****
"Wake up," said a familiar voice the next morning. Someone was holding each of his hands, and it was definitely not jants.
He opened his eyes. It was his parents, one on each side of the bed, staring down at him apprehensively! "Hi Mom, Dad!" he said cheerfully. "Welcome to New York!"
"Christ Boy, you gave us some scare!" said Frank Kelso. "Moving away from home like that; and then not going to the hospital for treatments anymore! It's a damn good thing I have friends with influence, even here in New York!"
"Thank God you're alive, George!" Alice Kelso told her son, as she bent down to hug him and kiss his cheek. "And he looks good, doesn't he Papa? He has gained some weight and he even has a little hair!"
"We'll wait until we hear what the high-priced New York doctors say about his health. Now what's this crazy business about a big bug on your back, Son?" Frank asked. "It's all over the news, even back home in Texas! It was on that network that specializes in showing big-ass snakes and worms and bugs and so-forth."
"I don't know, Dad. They sedated me soon after they found it. You probably know more about it than I do."
"Well, when the city news hacks here want to interview you about it, don't tell them that," advised Frank. "Make up a good story to sell them and hold out for plenty of cash! Bug stories are hot now! There's those big ants that are all over, for one thing! They've been in Texas for years but we never paid them no never-mind. Now there are all kinds of crazy rumors about them being smart. Plenty of people are spooked.
"But that's OK, Son, because every new panic translates to big money! The real estate market has already been going ape-shit for a couple of decades with people trying move in and out of this place or that place because of it being too hot or cold, too rainy or dry, or because of having blood sucking bats or giant snakes or whatever in their neighborhood. And right now there's another fresh new round of panic over bugs! This global warming crap produces one gold mine after another! I saw this coming. I recently put most of my investments into Falcone Unlimited Communities."
"Isn't Falcone a big national pest control company rumored to be a mob front?" George asked.
Frank nodded his head in agreement. "That mob business is pure hokum; they're put aside their mob roots in New Jersey and are a legit Fortune 500 company now! They've branched out into protecting selected communities from everything weird, including burglars, evangelical survivalists, and illegal immigrants. People will pay an extra couple-hundred a month or more to live in a Falcone gated community. I'm making money out the wazoo!"
"Sounds great, Dad!" Actually it sounded like paying protection money to the mob.
"And that's just the beginning!" Frank boasted. There was an excitement in his voice and eyes that he always got when he was enthusiastic about his business investments. "There are opportunities like that all over the country and the Falcone people are getting in on them! For example in hot places people want to move into underground homes that stay cool, while in cold places people want to move into underground homes that stay warm! That means excavation equipment and building materials and unionized laborers that people have to pay plenty for!
"Then there's water shortages! Super deep wells are the rage! People want their own water, if they can afford it, since municipal services are failing and fracking has screwed up a lot of water supplies. Then there's folks with too damn much water; people near flooding rivers and rising coastlines that want their houses to be put up on stilts! And they all want their own guns and ammo, even the damn liberals! And everybody has dangerous pests and pathogens to worry about! And solar and wind power is the rage, due to less oil and so-forth! All of that stuff and more involves cash being spent and the Falcone family has ways to get a cut of it. Since I went in with them I might soon archive my life-long goal of being a billionaire!"
"That sounds really exciting, Dad," George agreed. "But aren't there lots of down sides to consider? For instance aren't there droughts in some places and floods in others that you can't fully protect against no matter how much money is spent on wells and stilts and dikes and so-forth? For New York a huge dike system is being built, but critics say that the full effort isn't funded and the dike construction won't keep pace with the rise in ocean levels anyway. Antarctica was supposed to take a couple of centuries to melt but it's happening in only a few decades."
"Son, I'm not saying that the things that people are doing will always work to solve all their goofball problems, I'm saying that they spend lots of money to try to do it! They pay increased taxes too, for the Government to try to do things that also don't work. I'm just getting my cut."
