Chapter 21: What Happened Next

Part One

So this chapter starts right after I was killed by a sniper's bullet through the heart.

The thing about dying is, if you're killed a hundred feet away from the most advanced medical equipment on the planet, you don't necessarily stay dead for very long.

What I'm describing next came to me second-hand, from news video, discussions with others, and video feeds from Alpha and others sources.

The AARD building, its attached warehouse and the currently-undergoing-renovation extension building are not in downtown Fort Worth with its groups of skyscrapers, but there are plenty of buildings nearby. Maybe a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty yards to the north-east, across the two-lane side-street connected to the AARD parking lot, was a three-story building housing a variety of small offices. On the roof of that building, a sniper with a high-end hunting rifle had fired a shot which hit just off-center of my heart.

The heart is actually much more centrally located in the human chest than most people think, in place right between the lungs. The hollow-point bullet broke through my sternum and hit my heart as it expanded, destroying the blood-pumping muscle for all intents and purposes. My right lung received only a couple bone splinters, whereas my left lung had over a dozen noticeable holes punched through it. Some bullet and bone fragments exited through my back, but most stayed inside my chest cavity.

Not that I knew this. Although I apparently looked as though I was still conscious for thirteen seconds, I have no memory of that time. Conscious or not, I was in shock, losing most of my blood and quickly became obviously unconscious, dying less than a minute later. I was brain dead for up to three minutes, but we'll get into that mess some more in a bit.

Alphadroid One, which had been standing only a couple feet away from me at the time, traced back a rough trajectory of the bullet in less than a second and started running toward the source, scanning the environment for the shooter.

Beta, also standing nearby, was not quite fast enough to keep me from falling, but she was fast enough to maneuver her foot under my head, cushioning it enough to keep it from smacking the pavement. She grabbed my body and started running back into the AARD building.

A couple seconds later, Kara took off after the Alphadroid while Zatanna started trying to herd the reporters to safety inside the building.

The reporters were trying to duck to find safety ... and trying to film me being carried away ... and trying to film Alphadroid running across the parking lot ... and trying to locate the source of the shot ... all at the same time.

One of their cameras caught the image of Alphadroid 01 running across the parking lot. Without stopping or noticeably slowing, she picked up a fist-sized rock from a generic ornamental rock garden -- the kind that's 90% gravel with various larger stones set in place to artistically break up the monotony -- which ran along the side of our parking lot. As she neared the front of the target building, she threw it like a baseball toward the roof. The camera shot jerked up and caught a flash of movement on the roof, and a frame-by-frame examination showed a man clutching something in his hands being knocked back onto the roof and out of sight. Then she ran inside, slowing just enough to open the doors, with Kara running hard to catch up.

Police arriving later found Alphadroid and Kara standing watch over the corpse of a man in a suit, fallen by the edge of the roof, the hunting rifle with scope next to his body. The rock Alphadroid had thrown had caved in his skull.

Meanwhile, AARD came alive with artificial life. Every Alpha system had immediately refocused their tasks on securing the building and getting my body to surgery as quickly as possible.

If you've ever read Speaker for the Dead, the second Ender Wiggin book, do you remember the scene where Ender turned off his link to his AI computer friend? Remember how that threw the computer into a near-panic after having had constant contact with Ender for years? Take that basic idea and multiply it by one thousand for Alpha. I'm fortunate that Alpha cannot panic ... well, not like humans do. She can certainly over-react.

We had fifteen Alphadroids in the AARD warehouse which were capable of having Alpha loaded into them, but which were currently just plain Alphadroids. Installing a copy of Alpha into their systems would take at least ten minutes, but they were immediately capable of being remote controlled, so they moved to guard all five building entrances, with at least two of them per door, except for one which was used as an extra set of hands in the nanopod lab.

There were seven Alpha-platform cars at AARD, all of which came to life, but none of which moved. They were given processing chores and used as additional observation points.

We had an additional three normal Alphadroids in the building with full copies of Alpha already loaded, plus my R2-D2-style Alphadroid to make four (ignoring the one who dealt with the shooter). One of them grabbed our prototype artificial heart while two others grabbed all our stores of artificial blood.

Elisa and Jasmine were setting up the nanopod for my arrival.

When Beta reached the lab, they tore off my jacket and shirt in seconds, using enough force to dislocate one of my shoulders. I was put into the nanopod which was immediately flooded with over $140,000 worth of nanites, which was three times more than we had ever used before, about nine times as many as we normally used. Many more would be used before this was over.

