your Social Security stock to me and let me bet it all on Shallobeertun. This is really hot stuff. Just this once. Waiters will be tucking us in with champagne every night.”

“Don’t even joke about that again,” she muttered sullenly. “I’m not falling for it twice.” The accusation stabbed him through the heart. No, actually, the drug stabbed him through the heart. As he stood up from the couch to confront her, he got another headrush, worse this time -- and his chest, his heart, felt constricted like in a vise.

“Hey, what are you talking about? You didn’t really lose anything last time...!” he wheezed. He’d tough out the pain and show her why she was wrong. But Arlen had already slammed the bedroom door. She didn’t notice his distress. Gee, good eye there, Arlen. Don’t you see the sacrifices I make for you?

This was the real reason why he hated Sub E, Myke told himself. Whenever he took it, everyone around him simply started acting stupid.

* * *

The comedown after Monday night persisted well into Tuesday morning. The fact that he was now supposed to do six months’ worth of fundamentally unnecessary drudge work before his presentation on Thursday didn’t help. He typed the probe’s generic specifications into his computer model. Myke felt like he had to rest his eyes after every single keystroke. This was going to take forever.

He reached into his wallet and pulled out a shrink-wrapped dermal patch. I need this. The work won’t be ready if I don’t. Just this once. He broke the seal on the shrink wrap.

As the drug took hold and his perceptions expanded, the enormity of his task began to hit him. Before Thursday? His breath became ragged. Once again his heart struggled to fulfill its duties and pain wracked his chest.

No point in panicking. There are steps to be taken. Steps. Gather all available data. Most of it is missing. It is possible to make certain assumptions: Shallobeertun would naturally equip their probe with the latest gas spectrometer module from Japan, the fanciest retro-rockets from JPL, a work-horse radio communications module from Germany. What else? Of course! It’s the elegant solution. Knowing that made all the difference.

The drug left him early that afternoon, with an almost palpable sense of plunge. Myke found himself in the sandwich shop across the street without any clear recollection of going there. One minute he was enjoying a liverwurst, pickle and PB sandwich, snickering at the dreary proles walking into his own office building; the next minute his stomach refused to accept the bizarre amalgamation it was being offered and suddenly turned alkaline. He stood up unsteadily, which caused him to break out in a sweat despite the air conditioning. Another headrush. He’d stayed too long at lunch, he’d forgotten about that Gawdawful presentation two days from now. Myke staggered back into his office.

When he reached his computer, the probe’s density profile was the same bland approximation he’d had last week. Yet he recalled receiving more data from somewhere. He had created a specific orbital solution, somehow, before he went to lunch. The solution fit the bland profile just fine, but so would a hundred other solutions. Somehow he had picked out this particular one.

His problem was solved. He had earned the right to go home early that day. But some missing piece of the puzzle gnawed at him. At some point when he was doped-up, he had had more information about the probe. Information that was not visible now.

There was a new folder in his computer which contained an exact mass specification for the Chiron probe, but only numbers. No description. The folder was entitled “INNOVATIVE ANTI-SOLAR POWER SYSTEM.”

Anti-solar? Power out of the dark. Never heard of such a thing. This probe was going to spend a long time in the dark. Maybe even pass Pluto eventually. Wait. Pluto was about as far from the sun as you could get. Pluto. Plutonium. The probe was going to be powered by Plutonium.

He totaled up all the same known probe components that he had just methodically worked through earlier this morning. The process took him two hours when the time-indexes on his notes indicated he had solved the problem in fifteen minutes, the first time. No going home early today.

But there it was. There were a few components that were still missing. Still, he already had the overall weight and dimensions. Unless the on-board temperature gage was hiding a cubic meter of lead, well then the only reasonable conclusion was that the power module was composed mainly of Uranium or Plutonium.

Myke wondered at this news. Everyone had assumed this was a battery-powered probe, but nuclear probes were not uncommon. Why not just specify that up-front? Why all the secrecy? Above all, why hide the information from himself?