George didn't see how it could all add up to a good outcome. He was an accountant and used to following rules that defined how things were supposed to add up but the problems he had with what his Dad did for a living deeply troubled him. Even though Dad followed the legal rules, he did it to only make money for himself, not to benefit anyone else. Additionally Frank provided no services or goods of value directly to anybody; he only bought, sold, and held investments in things that other people did or made. Looking beyond the margins of the accountant ledgers it seemed to George that his Dad and many other people were profiteering parasites that sucked away at the positive efforts that other people made. Much like blood-sucking ticks!
"Isn't the over-all stock market going to shit in terms of real value?" George asked him. "Aren't good jobs and wages still disappearing? Aren't houses being abandoned because people can't afford to live in them anymore, and then homeless illegal squatters move into them? Squatters that don't pay taxes and let the houses and neighborhoods and cities fall apart? It's like Detroit and Los Vegas when I was a kid, but it's happening all over the world now! Isn't the value of the dollar unstable and falling? The emperor has no clothes, Dad! The economy is rotting away like the cities!"
"That stuff has always happened now and again, Son. We're in a down-swing of a natural cycle that we'll come out of soon; we always do! In the meantime there's big money to be made, and if we don't make it, someone else will. Once all of this global warming BS is forgotten and the economy picks up again we'll be sitting pretty."
"Listen to your Dad," Alice implored. "He knows about these things!"
"But climate change isn't going away; it's just getting started!" George noted. "Even the Eastern Antarctica ice sheet has stopped increasing and is melting rapidly! We won't come out of this hot spell for thousands of years, if ever! Pretty soon nobody will be sitting pretty. How the hell is our society going to survive everything that's happening? Capitalistic assumptions of growth can't be met anymore. At some point soon your money and investments will become worthless."
"That's left-wing propaganda from sneaky bastards that just want to pry into my well-deserved fat wallet to get money that I earned fair and square through hard work! We have to get you checked out of this hospital and out of this pinko blue state, Son. We need to get you back to your roots. Your Mom and I live in a big new place in the country now where together we can do some hunting and watch my investments make more billions. I've even got my own golf course! We'll take doctors with us to take care of your cancer, and your Mom will make us her famous Texas barbeque."
"You've moved out of Houston and into the country?"
"It's a Falcone protected estate in north Texas," Frank boasted. "Houston was getting too damn many hurricanes and displaced weirdoes. It was either that or move back to New Jersey near your Mother's family. But that hurricane two years ago washed away all the nicest Jersey coastal towns, so that was out. Move back to Texas with us Son, and I'll cut you in on everything."
George couldn't imagine doing that. But he knew that to be fair he should consider it some more. He owed his parents big time for supporting him through all of his problems. Besides, maybe Dad wasn't merely a blood-sucking parasite; maybe the system was set up such that even the parasites were useful or even necessary. Maybe Dad's investments were needed to enable positive things to happen such
as Falcone Unlimited Communities, where people were safer. Or at least they thought they were safer.
Before George could think of a reply there was a courtesy knock on the door and four people entered the room; he recognized two of them to be his doctors, while the other two were complete strangers. "Wonderful news folks!" began Dr. Milner. "We detect no disease or parasites or anything else harmful in your body! It's a miracle!"
"No harmful effects from the giant tick then?" George asked.
"None at all that we can detect," Milner assured him. "The bite on your back has even started to heal! Frankly I'm astonished; ticks normally carry a variety of pathogens, including nasty bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and macroscopic parasites such as worms. We checked for everything we could, including Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, relapsing fever, tularemia, tick-borne meningoencephalitis, Colorado tick fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, babesiosis, cytauxzoonosis, and a menagerie of worms, insect larvae, and other nasty critters, including the anisakis nematode, wuchereria bancrofti, guinea worm, hook worm, roundworm, pinworm, whipworm, eyeworm, flatworm, blood fluke, and others. You test negative for everything!"
George had no idea what most of those things were but he felt good about not having any of them.