As a little aside, using nanites is a game of numbers, cost and control.

There are tens of trillions of cells in the human body, but we can't create or control trillions of nanites. Well, given enough time, we could create that many, but there's no need to use such a huge number. You generally just need a few thousand or a few hundred thousand for any given task. For the really big jobs, like a full body tune-up, we generally used a few million over multiple sessions, addressing different areas or systems within the body with each session, with the understanding that most parts of the body don't need to be 'fixed up' every time. I mean, what's the point to fixing up blood cells or other cell types that are innately designed to have short life spans? For example, with blood cells you need to tend to the bone marrow instead.

Next, the monetary price. The cost of creating a single nanite is huge. The cost of creating a huge number of nanites is comparatively tiny. The reason is the cost of the equipment and expertise needed to create them. Once that is paid for, the actual cost of materials for an individual nanite is miniscule. (Also note if we were including payment for Alpha's production, programming and control services, the cost would be millions or possibly even billions of dollars, given all of the nanites we've produced over the years.)

You might ask about the time it takes to produce our nanites, and that question has a basically similar answer as the question of control. When we first started, it took us weeks to create a few hundred nanites, and Alpha was hard-pressed to control them all. Both production ability and control have vastly improved over time. At the the time of the shooting incident, we could mass produce tens of thousands of nanites every day and were planning expansions that could theoretically let us produce millions a day, which was necessary because we were also supplying nanites for our independent cyborgs. Our controls had likewise improved - external hardware, software and control nanites - enough that each of our control stations could run from a hundred thousand to close to a million nanites at one time (varying with the task and type of nanites being used).

The current generation of nanites could be recovered and reused, with roughly a 2% failure rate with each day of use. The failure rate had also vastly improved from an original failure rate of 23.4%. We expected the failure rate of our nanites to drop below 0.5% within the next two design generations.

Anyway, sorry. I got distracted from the story with relevant but dull discussions. Let's continue with a few gory details.

My chest was quickly opened up, breaking open my rib cage for easy access to the heart. The useless remains of my old heart were quickly cut free and removed, the artificial heart put in place, and the arteries and veins attached with our own version of superglue. Ideally, they would have cleaned everything carefully first, but infections were considered a minor hazard to be dealt with later.

Meanwhile, the artificial blood was connected to six points on my body and forced in half a pint at a time.

By the time the nanites were ready to take part in the operation, I had been brain dead for about two minutes. It was another minute before blood flow was properly restored, and another two minutes before all the holes were plugged so that the connections to the artificial heart stopped leaking (plus the holes from the bullet and the whole ripped-open ribcage thing).

Both of the other on-site nanopod control units were moved over to my pod and quickly arranged to control nanites in different parts of my body. All throughout my still warm flesh, they started acting to try to keep the body alive, stimulating nerves and encouraging blood flow. Unfortunately they could not actually transport oxygen to the cells, which was the main problem at the moment. Their most important job was taking control of my nervous system and restarting my autonomic systems.

Alpha had so far been forbidden to do anything to my brain other than scans and an occasional cellular revitalization. This time, my health was at risk so my previous orders meant little. Among their other tasks, nanites flooded my brain, looking for and repairing damage as best they could, mainly doing what they could to delay neural decay, directing red blood cells to where they were most needed. They also cut off the pain signals being sent to the brain and manually forced me to stay unconscious.

As mentioned before, my left lung had also been noticeably damaged by the bullet and bone fragments which had cut through the chest at an angle, peppering the surface with small holes, and was working at a reduced capacity. Since we had no replacement lungs available, makeshift patches were placed over the holes and glued into place. The nanites could tell my lungs to breathe, but only my right lung was working well.

After a few minutes, an oxygen mask was fitted over my mouth and nose, which helped, but our artificial blood is not as efficient as red blood cells when it comes to absorbing and distributing oxygen to the body. It works well enough to keep someone alive, but in my case it almost wasn't enough. I had just lost too much blood.

About ten minutes after I had been put in the nanopod, Elisa ran a line from an artery in her arm to my arm. All of the women in my household had been built with either O negative blood (i.e. universal donors) or A negative blood (to match my own blood type).

With her cyborg body controls, she could replace her own blood faster than a normal human, but not as fast as I needed it. After ten minutes, she passed the donation tube to Jasmine. After the twenty minute mark, they started bringing in non-cyborgs. By the time I finally had enough blood in me and all major bleeding points had been given good patches, I had also gotten donations from Anna, Diana and Blossom, as well as a couple bags taken from the ambulance.