Within his note folder on the power plant, there was another hidden hyperlink. “GREAT SOLUTION BY ALEXANDER & CO.” That wasn’t the name of the client. But he had hidden some information there, underneath that bland comment, waiting for a password to unlock it. Damn. This he didn’t need. He was working against himself. When he was hopped-up on Substance E, he had solved all his problems and found them unchallenging. He had a surplus of brainpower which, apparently, he turned backwards upon himself by creating riddles. Who was Alexander & Co.? Some hunch told him that it would be pointless to track down real-life companies by that name. This was a metaphor, like the “anti-solar” power system.

Great solution? Alexander the Great. Too easy. He clicked on the phrase that cited the company name, and replaced it with “ALEXANDER THE GREAT”. Nothing happened. The password line reset itself. “GREAT SOLUTION BY ALEXANDER & CO.” This was a puzzle, all right. Alexander. Alexander the Great had solved some kind of problem like this one. Some Greek province or other had a law saying that anyone who solved their riddle would be declared King without a fight. Myke’s history was weak. He couldn’t remember where this province was.

But suddenly he remembered the puzzle. It was a labyrinthine snarl of a knot, tied in fine red silk rope, which blocked some kind of doorway. He couldn’t remember the details. But the name of the puzzle had become a cliché for a tough problem. He typed in the phrase, “GORDIAN KNOT”.

Suddenly a flood of research notes appeared in the file. Shallobeertun had clearly exhausted all their environmental credit waivers for radioactive materials, only a couple months into this year. Those waivers could be bought and sold on the free market, and according to newspaper articles, smart investors assumed that their client would make a deal to do just that. Somehow. But those waivers were very expensive. Myke’s financial analysis was extremely sophisticated, his MBA professors would have been quite proud. Not even most professional stockbrokers would have spotted this. Shallobeertun’s profitability this quarter did not allow for the purchase of a waiver. They couldn’t even bury this expense in a hundred front companies; their loans would collapse like a house of cards. Nevertheless, if they didn’t make a profit off of this probe launch, Shallobeertun was going to be eaten alive on Wall Street when their next statement came out.

The conclusion was obvious.

Shallobeertun intended to shoot this Plutonium-powered probe into space without a nuclear waiver.

They were counting on their subcontractors, like Gravitic Op, like Myke, to keep quiet about it. Or at least, not to make an effort to put the pieces together. Why should we? It isn’t our liability problem, Gravitic Op has no stake in whether Shallobeertun does or does not buy a waiver.

Myke suddenly felt the ominous weight of the world on his shoulders. Part of the expense of a nuclear waiver was a preparedness bond, so that the government could monitor the project and have resources ready in case of an accident. To contain the nuclear material, to distribute protection to those in its path.

There would be no safety monitoring, no early warning on this project. Not if Shallobeertun was falsifying their power schematics and avoiding the nuclear waiver. If something went wrong, they could hide the responsibility for the waiver deep down inside a dozen recursive front companies, each with corporate competitive nondisclosure agreements, so that it’d take beleaguered Federal compliance checkers ten years to figure out if there was or wasn’t a waiver, let alone whose fault it was. The probe was going up in two months.

If Myke failed to do his job, if his elegant gravitational solution didn’t work and something collided with this probe... there could be a very large spill of Plutonium in the upper atmosphere. Thousands or maybe millions of people would certainly contract cancer from it.

Well good thing we won’t screw up, he thought. Just as long as we don’t run out of dermal patches before my final report, everything’s going to be fine.

He shook his head to clear it. In all his years of addiction, he had never heard such a frightening thing before. That last thought had been the drug itself talking to him. It was an echo, a residual chemical trace of Substance E lodged in the fatty cells of his brain.

He knew because he recognized the style.

Judging from the approving tones he had used in his encrypted notes... when Myke was high on Substance E, he knew that he approved of the deception by his client. “An elegant solution” to get around the Gordian Knot of environmental regulation. That’s how he had described it, when the drug was in the driver’s seat. Alexander the Great had simply sliced the Gordian Knot in half with his sword. Shallobeertun intended to do the same thing to the nuclear environmental laws governing space launches and government subcontractors.

* * *

On Wednesday Myke was supposed to prepare his big presentation. He could barely believe what he was doing. Somehow he just didn’t have the nerve to use the word “Plutonium” anywhere in his presentation materials. The specifications of the probe, which he had deduced (twice) himself -- those, too, he avoided using, since Shallobeertun apparently didn’t want that information released. Was he really about to give a presentation on a project that could conceivably contaminate half the Earth’s atmosphere? And not raise that possibility?