"If you experience any problems get in touch with us," Milner added, "but I think that you'll be perfectly OK."
"But what about the cancer?" Frank asked.
"Complete remission!" stated George's oncologist Dr. Ann Olson cheerfully.
"What's that? Stage five?" asked Alice. "I thought that stage four was the final one."
"The cancer is totally gone," explained Dr. Olson.
"Totally?" asked George. He knew that he felt much better, but this was even better than he had hoped!
"Totally!" repeated Olson. "Cancer detection has become precise in recent years and you are phenomenally clean of anything cancerous or pre-cancerous. We've never seen anything like it! You are probably the healthiest person in this hospital."
Alice started crying joyfully, and ran to give Dr. Olson a big hug.
"Maybe you New York big city doctors are worth the fancy fees after all," said Frank, as he retrieved his still sobbing wife and shook Dr. Olson's hand vigorously. "I'll be damned! We sure couldn't get him cured in Texas!"
"I don't know if our treatments had anything to do with it," admitted Olson.
But she'd bill them as if they did, Frank correctly figured.
"Great!" exclaimed George. "Then I can get out of here and go home!"
"Home to Texas with us!" his Mother stated.
"I'll need some time to think about that one," George said. "I have a new life here to consider."
"I'll give you one month, Son," said Frank. "Then if you want me to continue to pay off your credit card, you'll come home. This city you live in is going to shit even faster than Houston, and that's saying something."
"In the meantime I want to be discharged immediately," George told Dr. Olson.
"Certainly, Mr. Kelso," agreed Olson. "I'll get your discharge paperwork started, but before you leave, these other two gentlemen also want to speak with you."
Everyone turned to stare at the two strange men at the back of the room who had been silently observing them. The short skinny bearded one carrying the briefcase looked to be perhaps thirty five, but the tall well-dressed one appeared to be at least twice as old.
"Who are they?" Frank Kelso asked Dr. Olson.
"Dr. Sheffield and Mr. Green are Federal Government officials," said Dr. Olson.
"Yes, we work for the Government," said the tall old distinguished looking one, as both men stepped forward to shake George's hand.
"Mr. Green? Jerry Green?" George asked.
"Yes, I'm Jerry Green," answered the shorter, younger, frumpier looking man. "We have some mutual friends that live near you. Within two kilometers of you, as a matter of fact."
What the hell was this guy's connection to his jant friends in the Park, George wandered?
"We do need to speak to George for a few minutes in private," said Sheffield. "So if the rest of you would please leave the room, we will be able to get started."
"But we're his parents!" protested Alice Kelso.
"No harm will come to him," promised Green. "We merely have some standard questions for him to answer that are related to his encounter with the exotic parasite that was removed from him, and then he can be on his way."
"Sure, I don't mind," said George. "Mom, Dad, I'll be fine; it's wonderful to see you again but go home now. I'll see you again very soon, I promise. In the meantime from now on I'll phone you every day."
"If you don't phone we'll hunt you down again!" Frank promised, as after some more hugs and kisses Dr. Olson escorted both him and Alice out of the room, along with Dr. Milner.
Sheffield turned on the room entertainment center, placed it in television mode, and turned up the volume. "The background noise is to protect our conversation from unauthorized snooping, Mr. Kelso," he explained, as he showed his PID to George. It was an odd color and said 'Mark Sheffield, NSA Director' on it next to his 3-D holographic picture. "What we are about to discuss is highly classified information. Can we rely on your discretion, Mr. Kelso?"
"Sure," said George. Nobody else would believe any of this anyway, he figured.
"What do you think of our jant associates, Mr. Kelso?" Green asked.
"They saved my life, or I'm thinking now that maybe the big tick did," said George. "I think they're pretty terrific. Except for the yuck-factor, of course. I was in cancer purgatory when they discovered me: not fully dead yet but certainly not fully living either. Now I am apparently perfectly healthy. Healthier than I've ever been, it seems."
"The giant tick attached to you came as quite a shock, I suppose," said Green.