Oh yeah, the ambulance. About three minutes after the shot, the first police car arrived. An ambulance arrived two minutes later, while an Alphadroid was patiently trying to explain to the police why they would not be allowed access to my body.

This was an unusual situation ... let's just say that neither the police nor the EMTs had any experience which would prepare them to deal with the situation. Both groups insisted on being allowed access to my body, which was flatly refused. I think the police would have backed off if a doctor had been telling them to do so, but instead they were alongside Emergency Medical Technicians who were also trying to get in.

One of the policemen put his hand on his weapon, obviously nervous about dealing with an android.

"Officer," Alpha tried to explain again, "we are unarmed and will offer no violence. But if we allow you to interfere with Frank's treatment right now, he will likely die. Again."

"Again?"

"His heart has been destroyed, and he was brain dead for less than three minutes. We are currently fitting him with a prototype artificial heart."

"He needs to be in a hospital," insisted one of the EMS technicians.

"The time needed to transport him will kill him. Also, no hospital will have the means to keep him alive. At the moment, he is only alive because of the artificial life support being used. We estimate a 62% chance or better that we will be able to keep him alive. Moving him anywhere else drops his survival chances to less than 1% overall."

The argument continued. The police tried to push past a couple of times, but that doesn't work well against stronger-than-human androids. Alpha knows all details of the law in and out and used that knowledge as best she could, but the situation was pretty tenuous. Police investigating a shooting have access rights to the location. Alpha was interfering with a criminal investigation. At the same time, the location where the crime occurred was open to them, and allowing them direct access to the victim would endanger the life of the victim. And then of course, no one attending the victim was an actual doctor or was using any approved techniques, but the medical knowledge and expertise were obvious. It was a mess.

While that was happening in the AARD lobby, police were approaching the nearby building where the sniper had positioned himself. When they pulled up, Kara looked over the edge of the roof and yelled down, "Up here! The shooter's dead."

Even with her reassurance, they arrived with guns out of their holsters, but at least they didn't point them at anyone.

When they were close enough to take in the scene, Alphadroid said, "I am responsible for his death and submit myself to your authority in the matter. You are welcome to handcuff me, though I should warn you that handcuffs are not a viable method of restraint for me."

"Officers," Kara interjected, "my name is Karen. I'm the business manager at AARD and witnessed the whole thing. Alphadroid here acted only in self-defense. There's a good chance some of the cameras got the whole thing on tape."

"Do either of you know who he is?"

"No. We haven't touched the body at all. It's pretty obvious he's dead," Kara said.

Which was true. The rock was lodged about three inches deep on the right side of his forehead. His eyes ... well, mostly his left eye, since his right eye was partly gone ... were open and blank, and a nasty smell of fecal matter was coming from his stained pants.

Alpha said, "I have run his reconstructed image through facial recognition, and I believe he is Jonathan 'Johnny' Frincola, a known member of organized crime from Nevada."

"No shit?" asked Kara. "Someone sent a fucking mob hitman after Frank? Fuckin' assholes."

From viewing Alphadroid's eye-cam video later, I could easily see that Kara was frighteningly upset and frustrated and vented a little by kicking the brickwork ledge, smashing a couple bricks and splitting her shoe.

"Damn it!" she yelled. Then she sat down on the ledge, took off her damaged pump, and threw it across the roof.

Looking at it arc over the far edge, she calmed down a little standing there lopsided and half barefoot, saying to no one in particular, "Well, that was smart."

Before the policemen could try to deal with the upset business manager in front of them, Alphadroid finally realized what was wrong.

"Karen, Frank is not dead."

"What are you talking about. That was a dead-on heart shot. I saw it. There's no way he could have survived."

"While it is true that his heart was destroyed, we have him in surgery in a nanopod right now. Our artificial heart prototype has been installed. Though his survival and recovery is by no means guaranteed, he is currently alive."

"Really? You're not just saying that to make me feel better?"

"Although I still do not fully understand humor, even I would not make a joke at a time like this."

"That's great!" she yelled as she grabbed Alphadroid in a hug. After kissing the smooth, curved plate that served as Alphadroid's cheek, she let him go and went to the edge of the roof.

"Hey, Z!" she yelled, looking for Zatanna who was nowhere to be seen.

"She is currently in the lobby tending to the reporters."

"Tell her already! She's gotta be thinking the same thing I was."