What good would it do? Either Shallobeertun or Deckurt would simply deny that his accusations were true, he’d be fired and replaced. His computer models would be used by somebody else, the intellectual property laws made it clear that all his innovations belonged to the company who paid him. The probe would go up anyway, likely as not with the orbital solution he had plotted. He couldn’t mention any of this to a living soul without violating a dozen nondisclosure provisions in his contract. He might save the Earth from an imagined ecological threat, and then starve in the streets because he’d never be hired by any company ever again.

Even so, preparing the graphs and figures for the presentation was easy. He could just regurgitate the generic information he’d been given, make up some mumbo-jumbo about typical probe mass density, and then show off his specific solution. What he thought was six months of drudge work just melted into a couple hours in the morning. Still, by noon, he was feeling overwhelmed by the implications. His stomach was unsettled. He decided to call Arlen and meet her for lunch.

When he clicked on her name in his address book, another one of those damn riddles appeared.

Chroist on a crutch. Arlen didn’t like the drug and the feeling was apparently mutual. But when had he encrypted her phone numbers? He hadn’t even --

He clutched at his neck like a vampire had bitten him. There was a dermal patch there.

Myke didn’t remember putting it on. He didn’t remember fishing it out of his wallet, didn’t remember breaking the seal. But it was there all the same.

That was the last straw. Myke couldn’t sit on the fence anymore. Somehow he was going to figure a way out of this mess. First things first: if the drug didn’t want him calling Arlen, then he was going to call Arlen.

He looked at the passcode riddle on his screen.

“NO HELL WILL BE RAISED THIS WEEK”

That sounded familiar. Of course it did, because he was riddling himself. This had something to do with Arlen’s job. He could just feel it. What the hell was her job?

Suddenly he couldn’t remember what Arlen did for a living.

This was unacceptable. The riddles were merely annoying, just Myke being a smart-alecky kid to himself. Childish. But if the drug was trying to take away his memories of Arlen, well it would damn well not succeed.

He forced himself to calm down. Quieted his mind. He had taken a meditation class back in college, when he was worried about his falling grades but before he started using Sub E, and he could still remember a couple of tricks. Even though he never practiced anymore. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. He envisioned absolutely nothing but the air flowing across his filtrum, the dimple between his nose and his mouth.

Sean barged into his office unannounced, and failed to suppress a guffaw at seeing Myke apparently asleep. “Can you get this computation resource survey back to the Software Department by this afternoon?” He tossed a thick folder onto Myke’s desk, barely missing his face.

“Yeah, sure, Sean,” Myke grumbled. He picked up a pen and started leafing through it. As soon as Sean left his office, Myke arose, locked the door, and began his meditation again.

When his mind was still and calm, he could remember meeting Arlen. Laughing with her. As she read something. Something she had written.

That was it! An article in a newspaper. She worked for the local weekly alternative newspaper. Whatever it was named, Myke still didn’t recall; he never had time to read it anyway, only when Arlen handed him a rough-draft of her column.

But now he could solve the riddle. He knew that quote had something to do with newspapers. Some dude a hundred years ago had said something like, “It is the duty of a newspaper to report the facts and raise hell,” or somesuch. Arlen’s motto. It took nearly twenty seconds on the Internet to figure out that the guy who said that was named Zenger. Arlen’s phone number appeared on his screen. And now, slowly, methodically, a plan of action was forming in Myke’s head. By obscuring the important clue, his drugged-up self had alerted him to what was important.

It was one thing to use the drug to get promoted or finish jobs on time. It’s another thing when the drug was using him. Somewhere, somehow, he would find the strength to stop using Sub E. That dermal patch that had snuck itself onto his neck without permission... that would be the last one he ever used. Not today, not tomorrow before his big meeting. He swore. He dialed Arlen’s work number.

* * *

But on Thursday morning about nine-forty-five, he realized he was really in deep. The boss was greeting the expensive suits from Shallowbeertun as the secretaries prepared the conference room. Myke’s pulse was pounding in his head like tidal waves from the ocean. His neck itched for a dermal patch.