"That's for damn sure!" George admitted. "But then I figured that the yucky tick was somehow involved in saving me. Is that right?"
"Absolutely," said Green. "The medical ticks of the jants are designed to be the most sophisticated and capable medical miracle workers that the world has ever known, and you have had the privilege of being the first human to be treated by one."
"Wow!" was the only thing that George could think of saying.
"How would you describe your treatment by the tick, Mr. Kelso," asked Sheffield. "Did you experience any pain or discomfort?"
"Hell no; I felt better right away! The pain was gone and I could eat and sleep and simply get stronger every day. And I had the jants to talk with also; that helped me a great deal."
"You were extremely lucky to encounter the jants while they were looking for a suitable test subject for the tick," said Green. "Ants have remarkable chemical sensing capabilities. With their antennas they could literally taste the air you exhaled to detect that you had advanced cancer. They placed the immature tick on your back where it was unlikely to be discovered and it grew rapidly, big enough to begin fighting your cancer almost immediately. You received a jant medical tick just in time to save your life."
"Why ticks?" George asked. "And for that matter, why ants?"
"The ants came first," explained Green. "Humans had screwed up our planet so much that I wanted there to be a non-human life form capable of surviving the mess. Ants were very capable already, so I figured they already had a good chance of survival. I made these ants larger and much smarter but they have greatly exceeded my expectations. They were my experiment in the beginning but now they do their own experiments. Medical ticks are mostly their creation."
"You made the jants?" George asked. He didn't know much about science but making an ant sounded like a hard thing to do. "They said something about gene-splicing."
"Yes, Jerry gene-spiced and diced them into existence many years ago," explained Sheffield. "That's where the 'J' in their name comes from. We in the Government came to call them Jerry's ants: jants. At first Jerry was hunted by the Government as a bioterrorist, but the Government was later able to recruit
him to combat biological threats and to deal with the intelligent jants."
"They are really, really smart," noted George.
"Yes, they join millions of their tiny minds together telepathically to become super smart," said Green.
"Why ticks?" asked George.
"For several reasons," explained Green. "They eat the blood of their patients, which provides them a convenient food source. They have heads and harpoon-like maxilla that they imbed in their patients to firmly attach themselves. Genes from what are commonly known as humming-bird moths provided the basis for adding hollow tongue-like maxilla extensions that that can reach deep into the human patient to take samples and give shots of the customized medicine they produce. Think of them as portable drug creation and dispensing agents, connected telepathically to the jants for cognitive analysis and control. The jants do the doctoring."
"The tick maxilla extensions can also tap into the patient's nervous system," said Sheffield, "directly into the spinal column, when necessary. This ability will be used to provide mobility to paraplegic humans."
"Nifty," said George. Helping paraplegic people to walk sounded like a good thing. He was glad to hear that all the bumps and bruises that he endured while under jant control weren't for nothing.
"In summary the giant ticks have bodies large enough to contain what amounts to a biochemical laboratory, and a neural capability that supports communications with the host and long-range telepathic contact with the medically skilled jant colonies," Green noted.
"Two kilometers," noted George. "Thanks for explaining all of that to me."
"What we told you are Government secrets," noted Sheffield. "This is a joint Government/jant initiative. If you were to divulge what has happened we would have to take certain actions against you that you would not enjoy."
"Fair enough," said George. "The way I look at it I owe you and our bug friends big time! Are there other cured people like me?"
"A handful more are starting treatment now, but you were the first!" said Sheffield.
"What happens with me now?" George asked.
"We want to hire you," said Green. "You have become a key part of our collaboration with the jants and we want that to continue. Through your salary as an NSA agent you will have the financial independence from your parents that the jants tell us that you have wanted. You will help save hundreds and perhaps ultimately many millions of lives."
"That sounds good!" said George. "But what exactly do I have to do?"
Green pulled some forms from his briefcase. "Go home, fill in these employee information forms, and mail them to the address provided," said Green. "Then return to your friends in the Park and secretly work with them. Central Park was chosen as the place to introduce ticks to humans and to begin their mass-production."