"I am telling her now."

"Let's get down there."

One of the officers stepped into her way. "Wait a minute, Miss. Are you a doctor?"

"No..."

"Then let's not interfere with his medical care and let the doctors do their job. In the meantime, we can deal with this situation here. Let's step over here so you can tell me what happened."

Kara and that particular Alphadroid were kept busy for hours telling their story multiple times to multiple people. Kara and the others were never in any real danger of being arrested. Even if Kara had pulled out heavy weapons and shot the guy, she still would have avoided jail in such a clear-cut case of self-defense. After all, this was Texas.

Alpha/Alphadroid was in a much more nebulous position. She did make a point of saying that she regretted Johnny's death. When asked why, she explained that his death prevented interrogation. The thrown rock was intended to disarm, not kill. He had been looking down at the sprinting android at the time -- some later opinions produced from the long-distance eyewitness videos were that he was trying to target the android -- and had just barely been able to jerk his hunting rifle out of the path of the rock in time, but not his head. Alpha had expected him to use the gun to deflect the rock, but for whatever reason he had not done so.

Later, the FBI passed along information that Johnny Frincola was a little odd among professional hitmen because he used the same rifle for all of his hits. Given modern forensics, this was an unusual risk to take, but his rifle -- which was apparently a treasured possession -- had never been found despite more than one search warrant. (Later testing of the rifle found next to the corpse confirmed its use in at least three other assassinations.) His attachment to his gun apparently extended to protecting it from damage rather than using it to deflect an incoming rock.

Examining Alpha's recordings revealed a snippet of faint audio which, when cleaned up, revealed what might have been a radioed call from a getaway driver who had been waiting for Mr Frincola to hastily exit the roof. We had no video at all of who the driver was or what type of vehicle he had been driving, but a simple two-way radio was found clipped to the assassin's belt.

In the short term, though, Alphadroid 01 was taken into police custody because they didn't know what else to do. They couldn't release an android that had just caused the death of a human being. They couldn't turn her off because they needed to be able to interview her, plus she might eventually be declared to be a person of some kind, so turning her off could be a violation of civil rights or something. They weren't even sure if Alphadroid was the one who should be in custody but didn't know how to approach the concept of arresting a computer or piece of software, and that's not even taking into consideration the need for Alpha to keep me alive.

Alphadroid 01 surrendered herself peacefully to the police and went with them to the police station where she was entered as evidence since they were unable to process her as as prisoner. (Fortunately, the employees in the evidence lock-up allowed her to plug herself in to recharge overnight.)

Alpha had legal maneuvers in motion almost immediately. A judge was petitioned with a variety of arguments the next morning, not the least of which was that no human in Alphadroid's position would be charged with a crime in this case. Either Alphadroid was a legal entity, in which case no charges would be filed for such a clear-cut case of self defense, or she was an advanced tool used by me as a means of self defense. There was a general feeling that any robot that had killed a human, regardless of the reasons, should be restrained or destroyed, but Alphadroid's own videos had confirmed that she was aiming for the assassin's weapon, meaning the death was accidental.

Fortunately Alphadroid 01 was released from custody the day after the shooting. It was made clear that Alphadroid should not leave the area, though there weren't really any laws to back up that 'request'. That was the whole problem with the situation. No laws had been created to deal with situations like this.

Upon meeting the press outside the courthouse, Alphadroid gave a statement to the effect that while she regretted the shooter's death, she did not regret her actions. "My intention was to disarm him, not kill him. However, his death by my actions was an acceptable if undesired outcome, since he was posing an immediate and active threat to the lives of other people in the area."

Now if you will, mentally rewind back to shortly after the shooting when the police arrived.

While Kara and Alphadroid were talking to the uniformed officers on the roof, an unmarked police car pulled up and discharged a couple of detectives. After talking with the uniformed officers for a moment and looking around, they went into the lobby to find out what was going on there.

The detectives talked with the Alphadroid guards and eventually worked out an agreement whereby they and the EMTs could see me as long as they promised not to interfere. (By this point, the temporary heart was installed with leaks sealed.)

Thinking about it, I wish there had been a window positioned so that my body could have been easily viewed while keeping the visitors out of the room, but the nanopod room had been deliberately built without windows, interior or exterior, so that we could grow bodies in secret. (Speaking of which, we did have two bodies in pods still in early growth stages which had been wheeled into a closet and covered after the heart was installed and before the visit. I didn't require all three nanite control units for very long, and the new cyborg bodies were recovered later with minimal degradation.)