However, he had successfully fooled himself. He had kept the patches, unused, in his wallet until half an hour before his presentation. Then before he could stop himself or think twice, he suddenly put his entire supply through the shredder by his desk. It was, obviously, far too late to obtain more. If he could just get through this presentation meeting... Just This Once... If he could get through this one meeting without the drug, then somehow he would find a way to avoid using it ever again.

Maybe he’d get fired from his job. It didn’t matter. Never having a memory lapse again, that mattered. Whatever the hell had been happening to his heart, lately, hopefully that would stop. That mattered. No more damn puzzles. Being at peace with Arlen. That mattered. Arguably the drug had tried to use him to endanger the Earth’s entire ecosphere, by shooting three hundred pounds of Plutonium around the planet without the proper safety precautions. I guess that matters too.

Myke preferred his own good old-fashioned cynicism and sarcasm, anyway, to the smarmy know-it-all that Substance E made him become. But he wondered if he really had the guts to go through with his plan. Then he wondered if his plan was gutsy enough to work.

However they ate up his doubletalk and hand-waving. Clearly Deckurt couldn’t care less if Myke said he got the solution from a psychic hotline. Just so long as his whiz-kid performed.

Meanwhile, the Shallowbeertun execs nodded approvingly and compared encrypted notes across their PDAs. Myke couldn’t decrypt the graphs and messages they were sending each other, not without Sub E, but he would have bet his next paycheck that their own technicians had already worked out the gravitational solution on their own -- or at least, the general parameters of the proper solution for the Plutonium-based probe. And Myke had passed their test. Looks like another “Sue-Me” job: Shallobeertun was paying Gravitic Op for no other reason than they wanted somebody to sue, if things went wrong. Wonder if Deckurt even realizes that, Myke asked himself, with an inward grin. He had finally spotted something important, where his higher-ups were clueless, instead of the other way around. More importantly, he had come to that realization without Substance E. The Gordian Knot was finally cut -- his own, not Shallobeertun’s.

Now came the gutsy part. His boss was offering parting greetings to the Shallobeertun execs as they walked out the door. As soon as they were out of sight, “Debrief,” Deckurt muttered softly. Myke had expected this. He followed Deckurt to his office and closed the door.

“Boss, I have some news that you should know even before the debrief. Twenty minutes before the presentation, I got a call from Will Bowyers,” Myke lied, “that investigative reporter for Indepth Dot Net.”

“Yeah, I got the same call,” Deckurt replied. Myke almost gasped; Arlen kept her promises quickly and obviously she was better connected than Myke had assumed. She had passed his data anonymously to another reporter, outside her own paper. From her fox-like expression when he’d asked, he wasn’t sure if she would -- but she had. He hoped she had also heeded his request not even to look at the data herself. There must be no connection between him and this data leak. None.

His boss was continuing. “Bowyers claimed to have financial analyses that said Shallobeertun intends to shoot a probe full of Plutonium without a nuclear waiver. He got the generic specs off of one of their damn advertisement viruses, and he put together the pieces that you couldn’t assemble,” he added with a growl.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Myke played along. “But after he called me I checked his assumptions. I don’t have any evidence, but circumstantially, I think he’s right.”

“Those Shallobeertun guys are gonna walk into a hellstorm when they get back to their office, if Bowyers has been calling around there too. I think we have to re-evaluate our commitments and responsibilities to them. Take a half-day off, Myke, while I ask the Board what to do. I can’t believe you missed something obvious like that. Thank God we got a tip-off, though. Next time try to keep your eyes open for liability questions.”

Myke couldn’t help feeling a bit smug as he shut off his computer. He was pretty sure nobody would contradict Deckurt’s opinion. Probably nobody would ever realize that he himself was the leak, because exposing Shallobeertun’s finances was a flash of genius whereas he still had a reputation as an unimaginative plodder. Deckurt, Sean or Jake had always taken credit for Myke’s innovations and apparently they had, themselves, forgotten who originated such things. Fine, if that’s what it took to keep his cover.

Arlen had followed his instructions carefully and gotten him off the hook with the probe project. Now he would obey his longstanding promise to her, and give up Substance E. When the scandal forced Shallobeertun to abandon the project three weeks later, Myke felt like he had closed the book on a story that he didn’t want to repeat.

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