"That sounds exciting," George said.
"But always remember that this is a top-secret Government project," said Green. "Someday soon we may go public with all of this, but not yet."
"You see, first we need a program with a proven track record," explained Sheffield. "We have to stay under the public radar for a time, and even under the Government radar. If it works we'll go public and take the credit; if it doesn't we've never heard of you or medical ticks. That's the secret way that most Government programs work nowadays, unfortunately. It saves us a lot of time and red tape that there is really no time for, given the emergency situation that this country faces."
They shook hands and the G-men stepped out of George's room and into the deserted hallway.
"Are any of your eavesdropping jants near here, Jerry?" Sheffield asked his younger friend.
"None close enough to read our thoughts, Mark. I'd sense them if there were."
"Do you have the tick and the blood samples?" Sheffield asked.
Jerry smiled and patted the briefcase he carried. "Yes. I'll analyze them myself; away from the prying thoughts of jants, of course."
"Good. I still don't trust those amazing little creatures of yours, Jerry," Sheffield complained. "They scare the hell out of me!"
"At this point the only thing that we can do is cooperate with them and influence and track their behavior," said Jerry. "After all, there are far worse things they could be doing. Judging from their amazing success with Kelso, they are shortly going to save countless thousands of human lives."
"But at what price, Jerry? That's what I'd still like to know! What are they planning?"
"After two decades I still don't know," admitted Jerry. "Maybe they aren't planning anything. Maybe we anthropomorphize them too much and we are overly suspicious. They are super-smart but they seem to lack emotion, so maybe they also lack ambition, greed, and deception."
Sheffield shrugged. "We can only hope that is the case. The other thing we should discuss is that I've finally put in for retirement. I'm seventy five-years old Jerry, long past my stale date. Unlike you, I do age. I've taught you all of what little I know about politics and you'll always know a hundred times more science than I do. I've worked my way into redundancy."
Jerry sighed. Many years ago he realized that due to the drugs he invented and administered to himself, he never got sick and wasn't showing any signs of aging. Since then he knew that difficult times like this would come. Sheffield was the closest thing he had to a friend, and the man was getting old. In a few more years Sheffield would be gone. He would outlive Sheffield and how many others? How long would he live himself? Hundreds of years perhaps? He still had the enduring jants for company of course; generation after generation of individual jants passed on their memories to their descendants such that their collective 'hive mind' didn't seem to age at all either. They only got smarter and more potentially dangerous. "What about our secretive efforts with the jants?"
"They will continue under the new Director."
"Who?"
"You Jerry, who else? You do most of my job now anyway. The fix is already in."
"But I don't want to be a manager," Jerry protested.
"Tough. I didn't want to become one either but I did it. Chronologically you're nearing sixty Jerry, time to grow up. For you to do what you need to do you'll have to have more political power and dollars. Actually I recommend that you switch over to the private sector at some point soon; that's where the real money and power are; George's dad was right about that. Besides, you'll be able to more easily hide the fact that you don't age if you're in the private sector. Be careful about what company you go with though; a lot of the big traditional corporations are failing and there are ruthless bottom feeders like the Falcones in ascendance."
"Thanks for the advice, my friend," said Green, as they reached the hospital exit. "Think about other topics now, Mark, and think pleasant surface thoughts about jants. There is a new nest of jants outside this hospital. Outside every hospital and hospice for a hundred miles, I'm told by the jants. George will be very busy."
****
George returned to his apartment. Without his connection to his jant friends via the long range telepathic powers of the tick it now seemed like a very lonely place. We went at once to Central Park where jant thoughts greeted him.
"GREETINGS GEORGE!" they welcomed him. "YOUR ABSENCE HAS BEEN NOTED."
"We can talk without the tick!' George exclaimed happily.
"YES, FOR SHORT DISTANCES. WE COULD ESTABLISH A SMALL COLONY IN YOUR A