So the four visitors were shown into my impromptu surgery room. Most of my chest was open, showing a blood-spattered white egg-like shape in place of my heart with the aorta, superior vena cava and so on all connected. One easily visible lung was inflating and deflating on its own, even if it was doing so a bit raggedly. An oxygen mask was strapped onto my face, and Anna was currently sitting next to me with a line running from her arm to mine and a very worried and somewhat nauseated look on her face.

The ambulance techs immediately tried to move to my body for a closer look, only to be intercepted by Alphadroids.

"Look at him," one of them protested. "He needs to be on a respirator ... and in surgery! In a clean room!"

"Incorrect," replied one of the droids. "His respiration and autonomic functions are under control. Infections and sepsis were not a concern given his condition, and they will be dealt with when or if such problems arise. He will need to stay here for at least one week while a new heart is grown for him."

"What are you tal ... that's impossible."

"No, it is not. And that is why he must remain here in my care. I can do much more for him than any hospital."

"How are you planning to do any of that?"

"I am not planning to do it. It is currently being done. Frank currently has over 3.1 million active nanites of various types in his body which are keeping him unconscious, controlling his autonomic functions, repairing the damage in his lungs, starting the growth of a new heart and performing over a hundred other minor functions."

Quick side note: Note that Alpha specified 'active' nanites. There were actually over 15 million in my body and the gel surrounding me, mostly on-call in case they were needed. Her equipment simply wouldn't allow control of all 15+ million anyway.

"Nanites?"

"Yes, nanites, but I encourage you to ignore the unrealistic and inaccurate portrayals of nanites you may have read about or seen in popular fiction."

"Nanites and a new heart. Seriously?"

"Yes."

The other tech finally spoke up. "This is ... we're not ... we'll have to talk to the hospital about this ... ummm ... do you need..." He gestured toward Anna. "We have a couple blood packs in the ambulance..."

"They would be greatly appreciated. A negative blood. Also, this is our only oxygen supply at the moment, so a replacement canister would be useful."

"Be right back," he said backing out of the room.

"This isn't really legal, is it?" asked the remaining EMT.

"It is not approved by the AMA, but this equipment is for private, experimental use and we have all necessary approvals for those purposes. Their use for this situation is the result of an emergency situation, which is allowed for, legally speaking."

"I'm not entirely sure about that..."

"I am. I know every law in existence."

Alpha's rigid self-assurance actually shut him up.

The detectives had obviously been keeping quiet until the EMT guys finished up. The lead detective finally spoke up. "So, is he going to make it?"

"That is not certain. I estimate his survival chance at approximately 82% providing he remains in my care, an increase of 20% since the initial heart installation was successful."

"When will he be able to answer questions?"

"I will not wake him up until his new heart is installed and working, which means it will be at least one week. I will have a more precise time estimate available once the base cellular structure for the new heart is ready, which should be within six hours."

"Will he remember what happened?"

"He was brain dead for at least 2 minutes, 52 seconds, but I have not detected any significant neural degradation. However I do not believe he saw anything unusual. All signs indicate that he was taken completely by surprise by the shot. If your goal is information about the incident, AARD employees Karen Starr and Annabelle Zane were both witnesses. Also the video journalists should have recordings of the shooting, and I will provide you with a video copy of what my Alphadroid saw."

"He was recording?"

"Everything the androids see is temporarily recorded into a cache. Any needed video from the previous twelve hours can be selected and saved separately."

"Thank you. That should be a great help. Now, could you tell me what happened in your own words?"

One irony of our situation was that we would normally have easy access to a minimum of six highly skilled surgeons on-site at AARD. We regularly held two week training courses for our nanowire surgery units, with six as our minimum class size and an average class of twenty, but on that particular day we were between classes. As it was, we had to ask a local hospital to send over a surgeon to consult with Alpha on my treatment (more to satisfy the medical and law enforcement communities than from actual need). The consulting surgeon was alternately excited about the implications of Alpha's work and worried about the whole situation.

Then the damn doctor mentioned it to the press. If you want to talk about an explosion of questions, stories and speculations ... wow. Nanites. Growing a replacement heart. An assassination attempt recorded live. Now extrapolate to guess what the press reaction might be.

Do you remember my comments last chapter about us being in the news for the past few months but not really on the front page? Yeah, forget that. We were the lead/front page story for the next couple weeks, plus off-and-on for the following months. At least I wasn't awake to be depressed by it.