***We don’t need a capsule, Wings. You know how it can be done….let me out of containment and I’ll insert myself right through your tear ducts…it’s already been done…it’s easy. A little sting, that’s all. I’ll just hang out inside your head. Believe me, I know where all the good stuff is. We’ll be partners***
Winger looked around. Sergeant Gavin was still there, still staring intently through the porthole. But there was a slight commotion behind him…another person. Gavin’s attention was momentarily diverted.
Shift change, Winger realized. Another tech coming on duty. Gavin’s face disappeared from the porthole.
Sometimes people make decisions without realizing they had made a decision. It just happens, like the sun going behind a cloud and coming out again. That fast.
No question Winger was intrigued by Dana’s offer. It was against all regulations. It was against Corps policy. It was against his oath of office as a nanotrooper. It was even against common sense. To let an unknown nanobot held in strict containment, a known threat that had already nearly killed him and Deeno, something that must have emerged from the depths of the Engebbe dig site, something perhaps dormant for a billion years and now loose, to allow that in the face of all the evidence that this was an insanely bad idea was just nuts.
And, yet….It was true that he was the very first atomgrabber. And now others would be atomgrabbers too. He was the top code and stick man in the Corps…but others would be hosting ANADs same as him and some of them were very good. But if he had something else, if he had another advantage, just the smallest edge…nobody could ever say Trooper Winger, J. was anything other than top dog….
He took one last peek at the porthole, fully aware that everything he did was recorded on video and audio. No face appeared but he could see bodies shifting around as Gavin relinquished his duty post to the new tech.
Without fully realizing it, he reached for the control panel above the containment pod and initiated de-containment…pressing two buttons, venting the pressure from the cap and opening up a channel out of the pod to the outside world. An alarm klaxon sounded inside the chamber.
On the imager display, the tiny nanoscale bot that had been clinging to the scaffolding had vanished, now moving out on internal propulsors. The trip would take about five minutes, by his reckoning.
There was a commotion at the porthole and faces appeared and disappeared. The klaxon changed to a warbling tone. The hatch handwheel started to spin. Gavin and the new tech would be trying to open up, trying to prevent the release of a dangerous device into the larger chamber. It would be a race now: the time to open the hatch versus the time for Dana to transit the pod entrance.
Just then, the hatch clanged open and the two techs came in. Both held mag pistols. Overhead, lights flashed as the beam injectors went through their priming cycle. It would be only seconds now.
“Sir…Lieutenant…get out of there…come out NOW! The seal’s been breached…here, grab my hand--!”
Even as he felt their hands grabbing his, yanking him off balance, out of the compromised containment bay, Johnny Winger felt something else as well. He stumbled, didn’t resist and was half dragged, half carried out. The sting in the corner of his eye lasted only a second, but it was there, he felt it and he was pretty sure he knew what had caused it. He blinked a few times, his eyes watered and it was done.
Gavin helped Winger outside and guided him to a chair beside the console. The other tech—his name plate read Vogt—slammed the hatch shut. Even as he spun the handwheel, a louder klaxon sounded and the chamber inside was instantly bathed in an eerie blue-white glow as trillions of electron volts flooded the room. Jets of toxic gas squealed as the containment bay was filled with a high-pressure vapor.
“Are you okay, sir?” Gavin’s face floated in front of Winger’s, studying the Lieutenant as if he were infected with plague. “Any pains, anything hurting…can you hear me? Can you see okay?”
Winger waved the Sergeant away. “Gavin, I’m okay. It’s all right. I’ll live. You did the right thing. A seal blew and you secured the chamber. I’m okay…really, I am.”
Gavin and Vogt both fussed over Winger for a few more minutes, then became more involved with making sure the inner containment pod was properly stabilized. For good measure, Winger checked things over himself, and pronounced himself satisfied. “Keep your shirts on, guys. Nothing’s been damaged. We’ll have to investigate why the seal failed, but it looks like our little guest is still contained.” Indeed, both techs were reassured when Winger pointed out that the scaffolding was still occupied by a few bots, beating and quivering as before.
“I just don’t want any trouble from Major Kraft,” Vogt was saying. “That man scares me. We’ll check the whole system over, Lieutenant…that’s a promise. Stem to stern.”
Winger said, “It’s okay, men. I won’t breathe a word of this to the Major. And you shouldn’t either. Call it a routine maintenance failure…safety systems scrammed and operated as planned. Nothing got out. Isn’t that the way you see it?”
Both sergeants replied in unison, with evident relief, “Yes sir! Absolutely, sir. We’ll go over everything with a microscope.”
Winger returned their salutes and signed himself out of the containment bay, cycling through the biometrics that protected the lockout compartment. He emerged into a bright sunny mid-winter day outside. It was cold and breezy on top of the Mountain, but that was normal. Some snow had fallen during the morning, but only a dusting.
Winger headed for the Officers’ Quarters.
He didn’t feel any different. But there had been a pinching kind of sting around his eyes just before the alarms had gone off. And now, as he walked along the graveled path past the PX toward A Building, the building troopers had long ago termed “Smallsville,” he began to feel the first faint waves of a delicious, shuddering, orgasmic pleasure wash throughout his entire body.
That’s when he knew.
Dana, you are there. This is nuts. I must be insane to have done this. Kraft’ll throw me in the brig for a thousand years and throw away the key.
It was clear that he couldn’t tell anybody what had just happened. Just thinking of it made him shiver…or was that the replicating Dana bots now stoking a dopamine cascade inside his ventral tegmentum? Did it matter?
Johnny Winger was now a living embodiment of Doc Frost’s Symbiosis Project, in a way and to a degree the old doctor could never have imagined. And in a few days, just to make it even more interesting, he knew he was scheduled to receive his newly upgraded, newly re-generated ANAD master in his shoulder capsule.
ANAD versus Dana…no telling how those two would get along. And they’d both be inside him. Maybe Dana was right, little by little, without realizing it or even intending it, he was becoming an angel.
As he unlocked the door to his quarters and went in, throwing himself onto a half-made bed, he kept the lights off for a few minutes and soon realized that the nanotroopers’ rally cry “Small is all!” was more relevant than ever before.
Now the dopamine cascade was building and Winger didn’t know how to turn it off. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d always been fascinated by trooper Dana Tallant, ever since she’d come out of nog school with her badass attitude, full of piss and vinegar. Sure, there had been a small piece of him that wanted to get closer to Tallant and maybe…just maybe—
I’m not sure this is what I really had in mind, he told himself. Then he wondered, is my coupler active? Can she hear me?
The answer came more quickly than he expected, more quickly than he really wanted.
***Wings, you have no idea…your new life…our new life is just getting started***
END
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’
s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
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